TO DISCERN THE ROOTS OF the Development Of towns in the New World, one must distinguish between Hispanic, French, and English colonial urbanization. The sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico and Central and South America required an extensive administrative, military, and missionary network whose nodal points were towns: civil settlements for Spanish colonists (pueblos), fortified garrison towns (presidios), and mission towns, which were administered by the church and settled by Indian converts. The Spanish founded many settlements, and most eventually grew into large, well-known cities: inland towns like Guadalajara and Guatemala City, coastal ports like Veracruz and Panama City, island citadels like Havana and Santo Domingo, and, of course, Mexico City, the capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain. In the case of Mexico City, “founded” is not the right word, since there was already a large Aztec city on the site—Tenochtitlán. The Spanish towns were often prosperous, but with the exception of Mexico City, they remained small during the colonial period, since they contained little commercial activity. Their wealth came from exploiting the resources of the hinterland, chiefly silver, and to a lesser extent, from ranching and growing sugarcane (all activities based on an indigenous labor force).
Farther north, the first European settlements also depended on the exploitation of local resources—fur, in the case of New France, and tobacco and rice plantations in the Carolinas—but there was no attempt to urbanize the native population by establishing mission towns. This would in any case have been difficult, for there was no extant flourishing indigenous urban culture, and there were no real towns, certainly nothing on the scale of Tenochtitlán. The Algonquian tribes of the Northeast inhabited an area stretching from the Carolinas to Labrador, and practiced a mixture of hunting, fishing, and agriculture. Since the Algonquians were semi-nomadic, changing their place of dwelling according to the seasons, the wigwams of frames made out of bent saplings covered with bark were put up and taken down several times a year; only the bark covering and reed floor mats were reused. Although the small, informal groups of wigwams are sometimes termed villages, they are probably better described as temporary campsites.
The settlements of the people of the Iroquois Confederacy, the League of Five Nations, were more impressive. Formed during the seventeenth century, the league was a military and economic federation of the Seneca, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Oneida tribes that covered most of present-day New York State. The Iroquois called themselves “people of the longhouse,” and communities were organized into clans, each occupying a communal structure, or longhouse. The largest longhouses were four hundred feet in length and housed more than two hundred persons. Iroquois towns, some as large as four thousand people, consisted of long-houses surrounded by tall palisades of sharpened logs with parapet walls from which the defenders could shoot arrows and throw projectiles. This gave the longhouse communities a resemblance to medieval fortified burgs; in fact they were sometimes described as castles by European observers. But Iroquois towns were surrounded by wilderness, not by feudal domains, and they were not primarily centers of manufacturing or trade but rather home bases for hunting and raiding parties. Drawings made by French explorers show the longhouses lined up side by side in rows in a fashion that looks like the functional layout of a modern mobile home park. These towns were impermanent and were rarely used for more than a decade or two. By then the adjacent tillable soil and sources of firewood and construction material were depleted; rubbish had piled up; and the houses had become infested with rats and fleas. The occupants abandoned their old dwellings to establish a new settlement nearby.
The native inhabitants of the southern coast followed a more stable, agricultural way of life and consequently built more permanent towns. Excavations in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, as well as in Ohio and Missouri, have uncovered monumental earthworks that suggest the early presence of developed urban civilizations. The most impressive of these was the Mississippian culture, whose chief metropolis was the city of Cahokia, near present-day Saint Louis. It is estimated that at its peak in the twelfth century Cahokia was home to about 40,000 people, which would have made it about the same size as medieval Florence, although smaller than the largest city in Europe at the time,
Paris, which already numbered about 100,000 inhabitants. Florence and Paris in the Middle Ages were walled and extremely compact; Cahokia, by contrast, was a sprawling city that covered close to six square miles. It contained six ceremonial plazas and about a hundred earthen mounds analogous to the stone pyramids found in Aztec cities. The evidence of how ordinary people lived has long since disappeared, which suggests that houses were probably built of impermanent materials: wood posts supporting roofs covered in bark, or perhaps log cabins. The city appears not to have been fortified, except for a small ceremonial area in the center.
Cahokia is an exceptional case of a major urban development north of the Rio Grande. Despite its imperial trappings and unlike Tenochtitlán, it was not the seat of an empire, although it seems to have served as a religious and trading center for outlying villages and towns. The city-building Mississippian culture flourished several centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, and by the time that Hernando de Soto visited the region in 1539, the cities had disappeared. The layout of the small towns he described was informal, although important public buildings were sometimes located on raised mounds that recall Cahokia, and the towns were surrounded by wood palisades.
Another later town-building people was the Creek Confederacy, which included the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribes and occupied a region that included northern Florida, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Creek towns were planned around a public center that included a ceremonial plaza, a large, swept ball court (for a ritual sport similar to field hockey), and a meeting structure (called the Square Ground); there were no mounds. William Bartram, a traveler who visited these towns in the late eighteenth century, recorded that houses were “placed with considerable regularity in streets or ranges,” and his sketches show a layout that resembles a grid. The Creeks occupied such towns until the early nineteenth century, when they were evicted in the infamous deportation to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears.
The Southwest was the site of another urbanized Indian culture, the Anasazi, who built some extraordinary towns, the most famous of which are in Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, contains several spectacular cliff towns. The most famous is known as Cliff Palace and is tucked under an overhanging canyon wall. (The overhang actually shades the settlement from the summer sun, while permitting the sunlight to warm the stone walls during the cool winter.) There are no streets—people walked from one roof to another—and the square and circular rooms and towers are piled up like a child’s blocks. Chaco Canyon is the site of nine so-called Great Houses, each a stepped-back communal structure of interlocking rooms, usually focused on a central plaza, which is likewise oriented to the sun. The urban form is extremely compact, almost like a very large horizontal apartment building with stepped-back terraces in front of each dwelling. Pueblo Bonito, which seems to have been the capital town of Chaco Canyon, rises to four stories at the rear. It is not clear if these structures were built for defensive reasons or whether they merely reflected a close-knit social organization. These small settlements, located roughly in the region where present-day Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet, probably numbered fewer than 2,000 persons each, and were the centers of what archaeologists speculate was a successful regional trading and water management economy.
