PARK AND CEMETERY. 
109 
PARK ROADS.* 
Park roads are, regretable necessities. The necess- 
ity in many cases is too greatly over estimated. The 
landscape designer is too apt to permit usage to control 
him in determining the location, width and number of 
his drives. The road is the despair of the park designer. 
He takes his territory with all its possibilities for adorn- 
ment, creates in his min i the beautiful picture of nature’s 
coloring which his art inspires and when he comes to 
formulating it on paper his tradition keeps saying, 
drives, drives. He tries them here, there and everywhere 
only to find that wherever he places them they would 
be better elsewhere. He sees a beautiful slope rising in 
graceful undulations from his little lake to the margin 
of the parkj but a road must go through it somewhere. 
He tries it at the foot of the slope along the water. The 
introduction of the rushing feverish life of a park drive- 
way there completely destroys the restful effect he loves; 
half way up the slope it is absolutely impossible, at the 
top it might do if he could hide it with plantation but to 
do this would so contract his area that what would other- 
wise be a strong complete picture becomes a trivial af- 
fair, feeble and unsatisfactory, with the road the princi- 
pal object. Nevertheless, the road has to be somewhere 
he thinks and there it goes as the least objectionable 
place. Sometimes it is the excusable vanity of the de- 
signer that causes him to provide too many roads. He 
wishes everyone who comes to the park to see all its 
beauties whether they come awheel, afoot, ahorse or in 
a road vehicle, so he must have roads, wheelways, eques- 
trian dri^'es and walks to lead to each place of vantage 
with the result that the design seems a maze of ways 
with the park feature as an incident. The reverse should 
be the case. Often the authorities controlling at the 
time make the greatest of all mistakes in deciding that 
the park shall be made a public circus with all 
sorts of side shows. Roads must be built to the bear 
pits to the merry-go-rounds to the race tracks, to the 
aviaries, to the monuments and to many other places 
which are desirable things perhaps most anywhere out- 
side a park. Result, roads and roads. 
There is another influence which often works per- 
niciously upon the designer. He is often called upon 
for plans for a cemetery. There numerous roads are de- 
manded and the apparent necessity for them not only 
excuses their presence but jus'.ifies them. When called 
upan for a plan for a park the influence of his last cem- 
etery plan is perhaps still with him and he proceeds to 
lay out a beautiful system of roads and green ovals, but 
he has failed utterly to make a park. The uses made 
of the two places are so entirely different that what is 
fit for the one is not at all suited to the other, though 
both in their way may be artistically beautiful. 
The crown of artistic success is placed upon a de- 
sign for a park just as surely as it is upon a design for a 
building when simple fitness for the uses to which it is 
to be put is beautifully apparent. The more grass, shrub- 
bery and trees in a park, the more beautiful. Roads 
*A paper read at the .\nnual Convention of the American 
Park and Out-door .\rt .Association at Chicago, June, 1900. By 
J. Frank P'oster, C. E. 
should only be used to make this beauty accessible. 
The more roads, the less of nature’s loveliness, there- 
fore, every unnecessary yard of driveway is a great scar 
on that beautiful admixture of the blue of the sky and 
the yellow of the sun light resulting in the luxurious 
green carpet with which nature has surfaced the earth, 
and which unlike any artificial carpet, is just as good as 
new after each spring house cleaning. In providing 
for roads in a park we aie apt to neglect the example 
given us by the great Master. His work is satisfying 
as that of none other. A beautiful little story of its 
great charm, which I heard lately, I must repeat to you; 
An old Scotch Highlander was accustomed every morn- 
ing early to step around to one corner of his lowly 
thatched cottage, from where the close by loch and its 
guardian hills were all in view, and stand there bare- 
headed for a few moments before entering upon his 
work of the day. A gentleman found him there one 
morning with bowed head in the attitude of devotion 
and asked him why he stood thus; if he was sa) ing his 
prayers? The old Scotchman said that every morning 
for thirty years he had stood on that spot for a few mo- 
ments with his bonnet off worshiping the beautiful world. 
The design for the great park, the short record of the 
creation of which is found in the first chapter of Gene- 
sis, shows no roads. There the kindergarten child may 
make his great pyramids in the sand pits; the biological 
student may lie on his back in the shrubbery plantations 
studying the habits of the birds and the young dominie 
can go into the sequestered solitudes and learn of the 
God of Nature without fear of a runaway horse, the 
bursting of a pneumatic tire or the blowing of a tally-ho 
horn. Let us keep as close to our best example as pos- 
sible. 
The most beautiful parts of any park are away from 
the roads, and any one who truly loves the beauties of 
nature goes afoot when he really wishes to enjoy them. 
Make fewer roads, teach the people where the beautiful 
is and let them learn that the little effort of walking 
through a well designed and well managed park is more 
fully repaid in true and pure enjoyment than any equal 
effort in any other direction. 
But park roads are deplorably necessary. The en- 
gineer’s evil eye has a sinister influence upon them. He 
demands regular curves or tangents, otherwise they are 
unscientifically designed. The landscape architect fear- 
ful of the engineer’s criticisms, calls upon his mathe- 
matical knowledge, and the result is satisfactory on 
paper regardless of the more than likely, stiffness and 
painful regularity when applied to the ground. 
Montgomery Schuyler in an article in a recent num- 
ber of the Century Magazine on art in bridges, broadly 
insinuates that the blood corpuscles which flow through 
the engineer’s brain are lacking in certain projections, 
or jagged edges, requisite to the production of the di- 
vine aflatus of art. Now, though I am something of an 
engineer I am forced by my own experience to agree 
with Mr. Schuyler and nowhere is the want of artistic 
inspiration in his soul more apparent than in the purely 
utilitarian expression given to most park roads. The 
boulevard is a road first and has incidentally some of the 
