FINAL STUDY GUIDE EVERYTHING INCLUDED
Jena-Paul Sartre
“American Cities,” pp. 197-205
He is a French philosopher and writer who traveled through American at the end of World War II. He writes about his
impressions of American cities and how they compare to European cities. It is equal parts accurate description and his
subjective opinion. He makes many comments and generalizations about American cities and gives an insight into how an
outsider views “our” cities.
European cities vs. American cities:
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European cities are continuous.
American cities between New Orleans and San Francisco are oases in the desert and generalizes that the “American
city” was originally a camp in the desert.
Settlement of American cities:
 People attracted by prosperity/resources arrive and settle as quickly as possible (building vital parts of town: bank,
town hall, church)
 Main road = spinal column of town. Other roads = vertebrae branching off
 Settlement same in 1940’s as in covered wagon days. Every year new towns are founded in the same way.
 Ex: Fontana, Tennessee
o Began due to construction of a dam (three towns sprang up), fuels growth of town.
o At height-one birth/day
o Use of “prefabricated houses: constructed somewhere else and transported by trucks (can be set up in 4 hrs)
o Hundreds of house, all alike, have a nomadic look
o “village has no weight…it is a temporary thing”: when dam done, workers pack up and move to new
prosperous project
 U.S.: communities created and destroyed in a day
o Americans only care about being able to take their homes with them (furnishings, personal belongings) not
house which is a shell and abandoned as such
 France: workers’ communities but are sedentary and don’t become real cities
 U.S.: any new community can become metropolis like Detroit or Minneapolis with some luck (Detroit pop. 1905-time
of writing, 300K to 1 million.
o Inhabitants like to recall when city was just an outpost (make no distinction between two)
o Even biggest cities born temporary and in essence stay that way
 Example of level of change. Going off to war ppl. Sell apartments and things b/c will be outmoded when return.
 U.S.: fashionable neighborhoods go from center of city to outskirts (suburbanization) – buildings bought to be
demolished and have new/bigger ones built
 U.S.: city = moving landscape
 Europe: city = shell
o Very old ppl. can say “when I was young the city was different this way”
 America: middle-aged and younger can make same statements about changes
o Man in San Francisco saw city change due to reconstruction after earthquake/fire and rapid Americanization
from Asiatic look: memories of 3 distinct San Franciscos
 Europeans change within changeless cities vs. American cities change faster than inhabitants
 During trip America in war and cities stagnant but temporary state
 American cities too young for ppl to find social past or tradition in them
o Consider cities instruments to be exchanged for more convenient ones like cars
o Houses resemble prefabricated ones of frontier communities: hastily built to be hastily demolished
o Sense that America is not finished; ideas/social structure have temporary reality
 Los Angeles (big urban cluster): 20 identical cities in one; like medium urban center reproduced itself
 Neighborhoods added on as prosperity attracts new ppl. Juxtaposition is rule: poor street right next to aristocratic area
 Cities not constructed to grow old but to move forward
o The past isn’t fostered. Only survives when happens not to be torn down
 U.S.: vertical disorder, buildings of varying heights
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U.S.: street is a piece of highway; doesn’t encourage walking; no mystery, straightforward
American not familiar with own city; only his neighborhood of surrounding 10 blocks
Cities all look alike (checkerboard design) but with unique aspects
Common element of Amer. Cities: temporary look
o Long straight roads give view of mtns/fields/sea from any part
o Frail, temporary, formless, unfinished, nothing is definitive
o Cities are stopping places on the roads; feel contact with them is temporary
Boredom of city: Ex: middleclass families eating in restaurants on Sun. in silence
Cities with similarities to outposts of Far West display side of U.S.
o Freedom: ppl free to leave customs of a place for another city
o Cities are open [to world and future]
Anne Mackin Americans and Their Land
 American character has been shaped by the abundance of land and resources
o Supported social and economic growth and mobility
o Plentiful land underlay national as well as individual prosperity
o Thomas Malthus “the happiness of Americans depended … upon their having a great
plenty of fertile uncultivated land”
 Two sides to prosperity; Succumbing to luxury
o Americans are consumers who spend trillions of dollars every year
o We are obsessed with the rapid development of technology
o Materialism in general is part of the American Dream; having lots of “stuff”
 Too Much Growth?
o Attitudes towards growth and property rights are changing as cities clamor to reduce
growth
o Depletion / degradation of natural resources  increased govt regulation
o Housing continues to take a greater share of Americans’ income
o Widening gap between the rich and the poor
o Most unaware about how actions affect the land, natural resources, and overall
environment  however gradually beginning to see the affects
o Must become aware and see how they affect cities and the land we inhabit
John Reps
The Making of Urban America, chapter 7 (5)
Colonial Towns of Carolina and Georgia
Introduction:
At end of 17th century, only Pennsylvania and the southern areas left to be colonized. This chapter chiefly talks about
Charleston, one of the larger more important commercial and intellectual cities of America and Savannah, which had an
interesting plan whose growth followed for more than a century.
Charleston, New Bern, and Edenton:
Between Ashley, Cooper river on the delta. A fort was originally built along the Cooper river side, but eventually site
expanded around 1720s, town expanded and Indians subdued. Grand Modell followed, design prepared when Locke and other
proprietors had developed government scheme for colony. Plan was real simple and not that noteworthy. Gridiron design with
a square at center where the two principal streets intersect and a harbor promenade. In end what makes Charleston highly
admired were the handsome buildings erected after 1740 fire.
New Bern and Edenton served as seats for the colony’s assembly. New Bern, planned by Graffenried, allowed for large streets
and open space, since “[Americans] do not like to live crowded.” Two streets formed a cross for the church in the middle. But
an Indian attack around the 1720s set it back. Town insignificant until assembly seat from 1754-61. Resembles plan of
Edenton, assembly seat c. 1710-40. But while in New Bern court and church on high ground in middle of city, Edenton had
theirs near the waterfront.
Sir Robert Mountgomery’s Margravate of Azilia
Given permission to colonize parts of Georgia, which was then still part of Carolina, if he settled it within three years. Instead
of individual forts, county to be surrounded by a fortification. 20 square miles. Outer square mile, fortification. Next two
square rings, for farming. Then rest gridded off, one square mile homes. But four, four square mile forests for public lands
near corners and a four square mile center for governors house. Never made three year deadline, but influenced Oglethorpe.
Oglethorpe and the Establishment of the Georgia Colony
Carolina gave southern territory back to crown due to defense expenditures. King George II gave it to Georgia trustees, led by
James Oglethorpe, a leader in prison and debtor reform. Georgia for people with debt or modest means to restart life. Charter
liked by crown, 21 years, crown could reexamine colony, no one to get more than 500 acres, land could not be split into itty
plots between heirs, trustees couldn’t own land.
The Founding of Savannah
Olgethorpe was a very hard worker. Organized Savannah. 4 wards of 4 square miles, each consisting of 4 Tidings of 10 houses
(60x90 feet) in each corner and two trustee lots in the middle left and right, all surrounding a square. Soon 6 wards. Wards
could multiply into open common right outside city. Each house had a 5 acre garden plot right outside the city and a 44 acre
farm lot outside that. Then there were around 39 square mile wooded areas outside the city for possible future use.
Ebenezer, Darien, Frederica
Salzerburgers with Olgethrope’s permission settled Ebenezer to the north. BAd spot, moved just east of Savannah into New
Ebenezer. Same as savannah’s plans except trustee lots on left and right middle of wards did not have a road through them as
Savannah’s did.
Darian for the Scots to the south. Consisted of one Savannah like ward. Frederica was a fortress town near Darian on St.
Simons Island. Similar again to savannah, except city surround a circular common around the fort. City declined quickly as
Spanish no longer a threat.
Other towns, Augusta sponsored by Olgethorpe, George Town sponsored by royal governor Reynolds to be capital, and many
others sponsored by private gentlemen, came and went. Many followed the Savannah plan loosely.
The Urban Pattern in Georgia: Tradition and Invention
Influenced by Montgomery, William Penn and Pennsylvania with liberty lands and the Ulster Plantation towns built in early
1600 in Northern Ireland.
Villages outside savannah. 4 villages make up a ward, which has a partner ward inside the city. If attacked, the villages would
encamp in square of partner ward.
Also influenced by new squares developed in Georgian London.
Wards multiplied according to original plan until mid 1800s, remarkable. Businesses set up along waterfront. But other towns
did not copy, possibly because not on way to expansion to west.
Possible key people:
James Oglethorpe, Sir Robert Mountgomery
Key terms:
Ward, Tiding, Charleston, Savannah
John Reps
The Making of Urban America, chapter 11 (6)
Checkerboard Plans and Gridiron Cities
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In the late 18th Century, most of the cities built in the United States adhered to a strict gridiron plan
o This was initially seen as lending a sense of order, regularity and rationality to the city
o However, the initial novelty was destroyed by the frequency with which this plan was implemented; it began
to be seen as a sign of lack of imagination
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The popularity of the gridiron plan was partly the result of its implementation in Philadelphia, the most important city
at the time. However, as political and economic power shifted to Washington and New York these cities became the
new models.
 The Planning of New York City
o 1807: Commission appointed by the State of New York with absolute power to determine the layout of NYC
north of Washington Square
o Adopted a gridiron system (12 north-south avenues, each 100 feet wide, intersected every 200 feet at right
angles by 155 streets 60 feet wide) which overlooked topography and major existing streets (such as
Broadway)
o Reserved relatively small amounts of space for a parade ground, several small parks and a public market
 Justified by the fact that Manhattan is surrounded by large bodies of water which they believed
would solve the commerce/health/pleasure problems
o Reps considers this plan a failure: he believes that the “narrow” economic concerns of the surveyor (regarding
the improvement of real estate) led to disastrous consequences (traffic, lack of space for public buildings)
 Reps uses the example of Chicago to demonstrate the gridiron patterns utility in maximizing economic value and
facilitating the expansion of a city’s population
 San Francisco’s population expands similarly – even with it’s unique topography a gridiron pattern was applied, this
again facilitated the expansion of population and growth in real estate investment
o Eventually, public space was set aside (Golden Gate Park) but the gridiron pattern was strictly adhered to (in
spite of the hills)
o Its unique topography allowed it to transcend the dull tradition of the gridiron system
 Thomas Jefferson’s Checkerboard Plan: Response to the problem of unattractive (gridiron) city planning
o Designed cities with a more open plan in order to improve public health
o Suggested the Checkerboard Plan: the black squares would be filled in by buildings, the white squares would
be left open (forested), so each developed square would be surrounded on all four sides by undeveloped land
(would give off the impression of living in the country while actually living in a city)
However, when put into practice (Jeffersonville and Jackson), the undeveloped lots proved too great a temptation and were
soon developed – defeating the purpose of the Checkerboard Plan
Thomas Jefferson
Query XIX from Notes on the State of Virginia, pp. 156-158 (7)
Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia
- Jefferson gives 3 main reasons that we should continue to trade with Europe for manufactured goods, but supply our
own agricultural goods:
1. There is a lot of land in the US so we should use it.
2. We aren’t as good at manufacturing goods as they are in England
3. Farming is virtuous and will create a good, moral group of citizens.
- Quotes:
o “We have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman.”
o “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts
He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”
o “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the
designs of ambition.”
o “Let our workshops remain in Europe.”
o “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of
the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in
these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”
“Mr. Jefferson’s University” Garry Willis
Article about Thomas Jefferson’s designing of the University of Virginia (UVA). While the architecture
of the buildings may seem regular and ordered, in actuality subtle design choices make the layout far more
complex and varied than many first assume.
A. Unlike most politicians, Thomas Jefferson (TJ) had concurrent careers of politician and architect.
a. Designed residential homes and Virginia’s State Capitol building, and created “ethos and a
rationale” for America’s public buildings.
b. Greatest work was “academical village” of UVA.
B. General design of Jefferson’s UVA.
a. Most of TJ’s patterns have been retained.
b. Four rows of buildings
i. Inner two rows are on either side of central Lawn and made up of Pavilions
(professor’s homes and classrooms).
ii. Rotunda (library) is in center of Lawn, Pavilions lead up to it
iii. Outer two rows (Ranges) made up of “Hotels” (service buildings)
iv. Colonnade on Lawn/Arcades on Ranges tie all buildings together
v. TJ uses a large ridge to make appearance irregular, though ordered.
vi. TJ’s design “combines the expectable with the surprising”
C. The Pavilions exemplify Jefferson’s subtle complexity/variety at UVA.
a. Different facades, columns
b. Columns negotiate the changing ground levels; “rhythm” of colonnade uneven
c. Pavilion widths vary, central doors are off-set from each other
d. Spacing between Pavilions creates depth illusion
i. Looking from south, makes Rotunda seem farther away
ii. From north, makes spaces look regular
e. Pavilion styles vary
D. Overall effect of design “paradoxical”
a. “regimentation and individual expression…hierarchical order and relaxed improvising”
b. Expression of conflicting elements marks the genius of TJ
John Reps
The Making of Urban America, chapter 16 (9)
Cities of Zion: The Planning of Utopian & Religious Communities
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Reformers, utopians and pariah religious sects also traveled across the continent to establish communities
o Many of the religious sects practiced some brand of communism
Homes for Heretics: The Huguenots = French Protestants
o Utopians were the minority among the settlers
o They created new communities that worked together
o Settled in Florida and the Carolinas
 Charlesfort, South Carolina by Ribaut 1562
 Fort Caroline, Florida by Coligny
o First successful colonization of New France involved Huguenots
o Oxford, MA 1687 – resembled other settlements of frontier New England
 Cluster of houses form village with farm and pasture lots lying beyond
o Manakin, Virginia 1700 – plan’s details, author & scale unknown
 Cannot tell which squares represent houses
 Town square in center
 Four corners of square for public hospital, church, laundry, townhouse, school
 Gardens between double rows of houses and on the two sides of the square fronting the woods and
the river
 Farm fields extended from the other two sides of the settlement
o Jamestown, South Carolina 1705 near Santee River
 Grid system
o
o
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 Smallest lots fronted directly on the town common bordering the river
 Not a successful town
1764 New Bordeaux village, vineyards, commons and church at center of township
Huguenot settlements not closed communities b/c inhabitants drifted to other towns or outsiders moved in
 Huguenots sought religious freedom and did not exclude people of dissimilar faith
Homes for Heretics: The Moravians
o Unitas Fratrum – Church of United Bretheren
o Consistent policy governed their planning
o Records of church and its settlement activities carefully preserved
o All have central square, grid plan, concentration of buildings in close proximity to village square, surrounding
belt of fields, grazing lands, and orchards farmed in common as a church enterprise
o Reproduced community forms most familiar to them in their European country of origin
o Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 1741
 Community center = church, town hall, hospice and church office in one
 Not clear if any overall village plan guided the gradual growth of the settlement
 Regularly laid out
 Mills near creek, skirting town
 Communal economy, directed by church
o Wachovia, North Carolina 1753
 Town = Bethabara
 Self-sufficient, industrialized
o Nazareth, Pennsylvania 1757
 Congregation town with permanent residents limited to members of the church
o Bethania, North Carolina 1759
 More regular than Bethlehem and Bethabara
 Rectangular town square at intersection of two main streets
 Farm fields surrounding village also perfectly regular
o Salem, North Carolina 1766
 Most impt town of Wachovia region
 Christian Reuter laid out town, but was guided by instructions and model plan from Bethlehem by
Friedrich Marshall (head of Wachovia Moravians)
 Close knit social community considered in deciding form of town plan
 Large lots with yard and garden for each family = good for children
 Wide-spread/sprawl no good b/c inconvenient and cannot be supervised by ministers
 Symmetrical
o To convert Indians Rev Zeisberger 1772 laid out Schoenbrunn and then Gnadenhuten 1773
 Church central feature
 Symbolical plan in the form of a Christian cross
George Rapp and his Towns of Harmony and Economy
o Harmony society let by Rapp
o 1803 settlement named Harmony, Pennsylvania
o 1814 moved to Wabash River in Indiana – “New Harmony”
o mid-1820s, moved to Economy, Pennsylvania
 regular grid layout
 sturdy, simple elegance, neat
 streets perpendicular to Ohio river
o Society dissolved around early 1900
Robert Owen’s New view of Society in Theory and Practice
o Took over Indiana Harmony 1825
o Expect to begin his transformation of modern industrial society in America
o Interested in national social and economic problems began in England
 Reduce unemployment with new towns
 More humane setting for manufacturing
 Came to America to build such towns
o Very specific about arrangement of buildings and uses w/in town
o
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 Town = Quadrangle enclosure
 Vacant space in middle for exercise and recreation
 3 sides of quadrangle family lodgings, one side dormitory for children
 manufacturing outside quadrangle
 agriculture beyond quadrangle self sufficient rural-urban unit
visionary plans never realized!
Zoar, Bethel, and Aurora and Amana
o Separatists led by Joseph Bimeler
 Build Zoar in eastern Ohio
 Grid with 2 ½ acre garden
 Central tree = salvation
 Twelve surrounding trees were apostles
 Paths radiating from central tree were paths to righteousness
o 1844 Bethel Missouri & 1856 Aurora, Oregon by Dr. Keil
 ownership of land was in common
 communities died after Kiel died
o Inspirationists led by Metz settled near Buffalo (western NY)
 All clothing and household property held in common
 Moved to Iowa River; named land Amana
 Tight clusters of houses and shops comprising villages
 Only 1 street
 Selling Ebenezer (land in NY) resulted in profits which they invested and prospered
Phalanstery, Phalanx and Fourier
o Fourier and later, Cabet dreamed of elaborate, complex towns; unusual plans
o Failures in building the towns, few lasted more than a year
o Fourier wanted to reorganize society on rational lines
o Bribane’s ideas:
 Phalanx = communal society dwelling in a vast building called a phalanstery
 Contains all the dwellings, common eating rooms, shops, places of worship, meeting halls
in one building
 Groups of such buildings form a city
 Criticized disorganization of cities of mid-1800s
o North American Phalanx near Red Bank, New Jersey 1843 lasted 12 yrs
 Farm community
 1854 ended with fire
Cabet and the Search for Icara
o Proposed city be divided into many separate districts bounded by major streets
 Each provided with necessary public buildings and local facilities
 Each of the 60 communities exhibits its monuments and dwellings in the architecture of one of the
sixty principal nations
 Public buildings are in all streets and every street contains the same number of houses
 Sidewalks, water supply, sewage disposal, street cleaning, etc
o Tried to settle in Texas, but didn’t work 1848
o Tried in Nauvoo
o Group split and little Icarian societies were formed in St. Louis and Cheltenham, Missouri and Corning, Iowa
and Speranza, CA
Frontier America was a proving ground for liberty and initiative; the more bizarre the group’s doctrine, the higher the
incidence of failure
Mormon Cities of Zion
o 1831 prophet Joseph Smith announced that God revealed to him that future center of Mormon kingdom was
to be Independence, Jackson County, Missouri
o three central blocks of city were sites of public buildings
 grid pattern
o
o
o
o
o
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 agricultural belt around city
lay out towns like this all over the world
driven by persecution to Far West, Cadwell County, Missouri
 1 square mile, differed slightly from city of Zion plan
Driven away again to Nauvoo, Illinois 1842
 Prospered
 Plan differed from City of Zion plan
 Persecuted again
Driven to Winter Quarters, Nebraska 1847
 New leader, Brigham Young
Moved again to Great Salt Lake, Utah
 Blocks divided into 8 lots
 House is supposed to be 20 ft back from front line of lot with shrubs and trees in that space
 Dozens of communities throughout Utah built in the spirit of Smith’s conception
 Houses not located at middle of plots, but grouped in fours at the street intersections; each house
built near the corner of its site formed by the two intersecting street lines
Zion by the Lake
o Zion city, Illinois – 40 miles north of Chicago on shores of Lake Michigan by Reverend Dowie
o Christian Catholic church of Zion
o Burton Ashley is designer but Dowie generated the outline of plan
o From the sides of the central square of 200 acres ran four main boulevards
o Four diagonal streets diverge from the corners of the central square cutting across the basic gridiron pattern
o Grid modified to follow watercourses where appropriate  winding park drives
o Along the lake shore north and south of the harbor, two large parks were provided (lake is on the eastern edge
of city)
o Leases could be declared forfeit if did not meet specific conditions
 holding stock in Zion Land and Investment Association
 One house to each lot
 No low class/sinful businesses like saloons
o Dowie ruled like a dictator
o City survived the death of its founder 1907 and Voliva became new leader until 1935
o The land company went bankrupt in 1933
Except Mormons, no group made any significant impression on the patterns of towns in its region
John Reps
The Making of Urban America, chapter 15 (17)
Chapter 15: The Towns the Companies Built
“The industrialization of America contributed more than any other single factor to the development and growth of the nation’s
cities. New factories provided jobs for new immigrants. Each additional person employed in manufacturing generated further
employment in retail and service activities and eventually in secondary manufacturing. As employment increased, towns
expanded to provide housing and the other physical requirements of city life” (414).
- the problem: largely unplanned urban expansion with many undesirable features
- COMPANY TOWN! – an effort to avoid these
“The conclusion is inescapable, however, that town planning by American industry generally failed to produce communities
significantly different or better than those which owed their layout to other sources. … American industry, which prided itself
ion its inventiveness in the operations of machinery or in business administration, remained fundamentally conservative in its
sporadic town planning activities” (414).
Mill Towns
- power looms – allowed much larger cities
- shortage of workers – wanted to attract young, unmarried women from farms of New England
- but factory employment not seen as positively moral – factory owners attempted to reverse the image by building
boardinghouses, providing bible reading sessions, making church attendance compulsory, making hours of work
reasonable, etc
- Lowell – the most famous example; but also Holyoke, MA
-
while for most the town provided a respectable environment, from early on, there were some workers (esp. Irish
immigrants) hired for building canals that lived in crowded shacks
- the Lowell plan became standardized – mainly thanks to immediate economic success of the city
- later, Irish girls could be employed for much lower wages and houses were not required to attract them as workers =>
the end of attractiveness and order of the mill towns
From Civil War to Chicago Fair
- early on, factories small so the order in them family-like
- BUT the scale of industrial enterprises brought an end to that – workers became a commodity like raw materials
- but the power of labor unions increased to – “there seems little doubt that many of the company towns founded in the
three decades before the turn of the century represented industry’s reply to these threats against absolute power. If
workers in a single plant cold be isolated from their fellows, if no alternative sources of employment were readily
available, and if employees were dependent on industry for housing, shopping facilities, and credit, then trouble might
be avoided” (421)
- early on – mining towns, but noone could tell when coal would be exhausted – so the housing sucked – very temporary
feel to it
Pullman, Illinois
- the European tradition of Enlightened Paternalism
- the town conceived and built as a unit – regularity of form
- but the paternalism too much – “uneasiness of the townspeople over their dependence on a single employer, their
resentment that no voice of criticism was tolerated, and their fear of losing the right to occupy their homes at the whim
of some company official. Ample, even lavish, residential accommodations and the luxury of the public buildings
could not overcome .. the feudal system of tenure” (424)
- during Chicago fair of 1893 Pullman received a lot of visitors
- but in 1894, due to recession, wages cut but rents remained the same => PULLMAN STRIKE
- court ordered the company to sell all property not directly related to production => unfavorable publicity
- examples of similar cities: Barberton, Ohio; Granite City, Illinois; Vandergrift, PA (designed by Olmsted family) – but
did not work out so well
New Towns in New Century
- Chicago Fair – 2 effects on modern city planning: 1) industrial leaders came away impressed with the idea of largescale planning, 2) the formal, axial disposition of the fair bildings came to be regarded as desirable
- but grid remained popular
- the newer towns – like Kohler, Wisconsin – also built whole communities, but unlike Pullman made the housing
available for purchase => REVERSION OF THE OLD PATERNALISM
Some conclusions
- “direct town founding and development by American industry has not been of great importance in terms of
population”
- “in quality of design the record is mixed”
- “even the best of the company towns appear to have exerted very little influence on subsequent town planning
activities”
- but it was in these cities that the first professional planning consultants found opportunities to experiment
- the feeling that the company “runs the town” contrary to the ideas of democracy in the US
“The paradox is plain. Where the towns were built and managed in a spirit of paternalism, as at Pullman, the physical results
might be pleasing but the towns lacked the sense of true communities in the socio-political sense. On the other hand, where the
companies did not attempt to dominate the social and political aspects of community life, as at Gary, the physical results were
often deplorable” (438).
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Jackson-Jefferson, Thoreau and After
This short reading is an explanation of a couple of origins for the American distrust of urban life.
Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau were two intellectuals that both opposed the urban
way of life, but differed in specifics.
Jefferson had a strong aversion to cities and preferred the rural way of life

o Cheap land and hostility towards centralized urban control were the two key aspects to
Jefferson’s philosophy
o A rural society was his argument against the urban environment and he attempted to inspire
the rural citizen who is an “active and effective participant in the political life in his
community”
o Man is his most natural in nature, but he is also innately a political creature
Thoreau protested against cities in from a more personal stance
o He preached for the fleeing of cities and a return to nature to avoid the dangers of the city
o Thoreau argued that the significant relationship is between man and his environment;
therefore, the farmer is as guilty as a member of a city because both fail to see themselves
as “parcels of nature”
Mackin, Americans and Their Land
Chapter 2: Land: The Early Bird Special
- By the early 16th Century, European fishermen were fishing off the coast of Newfoundland, so it
appears they beat Columbus to the new world
- European countries sponsored voyages to seek new trade routes
- 1607 – British colonization formed the first permanent colony in North America
- Skilled tradesmen rewarded with high wages – resource rich, man-poor economy
- Wide land distribution led to democratic ideals gaining hold
- America very attractive - Not only more available land, but economic and political freedom to a
much larger percentage of people
- Community relationships led to individual relationships between the man and his land
- Land distribution process favored the rich insofar as it reflected European economic and social
systems
- Puritan ideals could not hold up against a promise of individual prosperity and fulfillment, which
had no place in Puritan dogma
Chapter 6: Owning Ohio
- Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal was a late incarnation of George Washington’s dream of
opening the Potomac to westward navigation by connecting it to the Ohio River, but work didn’t
start on it until 1820
- Washington’s skills as a surveyor helped him acquire 2300 acres of land by his 20th birthday
- When French and Indian war started in 1754, Virginia Governor Dinwiddie offered 200,000 acres
of Ohio land to Virginians who would enlist to fight
- Washington became impatient when these lands promised were not given to him and his men – he
eventually ended up with 35,000 acres of land in Ohio
- The disenfranchised of Virginia eventually moved south and west – they formed first colonies in
North Carolina, and surged west into Kentucky
- Thomas Jefferson suggested a government that would take more responsibility for social welfare
than any developed country of that time
- Jefferson and Washington’s own large land holdings helped displace many people from Virginia,
but they only saw the large tracts of land to the west, and not the hardships of the wilderness
disenfranchised people would face to get there
- The democratic ideals presented by the early presidents influenced or coincided with federal policy
-
Before the end of the Revolutionary War, western bound settlers had a new government to present
their land concerns to
The Eastern Seaboard continued to grow, but it was no place for those wishing to have a lot of land
After the Revolutionary War, the federal government regulated land policy
By 1838, federal land offices had been established all along the frontier
Washington’s ideal of a democratic division of resources lived on for a few decades and then
finally faded, but his speculative investment habits live on.
Frederick J. Turner
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” pp. 1-15 (13)
In 1890, the United States Census Bureau declared the frontier to be officially closed. Turner's presentation in 1893 - known
among historians as the "Turner Thesis"
- essentially attempted to explain American history
to that point as a continuous, teleological story of westward expansion across the continent. Turner believed very strongly in
Manifest
Destiny.
Furthermore, he argued that American developments – political developments, such as democracy, and more abstract ones,
such as the American character - emerged from the frontier, and that the advance of civilization across free land guaranteed the
fundamental
basis
of
American
society.
American institutions were born out of frontier circumstances, at "the meeting point of savagery and civilization" (3), and
remained
distinct
from
European
ones
as
a
result
of
their
unique
origins.
Geographically and chronologically, Turner traces the advance of American civilization. His "record of social evolution" (11)
begins
along
the
Atlantic
seaboard,
with
wildlife
and
Native
Americans.
Then
comes
the
white man, and Turner's "procession of civilization" begins on its "march toward the West, impelled by an irrestistible
attraction" (12). The hunter and fisherman are followed closely by the fur-trader, then the rancher, then various degrees of
agricultural pioneers. By the time the farm settlements have become industrial manufacturing centers, the frontier is gone,
having
passed
by
on
its
way
further
west.
At each stage, Americans organized themselves around the needs of the frontier - particularly on the "Indian frontier" (15) - and
built
their
communities
to
reflect
those
needs.
Thus
we
have,
in
simplistic
form,
an
explanation
for
development
of
America.
"The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain
American development" (1)
Frederick J. Turner
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” pp. 16-38 (14)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain
American development (p. 31)
the peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an
expanding people (p. 32)
perennial rebirth—fluidity of American life, expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the
simplicity of primitive society—furnish dominating American character (p. 32)
frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization
American frontier much different from the European frontier
a. American—lies at the hither edge of free land
b. European—fortified boundary line running through dense populations
Atlantic coast frontier of Europe; moving westward, frontier became more and more American
a. advance westward has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe
b. steady growth of independence on American lines
c. the study of the really American part of our history (p. 33)
natural boundary lines have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
a. the fall line—marked the frontier of the 17th century
b. the Alleghany Mountains—18th century
c. the Mississippi River—first quarter of the 19th century
d. the Missouri River where its direction approximates north and south
e. the line of the arid lands approximately the ninety-ninth meridian
f. the Rocky Mountains
g. each was won by a series of Indian wars
Atlantic frontier serves as a means of studying the germs of process repeated at each successive frontier
American settlement a record of social evolution—Indian and the hunterdisintegration of savagery by the entrance of the
traderpastoral stage of ranch lifeexploitation of the soil in settled farming communitiesintensive culture of the
denser farm settlementsmanufacturing organization with city and factory system
French frontier dominated by its trading frontier; English colonization by its farming frontier
the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people (p. 42)
frontier created a demand for merchantsseaboard cities such as Boston, New York, and Baltimore engage in a rivalry for
the “extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire” (p. 43)
legislation which most developed the powers of the national government and played the largest part in its activity was
conditioned on the frontier
public domain has been a force of profound importance in the nationalization and development of the government
legislation with regard to land, tariff, and internal improvements was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs (p. 44)
a. economic and social characteristics of the frontier worked against sectionalism
b. eclectic nature
most important effect of the frontier has been the promotion of democracy here and in Europe (p. 46)
a. productive of individualism
b. frontier States came into the Union with democratic suffrage provisions (ex. western New York forced an
extension of suffrage in the constitutional convention of New York in 1821
Joel Garreau
Edge Cities: Life on the New Frontier, pp. xxvii-15 (15)
“Introduction: Pioneers, Frontiers and the 21st Century”
 Americans undergoing big change: how we build cities
o Unstructured- making it up as we go along
 American culture: individualistic-attacks obstacles
 Other current changes coinciding with edge cities:
o Routines of work, living and play
 Edge city: psychological location-state of mind
o Cutting edge: how cities are being created worldwide
o Physically on the edge of urban landscape-old farmland, etc
o Searching for edge/advantage
o Puts people on the edge
 Save our world: need to see “the land on which we build as sacred as the land we leave untouched”
“The Search for the Future Inside Ourselves”
 Edge Cities: new urban centers
o All the functions of a city-but spread out
o Calls inhabitants: immigrants, pioneers
 3 waves of the new frontier
o moved out homes (suburbanization post WWII)
o moved out marketplaces (malls of 60s, 70s)
o moved out means of creating wealth-essence of urbanism (jobs)
 examples of Edge Cities-larger than many actual cities
o area around route 128 and the Massachusetts Turnpike in the Boston region (birthplace of applied high
technology)
o Schaumburg area west of O’Hare Airport
 Tricky to define- no mayor/city council, population larger than urban cores
 Garreau’s definition of Edge City:







o 5 mill square feet of leasable office space
o 600,000 square feet of leasable retail space
o more jobs than bedrooms-people commute there to work
o perceived by the population as one place
o was nothing like the “city” as recently as 30 years ago
American life now centering on Edge City-very efficient
o more office space
o more retail than downtown
o provides every necessity
Many opponents of Edge Cities-plastic, sterile, lack community, lack soul
Works in progress-has no history
Frank Lloyd Wright: big cities (urban pattern of the 19 th century)=evil
o People need connection with nature, abandon the city
o Automobile and aircraft: “glorious agents” will allow people to disperse
o Principles of individualism, freedom, democracy
Debates over what we’ve lost and gained
o Edge cities as communing with nature-the good life, or poisoned sprawl?
Influencing histories of American views of nature: spectrum
o Paradise: Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, Captain Arthur Barlowe 1548-Virginia: garden of
abundance
o Evil wilderness: William Bradford (the Mayflower)
Edge Cities: American Dream, search for Utopia, attempt to create a new Eden, new frontier, second chance to
reinvent ourselves
“The Laws: How We Live”
 Garreau’s rules of human behavior-used by developers
 These laws seem to have a sense of humor. Many of them have corollaries. Here are a few examples:
o The Law of unintended consequence: no matter what your plan is, the result will always be a surprise
o The farthest distance an American will willingly walk before getting into a car: 600 ft
o The second corollary to the 600ft law: the most remote parking space in Edge City is rarely more than 300 ft
from its building’s entrance
o The number of pedestrians per hour at midday required to make an urban center work and be lively: 1000
o The first multi-million dollar structure usually built in Edge City: a mall
o How many customers must live within a 15 minute drive of a mall for it to be successful: a quarter of a
million (pop of Las Vegas)
o How big a mall must be before its developer is viewed by his peers as having hair on his chest: one million
square feet (25 acres) and/or 3 levels
o The rule of thumb for calculating how much traffic edge city will produce: 10 million square feet of office
and retail space equals 40,000 trips per day
 Other laws cover number of blocks Americans will walk in a downtown area (3-4), number of stories Americans will
take the stairs (1 or 0) and corollaries to the one-story-climb (such as 2 story office buildings must have an elevator,
and that buildings with elevators are often build to concrete and steel because of the support structure)
 Laws also discuss public transportation and traffic jambs, the platonic ideal of the size of an office building’s floor
plate (20,000sqft-quasiarbitrary), parking garages vs parking lots, and population densities
Joel Garreau
Edge Cities: Life on the New Frontier, pp. 463-471 (16)
“Once
Americans
have
dlanyone
standing





chosen
in
a
future,
it
it
is
way
open
to
in
being
molded
inviting
and
a
High rise buildings erupting in outlying parts of the state, far from the old downtown
Edge- psychological as much as physical location
Cities are growing to have multiple urban cores, broad, low outlines separated by green and parking lots
Few sidewalks
Single-family detached dwelling is the landmark structure
shaped,
but
trampling.”




















