The city has imposed upon your Board in addition to the duties originally assigned to it by the Legislature, with regard to the Central Park, the duty of also laying out and forming an outer park of no inconsiderable size. Including the portions which you have determined to unite with it from the park proper, this outer park will contain an area as large as the Battery, Bowling Green, the City Hall Park, and Hudson square united.

It is not desirable that this outer park should be separated by any barrier more than a common stone curb from the adjoining roadways. It is still more undesirable in the interest of those who are to use it that it should be separated more than is necessary from the interior park. It will offer to these a broad shaded promenade more than twice as long as from the Battery to Union Square, in immediate proximity to and associated in design with the scenery of the main park. The trees which grow upon it are used in the design as a part of the scenery of the main park, adding to its beauty, attractiveness and value. The scenery of the main park should much more be made to add to the beauty, attractiveness and value of the outer park. As far as it is practicable, the two should be incorporated as one whole, each being part of the other.

The value of this outer park can not be estimated at less than $3,000,000. Whatever separates it from the interior park detracts from its value and equally detracts from the value of the park itself. If a close fence six feet high intervened between the park and the outer park, it would by and by be felt to be cheaply purchased, for the sake of removal, at the price of $5,000,000. Assuming that a barrier is necessary for police purposes on this line, the more it fills the eye, the more it crosses the landscape, the more it is seen either from one side or the other, the more it is a nuisance, the more it detracts from the value of everything [339] else you do, the less valuable becomes the park. The more modest, unobtrusive, insignificant it is, the less will it interfere with your general purpose, the less will it injure your design, the more will be its value, and the greater the value of both the park and the outer park.

The object of the barrier is to prevent people from entering and leaving the park at improper times. It can have no other good object. If the present arrangement of allowing the public to use the park till eleven o’clock at night is to be continued, there is not the slightest use in any barrier at all. It will be not only an entirely useless expense to establish it, but an expense the only result of which will be an injury to the park. It will constitute an eyesore and an inconvenience and has nothing whatever to recommend it. Experience however must soon lead to such a modification of the present ordinance that while carriages may be permitted to pass through the park after dusk, only the outer park will be open at night to use for sauntering, resting and walking.

Experience has shown everywhere in Europe that public grounds must be closed at nightfall unless they can be very well lighted and policed; otherwise rapes, robberies and murders are frequent. A similar experience here, even with our small and open and well lighted public places, has led to the closing of Union Square at night and to quadrupling the usual police force on the area of the City Hall Park. The mere current expenses of a prudent lighting of the park with gas lights will not be less than $1,000,000 per annum, or five times as much as is at present expected to be expended for its maintenance in all other respects. There are the gravest objections however to the introduction of gas pipes through the park, aside from the enormous cost of laying them. Trees for instance seldom flourish and generally die young in the vicinity of gas pipes. The additional cost of adequately lighting the outer park need not exceed $5,000 per annum and with a suitable barrier the police expense of the park will be 75 per cent less than would be necessary, even if the park were well lighted, if the present arrangement should be continued.

On these grounds I assume that a barrier will be necessary, and for the reasons I have given previously, I further take it for granted that the Board will wish this barrier to be of the slightest and most inconspicuous character that can be made to answer the purpose.

An insurmountable barrier is not practicable to be had. Even the fence of the garden of the Tuileries, which is the most formidable one that I have seen, would not detain a man of ordinary strength and skill, who had a strong determination to surmount it, two minutes, and the effort would be neither fatiguing nor painful. Such a fence around the Central Park would cost more than the whole sum at the disposition of the Commission. I say therefore that a fence which would be really a formidable obstacle to a determined man is not to be aimed at. All that is required is a perfectly distinct demarcation between the main and the outer park which cannot be crossed accidentally, or without sense of effort and inconvenience, or without a deliberate intention of breaking the law.

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The style and appearance of the barrier, so far as it must be seen, should have some relation to whatever else is seen in connection with it. It should therefore change in character correspondingly with each very striking change in the character of the scene of which it will form a component part. There is not the slightest occasion for uniformity in the fence, because unlike many other situations, as the Tuileries garden for instance, or any of our City Squares and Parks, the position of the fence of the Park will be such that nowhere can it be seen except a little at a time.

