NOTES ON THE PLAN OF
FRANKLIN PARK
AND RELATED MATTERS.

Introduction.

PUBLIC OPINION COMPARATIVELY ILL-PREPARED TO SUSTAIN
AN ECONOMICAL MANAGEMENT OF A LARGE PARK WORK

Part First.

THE CONDITION OF BOSTON IN REGARD TO PROVISIONS FOR
VENTILATION AND URBAN RECREATION

Part Second.

THE PLAN OF FRANKLIN PARK

I.	Of Certain Conditions of the Site
II.	The Purpose of the Plan
III.	A Review of the Plan by Divisions
IV.	A Review of the General Landscape Design
	Drives and Walks
	Riding Pad
	Enclosures
	Entrances

Part Third.

THE KEY OF A CONSERVATIVE PARK POLICY, AND THE COST OF
CARRYING OUT THE PLAN UNDER SUCH A POLICY

A Brief History of the Rural Park of Buffalo, with Reference
to its Management, Cost, and Value

The Maintenance Cost of Parks

Part Fourth.

OF THE DIFFICULTIES OF PURSUING A SOUND POLICY, AND
THE MEANS BY WHICH THEY ARE TO BE OVERCOME

I.	Of the Supreme Importance that a Large Park may come to have in the History of a City
II.	The Element of Lastingness as Affecting the Importance of what is to be Determined in the Early Work of a Park
III.	The Earnings of a Park to a City accrue largely through the Less Conspicuous Use of it, and through the Use of the Less Conspicuous Parts of it
IV.	The Adaptation of the Park to the Use of Invalids
V.	The Value of a Rural Park to the Parts of a City more distant from it
VI.	The Bearing of the Difficulties that have been reviewed upon the Main End of these Notes

Part Fifth.

THE PARK AS A DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

FIRST.
A CONSIDERATION OF PUBLIC PROPERTIES IN OR NEAR
BOSTON AVAILABLE FOR OCCUPATION OTHERWISE THAN
BY BUILDINGS OR FOR THOROUGHFARES.

Among habits of thought that we have by inheritance there is one which is evinced in the custom of speaking of public grounds comprehensively and indiscriminatingly as “the lungs” of a city, “ventilating-places,” “breathing-holes,” and “airing-grounds.”

This habit originated in walled towns, with extremely narrow, crooked streets, half built over, in which all the filth and garbage of dwellings was deposited, and often remained until flushed out by heavy rains. In such cities of fifty thousand inhabitants, the deaths due to foul air were larger than they now need be in cities of five hundred thousand.

With it has come down to us a subtile disposition, — the ghost of a serious, solid, and firm-footed ancestral conviction, — by which we are often influenced in dealing with questions of public grounds more than we are aware. It is a disposition to assume that the chief value of such grounds is that of outlets for foul air and inlets for pure air, and to regard whatever else our taxes are required to provide upon them in the character of a comparatively trifling luxury, adding something to the pleasure of life, no doubt, like sweet things after dinner, or buttons on the back of a man’s coat, or the “gingerbread work” of a ship, but supplying almost nothing of solid sustenance and strength.

A wholly different understanding of the use of public grounds has long since begun to prevail; yet we are so much haunted by the old idea that we are rarely able to take clear, business-like views of the conditions of value in their equipment.

Even those who have been advocating the great addition lately made to the ground reserved from building within the city of Boston, have frequently made the sanitary requirement of airing-spaces in the midst of a city, and the need of providing them well in advance of the line of compact building, their main argument. Let it be supposed that the term “airing-place,” as now used, means a little more than it once did; that it means a place to which people shall be drawn by various attractions, and having been drawn shall be induced to exercise in such a manner as to quicken their circulation and give their lungs a good cleansing of fresh air; it is yet an error fruitful of bad management and of waste to suppose that such an undertaking as this of Franklin Park is to be justified on that ground.

This will be better seen and several other considerations affecting the problem of the plan, will be made plainer if the advantages which the people of the city now hold with respect to airing-grounds are passed in review.

To aid a cursory examination of them the accompanying map has [468] been prepared, showing the city and so much of its outskirts as can conveniently be brought within the limits of the sheet, and indicating one hundred and eighty-six localities, in each of which there is now a body of land, great or small, serving, or available to serve, at least a ventilating purpose. Of these, seventy-one have been already “improved,” are now in process of improvement, or are held with a definite intention of improvement, with a view to recreative qualities, as for example, by being turfed and planted. Fifty-six of these are public squares, commons, or gardens, of the city of Boston proper, the number of these much exceeding that of the same class of grounds of the united cities of New York and Brooklyn. Thirty-nine are burial grounds, most of them small, ancient, and disused. These are not likely to be built upon, and should the course now being pursued in London and other old cities be followed, as in time it probably will be, most of them will eventually be made public groves and gardens. At least they will be verdurous breathing-places. Forty-seven are lands which in various ways have come into the possession of the city, and may at any time be sold when the government thinks it wise to part with them. Their bearing on the present subject is this, that when it shall be thought that additional urban grounds are needed in any part of the city, it will not always be necessary to make a special purchase of land to supply sites for them. Many of these properties, for instance, are well situated for playgrounds for school children, and could be adapted to that use at moderate expense. Others, smaller, are available for open-air gymnasiums.

Within the city of Boston, or close upon its border, there are nearly two hundred public properties which are not held with a view to building over them, and most of which are secured by legal enactments from ever being built over. Omitting the larger spaces recently acquired and held by the Department of Parks, these grounds are on an average thirteen acres each in area. Omitting the islands, the burial grounds, the larger grounds of the Department, and all that would not ordinarily be classed with “city squares and gardens,” the latter have an average area of about four acres each.

The area of the entire number of public properties numbered on the map, and of which a classified list follows showing the situation and area of each, is 3356.63 acres, or over five square miles. Of those likely to be permanent green oases among the buildings of the city, the area is about four square miles, or nearly as much as the entire building space within the walls of some cities that had great importance in the world when the building of Boston was begun.

Before taking up the question of the proposed large park, it may be desirable to form some idea of the present standard for the equipment of cities in respect to public grounds other than large parks, and consider how Boston’s possessions, as they have been set out, may be rated by it. Of course this can be done but loosely, but the purpose may be carried far enough to answer with assurance the question, How are the people of Boston faring and [469] likely to fare in this particular in comparison with civilized townspeople generally?

For this purpose it must be kept in mind that the public grounds of most cities have come to be what they are and where they are by various detached and desultory proceedings, of which the result, as a whole, illustrates penny-wise-pound-foolish wisdom quite as much as the result of laying out streets with reference to immediate local and personal interests, regardless of burdens loading up to be carried by an entire city ever after.

Of late, however, ideas of systematization, with a view to comprehensive and long-sighted public economy, have taken root, and in a few instances are growing to profitable results.

These ideas move in two directions; and as confusion between them can only lead to blunders, it is well to see where the parting occurs.

If a large town were about to be built on a previously determined plan, a series of public grounds might be contemplated, to be situated at regular distances apart, all of the same extent, and all looking to a similarity and an equality of provisions for the use of those who would resort to them, the aim being to distribute the value of whatever should be done for the purpose of public recreation, as nearly as possible equitably among the several corresponding districts of the city. A type of grounds would result, an inclination to approach which is here and there evident.

Certain advantages follow, but they are obtained at a cost that would be unreasonable in any city, the site of which was not generally flat, rockless, and treeless, or in any the natural growth, expansion on all sides and prosperity of which were not singularly assured. Nor are the advantages aimed at in such a system, so far as attainable, of controlling importance.

As cities grow in a manner not to be accurately foreseen, as centres of business and centres of residence sometimes shift, and in the course of years become interchanged, and as some parts of the site or the neighborhood of a city will nearly always be specially favorable to provisions of recreation of one class, other parts to provisions of another class, it is generally better to have in view the development of some peculiar excellence in each of several grounds. And this may be considered the central idea of the alternative system, only that in proceeding with reference to it, it is to be remembered that cities are built compactly because of the economy of placing many varied facilities of exchange of service in close and direct intercommunication. Any large area within a city, not occupied by buildings, and not available as a means of communication between them, lessens this advantage, compelling circuitous routes to be taken and increasing the cost of the exchanges of service, upon the facilities offered for which the prosperity of the city depends.

It follows that so far as any purpose of public grounds can be well provided for on a small ground, it is better to so provide for it, rather than to multiply and complicate the purposes to be provided for on a larger ground. In a system determined with unqualified regard to this principle no ground [470] would be used for any purpose of recreation which purpose could as well be served by itself elsewhere, on a small ground.

It follows, also, that the larger the ground needed for any special purpose, the more desirable it is (other things being equal) that the ground should be at a distance from the centres of exchange, which will be the denser parts of the city, and out of the main lines of the compact outward growth of the city.

The smaller grounds of the class designed for general use (being such as are commonly called squares and places) may with advantage, as far as practicable, be evenly distributed, with a view to local convenience, throughout a city. Yet, with regard to these, there are at least three circumstances which should make numerous deviations from such equalizing distribution: First, topographical circumstances may compel spaces unsuitable for building to be left between streets, which it will be economical to use for such grounds; many such are found in and about Boston. Second, spaces should be left about public buildings, in order to give them better light, remove them from the noise of the streets, protect them from conflagrations, and make the value of their architecture available. Such spaces will economically become small public grounds.

Lastly, it is most desirable to make use of any local circumstance of the slightest dignity of character to supply a centre of interest for such grounds. Such a circumstance may be found, for instance, in a natural feature, as a notable rock, or in a historical feature, as the site of an old fort, or in the birthplace of a great man, or simply in a point of vantage for a view, as a prospect down the harbor. There is no better example of a very small public ground than one in Paris, where a beautiful church tower, decorated by centuries of superficial decay and mossy incrustations, has been taken as the centre of the work, the body of the church being removed and its place occupied by seats and gardenry.

Usually, however, there is nothing better for the purpose of this class of grounds than a simple open grove, or, on the smaller spaces, a group of forest trees (selected with regard for probable vigor and permanent health under the circumstances) with a walk through or around it, proper provisions against injury and unseemly use, a drinking fountain, and convenient seats out of the lines of passage, of which type there are good illustrations in Boston.

Playgrounds for children need not be so large as to interfere with direct, short communication, and should be evenly distributed in the residential part of the town, except as special localities are to be preferred on account of unusual topographical fitness.

If it is thought desirable to make any special provision for carriage and saddle exercise without going far from the central parts of the town, the most convenient and economical plan is that of a passage having the character of a street of extraordinary width, strung with verdant features and other [471] objects of interest, so laid out as not to seriously interfere with the primary business of the city; that is to say, with convenience of exchange. Such passages are found between the principal palaces and better-built parts and the more frequented parks in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Dijon, and other European cities, and are there more commonly classed as boulevards; in America they are to be found notably in Buffalo and Chicago, and are there called parkways.

To further develop a system of public grounds, areas will be selected as far as practicable in parts of the city where they will least interrupt desirable general communication, the topographical conditions of each of which adapt it to a special purpose, and each of these will be fitted for public use upon a plan intended to make the most of its special advantages for its special purposes.

These observations may be considered to suggest the present standard of civilization in respect to the urban grounds of a city situated as Boston is. Looking with reference to this standard to Boston possessions and Boston’s opportunities held in reserve to be used as her borders extend, hardly another city will be found in an equally satisfactory condition.

In the Boston provisions for urban public grounds there are:

(1) Two extensive parkway systems, one formed by Massachusetts Avenue, expanding into the broad, shady drives and walks that pass around and divide Chestnut Hill Reservoir; the other formed by the Muddy River (Riverdale) roads, spreading into the Promenade now forming about the Back Bay Drainage Basins, and with Commonwealth Avenue connecting the Common and Public Garden with Jamaica Pond, the Arboretum, and the site of Franklin Park.

(2) There are numerous local grounds so small in extent as not to interfere with desirable lines of street communication.

(3) There are a few grounds adapted to serve a similar purpose of a brief recreation for the people of their several neighborhoods, which are larger than the first, but so situated that they will interrupt street communication only where natural obstacles occur (such as the deep slough of Back Bay).

(4) There is one ground which, though centrally situated, is fully large enough for the purpose, wherein the enjoyment of floral beauty and plant beauty of a specific character is liberally provided for.

(5) In another, much larger and of strikingly diversified surface, on the outskirts of the city, provision is made for the greatest possible variety of hardy trees in a manner to show their specific qualities, and to combine opportunity for scientific research and popular instruction with the enjoyment of the forms of individual sylvan beauty to be thus presented.

(6) In another, marine landscapes are offered and special provisions made for various aquatic recreations under particularly favorable natural conditions for their enjoyment.

[472]

(7) In another, a natural lake with beautifully wooded borders is to be availed of, which, besides its value in other respects, has this, that it will serve as a general skating-place and a safe still-water boating-place.

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Looking for deficiencies in this system of non-rural grounds, the chief will be found to be the want of sufficient local and suitable general grounds for active exercises. It would be a good thing for the city to have a large, plain, flat, undecorated ground, not far away, easily accessible, if practicable, both by rail and boat, adapted to military and athletic exercises.

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Considering the advantage which pertains to the subdivision of the city by bays and rivers, and the constant movement through and around it of strong tidal currents, and the advantages thus offered for boating and bathing, as well as for obtaining unstagnant air, it is believed that this exhibit of Boston’s Breathing-Places will be found gratifying. Few cities have a larger number of small urban grounds proportionately to their population; and, while some of Boston’s grounds are of a nondescript character, serving no particular purpose very well, others are models of their class, and in no Northern city is the average usefulness of such grounds greater. As to reservations for the future, in respect to this class of grounds, no city is more forehanded.

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Finally, it will be plain that with such advantages as Boston has been shown to have within reach for a great variety of purposes to be served upon public grounds, it would have been a wholly irrational thing for the city to have purchased five hundred acres more of land, all in one body, except for a purpose to which so large a space was more essential than it is to the purpose of making a place attractive and suitable for those needing air and exercise.

As to the idea that the main object of making a park beautiful is to make it attractive, argument is hardly needed by anyone giving the slightest reflection to the question. Much more efficient means than can be found in any public ground could be easily and cheaply adopted for the purpose.

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“Tell them, dear, that if eyes are made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being.”

