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IN MID-JANUARY 1901, Perkins assisted in preparing an article about the Palisades that was published in the New York Tribune. He then purchased enough copies to deliver a Tribune to each member of the New Jersey and New York legislatures. Spreading around loads of newspapers with the Perkins article was good lobbying, but not enough to win prompt action on the Morgan financial challenge. On January 27, a special article in the New York Times was headlined, “Palisades Plans in Danger.” Legislators from central and southern New Jersey who had resisted the original bill to create the PIPC were resisting again. “The prejudice that exists is as fixed as the rocks of the Palisades are now, and worse still, there is a widespread disinclination to be informed on the subject. The newspapers in the lower part of the state have treated the proposition flippantly and have prepared the legislators to resist any attempt that will be made to secure an appropriation for the Palisades scheme.”

New Jersey legislators, always suspicious of New York motives, did not want to be drawn into an extended financial commitment that seemingly brought no benefit to many of their constituents. The two states once almost came to military blows over a boundary dispute, and, although closely tied by commercial and cultural ties, New York had the reputation either of bullying or ignoring its smaller, more rural neighbor. Of the eighty-one members of the New Jersey legislature, no more than twenty favored more money to buy land on the Palisades.

Elizabeth Vermilye, denied an appointment to the PIPC because of her gender, had largely directed her energies elsewhere, but on learning of resistance to expanded protection of the Palisades, she set about pulling another political rabbit out of the hat. She presided over the first meeting of a new organization, the League for the Preservation of the Palisades, formed only eight years after John Muir founded the Sierra Club. Among the activists joining Vermilye were Mrs. Ernest Thompson Seaton, wife of one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, Cecilia Gaines (now married to John Holland), Mrs. W. A. Roebling, whose husband oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and clifftop property owners Mrs. Frederick Lamb and Mrs. Ralph Trautman. Frederick Lamb had served on the first Palisades study commission and Ralph Trautman on the second.

This group began pounding the halls in Trenton, attending hearings and buttonholing legislators. Palisades Park commissioner F. W. Hopkins, a wealthy investor, testified at the hearings. (The Reverend) Dr. Laidlaw, spokesperson for the Federation of Churches, participated as well, urging protection of almighty beauty. Vermilye learned from New York governor Odell that an appropriation of $400,000 would be forthcoming if New Jersey took the financial lead by approving $50,000. This was a sweet deal, and she and her colleagues made sure that elected officials in New Jersey knew it. On March 22, 1901, Governor Voorhees signed the necessary legislation, including approval of eminent domain authority for the Palisades Park Commission should the commissioners have to play hardball to acquire particularly crucial properties. State appropriations suddenly leaped from the small sum of $15,000, mostly spent, to a total of $465,000, and the Palisades Park Commission was in business well beyond the scars of the Carpenter brothers’ quarry. Controversy followed immediately.

During the debate about financing in Albany, legislators claimed to have been left with the impression that the state of New Jersey would donate to the Palisades Park Commission riparian (underwater) land estimated to be worth $1 million. Acquisition of this watery real estate would strengthen the commission’s control over access to the river shoreline. Based on assurance of “handsome” generosity by New Jersey, the New Yorkers had readily supported the $400,000 appropriation. After the fact, they discovered that any claim by the commission to the riparian lands in New Jersey was seriously in doubt. The commission’s secretary, J. DuPratt White, took the heat. A New York assemblyman quoted in the Hoboken Observer said, “Now, Mr. Secretary White can take either horn of the dilemma he pleases—he is sure to be impaled. If his inter-state commission has a gift of $1,250,000 worth of riparian lands from the state, it has something the state can’t give. If his inter-state commission has no gift of riparian lands, as he says, then New York has been what the sports call ‘conned’ out of $400,000.”