The Anasazi towns flourished between about 1100 and 1300, long before the arrival of the Spaniards, and so were unknown to the early European settlers except as ruins. The Anasazi culture collapsed abruptly in the late thirteenth century, whether as a result of drought or of decimation by aggressive invaders is unclear. However, the Pueblo villages of the Anasazi’s descendants—the Acoma, the Hopi, and the Zuni—have survived to the present day. The layouts of Taos and Santa Clara, both in New Mexico, do not exhibit the architectural refinement of the Great Houses, and the adobe buildings lack the technological sophistication of the beautiful stone architecture of Mesa Verde. But the pueblos of southwestern New Mexico do incorporate such subtle adaptation to their surrounding topography that some observers have likened their siting to that of the palace of Knossos in Crete and of ancient temples in Greece. The location of towns like Acoma, on the summit of a 375-foot-high mesa, is breathtaking. Whether such pueblos would have developed into larger towns or even cities will never be known, since their evolution was interrupted and finally brutally truncated by the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, even in their ruined state, they are testimony to a vision well suited to the terrain and the climate.
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Native American settlements, especially those of the Southwest, represent a different, non-Western urban model. “The architectural principle at work in these individual dwellings, therefore, is that of imitation of natural forms by human beings who seek thereby to fit themselves safely into nature’s order,” Vincent Scully writes. “When the resources of large populations made it possible to build monumental architectural forms of communal function and at the landscape’s scale, exactly the same principle was brought to bear.” If ever we are to consider an environmentally conscious architecture, these are buildings that merit intensive study. The lesson we might learn is of a way of building that makes little distinction between individual structures and the collective whole, just as it makes no sharp division between the man-made and the natural worlds.
To the early European settlers, however, with their desire to separate private from public property, these settlements were inappropriate models. They could not appreciate the subtle and sophisticated use of local materials and adaptation to local conditions. The more or less temporary towns of the Iroquois Confederacy, too, would have appeared crude and unimpressive to European eyes. At best, existing Indian encampments might influence the choice of a site for a new town, since a well-known gathering place was a useful location when the chief function of the European settlement was fur trading. Thus Montreal was built near the site of the abandoned Iroquois town of Hochelaga; Toronto (which means “the meeting place”) replaced a French fort which itself had been situated on the site of an Indian summer camp; and Detroit was built across the river from a Huron village.I Just like the Iroquois towns that preceded them, the trading posts of the French colonists were fortified; in both cultures military considerations led to the choice of easily defensible locations like islands, hilltops, and clearings.
The oldest European town in the United States and Canada is Saint Augustine—originally San Agostin—in northern Florida, founded by the Spaniards on the site of a Timucua Indian village in 1565. San Agostin was a small garrison town—even after a hundred and fifty years its population was less than fifteen hundred—whose chief function was as a military outpost to protect the passage of Spanish ships carrying cargo through the Straits of Florida to and from Havana and Veracruz. The town, surrounded by a wood palisade, was divided by narrow streets lined with walled gardens and small houses whose facades were interrupted by loggias and overhanging balconies. At one end was a small citadel that commanded the entrance to the harbor from the sea. The streets of San Agostin are laid out in a rectangular grid, and in the center there is a plaza faced by the main church and the governor’s house. This sounds very much like the Laws of the Indies, with their insistence on gridded streets and a central square. But in fact the Laws were formulated eight years after the town was founded, which suggests that they only codified what was becoming to be standard planning practice. This charming town can still be visited today but it is largely a reconstruction, since San Agostin suffered periodic devastation: it was put to the torch first by Indians, later by Francis Drake in 1586; sacked by pirates; burned by Carolina colonists in 1702; and bombarded by the British navy in 1740. In 1763 the town was ceded to the British. Twenty years later it returned to Spanish hands, and in 1821 changed hands again when Florida became a part of the United States.
San Agostín was the first town built by the Spaniards north of the Rio Grande; the last, Sonoma, in California, was founded in 1835. In the two hundred and seventy intervening years many pueblos, presidios, and mission towns were built in the Southwest, along the Gulf Coast, and along the entire California coast. A few cities, like Sonoma, preserve traces of the regular gridded street layout and the large central plaza that characterized Hispanic urbanism, but in most cases, evidence of the settlements has disappeared. For despite the fact that many of these towns later became the basis for huge cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, during the Spanish rule these were not impressive towns. Although the Laws of the Indies were more or less adhered to, the buildings were usually of poor quality, there was little local economic activity, and the population of these towns grew slowly. As the urban historian John W. Reps points out, “The North American settlements of the Spanish colonial empire were always frontier outposts far removed from the prosperity that characterized the cities at the heart of Spain’s colonial enterprise in the Western Hemisphere.” He adds, “Spanish colonial efforts rarely were regarded in the home country as more than marginal activities. Undermanned and underfinanced, the Spanish reach always exceeded its grasp, and the results were meager.”
At the other end of the continent was the French colonial citadel of Quebec, which was founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608 and became the capital of the French colony of New France. Quebec City is located on magnificent heights commanding the broad Saint Lawrence River. The city was made up of two parts. At the level of the river, against a rising cliff, was the so-called Lower Town, which contained the original settlement as well as boatyards, docks, and storehouses. The main city, including the citadel, the cathedral, the bishop’s palace, as well as numerous religious buildings, was in the Upper Town, on the heights. Although the Lower Town was laid out on a more or less regular grid, the Upper Town grew uncontrolled and resembled a medieval “organic” plan, an impression heightened by the city wall that circled it on the landward side.
