Literature and Arts B-20: Designing the American City
MIDTERM STUDY GUIDE
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
 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
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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]
Jean Baudrillard
“Utopia Achieved,” pp. 75-91 (2)
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This piece is an extreme intellectual look at the development of America from a European perspective. I don’t think it will be
covered much on the midterm.
America is portrayed as modern, dynamic, and unencumbered by history, in contrast to Europe, which can never be truly
modern because of the weight of history.
Similarly, we have racial mixing in Europe and a federal macro-state in a way that would never be possible in Europe.
Europe is driven by ideas, but it is only in America that ideas like justice are actually realized—precisely because Americans
are more direct about implementing these ideas rather than philosophizing about them.
Overall, Baudrillard depicts America and Europe as permanently, inseparably different along many of the usual lines.
Jean Baudrillard
“Utopia Achieved,” pp. 91-105 (3)
America is, as the title says, “utopia achieved.” The whole article is written from a European (French) point of view, and each section
is a contrast between America, which is being praised, and Europe, which is lamented.
Because of this notion—the fact that America has already achieved utopia, many consequences follow:
-America is the original version of modernity. Europe is the physical representation of a past that can’t be realized in the present. The
U.S., by contrast, is an achieved utopia, confronted with a crisis of permanence it does not know how to handle.
-History (like Marxism) does not cross the ocean. America, unlike Europe, has no history, and that’s fine.
-There’s no need for a metaphysical (philosophical) interpretation of American life.
-Europeans criticize Americans for not being able to conceptualize or imagine, but everything the Europeans imagine comes to
fruition in reality in America.
-Americans lack community, ironically, but everything makes itself public anyway: one’s wealth, e.g. American boredom is better
than French variety, because the manifestations of wealth and culture contain humor.
-utopian pragmatism represents the beauty of America. It leads to equality, banality, and indifference. Even politically, the American
revolution stood for practicality and the 18 th century ideals rather than ideology, as the French revolution did.
-Tocqueville said the spirit of America lies in its way of life. American culture is vulgar, sure, but it is “easy”—Americans aren’t
plagued by the weight of European culture.
-Paradise by definition is monotonous, and that’s the US.
-America has “no culture of culture, no religion of religion.” I.e., we don’t get bogged down in those things.
-Europe has always been caught in a reflexive, self-mirroring stage, but America only has the 2 stages around that: wild primitive
nature, and paradise.
John Reps
The Making of Urban America, chapter 6 (4)
New Amsterdam, Philadelphia, and Towns of the Middle Colonies
Intro:
Both NY and Philadelphia located at the mouth of an important river and on a splendid natural harbor
Important difference:
A) NY originally planned as a compact, regular little fortress town - during 1st century of growth developed on an almost
medieval pattern with irregular winding streets – in 1811 culminated in famous gridiron pattern
B) Philadelphia – from beginning in 1682 enjoyed a plan with generous scope and public open spaces ample in area for the
kind of city envisioned by founder – like this for many years but failed to follow orderly growth and adequate open space in
later extensions
New Amsterdam on the Island of Manhattan:
1626 – Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island for $24
Farms to be long and narrow and a rectangular pattern of roads and ditches to serve the farm parcels, with the remaining land on either
side of the fort to be used for vineyards
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Town proper to be located within the five-pointed fortification – provided a generous area for buildings
This neat symmetrical pattern conceived in Amsterdam never governed the development of the little colony
 Settlement didn’t have the resources for this fortress
 Also would have been impossible to man properly
 First fortress much smaller than one instructed, and it enclosed only buildings necessary for defense and company trading
options
Town began to grow with no overall plan for its development
 New streets laid out as needed
 Resulted in streets of irregular alignment and width
 Several other settlements sprang up along Hudson River (i.e. Kingston)
English New York
1664 – Dutch rule came to an end
Within a yr after English assumed control the corporate existence of the city of NY established by charter
Manufacturing, trade, and shipping increased in importance and growth accelerated
No comprehensive plan for development was being followed – instead, small parcels of land were surveyed and sold by property
owners following their own whims as to design
Ratzen Plan – shows approximate condition of NY immediately before and during the war for independence
Late 1780’s – expansion of NY regained momentum of first years of English rule
New Sweden on the Delaware:
1638 – Swedish colony was planted on the shores of the Delaware River
Most of the Swedish settlers remained on the Delaware under Dutch and then English rule
William Penn and the Planning of Philadelphia:
1681 - Beginning of English settlement in Pennsylvania
Philadelphia was Penn’s greatest accomplishment in city building
Each purchaser of a tract in the colony was to receive city lots proportionate to the extent of his holdings
Leave ground around houses for gardens or orchards “that it may be a green country town…and always be wholesome”
Penn extended bounds of city to Schuylkill River
Philadelphia had regular streets and neatly balanced open spaces
The reconstruction of London after the Great Fire in 1666 – influential in furnishing ideas on which Philadelphia was based
The gridiron concept was used in a majority of the known reconstruction plans – symmetrical distribution of open spaces and sites
for public buildings was an important element
Street widths were more than ample for the traffic of the time, almost extravagant by European standards
Construction of houses began immediately after the allocation of city lots
Philadelphia, as the first large American city to be laid out on a grid pattern, has always been identified as the inspiration of the great
era of rectangular town planning throughout the last 2 ½ centuries
For many towns that were built later during the westward march of urbanization Philadelphia served as the model – regular pattern of
streets and one or more public squares became widely imitated
Most important concepts: gridiron and open spaces
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
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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
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
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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.”
