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City Beautiful
The City Beautiful movement emerged in the 1890’s to create beauty and order in America’s
crowded, depressed cities. While it was intended to be a revolution in city planning, its legacy is most obvious in monuments and civic centers within the urban core. Many urban university campuses are also a product of this period. The City Beautiful reformers made important, though often overlooked, contributions to transportation planning [1]. They emphasized rail connections between the central city and satellite villages, with natural greenbelts in between. Parks and public open space were a signature component of the movement, promising to bring fresh air to inner cities.
History
The movement grew out of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair). The 600-acre fair site was a model for an idealized city and featured dozens of new Beaux-Arts buildings arranged among canals and reflective pools. An extremely popular event, the fair elicited universally positive reactions from attendees who were impressed by the beauty, cleanliness and serenity of the setting, which was “soothing to visitors weary from the rigors of early modern America” [2]
It offered a dramatic contrast with real-life urban tenements, largely populated by immigrant laborers, and sparked a desire to create social order and harmony through urban planning. It also “introduced the concept of a monumental core or civic center, an arrangement of buildings intended to inspire in their beauty and harmony” [3]. Planner Daniel Burnham and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, designers of the World’s Fair site, became leaders in the City Beautiful movement.
Transportation
Coinciding with the rail and streetcar era, the City Beautiful movement embraced efficient urban transportation. Planners ensured that rail service was extremely well-connected: intracity lines connected outer villages with downtowns, which then linked to intercity and cross-country rail. Most importantly, City Beautiful reformers valued aesthetics in transportation design, and deemed that the travel experience should be a pleasant one. Rail terminals were designed in grand style, elevating the status of rail travel. Streets, organized in hierarchies and clear patterns [1], were supposed to lead somewhere. “Orchestrated vistas” [1] helped to determine the location of important streets and rail lines. Streets were lined with shade trees and parks.
Parkways — leisure roads that interlinked suburban parks and center cities — were a signature transportation element of this period. They were intended for pedestrians, bicyclists, horses and carriages [4]. Conceived as scenic corridors by Frederick Law Olmsted, the first parkways were lined with greenery and divided by planted medians. Some ran through quiet residential areas.
City Beautiful endeavors
A number of American cities adopted City Beautiful plans in the early twentieth century. Most involved the construction of grand buildings in the downtown core. Beaux-Arts architecture was the preferred style.
Washington DC. The 1901 McMillan Plan [5] was an effort to complete the mall in Washington, picking up where Pierre L’Enfant left off. Lead by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted, the project looked to expand monument core south and east of the Washington Monument and create a continuous greenway. This was accomplished by adding the Lincoln Memorial and eventually the Jefferson Memorial. Land was also reclaimed for waterfront parks and parkways.
Cleveland, OH boasts “one of the most completely realized expressions” [6] of the City Beautiful movement. 1903 renovations created the city’s mall and civic center, as well as the University Circle buildings, which included the Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western Reserve University. In addition, boulevards lined with impressive homes linked city parks to Lake Erie: the parkway along West Boulevard leads to Brookside Park, while East Boulevard connects to Garfield Park. The plans, also by Daniel Burnham, helped to restore Cleveland’s blighted lakefront district.
The Columbia University campus in New York City moved to its Morningside Heights location in 1891. The World’s Columbian Exposition directly influenced the campus plan and architecture; in fact, it was supposed to be a miniature version of it [7]. Constructed between 1891 and 1913 at the height of the City Beautiful movement, the campus is considered a Beaux-Arts confection. Architectural firm McKim, Mead and White followed Italian Renaissance themes. It was one of the first “all in one” campuses, where all disciplines were taught on the same self-contained campus, at designated buildings.
John Russell Pope’s 1919 plan for Yale University in New Haven, CT is considered an important document in the City Beautiful movement, even though the plan was significantly revised by James Gamble Rogers in 1921 to more fully incorporate the city of New Haven.
The university neighborhood of Oakland in Pittsburgh, PA features groups of buildings designed in the Beaux-Arts style during this period. Although Oakland’s civic center plans were not fully realized, they did produce a number of iconic buildings in the area, like the Carnegie Museum of Art, Soldiers and Sailors Hall and the Carnegie Library.
Chicago, IL. After the Chicago World’s Fair closed in 1893, the only building left standing was the Palace of Fine Arts, which today houses the Museum of Science and Industry. Even so, the fair inspired city planning for at least two decades. Daniel Burnham drafted the Plan of Chicago (also known as The Burnham Plan) in 1909 to transform Chicago into “Paris on the Prairie”. The plan called for an extensive park network, forest preserves and broad boulevards [8]. Though he proposed a domed civic center with reflecting pool at the heart of the city, to which all main roads would lead, it was never built. He also called for the lakefront area to be reclaimed for parks and playgrounds.
Why did it end?
The City Beautiful movement waned in the 1920’s as the automobile grew in popularity and cities began to expand into outer villages. Electric rail lines had helped to extend suburbs into the countryside, but the automobile provided even easier access to far-flung areas not served by rail. After World War II and through the rest of the century, modernity and convenience would be favored over aesthetics.
While the movement valued the classical and the orderly, it “largely ignored the commercial vitality and (often healthy) disorder of the Modern metropolis.” [9] Still, City Beautiful plans (many largely unimplemented) are worth revisiting as the suburban automobile era ends and populations shift to transit-oriented urban areas.
ALSO ON THE LIVABLE STREETS NETWORK
REFERENCES
Each source is referred to by the same number every time it is cited. Please keep citation style consistent.
1] Hess, Daniel Baldwin. 2006. Transportation Beautiful: Did the City Beautiful Movement Improve Transportation? Journal of Urban History, Vol. 32, No. 4, 511-545.
[2] World’s Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath. Thesis, American Studies, Univeristy of Virginia. August 1996.
[3] The City Beautiful Movement. Wikipedia
[4] Parkway. Wikipedia.
[5] The L’Enfant and McMillan Plans. National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service.
[6] Preservation, City Planning Commission, City of Clevelend.
[7] A Brief History of Columbia. New York City Architecture images.
[8] The Burnham plan. Wikipedia
[9] City Beautiful: The Rise of Urban Planning. High Beam Encyclopedia (beta).
PICTURE REFERENCES
Pictures are cited in the order they appear above. Please keep citation style consistent.
[1] The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Flickr.
[2]
