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Title Suburbs of Last Resort: Landscape, Life, and Ruin on the Edges of San Francisco Bay
Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c87q28k
Author Ekman, Peter
Publication Date 2016
Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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Suburbs of Last Resort: Landscape, Life, and Ruin on the Edges of San Francisco Bay
by
Peter Sheldon Read Ekman
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Geography
in the
Graduate Division
of the
University of California, Berkeley
Committee in charge:
Professor Emeritus Paul Groth, Chair Associate Professor Jake Kosek Professor Louise Mozingo
Fall 2016
Abstract
Suburbs of Last Resort: Landscape, Life, and Ruin on the Edges of San Francisco Bay
by
Peter Sheldon Read Ekman
Doctor of Philosophy in Geography
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Emeritus Paul Groth, Chair
This study surveys the historical geography of suburban landscapes built and abandoned over the course of the United States’ long twentieth century. Diverse thinkers and actors, it shows, have understood the edges of the American metropolis to be laboratories of a sort, experimental sites where the forms of a reordered city might be glimpsed in microcosm and put on display. Suburbs have also served as laboratories where questions of landscape’s animacy — not what landscape means, the focus of a generation of scholarship in cultural geography, but what landscape does — came vividly to the fore, provoking much debate and speculation. Drawing on archival sources, visual materials, maps, plans, and field study of the built environment, this work recasts debates that have long been central to cultural geography, geographic thought, urban and suburban studies, and the intellectual histories of planning and urbanism. It argues that both the modal techniques planners and builders came to prescribe for the post–World War II suburb and the most noticeable programs since predicated on redressing suburbia’s perceived failures can find their roots in prewar debates, ontological in character, on the “life” proper to landscape, indeed to matter itself. Both tendencies, the study argues furthermore, established the terms by which Americans since have considered the possibility of giving life form by way of its environment — and assessed the threats presented by built environments deemed formless.
This work makes its intervention in three stages. It first assembles a new intellectual history of American planning around questions of the suburbanization of industry and the decentralization of urban form. During the Progressive Era, planners, architects, industrialists, realtors, and a host of reformers held industrial suburbs, more than strictly residential ones, to be the key to remedying urban “congestion.” In ways that existing histories have not realized, these actors also articulated a distinctive ontology of suburban landscape as an animate participant in life and work. This was not an environmental determinism, as most geographers would have it, but rather a multiform theory of the milieu that was indebted to broader vitalist and materialist currents in social thought. Numerous social scientists, life scientists, and philosophers, too, contribute to this history. In juxtaposing their thought with that of the first generation of self-identified scientific planners, this study explores ongoing tensions between formalist and anti-formalist, rationalist and vitalist, organismic and non-organismic tendencies lending structure to how certain Americans have made sense of how landscape matters. Many maneuvers central to
1 contemporary “new” materialisms, “object-oriented” ontologies, and “non-representational” theories in geography and its neighboring disciplines are, in fact, quite old. To couple them with questions of landscape, one does well to revisit the decentralist debates taking place at the turn of the twentieth century.
The analysis then scales down empirically to the San Francisco Bay Region, where premiums on a decentralized metropolitan form, as well as notions of the environment’s “influence,” have particularly deep roots. It turns most especially to the Carquinez Strait, a peculiar, imperfectly visible vector of suburbanization east of the bay, to which industrial flight was early, intense, relatively coordinated, and financed remotely by capitalists in San Francisco and, to some extent, Oakland. From the late nineteenth century on, the Carquinez became a repository for only the most noxious functions expelled from denser urban centers, as well as a site of considerable experimentation in sorting, buffering, and enclosing the “whole” new towns employers composed adjacent to their workplaces between 1880 and 1930. In surprising, sometimes unsettling ways, planners and industrialists also theorized the affordances of ambient climate and unbuilt environment to industrial work. A prehistory of the post–World War II suburb must consider the portable models and morphologies worked out in these and other “suburbs of last resort.”
As the narrative moves into the postwar period, its conceptual focus pivots from questions of suburban order to suburban ruin. Since the 1970s, the Carquinez has been marked by landscapes of abandonment: decapitalized workplaces, decommissioned military installations, and, lately, overgrown pockets of the post-2008 residential foreclosure crisis. Suburbs and peripheries are increasingly the loci of American privation, but there is still a tendency among analysts to narrate urban “decline” in ways that privilege denser centers, deploying metaphors of the rotting core rather than the fraying edge, and granting visibility and salience to some landscapes of decay at the expense of others. “Suburbs of Last Resort” establishes a prehistory in this sense as well. It argues that concepts of inbuilt suburban “formlessness,” which intensified in Northern California in the 1950s and 1960s, have rendered working-class suburbs, even or especially in times of their abandonment, peculiarly invisible. Such notions, too, have roots in prewar debates. The study closes by tracing a countervailing intellectual history, complementary to the more affirmative account of prescriptions for suburban form, of attempts to ontologize — and to denigrate — newly built suburbs as their own species of “ruins.” It has been precisely when their form is ambiguous or abandoned that suburban landscapes have seemed most animate: “contagious” in their putative spread, productive of manifold anxieties, and provocative of new forms of reflection and action.
