HENRY ADAMS, WHO VISITED THE White city, wrote: “Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.” The White City offered Americans a new urban model just when one was needed. By the end of the nineteenth century most cities were in the middle of a period of vigorous growth, and it was apparent that while laissez-faire planning might work in small towns, it had severe drawbacks in large cities. A small grid, like that of Alexandria, could be charming, but when it went on for miles, as it did in Chicago, the effect was oppressive. Moreover, the very people who had prospered in the American cities now felt that rough-and-ready planning no longer suited their increasingly genteel way of life. Movers and shakers acquired a taste for the planned avenues and squares of London, Paris, and Rome.
Chicago’s Columbian Exposition provided a real and well-publicized demonstration of how the unruly American downtown could be tamed though a partnership of classical architecture, urban landscaping, and heroic public art. Equally important, the planning of the White City brought together an extraordinary group of talented and like-minded creative individuals: the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the architects Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, and Richard Morris Hunt, and the artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Although their ideas were revolutionary, these were not young firebrands but experienced professionals of social standing with influence among businessmen and politicians. They were followed by a younger generation that included the New York architect John Carrère (codesigner of the New York Public Library), the Philadelphia planner John Nolen, and Olmsted’s son, Frederick Law, Jr., and stepson, John Charles, who together carried on the family business. (The senior Olmsted died in 1903, but his active professional life ceased shortly after the Columbian Exposition.)
These men had an ambitious goal. As Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets, the authors of The American Vitruvius, an influential handbook of urban design originally published in 1922, wrote: “Against chaos and anarchy in architecture, emphasis must be placed upon the ideal of civic art and the civilized city.” The first chapter of their book was entitled “The Modern Revival of Civic Art,” which underlined the common thread that bound together architects like Burnham, McKim, and their followers: a belief in the value of learning from the great urban achievements of the past. Their aim was nothing less than to transplant to the New World the ideals that had underpinned European city building since the sixteenth century—that is, to build classical cities in America. “Classical,” in this sense, refers to an architecture derived from the ancient Greeks and Romans, and given its full form by the Renaissance. Classical composition involved a repetition of standardized elements according to predetermined rules, and exemplified, in J. B. Jackson’s words, “a devotion to clarity and order.” In terms of urban planning, it meant adopting an orderly framework of streets and public spaces within which the work of individual architects could take its place, and introducing such devices as axial views, expansive public squares, and formal groupings of buildings. Although the inspiration was European, the results were distinctive and original. They mirrored the particular conditions of the American city at the turn of the century: available space, rapid urban growth, new urban technologies, and a need for grand civic symbols.
That the public at large was prepared to accept such a reform in urban design was due in no small part to the earlier proselytizing work of Frederick Law Olmsted. By 1900, the prolific landscape architect’s parks and parkways were flourishing in almost every major city, and the idea of large-scale urban interventions was commonplace. Not that Olmsted’s ideas were accepted wholesale by the younger planners. They considered parks not merely as antidotes to crowded living conditions but as integral parts of the metropolis, and they had more ambitious aims than merely greening the city. Their classically inspired designs were usually more formal than Olmsted’s picturesque and naturalistic landscapes, and Olmsted himself remained unreconciled to classicism. Despite his involvement in the Columbian Exposition, he never warmed to classical architecture and was ambivalent about large cities in general. Yet it’s difficult to imagine the achievements of the civic art movement and its environmental sensitivity without Olmsted’s all-important influence.
One of Olmsted’s practical legacies was the knowledge of how to organize a large consulting practice. Olmsted’s busy office was a training ground for a whole generation of landscape architects and city planners. He was the first American urban designer to work on a national scale, and thanks to him, it became accepted practice for towns and cities to turn to nationally recognized experts such as Burnham, McKim, Nolen, and the Olmsted brothers for advice. This explains how their ideas spread so quickly from major centers like Chicago to smaller cities like Denver and Dallas.
Idealists they might have been, but the proponents of classicism were not utopians, and they achieved some remarkable successes. The most prominent of these was undoubtedly Washington, D.C., where under the leadership of McKim, and with the active involvement of Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Saint-Gaudens, the final realization of L’Enfant’s 1791 plan was undertaken. In terms of civic art, the state of the national capital in 1900 left a lot to be desired. The area between the Capitol and the Potomac was unfinished; the Washington Monument, designed by Robert Mills and completed in 1884, had been built slightly off L’Enfant’s planned axis, lining up with neither the White House nor the Capital; a mere eighty years after the city’s founding, permission had been granted to the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad to lay tracks right across the mall and to build a marshaling yard along with a large terminal blocking the vista from the Capitol to the Washington Monument.
