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City Beautiful: The Rise of Urban Planning

City Beautiful: The Rise of Urban Planning

Sources

A Changing Balance. At the start of the Civil War only one out of twelve Americans lived in a city of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants. By the start of the 1880s that figure stood at one in eight; by the turn of the century one in five. More American cities were big cities, and more Americans—many of them immigrants—called these cities home. Two-thirds of New England townships declined in population during the 1880s, even as the population of the region swelled by 20 percent. Similar demographics applied in the Midwest, as immigrants (from small towns, rural areas, and foreign lands) swelled urban populations. As cities expanded, so too did the communication, transportation, and economic channels connecting the metropolis to hinterland. It was the rare individual in the late nineteenth century whose way of life was not touched in some way by urbanization.

The Other Half. The depressions (or “panics”) of the 1870s and 1890s devastated rural populations, as failures of railroads severely hampered the farmers’ ability to get their crops to market. Still, no matter how shaky their financial status, residents of the small town and the countryside enjoyed one advantage over city dwellers: the relief of open space. While investigating urban living conditions, Danish-born journalist Jacob Riis (1849-1914) counted 522 people living in one acre in the Bowery district of New York City. Small rooms—measuring just thirteen feet square—housed as many as a dozen lodgers. Riis’s epochal study of city life, How the Other Half Lives (1890), located a netherworld of poverty within walking distance of the poshest New York neighborhoods. Using photographs and text, Riis depicted an urban hell and entered a plea for urban reform. In many respects, Riis was a precursor of the “muckrakers” who transformed American journalism during the early years of the twentieth century. Riis considered it a journalist’s duty to educate the public and to stimulate reaction and reform. “Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives,’” Riis noted. “It did not know because it did not care. . . . Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its own ignorance.” The essential optimism of Riis’s vision dovetailed with that of the city planners who set out to remodel the American city in the 1890s.

Making the Cities Beautiful. Late-nineteenth-century reformers worked—with varying degrees of success—to revise tenement laws, construct affordable and sanitary housing, provide cultural and recreational opportunities for the poor, and eliminate graft from municipal government. Many reformers and social workers were associated with the settlement-house movement: residents of Hull House in Chicago or the Henry Street Settlement in New York lived by choice in povertystricken neighborhoods, the better to form meaningful bonds with the populations they intended to aid. While reformers worked through political and philanthropic channels, urban planners approached the question of urban renewal from an aesthetic perspective. Calibrating the salutary effect of urban oases (whether a park, a museum, or a railroad station) on urban dwellers, these landscape architects set out to transform the built environment.

Olmsted’s Vision. Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), arguably the most influential urban planner in the United States, worked to turn American cities green. European cities, Olmsted noted, gracefully integrated parks, grand avenues, and residential neighborhoods. American cities, on the other hand, had been built up, block by block, by profit-hungry developers. Olmsted believed that open space—scarce in American cities—could be an antidote to the pressures of urban existence. Public parks, he proclaimed in 1870, represented “the greatest possible contrast with the restraining and confining conditions of the town, which compel us to walk circumspectly, watchfully, jealously, which compel us to look closely upon others without sympathy.” Along with Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) Olmsted designed the gardens, ponds, meadows, and pathways that coalesced into New York’s Central Park in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1893 he designed a fairyland of lagoons, squares, and boulevards for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During the same decade Olmsted completed the complex of parks and riverways that became Boston’s “Emerald Necklace.” The joggers, dog walkers, and rollerbladers who throng Central Park or Boston’s Esplanade today validate Olmsted’s vision of healthy communal living.

Reclaiming L’Enfant’s Plan. The urban muddle of the late nineteenth century was particularly apparent in the premier “planned” American city: Washington, D.C. The Washington of the 1890s barely resembled the crisp grid of avenues and parks envisioned by planner Pierre-Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825) in the 1790s. The restoration of Washington to a closer approximation of L’Enfant’s vision represents the crowning accomplishment of the “City Beautiful” movement in America. Daniel Burnham—head architect of the World’s Columbian Exposition—served on a Senate Park Commission charged with resuscitating the nation’s capital. From 1901 to 1908 Burnham oversaw the construction of monumental buildings along the major axes of the city, the sprucing up of the Mall, and the clearing of parkland along the Potomac. By the early twentieth century Washington had been transformed into a national showpiece. Burnham’s theory of urban renewal—sketched out in later, largely unimplemented plans for San Francisco, Cleveland, and Chicago—emphasized the classical, the monumentai, the orderly, and the beautiful. Yet his concept of the City Beautiful largely ignored the commercial vitality and (often healthy) disorder of the Modern metropolis. American cities, from the late nineteenth century to the present, have stood witness to the ongoing interplay of chaos and order.

Sources

Charles E. Beveridge, Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, 1995);

Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago, Architect and Planner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974);

Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, revised edition (New York: Holt, 1988);

William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

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