The American City: Ideal and Mythic Aspects of a Reinvented Urbanism

Author(s): Alex Krieger

Source: Assemblage, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 38-59
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171064
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 Alex Krieger
The American City:
Ideal and Mythic Aspects
of a Reinvented Urbanism

Alex Krieger is Associate Professor of Observing European society at the dawn of the twentieth
Architecture and Urban Design at the century, Oswald Spengler was convinced that all great cul-
Graduate School of Design, Harvard tures were city born. Observers across the Atlantic have
University, and principal in the firm of
been less certain about where great cultures are nurtured,
Chan & Krieger.
and more ambivalent about the cities in which they seem
to flourish. As if in response to Spengler, Louis Sullivan
articulated one common American opinion: "The great
minds may go to the great cities," he wrote, "but they are
not born and bred in the great cities . . . for the formation
of a great mind solitude is prerequisite." Other Americans
have lamented possessing civic instincts while lacking the
"forms of a high old civilization," forms most readily found
within venerable cities. Such is Henry James's lament in
The American. Some have pointed to the physical concen-
tration indicative of cities without, however, locating any
corresponding commitment to urbanism; "a mountain
range of evidence without manifesto," as Rem Koolhaas
has suggested of Manhattan. 1 Contemplating the nature of
their own cities and still intrigued by those of their Euro-
pean ancestors, many Americans have wondered whether
all cultures evolve their own particular urban forms, and
have asked what these might be for an American culture.

What follows is an examination of the form of the Ameri-

can city. The intention is not to dwell on cities as mere
physical constructions but rather to see whether the forms
constitute an evidence of their builders' aspirations, to link
1. Houston, Texas, in 1986, the "mountain range of evidence" to the fragments of ur-
looking toward the downtown ban manifesto posed by American civilization.

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 assemblage 3

I formed a plan as harmless as it was extravagant . . . where our wealth, for its lack of exhibited sentimentality toward a
little society, in its second generation was to have combined the past, for its ability to accommodate change, for its incom-
innocence of the Patriarchal Age with the knowledge and general pleteness and modernity. More frequently, the American
refinements of European culture; and where I dreamed that in city is feared for these same characteristics. In any event
the sober evening of my life I should behold the cottages of inde-
Americans escape at most opportunities to places that seem
pendence in the undivided dale of industry.
- to them - more hospitable to the processes of life, but
A founder of Pentisocracy, 1793
to students of cities, less abundant in time-honored aspects
I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is of urbanism.
you can make a right turn on a red light.
Woody Allen about Los Angeles in Annie Hall, 1977 The American city has engendered awe or fear, at times
mistrust or disdain, but rarely genuine affection as in the
For three centuries Americans have built cities at a rate
case of, say, a Frenchman expousing a love for his Paris.
faster than had any civilization before them. They have
Can one imagine a citizen of one of the great capitals of
built cities instinctively and expediently, at times with noble
Europe sharing Henry Ford's conclusion (reached with a
intentions but generally with a speculator's fervor, often
particular instrument in mind): "We shall solve the city
with some intellectual trepidation though rarely with much
problem by leaving the city"?4 Or William Jennings
hesitation. The product of all this city building neverthe-
less leads some to call America - even with enthusiasm Bryan's exhortation (while campaigning for the presidency
in 1896): "Burn down your cities and leave our farms and
- an "urban civilization without cities."2
your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy
Tradition-minded urbanists find such a consequence in- our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every
conceivable, and wonder instead whether America has be- city in the country"?5 Or the words of Thomas Jefferson (of
come a civilization without urbanity. Indeed, New York agrarian heart but the most urbane of intellects): "I view
(or more specifically Manhattan) notwithstanding, and great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the
overlooking the Boston of its original peninsula and the liberties of man"?6 A popular nineteenth-century slogan
cores of several dozen other cities, America has long been stated: "God the first garden made, and the first city Cain,"
a suburban culture. The prefix "sub," however, denoting with Cain standing for moral decay, corruption, artificial-
"less than" (as in sub-par) rather than "alternative to" (as ity, vanity, lust, calculation, and materialism.' The slogan
might be the case), serves an injustice. Suburbanization recalled a principal biblical interpretation of the city as a
itself, today associated with the conventions and limited place of iniquity, created to escape God's judgment and
aspirations of middle-class life, was not so long ago consid- therefore a place of the damned.
ered a radical idea. For example, a contemporaneous ac-
count in Pagent Magazine referred to Llewelyn Park - The dilemma is that such sentiments, expressed through-
out the course of American history, enable historians and
one of the first of the planned nineteenth-century romantic
social interpreters to label American culture anti-urban.8
suburbs - as that place of "long-haired men and short-
haired women. "3 In 1857 such an observation would not On the contrary, rather than disregarding time-honored ur-
recommend the place to those mindful of convention. ban values the American instinct has been to reinterpret
the nature of urbanity in concert with a body of ideals and
But apart from the suburb, or perhaps because of the prev- perceptions fundamental to the Enlightenment. These ide-
alence of suburbia, a belief has persisted that Americans, als include the pursuit of reason and science, in search of a
by and large, have had trouble accepting urbanism as cen- secular understanding of the natural world; the pursuit of
tral to their culture, and consequently have, more often personal liberty and social egalitarianism; the admiration of
than not, built cities that are less than urbane and difficult agrarian philosophy; the pursuit of property as a source of
to love. The American city is occasionaly admired for its wealth and independence; the pursuit of individualism and
size and boundlessness, for its energy, for its material self-sufficiency; the veneration of nature and of pastoralism;

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 Krieger

5: ::age,

Il

the belief in progress as providing continuing opportunities

for social and geographical mobility; and finally, the pur-
suit of origins, on the one hand, and of that which is new,
on the other, in a New World seen as the setting for the
transformation of society based on these enlightenments.9

