A Second Ship Sails Upstream: Progressivism 1865-1933
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN BIG CITIES: Big City Progressivism
The stream to which we attach the label, Progressivism is very much a reaction to industrial capitalism, immigration and the social-economic-demographic change unleashed by these forces. In a previous chapter we introduced our initial sense of the Progressive approach and left it in the tender, so to speak, mercies of Josiah Quincy. That colonial-early Republic Progressivism could be summarized as:
A definite spirit of civic reform … directed by members of the ‘happy and respectable classes’ who obviously saw themselves as high-minded and responsible stewards of the city. Members of old Boston families, like Josiah Quincy, were intent on using their powers of political leadership to refashion and renew the urban community in which they lived–not only for themselves, but also for all the people of the community. This reform impulse, however, was destined to go far beyond the physical and material benefits of the city, gradually influencing the moral and intellectual standards by which the ordinary people of Boston lived and the heights to which they might eventually aspire.[1]
Over the next several decades Progressivism evolved into a multiplicity of “isms” and movements. Abolitionism was the most impactful, but Temperance and Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage, not to mention Transcendentalism and a goodly portion of pre-Civil War American literature sprung from this perspective. Most of these evolved into movements and community, indeed national, social and political change. Politics and political action and the use of politics to help the “common man” but the least fortunate of society, however, defined, and to remove evil and injustice constituted a very visible wing of Progressivism to the present day. Almost all these movements eventually centered about the federal government and national legislation as the most effective means by which these goals could be achieved.
Still Progressivism was, and never will be, one single set of values and priorities; it was always several. The tendency of Progressives to focus upon subsets and policy areas for special attention was always a feature of the approach. Education, for example, was a central policy concern and from 1837 Progressives such as Horace Mann (Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education) schools and professional training-expertise was primary and permeated other policy concerns as well. The Boston Public Library (1848), the first large municipally owned public library was the crown jewel
Also Boston was an early leader in schools for the blind and Julia Ward Howe (Battle Hymn of the Republic) established the Perkins Institution for the Blind. While concern for the mentally ill probably originated with Quakers of Philadelphia, Boston’s Dorothea Dix was the leader in establishing the first “hospital for the insane”. The orientation around community and the belief that residents of the community, no matter their class or occupation, should not only benefit to the extent possible, but should be improved, a sort of early American self-actualization was also prominent. The concern for not just the “common man” but for the least fortunate was deeply embedded into the Progressive approach:
Those who set the standards for excellence in the city, like George Ticknor and his fellow Brahmins, were seriously concerned that even those people who occupied the lowest rungs of Boston’s socioeconomic ladder should have more ‘useful knowledge’ in order to raise themselves up and improve the quality of their lives … ‘and Boston was determined that the boys and girls, and the blind and insane as well, should have the opportunity to know enough’.[2]
Boston, Massachusetts and southern New England were pioneers in the crystallization of our Progressive approach–but other cities and regions also developed their own versions as well. The emigrants diffused this perspective across the nation as population movements criss-crossed the nation. Also other religions, Quakerism for example, added their own perspectives to Progressivism’s Puritan core. Progressivism would diffuse across the nation and by the late 1880’s it could be found in varying degrees of strength in regions and cities from coast to coast (Hawaii especially). And as it confronted and incorporated other cultural approaches prevalent in other geographies, Progressivism evolved into several different versions.
From all this we can glean several crisp elements of what constitutes our Progressive approach to economic development:
- It draws from and is led by an upper and upper middle class business and intellectual elite
- There is a clear separation between business/employment and the needs of the overall community. Private corporations are responsive to different values and forces and cannot be trusted to automatically address the community needs.
- The needs of the community, and responsibility to satisfy those needs, is paramount and the greater virtue for both the individual and the corporation.
- The greater concern is with people and directly addressing the needs of community residents. There is less sympathy (and trust) for indirect means and non-governmental entities.
