John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner by R. Bruce Stephenson (review)

In this deeply researched and richly detailed biography of John Nolen (1869–1937), among the first to list his profession as “city planner,” R. Bruce Stephenson focuses attention on a figure who has been curiously understudied and who arguably deserves additional scrutiny on several topics—from his ideas about race and class to his proto-environmentalism, all key interests among Progressive reformers. Described as a “pragmatic visionary,” Nolen, in his signal contribution, translated garden city principles that originated in Great Britain for American audiences (p. 4). Nolen was previously examined in a 2011 article by Robert Freestone as a transitional figure bridging the City Beautiful and City Practical movements (“Reconciling Beauty and Utility in Early City Planning: The Contribution of John Nolen,” Journal of Urban History, 37 [March 2011], 256–77), but otherwise Nolen has mainly garnered attention in case studies of selected projects. One of the few other monographs to date is Jody Beck’s John Nolen and the Metropolitan Landscape (London, 2013), a much shorter study that Stephenson seems to have completely overlooked.

Nolen left a successful first career as a promoter of adult education in 1903 to enroll in Harvard’s landscape architecture program, where he studied under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Inspiration for this move came from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and what Nolen absorbed on trips to Europe, particularly Germany, which was pioneering land-use regulation at the time. Nolen received his first commission before even completing his graduate training, and ultimately he was credited with drawing up hundreds of plans. However, his efforts to convince profit-minded developers and penny-pinching city officials to implement his elegantly organic designs typically came to naught; Stephenson’s assessment that prior to the 1920s “only about a quarter of Nolen’s city and town plans were adopted” seems overly generous (p. 158). Apart from several well-received parks and subdivisions, practically all of Nolen’s most time-consuming projects were either dramatically scaled back (Madison, Wisconsin) or ultimately rejected (San Diego; St. Petersburg, Florida). Mariemont, Ohio (a Cincinnati suburb) was Nolen’s most successful achievement, being entirely underwritten by a wealthy patron. World War I delivered new opportunities, but Florida’s land bust and the coming of the Great Depression essentially destroyed his business; thereafter, a shift toward more “scientific” planning and modernist design, not to mention his own premature death, denied Nolen the chance to fully participate in the New Deal planning revival. Despite various setbacks, Nolen was extremely well connected in the field and published prolifically, contributing to the professionalization of city planning.

Historians of the South will find much material of interest here, considering Nolen’s active involvement in Charlotte, North Carolina; Roanoke, Virginia; Kingsport, Tennessee; and numerous Florida cities and towns. However, Stephenson does not go nearly far enough in exploring Nolen’s views on formalized racial segregation. Throughout, the approach is to give Nolen the benefit of the doubt, emphasizing his discomfort with blatant white supremacy and highlighting his several direct encounters with African Americans—Nolen drew up a Tuskegee Institute plan, for example—while postulating that his disadvantaged childhood made him empathetic. While Stephenson does scrutinize Nolen’s occasional inclusion of segregated black settlements—most strikingly in Venice, Florida, surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of white-owned farms—he asserts these were accommodations to southern racial custom. In fact, as Jody Beck notes, on a number of occasions (and as early as 1912) Nolen personally advocated racial segregation as beneficial for African Americans. While noting race-based deed restrictions in Belleair, Florida, Stephenson neglects to mention these were also applied to Myers Park in Charlotte, as well as to Mariemont (underlining that de jure segregation was not limited to the South in this period). While representing a welcome contribution to the field, there is clearly more to be explored in John Nolen’s contributions to the field of early city...