Olmsted Brothers

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The fundamental purposes of a rural park requires the shutting off from the interior of the park as completely as possible, all city sights and sounds, and the resolute exclusion of museums and of many exceedingly popular means of amusement from the main landscapes of the park; it usually requires fencing and limiting the number of entrances; it requires the relegation of drives and walks and public shelters to places where they will not too seriously injure the park landscapes even at serious sacrifice of opportunities for those using them to enjoy some of the scenery ”

“ Parks should not be brought into politics not only for the important business reasons that apply in all departments of municipal administration, but for the more important reason that the essential requirement of parks is that they should be naturally and artistically beautiful and because politicians as a class give small consideration to matters of art and beauty of natural scenery and care less whenever they conflict with their business interests. ”

“ For reasons rather difficult to explain there are in every city many more persons who consider themselves competent to direct the expenditure of public money on parks without plans prepared by experts than there are persons who would be willing to direct the expenditure of similar amounts on a large city hall, and yet, as a matter of fact, the ability to design landscape is very much rarer than the ability to design monumental public buildings. ”

“ The most expensive large parks, Central Park and Prospect Park, were located without taking advantage of the magnificent natural landscapes of the rivers and bays which distinguish New York and Brooklyn. There are many similar cases. Formerly people built with the backs of their houses upon the rivers and lakes, thus not only excluding the public from continuous access to them but ruining their beauty. Where land along the banks of rivers or along the shores of a lake can, in a city, be fairly well spared from commercial uses, public squares, parks and parkways should be located upon them. ”

“ In general, the main idea to be accomplished in the thinning is to arrange for a continuous border, so that surrounding houses will not be unduly conspicuous, and for the longest practicable views in various directions within the grounds over narrow winding lawns, or low masses of shrubbery. The fir tree is so suggestive of wildness that it is ill adapted to remain permanently in any considerable numbers in such a formal public park or square. To look well it should have its lower branches spreading upon the ground, in which case the turf would be destroyed on too large areas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the case of loans for purchase of land, especially land for a park system is very decidedly different from that of loans for most other municipal improvements. It is unwise for cities, as for business men and corporations, to borrow more than a safe fraction of their marketable assets or so much that the interest and annual sinking fund payments will be possibly greater than the sure income applicable to these purposes during periods of industrial depression. Still more fundamental is the principal that money should not be borrowed unless it can be profitably employed. ”

“ Examination of the facts by experts would be required, doubtless, to fully satisfy those in authority; but it requires very little knowledge of municipal finances to satisfy one of the general rule that parks are a better asset, when the loan by which they have been acquired becomes payable, than school buildings, fire engine houses, city halls, street improvements and most other things for which cities borrow money, and all of which deteriorate and some of which become almost valueless, even it they are not destroyed to make room for better structures. ”