TPIE METROPOLITAN PARK SYSTEM. 155 



connection with a park as thus designed provisions are made for 

 such suitable amusement, entertainment, or recreation, as can 

 appropriately be supplied under such conditions without interfer- 

 ence with the main purpose of the place, and in a way to meet the 

 needs of all classes of the population. These, of course, must 

 vary with the character of the locality- 



This is the work which Mr. Olmsted has done iu a manner such 

 as has never been undertaken before, and which could not have 

 been done without an extraordiuar}- sensitiveness to natural 

 beauty, combined with a remarkable creative faculty, and an 

 unprecedented fertility of resource in shaping means to ends and 

 in the devising of new means to those ends — guided by a con- 

 structive imagination that could look far into the future and 

 anticipate the formative growth of slow natural processes, together 

 with the possession of the warmest sympathy which identified him 

 with the great multitude and gave him the power, in appreciating 

 the needs of all sorts and conditions of men, of meeting those 

 needs in the fullest measure. 



The great American public park, as thus developed, has become 

 an essential institution, not only in nearly all the chief cities of 

 the land, but in many of the minor centres of population, which 

 are thus wisely providing for their future. In Boston the move- 

 ment did not make itself felt until considerably later than in many 

 other cities of similar rank. The great reason for this lay iu the 

 exceptional beauty of the suburbs of this city. Boston had the 

 advantage of possessing within its limits, public open spaces of 

 relatively small extent, to a greater degree than almost any other 

 city in the country. Boston Common was, until the establishment 

 of Central Park, the largest urban pleasure ground in the United 

 States. The suburbs with theu- rural charms w^ere easily access- 

 ible ; there was during a long period but slight restriction upon a 

 free resort to the fields, the woods, and the seashore. These things 

 made the need of extensive public open spaces of a park-like 

 character less apparent in Boston than in auy other large city. 



But with the extension of the urban population the beauty of 

 the suburbs was encroached upon and the rural sceuery was made 

 less and less accessible to the mass of the population. The wiser 

 heads in the community saw that parks would beeoiue a necessity 

 at no remote day, and they urged the adoption of the measures 

 needful to that end. But it was not until seventeen years ago that 



