CHAPTER I 

 THE WHY OF PARKS 



Man is essentially an outdoor animal. So far as our knowledge of 

 his origin goes he has always been found, until comparatively recent times 

 (approximately seven thousand years), in an open country environment. 

 That primitive man worshiped the sun is not strange when it is consid- 

 ered how vitally necessary an abundance of sunlight is to every form of 

 life, including man. All the other forms of worship included in the nature 

 cult which deified the air, earth, water and the stars and moon are equally 

 explicable because of the life-giving and perpetuating powers of these 

 natural elements whose fundamental importance seems to have been deeply 

 understood by primitive man. 



After untold aeons of living in a naturalistic environment from which 

 he not only secured sustenance but from which he drew the very breath 

 of life itself, man himself turned creator and builder and evolved the city 

 community. For the past seven thousand years the history of the world 

 has been the story of the rise and fall of city civilizations; in nearly every 

 instance of the fall of these civilizations the place of the worn-out people 

 has been taken by a fresh and more virile people from the open country, 

 a process that is less obtrusively going on in the cities of the present day. 



In no period of the history of the world has city building been under- 

 taken on such a gigantic scale as in America during the past half century. 

 It is necessary, then, in considering the importance of parks to stress some 

 of the disadvantages of city environment as contrasted with open country 

 environment, which have made parks, with the open country atmosphere 

 they create, so vital to the maintenance of wholesome conditions. 



PARKS NECESSARY TO MAINTENANCE OF GOOD PHYSICAL CONDITION 



In making the change from the open country type of life and civil- 

 ization in which the great majority of people had lived for nearly eight 

 generations after the first settlement of the United States, to urban con- 

 ditions, many desirable things were no doubt gained. At the same time 

 the people who gave up life in the country in response to the call of indus- 

 try and commerce bartered away many things representing distinct losses 

 - losses reparable only by more intelligent and humane city planning and 

 building. 



One of the first and most undesirable defects of modern city living 

 and working is that much of the sunlight necessary for man's existence 



