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Race, Housing, and Burnham’s Plan: Why is there no Housing in the 1909 Plan of Chicago?

Margaret Garb 1

Abstract This essay contends that the 1909 Plan of Chicago written by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett represented and contributed to a dramatic change in the relationship between public and private spaces in American cities. The plan gave concrete form to the Progressive aim of strengthening government and using the state to shape individual behavior. It reorganized the ideological relationship between the family home and public space, suggesting that the home in the industrializing city was no longer adequate to shape democratic citizens.

Keywords Daniel Burnham, Edward Bennett, housing reform, Chicago, 1909 Plan of Chicago, race

‘‘We already have conditions demanding relief,’’ wrote Daniel H. Burnham in January 1908 as he

contemplated an outline for the 1909 Plan of Chicago. 1

Burnham’s ambitious and provocative plan,

produced with his partner Edward H. Bennett and issued on July 4, 1909, aimed to remake the indus-

trial city according to the models of imperial Rome or Second Empire Paris. The plan, a volume

weighing more than five pounds and including illustrations lavishly drawn by Jules Guerin, is prob-

ably the most famous of the city plans issued by proponents of the City Beautiful movement in the

early decades of the twentieth century. Although distained by modernist architects for much of the

twentieth century, Burnham’s plan is widely considered a signal event that helped launch the pro-

fession of urban planning. Burnham proposed the construction of an expansive civic center, lake-

front parks, a regional road system, and landscaped boulevards. Burnham’s preliminary outline

for the plan, typed in the months before publication, included the subheading ‘‘Housing,’’ with

‘‘tenements’’ as a problem that must be addressed in the ‘‘modern city.’’ Yet, when the final plan

was published, housing was hardly mentioned. The issue that had inspired urban reformers through

much of the nineteenth century, galvanized the urban sanitary reform movement of the 1870s and

1880s, and generated a host of surveys of ‘‘slum housing conditions’’ around the turn of the twen-

tieth century was largely absent from Burnham’s plan.

This is not a new insight. Planners, reformers, and scholars, almost from its publication, commen-

ted on the plan’s neglect of housing. ‘‘(H)ere as elsewhere one must note,’’ Lewis Mumford wrote in

1Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Margaret Garb, Washington University, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA

Email: [email protected]

Journal of Planning History 10(2) 99-113 ª 2011 The Author(s) Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1538513210384453 http://jph.sagepub.com

a brief discussion of the plan, ‘‘ . . . no concern for the neighborhood as an integral unit, no regard for family housing . . . .’’2 Like Mumford, architectural historian David Schuyler later blamed the City Beautiful movement’s attachment to ‘‘monument, neoclassical’’ elements for Burnham’s neglect of

housing. Tenements simply did not fit within Burnham’s ‘‘vision of urban life that was far removed

from the realm of business or the harsh reality of the tenements and sweatshops.’’ The plan does

mention ‘‘cheaply constructed dwellings and ugly apartment houses,’’ yet Burnham offers no solu-

tions to what turn of the century reformers called ‘‘the housing problem.’’ 3

In an essay commis-

sioned by the American Institute of Planners to commemorate the association’s fiftieth

anniversary, Mel Scott noted that the plan was for an ‘‘essentially aristocratic city . . . . In this metro- polis for businessmen there are . . . no model tenements for workers, much less model neighbor- hoods.’’ All discussion of slum housing is, Scott says, ‘‘tucked into the report almost

surreptitiously, as if it were an irrelevancy to be overlooked in the contemplation of magnificent

boulevards, imposing public structures, and splendid parks.’’ 4

Burnham’s neglect of housing was fairly typical of early planners in the United States. Although

several reformers concerned with housing conditions contributed to the agenda of the first National

Conference on City Planning in 1909, two years later housing reformers, frustrated by the planners’

focus on regional plans and ‘‘aesthetics,’’ launched a separate organization, the National Housing

Association, and held a separate conference. Housing reformers often complained that housing, par-

ticularly tenement housing conditions, quickly dropped out of the concerns of professional planners

in the early twentieth century. ‘‘It is regrettable from every point of view,’’ lamented Edith Elmer

Wood in 1931, ‘‘that housing and city planning should be divorced to the extent that they have

always been in the United States.’’ Wood wrote that as planning became a profession with special

training programs, journals, and a national organization—the American City Planning Institute was

officially founded in 1917—planners decisively separated themselves from housing reformers. 5

The

general neglect of housing by American planners was all the more surprising since in England and

Canada, many planners focused on urban and semirural housing.

Peter Marcuse, in an effort to explain this ‘‘divorce,’’ argues that many of the primary concerns of

housing and sanitary reformers had largely disappeared by the teens. The threat of fire or contagious

disease, had been addressed by early housing legislation; mass immigration, which prompted con-

cerns about social order, had slowed by the teens. ‘‘Just as the fears about public health that had pro-

duced the tenement house reforms began receding by the 1890s, the fears of social unrest and the

need to Americanize immigrants in large cities . . . had begun receding in the 1910s,’’ Marcuse writes.

6 Moreover, planners and the municipal officials who sought their advice were concerned pri-

marily with stabilizing and enhancing property values, Marcuse writes. Tenement housing, as long

as it was concentrated in particular neighborhoods did not influence property values in the business

district, the cultural centers, or elite neighborhoods. 7

More recent studies of planning history have

generally agreed with Marcuse’s views: though planning emerged from the social reform move-

ments of the late nineteenth century, planners in the early twentieth century defined the profession

as distinct from social reform. 8

Yet, this description of planning’s ‘‘divorce’’ from housing reform does not explain the absence

of housing in Burnham’s plan. Tenement housing, despite Marcuse’s claim, remained a serious con-

cern among Chicago reformers in the first decade of the twentieth century. European immigration

remained strong—Chicago gained nearly 500,000 immigrants between the 1900 and 1910 cen-

sus—and Burnham could not have predicted that immigration might slow as a result of World War

I in the teens. The dangers of slum housing in the industrial city had hardly been solved, and could,

some housing advocates believed, threaten the property values, health, and stability in the city at

large. Burnham and Bennett clearly recognized these dangers. ‘‘Thoughtful people are appalled,’’

they commented in the plan, ‘‘at the toll of lives taken by disease when sanitary precautions are

neglected; and at the frequent outbreaks against law and order, which result from narrow and

100 Journal of Planning History 10(2)

pleasureless lives.’’ 9

Burnham, in his notes for the plan, had expressed concern about slums and

tenements. How then to explain the absence of housing in the 1909 Plan of Chicago?