- There is an optimistic, Rousseau-like belief in the least fortunate elements of the community and the obligation of the elite to improve their lot and provide the means by which these elements can improve.
- There is comfortability with government and the use of government to accomplish the needs of the community.
Progressivist economic development, similar to Privatist comes in several flavors (several “decks” using our ship metaphor). In this chapter we will trace three particular Progressive decks: (1) one which desired a physical urban pattern the polar opposite of the industrial city around which a community could prosper; a second (2) which attempted to modernize the industrial city to inspire the better angels of a new immigrant population and integrate them into the modern economy and society in order to avert social disorder, unionism and potentially European-style revolution; and finally (3) a reform of society, politics and economy to provide opportunities and fairness for the common man (including and eventually most focused on the most disadvantaged), the masses, from the abuses and injustices of an ever-powerful elite-dominated industrial economy[3].
As suggested in earlier chapters the Progressive Movement was dominated by the business elite of the early industrial period. Progressivist economic development is driven by business elites whose purposes and values are far from monolithic and which reflect the different occupations, scope and type of business owners/firms and their values and goals. The distinguishing characteristic among these three Progressive decks, therefore, reflects both the distinctive coalitions underlying each approach and the variation in attitude and purpose in business elites. Bluntly, if one views the business community as monolithic, a capitalist class for instance, this perspective will make little sense.
We, however, see important differences between elements of the business community which are “professionals” (lawyers, journalists, social welfare, architects, higher education, etc.), owners and employees drawn from local and regional firms, and a “corporate elite” composed of owners and employees serving in firms operating at multi-regional, national (and later global) scales. As we hope to demonstrate, these categories of business elites can differ in key ways from each other on how they wish to shape sub-state economic development. How (and if at all) each category enters into the economic development policy process is also likely to differ as well. In this period, for instance, our third category, corporate elites, were often the “bad guy”–the targeted evil-doer–of the other two categories. These corporate elites in the pre-New Deal era were much more likely to operate within the Privatist motif. Incredibly perhaps, these corporate elites tended to work well and closely with the leadership of immigrant-based political machines against which much of our second business category, the local and regional business community, strongly opposed.
Chronologically, the first of expression of the Progressive style in our transition era is the “parks movement”, a forerunner of the American planner movement. Geographically the parks movement, although within city boundaries, was most prominent in its periphery, vacant and less densely settled areas. In that our corporate elite grouping was in process of coming into existence (the robber barons were mere muggers at this point), the parks movement support was drawn from the professional class and the local business community. The political machines, based on early migration, if they existed at all, were relatively weak.
Progressivism Confronts Immigrants and the Industrial City: Parks, People and Planning
During these transition years, two needs rose to prominence: adjustment of the existing colonial city to the influx of migrants and immigrants (a population boom, if you will) and the identification and installation of an industrial city’s core infrastructure. In other words, social-economic integration of a new population and an expansion of the city physical landscape were the principal economic development-related goals[4] of these growing cities. Into this environment and time (1850-1870) wandered an exceptional and path-breaking individual, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. [5] Born in Hartford Connecticut, Olmsted was a journalist, the so-called father of landscape architecture, and an oft-times bureaucrat-public official (Sanitary District). Some also credit him as a forerunner of modern American urban planning. As we relate Olmsted’s various contributions, the contemporary economic developer may wonder what this all has to do with economic development.
To people like Olmsted, the expansion of city, its increased size, separated its residents from nature and distressed the humanity and morality of their residents by burying them in the conformity, pollution and congestion of the industrial-residential districts.
As the American city expanded …, it simultaneously deteriorated as a place for human life and activity. In a nostalgic attempt to overcome these barriers, city improvers offered urban parks as normative institutions. These [parks] would be points of contact between the afflictions of congested dwellings and a curative natural environment, between uncouth masses and the social values of an ideal rural order….