Cities because they contain all the functions a city ever has (spread out).
Edge because they are a vigorous world of pioneers and immigrants, far from old downtowns
New frontiers
Suburbs with marketplaces (malling of America 1970s)
Jobs, 2/3 of office facilities
“urban villages, technoburbs, suburban downtowns, pepperoni pizza city…”
no “welcome to” signs because it is a judgement call where it begins and ends
more jobs than bedrooms (population increases at 9am)
King of Prussia (to anyone familiar with the greater Phila. Area) is a perfect example- signs for the great mall “next 4
exits”
Homeowners and landspeculators made wealthy
Acculturates immigrants, provides child care, and offers safety
Moves everything closer to the homes of the middleclass
Live, learn, work, shop, pray, play, die
Plastic, a hodgepodge, a Disneyland (perjorative use), and sterile
Lacks “livability, community, a soul”
Will we ever feel it is a good place to be young, to grow old?
Edge city has no history
Force of change, emblem is the bulldozer
We want a land that is midway between too much and too little civilization-TJeff
Is Edge City the most purposeful attempt Americans have made since the days of the Founding Fathers to try to create
something like a new Eden?
Seeking to Construct an Egalitarian Landscape:
Richard E. Foglesong: Planning the Capitalist City: the Colonial Era to the 1920s
Parks and Park Planning
- park-builders helped formulate a response to the capitalist-democracy contradiction and
contributed to the view and practice of planning as a method of technical decision making removed
from institutions of popular control
- decision making occurred in independent park boards or park commissions, which were basically
centralized mini-governments
- Park planners engaged in an aesthetic process but for a social objective – socialization and control
of the new urban working class (mitigating the effects of work and elevating their sentiments
through park appreciation)
Capitalism and Parks
- grew out of 18th century landscape movement which sought to romanticize nature, in keeping with
similar tendencies in art and literature
- Andrew Jackson Downing
o came to park movement through an interest in landscape gardening – mostly planning of
country estates (ties to the wealthy)
o interested in landscaping of rural cemeteries (Mt. Auburn, Greenwood, Laurel Hill)
o viewed romantic cemeteries and public gardens as social as well as aesthetic endeavors –
counterpoints to the enervating forces of commercialism
o hoped that pleasure grounds would break down class barriers and civilize and refine the
national character
- Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.
o had a conservative concept of reform – advocated centralized forms of administration and
believed democracy should respond to cues of a trained and civilized elite
o believed that technological advance was the source of the problems with city life but also
would be the solution
o believed that the market system and the democratic decision-making process failed to
produce the antidote to the enervating forces of urban and commercial life  a more
technical problem-solving method was needed
o recognized the economic benefits to the aggregate community and the enhanced land
values for adjacent property owners but did not emphasize these (but this rationale grew
without his help)
New York City’s Central Park
- first of the nation’s large urban parks and the prototype for many later parks
- Mayor Kingsland got the city council to approve the acquisition of park land using public funds
that would enhance “the health, happiness, and comfort of those whose interests are especially
entrusted to our keeping – the poorer classes”
- project was controlled by specialized, highly centralized, governmentally independent institutions
that prefigured the future course of park planning
- initially, the Board of Commissioners consisted of the mayor and street commissioner, but in 1857
the Republican-dominated legislature voted to remove control of the park from the city
government and vest it instead in an independent, supposedly nonpartisan, eleven-member park
commission
- the park commission:
o Park Superintendent Frederick Olmsted, Sr.
o Chief Engineer Egbert Viele
o Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were chosen as the chief architects by winning a design
competition organized by the park commission, following the rejection of the plan prepared
by Viele
- Olmsted and his process:
o very centralized, elite-dominated process, separated from institutions of popular control
and accountability (the volatility and corruption of Tammany Hall in the second half of the
1800s)
o Believed the poor could be protected the best with a small commission, independent of
bribes from the wealthy
o believed a small body of select men should act as trustees for the public good, using hardheaded factual analysis and business methods of decision making (which he saw as more
important than special expertise)
- The Park’s features:
o did not want the grounds to appear too “unkempt” – wanted to “paraphrase” nature rather
than creating or restoring it
o accessible to all classes, especially the working class – wanted it to be a “democratic
development of the highest significance”
o 24-member police force was created early on to dispel the fears of the wealthy that it would
become a meeting place for ruffians
- The Successes of the Park:
o phenomenal flow of visitors – sometimes upwards of 100,000 per day
o a financial success
 land adjoining its 7-mile frontage increased in value 200% per year

attracted additional private capital to the city through additional visitors and
wealthy people who decided to move there
 very little crime, used harmoniously by poor and wealthy (wealthy broke law more
often by racing in carriages)
 When bars were closed on Sundays, more people came to the park but there was
know significant difference in Church attendance (demonstrates the social benefit
of parks)
o Olmstead’s commission became a model for the administration of public works planning in
NYC and across the nation
Olmsted: Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns
Attraction of cities:
-self-sufficiency no longer a pride
-specialization in town: “the greater the division of labor at any point, the greater the perfection
with which all wants may be satisfied” (16)
-“but only the poorest, who cannot find employment in the city, will come to the country,
and
there as soon as they have got a few dollars ahead, are crazy to get back to town” (7)
-cities growing twice as fast as towns e.g. Paris, London, Glasgow, Dublin, etc.
Evils of cities:
-average length of life of mankind much less than the country
-average amount of disease and misery more in cities
-Boston, too will be afflicted by the evils of cities => health & morals
Trees:
-air disinfected by sunlight and foliage
-trees planted on sides of street; but as street gets more crowded, no room for
lower limbs
-there should be a natural place in the city for trees to grow
-“what accommodations for recreation can we provide which shall be so agreeable
and
so
accessible as to be efficiently attractive to the great body of
citizens, and which while giving
decided gratification, shall also cause those who
resort to them for pleasure to subject themselves, for
the time being, to conditions strongly counteractive to the special enervating conditions of the town?”
(36-37)
-“what we most want is a simple, broad, open space of clean greensward, with
sufficient play
of surface and a sufficient number of trees about it to supply a
variety of light and shade” (48)
-park should complement town; openness, beauty of fields, meadow, prairie,
green pastures,
still waters => tranquility to the mind
Arguments on building Central Park:
-discussion on public or private
-rich & influential men against public b/c it would only add to their taxes
-construction of park will lower the value of property in its neighborhood
Frederick Law Olmstead
“Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns 53-75 (21)
 Reserves of land for the purpose of parks should be decided as soon as possible. However, nothing should be done at the
moment; instead, time should be taken for “comprehensive and business-like foresight and study.”
 How should a community best undertake this work? Because the interests involved (private, local, and special interests) are
so antagonistic towards one another the regular channels would be unsuitable.
 If the public were to act in its own self-interest (and that of generations to come) it would realize that the organization of
the park should be taken up by “a small body of select men.” But in this case, more so than others, the danger is that public
opinion may be led by personal financial considerations and not the overall interests of society, so that the results of a
“comprehensive and impartial study” would be overruled.
 When discussing the creation of parks, public discussion is not necessarily beneficial because you don’t want every person
to individually decide what is best for his own self-interest. Rather you want to put the decision in the “hands of somebody
who is able to take hold of them comprehensively as a matter of direct, grave, business responsibility.”
 To illustrate this point, Olmsted uses the example of Central Park.
Central Park:
 1851: New York legislature passed a bill providing for a park on the east side.
 The choice of the center of the island is supposedly because it appeared to be one which would the “least excite local
prejudices.” Olmsted writes, “It would have been difficult to find another body of land of six hundred acres upon the island
which possessed less of what we have seen to be the most desirable characteristics of a park, or upon which more time,
labor, and expense would be required to establish them.”
 Incomplete remedies for practical defects have cost the city more than a million dollars, which “intelligent study” could
have saved. Public discussion failed to correct these problems, and also did not express dissatisfaction with it.
 Many men of wealth and influence did not see any personal advantage to the construction of a park and opposed it fearing
additional tax burden. They argued that while other cities had benefited from parks, because of the open waters on all sides
they did not need “artificial breathing-places.”
 It was alleged that the park would be used to “develop riotous and licentious habits.” People argued that the lower classes
and upper classes would not be able to all enjoy the park, and so it would become “nothing but a great bear-garden for the
lowest denizens of the city, of which we shall yet pray litanies to be delivered.” It was also said that the construction of the
Park would be detrimental to the value of the property in the neighborhood. Some also argued that the increased taxation
and “general disgust which would be aroused among the wealthy classes would drive them from the city.”
 It was widely believed that the Park was a “rash and ill-considered undertaking” which would cost a great deal for no
purpose. This view was in part a result of the choice of the commissioners that were appointed to oversee the work. Most
of them were not politicians, rather from business of banking, railroads, mining, and manufacturing. Because they had
probably not asked for or even wanted the appointments, they were under no obligation to serve any particular
party/group/person’s interests. The fact they were businessmen also may have made them approach the question from an
objective business perspective.
 They spent their first year on questions of policy and organization, doing no practical work.
 The commissioners were not influenced by high-powered individuals, and were openly denounced by the Mayor, the city
government (who refused to cooperate with them and even put obstructions in their way), threatened with impeachment
and indictment, attacked in newspapers, attacked by mobs, and their businesses repeatedly audited.
 They barely kept ahead of those who aimed to stop the construction of the Park: “At one time nearly four thousand laborers
were employed; and for a year at one point, work went on night and day.”
 The Park is in some ways incomplete, and remains inaccessible to many.
 It was counted that during the four years prior Olmsted writing, thirty million visits were made to the Park (though many
passed through uncounted). Many are men of wealth and influence – the same men who believed there should never have
been a park in the first place.
 The positive effect on public health was great: a physician said, “Where I formerly ordered patients of a certain class to
give up their business altogether and go out of town, I now often advise simply moderation, and prescribe a ride in the Park
before going to their offices, and again a drive with their families before dinner.” Olmsted writes, “The lives of women and
children too poor to be sent to the country can now be saved in thousands of instances by making them go to the Park. […]
The much greater rapidity with which patients convalesce, and may be returned with safety to their ordinary occupations
after severe illness, when they can be sent to the Park for a few hours a day, is beginning to be understood. The addition
thus made to the productive labor of the city is not unimportant.”
 The Park also made the city more attractive to visitors, increasing its trade and drawing people and their businesses to the
city. It also has meant that rich foreigners remained in the country rather than going to Europe to enjoy their wealth, as they
settled permanently in the city.
 Except for a few cases, “not the slightest injury from wantonness, carelessness, or ruffianism has occurred.”
 Olmsted mentions Bentham’s remark in “The Means of Preventing Crimes” that amusement is important for the pleasure
itself as well as for the tendency it has “to reduce the dangerous inclinations which man derives from his nature.”
 The Park has a harmonizing and refining influence on everyone who visits – in particular “the most unfortunate and most
lawless classes of the city – an influence favorable to courtesy, self-control, and temperance.” Olmsted says that the Park
competes with grog-shops and worse places for ‘customers,’ not with churches and Sunday schools.
 The value of land surrounding the Park has certainly not fallen as some predicted it would – the value increased at a rate of
two hundred per cent per annum.
 The cost of the park has been far compensated by the additional capital drawn to the city as a result of the Park.
 There has been an immense change in public opinion towards public parks. Now there is lots of pleasure driving,
roadways adapted to light carriages. The Legislature of New Jersey has a bill for laying out another park of 700 acres.
Conclusion
 The “problem of public recreation grounds is one which, from its necessary relation to the larger problem of the future
growth of your honored city, should at once be made a subject of responsibility of a very definite, very exacting and,
consequently, very generous character. In no other way can it be adequately dealt with.”
Richard G. Wilson
“The American Renaissance, 1876-1917, pp. 11-25 (22)



American Renaissance: “concerns the identification by many Americans – painters, sculptors, architects, craftsmen,
scholars, collectors, politicians, financiers, and industrialists – with the period of the European Renaissance and the feeling
that the Renaissance spirit has been captured again in the United States”(11)
Important Factors
 Searching for an American identity
 Diverse artistic expression (according to Wilson, the period of the late 19 th/early 20th Centuries is one of the most
diverse)
 Popularity of European culture and art (a “release from the stuffy confines of Victorianism”[11])
 Interest in the Italian Renaissance and classical art
 Collaboration between different types of artists (architects, painters, sculptors, etc.) in world’s fairs, public buildings,
and new city plans
 Intense nationalism (especially in erecting great monuments to American history and heroes)
 “Imperialistic expression of American culture”(15)
 Key events: Spanish-American War, Teddy Roosevelt (the big stick), Woodrow Wilson’s policies in Latin
America
 Emphasis on capitalism and democracy in art and architecture (art as a public and private venture)
 Key: Patronage by rich families (EG Vanderbilts)
 Role of artist: “provide a setting of leisured elegance”(19)
 Beautification “portrayed as quintessentially ‘American and democratic’”(21)
 Foundation of major cultural institutions – museums, libraries, universities, etc.
 Money provided by the wealthy through gifts and philanthropic organizations
 Key building: Boston Public Library
 Built by Charles McKim
 Modeled after Renaissance palazzo
 High European influence
 Important phrases: “Free to All,” “Built by the People and Dedicated to the Advancement of Learning”
 Ornate decorations – memorial sculptures, marble, ceiling paintings, bronze doors; “give a message that this
is not merely a building for housing books, but a ritualistic center of civilization”(25)
Check out some of the pictures in the text (also it’s a pretty fast read if you want to skim it)
Richard G. Wilson
“The American Renaissance, 1876-1917, 26-37 (23)
The basic point of this chapter is to define the different trends in American culture during the so-called “gilded” age (18761917). This was a time of rapid physical/social/cultural change in America. In 1890 Fredrick Jackson Turner declared the
frontier closed—a declaration which impacted the way that Americans looked at their country. No longer could America
simply be defined by frontiers and exploration. The American renaissance was defined by three unique currents running
through the country. Here is a brief synopsis of each:
Nationalism
 Allegiance to government/state was a powerful force in art and politics
 Flags became important for national holidays; memorials started to be built
 Pride in unique political system. Also, questioning of religions (Darwinism, etc. led to greater dependence on national
identity)
 State buildings thought to increase sentiments of nationalism
Genteel Tradition
 Contained elements of “high culture”
 Wanted art, music, architecture of civilization to be interesting
 “ideal” art thought to teach noble virtues-- Art should be removed from mundane reality
 Buildings had relation to great cathedrals, domes, temples of Europe
Cosmopolitanism
 Did not care if art was considered good in Europe, just wanted art that was unique
 Wanted things to be interesting but not idealized—incorporated art, architecture, etc. from Asia as well as Europe
Important point to note—author expresses America’s pride in being unique and difficult to define. Pride in having different
aspects of culture
Richard G. Wilson
“The American Renaissance, 1876-1917, 38-55 (24)
Presence of the Past
I. Thesis: “...it was a new sense of history that most directly formed the mental set of the American Renaissance”
In the 1870s the was a shift in focus from the “American Adam” arriving with no history (compared to the lengthy
history of the European countries), to a more immediate history in Europe and America both.
Renaissance-“Italian revival of classic antiquity in art, architecture, and letters in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries”
II. Discovering the Past
Publications in the 1870s began American fascination with the Renaissance.
-the high point of Western Civilization occurred during the Renaissance
Artists returning from abroad brought back knowledge of the Renaissance
-Paris and École des Beaux-Arts were the most popular places to study
-Example artists: Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Senate Park Commission), Edwin Blashfield, Kenyon Cox
Americans begin to discover their own past
-Why? Nationalism, opinion that lack of history => decadence, and the Centennial Celebration in
Philadelphia, where colonial artifacts and paintings were on display.
-Civil War: “For the United States, it secured admission into a pantheon of nations possessing a stock of
noble themes” such as brother v. brother, courage, and manhood.
-plazas, monuments, memorials, tombs and statues sprouted everywhere in the 1880s
III. Role of American History in Ideal Art: Combining American History with the Renaissance
Pro: Many were of the opinion that, as Sen. James McMillian said, “All great art borrows from the Past,” changing
small details of art perfected to fit his current situation.
Con: And yet, many found American History too short, and clothing too ugly to be part of ideal art. (Kenyon Cox)
Possible Solution: Draw symbolic figures realistically, identified with emblems, such as the Phrygian liberty cap for
France, the spiked helm for Germany. For America, it could be the Union Shield. And so we arrive at...
IV. American Renaissance Symbolism: the American Virgin
-She was...
glowing with health, beautiful, elegant, noble, sexual yet unaware of her sexuality
-She was not...
crude in thought or action
-She was found everywhere: in the Swift Packing Company’s “Premium Calendar”, Henry James’ Daisy Miller, and
in the World’s Columbian Exposition: the Columbian fountain sculpture consisted largely of young girls representing
Columbia and the Arts and Sciences.
-Evelyn Nesbit--An American Virgin who wasn’t: the “sad reality of the American Virgin.” Scandalously
involved in the murder of the architect Stanford White. The American Virgin, it would seem, is a purely
idealistic concept, generated for artistic and literary purposes.
V. Conclusion: During the rediscovery of their past, Americans were heavily influenced by the Renaissance, and tried to adapt
it to their own purposes
Richard G. Wilson
“The American Renaissance, 1876-1917, 56-61 (25)
“Eclecticism, the selection and usage of styles, motifs, and details drawn from a variety of sources, defines an element of the
aesthetic of the American Renaissance.”
The eclecticism of American art from the 1840s to the 1880s was less scientific and more “amateur:”
- Nadir of American Renaissance
- Ideas were taken from many different areas often to create one piece of art.
- The form was hodge-podge and exhibited little aesthetic beauty
- Kenyon Cox, a well-known painter of the time, decried the scientific spirit itself as encouraging artists to give up
the high art and aesthetic form of the Renaissance for the “horrors of Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism”
(quote from Wilson, not Cox)
- The thin Gothic of Renwick, the anecdotal sculpture of Rogers, and the imitations of nature by the Hudson River
School all fit the style of American eclectic but non-scientific art—though science might have provided an
impetus for this art
- Francis Millet claimed American artists were confusing “genius” with novelty
The above unscientific art gave way to a new artistic ideal: scientific eclecticism.
- “The new guideline was a scholarly knowledge of history, and while seldom if ever (except in the case of some
furniture) was exact copying promoted, the attitude of the past was almost scientific.”
- Science was applied to nearly all aspects of life: natural history fused with national history, social concepts
received scientific credentials (political science, sociology, scientific management)
- Scientific rigor, inquiry, and definition become integral to American Renaissance art
- Spirit might be indebted to rise of experts and professionals distinguishing themselves from past generations
- An extension of American ideals of improvement and perfectionism manifesting themselves in science
- History of art essential to creation of new art
- Expositions of period were examples of “the harmony of scholarship, science, and the arts”
- Museums become sources of educational and intellectual values, not entertainment: lauded architectural firm
McKim, Mead, and White build 1.5 million square feet Brooklyn Institute of Art in 1893
o Such museums become havens for all types of art, reproductions and actual pieces catalogued in all ways
possible
o A “collection and appreciation of ‘masterpieces’ and Old Masters became the main objective”
- Photography offers new degree of accuracy of representation
- Artists such as Kenyon Cox argued “for a classic art of tradition, perfection, and self-control”
o Purpose of art is to create a beautiful surface
o And remind spectator of things to admire in nature and create an illusion of truth
- Accuracy of detail of utmost importance
o For J. P. Morgan, Library Charles McKim ordered wax impression of joints of Erechtheum in Athens as
a study model
o Daniel Chester French asked scholars for information about fashion, hairstyles, and facial types before
creating the statue of John Harvard. He made similar inquiries when sculpting Lincoln in D.C.
o
-
Edwin Austin Abbey believed that he was obligated to learn as much about the past and the art of the
past before painting such a period so that he was guilty of the fewest mistakes
Often artists would strive to create art evocative of a single period/styles that combined a variety of works from
that period/in that style
o Some artists who did this: H. Siddons Mowbray, Cass Gilbert, and John La Farge
o “All the past [became] the property of the American Renaissance”
o McKim, Mead, and White’s Boston Public Library is a perfect example. Sources:
 Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Saint-Genevieve in Paris
 Leon Alberti’s San Francisco in Rimini
 The Colosseum in Rome
Richard G. Wilson
“The American Renaissance, 1876-1917, 62-70 (26)
Periods and Organizations





Prelude to the American Renaissance (1870s – mid 1880s):
o Increased collaboration, scale, and luxury
o Direct quotation from the “Old Masters” – classical European art
o No stylistic consensus among the artists. John La Farge reflects English Pre-Raphaelite style, while William
Morris Hunt draws on Fench allegorical painting
o Private commission of art work is the norm.
Beginning of the American Renaissance (1876) – Centennial celebration
o Formation of art societies: Society of American Artists (1877), Art Students League of New York (1875), etc;
later societies in the 1880s: Society of Painters in Pastel (1883)
o Museums and art schools founds in 1870s to 1880s.
o Book and periodicals on art and design: The American Architecture and Building News (1976)
Height/mature period of the American Renaissance
o Private commission increased in scale, but new public projects came to life: replanning cities, building
monuments to glorify American civilization
o Boston Public Library, 1887-1895, most prominent symbol of the period
o Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, was the full display of public art and architecture
o More expositions around the country following Chicago: Nashville, Omaha, Buffalo, St. Louis, Seattle, San
Francisco, San Diego. Large central bodies of water, cohesively arranged buildings and statues, and classical
murals became standard elements of the fairs.
o Style: scientific eclecticism replaced the old synthetic, romantic approach. Divergence disappeared as artists
studies together and classical imagery became the norm.
o Formalization of art through the establishment of art organizations: National Sculpture Society, American
Federation of Art.
Late Period of the American Renaissance (1917, WWI)
o After the wall, Greek and Roman ideals were no longer the sole inspiration of art and culture. The classical
arts were outdated
o Late 1930s, the rise of European Modernism and the resulting change in American expectation of European
art put an end to the American Renaissance.
Effects of the American Renaissance on today’s society
o Remaining institutions: Municipal Art Society of New York, the American Academy of Rome, various art
schools
o U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, designs range from lampposts to building complexes
o Major museums and library collections
o Since 1930s, the aesthetics of the American Renaissance have been subject of derision: art works were
thrown out or buried, murals painted over and decayed, buildings demolished. The artistic elite rejected the
methods and vision of the American Renaissance in favor of something abstract and totally original.
Mackin, Chapter 8

Group Plan
o Conceived in 1903 by Daniel Burnham (and John Carrère, and Arnold Brunner) for
Cleveland
o Plan: Cleveland Mall would be a vast public room flanked by a “grouping” of the city’s
major civic and governmental buildings
o Competing with Chicago and Cincinnati
o Beaux-Arts architecture
o Trying to resist pitfalls of urbanization
o Outgrowth of City Beautiful movement
o Buildings included the Metzenbaum Courthouse (1910), Cuyahoga County Courthouse
(1912), Cleveland City Hall (1916), Public Auditorium (1922), Public Library main
building (1925), and the Cleveland Public Schools Board of Education building (1931)

Pullman, Illinois
o Company town as discussed in lecture
o Adjacent to company 14 miles south of Chicago
o A for-profit endeavor
o Ruled dictatorially; private town, suppressed rights (speech, press, assembly)
o The 1894 strike was related to the town

Cleveland, Ohio
o Victorian Cleveland = industrial capital during Industrial Revolution
o Transportation and public utilities improved over the latter half of the 19th century
o Public Square with its Civil War memorial at the heart of the city
o 1890-1910 = Cleveland population boomed due to immigration
o Immigration led to economic diversification and now Cleveland produced consumer goods
o This diversification encouraged urban restructuring into zones
o Immigrants and African American enclaves developed due to prejudice in housing market
o Police allowed red-light districts to develop in African American communities and then
“cleaned them up”
o Victorianism and City Beautiful movement gave way to Progressivism
o Suburbanization began
Montgomery Schuyler
“Last Words About the Fair,” pp. 556-574 (27)
The essay’s was written near the closing days of the Chicago World’s fair and was a reflection on what effect it would have on
American architecture
 The author fears that the fair will lead to unthoughtful imitation
 Simple reproduction of classical forms in architecture is unlikely to have the same success seen at the fair
 He argues that the fair was successful for three reasons: unity, magnitude, and illusion
Reason for success 1: Unity
 Various architects designed the buildings. To guard against competing visions, some guidelines were set to insure
unity:
 All the cornice-lines were se at 60 feet
 All the architecture should be classic
 common guidelines of classic architecture made cooperation easier—most of the fair’s architects had Parisan
training
 classic architecture beautiful in part because of its repeating patterns
 Landscape also critical: the contrast between unified architecture and Olmsted’s irregular lagoon striking
 The unity of the buildings hides the failure of particular buildings, a sign of success
 Success of the whole depends on the fact that there be a plan beforehand
Reason for success 2: Magnitude
 Buildings impressive because of their size, which is enhanced by their number
 Reproducing a single building or at a smaller scale would lose this quality completely
Reason for success 3: Illusion
 The fair was understood to be a fantasy, a vision given a temporarily physical character
 They were buildings of celebration and holiday, not daily work
 The design was unconcerned with function
 For this reason, the fair’s reproduction generally to American architecture will fail
Lessons applicable to American architecture
 Architecture should be both structure and function
 The value of unity and magnitude (planning) should be applied in American architecture generally alongside
concern for practical function
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Introduction and Chapter 1 (28)
--crime rates higher among worst tenement house districts
--tenements came into existence because of the influx of immigrants
--people were often scammed: often 2 or 3 parties would collect rent
--repairs were never made to tenements
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 2 (29)
“The Awakening”
- The advancing spread of cholera in New York city slums led to citizen’s movement that resulted in the organization of
the Board of Health and the adoption of the “Tenement-House Act” of 1867
- legislative attempts were made to improve tenements
o 1869: dark rooms banned; 46,000 windows cut into interior rooms for ventilation
- both owners of tenements and tenants opposed such ‘repair’
o both believed that such official interference was an infringement of their rights, and a hardship
o often, police had to drag tenants out by force
- despite such attempts at repair, new tenements arose, just as badly-planned as the old
o dark rooms, wet cellars, extreme overcrowding
o these unhealthy tenements were “continually springing up and getting the upper hand whenever vigilance was
relaxed for ever a short time” (19)
- Riis attributes this never-ending cycle of repair and dilapidation to poverty; as long as poverty exists, tenements will
exist
He sees the importance of repairing the tenements in the realization that “tenements will exist in New York
forever” (19.)
He defines the tenement thoroughly: “It is generally a brick building from four to six stories high on the street…four
families occupy each floor, and a set of rooms consists of one or two dark closets, used as bedrooms, with a living
room twelve feet by ten. The staircase is too often a dark well in the centre of the house, and no direct through
ventilation is possible, each family being separated from the other by partitions…” (19.)
Riis ends this chapter by reiterating the continual proliferation of tenements in New York, bringing to his reader’s
attention the urgency with which this problem must be dealt
o “The tenements of to-day are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population. When another generation
shall have doubled the census of our city, and to the vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very
name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be?” (20)
o
-
-
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 3 (30)
Chapter 3 “The Mixed Crowd”
 Ethnic makeup of tenements
o Very diverse (Italian, German, French, African, Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, Chinese,
etc)
o No “distinctively American” community  disappeared
 Cycle of assimilation
o New immigrants come  replace old immigrants in lowest socio-economic position
o Example: Irish landowner treating Italian tenant as he was once treated (poorly)
o America does provide a place for ppl to benefit from hard work – BUT the benefits are slow to come by, and
the process isn’t easy.
 Neighborhood by neighborhood
o Each ethnic group occupies its own geographic region, and there are innumerable such regions
o These divisions are dynamic and represent communities’ interactions w/ one another (i.e. African-American
v. Italian neighborhoods)
 Plus: lots of generalizations about different ethnic groups
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 4 (31)
MISSING
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 5 (32)

The Italian immigrant lives within a completely closed circle: he is brought over to America by “bankers” who acts as
a middle man in every aspect of the immigrant’s life, making a profit every step of the way.
 The “banker” [also called the padrone] charges a fee for travel to America, for getting the Italian a job [where he also
profits off the company for providing labor], and even for “space in the vilest tenements at extortionate rents” (37).
 This “banker” will also get the Italian fired as often as possible so he may charge a commission again upon rehire.
 As for the Italian, he [according to Riis, not me] is exceptionally ignorant, is suspicious of strangers, and is a good
tenant because he “is content to live in a pigsty and submits to robbery at the hands of the rent collector without a
murmur” (36).
 But the Italian can “turn the very dirt of the streets into a hoard of gold,” and has taken over the rag picking business.
 Unfortunately, the padrone has gotten his hands into this, too, as a contractor, and in addition to finding new ways to
get money out of the poor, there is also a constant war between contractors over patronage of the dumps.
 The Italian is a “born gambler,” a true inhabitant of “the Bend,” and gets in knife fights all the time, which he settles
[revenges] himself, refusing police interference.
Riis goes on to stereotype the Italians plenty more, but the main theme is this:
The Italian lives outside the laws, mores, and [most importantly] economic principles of the rest of society because his entire
world is a closed circuit run by these padrones. Where the Italian lives, how he lives, even his job is determined by the same
man, who profits from it all just enough to keep the Italian immigrant forever in poverty, yet able to continue providing profit
for his padrone.
This is a prime example of the vicious circle of poverty, and the inescapability of the poor man’s situation.
One more thing: The Italian himself is guilty of wringing money out of the destitute—he keeps the stale-beer dives—but Riis
only mentions this in the last two sentences of the chapter, perhaps to emphasize that poverty breeds the very evil and
corruption that creates it. The Italian takes advantage of those below him just like those above the Italian take advantage of
him.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 6 (33)
The Bend
→ Around the bend are the bulk of the tenements, altogether bad
-tenements are unclean (rag-pickers) and dishonest (tramps)
The Bend District:
-24 of 609 tenements in decent condition.
-the only relief would be complete demolition
-corruption makes its home here/ this area is described as “bewildering conjecture”
-when the sun shines, everyone is out on the street doing household work, bargaining, trading, hanging out (Polish Jew
is said to do the opposite).
-several rows of shops on the street, much of what is there is unsanitary (stale bread is considered good)
-tenement hallways even house some shops (tobacco, fish, sausages are some examples)
-women do all the work and carrying in The Bend/ men sit or stand and talk
-in this area there are many: Italians (Pasquales as they are called), banks, children, young mothers
-there is a small effort to clean up, mostly by the undertaker and police
-infants and children (5 yrs. or younger) account for the majority of deaths in the tenements.
-3 beds for 5 people, and a cradle for an infant are typical numbers
-backroom and 2 “bedrooms” = $10/month
-backroom and 1 bedroom = $9/month
-attic rooms, $3.75 to $5.50 according to size
-homeless people are not counted in the number of tenement occupants
→ In The Bend only 9 of 4,367 “apartments” were vacant
→ health officers know the conditions
→disinfectant is spread throughout the streets
→ police would go on raids to break up overcrowding (example: 12 men and women slept in a room not thirteen feet either
way)
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 7 (34)
A Raid on the Stale-beer Dives
- “sitters”/tramps occupy the hallways of the worst tenements in “the Bend” during hot summer nights b/c they can’t afford the
admission fee to a stale-beer drive.
- the worst fate is to reach the bottom in “the Bend”, which comes with increasing shabbiness of clothing and corresponding
loss of self-respect.
note: this chapter is very short, it talks about “the Bend” which is host to many stale-beer dives and the “sitters” that occupy it.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 8 (35)
The Cheap Lodging Houses











