Civitas By Design Building Better Communities From The Garden City To The New Urbanism Howard Gillette

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Civitas By Design Building Better Communities From The Garden City To The New Urbanism Howard Gillette
Civitas By Design Building Better Communities From The Garden City To The New Urbanism Howard Gillette
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Civitas by Design
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University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Civitas by Design
Building Better Communities,
from the Garden City to the New Urbanism

Howard Gillette, Jr.
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Copyright2010 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review
or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form
by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10987654321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gillette, Howard.
Civitas by design : building better communities, from the garden city
to the new urbanism / Howard Gillette, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4247-8 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. City planning—United States—History. 2. Community
development—United States—History. 3. Urbanization—United
States—History. I. Title.
HT167.G55 2010
307.12160973—dc22 2009044901
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For Margaret
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Contents
Introduction1
1.Progressive Reform Through
Environmental Intervention5
2.The Garden City in America23
3.The City: Film as Artifact 45
4.The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning60
5.The Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City77
6.James Rouse and American City Planning95
7.The New Urbanism: ‘‘Organizing Things That Matter’’115
8.Civitas in the Design of Low-Income Housing134
Conclusion160
Notes169
Index215
Acknowledgments223
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Introduction
Americans have perpetually harbored complex and often un-
comfortable feelings about urban life. Recognizing early in their national
history that cities performed critical economic functions, they nonetheless
worried about the effects of concentrated settlement, not just on individual
behavior but on citizenship itself. Thomas Jefferson was not alone in the
belief, which he stated inNotes on Virginia, that ‘‘the mobs of great cities
add just as much to the support of government, as sores do to the strength
of the human body.’’
1
Stating his strong preference for agrarian republican-
ism over social conditions generated in European cities, Jefferson, like oth-
ers after him, nonetheless ultimately embraced the forces of modernization.
For critics who followed, the challenge lay not in avoiding urban develop-
ment but making it work according to republican principles. Over time,
solutions differed, but one strain remained remarkably consistent: the belief
that in improving the physical environment lay the key to civic as well as
social regeneration. Countless reforms, of course, were incremental. Among
the most lasting and influential efforts, however, were those intended to
uplift whole communities. Distressed by the ways urban density fostered
anonymity and social differences at the cost of solidarity, reformers sought
new means to bring together the ‘‘people’’ in whom the nation’s founders
had endowed so many powers. Through interventions in public spaces as
well as private living conditions, they sought to enhance both sociability
and knowledge among strangers. Their goal was not simply better people.
Ultimately, they sought to shapecivitas—the community of citizens—
through design.
2
These efforts first emerged in concentrated form in the early twentieth
century, as critics of unbridled capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic
sought alternative ways of assuring more responsive and humane uses of
investment. In England, Ebenezer Howard’s vision for a whole network of
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2 Introduction
garden cities organized on the principle of returning to residents the in-
creased value of the land as it was improved provided a powerful alternative
to the status quo. Progressive reformers in the United States embraced a
number of methods for countering the ill effects of the prevailing laissez-
faire ideology. They shared with Howard, however, faith in the ameliorative
effect of a good environment and sought in their best efforts to implement
change for the betterment of civic life, not just of individuals. Reform with-
ered with the disillusionment that followed World War I, but other efforts
emerged, not least through a small band of architects and critics who
formed the Regional Planning Association of America in the mid-1920s.
From their extraordinary members, among them Lewis Mumford, Clarence
Arthur Perry, Catherine Bauer, Clarence Stein, and Henry Wright, came
innovations to building practice that envisioned broad social benefits
through good physical design. Through their writing as well as their build-
ing experiments they left a vital record of what I have chosen to call here
‘‘civitas by design.’’
This legacy remained in evidence as I undertook graduate training at
Yale in the mid-1960s. Christopher Tunnard, of the School of Architecture,
was an enthusiast of Lewis Mumford’s sweeping formulations for a revital-
ized urban civilization based on purposeful regional planning and respect
for the natural environment. It was through him that I was exposed to
Mumford’s assertion, which has been repeated more than once in my sub-
sequent writing, that ‘‘The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of
maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. . . .
here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols,
patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civiliza-
tion are focused.’’
3
Times were changing, however. Mumford’s emphasis on
the central agency of cities remained pertinent, but the focus for reform was
shifting. Even as New Haven received accolades from journalists as well as
academics for its extraordinary ability to tap federal funds in the cause of
‘‘urban renewal,’’ Mayor Richard C. Lee came under intense fire from local
activists for putting physical revitalization ahead of human welfare. When
civil disturbances wracked the city in August1967, a protest document di-
rected at the mayor carried with it the ring of authority: ‘‘What are looted
stores compared to looted lives?’’
4
Within a few years, prescriptions for city
revitalization had changed irrevocably.
Rejecting ambitious efforts to reconstruct whole cities typified by the
ambitious ideas of Paris-based architect Le Corbusier and the Modernist
movement he promoted,
5
critics embraced instead more incremental and
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Introduction 3
community-based approaches that stressed social justice first and physical
design only secondarily. Social history and its allies in related disciplines
dominated the historical field, and the broad approach employed by Mum-
ford, though not forgotten, was marginalized in academic discourse. In the
meantime, the public, far from supporting the new research agenda in the
academy, distanced itself both from difficult urban problems and the peo-
ple associated with them. A postmodern turn in scholarship in the last part
of the century only deepened the distance between the public and the acad-
emy. Not surprisingly, widely held perceptions of cities remained largely
uninformed by academic criticism.
My interest in cities derived from the critical views conveyed both
before and after the upheaval of the1960s. In my early years as a college
professor, I became closely associated with Frederick Gutheim, a younger
associate of Lewis Mumford and a leader in the movement spurred in the
mid-1970s to recover and celebrate the career of the landscape architect
Frederick Law Olmsted, an early practitioner of environmental reform.
Through Gutheim, I became interested in the work of Roy Lubove, another
enthusiast for Mumford, and a tradition he labeled ‘‘environmental inter-
vention.’’
6
That interest is reflected in the four chapters included in this
volume. Although I found that each effort to promote better civic life
through physical design ultimately proved problematic, I considered these
experiences not just influential in their own time but the basis for reflecting
upon contemporary urban policy. The two chapters that open this volume
provide the context for those approaches to urban reconstruction.
Even as I maintained an interest in the intellectual traditions associ-
ated with Mumford and his later admirers, I could not help but be drawn
into discussions central to my own generation’s concern for social welfare,
concerns that were heightened beyond earlier work to include avid atten-
tion to issues of class, gender, and race. The last two chapters here revisit
earlier traditions of environmental intervention in light of these changed
perceptions and changed circumstances in the nation’s metropolitan areas.
The New Urbanist movement, a clear descendent of earlier environmental
reform efforts—most notably the Garden City tradition—has opened the
door to a reconsideration of how best to design and redesign communities
for the betterment of civic life. As much as they have focused on physical
design, New Urbanists have not ignored issues of social welfare, even in the
inner city. Their efforts have had mixed results, but the record of their
building practices, as well as the social criticism they have produced, offers
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4 Introduction
the opportunity to take stock once again as to what is both desirable and
possible.
This exercise is not merely academic in light of contemporary events.
The failure to respond effectively to the disastrous effects of Hurricane Ka-
trina and the deep recession that rages as this volume goes to press provide
compelling reasons for revisiting traditions of environmental intervention.
For much of a generation, public policy followed the lead of neoliberalism,
an unwavering faith in the benevolent effect of the marketplace. As regula-
tions receded and housing markets boomed, criticism by urban activists
and environmentalists had marginal effects at best on the fate of our metro-
politan areas.
7
Despite warnings of deepening residential disparities and un-
equal resources, outer suburbs boomed, highways clogged, and wasteful en-
ergy consumption continued.
Barack Obama’s election as president set the stage for a policy reversal.
Both his experience as a community organizer and his promotion of energy
independence provided supporters hope that new investments by his ad-
ministration would address the structural inequalities of resources even as
they met the immediate needs for recovery. It was not too much to hope,
they asserted, that the United States could achieve not just a stronger but a
more just economy, not merely a safe environment but one that could bet-
ter sustain communities of citizens.
8
The goal in this volume, then, is both to report evolving traditions of
environmental design and to do so in light of the best available scholarship,
including that which has complicated my previous view of such activity.
While this volume contains older material, it is framed from a contempo-
rary perspective, one that has been informed by other work connecting so-
cial justice and the built urban environment. Most recently, inCamden
After the Fall, I concluded that the best way to overcome an American
apartheid as it is currently entrenched in our metropolitan areas is to join
the forces of the civil rights and environmental movements, broadly con-
ceived.
9
This book is an effort to bring together the sensibilities associated
with these movements in the review and assessment of traditions that can
be built upon in a new century.
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Chapter 1
Progressive Reform Through
Environmental Intervention
In its attempt to grapple with the harsh conditions brought
about by urban industrialism, the Progressive Era set the stage for many of
the twentieth-century reforms that followed. Seen in historical perspective,
this movement appears sharply limited by a middle-class bias that sought
less to eliminate injustice than it did to restore an idealized vision of estab-
lished republican principles. If it failed to challenge racial or gender bias
and left unchallenged the basic tenets of modern capitalism, it nonetheless
sought through active government intervention to assure that the demo-
cratic system offered its citizens the chance of a decent life. In seeking to
mediate the ill effects of unbridled development, Progressives became the
first generation to embrace environmental intervention as a means of im-
proving both the social and the physical attributes of cities. Whether the
object of their attention was in the home, in public spaces, or in the means
though which urban development might be directed through planning,
they sought to assure acceptable conditions for living, work, and recre-
ation.
1
That reform groups counted on an active and engaged citizenry to
achieve their goals made them the first generation to actively pursue civitas
through design.
Because activists committed to social and physical aspects of urban re-
form diverged in the second decade of the twentieth century, it is often been
assumed that their goals were incompatible. The chief publicist of the City
Beautiful movement, Charles Mulford Robinson, suggested as much in
1904: ‘‘We may reasonably assert . . . that civic art need concern itself only
with the outward aspects of the houses, and therefore that for such details—
sociologically pressing though they are—as sunless bedrooms, dark halls
and stairs, foul cellars, dangerous employments, and an absence of bath-
rooms, civic art has no responsibility, however earnestly it deplores them.’’
2
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6 Chapter 1
Robinson may have intuited the ultimate divisions that specialization ulti-
mately advanced, but at the outset reformers of all persuasions looked to
environmental improvements as a primary means for social uplift. Whether
it was a City Beautiful plan to reshape downtowns as monumental civic
cores capable of inspiring resident loyalty and respect or the actions of
housing activists and settlement workers to improve the lives of immi-
grants, reformers agreed: a strong democracy required a decent environ-
ment.
Progressivism had many antecedents, but without doubt the crusading
journalist Jacob Riis played a major role in sparking public interest in envi-
ronmental reform. For more than a quarter century, as far back as the after-
math of the1863draft riots, critics had sought to curb building practices in
New York City that crowded residents into densely overcrowded and highly
unsanitary tenements. Efforts to eliminate the most atrocious conditions
secured modest results without, however, attracting the lasting concern or
interest of the general public.
3
Riis’s provocative expose´How the Other Half
Lives, published in1890, reflected earlier criticisms but had the advantage
in its graphic imagery of bringing home to a middle-class audience condi-
tions that were not just alien but threatening. Here, he demonstrated, were
conditions infecting not just individuals but civic health as a whole, for such
poor home conditions, it seemed beyond argument, produced bad citizens.
Alienated from nature, removed from any trace of healthy village life, and
thus lacking natural ties of friendship and moral support, poor urban
dwellers appeared susceptible to every variety of social, physical, and spatial
disorder: crime, saloons, and a steady deterioration of mind and body.
Crammed by necessity into living quarters in which they remained defense-
less, these victims threatened to spread the ill effects of their own disorderly
lives, thus contaminating whole cities. Riis made just this point in a1903
visit to Washington, D.C., where a quick survey of that city’s notorious liv-
ing conditions in back alleys had stirred reform efforts at the turn of the
century. Describing the inside of these dwellings to the Senate District
Committee as worse than those in New York and ‘‘too dreadful to con-
ceive,’’ he subsequently warned a meeting of the city’s Associated Charities,
‘‘You cannot suffer these places to continue in existence and do your duty
to your city or to yourselves. The influences they exert threaten you, for the
handsome block in whose center lies the festering mass of corruption is rot-
ten to the core. The corruption spreads, my friends, and you will pay the
bill.’’
4
Riis’s friend Theodore Roosevelt shared his view of the dire civic con-
sequences that followed slum conditions. Speaking at an exhibit on New
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Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention 7
York tenements about the same time, Roosevelt advised his audience to ‘‘go
look through the charts downstairs, which show the centers of disease and
poverty, and remember that it is there that the greatest number of votes are
cast.’’
5
Such efforts to tie the social welfare of those living in slum condi-
tions to the self-interest of the middle class helped Progressives generate
support for their cause.
6
In what would prove an understatement in a period when graphic de-
piction was becoming the rule, political scientist Elgin Gould concluded in
his influential1895volume,The Housing of the Working People, ‘‘bad hous-
ing is a terribly expensive thing to any community.’’ According to Christine
Boyer, the obvious response was to impose an orderly environment to ‘‘dis-
cipline and turn to social advantage the base instincts of the individual.’’
7
This intervention necessarily started in the home according to early housing
critics. Alice Lincoln, for instance, declared in1899that ‘‘a good, clean,
wholesome home ought to be within the reach of every honest, temperate,
and respectable man and woman; only from such homes can the best chil-
dren and the best citizens come forth to help forward the progress of the
nation.’’
8
Riis shared this outlook, complaining about the ‘‘murder of the
home’’ and describing the tenement as ‘‘the enemy of the commonwealth.’’
9
Roy Lubove reports, ‘‘He observed that tenement neighborhoods, popu-
lated often by foreigners and their children, seemed to abound in vice,
crime, and pauperism. He assumed, therefore, that the physical environ-
ment was at fault. The tenement must cause a deterioration of character,
making the individual more susceptible to vice than he would have been in
a different environment. Improve his housing, it followed, and you would
influence his character for the better.’’ Riis was not entirely captive to such
determinism, however. ‘‘More than previous housing reformers, he sensed
that the tenement, the slum, was a way of life and not simply a problem of
sub-standard housing. Thus socially effective housing reform would involve
a reconstruction of the whole environment and the customary life-organi-
zation of the inhabitants,’’
10
Lubove concludes.
Reconstructing a broader environment necessarily led Riis and other
Progressives to campaigns to curb, if not eliminate, the influence of institu-
tions considered morally suspect, such as saloons and dance halls, even if
such places may have satisfied deep needs for recreation and release from
the vicissitudes of daily living, at work as well as at home. Again, such ef-
forts may have been more intense in the Progressive Era, but they were not
new. What Riis pointed to as well were changes in the urban environment
that could be relied on to counter the bad effects of conditions that could
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8 Chapter 1
Figure1. Work invades the home: a New York City tenement apartment.
Photograph by Lewis Hine,1913. Library of Congress.
not be eliminated entirely. Here he looked especially to youth, seeing the
school and its associated recreational activities as necessary means for creat-
ing the next generation of what he called ‘‘useful citizens.’’ Anticipating the
community school movement described in Chapter4in conjunction with
Clarence Arthur Perry’s neighborhood planning concept, Riis argued,
‘‘When the fathers and mothers meet under the school roof as in their
neighborhood house, and the children have their games, their clubs, and
their dances there, there will no longer be a saloon question in politics; and
that day the slum is beaten.’’
11
Closely associated was Riis’s interest in plant-
ing small parks in tenement districts as wholesome diversions and, ulti-
mately, as places of socialization as well as recreation.
Each element in Riis’s range of reform efforts would grow in impor-
tance as the Progressive movement matured. In the years when Riis first
become widely known, housing reform remained largely a philanthropic
endeavor, a position he promoted himself.
12
Among the most visible efforts
in New York City was Alfred T. White’s construction of tenements between
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Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention 9
1877and1890for ‘‘thrifty and socially ambitious’’ artisans in Brooklyn.
White described his effort as driven by ‘‘fair return for fair rents, simple
justice, and not that which is falsely called charity.’’ To his first efforts in
the late1870s he introduced the innovation of locating a central courtyard
within several blocks of tenements, a clear effort to insulate residents from
the temptations of the street even as it assured residents greater access to
light and air.
13
Suburban Homes, which he formed in1896,becamethe
most prolific ‘‘limited dividend’’ company in America, so named because
with returns limited at between3and7percent, they were well below ex-
pected market returns which could reach20percent. Costs were kept down
as investors combined modest profits with a sense of charitable giving.
14
The critic Elgin Gould formed a limited-dividend company himself, build-
ing properties both in Manhattan and Brooklyn to provide amenities lack-
ing in the city’s worst tenements—broad central courts, apartments two
rooms deep to guarantee light and ventilation, private water closets, and gas
appliances—but at a cost that made such structures unaffordable to the
mass of workers whose housing conditions remained intolerable.
15
The alternative approach embraced more widely by mainstream re-
formers at the turn of the century was regulation, a movement that as-
sumed prominence first in New York City under the leadership of Lawrence
Veiller. As head of the New York Charity Organization Society, Veiller used
information gathered from a survey of sanitary and physical conditions in
tenement houses to mount an exhibit whose shocking details helped build
support for new legislation. As approved in1901, the new state tenement
law marked a shift from regulating building materials to regulating building
conditions by mandating minimum standards for light and air and requir-
ing running water and water closets in every apartment. That success
sparked other regulatory efforts, in Chicago, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland,
and Cincinnati, among other cities. Veiller’s massive two-volume report,
issued in1903with fellow housing reformer Robert DeForest, charted those
efforts even as it further documented unsuitable housing conditions around
the country.
16
Throughout the volume, the authors expressed confidence,
now common among Progressives, in the power of the environment to
make new citizens: ‘‘It is only by providing homes for the working people,
that is, by providing for them not only shelter, but shelter of such a kind as
to protect life and health and to make family life possible, free from sur-
roundings which tend to immorality, that the evils of crowded city life can
be mitigated and overcome. . . . Homes are quite as much needed to make
good citizens as to make good men. According as the working people are
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10 Chapter 1
provided with better or poorer homes will the government, morals, and
health of a city be better or worse.’’
17
The1903report marked a shift that became characteristic in the Pro-
gressive Era, from the sensationalist reporting typified by Riis to the system-
atic gathering of information and more concerted organization to act upon
findings. Its success prompted other efforts to effect environmental change,
the most important of which was the Pittsburgh Survey of1907–8, gener-
ously funded by the newly formed Russell Sage Foundation. Published ini-
tially in the journalCharities and the Commonsbeginning in January1909,
the survey appeared in six volumes between1909and1914. Describing ‘‘en-
tire families living in one room, . . . courts and alleys fouled by bad drainage
and piles of rubbish,’’ and ‘‘playgrounds for rickety, pale-faced grimy chil-
dren,’’ the Survey coupled emotion with fact-finding to secure new regula-
tory reforms. In attempting to remake man-made environments by identi-
fying problems in the community machinery and recommending specific
solutions, the Survey sustained as an article of faith the belief that civic ac-
tion and a revitalized democracy would inevitably follow such investiga-
tions.
18
Pointing especially to environmental reforms—to reduce smoke,
improve sanitation, and increase access to natural resources—Joel Tarr
characterizes the investigators’ motivation as rooted in a ‘‘new science and
art of social up building’’ with the goal of producing ‘‘a self-reliant, self-
directing community.’’
19
Closely associated with housing reform was a settlement movement
that built on Riis’s emphasis on the neighborhood context for social reform.
Dominated by the first generation of college-educated women seeking an
outlet for their idealism as well as their advanced training, settlements
sought through a range of programs and activities to draw workers and
their families into their sphere of influence and, in the process, to educate
them to the habits of good citizenship. Linked to earlier uplift efforts con-
fined to home improvement, settlement work nonetheless embraced a
wider environmental sphere. Settlement workers fought for better schools
and sanitation, supported union organizing, and agitated for accessible rec-
reational opportunities. New York settlement worker Mary Kingsbury
Simkhovitch unveiled a typically ambitious agenda by seeking to reduce
neighborhood congestion, establish social centers at schools, and create ‘‘a
community spirit.’’
20
As the premier representative of the settlement movement, Jane Ad-
dams made explicit the domesticating thrust of her work. She considered
Hull House a model home for the immigrants who attended the programs
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Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention 11
there. High standards in art and furnishings were but part of the larger mes-
sage of proper comportment that visitors were to take away. If they could
never afford the particular emblems of civilization they were exposed to,
they nonetheless were expected to absorb and appreciate standards of
beauty that could be applied in their own homes. Further efforts extended
directly into working-class homes, where the new helping professions pro-
vided advice on how to apply rules of cleanliness and order considered es-
sential to the sustenance of the family in crowded apartments that often
doubled as work as well as domestic spaces. Gwendolyn Wright asserts that
‘‘Housing reformers saw themselves as a moral police force, using environ-
mental change to enforce propriety.’’
21
Some tensions existed between settlement and professional social
workers. While the former grew increasingly convinced that poverty was
the product of environmental conditions that could be overcome through
humane intervention, the latter field clung still to the nineteenth-century
belief that impoverishment was a product of poor character.
22
As settlement
workers made inroads into the programming for the national meetings of
the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, however, the divi-
sion narrowed in favor of an environmental view. With the election in1906
of Edward T. Devine, a strong believer in shifting intervention from indi-
vidual uplift to a broader program of environmental change, the agency
began to swing to that view. By1910, when Jane Addams delivered her presi-
dential address by right of her election a year before, she could claim the
two wings had been united, each with its own role, but marching together
under the banner of environmental change.
23
By this point, Daniel
Burnstein asserts, while Progressives agreed on the need to alter social be-
havior, unlike conservatives who demanded behavioral change in the poor,
they ‘‘recognized a reciprocal obligation to help upgrade the urban environ-
ment and living standards of city residents. With adequate external re-
sources, individuals could more readily change their attitudes and behav-
iors.’’
24
As the network of settlement workers fanned out in the early years of
the century, new alliances and new organizations formed, each operating
on a similar conviction, that urban industrialism had badly degraded the
human as well as the physical landscape and that organized responses were
both necessary and possible. Among the organizations spurring new efforts
beyond the neighborhood focus of the settlements themselves was the Na-
tional Consumers League (ably directed by Addams’s former colleague at
Hull House, Florence Kelley), with its intent of rallying women to selective
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12 Chapter 1
buying from employers as a means of pressuring them to improve working
conditions of women and children,
25
and the National Child Labor Com-
mittee. Among the most committed environmentalist organizations which
Addams, Riis, and other nationally recognized Progressives helped initiate,
was the Playground Association of America.
The organized play effort dated back to1885with the establishment in
Boston of a small sand garden under the influence of an organization of
influential women, the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association.
Within two years, the city had added ten more sand gardens and authorized
the use of school property during summer months for children’s recre-
ation.
26
Riis’s campaign to eliminate a notorious example of slum life, Mul-
berry Bend, near the infamous Five Points area on the Lower East Side of
New York, followed shortly thereafter. As part of a larger movement de-
voted to getting children off the street and directing them into safe play
spaces, Riis’s graphic criticism inHow the Other Half Livesprompted the
city, after a tragic accident killed several children in the district, to tear
down tenements in order to convert the area into a park. Even as Riis pur-
sued his criticism, Jane Addams succeeded in getting the city of Chicago to
open the first space devoted specifically to neighborhood play through the
conversion of an empty lot in1893.
27
Soon they were joined by other settle-
ment house leaders who saw in the effort the opportunity to direct their
faith in environmental uplift toward civic revitalization. City playgrounds,
they asserted, would be the womb from which a new urban citizenry—
moral, industrious, and socially responsible—would emerge. According to
settlement house leader Graham Taylor in Chicago, ‘‘The city which has
made its reputation by killing hogs has awakened to the fact that manufac-
turing good and sturdy citizenship is even more important.’’ In Pittsburgh,
leaders of the movement claimed that money spent on playgrounds would
pay high dividends in cultivating ‘‘the moral nature of children, promoting
civic unity, and supplying the social training and discipline’’ urgently
needed among the immigrant masses.
28
By the early years of the new cen-
tury, critics had become convinced of the need for a national association to
promote and sustain their work. In1906, Addams and Riis, with the finan-
cial backing of the Russell Sage Foundation, helped form the Playground
Association of America. The movement accelerated thereafter, as municipal
governments invested $100 million in the construction and staffing of orga-
nized playgrounds across the country between1880and1920.
29
By entrust-
ing the supervision of play to experts, one city authority claimed, ‘‘More
ethics and good citizenship can be instilled into our embryo rulers by a play
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Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention 13
Figure2. An unsafe environment seen as a danger to raising future citizens. Library
of Congress.
master in a single week than can be inculcated by Sunday school teachers
and Fourth of July orators in a decade.’’
30
Other youth programs, dedicated to the proposition that juvenile
prospects as good citizens depended on a commitment to, as well as immer-
sion in, a healthy environment, sought ways to introduce young people to
sanitary reforms. Among the leading examples of such activities were the
juvenile street-cleaning leagues, organized most effectively in New York
City under the influence of civil engineer and sanitarian George Waring.
Devoted both to removing children’s play from the streets—‘‘the foul mud
of the gutter is his toy’’—and to embracing standards of cleanliness and
beauty, such organizations sought to instill habits of social cooperation that
could flower eventually into civic loyalty. In league efforts to build charac-
ter, Waring perceived the citizen in the embryo, with reform organizations
acting as what a colleague dubbed ‘‘citizen factories.’’ Such efforts were part
of a larger perception, as Delos Wilcox put it, that ‘‘the health and morals’’
of children were well cared for ‘‘where the physical surroundings make
health and morality possible.’’ Such perceptions, he thought, required gov-
ernment intervention to provide not just improved housing in tenement
areas but also inexpensive transit, water, and lighting services.
31
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14 Chapter 1
Figure3. The reformer’s goal: organized play, the teacher of future citizens. Library
of Congress.
Even as social progressives tackled the difficult problems associated
with growing concentrations of poor, who were most often immigrant resi-
dents in older urban districts, a separate yet ultimately complementary
movement emerged in towns and cities across the country. Diverse in the
object of their attention and their methods, contributors to this movement
had in common a commitment to improving their communities and con-
fidence that their efforts could make a difference. From civic improvement
organizations to municipal arts organizations to enthusiasts for outdoor
recreation, these activists shared a belief in the beneficial effects of beautify-
ing their communities. By the last years of the nineteenth century, their
efforts had coalesced in what came to be called the City Beautiful move-
ment. Often dismissed by social progressives as well as later scholars for
embracing causes quite separate from the most pressing failures of urban
industrialism, these contributors have found a powerful defender in histo-
rian Jon Peterson, who has made the most complete assessment of the
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Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention 15
movement. These ‘‘improvers,’’ no less than others active in urban reform,
Peterson argues, were committed to creating better citizens through envi-
ronmental intervention. They were not simply seeking to impose their elit-
ist standards of taste on the urban masses: ‘‘By seeing beauty as an attribute
of the collective environment,’’ Peterson asserts, ‘‘they redefined what had
been matters of private concern and proprietary right as issues of public
moment, worthy of expression within a new and sought-for social order:
the City Beautiful.’’
32
That collective concern ultimately coalesced support
for comprehensive city planning, and with it, confidence that such efforts
would uplift the full body of urban citizens.
The World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in1893, no doubt
had a strong influence in launching the City Beautiful movement and,
through it, city planning, as Peterson confirms. The grouping of buildings,
artfully arranged and draped in the architectural garb of classicism with all
its positive associations with the civilizing effect of art, helped convince
skeptics that city cores could be both planned and beautiful. But the White
City, so named for the striking consistency of the core exhibits grouped
around the Court of Honor, was merely temporary, its plaster-of-paris con-
struction quickly dissipating as the marble it evoked would not have done.
So the1902Senate Park Commission plan for Washington, D.C., which had
been inspired by the Chicago fair but proposed a permanent reordering of
the nation’s capital at its core, proved most decisive in creating a vision that
extended beyond the individual project to that of a whole city.
33
It was this
commitment to uplifting cities as a whole with the ultimate goal of reshap-
ing civic life that made the movement so ambitious.
In the early years of the century, a number of interrelated efforts con-
veyed a similar message. The positive effects of sculpture displayed at the
world’s fair in Chicago, for instance, spawned a number of beautification
organizations, not least in New York City. There, as Michele Bogart points
out, ‘‘artists contended that civic sculpture could help improve the beauty
and arrangement of city thoroughfares as well as socialize the working
classes and new immigrants. The content of the images and their technical
excellence would establish high ideals and standards of workmanship for
the public to emulate.’’
34
Properly stated, they offered a practical lesson in
democracy too, as an early proponent of the City Beautiful approach con-
tended. Immigrants might not be able to read English, but they could not
miss the message of grand civic structures.
35
More generally, Charles Mul-
ford Robinson argued, it was the aesthetically rich element of a city that
formed civic attachments: ‘‘Upon just such little things as this is fixed the
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16 Chapter 1
citizen’s love for his city; its towers and domes pin his affections, and the
more because in every case the composition has inevitably a meaning, a
cleanness and accuracy of significance, that makes it more than merely a
pretty picture. It is a work of art which speaks not to the eye alone, nor to
the head alone but unitedly, to sense, brain and sentiment.’’ Such efforts
would assure ‘‘a happier people, a better citizen, democratically instructed
and more artistic in mind and soul, would arise from this beautiful and
ceremonial American city.’’
36
A contributor to the journalAmerican City
added, ‘‘A city which does nothing except to police and clean the streets
means little. But when it adds schools, libraries, galleries, parks, baths,
lights, heat, homes, and transportation, it awakens interest in itself. The cit-
izen shows some care for him. He looks upon it as his city, and not as a
thing apart from him; he becomes a good citizen because it is his city.’’
37
An early form of the historic preservation movement took a similar
position, according to Randall Mason’s examination of turn-of-the-century
New York. Members of the American Scenic Preservation Society, orga-
nized ‘‘to minister to both the physical and spiritual well-being of the peo-
ple,’’ believed that the cherishing of historical landmarks would ‘‘make
better citizens of our people’’ and ‘‘stabilize our cherished political institu-
tions.’’ By assuring a ‘‘landscape of memory,’’ as Mason describes it, such
organizations intended to instill in citizens ‘‘a proper dignified, celebratory
civic memory in the form of stone, bronze, authentic buildings, and histori-
cal park landscapes.’’ By thus teaching civic patriotism, one preservationist
claimed, the city ‘‘becomes more than a mere collection of buildings. . . .
Instead, it becomes a living organism with an interesting and honored past
and a future to which every citizen ought to contribute, and for which every
citizen should cherish great concern.’’ ‘‘By giving historical memory lasting
form in the built environment, it was thought, the particular memory was
endowed with power to reform the public at large,’’ Mason concludes.
38
Perhaps the most ambitious, if not ultimately influential, embellish-
ment came in the form of grand civic centers inspired by the Court of
Honor at the1893World’s Fair. The vision, formed in Chicago and ex-
tended in Washington, was that of a grouping of public structures classical
in style and monumental enough in construction to match the nation’s
highest ideals. Created in the unplanned, congested, and increasingly ugly
city, such bodies of work would prove uplifting, even as they conveyed a
necessary civic lesson to an increasingly diverse population. Although it
took virtually a generation to achieve the vision of a monumental core at
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Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention 17
the heart of the United States capital, architect Daniel Burnham proceeded
to extend the concept even to the least promising sites, including industrial
Cleveland and his home city of Chicago. Where rail yards and smokestacks
had once symbolized the emergent industrial metropolis, Burnham envi-
sioned public groupings of civic structures not unlike those that he pro-
posed for Washington’s National Mall. In Cleveland, such buildings,
headed by a monumental railroad station—the gateway to the city—framed
a mall-like park, the500-foot-wide Court of Honor named in the spirit of
the Chicago fair.
39
In his1909plan for Chicago, Burnham’s ambitions extended to res-
haping the whole city and region. At the core, grand avenues converged on
a grand civic structure—‘‘the St. Peter’s of the new Chicago,’’ as Daniel
Rodgers has described it—appearing very much like the U.S. Capitol in an
open plaza. Such a center, Burnham believed, would promote good citizen-
ship by helping cement together the city’s ‘‘heterogeneous elements,’’ teach-
ing them, as symbol of civic order and unity, ‘‘the lesson that obedience to
law is liberty.’’
40
Although the civic center was never built, Burnham was
more successful in achieving his vision of forming a grand complex of civic
and educational institutions along a new park at the Lake Michigan water-
front. Here, clearly, civic presence was enhanced and grand public spaces
offered the opportunity for social mixing. The ‘‘lakefront by right belongs
to the people,’’ Burnham proclaimed. Creating recreational opportunities
here would enable workers to ‘‘take up the burden of life in our crowded
streets and endless stretches of buildings with renewed vigor and hopeful-
ness.’’ New parks and parkways would accommodate parades and pageants,
giving ‘‘charm and brightness to the life of people who might of necessity
pass long summers in the city.’’
41
In his analysis of the plan, Carl Smith
marks the connection with social reform efforts, noting, ‘‘Just as a bad envi-
ronment brought out the worst in people forced to inhabit it, a grand one
that expressed the values of civilization and order would inculcate these
ideas and thus elicit the best.’’ The plan, he asserts, repeatedly stressed ‘‘that
terrible living conditions diminish the individual and, by extension, the en-
tire city, and so should be of concern to the prosperous as well as the less
fortunate.’’
42
Burnham also repeatedly emphasized elements of ‘‘order’’ and
‘‘unity’’ and the need to see the city as an ‘‘organic whole,’’ in what one
scholar later described as ‘‘an awesome visual idealization of civic har-
mony.’’ As such, thePlan of Chicago, Paul Boyer concludes, represented
‘‘the supreme expression of some Progressives’ dream of transforming the
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18 Chapter 1
behavior and moral outlook of America’s urban masses by transforming the
cities in which they lived.’’
43
Despite obvious differences between the beautifiers and those who high-
lighted untenable social conditions, the entire range of Progressives—writers,
architects, engineers, and settlement workers—descended on Washington
for the first national planning convention in1909. The driving force behind
the convention was a group of social progressives who had formed the
Committee on Congestion of Population in New York in1907. Headed by
Florence Kelley, the group included Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settle-
ment, Edward Devine of the New York Charity Organization, Paul Kellogg
of theSurvey, and Mary Simkhovitch of the Greenwich House settlement.
Convinced that crowding compromised the quality of life of tenement
dwellers, Kelley, stepping away from earlier efforts to disperse workers to
the countryside, argued instead for lower densities throughout the city as a
result of comprehensive planning. Housing reform, child labor reform, and
a few playgrounds were insufficient to change existing conditions, she
thought, unless the density of population were reduced. ‘‘Instead of assent-
ing to the belief that people who are poor must be crowded,’’ she asserted,
‘‘why did we not see years ago that people who are crowded must remain
poor?’’
44
As their executive director, the committee hired Benjamin Marsh,
an enthusiast for Henry George’s proposal to tax for public reinvestment
the ‘‘unearned’’ increments of private land value due to public investment
and urban growth. As a result of several study tours undertaken at the com-
mittee’s request, Marsh returned from Europe deeply convinced that plan-
ning measures pioneered in Germany, particularly zoning for separate land
uses, promised to ease forces crowding wage earners and their families into
tenements at ever higher rents. By creating separate districts for industry
and low-density workers’ housing at the urban periphery, Marsh and his
allies hoped to improve home conditions while at the same time rationaliz-
ing land use. Marsh made sure those issues would be central to a national
planning conference.
45
For those associated with the City Beautiful movement who joined the
social progressives at the convention, most notably Frederick Law Olmsted,
Jr., zoning offered considerable appeal as well, though more as a means of
managing land use than effecting social justice. Although he maintained a
low profile by necessity, given Marsh’s influence on the convention, Olms-
ted nonetheless was effectively countering Marsh’s influence even before the
sessions were over. Within a year, he had succeeded in establishing a leader-
ship structure for future planning meetings without Marsh’s involvement.
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Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention 19
In1911, despite Simkhovitch’s objection, the National Plan Association
dropped any further reference to problems of congestion in the title of its
annual meeting, prompting Marsh to quit national planning efforts, never
to return. As Jon Peterson reports, Olmsted ‘‘aimed for a better-ordered,
more livable city, but not a socially reconfigured one.’’
46
Even as Olmsted
worked to move planning away from social reforms toward greater techni-
cal mastery of the built environment, the movement splintered still further
as Lawrence Veiller managed to form his own organization, the National
Housing Association in1910. Launched with the assistance of the Russell
Sage Foundation, the NHA embraced the cause of tenement reform with-
out Marsh’s attendant enthusiasm for social justice. The chief problem of
cities, Veiller insisted, lay in the regulation of space, not the reform of land
use. The former could be managed within the existing system through
proper use of police power. More fundamental changes in land use still re-
mained too radical for adoption, he believed, and thus remained outside
the purview of reform. Although Veiller and Olmsted held nominal posi-
tions in each other’s respective organizations, they effectively pursued their
own agendas.
47
In the process, not just collaborative opportunities were
lost, but also the goal of citizenship was subsumed by other, more narrowly
conceived objectives, at least among men working at the national level.
48
There were exceptions, however, especially among women, whose own con-
tributions beyond the settlement movement are less well known.
The broad role of women in Progressive reform was identified at the
time ‘‘as municipal housekeeping,’’ a means of identifying women’s appro-
priate role in civic affairs by drawing parallels between the home and the
city, especially the need for cleanliness and order. As Rheta Childe Dorr, of
the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, put it in her1910book,What
Eight Million Women Want, ‘‘Woman’s place is Home. Her task is home-
making. But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual
home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family.’’
49
Seeing beyond such efforts as simply supplemental to men’s work, recent
scholarship has emphasized the way women embraced a more comprehen-
sive and fully inclusive and civic approach to reform than their male coun-
terparts.
50
Seeing the integrity of their homes and those of their neighbors
at risk from the forces of the marketplace, they sought government action
to protect values they held dear. As Nancy Dye writes, ‘‘Increasingly, mid-
dle-class women came to the realization that in modern industrial society,
the doctrine of separate spheres no longer held: the home and the commu-
nity were inextricably bound together, and those concerns once defined as
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20 Chapter 1
the private responsibility of individual housewives and mothers were in
actuality public and political. Women argued that their domestic duties
compelled their interest in municipal politics.’’
51
Women’s networks, Ardis
Cameron argues, converted neighborhoods into ‘‘landscapes of subterfuge’’
and ‘‘autonomous social spaces [that] allowed women to develop and sus-
tain a world of vision and value relatively independent of husbands, bosses,
priests, and teachers.’’ In the spirit ofcommunitas, as used by anthropolo-
gist Victor Turner, such spaces created a ‘‘bond uniting people over and
above any formal social bonds.’’
52
Maureen Flanagan suggests that such powers both put women at odds
with their male counterparts and ultimately helped them sustain their cri-
tique of existing approaches to civic revitalization long after the great ma-
jority of men had abandoned a structural critique of modern city develop-
ment in favor of making the existing system more efficient. In matters of
housing as well as sanitation reform, women were less likely to accede to
the constraints of private property and its prerogatives. Rejecting the male
definition of the city as a corporation with defined but limited objectives,
women activists sought government action to assure the public welfare.
‘‘We are building now a new city—a spiritual city, where the watchword is
‘personal welfare,’ ’’ declared Anna Nicholes, superintendent of the Wom-
en’s Club of Chicago, in1913. ‘‘This new city will care because babies die
from preventable diseases . . . will work to decrease the procession of little
