An unusual number of questions and projects have lately come before your Board in the discussion of which some regard might with advantage be had for the experience and the general drift of judgment of other Park Commissions. It has occurred to us that it might serve a good purpose if we should lay before your Board some of the information in this respect that we have had opportunities of acquiring; these opportunities growing largely out of the fact that we have had part professionally in the counsels of more than twenty Boards of Park Commissioners and have followed the history of others, [451]studying their reports, examining their works and conferring personally with those in direction of them.

While no two of our American Park Commissions are constituted quite alike, the general aims and methods of nearly all are sufficiently akin to allow them to be viewed collectively as one institution with local variations.

[26:805b] Examined in that light the first common circumstance to which we would ask attention is that the Park Commission, as a [26:843] [Department of city administration, while it appears to be a firmly established institution, is of such recent introduction that it is nowhere yet to be fairly judged by its works. To show you this we may remind you that the first definite undertaking of your Commission, that of the Fens, was entered upon thirteen years ago.] The territory to be dealt with was comparatively small, hardly exceeding a hundred acres in extent. A million dollars has already been expended upon it but to this day the larger part of all the work done has been that of grading operations and road-making; that is to say, chiefly the disposition of raw materials which have been so placed that they will be permanently concealed beneath the intended finished surface. Anything pleasing to look upon that is to come from all your outlay will come as the result yet to be attained of plantings and sowings which plantings and sowings are yet incomplete, and which, when complete, will have cost but a trifling fraction of your total outlay. There are but few of all the citizens of Boston, not probably one in a thousand, who have had such training as is necessary to enable a judgment of the slightest value to be formed today upon the question of what these results are to be. [And among a hundred of those best qualified for the duty, the judgment of one half of them might differ considerably from that of the other half.

Obviously there is nothing to be seen as yet, after eleven years, from which a citizen, ordinarily well-informed and intelligent, can form a fair judgment as to the design of this work, or as to the economy with which the operations have been directed.

And we may say that we have known no other community in which the state of the case in this respect could have been expected to be as generally appreciated as it has been in that of Boston. The patience and forbearance with which the tedious progress of operations in the Fens has been generally regarded, is not generally to be reckoned on.]

It is true that this has been, in some degree, an extreme case; the amount of preparatory work required having been unusual. We have cited it but to exhibit more distinctly, by an instance acknowledged to be extreme, a difficulty which more or less formidably stands everywhere before the Park Department of city governments, and which, if the Commissioners are to earn a respectable success, is apt to be not a little trying to their manhood.

The community being pervaded at the outset, as we have said, not only with vague and confused but with inconsistent and conflicting ideas of what a Park Commission is to do, it necessarily occurs that in whatever view of [452]its duty a Park Commission shall act, its action cannot be that which many will have expected; cannot fail, consequently, to cause disappointment.

Disappointments with what a Commission has done are the more likely to be felt, for the reason that much the larger part of its entire work is often preparatory work, of no value in its immediately observable results. Before the intent of this preparatory work can, in any important degree, be realized; that is to say, the forces of nature must have been operating, for a series of years, upon the basis which results from it. During the preparatory and the growing periods those to whom the immediate results have not been a surprise are much less apt to express their views, either personally or collectively, than those to whom they promise disappointment. We recall, in fact, not a single instance in which any number of citizens have united to testify their satisfaction with the work of a Park Commission, but many in which committees, deputations and delegations claiming to represent an important element of public opinion, have appeared to express dissatisfaction with it. Sometimes those so appearing have been formidable in numbers and have assumed a threatening attitude. In several cities the majority of the newspapers and of the City Council, assuming to represent public opinion, have done all that was possible to place obstructions in the way of the Commission. In one case, the Commission has been unable to proceed in its duty until it had obtained an order of Court compelling the Mayor and City Council to abandon the position they had taken. And it may be worth while to mention that the results of the resolution and perseverance of the Commission in this case was, a few years later, a degree of popularity for it that was almost burdensome, a tendency being evident to give it undesirable responsibilities.

It is noticeable that when organized bodies of citizens ask a hearing from a Park Commission, it is nearly always with a purpose, often an avowed purpose, to induce it to take some action for the benefit specifically of a small subdivision of all the people of the city, as of the owners of a particular body of land, or of the practitioners of a particular method of recreation. In the latter case, especially, an assumption as to the duty of the Commission often appears, for which there is no warrant.

