CITY-BUILDING INNOVATION: PLANNED COMMUNITIES
Since the Gilded Age cities were built from scratch to impart values, shape lives and behaviors or to house a firm or jurisdiction’s workforce—sometimes both. The “planned community” is an element of social control in this; either that or a desire to reform society, economy and/or politics—there are examples of both to be discovered. Going way beyond a simple grid, profit motives of real estate speculators, railroad development, city-building booster elites and religious or socialist communities, there is literally a “plan”—or at least an image of the final result. The planned community is congruent with the era’s “physical” paradigm. Planned communities came in forms congruent with each of our two ships, Privatist and Progressivist.
Privatist initiatives tend toward “worker control”—in the Gilded Age to prevent unionization, an accessible and pliable workforce laced with capitalist “do good” altruism. Progressive Planned Communities—more highfalutin’ in their aims, and more profound in their philosophy—rejected the Big City as a proper environment for a family and sought, in these years, to recreate the natural environment of the old village: an environment that diverts stressed immigrants from violence and social revolution. Planned communities are a distinctive approach to city-building. In this section, I will discuss two forms of planned community city-building which appeared in the Gilded and Progressive Ages: the company town and the garden city.
The Company Town
Traditionally, company towns are associated with rural communities dominated by extractive industries, and housing poor folk who happily sing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.” Examples like Carolina “mill towns” were consciously set up to house the workforce for new textile mills (discussed in the next chapter). These planned communities are undisputedly Privatist in nature; but even Privatists pursue moral and individual empowerment through values/family/behavior change.
The first major example (1880s) of such a company town was built by George Pullman (Pullman Palace Car Company), securing a location 12 miles from Chicago’s CBD loop (now part of Chicago’s South Side, one of the city’s 77 community areas). Pullman, with the best of intentions, established a “suburb” to provide suitable, clean and affordable worker housing adjacent to his car factory.11 Employees in his factory were required to live in the housing. His ideas on how people should live their lives, the values and behaviors they ought to practice (no alcohol), thoroughly permeated his housing endeavor. Like most good intentions, things didn’t work out. In 1894, during a great Panic, worker and union resistance to large-scale layoffs/wage cuts culminated in the bloody Pullman Strike. Federal troops crushed the strike. In 1896 the Illinois Supreme Court required separating Pullman ownership from the municipality. Chicago in 1889 annexed major portions of the suburbs, and within a decade bought the rest.
Along the same lines, in 1891 lumber king Turlington Harvey started his own suburb, Harvey Illinois. Modeling his designs after Pullman, he actively promoted his housing model to factory owners and workers who shared his evangelistic Protestant values. Harvey was a “temperance town,” and social reformer Susan B. Anthony lectured there. The religious tone and temperance were soon repudiated in an 1895 referendum. The city somehow prospered, and today is a Chicago suburb of 25,000 residents. Another example of Chicago-based corporate city-building was the 1906 United States Steel Corporation’s founding of Gary Indiana—initially home for its Gary Works factory. US Steel acted more as a developer than a reformer in this city-building endeavor. The original plan created a grid-based, privately marketed city of hopefully 200,000. In 1960 Gary housed nearly 180,000 residents, but in 2010 only 80,000 remained. With surprising frequency company-planned city-building sprang up across the United States after the twentieth century’s first decade. These second-wave projects were consciously planned communities complete with architects and plans intent on Progressive-style social welfare and industrial relations. Perhaps the first example was the 1915 Indian Hills-North Village Massachusetts built by the Norton Grinding Company (Crawford, 1996). Others followed: Carnegie Steel and McDonald Ohio,
Hershey PA, Alcoa Tennessee, Sugar Land TX. Some were quite successful; labeled “satellite cities” by urban scholars, they appeared mostly in the South and West— Birmingham Alabama, for example, but also Lackawanna New York (Green, 2010). Sporadically, they still appear (Lake Buena Vista, Disney World and Ybor City cigars); occasionally they appear in the news, such as when Millinocket in Millinocket Maine closed down (2014). Several hundred company towns still exist at the time of writing.
