MOVING DOWN THE PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT ROAD: THE CITY BEAUTIFUL
The “City Beautiful” as a movement hit our Big Cities sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. Its roots lie in the nineteenth century, and it stretched into the 1920s. Its most visible consequences were park systems, road networks and a modern central business district with an upgraded governmental presence. The civic center was a common new addition to the downtown. City Beautiful initiatives were inspired by the massive (1860s) Ringstrasse in Vienna and Haussmann’s renovation-modernization of Paris (the mother of all urban renewal projects—60 percent of Paris’s buildings were affected). Paris’s 12 grand tree-lined boulevards, laced with magnificent civic buildings and residences, radiated from the Arc de Triomphe and provided a visual benchmark and a none-too-subtle model for the City Beautiful.
City Beautiful borrowed hugely from continental Europe—for example, Burnham and the Washington DC commission travelled for six weeks across Europe, seizing upon Paris in particular as a model for the layout of our national capital. But not everyone appreciated this foreign influence. Louis Sullivan and his famous protégé Frank Lloyd Wright (founders of the Chicago and Prairie Schools) repudiated City Beautiful’s foreign borrowings. The assumption underlying City Beautiful was that beauty, in the form of Beaux Arts architecture and tree-lined boulevards, inspired city residents to a life of moral and civic virtue.
Underneath its characteristic physical developments, City Beautiful encompassed a raft of professions, movements, personalities and organizations—each drawing from City Beautiful what they could to achieve their ends. History imparts more coherence to the movement than, I think, it deserves. Economic development, loosely attached to several professions/organizations, and lacking self-identity, played a major role in City Beautiful. Chambers again provided much of the political will and muscle that sustained City Beautiful initiatives. Progressive social reform mayors such as Cleveland’s Tom Johnson embraced City Beautiful as one of their signature initiatives—so did Philadelphia machine mayors and Harrisburg business structural reformers.
Economic growth, the assertion of central city dominance over hinterland (an emerging form of urban hierarchical competition) and old standbys, infrastructure and CBD, are central to understanding the City Beautiful movement. Importantly, City Beautiful’s use of ED tools transformed the CBD through something akin to slum clearance or urban renewal; and the governmental capacity that came with the City Efficient allowed municipal departments to take a lead in implementation. City Beautiful was not pure economic development but, unheralded, economic development played a centerpiece role.
In 1909–10, midstream in the City Beautiful period, a counter-movement redefined City Beautiful, altering its purposes such 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 physical economic developers. 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 humanities/social scientists). These groups were integral members of the famous Parks Movement which played an important role in planning. The catalyst for “City Beautiful” was the romanticism, idealism and media momentum generated by the 1893 Columbian Exposition.
In the City Practical phase engineers, chamber-led structural reformers and municipal government bureaucratic elites gave the boot to the earlier coalition. Cost, efficiency, functionalism and frugality were critical values. Active in both phases was Daniel Burnham, arguably economic development’s (and planning’s) first national celebrity.
Origins of City Beautiful: The Parks Movement
Between 1850 and 1900ish a charismatic and peripatetic Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. initiated, then personified, a nationwide “Parks Movement.”8 Over a half-century Olmsted and his partners constructed parks, lakes, gardens and tree-lined wide-access boulevards in many major cities across the nation.9 For us, the notable feature of the parks movement was less what they did: they built “stuff” and they also produced the first plans. The more interesting question is why? Explaining the “why” sheds light not only on City Beautiful but also on the way of thinking that dominated early planning, social reform, much of our early community development approach and physical economic development until the early 1960s when it was shattered by riots, social disruption and the Great Society—ironically the very things the Parks Movement intended to prevent.
Olmsted focused his attention on the upper and professional classes, not immigrants or even the middle class. His appeal was to the well-to-do who held a stake in society, Big Cities and the “system” (Trachtenberg, 2007, p. 108). He argued that the industrial city’s physical/population growth separated Big City residents from nature, crushing their humanity and lowering morality by burying them in the conformity, depravity, pollution and congestion of its residential districts. People needed someplace to escape to—parks and gardens. A new physical landscape was needed to alleviate this distress which, if left unabated, would surely result in social disorder, violence, crime and poverty, and unions, revolution—and socialism.
The connecting point between Olmsted and the City Beautiful is his early partner, Andrew Jackson Downing (who died at 37 in 1852). Downing, a landscape gardener, connects the Parks Movement to the Civic Improvement Movement—but also to City Beautiful’s early defining purpose, “Beauty.” Beauty inspired the human spirit, motivated change in attitudes, behavior and promoted civic pride. In the nineteenth century, Downing’s beauty inspired City Beautiful’s “other” charismatic leader, Charles Mulford Robinson.