They saw a need to revitalize and restore the balance between urban dwellers and nature, even if at government expense. It was right and just, they argued that the state should regulate and control the boundaries beyond which man could not travel without being a detriment to him and to civilization….
[They] believed a civilization of cities would not survive if it was cut off from nature. Nature had the power to uplift the downtrodden and instill the best ideals ….Thus islands of nature had to be inserted into the artificial urban milieu…[6]
And so in 1857 promoted by business leaders, New York City dedicated 700 plus acres between 59th and 106th streets to an urban park (Central Park) and commenced a landscape design competition. And the rest is history, so they say.
Olmsted (and Calvert Vaux) won the bid and the “Parks Movement” (1857-1890’s) was off and running. In the next twenty years (interrupted by the Civil War) Central Park was built out along Olmsted and Vaux’s “Greensward Plan” and similar parks were designed for Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Rochester, Montreal, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Hartford, Wilmington, Detroit, Marquette, Milwaukee, Louisville, Chicago, University of Chicago, UCLA and Stanford Universities, Capitol Building and other cities as well. Philadelphia, Baltimore, St Louis, Omaha, Kansas City and San Francisco hired other landscape architects and developed their urban park infrastructure as well. “The fact that the park was planned in anticipation of future open-space needs is but one reason why Central Park deserves to be considered the beginning of modern city planning”[7]. The parks movement has made it into our economic development history in that the parks movement was the introductory step in the emergence of the planning movement–to which economic development is very much linked.
Central Park and the Parks Movement also represent to us the first clear, widespread, “jelling” of the values inherent in the second stream. Community well-being, integration of the immigrant population, an antidote to the negative externalities of urban growth and economic change, its use of government and public action to impart moral as well as socio-economic values (health and a bulwark against contagion and disease was a major motivator as well as the healing effects of nature on the human soul), and its dependence upon professional experts rather than private firms and its linkage to a rational plan, and politically powered by an upper middle class in the name of the less fortunate. To us, the parks movement fits quite well into our Progressive approach.
The economic development task the early progressive planner-architects addressed was to integrate the new workers and urban dwellers into the newly emerging industrial cities and in so doing create a sustainable urban fabric. At its earliest, this meant creating public water systems and urban parks; as we moved into the 1900’s it mean creating a sustainable municipal prosperity which could translate into jobs for city residents. Jobs and the household wealth they engendered would restrain the need that the new immigrant would turn to unions and political machines–and in extreme situations to violence and demands for social, economic and political change not dissimilar from the socialism that was reshaping European societies and governments. How this was to be accomplished is outlined by M. Christine Boyer:
… between 1897 and 1940, the city fabric, urban laborers, the poor and restless rabble-rousers were to be marked by a nexus of improvement schemes. Economic prosperity would be used to mask the problems of social unrest and the devastating conditions of congested cities. … congested city centers, overcrowded tenement dwellings, pauperization and destitution of the laboring classes, and uncouth frontier and country manner would dissolve with the overall rise in economic prosperity …. City improvers (progressive planners and their allies) could take hold of the physical environment of the American city. These select missionaries of taste would reveal the secrets of a natural and rational order with a degree of perfection that could discipline alike the baser instincts of common man and the exploitative impulses of the capitalist.[8]
While infused with a Marxist motif (and sarcasm), Boyer does reach into the link (physical modernization/upgrading and infrastructure) of the early planning profession with economic development. Through rational planning the physical landscape of the urban area, the city, could be manipulated to achieve both social and economic ends and goals. In many ways, this was the ultimate task that the progressives as a whole were attempting to confront: how to integrate all classes and elements into the newly emerging industrial city. The fear of ethnics, workers, strikes, and the union movement, the housing and mental health reforms, the park systems, the early garden cities, all were linked together to create through rational planning of the physical landscape a sustainable urban economy and society
In the end, do we consider the Parks Movement as an example of nineteenth century economic development? No, we do not think of Park Movement advocates as economic developers. Parks are an urban infrastructure, to be sure, and broadly conceived Parks advocates would have thought of parks as a necessary infrastructure and precondition for economic growth of the new industrial city. But our interest in the Parks Movement is that it is the first concrete example of the second stream coalition and values coming together in a national movement. It is not evident to us that the link between parks and social integration is sufficiently close to economic growth and prosperity that we can consider them as our first economic developers in the Progressive tradition. Rather, we tend to think that within the planning-architect nexus was a seed from which a Progressive wing of American economic development would eventually evolve.
