We have received your telegram from North Platt and replied by wire that we cannot be in Washington this week.

A brief report giving the opinion which you have asked of us will be sent you herewith. I had partly prepared a more extended report giving reasons at length for the opinion expressed, but had found that it could not be made complete and satisfactory without reference to maps and data other than those we have. Mr. Schoepf had consequently been asked to furnish us with these a few days before your telegram came.

Three things I may say to you as growing out of our examination of the ground and of our reflections upon the question since we saw you.

First; The cost of obtaining a reasonable degree of convenience upon any scheme of straight streets through this region would be enormous. So much so that considerations of cost would greatly delay and obstruct the satisfactory improvement not only of its streets, but of private premises fronting upon them. Steep, high, raw banks of gullying red clay, such as have been established in the cuttings and fillings required to obtain tolerable grades for the straight course of Connecticut Avenue, for example, are likely to remain eyesores for many years, detracting greatly from such general attractiveness as [420]the region might otherwise possess. Is there any sight more forlorn and repulsive that the outskirts of a large town through which, regardless of the natural surface, streets have been formed with raw embankments and cuttings, more or less gullied, more or less overgrown with coarse weeds, altogether shabby and squalid?

Second; To lay out streets through the region upon courses approximately fitting the natural surface, but with the aim of making them both more eligible and more economical of construction than straight streets could be made, while not an impossible task, would require much more original study and exercise of ingenuity than has ordinarily been applied to the laying out of streets. It cannot be a mechanical process. It requires forecasting and constructive design, as well as engineering science.

Third; The full value of your Company’s land will not be realized unless in the laying out of it and in the plans of construction to be adopted there shall be a clearer recognition than has yet been had in real estate operations in any city of the world, of a long-growing and rapidly augmenting tendency of civilization to separate and greatly distinguish business premises from domestic premises; to form quarters for one of a wholly different character in respect to street plans from quarters for the other; business quarters being closely and compactly built with an effort to provide facilities for business within the smallest area that convenience will permit; domestic quarters being spread out much more than domestic quarters yet are in any old towns, and this with an effort to secure spaciousness of scenery and to combine rural with urban advantages in a degree that the usual methods of laying out streets and marketing building lots makes in all cases extremely difficult and costly, and generally wholly impossible.

Evidences of this tendency having strongly impressed me in my studies of Old World towns as well as our own, in 1876 I wrote an official report addressed to the Commission charged with the duty of laying out the Spuyten Duyvil promontory, (an outlying district of the city of New York), advising them that in this duty

“the development of a distinctly suburban and picturesque character should be kept frankly in view as a source of wealth, and that the roads should be adapted to a population living less densely and with which pleasure driving and walking are to be, relatively to heavy teaming, more important than in the streets of the compact city.

“In broken and rolling ground, and especially in rocky ground, sites for houses can be well chosen only with an intelligent consideration of local circumstances. If a hundred lots are to be laid off, each one hundred feet wide, and with the dividing lines all at right angles with the street line, in many parts of the promontory the dividing lines will so occur that on not half the lots will an entirely satisfactory site for a building be found, and, on several, building will be impracticable until after much labor has been given to transform the natural surface. Let the same property, on the other hand, be laid out with a judicious adjustment of lines to the local [421]conditions, and an equal number of lots may be made of it, each offering an admirable and conveniently approached site. Of course, however, they will vary in size.

“As to the general attractiveness of the region, and as to the total or average value of all its real estate, there are certain well established principles by which men of taste throughout the civilized world, when living among rural or even rus-urban conditions are almost invariably guided when laying out the private carriage approaches to their houses. The motives growing out of well established experience which enforce this practice, apply equally in the case of a common approach to two houses as to one, and if to two, equally to twenty or to two hundred. Though the propriety may be questioned of advancing toward a house indirectly when it is situated on a plain, there is no question that in a hilly country the principles referred to always lead to the use in roads of winding courses in greater or less degree of correspondence with the natural surface.”

Since this was written, although the manner of laying out streets and offering land for sale has been but very rarely at all accommodated to it, the tendency in question has become much more apparent. It is to be observed no less in Chicago and San Francisco than in Boston, and though what, since the war, has become the fashionable quarter of Washington is nowhere adapted to its full development, its effect is nowhere more generally apparent. It appears in most of our large towns no less in the growing custom of building, in certain quarters, structures of great height and thus bringing many times as much business as formerly within a given ground space and under one roof, than in that which has led men of means so generally to vacate the class of dwellings which were fashionable thirty years ago, dwellings set close upon the street and in solid blocks, and to move, if not into fully suburban houses, at least into town houses of a much more villa-like class, often wholly detached from other houses, and with a space of sodded and planted ground between them and the street. It is seen in the greatly increased number, near every thriving town, of more distinctly suburban dwellings both for people of large, and for those of moderate wealth; in the organization of numerous suburban improvement societies with the object largely of promoting the improvement of suburban country roads, the planting of roadside trees, the neater keeping of road borders, and of stimulating private practices by which a neighborhood may be made comprehensively attractive, not in a formal and stately, but in a picturesque, sylvan and rural way.

And it is plain that the tendency is being rapidly augmented by the introduction of suburban railway trains, telephone and telegraph systems, of street railways and of modifications in methods of housekeeping supply, such as the increasing use by tradesmen of suburban delivery wagons, and by the multiplication of suburban expresses.

There is no branch of business in which this tendency is as little recognized as in that of land dealing, and this plainly because it is practicable to vary greatly from the old ways of laying out streets and offering for sale building sites, only when those interested to do so can determine the entire street system [422]of a large suburban district, and connect it by commodious trunkways with the business quarters of the town.

I have been writing more particularly of the tendency to a great change in the character of the public demand for sites for dwellings as it is beginning to make itself apparent in our American cities. That you may be satisfied how general and irresistible it is, and of the folly of disregarding it in dealing with suburban lands, I wish that you would look at an article in the October number of the Contemporary Review entitled “THE RISE OF THE SUBURBS.” It has for its text the revelations on this subject of the last English Census, and fully corroborates all I have said bearing upon the question of the future demand for dwelling places promising to be permanently attractive because of the permanent suburban, semi-rural, sylvan and picturesque landscape character of the region in which they are situated. You will remember that when we had the pleasure of a visit from you, several instances were pointed out in our own neighborhood, in which the soundness of this principle had been demonstrated, where the several owners of a considerable body of land could be united to act as one in operating consistently with it.

From the article in the Contemporary Review I append a brief extract:

“The greatest advance in the decade is shown, not in the cities themselves, but in the ring of suburbs which spread into the country about them. If the process goes on unchecked, the Englishman of the future will be of the city, but not in it. The son and grandson of the man from the fields will neither be a dweller in the country nor a dweller in the town. He will be a suburb-dweller. The majority of the people of this island will live in the suburbs; and the suburban type will be the most wide-spread and characteristic of all, as the rural has been in the past, and as the urban may perhaps be said to be in the present.”

I add one other from a report to the Boston Rapid Transit Commissioners of the results of a special examination of the suburbs of European cities, just made public:

“While in Berlin, as in all cities of Continental Europe, there is a disposition on the part of the people to reside within the city limits, and to occupy lodgings in buildings fronting on business streets and used for mercantile purposes. This method seems to be gradually changing. Each year a proportionately larger number of people find homes for themselves in the suburbs. **** Berlin is growing in number of population more rapidly than Chicago, and it is believed the many thousands of acres of unoccupied land in the suburbs will soon be covered with tens of thousands of small buildings occupied by one, or at most two, families.”

Yours Truly