DURING HIS VISIT TO NEW York, Le Corbusier Found it strange that many of the academics, professionals, and businesspeople he met did not live in the city but in the suburbs. This was unheard of in Paris, where most people who worked in the city lived in the city. There were outlying towns such as Auteuil, Boulogne-sur-Seine, and Neuilly where some rich Parisians built villas, including some designed by Le Corbusier himself, but in the 1930s not many middle-class people owned the cars necessary to commute to such far-flung locations. To most Parisians, then, les banlieues (the suburbs) referred chiefly to the dreary industrial districts that ringed the city like a sooty pall. Only workers who manned the factories lived there.
Suburbs in the New World were different—not industrial but residential, and not proletarian but professional and managerial—and one senses grudging admiration as Le Corbusier describes the American suburban landscape with its generous unfenced lots and its green amplitude. Always attracted to technology, he was impressed by the comfortable trains that linked Connecticut to Manhattan, and made the leisurely suburban way of life possible. But there is an underlying sarcasm in his description of the suburban commute: “After a stimulating cocktail they [the commuters] pass through the golden portals of Grand Central Terminal into a Pullman which takes them to their car; after a ride along charming country roads they enter the quiet and delightful living rooms of their colonial style houses.” The notion of a decentralized city ran counter to all Le Corbusier’s urban theories and he would have none of it. In When the Cathedrals Were White, the chronicle of his American visit, he vociferously condemned the concept of suburban living, convinced that the city of tomorrow would be a concentrated vertical city, not exactly Manhattan, perhaps, but a version of Manhattan, nevertheless.
He was wrong. Fernand Braudel once wryly observed that the French visitors to nineteenth-century northern England, horrified at the ugly, jerry-built factories and crowded mill towns, could not have dreamed that it was precisely Manchester and Glasgow, not London, that were the harbingers of the new Industrial Age cities soon to spring up in France and all over Europe. In 1935, when Le Corbusier saw the houses of the American suburbs he could not imagine that it was they, not the towers of Manhattan, that were the precursor of the postindustrial urban future.
Le Corbusier was too caught up in his own urban theories to stop and ask, “Why are their cities like that?” Had he asked, he might have found that the different form of American cities represented a long-standing desire on the part of their inhabitants for a different way of life. Unlike Parisian workers, Americans lived in suburbs by choice and had been doing so for a long time, more than a hundred years. The architectural historians Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed date the earliest New York suburbs at 1814, when a ferry service for commuters was started between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and New Yorkers who could not afford a house in the good parts of Manhattan settled in suburban Brooklyn Heights. Soon the commuters ventured farther. The Harvard historian John Stilgoe quotes Nathaniel Parker Willis, complaining in 1840 that “There is a suburban look and character about all the villages on the Hudson which seem out of place among such scenery. They are suburbs; in fact, steam [Willis was referring to the steamboats that linked the villages to Manhattan] has destroyed the distance between them and the city.” Similar patterns were unfolding in other cities: Henry Binford of Northwestern University traces the origin of the first suburban communities around Boston to 1820; and Rutgers historian Robert Fishman dates the first West Philadelphia suburbs, which were reached by horse-drawn omnibus, at the 1840s.
By the time of Le Corbusier’s visit, suburban living was a well-established fact of American life; one out of six Americans lived in the suburbs. This number was increasing rapidly: of the six million new homes built between 1922 and 1929, more than half were single-family houses, and most of these were in the suburbs. More significantly, suburbs were growing faster than cities. Between i860 and 1920, the number of people living in urban areas had increased from only 20 percent of the population to more than half, but by the thirties and forties, the rate of urban growth slowed to almost zero. The use of streetcars and buses, a good indicator of urbanization, peaked in the mid-19 20s and fell thereafter. One of the most urbane cities in America, Boston, started losing population as early as 1930. The entry on “Chicago” in the 1949 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that the decade 1930-40 had seen the smallest increase in population in the city’s history, and adds: “The rate of regional growth about the city seems to be increasing as the rate of strictly urban growth declines.” By 1950, New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia and many smaller cities had all stopped growing. Not that the metropolitan regions surrounding these cities were not vigorous, but 1950 is probably as good a date as any to mark the end—or, more accurately, the beginning of the end—of traditional, concentrated cities.
One reason that it’s not easy to clearly identify what has happened and is happening to cities is that urban terminology is very inaccurate. Terms such as “city” and “suburb” are used as if they represent two distinct polarities. In fact they are often only polemical categories: depending on your point of view, either bad (dangerous, polluted, concrete) cities and good (safe, healthy, green) suburbs, or good (diverse, dense, stimulating) cities and bad (homogeneous, sprawling, dull) suburbs. The reality is more complicated.
