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  • Highland Park and River Oaks: The Origins of Garden Suburban Community Planning in Texas by Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson
  • Gordon Scholz
Highland Park and River Oaks: The Origins of Garden Suburban Community Planning in Texas. By Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. ix + 323 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. $70.00 cloth.

Planned garden suburbs were first conceptualized and implemented in late 18th-century England. The intent of the planned garden suburb was to provide relief for newly arrived residents—mostly wealthy—from less desirable living conditions in high-density urban neighborhoods and city centers. Planned garden suburbs were designed to evoke the pastoral physical environment of villages in the countryside. These suburbs became popular with the advent of the automobile and are characterized by curved streets, generous park areas, thoughtfully designed landscaping, and distinctively designed houses on large lots.

The idea of the planned garden suburb was imported to the United States in the 19th century, and it eventually became an internationally adopted concept in the first two decades of the 20th century. In the United States, there are several important examples of planned garden communities, such as Roland Park in Baltimore (established in 1891), Beverly Hills in Los Angeles (1906), Country Club District in Kansas City (1907), Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York (1912), Shaker Heights in Cleveland (1916), and Coral Gables in Miami (1921), among others.

Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson’s book focuses on the early 20th-century emergence of planned garden suburbs in Texas, with detailed analysis of Highland Park, today a landlocked 2.2-square-mile municipality surrounded on three sides by the City of Dallas and located just four miles north of downtown Dallas, and River Oaks, a 1.7-square-mile neighborhood located in the center of Houston.

While Dallas and Houston usually are not considered Great Plains cities, Ferguson’s research is relevant in the study of Great Plains cities because she also describes the significant influence that Highland Park and River Oaks had upon the development of similar planned garden suburbs and residential areas in other Texas cities, specifically Fort Worth, San Antonio, Wichita Falls, Amarillo, and Corsicana.

Ferguson also points out the important influence of developer J. C. Nichols’s Country Club District in Kansas City, Missouri—on the eastern fringe of the Great Plains—as a design precedent and economic model for the development of Highland Park and River Oaks.

The first two of the book’s six chapters describe the general context for planning residential communities in Dallas and Houston, followed by three chapters focusing on development of Highland Park and River Oaks. The sixth chapter briefly describes planned garden suburbs in other Texas cities. This handsomely designed book is lavishly illustrated with about 200 high-quality photographs, over half of which are full color.

Using a wealth of primary sources, Ferguson insightfully describes the planning, design, implementation, and financing of these suburbs, including observations about the roles of specific developers, architects, landscape architects, and other key players who created the physical environment of these suburbs. Over 80 single-family homes in these suburbs are described in some detail, most also illustrated with exterior-view color photographs. Photographic reproductions of original floor plans are included for over half these featured houses. [End Page 136]

Even though the text meanders somewhat among the themes addressed, this book is a thoroughly researched, unique, and valuable contribution to the history of garden suburban community planning and development in Texas.

Gordon Scholz
Community and Regional Planning Program
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
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