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the island as yet far out of town, where streets have not been made, 

 and where there is little building. About their park they cannot do 

 this, though efforts are making in a small way. There is the East 

 Side Association and the West Side Association, and numberless 

 little rings of interested speculators, who vainly try by forethought 

 to control the character of some section or block in which they own 

 lots, but no one of these appears to control property enough to do 

 what is necessary to establish beyond contingency the success of a 

 single comprehensive scheme. The recent rapid advance in value of 

 the property held compactly and managed shrewdly by the corpora- 

 tion of Columbia College is an example of the advantage which may 

 result from the power to control the character of improvements 

 throughout a complete district, even when the street plan is out of 

 the reach of improvement. In this case it has been made certain 

 that a considerable property will be occupied for a long series of 

 years exclusively by a certain agreed-on class of residences, but it is 

 almost an isolated instance. It is too late to do anything of this 

 kind in connection with the Central Park. 



It is not too late for us. We still hold the opportunity of estab- 

 lishing a district which shall have throughout a character in the high- 

 est degree attractive. The possession by the city of Brooklyn at 

 this juncture of the 128 acres of fairly paid-for land, on the east side 

 of the park, thus puts in its hands the one additional lever that is 

 needed to establish the balance of advantage between the two 

 cities. 



What we want to do with this land, then, is this. We want to 

 thoroughly revise the whole street plan from beginning to end, and 

 to lay it out anew in such a way as will not only be much more con- 

 venient and useful to the whole public than it would under any other 

 plan that has been proposed, but in such a way as will make it easy 

 for us to show every one who comes to the park that we have, in 

 Brooklyn, sites in close connection with our park better adapted for 

 first-class residences than can be found anywhere else. Then we 

 propose to sell these lots, with certain provisos in regard to the char- 

 acter of the improvements which shall be made upon them. We 

 believe that if we are allowed to develop this idea unhampered, it 

 will tend to the advancement of the reputation of Brooklyn as a place 

 of residence well nigh as much as the park itself, and will give it ex- 

 actly the advantage that it needs in its struggle for its natural rights 

 in this respect in competition with New York. We propose to re- 

 serve, besides the avenues and about twenty-eight acres of ground 

 for public use, the lands which include the Reservoir and the higher 



