I slept three nights in New York last week but was out of town all of evry day & evng, meeting engagements or I shd have called on you. A Tribune reporter caught me one night and you probably saw the result.

Dodge had written me indicating that a movement was to be made to save the Palisades, intimating that I shd be employed and asking for the address of Harrison. (Dodge had been a contributor to the fund which I raised years ago for employing Harrison in the Niagara agitation) I replied advising him to call on you; stating that you long since had seen the danger to the Palisades to which he was just waking up, that you had resided on the Palisades, were well posted as to the facts, and better able than I should be even after considerable study to give him the advice he needed—I said what I did to the Tribune man to encourage the agitation. Stiles aftds called on me but I was not in. I have not seen him for a year past.

I was chiefly occupied with Brooklyn Park matters. The situation is a very embarrassing one. Really, our principle duty there is to hinder, delay and resist operations further upsetting the original design, while we wait and seek opportunity to urge & advance restorations and recoveries. This last week under instructions I defined a site for a house for tennis players which I suppose White is to plan. (Though White has been often referred to as if he were the Architect of the Park, we have not seen him nor been brought into communication with him.) There are two things to which in Brooklyn I make every thing else secondary. One is to secure certain additions to the plantations which were intended and prepared for at the time we left and the lack of which frustrates leading motives of our design; the other to get the soul into the Concert Ground. The present arrangements is simply absurd. It is the play of Hamlet with Hamlet omitted. Yet nobody in Brooklyn seems to have recognized it or to be able to recognize it and I am almost driven to ask: “Am I crazy or is it these others who are so.” I have been cautious as yet, not wishing to be thought a crank, but I have not found a Brooklyn man who can entertain the only idea on the subject that I think sane. I detect an inclination to smile when I approach the question. I was told last week that a trial of music on the [814]island had been made years ago and that it was a failure. I do not believe it. I never neglect to urge the completion of the arrngmt, but the Commissioner always looks uncomfortable and shies it. The present conditions are hideously absurd.

There are two other matters which my heart is set to further. First, to recover the use originally intended of what is now a mere shabby desert of sand, the ground designated by us as a Play Grnd for little children. The other, the Plaza, as to which there is a disposition to raze the mounds & abolish the fountain. That being done, what next I don’t yet know. I am simply resisting with the aim to get back to our original plan. What is chiefly wrong now, and exciting to projects for radical changes of plan is plainly, it seems to me, the result of incomplete work, and neglect in mangmt of the plantations which as a consequence are wholly ruined. The Commission from time to time advances suggestions for new works which we try to discourage with a view to the use of the money they wd require for restorations, corrections and the carrying out of intentions which have been frustrated & thwarted.

We have been asked to advise about a piece of ground which has probably been made public property because it would cost too much to adapt it for buildg lots. Instead of having it cut down at great cost I have proposed that it shd be dealt with as you dealt with Trinity Cemetery and that this proposition might not be misunderstood & misinterpreted, I got the Superintendent to go with me to the Cemetery where the results that you obtained converted him.

John is in Europe this summer, Rick graduated with honors last Fall & has been spndg the summer in the Rocky Mtns on the Coast Survey.