Olmsted Brothers

“ Unless a special and intelligent effort is made to secure individuality in the improvement of each of the public squares, parks and boulevards of a city, they are liable to repeat each other too much. The West Side parks of Chicago resemble each other to a regrettable degree. Each has its little, crooked lake, its green house and flower beds, its little lawns, its curving level drives and walks, its bridges and statues, its plantations mainly of the same selection of trees crowded and slim and only partially screening out surrounding houses. ”

“ Future generations, however, will be likely to appreciate the wild beauty and the grandeur of the tall fir trees in this forest park or reservation, as it would perhaps better be called, its deep, shady ravines and bold view-commanding spurs far more than do the majority of the citizens of today, many of whom are familiar with similar original woods. But such primeval woods will become as rare about Portland as they now are about Boston. ”

“ The result is to divide the landscape opposite the long façade of the building into three distinct parts, of three totally different characters, the combined relations of which to the building seem to us most unfortunate.
The formal treatment on the axis is too narrow to furnish in itself an adequate setting for the frontage of so wide a building, and yet is so massive that, instead of seeming a mere incident within a unified open space relating as a whole to the whole façade, it almost completely divides the open space. ”

“ A resourceful man, with strength of character, persistence, sound judgment, and above all, tact, can often save a city a large percentage in cost of land for parks.
But whether or not the president of the Board is both an able business man and a good judge of park beauty, it is of the utmost importance that the rest of the Board be men of refined taste and competent to safely decide the innumerable questions that concern the appearance of the parks and of every part of them and of every object proposed to be put upon them. If they are not fit for that, they are practically useless. ”

“ The embankment of the new road is in itself an ugly interruption of the valley, but it can and should be pierced by an ample archway through which the narrow sylvan portion of the valley and a pathway traversing it would debouch at the head of the broader glade, the embankment of the roadway being heavily embowered in trees. ”

“ The designer of a park should assign proper places for sundry things for a variety of purposes and must meet many limitations and practical requirements always with the beauty of the whole as well as of the parts in mind as the prime consideration.
For instance, if a meadow is to be provided as a prominent landscape feature because of its usefulness for strolling and for field sports, it must constantly be borne in mind that the beauty of a meadow consists in its breadth and simplicity, in its smooth, continuous green sward and in its naturalness. ”

“ One of the most beautiful, striking and completely self-contained and independent new features which could be added to the Botanical Garden is that which has been for some time under favorable consideration by the Director-in-Chief in the so-called “Lake Valley”—a great naturalistic exhibition of rhododendrons (including azaleas) and of plants suitable for association therewith, in such a manner as to make a notably impressive landscape unit, a valley of rich foliage and brilliant bloom enclosed by wooded rocky hills. ”

“ It almost never happens that a whole park exists, like an artist's painting, solely to be looked at, yet by far the greater portion of every park exists primarily for landscape beauty. If large portions can be used for recreative purposes other than enjoyment through the eyes, the park will be worth more to the public, but it would be ruinous to let the public use all portions to the destruction of beauty. ”

“ The Museum looms into view in one of its less attractive aspects, but to those who are more interested in outdoor than in in-door matters a walk of fully a third of a mile intervenes before they begin to find themselves in surroundings which have the quality so much to be desired, upon entering the Garden, that of giving immediate delight while stimulating to press onward. ”

“ Park commissioners are therefore apt to employ men who seem to know something of at least the practical parts of the work, and they often flounder around in all the vitally important matters of design, using their own taste and knowledge as far as they have time and inclination to do so and leaving the rest to their practical men. Even those park commissioners who know and appreciate beautiful landscape when they see it are rarely able to select and adapt a particular type of landscape to the particular land with which they are dealing. ”

“ The sort of thing we mean is a type of what is sometimes called a landscape garden, the heart of which is a beautifully modelled lawn, enframed by beautifully composed trees irregularly disposed, under which the lawn here and there loses itself in shadowy mystery, while elsewhere its irregular margin is formed by masses of flowering shrubs and flowering herbaceous plants, providing, as an incident of the landscape, an informal or naturalistic herbaceous garden designed predominantly or almost exclusively for esthetic effect. ”

“ No other form of park has ever proved so attractive and so useful to the masses of the people as the meadow park, particularly when there can be associated with it long reaches of still water as a landscape attraction and for boating purposes. There is a surprisingly large number of people who will go upon a shallow park lake who will not go, or who do not fully enjoy going upon such a river as the Willamette, where they fear being interfered with by steamers or carried away by the current if they drop an oar, and where they do not feel at home. ”

