USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 2 > Part 32
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The part of the landscape architects in the development of these parks has been notably less than in the case of the Boston city system. During recent years the work of the Commission has been primarily road construction and routine administration. The original driving force which created the Met- ropolitan Park System has been diverted to other efforts as the aims set up in 1893 have become accomplished facts. The time has come for a new statement of objectives and new activities, in order to make greater use of the existing
* Report of 1903.
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park reservations and to provide new parks in the newer urban areas surround- ing the metropolitan parks district.
The area of the Metropolitan Park System in 1930 is given below:
Reservations Parkways
9,681.32 acres
1,519.15 acres
The total length of parkways and roads is 102.57 miles. A comparison with the figures given earlier shows that the metropolitan parks cover fifteen square miles and the City of Boston parks about four, exclusive of separate playgrounds.
THE CHARLES RIVER BASIN.
The principal feature of the proposed park systems outlined by both the original Boston Park Commission and the Metropolitan Park Commission was the Charles River Basin. The tidal flats and insanitary condition of the river presented a serious problem and at the same time offered great possibilities. After twenty years of agitation the problem was solved and many of the possi- bilities were realized. Other possibilities are now in course of becoming realities, and these developments will, no doubt, form part of the history of the next fifty years.
The Boston Charlesbank was first started in 1883 on the stretch between the Craigie and Cambridge Bridges, while the Cambridge side, usually divided into two pieces - the "Front" opposite the Charlesbank and the Embankment south of the Cambridge Bridge to Cottage Farm - came under construction in 1896. The reclamation of the remainder of the Boston side waited upon the solution of the sanitary problem in 1910.
First agitated about 1859, the proposal for a dam across the mouth of the river, to exclude the tide and hold the water above the flats yet below the marshes, ran a gauntlet of opposition. For a while it was thought that the ebb and flow of the tide in the river had a scouring effect upon the harbor which was essential to the preservation of the port. When that theory was exploded after a series of investigations,* a second source of opposition appeared among the owners of property along the north side of Beacon street.
The original report of the Boston Park Commission in 1876 had included a proposal to fill in a strip of land on the Boston side of the Charles River Basin and to provide on this filled land a new row of lots for houses facing on a parkway along the river bank. Somehow this particular plan for the treatment of the Boston side of the Basin, which had never found much favor, became inextricably connected in the minds of many owners of property on Beacon street with the general proposal for a dam at Craigie Bridge. They had no objection to a dam at St. Mary's street, some distance up the river, and one was authorized for that site by the General Court in 1898; but nothing could persuade them that a park along the Boston shore adjoining their property would not cut off their enjoyment of the open space of the Basin. Finally in 1903, after a compre-
* Charles River Improvement Commission (1891), Reports of 1892 and 1893. Joint Board - Metropolitan Park Commission and State Board of Health, 1894. Harbor and Land Commissioners, 1894.
Committee on Charles River Dam, 1903.
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hensive report by John R. Freeman to Henry S. Pritchett, Samuel M. Mansfield, and Richard H. Dana, acting as the Committee on Charles River Dam, the opposition was overcome and the dam was authorized.
Over four and one half millions of dollars have been expended on the Charles River Basin and further radical changes are now in progress. As a result of all this expenditure and effort, the central feature of the Boston metro- politan area is now pointed out as an example for other cities in the recreational use of what was formerly a nuisance. The vision of landscape architects, the skill of engineers and the public spirit of citizens have combined to turn an unsightly expanse of muddy tidal flats into what is generally regarded as one of the finest water parks in the world.
THE FUTURE
As Boston had led the way, so it is appropriate that the next step in advance should be based on its successful park development. Forty years ago it was the Trustees of Public Reservations who called a meeting which started the metropolitan park movement. In 1925 it was again the trustees who called a meeting which may start a new park movement.