The simple answer is that Burnham was concerned primarily with public space. Burnham was

interested in more than the physicality of urban space. He was, as Kristin Schaffer notes, ‘‘concerned

with forging a new relationship between the city and the citizen.’’ 10

He aimed to use the material

conditions of public space—property owned and managed by the state—to fashion a new public,

a new citizenry, rooted in a shared aesthetic experience. His project then merged aesthetics with pol-

itics and conceived of the public sphere—or civic culture—as overlapping, if not always congruent,

with public space. Burnham’s views drew on a long line of landscape architects from Andrew

Jackson Downing through Frederic Law Olmstead, to name just two, who argued that carefully

designed parks and other public spaces would strengthen American democracy. Burnham’s vision

of the role of public space also reflected the beliefs of many of the city’s social reformers who

contended that playgrounds and parks would improve the physical and moral health of the city’s

recent immigrants. The Plan of Chicago affirmed and expanded this vision. Rather than focusing

on parks alone, however, Burnham presented a regional plan. He envisioned the city as a whole,

as an interconnected entity where buildings, roads, and green space could form an efficient and

beautiful city. Housing—privately owned domestic space—stood at the edge of that vision. Most

importantly, by neglecting housing, or placing it at the margins of his plan, Burnham jettisoned the

ideology that guided many of his contemporaries. He, in effect, dramatically reorganized the

ideological relationship between public space and the private space of the family home. Burnham

presented a vision of the modern city that emphasized consumption over production and stressed the

influence of the state over that of the family in shaping urban citizens. 11

The Plan of Chicago gave concrete form to the Progressive era aim of strengthening government

and using it to shape individual behavior and ultimately to improve society. Yet beyond that, the

Plan represented, even as it contributed to, a dramatic transformation in American political culture,

a shift that began with the social reform movements of the early twentieth century, was propelled

forward by the New Deal and Great Society programs, and finally was questioned and, in many

important ways, reversed by the conservative right in the 1980s. For Burnham, public space

designed and managed by government would be the crucial realm shaping individual behavior and

articulating collective values. That proved a striking shift from the ideals of nineteenth century

Americans. This essay, taking seriously cultural geographer David Harvey’s claim that public space,

at least in its political purposes, ‘‘connects symbiotically with the organization’’ of private spaces,

seeks to understand how public space was intended to function, and to analyze the absence of hous-

ing in Burnham’s Plan of Chicago. 12

The Plan of Chicago called for a massive state intervention in the city’s real estate market and for

municipal regulation of the materials, height, and design of new buildings. The plan, in short,

assumed an expansion of government authority both in taking privately owned land for public pur-

poses and in regulating new construction. For the civic center alone, the city would have been

required to take several square blocks of privately owned residential property. 13

The city would,

in addition, have to demolish properties edging Congress Parkway, the street the planners hoped

to widen to become a landscaped parkway linking the lakefront to the new civic center. City

Beautiful proponents in other cities imagined, and in a few cases implemented, similarly expansive

uses of state power to take and reuse private property. Baron Georges-Eugene Haussman’s Paris,

with its boulevards and Beaux Arts apartment buildings supplanting the winding streets and narrow

frame houses of the Medieval city, was the City Beautiful ideal. But in American cities, even those

like Chicago governed by powerful and corrupt machine politicians, there was little legal basis for

such massive municipal or state intervention in real estate markets or construction specifications.

The Chicago plan’s authors recognized the need for legislation to justify the broad taking and

regulating of private property called for in the plan. Burnham and Bennett added an addendum to

Garb 101

the plan, written by Chicago lawyer Walter L. Fisher, presenting the ‘‘Legal Aspects of the Plan of

Chicago.’’ In contrast to Paris and London where governments ‘‘have a free hand,’’ in the United

States there were, Fisher noted, ‘‘constitutional limits which here determine the form of public

improvements.’’ 14

Chicago could effectively implement most, though not all, measures proposed

in the plan. City governments, Fisher noted, could use the power of eminent domain to take private

property for public uses, compensating the owner at market value. The courts had also given the city

the ‘‘police power’’ to regulate uses of property or take property that in some way threatened the

public welfare. Under both—eminent domain or police power—the state had to demonstrate a sig-

nificant public interest to justify the taking of private property. In the decade following publication

of the Plan, urban planners would push City Councils in several cities to augment state control of

land uses by passing zoning regulations. But in the first decade of the twentieth century, the primary

legal precedent for government regulation of private property were nuisance laws aimed at regulat-

ing tenement housing. Burnham, well aware of potential legal obstacles to his plan for remaking the

city, sought to expand existing municipal authority. 15

By the time Burnham proposed a plan for Chicago in a speech and series of meetings with mem-

bers of the Merchants and Commercial Clubs, housing was widely considered a leading threat to the

health and economic stability of the city. Housing, as Burnham’s notes for the plan suggest, was

among the many issues of concern to reformers and business leaders in the industrializing city. The

rapid expansion of industry, transportation technologies, and immigration had in the decades after

the Civil War transformed the lakeside city. Chicago’s population doubled every ten years from

1860, hitting over two million in 1910, as its boundaries expanded and neighborhoods ringing the

commercial center filled with immigrants from Europe and migrants from rural regions of the

American Midwest and south. The city’s manufacturing sector grew significantly, sending waste

into local waterways and heavy coal smoke into the air. These public health hazards worried health

reformers and planners alike. Of even greater concern were outbreaks of contagious disease, such as

cholera, yellow fever, diphtheria, and tuberculosis that raged through impoverished immigrant

neighborhoods and often spread to the homes of the wealthier classes. (A typhoid epidemic killed

more than 100 people on the city’s west side in the summer of 1902.) 16

The family home, particu-

larly the homes of the urban poor and laboring classes, was widely viewed as the source of disease

and a danger to the public welfare.

The threat of contagious disease, both real and imagined, spurred a generation of urban reformers

and prompted municipal government efforts to regulate private property in housing. In the 1870s, a

group of doctors, builders, engineers, and political activists, drawing on the rhetoric and practices of

reformers in New York City, Boston, and London, began organizing to promote new measures to

improve the public health. The sanitarians, as this diverse group of reformers was known, aimed

to eliminate epidemic disease through the introduction of new technologies like indoor plumbing,

and the construction of sewer and water lines in cities and towns. In articles and speeches, they

focused on housing, highlighting the dangers of deteriorated housing conditions and, in the sanitar-

ians’ view, the inability of recent immigrants to maintain sanitary homes. The tenement, commented

a Chicago Daily Tribune reporter in an 1876 article rousing public concern about the dangers of the

homes of the immigrant poor, ‘‘has been the nucleus of contagion and the recruiting-sergeant of

death.’’ 17

Sanitary reformers pushed for local ordinances, which used the police power to regulate

residential property and provided an opening for state intervention in real estate markets.

