I have just received, gratefully, your letter of the 17th instant. I feel with you warmly that the meeting at Chicago was a most happy, useful and promising occasion and I look forward with much pleasure to others to follow.

[295]

I am a most unfluent and clumsy writer and can publish nothing without an appalling amount of revision and trimming. I have always applications in this way beyond my ability to meet. I cannot now possibly undertake what you suggest that I should for the Atlantic.

The latest information I have of the class you need is in the form of a Report from the Earl of Meath to the New Town Government for London, called the County Council. Lord Meath was at my house while here and his Report is largely based on information compiled from various sources in our office, or which were collected for him by direct correspondence with the different cities. It is neither full nor accurate, and there are omissions in it of matter we gave him, for which I cannot account. Perhaps he thought it too vague or incomplete. For example, Denver possesses a public park site not yet much improved. I presume that you have correspondents there. If not, you could address the Mayor, or our friends Andrews and Jacques, who have an office there now, would get accurate information for you. A public park, parkway and small grounds are being laid out at Omaha by our friend, H.W.S. Cleveland, a most worthy old gentleman, formerly a partner of Copeland and of Follen in Boston, whom you could address, mentioning that I advised you, care of the Park Commission of Omaha. He would gladly aid you, I know.

There is an article of mine on “Parks” in the American Encyclopedia, and one on “Landscape Gardening” in Johnson’s Encyclopedia, that you might like to run over.

You will find some information in Waring’s contribution to the Census of 1880; “Social Statistics of Cities.” See columns “Parks” in the index of each of the two volumes (XVIII and XIX); but it will hardly pay for the gathering.

Hyatt’s interest in the subject has grown entirely out of efforts of mine to get the Boston Society of Natural History to move with reference to out-of-door scientific and educational museums. I will try to send you copies of correspondence on the subject. I mention the fact only that you may recognize that my prevailing purpose has been to guard against the injection of such museums into park designs.

This brings me to what would be chiefly interesting to me in anything that you may write on the subject of parks.

The grand difficulty with which, from the outset, Vaux and I had to contend, and with which all who have a serious interest in the subject are incessantly struggling, is the almost universal want of discrimination between the special purposes, motives and reasons for being, of different species of public grounds. From the beginning of work on Central Park, as you must in some degree recollect, the disposition of the public, of the liberally educated, cultivated men, of the majority of newly appointed Park Commissioners, of all snobs and Philistines like Judge Hilton, and of nearly all members of City Councils and other city officers, has been to consider land appropriated for a public park as a vacant space in which anything of public interest could be dumped that would not be better placed on land in the form of city lots to be [296]specially purchased for the purpose. Half the strength of my life has been spent in various forms of contention with this difficulty. I send you a copy of the last private letter I have written on the subject. This was in reply to an inquiry addressed to me a few weeks ago by Paul Dana almost immediately after his appointment as a Park Commissioner. During the last thirty years I have written many such letters, and also a great deal for the public on the subject, mostly through newspapers with reference to special occasions. I will send you one of these writings, of a less fugitive character than most, addressed to the Social Science Association in 1880. You will not need to read it all, but I wish you would glance at the first half dozen and the last three pages at least, in order to see for what I am always contending.

You may observe that Lord Meath quotes from this pamphlet a passage, the object of which was really the opposite of that he apparently assumes: i.e. the passage was intended as an introduction to an argument for large parks (preserves) of rural scenery, such as cannot be had in public grounds of small area. Doubtless, he accidentally missed the point, but the fact that he did so shows you how hard it is to get the less intelligent public, and less liberal Park Commissioners to apprehend the point.

(Lord Meath has officially to do with no large public park, but only with small public grounds. He is Chairman of an Association, the chief object of which is to get the disused burial grounds of London turned into gardens—not parks—and opened to the public,—a most useful institution.)

My notion is that whatever grounds a great city may need for other public purposes, for parades, for athletic sports, for fireworks, for museums of art or science, such as botanic gardens, it also needs a large ground scientifically and artistically prepared to provide such a poetic and tranquilizing influence on its people as comes through a pleased contemplation of natural scenery, especially sequestered and limitless natural scenery.

What should be aimed at in this respect is always a special problem to be solved by special study of the landscape capabilities of each city.

Please preserve and return to me the Meath Report and the pamphlet by Eckman. You need not return the others.

Suppose that you had been commissioned to build a really grand, opera house; that after the construction work had been nearly completed and your scheme of decoration fully designed, you should be instructed that the building was to be used on Sundays as a Baptist Tabernacle, and that a suitable place must be made for a huge organ, a pulpit and a dipping pool. Then at intervals afterwards, you should be advised that it must be so re-fitted and furnished that parts of it could be used for a court room, a jail, a concert hall, hotel, skating rink, for surgical cliniques, for a circus, dog show, drill room, ball room, railway station and shot tower? What chance would you see for making a fine affair, in any respect, of your building?

Again, suppose that once in three or four years an ordinary house [297]painter and paper hanger, or even a theatrical scene painter, should be called in to revamp and improve your decoration of the auditorium? Could you think of such a history without indignation and disgust?

But that, more or less, is what is nearly always going on with public parks. Pardon me if I overwhelm you; it is a matter of chronic anger with me.

Cordially Yours,