2. G. A. While the"American
Crofutt, American city was formed in relationship to
Progress," 1873such ideals and myths, the criticism of the American city
commonly begins with an enumeration of its shortcomings
relative to traditional Western urbanism. That the New
World expanded the frontiers of social organization is uni-
versally recognized. That such social experimentation
THE INCREDIBLE NEW YORK OF 1930:
would affect the means of aggregating spatially in commu-
THE CITY OF SKYSCRAPERS.
nities is less frequently acknowledged. And if social and
political experimentation provided a means of evaluating
old-world institutions and values, why not its corollary in
matters of civic design? Europeans have often perceived
such a potential in the New World cities. Tradition-bound
but restless for political, social, and technological revolu-
i::
1_ ... .......
tions, eighteenth-century society could use the Americas to
!14 ' LO imagine primary forms of community. "In the beginning,"
proclaimed John Locke, "all the world was America."
k IS'I-" Throughout the nineteenth century when the traditional
city was facing despair more than hope, American cities -
just being built rather than being radically transformed by
14: 1: industrialization - offered the possibility of circumventing
the chaotic tendencies of rapid growth and mechanization.
LIK ADIERON 100FT SRIN-BAR: WRKMN N HENE
While seeking an authentic modernity, twentieth-century
EM I E T TE B IDI G SI H U TT D AG IS A P NO A A OF EW Y R European travellers to America caught glimpses of what
-=--.I
LOOKNG ORTHTO ENTRL PRK AD TE HUSONRIVE (LFT) modernism would bring to the city.'0
k Mom., orra ro r^ s,
Consider the impressions of one European upon his first
encounters with the American city:

The striking thing is the lightness, the fragility. . . . The [city]

has no weight, it seems barely to rest on the soil . . . born tem-
porary [it has] stayed that way. . . . The result is a moving land-
scape for its inhabitants, whereas our cities are our shells. ...
We Europeans change within changeless cities, and our houses
3. "The Incredible New York,"
and neighborhoods outlive us; American cities change faster than their
brought to the readers of the
inhabitants do, and it is the inhabitants who outlive the cities. ...
Illustrated London News in
1930 That is why they see their cities without vain sentimentality. ...
For us a city is, above all, a past; for them it is mainly a future;
what they like in the city is everything it has not yet become and
everything it can be. . . . The past does not manifest itself in
them as it does in Europe, through public monuments, but

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 assemblage 3

4. Charleville, France, engrav- " "'- r "' * CS

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 Krieger

6. Guthrie, Oklahoma, the

main street after four weeks,
1889

through survivals. ... These are there simply because no one The majority of American cities, created overnight, "camps
has taken the time to tear them down, and as a kind of indication in a desert" or clearings in a forest, without the benefit (or
of work to be done. . . . Our beautiful closed cities, full as eggs,
the liability) of preexisting contexts, retain this evanes-
are a bit stifling. . . . Once you are inside the city, you can no cence. The Oklahoma land rush, as if staged for an epic
longer see beyond it. In America . . . frail and temporary, form-
Western film, replicated in a matter of days a century of
less and unfinished, they are haunted by the presence of the im-
urban development. Less than four weeks after the region
mense geographical space surrounding them . . . you feel, from
had been opened to homesteaders a nascent Guthrie was
your first glance, that your contact with these places is a tempo-
rary one; either you will leave them or they will change around
clearly in place. A historian has written of another region:
you. . . . The cities are open, open to the world, and to the "There was no fork, no falls, or bend in the river, no nook
future. This is what gives them their adventurous look, and even or bay on Lake Erie or Lake Michigan; no point along any
* . a touching beauty."1 imagined canal or railroad, in fact not even a dismal
swamp of dense forest, but could be classed as a choice
The impressions are those of Jean-Paul Sartre, neither an
location for a flourishing metropolis."'2
architect nor urban theorist but an observer with an appre-
ciation of the American city as a reinvented city. The expectation of becoming a "metropolis" is ubiquitous
among American settlements, and a remarkable number of
Two engravings, of the nascent cities of Charleville,
these metropolises have flourished. Many continue to
France, and Savannah, Georgia, prefigure a number of
reenact the speculative fervor that facilitated their origins,
Sartre's insights. Charleville was laid out between 1608
experiencing jarring cycles of booms and busts (existing as
and 1620. Its founder, Charles Gonzago, like Savannah's
solid or "see-through" cities, as contemporary developers
James Oglethorpe, was an admirer of Renaissance town-
would say). Rarely do their geographical settings or limita-
planning principles, which he introduced to France.
tions of infrastructure impede a dream of becoming the
Indeed, the Place Ducale in Charleville would become
next Chicago - or as it was assumed before the railroads
an inspiration for the plan of the Place Royale in Paris.
began crisscrossing the middle west, the next Cairo, Illi-
Savannah was commissioned by King George II in 1734
nois. 3 For each Cairo that failed a Kansas City flourished,
in an attempt to secure England's southernmost colony
and is still being formed, acquiring sufficient "weight" and
against Spanish ambitions. The engraving served in part as
a fabric with which to inspire or delimit subsequent devel-
a promotional brochure for the colony. Separated by less
opment.
than a century, these images project two kinds of urban-
isms. Charleville is defined and finite. Savannah is partial Is it not somehow reassuring that the great twentieth-
and without boundaries. Charleville is centrally ordered century monolith and, for some, the primary antagonist of
and hierarchical. Savannah is a field or a matrix. Charle- the city, the skyscraper, despite its size, objectness, and insu-
ville distinguishes itself from what lies immediately outside larity, can also create a fabric if multiplied sufficiently?
its perimeter; its defining walls are among its dominant Of course we should have known this in the 1930s when
physical features. Savannah is merely a clearing in the for- Rockefeller Center was being completed, or even earlier
est, bounded only by the area cleared to date. Charleville when the proprietous structures of Chicago's commercial
portrays a collective form, while Savannah seems to form Loop were first rising. But as with many innovations, pos-
itself by collecting individual elements. Charleville exudes sibilities are assimilated slowly. Planners and mayors of
stability. Savannah is unmistakably incomplete, barely rest- several cities are coming to fear skyscrapers and seek to
ing on the.soil. disperse them, unappreciative of Michigan Avenue and the

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 assemblage 3

What city offers waterfront dinin

international cuisine, trolley car
;IilI and one spectacular view
after another?

