The Making of Urban America

A History of City Planning in the United States

John William Reps

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691006185
  9780691045252
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691238241
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This comprehensive survey of urban growth in America has become a standard work in the field. From the early colonial period to the First World War, John Reps explores to what extent city planning has been rooted in the nation's tradition, showing the extent of European influence on early communities. Illustrated by over three hundred reproductions of maps, plans, and panoramic views, this book presents hundreds of American cities and the unique factors affecting their development.

CHAPTER 1

European City Planning on the Eve of American Colonization

THE first settlers of the New World were Spanish, French, English, Dutch, and Swedish. They were not yet Americans. Their language, their dress, their political, social, and religious beliefs, and their architecture were those of their homelands. Gradually in some instances, more rapidly in others, these cultural and physical characteristics changed to meet the opportunities and requirements of the American environment. Although European influences continued, with the passing of time their power waned, and new modes of life more appropriate to the changed circumstances of the settlers emerged.

No crude environmental determinism is implied by the foregoing statement. Complex and subtle forces caused these changes, and cultural factors seem to have exerted as much influence as the more obvious physical elements. The fact remains that, from the beginning of settlement, the European way of life, as represented by the various colonizing groups, began its metamorphosis to a new and different pattern.

During the early period of colonization innovations in community layout rarely appeared. The plans of villages and towns, and their surrounding agricultural lands, closely resembled, if they did not actually duplicate, traditional patterns of land division and allotment already familiar to those coming to America from the colonizing countries of Europe. But new or modified community plans emerged in response to novel requirements or changed circumstances.

In this book we shall be examining the adaptation of those community planning forms to the evolving American scene. This introductory and preliminary chapter will survey the status of European city planning on the eve of colonization in an attempt to summarize the body of knowledge dealing with urban layout available to the founders of America’s first cities. Those readers already familiar with the rich history of late medieval and renaissance European planning will find this at best a mere outline of an incredibly interesting and complicated period of urban growth. Others less aware of these events may at least gain some understanding of the extent to which European town planning had developed by the time the first settlers left for the New World and during the formative period of colonial life.¹

What were these elements of the European planning tradition? Aside from the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome, half a dozen fairly distinct aspects of European town planning stand out. There were, first of all, a whole series of architectural treatises dealing at least in part with the principles of planning, urban reconstruction, town extensions, and the layout of new cities. Of these the works of Alberti and Palladio exerted greatest influence on their contemporaries and remain the best known. Similar in some respects but forming a group somewhat apart were the various ideal city proposals put forward by utopian philosophers, economic reformers, and military engineers.

The European tradition could also boast of scores of “new” towns, completely preplanned and built largely as designed. While most of these date from the late middle ages, many were creations of the Renaissance and Baroque periods and came into being shortly before and during the early periods of American colonization. Urban extension projects also provided examples of large-scale planning and construction.

An important aspect of European planning influential in many New World towns was the development of residential squares and public piazzas or places. Not so extensive in scale as new towns or new suburban quarters, the squares nevertheless provided a sense of order otherwise often lacking.

Finally, the European tradition included a history of evolution in garden and park design, which in turn strongly influenced the layout of cities and especially the alignment of major streets and boulevards. The similarity in scale and design between the gardens of Versailles and the plan of Washington, D.C. was no mere coincidence, as we shall see in a later chapter. Still later the sinuous lines of the English garden appeared in the winding roads of the romantic suburban developments of America’s nouveau riche.

We now turn to an examination of each of these elements of European planning. While they are discussed separately, this is more a matter of convenience than an accurate representation of their true positions. In fact, many of these elements are closely connected with one another.

Bastide Towns of Medieval Europe

As Europe began to emerge from the Dark Ages and as a limited revival of commerce and trade developed, a new period of town founding began. These new towns were primarily military in character and were designed to protect a frontier or to consolidate military and political domination of a region. Their founders were usually locally powerful lords who claimed or aspired to the rule of a domain larger than the traditional feudal estate and who were in positions to make that claim effective. In the countries with which we are concerned these fortress or bastide towns are to be found chiefly in southwestern France, in the northern portions of Spain, and on the Welsh and Scottish borders of England.

