The City Beautiful
The City Beautiful Era (loosely including 1893-1920–it actually continued through the Depression and New Deal public works often embraced it’s principles) is an important period in the tale of our profession, albeit a somewhat subtle, if not confusing one. The era is much more critical to the planning profession than to the economic development profession, but, we will develop our perspective that Progressive and Privatist significant elements of what will be economic development travels alongside (arguably within) the planning profession through the end of World War II. The story is complicated, to be sure, in that City Efficient planning will evolve simultaneously and alongside the City Beautiful planning–but they are not quite the same thing and spring from different roots. At the outset, however, the reader should be aware there is considerable overlap between the advocates of these different approaches.
It is a reasonable argument that during this era, several of these rings jelled and rapidly evolved to create comprehensive planning and the city planning profession[1]. At no point did during the City Beautiful Era/Movement was economic development the dominant or principal element. Economic development is at best a derivative concern of City Beautiful proponents. The City Efficient advocates, we would argue, focused upon structural reforms, honesty-anti-corruption and efficiency more as necessary preconditions for effective and efficient governance which was the foundation for future economic development. City Efficient did not envision a strong government as the initiator of a vision to change the community.
Some of the drivers internal to the Progressive City Beautiful era include: the Garden Cities folk described above, the Municipal Art Movement, the landscape architecture profession (including journalists and academic types), the women’s movement (an example of moral Progressivism drawn from Mohl’s earlier-described typology of Progressivism), and the “civic improvement or betterment” association movement. The constituencies that powered these sub-movements are disproportionately middle-upper class women, landscape architects and other professions, and the newly formed national-regional corporate elite. Landscape architects in this period were the driving force behind comprehensive and city-wide planning. Lurking offstage inspiring early City Beautiful initiatives was the massive (1860’s) Haussmann renovation-modernization of Paris, the mother of all urban renewal projects (60% of city structures were alleged to have been affected), and Vienna’s Ringstrasse. The twelve grand boulevards of Paris, radiating out from the Arc de Triomphe, tree-lined, and laced with magnificent grand civic buildings and residences provided a visual benchmark and a none-too-subtle model for American proponents of the City Beautiful.
The assumption underlying City Beautiful was that beauty, in the form of Beaux Arts architecture and tree-lined boulevards would inspire the city residents to a life of moral and civic virtue. How far anyone but an architect of arts culture-phile could actually believe this assertion is unclear to the Curmudgeon. Still City Beautiful shared with the Garden Cities a belief that nature and beauty was what was missing from the industrial city. Beauty was the antidote to deterioration, congestion, and misery in the physical form of the industrial city which extended to its poor and immigrant residents. Living in misery, without the presence of beauty and virtue, the poor (and their unions, bosses and political machines) tended to crime, violence, hopelessness and potentially to revolution. To better grasp the goals of many Progressive planner-developers during this period it would follow that “place” and the physical improvement of the landscape applied to place is the most effective vehicle to help and empower “people” who live in that place. That is not always the goal structure desired by contemporary Progressive economic developers–there will be a shift in Progressivist economic development later in the century.
Today, many economic developers believe jobs and skill empowerment, job creation if you will, is the logical solution to these miseries. This goal, however, is a relatively recent arrival to the profession. We will argue that through the 1960’s, the dominant strategy of economic development (and planning) was not job creation nor skills-education enhancement, but the physical (real estate, logistical-transportation access and infrastructure) transformation of the city and the region. Say it another way more pertinent to the City Beautiful period, infrastructure and modernization, clothed in beauty and reminiscent of nature and small town America, were the solutions for individual virtue, a moral society, social and class stability, and economic development–and the best counter to the pernicious effects of immigration and the industrial city.
… ‘thoughtful people’ … were ‘appalled at the results of progress; at the waste in time, strength, and money which congestion in city streets begets, at the toll of lives taken by diseases when sanitary precautions are neglected; and at the frequent outbreaks against law and order which result from narrow and pleasure less lives’
The American city was marked by a void. It was blamed for having destroyed the uplifting qualities of the physical environment; everything had been sacrificed on The altar of industry and capital acquisition. No one had questioned every man’s right to disfigure the city with heavy smoke from soft-coal furnaces, stenches from soap factories and leather tanneries, unsightly billboards, and aesthetic nuisances.… There had been no time (in the building of the industrial city) to develop the finer instincts, to transform the ideals of communal living into an adequate physical environment.[2]
The solution, of course was “the city beautiful”. We shall concentrate upon two dynamic forces which drove the early City Beautiful era: the women’s-civic improvement association movements, and Daniel Burnham, the personification of the skyscraper, the architecture profession, and for our money, the father of American city planning.