Regulation of property rights was controversial in nineteenth-century America where the pursuit

of property and the rights to benefit from it were widely considered hallowed American rights. But in

cities rapidly industrializing and filling with immigrants, arguments for the protection of public

health effectively justified legislation, which restricted the property rights of some urban dwellers.

Reformers, arguing that only government could protect residents from the epidemics that periodi-

cally raced through the city, pressured Chicago’s Board of Health to inspect and regulate the city’s

102 Journal of Planning History 10(2)

tenement housing. The Common Council passed the city’s first housing ordinance in 1880. It was

followed a year later by a state law, which put the ‘‘sanitation’’ and construction of all tenements,

workshops, and lodging houses under the supervision of the city’s Department of Health. Chicago’s

fire limits legislation, passed in 1872 just months after the Great Fire, was the first municipal leg-

islation to regulate construction materials. The 1880 ordinance and 1881 state law marked a signif-

icant expansion of state power, giving officials the authority to inspect and regulate the interior uses

of urban housing and to reject plans for buildings considered unsafe. These laws were among the

first to permit the state to restrict the ways property owners could use their property and, as Fisher’s

addendum noted, would provide Burnham with a useful legal tool. 18

But regulation of the property rights of some residents, while accepted in theory, was rarely

implemented. Moreover, regulation differed significantly from construction; most housing refor-

mers and business leaders affirmed municipal authority to regulate housing conditions while few

believed government had the authority—or even should spend the resources—to construct new

housing. Still, many believed city government could acquire the authority to tear down property that

threatened the public health. The Sunday Times-Herald, owned by reformer and organized labor

supporter Herman H. Kohlsaat, called in 1896 for legislation for ‘‘reclaiming the slums’’ by follow-

ing a strategy proposed for New York City. With a detailed and gruesome description of the west

side slums that Burnham’s Plan would seek to level, the Times-Herald, contended that the city could

‘‘empower the board of health to condemn all buildings that are unfit for human habitation,’’ allow-

ing the owners of the lots to sell or rebuild according to new, stricter health ordinances. The City

Council did pass a ‘‘new’’ housing ordinance in 1902, but this applied only to new construction, and

did little to improve conditions in the city’s run-down tenements. Concerns for the public health

along with worries about vice, which reformers linked to slum neighborhoods, could justify

encroachment on some property rights. 19

The sanitarians set other precedents that shaped the urban reform culture out of which the

Chicago Plan emerged. They drew attention to the threats posed by the urban environment and to

the germ theory of disease. Just as significantly for Burnham’s purposes, the movement fragmented

around 1890 as professionally trained and generally male physicians established the new field of

public health. Through their professional organizations, publications, and the health issues they

addressed, public health professionals distinguished themselves from the growing number of gener-

ally volunteer and women reformers. Although public health professionals tracked disease etiology,

reformers focused on urban social and material conditions. The split between professional planners

and housing reformers replicated the earlier division between professional doctors and reforming

women sanitarians. 20

The divorce of professional planners from housing reformers reinforced the gendered division of

labor and of space among those aiming to improve living conditions in industrializing cities.

Planners increasingly saw themselves as engineers, trained professionals (again, generally male)

who addressed regional issues associated with new technologies of transportation, production, and

communication. Reformers, often though not only women, took up the ‘‘tenement problem.’’ The

most famous of this turn of the century generation of reformers were the settlement house workers

associated with Jane Addams’ Hull House, Graham Taylor’s Chicago Commons Settlement and

Mary McDowell’s University of Chicago Settlement. Some, radicalized by labor conflict in the city,

would join the American Socialist Party; others would move to professionalize the field of social

work through establishing a training program at the University of Chicago. For the settlement volun-

teers, the neighborhood with its densely packed hive of multifamily housing, narrow commercial

streets, and sweat shops was the central unit of reform and of study. Housing reformers aimed to

organize neighborhood residents to fight to improve their homes and workplaces. They aimed, in

addition, to draw broader public attention to the plight of the urban poor and to pressure public offi-

cials to regulate and improve urban housing conditions. 21

Garb 103

Hull House volunteers, perhaps most famously, produced a set of maps, which when set next to

Burnham’s Plan of Chicago, suggest an almost parochial focus on the residential neighborhood. The

maps, with color-coded precision, detail living conditions lot by lot, and delineate residents by nation-

ality, employment, and number housed within each tenement. The maps were a crucial force behind

the push for the housing ordinance passed in 1902. Burnham’s regional vision of the city with its

emphasis on transportation systems, parks, civic structures, and public spaces, stands in stark contrast

to the Hull House maps. Burnham, as his biographer Thomas Hine, comments, was ‘‘conscious of his

role in the progressive movement.’’ 22

It may be, as Thomas Philpott contends, that the city’s business

leaders, who commissioned the Plan, discouraged proposals for constructing worker housing.

Although government was granted the authority to dismantle housing that threatened the public

health, ‘‘the building of houses, unlike the widening of streets and boulevards, was business in the

strict sense and therefore not a proper matter for public endeavor.’’ 23

Burnham’s notes for the plan,

along with a few stray comments in the final document, reveal his interest in urban housing and in the

work of housing reformers. Yet, the absence of a plan for housing in the final version of the Chicago

Plan suggests an ideological shift as much as a response to pressure from business leaders. Burnham,

in a sense, left one foot in reform work as he strode forward to help establish the planning profession.

Professionally, (and geographically) housing remained at the margin of Burnham’s concerns.

The sanitarians’ rhetoric was equally influential on the nascent planning profession. The sanitar-

ians, while drawing public attention to the threat posed by tenement housing, typically framed the

‘‘tenement problem’’ as an immigrant problem. In many cases, they recast the social difficulties

associated with poverty into the so-called biological flaws of varied immigrant groups. It was, in

much late nineteenth-century reform rhetoric, the varied ‘‘races of men’’ that determined the mate-

rial conditions of housing. A Department of Health report from 1882 blamed deteriorated tenement

housing on the ‘‘habitual and hereditary insanitary modes of living’’ of the city’s southern and east-

ern European immigrants, even though Italians and Bohemians made up just a small portion of the

immigrant population in the early 1880s. 24

It was the perception—not the sheer numbers—of new

laborers with foreign habits and behaviors, just as it was the increasing visibility of deteriorated

housing conditions just west of the city’s commercial center, that gave the sanitarians’ pleas such

political weight. Furthermore, if the behavior of these new immigrant laborers, these new ‘‘races’’

of urban dwellers, was hereditary, then their unsanitary living conditions were largely immutable.

