This Volume is for
REFERENCE USE ONLY
DATE DUB
1882-1936
CITY
HOUSING
BY
WERNER HEGEMANN
EDITED BY
RUTH NANDA ANSHEN
With a preface by Joseph Hudnut and a
chapter by Elbert Peets on recent civic
art in Washington and elsewhere
SECOND VOLUME OF TEXT:
POLITICAL ECONOMY and
CIVIC ART
ARCHITECTURAL BOOK PUBLISHING Co., INC
112 WEST 46TH STREET, NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1937, BY
BOOK PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC.
Reference
fEPRINTED
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the reading of the manuscript the editor is indebted to
Mr. R. C. Weinberg.
The sketches illustrating this book were made by Messrs.
Gunther Arndt, John G. Breck, Charles Warner, Chauncey
Stillman, and B. Bowen from instructions by Dr. Hegemann,
supplemented, after his death, by Mr. R. C. Weinberg and Mr.
W. A. Sanders.
The frank criticism by Elbert Peets (Principal Town Plan
ner of the Greendale Project, Division of Suburban Resettle
ment, Resettlement Administration) of recent developments in
federal capital planning affords a specially fitting conclusion to
this volume.
ED.
PREFACE
Whenever, as a part of those processes of assembling, shapmg,
and arranging materials -for human use, the arts achieve
also an expression of those qualities which men seek, without
finding, m their non-human environment they become endowed
with a sudden vitality. It is at such times, when they seem to
share the processes and aims of science, that the arts attain
their greatest power over our hearts. The assurance of per
manence, completeness, and peace which they offer us seems then
to be, for a moment, convincing.
The art of city planning is no exception to this universal
principle. City planning is a practical art concerned with the
application of science to the problems of shelter, of traffic con
trol, of public health. City planning is also an art of expression
and strives repeatedly to attain an aesthetic excellence through
the creation of patterns geometric or free whose elements are
streets and squares, planted areas, and structures. Considered
as an art, city planning is most successful at those rare moments
in which its two objectives (service and expression) are seen to
be attained as parts of a common process.
Aristotle defined a city as a place where men live a common
life for a noble end. He could have meant no existing city but
rather that city which men in all ages have built out of their
aspirations: the planned city, the city made consonant with an
exalted pattern of life inwardly apprehended. His definition
takes no account of outward aspects, whether these are the con
sequences of science or of a search for expression. Neither a
collection of buildings nor an aggregation of people makes a city,
but rather the form and content of society and the direction of
its march.
In the vision of such a city there may be discovered the secret
which will give vitality to our science and our art. Technique
and expression will be reconciled when both are addressed to the
realization of a communal order directed towards a common
vii
viii PREFACE
good; and from that realization and direction there may arise
that inner discipline which in all the great traditions has been
the true source of unity and power in the arts.
It may seem strange that housing by which is meant the
provision of shelter for the vast populations of industrial cities
is in this book by Dr. Hegemann closely associated with civic
art. Housing is a homely word and contains no suggestion of
that grandiloquent geometry of street and structure which until
recently was an accepted connotation of "art" in its relation to
cities. Housmg in its important aspects is a matter of science.
Its factors are as much social and economic as material. It
would appear to have little to do with the patterns made familiar
by city planners.
Yet it is probable that the study of housing is precisely that
study most likely to lead to a redemption of this art from its
present futilities. This will not be true, of course, if housing is
thought of as merely the expression of a compassionate impulse;
but it is, fortunately, impossible to consider it long in such a
way. Every question of civic life impinges on this arresting
problem, whose solution if there be a ^solution will demand a
reexamination of every premise upon which the structure of our
society is founded. From this reexamination, it is probable that
there will take shape some new vision of life that will in time
transcend our science and our art. In that vision we shall dis
cover a new ideal of beauty from which our civic art will gain a
new dignity and authority.
Joseph Hudnut
Cambridge, Massachusetts
October 22, 1936
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XIX. A COMPARISON OF PARIS AND BERLIN 259
XX. FOREIGN EXAMPLES PARIS 268
XXI. POLITICAL ECONOMY IN GERMAN HOUSING 278
XXII. POLITICAL ECONOMY IN AMERICAN HOUSING 296
XXIII. SLUM FIRES 307
XXIV. IMMEDIATE NECESSITIES IN PLANNING AND HOUS
ING 314
XXV. Civic ART 328
XXVI. ORIGIN AND GOAL OF AMERICA'S NEW Civic ART 342
XXVII. WASHINGTON, WILLIAMSBURG, THE CENTURY OF PROG
RESS, AND GREENDALE 382
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Two Berlin Slum Children xviii
Napoleon-Hausmann's openings through central part of old
Paris . 269
General plan of Le Corbusier's project for Paris 273
Knickerbocker "Village" 275
Skyline of New York City 328
Garnier's Grand Opera Site 330
Proposed City Hall and street arrangement from "the Chicago
Plan" 331
Planned Civic Center for Mariemont, Ohio 331
Central section of Buenos Aires 333
Comparison of respective heights of Cologne Cathedral, Trav
elers Insurance Building, Empire State Building, St. Patricks
Cathedral and Rockefeller Center 337
Skyline of Dallas, Texas 341
The City Hall, New York 342
Grace Church, New York 344
Trinity Church, Boston, Massachusetts 345
Plan of Copley Square 345
Aix-la-Chapelle 350
Nave of Westminster Abbey 350
Interior of Trinity Church, Boston, Massachusetts 351
The Jail, Pittsburgh 357
Glessner residence, Chicago, Illinois 357
Astor House, New York City 360
Stewart Building, New York City 360
Neil House, Columbus, Ohio 360
Public Ledger Building, Philadelphia 360
Monadnock Building, Church in Baltimore, 900 Broadway, New
York, Auditorium Building, Pray Building, Field Building. . . 362
The Rookery, Chicago 364
xi
xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Design for Chicago Tribune Tower 365
Carson, Pirie, Scott Building, Chicago 366
Wainwright Building, St. Louis 367
Piranesi's fireplace design 369
Adelaide House, London 372
The Washington Monument 373
The Lincoln Memorial, Washington 374
War Memorial, Berlin, Germany 374
Philadelphia Cricket Club 876
Villard Residence, New York 377
Columbia University, New York 379
The Great Hall, College of the City of New York 380
Ferris' Wheel, Chicago 381
Washington, from an early nineteenth century map 382
The Mall, Central Area, Washington, D.C 385
Map of the City of Williamsburg, Virginia 395
A Century of Progress Chicago Exposition of 1933 401
Greendale, Wisconsin 407
Greendale scheme of house location 412
Residence street, Greendale 412
INTRODUCTION
A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Our fathers and forefathers believed implicitly in liberty as
the unfailing boon and saviour in every emergency: in economic
liberty which means free competition; in political liberty which
means democracy, both of which, however, are helpless without
some form of national planning a basic conception of the
American Constitution. It was this faith that gave our fathers
inspiration and strength for mighty achievements. They
marched forwards and upwards in almost every field of science,
of economics, of culture. Today this faith is considered to be
mere delusion. Yet with its disappearance there vanished both
strength and prosperity and we stand today aghast, confronted
with the possible downfall of our civilization, faced with the
prospect of falling back into poverty, servitude and barbarism.
Yet there is one shining ray of hope which, if we grasp it, can
prevent the imminent cataclysm. This hope lies in a rationally
planned society rather than in a growth of purely "natural
forces."
The strengthening of civic pride and the recognition of the
importance of housing the masses decently must soon become
one of the main objects of social, economic and political en
deavors and of historic research. Fortunately civic pride as
well as efficiency of the inhabitants of America are rapidly in
creasing. The old English saying cannot be too often repeated,
namely, that one can kill or disable a man just as well with a bad
dwelling as with an ax. As long as this disguised state of law
lessness is tolerated and even encouraged by building codes and
law courts, the resistance against criminal abuse must come from
the surviving victims. A grocer is forbidden to sell decayed
food. As long as a slum owner is encouraged or compelled (by
tax assessor and sheriff) to sell decayed and poisonous housing,
as long as such enforced crime is
euphemistically labelled 'main-
xiii
xvi INTRODUCTION
most intense national efforts than city planning and housing.
Dr. Werner Hegemann, eminent and internationally known
city planner and architect, whose philosophy since truth can
bear repetition I have attempted to expound in terms of the
First Volume of this publication, had, for many years before his
tragic and untimely death on Easter morning, 1936, at the age
of 54 years, been engrossed in the problem of better housing for
the masses. The present volumes of "City Planning and Hous
ing," are, indeed, sufficient evidence of Dr. Hegemann's unique
ability to offer a working program of reform and a solution to
what heretofore have been considered irremediable difficulties.
This book thoroughly discusses the historical, sociological and
economic aspects, in addition to many others, of city planning
and housing and can, without exaggeration, be said to be a reve
lation to and an invaluable background for every one interested
in sociology, economics, housing and national planning.
Originally a student of city planning, history of art and
architecture, Dr. Hegemann later turned to economics and polit
ical science, thus achieving, by means of natural endowment and
varied though related studies fostered by many years of resi
dence in most parts of the globe, a broadness of view entirely
free from national prejudice. His excellent and iconoclastic
studies found in his "Napoleon," "Frederick the Great" and
"Christ Rescued" reveal not only Dr. Hegemann's uncanny in
stinct for historical truth but his open-mindedness, liberalism,
and objectivity of thought. He longed to divest ignoble leaders,
living and dead, of that pseudo-immortality which mythopoeic
and unthinking men had granted them. He was less interested
in what actually happened than in the illustrative, moral and in
structive aspects of history. Aristotle said, "Poetry is truer
than history because it is illustrative, moral, human, pertinent to
man in the generic sense." And although Dr. Hegemann repudi
ated the "unintelligible," esoteric and poetic medium of many
systems of philosophic thought, although he deprecated the old,
biblical assumption, which traditional philosophy at times has
adopted, that "blessed is he who shall not reveal what has been
revealed unto him," he nevertheless conceded the value of the
philosophical approach in matters of history.
In 1905 Dr. Hegemann became a housing inspector for the
INTRODUCTION xvii
City of Philadelphia, and in 1909 and 1910, as director of the
international city planning exhibitions in Boston, Berlin and
Duesseldorf, exhibitions which were, in the autumn of 1910,
transferred to the Royal Academy in London, he brought the
housing problem to the foreground. Later, in 1911 and 1913,
he published two volumes (financed by the Municipalities of
Greater Berlin) summarizing the results of the city planning
exhibitions and showing the basic importance of housing in every
aspect of city planning.
1
At that time Dr. Hegemann was
elected Honorary Secretary of the "Association for Decentral
ized Settlement in Greater Berlin," of the "League for the Pro
tection of the Forests of Greater Berlin," and of "The Group of
Twelve for the Architectural Development of Berlin." The
interest the socialist labor unions had manifested in the Berlin
City Planning Exhibition led to Dr. Hegemann's directorship of
the socialist "Cooperative Building Association Ideal," which for
the first time, after a lapse of almost a century, again con
structed for the workingmen individual homes with private gar
dens within the districts of Greater Berlin (Britz) zoned for
tenements.
In 1912 Dr. Hegemann started a popular campaign for a
more decentralizing system of housing and transportation and
for more playgrounds and forest reserves in Greater Berlin. At
the same time he was prosecuted by the Prussian police for hav
ing the billboards of Emperor William's ambitious capital
covered with posters reading: "600,000 inhabitants of Greater
Berlin live in tenements at the rate of from 5 to 13 people per
room.
2
300,000 children have no playgrounds." The persistent
placarding of these figures, accompanied by a gripping drawing
of two Berlin slum children
8
was declared to be conducive to the
lfThe title of these volumes is: "Der Stadtebau nach den Ergebnissen
der Allgemeinen Stadtebau-Ausstellung in Berlin." Volume I (published
1911) offers a history of city planning and housing in Berlin; a new pub
lication which appeared in 1929 under the title "Das Steinerne Berlin"
brought the discussion up to date. Volume II (published 1913) contains
studies of city planning, urban transportation, housing, and open spaces in
Paris, London, Vienna, and in some American cities.
2 In honor of Berlin's civic beauty it should be stated that these statistics,
equally ghastly as they were reliable, did not include kitchens as rooms to
live in.
3 It was designed by Kate Kollwitz. This powerful artist and realistic
portrayer of slum life has recently been forced by the Hitler regime to
leave the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts.
XV111 INTRODUCTION
"incitement of class hatred," punishable according to law. The
prosecution, however, had to be abandoned because, finally, the
truth of the hotly debated figures could not be denied.
The propaganda connected with the figure of 600,000 Berliners
in badly crowded tenements reached wide sections of the
population. Especially did it receive the support of the power
ful labor unions whose leaders, more perspicacious than many of
their American colleagues, appreciated how easily workingmen,
even with rising wages, can be plundered of income and health by
rising rents and bad living
quarters. Also after the
:
war, the labor unions, SoIlllll
cialist and Catholic, and
Ijtljj the different Federal, State
and Municipal govern
ments, supported by them,
became the real agents of
housing reform.
In 1913 the People's
111111 Institute of New York,
directed at that time by
Dr. Frederick C. Howe,
III asked the then prominent
| III! mayors of the German
cities (Mayor Adickes of
Frankfurt-on-the-Main and
Mayor Marx of DuesselItllif
dorf) to recommend sometllftff
one who would expound
German city planning to
III American audiences and
Hilt! compare it with procedures
Iftltll
in American cities. Dr.
III! Hegemann was selected and
Two Berlin Slum Children
Designed by Kate Kollwitz.
INTRODUCTION xix
thus secured the opportunity of studying and reporting about
civic conditions in twenty American cities, large and small.
From the end of the year 1913 to 1915 he worked for the
East Bay Communities of San Francisco. This activity was
interrupted by a journey for the purpose of studying the
capitals of Australia, Japan and China. In 1915 his "Report
on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley"
was published.
From 1916 to 1921 Dr. Hegemann associated himself with
Elbert Peets and Joseph Hudnut and directed a considerable
amount of practical real estate subdivision work especially in
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. (Part of this work is described
and illustrated in "Civic Art," p. 216, 217, 223, 280 and 283.)
A large part of the following years was spent in travelling and
in studying city planning and architecture in all countries of
Western Europe, in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. From 1924 to
1933 he was intermittently city planning advisor to the cities of
Hameln, Leipzig and Minister, while his main work was dedicated
to the editing of two prominent architectural reviews of Berlin,
"Wasmuths Monatshefte fur Baukunst" and "Stadtebau." In
1931 he was invited to advise the cities of Buenos Aires and
Rosario, Argentine, in matters of city planning and housing. At
the same time he gave courses of lectures on this subject at the
Universities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo (Uruguay).
As editor of the architectural reviews in Berlin Dr. Hege
mann tried, during those long years of often violent polemics
between opposing ideas, to give recognition to such architectural
developments as seemed promising, and likely to endure and be
come valuable. In so doing he attempted to be indifferent to the
origin of such ideas, indifferent as to whether they issued from
the "left" or from the "right," or whether they claimed to stand
for either progress or tradition. In expressing, without reti
cence, his views, he acquired the gentle art of making enemies
and friends, right and left. He was often bitterly attacked
from all sides. But when his fiftieth birthday arrived his friends
and antagonists joined to thank him most generously. One
hundred and thirty leading architects from many countries urged
him to continue his critical work. The list (published in
"Wasmuths Monatshefte fiir Baukunst und Stadtebau," July
xx INTRODUCTION
1931) extended from the right traditionalism of Ragnar Ostberg
and Paul Schmitthenner to the left modernism of Bruno and Max
Taut and the brothers Luckhardt.
From the encouraging observations made on that occasion
two extracts may be quoted. J. J. P. Oud declared: "I seldom
am of your opinion, but I almost always learn from you." And
Erich Mendelssohn wrote : "Best wishes, for more of your sharp
tongue. We will furnish the grindstone."
Dr. Hegemann time and again has manifested an indisputable
capacity not only for abstract idealism but for inspired idealism
and realism. In 1933, when the last vestiges of freedom were
confiscated in Germany together with his property and citizen
ship, Dr. Hegemann found refuge as visiting Professor of City
Planning and Housing at the New School for Social Research
and as Associate in Architecture at Columbia University. He
was thus able, in spite of many, many impediments, to continue
his battle for peace and order in an otherwise belligerent and
planless world. He was a pacifist armed with the only effective
weapon the power of reason. He was one of that esoteric num
ber who realize that a social philosophy of liberalism need not
be divorced from constructive radicalism in action.
"City Planning and Housing" is a veritable treasure house
of tangible ideas and applicable plans. Endowed with a most
perspicacious recognition of historical and contemporary paral
lels, Dr. Hegemann declares that we have only to substitute the
word "slaves" for the word "slums" and we have a condition at
present almost identical with that of the Civil War period. On
a par with Lincoln's general recommendations to indemnify the
slave holders is his suggestion as to the extent of compensation
to be granted them. A similar proposition might advanta
geously be chosen today in indemnifying our slum-owners. And
"whenever, indeed, a right of property is infringed upon for the
general good, if the nature of the case admits compensation, it
ought to be made, but if compensation be impracticable, that im
practicability ought not to be an obstacle to a clearly essential
reform." (Alexander Hamilton) With such piercing analysis
as this the reader is at once convinced of the monumental char
acter of the book. Furthermore, Dr. Hegemann's keenness in
the perception of housing problems in America and the wisdom
INTRODUCTION xxi
of his suggested panaceas reveal the great extent of his fine,
clear judgment.
"Can the American architect under existent conditions eco
nomically design effectual and legal plans for the construction of
decent cities to be inhabited by people, the majority of whom
may at any moment be unemployed?" Dr. Hegemann asks. And
he swiftly brings home to the reader the appalling realization
that approximately 40 million Americans live in slums and
blighted districts; that the New York Region could hold twice
the population of the globe if built up to the full extent legally
made possible under the New York Zoning Laws and "restric
tions"; that the founders of our country Washington, Hamil
ton, Jefferson had proposed plans for national public works,
zoning laws and housing; and that in Stockholm, the Municipal
ity enables the tenement-dwellers to become builders and owners
of garden cottages under a practical plan of supervision and
financing, without paying more than they previously paid in
their congested tenements and without becoming a burden to the
general taxpayer.
Few historians have sufficiently emphasized to what a large
extent the political revolution of the nineteenth century was a
direct victory for better housing the political victory
of 'the people who live in small houses.' With irrefutable logic,
with burning conviction and with the fervor of a pioneer, Dr.
Hegemann points to the palpable truth. Instead of fearing the
city as the inevitable grave of humanity, the present study rec
ommends the modern decentralized city with its highly improved
health standards as the only possible salvation for mankind.
This requires not only planning, but good planning. And the
realization of good planning is impossible without a high degree
of mental and material prosperity of the masses, without real
social well-being of the whole community to be achieved in the
way Dr. Hegemann suggests and by the "destruction of fictitious
land values."
Back of this book is the conviction that modern civilization
is not only on trial but that it has been judged and found want
ing, and that in the struggle for a new world more is at stake
than the discovery of new political and economic organizations
which will enable humanity to survive a while longer. "City
xxii INTRODUCTION
Planning and Housing" is a beacon to those who despair of
freedom. It points to the fatal error which led humanity into
the wilderness. It exposes the deception and wins back the faith
that once made us strong and enables us to find a way out of the
terrible crisis of our civilization. Planning must henceforth take
the place in governments that thinking takes in individual lives.
Dr. Hegemann was one of the remaining few who with great
effort, and, we pray, with no little hope, still believed in liberty
and hung on grimly to the last battered trenches of freedom.
The power of reason is its decisive influence on the life of
humanity. Conquerors have influenced profoundly the lives of
subsequent generations. But the total effect of this influence
shrinks into insignificance if compared with the entire trans
formation of human habits and human mentality produced by
the long line of men of thought from Thales to the present day,
men individually powerless, but ultimately the rulers of the
world.
Werner Hegemann was the
". . . nerve o'er which did creep
The else unfelt oppressions of mankind."
RUTH NANDA ANSHEN
New York, July, 1936
NINETEENTH CHAPTER
A COMPARISON OF PARIS AND BERLIN
America's imitation of foreign examples in city building and
housing is difficult and even dangerous due to the fact that it is
not at all easy to ascertain what peculiar political and other
conditions brought them into existence, made them survive or
caused their doom. Even knowing these facts it remains difficult
to determine the applicability of these foreign examples to the
very different conditions in America.
While in Berlin, the author of this book had the privilege of
making repeated tours with Americans desirous of seeing the
achievements of Berlin's post-War housing policy. A day or
two of continuous driving is hardly sufficient to obtain even a
perfunctory glimpse of the innumerable new housing schemes
which form a wide girdle of unprecedented decency around the
shamelessly overbuilt quarters of old Berlin. The American
visitors were as a rule quite overwhelmed by what they saw. One
of the most prominent and cultured among them, after a strenu
ous day of sightseeing, exclaimed : "If New York within the next
fifty years will have achieved as much modern housing as I have
seen today, it will have done wonders !" Indeed, it requires a
cultured mind to appreciate intelligently the surprising achieve
ments and promises proffered by the new housing enterprises in
various European countries. Cultivated observers from lands
which for some reason or other remain inactive or less active in
this new field are easily overcome by something like rage or
shame, and frequently, even unjustly, fail to appreciate the
achievements of their own countries. These feelings are akin to
that very injustice (commented upon in the First Chapter) that
led a prominent French observer to deprecate so vehemently
modern Chicago.
One may further add: "We Americans were putting up
houses twenty years behind those of England and Holland. We
were building horses and buggies instead of automobiles. One of
259
260 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
the great objectives of our government housing will be to investi
gate European housing improvements. We are learning in
Europe not to crowd the land, and we are tending already to
ward greater openness of land. Crowding brings obsolescence."
(N. Y. Times, Aug. 21, 1934.)
Almost all European states did engage in great housing
schemes for their workingmen as long as the United States in
sisted upon continuing her exports to them and paying for these
exports and especially for Germany's war indemnities by new
American loans. Even those countries which received only small
shipments of American capital profited, indirectly, either from
the American money that reached them in the form of war in
demnities or from the general prosperity created by the steady
flow of American funds into countries with which they traded.
Unfortunately, the great foreign housing and city-planning
schemes (due to far-sighted American generosity or short
sighted greed) were finally suspended by two causes:
(1) As the United States insisted upon European interest
payments and amortization but refused practically every other
means of payment but gold, the American bank vaults became
glutted with this precious metal and many European vaults were
in serious danger of being emptied altogether. Even the safes of
thrifty or over-conservative France, Switzerland and the Nether
lands were at various periods dangerously drained. The result
was panic.
(2) Europe had not been able to use all the abundant Ameri
can loans for public works, comprehensive though they were.
Some of the American funds, therefore, found their way into the
chests of a bellicose nationalist propaganda which asked for the
revision of frontiers and managed to create an international fear
of new inner and outer complications in Europe, and especially
in Germany. Suddenly the American bankers lost their buoyant
confidence in Germany's economic future. They withdrew Ger
many's liquid funds and quickly discovered that the American
billions invested in Germany were "frozen" assets which could
not be liquidated. Even Dr. Schacht cancelled his previously
persistent promises of repayment. The resulting panic was the
end of a wonderful period of public works in Europe, the tempo
rary end of those fine European housing achievements from
NINETEENTH CHAPTER 261
which America will benefit so greatly, if the depression finally
forces her to subsidize her own public works rather than for
eign ones and to return thereby to the basic conceptions of
George Washington and his fellow statesmen who founded the
Constitution and the Nation in order to control its resources,
and who created national legislation for model city planning.
The great public works Republican Germany achieved with
American money in the field of city planning and housing have
been given an appreciative treatment of high literary value by
the afore-mentioned Jean Giraudoux. (First Chapter, p. 38)
This appreciation is interesting for two reasons; firstly, for the
vivid description of war-stricken Berlin as it gloriously developed
under the policy of the public works instituted; and, secondly,
for the French writer's flaming indignation over the failure of
victorious France and rich Paris to carry out similar schemes
and surpass or at least compete with those of Germany and
especially of Berlin. This indignation, of course, must be taken
with a grain of salt. It is the patriotic indignation that every
patriotic citizen of every country should and will feel about the
civic shortcomings of his fatherland. It happens that the author
of the present volumes has written in a similar spirit of indigna
tion about Berlin and its civic backwardness. It is true that his
criticism was directed especially to the Berlin of pre-War time,
while Giraudoux very justly criticizes the post-War development
of Paris.
Is it possible to portray adequately those highly exhilarating
feelings the liberation, the admiration for great new achieve
ments, and the disgust for the backwardness of one's less pro
gressive land those potent emotions aroused by a comparison
of the old-fashioned, wild, disorderly growth of certain cities
and the amazing new possibilities illustrated in so many wellplanned
housing developments of post-War time? This has been
done very vividly by one of the most sublime writers of modern
French literature. Jean Giraudoux has written a comparison
between Paris and pre-Hitler Berlin (in the little book "Berlin,"
which appeared in the collection "Ceinture du Monde," Editions
Emile-Paul, Paris, 1932) a few excerpts of which will illustrate
the point. Much of what in these passionate sentences refers to
Paris does, of course, equally well apply to many sections of
262 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
cities in America and Europe, not excluding, to be sure, those of
Germany.
"What is there new and instructive for us in Berlin?" Jean
Giraudoux asks, and replies: "In the first place there is that
which would be sufficient to complete the supreme happiness of
our first parents :
gardens.
"Berlin is not a city of gardens, it is a garden. All the
descendents of the primeval couple are not dwellers in Eden.
Berlin contains 272,900 disabled in peace, 63,000 disabled in
war, 115,000 backward children, and at least 600,000 vagrants.
Nevertheless, it is a garden.
"In France, the mere presence of the usual Frenchman not
to mention architects or contractors is sufficient to deface a
countryside which is naturally beautiful and which has proved
its adaptability to every artificial embellishment. In Germany,
the presence of man and his house beautifies a countryside which
is by nature hideous. There is no modern invention railroad
station, tramway, garage, power-house the name of which in
France does not evoke the idea of squalid neighborhoods forever
defiled. In Germany, on the other hand, the words gas, steam,
electricity are associated with terms that we employ only to
describe parks and gardens. There is no station, no warehouse
front, no newspaper printing plant, which cannot be photo
graphed with trees and flowers in the foreground. No city
possesses more tramways than Berlin, but they run between trees
and over lawns. Each time a person leaves Paris, each time he
arrives, his heart is wrung. There is no possibility of reaching
or leaving this city, known as the city de luxe, this city of Art,
this city of Liberty, without going through a terrible zone of
wretchedness, without having one's eyes overwhelmed by every
thing in bad taste, in pettiness of conception, and in poverty of
execution which an irresponsible municipality has been able to
accumulate, without having to contemplate, from the last wheat
field of Brie to the Louvre, unrelieved by a single refreshing in
terruption, proofs of a determinism the most hideous and most
humiliating to man that a mistaken interpretation of modern life
could have created. The word suburb, in German so alive with
rich promise, in French is the most terrible term in the vocabu
lary of ugliness. Berlin lay defeated, desolate, without the
NINETEENTH CHAPTER 263
traditions of a great city, in the midst of a plain and marshes.
Paris was rich, victorious, no one of its projects realized by its
kings or emperors but could have been carried on and enlarged
throughout a countryside encircled by chateaux and gardens.
Berlin a black stream, a gutter. Paris a beautiful river,
studded with islands, winding between sloping banks. This ad
vance towards perfection, this search for fresh water, the law of
every civilization, for the individual as well as for the state, was
for the Parisian of the time of Flaubert or de Maupassant al
ready nearly accomplished. What is left today of these marvel
lous advantages? On the outskirts of the city, in the zone of
wretchedness, even the banks of the beautiful Seine seem to be a
no man's land, but an over-populated one, where all the beautiful
monuments of the future, schools, libraries, hospitals are bar
racks ; where there is a river with bare shores, reflecting nothing,
without borders, the water but mud, the islands evoking only
ideas of filth ; where the city magistrates, because they heap love
and care on the begonias of the Tuileries and the fuchsias of the
Luxembourg, are given the right to make an organized drive on
every tree, on every green thing for ten miles around and to fill
up with reenforced cement every remaining cubic inch of fresh
air which ought to be considered more important than any his
torical monument. Paris, the most beautiful example of con
glomerate humanity, is no longer anything but a kind of trap, a
noose, from which those who have yielded to her allurements can
escape only through cunning. There is not one of its future
institutions but is already consecrated to atrophy. No one has
been willing to understand that the future city is neither the
Carrousel, nor the Arc de Triomphe but is rather IssylesMoulineau,
Asnieres, or Pantin, and that the fate of Paris de
pends upon the fate of each inhabitant of these suburbs, upon
his well-being, his happiness, his habits and a normal life. Paris
pours out its surplus population all around itself as it pours its
surplus refuse over the sewage farms where the enslaved condi
tion of the laborer and the employee is accentuated in all its
forms. In Paris the only planned open spaces are the cemeteries,
the area of which almost exceeds, even in the city, the area of the
parks. Honor to the city which provides more oxygen for its
dead than for its children !
264 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
"Berlin, on the contrary, gnaws with a jaw of iron into a
plain flatter than a looking glass, its only charm being the mir
roring of the seasons. The last field of rye and Brandenburg
potatoes touches uninterruptedly upon the rhododendrons and
the geraniums of the boldest and most elegant of model suburbs.
The walls of Berlin are these colored-walled citadels where the
meanest worker's dwelling boasts of its bath-tub and its telephone.
And in front of these dwellings each year will arise new garden
apartments and country houses never so closely built as to ex
clude large groves of poplars, pines and wild birds. All that
reconstruction of the Fatherland which a vanquished generation
cannot permit itself has been replaced, awaiting better times, by
the reconstruction of its houses. All the orgies of architecture
and civic scenery which formerly only victorious kings dared
indulge in, this conquered country enjoys by virtue of the victory
it has gained in dedicating itself to its democratic and civic life,
which is at the moment its only future. An army of talented
architects, for example, Peter Behrens, Erich Mendelssohn, Hans
Poelzig or Max Taut has found in the heart of Berlin that which
our French architects have found only in Morocco in the sand
and in the brush: space, poise, liberty. Immense streets unob
structed (the one to Wannsee is paralleled by an auto speedway)
present to your view an open, airy city with huge public build
ings which, even when imperfect, at least seem to be inspired by
the architectural models of the future and not of the past.
"The army is a question of barracks," said a German general
who had made his corps un corps d'elite by giving it ideal
quarters with a library and swimming pool. The nation, the
German statesman now says, is a question of city planning.
From this point of view, Berlin merits the assignment that
Germany has given it. A people composed of individuals who
have well-poised bodies will have, later, a well-poised civilization.
All new Berlin from Lichterfeld to Grunewald is a watering place
though it has no particular springs, a seaside resort without the
sea. The idea of vacation which for the French bourgeois is
squeezed between the heat of July and the rain of September,
is in Berlin extended to each day, each hour, and resting three
times daily has assumed the charm of wealth, of leisure, and
it is, now 1930 of who knows what victory. . . ."
NINETEENTH CHAPTER 265
All this was written three years before the Hitlerite or
national-socialist revolution, which is considered by many as
that "victory" which Giraudoux foretold would come, "sooner
or later." Others prefer to believe that this revolution post
pones the ultimate "victory" as it postponed further housing
reform in Germany. At any rate the national-socialist "revolu
tion" of 1933 does not invalidate Giraudoux's reasoning. He
continues: "Finally there is for every Berliner what even in
America can be obtained only by the privileged classes :
physical
culture.
"The most surprising thing in Berlin is the joy with which
the people welcome the changes of season. In France, they
dread the winter because of the cold, the summer because of the
heat and the extremes of climatic changes are regarded as
calamities. The entire population of Berlin, on the contrary,
rushes out into the frosty weather and into the heat of the dogdays
as if to the rarest of pleasures, for the winter brings snow,
ice, and the sports that go with them; the summer, open-air
bathing, and every season brings the sun. Not a day passes
for the Berliner which does not include a bath outdoors or in
doors thereby bringing his naked body in contact with air, light
and water. . . . Paris is the land of the lone fisherman. Most
of the frequenters of the banks of the Seine have no contact
with their river except through its fish ; they show their love for
it chiefly by sprinkling it in the open season, with worms and
other bait ; they prefer those turns in the river, as does the carp,
where the sewers empty and from under their turned down imi
tation panama hats they present to the Sunday sun scarcely
more than a nose, which they bring home reddened and painful.
It has never occurred to the municipality of Paris to restrict
the banks of its rivers and to regard them as possible municipal
bathing beaches, magnificent and free. . . . For the Berliner,
on the contrary, water and sun have become necessary nourish
ment and the beer halls, the restaurants formerly filled with
greasy humanity are little by little becoming empty to the ad
vantage of their competitors: the sands of the Havel and the
air of the pines.
"This care of the body which certain classes of French people
practice in secret as though it were a superstitious task and a
266 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
personal ordeal, the German leaders have, on the contrary, done
everything to give the character of national public salvation.
All the environs of Berlin have been organized for this religion.
There is not a wood without its establishment for sun bathing.
There is not one of the numerous lakes formed by the Havel
between Berlin and Potsdam where the beach is not more commodiously
and conveniently arranged than at Deauville. Every
afternoon, spring and summer, Berlin swarms out to Wannsee.
In 1930 the old establishment was replaced by four model build
ings of yellow brick clinging to the edge of the hill, all four
topped by a terrace five hundred meters long, intersected by
colossal stairways and surrounded by flower beds. On holidays,
thirty thousand bathers install themselves for the day on the
beach which is cut into patterns to its very edge by the innumer
able naked children digging in the sand and forming a lacework
of water, shore and infancy.
"The German theoretical mind would not have deserved its
reputation if it had not progressed from the passion for seminudity
to the complete nude. Wannsee is but the ante-chamber
to the colonies where all covering is proscribed. They are
numerous. ... It sometimes happens that all special disfigure
ments such as pimples, eczema, pock marks, corns become im
perceptible to the advantage of the general beauty of the sect
and one envisages a white race attaining the natural perfection
of the black; deprived of cotton, wool and silk, all these bodies
are compelled to clothe themselves in calm tranquillity and
silence ; when the couples, deposited by automobile, have ascended,
clothed and agitated, the forest road to pavilions, and descend
naked to the lake, they seem to have abandoned only their dis
agreements and nervous habits, and the atmosphere is purified
because, for the first time in this age, it no longer resounds
with coughing, spitting and sneezing. . . . Such is the mission
of New Berlin. . . ."
*
It was perhaps partly for political reasons that the wonder
ful German achievements were calumniated by Adolf Hitler.
But to attempt to vindicate his hyperbolical criticism one may
well assume that he was animated by that same patriotic indigna
tion which inspired Giraudoux to criticize Paris (and the author
!The translation of these excerpts is made by Dr. Ruth Nanda Anshen.
NINETEENTH CHAPTER 267
of the present volume to criticize Berlin). One, very properly,
is never quite satisfied even with the finest achievements in his
own fatherland. At any rate in his "My Battle," Hitler wrote:
"By its mere incapacity to solve the housing problem the socalled
'social' Republic has simply prevented many marriages
and has thereby helped prostitution."
TWENTIETH CHAPTER
FOREIGN EXAMPLES PARIS
When it comes to housing his workmen, Uncle Sam has, so
far, been even less socialistically inclined than his old constitu
tional daughter, individualistic and capitalistic France. This
latter country has spent, from 1922 to the end of 1934, 12.93
billion francs in subsidies for low cost housing, a sum equal to
855 million present American dollars. Of this total only 3.77
billion francs (or 249 million present dollars) were spent in the
Region of Paris. This is only about 26 per cent more than
what has been spent for the same purpose by the city of Vienna
which has less than one half the population and is much poorer
than Paris. Most of this Parisian money was wisely expended
for homes on comparatively cheap land outside the congested
districts, i. e., not in clearing the slums to winch in America
many social workers would like to give primary attention.
In a certain instance when the French built tenements in
the more congested districts, their experience recalls rather
curiously the arguments of the Viennese "Christians" and even
gives one a taste of the bloody days of the American draft riots
of 1863. In Paris, so reported the New York Times of May 3,
1934, "several hundred manifestants, after a meeting at the
Joan of Arc City Municipal Apartment, which right-wing lead
ers say is a revolutionary center, ripped up newly repaired
pavements and attempted to build barricades. Police reinforce
ments again besieged the huge tenement block which served as
the red citadel." And the Paris newspaper Le Matin, by no
means ultra-reactionary, wrote on May 2: "Such barracks as
Joan of Arc City should not be permitted inside Paris. Freedom
of speech and opinion is well enough but freedom to organize
armed rebellions is a wholly different matter and the most severe
measures should be taken."
This forcible language recalls the old Parisian billion-dollar
slum clearance which has so often been recommended for Ameri-
268
TWENTIETH CHAPTER 269
can imitation. It was initiated eighty
III, after street fighting in the two
Paris had brought him to power,
expensive streets through the most
city and at that time all Paris was
plan was conceived primarily with an
in street fighting.
-five years ago by Napoleon
thousand-year-old slums of
He then hastened to push
congested districts of the
congested. His new street
eye for the use of artillery
g&kU 2ca
V:^ *! W--::< __? .v.^,--. >
Kr% \\W^ II II!
"Napoleon-Haussmann's" openings through central part of old Paris.
270 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
With his great street openings Napoleon III intended to
"slash the belly of rebellion." But he also stuffed it with more
indigestible material. His successors noticed it (even before his
grand projects were completely carried out) during the bloody
days of the Commune. Napoleon-Haussmann's huge operations
did not decentralize congested old Paris. They did not benefit
from the example of London and its extensive garden suburbs
served by new suburban rapid transit lines. Napoleon III
financed his slum-clearance by piling additional stories upon the
already over-built areas of his capital. He succeeded in con
cealing the increased congestion behind the often well designed
facades of his new straight avenues. He pursued the dubious
policy (which has been followed again, recently, in New York's
Knickerbocker Village) that building higher, rather than lower," Jf
means wise economy.
This story (with its sad antecedents and finale) has
told in greater detail and with the reproduction of many plans I
in the volume entitled Civic Art (p. 241 ff.) of this publication.
Some facts concerning the social and "labor creating" policy
of Napoleon III may here be added. They have become of
special interest in the light of the present American efforts to
finance such public works as "create labor." Napoleon III had
done more than learn the bloody lesson of October 5, 1795, when
his "greater" or bloodier uncle had shown that the ever-rebellious
old slums of Paris could be disciplined by artillery. In addition
to building straight wide streets for efficient gunfire, Napoleon
III intended to be a social reformer. His slogan was :
"Every
Frenchman for whom I secure a comfortable existence is a recruit
against Socialism." Napoleon and his faithful assistant, Haussmann,
were determined to be far-sighted social planners and
providers of great public works as a means of combating
socialism.
Although the replanning of Paris, Marseilles and other con
gested old cities, was the most expensive aspect of their public
works, equally as much was spent for roads and railroads, canals,
river regulation, ports, etc., and, of course, for armaments. But
the dictator spent the billions belonging to his people in such
an ill-advised manner that he met with results not bargained
for. He thought he was very cunning when he combined his
TWENTIETH CHAPTER 271
slum-clearances with the construction of strategic avenues. But
his Haussmann in "slashing the ancient belly of revolution" only
succeeded in making it fairly easy for the more fortunate re
publican successors of his beloved emperor to smash the com
munist revolution which arose from his military defeat of 1870.
Haussmann was thus even inadvertently instrumental in bring
ing about the great defeat which finally ousted his master
Napoleon.
These far-reaching and again today timely implications
of city planning are well illustrated in the letter written to
Karl Marx, August 16, 1870, by Friedrich Engels, part of
which reads :
"Napoleon could never have gone into this war
without the chauvinism of the French masses, of the bourgeois,
petty bourgeois, peasants, and of the proletariat of the building
trades. This proletariat created by Bonaparte in the big
\cities, the Haussmannian building proletariat, had arisen from
i^the peasant class." The ill-reputed 'Vhite blouses" of the
Second Empire (today one would probably call them "gray
.
shirts") were ill-educated peasants turned building workers. For
a long time they had been the loudest supporters of the French
dictator. They frequently had been accused of being bribed
supporters of this spendthrift regime. A somewhat similar re
proach was reiterated in the United States by some Republicans
Jn their campaign speeches during the Congressional election of
^1934. Here the supporters of the Democratic ticket were acC
cused of reaping benefits from President Roosevelt's laborcreating
schemes or from other federal subsidies.