Beginning in 1901, McKim and the members of the Senate Park Commission (also known as the McMillan Commission) visited various European capitals and in less than a year produced a master plan for Washington that included a realigned mall, the placement of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, as well as a new railroad terminal with relocated railroad tracks—in a tunnel underground. Some contemporary critics pointed out that the enlarged mall—L’Enfant’s “Grand Avenue” was now 1,000-feet wide—had become inhuman, and that replacing the residential scale and atmosphere of Lafayette Square with government offices isolated the White House from the rest of the city. Others were uncomfortable with what they perceived to be imperial grandeur in a republican capital. On the whole, however, the new plan, widely covered by the press, was well received by the public, and implementation of it began right away.
This time the national capital did become a model for the rest of the country, and it encouraged other cities to undertake similar civic improvements. In 1904 Burnham was invited to prepare a master plan for the rapidly expanding city of San Francisco. He spent more than a year on the work and produced a detailed study that would have completely reorganized the major streets according to the lessons of Washington, D.C., with broad diagonal boulevards intersecting at plazas and public building sites. A month before the report was to be made public, San Francisco was struck by the great earthquake and the ensuing fire that destroyed a large part of the city. There was now not enough time to develop a consensus around Burnham’s new plan, and in the rush to rebuild, the old street layout was repeated and an important opportunity lost.
There were many other occasions, however, for wholesale redesign. In 1903 John C. Olmsted began work on a new master plan for Seattle, and in 1912 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., was retained by the city of Denver to develop plans for a system of parks and parkways. Kansas City and Dallas also undertook to install parkways and boulevards. In 1908 Philadelphia started to plan Fairmount Parkway (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Parkway), a great boulevard cutting diagonally through Penn’s grid and linking the new city hall with Olmsted’s park. The parkway sliced through one of Penn’s original squares (now Logan Circle), which was redesigned to resemble a Parisian square, complete with two buildings patterned after the hotels that the eighteenth-century architect Jacques-Ange Gabriel had built on the Place de la Concorde.
Such ambitious projects were possible because the advocates of civic art had an extraordinarily broad base of support, exemplified by the popular movement known as the City Beautiful. According to the architectural historian William H. Wilson, the term “City Beautiful” emerged in 1900 as a slogan for an urban improvement campaign in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It became a rallying cry that brought together civic reformers, community volunteers, businessmen, and municipal politicians, with crusading architects and landscape architects. This makes the City Beautiful movement the equivalent of, say, the historic preservation movement today, although it was shorter-lived, lasting only until about 1910.I Local chapters of the American Institute of Architects, the American Park and Outdoor Art Association, and the American League for Civic Improvement spread the word. The last two merged, in 1903, into the American Civic Association under the leadership of J. Horace McFarland, a businessman turned activist who became a national spokesman. The public learned about urban beautification through books such as Charles Mulford Robinson’s The Improvement of Towns and Cities and Modern Civic Art, through essays in The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, as well as through articles in such popular women’s publications as Home and Flowers and the Ladies9 Home Journal.
Thanks to City Beautiful activists, American cities started to look at themselves critically. One way to improve a typical gridded downtown was to introduce a formal civic center. This group of public buildings usually included the city hall, a public library, and an auditorium placed around a square or landscaped mall. In 1902 a commission made up of Burnham, Carrère, and the architect Arnold Brunner prepared a plan for a civic center for Cleveland that was consciously modeled on the concept of the Court of Honor of the White City. In 1912, Brunner and Olmsted, Jr., collaborated on a design for a civic center for Denver that arranged municipal buildings, a library, and an art building along a landscaped mall facing the state capitol. The design for Saint Louis’s civic center likewise used a mall as the focus. New York City acquired a vertical civic center in the Municipal Building, designed by McKim’s firm of McKim, Mead, and White. There were also civic centers built in Springfield, Massachusetts, Rochester, New York, and other smaller cities. The civic center introduced noncommercial buildings into downtown in a prominent way that was intended to give people a sense of civic pride. The most famous existing example of a grand civic center is in San Francisco, built in 1912 following the 1906 earthquake and fire. Although it did not follow Burnham’s original proposal, the more modest and compact plan developed by the architects John Galen Howard, Frederick H. Meyer, and John Reid, Jr., has proved to be adaptable over the years. It began with City Hall (modeled after Saint Peter’s in Rome!); in 1936 an opera house and the Veterans Building were added; in 1980 a symphony hall; and in 1986 a new state office building completed the ensemble.
