DESIGN OF PARK AND RECREATION AREAS 221 



Reservation of the Metropolitan Park System of Boston there is along the 

 edge of the beach an asphalt roadway flanked by a paved sidewalk on 

 each side. Abutting on the landward sidewalk is a mile or so of private 

 amusement resorts, restaurants, etc., the patrons of which come and go 

 almost wholly by way of that sidewalk. These private properties run 

 through to a city street in the rear in which they have the usual rights of 

 abutters on streets; but the beach front drive and sidewalk, which is the 

 ordinary and extremely valuable means of access to them, is not legally 

 a street but a 'park,' in which they have no rights not possessed by any 

 other citizen. Occasionally when the owner of one of these places has 

 conducted it in a manner unsatisfactory to the park commission, the com- 

 mission has simply fenced his place of business off from the sidewalk under 

 their control until he came to terms. These abutters received, in fact, 

 great special benefit from the commission's opening and continued main- 

 tenance of the roadway and promenade on what was formerly a railroad 

 right of way, but they were not assessed as abutters having special rights 

 in the land taken by the commission; and they have no special rights in it, 

 but merely privileges extended to them on sufferance and revokable at will. 



The above, however, is a very special case, and ordinarily where a 

 strip of land along the border of a park or parkway is expected to be used 

 by abutters in a manner substantially equivalent to that of a street, it is 

 better that the abutters should acquire definite street rights in that strip 

 and that it should be legally a street and dealt with as to improvements 

 and assessments like any other street. 



I have diverged to the legal aspect of border streets from the question 

 of physical design, because it is so intimately related to it and so important. 

 I now return to the question of physical design in connection with park- 

 ways of the third group. We are not concerned with those of the second 

 type, where enhancement of the value of the abutting land is the prime 

 consideration, except to point out that this consideration properly enters 

 into the design of parkways laid out by public authorities solely as a second- 

 ary and subordinate consideration a thing to be sought so far, and so far 

 only, as the means by which it is sought are wholly compatible with the 

 most perfect possible accomplishment of the primary and public purpose 

 of the undertaking. To that extent and with that limitation always in mind 

 it should be sought, not only because enhanced value of property is a good 

 thing for the community, but because under plans calculated to have that 

 effect the land necessary for the public purpose can often be secured more 

 cheaply than otherwise, or even secured as a gift. 



Parkways of the third group normally occupy the legal status of 

 streets rather than of parks, or of streets enclosing islands of land having a 