John Reps
The Making of Urban America, chapter 5 (8)
Chapter 5 – New Towns in a New England
- at first elaborate fortifications – but soon abandoned
Nucleated farming community
- the first permanent settlement – Plymouth
- a fenced community with slots allotted depending on the size of family
- neat regularity – reflecting the social and economic organization of the Pilgrims
- for the first 7 years they even pooled profits
- but with the gradual pacification of the Indians and the growing demand for larger farms and gardens – the character of these
towns changed
- eventually broke down – “a European institution that failed to survive in the American environment of boundless land
peopled by resourceful and rootless colonists” (119)
New England communities
- agricultural, but not entirely rural
- settled by groups bound by ties of kinship, religion, economic interest, etc
- allotments based on financial share in the enterprise
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all inhabitants lived in a village with farm slots further out (not isolated farmstead) => sharp break between village and
countryside
“common fields” or “proprietor’s commons” – “Even where home lots and strips in the common fields were in individual
ownership, by custom and by town regulations the welfare of the community as a whole predominated over individual desires
or advantage. For communities who were only one crop removed from starvation and engaged in subduing a harsh
wilderness, no other system would have met their requirements so well” (120)
narrow strip cultivation practices (origin in European land tenure system)
for newcomers: the hitherto undivided lands or establishment of new towns
appearance of land speculation – speculators establishing towns and communities with no intention to settle there
planned to accommodate a limited population – some form of democracy existed
centered on some form of central open space – often served as a site for the meeting house and later for other public buildings
as well
frequent departures from geometry – but generally quite regular (e.g. Salem, Cambridge)
Boston
- also regular – but adjustments to minor topographic variations (such as marshes)
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
 Smallest lots fronted directly on the town common bordering the river
 Not a successful town
o 1764 New Bordeaux village, vineyards, commons and church at center of township
o 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
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 Self-sufficient, industrialized
Nazareth, Pennsylvania 1757
 Congregation town with permanent residents limited to members of the church
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
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
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
 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
o 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
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Failures in building the towns, few lasted more than a year
Fourier wanted to reorganize society on rational lines
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
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
 agricultural belt around city
o lay out towns like this all over the world
o driven by persecution to Far West, Cadwell County, Missouri
 1 square mile, differed slightly from city of Zion plan
o Driven away again to Nauvoo, Illinois 1842
 Prospered
 Plan differed from City of Zion plan
 Persecuted again
o Driven to Winter Quarters, Nebraska 1847
 New leader, Brigham Young
o 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
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City survived the death of its founder 1907 and Voliva became new leader until 1935
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 13 (10)
Cities for Sale: Land Speculation in American Planning
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“Gain! Gain! Gain! is the beginning, the middle and the end, the alpha and omega of the founders of American towns…”
This quote is especially true for the land boomers, the townsite promoters, and the wholesalers and retailers of frontier land
who established communities primarily founded as commercial ventures and are the primary focus of this chapter.
Early Land Companies and Town Promotion Schemes
 Early settlements were small and based on agriculture. Speculation in early land was not widespread.
 Profit making was secondary to considerations of religious freedom, promotion of trade and commerce and the development
of raw material sources for the mother country.
 With the filling up of seaboard settlements, accumulation of wealth by local merchants and traders and the subjection of the
Indians along the frontier, land speculation became feasible. Wealthy merchants or planters began to dream of acquiring large
land holdings.
 A general system of land subdivision into town lots and one or two type of outlots, garden lots or farm lots became fairly
widespread.
 City planning of Holland Land Company in late 1790s to early 1810s.
o Land agent was Joseph Ellicott (brother of Andrew Ellicott who succeeded L’Enfant as planner for the federal city).
o Ellicott’s plan followed the diagonal street pattern est. by Washington with outlots varying in size from 5 to 20 acres
of more.
o Many cities were planned by the Holland Land Company
Backwoods Baroque
 Two early 18thC and one slightly later town promotion are to be considered. (Esperanza, Franklinville and Lystra)
o Esperanza, NY – a city built of hope.
 Street pattern and the names given the streets (Liberty and Equality Streets) suggest the influence of the late
French Revolution as well as its circular and radial blvds. which draw from the grounds of a royal chateau
or hunting ground.
 Failed to materialize.
o Franklinville, KY and Lystra, KY
 Proposed plans show some of the same qualities as Esperanza, derived from perhaps the plan of
Washington or from the experience in London.
 Never existed except on paper, just like Esperanza.
 Perhaps the baroque layout was too advanced.
Towns for Sale in the Old Northwest
 Opening of western land for settlement by the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the est. of government in the Northwest Territory
in 1787 provided the impetus for wholesale townsite promotion throughout the Ohio Valley.
 Land speculation produced unnumbered tragedies.
o Families lured from the comfort of seaboard communities by town promoters frequently found themselves stripped
of their savings and faced with the crude life of the frontier.
o Many could not adjust and returned to their former homes.
o Most remained and as a result, hundreds of these paper town did, eventually, become actual settlements.
 Newspapers were usually enthusiastic supporter of local efforts at town promotion.
Town Jobbing at the Water’s Edge
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Nowhere was speculation in town lots and new town development more intense than along the principal rivers, and later the
canals, serving as major arteries of transportation from coastline to interior. (i.e. Ohio River became the chief avenue to the
west).
 Clarksville and Louisville were early arrivals.
o Each of the cities claimed to be the future metropolis of the falls area and engaged in the typical antics of town
promotion.
 Beaver, OH
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Plan was simple, similar to Philly w/central open space of 4 squares, and w/4 additional reserved squares, one at
each corner of the town.
o Until 1830, town grew slowly but by 1843, rapid growth resulted.
New Babylon, Kansas (1830s)
o Usually represented as having one or more railroads, a university, churches, parks, etc.
o New Babylon was, however, little more than a shack of tent and often consisted solely of an expanse of rolling
prarie.
o “It was not a swindle, but a mania. The speculators were quite as insane as the rest” (364).
o There were many swindles by townsite speculators and a good many Kansas residents were guilty of fraud and
perjury.
Sumner (one of the Kansas boom towns along the Missouri River)
o Widely advertised in the east around late 1850s.
o On young settler, John James Ingrall of Boston writes to his father calling Sumner a “lithographic fiction.”
 “There are no churches in the place… No respectable residence; no society; no women… no schools, no
children; nothing but the total reverse of the picture which was presented to me” (371).
o By 1866, Sumner was a dead town with a meager population of 25 remaining out of a total of 500 in 1858.
The Colleges Enroll in School of Speculation
 Townsite promotion touched virtually every element in the country. Colleges and universities were no exception.
 Kenyon College in Gambier, OH (attempts of Bishop Philander Chase to develop a town)
o Though widespread town promotion showed promise of providing funds to complete the college building and to pay
overdue bills.
o Town failed to develop and the college was denied the speculative land profits.
 Cornell University (est. in 1865 by Ezra Cornell)
o Morill Act of 1862 provided scrip exchangeable for government land which could be sold to finance the
development of the institution.
o Cornell took up land in Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin as rapidly as possible.
o Promotion land fell through. University has no real estate interests in the community.
Boomers, Sooners, and the Great Town Rush in Oklahoma
 The record for wholesale town promotion and town building was set during the great Oklahoma land rush of 1889.
