The Beginning
Chapter 2
When I look around at what you two have got here, well I don’t know.
Maybe there are some things you should buy with your heart and not with your
head. Maybe those are the things that really count.
- Bill Cole, attorney to Jim Blandings
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
During the fall of 1945, soon after VJ Day,
Carroll Sweet visited Philip Klutznick in his Washington office. Sweet had come
to Washington, representing Nathan Manilow’s interests, to ask Klutznick’s help
in acquiring some of the excess military buildings for peacetime use. Sweet and
Manilow had an idea that, if they acquired some of the surplus defense
structures available under the Veterans’ Temporary Housing program, they could
use them to build a new town for returning veterans, a GI town.
Sweet had a dream. “Here I am, an old man,” he
told himself, “who has never done anything for anyone but me — nothing at all
for the boys of those three wars whose victories have made my whole life
possible.” He had traveled extensively about the country and had seen the
palatial estates of the rich. The thought of a town, a great new city of trees
and parks, an estate for people, began to jell. He kept thinking, “Can’t
anything be done to give those veterans something approximating that kind of
living on a scale they can afford?” Gradually, Sweet evolved a scheme for a
town, a GI town, which would have the spaciousness and greenery of a park and
affordability for all.1
Klutznick turned Manilow’s and Sweet’s housing
requests down for two reasons. First, the government’s housing materials could
not be sold to private builders, only to public agencies. Second, under no
condition would he release these structures for use by returning veterans. The
quality was not good enough for these men and their families. Klutznick told
Sweet the idea was excellent and sound but his GI community should be well
planned and thought out. The materials should be as good as available, and the
FPHA structures didn’t meet that standard. “I would be ashamed,” Klutznick told
Sweet, “to build a permanent GI village or anything else that way. If you and
Nathan Manilow want to build a GI town, make it one worthy of the men who
served the country so well.”2
Manilow’s construction firm had already begun to
address the issue of the returning veteran. Chicago was the second largest city
in the United States at the end of the war, and many of the millions of
discharged veterans would be returning to the region, thus compounding the
existing housing shortage. Manilow had begun building Jeffrey Manor on
Chicago’s South Side before the war, and now, with peace, the sale and rental
of the thirty-one hundred single-family homes and townhomes began to improve.
Manilow knew there would be an end to this community and that he would soon
need to start another, but there was a problem — a paralyzing shortage of
construction materials.
There had been a substantial shortage in almost
all construction materials for nongovernmental use for several years, shortages
in lumber, bricks, clay sewer pipes, gypsum board and wood lath and cast iron
pipe. Most shortages were the result of a lack in manpower (soldiers who didn’t
return to their homes), low wages that discouraged new employees, and price
controls. Truman announced, in early winter 1945, the appointment of Wilson W.
Wyatt as housing expediter and head of the National Housing Administration.
Klutznick’s Federal Public Housing Authority was grouped together with the
Federal Housing Administration and the Federal Home Loan Bank Administration
under the National Housing Administrator. As housing expediter, Wyatt could
determine price adjustments and priority ratings in the building industry and
also exert a strong influence on wages.
Wyatt proposed to handle the housing shortage as
if it were a war production job, and in February of 1946 he announced his
program. It was a lengthy list of prohibitions that would restrict commercial
and industrial construction in favor of residential construction. It would
channel scarce building materials to housing units that would cost six thousand
dollars or less or would rent for fifty dollars a month or less. The program
would increase the supply of building materials through subsidies to producers,
increase prices and wages, use surplus war plants, provide some government
underwriting of the risks and guarantee a market for a struggling prefabricated
housing industry. Most important, it would restore the liberal financing terms
that FHA gave to builders of war housing. This program was immediately attacked
and debated. Opposition to the subsidy plan was especially strong.3
The government and private builders and their
associations campaigned with confusing and contradictory announcements as to
how much housing was really needed. In January 1946 Truman said, “We urgently
need about five million additional homes — now.” The National Association of
Home Builders, in which Manilow and Sweet were deeply involved, issued an
estimate that 1.5 million new housing units “would relieve the extreme pressure.”
Almost everyone had some number that fell between these two figures. Wyatt’s
program was not as fulfilling as it would first appear. The 1.2 million housing
units proposed, more than were built during the entire decade of the 1930s,
would also include temporary housing (trailers and other non-permanent types of
housing) and the rehabilitation of existing residential structures. These
rehabs would not contribute to a long-term solution but did inflate the
numbers. The remaining housing units would come from new housing, but only
about half of those units started in 1946 would be available for occupancy in
that year. As a result, the housing the government proposed would still fall
seriously short of the demand. Even though Wyatt’s forecast for 1947 of 1.5
million units relied more on permanent construction, his figures had to rely on
an unproved prefabrication industry to help meet the goal. The real problem was
not the number of units but the availability of materials to build the homes —
materials that were still under the firm control of the government.
Fortune magazine conducted a survey in early 1946 and found that the American
people believed that the government would need to step in to help ease the
housing shortage. Americans supported home building by the government, lending
money at low interest rates directly to people for the construction of their
own homes, the control of building materials for low and medium priced houses,
and the government’s control of rents. Many of these beliefs were the result of
fifteen years of social conditioning that fixed a belief in the altruistic and
nurturing nature of the government.
Shortly after his first meeting with Klutznick,
Carroll Sweet returned to Washington, this time with Manilow. They told Klutznick
they were planning to build a new town out of quality materials as soon as the
materials became available. Manilow and Sweet believed Klutznick would be a
great asset in their efforts to build this new town, especially with his
experience in materials, sources, and acquisitions. Would he join them?
Klutznick had been offered a number of other postwar opportunities in New York
and back home in Omaha. Their offer would need careful consideration and
certain requirements would need to be met before he could even think of
accepting it.
Klutznick indicated that he might be interested
if the town were not just another housing project or suburban development. He
explained to them the most important aspect of such a venture was the planning
of the town itself. The planning would require locating housing areas,
commercial areas, industrial sites, parks, and other community services. It
would require new utilities and roads, a good water supply, and well-designed
storm and sanitary drainage systems. Klutznick also told them that for this
town to become successful it must be more than a collection of houses, the new
town must be incorporated. The residents must create new public institutions to
govern and manage the new town or village and fully participate in the decisions
that affect the community and its future. This conversation, as reported by
Klutznick and a bit self-servingly, seemed almost a lecture — one that Nathan
Manilow surely didn’t need. Manilow, being only nine years older than
Klutznick, had far more experience in private home and community building than
Klutznick had experience with the federal government.
