NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Park and Recreation Structures

EXACTLY three times a day facilities for cooking and serving meals become the most important structures in every camp, wherefore too much care in planning them is hardly possible. The primary structure is a dining lodge housing dining room and kitchen with necessary dependencies. While separate structures for cooking and dining purposes are imaginable in some situations, the arrangement promises too little of logic and efficiency to occur very often.

The outdoor kitchen as a joined or detached dependency of the unit lodge has already been touched on. This facility in which the cooking done is normally recreational and occasional, and not an efficient "three-square-a-day" business routine, is not a present concern. After a preliminary reference to campstoves, the discussion here will treat only of the dining lodge, combining dining room and kitchen, and the several minor accessories which may be housed either in it or in small independent buildings clustered around the kitchen wing or service court.

Campstoves have previously been discussed and illustrated as needed facilities in the public campground of a park. They likewise have useful purpose in the organized camp planned for the use of families, where it is likely a family will sometimes wish to prepare a meal on its own. They will differ not at all from the types of park campstove illustrated in the section "Campstoves", for they will properly be built to greater height than picnic fireplaces; they may, or may not, have a sheltering roof; and they may be either single or multiple. When an organized family camp can be built with its full complement of desirable structural accessories, one or more campstoves will be provided in each cabin group.

DESIRABLE OBJECTIVES in devising a plan for a dining lodge are wide and pleasing views from the dining room, ample light and cross ventilation for both dining room and kitchen, and a relationship between these two units which will result in a service of maximum efficiency with a minimum of steps. The T-shaped plan accomplishes these objectives, and is recommended above all other plan possibilities, with a full realization that the recommendation, if widely accepted, will lead to a degree of standardization, and that standardization is frowned on by designers of ability. Nevertheless, the T-shaped plan has too many advantages to justify rejection of it solely on the score of its being too commonly used.

The dining lodge is generally built for summer use only. It can therefore be of very light construction and can have many large screened openings with low sill height for the full benefits of view and ventilation. All openings should be equipped with shutters or closures of a type to give protection in stormy weather while the camp is occupied and to make possible closing the building out of season.

Completely effective insect screening of the dining lodge is essential. This should include all roof and floor ventilators and every other minor opening, for only the most positive precautions against the entrance of flies, where food is prepared and served, comply with recommended camp practice.

A fireplace is a welcome feature in the dining room not too widely open to retain the cheer and warmth a fireplace can spread on chilly mornings and evenings and in wet weather. Its flue and, let it be remarked in passing, the flues of all camp buildings, regardless of purpose, should be topped off with an effective spark-arresting device.

A dining room of suitable size will be had by allowing from 10 to 15 square feet of floor area per camper, depending on the size and shape of the dining tables. Table and bench combinations, that is, tables with seats attached, such as are appropriate in the picnic area, are not recommended in the camp dining room. Chairs or benches independent of the tables will be useful on those occasions when the tables must be stored away to clear the room for recreational use. Tables seating four, six, or eight persons have been found practicable. They may be square, round, or rectangular. In camps where the lack of a separate central recreation hall means that the dining room must sometimes be converted to recreational use, light dining tables of folding type, which can be easily handled and stored in a small space, are a possibility.

In most well-ordered camps, a current trend in the serving of meals is to duplicate as far as possible practices that would prevail in a not underprivileged home. Meals are served as at a family table with campers taking turns as waiters and a counselor serving at each table or delegating the serving to one of the campers. Stacking the dishes and skidding them to the end of the table nearest the kitchen may be timesaving, but there is nothing else to recommend it and, as a permissible practice, it is out. There are those who condemn cafeteria service in a camp dining room for being institutional in flavor. There are localities, however, notably along the Pacific coast, where this type of service has been preferred. Regional preferences should be the weighing factor when a choice between the two types of service is to be made.

To prevent kitchen heat, noises, and odors from penetrating to the dining room, the openings between these rooms should be limited to two doors, whichever type of service is adopted. The camper-waiters of the one plan will pass in one door, pick up food from a serving counter extending across the kitchen, and reenter the dining room by the other door. If cafeteria service is used, the counter, of course, will be on the dining room side of the partition separating dining room and kitchen, and the two doors will serve the in-and-out traffic of the kitchen help. In either case the counters should be continuous, with gates or hinged tops at any required openings to bar the campers from the kitchen help's field of operations.

The most vexing problems of camp operation invariably center around these employes. A first and far step in forestalling some of the difficulties which can arise is to keep the campers out of the kitchen proper and away from behind the serving counter. It is appreciated that in many camps the campers will be detailed to set the tables, to assist in the preparation of vegetables, and to perform other tasks, but it is only rational so to plan the dining lodge that this amateur help will not recurrently short circuit the professional and blow the fuse of morale. Very effective insulation against such disasters is to provide a screened porch directly off the kitchen where the campers doing K. P. can work at their set tasks out from under foot of the cook and his assistants.

