from paris to chicago: the city beautiful movement

7/23/2019 From Paris to Chicago: The City Beautiful Movement

1/13

From Paris to Chicago:

The City Beautiful Movement

(Major resubmission changes: The Chicago Exposition also led to many other commissions p. 7; new

analysis on pgs. 8-11; additional referenced sources in bibliography)

Compare & Contrast Essay #1

Jonathan Hopkins

RWU SAAHP

Arch 572 Fall 2011

Prof. Edgar Adams

Resubmission


2/13

1 | P a g e

The City Beautiful Movement was a reform effort by various architects and landscape architects

to address the issues that had developed in many of Americas industrial centers by the turn of the 20th

Century. These leading designers felt that large scale interventions of infrastructure, buildings and land

preservation were necessary to save cities from overdevelopment, moral degradation and second class

status to European cities. While this Movement came and went fairly quickly in a span of roughly 20

years - from 1893 to the early 1910s it did not develop overnight. The City Beautiful Movement was

the result of decades of prior work that was done by the previous generation of architects and

landscape architects in both the United States and in Europe. This essay with explore what these

influences were, and what effect they had on the reform era designs that emerged around 1900 in

America.

In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte made

himself emperor of Paris and set out on anambitious project to make Paris the most

beautiful city in the world. It was during

Bonapartes reign that the Arc de Triumphe and

many other monuments were built on what

were, at the time, the outskirts of Paris. In 1851,

Bonapartes nephew, Napoleon III, assumed the

role as the citys emperor and by 1852 he had hired Baron Haussmann to complete Bonapartes goal.1

Haussmann was commissioned to take the medieval city of existing Paris and modernize it for the

rapidly changing contemporary world of technological advances.

Inspired by the mid-17th Century design of Versailles and Baroque city planning in cities such as

Rome, Baron Haussmann rapidly changed Paris over the following decades after his hiring. Large swaths

of medieval Paris were demolished to make way for wide avenues, new buildings and upgraded

infrastructure. The city was also expanded, most noticeably to the west where new avenues were

extended from the Arc de Triumphe. Baron, being trained as an engineer of sorts, approached the

project from the perspective of improving the city, not only aesthetically, but structurally. He wanted to

make the city run smoother and work better for modern times.

1Sinclair, George. Historic Maps and Views of Paris (Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2009)


3/13

2 | P a g e

This modernizing project, known at the Grands Travaux, succeeded in improving the citys water

supply, upgrading the sewer systems, accommodating railroads and stations, and making Paris a

beautiful place to be. New sewers and water supply systems were laid under newly cleared land, some

of which was developed with buildings and some of which were reserved for avenues. The creation of

wide streets helped to reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality and accommodate multimodal

traffic with separate facilities for walking, horseback riding and carriages.2

Clearing out medieval

building stock also allowed for land to be opened up for new building typologies like department stores.

Older, narrow buildings were difficult to adapt for a changing consumer and production economy and

this massive reconstruction project provided the opportunity to change the networks of commerce in

the city. Not only did large department store buildings line these new avenues, so did new apartment

buildings that had better access to light, ventilation and space, in addition to central courtyards. Many

2Jacobs, Allan B. Paris Boulevards, A Grand VarietyThe Boulevard Book: History (MIT, 2002) pgs. 11-30


4/13

3 | P a g e

new monuments were also built and displayed in homage to the planning principles established in

places like Rome during Sixtus Vs Baroque rebuilding period. Triumphal Arcs, statues, and obelisks were

erected at intersections, in squares and used to create terminating vistas. Unlike Rome, however, these

monuments were somewhat more civically inspired as seen in the new opera houses and other public

buildings. Remarkably, the modernization project under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann did not cost

the Parisian citizens anything, in terms of money. The entire project was not done using taxes, but

rather by anticipating the rise in property values that would result from these improvements. The value

of land lining these new avenues made up for the costs for the demolition and infrastructure

construction.

All these improvements, however, were

not without their sacrifices and hardships.