New Jersey officials who served on the state’s riparian board were caught off guard. They had not been involved in the Palisades maneuvers and were unaware that part of their submerged domain was being used as a bargaining chip. The secretary of the riparian board doubted whether legislation that directed the interstate commission to “improve the water’s edge” applied to the drowned, muddy bottom of the river. But after due deliberation and pressure likely applied by Governor Voorhees, the board concluded that the New Jersey legislation must have “contemplated” that riparian lands running parallel to the Palisades cliffs should be excluded from dock and industrial site development. The underwater rights subsequently were transferred to the interstate commission, taking the bite out of this first cross-border park controversy, a hiccup promptly forgotten by politicians and the press.

J. DuPratt White was not a con man. A graduate of Cornell University Law School, he was admitted to the New York Bar in 1892 and, with a colleague, founded the prestigious law firm White & Case. All interstate commissioners were uncompensated and served at the pleasure of various governors. For many, this was a dutiful and honorable moment of public service, lasting for a few years. Not for White; he would serve on the commission for four decades regardless of shifting political winds, becoming a staunch defender of commission integrity and a key participant in the commission’s many early achievements.

With muddy river tidal flats and blossomed funds in hand, the interstate commission hired its first employee in April 1901. Not surprisingly, Leonard Hull Smith was a lawyer with an annual salary from the commission of $1,200. Smith moved quickly, concentrating on the cliff face and shoreline of the Palisades, allowing Perkins to report at a meeting in mid-October 1901 that lands had been purchased from the estate of George Green, the Mahan heirs, Charles W. Opdyke, E. Ellen Anderson, John S. Lysle, the estate of George S. Cole, the estates of William B. Dana, Henry W. Banks, the Van Brunt properties, and, of course, the Carpenter brothers.

Soon after this meeting, a small article appeared in the New York Times under the interesting headline, “A Landscape Engineer Employed to Study and Preserve the Rocks.” The commission had retained the services of Charles W. Leavitt, a civil engineer who, later in his career, would win kudos for landscape and design projects at the Saratoga and Belmont Park horse racetracks. Levitt’s arrival signaled that the commissioners were not content with a preserved view of the Palisades from the New York side of the Hudson River, but wanted to develop public access to the summit of the cliffs and build a carriage road along the base. By early 1902, while Leavitt studied the rocks, the commission succeeded in acquiring thirty-four additional properties, spending funds as quickly as they arrived in the PIPC bank account.

By then, Perkins had organized a subsidiary Palisades Improvement Company intended to avoid most government red tape and move quickly when land buying opportunities beckoned. Part of the strategy was to enlist support from as many property owners as possible by encouraging donation of the vertical cliff faces while offering $500/acre for shoreline holdings. Many of these properties had been passed down by families through the generations and were held in small interests by widely scattered heirs. In one instance, the commission had to acquire a 1/240th interest in a 2.25-acre parcel from an heir who lived in the state of Washington. During this transaction, there was wording confusion when the proposed deed was reviewed by the heir. Back came the flawed deed via a railroad and carriage journey so that correction could be made, then the deed was dispatched again cross-country. The owner’s signature was affixed; purchase price, $3.28, total mileage, 12,000.

Some of the properties acquired in this first bold conservation push included houses and cottages. The commission, searching for ways to build income, began renting them out. An exception was a carcass-filled, pungent fat-rendering plant on the river shoreline, which was torn down. With focus entirely on the New Jersey Palisades, enterprising quarry operators simply began moving upriver. Quarries sprouted at the New York river communities of Nyack and Haverstraw and on the slopes of Hook Mountain, a geologic feature almost as prominent as the Palisades. The kind of hue and cry that stopped the Carpenter brothers was heard again, with increasing citizen demand that PIPC authority be quickly expanded onto a new battle-front in New York.