Farther up the Saint Lawrence River was the missionary outpost of Ville-Marie de Montréal. When Ville-Marie was founded in 1642, the population was only fifty; a hundred years later it had grown to four thousand, although that was probably not many more than had lived in the original Iroquois town that had preceded it. Like Quebec City, Montreal, as it was now called, was surrounded by defensive fortifications and remained so until the eighteenth century. The walls offered protection against attack by a variety of enemies: first the Iroquois, who were allied with the British and staged regular raids; later the British themselves, with whom the French were at war; and lastly, after New France passed into British hands, the Americans during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
The walled towns of New France were different from the neat, gridded towns of New Spain. An engraving of Montreal made in 1760, when the population had grown to about five thousand, shows a lively landscape of closely packed house roofs and church and convent spires, all peeping out from behind a stone wall. The presence of the encircling fortifications gives the town a medieval air. Medieval, too, was the street layout. The shape of the walled town was roughly a long rectangle, divided lengthwise by two wide, main streets and crisscrossed at random angles by numerous narrower streets. There were several open spaces: a parade ground and a market square, a cemetery, and the gardens and orchards belonging to the five religious orders (Jesuits, Sulpicians, Recollets, Sisters of Notre-Dame, Sisters of Saint Joseph) headquartered inside the town. The residential plots were of different shapes and sizes, and like the streets, displayed little geometrical regularity. The effect was casual, almost haphazard. As in the Middle Ages, the houses of the poorer people were outside the walls, situated in what was called the faubourg (from the Old French forsbourg, meaning the town outside the wall); by 1765, almost half of the population of Montreal lived in these incipient suburbs.
New France was distinctly old-fashioned, almost medieval. Land was granted to prominent individuals who assumed the role and title of seigneur, together with the rights and privileges of a feudal lord. Equally old-fashioned was the city planning. Montreal’s Place d’Armes was an unprepossessing open area of beaten earth, awkwardly flanked by the side wall of the parish church. A Parisian visiting Montreal in 1760 would not have been impressed by the latest civic improvement, the newly completed fortification (a fourteen-foot-high masonry wall, a ditch, and a glacis) that replaced an earlier wood stockade. By then, Paris’s ramparts had long since been converted into tree-lined promenades and Louis XV was building the expansive Place de la Concorde. While in London, English aristocrats were turning their estates into upper-class residential developments like Leicester Square and Grosvenor Square, with grand houses facing a landscaped square, and in Friedrichstadt, a planned extension to Berlin, Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia had started to lay out a series of square, circular, and octagonal plazas, in Montreal, people huddled close together in little houses crowded behind the protective town walls.
There was a single short-lived example of innovative town planning in New France: Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island. This fortress town was begun in 1712 and took twenty years and thirty million francs—a vast sum—to complete. The plan reflected the latest version of a French approach to building fortified towns that had been evolving since the middle of the seventeenth century. Louisbourg bears a close resemblance to the plan that the famous military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban devised in 1704 for the fortified town of Neuf-Brisach, near Strasbourg. The perimeter of the town resembles a starburst and is made up of several layers of bastions linked by zigzagging walls. Inside the star shape, Vauban laid out a perfectly orthogonal grid of streets and square blocks, with a central open parade ground. Unlike Neuf-Brisach, however, and despite its incorporation of the latest in fortification technology, Louisbourg turned out to be militarily ineffective. It was captured twice: once by American colonists in 1745 and again by the British in 1758, who a few years later, in a fit of vindictive pique, razed it to the ground.
The French established a network of forts in the interior of the continent, as far west as Manitoba and as far south as Texas: Fort Du Quesne (Pittsburgh), Fort Rosalie (Natchez), Fort Rouge (Winnipeg), Fort Nécessité (Uniontown, Pennsylvania), and many others. Some of these outposts, such as Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, Saint Louis des Illinois (Saint Louis), and Louis de la Louisiane (Mobile), also included small towns. There was no French equivalent to the Laws of the Indies, but these foundations did follow a pattern: the towns were built beside rivers, they were fortified, and their plans, like that of Montreal, were more or less elongated and orthogonal. Mobile (1710) and Saint Louis (1762) were carefully gridded to accommodate future expansion, although neither settlement experienced much growth during French rule, each remaining a large village with only one or two hundred houses. Detroit (founded in 1701) was a walled settlement, a tiny version of Louisbourg, surrounded by farmsteads. Nothing remains of the original layout, however, for in 1805, after it passed into American hands, Detroit was destroyed by fire and was rebuilt according to a new plan.II
Generally, the French efforts at town building suffered from the same constraints as those of the Spanish: not enough support from the mother country, not enough immigration to promote rapid growth, and too much dispersal in the vast continent to allow towns to establish trade links with one another. The largest and most successful of the French river towns was New Orleans, whose construction began in 1722. This was to be the capital of the province of Louisiana, and its founder, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, adopted a similar plan to one that he had used a decade earlier at Mobile, although at New Orleans there was no fort—the entire town was walled. The streets divided the town into regular square blocks, exactly fifty French toises (about 300 feet) on each side; the town measured eleven blocks long by four deep (later expanded to six deep). As in Mobile, the central block facing the river was a formal parade ground (today, Jackson Square) and the block behind it was reserved for institutional buildings, including, at the center, in the place of honor, the parish church.
The street layout of New Orleans has proved remarkably durable, although most of the architecture of the so-called French Quarter really dates from the Spanish period (1762-1801), when the wooden French buildings were destroyed in two calamitous fires and the town was rebuilt in brick. Under Spanish rule, New Orleans grew slowly, and it was only after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 that the city began a period of steady urban expansion. Nevertheless, the plan put in place by Le Moyne proved to be an excellent model. When new districts, or faubourgs, were laid out, they included similarly proportioned blocks and central squares, but instead of simply extending the French grid, the American planners adjusted the angle of the new gridded areas to follow the curve of the Mississippi, which created interesting relationships between the different districts where the grids intersected. As the entire geometry shifted, the early inhabitants of New Orleans knew they were passing from one faubourg to another; arriving at the square they knew they were in the heart of the district.
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The British colonies of North America grew more quickly than those of the French, and by the middle of the eighteenth century their combined population was more than twenty times larger than that of New France. The towns were bigger, too. In 1750, when the population of Quebec was about 8,000 and that of Montreal less than 4,000, Boston’s had already reached 15,000; Philadelphia and New York, 14,000; and Charleston, 12,000.