Civic beautification also produced the grand American railroad stations. The urban railroad terminal was a peculiarly characteristic building of the first quarter of the twentieth century when railroads were the preeminent means of transportation. Central terminals served a vital role in the life of cities and were used by both long-distance travelers and commuters. As one historian put it, urban railroad stations were also focal points for the expression of civic values. The symbolic role of the terminal, like the ceremonial gateways of medieval towns, was to signal arrival in the city. Terminal Station at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, whose design Peirce Anderson of Burnham’s firm adapted in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, became the architectural model. It was followed by the two New York City terminals: McKim’s Pennsylvania Station, modeled on the Baths of Caracalla of ancient Rome, and Grand Central Terminal. Jarvis Hunt, the nephew of Richard Morris Hunt, who had designed the main building of the White City, was chosen to design the new Union Station in Kansas City, which had just completed an extensive park and boulevard system. Kansas City’s station was one of the largest in the United States, with a ninety-foot-high lobby almost as big as a football field.
Two outstanding later examples, both designed by Peirce Anderson after Burnham’s death, were Chicago’s Union Station and the Cleveland terminal. The Cleveland station was part of a nine-building group that included a fifty-two-story Terminal Tower, a hotel, a department store, and offices. (This group of buildings replaced Burnham’s civic center plan, which was not carried out.) In 1927, Anderson’s firm, Graham, Anderson, Probst, & White, started work on one of the last great terminals, Philadelphia’s beautiful Thirtieth Street Station, whose details are influenced by Art Deco but still recall their classical antecedents, as do the seventy-one-foot-high Corinthian columns that form a colonnade at the entrance. The consistent success of these architects in turning what was essentially a transportation interchange into a civic symbol is all the more admirable when one considers the fate of the modern airport, which despite the best efforts of modernist architects has failed to transcend its utilitarian role except in very few cases, such as Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., whose large departure hall with its column-free space is in some ways a reworked classical railroad terminal.
Civic art concerned itself with two other types of buildings: expositions and university campuses. As a result of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, major fairs were held in a series of cities: Buffalo (the Pan-American Exposition, 1901); Saint Louis (the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904), which introduced Americans to the work of German and Austrian architects such as Peter Behrens, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Josef Hoffmann; and Seattle (the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1910). All these popular fairs drew upon classical principles such as axiality and formal symmetry for their planning. In 1915 two large fairs were held in California: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition and San Diego’s Panama-California International Exposition. In the San Diego fair, whose overall design was coordinated by the architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, the use of the Spanish colonial style demonstrated that the classicism that had first taken root in Chicago and Washington, D.C., could be adapted successfully to Southern California.
The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the construction of many new large universities. The planned college campus was a well-established tradition in America (going all the way back to Jefferson’s University of Virginia), especially in New England, where the numerous private colleges included such architectural gems as Williams, Amherst, and Smith (whose parklike plan was devised by the elder Olmsted). The new campuses were larger, and many, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University and New York University, both designed by McKim, Mead, and White, were urban. All three were classically inspired in layout and appearance, with columned porticoes, domed rotundas, and pedimented porches. Classicism became a hallmark of urban universities the same way that Victorian Gothic had characterized many of the small colleges, but there were other styles, too. The layout of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore followed the best classical precepts, with a central lawn and a symmetrical layout, but the architecture was colonial. Houston’s Rice University, planned by Goodhue and his partners, Ralph Adams Cram and Frank W. Ferguson, exhibited an exotic sort of classicism with Byzantine motifs and multicolored Saracenic arches. The University of California at Berkeley held an international competition for its campus; the winner was a Beaux Arts-educated Parisian, but the buildings—many designed by John Galen Howard, a San Franciscan—were in the Spanish colonial style.
The original parts of these campuses, where buildings, landscaping, and public plazas complement each other, remain the most fully realized examples of the civic art ideal and probably its most tangible legacy. These academic enclaves, many of which were built from scratch, gave architects the opportunity to design what were in effect small, self-contained towns. With the advantage of a private (and rich) patron and without the constraints imposed by zoning, commercial interests, multiple landowners, and municipal politics, architects could build large, comprehensively planned environments on a scale and with a consistency impossible in the city itself. Here was proof, if proof was required, that Americans could build beautiful urban places.
