Cleveland: City Beautiful as “a City on a Hill”
The most tangible tie with Downing’s romanticism sprung from a 1895 design competition advocated in 1895 by young Cleveland architects (Cleveland Architectural Club) who, seeking to imitate the Columbian Exposition cluster of buildings grouped around a body of water, called for a design competition. They believed the mass and scale of grouped government and public buildings (libraries and museums) and monuments would facilitate “the transaction of public affairs” and instill public order and pride.[1] This so-called ‘municipal art” approach eventually 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 relating governmental structures to each other/cluster and the Ritchie-led Cleveland Chamber of Commerce showed its 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’ …. Through this and other structures did not materialize until after the turn of the century, many civic leaders had already accepted the proposition that grandeur, convenience and efficiency could be combined in a stately arrangement of public buildings.[2] 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”.
Cleveland’s politics subsequently went under some stress and strains as the Hanna state Republican machine clashed with a charismatic, but rogue mayor. With victory of Progressive social reform mayor Tom Johnson (see next chapter) in 1900 things changed fast. With urging from the Chamber, Burnham was hired to design a new City Beautiful-style railroad state. Burnham by this point had secured immense publicity through his role in bringing City Beautiful to Washington D.C. (see below). With authorization from the state government in June 1902, the commission of architects (which included Burnham) was reconstituted (also included was John M. Carrere, the chief architect for the 1901 Buffalo World Fair).
The Commission produced a Cleveland-version 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 very short order Cleveland became the symbol of the new urban order rising throughout the nation. Celebrated and cited in the journals, newspapers and media of the day for “pioneering a new conception of a municipality”, “the best-governed city in the nation”, and for being “fifty years ahead of most cities”.[3] 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. The civic center was not only a symbol of local pride; it was also a tangible municipal reform.”[4]
With the nation’s media lights shining on Cleveland, the new shining city on a hill (or Lake Erie), the civic center of Cleveland became identified as 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 street car 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….. The civic center was the keystone of this vision. Its mall provided a communal space for civic celebrations and its uniform cornice lines symbolized the rejection of individualism and competition”.[5]
But all was never really perfect in Camelot. The policy implementation stage did not go exactly 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.”[6] 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. After an initial burst (the federal building completed in 1910, 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. The railroad station was built five blocks away from the mall, and not quite so City Beautiful in 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. “Yet [the Cleveland civic center] fared better than many others conceived in fulsome days of the City Beautiful movement. Only a lone city hall or courthouse bears witness to the enthusiasm with which some were begun; and an incalculable number remained nothing but architectural drawings”.[7] The City Practical had intervened—a story that will be told a few pages from now.
But fear not, Daniel Burnham had already moved on–to Washington D.C.
Footnotes
[1] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p.43.
[2] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p.43.
[3] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: the Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest, op. cit., p.139.
[4] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p.63.
[5] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: the Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest, op. cit., pp. 139-140.
[6] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p.62.
[7] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p.62.
Ron W. Coan 