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For all and none
i
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments iii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Experiments on the Edge: Working Suburbs and the Method of a Scientific Planning 7
Chapter 2 Rethinking the Rational City: Urban Form and the Revolt against Formalism 23
Chapter 3 “Problems Peculiar to This Coast”: Vitalist Planning and Metropolitan Dispersal in the Bay Region 54
Chapter 4 “Terra Incognita, Although Close at Hand”: Capitalist Regionalism and the Specialization of the Carquinez Strait 78
Chapter 5 Enclosure and the “Idea of a Town”: Composing Suburban Units for Life and Work 93
Chapter 6 “The World’s Best Working Climate”: Nature, Race, and the Involuntary 116
Chapter 7 The Force of Example: Display and Demonstration on the Carquinez 142
Chapter 8 Sensing Suburban Ruin: Abandonment and the Afterlives of Form 174
Illustrations 219
Bibliography 341
ii
Acknowledgments
Paul Groth was the first one to call me a geographer — it had not occurred to me — and ever since he has been an estimable companion in sizing up the landscape. His mind and eye are singular things. Jake Kosek has stoked my élan vital for almost as long, a close reader unconstrained in his curiosity and unafraid to puncture convention as to what matters and doesn’t. Louise Mozingo’s readings and repartee have steadied the project, underwritten by a confidence that its assorted parts do, in fact, belong together. These three gave this work their formal backing, and their many forms of support leave the author indefinitely in their debt. “Some things can be done as well as others,” but significant portions of this research would have been impossible without the assistance of archivists at Berkeley’s superb Bancroft Library; its Environmental Design Archives; the Contra Costa County Historical Society in Martinez, California; the California Historical Society in San Francisco; the San Francisco and Oakland Public Libraries’ respective History Rooms; the Kislak Center for Special Collections at Penn; the Kroch Library at Cornell; the Loeb Library at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library; the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York; the Institute Archives and Special Collections at MIT; the very special collections at Monmouth University in New Jersey; and “Archives II” at College Park, Maryland. Good things came my way from audiences at the Savannah College of Art and Design; Valparaiso University; the Bancroft Library; Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society; the Urban History Association; the International Conference of Historical Geographers; and various iterations of the American Association of Geographers. The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, too, have been sites of some camaraderie. Courses and conversations with Teresa Caldeira, Nathan Sayre, Michael Johns, Dick Walker, Margaretta Lovell, Michael Dear, Marion Fourcade, and, perhaps crucially, John Lie gave point to some of these ideas, whether they know it or not. Among Berkeley geographers, I found intellectual kinship with John Elrick and Alexander Arroyo, most especially during the later stages of this project. Elrick supplied enlightenment in dark times. Arroyo set in motion new explorations and some indelible loaves of bread. Will Payne, Lance Owen, and Alex Werth, urbanists all, have been dependable partners. An exceptional group of sociologists, too, watched this project unfold at a slight remove. Significant debts are owed Rebecca Elliott, Ben Shestakofsky, Alex Roehrkasse, Sun Kim, Carlos Bustamante, Carter Koppelman, Beth Pearson, and Jonah Stuart Brundage. Katherine Mintie has added considerable thing-power to this whole undertaking. Elsewhere on the Berkeley campus, Elaine Brown Stiles, Sujin Eom, Mia Ritzenberg Crary, Stacy Farr, Shira Wilkof, Mukul Kumar, Kevin Block, Robert Parks, and Ghigo DiTommaso leavened things geographic with other sorts of insight. Eric Kaltman was a necessary writing companion during one harsh stage. Douglas Leong nourished the imagination in ways that elude capture by language. And then there is Andrew Duncan. Disce pati. Beyond California, Jonathan Liu, Gerard Leone, Paul Davis, Colin Hill, Julian Lynch, the brothers Casertano, Nathan Lynch, E. J. McLeavey-Fisher, Veronica Balta, Dave Hancock, Sasha Hammad, Tony Domestico, Shawn Liu, and Mickey Muldoon gave substance to the
iii project’s high-energy metaphysics. Walks with Alexandra Dauler, Kate McGuire, Laura Settlemyer, and John David Thearle helped one geographer learn to see other slices of the landscape. Garrett Dash Nelson has been, and will be, a singular collaborator. In countless ways, Philip Bartholomew Rocco has given form to life. A decisive march inland in June 2010 focused our attention, beyond repair, on the nomos of the Carquinez. We spent the better part of five years establishing a language to describe the American scene. Katherine Suzanne Wong, sine qua non.
iv
Introduction
This is a historical geography of ordinary suburbs and their undoing. Planners have long understood suburbs as laboratories, places to glimpse and give form to the future of urban life. Industrial and other non-elite suburbs, in particular, have figured as zones of reconciliation between city and country, templates for the measured dispersal of metropolitan regions, and portable object lessons in how denser urban centers might yet be remade. Over the course of the long twentieth century, though, these landscapes underwent a shift. In the Progressive Era, such unspectacular suburbs served as crucibles of replicable spatial order, securing urban futures against the specters of both “congestion” at the city’s center and “haphazard” growth on the edge. Since the Second World War, however, working suburbs have meant and mattered very differently. They have endured economic abandonment and privation, marked out diffuse geographies of social invisibility, and, in their putative disorder, focused new repertoires of denigration. The suburban edges of the metropolis also came to provoke elite anxieties. Once the epitome of legible form, these same landscapes came to project a threatening “formlessness” — and in the process durably recast the spatial indices of class, race, nativity, and other diacritics. Holding these legacies — order and ruin, form and formlessness — in perpetual tension, this study pursues a capacious cultural and intellectual history of interventions on the peripheries of our cities, first at the national scale and then through textured empirical study of one very particular sliver of Northern California. It reformulates basic questions about the dynamics and consequences of decentralization, and about the promise and precariousness of suburban life. “Suburbs of Last Resort” thinks the American city and its vulnerabilities from the outside in. The narrative advances in three stages. It first assembles an unfamiliar genealogy of American planning, its claims to scientific legitimacy, and the distinctive objects of