The Garden Cities: Suburban sprawl done in good taste
Olmsted, to his lasting shame, also ventured into city-building. In 1869 he and Vaux planned and formed the Riverside Improvement Company to build a new residential community nine miles north of Chicago. Embracing 1600 acres, linked to the central city only by commuter train, they platted 2500 individual, half-acre lots on which they proposed construction of single family detached housing located on winding, tree-lined (non-grid) road system with several parks sprinkled within the overall development. They called Riverside a “garden city” and it was meant for workers as much as anyone and was advertised as “a perfect village in a perfect location”. The project went into bankruptcy in 1873 and was incorporated into a Cook County village in 1875[9]. Olmsted also worked with the New York City suburb, Staten Island. He developed a plan-proposal to transform “that malaria-ridden swamp into a system of winding tree-lined roads and parks suitable for residential speculators”.[10]
The garden city raises the specter of the planned creation of a new city outside the limits and jurisdiction of the industrial (now central city).This is an example of Progressive city-building. Equally important it, could also be construed as a rejection (at least an alternative to) of the industrial city as the desired form of urban evolution. If so, garden cities as planned suburbs can be a serious entry point to introduce the phenomenon of suburbs. The originator of the garden city concept is usually accredited to Sir Ebenezer Howard, a Brit who in 1902 founded a company that built the first real garden city, Letchworth. Howard titled this suburban development as the Garden City, derived from Chicago’s motto, Urbs in Horto, or “city in a garden”[11]. Howard’s path-breaking book was eventually titled “Garden Cities of To-morrow”.
Garden cities, we argue, will presage the Progressive approach to city-building which in the more established Northeast and Midwest took the form of suburban developments[12]. Garden cities do not draw their inspiration, or consider as part of their heritage, the Privatist city-building efforts such as Pullman, Illinois (which opened in 1884)–the company town of the Pullman railroad car fame (and the later scene of a great strike, riot, and federal government crackdown)[13]. Indeed they are a reaction against it.
The function of Letchworth and the garden cities that followed–indeed their chief attraction–was to serve as alternatives to the crowded industrial city. However, none of the garden cities that were built achieved the economic autonomy that Howard envisioned. Instead, they invariably depended for employment on a nearby metropolis.[14]
The garden city, we will argue is Progressive solution to the social ills associated with congested, polluted, densely populated and large central cities through a new physical form of a “natural” urban community. The garden city in some version will become the pre-World War I model for many of our earliest nineteenth and twentieth century suburbs. The irony is that the suburban alternative has been identified as Privatist. In that density and central cities has since the mid-twentieth century become closely associated with Progressive economic development, it may come with some shock that it was not always so.