U j
\ f. ..
'T ':77 , ...

:LL ~ :. iW \: ,' S;.::\i,"

! f

Rttsburgh.
If we told you that Pittsburgh is some-
times called "the San Francisco of the
East," you'd probably smile. Until you
visited the city.
The first thing you'd notice is the
view. A dramatic skyline framed by
SStudy by the Development Divisin of blue skies, water and trees. The second
is the food. International dishes pre-
THE CLEVELAND ELECTRIC ILLUMINATING COMPANY pared by people whose heritage taught
them how,
Then you'd visit ajazz supperclub,
7. Cover of a promotional bro- or a concert, or a Broadway musical
chure for Cleveland, Ohio, 1947 Anrid while you strolled through a
sculpture garden at the water's edge,
watching the city lights, you'd feel the
resemblance.
Pittsburgh is America's Renaissance
city, all dressed up and ready for com-
pany. Ready for a visit that will really
put a smile on your face.
Ask why Pittsburgh is a great place
to be. Greater Pittsburgh Convention
and Visitors Bureau, Four Gateway
Center, Pittsburgh, PA 15222(412)
281-7711.
Youve got a friend in Pennsylvania.

8. Magazine advertisement on
behalf of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1986

9. The Loop of Chicago, view 10. "City of the Captive Globe,"

from the Sears Tower, 1981 Rem Koolhaas, 1978

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 Krieger

Avenue of the Americas as seminal contributions of Ameri-

can civilization to urban form.

The establishment and maintenance of a fabric demands a

certain endurance of place. One factor that makes endur-
ing contexts difficult to achieve is identified by Sartre in
the "cities which we survive." Ephemerality has seldom
been regarded as an attribute of the physical city; the en-
durance of the preindustrial city is what appeals to us. But
to a civilization maturing under the dual forces of indus-
trialization and romanticism, endurance is ultimately in-
herent in the natural orders, not in human artifice. Faith
in the endurance of the land and its resources, coupled
with an orientation toward material progress, mandates that
products be perishable, intended for use but also serving to
stimulate the production of successors to whom they give
11. Postcard view of Aspen, way. As a man-made phenomenon, even the city cannot
Colorado. The mountain range escape transience. A century prior to Sartre, Baudelaire
is clearly the focus of the had drawn a similar conclusion, paradoxically, by observ-
image, and sure to outlive
ing Haussmann's powerful and stable boulevards taking
the town clinging to its base.
shape. For Baudelaire the apparent solidity of the new
boulevards could not alter the fact that the citizens of mid-
nineteenth-century Paris had outlived the city of their
birth." The endurance of urban form could no longer be
relied upon. Far more than its ancient predecessor, the
modern city would become a facilitator of services, a re-
ceptacle of goods, a warehouse rather than a repository, its
spaces formed not out of a desire to establish points of
stasis but for "expediating processes."" As the processes
changed, so would the spatial requirements.

The need to process livestock and goods created a vast net-

work of terminals, depots, and freight yards in the post-
bellum city. The need to process insurance premiums,
mortgages, equity funds, and legal records has created even
vaster volumes of office districts in the postindustrial city.
In the 1950s, Boston's first major urban renewal program
was propelled by the Prudential Insurance Company of
America, which built its corporate headquarters over a
long-underutilized array of rail yards adjacent to the Back
Bay. And so a mixed-use commercial center synonymous
with the late-twentieth-century city proudly replaced a
complex synonymous with that of the late nineteenth cen-
tury. It is unlikely that the next major reuse of this land is

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 assemblage 3

12. What appears to be a

paving pattern is a system of
streets laid out in preparation
for a suburban subdivision,
circa 1974.

14. John Portman, Renaissance

Center, Detroit, Michigan, 1978

13. Daniel Burnham, a city hall

for Chicago, 1909

15. Manhattan Bridge, New

York City

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 Krieger

16. Downtown Boston in 1964.

Over ninety acres were demol-
ished as the first step of urban
renewal.

a century away. How permanent are the spatial require- ment this is for a city that flourished at the crossroads of
ments currently producing the speculative office tower, nineteenth-century
that continental trade routes. Paradoxically,
ubiquitous volumetric extension of the city's grid? What the freeway - a mere facilitator of movement - becomes
one of the few constants of the urban landscape, occasion-
will the cities do with the acreage devoted to airports when
technology eliminates the need for the half-mile runway? ally, as in the bridges of Manhattan,- aspiring to the gran-
For many cities, the problem of reemploying buildings anddeur achieved by monuments to cultural constants of the
past.
land devoted to obsolete functions surpasses the nineteenth-
century problem of finding additional land for expansion.
The city, of course, has always been a great catalyst of
In a transient city, Sartre's "moving landscape," what sur- change. The medieval German adage "city air makes men
vive best are the facilitators of movement. To accommo- free" implies free access to economic opportunity, cultural
date both Walt Whitman's expectations of freedom and advance, and eccentric tastes as well as political choice.
Jack Kerouac's restlessness, American streets must precede But while the preindustrial city changed by being built
their defining edges. Unlike traditional counterparts, de- upon - determined ruins supporting new walls - modern
fined by adjoining walls and activities, the very void of the technologies and modern predilections result in substitu-
street assumes artifactual properties. It becomes tangible, tion rather than elaboration. Of whatever preceded the Re-
autonomous, three-dimensional, the tool and symbol of naissance Center on the shore of the Detroit River there is
the passion for mobility. To achieve a point of stasis for no trace, and the newness of the development challenges
Chicago, Daniel Burham proposed a great crossing of axes the ruinous fabric of the surrounding city not to rebuild
marked by a grandiose city hall. 16 Occupying the same site itself, but to be replaced. Maybe this is expected of De-
today is a highway interchange that boastful Chicagoans troit, the automobile-made city, where last year's models
describe as the world's largest. How more fitting a monu- command little attention. But what must admirers of Bos-

