WHAT to do and how to do it, are questions that come foremost when an organization for civic improvement has once been effected. Indeed, it is the manifest need for doing certain things that usually leads to the organization of such a society. There is never any lack of things to do, but a great deal depends upon the choice of the activities to be entered upon at the outset, and still more depends upon setting about the work in the right way. In the promotion of such work sound sense and tactful procedure are prime requisites. The public should be impressed with the fact that the aims sought are not visionary; that mere prettiness-the trimming of things, as with a sort of civic millinery-is by no means the end in view; that the objects of civic improvement mean good practical work for the benefit of the community, and a corresponding enhancement of its prosperity. As for tact, let everything possible be done-for instance, in securing the friendship, good will, and sympathy of the powers that be, so far as may be consistent with integrity of aim and adherence to the highest practicable purpose. Let friends be made with the press; its help will be invaluable, and, as a rule, its sympathy can be easily gained for genuine public-spirited work untainted with crankery or fanaticism.

In the choice of things to do it is well to follow the line of the least resistance that is, consider what most needs to be done; and where several things present themselves, do those that can be done most easily and effectively, and do them in the best possible way. Let local circumstances be studied carefully and intelligently, and let the improvements entered upon be undertaken in accord therewith. If practicable, let the conditions of the place be submitted to competent expert authority; the cost will not be excessive, and

the advice given will be well worth the while. Should a visit from such an authority not be feasible, much might be gained from correspondence. It is very important to know how to go to work. To proceed planlessly, without a definite purpose, in such things is expensive and short-sighted. The best of good taste, so far as capacity for appreciating a good thing goes, can seldom accomplish an admirable result if creative work be undertaken without training or experience. Therefore it is not sufficient to understand what should be done: the knowledge of how best to do it is of equal importance.

For instance, are the town streets or the country highways deficient in shade-trees? Is there a lack of playgrounds or of local breathing-spaces? Are the public monuments or decorative features in good taste? If not, how can the public sense of the community best be awakened to an appreciation of genuine good taste? Is the place one of a rural type, or is it a factory village of growing importance and assuming a densely settled and urban character? Questions like these are of prime importance. Again, what are the geographical and climatic characteristics? Is the place on the coast; on a river; in a woodland region, with rolling hills; on the prairies or plains; or amid high mountains? In each of these cases the problems are apt to be radically different, and a form of improvement admirably adapted to one place would be wholly out of keeping if applied to another.

The fullest possible advantage should be taken of the opportunities presented by topographical character. By giving due weight to this circumstance the most effective, most appropriate, and most economical results can be reached, and the maximum in the way of public benefit and popular enjoyment. If a town lies near the sea, for instance, then the

sea is usually the great factor in the scenery, and the main efforts at improvement should be concentrated upon the sea-shore. It would be manifestly out of keeping, in such a situation, for the community to turn its back to the sea and by preference give its attention to the development of some feature on the inland side, where the character of the scenery would be commonplace in comparison. Yet this is precisely what is often done; the great and dominant feature of the site is apt to be slightly regarded, perhaps because of its very familiarity. Hence what is essentially the most precious possession of the community in its possibilities for administering to public enjoyment is not infrequently held in low esteem. The water-front of a town, which might easily be made the most beautiful feature of it, is therefore often the most disagreeable and squalid section, given up to slums and nuisance-breeding forms of occupation. In a seaport, of course, the needs of commerce must be held in prime regard, and these are largely of a sort that often precludes recreative uses, while manufacturing establishments, railway terminals, mercantile demands, etc., by good right have the first claim for consideration. In turn, however, these call for large industrial populations about them, and their higher needs must be looked after. Hence enlightened civic polities tend to the development of a water-front both industrially and recreatively. In a large city we therefore may see local pleasure-grounds and recreation-piers interspersed among the docks, the warehouses, and the factories. Fortunately, moreover, the character of the water-front of a port is commonly such as to invite both forms of development, from the fact that beside the deep-water shore-line there are usually considerable reaches of shoals that discourage commercial occupancy and are preeminently adapted to recreative uses. The popular enjoyment of such places is heightened by the fact that the movements of commerce near by are essentially picturesque of aspect, presenting an ever-changing spectacle that exerts an unwearying charm. The neighborhood of the sea is a priceless possession for any community, and the circumstance should be made much of. The sea-shore is a great attraction all through the summer. No seaside village is too humble to cherish most jealously its rights to the shore, or to prevent its passing into private possession, whether for summer residences, for hotels, or for privately owned recreationgrounds. At least one goodly strip of sea

beach, either on a bay or cove or on the open ocean, should be secured as public property, for use as a promenade, for bathing, and for a public landing-place.