2
If Engels' interpretation of the causes of the Franco-German
war should happen to be correct, it may, at some future time,
become worth while to ask to what length a leader less peaceful
^ than President Roosevelt might be able to drive the masses de^pendent
upon his labor-creating schemes. The so-called "white
shirts" of Napoleon seem to have become, after his fall, the
supporters of the "Commune" which the Revolutionary Napoleon
so much dreaded. Mark Twain's prophecy that after Haussmann's
strategic street openings barricades could not again be
built in Paris proved to be incorrect. The Commune did erect
^"barricades. But they could be demolished by the new French
republic under Thiers within a week ; even if it had to be a week
272 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
of ghastly bloodshed. For Marx this was the destruction of his
hopes. The artillery of the new French "bourgeois" republic
victoriously bombarded the city of Paris which was in the hands
of the Communists. Marx asserted that Bismarck gloated over
this bombardment of Communistic Paris by the French bourgeois
who were backed by the Prussian army lurking nearby.
Marx referred to one of Bismarck's earliest and bloodiest
speeches delivered twenty years before, soon after the revolution
of 1848 had shaken Berlin and the other capitals of Europe.
Bismarck had then declared: "If the big cities should dare to
rebel again, the real people of Prussia will be able to force them
into obedience, even if it should be necessary to wipe the cities
off the earth." In 1871, Marx claimed that the German bom
bardment of Paris appeared to Bismarck as "the first installment
of the general annihilation of all big cities he had prayed for."
The fact that the workingmen beneficiaries of Napoleon's laborcreating
and city-planning policy turned against bourgeois
society only after he had led them into a disastrous war proves
that Napoleon was by no means entirely wrong when he defended
his vast public works by his much repeated phrase: "Every
Frenchman for whom I secure a comfortable existence is a recruit
against socialism."
The dangerous policy of Napoleon-Haussmann who thought
it well to finance the rebuilding of the congested French cities
by increasing land values and the heights of houses has found
subsequent imitators. The work of two prominent ones, the
American, the late F. F. French, and the Frenchman, Le
Corbusier, may be discussed here.
Le Corbusier shares with many thoughtful Frenchmen the
deep dissatisfaction about the urban development in post-war
Paris. Le Corbusier, therefore, proposed to pull down the city of
Paris, or at least large sections of it. He proposed to begin with
clearing completely the most congested and very expensive 800
acres in the heart of this city, on the right bank of the Seine
River. The area is now covered with buildings from five to seven
stories high. The appalling maze of cluttered buildings which
now exists there is to be replaced by twenty skyscrapers, each
sixty stories high and each one standing in a twenty-five acre
garden of which the skyscraper covers only five per cent. Each
TWENTIETH CHAPTER 273
tower shall contain working space for some 30,000 to 40,000 peo
ple. This proposed occupancy is from two to eight times larger
than the population which at present is squeezed into the existing
muddle of narrow streets and dark courtyards. Le Corbusier's
hope to squeeze into the skyscrapers more than twice as many
people as previously lived upon the same area makes him believe
that his proposal is economical and apt to be realized in the
near future.
The skyscrapers Le Corbusier proposed have a cross shape.
The axis of the cross is assumed to be either 500 or 660 feet long.
An area of twenty-five acres covered at the rate of five per cent
(or 1.25 acres built upon) gives him 50,000 square feet of area,
or, in 60 stories, 3,000,000 square feet of floor space (including,
however, the areas sacrificed for elevators, stairways, corridors,
walls, flues, etc.). In order to accommodate 30,000 workers
upon this floor space (as Le Corbusier plans) there can be given
a net area of only about seventy-five square feet (or even less)
to each worker. This is less than one-half the American standAbove:
(right), General plan of
Le Corbusier's scheme for Paris;
(left), Floor plan of individual
building.
Below: (left) Elevation, show
ing parts shadowed.
274 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
ard. To arrive at even so low an average Le Corbusier has to
work up a rather tortured ground plan. He breaks up the
exterior of his buildings by numerous U-shaped courts. Although
Le Corbusier thinks this an excellent method of lighting the rooms
in his buildings and although he calls his buildings "real
radiators of light," more than one-half of his rooms are very
badly lighted. Whoever has worked in the lower stories of
closely spaced skyscrapers knows that a room in a deep narrow
court, even if it does open towards a park on one side, is badly
lighted during many hours of the day. When it comes to sun
light in an office it does not matter so much how many feet above
the ground this office is located, as to what an extent the sunlight
can penetrate into the office unobstructed by walls facing the
office or rising at its left and at its right. Le Corbusier's "real
radiators of light" are in reality ghastly shafts of about 25
by 35 feet and of a depth of 600 feet. The fact that these
shafts are open, on one side, does not make them any the less
fantastic.
The foregoing facts have been stressed by the author in
1927.
1
Since that time Le Corbusier has publicly admitted (for
instance, in his lecture given at Columbia University in Novem
ber, 1935) that large parts of his proposed towers are badly
lighted. He has made new proposals for towers which are much
lower (i. e., much less "economical") and which do not suffer
from the ugly light shafts of his former plans. After, however,
having made all these reasonable concessions, Mr. Le Corbusier
calmly proceeded to show lantern slides illustrating his old pro
posals of badly lighted towers and discussed them as if they
could still be taken seriously.
But it is not Le Corbusier alone who thus returned to the
obsolete policy of Napoleon and Haussmann who thought it good
finance to rebuild congested cities by increasing land values and
building heights. This same policy is continuously being revived
in the congested sections of New York. The outstanding example
is the so-called Knickerbocker Village. It is called village
probably because it is no village at all but one of the most
congested and tallest conglomerations of dwellings in the world.
This unpleasant fact is supposed to be veiled by giving it a name
1 Cf. The city planning monthly "Stadtebau," 1927, p. 69 ff.
TWENTIETH CHAPTER 275
suggesting quaintly pleasant and country-like conditions. The
Knickerbocker "Village" replaces congested six-storied "tene
ments" by twelve story "apartments," tripling (with 1047 per
sons per acre) the former population congestion per acre of
this area, and even quadrupling the average residential density
of Manhattan Island.
Immediately after the opening of these Knickerbocker Apart
ments the tenants, dissatisfied by the inefficiency with which the
buildings were operated, organized. They staged their first
Knickerbocker "Village" . . . New York (Fred F. French & Co.)
Above: General view.
Below: (left), Plot plan; (right), Detailed apartment plan of shaded part.
276 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
strike and refused to pay rent. This strike could be pacified by
strategic concessions to the new tenants and by equally strategic
evictions or threats of eviction. The strike, however, carried a
foreboding of the greater things which may develop if this
policy of increasing congestion should be carried further.
The attempt to abolish slums by building higher, instead of
lower, is false economy. True, three thousand people paying
about four to five dollars a month for their old dilapidated
rooms, are being replaced by the inhabitants of 6030 new rooms,
costing $12.50 per month per room, in Knickerbocker "Village"
and lined up along windowless, long and narrow corridors (4
feet wide and averaging 120 feet in length). (And 800 of these
"rooms" are in reality dining alcoves or bathrooms which were
permitted to be called "half rooms" in order to secure more
government subsidy.) It is also true that in a somewhat similar
instance the city authorities can point to a 262 per cent increase
in land assessment as a result of the Amalgamated Clothing
Workers' rehousing scheme in Manhattan with its 112 families
per acre (which must not be compared with the London standard
of 12 families per acre in public rehousing areas). It is again
true that the late Mr. F. F. French, promoter of Knickerbocker
Village, claims : "The high cost of land in lower Manhattan does
not render slum clearance impracticable . . . the cost of land is
rendered less expensive per room by building twelve or sixteen
stories on it rather than six."
The weakness of this argument, however, is emphasized by
the 1933 report of the New York State Board of Housing: "on
land as expensive as $6 a square foot commercial practice cannot
produce a cheaper room in a twelve-story building than in a sixstory
building. In both, only a room rent as high as $18 a
month would be remunerative. But under the regulations of the
State Housing Law, a room on one-dollar land costs $10.21 in a
twelve-story building and only $9.51 in a six-story building."
These figures again prove the accuracy of the late Eberstadt's
often quoted contentions. This German master in the science of
housing has established the fact that the higher a dwelling is
the more is it apt to be burdened with unproductive expenses.
He has also proved, as has been said before, that the individual
two-story row-house is the most economical unit for housing the
TWENTIETH CHAPTER 277
masses and for distributing the heavy financial burden connected
with a large-scale project.
2
2 The First Volume (p. 246) of this publication indicates a similar con
clusion reached by the architects, Aronovici, Churchill, Lescaze, Mayer and
the late Henry Wright in their illuminating analyses of housing economics
in New York.
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER
POLITICAL ECONOMY IN GERMAN HOUSING
The favorable French opinion of German housing stated in
the Nineteenth Chapter is clearly dictated by that noble spirit
of national self-criticism which proud and progressive nations
relentlessly cultivate (see pp. 262 if.). In spite of its severity
this French estimation contains a degree of truth. These people
and many patriotic Americans will think it even more true of
their own countrymen have, one may say, reposed upon the
laurels and other advantages gathered in the World War. In
matters of internal reform this War was for some of the victors
as dangerous as the victorious Civil War was for the northern
States of America.
Germany, on the other hand, during the post-War spell of
democratic enthusiasm and social freedom and during the five
years (1924 to 1929) of boundless international credit enjoyed
by her first Republic spent about 3 billion dollars of the public
money, achieving thereby considerable advances in the field of
housing, not to mention the great amount of other social archi
tecture (public baths, playgrounds, stadia, hospitals and build
ings of labor unions). It would, however, be rash to overestimate
these achievements. Not only were they (by 1929) almost entirely
discontinued by the anti-democratic propaganda of the Hitler
ites, even before this political party actually came into power;
not only did the German post-War housing hardly surpass what
was being accomplished at the same time in Holland, England,
Austria, Denmark, Sweden and probably in other countries ; but,
most of all, the German accomplishments, notable as they were,
were far from what they could have been or from what would
have been required in order to prevent the catastrophic reaction
brought about by the Hitlerites. To be sure, post-World-War
Germany has fought more valiantly for internal reform than the
post-Civil-War United States, thereby indicating that the for-
278
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 279
mer enjoyed a spiritual, if not physical victory in the World
War. And compared with the inexcusable indifference to (or
even obstacles impeding) better housing vouchsafed by the im
perial regime in pre-War Germany, the post-War achievements
seem almost like miracles. But the final "moral breakdown" (the
catastrophe which in the United States has been so eloquently
described by Emerson, Henry Adams and James Truslow Adams)
occurred in the Germany of 1933 with no less virulence than it
did in the America of 1870. And Germany's economic strength
was so much inferior to America's inexhaustible economic power
that the German collapse could not but be even more severe than
the American one two generations earlier.
The breakdown of Germany's morale following her gallant
effort in the field of social architecture might well discourage
the advocates of comprehensive planning. The German failure
requires analysis. What influences invalidated Germany's much
vaunted democratic enterprise from its beginning, or during its
development, and what sinister agents finally ruined it? Such an
analysis may also shed new light on America's great parallel
example: the memorable advantages grasped by Lincoln and the
opportunities ignored by Grant.
Republican Germany's surprising post-War effort in housing
has sometimes been referred to as her "great five-year program"
(for instance, by the late Henry Wright in his excellent new
book "Rehousing Urban America," p. 96). Such a term is
perhaps too complimentary to be applied to Germany. It sug
gests a more comprehensive effort and greater political wisdom
than had actually been brought to the task. The word "fiveyear
plan" suggests the Russian idea of the endeavor to engage
the whole nation in a planned campaign for a technical and
economic reorganization and regeneration. Such a coordinated
effort has been sorely lacking in Germany although nothing short
of a successful attempt in this direction could have saved the
Socialist and the Catholic masses from the catastrophe of 1933,
and could have prevented the victorious re-habilitation of the
reactionary Junkers exploiting the industrialists and their nu
merous unreasoning supporters in the middle classes.
From the very beginning of the Republic and even, previous
to it, during the War, promises of better housing and of sub-
280 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
sistence homesteads have played prominent roles in the ruthless
political campaigns involving such issues as monarchy versus
republic, militarism versus pacifism, industrial exploitation ver
sus labor unions. The two outstanding leaders of the ultimately
victorious "Third Reich" owe part of their popular appeal to
the seductive promises they made at an early date in matters
pertaining to housing and real estate. "The fatherland shall
help everyone willing to live by honest labor to win a home which
is secure from the exploitation of usurers, fit for the sheltering
of German family life and for bringing up children healthy in
body and mind," the late President Hindenburg wrote during the
World War.
And Adolf Hitler, whom the dying Hindenburg entrusted
with the execution of his patriotic wishes for Germany's mili
tary regeneration, had, even in his official and allegedly "un
changeable" program of 1920 and 1926, promised "a national
reform of the laws governing real estate, the creation of a law
permitting, for public benefit, the expropriation of real estate
without indemnification, the abolition of ground rent and the
prohibition of all speculation in real estate."
Such promises were forgotten the moment those who made
them came into power. But as they were proclaimed these
assurances sounded the historic clarion call of the Roman soil
reformers, the Gracchi, of the old German "peasants war," of
the American President Jackson, and of the American Freesoilers
who, in 1856, formed the nucleus of the new Republican Party
and helped ultimately to form the one-third minority that
brought the Presidency to Lincoln, the Homestead Act to Ameri
can settlers, and doom to the landed aristocracy of the South.
Nowhere could similar promises have been more sorely needed
than in Germany where the "peasants war" (152425) during
the so-called Reformation had practically restored human
chattel-slavery. Its "moral, social and political blessings" have
been praised not only in South Carolina, by the "war hawk,"
John C. Calhoun, but, three centuries earlier, in Germany, by the
"reformer," Martin Luther, who enflamed the princes and noble
men of his time to curb the small farmers, ruthlessly and for
centuries to come.
Field Marshall Hindenburg had given his soldiers the charm-
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 281
ing war-time promise of home-sweet-home in order to please the
large and ever active but peaceable group of German "soil re
formers" whose leader, Professor Damaschke, soon afterwards
was so often referred to as the first candidate for the Presidency
of the new German Republic. (This man's death in 1935 has re
ceived considerable space in American newspapers.) He had de
rived much of his pacific inspiration from America, especially
from the book "Progress and Poverty" first published in 1879 by
the same Henry George whose "livid description of the carking
desolation spread under high noon of American prosperity had
given no serious qualms to the managers of politics." (Beard)
It was during the World War that the propaganda of the
German "soil reformers" became more threatening. They
patiently repeated to the suffering soldiers (and to their families)
the pathetic appeal made 2050 years earlier by the classic housing
reformer, Tiberius Gracchus, to the soldiers of Rome: "The
savage beasts have their dens, their places of refuge and repose.
But the men who bear arms and offer their lives for the safety
of the country, enjoy nothing in it but the air and the light and
have no houses and no places of their own where they can settle."
The German reiteration of the old Roman housing propa
ganda sounded equally as appealing to the socialist privates who
daily embraced death in the trenches as to the aristocratic gen
erals who espied it from afar through efficient telescopes and
commanded it by long distance telephones. At the same time
Lloyd George demanded that England, after the War, be made
"fit for heroes to live in" and promised the English soldiers the
abolition of the slums from which so many of them came. At
least the slums of London were for the most part only one or
two stories high and consisted generally of houses lined up
along simple lanes, while the tenements built on the highly
mortgaged soil of Berlin and of most other German cities were
uniformly five stories high and were crowded about dark court
yards. Their victims, therefore, could not even enjoy the "air
and the light" conceded as an inalienable right of the poor
Roman soldiers who were deprived of land.
One of the curious outgrowths of the World War's "trench
spirit" was a new and less tolerant attitude on the part of the
soldiers towards the essentials of the life they had left behind
282 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
and had indeed never enjoyed. It was commonly and almost
seditiously rumored that the bellicose activities in the open had
made the common soldier unfit for returning meekly to the
German tenements, many of which were worse than the trenches.
The introduction to this book mentions the pre-War housing
propaganda relating to the 600,000 Berliners in badly crowded
tenements. This propaganda had reached wide divisions of the
population and had received special support from the powerful
labor unions whose leaders, more far-seeing than many of their
American colleagues, recognized how easily workingmen, even
with rising wages, can be plundered of their incomes and health
by rising rents and bad living quarters. Also, after the War,
the Socialist and Catholic labor unions and the different federal,
state and municipal governments supported by them, became
much more the real agents of housing reform than either Field
Marshall Hindenburg and his Nationalist supporters were, or
than "Fiihrer" Hitler and his National-Socialists are, although
their futile promises of better housing had acquired for both
these men good electioneering results.
Today, it is generally recognized, even by advocates of mere
slum clearance, that housing is
by no means a purely municipal
matter and simply a cure for urban ills. Housing can be suc
cessful only when it is a part of such state planning as is able
to generate new life by means of the effective redistribution of
crowded industries and suffering agriculture. One must keep
this urgent fact in mind when judging the curious events related
in the following pages.
The first President of the new German Republic, the Socialist
Ebert, died early in 1925, shortly after the inauguration of
those energetic, though often haphazard, housing activities by
which the Socialist and Catholic governments of Republican
Germany achieved so much merit and even greater fame. As a
fighter for homesteads, however, this first German President
was by no means a worthy imitator of the Roman Gracchi or of
such American friends of the small farmer as the "leveler" Jef
ferson, "Old Hickory" Jackson, or Abraham Lincoln, who suc
ceeded in opening land to city workers willing to farm it. On
the contrary, the Socialist Ebert had strong conservative crav
ings and connived with the army generals and their landholding
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 283
Junker friends who, hardly worth a picayune and therefore more
rapacious, were the diminutive .
counterpart of the planting and
slave holding aristocracy of the American South. Although
Ebert was the representative of the people having small or no
means, he unwittingly prepared the political re-establishment of
the big landowners. Like the Southern planters before Lincoln's
time, the Junkers enjoyed (and still enjoy) the social prestige
that indicates power. For many hundreds of years they have
known how to exploit every ruler of state for their private ends.
They called themselves Nationalists and Patriots and their
belligerent propaganda was greatly augmented by the Treaty
of Versailles. It was this "peace" Treaty that infuriated the
Germans (whom Wilson's "fourteen points" had pacified) against
their former enemies who imposed upon them huge indemnifica
tions which could not be paid unless Germany's role in interna
tional commerce was magnified on a basis of world-wide free
trade. The Treaty of Versailles made no provisions for this.
The War had brought America into the salient economic
position formerly held by England. America had become the
creditor of all nations. But she was opposed to, or psychologi
cally not yet able to enjoy the privileges inherent in such a
position. She refused the foreign goods offered in payment by
her debtors. Since, however, in the long run, debts can only be
paid by goods, America's refusal to accept them became equal to
declaring international default. And since the Treaty of
Versailles had commanded Germany's payment of especially large
slices of all international debts, America's refusal to accept her
goods approximated the enforcement of Germany's default, a
position preceded and enlivened by great internal difficulties.
Many well-informed Americans agree with the Secretary of
Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, who often and with due concern
has spoken of "the insane spectacle of American tariffs raised
in 1922 and again in 1930, in defiance of the inevitable funda
mental trend of the American post-War position."
*
Probably
no other form of "insanity" since the War has contributed as
much to the catastrophic economic depression of 1929 to 1936
and, incidentally, to the political debacle in Germany.
The Versailles Treaty was not more sane than the "insane
1 Cf. "New Frontiers" by H. A. Wallace (New York, 1934), p. 71.
284 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
spectacle" in America. This treaty permitted Germany to
return, after 1924, to its pre-War system of high tariffs in
favor of the Junkers' landed estates reaping profits from that
economic "autarchy" which prepares and invites war.
The new German situation was analogous to the American
one under Lincoln except for these two important differences:
Firstly: the big planters of the American South found their
interest in fighting for free trade, while the would-be big planters
of Germany benefited from high tariffs. Secondly : the Ameri
can planters later found their inspiration in Lincoln and in
America's decision to be free, while Germany's aristocratic land
owners always remained victorious over the German people cowed
by centuries of despotism and military drill. The Junkers have
controlled their nation at first through the Prussian kings, later
through Hindenburg and, today, they control it through the
medium of their even more popular tool, Chancellor Hitler. Only
immediately after their defeat in the World War and then only
for a short time did the Junkers lose their power.
But even one year before Ebert's death Germany had re
turned to her pre-War policy of subsidizing the large agrarian
estates by rapidly increasing the tariffs on grain at the expense
of the industrial laborers in the crowded cities. This was equal
to restoring political power to the Junker class and to the
rapidly re-arming military caste which is intimately connected
with it, both of which have always mastered the war-ridden
country. The victory of the Junkers meant death to all hopes
for the democratic replanning of Germany and for a truly
modern housing policy based upon a wise and expedient redistri
bution of the population.
Curiously enough this latest restoration of the large agri
cultural estates took place in contradiction to the ideas of the
late von Treitschke, Prussia's most nationalistic historian and
statesman in obvious sympathy with the Junker class. When,
long before the War, he discussed the fact that about 200,000
Germans yearly left their fatherland and found homes in Amer
ica, he declared: "Germany is by no means over-populated, es
pecially in her northeastern parts." (These sparsely settled
areas are devoid of free peasants and are the very stronghold
of the Prussian Junkers.) Treitschke believed that by subdivid-
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 285
ing her large agrarian estates Germany could be made to accom
modate a population of almost 100 millions. At present she
contains only 65 millions ; but, nevertheless, the Prussian aristo
crats clamor for expansion just as vehemently as their cousins,
the aristocratic Southerners of the United States formerly did.
Both vociferated so loudly that a considerable part of world
opinion feels that their demands must have been and must now
be justified.
Replanning the nation for a democratic redistribution of
landed property, a national rehousing policy and the compulsory
abandonment of the ghastly tenements built under Bismarck and
the last two Williams would have been an inspiring duty for a
German statesman of Gracchian or Lincolnian caliber.
There were powerful national reasons why this duty had to
be fulfilled. Many of the large estates were of very low agri
cultural productivity. The managing efficiency of their aristo
cratic owners has been unduly praised. Furthermore, small
farming of the Danish type would have been more suitable to the
changed economic peculiarities of the country. But the strong
est reason for the unproductivity of the Junkers was intimately
associated with the predatory old mortgage system. It is that
same system which during the last hundred and fifty years has
been the fearful handicap of German city-building. (This fatal
mortgage system which, since the War, has been copied in Amer
ica and has here brought about dead losses of over ten billion
dollars will be discussed in another chapter.) For more than a
century the facility of contracting continuously new mortgage
debts and paying the interest by a new increase of the tariff on
bread made it possible for the economically decaying aristocrats
to rival with the rapidly increasing "conspicuous consumption of
wealth" (to use Veblen's pointed phrase). The pace for this
more and more voracious consumption was set by the big in
dustrialists who on their part yearned to be accepted as social
equals by the aristocratic exploiters of the state. For more than
a century this highly immoral situation has been the secret of
Germany's political and economic tragedies and the grave of her
hopes for better planning and housing. "The indispensable effort
to rival with the richer bourgeoisie's increasing standard of
life has become a disaster for the majority of the landed aris-
286 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
tocracy of eastern Germany." So has the immorality of the
condition been described by Max Weber, one of the internation
ally recognized economists of Germany. The situation is ag
gravated by the fact that these 15,000 "big" landowners are
individually only pretentious small fry, approximately one-third
of whom own not more than 1250 acres. Therefore "their in
herited political power," Max Weber continues, "instead of being
established on a broad, secure economic basis, must, on the con
trary, be used for obtaining economic advantages. . . . Under
such conditions their request for economic protection easily
turns into the demand of the dissatisfied recipient of alimonies
to which he feels himself entitled."
2
The large estates could bring adequate financial returns only
under the protection of high tariffs ruinous to Germany's in
dustries and to the vast majority of her people. According to
leading agricultural scientists many of the big estates could
never be made profitable by the present methods and the avail
able hired help. The low-grade agricultural laborers have, in
fact, been kept very much in that old serf-like condition which
prevailed, such was their status even in law, prior to the time
of Napoleon I, who very much against the Junkers' will ef
fectuated at least the beginning of the laborers' legal liberation.
And, today, these Prussian farm workers, although not exactly
slaves are yet serfs who have not up to the present found a
German Lincoln, and who can attain their freedom only by flee
ing from the country into the big cities. "The farm laborer
knows that as long as the Junkers rule he must give up his
home if he wants to be free." (Max Weber) On the other
hand, however, only the subdivision of the large estates into
small farms and the self-abnegating labor of individual owners
with fairly large families could restore real productivity to the
soil. The Junkers fight this solution with every method, fair
or foul. Indeed, this solution would mean a return to the more
intensive procedures and denser population prevalent at the time
of the first settlement (i.e., before the year 1400) and before
the "noblemen" had plundered and driven away the small farmers
2
Cf. Max Weber, Entwicklungs-Tendenzen in der Lage der ostelbischen
Landarbeiter. (Archiv fur soziale Gesetzgebung, 1894.)
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 287
and had enslaved the few hands which are required for the
noblemen's more extensive agricultural pursuits.
Incidentally, a return to the older and denser form of settle
ment would be the only means of protecting the empty eastern
provinces from the ultimate influx of the more democratic Slavic
nations who, for political and military reasons, introduced a
very compact form of settlement east of the German frontiers.
But such truly national considerations were and are of no avail
among the Prussian aristocracy which emphasizes its political
Nationalism for more practical inducements, i.e., for the tingling
of the pecuniary nerve.
To oppose such pseudo-Nationalism by a truly NationalSocialist
policy of rehousing and resettlement would have been
the fighting chance for a democratic German statesman. He
could have copied the replanning work of the new Slavic states
created near the eastern boundary of Germany by the Treaty
of Versailles. These states got rid of their overbearing German
aristocracy by distributing the land among many thousands of
small Slavic farmers, thus creating a strong national and demo
cratic basis for the new commonwealth. It is perhaps one of the
most regrettable facts in the world's social history that the
German Socialists were prevented, largely by fallacious socialistic
doctrines, from making true social use of their power, when
they had it.
Immediately after the War they could have fol
lowed Lincoln's example and passed a liberal German Home
stead Act subdividing the aristocratic estates unfit for economic
survival. This is exactly what Hitler, as quoted above, promised,
but never did. The Socialists did not enforce the necessary sub
division largely because the "scientific" doctrines of Marx did
not demand it. Marx fatalistically believed that the concentra
tion rather than the division of property deserved encouragement.
Concentration of property, expropriating the few remaining big
owners, would, he believed, lead automatically to the communistic
state. The Socialists, furthermore, suffered from the other er
roneous belief that technically also the age of big scale agri
culture was everywhere at hand and that small farming was
an antiquated mode of production. Ideas such as these may to
some extent be justified in such countries as America or Russia
288 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
where enormous plains and rich soil permit (or rather per
mitted !) extensive farming. The illusion that the same concepts
can, and at once must, be applied to densely populated countries
like Germany, Denmark, Holland or France is dangerous.
Even in Russia ideas may change. H. G. Wells relates his
conversation with Lenin: "We talked chiefly of the necessity of
substituting large scale cultivation for peasant cultivation."
But on September 10, 1935 the New York Times published
Walter Duranty's report: "Soviet Peasants Get Deeds to Land.
. . . With a shrewd if somewhat belated recognition of the
peasant mentality, such grants are being given sparingly to
collectives finishing the harvest sooner and better than schedule
and are being made the occasion for public rejoicing with the
formal presentation of the grants and speeches by important
local officials. All Europe knows that the outright ownership
of land by the farmers is the surest weapon any regime can
have for its own stability. The Bolsheviki have reforged it for
the defense of their agrarian socialization, which only three
years ago was the cause of much strife and suffering in Russian
villages."
The German Socialists had no "shrewd recognition of the
peasant mentality." They preferred to build huge model tene
ments in the big cities ; they also tried to win the farmers by
burdening the city workers with continuously rising tariffs which,
however, were mostly profitable for the Junkers. Thus the peas
ants were driven into the arms of Hitler who, having received his
power from the Junkers, Hindenburg and von Papen, quickly
ceased talking about the subdivision of their estates.
A comparison here of three presidents, Washington, Grant
and Hindenburg, is significant. What Washington said about
his aversion to receiving a "pension" from some powerful eco
nomic group has been restated in the First Chapter. Reference
has also been made to Grant's rather close proximity to the
Erie Railroad scandal and the Gold Conspiracy; but the fact
remains that after his presidency he was poor and, only on his
deathbed, received a pension from the United States. All
German state planning has been deeply influenced by Hindenburg's
actions, actions which were diametrically opposed to those
of Washington and Grant.
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 289
After the death of the pseudo-Socialist Ebert and after
Hindenburg's election to the Presidency, the Junkers had pon
dered in their own way over that classic phrase of the Roman
Gracchi which had been used in time of war to win the German
soldiers to embrace the idea of homesteads and better housing:
"The savage beasts have their dens. . . ." The Junkers as
serted that it would be unjust for a Field Marshall who had
for four years successfully opposed a peace without annexations
(although, incidentally, he had thereby brought about Germany's
complete downfall) not to be presented by his grateful nation
with a landed estate worthy of his old noble name. The large
landowners had always objected to any statesman presiding over
them without himself being a landowner. They were accustomed,
for almost a thousand years, and it was therefore their godgiven
right, to be ruled only by big landowners. Knowing well
how to hold their own, they prevailed upon the less close-fisted
barons of heavy industry, the producers of iron and coal, who
in important matters were wont to submit to the Junkers as
their traditional and social superiors. Big industry, therefore,
bequeathed to President Hindenburg
3
the large agrarian estate
of Neudeck. This was one of the cleverest strokes executed by
the Junkers during their everlasting management of Germany
and her rulers.
3
Today one can hardly avoid seeing the parallel in the action of Presi
dent Hindenburg who accepted a gift of a large landed estate offered to
him by the Junkers and paid for by big industrialists both strongly imbued
with "principles unfriendly to republican government." By this ingenious
machination of the Junkers Hindenburg became a Junker himself and was
quite rapidly induced to abandon his previous fairly republican attitude
and to favor thereafter the reactionary plans of the Junkers. This led to
the fall of the parliamentarian ministers, Bruening and Schleicher, who
planned to stop subsidizing the parasitic Junkers, and it also led to Hinden
burg's delivering the political power to Hitler who pledged that he would
not carry out his former program of a democratic land policy of condemn
ing and subdividing the uneconomical estates of the Junkers. Here are the
words with which Washington, on the other hand, objected to the gift offered
to him: "What would be the opinion of the world when it comes to be re
lated that George Washington has received twenty thousand dollars and
five thousand pounds sterling of the public money as an interest therein?
.... Would it not in some respects be considered in the same light as a
pension? .... Under whatever pretense, and however customarily these
gratuitous gifts are made in other countries, should I not thenceforward
be considered as a dependent?" Washington, nevertheless, accepted the
gift but immediately bequeathed it to institutions of learning for the per
petration of liberalism. Hindenburg after having accepted the gift did not
bequeath it; he had from the beginning accepted it for his son in order to
evade the national inheritance tax. But here, as m so many similar cases,
the glorious legend is stronger than the sordid facts: Hindenburg is still
being celebrated as an unimpeachable nobleman.
290 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
From now on, old Hindenburg, who admittedly had never
taken an interest in politics, economics, or other non-military
matters, suddenly forgot that his last (second) Presidential
election was due to the Socialist and Catholic workers. He
turned an ardent sympathizer of agrarian interests. He there
fore angrily dismissed two chancellors, the "bolshevist," Bruening
(a devout Catholic) and the self-styled "social general,"
Schleicher, both of whom thought it impossible to delay any
longer the introduction of a somewhat less anti-social agrarian
policy. Bruening and Schleicher favored small settlements and
the subdivision of at least those big estates which could not, by
any conceivable elevation of protective tariffs, ever be made pro
ductive and which depended for their economic salvation entirely
upon the continuous renewal of hundreds of millions of state
subsidies given to big agriculture (Osthilfe). These profuse
gifts, in the last analysis, must be paid for out of the taxes
collected from industrial laborers in crowded cities. These
workers are forced to pay high taxes and high prices, to boot,
for their bread, in addition to still being, in many cases, badly
housed and prevented (by the lack of an effective homestead
act) from returning to the open country of their fathers, from
which they had been driven by the Junkers. But the Socialists,
at least, have built fine tenements for the upper strata of in
dustrial city workers and have won the admiration of Jean
Giraudoux and of many American travelers.
When the Junkers saw their big state subsidies threatened
by General Schleicher, they handed the power to Hitler. Having
been able to ply honest old Hindenburg, they had no difficulty
in picking from Hitler's highly contradictory policies such parts
as suited their interest. Those of Hitler's followers who insisted
upon the tangible realization of the more popular aspects of
his versatile program were shot in the wholesale murder of June
30, 1934. Among them was General von Schleicher, the noble
man who had committed the felony of planning the subdivision
of noble estates.
Although the liberal-socialist-Catholic governments (existing
from 1919 to 1931) have carried out no comprehensive state
planning ideas and have done little towards a rational redistribu
tion of Germany's population, they have, nevertheless, indis-
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 291
putably enjoyed international and especially American credit
and have caused the erection of 2,510,000 urban dwellings
*
(about 300,000 of which were rehabilitated old ones). And since
1929 (when the belligerent Nationalist propaganda had ruined
German credit and had put an end to the previous and continuous
inflow of American loans) the pre-Hitler governments discon
tinued expensive tenement house building (price $2500 per onefamily
dwelling) and efficiently encouraged the more rational
construction of subsistence farms (price $900 per dwelling).
When Hitler's fourth party congress convened, the American
newspapers reported (Sept. 5, 1934) the affirmations of superior
achievement proclaimed on this solemn occasion by Nazi-officials
eager to vindicate their destruction of democratic ideals and
self-governing institutions. In the field of housing their conten
tion was:
"Twice as many homes have been constructed during the
first six months of 1934 as during the first six months of 1933.
The total value of the building materials produced in Germany
rose by 1,000,000,000 marks in 1933 and statistics for the
first half of 1934 show another increase of 50 per cent."
The validity of dictatorial statistics can seldom be proved.
But even if Hitler's housing computations are correct, they may
only mean (1) that during the first six months (1933) of his
government, building activities were practically at a standstill,
partly because (2) the Hitler government, strongly favoring
manufacturers and vested interests, permitted the price of build
ing materials to rise. The Nazi government spent 500 million
Marks (200 million dollars) for rehabilitation, i.e., for trans
forming large apartments and large suburban one-family houses
into small apartments and small tenements. With such large
subsidies some recovery in building activities and in prices of
building materials is quite possible. The public money for re
habilitation was largely a subsidy given to the owners of old
apartment houses. These owners, in Berlin (as in Vienna), had
strongly opposed the socialist housing policies and were, there
fore, instrumental in bringing Hitler to power.
Something not quite dissimilar developed in the United States.
In 1934, many American advocates of better housing seemed
4 See Vol. Ill of this publication.
292 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
to be disappointed because instead of the vigorous construction
of new dwellings which they had expected from the New Deal,
they could discern only some loans for the rehabilitation of
old ones. An important difference, however, distinguishes the
American from the German situation. In America, about onehalf
of all families live in their own houses, while Germany by
her bureaucratic regulations and stupid exploitation of bad
mortgage laws has long ago become a nation of tenement house
dwellers. Loans for rehabilitation, therefore, in America are
apt to be a fairly democratic matter, while in Germany they are
apt to be of benefit first and foremost to the small but influential
group of large tenement house owners. Only one per cent of
Berlin's inhabitants are owners of houses.
The official newspaper of the Czechoslovakian government
(Prager Presse) published, on August 22, 1935, an article
entitled "The Crisis in German Housing." In it a leading Ger
man official (Staatssekretar Reinhardt) was quoted as saying:
"The lack of small dwellings, already very great in 1934, will
become even greater in 1935. Soon we will have a general scar
city of lodgings (allgemeine Wohmvngsnot)." It furthermore
reports that the Hitler regime, always bent upon union and co
ordination, instituted its housing activities by uniting seven ex
isting organizations into a comprehensive "Working Communion
for Furthering the Construction of Workingmen's Homes."
But the government gave it very little financial support. It was
officially stated, however, that Germany at present lacks
1,350,000 dwellings, 500,000 of which are "most urgently
needed." Since so little construction was actually forthcoming,
the favorite plan of "liquidating" the shanty towns (allegedly
homes of "communists") surrounding Berlin, had to be aban
doned. They "house" 140,000 people in the most primitive
manner, although they afford them more sun and air than
did the clumsy pre-War tenements of Berlin.
Real improvement in housing is possible only in times of a
general rise in employment and wages. Employment and wage
statistics are almost identical with housing statistics. Hitler
has given new work to all industries which produce war mate
rials, many of them working overtime. And, in spite of reports
about the boycott of Germany, she has in 1933 and 1934
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 293
doubled her imports of raw materials required for armaments.
According to official statistics (Institute fur KonjunkturForschung)
the number of those privately employed in Germany
during the first Hitler year has risen from 12 millions at the end
of 1932 to 13.3 millions at the end of 1933. The industrial
workers' hours of work have been increased by an average of 6
per cent. The total sum paid for wages has risen by 3 per cent.
Therefore the real wages paid have sunk during Hitler's first
year by 13 per cent. Evidently Hitler's destruction of the labor
unions was not as much of a boon to the working masses as Hit
ler's propaganda wishes them to believe. After October 1, 1934,
industrial laborers under 25 years of age lost their claim to
regular work in their own trades. They now have to abandon
their jobs to older, married men who thereby disappear from the
lists of the unemployed. The younger men are not granted any
dole for unemployment, but are invited to join labor camps
where they have to do a kind of forced labor for little more than
board and lodging. The housing problem is being solved by the
construction of the roughest kind of barracks. Even for those
who are maintained in regular work, Hitler's general lowering
of wages by 13 per cent must necessarily have a repercussion in
their housing. Not all of them can benefit from the satisfactory
dwellings provided by the previous liberal-socialist-Catholic
governments. Hitler has done much for encouraging new mar
riages. They require new homes. It may take Hitler's propa
ganda many years before it will admit the sad effects on popular
housing resulting from his rapid destruction of German credit,
export and industries.
Only a dictator firmly enthroned over an enslaved nation can
make as startling revelations regarding housing as, for example,
Mussolini has made. After twelve years of Mussolini's dictato
rial achievements, the Herald Tribune, New York, reported on
September 8, 1934:
"As part of a general campaign to prevent an exodus of the
rural population to the cities, Italy's Fascist government has
taken the first steps in a sort of 'New Deal' program designed to
relieve unsanitary and often miserable living conditions among
large sections of the peasant population dependent on agricul
tural labor for sustenance .
294 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
"In accordance with orders of Premier Benito Mussolini, the
National Confederation of Agricultural Laborers has completed
a statistical survey in which it is shown that more than 6,000,000
persons, or about one-third the total rural population, inhabit
houses often in conditions of unhealthful promiscuity which
should be either demolished or subjected to extensive repairs
... In an address last March, Premier Mussolini described a
'thirty-year-program' calling for the building of 500,000 new
rural houses and the repairing of 930,000 others as one means
of combating excessive urbanization ... Of the 3,479,000
houses which fell within the limits of the survey it was found that
8 per cent, or 276,810, should be classified as absolutely beyond
repair, while 21 per cent, or 739,580, needed extensive repairs.
Houses in the first category were inhabited by 346,930 families,
a total of more than 2,000,000 persons. In other words, a tenth
of the entire rural population was found to be living in 'uninhabit
able* homes . . .
According to France Angelini, national
commissar for the confederation making the survey, at least onethird
of the Italian rural population is unsatisfactorily housed."
Similar conditions prevail in the rural housing of Germany
and of the southern part of the United States, not to speak of
the equally unfortunate conditions in most of the obsolete big
cities all over the world.
It will be interesting to ascertain whether fascist governments
like those of Italy and Germany or democratic governments like
those of England and the United States will be the first to stamp
out unsatisfactory housing, ruinous equally to the health and to
the economy of their respective nations. Figures published by
military dictators must be read with suspicion and with extreme
caution. This has been again evidenced quite recently by the
Italian example.
5
Different contradictory sets of official Italian
statistics conclusively prove that the various local unemployment
figures are badly tampered with in Rome. And even according
to these officially concocted calculations the number of Italian
unemployed in 1932 was at least twice what it was in 1922 dur-
5 See G. Salvemini's article, "Italian Unemployment Statistics" in "Social
Research, an International Quarterly," New York, August, 1934. "Even ac
cording to the statistics cooked up in Rome, 24 per cent of the total number
of workers (in Italian industry and commerce) were unemployed in February,
1932" while in non-Fascist England the much more reliable official figures
show at the same time only 17 per cent unemployed.
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 295
ing that severe crisis which Mussolini accepted as his justification
for destroying the labor unions and the democratic institutions
of the State.
