John Nolen and the Metropolitan Landscape

Jody Beck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135074883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

"A model city, the hope of democracy" – John Nolen on his suggested plans for Madison, Wisconsin

This book connects John Nolen's political and social visions with his design proposals by analyzing his extensive writings, personal correspondence and some of his most significant works. While John Nolen is best known as a city planner, he trained as a landscape architect and used the titles 'landscape architect' and 'city planner' interchangeably throughout his career. A prolific practitioner, he was engaged in nearly 400 projects throughout the United States between 1905 and 1936, including town planning, industrial housing, state and city parks, new towns and regional planning.

Focusing particularly on several projects central to Nolen's career including Madison (WI), Mariemont (OH), Venice (FL) and Penderlea (NC), Beck investigates the ideologies that underpinned Nolen's work. This is a rare look at a key figure in the development of 20th century American cities.

1

John Nolen in Context

John Nolen is an important figure in the history of American urban landscapes. He entered the landscape architecture program at Harvard in 1903 at the age of thirty-four and quickly became a notable figure in the development of cities and the professions responsible for their design. He practiced landscape architecture and city planning from 1905, when he graduated from Harvard, until his death in 1937 and was likely the first person to use “city planner” as a professional title. Over the course of his design career, Nolen was engaged in the design of a wide variety of projects – from suburbs for wealthy citizens of Charlotte to housing for laborers in Wilmington, from public parks in Madison to various state and regional planning efforts, from private estates to growing cities such as Kingsport and new towns such as Mariemont. He maintained a close lifelong friendship with Raymond Unwin and corresponded personally with such notable figures as Patrick Geddes, Werner Hegemann, and Richard Ely. He held many significant positions in professional organizations that focused on housing as well as city planning and landscape architecture and was appointed to a number of positions that supported the federal government’s efforts to address urban growth at national and regional scales in the 1930s.

An appraisal of the social and political assumptions that grounded Nolen’s work is valuable as landscape architecture continues to claim ever broader responsibilities for the city. In doing so it takes on work that is ever more deeply political in nature, whether the signature practitioners openly engage it or not. The reliance on method in design either sidesteps or denies political intention and it was just this reliance on method, this treating the city as a technical problem, that a century ago fostered the growth of city planning as a profession separate from landscape architecture and exemplified Nolen’s proposals for urban landscapes. Ironically, current landscape practitioners seem to be trying to resist the professional division between landscape architecture and city planning with the very mental machinery that led to the dominance of city planning in the first place.

As the city came to be regarded as a technical problem, the political implications of urban place-making did not disappear. They merely went unstated and therefore grew more powerful as they became the unconscious foundations of proposals for urban landscapes. In setting out the connections between Nolen’s intellectual life and his professional life, it will be important to pay attention to the assumptions underlying what he proposed as strictly technical solutions – to exhume the political implications that were buried in technical goals.

Nolen is particularly interesting because he made broad social claims for landscape architecture and city planning, explicitly connecting his political imagination to some of his more comprehensive projects. Madison, Wisconsin and Mariemont, Ohio will be discussed at length here, as well as his long-standing professional and personal commitment to reorganizing not only the metropolitan but also the rural landscape. Nolen concluded his report for Madison with the claim that it could become “a model city, the hope of democracy.” He subtitled his plan for Mariemont “An Interpretation of Modern City Planning Principles applied to a Small community to produce local Happiness: A National Exemplar.” He wrote to Hugh MacRae in 1933 that he felt the Farm City ideal was the only way out of the national economic difficulties of the period, and that there was no permanent solution that did not include “the building of farm communities that provide the necessary social and family satisfactions”, and then pledged that any work toward that end would take precedence over any other work in his office.¹ His long commitment to what he referred to as appropriate centralization is made clear by the fact that he had been one of five investors who underwrote the creation of the Pioneer Farm City Corporation in 1922.²

However, Nolen consistently described his work as one of expertise and seems to have fully believed that the distribution of populations, including segregation by class and race, was a technical problem. His treatment of social issues as technical problems is perhaps most poignantly evident in the project survey he sent to his client for Venice, Florida, in which he includes a question about racial segregation in the same section as a query about types of roads and sewer systems. Unfortunately, contemporary researchers continue to take him at his word. Robert Freestone claims that his planning reports were “unabashedly unphilosophical”.³ In contrast, implicit in this examination of the political and social underpinnings of Nolen’s design work is a criticism of his assumption that the planning and design of land is at base a problem that can be adequately addressed with technique. It should make evident to contemporary practitioners in the professions, who deal with the arrangement of land for human (and non-human) use, that their work is inherently and ultimately political and should be treated as such.

To understand Nolen’s work, one must understand the times in which he lived and practiced. The depth of change to American cities and the populations that lived in them which Nolen and others in city planning and landscape architecture were attempting to address in the early twentieth century must not be underestimated. Given the scale of these changes, perhaps a level of historical graciousness is in order. From the time Nolen entered the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1891 where he was first formally exposed to issues of municipal governance and city form until the end of his career in 1937, truly massive changes took place in technology and population.

