Let every citizen, not just the wealthy or privileged, be acquainted with grandeur.
In 1893, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a gleaming citadel shone forth upon the banks of Lake Michigan, a shining light in contrast to the grimy, sooty, industrial purgatory that was the rapidly expanding city of Chicago. Millions of visitors from around the world came to gawk at the inventions and curiosities on display, from the world’s first Ferris wheel and moving walkways to Quaker Oats and Chicago hot dogs.
Fantastically scaled Beaux Arts and neoclassical structures served as the exhibition halls at the fair. An Agricultural Building, Transportation Building, and Electricity Building were among the immense structures showing off the latest and greatest in modern technology. The entire compound was planned to create the most splendorous effect — the promenades, the waterways, the gates, and the grand halls were all ordered to one master plan. The completed project was nicknamed “the White City” for the extensive amount of white marble used on the façades of the massive structures.
The grandeur of the place, marked with monumental symmetry and Gilded Age splendor, sparked the imaginations of the fair’s visitors, including the American artists and architects in attendance who were eager to formulate a new style of architecture unique to the American city. This desire ushered in a new aesthetic movement in American architecture, the City Beautiful movement.
The philosophy of the movement is fairly simple: that beauty in the urban landscape is essential to the public welfare. Followers of the City Beautiful ideal believed that grand, monumental structures, intentionally incorporated into a planned urban landscape, serve to inspire civic virtue and unite the imagination of the community.
The most iconic product of the City Beautiful movement is certainly the National Mall in Washington, D.C. From the city’s inception as the nation’s capital, its overall design was important to the Founding Fathers, representing a pinnacle of national pride. President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson commissioned French engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design a grand new city from the ground up in 1791. After a century of expansion and change, however, the capital had outgrown L’Enfant’s original plan and was in dire need of a renewal.
Architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who were all integral to the creation of Chicago’s “White City,” were among those commissioned to revive the heart of the capital. Stemming from the McMillan Plan (1901–2), which was essentially the first congressional plan to regulate aesthetics, the National Mall was transformed into the iconic lawn Americans are familiar with today. The tree-lined walkways, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Monument all emerged from this City Beautiful renewal. By maintaining and expounding on L’Enfant’s plans for the city, the McMillan Plan proved the tenets of the City Beautiful movement — that the value and power of civic beauty cannot be underestimated. Unlike the buildings of the Chicago World’s Fair, which were thrown up in a hurry to accommodate the spectacle, the memorials of the National Mall were built to last and, with the proper care and maintenance, serve as inspiration for generation after generation.
The City Beautiful movement recognized that beautiful public spaces create an arena for social cohesion like no other, for beauty itself is an inexhaustible resource, fully available to all who place themselves in its way. As the turn of the 20th century was a time especially marked by class divisions, the City Beautiful movement allowed for every citizen, not just the wealthy or privileged, to be acquainted with grandeur. The heralds of City Beautiful ideology sought to enrich the everyday aspects of urban life, by endowing avenues, train stations, and post offices with a certain splendor, reminding onlookers of America’s great potential and of their duty to strive toward it.
The City Beautiful movement stretched far beyond the nation’s capital. In New York City, Grand Central Terminal is a child of this movement, along with the New York Public Library and the Flatiron Building. Across the nation, the Cultural Center Historic District of Detroit, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, the San Antonio River Walk, and the Cleveland Mall are some of the urban plans that owe their inception directly to City Beautiful ideas.
While conservatives tend to recoil from the words “urban planning,” City Beautiful brought intelligent design to urban landscapes that desperately needed it, and, 100 years down the line, we are certainly better off for it. There is a danger in sacrificing urban coherence for unrestrained freedom of development. The strange juxtapositions found in Houston, a city lacking nearly all zoning regulations, speak to this. Amid the 600 square miles of urban sprawl, one can stumble upon a crematorium nestled into a quiet neighborhood street, or a skyscraper jutting out of someone’s backyard. While the libertarian might rejoice in such chaos, the conservative must question what kind of city are we leaving behind for posterity.
Although the City Beautiful movement markedly maintained a Beaux Arts style (the architectural fashion that was popular at the time), the style of the movement was not as important as the ageless idea behind it. Public structures certainly don’t have to be marbled, pillared, and vaulted to enrich the surrounding urban landscape and instill within citizens a deep respect for their home. For, besides ushering in a series of grand building projects that came to define the heart of several American cities, the core idea behind the City Beautiful movement — that beauty in the urban landscape ought to be sought and cherished as a matter of the public good — is the same idea that awakened a conscientiousness about the preservation of the structures, streets, and squares that contribute to the architectural character and coherence of American cities.
Beautiful old buildings contribute an unquantifiable, aesthetic value to the communities in which they reside (although they often also add considerable real-estate value to their neighborhood and help heighten the success rate of local businesses). In order for this value to endure and compound over time, communities must be resilient to the changes wrought by wrecking balls. Each generation must realize the importance of preserving the beautiful structures that make their cities a more enriching and habitable place to live, as well as the importance of creating new structures that complement and expand on the aesthetic value already manifest.
New York is a case study. There is a direct correlation between the state of the city’s public spaces and the state of the city’s overall health. While the city is known for its glorious parks, such as Central Park, Washington Square, and the newly developed High Line, many smaller, more local spaces have fallen into disrepair.
According to recent findings by a New York City–based think tank, the Center for an Urban Future (CUF), insufficient park maintenance has led to the decay and the costly collapse of parks infrastructure. With over 100 million visitors every year, New York City’s park system has a history of woeful neglect — the estimated cost to bring the system up to a basic state of good repair is a whopping $5.8 billion over the next decade.
As the report delineates, the parks department consistently receives funding that covers only a minute fraction of its needs and that is one of the lowest shares of any city agency.
Where the city has failed to act, the private sector has stepped in. The High Line is a good example of a new park project that provides a green, serene space in the midst of steel and concrete hustle, an oasis from the grime and grind. The project significantly upped the real-estate value of adjacent buildings and ushered in a new wave of development, with over 40 new building projects taking shape in the neighborhood since 2011.
Even though the city is raking in a greater pile of real-estate and sales tax from the rejuvenated area, the cost of the High Line project itself was fronted almost entirely by donors, and maintenance continues to be covered by donors. The group behind the project, Friends of the High Line, raises nearly 100 percent of the High Line’s annual budget. And while the space is owned by the City of New York, the High Line is generally programmed, maintained, and operated by the Friends of the High Line. The beautification of the space is really a testament to the power of the private sector, of citizens who rally in an effort to improve their neighborhood, and of the donors who follow suit.
Grassroots organizations such as the Friends of the High Line are, more and more, taking on the work of maintaining and renewing the urban landscape in their respective cities and towns. A noble cause — and one that is conservative to the core. Whether found on the tree-lined city square or in the old courthouse on Main Street, the beauty we inherit and the beauty we can give is a wonderful gift. Let us not fall apathetic toward it.