Numbers of citizens in every community are disposed to find recreation in methods different from those preferred by others. Means having been provided by a Park Commission for certain methods of recreation, it is assumed that justice requires that those who do not use these means should be provided with other means; as if it were simply a question of the numbers desiring any form of recreation whether provisions for recreation in that form should be supplied by the Commission. Very intelligent men and good citizens have often taken this ground without considering what it involved. In Spain, city governments make provision for the recreation of their people by bull fights; in Mexico, by cock fights. The late Mr. Barnum once sought permission to occupy a part of the finished ground of a park, promising to give an exhibition that would be many-fold more attractive than anything the [453]Commissioners had to show for all they had spent upon it. There was not the least doubt that he could easily have kept this promise. But the Commissioners were of the opinion that in assuming it to be their duty to favor whatever would add to the attractions, or increase the recreation, of the people on the Park, Mr. Barnum misconceived the nature of their business.

When a bill was before the British Parliament, providing that the practice of hanging certain classes of criminals “in chains,” leaving their remains exposed on high gibbets for years, remonstrances were received, in which it was stated that as executions of this order were usually made beyond the immediate outskirts of towns, the spectacle of the decaying bodies was an attraction which constantly led townspeople to take long walks in the country whereby they obtained healthful recreation. Probably the execution of a criminal in a public park would, even now, attract more people to it than anything that Mr. Barnum could have offered.

Again, arguments are often addressed to Park Commissioners by honorable men and good citizens, in favor of measures by which their own convenience or the value of their private property may be advanced, such as these gentlemen would not think of using but for the effect upon them of a long established custom, by which a healthy exercise of public opinion is impeded. More than a hundred streets have been laid out leading to the boundaries of one of our American Parks, and the owners of property in more than half of these streets have, at different times, sought to have entrance roads made between them and the roads that have been laid out in the Park, nearly always some of the owners of property adjoining a park take ground that the park should be laid out and managed with special regard to their private convenience and the gratification of their private tastes.

We say that the arguments commonly used in such cases would not be employed, as they often are, by honorable men and good citizens, were it not for the effect of an established custom impeding the exercise of fair judgment in the premises. We refer to the fact that the planning of the greater part of the outgrowths of most of our rapidly grown cities has hitherto been devised with undisguised primary reference, not to the permanent convenience and interest of the general future community of the city, but to what, in each case, a limited number of persons having an interest more or less in common in some particular body of outlying land, may have agreed to consider the arrangement best suited to their own private convenience and pecuniary interest at the moment the plan is to be determined. It even occurs that the plan upon which an important part of a city is to be built for centuries afterwards may thus be hastily fixed by one man; the owner, for example, of what has been a large farm on the boundary of the city. It may happen that this man is wholly incompetent for the task; that he is at the moment in a state of financial embarrassment, and pressed to get his land into market with an entirely inadequate outlay of thought and money; it may be that he is a spendthrift, or a speculator with a gambling disposition. It often happens that his motives are the exact reverse of [454]those which would be adopted by a courageous public servant, moving with enlightened, deliberate forecast of the lasting interests of the city as a whole. Illustrations of almost incredibly reckless, selfish, time-serving perversity in this way may be found in some of our younger, most prosperous and most promising great cities; in San Francisco, for example, parts of which are laid out in a manner which could hardly have been more skillfully contrived, had the object of the contriver been to impose the greatest practicable inconvenience and the highest rates of taxation upon all who were to inhabit the city for hundreds of years afterwards.

This custom has quite generally ruled in the outlying parts of Boston from early days to this very year, when the wrong and the folly of it have been recognized in the appointment of the Board of Survey. It is impossible to estimate what it has cost the city and what it has cost all whose business has had, in any remote degree, to be done through the city. Attempts to palliate its evils by the introduction of streets of connection to be carried through property already built upon in accordance with ill-digested and desultory street plans of the past, and in widening and making them more direct streets so planned, has already cost the city millions of dollars, and as standards of convenience advance and the business parts of the town are enlarged, must yet cost it many more millions. It was a custom originating in a pioneer state of society, and the ground upon which it has been generally maintained, namely, that competition of private interests will secure, through efforts to sell building lots, what is permanently most desirable for the community, has, in thousands of instances, proved a fallacy.

