City Beautiful movement

URBAN PLANNING

City Beautiful movement, American urban-planning movement led by architects,

landscape architects, and reformers that flourished between the 1890s and the
1920s. The idea of organized comprehensive urban planning arose in the United
States from the City Beautiful movement, which claimed that design could not be
separated from social issues and should encourage civic pride and engagement. Its
influence was most prominent in cities such as Cleveland, Chicago, and Washington,
D.C.

Aerial view of the grounds and buildings of the Worlds Columbian Exposition, held
on the lakefront
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZC2-3394)
The movement first gained ground in 1893 with the Worlds Columbian
Exposition in Chicago. Daniel H. Burnham headed the construction of the fairs
temporary city, known to those who attended as the White City, a semi-utopia in
which visitors were meant to be shielded from poverty and crime. Burnhams plans
for the site incorporated the designs of architects trained at the cole des Beaux-
Arts in Paris, who paired the balance and harmony of Neoclassical and Baroque
architecture with the aesthetic of Chicagos buildings and cityscape. The landscape
of the Columbian Exposition, which included lagoons and big green expanses, was
designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., famous for his winning design of New York
Citys oasis, Central Park, which broke ground in 1857. To not only enhance the
citys appearance but also help the flow of vehicle and pedestrian traffic, the City
Beautiful concept focused on incorporating a civic centre, parks, and grand
boulevards. The holistic and multipurpose approach to urban planning that was
championed by Burnham and displayed at the Columbian Exposition remained at
the forefront of architecture, landscape architecture, and design for many years. Its
impact is still visible in many cities throughout the United States.

Daniel H. Burnham, the director of works for Chicagos 1893 Worlds Columbian
Exposition.

Aside from making cities more livable and orderly, the City Beautiful movement was
meant to shape the American urban landscape in the manner of those in Europe,
which were primarily designed in the Beaux-Arts aesthetic. Burnham especially
thought of the movement as a mechanism by which the United States could
establish visible and permanent ties to European Classical traditions. His
opponents, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright among them, wanted to avoid
borrowing from and outright replication of European design and instead invent a
new and truly American style.

The City Beautiful movement emerged at a time in U.S. history when the countrys
urban population first began to outnumber its rural population. Most city dwellers
perceived that cities were ugly, congested, dirty, and unsafe. As cities grewan
increasingly rapid condition enhanced by an influx of immigrants at the end of the
19th centurypublic space was being usurped. With increased congestion, city
dwellers needed open outdoor areas for recreation as they never had before. In
addition, the chaotic approach to sanitation, pollution, and traffic found in most big
American cities affected rich and poor alike, which is how the City Beautiful
movement gained both financial and social support. The movements chief
spokesperson, Charles Mulford Robinson, a muckraking journalist from Rochester,
New York, helped inspire politicians to perceive it as a move toward increased civic
virtue and the waning of social ills. He published his first major book on the
subject, The Improvement of Towns and Cities, in 1901. It subsequently became the
bible of the movement.

Washington, D.C., in 1902 became the first city to carry out a City Beautiful design,
the McMillan Plan, named for Michigans U.S. Sen. James McMillan, who was
chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. It limited building
heights and positioned new structures and monuments throughout the city to create
a balanced aerial composition. Other cities that benefited from the movement were
Cleveland (1903), San Francisco (1905), and St. Paul, Minnesota (1906).

The grand facade of Union Station, Washington, D.C., by Daniel H. Burnham.

The pinnacle of the movement came in 1909 with Burnham and fellow architect and
urban planner Edward H. Bennetts design for Chicago, published as the Plan of
Chicago and also known as the Burnham Plan. The plan involved a 60-mile (95-
kilometre) radius in which avenues would extend out from a civic centre. It included
an extensive rail system, a bi-level boulevard for commercial and regular traffic
(what is now Wacker Drive), and a sprawling network of parks. The lakefront, in
particular, was an important component of the proposed plan; a park and trail were
constructed to run near the shore of Lake Michigan. In addition, a comprehensive
highway system that promoted simplicity and efficiency was to connect the city to
its suburbs and the suburbs to one another. The implementation of much of the
Burnham Plan took place over the course of 20 years, starting in 1909 and coming
to an endthough incompleteat the start of the Great Depression in 1929.

