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.
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 PlanningSince 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 History6, no. 2 (February 1980): 171.
7.
Marcuse, ‘‘Housing in Early City Planning,’’ 171-72.
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 Problem (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 reformers see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley & the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 174-205; Paula Baker, ‘‘The Domestication of 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.
Draft of plan, quoted in Schaffer, ‘‘Introduction,’’ ix.
32.
Everett B. Mero, ‘‘How Public Gymnasiums and Baths Help to Make Good Citizens,’’The American City1, 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 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.
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 City1, 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.’’