The custom to which we have thus referred, so long and so strongly established, of letting streets be laid out, not with the wisest forecast that can be commanded of what will best serve the permanent interests of the growing city as a whole, but with regard for what a small number of its population may happen for the moment to think will most advance their individual fortunes; this custom, we say, has bred a habit with the people of nearly all our cities, the tendency of which needs to be recognized in order that it may be understood in how slight a degree what are often represented to be demonstrations of public opinion really are so, when considered relatively to the duty of a Park Commission, and how little they represent, even as expressions of individual opinion, any real exercise of judgment upon the vital question of that duty—the question of the future interests of the whole body of the people concerned.

Combinations of the property owners of particular districts are often made and active measures taken in their behalf, sometimes by attorneys employed for the purpose, avowedly in order to exercise influence with reference to the plans of a Park Commission. We have known successively, in a single city, six separate and rival associations of this character, each aiming to advance the value of real estate in a different locality. Each putting out of consideration the suggestion that the Park Commission can be thinking of anything more important than the immediate pecuniary interests of living individuals.

[455]

In Chicago, the jealousy between competing real estate interests has been such that the Legislature has been induced to establish three rival Park Commissions, each operating in the interest of a separate section.

Now, when a Park Department fails to be moved by the representations made to it by persons dissatisfied in any particular with its course, it seldom happens that these persons are led much better than before, to appreciate the Commission’s obligations to the community, and the difference in its position from that of those departments of a city government to which a citizen would apply if the pavement in front of his house, or the street lights or water supply, or the school-houses, or the means of protection against fire or burglars, of his neighborhood were inadequate. Not appreciating the real motives of the Commission such persons are apt to account for their disappointment in some other way and they generally adopt a way that leads, after a few years, to the spreading abroad of an impression that a set of men have been unfortunately selected for Park Commissioners of peculiarly pragmatical, unaccommodating, self-sufficient and supercilious personal habits. There are few Park Commissions of more than two or three years standing, with regard to which reports of this sort have not been rife. Often they appear in debates of the city councils; yet oftener, in newspapers, and especially in newspapers that represent local divisions of a city.

We have so often, and in so many places, heard this imputation laid against men differing greatly from one another in personal habits, that its error has been made palpable to us, and observing that its spread has been countenanced by respectable men, we have been led to consider out of what it grows.

Plainly it grows out of an assumption that the business of determining in what quarter of a city a public pleasure ground shall be formed, what lands shall be taken for it, how it shall be laid out, how approached, and how managed in all respects, is to be carried on in the same manner as is the business of laying out streets, extending water-mains and sewers, determining the sites for school-houses and engine-houses and most other matters of city government; that is to say, by regard for the immediate wants, and largely by regard for what may be thought to be the immediate wishes of the citizens at the moment occupying a particular district of the city.

We will presently show how wrong such an idea of the duties of a Park Commission must be. But first it may be well to note that, however strong a hold such an idea may have upon a man while he remains a citizen, it rarely happens that it does not begin to fade away soon after he assumes the duty and puts his mind practically to the business of a Park Commission.

A striking instance of the different points of view that may be taken by citizens in their capacity as citizens, and citizens in their capacity as public servants, has been presented here in Boston, in connection with the question of the right of citizens to hold public meetings and deliver orations and exhortations within a certain area of the property placed in charge of the Park Commissioners. Since the first unanimous action of the Commissioners [456]adverse to this claim, while the membership of the Commission has been three times wholly changed, each new member, as he has had occasion to review the proceeding and determine his own duty to the community in the premises, has reached the same conclusion. Yet from the point of view of those who have been active in asserting the right, so unreasonable does this conclusion appear, that they can attribute it only to a disdainful disposition on the part of the Commissioners, and a propensity to the oppressive exercise of arbitrary power. The case is the more remarkable for the reason that all other Park Commissioners of the country, so far as known to us, have been led to the same conclusion as that adopted by the Commissioners of Boston.

Such a difference between the point of view toward which Park Commissioners are generally drawn before they have been long engaged with their duties, and the points of view of those who wish to influence their action in various points of policy, is to be found in every city in which a Park Commission is moving with any notable vigor.