Aerial view of North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, looking north. Lake Shore Drive,
weaving through
Over time, the movements shortcomings came to the fore, and it became apparent
that improvement of the physical city without addressing social and economic
issues would not substantively improve urban life. The movement, as a whole,
began to wane by World War I and was then succeeded by a modernist approach to
architecture known as the International style. Examples of extant buildings from the
City Beautiful period are Union Station in Washington, D.C., the Field Museum in
Chicago, and the Boston Public Library in Boston.
 The City Beautiful Movement

Frederick Law Olmstead's Ideas Developed the City Beautiful

Movement

At the beginning of the 20th century, a leading urban designer named Frederick Law
Olmstead was highly influential in transforming the American landscape. The industrial
revolution was replacing American society with an urban economic boom. Cities were
the focus of American enterprise and people flocked towards manufacturing centers as
jobs in industry replaced jobs in agriculture.

Urban populations rose drastically in the 19th century and a host of problems became
apparent. The incredible density created highly unsanitary conditions. Overcrowding,
corruption of government and economic depressions promoted a climate of social
unrest, violence, labor strikes and disease.

Olmsted and his peers hoped to reverse these conditions by implementing the modern
foundations of urban planning and design. This transformation of American urban
landscapes was showcased at the Columbian Exposition and World Fair of 1893. He
and other prominent planners replicated the Beaux-Arts style of Paris when designing
the fairgrounds in Chicago.

Because the buildings were painted a brilliant white, Chicago was dubbed the "White
City."

The term City Beautiful was then coined to describe the movement's Utopian ideals The
techniques of the City Beautiful movement spread and were replicated by over 75 civic
improvement societies headed mostly by upper-middle class women between 1893 and
1899.

The City Beautiful movement intended to utilize the current political and economic
structure to create beautiful, spacious, and orderly cities that contained healthy open
spaces and showcased public buildings that expressed the moral values of the city. It
was suggested that people living in such cities would be more virtuous in preserving
higher levels of morality and civic duty.

Planning in the early 20th century focused on the geography of water supplies, sewage
disposal and urban transportation. The cities of Washington D.C., Chicago, San
Francisco, Detroit, Cleveland, Kansas City, Harrisburg, Seattle, Denver, and Dallas all
showcased City Beautiful concepts.

Although the movements progress drastically slowed during the Great Depression, its
influence led to the city practical movement embodied in the works of Bertram Goodhue,
John Nolen and Edward H. Bennett. These early 20th century ideals created the
framework for todays urban planning and design theories.

Frederick Law Olmsted

The Father of Landscape Architecture

As the father of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted and his firms designed
the American landscape at the turn of the 19th century. Although he never enrolled in
college, it was through rigorous study and a nurtured love for nature that his life evolved
into a complex and very successful career. A few of Frederick Law Olmsted's most
notable projects are the U.S. Capitol grounds, Central Park, the Buffalo and Boston park
systems and the Columbian Exposition fair grounds.

Growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, Frederick Law Olmsted's father boarded him with
various clergymen hoping to groom the young gentleman for study at Yale. Diary entries
of this period recount a disdain for such orderly life. When sumac poisoning severely
stressed his vision at age 16, Yale was surpassed for private tutoring in topographical
and civil engineering; he was taught by Frederick A. Barton in Andover, Massachusetts.

Frederick Law Olmsted merrily described his early adulthood as "really for the most part
given over to a decently vagabond life, generally pursued under the guise of an angler, a
fowler, or a dabbler on the shallowest shores of the deep sea" (Dutton).
Desiring an end to the boredom of his work in a French importing house, he became an
apprentice seaman aboard the ship Ronaldson, bound for China.