 In 1879, the “Boomers” announced their intention to move into Oklahoma to establish a “city capital” and claim land.
 April 22, 1889, at noon, the unassigned lands were thrown open for settlement.
 What followed were perhaps the most hectic days in the entire settlement of North America.
 Estimated tens of thousands of people crossed the border to seek land.
 Within 3 months, tents gave way to shanties and then to larger houses.
o “Gutherie presents the appearance of a model Western city, with broad and regular streets and alleys; with
handsome stores and office buildings: with a system of parks and boulevards…” (376).
Promotions in Paradise
 With the westward course of empire went the town speculators.
 They flourished to southern California, and while many cities planted here grew strong and healthy, other were forced too
quickly and died.
 Gold rush and the arrival of the railroad in the Bay Area (San Fran) both contributed to the unusual excesses of town
booming, first in the 1850s and later in the 1870s.
 The coming of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876 and the Santa Fe in 1887 touched off the first town promotion
explosion.
 Many of the cities of the boom followed the traditional checkerboard pattern. (i.e. Santa Monica)
Conclusion
Cities for sale through boom and bust went across the continent. Although land speculation continues to this day, we are unlikely to
see again such an era of wholesale humbuggery and land butchery. The stamp of the early speculator remains upon most of our cities.
Modern city planners are now attempting to erase the worst blotches spilled across the country by the boomers, the townsite promoters
and the speculative builders of yesterday. It is an aspect or our urban history in which Americans can take little pride.
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John Reps
The Making of Urban America, chapter 14 (11)
Chapter 14 – “Towns by the Tracks” (11)
Brief summary: Traces “the influence of railroads on the planning of new towns and the direct activities of the railroads and their
sponsors in laying out towns and promoting town development.
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Railroads tremendously impacted urban development:
o Sped up city building
o City patterns changed to fit the railroads
o Allowed suburban communities to develop
Along eastern slope of the Appalachians and along the Atlantic coastal plain, railroads mainly served to connect already
existing towns and cities.
Great Expectations and Hard Times: The Planning of Cairo, Illinois
 Located at the meeting of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers; Bought in 1835 by Darius Holbrook who later chartered the
Illinois Central Rail Road Company.
 Goals of RR: 1) stimulate growth of town; 2) trade generated by the river port would contribute to profits on the railroad.
 1837 – Illinois legislature passed Internal Improvements Act which provided for a network of RRs to be constructed with
public funds. One was to end in Cairo, so Holbrook focused on townsite promotion.
 Holbrook went to London to raise capital and obtained a million and a half dollars.
 William Strickland was the city planner along with Richard Taylor – envisioned a booming metropolis patterned after parts
of London.
 Only a few buildings were built – thought that Holbrook and others had kept the money. The value of the land and
improvements of the Cairo City and Canal Company was three and one-half million dollars. Holbrook sold them for
$700,000.
 Once again the town planning process was begun. Henry Long was to survey and plan Cairo, one of many plans between
1850-1853.
 1853 – first land sales begun. Town is a “curious patchwork”.
 Problems: floods, conflicts over land titles, responsibility for maintenance of levees, and normal growing pains.
Cheaper by the Dozen in Illinois and Beyond
 Illinois settlers saw RRs as the key to the path to prosperity and comfort. Il first state to include RRs in town planning on a
broad scale.
 Businessmen saw Il with the potential of widespread profit – “Business ethics commonly employed in these ventures would
have shamed the most hardened grave-robber.”
 An amendment to the Illinois Central RR charter in 1851 prohibited the RR from laying out towns on its line. As a way
around this, land was bought while station sites were kept secret until after the land had been purchased.
 David Neal, one of the associates and the VP of the RR until 1855 was responsible for land promotion. He used a scheme
involving a standard plat for all 33 towns he developed. They were all identical (see pg. 393).
 Most of the existing towns were planned with roads precisely east-west and north-south, though some RRs cut diagonally
through the town.
 “Towns” sometimes consisted of only a few houses.
 All of these towns often lacked aesthetic beauty, and their planning often reflected the impatience and greed with which they
were bought and designed.
New Tracks and New Towns Across the Continent
 With the planning and construction of the Transcontinental RR, development in the west was taking place with excitement
and speed.
 Land prices skyrocketed and were auctioned off. Some towns made it, some did not.
The Lunatic Fringe
 George Francis Train – a certified lunatic, but also a genius for erecting complex financial structures and a talent for enlisting
the gullible and greedy in his enterprises. He was the head of the Credit Foncier which was a townsite promotion org. along
the Union Pacific road. He went from Columbus to Omaha to Denver to Tacoma.
 P. Gerard – civil engineer and self-appointed advisor for city planning for the western RRs. His plans implemented a strict
grid system.
General Palmer’s Resort in the Rockies
 General William J. Palmer – put in charge of surveying the route for the Western Pacific line from Kansas City to Denver.
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1870 – line was completed. He resigned and began his own line, the Denver and Rio Grande. He developed his line over the
most difficult terrain yet encountered. He organized the National Land and Improvement Company to buy land for
speculation along the RR. Planned Colorado Springs, meant to be an oasis of culture and refinement in the West.
o The city was a beautiful creation, settled quickly.
The Railroad Land Boom in Southern California
 Small towns sprang up all over southern California. Promoters flocked there during the 1870s and 80s. During the 1870s, the
RR was extended from San Francisco to LA.
 Prior to the RR, droughts had ruined farmland, so towns were created, ready for the RR a decade later. LA, Santa Barbara,
and San Diego were centers of activity.
 RR advertising promoted these towns and cities in local and eastern newspapers.
 Many of the towns were, in fact, successful, but dozens of others were not.
 Many of the town designs had town squares, grids, prominent lands reserved for hotels or city halls.
 Coronado diverged from the tradition grid with diagonal streets converging on a central square.
Pears and Bananas in the Pacific Northwest
 Tacoma had 3 plans: one premature, one epic but rejected, and one of mediocrity that was accepted.
 Charles Wright became interested in Tacoma, at that time a tiny settlement at the edge of Commencement Bay, an arm of
Puget Sound. Wright engaged Frederick Olmsted to prepare a plan of Tacoma. Tacoma had sloping hills, and Olmsted’s plan
was prepared accordingly (pg. 411). This plan was rejected.
 Isaac Smith planned the next design with undeviating grid patterns with no regard for the actual topography.
 The era of RR expansion was not a notable period. The philosophy of speculation, and treating land like a commodity were
dominant.