The fact at the bottom of this difference is that while, as we observed in the beginning, the communities served by Park Commissioners remain for years pervaded to a singular degree with vague, incoherent, inconsistent and often conflicting ideas of the nature of the benefits that are to come to them from the work of the Commissions, the Commissioners, themselves, whatever their state of mind previously, are, in a measure, compelled, in the exercise of their official functions, to be moving toward a theory in this respect that will serve for working purposes; a theory that can be pursued with some approach to consistency.

The first question of one seeking to move rightly in this respect necessarily is a question of the motive and intention of the Law.

Legislative action providing for a Park Commission has been had in sixteen or more states of the Union, and in each of several of these, a number of such Commissions have been formed.

Under these Acts, as a general rule, a Park Commissioner is established in his position independently of City Councils, and for a period of several years; in some cases it has been five, in some, ten years. He is allowed no salary, fee, perquisite or property advantage in any form because of his service as a Commissioner. He is a representative of no district, ward, party, faction, or set of citizens, and is entitled to look specially after the interests of none. In connection with others of his Board, he can cause the landed property and the homes of citizens to be taken from them against their will, and he can dispose of large funds which have been obtained by loans to be paid many years afterwards, and mainly by a body of taxpayers whose interests in the results of the operations which his Board directs, he has no right to sacrifice out of regard to the interests or the demands, however presented and urged, of the living population. He is, in this respect, a trustee, unpaid and, therefore, a trustee on honor, for persons unable at present to stand for their own interests, and there is no duty resting upon him with such imperative moral force as that of [457]protecting the general interests of the future population of his city as a whole from dangers to which they would be exposed were the business to be conducted on the principles ordinarily ruling in the management of such other city business, as that of the laying out of streets, paving, lighting, sewering and so on.

It is reasonable to assume that it would not have become customary to place Park Commissioners in a position so far differing from that of most other citizens given charge of city works, had there not been reason for thinking it necessary to the accomplishment of the purpose to be committed to them that they should act with a special independence of ordinary political, commercial, personal and social influences, and with a clear recognition of a special duty resting on them to consider questions to come before them from a different point of view from that ordinarily taken, or that can reasonably be expected to be taken by citizens generally, or by their representatives in City Councils elected for short terms, and for duties of a more general scope.

But although Park Commissioners are thus plainly assigned to a special duty, requiring them to act with unusual freedom from motives generally desirable to be operative with public officers, if a clear, concise working definition of that duty is looked for, it will be found in not one of all the acts of legislation that have been had on the subject

The title of the Act providing for a Park Commission commonly reads: “An Act to provide for the establishment of a Public Park,” or words equivalent to these, and it often happens that nowhere in the body of the Act is the purpose to be served by the Commission more definitively stated, or more precisely limited, than it is in these words.

What, then, in the eye of the Law is a Park?

The word has been used, with us, to cover nearly all sorts of spaces of public property about a town, which are not intended to be given to streets and buildings. Among them are included spaces otherwise specifically known as Commons, Greens, Squares, Yards, Muster Fields, Play Grounds and Gardens. City governments have often established new grounds, classing them as parks, without resort to any such machinery as that of a Park Commission, and in many cases, as in Boston, when a Park Commission has been constituted, it has not been given charge of such grounds called parks as were previously existing, but these grounds have remained under the same management as before. Even new grounds of additional “parks” have been acquired by a city while a Park Commission was in operation, and independently of it. This being the case, it is reasonable to assume that the word park in an Act specially providing for such a Commission is not intended to charge it with the duty of supplying additional spaces for the same purposes with those of Commons, Greens, Squares, Yards, Muster Grounds, Play Grounds and Gardens, adequate provision for this purpose having already been made.

Nor is it reasonable to suppose that the word Park in the Acts constituting Park Commissions is intended to be applied, as is sometimes assumed, to places simply adapted to a display of fine equipages and horses, or fashionable [458]assemblages of any sort, or for trotting courses, or ponds for boating or skating, or arenas for public debates or addresses, or for ball-playing or other athletic exercises; for, if the object of obtaining spaces well adapted to be prepared for these purposes had been controlling, it would not have led to the choice of sites of such a character as those that, under these acts, have almost everywhere been taken. Better sites for such purposes could nearly always have been obtained, than those that have been selected. Whatever the site of Franklin Park in Boston, for example, was good for, it was certainly not one that would have been chosen simply from regard to any of these purposes. More suitable ground for most of them was to be had at less cost within a hundred yards of the site taken. This other ground was not overlooked. It was not thrown out without a reason.