The cheap lodging houses, or hotels, of New York (of which he mentions the ones on Chatham Street and the Bowery)
are “nurseries of crime” according to the Chief of the Secret Police.
He quotes the judicial authorities as saying that these lodging houses have caused much crime, destruction and
beggary than any other agency created.
Big difference between 25cent a night hotel and 10cent a night hotel.
Young men from the country head to the city in search for work and are attracted to stay in these cheap hotels while
they find a job. In them they meet adventurers like themselves, lower class workers and thieves, but when no jobs turn
up for these young men, they are likely to move into even cheaper hotels and end up working with thieves, some even
becoming murderers.
Many of the perpetrators of petty theft are under 20, without means and clothes and most originated from the lodging
houses.
Riis narrates the story of a man called David Smith, who took under his wing a young boy from NJ who had ran away
from his home. He tried to turn the boy into a pickpocket but when he saw the boy wasn’t very good, Smith burned the
boy’s arms and had him beg for money in return for bad food and lodging at the hotels.
Riis then describes the condition of some of the lodging houses, stressing the huge difference between 25cent ones and
7 cent ones. In the former they get a bed and a lock for their belongings, while in the latter they get a bunk with yellow
sheets and pillows, people snoring and foul air, with no locks for their belongings, as it is assumed they have nothing
valuable.
The owners of such lodgings are wealthy people who live in exclusive neighborhoods.
Some places let people sleep on the floor for 3 cents but they are unlicensed.
High crime rate around lodgings, also large presence of saloons and pawn shops.
In presidential elections the lodgings are a major recruiting ground for politicians, as they are easily able to buy votes
and defraud the polls with little consequence. Some who call for ballot reform argue that it will do more to improve
the lodgings than all of the police regulations.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 9 (36)
“Chinatown”
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
-Chinatown is located between the Jewish neighborhood and the Bend.
-The Chinaman does everything to make money, and is selfish.
-There’s no hope to make Chinamen effective Christians, because they are characterized by senseless idolatry and grubworship, and lack strong faith in anything.
-There is nothing strong about the Chinaman, except his passions—opium, gambling, (& white women).
-If the Chinaman adopts Christianity, it is because he is trying to be American and has an ulterior motive—perhaps to have a
Christian wife.
-Riis is very racist, and slanders the Chinaman. He can’t find anything to credit “the race” of the Chinaman for.
-Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing—little outdoor stir like the Bend.
-Mott Street is clean but dreary, and even the Chinamen’s red and yellow colors do not make it bright.
-Houses are of the conventional tenement-house type. There are jammed-pack houses/tenements everywhere.
-Chinaman is characterized by stealth and secretiveness—his business and his domestic life are private because that’s the way
he is.
-Doorways of his offices and shops are fenced off by forbidding partitions suggestive of a continual state of siege.
-Riss says no one can be trusted, and the Chinamen don’t trust anyone.
-The Chinaman smokes opium and gambles a lot.
-No Chinese women are present, and very few Chinese merchants have Chinese wives, who are never seen in the street. The
“‘wives’ of Chinatown” are white women.
-There is a church in Mott Street, but it hasn’t saved the young men who give into their passion for opium.
-Conventional Chinese households: men worshippers of Joss, females are white young girls, worshipping the opium pipe. The
girls are indifferent and unconcerned about their condition.
-Chinatown is “scrupulously neat”—the distinguishing mark of Chinatown, outwardly and physically.
-The “laundry” is the Chinaman’s distinctive field, which Riis says is not surprising because he is by nature clean and is
resembled in his traits of cruel cunning and savage fury.
-There is no remedy for the Chinamen’s addiction to the pipe—they end up in the hospital or “Potter’s Field” (dead).
-The telegraph pole is the “official organ of Chinatown,” on which gambling news is posted.
-The Chinese consider themselves subject to the laws of the land only when submission is unavoidable. They are governed by
a code of their own, the very essence of which is rejection of all other authority except under compulsion.
-The Chinese are quiet, exclusive, and reserved, but a menace to society. Their opium corrupts the soul, and causes moral,
mental, and physical death.
-Another racist comment: “The Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population, that they serve no useful purpose
here, whatever they may have done elsewhere in other days.”
-But Riis is constructive in his argument, that because the Chinese are here, we must bake the best of it—rather than banish the
Chinaman, we must open the door wider, for his wife, and make it a condition of his coming or staying that he bring his wife
with him. Thus he will no longer be a homeless stranger.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 10 (37)
Chapter
10:
Jewtown
-10th
Ward
-"It
is
said
that
nowhere
in
the
world
are
so
many
people
crowed
together
on
a
square
mile
than
here."
330,000
per
square
mile.
-Riis
perpetuates
a
bunch
of
stereotypes
as
he
does
in
his
other
chapters.
This
takes
up
a
great
portion
of
the
chapter.
-"Penury
and
poverty
are
wedded
everywhere
to
dirt
and
disease,
and
the
Jew
is
no
exception."
-sees
these
diseases
not
as
a
sign
of
immorality
but
ignornance,
and
the
need
for
cleaner
air
-residents
spend
too
much
time
inside
working
(piece
work)
-problem
of
typhus,
and
also
suicide-the
"suicide
ward"
-"religious
life
tinges
all
their
customs"
-teachers complain about hygiene of school children
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 11 (38)
The Sweaters of Jewtown








Uses the Tenth Ward as an example of a place that has many economic problems (92)
New York became known for its cheap clothing because of the intense competition here by the Jewish population (92)
Sweater – “The sweater is simply the middleman, the sub-contractor, a workman like his fellows, perhaps with the
single distinction from the rest that he knows a little English; perhaps not even that, but with the accidental possession
or two or three sewing-machines, or of credit enough to hire them, as his capital, who drums up work among the
clothing-houses.” (94)
The sweater is one step up from the average workman, and the workman eventually becomes a sweater himself (94)
“The sweater knows well that the isolation of the workman in his helpless ignorance is his sure foundation, and he has
done what he could – with merciless severity where he could – to smother every symptom of awakening intelligence in
his slaves.” (94)
As long as there are people willing to work for him, “his grip can never be shaken off” (95)
Most of his work is done in the tenements, since the law is easily avoided here (95)
Riis goes through several short descriptions of different sweater families (their poverty is typical of all the other
families he describes in the book); his main point is that “probably this sweater’s family hoards up thirty dollars a
month, and in a few years will own a tenement somewhere and profit by the example set by their landlord in rentcollecting. It is the way the savings of Jewtown are universally invested, and with the natural talent of its people for
commercial speculation the investment is enormously profitable.” (97)

Finally, Riis declares the first step of his plan, of any plan: “They must be taught the language of the country they have
chosen as their home…” (101)
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 12 (39)
Tenement house Cigarmaking
- Tenement responsible for the majority of the miseries of the poor
- Landlord (usually Jewish) makes his employees be his tenants or lose job
- Bohemian immigrants completely isolated because:
1. they have an ugly language and don’t learn English or German
2. they have stubborn pride in their race
3. there is a popular stereotype of them as enemy of organized labor and disturbers of peace (though actually,
Bohemian criminals rare)
- Live around cigar factories, so have no choice as to neighborhood
- Like to drink, don’t save money like the Jews do
- Whole family works 7 days/week
- Usually, wife made cigars back home
- Early Bohemian immigrants had contention w/ unions b/c unions refused to admit women
- Court of Appeals over-turned law that prohibited cigar making in tenements as unconstitutional
- Consumption relatively common due to tobacco fumes
- For example, rent = $12.25/month; family makes 3,000 cigars/wk = $11.25/wk, but went on strike (unsuccessfully)
- One father was blacksmith in old country, can’t do here b/c can’t speak English
- After mother taken to hospital to die, Riis comments “There is no waste in these tenements. Lives, like clothes, are
worn through and out before put aside”(108).
- Work 17 hours/day, 6.5 cents/hour. Eat lunch (bread) at bench, supper together (bread + sausage).
- It is inevitable that the Bohemian, who faced opposition in the old country and in America, will turn against society
which gives him nothing. However, the Bohemian loves peace, and doesn’t seek war – only when it’s a last resort.
- It is propaganda from Catholics and Protestants who killed in the name of God who “disgrace [Bohemians’] history”
- The whole problem comes down to lack of education.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 13 (40)
The Color Line in New York
-
-
Landlords control where non-whites do and don’t live
o Any progress taking place against prejudice happens in spite of the landlord
o Blames landlord despotism for continuing prejudice
o Blacks have to pay higher rents than other tenants, because whites would not live in the same house with
black tenants, or a house recently occupied by black tenants
o Landlords preferred to have blacks in their worst tenements because they perceived blacks as keeping the
place clean and with less destroyed property
Blacks have been migrating to New York from Southern cities – not always great job opportunities though
Makes (racist? uninformed?) generalizations:
o “As a matter of fact the colored man takes in New York, without a struggle, the lower level of menial service
for which his past traditions and natural love of ease perhaps as yet fit him best.” (114)
o Blacks are “immensely the superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews…” (114)
o “Poverty, abuse, and injustice alike the Negro accepts with imperturbable cheerfulness…his home
surroundings…reflect his blithesome temper…he is loyal to the backbone” – spends a page (117-118)
creating a stereotype for his readers
o Notes gambling problem
- Lauds the new and growing Harlem as the most “clean and orderly community” in New York
- Riis laments the “utterly depraved of both sexes” of white and black co-mingling in “border-land” bars
Ultimately credits blacks for advancing despite prejudice and greed, says that they would do as well as whites with fair
treatment; does not
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 14 (41)
The Common Herd

Flat vs. Tenement
o Locked door of flat signifies privacy, no privacy in tenement

Closer to the river (industry), greater percentage of tenements
o Gas-houses, slaughter-houses, docks create worst slum-centers