children going through the Juvenile Court; will open to all greater industrial
and social opportunities within its borders.’’
53
Whereas male voluntary or-
ganizations consistently curbed the power of housing programs when they
conflicted with private enterprise, women demanded pledges from munici-
pal officials ‘‘not only that the laws were enforced, but that even the hum-
blest citizen had a clean, comfortable, sanitary dwelling.’’ By1920,these
same women were calling on the national government for a federal bureau
of housing, which would incorporate the expertise of women, as well as
men. Looking similarly to government to ensure adequate removal of mu-
nicipal waste, Chicago women activists secured a goal in1914, sought after
from the early years in the century by Jane Addams, of municipal owner-
ship and collection.
54
Clearly, such efforts afforded a bridge to the reform
efforts, especially in housing, that had to wait until the New Deal era. In
the meantime, women found in federal funding a means both for sustaining
their reform activity and for carving out a sphere of public influence for
themselves through the creation of the Children’s Bureau in1912.
Spurred especially by the leadership of Florence Kelley, whom histo-
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Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention 21
rian Robin Muncy identifies as the person most responsible in the1890s for
transforming Hull House from a philanthropic to a reform organization,
the Children’s Bureau provided both a national forum for women’s advo-
cacy and a sphere for exerting influence. Boosted by President Theodore
Roosevelt’s decision to host the White House Conference on the Care of
Dependent Children in January1909, the idea of a children’s bureau
divided supporters by gender. Whereas most of the majority men in atten-
dance sought to divorce fact-finding from advocacy, in line with the male-
dominated ethos of social scientific research, the women in attendance
rejected that restriction based on actions they had already pioneered at the
state level that combined both spheres. The bureau, as formed under the
leadership of Julia Lathrop, acted on the female perspective voiced at the
conference, creating what Muncy describes as an effective vehicle for link-
ing a small federal agency with women’s volunteer actions to effect change
in states across the country. When funding lapsed for the bureau, women’s
organizations effectively lobbied legislators for restoration, giving the organ-
ization power and influence that endured well beyond what historians nor-
mally consider the height of the Progressive Era.
55
In1906, Frederic C. Howe, the single-tax enthusiast and ally of Pro-
gressive Cleveland mayor Tom L. Johnson, turned the concept of municipal
housekeeping to socialist ends. He claimed that with the socialization of
transit, light, heat, and water, along with urban ground rents, ‘‘the city
would become in effect an enlarged home, offering to its members many of
the comforts and conveniences that are now denied to any save a few. With
these opportunities enlarged, the love and affection of the citizen for the
city would increase, which, in turn would bring about a purification of our
politics that cannot be obtained so long as the influence of the rich and
privileged classes is united against the community. With such a programme
achieved, democracy would cease to be a class struggle. There would be cre-
ated a union of all the people, seeking in conscious ways the betterment of
human conditions.’’
56
Progressive reform stopped well short of Howe’s ideal, the result in
part of the movement’s own biases and shortcomings. Even acknowledging
women’s success in advancing a socially progressive and highly participa-
tory agenda that went well beyond restrictions imposed by the exclusion of
women and most racial minorities from the franchise, the tilt of reform was
never fully inclusive. Immigrants, African Americans, and to a considerable
degree, women themselves were not treated equitably, and the interests of
capital over workers and consumers surfaced in numerous ways. That being
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22 Chapter 1
said, the early years of the twentieth century opened a serious and enduring
conversation about the proper balance between people and profit. In multi-
ple instances, land use became central to that conversation, most notably
who was to derive not just its profits but also its social benefits and to what
degree would that value be shared equitably. In this conversation lay the
roots of a difficult and yet critical dialogue about how best to realize the
promise of the civitas.
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Chapter 2
The Garden City in America
Even as the elements of Progressivism were first stirring in
America, an obscure English stenographer named Ebenezer Howard pub-
lished with his own funds a modest looking tract with the pretentious title
To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. The product of years of discus-
sion in moderately radical English circles, Howard’s extended essay pro-
posed nothing less than the elimination of the capitalist exploitation that
had characterized English cities as the scourge of the Western world. Influ-
enced by a range of utopian thinkers, not least two nineteenth-century
American reformers who themselves had fundamentally challenged the ill
effects of urban industrial development, Henry George and Edward Bel-
lamy, Howard incorporated elements of each critique. His proposed solu-
tion was unique, however, in that he sought to solve the problem of urban
industrialism by the formation of a new kind of community, what he called
the ‘‘garden city.’’ Located apart from existing cities, but with comparable
economic opportunities shorn of the associated exploitation that followed
from low pay and high rents, Howard believed his new creation could so
undermine existing economic and social arrangements as to make them
wither away. As cooperative in spirit as Bellamy’s utopian future but with-
out its authoritarian control, as economically just as George’s ‘‘single tax’’
economy but without the expropriation of any single class, this was to be a
peaceful revolution effected through design. In the words of Robert Fish-
man, ‘‘Howard was, in his quiet way, a revolutionary who originally con-
ceived the Garden City as a means of superseding capitalism and creating a
civilization based on cooperation.’’
1
Howard’s vision would be modified in England as it was first put into
effect in the form of model versions of his plan and subsequently adopted
as the basis for a national policy of town planning. It would be further mod-
ified in the United States, initially under the direction of the Russell Sage
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24 Chapter 2
Foundation’s construction of Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York,
and subsequently in experimental projects pressed alternatively by the War
Industries Board, the small but influential Regional Planning Association of
America, and finally the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration’s new
towns program. The scope and intent of the efforts differed in detail, but
propelling every one was an unrelenting confidence in the power of a
proper physical environment to enhance and sustain a vital civic life.
Howard’s garden city vision percolated a long time before he fully ar-
ticulated it. Influenced in part by his own experience with poverty during a
brief experience as a homesteader in Nebraska, his introduction to critical
political theory followed his return to London in1876, when he joined a
number of earnest discussion groups. Appalled by the concentration of
wealth in England, these critics were too substantial themselves to seek a
Marxist overthrow of the system. Instead, they sought the means to greater
cooperation, favoring such innovations as profit sharing in production and
cooperative stores.
2
Howard was himself greatly influenced by a number of
contemporary critics, including James Silk Buckingham’s vision to create
the planned community of Victoria (set within an agricultural belt and
owned cooperatively), and the social critiques of Alfred Marshall and
Thomas Spence.
3
His concern with the concentration of land in the hands
of the few gained visibility and a specifically urban focus under the influ-
ence of Henry George. His series of lectures in London in1882ignited inter-
est in George’s1879bookProgress and Povertyand generated proposals for
solving the problems associated with industrial crowding by forming new
communities devoted to combining the conveniences of town life and with
the salubrious environment of the country.
4
Such proposals undoubtedly
influenced Howard, but it was in reading Bellamy’s utopian novel,Looking
Backward, that Howard’s still inchoate ideas about poverty solidified. Re-
porting that he had been carried away by reading the book shortly after its
publication in1888, Howard described his actions the next morning:
I went into some of the crowded parts of London, and as I passed through the
narrow dark streets, saw the wretched dwellings in which the majority of the people
lived, observed on every hand the manifestations of a self-seeking order of society
and reflected on the absolute unsoundness of our economic system, there came to
me an overpowering sense of the temporary nature of all I saw, and of its entire
unsuitability for the working life of the new order—the order of justice, unity and
friendliness.
5
Looking Backward, he wrote, ‘‘permanently convinced me that our present
industrial order stands absolutely condemned and is tottering to its fall, and
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The Garden City in America 25
that a new and brighter, because a juster, order must ere long take its
place.’’
6
Howard began promoting Bellamy’s ideas in the circles that had al-
ready influenced his own critical thinking. In1890he participated in form-
ing the English Nationalisation of Labour Society, the counterpart of Bella-
my’s Nationalization Party in the United States.
7
It was this group on which
he relied to promote the idea that had been forming since George’s visit, to
create garden city alternatives to existing industrial cities. Wary, however,
of the authoritarian powers that Howard became convinced would follow
from Bellamy’s centralized national state, he concluded that the best hope
for founding a cooperative civilization lay in small communities embedded
in a decentralized society. To visualize the challenge, he conceived the
image of three magnets. The town magnet historically had drawn residents
through the promise of employment but had burdened workers with high
prices and terrible living conditions. The country’s obvious amenities of
health and beauty were countered by backwardness. The task for the plan-
ner, then, was to create the new town-country magnet as a community that
would offer high wages, low rents, the beauty of nature, bright homes and
gardens, and freedom and cooperation. In Howard’s words, ‘‘Town and
countrymust be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new
hope, a new life, a new civilization.’’
8
In order to move his vision from simply a utopian concept to an im-
mediate reality, Howard envisioned the creation of a philanthropic invest-
ment company that would buy up land and raise money by issuing bonds
at a modest fixed rate. With these funds, the necessary infrastructure for a
city and its productive industries would be created. As population grew in
response to the new opportunities for work, rents would rise. The profits
accrued would be used to pay back investors, allowing any surplus for rein-
vestment in additional community services. Eventually the garden city
company would buy out the original investors, and the entire income from
rents could be used to benefit citizens. Taxes would be unnecessary because
rents would support schools, cultural, and other necessary institutions. As
collective ownership replaced individual ownership and a new common-
wealth formed, the land problem finally would be solved.
9
Central to Howard’s goal of obtaining desirable social ends was the
creation of a completely planned environment. He called his approach to
community organization ‘‘social individualism,’’ suggesting a good deal of
flexibility for the evolution of personal relations. Overall, however, every
element of his ideal spelled cooperation, and in its physical details the gar-
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26 Chapter 2
Figure4. Ebenezer Howard’s ‘‘Plan for the Garden City,’’ envisioning a compact
urban core, surrounded by open space with easy access to work set apart from
residential living. From Howard,Garden Cities of To-Morrow, 1902.
den city revealed an unwavering commitment to substituting communitar-
ian for previously competitive values. No household would be privileged
under this arrangement. Each was assured access to adequate space for liv-
ing, enhanced both by abundant light and a small garden as well as easy
access to the open space represented by parks within the town and a contin-
uous greenbelt surrounding it. Such housing arrangements, buttressed by
centrally located common facilities grouped around a small park—a mu-
seum, library, theater, concert hall, and hospital—seemed to assure easy
mixing among residents and thus provide the civic underpinnings for a
larger commitment to the common good. Behind them a central park
hosted shopping facilities grouped in a ‘‘Crystal Palace’’ to further assure
social congregation. In line with his commitment to small communities,
Howard set a fixed limit of32,000people on6,000acres of land. As the first
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The Garden City in America 27
demonstration town filled up, he theorized, a new one would spontane-
ously sprout up nearby. Over time, a planned amalgamation would form,
with each garden city offering a range of jobs and services even as it was
connected to others, and to the metropolis, by rail. This larger ‘‘social city,’’
as he called it, constituted the true third magnet as he originally envisioned
it.
10
Howard was disappointed not to secure the financial backing he ex-
pected from his fellow critics of exploitive capitalism, including trade
unions and the cooperative movement. With Fabians arguing that money
was better spent in existing cities, he had to rely on businessmen for the
investment necessary to bring his ideas to fruition. In the process, some of
the more radical social thinking behind his effort was modified, including
proposals for communal living and intentions to eliminate class differ-
ences.
11
In the hands of architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, how-
ever, the first garden city, Letchworth, built some thirty-four miles outside
London, remained true to the spirit of Howard’s ideas. As secretary of the
Manchester branch of John Ruskin’s Socialist League, Unwin in particular
had attempted to translate Ruskin’s aesthetic theories into a ‘‘civic art’’ de-
voted to advancing a ‘‘spirit of cooperation’’ through design that he imme-
diately associated with the garden city. Unwin described such art as in-
tended to transform ‘‘mere aggregations of people’’ into ‘‘consciously
organized communities’’ allowing residents to enjoy ‘‘that fuller life which
comes from more intimate intercourse.’’
12
His proposal to organize the new
city cooperatively, around ‘‘quadrangles’’ of homes in which three sides
would be devoted to private apartments and the fourth to a common dining
room, recreation room, and nursery, was realized only on a limited basis in
Letchworth, which became the victim of financial restraints.
13
Other ele-
ments spelling cooperation remained, however, not just in the common ac-
cess to open space but also in strategically situated community facilities,
most notably the town’s civic center, located along a mile-long axis leading
to the railroad station. Influenced more by the Arts and Crafts aesthetic
associated with John Ruskin than by Howard’s own ideas of social and eco-
nomic change, Unwin and Parker’s vision drew from the relationships asso-
ciated with the traditional English village, which gave the feeling, Susan
Klaus reports, ‘‘of being an organic whole, the home of a community, to
what would otherwise be a mere conglomeration of buildings.’’
14
Although
the town grew more slowly from its origin in1904than anticipated, by1910
the practicality of Howard’s vision had been realized. As Robert Fishman
reports, ‘‘The new town of Letchworth was a clean, healthy, and well-
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28 Chapter 2
planned environment; it had shown its capacity to attract industry and resi-
dents; and the First Garden City Ltd., though still financially pressed, was
beginning to reap the rewards of its investment and declare its first divi-
dend.’’
15
Equally important to the history of urban design was the intentionality
of focusing civic life in limited neighborhood units, a concept fully devel-
oped a quarter century later in the United States by Clarence Arthur Perry.
Dividing the garden city into wards defined by radial boulevards, Howard
created virtually self-sufficient residential quarters, where schools would
also provide sites for worship, concerts, libraries, and other civic gatherings.
Such subelements of the new city would act as villages once had, in Ray-
mond Unwin’s words, ‘‘as an expression of a small corporate life in which
all the different units were personally in touch with each other, conscious
of and frankly accepting their relations . . . it is this crystallisation of the
elements in a village in accordance with a definitely organized life of mutual
relations . . . which gives the appearance of being an organic whole, the
home of a community.’’
16
Mervyn Miller contends that Unwin readily
translated that concept of design on a village scale to Letchworth and ex-
tended it farther in a second city demonstration, Hampstead Garden Sub-
urb, starting in1905. There the layout of the worker’s quarter especially was
‘‘arranged to encourage neighborliness,’’ through the siting of two small
children’s play areas, a primary school, and a clubhouse located where
working- and middle-class areas converged, in a conscious effort to break
down class barriers.
17
The Garden City movement had its own counterpart in the United
States, as a Garden City Association of America formed in1906to propose
that garden cities be built in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, but
it disbanded within a year. The effort, which stressed relocating workers to
the country, depended on large corporate sponsors to assure that workers
who followed factories had sufficient reason to stay. The economic down-
turn of1907dampened business interest in the concept, and it collapsed as
a movement.
18
A delegation organized by the National Housing Association
and charged to investigate British garden cities visited Letchworth and in-
terviewed Ebenezer Howard. Subsequently its representatives met with bot-
anist and town planner Patrick Geddes, whose tour of Dublin was intended
to demonstrate the positive attributes of the organic medieval city. The as-
sociation’s field secretary, John Ihlder, was not impressed, concluding that
whatever the attributes of garden cities, they remained philanthropic proj-
ects that did not pay.
19
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The Garden City in America 29
The one community built specifically along garden city principles dur-
ing the early years of the century, Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New
York, was the product of the Russell Sage Foundation. An exemplary part
of the fact-finding generation that constituted the core of Progressive re-
form in America, Russell Sage’s pioneering the social survey of Pittsburgh,
described in Chapter1, demonstrated in six thick volumes of statistics, pho-
tographs, and chilling narrative the ill effects of unbridled industrialism
on working people. Such efforts added weight to demands from mass-
circulation magazines for increased government regulation of the work-
place. But Russell Sage went one step further by determining to underwrite
a model community for working people that would demonstrate a viable
alternative to environmental degradation. Described as an institutional bul-
wark for the developing professionalism of the reform community, Russell
Sage poured nearly half its endowment into Forest Hills Gardens.
20
Among
the driving forces behind the new community were housing reformer Rob-
ert DeForest and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who had
assisted his father at the Chicago’s World’s Fair before serving with Daniel
Burnham on the commission that brought forth Washington’s landmark
1902plan. DeForest recruited Olmsted for the task of building the new
community because, he thought, Olmsted was ‘‘interested in the social as
well as the aesthetic side of landscape gardening.’’
21
Tastefully designed in
1911by architect Grosvenor Atterbury on a farm eight miles from Manhat-
tan on the Long Island Railroad, Forest Hills Gardens reflected the spirit of
Parker and Unwin’s effort at Letchworth.
In this new community, housing was to be sufficiently concentrated to
save enough in costs to ensure plenty of open space, land that would be
devoted not to individual but to collective use. Workers targeted as buyers
thus would be not just be buoyed by contact with nature; they would be
given every opportunity to socialize together, thus heightening civic ties.
Centrally located shopping facilities would further enhance social inter-
change. This approach was what Grosvenor Atterbury, influenced by Aus-
trian architect Camillo Sitte, and transmitted through Parker and Unwin’s
design for Hampstead Garden, called ‘‘collective design.’’
22
Determined like
Howard before him to avoid the ill effects of socialism without succumbing
to the evils of land speculation, Atterbury called for ‘‘collective town plan-
ning,’’ fully convinced that as ‘‘the school of environment’’ the model town
was capable of breeding the ‘‘blooded’’ citizens necessary to sustain the en-
terprise.
23
But this was America. In place of collective ownership of land, as
Howard had envisioned his ideal city, lots were to be individually pur-
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30 Chapter 2
Figure5. Hampstead Garden Suburb, Ebenezer Howard’s effort to group essential
services, including a neighborhood school, within walking distance of residences.
From Clarence Arthur Perry,The Neighborhood Unit, 1929.
chased, and investors were to be guaranteed a return, modest as it might
have been in an otherwise speculative housing market. As a result, the ex-
periment never reached the working poor as intended. Moreover, the ex-
periment proved the exception in an era which, as much as it accepted the
necessity of making cities more livable, lacked the commitment to funda-
mental social change that lay behind Howard’s and, to a lesser degree, Rus-
sell Sage’s plans for whole new communities.
While the Garden City concept did not achieve wide application after
Forest Hills Gardens, it was employed to an extent by a number of indus-
trial housing projects, including Kohler, Wisconsin; Goodyear Heights,
Ohio; Kincaid, Illinois; Beloit, Wisconsin; and Fairfield, Alabama.
24
As in
earlier experiments such as Pullman, Illinois, companies were anxious to
blunt worker militancy through the control they held as landlords and em-
ployers. In the Indian Hill development in Worcester, Massachusetts, spon-
sored by the Norton Grinding Company, Forest Hills Gardens architect
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The Garden City in America 31
Atterbury was charged with designing a ‘‘charming New England village’’
for skilled machine-tool industrial workers so that the ‘‘cozy colonial cot-
tages, tree-lined streets, and a town square’’ would help the company oblit-
erate the public memory of recent labor turmoil.
25
Less directly influenced
by the Garden City concept but embracing a similar commitment to uplift
through proper environmental influences, the Massachusetts legislature
launched a ‘‘homesteading’’ program in1911intended to relocate workers
from congested cities to the country. Intended to combat a ‘‘lowered stan-
dard of citizenship’’ following from ‘‘generations habituated only to contact
with stone pavements, wooden floors, and brick walls,’’ the solution was to
place families in small homes with garden plots and exposure to air and
sunshine. Hardly a harbinger of extended public commitment to fashioning
new communities for workers, the effort resulted in construction of only a
dozen homes in Lowell.
26
It took World War I and an acute need to house war workers to
prompt the federal government to assume a direct role in town planning. In
all, the United States Housing Corporation and the U.S. Shipping Board’s
Emergency Fleet Corporation constructed fifty-five housing developments
to shelter workers in shipbuilding and munitions industries.
27
Among a
number of projects incorporating Garden City principles was Camden,
New Jersey’s Yorkship Village. Each built commercial and civic spaces
around village squares that were intended to be community gathering
points. In Camden, these facilities included churches, a library, and the
public school, each designed for easy pedestrian access. A public meeting
hall was intended, according to architect Electus Litchfield, to afford work-
ers ‘‘the physical plant where the worker might quietly and in comfort dis-
cuss among his fellows the problems which affect him, thus developing a
cooperation, a unity, and a community of spirit between himself and his
fellow workers.’’
28
Appropriately designed as a ‘‘Colonial tower and cu-
pola,’’ its role among Colonial Revival architecture and planning features
was to convey a sense of order and patriotism, an approach further assisted
through the adoption of patriotic street names. Offering workers what
Litchfield termed every ‘‘physical opportunity for happiness’’ and everything
‘‘essential for the development of true American citizenship,’’ the Yorkship
neighborhood was intended, as Kristin Szylvian suggests, to dissipate any
sense of alienation workers felt on the job when they reached their snug,
colonial-inspired town. Similarly, a Bridgeport, Connecticut, site, according
to a report inArchitectural Record, was expected to ‘‘exert a commensurate
influence upon the people who live there—counteracting the slovenly and
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Figure6. Fairview Extension (Yorkship Village), in construction, 1916, a model community constructed for ship workers, World War
I. Courtesy Camden County Historical Society.
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The Garden City in America 33
vicious tendencies of the usual tenement environment and leading them
along the first steps of the way to the higher grades of American working
life.’’
29
Influenced by the British Guild Socialism promoted by John Ruskin
as well as by Howard’s Garden City ideal, Frederick Ackerman, as director
of design for the Emergency Fleet Corporation, sought continued public
ownership of the land when the war ended. Although the federal govern-
ment rejected that argument and sold the properties, physical layouts favor-
ing a spirit of common responsibility for community welfare and of neigh-
borhood good fellowship nonetheless remained to inspire future efforts.
Ackerman and Emergency Fleet director Robert Kohn managed to ex-
tend their mission by helping form, in1923, the Regional Plan Association
of America (RPAA), a small group of critics and practitioners that became
especially active proponents for extending the Garden City ideal in
America. Their interests were buttressed by fellow architect Clarence Stein,
recently returned from a meeting with Howard in England and a review of
his accomplishments. As Stein described the experience, ‘‘After the First
World War there was a strong surge of enthusiasm for a better world. . . . I
went abroad in search of more constructive action. In England . . . the sec-
ond Garden City, Welwyn, was being built. I returned to America a disciple
of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin.’’
30
Joining interests with these
architects was Lewis Mumford, then a young journalist. An early enthusiast
for the work of Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, Mumford drew from
their somewhat divergent approaches the belief that successful architecture
and planning required a carefully considered social underpinning.
31
De-
scribed by his biographer, Donald Miller, as more responsible than anyone
else in his time for making the case that good buildings need to be comple-
mented by intelligent community design,
32
he became the chief publicist for
the group.
In an effort to put theory into practice, Stein joined with fellow RPAA
member and a former town planner for the federal Emergency Fleet Corpo-
ration Henry Wright, a particular enthusiast for Unwin’s design philoso-
phy,
33
to form the City Housing Corporation, a limited dividend corpora-
tion, as a vehicle for developing an American version of the garden city.
When plans to build for25,000people on a square-mile plot on the edge of
New York City faltered for lack of investment, Stein and Wright settled for
a more modest site on a former Pennsylvania Railroad property in Queens.
Limited finances reduced the scope of the project considerably, but by re-
ducing costs through unified production techniques, the Sunnyside Gar-
dens development managed to reserve space on the interior of extended
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34 Chapter 2
Figure7. A Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, superblock, intended to enhance
sociability through the creation of common open space, protected from intrusions
external to each housing complex. Reprinted from Clarence S. Stein,Toward New
Towns for America(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1966), copyright1MIT Press,
used by permission.
‘‘superblocks’’ for common use, creating in the process a commons in-
tended to enhance community sociability. Stein and Wright thus realized,
even within the constraints of an existing city grid, the goal of communal
space that had escaped Unwin in Letchworth.
34
Mumford moved there with
wife Sophia in1925and stayed for eleven years, commenting that ‘‘though
our own means were modest, we contrived to live in an environment where
space, sunlight, order, color—these essential ingredients for either life or
art—were constantly present, silently molding all of us.’’
35
Even as work on Sunnyside Gardens proceeded, the RPAA hosted in
1925the International Town, City, and Planning Conference in New York
City. The conference theme was the garden city and regional development,
and all the key figures in the movement attended, among them Howard,
Parker, and Unwin. As the meeting drew near, members of the RPAA con-
vinced the editor ofSurvey Graphic, Paul Kellogg, to produce a special issue
on regionalism. Pulled together by Mumford and featuring essays by Acker-
man, Stein, and Wright, among others, for publication in May, the issue
spelled out the RPAA critique of modern development. Housing was more
expensive than it needed to be. Using large-scale, modernized production
techniques pioneered in the United States and Europe during the war,
builders could overcome the shortage of housing at affordable costs. Incor-
porating garden design principles of open space and adopting the neighbor-
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The Garden City in America 35
hood plan that Clarence Arthur Perry had proposed as a recreation special-
ist for the Russell Sage Foundation, strategically located schools and
associated recreational spaces would foster a sense of community. Utilizing
these techniques, Mumford asserted, regional planning would ‘‘promote a
fuller kind of life.’’ In terms that harked back to Howard as well as to fellow
RPAA member Benton McKaye, he labeled such efforts ‘‘the New Conser-
vation—the conservation of human values hand in hand with natural re-
sources,’’ which could promote development ‘‘that will eliminate our enor-
mous economic wastes, give life to stable agriculture, set down fresh
communities planned on a human scale, and above all, restore a little hap-
piness and freedom in places where these things have been pretty well
wrung out.’’
36
What still remained theoretical as Sunnyside reached completion in
1928promised fuller realization on open land, as the City Housing Corpo-
ration laid out a640-acre site in the Borough of Fair Lawn, New Jersey,
sixteen miles from New York City, to be known as Radburn. Seeking ‘‘an
adequate theater in which to produce an American Garden City,’’
37
Wright
and Stein nonetheless had to sacrifice two elements central to Howard’s
concept: the greenbelt, because of the high cost of land in metropolitan
New York, and nearby industry. The experiment became important, how-
ever, for its novel approach to controlling the effects of the automobile on
town building. Finding some precedent in Olmsted, Sr.’s specialized path-
ways for carriages and pedestrians in Central Park, the Radburn approach
of fully separating automobile from pedestrian traffic broke new ground by
planning the development as the ‘‘Town for the Motor Age,’’ a ‘‘town in
which children need never dodge motor-trucks on their way to school.’’
Stein called Radburn ‘‘Anewtown—newer than the garden cities and the
first major innovation in town-planning since they were built.’’ As such,
Radburn was ‘‘a setting in which a democratic community might grow.’’
38
Believing Radburn went beyond what Howard had accomplished in En-
gland, Mumford credited the garden city for putting forward ‘‘a new
method of urban growth—by whole cities, rather than by block-by-block
accretions or by suburban dribbles; and this principle of growth led us in
turn to conceive of a wholly new kind of urban unit, whose outlines How-
ard had first roughly sketched out in his chapter on Social Cities, a regional
constellation of cities that would have all the advantages of a metropolitan
massing of population without destroying valuable soils and landscape that
should be put to non-urban purposes.’’
39
Constituted around contiguous ‘‘superblocks,’’ each containing some
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36 Chapter 2
thirty to fifty acres, much of Radburn could be traveled by foot by way of
interior parks without crossing a single street. Here, a1930brochure as-
serted, planners had addressed ‘‘the civic and social need for a scientific
attack on the problem of providing better communities and better houses
for the average family.’’ Noting that the town ‘‘should not be confused with
the average little suburban development,’’ the brochure promised ‘‘all the
facilities and conveniences which ordinarily are associated only with living
in a large city.’’ Promoters promised a rich community life and permanent
upkeep of public spaces and associated facilities through creation of the
nonprofit Radburn Association.
40
Mumford was never impressed with the
architecture, which he considered mediocre, but he embraced Radburn’s
vision of civic nuclei—strategically located shopping areas, schools, and
parks to draw the population together—and outer boundaries to give resi-
dents a sense of belonging together.
41
Stein and Wright’s designs were not so directly devoted to the uplift
of working people as even Forest Hills Gardens had been. As the Depression
deepened, more ambitious plans for Radburn faltered. The City Housing
Corporation declared bankruptcy, Wright and Stein went their separate
ways, and the community never became self-sufficient as its supporters had
hoped. Ultimately the town became only a pristine part of a larger suburban
landscape.
42
It did, however, provide a model for the ambitious new towns
effort instituted under the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration. Headed
by Columbia economist Rexford Tugwell, the new towns program was in-
formed by the more collectivist philosophies of George and Howard rather
than those that had been modified or muted in American translation. As
Tugwell explained in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘‘I am eager that from the
beginning this housing should be thought of not only in terms of its physi-
cal aspects, but as a contribution to a better way of living.’’
43
Although
Tugwell denied any Garden City influence, direct or indirect, his stated in-
tent ‘‘to go outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole
community, and entice people back into it,’’ clearly derived from that tradi-
tion. So too did his intention to ‘‘go back into the cities and tear down
whole slums and make parks of them.’’
44
Intended initially to encompass as
many as100communities as an effort to relieve overgrown cities of conges-
tion even as they gave homesteaders a new chance at a healthy living envi-
ronment, the program quickly attracted criticism from conservatives for its
collectivist goals as well as its high costs. Ultimately, only three such com-
munities were built, each surrounded by a belt of forest or farmland. Only
Greenbelt, Maryland, appropriately the focus of Stein’s advocacy filmThe
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The Garden City in America 37
Figure8. Underpass, Greenbelt, Maryland, keeping kids safe by separating
pedestrian from automobile traffic. Library of Congress.
City(see Chapter3), incorporated the prime elements of the Radburn de-
sign intact.
45
Although the new towns built under the Resettlement Administration
conspicuously lacked industry, Stein harbored no doubts that the Garden
City concept was the preeminent influence on their physical design. Town
planners carefully sited Greenbelt within a green crescent of open space. At
the town’s heart was a community center Stein described as ‘‘the focus for
the common life of the town’’ and the ‘‘logical and beautiful arrangement’’
for various elements for community activities, including religious, educa-
tional, leisure, and market facilities.
46
Early residents recalled the impor-
tance of these facilities to their sense of civic engagement, while more per-
sonal interchanges followed from the division of blocks into courts, where
families easily formed social groups. Such interchanges on a daily basis
formed the foundation for the cooperative spirit as well as organizational
structure planners envisioned for the community.
47
Design elements dif-
fered among the three towns built, but the greenbelt program consistently
embraced the belief that good citizenship followed good design. Keeping
the size of planned neighborhoods manageable was important not primar-
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38 Chapter 2
Figure9. Plan of shopping center at Greenbelt showing the new food store and
youth center. Reprinted from Clarence S. Stein,Toward New Towns for America
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1966), copyright1MIT Press, used by permission.
ily to advance economic goals but to assure neighborliness and high levels
of social knowledge among residents. ‘‘A community must be small enough
to permit friendly association,’’ Stein told an audience at Greendale, Wis-
consin. ‘‘It is only in small places that everyone can know everybody and
associate with as many as he wants.’’
48
Such planning had its effect, accord-
ing to Cathy Knepper: ‘‘As hoped the physical design contributed to the
ability of residents to carry out their goal of cooperation by providing ways
for residents to easily come together.’’ New Deal planners, she concludes,
‘‘created a symbiosis in which the physical design and cooperation mutually
sustain each other, a symbiosis that has proven to be long lasting.’’
49
Even though the Resettlement Administration’s new towns program
had been shut down by the time his sweeping analysis of the urban condi-
tion,The Culture of Cities, appeared in 1938, Mumford remained an enthu-
siast for the effort and its Garden City antecedent, what he labeled ‘‘the
biotechnic conception of a balanced urban environment.’’ It was not How-
ard’s physical design, Mumford argued, that was so groundbreaking, but
the principles behind it, principles that were above all civic in intent. Stating
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The Garden City in America 39
the goal not just to bridle unchecked individualism but to transform ‘‘the
military-capitalistic regime’’ into ‘‘a social commonwealth,’’ he called for
‘‘a new order of design and a different kind of designer,’’ following the Gar-
den City precedents in England and the United States. Charging that ‘‘a
community that does not plan and build the necessary structures for a com-
mon life will remain under a perpetual weight and handicap,’’ he called for
the dramatization of communal life: ‘‘the widening of the domain of
human significance so that, ultimately, no act, no routine, no gesture will
be devoid of human value, or will fail to contribute to the reciprocal sup-
port of citizen and community.’’
50
Mumford attributed the Garden City’s limited success to the lack of
supportive social and political institutions grounded in a cooperative and
socially planned society. The collapse of capitalism in the1930s appeared,
however, to open the door for critics such as Mumford, who sought, like
Howard, a middle way between individualism and socialism. The New York
World’s Fair of1939offered a possibility to make the case. Marking the
150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration as president in New
York City, the fair drew the interest both of businessmen hoping to boost
the city’s economy out of Depression doldrums and social critics seeking to
communicate a reform message to a broad audience. At a dinner meeting at
the New York Civic Club in December1935, one hundred artists, designers,
architects, and educators heard a series of speakers call for a new kind of
fair that would take up the means for solving America’s central social prob-
lems. Determined not simply to celebrate past achievements as earlier fairs
had done, Mumford used his opening address to lay out his case:
The story we have to tell . . . and which will bring people from all over the world
to New York, not merely from the United States, is the story of this planned envi-
ronment, this planned industry, this planned civilization. If we can inject that no-
tion as a basic notion of the Fair, if we can point it toward the future, toward some-
thing that is progressing and growing in every department of life and throughout
civilization, not merely in the United States, not merely in New York City, but if we
allow ourselves in a central position, as members of a great metropolis, to think for
the world at large, we may lay the foundation for a pattern of life which would have
an enormous impact in times to come.
51
To achieve their goal, these critics formed the Committee on Social
Planning and managed to carry much of their agenda with the fair’s busi-
ness leadership. In adopting the theme ‘‘Building the World of Tomorrow,’’
members of the committee together conjured an optimistic preview of a
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40 Chapter 2
future America where the advances of science, the capability of technology,
and the wisdom of good design would shape an orderly, healthy, and con-
tented society. In a magazine section devoted entirely to the fair, theNew
York Timesadopted the motif of progress, adding to its own essay, ‘‘World
of Undying Hope,’’ sociologist William Odgen’s contribution, ‘‘Building a
Better Society,’’ as well as grand claims for the products of industrial giants
RCA and the Ford Motor Company.
52
The Committee on Design, cochaired by the RPAA’s Robert Kohn,
took responsibility for translating the theme ‘‘Fair of the Future’’ into real-
ity. Although committee members agreed that building displays could dif-
fer, they imposed strict guidelines for exhibitors in which companies would
have to contribute to the overall plan to stress ‘‘the vastly increased oppor-
tunity and the developed mechanical means which this twentieth century
has brought to the masses for better living and accompanying human hap-
piness.’’ A central exhibit was intended to provide visitors their initial intro-
duction to the seven other sectors of the fair, each designed to coincide with
major functional divisions of modern living: production and distribution;
transportation; communications and business systems; food; medicine and
public health; science and education; and community interests. All elements
were contained in the fair’s central exhibits on urban and regional develop-
ment.
At Democracity, the creation of industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss,
visitors viewed a massive exhibit of the metropolis of2039, extending over
11,000square miles and accommodating1.5million inhabitants in what a
guidebook described as the ‘‘symbol of a perfectly integrated, futuristic me-
tropolis, pulsing with life and rhythm and music.’’ Reflecting the idealized
regional planning promoted first by Ebenezer Howard and subsequently by
Mumford and his RPAA colleagues, the region was divided between Center-
ton, a metropolis without residents into which a working population of
250,000commuted daily, and seventy surrounding satellite towns, some ex-
clusively residential (Pleasantvilles) while others (Millvilles) contained a
mixture of light industry and suburban dwellings. Visitors, viewing the
model as it would appear from a height of7,000feet, were encouraged to
see it as a realistic blueprint for forming ‘‘a brave new world built by united
hands and hearts.’’ Not incidentally, Robert Kohn sized the opportunity to
describe Democracity as no ‘‘planless jumble of slum and chimney, built
only for gain, but an effective instrument for human activities, to be used
for the building of a better world of tomorrow. . . . The relation between
these units of stone and steel, highway and green is symbol of the new life
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The Garden City in America 41
Figure10. Traveling sound chairs at Futurama exhibit in the General Motors
‘‘Highways and Horizons’’ pavilion at the1939New York World’s Fair. Courtesy
GM Media Archive.
of tomorrow; that life will be based on an understanding of the contribu-
tion of all elements to a new and living democracy.’’
53
Later critics would see Democracity as closer in inception to the mod-
ernist Le Corbusier’s vision than to Mumford’s own utopian one.
54
Indeed,
Kohn’s statement to the contrary, the fair’s emphasis had shifted dramati-
cally from its early focus on social reconstruction to the active embrace of
consumerism and its corporate sponsors. Nowhere was that fact better il-
lustrated than in the fair’s other exhibit to encompass a regional vision,
‘‘Futurama,’’ which proved to be not just the fair’s most popular attraction
but also its most revealing insight into a future in which the automobile
would triumph rather than come under appropriate controls. Sponsored by
General Motors, an even more expansive exposition, this one geared to the
year1960, carried visitors above36,000square feet of display, including half
a million buildings and50,000automobiles,10,000of them in motion. Al-
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42 Chapter 2
though the vast highway system, with seven lanes of traffic moving at three
prescribed speeds, served as the exhibit’s greatest promise of future happi-
ness, cities were nonetheless conceived in utopian terms. Here highways did
not end in congestion but coursed through on elevated causeways or linked
up with feeder roads at the periphery. As skyscrapers dominated the core,
pedestrians strolled above through traffic on raised walkways, enjoying un-
fettered access to shops and businesses. Outside the central city lay housing
developments, zoned to prevent business encroachment. In sharp contrast
to the Radburn ideal that preceded the fair, no effort was made to link resi-
dential with other amenities. The whole effect rested on functional effi-
ciency, defined as moving between places by automobile, not by foot, creat-
ing in the process what one observer calls ‘‘the thrills of Coney Island with
the glories of Le Corbusier.’’
55
No wonder Mumford reflected bitterly on
the hopes he held for the fair.
56
That Clarence Stein produced the filmThe Cityfor release at the New
York fair, that it attracted large and enthusiastic audiences, and that it in-
corporated through its structural imagery as well as its narration ideas most
closely associated with Mumford, thus contained a sad irony. As competent
as the film was in translating ideas into imagery, as consistent as its message
was from the progressive experiments in bringing the Garden City ideal to
America, its role was an anomaly. What underlay the fair, despite its socially
progressive intentions, was a consumer ethos that pointed fully to the sub-
urban diaspora that undercut any pretensions RPAA had for advancing
communitarian solidarity. What had been whittled back in Howard’s gen-
eration would be devastated in Mumford’s.
While most scholars have chosen to celebrate the garden city legacy as
a socially, as well as environmentally, sound alternative to unfettered devel-
opment, the movement has had its critics. Standish Meacham argues that
Howard’s more utopian goals were undercut from the start by Unwin and
Parker in their effort to reproduce not just the sociability of the old English
village but also its class hierarchy. Although common meeting spaces for
workers were described as areas where ‘‘a common life for a noble end
could be discovered,’’ the intent was not so much to vivify civic practice as
to impart endangered middle-class values. Parker and Unwin, he asserts,
‘‘designed for people not as they were but as they wanted them to be, and
as they hoped their buildings would make them: individual best selves come
together into a community of the high-minded and plain-living.’’
57
Others
have blamed Howard and his disciples for fostering the problems they most
deplored. Many elements of the garden suburb model, William Fulton
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herrakin tunnusteli ruumistaan varmistuaksensa.
Hänelle ei ollut tapahtunut mitään; mutta hänen naisensa oli
pyörtynyt.
Vaikka matkustaja saattoikin aavistaa, miten ajoneuvojen
etuosastossa oli käynyt, sillä kääseistä kajahtelevia huutoja oli nyt
seurannut syvin hiljaisuus, ei hänen ensimmäisenä huolenaan
kuitenkaan ollut taintunut nainen.
Heti maahan päästessään hän päinvastoin juoksi vaunujen
takaosaston luo.
Siellä oli tuo kaunis arabialainen hevonen, josta olemme
puhuneet, hirmustuneena ja jäykkänä, harja pörhössä, jokainen
jouhi pystyssä niinkuin kukin niistä olisi elänyt. Rajusti kiskoen
juoksuköyttänsä oli ylpeä eläin tärisyttänyt ovea, jonka ripaan se oli
sidottu; turhaan ponnisteltuaan kytkyimensä katkaisemiseksi se oli
jäänyt paikalleen seisomaan, silmät tuijottavina ja suu vaahdossa,
myrskyn kauhun lumoamana, ja kun isäntä tapansa mukaan
viheltäen laski hyväilevästi kätensä lautasille, niin se hypähti ja
päästi hirnahduksen ikäänkuin se ei olisi häntä tuntenut.
— Taas se hevosen paholainen! — kuului nyt ärtyisä ääni
ajoneuvojen sisästä; — kirottu elukka huojuttelee muuriani!
Sitten yltyi sama ääni huutamaan kärsimättömästi ja uhkaavasti
arabiankielellä:
— Nhe gullak hogud shaked haffrit![22]
— Älkää suuttuko Djeridille, mestari, — vastasi hänelle matkustaja
päästäen hevosen irti ja sitoen sen ajoneuvojen takapyörään; — sitä