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Jane Jacobs has called the City Beautiful movement an “architectural design cult” rather than a “cult of social reform.” This is only partly true. The advocates of civic art did believe in the value of design, both architectural and urban, but they did not think of parks and boulevards as merely civic adornments; these were to be places for leisure and public recreation, and improvements to the very fabric of cities. The focus on railroad stations and on urban transportation likewise reflected a concern for the broad public good. On the other hand, it’s true that building grand railroad stations did not address housing issues at precisely the time—the early decades of this century—when the living conditions of most working people were abysmal. But the chief handicap of the practitioners of civic art was not a lack of social concern, nor, even less, their partiality to classicism. It was an inability to face up to the reality of the American city.
This inability is best exemplified by what the urban historian John Reps has described as “one of the great accomplishments of American planning,” the Burnham plan for Chicago. In 1906, more than a decade after the Columbian Exposition, Burnham and his associate, Edward H. Bennett, were commissioned by the Merchant’s Club, a Chicago businessmen’s association, to produce a visionary plan for the city. The project took three years to complete and is estimated to have cost almost $70,000—a vast sum that did not include Burnham’s own time, which he volunteered free of charge. The result was a 164-page report, published in 1,650 copies, with a text by Burnham and many illustrations—photographs, diagrams, plans, and sketches, as well as a beautiful series of colored views of the city-to-be drawn by the New York painter, illustrator, and set designer Jules Guerin.
Burnham and Bennett’s extraordinary plan covered an area enclosed by a circle drawn with a sixty-mile radius around the Loop. It was in effect a proposal for the entire metropolitan region of Chicago. It showed how the city should be linked to surrounding suburban towns by highways and railroads, and analyzed the movement of passengers and freight throughout the region. It proposed forest reserves and greenbelts, and within the city, parkways and urban parks, including a long lakefront park built on reclaimed land and forming a series of inland lagoons. Diagonal avenues were cut through the traditional grid, and a thirty-mile circular parkway that recalled Olmsted and Vaux’s earlier plan for a linear park provided a “grand circuit” linking half a dozen of the city’s major parks. Another dramatic innovation was the creation of a brand-new civic center, not in the Loop but inland, east of the Chicago River. Here, at the exact geometrical center of the entire plan, Burnham and Bennett placed a huge domed municipal administration building facing a great plaza flanked by county and federal offices.
Burnham and Bennett held public hearings and political consultations, and their report included material prepared by numerous committees charged with studying railroads, freight movements, ports, road traffic, and recreation. The comprehensive nature of the plan belies the proposition that the concerns of City Beautiful advocates were solely aesthetic. Burnham’s original draft incorporated reforms to public utilities, hospitals, daycare centers, and schools. This was hardly the work of a “design cult.” Nor was the plan intended to be a theoretical exercise; a postscript entitled “Legal Aspects of the Plan of Chicago,” written by Walter L. Fisher of the Chicago Bar, set out the legislative basis for instituting the proposed changes, and was endorsed by county and municipal governments.
“We have found that those cities which retain their dominion over the imaginations of mankind achieve that result through the harmony and beauty of their civic works,” wrote Burnham, who imagined that the “Metropolis of the Middle West” would be a city along the lines of London, Paris, Vienna, or Berlin. To him, “civic works” meant impressive squares and stately public buildings—features which, in Burnham’s view, would provide the chief urban and architectural identity of the city, and which therefore should be given physical preeminence. Guerin’s panoramic watercolor views of the new Chicago showed the tall dome of the civic center rising from a city composed entirely of buildings seven to twelve stories high. This low-profile city bore an undeniable resemblance to Paris; not coincidentally, both Guerin, an American, and Bennett, an Englishman, had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Despite its practicality, the Chicago plan had one utopian feature: Burnham and his colleagues, who scrupulously delineated existing streets, public parks, and even railroad rights-of-way, chose to ignore the tall buildings (many built by Burnham’s own firm) that were downtown Chicago’s most distinctive feature. This rejection of the skyscraper was certainly not an implied criticism of commercial development—the conservative Burnham was not antibusiness—nor was he suggesting that dozens of existing Chicago skyscrapers be demolished. Presumably, Guerin was portraying an ideal future, not merely making pretty pictures. But in that case, how were the heights of buildings to be controlled? The legal section of the report does mention easements that might be applied to lots abutting parks or boulevards, but there is no mention of restricting building height. This is a curious omission, since Washington, D.C., with which Burnham had extensive experience, did have rigorous height limits: 90 feet for residential streets, and 130 feet on wider avenues. But these limits were imposed by Congress in 1899, two years before Burnham was involved, and since there was no pressure to build tall buildings in Washington anyway until the late 1930s, the significance of height controls may have passed unnoticed.