Idea of the tenement as the enemy of honest, devoted, labor, and of womanhood, as corrupting its residents
o Some women and girls able to preserve innocence in spite of awful conditions
o “Inherent purity revolts instinctively from the naked brutality of vice as seen in the slums”
o “Humanly speaking life is not worth living there”
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Poor live in tenements out of necessity, not choice
o Most of their wages go to rents
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No aesthetic resources in tenements
o Nature (sunshine, air, greenery) has been trodden out of tenements:
 With it goes gentle thoughts, aspirations, moral values
 Germans better off than most because of love for flowers
 Nature better crime prevention than police, leads to more order in neighborhood
 Advocates small parks system for NYC
 Fresh-air excursions take tenement dwellers out of the city for the day, but do little to ease
high death-rate
o Airshafts, if they exist, don’t bring enough fresh air
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No strong morals in tenements
o Girls tempted by prostitution
o Temptation of the saloon
 Most aesthetically pleasing, cheerful part of tenement
o Exception: Poor willing to share to help others in need
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Tenements as Unhealthy
o High death rates
 Quick spread of infectious disease due to overcrowding, poor sanitation
 Babies die from heat during summer
 Starvation
o Cases of insanity
o Scarcity of water, especially during hot months
 Encourages drunkenness
o Health codes for new buildings helping to lower death rates, old tenements must be demolished
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Urban poor do not respond to charity, slip back into old position
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Even in death, poor packed into overcrowded common graveyard
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 15 (42)
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Says children are our nation’s future. Saying that they will grow to be leaders of this country and appeals to people on
the basis of “if our government means anything” to remedy the situation.
After his patriotic appeal he then appeals to human instincts telling stories of children drowning and one crushed to
death at a lumber yard.
He states that many children are crowded out of schools.
He tells the story of a tenement with over half of its inhabitants having been arrested and the majority of the children
nowhere to be found.
He then states that the children are not benefiting anything from the home but are learning everything in the street
becoming “savages”
He then attempts to examine solutions. He states that trade schools are not sufficient since the children will have
already have a negative impression of work resulting from a youth of idleness.
He tells the story of hungry and abandoned children
He discusses the absence of religion among the young stating it would be better for missionaries to spend their time
and money in New York rather then in far off lands.
He talks about the Children’s Aid Society, a charity, rescuing children from abusive homes. He discusses how they
house thousands and how they have placed thousands in homes out west.
He ends stating that the state leaves the children of the proletariat to the street or takes them to prison all other
constructive works are left to charity.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 16 (43)
Waifs of the City’s Slums
- This chapter discusses the numerous children that were given or thrown away by the mother’s of NY’s tenements.
- Police often gathered these abandoned children up along with a social group called the Sisters of Charity
- Many babies were abandoned to the doorsteps of upper class citizens within the city. These infants were generally
unpopular amongst the rich and taken to the local police station in the morning. After the police station they would be
shipped to the Infant’s Hospital on Randall’s Island.
- Many deserted babies did not survive. The Hospital on Randall’s Island had a mortality rate of 65.55%. If the infant
was picked up in the street the death rate was closer to 90%.
- Many dead infants were picked up around town, especially in midst of winter and the peak of summer.
- The Sisters of Charity Asylum/Orphanage received many infants which were dropped off by helpless mothers.
Children at the asylum had a death rate of 19%.
- Mothers were paid from around the city to nurse the young at the asylum.
- However problems arouse when baby farms were created in which individuals received payments for raising numerous
orphans, but this created a cash incentive to raise as many babies as possible under the most deplorable of conditions.
Many babies were killed or neglected in this practice.
- There was also a problem of child killing to receive dismal insurance payments.
- Pioneers which combated these evils were Sisters of Charity and The Five Points Mission. They led the way saving
thousands of infant’s lives and creating the need for modern day infrastructure like playgroups, homes, kindergarten
etc…
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 17 (44)
Riis – Ch 17: “The Street Arab”
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The term refers to homeless ‘street urchin’ boys who sometimes work selling newspapers.
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“The street Arab has all the faults and all the virtues of the lawless life he leads …” he is self-reliant, values a sense of
‘golden rule’ justice, and so …. Generally hard working.
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“bohemian instinct.”
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Some see them as beyond the “reach of missionary effort” but they are wrong; Riis argues they support themselves,
and learn his conception of civic mores if provided the right support.
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Many are run-aways, fleeing drunken, poor, abusive, parents, etc.
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Children’s Aid Society provides cheap lodgings and meals; the idea isn’t pure charity, but low rates and opportunities
for microcredit to help the boys learn responsibility, maturity, and so on.
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Riis suggests the physical cleanliness / sense of order & structure is an important element of these homes
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Many of the best homes “lie outside the city … safe from the temptations of the vice of the city.”
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Riis suggests the homes will eventually “put an end to the existence of the New York Street Arab, of the native breed
at least.”
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 18 (45)
“The Reign of Rum”
“The saloon projects its colossal shadow, omen of evil wherever it falls into the lives of the poor.”
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Where the worst tenements exist, saloons vastly outnumber churches (almost 40:1).
The poor seek refuge in the saloon, which is often the best-kept building on a tenement-house block.
The Excise Board had to create a rule that no three corners of an intersection could be licensed for selling rum.
Below Fourteenth Street was the worst area in terms of poverty but also had the most pawnshops and most saloons.
Even in these poor areas, saloons were an extremely profitable enterprise.
Saloons and “bar-rooms” were also commonplace in the richer uptown areas of the city.
The number of unlicensed saloons was estimated at about a thousand, complicating the problem.
Despite the signs outside nearly every saloon announcing that alcohol would not be sold to children, young children are
never turned away as long as they are able to pay.
Anecdote about a young boy who got drunk and fell asleep in a cellar and was killed by rats.
The saloon fosters crime and shields criminals who find refuge there.
Saloons corrupt children and who can never escape their influence.
growler: a pail for beer.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 19 (46)
“The Harvest of Tares”
Gang involvement of tenement youth
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Children playing basically illegal—arrested if found playing in streets or yards
This contributes to the formation of gangs and perpetuation of gang culture, since it is basically a childhood
passtime—also a way to acquire resources through theft
Overextend police resources, and violence tends to break out in one area when police are focusing in another
Often, a young member would be initiated into a gang by robbing a passed-out drunk or sleeping person
Neighborhoods were often terrorized by gangs, and individual citizens would know the individuals and need to show
them respect as a way of self-protection
Police often could do no more than to beat gang members with nightsticks whenever possible—but actual arrest was
fairly futile, since charges would rarely stick
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Girls would often find themselves related in gang activity as well, and would eventually come to “live in sin” with
male gang members
Known for blackmailing shopkeepers—if they refused to pay dues, their shops would be ransacked, and sometimes
even blown up with gunpowder!
Riis contends there is rarely “honest life” after life in a gang, and most former members will turn to a petty life of
crime
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 20 (47)
“The Working Girls of New York”
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Women had no minimum wage. Riis presents quotes of people who say that working as prostitutes on the street is
often a woman’s last resort, but that it offers a higher wage than honest work.
Many working women in NY, upwards of 150,000, with average wage estimated at 60 cents.
Women wage earners were subjected to a number of unfair standards:
o
o
o
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earned much less than men, even when they exceeded sales of fellow men workers.
subjected to child labor
were fined excessively for petty offenses; these fines were taken out of their paycheck.
One law at the time was for there to be seats for workwomen; the businesses would fine the women for
sitting in them.
About Sewing Girls
o Worked in stretches up to 19 hours, had to buy own thread and machines with wages.
o farm girls would go into the city and sew, using their two weekly dollars for silk and wedding gifts, while
women in the city were starving looking for work.
Riis calls NY women “brave, virtuous, and true” “plucky and proud,” and mentions that “working girl’s clubs, union,
and societies with a community of interests” point toward a brighter future for working women.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 21 (48)
Pauperism in Tenements
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In eight years 135,595 families in New York were registered as asking for charity
Tons of people were so helpless. Aged people, orphans and widows all just need a little bit to get onto the road to
independence but could not find work or any solution to there problems.
In five years one person out of every ten who passed away was buried in potters field.
At the time there were many people that were professional beggars and applied for a charity even I it was no
necessary.
The 135,595 families lived in only about 30,000 tenements.
Tenements had lots of crime and lots corruption in them because people were always trying to get ahead.
There is a difference between a pauper and the honestly poor. The pauper is hopeless.
Types of Professional Beggars
Boston Widow – buried her husband 17 times with tears and lamentation and has made the public pay for his
funeral(s)
The “gentleman tramp” and the “once respectable Methodist” who patronized revivals in town with his profitable story
of repentance.
It was estimated that New York at the time spent over 8 million dollars on charity for poor individuals.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 22 (49)
“The Wrecks and the Waste” (Ch 22-Riis)
-Pauperdom is to blame for unjust “yoking” of poverty with punishment (charities and correction)
-people who live such horrible lives can never “reform,” they just keep being thrown back into crime
-so in order to cure, you must find the root
-Riis estimates that it costs about 7.1 milion dollars a year to maintain facilities for criminals/poor/insane
1. Charity Hospitals-doesn’t do anything except keep them inside bars, they still try to escape to get
alcohol/tobacco
2. Workhouse-old people sent here to work, but they don’t get anything done
-most of the time the old people are sent to these almshouses by their children when they get too old
to
work, therefore they are really bitter
-natural sentiment between families smothered by basic survival in slums
-mother cant afford to mourn/bury child, children cant afford to take care of old parents
3. Mental Hospitals-women and men who are sent here never go back to society
-“chain-gang”-women tied to a wagon to keep them from jumping in river while on daily walks
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 23 (50)
The Man with the Knife
-a poor, hungry man assaults the carriages of the rich, ‘blindly seeking to kill, to revenge’: “They behind their well-fed teams
have not thought for the morrow; they know hunger only by name and ride down to spend in an hour’s shopping what would
keep me and my little one from want a whole year (p.196).”
-arrested, locked up, forgotten: “the world forgets too easily what it does not like to remember (p.196).”
-man and knife had a mission: addressed the warning spoken by conservative public bodies: “Our fear is that reform may come
in a burst of public indignation destructive to property and to good morals(p.196).”
-Problem: ignorant poverty vs. ignorant wealth
-Solutions: violence or justice
-Worst tenements of NY do not look bad; especially not as bad as the slums of the Old World—they are not quite old enough;
but this “delays the recognition of their true character on the part of the well-meaning, but uninstructed…(p.197)”
-‘to get at the pregnant facts of tenement-house life one must look beneath the surface (p.197).”
-“we are all creatures of the conditions that surround us, physically and morally (p.197).”
-the dangerous classes: ‘dangerous’ not because of their crimes but because of the “criminal ignorance of those who are not
their kind. The danger to society comes not from the poverty of the tenements, but from the ill-spent wealth that reared them
(p.197).”
-at a convention of Christians to address bringing faith to the poor: “How shall the love of God be understood by those who
have been nurtured in sight only of the greed of man? (P.198)”
- “You cannot expect to find an inner man to appeal to in the worst tenement-house surroundings. You must first put the man
where he can respect himself (p.198)”
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 24 (51)
What Has Been Done
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What improvements have been made?
o The reforms of the Health Department: “air and sunlight have a legal claim, and the day of rear tenements is past”
(199); fewer open sewers; water supply is increasing
o Public sentiment is unsatisfactory, because people only notice the tenements when they become a universal hazard
(e.g., epidemics)
o The landlords:
 They cannot be solely altruistic: “the business of housing the poor, if it is to amount to anything, must be
business…as charity, pastime, or fad, it will miserably fail” (201)
 One rich landlord equipped his tenement with the newest conveniences, only to have them torn out for
firewood by the tenants
 The absentee landlord is especially culpable. As a remedy, tenements should have live-in housekeepers.
o Business has done the most of anyone by developing the tenements into warehouses, factories, etc.
o
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The tenants themselves:
 The poorest hinder progress: “they are shiftless, destructive, and stupid; in a word, they are what the
tenements have made them” (202)
 The continued increase of the tenant population (1.25 million in 1890) is the biggest obstacle to
progress—suburbs are not yet feasible.
“The law has done what it could,” but the emphasis with legislation was often with education of a better way of living for
those in tenements rather than forcing change on these communities (this was sometimes not sufficient for the most urgent
reformers). He points to some clear gains that legislation has affected on tenements, noting that windowless rooms without
ventilation and open sewers had been prohibited, and that air and sunlight now had “a legal claim” in the world of
tenements.
The reform of tenements needs to be presented as a strong business move to landlords and employers, because in the end it
is better for everyone involved if living standards rise (employers, employees, and landowners). Thus the motivation
should be to improve business and should be undertaken as such, because if is approached as charity it is doomed to be less
effective.
“Business, in a wider sense, has done more than all other agencies to wipe out the worst tenements” because these
tenements are an inefficient use of urban space.
The focus on tenement reform needs to be about empowerment rather than philanthropy, because the desperation of the
poorest often leads them to take advantage of whatever is around them in a way that harms the community as a whole. He
gives the example of a philanthropist who made significant improvements to one tenement house, only for the poorest
residents to strip the renovated areas and sell the building materials.
Due to population growth, the problems of crowding and poor conditions continues to get worse. The Board of Health
thought that better mass transit would reduce this problem, but workmen still seem to prefer to live closer to their place of
employment despite considerable discomfort.
Absentee landlords have been a big problem in maintaining good conditions in tenements houses, and increasing the
number of tenements in which the owner lives on the premises has shown to be a very effective way to improve the quality
of life there. Riis gives the example of one large tenement block in the Tenth Ward that saw a dramatic turnaround in the
course of a year due to a new supervisor.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 25 (52)
The flat- a spread out living space that alleviates the “nuisances” of tenement life (i.e. overcrowding, staircases, etc…)
Three effective ways of dealing with the problems of tenements in NYC
1.By Law
 Must aim to make it unprofitable to own a bad tenement
 New laws to fine those not meeting certain codes
o Increase size of police sent to check building code violations
2.By remodeling and making the most out of old homes
 Landlords thought to remodel the tenement was to slap on a new coat of paint
 Riis says they must be torn down and rebuild
 Incentives for absentee landlords to rebuild
3.By building new, model tenements
 Good living conditions yield safe neighborhoods and a reduction in thievery
 Living space should look out at either a street or a garden in order to allow for sunlight to enter the quarters – should
not look into internal building shafts
John Reps: Monumental Washington
LOOK AT THESE PLANS – very high chance they appear as one of the image identifies
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History of DC is tied to expansion of national government – largely stuck to plan for 200 years –
not typical of most cities – not necessarily a desirable model
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Jefferson suggests wide streets and a perfect grid (with specified sizes), and the following “the
federal Capitol, the offices, the President’s house & gardens, the town house, Market house,
publick walks, hospital” – two blocks for the presidential residence, one each for the capitol and
market, nine blocks “consolidated” for the “public walks”
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Other big players:
Thomas Johnson, Daniel Carroll, David Stuart – three commissioners for Residence Act
Andrew Ellicott – experienced surveyor
Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant – specifically look for locations for federal bldgs
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L’Enfant is particularly influenced by Paris / Versallies
Possible American sources for inspiration: Williamsburg & Annapolis
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L’Enfant is a friend of Washington’s. Writes him to ask to plan the new city, realizes it is a unique
opportunity in history to choose the location of a capital city and plan it from the ground up,
leaving room for growth and aggrandizement.
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Jefferson “anticipated a town of substantial size but favored an original settlement of compact
dimensions”
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Washington doesn’t like the offer from either Georgetown or Carrollsburgh – objective is largely
to take the entire district and plan for it to be a city
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When all is secured, they start thinking about building a truly great city (to compete with the
European capitals?) as the seat of a powerful empire
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L’Enfant suggests “Several nodes of settlement, rather than one of grouping all or most buildings
in a compact single center.” To promote more rapid growth. Also, he hates the Jeffersonian grid.
Calls it “tiresome”, “insipid”, “cool imagination wanting a sense of the real grand and truly
beautiful.” Nodes of settlement are chosen for their topography (unlike in a pure grid), and linked
directly by the diagonal boulevard.
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L’Enfant requests, receives from Jefferson plans of 10 major European cities – wants to compare
& improve upon them – one has symmetrical radial street pattern (Karlsruhe)
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“Here truly, if not ‘a plan wholly new,’ was an urban composition unique at least to America
both in scale and in concept.” // “It was a supreme irony that the plan forms originally
conceived to magnify the glories of despotic kings and emperors came to be applied as a national
symbol of a country whose philosophical basis was so firmly rooted in democratic equality.”
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Shortcomings:
Distance from Whitehouse to Capitol
Little use of river frontage on the Potomac (changing more recently)
Combination of grid & radial streets creates some poorly shaped lots that are difficult to use and
create visual disorder.
J.B. Jackson
“Chicago,” pp. 72-86 (55)
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Before the Great Fire, there was no city comparable to Chicago—though smaller than St. Louis and on a less beautiful
landscape than St. Louis, Chicago had “sensational” buildings and streets that were “broader, longer, incessantly alive”
Chicago’s mechanical feats were impressive—raising the streets and houses above the low-lying muddy ground,
reversing the flow of the Chicago river so the sewage wouldn’t contaminate Lake Michigan, elaborate system for pure
drinking water
1969 creation of a public parks system was nice, but confined to the North Side of the city
Chicago copied the parks of other cities, but the city motto of “Urbs in Horto” was adopted, which translated from
Latin means “City in the Garden”
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Olmstead and Vaux were commissioned to design a park system for the South Side, but the Great Fire (1871)
destroyed the building plans so a new architect was hired—Horace William Shaler Cleveland
More about Horace William Shaler Cleveland
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Cleveland was from Mass., no formal training in architecture but was a leading landscape architect in the Midwest
Cleveland was not very popular in the histories of art, because he
o 1) confined his work to the Midwest
o 2) had a different style than the “Establishment”
He saw wood as very important (being from New England) as a way to
o beautify the area
o change the climate
o ensure future supplies of wood for building
He hated the grid
o 1) it imposed sameness on every city
o 2) prevented the development of functional divisions and cross-town movement (caused steep streets,
expensive grading was required)
Cleveland’s Plans for the south side parks
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His goals were
o 1) transform the environment for humans through more varied vegetation
o 2) divide and arrange spaces efficiently and harmoniously (freed from the “tyranny of the grid)
since Chicago was accessible to many other cities, all that was needed to beautify the city was a network of green
diagonal boulevards
o unlike New York, which needed a huge park in a very dense area, Chicago did not have these dense areas so a
block park would not be as useful as a beautiful street where one could sit during a traffic jam
o he was concerned for traffic flow and better health for those who live near streets
the city built several park boulevards, but not diagonally
Street or road as a megastructure of the landscape—exemplified by the suburb of Riverside (Designed by Olmstead and Vaux)
- not the first suburb to be built in a “picturesque” manner—Lake Forest was designed 12 years earlier by Hotchkiss
- Riverside was quite isolated houses, with curving streets, homeowners were discouraged to use fences
Expansion and the Great Chicago Fire
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city expansion had a dark side—frame houses, shanties, brothels and sailors (uh-oh), ugly storehouses for boats on the
river, dirty Irish squatter village
40,000 wooden buildings with shingled roofs + dry summer of 1871  Fire starting in the O’Leary barn that killed
275 people and left 100k homeless
o the “new Chicago” was going to be a city of brick and stone
fire created a new kind of city—with massive business districts where nobody lived, because the inhabitants of
churches and houses in the center of the city moved out before anything was rebuilt
regulations on building caused residential development right outside of the city limits—these suburban houses could
use wood (which was cheaper) and posed little fire risk because they were on isolated lots
Chicago’s Contributions to Industry—Housing and Meat
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Chicago got a lot of wood from Wisconsin and Michigan, so the prefab house industry grew
many houses were sent out west after the gold rush
this industry was one of Chicago’s major contributions to urban development until the Depression
“mechanization of death” aka the meat industry
a gridded stockyard that was the first large space in America designed for processing, and it was imitated in other areas
linear system of gates and fences allowed animals to move without disorder or delay
space was organized for efficiency—this was necessary because the animals came off many train lines
Key Terms
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Riverside = Chicago suburb designed by Olmstead that was supposed to be leisurely and tranquil, cities were gently
curved and houses were laid out in big lots with plenty of park space for croquet or other activities
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Great Fire/Chicago Fire = Caused by wooden frame houses and even wooden sidewalk planks, this fire destroyed a
large area of the city and the replacement area was different. The churches and residences moved out, so the area
became less community and culture centered, and more of a mass of businesses
Gary Wills: “Underground Chicago” New York Review of Books
 mysterious floods in 1992 Chicago led to awareness of delivery tunnels under the city
 builders gave “limited and misleading accounts of their purpose”
 underground transportation developed slowly-high water and problems w/ sewer systemeventually had to go underground b/c so many hurt b/c of busy streets-trains hit people-2
killed/day + many injuries
 elevated train b/c didn’t want tunnels b/c unstable foundations of buildings etc
 1899-tunnels got city franchise-by bribes and lies, said only laying cable for telephone company so
that poles/service wagons would be out of the way
 Tunnels dug at night-when found out the tunnels already 13 ft high
 Builders wanted to sneak in a subway before people knew what happened-but backlash, so made
tunnels <7 feet-said workers needed head clearance
 Worked way to people-deliveries to stores, mail, pipe steam heat into stores, pump cool air from
tunnels into theatres for air conditioning etc.
 Tried to get public support for tunnels-tourist attractions
 Not abandoned until 1950s
 Soft soil and sewage issues caused the town to lay sewage pipeson surface then just raise the
buildings up a story-some just made 2nd floor into the ground floor
 The river flowing into the lake with silt kept ships from docks so made flow backwards into the
Illinois river by deepening Illinois and Michigan Canals
 Chicago = “triumph over circumstance” not natural, made itself what it is
 Chicago invented machines for grain industry so got ahead of St. Louis which had the natural
advantage
 Used technology to gain advantage in pigs/cattle industry also
 New technology made tall buildings/skyscrapers possible
 Architect Burnham as “villain” in novels, made city into idealistic instead of self-made, made plan
for development in 1909, Columbian exposition, Beaux Arts
 Sullivan critique exposition as set back to architecture/new and false ideal-but he participated in
exposition, didn’t have most modern contribution, beaux arts nt’l mv’t
 Classic Chicago novel say buildings cold/mechanistic, Condit praises for these things
 Architecture said to be form over function, but many had beauty too-critics ignored b/c pretty
exteriors weren’t like technological interiors-elevator was important in novels
 Chicago described as top-heavy, broad shoulders, male not female
 Businessmen often members of arts clubs and religious b/c of Swedenborg and Moody
 Had lots of offices etc. but also churches, parks, synagogues, theatres which were ornate
 Sullivan created new decorative scheme for community buildings-ornate, enchanting
 Root and Burnham also like ornamentation maybe Chicago not male…or female
 Chicago did have problems and inequalities, but despite all the “brawn” still had a “brain” as it
was conceived in technology, commercialism, and reform
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The Plan of Chicago (online version):
Book written by Daniel Burnham and the Commercial Club
The book discusses and describes different plans of reform for the city of Chicago to ensure that
the city remains successful and prosperous in the future; book written in response to the
overwhelming increases in growth that have caused problems/limitations to the city (i.e.:
overcrowding and pollution)
Online version summarizes the book into 6 key recommendations made by the authors:
o 1. The improvement of the Lake Front and the development of Grant Park
o 2. The creation of a system of highways outside the city
o 3. The improvement of railway terminals and the development of a complete traction
system for both freight and passengers (i.e.: trains, tunnels, elevated rapid transit, and
subways) to make the movement of passengers more efficient and convenient
o 4. The acquistion of an outer park system and parkway circuits
o 5. The systematic arrangement of streets and avenues within the city, including the cutting
of new diagonal streets and the widening of important thoroughfares in order to facilitate
movement
o 6. The development of centers of intellectual life and of civic administration so as to give
coherence and unity to the city
The Plan states that it is the city’s elite who must take responsibility and lead the campaign for
change… change to make the city better through the reforms they have indicated in their book;
plan also appeals to businessmen who have much at stake (i.e. economically) in the future of
Chicago
The Plan also emphasizes how the time has now come to assert control over what has become a
crazy and undisciplined city due to the great influx of people, etc
Overall, the Plan’s aim is to anticipate the needs of the future (of Chicago) as well as to provide for
the necessitites of the present
The Plan is a mix of familiar booster rhetoric (i.e. Chicago is the greatest city ever) with criticisms
of the city (i.e. pollution, slums, that Chicago is a place where everyone comes to work but not
live…) This mix serves the purposes of showing its readers why they must advocate change for
the city in order to preserve its greatness.
The book also briefly mentions how they authors think that Paris is a good city to model; the
authors also advocate the City Beautiful movement
Kenneth Jackson
Crabgrass Frontier, chapter 1 (58)
SUBURBS AS SLUMS
“Suburbs, then, were socially and economically inferior to cities when wind, muscle, and water were the prime movers of
civilization… Even the word suburb suggested inferior manners, narrowness of view, and physical squalor.” (Jackson, 19)
Suburb: residential place, as the site of scattered dwellings and businesses outside city walls
 This phenomenon has been around for a long time (ancient and medieval examples)
Main cities at the time (1815) were “walking cities” (Jackson, 14)
1. Congestion
2. Clear distinction between city and country
3. Mixture of functions: residential and commercial intermixed
4. Short distance from home to work
5. Fashionable addresses in the center of town
a.
Undesirable stuff was often pushed to the outskirts of towns
Race Relations
 Initially blacks were forced to live near their masters, and thus lived downtown
 Then, “living out” system, they could move away, so they moved far far away, i.e. the suburbs
Kenneth Jackson
Crabgrass Frontier, chapter 2 (59)
The Transportation Revolution and the Erosion of the Walking City
I. Suburbanization
a) Between 1815 and 1875 the development of the steam ferry, the omnibus, the commuter railroad, the horse car, the
elevated railroad and the cable car lead to the growth of suburbs.
b) Soon after the Civil War large cities had generated enough wealth to provide the market demand for large numbers of
private houses near major urban center, and for wealthy former city-dwellers to desire to move out of the city where they could
build large estates while still living close enough to the city to be able to work in it.
c) “As has usually been the case in the US, the distribution of population was governed primarily by the desire of the property
owners and builders to enhance their investments by attracting the wealthy and by excluding the poor.”
d) In smaller cities and towns the suburbs remained predominantly slums until well into the twentieth century. In country
villages across North America, the beset streets were often those toward the center as late as 1970. But by 1875 in the major
urban centers, the merchant princes and millionaires were searching for hilltops, shore lands, and farms on which to build
substantial estates.
II. Brooklyn
a) The first commuter suburb, Brooklyn was created as a place where wealthy people who worked in the cities could move to
be away from the hustle and bustle, but still be close enough to the city to be able to enjoy its benefits.
b) The attraction of the easy access to NY, pleasant surroundings, cheap land and low taxes made Brooklyn a faster growing
city than NYC by 1800 and in almost ever decade until the Civil War the population approximately doubled.
c) Brooklyn was originally rural, but by 1880, when it had become part of the expanding metropolis, very few laborers
remained and the farms had disappeared.
d) In 1834 Brooklyn leaders won city status from the state legislature over the opposition of Manhattan representatives.
e) Brooklyn’s popularity and expansion can be traced to the development of the steam ferry. Many different ferry lines
connected large cities throughout the US to growing suburbs. The ferry that connected Brooklyn to Manhattan made the trip to
Manhattan from Brooklyn faster that the walk from the tenements of Manhattan to the business districts.
III. The Omnibus
a) Many large cities, some which did not have water access, and therefore did not have ferries, were confronted with growth
that was so substantial that it outmoded pedestrian movement as a workable basis for organizing urban space, this lead to the
development of the omnibus.
b) Prior to 1825 no city any where possessed a mass-transit system, defined as operation along a fixed route, according to an
established schedule, for a single fare.
c) Abraham Brower introduced omnibus service to the US (first created in France in 1828) with operation along Broadway in
NYC in 1829.
d) Omnibuses appeared in Philly in 1831, Boston in 1835 and Baltimore in 1844.
e) The omnibus system: a city government granted a private company and exclusive franchise to operate coached along and
existing street. In return the company agreed to maintain certain minimum standards of service.
IV. Steam Railroads
a) In North America the first important line to begin laying rails was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1829. The steam
railroads worked as commuter rails, going into the countryside with stops at each town.
b) Along the tracks the populations of many towns grew more than 50% in the first decade after the initial construction.
c) Railroads also aided in the development of suburbs because they made cities accessible to farther towns.
d) The rail cars had accidents and were expensive. People became afraid to use them, until the technology improved and
railroad travel became a common place event in city and suburb life.
V. The Horse Railway
a) The Horse Railway is a combination of the omnibus and the railroad.
b) A horse pulled an omnibus that ran on rails built into the street, causing the car to move twice as fast as an omnibus.
c) A horse could bull a thirty to forty passenger car with more inside space, more effective brakes and an easier exit that a
normal omnibus.
d) The horse car tracks radiated out of the city following main roads toward the wealthy suburbs.
e) Proximity to the horse car tracks made suburbs more attractive and helped to develop suburbs farther outside of cities.
f) The horse cars represent America’s first integrated transportation system. The horse cars connected to the omnibuses,
ferries and the railroads.
VI. Transportation Innovation and Suburban Growth
a) For the underlying causes of the increasingly stratifies and segregated social geography of great American cities, as well as
their relatively love density as compared to Europe. It is important to look not just to transportation and technology and the
powerful mechanical forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution but to the development of new cultural values to better
understand the development of suburbs.
Kenneth Jackson
Crabgrass Frontier, chapter 3 (60)
Home Sweet Home: The House and the Yard
This chapter deals primarily with specifics regarding the ideals and development of suburban homes with a later focus on the
introduction of yards and therefore the establishment of open land between street and home. The chapter discusses four main
topics labeled as: family and home, real estate, the yard, and then sketches three different figures important in the development
of the suburban image of the three sections prior. As is the case throughout the book, Jackson tends to wander at times. In
1890, the suburban image first becomes a distinct form that combines the best of both city and rural life. This shift in the
suburban image was prompted by the impulse for families to protect their home life as public spaces became increasingly more
crowded.
“Family and Home”
 Only within the past 200 years has the family come to play a big role in determining the fate of an individual. Before
then, populations were arranged around production, not by biological units which led to an inescapably pubic life. In
the 18th century, the family became a bastion against society, which led to an increased demand for privacy. In the
middle third of the 19th century, the values of domesticity, privacy, and isolation peak in the U.S.
 In the US, wealth and religion influenced the primacy of home life as it became the middle-class aspiration to create a
“heaven on Earth” in the private space. A single family home now became a necessity for all decent families—a
necessity which many thought would be their ticket to wealth and status.
 Additionally, a permanent residence was thought to provide stability for a migrating US population. Home ownership
was seen as a counterweight to rootless urbanism.
 The home was not only the middle-class ideal, but also a representative of the individual himself.
“Real Estate”
 Ownership of land = true basis of power  land ownership as mark of status + insurance against ill-fortune
“The Yard”
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From 1825-1875, middle class America demanded an enlargement of open space to benefit “aesthetic and moral
nature.” Since we no longer had utilitarian expectations for residential land, Americans built cemeteries, parks, and
country cottages. This development reflected a need to link “life contemplative with the life practical” (55).
By 1870, separateness with a conscious theme of private space (w/grass) became the defining characteristic of the
suburban home.
The suburban yard followed a naturalistic or romantic approach with an open American style that contrasted with the
European formal, sculpted look.
The well-manicured grass lawn now becomes the mark of suburban respectability (yard as a status symbol.)
3 Most Important Voices in Shaping American Attitudes about Residential Life:
“By romanticizing the benefits of private space and by combining the imagery of the New England village with the notion of
Thomas Jefferson’s gentleman farmer, [these three individuals] created a new image of the city as an urban-rural continuum”
(71).
1. Catharine Beecher: sought to connect architectural style and landscape design to her domestic ideal (“cult of true
womanhood”)
2. Andrew Jackson Downing: believed the house was a symbol of character; better homes=better citizens
3. Calvert Vaux: collaborated with Olmstead on Central Park; agreed with Downing; hated banality/monotony of grid plan
“Anti-Urban Tradition in American Thought”
As urban areas became bigger, louder, and scarier, people began to fear cities rather than view them as a cultural or intellectual
refuge.
o “Suburbia, pure and unfettered and bathed by sunlight and fresh air, offered the exciting prospect that disorder,
prostitution, an mayhem could be kept at a distance, far away in the festering metropolis” (70).
o “To withdraw like a monk and live like a prince—that was the purpose of the original creators of the suburb” (71).
o “The suburban ideal offered the promise of an environment visibly responsive to personal effort, an environment that
would combine the best of both city and rural life and that would provide a permanent home for a restless people”
(72).
Kenneth Jackson
Crabgrass Frontier, chapter 4 (61)
Romantic Suburbs
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No precedent for developing a suburb as a completely planned and separate unit; suburbs never had a separate existence from
city
Suburbs always built in grids: straight, right-angled systems in past
o Curving roads of Anacostia are a signal that the neighborhood was not part of the D.C. master plan
Grid
o Pros: efficient, minimized legal disputes over lot boundaries, maximized # of houses, testified to man’s capacity to
overcome the hostility of the land and to civilize a continent
o Cons: poorly lighted, inconvenient, unattractive, conducive to disease, ignored topography of land
o Solution: 1) grand, tree-lined boulevards: these elaborate roads were seen as extensions of the developing park system
2) the winding lane: intended to be picturesque; gentle turn was indicative of the pastoral and bucolic pace of the
home
First completely designed suburbs (beginning tradition of carefully planned suburbs)
1. Llewellyn Park, Alexander Jackson Davis
a. Located in eastern foothills of New Jersey’s Orange Mts.
b. Introduced the unprecedented (for an entire community) curvilinear roads and natural open space in center
c. “Ramble”: completely natural open area w/pedestrian walkways which curved through woods, connected w/cliff
walk along ridge of mountain and followed stream
d. no commercial sites, fences prohibited, effort was made to harmonize each site w/natural fall and character of land
2. Riverside, Frederick Law Olmstead
a. Outside Chicago
b. Olmstead and Vaux meticulously planned the water supply, drainage, lighting, schools, recreational facilities, etc.
c.
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Features: Parks and other unfenced areas for family recreation, as well as a special dam w/backed up water for
boating
d. Generous lots, curved roadways, trees at irregular intervals, houses set back w/immaculate gardens
e. Limited access highway to Chicago w/o stores or industries to disturb the natural vista: would provide harried
businessman opportunity for “taking air and exercise amid delightful vistas on his way to work”
f. Not an immediate success b/c of great Chicago Fire of 1871 which required funds to go towards rebuilding of city,
not Riverside; Riverside Investment Co. (which hired Olmstead) went bankrupt
g. Ultimately attracted rich and “intelligent”
3. Garden City, Alexander T. Stewart
a. On Long Island
b. Constructed spur to the main railroad line to make commuting more convenient
c. Gridiron street system w/diagonal avenues conforming to natural drainage of land, measurements of individual
blocks varied w/topography and several parks
d. Unusually large streets and large lots far away from other houses
e. Stewart wanted to RENT houses, not to sell property to ensure respectful tenants now and in future—very similar
to company towns w/Stewart trying to control the lives of affluent business instead of powerless workers
f. No provisions for schools or churches
g. FAILURE
All 3 set sociological and architectural pattern for hundreds of communities in 20 th century (sidenote: all 3 were blatantly elitist
w/ large plots, generous open spaces, expensive homes)
What they learned: 1) quality single-family homes in a planned environment could not be built for profit for working class (but
for middle- to upper-classes) and 2) those who could afford luxury wanted full ownership
This chapter discusses the development of the “romantic” suburb and how they were built with the intention of creating a
more attractive and peaceful home close to the nearby city. A big part of this was breaking away from the traditional
gridiron and developing a curved road system to suggest “leisure, contemplativeness, and happy tranquility” It was
considered more picturesque to have curved streets and irregular foliage in the area to leave an impression of nature while
still having an organized plan. The rest of this chapter discussed in more detail certain towns that set as patterns for
hundreds of future suburbs as well as the people that designed them:
 Alexander Jackson Davis and Llewellyn Park: Davis was hired to design Llewellyn Park in 1856. Davis
introduced the idea of curvilinear roads and a large natural open space in the center. Davis’ design began the
tradition of carefully planned suburbs with Llewellyn Park.
 Frederick Law Olmstead and Riverside: After his success with Central Park in New York, Olmstead created
designed Riverside which maintained these same ideas, although he focused even more on preserving the natural
topography, and providing an easy access to the nearby business district of Chicago. This access eventually
developed into the idea of the modern turnpike. Again, Riverside set as another model for future suburbs in it’s
natural feel and modern design.
 Alexander T. Stewart and Garden City: This design differs from the others in that it maintained the familiar
gridiron system. However, the difference was that the grid was not arbitrarily placed on the land. It fit the natural
drainage of the terrain and the blocks differed in size. In addition the were numerous large plots for parks that
helped break up the regularity of the streets. Another difference was that Stewart leased the property he designed
instead of selling it. This allowed for better control, but the was not popular and the town did not find success
until the lots were put up for sale.
Kenneth Jackson
Crabgrass Frontier, chapter 5 (62)
The Main Line: Elite Suburbs and Commuter Railroads
1. Trend of suburbanization started by the Robber Barons
a. Between 1885 and 1905, new generation of robber barons (Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc.), spurned by the old money
families of the East Coast, built huge, decadent neo-Gothic, neo Renaissance and Georgian manors.
b. Most common location was in commuting distance of a major location e.g. the north shore of Long Island.
c. Only very rich could afford this lifestyle – less than a fraction of one percent of US population
2. Residential Options of Upper Middle Class
a. remain in a private dwelling within the city
b. move to elegant apartment house
c. relocate to growing edges.
During Gilded Age idea of the house was seen as an expression of a middle-class dream.
3.Suburbs expanded due to railroad expansion from 1865 to 1900.
a. expensive, but twice as fast and much more comfortable.
b. Term “Main Line” come from Philadelphia commuter railroads.
c. From Memphis, to San Francisco to Philadelphia, commuter railroads attracted businessmen away from the quickpaced cities to little towns along the tracks.
Chicago – Lake Forest suburb – the elite retreat, noted for social pretensions, careful planning and exquisite landscape.
New York – Westchester County, contained many railroad suburbs the most prestigious of which was Bronxville, whose design
of curvilinear streets, architectural diversity, and rustic appeal became the model for railroad suburbs everywhere.
3. The Growth of the Country Club
a. gradually became focus of suburban social life, spur to residential movement to the periphery.
b. economically, racially, and socially exclusive
c. Picturesque ideal promoted by 19th century advocates of surburbia consisted of a varied and significant life.
However, as leisure time increased, compulsive play at the Country Clubs became an acceptable alternative to
compulsive work.
4. Socioeconomic Composition of Railroad Suburbs
a. Unlike homogenous socioeconomic post-WWII suburbs, railroad suburbs did not have a single economic class.
b. Consisted of a extremely wealthy elite and the laboring class who they employed for gardening, domestic and other
services, NO MIDDLE CLASS.
c. Working Class lived within walking distance of railroad station, couldn’t afford transportation. Rich people lived
farther away from railroad station because they could afford transportation.
d. Result – railroad towns looked like beads on a string, the cost of transportation gave the railroad suburbs form and
prevented “sprawl”.
Railroad Suburbs reached their apex around 1920
- small in size and number, they stood as a model for success.
- “In the 19th century, the image of suburbia as an affluent community of railroad commuters was set, and the image remained
until the interstate suburbs developed in the 1960s.” (102)
Kenneth Jackson
Crabgrass Frontier, chapter 6 (63)
The Time of the Trolley
- the generation after the Civil War was marked by a wave of invention, including the invention of the telephone, phonograph,
and electric light; no invention had greater impact than the streetcar
The Cable Car
- developed by Smith Hallidie, a Scottish immigrant
- before the development of the electric streetcar, cable cars were introduced in 1867, well-suited for the broad, straight avenues
of American cities (as opposed to the narrow and windy streets of European cities); passenger vehicles ran along tracks, and
power came from giant steam engines that moved the cable
- extensive cable systems developed in Chicago (1894), Philadelphia (1883), New York (1887), and Oakland (1887); cable
transportation reached its peak in 1890, found in 23 cities
- cable-car operation was simple; the cable itself, and almost all of its supporting machinery, was underground, and it moved at
constant speed
- advantages over horsecar, the only available alternative: cleaner, quieter, more powerful, no animal cruelty required
- cable car encouraged real-estate development
- disadvantages outweighed advantages; e.g., initial capital cost, inefficient operation (speed could not be adjusted, too much
energy required to move cable alone), frequency inability of conductors to disengage their grips from moving cable (resulting in
runaway cars); popularity therefore quickly waned, and most cities remained with the horsecar; only San Fransisco retained the
cable car, primarily for nostalgia and tourism
Disenchantment with the Horsecar
- drunken and disorderly behavior; companies unable to maintain standards of clean and reliable service
- required thousands of horses; hills were a problem; horses need rest; animals were overworked and beaten, often died due to
physical stress and sporadic epidemics; lots of manure in streets
The Invention of the Electric Streetcar
- trolley born in New Jersey; forerunner of streetcar produced by Leo Daft in 1883
- in 1885 Daft tested his electric locomotive over three-mile stretch of Baltimore horsecar line
- further experimentation took place in Cleveland (1884) and Montgomery (1886)
- Frank Julian Sprague founded Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company in 1884; developed trolley, “trolled” along by
flexible overhead cable, in Richmond, Virginia
- by turn of the century, half the streetcar systems in the United States were equipped by Sprague, and 90% were using his
patents
- typical trolley resembled 19th-century railroad car – metal wheels underneath, open platforms front and rear, and large
windows all around
- advantages: faster than cable car and horse-drawn tram, raising potential speed of city travel to 20 miles per hour; adjustable
speed; required neither the extensive underground paraphernalia of the cable car, nor the heavy investment in animals, feed, and
stables of the horsecar; cost per passenger mile reduced by 50%, compared to horse trams, thus reducing price of far
Robber Barons of Street Railways
- streetcar lines provided basis for substantial fortunes
- exclusive right to operate electric railway line along particular city streets typically granted by municipal governments to
private companies in return for certain guarantees of service; bribery and political favoritism were the most common requisites
of successful applications
- though initially numerous smaller companies provided service over only two or three streets, consolidation into a few large
firms took place in most American cities before the turn of the century
- greatest street railway tycoon was Charles Tyson Yerkes, who organized transit enterprises all over Mid-West (e.g., in
Chicago)
The Spread of Electrified Traction
- in 1890: 5700 miles of horsecar track, 500 miles for cable cars, and 1260 miles for trolley; by 1893, more than 60% of
nation’s 12,000 miles of track had been electrified; by end of 1903, American’s 30,000 miles of street railway was 98%
electrified
- heavy transit use extended to smaller cities and towns
- trolley represented progress and technological development, and became the symbol of a city
Tying the City Together
- trolley acted as major spur to suburbanization, and also served as major instrument by which ordinary citizens began to
explore parts of city outside their immediate neighborhoods; made possible by inexpensive fare
- streetcar companies encouraged pleasure-riding by establishing race tracks, beer gardens, parks, beaches, amusement parks,
and resort hotels at the end of the line
The Electric Streetcar and the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity
- trolley enabled workers to reach industrial plants from more distant residences, thereby creating more favorable conditions for
more factories
- central business districts of large cities thrived during time of trolley, though there were many centralizing forces unrelated to
the electrification of public transport (e.g., steel-frame skyscraper, telephone, elevator)
- unlike the railroads, streetcars penetrated to very heart of the city; tracks radiated out from city center, tying residential areas
far distant to the heart of the metropolis; because the routes almost invariably led downtown, with only an occasional crosstown
or lateral line, the practical effect was to force almost anyone using public transit to rely on the central business district
- relationship between the electric streetcar and the spatial distribution of commercial activity is perhaps best illustrated by the
development of the department store; the department store owners learned to locate at the intersection of the busiest transit lines
Suburbanization at the Turn of the Century
- radiating outward from the central business districts, the tracks opened up a vast suburban ring and enabled electric trains to
travel four times faster than the horse-drawn systems they replaced
- by turn of the century, a “new city,” segregated by class and economic function and encompassing an area triple the territory
of the older walking city, had clearly emerged as the center of the American urban society; the electric streetcar was key to the
shift
Frank Lloyd Wright
“Broadacres: A New Community Plan,” pp. 243-254 (64)
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Broadacres: Frank Lloyd Wright’s model of an ideal community
Vision: “general decentralization and architectural reintegration of all units into one fabric.”
 Coordinated grouping of small farms, small factories, small homes, small schools, etc.
 Public utilities and government itself is owned by the people of Broadacre
 Based on the values of individuality; social rights such as land property and public ownership of ideas, and exchange;
and a wholesome life not entirely based capitalistic industrialization.
Broadacres: Characteristics
 Industrialized with cars, radios, etc.
 Government only exists for each county. This makes the distribution system much more simpler and more direct.
 Multilevel traffic system: truck traffic concentrated on lower side lanes, speed traffic above, and monorail speed
trains at the center, always running. No airplanes.
 Land distribution happens equitably. A childless family gets X, a family with children gets X+.
 “Organic architecture”: most of the city is not planned but rather designed to grow by itself. Each county thus
becomes individual and special.
 Utilities, such as administration, patrol, fire, post, banking, etc. are all concentrated in the hands of the county
government so people are more apt to be politically aware.
 There are no rows of trees along the roads to shut out the view. Trees could only be planted in groups perpendicular
to roads to give character, privacy, and comfort. General park and music-garden are available; general sports and
festivals are important.
 Houses are made of fireproof synthetic materials and are factory-fabricated in most cases but more natural materials
are encouraged to be used as well.
 School is composed of a group of low buildings in the interior of the city where children can go without crossing
traffic.
See map in SB 213, SB 214: regions seem to be very divided into their individual purposes (e.g., park in one region, houses
in another, etc.); use of the grid system
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FLW saw several inherently just rights of man in suburbanization, and in his broadacre community plan.
FLW saw the best architecture as that which was organic but not regimentally so, it should follow human growth and
not impose restrictions on it.
The three key features of broadacres are:
o The car: everyone drives.
o Radio and telephone: strictly long distance communication here.
o Standardized machine shop production: making machines (30’s “Machines are cool” and scientific
discovery).
Broadacres was supposed to be an environment fit for the three rights FLW envisioned: the right to own and improve
land freely, to invent and produce and for discoveries to be public goods, and for a kind of direct medium of exchange
(ie, no money).
o Context: Rise of the USSR, New Economic Plan craziness.
“One minor government for each county”.
Distribution of goods and services is to be localized and regionalized. This is a somewhat anti-trade vision of urban
form. It’s a bit of a pastoral hangover in some respects: yeoman farmers are now yeoman workers.
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One good idea: mine-mouth powerplants. Very common in China now.
Vision of highways: trucks, traffic and lanes on their separate ways.
Redistribution of land (MINIMUM ONE ACRE PER CHILDLESS FAMILY – A LOT).
All public utilites are controlled by the county.
“Broadacres would end unemployment and all its evils forever.”
Model was of four square miles developed as specified.
No rows of trees along roads to shut out the view.
Houses are predominantly made of cutting edge materials (fireproof – Asbestos! Glass, concrete, etc).
School is accessible without crossing roads.
Lewis Mumford
“The Fourth Migration,” and “Regions to Live In,” pp. 130-133 and 151-152 (65)
“The Fourth Migration”
There were three migrations in the history of the United States. Each great migration of people is a chance for a society to
remold their institutions. At the time that Mumford wrote this, he believed that the U.S. was on the verge of the Fourth
Migration.
First Migration: Farm Village
 Not so much a migration as it is a settlement of the settlement of the colonies
 These first cities sprang up on the eastern seaboard beginning in the seventeenth century, but by the 1850s these cities
were at full capacity.
 “They lacked the traditional resources of common life – their games, their religious revivals, their intellectual stimuli,
were all of the crudest.”
 Late in the migration was the idea of preserving natural resources for future consumption.
Second Migration: Industrial Town
 Settled on land west of the Alleghany Mountains and opened up the continent
 People moved from the countryside into factory towns
 “In short, if the first migration denuded the county of its natural resources, the second migration ruthlessly cut down
and ignored its human resources.”
Third Migration: Financial Metropolis
 “The magnet of the third migration was the financial center.”
 Drained the resources from the industrial towns of the second migration.
Towards the Fourth Migration: The Technological Revolution
 The automobile has decentralized people, roads do not need to be kept up like railroads
 The telephone and electric transmission were new modes of communication
 Decentralization was even easier with the invention of the radio
Migrations in general
 “The migrations rather come as successive waves, and while one wave recedes as the next comes foaming in, the first
nevertheless persists and mingles with the second as an undertow.”
 “The first migration sought land; the second industrial production; the third, financial direction and culture; but as a
matter of fact, each of these types of effort and occupation is needed for a stable, all-around community… To effect
this union is the task of the fourth migration.”
Lewis Mumford “Regions to Live in”
 The main point of this reading is that you cannot understand regions by looking at cities in isolation, rather you need to
see the region as a whole
 Cities are becoming too big and expensive and burdensome, they need to be neutralized by environmental factors.
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Regional planning attempts to enrich the lives of people all over the region (as opposed to the cities or country, alone)
Regional planning was a “movement towards garden cities… a movement towards a higher type of civilization than
that which has created our present congested centers. It involves a change in aim as well as a change in place.”
LECTURE NOTES
February 8 Lecture Notes (70)
The Search for an Egalitarian Landscape
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Land became a source of wealth, independence for the common citizen. This created a need for a way to divide land.
The roots of sprawl go all the way back to the original ambitions of the first settlements.
Ideals of the Enlightenment
 Pursuit of reason and science: measurment of the world
 More objective relationship to the world
 Liberty
 Self sufficiency
o Romanticizing agragrian virtue
 Pursuit of Nature
o Standard of knowledge, moral behavior, ascetic guidance
 Pursuit of Personal Property
 Ethic of the middle link (see below)
Gridiron
 Human hand, partitioning a landscape
 The principle pattern of settlement in the New World. A rational tool of land division, and thus a sign of human
presence.
 Establishing a collective (democratic) order over the land.
o “the grid system, as originally conceived, was thus a device for the promotion of ‘virtuous citizens’….A
blueprint for an agrarian equalitarian society, based on the assumption that the landowner will be active in the
democratic process.” ~ J.B. Jackson
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New York City: “The Big Apple”
Manhattan, Kansas: “The Little Apple”
Garden
 (As all gardens since Eden) representing Nature, and yielding sustenance and delight
 Portrays (retains) the character of the individual cultivator
o “What should we do without that distinct possession of that soil? It feeds us, from it we draw a great
exuberancy.” ~J.H. St. John
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Middle Landscape
“Middle State”, a metaphysical state of centering where the virtues of Nature and Civilization (the city) can be
simultaneously enjoyed.
o “The happiest state of man is the middle state between savage and the refined.” ~Richard Price
o “to withdraw like a monk….yet live like a prince.” ~Lewis Mumford
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Ethic of the Middle Link
It may in truth be said that there is no one happier that the farmers of new England. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
In discarding colonialism, the farmer was seen to be freeing themselves of the corruption of English society, so a new
state could be realized in the middle position between the wilderness and civilization.
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Idealized Landscape of 3 realms
Wilderness
Expanding region of prosperous farms (best setting for virtue, happiness, and productivity)
Civilization/City
Savannah, Georgia
Founded in 1732 by James Oglethorpe on the commission of King George
o About a century older than Boston, 50 years older than Philadelphia
o Oglethorpe had a military background, visionary reform
 Four blocks surround a garden type center
o Could multiply itself as city grew
o One that grows outward, has communites, place in town and outside of town
 Georgia was the last of the original 13 British colonies to be established
 Savannah emerged as the most cosmopolitan and British of American cities during the “Cotton Kingdom”
 Crash of “cottom kingdom” ‘saved’ Savannah from turning into a modern city
o “Savannah is the most charming of cities….It is an assemblage of villas which have come together for
company.” ~Frederick Bremer, 1850
o If 4 &20 villages had resolved to hold a meeting and had assembled at this place…the result would have been
a facsimile of Savannah.” ~C. Macky, 1857
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How did Oglethorpe get this idea?
Precedents:
 Philadelphia (1682)
o Grid, river to river, reserving 4 large squares and central square for government
o Aware of philly plan, but wanted to perfect it
 Plans for the rebuilding of London following the Great Fire of 1666
o Greatest influence on Oglethorpe
o Influenced Washington DC planning….
o Parish society
o Oglethorpe transforms parish ward to a place for debtors
 New Haven (1638)
o First geometric grid
o Tried to establish clarity and order, center was church
o As New Haven grew, it grew in every which way
o Oglethorpe wanted little square in the center of town to reproduce itself in Savannah
 Cambridge (1637)
o First grid
 “Laws of the Indies”, Edict of the Spanish Crown in 1571
o Oglethorpe was aware of these laws, but tried not to follow them—wanted to democratize this plan in
creating a place for debtors
o “much of the southwest was layed out this way
o definition of a town: “thirty neighbors, each with his own house, 5 pigs, 6 chickens, 20 sheep, etc.”
 Theories of Castermentation
o The laying out of military encampments revived during the 15 th century, but dating back to Roman times
February 10 Lecture Notes (71)
Seeking to Construct an Egalitarian Landscape
Thomas Jefferson’s Cities: The Urbane Visions of an Agrarian Philosopher
Thomas Jefferson, A Politician
 1740- Born into wealth in Savannah
 1779- Governor of Virginia (involved with Virginia Assembly)
 1785- succeeds Benjamin Franklin as ambassador to France
 1801- Elected President of the United States and served two terms
Thomas Jefferson, A polemicist
 Agrarian thinker once retired from presidency
 Believes in widespread land ownership, values the small-land holders
“Those who labor the earth are the chosen people of God”
 Ownership of land is a virtue of free individuals
 At age 74 creates the University of Virginia
 Resided in home- Monticello
Four Characteristics to Jefferson’s Pattern
1. Continental Plan
-most importance= subsistence farming
- Land Ordinance of 1985 is the plan to section the newly acquired lands
1. Dealt primarily with the new lands in Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin
2. Ohio sold townships of 6 sq. miles
3. 6 sq. mile blocks reserved for public land and public education
- Very skeptical of city living
1. European cities= close quarters and corrupt
2. Town Plan
- Checkerboard cities
1. ex. Washington= half grid set, half diagonal set
- Utilized the Middle Landscape
1. garden to encourage the benefits of country living in a city
- Ideal vision- half of the reserved space for town would be left as open space
3. Community/Village
- Exemplified in his creation of UVA
1. Setting= a middle ground between nature and cultivated society
2. Contained a central garden with multiple pavilion’s (Inspired by Marlee’s Cheateau)
3. University contains main houses connected by pillared dorms
4. Individual Homestead
- Building blocks of the nation
- Monticello
1. Large plantation used slave labor
2. Pavilions inspired by architecture of the French Renaissance
3. Multiple buildings, located on a hillside
a. demonstrates the embrace between culture and nature
4. Jefferson spent forty years to perfect and finish his building masterpiece
Grids vs. Garden
 It is possible to co-exist
 Transcendentalists -Hawthorne and Thoreau- literature is an attempt to control the wildness of nature
February 15 Lecture Notes (72)
JEFFERSON
 For Jefferson and many of the original Founding Fathers felt that this notion of an American Destiny had to do with a
continuous transformation from a wilderness state to a civilized state by the use of intellect, by settling in a middleground between the extremes.
 Most Americans would love to live in Monticello, but few do, most live in quarter-acre modest versions of it.
REINVENTION OF THE SMALL TOWN
 Seaside, Florida: a seaside community that has timeshare condos that tries to evoke a long-term sentimental love for
small town living.
o It is an attempt to say that we don’t have to live in generic suburbia, but we can return to the tradition of
social organization that is characteristic of a small town: slower pace life, walking for transportation,
neighborly gatherings, etc.
o The Truman Show was filmed in Seaside. The movie was about Jim Carrey who thought he lived in a real
life, but in actuality he lived in a stage set. Several similar communities have sprung up around the country.
 Religious utopians have also tried to make a new life in their own small towns
o Robert Owen, founder of the New Harmony Community in Indiana
 Similar to a Kibbutz from Israel
o Charles Fourier,
 French son of a middleclass merchant\
 Build self sufficient buildings and towns, about 40 of them in Europe
o Horace Greeley: “Go West Young Man”
 Celebration, Florida: Disney’s town
NEW ENGLAND AS EDEN
 “Consider the village itself…Would it be an exaggeration to say that there has never been a more complete an
intelligent partnership between the earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the old New England Village.” –
Lewis Mumford
 “It is tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and of futility… It is dullness made God.” -Sinclair
Lewis, on the small town
 The country town and rural life is often found to be dull and restrictive. In the city we find material success, but we
remain haunted by the dreams of a more peaceful life.
 The founders signed a covenant stipulating several restrictive rules, such that the land of the township will be jointly
held and distributed per a formula.
 At one point, a law in MA required that everyone live within a certain time distance of travel from the town common.
 The majority of township lands remained public property in the form of farm lands that was communally farmed.
 It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that various social reform societies embarked upon trying to make these
communities beautiful. The beautification of the town commons, the erection of a church and public buildings and the
impositions of design regulations, aimed to keep people from leaving.
CITIES OF GOD
 Members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) build their own cities of God
o They settled in several landmarks, and eventually moved to the Utah area
o Mormons believed that Zion would serve as the religious capital of the new world, a new Jerusalem
 They build 400 Zions
o Zion was both a town and a place for Mormons to gather for the second coming
 So the city was build to be orderly, “length as large as its breadth,” so the Mormons adopted this
description and the concept of four squares
 This worked well with the continental grid
o Jefferson’s homestead idea
o Joseph Smith in 1833 sends to Brigham Young and his followers the plot of the city of Zion
 All streets intersect at right angles and streets are in the cardinal directions
o “The land between the buildings is cultivated, like a garden.”
February 17 Lecture Notes (73)
A Frontier Hypothesis: The Origins of “Edge Cities”
Detroit
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1930 – 5th largest city in America; now – downtrodden, uninhabited
A city half its former size in population
Jefferson wanted to prevent dissolution of industrial empire by creating a more egalitarian, natural land/pastoral state
During the war, Detroit was key sources of armaments – automobile industry has to retool itself
Fractious racial strife  “white flight” (suburbanites spread out)
Downside of Jeffersonian vision for future
Southfield, MI has more employment now than Detroit, an example of the new version of Turner’s “Frontier
Hypothesis
 no longer geography as drawing line, Detroit has been replaced – rotational urbanism
April 22, 1889 - Guthrie, Oklahoma
- 100 years after Jefferson’s continental survey
- Oklahoma Land Rush: 12 000 homesteaders could settle, five times that many gathered
1892
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World’s Expo in Chicago, honoring Columbus’ arrival
Frederick Jackson Turner , “Frontier Hypothesis,” 1893
o influential essay, presents theory on course of American empire (American development explained not by
growing East Coast but existence of free land and settlements westward)
o permanently new society – as the frontier advanced, requiring distinctively American lives; each frontier was
an escape from the past  promotes freedom and individualism
The Homestead Act
- 1862 – Act authorized by congress
- 6 out of 7 acres given from government to railroad companies or mining enterprises
- Thousands of speculators acquired contiguous parcels under fake names
- 1935 - termination of Act (at this point, 400 000 farms on 200 million acres)
- Agriculture surpassed by industry (18201930)
- West as “safety valve” for American cities, immigration from abroad
February 22 Lecture Notes (74)
Seeking to Construct an Egalitarian Landscape: The Company Town: Industrial Experiments in the Garden
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During the 19th century, efforts were taken to establish model work and living environments in settings removed from
the stresses of large urban cities. “The aspiration to marry modern industry and natural settings to assure a productive
and content labor force.”
The company town sought an alternative to the problems associated with the industrial urban city; company towns
were located near streams and rivers for steam and water power sources.
The company town is an example of a “middle landscape.”
Labor was sought in a natural setting and a healthful environment.
Factories move out of cities to large, open areas, to expand industrial output.
i.e., Detroit, Michigan. The “White flight” following industrial de-urbanization resulted in 1. the growth of white,
middle class suburbia and 2. Detroit experiences race riots and competition for jobs, ultimately becoming a black
metropolis (82% African American)
3 examples of company towns:
1. Pullman, Illinois
a)
Est. in the 1880 by George Pullman, it was a town outside of Chicago meant to be very
attractive to workers meant to operate as efficiently as a factory itself.
b) It was built to optimize the production of the railroad car—by mass production, the once
luxurious railcar could be democratized and available for use by all people.
c) Pullman was an example of industrial paternalism—forcing workers to live a “correct”
behavioral lifestyle while providing them with living necessities (housing, food,
education, etc.) in order to make them better, more efficient workers.
d) US Supreme Court forced Pullman to relinquish ownership of his company town, ruling
that it was an “un-American” idea, and that the success of a company cannot conflict with
the free behavior and welfare of workers.
e) The company failed for other reasons, too:
1. Pullman lowered workers’ wages without the corresponding lowering of their rents
2. Violent strikes and labor riots ensued, bringing Pullman to failure.
2. Lowell (1822) and Manchester (1855), Massachusetts
a) Were New England textile manufacturing centers.
b) Its original goal was to create an environment that would fully cater to the life-style and
needs of a particular labor class so that their productivity as workers—and thus the
profitability of the company—would remain optimal.
c) Largely employed young women to operate the mills.
3. The GM styling plant located outside of Detroit
a) Est. in 1849 in Warren, Michigan and was dubbed “The American Versailles”
b) It was designed to accommodate the styling, research, and engineering development
operations for General Motors in an ultra-modern complex whose image would help market
GM automobiles.
c) It was a primary example of “industrial aesthetics,” “aesthetic progressivism,” and the
strive of American industry to be “modern”
d) The styling plant focused on the design, rather than the production, of products. This
embodied the notion that American industry also shifted to offering products that enhance
American lifestyles through practical technology.
e) The tech center “linked aesthetic of machine to aesthetic of design and the environment.”
February 24 Lecture Notes (75)
PARKS AND PUBLIC PICNIC SPACE
 Parks are America’s greatest contribution
 They wanted to bring nature back to the increasingly industrialized cities
o Necessary to make it fit for human habitation
 The wealthy could always have access to the “healing forces of nature” but what about the less affluent? This was
supposed to bring this natural freedom to everyone
 Olmsted thought this would make people better citizens
o A continuum between the wilderness and the industrialized
 Connected to transcendentalism movement with Thoreau and Emerson
 This movement began in America with Cemeteries
o Mt. Auburn Cemetery; Bigallo had the idea that it was bad to bury dead people near neighborhoods and
moves the cemetery away from the population center
o There is a tradition in the 1920s and 1930s to make these lavishly landscaped cemeteries
o People started going to these for picnics and to enjoy the landscape
o Became obvious to people that citizens enjoyed relaxing in landscaped environments
 Spread to subdivisions and new park spaces
 Andrew Jackson Downing petitioned to have one of these picnic open spaces in Manhattan
 He compared New York, which had no open space, to London, which had acres of open
parks and public spaces
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“The taste of an individual as well as that of a nation will be indirect proportion to the
sensibility to which he perceives the beautiful and natural scenes. Plant spacious parks in
your cities and unclose your gates as wide as the gates of morning to the world.” --A.J.
Downing
o His mentor was Sir Henry Repton, the father of landscape tradition
o Lord Byron declared that “such symmetry is not for solitude.”
o The Duke of Marlburl needed his estate updated, his architect said that “you must
send for a landscape painter.”
o Vienna has an open space around the city when the fortification came down
o London has the large Regents Park
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTEAD (1922-1903)
 Superintendent for Central Park
 Landscape Architect, City Planner
o Also a journalist and an author
o Involved in the design of the World’s Fair in Chicago
 Central Park
o An unbelievable and monumental creation, both of a work of an artist and engineer
o Took 16 years and 14,000 laborers to build
o Thousands of trees
o Required genius innovations about moving trees, bridges, etc.
o “The time will come when New York will be built upon, when all the grading and filling will be done …and
the island will be converted into…monotonous rows and…erect buildings. Therefore, it seems desirable to
interfere with its easy underlying outlines and picturesque rocky scenery…to increase and judicially develop
these individual characteristics.” He was advocating for constructing the island into what it used to be. This
wasn’t preservation, it was an act of design.
o Never fulfilled Olmsted’s desires. He was dissatisfied with New York for only building Central Park
 He wanted a system of open spaces, not just one large open space
 Then he came to Boston, MA, where he remained for the remainder of his career
 Boston’s Park System
o “The Emerald Necklace” is a system of open spaces that starts with Boston Commons
 He elongates Commonwealth avenue to the second lung
 Along the J-way to the next “lung” Jamaica Pond
 All the way to Franklin Park
 The Necklace is a broken necklace, it is only half of his original plan
o He saw the city as a human being, with lungs (parks) and arteries (streets)
o Franklin Park is our version of Central Park
 Wanted havens against the industrialized city
 Horatio W.S. Cleveland warned that we must “Look forward a century” when designing a city and parks
 “We want a ground to which people may easily go after their day’s work is done, and where they may stroll for an
hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets, where they shall, in effect, find the city
put far away from them.” --F. L. Olmsted, 1970
KANSAS CITY, MO
 They did not have parks or a sewer system
 No legacy of transcendentalist ideology
 Archetypal American “book town” from the move west
 Will be discussed later
CONCLUSION
 In Kansas City, the park system completion was the essence of urban planning at the end of the 19th century.
 It was a way to extend usable services to outlying areas
o The park system was a way to extend the sewer system
o To promote residential growth around the parks
o Made it easier to get around landscape difficulties
 Symbol of city pride
 Way to modernize increasingly large cities
 Philadelphia and Chicago followed suit
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o Chicago keeps doing it today, building a new Grant Park
In these and many other cities, this is a response to Thomas Cole
o As Cole’s Savage State in the progression of Empire, the seat of the consummation of empire needed forces
to keep it human
o The park environment becomes the equivalent of the plaza, the piazza in Europe, a socializing space and an
eternal state
o Giving such a progressive era, the park environment as a representative of nature lets it transform
March 1 Lecture Notes (76)
The Era of City Beautiful
This era continue from the Park movement, from the less flattering aspect of European urbanization--to coexist with nature
(idealized in the 1890s)--naturalistic landscape
Photo: Farmer/gentlemen/poets. Unsettling view, some industries in the background, kind of threaten this peaceful wieve.
Today turn to the opposite, making cities on European model, maybe even more grandeur.
Romanticism, nature as being permanent versus human stasis as temporal
Image of a church (in Europe, supposedly)--once thought to be uplifting and permanent--now become ephemeral, whereas the
mountain endures.
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Shift from ecclesiastical institution as permanent to nature as everlasting. Eschewing artifice being pernanent
o Nature as healing
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1900s turn to Pan-American: a REVERSE force. task of building great city as urbane/as edifice as in Europe.
o Almost imperialistic, compete with the outdone urbanism, either equivalent or even competing with the great
Western Europe
o Perfect transition, from park as antidote to corrupt aspects of the city: (Kansas city e.g.) to park as new
civilization. But still, park is a part of city building rather than going out of city for nature.
o Era of city beautiful: focus on physical appearance of the cities. Described as: the Age of American
Enterprise, American Renaissance, gilded Age, Age of Excess.
o An Era leading toward the commence of WW1
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Photo: generic American grid in the background, foreground of the bombastic palace-like institution building,
make the city grand, monumental. Offering the foreground as edifice against the American mundane grids
Photo: Grouping of buildings to set public realms
Photo: Boston/New York Public library, the beginning of city beautiful era, started with public buildings.
Reflect the ambition to establish America as a world power, resulting from accumulation of wealth. See this
architectural trend as an inevitable part of civilization, therefore the city has to be grand to assert that.
 Reference to Italian renaissance, NY public library, Widener's reading room on the mezzanine,
meant to evoke Europe, the great symbolic institution
 Grand railroad station (NY Penn Station)
 Urban, ennobled symbolism of American power, imperialism. Embellishing public building with
sculptures, artworks (turn to "the classics" for decoration)
Great park of Philadelphia
planting of trees lining of grand boulevards: New bridges from Manhattan connected to vicinity using grand tree line
boulevard, Chicago even reconceive the city, abandoned the grid (plan for Fairmount parkway) to make it more like
Paris.
Resurgence of classic taste: Italian renaissance
Merge with American emergence in arts of various forms (comparison of American literature with literature of the
renaissance, italian classicism, in philosophy as well, e.g. James Henry)
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Making things just as beautiful as the Louvre.
To understand this desires for city beautiful, let's consider what one likes about a city or what gives character of a city.
Some identifies cities with what they enjoy about it, like restaurants and lifestyle. But for city like Paris, it's physical
appearance that distinguishes its character.
Chicago's World Columbian Exposition (1883): Centennial commemoration of the arrival of Columbus in America
The most integral, elusive piece ever perceived. Spanning from eastern seaboard, to the west of Chicago
Also the first place to be extensively photographed in America
Enchantment/ghost image of what American cities might be, grander than Europe
However, retreated by historian as importing styles from Europe (several decades after this apparition)
27 million pf people attended the exposition. Major national city Pavillion, 17 hundred feet long, the hugest building ever built.
Modeled after Paris exposition in 1889
Look at the plan
o Giant statue of the republic in front of the lake, massive in scale
o Carnival ride
o "Midway" and iteration of other cultures
o American indigenous references: bears, bulls versus Paris grandeur architecture
o References to Venice: gondola
o Baker charlet pavilion
Summary: Columbian Exposition demonstrates art and design: not engineering, to symbolically unify a diverse society
 Technology
????, living in Pennsylvania, wrote about American architecture, thought it was the most savage of nations but was impressed
when he saw Chicago expos, referred to it as "the finest thing about life" is emerging in America, a step toward intellectuals.
He believes the Americans can outrival Eiffel by a quarter of mile.
In Europe, however, the progressive technology did not make its way into everyday life, but Americans believed to do so. No
tall buildings in Paris at the time other than Eiffel structure. Engineering at the fair is used mainly to force artistic sensibility.
Tall buildings were already built extensively in Chicago. The ambition is to make things beautiful as it is always been beautiful
in high culture of Europe
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After the expos, Americans had a sense of technological know-how, therefore Architecture made the direction toward
progress. (as opposed to comparison/identification of the past). This is the very root basic to building a new empire,
beginning with learning about best quality, and then distinguishing themselves from the Europe.
 The desire to create national history (this period is also the time when Americans started studying their own history),
cultural continuity, hoping it will last, faith in enduring future and the forming of institution that is as long-last as the
European nations
Comparisons with Venetian Mercantile Princes in 15c
- The same phenomenon that happened, comparable to the Venetian merchants built for themselves big buildings in 15c.
Now it was 19c American Industrialists. The rise of wealth made classicism available to almost everyone.
- Photo: homes of the 19c American Industrialists become like art gallery ex. The Guggenheim
- The charitable idea about obligation of wealth—charity from the rich to commission public buildings as grand as their
house, “civilization of public grounds” The establishment of Cultural institutions like art museum, art collector
organizations were product of this age. The elite industrialists spent a bit of their resource for monumentalism of the
public.
However, the buildings from World fair Chicago were finally burnt down by Pullman labor strikes. The change of American
scene from the top down is being questioned and turned into great debate. Social reform from the bottom up is speculated.
After all, the World’s fair was ephemeral, and finally become City Park (Jackson park in Chicago). Olmsted’s park and its
healing characteristic endured, finally.
March 3 Lecture Notes (77)
Aspiring to a Civic Realm: American Urbanism a Century Ago
Reformers and Utopians in a Rapidly Urbanizing Nation
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Characteristics of the City Beautiful
o Aggrandizing and enlarging the public realm of the city
o Great beauty, aesthetically pleasing
o Have big parks, civic centers, cultural edifices, museums
o Tended to be elitist and imperialistic
o Provided an opportunity to achieve urbanity
o Overestimated the pictorial view of the city
o Ignored the social consequences of crowding
o American cities competed with other European cities to be “greatest city”
Pessimistic and optimistic views of the city
o Pessimistic view: social reform, reform tradition
o Optimistic view: spatial reorganization, progressive era
o Both views sought reform and improvement of the city
Chicago viewed as:
o The city of deeds – rational, too functional (not aesthetically pleasing)
o The city of dreams – clean, sanitized, with time honored traditions
The World’s Fair was a call to arms to remake the rest of Chicago (dealt with the growing population)
Jacob Riis (writer from Denmark)
o Invention of the strobe light allowed him to take pictures of unpleasant, dirty places
o These photos resulted in social unrest
o Riis campaigned to reduce over crowding, increase ventilation, provide clean water, reduce disease, reduce
death risks
o People responded and started doing more research on these conditions. Found that many buildings lacked
good ventilation, had few bathrooms, were overcrowded (they claimed that poverty causes these conditions).
Jane Adams – Christian charity
o Set up welfare houses (settlement homes) that were not necessarily acts of charity. They provided social
services (advice, campaigns for better working conditions, tutoring, English classes, etc).
o These welfare houses were set up in response to poverty
Reform Policies:
o Political reform
o Social reform (Riis & Adams) – effort to lessen the gap between the extremely poor and the extremely rich
o Moral reform (“purity reform”)
o City planning reform
o Utopias – “economy reform utopias” = do not involve planning, morals, etc. but try to achieve equality in the
economy
Edward Bellamy, “Looking Backwards”
o Fictional story about a man who wakes up and finds out that NY is socially and morally just. He speaks of a
better city with broad streets, trees, large open squares, statues and fountains. The architecture of public
buildings is beautiful. Idealizes the American dream of pastoral-ism
Howe, “Letters of an Alturia Travel”
o Total of 12 essays on critique of cities: describes a fictional character who visits us from Utopia – the traveler
is impressed and excited by Chicago’s World Fair (claims that our best attempt at utopia is Chicago’s World
Fair)
o Claimed that most cities were not fit for living humans
o Believes that the rich segregated themselves while the poor were living in poverty in unsanitary conditions.
o Wants to destroy the existing city for creating a new altruistic community (called “Alturia”)
March 8 Lecture Notes (78)
Conditions unique to Washington D.C.
- Differs from European capital cities in that it is, and was intended to be, primarily a center of government. European
capitals also tend to be the main commercial/cultural centers of their respective countries.
- Original monumental ambition to create Washington realized a century later
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City was planned in two stages, first by L’Enfant, then in 1901-2, when Senate Park Commission wanted to revive the
spirit of the original plan while at the same time infusing it with elements of architecture and planning taken from the
World’s Fair in Chicago.
 The growth of Washington corresponded with the growth of the federal bureaucracy
 The Columbian Exposition turned attention to DC, which was seen as a canvass for new design ambitions.
Choosing the DC area
- 1791: Congress pushed by Washington to designate area around the Potomac as the site of the nation’s permanent
capital.
- Built at the intersection of the two central axes of the country at the time.
- Those pushing for DC envisioned a canal that would be built west from the city to the Ohio River, making DC the
gateway to the West. This ambition revealed a southern bias, as most westward movement at the time had taken place
in the northern states.
- Jefferson involved himself in the planning, submitting several proposals for the layout of the city (grid).
Pierre Charles L’Enfant
- Hired in 1791 to create a plan for the city.
- Was not a professional architect or city planner, but close ties to President Washington secured him the job.
- The fact that he was of high social standing, French, and had served in the military were seen as good credentials for
the job. Military service was often seen as an important qualification for city planning, since one would be able to
design the city with troop movements in mind.
- L’Enfant was inspired by European designs, and particularly by Versailles. He wanted to integrate large diagonal
streets into the plan to connect a web of city monuments visually (monuments would be at the intersection of two
diagonals). He was met with resistance from Jefferson, who pushed hard for a grid design.
- Andrew Ellicott: Surveyor for L’Enfant.
- Benjamin Banneker: Assistant surveyor, African-American, self-educated, scientist and mathematician. Produced
important almanacs of stars and planetary arrangements.
 Goosefoot: geometric scheme that L’Enfant wanted to include in the city design. Consists of diagonals emanating from
points of focus. It was used in many European designs (Versailles). L’Enfant was also influenced by Renaissance radial city
designs.
 His final plan ended up being a compromise between his vision and Jefferson’s. It included a grid, but also diagonal streets
and goosefeet. Integrates elements from Savannah and London.
The need for government expansion renewed interest in DC. In 1900, architects gathered to renew L’Enfant’s plan, integrating
ideas from the Columbian Exposition.
- As a result of this meeting, Congress creates a commission in charge of reviewing DC’s design and coming up with a
new one.
- Commission is led by Senator McMillan
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The city that was eventually completed from these plans did not mirror perfectly the designer’s intentions perfectly. The
Capitol, White House, Monument axes were not aligned correctly due to a surveying error, and one cannot see DC’s
central buildings from the others.
DC’s pastoral qualities differentiate it from Europe’s capital cities.
March 10 Lecture Notes (79)
At the beginning of the 20th century, Chicago was the model of what a modern metropolis ought to be.
Combination of Factors that Make it that Model
1. Unparalleled growth -- boomtown: century between 1830 and 1930 took it from nothing to 3.5 million people; rate of
growth faster than any other country in the world at the time
2. Reliance of technological know-how and ingenuity -- facilitator and conveyor: colossal network of railroads, depots, docks,
and stockyards; incredible machine of industrialization
3. Beneficiary of the Jeffersonian endless and exploitable grid -- volumetric extension of grid vertically with skyscrapers
4. Planning to create a commercial core with residential homes on the periphery
5. Infrastructure – an Olmsteadian vision of a park system and a modern highway system as well
SECOND HALF OF YEAR
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: 1-14 (66)
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His suburb’s first 17,500 houses had been built in 3 years
He thought of them as middle class even though they were not at all
He believes each of us is crucified
The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities
In 1949, 3 developers bought 3,500 acres of southern cal farmland
o They hired a photographer to take pictures from a plane at different stages of construction
o The pictures became famous: from above the grid is beautiful and terrible
o Four of the photographs became the definition of the suburb and then all suburbs
o One picture was used to show what had changed between 199-1956. in the picture the men were barely
recognizable like just part of the pattern
 The houses were built assembly-line style with teams of workers specializing in different areas of construction
(foundation, framing, nailing, etc). Not much skill was required.
o “scaffold jack”: could lay rafters without setting up scaffold. Advances that allowed rapid building of houses.
Idea of economical building.
o 92% of residents think this suburb is desirable place to live
 Distance between houses is carefully planned.
o Number of houses per acre is the subdivision’s yield
o A measure of profitability: the subdivision’s population density: idea of density sold to shopping center
builders.
o This yield increasing over time.
o People are grateful for the space between houses. Appreciate the isolation.
 Local newspaper called the area “the best protected I the U.S. against [nuclear attack].
o Because of advances in weapons technology, reaction time to attack reduced.
Fighter planes without engines donated as war memorials. Korean War
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 15-29 (83)
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General note: blocks of text mimic suburban grid – “islands isolated from each other” – bocks of text are fragmented,
like each island of a house
32
o Children playing on F-3d are hurt so it is raised on a concrete pylon
o Korean war dead plaque, but only names of Cit Council members on it
33
o Memorial Day service under the wings of the plane
34
o Defense contractors tunneling under Mrs. A’s house, spewing toxic waste into her house, she claims
35
o Army Corps of Engineers and Douglas Aircraft Company (military industrial complex) dig under her house
o Carter stopped them but Regan didn’t
o Mrs. A has a string in her closet she can pull to stop the digging but only for a while
Unclear how much of Mrs. As stories are true and how much are conspiracy theories
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o
Mrs. A claims NASA funded by a film of her rape
o
Narrator received a flyer for a manned mission to mars to reconvene with Jesus Christ
o
Narrator recieved pages full of writing from a man suffering from a mental condition that forces him to write.
o City theme song written by someone in the mental institute
o Residents welcome aliens in their house
o Man files to change all traffic lights to green because he doesn’t like red lights
o Mrs. A demands restitution for damage done to her roof by the cable man, she wins
Everyone in the suburb going truly crazy: aliens, lights, the cities theme song comes from a mental hospital
40 and 41
o Mr. H prosecuted for the rubbish in his yard
o Neighbors complain
o City spends ten years examining the junk, checking in on Mr. H
o Mr. H is counseled, offered help the man who has a messy yard is given “help” while the alien well wishers
and the man that can’t stand red lights are allowed to go about their business
42
o Suburban life a compact between neighbors
o Honest hypocrisy
43
o City set up for returning GIs and their wives
o City felt like it would turn into a slum… who are you going to sell the houses to, the jack rabbits? Looked
like they would be the appropriate buyers
44
o Not a garden suburb , Right angled streets, grid
o Highways (Boulevards) are tree lined
o People passing through always mention the trees but never the grid
45
o Grid system in “my city” is a fraction of larger LA Grid
o LA Grid set up from a book in the Archive of the Indies in Seville
 Described the exact layout of all colonial towns in Spanish America
46
o Mother counting “3,2,5,3,2” on her deathbed
o Narrator says “they were coordinates to a map I did not have”
47
o America laid out on Jeffersonian grid
o Land Ordinance of 1785, mile square sections of land in the wilderness west of the Ohio river
o States have sharp edges because of it
48
o Ten years along with Mr. H the city is fed up and his case is turned over to the District Attorney’s office
o Mr. H is sent to jail for sixty days, longer than a check forger, a first-time car thief, or a man convicted of
assault
49
o Father died behind a three-panel door to the bathroom
 The doors were like a grid, three rectangles surrounded by a raised framework
50
o Douglas manufacturing plant camouflaged as suburb during WWII to blend in with the surrounding tract
houses
o “No one who lived there questioned that the War Department could make these real houses the target of
deceived Japanese bombers”
51
o Wood in narrator’s house is older and sturdier, he can’t break the door down to get into the bathroom to save
his dad
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His dad dies in the bathroom
o
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Ambulance carrying his dad’s body drives through the grid
Area used to be upper middle class but they moved away because they thought the development was going to
become a slum
o
Manual Nieto gets 500 square miles of land with 25 miles of white sand beach for his service as a soldier in
the Spanish army
He never mapped out his property
52
53
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54
o
William A Clark owns land across the country and in 1928 sets leases his land to tenant farmers who grow
beans, alfalfa and carrots
o
Third person description of waiting for father to die and how they take showers at different times of the day,
he is waiting to brush his teeth when his father dies
o
First person description of waiting for father to die, thinking about the small rooms in the house, not about his
dad
o
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Fire department came to get his dad, not the paramedic. Rarely fires in town
Innovations of public safety often tested in town
55
56
57
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 30-44 (84)
Key themes of included stories:
- death
- isolation
- uniformity, the production line
- emptiness
Summary of stories:
- Fire is rare in the suburb, except once when a woman gasses her house
- Son describes his father’s ordinary, nearly humdrum, death
- Son sees his father’s house as a representation of his father’s ideals
- Narrator (son) identifies the black and white of TV with the aura of death that pervaded post-WWII American media
- When someone in the suburb dies, they can only tell because the lawn has not been mowed
- City is gridded and flat. Houses were sold at set fees – mostly to WWII veterans.
- Each house comes with a fridge, oven, trash compacter, washer and a tree in the front yard.
- Average income is above American average. People are in debt as they pay for standard household luxuries like
furniture and TV
- Profile of typical family: Wife knows very few people. Husband pays a lot for the TV. They would like to go to a
church, but they don’t know which one. They would like to be more involved in the community, but they want to get
the grass growing properly first.
- A couple boys die playing in a drainage ditch
- Most people vote for Eisenhower
- The house has no basement. It was built cheaply and quickly. A feeling of void pervades it.
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp.45-60 (85)
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this section weaves through past and present, connecting the narrator’s childhood growing up in a development
housing project (built in 1942 as a company house for the workers of the Douglas Aircraft plant) to his present day.
He still lives in the same house that his parents bought, though they have both died
the house and other tract houses in this suburban neighborhood (Lakewood CA) were carefully marketed and
retouched.
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selling points: a car posed in front of the house (a symbol of domesticity, family life) in propaganda pictures, street
lights (considered a luxury)
the section has many exact measurements of lawn sizes, street widths  the narrator seems extremely critical of the
“subdivision maps filed in the county recorder’s office” that made the cookie-cutter suburb possible
o Example: “The sidewalk is four feet wide. The street is forty feet wide. The strip of lawn between the street
and the sidewalk is seven feet. The setback from curb to house is twenty feet. This pattern — of asphalt,
grass, concrete, grass — is as regular as any thought of God’s.
when the houses went on the market in the 50’s, the developer/salesmen said that, “We sell happiness in homes.” (49)
 houses sold very quickly (7,400 houses in less than ten months, in areas that were previously completely
undesirable and undeveloped)
as a dichotomy to this statement, Waldie describes crime in the area as well as the tragic story of suicide. in this
sterilized, highly ordered and lifeless world, people are not as happy as the salesmen and the pamphlets would have it.
the dried up San Gabriel River (barely a trickle; lined in concrete against a repetition of floods) is a symbol of
lifelessness in the suburbs
mention of the park movement, as well as the fact that completely fake trees are planted in everyone’s yard and along
the streets. when the houses were developed in the 1950s, there were no trees to be seen (see cover of the book). but
the tree development isa unnatural: the narrator points out that trees come from other countries, are not native, etc.
the concept of “urban forestry” in the contemporary Lakewood, CA: the city replants trees in people’s yards, even if
residents try to get rid of it (idea: a federal body trying to impose “nature” and the “Garden” on the boring suburb grid)
“When I walk to work, I walk through a vista that is almost one continuous garden and lawn, broken every fifty feet by
a concrete driveway” (59). The narrator comments on the monotony and sterility of the grid with the highly-cultivated
suburban gardens intermixed. “Every square foot of my city has been tilled or built on and fitted into the grid.” (54)
 the grid as supreme, as exhausting the natural landscape.
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 61-77 (86)
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Describes history of Lakewood when Louis Boyar, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart bought the land from the Montana
Land Company in 1949.
Built 17,500 houses in less than three years—according to Time magazine, “the biggest housing development in the
world.” (62). Also built one of earliest suburban shopping centers.
Some funding was supplied by the FHA for construction loans and mortgage guarantees
Used grid layout because it was “familiar and cheap” (70)
When the Montanta Land Company owned the land, they refused to sell subplots of blacks, Mexicans and Jews. Even
when the Supreme Court ruled that such racial restrictions were unconstitutional, they continued to include restrictive
covenants into the property deeds.
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 78-98 (87)
MISSING
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 99-114 (88)
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quick, cheap, and profitable living is best accomplished when grids with right angles are used
when more space was required, prisoners were just packed tighter together with no remodeling done
Boyar took his drawings to LA to meet with the county planning commission in 1950
approved Boyar’s subdivision plan, but allowed Weingart’s plan although they didn’t like it much at all
Hopper developed subdivision with no sidewalks because it interfered with gardens and others complained that kids rollerskating and
other activities was an inconvenience
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Bonner honored by Boyar, Taper, and Weingart at golf course with a plaque
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Waldie continues with his disjointed thoughts of the suburbs
Compares Louis Boyar’s design of a small, packed grid to other places that must be built quickly (Auschwitz,
Birkenau concentration camps)
Boyar’s wife suggested service streets to make the neighborhood more kid-friendly
County commissioners were impressed with the idea of having neighborhood shopping centers at each major
intersection, within walking distance of each house
For various reasons (didn’t want children playing in streets, didn’t want to give up land), residents in Charles Hopper’s
subdivision voted against having sidewalks
City took 5 years to build Mae Boyar Park in honor of Louis Boyar’s wife – took so long because property owner’s
held out for more $
Other parks dedicated to Latin American heroes – there used to be an annual parade honoring a particular Latin
American country each year
“During the interview, Taper said that home ownership was a steadying influence on people. He believed that owning
a home for the first time was enough to make a working man a good citizen.”
Many of the residents have lived in the neighborhood’s houses for many years now, have become old, and retired from
being concerned about the community
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 115-128 (89)
212-214
The inevibility of death, lonliness in suburbia
215-220
The grid
The original Spanish city of Los Angeles was oriented at a 45 degree angle to the
cardinal directions. The Americans expanded the city with a north-south grid.
Mormon cities (zions) were made by reproducing the same square mile grid
221-228
Origins of Long Beach, CA
Was Willmore city, Methodist roots, so very littl saloons
South of LA, streets numbered from 1 up starting in South
Long Beach’s 72nd street next to LAs 226th street
229-235
About Lakewood, the author’s city
The developer’s son, Marshall Boyer, named many of the streets,
including ones after his old girlfriend, wife, and a dog.
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 129-142 (90)
236 – Every family speaks their own language – The language he learned had the flavor of big cities.
237-239 - He spent all of his childhood playing with children who lived in similar houses to himself. They played Monopoly for day
with rules that made it impossible to for the game to end.
240 – Chevron auctioned off the street names of its new subdivision as a fund raiser for the YMCA. He paid $200 to have a stre
named after his family.
241-242,249 – He built cities out of dirt at the edge of his mother’s garden. The cities included garages for the metal trucks his moth
bought. He destroyed them using a hose.
243 – The Bureau of Soils classified the soil covered by houses and lawns as Chino clay loam. This land was good for growing sug
beets. Most of the farmers, before 1942, were Japanese.
244-246 – His mother came to Southern California in 1943 while his father was serving on the destroyer Bradford. The Bradford w
not harmed during the war.
247 – His city doesn’t have a cemetery; it was not included in the plan.
248 – Emmett Gossett suffocated when a mound of sand collapsed on him in 1951. He was 9.
250-253 – His city is concerned with earthquakes. The city is trying to get residents to keep enough food and water in case of disaste
The post-war houses were built do lightly they might provide shelter in a major earthquake. The major danger is liquefactio
Prolonged shaking can cause the soil to shift, letter water up and turning the ground into mud.
254-258 – A number of aquifiers flow beneath his house. There is a pattern of wet and dry years on the Los Angeles plain. In 1895
real estate promoter named Edward Bouton tapped a well that produced more than three million gallons of water a day.
 His interactions with other kids in his childhood come from the three blocks around him house (approx. 140 houses)
 Suburbia: all his playmates live in houses just like his
 Together w/his friend, Billy, they would build cities in the dirt
 Houses in new suburb publicized as small by design, so streets can be wider; to narrator, he could hear everything
 Cemetery outside of suburb, in Long Beach
 9-yr-old boy dies near equipment of house-builders
 Stucco and chicken wire houses not fit for earthquakes
 Danger to area during major earthquake is liquefaction; many aquicludes found underneath suburb (once riverbeds)
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 143-156 (91)
Boulton’s well-water in LA tastes like hygroden sulfide, yellowish—from peat
supplied Long Beach for 15 years.
Redwood pipes until 1950s water level dropped, stopped flowing.
1903 Water company installed electric pumps to get the bring the water to the surface. 19 year drought.
Early 1930s, long beach water department began drilling in the Silverado aquifer- 93 degree water came up (nicknamed
shotgun strip).
Meanwhile, boulton’s well is dried up, turned into a golf course.
Over extracting water- layers of sand and gravel sages and neighborhoods sank 1 or 2 feet!
Salt got into the water supply.
Problem of recharging the aquifers.
Floods.
So many problems of extremes.
Main point: there are many water-supply problems in the LA area because LA is a desert and relies on eastern water
supplies. Construction of dams, wells, etc. only hurts the land and eventually backfires. Problems persist.
“Most people who live on the semiaric LA plain cannot explain precisely where their water comes from. The rivers, spreading
grounds, dams, injection wells, and aqueducts are part of a landscape people rarely notice.”
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 157-168 (92)
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Memoir of the development and realization of the suburban planned town known as Lakewood, California, after
WWII. Built on a grid with identical houses and similar lots.
City deliberately stores flood water on city streets and floods the streets from time to time to prevent major
catastrophe.
It is illegal upon the foundations of the city to believe or obtain any knowledge about the future or events unknown to
us through unnatural means such as prophecy, witchcraft, psychology, etc.
1970 Census: population @ 83,000; 1990 Census: population@ 73,557 ; as city gets older families get smaller
1940- Douglas Aircraft Company build new assembly plant in the city.
Sales brochure for the town claims that the #1 reason to move to Lakewood is that it is “100% American Family
Community.”
This sales brochure also explains the race and residential restrictions in the town.
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In Levitown, Long Island in 1953, the population was 70, 000, and boasted of being the largest community without
blacks.
Many residents have Southern background or parents.
$695 down payment for entrance into the community and home very steep for newly weds.
Section 213 of the New Deal Program aimed to assist poor rural communities through house construction and nonprofit organizations. It was also used by many developers to create suburbs.
279:
This is part of the author’s continuing discussion of the problems with water management in Lakewood. The flood
water management system occasionally floods the streets, which causes residents to complain.
280:
He tells stories about his young brother to his tenant’s daughter.
281:
It is illegal to be a fortune teller in Lakewood.
282:
He talks about the demographics of his city. Its population has gone from 83,000 in 1970 to 73,557 today. The
population decreased because older children moved away, and families moving in have fewer children.
283:
In 1940 the Douglas Aircraft Company built an assembly plant near Long Beach airport. They bought a lot of land to
house their workers, and made a brochure advertising the houses.
284:
The sales brochure includes a list of questions, to which the answer is always “yes.” One of the questions is “race
restrictions?” In other words, the brochure is a bit racist.
286:
During World War II, the black population of Long Beach rose substantially because of jobs at defense plants. After
World War II, it fell because the city demolished their homes and because real estate agents wouldn’t sell to blacks. In 1960,
the census counted 7 black people out of 67,125.
287:
In 1953 Levittown, the first suburb, was the largest community in the nation with no blacks at all. It had 70,000
people.
288-290:
A lot of the population of Lakewood is Oklahomans who came there during the dustbowl. They found work
at the Douglas plant during WW2, and saved up to buy houses in the suburbs.
291-297:
Details how the community was built by Ben Weingart and Louis Boyar as a semi-legal scam involving the
setting up of non-profit cooperatives as fronts to receive financing from the government under the National Housing Act.
D.J. Waldie
Holy Land: pp. 169-179 (93)
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298: Businessmen put up money to create a subdivision in 1949, some in return for receiving exclusive rights to be the
mortgage lender for the homes. It was a risk-free, and extremely profitable investment.
299-300: Boyar and Weingart, two developers, made huge returns on investment in subdivision developments and
FHA mortgage lenders
301-303: Boyar and Weingart died in 1976 and 1980, respectively, and gave a great deal of money to city and
synagogue projects, for which they are remembered. Mark Taper died in 1994, and is vaguely remembered for
donating a fish tank, or fish, to the library, but also for a theater in the LA Country Music Center
304-305: Many of those in Waldie’s neighborhood were migrants from Oklahoma who had grown up in tents or
tarpaper shacks, learned to hide their characteristic accents or religions, but embraced the climate of CA and
appreciated the fruit trees the climate supported. ‘Okie’ was considered a slur, like ‘nigger’.
306-307: Those that lived in the neighborhood, regardless of roots from Okla. or elsewhere, were largely
indistinguishable. They lived in similar homes, shopped in the same stores, watched the same TV shows, wore the
same clothes. They made similar amounts of money, and helped out with ‘neighborly’ tasks. He comments “Our
parents were anxious to do what was expected of them, even when the expectation was not altogether clear” (173).
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308-309: Despite the sales brochure’s promises, there was no Catholic church or synagogue in the subdivision. The
rabbi set up a network of home schools staffed by Jewish parents for all the children (100 enrolled, there was a waiting
list with still more). Waldie’s father taught at the parish church religious school for kids, teens, and people in juvenile
hall, all of whom couldn’t afford Catholic school. He also instructed the altar boys and ran the more difficult
ceremonies because the parish priests didn’t know how.
312: The city sponsors an annual award for property owners based on landscaping, maintenance and overall
appearance. It is judged by volunteers and quite competitive, with the decision usually coming down to details like rust
stains in the driveway.
313-316: Church services were similarly conforming, with everyone taking part in the same, superficial manner.
Mackin Ch. 14 Watering the West
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Most of the west is inhospitable / extremely dry
LA and San Diego continue to grow along with the pressure to find more water for inhabitants of
these large cities
Where will it come from, how will it be transported, and how much will it cost… are all important
questions
Late 1800s and early 1900s public and private ventures were launched to provide water to places
for growth
With the arrival of the RR California was now economically connected and able to grow but the
gov't was still needed to draw the line on who was entitled to water rights
To this day still water rights wars between California and federal government
And as populations continue to rise the need for water will be even greater
Mike Davis
“Fortress L.A.,” in Variations on a Theme Park, pp. 154-168 (30)
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We do indeed now live in “fortress cities” brutally divided into “fortified cells” of affluence and “places of terror”
where police battle the criminalized poor.
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In cities like Los Angeles, on the hard edge of post modernity, architecture and the police apparatus are being merged
to an unprecedented degree.
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The universal consequence of the crusade to secure the city is the destruction of a truly democratic urban space.
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To emphasize the “security” of the new downtown, virtually all pedestrian links to the old center were removed.
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The new Downtown is designed to create a seamless continuum of middle-class work, consumption, and recreation,
insulated from the cities “unsavory” streets.
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The city is engaged in a relentless struggle to make the streets as unlivable as possible for the homeless and the poor –
“bumproof” benches.
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Extraordinary precautions have been taken to ensure the physical separation of the different classes.
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By criminalizing every attempt by the poor to use public space for survival purposes, law-enforcement agencies have
abolished the last informal safety net separating misery from catastrophe.
Miles David
“Fortress L.A.,” in Variations on a Theme Park, pp. 169-180 (31)
The Panopticon Mall
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Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (an 18th century model prison constructed in a radial fashion so that a guard standing at
the center could see all prisoners simultaneously) became the inspiration for developer Alexander Haagen’s “ghetto
malls”
Examples include King Shopping Center in Watts and its three “siblings”
Security devices used include wrought iron fences, video cameras, bright lights in parking lots, locked service gates
under constant surveillance, infrared beams that detect intruders trying to climb over the fence out of view of camera
and a security “observatory” that houses a substation of LAPD
These security measures were main incentive for retailers (and insurers) to sign lease contracts with Haagen
High-Rent Security
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New trend amongst luxury developers is “fortress cities” equipped with security walls, private police and roadways,
and guarded entries
Examples include Rancho Mirage, Palos Verdes Estates, Hidden Hills, San Marino
Exclusionary strategies include restricting access to public facilities (San Marino closes parks on weekends in order to
keep out families from adjacent communities) or restricting parking to local homeowners
Even Park La Brea, generally considered a successful example of mixed-income living is seeking to “upgrade” its
high-rise housing by sealing it off from surrounding neighborhood
High demand for gated communities, and among uber-wealthy such amenities as “terrorist-proof security rooms”
Securities Packages include alarm hardware, monitoring, patrols and personal escorts, and “armed response”
The LAPD as Space Police
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LAPD introduced first aerial surveillance systems employing helicopters
19-hours-per-day vigils kept in “high crime areas”
Aerial view of city resembles police grid, with street numbers painted on rooftops
Transition to Technopolice largely due to relationship with military aerospace industry
Emergency Command Control Communications Systems (ECCCS), the most powerful police communication system
in the world, recently installed
The Carceral City
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“War on Drugs” expected to double number of incarcerations in next ten years
Expansion of County Jail in Chinatown and construction of state prison in East Los Angeles evidence
INS setting-up “auxiliary jails” for detained aliens in motels and apartments due to overcrowding in regular facilities
New ten-story “post-modern Bastille” constructed in downtown L.A. represents “new frontier of public architecture”
Fear of Crowds
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Charles Murray suggests in New Republic that landlords, not cops, are the key to winning war on drugs
Advocates drug testing at random by employers, vouchers to save kids from drug infested schools, and landlords being
entitled to discriminate against shady characters
Suggests restricting criminals to hyper-violent and antisocial neighborhoods which would be contained and therefore
easy to police
Dialectical Utopias On Santa Fe and Las Vegas, by: Dave Hickey
-Asserts both cities as nearly indistinguishable environments early on in their ‘Victorian Protestant
clapboard environments’
-Both cities are as much ‘ideas’ as locations
-Discusses the extent to which every building is a little utopia, how modern cities are like a
‘republic of little utopias’
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-Sante Fe and Vegas as resort cities, marketing themselves as ‘the heart’s destination’ – both seen
as ‘invented cities’
 -Prefers the ‘real fakery of Las Vegas over the fake reality of Sante Fe’ or ‘the genuine rhinestone
over the imitation pearl’ (bias as Hickey lives in Vegas)
 -Both are theme parks, Vegas created by the mob and the highway, Sante Fe by the railroad
 -Sante Fe seeks to embody and preserve the eternal west, drawing the professional classes like
dentists and lawyers
 -Vegas seeks to recall the Frontier west, the typical boomtown embodying “an American fantasy
of slaves in the role of masters”
 -He calls Vegas “an institutionalized social revolution” with the wheel of fortune as its emblem
 -Vegas speaks the language of worldly empires while Santa Fe speaks the language of cosmic
sublimity
 -Both rely on desert architecture, hard and reflective by necessity. Vegas maintains ornate and
flashy exteriors, while Santa Fe employs plain, solid volumes that connote strength and virtue
 -To be in either city is to feel lost “first you are lost in time, lost from history.” In Santa Fe, you’re
lost in perpetual oldness, even the newest buildings look antique. In Vegas, “you’re adrift in
perpetual newness.”
 -In Santa Fe, you’re always lost because everything looks the same, nothing has a sign on it, the
opposite is true in Vegas, thus Las Vegas “always looks different”
 -Hickey gives an example of a dice table at the Mirage covered by three separate roofs, signifying
Vegas’ ability to shield you and your sins from the watchful eye of God
 -Two distinct iconographies: Santa Fe, the iconography of taste, and Vegas, that of desire
 -People go to Vegas to waste money, to Santa Fe to waste time
*Mike Davis: “The Strip vs. Nature” in Ramesh Kumar, ed. Metropolis Now, pp. 100-110
- in his Frontier hypothesis Turner wonder what would happen to frontier when west filled with big
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cities
o Las Vegas is the end of the trail – combo of boomtown, world’s fair and highway robbery
Explosive growth – construction
o Environmental degradation – water/ fossil fuel usage
o Lack of environmental conservation
o The Stirp not actually in metropolitan Las Vegas – separate tax resources from regional social
needs
o Huge electoral districats- minorities/ working class don’t really have a voice
o Strip consumes huge amount of water, power, social resources – strong corporate controls
muscle out government
Lack of public commons space
o Outside desert imperiled by urbanization
o Flash floods
Atrophy of downtown
o Automobile area
o Gaming industry displaced from civic activites from center to periphery of city
Automobile dependency
o Traffic
o Lots of people hawking sex – walking is hard for families
- In general absence of planning of strip as a whole
Contemporary LV as “one vast freeway construction site” – sprawled sprawl
Completely unresponsive to social and natural constraints
Headed for crack up
Need to reassess carrying capacity of city
 Since bad design limits power availability…
Mike Davis
“The Strip Versus Nature”
o
o
o
o
-
-
In 1993, Steve Wynn (Nevada’s “god of hospitality”) blew up the Dunes Hotel
Nobody thought it was weird – just a Vegas style urban renewal
Extravagant demolitions have become Vegas’ version of civic festivals
Dunes demolition happened on centenary of Frederick J. Turner’s legendary “end of the frontier”
Las Vegas is the terminus of Western history, the end of the trail
While Southern California has suffered its worst recession since the 1930’s, Vegas has 10s of
thousands of new jobs in construction, gaming, and security
Explosive growth has greatly accelerated the environmental deterioration of the American
Southwest
The strip is several meters lower today than in 1960 due to groundwater overdrafts, and some
subdivisions have had to be abandoned
The SN Water Authority is threatening to divert water from the Virgin River or steal it from
ranchers in sparsely populated central Nevada
Infamous water grab unified rural Nevadans against it
Vegas and LA want to divert Colorado River water away from agriculture and toward respective
metropolitan areas
Southern NV is as thirsty for fossil fuels as it is for water
Most of Hoover Dam’s output is exported to California – electricity for the Strip comes from coalburning, pollution-spewing plants on the Colorado River
Vegas has supplanted NYC as the city with the fifth highest number of days with “unhealthy air”
Vegas recapitulates “seven deadly sins” of LA as it has:
1. Abdicated a responsible water ethic
2. Fragmented local government in favor of private corporate planning
3. Produced negligible useable public space
4. Rejected “hazard zoning” to lessen natural disaster and conserve landscape
5. Dispersed land uses over and enormously unnecessary area
6. Embraced the resulting dictatorship of the automobile
7. Tolerated extreme social and racial inequality
Unlike LA, Vegas has never practiced environmental conservation or design on any large scale
City limits barely encompass 1/3 of the metropolitan population
Poverty, unemployment, and homelessness are disproportionately concentrated within the city
boundaries
While Vegas’s image is fun in the sun, free recreation is more accessible in older eastern and midwestern cities that cherish parks and public landscapes
Some of the most beautiful desert areas near Vegas now run rampant with urbanization
-
Vegas is everything Olmstead abhorred – artificial deserts of concrete and asphalt have greatly
exacerbated its summer flash-flood probability
Tourism and poverty now occupy the core of the metropolis
Vegas is a “back to the future” version of 1950’s southern California
Vegas’ centrifugal urban structure reinforces a slavish dependence upon the automobile
Major gaming corporations are relying on new freeways and a proposed billion dollar monorail to
speed customers between the casino-hotels
Supply of jobless immigrants has far outpaced the demand for new workers
Homeless population increased 750% between 1990-1995
Gaming industry remains far from achieving racial or gender equality
One Solution: oppose development at the source by fighting for a moratorium on further
population growth in the arid Southwest
Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
“Divided We Sprawl,” pp. 26-41 (26)
The central argument in this article is that sprawl needs to be contained through a variety of policy methods in order to promote
better communities and higher standards of living. The main points are as follows:
 Although some cities have proclaimed that they are experiencing a renaissance, the overwhelming evidence points to
decay of urban centers. Poverty has become concentrated in cities, and infrastructure has been decaying. Most cities
have been losing population to suburban areas, often because of crime, bad schooling, fewer jobs, and other related
issues.
 Decay has started to effect suburbs too, as it becomes more costly for local governments to repair problems and
provide resources.
 Sprawl is to blame. “Sprawl” is a tendency to develop areas outside in an outward direction, moving towards empty or
undeveloped areas rather than concentrating on building density in a centralized or urban core. “Old suburbs” are hurt
by sprawl as well as cities, as their resources for repair and further development are drawn outwards toward the
periphery of an urban area. Sprawl was not intended by anyone, but has been encouraged by government financing
programs, ubiquitous roads, and certain kinds of development regulations.
 Sprawl is attractive to developers because it’s predictable and people seem to like it at first. However, sprawl is really
bad for poor people who tend to get “left behind” in decaying areas, it’s really bad for the elderly and people who can’t
drive (who then get isolated in a sort of house arrest), and it’s bad for the community in general who have difficulty
associating with others when they are stuck in “placeless” sprawling neighborhoods.
 In order to improve development and make it more centralized, people need to embrace metropolitanism, or the idea
that cities and suburbs are united and that they can provide similar functions and offer people integrated opportunities.
Cities and suburbs should be united against sprawl.
 Policy recommendations to combat sprawl are as follows: concentrate transportation resources on projects within
metropolitan areas; embrace “land-use planning” rather than outward development, a move that would require zoning
reform; pool resources across urban/suburban areas to promote fair and balanced development; facilitate mobility for
urban residents, especially in order to create work opportunities for the poor; and finally, explore options for regional
governance in order to find solutions across city/suburb boundaries.
 These options have recently become more politically popular indicating their future viability. However, local and state
governments need to work hard to rejuvenate their urban areas in order to attract population back to cities.
Alex Krieger
“The Costs—Or Have There Been Benefits, Too?—of Sprawl,” pp. 50-55 (27)
In the growing literature on sprawl, the predominant view is that sprawl is a problem for America. However, the main points of
this article are that first of all, this was not always the view of sprawl historically; and secondly, there is the problem that
Americans as individuals still like to spread out and live in more suburban environments but they are less tolerant of the sprawl
of their neighbors because they recognize the negative impacts of sprawl on society. Thus Krieger argues that there needs to be
a better way for Americans to align short-terms self-interest with long-term social value as well as share the costs and benefits
of sprawl more equally among all those in society.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
Views today about sprawl
A. Against sprawl—it is a form of urbanization that is responsible for problems in America and even threatens
the American Dream
B. Others oppose those who attempt to control sprawl saying that it is an elitist attack on the American dream
What is sprawl?
Suburbanization, auto-dominated, zoned-by-use development spread thinly over a large
territory, especially in an “untidy” or “irregular” way
Increasing mainstream media attention given to sprawl in recent years—fears that it is eroding American quality
of life
Five main arguments against sprawl:
A. Aesthetic—sprawl is ugly, an insult to nature, and has no character
B. Sociological—suburban life as “conformist, drab, and isolationist” and leads to social apathy and intolerance
of neighbors unlike oneself
C. Environment—Krieger calls this the most compelling critique—increasing auto emissions, water use,
pollution, trash, loss of species habitat, and energy consumption
D. Lifestyle—sprawl leads to “boring” lifestyles
E. Self-protection—“not in my back yard” attitude pushes development away from areas resisting growth,
increasing sprawl—nobody wants more people impinging upon their open space and changing their
neighborhoods
Randal O’Toole and Proponents of Sprawl—attacks core assumptions advanced by the critics of sprawl
A. Many people cite the “cost of car culture,” but O’Toole says that since most people use cars and few use
public transit, the public investment in public transit per user is less than the public investment per user for
highways.
B. O’Toole says that the “War Against the Suburbs” (leading to rising housing costs in the city)
disproportionately affects the poor
C. He says it is density, not dispersion, that causes congestion
D. He argues that Americans like to drive and are not forced to by an absence of alternatives
A Historical Perspective
A. Roosevelt administration was committed to sprawl (prior to the concern about population concentrations
brought about by the atomic bomb), then called decentralization—it was seen as a way to recover from the
Great Depression and prevent similar economic setbacks in the future.
B. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (two generations earlier)—argued that concentrations of urban
populations would worsen economic inequality and social inequality
C. Thomas Jefferson—worried about urbanization
D. Widespread public optimism about sprawl following WWII, despite exceptions of Lewis Mumford and
William H. Whyte
What made the optimism about sprawl wane and has it really waned?
A. Krieger argues that what has mostly changed is individuals’ perception of the impact on them of others’
sprawl
B. Since 1950, the spread of sprawl has been exponential—self-perpetuating cycle of American urbanization
(Americans find it easier to retreat than to repair)
C. Americans still like sprawl, they just have less tolerance for the sprawl of others
D. Imbalance between personal benefits of sprawl for individuals (more housing for less cost, etc.) and cost of
sprawl for society (infrastructure building, energy generation, pollution mitigation)
Handout
The Charter of the New Urbanism (4)
This is quite a short document. I recommend reading through it, and if you lost the handout it’s online:
http://www.newurbanism.org/pages/532096/
-
The current problems are:
o disinvestment in central cities
o spread of placeless sprawl
o increasing separation by race and income
o environmental deterioration,
o erosion of society's built heritage
-
Necessary components of regional planning are:
o borders and edges, especially in the form of neighborhoods: to preserve the uniqueness of the place and
prevent important things from being scattered
o a connection with farmland and nature
o infill development instead of sprawl
o development is based off historical patterns
o mixed-use areas with affordable housing to enable “a regional economy that benefits people of all incomes”
o public transportation and WALKING are important, cars are bad! This is egalitarian, stops pollution,
encourages interaction between people, and saves time
o share resources between regions to prevent competition
-
Necessary components of city planning are:
o neighborhood, district, and corridor are essential elements
o neighborhoods should be small and walking-friendly
o broad range of housing types and diversitygood communities
o transit corridors should be well-planned
o DIVERSITY of residential, civic, commercial areas
o there should be parks
-
Necessary components of street planning are:
o define streets and public spaces as areas of mixed-use
o link individual buildings to the surroundings
o safety must be emphasized
o streets should encourage neighbors to talk to each other and keep the community safe
o architecture and landscape should be related to the climate and history of the area
o public gathering places are good
o natural methods of heating and cooling should be utilized (shade, sun)
o preserve and restore historic districts
So the basic key items for the New Urbanists are:
- MIXED USE AREAS
- PEDESTRIANS
- NATURE
- SENSE OF HISTORY
- STRONG COMMUNITY
Flavel Shurtleff
”Use of the Police Power in the Execution of a City Plan,” pp. 138-150 (6)