Garden cities would arrive in America largely due to Frederick C. Howe and Frederick Law Olmsted, the younger. Howe was a Progressive reformer and his notion of garden city captures much of the distinction that we draw between Progressive and Privatist city building. Howe noted that
generations of urban living had produced physical and moral decay in the fibre of [Britain so that] it initiated the garden city movement. Howe believed that garden suburbs would not only urbanize the American countryside, but would revitalize the city as well, for they represented a shifting of emphasis from property to people … A garden city, Howe claimed, offered the first escape from tenements and cramped apartment lives…[15]
Howe himself wrote of his garden city as much more than a planned subdivision; he saw it as a total rejection of that nightmare of private profit[16]:
The city problem is primarily an economic not a personal problem. Our failure to see this is far more costly than the inefficiency and dishonesty about which so much has been written [the city efficient movement]…. The basis of the city is physical. The health, comfort, convenience, happiness of the people is intimately bound up with the material side of the city. Much of the poverty is the product of our neglect to control the economic foundations of the community. The houses we live in, the streets …, the air and sunlight …, distribution of wealth, the cost of living and the vice and crime of the community …. are intimately connected with the way the city is built.[17]
And for Howe the city at that time was being built, built badly, by Privatist forces:
…a million men are thinking only of their individualist lot lines, of their inviolable right to do as they will with their own, irrespective of its effect on the community. We do not think beyond our own doorsteps, we do not think in city terms. We have exalted the rights of the individual above the common weal. Our cities have been permitted to grow with no concern for the future and with no thought of the community or the terrible costs which this uncontrolled development creates.[18] …our cities have been planned by a hundred different land owners each desiring to secure the quickest possible speculative returns
This last statement could be written today; it was written in 1912.It was written not to attack sprawl, but to defend the need to create new suburban communities, planned to overcome the Privatist evils.
It was left to Frederick Law Olmsted the younger[19] to design and construct Howe’s first American garden city concept: Forest Hills Gardens (in Queens, New York) founded in 1908[20]. With no restrictive covenants, the 142 acre site, linked to Manhattan by the new Long Island electrified rail (a fifteen minute ride from Penn Station), projected a population of 5000, housed in mostly detached single-family homes, with some apartment buildings, row houses and twins. The town square was the commercial center, behind which was a village green and then curvilinear tree-lined parkways “snaked their way” to the periphery. “The overall effect recalls a medieval Bavarian town”.[21] The garden city concept outlined their conception of a “planned” suburbia, designed and built in essence, to overcome the dysfunctionality of a city built for private profit and to overcome the perversities of density[22].
While we confess to a bit of cynicism in our characterization of garden cities versus the subdivision suburbs which emerged in the fifties, the distinction seems somewhat valid in distinguishing Progressive city-building from Privatist city-building like that of Denver and Miami–and certainly Levittown of a future era. Suburbs though they might be, Olmsted’s creations were “planned” communities. Through the plan, design and land use was intentionally meant to counter Privatist grid-speculation which supported the dominant pattern of private profit by developers.
All of which leads us to finalize our conception of the relationship between city building (either Privatist or Progressive) and economic development. City-building is a form of economic development; it is not conventional economic development, nor is it especially prominent today (exceptions being the New Urbanism and retirement communities). Traces of it can be found in the “new urbanism” and in the privatist style in the retirement communities frequently built in the Sunbelt. Gated communities and subdivisions owned and managed by homeowners associations, i.e. Privatopia could also be versions found in unincorporated areas. Texas has several large master-planned communities and so does California. The New Deal and the Rouse Corporation would also launch several new planned communities. Oak Ridge Tennessee in its own weird way was a sort of Privatist city built by the Manhattan Project and whatever Disney World set off is another hard to classify form of city-building. In short, while “conventional” economic developers do not usually identify with these initiatives, it really serves no useful purpose to deny that they are a consistent, time-honored element of the profession.
Frank Lloyd Wright the City in a Garden)
If the Curmudgeon may once again over generalize, he would observe that contemporary Progressives are quite uncomfortable with suburbs as a category of urban form. There is a tendency to believe the suburbs exert a zero-sum impact on their beloved large, diverse, dense and efficient central city. Worse it is the residential, and until the last census employment center for the Privatist class–and those “escaping” blight and racial change. There are those, however, that tend to adhere relatively closely to Progressive values that do not think the central city is the “be all” and forever of our urban landscape. Their concern is with the common man and not with the capitalist class. Their focus is upon community–but a community of individuals. Frank Lloyd Wright is one thinker that embraces the suburb. His ideas, the polar opposite of Le Corbusier, will shape the future suburban expansion. But at heart Wright espouses the “planned” city–it just happens to be a suburb and not a central city neighborhood or CBD–and it bears a marked resemblance to today’s sprawl.