PART SECOND.
THE PLAN OF FRANKLIN PARK.
I.
OF CERTAIN CONDITIONS OF THE SITE OF
FRANKLIN PARK.

That the site for Franklin Park could have been rationally bought only with a view to a purpose previously not at all provided for, and that no use of the ground should now be permitted likely to lessen its value for this distinctive purpose, will yet more clearly appear if the topography of the ground and the manner of its selection are considered.

The scheme of Franklin Park, as it now stands, is a contraction of a much larger scheme outlined to the city government in 1869. This larger scheme included bodies of comparatively rich, humid, flat land, much better adapted to provide many forms of public ground than any within the field of the present scheme; a parade ground, for instance, and ball grounds; much better adapted, also, to the beauty to be obtained through refined horticulture, floral displays, and other decorations. It included streams of water and areas in which lakes with provisions for boating, skating, and bathing, as well as water-side beauty, could have been readily provided. All such ground has, long since, upon mature consideration by the city government, been thrown out of the scheme.

The ground finally selected has in its larger part the usual characteristics of the stony upland pasture, and the rocky divides between streams commonly found in New England, covered by what are called “second growth” woods, the trees slow growing from the stumps of previous woods, crowded, somewhat stunted, spindling; not beautiful individually, but, in combination forming impressive masses of foliage. It not only contains no lake, permanent pool or stream of water, but it commands no distant water view. It includes no single natural feature of distinguished beauty or popular interest. It is in all parts underlaid by ledges which break out at some points in a bold and picturesque way, at others in such a manner only as to make barren patches, with scanty vegetation that wilts and becomes shabby in dry, hot weather. It is thickly strewn with boulders; even in parts where the surface appears smooth and clear, their presence just below it generally becomes obvious in dry weather, and they are turned out by the plough in great numbers. Any fine cultivation of the ground will be comparatively costly. It is not generally adaptable at moderate expense for lawn-like treatment, nor to the development of what are commonly, though perhaps not accurately, regarded as the beauties of landscape gardening. As a whole, it is rugged, intractable, and as little suitable to be worked to conditions harmonious with urban elegance as the site of the Back Bay Drainage Basins, Mount Royal Park at Montreal, East Rock Park at New Haven, or Arthur’s Seat at Edinburgh.

It is on the borders of the city, remote from its more populous quarters, [474] remote, also, from any of its excellent water highways, and out of the line of its leading land thoroughfares.

What can be said for the property as a whole is this: That there is not within or near the city any other equal extent of ground of as simple, and pleasingly simple, rural aspect. It has been at various points harshly gashed by rudely engineered roads, scarred by quarries and gravel-pits, and disruralized by artificially disposed trees and pseudo-rustic structures, but, considering its proximity to the compact town, it has remarkably escaped disturbances of this character.

II.
THE PURPOSE OF THE PLAN.

Under this head a distinction is to be made which is of critical importance. It is a distinction so rarely regarded in gardening works, or in engineering or architectural works nominally subsidiary to gardening works, that a strong prejudice of mental habit will be found to be working against a complete entertainment of it. It will be necessary, therefore, to set it forth painstakingly and to justify insistence upon it. An indolent indisposition to be bothered with it has added greatly to the taxes of several cities.

What is the special purpose of a large park in distinction from the various purposes that may be served by such smaller grounds as Boston is provided with?

In the first division of these pages reference has been made to the manner in which various evils of town life, by the introduction of one special expedient after another, have been gradually so well contended with, that in cities that at present have several times the population they had in the last century, much less time is now lost than then to productive industry; the average length of life much advanced, and the value of life augmented. The evils in question have been for the most part intangible, and to those who were not close students of them have been considered inscrutable; not to be measured and reckoned up like the evils of fire and flood, famine, war, and lawlessness. Consequently plans for overcoming them have always been regarded for a time as fanciful, and those urging them as theorists and enthusiasts. For a time, no city outlays have been so grudgingly made or given so much dissatisfaction to taxpayers as those required to advance measures of this class. Looking back upon their results, after a few years, it is admitted that no other money has been so profitably expended. No one thinks that they were untimely or were advanced too rapidly.

Of this class of evils there is one rapidly growing in Boston, in contention with which nothing has yet been accomplished. It is an evil dependent on a condition involved in the purpose of placing many stacks of artificial conveniences for the interchange of services closely together. It may be [475] suggested if not explained (for evils of this class are seldom fully explainable) in this way.

A man’s eyes cannot be as much occupied as they are in large cities by artificial things, or by natural things seen under obviously artificial conditions, without a harmful effect, first on his mental and nervous system and ultimately on his entire constitutional organization.

That relief from this evil is to be obtained through recreation is often said, without sufficient discrimination as to the nature of the recreation required. The several varieties of recreation to be obtained in churches, newspapers, theatres, picture galleries, billiard rooms, baseball grounds, trotting courses, and flower gardens, may each serve to supply a mitigating influence. An influence is desirable, however, that, acting through the eye, shall be more than mitigative, that shall be antithetical, reversive, and antidotal. Such an influence is found in what, in notes to follow, will be called the enjoyment of pleasing rural scenery.

But to understand what will be meant by this term as here to be used, two ideas must not be allowed to run together, that few minds are trained to keep apart. To separate them let it be reflected, first, that the word beauty is commonly used with respect to two quite distinct aspects of the things that enter visibly into the composition of parks and gardens. A little violet or a great magnolia blossom, the frond of a fern, a carpet of fine turf of the form and size of a prayer rug, a block of carved and polished marble, a vase or a jet of water, — in the beauty of all these things unalloyed pleasure may be taken in the heart of a city. And pleasure in their beauty may be enhanced by aggregations and combinations of them, as it is in arrangement of bouquets and head-dresses, the decoration of the dinner-tables, window-sills and door-yards, or, in a more complex and largely effective way, in such elaborate exhibitions of high horticultural art as the city maintains in the Public Garden.

But there is a pleasure-bringing beauty in the same class of objects — foliage, flowers, verdure, rocks, and water — not to be enjoyed under the same circumstances or under similar combinations; a beauty which appeals to a different class of human sensibilities, a beauty the art of securing which is hardly more akin with the art of securing beauty on a dinner-table, a window-sill, a dooryard, or an urban garden, than the work of the sculptor is akin with the work of the painter.

Let beauty of the first kind be called here urban beauty, not because it cannot be had elsewhere than in a city, but because the distinction may thus, for the sake of argument in this particular case, be kept in mind between it and that beauty of the same things which can only be had clear of the confinement of a city, and which it is convenient therefore to refer to as the beauty of rural scenery.

Now as to this term scenery, it is to be borne in mind that we do not [476] speak of what may be observed in the flower and foliage decorations of a dinner-table, window-sill, or dooryard, scarcely of what may be seen in even a large urban garden, as scenery. Scenery is more than an object or a series of objects; more than a spectacle, more than a scene or a series of scenes, more than a landscape, and other than a series of landscapes. Moreover, there may be beautiful scenery in which not a beautiful blossom or leaf or rock, bush or tree, not a gleam of water or of turf shall be visible. But there is no beautiful scenery that does not give the mind an emotional impulse different from that resulting from whatever beauty may be found in a room, courtyard, or garden, within which vision is obviously confined by walls or other surrounding artificial constructions.

It is necessary to be thus and even more particular in defining the term used to denote the paramount purpose embodied in the plan of Franklin Park, because many men, having a keen enjoyment of certain forms of beauty in vegetation, and even of things found only in the country, habitually class much as rural that is not only not rural, but is even the reverse of rural as that term is to be here used.

For example: in a region of undulating surface with a meandering stream and winding valleys, with much naturally disposed wood, there is a house with outbuildings and enclosures, roads, walks, trees, bushes, and flowering plants. If the constructions are of the natural materials of the locality and not fashioned expressly to manifest the wealth or art of the builders, if they are of the texture and the grain and the hues that such materials will naturally become if no effort to hide or disguise them is made, if the lines of the roads and walks are adapted to curves of the natural surface, and if the trees and plants are of a natural character naturally disposed, the result will be congruous with the general natural rural scenery of the locality, its rural quality being, perhaps, enhanced by these unobtrusive artificial elements. But in such a situation it oftener than otherwise occurs that customs will be followed which had their origin in a desire to obtain results that should be pleasing, not through congruity with pleasing natural rural circumstances, but through incongruity with them. Why? Simply because those designing them had been oppressed by a monotony of rural scenery, and desired to find relief from it, and because also they desired to manifest the triumph of civilized forces over nature. And on account of the general association with rural scenery of things determined by fashions originating in these desires, they are carelessly thought of as rural things, and the pleasure to be derived from them is esteemed a part of the pleasure taken in rural scenery.

It thus happens that things come to be regarded as elements of rural scenery which are simply cheap and fragmentary efforts to realize something of the pleasingness which the countryman finds in the artificialness of the city. This is why, to cite a few examples familiar to everyone, wooden houses are fashioned in forms and with decorations copied from houses of masonry, and why the wood of them is not left of its natural color, or given a tint harmonious [477] with natural objects, but for distinction’s sake smeared over with glistening white lead. This is the reason why trees are transplanted from natural to unnatural situations about houses so treated, why they are formally disposed, why forms are preferred for them to be obtained only by artificial processes, as grafting, pruning, and shearing; why shrubs are worked into fantastic shapes that cannot possibly be mistaken for natural growths; why groups are made studiously formal, why the trunks of trees are sometimes whitewashed; why rocks too heavy to be put out of sight are cleared of their natural beauty, and even sometimes also whitewashed; why flowering plants are often arranged as artificially as the stones of a mosaic pavement; why pools are furnished with clean and rigid stone margins and jets of water thrown from them; why specimens of rustic work and of rock work are displayed conspicuously that have been plainly designed to signalize, not to subordinate or soften, the artificialness of artificial conveniences.

Defining the purpose of the plan of Franklin Park to be that of placing within the easy reach of the people of the city the enjoyment of such a measure as is practicable of rural scenery, all such misunderstanding of the term as has thus been explained must be guarded against.

That rural scenery has the effect alleged, of counteracting a certain oppression of town life, is too well established to need argument, but as the manner of its action will have a practical bearing on the purpose of the plan, the circumstances may be recalled that the evil to be met is most apt to appear in excessive nervous tension, over-anxiety, hasteful disposition, impatience, irritability, and that the grateful effect of a contemplation of pleasing rural scenery is proverbially regarded as the reverse of this. It is, for example, of the enjoyment of this pleasure, and not simply of air and exercise, that Emerson says, “It soothes and sympathizes,” that Lowell says, “It pours oil and wine on the smarts of the mind,” and which Ruskin describes as “absolute peace.”

It is not an easy matter, in the immediate outskirts of a great city, to make a provision of scenery which shall be so far rural in character and pleasing in effect as to have a high degree of the influence desired.

Some wise men are accustomed to ridicule the earlier result of efforts to that end by comparing it with scenery remote from cities the rurality of which owes nothing to human care. But these higher examples not being available for the frequent use of the mass of the people of a city, it is only a question whether a result is to be gained under such conditions as are offered in the site of Franklin Park which shall be of so much value in this respect that it will be worth more than it will cost. And, in considering this question, it is to be borne in mind that the purpose requires no elements of scenery of a class that would induce sensational effects. It will be answered in a measure — it is a question whether it may not even be better answered — by scenery that may be comparatively characterized as tame and homely. It is almost [478] certainly better that the aim in overcoming the difficulties of securing such scenery should be modest, provided a modest aim can be sustained, and the temptation to put it out of countenance by bits of irrelevant finery resisted. Given sufficient space, scenery of much simpler elements than are found in the site of Franklin Park may possess the soothing charm which lies in the qualities of breadth, distance, depth, intricacy, atmospheric perspective, and mystery. It may have picturesque passages (that is to say, more than picturesque objects or picturesque “bits”). It may have passages, indeed, of an aspect approaching grandeur and sublimity.

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It is to be feared that there are some who may be inclined to question if a considerable degree of refined culture, such as is common only to the more worldly fortunate, is not necessary to enable one to enjoy the charm of rural scenery sympathetically with Wordsworth, Emerson, Ruskin, and Lowell. To enjoy it intellectually, yes; to be affected by it, made healthier, better, happier by it, no. The men who have done the most to draw the world to the poetic enjoyment of nature have, in large part, come from lowly homes, and been educated in inexpensive schools. Burns, the ploughboy, was one such, known to all. Millet, whose works are honored in the stateliest houses, was a peasant in habit, manner, and associations all his life long. Léon Bonvin, whose pathetic love of the most modest natural scenery was illustrated in Harper’s Magazine of last December, was by vocation the bar-keeper of a wayside tavern. And in thinking of this question, especially with reference to a majority of the people of Boston, it is well to remember a phrase used by Dr. Shairp in his treatise on the Poetic Interpretation of Nature. Speaking of Wordsworth and his sister, he says that the woman was the greater poet of the two, “only not a literary poet.” Poetic sensibility is one thing; inclination and capacity to give coherent form to poetic sentiment another.

The following is an account by Mrs. Gaskell of the poorer sort of the humblest work-people of Manchester, England, and is drawn from life, as anyone chancing to be in that town on a fine summer holiday may test. Abating something from the grandeur of the trees, similar scenes have been witnessed during the past summer in the new Brooklyn, Buffalo, and Philadelphia parks, and in the yet hardly begun Beardsley Park of Bridgeport. It is a question of time and of a wholesomely restrained ambition when they shall be seen in Franklin Park.

“He was on the verge of a green area, shut in by magnificent trees in all the glory of their early foliage, before the summer heat had deepened their verdure into one rich monotonous tint. And hither came party after party — old men and maidens, young men and children. Whole families trooped along after the guiding fathers, who bore the youngest in their arms or astride upon their backs, while they turned round occasionally to the wives, with [479] whom they shared some fond local remembrance. For years has Dunham Park been the favorite resort of the Manchester work-people. Its scenery presents such a complete contrast to the whirl and turmoil of Manchester. . . . Depend upon it, this sylvan repose, this accessible quiet, this lapping the soul in green images of the country, forms the most complete contrast to a town’s person, and consequently has over such the greatest power of charm. . . . Far away in the distance, now sinking, now falling, now swelling and clear came a ringing peal of children’s voices, blended together in one of those psalm tunes which we are all of us familiar with, and which bring to mind the old, old days when we, as wondering children, were first led to worship `Our Father’ by those beloved ones who have since gone to the more perfect worship.

