37 



well equipped, and well kept park, adapted to draw together all classes 

 of the community from every part of a great city. It had also begun 

 to be realized that so long as Brooklyn offered nothing of the charac- 

 ter of the New York park, it must expect to fall rapidly into the 

 back-ground as a competitor in providing attractive sites for the resi- 

 dence of a large tax-paying class of citizens. 



In the light of this experience, it had become generally evident in 

 1865, when our relations with your Commission commenced, that ef- 

 fective discussion centered upon a very different idea from that which 

 had led to the acquisition of the two pieces of ground on Flatbush 

 avenue. 



Instead of a scheme for establishing severa) public grounds, each 

 designed for the special benefit of a district, ward or locality, the pressing 

 demand now was for one strikingly fine Park, adapted to be resorted 

 to from all quarters, which would retrieve the prestige which had been 

 lost to the city by the construction of the Central Park. 



The duty of developing a practicable scheme for this purpose having 

 fallen naturally, though not perhaps by distinct previous legal enactment, 

 upon your Commission, an examination of the neighborhood within 

 which lay the property under your control, showed that it occupied a po- 

 sition with reference to the distant parts of the city highly important to 

 be considered in the solution of the new problem, although no weight 

 had been attached to it in the original selection of the ground as a site 

 for one of eight district pleasure grounds. 



To understand its consequence, it needs to be remembered that the 

 present City of Brooklyn has been mainly formed by the gradual filling 

 up of the space between several original centres of settlement, and that 

 within the last thirty-five years there have been several eras of specu- 

 lation, during which large isolated estates have been divided for sale 

 in lots, by which additional local street systems have been inaugurated. 

 The present city therefore includes many quite distinct systems, laid 

 out independently, and having no convenient relation one with an- 

 other. In consequence of this fact few points in the city, and especially 

 in the suburbs, are accessible from more than two sides by direct lines 

 of communication over a mile in length. A certain locality, however, 

 which adjoined, though it was not included within the property of the 

 city in the Eighth and Ninth Wards, constituted what was practically 

 a converging point on the city map of several systems of communica- 

 tion, as will appear by the accompanying diagram, and the following 



