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Chapter Four: Hare & Hare: 1924–1951
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career Herbert Hare was actively involved with the profession, publishing and lecturing on landscape planning and design. He was a fellow of both the American Institute of Park Executives and the American Society of Landscape Architects and served as the director of the American Institute of Planners and vice president and president of the American Society of Landscape Architects.3 In Kansas City before Kessler’s death, Hare & Hare worked with him on many projects, and when Kessler died, the two firms were collaborating on a plan for the new town of Longview, Washington, evidence that Hare & Hare had moved into city planning as an important aspect of its practice. The appointment of Hare & Hare to finish George Kessler’s Kansas City commissions “was a measure of Kessler’s respect and trust of the Hare and Hare firm.”4 Houston’s Board of Park Commissioners and Planning Commission followed Kansas City’s lead and hired Hare & Hare in 1923 to take up where Kessler had left off. Herbert Hare was put in charge of the Houston work, and from the beginning he paid careful attention to the plans envisioned by Comey and particularly Kessler for a citywide park system and its central component, Hermann Park.5 Zoological Gardens Hare & Hare’s first project in Hermann Park was the Zoological Gardens . In 1921 the City of Houston had begun to move its animals, including Earl the buffalo, from Sam Houston Park to Hermann Park. Hare & Hare’s ink-on-linen “Plan for Zoological Garden in Hermann Park,” dated 1924, called for the main entrance to the zoo to be on axis T he Kansas City landscape architecture firm Hare & Hare inherited most of George Kessler’s clients. The senior partner, Sidney J. Hare (1860–1938), knew and admired Kessler, for whom he had worked in the Kansas City engineer’s office between 1881 and 1886. Sid Hare had no formal training, but as a high school student he studied horticulture, surveying, and geology, which quali- fied him to work for the city engineer as a surveyor, draftsman, and photographer. Hare was inspired by Kessler to pursue landscape design as a profession. In 1896 Sid Hare resigned his city job and accepted a position as the superintendent of Forest Hill Cemetery. The following year at the Association of American Cemetery Superintendents convention in Cleveland, he established himself as an authority on cemetery design, and in 1901 he delivered a paper on the cemetery as botanical garden, bird sanctuary, and arboretum. In his five years at Forest Hill, Hare assembled one of the most comprehensive collections of trees and shrubs in the Midwest. In 1902 Sidney J. Hare established a private practice in landscape architecture with the specialty of cemetery design.2 Sid Hare’s son, S. Herbert Hare (1888–1960), followed in his father’s footsteps but received the academic training necessary to put the family firm in the forefront of the new profession of landscape architecture. Herbert Hare attended Harvard’s School of Architecture in 1908 where he, like Arthur Comey (who graduated one year before Herbert Hare’s matriculation), studied under Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. Hare did not complete his Master’s Degree but returned to Kansas City in 1910 to enter his father’s firm, which then became Hare & Hare. Throughout his CHAPTER FOUR Hare & Hare 1924–1951 The people of Houston and their officials will have to decide whether they are building a great city or merely a great population.1 —S. Herbert Hare, 1929 50 Chapter Four at the Houston Zoo was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.9 Rodriguez’s dramatic tree sculpture in Hermann Park inspired a painting called The Bird Haunt by the Houston artist and teacher Ola McNeil Davidson (1884–1976). The painting was featured on the cover of Civics for Houston magazine in 1928.10 This area that once housed a variety of bird life is now the flamingo habitat filled with pink Chilean flamingos and the surviving Rodriguez sculptures. After completion of the aviary the main entrance to the zoo was placed next to the aviary on the west, not on axis with Montrose as the Hare & Hare plan shows. Other deviations from the plan occurred as construction proceeded. Hans Nagel had become the first zookeeper in 1922 in charge of forty animals, including a lion and several other animals purchased from a circus; initially they were all housed in a fenced section at the back of the Hermann Park in the area that Hare & Hare transformed into the Zoological...