“Holy was that distant choral praise, even to the most thoughtless; and when it, in fact, was ended, in the instant’s pause during which the ear awaits the repetition of the air, they caught the noontide hum and buzz of the myriads of insects who danced away their lives in the glorious day; they heard the swaying of the mighty woods in the soft but resistless breeze, and then once more burst forth the merry jests and the shouts of childhood, and again the elder ones resumed their happy talk as they lay or sat `under the greenwood tree.’

“But the day drew to an end; the heat declined, the birds once more began their warblings, the fresh scents hung about plant and tree and grass, betokening the fragrant presence of the reviving dew . . . . As they trod the meadow path once more, they were joined by many a party they had encountered during the day, all abounding in happiness, all full of the day’s adventures.

“Long cherished quarrels had been forgotten, new friendships formed. Fresh tastes and higher delights had been imparted that day. We have all of us our look now and then, called up by some noble or loving thought (our highest on earth) which will be our likeness in heaven. I can catch the glance on many a face, the glancing light of the cloud of glory from heaven, which is our home. That look was present on many a hard-worked, wrinkled countenance as they turned backwards to catch a longing, lingering look at Dunham Woods, fast deepening into blackness of night, but whose memory was to haunt in greenness and freshness many a loom and workshop and factory with images of peace and beauty.”

III.
A REVIEW OF THE PLAN BY DIVISIONS.

As to Local Names to be used in the following Review. — For convenience of reference, names have been given on the drawing to various localities. Some of these have been found in use, as Abbotswood, Glen Road, and Rock Hill. In most of the others, old homestead names of the neighborhood [480] are recalled, a choice among them having been made of such as would couple not too roughly with appropriate terminals. Scarboro Hill, Hagborne Hill, Waittwood, Rock Morton, and Ellicottdale are examples. Some of this class were suggested by the late Francis D. Drake, author of a History of Roxbury, shortly before his lamented death; others have been obtained from Colonial records of the park property, found at the Registrar’s office of Norfolk County. Nazingdale is from the birthplace of the first settlers. Long Crouch was the Colonial name of the road now known as Seaver Street, adjoining the woods to which it is given in the drawing. Old Trail Road is nearly on the line of the Indian footpath used in the earlier communications between Boston and Plymouth. The name Resting Place marks a shady knoll upon which the first military company formed in the Colonies with the purpose of armed resistance to British authority rested on its march home after the fight at Lexington. The captain and lieutenant of the company were both of families that at one time had homes on the park lands, and from them the names Heathfield and Pierrepont Road are taken.

The region named The Wilderness is referred to in records of the early part of the last century as “the Rocky Wilderness Land.” Playstead is an old designation of a rural playground, Steading of the offices of a rural estate. Greeting refers to the purpose of a promenade. Country Park is a term used to mark the intended distinction of character between Franklin Park and other public grounds of the city in a report made by Alderman, now Mayor, O’Brien in 1877. Schoolmaster Hill is so named in allusion to the circumstance that William Emerson and his brother, Ralph Waldo, while keeping school in Roxbury, lived in a house on the east side of this hill. Private letters of Emerson are preserved in which he refers fondly to the wildness and rurality of the neighborhood.

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As to the map. — The broad sheet that has been spoken of in the Introduction can be folded and carried in the pocket, and it is intended that copies of it shall be exhibited at different favorable points on the park site, with indices to the position on the ground of the more salient features of the plan. The drawing will best meet the intention with which it is prepared if it is examined on the ground with some exercise of the imagination, being considered as a map of what may be expected should the plan be carried out, the usual limitations of a map being had in mind.

In the review of the plan by divisions presently to be made, the verbal observations upon the broad sheet will be repeated, but in a slightly extended form, with a statement of some additional particulars, and with special reference to readers intending to look over the ground as just suggested.

The “limitations of a map” advised to be had in mind will be understood [481] if it is reflected that a map of Boston would give a stranger but little idea of what he would see if he were walking the streets of the city; still less of that more important part that exists under its roofs.

Seen from above, the trees of even a half-grown park would hide the outlines of the principal part of its roads, walks, and other surface constructions. Hence in a map designed to exhibit the general plan of a park, the woods, which will be the most important element of its scenery, can be but vaguely and incompletely represented; and bushes beneath trees, not at all.

Again, if it were attempted to show by the ordinary method of map-makers those variations of the surface which, next to the woods, are the most important features of the design, the drawing would be too complicated to fairly exhibit the plan of the work to be done. To avoid the obscurity which would thus occur, figures are given on the drawing, by which the relative elevation of the ground at various points may be determined. The more important swellings and depressions are also indicated by names ending in “hill” or “dale.”

If the drawing is taken on the ground where the existing hills and valleys can be seen, and if these and the principal existing masses of foliage are regarded as fixed features, the observer may with little personal trouble readily form a good general idea of what is projected. The conventional signs for foliage show, according as they are closely clustered, scattered, or wanting, the intended division into wooded, semi-wooded, and open turf-land; the positions of the principal outcrops of rock are indicated; the various routes for opening the scenery of the park to exhibition, in carriage, saddle, horse, and foot travel, are conspicuously lined out, and sites for the few structures necessary to public convenience are plainly shown.

It is to be considered in observing the position of these structures on the ground, that they are designed, as are all the artificial objects of the park, to be kept as low as will be consistent with their several purposes of utility, that their walls are to be of the stones of the locality, with weather stained and lichen mottled faces, and that they are to be so set in among rocks and foliage that, with a single not very marked exception, they will be seen only on near approach by those wishing to use them, and not at all by visitors following the walks, drives, and rides of the main circuit. The bolder ledges, on the other hand, will be rather more open to view than they now are. The woods, again, as they generally occupy the more elevated ground, will be relatively more prominent than they appear in the drawing.

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It has been considered necessary to public convenience that the park should be divided by a road crossing it from Blue Hill Avenue to Forest Hill Street, and that this should be open night and day for all ordinary street uses as the park roads will not be. Also that a considerable space of ground should [482] be open for pleasure use after daylight; that this space should be lightable in such a manner that no part of it will be in dark shadow, and to this end that it should be free from underwood, low-headed trees or other conditions offering facilities for concealment. (To keep all of the park open at night, making it a safe and decorous place of resort, would greatly augment its running expenses without securing an adequate return.)

The only favorable line for the cross-road is one corresponding nearly with the present Glen Road. (The following diagram represents the outline of the park property. Glen Road passes from A to B.) Such a road will divide the park into two parts, as Charles Street divides the Common from the Public Garden. The division on the side furthest from the compact part of the city will contain two-thirds of the ground, and this being enclosed by itself may be considered as the main park.

The ground on the other side is designed to answer purposes relatively to the main park analogous to those of a fore-court, portico, and reception room, with minor apartments opening from them for various special uses, and to which it is desirable access should be had at all times without entering the main park. It may be called the ante-park. From the ante-park there are to be two general entrances to the main park and an additional entrance for foot visitors.

For convenience in explaining the plan, the park must be considered as further subdivided as indicated by the black lines of the diagram below, but it must not be imagined that these lines will be obvious in looking over the ground. They are in part imaginary, and where not so will have the effect of barring the view or creating disunity of scenery less than an ordinary country road would do. Corresponding to letters on the diagram, names will be used to designate the several divisions as follows:

The distinctive purpose to which each of these divisions is to be fitted [483]

will now be stated, the more comprehensive landscape design which includes them all being afterwards described.

A. The Country Park (before referred to as the main park) is designed to be prepared and taken care of exclusively with reference to the enjoyment of rural scenery, that is to say, if it is to be used for any other purpose, it is meant that its advantages for that other purpose shall have accrued at no appreciable sacrifice of advantages for this primary and dominating purpose.

The division will be a mile long and three quarters of a mile wide. Natural scenery of much value for the purpose in view cannot be permanently secured in a tract of land of diversified surface of these limits with a great city growing about it, if the essential elements of such scenery are to be divided, adulterated, or put out of countenance by artificial objects, at all more than is necessary to its protection and to the reasonable convenience of those seeking the special benefits offered. The plan proposes, therefore, that in the Country Park nothing shall be built, nothing set up, nothing planted, as a decorative feature; nothing for the gratification of curiosity, nothing for the advancement or popularization of science. These objects are provided for suitably in the Public Garden, the Arboretum, and other grounds of the city. No other city in America has as good arrangements for them.

To sustain the designed character of the Country Park, the urban elegance generally desired in a small public or private pleasure ground is to be methodically guarded against. Turf, for example, is to be in most parts preferred as kept short by sheep, rather than by lawn mowers; well known and long tried trees and bushes to rare ones; natives to exotics; humble field flowers to high-bred marvels; plain green leaves to the blotched, spotted, and fretted leaves, for which, in decorative gardening, there is now a passing fashion. Above all, cheap, tawdry, cockneyfied garden toys, such as are sometimes [484] placed in parks incongruously with all their rural character, are to be eschewed. But a poor, shabby, worn, patchy, or in any way untidy ruralty is equally to be avoided with fragments of urban and suburban finery. In this respect the park is designed to be an example of thoroughly nice, though modest and somewhat homespun housekeeping.

The site of the Country Park is in most parts rugged, everywhere undulating. Where there are no outcropping ledges, solid rock is often close under the surface, and where it is not, there is in many places almost a pavement of boulders. Compared with that of most public parks, the surface soil is poor, while the subsoil is stony and hard. For these reasons, when the natural surface is much trampled and worn it becomes an inert dust, pernicious to vegetation. It cannot, therefore, be prepared to resist the wear of athletic sports without undue expense.

Under wise regulations and with considerate customs of use, for the establishment of which the good will of the people must be engaged, the site of the Country Park will be found happily adapted to its special distinctive purpose. But it can be wisely used for no recreations which would tend to the destruction of its verdant elements; for none not of the class of those in which women and children may not and do not customarily take part. The plan looks to its being maintained in quietness; quietness both to the eye and the ear. A grateful serenity may be enjoyed in it by many thousand people at a time, if they are not drawn into throngs by spectacular attractions, but allowed to distribute themselves as they are otherwise likely to do.

As will soon be shown, the intention of the plan of the park, as a whole, is that from no part of this Country Park division of it shall anything in any other of its divisions be visible, or, at most, be noticeable, except rock, turf, and trees, and these only in harmonious composition with the natural scenery of the Country Park. A large part of the Country Park is to be wooded, and adapted to the use of picnic and basket parties, especially small family parties. Various conveniences for these are to be prepared. Tennis courts, croquet grounds, archery ranges, and small lawns for children’s festivities, are provided for in connection with suitable picnic grounds in the several districts which are named on the Commissioners’ map — The Wilderness, Juniper Hill, Waittwood, Heathfield, Rock Milton, Rock Morton; on the western slopes of Scarboro Hill and in Abbotswood.

Near the picturesque declivity and hanging wood of Schoolmaster’s Hill, several small level places are designed to be formed by rough terracing on the hillside. Each of these is to be covered by vines on trellises, and furnished with tables and seats. Most of the arbors so formed look, at considerable elevation and advantageously, upon the broadest and quietest purely pastoral scene that the park can offer. These arbors are intended especially for the use of family basket parties. A small house is placed among them, to contain an office for the superintendence of the district, a parcel room and closets, and at which hot water for making tea can be had without charge. The [485]

house is to be placed and the other conveniences are to be so sheltered by existing trees and vines to be grown upon the trellises that they will be invisible except to those seeking them.

At a point central to all the picnic and basket party grounds that have been named, Abbotswood excepted, the map shows a space of unbroken turf, about eight acres in extent, named Ellicottdale, with a winding margin, which is generally rocky and shady. This ground is now for the most part boggy, and its surface strewn with boulders. The design is to convert it into a meadow adapted to be used (in the manner of the Long Meadow of the Brooklyn Park) for lawn games, such as tennis and croquet. On the north side of it another small house is provided, at which parties wishing to play will obtain assignments of ground, and can leave outer garments and store or hire needed implements. The position of this house is in a recess of the margin, near a great knuckle of rock and a large oak tree on the east side.

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The district last described and the circumjacent picnic groves may be approached by a walk coming from William Street. The entrance at this point is arranged with a view to a terminus and turning place of a street railroad; and to avoid compelling women and children to pass through a throng of carriages, the walk from it to Ellicottdale passes the circuit drive of the Park by a subway.

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South of the Meadow last described a walk and a narrow branch of the main drive will be seen on the map winding up the steep and rocky wood-side of Scarboro Hill to a resting-place upon the summit, where a temporary shelter for visitors now stands. Half-way up the hill, where a level shelf may be found under a steep ledge, buildings are shown marked “Dairy.” The Refectory, on the opposite side of the Park, being intended to supply more substantial refreshments, and to accommodate considerable numbers, the Dairy is designed, first, to provide the necessities of picnic parties in this part of the [487]

Park; second, to supply to all a few simple refreshments, such as are to be recommended for children and invalids, more especially fresh dairy products of the best quality. Cows are to be kept in an apartment separated from the main room by a glass partition, as in the famous exquisite dairies of Holland and Belgium; and those who desire it are to be furnished with milk warm from the cow, as in St. James’s Park, London. Fowls are also to be kept and new-laid eggs supplied. Immediately east of the grove in which this house will stand lies the principal expanse of turf of the Country Park. This is intended to be cropped with sheep, and a court with sheds south of the dairy and connecting with its cow-house is for the folding of the flock at night. The district of which this establishment is the centre slopes toward the prevailing summer breeze; is sheltered on the north; is already agreeably wooded, and will be a place at which invalids and mothers with little children may be advised to pass the best part of the day.