Upon returning to the United States he visited his brother at Yale, attending classes
mostly in self-amusement. There he socialized quite a bit and developed an interest in
the sciences of horticulture and agriculture. His studies grew into practice and his father
then purchased for him a Connecticut farm. When this venture failed, he moved to
Staten Island in hopes of achieving success on a better piece of land. Yet Olmsted's
interests were not confined to the soil.

Writing of Frederick Law Olmsted

In 1850 Frederick Law Olmsted left during the farming season for a walking tour of England,
writing Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England during the trip. Upon returning from
this six-month trek, he was sent to the American south aboard steamboat, stagecoach and
horseback. Then writing for the New York Daily Times, he observed the socio-economics of
southern plantation agriculture. His descriptions of slavery offered sympathy to blacks and poor
whites as victims of the same system for sustaining life in early America. Several books were
published from his twelve months of observation in the southern states.

Frederick Law Olmsted's inclination to write continued throughout his career. Authoring
several books and many articles for The Nation magazine, which he co-founded,
Olmsted developed a reputation as social critic. He advocated for international copyright
law, equal rights for all citizens, womens suffrage, better training for Army officers and
rights and safety of merchant seamen.

Another strongly influential work was a report to the California legislature calling for the
preservation of Yosemite and Big Tree Falls. The report established precedent as the
first methodical interpretation of a democratic governments duty to preserve public
lands. Delivered in 1865, the report laid the groundwork for creation of state and
national parks.

Frederick Law Olmsted wrote throughout his life. All together, his papers number above
60,000, contributing literary translation of the ideas embodied in the expansive acreage
of parks he designed directly and influentially as the father of landscape architecture.
 Design of Frederick Law Olmsted

The largest and most accomplished park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted was Central Park
in New York City. After applying and being hired for the position of park superintendent in
September of 1857, the Board of Commissioners appointed him as architect in chief the
following month of April 1858. The park took twenty-five years to complete and cost Olmsted a
great deal in personal health due to complexities in the implementation process. He left and
came back to the project several times before the park was completed.

By the 1860s he was sought after as a consultant and designer for major projects all
over the eastern U.S. Desiring not to separate the park from activities of the city, his
landscapes were meant to blend in with the built environment. Frederick Law Olmsted's
designs frequently spilled over across the borders provided for his projects. These
concepts helped to encourage the development of city planning and the City
Beautiful movement, which made its full debut with the layout and grounds of the
Columbian Exposition of the 1893 Chicago Worlds Fair.

In his diaries, Olmsted happily declared himself to be a "wholly unpractical man"

(Dutton). The practicality he detested was that of selfish politicians whose interests often
made it difficult for him to achieve all that he desired with his designs. Politicians
defeated some projects, such as Riverside Park in the upper west side of Manhattan. As
with Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted butted heads with such officials in many of his
projects.

Olmsted maintained a successful career. Working under his own terms, he influenced
the improvement of American social and environmental landscapes. After retiring in
1895 he soon was admitted to McLean Hospital in Waverly, Massachusetts, the grounds
for which he designed. His firm was handed down to his son, Frederick Law Olmsted,
Jr.Frederick Law Olmsted senior passed away in senility on August 28,1903.

Partial list of completed works of Frederick Law Olmsted:

Stanford University in Palo Alto, California

U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Druid Hills planned community in Atlanta, Georgia
Riverside planned community in Chicago, Illinois
 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois
Boston, Massachusetts parks: Morain Farm, Boston, Fenway, Jamaica, Arnold
Arboretum, Muddy River, Franklin Park
Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York
Buffalo, New York park system
Niagara Falls State Reservation
The Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina
Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Quebec

City Beautiful

The Administration Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in

Chicago, where Daniel Hudson Burnham's City Beautiful movement made its
debut.

