Origins of the City Beautiful
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.
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“.[11] 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.[12]
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“[13] 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[14].
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.
The Columbian Exposition
If I had to choose one single event or episode over which our history crossed into the modern world, it would be Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. The imprint it, and things Chicago, left on our profession and American urban history over the next several decades (until the Depression), was profound, and almost without exception formative and constructive to the profession. The 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair)—the “Great White City”, led by folk such as Olmsted Sr. and Calvert Vaux (who in the Exposition fused the Parks Movement, landscape architecture and the Planning Movements into one project). The Fair protected by arguably the most successful businessman mayor of the Gilded Age, Carter Harrison Sr.[15], lifted the career of American economic development’s first celebrity innovator, Daniel Burnham. The World’s Fair established, for a quarter of a century or more, Chicago, its universities and schools of thought, as the epicenter of urban affairs, and a beacon into the urban future. “The Chicago World’s Fair symbolized the rise of the city in American life.”[16]
Say what you will, this competition was sheer municipal boosterism that would make any economic developer proud. Chicago, as the consequence of its largest annexation ever, had leaped into being the nation’s second most populous city. It was “the undisputed mistress of the West, their civic pride at once catapulted them into a contest with New York, Philadelphia and Washington for the privileged of being designated by Congress as a city to hold the proposed exposition” commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus discovery of America.[17] The Exposition was to serve as a visible and successful symbol “of order and beauty” which hopefully would convince cities to adopt physical redevelopment as a strategy for remedying the obvious physical decay of the industrial city.
As might be expected a raft of big cities competed for certification by Congress. Each city was represented by a citizen’s and businessman’s host committee; each with the support of their municipal and state governments. Each out-promised the other and the lobbying which followed gave rise to one plausible explanation for Chicago’s nick-name, the Windy City.
The businessmen of [Chicago] realistically appraised as ‘hustlers’ by the New York Times matched this outburst of municipal activity by the vigor by which they organized to vanquish all other competitors for the World’s Fair, particularly New York. The Chicago Tribune saw it ‘not so much as a fight between Chicago and New York as between West and the East’.[18]
But in its favor, Chicago had developed a park system in the 1870’s, established a sewer district embracing much of Cook County that required the city’s ten foot rise in sea level, and had started construction of a ship canal that would reverse the flow of the Chicago river. Chicago was on a roll and was not about to lose the competition[19]. The Chicago delegation’s head was Daniel Hudson Burnham.
Daniel Burnham, an upstate New York native, had established himself in Chicago as a noted architect and co-founder of a firm which was nationally-known as a practitioner of the newly emerging Chicago school of architecture. The Chicago school’s signature distinction was the skyscraper. We pick up Burnham’s career in 1890 and the Chicago World Fair. Burnham, a leader of the Chicago delegation, was later chosen as the Fair’s chief planner and director of the works (its CEO or COO). As would be said today, the Columbian Exposition was very much “his baby”; while administered by a prestigious board, Burnham fit the design and plan into his perspective (making Louis Sullivan an enemy by imposing height limits, precluding the skyscraper) and imposing a Beaux Arts style on each structure. Olmsted, deeply involved, physically organized the buildings into three geographies, each representing his earlier described commercial, home and common “park”. Unable to convince city officials to locate significant public buildings in the campus, the Exposition did not include those elements which would be the core of the later City Beautiful.
In the spring of 1893, the Great White City opened its exhibits of America’s (and Chicago’s) technological and inventive achievements. Twenty-one million people attended (Burnham apparently was Chicago’s de facto tourism director). The architecture, the unified plan, the canals, as well as the infamous “little Egypt” (a stripper), ignited the crowds, and the imagination of the world. If timing is everything, Burnham timed it right (excepting that it coincided almost exactly with the Panic of 1893). He emerged from the Fair as the nation’s best known architect, the personification of the Great White City. Virtually every American city wanted to copy the Great White City and so Burnham’s architectural firm profited immensely. Given Burnham’s natural energy and entrepreneurship, his knack for coining a phrase, and impressing an audience, Burnham would preside over the next generation’s planning and city beautiful movements.
