ancient cities

of the population to the cities is sending ever-increasing
multitudes to crowd them. We know
now that there is no way out; that the system that
was the evil offspring of public neglect and private
greed has come to stay, a storm-center forever
of our civilization.
Riis’s writings, a dramatic documentation of
poverty and disenfranchisement in dense urban
settlements, were interpreted as a strong call for
social reform.
The City Beautiful movement rose as a response
by the ruling elites to these concerns. The reformist
and paternalistic goal of the movement (which
mobilized architects, planners, and social reformers)
was to bring social order and control to the
city through an improved, orderly, and beautified
urban environment: A new city would lead to a
new harmonious sense of community and belonging
for all citizens, thus removing the causes of
social conflicts. According to Julie K. Rose, the
underlying assumption of the movement was “the
idea that beauty could act as an effective social
control device.”
In major industrial cities, the growing phenomenon
of labor upheaval had resulted in legislatures
damping down labor movements, systematic state
repression, and violent confrontations between
police and labor protesters. The Haymarket Affair
in Chicago (May 1886), which had begun as a
peaceful rally in support of striking workers,
resulted in the death of several protesters, police
officers, and civilians. The highly controversial trial
that followed brought the capital executions of
four, presumably innocent, anarchists. Following
the example of the 1851 Universal Exhibition in
London’s Crystal Palace—which was strongly
encouraged by the British government to counter
the spread of political radicalism and to celebrate
the global expansion of the British Empire—
Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was
championed by the city’s political and economic
elites with the aim of cementing a badly divided
society and of rescuing the city’s reputation after
the worldwide publicity and outcry over the
Haymarket trial.
The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago
(also known as the Chicago World’s Fair) was the
first large-scale display of the principles of the City
Beautiful movement. The “White City,” under
City Beautiful Movement
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head planner Daniel Burnham, was a model for an
idealized, utopian, harmonious urban environment
unknown to most American city dwellers of the
time: It featured monumental buildings (all of uniform
cornice height, all painted white, all generously
decorated) orderly articulated among green
spaces, wide canals, and reflective pools, and a
picturesque lagoon designed by Frederick Law
Olmsted, Sr. Its stylistic vocabulary was the neoclassicism
of the Parisian École de Beaux-Arts, the
leading international school of architecture that,
from the 1870s to the 1930s, instructed artists and
architects from all over the world in the teachings
of harmony through the use of a historicist repertoire,
and in the art of large-scale planning—as in
Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s redesign of
Paris during the reign of Napoleon III. Several
American architects who studied at the École des
Beaux-Arts, such as Richard Morris Hunt, George
Post, and Daniel Burnham, imported these aesthetic
ideals to America for the occasion of the
Chicago World’s Fair.
The Columbian Exposition was the first materialization
of a utopian city, unknown to most
Americans. According to historian Roy Lubove, the
fair “created new ideals and standards by which to
measure the quality of urban life.” In this ideal city,
the more than 27 million visitors could see what
their lives could be like in a crime- and poverty-free,
orderly and magnificent urban setting. The popular
reaction of the time was overwhelmingly positive,
and the grandeur of the White City set the standards
for several City Beautiful plans across the
country and abroad.
In the following years, the leading proponent of
the movement, Daniel Burnham, flanked by leading
planners, architects, and designers of the time,
directed the general plans for Washington, D.C. (in
1902), for Cleveland (in 1903), for San Francisco
(in 1905), and finally for Chicago (in 1909); the
Chicago plan is still considered one of the most
consistent and magnificent endeavors of the City
Beautiful movement.
The Built Legacy of the
City Beautiful Movement
Burnham was quoted as saying, “Make no little
plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood. . . .
Make big plans . . . remembering that a noble,