To understand Chicago of the early 1900s, consider this

observation from Truesdale Marshall, the protagonist of Henry
Blake Fuller's novel, "With the Procession:" "[Chicago is a] hideous
monster so pitifully grotesque, gruesome, appalling." Many
people, foreigners and Americans alike, felt the same way about
most cities in America. By 1910, many cities contained one million
residents, but few planned properly for such
a population explosion. As a result, cities developed in an ad hoc
fashion. This made them shapeless, inefficient and, in many
cases, dangerous.

Daniel Hudson Burnham, a Chicago architect, began to address

these issues in an approach to urban planning that would become
known as the City Beautiful movement. City Beautiful was
characterized by the belief that if you improved form, function
would follow. In other words, an attractive city would perform
better than an unattractive one. Beauty came from what Burnham
called "municipal art" -- magnificent parks, highly designed
buildings, wide boulevards, and public gathering places adorned
with fountains and monuments. Such beautiful additions to the
cityscape could not directly address perceived social ills, but they
could, at least in Burnham's thinking, indirectly improve social
problems by enhancing the urban environment.

Burnham first displayed the City Beautiful principles at the 1893

World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His dream city, known
as White City, featured large-scale monuments, electric lights and
state-of-the-art transport systems. It also removed all visible signs
of poverty so that the roughly 27 million visitors who streamed
through the exhibition witnessed a true urban utopia.

Burnham then applied City Beautiful ideas to several city designs

between 1902 and 1905. He directed plans for Washington, D.C.;
Cleveland, Ohio; Manila; and San Francisco, Calif., But the
culmination of the movement came in 1906 when Burnham
teamed up with Edward Bennett to prepare the Plan of Chicago,
the first comprehensive plan for controlled growth of an American
city. The Plan encompassed the development of Chicago within a
60-mile radius and called for a double-decker boulevard to better
accommodate commercial and regular traffic, straightening of the
Chicago River, consolidation of competing rail lines and an
integrated park system that encompassed a 20-mile park area
along Lake Michigan. Some of these features, such as the twin-
level roadway, were firsts in any city, anywhere in the world.

Although the City Beautiful movement was revolutionary in

America, it drew upon urban planning ideas used for many years
in Europe. In particular, Burnham used Paris as a successful model
of urban planning. Planning of Paris began in earnest in the 1600s
during the reign of Louis XIV when architects used great foresight
to build squares, parks and avenues in areas that were barely
settled. As Paris increased its population, it was able to grow into
its design. Then, in another era of notable development beginning
in the 1850s, Georges Eugne Haussmann, appointed by
Napoleon Bonaparte, began reworking the city, making it more
suitable and attractive for the vast numbers of visitors,
merchants, manufacturers and residents who filled the city.

Burnham also recognized the contribution of the ancient planners

responsible for Athens and Rome, as well as the planning tradition
that went back for centuries. In the next section, we'll look at how
this tradition manifests itself today in the hands of modern
planners.

City Beautiful Movement

The City Beautiful Movement was inspired by the 1893 Worlds Columbian
Exposition in Chicago, with the message that cities should aspire to
aesthetic value for their residents.

People: William Vanderbilt Allen, Albert S. Bard , Evageline Blashfi eld, Daniel
Burnham, Robert G. Cooke, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Pierre
LEnfant, Richard Morris Hunt, Charles F. McKim, Frederick Law Olmsted,
Jr., Jacob Riis, Louis Sullivan
Organizations: American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society , Municipal
Art Society , Mayors Billboard Advertising Commission
Places: Jeff erson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, National Mall, 1893 Worlds
Columbian Exposition
Public Policy: Bard Act (1956) , McMillan Plan, New York City Landmarks Law
DESCRIPTION

The City Beautiful Movement emerged in response to the 1893 Worlds

Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The fundamental idea expounded at the

fair was that the city was no longer a symbol of economic development and

industrialization, but could now be seen as enhancing the aesthetic

environment of its many inhabitants. The fair, coordinated by architect

Daniel Burnham, deeply impacted the way that Americans saw the urban

landscape, and brought the United States to the level of its European

predecessors in terms of architectural design. 1 New York architects such as

Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Mead and White, together with the Chicago

school of architects such as Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham created an

ideal city made up of classically designed monumental buildings. The

magical white city that Chicago embodied demonstrated for the fi rst time

that cities could be planned. 2 Artists and architects were deeply impacted

by the beautiful designs at the fair that upon returning to major cities like

New York, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., they took notice of the austere and

cluttered landscape in their own cities. During the height of the Industrial

Revolution, technological advancement paid little attention to the visual

elements of urban cities. Smoke billowed from factories, soot covered

buildings, and streets were merely symbols of progress.