Such unemployment as this makes better housing impossible.
And even the method, utilized rather recently in Germany and
Italy, of relieving unemployment by the feverish and expensive
manufacture of armaments is unlikely to cure permanently the
inferior housing conditions.
It is now proved that during the first 28 months of Hitler's
regime, Germany spent 17 billion marks from ordinary tax re
ceipts, 4.3 billion marks from publicly admitted new loans, 18.3
billion marks from secret new loans (mostly in the form of short
term bills of exchange endorsed by the Reichsbank), or a total of
15.8 billion dollars ; in other words, 250 per cent of the expendi
tures made by the French Republic during the same period (50
billion francs yearly).
6
By far the largest part of Germany's
secret loans has been used for "labor creating" armaments. This
has indeed brought relief to unemployment, but this method of
financing can hardly be continued for any length of time. Coun
tries using such methods must, as soon as the lack of funds or
inflation stops further unproductive spending, experience great
internal suffering or seek refuge in external war. Somehow,
nations always find the means with which to finance even the
most expensive war at least for a time. A fraction of the
money burned in war could cure all housing ills and, if wisely
spent and in proper time, could prevent the necessity of war.
Cf. the article, "Die endgiiltige Ziffer der Reichs-Ausgaben," by
L. Schwarzschild and H. Hermes in "Das Neue Tagebuch," Paris, Sept. 6,
1935.
TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER
POLITICAL ECONOMY IN AMERICAN HOUSING
AMERICAN MONEY FINANCED GREAT CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
SCHEMES IN EUROPE.
The first object of a renascent liberalism is education. Its
task is to aid in producing the habits of mind and character, the
intellectual and moral patterns, that are somewhere nearly even
with the actual movements of events. It is the split between the
latter as they have externally occurred and the ways of desiring,
thinking and of putting emotion and purpose into execution that
is the basic cause of present confusion in mind and paralysis in
action. The educational task cannot be accomplished merely by
working upon men's minds, without action that effects actual
change in institutions. The idea that dispositions and attitudes
can be altered by merely "moral" means conceived of as some
thing that goes on exclusively inside of persons is itself one of
the archaic ideas that must be changed. Thought, desire and
purpose exist in a constant give and take of interaction with
environing conditions and idealistic concepts. And resolute
thought is the first step in that change of action that will itself
carry further the needed change in patterns of mind and
character.
Because America "boasts itself, with truth, to be the might
iest republic that the world has ever seen," the Republican Presi
dent, Theodore Roosevelt (April 29, 1903) prophesied that in
the field of well-planned public works, the United States "will
rise to a position of headship and leadership such as no other
nation has ever yet attained. . . . There is no use of a nation
claiming to be a great nation, unless it is prepared to play a
great part."
The American people have begun to realize that the Demo
cratic "Professor in the White House" was right when, in 1919,
296
TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER 297
he warned them of a world catastrophe in case America should
refuse to assume world "headship and leadership."
The aftermath of the World War compels the American
people to fulfill the prophesies of their Republican President.
The depression existing since 1929 can be overcome only by a
new demonstration of the American "Pioneer Spirit," which, ac
cording to Theodore Roosevelt, is the truest and most practical
"Spirit of American Government."
The American people of 1936 desire- the resuscitated activity
of the old pioneer spirit. Common sense and the power of
practical thinking makes something of a pioneer and an engineer
of every good American. The sense of common decency inherent
in this engineering spirit is insulted by the ludicrous technical
inefficiency of those "realtors" who use their political power only
to imprison millions of their brethren in shameful dwellings.
Very appropriately Theodore Roosevelt further insisted:
"A century and a quarter ago when there were no big cities, no
factories, no mines, no railroads, when the normal relations of
capitalists and laborers were those of employers and the hired
help, you didn't need legislation to secure the rights of the
employee."
It was indeed long after the framing of the Constitution that
crowded slums for the employees and rapidly widening blighted
areas became the plight of all American cities. And (as has
been shown here) this was caused not by deficiencies in the Con
stitution, but by contempt of its spirit. It may be restated here
that the legislation created by the framers of the Constitution
made provision for city planning of the finest type. "As to the
federal city, it is not to be denied that this was a favorite of the
illustrious Washington. But it is no less certain that it was
warmly patronized by Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison and the great
majority of the members who at the time composed the opposi
tion in Congress, and who are now influential in the anti-federal
party." (Alexander Hamilton, Works, ed. H. C. Lodge, Vol.
VIII, p. 232.)
It has also been shown here that George Washington not only
secured the best city plan available, but that he also proved to
be a great empire planner and wished his city to become the
keystone of that comprehensive system of waterways by which
298 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
he planned to unify the growing nation and to connect the im
mense valleys of the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, Hudson, and
Mohawk with the Potomac. This was the very plan that
brought forth the American Constitution. There exists, there
fore, no constitutional or historical excuse for urban crowding
and for avoiding, today, effective legislation which will safeguard
ample space, sun, light and satisfactory working conditions for
all American city dwellers, at least one-third of whom are now
crowded into unhealthy tenements. In justice did Theodore
Roosevelt continue his argument in favor of adequate legislation
for the modern employee:
"Now such legislation is imperatively necessary. To give
such legislation is not to work a revolution in the Constitution;
it is simply to carry out the purpose of the Constitution by
facing the fact that new needs exist and that new methods must
be devised for reaching these new needs. It would be entirely
wrong for us as a nation or for us as individuals to neglect our
self-interest. Until a man can pull his own weight he can't help
anyone else pull anything. I have no use at all for the type of
reformer who seeks to have everybody do something for somebody
else before the individual is able to do anything for himself."
Benjamin Franklin's expression of the same idea was : "It is
hard for an empty sack to stand upright."
Not charity but a chance ! This fundamental American re
quirement underlies all planning for the wise use of the national
resources and for public works as an emergency measure to
counteract the slack in employment.
At present the American people are forced to live up to the
expectations of their last popular President from the Republican
ranks by making expenditures for public works and relief at the
rate of several billions a year. And this national expenditure
for public works, relief, etc. has proved to be far from sufficient,
i.e., far too small to make up for the much larger sum of missing
billions which private enterprise (ashamed of its recent misman
agement) is still withholding from the work the nation must
perform. The nationwide unemployment affords us an oppor
tunity to fulfill, in a much broader way, Theodore Roosevelt's
inspiring promise.
Needless to say, in the fight against unemployment, this en-
TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER 299
terprising statesman was also a leader. He demanded (January
26, 1915) that "the national government should at once start
work through the Reclamation Service and through the River
and Harbor Service in such ways as to relieve unemployment."
Quite in the vein of George Washington he asked for "a perma
nent labor policy," "a great scheme of flood control in the
Mississippi basin, including the Ohio and Missouri, at the mouth
of the Columbia, and in connection with Boston Harbor and the
Hudson." Subsequent presidents, like F. D. Roosevelt, have
tried to reap for the nation the harvest sown by Theodore Roose
velt and to bring to a tangible realization his suggestions.
Whoever is unwilling to trust the recommendations of so
practical a politician and successful a statesman as Theodore
Roosevelt, may prefer to accept the advice of as practical a
business man as Henry Ford who for many years was a national
idol and who, in 1935, was again mentioned as a desirable Re
publican candidate for the national Presidency. As a true
American he seems to have a strong appreciation of the old
American tradition in public works as a necessary objective in
national planning. In his book "Ford Ideals" (1922), the
world's most successful automobile manufacturer republished his
article, "The Army is Never Laid Off," which appeared in his
Dearborn newspaper immediately after the World War.
"During this war," Henry Ford here says, "it has happened,
as it sometimes does in industry, that there is nothing for an
army to do in the task it was organized for. We have seen
whole winters pass with nothing special for the armies to do.
Did the government lay the men off and stop their pay, saying,
'Come back when the fighting opens up again and we'll put you
on the payroll?' No. The Government felt itself under obliga
tion to keep that army intact and in good trim. Where is the
difference between our fighting armies and the armies of peace
our great industrial army? There are about twenty millions of
men engaged in the industrial maintenance of the United States.
They are our great standing army of production. . . . We
are ready for business. But suppose business isn't here. Are
we to sit down and wait? Is there nothing for us to do? It is
not the American way to sit down and wait. If not enough is
doing, we must start something."
300 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
Henry Ford himself controls a "great standing army of pro
duction." The Russian dictator Stalin, in a perhaps somewhat
unfriendly manner, observed that "Henry Ford unquestionably
is a capable organizer, but one who throws his workers into the
street when it serves his interests to do so."
1
But the above
quotation from Henry Ford's article ought to leave no doubt in
one's mind as to his eagerness to see the federal government
"start something," even when his own starters have proved in
efficient.
There are numberless ways "to take up the slack in employ
ment," says Henry Ford, and continues : "For the cost of a
month of war we could make such public improvements in this
land as would be worth most of the territory involved in the
war. . . . There are any number of things waiting to be done which
will bring fabulous benefits to our country if we would only turn
out to do them. And they are the very things which must be
done if American business is not to burst its already tight
bounds."
Thereupon Henry Ford made an observation pertaining to
war debts and the financing of public works of revealing signifi
cance :
"Somebody may ask where the money (to bring fabulous
benefits to our country) would come from. That is easiest
of all. If it were a shortage of men or food that confronted us,
it would be serious; but money is the cheapest thing there is.
All the money we spent on the war is here now. It is only ( !) the
material that is gone. The war is paid for, so far as money for
its support is concerned. Every man who contributed a bushel
of grain, a ton of material, or a day of labor to that great
enterprise has been paid. All the borrowing we did, we borrowed
from ourselves, and we spent it among ourselves. All the money
we lent, or the larger part of it, was spent here among us."
To appreciate the poignancy of Mr. Ford's observation, one
may compare it with the following statement taken from the
Annual Report of the Comptroller of the Currency (66th Con
gress of the United States, Dec. 6, 1920, Vol. 1, p. 2, etc.) :
"It has been estimated that the profits and increments accruing
1 Stalin said this in his interview with H. G. Wells; see N. Y. Herald
Tribune, Oct. 9, 1934.
TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER 301
to the people of this country during the last year of the war
amounted, approximately, to 50 billions of dollars ; and that the
surplus income over and above the living expenses of the people,
despite the extravagant rate at which they were living, approxi
mated 15 billion dollars for that year."
Out of these enormous war profits and the more or less ficti
tious war debts so pointedly alluded to by Henry Ford, developed
the big loans granted by the United States after the war to
foreign countries, those very loans which became so important
a cause of the large public works achieved, not in America, but
in Europe, between the years 1920 and 1930. This period
affords one an idea of the preponderant role which public works,
city planning and, today especially, housing, may and, according
to Washington and Jefferson, should play in all the world's
politics.
If Henry Ford's opinion on war debts, as quoted above, can
be relied upon, it would seem almost evident that the demand of
the United States for European repayment of "all the money
lent and spent here" during the War was uncalled-for. At any
rate, this repayment became doubtful long ago and, today, is
generally considered to be improbable. Rather than lose these
loans entirely (and in order to preserve at least the semblance of
receiving some return) the American bankers preferred to pay
(i.e., with "other American people's money") the interest on
them and send billions of new loans abroad. Thus the American
bankers seem to have hoped to create prosperity in Europe and
the economic ability for repayment. And thus, also, the United
States created the economic basis for much or most of the public
or semi-public housing abroad, referred to in previous Chapters
and illustrated in the accompanying Atlas. American money
has not been directly given for housing; but it has indirectly
benefited housing. About the large German portion of the Amer
ican loans going to Europe, the much-quoted President of the
Reichsbank and Minister of Economics, Dr. Schacht, wrote in
his book "The Stabilization of the Mark" (1926) :
"These foreign credits have been used extensively to bring
the producing plant of Germany up to date, to make good the
defects arising out of the isolation of the war and inflation
periods and to further the process of 'rationalization.' . . .
302 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
For a long time ahead Germany will not be able to dispense with
foreign credits. . . .
Germany will never be guilty of betray
ing the confidence foreigners have placed in her economic
capacity."
This optimism later proved to be sadly unwarranted. Under
Schacht's leadership the effective "rationalization" of Germany's
industry was directed to serve almost exclusively and at high
speed Germany's colossal re-arming activities which are paid for,
in the last analysis, by American workingmen compelled to live
in slums !
At any rate, the United States' amazing creative power
which was conducive to European "rationalization," public
works, and the housing of German munition workers may be con
sidered very auspicious. It offers the hope that someday, and that
perhaps soon, the United States will find it less disappointing
and more advantageous to spend her large pecuniary riches for
public works, housing and city planning at home. However
reluctantly, Uncle Sam may be forced into and may succeed in
finding methods of gradually habituating himself to the benefit
his own countrymen may derive from his capacity to sow the
surplus funds available at the rate of about 12 billion dollars a
year. This threatening change of habit may not only interfere
with America's economic prejudices, but, so Mr. Wallace, Secre
tary of Agriculture, fears, may even ruin her constitutional
traditions and cause democracy to be replaced by dictatorship.
Fortunately this fear appears to be unfounded when one remem
bers that national planning for public works amply indicated
above is one of the basic conceptions of the American Constitu
tion well able to be revived. A departure, therefore, in the direc
tion of wisely planned public works may have, not a destructive,
but a truly regenerating influence upon American politics. Such
a departure may protect the American government from certain
defects in the "spoils system" and in the "boom system" and may
save her from again becoming the victim of "robber barons."
Thus a more wisely planned economy, instead of ruining America
and her political ideals, may even secure the more adequate ful
fillment of well-being among those for whom Lincoln wished "the
greatest good to the greatest number."
Some reference has already been made to this suicidal policy
TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER 303
of American saviours and capitalists, who practically forced
European countries to build modern, state-supported, low-cost
housing for their workingmen. Thus, Americans thought they
could preserve one of their old ideals which, however, has here
been proved to be neither old nor indigenously American, but
rather English and contradictory to the essential contributions
made by America to the constitutional and sociological thought
of the world. It may be restated that before the war America
was a great debtor nation and was, therefore, forced to export
great quantities of goods (export always being the only means
of paying the interest on foreign debts). When, after the war,
however, all the world owed money to her, America asked for the
impossible; she wished at one and the same time (1) to continue
her large exports of American goods and to receive cash pay
ments therefor, instead of distributing these goods in the form
of higher wages (permitting better housing, etc.) and shorter
working hours among those millions of Americans who were and
still are in need of such relief; (2) America wanted, furthermore,
to receive large payments for the interest and repayment of the
loans she had granted to foreign countries ; (3) America wished
to refuse most foreign goods (except gold) in payment for her
foreign exports and loans, although the acceptance and wise dis
tribution of the foreign goods proffered could have greatly im
proved the standard of living for millions of needy Americans.
The United States Ambassador to Germany, William E.
Dodd, characterized the American attitude in the following
words : "Industrialists in the United States forced through Con
gress in 1923 and 1930 tariff acts that practically closed Ameri
can markets to the debtor countries. Simultaneously the same
men demanded payment of $11,000,000,000 of war debts in gold
at a time when there was hardly that much free gold in the
world and when $4,000,000,000 of this precious metal was al
ready in the United States. The protectionists thus injured
themselves and prevented the payment of the allied debts." (See
New York Times, September 10, 1934.)
In short, in her supreme economic superiority, America sur
prised the world by demands which were not more consistent than
would be the invitation extended by the mighty owner of a
pistol urging a weaker brother to simultaneously hold up 'his
304 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
hands and hand over his money. As has been pointed out, the
United States' contradictory attitude culminated in her paying
out of her own pocket for most of the goods she insisted upon
exporting to other countries.
Furthermore, by her contradictory attitude the United
States inadvertently placed herself in dangerous opposition to
the system of privately controlled capitalism. By January 1,
1931, the United States' private long term investments abroad
amounted to 15.17 billion dollars. The interest on this invest
ment could have well been paid by the foreign borrowers if
America had been willing to accept from them annually the
equivalent of approximately 800 million dollars more goods than
she exported to them. Instead of accepting this necessary excess
of imports over exports, she herself, from 1919 to 1930, ex
ported an excess averaging annually more than 1.2 billion
dollars. In the form of unpaid exports and of interest pay
ments due but not paid to American creditors, the United States,
therefore, bestowed upon foreign countries, practically free of
charge, values to the amount of approximately 2 billion dollars
annually. If efficient salesmanship had been able to deflect onehalf
or all of these yearly foreign investments (largely lost
today) into American housing, it would have been possible to
build annually from 250,000 to 500,000 new American homes at
$4,000 a piece. From 1919 to 1930 this would have meant
from three to six million new homes, or the adequate rehousing
of most of those 30 to 40 million Americans who today live in
rural or urban slums.
Instead of rebuilding "the national House" and realizing
Lincoln's ideal of "making there the homes of a free and happy
people" (March 6, 1860), instead of fulfilling what Lincoln
called "the duty of that (Republican) party to attend to all the
affairs of national housekeeping" in short, instead of evincing
statesmanlike imagination and constructive powers, the American
leaders of business threw away 15 billions of dollars in preference
to giving the American workers better pay, a little more freedom
and the chance to spend at least part of the available billions
for better homes in their own land. Such a state of affairs seems
so criminal that one must hope it was only a manifestation of
TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER 305
stupidity (although this is even worse). The American cap
italists did not even realize that they were digging their own
graves and destroying for capitalism the chance for survival.
They did not realize that in forbidding the ingress of foreign
goods by prohibitive tariffs a creditor nation directly opposes
private capitalism and contradicts those capitalistic conceptions
previously demonstrated by England, the godmother of cap
italism. When England, in pre-War time, was the great creditor
nation of the world, she fostered private capitalism everywhere
by giving in all her markets a fair chance to the efficient private
capitalistic producers of all countries. She never forgot the
essential fact that in order to be a great creditor one must be
a free trader or else be satisfied with receiving no payments.
This latter alternative was selected by the American Republic
and her bankers. In making this choice they showed a gratifying
and helpful preference for America's youngest sister republic,
socialist. Germany, and made it possible for her not only to pay
annually to the "allies" (with one-half of the yearly American
loans she received) her huge war "indemnities," but also (with the
other half) to "rationalize" her industry and to institute re
spectable schemes of state socialism and engage in those impres
sive housing and city-planning activities previously described.
With American help, the efficient German Republic, between 1923
and 1931, carried out many of those ideas of public works the
execution of which had been denied to America by her curiously
uninspired leaders during the long years preceding President
Hoover's belated conversion.
It was only after the black Friday of 1929 i. e., it was too
late when President Hoover urged the state governors to co
operate in an extension of public works which would ameliorate
the slack in employment. Or, as the astute Stuart Chase put
it: "Mr. Hoover threw billions of government dollars under
tottering banks, railroads and insurance companies. . . . He
sought to preserve economic individualism by two billion dollars
worth of socialism." ("The Economy of Abundance," p. 305.)
This was as yet by no means the end of disappointments for
American housing reformers. The construction of suburban
communities on a large scale was one of the original New Deal
306 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
plans for recovery, but failed to be adopted in March and April,
1933. (This measure, however, has subsequently become one of
the major policies of the Administration.)
Remembering the prodigious sums the United States expended
for German housing, the plans made in Washington for housing
the American nation do not seem rash or impossible. On the
contrary, sincere critics blame only the dilatoriness with which
the Federal Housing Administration in October, 1934, announced
its intention to build three million new homes and renovate many
old ones. (See N. Y. Times, Oct. 7, section 8, p. 2.) Also
Secretary Ickes' proposal to spend, over a period of five years,
$5 billion of the Public Works Administration funds on housing
for low-income groups, the Federal Emergency Relief Admin
istration's (under Harry L. Hopkins) proposal to spend $9
billion on subsistence homesteads, or the proposal of H. I.
Harriman (president of the Chamber of Commerce of the United
States) to bring private enterprise to build 750,000 homes
yearly over a period of ten years and at a total capital outlay
of $15 billion these and many similar private proposals only
approximately indicate what is possible and necessary.
TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTEE
SLUM FIRES
"I am come to send fire on the earth; and what
will I, if it be already kindled?" Jesus Christ
(St. Luke, 12, 49)
The growing number of slum fires in New York and other
cities begins to awaken the public conscience to the slowness and
cruelty of this method of slum clearance. In his moving radio
talks the chairman of the New York Housing Authority, Hon.
Langdon W. Post, has told us that "last year, here in the city
of New York, 81 men, women and children were burned to death.
Yes, burned to death, in tenement house fires, in slum fires.
Eighty-one of our fellow citizens burned to death because, through
no fault of their own, they were compelled to live in slum fire
traps." (April 26, 1935.) In the same address we were again
informed that "more than a million and a half people in the city
of New York live in houses which are unfit for human habitation.
These slums of ours are not isolated social cancer spots. The
slums and blighted areas of our city extend from Coney Island up
to the furthermost reaches of the Bronx." How shall we get rid
of this plight?
We are not yet as fortunate as the people described by H.
G. Wells in his great story on replanning England: "In the
Days of the Comet." These reformed Englanders knew how to
use fire, in a much more clement, intelligent and efficient manner,
for the purpose of ridding their country of the slum disease.
Wells' memorable novel offered, in 1906, a ten-year plan for a
whole country's systematic reconstruction, an idea which could
be practically approached only thirty years later when the first
"five-year-plan" was undertaken in Russia. Wells anticipated, by
twenty-nine years and on an even larger scale, the ten-year pro
gram submitted (on October 20, 1935) to the Mayor of New
York by his special commissioner, Nathan Straus, who restated
307
308 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
"the fact that 1,500,000 people in this city are forced to live
in crime-fostering and disease-breeding tenements" and the other
"fact that New York City still has buildings built before 1879
which contain more than 250,000 rooms without windows to the
outer air." Commissioner Straus justly criticized New York
City's housing policy, because in view of such appalling facts
it has since 1920 issued $190,000,000 in the form of tax ex
emption as a subsidy for building up new slums, "a subsidy used
to line the pockets of speculative builders who have disfigured
great portions of our city with shoddy, ill-designed, ramshackle
buildings without central plan, without adequate space for re
creation and with no thought of anything except profit to the
individual engaged in the building operations."
What the Mayor's Commissioner criticizes as New York's
"piecemeal slum clearance, without a comprehensive plan or
purpose" is most inefficiently and cruelly helped along by the
occasional burning of fire-traps. All this is a pitiful contrast to
the inspiring tale of strong, planful and fiery action visualized
by Wells. After his amazing comet had struck our world and
provided it with a new respirable gas healing for nerve and
brain, renewing all men and giving them what they needed most :
common sense; after this great feat had been achieved, people
no longer had any doubts in their minds as to "the public nature
of the housing duty." "Until schemes of work were made out,
almost every one was going to school again to get as much
technical training as they could against the demands of the huge
enterprise of reconstruction that was now beginning." Until
the huge enterprise could be started the finest residences in the
country were "taken over ... to make communal dining-rooms
and so forth their kitchens were conveniently large and pleas
ant places for the old people of over sixty whose time of ease
had come, and for such like public uses. . . . About these 'great
houses' there had usually been good out-buildings, laundries,
married servants' quarters, stabling, dairies, and the like, suit
ably masked by trees. We turned these into homes, and to them
we added first tents and wood chalets and afterwards quad
rangular residential buildings. . . .
Nearly all the other com
munes that sprang up all over the pleasant parkland round the
industrial valley of the Four Towns, as the workers moved out,
TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER 309
came to us to study the architecture of the residental squares
and quadrangles with which we had replaced the back streets
between the 'great houses' and the ecclesiastical residences about
the cathedral, and the way in which we had adapted all these
buildings to our new social needs. Some claimed to have im
proved on us."
After the workers had moved out of the squalid industrial
towns, industry could be reorganized on a new scale. "Now
that we had got all the homes and schools and all the softness
of life away from our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a
thousand obstructive 'rights' and timidities had been swept aside,
we could let ourselves go, we merged this enterprise with that,
cut across this or that anciently obstructive piece of private
land, joined and separated, effected gigantic consolidations and
gigantic economies."
Then came "the May-day in the Year of Scaffolding. It
was the first of the ten great rubbish burnings that opened the
new age. Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine
the enormous quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation
with which we had to deal ; had we not set aside a special day and
season, the whole world would have been an incessant reek of
small fires ; and it was, I think, a happy idea to revive this
ancient festival of the May and November burnings. It was
inevitable that the old idea of purification should revive with the
name, it was felt to be a burning of other than material encum
brances, innumerable quasi-spiritual things, deeds, documents,
debts, vindictive records, went up in those great flares. People
passed praying between the fires. . . . Endless were the things
we had to destroy in those great purgings. First, there were
nearly all the houses and buildings of the old time. In the end
we did not save in England one building in five thousand that was
standing when the comet came. Year by year, as we made our
homes afresh in accordance with the saner needs of our new
social families, we swept away more and more of those horrible
structures, the ancient residential houses, hastily built, without
imagination, without beauty, without common honesty, without
even comfort or convenience, in which the early twentieth century
had sheltered itself, until scarcely one remained ; we saved nothing
but what was beautiful or interesting out of all their gaunt and
310 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
melancholy abundance. The actual houses, of course, we could
not drag to our fires, but we brought all their ill-fitting deal
doors, their dreadful window sashes, their servant-tormenting
staircases, their dank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers
from their scaly walls, their dust and dirt-sodden carpets, their
ill-designed and yet pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and
chests of drawers, the old dirt-saturated books, their ornaments
their dirty, decayed, and altogether painful ornaments. We
burned them all. The paint-plastered woodwork, with coat above
coat of nasty paint, that in particular blazed finely . . . thank
Heaven ! there is nothing in life now to convey the peculiar dinginess
of it all. . . . We burned and destroyed most of our private
buildings and all the woodwork, all our furniture, except a few
score thousand pieces of distinct and intentional beauty, from
which our present forms have developed, nearly all our hangings
and carpets, and also we destroyed almost every scrap of oldworld
clothing. Only a few carefully disinfected types and ves
tiges of that remain now in our museums. . . . Most of our public
buildings we destroyed and burned as we reshaped our plan of
habitation, our theatre sheds, our banks, and inconvenient busi
ness warrens, our factories (these in the first year of all), and
all the 'unmeaning repetition' of silly little sham Gothic churches
and meeting-houses, mean looking shells of stone and mortar
without love, invention, or any beauty at all in them, that men
had thrust into the face of their sweated God, even as they
thrust cheap food into the mouths of their sweated workers; all
these we also swept away in the course of that first decade. . . .
Then also there was a great harvest of fences, notice boards,
hoardings, ugly sheds, all the corrugated iron in the world, and
everything that was smeared with tar, all our gas works and
petroleum stores, all our horse vehicles and vans and lorries had
to be erased. . . . But I have said enough now perhaps to give
some idea of the bulk and quality of our great bonfires, our
burnings up, our meltings down, our toil of sheer wreckage, over
and above the constructive effort, in those early years. But
these were the coarse material bases of the Phoenix fires of the
world. These were but the outward and visible signs of the
innumerable claims, rights, adhesions, debts, bills, deeds, and
charters that were cast upon the fires; a vast accumulation of
TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER 311
insignia and uniforms neither curious enough nor beautiful
enough to preserve, went to swell the blaze, and afl (saving a
few truly glorious trophies and memories) of our symbols, our
apparatus and material of war. Then innumerable triumphs of
our old, bastard, half-commercial fine-art were presently con
demned, great oil paintings, done to please the half-educated
middle-class, glared for a moment and were gone, Academy
marbles crumbled to useful lime, a gross multitude of silly
statuettes and decorative crockery, and hangings, and embroid
eries, and bad music, and musical instruments shared this fate."
When this utopia of Wells' was first published (in 1906) it
must have appeared much more fantastic than it turned out to
be, when after the World War and after the Revolution of 1918
in Germany the so-called financial "inflation," as efficiently as
any fire from heaven could have done, actually wiped out "in
numerable quasi-spiritual things, deeds, debts, vindictive records"
and, most of all, produced the "destruction of fictitious land
values" as was demanded, for America, by Henry Ford. This
magic "inflation" wiped out the hard earned or ill-gotten savings
of millions of families. It transformed an urban mortgage debt
of about ten billion dollars into an obligation that one single
gold dollar could have repaid. In other words, this magic stroke
had for 60 million Germans comparatively even more cata
strophic results than the "depression" after 1929 had for 120
million Americans. The latter wiped out only eight billion
dollars worth of "guaranteed" mortgage bonds and, perhaps
only temporarily, invalidated another eight billion of America's
urban mortgage debt totaling thirty-five billion dollars. It was
this tremendous economic and spiritual German earthquake that,
as efficiently as any miraculous comet could have done, prepared
the clean foundations upon which, with the indirect but power
ful assistence of Prepayable American loans (or grants), those
new German housing activities that have become the object of
international admiration could be effectuated.
However, even this tremendous cultural advance of the Ger
man (pre-Hitler) republic was by no means so sweeping that the
desirable utopia of Wells', the systematic and rapid destruction
of all obsolete and undesirable buildings, furniture, etc. could
have been realized on a comprehensive scale. During the long
312 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
years of the War, destruction on the biggest and most expensive
scale ever conceived had, indeed, been carried on, but it had been
directed mainly against human life and, when it attacked
buildings, it devastated indiscriminately the worst slums and the
finest cathedrals or residences. The billions spent so destruc
tively and on such an unprecedented scale resulted in little that
was permanently useful. Among other calamities this fierce
wasting of productive power produced a severe housing shortage.
Therefore, after the War, while 2,500,000 of the most modern
dwellings were erected for the masses, even greater masses were
compelled to remain in those old obsolete tenements which should
have been destroyed, or they had to live in the new shanty towns
that in post-War Germany were less rigidly forbidden than be
fore. The same thing was experienced in Russia, where the
great efforts to house the masses, efforts made under the first and
second five-year plans, could not prevent millions from still being
forced to live in very crowded and undesirable old houses or in
pitiful new dugouts.
We may safely assume that in America also even the most
optimistic and best supported of reconstruction plans would have
to proceed fairly slowly with the pulling or burning down of the
huge American slums which in any case will remain, at least for
another five or ten years, the shameful monuments of the senile
blindness with which one of the most advanced nations has
employed, for a whole century, good money for producing in a
reactionary manner utterly backward and undesirable goods re
quiring speedy destruction.
If the slum fires, which in New York are occasionally and
much too slowly permitted to burn down the "firetraps," were
started systematically, as had been planned for England by
H. G. Wells, in order to liberate the unfortunate inhabitants of
New York (instead of permitting them to be burned alive), the
conflagration would have to be much greater than the one
emperor Nero is reported to have started in order to rid Rome of
its historic slums. Imperial Rome, at its period of most in
tense crowding, probably never had more than one million people.
In New York City, on the other hand, as has been mentioned
before, "more than a million and a half people live in houses
which are unfit for human habitation. These slums of ours are
TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER 313
not isolated social cancer spots. The slums and blighted areas
of our city extend from Coney Island up to the furthermost
reaches of the Bronx." (Langdon W. Post) What a gigantic
bonfire! And how suitable for a nation large sections of which
were so aptly described as having "manifestly no other solici
tudes, just burning to live and living to burn!" (Cf. H. G.
Wells, Social Forces in England and America, p. 351.)
Before the destruction of these enormous agglomerations of
bad housing can be undertaken on a large scale, even larger
scale housing operations will have to be carried on for at least
five years in order to supply decent homes for the millions who
must be liberated from the degenerating prison-life in slums and
blighted districts.
TWENTY-FOUETH CHAPTER
IMMEDIATE NECESSITIES IN PLANNING AND HOUSING
The question as to the most desirable character of the most
urgently required new housing activities has been discussed by
numerous bodies and agents. The details of this discussion are
less interesting than is the imperative problem of securing a
speedy start. The field to be covered is so enormous that the
unavoidable initial mistakes will be comparatively harmless. Ex
perience in the most efficient methods of producing rapidly, in
the United States, the most desirable, economic and altogether
popular types of new dwellings, residential groupings and in
dustrial nighborhoods can and must be acquired while instituting
and accelerating the nation-wide reconstruction. An excellent
start had been made by some of the War housing activities and,
subsequently, by the work of the late Henry Wright, Clarence
Stein and other "social" architects in such developments as
Sunnyside, L. I. ; Radburn, N. J. ; Chatham Village, Pittsburgh ;
and in other developments illustrated in Henry Wright's new
book "Rehousing Urban America" (1935). Another and very
important departure was started in the fall of 1935 by the
Resettlement Administration under Professor Tugwell (although
the twenty new suburban communities which were to have been
started in September, 1935, had dwindled down to four by
October of the same year).
1
Among the general rules to be observed in all new planning
and housing work the following are probably the most important :
(1) All new housing must closely correspond to a reason
able (state and national) plan for an efficient relocation of
industry avoiding the huge unnecessary expenses connected with
the present, often accidental or routine crowding of industries in
congested neighborhoods. New housing supported by public
money is never to be a subsidy for badly located or otherwise
1 See Volume III of this publication.
314
TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER 315
handicapped industry. The relocation of industry is being
carried on continuously, automatically and irresistably, but
planlessly. In the future this process should be helped by and
should help the redistribution of housing.
(2) All new construction should be planned in close relation
to the existing or the proposed lines of transportation. The
Empire State Building requiring an office population of 20,000
and twice or thrice that many daily visitors to fill its at present
largely empty offices, stands at a distance of 1000 feet from the
nearest subway station and is an example of expensive new con
struction insufficiently related to rapid transit facilities. The
largely unoccupied Empire State Building is an illustration of
the present costly, planless and wasteful method of reconstruct
ing New York, a method which must be replaced by a more
satisfactory system. About the financially disastrous Empire
State Building "Mr. Foster" in his "New York Standard Guide"
tells the interested visitors: "There is here in this stupendous
fabric a striking illustration of the process which is continually
going on in the never ceasing and never ending making-over of
the City of New York, where millions in value are ruthlessly
scrapped to make way for more millions to take their place.
The erection of the 50-million dollar Empire State Building
involved the destruction of the 13-million dollar Waldorf-Astoria.
With the exception of the copper of the roof and the steel which
was sold for junk, all of the magnificent hotel building now lies
at the bottom of the sea, five miles off Sandy Hook."
This planless and dangerously anarchical process of con
tinuous urban reconstruction in its inadequate relation to social
and traffic! requirements was even better described by the
Chairman of the New York Housing Authority when he said
(April 26, 1935): "We have just spent a million dollars to
build the new, modernistic Central Park Zoo 2
in which to house
monkeys, but we allow tens of thousands of our children to con
tinue to live in the slums. Nor is this all. At a time when
most office buildings are a quarter and a third vacant, a group
of citizens have constructed and are constructing Rockefeller
City at a cost of $250,000,000. Two hundred and fifty million
dollars! This amount of money could clear 250 square city
2 See Volume III of this publication.
316 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
blocks in the slums and pay for the construction of airy and
clean apartments for nearly a quarter of a million people."
The new and, in many ways, ideal offices in Rockefeller Center
3
and the financial power behind this colossal enterprise spell
ruin for numberless owners of less modern and less powerfully
managed but concentrated office buildings. Their tenants flock
to the giant towers of Rockefeller City which is beginning to
create a new and serious problem of traffic congestion to be
solved largely at the expense of the very citizens whose useful
work is delayed by the new traffic difficulties thus created.
Another and perhaps even more serious instance of the un
satisfactory relation between new building and in this case
new means of transportation is furnished by the fact that the
perfectly amazing and in many ways quite wonderful new high
way systems called "parkways," as have been created especially
in Westchester County, New Jersey and Long Island, are de
signed, for the most part, for automobile pleasure traffic or at
least are not permitted to serve the most important requirement
of residential decentralization.
4
It would have been compara
tively easy to combine the construction of these new highways
for automobile traffic with the design of new roads for rapid
and inexpensive rail communication. Auto-roads and rapid sur
face railroads could have been made to run near each other
separated by some twenty to one hundred feet of dense planting,
but both using the same viaducts or kept free from intersecting
traffic by the same bridges and underpasses. Since this great
opportunity has been lost a minimum requirement could be satis
fied by allowing rapid buses to operate on these expensive new
parkways. Only by thus serving the popular demand for cheap
and rapid means of communication would the great cause of
decentralized housing be efficiently served by the new parkways
and their enormous cost be justified and redeemed. New "park
ways" should always be designed in relation to new model suburbs
to be served.
(3) No window of any living room, bedroom, kitchen (nor
of any other room used for more than an hour at a time) should
ever again be built without being guaranteed, permanently, good
a See Volume III of this publication.
4 See Volume III of this publication.
TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER 317
natural lighting and ventilation. This means that the distance
between all new buildings (not only those facing streets but
also those facing courtyards) should never be smaller than the
height of the highest of the buildings. In other words the
angle at which the outer light strikes a window must never be
greater than 45 degrees ; and no wall of any kind (facing the
window, to the right or the left of the window) can be allowed
to obstruct the incoming light. Therefore, if the buildings are
grouped around a closed or open court necessarily forming
darker corners, the outer light must enter at a considerably
smaller angle, or (in other words) the height of the buildings
must be much less than the distance between the buildings.
Once this minimum demand for light and air is draconically
enforced one might almost say that everybody can build as high
as he pleases or cover his lot as densely as he pleases. Even
high apartment houses in a district of one-family residences can
not do much harm if their whole mass sets back ten feet more
from their lot line for every story that is added to their height.
(4) Very little if any of the new housing should be carried
on within congested areas, on expensive land, separated from
liberal areas for recreation. There are in this country and even
near most big cities immense areas available which can be used
neither for agriculture nor industry, but only for recreation and
spacious residential districts. The latest English and German
standards for recreational areas should be equalled and can,
sometimes, be materially surpassed in America. Liberal acquisi
tion of land for public recreation is, indeed, in most cases the
only chance for the owners of such land ever to get any, however
small, return from their property. All new buildings must and
can be so located that a park of at least ten acres in size can be
reached within a five minute walk. In most cases one of the larger
radial park areas making uninterrupted connection with the
outer park belt and forest reserves should be accessible from
new buildings within a six or seven minute walk. This applies
not only to new residential buildings but to all new buildings,
especially schools, business and public buildings, and also to most
new factories.
(5) Another chance for outlying private real estate to be
come useful and bring at least a small return to its owners is
318 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
the rapid increase of general standards of private garden areas.
The more spacious the new developments are, the larger will be
the number of present property owners who are benefited. On
the other hand, the more concentrated the new residential and
recreational developments are, the more restricted will be the
benefit to a limited number of real estate owners and the larger
also will be the number of those landowners who must remain
empty-handed. As long as the general confiscation of land is
avoided and the present system of land ownership adhered to, so
long will landowners benefit most from the generous decentraliza
tion of all relocation of industry and redistribution of the at
present crowded masses.
It is therefore entirely possible and economically most neces
sary to satisfy all reasonable "land hunger." But what is reason
able? Why not accept the advice of one of the best American
minds? On August 15, 1835, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then thirtytwo
years old, wrote in his diary: "I bought my house and two
acres six rods of land of John T. Coolidge for 3,500 dollars."
Four weeks later (Sept. 14) he wrote: "I was married to Lydia
Jackson." Nine months later (June 10, 1836) Emerson wrote:
"I gladly pay the rent" (i.e. the tax) "of my house because I
therewith get the horizon and the woods which I pay no rent
for. For daybreak and evening and night, I pay no tax. I
think it is a glorious bargain which I drive with the town." And
during the year 1843 we find in his diary such entries as :
"My
garden is an honest place. ... I enjoy all the hours of life.
. . . The sky is the daily bread of the eyes. What sculpture
in these hard clouds. . . . No crowding; boundless, cheerful,
and strong."
All this can be enjoyed on two acres of land. There is no
reason why every family desiring it should not have two acres.
The whole country would be benefited if there were many such
families, even if all of their forefathers were not Emersons. Em
erson's contemporary, Walt Whitman, asked indignantly : "Is the
Dollar-god so ruthless that he grudges a few poor acres to the
service of health, of refinement, of religion? Is nothing to be
thought of on earth, but cash?" Whitman wrote this (July
9, 1846) when his fellow citizens of Brooklyn suffered from one
of the first attacks of that insane land exploitation craze that
TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER 319
afterwards ruined not only Brooklyn but many other American
cities. Walt Whitman chided: "And we are to be 'justly proud'
of increasing the 'rapid Growth' of Brooklyn, by cutting down
Fort Greene Park ! Oho !
Imagine some one in New York hold
ing forth in that vein to the good citizens there how 'justly
proud' they might be of erasing the Battery, selling Washington
Parade Ground (i.e. Washington Square) in building lots, and
running blind alleys through Tompkin's Square !
Why the man
would hardly be safe from the Lunatic Asylum."
