New York 



Five years before Boston and Kansas City commenced their park systems, New 

 York secured three large parks in the Borough of the Bronx, and connected them 

 by splendid parkways. Van Cortlandt Park is connected with Bronx Park by the 

 Mosholu Parkway, 600 feet in width and over a mile in length. From Bronx Park 

 a parkway 400 feet wide and two and a quarter miles in length, leads to the Pelham 

 Bay Park, 1,756 acres in extent. It is proposed to continue the Grand Boulevard 

 and Concourse southward, to connect it with Fifth Avenue, thus completing the 

 connection of the Bronx Parks with Central Park and the heart of the city at Fifty- 

 ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. 



At the foot of Manhattan Island a number of small _parks have been acquired 

 within a decade at an expenditure of many millions of dollars. The land for three 

 of them, covering ten acres, cost $5,237,363. Central Park, which covers 840 acres, 

 cost for the land alone $5,028,844. It was acquired from 1853 to 1863. In other 

 words, by New York's delay in securing sites for small parks and playgrounds it has 

 been obliged to pay more for these three small parks than it did for the whole of 

 Central Park. The advantage of securing outlying parks in time, thus strikingly 

 illustrated in New York, is now well shown in Philadelphia. It is probable that 

 the proposed Pennypack Park from crest to crest, through a length of six miles 

 with an area of a thousand acres, can be secured for about $500,000. A triangle 

 of ground two and three-fourths acres in extent, at the entrance to Fairmount Park, 

 covered with houses instead of trees, has recently been condemned by the city for 

 park purposes, at a cost of $400,000. 



New Yorkers, spurred on by the city's want of breathing spaces, its great 

 congestion of travel and its ugliness, and inspirited by the success that the outer- 

 park movement is obtaining throughout the country, recently secured the appoint- 

 ment of an official body called the New York City Improvement Commission. 

 That Commission has just rendered a preliminary report, urging the acquisition of 

 a large part of the water-front along the Hudson River and East River, the exten- 

 sion of Fifth Avenue to the Grand Boulevard and Concourse already mentioned, 

 and the acquisition of park areas in Staten Island and in Brooklyn. The report 

 was published after the plates of the map of New York's existing system, which is 

 printed herewith, had been made. A notable recommendations follows: 



" Although, as above said, the expenditures necessarily required by any proper plan 

 must be large, they could in many instances be greatly reduced, if the City had the power 

 exercised in many European cities of condemning more than the area actually required, so 

 that the City might reap the benefit to be derived from the enhanced value of neighboring 

 property; and, in the judgment of the Commission, steps should be taken to secure such 

 changes in the constitution and legislative enactments as may be necessary for the purpose. 

 This method of taking more land than required, with the object, by resale at an advance, of 

 recouping part of the expense, has been applied in various large cities of Great Britain and 



