The Treatment of City Squares 
shelter ” conception, can thus he fully 
assured, while in the low, balustraded terraces 
urban art has rich opportunities. 
Finally, in the case of the station which 
has lost its station appearance in the new role 
of the hotel, or of the railroad office-build¬ 
ing, there is obviously little sense in empha¬ 
sizing topographically the portal function. 
On the other hand, while it is always pleasant 
to provide an outlook of grass and flowers 
and trees ; there is no essential consistency 
requiring such an outlook for such a struc¬ 
ture. The city 
planner, coming, 
then, to a station 
that has been 
transformed to 
all appearances 
into a commer¬ 
cial structure, 
will feel little 
obligation to 
make its ap¬ 
proach other 
than a street; 
and if the con¬ 
verge nee of 
travel here de¬ 
mands a broader 
space than is usual in streets, he will have 
done his duty if he grants such space and 
develops it with that regard for civic 
esthetics which Paris has shown before the 
Gare Saint-Lazare, or—better—before the 
Gare de l’Est. If the railroad erects an 
office building with nothing more sug¬ 
gestive of a station than a mammoth 
porte cochere , and then walls in the whole 
construction with its tracks, as has happened 
in the case of the costly Pittsburg station, 
which thus rises as a fine office building 
located on the noisest and dirtiest of sites, 
then the city planner may well feel dis¬ 
couragement. But for the city’s sake he 
may still arrange converging streets, for there 
is nothing that reflects so much upon a city’s 
progressiveness and liberality, in determining 
the arriving traveler’s first impression, as a 
costly station—for which the railroad is to be 
thanked—abutting on a narrow street, for 
which he holds the city to be responsible. 
Unhappily, few sights are more common, 
though there is thus exemplified not merely 
unprogressiveness and a lack of courageous 
expenditure, but a policy short-sighted as to 
the future and involving submission to much 
present inconvenience. The construction of 
a new Union Station in Washington has 
offered to the commission that has in charge 
the beautifying of the Capital an opportunity 
for such a rearrangement of adjacent streets. 
By the planned radiation of these from the 
space in front of 
the proposed 
station there will 
be formed a focal 
center that will 
makea conspicu¬ 
ous andexcellent 
illustration of 
what should 
usually be done. 
Phis problem, 
then, of the sta- 
tionsquareissus- 
ceptible of three 
general solu¬ 
tions, these con¬ 
forming to the 
three general types of stations—the portal, the 
way station, and the disguised. That there 
should be such conformity—or harmony— 
scarcely needs repetition. But the first esthetic 
consideration for the combined construction 
of any type should be dignity, attractiveness, 
and fitness—three words that in this connec¬ 
tion do not at all stand for the same thing, as 
the examples have shown. And if these be 
considered, in both the building and the open 
space before it, mutual harmony is pretty 
sure to result. First, then, as in the square 
in the city’s heart, measure the volume of 
travel through the area and the lines it 
naturally takes. If there be space left be¬ 
tween these lines, so treat it that the area as 
a whole weds the station to the town. If 
there be no space, civic art has yet an obli¬ 
gation at this focal point, and will find in the 
street furnishings its ample opportunity. 
Charles Mulford Robinson. 
386 