Of all [the] sorts of barriers which could be used, by far the worst, artistically, is the ordinary spiked iron fence. In expression and in association, it is in the most distinct contradiction and discord with all the sentiment of a park. It belongs to a jail or to the residence of a despot who dreads assassination. Mr. Ruskin in a recent work asks what it means and answers: “Your iron railing always means thieves outside or Bedlam inside. It can mean nothing else than that. If the people outside were good for anything, a hint in the way of fence would be enough for them; but because they are violent and at enmity with you, you are forced to put the close bars and the spikes at top.”

I consider the iron fence to be unquestionably the ugliest that can be used. If on the score of utility it must be used, then the less the better, and certainly where used it should not be elaborated and set up on high, and made large and striking as if it were something admirable in itself, and had better claims to be noticed than the scenery which it crosses and obscures. Where used, the less it obtrudes itself the better. It should be no larger in any way than is necessary and should appear nothing more than is necessary to guard people from going where they should not go. Unfortunately, an iron fence is the cheapest upright fence of a substantial and permanent character which can be used, and where it will not bar the promenader on the outer park from any beautiful prospect over the main park or cause him to look at it like a confined madman through a grated window, it will probably be thought best to use it. Wherever practicable I should flank it on the park side with a hedge.

The most elegant form of iron fence, if my reasoning and feeling is right about it, would be a simple series of ¾ inch iron bars six feet high, six inches apart, firmly attached at each end to rails and posts of the same character. This would be as little offensive as an iron fence of the requisite strength could be, and with the hedge would accomplish every desirable purpose required as well as the fence of the Tuileries and at one tenth the cost. It may be questioned if a strong wooden paling of a rustic character would not be better than either. An iron fence of the kind described could be contracted for, at the present low prices of iron, at $6. per foot, and if it is to be got, had probably better be engaged at once, the price of iron being subject to great fluctuations.

Where the outer park is graded at a higher elevation than the adjoining ground of the main park and commands a view over it, a high fence of any kind would be as much out of place as a grating over a beautiful picture or before a [341] drawing-room window. If the outer park were formed on a causeway-wall above the park at a height of eight feet or more, no other barrier against ingress or egress would be needed, as no one would ordinarily leap a distance of eight feet, perpendicularly, without an object, and it is more difficult to climb an eight foot wall than to surmount an ordinary iron fence of twice that height.

A guard in the form of a balustrade or banister would be needed to prevent accidental falls, and this would add to the depth to be leaped by one attempting to enter over it. If eight feet is enough to deter a man from carelessly undertaking this, and an iron banister be set 3½ feet high, 4½ feet of wall would then be sufficient. It would perhaps be too easy to attempt to get out of the park by grasping the banisters and pulling up by them. This would be obviated by a hedge planted at the foot of the wall. Such a method of separating the interior and exterior portions of the park is much better than any other which has been suggested and should be adopted wherever practicable. In some situations, a balustrade with a cut stone coping and base course might be substituted for the iron banister with great advantage. With a dead-wall of brick, masked by a hedge, this would not be too expensive. I have not been able to obtain any satisfactory plan of substantial fence in which the use of both iron and brick could be dispensed with which would not cost more than it is prudent to appropriate for this purpose.

Where cliffs, or vertical walls of rock more than eight feet high, bound the outer park toward the park proper, no other barrier is required. I propose only to excavate niches at intervals of about ten feet, and to guard these with iron railing, within which ivy can be planted, and at a proper height trained over the face of rock. This will be the most beautiful as well as the most economical barrier of the park. Unfortunately it is practicable but for a short distance.

By using the four different plans which I have described alternately, accordingly as either is best adapted to local circumstances, the cost of the barrier between the park and the outer park, if the iron work could be contracted for at present prices, could be kept within seven dollars a foot—which is, I think, the largest price that could be allowed for it with propriety. This is exclusive of gateways and their immediate vicinity.