We beg leave to respond as follows to your request for a fresh expression of our views with respect to the Boston shore of the Charles River Basin.

At different times within the past twenty years, various plans for adapting this important river bank to public uses have been proposed. The first Boston Park Commission (that of 1876) composed of Messrs. T. J. Coolidge, Wm. Gray, Jr. and Charles H. Dalton, recommended the eventual construction in the rear of the Brimmer Street and Beacon Street houses of a riverside parkway, comprising planting strips, a driveway, a bridle path and a promenade with a total breadth of two hundred feet.

In response to special requests, we have ourselves proposed four solutions of the problem. Three alternative plans, with a comprehensive report, were laid by us before your Board in 1893, in response to the question: What ought to be done, assuming, in accordance with the existing law, that the necessary new filling shall not extend into the river more than one hundred feet from the present sea-wall? Another, and, naturally, a very different plan, was made and reported upon by us for the Joint Charles River Commission of 1894 in response to the question: What ought to be done, assuming that the limitations of the law cannot be removed?

The Commission will, however, remember that Mr. F.L. Olmsted, Messrs. F.L. Olmsted & Co and Messrs. Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, as landscape architects to your Board, have always taken the ground that the City of Boston would make a grave mistake if, while sufficient interior parks, parkways and playgrounds were still lacking or incomplete, any money at all should be devoted to the Charles River Basin. Such is still our opinion. The reasons thereof may be briefly recapitulated as follows:

1st. The present population of the Back Bay has no need of any additional recreation grounds. It already possesses the Public Garden, Commonwealth Avenue and The Fens. Moreover, the present residents of the Back Bay are generally away from town during the only part of the year when the adjacent shore of the Basin might be a pleasant place of resort.

2nd. While convenient interior squares and playgrounds are not yet sufficiently numerous, the necessarily costly development of the shores of the Basin may better be put off. The Fens, the Muddy River valley, Jamaica Park and Franklin Park were lately tracts which lay in imminent danger of being built upon in ways which would forever have precluded their conversion into parks. Much of the Charles River above Cottage Farm lies today in the same dangerous predicament, but not so the Basin now in question. Here is an open space which can safely be held in reserve until other necessary spaces are acquired. The million or half million dollars which it is proposed should be invested in constructing what today is an unnecessary promenade on the borders of a great, natural, open space ought rather to be spent in acquiring open spaces in those parts of the town where they are, and will be, most needed.

Similarly, it seems to us that the City, as a whole, would receive a greater benefit from the completion of the construction of the parks and parkways already acquired than would accrue from the construction of a river embankment. Also, that while money for the proper maintenance of the acquired parks is obtained with difficulty, the addition of a public promenade, which, like Commonwealth Avenue, would cost much for maintenance, ought to be avoided, if possible.

For these reasons, we question whether any mandatory legislation which would commit the City to the immediate expenditure of large sums for the construction and maintenance of any sort of a public promenade on the [893]bank of the Basin adjacent to Beacon Street ought at this time to be favored by your Board.

Respectfully,