House & Garden 
FLOWER-BEDS IN COPLEY SQUARE 
little has seemingly been done for it, that 
little is strongly marked. 
Here was a space at the juncture of 
arterial streets and made notable by the 
interest and excellence of the surrounding 
buildings. The basic points, then, in the 
treatment of this square were to be regard 
for the architecture and for the free move¬ 
ment of the traffic from the important 
streets. For the latter purpose, the streets 
are carried through the space in their natural 
line of extension, and what might, by their 
diversion, have become a little park is re¬ 
duced to a couple of green islands in 
an ocean of pavement. Like a breakwater 
around each one has been put the coping to 
keep the streams of traffic in bounds. That 
none of the surrounding architecture may 
be screened, no trees here cast their shade. 
Thus were some sacrifices required. 
But Copley Square’s lessons are not all 
negative. After many months of effort, and 
a great deal of subsequent litigation, a 
special statute was enacted and established 
prohibiting the erection on Copley Square of 
any building more than ninety feet in height, 
the special purpose of the legislation being 
to prevent the proposed erection of an 
apartment house so tall as to threaten 
seriously to dwarf Trinity Church, the 
Public Library, and other good structures. 
I his was a step well taken. Hygienically, a 
square, of course, will bear taller buildings 
than a street. Jn fact, in European cities 
the restriction on building heights very 
familiarly proportions the limit of height to 
the width of the thoroughfare upon which 
the building faces, though usually with a 
wise proviso as to maximum height in order 
to safeguard broad squares. 1 We have no 
such graduated restriction in America, and— 
in the common absence of any legislation 
as to height—we put good low structures 
at the mercy of the first conscienceless 
builder. "T he treatment of Copley Square, 
then, offers in this particular a very im¬ 
portant suggestion, and one that has made 
it famous. 
Up to the time of this courageous act, the 
treatment had been timid in the extreme. 
There was nothing but the grass plots. 
Lately, however, some flower beds have been 
laid out in geometrical contortions and filled 
with bright-hued flowers. The result gives the 
impression of a civic skirt dance between the 
stately library and the church, all the 
reposefulness of an architectural base 
destroyed. The grass had been at least 
unaggressive, but conditions so urgently 
invited something positive that turf alone 
could not be satisfactory. The only treat¬ 
ment here must, indeed, be frankly formal; but 
surely not that of carpet-planting. At least 
there might be clustered shrubs. Whether 
the unusual character of the immediate 
neighborhood does not also invite symbolic 
representation in statues, made the more 
suitable by the architectural pretensions of 
the square, is a question for sculptors. 
One would think it should be easy to 
combine the sculpture and the planting. 
But this at least can be said : Copley 
Square would not disappoint the average 
visitor half as much if it were consistent and 
complete. Granted the wisdom of the sac¬ 
rifices made, granted the evidences of care 
expended on the plots as they stand, and 
still the space looks half finished. It is 
crude where, of all places in Boston—and 
is not that to say in the United States—the 
treatment should be refined. For behold 
the barbarity of the telegraph poles against 
the lovely library; see the ugly lamp post 
where millions of dollars have been spent 
for public beauty. Overhead wires cross 
and recross, and against the library’s pale 
granite the graceless trolley poles rise black. 
It is well to limit the height of the buildings 
1 The law of Rome, for example, is that a structure's height must 
not exceed one and one-half times the width of the street, with a 
maximum limit of 78 '/> feet. 
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