I hope that I am not wrong in addressing you individually at this stage of our business with your Park Commission. Everything is to be built on what is now to be first determined. As a good sailor considers his ballast before [782]beginning a voyage, a good architect his foundations before erecting his walls, so there are fundamental matters about which we must have our minds at rest before we can make much further progress. Your interest in landscape painting must make you more appreciative of our present anxiety than we can expect others of your Commission to be.

I enclose a copy of a letter we are sending the President for the consideration of the Board. I am afraid that we may appear to others of the Board stubbornly persistent in pressing further consideration of the lock question against the opinion of your engineer. But you ought to see that we are not going beyond our duty. Everything in the landscape design turns upon this question. It is thus, as we must insist, a question of millions of dollars. If we adopt the engineer’s opinion, it balks every motive of design which we are otherwise disposed to adopt. We cannot help thinking that the engineer is wrong as an engineer. From conversation with him we apprehend that he has not looked at the question exclusively from an engineer’s point of view. He has looked at it as a park designer. It is natural enough that he should do so, but it is not what we want of him. We are the designers. We do not want to appear to overrule him on an engineering question. We are perfectly ready to overrule him on questions of landscape, and even on questions of park superintendence, as to which we have had a much larger experience than he has.

We have once, and only once in our professional life, had to act upon our own opinion as to a question of engineering in opposition to an engineer’s opinion. This was thirty-seven years ago when I was a young man. Two engineers of considerable eminence then gave the Park Commission and the public of New York the professional opinion that the subway proposed in our plan south of the old reservoir in the Central Park was impracticable, and if undertaken would be extremely dangerous. They wrote so to the newspapers and succeeded in getting up a small public panic on the subject with the threat that the City would be overwhelmed by the flood breaking out from the reservoir. The majority of the Commission trusted us. We carried out the work accurately according to our plan and accomplished just what we intended. It has been completed thirty-four years and not one of the dangers had in view by the engineers has ever been apparent.

To-day I put the case to the City Engineer of Boston; an eminent hydraulic engineer. He has visited the ground and knows the conditions. He said: “If I were in the place of the engineer in Chicago and you said that you wanted a lock in that place, I should put it there. I see no reason to question its practicability.”

Ought we to go on and make a plan under which results would be obtained worth twenty millions of dollars with the conviction which we have that by use of the lock we could obtain results worth thirty millions of dollars? An engineer cannot be found in New York to-day who will say that New York is not ten millions of dollars richer because the Park Commission took our advice [783]against that of their engineer in regard to the purely engineering question of the transverse roads of the Central Park.

Very Truly Yours