New York was founded in 1623—only fifteen years after Quebec—but by 1664, when the Dutch handed over what was then called New Amsterdam to the British, the walled town contained 10,000 persons. The influence of old Amsterdam was evident in the canal that led into the center of the town, the brick construction, and the gable-fronted houses; behind the houses were large garden plots and orchards. There was a fort and a governor’s palace. The great expansion that transformed old Amsterdam from an essentially medieval town to a planned city of radiating streets and great concentric arcs of canals was begun in 1607, but it had no influence on the planning of New Amsterdam. New York continued to expand under British rule; the name was changed, but its street layout continued to be informal, at least until 1811, when the Commissioners’ Plan divided the rest of Manhattan into a gridiron.
Nor was civic grandeur to be found in Boston, which was founded in 1630 and was the largest city in North America throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. Its planning, too, followed the organic model: winding, narrow streets, irregular plots, vaguely defined public spaces. Boston was located on a peninsula, protected by the invincible British navy on the sea and by Iroquois allies on the land. Like all the northern British colonial towns, it was not fortified. Nevertheless, its buildings, as one urban history puts it, belonged to the Middle Ages: the plain houses were built of timber frames infilled with rubble, brick, and stucco; their second stories overhung the cramped and winding streets.
The medieval similarity was more than superficial. Although there was no equivalent to the self-governing free towns of the Middle Ages, towns in the New World were far away from one another and were obliged to develop a similar self-suficiency with regard to trade. There was another similarity to the Middle Ages: relatively few people in the New World lived in towns. In 1700, North American urbanization was just beginning and only about 10 percent of the population was urbanized, a figure comparable to English urbanization at the beginning of the sixteenth century. European cities were passing from their closed phase to one of aristocratic control, but the isolated towns of the New World seemed to be a throwback to an earlier period.
The first colonial towns were on their own in terms of design. There were few contemporary European models for city builders to follow. All the great European cities—Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Amsterdam—had grown from medieval roots; in the case of Rome and Naples, the roots went back to ancient times. After the sixteenth century, no large cities were founded in Europe, and the new towns that were built were usually Renaissance fortress-towns such as Vauban’s Neuf-Brisach. Philippeville in Belgium, built in 1555, and Palmanova in Italy, designed in 1593, were both fortified towns, but their streets radiated from the central squares like the sun’s rays. The unusual plans were chiefly dictated by the shape of the fortifications, as well as by their autocratic builders’ interest in geometry. In any case, these towns were intended to remain small: the constraints of the surrounding walls and the lack of any real economic base guaranteed that they rarely grew to more than a few thousand people.
The influence of continental European town-planning theories was evident in the New World in the towns of the Laws of the Indies, and to a lesser extent in French settlements like Louisbourg and Detroit, but French and Spanish urban theories had little or no impact on the British colonies of North America. Moreover, there was no strong English tradition of formal town planning. English towns and cities remained unaffected by Renaissance planning concepts and continued to grow according to the old and well-established medieval patterns. This was partly the result of the emphasis that the wealthy English placed on the countryside, where they had their primary homes, and partly of an innate conservatism. This conservatism is apparent in the reconstruction of the City of London, much of which was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666. English architects saw this as an opportunity to refashion the cramped medieval street layout. Some proposed perfectly regular square grids; others, like John Evelyn and Christopher Wren, devised plans that were obviously influenced by Continental ideas and incorporated Baroque devices like diagonal avenues and circular piazzas. These would have transformed the City into a version of sixteenth-century Rome, which was replanned by Sixtus V in 1585-90. Had one of these plans been adopted, it is likely that the history of American urbanism would have taken a different course. But when London was rebuilt in 1666, it largely followed the earlier medieval street layout, and although historians have speculated about the possible transatlantic influence of the unbuilt proposals, there is little evidence that these plans inspired city builders in the New World. There was one important influence of post-Great Fire London on the New World, however. Although the city was rebuilt as before, it was used differently: the business section, or the City, was separated from the surrounding residential districts. This novel idea probably played a role in the development of an important characteristic of later American cities: the commercial downtown.
The first generation of American towns—New York (founded in 1623), Boston (1630), Cambridge (1636), Providence (1638), Newport (1639), and Hartford (1640)—reflected the traditional English preference for informality and improvisation, and a casual approach to planning. The layouts of these towns followed one of three general patterns: angled and winding streets, as in Boston, resembling Lynch’s organic model of a town that grows informally over a period of time; orthogonal and roughly gridlike plans with occasional open squares, like Cambridge and Hartford; and linear layouts, that is, towns organized along a main or “high” street, like Providence. Some towns combined two or more patterns. When villages grew into towns or towns into cities, the street pattern was simply expanded.
New Haven, founded in 1638, was an exception to this pragmatic approach. Here the plan resembled a ticktacktoe diagram: nine perfect squares, 825 feet on each side, with the central square a town green and the site of the market, meetinghouse, courthouse, school, and jail. This scheme is unusual not only because of its strict geometry (still visible today) but also because of its scale. A plan of New Haven, drawn in 1748, shows that houses formed an almost continuous frontage along the streets, and that the large square blocks, without lanes or intermediary streets, created extremely deep gardens in the rear. Thus although the plan appears urban, the density is what we would call suburban. The green itself is huge, larger than the maximum size dictated by the Laws of the Indies, and suggests a park rather than an urban square. The regularity of the plan (it may have been prepared in advance in England) could have been influenced by Vitruvian principles, as one historian has argued, but the effect on the ground is much more open—and much greener—than anything the ancient Roman architect would have designed. The farsighted decision to create such a generous town green is a mark of the ambition of New Haven’s founders and makes the center of New Haven particularly appealing to this day. On the other hand, since the nine-square plan made no provision for future expansion of the town, as the population grew, the residential squares filled up and were further subdivided, losing much of their green character in the process.