Between 1890 and 1930 the population of the United States nearly doubled, and most of this population increase took place in cities. While in 1890 the percentage of people in the nation living in urban places was just over 35 per cent, by 1930 that percentage had risen to nearly 56 per cent – a total urban population increase of over 46 million people in only forty years. This increase in urban population by more than 300 per cent is reflected in the size and number of urban places in the United States: the number of those with a population greater than 2,500 more than doubled in these years. The greatest growth was in urban places with a population between 50,000 and 1,000,000. In 1890 there were 55 urban places in this category, in 1930 there were 186 – an increase of nearly 340 per cent.⁴

The intensity of this growth was heightened by the fact that much of this population increase was due to immigration. Between 1890 and 1930, over 22.5 million people immigrated to the United States, with over 8.2 million arriving between 1900 and 1910 alone.⁵ While the total percentage of the foreign-born population dropped over this period from just over 15 per cent to approximately 11 per cent, the percentage of the population that was either foreign born or born to at least one foreign parent increased from a little over 20 per cent to nearly 33 per cent.⁶ And most of this population was urban. In 1900, approximately two-thirds of the country’s immigrants lived in cities, by 1920 over three quarters did.⁷ The foreign-born inhabitants amounted to more than 30 percent of the population of the majority of significant cities in the country.⁸ These percentages decreased slowly but the percentage of immigrants and their children continued to be significant. In 1910 they accounted for more than 70 per cent of the population of New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo and Milwaukee, and between 50 per cent and 70 per cent of many more cities including San Francisco, Newark, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Cincinnati.⁹

Many of these immigrants found work in various types of industrial production. In 1890, about 8.3 million people in the nation were employed in agriculture and approximately 14.3 million in non-agricultural work – about 63 per cent of the total workforce. By 1930 agricultural employment had increased by 14 per cent to approximately 9.5 million people while non-agricultural employment had nearly doubled to over 28.5 million and accounted for 75 per cent of all employment.¹⁰

This aligns with the fact that the majority of urban centers fell within an industrial corridor that stretched from Boston and Philadelphia in the east to Milwaukee, Chicago and St Louis in the west. In 1920 this corridor contained nine of the ten largest cities.¹¹ Factory size increased in step with the size of both non-agricultural employment and urban populations. It was unusual in 1890 for a factory to employ more than 10,000 people, but by 1910 factory sizes of 15,000 were common. In 1920 the Ford and Goodyear factories employed more than 30,000 people and in 1924 the River Rouge facility hired over 68,000 people.¹²

Of course all of these people had to have homes and they increasingly expected what we now think of as basic municipal services such as clean water out of a tap and fire protection. While the single-family home dominated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the beginning of the twentieth century apartment houses were not unusual for middle and upper class urbanites – particularly in the larger cities – and tenements were the norm for the poor and working classes in most places. In 1900 the Lower East Side of New York reached a density of 900 people per acre.¹³ While this was one of the most extreme cases, the problem of overcrowding was endemic to the early twentieth century city. Housing and sanitary conditions in the tenements were deplorable and became the subject of much reform-oriented writing – the best known of which is Jacob Riis’s book How the Other Half Lives. After reading this and other texts such as Upton Sinclair’s fictional account of immigrants in Chicago, The Jungle, one fully understands why parks were thought of as relief valves for the discontent that could be generated in the tenement districts.

The country also saw significant labor unrest early in this period and the subsequent growth of labor unions. Both the Populist and Socialist parties held some degree of political power during this period, with the Socialist party having more influence in municipal and state governments and the Populist party having greater influence in national politics. The Haymarket Riots of 1886, only five years before Nolen entered Wharton, remains one of the most significant clashes between police and workers in United States history, and four men were hanged, not for direct responsibility in the bombing that killed eight policemen but for being anarchists and agitators. The Pullman Strike of 1894 was quelled with the use of federal troops and in the same year Coxey’s army marched on Washington DC. Strikes and riots were common occurrences well into the 1910s. However, by the time the United States entered the First World War, numerous state and local laws had been passed restricting the hours that could be worked in a day, limiting child labor, improving job site safety and requiring compensation for workers injured on the job.

Increased density was not only an issue in housing the working class. Density of office space and white-collar workers also increased dramatically as buildings grew taller. At the end of the nineteenth century, buildings of ten stories were considered tall. The fifty-five story Woolworth Building was built in New York in 1913, and subsequent skyscraper construction dramatically changed the number of office workers that could be imagined above a given piece of ground. As this possibility increased property values at the urban core, residential districts were demolished for ever greater concentrations of business, governmental and commercial functions.¹⁴

The largest physical change to the city that accommodated this increase in residential and employment density, however, was the revolution in transportation. Horse drawn cars had replaced much of the walking transportation by the 1880’s, but were already in the process of being replaced themselves. By the mid 1890s there were 626 miles of cable car track in twenty cities¹⁵ and the electrification of commuter rail lines began to expand rapidly. In 1890 there were 5,783 miles of electrified track. In 1902 there were 16,645 miles of track in service and by 1912 there were 30,438 miles. The number of passenger cars also increased significantly, more than doubling from 32,505 in 1890 to 76,162 in 1912. The number of passengers increased even more dramatically. In 1890 there were over 2 billion fares paid for travel by electric train. In 1912 that figure reached over 9.5 billion and it peaked at more than 12.5 billion trips in 1922.¹⁶ The automobile quickly overtook public transit however. In 1900 there were approximately 4,000 factory sales of automobiles and 8,000 vehicle registrations. In 1910 there were 181,000 sales and 468,000 registrations. By 1930 there were nearly 2.8 million sales and 26.7 million registrations.¹⁷

Not only did the geographic boundaries of many cities expand, but the list of services that municipal governments were expected to provide also expanded. These included not only the provision of serviceable streets, clean water and sewage lines but also firefighting services, effective policing, primary education, open libraries, public assistance in times of need and public health administration.¹⁸ Chicago’s meteoric rise is emblematic of the technological changes that came with urban expansion. The city grew from the most negligible of beginnings in 1830 to a c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• 1. John Nolen in Context
• 2. Seeking a Wider and More Useful Life
• 3. A Model City, the Hope of Democracy
• 4. Modern City Planning Principles and Local Happiness
• 5. Better Planning, Better Organization, Better Control
• 6. The Problem with Practical Arguments
• Bibliography
• Index