It is also not hard to imagine that Sweet and,
more important, Manilow offered the position to Klutznick for his influence and
ability to acquire the building materials they needed for the community and his
FHA contacts. These may, in fact, have been primary reasons in asking him to
join them. It was not his experience in construction management and knowledge
of Cook County politics and zoning approvals which had them travel almost a
thousand miles to offer him a job.
This value of community planning was, however, a
fundamental belief for Klutznick. It was based on his wartime experience and
the experience the federal government and he, as an administrator, had had with
the three Greenbelt towns planned and built in the 1930s. It is important to
note that, even ten years after their construction, there were few supporters
within the Truman administration for these experimental communities built under
Roosevelt.4
The new community that Klutznick described for
Sweet and Manilow was a manifestation of planning concepts and designs for
communities aggressively designed and built between 1900 and 1939 — communities
that shared many of the same planners, visionaries, and theorists. Even more
revealing is that many of these new communities could trace their lineage back
to the Chicago area of 1869. Five great planners would be the grandfathers for
Park Forest — whose careers extended over almost one hundred years of planning
for human settlements. They were Frederick Law Olmsted, Ebenezer Howard, Henry
Wright, Clarence B. Stein, and Elbert Peets. All five, through their visions
for new towns, would build on one another’s work in an effort to create better
and more successful places for people to live.
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.”5
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.”7
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.”8
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.
The Garden City was not the idle whimsy of a
Victorian romantic but a well-thought-out analysis of what would be needed to
plan, build, and occupy this new form of community living. Howard developed
conceptual plans and details showing how the various relationships among land
uses would work. He first presented his plan in diagrammatic form: a circular
design with concentric land uses spreading outward from the garden and civic
core. This radiating pattern may indicate how much of an impact Mrs. Cora
Richmond, a well-known Christian Science lecturer, had on Howard after he met
her in Chicago in 1876. Richmond, reputed to be a seer, told Howard that she
saw his future as, “ in the centre of a series of circles working at something
which will be a great service to humanity.”9 He would
use her prophecy in his theories.
The Garden City’s diagrammatic plan had radiating
roads, like spokes, which bisected the town into wards and neighborhoods. These
roads interconnected the rings of development which expanded outward from the
center. Commercial interests were in the first ring outside the public core,
and industrial uses were closest to the railroad. Residential neighborhoods
were behind the commercial areas. In the surrounding buffers were farms, woodlands,
pastures and some institutional uses. Town planning had never had this form of
analysis and structure before. This “unique combination of proposals” separates
Howard’s ideas from all others previously offered.
The Garden City, as envisioned by Howard, is a
town-country community with specific characteristics.
1. Larger than a village, substantially self-supporting,
and separated from other towns by a large agricultural zone. This is not just a
town “in” the country but one which is a complementary part of the country.
2. Directly accessible to railroads.
3. Limited in size to property of not more than
an “area of 6,000 acres, which is presently purely agricultural, and has been
obtained by purchase in the open market.” This land will be divided into a
central core of 1,000 acres for a town of 30,000 people and the remaining 5,000
agricultural acres will house 2,000 people. This agricultural zone will act as
buffer and control the growth of the village center.
4. Land occupied through leases and not sold to
the occupants. The entire community’s acreage will be “legally vested in the
names of four gentlemen of responsible position and of undoubted probity and
honor, who hold it in trust.”
5. Managed through controlled planning. All
aspects of the community will be planned before the start of construction and
to allow for later adjustments as needed under municipal control.
6. Divided into equal districts or wards of 5,000
people each. Each will be a complete town within itself. (This element of
Howard’s proposal will later lead to the neighborhood concept in community
planning.)
7. Designed to be spacious. In addition to the
suggested 145 acres for a central public park, ample lands will be available
for a town hall, public library, museum, theaters, concert hall, hospitals,
schools, churches, swimming pools, and public markets. Howard’s concern was for
public facilities and for housing. His proposal would be for all people, not
just a select few. There will be “ample sites for homes . . . ample space for
roads . . . so wide and spacious that sunlight and air may freely circulate,
and in which trees, shrubs and grass give the town a semi-rural appearance.”
8. Planned so as to include the expectation of
the outward expansion of industry from the older Central City into the Garden
City. These industries will be located along the periphery of the town and will
include factories, warehouses, dairies, and other clean industrial facilities.
These industries will be both municipal and private in ownership.
9. Planned for a maximum population size of
32,000. When reached, another town center will be selected, and the additional
regional growth would transfer and continue there. This new town center will,
like its parent, be buffered from the old town center and grow to its
predesigned size. In time these towns will encircle and support the old Central
City. Howard was one of the first to understand and propose the concept of the
“satellite town.”10
Howard’s ideas first took tenuous hold in the
British planning fraternity. Others who shared his ideas soon joined his
planning and reform group. In 1902, after an extensive search to find a
suitable property, a site was found that met Howard’s criteria for the
construction of a Garden City. The site proved to be a third smaller than the
prescribed 6,000 acres but in all other aspects excellent. The property was the
Letchworth Estate, located 35 miles north of London in Hertfordshire and on a
branch of the Great Northern Railway.
Growth was exceedingly slow during Letchworth’s
first ten years. The town continually faced financial problems, which added to
the difficulties of paying for even this limited growth. By 1919 the town had
grown to only ten thousand people, but Howard would not be deterred. He
believed so strongly in his Garden Cities’ concept that he began another
community, Welwyn, about twelve miles south of Letchworth. Even though many of
the same economic problems beset this new town, Welwyn’s planning benefited
from what had happened at Letchworth. Welwyn’s population also grew slowly, and
by 1930 eight thousand people were living in almost twenty-five hundred
dwelling units.