Medieval Paris was home to thousands ofpeople at the time of this project. There were

established networks of commerce, social

relationships, and communities that were

destroyed almost overnight. The under-classes

in Paris were fed up with dictatorships and

frequently held uprisings against the nobility of Paris and the emperor. Instead of addressing these

grievances, Napoleon III decided to clear away the problem and prevent them from reemerging. The

wide avenues were a way to prevent the blockade of roads by unhappy citizens, which was much easier

on the narrow medieval streets than these new monumental boulevards. The new housing apartments

also displaced many poor residents who could not afford to live in these new buildings, or if they did, it

was in the cramped attic spaces, which were up seven stories of stairs. There is also the issue of a loss of

medieval urban fabric and building culture that can never be reclaimed. While vernacular, artisan

buildings were not beautiful in the classical sense, today there is much appreciation for the

craftsmanship that created these humble dwellings over the course of hundreds of years. Although

much of the demolished material was reused for new buildings and streets, the destruction of an entire

piece of history cannot be overlooked.

With that said, it would be difficult for anyone to look at Paris today with its beautiful

Neoclassical architecture and pleasant sidewalk cafes, and wish that it could be replaced for the old

medieval city. The architecture that replaced the medieval city was of the highest quality and it helped


5/13

4 | P a g e

to unify the city under a single design character.

And while poor people were displaced, the new

housing did accommodate people of lower

incomes, albeit with attic apartments, but today

the building stock of the Grands Travauxhas

proven to be extremely adaptive for changing

needs. For example, the 10th arrondissement of

Paris, Enclos-St-Laurent, is home to a large

population of North African immigrants who are looking for better lives. It would also be tough to find a

proponent of the plague and disease, and the medieval urban form that facilitated their rapid spread. All

in all, the Baron Haussmann plan was a masterpiece of planning and execution that has resulted in one

of the most functional and inspirational design projects of all time and it is easy to see why the City

Beautiful Movement drew from it in their work.

In America, at the time when Napoleon III was assuming power over Paris, cities and towns were

rapidly expanded in an unplanned fashion as a result of heavy industrialization. New York City had long

outgrown its original colonial settlement in lower Manhattan, its subsequent Federal period growth and

the urban expansion of the Canal era was soon to be eclipsed by the suburban expansion of horse-

drawn streetcar suburbs along the endless grid

running north up the island. This new industrial

development with smokestacks, water polluting

policies and associated dense worker housing

tenements was unlike anything that cities had

experienced not even with water powered

mills at the beginning of the industrial

revolution. Without planned development, the

city would choke on its own industrial might.


6/13

5 | P a g e

In the interest of public health, leading landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his

partner Calvert Vaux urged the City of New York to intervene with a design for a grand and gracious

public park in the center of the city. Great visionaries like Olmstead, were able to see the potential

future should his warnings not taken seriously. Smoke towers would cover the skyline, refuse would fill

the streets and all the horrors of some sections of the city would spread to the entire island. While this

may have been somewhat of an exaggeration, the underlying premise remains solid and valid. Finally, by

the 1860s the City had acted and Olmsted and Vaux were working on the design of 843 acre park in the

middle of the island. The park combined elements of picturesque landscape and wooded trails as well as

formal green spaces. The park was, and remains today, an oasis in the city and an escape from the urban

environment to a natural one.

With the success of Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux as well as Olmsted on his own were asked

to design several other parks and parks systems. Some of these projects include Prospect Park in

Brooklyn and some of the new parkways that traversed the borough, a suburb of Riverside, Illinois, and

the Emerald Necklace around Boston.3

Other key players in this Parks Movement included important

landscape architects, such as AJ Downing who worked on the Washington, D.C. Mall. An influential

development that came out of the parks movement was the Parkway, which drew from the boulevards

that were being constructed from old protective walls in European cities, but were uniquely American in

form and design. These parkways tended to be more park-like than the urban and heavily paved

avenues in cities like Paris and Florence. In many cases, a single large green space in the center of the

road would be flanked by two two-lane roads rather than opting for the multiway boulevard model. This

3Olmsted, Frederick Law. Public Parks and Enlargement of Towns The City Reader (Routledge, 1996) pgs. 321-327)


7/13

6 | P a g e

became especially true when the Federal government built new parkways throughout the country in the

1920s and 30s in the model of this Parks Movement design.

