Editorial 
House&Garden 
Vol. I. AUGUST, 1901. No. 3. 
EDITED BY 
Wilson Eyre, Jr., Frank Miles Day, 
and Herbert C. Wise. 
Published Monthly by 
The Architectural Publishing Company 
929 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Penna. 
Price 
United States, Canada or Mexico, #5.00 per annum in 
advance; elsewhere in the Postal Union, $6.00. 
Single numbers, 50 cents. 
Copyrighted 1901, by The Architectural Publishing Company. 
Entered at the Philadelphia Post Office as Second Class Mail 
Matter , June, 1901. 
Trade supplied by the Central News Company, Philadelphia. 
A great park is a treasure for any city, 
but it has its dangers. The citizens 
are proud of it. It has cost them 
much money. Any suggestion that it is not 
adequate for all time is civic treachery. Soon, 
however, men come to see that an isolated 
spot, at first at one side of a city, then rapidly 
surrounded by a growing population, is not a 
final solution of the problem. Conditions 
change rapidly in these days. What did very 
well twenty years ago will not do to-day, and 
so park systems are taking the place of parks. 
Boston, as usual in the van of liberal ideas, 
has spent twelve millions in the last eight 
years, acquiring seven thousand acres of 
woodland, eight miles of sea beach and the 
banks of four rivers. These it has connected 
by parkways into a system in which the once 
famous Franklin Park is but an incident. In 
Chicago seven large parks are connected by 
an encircling drive. In New York, Central 
Park is now but the point of departure for a 
system which, running up the Hudson, passes 
along the Harlem River and extends through 
the Borough of Bronx to great areas at the 
northeast, reserved but as yet undeveloped. 
Washington is studying her problem in a 
most enlightened way, but Philadelphia, al¬ 
ways conservative, is as yet scarcely awake to 
the thought that if some of the beauty of her 
environs is to be preserved from the electric 
car and the speculative builder it must be by 
an outer park system similar to that of Boston. 
One of the things that helped to give Bos¬ 
ton what she now has, was an admirable re¬ 
port upon the possibilities of forest, seashore 
and river valley reservations in her neighbor¬ 
hood, prepared by Charles Eliot. This re¬ 
port contained three maps, no larger than 
one’s hand, showing in mere patches of green, 
the lands publicly owned, in and about Paris, 
London and Boston. The comparison was 
astonishing. Great areas open to the public 
were seen on all sides of Paris. London 
was scarcely less fully provided, but the map 
of Boston showed only a few patches of tri¬ 
fling size. To-day all that is changed and, 
though Boston’s park area is still unequal to 
that of London or Paris, it has a system more 
complete and satisfactory than either. 
At last, London is awakening to the neces¬ 
sity of coordinating her isolated units. As 
she gathers to herself the neighboring vil¬ 
lages, their commons become her parks. As 
she changes like a gigantic amoeba, throwing 
out, in a few years, here a town of a hundred 
thousand people, there a city of a quarter of 
a million, those who feel the urgency for the 
preservation of breathing-spaces become more 
alarmed. Under the caption “ A Green Girdle 
for London ” the Spectator in a recent number 
gives its earnest support to a newly formu¬ 
lated scheme for linking up all the parks and 
commons around Greater London by the im¬ 
mediate purchase of a broad belt of open 
ground. The links to be acquired would be 
about half a mile in width, and the whole gir¬ 
dle when finished would be thirty-five miles 
around. It would include Kew Gardens, 
Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common, Dul¬ 
wich Park, Hampstead Heath, Alexandra 
Park and the marshes of the Thames be¬ 
low London, with many other places of less 
familiar name. Some of the links would be 
most difficult to form, but the promoters 
seem to be nothing daunted by a probable ex¬ 
penditure of sixty million dollars. If such a 
scheme should be carried out London would 
undoubtedly have the greatest park system 
in the world. 
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