Abstract
Lakefront and New York Recentered both make original and unusual contributions to scholarship on the histories of American waterfront redevelopment. The books are fascinating to compare, since they cover approximately the same time period (1850–1950) in what were then America’s two largest metropolitan regions. Both books are sceptical about the value of big plans for these two large metropolitan regions, with Kearney & Merrill bluntly stating, ‘Conflicting visions and political realities will always frustrate any attempt at comprehensive planning’ (7).
Instead, both books foreground the work of non-professional planners who shaped these regional waterfronts. The legions of lawyers and legislators who litigated lakefront development are the central actors in Chicago. The New York book features ‘city builders’ such as developers, landscape architects and engineers.
Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago is the result of over 20 years of research in court records led by two distinguished legal scholars, Joseph Kearney (Marquette) and Thomas Merrill (Columbia). The authors both lived in Chicago for many years and have unearthed the tortured legal history of its waterfront over more than a century. As a result of weak and corrupt local and state governments and the absence of planning, waterfront ownership and development rights were established by continuous litigation over a period spanning many decades.
The Chicago lakefront’s story unfolds in a series of legal cases associated with a range of projects: The 1869 ‘Lakefront Steal’ by the Illinois Central Railroad, Grant Park, Streeterville and Michigan Avenue, reversing the Chicago River, Lake Shore Drive and the US Steel South Works and later projects. Kearney and Merrill demonstrate that the Illinois Central Railroad (ICR) was the dominant actor on the Chicago waterfront in the mid-nineteenth century. The state and local governments were desperate to attract this new transportation system to their city, granting the ICR rights to build waterfront yards and a station on landfill. The ICR purchased the lakebed from the state, creating landfill that was immensely valuable after buildings replaced the railyards in the 20th century. The railroad also repeatedly tried to acquire Lake Park along the waterfront, only to be resisted by a barrage of lawsuits from adjacent property owners who enjoyed their views of the park and lake. Waterfront guardians must constantly resist proposals by transportation engineers, who find a waterfront parks to be cheap locations for a new railway or highway corridor, as seen on Toronto’s Esplanade or Boston’s Charles River.
Other property owners, led by department store magnate Montgomery Ward, resisted proposals to place cultural buildings in Grant Park, the centrepiece of Chicago’s downtown parks system. Large downtown parks are regularly under pressure from institutions that would like to acquire a central location at no cost. Grant Park was protected by a decision that prohibited new buildings, which, a century later, led to debates about the definition of a building during the controversial decision to locate a large new bandshell in Millennium Park.
Kearney and Merrill’s Streeterville case examines the ways that a colourful squatter tried to acquire title to valuable landfill north of the mouth of the Chicago River and the efforts of more legitimate claimants to ownership. The Chicago River was itself the subject of numerous legal battles to establish a connection to the Mississippi River. The first project was a canal that connected Lake Michigan to the Mississippi system, permitting shipping between the Great Lakes and Gulf of Mexico. A bigger channel, completed in 1900, reversed the direction of flow of the Chicago River, to act as an open sewer carrying the waste of the growing metropolis away from its water supplies and parks along Lake Michigan. The environmental consequences between Missouri and Illinois were litigated at the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in Chicago’s favour, but set off another string of legal actions to prevent further water diversions that were settled in a 2008 federal compact between the United States, Canada and eight states.
Chicago’s famous Lake Shore Drive began as a narrow gravel roadway built by the Lincoln Parks Commission in 1875 for pleasure driving along the waterfront in horse-drawn carriages. Several parks commissions extended the Drive along the lakefront in the first half of the 20th century using a clever set of legal manoeuvres that permitted landfill for public purposes, such as creating a waterfront park and driveway, but paid for by selling new building lots on landfill nearer to the original shore.
The book explains the legal procedures by which the parks commissions financed the landfill and parks in great detail but is unfortunately silent on how the region’s traffic engineers hijacked the pleasure dive and transformed it into an expressway. Lake Shore Drive is now 6–10 lanes wide, impairing access to the waterfront, and reducing the park space to a thin strip in many locations. North of Streeterville, the park completely disappears, replaced by a concrete deck hung outboard an 8-lane expressway. If the ICR’s railway engineers were the villains of the 1860s ‘Lakefront Steal’, then the legislative means by which the traffic engineers of the 1950s stole waterfront parkland and the pleasure drive needed to be exposed, so that they are never repeated.
