mmm jggjfew ■iHijSii. ferWfc zl:]: Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/moderncivicartor00robi_0 BY CHARLES MULFORD ROBINSON Modern Civic Art. The City Made Beautiful Octavo. Third Revised Edition. With 30 Full-page Illustrations. (By Mail, $3.25) Net, $3.00 The Improvement of Towns and Cities; or, The Practical Basis of Civic ^Esthetics. Cr. 8vo. Sixth Printing. (By Mail, $1.35) Net, $1.25 Decoration over an Entrance to the Doges’ Palace in Venice i The doge kneels before the lion of St. Mark in token that he is servant, not master, of the State. I sdbIb*! eagoQ arli ol aanBiinH nn lavo riqiJBiopa’Q abmaV ni j£f|j /ssioj ni shcM J8 io rioii srfi siotetf gbsni sgob tdT sifs;l8 adl Jo ,*i9i8£rn jon gi arf Modern Civic Art OR THE CITY MADE BEAUTIFUL CHARLES MULFORD ROBINSON AUTHOR OF ‘‘the improvement of towns and cities ” Third Edition With Illustrations G, P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON Ubc Itnicfeerbocher press Copyright^ 1903 BY CHARLES MULFORD ROBINSON U'foe ftmcfeerfeoclfeer TfUw U«rt PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. HAT there has been a call for a new edition of this volume may be understood as meaning much more than the success of a book. It stands for the progress of the Cause for the further- ance of which the book came into existence. Nothing, indeed, has been more remarkable than the growth of the “civic improvement” movement during the last few years. There must be a strong feeling on the part of an individual before he sets about the organisation of a society to further his pur- pose ; and not until his earnestness has spread to a good many others can he succeed in establishing such an association, if it is to call upon its members for money, work, and self-sacrifice. And yet up- wards of twelve hundred local “improvement” so- cieties in the United States alone are now recorded. They range from the club in that village which has wisely substituted a wish to be attractive and beauti- ful for the old vain dream of bigness, to a society in one of the second-class cities that has 3000 mem- bers. The clubs have begun to come into touch with one another through national organisations ; and they are, in a wish to learn, reaching beyond iv preface to the Seconb iCbitton. their own neighbourhood and even beyond their own country. Cities of like size and class, wherever they are, have similar problems. New York learns some- thing from Paris, and Paris from New York. The illustrations in this volume, of which not one is with- out general pertinence, happen to be drawn from five different nations, and in the United States they range from the Eastern coast to the new North-west. It is because suggestion can be thus widely and help- fully drawn, that a literature of the subject is pos- sible, and is called for, and can be international. The best phase of the movement is not, however, its extent, nor even its vigour and growing efficiency, but the dependence it puts on the ideal. By select- ing here and selecting there, the dreamed “City Beautiful ” becomes a reality, is made a tangible goal. Nobody now laughs it to scorn. Boards of Trade work for it ; Chambers of Commerce appoint com- missions to consider the local development ; to do one’s part, in association or individually by gifts, to bring nearer its consummation, has become the test of public spirit and philanthropy ; corporations ac- knowledge its claim to consideration, and politicians have respect for the popular faith in it. It is the one definite civic ideal now before the world. When, only three years ago, the author published The Improvement of Towns and Cities, no one had dreamed of making a book out of the records of scat- tered and still largely sporadic efforts for improving the aspect of cities and towns, and the requirement preface to tbe Seconb Ebition. V was for a small volume that should be a practical handbook for general use by those who were working for town and village improvement. This manual came into larger use than had been antici- pated, and the phrase Modern Civic Art, which would not at the outset have been understood, was chosen as the natural title for a more comprehensive work devoted chiefly to the artistic side of the sub- ject. The army of workers for bettering material conditions in community life had become conscious of its own worth and was beginning to realise its power for influence. A new, or at least a revived, ideal had found itself. Not merely the philanthropic, “the good and poor,” but the rich and cultured were giv- ing thought to the matter. The current periodicals, quick to note the trend of popular thought, became full of the subject ; and their proof of the facility with which it can be illustrated has created the demand that the new edition of Modern Civic Art should contain appropriate designs. Regarding the book itself, the author will avail himself of this opportunity to say only a word. The first two chapters have been occasionally misunder- stood. It has been sometimes forgotten that they form only the “ Introduction,” and that so little can the book and its exposition be judged from them that, as far as it is concerned, the reader could omit them. Of course, the author sincerely hopes that he will not. They have their purpose and were written to be read; but because, necessarily, they speak of the subject as vi preface to tbe Second jEMtion. a whole somewhat abstractly, it is not to be con- cluded that the volume lacks in concreteness and definiteness. For the rest, he would express the warmest gratitude for the extreme cordiality, kind- ness, and appreciation extended to him by both reviewers and public. C. M. R. September, 1904. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I. — A New Day for Cities .... II. — What Civic Art Is .... THE CITY’S FOCAL POINTS III. — The Water Approach .... IV. — The Land Approach .... V. — The Administrative Centre . IN THE BUSINESS DISTRICT VI. — The Street Plan of the Business District VII. — Architecture in the Business District . VIII. — The Furnishings of the Street IX. — Adorning with Fountains and Sculpture IN THE RESIDENTIAL SECTIONS X. — Street Plotting among the Homes XI. — On Great Avenues .... XII. — On Minor Residential Streets XIII. — Among the Tenements .... PAG® 3 . 2 4 ps . 39 • 59 . 8i . ioi . 123 . 138 . 166 . 187 . 206 . 228 . 245 Vll viii Contents THE CITY AT LARGE CHAPTER PAGE XIV. — Comprehensive Planning 271 XV. — Open Spaces ....... 287 XVI. —Parkways 307 XVII. — Distribution and Location of Parks . . .321 XVIII. — Park Development 337 XIX. — Temporary and Occasional Decoration . . 355 Index 377 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Decoration over an Entrance to the Doges’ Paiace in Venice Frontispiece The doge kneels before the lion of St. Mark in token that he is servant, not master, of the State. St. Paul’s, London, from the Thames . . .14 The Arc de Triomphe, Paris ..... 24 Embankment and Bridge, Place de la Duchesse Anne, Nantes, France 38 The Thames Embankment, London, at Somerset House . ...... 50 St. Pancras Station, London 66 A familiar type of European station in which a hotel, screen- ing the train-shed, disguises the true significance of the building. Only the clock tower suggests possible connection with a railroad. A Civic Centre in Berlin 68 By courtesy of the Art Commission of the City of New York. The buildings from left to right are: The Altes Museum, the new Cathedral with the Lustgarten before it, the royal palace, and the Kaiser Wilhelm I. Memorial. The monu- mental bridge in the foreground is the Schloss Briicke, over the Spree. Note the imposing effect of grouping the structures. Railroad Station at Waban, Mass 74 On the Boston and Albany Railroad. A suburban station in a parklike setting. Railroad Station at Wellesley Farms, Mass. . . 88 On the Boston and Albany Railroad. IX X iHlustratfons PAGE Sir Christopher Wren’s Plan for Rebuilding London after the Great Fire in 1 66 6 no A Bit of New York, at Bowling Green . . . 124 Height as the most striking characteristic of modern com- mercial building. Isle of Safety and Artistic Electrolier . . . .148 Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, New York. This construction was a result of the Municipal Art Society’s competition. The Fontaine Moliere, Paris 170 This has been placed in the acute angle formed at the build- ing line by converging streets, a point of great civic significance but one that, because of its slight commercial value, is often an eyesore. The Sieges Allee, Berlin 182 Manning Boulevard, Albany, N. Y. . . . . 198 Suggesting the charm of the curving street. The Champs Elysees, Paris . . . . .218 A Minor Residential Street 236 The planting on the house lawns is, as commonly, too “ spotty ” ; but the street’s dependence on private property for its beauty is well illustrated Seward Park, New York 262 This open space in a tenement district has been elaborately developed as a playground. It would be better without the fence. Gate to the “ Yard ” at Harvard .... 278 Place de la Republique, Paris 288 Trafalgar Square, London 296 The Square and the Place Darcy, Dijon, France . 300 Hudson Park, New York ...... 306 This square illustrates an unusual and interesting develop- ment, but one lacking relation to the streets it should adorn. The fencing of the greensward here also is to be regretted. Illustrations XI Chart Showing the Public Reservations in the Metro- politan District of Boston Note how the outlying parks are connected with the areas of densest population by means of parkways. The Sumac Drive in the Park and Pleasure Drive Association’s Holdings, Madison, Wis. A suggestion of how outlying parks that have been developed in the natural style can be suitably connected. View in Seneca Park, East, Rochester, N. Y. Note the invitation to loiter and enjoy the view. Chart Showing the Distribution of Public Reservations in and about Metropolitan London This may be compared with the chart showing the reserva- tions in metropolitan Boston, where a “system” has been developed. The Glen in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, Minn. In Genesee Valley Park, Rochester, N. Y. “ The park is the cathedral of the modern city.” Broad Street, Philadelphia, Temporarily Transformed into a “Court of Honour” for a Pageant PAGE 310 314 322 334 338 344 366 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. A NEW DAY FOR CITIES. ''T'' HERE is a promise of the dawn of a new day. ; The darkness rolls away, and the buildings i that had been shadows stand forth distinctly in the gray air. The tall facades glow as the sun rises; their windows shine as topaz; their pennants of steam, tugging tlutteringly from high chimneys, are changed to silvery plumes. Whatever was dingy, coarse, and Ugly, is either transformed or hidden in shadow. The streets, bathed in the fresh morning light, fairly sparkle, their pavements from upper windows appearing smooth and clean. There seems to be a new city for the work of the new day. There is more than even the transformation that Nero boasted he had made in Rome, for night closed here on a city of brick, stone, and steel; but the morning finds it better than gold. Sleep had come to weary brains and hearts, and had closed eyes tired of dreariness and monotony; the day finds faculties alert and vigorous; and eyes are opening 4 fIDobern Civic Hrt. upon beauty. As when the heavens rolled away and St. John beheld the new Jerusalem, so a vision of a new London, a new Washington, Chicago, or New York breaks with the morning's sunshine upon the degradation, discomfort, and baseness of modern city life. There are born a new dream and a new hope. And of such is the impulse to civic art. Cities grow in splendour. There are new stand- ards of beauty and dignity for towns. The science of modern city-making is being formally laid down as its principles are discovered and its rules enun- ciated. For the true ideal that spurs to useful en- deavour must be that which is based on study and facts. But as the dawn transforms only real cities, so can this “new day '' come only when the town of familiar experience has purposed to become what it should be and might be. In one place this may be soon, in another late ; in one place there is already long progress toward it, in another there are only the yearnings and painful beginnings. Yet every- where a desire to some extent is present ; often there are earnest efforts to attain to the beautiful in city- making; and there is proud remembrance of such urban glory as the past may claim. Out of this irregular progress a law appears of municipal evolution. Though the development be slow and tedious, it is sure; and if the course be marked, the law noted, the vision at the end described, doubtless something will have been done to hasten an advance that was never so swift as now, however H flew 3Da? for Cities. 5 laborious to the impatient the process seems. Con- sidered merely as a morning picture, the new day for cities has its earliest promise in the tower and steeple gleaming in the sunlight. Its later social pledge is in the light that, glancing on the dew- bathed flowers and grass of the people’s parks, studs them with jewels as sparkling and as precious to a city as were the gems in the prophet’s vision of the new Jerusalem. Again, we see it in the beams that, falling athwart the open space, change it to a bright oasis whither pallid multitudes flock from dreary homes, and where little children play, the sun upon their hair. Progress toward a better day for cities owes more than might be guessed to the impetus of dream and hope and high resolve. These furnish the inspira- tion to practical achievements. Merely as a measure of the advance, however, the latter alone have first to be considered. Observe how much the modern city is indebted not merely for comfort but for dig- nity and beauty to recent discovery and invention. The dark streets through which the pedestrian form- erly made at night an uncertain way, with his indi- vidual lantern, now glow at midnight as at noon. The refuse once poured from upper windows to the streets, in proudest capitals, flows now in subter- ranean streams, unknown. The pavement, that at best in other days was a racking way of cobble- stones, is now made hard and smooth. Streets, once so crowded by enclosing city walls as even irt 6 flfrobern Civic Hrt. capitals of empires to be narrow, treeless slits be- tween the buildings, now — alike in the humblest and most thronged communities — widen broadly, per- mitting the traffic to move with ease, and still leave room for grass and trees, and ever and again for flowers. Water is had in abundance to clean the pavements and lay the dust. The mesh of wires that inventions brought with them as a temporary urban evil are now assembling in orderly strands beneath the ground; and there is promise that the smoke, which has hung in a dark cloud above the modern industrial community, is shortly to be dissi- pated by the ingenuity at work upon the problem. All these are powerful factors. They lay a strong and suitable foundation upon which a superstructure of civic art may be consistently built up. If, indeed, our cities be spacious, well paved, and clean, with the touch of God’s fingers in open space, park, and street, to what mingling of comfort and nobility may there not be aspiration in these days of municipal resource and power? From such a foundation it must, inevitably, be possible to build statelier cities than ever before. So arises modern civic art. Of all the prerequisites to this progress the most potent is the extension of cities over a greater area. That the normal city can increase vastly in popula- tion, with no proportionate increase in congestion, is a condition of supreme importance. This is the aid of rapid-transit to the cause of city beauty. We are not even yet realising fully what it is to mean, a Iflew Da? for Cities. 7 for it has brought with it at first a financial and con- structive embarrassment in the greater burden of public property to be cared for, extending and multi- plying sparsely built-up streets that have to be paved, lighted, provided with sewers and water, and guarded from crime and fire. And this embarrass- ment is one which many cities have gone half-way to meet through the extravagant extension of their boundaries, so that it has early had an undue pro- portion of the emphasis. But the net advantage of widening the area available for city expansion re- mains very great. Therein rests the solution of many problems of city development that have to be solved before the new science of city-making can advance any claim to thoroughness in results ; and if we have hastily gone half-way to meet the one great disadvantage, striving first of all to overcome that, we already know the worst and may expect in the fast coming years to reap a profit which will then appear to be almost wholly net . 1 And what is this profit to be ? Of its immediate and superficial benefit, in such broadening of thor- 1 In the United States where, through multiplicity of examples, the first results of the extension of city boundaries can be most conveniently observed, a newspaper took a census at the opening of the twentieth century of “the greatest needs ” of a score of the larger and older cities. Overwhelmingly they were : (i) pave- ments ; (2) extension of water- and sewer-pipes ; (3) additional water supply. Such practical wants in old and rich communities would have been inexcusable, and undoubtedly of nothing like this predominance, had not the city’s area been recently extended greatly in every case. The census was taken in a period of national prosperity, and as this was prolonged great urban expenditures were undertaken to supply the wants. A compilation made by the Municipal Journal two years later put the anticipated expenditures for municipal improvements in that one year in the United States at upwards of a billion dollars. This included $24,000,000 by New 8 ffoobern Civic Hrt. oughfares that there is room upon them not only for the traffic but for the soft and brightening touch of nature, there has been already a suggestion. The change can be better appreciated in the old world than in the new, for there the razing of the walls marks distinctly the transition from the ancient method of city-building to the modern. Within a stone’s throw we may find the old, narrow, treeless chasms that did for streets, and the broad new boulevards with trees and turf. But without the provision of some means of urban transit that should be cheap, swift, and frequent, this razing of the con- fining walls could have accomplished little. Hap- pily, however, one promptly followed the other. The town, having been given the opportunity to expand, found the means to do so. Thenceforth, in the United States, and wherever the self-confident commerce of late years has built new cities, the towns have begun expansively. The advantage, however, far exceeds an outward and purely aesthetic gain. It promises to check that sad phase of urban development in which, heretofore, York, mainly for subways, bridges, paving, and water ; about $20,000,000 by Philadelphia, mainly for the improvement of the water system ; and, as an example of the effort by smaller cities, the laying of at least one hundred thousand square yards of paving in St. Paul. These estimates, it should be remembered, were simply on work to be actually done within the twelve months. The commitments for the future represented a far greater sum. In New York, for instance, the rapid-transit tunnel alone was to involve a total cost of $15,000,000. To this more than half a dozen millions were to be added by the tunnel under the East River. Three new bridges, on which work was in progress, were expected to add $60,000,000— a total in these items of more than a hundred millions. Then there were bridges over the Harlem, development of the Bronx district, new street openings, paving, etc., to a very great amount. Clearly, the new obligations were courageously attacked. a IRew 2>a? for Cities. 9 the increase of population has meant a closer huddling of the poor. For this there could have been no relief while city walls lasted; it must have gone from bad to worse and have made in the misery of the poor a horrible mockery of the efforts for city beauty; and these walls, we need to remind our- selves, did not have to be of stone. Much more relentless than embattlements of masonry are those gateless walls that tirnq and space throw round about a city. Until rapid-transit lowered these, municipal art held out no promise to the poor. The tenement we have with us yet, and it seems too much to hope that we shall ever be without it; but it may be an improved tenement, with a playground for the children very near it and a lovely park not far away. Thanks to rapid-transit, modern civic art can now hope to banish “ the slum,” thus to redeem the tenement, and to make its own conquests thorough. For the expansion of the town resultant from good transit facilities acts in two ways upon the slum. It lessens the pressure from within by making possible the removal of some of the surplus pop- ulation; it lessens the pressure from without by permitting the increase of the town’s accommodation to be by concentric rings. What this means to the community can hardly be appreciated in the bare statement; but the greatest of our humanitarian op- portunities lies within it. That, now, the civic renaissance to which we tend must include an entirely new art of city-making is IO flDobern Civic Art. clear from the character of the factors which have been already considered. Not one of them was operative in the most superb city of ancient times. The opportunities that are offered by recent inven- tion and discovery, the levelling of restricting city walls with the consequent lessening of pressure within the town, an outward movement from the centre for the express purpose of improving industrial surroundings — so robbing the great rise of modern industry of its menace to civic aesthetics, all this is a recent development. It is a happy adjustment to new conditions, seeming to make possible the creation of a city beautiful on lines that are not antagonistic to any development which may be essential to modem urban greatness, and on lines also that should be more permanent and splendid than any civic creation of the past, if the science of city-building be care- fully evolved and adhered to. But there remains one factor more. To describe an art movement in the industrial phraseology of the day, it is as if we had a clear track for our locomotive and an engineer eager to draw the throttle. We need only the steam. If this be conceived of as the power derived from wealth, the gauge should now be marking an extremely high pressure. We are rich enough to-day, not in the United States alone, nor in Great Britain alone, nor in France or Germany. For, whatever may be the per-capita wealth of nations or cities, this is the day of great individual fortunes, which is to say of vast opportunities, and a Iftew 2)a? for Cities, ii more and more it is the fashion to use these for the public good. It is the day also of ready com- munication, so that the treasures of the world, the various materials, and the taste and ingenuity of man lie at the hand of him who can pay for them. The city that would make itself magnificent has the whole world to draw upon. And in this connection, note these thoughts: Bayet in his Precis d’Histoire de VArt observes of the Renaissance cities of Italy that “the accumulation of wealth by these enlightened communities made for artistic progress. ” 1 The statement is interesting as a historical justification of the claim that in an age of enlightenment wealth does make for art. Art, de- pendent on slow painstaking, must have its patron who can pay. Bayet again speaks of the Italian cities as republics “which by their commerce and industry became prosperous and rich, and in which political life was especially ardent.” This is of interest as showing that the eager feverishness of municipal politics does not necessarily hamper the development of civic art. Nor is it perfectly clear that such art has to develop in spite of, rather than 1 Ernest Gilliat Smith in his Story of Bruges notes an exactly similar phenomenon in the Flemish Renaissance. During the prosperous fifteenth century, when the Renaissance was at its zenith, he remarks that aside from the splendid work done by the great city companies and by the nobles, the movement toward civic art became truly popular. He says: “ The new men who had recently amassed fortunes vied with the old aristocracy in the magnificence and luxury of the mansions which they now built; plain, well-to-do merchants were everywhere constructing those roomy, comfortable abodes, which, with their high-stepped gables and their facades en- circled with stately panelling and Gothic tracery, still render the streets and squares and waterways of Bruges the most picturesque in Europe.” 12 flDobcrn Civic Hrt. because of, such interests. For where political life is ardent, the civic consciousness is strong; the impulse toward creative representation is fervent; and state, government, the ideals of parties, are no longer abstractions, but are concrete things to be loved or hated, worked for, and done visible homage to. The strain and stress of city politics to-day are not, then, a factor essentially antagonistic to civic art. The final thought is this : Engineering, upon which the aesthetic aspect of cities is so largely de- pendent, differs from pure art in that it need not be the child of inspiration. It is an exact science and, as such, wealth can buy it, can even import it, bringing to the city the engineer who can make the municipality splendidly correct, if among its own citizens there be no lover who has that power. Here again in the modern effort for the physical improve- ment of cities there is singular good-fortune. The science of city-building does not wholly depend upon high impulse or inspiration. For its plainer and yet essential victories the intellect is sufficient. And yet, over and above this requirement which we can hope to meet so easily, there are the high motives that must surely give birth to inspiration. Thus the modern, dawning, civic art appears as the latest step in the course of civic evolution. The flowering of great cities into beauty is the sure and ultimate phase of a progressive development. It has represented the crown of each successive civilisa- tion. If decadence has followed it, if the storied a iRew 2>ap for Cities. 