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for the sake of revenue, but that I might, in straightforward editorials, let the public know just what we were doing and what our ideals were. The best writers in town contributed to our pages. Mr. Edgar A. Guest, the poet of the Detroit Free Press, whose daily column is a favorite with thousands of readers, often writes for the magazine a bit of verse about children. Now the magazine has a circulation of more than 5,000 and is a financial help directly and indirectly. My "Story of the Children's Ward," largely autobiographical, also helped out, for it was published in book form and sold pretty well. But, although I worked joyously and eagerly for my great cause, I am a cripple and weak, and the strain was terrible. But it was a joy to me to see that the hospital-school was becoming a sort of pet among those who knew most about it. Especially the younger people enjoyed helping me. The members of the Delta Alpha Delta sorority of the most fashionable girls' school in town started the practice of doing something "extra" for the children every week.

One young woman who is wonderfully skilful with her needle is teaching Zella to use her magic fingers to make exquisite embroideries. Zella will never be able to leave her rolling chair- but she is no longer wretched about that, because she knows the dignity and happiness of being really useful.

Another girl is teaching music to little Tootsie, who has a plaintive voice and a talent for mimicry. I truly believe that in a few years' time she will be able to support herself as an entertainer, after the manner of Kitty Cheatham.

One of the things upon which we spend most time and thought is trying to discover the least inkling of a talent or a particular liking for some special kind of work in our little cripples. It all works out with a success that I cannot describe or explain. I have been criticised because I repudiate routine. Well, I admit frankly that I loathe with all my heart and soul the red tape and institutionalism which cramp the individual and nip the child's exuberant happiness in the bud. I have been criticised because the visitor

who comes here always finds the children in the halls, on the stairs, everywhere —getting all the joy that life offers them. I know the institutions through and through, and I know at what a sacrifice of children's happiness the great shining halls and formal, undisturbed order of the rooms are achieved. I remember with a shudder seeing the toys taken from a very sick child because visitors were expected and the battered playthings looked mussy on the spotless bed. Nor did they bother to return the toys when the fastidious visitors were gone. And it doesn't soften the ugliness of this picture to remember that the child died a few days afterward. That was an institution famed and praised for the perfect clockwork system by which it was run. But red tape and system are a monster into whose maw many a little child's happiness is fed.

I have been criticised because I will not investigate the circumstances under which children come to me. I never will. I don't believe in it. What do I care if a child has a father who drinks or gambles? A mother who is shiftless or worthless? All the more reason that I should help him; all the more reason that I should not keep him waiting in an environment that is destructive to him while I waste precious time and precious money in investigation which leads nowhere. Why need I know more when I know that the child needs help and a chance?

My one thought, my one aim, my one hope, is that children shall be given a chance for happiness, for usefulness, for self-expression. For centuries the world has looked upon cripples as deadwood. It has regarded them as essentially useless, a burden on society. That is wrong, untrue. Cripples are often full of lofty ambitions for service, and not only are they ambitious but variously gifted in ways that lie outside the beaten paths. Cultivate their gifts, give their ambitions to be useful a spur, and you have, instead of wretched idleness, joyous productiveness. This is the beginning and the end of my ideal for cripples. I believe that if once I could make the world understand what I know, there would no longer be a problem to solve.

THE COMING CITY

THE REMARKABLE WORK OF MR. JOHN NOLEN TO MAKE MORE THAN TWENTY
AMERICAN MUNICIPALITIES MORE CONVENIENT AND MORE BEAUTIFUL

A RAPIDLY GROWING NATIONAL MOVEMENT TO CORRECT THE EVILS
OF CARELESS GROWTH AND TO INSURE THAT THE CITIES OF

THE FUTURE SHALL BE DEFINITELY PLANNED TO
SERVE AND PLEASE THEIR CITIZENS

BY

JOHN S. GREGORY

N SPITE of our bewailing it, the growth of the cities goes on. You preach the advantages of country life, but the people of the country continue flocking to town. Isn't it clear that, babble o' green fields as we will, we have got to admit that men are going to live in town? Isn't it possible that we are mistaken about it mistaken in thinking that city life is necessarily noisy and crowded and bereft of green freshness-mistaken in thinking that we must flee to the country really to live? Isn't it, really, a faint-hearted, cowardly act to abandon the city, shirk its problems, and yield it over to the dingy, jostling, jangling conditions that prevail there that our own neglect has permitted to prevail there?