näet peloittaa, ja peljästyä saattaa tosiaan vähemmästäkin.
Ja näin sanoen avasi matkustaja vaunujen oven, laski astuinlaudan
ja meni sisälle, sulkien oven mennessään.
2.
Althotas.
Matkustajamme oli nyt vanhuksen edessä, jolla oli harmaat silmät,
koukkuinen nenä ja vapisevat, mutta toimeliaat kädet, kun hän
tilavaan nojatuoliin kuopattuna paraikaa selaili oikealla kädellään
vankkaa pergamentti-käsikirjoitusta nimeltä La Chiave del Gabinetto
ja piti vasemmassa kädessään hopeista kuorinkauhaa.
Tuo vanhuksen asento ja askarrus, nuo jäykkäryppyiset kasvot,
joissa ainoastaan silmät ja suu näyttivät eläviltä, yleensä kaikki
hänessä, mikä lukijasta varmasti on outoa, oli kuitenkin tälle
muukalaisellemme sangen tavallista, sillä hän ei edes luonut
silmäystä ympärilleen, vaikka tämä ajoneuvojen osasto kyllä ansaitsi
huomiota.
Osaston kolme muuria — muistamme vanhuksen siten puhuneen
ajoneuvojen seinistä — olivat täynnänsä laudakoita ja ne jälleen
täynnä kirjoja, ja noiden muurien keskellä oli tuo nojatuoli, kammion
eriskummaisen asukkaan ainainen ja ainoa istuin. Vanhuksen
käytettäväksi oli kirjain yläpuolelle kiinnitetty seiniin vielä
reikähyllyjä, joissa voitiin pitää melkoinen määrä pieniä pulloja,
purkkeja ja lasirasioita, puisiin koteloihin suljettuina niinkuin laivassa