The history of the bastide towns can be found in the works of several authorities. There is no need to repeat this material here, but some brief description of these communities is warranted. The extent to which these bastide communities served as models for American colonial town planning remains undetermined, but, as will be seen, many of the early American towns bore close resemblance to them. In at least one case—French Detroit—there appears to be some direct connection between a bastide plan and that of an American town. Certain similarities in form suggest that these medieval towns may have been influential in other European colonial communities. Yet we cannot be certain that these points of resemblance resulted from direct or even unconscious copying of the features of the bastides.

The plan of Monpazier in France is fairly typical of these cities, although such complete regularity is not often encountered in the scores of other such towns in southern France, the few in northern Spain, or the half-dozen or so in the British Isles, of which Flint, Winchelsea, and Hull are perhaps the best known. The gridiron plan, market square, walled perimeter, and restricted size characterize them all with but few exceptions. The plan of the town as it was established near the end of the thirteenth century is reproduced in Figure 1. The walls of the town enclose a rectangle about 1,300 feet long and 600 feet wide, divided into blocks approximately 125 feet wide and 150, 250, and 300 feet long. Near the center, surrounded by arcaded streets—a feature of many of the French bastides—is the market square. The church and its adjacent open space are located nearby off one corner of the market square. The main streets were only 24 feet wide, the minor ways 16 feet, and the alleys but 6 feet in width.

In most instances the bastides were established as frontier outposts or to dominate actual or potentially hostile territory. Towns on the American frontier came into being for similar reasons. The bastide type plan met the requirements of these stern conditions, and it is little wonder that it was used by some of the earliest town planners in the New World. The relative unimportance of most of the European bastides and the remoteness in time of their founding suggests that functional requirements rather than historical imitation was largely responsible for the use of this plan in America. If the bastides did not directly provide models for our colonial towns, they at least furnished a background of examples of planned towns for subsequent European planning activities. These in turn supplied many of the concepts and design details later to be incorporated in American colonial towns.

Figure 1. Plan of a Portion of Monpazier, France: 1284

Europe’s New Vitruvians

The bastides mark a transitional stage between the feudal castle with its confined community huddled at its base and the bustling, expanding cities of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Renaissance city planning did not lack for theoreticians. Books expounding architectural principles appeared almost as soon as the new printing press came into widespread use. Most of these works contained at least some reference to the ideal layout of cities, and many of them emphasized this aspect of architecture as of importance equal to that of the design of individual buildings. In this the Renaissance writers followed the model of Vitruvius, who wrote in the first century B.C. and whose rediscovery in the fifteenth century stimulated a long series of similar theoretical works.

The earliest important treatise of this kind in the Renaissance was Leon Battista Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria, published posthumously in 1485. Alberti was one of the acknowledged masters of the early Renaissance and the architect for important buildings in Mantua, Rimini, Florence, and elsewhere in Italy. His manual of architecture drew on this experience, on the principles laid down by Vitruvius, and on the practice of his less illustrious contemporaries in the design of dwellings, civic and palatial buildings, and urban open spaces.

Alberti, like Vitruvius, began with a consideration of desirable site conditions for cities. The shape of towns, their walls and fortifications, and such matters as water supply and sewerage all received his attention. The design of the street system also was considered. For large and important towns Alberti felt the streets should be straight and broad. Smaller and less heavily fortified towns should be planned with winding streets to increase their beauty and to give the impression of greater size. Alberti singled out other streets leading to public places as deserving of special architectural treatment for the buildings along their path. He advocated the development of piazzas and recreational areas for each district of the city. Finally, he suggested that certain industrial activities, offensive because of odor or noise be prohibited from towns altogether and that the various crafts and industries be grouped together in districts set aside for that purpose.

