As requested by you, I herewith submit estimates for ordinary maintenance expenses for parks and places for the year 1875. This estimate is based on a consideration of what has been accomplished by the Superintendent of [75] Parks, the Director of the Menagerie, and the Captain of Police, with the means heretofore allowed them, and on the assumption that the rate of wages, the prices of materials to be purchased, and the degree of efficiency for their respective duties of the force employed will remain essentially unchanged.

For convenience of comparison I have tabulated the estimate for 1875, under various heads of accounts, together with (1) a statement of actual expenditures under the same heads for the year 1872; (2) the same for 1873; (3) estimates for 1874, as prepared in October last for the Board of Estimate and Apportionment; (4) estimates for 1874, as modified by the reduction made by the Board of Apportionment in June last, this reduction being applied pro rata to the several items of the table; and (5) the expenditure for 1874, calculated on the assumption that the average rate will be maintained under each item during the last five months of the year that has obtained during the first seven months.

This comparative table, with the above explanation, renders argument in any other form for the estimates of 1875 unnecessary, except with reference to the increased expense proposed for the items of ice and police, and the two unusual items of special repairs of architectural structures and special improvement of plantations. Independently of these items and that of contingencies, the amount of the estimate for the Central Park is $43,000 less than that of last year, and $6,000 less than the amount actually expended in 1873.

You have requested me to fully state the occasion for the several items of proposed expenditure of a new or extraordinary character; to give testimony as to their necessity; and to state upon what grounds a postponement of them is to be deprecated.

I proceed to do so:

Ice.— The estimate for ice is much larger than the amount expended under the same head during the past winter, because the last winter was a remarkably open one, and there was scarcely any skating. The chances are that the next will be very severe, and the expenses of keeping the skating ponds and houses in good order unusually large. No permanent injury to the value of the park will occur if the public should be denied its customary use of the ice during the whole or part of the winter, but I need not say how much disappointment and discontent would be caused.

Police.— Having no official responsibility in respect to the Police, my information is derived chiefly from the papers which you have referred to me, especially the reports from the Superintendent of Parks and the Captain of Police. I have also consulted the Landscape Gardener, the Director of the Menagerie, and others who have responsibilities on the Central Park.

To justify the design of the park and the vast outlay which the city has made to carry out that design, a certain class of requirements must be met upon it for which no provision is made, unless through the expenditure designated “For Police.” This class of requirements is not met by the Police, and the Captain of Police when called upon by you to account for the consequences, [76] states that it is due to the insufficiency of his force in numbers. Assuming this to be the true and only reason, I have not the slightest doubt that the value of the city’s property in the park not only now falls short of what it might economically be made by giving him a larger number of men, but that this value has diminished of late, and is diminishing to that degree; that for every dollar saved in Police wages, hundreds of dollars are wasted.

I shall but barely indicate the grounds of this opinion by a few illustrations.

An important object in the design of the park is to provide a place close at hand in which invalids, weakly and delicate persons, and children may obtain the relief from the confinement in the city which those of wealth and leisure gain by retiring to distant country-seats. For this purpose large districts of it have been designed to take the character of quiet seclusion, within which, as far as practicable, there should be a counterpart of the common scenes of fortunately disposed woodland glades; this not only in trees, and shrubs, and tender plants, but in the twittering of birds and such other rural charms as would help to the general result of simple, quiet, tranquilizing, and refreshing recreation. This purpose was at one time so far accomplished that under advice of physicians, not only invalids and convalescents, but numbers of school girls and children in delicate health were induced to spend much time in the park, and they did so without annoyance or any feeling of insecurity. It is now becoming a much less prudent, agreeable, and beneficial custom for them to do so than it was a few years since, because of their liability to encounter rudeness, impertinence, dishonesty, and filth; and the special rural attractions referred to, instead of increasing, as they naturally should, if Nature were simply left undisturbed, are diminishing. I personally know of several cases in which heads of families have discontinued sending their children to the park, because of disagreeable and painful experiences to which they have been subjected while there. A physician, who ten years ago told me that he customarily sent a certain class of patients to the park every fine day in summer, and who regularly sent his own children to exercise in it, lately told me that he had been obliged to caution the same class of patients against going there, and to forbid his children their accustomed rambles. Numerous complaints of rudeness experienced, and disgusting things heard or witnessed in the park have been made by children to me personally, and parents have told me that while their children had formerly been eager to obtain leave to go to the park, they had lately found them reluctant to go there, and for the reasons I have indicated. Your Superintendent and other officers at the same time testify that it is evident that there are many persons who make a business of spoiling birds’ nests and stealing plants from the park, and that in pursuing this business they break down and destroy trees, shrubs, and plants. A tree, six inches in diameter of trunk, standing in a prominent position, was the other day cut down with an axe by one of these rascals, in order to get from it a nest of young robins.

