Samuel Parsons

Members of the Century who knew Samuel Parsons only by his sturdy figure, his simplicity of manner and his modest participation in the talk of the Graham Library, could hardly have known the greatness of his service as guardian of one of New York City’s best possessions. His civic career gives a picture on the one hand of what the best New Yorkers can do to beautify the city; on the other, of the inflexible resolution which such citizens must display to prevent disfigurement of the city by the baser elements which are constantly invited to misgovern it. To Parsons, landscape gardening was the highest kind of art. His feeling in regard to a great tree, a graceful group of elms and beeches, a well-ordered grove at a country-seat or a well-disposed city park, was the feeling of intimate affection and admiration which art-lovers have for a gallery of choice paintings or a harmonious group of stately buildings. Those who knew Parsons intimately will recall the fondness with which he used to show the photograph of an estate or park which had been reforested under his sympathetic eye. It was passed around by him with something of the paternal pride with which the photograph of a group of healthy children might have been exhibited. He even had his favorites in the family of trees, though he tried hard to be fair to all of them.

Parsons came honestly by his artistic skill. His father and grandfather were horticulturists whose Long Island nursery became celebrated at home and abroad for the quality of its trees and shrubs. With Parsons himself, study of nature was a delight from boyhood, but he reveled in the art and poetry of landscape gardening. It became quite inevitably his profession, and as inevitably he drifted into partnership with Calvert Vaux, one of the two designers of Central Park. At first through Vaux, then Landscape Architect of the Park Department, and afterward through recognition of his own high qualities, Parsons was made successively Superintendent of Planting, Superintendent of New York Parks, Landscape Architect and once, for a brief unexpired term, the Park Commissioner. These services covered twenty-nine years. If they could have been continued during the eleven years which followed, and could have been supplemented by intelligent support from New York’s government and people, Central Park would not today be the half-ruined pleasure-ground with which the city is making futile experiments and from which the Transit Boards and War Memorial promoters are trying to snatch part of the damaged beauty which is left.

The story of Parsons’ dismissal in 1911, by a Park Commissioner whom the cynical Mayor Gaynor had appointed as a joke and who eventually ran away from his job and hid himself before his term expired, is not a pleasant story. Its only moral is the unremitting fight which friends of the city must keep up if they mean to save the city’s pleasure-grounds from entire destruction. With a magnanimity which not many other men would have shown in his place, Parsons continued in his difficult position his efforts to avert deforestation of the city’s playground. His official proposal of nearly twenty years ago, for comprehensive re-soiling and reforestation, he could no longer urge. But he used his persuasive power to obtain private funds for the replanting of large trees where old trees had died. Only a year ago he had induced the Andrew H. Green Estate to establish as a memorial three tall elms on the knoll where the old Casino used to stand. With the present Commissioner’s assent, they were planted under Parsons’ personal supervision and they are there today, an ornament to the landscape. When Parsons died, he had in hand a completed plan for reforesting with large trees through private subscription the devastated Mall; a plan which was being blocked by a stupid City official.

Perhaps we can say with truth that, even in New York, the memory of such a man will itself be protection to the interests of the city—if not a barrier to the forming of schemes to despoil the city of its beauties, at least an inspiration to honest officials and public-spirited citizens in the work of guarding their heritage.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1924 Century Association Yearbook