This was a profound concern and increasingly a point of debate among Progressive era reformers:

Was it possible to transform, to Americanize, the diverse races of people arriving in the industrial

city? Burnham’s plan suggested it was. But only through shifting a complex web of relationships

between public and private spaces, state power and family influence, men’s and women’s domains

of responsibility.

Indeed, Burnham’s plan effectively reversed the nineteenth-century ideological connection

between home and commerce, domestic spaces, and public spaces. Advice givers, responding to

urban growth and the expansion of commerce, had in the nineteenth century argued that the family

home would be the nation’s seat of virtue, the site where children were formed into good citizens.

Domestic space stood, ideologically at least, in contrast to the chaotic and competitive spheres of

work and politics. 25

Housing reformers of the late nineteenth century, while directing attention to

the streets, alleys, and playgrounds in an urban neighborhood, continued to focus on the family home

as the place where individual character and health was produced. Burnham, however, shifted empha-

sis toward public spaces. He contended that parks and playgrounds were the most important spaces

for producing physical health and moral citizens. ‘‘There cannot be too many of these neighborhood

parks,’’ he wrote in a draft for the plan. With more parks, ‘‘the safer and sounder our democracy will

grow because they tend to cultivate those qualities which are the most important for a citizen to

possess.’’ The family home remained important to character building. But Burnham seemed, impli-

citly, to distrust the influence of immigrant mothers raising children in ‘‘slums’’ on the city’s west

104 Journal of Planning History 10(2)

side. Chicago had not yet moved to provide ‘‘sanitary’’ housing for its laboring people, he wrote in

the plan, but may soon ‘‘be required in common justice to men and women so degraded by long life

in the slums that they have lost all power of caring for themselves.’’ 26

The inability of immigrants to care for their families may have resulted from their ‘‘hereditary

and habitual behaviors,’’ as some sanitarians had claimed. But Burnham placed blame primarily

on the municipal government. ‘‘The slum exists today,’’ he wrote, ‘‘only because of the failure of

the city to protect itself against gross evils and known perils . . . .’’27 Among those perils was the inability of immigrant parents, mothers primarily, to use the home environment to produce good cit-

izens. Commenting on the neighborhood of European immigrants surrounding the intersection of

Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street, where he hoped to build the new civic center, Burnham noted

there ‘‘is a cosmopolitan district inhabited by a mixture of races living amid surroundings which are

a menace to the moral and physical health of the community.’’ 28

In the months before the Plan was

presented, Burnham typed a preliminary outline, which suggested a link between ‘‘slums’’ and an

‘‘imperviousness to American Ideals.’’ 29

Not all homes were dangerous, but a family home stuck

in the west side slums threatened the urban community and resisted reform.

Burnham suggested that the most efficient means to Americanization lay not in the family home

but in replacing slums with a monumental civic center, building urban parks, and putting boulevards

through tenement neighborhoods. Burnham hoped, as Fisher noted, for ‘‘the reclamation of slums

and congested areas.’’ Yet, the city lacked the legal authority for such broad and drastic measures

as Haussman had applied in razing Paris slums. American belief in inviolable property rights might

prevent the city from tearing down whole neighborhoods of slum housing. The state could and

should use its police power, expanded by sanitary reformers, to regulate and improve tenement hous-

ing, the plan suggested. Burnham did not elaborate that point, perhaps because some of the men who

commissioned the study were also investors in residential real estate and might reject a proposal to

demolish their properties. Instead, Burnham suggested an alternative to state regulation of the pri-

vate property in housing. If the home, because of its degraded material conditions could not generate

virtuous Americans, then the state must move to make and manage those urban spaces that could

shape the character of the populace: streets, parks, and playgrounds.

Burnham conceived a set of public spaces and public institutions to resolve the social upheaval

caused by mass immigration. His aim, as he wrote in several outlines and articles on the plan, was

to ‘‘create unity,’’ to bring together the disparate nationalities and classes of urban residents in a uni-

fied ‘‘civic consciousness.’’ 30

Like many of the settlement house volunteers who also were concerned

about Americanizing immigrants, Burnham proposed the construction of playgrounds around the city.

On the playground, ‘‘so much of the training of a child toward good citizenship occurs . . . .’’31

Similarly, orphanages, creches, hospitals, and public baths would provide for both the moral and the

physical improvement of the city’s citizens. Everett B. Mero, in the title to an essay describing the plan

captured Burnham’s sentiments: ‘‘How public gymnasiums and baths help to make good citizens.’’ 32

The plan aimed to fashion a uniform citizenry with a common interest in American ideals and

committed to the civic institutions undergirding American democracy. The planning movement, as

Burnham described it, sought ‘‘to express in concrete form the feeling of loyalty to and pride in the

city.’’ This sentiment, he added, ‘‘finds expression in parks and pleasure grounds, in monuments and

fine public buildings, in institutions of art and learning, and in hospitals and other means of alleviating

the ills of mankind.’’ 33

These reorganized public spaces and semipublic institutions would, Burnham

notes in the opening paragraphs of the plan, ‘‘bring order out of the chaos incident to the rapid growth

and especially to the influx of people of many nationalities without common traditions or habits of

life.’’ 34

These new public spaces and civic institutions would replace the family home as sites to edu-

cate young and old, to guide recent immigrants toward the values and virtues of American life.

By contrast, settlement house residents viewed their own programs, not as rejecting the family

home but rather as bolstering the family and extending the influence of the domestic sphere.