Like “bourgeois” or “capitalist,” “suburb” is one of those words that is difficult to use in a precise discussion because it describes something that has become a stereotype. And like most stereotypes, it is composed of clichés. For example, compared with urban housing, suburban housing is held to be monotonous, although urban tenements and industrial-era rowhouses are equally standardized and repetitive. Another cliché holds that suburban areas are rich, white, and white-collar. While this was true of the first suburbs, suburban areas have grown to include a diversity of incomes, classes, and, increasingly, ethnic and racial groups. (A manifestation of this growing diversity is the appearance of ethnic restaurants and food stores in suburban malls.) Indeed, it is the cities that are more likely to be homogeneous with more than their representative share of the poor, of blacks, and of Hispanics.
Only in a legal sense is the difference between urban and suburban clear: everything inside the city limits is urban, and everything outside is suburban. On the ground, there is often little distinction between the physical appearance of urban and suburban neighborhoods or the life they contain. Of course, there is a marked contrast between crowded inner-city neighborhoods and the outer suburbs, where large houses stand on one-acre lots, but these are the two extremes. In most cities—especially those newer cities that grew in the postwar period—urbanites live in houses, mow lawns, drive cars, and shop at malls, just like their suburban neighbors. Even a city like New York, once one leaves Manhattan, is composed of many neighborhoods in which houses with front gardens and backyards line the streets.
American cities grew—and grow, at least in the West and Southwest—by annexing surrounding towns and villages, hence producing urban areas that include neighborhoods that are suburban, even rural, in character. Houston and Minneapolis annexed entire counties and created an apparently anomalous hybrid: bucolic outer suburbs inside the city limits. Some annexed suburbs, like Queens or Staten Island, maintained a suburban atmosphere; others were physically transformed and grew denser, and are now indistinguishable from the rest of the city. Suburbs were not always integrated into the adjacent central city. Academic enclaves like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California, started as suburban villages, and developed into small, independent cities without losing their small-town, suburban character. Brooklyn, on the other hand, had become the third-largest city in the United States when it was annexed by New York City in 1898.
The Connecticut suburbs that Le Corbusier described were the offspring of what John Stilgoe has characterized as “borderlands”: nineteenth-century residential enclaves typically one or two hours outside the city that were cherished for their semirural character and their sylvan surroundings. Stilgoe makes the point that the “women and men who established these communities understood more by commuting and country than train schedules and pastures,” and what drove them was a search for better, healthier, more restorative surroundings than were available in the city. They were not simply leaving the city for the country, but rather creating a new way of life that contained elements of both.
But trains were expensive, and less wealthy commuters relied on horse railcars, which were pulled on tracks and were later replaced by electrified streetcars. Stilgoe deplores the kind of dense inner suburbs that sprouted along streetcar lines, where people lived “without the joys of genuine city life and without the pleasures of borderland residence.” This judgment may be too bleak. Another Harvard historian, Alexander von Hoffman, argues in a recent book, Local Attachments, that the evolution of Jamaica Plain in Boston demonstrates that streetcar suburbs could provide some of the advantages of city life. By 1850, this farming community had grown large enough to incorporate itself as a separate town of about 2,700 people. Over the next two decades, the town grew, chiefly as a result of the arrival of middle- and upper-class commuters, who traveled by horse railcar from Boston. In 1873 the townspeople voted for annexation to the City of Boston, which promised jobs, development, and growth. Growth did come, fueled by inexpensive electric streetcars and later by the railroad, and at the turn of the century the population had mushroomed to almost 33,000, the equivalent of a small city. Was Jamaica Plain merely a residential appendage to Boston? Von Hoffman presents compelling evidence to the contrary. The railroad did bring upper-middle-class commuters, but it also brought factories; people commuted out of Jamaica Plain, but also into it (much as they do in contemporary suburban cities). “During the second half of the nineteenth century, Jamaica Plain matured from a fringe district to a heterogeneous city neighborhood, a type of urban area that heretofore has not been generally recognized,” he writes. “It evolved into a local urban community, not as an isolated or segmented district, but as part of the larger growth patterns of Boston.” Such outer-city neighborhoods, unknown in Europe, were physically different from their inner-city counterparts—instead of tenements there were small houses, and the density of buildings was generally lower—and while their location and character was suburban, the way of life they contained was urban.