B.   The Playstead. This is a field of turf, thirty acres in extent (the most nearly flat ground on the property, little broken by rock), designed to be used for the athletic recreation and education of the city’s schoolboys, for occasional civic ceremonies and exhibitions, and for any purpose likely to draw spectators in crowds. The ground about Ellicottdale not being adapted to accommodate many spectators, for example, and a crowd being undesirable at any point in the Country Park, if a parade of school children, such as occurs in the Brooklyn Park every year, were to be made, this would be the place for it. “The Overlook,” on its left, is an elevated platform for spectators. It is eight hundred feet long, covering a barren ledge which would otherwise be disagreeably prominent. It is built of boulders obtained in clearing the Playstead, which are to be mainly overgrown with vegetation befitting the form and material of the structure, adapted to harmonize it with the natural [488] scenery, and make it unobtrusive. The Overlook will be in the shade of existing trees during the afternoon, and spectators will look away from the sun. Among these trees, in a depression of the rocks, a rectangular block appears on the map. This stands for a structure which will supply a platform, to be covered by a roof, to serve as a retreat for visitors during summer showers, and in the basement a station for park keepers, with a lock-up, a woman’s retiring-room, a coat-room, lavatory for players, and closets. An arched passage through the wall of the Overlook gives admission to it from the Playstead.

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C.   The Greeting. This division is to be wholly occupied by a series of parallel and contiguous drives, rides and walks, a double length of each, under rows of trees forming a Promenade, or Meeting Ground, of the Alameda type, half a mile in length. Monumental, architectural, and various decorative adjuncts are here admissible, but not essential. There are suitable positions for statues, water-jets, “baskets” of flowers, bird-cages, etc. The Playstead and the Greeting are to be without underwood, and adapted with electric lighting for night as well as day use. Together they will form an unenclosed ground, reaching across the Park, nearly a mile in length.

D.   The Music Court. A sylvan ampitheatre adapted to concerts.

E.   The Little Folks’ Fair. A division for childish entertainments, to be furnished with Swings, Scups, See-saws, Sand Courts, Flying Horses, Toy Booths, Marionettes, Goat Carriages, Donkey Courses, Bear Pits, and other amusing exercises and exhibitions, mostly to be provided by lessees and purveyors, to be licensed for the purpose.

F.   The Deer Park. This will supply a range for a small herd to be seen from the Greeting. Most of the ground, owing to the thinness of the soil over a flattish ledge, cannot be adapted to occupation by the public, or to be planted, except at excessive expense.

G .   Refectory Hill. A place for refreshments, to be principally served from the house shown, out of doors, under a large pergola, or vine-clad trellis, upon a terrace formed in the manner of the Playstead Overlook. From this terrace extensive sylvan prospects open, one of which will be later referred to. In the rear of the Refectory building, across a carriage-court, there is a circular range of horse-sheds for the use of visitors.

H.   Sargent’s Field. This ground being comparatively free from rock, and to be easily brought to a nearly level surface of good turf, tennis courts and a small ball ground may be provided in it; the object being to save players coming from the east from walking further to reach a playing ground, and to provide a place for players in general to go to, when on holidays the Playstead shall be reserved for other uses. Until found to be needed, it may with advantage be made a part of the Deer Park.

I.   Long Crouch Woods. A rambling ground, with sheltered southwestern slopes, to be held subject to lease to a suitable organization for a Zoölogical Garden.

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J.   The Steading. A rocky, sterile knoll, reserved for the Commissioners’ offices, within a screen of woods.

K.   The Nursery. Depressed ground, to be used, when adequate drainage outlets for this part of the city shall have been provided, for a service garden.

Border Ground. The streets by which the property taken for the park is bounded, are generally laid down on this plan as if moderately enlarged from the present thoroughfares (which at various points are but narrow lanes) and with a sidewalk on the park side, at such varying distances from the wheelway as may be necessary to avoid, in forming them, the destruction of fine trees and the cost of excessive grading. This arrangement is made practicable by setting back park fences and other obstructions fifty to eighty feet from the wheelways. In this way, also, a much larger widening of the wheelways than is suggested by the drawing can be made whenever public convenience will be served by it, without inordinate cost. In a few cases, for short distances, streets are shown as they may be improved by a slight taking of private land. This is to avoid heavy outlay for grading and the destruction of fine natural features on the park side of the present roads — as where, for example, rocky eminences of the park have their bases in the street. It is suggested that Canterbury Street should be widened ten feet opposite the park in order to avoid injury to the fine trees now growing in the park close to the street.

It is suggested on the drawing, also, that at the Williams Street entrance to the park the course of Forest Hills Street should be made more direct, and the grade improved by throwing it entirely into the park; and that some other variations from the present arrangements should be effected with a view to greater public convenience. To avoid interruption of pleasure travel by funeral processions, and to improve passage around the park, a short crossroad is planned opposite Forest Hills Cemetery, passing the park drive by a subway (LL in the index map). A short new street in extension of Sigourney Street is suggested to facilitate passage around the park. A small piece of land is proposed to be taken into the park at the corner of Sigourney Street to avoid awkward complications. The land proposed to be thrown out of the park property for all these purposes of street improvement is much larger than that to be taken in.

A direct approach to the park from Boylston Station of the Providence Railroad, is suggested by an extension of the present Boylston Street to the Playstead entrance. By this route a thousand men could, in half an hour, be transferred in a body from the Common to the Playstead.

IV.
A REVIEW OF THE GENERAL LANDSCAPE DESIGN.

Suitable provision has not commonly been made in the first laying out of a large city park for the purposes of the Greeting and the Music Court. Wherever it has not, ground that could only be poorly adapted to these purposes, and this at heavy cost, has generally come, in after years, to be used for them. It is best to avoid this danger. The best arrangements will be of a formal character, and these can be best provided on the site of Franklin Park, in the locality indicated, near the east corner. This not only has topographical advantages for the ends in view, but it is at such a distance from, and stands so related to, the Country Park, that great throngs upon it will in no wise disturb the desired serenity of the latter. The formal arrangement of trees within this division, and the small structures that will be required in the adjoining Little Folks’ Fair Ground, will not be observable except upon close approach, the rows of trees being so flanked by the outer, naturally disposed trees that, seen at a short distance in connection with the latter, they will have the effect of a forest growth.

Setting aside these two features, which stand to the rest of the park somewhat in the relation of the dwelling-house to a private park, except that care is taken to place them in landscape obscurity, the landscape design may be understood by considering that the intention is to make no change in any of the present leading features of the ground except with the purpose of giving a fuller development, aggrandizement, and emphasis to what are regarded as the more interesting and effective existing elements of their scenery, and of taking out or subordinating elements that neutralize or conflict with those chosen to be made more of. This first, and second, the sequestration, as far as possible, of the scenery of the park so that the outer scenery, to be formed by the gradual growing of the city about it, and which will necessarily be conflicting in expression, sentiment, and association with it, may be kept out of sight.

The latter purpose accounts more particularly for the woods which, it will be seen, are intended to be formed where no woods now are, along the borders of the Country Park; and the further to promote seclusion, these and other border trees are to be imagined as furnished with underwood.

The woods of the Wilderness, after having been much thinned and trimmed with a view to the growth of the best of them in sturdier and more umbrageous forms, and to some degree of grouping and more harmonious companionship, are also to be interspersed with scattered, irregular thickets of low, sturdy bushes, not only for picturesqueness, but to keep the ground, in the more arid parts, better shaded and moister, hide its barrenness, check rushing movements of visitors, and prevent the trampling of the drier ground to dust.

Trees in the Greeting and Playstead are to be all of large growth, and [491]

high stemmed (like those now growing spontaneously upon the Playstead), leaving room for light and vision to range under their branches.

The slope west of Glen Lane where, near the entrance to the Country Park, drives, rides, and walks come together, is designed to be closely planted with low bushes (shown on the Commissioners’ map, but not on the reduced reproductions), the object being to obscure the artificial features without making a screen between the natural features of the Playstead and Nazingdale. Looking in this direction from nearly all of the Playstead quarter there will be an open prospect extending to the Blue Hills of Milton, five miles away, the first mile within the park. The proposed plantation along the line of Canterbury Street will hide ordinary buildings that may hereafter be erected between the Park and the Blue Hills, leaving this permanently a broad, extended, purely rural prospect. The outlook westwardly from the hillside ending at the Refectory terrace will also extend permanently to a distant wooded horizon formed in part by the tree tops of Forest Hills Cemetery and in part by those of the Arboretum, two miles away, both these properties, though out of the Park, being preserved from building by legal enactments, and the objects to which they are devoted requiring that they should be always overgrown with trees.

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The centre lines of the two broad fields of extended vision that have been pointed out, cross nearly at right angles, the point of their crossing being where the Ellicott and Nazing dales run together, nearly midway between the two hanging woods of Schoolmaster Hill and Abbotswood crags. This locality, being at the centre of the property, may be considered the pivot of the general landscape design. Looking in the general direction of the lines that have been defined as crossing it from either of four quarters of the Park, a moderately broad, open view will be had between simple bodies of forest, the foliage growing upon ground higher than that on and near the centre lines. From wherever these larger prospects open, the middle distances will be quiet, slightly hollowed surfaces of turf or buskets, bracken, sweet-fern, or mosses, the backgrounds formed by woodsides of a soft, even, subdued tone, with long, graceful, undulating sky lines, which, according to the point of view of the observer on the Park, will be from one to five miles away. Causeways, trees, rocks, and knolls interrupting or disturbing the unity, breadth, quiet, and harmony of these broader open passages of the Park scenery are to come away. There are none of importance that are not of artificial origin and easily removable. Trees wanting to the results proposed are to be planted and suitably developed by timely thinning.

A contrast to the fair open part of the Park which has been thus described will be found in following the circuit road where it is carried between Scarboro Hill and Rock Morton, Rock Milton, Waittwood, and Juniper Hill, through a part of the Wilderness, and between Hagborne and Schoolmaster [493] Hill, all of the localities named being rugged, rocky, and designed to be for the most part somewhat closely planted. A narrow road is thrown out from and brought back to the circuit drive, passing by winding courses among the rocks of the upper part of the Wilderness, by which a higher degree of this character of scenery (serving as a foil to that of the open dales) may be enjoyed than it would be practicable to offer in a broad and much used thoroughfare. The branch drive to the summit of Scarboro Hill, before described, will serve a similar episodical purpose.

Comparatively speaking, this western region is picturesque and romantic; and the design is to remove what is inconsistent with this character, and to add, develop, and expose elements favorable to it.

Drives and Walks. — The roads and walks of the park have been designed less with a purpose of bringing the visitor to points of view at which he will enjoy set scenes or landscapes than to provide for a constant mild enjoyment of simply pleasing rural scenery while in easy movement, and this by curves and grades avoiding unnecessary violence to nature. There is not a curve in the roads introduced simply for the sake of gracefulness. Every turn is suggested by natural circumstances. Notwithstanding the rugged surface of the larger part of the site, the circuit drive is at no point steeper than Bromfield Street between Washington and Tremont, its heaviest grade being one in twenty-five; nor are the branch drives at any point steeper than Brattle Street near Court, the steepest pitch being one in sixteen. The Greeting is an inclined plane with a fall from south to north of four feet in half a mile, which is about the same with that of State Street, or essentially level. These grades are obtained without much disturbance of natural features; the heaviest cutting is in continuance of an excavation already made for the quarrying of building stone, the heaviest filling through an adjoining rocky depression. As a general rule, the surface of the roads is to coincide closely with the natural surface, where the natural surface has been hitherto undisturbed. As far as practicable, it is designed to be slightly below it, so that the road may be less observable from a distance.

Riding Pad. — From Boylston Bridge, Back Bay Basin, there will be a shaded pad extending to the Park and through it from Forest Hills to the main entrance from the Playstead. It will be six miles long and from twenty-four to thirty feet wide. There is a double riding course in the Greeting, one division in the central alley, adjoining the carriage promenade, forty feet wide; the other in a side alley thirty feet wide.

Enclosures. — The Country Park is designed to be enclosed with a wall formed of the field stone drawn from its surface, the wall to be four feet high and similar to that first built for the New York Central Park. It is to be draped with vines, and, though not costly, will be perfectly suitable for a rural park. If, as the city is built about the park, a wall of more urban elegance is thought to be required, the stone of the original wall will be used for its foundation. The present enclosing wall of the Central Park, which is but a neat, [494]

[495] [496] unobtrusive piece of masonry four feet high on the street side, has probably cost half a million dollars, and is yet incomplete.

Entrances. — Much pressure is generally brought to bear on those controlling a park to establish entrances with a view to neighborhood convenience and favorably to local real estate speculations. Every entrance is costly in various ways, and there should be none that can be avoided without incommoding the general public. The plan provides ten carriage and foot entrances and eight additional special foot entrances to the park as a whole, and five carriage entrances and two special foot entrances to the Country Park, all at points offering natural facilities of entrance and on easy grades. The average space between entrances is a little more than in the New York park, a little less than in most other large parks.

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The drives within the park will be about 6 miles in length; bridle-roads, 2 miles; walks, 13 miles.

The Country Park will contain about 334 acres; Playstead, 40 (of playing ground about 30); Greeting, 19; Music Court, 3; Little Folks’ Fair, 14; Deer Park, 18; Sargent’s Field, 8; Long Crouch Woods, 20. (Boston Common is 48 acres in area; the Public Garden, 22. The “Green” of the New York Central Park is 16 acres in area; the “Ball Ground,” 10; the “North Meadows,” 19. The Central Park Mall is half the length of the Greeting.)

The area prepared for public recreation of Franklin Park will be 500 acres; (of the Central Park, 680; Brooklyn Park, 540. The drives of Central Park are 9 miles in length; riding pads, 5; walks, 28).

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PART THIRD.
THE KEY OF A CONSERVATIVE PARK POLICY AND THE COST OF CARRYING OUT THE PLAN UNDER SUCH A POLICY.

The project of a rural park for Boston has been more than twenty years under consideration. It has been advanced always deliberately and cautiously. The earlier leaders of the movement in its favor, most of whom have now retired from active interest in local public affairs, and many passed away, were, as a rule, no more anxious to press argument for a rural park than to press the importance of proceeding toward it by slow, frugal, and conservative methods. And this disposition has not only been constant, but has been growing in the community. There has hardly been a public utterance on the subject [497] for several years past in which it has not been manifest. To carry out the scheme that was most prominently before the public fifteen years ago, would have cost more than double as much as to carry out that now in view. There is no party, faction, division, or class of citizens pressing the matter. There are no strong private interests engaged to force it.

The reasons why Boston should proceed in such an undertaking with exceptional caution are fully realized; yet, under the circumstances that have been stated, there can be little danger in pointing out the possibilities of an extravagant holding back.

