A CITY'S DREAM OF A CITY

Poole, Ernest

A City's Dream of a City What an Engineer with Ideals Predicts as to the Future of Our American Municipalities By ERNEST POOLE FROM our airy pinnacle, high above, we were looking down into the...

...It seemed a sensible idea...
...We call it a 'Gridiron City.' The first and chief promoter of the Gridiron was no less a man than William Penn...
...The population will then naturally flow outward to those suburban zones where the city's future millions are to live...
...The ground beneath the city will be honeycombed with subways, one, two, three tiers deep...
...Scattered at close intervals all through the dwelling regions will be small parks and playgrounds of anywhere from five to a hundred acres each, like those with which in the last six years the South Side of Chicago has been studded...
...other half are northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest—and to picture the homeward route of this luckless half million, you need only imagine an immense field two or three miles square, over which you wish to go from the northwest to the southeast corner...
...To treat the heart of the town as the hub of a wheel, to open up broad diagonal thoroughfares (like the spokes of a wheel) straight out in all directions to the regions where the people dwell —this is the idea in the rough, to be varied according to need...
...There will be smaller community centers as well...
...There will be careful regulations, as there are in cities of Europe to-day, to keep the real-estate speculator within proper bounds, to prevent the erection of block upon block of crowded, sunless tenements, to keep the mills and factories to districts of their own...
...There will be broad connecting boulevards, radial avenues, graceful curves—the old Gridiron dreariness forever left behind...
...There will be ample provision for parks, playgrounds, water fronts...
...This subway system will not...
...To theatre centers the larger parks, and the water fronts, access will be swift...
...The lake front, which extends for over twenty miles, he is planning to make into one continuous park...
...those whose homes lie due east or west or north or south, will have direct routes home...
...Having seen the tortuous, winding streets of the ancient cities abroad, he decided that crookedness was a work of the devil, and that in decorous Philadelphia blocks should all be squares...
...So much for William Penn's idea...
...For we are beginning to learn, these days, that every city has its own topography, its own peculiar needs and possibilities, and therefore must be studied by itself...
...They are being so made in Europe...
...And in these outer regions of homes, the builders of our cities will have at last a free hand...
...it will also give swift and easy egress in the rush hours at night to those who work in the heart of the city—feeding into the groat radial subways which will run outward by the shortest routes, that is, under the radial avenues that I have already described...
...Here will be gathering places of many kinds to accommodate both young and old in the neighborhood around—public schools, kindergartens, and creches, gymnasiums, swimming pools, and baths, ball fields, sand courts, small lagoons, band stands, public libraries, club rooms, halls for music, lectures, dances, and other social gatherings—all those different forces, in brief, that make for a wholesome community life...
...But to clear out a city, relieve its congestion, the plan of our first great engineer is acknowledged now as the best by authorities the world over...
...Look down again, and you will see that all its streets run due north and south or east and west, with rectangular blocks between them...
...A wild vision you may call it, a vision of some age remote...
...Cities fit to live in," the engineer began, "don't grow by themselves...
...This radial scheme has already been adopted in part in many big cities of Europe...
...To follow—not to copy...
...And from these resident zones there will be easy communication not only with the centers of work but with the regions of pleasure, too...
...In this city the circulation is clogged...
...The railroads from outside will come in underground, will connect at their terminals with the local subways, and their passengers and freight will thus be taken to their destinations or transferred to other terminals or docks, without crowding the surface streets above...
...Half of them, at most...
...No remolding, no patchwork here to make the best of a job started wrong...
...But in the Chicago playgrounds you may see these community centers to-day—for there they have all come into life in the space of six short years...
...Soon it became the regular thing...
...And a study of the plans recently put upon paper for a score of American cities will show an almost universal agreement that these radial thoroughfares must be ploughed out here...
...So far-sighted a builder he was that bis conception for the capital, worked out by Major L'Enfant, was an object of amusement to shortsighted men for generations—and is now a model for all of us to follow...
...You axe forced to take a zigzag path or else to go all the way around...
...You are not allowed to cut straight across...
...And now at least nine out of ten of our cities and towns are of the Gridiron type...
...The newer American towns began copying Philadelphia...
...The very air was alive with a muffled, quivering roar...
...at the buildings of all shapes and ages squeezed and wedged together into a grimy, mammoth hive, some of them suddenly towering as though for a breath of air—the whole aspect of the mass below was that of congestion and fever...
...The old idea our fathers conceived of grouping public buildings around a village 'commons' will be revived in another form...
...Imagine a dozen waterways all along this line, reaching up into the crowded regions—and you have one hint, just one, of the city that is to be...
...They will be able to take a fresh start, to plan before the growth begins...
...And we had stepped out on the roof to have a look down at his patient...
...But the homes of the...
...The Transportation Question THE CITY of the future will have no elevateds, no unsightly train yards, no trolley lines, no long lines of clattering trucks and drays...
...Noises rose...
...only absorb the railroad traffic...
...Its people, and its freight as well, will be transported underground...
...For the past twelve months he had been employed to diagnose a city, to find where and how to operate, and to draught a plan for the city's future growth...
...The health of a city," he went on, "like the health of your body or mine, depends on its circulation—that is, its veins and arteries—its streets...
...A City's Dream of a City What an Engineer with Ideals Predicts as to the Future of Our American Municipalities By ERNEST POOLE FROM our airy pinnacle, high above, we were looking down into the city...
...Heavy columns and billows of smoke rose up from every direction, rose up and whirled and eddied, and settled in sluggish, sprawling clouds that veiled and befouled the light of the sun...
...They have to be made, molded, planned to suit humanity's needs...
...He belonged to that new profession of rude, gigantic surgery which in recent years has suddenly come into prominence in scores of our crowded cities and towns...
...Boulevards and subway lines are not the only means to be employed...
...His name was George Washington—and be was an engineer...
...About a century later, another American planned a city...
...The dreary ugliness of the scheme, the monotony of hundreds of blocks all shaped exactly alike—is only a part of the trouble...
...His offices were perched at the top of a twenty-two story building...
...The most serious part is this: Down there in the heart of the city to-day are nearly a million people, workers and shoppers, who will soon be going home...
...Everybody's...
...The patient seemed in great distress...
...In less than a hundred years from now," said the engineer beside me, "such cities as the one down there will have vanished from the civilized world, remembered as monstrosities, replaced by other cities, which will he to Paris as Paris is to this...
...And, looking down through the scurrying smoke—at the streets that were long, tumultuous tides of people and things...
...Already in Chicago, the engineer at work (the same man who built that astounding White City) is proposing to make of the Midway Plaisance a broad canal, its banks girdled by green, to reach far up into the congested living centers and so give to the people there a chance to go down to the lake by boat...

Vol. 5 • March 1913 • No. 12


 
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