Charleston (originally named Charles Town, in honor of Charles II), the capital of Carolina, was established on its present site in 1680, and became the largest city of the southern colonies and probably the richest city in all of British America. (Through its port flowed American rice to Europe and African slaves to America.) It was the only major fortified town built by the British in America, and remained walled until 1717. Charles Town was also the first British colonial town in America laid out on a grid. This was done specifically to “avoid the undecent and incommodious irregularities which other Inglish Collonies are fallen unto for want of any early care in laying out the Townes,” wrote Maurice Mathews, a contemporary observer, who must have been thinking of the “irregularities” of New York and Boston. Charleston’s street grid, not as geometrically perfect as that of New Orleans, which was planned almost fifty years later, was differentiated by two major streets crossing in a central square (built over by 1788). The site of the city, a point at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers, was particularly attractive and permitted a pleasant promenade along the water’s edge. The width of the chief streets (60 feet), allowed room for tree planting, and the generous blocks (about 500 feet by 600 feet) produced a sense of breathing space that is still noticeable in this charming southern city.
After Charleston came a spate of gridded towns in Virginia: Yorktown, Tappahannock, and Marlborough, all laid out during the 1680s and all consisting of blocks crisscrossed by a simple street grid. Unlike Charleston, however, the blocks were small—in the case of Tappahannock and Marlborough, each block contained only four half-acre plots and measured 230 feet by 265 feet. There were advantages to such small blocks—all the houses were situated on corner plots—but these diagrammatic plans demonstrate little artistry. There is no public green as at New Haven, no river’s edge promenade as at Charleston, and there are no special sites for civic buildings. This is surveying, rather than town planning; the chief virtue of this approach was simplicity and speed of execution, which is perhaps why, fifty years later, new Virginia towns like Fredericksburg and Alexandria were still being laid out this way.
Farther north, Annapolis experimented with a different sort of town plan. At the mouth of the Severn River on Chesapeake Bay, the town was founded in 1694 by Francis Nicholson, a governor of Maryland, who is believed to have devised the plan. Although Annapolis, which Nicholson designated the new capital of the colony, incorporated not much more than a hundred building plots, it was laid out like a miniature perfect city. Nicholson knew Paris and incorporated such Baroque planning devices as radial and diagonal streets and four public open spaces: two large circles, the larger one reserved for the statehouse and the smaller for the church, a market square, and a London-type residential square, which he called Bloomsbury Square. What is unusual is not only the provision of such a variety of public spaces but also, as in New Haven, their generous dimensions: the market square was 100 feet on each side, the residential square measured 350 feet on each side, the church circle about 300 feet in diameter, and the grand public circle, located on a slight rise, was more than 500 feet in diameter. Unlike the layouts of the earlier-established Virginia towns, the plan of Annapolis provided a variety of sizes and shapes of plots; there was even a group of twenty smaller plots on the outskirts of the town for tradesmen whose industrial activities might disturb the townspeople. The greatest benefit of Nicholson’s plan was to provide for special locations for public buildings in the great circles, which create a useful balance to the relatively straightforward grid layout of the residential streets.
Such planning did not necessarily make Annapolis functionally more successful than other colonial towns, but the modern visitor—and thousands come yearly, merely to stroll in these charming surroundings—can only conclude that it is considerably more attractive. Annapolis has that rarest of urban qualities, a distinctive sense of place due in part to its setting on Chesapeake Bay, in part to the comfortable scale of its streets and buildings, and in part to Nicholson’s sophisticated planning.
Annapolis had no precedent in the British colonies; indeed, this kind of Baroque town layout would not reappear in America for another hundred years, with L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, D.C. It has been suggested that perhaps Nicholson knew of Wren’s unrealized proposal for London, although it was almost thirty years old by then and, in any case, the scale of the two projects is quite dissimilar (the reconstruction of London involved about 500 acres, or three times the area of Annapolis). More than likely, just as many English gentlemen used their extensive libraries and foreign travel as the basis for designing country residences, Nicholson, who was largely self-taught, went one step further and designed an entire town. Annapolis was the work of an amateur, and it is easy to point out its shortcomings: some radial streets arrive at the circles at odd angles, there are occasional awkward intersections, and as so often happens in Baroque plans, the shapes of some of the building plots make design and construction difficult. But Nicholson was a gifted amateur, as evidenced by Annapolis today, which in large measure has fulfilled its planner’s ambition.
Shortly after laying out Annapolis, Nicholson was appointed governor of Virginia and decided to move the capital from its swampy location at Jamestown to Middle Plantation, henceforth to be called Williamsburg. The same ambition and amplitude is visible in Williamsburg as in Annapolis, although the plan is quite different. In Williamsburg, Nicholson adhered to strictly orthogonal geometry, avoiding Annapolis’s impractical wedge-shaped plots, caused by the intersection of many differently angled streets. Still, this was anything but a simple grid. The chief element of the plan was Duke of Gloucester Street (which in the eighteenth century was also called Main Street), ninety-nine feet wide and three-quarters of a mile long, with lines of catalpas trees separating the broad sidewalks from the thoroughfare. Today, the effect is less of a street than a long park. As in Annapolis, the houses along the street are built far apart on large garden plots (half an acre) and, as if that were not greenery enough, the lots are interrupted by shallow ravines left in their natural state.
The plan of Williamsburg was more than a two-dimensional document. Nicholson prepared an architectural code that dictated building lines and setbacks, required houses on Duke of Gloucester Street to be provided with fences, and also spelled out in detail the location and general configuration of the public buildings. As in Annapolis, public buildings were assigned important locations. The House of Burgesses was placed at one end of Duke of Gloucester Street, and the College of William and Mary at the other; at the midpoint of the street, it was intersected by a broad (210 feet wide) green, at the head of which stood the Governor’s Palace. The civic buildings gain prominence from their advantageous positions and are always approached from a distance; the houses play a distinctly secondary role and define the edges of the main street. A small grid of residential streets continues behind Duke of Gloucester Street.
When I first visited Williamsburg, I was not struck by its strenuous “historical” character, despite the employees costumed in colonial garb and the carefully restored buildings, but rather by how familiar it seemed. Here were all the hallmarks of the American small town: the spatial liberality; the large plots and broad streets; the dependence on landscaping, especially large trees, which create a natural atmosphere in the very center of the town. Main Street, in what would become a common American practice, is a mixture of commercial establishments and private homes, the houses standing free and surrounded by large gardens. In Williamsburg the American town was born, incorporating all the ingredients that would set it on a course independent of its European counterpart.