It is possible that Burnham and Bennett simply wanted to avoid the thorny issue of architectural controls altogether, since such prohibitions flew in the face of the American tradition of allowing property owners to build with a minimum of restrictions. It was one thing to have height restrictions in the national capital, quite another to propose them in commercial cities. While large cities were beginning to enact building regulations, especially with regard to fire safety and public health (zoning ordinances were introduced for the first time in Los Angeles in 1907, and in New York City in 1916), aesthetic regulations such as standardized building height, uniform frontage, and a common cornice line were felt to be intrusive.
It is also possible that the two men could not reconcile their urban theories—which assumed that public buildings would take precedence over commercial and residential structures—with the actual state of affairs in the American downtown. Tall buildings like New York’s Municipal Building or Cleveland’s Terminal Tower were intended to act as civic symbols, but there was no place in Burnham’s vision for downtowns made up of commercial skyscrapers. Yet it was precisely the tall office buildings that impressed the European visitor to Chicago and New York City, and set American cities apart from Europe. In Europe the most impressive urban monuments were public structures like the Eiffel Tower, or religious buildings like the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, or freestanding campaniles; in Chicago and New York the tallest buildings were privately built and privately owned, and they towered over the cathedral, the city hall, and the public library. It is true that in medieval Lucca, Bologna, and San Gimignano, wealthy merchant families had also built competing towers that rose as high as three hundred feet. Eventually many of these towers were demolished or reduced in height as communal or princely authority affirmed its power over private interests. The American skyscraper found no such opposition.
Commercial towers were symbols of the entrepreneurial American city. The tall office building not only made money for its corporate owner but also celebrated and symbolized the making of money. They were also a source of wonderment for the general public, a dramatic index of technological achievement. Having “the tallest building west of the Mississippi” or “the tallest building in the British Empire” marked a city in much the same way as a pennant-winning baseball team does today.
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The clash between horizontal ideals and vertical aspirations is dramatically illustrated in the evolution of North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. As early as 1896, Burnham had proposed linking the Loop with the area north of the Chicago River—the so-called Gold Coast—by building a tunnel under the river at Michigan Avenue and broadening the existing street. The 1909 Plan of Chicago elaborated this idea, replacing the tunnel with a bridge and extending Michigan Avenue northward as an elevated boulevard in the mold of the Champs-Elysées. Guerin’s bird’s-eye view shows a broad avenue lined with trees and flanked by uniform seven-story buildings with distinctly Parisian mansard roofs. The median strips are marked by heroic sculptures; a sort of traffic island contains a large fountain. There are crowds of promenaders, including many women with parasols, both on the sidewalks as well as in the street itself; the pedestrians seem oblivious to the carriages, horse-drawn omnibuses, and automobiles.II The chief impression of this charming drawing is a kind of ease and a sense of spaciousness that were in marked contrast to the busy congested streets of the Loop.
There was a great deal of interest in implementing this proposal, not the least because of the impact such an important street would have on adjacent property values. The mayor formed a planning commission to oversee its execution. Four years later the city council passed an ordinance for the construction of the new bridge and widening the avenue north of the river. The project incorporated many, though not all, of the original designers’ ideas (after Burnham’s death, Bennett continued to serve as a consultant to the planning commission). The idea of an elevated boulevard was scrapped, but the overall architectural concept was preserved. The North Central Business District Association, which had been formed to rule on details of the project, recommended that all buildings on the avenue maintain a uniform cornice line, just as in Guerin’s drawings, and be ten stories (about 120 feet) high, the maximum allowed by the Chicago building code in that area. It’s true that a ten-story limit was higher than the original cap of seven stories, but this would still have produced the desired result: buildings whose heights were proportional to the width of the avenue. It seems that the association, at least, realized that uniformity and height controls were an integral part of Burnham and Bennett’s plan.
