Samuel Parsons, Jr.Balboa Park’s First Planner C100’s 2025 Bertram Goodhue Award Recipient

By Nancy Carol Carter

Samuel Parsons Jr. (1844-1923) traced his roots to colonial New York and was a third-generation American horticulturist. He farmed for a time after graduating in 1862 from Sheffield, the Yale Scientific School, then entered an apprenticeship with celebrated British immigrant Calvert Vaux, an architect and landscape designer.

The Art of Landscape Architecture, 2009 reprint, University of Massachusetts Press

Vaux landscaped many New York landmarks, including the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but is best known for winning an 1857 design competition for Central Park, having brought in Frederick Law Olmsted to assist in preparing his entry.

With the Vaux landscape firm, Parsons earned a partnership and transitioned into the work of the New York City Parks Department. As  parks superintendent from 1894 until 1897, he oversaw every detail of more than 100 city parks throughout the city’s five boroughs.

In his private landscape practice, Parsons worked across the nation, designing parks, cemeteries, private estates, college campuses, planned cities and the grounds of large churches. His clients included the Biltmore family, Colorado State University, Bryn Mawr College, the University of Alabama and the cities of Philadelphia and Birmingham.

Parsons was a founder and served as president of the American Institute of Landscape Architects and published numerous articles on gardens and landscape design and wrote six books.

Cover of his 1905 plan for “City (Balboa) Park.

Parsons in San Diego

In 1902, Parsons was engaged to develop a comprehensive landscape plan for San Diego’s City Park (renamed Balboa Park in 1910). Established in 1868, the park had languished for decades under a city of San Diego policy of neglect. Impetus for Parson’s hiring came from park advocates, a Chamber of Commerce Park Improvement Committee and the generosity of merchant and philanthropist George W. Marston, who personally paid Parsons’ fee.

Parsons visited San Diego for the first time in December 1902 and declared City Park to be beautiful, especially noting the panoramic views of mountains and ocean that extended far beyond the park. He urged San Diegans to create a unique regional statement with their park, preserving “the natural beauty that exists by simple treatment.”

His plan for City Park specified designated entrances, designed roads and paths that curved around the natural contours and canyons and called for restrained planting with no large formal gardens. In 1903, Parsons’ landscape business partner, George Cooke, made the first of a series of annual trips to San Diego. He remained in residence for a few months each time, overseeing implementation of the Parsons plan. Cooke first built roads and trails in City Park, then worked on defining entrances and the overall planting plan.

Parsons last visited  San Diego in 1910 when he was invited to report on the condition of City Park and other community parks in advance of San Diego’s planned 1915 Panama-California Exposition.

He was impressed by the progress made in developing City Park and the growth of trees within the park. He said it was time for San Diego to give its big urban park a more memorable name. City Park became Balboa Park within the year. This was the last major influence Parsons exercised in San Diego. While his plan for developing the park was not yet fully realized, it was about to become a dead letter. The Parsons plan was completely overtaken by the decision to build the fairgrounds at the center of the park.

Parson’s Fragile Legacy in Balboa Park

San Diego has made decisions for its park that are at complete odds with the vision Parsons brought to town in 1902. He was representative of landscape designers who treasured urban parks as a healthy and necessary alternative to city life. He envisioned a city park as an oasis of nature, a place in which people could escape noise, traffic and man-made structures.

With the decision to locate the 1915 exposition in the park’s Central Mesa and subsequent decisions to add more buildings, route freeways in and near the park and parcel out parkland for non-park land uses, San Diego has turned the Parsons Plan on its head. All the stresses of city life, including the need to feed a parking meter starting in 2026, are now part of the Balboa Park experience.

However, today, the park’s West Mesa is a remnant of Parsons’ vision of what he envisioned should be in an urban park. Although it has its share of intrusive structures and roadway noise, the area of the park between Sixth Avenue and State Route 163 has large stretches of greenery and many trees. Visitors can meander, nap, read, sunbathe, play and picnic. There is an openness and restfulness on the West Mesa that is missing in many other areas of the park. It is a landscape that Sam Parsons Jr. would recognize.

Parsons’ Plan in his Own Words

Don’t disturb the natural beauty:  [Many areas of San Diego’s park should remain undisturbed because]  “nature has so beautifully and perfectly modeled slopes and sides of canyons. Hollow inclines and narrow gullies of as subtle beauty as the most perfectly sculptured forms of the human figure, need no touch of art, which at best would disturb a peculiar charm that is in such perfect harmony with its setting of surrounding country, where canyon and canyada, at certain seasons of the year draped with only a light covering of thin growth of flowering shrubs, give the impression of fold on fold of most beautiful grayish green.”

Encircle with a ring road: “An essential thing in the ordering of a park is a road along and outside its boundaries, to prevent abutment of private or other buildings upon it. In this case, however, it has been found impracticable to establish such a boundary avenue because of numerous canyons and other steep declivities, but in all possible places such an avenue has been provided.”

No-building principle”: “Another general principle, which cannot be too urgently insisted upon, from the very beginning, is that no building should be allowed within its boundaries that does not subserve the legitimate purpose for which the park was ordered.”

Roads and viewpoints: “In the general adjustment of roads we have been governed, primarily , by the consideration of reaching view points from which interesting scenes within and outside the boundaries of the park may be seen to the greatest advantage, and in making these roads easy to traverse, have made them as a trail would have been made, producing thus a thing that exactly fits a place, and has in addition to the beauty of fitness, one also of gracefulness.”

Shut out the city din: “A primarily essential object in designs of parks in most great cities is to shut out as thoroughly as possible all sense of feeling of the city, with its multitudinous activities and noises and buildings, lying without and around it; so that the restfulness of nature may be uninterruptedly enjoyed, as in the Central Park of New York. In the San Diego Park it is different. Upon entering, the vision is compelled by the noble scenery which girdles the horizon with uninterrupted majesty.”

Conserve the natural beauty:  “We wish to admonish those who come after us in the work of carrying out our design to a nearer state of completion, and in adding such things as future needs may demand; to work always with an eye single to the conservation of the unusual beauties with which nature has so peculiarly, and richly endowed this spot of earth.”

“Sane public opinion” constantly needed to thwart nonpark uses: “In the matter of public parks there are so many of the public to whom it belongs, who, being unable to comprehend for just what purpose it was made, try constantly, and with good intention, to divert it to uses altogether apart from the original and true purpose of it, that constant pressure of sane public opinion is needed to save it from them.”

Protect natural beauty from “hurtful purposes: [In this park plan we have tried our best] ”to preserve and accentuate natural beauties of a very unusual kind, which we trust may be kept forever free from the interjection of all foreign, extraneous, and hurtful purposes, or objects.”

Read the full 23-page report go to: tinyurl.com/parsons-report-1905

Newpaper articles on Parsons’ involvement in planning the park. The map shows the locations he suggested for roads to and within the park. The central road is roughly where Park Boulevard was eventually built. Sixth Avenue and Balboa Drive are located at the left. The dotted line in the center is roughly where Florida Drive is today.