Criteria for courts to validate land-use ordinances:
o Is it substantially related to public welfare
o Is it reasonably calculated to achieve that purpose
Reasons for land-use ordinances:
o To prevent overuse of land
o To prevent undesirable use of land (this  instability in prop. values)
Limitations to prevent overuse of land
o Limits on building height/size
 Strictest ordinance upheld by Sup. Court. = Boston law: bldgs must be < 125 ft. tall
 Justified by fire/public safety concerns
 Often related to distance b/w bldgs
 Courts won’t sanction anything, must be determined to be necessary
o Differentiated zones of height limits
 Precedent established in Köln, German (4 districts w/ diff. height/size limits)
 Boston and Washington have similar systems (Boston – more differentiated, less severe than Köln)
 Since restrictions are for light/air, it makes sense for cities to be able to regulate distance b/w bldgs
Challenging land-use ordinances
o The burden is on the private owner to show an act is unreasonable
o
Many private developments have even more severe restrictions that attract rather than repel buyers
Flavel Shurtleff
“Use of the Police Power in the Execution of a City Plan,” pp. 151-167 (7)
interesting to give you an idea on cases when police force is and when it isn’t used but definitely not a crucial reading
1.
USES OF LAND WHICH IMPAIR THE FREE USE OF A PUBLIC HIGHWAY
- municipality can exercise police power if the use of signs, posts, etc “obstructs the street or diminishes the space
available for walking, or impedes traffic”
- e.g. Fifth Avenue Coach Co. vs City of New York case (the court ruled against the plaintiff – the Coach Co – on the
grounds that the signs made the entrance to the park ugly => purely esthetic considerations)
- increasing regard to esthetic considerations (incl. forcing a developer to put wires etc under ground)
2.
USES OF LAND THAT CONSTITUTE A NUISANCE
- “A use of land that is inherently unlawful and unprofitable and dangerous to the safety and health and offensive to the
morals of a community may be treated as nuisance per se”
- such may be “summarily abated without previous notice”
- e.g. slaughter house, smelting works, fertilizer factories, stuff that emits dense smoke
3.
DIFFERENTIATED DISTRICT REGULATIONS
- legislation in MA – giving further right to boards of health to assign certain places for an exercise or trade or
employment that is a nuisance (the way they resolve it is that usually they put it into districts where “legal actions by
property owners … would be unlikely”
- LA – principle of separating industrial districts from residential districts (e.g. in Ex Parte Quong Wo case – a guy was
arrested for carrying on a public laundry and wash house in a residence district; later upheld in a case with a lumber
yard)
4.
OFFENSIVE USE OF LAND NOT SUBJECT TO MUNICIPAL REGULATION
- usu. odor and noise fall within point 2. above (damaging to health) but usually police force not used solely based on
building’s appearance or the class of persons it attracts
- e.g. in Baltimore – there was an ordinance that would allow the city not to grant a permit to new buildings that would
not “conform to the general character of buildings previously erected” – but this ordinance was held ultra vires1
BILLBOARDS – tend to be a special case
- everybody tries to prevent them 
- in St. Loius, MI – there were “discriminating” fees (e.g. only a 1.00$ for alteration or erection of a building costing
less than $1,000, but for erection of a billboard it was $100 for a 100-dollar billboard)
- attacked, but upheld
- on the grounds that “all billboards are likely to fall (cause if you build them in a more “permanent way” they would be
too costly to erect), are therefore likely to harbor nuisances + they increase fire hazard
“Police is constantly being held to justify interference with the use of private property. The only limit to such interference is
judicial determination that a specific ordinance is not a reasonable means of protecting the safety, health, and morals of the
community.”
Michael Kwartler
“Regulating the Good that You Can’t Think Of,” pp. 13-21 (8)
-Kwartler recognizes that total control over city growth is impossible; the phenomenon of the city is just to big, decentralized,
complex, etc.
-Quotes an earlier theorist that “Only partial control can be exercised over [a city’s] growth and form. There is no final results
only a continuous succession of phases.”
-The good you can’t think of; we can’t predict the (good) ways people will use things in order to regulate them in advance.
Example: use of lofts as apartments.
-Tension between abstract zoning laws and the complexity of real life
-Euclid Decision: 1926; approval of rigid and comprehensive zoning based on the police power (main grounds was the
externality argument; eg., it’s not that we’re limiting your use of your land, it is that we are limiting your neighbor’s use so as to
protect your land [value])
1
Do you guys know what this means? I totally didn’t’. “Beyond the scope or in excess of legal power”
-Reviews NYC Zoning:
•1916 Zoning Ordinance: regulated both density and form of buildings
•It used ‘districting’ which ‘rationalized’ the city, dividing it into discrete chunks
•this idea that the city is boundable/knowable is central to zoning
•pre-regulation zoning = prescriptive zoning: use, height, etc.
•1961 Zoning Ordinance: made innovation difficult; but at the same time, discretionary authority has a potential for
abuse
•1982 Regulations: assumes one doesn’t want to live in an industrial zone… no appreciation for mixed live-work
environments
-However, in modern times mixed use is growing in popularity
-in contrast, the new idea of “Just-in-time” zoning
•simple Euclidian model just won’t work anymore
•pay attention to individual actions even when they are driving by self interest
•PERFORMANCE: “relates zoning to actual development and design process”
•THRESHOLDS: benchmarks based on “capacities of infrastructure / public facilities”
•FEEDBACK: looking at the way things are happening and adjusting zoning accordingly
•the idea of linking planning to zoning
•more ‘systems theory’ based than rigidly rational/Euclidian/etc
•decision making “put in the hands of those who are closest to the problems…”
-zoning must be responsive to the face that “we never really know…”
Marshall Berman
“All That is Solid Melts into Air,” pp. 290-300 (12)