"Besides, what right have we to come to the city to make money and then hurry to the country to spend it? Many are obliged to live in town. They cannot desert the dreary scene. Isn't it ignoble of any of us to do so?"

The speaker (let us follow the excellent fashion of the old-fashioned novel) — the speaker was Mr. John Nolen.

The "City Beautiful" idea is not a new one, even in America. It had a delightful vogue a dozen years ago. But it has been scarcely half that long since that there came the very practical realization that convenience, comfort, and economy in city life the life that men and women apparently prefer and resolve to live is worth planning for. And while that more substantial idea has spread fast and far and won many disciples, it has had one chief apostle Mr. John Nolen; John

.

Nolen, a landscape architect, with a social conscience and vision. A patient man. A positive man- but modest, so modest that thousands who have learned his thoughts have never heard of him—as yet. A man who has once or twice demonstrated that one can very deliberately make his own life what he will, and is now demonstrating in a score of states that a city can deliberately make itself what it will.

Twelve years ago Mr. Nolen was the secretary of what called itself the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, an organization of seriousminded people of Philadelphia, with a high purpose, which never quite realized itself. Mr. Nolen was living comfortably on his moderate salary; he had married him a wife, built him a house, and begotten a son. It may have been in sticking in shrubbery about his house, or somehow or other, that he saw the possibility of a career in landscape gardening. He sold the house, carried his wife and baby to Cambridge, the three of them covenanting to live as economically as possible till the head of the family, with his last penny spent, should have learned all that Frederick Law Olmsted could teach him about landscape gardening.

The covenant was kept so faithfully, the proceeds of the sale of the house were husbanded so carefully, that after the landscape course there was a year in Germany, partly at the University of Munich, partly on travels afoot in many German cities.

Mr. Nolen prospered as a landscape artist. He "did" his share of estates

and suburban land enterprises, and he got out a delightful book, founded on Repton. But there was an idea working in his head all the while, an idea that no doubt had begun to germinate in Germany. It was that of the possibility of pleasant cities instead of dreadful ones. Little by little he worked up a practice among park commissioners and such-like city clients. And wherever Mr. Nolen was engaged to advise a commission about a park or a school-ground, that commission found itself with a full-grown scheme for a transformed city on its hands. You see, the park called for approaches, and that meant extension of streets - why not new streets, and why not, while we are about it, rationalize the city's whole street plan?

I hope I suggest nothing that would offend the ethics of the landscape architects' profession, for Mr. Nolen is the soul of conscience, with a soberness and dread of exaggeration as notable as that of the worthy John Woolman himself, and I am sure he took the utmost pains never to transcend his instructions or powers in so far as his sense of what would be good for the city in question allowed him. But the facts stand out that to-day this editor of Repton and graduate in landscape describes himself on his stationery as John Nolen, City Planner, and that he has worked out specifications for the remaking of a score or more American cities.

In no other country, except perhaps in England, do people look upon cities as places to escape from as soon as possible. They don't do that in Germany, nor in other countries of Continental Europe, nor in South America. When one visits Germany, no matter what the season, he doesn't visit the country; he visits the cities. For the Germans have learned how to make the cities beautiful, comfortable, and pleasurable, as well as highly successful centres for trade and commerce. They have built cities in which they have abolished crowding and noise and discomfort, retained the freshness of trees and flowing waters, made outdoor life possible, while at the same time they have multiplied the particular exclusive advantages of the city the social institutions which

the country cannot have: theatres, public music, museums, well-supplied markets, noble parks, perfect pavements and roads, swift and easy and inexpensive transit.