Once visitors returned to their cities and they realized that it was essential

to the public welfare of the people to take heed of the urban landscape,

many American cities embarked on public building and art projects in order

to beautify their cities.

In Washington, D.C., this led to the creation of the McMillan Plan (named

after Senator McMillan), the fi rst governmental plan to regulate aesthetics.

The plan included the major players behind the planning of the Chicago

Worlds Fair: Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Charles F. McKim,

and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. 3

They revived Pierre LEnfants original city design plans for Washington,

D.C. The results can still be seen today. The McMillan Plan led to the

construction of the tree-lined National Mall, the Jeff erson Memorial, and the

Lincoln Memorial. 4

Many American cities lacked governmental regulation of their urban

infrastructure. For instance, New York City at the turn of the century was

described as a ragged pin cushion of towers. 5 Massive immigration to the

City, combined with the overcrowded tenement housing created the vision

of a discordant urban environment marked by poverty and social injustice.

Jacob Riiss telling portrayal of tenement living in How the Other Half Lives,

published in 1891, describes the urban plight of emigrant slums, which

characterized American cities during this time period. 6 The City Beautiful

Movement promoted the idea that beautifying the city is benefi cial. It

spurred the creation of the Municipal Art Society in New York City, which

works to promote public art in the City and also led to the development of

legislative means for the City to control its physical environment.

R E L E VA N C E T O T H E H I S T O RY O F H I S T O R I C P R E S E RVAT I O N

The City Beautiful Movement led to the creation of numerous art societies

seeking to obtain legislative means for aesthetic regulation in New

York City. This idea eventually led to the preservation of historic structures

for the public good with the passage of the Bard Act and the New York City

Landmarks Law.
The Municipal Art Society was one organization that was formed as part of

the City Beautiful Movement. Upon returning home from Chicago after the

World's Fair, prominent New York artists and visitors realized the potential

for New York to gleam as a beacon for the arts and urban design. On a more

fundamental level, artists took with them the idea that art was not just for

the elite but was to be shared with the public. 8 These artists, including

William Vanderbilt Allen and Evageline Blashfi eld decided to form the

Municipal Art Society. Their mission was to promote the idea that public art

was for the benefi t of the public and promoted an enhanced state of being. 9

In addition, Albert S. Bard played a pivotal role in the City Beautiful

Movement in New York City. He was a lawyer with an affi nity for the arts.

Like his contemporaries, the World's Fair had also provided him with the

idea that a city could be regulated for aesthetic purposes. He joined the

Municipal Art Society in 1901, joined its board in 1911, became its

Secretary in 1912, and its President in 1917. 10 Bard's infl uence on the City

Beautiful Movement would lead to drafting the Bard Act, which enabled

municipalities to pass laws for aesthetic regulation of private property. 11

The City Beautiful Movement inspired residents of New York City to fi ght for

the regulation of billboard advertisements. New York City at the turn of the

century had no laws protecting the physical fabric of the City. By the 1870s,

large billboard advertising signs dotted the urban landscape. 12 There were

some nascent eff orts to control billboard signage. In 1896, for instance, the

Parks Commissioner passed a law removing billboards from public

parks. 13 However, by 1911, New York City was reported to have 3.8 million

square feet of billboard advertisements. 14 Art societies, including the

Municipal Art Society and the American Scenic and Historic Preservation

Society, began to use billboard regulation as a way to beautify the City. The
Municipal Art Society, along with Albert Bard, worked on legislative

measures to regulate the billboard placement in the City. 15 In 1913, the

Mayor set up a commission to fi nd methods for billboard regulation called

the Mayor's Billboard Advertising Commission of the City of New York.