The presence of suburban elements in cities like Berkeley or in urban neighborhoods like Jamaica Plain is a reminder, as Robert A. M. Stern, has pointed out, that the suburb is defined neither by location or legalities alone. “The suburb is . . . a state of mind based on imagery and symbolism,” he writes. “Suburbia’s curving roads and tended lawns, its houses with pitched roofs, shuttered windows, and colonial or otherwise elaborated doorways all speak of communities which value the tradition of the family, pride of ownership and rural life.” Stern also suggests that as long as the image—not necessarily the reality—of a freestanding house on a tree-lined street is maintained, the suburban ideal can be applied in a wide variety of situations, which explains the surprisingly rich diversity of suburbs.
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Suburban growth in America was the result of coincidences. First, there was the availability of land. Then there was the pressure of the growth of the commercial downtown, which engulfed the traditional downtown residential neighborhoods of the rich and the middle class. There was transportation—the railroad (which in many cases was already in place) and the streetcar. Above all, there were businessmen who had the resources and the vision to undertake the task of creating new communities. The first comprehensively designed suburban residential development was Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, begun in 1853 by a young, successful Manhattan merchant, Llewellyn S. Haskell. Haskell intended his project, which he called a “villa park,” to be a healthy and picturesque alternative for New Yorkers who wanted ready access to the city. Llewellyn Park is about twelve miles from New York City and connected by train, although there is a two-mile drive to the station, a journey originally made by carriage. Llewellyn Park attracted enterprising individuals; its most famous resident was probably Thomas Alva Edison, who lived there for more than forty years and established his laboratory nearby. For ordinary folks, however, the high cost of commuting to New York and the price of the generous lots were prohibitive; buyers in Llewellyn Park were well-to-do. Llewellyn Park was exclusively residential; no industrial, commercial, or retail uses were allowed. Deed restrictions included rules about architecture and landscaping—fences, for example, were banned. This became the pattern for many of the early suburbs; moreover, developers used their own discretion to ensure that the new home owners were socially acceptable.I
Haskell’s architect, Alexander Davis, did not simply subdivide the 400-acre parcel of mountainous terrain on Eagle Ridge into building lots. He carefully manipulated the landscape to produce a natural experience. He heightened the impression of being in a virgin forest by leaving a heavily planted fifty-acre nature preserve, cleft by a ravine, in the center of the development. Today, the visitor to Llewellyn Park is impressed not only by the terrain and the planting—Haskell spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on landscaping—but also by the romantic appearance of the houses themselves. Their Gothic, Swiss chalet, and Italianate styles were not chosen for their cultural connotations, but simply to please the eye.
Davis was a skillful architect and the author of Rural Residences, a popular book of house patterns for architects and builders. His ideas were influenced by his friend and frequent collaborator, Andrew Jackson Downing, whose Cottage Residences and The Architecture of Country Houses were the most widely read books on domestic design of the period. Downing recommended that houses should be designed in an irregular, picturesque manner; the rambling architecture was to be augmented by naturalistic landscaping and informal street layouts. This became the hallmark of all early American suburban developments, although the actual architectural styles varied. The preferred style at Garden City, one of the first Long Island suburbs, founded in 1869, was Italianate; at Short Hills, another New Jersey development, the society architects McKim, Mead, and White were commissioned to design a model home in the English cottage style.
The entire development of Llewellyn Park, including the nature preserve and the streets, was treated as private property; public access was restricted by a peripheral fence and a gatehouse. This, too, became common practice. This type of exclusive enclave represents one branch of the suburban tradition. In its contemporary guise the exclusive enclave has become a new kind of town, composed uniquely of private homes, socially homogeneous, and privately governed. The chief legal vehicle of the enclave is the homeowners’ association (also pioneered at Llewellyn Park), which enforces the rules established by the original property developer and administers the commonly owned landscaped areas. Over time, the amenities of such enclaves have come to include not only gardens but recreation areas like golf courses, tennis courts, riding paths, and swimming pools. The homeowners’ associations administer common services such as garbage collection, road maintenance, and policing; in other words, many if not all of the functions normally carried out by municipal governments.II These types of communities, called Common Interest Developments, have proven very popular with developers and buyers alike; according to Evan McKenzie of the University of Illinois at Chicago, there are currently some 130,000 such developments in the United States, housing about 30 million people—12 percent of the population—and he has estimated that by the year 2000, as many as 30 percent of Americans will be living in some form of community association!
