St. Louis: A Sign of the Future
While it fits badly into the above time frame, St. Louis in the first decade witnessed a major departure from the orthodox City Beautiful. Its departure, however, presaged the direction in which the nation would shortly follow in the next decades. St. Louis had competed hard for the Columbian Exposition and obviously had lost. It tried again eleven years later (1904) with its “Louisiana Purchase Exposition”, a world’s fair that “dazzled visitors with an array of neoclassical palaces. Yet the St Louis Exposition went Chicago one better and offered a ‘Model Street’ lined with model municipal buildings erected by various American cities to house their exhibits …. [This Model Street was intended] to create higher standards of street equipment and city arrangement by practical suggestions from experts and by comparison of methods in vogue in American cities. … Located at the center of the Model Street was the Civic Pride Monument, a sculptural expression of the spirit emerging not only in Chicago, but throughout the United States.”[2]
Of interest to our tale is what followed the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. In 1905 the Civic League of St Louis formed a committee to draft a comprehensive image for the city’s future development. Two years later (1907) the plan it delivered was a path-breaker. The first part of the plan followed the conventional, Burnham, City Beautiful formula for creating “civic orderliness and beauty”. After all the plan observed “’A city cannot … maintain a high commercial standing [prosperity and growth] unless it maintained at the same time a high civic life’. A metropolis that looked great would draw visitors and commerce; a town that appeared down at the heels would lure few dollars.”[3] What followed in the plan was to create the civic center—in each of its various neighborhoods.
The proposal to establish a number of neighborhood civic centers was revolutionary. It was based on the committee’s belief that neighborhood civic centers “would tend towards the development of better citizenship”. Neighborhood-based schools, libraries, police stations, and bath houses, clustered around a park with a playground, would not only provide a focus for the neighborhood, but foster neighborhood civic pride as well. “It is in relation to the immigrant that the neighborhood center would perform one of its most important functions …. Why not bring the foreigner in contact with the best of our civilization, and teach him that government is maintained for his welfare.”[4]
Unfortunately, it never worked out and the plan was not implemented. Still, St. Louis departure brought to light the forces of change operating alongside the orthodox City Beautiful Movement—forces which were not yet sufficiently strong to take the lead, yet would in a relatively short time auger the new directions of change for urban policy and even economic development,
[1] Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, op. cit. p. 25
[2] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p.144.
[3] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., pp.144-145.
[4] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p.145.
Ron W. Coan 