The metropolitan area continues to grow and already the metropolitan park reservations are being surrounded by urban development. Another series of reservations is needed outside the metropolitan ring, and a plan for such a new park system has been proposed by the Governor's Committee on Open Spaces. This Committee, organized through the efforts of the trustees, has advocated a Bay Circuit of Parks -from Plum Island on the north via the Ipswich, Concord and Sudbury rivers to the west, and back to Duxbury Beach on the south.
The park system of Boston, starting almost fifty years ago, has already grown to cover the entire metropolitan area. Through the proposed Bay Circuit it seems destined to expand into an integrated system of parks for the service of the whole eastern portion of the state. The nucleus of this great growth in being or prospective, was the Olmsted report of 1881; its ultimate origin may be traced back to the setting aside of the historic Common in 1634.
PLAYGROUNDS, BEACHES AND BATHS
By JOSEPH LEE
Boston's earliest playground, as everybody knows, was the Common, originally William Blackstone's cow pasture, sold by him to the town for thirty pounds in 1634. How early it was used as a playground our chronicles do not specifically record. Such use goes back at least to the time when, as the school history used to tell, the boys of Boston remonstrated with General Gage against being prevented by his soldiers - who doubtless wanted it for themselves - from playing football there; but as every town founded by the Puritans of the Bay Colony had its common - a continuation of the old village green of England with its tradition of games and sports - just as so many of them have their bandstand and their trotting course, we may safely assume that our own Common was so used from the first. Thus, our city's first playground dates almost from the Elizabethan age. The General Gage episode is characteristic, being merely one in the long series of battles that still rage between games and grass and other interests - as they must do on any piece of common land - the latest being that of the Boston children versus Mrs. Grundy, ending in the successful assertion by the former of the right of uncensored bathing in the Frog Pond.
So much had England and the Middle Ages done for us. What have we done for ourselves?
From the setting aside of the Common as public property it is a far cry to the next step in our public provision for play and physical education, a step that brings us to a very different age and a very different set of ideas, namely, the establishing in 1866 of ten municipal floating baths by the Boston City Council. These were, by ten years, I believe, the first municipal baths in America. Their starting was, I think, a result of the wave of sanitary reform which - stimulated by one or two visitations of the cholera, and given great impetus by the lessons of the Civil War and the work of the Sanitary Com- mission - passed over the country at that time.
It was also in this year, 1866, that there was opened in the old First Church in Chauncy street - the first church founded by the Puritans in the Bay Colony - the first vacation school in this country, an event that marks the beginning of an epoch in our philanthropic and educational history. This first vacation school may almost be said to have initiated both the extended use of public schools and the playground movement, as it used a public school building for its work and opened the school yard as a playground. It was not, however, until 1879 that the next such school was opened by Miss Mary E. Very, a public school teacher, with funds supplied by the Woman's Education Associa- tion - which had a part also in the founding of Radcliffe College and in many other important pioneer enterprises. In 1881 several conferences of the Assc-
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ciated Charities conducted vacation schools, at which the children learned sewing, carpentry, the care of plants, singing and drawing, and inade weekly excursions to the country, where, under the guidance of some nature-loving teacher they might pick flowers, chase butterflies, rub their noses in the grass and otherwise cultivate a first-hand acquaintance with their mother earth.
The movement spread slowly at first but with accelerating rapidity. In Boston the School Committee took up the idea and carried on half a dozen such schools. I have a list of some sixty of them that were carried on in Massa- chusetts in 1903,- started for the most part by the women's clubs. The public service rendered by the vacation school includes the stimulation of the play- ground movement and the deepening of its educational purpose, the increased utilization of our public school plant and a great stimulus to nature study and manual training.