J.B. Jackson
“Jefferson, Thoreau, and After,” pp. 1-9 (12)
Jefferson and Thoreau both established “anti-urban” traditions, but they were quite different from one another. For Jefferson,
the city was a social distortion, a “sore on the body politic.” The country and the agrarian way of life promoted “more virtuous
citizens” and cultivated men to be better and more Godly civic participants. For Jefferson, the key relationship was between man and
man. Jefferson’s grid—from the village up to the national survey—can be understood as part of his vision for an agrarian Utopia
composed of a democratic society of small landowners. For Thoreau on the other hand, the important relationship was between man
and nature, or man and his environment. He helped to articulate the Romantic view of land preservation, which had application in the
West and in preservation movements long after Thoreau’s time. In certain parks and in other landscape architecture, we can see this
relationship between man and the land dominating the design: dwellings placed in isolation, topographical landscape features
dominating, etc.
These visions were utopian, and professed to help create better men—Virtuous Citizens for Jefferson and Men as Inhabitants
of the Earth for Thoreau. These utopian ideals have lost followers in the modern era, where the landscape has become more devoted
to change and mobility and not dedicated to an absolute or prototype.
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.
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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)
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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
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
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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)
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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 chosen a future, it is open to being molded and shaped, but
anyone standing in it way in inviting a trampling.”
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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
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?
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
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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 large-scale
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).
John Reps
The Making of Urban America, chapter 12 (18)
Chapter 12 – Cemeteries, Parks and Suburbs: Picturesque Planning in the Romantic Style
- in early cities - Greek temples, classic details (e.g. L’Enfant’s Washington)
- but new designs appeared – e.g. based on Romanti theories – at first in layout of cemeteries
- but popularity of these “rural cemeteries” – people came to relax there
- even guides books published with information on routes in them etc
- the use for suburban residential districts lagged behind 25 years
- in 1848, Downing advanced the revolutionary idea that city parks be maintained at the expense of taxpayers
- at this time, cities really crowded and congested
- where there was open land (squares, etc) “was forced to serve a population far greater than anticipated by the early planners
of these communities” due to high rate of immigration
- Olmsted and Vaux – in 1858 – appointed to design “Greensward” – a new park – with a wide range of recreation facilities
proposed
- “large open spaces … were intended for a parade ground, which was a requirement of the competition rules, and a cricket
field” (336)
- “Olmsted and Vaux were to spend a good part of their time defending these principles and resisting the efforts of the wellmeaning but poorly informed citizens and officials to use the park as a site for almost every conceivable recreational building
or facility” (336)
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the new popularity of the picturesque parks led to the use of these design elements in the expanding suburbs of American
cities
design followed “the natural indication of the surface” – Lake Forest (Hotchkiss) became a famous example of curvilinear
planning; also Olmsted’s Berkley
Olmsted justified everything on logical and artistic grounds (e.g. cost, practicality)
“In most cases the curvilinear plan was used in subdivisions for the fairly well-to-do. It became a mark of fashion and
distinction to live in such areas, although they never entirely superseded the old, straight, tree-lined rive or boulevard in older
sections of the city” (348)
Frederick Law Olmstead
“Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 5-29 (19)
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Mentions how in California, “only an inferior class of people can be induced to live out of towns”
Olmstead is surprised by this, as he notes how much rich land Cali has outside of its towns
Notes a shift from independence / self sufficiency of rural dwellers has changed to have more of a town focus after the rails
came
In Mass., rural towns were becoming dilapidated
Social and educational advantages of towns/cities draw people in from the countryside
European cities have been growing around this period as well (1880s)
Some see movement towards towns as a moral epidemic
Rails have nationalized economy, especially agriculture, so it is no longer dependent on local demand/supply fluctuations
Olmstead: “…the tastes and dispositions of women are more and more potent in shaping the course of civilized progress, and
we may see that women are even more susceptible to this townward drift than men.” [ he said it, not me =) ]
Notes the social advantages of towns over the country, especially for young women like seamstresses
“The greater the division of labor at any point, the greater the perfection with which all wants may be satisfied.”
He claims women like towns not because women are senseless but rather because women appreciate the efficiencies that
towns afford them (ie, the benefits of having a dedicated butcher, baker, postman, etc)
Even though towns have benefits, high density is not one of them; Olmstead prefers spacing of suburban homes
Olmstead argues for public goods like roads, water pipes, sewers, etc
Predicts that towns will get larger and larger, as people recognize even greater economies of scale
Thinks men in towns are affected because of the increase in impersonal interactions with strangers in the street
Urban renewal helps to rid towns of the pestilences that do plague it (example: rebuilding of commercial center in NYC after
it burnt down led to improvements in commerce)
Surprising to Olmstead that more care isn’t paid to town plans when so many are springing up
Gives example of advising a town to broaden its roads; council members agree, but note that the people who have nothing to
gain by a wider road will prevent its construction, even though the community as a whole would benefit
Frederick Law Olmstead
“Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 30-52 (20)
a speech to the American Social Science Association in 1870 and 1880
The Growth of Towns
 In the United States
o From California to new England the rural families are moving back into the city
o Rural pride and self sufficiency is being dropped in favor of a more convenient lifestyle in the town
 In Europe
o The Cities are increasing faster than the countries as a whole, leading to severe overcrowding
o Cities growing at never before seen rates while agricultural districts are losing population
The Move to Towns is Indicative of “Human Progress”
 The move to towns is a permanent phenomena that will not reverse as people are morally disgusted with the towns
 Rather, city life is to be seen as a human progress
 With the increase in towns comes the decrease in slavery, and ‘feudal customs, of priest craft and government by divine
right”
 Towns bring in good things like newspapers, schooling, communications, transportation, and “labor saving inventions”
 We should prepare for continued town growth instead of counting on it to subside
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Reasons to Move to Town
o “Tastes and Dispositions” of Women
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More civilized, social and gay in town
Housework is easier
Progress of Invention
Streetcars, pavement, heating,
The advantages of towns will spread to the suburbs and less concentrated areas
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Problems in Town
o Bad Air
o Busy Streets cause nervousness and hardness towards others
o “ It is upon our opportunities of relief from it, therefore, that not only our comfort in town life, but our ability to
maintain a temperate, good-natured, and healthy state of mind, depend”
o As the town grows, the space in town is becoming less and less sufficient for the comfort of the citizens, streets are
too narrow, there aren’t enough trees,
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Solutions
o Trees
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Asks for a “provision in some of our streets—for trees to remain as a permanent furniture of the city? I
mean, to make a place for them in which they would have room to grow naturally and gracefully”
 Finally asks for a park on the 35th page of his speech, he has been buttering up his audience for his request
Recreation
 Two Primary Types:
 Exertive: Typified by the playing of mental or physical games.
