Civic Improvement Associations
The City Beautiful Movement was predated by yet another mass movement: the Civic Improvement Association. Both Civic Improvement Association and Parks Movements rested on a shared foundation. Each, in its own way, believed the physical form (buildings, parks, flowers, neat streets, infrastructure, houses, schools, playgrounds)—if designed appropriately, could alter human behavior and correct dysfunctionality caused by the industrial city and the impoverished and hard-put industrial worker. The physical landscape could not only inhibit crime, facilitate economic growth, and counter poverty, but it could change how people think and feel. The “right” physical landscape could make better people, more contented citizens; it could forestall revolution and social/political change.
Let’s start at the beginning, more or less, with the civic improvement movement. The civic or village improvement movement first appeared around 1848, personified by Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing, considered by some to be the founder of American landscape architecture, encouraged city dwellers to establish “rural improvement societies for encouraging tree planting and tasteful architecture“.[1] Downing believed a beautiful home and house created sound moral fabric for the family and built strong communities. The first known group to form was 1853 Stockbridge Massachusetts, and it became “the prototype for all that followed“. Massachusetts by the 1880’s had twenty-eight associations, Connecticut between fifty and sixty. Associations spread first thru the Middle Atlantic, then South East and by 1900 reached California.[2]
The neighborhood-based civic improvement association, often led by, and disproportionately populated with upper middle class women, many of which were often adherents of other Progressive movements (temperance, abolitionism). Civic improvement associations arose from grass-roots, almost spontaneously, in smaller cities and towns. Their views and purposes varied enormously from region to region, and even city to city. Both Richard Hofstadter and Craig Turnbull later described these civic associations as “the coexistence of illiberalism and reform“[3] in that many used beautification and real estate techniques to keep undesirables out of their areas. In later years of the City Beautiful (post 1910), early Black migration deeply affected the policy and activities of these associations. To counter this trend of “conservative parochialism” which from the start permeated civic association movement, Progressive reformers created a national association, (1900) the American League of Civic Improvement. The League first located in Springfield Illinois, in 1902 moved to Chicago, and finally located in Washington D.C. in 1910[4].
Small town and third tier city civic associations differed radically from their Big City counterparts. Newspapers, Progressive professional leaders, and socially progressive wealthy business owners and old money usually formed their own organizations. The Big City overlap with landscape architecture and the parks movements was extensive—it could be argued in many cities the parks movement moved lock, stock and barrel into the civic association movement. In the Big Cities, across the nation, these civic associations were filled with upper crust and rising professionals; this wealth, especially when newspaper owners joined, enjoyed considerable access into the municipal policy system, independent of chambers. In any event, the civic improvement association became the structural vehicle of choice, called by various names, and used by small city garden clubs and Big City one per centers alike during the early City Beautiful period.
[1] 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; Downing possibly was the author of the idea which led to Central Park, he also brought Calvert Vaux from Europe to the United States, and was possibly the first recorded advocate for establishing state agricultural colleges. He and Vaux worked on projects such as the Smithsonian Mall and White House gardens under Millard Fillmore.
[2] Peterson, The City Beautiful Movement , op. cit., p. 422. Peterson observes that many New England associations “were anxious to capture the summer trade”–i.e. the city beautiful was very much a tourism strategy.
[3] Craig Turnbull, An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920: Chicago in the Progressive Era (Cambria Press, 2009)
[4] The American League of Civic Association merged with the American Park and Outdoor Association in 1904, changing its name to the American Civic Association. The American Civic Association merged in 1935 with the National Conference on City Planning to form the American Planning and Civic Association. In 1970 along with a number of other organizations it merged to form the National Urban Coalition.
Ron W. Coan 