suojellaan pöytäposliineja ja laseja. Jokaisen näistä rasioista ja
koteloista saattoi vanhus itse tavoittaa käteensä lykkäämällä
nojatuoliaan paikasta toiseen; pyrkimäänsä paikkaan saavuttuaan
hän kohotti tai laski istuintaan sen sivuilla olevan vivun avulla, jota
hän käänsi omin käsin, niinkuin hän muutenkin näytti tottuneen joka
asiassa itse palvelemaan itseään.
Kamari, — jos sen nimen annamme tälle osastolle — oli kahdeksan
jalkaa pitkä, kuutta leveä ja kuutta korkea. Ovea vastapäätä, lähellä
neljättä seinää, joka oli tyhjä, sillä siitä päästiin ulos ja sisälle, oli
paitsi lasipulloja ja tislaimia pieni sulatusuuni katoksineen,
pajapalkeineen ja ahjoineen. Tästä uunista juuri läksi tuo
salaperäinen savu, jonka me olemme nähneet nousevan vaunujen
kattotorvesta, sillä vanhus paraillaan kuumensi siinä sulatuspannua
ja keitti jotain sekotusta. Siitä siis aiheutui sankka haiku, joka oli
kaikkien kulkijain, nuorten ja vanhain, miesten ja naisten
herkeämättömän kummastuksen ja uteliaisuuden syynä, olivat he
miltä maankulmalta tahansa kotoisin. Sitäpaitsi oli pikkupullojen,
rasiain, kirjain ja paperikotelojen joukossa, joita oli hajallaan
permannollakin maalauksellisessa epäjärjestyksessä, pieniä vaskisia
nipistimiä, hiiliä erilaisissa nesteissä kellumassa ja maljakko
puolillaan vettä. Laipiosta riippui rihmassa kasvitukkuja, joista toiset
näyttivät äsken kootuilta, toiset ehkäpä sata vuotta sitten.
Kamarin täytti voimakas haju, jota olisi jossakin vähemmän
eriskummaisessa laboratoriossa kutsuttu parfyymiksi.
Juuri matkustajamme tullessa sisään vanhus lykkäsi nojatuoliaan
ihmeellisen taitavasti ja nopeasti uuteen paikkaan; hän siirtyi siten
sulatusuunin ääreen ja alkoi kuoria syvää kunnioitusta lähenevällä
huolella keitostaan.