that science. Industrial suburbs, it contends, afford a unique window onto how planners have gradually rendered technical a larger constellation of (mostly) middle-class prescriptions for the everyday spaces of working-class life. The edges of the metropolis have long been quite central sites for the consolidation of planning as a mode of expertise. The present analysis reconstructs robust, multiform Progressive Era debates over the conjoined decentralization of work and home to establish a complex, sometimes conflictual prehistory for the forms that have defined both the modal postwar residential suburb and, curiously, the most visible schemes lately premised on redressing suburbia’s failures, from interwar varieties of regional planning to the New Town impulse of the 1960s, and on to the New Urbanist toolkit normalized in recent years. In so reperiodizing, the narrative repositions the earliest generations of professionalized American planners within a wider ecology of thinkers — life scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals within and without the academy — vigorously engaged in rethinking questions of landscape ontology. From 1880 to 1940, planners and their peers together came to articulate a distinctive, darkly vitalist understanding of landscape’s animacy as participant in and guarantor of social order. Indeed, as the evidence demonstrates, the notional blank slate of suburbia was quite consistently a privileged site for planners and their peers to speculate on what built environments, inorganic but never quite inanimate, might materially be said to do — regenerating working bodies, setting limits on their discontent, enforcing separation among uses and users of land, imparting affective tone to the everyday, and, harnessed from afar, channeling ever more indirect modes of intervention on suburban life and work by way of their milieu. The “planning idea,” as these edgewise experiments testify, amounts at its origin to something far
1 more dynamic and equivocal than the disenchanted technics that so much critical historiography, in the name of the “rational city’s” eventual demystification, has presumed to obtain. The study then intercuts this wider-angle treatment of discipline and profession with an extended, morphologically rich history of one very particular vector of suburban development. It turns to the eastern extremes of the distended San Francisco Bay Region, where premiums on a decentralized metropolitan form have deep roots — and, not insignificantly, where notions of the unbuilt environment’s vital “forces” have long had semantic and political currency. The narrative moves gradually inland along the Carquinez Strait in Contra Costa County, an strategically auxiliary middle landscape to which industrial dispersal from the 1880s forward was intense, remotely financed, and to a great degree coordinated among regional-minded capitalists, almost all of them headquartered in San Francisco. On the Carquinez, employers, boosters, realtors, speculators, planners, and other shapers of suburban space composed a distinctive landscape of instant cities writ small, each a “model” town set in relative isolation, each legibly enclosed in its physical form. These suburbs of last resort, repositories for only the most noxious functions expelled from the city, can disclose a great deal about the formal techniques, lay ontologies, and founding fractures of the urbanism that would remake the American landscape on another scale entirely in the postwar era. Yet this all constitutes a prehistory in a second sense as well: it is a genealogy of suburban abandonment. In the twenty-first century, the forsaken edges of the Carquinez present a conspicuously desperate landscape of ruination: decapitalized industrial brownfields vacant since the 1970s and 1980s, decommissioned military installations in varying states of reuse, and, differently marginal, vast deposits of the late-2000s foreclosure crisis. Suburbs and peripheries are increasingly the loci of American privation, but we have tended to narrate “decline” in ways that privilege denser centers, metaphorizing rotting cores rather than fraying edges, and granting visibility and political salience to some landscapes of decay — and only certain suburbs — at the expense of others. This selective invisibility has a history. So do inherited notions of inbuilt suburban formlessness and its contagion, prewar ideas which intensified in California during the 1950s and 1960s, and which have occluded serious scrutiny of such spaces ever since — even or especially in times of their distress. Amid “revitalized” cities and reconcentrated urban fortunes, “Suburbs of Last Resort” tells a variegated story of the sources and the afterlives of specifically suburban ruin.
The first three chapters elaborate a new intellectual history of American planning, attending closely to decentralist schemes for industry. Chapter 1 clarifies the privileged place leading planners and reformers accorded to working suburbs as places to display the new forms and techniques professionals were developing from 1880 to 1940. This first chapter complicates the oft-noted transition, common to much planning historiography and dated to 1910, from “City Beautiful” to “City Scientific” modes of thought. It also begins to probe the limits of such rationalization narratives for making sense of planning’s rise (and of Progressivism more broadly), proposing that the new self-appointed science of suburban space, precisely in its attempts to harness the animate propensities of the built environment and so give form to workers and their work, was a peculiar sort of life science that had more in common with the broader “revolt against formalism” in trans-Atlantic social thought than has generally been understood. Chapter 2 places the planning profession in a new, interdisciplinary intellectual context, holding its sometime organicism in tension with a less settled, broadly vitalistic understanding of
2 landscape articulated by social scientists (chiefly geographers, sociologists, and historians), heterodox biologists broaching questions of social theory, and, to a lesser extent, writers of urban fiction. It also shows how planners translated spatial concepts made available by certain explicitly anti-rationalist philosophers, among them Henri Bergson and William James, who both enjoyed remarkable American celebrity just as professionals outwardly declared its disciplined control of the city and sought to perform it, in microcosm, in suburbs. By a surprising consensus, this chapter argues, all figured the materiality of landscape as a suasive milieu (after Lamarck) of vital forces and fluxes governed by something quite unlike the brittle, call-and-response “determinism” that most contemporary geographers and planning historians see as definitive of Progressive Era environmental thought. Neither mechanism, the usual charge, nor organicism, its usual antithesis — two versions of the same urge to posit total, structured systems — quite captures how planners, mainline or dissenting, were formulating