Part V. Vicinity of the Museum 32

In conclusion 39

Appendix A 41

Appendix B 44

Resolution of the Board of Managers 47

Index 49

REPORT ON

THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN

August, 1924

DR. FREDERIC S. LEE, President, Board of Managers, New York Botanical Garden, New York City.

DEAR SIR:

This Report is submitted at your request to set forth the results to date of our investigation and study of the grounds of the Botanical Garden, as a basis for comprehensive plans for their improvement. It is a revision, in the light of further discussion and study, of a preliminary report, made in December, 1923.

The reading of this Report will be facilitated by consulting Maps A and B, which follow the text.

This investigation was set on foot because of an impression, voiced in your Statement of April, 1923, that the grounds of the Botanical Garden are much less beautiful and much less attractive and valuable to the general public, and especially to that part of the public particularly interested in gardening, in gardens and in landscape beauty, than is reasonably to be expected in the leading institution of its kind in the metropolis of the United States.

Our investigation has emphatically confirmed this impression, has defined its particulars in many respects, and has begun to make clear the means by which this condition can best be changed to a really satisfactory one.

For the purpose of this Report the defects can best be considered incidentally and in connection with the probable means of overcoming them by positive constructive measures directed toward making the Garden by degrees more and more excellent, on the assumption that means can be found to carry forward such progressive improvement in an orderly, well-balanced and reasonably rapid way without any arbitrary limit on the extent of the improvement.

As already indicated, this Report is to be regarded as a progress report, as a step toward the adoption of a general program in accordance with which definite plans for improvement may be successively elaborated in the necessary degree of detail.

It will be convenient to group what we have to say under the following five main headings:

I. Maintenance of grounds. Pages 6-11.

II. Improvements closely associated with maintenance; the making of existing features better of their kind. Pages 11-17.

III. Improvements which would constitute new departures (the introduction of distinctly new features), so far as not dependent on the questions considered under the two remaining heads. Pages 17-24.

IV. Questions of automobile through-traffic or park traffic and of park uses distinct from and more or less conflicting with Botanical Garden uses as such; of possible restrictions on the right of the public to enter upon all parts of the grounds at all times of day and night; and of related matters. Pages 25-31.

V. The vicinity of the Museum and various other questions dependent upon that and upon the questions discussed under heading IV. Pages 32-39.