13 beauty of Babylon, if the splendour of Carthage as Turner painted it, if the chaste loveliness of Athens and the magnificence of Rome marked in each case the culmination of an empire, it has been through no effeminacy and weakness inherent in the develop- ment itself. Rather has it been because the glory showered upon these cities was a concentrated ex- pression of the highest civilisation and the highest culture of which the empire was capable. All that is best the city draws to itself. As mag- nets acting on filings of steel, the cities attract from their dependent fields whatever there be of learning, culture, and art. The adornment that was lavished upon Venice, Florence, and the minor city-republics of Italy, and again upon the Flemish cities, repre- sented, not weakness, but the virility and rich abund- ance of those qualities of mind and heart which expressed themselves in the Southern and Northern Renaissance., Had the cities been less beautiful, the Renaissance had been less notable. They mutually interpret each other ; and cities begin to bud and flower in beauty only when learning, culture, and art are flowering around them. The development will differ in aspect, of course, as the civilisations differ in character. The art of Greece was sculpture, and the glory of Athens in her golden age was the chiselled art of the Acropolis. Rome was imperial, and her glory found expression in construction that was colossal and magnificent. The art, again, of the Southern Renaissance was 14 flfrobern Civic art. painting, and we find in frescoes and in the more delicate, more pictorial, phases of architecture the triumph of the Italian republics. To-day, the spirit of the time is commercial and industrial, and our modern civic art reveals itself in forms that com- merce and industry comprehend. That our civic art must differ from that of other times does not mean, therefore, that it is not art, or that the new day for cities will be less brilliant than of old. Rather, if it be truly the heir of the past, it must be the new glory of a new time. Commerce and industry now express themselves, in the realm of city aesthetics, in great highways, in commercial palaces, in bridges, and wharves, and stations. The love of nature, the lately aroused consciousness of what may be called sentiment for landscape, brings vegetation into the busy city to soften and brighten ; and then the spirit of practical philanthropy — so evident to-day — locates play- grounds, builds schools, and insists that modern civic art shall pervade all quarters of the town, re- modelling alleys as well as avenues. Now, if civic art be a phase of urban evolution, it should be possible to trace the steps by which it is approached. Let us consider what these have been in the rise of modern cities: There came first the aggregation. Where no city had been the people flocked — the reason need not now concern us — until there was a city. The aggregation continuing led quickly to congestion, at least in parts of the St. Paul’s, London, from the Thames. a IRew 2>a? for Cities. i5 community, and close upon congestion came squa- lor. We had now a large city, a crowded city, and a miserable one. Out of misery came corrup- tion, debauch of the popular conscience, and — from such favourable conditions — political knavery. These, swiftly, are the steps of the downward course. But all the time there were forces at work for good. The very evil into which affairs had passed created a disgust that vastly aided the reform endeavours. So reform efforts gained gradually in importance. Ideals were put before the people, and to some extent assimilated. There had already been evid- ences of aesthetic aspiration, first noted in those quarters in which was congregating wealth — that wealth which had begun to accumulate in accord- ance with the laws the foreseeing of whose opera- tion had induced the growth of the town. But such is the force of good example that aesthetic aspira- tions spread broadly. Elementary construction, also, had begun. At first this was for the sake of the traffic and of sanitation ; but by degrees it had a more distinctly aesthetic purpose. Of these forward steps, some, of course, were taken coincidently with the backward, for the community did not march first one way and then the other. Two forces were pulling in opposite directions; and if political knavery turned constructive efforts in the public works to its own evil purposes, the physical condition of the town in its turn gained something from the official eagerness to rob it and the stupid dormancy of i6 flDobern Civic art. the popular conscience that afforded the opportunity for such outrage in constructive work. Thus the early improvements were purchased at an immensely extravagant price; but — there were improvements and they were hastened. With varying celerity the conscience now awak- ened. The reform efforts enlisted individuals, and then associations of individuals, who were concerned in bettering not alone the government, but the aspect, of the town. Where officials were dis- trusted and individuals and associations tried to act by themselves, or where the trust in officials was misplaced, there followed necessarily much waste, extravagance, and positive injury by poor taste. As the like result followed either of these choices, we find its expression, indeed, almost universal. Then appears another phase in the civic develop- ment. This is perception of the waste, extravag- ance, and lack of artistic judgment, and willingness to seek their correction by submission to expert guidance. With this come co-operation, eagerness to learn the experience of other places and to profit by it, and dependence on those authorities whose knowledge, genius, or talent is broadly recognised. With this new chapter, wherever it is now entered upon, begins modern civic art as distinguished from merely the improvement of cities. In the broad field of cities, examples can readily be found to illustrate the successive steps in this general evolution. The phases will differ slightly a IRew Da? for Cities. 1 7 here and there, as national and local peculiarities stamp the development; but the course is clear, essentially uniform, and leading surely to civic aesthetics as its visible crown. So civic art properly stands for more than beauty in the city. It repre- sents a moral, intellectual, and administrative pro- gress as surely as it does the purely physical. It stands for conscientious officials of public spirit, and where the officials are elective it is evidence of an aroused and intelligent populace. Perhaps the steps of this civic evolution will show more clearly if we turn from abstractions to the concrete. The census bulletins of the United States declare that in that country during the nineteenth century there came into existence five hundred and thirty- three communities of eight thousand or more in- habitants each. If we call them all by the name that doubtless four-fifths ot them claim, we shall group them as cities; and can say, in the census phrase, that in 1800 the urban population was con- tained in twelve communities and represented four per cent, of the total population, while in 1900 it constituted five hundred and forty-five communi- ties containing more than thirty-three per cent, of the total population. This is a group of statistics that illustrates conveniently that nineteenth-century phenomenon which is known as the “ urban drift,” and which was no more marked in the United States than in other nations — most notably in Germany 1 8 flDobern Civic Art. and England. This, as representing the “aggrega- tion,” constitutes what we have called the first step in the civic evolution. To find some of these communities that are yet in the earlier stages of the subsequent development, we may turn with best assurance to the Western States. In the newer towns congestion will not, happily, be revealed; but that is a spectacle too familiar in cities of all nations and all times to need illustration, and wretchedness has not waited for congestion. We find the town growing on lines determined partly by accident and partly by the push of enterprising real-estate holders, not at all according to artistic design. There is little that can be reasonably called architecture. If a man wants a store, a barn, or a house, he goes to the carpenter, and the carpenter puts up the long, single-gabled, frame structure that is the simplest and cheapest. Possibly, if the owner be a merchant and ambitious to have his emporium impressive, a square front, built to the height of the roof peak, may be put before the skeleton structure; but this, misleading no one, hardly serves to change the type. If there be no time to build attractive houses, certainly there is none in which to lay out gardens. People have not come to live in the place because it is pretty, but because they want to make money; and they have not learned yet to love the town. It will not even represent “home” to them for several years. Clearly, civic aesthetics are at the antithesis a Iftew 3>av> for Cities. J 9 of this phase; we are yet at the beginning of urban development. In fact, such public spirit as there may be is so crude and sordid that it counts any- thing — even a water-tank — as growth. The moral, intellectual, and political conditions in this dreary town need not here concern us. But they cannot be high. We may pass now to those thriving cities of about thirty thousand - inhabitants which, met so frequently in the more closely settled portions of a country, well represent another stage in the devel- opment. In the United States they are frankly in- dustrial communities. Political affairs are in that condition when, out of the sore need of reform en- deavours, there is a more or less continuous series of spasmodic reform efforts. But the physical im- provement of the town has gone steadily, though expensively, forward. The town is well lighted, most of the important streets are paved, and there are rather more sewer- and water-pipes than perhaps are needed — or, if the aggregate be not excessive, their location is not of the best, for they have been extended on some streets that may not be built up for a decade at the expense of others that are popu- lated. The industry of the town has begun to roll up the expected private gain. The old type of building has given way again and again to some- thing ornate, garish, and showy. Iron is favoured because it can be made to suggest stone, while being cheap. There are stores with cast-iron fronts; there 20 fIDobern Civic Hrt. are lawns with red iron deer; there is a soldiers’ monument of iron. It is the iron age'. The houses are now of all kinds. From the extreme of monot- ony the town has reacted, seeking the extremes of originality. But the residential streets are lined with trees, the square in front of the court-house is kept in order, and most of the houses stand in little gar- dens that add much to the attractiveness of the place. The people have begun to love their city. It is their home, and they like to have strangers call it “attract- ive.” There are distinct yearnings toward better things. /Esthetic ambition has been born. The next step in the evolution develops rapidly. A park is laid out. If it is done somewhat apologet- ically, with a pushing forward of philanthropical rea- sons, no one is deceived as to the relative importance of these. Gifts are made to the town. The memo- rial fountain is really stone, for the iron age has passed; and the new public library is so unmistaka- bly a thing of beauty that, although it did not cost as much as the post-office, it is shown to the visitor with no less pride. The new public schools are not barracks within and do not resemble factories on the outside. The factories themselves are improving; and public sentiment has so crystallised that a society has been formed to insist that rubbish be not thrown into the street, that the station grounds be improved, that flowers be generally grown, and that the waste places be taken care of. This improvement effort is, however, unguided. H IHevs) ©a? for Cities. 21 There is immense scope for the poor taste of un- trained individualism. And as the city grows larger and its resources increase, the public works become more spectacular and permanent, so that mistakes in them last a long time and are striking. The need of artistic guidance, both in public and private construc- tion, is more keenly felt; the extravagance and wastefulness of duplicated effort are realised; the value of an authoritative aesthetic control is perceived, and it is appreciated that to make true advance in civic art — which is now frankly a goal— there is needed something more than means and impulse. Various efforts are made to provide the required artistic supervision. If these are reasonably success- ful, the city — now rich, self-confident, ambitious for its higher life and its development in beauty — has reached an advanced and healthy phase in its evolution. Without much regard as to what the means are, so long as they are successful, there dawns a day of civic art. The plan may be to elect as administrative officers of the city persons whose education, refinement, and culture — as well as executive ability and business sagacity — are a guarantee that the right things will be done and done well. This has been for the most part the outcome of the civic reform efforts in Great Britain, and has hastened the dawn among British cities of a civic art based on business principles. In France, under the leadership of Paris, the method has been to summon to the service of the municipality, 22 flbobern Civic Hrt. in an advisory capacity, the best experts and art- ists of the city ; and the result has been the develop- ment of civic aesthetics on thoroughly artistic lines. In the United States, where the effort has included the appointment of “art commissions,’" the banding together of cities and of conscientious city officials in leagues, the association for the public good of artists and architects, and an immense amount of effort by popular improvement societies, — with the usurpation by them of critical functions, — the tendency, so far as there may be said to be a tendency, is toward federation, co-operation , and the exchange of experi- ences, to the end that there may be evolved so precise a science of city-building that henceforth no community need be ugly. The German theory of city administration is based still more emphatically on scientific principles, almost to the exclusion of other considerations; but it differs from the American in that its dependence is not so much upon a science as upon scientists. The burgo- master and his magistrates are the best experts procur- able, and the council of the latter does not pretend to be citizen-representative, but is made up of honoured, highly paid, professional, and permanent employees, trained to the work of city administration. In Ger- many, therefore, civic art takes on something of the thoroughness and exhaustiveness of German science. The varying national developments of this late phase of urban evolution are thus interesting mainly as emphasising the fact that the modern movement a Iftew Da? for Cities. 23 toward civic art is truly international. They reveal, too, that, however the exact course of the evolution may vary in different places, municipal aesthetics — the flowering of cities into beauty— is the ultimate, the highest, step. It is the phase toward which all the other urban changes tend. In our day it has been at once hastened and elevated by many ad- vances in science, by discovery and invention. To recapitulate : The first light of dawn is on tower and spire. There, in the early days, the civic re- naissance halted on the great buildings. Now it embraces much more. Cities are spreading out, and there is the wish that crowding shall give way. There is the wealth that wrought wonders of old ; there is an intercourse that levies tribute of the genius of all the world; there have been taken in orderly sequence the steps that are precedent to a new mu- nicipal beauty; and over all is the widespread modern spirit of social service. That breathes life into civic art. That puts the flowers and children into open spaces — a deed that is typical of many ; and makes our modern civic art not aristocratic, but democratic; Christian, not pagan. What in detail it will be, just what is the promise of the new day now dawning lor cities, — this is to be our study. CHAPTER II. WHAT CIVIC ART IS. T HE question properly arises as to what muni- cipal art is. Granted that the progressive modern city develops gradually in beauty and splendour, is this normal improvement, which is yet more or less haphazard, civic art? Is the term, after all, a relative one; stands this art alone among all the arts in having nothing absolute, nothing sure? Is there civic art, or merely progress toward civic art, when macadam is laid where no pavement was, or when a bit of waste ground along a river bank is secured by the municipality in order that it may be never used for private ends to the exclusion of the public ? If that be civic art, what shall we say if the town, having secured the plot, never develops it; or if, in an effort to “ improve,” it follows wrong coun- sels and degrades with tastelessness what might have been a charming feature ? Shall we let the spirit of the thing count and still cry “ Hail ” to civic art ? In other realms of art there must be a joint worthi- 24 The Arc de Triomphe, Paris. TMflbat Civic art Is. 25 ness of impulse and execution, else the act is not recognised as art. The child, or untaught man, who would paint a Sistine Madonna and succeeds in making only a daub, is not greeted as a master, nor hears the work called “art,” though his impulse be of the highest and most artistic. So in the plastic art and the tonal art, there is something absolute — a standard below which no handiwork is art, whatever be the impulse; above which beauty is surely recog- nised and where the highest art of all is possible — the coupling of worthy execution to high resolve and noble impulse. So it is not enough that we should see the progressive city tending normally toward physical improvement, and should lay down therefore a dictum that civic art is a late step in civic evolution. We may well pause to ask ourselves just what is municipal art, and whether we mean only a con- tinuance of improvement, an extension of sequence with never a conclusion, when we talk of civic art as a goal. Perhaps the common trouble is that our minds are not fixed upon perfection in this art, so that we forget that there may be perfection in it. For most art, it may be noted, serves a useful purpose in- cidentally, finding in its own perfection, in its own beauty, such justification that often men seek art for art’s sake alone ; while with municipal art the utilitarian advantages and social benefits become so paramount that they are not forgotten, are not 26 flDobern Civic art. overlooked, in straining for the sensuous pleasure and for that full rounding of positive attainment which in itself may be the artist’s goal. Here, then, in this distinction, comes a suggestion for the first qualify- ing clause in the definition of municipal art. And how natural this first step of definition is! This art, which serves so many social ends, is municipal, in the sense of communal. It is municipal first of all. If men seek it they seek it not for art’s sake, but for the city’s; they are first citizens and then, in their own way, artists jealous of the city’s looks because they are citizens. We do not find men and women banding them- selves together to create a public sentiment and fund in order that some sculptor may do a noble bit of work to the glorifying of his field of art. But they so band themselves and so commission sculpt- ors, painters, artists, and landscape designers, for the glorifying of civic art — not just because it is art, but because it is civic. They are not asking the town to help art, but art to help the town ; the artists, not to glorify their art, but by their art to glorify the city. This, then, is the first consideration, and it is worthy of more emphasis than might appear. It does something else than conveniently differentiate civic art from any other art. It explains why its disciples may care little for artists though giving commissions, why its clientage should be all the urban world — the art ignorant as well as the cult- TOat Civic Hrt Us. 2 7 ured ; why it must be delayed in coming until civilisation is at its flower, since not dependent on individual and selfish ambition ; and why, when coming, it will magnificently make all other purely art endeavours but handmaids to its one great effort — because this is social and the public is behind it. Thus is civic art first municipal, and has ever attained its largest victories when cities were mighti- est. For in so far as it is art, its principles are eternal as the truth, and its conquests must be at least as old as cities. Down through the Middle Ages, poets and painters dreamed of the “city beau- tiful” ; the Irish Gaelic poets sang of it ; barbaric Nero strove to realise it ; the inspired apostle tran- scribed his vision in its terms ; Greek philosophers drew inspiration from the measure of Athens’s at- tainment of it, and the great prophet named Babylon as “the glory of kingdoms.” As anciently as the dawn with its golden radiance has transformed cities, there has been a dream, a sigh, a reaching forth, with civic art the goal. And what precisely shall be the definition of this art, ancient as all the arts, but distinguished from them by its contentment to be servant, not mistress, in the glorifying of cities ? What is any art but the right, best way of doing a certain thing ? This art, which is so utilitarian in its purposes as to be civic first and art afterwards, may be defined, then, as the taking in just the right way of those steps necessary or proper for the comfort of the citizens — as the 28 flDobern Civic art. doing of the necessary or proper civic thing in the right way. Thus is its satisfaction quite as much intellectual as sensuous, and for popular appreciation it must wait — because of its very practicalness — upon popular education. So civic art is not a fad. It is not merely a bit of asstheticism. There is nothing effeminate and sentimental about it, — like tying tidies on telegraph poles and putting doilies on the cross-walks, — it is vigorous, virile, sane. Altruism is its impulse, but it is older than any altruism of the hour — as old as the dreams and aspirations of men. We talk much about it now, because we are living in a period that has witnessed more building and remodelling of citids than any period of history, and therefore in a period that compels us to turn our thoughts to the best ways of making improvements and to the principles that ought to guide in building the modern city. And those are the laws of civic art, of the great art that is of the people and for the people, that is closest to their lives, and that draws more than half its charm from the recognition of perfect fitness in its achievements. There is much said now of civic art because it has become at last a popular goal — this art of doing civic things in the right way, which is ever the beautiful way. Because this is true there is a civic art. As an art that exists not for its own sake, but mainly for the good of the community, first for the doing of the thing and then for the way of doing it, TObat Civic Hrt Us. 29 there can be only one successful civic art. This will be one which joins utility to beauty. Cities are not made to be looked at, but to be lived in; and if in the decoration of them there be any forgetfulness of that, no successful civic art will follow and the effort will defeat itself. Realising this, we should try to discover some general rules for guidance, and if we succeed, by noting the requirements and the vari- ous means that have been tried to satisfy them, we should be able to that extent to translate our art into a civic science that will be more or less exact — into the science of city-building, which is the text-book of civic art. Where the art fails, the cause has been neglect of the rules, through forgetfulness or ignor- ance. Precedent, of course, to transcribing the science, there are to be considered the functions of civic art. If the end be to clothe utility with beauty, and in providing the beautiful to provide also that which will add to the convenience and comfort of the citizens, we shall best find its opportunities for use- fulness by studying what has been happily called the anatomy of cities. In this there appear three groups of requirements: Those that have to do with circulation, those that have to do with hygiene, and those that have to do distinctly with beauty. No hard lines separate these classes. If in the street plan, for instance, we find the convenience of circu- lation — i. e., readiest adaptability to the traffic — the most pressing point, we come in the broad open 30 flfrobern Civic art. space, shaded with trees and planted with grass, to a problem that is to be approached still from the side of circulation — since convenient short