The goals of the Parks Movement were to protect natural environments from the on slot of the

uncontrolled industrial development, impose naturally-inspired landscapes on industrial areas, and

address the issue of disease spread that was occurring in American cities in the mid-19th Century. The

Movement did so by encouraging cities and towns to adopt regional plans for maintaining open space,

building new parks, and designing facilities that people enjoyed and supported. This movement was

integral for influencing the next generation of landscape architects, who would team up with leading

architects of the day to form the City Beautiful Movement in the decades following the design of Central

Park in New York and the reconstruction of Paris under Haussmann and Napoleon III.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed enormous swaths of the center of the city as the

flames rapidly spread across the miles of the wood frame buildings until it eventually burned out. In thewake of this event, designers from around the country expressed the feeling that something should be

done with this opportunity. Given the democratic republic political system with a stern protection of

private, individual property rights in America, it is not easy to do large scale planning exercises that are

actually implementable. The disaster in Chicago, however, provided the unique opportunity to rebuild

the city in a different and planned way.

The Worlds Columbian Exposition of

1893 in Chicago was organized by Daniel

Burnham, a leading architect, who gathered the

great classically and Beaux Arts trained

architects and landscape architects in the

country to propose that different way to rebuild

the city. The White City was the result of these

efforts and it embodied the principles that are

now used to define the movement. The design

called for grand formal plazas lined by Classical and Renaissance Revival civic and public buildings that

would serve as the government center of the city and the transportation hub. Grand avenues would

lead into this public square and guide all the residents of the city to the center where all the proposed

activity and life of the city would be. The only interventions, however, were not architecture; the plans

also included picturesque parks with rolling hills and irregular paths, which would complement other


8/13

7 | P a g e

formalized green spaces elsewhere in the city. Incorporating water into the center of the city was also

another important aspect of the Exposition, which would be accomplished by rerouting rivers and

designing formal promenades beside them. Also integral to the design were regional park plans and

natural green space preservation.

The Worlds Columbian Exposition led to the

commission of Daniel Burnham to create a plan

for the city of Chicago for 1909. The plan drew

on the Exposition designs, but greatly expanded

on them as well. Like the 1893 designs, the

Chicago Plan embodied principles established

during the Grands Travauxin Paris under Baron

Haussmann like wide, airy avenues for thetransportation needs of modern society, new

grand public buildings, upgraded infra-

structure for railroads and trolleys, and a beautiful city. Also incorporated into the plan was an

expansive park system wrapping around the periphery of the city and throughout developed areas.

Massive parkways were also planned to connect the city along straight, radial streets that would bring

some monumentality to the regular street grid of Chicago. These ideas were pursued by the second

generation of landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. The Chicago Exposition also led to

many other commissions for civic improvement plans for other major cities, which include the

MacMillan Plan of Washington D.C., the Report of the New Haven Civic Improvement Commission of

1910 by Cass Gilbert and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., John Russell Popes Beaux Arts expansion of Yale

University and plans for cities like Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Like the Haussmann

project in Paris, many of these city plans called for the demolition of derelict housing that was home to

poor residents. These slums would be replaced with monumental avenues and buildings and it was

unclear what exactly would happen to the displaced people.

Although many of the designs were meticulously planned, beautifully drawn and well

researched, very few were implemented even partially.4

By the turn of the 19th Century, Chicago had

already substantially filled the land that was destroyed during the 1871 fire and the attitude of property

rights, low taxes and inaction in the economic markets had rooted itself once more in American politics.

