ON MAY 9, 1831, ALEXIS DE tocqueville And His friend and traveling companion, Gustave-Auguste de Beaumont de la Bonninière, disembarked from the sailing ship that had brought them from France to the New World. The town in which they landed—Newport, Rhode Island—contained several notable public buildings: the State House at the head of Washington Square, a synagogue, the Redwood Library, and Trinity Church, with its graceful spire. But it was the tiny, toylike rowhouses along the narrow streets climbing the hill behind the long wharf at the water’s edge that made the strongest impression on Tocqueville. “We went to see the town,” he wrote in a letter to his mother, “which seemed to us very attractive. It’s true we weren’t difficult. [It had taken thirty-seven days to make the trip from Le Havre, and a severe storm had forced them away from their original destination, New York.] It’s a collection of small houses, the size of chicken coops, but distinguished by a cleanness that is a pleasure to see and that we have no conception of in France. Beyond that, the inhabitants differ but little superficially from the French.”
When the two young Frenchmen arrived—Tocqueville was twenty-five, Beaumont three years older—Newport was, in a sense, between roles. No longer a commercial powerhouse, it was still one of the two capitals of Rhode Island, with an architectural heritage that announced its earlier prosperity. Newport had been established in 1639. Its founders, a group of religious freethinkers driven out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, picked a propitious site. Thanks to its well-protected harbor and advantageous location at the head of Narragansett Bay, the small settlement grew into a major colonial port and, by the middle of the eighteenth century, was handling more international cargo than New York. Newport shipped rum to Africa, where it was exchanged for slaves, who were transported to Barbados and traded for sugar, which in turn was brought back to Newport to be made into rum. This profitable triangular commerce was disrupted by the Revolutionary War, during which the town spent five years under the occupation of the English and then the French. Although it never again recovered its commercial preeminence, Newport did not fade into obscurity. During the late 1800s and early 1900s it became a fashionable summer and autumn resort for the New York rich, after World War II it was a navy port, and today it continues as a summer resort and a destination for tourists.
Tocqueville and Beaumont were in the United States as representatives of the French minister of the interior; their official purpose was to visit prisons and penitentiaries in order to make a study of reforms in the American penal system. That, at least, was the project that the two lowly juges-auditeurs (assistant magistrates) at Versailles had proposed to their government, and the idea was accepted, although evidently not with great enthusiasm, as most of the travel expenses were borne by the young men’s families. But Beaumont and Tocqueville had grander ambitions than merely the study of prisons. They planned to use the opportunity of visiting the United States to write a book together. Perhaps Tocqueville was influenced by his distant relative, Chateaubriand, who had earlier written Voyage en Amérique. France had just undergone the Revolution of July 1830, which expelled Charles X, the last of the Bourbon kings, and installed Louis-Philippe (the Citizen King) on the throne as a sort of constitutional monarch. The two young Frenchmen hoped that a book on the world’s only mass democracy would attract readers and make their fortunes.
And so it did, although their joint writing project foundered and each wrote separately (they nevertheless remained lifelong friends). Beaumont published a well-received abolitionist novel, Marie, ou l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis (Marie, or Slavery in the United States); and Tocqueville pursued the original project. The first volume of De la démocratie en Amérique (as the title suggests, his main subject was democracy rather than the United States) appeared four years after his return to France (the second volume was published in 1840). The book (that is, the first volume) was a popular success, printed in thirteen French editions during the author’s lifetime. With honesty and intelligence, Tocqueville described the effects of Jacksonian democracy not only on political institutions but also, especially in the second volume, on everyday life, on the family, on social customs, on public and private behavior, and on literature and the arts. Democracy in America established his reputation in England, where John Stuart Mill wrote a favorable review in the London and Westminster Review, and in Europe. Tocqueville went on to a political career, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, wrote the constitution of the Second Republic, served briefly as minister of foreign affairs, and resigned because of Louis-Napoléon (later Napoléon III). As a result of his public protest following the latter’s coup d’état of 1851, Tocqueville was briefly imprisoned, but unlike his illustrious great-grandfather, Malesherbes, who was guillotined during the Revolution, Tocqueville was set free in a few days. Withdrawing from public life, he spent his last eight years living on his ancestral estate in Normandy writing a history of the French Revolution; he died at the relatively young age of fifty-four. He traveled widely during his life, and although he had many American correspondents he never returned to America.
Tocqueville and Beaumont spent slightly less than nine months in North America. Their travels consisted of two major swings. On the first, they went from New York by steamboat up the Hudson to Albany, by stagecoach to Buffalo, a stop at Niagara Falls, and then by water as far west as Michigan, in what was then called the Northwest Territory; then after a side trip to Montreal and Quebec City, they visited Boston and returned to New York, traveling through Massachusetts and Connecticut. This journey lasted about four months. The second trip, slightly shorter, took them to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, down the Ohio Valley to Cincinnati and Memphis, on the Mississippi River to New Orleans, overland to Norfolk, Virginia, and up to the capital, Washington.