“ Our impression is that a continuous, dense, high, but narrow screen of trees and undergrowth should be provided between the road and the railroad; that the slope toward the Garden should be more openly and intermittently planted; and that the permanent fence between the road and the Garden might in many places take the form of a mere parapet supported by a high retaining-wall so as to permit unobstructed views of the Garden without facilitating trespass and at the same time minimize the encroachment of the slope-grading on the present plantations of the Garden. ”

“ Politicians do not make good park commissioners, not alone because they are not good judges of landscape beauty, but because they are strongly biased in the direction of deciding every question in the way that will gain them and their party friends and votes, and because they will inevitably sacrifice what seems to them such trivial things as matters of appearance to oblige people who generally have some personal or selfish or party end in view. ”

“ It would always be pleasing in the vistas looking southwest through Park street and West Park street and through the Park squares, to have a pleasure ground with picturesque plantations for the eye to rest upon, rather than to have some crooked arrangement of private buildings. ”

“ Many things are done to a park meadow in direct contravention of these obvious characteristics. Its breadth is broken by conspicuous drives and walks, its simplicity is ruined by flower beds, its greensward is injured by excessive trampling or by short-cut paths being allowed to be worn in it and its naturalness is destroyed by grading it to a flatness not characteristic of the surrounding topography, or by harsh obvious artificial turf terraces, or by planting regular rows of trees along its borders. ”

“ Yet they will order a wood cleaned of underbrush, feel gratified by the efforts of the gardener in the way of so-called rock work, rustic bridges, formal flower beds in informal surroundings, and by walks leading hither and yon without any purpose that one can discover, and by all the injuries which even good gardeners (because they are mostly mechanics and not artists) will inflict on a park landscape already naturally beautiful or which needs only native trees and wild bushes in proper places to make it so. ”

“ It is to be regretted that the necessity for general plans in parks is not appreciated by most people as is the necessity for a general plan for city hall or court house. Yet a park is apt to include more naturally incongruous purposes and objects than a city hall. ”

“ Where money is raised by taxation for interest and sinking fund on a debt incurred for the wise purchase of land, it is a kind of forced saving by the people, not an expense, as is necessarily most of the money spent by a municipality. It would be perfectly reasonable and much more scientific to have a law permitting the purchase of land by a municipality for park and other suitable purposes on long-time bonds. ”

“ There will often be a large section of a park devoted to a great meadow, another section devoted to a lake, another devoted to rough woodland scenery, another devoted to a conservatory with gardenesque treatment of its surroundings, another section may be devoted to a zoological garden, another to a botanical garden, another section may be devoted to popular amusements requiring more or less apparatus, fences, shelters and artificial constructions. The beauties which should characterize each section should be constantly kept in mind. ”

“ In general, it is safe to say that some parks and parkways or some portions of them should be rapidly improved, at least to such degree as is necessary to perfect their landscape and to render them at once available for the public to use with reasonable convenience and satisfaction and without undue injury to the verdure of the parks. Such rapid improvement cannot, as a rule, be accomplished by means of such appropriations as can be spared from annual taxes. ”

“ The broad meadows in such a park, with their open groves and scattering trees, afford opportunity for many thousands of people to enjoy themselves and each other in such a way that they can do little harm to the ground and interfere but little with each other; whereas, in the steep hillside woodlands such great crowds of people would soon destroy the greater part of the undergrowth and ground covering and make the ground bare and ugly. ”

“ Even without the cultivated taste of an artist, the use of a trained intelligence in a conscientious effort to design and explain a comprehensive plan will do much to make clear what should and what should not be done in each of the main subdivisions of a park. ”

“ Considering that both sides of the boulevard would offer most excellent house frontages, it is obvious that the whole cost of such a parkway ought not to be considered as a matter of luxury, so that even if it should prove a disappointment for many years to come in the way of increasing the value of land fronting upon it to a sufficient degree to equal or more than equal its excess of cost over that of an ordinary street, no serious loss would have been incurred. ”

“ Leading writers and other authorities on modern municipal development agree that no city can be considered properly equipped without an adequate park system.
All agree that parks not only add to the beauty of a city and to the pleasure of living in it, but are exceedingly important factors in developing the healthfulness, morality, intelligence. ”

“ Many of the civil engineers employed on park work do more even to injure naturally beautiful scenery, because their operations in grading and road building and bridges are apt to be larger, and more conspicuous, and so expensive that once done, it is practically impossible to change them and because most of their training has been in smashing beautiful landscape with railroads, streets, dams and bridges and other constructions, all of which might at the same, or at moderate additional cost, be made beautiful in form and location, even if without ornament. ”