Rebuilding America's Cities

Paul R. Porter, Robert W. Lake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351494557
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A growing cooperation between the public and private sectors indicates that the tasks of redevelopment are too large and complex for either sector to accomplish alone. Some people maintain that government can do few things right; others are equally distrustful of the private sector. As used here, the private sector is considered to be all that is not government. Each of the success stories illustrated is, in part, a ""road to recovery,"" although none appear to have been influenced by a purpose that broad.Paul R. Porter and David C. Sweet present stories of progress in self-reliance that concern neighborhood and downtown recoveries, school improvement, job generation, a regained fiscal solvency, novel financing techniques, helping tenants to become homeowners, and a successful venture in self-help and tenant management in crime-infested neighborhoods. The successes stem from the diverse community roles of Yale University, a medical center, the world's largest research organization, the Clorox Company, a gas company, an insurance company, a newspaper, neighborhood and downtown organizations, city governments and two religious organizations - the Mormon Church and the tiny Church of the Savior.These stories are located throughout the United States, including Akron, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New Haven, Oakland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, St. Paul, Salt Lake City, Springfield, Mass., Tampa, and Washington, D.C. The editors have gathered the work of professionals known in the field of urban studies: James W. Rouse, Donald E. Lasater, Rolf Goetze, Dale F. Bertsch, Joel Lieske, Eugene H. Methvin, James E. Kunde, T. Michael Smith, Robert Mier, Carol Davidow, Jay Chatterjee, June Manning Thomas, Norman Krumholz, Larry C. Ledebur, and Robert C. Holland.

I
Some Cities Report Successes

1
A Few Who Made a Difference

Paul R. Porter

Six To Be Remembered

The people who told their success stories at the Cities’ Congress shared a common conviction. Even just a few persons, they believed, could make a real difference in the quality of living in their city. They could, that is, if they were strongly motivated and went about their task the right way. It seems fitting, therefore, to introduce a review and appraisal of their accomplishments with an account of the careers of six people who in their time and in their own way did make a difference—a big one—in affecting the urban environment of one or more cities.

The six chosen for this purpose are Frederick Law Olmsted, Daniel H. Burnham, Henry E. Huntington, J. C. Nichols, Robert Moses, and James W. Rouse. The last is still living and still making history. He has contributed the next chapter in this book.

Their contributions were of different kinds, differently motivated, and strongly influenced by individual personality. Each of the six was or is a man of his time, sharing with his contemporaries the dominant cultural attitudes of the day, but each also transcended his time by virtue of a vision that he perceived more clearly or pursued more resolutely than did his contemporaries. Posterity—characteristically—has been unsure in its judgments of those now dead, especially the best known, Olmsted, Burnham, and Moses. The reputations of those longest dead, Olmsted and Burnham, have experienced revisionist depreciation and neglect and recently a postrevisionist rediscovery and new respect. The sequential ideas and works of the six are an outline of the evolution of cities and suburbs since the middle of the 19th century.

It should be said that, having willed change, they changed the nature of cities much less than did a dozen or so men who altered them profoundly without any particular intent to do so. The paradox, however, has nothing to do with willpower or competence; it merely records the fact that modern nations have thus far been more successful in creating new technologies than in mastering their side effects. In large measure, the preoccupation of most of the six was to enable cities to benefit more advantageously from the new technologies—especially those invented in the fabulously inventive last half of the 19th century—while ameliorating unwanted side effects. So, before telling their stories we should pause to consider the origins of the paradox.

The history of machine power is rich in antecedents that allow choices in dating the beginning of particular periods, but probably the most relevant early event in its effect on cities occurred in 1774 when James Watt and Matthew Boulton established a partnership to manufacture Watt’s improved steam engine in Birmingham.¹ The effect came more slowly in America. However, when the Baltimore and Ohio railroad began operations in 1830 it carried more than passengers and freight. It became itself a locomotive of change. The most revolutionary change in the nature of cities was probably Thomas Edison’s invention in 1878 of the incandescent lamp, or electric light. It made illumination safe, plentiful, and cheap. By creating artificial daylight on a grand scale, it permitted land and capital to be used for a longer part of the day—a matter of some moment in the cost of producing goods. Although gas might still serve to illuminate homes and offices, the electric light is inseparable from present-day transportation. Even traffic is regulated by it.

Almost as revolutionary, surely, was the invention of the telephone two years earlier by Alexander Graham Bell, which allowed the human voice to be heard in conversation anywhere. The Edison effect and the Bell effect reach everywhere, but they could not without the Faraday-Brush effect. Michael Faraday, a British physicist, constructed an experimental dynamo in 1831 about the same time as did Joseph Henry, an American scientist; Faraday is credited with being the first. The growing use of the electric light and the telephone created a demand for the central generation of electricity. Charles Francis Brush, a Cleveland engineer, designed a dynamo practical for the need.