Garb 105

Burnham’s plea emerged in a city immersed in social reform rhetoric. Although his goals of

improving civic life were similar to those of many of his contemporaries, his plan clearly separated

him from the ‘‘tenement reformers,’’ who were among the city’s most vocal advocates for immigrant

laborers. Many reformers, even before Burnham’s proposal, called for the construction of play-

grounds for children, urban parks and the reordering of public spaces to strengthen civic life. Public

parks and playgrounds were, many reformers believed, places for both Americanizing immigrants

and celebrating ethnic traditions, writes Robin F. Bachin. Yet reformers, particularly those con-

nected with the settlement houses, saw playgrounds—indeed almost all neighborhood spaces—as

an extension of the family home. ‘‘We cannot take away evil influences unless we replace them

by something good,’’ said Louise de Koven Bowen, a philanthropist and reformer associated with

Hull House, in a speech in July 1909, just weeks after Burnham released the Chicago Plan. ‘‘We

must have swimming pools, playgrounds and clubs. But above all we must protect the home.’’ 35

The

reformers’ views of the importance of the family home in shaping civic life were revealed in the

responses to the Plan. The board of the University of Chicago Settlement was explicitly critical

of the plan noting, ‘‘We cannot have a really ‘great’ Chicago unless there are habitable comfortable

dwellings for its wage earner.’’ Similarly, George E. Hooker, a settlement volunteer and member of

the City Club, wrote in the Survey that the Plan’s neglect of housing meant that it would do little to

address urban problems. 36

For reformers such as Bowen, Addams, and McDowell, the family home

remained the central tool for mitigating the dangers of industrial capitalism and improving the lives

immigrant families.

In many ways, Burnham was typical of many among his turn of the twentieth-century generation

of elite and professional Americans who were concerned about how the nation would incorporate the

massive numbers of immigrants arriving in the United States. But Burnham had reason to think more

deeply about the relationship between the built environment and state power, or architecture and

civic loyalty. In the fall and winter of 1904 and 1905, Burnham had spent several months in the

Philippines, studying the landscape and architecture and developing a plan for rebuilding that

nation’s capital. The plans for Manila and for a ‘‘summer capital’’ at Baguio in the mountains

outside Manila were commissioned by the U.S. government and aimed to assist the U.S. effort to

bring the Philippines under American control. ‘‘(T)he two capitals,’’ Burnham wrote, ‘‘even in their

physical characteristics, will represent the power and dignity of this nation.’’ (meaning the United

States). Burnham supported the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, at least until Filipinos could

be remade into the kind of democratic citizens Burnham saw in America. For Burnham, planning

was not just an exercise of state power. It was, more importantly, a method for producing a particular

kind of citizen, of creating a more homogeneous and democratic populace. As he commented in an

1896 speech to members of the Commercial Club, ‘‘If the plan (meaning a proposed plan for

Chicago) of improvement be carried out, you will have taken a long step towards, cementing

together the heterogeneous elements of our population, and towards assimilating the million and

a half people who are here now, but who were not here some fifteen years ago.’’ 37

The state was

in a stronger position to control the aesthetics and organization of public space than of the immigrant

family home. It was through the ordering of public space and the commercial institutions that

abutted it that Burnham aimed to create a particularly American version of the bourgeois citizen.

Expansion of government power was just one side of the Plan of Chicago. The proposed infra-

structure represented a public investment designed to enhance private profit. Boulevards and parks

would likely boost property values on nearby lots, creating or stabilizing elite districts edging parks

and expanding off the elegant thoroughfares. Of greater importance to the men who commissioned

the plan was the impact the Plan would have on urban commerce. This was the Plan’s primary sell-

ing point. ‘‘Beauty in the public works of a city has always paid,’’ Burnham contended in a speech

before the Chicago Women’s Club in March, 1898. 38

Business leaders had commissioned the Plan;

the Commercial Club aimed to use the Plan to attract consumers and investment to the city. Daniel

106 Journal of Planning History 10(2)

Bluestone argues that the Chicago Plan, like much of the work of City Beautiful activists, aimed to

create a civic landscape to counter the dominance of corporate capitalism and its representative, the

skyscraper. Chicago, many believed, had acquired a reputation for cut-throat competition, greed, and

corruption. The aesthetic reforms promoted by Burnham and others, Bluestone writes, would estab-

lish an alternative, ‘‘not fundamentally anticommercial’’ public space. ‘‘Good order is essential to

material advancement,’’ Burnham wrote. The ‘‘well-ordered, convenient and unified city’’ would,

Burnham believed, make Chicago a commercial center rivaling Paris, Vienna, and Rome. 39

Chicago was a thriving industrial center. Yet, Burnham and many of the businessmen who sup-

ported the Commercial Club worried that the city’s reputation for corruption, its billowing smoke-

stacks, polluted waterways, and perhaps most importantly, its history of violent labor conflict, might

frighten investment capital and new consumers. Burnham’s plan urged the removal of heavy indus-

try from the urban core, the relocation of major rail lines from the lakeshore to underground tunnels,

and the construction of new rail hubs just edging the commercial center. He mandated design criteria

for public and private construction along the boulevards and lakefront, pushing a Beaux Arts aes-

thetic that would, he believed, emphasize civic culture over commercial functions. Industry might

continue to drive the city’s economy, but industry and the laboring classes would be expelled from

the city center. The industrial urban core would be replaced by a new consumer-oriented commercial

district that stressed leisure activities along the lakefront and the boulevards.

Burnham took his vision of the city’s purpose, in part, from Haussman. Burnham was much less

interested in using urban space to suppress a military coup or social revolutions; unlike those of

Haussman, Burnham’s boulevards were not seen as providing open space for armies to mass or for

clear lines of fire against political agitators. But public space in the Burnham plan was designed to

serve the state and generate harmony among diverse social groups. The uniform aesthetic and har-

monious placement of buildings and parks would contribute to establishing social harmony, and at

the same time, set clear standards for appropriate behavior for the citizen of the modern city. The

new urban citizen, strolling boulevards, enjoying Lakefront amusements, eating in restaurants, and

shopping in the latest department stores, moved effortlessly from public to privately owned

commercial spaces. The reorganization and expansion of public spaces generated new uses for

private spaces; commerce would thrive in spaces contiguous with and dependent on public space

bordering it. 40

The modern city was the consumer city. ‘‘A city of little attraction though great in commerce and

manufactures, looses the cream of its earnings, which are largely spent in other towns,’’ Burnham

wrote. ‘‘It is one thing for a town to be a money making center and quite another for it to get the

benefit of its profits.’’ Public space functioned to draw bourgeois consumers and to assure their

safety and comfort in the city’s commercial center. It is not surprising Burnham was thinking about

consumer activities. During the first decade of the twentieth century, when Burnham was developing

and promoting the Chicago plan, his firm was, perhaps, the nation’s leading architects for depart-

ment stores. Burnham’s firm designed department stores for some of the biggest names in retail:

Gimbel Brothers in Milwaukee and New York, Wanamaker’s in New York and Philadelphia,

Selfridge’s in London, and Marshall Field and Co., in Chicago, as well as plans for Filene’s in

Boston and a May Company in Cleveland. The Department store, along with the office tower,

embodied Burnham’s vision of the modern city. 41

Here too was a reversal of the ideological relationship between public and private spaces. In

nineteenth-century thought, women’s influence was confined to the family home; their knowledge

of domestic labor was acquired within the home. But in the modern consumer city, new safe public

spaces would guide women shoppers into department stores while women service workers would

find employment behind store counters. Money spent enjoying the beauty of the city would benefit

all citizens through ‘‘the demand for his (the ordinary citizens’) services or goods,’’ Burnham

wrote. 42

Department stores, argues historian William Leach, ‘‘doubled as ‘educational centers.’