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Williamsburg was intended to reach a population of about 2,000; like Annapolis, it was never meant to be a large town. The plan of Philadelphia, on the other hand, devised by William Penn and Thomas Holme in 1681-83, was intended to accommodate a very large city indeed. It measured two miles long and one mile across, about the same size as contemporary London or Paris (it took a hundred years to fill out this immense area). The rectangle lay almost exactly on an east-west axis and stretched between two rivers, the Delaware and the Schuylkill. Philadelphia was a city of orthogonal streets, but unlike Alexandria or New Orleans, it was not a repetitive grid but a finite composition. The city was divided in four by two intersecting main streets, and at the center of each quarter was a square. The grid was not exactly square (the blocks were 425 by 675 feet and 425 by 500 feet); the majority of the plots fronted on the east-west streets that traversed the city. Rationalism governed the organization of the city, including two novelties that would become an American habit: streets named after trees, and numbered streets (an idea Penn may have derived from Amsterdam, which was the first European city to have numbered houses).
It was a generous plan. The two main streets—Market and Broad—were one hundred feet wide (by comparison, Montreal’s main streets, laid out at roughly the same date, were only thirty feet wide, and no street in New Orleans exceeded sixty feet). At the intersection of Market and Broad was a ten-acre park; the four squares were each eight acres. The straight streets were lined with trees, and the smallest plot was half an acre. If today the four scattered squares seem insufficient for a city of this scale, it is because Penn’s vision was of an entire city as a garden. “Let every house be placed, if the person pleases, in the middle of its plat,” he specified to his surveyors, “as to the breadth way of it, that so there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards, or fields, that it may be a green country town, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.” This spread-out and expansive urban vision would have made Philadelphia unlike any city then known in England, or indeed, anywhere in Europe.
Penn, who once said of his creation that “The Improvement of the place is best measur’d by the advance of Value upon every man’s Lot,” was not innocent of the speculative nature of town building, but he seriously miscalculated the economic forces that came to bear on his endeavor. The original plan showed a variety of building plot sizes: the larger plots on Market Street, and the smaller on the narrower streets. But the true commercial center of gravity of the town was neither along Market Street nor at the intersection of the two avenues, which was nothing more than a crossroads in the forest. It was on the banks of the Delaware River, which was then the chief transportation route. This is where the city began to grow. The side of Front Street facing the river, which was to have been left open to create a pleasant esplanade, was soon crowded by warehouses of merchants who wanted to be as close to the river as possible. Most dramatically, instead of implementing Penn’s idea of detached houses surrounded by gardens, the practical Quakers subdivided the generous building lots into narrow slivers and filled them in with rowhouses. As land values rose, they cut narrow lanes through the back gardens and crammed in rental units: the tiny three-story townhouses (often no more than one room per floor) called Trinity houses. Brick, not foliage, became the defining element of Philadelphia.
It took only two decades for commerce and cupidity to compromise Penn’s plans. Penn had intended that important public buildings would surround the main central square, but because the real center was the commercial waterfront, that was where the public buildings were built. The State House (now Independence Hall) for the province of Pennsylvania was located on Chestnut Street—one of the narrow streets, not one of the broad avenues—and it faced a row of small houses, not a square; the hospital, the Quaker meetinghouse, and the many churches were likewise scattered throughout the city without being given favorable locations. This was a common situation in gridded towns like Alexandria or Yorktown, where similar plots were allocated to public and private buildings. A citizen of Philadelphia in 1750 walked down streets along which commercial, residential, and institutional buildings stood side by side, none preeminent over its neighbor. When the land around the squares was finally occupied, it was by private residences, not public buildings. (The main square did become the site of a new city hall, but the building, completed in 1901, was crudely located within—rather than facing—the square.)
Penn’s original plan was thwarted by the dulling impact of land speculation and commerce and by the dynamics of growth. It was one thing for aristocrats and military engineers to lay out perfect little garrison towns in Europe, and quite another for a British proprietor, whose powers were severely limited, to attempt to do so in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. Moreover, Penn faced something that didn’t exist in Europe—brisk immigration. Many American towns grew quickly, but the rate of Philadelphia’s expansion was extreme. Attracted by the promise of prosperity and civic and religious tolerance (not for nothing was this called the City of Brotherly Love), which Penn actively advertised throughout Europe, immigrants flowed to the city from Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia. Philadelphia grew quickly: in 1684, only a year after the town was officially founded, there were already 600 houses; in 1698 there were 2,000; in 1750 the city had attained a population of about 20,000; and by 1800, with a population of 41,000, it surpassed New York as the largest city in the United States.
Philadelphia did not grow according to Penn’s vision, but it was still an impressive accomplishment. A young Bostonian visiting the city in 1773 wrote: “The streets of Philadelphia intersect each other at right angles; and it is probably the most regular, best laid out city in the world.” So it must have seemed to many, and the prosperous city became a model for new towns around the country. In some situations, as in the case of Raleigh, North Carolina, or Tallahassee, Florida, the five-square plan was replicated; in others, it was simply the idea of an open square in the middle of a grid that was followed. The original plan for Philadelphia was almost certainly an influence on a remarkable group of towns built in the 1730s in Georgia. The towns of Savannah, Ebenezer, and New Darien were the work of General James Oglethorpe, perhaps the most gifted of the colonial city planners. Oglethorpe actively promoted the idea of the new colony of Georgia, and he accompanied the first colonists and personally supervised the laying out of the new towns. Their ordered, rational urbanism recalls Roman camps and reflected his military background, but their political organization, much more sophisticated than anything that Nicholson or Penn imagined, reflected his practical experience as a member of the House of Commons and as an active social reformer.
