Playgrounds in Parks from the Designer's 
Standpoint 
By Frederick Law Olmsted,* Massachusetts. 
ANY question about playgrounds in parks from the 
standpoint of the designer has just as many 
different answers as there are different kinds 
of parks and playgrounds. In one sense any land de- 
voted to public recreation may be called a park, even 
if it is all playground like a base ball park ; and in an- 
other connection the most richly decorated public gar- 
dens of the most charming reservations of natural 
scenery appealing to the highest esthetic sensibilities, 
may be called the "people's playgrounds." 
Rut I suppose the question you want me to discuss 
has to do on the one hand with those playgrounds which 
are adapted to active athletic play by many persons con- 
centrated upon a limited area and characterized by a 
good deal of bare ground and other features not gen- 
erally desired as parts of a beautiful landscape; and on 
the other hand with parks which are valuable chiefly 
for their beauty, whether of natural landscape or of 
formal gardening or otherwise. Even with these limita- 
tions no hard and fast rules can be laid down, such as 
this Association might adopt to express its opinion that 
certain things ought always to be done and certain other 
things ought never to be done. Individual circumstances 
are so variant that rules are certain to be misleading, 
and we must fall back upon the much more troublesome 
method of trying to get at the principles lying back of 
any such rules. 
I want to call attention first to two important prin- 
ciples much broader in their application than the entire 
subject of public recreation facilities. Both are sound, 
but cither is apt to be misleading if the other is for- 
gotten, because they are complementary to each other. 
The first principle is suggested by the familiar saying 
about killing two birds xvith one stone. 
If a given piece of public property can be used 
effectively for two or more purposes, it ought to be so 
used rather than withdraw a second piece of property 
from other use or forego the accomplishment of one of 
the purposes. Thus it is better that schoolhouses should 
be used in the evening for various worthy purposes to 
which they are adapted, than that these purposes should 
go unserved or that separate buildings should be erected 
and maintained at needless expense to serve them while 
the schoolhouses stand idle in the evenings. Of course, 
the use of the schoolhouses in the evening is not all 
clear gain. There is increased wear and tear, there are 
serious complications of janitor service, and there are 
other drawbacks which the school administration would 
be glad to avoid. But if these drawbacks mean only 
a somewhat increased expenditure of money and intel- 
ligent effort and do not in any essential way impair the 
quality or quantity of educational work done by the 
schools, the argument for the double use of the school- 
houses is apt to be unshakable. 
And similarly a park meadow may in many cases be 
largely used for baseball and other games with so little 
reduction of its effectiveness in the landscape (even 
though the turf does become a good deal worn in spots) 
and so little reduction in the effectiveness of the base- 
ball playing as compared with what it might be if played 
on costly separate playground equipped exclusively for 
* A paper presented at the New Orleans convention of the American 
Association of Park Superintendents. 
baseball, that the combination of playground and park 
becomes in these cases a thoroughly wise one. 
Kill two birds with one stone if you can, but don't 
take too much chance of missing both in the attempt. 
For there is to be borne in mind the complementary 
principle of which I spoke, a principle which is reflected 
in the saying that yon can't have your cake and eat 
it too. 
Let me illustrate by referring to the combined use of 
certain lands for park and water-supply purposes. 
Where water-supply is the prime purpose to be served 
in acquiring and developing a piece of land, it is very 
often possible to secure incidentally important means of 
public recreation of certain kinds at a very slight addi- 
tional cost and with no impairment of the water-supply 
function whatever, thereby reducing the extent and cost 
of park facilities that need to be independently provided. 
Not infrequently land acquired and policed primarily 
for park purposes may serve incidentally to protect the 
purity of a water-supply, or may afford rights of way 
for water-works or sites for reservoirs, with no impair- 
ment of its park value or even with actual increase of 
park value, thus killing two birds with one stone again. 
On the other hand, there are some combinations of 
park and water-works functions to attempt which would 
be like trying to have your cake and eat it. For the 
park department to establish a public swimming beach 
in the distributing reservoir of the city water supply 
would be such a case. No matter how much the people 
needed the swimming beach, and no matter what the 
cost of providing it elsewhere, this particular combina- 
tion could never be justified. It might be possible and 
expedient in a given case to give up the use of a reser- 
voir for water-works purposes and convert it into a 
park lake containing a swimming beach ; or it might be 
found expedient in another case to give up a long- 
established custom of using a certain natural park lake 
for swimming and boating and convert it into a reservoir. 
Either of these courses would be a deliberate transfer 
of a piece of property from the service of one function 
to the service of another. The city authorities would 
make up their minds whether it was best to eat the 
cake or to have it ; whether to drink the water or swim 
in it ; because it is obviously a case where an attempt 
to kill two birds with one stone would be foolish. 
Now the application of all this to the question of 
playgrounds in parks is : first, that any combination of 
playground and park functions which, under given local 
conditions, can be worked out in practice without hurt- 
ing the park scenery and without sacrificing the quality 
of the playground is desirable on the principle of killing 
two birds with one stone ; and second, that where the 
sort of playground facilities desired are incompatible 
with the kind of landscape beauty desired for park pur- 
poses, as is very frequently the case, there should not 
be a mere compromise, an attempt to eat the cake and 
have it. There ought rather to be a deliberate decision 
as to whether it will pay to exclude certain land from 
the park landscape and use it primarily for playground 
purposes. 
As a rule, I think it is fair to say that playgrounds 
are more efficient in proportion to cost when they are 
scattered in numerous small recreation grounds near the 
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