Blasting reverberated across the river and reached the 3,500-acre Pocantico Hills estate owned by John D. Rockefeller. From Kykuit, his stately home, Rockefeller had a direct view of Nyack and Hook Mountain, about five miles distant. The view is so compelling that Alfred Bierstadt, among the most admired of the Hudson River School artists, captured the scene on canvas from a location near where Kykuit stands today. The scene is of a meadow decorated with ancient trees sloping down to the eastern edge of the broad Hudson River; the painting invites the viewer’s eye westward across the water to hazy Hook Mountain, sheltered under a blue, cloud-touched sky.

View across the Hudson River to Hook Mountain (Alfred Bierstadt)

Kykuit was constructed under the watchful eye of the elder Rockefeller’s son, John D. Jr., but “Senior,” known for his immense business success, personally designed the landscape plan to celebrate “bursting views of river, hill, cloud, and the great sweep of the country.” This sense of design and appreciation for natural beauty would be passed on to Rockefeller Jr., who would leave a legacy of conservation from Maine to the Caribbean, from Virginia to California, and down through the Rocky Mountain region encompassing Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and Mesa Verde national parks. But the Palisades and the upriver scenes were right in the Rockefeller front yard. In his book John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait, Raymond B. Fosdick says that Rockefeller Jr. “had known and loved the Palisades since his boyhood days when he often used to take his horse across the Hudson on the Fort Lee ferry and ride for hours beneath the cliff and through the woods to the top.” Rockefeller Jr. was aware of the effort to stop the blasting in New Jersey. Now, his family could see, hear, and feel the explosions in what had been a bucolic Bierstadt scene.

In letters of March 18 and 21, 1902, to the New York governor and lieutenant governor, Rockefeller Jr. had taken up the interstate commission cause by supporting the extension of its activities into New York. He and George Perkins also were exchanging letters. Not everyone was on board. In a mid-March letter to Rockefeller Jr., a Nyack resident, James P. Mcquaide, reported, “There has been strong opposition by the people who have stone crushers in Haverstraw, the principal being General Hedges, who, for many years, was the leading Republican politician in Rockland County.” Hedges had clout. When a bill to expand the PIPC reached the desk of Governor Odell, it was vetoed.

The setback was made worse in early 1903 by the sudden death of one of the commission’s founding members, Abram S. Hewitt (1822–1903). Hewitt’s father had been a mechanic and his mother the daughter of a farmer. Hewitt attended public schools in New York City and successfully competed for a scholarship to Columbia University, where he earned a Doctor of Law degree. During his undergraduate days, he and his friend Edward Cooper toured Europe and, among their adventures, luckily survived a shipwreck. Hewitt returned to America in a borrowed sailor’s suit with three silver dollars in his pocket.

The two friends went on to form the company Cooper & Hewitt, specializing in the manufacture of iron and laying the cornerstone for Cooper Union Institute in 1854. Their partnership surely must have been strengthened when Hewitt married Cooper’s sister, Sarah. During the Civil War, Hewitt traveled to England and, in best cloak-and-dagger style, passed himself off as a copperhead, a Yankee who worked as an agent for the Confederacy. England was supportive of the rebellious southern cause, and Hewitt, playing to this sympathy, managed to purchase a large supply of guns and swords that he dutifully arranged for shipment to Union troops. Back in the U.S., and while visiting his wife’s parents, he received a dispatch from President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln said that General Ulysses S. Grant was in urgent need of twelve heavy mortars for an attack on Confederate fortifications, but that the U.S. Ordnance Department could promise delivery only in about a year. Could Hewitt & Cooper do better? The mortars were delivered in twenty-eight days.

After the war, Edward Cooper was elected mayor of New York City. Abram Hewitt also entered politics in 1874 and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He was a skilled strategist and strong debater who won credit for establishing the Geological Society, a federal agency whose purpose was to measure the mineral wealth of the nation. Then another political goal beckoned. Following in the footsteps of his partner, Hewitt ran as a Democrat in 1886 for New York City mayor, competing against United Labor Party candidate Henry George, who came in second, and Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who came in third. After his term as mayor, Hewitt moved across the river to New Jersey and, in 1900, was appointed to the interstate commission by Governor Voorhees. By then, Hewitt was a well-known philanthropist and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Institute, and Barnard College.