What was significant about the planning of these
two villages was the strong character of the street pattern that radiates
outward from the central core. Outward rings of roads, serving primarily
residential neighborhoods, encircle the town center. Each village was anchored
on the rail line to London. Both were placed with respect to the specifics of
the site, high ground at the core, and existing roads to neighboring
villages. Welwyn was highly structured
and the commercial core built to surround generous open parklands decorated
with fountains, flowerbeds, and colonnades of linden trees. A strong axial
alignment of the roads led into and out of the village.
The principal planners for Letchworth were
Raymond Unwin and his partner, Barry Parker. Unwin wrote in his pamphlet Nothing
Gained by Overcrowding that large, open space areas could be preserved in
the centers of residential “superblocks” without adversely affecting the
density and cost per lot or unit. His innovative planning ideas also included
cul-de-sac streets and architectural control over the exterior design of
speculatively built dwellings. Letchworth’s residential density is, in its
densest areas, twelve houses to the acre and its overall average density is
five units to the acre. Unwin even proposed children’s playgrounds. By today’s
standards these design elements do not seem profound, yet at the turn of the
nineteenth century they were revolutionary. Significant changes were to alter
the final plans over the years, and many of the stronger components of the
initial plan have been lost; the radial plan still exists, but the center of
Letchworth is a park, not the grand public buildings that Unwin showed in his
initial plans.
Simple as these beginnings were, the new towns,
Riverside, Letchworth and Welwyn, were to have a profound impact on the concept
of town planning in the United States. Lewis Mumford, the most influential
urban writer and critic of the last seventy-five years, would later write, “At
the beginning of the twentieth century two great inventions took form before
our eyes: the aeroplane and the Garden City, both harbingers of a new age.”11
Mumford also points out, in his essay “The Ideal
Form of the Modern City,” that Howard offered two other contributions to the
form of the modern community. The first is a logical and organized division of
the Garden City into six wards or neighborhood units. This division of the new
town would predate the concept as it developed in the United States by almost a
generation. This “self-contained” aspect of planning would be the backbone of
planning for the latter half of the twentieth century. The second and possibly
most important element was that these communities are never completely
self-contained. They would need to be connected by rapid transportation and
that the interconnections of these Garden Cities would in fact allow facilities
and resources of each to be more easily supplemented by the others. By this,
then, the communities would have the benefits of the larger and older “social
cities” without the problems of the congested metropolis.12
Immediately after the World War I, and throughout
the dynamic 1920s, Americans were rapidly building and expanding. The efforts
and concepts of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin were being restudied and
applied. Among the persons intensely involved as planners and architects in the
new field of town planning were two New Yorkers, Henry Wright and Clarence B.
Stein. Their work on the design and construction of low-cost housing and better
land-use planning, championed by their friend Mumford, was to revolutionize
American community planning.
The conceptual planning by Wright and Stein and
essays on urban planning and social reform by Mumford led to their formation of
the Regional Planning Association of America, in 1923. This nongovernmental
group, never more than twenty members, extensively analyzed and discussed the
state of planning and development in the country for ten years. It was within
this group that progressive communities such as Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn
were conceived, designed, and built. Within this intellectual environment ideas
were cross-fertilized. The group’s members could move between tasks and ideas
without losing their ultimate focus of building balanced communities, reducing
the urban and residential community to human scale, and establishing
communities with a balanced social program. This, they hoped, would lay the
foundation for ever-widening theories of national, continental, and global
community planning.
This background and the efforts of one of the
members, Alexander Bing (himself an experienced real estate operator), led to
the creation of the private City Housing Corporation. This corporation’s goal
was to design and build the first Garden City in America, based on the Howard
English model.13 Correspondence between Howard and Bing, in the
mid-1920s, showed their mutual interest in “launching a Garden City” in the
United States, but Howard died before their goal could be mutually undertaken.14
The City Housing Corporation’s first venture in
community planning began with Sunnyside Gardens, in Queens, New York. The site
was a seventy-seven-acre parcel of land acquired from the Long Island Railroad
— close to Manhattan and only a fifteen-minute trip, by subway, to the
Forty-second Street center of New York. Built continuously from 1924 to 1928,
Sunnyside Gardens ultimately had 1,202 family units laid out in a uniform
pattern of growth and organization. Using the existing network of streets, the
plan evolved as a series of 200- by 900- foot residential superblocks. Two- and
three-story brick apartment buildings were built facing the street and laid out
to enclose an interconnected open-space park. These blocks, ten in all, were to
change the standard urban pattern of development within a typical neighborhood.
Not encumbered with traditional lot lines, separate housing structures, alleys,
and disconnected spaces, these new residential blocks closed off the street from
intruding into the large private, commonly held, landscaped open spaces.
Changes were continually made, as the development grew and evolved, to these
interior spaces and their use.
The intrusion of the automobile,
during this thriving economic period, was also beginning to become apparent.
Sunnyside’s early plans did not take into full account the automobile and its
growing popularity. As the community grew, a garage was built at the perimeter, almost thousand feet from the farthest
unit. Later, a heated garage was constructed nearer to the neighborhood but
proved to be too expensive to maintain with only tenant and resident support.
It was later determined that the simpler and more convenient the structure, the
more successful it would be. In the last phases of construction the residential
buildings were turned inward and away from the existing rows of apartments,
which faced the community. These courts opened out and directly accessed the
street, a harbinger of the eventual parking court.
Lewis Mumford, Sunnyside Garden’s most well-known
resident for eleven years, says of the housing block and design: “It has been
framed to the human scale and its gardens and courts kept that friendly air as,
year by year, the newcomers improved in the art of gardening and the plane
trees and poplars continued to grow. . . So, though our means were modest, we
contrived to live in an environment where space, sunlight, order, color — these
essential ingredients for either life or art — were constantly present,
silently molding all of us.”15
Luckily, the land was left zoned as industrial.
This resulted in a freer design that allowed the specific type of community and
aesthetic objectives desired by the planners. The varied heights and sizes of
the Sunnyside’s buildings were in violation of the existing residential zoning
ordinances. Specific heights and the massing of buildings, if the site had been
rezoned as residential, would have had to have been designed to meet those
ordinances and codes. Flexibility and creativity would have been lost.