Walt Whitman's protests, in addition to those of others,
succeeded in saving for Brooklyn its Fort Greene Park from the
ruthless Dollar-god. And (as has been stated before) there is no
reason under the sun why much more liberal public parks should
not be preserved and why, furthermore, two acres of private gar
den should not be granted to every family desiring it and deserv
ing it by the good upkeep of the land thus granted. This is
possible even in the most congested neighborhood of the globe.
The City of New York and Environs (or New York "Region")
covers 5,528 square miles, or 3,537,249 acres. If the liberal pro
portion of sixty per cent is reserved for streets, public buildings,
business, industry, parks, etc. and forty per cent for residences,
we have remaining 1,414,899 net acres for about 11 million
people or 3 million families. Assuming that half a million
families for some reason must select the apartment house con
taining approximately fifty families to the acre (requiring a
total of 10,000 acres) while 1,900,000 families are to be housed
at the fairly liberal "garden-city standard" of ten families per
acre (or each family occupying a lot of 43 by 100 feet), re
quiring 190,000 acres, there would still be more than 1,200,000
acres remaining, or enough to give a full two acre garden plot
to 600,000 New York families. If, with a different calculation,
the available residential area (after deducting the land required
for 500,000 families in apartments) were to be distributed
equally among the remaining 2,500,000 families of New York
"Region," each family would obtain more than half an acre
(net) or a lot 115 feet wide and 200 feet deep. These are, of
course, average figures which, when practically applied, would
greatly vary. The contrast between different methods of dis
tributing the houses adds decidedly to their charm. Squares
320 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
and common garden courts surrounded by rowhouses only 20
to 25 feet wide, alternating occasionally with a few stronger
blocks of low apartment houses framed by many high trees, with
groups of semi-detached houses and rows of three to eight houses
and with areas of detached houses having gardens of one or
more acres merging into parks and golf links, these attributes
constitute the charm of the garden-suburb.
5
On lots of two acres, or even of one-half an acre granted
to everyone who desires it, many activities including "sub
sistence" gardening could be carried on. The recommendation
or condemnation of "subsistence" farming is not unusual. Many
critics believe that the provision of subsistence farms for the
workers could and should become the solution of the problem of
housing and also of the problem of unemployment. Others see
in the subsistence farming idea mainly a new trick on the part of
irresponsible employers, eager to pay lower wages, to force the
worker to make up his deficit by sweating overtime in his vegeta
ble garden. The latter view had something to do with the policy
(referred to in the Seventeenth Chapter) of such cities as Vienna
and Copenhagen where the public housing activities were directed
or strongly influenced by the representatives of socialist workingmen
organizations and where rather few private houses with
gardens were built for the workers while the large "model" tene
ment became the rule.
6
On the other hand, even the Russian type of communism did
not exclude the private ownership of the individual home. But
bolshevism did, originally, exclude the private ownership or even
the private use of a garden. As a result foreign observers re
ported an appalling contrast between the superior maintenance
of Russia's private houses as compared with the utter neglect
of the gardens which formerly had belonged to them but had been
turned into public property by the Bolshevist revolution.
7
The neglect of public gardens might not necessarily have been
final. On the contrary, a joyous responsibility for public prop-
6 Cf. Henry Wright's plan for such a city.
6 See Volume III of this publication.
7 This contrast was mentioned as being a prevalent condition in the
Russian cities by Ernst May, one of the most prominent foreign directors
of Russian city planning (former director of city planning and housing of
the Municipality of Frankfurt-am-Main) when he lectured in Berlin, in the
summer of 1931, about his Russian experiences.
TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER 321
erty is possible even in capitalist countries and among their
lower income recipients, as soon as the most elementary wants
of this stratum are provided for. An example: shortly before
the war, enterprising or socially-minded realtors of San Fran
cisco's East Bay suburbs undertook to serve one of their high
grade real estate developments by having the municipality build
a "boulevard" or "parkway" which, before it reached the real
tors' new enterprise, had to pass through a fairly poor resi
dential section. Pessimists prophesied that the plantings of the
parkway would be ruined by the irresponsible inhabitants of the
poorer quarter. The opposite turned out to be true. During
the long dry summer months the vegetation of the public park
way suffered more in the wealthy quarters than in the poorer
sections where the inhabitants "came out with tin cans and
coffee pots to water the thirsty plants in front of their homes."
And water is scarce and expensive in California.
The possibility that workingmen are capable, desirous and
"deserving" of owning and cultivating private gardens has been
recognized by the Soviet Government. According to a N. Y.
Times report (Dec. 27, 1933) the Soviet Government decreed
(Dec. 25) the allotment of individual vegetable gardens to 1,500,-
000 Soviet workers. Thus, during the year 1934, huge vacant
land areas were ordered to be made available for the purpose of
enabling the most deserving workers to increase their food supply
during their spare time. The individual plots were ordered to
range from one quarter to one-half an acre. They were to be
leased to the workers for a period of from five to seven years,
free from taxes and crop levies, provided the workingmen thus
benefited would not be negligent in cultivating the privileged
land granted to them. This new departure in communist Russia
is in keeping with the policy promulgated by Stalin, on June 23,
1931, when he expressed the desire "to attach the workers to their
factories."
The Russian allotment of vegetable gardens to "deserving"
workers has found approval among foreign realists and reproba
tion among critical idealists. The American attitudes regarding
the "subsistence" farm problem were expressed by Catherine
Bauer and Lewis Mumford. The latter wrote: "Unemployment
insurance is not by itself a sufficient safeguard against fluctua-
322 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
tions in industry; our new cities must have agricultural belts
and internal gardens capable of raising fruits and green vegeta
bles in sufficient quantity to eke out the family income and to
provide a healthier environment and more sanative forms of
recreation than our crowded, dreary, asphalted, urban environ
ments now do." (Cf. "Break the Housing Blockade!" by Lewis
Mumford, in The New Republic, May 17, 1935.) And Catherine
Bauer wrote a succinct criticism from which the following ex
tract affords one an unbiased American opinion of the latest
German development in the field of "marginal settlements"
(Randsiedlungen). She writes:
"The idea of rendering the individual less dependent for his
life and living on the erratic extremes of urban employment
conditions, by providing him with a garden, is as old as the
factory system. Older, in fact; for the whole system of cottage
industries depended on it. As a working principle, it has served
dozens of social and political philosophies at one time or another,
from the anarchism of Proudhon and Kropotkin to the feudalism
of Ruskin. At present it is one of the keystones of Hitler's
Nationalism. ... In the working philosophy of Kropotkin
and Patrick Geddes, this included the possibility of balanced
work for all individuals. The entire Garden City Movement
sprang from such an ideal. . . . But 'unemployed colonies,' as
they have been developed in Germany and as they seem likely to
be projected in this country, are quite another thing from funda
mental regional planning on the one hand, and small allotments
on the outskirts of large cities on the other. The truth of the
matter is that if even a very small part of the current talk about
'homesteads,' 'subsistence gardens,' 'decentralization,' and 'put
ting people back on the land' had been put into practice in the
manner suggested, we should already have succeeded in trans
forming not only a large number of our present city-dwellers
but most of our farmers as well, into a new American peasantry
with a standard of living and an outlook for the future probably
about equal to that obtainable in the Balkan rural regions.
Perhaps I should not be so vehement had I not seen the results
of the emergency homesteading movement in Germany. There,
since 1931, when reactionary forces began to tip the scales, no
public money has been lent for new housing unless each dwelling
TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER 323
was accompanied by a sizeable allotment garden tract and the
houses built for themselves by groups of unemployed workers
whose labor became their 'capital' investment. On the surface
some of these colonies are picturesque enough, and at worst the
fact that they are likely to be built in arranged groups, and with
some benefit of the admirable technique of community planning
lately developed in Germany, makes them rather better than the
average American equivalent would probably be. But what is
the net result? The 'dole' of such people is cut down to almost
nothing. ... In short, the Randsiedlungen, taken by and large,
are nothing more nor less than poor-farms, and the only people
who really benefit from them are likely to be the people who
pay the taxes which support the dole. The cycle of 'modern
housing' has turned back on itself, back to the pauper hand-outs
of the mid-nineteenth century. It is worth noting that the
subsistence-homestead movement in Germany was first urged by
the Liberals, but that now, when the Liberals have vanished, the
movement fits perfectly into Hitler's conscious and energetic
policy of turning potentially dangerous urban workers into a
helpless pauper peasantry."
8
This just criticism by Catherine Bauer could be refuted
only in a country where political freedom is secure, where social
insurance (against unemployment, etc.) is strong, and where re
distribution of industry and population is planned and carried
out so as to secure for each worker easy access to such new work
as may present itself after periods of unemployment. What
Miss Bauer says about the possibility of "subsistence"-homesteads
becoming poor farms reminds one of what the Secretary
of Agriculture, H. A. Wallace, says in his book, "New Frontiers"
(p. 243 f.). We read:
"While no hard and fast rule can be drawn, it would seem
that in the eastern half of the United States, the ideal location
for many of these poor land farmers who are now on relief
would be on self-subsistence homesteads where part of the family
can work in industry. This may also be the destiny of the un
employed in our cities. It costs only one-third as much to take
care of a farm family on relief as a city family, and if the
Federal Relief has to support several million families for several
8
Cf. "Modern Housing" by Catherine Bauer, p. 248 ff.
324 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
years, it will try to make the money go as far as possible by
getting several hundred thousand of them out on the land, estab
lishing them in part-time farming and part-time industry.
"This trend is a matter of grave concern to established in
dustry and agriculture. We in the AAA will of course insist
that these government financed people do not produce farm
products for sale. Industry will probably insist that they do not
produce industrial products for sale. But industry can not
solve the problem this easily, because ultimately industry through
the income tax has to foot the government relief bill.
"The 10 million unemployed plus the 5 million living on
(poor and crowded) land which can never be farmed are a con
tinuing menace to the established industry and agriculture of
the United States. To solve it means decentralized industrial
planning relative to land. If the heads of our two hundred
leading corporations were to take into account the full signifi
cance of paved roads, autos, trucks, high line electricity, and
the increased happiness of human beings close to the land, might
they not enthusiastically start a decentralized, industrial, selfsubsistence
homestead program on a scale which would jerk us
out of the depression for years to come?
"If industry does not seize this opportunity, its only effective
defense against serious trouble will be such a revival in business
that two-thirds of the unemployed will be put to work again at
their accustomed places in the big cities. It would seem high
time for those big industries which are truly conservative and
interested in their long-time welfare to begin to do a little real
planning about the unemployment problem. Agriculture should
be included in this, because the wrong kind of decentralization
would increase the burden of agriculture. . . .
Nearly half of
the unemployed are under thirty years of age. The larger part
of them have at least high school education and many have col
lege diplomas. They are well equipped in mind and body and
can see no good reason why it is so hard for them to find jobs.
As I have indicated, there is some danger that these younger
unemployed, joining hands with farmers who have been in the
most serious trouble, and with certain other unprivileged groups,
will push the nation so far to the left that we will be headed
TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER 325
toward the land of nightmare, even as the unemployed youths
have succumbed to misguided leadership in certain foreign coun
tries. This group, by asking more relief year after year than
the Government can afford, can eventually bring on an uncon
trolled inflation. To avoid this disaster, it will be necessary to
get more and more of our people thinking seriously about that
continuously balanced harmonious relationship which I call the
Land of Tomorrow. The industries of the country must be
brought definitely face to face with their responsibility for these
unemployed. If they dodge, it will be the duty of the Govern
ment to go ahead with its own method of rehabilitation and
build out of the unemployed a self-subsistence system of exchange
cooperatives which are outside the capitalistic system."
The case of providing the worker desiring it with liberal
grants of land (from one to two acres per family) would be
come even stronger in a country such as the United States at
present spending billions for automobile highways and per
haps soon? fulfilling the Ford-dream that every family own a
car. It is being hammered into everybody's head that we are
to live in an "economy of plenty" where to work will become
more and more a privilege of the most capable. According to
General Hugh S. Johnson, former NRA administrator, there
were 12,000,000 unemployed during the last "depression"; "the
total is now down to 9,500,000" ; and "you are going to have at
least 6,000,000 unemployed when you get all the way back to
normal." In such an economy liberal grants of land to anybody
capable and willing to assume the ensuing responsibility, will be
necessary as one of the means of keeping the individual busy,
or at least amused and out of mischief.
Incidentally, nothing short of a liberal redistribution of the
population can save the smaller cities of the United States.
There are at present about 53,000 towns and villages of less than
1,000 inhabitants most of which have too many retail stores.
Only 22 per cent of the population of the United States live in
cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants. But these cities repre
senting 22 per cent of the nation's population do 70 per cent
of its total retail business. The retail stores of the towns con
sisting of less than 1,500 people are deplorably lacking in
326 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
customers.
9
The economic structure of most of these small towns
is thus seriously endangered.
The necessary redistribution of the population should by no
means become a method of "poor farming." On the contrary.
// we shall ever live in an "economy of plenty," anyone not
anxious for action or eager for work will again be in the enviable
or pitiable condition of the "free" in Greece, who according to
such approving philosophers and statesmen as Plato felt greatly
honored in never resorting to manual labor. To them, artists
such as architects, sculptors and other masons were inferior
beings. At present, a return to such a philosophical attitude
would greatly relieve the problem of unemployment. "Sub
sistence" gardens as described and loved by Emerson will mitigate
this difficult problem and, perhaps, provide America and the
world with a new race of Concordian philosophers of the ThoreauEmerson
type.
In this connection Professor Alvin Johnson's charming de
scription of new "Happy Valleys" must be mentioned. He has
pointed out that Theodore Roosevelt may have been wrong when
he said "the pioneer days are over, save in a few places." (Out
look, Sept. 10, 1910.) A new pioneering age has just begun.
The "frontier," formerly vanishing in the West, has come back
to us and now lies within sixty miles of most large cities. (Cf.
Eighteenth Chapter; p. 256.) Sixty miles from New York
City, for example, poor New Jersey land can, today, be acquired
at $20 an acre and, with an additional expenditure of $90 for
soil treatment, can be made richer than Mississippi Valley land
at $150 an acre. Nearly the whole of the United States could
and should again be considered as open land. The present
tenants are tired out or lacking in ability. To acquire their land
and make it useful would require no more, or even less effort
than the original pioneers had to expend when first conquering
it. Agriculture, by this time, has made such amazing strides and
raises so much food that the Government will soon have to pay
us for eating it. Today it is no longer land that is
being sold,
but the right to raise or to sell the products of the land. It is
the right to sell so much milk or so much cotton that gives value
8 Cf. The article: "Are Small Towns Doomed" by a Village Trustee, in
"The American Mercury," May, 1934.
TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER 327
to a farm or a plantation. Four-fifths of the present farmers
may have to come to the new decentralized cities. They will
have to live there the contemplative life of free philosophers.
As a result of the rapidly growing efficiency of agriculture it
will be just as easy, for the remaining farmers, to cultivate 200
acres as it was, formerly, to cultivate the customary 30. In
Kansas, at present, eighty bushels grow where formerly eight
grew. Noble leisure, therefore, must increase tenfold.
Facetious critics claim that "the United States has only
200,000 armed crooks, 300,000 unarmed crooks, 400,000 lawyers
and 500,000 capitalists, but that all the rest are still honest
Americans." Even if such irony were justified, there would yet
be a sufficient number remaining to begin anew in American
pioneering and industry. And nothing could more appropriately
facilitate such a new start than redistributing and rehousing
the nation, when, at present, approximately 50 million Americans
are badly housed and when bad housing produces worse effects
and prepares more crime than a reformatory. Children delin
quent at thirteen are delinquent for good. And "the child with
out a playground is the father of the man without a job."
National defense, the army and especially the navy, require
billions for material that will surely be scrapped within ten
years. Native delinquents, robbers or thieves, attack a com
munity more persistently and insidiously than foreign enemies
could ever do. Money spent for housing would become an
investment with a duration twice and thrice that of capital
invested in war material which ages much more rapidly than
even semi-permanent buildings. Even the present destitute slum
dweller will be able to pay more for, or at least take better
care of his housing if he lives in better surroundings. At present
his shelter stands upon sinfully overvalued land and is built in
accordance with complicated old methods which, if adopted for
the production of an automobile, would make the cheapest one
cost $10,000 instead of less than one tenth that sum. Rehous
ing the nation according to newer and better methods offers an
unlimited field for the necessary pioneering, for the lasting
reconquest of the nation's domain and for statesmanlike leader
ship.
TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER
CIVIC ART
Cities of men are like the perpetual
succession of shells on the beach.
Emerson's Journals, VI, p. 9 (1841).
Contemporary thought in aesthetics tends to reject the ab
solutism of both "nature" and theology. Man is not regarded
as condemned to remain forever either a glorious brute offend
ing the deity that flickers through his aspirations or a fallen
angel struggling with his brute nature through the heroic failure
of successive renunciations. These conceptions of man are dis
solving with the dissolution of scientific and theological certainty
and assurance. In this place comes another conception of
aesthetics controlled by neither the compulsions of brute nature
nor the fears of everlasting hell-fire. At its very center is
knowledge of good and beautiful things and conduct which have
been brought to realization if only here and there and in frag
mentary form. And when this knowledge respecting the nature
of aesthetics consciously or unconsciously is made central to all
thought about policy, the creative forces of aesthetics can be
accelerated. In other words, when the idea of a mechanistic
necessity is abandoned and it is universally recognized that all
who act, teach and lead in any capacity, large or small, do act
on some conception of the good and the beautiful, then the
clarification of aesthetic purpose will precede efforts to formulate
and to apply policy. This recognition is now slowly taking place
and its widening and deepening in the consciousness of mankind
constitutes the chief revolution wrought in contemporary
thought. Such is the operating synthesis for the future.
328
TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER 329
The American city of former days and its future have been
strikingly described by one of America's most penetrating
thinkers. Emerson wrote in his Journal (June, 1847) :
"The American builds shingle palaces and shingle cities ; yes,
but in any altered mood, perhaps this afternoon, he will build
stone ones, with equal celerity, tall, restless Kentucky strength;
great race, but though an admirable fruit, you shall not find one
good, sound, well-developed apple on the tree. Nature herself
was in a hurry with these hasters and never finished one."
Since Emerson's time new American cities, "stone ones" and
steel ones, have arisen. Their feverish growth and gruesome
magnitude have startled the world. Emerson commented:
"Speed and fever are never greatness . . . America is form
less." Was his pessimism as to American "forms" exaggerated?
Speed and fever have achieved in American cities new and fan
tastic proportions. Out of contradictions new "forms" have
evolved. The awful has married the freak and has generated
"forms" of its own. The following newspaper report reads like
a satire on American urbanism:
"Jack Glickstein, age 35, weight 58 pounds, height 37 inches,
weds Mildred Monti, age 21, weight 400 pounds, height 5 feet
4 inches. The two were married in the ballroom of the Hotel
Edison yesterday afternoon. ... At the end of the service
the blushing bride lifted her husband high in the air and kissed
him. Professional exigencies postponed the wedding trip, the
bride and bridegroom being dancing partners in a revue." (From
The New York American, Dec. 5, 1934, a newspaper which
has as its motto, "Character, Quality, Enterprise, Accuracy.")
A photograph of the newlyweds, dwarf and giant, accompanied
the report. Few of us will look at it a second time. But most
of us are very frequently obliged to look at the freakish architec
ture that surrounds us.
Every American city crowds skyscrapers into many of its
oldest and narrowest streets which were designed to accommo
date two-storied or three-storied houses, and are hardly wide
enough for four or five-storied ones. Today, twenty and thirtystoried
buildings push their naked "party"-walls against those
of two stories. The windows of hundreds of the new skyscrapers
will be darkened the very moment the neighboring low buildings
330 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
accept the invitation to this strange "party" and transform
themselves into equally towering annihilators of light and air.
In Paris, the poor design of Napoleon Ill's and Haussmann's
costly street openings had been the source of infinite pain to
contemporary artists. The bitter and just complaints of Charles
Garnier about the ruination of his Grand Opera site have been
quoted in full in the volume, "Civic Art" (p. 62 and 63 f.). The
assembly of radial street openings in the immediate neighbor
hood of what was meant to be a monumental building had lost
all the charm of such well-designed prototypes as the Piazza, del
Populo, Rome ; the Chateau Plaza, Versailles ; or the Capitol Site,
Washington, D. C. Instead, an ill-digested geometrical pattern
was put on the map. But the lamentations of a Garnier, deplor
ing such atrocities, did not reach the ears of those American
city planning enthusiasts who lustily glorified the work of Haussmann
and who were determined uncritically to repeat and to mag
nify in American cities the mistakes made in Paris. The bad
setting of the Grand Opera was duplicated in Philadelphia. The
walls of the old square surrounding the City Hall of Philadelphia
were demolished. At least one diagonal gash (costing some fifty
million dollars) was required to satisfy the American Haussmannites.
For subsidiary "civic centers" slashed by diagonal
IDDDnDOODLu
dHHl
Part of Paris showing site of
Garnier's Grand Opera House
Part of Philadelphia showing direc
tion of Fairmount Parkway connect
ing the City Hall with the Art
Museum
TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER 331
streets provision was made in cheaper sections of the Pennsylvanian
metropolis.
Chicago meant to outdo Philadelphia and advertised a
"Chicago Plan" with a new city hall in the focus of a diagonally
slashed site which rivalled effectively all the errors that had op
pressed the architect of the Grand Opera in Paris. This ruthless
spirit of civic enterprise, however, seems to have suffered after
wards from a faint heart, weakened in Chicago, and, fortunately,
nothing came of the grandly advertised "civic center" plan.
But Buenos Aires, queen of South America, mustered more civic
energy than her equally populous sister, queen of the Middle
West. Untold millions were spent for slashing the central
rectangular plaza of her old city plan, of Spanish origin. One
of a pair of radial streets of symmetrical obliquity chopped off
the southern corner of the old "cabildo" or town hall, the finest
and almost the only historical building of the Argentinian capital.
(The northern part of the same monument had been chopped
off at a previous street opening.) An esthetically disastrous
attempt at building a new city hall was made, with great ex
pense, upon one of the many utterly impossible sites created by
the new diagonals. (And terminating the main axis a national
Capitol was erected that resurrected the idea of the very highly
MILE:
Planned Civic Center for
Mariemont, O. showing one
public building already erected
Proposed City Hall and street ar
rangement from "the Chicago Plan" by
Burnham.
332 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
stilted cupola which had been buried with the plans for Burnham's
Chicago City Hall.)
The craving for the decadent diagonal type of planning even
penetrated into the otherwise far superior garden city design of
America. Only the lack of money has, so far, protected Mariemont,
Ohio, from the erection of more than one of its public
buildings upon those unfortunate triangles rarely able to produce
esthetic satisfaction.
The attitude of mind of the advocates of similarly dubious
schemes is illustrated by the articles of the late Andrew W.
Crawford, who had given much of his indefatigable and unselfish
energy to the promotion of the furiously expensive diagonal
"Parkway" of Philadelphia. He was editor of a page in the
Philadelphia daily "Public Ledger" dedicated to city planning.
And some of his most striking contributions appeared in the
monthly review "Charities and the Commons" (today called
"Survey Graphic"). He and many other militant city planning
enthusiasts were permeated with an ill-founded admiration not
only for the work of Baron Haussmann in Paris, but also for
the more recent German city planning. Crawford (to mention
one among these) urged American cities to copy certain novel
street planning ideas rather than imitate the monotonous or
ugly designs of the nineteenth century. The source of his in
spiration was illustrated German magazines. But without a
knowledge of the German language and without a trained esthetic
judgment of his own, the American enthusiast confused the Ger
man instructions and models, good and bad. Thus he inadvert
ently recommended what his admired German masters considered
bad, and he ridiculed what they recommended as being more
beautiful. He meant to live up to their instructions. And to
add to the confusion, the discussion in Germany took a new
turn while Mr. Crawford wrote his articles in America. The
German town planners concluded by ridiculing the schemes which
Mr. Crawford had originally intended to acclaim; not under
standing the points at issue, he not only condemned them but
advocated something even worse.
This type of well-meaning if confused intelligence was instru
mental in bringing about the construction of the expensive
Philadelphia "Parkway" and, influenced by the Philadelphian
TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER 333
example, the similarly costly and problematic two radial streets
in the center of Buenos Aires. The unsatisfactory appearance
of these diagonal streets with their badly designed street inter
sections (not to mention their obstruction to traffic and their
undesirability as building sites) is another proof of the necessity
of studying more carefully, before millions are expended for
the sake of civic "beauty," the esthetic problems of city planning.
Such a study has been attempted in the volume "Civic Art" of
this publication (which, on p. 250 and 260 f., contains an il
lustrated analysis of the Philadelphia Parkway just referred to).
unnnnnnnnnnc
Dannnniinnnnnc
1 MILE
CENTRAL 3LCTION Or BUENOS AIRES
3HOWINO CEh4TRAL PLAZA AND RADIAL 5TREE.T5.
The American cities, built since Emerson's time, are loaded
with heavy-weight investments crowded carelessly into ill-selected
spots of the globe by planless, badly trained and often imbecilic
men who control billions and hundreds of billions of dollars and
cause their trusting fellow citizens to suffer enormous losses. A
prominent spokesman of American architects estimated that:
334 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
"the United States now staggers under something like five hun
dred billions of dollars of debt (including all public and semipublic
debt, and all land Values' held for rent) almost every
cent of which (except the few billions spent on wars) has been
piled up in buildings, or in schemes that serve buildings. (Charles
Harris Whitaker in "Rameses to Rockefeller: The Story of
Architecture," p. 262.) Almost everything on earth is some
how involved in buildings. And the financial disasters following
even the costliest of wars are small compared with the economic
losses resulting from ill-advised building perpetrated decade after
decade by a whole nation. In any event, it is not the lack of
funds but the lack of cultural leadership which has produced that
American formlessness so bewailed by Emerson.
Building may be ill-advised and require speedy destruction
for many reasons : because it furnishes unhealthy or unsafe quar
ters, because it is ugly, because it is uneconomical, or because it
has all these vices combined. People often believe that civic art
should or could concern itself exclusively with the question of
architectural ugliness or beauty. This is an error. Some of
the preceding chapters have expounded such economic, social
and political conditions as must necessarily be fulfilled before
one can hope for and seriously discuss a less "showy" but a
truly modern "city beautiful."
One might attempt to contradict this by saying that history
records great periods of civic art built upon the economic and
social foundations of slavery, serfdom and other methods of
exploitation. This is true; but it is also true that the creative
minds of those by-gone periods were not awakened to the in
justice of their economic environment. Plato had no objection
to the employment of slaves in the construction of kings' palaces
or the Parthenon. Neither did the finest minds of the Middle
Ages object to the miserable poverty of the manual laborers
who built the cathedrals nor to the beggars besetting them. (We
have seen that Luther even recommended slavery.)
There was the assumption in the Middle Ages that universals
and conceptions, ideas and categories were the genuine actuality.
It is the assumption which the greatest of classical philosophers
made the kernel of his system. But Plato only taught this
TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER 335
theory. The medieval age lived it. The modern age repudiates
it.
Into every house that he built, every song that he sang, every
ceremony that he practiced, medieval man put deep symbolism
which brings bliss because it casts a spell. And the poetic point
of view is distinguished from the scientific and the practical
point of view in that it views natural phenomena symbolically.
The picture that the Middle Ages offers us is full of contra
dictions. Seen in one aspect, it has an appearance of blessed
repose, of a majestic noonday stillness which illumines and protectingly
embraces all living things; in another aspect there is
the spectacle of a splendid discontent, of deep internal rendings
and stirrings. No doubt everything lived and moved in God
and felt itself enveloped in God; but how satisfy Him? This
was the dread question which trembled everywhere under the
serene and peaceful surface of existence. The mediaeval soul
lies before us, as a clear silvery pool, but at the bottom there
is agitation: a perpetual seeking without finding, a brewing, a
bubbling, a reaching. Spires rear themselves to Heaven, striving
to lose themselves in the depths of the firmament, insatiable in
the erotic yearning that was their most fundamental and original
discovery or invention, the love that so hypostasizes its object
that it becomes unattainable and is reduced to a symbol of
infinite longing. And above it all rises the figure of Christ, the
incomparable and yet the exemplar whom man has solemnly been
bound, by baptism, to copy in his life.
But by the middle of the fourteenth century there appears
on the stage an entirely different kind of humanity, or rather
one which contains the germs of another kind. There is still
seeking but also finding; still agitation, but no longer only in
the depths. A tragic culture is making way for a bourgeois
culture, a chaotic for an organic one. The world is thenceforth
no "God-inspired mystery but a man-made rationality."
The great devout thinkers of the Middle Ages thought health,
wealth and beauty dangerous impediments to the salvation of
the soul and believed, perhaps somewhat perversely, that poverty
was a great spiritual asset. And even quite recently (Sept. 11,
1935) the German chancellor, Hitler, told his nation that "des-'
336 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
titution (Not) has been a constant companion of art." Poverty,
the medieval thinkers claimed, recommends its victims to the
special and loving attention of a supreme being who, although
he was considered to be ever kind and almighty, must have been
in their conception somewhat sadistic in tolerating, or in even
obtaining satisfaction from the unspeakable sufferings of millions
of his creatures.
These antique and medieval notions have been fundamentally
changed by Dutch and Anglo-Saxon Calvinism and especially
by the American Declaration of Independence, guaranteeing and
recommending liberty and the pursuit of happiness to everyone
except the stupid. Lincoln sharply opposed those who held "that
slavery is morally right, and socially elevating," and he declared :
"We think slavery a great moral, social and political evil." And
poverty, today, is considered most dangerously synonymous with
bad housing, poor nourishment and the other causes of disease
and social decay which seriously threaten the health and the
purse of our entire community. Bernard Shaw came close to
expressing a widespread modern conviction when he said that
poverty is the worst of crimes and should be made punishable
by death. This paradox, of course, has a moral meaning only if
the victims of poverty have been given a chance to overcome it.
This chance must be available from the earliest beginnings of
natal as well as prenatal life. If received any later, the chance
fails to be a complete chance. The prey of such a failing chance
is in danger of being victimized for life; and we have no right,
Voltaire chided, "to expect the unfortunate to be perfect."
All these facts are now somewhat generally realized. They
are graven deeply into the hearts of all thinking and feeling
women and men. The vivid realization of these truths is a part
of our new religion, the devout belief in the desirability of a
spiritually and materially abundant life. Whoever is not imbued
with this new creed can as little be a true representative of
modern society as anyone not believing in the desirability of
poverty and chastity could have been a true representative of
medieval culture.
Any new civic art that does not fully express the new religion
can only be unrepresentative of our times, and is necessarily an
evasion and an abortion. The medieval city, wherever it was
TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER 337
congested and filthy or wherever it was exalted and sublime,
was a true expression of medieval religion with its implicit belief
in the desirability of the most ghastly contrasts of gallows,
pillories and crowded ghettos on the one side, and, on the other,
of masterly patrician houses arrayed in the sanctifying vicinity
of lofty spires. The slum dwellers even more than the owners of
rich mansions were promised the rewards of heaven and the pro
tection of the saints in the mighty cathedrals transfigured,
through dazzling stained windows, in mystical lights.
Modern civic art can readily build much loftier cathedrals
and higher towers than the medieval cathedral builders ever
dared to conceive. The highest of all cathedral towers, that of
Cologne (495 feet high, but completed only in the nineteenth
century and with money gathered from lotteries) is lower than
the Connecticut Yankee's tower in Hartford (Travelers Insur
ance Building, 527 feet high). The Empire State Building
(1248 feet) is more than twice as high. Holy St. Patrick's
Cathedral in New York humbly stands in the shadow of the
Rockefeller Center Tower which, aside from being much higher,
boasts of infinitely greater bulk than the religious spires
opposite.
In spite of their superior height, however, most high buildings
338 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
in America are abortions. They often do not pay and, to boot,
ruin their neighborhoods by taking the light, air and tenants
away, and by congesting the traffic. Furthermore, most Ameri
can high buildings are even esthetically a miscarriage. They are
appealing, for the most part, only in so far as anything unusu
ally tall and even gigantic impresses and excites the startled
mind. But even this precarious appeal of dubious beauty imme
diately disappears when the inordinate giant is closed in upon by
other giants. The height of a building can be measured only by
relating it to other buildings or objects in its vicinity. The City
Hall Tower (548 ft.) of Philadelphia, for instance, was formerly
very high. Today it is only moderately so and produces a
spindle-like or niggardly effect unworthy of a city hall. This
lapse of worthiness was caused by other towers beginning to
crowd in upon it. The newcomers are lower than the City Hall,
but they are much bulkier.
Or, to illustrate further, looking at the skyline of Dallas,
Texas (and one finds the same distortions in most American
cities) one observes buildings which formerly were very tall now
becoming part of a large mass, not even as high as it is broad.
(See sketch, p. 341). Aside from being clumsy, such a huge
heap suggests to every thinking observer at least two questions.
Firstly: how many badly lighted and badly paying offices and
how many clerks deprived of sunlight and ruining their eyesight
exist by this evident abuse of the new technical possibilities of
skyscraper construction? Secondly: what evil or stupid powers
instituted such laws as permit this abuse, an abuse, which, even
if it brought some profit to a few owners of centrally located
land (and in the long run this profit is also doubtful), must have
shattered the formerly well-founded expectations of most owners
of less centrally situated property.
A medievalist and there are many still living could well
tolerate the most appalling civic antitheses and any extreme of
local crowding, stupidity, or even malevolence in his city, since
he could view it as the work of the devil in whom he sincerely
believed or as a part of that earthly creation which the divine
Maker distinctly desired to be less perfect than that promised
heaven which is to be enjoyed after death. Most modern people,
on the contrary, believe that no devil should prevent their making
TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER 339
the world a place worthy of the economic and technical powers
they possess and which they can employ to combat the hell on
earth. We today feel that the world may well be made meritori
ous of whatever perfect heaven God has or has not planned and
built for our posthumous life. Even before he dies the spiritual
eyes and nose of a modern man are so acute that they see conges
tion and smell disease even when the stench from these despicable
relics of former civilizations does not emanate directly from Park
Avenue, New York, or from the most stately avenues of Wash
ington, but, concealed, issues (except for the insensible observers
or the medievalists) from the alleys immediately adjoining.
All this is fairly well understood and agreed upon by most
contemporary thinking and seeing people. But the problem does
not end here. Let us suppose that all the prerequisites of mod
ern city building, as have been discussed in the previous Chap
ters, are achieved. Let us suppose that every worker can pay
and maintain (thanks to his wages or to public subsidies) a
healthy home, and that every city can and will provide in decency
and even in beauty for all the public buildings, parks and play
grounds required, and that all semi-public buildings (banks,
offices, factories, etc.) can and will be dignified, spacious, welllighted,
well-ventilated and even beautiful. The question then
arises: what shall these novel and extensive groups of buildings
look like? The answer obviously must be that the new forms
required will naturally develop with the practical facilities for
fulfilling the new needs. But this evident consideration does not
exempt us, citizens and architects, from giving the most serious
thought to the plan and to the exterior forms of every proposed
new building.
Fortunately, America, since the time of Thomas Jefferson, of
Walt Whitman and of Montgomery Schuyler (to mention only
three outstanding personalities) has often had statesmen, art
critics, poets, and philosophers deeply susceptible to civic beauty.
And during the last decades a valiant school of new civic critics
arose; women and men of the strength of Catherine Bauer,
Claude Bragdon, Royal Cortissoz, T. F. Hamlin, Joseph Hudnut,
Fiske Kimball, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, Elbert
Peets, Kingsley Porter, T. E. Tallmadge, or last but not least
of the strength of that ever-young veteran Charles Harris
340 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
Whitaker, who, "for thirty years, has assigned himself the roving
commission of historian, observer and commentator in the field of
architecture."
These intrepid critics guide America to a new Civic Art
worthy of her unparalleled technical and economic power. Do
their opinions harmonize and are they all sympathetic with the
obvious rationalism of our 'period? The answer probably is
that these opinions are evolving. Nothing could be more con
vincing to take one specific example than some of Lewis
Mumford's recent articles on housing which refer mainly to the
economic and social aspects of the problem. (I do not see how
a better article than "Break the Housing Blockade!" by Mr.
Mumford in The New Republic, May 17, 1933, can be written.)
But when we search for light on those esthetic problems which
the next Chapter endeavors to discuss, we find that modern
American critics, and with them the architects, have to overcome
the same difficulties and contradictions which confront their
European colleagues and which the author of the present volume
had occasion to experience in all their intricate developments
during the nine years of his editorship of a critical architectural
review. To him nothing appears to be more to the point than
Joseph Hudnut's victorious jousting with R. A. Cram in the
articles, "The Romantic Architecture of Morningside Heights,"
and its sequels (Columbia University Quarterly, 1930, 1931,
1933). No criticism could be more penetrating than Elbert
Peets' analysis of the ponderous developments in the national
capital (published in the "Architectural Record," Sept., 1932).
But the mere fact that many recent buildings seem to justify as
pointed a criticism as that made by Hudnut or Peets, shows
what fundamental differences of opinion prevail among American
architects.
Whoever tries to find his bearings among the often contradic
tory writings of America's leading architectural critics, finds
himself at once attracted to the frequent assertions which declare
H. H. Richardson (1838-1886) to be the father of modern
architecture. A similar claim has been made in Germany in esti
mating F. Schinkel (1781-1841) whose "Old Guard House" has
quite recently been praised as being far superior to the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington. (Cf. next Chapter) The allegation
TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER 341
that Schinkel is the father of modern architecture is probably
much more valid than the similar one made for Richardson. Both
assertions, however, appear untenable to the present author.
1
Schinkel, in spite of his advanced classicism, his love for iron as
a medium of construction, his strong tirades against the tedium
of traditionalism and his sympathy with new functionalism, was,
nevertheless, a romantic, flying off on many tangents. Such a
quixotic spirit is a danger to our aspirations for new and true
civic art. We can follow his teachings only with great caution.
Can we with any less caution follow H. H. Richardson? Was
his effort consistent? Did he actually create the beginnings of
our new architecture, as his admirers maintain? The appear
ance of our future cities will, to a considerable extent, depend
upon consistent answers to these questions and their implications.
Who was Richardson?
lfThe author believes he has refuted the claim made for Schinkel, in
"Das Steinerne Berlin," p. 232 ff. and 241 ff.
Sky line . . .
Dallas, Texas.
The City Hall . . . New York.
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER
ORIGIN AND GOAL OF AMERICA S NEW CIVIC ART
In Europe, Americans have often been praised or blamed for
giving or failing to give a new architecture to our new world.
In America we have been told, many times, that a "new school of
architecture" has been founded by H. H. Richardson who as
we shall see was "a colossal man." A man of such proportions
seems to have been indispensable for overcoming America's
architectural plight concerning the seriousness of which, prior
to Richardson's intervention, foreign as well as indigenous critics
seem to have been unanimous in their opinion. Previous to the
architectural revolution wrought by Richardson, poorly informed
foreigners approaching New York's beautiful City Hall (built
in 1803) are said to have exclaimed: "That never was built in
this country!" (Cf. Montgomery Schuyler, "American Archi
tecture," p. 120). Only after Richardson's efflorescence do we
find frequent reports about perhaps lengendary but thoroughly
pleased citizens of Chicago who after their death and subsequent
reawakening in the ghastliest of hells always mistake that abode
for heaven and shout delightedly: "How wonderfully this glori
ous paradise reminds us of our dear old Chicago !" To recognize
a good thing when one sees it is a sign of true wisdom, and it
also applies to architecture the highest virtue of the critic.
At the very time when Emerson called America "formless,"
342
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 343
his great compatriot, Walt Whitman, also advanced powerful
reasons for equal dissatisfaction. It was the period when the
development of young America's traditional architecture was
interrupted by the importation of medieval forms from Europe.
These forms were neither practical nor had they ever taken root
in that new world of America, which was discovered by bold
Renaissance thought and which received its political institutions
from that new humanism and rationalism which sneered at the
"dark ages" and at their "Gothic" (i. e. barbaric) architecture.
In the Brooklyn Eagle (March 9 and 30, 1846) Walt Whitman
discussed the new Gothic church (Grace Church) on Broadway
and Eleventh Street, New York, designed by James Renwick, the
Englishman, in the new fashion of English romanticism at that
time entirely foreign to America. It was the same English
architect who also designed the Smithsonian Institute in Wash
ington, D. C., and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.
1
For
Walt Whitman, the philosopher, architecture was necessarily
not only an esthetic but also a moral consideration.