Robert G. Cooke, head of the commission, claimed that the advertisements

"rob the people of their rightful heritage of natural beauty." 16 Eventually the

1916 zoning resolution, which divided the City into specifi c areas or zones,

worked to set up rules for billboard signage on public property. 17 The

problem, however, appeared to be regulation of private property for

aesthetic reasons for the benefi t of the public. The initial eff orts waged by

Bard and the Municipal Art Society served as a "progenitor" of the Bard Act

eventually leading to the passage of the Landmarks Law. 18

The Bard Act in many ways owes its existence to the City Beautiful

Movement. 19 The fundamental idea of this movement was that the livability

of cities was essential to the health, welfare, and safety of the people. By

beautifying the city, the government was providing a benefi t to the public

overriding private interests. The Bard Act passed in 1956, and permitted

local municipalities enabling legislation to pass laws that regulate the

aesthetics of the city. The "police powers" were extended to mean that the

regulation of the physical environment promoted the health, safety, and

welfare of the people.

In turn, the passing of the Bard Act paved the way for the New York City

Landmarks Law because it gave the power of the City to pass legislation for

aesthetic regulation. Historic buildings were now seen as enhancing city

blocks and promoting a charming feel to neighborhoods. Preserving historic

structures would soon be included in these aesthetic regulations when the

New York City Landmarks Law was passed. This idea was predicated on the
"police powers" in which preserving structures of cultural and historic

signifi cance was providing a service to the public by enhancing the

aesthetic environment of the City. 20

A RC H I V E S , P E R S O N A L F I L E S & E P H E M E RA
D. Arnold photographic collection from the 1893 World's Columbian
Exposition
Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library
Columbia University
1172 Amsterdam Avenue, #3 MC0301
New York, NY 10027

McKim, Mead & White Architectural Records and Drawings

Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library
Columbia University
1172 Amsterdam Avenue, #3 MC0301
New York, NY 10027

Architecture: The City Beautiful Movement

In Henry Blake Fuller's 1895 novel, With the Procession,
the artistic young Truesdale Marshall, just returned home
from a prolonged grand tour, looked upon his native
Chicago as a hideous monster, a piteous, floundering
monster too. It almost called for tears. Nowhere a more
tireless activity, yet nowhere a result so pitifully
grotesque, gruesome, appalling. Marshall was not alone:
many observers of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
PLAN OF CHICAGO century Americaresidents, visitors, and expatriates alike
MICHIGAN believed that its cities were ugly. The shapelessness of
AVENUE, 1909 American cities was due in large measure to the
extraordinary speed with which they had developed:
between 1860 and 1910, the number of American cities with more than
100,000 residents rose from 8 to 50. By 1910, several cities had passed the
one million mark. Such statistics are crucial to understanding the City
Beautiful impulse. Despite its preoccupation with aesthetic effect, the
movement concerned far more than facade: the quest for beauty paralleled
the search for the functional and humane city. Urban planning as the
twentieth century would know it developed out of the City Beautifulboth as
a phase of it and a reaction to itand its coalition of planners, of paid
experts and unpaid volunteers, of architects, artists, civic officials,
journalists, business people, and interested ordinary citizens.
Daniel Hudson Burnham was indisputably the Father of the City Beautiful.
As director of works of the World's Columbian Exposition (1893), he
effectively launched the movement that 15 years later would reach its
apogee in his epochal Plan of Chicago(1909). Burnham's importance as an
architect and planner lay chiefly in his ability to direct and stimulate the
design efforts of others. His own credo captured the essence of his life and
work: Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood. ... Make
big plans ... remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will
never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself
with ever growing consistency. In his various architectural and planning
pursuits, Burnham choreographed large efforts indeed.