The residential units themselves were a mixture
of two- and three- bedroom structures, two and three stories high. Most units
were exposed to the sun and fresh air on three and, in some layouts, four
sides. They were stacked “flats” which entered from the street side, and the
first-floor units had direct access to the courtyard and gardens inside the
block. The second-floor units were designed with a porch that extended the unit
and living space into the courtyard. The buildings had cellars or basements
that, because of the designer’s insistence, expanded the amount of personal
storage space for the residents.
The 1920s brought on one of the greatest housing
booms in U.S. history. The post-World War I depression and low numbers of homes
built during the war only exacerbated the problem. The 1920s saw great changes
in the character and look of America:
— Annual housing
production accelerated from 449,000 units in 1921 to 937,000 units in 1925.
— For the entire
period from 1921 to 1928 production totaled 6.3 million units, an annual
average of 785,000 units.
— The nonfarm
population increased 2.2 percent annually from 1921 to 1928.
— Immigration,
while somewhat curtailed, still continued with 707,000 immigrants arriving in
1924.
— Average household
size dropped from 4.20 to 4.00 persons.
— The average
nonfarm income rose 22 percent from 1920 to 1928.
— Automobile
ownership rose from 6.8 million in 1921 to 17.5 million in 1928.
The 1920s were not known for social reforms, but
concepts and advances in housing made prior to World War I at the state and
local level were extended and refined. These areas included building and
housing codes, city planning legislation, and zoning ordinances. The federal
government actively supported these actions. Local zoning was upheld by the
U.S. Supreme Court in the Euclid case, and other federal agencies
promoted the use of model statutes for city planning, zoning, and building
codes.
Sunnyside Gardens, far too small to be considered
a Garden City, was designed with the hope that it could create a setting in
which a “democratic community” could grow. It was, in fact, a study of what a
portion of an American Garden City could be. The City Housing Corporation
provided the land, buildings, and equipment that supported community gatherings
and activities. It encouraged a community association which was more effective
than the separate “block” organizations that had evolved in other
neighborhoods. When the difficult times of the Depression hit, this association
provided a cohesiveness for the residents not found outside Sunnyside.
Unfortunately, as time passed, and in the face of the economic problems facing
the tenants, the community could not withstand the slow erosion of its unity
and eventually lost much of the vitality that separated it from others. Even
the difficult times of the Depression, however, could not destroy the beauty of
Sunnyside Gardens.16
In 1927 the City Housing Corporation, after the
early success of Sunnyside Gardens, believed it was now time to fulfill its
dream and build a complete Garden City along the specific instructions of
Ebenezer Howard. The corporation, after looking at many potential sites,
settled on a location in New Jersey. It purchased two square miles of raw
farmland located in the Borough of Fairlawn, near Patterson, and called the new
community Radburn. The land lay on a branch of the Erie Railroad and was near a
new highway which was to lead to the new bridge being built across the Hudson
River into New York.
The planners, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright,
separated the site into three distinct “neighborhoods” of about eight thousand
to ten thousand people each — a goal that, when reached, would meet the size
specified by Howard for a Garden City, thirty thousand inhabitants. Even though
there would be a minimal greenbelt separating Radburn from other encroaching
developments, they believed that their community would be able to stand alone
and not be lost within the adjacent growth. Unfortunately, industry did not
find the limited industrial lands in Radburn as desirable as other areas of the
region. This eventually resulted in the village becoming a bedroom community to
New York City and northern New Jersey and not the job center it was hoped to
have been.
The concept of the “superblock,” championed
almost thirty years earlier by Raymond Unwin, at last found a home in Radburn.
These superblocks of housing were interconnected by streets and walks, all
leading to an extensive list of recreational, business and retail facilities.
The plan, according to Stein, was based on the concept of overlapping circles,
each a half-mile radius, with an elementary school fixing the center. The high
school would be placed where these overlapping circles met. Each neighborhood
would have its own shopping center, and the ultimate plan was to include
athletic fields, tennis courts, and an extensive system of parks and open-space
areas. The residential areas would be interconnected by overpasses and
underpasses to separate pedestrians and automobiles. These separation
structures worked so well that there was only one serious accident, a broken
arm, during the first twenty years of their use.
The radical change which began with Riverside and
continued with Radburn was the departure from the traditional grid lotting
patterns. The plans for Radburn developed a system of streets which used the
cul-de-sac and parking court as the primary residential device for clustering
homes. These clustered homes would face the court for direct access from the
street but also permit access to the interweaving open space that connected the
whole village. It was this dual frontage that set this community apart from the
usual street and alley suburban form of the times.
The homes, initially detached and then attached
as the market showed its acceptance for this new style, were away from the main
roads. Children, moving through the village, were not forced to cross major
streets on grade but used the under- and overpasses. Footpaths connected the
different residential clusters and most sidewalks were not directly attached to
the street. The planners understood, even in the late 1920s, the impact that
the automobile would have on the quality of the residential neighborhood. It
was their desire to reduce its affect on the residents. Benton MacKaye, one of
the Regional Planning Association’s founders, remarked, “Radburn was the first
town to be planned on the assumption that through motor traffic must be
completely separated from the communal aspects of the environment.” Maintaining
this goal was important to the both the safety as well as the beauty of the
community.17
A critical difference between Radburn and other
later new communities was that Radburn was not constrained by the more
restrictive zoning ordinances developed during the 1930s and 1940s. These
ordinances would have set minimums on lot sizes, densities, street widths, and
setbacks, all which would have challenged the innovative aspects of the plan
for Radburn. Even with all of its creativity, it still took considerable efforts
to convince the county assessor of the village’s merits.
These planning elements — the superblock, the
innovative street system, the common lands, the separation of pedestrians and
vehicular traffic, and the dual home frontage — all contributed to the orientation
of the village away from the street and toward the common parklands and
walkways. This concept was adopted by later twentieth-century planners as a
fundamental element of their new towns.
Unfortunately, Radburn was never completed, and
it did not become a Garden City. The first families moved into Radburn just
five months before the October 1929 economic collapse of Wall Street. The City
Housing Corporation, through no fault of its own, was forced into bankruptcy.
