Cleveland: City Beautiful as “a City on a Hill”
The most tangible tie with Downing’s romanticism sprang from an 1895 design competition promoted by young Cleveland architects (Cleveland Architectural Club-Robinson). The Club sought to imitate the Columbian Exposition cluster of buildings grouped around a body of water. They believed mass and scale of grouped government/public buildings (libraries and museums) and monuments would facilitate “the transaction of public affairs” and instill public order and pride (Scott, 1969, p. 43). This so-called ‘municipal art” approach formalized into Cleveland’s “Group Plan”. The Group Plan anticipated that clustered government buildings would create an urban park-like beauty that awed the spirit to produce hope, civic pride and enhanced productivity.
The Cleveland chapter of the American Institute of Architects endorsed the general idea of clustering governmental structures and the Ritchie-led Cleveland Chamber showed interest in the “construction of a new city hall, courthouse, public library and post office around a beautiful park extending from the heart of the downtown area to the lake, all that was needed to impel the city toward its famous ‘Group Plan’ (Scott, 1969, p. 43). This cluster of government and public functions grouped together to centralize the public function in the central business district of a major city is what is meant by a “civic center”. In the later years of the City Beautiful, civic center was a multi-function building that unified a number of governmental/civic services/functions under one roof.
Mayor Tom Johnson’s in 1900 embraced the concept. With urging from the Chamber, Burnham (fresh from his Washington D.C. City Beautiful plan) was hired to design a massive City Beautiful-style railroad station. With authorization from the state in June 1902, the commission of architects (which included Burnham) was reconstituted (included was John M. Carrere, chief architect for the 1901 Buffalo World Fair). The Commission produced a Cleveland-version of the Great White City and presented it to the chamber in 1903. The plan, “modeled after the gardens of [Paris’s] Palais Royale”, and the architecture “derived from classic[al] Rome”, was embraced wholeheartedly by Mayor Johnson. In short order Cleveland became the symbol of the new urban order. Celebrated in journals, newspapers and media for “pioneering a new conception of a municipality”, “the best-governed city in the nation”, and for being “fifty years ahead of most cities” (Teaford, 1993, p. 139). But that was not all. “Grouping public buildings was one way to outwit ‘local rings of real estate interests’, who wanted to scatter public structures in order to “divide the benefit of their presence” among various sections of the city … a tangible municipal reform.” (Scott, 1969, p. 63)
With the nation’s media lights shining on Cleveland, a Great Lakes version of a “city on a hill”, the civic center of Cleveland, became the wave of the future and the signature expression of the politics and mission of the social reform mayors across the land. “The civic center was an integral part of the new vision of the municipality that was being tested in Johnson’s Cleveland. Johnson and his followers were fighting what they perceived to be the individualist avarice of streetcar magnates and corrupt councilmen. In their minds the city was not an arena for the no-holds-barred pursuit of wealth, but a community where cooperative spirit would ensure a better life for all people. … The civic center was, then, intended to be a lesson to private developers in the Ohio metropolis….. Its mall provided a communal space for civic celebrations and its uniform cornice lines symbolized the rejection of individualism and competition”. (Teaford, 1993, p. 62)
But all was never really perfect in Camelot. City Beautiful’s implementation did not go as planned. “The civic center project, the prototype of dozens of others in the first two decades of our century, was also a slum clearance effort.” (Scott, 1969, p. 62) Over the next few years much of the four acre site was demolished—but some was not. A five story abandoned factory was left untouched until 1936—years after the mall had opened. An initial burst–the federal building was completed by 1910, the post office in 1911, county courthouse in 1912, and city hall in 1916—twelve years later the mall abruptly stopped about midway. The other end of the mall, where the centerpiece massive railroad station was to have been built—nothing. Instead, the railroad station was built five blocks away from the mall, and not in City Beautiful style. In place of the railway station, a quarter-century later (1931), a much-loved municipal stadium was constructed. Not until 1925 was the library built. This was not at all unusual of many a “City Beautiful”; in too many instances projects never moved off of the architect’s desk. The later criticism of urban renewal as leaving far too many vacant plots, also characterized the City Beautiful. A not so hidden underneath grand visions and Beaux Arts structures was a strategy to reconstruct the fragmented, congested downtown cores of the initial industrial city.