Twenty years ago — even ten years ago — Boston was not conspicuously behind other cities in providing for the rural recreation of her citizens, but there was an apprehension that she might come to be, and a livelier conviction than at present that it would be a calamity. In 1869, Mr. Wilder, addressing a meeting called by the City Council, pointed out that Boston to sustain her reputation must not only have a park, but the first park in the country; and seven years later Mr. Collins, at a meeting in Fanueil Hall, called to discuss the park question, asked, “Can Boston afford to be less comfortable to dwell in, less attractive, less healthy than her sister cities?”

If such a question was then at all timely, it is now a great deal more so. There were then but two well advanced rural parks in America. There are now more than twenty. Every city that was then at a parallel stage in the discussion of a park project with Boston, now has that project in a large degree realized, and is enjoying the profits of it. There is not one city of America or of Northern Europe distantly approaching to rank with Boston in population, wealth, and reputation for refinement which, before unprovided with a park, has not gone further and moved more positively than Boston to make good the deficiency. London and Paris, Brussels and Liverpool have each within a generation twice doubled the area of their rural recreation grounds. All the cities of the British Islands thirty years ago possessed but four parks adapted to rural recreation; they now hold thirty, as large, on an average, as Franklin Park is intended to be.

There is an impression with some that the civilized world has been swept by a ruinous rage for parks. Not an instance is known of a park adapted to provide rural recreation that is not regarded by those who are paying for it as well worth all it has cost. No city possessed of a rural park regrets its purchase. During the last year New York City, which has had the largest and costliest experience of park-making of any in the world, has been purchasing land for six additional parks averaging six hundred acres each in area. This after long and heated debate as to questions of extent and location, but upon the undisputed ground, so far as known, that the city’s outlay for parks hitherto has had the effect of reducing rather than increasing taxation. Philadelphia has a park nearly six times as large as Franklin Park will be. Chicago has six rural parks, in each of which large works of construction have been completed, [498] and are found valuable beyond expectation. Even smaller cities than Boston (as New Haven, Bridgeport, Albany, Buffalo, Montreal) have provided themselves with rural parks.

It cannot be questioned that a rural park is rapidly coming to be ranked among the necessities of satisfactory city life, or that a city that offers simply promises or prospects in this respect stands at a certain commercial and financial disadvantage — a more decided disadvantage to-day, very much, than it did when Mr. Wilder or even when Mr. Collins advised attention to the danger.

At the present stage of the Franklin Park undertaking another consideration enforcing a like caution presents itself.

Land having been acquired, a plan for forming a park upon it adopted, operations of construction begun, and considerable resort being had to the ground, the affair is bound to grow in some fashion. And if the work is to be pursued in a desultory, intermittent, and unimpressive way, that fashion will not be altogether the fashion of a desirable rural park. The ground will be much disordered by the work, it will be streaked and scarred, dusty and muddy. There will be an increasing public use of it; the process of determining the customs of its use and the manner in which it is to be regarded by the people will be continuous, and every year something will be done toward an irretrievable settlement of its character.

In their examination of parks last summer, the Commissioners were struck with the different standard of keeping and of manners that had evidently become established on different parks. The keeping in one case was of a sort which in housekeeping might be described as squalid, and the manners largely loaferish. In another the keeping was comparatively neat and efficient, the manners decorous and civil. No matter what may be ultimately expended for a park, its value cannot fail to be largely determined by the expectations and usage of it into which the public is led in the early years of their resort to it.

Boston should continue to practice conservatism with respect to the park, but there cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that conservatism will be concerned only to keep down the current cost of the work, and to this end will be engaged to impose checks on its progress at every opportunity. Conservatism cannot be concerned to have a state of things under which the leading aim of those in direction of the work is forced to be that of enlisting public support from year to year, by producing results from year to year that shall be immediately pleasing to superficial observation. It cannot fail to be concerned that the work shall be directed with a wise regard to what experience may have taught as to conditions of lasting, growing, and substantial value in works elsewhere of the same leading purpose.

The cardinal requirement of economy in obtaining such conditions has never yet been realized by the public in the early stages of a park work, but it is perfectly plain to anyone who has so closely followed the history of a number of parks as to be able to compare marked differences in methods of [499] management and the respective results obtained. It would take too much space to present an extended comparative statement of this kind, but the lesson it would present may be indicated by reference to a few typical facts.

To realize the full bearing of those that will be cited, it must be kept freshly in mind, first, that the only justification of the cost of a large park near a growing city is the necessity of spaciousness to the production of rural scenery.

Second, it must be remembered that the choicest rural park scenery is that which, other things being equal, has been longest growing, and which has the least of the rawness and smartness of new constructions, and the weak puerilities of new plantations.

Third, it is to be kept in mind that the oldest part of the oldest rural park in the country is not yet half grown, and the primary construction of some of its parts is not even yet begun.

Take, then, this oldest park and see by what courses it has come to be what it is, and has been made to cost what it has.

Its site was determined almost by accident; no one, when it was first defined in the bill which became the act establishing it, giving the least thought to the question whether it was well adapted to the purpose of a large park; no one concerned having any clear notion what that purpose might be. In fact the idea in mind was simply this: “The great cities of the old world have large areas called parks, and they are popular. Let us have a great area to be called a park. To neutralize conflicting local jealousies let us have it as nearly as possible in the centre of the city’s territory.” That was thought to be the common sense of the matter. Not the slightest inquiry was made as to what sort of land there might be at this central point, and so thoughtlessly were the boundaries determined that upwards of a million dollars were judiciously spent after a few years, to secure an economical modification of them. Even since this modification a great sum has been expended in retaining walls and other adjustments between the park and its bounding streets. A few pages further on, official statistics will be quoted, further illustrating the costliness of this common sense proceeding, about which it may be as well to mention that there was nothing peculiarly American or democratic. The Emperor of France began the Bois de Boulogne in the same spirit, trusting to common sense in a matter which was not one for common sense but for careful study and foresighted regulation; fell into blunderings even more humiliating than those of New York, and was obliged to make an abrupt change of plan after his work had been put well under way.

There is no important general public purpose now served, or likely to be served in the future, by the New York Park, for which if ground had been well selected, and if every step in the subsequent operations had been well devised with reference to it, and pursued without unnecessary complexity or confusion, provisions of equal value might not have been made at half the cost of those now possessed by the city.

[500]

The degree of public unpreparedness at the outset to sustain such a course, however, may be inferred from the fact that one of the leading newspapers at that time treated the undertaking as an affair for the benefit of rich men — an affair of fashionable luxury — while another thought that any park in New York would be so entirely taken possession of by the low, rowdy, and ruffianly element of the population, that respectable people would avoid it, and that a woman would not be able to enter it without compromising her reputation. Each of these views turns out to have been as wrong as possible. There is not a church in the city in which rich and poor come together as satisfactorily to both. And for years after it came into use there was not a public street of the city in which a woman or girl was as secure from rudeness.

The next most instructive circumstance in its history, as far as it concerns Boston at this time, is the gradual advance of public opinion toward a correct understanding of the conditions of the park’s value. Such an understanding has not yet, after twenty-nine years, been universally attained. The papers of the city are at this moment denouncing a proposition, made in good faith and urged with elaborate arguments, for introducing an important new feature into the plan of the park. An interview is publicly reported (in the Sun, January 15) with a prominent citizen, who urges in counter-argument not the waste that would be involved in the value of the park as a place prepared at great expense for the ready enjoyment of rural scenery, but what is assumed to be the more practical objection of the contraction of areas available for games, a use of the park in which with the present area available for it when the park is in largest use, but one in several hundred of its visitors takes part.

[501]

Twice in the history of this park, after enormous expenditures had been made upon it with the stated purpose of excluding urban and securing rural scenery, this purpose has been distinctly and publicly repudiated; in one case, the Superintendent for the time being, explaining to a reporter of the press that his leading object was a display of architectural and urban elegance, and that he had removed certain trees because they prevented visitors passing through the park from seeing the stately buildings growing up outside of it.

But although these incidents may seem to argue otherwise, no one can have long been a reader of New York newspapers without knowing that the public opinion of the city has of late years been often aroused to prevent various proceedings upon the park, running counter to the purpose of rural recreation, that earlier would have been permitted to pass without objection. For example, when the trees of the park were yet saplings, and its designed rural scenery wholly undeveloped, the suggestion that the most central and important position upon it should be given to a public building was received with no apparent disfavor, and one of the Commissioners of the park declared that any ground the promoters of the undertaking might desire would be gladly assigned to it. Fortunately, because of hard times, the scheme fell through. Ten years later, a monumental building was actually given a site upon the park, but it was one in which the structure would not interfere with any extended view, or be seen from a distance, and even this concession did not pass without much remonstrance. When the next scheme of the class was disclosed, though coupled with many most attractive incidental propositions, skillfully presented, and supported by eminent citizens, so much popular indignation was soon manifested that in response to petitions a bill was rapidly advanced in the legislature to make it illegal for the Commissioners to entertain the proposition, and would have passed had not the head of the movement publicly and apologetically announced the abandonment of the idea. At the present time, a proposition similar to that once similarly accepted in the case of the Museum of Art, no matter how highly its objects were valued, and no matter how worthy a body of public-spirited citizens were backing it, would be less agreeable to the public opinion of New York than would be a proposition to build a public hospital in the middle of the Common to that of Boston.

In the early days of one American park a proposed ordinance to establish a Small-Pox Hospital in its midst was gravely debated in the City [502] Council, being advocated on the ground that there was plenty of unoccupied room there, that no private interest would suffer from it, and that nobody wanted it anywhere else. Many occurrences showing similar public indifference, in the early work of a park, to the essential conditions of its ultimate value, might be cited. At least four times in the history of one park obstructive disturbances of natural scenery have been established, and afterwards, in respect to a rising public sentiment, have been removed. Twice these have been works of alleged art presented to the city and received and set up with acclamation.

Is Boston quite safe from falling into similar costly courses? Has she been so in the past? Let the history of the little but important ground called the Public Garden be considered.

The design first made public for this ground, prepared by an eminent and popular architect, had in view a highly decorative garden, with many beds of flowers and ornamental foliage, architectural basins of water, jets, fountains, and other richly artificial embellishments. The weight of influence in the matter, however, tended toward a parklet in the natural style, simple, quiet, and in a degree sequestered. The plan at length adopted was devised mainly with reference to such a ground, with a slight compromise manifested in a few scattered features which would have been more congruous with a decorative garden. But the work had not gone far before objections were urged to its more important naturalistic features, and several of these, one after another, were modified or radically changed. Large mounds of earth at first formed in accordance with the design were afterwards removed. What was intended to be a rural lakelet with natural borders was changed to a basin with formally curving outlines and a rigid edging of stone. After many years and large outlays made with a plan thus fluctuating in the spirit of its details, the purpose, originally rejected, of a splendid urban garden, with all practicable display of art, was fully revived, and has been gradually carried out as far as it could be without a complete structural transformation of the site, but necessarily under great disadvantages from the necessity of working upon the timbers of a wreck originally modelled with a wholly different ideal. It cannot be doubted that, had all the work from the beginning been undeviatingly directed with reference to the essence of the present leading motives in the management of the ground, more valuable results would have been attained, at much less cost.

Whatever the difficulties may be of avoiding another experience of the same kind, but on a much larger scale, it is best to look them fairly in the face. It is best to beat them, and beat them now, at the start. That it is practicable to do so, and at moderate cost, may be established, if a single instance can be shown in which a city has been able to secure a steady, straightforward, business-like pursuit of the proper purpose of such a park.

Testimony of such an instance that cannot be gainsaid has been furnished [503] the Commissioners from Buffalo, a city that has not earned a reputation for honesty and efficiency of administration exceeding that of Boston.

It is believed that the difficulties of securing a sound public opinion were at the outset much greater in Buffalo than they are in Boston. There was a more general and a more heated apprehension among the tax-payers that the undertaking of a “big park” would be excessively costly. More ignorance and confusion of mind prevailed as to its proper purposes. The history of what has since occurred is summarized in the statement below. Of the gentlemen signing this statement, five have been Mayors of Buffalo during the period in which the park work has been in progress, three Judges of its Courts, three presidents of the Board of Aldermen, five members of Congress, several members of the State Legislature, Commissioners of the Park, leading editors, bankers, and merchants, and heads of the working organization of each party, and of each faction of party of any importance in local politics, a fact in itself evincing the remarkable popularity earned by the management to be described.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE RURAL PARK OF BUFFALO, WITH
REFERENCE TO ITS MANAGEMENT, COST, AND VALUE.

“There were at the outset many grounds of objection to the site selected for the main Park of Buffalo. Parts of it were rocky and bare of vegetation; other parts swampy and most unattractive. It was at the opposite end of the city from its populous quarter, and more than three miles from its centre. Hence the project had to encounter a strong sectional jealousy, and for this and other reasons met with determined opposition, which succeeded in reducing the area originally intended to be taken — a misfortune since deeply regretted even by those to whom it was due. After the work of construction was entered upon, repeated efforts were made to arrest it; to alter the plans; to introduce new features, and to compel the adoption of different methods of operation.

“In full view of the acknowledged objections to the site, it was selected as, on the whole, the best that could be found for the purpose exclusively had in view. This was to provide recreation for the people of the city through the enjoyment of simple, rural, park-like scenery. The ground was laid out upon a plan that made everything subordinate to this purpose.

“The work was organized with exclusive reference to the steady and methodical carrying out of the plan. The heads of the organization were drawn from a similar work in another city, and were at once familiar with their duties, disciplined and co-operative. No change in the staff of the superintendence has since been made, except as the work has advanced to points [504] where permanent reduction could be afforded. The present General Superintendent has been Superintendent from the start. In the city reform movement that first brought Grover Cleveland as mayor of the city prominently before the public, no occasion for reform or improvement was found in the park work. No change of men or methods was made or suggested to be desirable. The work has been pursued steadily and without the slightest deviation from the plan upon which it was started. As it advanced and the intentions of the plan approached realization, the park grew in favor. Opposition to it gradually died out. It is now universally popular, and with no class more so than the frugal, small house owning tax-payers, who constitute an unusual proportion of the population of the city.

