C/AU 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF PARK SYSTEMS IN AMERICAN 



CITIES 



BY ANDREW WRIGHT CRAWFORD, ESQ. 

 Secretary City Parks Association, Philadelphia. 



The most promising feature of American civic life during the 

 last decade has not been heralded with flourish of trumpets. The 

 fashion of the newspapers and magazines of the day to decry indis- 

 criminately all things municipal has spread to such an extent that 

 the majority of us are loath to believe that there is anything to be 

 said in actual praise of municipal government in this country. It 

 would be interesting to inquire to what extent this fashion has pre- 

 vented the success of many reform movements. The mis-state- 

 ments of honest but ill-informed reformers have acted as boomer- 

 angs. Nothing needs accuracy more than a reform movement. Yet 

 reformers exaggerate to such an extent that "the rank and file" 

 assume that they are as far from the truth as the parties in power. 

 One of the accomplishments of the parties in power, for which not 

 only reformers but the public in general have failed to give due 

 credit, is the improvement in appearance of cities, which has been 

 effected chiefly by preserving places of marked natural beauty for 

 the use of the public and by making attractive the communications 

 between these natural parks and residential sections. If politicians 

 have been brought to the point of appreciating natural beauty, and 

 I believe this paper will note results that bear strong testimony 

 that they have, and if the appreciation of beauty is really uplifting, 

 it would seem that the general pessimism of the day as to municipal 

 government fails to take into account the real facts of the case. 



Progress of this kind is not likely to attract general attention 

 at its inception. A large part of the general public do not under- 

 stand "plans." They cannot visualize. The people who can visualize 

 saw many plans on paper twenty or thirty years ago, but no execu- 

 tion of them. Consequently, it is only now, when concrete results 