Brennan begins by explaining how massive construction has made the Bronx an urban nightmare: with drugs, gangs,
garbage, abandoned buildings, etc.
He focuses on the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway in the 1950s century, which went through the center of
the borough where he grew up in, forcing thousands of people out of their homes.
The construction of the expressway changed the landscape of the Bronx for the worst, most of the borough now laid in
ruins, and the adjacent streets to the new road now suffered from fumes and deafening noise. He also suggests at the
temporary nature of American cities, saying that buildings which were occupied for 20 years were abandoned
overnight.
He compares Moses with a quasi mythological being, due to the reputation his cruelty, visionary brilliance, obsessive
energy and megalomaniac ambition brought him.
In the 1960s Moses enemies finally got to him and deprived him of his building powers.
Moses seemed to be able to get away with all of this due to his ability to convince the people that his works
represented modernity and human progress, and that opposing them would be like opposing history and progress,
which seemed impossible for New Yorkers to do.
“Moses was destroying our world, yet he seemed to be working in the name of the values that we ourselves embraced”
(295).
Brennan narrates how the center of the Bronx was characterized by simple but beautiful art deco buildings, along a
grand concourse that resembled a Parisian boulevard, and how it was all wrecked by Moses and his gang.
Expanding modernity comes at the cost of everything beautiful in the existing modern world itself.
Brennan then turns to summarize some of Moses works which led to the Cross Bronx Expressway.
o Jones Beach State Park: beach in Long Island, spectacular display of the primary forms of nature: earth, sun,
water and sky. Nature appears with abstract horizontal purity and luminous clarity. Constructed in a former
swamp and wasteland. Not commercialized, serene ambience of Mediterranean romantic landscape. Nice
contrast to the cities skyscrapers.
o The northern and southern state parkways: gentle flowing, artfully landscaped roads, in an artificially created
environment. Can only be experienced in cars, buses couldn’t pass under low underpasses. Moses did this as
a means of social screening to prevent people who didn’t own cars from using it.
In the 1930s construction went from being a private to a public ordeal, now people saw how their lives could be
enriched by public works, not just for a few but for the people as a whole.