“The cost of the work has been much less than was predicted by the opponents of the undertaking, and even less than its promoters expected it to be. It is regarded as moderate relatively to the return already realized. It is believed that through the increased attractiveness of the city as a place of residence, the rise in the value of property adjacent to the park and its approaches, and the additional taxable capital invested in land and buildings in the vicinity of these improvements, the outlay for the park has lightened the burden of the tax-payers. The city has recently obtained an act of the legislature authorizing a portion of the land originally thrown out to be purchased and added to the park. Its market value is now estimated to be from four to five times as much as when thrown out. Broad avenues from different directions have been opened, and a street railroad constructed expressly for the use of visitors to the park. Its value is largely increasing every year. The city is now proud of it and grateful for it.

“But its promoters had ultimate results in view, which cannot be fully realized during the lifetime of the present generation or of the next. As the growth of its plantations develops, as the city extends to its borders and becomes densely settled at the centre, the attractions, the accessibility, and the benefits to the community to be derived from the park, will correspondingly increase. Its chief value lies in its ever-growing capabilities of usefulness in the future, as the city grows in wealth and population.

(Signed)
“Pascal P. Prait.	S. S. Jeweit.
Solomon Schew.	Edward Benneit.
J. Mothan Scoville.	John M. Farquhar.
Jas. Sheldon.	Edgar B. Jeweit.
W. S. Bissell.	Francis H. Root.
Alex. Brush.	Gibson I. Williams.
James D. Warren.	R. R. Hefford.
Henry A. Richmond.	Chas. Beckwith.
Sherman S. Rogers.	Wm. F. Rogers.
Philip Becker.	John B. Sackeit.
Daniel N. Lockwood.	L. P. Dayton.
[505]
James M. Smith.	Jno. B. Weber.
James Mooney.	Wm. Franklin.”

The estimate to be presented of the cost of preparing Franklin Park for public use, will be so much less than has been generally anticipated by those familiar with the cost of parks elsewhere, that it will be received with incredulity. Something, therefore, should be said in explanation of it.

First, it may be observed that more than two-thirds of the cost is calculated to be for the construction of roads, walks, concourses and other structures, for the estimates of which the City Engineer is responsible, and that the entire estimate is made in the same manner as that, of about the same amount, prepared for the Department with respect to the work of the Back Bay Basins, which work after a progress of seven years is likely to be completed within the estimate.

That it is possible to meet Mr. Wilder’s demand that the Boston park should be the first park in the country, meaning the first in respect to adaptation to provide city people with rural recreation, is largely to be accounted for by the fact that the site was selected discriminatingly for that purpose.

The advantage gained by this circumstance has already been partly suggested in the statement that the cost of piecing out the New York park has been considerably more than a million dollars. It may be added that the annexations to the primary scheme in the case of the Brooklyn and the Philadelphia parks, made in each case with a view to rural advantages, have been much larger though less costly. In Brooklyn the original site was greatly modified by a process of exchange.

But a more important part of Boston’s economical advantage may be inferred from the statement made in the Third Annual Report of the New York Department of Parks that the modifications of the surface of the site of the Central Park had involved the lifting and readjustment of its entire surface to an average depth of nearly four feet, and of the material moved that nearly half a million cubic yards had been originally in the form of solid ledge rock, twenty thousand barrels of gunpowder having been used for breaking it [506] out. More than two hundred thousand cubic yards of first-class solid mason work have been laid on the Central Park, a large part under ground and most of it in retaining walls that would have been unnecessary to the proper purposes of a park in a situation as well adapted to those purposes as is that of Franklin Park.

A considerable part of the outlay for most parks has been made for materials which the site for Franklin Park supplies. The stone and gravel of the Chicago parks, for example, is brought to them from distant quarries and pits, and the cost of transportation is not a small matter. The same is the case at Detroit. The gravel used in the New York and Brooklyn parks has cost twice as much per yard as that to be used in Franklin Park. (It must be said that it is a better sort of gravel.) In Franklin Park there are no difficulties of drainage to be overcome by costly expedients (there are thirty-three miles of sewers in the Central Park). No costly works of damming and puddling or concreting will be required as has been the case elsewhere. And as an illustration of the advantages of its site in these particulars (the plan being adjusted to it) it may be said that the conditions in question of the five hundred acres of Franklin Park are directly the reverse of those which the city has for seven years past been gradually and slowly and at great cost overcoming in the one hundred acres of the Back Bay Basin.

The work required to carry out the plan of Franklin Park can nearly all be done, after practicable training, by a force recruited from the class of working-men who command but the lowest wages, and who are most liable to fall into a condition requiring charitable assistance from the city. More than nine-tenths of the needed outlay would be in wages to citizens. The few manufactured articles necessary would nearly all be manufactured in the city. Not one per cent. of the entire expenditure contemplated would be required for what are commonly called park and garden decorations. The larger part would be for substantial matters, to endure, and generally to gain, in value, for centuries.

Estimates of cost, to have any value, must be based on some definite understanding as to the manner in which the work is to be conducted, the adequacy and what in military operations is called the solidity of the organization, the thoroughness of the discipline, the time within which the work is to be completed, and, above all, the degree in which steady, orderly progress, smoothly interlocking in all parts, can be calculated on.

The work will proceed much more economically with a moderately large force, if kept “well in hand,” than with a small one. The reason can easily be seen. It is to be mainly a transfer of material, — stone, sand, gravel, earth, soil, peat. To proceed with the work at one point certain materials are to be sent away that are wanted for the work at another point, and certain materials are required that are to be taken out at yet another. Unless a force large enough to keep a considerable system of exchanges in operation is employed, the same materials will need to be rehandled, perhaps repeatedly.

[507]

It is to be assumed that the work of construction will be completed within a period of six years; that it will be carried on with as large a force as may be best; that advantage may be taken of favorable seasons and favorable markets, and that it will be placed and maintained from the start in all respects upon a soundly economical basis.

The work to be done during the period stated is not to include the public roads and their borders outside the park, as this would extend it beyond the territory under the Commissioners’ control. It does not include fountains, sculptural or other purely decorative works that may be thought desirable later, upon the Greeting, or in connection with the gateways, nor does it include movable furniture. But it includes all that is necessary to the making of the park in substantial accordance with its general plan as it has been set forth.

As thus proposed, the work may be expected to cost not exceeding fifteen hundred thousand dollars.

Maintenance Cost. — The question of the economy of what is proposed in the plan for a park is less a question of what the work of construction will cost than of what ever afterwards will be required for reconstructions, repairs, and for pursuing a system of maintenance adapted to secure its intended qualities of beauty, and keep it in suitable order for its intended uses. An explanation of the character of the plan in this respect will therefore be offered.

Rural parks may be excessively costly of maintenance, either by setting the standard so low that visitors gain but little rural refreshment from them, or by setting it so high that it cannot be lived up to, and they become forlorn through shabby gentility. In some parks both errors are illustrated, high keeping being apparently attempted at some points as a compensation for general gracelessness and dowdiness, with a result like that from putting a few bits of bravery upon a meanly dressed and dirty person. Nearly all American Park Commissioners apologize for the condition of some parts of their work, stating that they are not allowed funds enough to keep them in good order throughout.

In a considerable part of one park examined by the Boston Commissioners last summer, they found roads in very rough condition and dusty gravel walks in such bad repair that they had actually gone out of use, and [508] visitors were trying to walk in lines parallel with them, some making a crooked way among trees and bushes, or over what had once been turfed ground, some turning out upon the wheelway. A family party was seen moving along the ruts of the dusty road, the father dragging a baby wagon, the mother in trepidation lest they should be run over, and the entire party evincing anything but the quieting and restful pleasure that they would have had in a park suitably fitted and kept. Elsewhere they saw lawns from which the turf had wholly disappeared, dry brooks and fountains, green stagnant waters, dilapidated and rotting rustic structures, trees with dead branches, flower-beds gray with dust, set in coarse seedy grass half trodden out, opposite a sign, “Keep off the Grass.” They saw a large and substantially fine house, of which the details and furniture were so out of repair that the public had been for some time excluded from it, and its windows appeared to be targets for ambushed boys. The explanation in every case was that the city was unwilling to suitably carry out and sustain what had been undertaken.

It is difficult to make comparative statements of the cost of maintenance of different classes of public grounds. In most cases it is found to vary widely from year to year, and this capriciously, accordingly as successive city councils are disposed. The appropriation for one year has in several cases been but half that for others. Accounts are kept upon different bases.

But omitting police, museum and menagerie expenses it may, be roughly reckoned that the annual running expenses of a park of the extent of Franklin Park, if laid out, stocked, and maintained in the manner of the Public Garden of Boston, or of any much decorated, garden-like ground, would be about $500,000; of the Central Park, New York, $160,000; Brooklyn Park, $80,000; Buffalo Park, $40,000.

The plan adopted by the Commissioners for Franklin Park is one that, when the designed plantings have been well established, will require comparatively little fine garden work, no exotic or fine decorative gardening, no glass, no structures of an unsubstantial class, and few of any kind subject to fall into serious disrepair, except roads and walks. All walls and roofs are to be of stone, tile, or slate; all guard rails and seat supports of stone or wrought iron. The economy of substantial work in all such matters may be seen in the fact that of upwards of forty arches and bridges on the Central Park built more than twenty years ago, all but three were structures of stone, brick, or iron. As a matter of alleged economy, three were built with timber superstructures. Each one of these three has been at times closed for use because of disrepair, each has been entirely rebuilt, and one twice rebuilt; each has already cost more than a substantial structure would have cost, and no one of them is now in a satisfactory condition. The others remain perfectly sound, and with but one important exception have been in continuous service. The exception is an iron bridge with a wood flooring. This has been several times closed for painting and the relaying of the wood-work. A similar story could be told of [509] other structures; and the moral could be enforced by reference to every class of work done on the park. Its entire history is an indication of the economy of using as sterling masonry and thorough, exacting professional superintendence in park work, as in water-works, sewers, and monumental buildings. If the Commissioners could have taken a different view of their duty, which for the moment would possibly be a more popular view, the estimate they have presented might have been reduced.

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To restate briefly the lesson in conservatism most important for Boston to learn from the experience of other cities in park-making, it is this:—

That those in charge of a park work may proceed economically and with profit they must be able to proceed with confidence, method and system, steadily, step after step, to carry to completion a well-matured design. Until the point of completion is reached the work of each year must be the carrying out of work prepared for in the previous year, and the preparation of work to be done the following year. Plans laid with an economical purpose in this respect must not be held subject at any moment to be nullified, or hastily and radically modified, even under worthy impulses of economy.

PART FOURTH.
OF THE DIFFICULTIES OF PURSUING A SOUND POLICY,
AND THE MEANS BY WHICH THEY ARE TO BE
OVERCOME.

The difficulties in question are difficulties of securing a sound controlling public opinion and of avoiding a costly accommodation to demands based on mistaken or inadequate impressions of what is desirable in the business of a rural park.

As the notes to follow will be somewhat discursive, and the facts to be stated will have bearings other than those indicated by the headings under which they will be arranged, several master difficulties may be here mentioned to which it is believed that all will relate.

First, the difficulty of realizing the importance of a park work, from which follows the danger that details of serious consequence to the community may be settled too lightly.

Second, the difficulty of understanding the essential economies of so intangible a commodity as that of rural scenery.

Third, the difficulty of realizing how largely the interest of the community as a whole lies in parts and elements of a park that are of little direct personal interest to those who make the largest figure in it, and who have the most direct influence upon the conduct of the work.

[510]

Fourth, the difficulty, no matter how important the results of the work to be soon obtained may be, of realizing how immeasurably more important are those to come later.

Fifth, the difficulty to most men of realizing how greatly the cost of suitably preparing a park is to be increased by frequent shifts of responsibility, unsteady courses, breaks of system and of routine methods.

I.
OF THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE THAT A LARGE PARK MAY
COME TO HAVE IN THE HISTORY OF A CITY.

It is contrary to habitual modes of thought to take due account of the comparative economico-political importance of what is at stake in a large park undertaking — to recognize how costly a park may be, otherwise than through the taxation which it directly calls for; how useful it may be in wholly different ways from those most readily and customarily thought about. How it has come to be so will be partly explained later. The purpose of what is immediately to follow is to give a single reason for soliciting a more thorough consideration of various aspects of the subject than the occasion will be generally thought to require.

It is to be considered, to begin with, how much less likely than we are apt to suppose, the larger fortune of a city is, in these days, to turn controllingly and lastingly upon the local legislation that from year to year is led up to and brought about through an activity of local public opinion favorable to its object: how much more the historic course of the city is commonly determined by a discovery or an invention, for example, made by someone having no personal interest or direct part in it, as of a cotton-gin, a steel process, or of gold in a river-bed.

When currents of such exterior sources have been established, the local defects of a city, with reference to them, are apt sooner or later, at more or less cost, to be remedied. The methods by which needed means for this purpose shall ultimately be reached, may vary radically, as, with reference to the currents of modern oceanic commerce, in the landing and loading facilities of the ports, respectively, of Liverpool, New York, and New Orleans. But the tendency to come nearer to a common standard of utility in essential results is so strong that if at one time a mistake of dealing inadequately with a problem is made, while the blunder will be costly, it is but a question of time when a sufficiently courageous and well-considered effort is to follow and sweep it away and build anew on firmer ground.

It may be considered, also, how much more cities gain on an average in all that makes them converging points of the growth of nations in population, wealth, and refinement, from general currents of scientific progress by [511] which all the world benefits, than from political proceedings of local origin and special local application.

It is, for instance, through falling into such a current that the ancient city of Cairo has come to be so relieved from its former annual devastations by the Plague, that the life of its people has come to be twice as long as it was in the first half of the century, and the value of life in it has been more than doubled through avoidance of pain, anxiety, and sadness, and the steadier profits of all industry. It is by falling into such a current that most of our southern cities have come to keep at home and in active employment during the entire summer a large part of the population, that would otherwise go out from them at the cost of a general suspension of many profitable branches of their trade, and nearly all important productive industry.

Through the tendency thus illustrated, to work up to standards mainly provided by agencies acting on public opinion from without, and established no one quite knows how, it occurs, notwithstanding the great differences of origin and historical development, of early social circumstances, of climate, of back-country conditions, and of resources of wealth and products to be dealt with, that schools, churches, hospitals, courts, police, jails, methods of fire protection, methods in politics, in benevolence and almsgiving, in journalism, in banking and exchange, are rapidly growing to be closely alike in San Francisco and in Boston.