IN THE CAMP KITCHEN, as in every other kitchen, the lay-out of equipment should adhere to the tried principles of efficient arrangement. In short, it should be zoned for three basic functions—preparation of food, serving of food, and dishwashing—arranged in this proper sequence. In the well-planned kitchen the dishwashing zone will be definitely isolated from the two others, which will be as disentangled one from the other as their inherently close relationship will permit. Range, work tables, counters, dish closets, pan racks, sinks, and all the items which make up the complete kitchen will only find their proper location if the importance and use of each in relation to the others has been carefully analyzed, and if such factors as light, ventilation, and circulation, have been weighed.

Size is a matter of first importance in the kitchen. There is no glib formula for calculating the exact desirable size, yet for every particular case there is a right answer within very narrow limits, about as one might say the answer to 7 times 7 is between 48 and 50. The kitchen a little large is much too large; the kitchen a little small is much too small. And sadly enough, the kitchen that is just the right size is very rare indeed.

Concrete floors under the range and the hot water heater serve as a safeguard against fire. If extended throughout the kitchen, concrete provides a floor surface that is more easily cleaned than wood, though harder on the feet of those who must stand on it all day, and usually costlier. Wall and ceiling surfaces adjacent to the range and to the hot water heater should be adequately fireproofed.

The temper of the kitchen staff and the temperature of the kitchen would appear as parallel movements if shown by graphs. No simple ventilating device which will aid in keeping down temperature and tempers in the kitchen should be omitted from the construction. A long, low ridge ventilator, screened and fitted with movable louvres, will serve as an outlet for the warm air and cooking odors which accumulate under the roof. Louvred screened openings at the floor line will supply fresh air and, in conjunction with the ridge ventilator, effect a helpful natural circulation of air. An abundance of windows for cross ventilation and light is strongly urged. An overventilated summer camp kitchen south of the arctic circle is yet to be heard of. Whereas the sills of the dining room windows should be low enough to afford persons seated views of the outdoors, the sills of the kitchen windows should be high enough to clear all counters and sinks at a suitable working height.

Dependencies of the kitchen desirably joined with it include a cool room; a refrigerator having two compartments, one for meats, the other for vegetables and dairy products; a rodentproof storage closet; and a service porch. The cool room is a storage place for vegetables and need not be large if it is supplemental to an underground vegetable cellar. A secondary function of the cool room, if proper planning has the refrigerator entered from the cool room and not directly from the kitchen, is to insulate the ice box against kitchen heat. In such a plan arrangement, ice is conserved, and some of the cold lost by the refrigerator serves to lower the temperature of the cool room.

To serve a summer camp adequately, the ice box of necessity will be large. Whether it may be a carpenter-built affair that pretends to no exceptional rating for efficiency or should be a commercially built box of guaranteed, proved insulation value depends on the source of ice. Obviously, in northern locations where natural ice has been cut and stored near at hand in abundance, there will not be the same economic reason for efficiency in the ice box as exists where artificial ice must be brought from a distance. An outside icing door placed suitably high in the wall will prove convenient.

In the rodentproof closet are kept the staples and foodstuffs which do not require storage in a cool place. Quarter-inch wire mesh over walls and ceilings and between subfloor and finish floor will prevent animals from entering the closet.

The service entrance steps and porch should be built of masonry or concrete. Not only must these endure much wear and tear due to deliveries and removals, but there will be frequent need for hosing down the platform and steps to keep them in a sanitary condition. Nearby, though preferably not directly joined with the steps, should be a concrete platform for garbage cans. It is convenient to have this at truck platform height.

If toilet and wash basin are not available in another building close by, there will be the economy of saved time if these are provided along with other dependencies in the kitchen wing.

It is conceivable that there might be need in a large camp for a dietitian's or steward's office where accounts and deliveries might be checked and other duties performed away from the kitchen proper. It can be a very small room, and its proper location is near the service entrance door.

DEPENDENCIES OF THE DINING LODGE which are better housed separately than incorporated within the kitchen wing are few. Most necessary is space for fuel storage. If the fuel for the range and the water heater is the usual coal or wood, a small separate structure in which to store it convenient to the service entrance will keep much dirt and dust out of the kitchen. To bring in fuel from the outside may seem less convenient than to dip into an abundant supply stored alongside the range, but the annalist should ponder the more frequent scrubbings of the kitchen floor made necessary when the kitchen doubles as the coal bin.

If gasoline or oil must be used as fuel for the kitchen range and heater in the camp, it becomes mandatory to provide a separate shed a safe distance from all other structures, marked to announce the hazardous contents, and otherwise in compliance with any governing regulations in force.

In some localities an underground storage place for vegetables, convenient to the kitchen wing, will be useful. When ice must be brought from such distances that buying for only a few days' need is uneconomical, or when winter ice is cut on the camp property and a season's supply must be stored on the premises, generous storage space is needed. As for other minor structural needs associable with camp cooking and dining facilities, it is pointless to explore the nontypical further to a possible confounding of typical construction.

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