Garb 107

Staff offered consumers advice on how to decorate their apartments or houses, and how to use new

devices like vacuum cleaners and kitchen stoves.’’ 43

Most tenement dwellers could not afford the

new consumer goods exhibited in department store windows. But as they strolled the boulevards,

gazing at the displays, they gained an education in American-style home design. For middle- or

working-class women, the vibrant, ever-changing displays provided a uniform aesthetic aimed at

transcending differences of class or nationality, a vision of the properly organized home. Women

consumers and window shoppers could take that vision, their domestic education, back to their pri-

vately owned homes. In this sense, the department store was an extension of public space, affirming

and completing the work Burnham assigned to playgrounds, parks, and boulevards. The private

space of the home would be remade according to the values women consumers acquired during their

visits to the city’s commercial center.

Public space functioned to draw bourgeois consumers and to assure their safety and comfort in lei-

sure and commercial activities. Burnham’s discussion of the lakefront park plan, which he had been

promoting since the 1890s, is another example. He urges the construction of a park along the lakeshore

from the northern suburb of Wilmette south to Jackson Park. The park, built on landfill from urban

waste, would enclose a series of lagoons, creating waterways for boating and green space for sports

and leisure activities. The lagoons, he notes, would be lined with ‘‘restaurants and pleasure pavilions

and public bath houses.’’ The waterways and shoreline would be owned by park authorities, ‘‘in order

that the whole may be effectually policed.’’ The beauty of the lagoons heightens the appeal of the res-

taurants and pleasure pavilions. ‘‘After it is finished will the people of means be so ready to run away

and spend their money in other cities?’’ Burnham asked. 44

Municipal revenue would pay for the infra-

structure of the park as well as the policing of the space, assuring park visitors of safety and comfort.

The restaurant and lagoon, commercial and public space, are interdependent with each affirming the

purpose and legitimacy of the other. Just as the boulevard and the department store were mutually rein-

forcing. Parks and boulevards would draw consumers, elite Chicagoans and tourists. ‘‘(T)he best wel-

fare of the City demands that the town should immediately put on a charming dress and thus stop our

people from running away,’’ Burnham wrote to his father-in-law, John B. Sherman, in 1897, ‘‘and

bring rich people here, rather than have them go elsewhere to spend their money.’’ 45

This is not to argue that Burnham conceived the lakefront park simply as a commercial entity.

(His proposal did, however, generate debates with reformers who urged the reconstruction of the

lakeshore for purely recreational purposes.) But rather, for Burnham, beauty and commerce were

intertwined. The spiritual experience of nature was, perhaps, central to Burnham’s vision. ‘‘The

Lake front by right belongs to the people,’’ Burnham wrote. ‘‘It affords their one great unobstructed

view, stretching away to the horizon, where water and clouds seem to meet . . . these views are help- ful alike to mind and body.’’ As he described the park and its landscaping, Burnham’s prose became

increasingly evocative and lush, almost excessively ornate. ‘‘(T)he sweet breath of plant life so

abundant in nature and so agreeable to man,’’ he wrote, ‘‘would give greeting to those who seek the

refreshment of the parks.’’ Nature was healing and calming; park construction was ‘‘dictated by con-

siderations of health and enjoyment.’’ 46

Yet, strengthening the city’s commercial base was almost

always prominent as Burnham promoted the plan to businessmen, civic boosters, and reformers.

Charles H. Wacker, one of the plan’s leading advocates, emphasized the commercial benefits of

an aesthetically pleasing urban center in an October 1909 essay touting the plan. ‘‘ . . . (T)he great commercial advantages of a beautiful, well ordered and convenient city, are nearly always lost sight

of by the many who have given the subject insufficient study,’’ Wacker wrote. ‘‘In foreign lands, this

work of beautifying cities and creating attractive features therein is justly considered an investment

of the safest kind.’’ 47

For Burnham, as Wacker noted, beauty and commerce, like public and com-

mercial space, were mutually reinforcing.

Even as he sought to organize public space in ways that would serve private interests, Burnham

apparently believed that the reordered city would serve all of it’s citizens, rich and poor. There was

108 Journal of Planning History 10(2)

an unstated class dimension to his plan. Burnham imagined an urban public of two symbiotic

classes: an elite who consumed and the workers who serviced their consumption. This spotlights

another glaring absence in Burnham’s plan; there is almost no discussion of the location or design

of manufacturing sites. Worker housing, he suggests, could be constructed at the edge of the city and

might, as had been the case in England, require state subsidies. But Burnham’s attention was on ‘‘the

heart of Chicago’’ and the lakefront, though he did suggest regional plans for transportation and for

parks. He hoped to replace slum neighborhoods with the monumental architecture and controlled

public spaces that would attract wealth and generate business for service workers and their employ-

ers. He left the details of tenement construction and regulation to the women reformers who had been

mapping urban streets, alleys, and buildings for nearly a decade before Burnham began studying

Chicago. As both David Harvey and Richard Sennett write of Haussman’s Paris, Burnham’s