A century later, in 1570, Andrea Palladio published a similar work. Palladio’s I Quattro Libre dell’ Architettura bulged with sumptuous views and plans of magnificent palaces and public buildings. The relative simplicity and restraint of Alberti’s day had given way to the elaborate devices of the Baroque. Palladio’s chief concern lay in the city as a visual experience. Mundane problems of water supply and sewage disposal he dismissed in a few short lines. Broad streets lined with imposing buildings leading to great squares embellished with fountains and statues are admiringly described. The image of the Baroque city of pomp and pageant appears in these pages—and it soon began to take shape as powerful princes, both secular and spiritual, began to remake European cities into these new patterns.

Every European country produced architectural theoreticians of the Vitruvian mold, although the Italians remained best known. The works of both Alberti and Palladio were translated into other languages and were widely read throughout Europe. These books, and the many others of similar character, exerted a powerful influence on the design of Renaissance and Baroque towns, urban extension projects, the layout of squares and plazas, and the character of new streets and boulevards.

Along with the theoretical works of Alberti, Palladio, and their followers appeared other books by engineers dealing with the city primarily as a military stronghold and fortress. With the introduction of gunpowder into Europe in the fourteenth century, the traditional types of fortification became obsolete. The castle walls which had served so well as a defense against more primitive weapons now stood open to breaching fire from cannon. Clearly some way was needed to keep artillery at bay. The method finally devised involved the construction of various types of outworks, either as separate strongpoints or as projections from the main wall. These outworks or bastions were usually flat, thus presenting a small target area, and so laid out that the flanks of salients received protection from adjoining points.

Such new methods of fortifying cities gave rise to a host of theories and proposals. Francesco Martini was one of the earliest and most prolific theoreticians, the designer of several ideal military city plans dating from the late fifteenth century. Cattaneo, nearly a century later, refined and elaborated these studies of Martini. Palma Nova, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi and built in 1593 north of Venice, was one of the earliest examples of a city whose entire plan stemmed from these theories of military engineering. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Scamoz-zi described a similar ideal fortress town with twelve sides, a bastion at each angle, and the whole town surrounded by a moat. At least a dozen other architects and engineers, chiefly Italian, advanced like proposals.

In all these schemes two general types of street patterns stand out: the rectangular and the radial. Most designers employed squares and open spaces—the architects for their visual appeal and as sites for major buildings, the engineers for their utility as mustering places for troops. The perimeters of these plans were normally circular. The architects evidently found this more satisfying aesthetically, and the engineers wanted to minimize the length of the required fortifications. Both advocated straight, wide streets—the architects because of the monumental character it would give to the city and the engineers because of the facility such streets would provide for troop movements and the use of artillery. To a remarkable degree, then, the desires of architects and military engineers coincided and blended. While actual city building in the Renaissance rarely approached the symmetrical perfection shown in these theoretical plans, the many executed projects for enlarged fortifications or for civic embellishment followed ideal proposals in general outline.

Another group of treatises influenced the layout of cities. These were works dealing with the art of castrametation, that is, the layout of military camps. These castrametation books were based largely on Roman writings. Niccolo Machiavelli’s Arte della Guerra, which appeared in 1521, was but the first of a long list of such works. Most of them contained illustrations and diagrams of camp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. European Planning on the Eve of American Colonization
• 2. The Spanish Towns of Colonial America
• 3. The Towns of New France
• 4. Town Planning in the Tidewater Colonies
• 5. New Towns in a New England
• 6. New Amsterdam, Philadelphia, and Towns of the Middle Colonies
• 7. Colonial Towns of Carolina and Georgia
• 8. Pioneer Cities of the Ohio Valley
• 9. Planning the National Capital
• 10. Boulevard Baroque and Diagonal Designs
• 11. Gridiron Cities and Checkerboard Plans
• 12. Cemeteries, Parks, and Suburbs: Picturesque Planning in the Romantic Style
• 13. Cities for Sale: Land Speculation in American Planning
• 14. Towns by The Tracks
• 15. The Towns the Companies Built
• 16. Cities of Zion: The Planning of Utopian and Religious Communities
• 17. Minor Towns and Mutant Plans
• 18. Chicago Fair and Capital City: The Rebirth of American Urban Planning
• Notes on the Illustrations
• Note on Cartographic Research Methods
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index