Only a small portion of the overall plan was completed, and when the
residential market finally came back after World War II, it was too late for
the plan to be resurrected. The dream for a complete new town, a Garden City
for thirty thousand people, was destroyed by the Depression. The events of that
time demonstrate how difficult it is to bring a new town to fruition. There are
so many unknowns: changes in the national economy, vagaries in the residential
market, and the high costs of building and maintaining the infrastructure. Yet
even the limited success of the Radburn neighborhood plan provided a
significant advance in community planning.
Clarence Stein reflected later that the keys to
successful housing developments for those of limited incomes were defined by
Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn:
1. Low cost land, adequate in
size and easily developed.
2. Transportation to take people
easily to working places in relatively short time.
3. Continuous large scale
building of complete sections with installations of utilities and streets
paralleling construction of buildings, the building to be followed immediately
by marketing and use.
4. Rapid development so as to
minimize carrying charges [of land and costs].
5. Simple standardized units.
6. Grouping [of structures] for
unity and variety of appearance and to add to the feeling of spaciousness given
by the open areas.
7. Limited interest rate on
capital investment.18
These seven fundamentals are no different today
than they were seventy years ago. Low cost land, or the financial basis for the
community, establishes the starting point for all later cost determinations.
Costs may increase depending on what the market may bear, but the starting
point has always been the initial investment in the cost of the land.
Transportation, specifically the railroad in the
1920s, and later the automobile, establishes the marketability of the property,
along with its affordability. Ease of access and nearness to job centers fix in
the minds of the buyer the relationship of the community to the region. Remote
and inaccessible locations had a difficult time becoming successful, regardless
of the price.
Continuous and rapid building of complete
neighborhoods almost goes hand in hand with the success of a community. The
economies of scale in a continuous construction schedule allow the builder to
buy greater quantities of materials at better prices and to employ workers in
an assembly-line fashion. This helps to meet the real demand for affordable
public housing in a timely manner. The competition is also forced to meet the
same goals and demands of the buyers. High production counts and high sales and
occupancies also reduce the carrying costs for the builder. These savings are
passed immediately on to the buyer. In a competitive market this can
significantly reduce the cost of the house.
Standardization in not always received in a
favorable light and there is a perception that it leads to monotony and lower
quality. The reverse is often the case. Standardization reduces the cost of
architectural design fees and engineering costs and is directly related to the
final cost of the building. The architect’s fee can result in one structure, a
custom design, or a thousand buildings, all of which share the same initial
fee. The economies of scale will win out. It is the talent of the architect
that determines the final design of the structure and there is seldom a direct
connection between the fee and the quality of the design.
The overall plan of the community is the most
critical component affecting the quality of the residential village or new
town. Placement of the roads and structures is paramount to the spaciousness,
ease of access, and circulation into and out of the community. It is this
interaction of the physical elements of the plan with the amenities which add
to the improved livability that new residents demand from the builder.
Finally, the cost of money, or the interest paid
on borrowed money throughout the process, is critical to ensure success. It is
not only the buyer of the house who pays interest on his home loan, but every
subcontractor pays some form of interest on the costs of goods, materials, and
services. If interest rates are high, the cost is magnified throughout the
construction process and results in the home price rising. Rising rates also
cast a pall on the future cost of the home and can reduce buyer demand. A lower
interest rate allows the home price to remain stable which permits the builder
to see farther into the future to develop a long-term marketing strategy.
The Radburn plan, according to Stein,
accomplished the important objectives of being safer, more orderly and
convenient. The community was spacious and peaceful and it brought people
physically closer to nature. What is more important, it cost less per unit than
other types of development with an equivalent amount of open space. Stein
suggested, as a final point, that conveniently placed and varied industry is an
essential requirement of a New Town. The timing of industrial development must
be synchronized with that of the building of homes and community development.19 It was
also about this time that the English phrase Garden City began to be
Americanized to New Town; unfortunately, more than name was lost in the
translation.
In the spring of 1933, four years after the
development of Radburn was stopped, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated. As
he held up his hand to swear to the American people his fealty as their new
President, more than ten million American workers were unemployed, great
numbers were homeless, and many were on the verge of losing their homes. That
same year, in Germany, Adolph Hitler was appointed chancellor by President von
Hindenburg.
One element of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the legacy
of which extends even into the twenty-first century, attempted to create jobs
through massive and extensive public works projects. Roosevelt succeeded in
creating jobs that were, for the most part, temporary and transitory. These
jobs only existed during the life of the government program and ended when the
need or the program disappeared. Two notable exceptions created jobs that were
both permanent and continuing. The greatest and biggest was the Tennessee
Valley Authority (TVA), and the second and smaller program was called the
“Greenbelt Towns.”
The
TVA, an extensive system of dams, lakes, and electric power production plants
along the Tennessee River, required new communities be built to house
construction workers and administrative staffs for these facilities. The
“satellite town,” as it would be known, is best seen in the village of Norris,
Tennessee. Designed as a community for the TVA personnel working on the Norris
Dam near Knoxville, it would never achieve its independence as a fully planned
and self-sustaining town. Planned by Tracy Augur, it follows many of the
Howard-Wright concepts and principles and is an excellent example of structure
and organizational innovation. Unfortunately, even though these TVA new towns
contributed to the early planning efforts of American Garden Cities, they were
remote and had little impact on existing regional conditions.
The basic ideas of circulation, land use, density
and social justice which evolved during the planning of Sunnyside Gardens and
Radburn became public policy within the concepts of the Greenbelt communities.
All government projects of that time needed justification, and therefore the
purposes for the Greenbelt communities were officially stated:
1. To give useful work to men on unemployment
relief.
2. To demonstrate in practice the soundness of
planning and operating towns according to certain Garden City principles.
3. To provide low-rent housing in healthful
surroundings, both physical and social, for families that are in the low-income
bracket.20
Unfortunately, these guiding principles were
short lived, flawed in concept, and overly costly for the benefits they
produced.
Four Greenbelt communities were authorized in
1935 under legislation passed as the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act and
National Industrial Recovery Act. The functions of the Greenbelt towns — which
included Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; Greendale, Wisconsin; and
Greenbrook, New Jersey — were prescribed through an executive order by the
president. The last of the four, Greenbrook, was dropped due to legal issues
and local objections which arose during the planning. Henry S. Churchill, a
leading architect and planner of the time, noted that it was “stopped by
injunction proceedings brought by the Liberty League at the behest of an irate
local magnate” who wanted “no wops or polacks” near his prerevolutionary manor.