4Brown, Elizabeth Mills.Architectural Note New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (Yale University

Press, 1976)


9/13

8 | P a g e

Cass Gilbert drawing of the proposed avenue linking the Green to the train station5

Other cities were just as cautious about implementing these ambitious plans and perhaps more so than

that, people were skeptical of the benefits of implementing such plans. In New Haven, specifically,

republican Mayor Frank Rice, at the time of the release of that citys City Beautiful Report, was

uninterested in raising taxes on businesses and doing anything more than repairing sidewalks.6

Another

factor in political officials opting not to implement these plans may have been their fear of what voters

might do in the next election cycle if large scale eminent domain and demolition of homes were to take

place, as was called for in many of the plans. It is likely that this type of thinking was repeated all over

the country so the potential benefits of the City Beautiful Movement will never truly be understood.

While in many ways it was wise and understandable for the Movement to draw inspiration from

both Haussmanns reconstruction project in Paris and Olmsted Sr.s Central park design, Burnham and

the other City Beautiful supporters seem to have ignored the fundamental differences between the

circumstances that guided each project. Haussmann had Napoleon III to implement his vision with little

regard for the impact it might have on residents of affected areas. One could even say that the design

interventions were done with downright contempt for the underclasses as evidenced by the creation of

avenues that prevented protester blockades. The authority that one emperor yielded in mid-19th

Century Paris was unlike anything that any combination of American political leadership had in the

State-empowered Constitutional Republic system7

in the early 20th

Century. In the case of Central Park,

when Olmsted was proposing this design, much of Northern Manhattan was still underdeveloped andrural. And by the time construction on the design had begun, land was already set aside for the park as

5Gilbert, Cass and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Specific Recommendations and Suggestions Report of the New Haven

Civic Improvement Commission (1910) pgs. 49-586

Rae, Douglas.A Sidewalk Republic City: Urbanism and Its End (Yale University Press, 2003) pgs. 183-2127Stipe, Robert E. The States: The Backbone of Preservation A Richer Heritage (HPFNC, Inc., 2003) pgs. 81-115


10/13

9 | P a g e

townhouses developed along streets making

their way up to where the park would be. Aside

from Earth moving, and demolishing some

shacks, the creation of this massive park had

little negative impact on residents of the city.

This stands in stark contrast to the situation

that existed in most cities by the turn of the

Century, when the central cities were bursting

at the seams with development and very little42

ndStreet and 2

ndAvenue (New York City, 19

thC.)

land remain buildable even in largely residential

neighborhoods.

What the City Beautiful Movement was proposing was to demolish large portions of the city

center where low-income immigrants lived and replace these vibrant, although somewhat decrepit,

communities with places that would essentially be a playground for politicians and the bourgeois society

of industrial wealth. Like in Paris, wealthy people would once again inhabit the central city and its

adjacent areas, reversing the trend of the previous decades where suburban villas and estates provided

refuge for the wealthy and streetcar suburbs provided an escape for the upwardly mobile Irish, Polish,

and other early European immigrant families in the 1860s8

and afterward. This would result in poor

people having to live once again on the outskirts of the city like in feudal societies because both the

center and the suburban periphery would be too expensive for the working classes. While American

politicians may have had contempt for these citizens, like Napoleon did, or wanted their neighborhoods

reformed, they also depended on their votes for election, which meant that supporting these plans

would not poll well. The successful, or implementable, parts of many of these City Plans tended to be on

the creation of civic and public buildings like train stations, libraries, post offices and courthouses, rather

than the grand infrastructure that accessed and defined them, and would have required mass

demolition. These specific building projects were popular because they appeared to serve more people

than wide boulevards lined with expensive apartment buildings would. The other successful portions of

the City Beautiful documents were often the periphery parks systems that relied on preserving open

spaces and, in some cases, publicly acquiring fresh water supplies like lakes, shoreline ports, trolley

8Brown, Elizabeth Mills. Fair Haven New Haven: A Guide to (Yale University Press, 1976) pgs. 196-207
http://constructbirmingham.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/second-avenue-manhattan-1861.jpg


11/13

10 | P a g e

service and utilities. Many cities, like New Haven9, Boston, and San Francisco did implement park

systems around the periphery of the city. Although not to the scale suggested in many reports, these

cities did preserve water features and woodland in semi-continuous bands around their centers. Less

well received were the parkways that would bisect neighborhoods all for the purpose of easing travel for

the upper classes and creating terminating vistas for buildings.

