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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? 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 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 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. 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 thoroughfare 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 Boston 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

sible grades and pursue their unyielding "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; 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

buildings would be most conveniently placed in this central spot and so on. A few such points as this determined, the city composes itself. Streets, forming its skeleton, become natural, not artificial, lines streets of different classes: some, chief arteries of travel; some, business streets; some, spacious boulevards; some, streets for residence; some, for service, etc.— streets following the land's contours, or its natural features, the main thoroughfares passing from centre to centre, residence streets retiring into quiet sections deliberately protected from general traffic. Thanks to the flexible course of the streets, there is great variety in the size, shape, and position of plots of ground; on this one might stand a schoolhouse; on this a church; this should be dedicated to a park, a playground, a fountain, a monument. There are none of the long, straight, endless vistas of the rectangular town; in every direction the eye meets something of interest. The community, while it has provided for its own greatest convenience and comfort, has also composed itself into a picture and saved money.

The rectangular town is inevitably inconvenient and uneconomical. It calls for uniform streets, whereas every street is a thing that demands a special character suited to its particular use. It wastes land, shockingly, and so, of course, increases the price of the lots from which it unnecessarily steals. It carries every traveler the long way round. It is inexpressibly dreary. It affords no interesting views. It provides no sites for particular purposes; there is no reason why any building should be anywhere in particular.

The checker-board plan is, of course, more a negative than a positive defect. It is a pity, though, at the best, and it has furnished the foundation for many of our most vicious city errors.

A new spirit is abroad among the cities. The swiftest mention of the communities to which Mr. Nolen has been called to survey and advise will probably surprise those not informed of the rapidity with which the idea of city planning has recently spread. These points include Scranton, Reading, Erie, Lock Haven,

Milwaukee, Madison, St. Paul, Savannah, Roanoke, Va., Wilmington, Del., Montclair, N. J., Schenectady, Keokuk, la., and San Diego.

Mr. Nolen's plans for most of these cities extend to a complete remodelling, with special attention to the rectification, so far as possible, of the street scheme; the opening, widening, and connecting of thoroughfares; the deflecting of streetcar lines where advisable; the rescue of streets and water-fronts from railroad or other invasion; the establishment of a civic centre; the creation of a park system; the destruction of slums and the opening of playgrounds; and the laying out in a scientific manner of territory on to which the city is expanding.

It is not pretended that all or perhaps any of these cities will carry out all that Mr. Nolen plans for them; but in a number of them his designs have been adopted as the official plans toward which all improvement must proceed, and in some large appropriations have been made and work begun.

In other cities, like Chattanooga, La Crosse, Sacramento, Charlotte, N. C., and New London, Mr. Nolen's commission limited him specifically to parks. Other places for which he has made complete plans are such small communities as Wayland, Stoneham, and Cohasset, Mass., Glen Ridge, N. J., and High Shoals, N. C.

and the opportunity of catching a town young particularly delighted this designer of cities. Results in Glen Ridge were especially satisfactory; an illustration on page 93, for instance, shows the neat building erected by the community to establish the village centre at the proper point and to prevent the growing up of the shanty-town that had already begun. At Montclair, hard by, Mr. Nolen's recommendations not yet having been adopted, we see the squalid stores that Glen Ridge has got rid of.

One of Mr. Nolen's most interesting studies has been the Wisconsin capital, Madison. The natural possibilities of the place were-and still remain-very great, but they have been totally neglected. The city lies on and between pleasant hills and is surrounded by a chain of really

beautiful lakes. In laying out the city, one hill-top was rightly appropriated for the State Capitol and another for the University. But that was as far as forethought went. The city's best street connects the two eminences, but it is contemptible in width-66 feet and treatment. The Capitol is put down on a lot altogether inadequate, and its surroundings are not protected, the building of a splendid new State House that cost $6,000,000 accentuating the failure to provide a proper setting. The lake-fronts have been surrendered to private ownership. Within a few hundred yards of the Capitol lie low banks as marshy as they were when Indians hunted in the reeds - except that now they are the dumpingground of insanitary and unsightly refuse. But the possibility of a new Madison

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A PLAN TO MAKE MADISON, WIS., A WORTHY CAPITAL CITY

BY AN EFFECTIVE ARRANGEMENT OF ITS OFFICIAL, ITS COLLEGIATE, AND ITS RESIDENTIAL QUARTERS

has sprung like a vision into the minds of its citizens and of many lovers of fitness and beauty throughout the state of which it is the capital. Nowhere else has the imagination of the city-planner been so fired as here on the hill-tops amidst the four clear-watered lakes. Mr. Nolen has drawn a city dedicated first to its function as a seat of statehood, second to its opportunities as a seat of learning, and third to the needs of a place of residence. He has conceived a city of ample proportions with the dome of the Capitol as its focus of attention, grouped about with other buildings of state, approached from every side by liberal avenues, but particularly composed to impress the beholder who comes up a Mall, 400 feet wide, leading from the lake-front. On the other

of Wisconsin's history. And throughout the city, all that informed and skilful planning can do to aid the increase of comfortable and architecturally pleasing homes on wellshaded streets will be but another function of the creators of this model city.

They have done one great deed at Madison, which makes it seem not at all improbable that they will do another. They have created there one of the most important universities in the world, a university with a versity with a new conception of the relation of learning to the state and to the life of the people. They claim to have created a new breed of barley that has paid the cost of that university many times over. times over. Mr. Nolen conceives that the university can serve the people just as truly by improving its city life as by improving

its agriculture. He argues that there is as much necessity that a state should establish a model city as a model farm. You may amplify that sentence eloquently, but you cannot increase its force.

The citizens of Madison have risen splendidly in response to the ideal presented them; they have done what they could to advance it, but, of course, full realization depends upon the legislature, from which great things are hoped.

A sharply contrasting instance of the community in quest of better civic life is afforded by Schenectady, a town of altogether another type, with an alto

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it took, but it cannot be made here. The
city it numbers
it numbers 80,000 now - has
awakened to a social consciousness, and
it has undertaken, among other things,
to make itself over physically. It has
called in Mr. Nolen and listened in delight
as he has shown it what could be done.
By ordinance the city has created a Plan-
ning Board; a man worth a story by him-
self, Mr. Charles P. Steinmetz, is its chair-
man. In coöperation with the state offi-
cials, who are spending 100 million dollars
on a barge canal, constructing at Schenec-
tady one of its great terminals, far-reaching
steps for the redemption of the neglected

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PROF. E. J. A. DUQUESNE'S IDEALIZATION OF THE HISTORIC BUSINESS SECTION OF CAMBRIDGE, MASS., SHOWING WHAT CAN BE DONE BY A UNIFIED SCHEME OF ARCHITECTURAL TREATMENT TO IMPROVE AN UGLY TOWN CENTRE

gether different vision in its case the simple dream of a shabby, overgrown town to make itself into a minor city in which life, especially for workers of small means, shall be worth the living. Schenectady was once quaint, in a crowded Dutch way, on its canal and its river; now it is merely uncomfortable and distressing, in parts squalid, the result of its swift and unplanned growth as a centre of industry. A study of its life and its interesting population would well pay for the space

areas near the water have been taken, and the plans for the opening of needed streets, the development of a park and playground system, of school grounds, and the general integration of the community are being prepared by Mr. Nolen.

A first step was the reclamation of one of the ravines, a place of natural beauty degenerated into a slum. Eight hundred thousand dollars were needed to reclaim Cotton Factory Hollow, and a two-thirds vote of the City Council was necessary to

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