House and Garden 
question of law or the health of the city be 
involved, those having the layout of the city 
in charge have little regard to experts in mat¬ 
ters of art, applying merely to a surveyor to 
lay out a park or an avenue. 
There is absolutely nothing new in these 
principles which I have tried to explain. They 
are as old as the art of architecture. And as 
1 have tried to show by selecting a few illus¬ 
trations, these principles have been adhered 
to by every country as well as at all times in 
the history of art. And although we may 
not realize it, it is the beautiful architectural 
landscape work which has been done in Eu¬ 
rope throughout the centuries that attracts 
us more than anything else and makes trav¬ 
eling abroad a pleasure. What would Paris 
he without the Place de la Concorde, the 
Champs-Elysees, the Tuileries Gardens and 
their relation in design to the Louvre and 
the Arc de Triomphe, the Madeleine and 
the Corps Legislatif? Suppose this entire 
layout had been designed with winding paths 
and grass plots and irregular planting of trees, 
what a loss would Paris have sustained, for 
the main artery of the city formed by these 
ornaments is one of the most artistic and 
beautiful things the world has ever seen. 
Even the little garden of the Palais Royal is 
a perfect example of park treatment within 
architectural boundaries. Almost every city 
in Europe and almost every country place 
of historic interest is laid out in an architec¬ 
tural way; and there is no time better than 
now, when everything is still in its infancy, 
for the American people to awaken to this 
fact and develop, ere it is too late, the op¬ 
portunities lying on every hand. 
COMMUNITY LIFE AT ROCHELLE PARR 
By Samuel Swift 
(AMERICAN SUBURBAN COMMUNITIES-IV.) 
I F Llewellyn Park 1 be an expression of the 
idealistic aims of a wise dreamer, then Ro¬ 
chelle Park may be declared an embodiment 
of commercial expediency. Nor is it the less 
interesting on that account; rather, is it more 
suggestive than the other, as showing what it 
may be pecuniarily worth while to do with a 
property not remarkable for natural advan¬ 
tages or situation. The case of Rochelle 
Park might be matched within the land trib¬ 
utary to any one of a dozen American cities ; 
while Llewellyn Park and our exclusive and 
fashionable communities are the products of 
exceptional conditions. 
Early in the eighties a New York insur¬ 
ance company found itself saddled, through 
foreclosure of a heavy mortgage, with more 
than seventy acres of farm land, orchard and 
undrained marsh, on what was then the outer 
edge of New Rochelle, Westchester County, 
New York. The plot seemed discouragingly 
hard to convert into cash, and men directly 
interested pondered the sacrifices by the com¬ 
pany that might be the price of escape from 
1 See “House and Garden,” Vol. III., No. 6, page 326. 
an undesirable burden. Fax paying, with no 
appreciable return, grew irksome, but the 
company’s faith in the property was scarcely 
such as to warrant costly improvements. 
The plot controlled was an oblong, with a 
mean length east and west of about 2700 
teet, and a width of about 1300 feet. From 
North Street, a town thoroughfare and the 
property’s western boundary, the land sloped 
downward, toward the eastern end, with its 
lowest point at what is now the Court, near 
the embankment of the New York, New 
Haven & Hartford Railroad. Here was a 
swamp, and at the northeast corner, in the 
woods,the tract was crossed by a small stream. 
The rocky formation underlying the upper 
end of the land, cropping out picturesquely 
here and there in rounded knobs, was not 
in evidence at this eastern edge of the prop¬ 
erty, and this spot was looked upon as the 
weak feature of the place. Woodland and 
orchard lay beyond the north border; east¬ 
ward the ground sloped up again, in unculti¬ 
vated wildness. South of the tract, except 
tor a narrow belt of open land, the average 