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If McKenzie is correct in suggesting that Common Interest Developments “are not only the present but the future of American housing,” the further development of enclaves is likely to accentuate the existing inequalities between rich and poor communities. That would be a shame, because the exclusive enclave is not the only model for suburban developers. The Anglo-American garden suburb represents a different ideal. In America, its antecedents were developments like Riverside, on the outskirts of Chicago, planned by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1869. Nine miles from the Loop on the Burlington and Quincy Railroad, sixteen hundred acres of farmland was transformed by Olmsted into a beautiful parklike setting. The landscape approach is similar to Llewellyn Park (Olmsted, too, planted thousands of trees), but Riverside was not gated, and its scale was truly urban; there was also a commercial town center. Today, the graceful streets display the soundness of Olmsted’s vision. Chicago was ideal for suburban development since it had a ready-made commuter system in place—the railroad. The 1880s saw many similar upper- and upper-middle-class suburbs—Winnetka, Highland Park, Lake Forest—stretching as far as thirty miles from the Loop.
The British branch of the garden suburb tradition originated in an urban movement that was analogous to but different from the City Beautiful. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard, an English court stenographer inspired by the American Edward Bellamy’s best-selling futuristic novel, Looking Backward, himself published a book containing a working blueprint for a new kind of city. In Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (later retitled Garden Cities of Tomorrow) Howard elaborated in detail how to build completely new, economically self-sufficient communities. These “garden cities” would be planned at a relatively low density to avoid the overcrowding and squalor of Victorian industrial cities; they would be surrounded by greenbelts to preserve the countryside, and would include industry and commerce to provide employment to their inhabitants. Howard acquired a wide popular following. In 1899, a group of British industrialists, businessmen, and social reformers formed the Garden City Association, and in relatively short order marshaled the resources to start building the first garden city.
Founded in 1904, in Hertfordshire, some thirty miles from London, Letchworth Garden City was an ambitious undertaking that encompassed almost 4,000 acres and was intended to house 30,000 people. Howard had written nothing about the actual design of the proposed city, but the plan devised by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, two young architects who were members of the association, became a model for all later garden suburbs. Unwin and Parker came up with a loose, village-like layout, and for the buildings, they adopted an informal domestic style loosely based on the traditional architecture of British country towns. Although Letchworth incorporated Howard’s novel ideas about urbanism, to most people it looked comfortably familiar.
Letchworth was followed by a second garden city: Hampstead Garden Suburb. As the name suggests, it was not a true city, but a suburb, a short subway ride from London. The developer of Hampstead was Henrietta Barnett, a friend of the famous housing reformer Octavia Hill and a social activist herself. Barnett saw the new suburb as an opportunity to offer working-class Londoners an alternative to the crowded inner city. Therefore Hampstead incorporated housing for people in various income brackets, and included rental cottages and flats affordable to clerks and artisans (although Barnett’s dream of rehousing slum dwellers never materialized). Hampstead Garden Suburb was laid out in 1906 by Unwin (with the later collaboration of Edwin Lutyens). With Letchworth under his belt, Unwin, one of the most talented urban designers of the period, produced in Hampstead a plan of great sophistication and subtlety. It incorporated a picturesque street layout, extensive landscaping in the residential areas, a range of innovative housing types, and a compact town center. The site covered more than three hundred acres, and at an average density of eight houses to the acre—about half the density of a typical inner-city neighborhood—there was plenty of parkland and other open spaces. Nevertheless, compared to many later suburbs, Hampstead was densely occupied. The Long Island suburban communities built by William Levitt in the 1950s, for example, usually had a density of about four houses per acre, and many contemporary suburb developments average less than that.
Unwin’s plan was neither a simple grid nor a Beaux Arts diagram, but rather a complex (Lynch would call it organic) composition that took advantage of topography and natural features. There was variety in the road system: avenues, side streets, cul-de-sacs, and service lanes were all integrated into the plan. “It was not deemed enough that a road should serve as a means of communication from one place to another,” said Unwin, “it was also desired that it should offer some dignity of approach to important buildings, and be a pleasant way for the passer-by.” This comprehensive planning was based on the visual and spatial experience of a place. It was similar to Olmsted’s approach but distinctly more urban; Hampstead was a conscious attempt on Unwin’s part to capture some of the charm of the traditional country towns he so loved. The housing groups, designed by Unwin and Parker and by the notable Arts and Crafts practitioner M. H. Baillie Scott, were based on English vernacular architecture. Lutyens planned the town center in a more formal manner, with a large rectangular green flanked by two churches and a Wren-inspired housing terrace, all designed in masterful fashion by him.
Hampstead has been called “the jewel in the suburban crown.” It is one of the most beautifully designed suburbs of the period—indeed, of any period—and influenced suburban developers everywhere, especially in the United States. One of these developers was George Woodward of Chestnut Hill, an outlying neighborhood of Philadelphia. Once a summer retreat for wealthy Philadelphians, twelve miles from downtown, Chestnut Hill was annexed by the city in 1854. Unlike Jamaica Plain, Chestnut Hill was merely a small part of what was then the largest annexation in American history. Philadelphia, which occupied only about two square miles, added to itself an entire county, and overnight became a metropolis of 129 square miles.