"The architecture of Grace Church," Walt Whitman wrote,
"is by superficial observers called beautiful. The proper word
is not beautiful, but showy. . . . We are impelled to say that
we do not look with a favorable eye on these splendid churches
on a Christianity which chooses for the method of its develop
ment a style that Christ invariably condemned, and the spirit
which he must have meant when he told an inquirer 'that he
could not enter into the kingdom of heaven.' Grace Church,
inside and out, is a showy piece of architecture, and the furnish
ing of the pews, the covering of the luxurious cushions, etc.,
appear to be unexceptional, viewed with the eye of an up
holsterer."
Thus did Walt Whitman give vent to strong utterances in
his criticism of that new fangled Gothic revivalist architecture
which also was later so profusely used for American universities,
or rather for what Joseph Hudnut calls, "the university of es-
1 Renwick designed the old (now demolished) building of New York's
City College at Twenty-third Street, an achievement which called forth the
following comment: "The president of one of the literary societies of the
College told his audience that the old pile was called Gothic, not from any
similarity to Gothic architecture, but rather, he thought, because it might
have been built in the time of the Goths." Cf. "The City College Quarterly,"
Dec., 1907.
344 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
cape" or "the romantic university." In such a university and
in such a church a-social and anti-social predilections seek and
find comfort and protection. "The familiar concrete world
might not enter here."
Against this costly architecture of escape Walt Whitman
sets the simpler forms of America's traditional small churches.
"Ah, who does not remember," he continues, "some little, old,
quaint, brown church in the country, surrounded by great trees
and plentiful verdure a church which a property speculator
would not own, as an investment, if he had to pay the taxes on
it? Is that to be compared for a moment with the tall-spired
temples of our great cities, where 'the pride that apes humility'
is far more frequent than the genuine spirit of Christ? And
we must say that for such reasons, we regret to see every new
putting up of a gorgeous church. . . . Grace Church puts one
in mind of the style of over-ornamented and bedizened column
and panel work so popular among theatrical scene painters.
The music, too, is a complete innovation on the usual style of
church music. It is loud without being impressive. . . . The
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 345
haughty bearing of our American aristocrats (that most con
temptible phase of aristocracy in the whole world!), the rustling
silks and gaudy colors in which wealthy bad taste loves to pub
lish its innate coarseness the pompous tread, and the endeavor
to 'look grand,' how disgustingly frequent are all these at Grace
Church! Ah, there is no religion there. The worst feelings and
impulses of humanity, instead of being thrown aside, are in
corporated in everything connected with the establishment, and
its proceedings."
American church architecture which according to Walt Whit
man embodied "the worst impulses of humanity" has long since
been supplanted by the superior taste of those American church
builders from Richardson to Goodhue and Cram who were even
more deeply steeped in European medievalism than the English
architect of Grace Church on Broadway. Is their art more
American? Is it expressive of higher social impulses and of a
more truly civic spirit than the English church that shocked
Jill JI'L
Trinity Church, Boston.
Right: Plan showing its location on Copley Square.
Walt Whitman? And if the individual buildings of these new
designers evince superior skill in the use of the medieval mode,
are the settings of their structures compatible with this more
dignified use, and does the neighborhood respect them? Even
the satisfactory appearance of the finest building depends largely
upon its satisfactory position in the proper surroundings. Did
the architects fulfill this most fundamental requirement of all
civic art?
By no means ! Richardson's famous Trinity Church in Boston
lacks the indispensable relationship to a well proportioned fore-
346 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
court (the "paradise" of the medieval builder), and faces, in
stead, a triangle created not by an artist but by unsympathetic
traffic engineers. It is true that the neighboring would-be sky
scrapers were, respectfully, half-completed, and were prevented
from soaring higher than ten stories. But this means that they
are still six stories higher than the scale of Trinity Church
could artistically permit. In New York Goodhue's charming
St. Thomas' Church is disrespectfully squeezed into an irrelevant
corner of a block and is, now, fatally drowning between sky
scrapers. And the ostensibly medieval construction of Cram's
gorgeous and most costly St. John the Divine is in reality a
sham pasted over modern steel and skyscraper construction thus
flagrantly contradicting the ideals of superior "honesty" pro
mulgated as an expression of medieval architecture by its modern
copyist.
2
Also the outward refinement of the showiness of col
lege and office buildings, apartment and tenement houses al
though they are distinct improvements or caricatures of heavily
corniced Italian palaces or of Tudor castles with battlements
and fake half-timber work is often transcended by the parsi
mony influencing the exploitation of and the crowding on the
land. Crowding and "overcrowding" made the pretentious new
cities of this evidently too small American continent obsolete
long before the steel supporting their pasticcio of architectural
motives had a chance to rust. To what extent could the genius
of Richardson and his followers have given a dignified appearance
to this economic and social chaos?
Richardson's greatness was eulogized at an early date. In
a symposium on the ten finest buildings in America, conducted by
an architectural journal in the 'eighties,' five designed by Rich
ardson were given unanimous acclaim. Although the dilatory
Encyclopedia Britannica of 1891 does not refer to him in a
single word, its Chicago reprint of the same year, with "Original
American Articles by Eminent Writers," informs us that "the
late H. H. Richardson, of Boston, may be said to have first
popularized the principles of a pure architectural taste in the
United States, and it has been justly said that to him we owe
the fact that we have today an American architecture, though
2 The %" scale drawing of wooden king post truss over Synod House
at the Cathedral of St. John in New York shows this truss and ceiling
suspended from a steel truss completely concealed in the ceiling space.
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 34T
scores of lesser lights were working along the same lines whose
labors have since borne abundant fruit. Richardson's monu
ment is Trinity Church, Boston, and from its erection, a few
years ago, dates a new era in the religious architecture of the
country. Scarcely a city of prominence but can point to one
or more churches conceived in the highest spirit of the builder's
art. In our civic and governmental buildings, too, we have cast
off the shackles of ignorance and provincialism, and in most
instances the results are eminently satisfactory. Meantime, the
aesthetic leaven, spreading downward, has tended to beautify
the domestic architecture, at least, of our larger cities and towns.
In the West, no less than in the East, is this made manifest, and
the suburbs of the great centers of population are dotted with
examples of a trained taste and an attention to the demands of
the new environment. The amazing growth in recent years of
building and loan associations has made it possible for the artisan
and the man of moderate means to own a modest home. Even in
this direction the new school of architecture has made itself
felt." (Cf. American Appendix to Vol. II of Encycl. Brit.,
ninth edition, Chicago, 1891, p. 131.)
Thereupon the same American Appendix from Chicago
proudly and elaborately describes another and entirely "new
style of structure, first introduced into that city and known as
'The Chicago Construction.'
'
In connection with this "new
style," however, the name of Richardson is not mentioned. It is,
nevertheless, this very mode of iron and steel construction which
is rapidly becoming, apparently, the most congenial expression
of our machine age. This new style has conquered America and
is conquering the world, while the works of the previously men
tioned "new school of architecture" founded by Richardson seem
to be what Claude Bragdon called them "stage scenery," hav
ing long ago gone "back to the storehouse." (The full quota
tion is given on p. 354.) This criticism of "stage scenery" re
peats (inadvertently, one may assume) the denunciation ("the
atrical scene painting") so eloquently declaimed half a century
earlier by Walt Whitman in his refutation of the Gothic pastic
cio of Renwick's Grace Church. Even for Richardson's Ro
manesque art his great contemporary in poetry seems to have
expressed less, if any, veneration than for the symbols of the
348 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
new machine age. Richardson was ten years old when Whitman
wrote: "There are few more magnificent pieces of handiwork
than a powerful steam-engine, swiftly at work!" (January 10,
1848.)
The patriotic admiration, which Richardson's Romanesque
buildings aroused in other contemporaries of the gilded eighties
and gay nineties, is perhaps exactly what should have been ex
pected. More impressive is the fact that in some minds this
admiration survived the period of alleged bad taste and that it
has, only a few years ago, been voiced again in similar and even
stronger terms by some of the advance guard of American critics.
And even when they stop admiring Richardson's own "new school
of architecture," they claim as we shall see that Richardson
was in reality the very prophet of that "new style" of "Chicago
construction" referred to above which is today our most adequate
hope for a new civic art. Against this claim the counter-claim
exists that Richardson (and, in so far as he has influenced them,
almost each one of his followers) has not aided but rather im
peded the American advance towards a new civic art, i.e. an art
which is at the same time practical and beautiful. Richardson's
critics, furthermore, claim that the handicap he created is as
yet by no means overcome ; that its implications still lie at the
bottom of much of our historical teaching in architecture ; that
similar regrettable "modes" or fashions under different guise
are recurring every few years.
It is not in architecture that la recherche de la paternite est
interdite. On the contrary, the curiously opposing and some
times even slightly grotesque opinions held about Richardson
demand scrutiny. If the paternity of modern architecture is
once analyzed and validly repudiated in so outstanding a pre
tender as Richardson, the child new architecture! may grow
up to be more healthy, and the subsequent claims made for the
numerous other dubious but ambitious "fathers" can be passed
over with less concern.
Following are, verbatim, some of the more recent assertions
and counter-assertions made in Richardson's behalf. We read:
"Between 1880 and 1895 the task and method of modern archi
tecture were clarified through the example of a group of Ameri
can architects whose consistent and united efforts in this line
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 349
antedated, by at least a decade, the earliest similar innovations
in Europe. Modern architecture had its beginning in this
period," which witnessed "the first experimental efforts to work
out the form of an office building, an urban factory, a hotel, in
terms of their inherent needs and their new possibilities. How
did this change come about? In back of it stands a colossal man,
Henry Hobson Richardson, an architect who almost singlehanded
created out of a confusion which was actually worse than
a mere void the beginnings of a new architecture." ("The Brown
Decades," Lewis Mumford, p. 113 f.)
Thus in almost medieval adoration of Richardson spoke his
admirer, Lewis Mumford, who otherwise has by no means such
medieval inclinations. His Richardsonian creed, although shared
by many, is opposed by those iconoclasts who denounce Richard
son as "a kind of exotic, a mistaken interpreter of his time and
his opportunity, a great artist manque." (Royal Cortissoz, in
"Art and Common Sense," p. 387) Creator? Or mistaken in
terpreter? Which is he?
Richardson's power of specifically modern creation was com
patible with (or due to) the fact that he "was perhaps the last
of the great medieval line of master-masons." ("Sticks and
Stones," Lewis Mumford, p. 101.)
What may the terminator of an extinct art have done to
initiate modern architecture? The last medieval master-mason?
Do not this and similar slightly mystical expressions form part
of that romantic and sometimes even nauseating ideology of
John Ruskin who praises everything medieval and sneers at
everything else, be it Renaissance or modern? We know, by
now, that the medieval master-masons, like any other masters,
made frequent errors. Their calculations were probably less ac
curate than those of modern architects. Entire medieval
churches proved unstable and were blown down by the wind (like
the one of Utrecht, only the apse of which is still standing).
Probably many more of them would have collapsed by this time
if modern architects had not spent much of their genius and
more of the people's money in maintaining the complicated stone
work of these often irrational structures or rather stone scaffold
ings. Also the frequently stated assertion that the medieval
masons were more "honest" than their successors may be dis-
350 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
missed. It is true that the famous Renaissance domes of the
cathedral in Florence or of St. Peter in Rome are held together
by hidden chains. But is this any more "dishonest" than the
fact that the grandiose Gothic choir (built about 1385) of the
cathedral in Aix-la-Chapelle is built without the outer stone scaf
folding of flying buttresses and is actually held together by con
cealed iron chains? (Where this chain must pass through the
gloriously exalted windows of the choir it is each time deftly
disguised as one of the metal frames that holds the stained glass
in place.) Thus the choir stands and is probably much more
beautiful for having its outer view unobstructed by the heavy
outriggings of stone called flying buttresses. And these fine
outer views convey to an honest person nothing "dishonest." On
the contrary, if one craves for interpretation, one might even
say that they suggest the almighty though invisible holy ghost
who through as modest and "modern" a medium as iron holds the
body and the soul of the sacred church together. Words per
mitting any variety of literary interpretation to whatever an
architect wishes to do will never be lacking.
Above: Aix-la-Chapelle, 16th Century.
Right: Nave of Westminster Abbey,
15th Century, showing light obscured
by flying buttresses.
A claim as precarious and romantic as the one asserting the
superior "honesty" of the medieval master-masons has been made
by Ruskin and his followers who declare that the social order of
the middle ages was superior to our own. More careful students
of medievalism have shown that there was just as much social
unrest during the period of cathedral building as there is today.
And there were many fights and strikes even when it came to the
financing of and the slaving for the erection of the most sublimely
religious structures. But there is here not sufficient space to
discuss this obvious fact. (It has been touched upon in the Six
teenth Chapter.)
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 351
Let us return to the question: what does it mean to designate
Richardson as "perhaps the last of the great medieval line of
master-masons"? The medieval architects knew most of all how
to form wonderful interiors. They put the "flying" structural
supports of their amazing halls outside the building so as not to
obstruct its interior. In sunny Greece the congregations assem
bled outside the temples which could be duly admired from with
out; neither inside nor outside had they flying buttresses to
obstruct their crystalline forms. The churches in the cloudier
countries of the "dark" middle-ages, on the contrary, gathered
their rapt congregations within masterly shaped halls. Joseph
Hudnut has justly emphasized: "Gothic architecture is an
architecture of interiors." But another attentive student of
medieval architecture, on the other hand, speaks of Richardson's
"wholly evil interiors." (A. Kingsley Porter in "Beyond Archi
tecture," 1918, p. 198) What was there medieval about
Richardson?
Interior of Trinity Church . . . Boston.
352 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
With this question in mind I visited his Trinity Church one
bright sunny September morning and was shocked by the glare
of at least two hundred electric bulbs. These were distributed
around large and small chandeliers, but struggled ineffectually
against the darkness of the medieval structure. A kind gentle
man attendant assured me that artificial light was required even
in the summertime. "And even then," he said, "I find it often
quite spooky. A lady of our congregation told us that she would
like to visit the church more often, but this spookiness gives her the
creeps." Over the small windows filled with darkly stained glass
Richardson raised a vault which is a wooden make-believe covering
a truss with tie-beam and king-post. The vertical kingpost seems
to hang down from the center of the vault, i.e. from the very point
of the vault that would be the weakest if the construction were
what it tries to appear to be, namely, a vault, rather than a mas
querading truss. There may be no objection to simulating an
appearance which is at variance with the structural reality. But
such a conjurer's trick must either produce something beautiful
or at least conjure up the illusion of some historical precedent
with which the designer or the beholder may be infatuated.
Richardson's vault is not beautiful. It certainly reminds one of
no "honest" medieval construction. Where, then, is the "medieval
master-mason"?
3
This brings us to something more truly moyenagesque. The
discoverer of Richardson's more significant new name (see foot
note) also calls him a "true master builder." But he adds:
"Richardson, too, might be called a copyist, for he adored the
genuine craftsman splendors of the Romanesque." (Cf. "Rameses
to Rockefeller," Charles Harris Whitaker, p. 242). Now the
real miracle appears : the "copyist" was provided with "the crea
tive instinct." It was the Romanesque of Southern France that
fecundated this instinct with the conception of a "new archi-
8 Is it perhaps more akin to medieval practice (but it certainly cannot
be important!) that part of Richardson's name is shrouded in that romantic
mystery which often conceals the identities of designers of medieval cathe
drals? As a modern illustration of how such medieval shroudings can
originate, it may be mentioned that for many brown decades Richardson's
admirers thought his middle name to be Hobson. But this was evidently not
"Hobson's choice." Recently, his cryptic connection with a great musical
composer and his identity with a certain Australian writer seem to have
been discovered: his middle name now seems to be Handel. (See Whitaker,
"Rameses to Rockefeller," p. 242 and 358)
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 353
tecture." And an entirely medieval touch this fecundation
was the result of an immaculate conception: it occurred without
bodily contact. This belated or pseudo-Christian miracle was
consummated in 1872 when Richardson received the holy and
profitable commission for Trinity Church in Boston. "Although
it was not until ten years later that he saw any Romanesque
buildings other than in photographs for he had not traveled
during his student years in Paris it was in this sturdy mode
that he cast his best work." ("Sticks and Stones," Lewis Mumford,
p. 101.) Indeed, Richardson's admired Trinity Church, in
spite of its "wholly evil interior," presents his inspired effort to
copy the French Romanesque "mode," a mode which he did not
see "until ten years later."
Such an attempt to create out of photographs a new archi
tecture which is "cast" in medieval forms might be called "bookish
theoric"; but this term belongs to Shakespeare and his Renais
sance, unsympathetic with medieval modes. At any rate, Rich
ardson's "single-handed" and perhaps somewhat high-handed
effort was doomed to failure.
Christ fulfilled the predictions of great prophets. The in
spired medieval master-mason tried to do likewise: "Going back
to Romanesque precedent. ... he was following out a dictum of
Viollet-le-Duc :
'only primitive sources supply the energy for a
long career.'" ("Sticks and Stones," Lewis Mumford, p. 101.)
Primitive? How can the "last medieval master-mason" be a
primitive? Richardson "copied" the porch of Saint Trophime
(Aries), built in the twelfth century. Is it likely that its anony
mous designer considered himself a "primitive"? Or did he
rather proudly consider himself to be the last of the Romans?
This church in Aries is adorned with sculpture and decorations
which might almost pass as late Roman work.
And did Richardson have "the energy for a long career"?
He had the genial appetites of a "King Lehr" and of "the Gilded
Age" the clumsy extravagances of which have recently been re
told by Elizabeth Drexel Lehr. But Richardson's "gargantuan
appetites," his "love for good food," and "his capacity to drink
champagne" lasted him after his virginal conception of the
Trinity only fourteen years. His "bulky figure" (all these
epithets are taken from "The Brown Decades," Lewis Mumford,
354 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
p. 116) had soon become so bulky that his genius, to permit him
to survey his jobs under construction, had to invent special hoists
and tackles to lift the weight of his Falstaffian figure to the upper
stories. As late as 1934 an old attendant at the State Capitol in
Albany vividly described this uplifting process of which he had,
in his youth, been a frequent eyewitness. But it is perhaps not
to the rope required by this process that Mr. Whitaker refers
when, in his glowing account of Richardson's significance, he
writes: "With Richardson there passed a moment when it would
be easy to say that the fate of Architecture in America hung by
a thread." ("Rameses to Rockefeller," p. 244.) American archi
tecture will not be hung as "easily" as that.
Even liberated from his chores by an untimely death, the
spirit of Richardson had no "long career." In an essay "To
wards a New Architecture," Mr. Claude Bragdon writes the
following phrases (partly quoted above) : "The vogue of the
'Richardson Romanesque' was short-lived, being foreign to our
psychology, and ill-adjusted to our needs. It was stage scenery,
in point of fact, and only a little after the death of its great
exemplar the show closed and the scenery went back to the store
house." And "the so-called Richardsonian Romanesque style,
with its rough stone walls, small, deeply set windows, squat
columns and round arches with enormous voussoirs, was affected,
extravagant and ill-adapted to modern needs and conditions.
Being first of all a practical people, and architecture being first
of all a practical art, a short time after death had put an end to
Richardson's activities and so diminished the force of his example,
we abandoned the use of a style which offered so many impedi
ments to comfort and convenience."
*
A similar opinion was expressed by Mr. Royal Cortissoz:
"Richardson encouraged exoticism, redundancy, and an unexpressive
florid kind of swagger, at a time when the one thing needed
was discipline."
The opinion of Mr. Cortissoz has been quoted and called
"stupid" by Richardson's admirer, Mr. Mumford, who, some
times, likes to fling epithets at his opponents, although he may,
*The latter quotations are taken from Bragdon's essay: "The First
American Modernist: Louis Sullivan." As the title indicates, Bragdon en
deavors to secure the title of "First American Modernist" for Sullivan rather
than for Richardson. The merits of each are equal.
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 355
in many essentials, agree with his victims. Mr. Mumford avers
that :
"Richardson, alas ! left scarcely a trace upon the period
that followed." He calls Richardson "the chief exponent of
American romanticism" and admits that the "Romanesque prece
dent" which Richardson attempted to "absorb" was "a vanished
tradition." And the attempt was not always successful : "So far
had the art of masonry disappeared that in Trinity Church
Richardson sometimes introduced struts and girders without any
attempt to assimilate them in the composition"; nevertheless,
"Richardson's brand of romanticism was a genuine attempt to
embrace the age." ("Sticks and Stones," p. 102 f.)
Does Richardson's failure to assimilate struts and girders
weaken or strengthen the thesis that he was the last great mastermason?
This thesis, by the way, might have made Richardson,
or at least his contemporaries, smile. One of them, a true ad
mirer, wrote, in 1888, an article on fire-protection by slow burn
ing construction, especially in the textile factories of New
England. He cites Richardson's Field Warehouse in Chicago as
an excellent example of good (interior) timber construction.
Today, it is a parking lot. Unlike most of the other of Richard
son's cyclopean buildings, the ponderous masses of which are too
expensive to pull down, it did not escape destruction. Probably
its floors and roofs were three inch oak planks, its joists heavy
oak timbers and its posts cast iron. Assimilated or not by the
master-mason, such construction satisfied the fire insurance com
pany. It evoked the following comment from the expert in fire
protection: "The great warehouse built by Richardson for
Marshall Field is but a glorified cotton factory, and the lovely
little building connected with the home office of Mr. Richardson
in which his art treasures were safely housed was the picker
building of a cotton factory with a touch of genius added."
(Century Magazine, Vol. 15, p. 578.) Richardson came from
Louisiana. It is a great pity that his cotton picking souvenirs,
after he had "glorified" them, look so very much more like medie
val dungeons than like Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Richardson's most censorious critic is probably neither
Cortissoz nor Bragdon, but Mumford: "The chief marks of the
style Richardson created," he said, "are the all-too-solid courses
of rough stone, the round arch, the squat columns, and the con-
356 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
trasts in color between the light granite and the dark sandstone
or serpentine." ("Sticks and Stones," p. 105.) Seven years
later Mr. Mumford praised Richardson's "strong sense of colour,
which perhaps tempted him too far in his use of contrasting
stones." Without a doubt, too far. Today, one may admit that
although Richardson had little sense of colour he wantonly used
contrasting stones, probably because he had been reading Violletle-Duc
or Ruskin who told him that polychromy was good medie
val practice.
"Mr. Montgomery Schuyler, an excellent architectural critic,
once said, not without reason, that Richardson's houses were not
defensible except in a military sense." ("Sticks and Stones,"
Lewis Mumford, p. 105.) Mr. Mumford speaks of Richardson's
"ponderous forms" and says : "His efforts with the heavy Roman
esque earned, not altogether unjustly, the epithet dropsical."
Dropsy, the dictionaries tell us, is "a morbid collection of fluid in
the serous cavities of the body."
Montgomery Schuyler, whom even Mumford does not refer to
as being "stupid," but as being "the one real critic of architec
ture that America has produced," comments on the Gargantuan
freakishness of Richardson's work as follows:
"Richardson's best buildings were the express images of that
impetuous and exuberant personality that all who knew him re
member. He used to tell of a tourist. . . . who upon being
introduced to him exclaimed: 'Oh, Mr. Richardson, how you are
like your work !' . . . the salutation was not without critical
value." Schuyler ponders: "... when a building consists as
exclusively as possible of bare stone walls, it irresistibly suggests
.... the abode of a misanthrope." When it happens, however,
that such a defensive residence is erected "upon a fashionable
avenue" one may assume "that the owner does not profess mis
anthropical sentiments," but that "the character of his abode
must be referred to a whim on the part of his architect a
Titanic, or rather Gargantuan freak." (Montgomery Schuyler,
"American Architecture," p. 153 and 160.)
The "dropsical" morbidity of many of Richardson's erected
buildings being fairly generally admitted, his disciples, when in
less anachronistic moods, ask us to admire the work which he did
not do, but would have liked to have done. "The things I want
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 357
most to design," Richardson said to his biographer, "are a grainelevator
and the interior of a great river-steamboat." But those
who praise him for such statements forget that "by one of those
paradoxes that seem peculiarly ironical (Richardson once said:
The Jail . . .
Pittsburgh
(Richardson).
'Wait till they see my jail!'), his finest building is the Pittsburgh
County Jail. There one finds true masonry, flawless in the
rhythm of all its parts. In the jumble of modern Pittsburgh,
with its dull and pompous pseudo-Roman, at Schenley Square,
and its miles on miles of shabby streets and sprawling fringes of
sheer and utter ugliness, Richardson's jail stands out like a finger
of shame." ("Rameses to Rockefeller," Charles Harris Whitaker,
p. 243.)
Shameful, therefore, seems to be the fact, that the finest build
ing of the "creator of modern architecture" is a pseudoRomanesque
prison. It is his finest achievement because in this
he could approach most closely his far-fetched romantic ideal of
an eleventh century dungeon and could fully satisfy his craving
for a minimum of small windows, or rather loopholes and em
brasures. Old dungeons are, of course, very beautiful at least
from without, in spite of their "wholly evil interiors." It would
Glessner residence . . .
Chicago
(Richardson).
358 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
even be unjust to say that the beauty of this kind of military
architecture is wholly un-American. In the northwest corner of
Central Park, New York, stands a souvenir of the American
Revolution, "Blockhouse No. 1," an excellent example of how
sturdy an American pile of rocks with a minimum of openings
also can look.
Richardson's admirers, however, are not inclined to admit
that the "copyist" of fortresses ("not defensible except in a
military sense") stubbornly resisted the modern age and its de
mand for air, light and lightness. They suggest, rather amus
ingly, that after all Montgomery Schuyler must have been wrong,
when he directed his accusations against the architect, and not
the client, for demanding this freakishness. No, they say, it was
not Richardson's fault, but modern America's: "The fact that
so many of Richardson's buildings have the heavy air of a prison
shows us that the Gilded Age was not, indeed, gay, and that a
spiritual Black Friday perpetually threatened the calendar of
its days." ("Sticks and Stones," Lewis Mumford, p. 114.) Thus
the ominous fluctuations of the New York Stock Exchange (and
not Viollet-le-Duc's "dictum") were responsible for Richardson's
imitating "a vanished tradition" of France, most suitable for
prisons, when the problem was rather to design modern America's
residential and other buildings. In short, Richardson's edifices
were not "the beginnings of a new architecture," but were the
ominous expressions of the Gilded Age.
Richardson's admirers may sometimes be perverse; but they
are not blind. "Richardson was a mason, and masonry was being
driven out by steel. . . . The very strength of Richardson's
buildings was a fatal weakness in the growing centers of commerce
and industry." The difficulty of getting rid of these Romanesque
structures "only increased the demand for a more frail and facile
method of construction. Romanticism met its great defeat in
the office-building." ("Sticks and Stones," Lewis Mumford, p.
106 f.)
After this admission of Richardson's defeat his admirers found
a new line of defense. Mr. Mumford even reversed his previous
argument : "Romanticism met its great defeat in the office build
ing." Those in sympathy with Richardson now claim that "the
chief exponent of American romanticism" celebrated his great
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 359
triumph in his last office buildings. "What Richardson brought
to architecture, finally, was an interest, not in an exotic past,
not in dead forms, not in the external flourish, but in the inher
ent nature of building itself and its relation to society."
This new thesis is said to be proved by Richardson's Marshall
Field and John H. Pray buildings. His contemporary, the ex
cellent Montgomery Schuyler, praised the Field Building by say
ing: "Its bigness is made apparent by the simplicity of its
treatment and the absence of any lateral division whatever.
Simplicity, indeed, could scarcely go further." Instead of the
simplicity of the structure the modern observer rather admires
Richardson's capacity to invent, for a simple warehouse of seven
stories and a basement, the unbelievable multiplicity of eight
different types of windows. At least two of these rows of windows
(the arched ones in the fourth and sixth stories) are distinctly
designed to create an exterior "esthetic" effect and not to satisfy
requirements for interior lighting. The game played with po
dium, colonaded attic, palace cornice, and different-sized groups
of windows dissatisfies even Schuyler. He says: "It must be
owned that there is a distinct infelicity in the arrangement of the
five stories of this intermediate wall, the two superposed arcades,
the upper one of which, by reason of its multiplied supports, is
the more solid aspect, and between which there is no harmonious
relation, but contrariwise a competition."
Richardson was incapable of simplicity even when he distinctly
desired it. One must appreciate this unsatisfied craving. When
the rebuilding of the business quarter of Boston was in progress,
and while that city was for the most part congratulating itself
upon the display of the skill of its architects for which the fire
had opened a field, Mr. Richardson observed (to Schuyler) "that
there was more character in the plain and solid warehouses that
had been destroyed than in the florid edifices by which they had
been replaced."
This comment (the present author believes) should become
the basis of America's architectural criticism. It is directed most
of all against Richardson and then against all the "architects"
who, following him, ruined the auspicious, fairly sane and prac
tical development of American architecture one might even say,
tradition. They ruined it by acting the part of some anachro-
360 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
nistic "master-mason" and by "designing" buildings inspired by
photographs taken elsewhere, first in southern France, then in
Egypt (we shall presently see the Monadnock Block!), and later
in almost every other part of the globe.
Astor House . . . New York. Stewart Bldg. . . . New York
(now Wanamakers).
Richardson's platonic words (or crocodile tears) about the
fine "character in the destroyed plain and solid warehouses" will
be understood if one considers the scanty remains of those very
periods as yet undefiled by romantic master-masons. Mr. T. F.
Hamlin, in his valuable book, "The American Spirit in Archi
tecture," has preserved many fine old views. The old Astor
House and the old Stewart Building, both on Broadway in New
York, the Neil House in Columbus, and even Philadelphia's old
Public Ledger Building (with its cast iron front, like that of the
old Stewart Building), manifest greater simplicity and less pretention
than Richardson's vaunted Field Building. They also
evince what serious tendencies towards a new and practical real
ism, utterly unconcerned with academic prejudices, had been fa
tally interrupted by the "dropsy" of Richardson.
But Mumford writes: "One can almost agree with a young
pflBHlliiiia
"'ifUIIIIIISPFPIW n
Neil House . . . Columbus, O. Public Ledger Bldg. . . . Phila, Pa.
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 361
American critic of architecture when she says: 'Richardson was
the real founder of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
9 '
("The Brown Dec
ades," p. 126.) If this has a malicious intent, she might indeed
be right. Of course, the German architects' "Neue Sachlich
keit" means "new matter-of-factness" or functionalism. But,
unfortunately, this slogan has been selected by a group of archi
tects, some of whom were decidedly great artists of the I'art pour
Vart type, willing to commit any conceivable sacrifice of common
sense and practicality for the sake of some novel artistic effect,
whether it was long horizontal windows, or whole glass fronts,
or making buildings look like ships, like Le Corbusier's, or resort
ing to other novel devices.
Richardson's matter-of-factness, we are told, achieved its final
triumph in his Pray Building. "Though this building antedated
the skeleton form of construction, it already has the feeling of
lightness, and the readiness to welcome sun and air that this de
parture should have brought in ; in the shallow reveals, the design
is already miles from stone construction. This conception of an
office building dates less than ten years after the clumsy roman
tic office buildings Richardson himself had designed in Hartford
and Boston ; but it was more than a generation in advance of
current work." And: "The bays (of the Pray Building) are
given their full width and the spandrels are only as wide as the
floor is thick ; the windows are unbroken, except for the band that
separates the stories from the upper panels ; even the unfortunate
features of the upper story, the round arches and the castellated
windows at the top are carried through with great simplicity."
("The Brown Decades," Lewis Mumford, p. 126.)
The fact is that Richardson decorated his Pray Building with
colossal windows, aiming at an effect which is uncalled for. It
would be justified only if some huge hall or church with an unob
structed interior equal to four ordinary stories were to be lighted.
But Richardson places his colossal windows in front of four ordi
nary stories. He does it by extending the glass surface of ordi
nary windows down to the floor level, i.e., down to the place where
no glass is needed and where quite generally the observer (on
the outside) sees the radiator which blocks and must heat the
unnecessary expanse and expense of glass near the floor.
Delusion has infinite possibilities, good sense, only one ! As
362 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
MONADNOCK BLDG- -CHICAGO
BURNHAMtROOT CHURCH IN BALTIMORE-MCKIM,MEAD* WHITE
900 BROADWAY - NEW YORK AUDITORIUM BLDG -CHICAGO
MGKIM( MEAD*WHITE(>M WELLS) ADLER * SULLIVAN
POAY BLDG--BOSTON -H-H- RICHARDSON PIELD BLDG--CHICAGO - H H- RICHARDSONJ
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 363
Richardson wished to have his make-believe giant window appear
arched at the top, one whole story receives more of the super
fluous light coming in at the floor level, and much less of the
essential light coming in where the upper and most light-giving
part of the window should be. It is in the fifth story that the
upper part of the outer wall must accommodate Richardson's
Romanesque arch (inevitable, of course!) which seems specially
designed to obstruct the light. Is this "great simplicity," or
are we already in the presence of "the unfortunate features of the
upper story"? No, it is the sixth story whose "features are
carried through with great simplicity" but made "unfortunate"
by Richardson's craving to obtain, above his round arches, the
additional "artistic" effect of a Romanesque cornice with windows
through which as little light as possible may pass.
It is unnecessary to show in detail how Richardson's extrava
gance influenced other architects, especially Sullivan, and how
the same illogical method of extolling Richardson has been prac
tised in the critical judging or rather misjudging of other Ameri
can architects and has done much to deter the advance of
American architecture. Two examples, from the work of Root
and of Sullivan, may be given special attention. Sullivan (who
will be discussed after Root) began by imitating Richardson's
copies of Romanesque arches. His colleague, Irving K. Pond,
wrote: "In his 'Autobiography of an Idea' . . . Louis Sullivan
proclaims his love of mathematics and his sympathy with engi
neering . . . his design belies the latter in many a striking ex
ample in which the dominating arch is made mere ornament and
its structural character is denied."
This same use of ornament which is intended to look structural
but in reality is not, was also resorted to by J. W. Root. Loud
praise has been given to the exotic tendencies of Root and gentle
slander has been piled upon his partner, Burnham, and upon the
architects who with him built the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.
They broke away from the Richardsonian Romanesque in an at
tempt to develop for modern American use the Greek-RomanRenaissance-Georgian
forms which had taken firm root in
America with the earliest white settlers, long before 1785, when
Thomas Jefferson (twenty-two years before the Madeleine was
built in Paris) designed and constructed the Virginia Capitol,
364 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
upon purely Roman lines, and soon afterwards attempted some
thing similar in his home at Monticello and in the very wonderful
University of Virginia. The efforts to follow American prece
dent instead of playing with exotic forms have been most severely
criticized by the advance guard of American critics. They praise
Root who preferred Egyptian, East Indian and Hindoo forms.
Root is the architect who is generally credited with the design
of the Monadnock Building, in Chicago. "Montgomery Schuyler
pronounced the Monadnock Building the best of all tall office build
ings. He was right. It was by far the best thing done in ma
sonry and its windows were more inventively planned than those
of Sullivan's Auditorium Building, which followed close on its
heels." And it is the Monadnock Building "which has exerted
such a powerful influence over the new school of German archi
tects." In addition to these remarks made by Mumford, he fur
ther maintains : "Our first tall buildings were designed for the most
part by men who thought in terms of established architectural
forms : Burnham and Root's Monadnock Building was an almost
isolated exception ; and, significantly enough, it did not employ
the steel skeleton! The academic architects compared the sky
scraper to a column, with a
base, a shaft, and a capital."
("Sticks and Stones," p. 169.)
It happens this may be
mentioned incidentally that it
was one of the most anti-aca
demic of architects, the inter
nationally known Viennese
modernist, Adolf Loos, who
most strongly entreated that a
skyscraper look like a column.
It also happens that the Mon
adnock Building and its alleged
designer Root were by no
means the exceptions Mumford
declares them to be. Root was
The Rookery . . .
Chicago (Root).
(See p. 366)
5 Cf. "Adolf Loos," edited by H.
Kulka, Vienna, 1931, p. 378, fig. 156.
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 365
precisely one of those despised "men who thought in terms of
established architectural forms." It was the much slandered
business man of the nineties and, with him, the shrewd Burnham
who partly, but only partly, succeeded in pulling Root away from
his academic leanings. Harriet Monroe's biography of Root
tells us very honestly how the clients "rejected Root's sketches
as too ornate. During Root's absence of a fortnight, Mr. Burnham
ordered from one of the draftsmen a design of a straight
up-and-down, uncompromising, unornamented facade. When
Root returned, he was indignant at first over this project of a
brick box. Gradually, however, he threw himself into the spirit
of the thing, and one day told Mr. Aldis (the uncompromising
businessman) that 'the heavy sloping lines of an Egyptian pylon
had gotten into his mind as the basis of this design, and that he
thought he would throw the whole thing up without a single
ornament.' "
When Root thus turned Egyptian, he had seen as little of
Egypt (and of Egyptian
pylons used for office purposes)
as Richardson had seen of
Southern France when he
turned South French Roman
esque. But such truly "crea
tive" architects could work
(and, it seems, could work
only) when the practical de
mands made by the clients were
somehow reconciled with the
suggestions of some photo
graph which had impressed the
artists' brilliant minds.
When such recollections
have influenced the business
buildings of architects of the
McKim, Mead and White
group, the severe American
critics speak with disgust of
"office-buildings which retained
Design for Chicago Tribune Tower
(Adolf Loos).
366 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
ill-chosen souvenirs from crumbled civilizations." ("The Brown
Decades," Lewis Mumford, p. 141.) When Root finally decides
to bow to the practical requirements of his client and to
the better judgment of Burnham, it is called "a wise decision."
When bulky Richardson refused to listen to common sense, we
are told: "Richardson did not grovel before practical condi
tions." It was, of course, only Burnham who groveled; at least
that is an often repeated criticism of him. Even the highly cul
tured McKim is branded as a "better salesman." The same
critics inform us that Burnham ruined the Chicago World's
Fair (by introducing uniform style and cornice line) and that
this Fair would have been so much better if his partner Root had
not died prematurely. But "Root had initially conceived of a
variegated oriental setting." (And Root's "epochal building,"
the Rookery, profusely covered with ornament, was "discovered
to be East Indian or Hindoo a wayward child of Root's seething
brain.")
Was Root's Egyptian choice for the Monadnock Building
really such a wise choice? In order to obtain the effect of verticality
indispensable to his souvenir pylon he had to use narrow
or "more inventively planned windows." To use narrow windows,
however, meant going back, even before Richardson, who in his
latest office buildings had previously proved that broad windows
were possible even when they must be arched in the fifth story and
Carson, Pirie, Scott Building . . .
Chicago (Sullivan).
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 367
thus decorated with souvenirs from the "dark" ages. In order
to obtain in his Monadnock Block what he considered to be an
Egyptian effect, Root did what Sullivan, at almost the same time,
with many declamations, did in his skyscrapers in order to ob
tain a soaring effect, only to prove shortly afterwards by his
Schlesinger and Mayer Building
6
that about one-half of the
vertical members separating the windows was wanton decoration
and could be eliminated.
Sullivan's fallacy has perhaps best been pointed out by Irving
K. Pond, who writes : "In the Foreword to his 'Autobiography of
an Idea' we read that 'Louis Sullivan's was the distinction of
having been, perhaps, the first squarely to face the expressional
problem of the steel framed skyscraper and to deal with it hon
estly and logically. Later solutions, in so far as they are good,
have been along the lines that he, by precept and example, first
laid down.' To solve the problem of the steel framed skyscraper,
in any manner, is just one thing that Louis Sullivan never did,
anyway not by example. I wouldn't say he never seriously at
tempted it. One time he gives the whole frame a horizontal
treatment an anomaly. Another time he gives part of the frame
a vertical expression and part a horizontal. Where his verticals
tend to dominate, as they should, he crushes them with a powerful
horizontal feature. Some one made Louis Sullivan believe that
he had solved the problem. On page 298 of the 'Autobiography'
6 Now the Carson, Pirie, Scott Building.
Wainwright Building ... St. Louis
(Sullivan).
368 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
we read : 'and in Saint Louis, it was given first authentic recogni
tion and expression in the exterior treatment of the Wainwright
Building, a nine-story office structure, by Louis Sullivan's own
hand'. . . . That design is no more a solution of the problem of
covering architecturally the steel skeleton than would be the ap
plication of a Palladian motif with a basement plinth, a classical
colonnade extending through the height of two or more stories,
and an entablature taking in the attic story. There is in the
Wainwright Building a two-storied base or plinth, a series of
columns all alike, but every other one containing a steel core,
though the exterior semblance is the same in all running through
seven stories and having each a capital, and this feature is
crowned with a frieze and cornice out of all proportion with the
columns on which they rest a horizontal, a vertical, and a hori
zontal, absolutely at variance with the movement within the
frame."
