The City Beautiful: the Younger
The “City Beautiful” is sometimes referred to in textbooks or planning histories. As a movement it was prominent for a time of uncertain beginning and no certain end, but 1897 (1893 Panic is over) and 1929 (the Depression) captures it all. Within that time and underneath that label “City Beautiful” a raft of professions, movements, individual personalities, organizations, and cities came together—each drawing from the others what they could—to achieve such ends and purposes as each desired. History imparts more coherence to the Movement than, I think, it deserves.
Economic development tagged along, attached to several professions and organizations, and cities almost always cited purposes or goals closely relevant to economic development that City Beautiful initiatives were supposed to accomplish. Economic growth, the assertion of central city dominance over its hinterland, urban hierarchy competition, and the old standby, infrastructure are important to the City Beautiful Movement as they are to economic development. The tools of our profession were essential to the City Beautiful. To make matters more difficult, the implementation of City Beautiful prescriptions (parks, boulevards, and civic centers, for example) transformed the CBD through something very akin to what later will be called slum clearance or urban renewal. City Beautiful was not an economic development movement, it shared that movement with other professions and functions, but economic development was a notable element.
The amorphously defined City Beautiful Movement housed a mélange from which a Big City, Progressive wing of our contemporary economic development profession eventually emerged. In this history, City Beautiful is treated more as a “tent”, a somewhat artificial label that housed a number of discrete and separate phenomena which came together for their own purposes and contributed in return their unique skills and perspectives. Eventually all its professions and advocates moved on, leaving only a memory of the tent, and the time spent underneath. For a shirt time (especially 1900 to 1909), however, the City Beautiful Movement had both meaning and purpose, and was “implemented” by a number of cities. By 1909-10, midstream in the City Beautiful, a counter-revolution redefined the City Beautiful, adding features, and altering its purposes so greatly that a new name, the “City Practical” replaced the older one. The counter-revolution was a struggle among professions, and the City Practical can be construed as a “victory” for economic developers. However fractured the City Beautiful as a movement, the name stuck, with City Practical, the victor, relegated to history’s trash bin.
For us the distinction between the City Beautiful first phase and the City Practical is convenient and heuristic. The early “city beautiful” phase was led by the wealthiest of corporate elites, civic associations, and Progressive professions (law, landscape/design architecture, and humilities/social scientists) joined. These structures and groups were integral members of the famous “Parks Movement” which also played an important role in planning. The trigger for “City Beautiful” was the romanticism, idealism and media momentum associated with the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In the “city practical” phase, engineers, chamber-led structural reformers, and municipal government bureaucratic elites[1] gave the boot to the earlier coalition. Active in both phases was planning—and Daniel Burnham.
Our policy cycle model is quite helpful in uncovering the dynamics behind this succession of phases and policy actors. It also reveals the less well-appreciated long-term implementation results of both phases—which in significant ways alters the historical image of the City Beautiful. Said and done, both phases of the City Beautiful were bottom-up policy, with local politics and policy-making coloring the content, timing and success of programs and initiatives pursued under the label of City Beautiful. The Movement spread across the nation, but in accordance with our policy model, its purposes and activities varied enormously across jurisdictions.
Lurking offstage, City Beautiful initiatives were the massive (1860’s) Vienna’s Ringstrasse and Haussmann renovation-modernization of Paris (the mother of all urban renewal projects[2]). Paris’s twelve grand tree-lined boulevards, laced with magnificent grand civic buildings and residences, radiated from the Arc de Triumph provided a visual benchmark and a none-too-subtle model for the City Beautiful. The assumption underlying City Beautiful was beauty, in the form of Beaux Arts architecture and tree-lined boulevards, inspired city residents to a life of moral and civic virtue[3]. The reader might keep in mind the City Beautiful borrowed hugely from continental Europe—for example, Burnham and the Washington D.C. commission travelled for six weeks across Europe, seizing upon Paris in particular as a model for the layout of our national capital. Not everyone appreciated this foreign influence. Louis Sullivan, and his famous protégé, Frank Lloyd Wright founded the “Chicago School” and the “Prairie School” or architecture to counter the City Beautiful’s more pernicious borrowings. Wright’s Prairie School impacted economic development profoundly (Levittown was based on Wright’s house and his preference for suburban living).
