Harrisburg: City Beautiful as a Comprehensive Infrastructure Plan
Our second and final first phase City Beautiful case study contrasts the experience of Kansas City with that of Harrisburg Pennsylvania. Harrisburg (population 40,000) in 1890 was one fourth the size of Kansas City, and the reaction of the city’s business community to parks and boulevards was on 180 degree opposite. The city beautiful initiative was led throughout by Mira Lloyd Dock, an irrepressible, forceful and impressive advocate whose charismatic personality fostered cooperation, not division. Well-educated and bred, Ms Dock embraced forestry, landscape architecture and conservation. She was a founder of Harrisburg’s civic association club, and served as chair of the Town’s Department of Forestry and Town Improvement. Although, Harrisburg had been the state capital since 1806, population growth was rather subdued, and the city, frankly, was a rather grubby affair, riddled with water pollution, unpaved streets, constant flooding, with “culm, washed down from anthracite mines … which brought [a] murky, foul-smelling liquid to spigots in Harrisburg”. A swamp on its northern border added to the city’s delights.
Dock’s campaign began in late 1900. Speaking before the Board of Trade, she delivered a one hundred slide presentation, in which she used the expression “City Beautiful” (Wilson believes this is the first time used publically). So energetic and compelling was the presentation, appealing chiefly to civic pride “and an interurban competitive spirit”, she made the case that parks benefited all classes, and called for bath houses, and playgrounds as well for the working class. Hers was a parks movement for all, not just the Nelson’s, Meyers and the Kessler’s From the outset, Harrisburg’s parks were but one, a vital one to be sure, physical reform to benefit all classes that resided in Harrisburg.
The newspaper and the Board of Trade embraced her presentation and after a series of meetings announced in April 1901 a comprehensive plan of improvements that attacked the various negative features of the city. A city plan of improvements shortly followed. The Plan “reinforced Dock’s themes of beautification, recreation and citizen activism. It asked for parks, pure water, paved streets, a city hall, and increased taxes to pay for them”. It included a sewer to address pollution, and converted the swamp into a proposed park. While Dock was the only female, the Harrisburg business community stood united around the plan, and campaigned to achieve voter and council approvals. The business elite incorporated the Harrisburg League for Municipal Improvements to run the campaign and conduct the studies. With the newspaper support, private funding to support the campaign and to pay for engineering and planning studies to support the individual elements of the plan, the council approval followed as did voter approval (3-1) of the bond issuance. The dominating theme echoed urban hierarchy competition, which seemingly was common in most city beautiful campaigns. Women and the Civic Association was especially active. The role of the Civic Club, led by Dock, “paved the way” for success.
Fifteen years later all the elements of the plan had been successfully funded and installed. Three additional bond issuances were approved previous to 1915 to finance the Plan.“Four and one-half miles of streets were paved by 1902, and more than seventy-four by 1915. Filtered water, intercepting sewers, and flood control (dam) had raised municipal sanitation …..Harrisburg park acreage grew from 46 in 1902 to 958 in 1915. A 140 acre lake in Wildwood Park, the old … swamp, served recreational needs while it impounded floodwaters”. A Capitol Park extension soon followed and band platforms, swimming facilities, ball fields, grandstands, a nine-hole golf course, and playgrounds were constructed in the parks[1]. The various city and private organizations cooperated throughout. The Harrisburg first phase City Beautiful was defined differently than Kansas City, policy in the two cities was shaped by different players, with Harrisburg manifestly a more open process, and the business community involved in first phase city beautiful policy was cohesive and sustained in its involvement, as opposed to narrow, fragmented, and not infrequently intermittent. Size of city may be a factor in the policy system, as well as possible differences in political culture within the business elites.
Footnotes
[1] William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, op. cit., p. 139. The Harrisburg case study is also drawn from Wilson: Chapter 6 “An Elite Campaign for Beauty and Utility in Harrisburg”.
[2] Blackford, op. cit. pp. 40-41.
[3] 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.
Ron W. Coan 