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 assemblage 3

17. An American home near

Dumbarton Oaks, Washington,
D.C.

ton, historic, slow-to-change Boston, conclude from con-

templating a 1964 aerial view of the city, its heart virtually
demolished as the first stage of urban renewal? With their
cities exquisite arenas for rapid change, Americans have
demanded a counterpoint, and in their homes and home
districts have forged equally powerful symbols embodying
convention, tradition, and (at least the illusion of) perma-
nence.

The invocation of home calls to mind anoth

tic of American urbanism. In the tradition
slowly under exacting social constraints an
nologies, the emphasis is on the collective,
paradigms for urban aggregation seem to
sciousness of the individual unit. In Amer
remains with the building unit, from whic
settlement patterns then emerge. In Geor
or wall may be said to be of first importa
Providence the silhouette seems to take pr
priate to a society championing egalitarian
of the discernable unit, whether familial o
almost always respected. Periodically, how
seeking to balance individual prerogative a
good must form.
18. The Great Crescent, Bath,
England In the American city, such an alliance seem
along the residential "Elm Streets," those
convergence of the tenets of romantic cla
Street in Salem, Forest Street in Oak Park
Litchfield, South Street in Houston, and c
embody a fragile harmony of architectur
For a moment a synthesis seemed possible
tion of communal order - established by t
street and the embracing branches - with
tity - expressed in the exuberance and ecc
the houses themselves. Along Elm Street p
and public manners coexist beneath an arc
If the Strada Nuova in Genova, lined with
century palaces for a mercantile nobility d
on the outskirts of town, represents a Ren
tial ideal, then Westmoreland Place in S
with late-nineteenth-century villas for a ca
19. View of the East Side of provides the New World's rebuttal. The na
Providence, Rhode Island public way of Genova is replaced with the

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 Krieger

20. An "Elm" street of Red

Oaks: South Street, Houston,
Texas

22. The Strada Nuova, Genova,

idealized view of the street

21. The Strada Nuova, Genova

23. Westmoreland Place, St. 24. Westmoreland Place in its

Louis, Missouri, villas for a context of private streets, a
capitalist nobility. The setting hint of parallel lines emerging
is a virtual figure-ground from the forest
reversal of the Strada Nuova.

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 assemblage 3

25. The Jeffersonian grid

across the rural midwest

26. An early-nineteenth-century engraving of a

southern plantation framed by its bountiful garden

roles. The gridiron, a rational tool and thus a sign of hu-

a pastoral landscape. The private courtyards sheltered from
the street have given way to yards and porches and baysman presence, establishes a measurable and perceivable
and bearms that connote private idiosyncracy while en- order over the land. It is a product of society. The garden,
livening the public way. What is figure in Genova, theas all gardens since Eden, represents nature, yields both
sustenance and pleasure. It is a product of individual culti-
space of the street and that of the hidden courtyards, delin-
vators. Forming a network over the land, grid and garden
eated by the walls of the joined palazzos, becomes its op-
together express accommodation between man and nature,
posite in St. Louis: there, an open landscape is ubiquitous
rationality and spirit, societal constraints and individual
and the figure, of course, is that of the house, promising
like its Genoan counterpart elegant suburban living to expression.
which, in America, all could aspire.
Understandably, Jefferson championed both. As a farmer
who once called himself a "savage from the wilderness of
Michael Dennis has pointed out the similarities of certain
neoclassical French streets, for example the rue Poisson-
Virginia," Jefferson always preached that the cultivation of
niere in Paris, to American Elm Streets.17 These, however,
the land should be the primary occupation of Americans.
were at most a prelude, an aberration within their own He speculated that an agrarian republic might be spared
culture. Though the French neoclassicists may have the cyclical waves of repression and conflict common in
Europe; moreover, he believed that land ownership fos-
wished to realize more such streets, they lacked the cour-
age of their Enlightenment convictions, the necessary dis-
tered egalitarianism and a virtuous citizenry. 8 Therefore,
to Jefferson, a method of partitioning the land to ensure
tance from their own history and precedents, and sufficient
land free from entail. In the colonies, the presence of small
un- land holdings was imperative. In the precision of the
limited land and the perceived absence of history stimu-surveyor's gridiron he saw a means to achieve a pattern of
lated a naive inventiveness. settlement consistent with his ideals, and throughout his
life he advocated its use for defining towns and regions.
To appreciate Elm Street as a balancing of communal val-
ues and private prerogatives, two cardinal metaphors ofSince Jefferson's continental surveys, the American city has
American settlement must be drawn out. In the evolution been characterized by its expansive grid. For many it has
come to signify expediency, speculation, neutrality, indif-
of an American spatial order, the gridiron, as the principal
ference,
pattern of settlement, and the garden, in its many guises as monotony, and merely a means of defining prop-
man's bond with land and nature, have played dominant erty. Sartre hinted at its other properties - pluralism,

