There is no one thing in city planning that stands out conspicuously today as the crowning achievement of its purpose. City planning is thus not a finished ideal, but one capable of, and exhibiting, indefinite expansion. In fact, city planning is in its infancy in this country, but its promoters are enthusiasts with a developing sense of values and they are meeting an increasing response among the people for whose interest they are working.
Every movement for civic art has been an attempt to make the contrast “less disgraceful between the fields where the beasts live and the streets where men live,” in the words of William Morris.
The movement for municipal beauty has been the strongest phase of city planning up to the present time and the element that has appealed to women’s civic leagues in their early days very strongly. It is a most legitimate object of civic endeavor and it is comparatively easy of accomplishment where it touches no vital economic interests. “The City Beautiful” only a short time ago was a city with a few wide boulevards, a civic center, handsome parkways with “Keep Off the Grass” signs in abundance, statues in public squares, public fountains, and public buildings with mural decorations. Alleys and indecent river-front tenements, filthy and narrow side streets, were ignored in the more ostentatious display of mere ornamentation and no provision was made for playgrounds and well-located schools and social centers.
City Planning
The new spirit is rapidly permeating conferences on city planning, however, with an insistence on the elimination of plague spots and unsightly congestion as well as on the creation of boulevards and civic centers. This new spirit is being instilled by women as well as by men. Jane Addams’ “The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets” has helped arouse the feeling that the children are the first to be considered in city plans. Women who have worked for shade trees so extensively have not been unmindful of the fact that mothers have to push baby carriages up and down through the hot sun, oftentimes to the detriment of both mother and child, and they have taught us that mothers should be considered in city plans. In regulating movies women have learned that men are ready to go with their families to a five-cent show in preference to the saloon alone, that the movie has made real inroads upon the saloon, and so they have taught that men should be included in city plans. Thus city planning is becoming of decided human interest and is no longer merely a cultural or artistic recreation.
City planning moreover has an economic value even when it is confined to beauty. Mr. J. Horace McFarland elucidated this point at the annual meeting of the American Federation of Arts in Washington. He said: “The ripened civic art of Europe is nowhere better shown than in its water-fronts and the water approaches. Consider, for instance, Stockholm, with the Royal Museum, the Houses of Parliament, the Royal Palace, and the greatest hotels and theaters, all grouped along that arm of Lake Mälar which gives access to the Baltic. Europeans develop their water-fronts in this way because they have learned the money and social values of such things. We spoil all such advantages and ‘when we look at the approaches to such cities as Hoboken, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Camden, and realize that the residents of these prosperous communities take the money made in making ugly their water-fronts with which to travel abroad to see beautiful water-fronts, we are confronted with a most incongruous and uncommercial point of view.’ One hundred and seventy millions of dollars of American money is spent in Paris every year, mainly because Paris is beautiful. Ex-Mayor McClellan has well said that healthy, wealthy and wise cities excite pride, ‘but it is the city beautiful which retains the love of her people.’... Our best efforts have on the whole been put into our cemeteries. We are shy on parks, but strong on cemeteries, in careless, illogical America.”
That women in some cases have concentrated their local activities on cemeteries is undeniable. Story after story comes in with pride of the care of a town burial ground, its beautification, its glorification. In one instance, a woman’s organization bought a plot for the town cemetery, improved it with their bazaar money and then presented it to the town. This too has been a legitimate interest on the part of women as it has just been a case again of caring for loved ones. It is an easy transition, fortunately, from caring for loved ones who have gone on ahead to caring for those who remain, and that the step is taken is illustrated by the testimony of club after club, league after league, that when they had beautified the cemetery, they began to beautify the school grounds, and then the library, and strange to say, last of all the homes of the people.
From small and circumscribed beginnings women have advanced to larger ideals—just as men have. In the city planning movement, of which we hear so much today and which is so ably forwarded by the National Conference on City Planning, women are to be found working side by side with the men. They are giving serious attention to specific elements of the city plan, like parks, playgrounds, housing, billboards, street cleaning, waste disposal, social centers, and so on; and they are helping to coördinate all of these elements in a more comprehensive way by serving on commissions and committees, by making surveys, by preparing lectures, articles, and books, and by aiding in the organization of public exhibitions, designed to show in graphic form the needs of cities and possible definite methods of improvement.
Women have hailed with pleasure the new slogan “Know Your City,” which means that when it is properly known constructive work for improvement will inevitably set in. A good way to know one’s city is to have a survey made of it. As we have seen in the chapter on housing reform, women have often organized and made local surveys. In many cities, like Pittsburgh, Scranton, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, and Cleveland, women helped in working out special features of the surveys.