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Your stock of swans and other water-fowl, and of wild birds, is now smaller than it was ten years ago. There is but one reason why it should not have greatly increased, and that is the stealing of eggs and young birds. This year you had, at one time, five nests containing twenty eggs, of swans, every one of them has been broken up and the eggs stolen; there have been a much larger number of eggs of the other fowl stolen, but in no instance have the thieves been detected.

Not a week has passed this summer that lead pipe, bronze ornaments, or other like property, has not been wrenched violently from its place and carried off the park, in consequence of which several structures have been rendered useless, and for some time closed to the public. The gardener states that it is evident that some of those who steal plants, know and select such as are readiest of sale and have the largest money value.

I refer to the obvious rapid increase of offences on the park, in themselves of comparatively small importance, as demonstrating the comparative security with which another class of offences are committed, which cause vastly greater injury to its value, as a place of wholesome resort, for the young, the pure, and the delicate.

Whenever it shall have become fully established that the park is the chosen resort of that part of the city’s population which finds its chief pleasure there, as elsewhere, in the exercise of insolent, cruel, lewd, and dishonestly selfish propensities, the value of this costly recreation ground will have vanished. In other words, it will be seen that more than ten millions of dollars have been spent for an undesirable end. That there is a strong and increasing tendency to that result, as things are, there is no room for doubt. If enlarging the number of the police force will effectually check it, there is as little room for doubt that it will be a measure of the strictest economy to make such increase.

Special Repairs and Improvement of Architectural Structures.— The estimate for this purpose is the result of a survey just completed by Mr. Munckwitz, your Superintending Architect, and the object of it is to arrest the progress of numerous processes of injury, some recent and slight, but many first detected years ago, and which have been every year since increasing in magnitude. The longer, in each case, the required repairs are delayed, the greater will be the eventual cost to the city.

I propose to show how it happens that so large an accumulation of demands for repairs has occurred.

Previously to 1863 all expenditures on the Central Park were defrayed from the proceeds from the sale of City Bonds. Since then it has been required that the proceeds of bonds should be applied solely to a particular class of expenditures; another class being met from taxation. The two classes of expenditure are designated, one as “Improvement and Government,” the other as “Maintenance and Government.” The terms are ambiguous, for a park is not wholly a human construction, but partly a growth, and the completion of so much of it as a human construction must to a certain degree wait [78] upon and follow the process of growth. The continuous cost required on a park is not, on the other hand, strictly speaking, devoted solely to its maintenance, but largely to the stimulation, direction, and regulation of its growth, and in some degree to the modification of those elements which are not subject to natural growth in accommodation to the changes of those which are. A strict and true division between expenditures for “improvement and government” and for “maintenance and government” has never been practicable. For the purposes of their book-keeping, however, the Park Commissioners have always felt constrained by the law to assume that portions of the park, one after another, as the rougher preliminary work upon them has been completed, should be assumed to be completely improved, and to direct that all work thereafter expended on them should be reckoned as expended for their maintenance. It has, nevertheless, all the time been impossible to wholly ignore the obvious requirements of their continued improvement; and though there has been a great lack, and with a presumed motive of economy, a systematic withholding of intelligent direction for that purpose, the maintenance account has always been overloaded by charges for labor, which would not have been necessary were the park well grown and beyond the constant accidents and backslidings to which new garden work is subject.