The Germans have done no one thing for which humanity ought to be more grateful than this: they have demonstrated that the city is not necessarily ugly. "Ah!" is a rejoinder sometimes made, "German cities are old; in America our cities have grown so fast." The truth is, German cities have grown as fast as ours. Berlin is as new as Chicago. Take Düsseldorf: in 1870 it had 70,000 people; to-day it has 300,000. It has grown as fast as Pittsburgh, and it is, industrially, the Pittsburgh of Europe. Physically, it is one of the loveliest towns in which men and women have ever gathered to live. Though without the splendid and natural scenery that Pittsburgh has so sadly misused, built on a flat plain with a yellow river flowing past it, Düsseldorf, while it was gathering to itself furnaces, foundries, boiler-works, and machine factories, managed at the same time to create a city of leaf and fountain, with noble houses and ample spaces for play, and every a pleasing prospect. Look at the photographs shown on pages 96 and 97-views taken almost at random, and faithfully representing the general atmosphere of the whole city of Düsseldorf, and ask yourself why Pittsburgh is not like that.

The answer is, Mr. Nolen would tell you, because American cities are not planned. The founders of a town draw a checkerboard on the soil - totally irrespective of the natural features of the place, and the real estate gentlemen who lay out successive "additions" draw more checkerboards, and presently a city finds. itself sprawling along a characterless extension of blocks; with a few streets crowded by impossible traffic and a great many more empty except for an occasional cart; with no parks or playgrounds and no longer a possibility of them except at gigantic expense; the river banks in the hands of the railroads which, like as not, have a right of way through the heart of the city; the railroad stations badly placed, the public buildings scattered

all ugliness and discomfort, endured because better is not known nothing to arouse or express city pride.

A city naturally tends to deteriorate. Do you remember your home town? home town? When you last visited it, were you not oppressed by the sad changes that made it so unlike the pleasant place of your boyhood days?

The explanation of the deterioration is not hard to find. It does not lie merely negatively in the thoughtless extinction of natural beauty as trees are cut down and empty spaces built up. It lies in the positively selfish acts of hundreds of individuals moved by no sense of community. It is cheap to crowd. The slum pays. It costs to widen streets; to plant trees as old ones die. The railroad almost invariably captures the river bank or the lake-front. The gas company, the electric power company, and the trolley company are all enemies of the streets. Every rival real estate dealer struggles to get the new courthouse or the Federal building for his particular section. And there are scores of worthy citizens so eager, some for this particular "improvement," some for that, that the city is always at the end of its debt limit, and has no money with which to buy land the first necessity the first necessity of a largely planned city. (“If you write an article on city-planning," said Mr. Nolen, "don't forget to put on every page an exhortation to American cities to buy land- buy land when they are young, and buy land every chance they get. They can't go wrong. Tell them to buy land.")

The city, unawakened to its own needs and possibilities, is the prey of a thousand selfish interests, who are perfectly awake. It is only by united action and by "planning ahead" that the people of a city can successfully oppose the forces of deterioration or provide for that fuller life which growth ought to mean.

On pages 88 and 89 are shown three pictures of Harvard Square, Cambridge, as it was, is, and is to be. Fifty years ago the place was one of quiet beauty. But as the town of Cambridge grew into a city, the village green degenerated into the wretched square that to-day affronts with such peculiar insolence the expecta

tions of every visitor to the seat of our oldest university. Only now has the consciousness of the neighborhood realized the necessity for neighborhood action. A Harvard Square Business Men's Association, making Mr. Nolen its chairman and calling in the aid of the University and the coöperation of other civic bodies, has provided a plan for the redemption of the Square. The sketch reproduced on page 88, giving Prof. E. J. A. Duquesne's idea of the reconstructed square, does not, one may hope, show what the result will look like architecturally; it cannot seriously be expected that Cambridge will turn its back on its noble "Colonial" tradition for this rhapsody of the Boulevard Raispail. But Mr. Duquesne's plan, if not his architectural treatment of it, does give Cambridge a centre which in proportions, uniformity, and relatedness, is worthy of the town and the university.