cuts may be offered — and yet from the side of hygiene, and from that of aesthetics. But the classification remains convenient, for in seeking urban welfare and comfort we must act in one or more of these groups. It may be briefly asserted, therefore, that the function of civic art is the making of artistic — which is to say, of aesthetically pleasant — provision for the circula- tion, for hygiene, and for city beauty. It is important to note that beauty itself is the ob- ject in only one of these three departments of effort, and even then, as in the case of a bit of sculpture, which certainly belongs under neither hygiene nor circulation, other considerations, educational or com- memorative, may easily modify the artistic aspiration. Thus the greater part, if not the best, of civic art is that which first does something else than please the senses. And that is why public-spirited men of all interests, striving to ameliorate civic conditions along many lines, find in municipal art one desideratum upon which they all agree, and for the furtherance of which they all — by many paths — are working. Having observed the purposes of civic art, we come to the means to be employed in gaining them. Here we must seek rules for guidance and may take up art principles. These are not new nor are they novel. They are as old as beauty and as broad as art. They are the three dominant chords on which TObat Civic Hit 11s. 31 is built up the melody of all art. They are unity, variety, and harmony. If our civic art will not stand its double test — first, the civic test, as to the urban good it does; and then the aesthetic test, it fails. And this latter test is a more rigorous requirement with civic art than it is with any other, for municipal art cannot stand alone, to be judged without its environment— and the field in which it stands is so broad to have unity, so varied to have harmony, so much the same in parts to have variety. Consider how easily civic art may fail with this test applied: a thrilling statue on an unkempt street is not successful civic art, because its surroundings are not harmonious; a park, lovely in itself, may fail, from this broad standpoint, for want of that unity in the city plan which would lend to its location seeming inevitableness. Building re- strictions designed to insure harmony, but made too severe, may lose their artistic effectiveness by the repression of variety to the verge of monotony. But if it is easy to fail, as surely it is, success is better worth the winning; and where a city, or part of a city, is built up from the ground plan to the street furnishings and construction with regard for these three principles of art, how beautiful, consistent, and intellectually satisfying is the result! The desirability of obtaining such a thorough, general, and artistic plan of improvement for every community is evident. The chance to plan a city on paper before it is built comes but rarely nowadays, 32 fIDobern Civic art. and the best we can do is to see to it that the cities grow artistically, that their extensions at least are beautiful, and that every change in the city itself shall bring it one step nearer to the ideal. The trouble with most improvement effort is that it is planned all by itself, that the benefit to the neighbourhood is studied rather than that to the community, and that the first half-dozen years after the improvement is made stand out with more prominence and importance — receive more consideration from tax-payers and tax-spenders - than all the years that are to come thereafter. But in wise city-building we would consider not five years, nor ten years, but posterity. And to do this would be cheaper in the end. In an effort for civic improvement, therefore, the first step is to secure a comprehensive plan. This is almost the only step that can insure the highest type of modern civic art, since requirements are greater now than when artists and master builders, dressing with beauty the narrow streets of Italian and Flemish cities, created the civic art of five cen- turies ago. In those cities urban hygiene and circula- tion made no demands on civic art. Nowadays these things are fundamental, and unless there be a well thought out, artistically conceived, general plan to work on, our civic art will go astray, with lack of completeness or continuity. So it will fail, because isolated and spasmodic ; because it will mean a tine park, some patriotic statuary, three or four good streets, and a few noble buildings rather than a city milbat Civic art 11s. 33 dignified and lovely as a whole — where the open space does not stop with balancing the slum, but re- deems it. We have set for ourselves a more complex problem than was dreamed of by the Renaissance, and unless our modern urban art can gain it the result will not satisfy. It is no reproach to the present that so much has been done without the guidance of general plans. It merely shows that our art impulse outran our art intelligence — a very common procedure. The archi- tect, the artist, the landscape gardener, — all enthusi- astic, —have gone too fast for the civil authorities, who represent the people ; and so the underlying principles, the great laws that should determine the laying-out and the up-building of cities, have not been set down and studied, as they should be, from all sides. Many a good thing costs more than it ought to, or has to be done over, and often the people have the common-sense argument — though the ideals of the artists are true and high and their dreams need only a little pruning and a little injection of worldly wisdom to be made thoroughly practical. The great thing, the significant thing in its promise for the future, is that there are such dreams, for it is easy to prune, and worldly wisdom is ever cheaper than in- spiration. If, out of the abundant experience now available, out of the many costly experiments of the recent years that have witnessed in so marvellous a degree the rise and growth of cities, we can now find enough lessons that are pertinent and suggestive 34 fIDobern Civic Hit. to formulate a sort of science of city-building, we shall have something to guide the artist and something to awaken the interest and enthusiasm of him who can- not dream. It will be not the gospel — which is in the heart — but the law and the prophets of modern civic art. That, in fact, is one of the great theoretical wants of the day. The dreamers of the city beautiful, the countless artists and laymen who are working for the improvement of cities, towns, and villages, want a theory of civic art to which they can turn. Practi- cally, the need of the day is the local application of this general theory to every interested community. It is the attainment of this end which is sought in urging that the first step in bringing civic art to a town should be the provision of a general plan of development and improvement ; of a complete and consistent plan, to the end that henceforth every step taken should be a sure step of progress. To the greater part of the population, also, the plan that is thus set forth will represent a new ideal, and one which they will find readily comprehensible because concerned so plainly with the conditions before their very eyes, to the avoidance of abstrac- tions. The value to the community of a civic ideal scarcely needs exposition. Since realisation of this ideal is dependent ultimately upon the public’s ap- preciation, it will be brought a great deal nearer by the public’s perception of it. Of course an immense responsibility will be thrown upon its makers. The TObat Civic Art 11s. 35 best expert advice should, unfailingly, be obtained ; but if the laws of city-building have been put on paper, it will not be hard to measure the suggestions by these laws ; and the very prominence of the work will give to it a publicity broadly inviting criticism, while the fact that the progress toward the ideal must continue through a long series of years will demand that the plan proposed be able to bear the changes in special interest and point of view which lapse of years will bring. The plan once secured, the public spirit and artistic sense of the community can hardly fail to insist that it be adhered to. Educationally, if may be parenthetically remarked, knowledge of this plan, which is the perception of a concrete ideal, will offer a short cut, doing in a few months what can be accomplished only very slowly by the efforts to inculcate in school children civic pride and aesthetic appreciation. These efforts will be continued, but they will be given direction and practicalness. The provision of this ideal, the setting before all the people of a tangible vision of their own possible city beautiful, will have other value than merely that of popular education. It will offer them inspiration. Nor will this inspiration be material only, but as clearly moral and political and intellectual. The pride that enables a man to proclaim himself “a citizen of no mean city ” awakens in his heart high desires that had before been dormant. “To make us love our city we must make our city lovely ” was taken as its motto by the Municipal Art Society of New York flDobern Civic art. 36 when it was organised, and he who loves his city is a better citizen and a better man. There will be other than merely general inspira- tion, for the dream of what one’s city should be, and may be, and even some day must be, will be a special inspiration to all those professions of the fine arts upon which the beauty of the city ultimately depends. There is not an architect of spirit who will not feel a new incentive when he thinks that he is planning buildings that are to be part of the city of the future; not a landscape gardener who will not plant with greater care because of this vision ; not a sculptor who will not throw himself more devotedly into the modelling of the civic monument that is to be one of the new city’s ornaments. And down from the pro- fessions to the workers, and from those who execute the commissions to those who give them, will be felt the spur of the dream, the hope, the goal. “ 1 do not want art for a few,” said William Morris, “any more than education for a few, or free- dom for a few” — and civic art is essentially public art. It has been likened to “a fire built upon the market place, where every one may light his torch; while private art is a fire built upon a hearthstone, which will blaze and die out with the rise and fall of fortunes.” M THE CITY’S FOCAL POINTS, P 37 CHAPTER III. THE WATER APPROACH. N O work of art is satisfying and vigorous if it have not definiteness of expression. Un- less it has something to say as to its own character, and says it, not here and there, but with such harmony of its parts that each adds its voice to the others in united expression, the result is not pleasing. That, in fact, is the goal in mind when it is said that the three underlying principles of art are unity, variety, and harmony. Considered from the standpoint, then, of civic art, a primary fault with most towns and cities is the lack of definiteness in the impression they make as one approaches them; and it is the un- conscious perception of this want which explains why the approach by night is generally so much more satisfactory than by day. At night the glow in the sky, and then the countless lights gleaming in serried rows, and every string of golden beads standing for a street, mark the town clearly, with 40 flDobent Civic Hit. no conflict of expression, and with irresistible appeal to the imagination. Pinned thus against the lone- liness and blackness of the night, the composition has a single message — that of warmth and life, of the juxtaposition of comfort with ceaseless effort and burning desire — which is the true message of the town. There is no jar, there are no distractions. The picture suggests a single thought and its voice is unmistakable and beautiful. And as a work of art, the municipality has a right to be considered in this impressionist way. Socio- logically, indeed, the details alone are important; but artistic details never make an artistic whole unless they harmonise; and if we propose by mod- ern civic art to rear the city beautiful, the picture is to be considered as a unit. As we see it first, afar off, we may study it as a composition; and then, as we come nearer, we shall see details — but the first impression counts. Does this seem to be a fantastic, aesthetic idea ? Remember the often painted and million times lov- ingly remembered view of Florence from San Miniato heights — Brunelleschi’s dome and Giotto’s tower making the centre of a composition which is an urban picture never to be forgotten. Do you know the view of Rome from the Campagna, with the dome of St. Peter’s rising high over the Church’s city; do you remember the sea view of Venice, the water lapping the walls of its palaces; have you seen New York from the Upper Bay, its tall buildings t£be Mater Hpproacb. 41 clustered like a forest of silver birches, gleaming in the brilliant light and marking the town with unmis- takable personality ? Ask yourself if these strongly marked pictures have no value to the communities that form them ? Are they a worthless asset in civic love and civic pride ? On a road leading out of Boston into the suburbs there is a view through an arch of trees of the gilded dome of the State House on Beacon Hill; from a point on the Thames there is a loved view of St. Paul’s with central London clustered about it — a vignette that stands for much. Upon just such little things as this is fixed the citizen’s love for his city; its towers and domes pin his affections, and the more because in every case the composition has in- evitably a meaning, a clearness and accuracy of significance, that makes it more than merely a pretty picture. It is a work of that art which speaks not to the eye alone, nor to the head alone, nor to the heart alone; but, unitedly, to senses, brain, and sentiment. And what elements go to make this picture of the city! What a story it tells of human progress or human fall — with broken hearts or blasted lives among its shadows, and its spires and towers that gleam in higher light the proofsof efforts that have suc- ceeded, of dreams that have come true! Think what you look upon when you see a city, and reflect that if it has definiteness of expression, if it says to you one beautiful and appropriate thing clearly and distinctly, it is the greatest work of art that man can create. 42 flDobern Civic art. What the thing that it says shall be, therefore, — whether a huge advertisement dominates the scene, whether great black chimneys, or towers and spires rising above the trees, determine the picture’s character, — is a question that may well make pause those who have a voice in the selection. It is not a question only of civic art, unless that art be in- volved with broad and heavy responsibilities. It is a question in part of civic pride, and so of good citizenship; and its solution is like the solution of all such questions. It depends on the willingness of the individual to surrender a little of his private liberty; to build, not exclusively for his own profit, or even under the dictates of his own artistic sense, but with a feeling for the resulting whole. The most favourable place from which to view a city is usually, as even the cited examples suggest, the water. There no distracting element intrudes between scene and seer. The waves are a neutral foreground, sufficiently detailed, and yet with no detail to arrest the eye; and beyond — with distance to idealise and harmonise — the city rises in a con- trast sharp and urban. The water view is one that civic art, then, cannot overlook. Happily, from the aesthetic standpoint, the city is rare which is not located upon water; and yet there is scant thought of the water-front appearance, scant regard for the possibilities of the urban picture where it should be seen most advantageously. The shore must long and perhaps always be one of the community’s focal tXbc Mater approach. 43 points, but the tendency is to appear to turn the back upon the water. At the water’s edge the town began, and pressing inward and climbing higher the beginning is forgotten or ignored, as if a cause for shame. But rather is it cause for pride, and as the city grows the water gate is still the entrance, the view across the waves the first picture still for growing numbers. If civic art is anywhere to be jealous of results, there is no point that can more fittingly demand attention than this — the picture of the city from its river, its lake, or sea. Whatever the body of water, it will bear its multitude of ob- servers, for if the narrow river would seem to have fewer than the port of sea or lake, remember that the farther shore, and every bridge that spans the stream, affords the water view. As to details, civic art, as the effort to make cities beautiful, cannot afford to let slip the opportunity of a bit of natural open space in such location. For here, at last, however close the buildings press upon it, the breezes play at will and the sun shines in un- broken radiance. No expression of nature is so wel- come in a city as is water, with its care-free, gay, and tireless playfulness. Even in the street fountain it is a ceaseless pleasure and in the park’s artificial pond or stream a constant joy. No city with so great an aesthetic asset at its feet should fail to utilise it, or part of it, for aesthetic purposes, though there be ever so foolish an indifference to the picture that the city itself may make when seen across the waves. 44 flDobertt Civic art. This accepted as a primary principle of civic art, it is to be understood that there is no need for such use of the water-front to interfere with that com- mercial or industrial use of it which was a cause of the town’s location there. If the stream be swift enough to furnish power, it has a natural beauty that requires only a place for observation ; if the body of water be large enough for navigation, the craft afloat upon it will furnish life and picturesque- ness to add the charm of variety and human inter- est to the natural majesty of the scene. To give up, then, the practical use of the water would be even to rob it of some of its urban attractiveness. In fact, because the city represents essentially man’s conquest of nature, the water within its confines and which induced men to settle there may most fittingly ap- pear as “harnessed,” to do men’s work, or as bridled, to bear their burdens. /Esthetically, we should not demand the abandonment of the use of the water — only a place whence, with all its activ- ities, it may be seen, for civic art assumes that the stream on which a city is located will not be trans- formed into an open sewer. But the problem of the water-front, which is so fascinating in the concrete example, since a scenic effectiveness can be certainly added to convenience and utility, gains in an abstract consideration almost baffling complexity. There are so many kinds of shore line, both as respects the topography and the use to which the shore is put, that in general dis- approach. 65 to be adopted in its approaches; and the advantages of attractiveness in the station and in its setting apply as certainly, if somewhat less obviously, to the course of the road through the town. Thus we come to the natural divisions of the definite dis- cussion. Let us take up first t)ie character of the station. The common failure to grasp the really civic signi- ficance that pertains to it, — the failure to look at it, as civic art must, from the standpoint of the municipality instead of merely from that of the rail- road which owns or rents the structure,— has led to the addition of a third type to the two kinds of construction that strictly railroad conditions must have suggested. There are not only the terminal and the way station, — the two inevitable and wholly appropriate types, — but because the roadhouse and inn theory still lingers, finding an excuse in some practical convenience, and because the company’s claim upon the structure even to the decision of its style is held to be paramount to that of the com- munity, there is developed, as we have seen, a type which may be called “the disguised.” In this the architect screens the train-shed, putting before it a structure that is sometimes a hotel, as often in Great Britain, and sometimes an office building, as often in the United States, and from which all visible significance as a portal has vanished. He doubtless does this at the behest of the company; but in so doing he not only gives civic art cause to mourn, 5 66 flDobent Civic Bit. he robs the station of that importance, of that appropriate character, and even of the accurate rail- road significance with which frank treatment as the city portal might have stamped it. The terminal Gare du Nord in Paris as seen from the short street leading up to it, the station at Ham- burg with the turrets flanking its castellated main pavilion, the many-portaled front of the Gare de I’Est in Paris, and the station in Genoa with its enclosing arms are striking examples of the portal treatment. Of the suburban, or way, station con- ception, the new station at Cologne is an example on a large scale; the station at One hundred and twenty-fifth Street in New York is a familiar illustra- tion; and the type may be found in innumerable towns in all countries — perhaps in no villages more prettily and appropriately than in those suburbs of Boston where a series of structures designed by H. H. Richardson are framed in bits of landscape that owe their arrangement to the genius of F. L. Olmsted. Of the “disguised” type, the familiar St. Pancras in London may stand for the hotel, and the Philadelphia stations of the Pennsylvania and Reading roads for the commercial. Upon the amount of space available, the travel offering or likely to offer, and upon the character of the station — as it conforms with one or another of these types — must depend, if there are to be consist- ency, harmony, and good sense, the treatment that the city will give to the space before the station. Gbe llanb approach. 67 And this problem, originating as it does with mod- ern civic art, is one which can be taken up with a more hopeful confidence of results than that with which the choice of the style of building is consid- ered. The latter depends upon matters that are far removed from civic art, while the development of the station square is essentially a problem in that art, and a most interesting one. Turning, then, to the community’s own treat- ment of the land entrance, we find that stations always should, and not uncommonly do, front upon open public spaces. They should be thus situated, first, — to place, as ever in civic art, utilitarian ad- vantages foremost in the discussion, — that the large and hurried travel of a busy centre may be com- moded ; second, that the station, of which the importance to the community can scarcely be ex- aggerated, may have all the topographical promi- nence that it deserves, and that the city may thus emphasise and dignify the structural value of it's chief land portal ; third, for the gain in the city’s aesthetic aspect. First impressions are notably virile and lasting, and the stranger must form his first impression of the city from the view which meets his eyes as he passes out of the station to enter the town. A square will be pleasanter than a street, if only for the space it gives. Some years ago the city of Genoa set itself to improve the area in front of the railroad station. There it placed, appropriately, the statue of Colum- 68 flfcobern Civic Hrt. bus, and in surrounding this with turf and flowers it did so “in order,” as the Genovese authorities ex- pressly declared, “that the first impression of strang- ers coming to our city may be favourable.” The like course has been followed for a like reason, though not always so frankly confessed, by a great number of towns and cities. Thus it is that in “station squares” we come upon a distinct and im- portant group of problems — of “portal square” problems— which it is appropriate to discuss apart from other open spaces. This square in front of the principal railroad sta- tion in Genoa is an unusually well arranged exam- ple. Architecturally, the building exemplifies a city portal conception, and very markedly. Its walls are turned in a concave around a corner of the square, so that they seem to enfold the town, and over two adjacent streets converging from beyond the station are thrown conspicuous gate-like arches, joined to the station as if a part of it. The station portal which is in the centre becomes, then, one of a series of three perfectly apparent entrances to the town that are united in one elaborate triple gateway. Before the station there is an open space which is larger than needed for business, and the municipality has gone to work to give to the incoming traveller a pleasant first impression. The town is at once indi- vidualised and set in its proper niche of history by the memorial to Columbus, placed here that it may appropriately be the first sight to greet the traveller’s £be Xanb approach. 