The same argument holds good in regard to rivers. The river-fronts of towns, as a rule, are more abused than sea-fronts. While the river itself is customarily a popular resort for summer pleasuring, its value as a source of enjoyment is diminished by the habitual disposition of the entire community to turn its back upon what should be paid the highest respect. The riverside should be invested with the beauty that by right belongs there, and that well repays its guarding, instead of being devoted to back yards, outhouses, the unsightliest rear ends of buildings, and degraded into a dumpingground for all sorts of refuse.

Whatever is the most characteristic element in the scenery of a place should stand first in the scheme of recreative open spaces. If there is a river, let there be an esplanade, a terrace, a promenade, or a drive, treated either formally or in naturalistic style, as circumstances may suggest. If there is a lake, let there be a lakeside pleasure-ground. If the region is a rolling country, let a charming valley scene be secured, with care to include some sightly point of view. If a town is spread upon the flat prairie, as so many hundreds are in the Middle West, let its people not despair of opportunity to vary what may seem a hopeless monotony in environment. The prairie itself may be made the motive for a charming landscape. A spacious expanse of level verdure may be inclosed in bosky margins, like a bay with sylvan shores; on the far side a vista may open out into the wide rural country, with horizon even, low, and remote, and as restful as the ocean in its sense of breadth and peace. If it is a factory town with waterpower, then above the dam the stream will have a considerable reach of slack water that invites boating and other aquatic pleasuring. As a rule, the banks of such a piece of water can readily be cleared of the ugly intrusions that are apt to possess a neighborhood of the sort; they can easily be made to clothe themselves with vegetation, and soon resume a natural appearance. A delightful popular pleasure-ground may thus be created. If the location is on the arid plains of the far West, then the irrigationditches of the neighborhood can be utilized to help create a public pleasure-ground, with attractive canal-like or stream-like features, feeding picturesque ponds or lagoons,

the beauty of which would be doubly appreciated in an environment where the sight of water is uncommonly precious.

From both a hygienic and an engineering point of view it is of prime importance that, in a settled neighborhood, the watercourses, the natural lines of surface drainage, be carefully studied with reference to treatment that will most economically and advantageously deal with the problems involved. Neglect of this opportunity has been extremely expensive for nearly every large town. Therefore, either in a growing community or in the case of a site where a new

community is to be established with a prospect of important development, one of the first things that should be done in planning for the future is to secure public ownership of the watercourses, with sufficient strips of bordering territory, making due provisions for suitably shortening or straightening the course where the natural channel may be too meandering. Here, as with most objects of utility, an artistic form of treatment is usually the most genuinely economical. Instead of going to the great expense of making these watercourses into covered sewers for surface drainage,

under naturalistic treatment they can be made pleasant, features in the landscaperoutes for picturesque parkways, where a central strip of turf and shrubbery permits the surface drainage to flow unhindered in its open bed, doing no damage, whether running bank-full or overflowing. The suburban city of Newton, in the Greater Boston neighborhood, has done some notable work along these lines. Indeed, in the great metropolitan park system for Greater Boston, one of the chief features of the scheme has been the sanitation of the courses of the three main streams-the Charles, the Mystic, and the Neponset rivers-by making them subjects for simple esthetic improvements in the restoration of their banks to attractive natural conditions. In like manner the very picturesque Boston and Brookline parkway, designed by Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted in conjunction with the city engineer, has its prime motive in the artistic treatment of a problem in utilitarian engineering for the disposition of surface drainage in the most economical way. Therefore, for one of the elements, the scheme of two great flowagebasins was adopted. These were given the form of salt-marshes, meshed by a meandering creek between upland banks with thickets of shrubbery and trees. In times of flood these basins safely hold enormous quantities of water until ebb-tide in the harbor permits discharge. A second element took the shape of a rural valley coursed by a clear stream in a landscape like an ideal bit of English country. And both of these remarkable designs, suggested in hints derived from the local topography, have the effect of being the perfect natural landscape that seems as

if it had always characterized the region, although in the first element every feature of the scene was an absolutely new creation. This, in the absence of all impression of artifice, represents an achievement of the highest art.