In 1873 Woodward’s father-in-law, Henry Howard Houston, a successful Philadelphia businessman, had acquired more than 3,000 acres along the picturesque Wissahickon Creek, in and around Chestnut Hill. Eleven years later, Houston persuaded the Pennsylvania Railroad (of which he was a director) to build a spur line through his property, linking Chestnut Hill to the city. He began an ambitious effort to create a new suburban community by constructing a large hotel; for recreation, he created a lake for canoeing, and an arboretum for promenading; for worship, a church. He also deeded land to the Philadelphia Cricket Club (which moved from downtown), and convinced the annual Philadelphia Horse Show to relocate to Chestnut Hill. These last two moves were not motivated by philanthropy but by business. Houston wanted to attract Philadelphia socialites to his real estate venture and he succeeded; he built about a hundred houses for predominantly upper-class families.
When Houston died in 1895, Woodward took over the direction of the family business. He displayed a not-uncommon characteristic of turn-of-the-century suburban developers: a curious blend of entrepreneurship and idealism. A physician by training, Woodward was a progressive reformer, politician, and state senator, and also president of Philadelphia’s Octavia Hill Association. Following the example of the British reformer, the association was engaged in building and rehabilitating low-rent housing and model tenements for workers. Hence, although he was a businessman, Woodward regarded Chestnut Hill as more than merely a real-estate venture. His ideas about architecture were inspired by both John Ruskin (Octavia Hill’s mentor) and William Morris. Many of the Woodward houses are in the Arts and Crafts style; all are characterized by solid, honest construction and good craftsmanship. Woodward was also familiar with the Garden City movement and with projects like Hampstead Garden Suburb, which he heard about in meetings of the National Housing Conference and during frequent visits to Britain.
One of the design issues that Unwin had addressed in Hampstead was forming a town composed uniquely of small, detached houses. “So long as we are confined to the endless multiplication of careful fenced-in villas, and rows of cottages toeing the same building line, each with its little garden securely railed, reminding one of a cattle-pen, the result is bound to be monotonous and devoid of beauty,” he had written. Unwin’s solution was to group individual houses into terraces, picturesque clusters, and large quadrangles or courts. This created larger, common spaces, as well as a variety of house types and building forms along the street. A small group of houses served by a narrow driveway instead of a wide road also saved money and land. The houses Woodward built in Chestnut Hill included terraces of rowhouses surrounding landscaped courts, clusters of houses whose freestanding character is disguised by connecting stone walls and outbuildings, and interesting groups of attached cottages that produce the visual effect of larger houses. There is also a Woodward innovation: quadriplexes consisting of four dwellings arranged in a cruciform plan, sharing a central core.III Between 1910 and 1930 Woodward commissioned about 180 houses. He sent his young architects—H. Louis Duhring, Robert Rodes McGoodwin, and Edmund Gilchrist—to England and France to study traditional architecture, and as a result, Chestnut Hill acquired several picturesque streets composed of Cotswold-style cottages as well as a group of eight houses designed by McGoodwin in the Norman style, known locally as the French Village. On one wall is a Loi de 1881, Défense d’afficher sign, to complete the French theme.
The houses built by Woodward, including smaller dwellings for young families as well as large houses, were not sold but rented. (He did sell individual lots to people wishing to build their own houses.) This assured a high degree of conformity with Woodward’s architectural ideals. But no effort was made to physically separate the development from the surrounding neighborhood. There were no gates—this was not an exclusive enclave. Access to the parks was unrestricted, and the streets were all public thoroughfares; in fact, it was not easy to tell exactly which parts of Chestnut Hill the Woodwards owned. Moreover, Chestnut Hill encompassed various income groups, including a large North Italian community of masons who had been attracted to the area by the Woodward construction projects (which were all built of local stone), as well as other artisans, domestic servants, and local shopkeepers. Woodward himself did not build retail spaces; he did not have to, since Germantown Avenue, a commercialized country road, traversed the entire neighborhood. Although most of Woodward’s tenants were upper- and upper-middle-class families, and despite its semirural character, which was accentuated by the adjacent forested tract of Fairmount Park, Chestnut Hill resembled Hampstead Garden Suburb: that is, it was more like a small town than a villa park.