Burnham became known as the chief figure in the City Beautiful movement, which sought the transformation of the city through the creation of neoclassical civic centers, park systems, tree-lined boulevards and plazas with fountains and statuary. This Chicagoan was the spearhead of a cause spreading throughout the country, and because of him the Windy City captured the attention of Americans entranced by the possibilities of urban planning.[20]
Charles Mulford Robinson
Taking advantage of Burnham’s City Beautiful “coolness” Charles Mulford. Robinson, a journalist by trade, injected new vitality into the civic improvement movement by linking it in 1899 with the furor created by the Great White City. Robinson’s publication of a three-part series “Improvement in City Life” in the Atlantic Monthly[21], enlarged upon the civic improvement movement by insisting that public buildings and even infrastructure could reflect beauty and that a city hall, a public library or even a tree-lined boulevard and statutes-monuments could achieve civic improvement goals and purposes:
‘When one speaks of the aesthetic side of American cities, one thinks at once of their public buildings; of their parks, statues and boulevards. But in any right conception of urban loveliness these would be only the special objects of a general and harmonious beauty’…. Robinson took the broadest possible view of what he called civic art and discussed practical ameliorations such as limiting the height of buildings, removing advertising, cleaning streets, planting trees, improving lighting and installing public art…. He emphasized that while city governments sometimes took the lead in these improvements, a variety of private organizations such as municipal art societies, park associations and (of course) civic clubs (associations), also had roles to play, in a way that anticipated today’s park conservancies and downtown business improvement districts.[22]
Robinson, according to Rybczynski, coined the label “City Beautiful”.[23] Robinson in 1901 also wrote “The Improvement of Towns and Cities” which served as the first “text” on city planning moving that policy area further down the road toward professionalization. In Robinson we can see the rather subtle coexistence between planning and certain forms of economic development.
Thanks to his writing, Robinson became a national figure and was engaged as a planning consultant by a number of cities, including Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Fort Wayne, Denver, Des Moines, Omaha and Honolulu. He was part of the team that designed a ‘Model City’ for the popular 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair; served on planning commissions in Rochester, New York and Columbus Ohio; and was appointed professor of civic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two universities in the United States to offer courses in city planning (Harvard was the other).[24]
[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”).
Footnotes
[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.
[11] 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.
[12] 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.
[13] Craig Turnbull, An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920: Chicago in the Progressive Era (Cambria Press, 2009)
[14] 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.
[15] Carter Harrison and the World’s Fair were irretrievably linked—he was assassinated two days previous to its closing. Readers might read Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (New York, Crown Publishers, 2003)
[16] Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (3rd Edition) (New York, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983), p. 260.
[17] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 31.
[18] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 32.
[19] Between 1890 and the First World War, Chicago would play a leading role in our history. The Pullman suburb, the industrial park, the Great White City, the skyscraper, Burnham, the Chicago Plan, Hull House, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the path-breaking University of Chicago disciplinal based dominance of the Policy World. I attribute much of this innovation to the wide open and highly permeable political and policy system in operation in Chicago at the time. The power and affluence of the Commercial Club, the leadership of father and son Carter Harrison, the ward-based Gray Hawk ethnic boss system with the very closest of connections to the emerging world of organized crime was a free for all into which the energetic and the affluent could pursue their initiatives. The prosperity and aggressive style which became characteristic of Chicago jelled to allow important initiatives to go forward, sufficient at least to convey momentum and success to its pioneering innovations.
[20] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: the Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 138.
[21] He later wrote several important works such as Improvement of Towns and Cities and his classic, Modern Civic Art. By 1902 civic improvement could be defined as “the promotion of outdoor art, public beauty, town, village and neighborhood improvement”, in the same year the Chautauqua institution prepared and disseminated “improvement study guides” to the association’s members. At its third convention in 1902, the League created fourteen advisory committees including ones on “municipal reform” and settlements, sanitation”. Billing itself as a “federation of organizations and individuals aiming to promote the higher life of American communities” the American League was spearheading the spread of civic associations in municipalities across the nation–to large cities such as Buffalo, Chicago, St. Paul, Milwaukee, and St. Louis and to smaller, frontier and left coast towns. A 1905 survey revealed that nearly 2500 civic associations existed[21].
[22] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities (New York, Scribner, 2010) pp. 16-17; the first quote is Robinson’s drawn from Improvement in City Life (Atlantic Monthly).
[23] Robinson was actually a member of the board of the American League of Civic Improvement and the American Civic Association board as well. His concepts deeply affected both the emerging planning movement and were adopted by the newly founded American Society of Landscape Architects. See Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 18-19. Wilson will credit the title to Harrisburg’s Ms. Dock. I have no idea which is the more correct and will assume both were first.
[24] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis op. cit. p. 23.
Ron W. Coan 