This chapter explores each “phase” of the City Beautiful. These phases were shaped by two movements (Parks and Civic Association), by the development of professional (law and landscape architects, engineering planning and cultural intelligentsia), and by the victory of Progressive structural reformers to establish a viable and modern municipal government. All these forces, professions and dynamics provided the turbulence which makes City Beautiful so hard to define and assess. The blast-off launching pad, the Columbian Exposition thrust City Beautiful and Daniel Burnham (and Charles Robinson) into the national limelight. To describe the variety of economic development purposes, the variation in its constituencies which affected policy-making, and to isolate how economic development was affected, a number of case studies, following a historical loose timeline, will be presented below. First, however, a description of the two Movements (Parks and Civic Associations) and the Columbian Exposition sets the stage, and introduces the celebrity actors (Olmsted, Downing, Burnham, Robinson) who played a little appreciated, but valuable role, in the evolution of our policy area/profession.
Parks Movement
Between 1850 and 1900ish, the inspiration and leadership of a charismatic Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., initiated a nation-wide ‘parks movement”.[4] Olmsted Sr. and his partners, over the next half-century constructed parks, lakes, gardens and tree-lined wide access roads constructed in many of the major cities across the nation[5]. For us, the notable feature of the parks movement was less what they did; they built parks, gardens, lakes and tree-lined roads. They also produced the first plans. The more interesting feature, I think, is the “why”. Why did they build all this good stuff? Explaining the “why” sheds light, not only on City Beautiful, but on the way of thinking that dominated early planning, social reform, and embryonic economic development until the early 1960’s—when it was shattered by riots, social disruption and the Great Society—the very things the Parks Movement intended to prevent.
Olmsted focused his attention on the upper and professional classes, not immigrant or even the middle class. His appeal to the well-to-do who held a stake in society and the system; was as a “resident” of Big Cities[6]. He argued the expansion of the industrial city separated Big City residents from nature, crushing their humanity and lowering their morality by burying them in conformity, depravities, pollution and congestion of its industrial city residential districts. A new physical order was needed to alleviate this distress—which if left unabated would surely result in social disorder, violence, crime, poverty, and … unions and revolution.
Physically, Olmstead saw the existing industrial city as divided between commerce and residential districts. The park was intended to, if not physically separate the two (as Central Park attempted), but to at least offer a third “place”, “a sharp contrast”, where all could seek relief. Parks were an instrument not only of restoring humanity to urban populations, but to maintain order and security as well[7]. The rationale for the building of parks included: community well-being, integration of the immigrant population, an antidote to negative public health externalities associated with urban growth, inequities caused by economic change, and parks necessarily required the use of government, essential to park creation, to impart moral values and alter lifestyle behavior.
They [parks advocates] 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 …. [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…[8]
The Parks Movement depended upon professional experts, and assumed nature could be reshaped through planning and technology. The rational plan or the planning process could produce designs and construction management for water distribution systems, then it could also serve as a blueprint for what should be in the future, where it should go and what standards it should satisfy. It was fundamental to the establishment of an effective park system. Politically, the muscle behind the Parks Movement was an upper class and professional middle class, acting on behalf of the less fortunate. These are hallmark characteristics of the Progressive Era, and are congruent with Progressive economic development. “This image [of the Parks Movement] evokes nothing less than Winthrop’s city upon a hill, a picture of a city-in-the-park as a corporate body joined in secular love and harmony, free from ‘all manner of vile things’”[9].
- Christine Boyer’s opening sentences in her history of American planning “Dreaming the Rational City” observed:
Near the end of the nineteenth century, an ‘instinct for improvement rolled across the cities of America, a movement rooted in personal annoyance at ugly and chaotic city conditions and a belief the urban environment was an unnatural and unhealthy location for human beings. The instinct transformed itself into a movement of benevolence to elevate through natural and beautiful surroundings the whole urban population, a movement that would minister ‘to the elemental needs of man as well as uplift intelligence and taste’.[10]
The irony, more properly the dilemma, Boyer further observed is that changing the physical environment required super-imposing a new physical environment upon the old dysfunctional one. That imposition required an “expert” to develop a rationally-constructed plan derived from a rationality-based planning process, from which an “organic unity” is constructed from the interdependent, but diverse fragments, of the overall city. “Imposing a new physical environment” meant substantial governmental involvement, with enhanced legal authority and bureaucratic capacity which reinforced the on-going structural reform movement helping its success in this Era. Ironically, the success of structural reformers will be crucial to ending the City Beautiful phase and moving it onto the City Practical phase.