Part of this criticism of Sullivan's pseudo-"functionalism"
also applies to Root's Egyptian pylon, as far as it is said to be
modern building. About one-half of the vertical members between
the windows of the Monadnock Building could advantageously
be eliminated. This superfluous ornamentation of the wall with
vertical subdivisions of areas available for light-giving windows
may represent a successful effort to make the rooms darker and
thereby more like a mysteriously dark Egyptian interior, but
they refute the claim made by Root and his admirers, that he
threw "the whole thing up without a single ornament." The
actual oversupply of Egyptianizing ornament obscuring the win
dows is especially objectionable in smoky Chicago.
It must be remembered that under the brilliant sun of Egypt
the smallest openings in a temple wall or roof (sometimes just a
hole of a few inches is used) suffice to illuminate a statue most
effectively. Root's confession that "the heavy sloping lines of
an Egyptian pylon had gotten into his mind," when the problem
was the building of a light and well-lighted American office build
ing, seems, if possible, even more ridiculous than Piranesi's volu
minous publication advocating the use of Egyptian architectural
forms especially for the ornamentation of mantelpieces. Piranesi
did not wish to copy Egyptian fireplaces, because none existed
(the Egyptians used the sun instead), but he designed fireplaces
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 369
as he assumed the Egyptians would have designed them if (in the
hypothetical possibility of the sun's disappearance) they might
have been compelled to design them. How much wood would a
woodchuck chuck for such fireplaces if a woodchuck had less
common sense than a human animal?
This craving to go Egyptian was by no means confined to
Root and Piranesi. When ten years ago practically the first
modern office building was erected in London, the Adelaide House,
it also had to look Egyptian. Some called it "modernistic."
Indeed, some of the best Egyptian forms have a certain powerful
and very modern simplicity and clarity. They justify the re
mark (made by the late Meyer-Graefe in his lucid study "Pyra
mid and Temple") that the interiors of the oldest Egyptian
graves possess to the highest degree that majestic simplicity
and that absolutely convincing matter-of-factness which other
wise is found only in the most modern and best designed American
W. C.'s or comfort stations. These have, no doubt, spiritual
affinities capable of further development. But it is
stretching the
point if such affinities lead the designer of a modern office building
to copy the batter (or inward upward slope of the walls) and
the huge hollow cornice which in Egypt were traditional features
of pylon or temple walls (even when built in stone). These re
ligious buildings preserved sacred traditions and copied the old
mud walls of the oldest and most primitive temples. The backFireplace
design
(Piranesi).
370 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
ward slope was originally required by the soft material. A huge
cornice of palm leaves and clay protected the old mud walls
against the rare but dangerous rains. In his Egyptian diary
Flaubert describes his experience of an extraordinarily strong
rain that washed away the whole house in which he was spending
the night, leaving him a spot under the table as the only dry
place in which to wait for the morning. It is slightly absurd to
reconstruct such "souvenirs from crumbled civilizations" when
the problem is to shape the appearance of modern office buildings.
At least Root secured his Egyptian effect only by creating an
inexpensive illusion.
"The corners are cut off by a slice which begins with nothing
at the bottom and increases to a width of several feet at the top,
where the whole wall flares out with the graceful outline of a bell,
very similar in effect to an Egyptian pylon. This clever device
of cutting off, or 'chamfering,' the corners produces the optical
illusion of a slope or batter in all the walls, the whole effect of
which fills the beholder with the sensation of a tremendous lift or
soaring of the entire structure. At the time of the Columbian
Exposition it was the Monadnock Block that received the most
study and praise from the European critics." (Talmadge, "The
Story of Architecture in America," p. 184.)
In addition to his clever pretense Root did widen the ground
story of his Monadnock masonry pile, such a high and heavy
mass being ill suited to the soft ground of Chicago. (Piles driven
down to the deep rock were introduced much later in this city.)
In the Monadnock Building "projecting bays of windows in
creased the sunlit space in rooms that would have been lost in
darkness behind piers fifteen feet thick at the bottom." ("The
Brown Decades," Lewis Mumford, p. 136.) The architects of
the Adelaide House in London were not satisfied with a clever
pretense, nor did they build in old-fashioned masonry. Their
whole granite-covered building, from foundation to Egyptian cor
nice, was given a real batter, an expensive method of having
granite surfaces recall to one's mind those structures built of the
mud of the Nile.
The most striking example of an American-Egyptian struc
ture and of the surprising difference an architectural critic can
find between six and half a dozen, is furnished by the Washington
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 371
monument, the obelisk, in Washington, D. C. Many Americans
may have been shocked when they read that H. G. Wells called
it "an idiotic colossal obelisk." But how well do they know what
they really like about the Washington monument?
It was one of the severest critics of "the dreadful influence"
of Greek revival "and the theory of precedent" who alluded to
the Washington monument in more respectful terms than did
Wells. About the obelisk and its designer, the engineer Mills,
we read the following opinion likely to please every American :
"Then Mills did as glorious a thing as mortal ever did. He
laid out the simple lines of the Washington Monument, the most
superb piece of pure masonry to be found in all America, and ex
ceeded in its majesty and purity of line by nothing built any
where. It was, after all, a natural design for a man who began
by building locks, canals and bridges. Nowhere was the effect
of craftsmanship ever made clearer. When Mills took to build
ings, because he really liked them, he fell a victim to the current
idea that the Greek ruins were the perfection of all art. In the
Washington Monument, his natural craft taste reasserted itself,
for, as he faced a temptation that hardly another designer of
his day could have resisted, he left the surface of the monument
clean and flawless. Up it goes, five hundred and fifty feet in the
air, a soaring majesty of craftsman simplicity, rising from the
earth, like a noble bole of genius. Had Mills been the complete
craftsman of Khufru's" (the Egyptian pyramid builder's) "days,
he would have known that the crushing weight of his obelisk form
was more than the lower stones could bear. The corners, at the
base of the Washington Monument, will one day need a treatment
such as no one knows how to give them, if the monument is to be
saved, and such as the pyramids of Khufru do not yet require.
It was not for nothing that a pyramid builder referred to his
work as a 'firm thing.'
"
(Elbert Peets)
So while it was bad to follow a dreadful Greek precedent, so
common in America, it was, "after all," natural for a good engi
neer to follow some old precedent and select the form of an
Egyptian obelisk. And it was dangerous to attempt designing
such an obelisk without being a good engineer. Nevertheless, the
final outcome exceeds everything else in beauty. Some observers
may follow such a line of reasoning. Others may remember the
372 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
fact that the obelisk, as we see it, is quite different from what the
good and bad engineer, Mills, wished it to appear to be. "Mills
intended it to be surrounded by a colonnade, and he gave it, at
the top, a low pyramidon, like that of the Bunker Hill Monument.
The present high point is probably due to the army engineers."
(Elbert Peets). No one who loves and understands music would
permit even the most highly qualified conductor to change ma
terially the first and the last movements of a famous symphony
as it was written by its composer. Why should very essential
changes in an architectural work of art remain unobserved?
Something we do not understand "is Greek to us." Egyptian
seems to be even more unintelligible.
What is, for us, an obelisk? Is it nothing but a well-chosen
or "ill-chosen souvenir from a crumbled civilization"? Or is it
an eternally beautiful form? But the great masters who orig
inally conceived this beautiful form never designed an obelisk
to stand alone in the middle of an axially organized group.
Obelisks always appeared in pairs to flank an axis. When Egypt
was plundered by modern Europeans, they had a hard time to
draw those gigantic granite bolts into their pirate ships. When
they succeeded in bringing one to Rome, Paris, or New York, they
placed their booty proudly in the middle of some Piazza del Popolo
Adelaide House . . . London.
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 373
or Place de la Concorde, much as some proud cannibal would
treat a precious bracelet he had torn from the wrist of a female
European. Instead of wearing the jewel on his wrist he would
rather pull it through his nose so as to have it decorate the cen
ter of his delighted face. Much of so-called human progress is
contingent upon such proud usurpations. Trying to be accurate
would be ill-becoming. We often lose the original sense of the
words and the ornaments we are using. (Perhaps because words
and their meanings are subjected to vicissitudes and empiricism in
usage. For example, soid was originally a purely generic term,
not a specific one, as we understand it.) But the Washington
Monument remains beautiful, wherever it stands.
When the question of designing and placing the Lincoln Me
morial arose, the ingenious Walter Burleigh Griffin (the American
who won the competition for the city plan of Canberra, the
capital of Australia, [see "Civic Art," p. 250]) proposed to
The Washington
Monument
As
designed
As
built
make intelligent use of the fact that the Washington obelisk (on
account of swampy soil conditions) had actually been placed a
little off the main axis. Griffin suggested that a second obelisk
be erected similar to the Washington one and that the main axis
of the Mall pass between the twin obelisks. This would have
been a correct and probably highly beautiful application of the
Egyptian designs from which the obelisk idea originally was de
rived. As everyone knows, Griffin's ingenious suggestion was not
heeded. The willingness to imitate an Egyptian obelisk seems to
carry with it no obligation to place the copy in such a position
as the original designers of its form would have placed it. In-
374 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
stead, the axis of the fine Washington Mall has been slightly
turned and now passes through the Washington obelisk.
Instead of a twin obelisk, Lincoln received a monument ter
minating the Mall. Instead of an Egyptian design, a Greek or
Roman colonnade was selected. But while for the Washington
Monument, as for the Monadnock Building, an Egyptian pylon
or obelisk was considered permissible by censorious critics, a
Greek colonnade seemed quite undesirable to them. "In the
Lincoln Memorial one feels not the living beauty of our American
past, but the mortuary air of archaeology." ("Sticks and
Stones," Lewis Mumford, p. 141.) "Into the designing of the
Lincoln Memorial the architect threw all the knowledge that
puttering measures and calculators have been able to extract
from the bones of the Greek temples. The result is a heavy
handicap, for the emotional content of this skillfully hallowed
Greek form has the effect of completely hiding the fact that the
Greek builders, were they alive, would never so build. They had
a principle and it produced a temple. To imagine that 2,500
years later they would still be clinging to that form is to insult
their superb intelligence." (Charles Harris Whitaker) It hap
pens that the Egyptians of approximately that period did cling
to pylon and obelisk forms and are praised for their superb
intelligence, are even copied, and their copyists are praised, in
The Lincoln Memorial . . .
Washington (Bacon).
Below: (right, at same scale) War Memorial . . . Berlin (Schinkel).
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 375
turn, for copying by the same critic who adds: "Also, to com
pare the Lincoln Memorial with the War Memorial in Berlin
the simple and profoundly moving building that the architect,
Heinrich Tessenow, succeeded in fashioning from an abandoned
guardhouse on the Linden is to realize the lengths to which a
maudlin 'art' propaganda has permitted architectural salesman
ship to impose on the American people." ("Rameses to Rocke
feller," Charles Harris Whitaker, p. 264.)
This critic seems to overlook the fact that "the simple and
profoundly moving" War Memorial in Berlin in every particle
of its exterior (and the interior this critic does not discuss) was
designed by the classical revivalist Schinkel who wished to make
it just as much of a Roman camp ("castrum") faced by a Greek
colonnade as was possible without making its practical use for
modern military purposes impossible.
Is it not employing different standards of measurement to an
excessive degree when a critic claims that Greek forms should
be permitted in Berlin, where the Greek revival came later than
it did in America, but should not be permitted in America, where
it was introduced at an early date by one of this country's
greatest architects and presidents?
Probably modern architects and their critics will have to
abandon some of the old erudite claims. The minds of most peo
ple, today, no longer seem to function in this field. At present,
the erudite traveller is capable of such curious and quite novel
interpretations of old art that an old-fashioned and unsophisti
cated student would probably consider them misinterpretations.
A striking example of this rather general modern state of mind
is furnished by the learned author of "From Rameses to Rocke
feller, A Story of Architecture" (cf. p. 50 ff) who has taken
such wonderful photographs of the Parthenon in Athens and has
come to the conclusion that, so far, the generally accepted inter
pretation of its appearance is quite wrong. We all have fondly
believed that the famous sculptured frieze picturing the Panathenic
festival was placed behind the columns around the top of
the wall of the cella. We learn now from Mr. Whitaker that this
frieze was a "lower belt, just above the columns" and just below
an "upper belt composed of alternate spaces known as metopes
and triglyphs" !
376 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
Where such surprising errors or differences of opinion are
possible among scholars, all fussing about architectural refine
ments should stop for a very long time to come. In the future
we can and must turn our minds above all to practical issues. If
anyone insists upon covering his building with ornaments
(Romanesque, Hindoo, Greek or this seems to be the preference
today Egyptian verticals and Le Corbusier horizontals), he
may use them only if they in no way whatever interfere with the
practical requirements. Whatever their shape may be, architec
tural ornamentations of residential buildings should become an
object of special taxation at least as long as there are millions
of people without the necessary decent shelter. It was Alexander
Hamilton who wanted "cottages inhabited by paupers to be excepted"
from his proposed "building tax"; (this has been men
tioned before). But Hamilton also proposed special assessments
for "every house with pillars or pilasters outside in front," and
for "every room with stucco cornices" or "with a stucco ceiling."
(cf. Works, III, p. 313.)
Of course, when it comes to denouncing and proscribing
columns and similar historical symbols, a special case is presented
in monuments and memorials. They have deep symbolic implica
tions while, different from most other buildings, they do not serve
Philadelphia Cricket Club (McKim, Mead and White).
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 377
practical purposes. It might therefore be wise to postpone the
erection of all memorials until some agreement among friendly
art censors has been reached as to what specific historical prece
dent (e. g. Egyptian) is to be praised, and what other precedent
(e. g. Thomas Jefferson's preference: the classical) is to be
damned or ridiculed. The many millions invested in Germany's
giant memorials of Emperor William's time ought to serve as a
warning. When they were being erected they were vaunted as
daringly novel. Today, they are generally recognized as being
hard to get rid of, although they are complicated, ridiculous and
old-fashioned art nouveau, while Schinkel's "classical" guard
house (erected in 1816) with its pure Doric colonnade is, today!,
and by a leading American critic, mistaken for the work of a
modern architect, and highly praised.
And this mistake is by no means unreasonable. The modern
architect (Tessenow) who rearranged the interior of the old
guardhouse is one of those "conservatives" of whom Catherine
Bauer justly says: "There has been very little strictly tradi
tional architecture in Germany since the war; for the work of
such conservatives as Schmitthenner, Tessenow, Bestelmeyer,
would be called 'modern' in America or England."
Villard Residence . . . New York (McKim, Mead and White),
378 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
The discussion of new civic architecture, attempted in this
chapter, seems to lead us back to the wishful prophecy which
Burnham's partner, J. W. Root, so clear-sightedly made and the
realization of which he and Richardson, as well as others, did so
much to prevent. "In America," Root once said in a lecture,
"we are free of artistic traditions. Our freedom begets license,
it is true. We do shocking things ; we produce works of architec
ture irremediably bad; we try crude experiments that result in
disaster. Yet somewhere in this mass of ungoverned energies lies
the principle of life. A new spirit of beauty is being developed
and perfected, and even now its first achievements are beginning
to delight us. This is not the old thing made over ; it is new. It
springs out of the past, but it is not tied to it; it studies the
traditions, but is not enslaved by them."
This ideal has not been realized by Richardson's dropsical
designs copied from France, nor by Root's copies of Egyptian
or East Indian forms, nor by McKim's copies of Italian palaces.
But at least Root's and McKim's designs are, even today, often
pleasing. Even a Romanesque church looks better when it has
been designed by McKim than when it has been designed by the
Romanesque specialist Richardson. Speaking of McKim, Mead
and White's Church in Baltimore (see p. 362), even the some
what partial Mumford admits: "The tower is surely one of the
finest that has been erected in America, a long leap ahead of
Richardson's own Brattle Street Church tower." With rela
tion to McKim's first office building (see p. 362), Mumford
says: "Nine Hundred Broadway carries on the story of the
Pray Building: its chief defect, the division into horizontal seg
ments, was due to the fact that only part of the building was
erected at first. Here again was a building above fashion. That
nothing so fresh was done in New York for a whole generation is
a manifold cause for astonishment."
Great praise is due to McKim, Mead and White for redis
covering the vitality of the American Colonial. Buildings like the
Germantown Cricket Club (1891) are creations permanently en
riching American architecture. Much of McKim, Mead and
White's "colonial" work ought to be called "so modern that it
startles us." (Talmadge) Only a blind man could deny that that
English critic was also right who said, in referring to McKim, Mead
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 379
and White's work: "There is all the difference in the world be
tween this and the practice of most of the previous revivals."
(Cf. A. L. N. Russell's book, "Architecture," p. 215.)
Even where McKim, Mead and White were heavy, as in some of
their Clubs imitating Italian palaces, one hardly has the feeling of
dropsical morbidity. These buildings, even today, appear stately
and often elegant. The Henry Villard residence (1885!), in
the palace style, represents an ingenious grouping of houses
which preceded similar grouping efforts in Europe by many
years. This American precedent merits new attention in the
rehousing campaign of today.
The error of copying forms designed for other climes and
other materials of construction becomes evident when whole
stories required for practical use are tucked into cyclopean base
ments as in the case of the "podium" on which most of the
Columbia University buildings stand (cf. "Civic Art," p. 119), or
when the architect tries to squeeze a whole popular library with
Columbia University . . . New York
(McKim, Mead and White) show
ing continuous podium.
a large auditorium into the cellar of the Pantheon shape origi
nally designed in ancient Rome as part of the bathing establish
ment of a rich plunderer of conquered provinces. The main
building of New York University (upon and under the Hall of
Fame terrace) is just such a depressing example. The book
stacks are squeezed between two rows of heavy columns, and seat
ing galleries cut sharply into the shaft of columns (round ones
and with entasis !). (cf. "Civic Art," p. 120)
It is in such cases that something akin to senility appears in
McKim, Mead and White. Even there a certain dignity remains
lifting the work above such concoctions as New York's City
College, designed almost a decade later (1907) by G. B. Post.
Its main building is called "The Cathedral" because it is squeezed
380 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
into the shape of a cathedral with huge, expensive towers and
with a transept and apse that have no interior relation to the
church-like large assembly hall in the nave. The buildings for
Chemistry and for Mechanical Arts rebelled so strongly against
being completely raped in medieval fashion that the following
apology had to be given in "The City College Quarterly" (Dec.,
1907) : "Most notable in this building, and really one of the
remarkable feats achieved in this whole group of buildings, is the
architecturalization in collegiate style of the factory chimney."
And: "practical requirements of lighting precluded architecturalizing
the rest of this building."
The Great Hall, College of the City of New York (George B. Post & Sons).
The farce of a main auditorium squeezed under the Hall of
Fame Terrace into the cellar of a "Pantheon," and the "architec
turalization precluded by practical requirements," cause the
architect to appear not as a benefactor of humanity but as its
enemy trying to force his victims into the prisons of his antiqua
rian imagination. Such incarcerations glaringly show how
urgently our age requires creative power for new design. Was
J. W. Root justified in saying: "Compare the best of our recent
architecture some of Richardson's designs, for example with
TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER 381
the most pretentious buildings recently erected in Europe. In the
American works we find strength and fitness and a certain
spontaneity and freshness, as of stately music, or a song in the
green woods !"
The very moment colossal Richardson stopped foisting his
cyclopean residences upon his clients, the prototype of the modern
prefabricated house seems to have been conceived. Ferris' big
Wheel of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 looks like a gigantic
machine whose endless belt delivers in rapid succession the new,
light and elegant cabins ten millions of which are needed, today,
for distribution in five thousand new garden cities and suburbs to
take the place of America's historic slums, and, incidentally, of
several prejudices dominating architectural criticism.
Washington, from an early nineteenth century map.
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER
WASHINGTON, WILLIAMSBURG, THE CENTUEY
OF PROGRESS, AND GREENDALE.
This chapter is by Elbert Peets who was for several years associated
with Dr. Hegemann in the practice of landscape architecture and city plan
ning; he is now a member of the planning staff of the Division of Suburban
Resettlement, Resettlement Administration.
I. WASHINGTON
Evening, the Mall, Washington. I walk on the grass, on axis.
Flocks of swift starlings sweep toward the Triangle and the city.
Soon the lights will come on the Capitol. I turn to look at the
soaring Monument and then back at the dome of the Capitol,
rising above broad horizontals. Reciprocal forms, would that be
the word? I walk, thinking inevitably of Versailles and St.
Peter's and then of the things I am to write here. Are the old
arts of space and form dying, as some say? How stands civic
art after so many centuries of striving? What is being done
and with what intention? Under the influence of what models
and ideas, with what popular response? Forming what augury
for the future?
Here is the Mall, surely tonight the most beautiful place man
has yet made in America. At last the Monument does not stand
beyond a woods from the Capitol; with the flow of space be
tween them, they now join in formal relation. The verticality
of the Monument has at last the appearance of rising from
a horizontal plane. And the Capitol is for the first time quite
beautiful: it must have been for this view that Walter designed
the dome. Here is begun, as if Michelangelo had roughed a
block of marble into the promise of a figure and finished part
of it, a work of plastic art potentially more majestic than any
other that man has created. I am sure of that, and sure that
in this serene light the body of that beauty is already felt. Yet,
here at its heart, on the axis of perfection, our architects
have made no place for people to walk; the Mall is deserted,
383
384 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
while in the city whose rumble comes to me from beyond the
Roman palaces of the Triangle, thousands of people are watch
ing movies, listening to radios, playing fashionable in furniture
of chromium and red leather, looking at improvisations in paint,
talking about art, and sincerely studying the appreciation of
art. It is evident that domes, monuments, and malls are not
for us the deep and stirring personal experience that they have
the power to be.
I have proposed questions touching on civic art and its place
in our lives. Toward answering them I shall use four examples :
the recent work at Washington; the old capital of Virginia,
Williamsburg, lately established as a museum-place of Colonial
art; the Century of Progress at Chicago, where the question
arises whether this fair will parallel the one of '93 in significance
to civic art ; and Greendale, a town being built by the Resettle
ment Administration near Milwaukee.
One would like to know what the people of 1791 thought about
L'Enfant's plan. Apparently the plan was accepted on sight,
with minor criticisms, by Washington and Jefferson. I have not
happened on any evidence of astonishment as concerns the type
of planning. Oddly enough, the plan seems to incite expressions
of surprise more frequently now than it did then. The point
may be that a planned variation from a simple gridiron appears
more remarkable to us than to the men of 1790 just because
such a mass of gridiron plans has grown up since then. The
language of American city planning, then as now, was based
on the gridiron plan based but not debased, for in the eight
eenth century the gridiron was still plastic, still fundamentally
an art style, as the architects of the Renaissance made it. Plans
of Philadelphia, Reading, Savannah and Williamsburg can be
printed alongside plans of Charleroi, the town of Versailles,
Bloomsbury, and Edinburgh. The average statesman or the
average architect of 1790 was better prepared by education and
experience to find meaning in L'Enfant's plan than were the
average statesman and architect of 1890 not to cite a later
date. The Renaissance still lived in the cultural air. The lan
guage of Renaissance planning still retained some of its inflec
tions: soon all was to be lost in America save its broadest
grammatical principle of course not at all exclusive to it the
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 385
386 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
straight street. My point is that the straight street is a deep
blood-bond between Versailles and Omaha, that the American
gridiron is not ineligible to the cult of Renaissance planning.
L'Enfant's plan stems from France and Rome, but the form
language in which it is was cast was the lingua franca of old
and new Europe in the eighteenth century. George Washington
needed no interpreter to help him understand it.
But the sentimental feeling-art that liquidified like a lovely
mold the rigiding form-arts of the winter-and-spring century
crept early over the genteel fringes of land-planning in the
post-Puritan America. Gardening melted first. The Washing
ton Mall became a potential landscape garden before Andrew
Jackson Downing was born to lay it out, and the Washington
Monument was placed on a hill overlooking the Potomac, a
typical landscape location, three hundred feet from the point
marked by Thomas Jefferson's stone pier. And so it went.
Buildings were placed where they would make a handsome ap
pearance. Trees were planted in every open space, to make
the city look as little like a city as it might. L'Enfant's vistas
were veiled with foliage. East of the Capitol, where our most
spectacular piece of Roman architecture demanded an imperial
forum to complete its formal life, a pretty arboretum was laid
out in the mode in which Currier and Ives prints depict the
lawns of neo-Gothic mansions overlooking the Hudson.
Around 1900 came the L'Enfant revival. For a moment it
seemed as if the totality the interwoven completeness of
L'Enfant's plan would be rediscovered. But the art of gardens
was too English and romantic, architecture too dazzled by the
Chicago Fair. Neither could see the beautiful city that was
L'Enfant's vision. The Mall, L'Enfant's Grand Avenue, was
at last to be carried out but as an "undulating lawn"! Its
median cross-axis, Eighth Street, commanding a vista of the
lovely Parthenon-front of the Patent Office, was to be plugged
up. And the plan of the Commission of 1901 proposed a monu
mental area where the buildings housing the government of a
nation newly conscious of its high place in the world could exist
forever in impeccable monumentality. Around the Capitol, along
the Mall, in the Triangle, around Lafayette Square, was to
rise a city-within-the-city, aloof from the rest of Washington
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 387
just as the Court of Honor at Chicago in '93 was unaware of
the vulgar Midway. Much of this has come to pass, but of it
I count the clearing of the Mall, imperfect though the work
is, as the only part of all this prodigious labor that reveals the
beauty of L'Enfant's plan and the glorious power of civic art.
The recent works of public architecture in Washington are
so well known that it is no longer necessary to repeat the facts
concerning their cost, cubage, and authorship. They have not
had, it must be said, the delighted acclaim of critics and other
thoughtful persons. On what might be called moral grounds,
the attack has been particularly sharp. Blatant grandiloquence,
pompous grandeur, criminal squandering, these phrases have
been repeated. When a fire in the windowless rooms back of
the cornice of the new post office building burned on for hours
while firemen chopped holes in the floor above, leftist architects
read the item with broad smiles. Increasing congestion and the
growth of government departments faster than buildings could
be erected have aroused even within official planning groups
much opposition to the policies of concentration and monumental
design. My own criticisms of the new work do not need to go
much beyond its bearing on the L'Enfant plan.
The inventory can well begin with the Supreme Court Build
ing. L'Enfant, presumably with Washington's approval, in
tended it to stand in Judiciary Square, a site somewhat aside
from the principal elements of the plan, but well connected with
it. The Commission of 1901 inexplicably assigned it the site
across East Capitol Street from the Library of Congress, where
it now stands. For the Court, the site is
meaningless, but it would
have made a good place for the Library Annex. One feels here
the good old American principle that a good site is one within
a certain zone of elegance. The Judiciary Square site was
available, but it would have been impossible there to eliminate
all vulgarity from the adjacent streets. What effect such a
conception would have had upon the planning of Rome or Paris
can be imagined. A planner who wishes to unify a whole city
cannot afford to be snobbish. After the place indicated by
L'Enfant, I should have chosen a site on the hill east of the
Anacostia River, on the extended line of East Capitol Street.
L'Enfant's median cross-axis, Eighth Street, one of the im-
388 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
portant and highly developed lines of the plan, has been blocked
by two new buildings. The Archives and the Federal Warehouse
(closing, north and south, the so-called "Mall transepts"), cut
off the Mall from the rest of the city plan. Though so planned
by Burnham and McKim, the ruling conception here probably
springs from the principle of landscape gardening that a park
must be isolated from the surrounding town. The designers of
the Triangle went farther than the Commission of 1901 and
wiped out the section of (old) Louisiana Avenue running from
Pennsylvania Avenue toward though not straight at the
Washington Monument. This, the only vista of the Monument
from the historic avenue, might have been trued up and made
into one of the finest views in Washington. Instead it is stupidly
blocked by the Justice Building.
Constitution Avenue is the most destructive of all the crimes
yet committed against the L'Enfant plan. The heart of that
plan was a triangle of which Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall
were two sides. Constitution Avenue has now been made stronger
in some ways than either of those lines. It is wide and grossly in
sistent, parallel to the Mall and cutting across Pennsylvania
Avenue. Essentially a service street, without axial function
and weakly terminated, it is overloaded for a short distance with
the spectacular walls and pediments of the Triangle buildings,
which however have on this front no architectural organization.
As civic art, the street is a piece of sumptuous stupidity. Its
effect on L'Enfant's plan can be expressed crudely by some such
analogy as this: If on a broad parade ground some beautiful
military ceremony were taking place, say in honor of a national
hero, and if at the highest moment a company of visiting firemen
marched across the field, with band playing and helmets shining,
that would be like the effect of Constitution Avenue on L'Enfant's
delicately adjusted city plan.
When you are covering some two dozen city blocks with
monumental buildings you have to lay hands on everything you
can get, and especially on buildings that do not have those
absurd office windows stuck all over them. So the National
Archives are in the Triangle, although elementary sense would
suggest, in these days of air bombardments, that they be housed
in low buildings, spread out on some suburban hill. Mr. Pope's
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 389
building is a rousing fanfare ; if the stone weathers contrastingly
the building will shortly be touching the popular heart.
Poor old Pennsylvania Avenue, to which our historical memo
ries used to cling, apparently hasn't a friend on the Art Com
mission. Nearly all the quaint buildings that one used to
recognize in old prints of the Lincoln and Grant inaugurals are
gone. A vast open space, largely to remain open, weakens its
eastern end; Constitution Avenue crashes across it; the plaza
at Eighth Street is maimed; vast walls of stone weigh down
one side of the Avenue, while parking lots cut gaps in the other,
making the north side even uglier than the south side was claimed
to be in early Triangle propaganda; finally, the plaza between
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets has been ruined by an open
space yawning wide toward the west.
The old Patent Office has suffered further indignities. One
Sunday morning I attended the unveiling of a monument, over
his grave in the Congressional Cemetery, to the memory of
Robert Mills, the architect of the Washington Monument and
of the Patent Office, a building that is acquiring standing as
one of the finest of the fine old structures of Washington.
Robert Mills was praised and the Patent Office was praised.
On the way home, I drove through E Street. The granite walls
and steps (marred by modern pipe handrails) that led up to
the Parthenon portico of the south front had been torn away.
Now the lovely columns stand on a rusticated wall with three
crude dark openings. The side view is especially gauche: the
wall is ill-proportioned, its top is not sufficiently emphasized,
and an absurd window stares at you. The old steps expressed,
in the side view, the existence of the Eighth Street axis, and in
the south view they took the rising flow of Eighth Street and
carried it up to the portico. I regret, particularly, that it will
no longer be possible to go up, at night, and have that dramatic
view of brightly lit F Street, framed by the ponderous yet grace
ful columns, with the Treasury colonnade in the distance.
Of the Triangle, specifically, little need be noted. It is
planned in the eighteenth century French mode and closely
resembles a plan submitted in the competition that resulted in
the formation of the Place de la Concorde. It was influenced
also by the San Francisco Fair of 1915, but falls far short of
390 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
that plan's fine outline and masterly subdivision. It is the type
of plan that needs spirited detailing, with enough verticality to
vivify the horizontals and enough dark narrowness to give light
to the open areas. The theatrical pediments that are tacked
to the Constitution Avenue front in order to natter Mr. Mellon's
hypothetical art gallery would have been used by an Inigo Jones
or a Contant d'lvry to give a voice to the big plaza of the
Triangle.
Around Lafayette Square no public construction has been
done for some years, and it is evident that the 1901 plan has
here met a disastrous defeat, leaving the Square definitely less
attractive as a setting for the White House than it was when
the Burnham group was named. This part of the Commission's
plan forms the clearest proof of its brutally destructive all-ornothing
attitude. With incredible assurance Burnham, McKim
and Olmsted in this part of their work Burnham probably took
the lead said flatly that the procedure used in designing the
Court of Honor at Chicago, the establishment of a standard
"ordonnance" and material, was the only way to create the set
ting for a public building and that everything in the areas they
marked out for this treatment was bad and must be torn down,
wiped out. If, in war, the forces of an enemy nation had bombed
and destroyed the buildings that stood around Lafayette Square
in 1901 the Dolly Madison house, Webster's home, the Hay
and Adams houses that Richardson built, the Decatur house
which thousands of people pay to enter when it is opened once
a year, that exquisite white and buff mansion across from the
State, War and Navy Building, and above all the fine old St.
John's Church, one of the beloved buildings of Washington, with
its picturesque old wall and centenarian sycamores if all these
had been destroyed by an enemy the whole nation would have
been stirred with grief and anger. But when three of our leading
architects proposed the destruction in order that they might set
up a copy of a vainglorious World's Columbian Exposition as
the setting for the modest mansion of the President, we ac
claimed the plan and conferred high honors upon its authors.
The destruction began, but the intolerability of the program
had its inevitable effect. The Treasury Annex may be extended,
but there is no likelihood that the whole plan will be carried
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 391
out. The present state of the enframement of the Square is, to
put it plainly, a mess, and it will get worse before it gets better.
If in 1901 a more modest plan had been adopted, one based on
the preservation of what was good among the existing buildings,
plus new public architecture harmonizing with the old work, the
beauty of the Square could have been maintained even during
reconstruction. The plan, if necessary, could have been adapted
to changing conditions and would not have been ruined by aban
donment after fractional execution.
The new Interior building stands in an area shown as park
in the plan of 1901. It is too close to the Pan-American,
D. A. R., and Red Cross buildings and will bring upon them
the curse of auto parking. It projects so close to the line of
Virginia Avenue as to make impossible the realignment of that
street, as formerly proposed by the National Capital Park and
Planning Commission, to bring the Washington Monument on
its axis. This was, I believe, the last possibility of creating a
perfect vista of this unequalled avenue-objective.
The planting around the Lincoln Memorial has been extended
in recent years so that it now hides almost all of the architec
turally important line where the earth comes against the great
stone retaining wall. As the enormous box bushes of the initial
planting grow larger, they still further reduce the scale of the
Memorial. A very interesting chapter could be written in
analysis of this gorgeously beautiful and thoroughly inappropri
ate planting. In a formal French park stands a Greek temple,
so we plant it in an American stylized mode derived from English
sentimental landscape gardening, partly by direct descent and
partly by way of Puvis de Chavannes and other illustrators of
Tempe and the dales of Arcady.
The striking thing about this roster of the efforts toward
beauty and impressiveness of architecture and civic art in Wash
ington is the consistency with which L'Enfant's plan is ignored
not to say flouted. The Triangle wipes out a large patch of
the L'Enfant plan, substituting not merely a different plan but
a different type of planning so that, whatever may be said in
its favor, it destroys the stylistic unity of the Washington
design. At the same time the national officials and planners
effect a gorgeous exhibition of self-deception for I think they
392 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
are quite sincere about it by interminably lauding L'Enfant.
The mental mechanics of the situation might seem to permit
only one explanation, that the planners have never looked at
L'Enfant's plan. The self-deception theory, however, is more
plausible, for we Americans have to an extraordinary degree the
power to entertain in our minds diametrically opposed ideas. A
trained capacity for dutiful self-deception sustains our religion,
our politics, and our patriotism. Why should it not also enter
into our art, particularly here at Washington, the busiest market
for this kind of thought, in all its branches?
Thus it is wise, in accounting for current capitoline civic
art, to disassociate it from the L'Enfant plan, and to seek outside
of L'Enfant's purposes for the ideas that have engendered the
Washington we see so often in the rotogravures.
The Triangle is not in its roots identical with municipal civic
centers but it is the fruit of similar purposes and values. Ameri
can city planning derives its power from two kinds of ideas
those prevailing in the chamber of commerce and those of the
social settlement house. To the energy of the chamber of
commerce, city planning is a tool for the creation and preserva
tion of land values. Planning, control of traffic, cutting new
streets, zoning, fine parks and pleasure boulevards, impressive
civic centers these exist because individuals forming energetic
groups believe that they pay in greater population, more busi
ness, and higher land values. The other source of impulse in
city planning is the benevolent-social people, lay and profes
sional, who, through psychological circumstances which real
estate dealers look on as abnormal, advocate better housing,
broader education, and playgrounds in the slums. The Wash
ington Triangle, plainly, is the product of the land-value type
of human energy. It is the highest flower of that motive, ex
panded by patriotism, aetherialized into a symbol and a justifi
cation of a way of life. It is our national conspicuous waste,
our display of superfluous power.
In its practical aspects, there is no question that the concen
tration of office buildings has been overdone. As a statement
of the case the writer may be permitted to use a paragraph from
an article published in Mencken's American Mercury in 1926:
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 393
"If there is one thing now plain about the planning of big
cities it is that beyond a certain intensity concentration is
wasteful, and that modern transportation makes such concen
tration unnecessary. Washington is ideally laid out for the
distribution of traffic-objectives and for convenient communica
tion between them. The departments are as autonomous as so
many universities. They ought to be widely spaced, even on
the suburban hills, where sensible offices could be built, and
where the personnel could walk to work or come in their cars
without producing intolerable traffic and parking congestion
where, too, an architect could make his own design, not having
to follow a set of official templets."
It would appear to be axiomatic that a building group that
is certain to grow should be planned so that it can expand
centrifugally, and that such a group ought not to be planned
as has been done in the Triangle within rigid external bound
aries. A department office building has in its use-character more
affinity with a school or hospital than it has with an exposition
hall or a Roman palace, and it ought to be placed and planned
in harmony with that character. The perfectly successful opera
tion of the Bureau of Standards in a suburb of Washington has
been cited by the National Capital Park and Planning Commis
sion as evidence that concentration is not an unquestioned neces
sity, while the Department of Agriculture's new Beltsville
experiment center, some ten miles from Washington, may be the
first evidence of a broader centrifugal movement from the
crowded city.
The thing that finally wrecks the heart of a city planner
who knows and loves Washington is
picturing to himself what
that money could have done if it had been spread less thickly
and more wisely. Let us say, and the figure is not impossible,
that a hundred million dollars could have been saved since 1901,
in land and construction costs, if the government offices had
been built neatly of brick in a number of groups, out of the
high-value zone. That amount of money, carefully administered
and supplemented by taxing, zoning, and encroachment laws,
could have influenced the architectural design of new buildings
throughout the city, could have secured changes in existing
buildings, and could have preserved old buildings. It could have
brought about the rehabilitation of depressed areas and could
have controlled the blight of parking lots which threatens im-
394 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
portant streets. It might have made the Triangle an attractive
residence district and might have preserved the colonial at
mosphere of Lafayette Square.
Efforts of this kind would have tended toward a harmoniously
developed Washington. L'Enfant designed a whole city. He
designed in terms of significant points, lines, and long vistas, thus
organizing large areas and forming a space-composition having
an effect of totality. The present procedure follows very differ
ent ideals. This concentration of monuments, memorials, mu
seums, and endless department office buildings in the central area
of the city is destroying the city, as a work of art and as a
social entity, in the process of glorifying the capital or per
haps more accurately the government. People who have no sense
of the beauty of large spatial organizations, people who do not
love the life of a city and who do not see that snobbishness
even though it be official snobbishness is fatal to civic art,
people who cannot distinguish between art and splurge, obviously
cannot see how far we are getting from L'Enfant's conception.
For he dreamed, not of a beautiful court of honor, but of a
beautiful city.
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 395
The store groups referred to in the text are at numbers 5 and 41.
H. WILLIAMSBURG
While the United States Government has been destroying and
plotting to destroy in Washington, Mr. Ford has been collecting
old buildings for his museum at Dearborn and Mr. Rockefeller
has gone him one better by collecting an old town and not only
an old town but an old state capital, complete with history,
traditions, a college, numerous firsts, oldests, and uniques, and
a live population, including several rare old ladies who would
grace any museum in the world.
Williamsburg has, of course, close relations to the city of
Washington. L'Enfant knew the town. It was admired by
Washington and other men who influenced the design of the
national capital. The similarity of the plans is obvious, though
I trace the resemblance to the common style and common require
ments, and do not suggest that the older plan was the principal
model for the later one. But the fact that Williamsburg was
part of colonial culture must have facilitated L'Enfant's work.
The town plan of Williamsburg probably derives from a
sketch by a skilled architect, imperfectly worked out on the
ground. Incomplete though it is, the town has the good order
and managed emphasis that mark a good Renaissance design.
People go to Williamsburg to see the sumptuous and beautiful
buildings and gardens that have been restored or rebuilt, but I
am sure that the basically good plan is a factor, whether con-
396 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
sciously or not, in the invariably pleasant impression of the place.
The restoration has hardly affected the plan except in the
shopping center that has been developed at the College end of
Duke of Gloucester Street. The necessary parking accommoda
tions are managed tactfully and are neither conspicuous nor
offensive. The store groups themselves, however, that have been
built (there was some remodelling) at each side of Duke of
Gloucester Street, constitute a preposterous travesty on eight
eenth century planning. The stores are frantically picturesque
and various ; the fronts are parallel to the curb but are set back
at random distances from it.