Physically, Olmstead saw the existing industrial city as divided between commercial and residential districts. The park was intended to 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 of maintaining order and security as well (Trachtenberg, 2007, pp. 108–9). 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; and inequities caused by economic change. To be created parks required government, and thus became a partner in creating moral values and altering negative 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 … [Believing] 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 … Islands of nature had to be inserted into the artificial urban milieu. (Boyer, 1986, pp. 34–5)
The Parks Movement relied on professional experts, and assumed nature could be reshaped through planning and technology. This is the basis underlying “rational planning” that produced landscape designs as well as water distribution systems. As M. Christine Boyer’s Dreaming the Rational City observed, the parks movement’s changing the physical environment required superimposing a new physical environment upon the old dysfunctional one, and 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 (Boyer, 1986, p. 3). Mankind could conquer nature and change human behavior—but that required rationality, experts and plans.
Politically, the muscle behind the Parks Movement was an upper class and professional middle class acting on behalf of the less fortunate. These are hallmarks 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’” (Trachtenberg, 2007, p. 110).
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 World’s Columbian Exposition or World’s Fair. The 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair or “Great White City”) led by Olmsted Sr. and Calvert Vaux fused the Parks Movement, landscape architecture and the Planning Movements into one project—the Exposition. The Exposition also advanced the career of America’s first celebrity ED innovator, Daniel Burnham (its COO). Indeed, the Chicago World’s Fair symbolized nothing less than the rise of the city in American life (Glabb and Brown, 1983, p. 260).
On the eve of the Fair Chicago, as the consequence of its largest annexation ever, had become the nation’s second most populous city and “the undisputed mistress of the West, [whose] civic pride … 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 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America (Scott, 1969, p. 31). The Exposition was intended to serve as a visible symbol “of order and beauty” which would convince other cities to adopt physical redevelopment to remedy the obvious physical decay of the industrial city. A boatload of Big Cities competed for certification by Congress, each city represented by a businessman’s host committee and each supported by its municipal and state governments. Out-promising the other, shameless boosterism and intense lobbying followed—giving credibility to one plausible explanation for Chicago’s nickname, 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.” (Scott, 1969, p. 32)
In its favor, Chicago had developed a park system (1870s) and established a county-wide sewer district that required the city’s 10-foot rise in sea level that prompted 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. The head of Chicago’s delegation was Daniel Hudson Burnham.
Burnham, an upstate New York native, had established himself in Chicago as a noted architect and co-founder of a firm which was a nationally known practitioner of the newly emerging Chicago School of architecture. The Chicago School’s signature distinction was the skyscraper. Burnham was later chosen as the Fair’s chief planner and director of the works (its COO). The Exposition was very much “his baby.” Burnham fit design and plan into his perspective (making Louis Sullivan, the father of skyscrapers, an enemy by imposing height limits that precluded skyscrapers) by insisting upon a Paris-like Beaux Arts style. Olmsted 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 on the campus, the Exposition did not include those elements that would later be the core of the City Beautiful.
In the spring of 1893 the Great White City opened: 21 million people attended. The architecture, the unified plan and 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 Burnham’s architectural firm profited immensely. Given his natural energy and entrepreneurship, his knack for coining a phrase and impressing an audience, Burnham presided over the next generation’s planning and economic development/city beautiful initiatives.
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. (Teaford, 1993, p. 138)
Charles Mulford Robinson
Taking advantage of Burnham’s City Beautiful “awesomeness,” journalist Charles Mulford Robinson injected vitality into the movement, linking it to the Great White City.10 Robinson’s Atlantic Monthly three-part series “Improvement in City Life” enlarged upon civic improvement, insisting that public buildings and infrastructure could reflect beauty, and that a city hall, a public library or tree-lined boulevards and statues/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 … 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 civic clubs, also had roles to play. (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 16–17)
It was Robinson who coined the phrase “City Beautiful” (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 18– 19), and his The Improvement of Towns and Cities (1901) served as the first text on city planning. In Robinson we see the rather subtle coexistence between planning and aspects 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). (Rybczynski, 2010, p. 23)
The post-Columbian Exposition City Beautiful, wrapped around parks and tree-lined boulevards chasing something called “beauty,” doesn’t sound very economic development; but the purposes behind beauty and parks were very much economic development. And the movement wasted precious little time moving away from parks and beauty into CBD modernization and rationalization of urban transportation infrastructure. The ultimate, often unarticulated goal of City Beautiful—one that would dominate economic development for the next 60–70 years—was to counter any diffusion of central city power and strengthen the Big City’s hold over its expanding hinterland.
The underlying goals of post-1910 City Beautiful, seen clearly in Burnham’s Chicago Plan, was to make the CBD the capital of the region though development of an enlarged cluster of public buildings, “the civic center”; and, through a rationalized transportation network, to tie the downtown to its most remote peripheries. Eventually the City Beautiful, like many initiatives, “got mugged” by voters upset about high taxes and concerned with other issues. The City Beautiful shifted in response to the City Practical—with a downtown focus and diminished concept of the civic center. Still, implementation of the City Beautiful/Practical continued through the 1920s, and was put to rest only when the Depression knocked at city doors.