the eventful ontology of suburban landscape. Chapter 3 sustains this argument on planning’s vitalist inheritance but shifts the conversation empirically to Northern California, where the professionalization crusade set in a few years later than among the mostly Northeastern and Midwestern circles whose productions occupy the first chapters. The chapter works through a set of high–Progressive Era city plans in some depth: by Charles Mulford Robinson and John Nolen, non-Californians whose work in Northern California is not particularly well known, for Oakland, San Jose, and Sacramento; and by the German visitor Werner Hegemann. Hegemann’s 1915 plan for the East Bay, in particular, shows how visions of the rational regionwide dispersal of suburban industrial districts merged with longstanding, racialized theses on the regenerative “energies” inhering in California’s natural landscape. Chapter 3 animates this latter, naturalistic intellectual history as well, showing that a range of mobile intellectuals gazing out on California — among them George Santayana, the novelist Frank Norris, and selected natural scientists — held these life forces to intensify in precisely that middle landscape between city and country. The next four chapters deepen this prehistory of the postwar order, scaling down to a series of coterminous experiments in industrial town planning carried out on the eastern edges of the San Francisco Bay Region. By the 1910s, and unignorably by the 1920s, most space- extensive industrial concerns with interests in the region were locating along the Carquinez Strait from Richmond to Antioch — not in San Francisco, on the peninsula to its south, or around greater Oakland — and the suburban towns they built reward morphological scrutiny. Chapter 4 narrates the story of industrial capital’s concerted dispersal to the corners of the bay, 1880 to 1940, and its stepwise flight from fractious urban labor. The chapter magnifies the case of the Carquinez, showing how this imperfectly visible vector of suburbanization, on a thin strip of land located just outside the bounds of most area planners’ “comprehensive” schemes, was progressively marked off for experimentation and exploitation. Chapters 5 and 6 attend with an even finer grain to specific workplaces and subdivisions along the Carquinez, pointing up two competing ontologies governing how industrialists, builders, and other well-capitalized actors sought to intervene on suburban subjects by way of their environment. (Not all of the prime movers in these chapters are themselves professional planners or self-styled experts. In vernacular ways, they channel and redirect the intellectual history traced in the opening chapters.) Chapter 5, which delves into visual culture with a new insistence, explores the more absolutist face of these attempts, a disciplinary program in which the clarification of physical edges, boundaries, and buffers was the organizing principle. Under this first mode, techniques of spatial enclosure, especially, were crucial in capturing workers,
3 fixing them in place, inclining them to work, sorting a diverse workforce hierarchically by race and ethnicity, and binding the whole complex into some notionally complete unit. This chapter first works through case material that predates the professionalization of soi-disant planning, focusing on a cluster of company towns and industrial suburbs platted from 1880 on: chiefly, Hercules, operated for years by a pre-antitrust DuPont, and a set of even smaller settlements adjoining explosives manufactories; Selby and Tormey, which housed workers at the region’s major lead smelter; and Crockett and Port Costa, whose residents worked at a major grain port, foundry, and then sugar refinery. The chapter’s scope then expands to a second set of towns, which industrialized between the early 1900s and the 1920s: Richmond, the county’s only bona fide multi-industry satellite, where national actors such as Pullman and Standard Oil led development; Martinez, where space-extensive oil refineries took root; and, a full forty miles east of San Francisco, Pittsburg (formerly “New York of the Pacific,” in line with an earlier booster’s ambitions, until its renaming by U.S. Steel). In Chapter 6, the argument thinks past the enclosure form, tracing how planners and their accomplices worked out a more fluid, atmospheric ontology of suburban landscape — clearly in eclipse of organic holism — in which edges are inexact, bodies are permeable, and the affordances of their surrounds can be only provisionally tilted and optimized, not guaranteed from the top down by clear buffers and bounds. The chapter delves into how planners and boosters — sometimes borrowing directly from academic human geographers — circulated ur- Californian ideas about how to calculate, capitalize, and instrumentalize the “best working climate” for manufactures. It also shows how these actors capitalized Bay-specific distinctions of subregion and microclimate as found accomplices in the making of quiescent suburban workers. It closes by considering how these strategies redefined concepts of racial “natures” in terms of differential dependence on and susceptibility to the physical environment. Throughout this history, the stewards of the Carquinez conceptualized their experiments as yielding spatial “models,” portable and imitable forms that might be applied farther afield, whether to reconstruct San Francisco, to reshape tonier residential suburbs for other classes, or to inform projects in colonial or developmentalist urbanism overseas. Chapter 7 reflects on the extent to which these pre- and interwar projects (and others like them) came to furnish abstractable templates for the post–World War II buildout, largely decoupled from industrial workplaces, that has tended to dominate the historiography on American suburbs. To do so, the chapter meditates on the intellectual history of the model town, a persistent motif in suburban imaginaries since at least the nineteenth century. It suggests that presumptions about the involuntary contagion of such models — or “object lessons,” in the telling period locution — derived from many of the same hunches about the suggestive materiality of landscape worked out in prior generations, as well as from a broader, mostly forgotten social science exalting imitation as the basis of social order. It treats of two such towns, at Mare Island and at Clyde, composed along the Carquinez to house shipbuilders during the First World War. This experiment in town planning, whose historiography does not usually include California, marks a crucial episode in the federal government’s codification of the forms and ontologies articulated by that first, polymorphous generation of scientistic planners and detailed in previous chapters. That codification project would continue through the 1930s, spurred, inter alia, by Hoover’s 1932 Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, more famously by the FHA’s early technical literature, and by the object lessons deposited by the new-town programs of the New Deal.
