San Francisco:
For all the success of Burnham’s he and his comprehensive plan stumbled badly in San Francisco. Its failure there makes visible the contrast and clash between the City Beautiful Progressive plan and Privatist economic development. It begins in 1904 when San Francisco merchants and a former mayor, desiring the city to issue municipal bonds to finance a hospital, sewers, schools, streets, library, jail and playground and parks improvements. 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 …”) all was to be achieved through a comprehensive plan which would “elevate the public taste” and serve as a “great advertisement for our city”[1].
To this end the reformers founded a civic improvement association (AIASF) and AIASF invited Daniel Burnham to town. Burnham brought along his assistant, Edward Bennett (who would later devise Portland’s comprehensive plan). In 1905, Burnham and Bennett produced a wonderful plan following faithfully city beautiful and McMillan Commission principles. In the midst of the discussion on the Burnham plan, San Francisco conveniently (April, 1906) almost totally burned down due to the famous 1906 earthquake. While terrible for the city and its populace, the virtually complete destruction of the past built environment created an opportunity for the plan’s speedy approval and implementation. To the surprise of Burnham and the AIASF the plan went nowhere. The city was eventually rebuilt with little or no correspondence to the outlines and principles of the Burnham plan[2].
Footnotes
[1] Blackford, op. cit. pp. 40-41.
[2] The San Francisco City Beautiful experience will be discussed in a future chapter on the West. The experience of Portland and Seattle will also be assessed at that time as well. San Francisco is inserted into this chapter as it is important in understanding the legacy of Burnham and the total City Beautiful.
Afterwards
Other cities implemented City Beautiful projects over the next few years, including Detroit, Pittsburgh and, as mentioned, Philadelphia. Cities out West, and in the South (Dallas) followed along, with less success, as well (to be discussed in later chapters). Prestigious colleges, such as Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), Rice (Houston), Southern Methodist (Dallas), California Institute of Technology (Los Angeles) and the University of Colorado (Denver) designed their campus around city beautiful principles. Train stations, built in imitation of Union Station, were constructed in New York, Kansas City, Dallas and Los Angeles, and Philadelphia,[1] The City Beautiful Movement was in its heyday during the first decade of the twentieth century.
By the end of the decade, however, pushback was sharp. It started in 1909 at the First National Conference on City Planning and hit harder at the Second. By the middle of the second decade, with America increasingly likely to join into the European War, the atmosphere seriously changed.
The shift from City Beautiful to City Practical played out in the second decade. The transition appeared as professional-based policy “swirls” such as planning, housing, playgrounds, neighborhoods which exposed the limitations and extravagance, not to mention the narrow policy constituencies, behind the City Beautiful. In the context of our model, the Policy World chipped away at the chief Practitioner paradigm of the era, finding support in various cities during the second decade. More than anything, during this decade, City Beautiful increasingly clashed with a new movement, the structural reform movement, which valued governmental structural change which produced efficiency (meaning usually lower taxes) and sound management.
Structural reform increasingly diverted much upper business crust support away from City Beautiful, into reform swirls listed above. If the City Beautiful was truly the last hurrah of the Gilded Age, than the Progressive Era was firmly asserting itself into state and sub-state policy during the second decade. The “times were a changing”. Planning and economic development incorporated “the social impulses that had crept into the City Beautiful movement as it became concerned with playgrounds, transportation and [railroad] terminals. … The playground movement particularly deepened the social undercurrents … and gave democratic colorization”.[2]
The shift to the City Practical was not solely the result of the shift in the times toward Progressivism. It was also the natural consequence of inherent flaws in the City Beautiful. Money for parks and beaux arts elaborate buildings, a beautiful and attractive city, was no matter to the Burnham Commercial Club elites, but it was more a matter to merchant associations and social reformers who saw these expenditures as misplaced and a poor priority given the needs of the Age. That bond issuance eventually raised taxes mattered to most tax payers. By the second decade, many social reformer mayors that had embraced City Beautiful in the early years of their administration had moved on, or were about to move on. Instead of “beauty” mayors turned to governmental structural reforms (budgeting), paving of streets, and planning—not just any kind of planning, but comprehensive planning. Necessary to comprehensive planning was what today is called “data-driven” economic development. Surveys, statistics, analysis and the like provided no sustenance to City Beautiful, but was the lifeblood for the reform policy swirls[3]. The shift (mostly) during the second decade is told by case examples cited below.
Footnotes
[1] Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, op. cit. p. 25
[2] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 123.
[3] As I am wont to do—structural reform will be discussed in the next chapter—and we will delve further into early twentieth century data-driven economic development by a new EDO-type, the municipal research bureau. We will do so in context of the municipal policy system from which they originated, and which they brought into existence.
Ron W. Coan 