“And should you in the contest fall, remember with old Homer-- ‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid, And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’ “Allow me now to close in one of Scott’s beautiful strains: ‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on! Were the last words of Marmion.’” _That_ was American architecture between 1820 and the Civil War--a collection of tags, thrown at random against a building. Architectural forms were brought together by a mere juxtaposition of materials, held in place by neither imagination nor logic. There are a number of honorable exceptions to this rule, for architects like Renwick, who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Upjohn, who built Trinity Church, had a more sincere understanding of the conventional task; and by any standard of esthetic decency the old Gothic building of New York University, on Washington Square, was a far finer structure than the bulky office building that has taken its place. Nevertheless, this saving remnant does not alter the character of the great mass of work, any more than the occasionally excellent cast-iron balconies, brought over from the London of the Regency, alter the depressing character of the great mass of domestic building. In elevation and interior treatment, these ante-bellum buildings were all what-nots. Souvenirs of architecture, their forms dimly recall the monuments of the past without in any sense taking their place. To tell the truth, a pall had fallen over the industrial city: contemporary writers in the ’forties and ’fifties speak of the filth and smoke, and without doubt the chocolate brownstone front was introduced as a measure of protective coloration. In this dingy environment, men turned to nature as a refuge against the soiled and bedraggled works of man’s creation; and as the creeping factory and railroad train removed Nature farther from their doors, the park was introduced as a more convenient means of escape. The congested capitals of Europe had already learnt this lesson; traveled Americans, like William Cullen Bryant, brought it home; and Central Park, planned in 1853, was the first of the great landscape parks to serve as a people’s pleasance. Conceived in contrast to the deflowered landscape and the muddled city, the park alone re-created the traditions of civilization--of man naturalized, and therefore at home, of nature humanized, and therefore enriched. And even today our parks are what our cities should be, and are not.