Sisääntulijan huomaaminen häiritsi häntä toimessaan; hän veti
oikealla kädellään alemmaksi otsalleen samettisen myssynsä, joka oli
muinoin ollut musta ja verhosi hänen päätänsä aina korvien
alapuolelle saakka. Myssyn reunain alta pilkisti näkyviin muutamia
hapsia harvenneesta tukasta, hohtavia niinkuin hopeiset rihmat.
Sitten kiskoi hän hämmästyttävän tottuneesti nojatuolinsa pyöräin
alta pois pitkän silkkimekkonsa liepeet; tämän viitan oli
kymmenvuotinen käyttö muuttanut suorastaan ryysyiksi, joilla ei
ollut enää väriä, ei muotoa eikä olletikaan kestävyyttä.
Vanhus tuntui olevan sangen pahalla tuulella ja nurisi kuoriessaan
keitostansa ja kohottaessaan viittansa lievettä:
— Se pelkää, kirottu eläin; ja mitä, kysynpä sinulta? Se tempoi
oveani, täristi liettäni ja kaatoi neljänneksen eliksiiriäni tuleen.
Akharat, Jumalan nimessä, heitä tuo eläin ensimmäiseen
erämaahan, jonka läpi matkaamme.
Matkustaja hymyili.
— Ensinnäkin, mestari, — vastasi hän, — me emme matkaa enää
erämaiden läpi, sillä me olemme nyt Ranskassa. Ja toiseksi minä en
saata heittää sillä tavoin hevosta, joka maksaa hyvinkin tuhannen
louisdoria tai jolle paremminkin ei ole hintaa, koska se on Al-Borakin
rotua.
— Tuhat louisdoria, tuhat louisdoria! Minulta saat milloin tahansa
nuo tuhat louisdoria tai muuta niiden arvoista. Minulle se maksaa jo
yli miljoonan, tuo hevosesi, puhumattakaan elämänpäivistä, jotka se
minulta riistää.
— No mitä Djerid-parka nyt vielä on tehnyt? Sanokaahan.