City Beautiful era planning, and the City Beautiful civic center advocates hoped the redevelopment central city cores would project a powerful central city into its expanding hinterland. Civic pride was intended to serve as a justification of central city economic/political dominance over its ever-expanding suburbs. The key was to redevelop its obsolete and dysfunctional central business district. The plan “must serve as a guide for the reconstruction of the congested areas and as an instrument for shaping the development of the sparsely settled outlying territories … a host of measures for revamping the older parts of the city: widening the streets, providing the diagonal thoroughfares, extensively rehabilitating housing, restricting the occupancy and use of private property, rerouting street railways, diverting traffic … removing poles, wires and unsightly advertising”. (Scott, 1969, pp. 97-8)
The City Beautiful’s was in fact the first modern experiment in what later would be labeled as “urban renewal”. In retrospect, its principal accomplishments were usually restricted to a few boulevards, some Beaux Arts museums and symphony and city halls—and the relocation of new downtown railroad lines and large, Grand Central-style railroad stations.
The Chicago Plan
In 1896, at a formal dinner party, Burnham proposed to a group of elite businessmen (such as Pullman, Marshall Field, and Phillip Armour), a scheme which would evolve over the next decade into a formal plan for the Chicago region. On the Fourth of July, 1909, the Chicago Plan was released; four months later, Chicago approved the creation of the development vehicle, the Chicago Plan Commission. Over most of the next two decades, some elements, but not others, were put into place—finishing during the 1920’s under the tender mercies of Mayor Big Bill Thompson.
Burnham’s plan called for redemption of the lakefront from commercial, rail and industrial uses, creation of a highway along the city rim, relocation of railways and development of an internal freight and passenger transportation system, plus street rationalization a park system in the periphery—and, of course, the civic center. Over the next decade, the Navy Pier was built, the lakefront reclaimed from the Illinois Central Railroad, the Lake Front Ordinance (zoning) passed, Grant Park to Jackson Park-site of 1893 World’s Fair (eight miles) developed for beaches and parks, and by 1930 the residential Gold Coast was in place.
The Plan did not propose to decentralize or fundamentally alter the central business district, or its role in the metropolis, and it did not view urban sprawl as an evil. Indeed the Plan implicitly endorsed the metropolitan perspective and the conviction, widespread at the turn of the century, that continued geographic expansion, if balanced by the encouragement of institutions and physical facilities that emphasized unity and social integration, would provide the metropolis with the economic base, social coherence and political stamina to maintain its vitality. (Miller & Melvin, 1987, pp. 140-41)
As one would expect, Burnham’s plan for his home city included everything we have come to expect from the City Beautiful—and one more! As the above quote indicates, the Chicago Plan was a true metropolitan plan—extending out sixty miles into the Chicago’s hinterland. In fact, a central tenet was to ensure adequate transportation to and from the central business district so that the CBD became, in effect, the region’s capital, its home base, and its visible and vibrant symbol. “From Kenosha Wisconsin, on the north, to Michigan City, Indiana on the south, Burnham’s plan outlined a regional network of highways, parkways and forest preserves [that connected to the Downtown Loop] ” (Teaford, 1993, p. 143). The plan would later be accused by housing advocates and planners for neglecting the poor and ignoring the car. Neither are fair. Burnham believed parks to be his solution for the needs of the urban poor; Ford’s Model T’s first year in production was 1908—when Burnham finished his plan. Despite the obviousness of the car, it was not until the 1920’s that communities needed to accommodate it.
