At a meeting of your Board in May last, we were led, upon your invitation, to present, informally, certain impromptu advice, drawn from our knowledge of the experience of Park Commissions in other cities, upon a [375]number of points of your impending business. A wish has now been made known to us that we would repeat this advice, as far as practicable, in a written form, and especially that we would restate the views we at that time expressed about the site then spoken of as Jacob Park.

We shall, with pleasure, comply with this request as far as memory serves, but cannot undertake to confine ourselves to the precise explanations and arguments used last Spring, nor to fully cover all the ground that we then did.

We presume that it will be found in your city, as it has been in others, that many good people have fallen into habits of considering projects and plans of public works in a great degree from local points of view, more especially giving thought to the effect proposed operations may be expected to have in making real estate in their vicinity more valuable relatively to real estate elsewhere. Such habits are apt for a time to impede the exercise of fair and sound judgment upon the business of a Park Commission, and often lead to apparent expressions of public opinion that are extremely deceptive, and by no means to be taken as an index of the real requirements of the community.

Having regard to this liability, we reasoned as follows:

Louisville has determined to have three parks to be formed upon sites, each of a natural character widely differing from the natural character of either of the others. Nothing can well be more undesirable for the community as a whole than that any one of them should be regarded as a ground to be fitted and maintained for the benefit of a particular division of the community, as a proposed branch of a water, sewer, or street lighting system, or a small public ground like Boone Square, might reasonably be. If a policy fitting such an expectation should be adopted by your Board, its logical outcome would be triplicate provisions for all purposes that are to be served by the entire system, which would be as wasteful as three City Halls, or three Mayors. If that was what was wanted, there should at least have been three Park Commissions, as the unfortunate jealousies of different sections of the city have made necessary at Chicago.

Advantages for certain forms of rural refreshment and recreation can be provided on each one of your three sites at a hundredth part of the cost that they can be on either of the others. If you set to work trying to make each Park complete and excellent in all respects, by itself, you will be embarking on a career of extravagance, with no possibility of a respectable result in any one case. And you will presently find that, with regard for means of accomplishing what you wish upon one Park, you have intensified the competitive spirit of those who are more interested to secure the rapid carrying out of your plans for the other two. This, unless the community of Louisville is of a fortunately exceptional character, will invite attempts to accomplish what is desired in behalf of each section, by log-rolling combinations and other manoeuvres, concerning which it may be said that it would be better that the city should have no parks at all for the next hundred years, than that it should be saddled [376]with such wretched, makeshift, incoherent parks as would result if it should be attempted to make the business of your Commission, now or hereafter, a business of political bargains and the marketing of patronage. That, in park administration, is the straight way to ruin.

Do the best you can to avoid a drift toward it, you will find in the long run that the difficulty of doing so is the most serious of all with which you have to contend. The advice we offered, therefore, was that you should do all in your power to induce your people to wholly discard the idea of rival parks, and that you should at least take care that no yielding to it should ever be in order before your Board.

The only policy that you can adopt, with the slightest prospect of a respectable success, will, in our judgment, be based on the purpose; 1st, to develop, within each one of your three properties, a treasure of rural and sylvan scenery, of a character distinct from that which you will develop within either of the other two, the distinction being determined in each case by regard for the existing topographical peculiarities of the particular site; 2nd, to make provisions on neither site for any form of recreation, the means for which will be in a marked degree discordant with, or subversive of, the natural character of that site; 3rd, to supply suitable means for making the enjoyment of the scenery of each park available to those escaping from the city, in the form of walks, roads and places of rest, shelter and refreshment, such means being regarded not at all as the substance of your parks, but as the wholly subordinate implements and tools by which the substance is to be made use of.

We advised you also to be prepared to strenuously disappoint all notions that any may have formed that you are to spend the public money entrusted to you upon objects of curiosity or decoration; your business is to form parks, not museums or collections of ornaments. If gifts are offered you of objects simply ornamental, by all means decline them. Admit nothing to your parks that is not fitting and helpful to their distinguishing purpose.