 Receptive: Typified by exposure to music, the fine arts, and social experience.
 Receptive Recreations
 Gregarious: In public and outdoors, among trees; persons brought closer together—“poor and rich,
young and old”
 Neighborly: Time spent among families (ex. picnics and nature education for children).
 Together, the gregarious and neighborly recreations provide “greatest possible” contrast with the hustle and
bustle of workaday life.
The Park As Integration of Recreational Forms
 Promenade (Gregarious) surrounds (Neighborly/Exertive) park center
 Conditions of the park are “glorious and necessarily artificial”.
 The “gardenesque” quality of the park, though, should remain without imposed exoticism (ex. French use
of subtropical plants).
 Park ought to be connected to the broader town: “trunk routes” established between the outlying sections of
the town and the central park.
The Problem of Municipal Works: Central Park Case Study
Original land allocated for the parks was as political counter to an 1851 New York Legislature bill for another.
Thus, much of Central Park’s land—and its location— were selected as if at random.
Olmsted’s point: The political quality of public decisions often renders them spontaneous, choices poorly made with grave
consequences.
Also: public decisions often made through influence of private individuals, many of whom may not understand the value of a
park or be concerned, for example, that it will increase their taxes.
Much value in the park remains, partially for the reason of this mismanagement and ill promotion, yet to be realized:
Exposure to fresh air heals ill
Provides safe, open space for summer enjoyment by all
Renders city attractive to visitors and potential residents
Attempts at prevention of “ruffianism” in the park have succeeded:
Cases of vandalism, etc. have been rare
Quotation from Jeremy Bentham on the use of “innocent amusement” (recreational) to lessen “dangerous inclinations” of the
public
Indeed, the Park exerts an “harmonizing and refining” influence.
Olmsted reflects on the capital brought into the city by the park, despite its high ($5,000,000) cost
Suggests a small admission fee to offset this initial investment as well as future upkeep.
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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.”
19
 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)
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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 (1876-1917). 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
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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
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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
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Prelude to the American Renaissance (1870s – mid 1880s):
o Increased collaboration, scale, and luxury
o Direct quotation from the “Old Masters” – classical European art
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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.
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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
o 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
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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)
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)
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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.
25
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
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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.
26
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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 grub-worship, 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
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-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
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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 rent-collecting. 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.
28
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
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Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 14 (41)
The Common Herd
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Flat vs. Tenement
o Locked door of flat signifies privacy, no privacy in tenement
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Closer to the river (industry), greater percentage of tenements
o Gas-houses, slaughter-houses, docks create worst slum-centers
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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
29
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…
30
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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least.”
Riis suggests the homes will eventually “put an end to the existence of the New York Street Arab, of the native breed at
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
31
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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
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
32
-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 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.
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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
The Making of Urban America, chapter 9 (53)
Planning the National Capital
I.
Compromise on the Potomac
 After the war, Congress moved around from Philadelphia to Baltimore, Princeton, Annapolis, Trenton, and New York.
Dozens of sites were considered for the capital.
 Difficulty: reluctance of South to agree to a Northern location and vice-versa (in 1789 South favored a place near
Georgetown on the Potomac and North favored Wrights Ferry, PA)
 Residence Act of 1790 – authorized the President to select a site not exceeding 10mi2 on the Potomac
 Washington appointed Daniel Carroll, Thomas Johnson, and David Stuart as commissioners for the federal district and
selected a site between Potomac and Anacostia River.
 Jefferson added his thoughts on the size of the town, amt of land necessary, manner it should be laid out.
II. The Site and Its Surveyors
 Andrew Ellicott (professional surveyor) and Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant (Washington’s friend; has artist, engineering, and
military experience) were appointed by Washington to direct the surveys of the new district. Ellicott was to create the bounds
of the district and L’Enfant to prepare the plans.
 Difficulties in the price of the land and the terms of the sale, but Washington personally stepped in. Jefferson thought 1,500
acres was needed. Washington got 3,000-5,000 acres.
 L’Enfant had high hopes for “a grand plan” but didn’t realize that he was a subordinate to the commissioners of the federal
district  led to his downfall.
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III. Jefferson’s Plan for the Federal City
 First to project a scheme for a capital city. Wanted liberal reservations for public use.
 Gridiron plan: square lots with diagonals connecting to the corners of the lot
 Public buildings: capitol, federal offices, White House, city hall, market, public walks, hospital
 L’Enfant did not receive Jefferson’s plan well. He called it “defective,” “tiresome and insipid.” No sense of imagination and
grandeur.
IV. The Grand Plan for the Capital City
 Compromise: Grid with direct avenues connecting the major places. Pennsylvania Ave connects White House and “Federal
House.” The Capitol is located on Jenkin’s Hill.
 Canal connecting the Potomac and the East Branch. Tyber Creek was to form the basis for this canal.
 L’Enfant was looking beyond the mere physical plan for the city to a land development policy that would result in rapid
growth. He wanted to created individual nodes of settlement to promote spread.
 Plan revised by Washington. The new plan included public statues/columns, a nondenominational church, and colleges and
academies. 3 important monuments proposed: equestrian statue of Washington, column in what is now Lincoln Square,
column in honor of the navy directly south of the church.
 Intention of beauty. Fountains, gardens along the avenue (now known as the mall).
 The plan was a clever fitting of a generally symmetrical design to irregular topography and had generous provision of a
variety of open spaces.
 Site surveys, first draft, and revised version all done in less than six months. Influences of western Europe (garden of
Versailles, garden of the Tuilleries, Place de la Concorde, Avenue des Champs Elysees)
V. L’Enfant Terrible
 L’Enfant wanted to complete many of the streets and public buildings first before putting up the lots near the White House
for sale (they’d fail to bring their true value if sold too early). Advocated borrowing a large sum of money, which the
commissioners, Jefferson and Washington, who were under pressure to show immediate results, did not approve.
 He would not show his drawing or print maps at the sale of lots or let Ellicott have it to be engraved.
 L’Enfant demolished a house built by one of the proprietors because it ran into the avenues by 7ft without permission of the
commissioners.
