INTRODUCTION 

 OLD PARKS AND NEW 



The great pioneer park planners and builders in America had no great 

 difficulty in denning a park. The term then had a definite technical and 

 functional connotation. Eliot defined parks to be "lands intended and 

 appropriated for the recreation of the people by means of their rural, 

 sylvan, and natural scenery and character." Olmsted, Sr., stated the 

 nature and function of a true park as "a place where the urban inhabit- 

 ants can to the fullest extent obtain the genuine recreation coming from 

 the peaceful enjoyment of an idealized rural landscape in rest giving con- 

 trast to their wonted existence amidst the city's turmoil. " 



At the close of the first quarter of the twentieth century it is not so 

 easy to state the nature and function of that conglomerate aggregation 

 of properties found in a modern, well developed park system. The term 

 "park" has been applied to many different kinds of properties which 

 the original meaning of the term did not comprehend. As long ago as the 

 eighties, Eliot protested against the growing tendency toward an almost 

 universal abuse of the term "park," in that it was being applied to every 

 kind of public property. 



Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century (1850) there were no 

 public parks in America, in the sense defined by Eliot and Olmsted. 

 There were plazas and pueblos (public lands) in the Spanish regions or 

 South and Southwest, commons in New England and in parts of the old 

 South, squares in nearly all of the thirteen original colonies and in the 

 newer sections of the United States, and various other types of public 

 properties of an open character. Many of these properties were, more- 

 over, embellished by the planting of lawns, flowers, shrubs and trees. 

 Because of the manner of developmental treatment, however, and the 

 functional uses of many of these properties, it was inevitable when park 

 departments began to be created that such properties should be turned 

 over to them and the word applied to them as a generic term. 



THE CHANGING CONCEPTION OF PARKS 



During the past twenty-five years the confusion in terminology has 

 become even more marked. The word "park" came to be applied not 

 only to plazas, squares, ovals, triangles, places, monument sites, prome- 

 nades and public gardens, but to other kinds of properties which func- 

 tionally were the direct opposite to the "peaceful enjoyment of an idealized 