Let the question be asked what is the use of such large bodies of land as you have been acquiring, situated at the distances they are from the homes of the great mass of your population? Why would not what you are going to pay for them be better applied to providing numerous smaller grounds, some one of which would be within convenient walking distance of the greater number of all the dwelling-houses of the city, and to which, therefore, the bulk of the people of the city would resort, much as those of them who are so fortunate as to have gardens adjoining their houses resort to these gardens? You will find that there can be but one answer. The object of acquiring these large public properties far out in the environs of the city is to supply something that gardens cannot supply; to supply something radically different from, and antithetical to, that which gardens in the city supply. What is it? Simply the healthfully soothing and refreshing effect which experience proves is exercised upon people escaping from the splendor and bustle, the confinement and [377]disturbance, of towns into the midst of spacious natural scenery. Not into a succession of scenes, but into scenery in a comprehensive sense.

Pretty bits of decoration in garden plants and architectural objects are not helpful to such scenery as is thus required; they are destructive of it. They are admirable in their place, but in association with elements of scenery such as make a park another thing from a garden, they put nature out of countenance.

Further, but pursuing the same line of advice, we cautioned you to beware of yielding to any apparent public impatience to see pleasing results of your work. We have known valuable opportunities destroyed and large funds given to waste because of a desire to have something accomplished in short order by which thoughtless people might be transiently pleased. This is cheap politics. It is dear park-making.

Why are you borrowing money that must be returned by taxing the citizens of Louisville years hence? Because the results reasonably to be aimed at in making a park, properly so called, are results that cannot by any means be obtained quickly, and it is, therefore, right that they should not be paid for quickly. The principal work that you have to do is a work of preparation whereby nature will be invited to produce, by growth, in the course of years, that which is to be desired in a park. Work directed to early results in parks is nearly always lamentable work; costly relatively to its value; obviously artificial and unnatural, and designed with a view to cheap applause of those on whom it imposes.

If you look for work in a park that will justify the borrowing of the money it will cost, it will not be the work that has been designed to attract admiration of itself, but that has been designed as a contribution to something larger and finer. To scenery. The best effect of scenery will be to promote a restful, contemplative and musing disposition of mind, and it is to be suitably admired only with such a disposition of mind. It grows in value as it gives less gratification to curiosity, and as its effect is less sensational. It grows in value as it grows in age.

There will not, in all the future, be any work to be done in the development of your Park System as to which it will be equally important to proceed deliberately and cautiously as that immediately before you.

There will, hereafter, be a great deal of talk about the economy, or failure of economy, in the management of the park works. But, even if the business should hereafter fall into the hands of incompetent or unfaithful Commissioners, the waste that is likely to occur at such times because of inefficient direction, jobbery in contracts, and all ordinary swindling, is of less importance to be guarded against than that to be feared from a wavering purpose and unsteady aims; from the going back of one set of Commissioners upon the intentions of a preceding set; from entering, now and then, upon new undertakings that involve a waste of work that has been done before, and so on.

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The complete escape of any city from everything of this sort is too much to be hoped for. All that can now be done in the way of precaution against it lies in the carefully provident study of the plans which it is the first business of the present Board of Park Commissioners to prepare and hand down to its successors. That these plans may be suitable to the future wants of the growing population of the city; that they may be nicely adjusted to the varied local conditions which they are intended to fit; that they may be judiciously [379]auxiliary and complementary each of the others, the first step to be taken is that of procuring elaborate {records} of measurements and data of the ground to which they are to be fitted. The topographical surveys which you now have in progress are to provide such records. The closer, more accurate and finer they are, the better your plans will be fitted to the ground; the less costly they will be to carry out. It would be folly to have made them hurriedly, as it would be folly to have the plans themselves made hurriedly, and as it would be folly to go to work except with plans deliberately pondered with fluent imagination and abundant exercise of searching, comprehensive forecast.