Moses took advantage of this and became the city and state’s park commissioner, managed to regenerate the city’s
1700 parks and build new ones in record time, managed to get the workers motivated and created a construction
spectacle for the public.
Marshall Berman
“All That is Solid Melts into Air,” pp. 301-312 (13)
The
author
community
to
in
of
this
passage
starts
create
the
Cross-Bronx,
by
but
discussing
moves
on
the
to
destruction
of
discuss
Robert
his
Moses
general.
-after receiving public acclaim for his parks, he had a springboard to start building the highways, parks, and bridges that would
reshape
NYC.
-got
DC
funding
for
most
projects
-Moses
creates
the
city
that
most
New
Yorkers
today
think
of
as
home
(pg,
302)
-Moses
work
a
breakthrough
in
modernist
vision
and
thought
-1939-1940,
World's
Fair,
envisioned
what
Moses
would
set
in
place,
expressways,
etc
-one
of
his
crowning
achievements-turning
the
Flushing
ash
heaps
into
a
park
-"He loves the public, but not as people" Indifferent to his projects on actual people, but loves "the public" -harsh perspective,
compared
to
Conrad's
Mr.
Kurtz.
-role
of
public
authorities
in
producing
Moses's
work
-modern
dream:
a
system
in
perpetual
motion
(pg
306)
-however, highway destroys city to a certain extent
Craig E. Colten: “Introduction: The City and the Environment,” “Water Hazards,” An Unnatural
Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature pp. 1-46
 “Wresting the (New Orleans) from its water excesses and the associated problems was, and
remains, a central issue in the city’s existence.”
 Keeping the city dry has been its main mission
 Unlike other cities, when New Orleans grew it moved into below water, high flood prone areas
 Without massive drainage systems, pest control, and heavy infrastructure development, New
Orleans would not exist
 “Through massive environmental transformation along with fundamental shifts in public
attitude toward nature, New Orleans has been able to reverse the public perception of its local
geography.’
 The current geography of New Orleans has been thoroughly shaped by the city’s longterm relationship with its environment.
 The city required canals to drain the city and huge levees to protect the waters from Lake
Pontcharchain from flooding it
 The massive growth of the city though has kept from making the investments to really protect
the city
 It is still vulnerable in many ways, i.e. to a hurricane
 Ribbon of levees and canals keep the city functioning but it is still in the most unnatural
environment.
Garreau: “A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t Forever; Who, What, When, Where, Why?”
Garreau argues that New Orleans (the real part, where people lived) is not going to be rebuilt:
-It was on the wane when Katrina hit.
-The ports of the Mississippi no longer require so many workers.
-Its necessity is no longer apparent to people with money.
-The insurance industry won’t be affected by sentiment.
-There are areas distinct from the city – ports, the crescent (tourist-y)
-There are nearly no white-collar jobs there, no important business headquarters, or other things that might
call for re-investment.
-It’s similar to Galveston, which was going to be the capital of Texas until it got hit by a deadly hurricane
(it was in a geographically unstrategic place, too). Today Galveston is just a charming little town, and
Houston has become what Galveston was supposed to be.
-New Orleans has low levels of social cohesion (not enough motivation from the population to rebuild)
Campanella, Thomas J. “Urban Resilience and the Recovery of New Orleans”
Thesis: Strong social infrastructure and the commitment of residents have historically been more
important to urban resilience after large-scale disasters than the degree of physical destruction.
-
-
-
-
Cities are incredibly durable in modern times
o Unlike mythical Pompeii and Carthage, no major city has been permanently lost or
abandoned worldwide since 1800
o Reasons cities won’t go under:
 The rise of the nation state means that nations must bolster their cities as a sign of
strength to the international community
 Fee-simple home ownership means more residents invested in staying and
rebuilding
 The modern insurance industry gives people the means to rebuild individually
 Urban Infrastructure is usually unharmed so things like sewers and concrete
foundations can be re-used
 The geographic and economic reasons that initially led to a city’s development
usually remain true after the disaster
Re-building the physical buildings and infrastructure is not sufficient to guarantee the success of a
devastated city
o Social, religious, and family networks must be re-established
o Recovery has been historically different when imposed from the outside (such as when
Franco rebuilt Guernica, Spain). The movement must be socially sanctioned and organic
A city will be resilient and successful if it has:
o A robust and diversified economy
o Preemptive planning to ensure evacuation routes and availability of supplies in case of a
disaster
o Resilient citizens who reach out to each other in time of crisis (examples: London during
Hitler’s bombardment, New York after 9/11)
 He believes New Orleans shows signs of these resilient citizens in the Vietnamese
community and African American home-owning community
 However, many of the hardest-hit communities had citizens that were already worn
down by broken public schools, gang violence, and drugs will probably not return
and will erode New Orleans’ chances for resilient recovery.
Hurricane Katrina as an urban-renewal project
o Urban renewal of the 1950s targeted slums and minority communities with federal dollars.
Katrina “targeted” the same types of communities and the federal governments slow
response is seen as a belated urban-renewal project by skeptics.
-
o Many communities survived the destruction of their physical neighborhoods during the
period of urban renewal (Boston’s West End displaced residents continued to meet and
produce a newsletter). Author is hopeful the evacuees from New Orleans will do the same
and then return to help the city’s social fabric recover.
Interesting trend: evacuees may be joined or even displaced by the Hispanic immigrants that are
taking the constructions jobs that are abundant in New Orleans
K. Jackson
Crabgrass Frontier, Chapter 11 (15)




Federal Subsidy and the Suburban Dream: How Washington Changed the American Housing Market
Federal Government Can Have Major Role in Shaping Development:
o Federal tax codes encourage business to abandon old buildings in favor of new construction by providing tax
breaks
o The Federal Highway Act of 1916 and the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 caused the federal government to
support the automobile’s increasingly prominent role- led to sprawl
Government Housing Before 1933:
o 1st 300 years of North American city building, government was not seen as having role in housing
o 1918: Emergency Fleet Corporation of U.S. Shipping Board and U.S. Housing Corporation created to provide
residences for industrial workers producing materials for WWI
 ineffective because of value placed on homeownership and concerns about socialism
 first federal housing effort born out of war necessity rather than general welfare
o Between 1928 and 1933, construction of residential property fell by 95%, home repairs by 90%
 Victims were not chronically poor but middle class
o In Response, Hoover convened President’s National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership in
1931
 4 Reccomendations:
 creation of long-term, amortized mortgages
 encouragement of low interest rates
 government aid for private efforts to house low-income families
 reduction of home construction costs
o 1932: Federal Home Loan Bank Act established a credit reserve for mortgage lenders, increased supply of
capital in housing market
 ineffective- only approved loans for those who did not need federal help- 3 applications approved
o 1932: Emergency Relief and Construction Act- also ineefective
The Greenbelt Town Program
o Initiated by Rexford G. Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration, and inspired by English town-building plans
o Designed to foster decentralization- Tugwell wanted to pull people out of the cities and bring more greenery
to the cities
o Limited to 10,000 people
o Decent housing and high levels of social and educational services
o Towns surrounded by belt of open land
The Home Owners Loan Corporation
o Signed into law by FDR in 1933
o Designed to serve urban needs
o Refinanced thousands of mortgages
o Grant low-interest loans to help owners to recover their homes
o 40% of eligible Americans saught HOLC assistance
o Introduced the long-term, self-amortizing mortgage with uniform payments spread out over the whole life of
debt
o Also brought about formal and unified system of neighborhood appraisal
 Introduced red-lining
 Undervalued neighborhoods that were dense, mixed, or aging, saw minorities as bringing down a
neighborhood’s value
 Divided neighborhoods into 4 catagories:


First Grade, A, Green:
o New, homogeneous (American business and professional men)
 Second Grade, B, Blue
o Neighborhoods that had reached their peak
 Third Grade, C, Yellow
o Declining neighborhoods
 Fourth Grade, D, Red
o Declined. All black neighborhoods were put in this category regardless of
appearance, as were poorly maintained or vandalized neighborhoods
 Generally HOLC appraisers favored suburban, country development to city life
 However, HOLC was still willing to give loans to C and D areas, problem was that its appraisal
system was used against those neighborhoods by other financial institutions
 Problem continued at least until 1970
o Emergency Farm Mortgage Act designed to reduce rural foreclosures
Federal Housing Administration
o Formed due to adoption of National Housing Act in 1934
o Primary goal was alleviation of unemployment through house construction
 Insures long-term mortgage loans made by private lenders for home construction and sale
 Extended mortgage repayment period to 20 to 30 years and fully amortized mortgages
 Established minimum standards for home construction- became industry standard
 Interest rates fell by two or three percentage points
o Became cheaper to buy than to rent
o Middle-class suburban family with a new house and the long-term, fixed-rate, FHA-insured mortgages
became symbol of American way of life
o Hastened decay of inner-city neighborhoods by stripping middle-class constituency
 FHA insurance went to new residential developments outside of cities
 Favored construction of single family units through building standards
 Not many loans for repair of old buildings
 Made rental insurance difficult
o Also used neighborhood appraisal, but used it in favor of all-white suburban development
 Saw racial mixing as lowering value of neighborhood
 Charted location and potential future locations of black families
o Suburbia received almost half of all FHA funding
o Under fire for racist policies, in 1966, FHA drastically changed policy to make it easy for inner-city residents
to get loans
 Resulted in increased white flight, companies buying into minority neighborhoods and making them
unaffordable to minorities
o Creation of Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) allowed for mortgage funds that could be
carried across country
K. Jackson
Crabgrass Frontier, Chapter 12 (16)
The
Cost
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of
Good
intentions:
The
Ghettoization
of
Public
Housing
in
the
United
States
“The long term, low interest mortgage was not the only federal housing innovation of the New Deal.”
By attempting to house the poor through public housing the government concentrating and segregated the poor and
minority classes further. This was another stimulus to suburbia and the ‘white flight’ from the city.
America followed the European lead of funding housing in the 1920’s after the First World War Traditional the
national and state governments had solely upheld housing laws (occupancy rates, light, ventilation etc.)
John Ihlder was a supporter of this positive housing reform after witnessing the social engagements in Europe.
In the early 1930’s a lobbying group including the National Public Housing Conference formed to support “public
construction for those people who can not be adequately housed at rents they can afford to pay.”
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In 1933 FDR announced reform to government policy with the passage of the National Industrial recovery Act. This
gave the government power to clear slums and develop or redevelop land for affordable pubic housing. (PWA Public
Works Administration).
After failures in the private sector to accomplish initiative goals the PWA took over building entirely.
However the government organization became an issue when a US court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the
government to reclaim lands for development. (Low cost housing was certainly not a public use.)
The PWA became the USHA (US Housing Authority) and was forced to purchase land a market price.
The USHA shifted back by 1937 to sponsoring/funding housing initiatives to private agencies.
Public housing was a success since by 1941 the USHA had sponsored 13000 new units in 300 new projects. “On
another level” it was a failure since its funding was continually cut and the clearance of slums was a discretionary
issue left to municipalities. Furthermore many municipalities did not use the USHA funding therefore housing for the
lower class as a whole did not become more accessible and cheaper. Since most of the clearance was in cities the
project became an initiative to raise or maintain property values by only clearing slums rather than rebuilding
affordable housing for the poor. This led to an increase in displacement of lower class people.
K. Jackson
Crabgrass Frontier, Chapter 13 (17)
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Soldiers coming home from war, together with increase in birth and marriage rates immediately before and after World
War II, caused enormous demand for housing in U.S.
Shortage during and right after the war had families doubling up in houses or living in huts or temporary quarters – even
trolley cars, trailers, and grain bins were used as houses in desperation.
Federal government underwrote a vast new construction program for five million new homes.
Congress regularly approved billions of dollars worth of additional mortgage insurance under the FHA.
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 created Veterans Administration mortgage program similar to that of FHA.
Unprecedented building boom resulted in contractors each building more homes.
However, U.S. home building remained small-scale in comparison with Europe (8.1% of homes built by builders of 500 or
more in compared to 24% and 33% in Britain and France, respectively).
Abraham Levitt and Sons built more than 140,000 houses and turned the industry into a manufacturing process.
Started in 1929 on Long Island, but in 1941 they received a government contact for 1,600 war worker’s homes and learned
how to lay dozens of foundations in a single day.
After the war they constructed Levittown, mass-constructed in 27 distinct steps, beginning with the laying of the
foundation and ending with the sweeping of the home.
Levitt defied unions and work rules, vertically integrated, and reduced the skilled component to 20-40%.
The first Levittown was initially limited to veterans and was located 25 miles east of Manhattan – attractive to new
families.
Largest housing development ever put up by a single builder.
Attractive because they were affordable, with no down payment, no closing costs, and “no hidden extras.” Largest line of
credit ever provided to a private home builder with FHA and VA benefits.
Several Levittowns were created, and other developers imitated Levitt’s method.
Characteristics of postwar suburbs:
- Peripheral location; suburban growth rate was ten times that of central cities by 1950. First suburbs were on open land
at the edges of built-up sections of major cities.
- Relatively low density: 97% of new single-family dwellings were completely detached between 1946-56.
- Architectural similarity; most of only a few basic, mass-produced plans. Very few custom homes. Similarity extended
across nation and was very stark in early years.
- Easy availability and reduced suggestion of wealth – lowering of the threshold of purchase.
- Economic and racial homogeneity: sorting of families by income and color continued, as well as new age
homogeneity.
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MACKIN CH 10
As cities grew and the agricultural economy continued to yield to industrialization, the American
government of the 20th century turned its attention from the need to provide its citizens with land
to the need to house them.
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In the 1930’s, the dire situation of American land displaced by the Depression, exacerbating a prior
shortage of housing for the not so well-off—helped bring about the first attempts at its national
housing policy.
The government not only reevaluated the needs of its citizens, but it also enlarged its subsidy of
private industry in order to create new housing. It sponsored new subsidies of the real estate and
building industries.
Roosevelt was elected president in 1933.He was confronted with issues of unemployment and
poverty. To solve both problems, Roosevelt crafted a larger role for the government in public
housing. He put jobless construction workers on the payroll to build model communities that
would serve to house citizens and serve as models.
Early settlement houses were also set up. Rather than provide just food and shelter, these houses
provided a caring staff that lived in the neighborhood and provided education and assistance for
neighborhood residents of all ages and recreational programs for children.
The National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), established in 1908, began to influence
national policy as the need for homes grew with the population. Their first battle was to reduce
property taxes. They wanted Congress to recognize the fact that land belonged to everyone in the
community and that rent was unearned income gained because the landlord held land that other
people needed to use. When the federal government implemented the new national income tax in
1913, NAREB convinced Congress that a landlord’s rent should not be taxed at all.
The Housing Act was also established in 1937. It made a number of important concessions to
private developers that reduced its efficacy as an aid to the poor. The act required that every new
housing unit built under low-income housing programs replace an older, demolished one.
Between the 1940s and 1960s, owner-occupied homes in the U.S increased about 18%-to 62% of
all homes. However, over the ensuing 45 years between 1960 and 2005, the rate of homeownership
has been slowly nudged up only another 6%, to the current record of 68%. That leaves roughly a
third of the nation renting,
Louis Wirth
“Urbanism as a Way of Life,” pp. 190-197 (14)
I doubt anything from this article will be on the midterm directly - it is highly theoretical, but pretty interesting if you have
time to read it (especially if you are into sociology).
Wirth takes a sociological approach to urbanism. Defines a city as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of
socially heterogeneous individuals.
He then goes on to describe the consequences of the 3 main factors:
(1) Size of Population
 greater range of individual variation than in rural societies
 spatial segregation of individuals according to color, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.
 peoples’ acquaintances might be more numerous but are always more superficial than in rural areas
 relationships are often those of utility (grocer, mailman, taxi driver, etc.) rather than also having a personal dimension
 urban social relations are characterized by superficiality, anonymity, and a transitory aspect
 leads to the “schizoid” character of urban personality
(2) Density of Settlement
 greater differentiation and specialization than in rural areas
 dramatic contrasts between wealth and poverty, intelligence and ignorance, order and chaos
 fosters a spirit of competitions, aggrandizement, and mutual exploitation
(3) Heterogeneity of Inhabitants and Group Life
 breaks down societal rigidity and complicates class structure
 heightened individual mobility
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individuals are part of many different groups which appeal to different aspects of his/her personality
collective behavior unpredictable due to individuals being severed from organized bodies which integrate society in
more rural areas
The last part of the paper seems to be mostly about how sociologists can use this model. I’ve included it for interest, but I
don’t think it’s particularly testable.
Wirth then describes how this theory of urbanism can be viewed from 3 different angles:
(1) Ecological Perspective
 urbanism as “a physical structure compromising a population base, a technology, and an ecological order”
(2) Form of Social Organization
 urbanism as “a system of social organization involving a characteristic social structure, a series of social institutions,
and a typical pattern of social relationships”
(3) Urban Personality and Collective Behavior
 urbanism as “a set of attitudes and ideas, and a constellation of personalities engaging in typical forms of collective
behavior and subject to characteristic mechanisms of social control”
Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 1/Intro (19)
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“This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding”
Says some people contend that with enough money we could thoroughly revitalize all our cities, but the money that
has been spent has not been helpful—we see worse slums, boring housing, failed city projects, etc.
Planning initiatives don’t rest on just public subsidies—there are tremendous private losses of whoever is being
affected or displaced by these initiatives
What she calls “planning theory” has failed—areas that have been revitalized according to planning theory have failed,
and areas that should have gone downhill according to it has survived—more or less says the theory used currently in
urban renewal is flawed, and we don’t pay enough attention to the reality of successes and failures
Example of the North End
o Author visited it in 1959—only a few years before it had been a horrible area
o Was amazed by what she found—nice place to be, kids playing, people walking around, seemed like a vibrant
place
o Called her Boston city planner friend—all the statistics he had on it were good (low death rates, good health,
etc) plus he said it was a nice place to be and he would visit often, but still insisted that it was a slum, that
people were living “horribly”
o Author attributes this to the fact that he was clinging to antiquated ideas of city planning and what a slum is,
and ignoring reality that didn’t fit in with his theory
o Bankers have same theories as city planners and wouldn’t loan to places like the North End—but
revitalization went on anyway, mostly through collective community action
Argues that best city planning will be whatever catalyzes communities becoming more close-knit and willing to take
collective action and ownership for their area
Basically—stop concentrating on what we think a city “ought” to look like and concentrate more on how to positively
alter its functioning
Splits book into two parts: first is understanding social behavior of cities, second is understanding economic behavior
Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 2 (20)
-sidewalks serve many functions
-sidewalks are given identity and meaning by the things that surround them.
-keeping a city safe means keeping its streets and sidewalks safe.
The slums are not necessarily the place where the problem of street danger lurks: the quiet residential neighborhoods,
particularly newer middle class rebuilt parts of the city, are.
1.
2.
police force alone does no good. The residents themselves must have a network and eye on the street.
spreading people out, lowering density on the street, is not the answer; A well-used street is safer than a deserted one
What makes something a safe street?
1. must have a clear demarcation between public and private space
2. Buildings must be oriented toward the street so that shop owners can have their eyes on it.
3. The sidewalk must have people on it. Strangers are good for a street that already has number one and two on the list,
since they add eyes.
To get people on the street, you need stores, bars, and restaurants at a bare minimum.
1. they give people reasons to be there
2. They cause people to walk past things and buildings in between them on the sidewalk which have no concrete public
use.
3. storekeepers like peace and order, so add to the safety.
4. people going to these places attract other people who like to loaf around and watch them, which adds eyes
term: “the Great Blight of Dullness” – a deep, functional sickness in a dead and dangerous area of the city.
term: “Turf” – an area of buildings, streets, and parks in the city where residents and shopowners, or alternately, a gang, agrees
to keep an eye on the street and keep other gangs and strangers out.
lighting: darkness is not the only factor making an area dangerous at night. For example, a movie theater is dark, but safe.
Lighting can only help if there are eyes that it helps see.
in highrise public housing projects, the main doors are open to anyone, as are the corridors and elevators, making them
analogous to sidewalks and streets, but are closed to public eye and police patrol, making them dangerous.
If we continue to intentionally build unsafe things, there are three ways to deal with them:
1. do nothing about the problem and let the danger rule.
2. take refuge in vehicles.
3. “Turf” - an area of buildings, streets, and parks in the city where residents and shopowners, or alternately, a gang,
agrees to keep an eye on the street and keep other gangs and strangers out. Often real fences demarcate these areas.
Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 3 (21)
(Chapter 3 – The uses of Sidewalks: Contact)
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Just to say I think its wack that someone would write a book about sidewalks but here we go…
Sidewalks bring people together who do not know each other in an intimate and private social passion.
A city street must have trust. People must feel comfortable with streets. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized
Cities bring everyone together – regardless of race, stature everyone lives in the same environment
In cities you have a lot more privacy than in small settlements. People only know about you what you wish to tell
them.
A community is about people trust one another.
Contact among neighbors mostly happens with upper middle class people
It is a strange concept for so many people to live in an a large apartment building in a city and not be friends.
Everyone in a city can learn from each other
Sidewalk public contact and public sidewalk safety together are our country’s most serious social problem.
Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 4 (22)
Ch. 4: The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children, pp. 74-88
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The main argument here is that sidewalks, which provide continuous adult surveillance, are safer and more interesting
places for children to play than playgrounds and parks.
o The adult surveillance of the sidewalks is passive, because adults do it “in the course of carrying on their
other pursuits” (82, Jacobs’ emphasis)
o The sidewalks also provide a moral education, because it teaches children to “take a modicum of
responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other” (82).
Accordingly, Jacobs advocates for wide sidewalks and deplores the erasure of streets by multi-block public housing as “the
most
Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 5 (23)
the uses of neighborhood parks
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Jacobs argues that while traditionally parks are seen as places that are a boon to their surrounding neighborhood, perhaps
we should turn this attitude around and see parks as places which need the boon of life and prosperity bestowed upon them
by their surroundings.
Neighborhood parks are the most general form of city parks, typically intended for general use as public yards.
She argues to understand parks we must jettison any mythical ideas about their use.
o They are not “lungs of the city” as the few trees in parks do not produce anywhere close to enough oxygen for the
city’s inhabitants
o They are no real estate stablizers or community anchors: plenty of bad parks exist
Philadelphia provides nearly a controlled experiment on the value of parks. It’s four parks laid out at the corners of
William Penn’s grid were created as equals but now exist very differently
o Rittenhouse square is a beloved success in a fashionable area; Franklin Square is the skid row park of the
homeless; Washington Square is at the heart of the fanicial district an is only used by bankers at lunch; and Logan
Circle is now only just a small traffic island.
o Jacobs argues that Rittenhouse square is a success for the same reasons that a lively sidewalk is a success:
continuous use brought on by a variety of functionality.
She argues that a park is a creature of its surroundings and of the way its surrounding generate mutual support from diverse
uses, or fail to generate such support.
o Successful parks are engineered to look organic and busy (lots of winds and turns) and when full of people they
should look most pleasing.
Unpopular parks are troubling not only because of the waste they imply, but also because of their negative effects. They
have the same problems as streets without eyes, and their dangers spill over into the surrounds.
o Pershing square in downtown LA is only used by the homeless. This is a product of LA’s vast decentralization.
She argues the perhaps the most important feature for neighborhood parks is centering: there must be something for it all to
revolve around: long, centerless malls get little use while centered squares are very popular.
Small parks also exist to be pleasing to the eye and confer the idea of greenspace: which is a good use for very very small
park areas.
o Parks that are in bad locations (i.e. are not visited) should restructure their environment to attract use. While she
believes beautiful views are usual not enough to attract use, she cites effective demand goods as swimming pools,
sports fields, music concerts, and outdoor carnivals.
“city parks are not abstractions, or automatic repositories for virtue or uplift, any more than sidewalks are abstractions.
They mean nothing divorced from their practical, tangible uses, and hence they mean nothing divorced from the tangible
effects on them – for good or for ill- of the city districts and uses touching them.”
Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 6 (24)
In some respect, in this chapter, Jacobs is attempting to dissuade Americans from having only a suburban notion of
‘neighborhood’:
“Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, ‘neighborhood’ is harmful to city
planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet
intentions in place of good sense” (112). Jacobs argues that cities can be great places for real neighborhoods to take root, “But
on the whole we Americans are poor at handling city neighborhoods” (112). She thinks that most Americans conceive of a
neighborhood as “an island, turned inward on itself”—but she says this is a “silly and even harmful ‘ideal’ for cities” (115). She
argues that one of the main functions for a neighborhood is the ability to create local ‘self-government,’ protecting it from
encroachments by city planners (such as Moses, specifically noted in this chapter) who simply want to ‘renew’ the city by
tearing down existing neighborhoods. In this vein, Jacobs identifies three main levels of neighborhood that work: (1) city as a
whole; (2) street neighborhoods; (3) districts of large, subcity size, composed of 100,000 people or more in the case of the
largest U.S. cities. She describes in the rest of the chapter how each of these levels of neighborhood can help create selfgovernance. On the level of the street, she is adamant about the ability of streets to create “length of fibers making up a rope”—
city streets need to be integrated with each other (instead of large, single-street neighborhoods), so that people can explore and
meet each other, not only those that live on their particular block (121). For districts, she writes, “the chief function of a
successful district is to mediate between the indispensable, but inherently politically powerless, street neighborhoods, and the
inherently powerful city as a whole” (121). Thus, districts have to function as a means for the politically powerless individuals
to bring resources and civic/political attention to the problems in their neighborhoods (122). But this doesn’t always happen:
“Our cities possess many islandlike neighborhoods too small to work as districts, and these include not only the project
neighborhoods inflicted by planning, but also many unplanned neighborhoods” (117).
Her final prescriptions for city planning is that it should (1) foster lively and interesting streets; (2) make the fabric of these
streets as continuous a network as possible throughout each district; (3) use parks, squares, and public spaces/buildings as part
of this street fabric, intensifying and knitting together the fabric’s ‘complexity and multiple use’—i.e., they should not create
subdivisions; and (4) emphasize the functional identity of areas large enough to work as districts (129).
She specifically discredits “renewal planning” because it aims to save buildings at the cost of the population, and she notes
cases in Greenwich Village and Yorkville, New York. Jacobs argues that “it is a miracle that our cities have any functioning
districts, not that they have so few” (137).
Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 15 (25)
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Slums are the victims of a vicious circle of troubles which urban renewal laws do not adequately address.
Conventional urban planning approaches to deal with spreading slums are paternalistic, and most often ineffective.
“The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of
getting out. This is the link that has to be broken if any other efforts at overcoming slums or slum life are to be of the
least avail” (271).
How to break the link (process of unslumming): foster personal attachments to other residents, create sense of street
community/neighborhood, diversify population, make it practical for people to want to stay (no overcrowded or unsafe
housing)
Mackin Chapter 11
“Knowing about the quality of housing in the United States is essential to understanding the
quality of life in this country.”
-U.S. Census Bureau, Population Profile of the United States: 2000
Mackin’s focus in this chapter: the “price tag” on the American Dream.
-Today nearly one third of Americans spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and more
than one in eight spend upwards of 50%.
-At some point these numbers become too difficult without sacrificing other components of the
standard of living such as food, clothing, medical expenses, time, and education.
-Even higher price increases in the densest areas (nation’s most competitive housing markets) have
facilitated new subdivisions and communities outside the cities which has increased commute up
to one hundred miles each way for workers.
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-To reduce a lot of these housing costs, the less well-off may live more than one to a room
-Also, concentrated population causes dramatically lower rates of home ownership. (Our housing
burdens correlate roughly with population density and the size of the area over which it spreads,
which help to explain the slowdown in rising homeownership in America).
Who are we really subsidizing?
-In competitive markets, renters pay more for housing than owners, so they are squeezed more
tightly.
-Undoubtedly, the third of the population with the lowest incomes suffers the most—those whose
incomes are no match for the rising costs of modern housing.
***The housing crisis may really be an income crisis—in a nation that has not raised its minimum
wage since 1997, while housing costs in most years, in most markets, rise annually, sometime
steeply. (Jane Jacobs also made this point in The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
Crowding Ourselves out of House and Home:
As the President of Home Builders Association of Massachusetts admits in explaining the barriers
to producing single-family homes: “there is no incentive for the home-building industry to do
anything at the starter-home level. Land is so expensive, you can’t really afford to put an
inexpensive home on it.”
Many of us buy the American Dream, and many of us sell it. Increasing competition has increased
competition for water, with housing development heedlessly flourishing in the driest parts of the
west. The dream also consumes oil. More than half of the oil we use fuels the transportation sector,
and supreme in that sector is the automobile we use to navigate our sprawling suburbs.
-Homebuilding has also begun to edge out other uses of land (e.g., land for agriculture, timber,
etc.).
-**The way we use land is the product of a long history, a natural abundance, and an economic
system that rewarded speculation and enterprise. While we pay a high individual cost for the
American Dream in terms of rising home prices, the extent to which housing uses certain resources
and reduces our access to others is the high collective price we pay as we house a larger
population.
Interesting Fact: When the U.S. government conducted its first census in 1790, there were about
four and a half Americans per square mile. There are now eighty of us per square mile.
Rem Koolhaas
“Atlanta” in S, M, L, XL pp. 833-840 (32)
For Koolhaas, Atlanta is “the real city at the end of the 20 th century.” This is not a good thing. The city is a hub of
sprawl, and it could be anywhere in America. Its formlessness, owing to its highway system, is its defining characteristic. He
calls it “post-urban” for its lack of a center, and he credits its organization to zoning laws, where “the exception is the norm.”
Interestingly, Atlanta somehow escaped the plight of the downtown in the 1970s. It was “a test case for an American
renaissance,” a rebirth orchestrated by John Portman, of whom the author is extremely critical.
Portman is an “artist-architect” and developer in one. He finances his projects with his own capital, which leads to a
lack of competing visions between architect and client, which in turn results in boring buildings. His network of similar
downtown buildings linked via a skyway lack insight and vision. He conceived the architectural feature that is a mainstay of
new construction: the atrium, which eliminates the need for other buildings. Dubbed “Portman’s Paradox,” this led to the decentralization of Atlanta through a downtown renewal project. Now that buildings no longer need each other, city centers can
pop up anywhere in the city. This decentralization results in random “centers” that lack unity of design or concept; the only
thing they have in common is their coexistence.
This “postmodern architecture” is the result of the time and budget constraints placed on the architects themselves.
Architects do not wait for inspiration; they churn out designs like machines. They no longer create and inspire with their
groundbreaking designs. They simply create, driven by the demands of a corporate society.
All is not lost for Atlanta. It will someday acquire an architectural richness, a richness framed well by Atlanta’s lush
greenery, for Atlanta is a city that acquires landscaping very well: “the vegetal is replacing the urban.” Comparing the new
Atlanta development of Northpark to Broadacre City and the ultra-modern early-century work of Malevich, the author suggests
that Atlanta is the realization of these two projects. Northpark’s justification is its appeal to our senses. On this note, Koolhaas
ends his essay by slamming Portman (who designed Northpark as well) by suggesting that he is “disurbanist to the world.” He
is “artist, architect, developer” but he is not a “thinker or theoretician,” and one could argue that “each city is now an Atlanta—
Singapore, Paris—what is the Louvre now if not the ultimate atrium?
Rem Koolhaas
“Atlanta” in S, M, L, XL,” pp. 841-850 (33)
- Atlanta is not a city, it is a landscape
- In the past 15 years, Atlanta shifted from the center to the periphery and beyond, to the point that there is no center.
In 1973, downtowns across America were in crisis, but Atlanta’s was in full swing thanks to the artist-architect John Portman.
He would design a building, build it, and them connect it with bridges to his previously designed buildings.
Result: No incentive to visit the rest of downtown.
He also (re)invented the atrium, which spread from Atlanta to the rest of the country, to the rest of the world.
“With atriums as their private mini-centers, buildings no longer depend on specific locations. They can be anywhere. And if
they can be anywhere, why should they be downtown?”
At first the atrium seemed to help rehabilitate and stabilize Atlanta’s downtown, but it actually accelerated its demise.
- proliferation of quasi downtowns that together destroyed the essence of center.
Infrastructure (subway system, major highways) seems almost irrelevant
- centers flourished in isolation.
Talks about current state of architecture
Post-modern architecture
– the only architecture that could be generated quickly enough to satisfy the needs of the clients.
- can design buildings in a day, any day.
- new form of professionalism, a technical training that creates a new efficacy in applying new, streamlined dogma.
- represents current conditions without any imposition of program, manifesto, or ideology.
Rem Koolhaas
“Atlanta” in S, M, L, XL,” pp. 851-859 (34)
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Atlanta = creative experiment, not intellectual or critical
Represents current conditions w/o any imposition on program, manifesto, ideology
Each site in Atlanta is exposed to a theoretical carpet bombardment of “centers”
Atlanta = metaphor for the world
Can create a brutal and ugly container that accommodates a wide variety of quasi-urban activities
 City = new pervasiveness containing landscape, park, industry, parking lot, housing tract, single-family house, desert,
airport, beach, river, ski slope, downtown
 Atlanta = convulsive architecture that will eventually acquire beauty
 Has an ideal climate -> jungle-like conditions, good for landscaping
 Atlanta as a new imperial Rome – large urban figures
 Can be described as a mixture of the imaginations of Malevich and Frank Lloyd Wright (Broadacre City)
 Atlanta is a realized prophecy
 Modernity = radical principle – it is destructive, destroys the city as we know it
 Atlanta as a whole comes close to this kind of modernity
Jacobs
The Death and Life, pp. 428-448 (39)
“The Kind Of Problem A City Is”
Scientific-Historical Developments in Strategy & The City
Quotes extensively from Dr. Warren Weaver’s 1958 essay on scientific approaches to complexity published in the
Annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Weaver offers three stages of scientific-historical thought:
Solutions to problems of simplicity (two-var. causal relationship)
Solutions to problems of disorganized complexity
Solutions to problem of organized complexity
Problems of simplicity (physical science solved these 18 th/19th cent.)
One quantity’s dependence on another (gas volume/pressure)
Problems of disorganized complexity
Billiard table: can track a single ball (prob. of simplicity), but to track interaction of series of balls
becomes problem of organized complexity (range of variables to consider = organized complexity).
Disorganized complexity involves statistical breadth: imagining
millions of balls allows probabilistic prediction at the expense of tracing specific balls’ path.
Problems of organized complexity
Involve “a sizable number of factors interrelated into an organic whole.”
Cities are problems in organic complexity but we have typically analyzed them as if problems in
physical complexity (disorganized complexity).
Ex. A park: Use depends on design, but also on local population, as well as use of city beyond park and
many other interrelated factors, which spawn new factors: “it is also partly a matter of how [the
factors] affect the park in combination with one another, for certain combinations stimulate the
degree of influence from another among their components.”
But city planners forego examination of the many factors, instead regarding the problem of the city as
one of organized complexity: 1920s-1930s, Europe and US city planners assimilate probability
theory from physical sciences.
Important Ways of Thinking about the City
a. Processes:
i.
ii.
Abstraction of topics such as “housing” ignore context and ongoing progress: “City
dwellings—either existing or potential—are specific and particularized buildings always
involved in differing, specific processes such as unslumming, slumming, generation of
diversity, self-destruction of diversity.”
Thinking in terms of processes encourages an organized-complexity approach: “once one
thinks about city processes, it follows that one must think of catalysts of these processes.”
b. Reason Inductively:
To reason from “expert” generalizations “drives us into absurdities.”
It is also democractic: “Inductive reasoning…is something that can be engaged in by ordinary,
interested citizens…”
Against Sentimentality in Planning:
Sentimentality for nature is disastrous: leads to disgust toward city and literal destruction of nature to
create middle-way of the suburb.
“Big cities and countrysides can get along well together. Big cities need real countryside close by.”
A romantic “search for the salves of society’s ills” in the pastoral is also negative in so much as it
obscures the regenerative solutions to social upheaval present present in the city itself.
Alex Krieger
“An Urban Revival for a Suburban Culture,” pp. 42-50 (40)
-In America, rings of settlement don’t always strengthen preceding ones or benefit old cores
-always a perpetual flow of people/resources to the perimeter
-America= Urban Civilization without cities
-Public sentiment: Henry Ford “We shall solve the problems of the city by leaving the city.”
-transferred problem of city to outskirts
-However, many urban centers of US cities are now coming back to life
-business and entertainment flourishing, crime rates fall, housing emerging
-suburban life losing hold on American imagination
-As population becomes more educated, they want more social/cultural amenities
-Changing household demographics also demands more diverse dwelling types
-In reaction to isolation created by sprawl, there is a search for community
-A generation change is underway-kids of baby boomers don’t want suburbia, they want an exotic city
-Managing Urban Regions, not Autonomous Cities
-cities are now clusters of density, fragments of lands, overlapping webs of jurisdictions
-as sprawl becomes more of a concern, effective growth management will need to be dealt with by regional
cooperation
-mobilization required to accommodate such growth while minimizing environmental harm is huge
-Managing Sprawl amid Greater Mobility
-A certain level of density enables a city to provide the social and cultural services needed, however, too much density
deteriorates experience
-likewise with sprawl, the many benefits accrued to those in the periphery become a burden to the region as a whole
(basically, sprawl=bad because is degrades the quality of our life)
-Hard for Americans to admit sprawl is bad because we’ve always thought we had tons of land and we like our
personal
space, but space is running out
-Sprawl was financed by 70 years of govt subsidies, so bad that people didn’t recognize sprawl for what it is, now
people are
trying to change it
-Urban Engagement by choice
-cities remain the broadcast centers for the information age, capitals of information
-now cities are less exclusively devoted to labor and more dedicated to the good life
-nearly 80 mil baby boomers are about to hit retirement-they will want to retire in urban areas
-the age where people raise children is short in the big picture, thus those who choose to live in suburbia are few
-The Possibility of Green Cities
-people need to pay more attention to conserving the environment now bc resources are rare
-wonderful image of a city surrounded by parcels of agricultural land…possible?
-Repository of Culture
-cities are talents for the most talented, most ambitious among us
-NYC remains to this day the center for media conglomerates
-industries that are just forming will stay in the city because of the ready made coalitions of information
-Becoming a more urbane species
-people must be civil, use technology to help each other achieve equitable progress, be less tolerant of waste
-In still developing world, (Asia, Africa, South America), rapid urbanization is creating congestion, pollution, crime,
disease…they are now looking to suburbia and decentralization
-By 2020, Asia will have 11 of the top 15 cities in the world
-Growth needs to be manages in a culturally and environmentally respectful way
The Fifth Migration:
- The 5th Migration is Robert Fishman’s belief that we are now currently witnessing the end of
suburbanization and the start of the re-urbanization of cities. This belief is an addition onto Lewis
Mumford’s original first 4 migrations, the 4th one being that people will move from the city to the
suburbs.
- The heart of his article is about immigration reurbanism-- how immigrant workers who live in
cities have begun setting the stage for the revitalization of the downtown cities.
- He also talks about how Black culture has largely defined the core ideal of hipness and diversity
which has become the cultural ideal of reurbanism. He downplays the impact of White middleclass reurbanism.
- Fishman also concludes that the demographic potential of the 5th migration rests on such varied
bases as the aging baby boomers deciding to return to the cities, their 20-something year old
children rejecting the suburbs, the natural increase of households becoming better and not worse,
and the millions of people who seek to migrate to the US.
- He also states that the degraded infrastructure of many inner cities is not beyond repair and that
their inherent urbanity can reemerge if there is proper intervention via urban planners,
governments, and the citizens.
- The problem with Fishman’s belief of the 5th migration is that cities tend to have higher housing
costs than suburbs. This fact could hinder the 5th migration from happening. Also, Fishman
worries that the success of blacks and immigrants may cause them to search for the American
dream in the suburbs or keep cities as they are now—a large split between expensive and
homogenized desirable city neighborhoods vs. the slums.
- In order to achieve a stable and diverse urban environment that would thereby allow for the
success of the 5th migration, Fishman believes that there needs to be a balanced housing policy that
encourages investment in recovering areas by promoting home ownership for those of moderate
income, as well as rental rehabilitation and an expansion of Section 8 voucher programs (those are
vouchers that lower your rent… they are given to you by the government).
March 22 Lecture Notes (42)
From Suburb to Suburbia to Suburbanized Regions
Disaggregated Urbanism: Los Angeles as a Paradigm
1) Statistics
a) Los Angeles has an archetypal quality for describing the American Landscape
b) It is almost a Broadacre city in real life
i) Frank L. Wright was inspired by Los Angeles
ii) But then Los Angeles developed based on Wright’s
iii) Non-nucleated, continuous ribbons of urban development
iv) Landscape promising an acre each
c)
Third Largest City
i) Superseded Chicago in both size and in the imagination of Americans
(1) Los Angeles took Chicago’s mantle in the second generation
ii) Limited by Ocean and Mountains
iii) 60 million
d) By 1990, its local economy made it the 11th largest economy in the world
i) Larger than Australia
ii) <3% of GDP in LA is entertainment
iii) 20% is industrial manufacturing
iv) 20% high technology
v) 10% aerospace and defense contracting
e) Densest city in country
i) More even spread of density than Chicago and New York, which peters out dramatically
f) Paradise that everyone sought out, but it had all the frictions of most metropolitan areas
g) Large suburban landscape
2) Product of infrastructure management
a) LA has always been seen as plentiful, but it is unsustainable
i) It is a desert without water!
b) LA struggled hard to acquire water without which it could never have grown to the size it was in the 1920s
c) LA could not exist today without…
i) Water
ii) Mass transit, highways, automobile
iii) Railroads
d) By federal edict, a law was passed that only the city of LA could have access to the river
i) So all the areas outside of LA asked to be annexed by LA to have access to the river
ii) Opening of the Owen Aqueduct
iii) The movie Chinatown was a movie about how LA gained water
iv) California Aqueduct, 1960-1968 is 444 miles long and the Owens valley Aqueduct (1905-1923) was 338 miles
long
(1) They also took water from the Colorado River Aqueduct (1932-42_ which is 242 miles long from river to
Owens Valley intercept
(a) This impoverished nearby states (Arizona, etc)
e) Transportation system established
i) Mass transit caused the first generation of rapid sprawl
ii) Private rail service existed throughout the 1900s and 1910s
(1) At one point in time there were 1100 miles of electric rail car
(a) These help sell home lots on the outskirts
iii) After developers sold the land, they no longer cared about the transportation systems
(1) Thus, by 1911 the city was needed to consolidate the Pacific Electric Railroad Company to take over all the
lines
(2) This caused problems because each private system had its own standards (width of tracks, etc) and they didn’t
always go where you wanted it to go
iv) Many historians have pointed out that this national transit line was bought only to sell automobiles
v) Highways floated above the land
f) Architecture will respond to culture and conditions
i) If you drive past buildings, then signs must be larger, building must look good while zooming past
ii) Road-side architecture
iii) Inter-collaboration of signage and architecture
(1) This started a century ago
g) Urban districts focused on umbilical cords and arteries
i) “The Golden Mile”
ii) A Linear city
h) Olmsted tried to set up a park system, but why do this when the whole city is a paradise
i) Imagineering: You risk over-promising and under-delivering
i) The inability to deliver on this promise is causing many of the friction of southern California
3) Product of Imagineering and life style salesmanship
For most of the 20th century, Los Angeles has been dedicated to lifestyle management
i) It has been programmed
ii) “Los Angeles…it not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be
advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes, and mouth wash.” --Morrow
Mayo, 1933
b) Los Angeles, to foreigners, seems like a window into American Culture
i) It is a legend about Americans’ conspicuous consumption, our good and bad habits
c) Imagineering
d) LA is a new city, settled as a Spanish Pueblo in the 1780s
e) Wasn’t much of anything until the 1870s when the transcontinental railroad brought thousands to CA
i) Growth rate shot to 400% in 1890s, 100% in 1900, 220% in 1910, etc
ii) This is a place with no water to satisfy the population (only from LA River)
4) California: The Cornucopia of the World
a) “Climate for health and wealth without cyclones or blizzards”
a)
5) Laboratory for postmodern theorizing, but also hyperbole and metaphor
April 5 Lecture Notes (43)
Las Vegas
 Most important metro area in the US founded after 1900
 Fastest growing city in America – 200 new residents/day
 New houses completed every 15 minutes
 Dry land but high water consumption
 Supplanted Los Angeles
 Bifurcated nature, bifurcated urbanism
 Artificial environment – air conditioning
 Most of it looks very ordinary
 Mojave desert is hot, but over 3 million people expected by 2020
 Millions of gallons of water is pumped upward from Lake Mead
 Other necessities are imported also
Founded in 1905, LA grew rapidly at the beginning of the 20 th century, while Las Vegas grew at the end of the 20 th century
 Most jobs are in the service industry (70% of labor force)
 ¼ of employment is related to the casino/gaming/entertainment – NOT in the city of Law Vegas – in the “Strip”
 Ecotourism, shopping, real estate
 Lots of back-office industries (credit card processing etc)
 Federal government
 Federal Bureau of Land Management – in charge of development, land disposal
 70% of state of Nevada is federally owned land
Summerlin
 America’s largest master-planned development with 70,000 people right now
 Howard Hughes – privately held – Raus company (same one that owns Faneuil Hall)
 “Private state” of 22,000 acres
 Provides amenities – parks, schools, churches, trails
 1/3 in gated subdistricts, 2/3 in open subdivisions
 Fair range of house price models
 Land values are low, so development costs are low
 Golf courses and 5 office parks
History of Las Vegas
 “The Meadows” in Spanish
 Spanish traders en route to CA (“Journey of Death”) stopped at this way-station: a little valley with its source of water
and wild grasses…it was an oasis
 Brigham Young of the Mormons wanted to settle it in the 1850’s
 Mineral repositories discovered