Park visitors with canoes (PIPC Archives)

His business reputation, scientific prestige, and seasoned political aptitude brought welcome strength to the commission as it searched to find footing in the tug-of-war between New York and New Jersey conservation challenges. With Governor Odell’s veto on the table, Hewitt was needed more than ever. His death left the commission with a gaping organizational hole. Problems of property title, squatters, obscure owners, outright resistance, and slow action by New York to dispense funds continued to plague the land-acquisition initiatives in New Jersey. One of these owners was eighty-four-year-old Susan B. Anthony. In March 1905, the commission offered to purchase her land for $2,300. Anthony thought the price should be $2,400. The commission paid $2,400.

As land holdings accumulated, so, too, did interest by the public in camping, canoeing, picnicking, and hiking. The commission held properties, some disconnected from others, sprinkled along fourteen miles of river shoreline. Several key holdings remained beyond the commission’s grasp, including an old, weatherworn structure that had been briefly commandeered 125 years earlier by Lord Cornwallis, whose troops struggled to the top of the cliffs in a vain effort to capture General George Washington. Some of the few fishermen or their widows who continued to cling to squatter’s shacks were convinced that the ghost of Cornwallis returned every November to shout orders for king and country and beseech his phantom troops to climb fast and rush forward to capture the upstart rebel general.

Ghost or no ghost, public use of commission-owned lands was beginning to blossom. Members of the American Canoe Association applied for and received permission to camp under the cliffs. Four hundred canoeists paddled across from New York City to take advantage of the opportunity.

Hundreds of others, transporting themselves by foot, with equine help, or in sputtering vehicles, decided that this idea of camping was grand and availed themselves of free permits even as the commissioners were debating the merits and purposes of the park they seemed to be creating.

The need for this debate was underscored by a fast-developing impression that the Palisades was a “lawless” place on Sundays and holidays, when increasingly large crowds came to recreate outside of the usual police controls by which a metropolitan population usually lived. In 1905, the commission managed to retain the services of only one law enforcement marshal, who was stationed at a ferryboat landing. He was supposed to patrol miles of shoreline on foot on the assumption that a handful of well-behaved visitors might wish to stroll along the river’s edge. In reality, and as word spread, this newly acquired public open space became a magnet for city dwellers. The lone marshal was overwhelmed. The Palisades was not going to be a static, protected natural scene; it was rapidly morphing into a people’s park.

Perhaps the commissioners could be excused for being distracted by property transactions and a budding work-in-progress park that caused them to decline a proposal by Mrs. E. B. Miles of the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs to secure a site atop the Palisades for the purpose of memorializing the role women played in the fight to save the cliffs. In response, the commission advised Mrs. Miles that it “was not in a position to take official action in that direction.” Subsequent commission minutes confirm a flow of “communications” on the matter, suggesting that the battle-tested women were unwilling to take “no” for an answer from the very commission they helped to create. In defense, the commissioners referred the matter to J. DuPratt White for further consideration.

The 1902 veto by Governor Odell of legislation to extend the jurisdiction of the commission into New York could not be forgotten because every morning and evening dynamite blasts at quarries on Hook Mountain would be heard for twenty miles up and down the Hudson River. John D. Rockefeller, John Speyer, and other wealthy river corridor residents were offering to pay for commission expenses in New York if its activities could be extended to Stony Point, fifteen miles upriver from the New Jersey/New York border.

Media attention, public outcry, and the influence of rich campaigners finally led to the introduction of the necessary legislation in January 1906, two years after Odell left office. Ironically, the legislation was introduced by a New York senator named Carpenter—no relation to the brothers Aaron and George.