About this work of designing the plans, two things more may be said: First, it must begin, after all needed data are obtained, with the devising of large and comprehensive controlling purposes or motives of design, to which features and details shall be steadily made contributive and held subordinate. Second, the process of establishing these controlling purposes must be largely a study of the balance of advantages between a number that will suggest themselves; which means a thinking out and comparison of what will be the lasting results of pursuing each under such management and such outlays for maintenance and improvement as, years ahead, and continuously, the city may reasonably be expected to provide. The cost of maintaining parks is a matter of more importance in determining plans for them than the cost of forming them.

To plan features and details, first, as, at the outset of a Park Commission’s work, there is always some pressure on it to do, would be as foolish a way of going to work as to build the chimney-pieces and buy the carpets and wall papers of a dwelling-house before planning its walls and partitions.

With regard to the southernmost of your properties, that which has been known as Jacob Park, its topography is strikingly distinct from the topography of either of the other two of your properties. It consists mainly of one great hill, lofty; of steepish slopes, bearing much crowded, well-grown wood. It is considerably more distant than either of the two other properties from the dwellings and the working-places of the mass of your people. It is much larger than either of them. Its soil is comparatively arid and unfertile. It includes no streams or bodies of water, or outlooks over water, and it even lacks an adequate supply of drinking water. Its surface is so modeled that, even were large clearings made of its woods, no open breadth of scenery could be provided within its borders; no scenery at all of the kind that is significantly described as “park-like” or pastoral. Its landscape must be of a sequestered character, except that from its upper parts, fine, broad, distant prospects are to be had, which, by the removal of trees in some places, and the growing of low masses of foliage in others, can be made more sweeping and effective than they now are.

If you wish the city to possess broad and tranquil meadow spaces, with, by and by, the shadows of great spreading trees slanting across them, and offering at once areas of turf to be inexpensively kept in a suitable condition for lawn games, more can be done to meet this want for a thousand dollars on [380]the site you have named Shawnee Park, than on this of the Iroquois Hill for a million. If you want the refreshment that is to be had in the contemplation of superb umbrageous trees, standing singly and in open groups, distributed naturally upon a gracefully undulating greensward, to procure such scenery in higher perfection than, with large outlays to obtain it, is yet to be found in any public park in America, all that is needed is the removal of fences and a little judicious use of the axe on your Cherokee Park site. In this respect, also, a thousand dollars of outlay will give you at once more of what you want than the outlay of a million will come near giving you in fifty years on the Iroquois Hill.

On the other hand, if you want, as a treasure of sylvan scenery, alternative and supplementary to the treasures which you will have on your other properties; the grandeur of forest depths in the dim seclusion of which you may wander musingly for hours, this you may find ready to your hand on the Iroquois Hill, and the beauty of the present forest there may be extended and increased and given diversity and made more interesting by processes which, judiciously organized and patiently pursued, will not be difficult or unreasonably costly. To attempt to apply what we are accustomed to distinguish as a “park-like” treatment to ground of this character would be as foolish as to attempt a garden-like treatment of such properties as you have in the sites for Cherokee Park and Shawnee Park. (We dislike to apply the term park to such a place, as we should to the Forest of Fontainebleau, or to Windsor Forest, or to what is called the Lynn Woods, the largest and most interesting public pleasure ground in New England.) The important matter in the treatment of each of these properties of the city is to adopt an ideal suited to the local natural conditions and pursue that ideal as consistently as public convenience in its use will allow, avoiding, of all things, finical and paltry features and details under the mistaken assumption that they will, in such places, be ornamental; avoiding of all things misplaced and unsuitable attempts at decoration, unbecoming the characteristic beauty of the natural local scenery; avoiding roads, walks, buildings, fences, monuments, constructions of any and all kinds, that are not necessary to the main and only justifying purpose of these great suburban reservations, that of quickly giving people a chance to cheaply, conveniently and pleasantly escape at times from the town, and come, under the influence of one or another form of agreeable scenery. You cannot give them a complete escape from buildings; you must at least allow invalids and children places in which to find shelter from showers, and rest and refreshment. Regard buildings, even of this class, as necessary drawbacks. Display them no more than is required for a fitting expression of their inner character, and as an invitation to a free proper use of them. Make them strictly subordinate to the main purpose, escape from urban artificial conditions, as far as this is possible consistently with neatness and good order.