Burnham’s plan focused on transportation—the CBD Beaux Arts railroad station, the usual mainstay of most City Beautiful plans, was only the beginning to the Chicago Plan. Incorporating much of the Chicago Commercial Club’s previous recommendations, the Plan eliminated most grade crossings in the city and proposed a central clearing and warehousing yard, and linked them to the harbors at the mouths of the Chicago and Calumet rivers. Passenger traffic was removed from the Loop area and distributed to three different rail stations. The plan addressed our longstanding need for a hybrid public/private EDO. Necessary for successful implementation–a major appendix detailed its powers, calling for both city and county development organizations. The location of future public buildings and streets/boulevards, for example, should rest with these bodies. Areas for future annexation should rest upon these agencies. Despite what it ignored, Burnham’s plan was the nation’s first comprehensive plan.
In 1909, upon approval of Burnham’s Chicago Plan, the city council authorized reform Mayor Fred Busse to appoint members to the independent Chicago Plan Commission[i]. Its job was to promote and secure implementation of the plan. The Commission initially lacked key powers that would enable us to assert it was a hybrid EDO. Most of the Chicago Plan-related projects were either turned over to city agencies or built by the private sector. But the Commission up to the Second World War was Chicago’s most prominent EDO.
Using Burnham’s Plan for legitimacy a large number of projects were pushed for and approved by the Commission during that period. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago History “In many respects the three-decade era (until 1942) of the Chicago Plan Commission as originally constituted, was a great success. Moody, Taylor, Wacker and Simpson developed a working relationship with a series of mayors between 1909 and 1931 … [and] were also able to convince voters to fund commission-supported initiatives. Between 1912 and 1931 eighty-six Plan-related bond issues, covering seventeen different projects, with a combined cost of $234 million”.[ii] They were also able to convince the state legislature to increase bond limits for Chicago to accommodate its initiatives.
Transportation-related infrastructure modernization initiatives were a principal focus of the Commission in these years. The Twelfth Street (Roosevelt), Michigan Avenue, Ashland, Sheridan and Wacker Drive street-widening” were, in reality, City Beautiful boulevards—exposing how that seemingly neutral concept actually masked serious transportation modernization while obscuring the urban renewal involved. Condemnation, slum and CBD clearance made it work. The result, for example, the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower (1925) and Magnificent Mile—not to mention the transformation of the Lakefront and Waterfront areas, including those of the original Columbian Exposition—were direct consequences of these “boulevards”. Perhaps, its most obvious success, the Beaux Arts Union Station (today’s Amtrak station) was built by the railroads themselves (forming their own composite corporation and hiring Burnham as its architect) opened in 1925. Burnham’s proposed “civic center”, however, was never built.
Burnham himself was not a product of the Progressive Era—he (and the City Beautiful) were the last hurrah of the Gilded Age, incrementally, and in most cities haphazardly, implemented. At its heart Burnham’s plan was, as Mel Scott asserted, a “businessman’s plan”. It was a creature, not only of Burnham, but of the “one percent-led” Chicago business organizations. Researched and written in Burnham’s (and Edward Bennett’s) private office, paid for by business contributions Burnham’s Chicago City Beautiful was the last gasp of an “essentially aristocratic city, pleasing to the merchant princes who participated in [the Plan’s] conception, but not meeting some of the basic economic and human needs.”. (Scott, 1969, p. 108). True enough, but Burnham plays a role larger than his life in our history of economic development.
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remembering that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that will stagger us. Let your watchword be order, and your beacon, beauty. Think Big.
[i] A staggering 328 members were initially appointed, representative of all sectors of Chicago. Its first and permanent chair was Charles Wacker, who served until 1926, its first and most famous managing director was Walter Moody who served until 1920. He was succeeded by Eugene Taylor who ran the place until 1942. The Commission by that time (1939) had been reorganized, becoming a part of city government. In 1957 it was effectively relocated inside of the city’s Planning and Development Department. Presently, among other responsibilities it reviews proposals for PUDs, administers the Lakefront Protection Ordinance, Planned Manufacturing Districts, Industrial Corridors, and a very aggressive TIF District Program. Today’s Commission is very much a hybrid agency.
[ii] Encyclopedia of Chicago History, “Implementation”, www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3000008.html.
Ron W. Coan 