69 eye. This is a reminder that, other conditions being favourable, the square before the station is an ex- ceedingly appropriate place — second only to the area before the town hall — for a distinctly civic statue. With some room still to spare after erecting the statue, the Genovese authorities gave to it a park setting, though the area nearest the station was not planted, that it might be free whenever needed. By this device, also, the statue was set far enough back for good perspective. Turf, shrubs, and trees were planted, that it might have verdure for back- ground; and yet there was retained a thoroughly formal treatment, consistently urban in suggestion. The result is that the arriving traveller’s first impres- sion is of a city rich and handsome, while not too large for the softer graces of vegetation ; and of a town of the historical interest of which he has full understanding and assurance. The departing travel- ler, on the other hand, has reminder that he is de- liberately leaving the delightful city when he enters the portals of its station, that it is no urban jaunt he is to take for he is passing through the city gate. it has seemed worth while to note thus, with some detail, the station square at Genoa, not merely for its own merit as an example of a bit of distinctly modern civic art, but for its suggestiveness to in- numerable towns and cities of like or smaller size. At the extremes, however, of population, for cities that are much larger and for villages that are much smaller, other treatment will often be advisable. 7o flDobern Civic art. We may easily find hints. Mere room does not mean success. Hamburg, which has done much on lines of civic art, failed lamentably in the treatment of the space before its new station. The square was of inviting opportunity in its area, and the city began well by making liberal provision for the travel which, con- verging at a station, was especially likely to esteem time as a factor of importance. There are broad walks and a very wide expanse of pavement, and the roadways lead directly to the door, and yet large areas remained for planting. A good thing was done in providing amply for illumination, and the electric- lighting apparatus is frankly decorative. But the wide flat spaces that are given to planting are grass plots enclosed by low wire fences, with their mono- tony almost unrelieved, the few flowers, that ought to have been shrubs, proving inadequate for the broad area. There is, indeed, an effect of spa- ciousness ; but the spaciousness of lawn that a city can show in front of its railroad station is not very impressive to those who have just been travelling through the open country, and if this effect be ignored there is nothing left. The space has no character. Along with this failure we may recite the well-known and pitiful failures of New York before the “Grand Central Station” and of Bos- ton before its North and South Union stations. The trouble in these cases is that there was not even an attempt at worthier treatment. The arriving £be Ha nt> approach. 71 traveller in New York, passing with gratitude out of one tunnel, gazes into another yawning cavern and gains an impression wholly unworthy of the brilliant city. Boston, which has been a leader in the United States in many phases of civic art, relinquished to the ugly elevated railroad the broad spaces of pre- cious opportunity before its stations. In great cities the .treatment of the area in front of the station must generally be strictly urban. The open space exists at this point first for the facilita- tion and convenience of traffic, and only secondarily for jesthetic purposes. Except, therefore, where the available area is very large in proportion to the travel across it,— and the value of the land rises ex- actly as the need for the open space increases, — the practical problem is rather that of treating utilities artistically and of making the aesthetic best of a probably bad situation than of deliberate effort by gardening. In this connection the space in front of the Gare de l’Est in Paris has suggestion. It is not so much a square as a broadened bit of boulevard that has been yet further widened by converging streets. Trees have been planted, giving height to the flat area, — an important aesthetic principle,— but except for this Paris, with all her love of beauty and fondness for display, has here held herself strictly in check. Tram communication with various parts of the city centres here, as it very properly may, and the transfer- or waiting-room for the trams is almost the first edifice that the arriving traveller 72 flDobern Civic Hrt. sees when he leaves the railroad station. Without permitting such barbarity as Boston, Paris has here made the accommodation of travel her first consid- eration. The earliest impression of the stranger is that of a populous, busy city — but, withal, one ar- ranged with singular convenience, and one in which the abundant trees prevent too violent a contrast in the swift transition from rural to urban scenery. Where, we may observe, there must be this contrast, it should be made so marked that there will be no danger of comparison. The area should be so handsome, so superbly architectural, as to sug- gest civic wealth and splendour. The Senate Com- mittee on “A Plan for the Improvement of the District of Columbia ” (Washington) thus formally describes in the preliminary report its scheme for the new Union Station 1 : The plans call for a station longer than the Capitol, the building to be of white marble, the facade to be Roman in style of architecture. . . . Facing the Capitol, and yet not too near that edifice, the new station will front on a semicircular plaza, six hundred feet in width, where bodies of troops or large organisations can be formed during inaugural times or on other like occasions. Thus located and constructed, the Union depot will be in reality the great and impressive gateway to Wash- ington. Again, of the plaza it says : The proposal is that it shall be six hundred feet in width by twelve hundred feet in length, ornamented with fitting terrace, basins, and fountains. This Fifty-seventh Congress, first session. Senate Report No. 1 66. ftbe Xanb approach. 73 great station forms the grand gateway of the capital, through which everyone who comes to or goes from Washington must pass; as there is no railroad entering the city that will not use the station, it becomes the vestibule of the capital. . . . The three great architectural features of a Capitol city being the halls of legislation, the executive buildings, and the vestibule, it is felt by the railroad companies that the style of this building should be equally as dignified as that of the public buildings themselves. Therefore it is that the design goes back to pure Roman motives. , The central portion is derived directly from the Arch of Constantine, and into subordination to this the wings are brought, so emphasising the portal con- ception. If great cities can rarely make the station square a component of the park system, smaller communi- ties may, obviously, quite often develop it in this way. In fact, as one goes down the scale of popula- tion, the point is reached at last where the railroad itself, by the improvement of its ample station grounds, can supplement the community’s efforts to give an invitingly park-like character to the entrance to the town. In these smaller communities the station has rarely the appearance of a terminal, being one neither in fact nor aspiration. Really a way station, it is consistently treated as such; and the edifice, both in its architecture and its setting, — which, as a bit of landscape work, will not be out of harmony with the structure, — follows the lines of a shelter or transfer building in a park. Of this type there are, as has been said, hardly lovelier or more satisfying examples 74 flDobern Civic Hit. to be found in the United States than in the little structures and station grounds on the line of the Bos- ton and Albany Railroad upon what is called the New- ton Circuit, just out of Boston. Here well designed stations, built of stone, and so adding to their grace suggestions of stability and permanence, rise from parks developed in the natural style, to fit pleasantly into an environment of nature as seen by the traveller who is hurried through wood and field. The bloom of hardy perennials in masses of flowering shrubs here takes the place of the stiff beds of summer flowers seen in most station grounds that pretend to be improved. In groups, they wed the building to the grounds, they frame with waving lines the patches of lawn, or hide the too-near corners, while the changing foliage, the masses of many-coloured stalks and twigs, and the green of the conifers prolong through all the year that colour and attractiveness which in carpet gardening is too often seized for only the brief weeks of summer. The new station at Cologne offers architecturally an interesting example, because on a large scale, of the city development of this way or suburban type of construction. As such it is indeed noteworthy. Both in itself and in the approach to it which the municipality has arranged, it has suggestion; for the type — though not as flattering to cities as the term- inal, or even as the disguised — is inevitably common with them. In appearance the Cologne station is suggestive of an exposition building in permanent Railroad Station at Waban, Mass., on the Boston and Albany Railroad. A suburban station in a parklike setting. I be Haiti) approach. 75 materials. It is the immensely amplified ornamental shelter of a park. Constructively, the train-shed’s location parallel to the street iterates the fact that this is not a terminal; and though in the direct, near view this effect is slightly negatived by the great arch of the main entrance, still it may be said that the impression on the whole is that of a splendid way station, rather than of the meeting of town and road at a gate. There is a very long facade, as relat- ively there must always be in the way-station type, and the city, in considering the demands of the traffic, finds that length instead of breadth can ac- commodate all that centres here. The open space before the station is laid out, therefore, as a broad parallel street with cross streets leading up to it — a plan which can generally be followed with the way-station type of structure. The spaces between the cross streets — the corners rounded for the con- venience of the travel — are set out as grass plots, adorned with shrubs and flowers, and so making a pleasant introductory to the town. Just inside these enclosures, where their suitably flaring bases make no trespass on the pavement, are placed the ornate electric-light poles. The whole arrangement is well fitted to the given conditions. But it is proper to ask how the conditions might have been improved. The tracks entering the station at Cologne are elevated, so that the natural place for the main floor would be above the level of the street. The architects to solve their difficulty adopted the 76 flDo&ern Civic Hrt. high-basement plan of fa9ade. Instead of doing this, the station might have been built at the track level, and the space before it have been terraced. This arrangement is one that may be often and happily adopted, now that the abolition of grade crossings is so widely demanded, and it need not in- convenience the travel. The carriage approach can be lifted by grade to the level of the main floor; and if the van approach, with unchanged level, be carried under the terrace to the real, though concealed, base- ment, there will be a considerable gain from various points of view. To this lower approach, also, the city surface cars might come. The arrangement re- lieves the area before the building, and adds to the comfort of travellers in enabling them to change from steam to urban transit without leaving the building. As to civic aesthetics, the joint dignity of town and station at this meeting-place — not a little endangered by the “glorified shelter” conception — can thus be fully assured, for in terraces there is conspicuous- ness, and urban art has rich opportunity. The sta- tion at Providence, Rhode Island, illustrates such a site. But before the arriving traveller has emerged from the station he has generally gained some sort of an impression of the town. If his views of it have been as “snapshots,” they have been serial; and if the opportunity for deliberate judgment has been lack- ing, a prepossession at least has been gained. The railroad must enter the town in one of three ways, £be Xatib approach. 77 or in combinations of them, it must enter on the level, or on an embankment crossing the streets by an elevated structure, or in a cutting. The last way is comparatively rare, being costliest, and either of the others offers a general survey. But the view is not flattering. Building sites are chosen in prox- imity to the railroad only out of necessity — for the facilitation of business, as in the case of warehouses or other large receiving or shipping establishments, or because the land not needed for these purposes is cheap. Manufacturing plants and warehouses are seldom beautiful, and on the cheapest land the cheap- est residences are built, while in any case the smoke and dirt of the railroad would tend quickly to blacken all structures within their reach. So it happens that the city turns its most forlorn side to the railroad, edging the route with the dingy and prosaic. To do something toward ameliorating this con- dition, which can give no pleasure to the traveller, is within the power of the railroad corporation. There may be planting along the borders for long distances, and mere neatness will do much. The result is as well worth effort as the improvement of the station grounds, and certainly it means so much to the town that the latter should require the railroad, as a con- dition of its entrance, to keep in order and sightliness the whole of its right of way within the city limits. It need hardly be stated here that there ought to be no grade crossings. They are characteristic not of the modern city, but of a transition stage out of 7 « flfrobern Civic Art. which the modern city — which, if we have not built, we can at least foresee — is developing. It were far better and cheaper, both for the railroad com- pany and for the town, that the need of abolish- ing the grade crossing were recognised at the start, as law is now more and more insisting that it shall be. Once recognised, there would be laid down in advance a complete and definite plan. The railroads would enter on the line that offered fewest engineer- ing difficulties to the avoidance of grade crossings; they would have a union station, conveniently situ- ated, suitably approached by converging streets, and with before it an ample area that could be appropri- ately developed. So the land entrance to the town would be, as a whole, pleasing, impressive, and dig- nified, and at the station the architect scarcely could fail to recognise and express its real significance. In the matter of elevated construction along the permanent right of way, there would be insistence on something more than that the embankment be turf- covered, or the retaining walls handsomely faced. There might be some gardening on the banks, with well placed shrubs where opportunity offers — even that can now be occasionally seen; and there should certainly be a demand that so important a struct- ure as the bridge by which the railroad crosses a thoroughfare be designed on artistic lines. These bridges which the railroad is permitted to throw across the streets close the vistas of the streets and have such civic prominence as few structures in the $be Xattb approach. 79 town possess. It is of the utmost importance that they be not hideous, and there is no reason why they should be. Yet where is the town or city that has made serious protest against the ugliness of the bridges that the railroad has hung so conspicuously over its streets ? Thus the problem of the land entrance to a town spreads out into problems of approach as well as of terminal. And because there must be considered the prospect from both road and town, because it is impossible that there should be any unsought natural beauty about this entrance, and because again the whole reason for the construction is utilitarian and profit-making, to the end that it is vain to depend unreservedly on aesthetic impulse, there arises many a perplexity and embarrassment. The purely ideal can hardly be expected. But it is clear that certain good things that make for modern civic art can reasonably be looked for. It will be to the advantage of the railroad as well as of the town to have a worthy entrance; but it re- mains for the town to insist upon this. If in its first plotting there are laid down the lines and propor- tions of the local main street, how much more appro- priately now may there be determined the best lines for the through travel, the course and station of the railroad that is to build up the town and to give to the world its view of the town! If in the com- munity’s growth the water entrance be developed by the municipality, is there less reason that it should 8o flDobern Civic Art. provide for the busy inland entrance approaches that shall be dignified, worthy, and convenient ? If in constructing the bridges that carry its own streets the municipality exercises artistic care, shall it be negligent in the matter of the bridges that, crossing its streets, present lateral views so striking and far visible ? If it constructs parkways, demands well kept streets, and requires its citizens to preserve the orderliness of their gardens, shall it fail to enjoin less care on that permanent right of way on which the railroad is permitted to bisect the town and from which the travelling public gains its view of the com- munity ? Civic art must surely rise to recognition of the importance and true significance of the modern railroad route and station as the land entrance of the modern town; and, recognising it, there must be demand for a treatment that shall be worthy because at once sensible, appropriate, and artistic. It should be the worthy portal of a worthy city, and for this end the community and railroad must work together. CHAPTER V. THE ADMINISTRATIVE CENTRE. C E an artist choosing the central figures of his group before he begins the composition, or as a landscape designer notes the dominant natural features of the given site before drawing his plans, we, in the study and practice of modern civic art, must pass from the portals of the city, from the entrances by water and by land, to the administrative centre of the town. This is the point that should nat- urally demand our next attention, for this should be the heart of the town. Its municipal life should be centred here, and it should be a distinct and definite point. To the buildings of the government, which would go to constitute the architectural elements of an administrative centre, there ought to be given not merely a central location, which will be invited by considerations of convenience even more strongly than by those of sentiment, but all the additional em- phasis and conspicuousness that site can offer. No 82 flDoberit Civic art. other structures are so appropriately entitled to the best position that the town can afford, convenience and appearance being jointly considered, as are those that officially stand for the town. And this being true of the leading public buildings, they are gregar- ious. They belong in about the same location, the- oretically, without regard to (because above) the temporary matter of land values and the claims of individual real-estate interests. And not only do these structures belong together, but each gains from the proximity of the others. There is, for example, a utilitarian gain, in the concentration of the public business and the consequent saving of time; and there is a civic gain, in the added dignity and importance which the buildings seem to possess. Collectively, they appear to make the city more prideworthy; they suggest the co-operation of departments rather than that individual sufficiency which separate buildings recommend and which is at the root of so much administrative evil; they make the municipality, in this representation of the mighti- ness of its total business, seem a more majestic thing and one better worth the devotion and service of its citizens. They make it seem better worth living for and working for, as of larger possibilities for good, than could the same buildings when scattered about the town and lost in a wilderness of commercial structures. It scarcely needs to be said, further, that a group- ing of these buildings may be as advantageous a?sthe- Six' Hbministrative Centre. 83 tically, for all of them and tor each of them, as it is in a civic sense and utilitarian sense, and as from those points of view it would seem to be natural. A prom- inent architect, in discussing this matter at a national gathering of his profession, has maintained that “ isolated buildings of whatever individual merit are insignificant in comparison to massed constructions, even if these latter be comparatively mediocre in quality.” This is a very strong claim, but even if it be pared down — as the architects did not require that it should be— there remains enough of undoubted truth powerfully to endorse on aesthetic grounds the grouping of the public structures. Granting this, consider what a waste of opportunity there is in the erection of monumental buildings for a city — what- ever the landlord represented by each — that are so separated as to make it impossible to see them together. Probably without additional expense, certainly without addition proportioned to the re- sulting gain, they might be put together, and to every building there might thus be given some- thing of majesty by its mere setting among its neighbours. So there would always be created, if natural laws were followed, a civic, or administrative, centre in each town. But the buildings represent various landlords — national, state, county, and urban — and even those that are municipal represent various sections of the city government — executive, legislative, educa- tional, or judicial — that usually are too independent 8 4 flfeobern Civic art. of one another to pool their interests in choosing sites. So it has repeatedly happened that the post- office has been erected in one place, the court-house in another, the city hall in a third, and the public library and high school in yet others, even when — as in the typical New England village — there is reserved a public area unbuilt upon in the heart of the town (the “green ” or “ common ”), upon which the official structures would most appropriately face. To be sure, in the old towns of New England the earliest church was erected here; but that circum- stance merely testifies to the appropriateness of the site, for there was no real grouping of public buildings. The objection may be made that the vicinity of the city buildings would be a poor place for a school, or even for the library. A good deal depends on the character of the officials. With politics at low ebb morally and intellectually, the city hall may not be the most desirable of neighbours. In Birmingham, on the other hand, where politics have been on a higher plane than in most American cities, the art gallery and the council chamber were long under one roof, with the town hall across the street on one side and the new art school across the street on the other. Even the new gallery is separated by no more than a street’s width from the council chamber. But speaking generally, we may say that the educational structures can be fittingly separated from the executive and legislative and from the &be Hbmimstrative Centre. 85 judicial, for in these days cities have grown too large to crowd into a single space quite all that is important. In the physiology of cities it is not ac- curate to-day to speak of “the heart” of the town; but, rather, of a series of nerve centres. Thus it is possible to have, with no contradiction of terms, more than a single centre. There may be, for in- stance, an administrative centre and an educational centre, just as we have already found collecting and distributing centres — all of them focal points of the town — at the water gate and the land entrance. A peculiarity, it may be noted, of the beautiful street plans of Washington and Paris is their topographical provision for a great number of such nerve centres. It is possible and convenient to discuss under a single head the administrative and educational foci, because they are alike in being, in each case, a group of public buildings. The same laws bring the struct- ures together, the same principles of civic art com- mend their concentration and suggest the governing of it. Alike, they are architectural aggregations, pro- bably, before in practice they are topographical foci, and the arrangement of the streets that lead to them, or of the streets or squares upon which they front, — all the generous provision for a large circulatory requirement, — will be determined by the location of the structures, instead of itself determining this. Here, then, is one of the few points in city-building where the topographical procedure may be perfectly rational, a result of forethought rather than of 86 flDoberrt Civic art. chance — even, if necessary, to the rebuilding of that portion of the town. As the public’s interest is greater than the interest of any individual or set of individuals, the ideal alone should be considered in the placing of the public buildings. Let us consider what the ideal placing would be. Most of the structures of a city are arranged in rows, fronting on the streets. This is an extremely undesirable arrangement for public buildings. Need- less to say, they might form a very stately series; and there are a host of examples — notably the handsome row of public structures on the Ring- strasse of Vienna — that could be named to endorse such a location. But Vienna’s Ringstrasse is to be counted out for the present, and of the other cases in which public buildings are collected into a group arranged along the side of a street, it may be doubted whether there is a single one in which the effect would not have been better with some other disposition. The main objections to location on a street, even assuming that there be no commercial interruption of the series, are: (i) the endangering of what is called the scale of the buildings; (2) the lack of opportunity for perspective owing to the nar- rowness of the street; (3) the loss of apparent re- lative importance. If the side of the street opposite to the public buildings be not built upon, — if it be a park or other reservation, — the buildings, as far as civic art is con- cerned, face not on a street but on the reservation. £be Administrative Centre. 