In Cambridge, a fine thing like this can still be done. The population is not more than 100,000. The like can be done in hundreds of our cities, some of them destined to grow into great centres of population. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, have passed the point where radical improvement is possible. It is too late to rectify the criminal neglect and ignorance that forever forbid that our largest cities should ever be convenient, economical, or beautiful.

Suppose a trifling amount of thought had been given to a plan for New York City. Should we find to-day hundreds of cross streets, almost unused, and only a dozen crowded up-and-down avenues? A trifling amount of thought would have shown that the long blocks should have run north and south instead of east and west, so that the great streams of travel and not the occasional vehicles should have had the many channels through which to flow. The merest touch of reflection on the matter would have placed Central Park on one river bank or half of it on either river, and not where it would, as to-day it does, divide the city into two separated sections, to immense inconvenience and enormous expense and the confusion of the whole transit problem.

Suppose Boston had been planned.

Would the roadway of its main thorough- sible grades and pursue their unyielding

fare be only forty feet wide at its most important section or only twenty-six feet wide in some places? Would it be possible to calculate to-day that every vehicle traveling about Boston still loses two or three hours a day? Turn that into money and see what the loss is; then reflect that Beston has spent $40,000,000 connecting and widening her streets, with little appreciable results, and compute by how many hundred millions more Boston would be the richer to-day had her streets been traced by intelligent city-planners and not by the cows.

There is a strictly financial side to all this which it is astonishing we have not appreciated. Consider, merely as an example easily understood, what a misplaced fire-engine house may cost a community! Every inconvenience, every uneconomical arrangement, making necessary loss of time and expenditure of energy, is costly waste. When the efficiency expert takes up the case of the average American city, the crudeness, extravagances, errors, neglects, with their financial consequences, roll into sums absolutely appalling.

More appalling still, purely on the financial side, is the waste of the wealth of human life and energy due to bad living conditions. What is the power of Niagara that we should conserve it, while we let the energy of men and women waste? Boston is to-day a rich and an intelligent city, yet more than half of her population, living in the congested sections, sleep every night under conditions below the irreducible minimum agreed upon by the humane world for the most unfortunate (an allowance of 400 cubic feet per person). Boston is thus crowded because it was not planned.

Suppose the city plan Sir Christopher Wren made for the rebuilding of London after the great fire had been followed. Would the British capital have had to spend (as it has just done) 125 millions to open two streets which give unappreciable relief to its congestion?

Would any city-planner have put a gridiron on San Francisco's hills, leaving empty "streets" to struggle up impos

"straight" lines up and down all sorts of inclines without a thought of how traffic would naturally want to travel? It is usually much more sensible from the standpoint either of economy or of beauty to carry a road around a hill than over it. Would any intelligent plan have left the vast territory of Philadelphia without important diagonals, without short-cuts across those endless arrays of squares? Had there been any notion of planning the places where we assemble to live, would the broad surface of the United States be covered to-day with commonplace towns, all alike in their dreariness, because all laid out by the brilliant method of giving an office-boy a sheet of paper and a ruler, and named by equally clever resort to the alphabet and the arithmetic. "No people on earth except ourselves would any more dream of numbering their streets than of numbering their babies!" exclaims Mr. John Nolen.

What is the matter with the checkerboard plan- known abroad as "the American plan?" Nearly everything is the matter with it. It isn't a plan at all; it is the lazy neglect of a plan. How can that be described as a plan which considers nothing, observes nothing, reflects on nothing, takes nothing into account, aims at nothing? There is no possible town site that does not possess some natural characteristics or distant views to be made the most of; most have elevations and depressions, not only invaluable for scenic effect, but practically determinative of the location of the various quarters of the city and of the paths of natural travel. Given a certain landscape, no matter how little broken, an intelligent student of the subject can anticipate pretty accurately in what direction the population will spread, and what will be the character of the various sections of the resulting city. Here the factories would naturally locate themselves; themselves; here naturally would the operatives live; this section is adapted to residences of the better class; here is a little stream which suggests a park strip; travel will be up and down this and this general line; retail shops would be likely to find this point the best. The public

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