The civic or village improvement movement dated as far back as 1848 with Andrew Jackson Downing who encouraged city dwellers to establish “rural improvement societies for encouraging tree planting and tasteful architecture”.[3] The first such group to form was in 1853, Stockbridge Massachusetts and it became “the prototype for all that followed”. “By 1880, Massachusetts had twenty-eight associations and Connecticut between fifty and sixty”. In the 1880’s and 90’s associations spread first to the Middle Atlantic, then to the South East and by 1900, California, probably the last, “had several dozens of associations.[4]
These municipally-based civic improvement associations were led and disproportionately populated by upper and middle class women, many of which were mobilized behind several of the other moral Progressive movements ongoing at the time. Like chambers of commerce civic improvement associations arose almost naturally in many smaller cities and towns. Like chambers civic associations were far from monolithic in their views and purposes. In fact, both Richard Hofstadter and Craig Turnbull describe these civic associations as “the coexistence of illiberalism and reform”[5] in that many used beautification and real estate techniques to keep undesirables out of their areas–a not so Progressive orientation. In later years of the City Beautiful era, the early Great Migration deeply affected the policy and activities of these associations. To counter what was viewed as “conservative parochialism”, Progressive reformers created a national association (similar to the NML) which came to be called the American League of Civic Improvement at first located in Springfield Illinois, and then in 1902 moved to Chicago.
Charles M. Robinson in 1899 injected new vitality into the civic improvement movement with his publication of a three-part series “Improvement in City Life” in the Atlantic Monthly[6]. Robinson enlarged upon that movement and it is to him that we attribute the label, “City Beautiful”. The dimension Robinson brought into play was that public buildings and even infrastructure could reflect beauty and that a city hall, a public library or even a tree-lined boulevard and statutes-monuments could accomplish civic improvement goals and purposes:
‘When one speaks of the aesthetic side of American cities, one thinks at once of their public buildings; of their parks, statues and boulevards. But in any right conception of urban loveliness these would be only the special objects of a general and harmonious beauty’
Robinson took the broadest possible view of what he called civic art and discussed practical ameliorations such as limiting the height of buildings, removing advertising, cleaning streets, planting trees, improving lighting and installing public art…. He emphasized that while city governments sometimes took the lead in these improvements, a variety of private organizations such as municipal art societies, park associations and (of course) civic clubs (associations), also had roles to play, in a way that anticipated today’s park conservancies and downtown business improvement districts.[7]
Robinson’s ideas were incorporated quickly into the civic improvement association movement[8].
Thanks to his writing, Robinson became a national figure and was engaged as a planning consultant by a number of cities, including Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Fort Wayne, Denver, Des Moines, Omaha and Honolulu. He was part of the team that designed a ‘Model City’ for the popular 1904 Stain Louis World’s Fair; served on planning commissions in Rochester, New York and Columbus Ohio; and was appointed professor of civic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two universities in the United States to offer courses in city planning (Harvard was the other).[9]
By 1902 civic improvement could be defined as “the promotion of outdoor art, public beauty, town, village, and neighborhood improvement”, in the same year the Chautauqua institution prepared and disseminated “improvement study guides” to the association’s members. At its third convention in 1002, the League created fourteen advisory committees including ones on “municipal reform” and settlements, sanitation”. Billing itself as a “federation of organizations and individuals aiming to promote the higher life of American communities” the American League was spearheading the spread of civic associations in municipalities across the nation–to large cities such as Buffalo, Chicago, St. Paul, Milwaukee, and St. Louis and to smaller, frontier and left coast towns. A1905 survey revealed that nearly 2500 civic associations existed[10].
How does all this fit into a history of economic development?
Forgive us the comparison, but one might construe these civic improvement associations as non-business, Progressive chambers of horticulture and real estate improvement. That these associations crossed over at times into municipal economic development is certain. Equally certain is that these associations were not primarily driven by economic development purposes. In many other ways, however, the civic associations were comparable to the municipal reform leagues described earlier in our discussion on Privatism. They make sense as economic development-related if we recall that the physical landscape, home and neighborhood beauty and order writ municipally large, reflected the period’s dominant perception of how to achieve order and prosperity through integration of immigrants into mainstream society and setting the standard for their neighborhoods and homesteads. No one at this point in time was defining economic development as job creation or knowledge-based economic growth–instead beautification (and order) improved the character and the moral spirit of American industrial municipalities by attempting to preserve a touch of small-town America into community and neighborhood. If viewed in this manner, civic associations can be viewed as an early forerunner of Great Society community development associations.
