191 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
USE AND BEAUTY IN WATER-FRONT DEVELOPMENT 
Read at the Cincinnati Convention of the American Civic Asso- 
ciation bv Harold A. Caparn, Landscape Architect, of New York. 
In trying to arrange for the limits 
of a short paper, the salient points of 
what I know and what I can learn 
from others about water fronts, I am 
a good deal astonished to find that so 
little has been written or said about the 
subject from the points of view espe- 
cially interesting to the American Civic 
Association. 
The subject is properly limited to 
such borders or boundaries of water 
as are of more or less monumental or 
architectural construction ; to warves, 
docks, bulkheads, sea-walls or embank- 
ments (whether intended to be primar- 
ily useful or primarily beautiful) and to 
what is behind them. The natural 
banks of streams however imposing, like 
the Rhine or the Hudson or the rocky 
precipices that curb the ocean on the 
coast of Maine or Ireland though su- 
perb in themselves are outside of our 
purpose ; as are even the banks of a 
lake or stream in a park. 
As one tries to look at the subject 
of water-fronts as they might be and 
not as one usually sees them, it seems 
astonishing that the opportunities they 
offer to the designer (artist) have not 
oftener been seized. Here we have two 
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conditions of a noble scheme — water 
and architecture — that time and time 
again have been created merely or 
mainly for their beauty; and every 
town or city that has a navigable river 
or harbor has them to start from ; they 
don’t have to be made, for one of them 
— the water — is there, and the other, the 
warves, docks and warehouses and so 
forth, grow up naturally in response 
to, the community’s needs. It would 
seem as though the most obvious thing 
to do would be to dispose of these 
things that so many see and that serve 
every one as beautifully as circum- 
stances would permit and the ideas of 
the population appreciate; it would seem 
as though the builders would instinct- 
ively try to make some composition that 
would be worth while out of their wat- 
er-mirrored structures, especially when 
we remember that it would be difficult 
to find instances of man’s constructing 
anything without some evident attempt, 
however rudimentary, to make it beau- 
tiful. Such things as a corn shock and 
a squatter’s hovel are built on principles 
of order and symmetry, and even a 
laborer making a pile of dirt will spend 
some effort on making it shapely. But 
when one contemplates the things that 
line the average American commercial 
water-front, one is tempted to wonder 
whether their makers expended any 
more thought on beautifying them, con- 
sidering their opportunities, than the 
farmer on his corn shock or the laborer 
on his pile of dirt. 
The reasons for this are several and 
complex, among them being the unwill- 
ingness of the average man to spend 
more than he must on things of mere 
utility, and a sort of widespread sup- 
erstition that use and beauty are very 
different things, and therefore hostile. 
For my own part I think them so close- 
ly interwoven in constructive works as 
to be positively the same thing. But 
that is too long to discuss here. But 
the principal cause of the condition of 
most of our water fronts is that they 
were made piecemeal and accidentally 
by men with different or conflicting in- 
terests ; each man put up what he 
thought he needed, unconscious that his 
advantages had any relation to his neigh- 
bors, or perhaps assuming that his 
neighbor’s advantage must be his own 
disadvantage. In this way vast as- 
semblages — they can often scarcely be 
called systems — of wharves, docks, ware- 
houses, railroads and so forth, have 
come together with as little beauty as 
they could have, and, one is tempted to 
say, with as little usefulness as they 
could have; for if they were less use- 
ful and effective than they are, they 
would gradually cease to exist. It is 
not that they are not enormously useful 
and effective, but that they might be 
far more so, more practical, easy run- 
ning and economical, could they have 
been imagined and organized as a whole 
instead of as a number of unrelated 
parts whose cohesion is merely acci- 
dental. 
This audience will naturally look more 
at the artistic side of the water-front; 
but if your water-front is to be a work 
of art it is not enough for it to be mere- 
ly beautiful. It is not enough for your 
architect to design a handsome facade 
for the docks or for a succession of 
them a mile long, or for a superb quay 
or embankment of masonry. Your 
water-front and what is behind it, to be 
a real work of art, must be also prac- 
tical to the highest degree. Its feeding 
streets and railways, its avenues of in- 
gress and egress and all the complex 
machinery for handling men and mer- 
chandise must be organized so that the 
stream of commerce may flow increased 
by everyone of its thousands tribu- 
taries, interrupted by none of them. 
Then will your fine and dignified facade, 
your noble scheme of architecture and 
water rising from the water curbing 
and utilizing it, be a true expression 
of the ordered energy of the life that 
pulses behind it. Your water-front in 
fact can only be completely beautiful in 
proportion as it is completely useful. 
Perhaps the best way to clarify our 
ideas of what is and may be beautiful 
and practical in water-fronts will be to 
consider some actual examples of what 
has already been done at home and 
abroad. Most of you will recall tbe 
famous Thames embankment in Lon- 
don, England, forming a base to the 
House of Parliament and the other 
more or less stately buildings along the 
river. You will remember the stone 
quays of the Seine in Paris, and the 
superb sweep of the river walls 
of the Arona at Pisa and Florence 
and the Tiber at Rome. You will 
at once tbink of the visionary beauty 
of the palaces lining the Grand Canal 
at Venice. All these have been de- 
signed and made as works of art. 
You may know what they have done 
with the river banks at Berlin, Vienna 
and Antwerp, and the harbors at Ham- 
burg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stock- 
holm, Nagasaki and Sydney, Australia, 
and most of you have perhaps seen the 
great impounding basins at Liverpool 
