94 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY 



sailing, fishing, and swimming in all their phases may find ample space and endless variety. 

 In his report of January 26, 1905, on possible sites for parks on the shores of the bay, Mr. 

 John C. Olmsted refers to the possibility of "forming lagoons and wooded archipelagos" 

 between Bergen Island, Plum Island and Barren Island, which would make one of the most 

 interesting parks in the world. The idea on a much larger scale applies equally well to the 

 marshes in the interior of the bay. The region has a sentiment about it that is all its own; 

 a feeling of stillness and serenity that the rhythmic thud of the oarlocks and the dip of 

 the blades seems merely to augment, and even the multiplied explosions of the exasperating 

 and prosaic, but useful, motor-boat are unable to destroy. The scenery is widespread, 

 soothing and eminently paintable in broad and dun or broad and splendid tints borrowed 

 from the sky; and everywhere pervading is a large monotony that is perhaps its greatest 

 charm — the charm of the prairie, the desert, a still sea, or cloudless heaven, or whatever 

 one can imagine vast and simple. 



All this somewhat hackneyed and commonplace kind of description will not account 

 for the fascination the place has for anyone who is sensitive to the influence of sky and 

 water. The result to the imagination is one of complex causes; the whole air of repose and 

 self-possession is only part of the feeling produced by the seemingly limitless expanses 

 overhead and beneath; of level surfaces of marsh and water above which one cannot rise 

 high enough to see that their boundaries are nearer than a vast distance. 



Now, as the sentiment of a work of art is the only thing that makes it finally worth 

 while, the sentiment of Jamaica Bay, not its extent, is what makes it most valuable to 

 the people of New York. It is different in expression and in uses from any public park 

 with which I am acquainted. It is not merely valuable because different, but because it 

 expresses one of the characteristic and peculiar kinds of the very varied scenery and topog- 

 raphy of Greater New York. And in park-making as in other kinds of art, the true solution 

 of the problem before one is surely not to try to impose one's ideas or prejudices on the 

 conditions, but to find how the conditions can be best expressed or ideahzed in the terms 

 at one's command. 



How is this to be done so as to make such a park, practically as well as esthetically, as 

 useful as possible? The land, or much of it, must be raised high and dry, not less than three 

 feet above mean high tide, by dredging the channels to obtain filling for the islands. The 

 common way in which this is done is simply by digging out and filling in so that whatever 

 comes out last remains on top and the best soil is buried deepest. In this case the top 

 would be pure sand, which, of course, would never do for a park. The marsh averages 

 about four feet three inches thick; twelve or eighteen inches of this could be removed 

 to be spread over the top when the sub-filling was deep enough. But here is a possible 

 solution of an important civic problem. Last summer, when the garbage strike raged 

 most furiously, and the garbage smelled most villainously, I went through the east side 

 and saw many tons of it on the streets. Excepting for the addition of sundry old hats, 

 pieces of wood and the like, it did not difi'er radically in composition from the gardener's 

 compost heap, consisting, as it did mainly, of banana skins, vegetable refuse and the like 

 which, mixed with soil or ashes or both, will in two or three years disintegrate into fine 

 and very fertile black soil. At present the city's garbage is taken to Barren Island, where 

 the oil is squeezed out of it and the refuse dumped into the Jersey meadows ten or twelve 

 feet deep for filling. Now there are removed from Brooklyn alone every year 750,000 

 cubic yards of ashes, and these, mixed with the garbage or garbage refuse and street sweep- 



