26 The Annals of the American Academy 



from twenty-two to sixty acres. I understand that the other two 

 park boards have made some selection for new parks for play- 

 grounds, but have not as yet acquired any property therefor. There 

 are five or six municipal playgrounds of perhaps an acre or two 

 acres in extent, managed by a special park committee under the con- 

 trol of the mayor, that have been in operation for two or three 

 years. 



"The cost of maintaining the five new playgrounds which the 

 South Park Commissioners have created is estimated at from fif- 

 teen to twenty thousand dollars a year each." 



The committee formed to bring about the establishment of an 

 outer park system secured the appointment of Mr. Dwight Heald 

 Perkins by the city of Chicago and Cook County to prepare a com- 

 plete plan. This plan is to be published in February, 1905. 



In describing the system in a letter to the writer, Mr. Perkins 

 says : "We have divided Chicago and Cook County into four zones. 

 The first is inside of the present chain of parks ; the second zone is 

 comprised of the existing large parks ; the third zone circumscribes 

 them and is itself circumscribed by the fourth zone. The third zone 

 has a park sixteen miles long in what is known as the Skokee 

 Marshes, which lie northwest of the city; west and southwest this 

 zone is taken care of by separate parks varying from forty to three 

 hundred acres, connected by boulevards and country drives. The 

 fourth zone comprises one park twenty-five miles long in the Des- 

 plaines Valley and other parks and drives in the Sag Valley about 

 fifteen miles in length. Some portions of these parks are twenty- 

 two miles from the centre of the city. 



"No formal estimate of prices has been made nor can it be at 

 this time. . . . My own idea is that $25,000,000 will cover the 

 cost. You will understand that the entire report is suggestive, that 

 other boards will take up and execute it as rapidly as possible in the 

 future. The suggestions have been approved, but nothing of a 

 legal or financial nature has as yet been done to carry them into 

 effect." 



"The Kingshighway Commission" presented a report in the 

 spring of 1903 on a plan for joining four existing large parks of the 

 city of St. Louis with other outer parks by means of a continuous 

 parkway, the estimated cost of which is three and a quarter million 

 dollars. 



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