50

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boundlessness, and freedom: "These long straight unob-
structed streets carry one's glance, like canals, outside the
city. You always see mountains or fields or the sea at the
end of them.""'9 At least you feel that you may see them
and that they may be accessible. Another European had
gone further: "The winding road is the pack-donkey's way,"
Le Corbusier proclaimed.20 For him, as for Jefferson, the
straight road was "an action and the result of self-mastery,"
and therefore sane and noble. While the gridiron plan may
be found throughout the history of settlement, particularly
during periods of large-scale colonialization, in the New
World it seemed to acquire a special significance, an ideo-
logical substance.21
Though relentless in the hands of the land speculator,
threatening to overwhelm the landscape, the gridiron
serves to promote its antithesis, the individual's garden. In
America the garden as cultural metaphor has had at least
three, overlapping manifestations, each acquiring mythic
dimensions and promoting a particular consequence for
the city. In a Jeffersonian sense, the garden has represented
the fitting domain of the freeman, and has been expressed
as a cultivator's paradise. In the spirit of romanticism, it
has represented a certain constellation of forces deemed
necessary for the cultivation of the spirit. Finally, it has
represented a refuge in which to remove oneself from the
traumas of industrial civilization.
A cultivator's paradise the New World was, attracting mil-
lions to its fertile lands, and by the mid-nineteenth century
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Krieger
27. A bird's-eye view of
Herrington, Kansas, 1887
becoming identified as the "breadbasket" or "garden of the
world.""22 So powerful was the national identity with agrar-
ianism that well into the twentieth century any economic
crisis set in motion another back-to-the-land movement.
That few ever actually returned to the farm was immate-
rial. Though compelled by the temporal temptations of the
city, the American always looked to the farm for assurances
of stability. To move further from the center of town, to
decentralize the city, seemed quite natural, a means of re-
turning to imagined origins and ancestral landscapes.
Seeking imagined origins also meant that the very heart of
the city needed to be gardenlike. The nation's capital,
Washington, D.C., is a telling example. The City Beauti-
ful-inspired MacMillan Commission Plan of 1902 pro-
jected a neoclassical order, as befitting a government
becoming aware of its central role among powerful na-
tions. Paris, Versailles, Vienna were the models, and the
mission was to fulfill the promise of L'Enfant's original
plan. With remarkably few changes, the vision was real-
ized. The graphics of a common tourist map, however,
reveal another (desired) spatial order: the public edifices
and monuments are rendered in a sea of green that ignores
the geometries of the neoclassical arrangement. And the
experience of tIle Mall is closer to the rendition of the
map. While sensing a monumental order of vista and axi-
ality, a visitor finds himself in a prodigious but vaguely
defined park. This is neither an accident nor the result of
poor Beaux-Arts planning. Senator MacMillan's commis-
51
 assemblage 3

28. General Plan for Central

Washington by the Senate Park
Commission, 1902

29. Portion of a tourist map of

J?A? Of? central Washington, 1974

KtiONAs (;ITI"
S W,% PAUd SYJTM AD ETLtustWAusrjj

!/-...............

?.... i_.
... .. ..

30. Map of Kansas City Park

and Boulevard System.
Undeveloped in 1888, it had
exceeded four hundred acres
by 1910.

31. The Chicago lakefront,

looking north from the Loop.
Over twenty miles of parks and
beaches were recaptured from
private ownership and indus-
trial uses.

52

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sion was, after all, called the Senate Park Commission,
and its broadest mandate was to develop a district-wide
park and open-space network of which the Mall would be
a mere part.23
It has been argued that the urban park and open-space net-
work, conceived specifically for the use and pleasure of
the public, were America's foremost contribution to nine-
teenth-century urban design.24 It is a supposition difficult
to refute, if only because of the scale of the endeavors by
hundreds of cities and towns to create park systems. The
initial proponents of the park system - Olmsted, Down-
ing, Cleveland, Kessler - were not principally motivated
by beautification or by the social conceits of the English
gentry who sought to surround themselves with pastoral
scenery. Rather, they believed that the reintroduction of
nature into the increasingly dense, increasingly expanding,
increasingly "unnatural" industrial city was necessary to
maintain it as a habitable domain, particularly for the
common citizen who could not retreat to a country estate.
Olmsted and his contemporaries sought to demonstrate
that a vigorous young nation could physically respond to
the social problems brought about by massive urbaniza-
tion. The integrated park and boulevard system was that
response, and it formed the basis for the initial struggles
with city planning in America.25
Generous and grand, and permeating the city with the
"healing" virtues of nature, the urban park combined the
requirement for a prominant public realm - deemed nec-
essary by virtually every urban culture - with the ideolog-
ical prescription to follow nature. The public park became
a post-Enlightenment analogue to the traditional public
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Krieger
32. The Public Garden, Boston,
Massachusetts, 1869
square, a place of order and repose carved out of the chaos
of industrial urbanism. While the economic and social
forces accelerating industrialization were also forcing the
frequent rebuilding of the city, the park - as an embodi-
ment of nature's immutability - would provide a measure
of constancy within the ever-changing city.
Prior to the introduction of the park into the city, there
long simmered a desire to build a pastoral city, or rather,
to inhabit an environment forever balanced between the
extremes of urbane sophistication and natural virtuousness,
a place where the attributes of both city and country might
be simultaneously enjoyed. Inspired by the potential of
industrialization and reacting to the backwardness and
oppression of European feudalism, Engels and Marx
sought to eliminate the "idiocy of rural life." By contrast,
American social reformers, ever suspicious of the progress
produced by technological advance, leaned toward rural
simplicity; Thoreau lamented that "the whistle of the loco-
motive penetrates my woods summer and winter.'"26 But
another line of Americans have argued that neither urban
nor rural life alone (or separately) represented national
ideals. "A plague on both your houses," concluded W. E.
Smythe in a nai've little book of the 1920s, whose title,
City Homes on Country Lanes, succinctly captures this
longing for a middle landscape.27
The roots of such a yearning date back to the very discov-
ery of America. As an emerging Age of Reason began to
seek Truth in the phenomena of nature, the natural world
and especially the landscape began to evoke emotions tra-
ditionally reserved for God. To be enlightened was to read
God's laws in nature, not in the scriptures. Theories re-
53
 assemblage 3