87 which is quite another matter. If the street be built up on the opposite side, private ownership of that land puts in jeopardy the beauty and dignity of the public structures through the possibility of mingling inharmonious architecture, of making a squalid and unworthy outlook, or of destroying scale by the erection of a “sky-scraper,” or any colossal build- ing, that would dwarf the public structures. The danger that threatens on the farther side of the street threatens also at either end of it, except that there the possibly unworthy outlook becomes an unfortunate approach. If, on the other hand, both sides of the street be reserved for the public build- ings, so that they face each other in two series, the space between becomes simply a court. This, clearly, would serve the buildings better if it were wider than a street and were not open to all kinds of traffic— if, in other words, it were really a court and not a street. The narrowness of a street, again, is a serious matter because of its denial of opportunity for per- spective, the public buildings being deliberately monumental. The architect should not be discour- aged by a thought that the beholder of his work for the municipality can get no more than eighty or a hundred feet from the base lines. Such discourage- ment would be a sad thing for the city; and if there were no disheartenment, and lovely buildings were still erected, their beauty would be well-nigh wasted by the necessity of having to look straight up their 88 flDobent Civic Hrt. walls to see them. In the case of Vienna’s Ring- strasse, the street is extremely broad — so broad as to become at any point, with its trees and turf and “parking,” a little park; while its great width is further enhanced by the curve of the street, that renders possible long and changing oblique views of the fafades. That is why the majestic Ringstrasse is not to be taken as an example of the normal street. It is hardly fair to call it a street at all, for it is more like a long, curved plaza. Finally, if the public buildings be crowded along the edge of a street, what is there to distinguish them from the other structures of the town, to give them character, prestige, and the surpassing dignity and conspicu- ousness that should be theirs ? To set them back from a street elsewhere built up closely would be even to conceal them further. For all these reasons together the street is the least satisfactory location for the public buildings of a community, a fact that is even emphasised by the circumstance that it is the usual position for buildings of other kinds. Location on the water-front is in many cases to be strongly urged. It will frequently happen that this is not a geographically central location, as when the water forms the boundary of the town. But even when that is the case — and often, on the contrary, a bisecting stream will fix the town’s geo- graphical centre more surely than could an arbi- trarily chosen site — the water-frontage is likely to be, nevertheless, extremely centra! in a commercial Railroad Station at Wellesley Farms, Mass., on the Boston and Albany Railroad. 1 £be administrative Centre. 89 sense, the population and business of the com- munity crowding close upon it. If such a site be, in fact, sufficiently central to satisfy the convenience of the community, there is much to commend its selection for the location of the public buildings. The advantages are double, as they should be, — the site benefiting the appearance of the city as a whole and the aspect of the public buildings con- sidered by themselves. As far as the city is con- cerned, the grouping of the public buildings along the water-front offers an opportunity for that har- mony of water-front treatment, that visible perman- ence of construction, that stateliness of architectural facing, that may mean so much to the town in the water view. As far as the buildings themselves are concerned, the water outlook is something more than pleasing. It safeguards them from the inter- ference of private construction; and it invites care- fully treated approaches with an irresistibility which makes them unquestionably fitting. The very rise of the bank, with its suggestion of terraces or sloping ascents, adds to the dignity and seeming importance of the buildings. From a picturesque standpoint the site is, then, an entirely favourable one. A drawback is that the government buildings — excepting a possible custom-house — have little essential connection with the water. Utility does not demand their location along its edge, as it does demand the location of many other kinds of structures, and for this reason 9 ° flDobern Civic art. the municipality is likely to need its water-front space for other purposes, if the body of water has commercial or industrial value. But even in those cases there is to be urged the setting aside of some area for enjoyment, and upon this public reservation if it be large enough, or at least to front upon it, the municipal buildings might often be arranged with advantage. So would be served a twofold purpose. The public buildings would face upon the water-front, and a portion of the water- front would be preserved for public enjoyment. The artistic treatment given to the plot would constitute a beautifying of the buildings’ approach or site at the moment that it was also park development. With scarcely less certainty than the possession of a water-front, most communities have an emin- ence. If it does not command the whole town, it yet commands a considerable area, so that whatever structure is reared upon it possesses a conspicuous- ness above that of the town’s other buildings. Various considerations urge the reservation of this site for a public pleasure ground. The urgency of the considerations grows as the height of the emin- ence increases, for a far view is a precious pos- session; but when the height is not very great, when the ascent is neither so long nor so steep as to inter- fere seriously with traffic, and when the summit, if centrally located, is given over to building, — as it is likely to be under this combination of conditions, — then it would be difficult to find more fitting ten- $be administrative Centre, 91 ants than the structures that house the government of the city. There they would visibly dominate the town. To them the community would look up, seeing them lording over it at every turn, as, in fact, the govern- ment ought to do. The buildings would appear, to that extent, as a free people’s appropriate creation in succession of the castle of the feudal lords. And, apart from this sentiment, the height of the location would emphasise the relative importance of the buildings, without making too great a demand upon the architect or involving too high a cost for con- struction. They would gain in seeming importance and in dignity, merely because of their situation; and here once more there would be invitation for those balustrades and terraces that may do so much to place a building to advantage. In the distant view of the city the buildings of its government would be, fittingly, the first and most striking objects of the scene. The Capitol at Washington suggests itself immediately as a familiar example. Of its loca- tion, an English critic, Frederic Harrison, has lately declared: I have no hesitation in saying that the site of the Capitol is the noblest in the world, if we exclude that of the Parthenon in its pristine glory. . . . Londoners can imagine the effect if their St. Paul’s stood in an open park, reaching from the Temple to Finsbury Circus, and the great creation of Wren were dazzling white marble, and soared into an atmosphere of sunny light. As to the advantages that grade itself offers to 92 ®ot>ent Civic art buildings, the “ Papers Relating to the Improvement of the City of Washington ” 1 contain these very im- portant reflections: Abrupt changes of grade are not obstacles, but opportuni- ties. We have been abundantly satisfied if our buildings were planted, not set; that is, if the surface were levelled for them and they had no apparent connection with the ground on which they were placed. . . . There is nothing more attractive than walls, steps, terraces, balustrades, and buttresses, which are integral parts of most (public) buildings abroad, and which, when the natural grades have not given excuse for their exist- ence, have been deliberately created as necessary setting to the buildings. The monumental treatment of grade may, then, very greatly enhance the imposing effect of a build- ing. As the paper continues, this work is of im- mense variety: It can be made to soften too great austerity of design and to dignify too great license. In many cases the approaches to a simple, inexpensive structure exalt it above a pretentious but undeveloped neighbour, and in any scheme for the embellish- ment of a city, too much stress cannot be laid on these important accessories to the higher architectural achievements. Finally, and more prosaically, the very site safe- guards the public buildings from the intrusive elbow- ing of private structures that might dwarf them, that might screen them from view, or might shut out their light. As was assumed at the beginning of this chapter, no site can be too good for the struct- ures that officially represent the town. Here again, 1 Senate Document 94, Fifty-sixth Congress, second session. Paper by C. Howard Walker. £be Hbministrative Centre. 93 as on the water-front, if it be impossible to secure some of this advantageous situation to public enjoy- ment by means of a park, the end may be indirectly gained by dedicating it to the public buildings. But many communities, having neither a suitable eminence nor an available bit of water-front on which to locate their public structures, are compelled to make choice along the existing ways — be they the streets, parks, or squares — of the city. This, be- cause the question has been long neglected so that the best natural sites are pre-empted, is the common problem; and when it does arise, it is taken up too often with no courageousness of spirit or comprehens- iveness of plan. Then there is secured no grouping of the buildings; but, one by one, as necessity occurs, the question of situating single public structures is dealt with half-heartedly — at how great a loss to the total impressiveness, beauty, and majesty of the city! Even, however, amid these discouraging con- ditions, it is possible to find a rule that will help im- mensely in obtaining results which, though far from the ideal, are yet comparatively favourable for build- ing and for town. We have said that the street, using the term in its ordinary sense, is the least satisfactory location for the public structures. The reproach may be modified and an exception made, when a site is chosen that puts the building at the axes of im- portant thoroughfares. From the standpoint of the town, the building then suitably closes street vistas; 94 flfrobern Civic Hrt. and from the building’s standpoint, it may then be seen in perspective and has as great a conspicuousness as a relatively built-in site can give. The location, if not equal to the water-front or an eminence, is, all things considered, fairly good. In the original street plan of Washington much stress was laid upon the axial position of governmental structures. In Paris there is given to such monumental constructions as the Opera House, the Arch of the Star, the Made- leine, and the Hotel des Invalides axial treatment by causing a convergence of streets to them and by making their location complementary to similarly massive construction at the vista’s other end. In the new street planning of London, Washington, and countless other cities, this axial position for important buildings is again endorsed, both for the building’s sake and for the street’s. It not only terminates with a satisfactory mass the street vistas that were only wearisome if not thus closed, but it prevents the buildings of special prominence and size from destroying the scale of ordinary structures or from thrusting themselves too intrusively upon the street. To recapitulate, then, the government buildings should be grouped. That is, there ought to be a civic centre. If grouped, they should not be strung along a street. The street position is on the axis at a focal point. When grouped, they belong at the edge of squares or plazas; or, best of all, if the site be sufficiently central, on an eminence or upon the She administrative Centre. 95 water-front. If the public structures be educational institutions, the water-front might well prove unduly distracting. The ideal neighbour of an educational centre is a public reservation suitable for the play of little children, and inviting, by its quiet and leisure, the reflection and study of adults. But the requirements of civic art in the grouping of the public buildings are not exhausted by these considerations. We have noted only the relations of the buildings to the town as a whole. They have relations to one another. A number of these are comprised in what the architect calls scale — the adoption of a certain module to which all the build- ings must strictly adhere, as they can with no loss of individuality. If they so adhere that no building clashes with its neighbour, we may hope to attain that beauty of harmony and repose of which so many non-professional persons gained a new con- crete conception in the “Court of Honour” at the Chicago Fair. If they do not adhere to it, the grouping will prove of doubtful aesthetic value. Oftentimes it will be possible, also, to emphasise the group plan, or to appear to group existing build- ings that are really somewhat scattered, by joining them by means of arcades or colonnades or — if they be too far apart for that — by formal avenues of trees, with balustrades and sculpture. This is a course that may do much for civic art, not only in the end to which it leads but by the means it uses to reach that end. 96 flDobern Civic art. Of the relations of the now really or apparently grouped buildings to the structures near them, something has been already said. Here require- ments of scale are hardly less pressing than in the group itself. In European cities building regulations which determine not merely the height of the struct- ures, but of the cornice line, are so common that the matter of scale can be easily governed. In Amer- ica, however, there is danger. Boston imposed a special restriction as to height upon structures erected on Copley Square, with a view to safeguarding the beautiful buildings of a public character that had gathered there. In New York, where the chaste little City Hall occupies the centre of a green that has not been thus protected, dozens of millions of dollars have been expended upon structures that edge the square and that shut it in with lofty walls which utterly dwarf the municipal building. The same huge sum of money might have secured a series of structures that would have been civic orna- ments. Those that have risen, while fairly good of their type, do not include a single one that is an art possession, such as would have been appropriate around the edge of this little park which is the centre of the municipal life of the chief city of the United States. The apparently lost opportunity points to the lesson that it is well to go one step beyond the grouping of the public buildings, and to assure the maximum success by regulating the character and size of the buildings that bound the group. Sbe atmiintetrative Centre. 97 It should here be said that the Municipal Art Society of New York appointed a committee in 1902 to consider the possibility of securing an administrat- ive, or civic, centre in New York, by grouping pub- lic buildings in a central location. After careful study, the committee reported in favour of making the present City Hall Park the centre of such a scheme. It recommended that the park be cleared of all buildings except the beautiful City Hall, which is in the middle of it, and that the municipality pro- ceed to acquire all of the property (a portion of which it already owned) facing the park directly on the north. On this area, and on a block to be acquired on the east, it should then erect new administrative buildings. These, it was pointed out, with the Post-Office on the south, would furnish at least a partial frame that might be dignified and fairly har- monious. The committee added that the trans- formed park, “attractive and spacious to an extent that can now be scarcely imagined,” would be “a fitting site for generations to come for every class of adornment that may make beautiful the place, or commemorate historical events or characters.” Even if the recommendations of the report, which were presented in a persuasive financial as well as aesthetic light, are not to be carried out, they must have interest as showing how keenly is felt the need of a civic centre. Though conditions be ever so discouraging, as certainly they appeared to be in New York, modern 98 flDo&ern Civic art. civic art will not be content to forego dreams of their betterment. It will yet have that civic centre vision which was the climax of the civic art of the Flemish and the Italian Renaissance. The dream of New York is surpassed, as conditions warrant, by a plan in Chicago for grouping public buildings on the lake-front; and in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, where circumstances have given exceptional advantages, the “group plan,” on a square that leads to the water-front, is being actually secured. In each of these places, also, it is the earnest popular interest which has rendered possible this result. Finally, it may be suggested as a fitting conclusion, that the architectural grandeur of Athens, Florence, Venice, Budapest, Moscow, Antwerp, and Paris, — to name but a few examples, — is due largely in each case to the concentration of the chief buildings. Imagine its chief buildings as separated and isolated, and the beauty of each of these cities departs. ■ , . - . : : ;f| IN THE BUSINESS DISTRICT. p 09 CHAPTER VI. THE STREET PLAN OF THE BUSINESS DISTRICT. M ODERN civic art, having fixed certain definite foci, having determined that here shall be the formal entrance to the town by water, there its entrance for those who come by land, and that in such a place its public business shall be trans- acted ; having laid down the principle that an open space is desirable at each of these “nerve centres,” and that important streets should converge to them, — civic art, having established these bases and gone so far, is ready to take up the larger and more intricate problem of the street plan of the business district. The problem is important, interesting, and difficult. In the anatomy of the city there is no point at which the circulatory demands are so great, so insistent, so impatient, or where failure to provide adequately for them is so injurious. In the existing city there is no portion where it is more difficult to make changes, nor is there any district that has been allowed to grow with so little scientific planning. IOI 102 flDobern Civic Bit, In the average town in the United States, ever a most attractive field for the student of community development, the broad, straight Main Street of the village has become in fact, as it already is in name, the main thoroughfare of the town. From it the business has overflowed into a series of narrow streets that cross it at right angles, and on the broader of these it may extend some distance. The arrangement, stretching the business along two sides of an uncompleted triangle, is the most inconvenient possible, involving greatest loss of energy and time. Or the business, having found no cross street of especial invitation, may extend equally along a series of them and then spread over a thoroughfare that, paralleling the main street, connects them. So it will overflow a rectangle, and perhaps a series of these, until there is a large business district tending to be rectangular. In no other equal area is space so precious, or time and distance more important fac- tors; yet, to go from any point on one street to any point on one that is parallel, two sides of the triangle must be traversed. Furthermore, the traffic, far larger than had been intended for these streets, doubtless chokes them. Every slowly moving truck impedes every vehicle behind it. The great business houses, barely seen from the mean and narrow thoroughfares, lose their dignity. Rapid-transit facili- ties, crowded on to one or two broad highways, contract these for general traffic and, consequently, the attempted rapid-transit is delayed. In London Street plan of tbe Business ^District. 103 where, thanks to excellent police regulation, the traffic moves with relative celerity, a calculation has been made that “every omnibus and cab that uses the main streets of the ‘ City ’ and its approaches is delayed on an average half an hour each day through blocks and partial blocks.” Could the money loss of this to passengers in cab and omnibus be esti- mated, consider what would be the aggregate ! A problem that, for all its difficulty, so urgently invites solution has not lacked for thought. There are such practical requirements that civic art must have had pressing claims to be heard among them ; and yet it is heard, for if the centre of the city be not imposing, if there be here no handsome sites, no state- liness, no majestic thoroughfares, and the conveni- ence of the business be not consulted, the modern city has lamentably failed to realise the ends of civic art. The courage with which this hardest of all the prob- lems has been attacked in the world’s great cities is one of the most interesting and inspiring, as it is one of the most suggestive, episodes in the history that relates the rise of the new ideal for cities — that ideal born of new conditions and which cannot therefore be a fruitless dream. This essential newness of the problem is well illustrated by one of the most striking attempts that have been made to solve it. On Christmas day in 1857, as a result of preliminary agitation, Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria issued a decree addressed to the Minister of the Interior, requiring that “the 104 ffcobern Civic art. enlargement of the inner city of Vienna, for the pur- pose of its suitable connection with the suburbs, should be undertaken as speedily as possible.” It was suggested that the surrounding fortifications and ditches, which are always the great opportunity of the cramped old Continental cities, be removed, and that at the same time there be made adequate provision of sites for a new war office, a city mar- shall’s office, an opera house, imperial archives, a town hall, and the necessary buildings for museums and galleries. The decree required that there be opened a competition for plans for the improvement, the jury to consist of a commission of high officials representing various interests, these commissioners before making the awards, however, to “submit the plans to a committee of specialists appointed by them.” Three designs were to be selected for prizes and the premiums were to be two thousand, one thousand, and five hundred gold ducats. This was the opportunity, the perception and courageous seizure of which have since made Vienna so superb and famous. Eighty-five designs were submitted, and though none of the premiated plans was literally carried out, they gave suggestions and set the stand- ard for the final scheme. But this, as the decree required, dealt rather with the enlargement of the inner city and its convenient connection with the suburbs than with a remodelling of the district itself. Thirty-five years later, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the municipality took up the latter Street plan of tbe Businese District. 105 problem, inviting the architects and engineers of the world to compete in the submission of plans for the remodelling of old, central Vienna. There were two prizes of ten thousand florins, three of five thousand, and three of three thousand florins. For “ part de- signs which do not comprise the whole city, but consider only a few questions of the improvement, or means of communication,” there were prizes of three thousand florins and under; and finally prizes were promised for plans that were good in parts though not satisfactory as a whole. The jury was composed mainly of professors, leading architects, and engineers ; and far-off Vienna proved again that she had nothing to learn either as to modern municipal ideals or civic spirit from Berlin or Paris or Rome or from the hurrying cities of England and America. The early days of Philadelphia and New York offered exceptional opportunities for a scientific plan- ning of the business districts in communities which, as could be even then foreseen, were destined to become great cities. That the outcome in each case is a failure, an example of what not to do, shows how little progress had yet been made in the physical science of cities. There was, however, conscious- ness of the problem and its thoughtful consideration. For Philadelphia no less a personage than William Penn made a plan. Its feature was a long series of rectangles that were almost squares, the straight highways unrelieved by curve or diagonal, with two io6 flbobern Civic art. of the streets, which crossed at right angles in a big open space nearly in the middle of the tract, consid- erably broader than the others. If there was little of art or science about the design, there was enough forethought to appreciate the value of frequent open spaces for the admission of light and air to a crowded section, for the provision of good building- sites on the ground facing the public areas, and for relieving the monotony of the district. Penn’s plan shows five such spaces, each half as large again as an ordinary block, in a district only five blocks broad by twenty-two long. 1 Had the same proportion been secured for the closely built-up sections of the city when it extended beyond this district, as the Consolidation Act of 1854 directed should be done, there would have been two hundred and eighty small parks in the city plan of Philadelphia at the beginning of the twentieth century instead of the forty-five that were actually there. But there was not enough public appreciation of the importance of the problem to secure the adoption of even the one redeeming feature of Penn’s plan. The straight streets and rectangular blocks, unrelieved by frequent open spaces, extended over the growing city and were adopted as a model by the thirty or more out- lying towns and villages that have since been in- corporated in it. When New York came to wrestle with the pro- blem, in 1807, the public held it serious enough to The area between Vine and South streets and the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Street plan of the Business District. 