Page:Report of the Park Board 1903.djvu/68

 engaged to labor an hour or two a day on the park and to "keep an eye on it" merely the rest of the time while working on his own place.

STEEP LANDS UNDESIRABLE FOR SMALL LOTS.
Having pointed out the extraordinary opportunities possessed by your city for picturesque parks and parkways, and having indicated other possibilities as to pleasure grounds, parkways and boulevards needed to complete a proper and comprehensive system of parks, some comment may be worth while on the peculiar conditions which make it desirable to take for park purposes a much larger amount of land in narrow strips and small pieces along the western hilly margin of the city than would be desirable in most other cities. The broken hillsides between Portland Heights, and the comparatively flat portion of the city below, are at present the most particularly observable by the largest number of citizens. Those who have no interest in the ownership of these lands, can hardly fail to agree that they are neither economical nor desirable as building sites for crowded residences; yet people are attracted to them, and some houses have actually been built on these steep slopes because of the views which they command and because of their convenient proximity to the center of the city and because of the good class of the neighborhood. At present, the custom of building in a cheap and flimsy manner is so firmly established that few people who build in these difficult places are put to any very extraordinary expense for retaining walls, terraced slopes, foundations, steps and all the other constructions which would cost enormously, if the custom of building substantially, as in older and wealthier communities, was firmly established. At present it is not a very notable expense to put fifteen or twenty feet of trestle work under a house—at times thirty to forty feet may be required—and so the process of occupying these steep declivities proceeds with comparatively little deterring influence on the score of cost, but some of these houses will be too inconvenient, too flimsy, too uncomfortable, too much out of fashion and too ugly to remain. Pressure of population will eventually put higher values upon the land, and future owners will undoubtedly, unless some method is adopted to prevent it, spend in the aggregate enormous sums of money on these hillsides, by far the greater part of which will be an absolute waste as compared with the conveniences and beauties which the expenditure of the same amount would bring upon gently sloping land. It is not too much to say that by the time people begin to spend from ten to twenty thousand dollars in the erection of thoroughly convenient and handsome residences in these localities, they will often, if not generally, be obliged to spend on the average about half these amounts in retaining walls, steps and other