The next and greatest advance in Boston's provision for play and recreation came with the starting of another institution into which the vacation schools as I have described them were destined to be merged. In 1886 Dr. Marie Zakrzewska - one of the pioneer women doctors of America and a most dis- tinguished and interesting person - wrote to Mrs. Kate Gannett Wells, president of the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, that in the public parks of Berlin there were heaps of sand in which children, under the care of the police, were allowed to dig, as on a miniature seashore. The immediate result of this letter from the land of Froebel was the placing of three piles of yellow sand in three improvised playgrounds in Boston. The next year there were ten, and in 1900 there were twenty-three, toward the maintenance of which the Boston School Committee contributed $3,000 and public-spirited citizens $1,000 more, while the average daily attendance was about 4,000. Besides the sand-box there was in each of these sand gardens some shade and also a kindergartner, completing the three essentials, and every kind of children's game was carried on, even baseball in some of the bigger yards. And there was sewing on the doll's dress and on perforated cards and the making of scrap- books and other marvels.
It is not too much to say that in the work of this Boston society the play- ground problem for small children had been solved. Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and many other cities and towns followed the example. The move- ment grew in geometric ratio until in 1908 Boston, in her turn, following the example of Chicago, made these playgrounds public. As a result of the demon- stration inade by Miss Tower and her associates, a bill, effectively supported by the Mayor, John F. Fitzgerald, had been passed in 1907, giving the Boston School Committee four cents in the tax levy for play and physical education. The Committee used part of this sum, which with rising valuations and with legislation assigning larger portions of the tax levy for this purpose increased from $56,000 in 1908 to $320,000 in 1929, to take over and extend the sand gardens. These it has ever since carried on with marked success each year from early May into October, in school yards, on city parks and in children's corners on the larger playgrounds. With increased appropriations the number of these playgrounds increased until in this year of our Tercentenary it is eighty-six.
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FIFTY YEARS OF BOSTON
Some day Boston will put up on the site of the first yellow sand pile a monument, very modest and pretty well hidden, so as not to shock its subject, to Miss Ellen M. Tower, the mother of the American sand garden.
Our next important date after the starting of the sand garden is the laying out of Charlesbank,- the wide embankment along nearly half a mile of water- front in the West End at Charles street,- containing at one end the first publie outdoor gymnasium in America, planned by Dr. Dudley A. Sargent of Harvard and opened August 27, 1889. Two years later a women's gymnasium was started at the other end.
The provision of these two gymnasiums was an important step in a great forward movement in American edueation, but like almost all such steps it owed its stimulus to individual initiative and private enterprise. The gym- nastie movement, of which Charlesbank was an outeome, was an importation from Germany, being brought to this eountry by Professor Charles Follen of Harvard, a young German refugee of '48, who, sharing an enthusiasm for physical education dating baek to Father Jahn, set up some masts, rigged like those of the famous elipper ships, upon the Harvard Delta, the triangular piece of ground on which Memorial Hall now stands.
Next eame the founding in Boston in 1851 of the Young Men's Christian Union, of which the gymnasium has been and is a most valuable feature, ineluding among its patrons, past and present, many distinguished eitizens of Boston. Many other private organizations, and especially the Young Men's Christian Association, have taken up and earried on the movement, the Sar- gent Sehool and that of Miss Bouve, now amalgamated with the Boston School of Physical Education, being among the outstanding leaders.
Ineluding the Charlesbank, Boston had at one time perhaps half a dozen outdoor gymnasiums. These, however, beeame by 1900 pretty mueh absorbed in the regular big boys' playgrounds, gymnastie apparatus giving way even on Charlesbank - exeept in the women's end of it - almost entirely to open play spaees. Boston now has, instead, eleven indoor gymnasiums distributed about the eity. Even in these the main stress is on basketball and other games, though there are also many elasses in ealisthenies and gymnasties for men and women, boys and girls, ineluding some mueh enjoyed by women of middle age, who therein seem to lose both weight and years. There are also twenty- five sehool gymnasiums,- seventeen in the High and Latin sehools, six in intermediary and two in private sehools,- the first being that provided in the Publie Latin and English High School building in 1881.
The gymnastie movement was the first great step in American physical edueation. It had great vogue in the 60's, 70's and 80's, and, though it has now been superseded in importanee by other methods of training mind and body and forming eharaeter through museular exercise, it earried the ball in its day and generation and still holds an honored and important plaee.
