1894.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 48. 13 



REPORT OF THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS. 



Hon. C. F. Adams, Chairinian of the Metropolitan Park Commission. 



Dear Sir: — In a professional report addressed in 1892 to 

 the preliminary or advisory Metropolitan Park Commission, 

 Mr. Eliot (who has since become a member of our firm) re- 

 viewed the hills, streams and coasts of the neio^hborhood of 

 Boston and sketched in colors, on a map, the areas which it 

 seemed to him should be reserved for public use through 

 metropolitan as distinguished from municipal action. No 

 attempt was made to define the exact boundaries of any of the 

 reservations proposed. At the time of writing it was not 

 decided that an executive Metropolitan Park Commission would 

 ever be established. 



Your Commission having been created and organized, you 

 asked us to give our attention to the definite demarcation of 

 five of the reservations proposed in Mr. Eliot's report, namely, 

 the reservations at the Blue Hills, Middlesex Fells, Muddy 

 Pond Woods (or Stony Brook), Revere Beach and Beaver 

 Brook. You directed us to prepare projects for boundaries 

 which would show alternative or maximum and minimum limits, 

 wherever possible, in order that a choice might be open to 

 your Board when the estimates of the probable cost of the 

 lands to be taken should be compiled by you. Six parties 

 of surveyors were placed at our service by your direction, 

 and during the months of September, October and November 

 we gave much time, in conjunction with the surveyors, to the 

 careful study of the problem put before us. On Dec. 15, 1893, 

 we sent to your office the last of a series of eight surveyors' 

 maps, drawn to a scale of two hundred feet to an inch, upon 

 which we had indicated by a continuous green line what 

 seemed to us to be the most desirable boundary for each of the 