Wright certainly is a part of the planning-architecture motif common to early twentieth century Progressive urbanism. He simply did not believe the central city of his day would survive–“I believe the city as we know it today, is to die”. The cause of its death: obsolescence caused by the then-modern technologies such as the automobile and communication-technology induced decentralization. “People can spread out–they no longer need to live in dense concentrations. Wright did not want to inject nature into dense concentrations of people; he advocated dispersing people into nature (countryside). The home of the individual social unit will contain in itself … all the city … plus intimate comfort and free individual choice[23]. Where’s the sign-up sheet for “bowling alone?”
He called his new conception of a city “Broadacre City” because it was based on a minimum of an acre for each family. Rybczynski assets that Wright was actually influenced by the old socialist, Henry George and that Wright conceived of Broadacre City as a land redistribution scheme for the common man. Wright’s classic, the Disappearing City[24] contains few firm details or sketches, but the cheap land “out there” in the hinterland made his image somewhat “doable”. Later works, however, provided more substance to the image and concept of Broadacre:
Wright imagined a hypothetical site: four square miles of vaguely Midwestern topography including farmland, a portion of a river, and a section of hillside. Following Midwestern custom, a grid of roads divides the land into quarter sections; some of the roads are two level highways, cars above and trucks below, with specially designed interchanges… There is no functional zoning; instead schools, civic buildings, factories, a county seat, and an arena are scattered among orchards, vineyards, farms, and recreational spaces. People live in houses on acre lots, as well as apartment towers, and on small farms…. There is no center or commercial core, nothing that resembles a traditional downtown …. (and) Wright’s plan does not represent a complete city; it is merely a small portion of an urban pattern that can go on forever.[25]
This is the planned, unplanned city and aside from its fairly radical 1930’s perspective, it does seem a reasonable reflection of today’s outer ring suburban sprawl. Whatever else like it or hate it, Wright’s crystal ball must have been pretty clear and amazingly accurate.
Wright never actually built a Broadacre City and no one tried to copy him. But he did seem to launch a new literature and a recognizable focus to the future American home–the house. He did publish home designs in House and Home and House Beautiful. His concept, Levittown’s future “Rambler” is today’s pervasive ranch-style housing. He called it the “Usonian” and he built more than 150 examples. His incomplete or partial depiction of a complete suburb arguably gave rise to the concept of subdivision and the “glass-roofed roadside markets” drawn in his image of Broadacre City reasonably resemble an enclosed shopping mall. The pervasiveness of various transportation modes in his Broadacre City image (rail, auto, planes, and believe it or not, personal Jetson-like flying cars bespeak his recognition that Broadacre City and the new urban landscape rests upon decentralizing transportation (and communication) technologies[26]. Wright saw the central city of his day as “disappearing”; it didn’t–although in the 1970’s it came damned close. But Wright did seem to understand how many Americans thought and what and how they wanted to live. The thrust of Broadacre seems very Privatist, but more precisely it is based around the individual and his/her family and is needs and wants as Wright imagined them and his notion that this community best expressed the needs of the average American family.
[1] Thomas O’Connor, The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001) p. 93.
[2] O’Connor, op. cit. pp. 102-103
[3] While our conception of Progressivism follows more traditional interpretations reasonably, the reader should understand our purposes is to adjust the complex and multiple-faceted late nineteenth and early twentieth century Progressive movement to contemporary economic development policy and professional history. We see continuities in Progressive style economic development, flowing from this period into contemporary economic development, which offer understanding to the historical evolution of economic development. They key factor underlying our different decks of the economic development-related Progressive approach is the supportive constituencies which provided the muscle and power in affecting the economic development policy-making.
