PBELIMIN"AEY WORK COMPLETED 47 



funds for the parks by direct assessment on adjoining prop- 

 erty. The park, charter was accordingly drawn on these 

 lines, as is these respects it at present remains. 



AS TO PARKWAYS. 



The precedents and conditions for providing for the cost 

 of the parkways were entirely different. For this purpose 

 existing boulevards, avenues, streets, or other public places 

 where rights of way had already been secured, might be 

 desirable in connecting the various parks into a system or 

 chain of parks ; or new rights of way might be indispensable 

 for the same object. A parkway being of a definable width 

 similar in many respects to any other avenue or street ac- 

 quirement, the application of the principle of assessing 

 benefits becomes a comparatively simple matter. This pro- 

 vision was, therefore, included in the second and sixth 

 sections of the park law (of 1895), and the East Orange 

 parkway has been laid out under the assessment-for-benefits 

 plan therein provided. In the method prescribed for mak- 

 ing parkways of existing avenues or streets, there were ap- 

 parently no very intricate questions to be solved. 



It was deemed advisable that the future commission 

 should have the right, and it was provided, as it now has the 

 right, to appropriate for a parkway any existing highway; 

 but as the local municipal or county authorities already held 

 possession under the right of eminent domain, the proviso 

 (section 2 of the charter) makes it necessary to first have 

 "the concurrence of the Common Council or other body hav- 

 ing authority over highways^^ in all cases where a larger 

 width of area for a parkway than the existing highway is re- 

 quired. The "care, custody and controF' clause (the 

 eighteenth section), which was for so many years the bone 

 of contention over the efforts to make parkways of Park 

 and Central avenues, was intended to simplify, not to com- 

 plicate, the transfer and utilization of those avenues as fun- 

 damental parts of the park system. 



The scramble to obtain possession of one or both of those 

 great county thoroughfares by the corporations for traction 