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Chapter 8 pivots in earnest to the years following the Second World War. This last, long chapter first considers where these models traveled — and, thus, what kind of prehistory the foregoing chapters can supply. It considers how they informed the continued postwar suburbanization of industry around the nine-county region; patterned ever more enclosed residential environments inhabited by the middle classes; and, curiously, offered resources for some of the most influential critiques of these “mass” suburban trends, many of them mounted from a normatively regionalist perspective, hatched elsewhere in the country, that took distinctive forms in California. The chapter then considers how such models have fared amid widespread suburban ruin. It then meditates on the landscapes of deindustrialization that have marked the Carquinez from the 1970s forward, tracing a kind of abandonment from the outside in. The dispersal of industry, the chapter argues, across this arguably centerless urban region, patterned a profoundly dispersed landscape of ruination — and palpably, punishingly so along the Carquinez. That landscape is difficult to cognize, or even to see, if we hew to an image of abandonment in which suburban flight produces “decline” but locates it only and securely back in the center city. The last chapter then thinks differently about suburban ruin and its conditions of visibility, prefacing another round of abandonment, its signatures in the unromantic “new ruins” of the post-2008 foreclosure crisis. Subdivisions suspended in various states of incompletion, grown over, or else depopulated by the newly insolvent: the Carquinez, more than the region’s other suburbias, has borne vivid witness to these scenes. To contextualize these ruins, and to complicate the stereotyped rise-and-fall emplotments that so often attend discussions so voiced, the final chapter documents a longer intellectual history of elite-led criticism of intact, inhabited, newly built suburbs — residential environments for the working or lower middle classes — as already some species of “ruins in reverse”: “formless” or “edgeless” at the moment of their inception, unfinishable, and in that way difficult for their many detractors to see, grasp, get close to, or, often, care much about. “Ruin” talk and “sprawl” talk have a more complex affinity than we have realized. This final chapter argues, moreover, that the suburbs ringing San Francisco Bay, perhaps even more so than sprawl’s usual touchstone in the southern part of the state, have been crucial referents in founding this long-lived repertoire of denigration. Intimations of originary suburban ruin, moreover, took hold well before the aggrieved jeremiads of the late 1950s and early 1960s (by Peter Blake, William H. Whyte, the satirical novelist John Keats, Ada Louise Huxtable, Catherine Bauer Wurster, and others). This ruin talk, too, has roots in prewar suburbia — and at least partially has depended on models worked out pre-1940 for formal criteria against which to pronounce on all things “formless.” The chapter follows one diagnostic figure, the critical polymath Lewis Mumford, in his travels to and from Northern California between 1938 and 1962. Mumford’s thought — as planner, as theorist, as geographer by acclamation — haunts the intellectual histories that consume the first seven chapters. He had developed his critique of formless growth while walking the suburbanizing edges of greater New York in the 1910s and 1920s — and offered dissenting alternatives, with and without his colleagues in the Regional Planning Association of America, to the suburban solutions that occupy earlier chapters — but his thought shifted in kind as he confronted the ostensible ruins ringing San Francisco Bay. Acutely with Mumford, and diffusely in this larger intellectual history of denigration, these anxieties have been shot through with a biologized, differently vitalist understanding of what landscape does, even or especially when in ruins: viz., “inorganic” environments matter insofar as they actively spread, encroach, proliferate, are contagious, are
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“wild,” decompose social life, and so on. It was in and within view of California that these mobile ideas settled into a kind of common sense. Abstractly, this study suggests, to think about what suburban landscape materially does in the first place, we do well to pose the question — as so many, it turns out, have — of what ruins do. We live amid ruins and potential ruins, the “monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.”1 We need intellectual resources to make sense of them, and we need to write their histories, which still constrain how Americans imagine some of their most ordinary landscapes.
1 Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” [1967], in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 72.
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Chapter 1
Experiments on the Edge: Working Suburbs and the Method of a Scientific Planning
“Meanwhile, throughout Western Civilization, architecture during the first two decades of the twentieth century stirred on the verge of a great change. The monumental building, the individual structure, ceased to set the problem of the architect…. [A] new orientation came: the rehabilitation of city and countryside and the development of new communities as integrated wholes…. [W]herever the social and economic condition of modern society was faced realistically, the major problem became that of integrating a modern community, treating the individual building as a mere unit in the larger design.” —Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades, 19311
“A mended article,” wrote Charles Mulford Robinson in his influential The Improvement of Towns and Cities (1901), “is never as good as one well made at first.” The shapers of cities, he counseled, ought to “attain to underlying principles,” questing asymptotically toward the one discernible “ideal for all urban conditions.” Planners planned best when they planned from scratch. “Modern civic art” was an art of self-sufficient wholes.2 “Improvement” was an aesthetic and moral category before it was a technical one. “Comprehensive” planning, at whatever appointed scale, was the only legitimate planning. Around 1909 the tone changed. That December, the First National Conference on City Planning convened in Boston, bringing architects, landscape designers, engineers, and a range of municipal Progressives into a new kind of conversation and laying the groundwork for a new profession with its own rationalities, competencies, and canons of evidence. Daniel Burnham’s reimagining of Chicago saw publication that year, a transitional document between the high- minded “City Beautiful” aesthetic, of which Robinson was the popular figurehead, and an outwardly more technical, workaday kind of urban engineering. Some spoke of the dawn of a “City Scientific.” The Pittsburgh Survey, initiated by the sociologically minded Russell Sage Foundation, had two years earlier demonstrated a new commitment to empirical research concerning the bearers and byproducts of urban-industrial capitalism. As George B. Ford, the New York–based planner, could announce by 1913, “[T]he whole city is our laboratory. All its facts and symptoms are more or less under observation…. The same scientific investigation, analysis and deduction and the same definiteness in determining the best solution of the problems are now possible and feasible.”3 What had begun as an inspired art, it seemed, had come out a rationalized science. Planning as a law-fixing endeavor reducible to regularities and variables, planners as disciplined observers more than inspired seers: such were the precepts of this new, retouched urban reason that was in dominance in the profession’s mainstream for at
1 Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 79–80. 2 Charles Mulford Robinson, The Improvement of Towns and Cities (New York: Knickerbocker, 1901), 18, 19; Charles Mulford Robinson, Modern Civic Art (New York: Knickerbocker, 1903), was the longer, repetitive follow- up work. 3 George B. Ford, “The City Scientific,” Engineering Record 67 (17 May 1913): 551, 552. Oddly, Joseph Heathcott appropriates Ford’s words to title his fine article on another early-twentieth-century planner entirely, “‘The Whole City Is Our Laboratory’: Harland Bartholomew and the Production of Urban Knowledge,” Journal of Planning History 4 (2005): 322–355, which explores similar themes in the disciplining of space.
