To-Morrow in America

TO-MORROW IN AMERICA: EBENEZER HOWARD’S IMPRESSION ON HOUSING AND LAND USE IN THE UNITED STATES Theo Mackey Pollack, Esq., M.C.R.P. The influence of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City accrued in a sprawling landscape that Sir Patrick concept on American housing patterns can be found Geddes named conurbations—clusters of crowded in commercial, cooperative, and government- tenements, freight yards, and factories, laced sponsored settings. In the 1920s, the Regional together by an apparently endless network of Planning Association of America, which embraced railroad tracks and telegraph lines.6 Beyond the Howard’s vision, collaborated with the City city limits, the dwindling small towns and fallow Housing Corporation to plan and construct two countryside stood as further testaments to the new communities in Greater New York. 1 These impact of industry on traditional living patterns.7 self-contained communities—Sunnyside Gardens Worse, this blighted landscape contained a world of and Radburn—represented methodical applications human lives, many of which shared its desolation of many of Howard’s principles, as described in his and turbulence. 1898 book, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real By the 1890s, the traditional social order Reform.2 Meanwhile, beginning at about the same that had once existed in Europe (and, to a lesser time and continuing through the 1970s, the union- extent, in North America) had crumbled. City sponsored cooperative housing movement in New dwellers were frequently more than two York City applied Howard’s ideas in its own ways.3 generations removed from pre-industrial society8, Often remaining truer than Clarence Stein and while those who started out in the countryside Henry Wright to the author’s financial proposals, were often displaced to strange, crowded cities in the coops built under the direction of Abraham search of employment. In what could be seen as Kazan diverged from the physical plans of Howard the ultimate irony of a time whose fortunes seemed by adopting designs that increasingly resembled hopelessly stacked against people of modest means, the imagery of Le Corbusier.4 Finally, the ill-fated those few who managed to remain on familiar land Greenbelt towns of the New Deal employed many were often perpetually isolated from the changes in of the basic principles that Howard advocated in culture and technology that were constantly his book, but they did so in the new context of redefining modern life. Apparently, while the significant government intervention.5 To examine newfound faith in science and markets led to the progress of Howard’s ideas in the United striking innovations, conveniences, and comforts, it States, and to assess their ongoing impact on lacked its own inherent devices for social cohesion. American housing patterns, it is important to It soon became clear that rational self-interest consider their application in each of these areas. could not fill the void of a lost society, nor could The Historical Context of To-morrow technical know-how overcome, on behalf of an individual, the great structural inequalities that To view the Garden City concept with a had emerged in the wake of industrial wealth. And degree of historical accuracy, it is necessary to as ordinary people were exposed, en masse, to the recall the urban economics to which Howard was chaotic, Darwinian survival game of laissez-faire responding. In the last years of the Victorian era, economics, the moral dissonance of the new order the major cities of Europe and America were struck an especially harsh note in a Western choking on the accumulated blight of more than culture that claimed to have its basis in Christian five decades of heavy industry. The excesses of ideals and Enlightenment optimism.9 mass production and classical economics had In response to the growing specter of rail system.13 Finally, the population of a single Victorian reality, people began to challenge the city would be limited to 30,000 people. Once this extremely individualistic, legally conservative capacity had been reached, a new city would be ideas that had dominated during this promising, started, at a sufficient distance to ensure that each terrifying time. While Marxism had been city maintained its distinct identity. Howard dominant on the left for a generation, a separate envisioned this process continuing until wide strand had also emerged (traceable, maybe, to the swaths of the depressed English countryside were English Chartist movement and the Rochdale redeveloped into an extensive network of Weavers’ cooperative) that sought to enact flourishing garden cities.14 He included a number practical reforms within the existing legal and of colorful, hand-drawn diagrams to illustrate the economic systems. 10 Toward the end of the 19th various land use principles.15 century, a handful of these voices were becoming Howard proposed that land be purchased by widely acknowledged. In 1888, Edward Bellamy a newly-established cooperative, which would published Looking Backward, which envisioned a finance the Garden City’s construction costs Victorian contemporary falling into a deep sleep through debt. Howard’s financial and legal and waking up in a future world. In the year 2000, language sometimes reflects the lexicon of another society had transcended the rabid selfishness of time, but in contemporary terms, his proposal was 1880s America to embrace the values of science, to raise the initial capital by selling four percent technology, and cooperation. 