The existence of one of two conditions would have allowed for the ideals of the City Beautiful

Movement to have been implemented at the turn of 19th

Century. Either politicians and residents would

have needed the luxury of hindsight or the Movements proponents needed more sensitivity towards

the circumstances on the lower-classes. Hindsight would have shown people how much worse the

center city slums got by the 1950s, and how adaptive and accessible for the lower-middle classes new

apartment buildings would have become in just a few decades, as they did in Paris. Hindsight also would

have revealed the destruction of Urban Renewal, which demolished many times more land for larger,less accessible roads than was proposed under the City Beautiful Movement. This ability would

City Beautiful Proposed Demolition (dotted lines)10

Urban Renewal Planned Demolition (yellow, red, green)11

have made citizens and politicians more accepting of these plans. On the other hand, people like

Burnham, Gilbert, and Pope would have been more successful had they approached low-income

neighborhoods with a finer grain and deeper respect for the variation and accumulated learning that is

displayed in vernacular neighborhoods. This Movement missed the Gothic Revival of the 1860s and

preceded the Collegiate Gothic styling of the 1920s-30s. By strictly adhering to the formality of

Classicism and the symmetry of the Renaissance, the City Beautiful Movement disallowed the

accommodation of narrow, irregular streets and additive structures into their plans. Another oversight

9CPCGNH. Edgewood ParkNew Haven Outdoors: a guide to the citys parks (Field Graphics, Inc. 1990)

10Gilbert, Cass and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Illustrated Map New Haven Report (1910)

11New Haven Redevelopment Agency. Planned Projects Maps (1955) drawings of same location, at same scale


12/13

11 | P a g e

of the movement was the possibility that the outskirts of the city could absorb future growth by

decentralizing the central cities and developing nearby hamlets, villages and small towns as secondary

centers. This would have addressed the traffic problems without generating the need for large

infrastructure. It also would have saved many existing neighborhoods from demolition.

These conditions, however, did not exist and we will never know exactly what effect these plans

may have had. The legacy of this movement does live on in the form of New Urbanism, which has

brought many of the ideas from this movement and the influencing projects of the Parks Movement and

Haussmanns modernization of Paris back into the forefront of the American planning and design

communities. Perhaps the potential future success of that reform movement will provide some insight

into what impact the City Beautiful could have had.


13/13

12 | P a g e

Bibliography

Brown, Elizabeth Mills. New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (Yale University Press, 1976)

Bruegmann, Robert and Peter Bacon Hales. The Worlds Columbian Exposition Chicago Imagebase Project of the

Department of Art History (University of Chicago)

Citizens Park Council of Greater New Haven. Edgewood ParkNew Haven Outdoors: a guide to the citys parks (Field

Graphics, Inc. 1990)

Gilbert, Cass and Frederick law Olmsted Jr. Report of the New Haven Civic Improvement Commission (1910)

Jacobs, Allan B. and Elizabeth Macdonald and Yodan Rofe. The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of

Mulitway Boulevards (MIT, 2002)

Larice, Michael and Elizabeth MacDonald. The Urban Design Reader (Routledge, 2007)

Legates, Richard T. and Frederic Stout. The City Reader (Routledge, 1996)

New Haven Redevelopment Agency. Planned Projects Maps (1955)Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Builder101 (July 7, 1911)

Rae, Douglas. City: Urbanism and Its End (Yale University Press, 2003)

Sinclair, George. Historic Maps and Views of Paris (Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2009)

Stipe, Robert E. A Richer Heritage (Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina, Inc, 2003)

from paris to chicago: the city beautiful movement

Documents