House Garden 
IN WASHINGTON PLACE 
frequent sites against dead walls or at corners 
of buildings. American conditions are more 
favorable to the development of wall fountains 
than of those in open spaces. Our cities 
generally exhibit in their plans a discouraging 
reluctance toward curved lines or open paved 
plazas, surrounded by dignified buildings and 
not wholly given to vehicular traffic. There 
is nothing here to correspond with the Piazza 
before St. Peter’s, the Place de la Concorde, 
Trafalgar Square, or the great Platz in Berlin. 
In these spaces, troops are reviewed and mass- 
meetings held ; they are intended to contain 
crowds on stated occasions, and they are deco¬ 
rated with due heed to these purposes, by pairs 
or series of fountains and other monuments. 
Here at home, traffic is apt to press heavily 
upon street space. In New York, for example, 
Madison Square might best be beautified, 
perhaps, by truncating the trapezoidal block 
BALTIMORE 
formed by Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Twenty- 
fifth and Twenty-sixth Streets, as suggested 
by Russell Sturgis, and placing a wall fountain, 
such as that of the Place St. Michel, Paris, 
at its southern end. The cost was roughly 
estimated at $100,000. Broadway, in its 
diagonal course up Manhattan Island, offers 
several other opportunities for street foun¬ 
tains, especially at Longacre Square and at 
the Circle (Fifty-ninth Street), where the 
potency of the Columbus Monument might 
be heightened by shelving off' the lower part 
of the pedestal, introducing spouts of water 
from it, and surrounding the whole with a 
basin. In spite of the adjacent green of 
Central Park, the Circle is now arid enough 
in effect, with its six street-railway tracks, to 
warrant this inexpensive improvement. 
• The tendency to-day is all away from plac¬ 
ing fountains or other monumental structures 
1 S3 