11 Similarly, the bonds to investors. In return for a safe financial leading Zionist author, Theodor Herzl, in his 1901 instrument, investors would accept the lower novel, Old New Land, sent his misanthropic payment potential of coupon bonds, and the protagonists to a desert island for a shorter term of cooperative would distribute any and all profits years. Upon their return to civilization in the back to its own general fund. As property values 1920s, they found that a modern, pluralistic, social rose, maintenance fees would be increased to sink democracy had sprung up in the desert of the the mortgage debt ahead of schedule. In relatively Middle East. 12 Howard’s 1898 To-morrow: A short order, then, the mortgage liens could be Peaceful Path to Real Reform did not employ the shaken off, and all maintenance receipts could be literary devices of Bellamy or Herzl, but in a way it dedicated to providing community services. In fits neatly with these two contemporary books: It theory, this arrangement would allow people with envisions a future world, freed from the shackles of modest incomes to leave behind the crowded, entrenched 19th century power politics, drawing on expensive slums of London, and transplant the tabula rasa of a new time and place, to themselves to the spacious, healthy, and affordable approach a sort of scientific social perfection. lifestyle of the Garden City. Employers would flock Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Solution to the development because its workers would be more productive, and their wages would be more Specifically, in To-morrow, Howard affordable, because they would not have to pay proposed the purchase of depressed, rural land to London’s high cost of living. As an additional house the overflow population of London. The land benefit, the cooperative structure of land use would would be developed according to a new, idealized create a new city of stakeholders, allowing plan. Housing, commercial, and industrial uses individuals to build equity in their homes, while would be arranged in a pattern that was both conferring both the financial and civic benefits of convenient and aesthetically pleasing. Nature and resident ownership on the community.16 open space would be thoroughly intertwined with human development. Agriculture, parkland, and The principles of To-morrow were first asylums would be scattered along the outskirts, applied in the planning and development of the and a modern railroad would encircle the entire English town of Letchworth, Hertfordshire, urban core, and connect to a broader, interurban beginning in 1904.17 Endorsement of the plan by a number of powerful British industrialists government. The principles that Howard had (including George Cadbury and William Lever, of outlined in his book would exert a powerful chocolate and soap fame, respectively) lifted both influence on the development patterns of the city’s Howard and his ideas from obscurity.18 Over the newly annexed neighborhoods. In New York, the course of a decade, Letchworth was successfully tabula rasa that Howard had sought as far from developed into a well-functioning new town. London as Hertfordshire seemed to exist in However, during development, its cooperative deceptive proximity to Manhattan. The East River suffered from an ongoing lack of capital had limited the urbanization of Brooklyn and investment. Furthermore—in what could be seen Queens until it was finally spanned by the as a harbinger of things to come—the project failed Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. In the first decade of the to deliver a housing stock that was affordable to twentieth century, large tracts of land in these much the region’s working class.19 boroughs remained undeveloped or sparsely developed, despite the intense conurbations that The impact of Howard’s ideas on housing existed along their respective waterfronts. 23 Not patterns in the United Kingdom would require surprisingly, at least three of the earliest American more than a brief summary to describe. For the developments to draw on Garden City principles purposes of this paper, it should suffice to say that were located in undeveloped parts of Queens. But Howard was personally involved with while land was still available, it was already administrating the development of Letchworth, expensive 24 —a factor that would limit its and that a second town nearer to London, named usefulness in providing both moderate-density and Welwyn, was begun in 1920 under Howard’s direct affordable housing.25 guidance.20 During the interim years, and in the generations since World War II, the Garden City The first project began in 1908 when concept played a prominent role in British town Edward MacDougal started to develop a 350-acre planning policies.

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