Chicago was a bourgeois city where industrial workers might enjoy the beauty of the lakefront parks

or send their children into neighborhood playgrounds. But the plan included no clearly marked

spaces for their workplaces or homes. 48

Housing is not entirely absent from The Plan of Chicago. It is, however, removed from the city

center. In Burnham’s vision, the family home must be moved out of the city, whether the

smoke-filled industrial city or the planned center for leisure and commerce. The Plan, drawing

on the English Garden City ideal, suggests that residential communities should be constructed on

the edges of the city. With the aim of skirting the threats of rapacious developers and elevating the

influence of government-appointed planning experts, the Plan calls for city officials to appoint a

commission, ‘‘(A)fter the English manner,’’ to ‘‘lay out all territory adjacent to the city of Chicago

which is likely to become incorporated in the city at least during the next decade.’’ There, officials

should plat subdivisions with streets connected to the built up sections of the city and, it seems,

effectively draw lot buyers to invest in single-family houses. Officials would ‘‘establish building

restrictions’’ to create the aesthetic harmony which, crucially, would ‘‘prevent the depreciation of

property by the advent of undesirable classes of structures . . . ’’ Each town would, in addition, include a school, playground, public library, and all the amenities necessary for comfortable subur-

ban life. Residential development would be entirely controlled by public officials, funded by private

capital, and serve the needs of the middle-class family. 49

Burnham did not consider all homes inadequate. But he did believe that children should be raised

in a particular environment. Following a long line of housing reformers that stretched back, at least,

to Catherine Beecher’s 1869 volume American Women’s Home, Burnham contended that the family

home did not belong in the city. He moved his own family out of the city to north suburban Evanston

in the 1890s, writing to his mother: ‘‘The decision in the matter of Evanston was entirely mine, and

was made against the feelings of Margaret and the loud protests of every one else.’’ He added, ‘‘I did

it because I can no longer bear to have my children run in the streets of Chicago.’’ The 16-room, two-

story house was on Forrest Avenue, two blocks from the lake. It was, he noted, ‘‘old but very good’’

with some of the prettiest rooms . . . you ever saw.’’50 Beauty in the home was as important as beauty in public spaces.

Burnham was, in effect, presenting a new spatial hierarchy for American urban society.

Burnham’s neglect of housing highlights his deep faith in the power of public space. The family

home, to be sure, was still an important site for the education of children. But in his plan, in a sharp

break with nineteenth-century thought, the family is less influential than the state in molding the

character of urban residents. Certainly, families must do their part within the home. Yet, if the family

home proved inadequate and the family was not up to the task of raising good citizens, then the state

should intervene, providing playgrounds, parks and, if necessary, housing.

Burnham demonstrated great confidence in government, in the ability of the state to shape urban

space and to use that space to generate responsible citizens. Burnham’s vision of the proper citizen

was of a bourgeois consumer; public spaces were didactic forces guiding residents according to

Garb 109

fairly narrow expectations. Yet, Burnham offered an important insight into the value of public space

in urban centers and urged government’s responsibility to provide its citizens with comfortable,

safe green spaces. Burnham, in this sense, was a typical Progressive reformer; he hoped to expand

the role of government in society and to use publicly funded infrastructure to counter the impact of

industrial capitalism on the American city. His was a profoundly optimistic view of both the city and

the government.

Author’s Note

The author wishes to thank Eric Mumford, Andrea Friedman, Elizabeth Blackmar, Mark Gregory

Pegg and all of those who participated in the symposium ‘‘Burnham, Chicago, and Beyond,’’

sponsored by DePaul University and the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of

this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes

1. Daniel H. Burnham, handwritten note, dated January 1908. Burnham Collection, Box 61, Folder 13.

Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago. Just 1,650 copies of the Plan of Chicago were

printed. There are two subsequent editions, which include excellent reproductions of the illustrations: De

Capo Press (New York, 1970) and Princeton Architectural Press (New York, 1993). The complete volume,

including all illustrations, is available online in the electronic edition of the Encyclopedia of Chicago, eds.

James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff. All citations to the Plan in this essay are

from the Princeton Architectural Press edition.

2. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York:

Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 401.

3. David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century

America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 192; Plan of Chicago (New York: Princeton

Architectural Press, 1993), 34.

4. Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890: A History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the

American Institute of Planners (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 108.

5. Edith Elmer Wood, Recent Trends in American Housing (New York: 1931), 135. For a similar critique see

Benjamin C. Marsh, ‘‘City Planning in Justice to the Working Population,’’ Charities 19 (February 1,

1918). There is some debate about the role of settlement house women in the early planning movement.

Eugenie Birch has argued that women ‘‘had little direct impact’’ on establishing planning as a profession.

More recently Susan Marie Wirka, pointing to the role of Florence Kelley and Mary Kingsbury Simkovitch

in working with the New York Committee on Congestion of Population, claims women were crucial forces

in the early planning movement. See Birch, ‘‘From Civic Worker to City Planner: Women and Planning,

1890-1980,’’ in The American Planner: Biographies and Recollections, ed. Donald A. Krueckeberg (New

York: Metheun, Inc., 1983), 396-427; and Susan Marie Wirka, ‘‘The City Social Movement: Progressive

Women Reformers and Early Social Planning,’’ in Planning the Twentieth-Century City, ed. Mary Corbin

Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 55-75.

6. Peter Marcuse, ‘‘Housing in Early City Planning,’’ Journal of Urban History 6, no. 2 (February 1980): 171.

7. Marcuse, ‘‘Housing in Early City Planning,’’ 171-72.

110 Journal of Planning History 10(2)

8. See for example, Jon Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840-1917 (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2003); John W. Reps, ‘‘Burnham Before Chicago: The Birth of Modern American

Urban Planning,’’ Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 10 (1983): 190-217; William H. Wilson, The City

Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Thomas J. Schlereth, ‘‘Burnham’s

Plan and Moody’s Manual: City Planning as Progressive Reform,’’ in The American Planner: Biographies

and Recollections, ed. Donald A. Krueckeberg (New York: Metheun, Inc., 1983), 75-99.

9. Plan of Chicago, 32.

10. Kristin Schaffer, ‘‘Introduction’’ in Plan of Chicago (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), x.

11. There are several wonderful studies of the plan. See for example, Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel

Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Kristin

Shaffer, ‘‘Daniel H. Burnham: Urban Ideals and the Plan of Chicago’’ (PhD. Dissertation, Cornell

University, 1993); Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991),

183-204; Ira J. Bach, ‘‘A Reconsideration of the 1909 ‘‘Plan of Chicago,’’ in The Physical City: Public

Space and Infrastructure, ed. Neil Larry Shumsky (New York: Garland Pub., 1996), 154-64; Neil Harris,

‘‘The Planning of the Plan, An Address Given to the 695th Regular Meeting of the Commercial Club of

Chicago, 27 November 1979’’ (Chicago: Commercial Club, 1980); Joan E. Draper, ‘‘Paris By the Lake:

Sources of Burnham’s Plan of Chicago,’’ Chicago Architecture, 1872-1922: Birth of a Metropolis, ed. John

Zukowsky (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1987).

12. David Harvey, ‘‘The Political Economy of Public Space,’’ in The Politics of Public Space, ed. Setha Low

and Neil Smith (New York: Routledge, 2005), 31.

