28 The Annals of the American Academy 



Bronx Park, is six hundred feet wide and a mile in length; the 

 other, the Bronx and Pelham parkways, connecting parks of the 

 same names, is four hundred feet wide and two miles in length. 

 In Brooklyn the Bay Ridge Parkway reaches the great width of 

 nine hundred feet. For Staten Island, now almost devoid of parks, 

 its Chamber of Commerce has proposed a complete system to occupy 

 about four thousand acres, or one-tenth of the area of the island. 

 This report was presented in December, 1902. 



One of the most important park systems is being planned for 

 Washington. In 1901 the United States Senate appointed a commis- 

 sion composed of Messrs. McKim, St. Gaudens, Burnham and Olm- 

 sted to report a plan for the District of Columbia. The report that 

 was presented dealt largely with the development of the Mall, of 

 which hereafter, and recommended in addition an outer park system, 

 which, if adopted, will give the Capital of the United States an impe- 

 rial system of parkways sixty-three miles in length, connecting parks 

 eight thousand acres in extent, the outer link of which, completely 

 surrounding the city, north of the Potomac, will connect fourteen 

 forts built during the war for the protection of Washington. The 

 commission calls attention to the plan of the city. That plan is 

 fundamentally right and the commission was therefore fundament- 

 ally right in bringing it forcibly to the attention of the American 

 people. A radial system by which streets running north and south 

 and east and west are intersected by many diagonals offers an 

 opportunity for embellishment which Baron Haussmann quickly 

 realized. It is curious how many people think that Washington is 

 based upon the plan of Paris. Man after man will tell you so, and 

 yet Washington was founded in 1800 and its plan adopted a year 

 or two earlier, while it was Baron Haussmann, the prefect of the 

 Seine under Napoleon III, who beautified Paris by the radial sys- 

 tem of streets. It is significant that the two most beautiful cities 

 in the world, Paris and Washington, are not built upon the gridiron 

 plan. That significance has been pointed out and the lesson is being 

 learned. It is likewise significant that Paris has been made the 

 most beautiful city in the world in only forty years. 



Group Plans. 



The outer park movement is likely to be overshadowed in 

 popular apreciation by that for the realization of "group plans" 



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