In the neighborhood of Boston we have also the most eminent of existing illustrations of the comprehensive development of the recreative possibilities of a water-front. On the oceanside, and along the bay, the harbor, and their estuaries, the metropolitan and municipal authorities have developed no less than seven great tracts of public shore, reaching for miles and miles in their total extent, while five minor beaches for bathing and waterside enjoyment are features in a series of eight additional water-front pleasure-grounds of a more distinctively local type. On the other hand, Boston furnishes a negatively instructive example of neglect to take due advantage of a great opportunity for public embellishment presented in the city's maritime situation, and this through want of the organized effort that, with persistence, might easily have accomplished it. The islands and shores of Boston Bay were originally clothed with trees, and were beautiful. Early in colonial times they were stripped of this tree-covering, and, for the greater part, have since presented a singularly bare and bleak appearance. Hence, while the bay is not without picturesque interest, and even possesses certain beautiful individual features, it is not only not beautiful as a whole, but in the sharp and naked outlines of its landscape. contours it has a forbidding character, and even seems to retain the impress of the repel

lent spirit of puritanical austerity that prevailed when this change was wrought upon the scene.

Nearly twenty-five years have passed since a suggestion was made that the old-time wooded mantle be restored to the islands and headlands so far as possible. Mr. Olmsted made an illuminating report to the Boston park board on the subject, pointing out that, with the possible exception of Venice, no seaport in the world made so great a recreative use of its harbor, and that the chief drawbacks to its special attractiveness lay in the generally hard-featured, bare, bleak, and inhospitable aspect of the headlands and islands. He showed that by restoring the original forest there might be gained the beauty of large compositions as affected by broad masses of foliage palpitating over the rigid structure of the islands and headlands, lifting their sky-lines, giving them some additional, but not excessive, variety of tint,-greater play of light and shade, and completely overcoming the present hardness of outline of their loamy parts, without destroying the ruggedness of their rocky parts. He also showed how this end could be reached by the expenditure of six thousand dollars a year through a period of five years. But for an unfortunate mischance, these recommendations would at once have been carried out, and the appearance of the harbor would, by such simple means, have now been completely transformed into an appearance worthy of the gateway of a great city and of the circumstance that gave the city its being. Although the suggestion commends itself as something deserving to be realized, there has been no person or

organization ready to assume the responsibility and push it to its consummation.

The great value of a recreatively developed water-front to a city is illustrated by the work undertaken by Cambridge, which, in its scheme of park improvement, has devoted its chief attention to reclaiming and beautifying the banks of the Charles River throughout almost its entire course along the borders of the city. The community thus gains, at the cost of the work upon a comparatively narrow strip of land, the benefit of many hundreds of acres of free water-space for public enjoyment. This river-bank, under public ownership, takes the shape of a magnificent esplanade, a riverside drive and promenade, and two waterside playgrounds with bathing-beaches. The profitable character of such an investment for a municipality is shown in the fact that the increased taxes upon merely the first piece of improved property abutting upon the esplanade were more than enough to pay the whole interest and sinking-fund charges for the entire park work on the river-front.

The example of Manchester-by-the-Sea in acquiring public ownership of the four beaches in the town-including the famous Singing Beach, the sands of which give out a sort of musical note-shows what a rural community may profitably do for the benefit of its people. The Plymouth of the Pilgrims also has a highly appreciated public possession in its fine town beach. A sea-beach offers one of the simplest and most inexpensive problems in public improvement. So great and absorbing is the interest in the spectacle presented by the sea that little needs to be done in the way of adornment, while for a