7 least two decades. But alongside this inductive, piecemeal process of fact collection and falsification, the urge to comprehensiveness — expertly to comprehend the city in full — was as strong as ever.4 “City planning treats the city as a unit,” wrote the Cleveland reformer Frederic C. Howe. “It lays out the land on which a city is built as an individual plans a private estate. It…anticipates the future with the farsightedness of an army commander, so as to secure the orderly, harmonious, and symmetrical development of the community.”5 The professionalization of planning seemed to install an anxiously, self-consciously new way of knowing, sensing, talking about, parceling out, and then intervening upon built space.
What follows in this chapter and the next is an episodic history of ideas about, or in any case consequential for, the suburban edges of the American city. In this history, constellated around the question of the industrial suburb in particular, between 1880 and 1930 we can diagnose resonances — some of them untoward — among thinkers inhabiting discursive and professional spheres that may seem distant and discrete. This task requires a method that stresses the unthought compatibilities, not the essential fractures, between systems of thought, and that makes unapologetic recourse to what Peter Burke has called the “strategy of the surprising juxtaposition.”6 But compatibility should not be mistaken for epistemic uniformity: this account must not be read as the history of one shared vocabulary, technical repertoire, or ontology of the (sub)urban. Nor should this underdetermined language of resonances suggest only metaphoric attachments yoking these various intellectual projects. For, at root, this chapter will suggest that urban spaces, their suburban borderlands, and industrial suburbs most especially were key sites in and around which a distinctive American ontology of landscape, at once vitalist and peculiarly materialist, took shape and was rendered technical. These eventful urban edges, idealized, wondered at, and struggled with, figured quite literally as productive laboratories where the animacy of ordinary built environments — of inorganic things — and their capacity to give form to unruly life and work might be established, felt, gauged, instrumentalized, harnessed, displayed, communicated, and configured anew. The chapter interlaces developments in three broad provinces of thought. The first is that congeries of city planners, transcontinental and episodically trans-Atlantic, who by 1909 had self-consciously begun to render their work technical, a methodical “science” of inhabited space. “Planners” must at this time be understood capaciously enough so as to include architects, landscape architects, social scientists, proactive realtors, and other disciplinarily more nebulous sorts of Progressive reformers. All interacted at conferences, cooperated on projects, and contributed to a robust, if sometimes mundane, little republic of letters in the pages of
4 The generally reliable planning historian Jon A. Peterson has noted as much, stressing the pronounced continuities between City Beautiful and City Practical glosses on the “comprehensive.” See The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Etymology is never a substitute for argument, but it is worth noting that com-prehension implies not only a distanced knowing but a seizing of one’s object of interest. Comprehensive planning was already practical, already mingling subject and object, and thus ontologically never “idealist” (146, 149) in quite the way Peterson himself suggests, citing the 1902 McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C. The shift was one of emphasis, effected in degrees, and never explicable as one of Gaston Bachelard’s “epistemological breaks” — but do see his The Philosophy of No: A New Philosophy of the Scientific Mind [1940], trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion, 1968), for the many and evident attractions of that framing. 5 Frederic C. Howe, “The Remaking of the American City,” Harper’s Monthly 127 (July 1913): 186. 6 Peter Burke, quoted in Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), ix. Posnock claims this methodology for the New Historicism, but it travels farther, disloyal to discipline or school.
8 professional and popular journals. All collaboratively worked over a set of (mostly) middle-class ideas and anxieties about (especially) working-class space. The second intellectual province, which commands Chapter 2, scopes over a broader philosophical, literary, and cultural-critical community, again necessarily trans-Atlantic, rethinking the categories of matter, life, subjectivity, and space in a markedly vitalist key — very much in the (again middle-class) public eye. The third culls from the freshly and incompletely disciplined social sciences, especially human geography, versions of whose controverted theories of environmental “influence” then become particularly germane as the place-based empirics shift in Chapter 3 to the ragged edges of Northern California. For these utterances and experiments all to resonate, for them all to address some multiform but communicable ontology of the urban edge, we must be prepared to read city and regional plans as deposits of natural philosophy, literature as stylized human geography, realty treatises as lay sociology, and so on. Not as if, but as. This is on one level a history of “what people thought they were doing.”7 But we must be willing to move from a reliance on explicit propositions — issuing from always-intentional subjects — to the equally real register of presuppositions, tacit inventories of what the cultural landscape materially consists of, how it works, how it (inter)acts, and what kinds of human subjects it commissions. What there is in the world, and what it does: such are the basic ingredients of a historical ontology.8 Diagnosing the germs of a given thinker’s baseline claims on materiality, for instance, we can then induce, in sequence, a fuller theory of spatiality, of landscape, of urban and then specifically suburban built environments. The present chapter bridges the conventional territories of “intellectual” and “cultural” history, yoking formally delineated systems of ideas with more diffuse assemblages of meanings and practices. Throughout, this is a history that mingles public and private interests, “established” and “critical” voices, victorious ideas and forgotten ones.9 The commonalities, usually unstated, at the level of materiality and vitality, landscape and life, energetically seep through the walls of these post hoc historiographic enclosures.
