From Paris to Chicago:

The City Beautiful Movement

(Major resubmission changes: The Chicago Exposition also led to many other commissions p. 7; new analysis on pgs. 8-11; additional referenced sources in bibliography)

Compare & Contrast Essay #1 Jonathan Hopkins RWU SAAHP Arch 572 Fall 2011 Prof. Edgar Adams Resubmission

The City Beautiful Movement was a reform effort by various architects and landscape architects to address the issues that had developed in many of Americas industrial centers by the turn of the 20th Century. These leading designers felt that large scale interventions of infrastructure, buildings and land preservation were necessary to save cities from overdevelopment, moral degradation and second class status to European cities. While this Movement came and went fairly quickly in a span of roughly 20 years - from 1893 to the early 1910s it did not develop overnight. The City Beautiful Movement was the result of decades of prior work that was done by the previous generation of architects and landscape architects in both the United States and in Europe. This essay with explore what these influences were, and what effect they had on the reform era designs that emerged around 1900 in America. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte made himself emperor of Paris and set out on an ambitious project to make Paris the most beautiful city in the world. It was during Bonapartes reign that the Arc de Triumphe and many other monuments were built on what were, at the time, the outskirts of Paris. In 1851, Bonapartes nephew, Napoleon III, assumed the role as the citys emperor and by 1852 he had hired Baron Haussmann to complete Bonapartes goal. 1 Haussmann was commissioned to take the medieval city of existing Paris and modernize it for the rapidly changing contemporary world of technological advances. Inspired by the mid-17th Century design of Versailles and Baroque city planning in cities such as Rome, Baron Haussmann rapidly changed Paris over the following decades after his hiring. Large swaths of medieval Paris were demolished to make way for wide avenues, new buildings and upgraded infrastructure. The city was also expanded, most noticeably to the west where new avenues were extended from the Arc de Triumphe. Baron, being trained as an engineer of sorts, approached the project from the perspective of improving the city, not only aesthetically, but structurally. He wanted to make the city run smoother and work better for modern times.

Sinclair, George. Historic Maps and Views of Paris (Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2009)

1|Page

This modernizing project, known at the Grands Travaux, succeeded in improving the citys water supply, upgrading the sewer systems, accommodating railroads and stations, and making Paris a beautiful place to be. New sewers and water supply systems were laid under newly cleared land, some of which was developed with buildings and some of which were reserved for avenues. The creation of wide streets helped to reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality and accommodate multimodal traffic with separate facilities for walking, horseback riding and carriages. 2 Clearing out medieval building stock also allowed for land to be opened up for new building typologies like department stores. Older, narrow buildings were difficult to adapt for a changing consumer and production economy and this massive reconstruction project provided the opportunity to change the networks of commerce in the city. Not only did large department store buildings line these new avenues, so did new apartment buildings that had better access to light, ventilation and space, in addition to central courtyards. Many

Jacobs, Allan B. Paris Boulevards, A Grand Variety The Boulevard Book: History (MIT, 2002) pgs. 11-30

2|Page

new monuments were also built and displayed in homage to the planning principles established in places like Rome during Sixtus Vs Baroque rebuilding period. Triumphal Arcs, statues, and obelisks were erected at intersections, in squares and used to create terminating vistas. Unlike Rome, however, these monuments were somewhat more civically inspired as seen in the new opera houses and other public buildings. Remarkably, the modernization project under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann did not cost the Parisian citizens anything, in terms of money. The entire project was not done using taxes, but rather by anticipating the rise in property values that would result from these improvements. The value of land lining these new avenues made up for the costs for the demolition and infrastructure construction. All these improvements, however, were not without their sacrifices and hardships. Medieval Paris was home to thousands of people at the time of this project. There were established networks of commerce, social relationships, and communities that were destroyed almost overnight. The under-classes in Paris were fed up with dictatorships and frequently held uprisings against the nobility of Paris and the emperor. Instead of addressing these grievances, Napoleon III decided to clear away the problem and prevent them from reemerging. The wide avenues were a way to prevent the blockade of roads by unhappy citizens, which was much easier on the narrow medieval streets than these new monumental boulevards. The new housing apartments also displaced many poor residents who could not afford to live in these new buildings, or if they did, it was in the cramped attic spaces, which were up seven stories of stairs. There is also the issue of a loss of medieval urban fabric and building culture that can never be reclaimed. While vernacular, artisan buildings were not beautiful in the classical sense, today there is much appreciation for the craftsmanship that created these humble dwellings over the course of hundreds of years. Although much of the demolished material was reused for new buildings and streets, the destruction of an entire piece of history cannot be overlooked. With that said, it would be difficult for anyone to look at Paris today with its beautiful Neoclassical architecture and pleasant sidewalk cafes, and wish that it could be replaced for the old medieval city. The architecture that replaced the medieval city was of the highest quality and it helped

3|Page

to unify the city under a single design character. And while poor people were displaced, the new housing did accommodate people of lower incomes, albeit with attic apartments, but today the building stock of the Grands Travaux has proven to be extremely adaptive for changing needs. For example, the 10th arrondissement of Paris, Enclos-St-Laurent, is home to a large population of North African immigrants who are looking for better lives. It would also be tough to find a proponent of the plague and disease, and the medieval urban form that facilitated their rapid spread. All in all, the Baron Haussmann plan was a masterpiece of planning and execution that has resulted in one of the most functional and inspirational design projects of all time and it is easy to see why the City Beautiful Movement drew from it in their work. In America, at the time when Napoleon III was assuming power over Paris, cities and towns were rapidly expanded in an unplanned fashion as a result of heavy industrialization. New York City had long outgrown its original colonial settlement in lower Manhattan, its subsequent Federal period growth and the urban expansion of the Canal era was soon to be eclipsed by the suburban expansion of horsedrawn streetcar suburbs along the endless grid running north up the island. This new industrial development with smokestacks, water polluting policies and associated dense worker housing tenements was unlike anything that cities had experienced not even with water powered mills at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Without planned development, the city would choke on its own industrial might.

4|Page

In the interest of public health, leading landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux urged the City of New York to intervene with a design for a grand and gracious public park in the center of the city. Great visionaries like Olmstead, were able to see the potential future should his warnings not taken seriously. Smoke towers would cover the skyline, refuse would fill the streets and all the horrors of some sections of the city would spread to the entire island. While this may have been somewhat of an exaggeration, the underlying premise remains solid and valid. Finally, by the 1860s the City had acted and Olmsted and Vaux were working on the design of 843 acre park in the middle of the island. The park combined elements of picturesque landscape and wooded trails as well as formal green spaces. The park was, and remains today, an oasis in the city and an escape from the urban environment to a natural one.

With the success of Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux as well as Olmsted on his own were asked to design several other parks and parks systems. Some of these projects include Prospect Park in Brooklyn and some of the new parkways that traversed the borough, a suburb of Riverside, Illinois, and the Emerald Necklace around Boston. 3 Other key players in this Parks Movement included important landscape architects, such as AJ Downing who worked on the Washington, D.C. Mall. An influential development that came out of the parks movement was the Parkway, which drew from the boulevards that were being constructed from old protective walls in European cities, but were uniquely American in form and design. These parkways tended to be more park-like than the urban and heavily paved avenues in cities like Paris and Florence. In many cases, a single large green space in the center of the road would be flanked by two two-lane roads rather than opting for the multiway boulevard model. This
3

Olmsted, Frederick Law. Public Parks and Enlargement of Towns The City Reader (Routledge, 1996) pgs. 321-327)

5|Page

became especially true when the Federal government built new parkways throughout the country in the 1920s and 30s in the model of this Parks Movement design. The goals of the Parks Movement were to protect natural environments from the on slot of the uncontrolled industrial development, impose naturally-inspired landscapes on industrial areas, and address the issue of disease spread that was occurring in American cities in the mid-19th Century. The Movement did so by encouraging cities and towns to adopt regional plans for maintaining open space, building new parks, and designing facilities that people enjoyed and supported. This movement was integral for influencing the next generation of landscape architects, who would team up with leading architects of the day to form the City Beautiful Movement in the decades following the design of Central Park in New York and the reconstruction of Paris under Haussmann and Napoleon III. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed enormous swaths of the center of the city as the flames rapidly spread across the miles of the wood frame buildings until it eventually burned out. In the wake of this event, designers from around the country expressed the feeling that something should be done with this opportunity. Given the democratic republic political system with a stern protection of private, individual property rights in America, it is not easy to do large scale planning exercises that are actually implementable. The disaster in Chicago, however, provided the unique opportunity to rebuild the city in a different and planned way. The Worlds Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago was organized by Daniel Burnham, a leading architect, who gathered the great classically and Beaux Arts trained architects and landscape architects in the country to propose that different way to rebuild the city. The White City was the result of these efforts and it embodied the principles that are now used to define the movement. The design called for grand formal plazas lined by Classical and Renaissance Revival civic and public buildings that would serve as the government center of the city and the transportation hub. Grand avenues would lead into this public square and guide all the residents of the city to the center where all the proposed activity and life of the city would be. The only interventions, however, were not architecture; the plans also included picturesque parks with rolling hills and irregular paths, which would complement other 6|Page

formalized green spaces elsewhere in the city. Incorporating water into the center of the city was also another important aspect of the Exposition, which would be accomplished by rerouting rivers and designing formal promenades beside them. Also integral to the design were regional park plans and natural green space preservation. The Worlds Columbian Exposition led to the commission of Daniel Burnham to create a plan for the city of Chicago for 1909. The plan drew on the Exposition designs, but greatly expanded on them as well. Like the 1893 designs, the Chicago Plan embodied principles established during the Grands Travaux in Paris under Baron Haussmann like wide, airy avenues for the transportation needs of modern society, new grand public buildings, upgraded infrastructure for railroads and trolleys, and a beautiful city. Also incorporated into the plan was an expansive park system wrapping around the periphery of the city and throughout developed areas. Massive parkways were also planned to connect the city along straight, radial streets that would bring some monumentality to the regular street grid of Chicago. These ideas were pursued by the second generation of landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. The Chicago Exposition also led to many other commissions for civic improvement plans for other major cities, which include the MacMillan Plan of Washington D.C., the Report of the New Haven Civic Improvement Commission of 1910 by Cass Gilbert and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., John Russell Popes Beaux Arts expansion of Yale University and plans for cities like Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Like the Haussmann project in Paris, many of these city plans called for the demolition of derelict housing that was home to poor residents. These slums would be replaced with monumental avenues and buildings and it was unclear what exactly would happen to the displaced people. Although many of the designs were meticulously planned, beautifully drawn and well researched, very few were implemented even partially. 4 By the turn of the 19th Century, Chicago had already substantially filled the land that was destroyed during the 1871 fire and the attitude of property rights, low taxes and inaction in the economic markets had rooted itself once more in American politics.
4

Brown, Elizabeth Mills. Architectural Note New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (Yale University Press, 1976)

7|Page

Cass Gilbert drawing of the proposed avenue linking the Green to the train station

Other cities were just as cautious about implementing these ambitious plans and perhaps more so than that, people were skeptical of the benefits of implementing such plans. In New Haven, specifically, republican Mayor Frank Rice, at the time of the release of that citys City Beautiful Report, was uninterested in raising taxes on businesses and doing anything more than repairing sidewalks. 6 Another factor in political officials opting not to implement these plans may have been their fear of what voters might do in the next election cycle if large scale eminent domain and demolition of homes were to take place, as was called for in many of the plans. It is likely that this type of thinking was repeated all over the country so the potential benefits of the City Beautiful Movement will never truly be understood. While in many ways it was wise and understandable for the Movement to draw inspiration from both Haussmanns reconstruction project in Paris and Olmsted Sr.s Central park design, Burnham and the other City Beautiful supporters seem to have ignored the fundamental differences between the circumstances that guided each project. Haussmann had Napoleon III to implement his vision with little regard for the impact it might have on residents of affected areas. One could even say that the design interventions were done with downright contempt for the underclasses as evidenced by the creation of avenues that prevented protester blockades. The authority that one emperor yielded in mid-19th Century Paris was unlike anything that any combination of American political leadership had in the State-empowered Constitutional Republic system 7 in the early 20th Century. In the case of Central Park, when Olmsted was proposing this design, much of Northern Manhattan was still underdeveloped and rural. And by the time construction on the design had begun, land was already set aside for the park as
5

Gilbert, Cass and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Specific Recommendations and Suggestions Report of the New Haven Civic Improvement Commission (1910) pgs. 49-58 6 Rae, Douglas. A Sidewalk Republic City: Urbanism and Its End (Yale University Press, 2003) pgs. 183-212 7 Stipe, Robert E. The States: The Backbone of Preservation A Richer Heritage (HPFNC, Inc., 2003) pgs. 81-115

8|Page

townhouses developed along streets making their way up to where the park would be. Aside from Earth moving, and demolishing some shacks, the creation of this massive park had little negative impact on residents of the city. This stands in stark contrast to the situation that existed in most cities by the turn of the Century, when the central cities were bursting at the seams with development and very little land remain buildable even in largely residential neighborhoods. What the City Beautiful Movement was proposing was to demolish large portions of the city center where low-income immigrants lived and replace these vibrant, although somewhat decrepit, communities with places that would essentially be a playground for politicians and the bourgeois society of industrial wealth. Like in Paris, wealthy people would once again inhabit the central city and its adjacent areas, reversing the trend of the previous decades where suburban villas and estates provided refuge for the wealthy and streetcar suburbs provided an escape for the upwardly mobile Irish, Polish, and other early European immigrant families in the 1860s 8 and afterward. This would result in poor people having to live once again on the outskirts of the city like in feudal societies because both the center and the suburban periphery would be too expensive for the working classes. While American politicians may have had contempt for these citizens, like Napoleon did, or wanted their neighborhoods reformed, they also depended on their votes for election, which meant that supporting these plans would not poll well. The successful, or implementable, parts of many of these City Plans tended to be on the creation of civic and public buildings like train stations, libraries, post offices and courthouses, rather than the grand infrastructure that accessed and defined them, and would have required mass demolition. These specific building projects were popular because they appeared to serve more people than wide boulevards lined with expensive apartment buildings would. The other successful portions of the City Beautiful documents were often the periphery parks systems that relied on preserving open spaces and, in some cases, publicly acquiring fresh water supplies like lakes, shoreline ports, trolley
8

42 Street and 2 Avenue (New York City, 19 C.)

nd

nd

th

Brown, Elizabeth Mills. Fair Haven New Haven: A Guide to (Yale University Press, 1976) pgs. 196-207

9|Page

service and utilities. Many cities, like New Haven 9, Boston, and San Francisco did implement park systems around the periphery of the city. Although not to the scale suggested in many reports, these cities did preserve water features and woodland in semi-continuous bands around their centers. Less well received were the parkways that would bisect neighborhoods all for the purpose of easing travel for the upper classes and creating terminating vistas for buildings. The existence of one of two conditions would have allowed for the ideals of the City Beautiful Movement to have been implemented at the turn of 19th Century. Either politicians and residents would have needed the luxury of hindsight or the Movements proponents needed more sensitivity towards the circumstances on the lower-classes. Hindsight would have shown people how much worse the center city slums got by the 1950s, and how adaptive and accessible for the lower-middle classes new apartment buildings would have become in just a few decades, as they did in Paris. Hindsight also would have revealed the destruction of Urban Renewal, which demolished many times more land for larger, less accessible roads than was proposed under the City Beautiful Movement. This ability would

City Beautiful Proposed Demolition (dotted lines)

10

Urban Renewal Planned Demolition (yellow, red, green)

11

have made citizens and politicians more accepting of these plans. On the other hand, people like Burnham, Gilbert, and Pope would have been more successful had they approached low-income neighborhoods with a finer grain and deeper respect for the variation and accumulated learning that is displayed in vernacular neighborhoods. This Movement missed the Gothic Revival of the 1860s and preceded the Collegiate Gothic styling of the 1920s-30s. By strictly adhering to the formality of Classicism and the symmetry of the Renaissance, the City Beautiful Movement disallowed the accommodation of narrow, irregular streets and additive structures into their plans. Another oversight
9

CPCGNH. Edgewood Park New Haven Outdoors: a guide to the citys parks (Field Graphics, Inc. 1990) Gilbert, Cass and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Illustrated Map New Haven Report (1910) 11 New Haven Redevelopment Agency. Planned Projects Maps (1955) drawings of same location, at same scale
10

10 | P a g e

of the movement was the possibility that the outskirts of the city could absorb future growth by decentralizing the central cities and developing nearby hamlets, villages and small towns as secondary centers. This would have addressed the traffic problems without generating the need for large infrastructure. It also would have saved many existing neighborhoods from demolition. These conditions, however, did not exist and we will never know exactly what effect these plans may have had. The legacy of this movement does live on in the form of New Urbanism, which has brought many of the ideas from this movement and the influencing projects of the Parks Movement and Haussmanns modernization of Paris back into the forefront of the American planning and design communities. Perhaps the potential future success of that reform movement will provide some insight into what impact the City Beautiful could have had.

11 | P a g e

Bibliography
Brown, Elizabeth Mills. New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (Yale University Press, 1976) Bruegmann, Robert and Peter Bacon Hales. The Worlds Columbian Exposition Chicago Imagebase Project of the Department of Art History (University of Chicago) Citizens Park Council of Greater New Haven. Edgewood Park New Haven Outdoors: a guide to the citys parks (Field Graphics, Inc. 1990) Gilbert, Cass and Frederick law Olmsted Jr. Report of the New Haven Civic Improvement Commission (1910) Jacobs, Allan B. and Elizabeth Macdonald and Yodan Rofe. The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Mulitway Boulevards (MIT, 2002) Larice, Michael and Elizabeth MacDonald. The Urban Design Reader (Routledge, 2007) Legates, Richard T. and Frederic Stout. The City Reader (Routledge, 1996) New Haven Redevelopment Agency. Planned Projects Maps (1955) Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Builder 101 (July 7, 1911) Rae, Douglas. City: Urbanism and Its End (Yale University Press, 2003) Sinclair, George. Historic Maps and Views of Paris (Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2009) Stipe, Robert E. A Richer Heritage (Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina, Inc, 2003)

12 | P a g e