It has happened, consequently, that the Commissioners have never been able to do what they themselves recognized and admitted it to be necessary to do, on these improved portions of the park in anyone year since the attempt began to be made, without exceeding the limits of the allowance made to them for the purpose of maintenance. Repeated resolutions have been adopted that the utmost economy should be used, and every exertion made to prevent the recurrence of a failure in this respect, which they have felt to be a mortifying one, but always unsuccessfully. The average deficiency for eleven years past has been over $50,000 per annum: even omitting the extraordinary year of 1871, when it was recklessly carried to $248,000, it has been above $30,000 per annum.

It cannot be surprising, under these circumstances, that a great many duties of maintenance, the neglect of which would not affect the satisfaction of the public for the time being in the parks, have been every year postponed. Such a course has been inevitable, and thus it has occurred that important constructions in stone, iron, and wood threaten to fall into a state of dilapidation, and some have already done so, because of processes of injury which might at one time have been arrested at almost trifling cost.

I shall not be misunderstood as finding fault with the law or with the Commissioners for taking the course they have under the law. It was, perhaps, impracticable to do better with the political conditions under which they have had to conduct their business; but it cannot be right that to avoid adding to the immediate requirements of taxation, or the bonded debt of the city, another form of liability should now be allowed to go on increasing at more than compound [79] interest rates of enlargement, as this must, if no means are taken for stopping its insidious progress.

Special Improvement of Plantations.— There are certain places in the Central Park where there was originally a thick growth of sapling trees and bushes. In some cases, where it was desirable for landscape reasons, and also because of an intention to keep the surface of the ground in fine turf and to allow the public at times to range freely over it, the bushes were grubbed out and the trees so far thinned as to allow an expansion of the branches of those remaining. A part of those left were sprouts from the stumps and roots of old and decaying trees which had been felled, and for this and other reasons, not likely to be as healthy and vigorous as those which had sprung from seed. It was thought desirable to leave many such trees for a few years, lest too sudden and complete exposure of those designed to remain should be injurious to the latter.

The growth of the best trees, in these cases, has not been half as rapid as that of trees of the same species elsewhere on the park. This is due, in part, to the original thinness of the soil in which they were standing, and to the fact that the soil had been exhausted of the elements particularly required to sustain the trees, by their predecessors upon it, but it is also largely due to the excessive number of trees now growing upon it. The heads of the trees are interfering, and their satisfactory expansion is arrested.

I have repeatedly urged that a vigorous thinning out should be made among them, and I now again advise this, and also that the ground, in some cases, be richly top-dressed, and other measures taken to advance the desired result.

Again, in parts of the park, when trees were planted, they were set much more thickly than they were intended to stand—permanently, partly for the sake of shelter, and partly for immediate effect.

Such excess of trees has been but partially removed; in many instances the trees designed to be permanent have been ruined by insufficient thinning, and in others greatly injured with reference to the results intended. The ultimate value of the park can never be as much as it might be had all desirable attention been given to this duty from year to year. It is unnecessary to recur to the conditions which have led to its neglect. The injury to the park, and the cost of such remedy as is practicable, increases with every year that its application is delayed, and to withhold it even for one year more would be the reverse of economical. I recommend an estimate for the specific object of thinning and improving old plantations to be adopted, as an item of the general estimate, lest if a sum for the purpose should simply be added to the estimate “for plantations,” it will be found to be required, and will be applied to meet other exigencies of the year having more apparent importance for the time being.

The estimate for the sea-wall at the Battery includes an amount of [80] $7,500 in addition to the estimate of last year, as the result of a more thorough examination of the premises.

The estimate for the City Hall Park pavement is the same as was made last year, nothing having been since expended there.