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.
Ron W. Coan 