 Jefferson and Washington told L’Enfant to listen to the commissioners, but he would not and was fired in 1792.
VI. The City of Magnificent Distances
 During early years the city grew so slowly that there were renewed doubts about transferring the capital from Philadelphia.
 Initial years: Hard to distinguish the streets because there were too many trees planted. Part of the mall had been enclosed and
was used for cattle grazing. Many of the squares used for gardens.
 With the Civil War and reestablishment of the Union, the importance of the central government increased and DC began to
develop an economic base.
John Reps
The Making of Urban America, chapter 18 (54)
Chicago Fair and Capital City: The Rebirth of American Urban Planning
1910 there was an international meeting of city planners in London
- Daniel Burnham, leading planner in the US, summarizing the leading events in America
o Inception of great planning began at World’s Fair in Chicago World’s Fair
o From that make a comprehensive plan for the capital
o Manila, Cleveland, San Francisco, and many other cities
Burnham towering figure in American planner from the Chicago Worlds fair 1893 until Plan of Chicago in 1909 and death in 1912
Reps says that his plans may seem superficial and unrealistic in magnitude and impractical, but they are monumental essays on civic
design
- we should not judge on how many of their ideas were implemented but on how they changed the way people plan and
think about cities
The White City in Chicago
- Chicago World Fair of 1983 led to an new direction in city planning
- Buildings
o White and symmetrically arranged around the formal court of honor
o Domes and columns echo classic buildings of antiquity
 Made the Philadelphia exposition of 76 seemed crude and unfinished
 Seemed a vision of earthly paradise
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It was initially planned to commemorate the 400 year anniversary of the discovery of America (first proposed in 1882)
o Dr. T. W. Zaremba first suggested it to a group of NYC leaders
o After some initial lack of interest, giving way to debate over where city would hold it
 Finally, Feb 24, 1890 Congress decided on Chicago, and national commission was supported by City
and Indiana State funds.
Frederick Law Olmstead recommended the Jackson Park location with the help of Burnham
o Burnham was already a leading Chicago architect responsible for many of the buildings of the so-called
Chicago school that has led to contemporary design
 Between 1871 and 1893 most of the downtown Chicago buildings had nothing more of the classical
motif than superficial signs. Architecture needed to deal with building tall office blocks on restricted
sites, and built a collection of buildings with new structural methods of the steel frame, but also the
vigor and energy of a thriving commercial city.
Olmstead tagged as consulting landscape artist
A. Gottleib as consulting engineer
Burnham and Root as consulting architects
o Their firm eventually resigned, Burnham became the Chief of Construction and later the Directory of Works.
Jackson Park
o 3 ridges of sandbars parallel with the shore
o marshy land subject to floods, soil almost completely saturated when lake at normal level
o a series of canals needed to be built with retaining walls in order for the building sights to be filled in in order
for the works to be built.
Great Paris exposition of 1889 could not have been overlooked, it didn’t want to be haphazard like the Philly exposition
o Buildings again arranged symmetrically and in a classical style, fronting the central mall (Eiffel tower was the
modern exception)
 Like the Paris exposition 78 and Vienna of 73
John Root hurriedly sketched a rough plan on brown paper that was adopted Dec 1, 1890, and it was the plan essentially
used.
o Formal canal and great basin with adjoining court, surrounded by principal buildings
 Beyond that, an irregular lagoon with informal island park separating the major structures from the
many minor buildings and state exhibits
o Root favored variety of styles and colors
Burnham authorized to select architects to design principal buildings
o Richard Hunt; McKim, Mead and White; George B. Post: all from NYC
o Peabody and Stearns: Boston
o Van Brunt and Howe: Kansas City
o Said they could either work together to do the whole thing or separate and modify when all meet
o The Boston and NY people meet and agree that classic style should be adopted
o 5 Chicago architects commissioned to do the other major structures
Jan 10, 1891. 1st meeting of all of them at office of Burnham and Root
o Buildings assigned and plane reviewed, building, court and canal sizes agreed upon
o Height to a uniform cornice line was established
In Feb sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens asked to join and help on sculptural decoration and select the artists who would
do the actual sculpting
At a later meeting Hunt introduce plans for the administration building with its dome
o Post displayed his idea for the manufacturing and Liberal Arts building (the enormously large one) also had a
huge dome, but it was reviewed and was built more practically.
Meet conference after conference, sometimes in big groups, sometimes one on one, Burnham always oversaw.
o Reps says that some have claimed it was the greatest gathering of artists and architects since the 15 th century.
Worlds Fair opened in 1893 and was an immediate success
o Popular acclaim, local enthusiasm and universal publicity.
In the same year, Burnham is elected president of American Institute of Architects
Some dissent embodied most clearly in the extremely critical Louis Sullivan
o He was a champion of an architectural form that reflected the function and structure of the building
o Did not like the use of classical style and in fat his transportation building was the only one to avoid the use of
the white stucco and paint that dominated and gave the exposition the name the White City
o Called it a virus, a contagion and predicted, correctly, that it would persist for over 1/2 a century.
Most people were ecstatic
o Came to be perceived as an example of the new American city as people were impressed by the stark contrast
with the formless dingy other cities of the newly industrializing America.
Came to be called the White city and vital to the future of city planning.
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To get a look at the layout look at page 297 and a painting of it on 503. It will give a better idea of how the whole thing
is actually laid out.
Washington: A country and a Decade after L’Enfant
- Washington of L’Enfant proved to be first implementation of the new doctrines of monumental planning, whose basic
framework was already based on the principles of Renaissance planning.
- Furthermore, as the capital it attracted the attention of the whole country
- December 1900, the centenary of the city as the seat of national government, ideas for a monument or construction of
some kind thrown out, but nothing done.
- Glenn Brown secretary of American Institute of Architects (AIA), arranged for the annual meeting to be in Washington
in the centennial year with the theme of the beautification of the Capitol.
o Many designers, such as Cass Gilbert, C. Howard Walker, Joseph C. Hornblower, Frederick Law Olmstead and
H.K. Bush Brown, came and delivered papers on the grouping of the buildings, monuments and landscape
design
o A number of plans were introduced, some of which anticipated features that would be included in later official
plans
 One such plan was that of Cass Gilbert.
 Suggested formal treatment of the mall west of the Smithsonian
 A major avenue from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, and thought minor deviation
from misplacement of the monument off of the Capitol axis would not be noticed
 To compensate for the monument being off the white house axis another monument would be
built equidistant and to the west.
