Riverside,
Illinois and the Garden City
(Book
excerpt from GI Town)
 |
| Riverside Plan 1870s |
In 1868 Emery E.
Childs, a Chicago developer, asked the noted American landscape architect
Frederick Law Olmsted and his firm, Olmsted, Vaux and Company, to design a
“suburban village” on his sixteen hundred-acre property twelve miles west of
Chicago. The plan for Riverside was revolutionary in its concept and breadth
and unlike anything else in country. Olmsted and Vaux created a residential
community along the banks of the Des Plains River, with a hierarchical plan of
lot sizes, separated by generous open spaces and parks. Not having been
designed to the current trend of the time, the grid pattern of streets in
mid-American cities, Riverside’s residential roads curve in generous sweeps and
meet with soft tangents at well-landscaped intersections. The only portions of
the village which did not curve were the business streets that paralleled the
Burlington Railroad. “In the highways,” said Olmsted, “celerity will be of less
importance than the comfort and convenience of movement . . . we should
recommend the general adoption, in the design of your roads, of
gracefully-curved lines, generous spaces, and the absence of sharp corners, the
idea being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy
tranquility.”
Although its early
days were financially troubled, the village’s overall design is a testament to
the genius of the concept and the thoroughness of the execution. The
automobile, thirty years in the future when the plan was at last completed, has
not destroyed the village. Garages are placed in the rear of the lot, driveways
are narrow, and the streets not overly wide. The design is still an example of
melding the plan to the topography of the land. Riverside changed one of the
fundamental concepts of town design more than any other American community: the
integration into the standard grid pattern of streets curving streets with deep
residential setbacks. Olmsted wrote that a well-designed suburb is “the most
attractive, the most refined and the most soundly wholesome form of domestic
life, and the best application of the arts of civilization to which mankind has
yet attained.”6 The
completeness of Riverside cannot be overlooked. It has stood unchanged in both
plan and substance while, during the last hundred years, the area around it has
grown, suffered, and deteriorated. The village’s strongest defenders are the
current residents.
In 1869, as
Riverside was being planned and built, a young Englishman set out from his
London home looking for opportunities in the western United States. Nineteen
year old Ebenezer Howard and two friends moved to Nebraska, tried farming, were
quickly disillusioned, and within a few months Howard moved on to Chicago,
where he lived for ten years.
It was here in the
Midwest of the United States that many of the most important ideas for
twentieth-century town planning were initially formed. According to Howard, his
stay in Chicago had a great influence on his life. It gave him a fuller and
broader outlook on social and religious issues than if he had stayed in
England. His time in Chicago helped to direct him: “greatly in the direction of
perfect freedom of thought: and associated with this, a very deep sense of
responsibility, and a clear perception that all values, to be rightly
estimated, must be assessed mainly by their influence on the spiritual elements
in our nature.”
Howard, court
reporter by profession and land reformer by vocation, had by the end of the
nineteenth century authored theories for radically reforming the community
planning process. Those theories culminated in the Garden Cities movement. His
experience in Chicago helped to account for the Americanism in his makeup. He
believed in the American process of thought and action and that from it evolved
the ideal to the real. This was contrary to his belief that in England the
process went from the concrete to the abstract. This shifting of the creative
process toward the ideal remained with Howard all his life. He became a
stimulant and inspiration to the Garden Cities movement, and, as Dugald
MacFadyen notes in his 1933 biography of Howard, “If Chicago did not fill his
pockets with gold it did something better: it fitted him for world
citizenship.”
Howard’s own
thoughts on nineteenth-century American city planning are unknown because he
wrote little of his experiences in Chicago but his inquisitive mind would not
have allowed the efforts of Childs, Olmsted, and the Riverside community to
pass unnoticed. It is not hard to imagine Howard visiting the Riverside
development and that the impression it made stayed with him for almost
twenty-five years, gestating.
The Chicago region
continued to expand during the late nineteenth century, starting soon after the
Great Fire in October of 1871. There was, even then, concern about the sprawl
of development. One result was that Chicago and Cook County began a program of
buying up swamplands, woodlands, and farmlands and setting them aside as
permanent parklands. The Cook County Forest Preserve system was to have a
fundamental impact on Howard’s theory for Garden Cities and the use of
parklands and farmlands as buffers between communities.
In his seminal book
Garden Cities of Tomorrow Howard proposed dramatic changes in city
planning. Initially published in 1898 and called Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path
to Real Reform, it was republished in 1902 with the new name. Howard
proposed that it was “universally agreed to by all men” that people must be
stopped from relocating into the already crowded urban areas and cities. His
theory was simple: “Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous
union will spring new hope, a new life, a new civilization.” He believed people
must be given opportunities to find better surroundings in which to live and to
enjoy nature and be a part of it. This new village concept and its advantages
would be a draw, or, as Howard called it, “a magnet,” attracting those
believers to this new life. These town-country magnets would be called Garden
Cities.