Savannah, begun in 1733, was the largest town, and the model for the other two. The town was divided into wards—neighborhoods—of forty households. At the center of each ward was a large public square, approximately 300 feet by 300 feet; four lots on the opposite sides of the square were set aside for institutional and commercial uses (church, school, stores). The building plots were 60 feet wide and 90 feet deep (about the size of a typical suburban plot in the 1960s, and much smaller than the half-acre plots that were typical in most colonial cities). Unlike those in Charleston or Philadelphia, the blocks were shallow, only two hundred feet deep, and they were bisected by alleys. Alleys had been used in Europe since the Middle Ages, but they generally had extremely small houses (for poor people) facing them, a pattern that was continued in Philadelphia. The alleys in Savannah were not designed for dwellings; they were intended only to provide access to the rear of the houses for service deliveries. Service alleys were not a common feature of colonial towns—they do not appear in French or Spanish plans at all—and Savannah probably represents their first use in America.
Although alleys were incorporated into the layouts of all the new towns of the Georgia colony, it was some time before they were used elsewhere. Ebenezer Zane’s 1799 plan for Zanesville, Ohio, did include service alleys, and a few years later they were part of the plan for another Ohio river town, Columbus. Woodward’s 1807 plan for Detroit also included alleys, and they did become a standard feature of later nineteenth-century plans for cities such as Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Chicago. The service alley is a useful urban device that has almost disappeared from the modern planner’s lexicon. It was originally used for the delivery of heating and cooking fuel as well as for the collection of night soil, and was later adapted for such diverse functions as garbage collection and automobile parking.
Savannah’s plan was not a simple grid like that of Alexandria, nor a picturesque approach to town building, like Annapolis or Williamsburg, nor a finite composition like Philadelphia; the ward blocks of Savannah comprised a fine-grained system that could be incrementally extended, ward by ward, as the city grew. This sounds mechanical, but it was tempered by many subtle devices. For one thing, the grid was not homogeneous: a historic central axis, Bull Street, led inland from the river and passed through a series of squares to terminate in Forsyth Place, a much larger square measuring 700 feet on each side. Moreover, the squares differed in character, depending on the types of public buildings that fronted them: the hospital on Forsyth Square, the barracks on Madison Square, the market on Ellis Square. Some squares were strictly residential. As the town grew, wide, tree-lined boulevards parallel to the river were introduced at intervals.
The resident of Savannah could read the social structure of his city in the location of the fashionable houses lining the squares, separated from more modest dwellings on the side streets. Like Charleston, Savannah reflected a southern sense of gentility and refinement that was absent in many of the pragmatic northern gridded layouts. The chief streets linked the leafy squares, although they did not traverse them; vehicular traffic occurred on the secondary streets between the wards. Built almost two centuries before automobiles became commonplace in American cities, Savannah incorporated a carefully ordered traffic system of tree-lined boulevards, through-traffic streets, neighborhood streets, and back lanes. Oglethorpe’s farsighted plan proved enduring. Savannah started with four wards; two years later there were six; by 1790, eight; in 1801, thirteen; and fifty years later there were twenty-six wards. This pattern of growth lasted until the Civil War.
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In Williamsburg, Philadelphia, and Savannah, there is already a clear expression of what made American towns different. In the New World real estate was cheap, population was sparse, there was plenty of empty land, and colonial town builders took advantage of these conditions to spread out. There were also practical considerations. Fire, for one: anyone, like William Penn, building a city after 1666—the year of London’s calamitous Great Fire—could hardly ignore the advantages of keeping buildings well apart. Food production, for another: Williamsburg was surrounded by forests, not tended fields, and the land provided for gardens was for vegetables, not flowers, since unlike European towns, New World towns, at least at first, could not count on the surrounding countryside for food. This gave American towns an independence of spirit, but also reinforced the general assumption that urban self-sufficiency was the normal state of affairs. This was fine in good times, but proved to be a problem when cities encountered difficulties, not always of their own making. This attitude persists today; whether it relates to immigration, poverty, or industrial unemployment, cities are expected to solve their problems themselves.
Looking at the broad streets and ample public squares of American towns, it is obvious that there was also an enjoyment of open space for its own sake. According to Lukacs, it is part of the American character to be stingy with time but spendthrift about space. Whence came this profligacy? Was it the open, apparently limitless land itself? Was it a reaction to the generally crowded conditions of towns and cities in Europe? Or will people always seek elbow room and spread themselves out? Whatever the reason—probably a combination of all three—spaciousness in the towns of the New World became a habit almost immediately. Baron Christopher von Graffenried, who founded the town of New Bern in Carolina in 1710, wrote that “Since in America they do not like to live crowded, in order to enjoy a purer air, I accordingly ordered the streets to be very broad and the houses well separated one from the other.” The baron was Swiss, but his intuition about his adopted land was absolutely correct: the spread-out towns of the New World were not simply functional products; this was the way people wanted to live.
The common desire for openness that Graffenried observed was easily achievable because American cities lacked walls. This circumstance had several important consequences. It meant that the definition of exactly what was city and what was not—and consequently also of who exactly was a city dweller—was inexact, or at least blurred. There was no American equivalent of the medieval tradition of exclusive urban citizenship, in which the privileges of town life were jealously guarded, or of the customs boundaries that most European cities maintained well into the nineteenth century. City walls created inflexible limits, but the edges of American cities were easily movable: what was wilderness one day could be suburb the next, and what was suburb one decade might be city the next. This sense of infinite possibilities and of rapid and continual change became a hallmark of the North American city (and it did so well before the automobile).
The need to build cities quickly and to provide for almost continual growth led to a reliance on grid planning, a type of planning that would characterize city building throughout the New World. Grids were a convenient way to lay out plots for future sale, an important consideration in all the new towns that depended on immigration for their economic well-being. Rectangular plots were easy to build on, could be combined to form different-sized parcels, and could accommodate different uses; the first towns were not zoned according to different functions, as cities are today, but were, in the jargon of the planner, mixed use. Mixed, too, was the community that they contained, for the American grid also had a philosophic dimension that is not immediately apparent.