Credit for the revolutionary high-rise building must be shared among at least three men. Until about a century ago, the height of buildings was limited by the strength of their load-bearing walls and the stamina of people for climbing. Six stories were a common limit. The maximum was probably achieved in ancient Rome. The poet Juvenal, describing contemporary tenement houses in the second century, A.D., wrote:

Behold the mansion’s towering size

Where floor on floor to the tenth story rise.

Understandably, he also said of them that they “shook with every gust of wind that blew.”²

One of the three was Elisha Graves Otis, a Vermont-born engineer who settled in Yonkers, New York, and invented the safety elevator in 1852. Safety was provided by ingenious clamps that automatically and securely gripped guide rails if the elevator’s descent was not controlled by its lifting cable; to convince skeptics, Otis had an assistant sever the cable of an elevator while he stood triumphantly in it at a high position. His first commercial elevator was installed in a New York City department store in 1857 and was powered by steam.

In 1856 Sir Henry Bessemer introduced in Sheffield, England, the Bessemer converter for making steel from pig iron. The building of railroads created a steel industry, and it became inevitable that sooner or later someone would introduce steel into building construction. Its first introduction was in combination with continued reliance on load-bearing walls. By this measure, a plausible case can be made for crediting Burnham (with his partner John W. Root) or either of two other Chicago architects, William LeBaron Jenney and Louis Sullivan as the designer of the first sky-scraper. Perhaps, in justice, the honor should be shared among them. Yet, none came as close to anticipating the modern glass-sheathed building as did the French engineer Gustave Eiffel, best known for the tower that bears his name. At the same time that the Chicago architects were feeling their way to the independent steel frame, Eiffel was designing the interior structure of the Statue of Liberty and thereby revealing that an exterior need be no more than a drape. It is not inappropriate to describe contemporary skylines as the Otis-Bessemer-Eiffel effect.

Finally, the automobile. In 1886 Gottlieb Daimler, a German, created an internal-combustion engine light enough and powerful enough to propel a 4-wheel vehicle which he named the Mercedes. Henry Ford made the horseless carriage an affordable product for almost everybody. Drivers stuck in traffic on a city street may call it, if they wish, the Daimler-Ford effect.

Such are the effects of technology that engaged the talents of Olmsted, Burnham, Huntington, Nichols, Moses, and Rouse, whose stories are told in sequence.

Frederick Law Olmsted

Before his unlikely appointment as construction superintendent of New York’s pioneering Central Park, Olmsted, a man of “scattered enthusiasms,”³ had been, since leaving school at 18, an adventure-seeking sailor, a gentleman farmer, a European traveller, a writer of modest but growing reputation, and a partner in a bankrupt publishing company. He was then, in 1857, 35 years old and had not pursued any of his ventures diligently enough to become independent of his indulgent father’s financial support except during his two-year voyage to China.

In his new post, in which he was subordinate to the engineer who had created the park’s original plan, he displayed managerial competence and, in partnership with a professional architect, prepared a boldly original new design that in a field of 33 contestants won for the new firm of Olmsted and Vaux an exclusive contract to manage the construction of the park. It was the beginning of a career in which he became America’s foremost designer of public parks, father of the new profession of landscape architecture and a forefather of urban planning.

William Cullen Bryant, the poet and editor of The New York Evening Post, had begun a campaign for a large city park with an editorial in 1844. After nine years of mounting public support, the state legislature authorized the city to buy the site that became Central Park. By 1857 it had been bought for $5 million and construction was proceeding slowing in the face of political bickering and inadequate funds. Expressing its distrust of the Tammany-dominated city government, the state legislature, controlled by the new Republican party, appointed a park commission composed of Tammany Democrats, reform Democrats, and a Republican majority. It was under insistent public pressure to proceed with construction of the park in order to provide jobs for many destitute workers who had been made jobless by the financial panic of that year.

At a chance meeting with a commissioner, Olmsted learned that the commission was seeking a non-political superintendent. He quit work on a new book he was writing on the slave economy of the South (his third) and began an energetic campaign for the job. He obtained endorsements from nearly 200 prominent citizens, including Bryant and the painter Alfred Bierstadt. He cited experience in managing laborers and gardeners on his farm and a knowledge of English parks gained as a traveller. Washington Irving, then America’s most eminent man of letters, assured the commission that Olmsted was not too literary to be practical. An Olmsted biographer suggests that Irving’s advice was decisive in the appointment.⁴

