LANDSCAPE PARKS 307 



Sports like baseball, cricket, and football are much in the same cate- 

 gory as golf : they might be allowed in the open turf area of a landscape 

 park if that area could be closed to other activities during the time with- 

 out noticeable inconvenience, but if provision for match games is to 

 be made, with grandstands, and noisily enthusiastic crowds are to be 

 expected, these recreations also are more properly provided for in the 

 playfield. 



A certain amount of unorganized play by smaller children is practi- 

 cally unobjectionable in a landscape park, and arrangements for May 

 Day festivals and the like are very desirable, but any organized pro- 

 vision for apparatus play in a landscape park is made at a sacrifice both 

 to the playground and to the park.* A playground is most effective 

 when the children who use it can all come from a short distance. If it 

 is in a park or on the side of a park, it is evident that its tributary area 

 lies almost wholly on one side of it and the average distance which its 

 users must come is doubled. From the point of view of the park, a 

 playground with apparatus is an utterly incongruous object in the 

 landscape. Even if it be assigned a separate area, and even if when 

 this area is set aside there remains sufficient area for legitimate 

 park purposes, still the noise of the children playing would be un- 

 objectionable only in an adjacent zoological garden or promenade, 

 and would distinctly decrease the restful effect of an adjacent landscape 

 park unit. 



There are a number of other recreational activities occasionally 

 found in parks, such as merry-go-rounds, roller-coasters, shooting gal- 

 leries. Punch and Judy shows, and so on, which, while they provide a 

 perfectly legitimate form of recreation, still are not congruous with the 

 purpose of a landscape park, because their whole suggestion is of crowds 

 and the kind of excitement to be found in crowds. These " commercial 

 recreations" belong properly in an amusement park which might per- 

 haps be near the landscape park but not of it. It is an argument in 

 favor of having such recreations as these near a landscape park and of 

 having such provisions as a promenade and a zoological garden occupy 



* See the paper by F. L. Olmsted, Jr., Playgrounds in Parks from the Designer'' s 

 Standpoint, read before the American Association of Park Superintendents. (See 

 References.) 