— Mitä se on tehnyt? Se on tehnyt sitä, että muutaman minuutin
päästä olisi eliksiirini jo kiehunut ainoankaan pisaran pääsemättä
läikähtämään. Sitä menetelmää ei tosin neuvo Zoroaster eikä
Paracelsus, mutta Borri suosittelee sitä nimenomaan.
— No, hyvä mestari, odottakaa joku sekunti, ja eliksiiri kiehuu
uudestaan.
— Vai niin, kyllä kai kiehuu. Kuule, Akharat, on aivan kuin kirous,
että tuleni sammuu; ties mitä tippuukaan savutorvesta.
— Minä sen kyllä tiedän, — sanoi vanhuksen opetuslapsi nauraen,
— sieltä tippuu vettä.
— Kuinka, vettä? Vai vettä! Kas niin, siis meni eliksiirini taas
hukkaan! Taas saan alottaa sen työn alusta. Niinkuin minulla olisi
aikaa liiemmältä! Hyvä Jumala, — huudahti oppinut vanhus ja
kohotti kätensä epätoivoissaan taivasta kohti, — vettä, vettä! Mutta
mitä vettä, kysynpä sinulta, Akharat?
— Taivaan puhdasta vettä, mestari. Sataa kaatamalla, ettekö sitä
ole huomannut?
— Huomaanko minä mitään silloin kun olen työssä? Vettä!… Niin
on siis asia… Kuulepas, Akharat, se on sietämätöntä, kautta sielu-
raukkani! Kuule nyt, kuusi kuukautta minä olen pyytänyt sinulta
suojahattua savutorveeni… Kuusi kuukauttako… mitä sanonkaan?
Kokonaisen vuoden! Mutta sinä, sinä et muista asiaa… vaikka sinulla
ei ole muutakaan tekemistä, sinulla, joka olet nuori. Ja miten
käykään sinun huolimattomuutesi tähden?… Käypä niin, että tämän
päivän sade, huominen tuuli sotkevat kaikki laskelmani ja hävittävät
kaikki työni tulokset. Minun, jolla on kiire, kautta Jupiterin! Sinä