Odell’s successor as governor, Frank W. Higgins, suggested that written guarantees from private individuals to cover commission costs on the New York side of the border would be necessary to gain a favorable vote on the legislation. Despite informal expressions of philanthropic interest by the Rockefeller family, George Perkins, J. P. Morgan, and others in the highest financial orbit, the idea of a written guarantee did not go over well. Starr J. Murphy, a Rockefeller Jr. staff member, summarized the issue in a memo to his boss:

This suggestion seems to indicate an entire misconception as to the nature of the pending bill to extend the limits of the Palisades Park. The beauty of the Hudson River is one of the great scenic attractions of the eastern part of the United States; it probably draws more visitors to this State than any other single feature outside of Niagara Falls, and the movement to preserve it is of the same public character as the movement to preserve the Falls, or the Yellowstone Park, or the Yosemite Valley. When the original Palisades Park was established no such assurances were required, and yet, outside of the original appropriation which I understand was spent entirely for acreage property and has not yet been exhausted, whatever funds were needed for acquiring business properties the Commission was able to procure. All that is asked in this bill is extension of the powers of the Commission so as to enable it to acquire additional lands. These lands are just as much needed for the preservation of the scenic beauty of the Hudson as the lands taken under the original act.

The Rockefellers were not without their contacts, including Timothy L. Woodruff, an influential businessman known to have close ties with Governor Higgins. In a follow-up memo, Murphy reported:

I met Mr. Woodruff (President of the Smith Premier Typewriter Company) at the Club today and had a little talk with him. He said he expected to attend a meeting of your Bible Class tonight and thinking that you might perhaps see him there I thought I would give you the situation up to date. He tells me that he thinks former Governor Odell is really back of the opposition. Odell is the member of the State Committee from Rockland County and the quarry owners are therefore his direct constituents.

Former governor Odell apparently was fanning a rumor that Rockefeller and Morgan had pledged to fully fund the 1902 bill to expand commission activities into New York but had reneged. The Hook Mountain quarry operators were advancing a parallel argument; they contended that if the commission’s authority were to be extended into their territory, a “cloud” would be cast on the title to their land. They argued that the value of their holdings would decrease because of the commission’s suspected intent to use the power of eminent domain to force them to sell. (This argument resonates to this day when property-rights activists claim that zoning controls and similar development restrictions reduce land values. The reverse is consistently true.)

Six quarries now were active along the riverside landscape in New York. This earthshattering reality was bringing more allies to the commission cause, including the American Preservation Society, the Albany Day Line Steamers, and the New York Central Railway. Among those joining in support of the commission was Cleveland H. Dodge, a founder of Phelps-Dodge, a company that, paradoxically, operated huge mines in the American West. Dodge lived in Riverdale on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Like so many others, he had a low tolerance for the abusive tactics that he was witnessing across the river, so much so that he had purchased $25,000 worth of threatened rock outcroppings from one of the quarry operators, Brown & Fleming, and later would donate most of this holding to the commission. The rest was sold at a loss.

Political pressure marked by such a growing contingent of influential people and companies got the message across in Albany. In the same year that the New York legislature established Cornell University, Chapter 691 of the Laws of New York, 1906, extended the commission’s jurisdiction to Hook Mountain, ten miles upriver from the New Jersey/New York state line, marking a milestone moment when “interstate” took on new force.

While looking northward, Perkins and his colleagues could take comfort in the fact that almost 80 percent of the fourteen-mile New Jersey shoreline had been acquired, even though New Jersey appropriations to cover commission expenses had dried up. In June 1906, he and his fellow commissioners took a trip up the Hudson on the yacht Mermaid to view the challenges ahead. But also, with a backward glance, Perkins was able to report that “almost all danger points” along the New Jersey Palisades “had been removed” with the recent acquisition of the last two rock-crusher plants. This was a grand statement, but the commission also dealt with the mundane. Among bills paid was $9.34 to Standard Oil of New York, a printing bill for $7.35, and $73.00 paid to John Jordan to take down the old fat-rendering plant. By the beginning of 1907, the commission had expended $470,534.80, chalking up a deficit of more than $5,000.