The more obvious link of City Beautiful with economic development arises from the life work of one of America’s greatest architect, Daniel Burnham. Daniel Burnham, an Upstate New York native, had established himself in Chicago as a noted architect and co-founder of a firm which was regarded as a nationally-known practitioner of the newly emerging Chicago school of architecture. The Chicago school’s signature distinction was, of course, the skyscraper. We pick up Burnham’s career in 1890 and the Chicago World Fair. The Fair, wherever it was to be held, was authorized by Congress to celebrate the 400th birthday of Columbus’s discovery of America. It was to be a national celebration, described as America’s coming out party and a testimonial to America’s coming of age[11]. The closest comparison of contemporary life would certainly be the Summer Olympics.
As might be expected a raft of big cities competed for certification by Congress. Each city was represented by a citizen’s and businessman’s host committee, each with the support of their municipal and state governments. Each out-promised the other (can the reader picture the lobbying techniques employed to acquire favor of Congress) and one plausible explanation for Chicago’s nick-name, the Windy City, arises from this competition. Say what you will about city planning, and city beautiful, this competition was sheer municipal boosterism that would make any economic developer proud. Chicago, then the second most populous city, had just completed a huge annexation, established a sewer district which embraced much of Cook County, and had commenced the construction of a ship canal that would reverse the flow of the Chicago river. Chicago was on a roll and was not about to lose the competition.
It didn’t. Burnham, a leader of the Chicago delegation, was chosen to be the Fair’s chief planner and director of the works. In the spring of 1893, The Great White City placed on exhibit America’s (and Chicago’s) technological and inventive achievements before the world. More than twenty-one million people attended (Burnham apparently was Chicago’s tourism director as well). The architecture, the unified plan, and the canals, as well as the infamous “little Egypt” (a stripper), ignited the crowds, and the imagination of the world. If timing is everything, Burnham timed it right (excepting that it coincided almost exactly with the Panic of 1893). He emerged from the Fair as the nation’s best known architect and the desire of virtually every American city to copy in some way the Great White City was to launch officially the City Beautiful movement and start the process which would culminate in the launch of the city planning profession. It also greatly increased business at his architectural firm and given Burnham’s natural entrepreneurship, a considerable dose of privatism was unloaded upon the city beautiful.
To be sure, the four year Panic slowed the pace dramatically, but by 1897 the race was on.
… a penchant for structures of classical stability, and in the colonnades and pediments of the White City … was, indeed, a prophecy, forecast of monumental city halls, public libraries, museums, union stations, banks, and academic halls to be built over the next twenty or thirty years. As clearly as a royal edict, the fair proclaimed the aesthetic principles that would govern the design of civic centers, malls, boulevards, university and college campuses, waterfronts and other expositions for two decades or more. It powerfully persuaded visitors from Omaha, Buffalo, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego and other cities that they too must commemorate great events in similar fashion.[12]
The City Beautiful Movement picked up considerable steam when the U.S. Senate (1900-1902) established a commission to plan what would become today’s Washington D.C.’s national mall. Several members of this McMillan Commission, including Burnham, had worked together on the 1893 World’s Fair and they constructed a new plan for Washington D.C. which included the mall, the Federal Triangle, Union Station and the Lincoln and Jefferson monuments. The plan established a model for other cities to imitate. In 1910 Congress established the Commission of Fine Arts to implement the McMillan Plan and over the next decade much of the mall was rebuilt and the Lincoln Memorial was constructed. Following this lead world fairs in Saint Louis, San Francisco and San Diego propelled the city beautiful design principles to ever-higher visibility and added a considerable “coolness” factor to the movement.
Burnham’s 1902 Washington D.C. plan remade and enlarged the original L’Enfant Plan. The Mall. Union Station, the buildings and the boulevards transformed Washington into the perfect expression of the City Beautiful and elevated comprehensive planning to a first order urban priority.
Burnham’s Washington Plan drove home the value of comprehensive city planning. Like the Chicago’s World Fair, the monumental Washington plan awakened and nurtured the belief that urban life could be orderly and efficient, that cities could be beautiful and inspiring. Capturing the attention of civic leaders in other cities, Burnham’s grandiose Washington plan gave new impetus to urban planning.[13]
Burnham, as one might expect, did quite well with all of this design and construction. Skyscrapers, which had been confined previous to 1900 to Chicago and New York, spread to almost all major downtown districts– and neo-classical architecture, for good measure was also inserted into central business districts which now became not only a manufacturing but an office, retail and cultural-recreational district. The CBD, as we imagine it in its Golden Age was now in the process of its initial construction. By the definition of most, this aspect of the City Beautiful era was certainly economic development of its day. Daniel Burnham might be also named the “father of the modern CBD”.