tiedät hyvin, että aikani täyttyy, ja jos minä en ole valmis sinä
päivänä, jos minä en ole keksinyt elämän-eliksiiriäni, niin mennyttä
olet, oppinut ja viisas Althotas! Sadas vuoteni alkaa heinäkuun
kolmantenatoista, täsmälleen kello yksitoista illalla, ja ennen sitä
hetkeä täytyy eliksiirini olla aivan valmis.
— Mutta sehän valmistuukin aika vauhtia, mikäli näen, rakas
mestari, — vastasi Akharat.
— Totta kyllä, minä olen jo kokeeksi juonut sitä. Vasen käsivarteni,
joka oli melkein halvattu, on saanut takaisin kaiken joustavuutensa.
Ja sitäpaitsi minä säästän nyt koko sen ajan, jonka ennen käytin
aterioimiseen, koska minun ei enää tarvitse syödä muuta kuin joka
kolmas tai neljäs päivä, ja koska lusikallinen eliksiiriäni pitää minut
täydellisesti yllä, vaikka se vielä onkin niin epätyydyttävää. Oi, kun
ajattelen, että minä en luultavasti tarvitsisi enää muuta kuin yhden
ainoan yrtin tai siitä yhden ainoan lehden, niin saisin eliksiirini
täydelliseksi! Että me ehkä olemme kulkeneet jo sata kertaa, viisi
sataa kertaa, tuhannen kertaa, aivan tuon kasvin vieritse, ja että
hevosemme ovat ehkä sitä tallanneet, vaunujemme pyörät sitä
ruhjoneet, Akharat! Tuon kasvin, josta jo Plinius puhuu ja jota
tiedemiehet eivät ole sittemmin löytäneet tai tunteneet, sillä mikään
ei katoa! Kuule, sinun täytyy kysyä joskus sen nimeä Lorenzalta, kun
hän makaa häiriötilassa, eikö niin?
— Kyllä mestari, olkaa huoletta, minä kysyn.
— Ja sillä välin, — jatkoi vanhus ja huokaisi syvään, — taas
epäonnistui eliksiirini kerran, ja minulta menee kolme kertaa
viisitoista päivää päästäkseni tulokseen, johon olin jo tänään
joutunut, sen tiedät. Muista se, Akharat, sinä kadotat aivan yhtä

paljon kuin minä sinä päivänä, jolloin minä kadotan henkeni. Mutta
mikä tuo kumu on? Kulkevatko vaunut?
— Ei, mestari, se on ukkonen.
— Ukkonen?
— Niin, — joka oli sitäpaitsi tappaa meidät, niin paljon kuin meitä
tässä oli, ja minut erikoisesti; tosin minulla oli ylläni silkkipuku, joka
minua suojeli.
— Kas niin, siinä se taas on! — sanoi vanhus lyöden polveensa,
joka nasahti kuin kuiva luu, — mihin vaaroihin sinun lapsellisuutesi
saattaa minut, Akharat! Ukkosen surmattavaksi, sähköliekin typerästi
tapettavaksi, liekin, jonka minä pakoittaisin laskeutumaan
sulatusuuniini ja kiehuttamaan kattilaani, jos minulla olisi aikaa. Eikö
siis riitä, että joudun alttiiksi ihmisten typeryyden ja pahanilkisyyden
tuottamille tapaturmille, vaan että sinun täytyy saattaa minut vielä
taivaastakin tulevain vahinkojen uhriksi, tuollaisten vahinkojen, jotka
ovat kaikkein helpoimmat estää?
— Anteeksi, mestari, mutta te ette ole vielä selittänyt minulle
sitä…
— Kuinka, enkö ole sinulle vielä selittänyt metallikärki-
järjestelmääni, johdatin-leijaani? Kun saan valmiiksi eliksiirini, niin
esitän asian sinulle. Mutta nyt, ymmärräthän, minulla ei ole aikaa.
— Siis te luulette, että salamaa voi hillitä!
— Sitä ei ainoastaan voi hillitä, vaan voi myöskin johdattaa mihin
tahtoo. Kerran, jonakuna päivänä, kun toiset viisikymmentä vuottani
ovat loppuneet, jolloin minun on vain rauhassa odotettava kolmatta

viisikymmenvuotis-jaksoani, minä pistän ukkosen terässuitsiin ja
ohjailen sitä yhtä helposti kuin sinä Djeridiä. Sillä aikaa anna teettää
suojahattu savutorveeni, Akharat, minä pyydän sitä rukoilemalla.
— Sen teen kohdakkoin, olkaa huoletta.
— Kohdakkoin, kohdakkoin! Aina vaan puhe vastaisuudesta, aivan
kuin se olisi meidän molempain. Voi, minua ei ymmärretä
milloinkaan! — huudahti oppinut pyörähdellen nojatuolissaan ja
väännellen epätoivoissaan käsiään. — Olkaa huoletta!… Hän käskee
minun olla huoletta, ja kolmen kuukauden päästä, ellen ole saanut
eliksiiriäni valmiiksi, minulta on kaikki lopussa. Mutta jos minä elän
ohi toisen viisikymmen-kauteni, jos minä saan takaisin nuoruuteni,
jäsenteni joustavuuden, kyvyn kävellä, silloin minä en tarvitse enää
ketään, eikä minulle sanota: "Teen sen kohdakkoin!" Vaan minä
sanon itse: "Se on tehty!"
— Mahtanetteko luvata samaa suurestakin tehtävästämme?
Oletteko sitä muistanut?
— Oi, kyllä. Hyvä Jumala, jos minä olisin yhtä varma siitä, että
saan aivan valmiiksi eliksiirini, kuin timantin valmistamisesta…
— Te olette siis tosiaan varma siitä, mestari?
— Tietysti, koska olen jo tehnyt timantteja.
— Olette tehnyt?
— Katso itse.
— Minne?

— Tuonne; siellä oikealla puolellasi, pienessä lasiastiassa, — juuri
siinä, johon nyt kosket.
Matkustaja otti innoissaan käteensä neuvotun astian. Se oli
erinomaisen hienosti hiottu kristallipikari, jonka koko pohjaa peitti
melkein näkymättömän ohut aine; tätä oli tarttunut pikarin
reunoihinkin.
— Timanttitomua! — huudahti nuori mies.
— Niin, timanttitomua. Ja keskellä, katsoppas tarkkaan.
— Tosiaankin, hirssinjyvän kokoinen timantti.
— Koko ei merkitse mitään. Meidän onnistuu yhdistää kaikki nuo
tomuhiukkaset, tehdä hirssinjyvästä hampunsiemen,
hampunsiemenestä herne. Mutta, Herran tähden, rakas Akharat,
korvaukseksi tästä lupauksesta, jonka sinulle nyt annan, paneta sinä
nyt heti hattu savutorveeni ja johto vaunuihisi, niin että vesi ei tipu
lieteeni ja että ukkonen kuljeksii muualla.
— Kyllä, kyllä, olkaa huoletta.
— Taas tuo iänikuinen: Olkaa huoletta! Se saa minut aivan
vimmaan! Nuoruus, mieletön nuoruus, itserakas nuoruus! —
huudahti vanhus paljastaen synkässä naurussa hampaattoman
suunsa, ja hänen silmäkuoppansa näyttivät entistäänkin ontommilta.
— Mestari, — sanoi Akharat, — tulenne sammuu, sulattimenne
jäähtyy. Mitä sulattimessanne nyt onkaan?
— Katso.

Nuori mies totteli, avasi sulattimen kannen ja näki siellä pienen
pähkinän kokoisen, lasimaiseksi muuttuneen hiilikappaleen.
— Timantti! — huudahti hän. Mutta hän jatkoi melkein heti:
— Niin, mutta läikällinen, epätäydellinen, arvoton.
— Siksi, että tuli sammui, Akharat; siksi, ettei minun lieteni
suojana ollut savuhattua, tiedä se!
— Antakaa minulle anteeksi, mestari, — pyysi nuori mies
käännellen ja katsellen timanttia, josta vuoroin sinkosi kirkkaita
säteitä ja joka vuoroin oli tumma; — oi, antakaa minulle tosiaan
anteeksi ja nauttikaa jotakin ravintoa pysyäksenne voimissa.
— Tarpeetonta. Minä join lusikallisen eliksiiriäni kaksi tuntia sitten.
— Te erehdytte, mestari, te joitte sen tänä aamuna kello kuusi.
— Vai niin; mitäs kello nyt on?
— Se on kohta puoli yhdeksän illalla.
— Jeesus! — huudahti vanhus pannen kätensä ristiin, — taas yksi
päivä mennyt, kadonnut, hukattu! Tulevatko päivät nykyään
lyhemmiksi? Eikö vuorokaudessa enää ole neljääkolmatta tuntia?
— Ellette tahdo syödä, niin nukkukaa edes joku hetki, mestari.
— Olkoon menneeksi, minä nukun kaksi tuntia; mutta kahden
tunnin päästä katso kelloasi, kahden tunnin päästä tulet sinä minut
herättämään.
— Sen lupaan.

— Katsos, kun minä rupean nukkumaan, Akharat, — virkkoi
vanhus anelevalla äänellä, — niin pelkään aina, että nukun iäksi.
Tulethan minut herättämään, tulethan? Älä sitä minulle lupaa, vaan
vanno se minulle.
— Minä vannon, mestari.
— Kahden tunnin päästä?
— Kahden tunnin!
Niin puheltiin takimaisessa osastossa, kun yhtäkkiä kuului tieltä
ikäänkuin laukkaavan hevosen kavioiden kopinaa, ja sen äänen
jälkeen kuului huudahdus, joka oli samalla sekä levottomuutta että
hämmästystä ilmaiseva.
— Mitäs tämä taas merkitsee? — huudahti matkustajamme, avasi
nopeasti vaununoven ja hypähti ulos astumatta edes jalkalaudalle.
3.
Lorenza Feliciani.
Seuraavaa oli tapahtunut vaunujen ulkopuolella sillaikaa kuin
matkustaja ja oppinut juttelivat sisässä.
Ukkosen iskun kaataessa etuhevoset ja peljästyttäessä takimaiset
pystyyn, oli kääsipuolella istuva nainen pyörtynyt, kuten olemme
kertoneet.

Hän jäi muutamaksi hetkeksi tajuttomaksi, mutta koska hän oli
pyörtynyt ainoastaan pelosta, niin hän palasi pian tuntoihinsa.
— Oi, — sanoi hän, — onko minut jätetty tänne aivan
avuttomaksi, ja eikö ole ainoatakaan ihmistä, joka säälii minua?
— Madame, — vastasi arka ääni, — olen minä, jos jollakin tavoin
voin teitä auttaa.
Kuullessaan tuon äänen, joka kaikui melkein hänen korvansa
juuressa, kohosi nuori nainen pystyyn, ja kun hän pisti päänsä ja
molemmat kätensä ulos ajoneuvojen nahkaisten uudinten raosta,
näki hän edessään miehen seisomassa vaunujen porraslaudalla.
— Tekö minulle puhuitte, monsieur? — kysyi nainen.
— Minä, madame, — vastasi nuori mies.
— Ja te tarjositte minulle apuanne?
— Niin.
— Mitä siis ensinnäkin oli tapahtunut?
— Sitä, madame, että ukkonen löi melkein teihin ja rikkoi
iskiessään etuhevosten vetohihnat, jolloin ne karkasivat vieden
mukanaan kyytimiehen.
Nainen katseli ympärilleen ylen rauhattoman näköisenä.
— Ja… mies, joka ohjasi takahevosia, missä hän on? — kysyi
nainen.
— Hän nousi juuri tuonne takaosastoon, madame.