Cleveland: City Beautiful as “a City on a Hill”
The most tangible tie with Downing’s romanticism sprang from an 1895 design competition promoted by young Cleveland architects (Cleveland Architectural ClubRobinson). The Club sought to imitate the Columbian Exposition cluster of buildings grouped around a body of water. They believed that mass and scale of grouped government/public buildings (libraries and museums) and monuments would facilitate “the transaction of public affairs” and instill public order and pride (Scott, 1969, p. 43). This so-called “municipal art” approach formalized into Cleveland’s “Group Plan.” The Group Plan anticipated that clustered government buildings would create an urban park-like beauty that awed the spirit to produce hope, civic pride and enhanced productivity.
The Cleveland chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) endorsed the general idea of clustering governmental structures, and the Ritchie-led Cleveland chamber showed interest in the “construction of a new city hall, courthouse, public library and post office around a beautiful park extending from the heart of the downtown area to the lake, all that was needed to impel the city toward its famous ‘Group Plan’ (Scott, 1969, p. 43). This cluster of government and public functions grouped together to centralize the public function in the central business district of a major city is what is meant by a civic center. In the later years of the City Beautiful, the civic center was a multi-function building that unified a number of governmental/civic services/functions under one roof.
Mayor Tom Johnson in 1900 embraced the concept. With urging from the chamber, Burnham (fresh from his Washington plan) was hired to design a massive City Beautiful-style railroad station. With authorization from the state in June 1902, the commission of architects (which included Burnham) was reconstituted (also included was John M. Carrere, chief architect for the 1901 Buffalo World’s Fair). The commission produced a Cleveland version of the Great White City and presented it to the chamber in 1903. The plan, “modeled after the gardens of [Paris’s] Palais Royale,” and the architecture, “derived from classic[al] Rome,” were embraced wholeheartedly by Mayor Johnson. In short order Cleveland became the symbol of the new urban order, celebrated in journals, newspapers and other media for “pioneering a new conception of a municipality,” being “the best-governed city in the nation” and being “fifty years ahead of most cities” (Teaford, 1993, p. 139). But that was not all:
“Grouping public buildings was one way to outwit ‘local rings of real estate interests’, who wanted to scatter public structures in order to ‘divide the benefit of their presence’ among various sections of the city … a tangible municipal reform” (Scott, 1969, p. 63).
With the nation’s media lights shining on Cleveland, a Great Lakes version of a “city on a hill,” the civic center of Cleveland, became the wave of the future and the signature expression of the politics and mission of the social reform mayors across the land.
The civic center was an integral part of the new vision of the municipality that was being tested in Johnson’s Cleveland. Johnson and his followers were fighting what they perceived to be the individualist avarice of streetcar magnates and corrupt councilmen. In their minds the city was not an arena for the no-holds-barred pursuit of wealth, but a community where cooperative spirit would ensure a better life for all people … . The civic center was, then, intended to be a lesson to private developers in the Ohio metropolis … Its mall provided a communal space for civic celebrations and its uniform cornice lines symbolized the rejection of individualism and competition. (Teaford, 1993, p. 62)
But all was never really perfect in Camelot. City Beautiful’s implementation did not go as planned: “The civic center project, the prototype of dozens of others in the first two decades of our century, was also a slum clearance effort” (Scott, 1969, p. 62). Over the next few years much of the 4-acre site was demolished—but some was not. A five-story abandoned factory was left untouched until 1936, years after the mall had opened. After an initial burst—the federal building was completed by 1910, the post office in 1911, the county courthouse in 1912 and city hall in 1916—12 years later the mall abruptly stopped about midway. At the other end of the mall, where the centerpiece massive railroad station was to have been built—nothing. Instead, the station was built five blocks away from the mall, and not in City Beautiful style. In place of the railway station, a quarter-century later (1931) a much-loved municipal stadium was constructed. Not until 1925 was the library built. This was not at all unusual for many a City Beautiful; in too many instances projects never moved off of the architect’s desk. The later criticism of urban renewal as leaving far too many vacant plots also characterized the City Beautiful. A not so hidden underneath grand visions and Beaux Arts structures was a strategy to reconstruct the fragmented, congested downtown cores of the initial industrial city.
City Beautiful era planning, and the City Beautiful civic center advocates, hoped the redevelopment of central city cores would project a powerful central city into its expanding hinterland. Civic pride was intended to serve as a justification of central city economic/political dominance over its ever-expanding suburbs. The key was to redevelop its obsolete and dysfunctional central business district:
[The plan] must serve as a guide for the reconstruction of the congested areas and as an instrument for shaping the development of the sparsely settled outlying territories … a host of measures for revamping the older parts of the city: widening the streets, providing the diagonal thoroughfares, extensively rehabilitating housing, restricting the occupancy and use of private property, rerouting street railways, diverting traffic … removing poles, wires and unsightly advertising. (Scott, 1969, pp. 97–8) The City Beautiful was in fact the first modern experiment in what later would be labeled “urban renewal.” In retrospect, its principal accomplishments were usually restricted to a few boulevards, some Beaux Arts museums and symphony and city halls—and the relocation of new downtown railroad lines and large, Grand Centralstyle stations.
Ron W. Coan 