33. George Innes, "The Locka-

wana Valley," 1854. More opti-
mistically than Thoreau, Innes
incorporates the machine and
other signs of progress into a
pastoral scene. The puffs of
smoke from the engine and
from behind the depot seem
composed of the same matter
as the wispy cloud behind the
steeple.

garding these laws of nature were profoundly stimulated by
the consciousness in Europe of a New World untouched
by the processes of civilization. Rousseau, among others,
hypothesized the American Indian as existing in a height-
ened state of innocence. Such a state, he argued, could be
used to gauge the progress of European civilization and the
success of its institutions, conventions, and habits. Critical
of these, Rousseau declared his "natural man" superior to
civilized man, claiming that the very process of civilization
produced artificiality, perhaps even social regression. Out
of such arguments emerged the "Ethic of the Middle
Link," and, later, the more sentimental cult of the noble
savage.28 The best possible human condition came to be
represented by a middle position between intellect and in-
stinct, between mind and spirit, or, in more physical
terms, between the wilderness - the domain of the
heathen - and the city - the repository of culture. As
such sentiments continued to flourish in Europe, the New
World was seen increasingly as an embodiment of these
sentiments. Thus, Richard Price, believing that "the happi-
est state of man is in the middle state between the savage
and the refined," could by the mid-eighteenth century pro-
claim: "Such is the state of Society in Connecticut, and
some other of the American provinces. "29
A century later in these former provinces, citizens like
Emerson again championed such an ideal state. No doubt
with Rousseau in mind, Emerson saw the "uncorrupted
behavior which we admire in animals and in young chil-
dren belongs to . . . the man who lives in the presence of
Nature. Cities force growth and make men talkative and
entertaining, but they make them artificial."'" Emerson
was not, however, rejecting the city. He was seeking a re-
centering: "I wish for rural strength and religion . . . , city
facility and polish. I find with chagrin that I cannot have
both."" The chagrin merely intensified the search for a
center. The human spirit needed to question the conven-
tions of civilization (housed in the city) by fortifying itself
with the truths inherent in nature - if only a setting
could be devised that would foster a reconciliation between
civilization and arcadian innocence. To this ideal the
American mind has repeatedly returned, perhaps never
more eloquently in physical expression than in Jefferson's
University of Virginia campus.
In his "academical village" a great axis is established, an-
chored by the artifacts of man and the elements of nature.
The axis stretches from the library, both symbol and store-
house of knowledge, to the free and verdant hills of Vir-
ginia, to the wilderness. Students and teachers reside in
between, amidst a lawn and gardens. For Jefferson the
noblest of human functions lay in this conversion of wil-
derness into habitat, so long as the laws of nature were
consulted during the process.

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 Krieger

For many, Jefferson's campus, and the settings of Ameri-

can colleges in general, continues to present a model of
American urban aspirations, rarely achieved outside uni-
versity grounds. Of course, the risk of seeking a middle
ground - between town and country - is the abolish-
ment of town and of country, which many have advocated,
and which the very successes of suburbia have nearly
wrought. Somewhat like the nineteenth-century industrial
city, which came perilously close to choking itself with its
own energy and productivity, the suburban realm, so ap-
pealing and finally in this century so attainable, obliterates
the extremes upon which it depends for its validation.
Even as the traditional boundaries between country and
city give way to Wright's imaginary Broadacres or Jean
Gottman's very real Megalopolis, the ideal of a middle
state persists. 32 At midcentury, looking forward to the day
when city and country would encroach upon one another
sufficiently to form a new symbiosis, Arthur M. Schlesin-
34. A view of Westport Village ger invoked Plato, who had dreamed of a society in which
along Lake Champlain,
vestigial scene of the middle youth shall dwell in a land of health amid fair sights and sounds
landscape of romanticism and imbibe good from every quarter; and beauty, the emanation
of noble works, will flow into the eye and ear like an invigorating
breeze from a purer region and imperceptibly woo the soul from
infancy into harmony and sympathy with the beauty of reason.33

Plato's dream may still remain unfulfilled, but the majority

of Americans do reside in environments that presume to
blend the qualities of town and country. Neither the pre-
sumption nor the desire is likely to change even though a
rekindled interest in the centers of our older cities is in
evidence. Some of these cities are, at last, acquiring suffi-
cient weight to make use of their history and fabric. How-
ever, their peripheries continue to expand at a much faster
rate than their centers can stabilize. Many cities already
exhibit the phenomenon best characterized by contempo-
rary Houston: an increasingly vertical center, an ever-
35. A view of the University of densifying perimeter along circumferential highways,
Virginia, lithograph by C. Bohn, with felicitious houses under canopies of trees (former
1856
suburbs) stretching between.

Each new city, whether Columbia, Maryland, in the

1960s or Las Colinas, Texas, in the 1980s, is posited as an
improved middle ground, an alternative, on the one hand,
to overgrown cities and, on the other, to homogenous sub-