Burnham moved with his parents to Chicago in 1854. He became an architect

by apprenticing first with William Le Baron Jenney and then in the office of
Peter B. Wight, where he met his future partner, John Wellborn Root. Through
the 1870s and 1880s, Burnham & Root, and such contemporaries as Adler &
Sullivan and Holabird & Roche, helped rebuild the city that had been
destroyed in the fire of 1871. In so doing, they developed what would come
to be called the Chicago School of skyscraper architecture. Following Root's
premature death in 1891, Burnham turned to a succession of designers, but
he never found one who complemented his own talents as completely as
Root. With Root's death, Burnham lost both his design gyroscope and his
aesthetic self-confidence, and he turned increasingly to the authority of
historicism. In the 20 years between Root's death and his own, Burnham
found his greatest fulfillment as the leader of the City Beautiful movement
an effort to achieve for American cities something approaching a cultural
parity with Europe's great urban centers.

The central ideological conflict surrounding the City

Beautiful pitted invention and innovation against
continuity and tradition. The newness and cultural
nationalism espoused by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd
Wright lay in their quest for a uniquely American
culture, one with maturity and confidence enough to
cease relying so heavily on Old World traditions. Burnham

CARSON PIRIE
SCOTT ENTRANCE
and his allies, by contrast, believed that the sometimes frantic quest for
American-nessthe obsession with New World originality and horror of all
things Europeanwas itself a kind of insecurity, and that maturity would
consist in an acknowledgment that America was not culturally isolated from
the rest of the world. Burnham and his associates saw the United States as a
rightful heir to the traditions of Western culture and chose thus to recall,
celebrate, and use those traditions themselves.
Indeed, Europe and its traditions could provide a standard by which critics of
America's urban ugliness could appeal to the consciousness of a larger
constituency. Complementing their muckraking contemporaries
in journalism, architects could embarrass civic leaders into realizing that in
civic amenities as in social and political equity, America was somehow
woefully behind. City Beautiful advocates could invoke Fuller's heroine: Keep
up with the procession is my motto and lead it if you can.

Procession is an apt metaphor for the City Beautiful. However eclectic it

became in its borrowings and whatever the style of particular buildings
within its plans, the provenance and thrust of City Beautiful planning was
classical and Baroque in its emphasis upon processions of buildings and open
spaces arranged in groups. For the parallax effect, it depended on the
movement of the individual, or the human procession, through space from
one specific point to another. Great buildings or monuments were sited so as
to become the terminal vistas of long, converging, diagonal axes. The impact
on the individual of this arrangement, repetition, and ceremonial procession
was, in the Baroque and in the City Beautiful, calculatedly powerful,
impressive, and moving.

Burnham launched the City Beautiful movement at the

1893 World's Fair. While the relatively informal lagoon
area on the north side of the fairgrounds reflected the
picturesque preferences of Frederick Law Olmstedthe
designer of New York City's Central Park and a participant
in the fair's planning from its earliest sessionsthe
stately and well-ordered White City formed the seminal
image of the City Beautiful approach. Several of the fair's
STATUE OF architects had in fact studied at the Parisian cole des
REPUBLIC, GRAND Beaux-Arts and had garnered their penchant for
BASIN, 1893 neoclassicism there. All were imbued with the formal,
ordered, and axially oriented imperatives generally
associated with Beaux-Arts aestheticsa point of view that would dominate
most City Beautiful design.
The resulting ensemble of neoclassical temples, especially impressive when
lighted at night, had much of the twinkle and iridescence that Henry James
had found in Paris. It was at the World's Fair that Wisconsin historian
Frederick Jackson Turner lamented the end of the American frontier; but it
was there as well that urban reformers drew a suggestive vision of
new, urban frontiers. The journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd thought the White
City revealed to its visitors possibilities of social beauty, utility, and
harmony of which they had not been able even to dream. Henry Adams and
William Dean Howells saw it as a suggestive model for the planning of actual
cities. The builders of the temporary city had, after all, struggled with the
problems posed by actual cities, from the efficacy of streets,
sidewalks, waterfronts, and bridges, to the realities of
sustenance,transportation, and sewage. But the White City and the
movement it embodied continued to have detractors as well. Louis Sullivan
saw its influence as a virus that would afflict American architecture for 50
years. Each side of the debate might have taken a different moral from the
fact that one of the manual laborers working to create the fantasy was a man
by the name of Elias Disneyfather of Walt.