J. DuPratt White paid the bills. These included $1,500/year for a legal assistant and $15/month for the beleaguered law-enforcement marshal. In addition, most of the burden for issuing camping permits, dealing with the myriad details of land acquisition, evicting squatters, responding to complaints, preparing reports, and bringing definition to acceptable park uses fell on White’s shoulders.

One man wanted to use the forests for random target practice. White thought that the unpredictable flight of rifle bullets through forests visited by park patrons was a bad idea. Two brothers, Obediah and John Older, held side-by-side leases on commission-owned houses. White ordered both brothers to vacate, explaining to one that “there has been so much trouble between your family and your brother’s family that the commissioners have decided that this is the only way to settle the whole matter.” In a letter to Perkins, White suggested that “the commission needs a receptacle for its files and papers. The commission has never bought any furniture and owns none.” Lack of money was a persistent problem, with none coming from New Jersey, and the New York comptroller, an independently elected official, often responded slowly to vouchers sent forward for reimbursement.

Commissioner Abram De Ronde was not as involved in day-to-day management challenges as was White, but he certainly pulled his weight. His tenure would span thirty-seven years. De Ronde was a native of Teaneck, New Jersey, and had worked in New York City while attending night school. He won early business success in the chemical industry, then founded the Palisades Trust & Guarantee Company based in Englewood, New Jersey. While serving a term in the New Jersey State Assembly from 1889 to 1891, De Ronde proposed an idea whose time had not yet come: the construction of a bridge across the Hudson River that would connect New York City and New Jersey.

When De Ronde learned that the New Jersey women, steadfast in their hope that a memorial would be erected in recognition of their pathfinding conservation, had collected $3,000 with the intention of buying a suitable site on the summit of the Palisades and donating it to the commission, he joined their cause. He objected to the idea that the women would have to spend their own money to purchase a site for their memorial and convinced his colleagues to set aside commission-owned land for the purpose, thus allowing the women to reserve their hard-won money for “immediate” construction of the memorial. This was a victory for the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs, but it came at a time when the commission was struggling to find its way and keep financially afloat. A suitable site remained unidentified, and the women’s money remained in a bank account. “Immediate” would stretch into years.

In July 1907, White posted a long memorandum to his fellow commissioners in which he summarized the many complex issues that needed careful attention. Property acquisition challenges in New Jersey remained, now primarily narrowed to entrenched owners who were not inclined to deal with the commission. White also mentioned the idea of “construction of a continuous driveway connecting the state roads of New Jersey with the view of making the outlet for the great system of good roads in New York down through the Palisades Park.” This was not an entirely clear statement, but White obviously was floating the idea of a park driveway (parkway) that would meander through protected open space, giving travelers an opportunity to enjoy a linear park. A hint of the Palisades Interstate Parkway, now accommodating 65 million cars a year, cherished and sometimes cursed, was a glimmer in White’s mind, even in an era when horse-drawn carriages still outnumbered mechanically fractious automobiles.

He also lamented the newly encountered dilemma at Hook Mountain, pointing to a lack of appropriations from New York: “It is exceedingly doubtful if it will ever be possible to accomplish the purpose of the act by an absolute purchase of the properties, and the destruction of the trap rock industry. Whatever is done should be formulated and undertaken without delay, as at the present time the commission is being severely criticized for inaction and neglect. It is not important that such criticism is unjust. The fact is that it exists and must be met.”

Day-trippers and campers were being delivered to the commission shoreline holdings from ferryboat terminals in New York City and Yonkers. Where a handful of camping parties had appeared when the first river-edge lands were acquired, now two thousand tents would blossom on weekends. White sought advice about public use of parks from the faraway commander of Fort Yellowstone but found no help from an Army officer posted in a wilderness few people visited or even knew about.