Houston and Woodward were unable to innovate in the street planning of Chestnut Hill. They had to adhere to the layout established earlier by the city of Philadelphia, a continuation of Penn’s downtown grid. The regularity was somewhat relieved by the rising and falling topography of Chestnut Hill and by the ragged edge of Fairmount Park, as well as by the several angled, colonial-period roads, but it was not the sort of plan that the builders of garden suburbs preferred. Woodward did introduce an Un-winesque, crescent-shaped group of houses that flanked a public green, and he created a public park, but his design for a formal approach road was never implemented.
For a fully realized planned garden suburb in the United States, we must turn to the village of Mariemont, built in the 1920s on the outskirts of Cincinnati, overlooking the Ohio River. Like Chestnut Hill, it was the work of an enlightened developer, Mary M. Emery, who wanted to create a model community that would demonstrate the value of modern (that is, Garden City) planning ideas. In 1914 she engaged John Nolen, a Philadelphia native and an experienced planner and architect who had been active in the City Beautiful movement. Starting from scratch on 420 acres, Nolen created a formal town center focused on a village green and bisected by a boulevarded avenue, with streets radiating out into the village. The plan is an extraordinarily subtle exercise in axial formalism combined with a very relaxed form of grid planning, which is all the more impressive when one appreciates that this is among the first suburbs planned expressly for the automobile. Nolen provided space for on-street parking, and rear lanes giving access to garages. (The British garden suburbs did not have to contend with the automobile; private car ownership was so low.) Emery intended Mariemont to be an affordable community, and it included a variety of lot sizes, as well as low-rise apartment buildings and commercial buildings with flats above stores. The housing was designed by several architects of national stature, including Grosvenor Atterbury of New York, and Wilson Eyre and Paul Philippe Cret of Philadelphia; McGoodwin and Gilchrist, who had worked for Woodward, also designed interesting housing groups at Mariemont.
The development of Chestnut Hill and Mariemont coincides with a general increase in suburban construction that lasted from about 1910 to 1930. There were garden suburbs in all parts of the continent: Country Club District in Kansas City, Missouri, which was founded in 1907, grew over the next three decades and finally encompassed over 4,000 acres; Shaker Heights in Cleveland developed into one of the most beautiful garden suburbs; Forest Hills Gardens, fifteen minutes by rail from Manhattan, was the American suburb that most resembled Hampstead, planned and designed by Atterbury, with landscaping by the Olmsted brothers; Lake Forest, north of Chicago, included an exemplary market square, forerunner of the regional shopping center; in Montreal, the Canadian National Railway commissioned Frederick Todd in 1910 to plan the Town of Mount Royal, a garden suburb linked to downtown by CNR tracks; a few years later, Todd was hired by the Canadian Pacific Railway to design the town of Leaside, just outside Toronto. This suburban boom was caused by the increased congestion of traditional urban neighborhoods, encouraging people who could afford it to seek alternatives, and by the advent of automobile ownership that, especially after 1920, made outlying areas accessible and freed developers from dependence on railroad companies. Above all, there was the attraction of the garden suburbs themselves.
Whereas most people today equate suburban development with negligent planning and incompetent design, the earliest garden suburbs were distinguished precisely by the sophistication of their layouts and the quality of their architecture. What is impressive is the consistency of this quality. This was as true in North America as it was in Britain. A small group of exceptional planners—Elbert Peets, the Olmsted brothers, Nolen, Todd—set the example, and others followed. It is also striking how many talented architects—Atterbury, Cret, Eyre, Howard Van Doren Shaw, Bertram Goodhue, Myron Hunt—worked in the garden suburbs. Good planning and imaginative architecture made the garden suburbs popular with the buying public, but more important, they also assured their longevity. Like Chestnut Hill and Mariemont, all the garden suburbs of the teens and twenties have remained attractive places to live; some, like River Oaks in Houston, Beverly Hills and Palos Verdes outside Los Angeles, and Coral Gables outside Miami, have become synonymous with wealth.
The architectural and urbanistic qualities of the garden suburbs made them particularly attractive—and hence in the long run drove up real-estate values—but as the example of Chestnut Hill shows, they were by no means elitist. Nor were they always middle class. In 1918 before the end of World War I, the New York Shipbuilding Company of Camden, New Jersey, built Yorkship Village, a community of about 1,000 dwellings intended for its workers. (At the end of the war the houses were sold to their tenants.) The plan of Yorkship, designed by Electus D. Litchfield, a New York City architect, bears some resemblance to Mariemont: there is a square green in the center, flanked by shops with flats above. Two diagonal avenues lead from the green to a boulevard, where a streetcar line connected Yorkship with Camden. Most of the dwellings are tiny rowhouses arranged in small terraces. The plan, which includes a system of rear service lanes, is carefully designed to avoid long, unobstructed vistas and to create a sense of intimacy through pleasant, closed spaces. Yorkship Village (now known as Fairview) has survived intact. It continues to be a solid community, not far from its blue-collar roots; the small houses are well taken care of; shops still surround the shaded village green; and there is an active community association. It’s hard not to credit Litchfield’s careful planning, whose human qualities are still in evidence, with the vitality of this community, a community in the city of Camden, itself a sad model of urban decay and devastation.