The notion of the Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) movement, took shape under many
guises, long before the heady environmental days of the 1980s.21
Roosevelt placed Rexford Guy Tugwell, a member of
his inner circle, or “brain trust,” and a true believer in the Garden City
idea, in charge of the Resettlement Administration. Tugwell taught economics at
Columbia University when he was selected by Roosevelt as an assistant secretary
of agriculture and would coauthor the Agricultural Adjustment Act. It was under
his authority the Greenbelt Communities would be designed and built. Their
creation, due to the usual federal reorganizations, later found a home within
another agency formed within the Resettlement Administration, the Suburban
Resettlement Division.
Tugwell had been very interested in the concept
of the satellite city regardless of its social impacts. “My idea,” he wrote in
1935, “is to just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a
whole community and entice people into it. Then go back into the cities and
tear down whole slums and make parks of them.” The Suburban Resettlement Bureau
was set up in a mansion on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C.22
Tugwell rejected the concept of individualism and
believed that Americans shared a “cooperative mentality.” He proposed a
collectivist economic policy which he believed could be achieved through
planning and public control of the economy. It was his belief that the idea of
the Greenbelt Community was closer to the habits and aspirations of the
American people. He was blunt and, at times, tactless in the presentation of
his gospel and soon became a target of the press and a political liability for
Roosevelt. He left the administration after one year but steadfastly remained a
loyal supporter of the president. Tugwell’s important legacy focused on the
strength of suburban resettlement areas which he thought were more consistent
with the current trends in American growth. Tugwell initially proposed that
twenty-five Greenbelt towns be built close to existing urban employment, yet
only three were built. It was in this decade and during the worst economic time
the country had ever known to that point in its history that some of the best
and most creative talents in community and residential planning were hired and
brought to Washington to design and develop these communities.23
Henry Churchill wrote an article for The New
Republic in June 1936 announcing the concept of the Greenbelt town to the
general public. In it he presented the New Deal’s utopian idea on a level which
was foreign to most Americans:
It is a social experiment of the first magnitude,
and may well set new patterns not only for housing but for city government, for
these towns are to be self-governing, starting free of bonded debt, and without
the possibility of speculating in land or over expanding. No land or houses can
be sold; the ultimate sizes of the communities are definitely set. . . . these
towns must not be allowed to be defeated by real-estate foxery, double crossing
and indifference — the indifference of those most vitally concerned, the people
who will benefit by them, the landless and dispossessed, the constant victims
of peculative greed, all of us, that is.24
Ten years later in his book The City Is the
People, Churchill would continue to espouse his strong held belief in the
benevolence of government and the continued ownership of land by government:
“With municipal ownership of land . . . Possession [is] under long term lease,
‘due process’ could apply as well to the value of the lease and to the
structure as to land held in fee, brokers could still make money buying and
selling and leasing; the city’s fiscal problem could be much simplified and the
problem of ‘unearned increment’ [speculation] could be much more readily
adjusted.”
With the land owned by the municipality, long
term planning could be more easily accomplished because one body had complete
control of density, use distribution, and eventually the disposition of the
structures on the land. Churchill blatantly placed the belief before the
American public that “urban redevelopment purchase and subsidy should be
a first step towards municipal ownership of all the land.”25
Greenbelt, Maryland, is located approximately
thirteen miles northeast of the nation’s Capital. Now, sixty years later, the
community is engulfed within the growth that has occurred in and around
Washington, D.C., but in 1935 it was in a sparsely settled area of Prince
George’s County, Maryland. Purchased at the time by the Federal Government for
an average of ninety dollars per acre, the thirty-three hundred acres were
poor, overly farmed land with little agricultural value. Even today much of the
land purchased remains a buffer against the pressing growth in the area.
The design team, headed by town planner Hale
Walker and chief architects Douglas D. Ellington and R. J. Wadsworth, divided
the site into five residential “superblocks” that followed the hilly
topography. The community was served by two parallel crescent shaped loop roads
that wrap the dominant hill and provide good access to all areas of the
community. Each of the internal residential superblocks take their conceptual
lead from Sunnyside and Radburn. The clusters of buildings do not align with or
front on these main loop roads but face inward toward the open-space areas. The
residential clusters are separated by extensive greenways and open areas that
are interconnected by walkways and lineal parks. Overall, the plan is shaped
like a crescent moon that embraces the hill.
The majority of the buildings are four- to
eight-unit row houses. Two-family houses (duplexes) a few apartment units were
also built. The open areas are not as well defined as they were at Radburn,
and, even though the park areas are extensive, they do not create an intimate
and enclosed feeling; much of the open space just bleeds away. The primary
focus of the town is the community center, which is cradled in the inside arc
of the moon. Here are located the administrative offices, swimming center,
athletic fields, marketplace, schools, library, and entertainment center.
The first residents of Greenbelt moved into the
homes as they became available between October 1937 and the summer of 1938.
These residents were selected because of their incomes and existing housing
situation. They were also selected for their ability to pay the rents
established for these first units. The result of this selection process was a
very young population: fathers and mothers were typically under the age of
thirty and most had small children who were under school age.
Greenbelt went through two growth phases. The
first was the initial settlement by the Resettlement Administration, and the
second, about two years later, was during the “Defense” period, when the country
began to gear up for the possibility of war. The second growth spurt was
hastily built and detracts from the original construction. Greenbelt, by the
end of the 1940s, would house almost seventy-five hundred people.
Greenbelt, like Radburn, also failed to meet the
goals of Howard’s Garden City. There was no industry, no job center. This was
intentional on the part of the government planners, but it is unfortunate that,
even with the almost unlimited funding of the federal government, a sincere
effort at the creation of a total community was not attempted. Today, almost
seventy years later, most of the residents still commute into Washington.
The second of the Greenbelt communities,
Greenhills, was located eleven miles north of Cincinnati, Ohio, on a hilly and
wooded 5,930-acre property. The community’s plan placed the 676 residential
units around the community center and school complex. These facilities were
interconnected to the rest of the community by trails and greenways. Like
Greenbelt, the residential units were predominantly apartments and row houses.
