City Beautification and the Work of the Park Board.

              r<_ QUEST CLUB
February 2^, 1923.
PITY BEAUTIFIOATION AND THE WORK OF THE PARK BOARD
By M. S. MAHURIN
Mr. President, Members of Quest Club and Guests:
In order to interpret my subject, "City Beautifioation and the work
of the Park Board", I have asked myself two questions: "What makes a city
beautiful?" and "What might be the ultimate achievement of the work of the
Park Board?"
In order to arrive at a solution to these questions, I ahave woven
into the paper some of the creative thoughts of ancient and modern thinkers
as expressed in books, professional magazines and in the public press.
Where I do not specifically state authority, I give full credit for the
inspiration.
CITY BEAUTIFICATIONJ  Beautifioation implies the adornment of an ugly
thing with beauty. Anything that is beautiful is artistic and if it is
artistic, it demonstrates some of the qualities of Art.  There are two
elements of Art which I will discuss more or less all through this paper
and those two elements are Form and Color.
City Beautifioation is a civic community activity, inspired by individual and public sentiment, and carried on by enthusiastic citizens.
The Park Board, however, is a legally established organization, a separate
activity entirely. It has access to public money, raised by taxation, to
which you all contribute.
The building of a beautiful city does not always rest with a legally
orgainzed group, n^r does it rest with the community program.  The responsibility for the City Beautiful eventually devolves upon the individual
himself.
We say we have a beautiful city, but in reality, just how beautiful
is it? An why is our city not more beautiful? It has discrepancies.
Where are they?
Can you, if asked, define and point out an eyesore?
Eyesores exist because they defy nature's fundamental laws of beauty.
Now Nature is divine and therefore beautiful.  It is the man-made
things which are too often ugly because they are not done in harmony with
nature.
Did you ever imagine how the world would look if it had not color?
If the sky and the grass, the flowers, and our ownselves and surroundings
were all tinted a few shades of dull grey, accented here and there only by
the deep shadow hues.  OUr world would be a mere ghost of the world as it
is now, glowing with the colors of the rainbow, - and we should lose more
joy out of life than we can perhaps realize.
The world has never been without color, and from Nature's color
harmony...one of the symbols of the Covenant between the Creator and his
Creation we take our color scale of the spectrum.
We can very readily imagine a world without music, for we know tha^
speaking in terms of our present musical art, there were long ages in
which there was not music at all, and that even now, when music has come
to be the most mystical of all the arts, we can produce it only in time
not in soace as color is manifested.
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