Only the post office setback is
sufficient to produce a satisfactory area. Often the offset, be
tween one store and another, is so slight as to be without plastic
value. In one case a store with a bow window is set back from
its neighbors just about the amount of the window's projection,
the total result having less vigor than no variation at all. There
is no design-value in these weak deviations from alignment,
merely an affectation of un-mechanicalness which, since we
know it is not modern, we are intended to assume is colonial.
Emphatically, it is not. The southern planters laid out their
slave-quarters on axes and cross-axes and made dignified sym
metrical courts out of their barns and stables. Williamsburg is
not a medieval town, formed by centuries of accidents. It is a
product of seventeenth-eighteenth century rationality. If the
restoration is intended to give us a true picture of the culture
and the architectural ideals of colonial Virginians, this shopping
district is a gross misrepresentation.
Furthermore, for the truth must be told, the place smells
strongly of landscape architecture. Sitting on one of the pleas
ant sidewalk benches to have my shoes shined, I counted nine
different species of trees (two of them dead) within the distance
of a peanut toss. There were tall holly trees, fresh from the
woods, planted within a foot of the store fronts and leaning away
from the wall, as if they had grown there from babyhood. It
was a naturalistic planting of street trees, to go with the natu
ralistic planting of shoppes. Nobody but a landscape architect
could have thought that all out.
From the sumptuous way in which the buildings and formal
gardens are carried out, I judge that there was no wish to
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 397
understate the quality of the old designs or the skill of the
colonial craftsmen. I believe that strict archeologists will agree
that many parts of the work represent what the early Virginians
would have liked to do rather than what they actually did do.
The same attitude might well have stimulated the town planning
work. Take for example, the Palace Green, lying between the
Governor's Palace and Duke of Gloucester Street. The man
who made the plan (in England, doubtless) assumed that this
mall would be level and that it would afford a perfect view of
the Palace from the street. As it happened there is a little rise
of ground at the middle of the mall that cuts off the lower part
of the building, spoiling this all-important view. A few hundred
dollars worth of grading, before the young trees were set out,
would have remedied this patent fault and would have brought
out the true quality of the design.
This Palace axis continues on across Duke of Gloucester
Street, the main axis of the layout. South of Gloucester Street,
as it is at present, there is a field opening up a view into the
country. So casually is the whole thing handled that from the
upper front window of the Governor's Palace you see practically
nothing but grass and trees there is nothing at all to indicate
that the main street of the town, the main axis of a design
to which the Palace is related by perpendicularity of axes, runs
across your vista. In the distance a hill slopes sharply across
the view ; beyond that, woods. This failure to develop the design
architecturally, as the designer must have intended, contrasts
sharply with the very elaborate development of the garden axis
north of the Palace. A very modest amount of "expression" of
the intersection of axes (at Duke of Gloucester Street) and the
continuation of the cross-axis toward the south would satisfy
the minimum needs of the situation. Some grading, a few white
washed posts or stone piers, some white fence, possibly a pair
of sheds or summer houses, would serve to "render" this impor
tant part of the plan. The "Frenchman's map," showing the
town in Revolutionary times, indicates that some sort of formal
development marked the mall axis south of the main street.
The view of the Capitol from the College gate is already
partly obscured by the shade trees on Duke of Gloucester Street.
That is the American spirit to a T. Spend a million dollars
398 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
to create a beautiful perspective and then let it be overgrown
with foliage, for fear of inconveniencing a squirrel.
Williamsburg is a huge success. People are flocking there,
they love it.
They love the quaint buildings, the old cooking
things in the Governor's kitchen, the pillory, the old box bushes,
the powdered ladies in farthingales ; they love the Governor's
coach and cocked-hatted coachman driving through the streets,
just as in ye olden tymes. The architects of the frigid Wash
ington Triangle, when they go down there, must wring their
hands and say "Alas, why didn't we think of this?" There will
never be another Triangle, but there will be other Williamsburgs.
And why? Is it the vogue of antiques and our delight in
being able to collect with Mr. Rockefeller a colonial town when
in the past we have been able only to collect, or read about
collecting, door knockers and spinning wheels? Is there a vein
in us of nostalgic patriotism, a hungry love that we cannot feel
for this harried present time but can freely give to that simple
and beautiful and unworried golden age? Is it the smartness
of knowing about the past, a phase of the world interest in
archeology? Is it merely that men still long to go on pilgri
mages ?
One thing is fairly clear, that Williamsburg is largely a
phenomenon of sentiment. The management recognizes this in
such details as the costumes of the guide ladies and similar
affectations. Reports of "Ye Olde A. & P. Foode Shoppe" are
exaggerated but not untrue in essence. The grossly picturesque
store center is certainly a surrender of architectural sense to
sentimental antiquarianism. And the point I have mentioned
about the Palace Green where the visual spacial composition is
spoiled by a few feet of earth : so obvious a blunder can only be
accounted for by supposing that the architects looked at the
Green through some sort of magic glass that made of it a senti
mental value in which formal perfection would be a redundancy.
To people whose perception of pure proportion, formal relation,
and the modeling of space, is an infinitely more exciting ex
perience than their sentiments, this typically American (and Eng
lish) substitution of sentiment for sensation and perception, is a
constant distress. It runs all through our art, of course, but
the loss seems greatest in architecture and civic art, where the
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 399
formal values are so simple and evident and where they can be
kept relatively pure of distracting meanings as they cannot for
example in literature.
I associate this sort of feeling with the wide and deep popu
larity of informal landscape gardening. No art style is more
widely accepted. And the basis of "landscape" is a sentiment,
a feeling that nature's art is better than man's. Three genera
tions of infiltration of landscape conceptions have insidiously
corrupted our architects, making them tolerant of "informali
ties" that actually negative essential objectives in their designs.
This atmosphere, incidentally, is a dangerous one for the evolu
tion of "modern" architecture, for it encourages a general soft
ness and mere avoidance of "artificiality," usually taken to
mean the absence of axiation and defined pattern.
Much of the popular acceptance of "landscape" the word
has come to have a meaning far removed from the landscape
gardening of Humphrey Repton's time is due, I believe, to a
dim feeling that this way of arranging things is opposed to art
and is a new demonstration that intuition and the heart are after
all superior to the arts that require genius and training. This
kind of anti-art is a very deep-lying element in American
thought and feeling.
In any case there is no question that the kind of thinking
that produced the plan of Williamsburg and the plan of Wash
ington is not the kind of thinking that has meaning to most of
us, today. The severely rational and formal type of art is
apparently fundamentally irritating to people who are dimly
conscious of a basic irrationality and inconsistency in their own
thought. Our efforts to retain religious and patriotic conviction
while constantly surrounded by evidences of irrationality in
nature and human conduct, necessarily destroys the easy mental
balance which alone takes pleasure in a rationalized art. A
kind of sadism impells people who are conscious of their own
uncertainties to hate minds, and creations of mind, which have
the sense of order they cannot understand. When people of this
type can ascribe emotional meaning to a work of art they are
avid to substitute this intelligible meaning for the formal or
ganization which disquiets them. They look at the Lincoln
Memorial and see a symbol of a tragic life. Perhaps they also
400 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
see a demonstration of accepted propriety in the choice of ma
terials and architectural style. These are values they can accept
and share, but any exhibition of purely rational design unsup
ported by sentiment arouses the antagonism which is part of
uncertain comprehension. There is something very deep in
human nature which makes failure fully to understand equivalent
to fear, and fear equivalent to hate. Hence the invariable suc
cess of the ridicule of poets and artists and hence the delight
of visitors to Williamsburg in the purposed disorder of the
quack-colonial shopping center. Freed from any burden of
necessity to observe and understand an organized unity, they
can freely enjoy the toy-town prettiness and the lush senti
mentality.
Is there perhaps a compromise? Can civic artists whose
ill-judged time and place of birth throw them into a civiliza
tion of word-worship, sentiment-seeking and minute-counting
can they find some way of expressing space and mass and area
that will have meaning to crowds of people, as L'Enfant hoped
his plan would have? There is no more reasonable place to
look for the answer than at one of the big fairs where designers
are free from conservative restraints and where the popular re
sponse can be closely gauged.
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 401
A CENTURY OF PROGRESS CHICAGO EXPOSITION OF 1733
HI. THE CENTURY OF PEOGEESS
City planners have one bond with the landscape architects,
that they become very charitable of architecture. They lean
heavily upon a gracious law by which a large collection of bad
architecture may become very tolerable civic art, or charming
scenery. And their constant solace is the happy accident.
They feel (let us suppose) an active thirst to experience the
coming to life of space in unexpected perspectives and in
spirited conjunctions of silhouette. Thus it happens that they
find crumbs of nourishment even in badly baked bread.
The Chicago Century of Progress was mixed to continue
our homely figure in a hundred million dollar bowl but was
baked, alas, in a thirty million dollar oven. The bakers did
their best, but the loaf fell. The Fair had no general plan and
at a dozen points no perceptible local plan. The mixture of
chic science, architectural bontonism, architectural jazz, bigshot
advertising, Coney Island entertainment, and sentimental
archeology caused the physical and emotional collapse of all but
the sturdiest visitors. The confusion was complete. The inci
dental buildings were more looked at than the "dominants,"
over-subtle compositions of architectural plan failed to carry
in the normal view, the intended spirited variety became a mo
notonous incoherence, and the color seemed always tentative.
Yet I spent a dozen Saturday evenings at the Fair and
enjoyed them all. What was irrational by sober daylight be
came at the day's end a fairyland for optical adventure. The
arbitrary bulks and colors of the buildings were subjugated by
the sunset's warm light and long shadows ; they were drawn into
402 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
a single picture with the lagoon and its moored and moving
boats. The pale-dark towers of tragic Chicago and the leaden
lake seemed more unreal than these meaningless but hypnotizing
shapes when familiarity had drawn them together.
If in its totality the Fair became a landscape rather than
a work of art, its details could not be dismissed as valueless
to architecture. The designers of the Fair, or some of them,
were experimenting with abstract sculpture and with the corre
lation of forms that were alike so obscurely that their order
could only be sensed by some sort of metaphysical touch. It
is in this direction that the post-architectural art seems to seek
esoteric rationalities to take the place of those primitive con
ceptions of mass in stability and well-knit membering that have
been enervated by our modern structural systems using concealed
steel and large sheets of rigid materials. One suspects that
some of their constructions were intended to find something re
sponsive in the hazy physical meaning we give to such phenomena
as ether waves and cosmic rays. Since radio waves are tossed
back and forth by the earth and some layer of the stratosphere,
why shouldn't their vibration be symbolized by two parallel
planes, which they are imagined to animate, much as the constant
threat of movement is the energy that gives tactile animation
to a stone arch. Forming one of the minor gates of the Fair
there was a construction of steel pipe and orange canvas that
fascinated me deeply. There was something Japanese about it,
and a reminiscence of kites. It worked somewhat (in addition
to the muscular appeal of the strong posts) as if the tactile
meaning of surface were intensified, in some such symbolical way
as I have tried to suggest, by an atmospheric pulsation playing
between close and parallel planes. Things of this sort, con
struction for the beauty of construction, are needed in civic
art, particularly in civic garden art. They can have so much
more vivacity than the conventional earth-furniture of stone.
In their civic art their planning of open spaces and build
ing groups the designers of the Fair obviously adhered to the
slogan that guided their architectural work: Don't bore. They
therefore avoided anything so hackneyed as a general planorganization.
Only in a few passages did they suffer strict
axiation to appear, and they billowed the ground surface almost
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 403
as industriously as the landscape architects do when they want
to justify winding walks on a terrain that nature made flat.
In their planning they used freely what the painters call the
impreviw. In fact, there is a general impression that the correct
type of planning for the arrangement of buildings in nontraditional
styles is necessarily an informal one. The reasoning
seems to be that since axiation is obviously an art value, functionalism
(which was named and advocated as for modern man
a better guide than art) must give us a different result
asymmetrical forms.
Many passages in the Century of Progress plan had much re
semblance to the style identified with the name of Camillo Sitte.
That style was developed from the accidental or in part acci
dental medieval civic art. It was influenced by both informal
gardening (which has always been conceived of by its practition
ers as functional art) and the formal architectural planning it
sought to displace. In Sitte's plans the streets were usually
straight and at approximately right angles. But they were asymmetrical
in plan and elevation and the terminal or "closing"
element normally was of informal, pictorial, character. The open
places set with fountains and statues in informal relation to the
area, were asymmetrical and as closely enclosed as practicable.
Like the "Sittesche Stil," and like, one supposes, all young art
movements, the modern style has in it a lively element of sadism,
directed against the old way. That which pains the old teacher
delights the rebel pupil. The feeling of being wayward, destruc
tive, lusty, unlike and superior, is a rich reward for the perils of
insurrection. This stimulating sadism, this anti-art, is ex
perienced also, though not so sharply focussed, by the public.
They learn that it is smart to destroy, that it is chic to know
the proper object and means of destruction. Of the modern
style few people can perceive what it is, but anyone can see what
it is not. "Familiar" and "different" are the esthetic scales of
most minds. The familiar is beautiful until it becomes chic to
prefer the different.
There was the further effort, at the Century of Progress, to
exploit the chic of science. The rape of science by the modern
style in building and decoration is one of the entertaining ele
ments in what our literary friends call the contemporary scene.
404 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
The reasoning runs in the following syllogism: Science is de
structive of old ways; the modern style of architecture is de
structive of old ways; therefore the modern style is science
expressed in architecture. The fact that some kinds of scientists
are more fanatic worshipers of symmetry, as in the cutting of
a cogwheel, than ever were the architects of the Renaissance, is
just as easy to ignore as the fact that the old ways destroyed
by science and by the new art are not ways of the same order.
Though they had to renounce any general organization
beyond the psychological dominance of the lagoons the planners
of the Fair were fertilely experimental in their detailed planning.
The great circle of flags at the main entrance to the Fair and
the avenue of sloping flagstaffs with their enormous banners
were moving and beautiful things, rich in suggestions for serious
civic design. Piers, stele, and lighting standards were used to
define and give plastic depth to open spaces in ways that re
called the sculptural enrichment of French plazas and Italian
gardens. The baroque planners sought always to make their
work sociable and friendly and cheerful, touched with humanity.
The Fair was free to seek the same expression of life, unhampered
by the conventional concrete, granite, evergreens and grass that
make so many American civic centers a pall upon the imagina
tion.
The Fair planners wrestled with plaza design, though rather
in terms of courtyards and gardens than as monumental assem
blages of buildings. The court of the Science building a high
mass with arms extending to the shore of the lagoon was well
proportioned and vivaciously modeled, the sort of thing that
ought to be studied by those architects whose only rule for
creating an ensemble is to enforce a uniform cornice height.
Of the technical aspects of the Fair construction every city
planner must have been struck by the success of the pedestrian
pavements. A bituminous pavement covered with fine crushed
stone is easy on the feet and easy also on the eye, since it is
dark and cannot glare. It makes an infinitely better foil against
vertical masonry walls than does concrete, because the slick and
usually over-scaled slabs of a concrete pavement hide the mother
earth on which buildings stand and men walk. The low-set flood
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 405
lights on the lawns were distinctly worthy of restrained emula
tion in public gardens.
A big exposition is a fairyland, a museum, a bazaar, and a
carnival. At the Century of Progress the bazaars and the
carnival shows had several centers of intensity; there was no
such complete segregation as at the Columbian Exposition. And
the Century of Progress, particularly in the second year, carried
to an unprecedented development that old entertainment motive,
the Village, which has the charm of combining the four delights
of the fair. Here was the most ironical part of a highly ironical
whole. Alongside the boldly forward-looking modernism of the
Fair's main buildings flourished the lush antiquarianism of the
villages. The customers, it is embarrassing to confess, seemed
definitely to favor the medievalism with music. No doubt they
considered the modern buildings very smart, but they spent their
quarters to see the Belgian Village and the Black Forest.
There is no denying that several of the villages were fetching
places. They were small, close, harmonious, of human scale,
bearing plainly the human mark. It was pleasant to walk in
any direction free from traffic danger for the constant noise
and constant peril of traffic in our cities is a heavier nervous
burden than most of us realize. The villages were small enough
to be sensed as a whole, they were places of escape from worry
and boredom escape into a simple physical and emotional unity
made pleasant by a hazy familiarity. There was the flattery
of being asked to be at home in Belgium, Italy, or Tunisia. And
there was the crowd, the sociability. Say what you will, it is
sweet and sanitary, at carnival time, to sink one's personality
in the thought and feeling of a crowd.
I recollect an architectural cocktail party where at one point
the conversation touched the Chicago villages. What was their
charm? Among the theories advanced were infantilism, grandmotherism,
peasantism, snobbism, and agoraphobia. The last,
at least, is not wholly inconsistent with esthetic perception. Even
when we have no dislike for open places, most people have a
liking for safe havens such as a quiet cloister or a sunny clearing
in a woods. Far be it from a lover of old civic art to say the
villages were all silly. They had in various degrees something of
the composition of solids and voids, narrow streets and open
406 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
plazas, that endear to us Venice and Rothenburg and Ghent.
City planners must deal with the vest-pocket village and
must have a care lest it make fools of them. The shopping center
at Williamsburg is a fair warning of the spiritual swamps into
which a jolly Puck of this sort can lead an artist. It should
be possible to discover the sound values of the villages and to
reject the over-sentimental elements. Suburban shopping centers
of the "park and shop" type are being built around many cities.
These could profit by a close study of the Fair villages. An
understanding of marketing customs, traffic, and parking, for
work of this kind, must be supplemented by an understanding
of the history of towns, which will suggest the means of adding
deep esthetic values to practical convenience.
One went to Chicago in 1933 and '34 to experience threedimensioned
space mastered in terms of modern architecture.
One found delightful jeux d'esprit in the furnishing of open
spots ; one found architecture to please every taste save that of
the professional critics, who know a happy land where there is
no so what? in a la moderne; one delighted in lagoons that
seemed lately to have been borrowed from the wild ducks and to
have been surrounded temporarily with Gargantuan colored play
things in place of willows. One found lush sentiment enshrined
in medieval villages made old with painted weathering, made
wonderous with icicles of glass. But one found no civic art that
revealed so much intellectual conviction as laid down the stern
and hated gridiron of Chicago.
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER
IV. GREENDALE
407
A sampling of the American civic art of these days obviously
must comprise some notice of the New Deal's town planning.
Following the financial occurrences of 1929, it became a
matter of general agreement that a housing program ought to
be undertaken, with some kind of federal help. At the beginning
slum clearance seemed most promising, probably in part because
the destruction of old buildings and the construction of new
ones for (presumably) the same low-income tenants appeared
likely to sustain urban land values and not seriously to affect
rentals. A considerable amount of this rebuilding has been put
through, but it has become evident that it is impossible without
a large subsidy to bring the old slum tenants back into the new
apartments, even when the doubtful expedient is used of increas
ing the population density of the rebuilt area. In some instances,
furthermore, it appears that the slum environment the smoke,
for example, and the square-mile overcrowding, which is still a
408 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
burden after room-overcrowding has been relieved survives the
rebuilding and diminishes its social value.
Experience may show how these handicaps can be overcome,
but the theory is spreading that cities are fated to spread centrifugally,
that it is futile as well as anti-social to try to maintain
the present density of population. Some take it to be a necessary
corollary that this tendency renders the low-rental apartment
obsolete both in the blighted districts and in the new land on
which the city is spreading.
The subsistence homesteads experiment was a fruit of the
growing belief that industry ought to decentralize. The ex
periment was at least not a clear success, mainly for the reason
that the provision of an appropriate industry could not be made
a part of every project plan. The next step was to test a
European device, the colony town outside the large city but
within range of existing employment. For this purpose the
Division of Suburban Resettlement was set up, under the Reset
tlement Administration. Suburban Resettlement is at this
writing building three suburban towns at Washington, Cincinnati,
and Milwaukee.
Greendale, the Milwaukee project, enjoys the spiritual ad
vantage of being born poor. Its planners aimed at a population
of a thousand families with incomes of twelve hundred dollars a
year or a little more; their calculations soon showed that only
with money at nominal interest could such a town pay its way
and amortize its cost within sixty years, the estimated life of
the contemplated plain but sturdy houses. In a big city, people
of this economic stratum live in a kind of partial poorhouse.
Their homes are old buildings the value of which has been written
off by more prosperous occupants. The small taxes they pay,
concealed in rent and other living costs, may not meet the cost
of schooling one child. The enormous capital and maintenance
cost of public utilities, streets, police and fire protection, li
braries, schools, parks and playgrounds, hospitals, courts and
prisons practically all of this is paid for in taxes to view the
situation diagrammatically by the workman's employer, and is
reflected in the factory's accounts as an increase in the price of
its product and a reduction in its wage scale. In simple truth,
the cost of the city comes mainly out of workers' wages. This
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 409
is the "concealed subsidy" it might be called a concealed wage
of which housing experts talk. Now when a workman goes out to
the suburbs and buys a home in a town where there are no
factories or hotels or rich people to pay this subsidy, and the
workman still draws his pay from a factory in the city, he auto
matically loses most of this concealed wage. The man will be
paying (in the form of a reduction of money wages) part of
the cost of police protection and schools enjoyed by his friends
in the city, while at the same time he will be paying (in taxes)
the cost of the protection of his home and the education of his
children. That is why it is the well-to-do who live in the freshair
suburbs and that is why laborers live in city slums or in
smoky factory towns. All this discussion may appear to have
little to do with civic art, but it has had a great deal to do with
the plan of Greendale.
The program, the skeleton of ideas and facts, on which
Greendale is being planned is something like this: Automotive
transportation makes it possible for men to live a considerable
distance from their work; pure air, rural surroundings, and
contact with the ground, are physically and psychically good;
life is better in a small town where social cooperation is pos
sible; by eliminating inflated land values, by appropriate plan
ning, by large-scale construction, and by taking advantage of
every reasonable means for reducing living costs, working-class
families can afford to live in small special-built suburban towns.
The plan of Greendale has been directed toward making these
statements true particularly the last of them.
A large area (about five square miles) of rolling farm land,
eight or nine miles from Milwaukee, was bought. Near the
center of it a compact town, planned for an ultimate population
of about 4000 people, is being built. The farm land will mostly
remain farm land, in close economic connection with the town,
probably through correlated cooperatives. It is intended that
another compact group of houses, and a number of looser groups,
will eventually bring the number of families up to about three
thousand.
When it came to the location of the first compact town a site
was chosen that was not cut by existing roads. The site is
near main highways but does not actually touch them. In the
410 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
design of the plan, the first principle determined upon was that
the streets should be divided into two types: traffic streets and
residence streets. The traffic streets are wide, follow easy
gradients, are planned to avoid their being used as trunk high
ways but rather to form convenient channels of traffic flow from
highways to the town and within the town, and they are not
used to create lot frontage. The residence streets are narrow,
sometimes are rather steep, normally short, and normally deadended.
In fitting this scheme to the irregular and partly hilly
site an intermediate type of street developed, a kind of collector
street giving access to several culs-de-sac, and itself carrying
abutting lot frontage.
Along with the street plan had to be met the questions of row
house versus single and of private yard versus community block-
interior.
Row houses officially rechristened group houses have in
late years been accepted as the necessary form of low-cost
suburban housing, just as multi-family dwellings, formerly
thought of as apartment houses, have been accepted as necessary
in cities. In the latter case the controlling factor is the land
"value"; in suburban housing the land cost factor is usually not
sufficient to force housing into apartments but it reinforces the
cheaper-construction argument in favor of row houses. Rows
are somewhat cheaper to build than detached houses, and the
saving in street and utilities costs is considerable. Commercial
low-cost housing projects have usually adhered to local customs,
rows being much used in Eastern cities. The sophisticated town
planners, largely on the authority of English precedent, have
accepted the row house in short rows as desirable, or perhaps
rather as unavoidable, even for work in districts where it is not
traditional. The planners of Greendale, under pressure of a
limited budget, accepted the row house for about half their
housing units but they set out to find a way to place and build
single houses economically enough to justify using them for the
other half.
How that was done is to town planners the interesting part
of the Greendale story, but a discussion of the other factor
I named the handling of the block-interiors is a prerequisite
to it.
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 411
That "front yards" could be left unfenced was a discovery
of the '90's. A studiously planned community near New York,
some ten years ago, boldly did away with the ancient and beloved
back yard. Radburn, "the town for the motor age," was an
experiment in several ways of much value to town planning.
The basic principle of the plan is the division of the land into
"superblocks." An area of perhaps one thousand by two or
three thousand feet is surrounded by wide traffic streets ; from
these, dead-end lanes run into the block, giving wheeled access to
a dozen or more single or twin houses, mostly with incorporated
garages. Alternating with the lanes are foot ways, correspond
ing but in location only to the old-time alley. The houses
front toward these foot ways and the entrance walks diverge
from them. There are no fences : the space between the rows
of houses is developed in the manner known as parklike. Per
haps it will make this description clearer if I say that strangers
do not quickly perceive which is the front of the houses and
which the rear. Even on Monday, I understand, there may still
be uncertainty. Actually, social visitors are intended to park
their cars on the traffic street and walk in, via the foot way, to
the house they have in mind. It should be added that a strip
of private park runs through the super-block, with walks that
pick up the ends of the foot ways and form, with the help of
underpasses beneath the traffic roads, a safe route to the school.
This last feature has been much acclaimed; actually the under
passes are used only when it is convenient, and there is competent
doubt as to whether it will really conduce to the survival of the
Radburn young to be thus protected during the habit-forming
years.
The planners of Greendale liked the Radburn lanes, but they
could not accept, for a town of middle western workingmen, the
parked yards. They accounted for this aspect of the town of
the motor age by thinking of Radburn as a Riverside Drive
apartment house taken apart, set down on the ground, and en
vironed with one of those interior gardens the Phipps apart
ments have made the cynosure of all apartment eyes. The human
elements in this transaction have no hankering, in Spring, to
plant a row of cabbages, nor have they formed the habit of
pitching horse shoes on Sunday morning. No, it is overdoing
412 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
it to let the motor age deprive us of personal relationship with
the Ancient Mother. The Greendale plan started with the
premise that every house should have its patch of ground, with
a fence around it.
Our old conception of a town street was that it should be
a sort of public garden upon which it was pleasant to have an
outlook from the living room and the porch. Suburban residence
streets, in those days, were intended to attract admiring pleasuredrivers.
This conception is changing, thanks to gasoline and
to a growing appreciation that the front lawn was a very
expensive thing in land, in cost of utility connections, and in
upkeep. It had to be paid for by crowding the houses into a
disgracefully close row; the side yards were so narrow as to be
useless.
The special way of putting together street, house, and lot
that distinguishes the Greendale street as, in the spirit of the
advertising age, its begetters have christened it appears most
novel to those whose knowledge of town planning history is
least. The type of house it implies is much like the side-garden
house of our Colonial towns, a house built on the street and
Greendale scheme of house location
showing relation of living and service
rooms to street, entrance court, and
garden.
Residence Street . . . Greendale
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 413
along one side of the lot, with a garden between it and the
neighbor. Even more it resembles the ancient and universal
arrangement of the houses in farm villages, where one does not
enter the house directly from the street but through a court
around which the buildings are grouped. Not unexpectedly,
visitors to Greendale the town is under construction as this is
written have sometimes found an Old World flavor in its resi
dence streets. They are narrow, for one thing. That was done
to reduce the cost of grading, drives, and the utility connections :
sewer, water and electricity. It is the end of the house that
touches the side of the street there is no ''front yard" and the
entrance is in the longer front, facing on the hof. The lot is
quite wide for a poor man's town, at least fifty feet. The court
comprises all the room between one house and the next, because
each house lies on the side line of the lot. This is not a serious
matter since all the houses are rented : the town, in effect if not in
form, will own itself and rent its houses to its people but that is
another story! There are few on the first floor no windows
in the house-wall abutting on the neighbor's court.
The street, then, consists of two rows of houses facing
parallel to the street, not perpendicular to it as is the common
scheme. It is obvious that orientation becomes important in
such a plan. Almost all of the residence streets at Greendale
run north and south; the houses face south and the width of
the courts is sufficient to insure winter sunlight in the living
rooms. The garage is at the rear of the court. With the
neighbor's garage it serves to enframe a little house-lawn just
back of the house; beyond this lies the garden or recreation
area of the rear yard.
This plan conceives of the house, the car, and the garden
as together comprising the "home." It was worked out as a
correlation of the house with, on one side, the community and
the world, and, on the other, the privately held bit of land that
is the garden. The motor car is the link between the house and
the world: the court brings the car into the home complex
one can go from the car to the house as directly and with
almost as perfect privacy as one goes from room to room in
the house. One's friends drive in; they are not forced to stop
in the street, to walk across a public sidewalk, and to remain
414 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
in public view until the street door of the house is opened. The
court is a harbor in which the family car may anchor and un
load in safety after its journey on the high seas of the traffic
roads.
This Greendale type of house and lot planning brings the
residence street back into civic art it rescues the street from
the street trees and the front lawns. The street becomes a de
fined channel of space, as it was in the old town plans. It is
a plan well suited to substantial uniformity in the houses ; they
stand far enough apart to have personal identity, yet they are
together an entity of a higher order than each is separately.
Because the houses form directly the street walls, they can be
manipulated for plastic effect; a setting-back of the houses at
the entrance to a street, or a pinching-in of the plan at its end,
has value that tells in the modelling of the designed space of
the street. The entire street, too, is often so short that within
it can be compassed the completion of a simple rhythm, from
the portal to the terminal members. When the ground is favor
able a symmetrical pattern works out naturally ; if an irregular
space must be divided, or if the lie of the land and existing trees
affect the layout, the result is inevitably an informal grouping
that Camillo Sitte or the modernists, if the houses had that
cast would find more charming than the other. The whole
scheme, to the present writer's great contentment, is conducive
to straightness in the streets.
And it is not quite an accident that in its skeleton organiza
tion the plan of Greendale is much like the plan of Williamsburg.
When Werner Hegemann and I were building our book on
civic art we talked often of the future of civic art, not the
window-box type of civic center and that sort of thing, but city
and art of the same meat, the intended beauty of cities as places
of commerce and life and government, beauty built into streets
and open squares that are the daily gathering and passing places
of men. We had to say that no more towns like Nancy and
no more plazas like the Piazza del Popolo would ever be built.
And we had to say, further, that if an effort were made to
attain the old civic beauty it could not be done in the old forms,
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER 415
for the automobile has taken the city unto itself, destroying
the possibility of any full human experiencing of the city as an
esthetic whole. We studied old plans, sketched the fair sights
that would appear as one walked in those streets. But we knew
that modern traffic would leave little pleasure in such a town.
Traffic, however, is not the only enemy of civic art. Modern
cities are so large and so richly built, with every building doing
its best to detach itself visually from the rest, that they become
an intolerable burden upon the various elements of our minds
and bodies that react to mass, form, and color. The buildings
vary also in height, and the high ones rise far above the power
of the street to control them. This competition within the street
wall is another factor in the destruction of the street as a
perceivable whole. The plain fact is that our cities have architec
tural indigestion they would be better architecture, as cities, if
the street fronts of most buildings were in the same style as the
alley fronts, which are usually simple, harmonious, and uniform
in scale and material.
The hope for beautiful cities as architectural ensembles lies
in the direction of the new towns which must grow up in response
to the distributive factors in our mechanical and economic evo
lution. In some of these towns, as in the Resettlement Ad
ministration projects, budgetary limitations will compel the
architectural abnegation which competitive commerce does not
permit. Some will test new ways of sparing our days the burden
of traffic noise and danger. Something resembling the trafficfree
villages of the fairs may be evolved as the form of the town
business centers. A firm separation of residence streets from
traffic streets will give some peace and beauty to the homes in
future towns and suburbs.
But there is no need to abandon existing cities to the dragon,
Traffic. Architects must fight against the growing theory that
traffic volume is a phenomenon of nature which man may not
deny. Traffic engineers often work on assumptions that are at
least unphilosophical. People to whom there are finer values in
life than getting from one noisy place to another in five minutes
instead of ten, or adding a million dollars to the land values in
this street rather than in that one, must learn to fight for their
faith. In Washington, for example, there were other possibilities
416 CITY PLANNING AND HOUSING
than the slashing of the broad traffic route of Constitution Avenue
diagonally across Pennsylvania Avenue. The traffic roadways
within the avenue of the Mall are wholly unnecessary and are
obviously destructive of the intended simple grandeur of this
monumental composition.
In little bays from the traffic stream, minor passages of civic
beauty may still be attained. The plaza of the Rockefeller
Center will have its imitators and rivals. And in successive
regional, national and world fairs many beauties of civic art will
be given us, beyond the power of cities to compass.
Exceeding these possibilities, the student and lover of the old
civic art must dream of a public garden art in which the rare
essential glories of old cities and of old and new town plans
that have never been built can be translated into forms realized
in tree-masses, hedges, walls, green and paved areas, and water
surfaces. In such gardens an easy state of mind is possible, a
calm reaction to verticals and horizontals, nears and fars, such
as our cities will not tolerate. And in them people can meet and
talk without keeping one eye on a traffic light. There is more to
be learned about garden designing from the study of Renais
sance town planning than in any other way, and I believe that
the facts about solids and voids, masses and supports, that can
be learned from civic art must be the basis for effective garden
planning in whatever architectural styles the future brings. It
must not be supposed that a mastery of the means and purposes
of Renaissance city planning is
easy or commonly encountered.
The numberless confusions as to what is important in the
L'Enfant plan, failures even to perceive what that plan is, dem
onstrate how much we need still to know about this elusive art.
But surely it is not possible to be wholly pessimistic about
the future of those kinds of esthetic creation which we may group
in the phrase civic art, when the last year has given us so fine
a thing as the Mall already is. It is true that I must go there
at dusk when the bunglings of L'Enfant's modern successors are
charitably obscured, in order to get the feeling of perfection.
Well, that is an easy price to pay, here in the soft afterglow
of a Summer evening.
INDEX
Adams, Charles Francis, 100
Adams, Brooks, 43
Adams, Henry, 7, 58, 148, 195, 279
administration of Jefferson, 58, 60,
194
on U. S. Grant, 148-150
on London, 98, 101, 102, 151, 152
Washington, description of city,
30-32
Adams, James Truslow, 3, 150, 279
Adams, John, 15, 53
Adams, John Quincy, 35, 66, 90
Adams, Samuel, 63
Adams, Thomas: New York Re
gional plan, 165, 166, 168-170
Addams, Jane, 37
Agricultural Adjustment Adminis
tration, 65
American backwardness: building
codes, garbage collection, drug
stores, slums, zoning, etc., 152-
155
American Boss-Rule (Lincoln Steffens),
195
American Ideal of:
justice and economy, 145, 146
planning defeated, 39, 69
American loans to foreign countries,
260, 261, 278, 291, 301, 302,
304-306, 311
American price and production poli
cies, 208-210
American progressiveness :
park systems, play grounds, trans
portation, etc., 151, 152, 155, 156
American-Russian affinities theory, 8,
194-197
Amortization fund for reconstruction,
136, 137
Aronovici, Carol, 140, 246, 277
Baltic States, land distribution after
World War, 124, 125
Barker, Wendell P., 252
Barnes, Harry E., 45
Bassett, Edward M.: zoning of New
York City, 77, 164-167, 169
Bauer, Catherine, I. xviii, 161, 200,
202, 321-323, 339, 377
Beard, Charles, 144, 281
John Quincy Adams, measures of
conservation, 66
Beard Continued
Civil War (First Revolution):
expenses of, 123
Constitution, reasons for framing,
43
confiscation of Confederate prop
erty, 124
Horace Greeley, 93
immigrants, 110, 160
national planning, 43, 44
Roosevelt and Van Buren, com
pared, 146
Russian-American affinities, 196
War for Independence, 43
Bedoyere, Michael de la, English
biographer of Washington, 7
Behrens, Peter, 264
Bentham, Jeremy, 62, 89, 90, 181
Bestelmeyer, 377
Bimba, Anthony; History of Work
ing Classes, 101
Bismarck, 4, 272, 285
Blighted Districts, 26, 131
confiscation and indemnification
(see slums), 125
cleared by public opinion (E.
Roosevelt), 104
of Manhattan, 161, 311
population of, 138, 312
typical for American cities, 159, 297
values, 130, 131, 138
Bonn, M. T.: Russian-American af
finities, 197
"Boston 1915," Five year plan, 205-
207, 214
Bragdon, Claude, 339, 347, 354, 355
"Brain Trust," 1, 42, 44, 148
Breitner, Dr., Viennese Municipal
housing, 230, 231
Bright, John: labor union meeting
in London, 101, 102
Brisbane, Arthur: the miner and his
home, 242
British Conservative Party, 157, 158
British Labor Party, 94, 96, 203
Brookings Institute, Washington,
D. C., 232
Bryan, W. B., 20
Bryson, Lyman: population of New
York City, 238
Buchanan: veto of Homestead Act, 92
Buenos Aires
building codes and possible popu
lation, 176
417
418 INDEX
Buenos Aires Continued
center plaza slashed, 331, 333
reaction to European tenements,
230, 231
Building Codes
aims, 159, 196
Buenos Aires and possible popula
tion, 176
Chicago, 37
exploitation of real estate, 162, 176,
235, 236
inadequacy of: 76, 78, 143, 255
of Jefferson, Washington and
L'Enfant, 26, 27, 29, 159
of New York (corrupt, grotesque,
scandalous), 27, 74, 75, 125, 136,
162-165, 172, 201
(reactionary), 155, 158, 162
and population of New York Re
gion, 150, 151, 170, 172
and "unconstitutionally," 26, 27,
150
Building Tax of Hamilton, 63, 376
Building Zone Resolution, New York
(see Zoning Resolution)
Burnham, Daniel H., 37, 187, 332,
362-366, 378, 388, 390
Burr, Aaron: unscrupulous land
speculation, 141-143, 149, 156,
158
Busey, S. C.: Washington as city
planner, 2, 20
Butler, Nicholas Murray, 49
Canals, 8-12, 14-16, 58, 62
projects of George Washington, 11,
14, 15, 17, 297, 298
as public works suggested by
Hamilton, 52
suggested by Jefferson, 62, 66
Carnegie, use of reserve funds, 212
Catherine of Russia; as city planner,
8, 10
Calhoun, John C.: and national plan
ning, 54, 55
Capital
and labor returns (Charles W.