107 demand the consideration of a formally appointed commission. This laid down — tradition says with a mason’s hand sieve — the familiar gridiron plan. The one irregular thoroughfare was Broadway, al- ready a road of too much importance to be molested, and to that happy chance New York owes the only opportunities for civic stateliness or beauty afforded in its street arrangement. Broadway has developed, too, as the great -business street, just as the diagonal Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia has become, in spite of its narrowness, a street of shops. If, as wisely remarked, “ the shop-keepers go where the travel is,” the value of the diagonal thoroughfare for circulatory purposes is attested. But there are other faults in the rectilinear plan. Frederick Law Olmsted has put some of them well in saying of the commission’s work : Some two thousand blocks were provided, each theoretic- ally two hundred feet wide, no more, no less; and ever since, if a building site is wanted, whether with a view to a church or a blast furnace, an opera house or a toy shop, there is, of intention, no better place in one of these blocks than in another. . . . If a proposed cathedral, military depot, great manufacturing enter- prise, house of religious seclusion, or seat of learning needs a space of ground more than sixty-six yards in extent, from north to south, the system forbids that it shall be built in New York. . . . There- is no place in New York where a stately building can be looked up to from base to turret, none where it can even be seen full in the face and all at once taken in by the eye; none where it can be viewed in advantageous perspective. . . . Such distinctive advantage of position as Rome gives St. Peter’s, Paris the Madeleine, London St. Paul’s, New York, under her system, gives to nothing. fU>ot>ern Civic Brt. 108 The plan offers the maximum of building area, but the minimum of effect. Costly failures where there might have been magnificent successes are not confined to the United States. If modern civic art has learned, the world over, a lesson, if it has been taught to recognise the worth of a street plan for the business district that shall consult convenience of travel and stateliness of result, it has done so by dear experience widely dis- tributed. To devise on paper a plan intelligent and comprehensive required no impossible genius ; to secure public appreciation of such a plan required examples not only of its success but of the failure of simpler plans. In London after the great fire there was presented an opportunity as thrilling as any that America has had. Here, in the heart of the world’s greatest and richest city, a large district could be replanned. There was a genius who saw the chance and contrived a scheme that would have rendered London superb among the cities of to-day ; but the design of Sir Christopher Wren was in ad- vance of the age, and you must seek diligently now to find it in the archives of an Oxford college. Four hundred and thirty-six acres had been burned over ; a cathedral and eighty-seven churches were to be rebuilt ; a site was to be found for a new exchange and for other public buildings; and of about fourteen thousand structures, some of which might have stood in the way of a new planning, not one was left. But London was rebuilt in the old way, and such Street plan of tbe Business district. io 9 improvements as have since been made, unsatisfactory as they are, have cost enormously. From 1798 to 1821 ten select committees made reports on particu- lar improvements. In another twenty years, from 1832 to 1851, Parliament appointed eleven or twelve select committees to take into consideration plans for the improvement of London and to advise as to the best means for carrying out the plans. These committees did little more than report on the causes of the crowding — which were obvious enough — and on the difficulty of making changes owing to the great cost. All this was impressing the lesson. At last, however, conditions became so serious that vast expenses had to be assumed. In the thirty-four years from 1855 to 1889 the Metropolitan Board of Works expended upon street changes and improve- ments more than fifteen millions sterling. The net cost, after recoupments from the sale of surplus land, exceeded ten millions sterling, while a million and a half pounds more had been paid out by the board in grants to local districts, to aid them in bearing the cost of the smaller street improvements. It was at about the end of this period that the chairman of the improvement committee of the London County Council observed that the streets of London meas- ured some two thousand miles, and that in the thirty years ending with 1889 the board of public works had succeeded, with its great expenditure, in con- structing a total length of fifteen and four-fifths miles of new streets, with an average width of sixty feet. I IO flDobern Civic art. He noted this with pride; but those who know Wren’s plan, who recall how easily it might have been adopted, and its lines extended over the whole metropolitan area as London stretched farther into the country, can see only pathos in his figures, and realise more keenly than before the value of care in original street planning. The plan of Sir Christopher Wren for the re- building of burned London was in accord with the principles of civic art as they are recognised to-day. Wren was surveyor-general, so that his masterly design took a natural precedence; it was accepted also by the king, and what now seems the mere accident of a lack of ever so little ready money and a desire for haste were allowed to prevent the future splendour and convenience of the great city. The main features of his plan, which well repays study, were to be, going from west to east: (i) A circular space at the top of Fleet Street hill, about on the site of St. Dunstan’s Church. From this eight streets were to radiate, the eight to be connected with one another at a suitable distance from the centre by cross streets, these forming an octagon in relation to the circle. (2) A triangular space in full view from Fleet Street hill. This was to widen toward the east and was to include St. Paul’s and Doctors’ Com- mons. (3) An open space in the centre of which should stand, on its old site, the Royal Exchange, and grouped around this space were to be the public buildings. From this point, which was to be the Sir* Christopher Wren’s Plan for Rebuilding ^Lpndon after the Great Fire in 1666. Street plan of tbe Business District, m topographical centre, there were to radiate ten streets, each sixty feet wide. Three of these reached directly down to the river, offering from it a noble view of the Exchange. Along the river bank there was to be a broad quay, and opposite London Bridge a large semicircular space with arterial streets radiat- ing outward. Here and there, where radials of dif- ferent systems crossed, there were established new open spaces and new centres. The plan showed, in brief, that use of broad' straight streets linked to- gether by monumental buildings, that provision of commanding sites for important structures, that use of diagonals, of open areas, and of curving streets with their changing view-points, which the accepted plans of Paris, of Vienna, and of Washington have now made familiar. The opportunity was allowed to pass, and all the subsequent and costly changes in the London plan have proved inadequate, because it since has been impossible financially to carry out a single compre- hensive scheme that should bring every part into direct relations with every other. In all street planning there must be regard for the through lines of travel as surely as for the local, and it is these through courses which scattered improvements generally fail to benefit to great extent. The through travel in its usually heavy volume demands arterial thoroughfares that shall be wide, uniform in their width, straight, of easy gradient, and on the direct line between important foci. These requirements 1 12 HDo&ern Civic art. alone involve a considerable dignity of aspect. To gain the best spectacular results, however, civic art must be mindful also of other factors. Perhaps the most notable of these in the business district is the architectural effect. The relation between the architecture and the street plan is reciprocal. Each can do so much for the other that while, on the one hand, a street may be opened or widened simply that a monu- mental structure may be the better seen, on the other hand the precise location of a new street may be determined by the position of existing structures that are prominent, according as they would or would not close the vista of the street, and so enhance its beauty. For in a city mere distance is not fine. There should be set up visible limits, or at least accents, and the ideal would be to proportion the breadth of the thoroughfare to the distance between these limits or main accents. We have seen in this connection how Sir Christopher Wren built up his street plan from the focal points offered by important buildings and then on the minor axes obtained variety of treatment. We may observe also how the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is made a topographical centre whence twelve great streets radiate, and how fully again the method is exempli- fied in the plan of Washington. A few years ago there was a project on foot in Brussels to prolong a certain street 1 in order to 1 The Rue du Lombard toward the Rue Saint-Jean. Street plan of tbe Business District. 113 establish direct communication between two im- portant points. The utilitarian advantages of the proposed street were overwhelming, but the matter was not decided until that national society of workers for civic art, L’GEuvre Nationale Beige, had prepared a report on the aesthetic effect. This report showed what view of the Palais de Justice the new street would reveal, what views it would afford of two churches that were on its line, the character of the new view it would open of the Hotel de Ville, and finally what would be the general aspect of the street itself and of the lateral streets as seen from it. The incident is a happy illustration of the many points^ that civic art would have kept in mind when arranging or changing the street plan of a city’s centre. And there are some other requirements even than these. There is to be considered the general line of frontage, or building line, for this may be set back to widen a narrow street; the erection of porticoes over the walk, the projection and height of balconies and awnings, and finally the regulation of building heights if we would have an imposing thoroughfare. In the European cities, where more frequently than in the United States the central authority pushes new streets through closely built-up districts, there are statutes to control all these matters. Though these deal so directly with the architectural aspect of the city that they may be considered more fittingly under that head, it is well to observe here that their special design is to preserve the dignity of the street. 8 flftobcrit Civic Hrt. 114 In laying down, then, an ideal street plan, for the business district of a city, there should be first a comprehensive scheme, a skeleton of arterial thor- oughfares to provide for the through travel from point to point. These great roads will be direct, broad, straight, and free from heavy grades. At the focal points there will be open spaces and from these the great streets will radiate. Then, in laying down the precise location of any one of them, we shall note what views it opens, what its accents are, and, if possible, we shall proportion its width to its length or seeming length. On the lateral and minor streets, designed for local traffic, we shall obtain a pleasing variety in the street lines — even if it be only that of sudden regularity. Later on we will safeguard the appearance of the street by building regulations; we may even swerve it a little to preserve an historic or beautiful edifice; and we will take care that if it is to pass upon viaduct or bridge, or if a bridge is to be suspended over it, the majesty and beauty of the street shall not be destroyed by a hideous structure. In carelessness of civic art, in haste, in wonder at the prowess of modern industrialism and awe of our cunning with iron and steel, we have suffered a hopelessly unaesthetic truss bridge, cheaply made and quickly put together, to become a common and well-nigh prevailing type. The marvel is not that iron and steel are used, but that we submit to their use in ugly lines. Suppose, it has been suggested, that under the eaves of Notre Dame in Paris there Street plan of the Business District. 115 were, instead of the graceful sweeps of the arched bridges across the Seine, a couple of truss construc- tions — like, for example, the bridge by which rich Chicago has permitted State Street to be demeaned, — how the aspect not of a street alone, but of Paris, would be changed! How much poorer in urban beauty would be the world! As to the focal points, earlier chapters have sug- gested what these are likely to be. The government buildings, the entrances to the town, by water and by land — these are sure receiving and distributing centres. Wren’s plan has suggested the artificial creation of additional and local foci at convenient points, and the plan of Paris shows how such topo- graphical centres may be located with reference to monumental constructions (as the Arc de Triomphe) that are not in themselves magnets of travel but the conspicuousness of which is desirable on spectacular grounds. That the creation of such local centres may very greatly enhance the commercial value of their building sites, in the business districts of cities, is obvious enough. But the importance of an arbi- trary focus can be still further enhanced, so that it becomes more than local. An interesting example is found in the plan of Dalny, the new city that Russia constructed as a Pacific seaport terminal for its Trans-Siberian Rail- road. The street plan of this entire city was made in the office of the Russian engineers before any building was commenced. There are many diagonal fIDobern Civic art. I 16 arterial thoroughfares, tire crossing points of the different systems of radials creating local centres, and in front of the railway station there is a plaza which is an important focus. But in the heart of the town a circular public space had been laid out. Ten long straight streets converge upon it, connected by a circular street that forms the circle’s circumference. Built around this, with excellent effect in the plan, there were to be ten structures, each in its separate little block. Yet they included — and it must be re- membered that the list was made out in an office, before a house had been put up — buildings of as little individual importance as a private bank (three), a theatre, a club-house, a post- and telegraph-office. Still the aggregate result, the town hall and some government offices being added, locates the heart of the city. It is a valuable suggestion for towns of minor importance. But the opportunity for new planning on the scale of Dalny may come only once in a hundred years. Such transformations as have been wrought in Paris and Vienna, such extensive changes of street plan and aspect as Berlin and Rome have brought about, and such magnificently comprehensive projects as now accepted for Washington, are possible only under a government that is locally autocratic. Most cities of England, and especially of America, must make their revisions step by step. For this there is no less need of a good general scheme. That every step may count, that every improvement shall bring a lit- Street plan of tbe Business District, n 7 tie nearer to realisation that complete scheme which would be best, there must be a fixed ideal in mind. That is why civic art insists so earnestly on the value of the principles of a general street plan. If we have not these, we shall be in danger of widening at great cost a street that comes from nowhere and leads to nothing, that for all its width will be deserted be- cause the through travel takes a route that is more direct; we shall be opening spaces to which there is no convergence of thoroughfares, or we shall make a mockery of “improvement” by choking a corner with criss-cross travel through focusing important streets where there is only a street’s width to handle the converging traffic. That such dangers are before us always, that the problem of the street plan even in the business dis- trict is not theoretical, there is abundant proof. Con- sider the changes that London is making, while this is being written, in the widening of the Strand and the opening of the great new thoroughfare from Hol- born to the Strand. In New York the administration is having public hearings on the plans for street ap- proaches to the new bridges. In Pittsburg the Archi- tectural Club has lately had a competition of plans “for the improvement of the down-town districts.” In Toronto the like project is under earnest public discussion. In San Francisco it has been seriously taken up. New stations, new bridges, new build- ings, and, above all, the growing congestion of an increasing population — so sadly felt where there is i iS flDobeot civic art no scientific plan of circulation — are forcing these problems ever before us. When the new charter for Greater New York was prepared, the need of rectifying the street sys- tem, and of doing this in accordance with a compre- hensive scheme that should not be unduly influenced by local considerations, was felt so keenly that pro- vision was made for a general Board of Public Im- provements. An accident of politics put on the first board some incompetent men, and in disgust the board was abolished when the charter was revised. But the need remained, and there came to be de- manded even the creation of an expert commission, such as that which was working so successfully for Washington. The problem in its universal applica- tion is not, as we have seen, merely that of circu- lation. The traffic is not alone in clamouring for its solution. It is presented also that adequate building sites may be provided — sites that may be large enough for a great building, sites to which impress- iveness of effect belong, and to which there may be noble approaches, sites that can offer a frontage on at least three streets without the necessity of owning half a block. There is, perhaps, too common a notion that the way to secure comfort and convenience for the travel and to bestow on the business district of a city splend- our of appearance is simply to widen streets. As well might one think that the one way to emphasise a word in speaking is to scream it, and that therein Street pan of tbe Business District. 119 lay the secret of the art of oratory! The error must be clear from what has been said; but to emphasise it we may note that in Paris the Avenue de l’Opera is one hundred and twenty feet wide, and the Rue de Rivoli one hundred feet wide, while in London Hol- born, Oxford Street, and Bayswater Road have a width of seventy feet (and reach for four miles). Regent Street is eighty feet broad, and Queen Victoria Street seventy-five feet. We may ask ourselves how much of the difference in the impressions that these streets make is due to difference of width. As far as appear- ance goes, the architectural termini and the relative length are always stronger factors. The width de- manded by the traffic alone is not, also, to be determ- ined merely by the traffic’s mass. The grade and the speed at which the travel moves must be carefully considered in interpreting the requirements of its volume. There is, too, something to be said about the choice of the local improvements that are to be under- taken for bettering the urban conditions. There should be remembrance that it is the municipal, as much as the local, condition which it is necessary to improve. The committee of the London County Council which has this matter in charge states that in preparing its annual recommendations to the council it “ gives the fullest consideration to the requirements of each district, and accordingly selects, from all parts of London, such improvements as are most urgently needed and which will be of the greatest advantage 120 flDobent Civic art. to the general through travel.” This states the rule precisely. Now, as to securing the radical street changes that may be required, there are in general five meth- ods of procedure : first, the constructing authority may acquire only those properties the whole or por- tions of which are actually needed for the new or widened street. This is the method usually adopted by the London County Council. Second, there may be secured more land than is actually needed for the improvement, with a view to the gaining of valuable building sites. The plan is suggested in the quoted decree for the improvement of Vienna. Third, pro- perty over a large area through which the improve- ment passes may be acquired, with a view to abolishing a slum district for instance. Examples of this are found in some of the provincial cities of Great Britain and where large land improvement companies have operated. Fourth, the acquisition of only that property which is to be added to the public way and the levying of an improvement charge upon the ad- jacent lands. This is a familiar American method. Fifth, a modification of the third scheme to the extent that the acquirements are confined to freehold and long leasehold interests, the short leaseholds being allowed to run out. When the acquirements exceed the needs of the new or widened street itself there may be important recoupments by the sale of the sites made so much more valuable through the im- provement. When the acquirements are not so con- Street plan of tbe Business District. 121 siderable as to constitute good sites, or when no land is secured beyond that needed for the street itself, — which is pushed ruthlessly through, regardless of the cutting of lots, — there may be left along its edges building sites so meagre and fragmentary as to be comparatively worthless. In such case the improve- ment, instead of affording a handsome thoroughfare, results for a long time in only a dismal collection of the backs of buildings and . of patches of vacant land. Such an outcome must be anticipated and guarded against in making the new street. There is one other consideration to influence some- times the location of new business thoroughfares, or to add to the estimate of their value. It has been found that often there is no better wav to redeem a •/ slum district than by cutting into it a great highway that will be filled with the through travel of a city’s industry. Like a stream of pure water cleansing what it touches, this tide of traffic, pulsing with the joyousness of the city’s life of toil and purpose, when flowing through an idle or suffering district wakes it to larger interests and higher purpose. There is, finally, this to remember, and it is the especial text of municipal aesthetics. Until there is a good street plan, modern civic art can come to little. A Greek sculptor charged his pupil with having richly ornamented a statue because he “ knew not how to make it beautiful.” Beauty is dependent on a fine- ness of line, a chastity of form, the lack of which can be atoned for by no ornament that is superimposed, I 22 flDobetn Civic Hit. by no added decoration. And this is no more true in sculpture than in the street plan, which is the skeleton of the city, the framework of the structure in the highest and most complex of all the arts — the art of noble city-building. I CHAPTER VI!. ARCHITECTURE IN THE BUSINESS DISTRICT. W E have seen that a street which is badly planned can look for little stateliness or even beauty, however meritorious is the construction along its borders or the decoration heaped upon it. Conversely, we have seen that the best planned street requires, for full effect, the safe- guarding of its architecture, the establishment of a building line, probably of a cornice line, and the pro- tection of statutes regulating the height of balconies and awnings and the construction of porticoes over the walks. These are all matters that deal indeed with the architecture, but their design primarily is to guard the beauty or dignity of the way. The regulation and the obligations of construction be- come, then, a distinct phase of civic aesthetics. This is not merely because architecture is so important in itself that whatever protects it or adds to its imposing character adds immensely to the im- pression made by the city. It is because the street 124 fifco&ent Civic art. is so dependent on the architecture for the effect which is offered, that the latter becomes practically a constructive element of the street. Especially must this be true in the business district, where the lots contain no open space before the structures that will divide responsibility for the aspect of the way. In this district particularly, then, would civic art cherish the architecture, and with an equal zeal for the street’s and architecture’s sake. In this district, too, the archi- tecture is of so distinct a type from that in the residen- tial area as to offer in any event a separate problem. The most striking modern characteristic of the construction which is to be found in the business districts of cities is height. There are not wanting some indications of a reaction; but for the present at least, and for some years to come, the surpassing height of great office buildings will be the most domin- ant feature of the business area. More than this, the permanent level of building height for the whole district has been raised so greatly, whatever the pos- sible reaction, as to constitute in itself a clear division between old and modern construction methods. The influence of this on civic art is pronounced. Tall buildings are concentrators of business. Great office structures, side by side or facing each other across a narrow street, may easily house a daytime population of three to five thousand persons. A population as large as was spread over a square mile or more of these same streets, in the days of the vil- lage from which the city grew, is now crowded upon A Bit of New York, at Bowling Green. Height as the most striking characteristic of modern commercial building. architecture in tbe Business District. 