Seattle Parks

Seattle's Board of Park Commissioners was established in 1887 and reconstituted as an independent body in 1903, the same year the city engaged the Olmsted Brothers — the landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and John Charles Olmsted — to design a comprehensive system of parks linked by tree-lined drives. The resulting plan called for a green ring around the city's lakes and hills, connecting what would become Volunteer Park, Seward Park, Lincoln Park, and dozens of smaller grounds via scenic boulevards.

The word "boulevards" on this cover carried specific period meaning: these were not ordinary streets but dedicated pleasure drives — wide, landscaped, and intended to move park visitors through the landscape without mixing them into commercial traffic. Several survive as park property today, including Lake Washington Boulevard and Interlaken Boulevard, both now closed to cars on weekends.

The cover's oval photograph was reproduced by halftone — a process that breaks a continuous-tone image into tiny ink dots small enough to print on a press — standard for promotional printing of the 1900s–1910s. The scene shows a shoreline with low buildings, likely along Elliott Bay. The ornate display lettering, mixing heavy roman capitals with a looser script treatment for "Playgrounds" and "Boulevards," was a common convention for civic promotional printing in the Edwardian period.

At the very foot of the cover, in small capitals: SMILEY · SEATTLE. No commercial directory record for a Smiley printing firm has surfaced in available Seattle archives, though small local job printers often left only the thinnest paper trail.