PRELIMINARY WORK COMPLETED 4Y 
funds for the parks by direct assessment on adjoining prop- 
erty. The park charter was accordingly drawn on these 
lines, as is these respects it at present remains. 
AS TO PARKWAYS. 
The precedents and conditions for providing for the cost 
of the parkways were entirely different. For this purpose 
existing boulevards, avenues, streets, or other public places 
where rights of way had already been secured, might be 
desirable in connecting the various parks into a system or 
chain of parks; or new rights of way might be indispensable 
for the same object. A parkway being of a definable width 
similar in many respects to any other avenue or street ac- 
quirement, the application of the principle of assessing 
benefits becomes a comparatively simple matter. This pro- 
vision was, therefore, included in the second and sixth 
sections of the park law (of 1895), and the Hast Orange 
parkway has been laid out under the assessment-for-benefits 
plan therein provided. In the method prescribed for mak- 
ing parkways of existing avenues or streets, there were ap- 
parently no very intricate questions to be solved. 
It was deemed advisable that the future commission 
should have the right, and it was provided, as it now has the 
tight, to appropriate for a parkway any existing highway ; 
but as the local municipal or county authorities already held 
possession under the right of eminent domain, the proviso 
(section 2 of the charter) makes it necessary to first have 
“the concurrence of the Common Council or other body hav- 
ing authority over highways” in all cases where a larger 
width of area for a parkway than the existing highway is re- 
quired. The “care, custody and control” clause (the 
eighteenth section), which was for so many years the bone 
of contention over the efforts to make parkways of Park 
and Central avenues, was intended to simplify, not to com- 
plicate, the transfer and utilization of those avenues as fun- 
damental parts of the park system. 
The scramble to obtain possession of one or both of those 
great county thoroughfares by the corporations for traction 