The change by which this similitude comes about, goes on about as rapidly in the older as in the younger city. In many small ways Boston is taking up customs originating on the Pacific. In dealing with its sewerage problem, Boston availed itself of Mr. Chesborough’s experience in Chicago, as well as of Mr. Bazalgette’s in London; and the Boston Police Commissioners are this winter seeking to engraft on their system, which is of direct descent from Peel’s system for London, a scion grown in Chicago. In Europe there is quite as evident a gravitation to American methods as in America to European methods. Paris is just now looking to gain something from observation of the Boston Fire Department, and something from the experience of Memphis in sewerage. One European government has within five years sent expeditions of experts in three different branches of science applicable to the administration of cities, to see by what, in the recent experience of Boston, its people might profit. At least two other European governments have sent skilled agencies here for the same purpose.

Looking for important advantages which one city may possess permanently over another in respect to the constant value of life of those who are to dwell in it, in scarcely anything, perhaps in nothing, will the estate of cities, as it may be affected by local wisdom, effort, and timely legislation, be found to vary more and more lastingly than in the matter of public grounds. In scarcely anything is the general drift of civilized progress to be less depended on to set right the results of crude and shortsighted measures. In [512] scarcely anything, therefore, to be determined by local public opinion acting influentially upon local legislation and administration, is a city as likely to be so much made or marred for all its future as in proceedings in prosecution of a park project.

To many who have not been closely following the history of park enterprises, and tracing cause and effect in connection with them, this will seem to be the assertion of a man with a hobby. But let what has been occurring at the port of New York, in a large degree under the direct observation of thousands of the more active-minded business men of Boston, be thoroughly reviewed, and it will not be found unreasonable.

First, let it be reflected how little of permanent consequence in the history of New York has come about through the spontaneous movements of local public opinion as reflected in legislation during the last thirty years, of which the broad, essential results were not almost a matter of course. It has been little more than a question of time, for instance, when and how the port should be provided with docks, basins, elevators, and better general water-side facilities for commerce; when certain streets should be widened; when rapid transit for long, and street cars for short, transportation, a civilized cab system, telegraphs, telephones, and electric lights should be introduced, better conveyances across the rivers gained, better accommodations for courts provided, the aqueduct enlarged, public schools multiplied, graded, and made more educational, industrial and night schools started, public museums of art and natural history founded, the militia made more serviceable, the volunteer fire department superseded, and a strong police force organized.

There is nothing of general and permanent consequence in all that has been gained in these particulars that could have been more than delayed and made foolishly costly by careless, capricious, or perverse local public opinion and corresponding legislation. The same general currents of civilization that have brought what has been gained to New York in these respects have brought results answering the same general purposes to Philadelphia and Boston, to Cincinnati and to Montreal. Or, if not fully so in each case, every live man in those cities looks to see like results reached in a few years, — makes his business plans, builds his house, orders his investments, educates his children, with reference to them. The general plan of the combined city of New York harbor, the position severally, for example, of its domestic, its manufacturing, and its trade quarters, has been very little determined as the result of local legislation or of a settled purpose of public opinion. Such changes of domestic and social habits as have occurred are much less to be attributed to any of these improvements than to circumstances governing the general increase and distribution of wealth throughout the world, to the general advances of science, and to fashions originating in Europe.

But now let it be considered how it has been with regard to what has occurred through the park enterprises. Each of the two large parks that during [513] the same period have been set a-growing through local agitation and the careless legislation it has obtained, has had more such effect than all the other measures of that class together. The Central Park blocks fifty streets that, had it not been formed, would now be direct channels of commerce and of domestic movement from river to river. It takes out of the heart of the city two square miles of building-space, as completely and as permanently as a gulf formed by an earthquake could do, and for several square miles about this place it determines an occupation of land and a use of real estate very different from what would have been otherwise possible. Its effect on social customs may be illustrated by the statement that to enjoy the use of the park, within a few years after it became available, the dinner hour of thousands of families was permanently changed, the number of private carriages kept in the city was increased tenfold, the number of saddle horses a hundredfold, the business of livery stables more than doubled, the investment of many millions of private capital in public conveyances made profitable.

It is often asked, How could New York have got on without the park? Twelve million visits are made to it every year. The poor and the rich come together in it in larger numbers than anywhere else, and enjoy what they find in it in more complete sympathy than they enjoy anything else together. The movement to and from it is enormous. If there were no park, with what different results in habit and fashions, customs and manners, would the time spent in it be occupied. It is often said that the park has made New York a different city. If it has not done so already, it surely will soon have made New York a city differing more from what it would have been but for the park than Boston differs either from San Francisco or from Liverpool.

And the park of Brooklyn, while it has not as yet equally changed the destiny of this branch of the town, is sure, as the city grows, to be a matter of the most important moulding consequence, — more so than the great bridge; more so than any single affair with which the local government has had to do in the entire history of the city.

Similar results may be seen, or surely foreseen, from the new parks in each case of Philadelphia, of Chicago, of Buffalo, of St. Louis, of San Francisco.

Not less significant illustrations of the general fact may be found abroad, in Paris and Liverpool, for instance and in Melbourne, Australia.

But, it may be asked, if the Central Park had not been formed as it was, would not another park have been formed before this time? No doubt; but if so, the results of a different park would have been more importantly different from those that have followed the Central Park than the results of any determination of the city’s fortune equally open to be made thirty years ago, through the action of its local government, in any matter of architecture, of engineering, of jurisprudence, or of popular education.

But before the comparative importance of what is to be determined by a park work in the history of a city can be at all realized, a very different [514] view must be taken from that which is common of the irretrievableness of any blundering in its direction.

II.
THE ELEMENT OF LASTINGNESS AS AFFECTING THE
IMPORTANCE OF WHAT IS TO BE DETERMINED IN THE
EARLY WORK OF A PARK.

It needs to be emphatically urged (for a reverse impression is often apparent) that the plans of no other class of the public works of a city are to be rightly devised with reference to as prolonged and unchanging methods of usefulness as those of parks.

That the fact of the matter in this respect may be understood, let it be first reflected that the value of a large park does not lie, as is apt to be thoughtlessly taken for granted, in those elements which cost and manifest the most labor and the largest absorption of taxes; that is to say, in the roads, walks, bridges, buildings, and other obviously constructed features. These have value as conveniences for making the larger elements of a park available for the enjoyment of the public. If these larger elements are destroyed, the value of the artificial elements is lost. In the degree that they are ill-treated the value of the artificial elements depreciates. A park road is pleasant by reason of that which adjoins it, or is open to contemplation from it, not because it favors speed. Mainly the value of a park depends on the disposition and the quality of its woods, and the relation of its woods to other natural features; ledges, boulders, declivities, swells, dimples, and to qualities of surface, as verdure and tuftiness. Under good management these things do not, like roads and walks, wear out or in any way lose value with age. Individual trees must from time to time be removed to avoid crowding, or because of decay; but, as a rule, the older the wood, and the less of newness and rawness there is to be seen in all the elements of a park, the better it serves its purpose. This rule holds for centuries — without limit.

It is very different with nearly every other material thing — material in distinction from moral or educational — to which a city may directly outlay from its treasury. The highest value, for example, of civic buildings, of pavements, aqueducts, sewers, bridges, is realized while they are yet new; afterwards a continual deterioration must be expected. As to a park, when the principal outlay has been made, the result may, and under good management must, for many years afterwards, be increasing in value at a constantly advancing rate of increase, and never cease to increase as long as the city endures.

This (with an explanation presently to be made in a footnote) will be obviously true as to the principal element of a park — its plantations. But whatever value a park may reach simply through the age of its well ordered plantations, something of that value will be lost wherever repairs, additions, [515] or restorations are made by which the dignity of age in its general aspect (or what the ancients called the local genius) is impaired. Looking at the artificial elements of parks in Europe — the seats, bridges, terraces, staircases, or any substantial furniture of them, supposing that they are not ruinous — it cannot be questioned that they are pleasing in the degree that they are old and bear evidence of long action of natural influences upon them — the most pleasing being those which nature seems to have adopted for her own, so that only by critical inspection is human workmanship to be recognized. Hence, not only should park things be built for permanence, but ingeniously with a view to ready adoption and adornment of them by nature, so that they may come rapidly and without weakness to gain the charm characteristic of old things. For every thousand dollars judiciously invested in a park the dividends to the second generation of the citizens possessing it will be much larger than to the first; the dividends to the third generation much larger than to the second.

The better to bring this class of considerations home, it may be suggested that had five hundred acres of land been set apart as a park for Boston, and trees planted, natural plantations thinned, opened, preserved, renewed, and other natural features protected and judiciously treated for two centuries past, instead of deteriorating as most other public works would have done, the park would have been all the time advancing with a constantly accelerating rate of advance in value. But had the artificial features been originally made in adaptation solely to the wants of the people of the day or their immediate successors, an enlargement and re-adjustment of them suitably to a convenient use of the park by the present population of Boston could only be effected by much destruction of the natural features; by the rooting out of great and venerable trees, the blasting of ledges rich in picturesque, time-worn crannies and weather stains, the breaking up of graceful slopes, and the interpolation of much that could be comparatively crude, raw, incongruous, and forlorn. Rather than make radical changes with these results, much inconvenience would long be endured. For two hundred years, conditions of public inconvenience and of peril and of uncouthness, have rightly been submitted to, for this reason, in Hyde Park, which would not be endured for a year in any new work.

In no other public work of a city, then, is it of as much importance as in a park to determine courses to be pursued with regard to growing results, and in a great degree distant ends rather than ends close at hand and soon to be fully realizable.

III.
THE EARNINGS OF A PARK TO A CITY ACCRUE LARGELY
THROUGH THE LESS CONSPICUOUS USE OF IT, AND, IF
IT IS SUITABLY PLANNED AND MANAGED, THROUGH THE
USE OF THE LESS CONSPICUOUS PARTS OF IT.

There are two ways of estimating the earnings of a park. There is no doubt that the sixteen millions of dollars which Central Park has cost New York have been returned through the profit that has accrued from the attractiveness [517] of the city as a place of residence for men of means. All classes of the people benefit by the wealth thus brought to and held in the city, and it is generally considered by its financiers that simply through the increased value of real estate which has thus occurred, taxes are lighter than they would have been but for the park.

This is one way in which the value of the park is seen. The other is that which has been already indicated in pointing out the use of it that the leading capitalists of the city have been taught by experience to make, as a means of preserving their faculties in high working condition, — the value in health, vigor, and earning capacity, and in capacity to enjoy results of earnings, which is gained through the use of it. This value is not traceable in such form that it can be entered on the ledger and totalled up in annual statements. In estimating it, every man is, almost irresistibly, over much affected by his personal experiences. In ordinary social conference about what is desirable in a park, such a personal point of view sometimes becomes ludicrously apparent.

A gentleman much before the public, and who had taken an active part in urging publicly and privately certain measures of alleged improvement in a park, but who probably had never entered it on foot or seen any part of it not visible from the drives and rides, once asked in passing through it, “What is this pleasant odor?” “It is from the bloom of the locust; we are passing between two groups of it.” “I see. Beautiful bloom! beautiful foliage! Why should not that tree be planted more? Why not everywhere? Why should not the park roads be lined with it? Then this delightful scent would be constant, and the beauty also. Why not have the best everywhere?” The answer was, “The tree is not long in bloom, and after midsummer droughts we have few trees less beautiful; where its foliage predominates, as in some parts of New Jersey, it makes the landscape really sad.” “That’s of no consequence,” was the rejoinder, “for nobody wants to see the park in midsummer.”

This, while said thoughtlessly, manifested an habitual mode of thought. The man was neither thoughtless nor heartless. Yet the truth is, that the most important purpose of a park, and that through its adaptation to which its largest earnings should be expected, is at the season of the year when the fewest visitors come to it in carriages, when all citizens who can, have gone to the country, and that it lies in conditions, qualities, appliances, [518] and modes of superintendence of which many citizens and most strangers know hardly anything.

To understand this, let the imagination be gradually brought from the consideration of the general, mixed body of park visitors to the particular point of view of a distinct type. For this purpose let that part of the people be thought of, first, who are able to save enough from daily wages to be distinctly removed from penury, but whose accumulation is too small to relieve them from an anxious and narrowly dogged habit of mind and a strong incitement to persistent toilsome industry. Let it be considered that, setting aside the more floating and transient, and the useless and harmful sections, men of this class, and those who are dependent upon them, form much the larger part in numbers of a city’s population. For every storekeeper or head of a shop there are several clerks and workmen. Let it be considered also that those who shortly in the future are to lead in the affairs of the city, are to-day of this class, and are acquiring the aptitudes which are chiefly to determine the strength and character of the city in the early future. Then let it be further considered that more than half the battle for the city’s future prosperity lies, in fact, with the matronly element — the housekeeping women — of this class. Let the plan of the park then be regarded, for a moment, from the point of view of this subdivision of those who are to be its owners.

As a rule such women are compelled to live closely, in confined spaces, with a more monotonous round of occupations and more subject to an unpleasant clatter than is wholesome for them or for those whom they are bringing into the world and training. Many are constrained to give themselves up so to live even more confinedly than is necessary, from having a morbid sense of housekeeping necessities, bred by their confined life. In the nervous fatigue that comes upon them, it is easier to go with the current of habit than to make the exertion necessary to find and secure opportunities of relief and refreshment. The misfortune of the housekeeper in this respect, tells day by day, as long as she lives, upon every member of the family, from the master to the infant; its most important result being, perhaps, that of a disliberal educative tendency, a narrowing, stinting, materialistic, and over-prosaic educative tendency, affecting so many of the city’s heirs as may be subject to it.

Suppose that women of this condition could be largely induced to so far break out of their confining habits as, during the season when the schools are closed, to frequently spend part of a day with their children in a place secluded from all the ordinary conditions of the town; a place of simple, tranquillizing, rural scenery, taking their needle-work, and the principal means of a simple out-of-doors repast. Suppose that after work-hours the master of the family and the older daughters, who have been all day in a shop, should join the party, and all should have their supper in the open air, under a canopy of foliage. Suppose that once a week, during the hot weather, a half-holiday should be taken, to provide for which in the regulation of shops is a rapidly growing custom; that parties of friends should be made up to visit and [519] picnic together in the park; what is likely to be the value in the long run of provisions adapted to encourage such practices? The possibility of a general custom of this sort, and the value of it, is a question of how the park is laid out, how it is nursed to grow, and of how it is superintended, and by suitable service made convenient and attractive to such use. The character and habits, then, of these women may with profit be a little further considered.

