96 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY 



city; this income would be augmented by the receipts from fishing privileges, rent of boats, 

 etc. The existing frame structures should be gradually replaced, where necessary, by low 

 and simple buildings of brick, concrete, or other material native to Long Island. Place 

 might be found for various public institutions for which isolation is an advantage, such as 

 hospitals and penal institutions as is suggested by the majority report. 



The land area proposed for park purposes is about 3,660 acres. That this is not exces- 

 sive for a city such as New York, which will soon be the most populous in the world, is 

 proved by the examples of Paris, London, and Boston which have found it to their advantage 

 to set apart such great territories for park purposes, much of it even beyond their own 

 boundaries. The Corporation Counsel claims that the city has already good and clear 

 title to all this land, though the Attorney General of the state of New York claims that 

 title is vested in the state. In either case it seems clear that its acquisition by the city would 

 be easy and economical, and that New York has an opportunity of acquiring, perhaps for 

 fifty, perhaps for one hundred years, perhaps for all time, a public recreation ground 

 quite unique in character and whose value it is not possible to estimate. 



COST OF LANDSCAPE DEVELOPMENT 



By FREDERICK LA^V OLMSTED 

 (Meeting of December 10, 1907) 



THE landscape architect needs to take account of the cost of maintenance of the 

 work he designs for two kinds of reasons: 

 The first are concerned with absolute costs, a knowledge of which is needful 

 if a client is to be guarded against undertaking improvements of a kind and extent which 

 he will subsequently find himself unable or unwilling to pay for maintaining, to his own 

 dissatisfaction and to the discredit of his advisor and the profession. If the wisdom, 

 honesty, and knowledge of landscape architects were equal to the situation, when asked 

 for an estimate of the cost of a proposed improvement they would include an estimate 

 of the maintenance-cost, which is usually just as vital a question as the first cost, and 

 sometimes more so. 



The second set of reasons are concerned with the relative cost of maintaining land 

 under alternative methods of improvement, between which the landscape architect, or 

 the client acting under his advice, has the opportunity of choosing. Here considerations 

 of maintenance-cost affect, in a very intimate and detailed way, the design of any improve- 

 ments about which a landscape architect may be consulted. It is indeed the usual practice 

 to take them into account where differences in maintenance-cost are very obvious and 

 large; but the available information on the subject depends far too much on vague general 

 impressions. A more accurate and systematic knowledge of maintenance-costs on the 

 part of landscape architects, used in a more systematic way, would greatly increase the 

 value of their services to clients, and would frequently suffice to bring about that much- 

 to-be-desired permanency of consultation between clients and their original professional 

 advisors, the lack of which so often results in needless mutilation of the original plan 

 and much waste of effort and money. 



It is difficult to secure accurate, reliable, and intelligible data in regard to costs of 