13. The planners did survey residents of the area around Halsted Street to determine whether there would be

opposition to razing those blocks. See microfilmed survey responses, Series VII, Reel 23. Bennett Collection.

14. Plan of Chicago, 128.

15. Plan of Chicago, 128-29.

16. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Penguin, 1961), 281-85.

17. Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 20, 1874, 10. The Chicago Daily News also published a series on tenements,

‘‘How the Poor Live.’’ See Chicago Daily News, Jan. 4, 12, 14, 21, 30, 1884. See also Barbara Gutmann

Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842-1936 (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1972); Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America

from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); John Duffy, The

Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Maureen

Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890 (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins Press, 1996), 94.; Louis P. Cain, Sanitation Strategy for a Lakefront Metropolis: The Case of

Chicago (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1978).

18. Report of the Department of Health for the City of Chicago, 1881-2. 4. Harold Washington Library Center,

Chicago; Chicago City Council Proceedings, 1881 and 1882, cited in Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of

Chicago, vol. 3, The Rise of a Modern City, 1871-1893 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 54; Margaret

Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform, Chicago 1871-1919

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 73-74.

19. The Sunday Times-Herald, April 12, 1896. Scrapbook. Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of

Illinois at Chicago; Edith Elmer Wood, The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner: America’s Next Prob-

lem (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 19. For more on these debates see Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and

the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1978), 100-2.; Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles

in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

20. Maureen Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890 (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 150-51; For more on the split between men and women urban refor-

mers see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley & the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Cul-

ture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 174-205; Paula Baker, ‘‘The Domestication of

Garb 111

Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920’’ The American Historical Review 89, no. 3

(June 1984): 620-47; Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2001), 205-35.

21. Much has been written about the history of the settlement house movement. See for example, Addams,

Twenty Years at Hull House; Louise W. Knight, Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2005); Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work, 155-75.

22. Hull House maps and papers, a presentation of nationalities and wages in a congested district of Chicago,

together with comments and essays on problems growing out of the social conditions, by residents of Hull

House, a social settlement at 235 South Halsted Street, Chicago, IL (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1895);

Elizabeth Belanger, ‘‘The Neighborhood Ideal: Local Planning Practices in Progressive-era Women’s

Clubs,’’ Journal of Planning History 8, no. 2 (May 2009): 87-110; Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with their

Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2002), 91.;Thomas S. Hine, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1974), 35.

23. Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, 102-106; See also Harold Platt, ‘‘Jane Addams and the Ward Boss

Revisited: Class, Politics, and Public Health in Chicago, 1890-1930,’’ Environmental History 5 (April

2000): 194-222.

24. Report of the Department of Health of the City of Chicago, 1882, 47-48; Garb, City of American Dreams,

78-79.

25. Among the most significant studies to explain and analyze the separate spheres ideology are the following:

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1973); Jean Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early

Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

26. Plan of Chicago, 109.

27. Plan of Chicago, 108.

28. Plan of Chicago, 108.

29. Preliminary Outline for Plan of Chicago, (typed). Folder 17. Burnham Papers; Plan for Chicago, 129.

30. Burnham, Preliminary Outline, pp. 4, 1. Box 61, Folder 17. Burnham Papers.

31. Draft of plan, quoted in Schaffer, ‘‘Introduction,’’ ix.

32. Everett B. Mero, ‘‘How Public Gymnasiums and Baths Help to Make Good Citizens,’’ The American City

1, no. 2 (October 1909): 69.

33. Plan of Chicago, 29.

34. Plan of Chicago, 1.

35. Louise DeKoven Bowen, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, June 26, 1909. Bowen Scrapbook, vol. 1. Chicago

History Museum; Robin F. Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago,

1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 164. See also, Flanagan, Seeing with Their

Hearts, 42-44; Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2001), 213.

36. Letter from the Board of the University of Chicago Settlement to the Chicago Plan Commission, October 5,

1910. University of Chicago Settlement Board Meeting Minutes, Feb., 1896-Oct. 1910, Mary McDowell

Papers, Chicago History Museum. Quoted in Bachin, Building the South Side. 198. For a brief discussion

of criticism of the Plan see Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago, 125-28.

37. Plan of Chicago, 29; Speech before the Commercial Club, 1896. Box 63, Folder 17. Burnham Collection.

38. Daniel H. Burnham, speech before Chicago Women’s Club, March 8, 1898, typescript, 5. Box 63, Folder

17. Burnham Collection.

39. Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 153, 196. See also,

Bachin, Building the South Side, 196-7.

40. David Harvey, ‘‘The Political Economy of Public Space,’’ in The Politics of Public Space, ed. Setha Low

and Neil Smith (New York: Routledge, 2006), 21. As Harvey writes about Paris, ‘‘The validation of the

112 Journal of Planning History 10(2)

new public spaces (the splendor of the boulevards displayed) was heavily dependent on the control of

private functions and activities that abutted upon it.’’

41. Burnham, handwritten note. n.d. Folder 13, Box 61; Kristin Schaffer, Daniel H. Burnham: Visionary

Architect and Planner (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), 162-69.

42. Burnham, handwritten note. n.d. Folder 13, Box 61.

43. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1993), 134-6.

44. Plan of Chicago, 51.

45. Daniel Burnham to father-in-law, letter dated April 7, 1897. Box 61, Folder 2. Burnham Collection.

Reformers had been urging the city to remake the lake front as a recreational area for Chicago residents

since the 1890s. For them, as Maureen A. Flanagan notes, the emphasis was on recreation, not on new

business opportunities. Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts, 104-7; For a discussion of the fight with the

Illinois Central rail road for shoreline rights, a result of the publication of the Plan, see Lois Wille, Forever

Open, Clear and Free: The Historic Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company,

1972), 85-90.

46. Plan of Chicago, 50.

47. Charles H. Wacker, ‘‘The Plan of Chicago’’ The American City 1, no. 2 (October, 1909): 52.

48. David Harvey, ‘‘The Political Economy of Public Space,’’ in The Politics of Public Space, ed. Setha Low

and Neil Smith (New York: Routledge, 2006), 20-21; Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: The

Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 145-48. See also Harvey, Paris, Capital

of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003).

49. Plan of Chicago, 34-35.

50. Burnham to mother, letter n.d. Folder 25. Box 25. Burnham Collection. He noted that the house was leased

for one year with the ‘‘privilege of buying at the end of that time at a given price.’’

Bio

Margaret Garb is the author of City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Hous-

ing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919. She is an associate professor of American history at Washington

University in St. Louis.

Garb 113