Garden-suburb planning was even used in public housing. Mark Alden Branch, a contemporary architectural journalist, writes about two public housing projects in Bridgeport, Connecticut, both originally built to house defense workers. Seaside Village, constructed in 1918, is a small (257 dwellings) version of Yorkship: the street layout is village-like and includes a small green; the houses are similarly arranged in small groups; as in Yorkship, the architecture is simplified colonial. Marina Village, directly across the street, was built in 1940; its 408 apartments and flats are similar in size and quality of construction to those at Seaside. The urban design, however, is very different. The uniform blocks are lined up side by side like barracks, fronting pedestrian walkways rather than streets. This is planning done strictly by the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) and the Le Corbusier book. Although the construction is brick like Seaside Village, the roofs are flat, and the undecorated houses are devoid of domestic imagery. Seaside and Marina were both built as “model” projects, according to Branch, but they have turned out very differently. Seaside Village, which became a cooperative in 1954, is solid working-class, well maintained, with a low crime rate. In fact the main problem for the residents appears to be neighboring Marina Village, which since the 1960s has had a history of vandalism, crime, and drugs (and failed attempts at co-op conversion). As in Yorkship Village, it is hard not to credit garden-suburb planning for some of the success of Seaside, just as it is difficult not to blame the cheerless, Corbusier-inspired urbanism of Marina for its dismal performance.
The period 1900-193o is a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the American suburb, and merits closer study. The early garden suburbs of this era display none of the clichés of later suburban planning. The garden suburbs were clearly intended to offer a green alternative to the city, but their developers understood that town planning was an important tool in achieving their aims. Compared with contemporary suburban developments, the garden suburbs were paragons of urban design. Instead of confusing layouts of cul-de-sacs, there were carefully planned hierarchies of avenues and streets interspersed with parks and squares. Instead of the ubiquitous bungalow, there was variety: rowhouse terraces, clusters, twins, and courts, as well as freestanding cottages and villas. By the 1920s, the automobile had to be accounted for, and it was integrated in subtle ways: instead of lines of garage doors on the street, there were service lanes (shades of old Savannah) and garages at the back of the garden; to avoid high-speed traffic, secondary roads were kept relatively narrow. Above all, the garden suburbs were less spread out. Instead of one-story ranch houses, homes were planned on two and three floors; instead of being set back behind large front lawns, houses were often close to the street. This meant that lots were small, producing compact neighborhoods in which, despite the automobile, one could walk to the store, to school, or to the park.
Jane Jacobs has written critically of Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement, which she describes as profoundly antiurban; presumably she would extend this criticism to include the garden suburbs as well, but to people like Woodward and Unwin, she would be wrong. In 1909 Unwin published Town Planning in Practice, a combination manifesto and field manual that outlines in great detail his ideas about town planning. Several conclusions can be drawn from this illuminating work. First of all, the garden suburb planners had no antipathy to the traditional city. In a chapter entitled “Of the Individuality of Towns,” Unwin discusses a variety of historic examples, including Edinburgh, Cologne, and Philadelphia. Throughout the book he uses large European cities to illustrate the proper way to lay out squares and plazas, to dimension streets, and to establish pleasing relationships between buildings and urban spaces. It becomes clear that what Unwin does reject is the nineteenth-century industrial city. “We have become so used to living among surroundings in which beauty has little or no place that we do not realise what a remarkable and unique feature the ugliness of modern life is,” he writes, and adds: “We are apt to forget that this ugliness may be said to belong almost exclusively to the period covered by the industrial development of the last century. We do not find evidence of it before that period, in our towns or in those of a character to be compared with our own in other countries.” The aim of Town Planning in Practice is to explain what it is that makes towns and cities of the preindustrial period pleasing, and to formulate specific principles of urban design that can be adapted to the modern period.
Unwin subtitled his book An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs, but in the organization of his material he did not distinguish between the two. He illustrated a chapter on the design of public spaces with big-city squares like the Place Vendôme in Paris; small-city squares like Marienplatz in Munich; marketplaces in country towns; and Lutyens’s Central Square in Hampstead Garden Suburb. One gets the impression that although he obviously recognized the differences in scale between these examples, Unwin considered them intimately related. In the same way, Unwin and the other designers of garden suburbs did not think of their work as an alternative to the city—still less as anti-urban—but rather as a part of the long tradition of city-building.