As to the recorded definition of the word, Blackstone says: “A park is an enclosed chase, extending only over a man’s own ground.” Manwood says: “A park is a place for privilege for wild beasts of venery.” Lord Bacon says: “We have parks and inclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds.” Coming to literary usage, Shakespeare says: “How are we park’d and bounded in a pale. A little herd of England’s timorous deer.” Johnson’s only definition of the word is “a piece of ground enclosed and stored with wild beasts.” And down nearly to the time when the first American Park Commission was constituted, there were hardly any places distinctively known as public parks of cities that had not originally been enclosures for the keeping of deer for hunting; none which had ever, in any comprehensively organized, systematic, provident way, been formed for any other purpose. Of the parks of London, Hyde and Regent’s, St. James’s and Green, Greenwich and Richmond, had all been enclosures for deer. So had the grounds of corresponding public use in Paris, Berlin, Munich and Vienna. There were herds of deer in most of them, and in several deer were still occasionally hunted.

But it is to be considered that a body of land adapted to be a preserve for deer is likely to be one of considerable extent, and to include broad, quiet, fertile glades of turf for pasturage, with scattered trees, in the shade of which the animals will lie during the heat of summer days, and spaces of close-grown wood and obscuring thickets to which, as coverts, their instincts lead them at times to retreat. This, in fact, is the topographical character of the parks of England to which Blackstone’s definition of the term refers. Consequently, the term is, by a secondary usage, often applied to bodies of land of similar topographical character, although these are not used for the keeping of deer. This is a common significance of the word in our Western States and the usage is recognized, for instance, in the laws of the State of Colorado. The Bluegrass pasture lands of Kentucky are often described as natural parks. They are so, not because they are good places in which to drive and ride and play ball or skate or sail, but because of certain special qualities of agreeable pastoral and sylvan scenery. The distinctive parks that have been prepared by Park Commissions answer well to such a topographical definition in New York, [459]Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis and several other cities.

But although this fact is not without a significance of some value, it does not go far to define the purpose for which Park Commissions have been given their peculiar powers.

It may be asked, then, whether there is anything in the circumstances under which the series of Acts constituting Park Commissions have been enacted from which a reasonable inference can be drawn as to the purpose leading to their enactment?

Upon this point, the following suggestion is submitted:

The first movement in the United States leading on to the appointment of a Park Commission began forty years ago (1852). Since that time, and mostly within the last twenty years, nearly every considerable prosperous town in the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to the Gulf, has asked and obtained state legislation for such a Commission, and action of corresponding import has been taken by Congress with regard to our Capital city of Washington.

Now a truly portentous circumstance in the history of mankind has, in this same period of forty years, been growingly manifest. This is a tendency of people to come together, as never before, in great towns, and of great towns to depart much more than before from the old fashions of close building which had their origin in necessities of military defence and difficulties of transportation before wheeled vehicles came into general use, and to spread out by establishing much broader streets and blocks.

Of our American towns in which this double tendency has been most marked, nearly all that were much more than trading posts or frontier villages had already, before our first Park Commission was established, acquired various small public grounds. Most of these, also, had been prepared for certain uses to be made of them; walks had been made through them, trees planted and objects introduced which were regarded as ornamental. There were, for example, twenty such grounds, often indiscriminately classed as parks, in the city of New York; and Philadelphia, Baltimore and Savannah were celebrated for the numbers of them which they possessed. There were, in some cities, other grounds used as play-grounds, and others yet as muster and parade grounds. The need of anything more than was thus provided in the way of public grounds had not, fifty years ago, been felt, or any coming need for it practically anticipated.