The beginning and gradual evolution of physical education was naturally reflected in the sehools. Possibly as a result of the teaching of Charles Follen, a rule was adopted by the Sehool Committee in 1853 requiring that "every seholar shall have daily in the forenoon and afternoon some kind of physical or gymnastie exereise." For the next ten years nothing mueli was done, but in 1864 physical culture and military drill were introduced. In 1888 Mrs.
CITY POINT BEACH, WITH HEAD HOUSE
IR
STADIUM IN BACK BAY FENS PUBLIC PLAYGROUND ACTIVITIES
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FIFTY YEARS OF BOSTON
Augustus Hemenway finaneed a class in Swedish gymnastics for teachers in the publie schools. Next year she opened a school for that purpose with Miss Amy Homans as director, the first class being held in the old Y. W. C. A. building. In 1910 the sehool became the Hygiene and Physical Education Department at Wellesley College, Miss Homans remaining as acting head until 1918. Mrs. Hemenway's teachers were employed in the publie sehools, the eourse given by then and their successors gradually developing beyond Swedish gymnastics to the present course, carried on for two forty-minute periods each week, in which, besides gymnastics, games and dances are included. At pres- ent, Grades I to III, inclusive, have sixteen minutes a day of "repose exer- eises," story plays and rhythmic exercises, games and dances. From Grades IV to VIII fifteen minutes a day are given to formal gymnastics, supplemented by games and dances.
Play in recess in the elementary schools consists chiefly of what is generally known as free play, namely, the proper and inevitable exercise of all ehildren in recess, which consists of rushing around, thumping each other and squealing. Some of the schools provide material and a certain amount of instruction for pupils who desire to organize themselves. Sehool yards have since the begin- ning of the century approached the ininimum of thirty square feet per pupil in the crowded distriets, a minimum which is considerably exceeded where the eost of land is less.
Besides taking over the sand gardens, the School Committee, as a further result of the law of 1907, began its policy of sending many of its submasters on Saturday mornings and other week-day afternoons on to the bigger boys' playgrounds as promoters of baseball and other games. In 1906 school athletics had been placed in charge of the School Committee and athletic instructors are now members of the faculties of the several schools, teacher coaches conducting football, traek athletics and baseball in season. During 1926 at the suggestion of the superintendent provision was made for atliletie instruction for girls. Intramural competition in tennis, gymnastie games, indoor baseball and swim- ming has been successful and we are told that many of the girls have taken up hiking, skating and golf.
In our lists of children's playgrounds the all-important wide and grassy ones, with shrubs and trees and flowers, must not be omitted. It was Fred- eriek Law Olmsted, whose genius speaks in the landscape of so many Ameriean cities, who planned the shaded grassy mounds along the middle part of Charles- bank, where the children play informal games, give tea parties and generally disport themselves. I remember one day watching five small boys playing with an infant in a baby wagon. First they ran rapidly about the grass, pushing the wagon with its occupant in front of them as a sort of carroccio or armed chariot. Then they put the baby on the grass and ran and turned somersaults over him, thereby securing much healthful exercise and incidentally giving the baby the time of his life, judging by his comments. Formerly the grass had the right of way upon our parks and playgrounds. Now it is the children; there is, I think, no grass space in the whole Boston park system, except on some of the smaller squares, that is not open to them.
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Charlesbank affords besides its more material advantages a view across the Back Bay to the Brookline hills, and the hot southwest wind in summer comes to it across two miles of water. There is another refuge of this kind at Marine Park, City Point, with its half-mile of pier, its natural history pools, and its toy-boat sailing, while at North End Park with its playground, beach and baths - secured principally through agitation by John F. Fitzgerald, begun by him as a member of the Common Council in 1892 - we have the Recreation Pier stretching out one hundred and fifty yards into the harbor opposite the Navy Yard. The great recreational resources of the parks, with their hills, their forests, their wild creatures and their blessed solitude, are not my province. I will mention only the special provision for picnicking which -like the Forest of Arden - Franklin Park, Castle Island (reached either on foot, by a launch service from City Point, or by the harbor excursions of the Randidge Fund) and many other places in the city and metropolitan park systems provide.