[4] The reader should understand at the outset that we do not define or even link economic development with goals such as tax base-revenue raising or job creation which, for good or ill, are dominant today. We reject the notion that there exists, except in the most general and useless sense, a common set of goals for all cities which is timeless. In any period of time, cities differ in the purposes to which economic development is tasked; cities certainly differ in their goals over varying periods of time. A universal goal, such as job creation, for all economic development programs strikes the Curmudgeon as cute, convenient, but not descriptive of actual expectations placed upon the practicing economic developer.
[5] We use Olmsted as a stand in for a number of exceptional individuals who were prominent at this time or who were partners with Olmsted in his various activities. In particular, Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux were also important figures in the early second stream.
[6] Boyer, pp. 34-35
[7] Albert Fein, Frederick Law Olmsted and the American Environmental Tradition (1972) quoted in Mohl, op. cit. p. 75.
[8] M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1994), pp. 5-6.
[9] Today, the village of Riverside is headed by a village manager and economic development lead is performed by its chamber. A Main Street program is in operation.
[10] Boyer, op. cit. p. 41. We also should mention that Olmsted laid out Brooklyn in an essentially grid pattern, with a CBD housed in a distinctive architectural focal point (the Crystal Palace) and a walkable scale.
[11] Rybczynski, op cit. p. 30.
[12] the 1857 Llewellyn Park suburb (the Ramble), thought to be the nation’s first planned suburb (and home to Edison) in New Jersey (twelve miles from New York City), usually stands on its own, more a Privatist gated community than a forerunner of the modern suburb, the Progressive planned city or even the Garden City itself.
[13] Either does the planning profession apparently. Mel Scott’s, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969–the classic history of the profession does not mention, even in passing (we do appreciate that 1884 is before 1890) the Pullman or Sunbelt city-building we have previously described. This is for good reason, planning had little to do with that approach.
[14] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities” (New York, Scribner, 2010) pp. 31-32
[15] Boyer, op. cit. p. 41.
[16] Notice Howe’s discomfort with the “city efficient” movement which we have earlier discussed under the Privatist rubric.
[17] Frederic C. Howe, “The City as a Socializing Agency: The Physical Basis of the City: the City Plan” American Journal of Sociology, volume 17 (March 1912), pp. 590-601.
[18] IBID. pp. 590-601.
[19] Olmsted Jr. established the nation’s first graduate landscape architecture program at Harvard, first President of the American City Planning Institute and a private architect and author.
[20] Home of the West Side Tennis Club which hosted the U.S. Open until 1978 and in 2007 voted by Cottage Living as the “best cottage community. Residence of Anthony Weiner; see Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969) pp. 90-91.
[21] Rybczynski, op. cit., pp. 33-36. The Curmudgeon senses some compatibility with these designs and those of the “New Urbanism” of the 1990’s.
[22] Some examples of future imitation of the garden city include: Kohler Wisconsin, industrial villages in Camden, New Jersey, Worcester, Massachusetts, Erwin, Tennessee, Wilmington, Delaware, John Nolen’s garden suburb of Mariemont Ohio (outside Cincinnati) and several in Bridgeport Connecticut. Other examples are Venice, Florida, Shaker Heights in Cleveland, the County Club District in Kansas City and the well-known Palos Verdes Estates south of Los Angeles. In the late 1920, planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright used garden city concepts to build Sunnyside Gardens in the Queens and Radburn in suburban New Jersey. See Rybczynski, op. cit., pp. 37-39.
[23] For all this, and much that will follow we are indebted to Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities” (New York, Scribner, 2010) especially Chapter 4: “Mr. Wright and the Disappearing City). The above quotes are taken from pp. 67-69.
[24] Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York, William Farquhar Payson, 1932).
[25] Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 71-72.
[26] Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 75-76.
Ron W. Coan 