The Treatment of City Squares 
doing the necessary thing in the right way, 
and its satisfaction is thus quite as much 
intellectual as sensual. 
At the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris the 
opportunity is much less favorable. This 
station is notable, too, among those of Paris 
because architecturally it represents the 
English style ot construction, in which hotel 
and station are combined—to the seeming 
loss of the latter’s identity. The place in 
front of the station is reduced to little more 
than a court and, the whole 
space relinquished to traffic, 
it appears at first as it here 
the city had abandoned all 
esthetic efforts. But when 
one becomes accustomed to 
the busy scene and takes 
time calmly to look about, 
one finds that at this im¬ 
portant focal point the civic 
art which consists in doing 
the right thing well is still 
enthroned. The iron fence 
that encloses the station yard 
is ornamental, with Venetian 
masts for decorative pur¬ 
poses at its entrances. The 
transfer station for the om¬ 
nibuses stands on a raised 
platform, defined by ornate 
clustered lights, making an 
isle of refuge midway in the 
crowded pavement. For the small station 
square congested with the traffic of an im¬ 
portant line to a large city, the scene before 
the Gare Saint-Lazare has certainly good 
suggestions; and not the least of these— 
though its application is architectural instead 
of civic—is the preservation from the hands 
of the builders of a considerable area that is 
apparently station property, that it may be 
devoted to enlarging the cramped area of 
the street. 
If we have seemed to neglect the planting 
of station squares, it is because landscape 
architecture is not with them a first considera¬ 
tion. The open space before the station 
exists first for the facilitation and convenience 
of traffic, and only secondarily for esthetic 
purposes. Except, therefore, where the avail¬ 
able area is very large in proportion to the 
travel across it—which in great cities cannot 
be often, the value of the land rising exactly 
as the need for the open space increases— 
the practical problem is rather that of treat¬ 
ing utilities artistically and of making the 
esthetic best of a probably bad situation than 
of deliberate effort by gardening. In great 
cities the station square can rarely be con¬ 
sidered a component of the park system. 
But in smaller communities it can, obviously, 
be so considered quite often; and as one goes 
down the scale of population, the point is 
reached at last where the railroad itself, by 
the improvement of its ample station grounds, 
can supplement the community’s efforts to 
give an invitingly park-like character to the 
entrance to the town. At this point it is 
generally unwise and illogical to bestow upon 
the station a terminal appearance. Really a 
way station, it is consistently treated as such ; 
and the edifice, both in its architecture and 
its setting, follows the lines of a pretty shelter 
or transfer building in a park. This anti¬ 
thetical position is reached, however, only by 
a line of gradation as slow and approximative 
as is the gradient of population and site. 
In the principal railroad station at Genoa 
there is an interesting combination of these 
two theories of station construction, of which 
each should have always so pertinent an 
influence on adjacent civic art. Architec¬ 
turally, the station exemplifies the city portal 
THE RUIN OF DEWEY SQUARE BOSTON 
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