You say that you “cannot see why plans for Morningside should wait the completion of plans for other parks,” as if I had proposed that they should. I have not intended to say anything looking that way. It is my opinion that it is not desirable that any arrangement to be made for designing superintendence for Morningside Park should be of an exceptional character. If it is it will be of a makeshift temporizing and weak and inefficient character.

This is vacation season for my office force and I am personally much occupied with my regular business. But if it were otherwise I should not be disposed to give much time or thought to the affairs of the New York Department. I have no faith that anything satisfactory to me will come out of it. If I do not mistake the ruling purpose of the Commissioners even the arguments that the newspapers are addressing to them will have an effect the opposite of that intended and any apparent yielding to them will be deceptive. I have been played with longer than is agreeable to me. I do not mean to be churlish but Vaux, Kellogg and Parsons are on the ground; they are more familiar than I am with the conditions to be considered and I think that you can get what you want from them better than you can from me.

You give a great deal too much importance to a piece of paper which you call a plan. It is but a {mere} imperfect memorandum of {some particulars} of what lies in a designer’s mind. When you have got such a plan for Morningside there will remain any number of rocks under its lee and so long as the Commissioners think it is their business with regard to any of their work to play the part of navigators and seamen as well as that of owners, directors, providers, comptrollers, auditors and paymasters, the danger that Morningside will be wrecked is about as great as if you had no plan. I have no wish to have anything to do with the New York Parks so long as the Commissioners can learn nothing from the experience of their predecessors for ten years past in this respect and their yielding a point exceptionally because of a pressure of private and local interests and newspaper urgency will not be reassuring.

Yours respectfully