Armed with official letters of introduction, they dutifully visited penal establishments such as Philadelphia’s brand-new Eastern State Penitentiary, where all prisoners were kept in round-the-clock solitary confinement, and the New York state penitentiaries at Auburn and Sing-Sing, where some common activities were allowed but all speech was forbidden. Tocqueville, who spoke English well (and later married an Englishwoman), interviewed people in all walks of life—government officials, politicians, businessmen, farmers, trappers, and Indians. He also met such notables as Daniel Webster, Sam Houston, the recently defeated President John Quincy Adams, and Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. The young Frenchman had a wide-ranging intellect, a keen sense of observation, and a journalist’s curiosity. Consequently, one can pick almost any subject—religion, education, slavery—and find that Tocqueville had something interesting to say about it.
Tocqueville filled fourteen notebooks during his travels, and it is these, as well as his letters, that are the best source for his opinions of American cities and towns. Generally, he admired small towns. Traveling through Massachusetts, he writes: “Almost all the houses are charming (especially in the villages), and there prevails a height of cleanliness which is something astonishing.I Tocqueville considered the New England small town to be an exemplary democratic institution, since it involved a large number of citizens in managing their own affairs; he called the town “the ultimate individual [emphasis in original] in the American system.” He was also astute enough to note that the political independence of these small towns lay in what he called their municipal spirit. “Americans love their towns,” he wrote, “for much the same reasons that highlanders love their mountains. In both cases the native land has emphatic and peculiar features; it has more pronounced physiognomy than is found elsewhere.”
At first glance, these charming and picturesque towns seem more like the products of happy accidents than achievements of urban planning. The eminent urban historian John Reps agrees. Discussing Woodstock, Vermont, which was founded in 1768 and is similar in layout to the towns that Tocqueville visited, Reps concludes that there is no hard evidence that the town was built according to a predetermined plan. Its layout was characterized by curved and doglegged streets that seem to follow no regular geometry; in fact, there was only one intersection that formed a ninety-degree angle. There were no rectangular blocks in the conventional sense; none of the streets were even parallel. At its heart was a park or green. The shape of the green was roughly oval, with a sort of prow at one end. According to local tradition, the green represents the main deck of a ship once commanded by one of the town fathers. A charming story about a charming place, but surely it is no more than that? Surely, the shape of the green, like the rambling layout of the streets, was no more than chance? Reps appears to think so, but thoughtfully adds: “The visual satisfaction one discovers there is no accident. . . . The plan alone cannot convey the pervading qualities of fitness, serenity, and congruity one encounters on the spot.”
A visit to Woodstock bears out Reps’s observation: topography, views of the surrounding landscape, and shifting prospects do seem to have been taken into account by the builders of the town. The streets provide interesting views of buildings. Nothing is centered or quite lined up, but this does not produce visual confusion. Is all this accidental? The overall plan seems to have been dictated by the site: a narrow, flat valley hemmed in by the sweeping curve of the Ottauqueechy River on one side and a small creek on the other. The green was laid out lengthwise on the narrow peninsula between the river and the creek, allowing for many plots to have rear gardens running down to the riverbank. At each end of the green, two streets fan out at an acute angle. The town has a small extension, a sort of suburb, across the river, which is spanned by a covered bridge approached from one side of the green. Beyond the extension was the line of the Rutland and Woodstock Railroad, an important ingredient to the growth of the town.
The builders of Woodstock were aware that important buildings needed important sites. The Episcopalian church is at the head of the green, the Methodist farther down, and the Congregationalist church artfully closes the vista of Pleasant Street where it dead-ends into Elm Street. Two lesser churches, the Universalist and the Church of Christ, occupy lesser sites. The pride of place, on the green, is shared by private homes on one side, and the courthouse and the Eagle Hotel on the other. Stores, banks, the post office, and other businesses are located on two streets adjacent to but not actually on the green. This is a subtle sort of urban design, but it is design, design that proceeds not from a predetermined master plan, but from the process of building itself. A rough framework is established, with individual builders adapting as they come along. If Parisian planning in the grand manner can be likened to carefully scored symphonic music, the New England town is like jazz. Admittedly, it’s a very restrained jazz—pianist Bill Evans, say, not Fats Waller. But like jazz, it involves improvisation, and as in jazz, this does not mean that the result is accidental or that there are no rules.
Tocqueville considered the New England town an exemplary democratic institution. Yet the visual impact of a town like Woodstock suggests a very different urban response to democracy than our own. Woodstock grew according to a set of rules—not all written down, perhaps, but nevertheless widely understood. For example, buildings were erected on a line located close to the street, either along the sidewalk, in the case of commercial buildings, or ten or fifteen feet behind it, in the case of houses. It is this proximity that defines the streets in such a pleasant way. That is why the Woodstock Inn, which replaced the Eagle Hotel but relocated the main building some distance back from the street, is so disturbing. Even though the parking lot in front of the building is attractively landscaped, the effect of the empty space on the street is deadening—it has broken one of the key rules. Another rule involved the shape of the plots, which were narrow and deep. This meant that buildings, too, were narrow and deep; a larger house extended farther back but kept roughly the same frontage as its more modest neighbor. Only the most important public buildings, like the churches or the courthouse, were meant to be experienced as freestanding “objects.” The public library, a stone building of the late 1800s in a robust, neo-Romanesque style, successfully followed this rule. The commercial buildings, on the other hand, were built side by side and were meant to be experienced as a continuous series of fronts.