Only twenty-four detached homes were built. Unlike Greenbelt, where most of the
units were oriented inward and surrounded by roads, Greenhills faced many of
its residential units outward toward the open lands of the property.
Considering the exposure of the property and the ridges, many of these homes
have direct views into open space. Again, the community harkens back to the
Garden City, with its surrounding and separating greenbelt, but fails to live up
to the dream of an integrated industrial, commercial, and residential village.
The community had a severe lack of good regional access, especially a railroad,
and no employment or industrial center. In some respects it is nothing more
than a well-designed subdivision.
The Resettlement Administration, in 1936,
purchased 3,510 acres eight miles southwest of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the
construction of the third Greenbelt community, Greendale. It was designed to
provide low-rent homes for families with modest incomes. The Milwaukee area was
considered for one of these communities because it had, since the early
twenties, a deep involvement in public housing programs that provided
single-family dwellings. In 1934 the city played host to an international tour
of housing experts, including Americans Henry Wright and Ernest J. Bohn and the
English Garden City planner Sir Raymond Unwin. Unwin expressed his opinion,
during the course of the conference, that “this tendency to move out [of the
city] is very healthy and I think there is infinite more danger in trying to
bolster up a desire to live in the city center than doing a little too much to
live on the [city’s] outside . . . To me, the desirable life is to live in a
one family house with a garden.” It is surprising to hear the “American Dream,”
even in the 1930s, being voiced by an Englishman.26
It was here, at Greendale, that planners Jacob
Crane and the noted landscape architect Elbert Peets, created the smallest yet,
considered by many, the best of the Greenbelt communities. Initially, only
about 385 acres were used to develop 750 potential residential units. The plan
included 370 group- or twin -type units and 380 single-family designs. Its size
and large greenbelt buffer allowed the community to grow within itself and
create a living village.
To assure the planners of the market for the
homes, residents in and around Milwaukee were surveyed extensively about their
incomes and housing requirements. Social amenities they would like see built
were listed and even the extent of commercial facilities they would patronize
were tabulated. Unfortunately, the surveys overlooked attitudes about living in
an isolated housing project. Elbert Peets later noted that, even with all the
survey data available to the planners, they usually relied on federal
guidelines and their own professional experience and not on the survey of
potential future residents.27
Greendale was initially subdivided into five
neighborhoods that surrounded the elementary school and town center. The
residential size and scale was smaller than the other Greenbelt towns. There
were only a few row houses. Most homes were singles and duplexes, which
reflected the preferences gathered in the surveys. Some neighborhoods were also
subdivided into conventional lots, with fewer interior properties held in
common ownership. Most streets and cul-de-sacs had less than twenty-four units
facing the street. These subneighborhoods were oriented to have direct access
to the open-space buffers and greenways. The streets were designed to direct
through-traffic away from the residential areas; only those autos having
business on a residential street or cul-de-sac should be within that quarter.
Pedestrian paths were also separated from the roadways and led to the school and
town administration building. Peets and Crane also included a recommendation
for a collective farm on the surrounding greenbelt with all the farmers
employed on a salary basis with a share of the profit.28
There was a fundamental flaw in the execution of
all the Greenbelt plans: the land was federally owned and their entire
marketing strategy was toward renters. It was not until 1949, after extensive
lobbying by the residents and twelve years after the start of Greendale that
Congress voted to sell it and the other Greenbelt communities to private
enterprise, with preferential purchase rights for nonprofit or limited-dividend
groups of either veterans or tenants. Even these meager efforts at “property
ownership” failed to maintain the communities. Eventually Greenbelt, Maryland
was sold to private developers, sliced into pieces by freeways, and its
physical integrity erased.
Greendale was able to maintain the integrity of
the original plan because a group of Milwaukee businessmen formed a public
spirited investment group to purchase most of the town. Later, in 1953, the
Milwaukee Community Development Corporation acquired an additional twenty-three
hundred acres of vacant land, the shopping center, and administration building.
The Public Housing Administration, the 1950s newest name for the Roosevelt
administration’s Federal Public Housing Authority, then sold Greendale’s homes
directly to their occupants. Greenhills, Ohio, went through similar
machinations, and eventually the remaining open lands were converted to county
parks, Army Corps of Engineers “flood control” districts, or they were sold for
development.29 The dreams of Tugwell, Churchill, and others
for the government control of land and property disappeared with the sale of
these developments.
Many reasons have been cited for the failure of
these greenbelt communities, but the one that few point to as the best reason
was their cost. When Greendale was stopped in the summer of 1937, almost 10.5
million dollars had been spent by the government. If allocated to the real
number of units built, 572, the cost per residential unit was $18,350. This was
more than five times the current price of a home in that market. Though the
village’s roads were paved with good intentions, the product fell far short of its
goal: affordable housing.
Greendale owed much of its planning concept to
Radburn. The pedestrian scale of the village, the central grouping of its
public buildings, and, most directly, its street plan all reflect the planning
of Radburn. The concept and execution of the short cul-de-sac, or court, is
similar in scope and length. Peets admitted that, in designing the village, he
drew from the layouts of Midwestern county seats, European Renaissance
marketplaces, and the reconstruction of Williamsburg, Virginia.30
One other element of planning sets Greendale
apart from Greenhills and Greenbelt: the form of housing proposed and built.
Most planners of the time agreed that attached housing, the row house, was the
only affordable type of housing for moderate incomes. Experts referred to a
detached house as “sentimental without much to recommend it.” At Greendale,
Elbert Peets disagreed. He felt that the detached house was far superior to the
traditional eastern style of the row house. He thought each house should stand
apart, with its own fenced yard around it. It was his merging of the concept of
the detached house with the defined cul-de-sac that set Greendale apart from
the other Greenbelt towns.31
All three — Greenbelt, Maryland; Greendale,
Wisconsin; and Greenhills, Ohio — were under the watchful guardianship of the
federal government. They were incomplete, and, eventually, adjacent development
precluded their expansion. Although the three communities had basic health and
safety services, some commercial facilities, and more parks than most
comparable communities, they lacked one fundamental common to most other small
towns: they were not operated and managed by the residents. Eventually, there
was a natural tendency by the residents not to care as much as they would if
they were in charge.