Miners and farming
Transcontinental railroad 1905 – so it became a railroad town
In the 1930’s, 1) Legalized gambling 1931 2) “Quickie” divorce (if resided in Nevada for 6 weeks) and dude ranch
phenomenon 1931 3) Construction of the Hoover Dam 1933 around the Depression
 War – the air force identified the area as a military facility
 The Nellis air force base is 500 square miles (larger than the state of RI)
 Post-war affluence and liberal laws led to early casinos
 Mob associations
 Bugsy Siegel – the Flamingo – was a financial disaster
 During the 1980’s and 1990’s, went “from vice to nice” and became legitimate for families – tried to expand its
attractions and broaden the local economy
 You can fool yourself into thinking it’s an ordinary street
 Can’t combine drinking and stripping
 2 sides of Las Vegas
 As a model of a major metropolitan area, showed dichotomous urbanism (social, economic, etc)
Worrisome Characteristics:
1. Ignoring history and the present; living on borrowed time
2. Air pollution and smog in the valley
3. Degredation of desert and landscape
4. Universe of subdivisions with minimum collection of public and civic amenities
5. Homogenization of metropolitan centers
6. So dependent on tourism industry
7. Constantly upgrade – ephemeral nature
8. Conflation of history – authenticity
April 7 Lecture Notes (44)
New Urbanists
--try to find alternatives to sprawl
--Concerns about sprawl:
--parody of suburban disfunctionality
--demise of the American dream
--traffic
--homogeneity, greed, no individuality
--began 20-50 years ago; the New Urbanists created a Congress of Urbanism to try and pose solutions to these problems
--Arguments for New Urbanism is that it uses land more efficiently.
Examples of New Urbanist Communities:
--Seaside FL: holistic plan; a more dense form of planning
--Harbor Town, Memphis TN: conservation of the natural habitat of the island; higher density; people walk around to get
places; sensibility, collectiveness
--Drawback: All houses are required to be built a certain, “Southern” way. Tries to be contextualized, which is good,
but eliminates choice.
--Celebration, FL: Disney built this town and looks like something out of Disney.
--City Place, West Palm Beach, FL: very small area with fountains and shops.
Overall, new urbanism tries to make more urbane, urbanized versions of the suburbs.
April 12 Lecture Notes (45)
Managing the Modern Metropolis. Zoning: Regulating Urban Concentration and Congestion
New Urbanism thoughts:
- noble objectives
- Negatives:
-
o Overbearing sentimentality of “bygone” era, including aesthetically
o Over promised aims, very easily co-optable into slogans
o Dressing up of suburbia with little substantive difference—just more uppercalss, more amenities
o Doesn’t sufficiently stress reinvestment in existing areas
o Still replicable/rote
o Buys into the make believe fantasy of “town”-like places
Positives:
o Contributes to discussion /incites debate on public space, sprawl, urban regressment
o Operates reform from within—works with developers directly to change directly, affects the Real Estate
community
o Broadening housing product offered, enlargement of potential ways of building
o Changes thoughts on public housing—the Federal government influenced by their charter, lead to the
designing of public housing like everyone else’s
o Gathers other allies in smart growth, creates whole constituencies around urban development
o Zoning was producing the wrong model, based on antiquated vision of how people live, didn’t create
environments we want as ideal
Zoning
- Increasing management is needed to maintain the growth of the modern megalopolis.
- Burnham plan for Chicago was the apex of the City Beautiful era—afterwards came the movement from the aims of
elusive beauty to the need for functional goals
- The move from imagining future to enacting plans created a whole profession around urban planning distinct from the
previous architecture field
- 19th century shift towards function: hygiene, civil engineering, uncorrupt government, administrative systems, zoning
- Laws giving public right to control the use of private land, zoning as the principal tool of planning
- Shift from illustrating the future to mapping the ideal function of a development, “scientification” of planning process
- Segregate land use by location of ideal use
- Establish principal of yielding of private ownership to public interest, shift public costs to private, incentivize private
sector to provide services (ie. clean streets) that the public is used to
- Doesn’t deal well with regional issues, often too local of laws
- Produces conventional environment, generic
- Undermines self-reliant yeoman idea, cuts into owners freedom
o Basic right to use/control land
o Became popularize by wording it as a way of controlling neighbor so as not to adversely affect your land and
its value
- Previous practices that shaped land usage:
o Architect creates projection of future, convinces public of the initiative (Burnham plan)
o Establishing building codes to overcome poor conditions ie. fire hazards, crowding, unsafe materials
o Provision of infrastructure—ie. subway encourages specific growth, but doesn’t determine particular use
o Use of public expenditures—ie. creating parks or boulevards that impact the value of surroundings but not the
use
o Exercise of police powers and eminent domain to take land for public good or the general welfare of public,
most noticeably for highways
- Zoning
o Particularly a response to infeasibility of eminent domain and allows for expanding powers of public interest
without the money
o Allows for the protection of “social values”—often discrimination or at least informal division of people,
means of keeping people out, allows for areas produced for very specific segments
o Started with tannery/slaughter houses/factories, designed to protect from the use of your neighbor’s land,
prevention of a nuisance establishments in certain districts
- Early zoning examples
o Chicago building materials after the fire
o Laundry houses banned because they were largely run by Chinese immigrants
o Height of buildings—in DC buildings not allowed to be over the height of the monuments, in Philly no higher
than the Penn State statue, in Boston only a certain height because of the existing fire ladders
o
-
-
-
NYC had the first city wide zoning ordinance related to growth management and public health—a
commission headed by Benjamin Marsh limited the growth of skyscrapers because of concerns about
congestion and lack of sunlight on the streets. Established the right of a citizen to health, to live in normalcy,
a right to pedestrian property. Also created the broader notion of common good equated to criminal justice.
o Specific battle between 5th Avenue retailers and the producers of their clothing— producers wanted to move
closer to the retailers to limit costs, retailers thought the trucks would limit the value of their stores and harm
customers with congestion. But, because of relegation of height and use of buildings by trade and industry,
they could not.
Establishment of three use districts:
o Houses
o Retail
o Unlimited
Height limits usually twice the distance from the street to the top to allow for sunlight—produced a certain aesthetic.
o Loopholes—on 25% of the property they could build as high as they wanted—lead to consolidation of
property.
Over 20 states passed zoning allowing for state power to enforce the common good
Euclid of Ohio vs. Ambler Realtor Co.
o Euclid: small town outside Cincinnati
o Ambler granted injunction against zoning board as unconstitutional because they provided no compensation
when they took part of their land for a housing development. They thought this was less valuable than
developing and other potential incomes from the land (railroad)
o Exercising police power rather than eminent domain—not taking property, but exercising control over it for
public good
o Required zoning to have comprehensive plan related to health, safety ect. Of the community as long as not
discriminatory
April 14 Lecture Notes (46)
All about skyscrapers!
-
Same nation that creates urban sprawl by expanding horizontally also created vertical expansion.
Skyscraper is “archetypal contemporary” American building type
As learned earlier, skyscrapers first developed in Chicago (c. 1870-1910)
Skyscrapers are a celebrated part of American culture, portrayed in art and our imaginations
When we think of big city centers, we think of skyscrapers.
Tall buildings are the building block of the modern city
There have been many debates about the utility and risks of skyscrapers.
From Krieger’s notes:
Advantages:
> Urban aggregation
> Operational centralization
> Economic concentration
> High density
> Response to rising downtown land values
> High profile emblem for corporations
-
Problems:
> Environmental harm, such as no sunlight on street
> Banal expression of Capitalism/bureaucracy
> Siphoning investment from adjoining districts
> Overcrowding on street
> “boondoggle for developers”
> Inhumane working conditions
Beyond the stated problems, there are some dilemmas when designing a skyscraper:
o Type: Does it have antecedents? What should be in it?
o Form: How should it look? How should it be structured?
o Expression: What ‘meaning’ should it have?
o Arrangement: is it part of “a new urban fabric” or a singular landmark?
April 19 Lecture Notes (47)
LITERATURE AND ARTS B-20. DESIGNING THE AMERICAN CITY
LECTURE 16. THURSDAY, APRIL 07, 2005
UNIT IV: FROM SUBURB TO SUBURBIA TO SUBURBANIZED REGIONS
WHAT IS THE NEW URBANISM?
SPRAWL AND NEW URBANISM
 “For literally nothing down, you too can find a box of your own in one of the fresh air slums we’re building around the
edge of America’s cities…Where everyone’s [] are exactly like yours. …they destroy established cities…and drive
mad myriad of housewives shut up in them.” --John Keats
 The Congress for New Urbanism critiqued suburbia and posed a solution for the problems that John Keats pointed out
o “The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl,
increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and
wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge. We
stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the
reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the
conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.”
 www.dpz.com
 His essay critiques the New Urbanism movement, showing that their accomplishments do not match their ambitions
 Suburban sprawl sacrifices pedestrianism for automobile transportation
o In urban areas it is easier to walk from one place to another
 Transect: the area between rural and urban regions
SEASIDE, FLORIDA
 Not a solution itself, but a model for what people hoped to achieve
 At the center is the important stuff, surrounded by housing and on the periphery is nature and an undisturbed
environment
 Seaside accelerated sprawl based on its success
o Now there are homes surrounding the community, not the greenery they hoped
HARBOR TOWN, TN
 Towns imply that they will have town life instead of sprawl
 Had nothing to do with New Urbanism, per se, but it has been used as an example of what they’d like to achieve
 Connected directly to Memphis, TN; this helps people live closer to the city to enjoy urban life
 There is another side to these places though that seem unsettling
o There is a code that shows you what you can and cannot build
 The perfect Middle Landscape – close to the city and close to the country
 Similar plan to Seaside, FL
CELEBRATION, FL
 Disney’s attempt to find the perfect city
 You get there off of a highway; the city is removed from this highway
 This is really just an extension of sprawl, but a more acceptable version of it
 Model of an integrate community
 10,000 acres, shaped like Mickey Mouse
CITY PLACE
 Looks like something out of Daniel Burnham’s plan
 Sidewalks are broad
 Magnificent fountains in the city with beautiful civic buildings and lots of green
WEST PALM BEACH
 Little transit system
 Shops are doing less well than the housing
 Because it is a private development it programs itself to be attractive through lighting, fountains, etc.
 West Palm Beach used to be poorer, but now the people from Palm Beach go to West Palm Beach to relax
 It’s a lesson for the future: “if you like this, lets build more of this”
EASTON TOWNE CENTRE
 A renew of a shopping mall
 Lots of fountains
 Beautiful town center

It is a huge mall surrounded by parking spaces; but when you park your car and get into the square, you feel as if you
have avoided sprawl, you are outside the generic condition of strip malls, it’s like you’re back in the city but in a less
threatening, cleaner place
KENTLANDS SQUARE
 Not all that different in its use of resources, but gives the impression that it is different through more landscaping, etc.
 Perpetuates the middle landscape notion of small town life
NEW URBANISM SUMMARY
 Remarkably noble objectives
 Appeals to a population concerned with sprawl
o Revives the glory days
 Criticisms and Skepticisms
o This is just a “dressing up of suburbia,” intended for the upper middle class population that desires a few
more amenities than the lower middle class
o Despite the attempts to diversify, many New Urbanism areas look alike, they are generic
o Leads to “make believe” microcosms of towns
o This has led to a lot of debate about urban investment and sprawl
o They preach a lot, in the Jane Jacobs or Mumford tradition, but they also work directly with the developers to
help them improve their style
 Trying to move real estate community toward their objectives
o They have made a remarkable contribution to the diversity of houses that are offered
 Through the enlargement of the potential ways in which we can subdivide land and move into
suburban land…
 Three major accomplishments
o They have had an impact on the public’s role in providing affordable housing
 Affordable public housing shouldn’t look any worse than traditional housing
o Led to the Smart Growth movement and several other constituencies that recognize that we must be more
careful with out growth; the New Urbanists were the first to suggest this
o They argued that zoning isn’t working because it is based on an antiquated notion of the way people want to
live
 New Urbanists argued that zoning no longer provides environments that we want to achieve (rather,
achieving that the people in the 30s wanted)
April 21 Lecture Notes (48)




Examples of housing policies and housing improvements
o Late 19th century tenement reform laws
o Zoning against uses incompatible with housing
o Efforts at regional planning and depression era decentralization schemes
o Era of urban renewal
o Community block grants and local redevelopment corporations
o Recent public housing reform efforts
19th century reform movement
o improve unsanitary conditions
o legislating building codes
o health and social concerns of over-crowding
o the improvements to housing often increased the price of the housing, and was ineffective at helping the
residents, these improvements led to less housing choices for poorer people
Zoning
o led to exclusionary housing practices (not letting certain people move into certain areas)
FDR, Depression era “New Deal” Programs and housing policies
o gave support to building industries to create new communities
o public housing/subsidized housing were advertised in the newspapers as the end of racial segregation. Krieger
also said that they eroded the pride of the residents and made them feel that they had no self-sufficiency
o Resettlement Administration
 charged with building 39 residential communities


examples are Greenbelt, MD, Greenbrook, NY and Greendale, WI which were modeled after British
Garden Cities
 the workers were helping to rebuild their own houses
 high density housing
 after WWII the Federal Government sold these houses to private owners
o Federal Housing Administration
 prior to the FHA in order to buy a house, you needed 40-50% down payment, and the house was
usually paid off within 5 years
 FHA invented the 10 year mortgage, and a 20% downpayment
o Levittown (NY and PA)
 low-income housing, were affordable to more people, especially veterans
 all the houses looked the same
 came with television and washer
 Levittown builders did a better job with public housing than the US Government
The Housing Act of 1949 and the Beginnings of the Urban Renewal Era
o Stuyvescent Town by Metro Life Insurance Compnay of America
 did not admit African Americans
 no schools or services
o Housing Act
 commitment to fund program development at local level
 Federal Government pays city two thirds of the cost of preparing properties for redevelopment
April 26 Lecture Notes (49)
Urban Renewal: From Reconstruction to Preservation
 Post WWII federal aid programs to improve cities
 Initially desired to improve the nation’s deteriorating urban housing stock and to undertake what came to be called
“slum clearance”
 Later, city leaders who wanted to overcome decades of disinvestment in cities found ways of using urban renewal
legislation to pursue far broader goals of economic development.  led to wholesale demolition of older
neighborhoods and a diminishment in the local supply of affordable housing
 Cities wanted to renew their image
 Also called “Negro Removal” by critics; wiped out slums where minorities lived and replaced with market rate
housing
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Federal Housing Acts Conceived as a Catalyst for Urban Reinvestment
Number of housing acts post WWII that subsidized the building of low-rent public housing by local authorities (1937),
subsidized ¾ of the cost of local slum clearance and urban renewal (1949), and modified urban redevelopment and
renewal by requiring communities engaged in such activities to adopt code enforcement, relocation, and other
measures that would prevent the further spread of urban blight (1954)
United States Housing Authority (USHA): Financed construction of public housing, but cities had to develop their
own housing authority.
Federal housing authorities financed private builders, low interest loans, but in order to qualify, had to have
homogeneity in use, no ethnicity
Aimed to make new land available to private sector; taking of land for public good (How can you take private
land and give it back for private purposes?)
Loophole: Supreme Court decided that the legislative branch can determine “social good” and the judicial
branch can’t second guess that.
Government is allowed to displace people from their homes (e.g. Lincoln Center)
A Case Study: the Condition of Boston in the Post WWII Period
250,000 people left in 15 years post WWII. (From 850,000 down to 600,000); no faith in the city
Boston Mayor Collins wanted to search for ways to reverse disinvestment decay and loss of both population and jobs
to the nearby suburbs and the distant Sunbelt.
Transformation of the “Old” West End into the “New” Charles River Park
Razed the slums of the West End because city officials didn’t want people fleeing to the suburbs
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“Old” West End: 2,300 units of low-rent residential units in a heterogeneous, though poor and physically deteriorating,
ethnic neighborhood
 Charles River Park: 1,600 luxury housing units built over demolished land
D.
Government Center Urban Renewal Project (1960’s)
 Conversion of some 60 acres of decrepit and congested downtown – the local haunt of sailors on leave looking for
action – into a modern-day acropolis for government and a symbol of Boston’s renewal.
 Edward Logue: Boston’s Robert Moses. He declared 3/5 of Boston as urban renewal areas
 Government Center  City Hall
 Waterfront  created housing, park space, cultural facilities (e.g. aquarium)
 Central Artery Construction (1949-55)
 Reconstruction of the highway system  brought people back into the city but also allowed them to escape
 Boston, like many cities, is not a stable place of status (1820’s Faneuil Hall renewal project)
Criticism of Urban Renewal (Jane Jacobs!)
 Took away from true urban life, which was on the streets. In destroying traditional arrangements of streets and
buildings, urban renewal was not only disrupting the lives of thousands of city dwellers but creating sterile, anti-urban
environments that had little or no sense of the excitement, energy, or life that had always been associated with cities.
 City needs appreciation for old things; preservation of history is desired (this attitude did not exist prior to Urban
Renewal Era)
 Shouldn’t isolate the poor
 Need to control hasty actions (too much at once)
E.
Were there Positive Repercussions from the Much-Criticized Urban Renewal Period?
1. Increased local activism and citizen participation in planning
2. A new appreciation for conserving traditional urban neighborhoods
3. Historical preservation as a serious goal and powerful force in planning
4. An increased awareness of the “plight” of the inner-city
5. Gradual commercial and corporate re-investment in downtown areas
Examples:
 Hope 6 Program: realized poor people don’t want to live in places different from rich people, so tore down tenements
and replaced with single houses with white picket fences that are very suburban-looking
 Columbia Point Project: Mixed-use housing project; modified older houses, but still subsidized
Key terms: Urban Renewal, USHA, Federal Housing Acts, Government Center, Charles River Park, Jane Jacobs, Edward
Logue
Possible Essay Topics: underlying goals and initial impacts (generally believed to have been negative) of Urban Renewal Era;
long term impacts of Urban Renewal from today’s standpoint nearly 50 years later; Jane Jacobs’ critique of Urban Renewal
(agree or disagree?)
April 28 Lecture Notes (50)
Campaigning for Smart(er) Growth
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No one wants to be opposed to “smart” growth, but it means different things to different people.
Unconstrained growth
Controlling sprawl
Seaside: posterchild for anti-sprawl movement. Metropolitan expansion—multiplies quickly, eg Baltimore
Land development pace greater than population Growth
Guest Speaker: Andrew Flint
Smart Growth-Government initiated, policy driven; changed the rules of the development game; steers growth to already
built-up areas.
New Urbanism-Developer-initiated, market-driven; change zoning just enough to allow more models; market will decide
Beginnings
Oregon: urban growth boundary;
density and light rail;
regulate government
Maryland: Office of Smart Growth;
all state offices in downtowns;
state aid to already developed areas
harder to build in “greenfields”
farmland preservation
Revolution: everyone joined on: NJ, MI, PA, VT, OH, MA, NM, CA; NJ—war on sprawl/low-density bldg
Coalitions & Constituencies
 Traffic-weary suburbanites
 Affordable housing advocates
 Environmentalists
 Public Health advocates
 Equity / Fair Growth
 Urban Developers & Transit lobby
 Fiscal municipal
 Police, labor, elderly, faith based
Principles
 Limit outward expansion
 Encourage density and compact, missed use development around transit stations
 Revitalize cities
 Steer growth to already developed areas
 Design walkable neighborhoods
 Establish regulation government
 Preserve farmland, open space, character, sense of place
Common Policy Initiatives
 Fix it first
 Brownfields
 Green building
 Zoning reform
 Targeted funding for infrastructure
 Urban growth boundaries
 Revenue sharing and regionalism / split rate tax: land / building
 Bully pulpit
Advocacy
 Smart Growth America
 State-by-State Groups (1,000 Friends)
 Sierra Club
 Reg. planning association
 Architects and planners
 A new “PC”
Backlash
 Housing costs
 Sprawl is good
 Cost of light rail
 “Social engineering”
 Elitist, out of touch
Sprawl, Inc
 National association of Homebuilders
 Homebuilders
 Roadbuilders
 Self-perpetuating financing system
Dream Defenders
 Free market think-tanks
 Funded studies
 Op-ed essays—organize interest.
 Property rights
 Setbacks & Defeats: Measure 37, MY, NJ
Regrouping
 What to call it
 Red State Dilemma
 Fiscal argument
 Let the market do the talking
 Transit oriented development
 More targeted initiatives
Only some places are expanding
Benefits of sprawl—America’s individuals benefit from sprawl; all costs born by society overall.
May 3 Lecture Notes (51)
A. Dominant Influences on Contemporary American Urbanization (Since the 1930s)
1. Auto 86.4%, support of its use, like 1956 Interstate Highway Act
Transit 1.6%
Same thing is happening in China. They are at 20% but it’s on the rise-environmental catastrophe.
2. Government support for home ownership
3. Immigration, big dig in 1930s-50s also relates to big dig in urban cities.
Immigration/Urban City success relationship.
4. Instinct to suburbanize accelerated by mass-production of tract homes
% Households who own their homes: 1940: 44%, 2000: 71%
5. Deindustrialization of central cities, movement out. Tax breaks in subsidizing cost of land in peripheral areas. Historically,
city was center of economic activity.
Devastating consequences of urban renewal period, destroy big chunks of city in order to rebuild it in terms of modern need.
8. Race riots in urban city (e.g. 1960s) which did accelerate white out-migration to suburbs.
9. The loss of confidence in urban public education. Loss of faith, by far the largest drag upon those with kids.
10. Sprawl and decentralization, out migration to different parts of the country. First of dwelling place, then of commerce.
11. the invention of the enclosed shopping mall. Where we ‘socialize’, all the same.
12. Rise of gated communities and privatized environment.
13. AC has made the sunbelt inhabitable. Without it things would be more dense.
B, Emerging Trends and Factors That are Likely to Shape Urbanization in the Next Half-Century
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Growing disparities in wealth reflecting themselves in life and work. Particulary in cities, seems to be worsening.
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Suburbanization continues.
Aging of baby-boomer population, and increased lifespans. Kind of housing them might need, decisions where to live
again…longer life span as it effects urbanization.
Environmental considerations in planning and various ‘Smart Growth’ Agendas vs. libertarian, free-market end. This
is in increasing importance.
The internet/globalization/ service-dominated economies
The deterioration of early ‘first ring’ suburbs (leading to ‘suburban renewal’?_ “Starter homes” 10s of 1000s we made
of these nobody wants them any more—over supply. So now, we can redevelop that.
Changing family demographics, and shrinking housing sides. Diversification of house type needs to be broadened b/c
93% of families operate in various different ways. 7% have typical family structures.
Calls for metropolitan forms of government and land-use policy. “environmentalism” like Portland.
Continuing peripheral development (sprawl) supported by land economics, outer belt highway construction, and
appeal of “scenic areas”—like by pretty mountains.
Racial integration along with increased diversity in urban population
NIMBYism and search for ‘community,’ or sentiment-driven revivals of the past
Security concerns and responses
May 5 Lecture Notes (52)
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Cities - dense center, sprawling perimeter
o Used to just be feature of American cities, now big new cities emerging worldwide
o We try to prevent other new cities from making our urban mistakes (too much auto travel) but they insist on
getting all that US has
People in developing countries are flocking to urban areas
o Cities can’t keep up with demand  1/3-1/4 of urban households in world are in poverty
o 40% of Mexico is below the poverty line
Trend:
o 1900: 7/10 of largest cities are European
o 1950: US cities dominate
o 2000: Asian cities dominate
Fastest growing cities are cities with the most poverty
o Eg. Lagos, Nigeria: next 5 years will see it as 3 rd largest city
Cities used to be for the “good life,” is this still true?
Cities in US and in developing nations have different concerns
o Can there exist one type of (new) urbanism for all 5 billion of us?