Chicago would finally get its Champs-Elysées. But just as work on the avenue was beginning, the building code was revised to permit a maximum building height of two hundred feet, and the first building constructed on North Michigan Avenue rose sixteen stories, or almost exactly two hundred feet. The North Central Business District Association appears to have been silent on this point—hardly surprising, as the association was composed of property owners who stood to profit by the new height limit. In 1919 the maximum building height was again revised: now protruding towers were allowed to soar to four hundred feet. On North Michigan Avenue, the celebrated Wrigley Building took full advantage of the new code: the top of its central clock tower is 398 feet above the street.
This is not the end of the story. In 1923 the building code was again rewritten, with the result that the maximum height of towers was almost unrestricted; so was the height of buildings that did not cover the entire block but left at least three-quarters of their site open. The sky was the limit. During the 1920s, North Michigan Avenue became the site of some of the city’s tallest and most spectacular buildings: John Mead Howell and Raymond Hood’s 450-foot-high Tribune Tower (winner of a famous international competition) and the exuberant 42-story Medinah Club, which was built for the Shriners and is topped by a minaret and pear-shaped dome. The last tall building erected in the 1920s was the Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation Building that rose 40 stories straight up from the sidewalk. A poignant footnote: its architects were Burnham Brothers, Inc., a firm founded by Hubert and Daniel H., Jr., the old man’s sons.
“North Michigan’s transformation would see the construction of some of Chicago’s most significant individual works of architecture,” writes John W. Stamper, who teaches architecture at the University of Notre Dame, “yet at the same time this would result in a highly inconsistent pattern of urban design.” Or rather, all too consistent. Each building squeezed the economic possibilities of its site to the utmost and simultaneously celebrated and asserted the individuality and achievement of its owners and designers. As Stamper notes, the fate of North Michigan Avenue illustrates one of the persistent dilemmas of urban design in American cities: where land values were high, control over development was essentially impossible. And if Burnham’s ideals were compromised even in his native Chicago, what chance did they have elsewhere? For a public caught up in the excitement and glamour of seeing taller and taller skyscrapers, a primarily horizontal downtown must have appeared increasingly staid and old-fashioned. In the Land of the Dollar, Burnham’s genteel vision of civic harmony was given short shrift; the city profitable replaced the city beautiful. A profitable city was to be as little regulated as possible. It meant a city in which the no-nonsense street grid was reasserted without any urban frills such as diagonal boulevards or public squares.
According to William H. Wilson, the newly established associations of professional city planners, a new generation that replaced the old guard architect-planners like Burnham, never really warmed to the idea of civic art. These self-styled specialists did not appreciate the interference of architects, laypeople, and politicians, whom they perceived as meddlesome intruders, into their field. As city planning increasingly became the responsibility of municipal governments (therefore more bureaucratized and technical), it became increasingly common to denigrate the calls for urban beautification as the untutored opinions of misguided amateurs. At the First National Conference on City Planning, held in 1909, attempts to beautify cities were decried as exercises in “civic vanity” and “external adornment.” The bureaucrats and engineers felt that city planning should be concerned with engineering, economic efficiency, and social reform, not with aesthetics. They asserted that whatever functioned well would automatically produce a beautiful, or at least an acceptable, urban environment.
Our cities would not be “like that” after all. Perhaps the demise of civic art and the City Beautiful was inevitable, or at least foreordained. John Lukacs has characterized the fifty years after 1895 as “the bourgeois interlude: the half-century when American civilization was urban and urbane.” The ideal of civic art was in large part a reflection of the tastes and aspirations of an urbane bourgeoisie. Lukacs distinguishes between bourgeois and middle class, and maintains that the values of American urban culture, in particular, were bourgeois, “with a tinge of the patrician.” The desire for aesthetic rules, for polite urbanity, and for architectural decorum, as well as for sublimating private display for the sake of the public good, might be described as an attempt to translate bourgeois values into physical urban form. But the “civilized city” that Hegemann and Peets had called for in The American Virtruvius was not to be. The decline of the bourgeoisie and its replacement by a catch-all Middle America would take the American city in a very different direction.
I. In his 1909 Plan of Chicago, which I will discuss later, Daniel Burnham never uses the term “City Beautiful”; nor did Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets in The American Vitruvius.
II. Although Burnham’s plan did not anticipate the mass ownership of cars and the effect that this would have on the downtown—production of Henry Ford’s Model T was started in 1908, but low prices did not come into effect until about 1914—he did accurately foresee that the automobile would accelerate the growth of the suburbs.