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36. On the outskirts of a city:
some of the less pastoral con-
sequences of suburbanization
urban regions. Each alternative paradoxically hastens the
suburbanization of existing city centers, whose shopping
malls and streetscapes attempt to emulate the perceived
successes of places like Las Colinas.
Metropolitan landscapes, such as that of Dallas-Fort
Worth, of which Las Colinas is a part, constitute the mod-
ern city. And new ones such as Tysons Corner, Virginia,
growing from a single suburban shopping center in the
mid-1970s to an employment base for seventy thousand
people by the mid-1980s, continue to emerge overnight.
These metropolitan landscapes are the result of desires and
ideals, ideals that become myth. They are no longer a par-
ticularly American phenomenon but evident in various
stages of evolution throughout the modern world. They are
elements of an urbanism that raises questions not entirely
predicted by urban archetypes.
What is the usefulness to contemporary society of the idea
of a monocentric city, the city of an axis mundi?
Does the idea of the city as a collection of semiautono-
mous fragments, or districts, preclude singular unifying
organizational or formal patterns? What is the role of com-
prehensive vision or artistic inspiration within current de-
centralized physical and institutional frameworks? Should
there be contemporary equivalents to the monumental
spaces of traditional cities?
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assemblage 3
What should constitute the public realm of a contempo-
rary city? Is the privatization of traditionally public areas
(shopping malls in lieu of streets, for instance) an inevi-
table consequence of modern culture?
How independent of specific use should the fabric of the
city be? Is specificity of use inevitably a temporary condi-
tion of any one area or district?
How should the past and "historic survivals" manifest
themselves in the fabric of a rapidly changing city? Is abso-
lute preservation of entire districts, and even cities, deny-
ing the very forces that have always fueled city evolution?
How helpful are the traditional distinctions between coun-
try, town, village, city? Should new categories or defini-
tions be explored?
Finally, how should the ephemerality of the fabric of the
modern city be incorporated into the city's design? Histori-
cally, building a city had very much to do with the build-
ing of monuments and districts that would reflect cultural
values assumed to endure. While fostering social ex-
change, the city sought physically to embody stasis. By
building clear symbols of particular social orders, coher-
ence and common meaning was supposedly assured. Such
a notion of the city never fully crossed the ocean along
with the colonists; indeed, the very act of emigration indi-
56
 Krieger

37. Houston, Texas, 1986.

What appears to be another
view of the downtown (see fig.
1) is actually a view away from
the city center toward recent
development along a circum-
ferential highway.

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 assemblage 3

of the book - that retreat from the Located at the intersection of two of
cated a dissatisfaction with such coherences. Suspicion of
city was untenable for any modern the nation's greatest rivers, the Mis-
enduring values is implicit when one of Hawthorne's char-
culture - was frequently misinter- sissippi and the Ohio, its founders
acters proclaims, "Giving the impression of permanence is preted as support for further decen- and boosters were convinced that it
[what] I consider essential to the happiness of any one tralization and suburbanization. would become the principal city of
moment. "34 9. Toward the end of the nine- the Midwest. Unfortunately, the
first transcontinental railroads fol-
teenth century such sentiments,
What should convey permanence in a contemporary city lowed a more northerly alignment,
particularly an emphasis on origins
of innumerable moments, in Los Angeles, a city pro- and Cairo's Manifest Destiny went
and renewal, were synthesized into
foundly artificial and "imagineered"?35 Its boundlessness unrealized. See Herman R. Lantz,
a "frontier thesis" by Frederick Jack-
Cairo, A Community in Search of
and lack of center, its aggrandizement of private caprice, son Turner. The theory held that it
Itself(Carbondale: Southern Illinois
its web of infrastructure, importing water and exporting was not the growing and industrial-
University Press, 1972).
izing Eastern seaboard but "the ex-
mobility, its appeal to lifestyle and fantasy, makes it para-
istence of an area of free land, its 14. Between 1855 and 1867, Bau-
digmatic of our times. Can such a city be constructed en- continuous recession, and the ad- delaire wrote a series of fifty prose
tirely of artifacts for temporal events, such as the kiosks, vance of American settlement west- poems that became known as Paris
gates, and pavilions for the 1984 Olympics? What of value ward" that explained the character Spleen. They were among the first
should be built for a culture whose fabric and monuments of American society by allowing for literary attempts to chronicle the
the perpetuation of the notion of radical changeability of modern ur-
embody values not presumed to be permanent? This ques-
liberty, self-sufficiency, and individ- banism and its effects on city dwell-
tion has long challenged the builders of the American city,
ualism. See Frederick Jackson ers. The poems were, of course,
as it now challenges the builders of cities everywhere. Turner, "The Significance of the inspired by Georges-Eugene Hauss-
Frontier in American History" mann's systematic transformation of
Notes (1893), in The Frontier in Americanthe Paris of Baudelaire's youth. See
1. Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten 6. Thomas Jefferson, "Query XIX: History (New York: Holt, 1920), Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen,
Chats and Other Writings (1918) The Present State of Manufactures, esp. pp. 1-38. See also Henry Nash trans. Louise Varese (New York:
(New York: Dover, 1979), p. 112; Commerce, Interior and Exterior Smith, Virgin Land: The American New Directions, 1970).
Henry James, The American (New Trade," in Notes on the State of West as Symbol and Myth (Cam-
15. See John Brinkerhoff Jackson,
York: Scribner's, 1907), p. 45; Rem Virginia, ed. William Peden bridge: Harvard University Press,
American Space: The Centennial
Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New (Chapel Hill: University of North 1950).
Years 1865-1876 (New York: W.
York: Oxford, 1978), p. 111. Carolina Press, 1954).
10. Consider, for example, Le Cor- W. Norton, 1972), the chapter on
2. Irving Kristol, "An Urban Civili- 7. The origin of the slogan is dis- busier's initial encounter with Man- Chicago, pp. 72-86.
zation without Cities," Horizon puted, with credit given either to hattan. He admonished Americans
16. See Daniel Burnham and Ed-
(Autumn 1972). the seventeenth-century English for not building their skyscrapers
ward Bennett, The Plan for Chicago
metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley high enough, but was profoundly
3. Quoted in Samuel Swift, "Llew- (1909; New York: Da Capo Press,
or to the better-known eighteenth- moved by experiencing a built ana-
ellyn Park, West Orange, Essex Co. 1970), "The Heart of Chicago."
century English poet William Cow- logue to his imaginary Plan Voison
New Jersey: The First American
par. In any event, versions of it for Paris. See Le Corbusier, When 17. Michael Dennis, Court and
Suburban Community," House and Garden: From the French H6tel to
appeared frequently in popular liter- the Cathedrals Were White (1947;
Garden 3 (June 1903). the City of Modern Architecture
ature during the nineteenth cen- New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
4. Henry Ford, "Ford Ideals: Being tury, especially those of the "Go (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), pp.
11. Jean-Paul Sartre, "American 237-40.
a Selection from 'Mr. Ford's Page' West Young Man" boosterism vari-
Cities," in Literary and Philosophi-
in The Dearborn Independent," ety.
cal Essays (London: Hutchinson 18. Jefferson, "Query XIX." See
(Dearborn, Michigan, 1922), p. 8. For the broadest overview of the
Publishing Company, 1955). also A. M. Griswald, "The Ameri-
425.
American antiurban tradition, see can Democracy of Thomas Jeffer-
12. Roy Robbins, Our Landed
5. William Jennings Bryan, "Cross Morton and Lucia White, The In- son," American Political Science
Heritage: The Public Domain 1776-
of Gold" speech at the 1896 Demo- tellectual Versus the City (Cam- Review 40, no. 4 (August 1946):
1936 (Princeton: Princeton Univer- 657-81.
cratic national convention. Quoted bridge: Harvard and MIT, 1962).
sity Press, 1942), p. 63.
in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Paths to Written during the heyday of urban
19. Sartre, "American Cities."
the Present (New York: Macmillan, renewal (which proliferated its own 13. Cairo, Illinois, perhaps epito-
1949), p. 229. brand of antiurbanism) the message mizes the anticipated metropolis. 20. Le Corbusier, The City of To-

