NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Park and Recreation Structures

TO PROVIDE abundant hospitality for picnicking unquestionably the most popular recreational offering of natural parks requisite facilities must be scaled to peak attendances which touch new highs with each succeeding summer holiday. This, in terms of cooking units, means uncounted numbers of them, and in our parks their multiplication has been forced at an alarming pace. Is it then any wonder that critical opinion tends to urge that fireplaces be inconspicuous as well as completely practical? In this little scene Practicality will monopolize the center of the stage, and Aesthetics, if she is to have a speaking part at all, will be heard only from the wings.

But before Aesthetics is summarily driven out into the raging blizzard and biting wind off stage, may we not allow her an exit line? Let her rant that she played no small part when the chimneyed picnic fireplace was an ugly threat and the figurative "inability to see the woods for the trees" could be paraphrased to a literal "inability to see the trees for the chimneys."

In all truth our park vistas until lately were becoming more and more encumbered with chimneyed eruptions of the monumental proportions, and even the appearance, of a dismal mortuary art. It is not gross exaggeration to state that merely topping off with cast iron statues of military aspect the soaring piles of masonry elbowing each other in many antiquated picnic areas would approximate some very typical, and hideously compact, historic battlefields. Happily there is increasing evidence that the chimney blight is currently on the wane, thanks to the clamor raised by Aesthetics. If it is not eventually completely stamped out, then an aggressive campaign for picnic menus without benefit of cooking must be launched to save some of our picnic groves.

The pioneers, the plainsmen, who frequently cooked out-of-doors on the most primitive of contrivances, needed no chimney for their cooking, which on occasion embraced baking as well. Hence the open flueless fire would seem to be adequate for outdoor cooking in any situation and the chimney to be functionally unnecessary to any picnic fireplace.

The essentials of the inconspicuous chimneyless picnic fireplace are few and neither complex nor very rigid. Recently a number of revolutionary departures from principles long held to be inviolable have been taken with apparent success. It was once felt that the firebox, to be truly effective, must be roughly 12 inches wide and 24 inches long. A fireplace developed and now in wide use in parks in Colorado just reverses this and has a firebox width two or three times its shallow front-to-back dimension. Similarly, until lately the grate was very generally set about 12 inches above the hearth, but now there is noted a tendency to reduce this hearth-to-grate dimension. When it is from five to seven inches, economy of fuel consumption results, and the alternative use of charcoal for fuel is possible. The lowered grate means more stooping to use, but this is not a consideration of weight when the preparation of but one or two meals on a day's outing is involved. In such circumstances the importance of subordinating fireplace to surroundings justifies some sacrifice of convenience in use. The alternative of elevating both hearth and grate so that the latter is at a more convenient level is the prerogative of the campstove intended for day-in and day-out use by camping parties over extended periods. With campstoves it is reasonable that convenience have the call over aesthetic considerations. Thus is the line drawn between campstove and picnic fireplace.

Simplification seems to have become the watchword in fireplace design, once the chimney was shaken off. Apparently some observers came to feel that the rear wall was merely a vestigial remnant of the chimney and itself nonessential. In many parks a fireplace having side walls only and a firebox open at front and back evolved. A fireplace with no rear wall to join the side walls together has points of advantage. It will take a wider variety of fuel than more enclosed structures. It will cool more quickly and is less susceptible to breaking as it cools or as the grate expands under heat. In Minnesota and North Dakota the momentum of simplification has resulted in a unit of four low masonry piers to support the grate, with each of the four sides potentially a front and no chance of a draft that is disadvantageous. Whatever the form of the fireplace, some level shelf space as a part of it is useful for setting out cooking utensils and for keeping cooked food hot.

THE DESIGN OF GRATE is affected by several considerations. The interstices should be small enough to prevent, as someone has reasoned, "any but the most emaciated hot dog from dropping through."

The Central New York State Parks Commission has developed a cast iron grate which meets well this specification, but has also contrived, at one tenth the cost of the cast product, a satisfactory substitute, which can be cut to size from diamond mesh culvert reinforcement with a pair of bolt cutters. When the tendency to vanish, seemingly inherent in all unanchored park accessories short of "two-man" size, is borne in on the consciousness, the virtue of cheapness is appreciated. Some type of secure fastening of the grate to the masonry is the only alternative in long-range economy.

Hinged grates or grids make for convenience in the removal of ashes from the firebox. Grates subjected to the weather and intense heat, or in the event of failure to keep ashes removed, deteriorate and must be replaced periodically. When grates are built into the masonry, the disadvantage is obvious. If the side walls are connected by a rear wall or by a foundation, provision should be made to prevent the cracking and breaking of the masonry when the bars or grate expands under heat. Sleeves of pipe or tubing, built into the walls to receive the bars, or a slot for other types of grate, allow for expansion.

Fireplaces should not be placed near enough to trees to injure either branches or roots by heat. Orientation in relation to prevailing air currents is an important consideration.

Of all possible picnic fireplaces, a skillful manipulation of native ledge rock or a few large boulders, to a reasonable compliance with the practical and yet at first glance to suggest a natural arrangement or outcropping, is in the best park character and can take its bow on Nature's stage without blush or apology. This cannot be said for some other solutions which are ever more or less ill at ease in a natural landscape. Of these others, probably the most satisfying is the low stone unit laid up with mortar, and the closer its kinship to a natural formation or a casual piling up of rock, the more pleasing it is.