Last of all in the dawning of the playground era came the playground itself - the playground for boys over ten as distinguished from that for little children. (The girls too old for the children's playgrounds have until very recently been, and for the most part still arc, left out.) Down to the last decade of the nine- teenth century the principal playground for the bigger boys, apart from the Common, was the empty lot. My own crowd - including the not too successful Beacons of which I had the honor to succeed Fred Prince as captain - used to play on the lot on Boylston street next to the New Old South, thus securing a Puritan benediction on our sport. The lots were not so bad if there had only been more of them. In the crowded districts there were very few.
In 1894 - Nathan Matthews, Jr., being consul - there was great activity among the trade unions, and a desire on their part for a public meeting- place. It was not thought best to give them Franklin Park, as that was meant to be a place of rest and recreation rather than of oratory, so Franklin Field of seventy-seven acres was bought for meetings and "as a training place for the militia." The field, though but little used for the purposes which suggested or camouflaged its purchase, is now Boston's largest playground, its nearest rival being beautiful Columbus Park, with its beaches, its playfields and its stadium, comprising over seventy acres along the seashore of South Boston .* It serves with other more or less out-of-town playing fields both as a local play- ground and an overflow for more crowded districts, also as a center for special city-wide meets and contests. A similar provision, but intended for the smaller children, is the 30-acre Playstead, opened about 1890, on Franklin Park, which however - perhaps because of the sort of homesick feeling that a large un- featured open space is apt to give - is comparatively little used, the children seeming to prefer the shady grove just north of it.
But a few big fields are not enough. When Josiah Quincy was Mayor he saw that the great omission in our playground system was still the play- ground, and he set to work in a characteristically radical way to make up this
* EDITORIAL NOTE .- According to the Municipal Register (1930), the actual playground areas in these two spaces are: Franklin Field, 60; Columbus Park, 79.
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deficiency. Through his efforts a bill was passed by the Legislature in 1898 providing that half a million dollars might be spent by the Park Commissioners in creating "a system of playgrounds" for the city. This money was honestly, skillfully and judiciously expended, and soon we had some twenty-two local big boys' playgrounds - i e., playgrounds big enough for baseball - in different parts of the city, one hundred and seventy acres in all, of which all but twenty- five acres were in condition for use.
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There are now forty-one such playgrounds, fitted with goal posts and backstops, twenty-four of them with field houses or locker buildings, twenty- three with shower baths for both boys and girls. Many of them are flooded for skating in the winter, the total skating space which the city provides, includ- ing Jamaica and other ponds, being now about two hundred acres.
There are now, all told, seventy-two playgrounds, large and small, having a total of about five hundred and fifty acres (not yet all developed for use), not including the school yards, many of which are among the eighty-six children's playgrounds carried on by the School Committee as above described. These seventy-two playgrounds are open and in use all the year round, the lockers and shower baths from 8 a. m. to 6 p. m.,- this summer until 9 p. m. to accommodate the twilight baseball leagues.
Play and sport on Sunday afternoons was legalized in 1920. What the children do for Sunday meals I cannot say, but they certainly appear in great numbers on the Common at the stroke of twelve; at least they are there at that time, if not in most cases a trifle earlier. Their watches are apt to be a trifle fast on Sunday. Perhaps some haven't any.
Another of Mayor Quincy's many contributions toward making Boston a city in which it is an education to live was the great enlargement of its system of public baths. He increased the number of floating baths, bringing the total up, I think, to thirty-one. These have now been abandoned, but Quincy's vision of a bathing city has been fulfilled in other ways. There is the great bathing beach nearly a mile long at Columbus Park, flanked by the famous L Street Bath, where every year some 300,000 baths are taken, many of them by "Brownies" in the winter months, and where small boys can dig and big boys jump and wrestle on the beach and some of the privileges of an earlier age are still preserved. In the matter of clothes at least, L Street comes before the fall of man.
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