58

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morrow and Its Planning [originally
published in 1924 as Urbanisme]
(New York: Payson & Clarke,
1929).
21. John Brinckerhoff Jackson,
"Jefferson, Thoreau and After," in
Landscapes (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1970), pp. 1-9.
22. Smith, Virgin Land, book 3,
"The Garden of the World."
23. John Reps, Monumental Wash-
ington: The Planning and Develop-
ment of the Capital Center
(Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1967), esp. "The Senate Park
Commission at Work."
24. Albert Fein, "The American
City: The Ideal and the Real," in
The Rise of an American Architec-
ture, ed. Edgar Kaufman (New
York: Praeger, 1970).
25. In America the master plans for
city and regional park and parkway
networks constituted the first com-
prehensive attempts at city plan-
ning. Whereas in Europe city
planning as a distinct discipline
generally emerged from sanitary
engineering and housing reform
movements, the American planning
profession owes its greatest debt to
landscape architecture. See Mel
Scott, American City Planning
Since 1890 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1971).
26. Henry David Thoreau,
"Sounds," in Walden or Life in the
Woods (1854; Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1893), p. 181.
27. William Smythe, City Homes
on Country Lanes (New York: Mac-
millan, 1922). This is one among
countless appeals in American liter-
ature to seek a middle ground be-
tween urban and rural life. For the
intellectual origins of such a search,
see Leo Marx, The Machine in the
Garden (New York: Oxford, 1964).
Marx was the first to term this a
search for a "middle landscape."
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28. See A. O. Lovejoy, The Great
Chain of Being (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1942), pp.
189-207; Hoxie Neale Fairchild,
The Noble Savage: A Study in Ro-
mantic Naturalism (New York:
Macmillan, 1928); and Charles L.
Sanford, The Quest for Paradise
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1961).
29. Quoted in Marx, Machine in
the Garden, p. 105.
30. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Farm-
ing," in Society and Solitude (1870;
London: J. M. Dent, 1912), p. 72.
31. Ralph Waldo Emerson, letter
to Thomas Carlyle, 1840. Quoted
in C. N. Glaab and A. T. Brown,
A History of Urban America (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1967), p. 60.
32. Frank Lloyd Wright spent
nearly three decades trying to per-
fect his antidote to the modern city.
Broadacres was to capitalize on
electrification and the automobile
to achieve a national decentraliza-
tion. It would provide every man,
women, and child "his natural right
to an acre of land," while retaining
all of the benefits of modern tech-
nology. See Frank Lloyd Wright,
"Broadacres: A New Community
Plan," Architectural Record 47, no.
4 (April 1935). Jean Gottman
coined the term "megalopolis" in
his landmark study of the Boston-
New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-
Washington, D.C. urban corridor.
See Jean Gottman, Megalopolis, the
Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of
the United States (New York:
Twentieth-Century Fund, 1961).
33. Quoted in Schlesinger, Paths to
the Present, p. 232.
34. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The
House of the Seven Gables (Boston:
Tickner Reed Fields, 1851).
35. "Imagineering" is the wonderful
term used by Walt Disney to de-
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Krieger
scribe what his teams of artists,
architects, illustrators, writers, engi-
neers (his "imagineers") were doing
at Disneyland and Disneyworld.
Figure Credits
1, 8, 9, 14, 15, 17-20, 23, 24, 31,
32, 34, 36, 37. Courtesy of the au-
thor.
2. Library of Congress.
3. 6, 7, 12, 25, 26, 30. Courtesy
of the Loeb Library, Harvard Uni-
versity.
4. From Martin Zeiller, Topograph-
ia Galliae, 1656. Reproduced in
John Reps, The Making of Urban
America (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1965), p. 8.
5. New York Public Library.
10. From Rem Koolhaas, Delirous
New York (New York: Oxford,
1978).
11. Photograph by Robert C.
Bishop.
13. The Art Institute of Chicago.
16. Aerial Photos of New England.
21, 22. From Leonardo Benevolo,
The History of the City (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1980), p. 612.
27. Historic American Maps,
Ithaca, New York.
28. Washington, D.C., Fine Arts
Commission.
29. Smithsonian Institution.
33. National Gallery of Art, Wash-
ington, D.C.
35. University of Virginia Library.
59