 At the end of the white house axis suggested a museum of history and two smaller buildings
at one end of a circular formal garden
 A reviewing ground to be located past the monument as part of formal treatment of mall.
- In 1901 Senate authorized the District Committee to study and prepare plans for the improvement of the park system
o Subcommittee met with AIA members on March 19, This was the McMillan commission, chaired by Michigan
Senator James McMillan. Burnham and Olmstead selected for Senate Park Commission, and they asked
McKim and Saint Gaudens to join them.
o These three (St. Gaudens was sick) and McMillan’s secretary Dr. Charles Moore, went to Europe in June to
examine public parks and their relations to public buildings. Reviewed preliminary plans for the city while
viewing the great cities of Europe.
 These were some of the same cities that inspired L’Enfant’s early plans
- Replanning focus depended on the treatment of the grounds between the capital and the Potomac to the west, which had
remained undeveloped as essentially an open pasture
- Poor placement of the monument as well as the placement of the Baltimore and Potomac rail line were difficulties to be
contended with.
o A deal was reached when Burnham met with the President Casset of Pennsylvania Railroad who agreed to
move the line if the government would help pay for the development of a tunnel to the north to meet up in
Union Station where the Baltimore Ohio line would also run.
- McKim came to take on the central role in the commissions work.
- Plans approved and made public Jan 15, 1902
o Followed the axis shift proposed by Cass Gilbert and others, recentering the Washington monument as L’Enfant
had envisioned.
o Again the mall was the central focus
 Two lines of elms were planted in rows of four on either side
 This strengthened the change in axis that they made
 The termination near the capitol would have statues dedicated to Grant, Sherman and Sheridan
 The Washington monument would get a terraced base, surrounded by a formal walled garden
 Proposed a new end to the White house axis, a series of buildings, a memorial complex. Now
occupied by Jefferson memorial
 Further down the capitol axis beyond the Washington monument would be the Lincoln memorial on
land reclaimed form the Potomac. A new bridge would be created connecting to the Lee mansion in
Arlington cemetery in Virginia to connect to this memorial.
 A large reflecting pool with formal parks on either side would sit in between, as it does today
 Other public buildings would be grouped in three areas
 Around the capitol
 The triangle between the mall and Pennsylvania
 And by the Whitehouse around Lafayette square.
 Planned other parks including expanse in the Rock Creek area, and wanted to connect existing parks.
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Publicity was overwhelmingly favorable. Provided the model for others to imitate
The cost was usually thrust on city government and overlooked. Essentially paid the people who knew what they were
doing to prepare a plan and worry later how officials would react
Again look at the pictures to see the actual layout more clearly
The Haussmanns of Urban America
- In 1902 Burnham visit San Fran as architect of Merchants Exchange Building and there he agreed to prepare a plan for
the city
- Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Fran was formed
- Work began in fall of 1904
o Burnham volunteered services for a house in Twin Peaks from which he could track the development of the
entire city.
- Burnham presented the plan May 21, 1906
- The great earthquake that occurred a month before the presentation offered opportunity to rebuild closely along
Burnham’s lines
o However, because so little was known of the proposals, and people seemed to know relatively little of the plan
they did not seem to have an imperative to build on that plan. So did not, and Burnham’s idea was
unimplemented
- Here and in Manila Burnham was testing the principles applied at World’s Fair and in DC
o DC, however, was not built as a grid as San Fran was, in order to achieve Burnham’s desired effects would have
to reshape the basic street outline
 Introduced a series of diagonals, and where they met and at major intersections, boulevards, squares,
ovals, and circles were to be created.
o Civic center would be more loosely organized retaining the existing city halls. But opening up views and given
a new dome.
o More land for parks, playgrounds and reservations.
- Also not implemented in part because ignored financial and energy limitations.
- 1909 plan of Chicago, however, Burnham a shows clear understanding of the new city planning. His masterwork
o high technical standard but also stimulated laymen throughout the country
- Again Burnham volunteered his services, with the Commercial Club, an organization of merchants and professionals
paid the salaries of his associates and for his office costs.
- Began in 1907 published in 1909 in printed volume. Resembles SF plan but much more sophisticated.
- One major feature was to create a half-crescent boulevard enclosing a central part of the city in its ark
- A monumental lake entrance to the city would be created and tied with Jackson park which stretched southward along
the lake
- From the waterfront and a group of civic and cultural buildings a wide boulevard would run west to the civic center
o The civic center would be a great plaza from which the 10 major avenues would radiate
- New parks and plazas to be built in the central core
o This area and the civic center get the most attention in the plan, suggesting the part he was most interested in.
- Also focused on need for better rapid transit, possibilities for control of outlying subdivisions, railroads and terminal
relocation, all somewhat uncommon in city plans at the time.
- Chicago plan gave great focus to visual presentation, with perspective in color by Jules Guerin.
- At some unclear point, the name “The City Beautiful Movement” was applied to such efforts to recreate civic centers and
public buildings and parks, including the use of radial boulevards.
- There has also been much criticism of these efforts as these planners are viewed as overlooking the social and economic
ills of the city, the sharp divisions that existed.
- Also criticism of the return to classicism and the ignoring of other materials.
American Planning: New Dimensions and New Directions
- how did city planning of early 20th century differ from what came before?
o Attention to a vertical dimension, no longer two dimensional plan
o Physical elements considered part of the city, public buildings, parks, playgrounds, docks, harbors, railroads and
other things are now included as part of the planned city
o Became a function of local government
o The development of a new profession. A city planner had never really existed before, but now meeting together
and being trained separately and acknowledging themselves as such
o Became part of urban redevelopment, focusing on remedying existing problems.
o The idea that the formal elements of the city vitally affected those people who lived in the city
 From impact of groupings of public buildings on visual sensibilities to housing accommodations and
neighborhood open spaces come to be seen as important to city folk.