In a letter to a commission patron, White returned $5.00 that had come with a request for a camping permit: “It would not be proper under any circumstances to accept any money.” In the midst of overseeing the increasingly successful White & Case Law Firm and commuting from his home in Nyack to New York City, the indefatigable White found time to give advice to aspiring campers on the types of tents, equipment, and food to purchase to assure a favorable park experience. Public sanitation, accidents, the risk of forest fire, trespass by visitors onto private property, and rowdy visitor behavior were among the problems finding their way to White’s desk. In the absence of policy guidelines, he invented park regulations to address the more persistent challenges.

As if this were not enough, White defended against an Alpine, New Jersey, tax collector who thought that adjacent commission lands should be a continuing source of property tax revenue even though the town provided no fire protection or law enforcement services. Seeking a compromise, White wrote, “Of course, if these taxes are paid by the commissioners, it is not to be in any way construed as a willingness on their part to pay any taxes on this property in the future.” Compromise proved unnecessary; the commission refused to pay any taxes to the town.

White must have found irony in a communique from New Jersey state treasurer Daniel S. Voorhees, son of the former governor, who sought lease payments for the very riparian lands that had been ceded to the commission eight years earlier. The solicitation by Voorhees to receive payments on muddy land no longer owned by the state and regularly submerged by tides was declined.

Pressed by local residents and historians to build a battle monument on commission land at the Revolutionary War site Fort Lee, White wrote that “there is a dispute over the bills of H. A. Jaeger, who hauled several large boulders which were to be used for the monument. All agree that the bill is absolutely exorbitant and out of all reason, but the party is very stubborn and has declined to make any concessions.” The bill was paid, and the commission owned a pile of boulders but had no funds for construction of a monument.

One day White “went tramping” along the river shoreline in search of a tent reported to be missing from a campsite. Along the way he recruited willing visitors as unpaid “park wardens,” assigned them “districts,” and asked that they make their own park warden signs to hang on their tents and to report unlawful incidents to the marshal. Two enterprising boys, law-abiding, but seeing opportunity for profit, started selling camping supplies from their rowboat. White decided that this was an acceptable commercial service, a very early hint of a huge contest in decades to come between those who value preserved open space and those who wish to cash in on the very popularity of parks. On the environmental front, the commissioners sent a letter to the Sisters of Peace advising that “the break in the sewer pipe runs over park property. This must be fixed, and in attending to it we would like to have the pipe continued further in the river so that the refuse will be carried out beyond the low water mark.”

The commission found itself drawn to the idea that parks could be used for worthy social purposes, especially in cooperation with organizations that served underprivileged children. Working with representatives of the Hamilton House Settlement, a charitable organization located in New York City’s notoriously crowded and impoverished Lower East Side, the commission began issuing long-term camping permits that allowed for the “relay of poor boys” to and from camps set up for that purpose.

Most of these park stewardship experiments went unnoticed, but on occasion the commission won praise. “I remember you very well in connection with the purchase of your property underneath the Palisades,” White wrote to J. H. Magee. “The commissioners appreciate letters written to them in the spirit of your letter as they are glad to receive suggestions and assistance from outsiders, but we find that there are not so many public spirited citizens who will take the trouble to write about matters of this kind.”

The commissioners were learning about the vagaries of park management as taught in the school of hard knocks. They were learning that people eagerly responded to the availability of preserved open space but did not necessarily appreciate how or why it was available or who must provide for its care. The commissioners were learning that in the public sector criticism gushed and praise was rare, that their investment in volunteer hours was unknown beyond a small circle of family, colleagues, and friends, and that politics could be even more fickle than assumed. They had no benchmarks to help them determine how best to be good stewards of wild and rugged parkland near the epicenter of the New York urban colossus. Theirs was no Central Park or Boston Common with manicured lawns, gardens, pruned trees, landscaped ponds and hills, constructed pathways, urban pace and mood, and high public watchfulness. Nor were they dealing with remote wilderness. They were somewhere in between, on their own, helping to invent a new type of park, finding their way as they went along.