Lakefront’s final chapters provide a brief tour of 20th century projects that used lakefront landfill for a World’s Fair, a football stadium, water treatment plant, a steel plant and a university campus. Each project was enveloped in a cloud of lawsuits, and Kearney & Merrill explain how changes in the public trust doctrine helped Illinois courts sort out appropriate land uses and development rights in the absence of a waterfront plan. Submerged lands were held by the state and only to be developed for public goods, such as parks and they should be developed by public institutions, such as parks commissions. In recent years, the public trust doctrine has been embraced by environmental advocacy groups to oppose private and public development of waterfront lands.
Kearney and Merrill have reservations about the interpretation of the public trust doctrine in Illinois, and caution that other states’ courts may interpret the law differently. Based on examining 150 years of Chicago legal actions, they recommend that public use advocates ensure that waterfront lands be placed under public control before private ownership is entrenched. Once waterfront property is in private hands, it is difficult to retrieve it for public use.
The usual means by which a city would control the development of lakefront lands in the twentieth century would be to prepare and adopt a waterfront plan. Unfortunately, Kearney & Merrill’s dismissal of comprehensive planning missed a fine opportunity to compare control by litigation with control by planning. As it happens, Chicago was a leader in comprehensive planning in the early 20th century, through the famous 1909 Plan of Chicago prepared by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett. 1 A regional lakefront parks system was a central feature of this plan, 2 which was partly implemented over the next two decades by the Chicago Plan Commission and the various parks commissions, led by Edward Bennett. 3 Sadly, this celebrated plan is relegated to minor mentions of its promotional value in Lakefront; none of its gorgeous images are included in the book and Bennett is not listed in its roll of individuals that influenced redevelopment of Chicago’s waterfront (300–302).
In contrast, Kara Schlichting’s New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore, takes a somewhat different approach to the role of planning. The book is also based on extensive archival research, but it combines elements of urban and suburban history, planning histories and the environmental history of the New York coast. While non-professional city builders are foregrounded in the book, the author also compares the results to the well-known plans of Robert Moses and the 1929 Regional Plan of New York. 4 Professor Schlichting (Queen’s College, CUNY) adds to the reconsideration of Robert Moses’ controversial reputation as a parks planner, after it had been battered by Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. 5
As promised by the title, Schlichting focuses upon the northeast quadrant of New York’s coastal region, rather than high-profile, professionally-planned Manhattan waterfront projects, such as Battery Park City. The book’s lessons are extracted from a series of waterfront case studies drawn from the area between Queens and the Long Island Sound: nineteenth century Bridgeport CT and Queens waterfronts; Trans-Harlem – the South Bronx and Harlem River waterfronts; working-class leisure resorts along the East River; Long Island Sound playgrounds; opposition to parks plans; and transforming Flushing Meadows ‘From dumps to glory’ for the 1939 World’s Fair.
Bridgeport and Queen’s provide early examples of private developers reshaping the waterfront far from Manhattan. Bridgeport’s waterfront champion was circus promoter P.T. Barnum, who convinced the town to commission noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to design Seaside Park on Long Island Sound. Barnum then sparked the redevelopment of the adjacent lands by building an elegant family home on the edge of the park. Piano manufacturer George Steinway was a critical early promoter of the Queen’s waterfront. He developed a model company town with new industrial plants that took the pressure off his overcrowded Manhattan plants. The new town provided opportunities for workers to purchase small suburban homes and to enjoy themselves at a new waterfront park on Bowery Bay.
Redevelopment of the Trans-Harlem waterfront was started by a major infrastructure project – the Army Corps of Engineers dredging the Harlem River Canal, finally completed in 1895. This project encouraged development of the farms in the South Bronx. A sophisticated streets and parks plan by Olmsted and engineer James Groes was rejected by local landowners, who wanted a simple extension of Manhattan’s grid to facilitate rapid real estate speculation. Schlichting demonstrates how, in the absence of a city plan, the New York City Parks Commission acted as the initial planning agency for the South Bronx, creating a system of large parks connected by parkways.
The water’s edge on the upper East River and Long Island Sound was colonized by several large working-class leisure resorts that were accessed by the expanding regional streetcar network. Steinway’s beer gardens in the North Beach and Bowery Bay, were immensely popular and drew large crowds from far beyond his model town. Other inter-urban streetcar lines provided access to the north shore of the Long Island Sound, which saw large summer colonies, such as Edgewater. These resorts usually started as tent villages that working-class families enhanced by building their own cottages. Sewer and water infrastructure struggled to keep up, but these informal settlements helped pull the necessary infrastructure to the edge of metropolitan region.