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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”
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
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
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
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Expansion and the Great Chicago Fire
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
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
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space was organized for efficiency—this was necessary because the animals came off many train lines
Key Terms
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
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
Donald L. Miller
“The Astonishing Chicago,” pp. 179-191 (56)
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Chicago- “greatest urban rebuilding effort of modern times”
o Descriptive account of 1887 postfire Chicago as a “scene of metropolitan pandemonium;” includes bustling factories
on the outskirts, a smoke-filled downtown business section, and a Chicago River jammed with industrial shipping
(river harbor= center of economic activity)
o Chicago Limited Express- fancy NY-Chicago passenger train built by Pullman Palace Car Company; symbol of
Chicago’s postfire pride and prosperity
o Fire resulted in migration of artists & architects to Chicago wanting to reinvent the city
The Age of Cities
o To live in a big city was to be in “the great stream of life”
o Between 1789 and 1889, America’s urban pop. increased over 100 times while total pop. increased only 16 times
o Immense depots on borders of every American city = gateways to new world
 Depots were miniature cities in themselves; some handled over 30,000 passengers/day (enough for small
city)
Chicago’s Railroad Stations (“The City of Speed”)
o Grand Central Station- Chicago’s best railroad station; designed by same architect who designed city of Pullman
(Solon Spencer Beman)
 Architecture of station operated like “well-oiled machine;” very functional
o Chicago had the most major railroad stations in America; city often thought of as “one great terminal”
o Railroads created conditions for Chicago’s skyscrapers: Outward expansion of city prevented by steel ring of
railroad encircling the city; had no choice but to build upward
 Skyscrapers were signature of capitalist Chicago
o Trains were a physical danger; street-level crossings were unsafe: in late 1880s city averaged 2people/day killed at
crossings
Board of Trade Building
o Wall Street of the mid-continent
o Huge granite building; “chaotic symphony of virtually every architectural cliché of the age
o Epitomized the beating pulse of busy Chicago
Chicago’s hotels- Examples of conspicuous display; architectural celebrations of city’s rise from fire and from frontier
beginnings
o Palmer House- grand hotel; center for Democratic national conventions (regularly held in Chicago)
o Grand Pacific- equally grand hotel; hotel of Republicans
“America’s City”
o Most characteristically American city (surging commercial energy, raw and unfinished, no settled traditions)
o No city in history can parallel Chicago’s meteoric growth
o Chicago = a city of young men
City of Contradictions
o Although this was the “most American of cities,” over ¾ of residents were of foreign parentage in 1893
o The “city of millionaires” had some of the worst slums in civilized world
o Tree-lined roads of the “garden city” were filled with horse manure & animal corpses
Temperance capital of U.S.- headquarters of Temperance Union- had 1 saloon for every 200 people
Donald L. Miller
“The Astonishing Chicago,” 191-200 (57)
 Author discussing Chicago—his descriptions point out the fact that the city grew from the importance of and concurrent construction
of railroads, which seemed to convene in this city, and people often had to switch trains in Chicago during their journeys
 The amount of land that the railroads took up in downtown Chicago drove up rents and also ended up encouraging the growth of
skyscrapers, as there was little ground space left for horizontal building
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 “People began calling [Chicago] America’s city, ‘the concentrated essence of Americanism.’ Foreign writers, especially, saw this
raw, unfinished colossus, with its surging commercial energy, technological wonders, and absence of settled traditions as the most
characteristically American of America’s largest cities.” It was less European than the Northeast cities, and it lacked the “Spanish or
Chinese” flavor of San Francisco—it was perceived as simply American.
 The post-fire environment in Chicago brought with it the desire and the need to constantly reinvent, a sentiment that attracted
writers, architects, artists to the city.
Frank Lloyd Wright (architect)
Theodore Dreiser (author)
 “But in Dreiser’s Chicago novels, the big city is more than a romantic place of excitement and opportunity. It is an ungiving force of
nature that ruins as many lives as it elevates.”
 It was a city of intense contrasts: had many millionaires but also many intense slum areas.
 To Europeans, “Chicago was a spectacle of raw economic energy. There was no attempt to disguise what the city was, no fancy
architectural masquerading, no effort, even, to control the noise, the stench, or the smoke.”
 Chicago as an example of massive, uncontrolled growth—some said that it lacked planning
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.
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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.
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“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 18 th
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”
 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.
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Introduced the unprecedented (for an entire community) curvilinear roads and natural open space in center
“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. 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 20th 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
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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 quick-paced
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
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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
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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.
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.
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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.
 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.”
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives, Chapter 4 (31)
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His directions take us from the Elevated Railroad to Franklin Square (where the railroad dives under the Brooklyn Bridge), to
Cherry Hill, once a prominent area where the Knickerbocker houses stood, now victimized by poverty.
Describes these new tenements as dirty, greasy, rotted.
Blind Man’s Alley: where blind beggars resided under a landlord “Old Dan” Murphey who made a fortune off the
surrounding tenements before going blind himself in old age.
“Old Dan,” on the brink of the grave, argued against the Board of Health’s orders to clean up the tenements, saying “These
people are not fit to live in a nice house. Let them go where they can, and let my house stand.”
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“Old Dan” protested not so much out of hatred for his tenants, but out of distrust of the builders. Many tenants moved.
Riis’ flash once set fire to a house when he was taking pictures of five blind men and a woman in an attic. He managed to
smother it, and then sought help, in case it started up again. The policeman laughed, saying the house was the “Dirty Spoon,”
having caught fire six times last winter, with the dirt on the walls smothering the fire every time.
Once a year the Superintendent of Out-door Poor gives $20 thousand dollars to the blind of the city, including the residents of
Blind Man’s Alley (and their landlords)
Gotham Court, notorious for forty years: Irish, Italian, German residents. Mortality rate during last cholera epidemic:
195/1,000. 61/138 children born in it in three year period die before age of one. 10% of population sent to hospitals each
year.
Gotham Court was built in 1851 by a benevolent Quaker, ironically to rescue people from the impoverished conditions they
were living in.
Sewers often used as getaway routes for criminals (“swamp angels”), or as places to stash their loot. Other users included
people who took the sewers to work every morning (they were tall enough for a man to stand upright in).
Murders and “can rackets” frequently occur.
Fire-escapes often not accessible, leading to deaths of women and children.
Jewish community known for smartly saving and buying the tenements they lived in for years, thereby beating the system.
Not uncommon for as many as nine to live in two room apartments.
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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
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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”
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Garden
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(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
Middle Landscape
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“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
Ethic of the Middle Link
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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.
Idealized Landscape of 3 realms
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Wilderness
Expanding region of prosperous farms (best setting for virtue, happiness, and productivity)
Civilization/City
Savannah, Georgia
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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
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
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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)
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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 middle-ground
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)
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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.
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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
 “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.
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“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 19 th 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
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
o
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.
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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)
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”
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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
- 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)
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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
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