The connecting point between Olmsted (who did not support the City Beautiful) and the City Beautiful follows from Olmsted’s early partner, Andrew Jackson Downing (who died at 37 in 1852). Olmsted was a landscape architect; Downing published on landscape gardening. Downing connects the Parks Movement to the Civic Improvement Movement, but also to the phenomenon, important to the City Beautiful, referred to as “Beauty”. “Beauty” inspired the human spirit, motivated change in attitudes, behavior and promoted civic pride. The City Beautiful Movement was very much into “beauty” which could be created through architectural design, such as Beaux Art, and by gardens and parks. “Beauty” fixed the City Beautiful’s attention onto aesthetics, and into higher intellectual fabrics. This more intellectual, yet personalistic sense of the natural world proved of great attraction to the upper classes who believed architectural design inspired the human spirit to higher ends.
Downing and his romantic, idealistic focus on “Beauty” as a strategy of human change inspired City Beautiful’s “other” charismatic leader, Charles Mulford Robinson. But perhaps even more important was the Civic Improvement Association Movement of which he is attributed as its founder.
[1] Specifically, public works, water-related bureaucracies, budgeters, planning departments and often mayors and legislatures. The early City Beautiful dovetailed miserably with the priorities and perspective of the structural reform movement, which shall be considered in detail in the next chapter.
[2] 60% of Paris’s buildings were alleged to have been affected by the project.
[3] How anyone but a landscape architect or a sixties hippie could actually believe this assertion is unclear to me.
[4] 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. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Olmsted, a journalist, a second so-called father of landscape architecture, an oft-times bureaucrat-public official (Sanitary District), and a pioneer in American urban planning was also a principal founder of the American parks movement.
[5] Olmsted Sr. and Vaux (and later others such as Green) designed, then constructed Central Park between 1856 and 1873 and Prospect Park in Brooklyn; Vaux constructed Elm Park in Worcester MA (1854)—said to be the first municipal park as Central Park opened in 1857; Olmsted was the first chair of the Yosemite National Park in 1864,, between 1879 and 1885 he fought to preserve the Niagara Falls park. From there Olmsted worked on projects in Buffalo, Riverside Illinois, a planned community, Montreal, Quebec, Emerald Necklace in Boston, Highland Park in Rochester, Belle Island in Detroit, Presque Isle in Marquette, Grand Necklace in Milwaukee, Cherokee Park and park system in Louisville, Forest Park in Springfield MA, Hartford, Wilmington Del, Biltmore estate in North Carolina, Trenton New Jersey, master plans for UCLA Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Chicago campus, the landscape of the U.S. Capitol Building—and a host of Chicago-related projects associated with and resulting from the Columbian Exposition. If nothing else, Olmsted’s individual effort demonstrates the national scale of the Parks Movement and its durability lasting nearly fifty years. He suffered from declining abilities (possibly dementia) in his last decade—dying in 1903. Philadelphia, Baltimore, St Louis, Omaha, Kansas City and San Francisco hired other landscape architects and developed their urban park infrastructure as well. Daniel Burnham got his start designing Chicago parks (and the “Loop”).
[6] Alan Trachtenberg, the Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, Hili and Wang, 1982), p. 108.
[7] Alan Trachtenberg, the Incorporation of America op. cit., pp. 108-109.
[8] M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: the Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, M.I.T Press, 1994), pp. 34-35
[9] Alan Trachtenberg, the Incorporation of America op. cit., p. 110. Trachtenberg makes this statement in reaction to Olmsted’s quote: “The park will provide precisely the opportunity for commonness, for free intercourse within “a simple, broad open space of greensward’ with ‘depth of wood and enough about it … to completely shut out the city from our landscapes’. Here people will assemble ‘with an evident glee in the prospect of coming together, all classes largely represented, with a common purpose … competitive with none … each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greatest happiness of each’”.
[10] M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: the Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1994), p. 3. Boyer internally quotes Mary C. Robbins, “Village Improvement Societies”, Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 79, Number 472 (January, 1897), p. 221.
Ron W. Coan 