125 one block of one street. It is this circumstance which has lately urged, with an insistence that has become compulsion, the widening of many thorough- fares, the cutting through of new streets, and the study of a scientific system of street planning. The tall building requires a wide street quite as much be- cause of the congestion of travel it brings as because it shuts the sunshine out of narrow streets or because it cannot be fitly seen without a perspective sufficient at least to offer an appreciable visual angle. Yet these latter considerations are potent also. They belong more obviously to the field of art. They ex- plain the aesthetic desirability of wide streets where tall buildings are. In the present discussion, how- ever, we are assuming the street and have to con- sider the building. A degree of harmony if not of uniformity is clearly to be desired in the buildings along the thoroughfare. The business street is essentially formal. There is nothing in the world more artificial, for there is not a stick or stone of it which has not been placed by the hand of man. Orderliness, therefore, is required. We can liken the side of a street to a line of type. The letters need not be of precisely the same height and should not be of exactly the same form and width, but glaring contrasts will shock and offend. A line composed of such a mingling of exclamation points and periods as might well stand (with here and there an interrogation inserted) for many a business street would be a total failure artistically. The same 126 flfrobern Civic art. would be true of a line in which colours were hope- lessly jumbled. Some regularity, then, in skyline and in lines of balcony and cornice is desirable, with a harmony of tint. The pauses, however, will be clearly marked. These are the accents of the street. There ought to be an established maximum of height above which no edifice shall rise. A defeat of efforts to establish such a limit can be due only to the strength of private interests. The larger, public interest is altogether in favour of the restriction. Any extensive construction of tall buildings inevitably leads on narrow thoroughfares to a street congestion so unbearable that remedies must be had and these remedies will be extremely costly. The restriction is required, then, (i) for the street’s sake, from various points of view; (2) for the building’s own sake, since, the ground area being limited, there is a height at which the proportions cease to be pleasant; (3) for the protection of every meritorious structure so that a neighbour, towering immensely higher, may not dwarf it. The first requirement is made the basis of the familiar building statute in European cities, which proportions to the width of the thoroughfare the height of the structures bordering upon it, with a designated maximum limit — moderately increased, sometimes, of course, where the street widens into a plaza. 1 The second requirement is in the heart of the architect, but save in buildings of exceptional 1 A similar ordinance is occasionally found in the United States — as in St. Louis, for example. architecture in tbe Business District. 127 artistic character or in public structures may not have expression. The third requirement is embodied in occasional local legislation, of which the special building regulations enacted for Copley Square in Boston — that a tall apartment house should not dwarf, as projected, the existing examples of beauti- ful architecture — is a notable illustration. Equally desirable, and for similar reasons, is the establishment of a minimum building height for any given street, and this need also is recognised by statute in Europe. In fact, it has been seriously sug- gested in London that when a new street is planned it were well for the committee of the County Council^ when formulating the proposal, to invite the views of leading architects and engineers, and on their recommendations to draw up a general scheme pro- viding for the principal feature of the building eleva- tions. In due time the avenue would then have not only convenience but dignity and beauty. If this were done, not in London only but wherever new streets are planned for commercial districts, the pro- gress of contemporary civic art would be more striking. That the greater height of building, made possi- ble by the modern method of steel construction, will in itself add much to the imposing character of the business district, to its seeming importance, solidity, and impressiveness, if it be so curbed and regulated that there is a degree of uniformity in the rise of the building level, scarcely needs a saying. Between a 128 flfcobern Civic art. street forty feet wide lined with low brick or stucco structures, and a thoroughfare eighty feet wide with a border of modern commercial buildings, there is no comparison, as far as strictly urban effectiveness goes. But everything must be in scale. The ten- and eleven-story buildings that make a striking group around the Old Granary Burial Ground in Boston, where the law has limited building heights to one hundred and twenty-five feet, would lose their impressiveness in New York. There the inter- polated twenty-story structures would dwarf them. “Sky-scrapers,” however, which rise from two hundred to two hundred and fifty feet are necessarily scattered, if only to protect their own light. They establish a standard to which there cannot be uni- form adherence, and the failures to adhere to it look puny. So there is lost all that impressiveness which comes from mere order and regularity, while elsewhere lower structures lose nothing of seeming importance if there be no higher by which to measure them. Regarding the size of buildings, and especially their height, there is, too, another thing to be ob- served. This is the proportion to be maintained with respect to the vista in which they come. There has been note of the value of monumental construction at focal points. Is there need of the statement that the construction should be adjusted to the view which is afforded from converging streets, that it may be neither too massive nor too small and insignificant? This will not be an easy thing to adjust by statute. architecture in the Business District. 129 It also must be in the heart of the architect, or, if the building antedates the street, in the heart of him who plans the latter. The south end of the Treasury, in Washington, as it is seen from the Capitol, has been happily cited as an example. Large as it is, it is too small to count in a view down the length of Pennsylvania Avenue. The conscientious architect will strive also to establish a relation between the height of his build- ing and the length of its facade; and if his building is at a topographical axis or centre, where promin- ence is thrust upon it and large size is excusable, if not indeed required, he will see to it that the struct- ure shall still form a definite composition with its neighbours. Finally he will try to put into the appearance of the building something of appropriate- ness to its purpose, to its location, and its architect- ural period. When old London Bridge was demolished and a new one made, there was wisely planned a broad approach on the Southwark side. High Street at that time was rich in pointed gables, florid plaster work, diamond casements, and half-timbered over- hanging stories. These picturesque features were swept away with the broad approach ; there followed a line of monotonous brick fronts — genuine, if homely — and then these were superseded by a row of “Grecian and Italianised fafades” that in South- wark could have no meaning beyond a homesick dream or silly imitation. Civic art is in the broad approach and the clearing out of unsanitary rookeries; 9 flfcofcein Civic Hit. 130 but there goes with it such a loss, also of civic art, in the style of building which has succeeded, that the beholder does not readily appreciate the existence of a net advantage. These are not, however, matters readily reached by law, unless there be established a commission to pass upon the artistic features of the plan of every projected building as certainly as upon its sanitation. But the thoughts emphasise the many obligations of the architect, and civic art’s great dependence on him. In that remodelling of cities which new condi- tions make so conspicuous a feature in modern urban development and which is a potent stimulus to municipal aesthetics, it must often happen that in the older communities the location of a new street might endanger some building of historical or architectural interest. But the charm of a street is not dependent on newness. Historical interest is not to be lightly ignored and beauty is ever fresh. The special committee of the London County Council, which in such cases is charged to consider and re- port on the course of action to be taken; the com- missions of experts to which these matters are relegated in French cities; the zealous official guard- ianship in Italy, Belgium, and Germany, — all this shows that the European cities which have had long experience, and where such opportunities come with more frequency than in America, value highly the chance thus given to secure or preserve picturesque- ness, variety, interest, and assured structural beauty architecture in tbe ^Business District. 131 on the street. Modern civic art would not be all modern in its expression. It is no iconoclast where beauty is concerned. And therein is one secret of its power. Speaking merely from the architectural standpoint, it would draw gladly on the treasures of the ever lengthening past. At the same time, every effort must be made to render the present and future worthy of the best remnants of the past. In' France and Belgium, which to-day are leaders in the more decoratively aesthetic features of modern civic art, municipalities offer prizes for the most beautiful fafades. In Paris these, prizes go to owner, builder, and architect, the former being exempted from half of his street tax and the two latter receiving highly cherished medals. So in the new conception of the city beautiful is impressed the lesson of obligation to the community, the re- minder that good taste — love of beauty and ability to gratify it — should not be so selfish as to hide a lovely or splendid interior behind a plain exterior, and that to the city which has made possible a hand- some street something in its turn is owing in a visi- ble contribution to the general weal. It is not safe to leave all this to the results of individual rivalry. The facades, so long monotonous, in New York and Philadelphia, and the homely fronts and high garden walls that often hide beautiful interiors in England, show the folly of so doing. It is proved again in the familiar custom of the individual, when leasing or selling part of a tract, to require that a certain flDo&ern Civic art. minimum sum shall be represented in the exterior of the building to be erected. Once such rivalry has, by artificial means, been started, there is needed no great spur to keep it active, but rather that artistic guidance and control which can be given in the building regulations. In the business portions of a city the effects that are desired are rather those which can be called “stunning” than those dependent on the fineness and niceness of delicate design. In the business street there is inevitably much that is bizarre, blatant, and distracting. It is, further, the very purpose of the business house to attract attention, and civic art has something to be grateful for when, instead of making use of hideous advertisements, or striking colour, or great height, or sudden littleness in a wil- derness of “sky-scrapers,” the dependence for effect is placed on the dignity of the building’s appearance, on the majesty of its proportions, on the impressive- ness of its architectural treatment. That is why “stunning effect” can properly be desired in the structures of the business district. For the topographical conditions that most favour the attainment of this effect there is more and more demand. The public buildings cannot well vie in height with commercial structures, they cannot ap- propriately attract attention by their diminutiveness, and even a dormant public spirit would awake in protest were it sought to attract attention to such structures by vivid colours or great signs. Hardly Hrcbitecture in tbe Business district. 133 less marked than this need by the public buildings is the need, for similar reasons, by the banks, by the clubs, by the homes of the exchanges and commerc- ial bodies, by institutions financial, educational, and benevolent. 1 The greater the city becomes the more urgent is the demand for topographical conditions advantageous to architectural effect. The result of the demand, the available number of such positions being limited, must be their rapid pre-emption by this class of structure and their increasingly worthy development. That an occupation of such sites by handsome buildings means much for the aspect of the town, there is no need of saying. It means so mucht that we must provide many lots of this character with the certainty that, if so abundant as to be avail- able at last by even commercial structures, such op- portunities will be offered to these that many even of them will seek their effectiveness by artistic means. It has been pointed out that the ample provision of favourable sites is one of the merits of a diagonal street plan. It should here be said that where there 1 Good illustrations of the want of such sites are afforded by the important buildings that now line narrow Chancery Lane in London, or by the situation of the new Chamber of Commerce and the new Stock Exchange in New York. Of the latter Russell Sturgis has said, in an article in the International Quarterly (December, 1902): “ There is a building in which for purposes of utility the most has been made of a lot really too small for its purpose. ... No courtyard, whether of entrance ( cour d ’ honneur ) nor yet central and surrounded by buildings to which it gives light, no showing in any one direction of the whole building or of any large mass of it, — two facades on two parallel streets, and nothing else ! ” Yet this costly and beautiful structure is in its design one of the most ambitiously decorative in New York, and it fails of its full purpose mainly because of the poor chance to see it. 134 flDo&ern Civic art. are no open spaces or advantageously placed corners, architecture may yet discover opportunities. In seeking these it will value the broad, curving street, and in itself — as an art — will find no fault with grade. Approaches, also, count strongly with a building. The thing most to be dreaded is the nar- row, straight street, with rectangular crossings and every block alike in size and given over to building. That condition is thoroughly discouraging. There may once have been some reason for a notion that the cities of a democracy could be hum- drum in their business districts. Unless we imagine such an idea, how shall we account for the failure to provide noble sites when the plans of the new cities of America were laid down on paper ? There must have been a well-nigh universal thought that the splendour of empire and monarchy being over, the need of palaces and of provision for pageantry hav- ing passed, and a people having settled down con- tent to be tradesmen without an “ upper class,” there would be, in the parts of the town where they did their business and with entire equality earned their livings, no need to have one street differ from another — save as volume of travel might require greater or lesser width. But if that idea was ever held, the time has gone when it could be seriously put forward or supported from facts. The fast increasing wealth of the United States is reflected nowhere more strikingly than in the grow- ing splendour of city structures, and naturally so architecture in tbe Business District. 135 since toward the cities is the strongly marked trend of population, and they must be always the financial centres. In them, too, there must be massed, in a congestion eminently spectacular, those evidences of riches, luxury, and aspiration that, if widely scat- tered, might mean as much, but would prove far less striking. When we think that in a single city, for example, — within a space that may be traversed by rapid-transit in half an hour, — there are congregated such evidences of financial wealth as the new Stock Exchange in New York, of commercial precedence as the new Chamber of Commerce, of shipping import- ance as the noble new Custom House, of business resources as afforded by such private structures as the Equitable Life building with its wonderful mar- bles, of ecclesiastical welfare as Trinity Church, St. Thomas’s, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, of magnetic power to wealthy transients as offered by a dozen palatial hotels, of private fortune as shown by the splendour of in- numerable individual homes, of the ability to gratify aspirations in art as revealed by the Metropolitan Museum and its noble housing, or educational aspir- ations as shown by the Public Library and the build- ings of Columbia University, or the yearnings of philanthropy as shown in St. Luke’s Hospital, or of patriotism as indicated by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial or the Grant Monument, when — to name a very few illustrations of a very few types — there are congregated in small compass such a variety of flDobern Civic art. 136 noble structures, structures at least upon which the artistic genius of the day has been lavishly expended and from which money has not been withheld, it is clear that cities cannot be, as they never have been, humdrum. They make demand for a supply of com- manding sites and, these afforded, there will be raised structures of a pretentiousness and straining for effect that will insure variety, and of a significance that will guarantee the interest of the way. Nor has modern civic art occasion to fear lest these buildings offer to the architect, in purpose and requirement, less opportunity or inspiration than did their prototypes of the golden days of earlier civilisa- tions. There were never any cities larger than those of the present time, there was rarely such wealth massed in them as to-day, there was never before so long a past from which to draw the lessons of ex- perience, and never a people so familiar with that past. There was never so broad a world to be ran- sacked for treasures as we have now, never so wide a held from which to select genius, never such a con- course of spectators as in this travelling time from which to win applause or condemnation. Now that we have suddenly turned our thoughts in this direct- ion, there is not lacking the spur to great achieve- ment. Of all the huge buildings in the United States there is not one as large as a certain city hall, with its nearly five thousand tenants; and of all the beau- tiful buildings nine out of the ten that have been ad- judged the loveliest are public structures. The vast Architecture in tbe Business district 137 city hall happens to have little of art about it, but the opportunity it offered was magnificent. The great cities, now so rapidly re-building, teem with architectural chances; the most favourable sites com- mand highest prices; and civic art is working at no problem with such eagerness, with such assurance of immediately transforming results, as at the re- construction of cities in the new housing of their activities. The need of to-day is not so much to incite as wisely to restrain, pointing out that in the long run the height that most counts in a building is the height of the architect’s ideal; the richness, that 0^ his fancy; the solidity, that of his self-restraint. The need is that he should realise that his problem is not that of a building only, but of a city. CHAPTER VIII. THE FURNISHINGS OF THE STREET. A STREET consists of more than a passage cleared for travel with a line of building lots on either side. Although assuming, as modern civic art does, a good pavement, even curbs, well-laid walks, and an absence of overhead wires, with pavement and walk kept clean, there still re- main other factors to mar the prospect or to adorn it. These are the street furnishings — details, in- deed, but in as far as civic art is art it does not dare to scorn them. Rather, it will expend upon them that loving care, that fond attention, which art must ever give to the particulars which fill in and complete the picture after the main lines have been laid down and the dominating features are established. As furn- ishings of the business street, we may include the necessary lighting apparatus; the street name signs and post boxes that add so much to the convenience of the way; those isles of safety that are almost an essential at busy crossings; the public-comfort sta- i 3 s Gbe jfunnsbings of tbe Street. 