In its natural condition, the long rectangular site consisted of rock outcroppings, rivulets, and swamps and was largely barren of trees. At the time Olmsted began his job, it was “rubbish-strewn, deep in mud, filled with recently vacated squatters’ huts and overrun with goats.”⁵ The potential for a great park existed, but “anything beautiful on it would have to be created, literally, from the ground up.”⁶ In later years, when the role of Calvert Vaux, his partner, was often overlooked, Olmsted insisted that they had been equal partners in design, but acknowledged a difference in concept. Vaux gave emphasis to the park as a work of art, Olmsted to its use. In 1850 the census count for Manhattan Island was 515,000. Olmsted prophesied that it would reach 2,000,000. The park, he argued in the Olmsted-Vaux bid, would need to accommodate crosstown traffic and for this he proposed the novel principle of grade separation. Sunken transverse roads would provide passage for “coal carts and butcher carts, dust carts and dung carts” beneath gracefully arched overpasses.⁷

Central Park was America’s first large park. In its design Olmsted was strongly influenced by English parks. During a 5-month walking tour of England, he had been fascinated with the royal parks that had recently been opened to public use and in particular with a new park especially created for the public, at Birkenhead across the Mersey River from Liverpool.

The reputation he won as manager of the park’s construction led friends to propose, when the Civil War began, that he should direct the Sanitary Commission’s operation of military hospitals. He accepted the post and served two years with results no more distinguished than Lincoln’s generals were showing before Grant was placed in command. For another two years he managed a gold mine in California, again not impressively. Only then did he settle into the one occupation that brought forth his exceptional talents. In partnership with Vaux and then younger men, he planned parks in a score of cities including Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Louisville, Milwaukee, Montreal, Philadelphia, and Rochester. He planned the grounds of the Capitol building in Washington, college campuses, and estates for the wealthy. He helped to initiate the first national park at Yosemite which had excited him during his interlude as a mine manager.

In letters and conversations, he offered a general philosophy, never fully developed, that history was a continuing contest between civilization and barbarism, and that cities fostered both.⁸ One student of his life says that he felt helpless to improve directly the wretched housing of the poor, but “did deal with the slums at one remove by presenting parks as a palliative, an alternative to the gin house and a temporary escape from the congested misery of Chatham Square and Park Row.”⁹

Olmsted was a prophet and strong advocate of suburbs, although this aspect of his career is less well known than the planning of parks. He welcomed the emergence of railroad-linked suburbs and proposed the planning of whole new communities that would correct the faults of the haphazard growth of cities. He wrote:

Probably the advantages of civilization can be found illustrated and demonstrated under no other circumstances as in some suburban neighborhoods whereeach family abode stands fifty or a hundred feet or more apart from all others…There is no reason except in the loss of time…why suburban advantages shouldnot be almost indefinitely extended.¹⁰

Olmsted planned in 1868 a new community west of Chicago that was built and called Riverside. For the benefit of commuters, he proposed a six-mile parkway (a word he coined) to the city, with one set of lanes for carriages and another for horseback riders, but the land company that developed Riverside held that rail travel would be sufficient.¹¹

He encountered frustration as often as success. He suffered from in somnia and numerous physical ailments. Shortly before an onset of mental illness brought his intense work to a close, he chose the site and planned the landscape of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Burnham said of him at a banquet in his own honor:

Each of you knows the name and genius of him who stands first in the heart and confidence of American artists. He it is who has been our best adviser and common mentor… .As artist he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lanes and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountainsides and ocean views.¹²

The environmental movement of recent years has brought a large revival of a lapsed interest in Olmsted. Books concerning him published during the 1970s included two excellent full-length biographies by Laura Wood Roper and Elizabeth Stevenson, a short but perceptive and informative tribute by Elizabeth Barlow, and several lesser works.¹³

Daniel H. Burnham

The Columbian Exposition which marked the close of Olmsted’s career lifted Burnham, its director of works, from being one of Chicago’s three or four best known architects to national fame both as an architect and a grand-scale urban planner. The Exposition was conceived as a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. Chicago partisans cited the city’s central location and its advantage as a terminus of 38 railroads and argued that nothing better typified “the giant young nation” than “the marvellous growth of Chicago from a frontier camp to the active city of more than a million souls, with a corresponding advance in commercial, industrial and intellectual activities.”¹⁴ In April, 1980, President Harrison signed an act of Congress approving a national exhibition to be held in Chicago.

The firms of Olmsted and Codman and Burnham and Root were retained as consultants, their joint plan was accepted, and Burnham was made manager. The sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, described the architects and artists assembled by Burnham as “the greatest meeting of artists since the 15th century.” Louis Sullivan, the distinguished Chicago architect who designed the Transportation Building, said that “Burnham performed in a masterful way, displaying remarkable executive capacity. He became open minded, just, magnanimous.”¹⁵ (In his embittered old age, Sullivan harshly condemned Burnham and the Exposition). The Exposition became a patriotic celebration of a frontier society coming of age. Its buildings inspired the City Beautiful Mo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contribute
• Preface
• I. Some Cities Report Successes
• II. But Are They Successes Of The Right Kind?
• Success Story Presenters
• Notes
• Index