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VOL. XXVI

APRIL, 1905

No. 4

C

Chicago's Great Civic Dream

METROPOLITAN PARK SYSTEM

By MARY RICHARDS GRAY

HICAGO is having a wonderful civic dream. She sees herself a City Beautiful, surrounded by a great encircling belt of rural parks, comprising an area of something like twenty-five thousand acres of forest, meadow, river-bank and lake shore, all connected with her present system by boulevards and parkways, and made accessible to her people by steam and electric tramways. That the scheme is a tremendous one, involving the expenditure of much money, time, and labor, she well knows, but did not Boston have a similar dream and bring it to fullest realization within an incredibly short period of time? Much of the pioneer work in the way of an educational crusade has been accomplished for her by her sister city. Her problem is no greater than the one which Boston solved so successfully. There the idea of a system of rural parks originated with Mr. Charles Eliot. He appealed to Governor Russell, who in 1892 appointed a commission, of which Mr. Eliot was made landscape architect and Mr. Sylvester Baxter, secretary, to formulate plans. What this commission proposed seemed so ambitious that its authors hoped for little more than an educational crusade which would finally bring the people to an appreciation of their scheme, but to their surprise their report met with immedi

ate approval. In 1895 the Metropolitan Commission, composed of representatives from Boston and all the adjoining towns and districts, was appointed to carry out the plans, and what it accomplished in seven years reads like a romance. Almost at the touch of a fairy wand the natural features of the landscape about Boston-"The Blue Hills," Nantasket and Revere Beaches, the Lynn Woods, the Middlesex Fells-ten thousand acres of river-bank, forest, meadow and beach reserves, were incorporated into a great park system connecting with the Commons and the Public Gardens, the most distinctive features of the old system. The total cost so far has been between $10,000,000 and $11,000,000. Of the social development in America during the last decade of the nineteenth century, this is the most significant fact.

The accomplishment of so great a work in such a short period of time makes Chicago hope to meet with as great if not greater success. That she has need of a system of rural and more internal parks no one who knows of conditions in the metropolis of the Middle West will deny. Park experts state that the ideal city has one acre of park to every twenty acres of city area and to every one hundred inhabitants,-ratios, however, which do not and cannot give good results without a proper distribu

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tion. Chicago has to-day a population variously estimated from 1,785,000 to 1,820,000. Her park system, including the additions now being made or authorized, is 3,174 acres. This does not take account of forty-nine miles of boulevards, one particular in which she is second to New York with her sixty-one miles. In the matter of actual park acreage, among American cities Chicago stands seventh, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Newark, N. J., and its environs, Philadelphia and San Francisco ranking ahead of her; but as regards the effective distribution of park areas, she ranks thirty-second among cities having a population of 100,000 or more. Within her limits there are 122,008 acres of land, that is, thirty-eight acres of city to one of park, and of inhabitants there are 590.4 to each park acre. This hardly states the problem, however, for there are six river wards with

out so much as an open square; twenty-three wards, with a population of more than a million people, which contain 228 acres of park space, or 4,720 people to each acre. The stock-yards district, with a population of 100,000, Englewood, with 150,000, the great manufacturing center at South Chicago-all are without park facilities. The Chicago River for almost its entire length within the city limits is lined with warehouses and docks; the lake, the most beautiful and health-giving feature of our landscape, has but 10.78 miles of the 25.21 miles within the limits of the city, reserved for the people.

When we speak of overcrowding, we are wont to turn to foreign cities and lands other than our own, and to ignore the fact that conditions worse than any abroad exist in our own American cities. Bombay is not so badly crowded as New

York and Chicago. The Josephstadt in Prague has only four hundred people to the acre, while Manhattan has one thousand. We have space enough here in America. To do away with overcrowding is the problem of our large cities. Chicago is wrestling with hers now. Her development has been all in one direction. In furthering her business and commercial interests, she has neglected questions of health and comfort until things have come to such a pass

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2.75 acres, she paid $1,500,000, and for the Seward Park, 2.625 acres, $2,500,000. Yet to say that Chicago has really neglected the question of parks is not a fair statement. She has had parks almost from the day of her incorporation as a city. Dearborn Park, a plat of ground now occupied by the Chicago Public Library, was the first of these. Her principal parks were acquired in the sixties and seventies, but the first movement of a systematic or general character came

ible to the masses of the people, there seemed little or no need for them, but there were those who urged the matter and carried it to a successful issue, serving their day and generation with wisdom and foresight. In 1880, Chicago, then the fourth city in the Union in population, was the second in the amount of its park acreage. Her growth during the past twenty-five years has been phenomenal; her old system is no longer adequate to her need.. She must make

provision for changed conditions, and look forward to the future.

To understand the proposed Metropolitan Park System, it is necessary first to understand something of the topography of Chicago and its vicinity. The city stands on a low and strikingly flat plain, roughly crescentic in form, bordering the west side of the head of Lake Michigan. On its outer border, a ridge of gently rolling land extends from Winnetka on the north, through Galewood and La Grange on the west to Glenwood and Dyer, Indiana, on the southwest and south, with the greatest width-about fifteen miles, in a direction southwest from the city-at what is known as Mount Forest. The Chicago plain is in reality a glacial moraine. From the shore of the lake, the level of which is about 581 feet above the mean tide level in New York Harbor, it rises very gradually to a nearly uniform height of sixty feet above the lake. To the southwest and south the flatness of the plain is interrupted, and the surface attains the extreme height of two hundred feet at Chicago Chicago Heights, twenty-four miles south from the city. Through the district are a number of streams-the Chicago River, with its two Y-like branches,

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A VIEW OF THE LAKE FROM LINCOLN PARK.

in 1869, when it was proposed to have a chain of parks and boulevards, starting with Lincoln on the north, including Humboldt, Garfield, Douglas, Washington and Jackson Parks. Of course this proposition was opposed, as at that time Union Park, of seventeen acres, was sufficient for the needs of the West Side, then as now the most populous side of the city. As the parks in this chain were then in outlying districts and inaccess

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