PARK AND CEMETERY. 
243 
PARK PLAYGROUNDS from DESIGNER’S STANDPOINT 
Address before Neiv Orleans Convention of American Association of Park Su- 
perintendents, October ii, 1916, by Frederick Laiv Ohnstead, Landscape Architect. 
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 devoted to public 
recreation may be called a park, even if it 
is all playground like a baseball park; and 
in another connection the most richly deco- 
rated public gardens or the most charming 
reservations of natural scenery appealing 
to the highest esthetic sensibilities, may be 
called the “people’s playgrounds.” 
But I suppose the question you want me 
to discuss has to do, on the one hand, with 
those playgrounds which are adapted to ac- 
tive athletic play by many persons concen- 
trated upon a limited area and character- 
ized by a good deal of bare ground and 
other features not generally 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 other- 
wise. Even with these limitations no hard 
and fast rules can be laid down, such as this 
association might adopt to express its opin- 
ion 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 mis- 
leading 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 im- 
portant principles much broader in their ap- 
plication than the entire subject of public 
recreation facilities. Both are sound, but 
either is apt to be misleading if the other 
is forgotten, because they are complement- 
ary to each other. The first principle is 
suggested by the familiar saying about 
killing two birds with one stone. 
If a given piece of public property can 
be used effectively for two or more pur- 
poses, 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 ex- 
pense 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 draw- 
backs which the school administration 
would be glad to avoid. But if these draw- 
backs mean only a somewhat increased ex- 
penditure of money and intelligent 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 schoolhouses 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 effect- 
iveness of the baseball playing as com- 
pared with what it might be if played on 
costly separate playground equipped exclu- 
sively for 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 you 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 sup- 
ply is the prime purpose to be served in ac- 
quiring 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 additional 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 in- 
frequently land acquired and policed pri- 
marily for park purposes may serve inci- 
dentally to protect the purity of a water 
supply or may afford rights of way for 
waterworks or sites for reservoirs, with 
no impairment 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 combina- 
tions of park and waterworks 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 particu- 
lar combination could never be justified. 
It might be possible and expedient in a 
given case to give up the use of a reser- 
voir for waterworks 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 func- 
tion 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 hurting 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 purposes, as is very frequently the 
case, there should not be a mere com- 
promise, 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 propor- 
tion to cost when they are scattered in 
numerous small recreation grounds near 
the people they are to serve rather than 
when they are associated with the larger 
parks; but there are good arguments in 
favor of providing playground facilities 
in connection with large landscape parks. 
Wherever this is done, I believe it to 
be a wise policy to so design the layout 
that it will be perfectly evident to any 
intelligent observer that there are two 
distinct tracts of land, a playground 
and an adjacent landscape park, not a 
utilitarian and relatively unlovely play- 
ground in a landscape park. 
Never put anything in a park primarily 
devoted to beauty of scenery which does 
not upon the whole contribute, directly 
or indirectly, to the public enjoyment of 
that particular kind of scenery. If for 
reasons which are clearly convincing, 
some such thing, incongruous with the 
scenery, must be placed on land which 
has been a part of such a park, there 
should be a definite decision to withdraw 
either a portion or the whole of the park 
from service as primarily a place of 
scenic beauty, and to devote the land so 
withdrawn primarily to certain utilitarian 
purposes, retaining only such beauty of 
scenery as is compatible with the efficient 
accomplishment of those utilitarian ends. 
As I have said elsewhere,* in most of 
the objects with which we are concerned 
beauty is, and ought to be, an absolutely 
incidental factor. We want as much 
beauty in them as possible, but only that 
sort and degree of beauty which is com- 
patible with a high degree of utilitarian 
efficiency. This is clearly the case with 
playgrounds, just as it is with reservoirs 
or pumping stations or chairs and tables. 