Not uncommonly those the confinement and monotony and clatter and petty detailed worry of whose lives it would be most profitable for the city to have somewhat broken up are modest, retiring, often shy, of timid disposition, and of nervous temperament, a little thing leading them to painful and wearing excitement and loss of presence of mind.

The idea which many would thoughtlessly be satisfied to see realized in a public park would make it a place to which, coming by street-cars with a number of children, some of them marriageable girls, the mother’s day would be one of greater toil, anxiety, irritation, and worry than she would have had at home.

It is an important test of the value of a park that it should be found of such a character, so finished and provided with such service, that a woman under these circumstances would always find a visit to it economical, restful, tranquillizing, and refreshing for herself and her household.

Such a preparation and management of a park as will make it tolerably satisfactory with reference to this standard will only make it more than tolerably satisfactory to the more robust and less burdened part of the population.

But even a little greater refinement than is thus called for may profitably be aimed at, as will now be shown.

IV.
THE ADAPTATION OF THE PARK TO THE USE OF INVALIDS.

A highly important part of the business of a park is that of arresting the progress of disease, hastening recovery, and conservating the strength of the weak and the infirm of a city.

It is a common practice with physicians to order patients to be sent to the country. The necessity for doing so is commonly called a necessity for change of air and scene. The importance of the practice is indicated by the fact that the Massachusetts General Hospital Corporation maintains an establishment in the midst of rural scenery, near the Waverly Oaks, expressly for the purpose of hastening and confirming the convalescence of patients first cared for at its general city establishment. It is economical to do so. But it is impracticable to send the vast majority of those who in private practice come under the care of physicians, to be domiciled out of town; nor, in the [520] majority of cases, were it practicable, would it be best to remove them wholly from the comforts of home and the attentions of friends.

There are two conditions on which a visit under favorable circumstances to a suitably equipped park may be very useful. One is where it is a question whether a person is going to be able to throw off a little depression, or must let it be the beginning of a serious illness; the other, at a stage of convalescence when a brief change from the air and scene of a sick-room, a little easy exercise and a little variation from home diet may greatly hasten a return to a healthy working condition. To make such use of the park as is desirable in either of these cases, a visit to it should not be costly or troublesome or attended with needless worry or apprehension of rude encounters. In several cities what is thus desirable is now in a good degree realized. A weary woman, broken down by watching and anxiety, with a weakly child recovering from the debilitation of summer complaint, may be put by friends on a streetcar in a distant part of the city, and be taken to the gate of the park for five cents; may then be assisted by a person appointed for the duty into a low-hung, topped carriage and be driven two or three miles through rural scenery at a cost of ten cents; may be set down to rest and saunter at a pleasant rambling place with seats and drinking fountains scattered along its walks; may find, near by, a house with a woman whose business it is to meet the common necessities of an invalid, without charge, and at which a glass of milk, a cup of tea, or of hot beef broth, or a boiled egg may be had at a cost of five cents, the wholesome quality of these things being assured. She may then return by the carriage and a street-car, at a further cost of fifteen cents. The entire outlay of the day thirty-five cents. The city supplies the buildings and the roads and walks and rural scenery, and bargains with contractors for the rest, and contractors finding a profit on the whole transaction.

Let not this statement pass for a romantic fancy. Just that thing has been done many thousand times, and year after year, and in several cities. Charitable societies make contracts under which carriages take poor invalids from and return them to their own doors without charge, but this is another matter. What has been described is no more a matter of charity than the bringing of water and the carrying away of garbage by the city for the same people. Every man whose wife or mother or daughter benefits by it, has the satisfaction of knowing that he is one of the owners of the park, and that he pays from his earnings the full commercial value for the service of the streetcar, the carriage, the gardener, the keeper, and the purveyor.

A park on a suitable site, discreetly prepared, and arranged with reference to the class of considerations that have been suggested, will, simply through the increased savings and increased earning capacity of the industrial masses of a city, make a profitable return for its cost. Yet, in the progress of every large park undertaking, much public discussion occurs with reference to it, in which this element of value and that of the domestic use of it by people of small means are entirely overlooked.

V.
THE VALUE OF A RURAL PARK TO THE PARTS OF A CITY
MORE DISTANT FROM IT.

That a well prepared and arranged rural park adds greatly to the value of real estate in its neighborhood is well known. It may be questioned if the gain at one point is not balanced by loss at another. But in all growing towns which have a rural park evidence appears that, on the whole, it is not. With a good route of approach, such as was provided by the Champs Elysées and the Avenue de Bois de Boulogne in Paris, Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Parkways in Chicago, and such as will be supplied by Columbia Street, Humboldt Avenue, and the Riverdale Parkway from Back Bay, in Boston, people who ride or drive do not object to a lengthened passage between their residences and a park. As to others, the mass, even of habitual users, do not use a rural park daily, but at intervals, mostly on holidays and Saturdays, birthdays, and other special occasions. How much less than is apt to be considered, in the early stages of a park undertaking, such use of a park is affected by its being at the far side of a town, has been shown in Brooklyn.

When the rural park of Brooklyn was determined on, the people of a part of that city, the most remote from the site taken, pleading their distance from it and the difficulties of communication with it, were able to obtain a special exemption from the taxation that it would enforce. They had local advantages for recreation, and would never, it was thought, want to cross the town to be better provided in that respect at its opposite side. Nevertheless, long before the plan of the park had been fully carried out, the people of this very district began to resort to it in such numbers that two lines of street cars were established, and on holidays these are now found insufficient, to meet their demand.

There is no doubt that the health, strength, and earning capacity of these people is increased by the park; that the value of life in their quarter of the town is increased; that the intrinsic value, as well as the market rating, of its real estate is increased.

The larger part of the people to whom the Brooklyn Park has thus proved unexpectedly helpful are the very best sort of frugal and thrifty working-men, their wives, and their children.

Every successful park (for there are rural parks so badly managed that they cannot be called successful) draws visitors from a distance much greater than its projectors had supposed that it would. It is common for people living out of New York, anywhere within a hundred miles, to visit its park in pleasure parties on all manner of festive occasions. In Paris, the celebration of weddings by the excursion of an invited party to a park and an entertainment in it, is so common with people of moderate means that the writer has seen ten companies of marriage guests in the Bois de Boulogne in a single day.

VI.
THE BEARING OF THE DIFFICULTIES THAT HAVE BEEN REVIEWED UPON THE MAIN END OF THESE NOTES.

First, the chief end of a large park is an effect on the human organism by an action of what it presents to view, which action, like that of music, is of a kind that goes back of thought, and cannot be fully given the form of words.

Excellence in the elaboration and carrying out of a plan of work of this kind will be largely dependent on the degree in which those having to do with it are impressed with the importance of the intangible end of providing the refreshment of rural scenery, believe in it, and are sympathetic with the spirit of the design for attaining it. Now, it has happened that Mayors, Members of City Councils, Commissioners, Superintendents, Gardeners, Architects, and Engineers, having to do with a park work, have not only been wanting in this respect, but have been known to imagine that it would be pleasing to the public that they should hold up to ridicule any purpose in a park work not of a class to be popularly defined as strictly and definitely utilitarian and “practical,” and should seek to eliminate from it all refinement of motive as childish, unbusinesslike, pottering, and wasteful. In the history of the park of New York, three gentlemen of wealth, education, and of eminent political position, two of them Commissioners of the park, have used the word landscape to define that which they desired should be avoided and overcome on the park. One of them, and a man of good social position, a patron of landscape arts for the walls of private houses, said in a debate in regard to the removal of certain trees: “The park is no place for art, no place for landscape effects; it is a place in which to get exercise, and take the air. Trees are wanted to shade the roads and walks, and turf is wanted because without it the ground would be glaring and fatiguing to the eye; nothing more, nothing else.” He believed that in saying this he was expressing the public opinion of the city, and at the time it was not as certain as it has since come to be that he was not.

Second, spaciousness is of the essence of a park. Franklin Park is to take the best part of a mile square of land out of the space otherwise available for the further building of the city of Boston. There are countless things to be desired for the people of a city, an important element of the cost of providing which is ground space. It is the consequent crowded condition of a city that makes the sight of merely uncrowded ground in a park the relief and refreshment [523] to the mind that it is. The first condition of a good park, therefore, is that from the start a limited number of leading ends shall be fixed upon, to serve which as well as possible will compel opportunity for serving others on the space allotted to it to be excluded. The desirability of opportunity for using it for some of the ends thus set aside will be constant, and in a great city there will always be not only thousands in whose minds some one of them will be of more distinct and realizable importance than those that will have been provided for in the plan of the ground, and who will be moved to undervalue, relatively to them, that which has been done and reserved for the accepted purposes; but many thousands more who will fail to see that the introduction of appliances for promoting new purposes is going to lessen the value of the ground for its primary purposes. Where a strong and definite personal interest is taken, even by a few persons, in any purpose that is indirectly and furtively at issue with a purpose of comparatively indefinite general interest to a community, the only permanent security for the efficient sustenance of the larger purpose lies in a strong conviction of its importance pervading the community.

Such a conviction cannot be expected to develop intuitively or spontaneously, at an early period of a large park undertaking, because the work will as yet be supplying little of immediate and direct pleasing interest to the public. On the contrary, the earlier work on a park site is apt to destroy, for the time being, much of whatever rural beauty it may possess. Such is the first result of operations in drainage, in road-grading, and in tillage, for example: — such the result of all operations for the improvement of woodlands. Even a new plantation, if well designed for future beauty, is apt at first to make an unpleasant impression; and, while the heavy work of park construction is going on; with much blasting of rocks, loaded carts occupying the roads and crossing the ground in all directions, and squads of workmen everywhere, the experience of visitors can hardly fail to be adverse to a right understanding of the aims of the work.

In the management of a large park it is then of the first importance that the people to whom its managers are responsible should be asked and aided to acquaint themselves, otherwise than by observation on the ground, with the general plan upon which it is to be formed, to understand the leading ends and motives of this plan, the dependence of one part upon another, the subordination of the minor to the major motives, and to take an intelligent and liberal interest, and a well-grounded satisfaction, in its development through growth, as well as through the advance of constructive operations the results of which are to be of value only as they are fitted to serve as implements by which to obtain enjoyment of the results of growth.

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[524]

“And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labor of men, that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest is the fullness of the fruit.”

“Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think . . . that a time is to come when . . . men will say, `See! this our fathers did for us.’” — Seven Lamps.

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PART FIFTH.
THE PARK AS A DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION.

There is yet one aspect of the scheme too important to be left wholly unconsidered in a review of the design. As a seat of learning and an “Academy,” Boston is yet the most metropolitan of American cities. Others are gaining at many points with gratifying rapidity; but, on the whole, Boston is moving in a more simply evolutional and democratic way, taking ground less by forced marches and at isolated points in advance of her main line, consequently with a firmer footing. Her advantage in this respect is a good form of civic wealth. Any sterling addition to it is worth more to the reputation and commercial “good-will” of the city than an addition of the same cost to its shops, banks, hotels, street railroads, or newspapers. The Arboretum, with the library, cabinets, laboratory, correspondence, and records, of which it will be the nucleus, will not simply bring a certain excellent accession to the population of Boston; it will extend her fame, and will make in a measure tributary to her every man on the continent who wishes to pursue certain lines of study, and lines rapidly coming to be known as of great economic national importance.

The Park, if designed, formed, and conducted discreetly to that end, will be an important addition to the advantages possessed by the city in the Athenæum, in the Museum of Art, in the examples of art presented in some recent structures and their embellishments, and in the societies and clubs through which students are brought into community with men of knowledge, broad views, and sound sentiment in art.

To see something of its value in this respect, imagine a ground as near the centre of exchange of the city as the Agassiz Museum or the Cambridge Observatory, in which, for years, care has been taken to cherish broad passages of scenery, formed by hills, dales, rocks, woods, and humbler growths natural to the circumstances, without effort to obtain effects in the least of a “bric-à-brac,” “Jappy,” or in any way exotic or highly seasoned quality.

What would be the value of such a piece of property as an adjunct of a school of art? The words of a great literary artist may suggest the answer:—

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“You will never love art till you love what she mirrors better.”

If we would cultivate art we must begin by cultivating a love of nature, and of nature not as seen in “collections” or in mantel-piece and flower-garden ornaments.

As to the value that a park may have in this respect, the use may be recalled that is made by the art students of Paris, with the doors of the Louvre always open to them, of the out-of-door gallery of Fontainebleau, thirty miles away. There are no rocks at Fontainebleau more instructive than those to be had in Franklin Park. The woods of Fontainebleau that have been models of a thousand painted landscapes, being mostly of artificially planted trees, grown stiffly for the timber market, and not for natural beauty, are no more art-0educative than woods that may be had on Franklin Park. And though the region to which the name Fontainebleau is applied is so much larger, it offers the student no better examples of landscape distance, intricacy, obscurity, and mystery than may be had in Franklin Park.

But the art aspect of the scheme cannot be fairly seen from the point of view of the school of the artist. The value of an artist in the economy of a city, is as one of many agencies for the exchange of services. The artist dies when the love of art and of what art mirrors is dead.

Would you have an art-loving people? Take them to nature, and to nature not as it is to be enjoyed in glass cabinets, or in rows of specimens, or in barbered and millinered displays, or as wrought into mosaics, embroideries and garden ribbons. Let them enjoy nature, rather, with as much of the atmosphere of scenery and on as large a scale as the walls of your school will allow.

The main difficulty of gaining such an addition to the Boston Academy is that which lies in the momentary impatient misunderstanding of the public, or of those who speak for the public, of a policy that does not propose to make a great show from year to year for the public money from year to year expended, and that does not look to making a splendid show at any time.

Such misunderstanding and such impatience is not likely to have a permanently and gravely disturbing effect on such a work as that of Back Bay, where the justifying end is to be reached wholly by engineering skill, and into which art enters only as a process of dressing, but it may easily be absolutely disastrous where this condition is reversed, as to any success in its justifying purpose it must be, in the undertaking of Franklin Park.