Industrial Suburbs and the New Planning Rationality What kind of science, if it was a science, was this new complex called city planning? How did the suburban edges of American cities, in ways unlike their centers, help crystallize its methods? For that matter, what changed in 1909? These questions will occupy us here. The early Progressive planning literature sheds a certain kind of light. Here grandiose, here truly plodding, it fills out a peculiar genre between manifesto and user’s manual. But certain tropes stand out immediately in these texts, begging a measure of defamiliarization as we consider what kind of spatial science these professional urbanists thought they were
7 The quotation comes from Thomas Metcalf’s study of Indian urbanism and the British colonial absurd, An Imperial Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), xii. But the ethos can be seen to permeate most histories of science, since the Edinburgh School’s so-called Strong Programme at least, “symmetrically” committed to taking seriously the productivity of error, of ideas later discredited but historically consequential all the same. 8 The term is Michel Foucault’s, but its wider dissemination owes to Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 9 In particular, on the practical slipperiness between “planning” and “real estate” — on realtors as planners — see Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth-Century American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Marc Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). On intellectual versus cultural history, the comically dense graph constructed in Laurence Veysey, “Intellectual History and the New Social History,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, eds. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 11, remains very useful in sorting out, and then troubling, these parish boundaries.
9 inaugurating. “Order,” “system,” the moralized argot of “improvement” or “uplift”: these watchwords, while demonstrably present post-1909, had already enjoyed a long career, adorning programmatic nineteenth-century tracts typical of the campaigns that conditioned and fed into “planning” so called: among them early sanitary reform, citizen-led “village improvement” schemes, and park and parkway design in the mold of the first Olmsted. This confident, crusading language was entirely compatible with the high City Beautiful aesthetic — conspicuous at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Washington, circa the McMillan Plan of 1902, and a host of piecemeal implementations from coast to coast — that the Class of 1909 “practical” planners, for whom “real city planning” work “will not be done in the limelight,” ostensibly wished to outmode.10 Claims to the essential “rationality” of the enterprise, more often than not defined by its opposite, abound. For B. Antrim Haldeman, a Philadelphia surveyor and engineer, best practices could be conveniently set tout court against the existing “record of thoughtless, inconsistent, and unreasoning acts.”11 J. C. Nichols, the Kansas City community builder and sometime president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, flippantly defined city planning as “not the adornment or the foolish embellishment or the fixing up of buildings in a city,” but “simply the insistent demand of business and human instinct for the use of reason and fairness and foresight.”12 One way to read the new landscapes deposited with the benediction of the City Scientific — smartly “communicating,” infrastructurally sound, testimony to proportion and foresight — is as transcripts of an imposed spatial rationality. Yet, to the most ardent practicalizers, “rationality” could still smack of the philosophical and the pre-scientific. No term was as freighted or as diagnostic of the new programmatic, self- censoring planning sensibility as “method.” The prevalence of method talk is striking, almost awesome, in its bluff redundancy. Redescribing planning as a scientific discipline, its evangels shifted their emphasis to setting down a “systematized, standardized” procedure that could be replicated anywhere. Breaking cities down into isolable “parts,” “phases,” and “facts,” one author wrote of a 1913 comprehensive plan for Newark, New Jersey, “this particular method of work was the only way of getting at it scientifically.”13 Whatever “planning” really was may have been a matter of dispute: even Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., then chairman of the National Conference, admitted “the vagueness, multiplicity and divergence of the ideas for which it stands”; “there are no limits of space or time or subject matter.”14 But those variegated ideas and
10 Nelson P. Lewis, “The Engineer in His Relations to the City Plan,” Proceedings of the Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia 29 (July 1912): 208, 209. On the range of City Beautiful dreams and realities, see William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). On nineteenth-century village improvement, see the reviews in Mary Caroline Robbins, “Village Improvement Societies,” Atlantic Monthly 79 (February 1897): 212–222; and Warren H. Manning, “The History of Village Improvement in the United States,” The Craftsman 5 (February 1904): 423–432. 11 B. Antrim Haldeman, “The Street Layout,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 184. 12 J. C. Nichols, “Real City Planning Results and What They Mean to Property Owners,” California Conference on City Planning Bulletin 3 (November 1918): 3. See also Benjamin Marsh, “City Planning in Justice to the Working Population,” Charities and the Commons 19 (February 1, 1908): 1514–1518, for another foundational statement in which foresight is the core property of the normative planner–subject (citing no less than J. S. Mill for support). 13 “Efficiency in City Planning,” The American City 8 (February 1913): 139–143. The anonymous piece describes George B. Ford and E. P. Goodrich’s experience in Newark and Jersey City, and is quite likely the work of one of them. 14 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., How to Organize a City Planning Campaign (New York: The Civic Press, 1913): 2, 5.