Another rule, which is less obvious and was certainly unwritten, was that as buildings were added and the overall composition enlarged, builders were expected to take these changes into account. The intersection of Elm and Central streets, for example, acquired a special character, with commercial blocks rather than freestanding structures. This development left the green largely unaffected and still provides an interesting double focus between the busy shopping area and the quiet park. An accident? Perhaps. But if this is considered in terms of jazz, each solo player in succession built on what came before, added his own interpretation, and passed on the altered piece to the next soloist.
Here is another aspect of Woodstock that lends itself to the musical analogy. In a classical symphony orchestra, the musicians are placed in discrete groups: strings over here, woodwinds over there, violins in the front, brass in the back. In jazz, the instruments are more or less mixed up, and the musicians, at least those with portable instruments, have no predetermined spots and are free to walk around; what is important is that they stay close enough together for eye contact. From an extant map of the town as it was in 1869, one can tell that apart from the concentration of the commercial blocks, functional zoning didn’t exist in Woodstock. There were a few exceptions: the gasworks and the slaughterhouse were kept well back from the street; the wool mill was on the outskirts of the town and drew power from the river; but on the whole, buildings with different functions sat—and still sit today—side by side on the same streets. We live in a period when it is felt that streets—indeed, entire neighborhoods—must be either exclusively residential or exclusively commercial or industrial. (Manhattan and central Paris are exceptions to this rule.) It’s worth noting that Elm Street, arguably Woodstock’s toniest residential street, contained not only houses but also a little office block, the post office, a livery stable, a dry goods store, the probate office, and a church. All this on a street that is about a thousand feet long. Since the houses belonged to the town’s most prominent citizens, chiefly doctors and lawyers, the mixture of functions must not have been considered a drawback, nor, indeed, is it today. Instead, it provides variety and vitality to the town, a vitality that is often absent in modern single-use neighborhoods.
The 1869 map of Woodstock shows a proposed street drawn in dotted lines at the south end of town. Now this cannot be called a historical accident or an improvised street or a donkey track—it is clearly a planned street. But it is neither parallel to adjacent South Street nor even perfectly straight. Since the proposed street cuts through several properties in an awkward way, its imperfect course does not appear to have been governed by legal constraints, nor can its slight irregularity be explained by topography. It is the way it is because that is the way its makers wanted it to be. One can only surmise that the people who built these towns liked slightly twisted, angled streets, or it might be more accurate to say that they dislike geometrical regularity in city planning.II
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There are not more than 250 houses on the 1869 map of Woodstock, a reminder that during most of the nineteenth century New England towns remained small. They rarely had more than two thousand residents, which undoubtedly facilitated the democratic government that Tocqueville so admired. These were communities in the Aristotelian model, where everyone knew each other and communal decisions could easily be made. But in the early nineteenth century such small settlements were no longer typical of the United States. In the American interior a very different sort of town was coming into being—the boomtown. Tocqueville passed through a number of these towns: Rochester, whose population had increased from 150 to 15,000 in the decade between 1820 and 1830; Memphis, only four years old but already a busy cotton port; and Louisville, where a local merchant proudly told him that the town had grown from 3,000 inhabitants to 13,000 in only seven years. The fastest-growing inland city was undoubtedly Cincinnati, where Tocqueville and Beaumont spent three days in December 1831.
The birth of Cincinnati was typical of nineteenth-century real estate finagling. John Symmes, a New Jersey congressman, bought one million acres in southwestern Ohio, the so-called Miami purchase, from the federal government. Symmes, who eventually defaulted on his payments and lost everything, sold a large parcel of land on the bank of the Ohio River to Matthias Denman, a New Jersey speculator, who in turn sold shares to two promoters from Kentucky. They quickly laid out building plots and set about attracting buyers, chiefly from Kentucky and New Jersey, to what they called Losantiville. When Tocqueville arrived, the now-rechristened Cincinnati was only forty-three years old, but thanks to the opening up of the river to steamboat traffic in 1816, it had grown to a busy city of about 30,000 people.
“Cincinnati presents an odd spectacle,” Tocqueville recorded in his notebook. “A town which seems to want to get built too quickly to have things done in order. Large buildings, huts, streets blocked by rubble, houses under construction; no names to the streets, no numbers on the houses, no external luxury, but a picture of industry and work that strikes one at every step.”III An extraordinary photographic panorama of Cincinnati taken around 1865 by a traveling photographer named Henry Rhohiler illustrates the effect of this pragmatic approach. The horizontal photograph, which is five feet long, is composed of four overlapping plates and shows the entire sweep of what had become a city of more than 100,000 people along the curve of the Ohio River. It is an impressive sight, the hills girdling the city, the mighty river, the riverbank lined with more than a dozen steamboats; the tall stone tower of a partially finished suspension bridge (built by John Augustus Roebling, who later designed the Brooklyn Bridge) dominates the foreground. Paradoxically it is the bridge, a work of engineering, that is the one lyrical gesture in the picture; otherwise, the city has all the poetry of a parking lot, with rows and rows of three- and four-story buildings instead of cars. One can feel the untrammeled commercial life of this boomtown that is bursting at its seams. The riverbank is lined with the backs of warehouses and ramshackle sheds and outbuildings, regularly interrupted by the dead ends of dusty streets that stop just short of falling into the river. This cavalier—or rather commercial—treatment of the waterfront was typical of cities in North America. (The river promenade of Charleston, a genteel southern city, was an exception.) In a vast land with few roads the rivers provided the chief means of transportation and appeared to push their way through cities in the insistent manner of interstate highways today. Only after rivers were supplanted by railroads and highways did urban waterfronts come to be seen as potential amenities, places where it might be pleasant to stroll, play, or even live.
The most prominent city being built in the United States at the time of Tocqueville’s visit was the new capital, Washington; the two Frenchmen spent about two weeks there meeting public officials and consulting government archives. Construction of the city had begun forty years before their visit, according to a master plan devised largely by Tocqueville’s countryman, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, an architect and engineer who had established a practice in New York. This made Washington the first example in the United States of a city planned by a trained professional. The skilled L’Enfant merged practicality with grandeur by overlaying a straightforward grid with large diagonal avenues that created vistas and monumental axes. He set aside special sites for the president’s house, Congress, a national church (now the site of the National Portrait Gallery), several commemorative monuments, and five grand fountains. At the intersections of the avenues there were to be fifteen squares, one for each of the states in the union.
The plan of Washington effectively combined European and American ideas of planning: the diagonal avenues and axial composition of Versailles with the grid of Philadelphia (it was the practical Jefferson who had insisted on the grid). The mall, which L’Enfant called the Grand Avenue, was the equivalent of Williamsburg’s Main Street, but 400 feet wide and about a mile long; an equestrian statue of George Washington was planned for the site where the great obelisk, the Washington National Monument, now stands. The complete plan was roughly four miles across, which dwarfed William Penn’s Philadelphia and was also larger than any new city being planned in Europe, including even Peter the Great’s Saint Petersburg on the banks of the Neva.
When Tocqueville and Beaumont stayed in Washington, the population was less than 20,000, and the city was growing slowly. Unlike nearby Baltimore, which had already surpassed 80,000, Washington lacked a good port—Jefferson had misjudged the depth of the eastern branch of the Potomac River, which silted up and soon became unusable. Moreover, the new capital had a particularly unhealthy climate; from August to October, the so-called sickly season, Congress adjourned and those who could moved inland to avoid malaria. Compared with the carefully drafted plans made by L’Enfant (and by his successor, the surveyor Andrew Ellicott), the reality was almost comical. The largest building, after the Capitol and the White House, was a lowly tavern. The mall was used as a cow pasture; the rond-points scattered throughout the city were planted with vegetables. There was no indication in L’Enfant’s plan of how the city might grow in phases, so major avenues had been built in their entirety, with building construction taking place in a scattershot manner. The plan may have been Parisian in inspiration, but it gave Tocqueville the impression of a town composed of five or six villages, with groups of buildings here and there. The monumental avenues (130 to 160 feet wide) that L’Enfant had created to link important sites were flanked by cleared forest, not by buildings. There was disbelief in Tocqueville’s voice when he wrote that “They have already rooted up trees for ten miles around, lest they should get in the way of the future citizens of this imagined capital.” In fact the trees were probably removed as part of an effort to dry up the mosquito-ridden swamp.
L’Enfant’s plan may have struck Tocqueville as hopelessly ambitious, but it has turned out to be a success. The symbolic iconography of the city’s plan has become a part of the national imagination: the Mall representing the Constitution, and the locations of the White House and the Capitol representing the separation of powers. The monumental buildings have taken their intended places, and at the same time, the plan has proved adaptable, as evidenced by the addition of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and the extension of the Mall in 1901. The combination of grid and diagonal avenues has also proved amenable to automobile traffic. The only thing that L’Enfant did not foresee was the growth of the public bureaucracy—“ten miles around” was nowhere near enough.
Tocqueville and Beaumont visited all the major cities of eastern North America with the exception of Charleston and Savannah. Altogether, their impressions were mixed. In eastern Canada, where the presence of a French-speaking majority made him feel at home, Tocqueville wrote admiringly of the countryside and the villages but observed that Montreal and Quebec City (which then each had about 28,000 inhabitants) reminded him of ugly French provincial towns. He was favorably inclined toward smaller towns like Utica (“a charming town of ten thousand”), and Detroit (“a fine American village”). He passed New Year’s Day in New Orleans, but was unimpressed by its squares and jotted in his notebook: “External appearance of the town. Beautiful houses. Huts. Muddy, unpaved streets. Spanish architecture: flat roofs; English: bricks, little doors; French: massive carriage entrances. Population just as mixed.” The two Frenchmen spent several weeks in Philadelphia, whose extreme regularity they found oppressive. “All the edifices are neat, kept with extreme care,” wrote Beaumont in a letter. “Its sole defect I repeat is to be monotonous in its beauty.” Tocqueville commented again on the numbered, nameless streets, an American custom to which he could not adjust. He liked Boston, “a pretty town in a picturesque site on several hills in the middle of the waters.” Boston was one of very few American cities that did create a civic waterfront, which happened shortly before Tocqueville’s visit—Quincy Market was opened in 1825. The city was then the cultural center of the United States and the heart of the architectural Greek Revival that was sweeping the nation, and the young French aristocrat (Tocqueville was a count) appreciated Boston society, which he compared favorably with the upper classes in Europe. “One feels one has escaped from those commercial habits and that money-conscious spirit which makes New York society so vulgar,” he wrote.
Tocqueville spent a total of two months in New York, since it was the base from which he and Beaumont set out on their several trips, but he never warmed to the city. In a letter to his mother, he wrote: “To a Frenchman the aspect of the city is bizarre and not very agreeable. One sees neither dome, nor bell tower, nor great edifice, with the result that one has the constant impression of being in a suburb. In its center the city is built of brick, which gives it a most monotonous appearance. The houses have neither cornices, nor balustrades, nor portes-cochères. The streets are badly paved, but sidewalks for pedestrians are to be found in all of them.” Writing to his friend Ernest de Chabrol, he described the island site of New York as “admirable” but complained about the lack of noteworthy public monuments and added that “it does not resemble in the least our principal cities in Europe.” To Tocqueville, it was obvious why New York wasn’t like Paris. It lacked architectural refinements—cupolas, carvings, and ornamentation—and grand civic buildings. These would come. Tocqueville hardly suspected that in less than seventy years New Yorkers would start building public monuments at least as grand as anything in his native city—the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum, Pennsylvania Station, and Grand Central Terminal.
But in 1831 New York was a dismal place. Large sections of the city had been destroyed during the British occupation by two disastrous fires, and after the Revolutionary War the population shrank to 10,000. Eventually the city regained its trade, and by 1825, with the completion of the Erie Canal, it was once again the largest and busiest city in the nation. New York was certainly a city ruled by the “commercial and mercantile spirit.” It was also a newly growing, hurriedly built place, which, combined with the lack of an architectural heritage, gave it a makeshift, insubstantial air. The monotony that Tocqueville commented on was also the result of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which divided almost the entire island of Manhattan north of Washington Square into a regular gridiron consisting of 15 5 parallel east-west streets at regular 200-foot intervals, linking the two rivers, and a dozen 100-foot-wide north-south avenues more than seven miles long. Three large open spaces were set aside for public uses—a parade ground, a market, and a reservoir—and there were four small parks, almost afterthoughts. (In any case the open spaces were soon built over; Central Park was not inserted until 1858.) The blocks were subdivided into standard plots, 25 feet wide and 100 feet deep. “As an aid to speculation the commissioners’ plan was perhaps unequaled,” Reps observed wryly in The Making of Urban America, “but only on this ground can it be justifiably called a great achievement.”
In 1811, with the population of New York at about 50,000, laying out such a vast gridiron must have appeared hopelessly optimistic. Twenty years later, when Tocqueville stayed there, less than a third of the grid was filled in, despite the city having mushroomed to over 200,000. In another twenty years, the population would more than triple. A city of 200,000 doesn’t seem like a major center today (it’s smaller than Anchorage, Alaska), but at the beginning of the nineteenth century 200,000 people meant a city the size of Amsterdam, Vienna, or Berlin.
One should not imagine Tocqueville’s New York as a more livable version of today’s metropolitan behemoth. This was a premodern city lacking most of the urban technologies we take for granted. There were no underground sewers to carry off household wastewater, for example. The fecal matter of 200,000 people was either collected by night-soil scavengers and carted to the countryside to be used as fertilizer or was deposited directly into pits and cesspools; household slops were dumped into the street. Since there was no municipal water supply, backyard wells were easily contaminated. New York was no different than other American cities and towns in this regard, but it was much more densely occupied, and it is little wonder that the first cholera epidemic in the United States (brought over from Europe) broke out here in 1832. As Tocqueville noted, most streets were unpaved and crowded with thousands of wagons and carriages. The mud in the street was mixed with horse manure, and domestic waste was scattered everywhere, for there was no trash collection. Garbage simply accumulated outside and was trampled into the street, which explains why the oldest Manhattan streets are anywhere from six to fifteen feet higher than their original levels. Scavenging pigs wandered the streets and sidewalks. There was no mass transportation, although a horse-drawn omnibus on rails—the first trolley car—was introduced along the Bowery in 1832. There were few building regulations and such poor fire protection that a great fire destroyed more than fifty acres in lower Manhattan only three years after Tocqueville’s departure. Life in the big city was dangerous, uncomfortable, and unhealthy.
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When Tocqueville and Beaumont first arrived in New York, the steamboat in which they were traveling from Newport came through Long Island Sound and down the East River. They passed what is today the Upper East Side but what was then the suburbs, and admired a number of private mansions (“big as boxes of candy”) whose gardens came down to the water’s edge. Tocqueville was so intrigued by this pretty sight that the following day he set out to look at the houses more closely. He describes his disappointment at discovering that these classical buildings were not built of marble, as he had expected, but of whitewashed brick, and that the columns were not stone, but painted wood. They were, in his eyes, fakes.
Tocqueville recounted this story in the second volume of Democracy in America in a chapter he entitled “In What Spirit the Americans Cultivate the Arts.” The spirit, according to him, was distinctly shaped by the political system: that is, in sharp contrast to an aristocratic society, in which the fine arts were a prerogative of a privileged few who could be counted on to maintain a high level of craftsmanship and taste, a democracy left the patronage of the arts in the hands of wealthy but untutored patrons, or what was worse, at the mercy of the masses. “Quantity increases; quality goes down,” he observed mercilessly. “Appearance counts for more than reality.” This encapsulated the dilemma of the American city, which aspired to the artistic accomplishments of the aristocratic European city—to be “like that”—but was reluctant to deny participation to the mass of its citizens.
Tocqueville was skeptical of America’s artistic prospects. “Democratic peoples . . . cultivate those arts which help to make life comfortable rather than those which adorn it,” he wrote. “They habitually put use before beauty, and they want beauty itself to be useful.” However, although the architecture of New York might appear crude and functional to a sophisticated Frenchman like Tocqueville, for the previous hundred years everyday life in the United States had in fact been undergoing significant change precisely in the direction of adornment and beautification. There is evidence that beginning in the 1720s, the lives of at least some Americans were becoming more genteel. This was manifested in manners—using knives and forks instead of eating with the hands, for example—and in a rising interest in personal hygiene. More elaborate dress and an awareness of social etiquette were further evidence of the process of refinement.
A desire for elegance manifested itself in people’s heightened awareness of their physical surroundings. True, in some cities, like Philadelphia, commercial instincts overwhelmed civic aspirations, and instead of green amplitude there was congestion and overbuilding. But as we have seen, in many colonial towns, squares, parks, and ceremonial civic spaces appeared during the early eighteenth century. Boston started to build Long Wharf, which extended the main street straight into the harbor, in 1710, and located a new statehouse in a civic square the following year; Newport’s grand wharf, modeled on Boston’s, was built in 1739; Hartford added a new statehouse to its central square in 1718.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of the quest for beauty is the domestic American architecture of the first half of the eighteenth century. The townhouses of the gentry became larger, more ornate, more embellished, and painted. (During the seventeenth century, houses were usually left unpainted.) Interiors acquired grand staircases, plastered ceilings, and larger windows. Their architectural style, derived from the English Georgian, was refined but not ostentatious, with simple exteriors and more elaborate interiors. It continued well after the break with England as the Federal style, allowing prosperous citizens to privately enjoy their homes without jeopardizing republican ideals by an ostentatious display of wealth on the exterior of their houses.
The colonial gentry as well as their postcolonial successors, with their fine houses and clothes and manners, set themselves apart from the common folk. It was inevitable, after the War of Independence, that American gentility should democratize itself and broaden its base, and by the end of the eighteenth century, it did so. Refinements that were previously reserved for the gentry—the planters and successful merchants—began to spread to the middle class—those in the professions, industrial entrepreneurs, artisans, and shopkeepers. Such people could rarely afford a mansion, but they could have at least a front parlor; even modest houses could acquire a coat of paint (usually white), a front garden, and a picket fence. People could also change their manners: popular novels assisted readers in developing a more delicate sensibility; cookbooks promoted more elaborate recipes; self-help guides advised on etiquette and interior decoration; pattern books assisted carpenters in building more elegant houses. Briefly put, the quest for gentility was commercialized. This produced the first stirring of a mass consumer culture in dress, furnishings, and domestic architecture, and led to the inevitable cheapening of previously aristocratic fashions, as Tocqueville had noted on his visit to the East River mansions.
It proved easier to commercialize colonial architecture (the Georgian style is based on the use of standardized elements and relatively simple conventions) than to commercialize colonial town planning. Annapolis and Williamsburg, with their Baroque-inspired vistas and ceremonial promenades, might have offered a graceful example to city builders, except that their plans were ill suited to rapid growth, and their attractive, studied layouts had none of the advantages of gridded towns when it came to real estate development. Only Savannah, with its regular geometry, its standardized neighborhoods, and its handsome squares and tree-lined avenues, offered a balance between practicality and civic beauty. But Savannah, located far from the great population centers of the Northeast, had no influence whatsoever on American urbanism in the eighteenth century or later.
There was another indisputable fact that prospective city builders could not afford to ignore—Annapolis and Williamsburg were commercial failures. The development of the port of Annapolis was overshadowed by the phenomenal success of its upstart neighbor, Baltimore. By 1850, the population of Baltimore reached 150,000 and that city was second only to New York, while Annapolis, the capital of the state, remained a small town. Williamsburg did not fare any better. It was one of the few colonial towns not located on water; rather, the site was equidistant from two rivers, the James and the York. Nicholson intended Williamsburg to have not one but two ports, one on each river (with characteristic grandiloquence he named them Queen Mary’s Port and Princess Anne’s Port, after the late British queen and a Danish royal). It was hardly a practical solution. The ports were several miles from the town, and to make matters worse, the rivers were only navigable at high tide. Williamsburg therefore remained chiefly an administrative center. When the capital of Virginia was moved to Richmond in 1779, Nicholson’s town went into decline until it became an out-of-the-way country village whose only livelihood was the College of William and Mary. This is a reminder that in urban design, good aesthetic intentions are not enough.
A point must be made about the difference between American and European capitals. In Europe a capital city was not merely the seat of political power, but provided commercial, cultural, intellectual, and social leadership. This is what economists call a primate city. Englishmen looked to London, Frenchmen to Paris, Spaniards to Madrid, and Prussians to Berlin for ideas about what to wear, who to read, and how to build. Braudel has called the great European capitals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “hothouses,” fostering innovation and sometimes upheaval in all fields, including urbanism. Things were different in the New World. “America has not yet any great capital whose direct or indirect influence is felt through the length and breadth of the land,” Tocqueville observed. New York was the most important city commercially, but Boston was predominant culturally and Washington was the seat of government. This diffusion of powers was not accidental. It was a question of the country’s size. Many individual states were the size of European countries; hence no single city could be expected to dominate. Furthermore, as Tocqueville pointed out, many rural Americans were indisputably suspicious of the political influence of large cities; no less than Thomas Jefferson had proclaimed: “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, the liberties of man.” State capitals were often located in secondary, out-of-the-way towns: Albany, not New York; Harrisburg, not Philadelphia, Annapolis, not Baltimore. (Only in the New England states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island was the capital also the largest city.) Of course, the federal capital was moved from New York to a backwoods location.IV Ostensibly, this placed the capital closer to the center of the state or of the country, but curtailing the powers of the largest cities was undoubtedly a consideration.
If Washington, D.C., had been the commercial and cultural capital of the United States, American urbanism might have taken a different turn and L’Enfant’s planning ideas might have spread across the country. But the city that provided the ready example for prospective city builders was not Washington but New York, the largest and most commercially successful city on the continent; what worked there was good enough for everyone else. New towns had to deal with furious growth, and a simple subdivisible planning system was imperative. The no-nonsense Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 provided exactly that, and it became the model for almost all new North American cities: Chicago (planned in 1830), San Francisco (founded in 1839, and vastly extended in 1849), and Toronto (which started to grow in earnest after 1812). Occasionally, modifications were made to the simple grid: the Philadelphia central square showed up in Ohio towns like Columbus and Cleveland; the diagonal avenues of Washington are visible in the plans of Indianapolis and Madison, Wisconsin; the extensions to New Orleans were gridded but incorporated open squares based on the old French model. But generally the grid prevailed. The Land Ordinance adopted by the Continental Congress of 1785 also assured its continued widespread use. This legislation effectively divided all unsettled land in the United States into a vast grid of regular six-mile-square townships, each subdivided into a checkerboard of square-mile sections. Since country roads were usually located along section lines, and towns tended to spring up at crossroads, it was convenient and natural that their streets should follow the same orthogonal geometry.
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“Money is the only form of social distinction; but see how arrogantly it classifies itself,” Tocqueville observed caustically. That social refinements in the form of fine clothes and fine houses could now be purchased sounds democratic, but it did not apply to most of the poor. Gentility, even in its diluted, commercialized form, naturally erected barriers between the middle class and working poor that flew in the face of democratic ideals. Nowhere was this contradiction more evident than in the city itself. Eighteenth-century Europeans dealt with social distinctions by creating segregated “public” spaces. The pleasure gardens of the Palais Royal in Paris, for example, which was still operating when Tocqueville was a young man, were open to aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, but were off-limits to the common classes (who were invited in on only three special days of the year). Paris and London both had fashionable promenades (the Cours la Reine, the Tuileries gardens, the Mall in Saint James Park) to which only “respectable” people were admitted; these areas were fenced, with guards posted at the gates to keep out the riffraff. Many of the residential squares in the fashionable districts of London are still surrounded by iron fences and have locked gates, with keys available only to the householders living around them. There were some American attempts to create analogous restricted urban spaces, particularly in New York City, where there were several private residential squares like Union Square, Irving Place, and Gramercy Park (which remains fenced and gated to this day). But New Yorkers had no equivalent to the Mall or the Tuileries. Whereas genteel Londoners and Parisians, ladies as well as gentlemen, could stroll without danger of being offended by crude or vulgar people, American streets belonged to everyone, rich and poor alike; so did parks like Boston’s Common, New York’s Battery Park, and Philadelphia’s squares.
The “commonness” of such public places in the city flew in the face of refinement, however. “Neither the Park nor the Battery is very much resorted to by the fashionable citizens of New York,” sniffed a visitor, “as they have become too common.” Tocqueville, too, was struck by the presence of a vociferous urban lower class, which he described as consisting of freed black slaves (“condemned by law and opinion to a hereditary state of degradation and wretchedness”), and poor immigrants, whom he described as motivated by self-interest rather than good citizenship. The urban rabble was a common feature of European cities. It should hardly have surprised Tocqueville. What Tocqueville did foresee (more or less correctly) was that the large size of American cities and the volatile nature of the urban underclass (although he did not call it that) would eventually threaten personal liberties. Today, a combination of official lethargy and community resignation permits the decay of public behavior, when such simple pleasures as going for an evening stroll in the park or sitting on a public bench are no longer to be taken for granted by many citizens.V
Tocqueville also predicted that the government would be obliged to create an armed force to suppress the excesses of the mob, which had already instigated serious riots in both New York and Philadelphia. He was right about that, too; in 1833 Philadelphia formed its first regular police force, and eleven years later, New York followed suit. As towns became cities and as cities grew in size, social control would have to become explicit. The informal familial and personal mechanisms for exercising authority over miscreants no longer sufficed.
Even before Tocqueville’s American trip, it had become obvious that the unruly city population was not amenable to refinement. According to Richard L. Bushman, a historian at Columbia University, “Toward the end of the [eighteenth] century the standards of genteel delicacy rose ever higher, and polite society isolated itself more and more from the coarseness of ordinary city life.” The urban bourgeoisie withdrew to what Bushman calls “resorts of gentility”—that is, to selected taverns and assembly rooms, and later, to the “public” rooms of hotels and “public” parlors (there were also women’s parlors and family parlors), which were reserved for the middle class. Carriages became increasingly popular in cities, as they shielded their passengers from the life of the street—much as automobiles would a hundred years later. But the chief resorts of gentility were those constituents of American towns that had distinguished them since the colonial period: genteel people retreated to the private comforts and refinement of their individual houses. “Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself,” wrote Tocqueville.VI He was pointing out another unique characteristic of the New World city: it was a setting for individual pursuits rather than communal activities.
When Tocqueville went to the American frontier, he was taken aback to find that the boomtowns and backwoods hamlets were not being settled by European immigrants, as he had expected, but by native-born Americans. “An American . . . changes his residence ceaselessly,” he marveled. Here is another explanation for the general lack of refinement in American cities of the nineteenth century—the absence of long-lasting attachment to a place. People moved about: from house to house, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from town to town, from the East to the new frontier. The city—especially the newly built city—was chiefly seen as an anonymous, practical contrivance (hence the frequency with which numbers were used instead of street names). Cities could be started from scratch, built up, and as quickly abandoned, or at least altered. Americans were attached to their homes, to their families, and to their political institutions, but as Tocqueville so astutely observed, they carelessly left cities to their own devices.
I. The cleanliness of towns that Tocqueville refers to several times was probably chiefly due to large lots and wide streets, something that most European towns lacked.
II. In his famous book The Art of Building Cities, published in 1889, the Viennese urban theorist Camillo Sitte, who attempted to uncover the principles that governed the design of streets and squares in medieval and Renaissance towns, wrote: “Technicians of today take more trouble than is necessary to create interminable rectangular streets and public squares of impeccable symmetry. These efforts seem misdirected to those who are interested in good city appearance. Our forebears had ideas on this subject quite different to ours.”
III. Tocqueville was wrong about the lack of street names—there were simply no signs. According to contemporary city maps, Cincinnati streets parallel to the river were numbered; the cross streets, likewise following the example of Philadelphia, were Sycamore, Walnut, Vine, Plum, and Elm. There was a Front Street, but its view of the river was blocked by commercial buildings; there was also a Main Street running inland from the river.
IV. Interestingly, the same pattern was followed in Canada. Of the largest cities, neither Montreal nor Vancouver is a seat of government. Toronto, an exception, is a provincial capital and the financial and media center of the country; this would qualify it as a European-style capital were the national capital not located in Ottawa.
V. This may be changing. Recently, a few cities (San Francisco, Seattle) have passed laws against loitering, panhandling, public urination, and vagrancy, in a belated attempt to restore order to public places.
VI. Tocqueville did not coin the word “individualisme” but its first appearance in English was in a translation of De la démocratie en Amérique, in 1835.