-
Chapter 6. Reform: Social and Aesthetic
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Reform: Social and Aesthetic We cannot truthfully boast of or take pride in our capital city until we improve the conditions of our slum property and remove the festering plague spotswhich are equally a menace to the health and morals of the community .. . It may be a work meriting all praise to beautify a portion of the city in which we live, enhancing the value of property and of elevating human life. ...But how incomparably better is the merit of the effort and toil spent in uplifting frail members of the human family. William F. Downey, "How to Benefit the Poor in the Slums," President? Homes Commission,1909 If our country wishes to compete with others, let it not be in the support of armaments but in making of a beautiful Capital City Let it express the soul of America. Whenever an American is at the seat of his Government,howevertralreled and cultured he may be, he ought to find a city of stately proportion, symmetrically laid out and adorned with the best that there is in architecture, which would arouse his imagination and stir his patriotic pride. President Calvin Coolidge, quoted in the Arlrzual Report of the Public Buildings Comtnission, 1930 In 1901Charles Mieller,executivesecretary of the Associated Charities of Washington, urged the Senate Park Commission "in formulating plans for the systematicbeautification of our city to give especial consideration to its poorer neighborhoods." Weller received a polite response to his letter, and the commission included in its report his recommendations for more neighborhood playgrounds and their linkage with schools, aswell as larger recreational parks and expanded bathing facilities. The commission paid some attention to residential neighborhoods, albeit stating its concern by pointing to the way the Capitol had become surrounded "in the main by private buildings, many of them of the most squalid character or by neglected stretches of land used as dumping grounds."' To Weller's plea for the elimination of the dilapidated alley houses that honeycombed the interior of the city's older quarters-what Weller called "the saddest blot on our national capitaln-the report remained silent. When Senator McMillan described the "grave problems" facing Washington , he did not identify large numbers of poor living in substandard housing and strugglingat inadequatewagesasWeller had in his communication to the commission, although he had been largelyresponsible in 1896for the reorganization of Washington charitable work in an effort better to respond to those conditions. Rather, the "grave problems" that concerned McMillan and his successors over the next quarter century lay,in his words, in "the location of public buildings, of preserving spaces for parks in the portions of the District beyond the limits of the city of Washington, of connecting and developing existing parks by attractive drives." While he added the need of providing for "the recreation and health of a constantly growing population," the commission's perspective remained overwhelmingly shaped by aesthetic rather than social considerations.2 As a planning document, the Park Commission report's relativelynarrow focus was not surprising. Even other major plans that followed, notably for Cleveland in 1903and Chicago in 1909,while more encompassing, paid scant attention to residential neighborhoods3 Charles Mulford Robinson , the highly influential publicist of the City Beautiful movement, revealed its diffident attitude toward residential neighborhoods when he wrote in 1904,"We may reasonably assert ...that civicart need concern itself only with the outward aspects of the houses, and therefore that for such details -sociologically pressing though they are-as sunless bedrooms, dark halls and stairs, foul cellars, dangerous employments, and an absence of bathrooms, civic art has no responsibility, however earnestly it deplores them."4 Washington's special status as a governmentally oriented city,lacking the kind of immigrant concentrationscharacteristic of industrial cities, made the Park Commission's focus on the monumental core all the more appropriate. Such, at least, has been the standard historical interpretation of the plan and its legacy. The context of the plan ought not be forgotten, however. Far from lacking the lund of social problems characteristic of other cities, Washington gained national as well as local attention for the sorry conditions of its "poorer neighborhoods." As a major contributor to the formation of the McMillan Commission, the Washington Board of Trade led efforts to improve social conditions, especially in housing, both before and after the Park Commission's presentation. Two years before President Taft appointed the Commission of Fine Arts, Theodore Roosevelt named the President's Homes Commission to investigate and report on the causes of...