For more than a decade following the fair, Chicago lagged behind other cities
in the realm of urban planning. Yet during those years Burnham conceived
and directed City Beautiful plans for Washington DC (1902), Cleveland
(1903), Manila (1904), and San Francisco (1905) from inside his Chicago
office. His work also inspired the efforts of other City Beautiful planners, most
notably Charles Mulford Robinson and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

The apogee of the City Beautiful came 16 years after the

fair in Burnham and Edward Bennett'sPlan of
Chicago, which unified the goals of City Beautiful and City
Practical with unprecedented success. Never before had
one city plan taken into account so much of the
surrounding region. The plan encompassed the
development of Chicago within a 60-mile radius via a
system of radial and concentric boulevards that
WACKER DRIVE, connected the center to its outlying suburbs and linked
C.1930 the suburbs one with another. One of the plan's most
prescient recommendations was for what would become,
in Wacker Drive, the modern world's first double-level boulevard for regular
and commercial traffic. TheChicago River would be straightened and
enhanced for more efficient watertransportation and river-borne commerce.
The stations and tracks of competing rail lines would be consolidated into
 several train stations. A lakefront park system would run 20 miles along Lake
Michigan. The elegant, formal downtown would culminate in a
refurbished Grant Park that would be eastwardly inflected toward a new inner
harbor with breakwater causeways stretching far into the lake. At the
southern edges of this central park would rise such grandly neoclassical
buildings as the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum of Natural History,
counterpoints to the Art Institute of Chicago on the park's northern edge. The
number and quality of the city's outlying parks would be increased,
enhanced, and unified into an integral network.
Parks were central to the City Beautiful impulse and to Burnham's sense of
civic harmony. Fifty years ago, he explained, before population had
become dense in certain parts of the city, people could live without parks,
but we of today cannot. Good citizenship, he argued, was the prime object
of good city planning. Civic renewal more generally, Burnham believed,
could provide healthy activities to those citizens who could not afford
extensive traveling and who thus depended on the city for recreational and
cultural enrichment. He worried about the problems that congestion in city
streets begets; at the toll of lives taken by disease when sanitary precautions
are neglected. If such needs could be met, Burnham had confidence that
Chicago would be taking a long step toward cementing together the
heterogeneous elements of our population, and toward assimilating the
million and a half of people who are here now but who were not here fifteen
years ago.

Privately financed in its early stages by the Commercial Club, the Burnham
Plan was presented as a gift to the city, which appointed a commission to
oversee its development. The Chicago school board agreed to use an
elementary version of Burnham's report as an eighth-grade civics textbook.
Ministers and rabbis throughout the city delivered sermons on the plan's
importance. Brochures, a slide lecture series, a two-reel motion picture, and
other advanced promotional devices made their way into people's homes. It
was a masterfully orchestrated propaganda campaign. The most important
years in the plan's realization were the two decades between its publication
in 1909 and the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. In the teens and
twenties, costs exceeded $300 million. For the rest of the century, the
Burnham Plan would serve as a base point for the city's changing needs and
as proof, perhaps, of Burnham's belief that a noble, logical diagram once
recorded will never die.

Thomas S. Hines

Bibliography
Burnham, Daniel H., and Edward H. Bennett. Plan of Chicago, ed. Charles
Moore. 1909.
Fuller, Henry Blake. With the Procession. 1895; 1965.
Hines, Thomas S. Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner. 1974.

Daniel H. Burnham, the director of works for Chicagos 1893 Worlds Columbian
Exposition.