Here is a great industrial city. The scores of thousands of people whom the parks should serve are many of them foreigners, and the mass of them are workers over a single piece. Practically all of them work amid smoke and grime. The beauty of nature may be a new thought to these people. They should be helped to appreciate it, but they must be given first what they do understand and enjoy,—entertainment, vivacity, and brilliancy. If Schenley Park is little visited; a trolley park far away, where swings and boats, slides and ponies, keep something going all the time, is crowded day by day; and when, in the moonlight, shadows lie on the hills of Schenley, and the stars look down on deserted though free acres, other parks that are garish with a blaze of electric lights are thronged with people who have gladly paid a fee for admittance. There they find something to see and to do.
Industrial Pittsburgh ought to take pride in developing the special kind of park facilities that its population needs, and in setting an example to other cities. A comprehensive system of children's playgrounds would do something toward this; the proposed mall or parkway approach to the East End, where some thousands of the relatively poor would find, almost at their doors, a mile long open space with its ceaseless urban entertainment, would do something more; a system of small open spaces or outdoor social centers, where a man could smoke his pipe and chat with his neighbors, his wife at his side and his children at hand, would make further contribution; and the riverside park proposed for the business district, still further. But there should be two or three well-distributed and readily accessible large parks that would be real municipal pleasure grounds. Here should be ample athletic fields, a swimming pool, and a large field house; a band playing at frequent intervals; swings and boats; cheap conveyances that would make the whole space available; illuminations and song festivals; and refectory accommodations, with tables placed attractively out of doors, and wholesome food and drink at low prices. Tired workers, going to this free public park, should find entertainment. Little by little, and incidentally, they might learn there the more tranquil pleasure of contemplating nature.
There are various places in Pittsburgh where such parks could be established. One, that seems to be singularly adaptable is Brunot's Island. There is Maple Park on the South Side. For a neighborhood park, which by mere convenience of location and inherent interest should invite the Pittsburgh workman out of doors, the steep bank that rises across the Monongahela offers a site very distinctive and appropriate. Day and night the interest of its outlook would not cease. It would require little development. Inclined roads already scale the cliff, and midway stations would make any terrace available. And whatever landscape improvements were made would be visible and enjoyable from the business streets themselves. In Allegheny such a park site is already owned on Monument Hill.
PANTHER HOLLOW.
Schenley Park.
The site of the penitentiary may some day become another available park site, for a penitentiary in the heart of a city is undesirable. Another wonderful park site, so wonderful that it is difficult to perceive why it has been so long neglected since track elevation has made it available, is the tip of the "Point." To-day it is a dumping ground. Aside from the historical and natural charm of this location, should be noted the breadth of outlook it offers, its free currents of air, its proximity to a large working population and the possibility of its attractive connection with a yet larger area by means of the suggested embankments which would practically form a riverside promenade and parkway to it.
With the acquisition of more parks it would be possible to arrange an interesting connecting system of boulevards and parkways. It is not enough simply to designate an existing street a boulevard. Calling it so does not make it so. And when Pittsburgh awakes to her greatness, and appreciates the surpassing beauty that might be hers, there is no reason to doubt that among other things she will commission the planning of an excellent system of drives.
There are naturally beautiful runs, now despoiled with mean dwellings and made little better than open sewers, that might be transformed into parkways; and there are hills and stretches of fair country that could be had now for a song for an outlying park system. It is true that all this will demand money, but there are no improvements that by long term bonds can be so justly made a mortgage on the distant future as those for parks. School houses, fire houses, public buildings, deteriorate with the lapse of time, but parks and boulevards become yearly of greater value.