139 tions, in so far as they are visible; the fire-alarm signal boxes; the trolley poles, if the overhead sys- tem be in operation; and, finally, those innumerable and variegated advertisements with which business placards the way. The opportunity is urgent, broad, and varied. It is independent of merit or demerit in the street plan or in the construction at the street’s edge. It may, if ably handled, do much to adorn a street noble in lines and splendid in edifices, but it is not the less pressing where conditions are unfavourable. The problem is, also, — we should note, — strictly modern. With the street plan and the construction at the building line, the civic art of the earliest civilisations had to deal. With the furnishings of the street, as this term is understood to-day, it had no concern. An interesting illustration of the gradually de- veloped necessity of our street furnishings, and the evolution of their present type, is found in the light- ing apparatus. This might well have been, one would think, a problem of the earliest cities. Yet in the beginning it was considered a private rather than a public matter. In the civic Renaissance of Italy, for instance, the street lighting was left to the facades of the abutting structures; and how well the problem, when thus changed, could be handled, that ancient civic art now discloses in the lanterns of the Strozzi Palace at Florence. But the thought of light- ing cities had already Deen long postponed through the fact that those who had to see their way at night mo fl>obern Civic art. were individuals, not the masses. Nor is it strange, since every lamp required separate care before it could be lighted, that when, at last, their provision in the street could be conceived as a civic duty, lights were still made individual charges. If the individual pleased to shirk so publicly his obligation to the com- munity (newly conceived as that duty was), street lamps were omitted altogether. Mankind began, we should remark, by staying home at nights, taking the hint that darkness meant that day was over; and if his duty or his pleasure did take him forth, he went at his own risk and car- ried, as he still carries in the country, his own light. The notion that the street before his door might be kept lighted, for his own convenience when he went abroad and at other times for the profit of his prowl- ing neighbours, came, then, very slowly, and it might have been yet longer in arriving if there had not been perception that the fixture for the light could be made a highly decorative feature of the house. So, quite like the balcony, ornamental as well as useful, the street lights were left to the mercy of the builders, and civic art, as civic, took little heed of them. The public function of the lights was slowly appreciated better as their number multiplied, and when it became possible to lay gas mains through the streets and so to keep all the lamps simul- taneously in readiness for lighting — which now required only a touch of flame — the city could ap- Sbc jfurnisbtngs of tbe Street. h* propriately and conveniently take charge by contract of the lighting of its streets, henceforth to run no risk of individual delinquencies. The manifold ad- vantages were apparent; and the oil lamp, though less convenient to manage than the gas lamp, was similarly made a street furnishing, and was cared for indirectly if not directly by employees of the town. By the time that modern civic art began, oil lamps were considered no more than temporary make- shifts, abandoned, for the most part, to outlying and sparsely settled portions of cities, or to small vil- lages. The new art felt little call to give thought to them, and it was just turning its attention to gas lights when electricity appeared. For this reason its conquests in gas fixtures, though here and there important, are yet so widely scattered that the gas lamp of the city street is still usually ugly — multi- plied by tens of thousands in the strictly utilitarian shape in which it first came from the factory. The electric light required such an entirely different kind of apparatus as in its turn to present a new problem, and civic art is but just finding time seriously to consider its artistic possibility. As to the gas lamps, which must still be con- sidered, the candelabra of Paris, arranged for single, double, or grouped lights, are probably the best. Naturally the open spaces, the showy and more decorative parts of a city, have first attention in efforts to bring beauty into street utilities, and we find no examples in Paris more elaborate and ornate 142 J1>0t>ern GMc Hrt. than the fixtures on the Place de la Concorde. In Brussels — the “little Paris” in so many things — a prize offered by L’QEuvre Nationale Beige early in its career was for an artistic street light, and was awarded to the designer of a single candelabrum to stand on the Place de la Monnaie, where it was subsequently erected. The terms of this competition, conducted by a national society organised for the furthering of civic art, had invited the municipalities to “desig- nate those public places ” which it was desired to light artistically. A long step in advance was made by such recognition that the site and apparatus had a relation, that the kind of fixture which would be beautiful and artistic in one location might fail in another because no longer in harmony with its sur- roundings or proportioned to its position. This was a new idea. If there had been any thought of bring- ing beauty into the lighting apparatus, it had hereto- fore contented itself with a desire for a better design which should be universally adopted as far as any particular town was concerned. Perhaps even this new expression of an old art truth, that particular environments demand particular treatment, owed something to an economic condition. Certainly a costlier fixture was more likely to be adopted for a showy square, where a few examples could be con- spicuously fixed, than on the streets, where a great number would be needed and comparatively little noticed, once their striking ugliness were removed. £bc tfunusbings of tbe Street. H3 To secure, then, for the open spaces of the town especially made designs, that shall fit with cer- tainty into their location; to secure for the business streets a design of lighting post that shall be at least correct in its proportions, appropriate in its style, and graceful in its lines, and its universal adoption on those streets; and then to secure for the resi- dential streets a third and perhaps a fourth design, altered to suit the new environments, — that is am- bition enough for most developments of modern civic art. Nor does such a possibility fall far short of the ideal. For such is the formality of a city street in the essential evenness of its lines that regu- larly recurring light fixtures may properly have a formal likeness of pattern in a given portion of the town where surrounding conditions are similar. If alike graceful and sufficiently conspicuous they will not unpleasantly emphasise the formality of the business street, while the break that is made by the open space will be, in turn, the more strongly marked by the adoption of a different and here better- suited style of apparatus. It is natural, as noted, that the beginnings of civic art should be characterised by efforts to secure the beauty of the exceptional, but particularly notice- able, light rather than of the ordinary. In New York, the resuscitated Municipal Art Society, desir- ing to do a popular thing, — which was to say a practical and conspicuous thing, — announced early in 1902 a competition for an electrolier to be placed at 144 fIDobern Civic art. the edge of one of the most important open spaces of the city — the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Twenty -third Street. This particular electrolier was to be combined with an isle of safety, there greatly needed ; but for the present it is enough to note that the first undertaking was an attempted decor- ation of the street by providing a beautiful utility, and that the utility chosen was the lighting apparatus at a notable point. The competition aroused much at- tention, both among artists and laymen ; and of the three designs for which prizes were awarded, one at least was commonly considered to be very good. The event’s art significance, however, lay not so much in the victory there gained as in the grappling of the problem, in the elaborate effort to obtain beauty in a public lighting fixture. The stu- dent of civic art cannot fail to be interested in this occurrence. In what other period in the history of the world have private citizens banded together and contributed money that a light fixture on a street might be beautiful ? And yet the student, looking closely, must won- der whether the development has reached its end, whether civic art will not progress beyond the need of any fixture for street lights ; whether, to be ex- plicit, the uprights, though they be ever so orna- mental, are not as distinct a transition phase as is the old wooden post of the oil lamp, even when the village improvers paint it green. For now there is hardly a lovelier picture on earth than the night She 3furnisbinQ6 of the Street. 145 view of a great city — its thousands of lights twink- ling in a mighty constellation. Here is a firmament comprehensible because earthbound, but not the less marvellous for that. Its stars sing together, and their song is of the might of ourselves. The little heaven is rolled out before us, as a scroll. We know its lines well, we can read in our hearts the possible meaning of every star. Their very number is writ- ten. And the myriad lights have such beauty, inde- pendent of sentiment, that their effect has sunk deep in the hearts of men. We would make our exposi- tions lovely; and lo! with the new-found power of electricity we print on the darkness in miniature the glow of a city’s lights. Ever as our mastery of electricity becomes completer, the picture is made lovelier by multiplying lights. The roofs, bases, and corners of buildings are outlined with them. Every cornice, balcony, pinnacle, glows. The darkness of night is turned to the brightness of day, with the addition of a fairyland of mystery. The streets of the exposition are bright almost as in sunshine. The wonder of the display and the ease with which it is gained make an impression. The cities begin to have buildings outlined in hundreds of lights. Here and there a dome hangs in the sky as if pinned there with golden pins. The strands of a great bridge hang like a necklace of brilliants. A cross of fire among the stars means that a city’s church spire there points heavenward. It becomes necessary to enact legislation prohibiting a barbarous IO 146 flDobern Civic Hrt. use of lights. The business streets nightly blaze with them, as never for a festival a few years since. And civic art ? Does it wrestle still with the problem of separate fixtures, placed at regular intervals, occu- pying precious space and costing much ? Has it no dreams of lighting the business parts of cities as expositions have been successfully lighted ? It is doubtful if a harmonious genera! scheme of such illumination would cost more than is now expended privately on the shopping streets. Certainly it would cost no more than the total of the public and private lighting together ; and into what a scene of beauty and enchantment the business district would be then transformed at night! May not this be the near solution of the lighting problem in that city beautiful which is the dream of civic art ? Already, sections of cities have been turned into such fairylands for gala nights. The illumination of the “ Court of Honour” in Philadelphia, at the Peace Jubilee in 1898, when to a section of a business street there was given the night glory of an exposi- tion ; the transformation of seven blocks of State Street in Chicago for the Fall Festival of 1899, when eleven thousand electric lights and nearly four hun- dred flambeaux flung their radiance on the street ; the lighting of the public buildings and boulevards of Paris for the fete of July 14th, in 1900; the il- lumination of Monument Square in Cleveland for the Grand Army of the Republic encampment in 1901 ; and the lighting of a district of San Francisco, in Gbe jfurnisbinos of tbc Street. H7 honour of a gathering of Knights of Pythias in 1902, when eighteen thousand two hundred electric lights were used on the few blocks of the chosen area, exclusive of the lamps that outlined the colon- ades and dome of the City Hall, the high tower of the Ferry building, and a great commercial structure, — these are typical actual applications of the new lighting plan in cities, showing its feasibility, its popularity, and its aesthetic merits. Merchants, per- ceiving the commercial advantages of a district especially attractive because of its night beauty, will do well to combine to the end that by co-operation such radiance as now floods parts of Broadway, in New York, for example, may be made harmonious and lovely instead of glaring and crude. The Municipal Art Society of New York in an- nouncing its competition for an artistic electrolier, required that it should be fixed upon an “isle of safety” — by which is meant a raised platform of refuge where the hunted pedestrian may take breath in crossing the crowded road. It is easy to imagine such a platform without a lighting fixture, but one will be rarely found. Both the location and the purpose invite the fixing of one or more lights upon it. Raised but a few inches above the pavement, it is necessary that there be erected here something of sufficient height to be seen at a distance, for there is not only the danger otherwise of driving upon it, but one of its purposes is to divide the travel into distinct streams of opposite direction. As the need flDobern Civic art. 148 of seeing the tall structure is as great at night as by day, what more natural than that it should be a light ? Again, the pedestrian who has taken refuge here, has done so that he may wait a favourable chance for the rest of his journey, so that the street isle should be not merely one of safety but also one well fitted for observation. Finally, the location here of the lighting apparatus removes from walk or pavement a fixture that occupied precious space. It is natural and common, therefore, that lights should be found on the isle of refuge, and that civic art should make of the two structures a single composi- tion, as the Municipal Art Society of New York re- quired should be done and as Paris has repeatedly done with success. In Paris and other European cities a clock is often added to the light on the refuge, and the conspicu- ous fixture is also, especially when at a street inter- section, an excellent and appropriate place for the street signs. In all such cases, the refuge is the pedestal, or base, of one or more superstructures, and artistically is to be treated not as a separate problem but as a phase or part of a larger problem. In its proportions, however, in its relations to the street on which it is, and in the curve of its outline, the artist will find even in the refuge itself a worthy subject. In regard to street name signs, we have here a street fixture of extreme importance. Their position on the lighting apparatus of an isle of refuge, while Isle of Safety and Artistic Electrolier, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, New York. This construction was a result of the Municipal Art Society’s com- petition. ^be jfurntsbinss of tbe Street. 149 appropriate, is a comparatively rare event, for street name signs are, or should be, at the intersections of all streets, and the isles of safety even in large cities are few. In addition to their number, the signs have importance because it is essential that they be made conspicuous objects of the way. They must not thrust themselves upon the traveller, but they must be readily found and easily understood when he sees them. A glance must suffice to find and read the sign, for often the traveller will be whirling past his corner at a rapid rate. They must be as clearly visible by night as by day; and, finally, as such prominent objects of the street, civic art must insist that they have the aesthetic attention deserved. These requirements lay down certain principles: the street name signs should have a regular and uni- form location — not necessarily the same throughout the urban area, but always the same under the same conditions. This will enable the traveller, perceiving the character of his surroundings, to look at once to the right place for the name of the street. Again, the system employed in conveying the sign’s information should be uniform. If at a given comer the street name should be, for example, printed parallel with the street named, the arrangement should be identical throughout the community. Finally, the name must be so located that there will be a good light on it at night. This requirement has suggested making it a lamp so that a light burning within shall compel its message to be very plain; and it has suggested the 150 flDobern Civic Hit. fixing of the street names upon the regular lighting apparatus — on the globe, in the case of the gas lamp; and on the pole, possibly with reflectors to draw rays of light down to the sign, in the case of the electrolier. But this need would not interfere with the sign's location on the wall of a structure built flush with the walk, for the corner street lights usually render such location perfectly distinct while it has the further advantages of solidity, relative per- manence, economy of cost since it requires no special standard, and economy of precious street space. The main objection to the location is the difficulty in obtaining uniformity. Not only will the height of the sign vary, but frequently there will be no building to attach it to, and in any case different varieties of architecture will suggest different styles of lettering, so that the bewildered traveller will not know exactly where to look nor precisely what to look for. The use by Paris of illuminated advertising pillars, that contain also letter boxes, suggests that the street name sign might be written here and the column, which is really a source of municipal income, be made to serve many useful public purposes besides. Ameri- can cities, however, are not, as a rule, ready for such municipal business undertakings as the provision, for revenue, of public advertising columns. There is, further, the general objection to putting the street name here, that it will lose its immediate effectiveness in a confusion of lettering. A need for new street name signs throughout the ftbe jfurntebings of tbe Street. 151 borough of Manhattan in New York, and an officially expressed determination that the design adopted should be not only convenient but possessed of as much artistic merit as possible, presented in 1902 an unusual invitation for experiment. This was availed of by the Municipal Art Society, by local im- provement associations, and by firms and individuals. Thus a very interesting collection of designs was obtained. Of these it may be said that the most successful added the sign to the existing lighting apparatus, finding in the material of the latter the substance from which to make a suitable frame. As every corner has its street lamp, and the signs may be placed at a regular height, there is secured that uniformity of location which is so essential. The similarity, again, in the style of street light makes possible, without architectural incongruity, that likeness in shape, colour, and size which is necessary in order that the merest glance will leave no uncert- ainty as to the meaning of the legend borne. It was shown, also, that it is possible to make here again a single composition, the street sign becoming an integral part of the fixture without losing its own identity and sufficient prominence. Mention of the municipal advertising columns opens one of the most difficult problems of street furnishing. This is the advertising on the public way. It may as well be admitted that there will be advertising. A commercial street, lined with impos- ing architecture, the facades unmarred by lettering, 152 fIDobern Civic art. no screaming signs, by day no glaring colours, by night no flashing advertisements, all dignity, repose, and self-contained placidity, — this would possibly be the vision of the city ideally fair and stately. But modern civic art is nothing if not practical. It would dismiss such a vision as unattainable, and perhaps as not wholly desirable. As civic art, it would not crush out of its ideal the whirr and hum of traffic, the exhilarating evidences of nervous energy, enterprise, vigour, and endeavour. It loves the straining, striving, competing, as the most marked of urban characteristics, and when it advocates broad streets conveniently arranged, it does this not to silence the bustle of commerce, but to make the efforts more surely and quickly efficient. So modern civic art, coming to the advertising problem, should feel not hostility but the thrill of opportunity. It will recog- nise evils in the present methods, but will find them the evils of excess and unrestraint, and it will perceive possibilities of artistic achievement by which even the advertising can be made to serve the ends of art dans la rue. The first duty would be, doubtless, to curb unre- straint and to check, so far as might be, excessiveness. The street at least civic art can claim as its own pro- vince, bidding advertisements stand back to the building line. No hindrance should be offered to a clear path for travel by walk or road; no announce- ment should break the vista of the street, nor thrust itself before the wayfarer by hanging over the walk tTbe furnishings of tbe Street. r 53 or standing upon it at door or curb. The street should be a clear passage — that is its object in the making; and there is as true a need that every inch of it be open to the sky as that the vista of the way be unbroken. This means that civic art, turning its attention to the furnishings of the street, would frown upon all projecting signs; that it would prohibit all bulletin boards, signs, and transparencies on the side- walk or at the curb; that it would have no banners hung across the street, nor would suffer any public utility or ornament of the way to be placarded. It would sweep the street itself clean of advertisements from building front to building front. Does this demand seem too large, the ideal too high to be practical? There is not a particle of it that has not now been somewhere framed in city ordinance — revealing a public approval of each individual item in the count and an imagination that popularly has tried its wings and needs only daring to fly far. Projecting-sign ordinances are extremely common. Even where these do not entirely prohibit the signs, they make it necessary to ask permission for their erection, and then almost certainly limit the height above the walk at which they may be fixed . 1 In re- gard to the removal of bulletin boards, signs, and 1 As far back as the reign of George III. in England this matter of clearing the street of sidewalk obstructions was a recognised necessity. The preamble to an Act of II. George III., cap. 23, 1771, recites that the passage through certain streets in the parish of Aldgate, in the county of Middlesex, was “greatly obstructed by posts, projections, and other nuisances, and annoyed by spouts, signs, and gutters.” The enactment is “ that all houses and buildings hereafter to be built or new fronted shall, for the effectual and absolute prevention of all manner of projections, annoy- *54 fTDobern Civic Hit. transparencies from a position on the walk, probably the most interesting case to be cited is that offered by the Merchants’ Association of San Francisco. The special interest of this is the circumstance that the prime movers in demanding the enforcement of the existing ordinance and the increase of its restric- tive power were merchants, not a few impractical and visionary merchants, but the whole great body of the city’s business men, the advertisers themselves; and that the action, taken formally and after long thought, was that of the association which repre- sented them and which is one of the strongest com- mercial bodies in the United States. The Merchants’ Association Review summed up the action in these words: “ It has been decided by the board of direc- tors, after full consideration, to recommend to the Board of Public Works that all bulletin boards, signs, and transparencies on the outer edge of sidewalks be removed, and that nothing of this character be permitted hereafter.” The whole discussion and ordinance are most interesting and suggestive . 1 ances, and inconveniences thereby, rise perpendicularly from the foundation.” In 1 834 an act made all signs, sign-irons, sign-posts, barbers’ poles, dyers’ poles, stalls, blocks, bulks, show-boards, butchers’ hooks, spouts, water-pipes, and other pro- jections in front of the houses in Bermondsey liable to removal at the demand of the local commissioners. 1 The ordinance as finally drawn up presented a compromise in regard to “ signs and transparencies on poles,” at the outer edge of the walk. These were to be permitted if they were of a design approved by the Board of Public Works and if they bore a clock, — which should be kept accurate, — or lights having a minimum total of 192 candle-power, to be kept lighted every night from sunset to midnight at the expense of the person erecting or maintaining the sign. The argument was that the sign or transparency “ would thus benefit the public in exchange for occupying a portion of the public thoroughfare.” But this was unsatisfactory, and the final enactment was that only ornamental clocks without name or advertisement should stand at the curb. Gbe jfurntebinge of tbe Street. 155 In this connection there will be thought again of the advertising kiosks of many Continental cities, notably of Paris. Paris has done so much in civic art that she has gained for herself a reputation that makes it easier to judge kindly than justly of her experiments in the furnishing of the street and the adornment of the city. Could the municipality that has so bridged the Seine and lined it with no- ble quays, that has transformed slum districts into magnificent boulevards, that has made the Place de la Concorde one of the most brilliant scenes in the world and yet considers it but an incident in that belt of urban splendour of which the gardens of the * Tuilleries, the long vista of the Champs Elysees, the streets radiating from the Arch of the Star, the Ave- nue du Bois de Boulogne, and then the Bois itself are but other parts, — could that city have made a mistake in permitting the erection of kiosks along the walks ? How picturesque these kiosks are, and how much better to concentrate the miscellane- ous advertising upon them than to scatter it along the highway ! Little wonder that other cities have followed the Paris example. But civic art should have before it a vision of a city beautiful that is no more Paris, though equally practicable and attainable, than it is any other particular place. The question is not, “ Does Paris do this ? ” but, “ Is this the best practical solution ? ” The kiosks are picturesque, and it is better to concentrate the poster advertising and put its aesthetic character under control than not 156 fCtobern Civic art. to restrain it. This much may be admitted ; and yet can any one, walking along the Paris streets and giving an unbiassed judgment, declare that these thoroughfares would not be better were all the newspaper kiosks and advertising columns re- moved ? Asa step in the right direction, the experi- ment is to be commended ; but it is to be considered a step, not a goal. There is, too, a peril in partial ad- vance, lest satisfaction with relative relief grow into contentment. It were better and safer to banish at once all the advertisements from the walk. Finally, as to banners across the street and the placarding of public utilities and ornaments. The Review, published by the San Francisco Merchants’ Association, editorially declared, with reference to the first point, in 1901 : “The constant opposition of the association has resulted in freeing our streets from this conspicuous disfigurement.” The object- ion to over-street banners, of which this action in San Francisco is an expression, is common. What has been said of advertising columns and newspaper kiosks should of course apply with added force to the posting of placards or advertisements on any fixture of the public way, — on any utility, such as the lighting apparatus, or the trolley poles and bicycle racks where these exist. With still greater emphasis, again, must it apply to such decorative furnishings of the street as trees, to the very vitality of which injury may be done by attaching signs, or as statues and public monuments. New York or