Eliot), 223
Lincoln on: 68, 107
Marx and Engels on: 46, 98, 113,
191, 199, 202, 211, 212
Roosevelt, F. D. on: 68
Carlyle, Thomas, opposed Lincoln,
79, 94
Carpenter, N.: sociology of city life,
175, 179, 191
Carreau, Louis: "old law" tenements,
I. xv
Carver, Th. N. "Boston 1915," 207
Chase, Stuart: Hoover's socialism,
305
Chatham Village, Pittsburgh, hous
ing development, 314
Chicago, 18
"America, the Menace" (Duhamel),
37, 38, 259
"Century of Progress," 384, 401-
406
chaotic development, 36, 39
"Chicago construction" and Rich
ardson, 347-349
Field Warehouse (Richardson),
355, 359, 360
land values, 35-37, 145
parks and playgrounds, 37
plan of 1908, 37, 331, 332
World's Fair of 1893, 37, 363, 366,
386, 387, 390
Christ, 80-84, 213, 307, 335, II. xii
Christian Socialists of Vienna, 227,
228, 230, 231
Churchill, Henry, 246, 277
Cities
downfall lamented by Jeremiah, 162
"full sinful beauty" (Spengler),
185, 193
comparison of American and
European, 188
salvation of mankind, 179
City Hall, New York City, 132, 133,
342
City Planning, 5, 6, 93, 117, 159, 220
in England, 87, 203
Exhibitions, 205, 207
in Germany handicapped by mort
gage system, 28, 285, 292, 311
gridiron plans, 182, 384, 386, 406
integration of city and country,
190-192
Netherlands and Russia, 191
in New York, 166
and state and regional planning,
related, 38, 184
Civil War of U. S.: 110, 122, 124, 149
comparison with World War, 150
278
corruption after war, 119, 148-150
and democracy, 55, 89-92, 98
and England, 86, 96-100, 144, 203
expenses, 121, 123
Homestead Act, 93, 199
protective tariffs, 197
riots of Boston and New York, 92,
109, 110
slaves and slums, 71, 72, 115
war profiteering, 92, 109
and Washington's canal policies, 18
Clark, Allen C.: 25
Clark, John Maurice "Adam Smith"
41, 90
Clarke, Gilmore, 185
Clas, Angelo Robert, Federal Emer
gency Administration, 235
Cobden, Richard: labor meeting in
London, 101
INDEX 419
Committee for Economic Recovery,
home building, 255
Committee on Economic Security, 61
Communist Manifesto, 70, 85, 91, 105,
106, 113
demands plan, 200
praise of capitalism, 199, 202
slums, 111, 189
Compensation to slum owners, 117,
136-139, 234
abolition of property (Hamilton),
128-130
Lincoln's indemnification proposal,
78, 118, 121-123, 125, 126, 138
Constitution, 44-47, 54, 149
aim: general welfare, I. xiv, 40-43,
46-48, 146, 198, 211
amendment (Jefferson) for public
works, 16, 57, 61, 62
(Lincoln) for abolition of slav
ery, 117, 118, 122
powers of Congress, 16, 54, 57
framers in favor of municipal real
estate, 24
interpretation: by Hamilton, 50, 51,
53, 54, 149
by Jefferson, 63
by Washington, 54
national planning, basic concep
tion, 33, 34, 40, 42, 44, 46, 203,
261, 297, 298, 302
New Deal, 147, 148, 211
public works, 49, 52, 55, 57, 62
reasons for framing, 43, 45
and slavery, 73, 117, 118, 122
Constitutional Conventions : An
napolis and Philadelphia, 15,
16, 41
Cooley, T. M.: U. S. system of
bondage, 122
Corbin, John: Unknown Washing
ton, 7
Cortissoz, Royal: on Richardson, 339,
349, 354, 355
"Cotton famine" of Lancashire, 100
County Court House, New York City,
132, 133
Cram, Ralph Adams, medievalist,
186-188, 192, 345, 346
Crawford, Andrew C.: Philadelphia,
parkway, 332
Credit Structure
maintenance contradicts Jefferson,
Hamilton and Lincoln, 75, 130
and New Deal, 74, 75
or sane housing, 75, 77
Cunningham: "Western Civilization,"
218
Czechoslovakia, land distribution
after war, 124, 125, 226
Dahlberg, Axel, director of housing,
Stockholm, 242, 246, 247, 251
Damaschke Adolph: soil reformer in
Germany, 281
Davy, Humphrey: on Benjamin
Franklin, 2
Declaration of Independence, I. xiv, 1,
5, 41, 42, 61, 65, 157
applied to slaves (Lincoln), 73
criticised by Bentham, 89
march towards rationalism, 47
"pursuit of happiness," 63-65, 69,
89, 157, 181, 336
Democracy, 86, 91, 92, 97, 103
German Housing reform, 180, 279
"Jacksonian," 144
Jefferson on: 57, 66
Whitman on: 198
Democratic Party, 55, 67, 157, 271
Jefferson, founder of party, 55, 57,
60, 66
opposition to national planning, 55,
57
Denmark, 226, 278, 288
Depew, Chauncey M.: on Lincoln,
121, 122
Detroit
low-cost housing halted by prop
erty owners, 127
slum clearance project, 126, 127
Dewey, John: new American revolu
tion, 115
Dickens, Charles: on city of Wash
ington, 30
Dickinson, Lester J.: against New
Deal, 67
Dictators
Dollfuss, 234
Cleon, Phillip, Caesar, 217
Hitler (see Hitler)
Long, Huey: 15, 34, 142
Mussolini, 45, 46, 147, 293-295
Dinwiddie, Emily W.: new-law tene
ments, 161
Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), 96, 97
Dodd, William E.: post-war tariff
acts, 303
Downing, Andrew Jackson: Mall,
Washington, 386
Duhamel, Georges: America the Men
ace, 37, 38, 187, 259
Dunbar Apartments, New York City,
I. xiii
Duranty, Walter: on Soviet land pol
icy, 288
Eberstadt: German pre-war tene
ments, 245, 276
Ebert, Friedrich, 282-284, 289
Economic Depression
post-Revolutionary, 15
of 1837 and natural resources, 147
420 INDEX
Economic Depression Continued
of 1929^36, 28, 29, 122, 283, 297,
311, 325, 334
Egypt and influence in architecture,
1, 186, 215, 360, 365-374, 377,
378
Eliot, Charles W., 222, 223
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 81, 85, 87,
88, 279, 318, 326, 328, 329
America, formless, 334, 342
Civil War, 79, 106, 107, 150
Lincoln and Marx, compared, 88,
90, 91, 219
Engels, Friedrich, 91, 219, 221, 271
capital and labor, 46, 111, 113, 199,
202, 211, II. xii
city planning and housing ideas,
200, 201
Communist Manifesto (see Com
munist Manifesto)
and expropriation of tenement
owners, 125
and Marx, more uncompromising
than Disraeli, 97
Ricardian theory, 112
England, 13, 90, 91, 100, 114, 157, 158,
237, 238
and Civil War of U. S., 86, 94, 96,
99, 102, 144, 203
free trader and creditor, 305
labor unions, 94, 96, 101, 102
"laissez-faire" policy, 5, 40-42, 141
public works, 52, 157
English Housing and City Planning,
5, 108, 114, 203
city planning in 13th century, 7
garden cities, 203, 205, 231, 232, 270
housing program, 82, 87, 157, 203,
228, 278
low-cost housing, 157, 203, 241, 253
National Building Act, 204
National Housing Committee, 82, 83
one-family houses, 82, 180, 201, 202
Regional Plan Laws, 5
slum and slum clearance methods,
95, 157, 203, 204, 281
"small" and "great" houses, 85, 86
Town Planning Acts, 5
"Epic" Movement, 114
"Equal chance for humblest man"
(Lincoln), 89, 113, 198, 199,
206, 214
Erie Railroad Scandal, 39, 149
"Farmer Labor Movement," 114
Federal Emergency Administration
(public works), 234, 235, 306
Federal Government (see Govern
ment)
Federal Housing Administration, 306
Fichte, J. G., 197, 198
Filene, Edward: Five-year plan for
Boston, 206, 207
Fiske, John: On War for Independ
ence, 43
Five-Year Plans, 307
Boston, 206, 207
German housing (Wright), 279
and Jefferson's 10-year plan
(1808), 58
Flexner, Abraham, 80
Flag used for advertising, 151
France, 88, 94, 102, 288
low-cost housing, 268
public works, 52, 270
Frankfurt-on-Main, garden suburbs,
231, 232
Franklin, Benjamin, 1, 2, 40, 152-156,
298
Frederick II, 4, 28, 181
Freed, A. S.: on prefabricated
houses, 255
French, F. F.: Knickerbocker Vil
lage, 272, 276
French Revolutions, I. xiii, 88, 197,
218, 219, 268
Ford, Henry, 43, 395
fictitious land values, I. xv, 180,
192, 311
integration of city and country,
180, 190-192
public works and unemployment,
299, 300, 301
Ford, James, 139, 140
Fowler, "Social Life," 218
Gallatin, Albert: plan of public
works, 56, 58-60
Garden suburbs
England, 205, 231, 232, 270
post-war cities, 190, 262-266
Russia, 320, 321
United States, 239, 319-321
Vienna and Frankfurt, 231, 232
Gamier, Charles: Grand Opera Site
in Paris, 330, 331
George, Henry: on American pros
perity, 281
George, Lloyd: on abolition of Eng
lish slums, 281
Germany, 332
analysis of break-down, 279, 282-
293
architects, modern, II. xviii, 264,
377
Berlin and Paris, compared (Giraudoux),
262-266
city planning in llth century, 7
foreign loans to: 260, 261, 278, 283,
284, 291, 301-306, 311
"free cities," 188
homesteads, promised in political
campaigns, 280, 281, 287, 290
INDEX 421
Germany Continued
housing reform, 80, 108, 114, 180,
205, 226, 259-261, 278, 279
housing shortage, 256, 292-295, 312
Junkers: opposition to small farms,
178, 279, 283-290
mortgage system, fatal, 28, 285,
292, 311
land distribution in Eastern prov
inces, 285-290
slums, 79, 80, 281, 282
soil reformers, 281
subsistence homesteads, 280, 285-
287, 291, 322, 323
tariffs, pre-war system, ruinous,
284, 286
tenements, 180, 201, 230, 231, 292
War Memorial (Tessenow), Berlin,
340, 341, 375, 377
Giraudoux, Jean, 38, 180, 261-266,
290
Gladstone and American Civil War,
79, 94, 99
"Gold Conspiracy" under Grant, 149,
288
Goodhue, Bertram G., 187, 345, 346
Goodrich, Ernest P., 175
Grace Church, New York City, 343-
345, 347
Grant, Ulysses S., 3, 100, 147-150,
203, 279, 288
"Greatest happiness to greatest num
ber"
Bentham, 89, 159, 181
housing and public works, 52
Lincoln, 90, 156, 181, 213, 302
Greeley, Horace, 93, 219
Greendale, Milwaukee, Wis.: Reset
tlement project, 384, 407-414
Gridiron plans for cities, 182, 384,
386, 406
Gries, John M.: on slums, 139
Griffin, Walter B.: Lincoln Memorial,
Washington, D. C., 373
Haber, Fritz: nitrogen as land ferti
lizer, 186
Hamilton, Alexander, 16, 41, 53-55,
143, 225, 297
Building Tax, 63, 376
Commercial policy, 197
constructive interpretation of Con
stitution, 50-54, 149
credit structure, 130
and Jefferson, 51, 53, 63, 129
ideals and Republican Party, 49,
50
National planning and public
works, 42, 46, 49-52, 63, 158
property rights (abolition and com
pensation), 69, 128-130, 138
Hamilton Continued
Roosevelt, Th. on: 50, 141, 142
Hamlin, T. F.: "American Spirit in
Architecture," 339, 360
Hampstead: English garden city,
205
Hardy, Charles O.: Viennese hous
ing, 233
Haussmann: transformation of Paris,
208, 269-274, 330-332
Henard, Eugene: population conges
tion, 178
Heydecker, W. D.: zoning of New
York Region, 168
Hillside Homes, New York City, 234,
245
Hindenburg, 147, 280-284, 288, 289
Hitler, 142, 181, 187, 230, 284, 323,
335
cultural values of German cities,
188, 189
destruction of labor unions, 234,
293
hostile fear of big cities, 180, 192
"housing misery in Vienna," 189,
229, 230
and housing reform, 265-267, 278-
279, 282, 291, 292
homestead promise in political cam
paigns, 280, 281, 287-290
Holland: peaceful solution to ade
quate housing, 108, 191, 226,
278, 288
Homestead Act, 89, 90, 92, 93, 108,
110, 199, 256, 280, II. xiii
Hooker, George E., 37
Hoover, Herbert, 3, 67, 123, 139, 243
national planning and public works,
42, 59, 305
Housing
Administration of Roosevelt, 122
American backwardness, 109, 154,
155
and Christ's teachings, 82-84
comparison of American and Euro
pean, post-war: 152, 189, 192,
193, 302
Conference in Washington, 104
education campaign for better
housing, 38, 234
Eliot on: 223
estimate on replacing housing
(Wood), 131
Government subsidies, 35, 104, 105,
151, 157, 234-237, 253, 276, 292
labor prosperity and housing, 198,
213-215, 268-270, 292-295
light and ventilation, 276, 317
Lincoln (home for each man), 85
low cost housing in Europe, 226,
268, 303
multiple dwelling vs. individual
422 INDEX
Housing Continued
dwelling, 230, 245, 246, 255, 256
municipal housing, 209, 210, 230,
231, 238, 242
parks and play grounds, 317
policies of U. S., 209, 210, 234-237,
242, 301, 302, 306
President's Conference on Home
Building, 139
private garden areas, 318
public works (Wells), 190, 202-205,
307-313
relation: to industry, 314, 315
to transportation lines, 315, 316
to state planning, 282
row houses, 201, 232
Hudnut, Joseph: 339, 340, 343, 351,
II. vii
Ickes, Harold, Secretary of Interior,
35, 143, 239, 306
Individual home vs. multiple dwell
ing, 230, 245, 246, 255, 256
Italy
housing and slums, 293-295
Mussolini, 45, 46, 147
Jackson, Andrew, 144, 280, 282
Japan: population and birth rate,
120
Jefferson, Thomas, 2, 3, 5-7, 64, 88,
106, 282, 339, 384
on concentration of wealth, 44, 46,
II. xii
credit structure, 130
Democratic Party, founder of, 57,
66
and Hamilton, 51, 53, 63, 129
heights of buildings and zoning, 26,
29, 50, 159, 180
ideals and Republican party, 49, 50
"Jacobinical rabble," 65, 144, 220
and Lincoln, 64, 68, 69, 222
Monticello, 364
municipal property, 23, 24
national planning and public works,
11, 42, 46, 49, 50, 58, 62, 64,
149, 198, 208, 301
constitutional amendment for
powers of Congress, 57, 61, 63
financing, 58, 63, 198
support of Washington's plans,
42, 58, 297
10-year plan, 11, 59-61, 194, 203,
205
national university and University
of Virginia, 16, 59, 64, 363, 377
"pursuit of happiness" and slums,
63-65, 68
Johnson, Alvin: subsistence farms,
326, 327
Johnson, General Hugh S., 34, 325
Junkers, Prussian: opposition to sub
sistence farms, 178, 279, 283-
290
Kaganovich, L. M.: reconstruction of
Moscow, 191
Kahn, Ernst: Housing in Europe
since World War, 226
Karl Marx Hof, Vienna, 227, 229
Karlsruhe, 183
Kampfmeyer: garden cities in Vienna
and Frankfurt, 231, 232
Kimball, Fiske, 339
Knickerbocker Village, New York
City, 137, 228, 234, 270, 274-276
Kuczinski, R. R.: Viennese housing,
233
Labor
and capital, 107, 111, 211, 223
and Civil War, 91, 95, 97, 98, 100,
101
and gardens (private) Russia, 319-
321
and revolution, 105, 112
Roman Empire and dole, 218
prosperity essential for good hous
ing, 198, 213-215, 268-270, 292-
295
true standard of value (Lincoln),
94, 105-107, 111, 113, 199, 221
Labor Unions
encouraged by Lincoln, 94, 105-107,
221, 222
England, 96
in Germany support of housing,
282
meeting in London (Henry Ad
ams), 101, 102
Sweden and American, compared,
241, 242
in Vienna, fought tenement misery,
230
LaGuardia: housing and zoning, 61,
134, 144, 166, 307, 308
"Laissez-faire"
American government, 4, 40, 42, 68,
73, 146, 147, 149, 195
departure from ideals of Jefferson,
Hamilton and Washington, 141
England, 5, 40-42, 141, 197, 198
New York's triumph over City of
Washington, 30
Roosevelt on: 46
Adam Smith, leading prophet, 41,
198
Lanck, W. Jett: political democracy,
223
Land purchase, municipal, 20, 21, 24,
26
Land Speculation, 20-24, 26, 28, 29,
137, 177
INDEX 423
Land Values, 134, 135, 235, 236, 253,
276
Chicago, 36, 37, 145
and credit structure, 77
fictitious, destruction of, I. xv, 180,
192, 236, 311
Lincoln on: 76
of slums, 70, 76, 125, 126, 130, 132,
133, 138, 139
Landis, B. Y.: "Must Nation Plan?",
43
Lapsley, A. B.: "Lincoln's Writings,"
221
Law, Thomas, 24, 25, 28, 29
LeCorbusier: 272-274, 361, 376
L'Enfant, 5, 6, 22, 23, 27, 159, 384-
392, 394, 395, 400, 416
Lenin, 106, 114, 210, 212
integration of city and country,
190-192
large scale planning, 8, 196, 199
on revolution and war, 106, 112, 114
Lescaze, William, 246, 277
Letchworth, English Garden City, 205
Lewis, Nelson P., 175
Lincoln, Abraham, 2, 47, 67, 128, 147,
149, 199, 219, 279, 282
amendment to constitution and
overthrow of government, 54,
69, 211, 212
and Bentham, 62, 68, 89
capital and property rights, 68, 71
and Communist Manifesto, 105, 113
comparison of populations in
America and Europe, 118-120
and credit structure, 130
Democrat, 103, 220
"dollars and cents," 68, 70, 72
"draft riots," 92, 109
"greatest good for greatest num
ber," 68, 89, 90, 156, 181, 213,
302
Homestead Act, 85, 89, 90, 92, 93,
110, 199, 280, II. xiii
"humblest man an equal chance,"
113, 198, 199, 214, 304
and Jefferson, 64, 68, 222
labor true standard of value, 94,
105, 107, 111, 113, 121, 122, 199,
219
and Marx, 70, 79, 81, 84, 88, 91, 93,
94, 97, 98, 101, 107, 113, 220,
221
and New Deal, 67, 221
on slavery: 336
abolition, 115-118, 121
compensation to South, 118, 121-
123, 125, 126, 137
slums, interchangeable in
speeches, 70-78, 110, 115, 117-
119, 121
slave value, estimation, 70
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D. C.,
341, 373-375, 391, 399
Loans from America for public works
in Europe, 260, 261, 278, 283,
284, 291, 301-306, 311
Locke, John: on property rights, 63,
64
London, 7, 19, 132
Adelaide House, 369, 370, 372
city planning exhibition, 205, 207
and Civil War of America, 98, 99
"fashion" (Henry Adams), 151,
152
garden cities, 205, 270
housing, 111, 180, 201, 202, 253
land values, 201
Long, Huey, dictator, 15, 34, 142
Loos, Adolf, 364, 365
Louis, "Ancient Rome," 218
Low Cost Housing
Detroit, halted by property own
ers, 127
England, 157, 203, 241, 253
Europe, 226
France, 268
Germany, 205
Government subsidies, 35, 104, 105,
151, 157, 234-237, 246, 253
necessary in America, I. xvii, 78,
105, 251, 252
New York City, failure, 142-144
pre-fabricated houses, 240, 253-255
public opinion can achieve (E.
Roosevelt), 104
tax exemption for: 63
Washington's plan for: 27
Lowe, Robert, 85, 86
Luckhardt Brothers, Berlin, II. xviii
Luyten, W. J. New York population,
175
Lynch, D. T. "Boss Tweed," 133
Maclver, Robert M., 178, 179, I. vii
MacKaye, Benton, 339
Madison, James, 15, 16, 24, 57, 60, 61,
297
Marshall, John: constructive inter
pretation of Constitution, 54
Marx, Karl, 47, 93, 97, 102, 213, 219,
221
on capital, 46, 98, 113, 191, 199, 202,
212, 287, II. xii
and Civil War, 94, 97, 99, 101
Communist Manifesto, 70, 85, 105,
106, 111
and Emerson, 88, 91
housing ideas, 94, 125, 200-202
labor, 112, 211, 212, 271, 272
and Lincoln, 70, 79, 81, 84, 88, 94,
97, 98, 107, 113
London, 201, 202, 231, 234
Marxian Agrarians, 191
424 INDEX
May, Ernst: Russian city planning,
320
Mayer, Albert, I. xviii, 246, 277
McCarthy, Justin, M. P., 85, 95, 98-
100
McKim, Mead and White, 187, 362,
365, 366, 376-379, 388, 390
Medievalism in architecture, 334-338,
345-348, 350, 351
Mendelssohn, Erich, 264, II. xviii
Michigan Boulevard Garden, Chicago,
I. xiii
Mills, Robert, 371, 372, 389
Monadnock Building (Root and
Burnham), 360, 364-370, 374
Monroe, Harriet: on Root, 365
Monroe, James: 57, 60, 61, 94
Morris, Robert: land speculator, 24,
28
Mortgages (guaranteed) compared
to Swedish ownership titles,
244, 311
Moses, Robert, 185
Montevideo, reaction to European
tenements, 230, 231
Mount Vernon, Va., 15, 73, 77
Multiple dwelling vs. Individual
Dwelling, 230, 245, 246, 255, 256
Multiple Dwelling Law (N. Y.
1929) and population capacity,
163, 170
Mumford, Lewis, 321, 322, 339, 340,
349, 353-361, 364, 366, 370, 374,
378
Municipal Heights of Buildings Com
mission, N. Y., 164, 173, 174
Mussolini, 45, 46, 147, 293-295
Napoleon I, 4, 62
Napoleon III
city planning and slum clearance,
148, 208, 219, 269-274, 330-332
conspired against Lincoln, 79, 94,
102, 208
National Capital Park and Planning
Commission, 386-388, 390-391,
393-394
National Planning (see also public
works), 42, 44, 55, 57, 67, 146
Henry Adams on: 58
Charles Beard on: 43, 44
Constitution, basic conception, 33,
34, 40, 42, 44, 46, 203, 261, 297,
302
Gallatin's 10-year plan, 56, 58-61
Hamilton, 42, 49-52, 63, 158
Hoover, 42, 59, 305
Jefferson, 42, 49, 50, 62, 64, 149,
198, 208
Roosevelt, Washington and Wilson,
42, 296-299
National Recovery Act, 194, 221
Natural Resources, 42, 43, 66
Conservation Conference (1908), 42
Depression of 1837, 147
planning (Wallace), 209
public works, 298
Nearing, Scott: "Twilight of Em
pire," 218
Nero: city planner, slum clearance of
Rome, 215, 216, 218, 312
Newark, N. J. zoning, 168, 169
New Deal, 53, 67, 74, 75, 81, 148, 292,
305, 407
New York City
area and congestion, 161, 171, 172,
275
building codes, 74, 75, 125, 136, 155,
158, 162-164, 172-174, 176, 201
Building Department Records, 171
City Hall, 132, 133, 342
County Court House, monstrosity,
132, 133
"First Houses," 235, 237
garden suburbs, 238, 239, 319, 320
Grace Church, 343-345, 347
Hillside Homes, 234, 245
housing fiasco, 35, 239, 308
Knickerbocker Village, 137, 228,
234, 270, 274-276
low-cost housing, 142-144
Lower East Side, I. xv, 246
park system, 184, 185
population, I. xiv, 170, 174-176, 238
real estate values, 35, 132-135, 162,
176, 201, 276, 109, 161, 235, 236
Riverside Park, acquisition, 142
slums, 77, 80, 116, 143, 161
slum clearance, 307, 308, 312
Tammany, over-assessing policy,
135
tenements, 109-111, 161, 200, 201,
234, 307, 308
compared to European, 80, 201,
234-238
triumph over city of Washington,
18, 30, 33-35, 38, 39
zoning (see zoning and Zoning
Resolutions)
New York Housing Authority, 35,
126, 144, 170, 172, 235, 239
New York Region
area, 161, 168, 169, 319
park system, 184, 185
population and building codes, 150,
151, 159, 175, 238, 319
zoning, 150, 151, 170, 173, 174, 184
New York State Town Law, 169
New York Stock Exchange, 173, 244
Olmsted, Sr. Frederick L., 37, 390
O'Rourke: "Tweed's Defraudations,"
133
Ostberg, Ragnar, II. xviii
INDEX 425
Otto, Louis (French Ambassador,
1787): criticism of Constitu
tion, 44-46
Oud, J. J. P.: II. xviii
Palmerston, Lord: and Civil War,
94, 99, 100
Paris, 6, 38, 180, 201, 265, 331
building codes, 26, 27
Commune 1871, 112, 270, 271
post-war housing, 261-263, 268
slum clearance, 148, 208, 219, 268-
271
tenements, 180, 230, 231
Park Systems and playgrounds
American progressiveness, 155, 156,
203
Boston, 205
Chicago, 37, 205
and city planning, 184, 215
and housing, 317, 319
National Capital Park and Plan
ning Commission, 386-388, 390-
391, 393-394
New York, 184, 185
post-war cities, 189
Parrington, V. L.: "Colonial Mind,"
63
Pearl, R.: New York population, 175
Peets, Elbert, 339, 340, 371, 372, 382 ff.
Pepler, G. L.: report on English
housing, 204
Pericles, public works, 216, 217
Peter, Czar of Russia, city planner,
8, 9, 197
Philadelphia, 338, 384
Conventions, 15, 16
Parkway, 330-333
Piranesi, 368, 369
Platt, Charles A., 187
Piazza del Popolo, Rome, 330, 372,
414
Poelzig, Hans, 264
Pond, Irving K.; on Sullivan, 363,
367
Population
America and Europe, 119, 120, 176
Chicago, 36
Japan, 120
London tenements, 111
New York City capacity, I. xvi,
170, 174-176, 238, 275
New York Region, 150, 151, 175,
319
redistribution, 212, 290, 291, 325,
326
Roman Empire, 218
slums, 71, 105, 111, 138-140
Viennese tenements and World
War, 228
Washington, D. C., 188
Porter, A. Kingsley: medievalist, 188,
339, 351
Post, G. B. N. Y. City College, 379,
380
Post, Langdon W., 35, 313
New York Zoning Survey (popu
lation capacity), 170
slum clearance and slum fires, 307,
308, 315
Pre-fabricated houses, 240, 253-255
(see Sweden and Stockholm)
"Presidential Street," 26
Property
confiscation and compensation
(slums), 71, 75, 78, 118, 122-
124, 128-130, 137
prohibition and compensation, 130
Lincoln and Roosevelt on: 71, 72
"pursuit of happiness," 63-65, 82,
157
revaluation will prevent revolution,
78, 115
property rights and capital (con
trol of), 68, 128
Prussing, E. E.: Estate of George
Washington, 17
Public Wealth
international investments, 192, 304
and public education, 15
National Industrial Conference
Board (1928-32), 59
loans to private corporations, 58
comparison between Europe and
America, 63, 226
Public Opinion a power in America,
104, 115
Public Works (see also National
Planning)
America and Europe, 52, 67, 87,
260, 301, 302
canals and roads, 8, 11, 15-18, 52,
58, 62, 66, 297, 298
and Constitution, 49, 52, 55, 57, 62,
298, 299, 302
English program, 157
Gallatin's plan, 56, 58-60
Jefferson's plan, 57, 58, 60-63, 198,
203
Internal Improvement Plan (1808),
58
low-cost housing, 52, 63, 234, 235,
305, 306
and war debts (Ford), 299-301
and unemployment, 271, 298, 299
Public Works Administration, hous
ing appropriation, 35, 234, 235,
306
"Pursuit of Happiness" (Declaration
of Independence), I. xiv, 63-65,
68, 89, 157, 181
and property, 63-65, 69, 157
426 INDEX
Radburn, N. J., 314, 411
Real Estate
speculation, 137, 176, 177
valuation, 35, 134, 135, 274r-276
Reed, L. J.: N. Y. population, 175
Regional Planning, 184
Regional Plan Association of New
York, 27, 172
Regional plan of New York and En
virons, 163-167, 169, 175
Renwick, James, 343, 347
Republican Party, 67, 87, 124, 157,
211, 271, 299, 304
American free-soilers, nucleus of:
280
Hamilton's and Jefferson's ideals
recalled, 49, 50
Horace Greeley, 93, 219
Lincoln, misquoted against NRA,
67, 221
Resettlement Administration, 22, 24,
138, 140, 160, 384, 408, 415
Greendale, Wis., 384, 407-414
Revolutions, 157, 220, 272
American, 10, 88, 197, 219, 268
new American revolution, 114, 115,
123, 220
French, I. xiii, 88, 197, 218, 219,
268, 271
German and housing reform (1918),
266, 311
Russian, 112
Viennese (1934), 189
Richardson, Henry H., 341, 342, 346,
365, 378-381
and "Chicago Construction," 347-
349
Field Warehouse, Chicago, 355, 359,
360
medievalism, 345, 349-354, 359, 360,
363
Pray Building, 359, 361
and Schinkel, compared, 340, 341
Trinity Church, Boston, 345-347,
352-355
Riots, I. xiii, 92, 109, 110, 268
Riverside Park, New York, acquisi
tion, 142
"robber barons," 42, 145, 147, 157,
162, 187, 302
Rockefeller, 80, 212, 395, 398
Roman Gracchi: homesteads, 217,
280-282, 289
Roman Empire, 185, 186, 218
Rome, 6, 144, 182, 215, 218, 330, 372,
414
Roosevelt, Mrs. Eleanor: slum clear
ance, 104, 126, 127
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 59, 123, 146
Constitution, interpretation of:
51, 211, II. xii
Roosevelt, Franklin D. Continued
Federal grants for housing, 105,
122
and Lincoln, compared, 68, 220
"March to Moscow," 45-47, 147,
220
national planning, 42, 45, 46, 194,
197, 271
New Deal, 53
on property, 71, 72
unemployment policy, 63, 198, 299
Roosevelt, Col. Th., 211
Roosevelt, Theodore, 326
city development and federal ex
pense, 180, 181, 190, 298, 299
on Alexander Hamilton, 50, 141,
142
national planning and public works,
42, 296-298
on unemployment, 298, 299
Root, John W., 364r-370, 378, 380
Roper, Daniel C., Secretary of Com
merce, on property and owners,
75
Row-houses, 201, 232, 276
Ruskin, John: medievalist, 186-188,
192, 349, 350, 356
Russel, Andrew L. N.: "Architec
ture," 379
Russia, 8, 47, 59, 196, 237, 238, 288,
307, 312
American affinities theory, 8,
194-197, 210
reconstruction, 88, 108, 172, 191,
192, 208, 209, 279
parks and gardens, 319-321
price and production policies, 208-
210
Sakolski, Aaron M. "American Land
Bubble," 20, 156
Salvemini, Gaetano: Italian unenvployment
statistics, 394
San Francisco East Bay garden sub
urbs, 321
Schacht, Hjalmar: on foreign credits,
301, 302
Schinkel, Karl Friedrich: "father of
modern architecture," 340, 341,
375, 377
Schmitthenner, Paul, 377, II. xviii
Schmoller, Gustav: on slums, 80
Schuyler, Montgomery, 339, 342, 356,
358, 359, 364
Shaw, Bernard, 203, 204, 230, 336
Shay's Rebellion, 15
Simkhovitch, Vladimir G.: on de
population of ancient cities,
185, 186
Sitte, Camillo, 183, 403, 414
Slavery, 73, 79
abolition of, 115-119, 121, 336
INDEX 427
Slavery Continued
compensation of South, 118, 121-
123, 125, 126, 138
and England, 86, 94, 95, 97, 100
comparison to snake (Lincoln), 77,
78
"slave" and "slum-dweller" inter
changeable, 70-78, 110, 115,
117-119, 121
slave-holder and slum-owner, 113,
122
valuation of, 70, 130
Slum Clearance
in America, I. xvii, 72, 104, 152,
208, 230, 251, 268
cost, 121, 155
Detroit, 126, 127
English methods, 157
fires (New York City), 307, 308,
312
Paris, 148, 208, 219, 268-271
Rome in Nero's time, 215, 218, 312
Vienna, 148
Slums, 26, 67, 74, 77, 108, 110, 161,
189
Boston, I. xvii
Building Act (Shaw), 203, 204
confiscation and compensation, 78,
117, 118, 123, 125, 136, 139, 162,
234
credit structure maintains, 75
England, 95, 281
and foreign investments (1919-
1930), 301, 302
Germany, 79, 80, 281, 282
government subsidies, 151, 157
harmful: to government, 70, 73,
115
to national health, 69, 72, 75, 120,
122, 297, 313, 336
to liberty, 65, 76, 113, 336
Jefferson on, 64, 68
New York City, I. xv, 77, 116, 143,
253, 307, 308, 339
owners resistance, 113, 127, 131
population, 69, 71, 105, 138-140, 160
pride in slums, 146, 150, 151, 157
and "slavery" interchangeable, 70-
78, 110, 115, 117-119, 121
taxes on, 63, 72, 137
valuation of, 70, 76, 125, 126, 130-
133, 136, 138, 139
zoning ordinances, 69, 143, 151, 152
Smith, Adam and spirit of '76, 20, 41,
90, 111, 198
Smith, Alfred E., 184, 236-239
Spengler, Oswald, 178-187, 189, 190,
192, 193
Stalin, Joseph
integration of city and country,
190-192
rational planning, 8, 197, 208, 210
Stalin, Joseph Continued
and unemployment, 300, 321
State Housing Law of New York,
276
State Planning, 60, 87, 184, 197, 238,
239
Steffens, Lincoln, 132, 194, 195
Stein, Clarence, 238, 239, 314
Stockholm
Dahlberg, Axel, 242, 246, 247, 251
semi-prefabricated houses, 240-245,
247-249, 256
Municipal Corporation erects cot
tages, 244, 247, 248
Straus, Nathan, 307, 308
Strikes, ancient and modern, 190, 215,
216, 218, 219, 222, 223, 276
Subsistence Homesteads, 319-323, 408
American pioneering (Alvin John
son), 326, 327
Denmark, 285, 288
Germany, 285-287, 291, 322, 323
Russia, 288, 320, 321
unemployment, 321-327
Wallace, Henry, on, 323-325
Sullivan, Louis, 362-368
Sunnyside, L. I.: row-houses, 232, 314
Sweden (see also Stockholm)
housing policy, 9, 108, 241
Municipal Real Estate Board, 251
ownership titles compared to guar
anteed mortgages, 244
pre-fabricated houses, 240-245, 247-
249, 256
rent of tenements, 242
Talmadge, Thomas E., 339, 370, 378
Tariffs
American post-war, 283
of Austria Hungary, 237
Closed Commercial State (Fichte),
197
German pre-war, 284, 286
Taut, Bruno, II. xviii
Taut, Max, 264, II. xviii
Taxes, 64, 65, 69, 133-135
assessments of real estate, 21, 75,
137, 236, 252, 253
Building Tax (Hamilton), 63, 376
English compared to American, 83,
157
exemption for housing, 63, 109, 308,
376
municipal, 137
severence taxes of Huey Long, 15
state and federal, 65
Teapot Dome Scandal, 43
Tenement House Law (1901), 163
Tenements, 64, 65, 78, 109, 125, 136,
144, 160
428 INDEX
Tenements Continued
American and European, compared,
110, 111
Berlin and Paris, 180, 230, 231
Christ's words and, 80-83
and individual house, 230, 245, 246,
255, 256
New York City, I. xv, 71, 95, 109,
150, 161, 162, 237, 253, 307
rehabilitation (N. Y. Housing
Authority), 126
Sweden, 242
Vienna, 180, 189, 227-238
values, phantom, 136
Tessenow, Heinrich: War Memorial
in Berlin, 375, 377
Townsend Group, 114
Toynbee, Arnold: "Industrial Revo
lution," 95
Transportation, 13, 18, 155, 156, 203,
315, 316
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 79, 80, 284
Trinity Church, Boston, 345-647,
352-355
Trotsky, 112
Tugwell, Rexford Guy, 138, 314
Tweed, Boss, 109, 110, 132-134, 142,
149
corruption in New York City, 132,
133, 142, 143, 166
Unemployment and housing, 108,
292-295, 298, 299, 325
Universities, American, 15-17, 59, 64,
379, 380
Van Buren, Martin, 57, 146, 147, 149
Vevlen, Thorstein, 285
Versailles, and Treaty, 6, 132, 182,
283, 284, 287, 330, 384
Vienna, 7, 237, 238
Christian Socialists, 227-231, 268
garden suburbs, 231, 232
"housing misery" (Hitler), 189,
229, 230
housing reform, 108, 114, 238, 239,
268, 278
Karl Marx Hof, 227
labor and housing, 268
municipal housing (Breitner), 230,
231
and New York compared, 234, 235-
238
Revolution of 1934, 189
slum clearance, 111, 148, 189
tenements, 180, 189, 201, 227-231,
233, 245
Viollet-le-Duc, 856, 858
Voltaire, 336
Walker, Ralph T.: New York zoning,
166, 177
Wallace, Henry A., 209, 283, 302, 323-
325
War for American Independence,
43, 44, 60, 97, 98, 146, 147
Washington, George: city planner,
5-8, 20, 38, II. xii
administration, 16, 47, 50, 53, 54,
156, 158, 251
canal and navigation projects, 9,
11, 13-17, 297, 298
empire in West, 7-13, 19, 35, 36,
199
Grant and Hindenburg, compared,
288, 289
labor policy, 299
land purchase for city of Wash
ington, 2, 21-23, 28
on L'Enfant's plan, 5, 384, 386, 387,
395
national planning ideals and public
works, 11, 42, 46, 54, 58, 158,
261, 301
national university plan, 14, 16, 17,
19
plan for metropolis, 6, 19, 22, 31,
38, 39, 297
real estate man and speculator, 2,
7, 9, 20-22, 24-26, 156
slave quarters, 73, 77
zoning ordinance and building
heights, 26-29, 77, 156
Washington, City of, 8, 19, 31, 32, 35,
36, 183, 383-394
Capitol and Site, 330, 386
Commission of 1901, 386-394
Constitution Avenue, 388-390, 416
described by Adams, Dickens,
Moore, Wells, 30-34
by Mencken, 392-393
Interior Building, 391
Lafayette Square, 386, 390, 391,
393-394
land purchase for, 2, 21-23, 28
Lincoln Memorial, 341, 373-375,
391, 399
Mall, 373, 374, 383, 386-388, 416
New York's triumph over, 18, 30,
33-35, 39
Patent Office, 386, 389, 390
Pennsylvania Avenue, 388, 389, 416
slums, 339
Supreme Court Building, 387
Triangle, 217, 384, 386, 388, 389-390,
391, 392-394
Washington's Monument, 371-374,
383, 386, 388, 389, 391
Weber, Max: economic disaster in
Germany, 286
Webster, Daniel: on revolutions, 157
Weld, Isaac: pamphlet on city of
Washington, 19
INDEX 429
Wells, H. G., 152, 162, 288
housing (Idea of Planned World),
190, 202-205, 307^313
Washington, description of City,
32-34, 371
Whitaker, Charles H., 334, 339, 352,
354, 357, 374, 375
Whitman, Walt, 88, 91, 92, 339, 348
Brooklyn, 225, 318, 319
democracy, 198
Grace Church, N. Y., 343-345, 347
Immigrants and cities, 159, 160
Williamsburg, Virginia, 384, 395-400,
406, 414
Wilson, E. B.: N. Y. population, 175
Wilson, Woodrow: endeavors in na
tional planning, 42, 283, 296,
297
Witkin, Zara: Russian reconstruc
tion, 209
Wood, Edith, Elmer: slums and
blighted areas, 105, 131, 140
World's Fairs
"Century of Progress," Chicago,
384, 401-406
Chicago, 1893, 37, 363, 366, 381,
386, 387, 390
San Francisco, 1915, 389
World War, 20, 34, 37, 150, 160, 195,
207, 238, 278
and American economic situation,
28, 29, 59, 260, 283, 300-306
German housing shortage, 256
housing reform in Europe, 80, 108,
World War Continued
114, 180, 205, 226, 228, 260
"laissez-faire," 147
land distribution in Baltic States,
124, 125
Wright, Henry, I. xviii, 152, 238, 239,
246, 277, 279, 314, 320
Zoning
Berlin, 177
Buenos Aires, 176
exploitation of New York real
estate, 109, 161, 162, 235, 236
Newark, N. J. Ordinance of 1930,
168, 169
Paris, 26, 27
possible population of New York,
150, 151, 173, 175, 176
and slums, 69, 151, 152
of New York Region, 170, 173, 174,
184
revision necessary, 75, 78, 155, 158,
255
George Washington's Ordinance,
26-29, 159
Zoning Resolution of New York
(1916), 27-29, 163-168, 170,
174-176
(Building Zone Resolution)
criticised by: Thomas Adams, 165,
166, 168-170
Bassett, 77, 164-167
LaGuardia, 166
Spengler, 184
Zoning Survey of New York, 170-172
ANNOUNCEMENT
Volume III of "CITY PLANNING HOUSING" will ap
pear in the larger size and format familiar to readers of "THE
AMERICAN VITRUVIUS, AN ARCHITECT'S HANDBOOK
OF CIVIC ART," as an atlas containing plans and photographs
of the more significant work in the various fields of city planning
and housing in all parts of the world. While the author, before
his death, had planned the third volume as an integral part of the
complete work of which the two text volumes present his thesis
and argument, he also intended it to stand alone as a work of
reference for architects, housers and city planners who will find
here collected, within the covers of one book, a representative
selection of material.
Contents of Volume III
PART I CITY PLANNING
Section 1 General Considerations
City Plans
Town & Community Plans
Regional Plans
State Plans
Zoning
Section 2 Rebuilding Existing Areas
Clearing Blighted Districts
Major Commercial Developments
U. S. and Foreign Civic Centers
Section 3 Planning for Communication
Arterial Highways
Parkways Freeways
Traffic Intersections
Viaducts Tunnels Bridges
Railroad Terminals
Port Developments
Airports
430
ANNOUNCEMENT 431
Section 4 Planning for Recreation and Health
Parks Formal and Informal
Playgrounds
Beach and Bathing Developments
Health Resorts
Hospital Groups
Water Supply Systems
PART II HOUSING
Section 1 Private Developments
Suburban Subdivisions
Multiple Housing
Section 2 Public Housing
Austria Germany
Denmark
France
Great Britain
Holland
Norway Sweden
Russia
South America
Spain
Switzerland
United States