Because certain kinds of rock crack or explode under intense heat, it is common practice to line rock fireplaces with firebrick. This results in longer life for the unit, and provides a good level bearing for the grate, and is indeed practical, though it may detract from the informality so much favored for the fireplace. Before it is elected to omit the firebrick lining, it should be made certain that the rock is a kind that will not crack or explode in heat.

Because water thrown on rock or masonry heated to high temperatures tends to cause it to fracture, signs should be provided to instruct the public in the proper extinguishing of fires. It is better to put out a fire with earth than water, but recommendations to that effect may result in undesirable prospecting for earth nearby to the detriment of the picnic site.

One blind to the fact that in some regions neither rock nor boulders are indigenous might rule that, even there, fireplaces of any other materials are unthinkable and taboo. This view cannot be sponsored here in the face of a firm conviction that required facilities built of materials of "natural" origin, but "foreign" to an area, are no less than arrant Nature faking. Fireplaces of brick, concrete, or metal are surely to be preferred to this.

Probably such strictly utilitarian solutions are hardly to be considered "landscape units." But they can be not inefficient as to operation, not unskilled as to workmanship, not unsightly as to form, within limitations of their own. They are economical in the current demand for picnic units in greater numbers, and are somehow unmannered and free of false pretense.

THERE HAS BEEN CITED a growing doubt of the complete appropriateness of innumerable self-conscious repetitions of picnic tables of rustic handcraft and fireplaces imitative of rock outcrops on the very fringes of a machine age metropolis. The Cook County Forest Preserve District authorities have long realized that the rock-sculptured fireplace is a quaint anachronism in the perennially convalescent Nature in their charge. Moreover, they know that, in spite of every possible structural precaution to insure long life, this kind of facility remains intact scarcely one season under the hard use to which swarming hordes of picnickers subject it. They have tried experiment after experiment to determine the utmost in practical durability in a use of twentieth-century materials in a contemporary vein. Concrete units have been designed, constructed, tested, with innumerable revisions. Varying mixtures, employing various aggregates, have been subjected to rigid tests. Simultaneously many all-steel designs have been tried by fire and by torture, with resulting changes and constant improvement.

The battle of concrete versus steel for the light middleweight fireplace championship in the Chicago area has been thrilling all the way, and to hear it colorfully and dramatically broadcast round by round by the official observer and referee, Roberts Mann, superintendent of maintenance of the district, is equal to a seat at the ringside. The plates picture the current concrete favorite and what has been described as "the improved one-cylinder 1937 model" of steel. Latest flash from the Chicago front: CONCRETE CHAMPION CRACKING STOP ALL-STEEL CONTENDER WINNING DECISION ON POINTS.

Both concrete and steel fireplace units lend themselves to mass production methods at a central point, and are easily installed. Where the need is for thousands, or only for hundreds, of units, these factors are important. Although in Cook County the concrete fireplace has been perfected to a point where its weaknesses of form seem to have been overcome, no materials mixture has been found which does not show, after a year's time, signs of progressive deterioration under use and abuse, and abuse, unhappily, must ever be reckoned with.

The major drawback of the Cook County all-steel model is that it "requires skilled labor and lots of it." But if this produces a practically indestructible, theftproof, trim, compact, efficient unit which can be rustproofed with a special aluminum heat-resisting paint that weathers to an inconspicuous silver-gray, the high labor cost may prove to be entirely justified over the long run.

There are those who foresee in the expanding demand for picnic facilities the threat of fireplaces more crowded than gopher mounds on a prairie and who propose to meet it by resorting to multiple fireplaces. Obviously, the close coupling of units somewhat reduces smoke annoyance and hazard to tree growth, and can boast a certain economy of construction. The sole opposing argument, however, is formidable because it is based entirely on human nature. The massing of the cooking units brings in too close contact too many cooks, proverbially not conducive to peace and good will. Moreover, the propelling inspiration behind most picnics is a desire to get away from crowds. Confronted with sound reasoning both for and against multiple fireplaces, one shies at making oracular pronouncement sweeping in scope.

The discussion to this point has embraced more or less typical outdoor fireplaces and neglected the very simplest provisions for cooking out-of-doors that for some people are the most fun. A mere rock-bordered hearth will provide for a fire with minimum danger of spreading. This type of open fire is satisfactory only for cooking requiring no utensils. Supplemented by two forked sticks, a cross arm, and wire hooks to hold kettles, this basic facility is not necessarily inconvenient, and its cooking range is widened. In some western areas an iron stake, driven into the ground at the center of the hearth and furnished with revolving cranes and grids, has met with favor.

The one variety of picnic fireplace which dares to be somewhat pretentious is a combination of chimneyed fireplace and campfire ring, exedralike in form and as suitable a structure for a modest memorial to an individual as is to be found in natural parks.

In regions where the barbecue is a religion, the details of the pit are probably too much a part of the ritual itself, and to varied in strictly personal interpretations by the high priests thereof, to risk a controversy by more than mention here.

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