Fifteen years later Tugwell wrote, “We were
doomed to failure from the start.” He couldn’t accept the facts that these new
towns were failures due to conception or planning techniques; they were
failures of “character.” He continued to believe that the participants had
neither the commitment nor the self-discipline to make these communities work.
He blamed the press and what he called the “pulpit.” These New Deal towns
should have set the standard by which postwar communities were to be built, but
they resulted in a collection of squandered opportunities: indifferent
bureaucrats, exorbitant costs, and confusing goals. There was also a strange
atmosphere about the agency doing the planning. Resettlement, wrote Marquis W.
Childs of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was “a cozy conspiracy of good
will to remake America on a cleaner, truer, more secure pattern.” But Childs
also notes that the effort failed to take the American people into their
confidence. It was an attitude of “Trust me, we know what we’re doing.” But
those who were resettled by the process did not trust the government. The basic
concerns of Americans were self-interest and desire to prove themselves. The
needs and desires of the individual and their families could not find a
satisfying outlet in these self-contained communities.
The government and its planners failed to
consider the essential reason that contributed to the failure of these new
Greenbelt towns: the residents were transients and renters who lacked private
ownership, responsibility, and the power to control their own properties. The
social engineering beliefs of the New Deal planners neglected to give the
residents the control they needed in their daily lives. As such, these
communities floundered, and it would not be until the early 1950s that the
residents could buy the homes they lived in. It was only then that these
communities acquired a significant life and purpose of their own.
These communities were somewhat isolated and, as
the government proceeded, hardly anything was done to fold these new towns into
the fabric of the region. There was little if any involvement by local
governments and counties. These new communities were forced into the local
culture and were intended to house what many were to consider outsiders. The
need for a regional conscience, as voiced by Howard in his Garden Cities and
Mumford and others in Radburn, was never seen as a priority and may have been
seen by Washington as a nuisance or hindrance. As Clarence Stein, the architect
and patriarch of American new towns, later said: “You can’t plan a new town by
itself. It’s part of a regional problem. We have no administrative way to
develop regions.”32
It is safe to assume that Philip Klutznick was
aware of the problems that these Greenbelt towns had faced. They had been,
after numerous reorganizations, under the control of the Federal Public Housing
Authority, an agency he directed, since February 1942. With his knowledge of
the Greenbelt towns and their problems, it is understandable why Klutznick took
such a strong position on the two issues of community incorporation and
property management. In these two issues he was to prove himself prescient. In
a memorandum written in July 1946, soon after joining the team that was to build
Park Forest, he voiced his concerns about management of property acquisitions:
In our original concept of an integrated city, we
always envision the ownership and control of a band of surrounding land. It
seems foolhardy to add the value that our program will add to the surrounding
territory without participating therein. In our recent planning, we seem to
have lost sight of this objective. It is, of course, desirable to project a
complete utilization of the land which we presently have under control. However,
some thought should be given to methods and means to protect ourselves against
a huge enrichment of abutting owners without participation on our part in the
benefit.33
Klutznick also would require that the new
community be incorporated and form its own government as soon as possible. The
town must have legal standing in the region and obligate the residents to be
responsible for the future of the village; they would not be tenants on a
government-sponsored resettlement project.
In the United States between 1900 and 1939,
concurrently with the English Garden Cities, many new communities were being
planned and built. The Country Club District in Kansas City, with its seminal
shopping district, began modestly in 1907. Forest Hills Gardens on Long Island,
child of the philanthropic Russell Sage Foundation, started in 1909. By October
1910 Shaker Heights, just east of downtown Cleveland, had extended itself
across some six and a half miles of rolling land and had incorporated.
Many of the new towns were subsidized by
industrial growth and the need for employee housing. The Kohler Company moved
their factory into the countryside near Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and developed
Kohler Village. The Goodyear Company in Akron, Ohio, and the Norton Company in
Worcester, Massachusetts, also undertook suburban residential communities for
their workers. These new towns were similar to the mill towns of almost one
hundred years earlier, but there was a difference. Most privately built
communities were land ventures built to create housing not only for their
workers but for others in the community as well.
Lewis Mumford would define, in 1938, almost
exactly what would be required to meet the needs of new towns. Writing in his The
Culture of Cities he said that:
“. . . The garden city can take form, in other
words, only when our political and economic institutions are directed toward
regional rehabilitation. What is important to recognize is that these new
principles of urban development, as demonstrated by Sir Ebenezer Howard and his
associates, are universal ones: they point toward balanced urban communities
within balanced regions: on one hand, a wider diffusion of the instruments and
processes of a high human culture, and on the other the infusion into the city
of the life-sustaining environment and life-directed interests of the
countryside.”34
The experience that was gained in community
design in the United States prior to World War II formed the foundation for the
Park Forest village plan. Park Forest was the first real opportunity to pull
together the three basic ideas of modern postwar community planning. Noted by
Clarence Stein in his book, Toward New Towns for America, the three
fundamental concepts were the Garden City, the Radburn Idea and a new term
presented by Stein, the Neighborhood Unit. Each of these elements created a new
vernacular of design and planning which, when combined, formed the ideal of the
New Town.
Peets expanded this list to include the
“multicellular city” as the model for his planning. It created “a new texture
for the dispersion of the urban population, a texture which preserves much of
the countryside, conforms to the best principles of regional traffic
circulation, keeps land open for the gradual movement of industry, and groups
the people into neighborhoods having a stimulating autonomy in many social ways
without giving up the sound foundation of participation in the industrial and
economic life of the urban region.”35 Park
Forest was the child of these planning concepts and a direct blood relative of
these communities and the grandchild of Chicago’s own Riverside. It is also
possibly the only child of this parentage to mature and grow old.
The most obvious difference between the Greenbelt
communities and Park Forest was that Park Forest was built by private
developers with the intention to sell the housing to the residents. The most
important change from the planning of the prewar era was that Park Forest would
become an entity onto itself. It would be incorporated, and the residents would
control their fortunes, something the government did not grant to the residents
of the Greenbelt towns. Its conception and birth would be special.