Schlichting demonstrates how the expansion of automobility in the 1920s was aided by powerful parks commissions in the Bronx and Westchester County. Parkways connected parks but also served as armatures for adjacent land development and were incorporated into the Russell Sage Foundation’s 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Environs. 6 The expanding parkway network allowed more middle-class citizens to consider a waterfront trip, placing redevelopment pressure on many of the informal resorts. Rye Beach was redeveloped as a more sanitized Playland and Robert Moses rebuilt Orchard Beach as a modernist playground on Long Island Sound, similar to his more famous beach parks on Long Island.
Of course, the wealthy landowners with huge estates along Long Island Sound were opposed to the waterfront opening up to hordes of working-class and middle-class tourists. Gold Coast barons such as Louis Tiffany fought back with a variety of legal tools, purchasing strategic properties and claiming ownership of the foreshore to block public access to proposed parks at Oyster Bay and Sherwood Island. The large estate owners turned home rule traditions on their heads by forming local governments for small ‘villages’ comprised only of their lands and then blocking regional park and parkway proposals.
Schlichting’s most insightful case study is Robert Moses’ redevelopment of Flushing Meadows for the 1939 World’s Fair. The waterfront marshlands had been ruined by the ash dumps and garbage heaps made famous by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gadsby. 7 Moses led their transformation ‘from Dumps to Glory’ 8 by clearing the brownfields, draining the marshes and building a network of sanitary infrastructure, bridges and parkways that converge on the site. The Fair was a fine example of Modernist architecture and planning, complete with Lewis Mumford’s film The City 9 in the main pavilion and General Motor’s Futurama exhibit showing a future metropolis of high-rise office towers fed by wide expressways from residential suburbs. The dramatic transformation of Flushing Meadows’ waterfront ash heaps made the 1939 World’s Fair a high-profile demonstration project for the Modernist suburban planning it advocated and provided the infrastructure for auto-dependent post-war suburban development.
Schlichting drew four contributions to waterfront scholarship from these cases. First, she identifies a pattern of non-professional city builders and planning alongside the matrix of projects designed by urban planners. Second, she describes the power of property owners helped shape urban growth, especially in the absence of government plans. Third, she shows how local government was a battleground for often-conflicting state and federal policies, and finally that the natural environment played a critical role in shaping urban expansion along the shoreline. 10
Schlichting’s second and third themes are congruent with the core issues in Kearney & Merrill’s Lakefront. Both books are similarly critical of the role of rich capitalists abusing legal and governmental systems to thwart public access to the waterfront and cause pollution with untreated sewage and industrial effluents. New York Recentered goes further to be more explicitly critical of the damage caused by expressways, racist restrictions to waterfront access and ecological damage from coastal and marsh landfilling.
Lakefront and New York Recentered both have scholarly merit and deserve places in any university library system. The books are significant contributions to the extensive literature on the Parks Movement, 11 highlighting the great value that citizens place on access to waterfront open spaces. Frederick Law Olmsted, Burnham & Bennett and the early Robert Moses could combine immensely popular public parks with critical regional infrastructure in a manner that seems lost by contemporary civil engineers. 12 Schlichting admires Moses’ skill at implementing parks and parkway plans, but is critical of the social/economic and environmental impacts of the auto-dependent suburban landscapes that were enabled by these plans.
Both books will interest waterfront scholars, with fascinating historic images and good orientation maps drawn for each volume. Unfortunately, both books suffer from low-resolution printing of historic waterfront maps, which could not be interpreted even with a magnifying glass. A companion web site with high-resolution colour images of the large waterfront plans would be a welcome addition to each book, and provide an opportunity to add important missing plans, such as Burnham & Bennett’s Chicago waterfront or Olmsted and Groes’ original plans for the South Bronx. 13
Lakefront is a specialized work that will also be a useful addition to law libraries and should be consulted by stakeholders engaged in a waterfront public trust dispute. New York Recentered is urban history scholarship at the regional scale, which illuminates the development of the distant waterfront edges of a major metropolis. It re-centres the gaze of researchers away from the shiny, professionally-planned downtown waterfront projects. We can only hope that other scholars will follow its example in examining the regional waterfronts of other North American cities.