City after city sponsored design competition for their version of desired construction–and from these competitions came visions of the urban future. Cleveland, for example, led by its Chamber, its chapter of Institute of Architects conducted a design competition which sought to emulate the cluster of public buildings of the Chicago Fair. From this competition would come the “Group Plan” which cluster a city hall, courthouse, public library and post office around a beautiful park and situated on a grand boulevard. Added to that motley assemblage was the nation’s very first “civic center”.
This civic center project, the prototype of dozens of others in first two decades of our century, was also a slum clearance effort. On the forty-four acre site … stood many old buildings, including a five story light manufacturing structure…[14]
Other cities implemented city beautiful CBD projects over the next few years, including Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Prestigious college’s, such as Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), Rice (Houston), Southern Methodist (Dallas), California Institute of Technology (Los Angeles) and the University of Colorado (Denver) designed the campus around city beautiful principles. Train stations, built in imitation of Union Station, were constructed in New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Dallas and Los Angeles[15].
“Plaster fantasy”[16] as it was, the World’s Fair and the City Beautiful could not hide the deterioration so very evident in the central city and even in the new CBD. Alleys connected the resident to ghettoes and slums and the tenement house of Jacob Riis. Beauty and buildings alone was not going to successfully confront the dangers lurking in the new industrial city. Pioneered by Burnham, the need was for a complete remaking of the city and to do that one needed “the comprehensive 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 entire Chicago region. The Burnham of “make no little plans” fame had commenced in earnest his urban planning career.
Burnham and his comprehensive plan did stumble badly in San Francisco, however. Its failure there makes more visible the contrast between the City Beautiful Progressive plan and Privatist economic development. In early some 1904 San Francisco merchants and a former mayor, desiring the city to issue a series of municipal bonds to finance a hospital, sewers, schools, streets, library, jail and playground and parks improvements, formed a civic association (Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco (AIASF)). Phelan, the San Francisco Bulletin and other business leaders were at the same time locked in a bitter struggle with the Ruef political machine–which they would topple and send Ruef to jail in 1907. The AIASF had more limited aims:
… to formally discuss a plan for the improvement of San Francisco ….San Francisco is at a turning point of its growth. It can either be a great and beautiful and attractive city where men and women of civilized tastes and wants will desire to live, or a great and ugly and forbidding city which people will shun.[17]
Other improvements included an opera house auditorium, a music conservancy, planting of flowers and trees, prohibition of overhead trolley car wires (“as not befitting the dignity and beauty of our principal streets”) and the construction of harbor improvements made “necessary by the growth of commerce and the increasing population …”), but all was to be achieved through a comprehensive plan which would “elevate the public taste” and serve as a “great advertisement for our city”[18].
San Francisco businessmen, like their counterparts elsewhere, were generally optimistic about the prospect of remaking their city. They sensed that man could control his environment, that almost anything could be accomplished. A beautiful planned city would, they thought, lessen discord among different groups and help their cities capture the national reknown they deserved.[19]
In February 1904 the AIASF invited Daniel Burnham to town–Burnham brought along his assistant, Edward Bennett (who would later devise Portland’s comprehensive plan). In due measure, 1905, Burnham and Bennett produced a wonderful plan following faithfully city beautiful and McMillan Commission principles and design. In the midst of the discussion on the Burnham plan, San Francisco (April, 1906) suffered through the famous earthquake and almost totally burned down. While terrible for the city and its populace, the virtually complete destruction of the past built environment had to create an opportunity for the plan’s speedy implementation. To the contrary, over the next year the plan went nowhere and the city was rebuilt with little or no correspondence to the outlines and principles of the Burnham plan.
