Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 212, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 September 1918 — Home Town Helps [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Home Town Helps

NEW YORKER IS INDIGNANT * However, Not Many Public. Park* Ar* In a* Bad Condition a* the On* H* Describe*. In the latest bulletin of the Municipal Art society, C. W. S. is justifiably bitter In his comment on the waste of opportunity in the so-called city parks of New York. “When is a city park not a park?” he asks, and answers: “When It ceases to offer either grass, flowers, or the shade of trees; when, for instance, it has a large granite basin or fountain without water, which is gradually broken up and carried away; when, at one end it harbors a ship and at the other a bombproof cairn for explosives; when one-third of it is roughly fenced off for a few years while the subway burrows its slow course within a yard of the grass surface, destroying for the time the plantation and prevfenting for all time the growth, of shade trees over it, and when this .subway seizes more of its precious space for entrances; when the few surviving trees, uncared for In recent years, are left to die limb by limb and break down gradually, and their place is filled by no new shade trees; and when. In consequence, such a forlorn patch of barren ground and concrete as this has become stands year after year through the hot summers neglected, dusty, and shadeless; in a Word, when its name is Union square. The nursemaid in Punch being asked by the little boy at the station: ‘What is a junction?’ replies: ‘A place where two tracks separate.’ With equal truth this square Is to us a place where our Idea of a park and its reality separate.”