— Hänelle ei tapahtunut mitään?
— Ei mitään.
— Olette siitä varma?
— Ainakin hyppäsi hän alas hevosensa seljästä aivan
vahingoittumattomana.
— Ah, Jumala olkoon kiitetty!
Ja nuori nainen henkäisi helpoituksesta.
— Mutta missä te sitten olitte, monsieur, koska te satuitte juuri
tähän tarjoamaan minulle apuanne?
— Madame, rajuilma yllätti minut, ja minä olin tuolla pimeässä
luolassa, joka on vaan erään kivilouhoksen suu, kun näin yhtäkkiä
tien käänteessä vaunujen tulevan täyttä laukkaa juoksevin hevosin.
Minä luulin ensin, että hevoset olivat pillastuneet, mutta pian näin,
että niitä ohjasikin päinvastoin voimakas käsi; sitten äkkiä ukkonen
iski niin hirvittävällä räiskeellä, että luulin sen sattuneen minuun
itseeni ja seisoin hetkisen aivan kuin lamaan lyötynä. Kaikki mitä
olen tässä teille kertonut näin aivan kuin unessa.
— Niinpä ette lienekään varma, että hän, joka ohjasi takahevosia,
on tuolla vaunuissa?
— Olen kyliä, madame. Minä olin selvinnyt ja näin hänen varmasti
nousevan sisään.
— Ottakaa selko, onko hän siellä vielä, olkaa hyvä.
— Millä tavoin?

— Kuuntelemalla. Jos hän on siellä sisällä, niin kuulette sieltä kaksi
ääntä.
Nuori mies hyppäsi alas porraslaudalta, meni isomman vaunukorin
ulkoseinämälle ja kuunteli.
— Kyllä, madame, — sanoi hän palatessaan, — hän on siellä.
Nuori nainen nyökäytti päätään kuin sanoakseen: Hyvä on.
Mutta yhä edelleen hän istui pää käden nojassa aivan kuin syviin
mietteisiin vaipuneena.
Sillaikaa oli nuorukaisella tilaisuus häntä tarkastella.
Hän oli noin kolmen- tai neljänkolmatta-vuotias nainen; hänen
ihonsa oli ruskeahko, mutta sitä himmeän ruskeaa väriä, joka on
raikkaampaa ja kauniimpaa kuin kaikkein ruusunhohtavin tai vaalein
hipiä. Hänen kauniit silmänsä katselivat taivaalle ikäänkuin siltä
neuvoa kysyäkseen ja ne säteilivät kuin kaksi tähteä. Ja hänen
tummat hiuksensa, jotka vastoin ajan muotia eivät olleet jauhoitetut,
laskeusivat pikimustina kiharoina hänen kaulalleen, jonka väri
vivahteli opaalille.
Yhtäkkiä näytti hän tehneen päätöksensä.
— Monsieur, — sanoi hän, — missä me nyt oikeastaan olemme?
— Strassburgin ja Pariisin valtatiellä, madame.
— Ja millä paikoin?
— Peninkulman päässä Pierrefittestä.

— Mikä on Pierrefitte?
— Se on kauppala.
— Ja mikä paikka tulee Pierrefitten jälkeen?
— Bar-le-Duc.
— Se on kaupunki?
— Kaupunki, madame.
— Paljonkin asukkaita?
— Luullakseni neljä-, viisituhatta henkeä.
— Onko täällä jotakin oikotietä, joka vie Bar-le-Duciin suoremmin
kuin valtatie?
— Ei, madame, tai en ainakaan minä sellaista tunne.
— Peccato![23] — mutisi nainen aivan hiljaa ja heittäytyi takaisin
kääsiensä sisään.
Nuorukainen jäi hetkiseksi odottamaan, kyselisikö nuori nainen
vielä jotain. Mutta kun hän näki, että tämä pysyi vaiti, läksi hän
menemään pois.
Hän ehti jo jonkun askeleen, mutta silloin näytti hänen
liikkumisensa herättävän naisen mietteistä, sillä hän heittäytyi jälleen
nopeasti puhumaan ulos kääseistä.
— Monsieur, — sanoi hän.

Nuorukainen kääntyi takaisin.
— Tässä olen, madame, — vastasi hän lähestyen naista.
— Vielä kysymys, olkaa hyvä.
— Tehkää se.
— Oliko täällä hevonen köydessä vaunujen takana?
— Oli, madame.
— Onko se siellä vielä?
— Ei, madame; se mies, joka meni kuomeihin, päästi sen irti ja
sitoi sen ajoneuvojen pyörään.
— Eikä sillekään ole tapahtunut mitään pahaa, tuolle hevoselle?
— En luule.
— Se on kallisarvoinen eläin ja minä pidän siitä paljon. Tahtoisin
omin silmin nähdä, että se on vahingoittumatta. Mutta kuinka päästä
sen luokse tässä liassa?
— Minä voin tuoda hevosen tänne, — sanoi nuorukainen.
— Oi, tuokaa, olkaa hyvä, niin olen teille kovin kiitollinen.
Nuorukainen lähestyi hevosta, joka kohotti nyt päätänsä ja hirnahti.
— Älkää peljätkö sitä, — jatkoi kääseissä istuva nainen; — se on
lauhkea kuin lammas.
Sitten hän kutsui hiljaisemmalla äänellä:

— Djerid, Djerid!
Eläin tunsi varmaankin tuon äänen emäntänsä ääneksi, sillä se
kurotti nyt älykästä päätänsä ja huuruavia sieramiaan kääseihin päin.
Sillaikaa päästi nuorukainen sen irti.
Mutta tuskin oli se tuntenut, että sen juoksuköysi oli
tottumattomissa käsissä, niin tempautui se rajulla nykäyksellä irti ja
oli pian yhdellä ainoalla hypyllä parinkymmenen askeleen päässä
ajoneuvoista.
— Djerid, — toisti nainen kaikkein hyväilevimmällä äänellään, —
tule tänne, Djerid, tänne!
Arabialaisratsu pudisti kaunista päätänsä, päristeli ilmaa ja lähestyi
kääsejä kauniisti tepastellen ja jalkojaan kohotellen aivan kuin
musiikin tahtiin.
Nainen pisti yläruumiinsa ulos nahkauudinten raosta.
— Tule tänne, Djerid, tule! — sanoi hän.
Eläin totteli ja tuli ja alisti päänsä sitä kohti ojentuvan käden
hyväiltäväksi.
Silloin tarttui nuori nainen toisella hoikalla kädellään hevosta
harjaan, nojasi toisella kääsi-osaston etulautaan ja kavahti satulaan,
aivan yhtä keveästi kuin saksalaisten ballaadien aaveet, jotka
hyppäävät ratsujen lautasille ja pitävät takaa kiinni matkalaisten
vyöstä.

Nuorukainen ryntäsi häntä kohti, mutta nainen pysäytti hänet
käskevällä kädenliikkeellä.
— Kuulkaa, — sanoi hän, — vaikka olette nuori, tai paremminkin
koska olette nuori, täytyy teillä olla sääliväinen sydän, älkää siis
estäkö minua lähtemästä. Minä pakenen miestä, jota rakastan,
mutta ennen kaikkea olen minä roomatar ja oikea katolilainen, ja tuo
mies saattaisi sieluni iäiseen kadotukseen, jos olisin kauemmin
hänen parissaan. Hän on jumalankieltäjä ja taikuri, jota Jumala nyt
on ukkosensa äänellä varoittanut. — Jospa hän painaisi tuon
varoituksen mieleensä. Kertokaa hänelle, mitä olen nyt teille
sanonut. Taivas palkitkoon teitä avusta, jota minulle annoitte. Ja nyt,
hyvästi!
Näin sanoi hän, ja keveänä kuin nevojen yllä häilyvät usvat kiiti
hän pois laukkaavan Djeridin selässä ja katosi tuossa tuokiossa.
Nuorukainen ei voinut pidättää ällistyksen ja kummastuksen
huutoa, kun näki hänen noin pakenevan.
Se huuto se oli kaikunut vaunujen sisälle ja herättänyt siellä
olevan matkustajan huomiota.
4.
Gilbert.
Se huuto oli tuon matkustajan, kuten sanoimme, hälyttänyt.

Hän tuli nopeasti ulos ajoneuvojen takaosastosta, sulki
huolellisesti oven ja katseli rauhattomana ympärilleen.
Ensimäiseksi huomasi hän nuorukaisen, joka seisoi
kummastuneena paikallaan. Salama leimahti samassa ja salli
matkustajan tarkastaa häntä kiireestä kantaan. Moinen nopea
tutkimus näytti matkustajalla olevan aina tapana, milloin joku uusi
henkilö tai uusi seikka sattui hänen silmäänsä.
Katseltu oli tuskin kuusi-, seitsentoista-vuotias, pieni, laiha ja
jänteekäs jäseniltään. Hänen mustat silmänsä, jotka hän loi aina
lujasti kaikkiin esineihin, mitkä hänen huomiotaan herättivät, eivät
olleet suinkaan lempeät, mutta miellyttävät. Hänen pieni, pysty
nenänsä, ohut alahuulensa ja ulkonevat poskipäänsä ilmaisivat
oveluutta ja varovaisuutta, kun taas vankasti esiinpistävä leuka puhui
luonteen päättäväisyydestä.
— Tekö täällä äsken huusitte? — kysyi häneltä matkustaja.
— Minä, monsieur, — vastasi nuori mies.
— Ja miksi te huusitte?
— Siksi, kun…
Nuori mies keskeytti epäröiden puheensa.
— Siksi kun? — toisti matkustaja.
— Monsieur, — sanoi nuorukainen, — tuolla kääseissä oli eräs
nainen.
— Niin oli.

Ja Balsomo iski silmänsä ajoneuvojen etuosastoon niinkuin olisi
aikonut katseellaan lävistää sen lujat seinät.
— Täällä oli hevonen kiinni ajoneuvojen pyörässä.
— Niin, mutta missä hiidessä se nyt on?
— Monsieur, se nainen, joka oli kääseissä, läksi täältä hevosella,
joka oli sidottu tuonne taakse pyörään.
Matkustaja ei huudahtanut eikä virkkanut sanaakaan. Mutta
yhdellä hyppäyksellä hän meni kääsien luo ja tempaisi nahkauutimet
syrjään. Salama, joka samassa leimahti taivaalla, näytti hänelle, että
kääsit olivat tyhjät.
— Kautta Kristuksen veren! — karjahti hän äänellä, joka muistutti
sitä säestävää ukkosen jyrähdystä.
Sitten hän katseli ympärilleen ikäänkuin miettien keinoa ajaakseen
naista takaa. Mutta hän huomasi, ettei sitä löytynyt.
— Koettaa saada kiinni Djerid jollakin noista hevosista, — jatkoi
hän päätä pudistaen, — olisi sama kuin lähettää kilpikonna ajamaan
gasellia… Mutta kyllä saan tietää, minne hän meni, jollei vaan…
Hän pisti nopeasti ja huolissaan kätensä liiviensä taskuun, veti siitä
pienen lompakon ja avasi sen. Eräässä lompakon osastossa oli pala
kokoontaitettua paperia ja paperissa kihara mustia hiuksia.
Matkustajan kasvot kirkastuivat, kun hän näki nämä hiukset, ja
hän rauhoittui täydellisesti, ainakin mikäli päältä katsoen voi
huomata.

— Hyvä, — sanoi hän painaen otsalleen kätensä, joka kohta alkoi
helmeillä hiestä, — hyvä, ei ole hätää. Mutta eikö hän puhunut teille
mitään lähtiessään?
— Puhui kylläkin.
— Mitä hän teille sanoi?
— Käski ilmoittamaan teille, ettei hän lähtenyt teidän luotanne
suinkaan teitä vihaten, vaan pelosta. Että hän on oikea kristitty, kun
te sitävastoin…
Nuorukainen arasteli jatkaa.
— Kun minä sitävastoin? — toisti matkustaja.
— En tiedä, uskallanko teille sitä sanoa? — virkkoi nuorukainen.
— Antakaa tulla, hitossa!
— Kun te sitävastoin olette muka jumalankieltäjä ja uskoton, jolle
Jumala on tänä iltana tahtonut antaa vielä viimeisen varoituksensa.
Ja että hän, tuo nainen, oli sen varoituksen ymmärtänyt, ja hän
neuvoi myöskin teitä sitä ymmärtämään.
Ja siinäkö kaikki, mitä hän teille sanoi? — kysyi matkustaja?
— Niin.
— Hyvä; puhutaan sitten toisista asioista.
Ja matkustajan otsalta näyttivät katoavan viimeisetkin
rauhattomuuden ja tyytymättömyyden merkit.

Nuorukainen seurasi kaikkia mielialan ilmauksia, jotka näkyivät
matkustajan kasvoilla, — tarkkaili niin uteliaana, että voi arvata
hänellä itselläänkin olevan melkoisen määrän kykyä tehdä
havainnoita.
— No niin, — sanoi matkustaja, — mikä teidän nimenne on, nuori
ystäväni?
— Gilbert, — vastasi nuorukainen.
— Siinä kaikki? Mutta sehän on vaan ristimänimi, tietääkseni.
— Minulla on sellainen sukunimi.
— No olkoon. Hyvä Gilbert, sallima on tuonut teidät pariini
pelastamaan minua pienestä pulasta.
— Olen käytettävissänne, monsieur, ja kaikki, mitä voin tehdä…
— Te teette. Kiitokset! Niin, teidän iällänne on ihminen avulias
pelkästä ilosta saada auttaa. Muuten ei seikka, jota teiltä anon, ole
kovin vaikeakaan. Pyydän teitä ainoastaan neuvomaan itselleni,
missä saan suojaa tänä yönä.
— Ensinnäkin voi käyttää tuota luolaa, jonka alla minä olin paossa
rajuilmalta, — vastasi Gilbert.
— Kyllähän, — virkkoi matkustaja. — Mutta minä pitäisin
enemmän jonkinlaisesta talosta, jossa saisin kunnon illallisen ja
hyvän vuoteen.
— Se on vaikeampaa, se.
— Ollaanko siis niin kaukana lähimmästä kylästä?

— Pierrefittestä?
— Pierrefittekö on sen nimi?
— Niin, monsieur. Sinne on lähimain peninkulma matkaa.
— Sellainen matka yön pimeässä ja tällaisella ilmalla! Ja
ainoastaan nuo kaksi hevosta! Siihen menee noin kaksi tuntia.
Kuulkaahan, ystäväni, ajatelkaapas tarkoin, eikö tällä seudulla ole
minkäänlaista asumusta?
— On Taverneyn linna, joka on enintään kolmensadan askeleen
päässä.
— No niin, sittenpä, — alkoi matkustaja.
— Kuinka, monsieur? — kysyi nuorukainen katsellen häneen ylen
kummastelevin silmin.
— Miksi ette sanonut tätä heti?
— Mutta eihän Taverneyn linna ole mikään majapaikka.
— Asuuko siellä ketään?
— Tietysti.
— Kuka?
— Ka… Taverneyn parooni.
— Mikä tuo Taverneyn parooni sitten on?
— Hän on neiti Andréen isä, monsieur.

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