(City Plans - Boston)COPELAND, Robert Morris.   THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITY IN AMERICA.   Essay And Plan For The Improvement Of The City Of Boston.       Boston: Lee & Shephard,   1872.          First Edition. This rare pamphlet presents an early proposal for a city plan and integrated park system for the city of Boston, written by one of that city's first professional landscape gardeners. Copeland was a strong early advocate for urban parks and was among the handful who prepared plans for the original design of Central Park in New York City. He was also among the first to take a strong interest in the broader issues of city planning and integrated park systems. All these interests converged in the ambitious proposals made here. He begins with several pages of general arguments for the value of urban planning, focusing specifically on its usefulness to the growth of business and the economic health of cities. He then examines every major neighborhood of Boston and makes proposals for street construction, public land acquisition, opening up of the waterfront and developing specific areas for business, manufacturing or residential purposes. The second half is devoted to improvements intended to make this functional city beautiful, chiefly through the creation of a system of parks and scenic reservations. Here again the general arguments are followed by a tour through the city identifying a series of park sites to acquire, polluted ponds to reclaim, waterfronts to develop, trees to save and other related proposals. All these proposed parks and reservations, scattered across the city from the Common to the Blue Hills, are linked by a network of park drives and greenways. Included at the end is a large folding map of the city with the entire proposed park system colored in green. Although Copeland's ideas were probably too practical and earnest to be called visionary, they were nonetheless ahead of their time and unlikely to be implemented in the Boston of the 1870s. Copeland died two years after the publication of this pamphlet at the age of forty-four. It was not until twenty years later, in the hands of Charles Eliot, that ideas similar to those presented here were finally brought to reality.   Pamphlet 8vo (22.3 x 14.5 cm); 46 pp. + large folding map (102 x 78 cm).            Original printed paper wraps, chipped at edges; backstrip repaired with paper conservation tape; tear in folding map repaired without loss. $750.00

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