10 ends were underpinned, indeed justified, by an interest in content-independent method as such. A method only: planning would be in this sense a science, purified and molded onto the autonomized “how,” not the changeable “who” or “what,” of transformations in the landscape.15
Although the new breed of planners mounted arguments for the administrative and organizational centralization of their work, their physical program, quite unlike that prescribed under the City Beautiful, hinged signally on landscapes sited far from the conspicuous set pieces overlaid on the traditional downtown. Built into their pronouncements on the hard methods of a comprehensive planning was an operative concept of the city’s outer edge, more or less firm, that would bracket things urban off from things rural and tractably bound “the” city as one integral object of analysis and intervention. Wholes presuppose their outer limits — and just might stoke interest in the possibilities of what lies beyond. Indeed, foraging around the edges of the early planning literature, it becomes clear that its prime movers viewed the suburb, not the central city conventionally defined, as the privileged object and theater of their science, the key laboratory space where new principles of spatial configuration could be expressed, experimented with, and, crucially, exhibited with especial clarity.16 Out in the suburban “open,” they sensed, new templates and procedures of urban (re)form could be ordered, packaged, and made portable to sites farther afield. Distribution, not centralization, was the basic spatial impulse. Quietly, seldom stated outright, Progressive city planning post-1909 was suburban planning.17
15 “Bureaucratic thought,” in Robert Wiebe’s words, “made ‘science’ practically synonymous with ‘scientific method.’ Science had become a procedure, or an orientation, rather than a body of results.” And “the word ‘plan,’ which had once referred to a complete and fixed program, came to mean an hypothesis and an approach.” See The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 147, 149. 16 Earlier generations of urbanists — well before a professionalized “planning” held sway — had come to a similar understanding. For a convincing case that New York City’s antebellum governors and anglers staged a reconstructive “urbanism of the periphery” in uptown Manhattan, suburban in an expanded sense, see the David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 217–267. That reperiodization is harder to abide in the context of California’s late-developing cities, to which the present study turns in coming chapters. For this reason, and for reasons related to the different premia turn-of-the-century planners placed on “scientific” technique and the abstractability of their suburban “laboratory” sites, we should be content to note this important revision without extending a uniformly thorough intellectual history back to, say, 1850. 17 For many years the historiographic default was to narrate suburbanization with reference to composed residential enclaves of the middle class; industrial and other land uses on the urban edge were seen, when they were seen at all, as exceptional. See Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), for two classic examples. Aesthetically and ideationally more complex, but similarly constrained in its causal upshot, is John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) — although as a companion piece see John Stilgoe, “Moulding the Industrial Zone Aesthetic: 1880–1929,” Journal of American Studies 16 (1982): 5–24. See also Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), which ties middle-class escape to developments in transportation technology, and John Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), in which orthogonally Lockean philosophies of individualism are seen as manifest in suburban architectures of enclosed privacy. By and large, these works assume suburbanization to follow from an ingrained ambivalence about urban life, as first detailed in Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962). In the process they ratify a spatial and ontological discontinuity between city and suburb, imposing an orderliness on the development process that may never have existed, and hampering a more distributed, metropolitan-regional angle on the problem. See Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, “Constructing a Fault(y) Zone: Misrepresentations of American Cities and Suburbs, 1900–1950,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (December 1998): 622–639, on the piecemeal construction of the city–suburb divide from the
11
For some this suburban focus was an embarrassing liability. Of the nascent profession, the Scottish geographer Patrick Geddes noted in 1915 that “people think it merely or mainly suburban, and architectural at best” — relegated from the center and thus unable substantially to remake its forms of life.18 “Quite naturally,” one participant in the 1923 Town Planning Congress of Strasbourg coughed, “the first efforts were directed to the least difficult problem — that of the suburb.”19 For others, though, removal from denser cores was precisely the point, the very condition of possibility for an autonomous, maximally technical planning practice. “The Utopian city of yesterday can be realized in the growing suburbs of our own times,” wagered Carol Aronovici of Philadelphia, directing attention to those open green fields where the incremental, tenement-reforming “New Yorkism” of earlier housers and proto-planners would be moot, and where the grand-manner radials and plazas of the City Beautiful would be unthinkable.20 If up-to-date methods were complex, advanced, forbidding to all but “experts,” “an absolutely unoccupied stretch of country,” said Burnham’s assistant Edward H. Bennett, could make the job “a matter of comparative physical ease.”21 Suburbs were different, wrote the sociologist Harlan Douglass, and simpler: “all told,” they “contain only part of the elements found in the city.”22 The putative tractability of suburbs — or of the “empty” environs, at or just beyond the edge of the city, where they might be sited — was clearly one part of the appeal. The opportunity to plan from scratch, immune from competing interests and regulations, and to plan a notionally complete new town was, enduringly, another selling point. Charles Mulford Robinson himself, not usually read for his pronouncements on the edge of town, had broadly concurred as early as 1901, writing appreciatively that “[n]ew suburban areas are constantly laid out, and receive constantly more serious thought for their treatment as a harmonious whole.”23 Such sentiments intensified under the sign of the City Scientific. Time and again, leading planners post-1909 identified industrial suburbs, working-class suburbs of production rather than the composed
Chicago School onward; Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), especially 1–13, for an alternative view, channeled here, of “suburbanization as urbanization”; and James L. Wunsch, “The Suburban Cliché,” Journal of Social History 28 (Spring 1995): 643– 658, for a peppery sendup of much of the literature litanized above. 18 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution [1915] (New York: Harper, 1968), 260; emphasis added. Geddes’s evidentiary base is distinctly weighted toward Great Britain, but he does engage examples from the United States as well. 19 Author unknown; cited, of all places, in Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning [1929] (New York: Dover, 1987), 98. 20 Carol Aronovici, “Suburban Development,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 234; Carol Aronovici, “Housing and the Housing Problem,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 1. On the exceptional qualities of the tenement experience in New York, and on the prevalence of open-lot houses in most parts of most American cities, see John G. Barrows, “Beyond the Tenement: Patterns of American Urban Housing, 1870–1930,” Journal of Urban History 9 (August 1983): 395–420. 21 Edward H. Bennett, “Planning for Distribution of Industries,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 216. 22 Harlan Paul Douglass, The Suburban Trend (New York: Century, 1925), 35. Douglass came at suburbanization from the outside in: his earlier work was on the Missouri “little town” as a mode of social organization, and on the rural church. 23 Robinson, The Improvement of Towns and Cities, 29. We could surely go back centuries tracing a genealogy of this urge — aesthetic, political, economic, perhaps initially religious — to configure environments that encompass, or constitute, in microcosm all thinkable rounds of life. The twentieth century brought sustained reflection on the nature of comprehensiveness, and zealously rendered technical the promise of total spatial control, but versions of this motivation go back to the “ideal cities” of the Renaissance, if not before.
12 middle-class residential resorts that still dominate cultural iconography, as the key domain for technical experiment.24 Here, appealingly in the name of “comprehensive” control, realms of work and home, linked but distinct, could be collocated and formally specialized by use. Aronovici excitedly presented the twinned decentralization of industry and residence as “a golden opportunity…a new lease on life and industry.” In the great “industrial exodus
24 Historical and geographic literature detailing industrial suburbs built prior to World War II has proliferated of late. Site-specific empirical treatments, by turns economic and cultural, include the essays in Robert Lewis, ed., