Bellevue Park: The Suburb Beautiful and Enduring

City Beautiful leader J. Horace McFarland and Herman Miller, working with landscape designer and urban planner Warren Manning, conceived and developed Bellevue Park in the 1910s and 1920s as Pennsylvania's first fully planned suburban community at the eastern edge of Harrisburg's city limits. They committed to creating a stylistically consistent and rationally designed environment, focus on preserving and enhancing the natural landscape, belief in the power of natural and human-made beauty to uplift, and preference for neoclassical Colonial Revival forms. McFarland, Miller, and Manning—joined by the new neighborhood's first residents—applied City Beautiful approaches and values previously applied to civic and other public spaces to a new sphere: the private and domestic.