382 Landscape Gardening 



These timid tax payers, and men nervous in their private 

 pockets of the municipal expenditures, should take a lesson 

 from some of their number to whose admirable foresight 

 we owe the unity of materials displayed in the New York 

 City Hall. Every one familiar with New York has won- 

 dered or smiled at the apparent perversity of taste which 

 gave us a building, in the most conspicuous part of the city, 

 and devoted to the highest municipal uses, three sides of 

 which arc pure white marble, and the fourth of coarse 

 brown stone. But few of those who see that incongruity 

 know that it was dictated by the narrow-sighted frugality 

 of the common council who were its building committee, 

 and who determined that it would be useless to waste 

 marble on the rear of the City Hall, "since that side would 

 only be seen by persons living in the suburbs." 



Thanking Mayor Kingsland most heartily for his pro- 

 posed new park, the only objection we make to it is that it 

 is too small. One hundred and sixty acres of park for a 

 city that will soon contain three-quarters of a million of 

 people! It is only a child's playground. Why London has 

 over six thousand acres either within its own limits, or in 

 the accessible suburbs, open to the enjoyment of its popula- 

 tion - - and six thousand acres composed too, either of the 

 grandest and most lovely park scenery, like Kensington and 

 Richmond, or of luxuriant gardens, filled with rare plants, 

 hot-houses and hardy shrubs and trees, like the National 

 Garden at Kew. Paris has its Garden of the Tuileries, 

 whose alleys are lined with orange trees two hundred years 

 old, whose parterres are gay with the brightest flowers, 

 whose cool grooves of horse-chestnuts, stretching out to 

 the Elysian Fields, are in the very midst of the city. Yes, 

 and on its outskirts are Versailles (three thousand acres of 

 imperial groves and gardens there also), and Fontainbleau, 

 and St. Cloud, with all the rural, scenic, and palatial beauty 

 that the opulence of the most profuse of French monarchs 

 could create, all open to the people of Paris. Vienna has 

 its great Prater, to make which, would swallow up most of 

 the unimproved part of New York city. Munich has a 