Street construction proved to be a particularly contentious issue, for until the locations of streets were fixed and the streets rebuilt, businesses could not fully resume operations. Merchants and other businessmen who had long supported planning now broke from it in the interest of getting back in business as soon as possible. … Another divisive matter was the proposed extension of new strict ordinances governing the building of fireproof structures … to make San Francisco more secure against future blazes. The attempt led to vociferous opposition from small business owners … as too expensive…. A third issue that immediately surfaced was that of the building of a civic center (which) some businessmen countered, however, that San Francisco could not afford the expense of such a luxury… Overarching all of those individual issues was … a common fear on the part of many businessmen they could not afford the higher taxes they thought would be required by the improvements mandated by planning.[20]
Still, city planning had arrived as a profession and as an instrument of urban revitalization during the city beautiful decades. In 1907[21], Harford Connecticut established the first Planning Commission in the nation. Within a decade, virtually every city had one. By the 1920’s these planning departments were developing metropolitan plans for their regions. The EDO companion to the Chamber, the city planning department, took its place in the governmental bureaucracy.
It would be most helpful for contemporary economic developers to appreciate that planning, especially in its early years, was itself a “big tent”. Universities started courses and programs and students “piled” into them–lured by a new, exciting, and potentially full of opportunities for career experiences. The profession had yet to “professionalize”, and it certainly had not siloized in this period. Within a municipal bureaucracy, the planning department could easily have been the “go to” place to dump special projects and new initiatives. The overlap, as we see with our San Francisco case study, of the comprehensive plan (and zoning-industrial parks) with economic development was considerable in these early years.
Moreover, one should not assume that a planning department in one city, region or state was the clone of all others. Internal units within planning departments likely were composed of distinctive staff. For instance, over the next generation, it is likely, in our opinion, that more Progressive planners gravitated into housing-related or metropolitan planning programs and activities, while more privatist planners shifted into zoning and building codes. We suspect the Planning or Housing Departments housed those Progressive programs and activities which came closest to economic development in function and purpose. Perhaps interestingly, to this very day, over twenty per cent of EDOs are lodged in planning/housing departments.
[1] Again, Mel Scott’s chapter, “The Heyday of the City Beautiful” presents the City Beautiful period as seen through the planning prism. To the extent that Progressive economic development will dovetail with the planning profession for more than two generations, that history does have relevance to our economic development profession as well. We will, however, tend less to repeat Scott’s presentation than to draw from it (and others) the more economic development aspects of the City Beautiful. No claim is made that we are trying to describe the entirety of City Beautiful anymore than the entirety of the planning profession. We are culling out of this period only what, to us, appears of interest to the economic developer. This, also, was the age of professionalism as well as Progressivism. In this period the National Municipal League, the action arm of local progressives, (1894) was formed. Within two years the NML had 180 local municipal organizations as members. Alongside the NML was the National Civic Foundation (1900), the American Economic Association (1885), the National Housing Association (1910), the National Association of Settlements (1911), the American Political Science Association (1903), the American Institute of Planners (1909), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (1912), and many others such as the National Association of Port Authorities, the National Conferences of Mayors and City Managers, and the Municipal Finance Officers Association all came into existence and are still around in some form today.
[2] Boyer, op. cit., p. 43.
[3] Jon A. Peterson, “The City Beautiful Movement: Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings”, Journal of Urban History, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1976, Sage Publications, p. 422.
[4] Peterson, op. cit., p. 422. Peterson observes that many of these New England associations “were anxious to capture the summer trade”–i.e. for those associations the city beautiful was very much a tourism strategy.
[5] Craig Turnbull, An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920: Chicago in the
[6] He later added several important works such as Improvement of Towns and Cities and his classic, Modern Civic Art.
[7] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities (New York, Scribner, 2010) pp. 16-17; the first quote is Robinson’s drawn from Improvement in City Life (Atlantic Monthly).
[8] Robinson was actually a member of the board of the American League of Civic Improvement and the American Civic Association board as well. His concepts deeply affected both the emerging planning movement and were adopted by the newly founded American Society of Landscape Architects. See Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 18-19.
[9] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis op. cit. p. 23.
[10] Peterson, op. cit, pp. 425-430.
[11] We are using Mel Scott, op. cit. and his chapter, “Boosters, Builders and Planners” as well as Mohl, op, cit. pp. 78-80
[12] Mel Scott, op. cit. p. 36.
[13] Mohl, op. cit. p. 79.
[14] Mel Scott, op. cit. p. 62.
[15] Rybczynski, op. cit. p. 25.
[16] Scott, op. cit. p. 45.
[17] Mansel G. Blackford, The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast 1890-1920 (Columbus, Ohio, the Ohio State University Press, 1993), pp. 38-40.
[18] Blackford, op. cit. pp. 40-41.
[19] Blackford, op. cit. p. 46.
[20] Blackford, op, cit. pp. 49-50
[21] Steinberger, op. cit. p. 27
Ron W. Coan 