Colonial America was not, of course, a democracy, but prerevolutionary towns did incorporate traits that can be called democratic. The degree of religious tolerance, for example, was unusual. In Charleston the established religion was the Anglican Church, but other Protestants, including Baptists, Quakers, French Huguenots, and various Dissenters, all had their own places of worship; so did Jews, who established a congregation in 1749, and forty-three years later built the largest synagogue in the United States. Although the official nature of the Church of England was recognized by the naming of Church Street (on which the Anglican Saint Philip’s was located), the sites of the different houses of worship were really comparable. Charleston’s openness reflected its merchant founders’ laissez-faire attitude and an easygoing English Restoration tolerance that also extended to social behavior (prostitution and gambling were tolerated). Philadelphia’s tolerance had its roots in Penn’s experience of religious persecution in England, and the greater measure of privileges and powers that were accorded to individual colonists was grounded in his own idealism. A 1762 map of the city shows meetinghouses for Quakers, Moravians, Anabaptists, and Presbyterians; churches for Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists; and a “Popish Chapel.”
These were secular and diverse cities in which there was a place for all. They did not require a single focus like the cathedral square or the royal precinct of the European town; it would have been difficult to make a single, grand urban gesture that reflected and incorporated such a wide variety of beliefs. The anonymous American grid was not chosen for military convenience, as in the ancient world, or bureaucratic standardization, as in the Laws of the Indies. It was initially adopted for easy and rapid real estate development, but it also turned out to be an ideal accommodating device for a more tolerant society.
Seventeenth-century grid planning did incorporate a new type of urban space for which there was no contemporary European precedent: the broad, tree-lined residential street. This emphasis on trees was distinctive, and was epitomized by the characteristic American habit (popularized, if not invented, by William Penn) of naming streets after trees. Surrounded by nature, American town builders reacted not by emphasizing the contrast between the natural and the man-made, but by incorporating natural elements in the town as much as possible, whether as green squares, tree-lined streets, or ample gardens. There were practical reasons for this interest in greenery. The summers of the eastern seaboard of North America were extremely hot and humid, more so than those of northern Europe, first home to most of the early immigrants. Spacing houses far apart and planting large trees for shade created a more comfortable town. The desire for cooling greenery continued in the nineteenth century in enormous undertakings to build large urban parks (New York’s Central Park, Montreal’s Mount Royal Park) and to create urban lakes (Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle), urban wilderness areas (Philadelphia, Toronto), and urban lakeside recreation areas (Chicago). It is also part of the motivation that produced nineteenth-century garden suburbs. In some way this “naturalization” of the city represents an unconscious move away from the man-made and toward the natural—that is, away from Europe and toward the American Indian urban model, in which architecture was subordinated to the landscape.
The most important architectural element of these leafy colonial towns was not a royal palace or a cathedral or even the state-house; it was, rather, the humble individual abode. According to the American architect Jaquelin Robertson, the colonial urban vision was of “an idealized, even mythic, domesticity, with the individual house not only as the center of urban life, but as the city’s most representative secular temple.” To say that houses were secular temples is going too far, but Robertson has a point: these towns are, first of all, a celebration of the house. This celebration is apparent in the way residences stand side by side with civic monuments on New England town greens, or the way that in Charleston, as in Savannah, the houses, rather than public buildings, occupy center stage. It is also visible in the hundreds of small-town Elm Streets, with their canopies of trees (often, sadly, no longer elms), their green borders of front yards, and their porch-fronted houses.
This domestic ideal had its origin not in the New World but in the old. The establishment of Annapolis, Williamsburg, Philadelphia, and Savannah corresponds roughly to the period when the cult of the house became an established part of British—and hence Anglo-American—culture. The chief expression of this cult was the British (and Dutch) preference for owning individual houses. The situation on the rest of the Continent was different; in Paris, Naples, and Vienna, the bourgeoisie were likely to occupy apartments in multistory buildings. The relationship between dwelling and street was different, too. The front door of the Anglo-Dutch house faced the street directly, whereas one entered the French or Italian apartment house via an inner, private courtyard. Thus, the street in front of the private house acquired some of that privacy; the street in front of the apartment building was purely public.III This produced two distinctly different types of cities: the Continental model, dense, communal, and oriented to life in the square and in the street; and the Anglo-Dutch model, more spread out, more private, and socially focused on the family house. Some historians have speculated that the roots of this difference may be religious: in Catholic cities, traditional, extended families lasted longer and people became used to living in buildings that accommodated several generations, whereas in Protestant countries, like Holland and England, the nuclear family developed earlier, and with it the ideal of living in private, single-family homes.
The Anglo-Dutch ideal of domesticity was adopted in colonial America, and consequently, American towns, like English towns, were made up mainly of houses containing single families rather than of buildings shared by several households. In London, however, only a few rich people lived in their own houses; in America, real estate was cheap and ordinary people could afford to be property owners. Another difference was that in London and Amsterdam, houses, even houses of the wealthy, were usually built with common walls; in America, people could spread out. The American idea that cities could be made almost entirely of freestanding private houses with their own gardens was an original notion, at least in Western culture.IV It was a powerful cultural ideal that would later create all sorts of difficulties as urban areas spread ever more widely to accommodate this desire, but it was an ideal that, against many odds, would never be completely abandoned.
I. There are many city names derived from Indian words. However, only a few—Toronto, Chattanooga, Chicago, Milwaukee—are original place names; most, like Kansas City, Ottawa, Omaha, Cheyenne, Manhattan, Miami, Peoria, Sioux Falls, and Wichita, are the names of tribes. Nineteenth-century Americans, in particular, favored Indian names: New Amsterdam was renamed Buffalo, Commencement City became Tacoma.
II. The new plan for Detroit was devised in 1807 by Judge Augustus Woodward, a friend of Jefferson. His novel proposal was based on a triangular system of land division that resembled a honeycomb, and combined elegance with utility. This experiment in city planning was short-lived and was abandoned in favor of a simple grid; only Grand Circus Park and Campus Martius remain today as reminders of the city that might have been.
III. In Holland, the stoop outside the front door is maintained by the householder, just as in many American towns, home owners are responsible for cleaning the sidewalk in front of their houses.
IV. Cities composed of private houses with gardens were not unknown elsewhere. Traditional African cities consisted of houses surrounded by agricultural plots, and Chinese and Japanese cities were made up of one- and two-story houses with walled gardens.