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Suburban construction slowed down during the Depression and did not resume until after World War II. The postwar suburbs were different from their predecessors, however. They came to be called subdivisions—aptly so, for there was little artistry in the way they were planned. It’s almost as if a sort of amnesia had set in and the garden suburb was forgotten. There were several reasons for this. The postwar suburbs were marketed chiefly on the basis of low prices. The selling price of houses was kept affordable by reducing overhead costs. Developers quickly realized they could dispense with the niceties of architectural design and urban planning without harming sales.
Scale also differentiated the postwar suburban developments—they were huge. Railroad and streetcar suburbs had to be compact since people still walked a great deal; automobile suburbs could spread out—and, starting in the late 1940s, they did. One of the most famous, Levittown on Long Island, eventually housed about 80,000 people; the second Levittown, outside Philadelphia, had 60,000 residents. Compared with the garden suburbs, these were really small cities: the second Levittown also included light industry, office buildings, ten elementary schools, two high schools, recreation areas, swimming pools, and about eighteen churches. Size was an important ingredient in the economic success of these subdivisions, since it was by mass-producing the houses (on the site, not in factories) that the Levitt brothers in 1949 were able to market a four-room Cape Cod cottage for $7,990. (Thanks to the GI Bill of Rights there was no down payment, and the low monthly charges were actually cheaper than the rent for a comparable city apartment.) Although it was small—750 square feet—the two-bedroom house included an unfinished attic and such amenities as underfloor radiant heating, a fireplace, and a Bendix washing machine.
This achievement was the result of standardizing the way in which the houses were built. What is less obvious is that the urban planning was also standardized. The basis for the standardization was the individual lot for a detached house (the only kind of housing available in the postwar suburb) and the need to handle car traffic. High-speed arterial roads cut the developments into large blocks, which were further subdivided by feeder roads, usually culminating in cul-de-sacs around which the lots were clustered. There was nothing resembling a public center. Schools, recreation facilities, and shopping centers were scattered throughout the development—large buildings surrounded by parking lots. It was assumed that people would drive from place to place, and indeed, the low density of the postwar suburb (with predominantly one-story houses on large lots) made walking impractical. Standardization also meant that subdivisions largely ignored local topography and landscape features.
Unlike the builders of garden suburbs, the subdivision developers did not seek out prominent architects and planners. In order to save money, they preferred to use either stock plans or in-house architects. In any case, by 1945 people like Unwin, Nolen, Goodhue, Atterbury, and McGoodwin were either dead or retired, and the succeeding generation of architects had no interest in suburban housing. These architects were caught up in international modernism, and when they did design housing, it was more likely to be publicly funded housing for low-income people, which produced results like Marina Village and Cabrini-Green. As for city planners, they had moved away from physical design altogether, preferring to concern themselves with statistical and policy analysis. The undiscriminating buyers have to carry some of the blame for the bland subdivision as well, but the turning away of the architectural profession and of professional schools from the design of suburbs and suburban housing after 1930 contributed greatly to their decline in quality.III
The failure of the postwar subdivisions was, paradoxically, a result of their great commercial success. The making of suburbs, which had been an honorable branch of town planning, became simply a way of marketing individual houses. By concentrating entirely on making houses affordable, the developers overlooked the chief lesson of the 1920s garden suburbs: subdivisions should not be composed solely of private dwellings but also need shared public spaces where citizens can feel that they are part of a larger community. Suburbs are located outside the traditional city, but that does not mean that they cannot be urban, too. Civic art belongs in the suburbs just as much as in the cities.
I. Haskell did not screen buyers at Llewellyn Park, but such openness was unusual. Explicit racial zoning ordinances were common in cities and suburbs, not struck down by a Supreme Court ruling until 1917. Race-restrictive covenants continued to be attached to private deeds (especially in new suburban housing) until as late as 1948.
II. Interestingly, some of the features of Common Interest Developments are appearing in urban areas in the form of Business Improvement Districts, private associations of merchants and home owners that provide services such as policing and garbage removal.
III. The quadriplex design is usually associated with Frank Lloyd Wright, but the Chestnut Hill quads were designed by H. Louis Duhring in 1910, and according to historian John Sergeant, Wright first proposed this idea in 1913.
IV. Tragically, this remains largely true today. “The appalling fact is that most recent [architecture] graduates know very little about the organization of housing production, the technology of home building, and the kinds of housing requirements that are important to consumers,” writes the sociologist Robert Gutman.