OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS 53 



night. This idea, no doubt, was a sound one, while the park had only a small population 

 about it and while the cost of lighting and policing the park efficiently remains almost 

 prohibitive. But already, yielding to the characteristic American hatred of restraint, 

 and willingness to take chances of robbery and even murder, this theory of shutting 

 the greater part of the park during the latter half of the night has been abandoned, even 

 to the extent of tearing down the gateways. 



Another less vital feature of the plan of Franklin Park — ^The Greeting — has never 

 been carried out, but appears to have been definitely abandoned, presumably owing to 

 a preference for extending the open-field treatment and a dislike for such artificial aids 

 to enjoyment as the Mall in Central Park, New York, the Rotten Row in Hyde Park, 

 in London, and the corresponding drive in the Bois de Boulogne, in Paris. The idea in 

 each case is a social congregating place, and in such a case a considerable degree of arti- 

 ficiality is not only appropriate, but actually essential for neatness and convenience. 



Another feature designed in contiguity to The Greeting was The Little Folks' Fair. 

 This was intended to contain the means of amusement permissible, or more or less customary, 

 in parks, such as a path for pony riding, another for goat carriages, smoothly paved 

 places for scups and swings, and the like. Sooner or later experience proves that such 

 things get into parks, and the prudent designer will plan a suitable concentration of them 

 in a place where they will do the general rural landscape of the park little or no harm, 

 rather than leave them to be scattered here and there haphazard and often with no regard 

 to the effect upon the general design or the need of reserving certain parts of the park 

 for quiet enjoyment of the landscape. It was for this sort of protection of the park proper 

 that The Parade was created as an adjunct to Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and Franklin 

 Field as a supplement to Franklin Park. 



Another feature of the plan was the assignment of a considerable area along the north 

 or cityward margin of the park for the use at some future time by a Zoological Society 

 for a popular exhibit of living animals. It was, however, strongly urged that the collec- 

 tion include only hardy animals, or such as would require only occasional or slight pro- 

 tection. The occupation of part of the park by anything like the jumble of large but 

 cheap and unlovely buildings of the usual Zoological Gardens was, of course, repugnant 

 to the designer of the park; yet experience indicated that it was more prudent to endeavor 

 to guide and select what might otherwise be done badly some day in response to popular 

 demand. However, not even a start was made; so the plan amounts to nothing more 

 than the assignment of a site for some such thing. The idea, it must be confessed, has 

 one element of weakness; namely that, being on the border of the park, which is develop- 

 ing as a good residential district, the noises and smells of some of the animals may come 

 to be so strongly objected to by some of the neighbors that the administration of the 

 park may be driven to move some of the animals further into the park where they have 

 no business to be. 



The introduction of golf-playing is an unwise sacrifice of the pleasure and comfort 

 of many in the quiet enjoyment of the park. Not only are the attractive and harmless 

 sheep driven out, but the gently rolling slope, with the picturesque slight roughness 

 incident to sheep pasturage, and so appropriately suggestive, to the nerve-wearied visitor, 

 of the peace and quiet of the real country, is replaced by the hard, artificially smooth 

 surface made by constant clipping and rolling, and, what is worse, the nerves of the visitor 

 are still further irritated by the anxiety as to being hit by the hard and swiftly driven 