The Garden City Movement and Frederic Howe
The garden city is credited to Sir Ebenezer Howard, a Brit who in 1902 founded the first real garden city, Letchworth (England). Howard shockingly named his suburban development “Garden City,” with the name supposedly derived from Chicago’s motto, Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden). Howard’s path-breaking book of 1898, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, was retitled Garden Cities of To-Morrow in its 1902 reprint (Rybczynski, 2010, p. 30). The defining characteristic of the garden city was its rejection of the central city/industrial city as the preferred community of the industrial age. “The function of Letchworth and the garden cities that followed—indeed their chief attraction—was to serve as alternatives to the crowded industrial city. (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 31–2) This rejection is fundamental to this city-building strategy.
Howard’s garden city, a giant leap forward for urban planning, evolved into the Garden City Association, which morphed into Britain’s Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA). Progressive Era linkup of garden cities with America came through several reform Progressives, notably Frederic C. Howe. Howe believed the garden city to be a break with the Privatist City Efficient, and he characterized the garden city as more than a rejection of the industrial city. Howe saw the garden city as a complete repudiation of the nightmare of private profit at the expense of human well-being.
Howe was an interesting fellow whose impact and prominence has been lost in the mists of American history. A student of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, he earned a PhD, became a lawyer and joined a Cleveland law firm. He quickly became secretary of that city’s Municipal Association and then served a term on the city council (1901-03) working with social reform mayor Tom Johnson (and participating in Cleveland’s City Beautiful initiative). That began an off-and-on political career.
Influential in Cleveland’s hiring of Daniel Burnham (and his “Group Plan”), Howe wrote several influential works and dozens of articles. Moving to New York City in 1911, he was a principal founder of the National Progressive Republican League dedicated to the election of La Follette. Howe also served in both the Wilson administration and in FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Agency as a special advisor to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace (FDR’s future Vice-President and later a presidential candidate). Howe in the course of his life infused direction and content into urban planning, and his writings encapsulated core principles of what would become a wing of American community development.
Howe saw the garden city as a more humane urban form created through planning. His was not an attempt to reform the industrial city; he intended to replace it with his garden city suburb (Boyer, 1986, p. 41). His garden city did not merely integrate nature with human residence; it substituted planning for private profit. Howe believed he could create a new urban form built without the destructive features injected into the industrial city by profit and developers. The evils and human depravities created by the industrial city were “economic in nature,” creating a physical landscape that dehumanized its residents.
We have generally assumed that the city problem was a personal one: that it was a problem of men, of charters, of political machinery … Reform has been directed to securing efficient honest officials [the city efficient movement and anti-machine reform] … The city problem [however] is primarily an economic not a personal problem … The health, comfort, convenience, happiness of the people is intimately bound up with the material side of the city. Much of the poverty is the product of our neglect to control the economic foundations of the community. The houses we live in, the streets … distribution of wealth, the cost of living and the vice and crime of the community … are intimately connected with the way the city is built. (Howe, 1912, p. 590)
Remove the profit distortion, substitute a plan which ameliorates the ills of the industrial city, and the reader has Howe’s recipe for a “sustainable” urban form: the garden suburb.
A million men are thinking only of their individualist lot lines, of their inviolable right to do as they will with their own, irrespective of its effect on the community. We do not think beyond our own doorsteps, we do not think in city terms. We have exalted the rights of the individual above the common weal. Our cities have been permitted to grow with no concern for the future and with no thought of the community or the terrible costs which this uncontrolled development creates … Our cities have been planned by a hundred different land owners each desiring to secure the quickest possible speculative returns … Streets are worthy of as much thought as a cathedral, which is to endure for centuries … Every bit of land should be allocated and planned by the city rather than by the owner, in order to insure the harmonious growth of the community. (Howe, 1912, pp. 590–91)
It was left to others—Marsh, Atterbury and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.—to design and construct Howe’s first American garden city concept: Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York. Started in 1908, Forest Hills was funded by the newly created Russell Sage Foundation, which earmarked one-sixth of its endowment to the project. With no restrictive covenants, the 142-acre site, linked to Manhattan by the Long Island electrified rail (a 15-minute ride from Penn Station), plans projected a population of 5000 housed in mostly detached single-family homes, with apartment buildings, row houses and twins. The town square was the commercial center, behind which was a village green with curvilinear tree-lined parkways that “snaked their way” to the periphery: “The overall effect recalls a medieval Bavarian town” (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 33–6).
Similar style garden cities were constructed over the next several decades.12 From these garden city experiences, a “new planned cities’ FDR New Deal initiative carried the planned communities strategy to its next level.
Ron W. Coan 