There were, in fact, at that time, but one or two American towns from which it was not possible for people, when so inclined, to escape in less than half an hour into regions of comparatively simple, fresh, wholesome, spacious, quiet rural scenery. By going a little further, it was generally practicable for those roaming forth to leave the high-road and make their way pleasantly through meadows, or along thickets, or into the depths of woods. And, although the compactly built parts of these towns were then very much [460]smaller than now, and in the larger parts of them there was yet much garden ground and considerable areas not built upon, it was well known to many of their people, as a result of personal experience, that to get clear out of them into the open country often had upon many a most soothing and refreshing effect. This, even if the escape from the town was for no more than half an hour; much more, when half a day could be given to such an excursion, and especially was this recognized to be the case with respect to invalids and convalescents, provided they were not subject to too much exposure and fatigue. It was a common thing for physicians to order their patients to be taken from their sick rooms and given a drive in the country, and marvelous effects were sometimes reported of such excursions.

But as a result of the urbanizing tendency to which we have referred, there has since come somewhat suddenly, for nearly every thriving town, a time when, if anything of this old privilege remained for its busy people, it had grown to be obvious to all thinking men that it would not remain long. In many cases, indeed, it soon came to pass that nothing like a pleasant country road was left near them. Those which had formerly had an agreeable picturesque character had generally been widened and straightened. In the process, their sylvan borders had been destroyed, and to those disposed to wander away from them to enjoy such rurality as remained in these neighborhoods, warnings had been posted that if they did so, they would be treated as trespassers. Even outlooks to the right and left from these roads began to be cut off, miles from the town, by close fences and roadside buildings. These circumstances, with the increasing use of the wheelways by all manner of vehicles, and the frequent interruption of passage on the sidewalks by operations of building, sewering and like operations, left nothing available of the pleasure that had before been had in a short outing from the town, such as a merchant or a laborer might take after his day’s work was done.

This state of things having already begun to appear in the suburbs of several of our large towns, and thinking men, accustomed to exercise, even in small measure, anything like statesmen-like forecast, having been thus led to apprehend that the effect of railroads and other recent developments affecting commerce, would yet further increase the difficulty with which, in after years, the people of a city would find any ready escape from its confinement, excitements and disturbances, the following supposition may be considered.

That for convenience of discussing the subject, the word park, in want of a better, came to be used as the name for a suggested reservation of a ground near a city, in which, when properly prepared, its future people might yet find some notable degree of the quieting, soothing, tranquilizing influence of expanded rural scenery.

It may be further supposed that the minds by which these laws establishing Park Commissions have been prepared, foresaw the difficulties standing between them and the end which they had in view, which would lie, first, in local and personal jealousies; and, second, in obstacles to getting the busy [461]population of a great city to keep distant and unsubstantial ends in view, ends to be fully accomplished only by the slow growth of trees after long processes of preparation.

Supposing such considerations to have influenced the enactment of a law, and those who had been most active in the agitation for it, and who were able and willing to serve in the administration of it, without pecuniary compensation, to have been appointed Commissioners, their first important action was likely to show the influence upon them of the same considerations.

Under these circumstances, it would naturally occur that the first important movement of a Park Commission would look to the acquisition for a city of a body of land many times larger than would be necessary for a park, using the word in the loose sense it which it had been before applied to Commons, Squares, Play Grounds and Gardens. Just so it has happened. In a number of cases, the land so obtained, as the very first step in the work of a Park Commission, has had an extent of over a thousand acres; and in several, of over five hundred.

It has often been asked why the purpose for which a Park Commission is constituted would not be better served by establishing five grounds, each of a hundred acres, and so scattered about the suburbs of a town that none of its people would be at a great distance from it? The question is a grave one. A reservation of several hundred acres anywhere in the outer parts of a town, ordinarily involves a considerable interruption of streets, necessarily compelling traffic of all sorts to be carried around it, thus putting a tax on the business of the people.

How was this common course of Park Commissioners, then, to be justified?

Only, we answer, by assuming that it would serve a compensating purpose.

No such compensating purpose has ever been suggested, except that of providing the people of a town with a place in which they could escape better than they could in a smaller one from the sight and hearings of crowds, the jar and bustle of streets and the vision of buildings; where they could find the soothing influence upon the nerves and the effect upon the mind and body through the imagination of what, because no one succeeds in explaining it satisfactorily, we are apt to call the charm of natural scenery. To secure the highest degree practicable of this influence, it is necessary to secure variety of incident subordinate to broad effects of light and shade, extended perspectives and the softening action of distance upon the tints of verdure and foliage. To accomplish such a purpose, large spaces are indispensable.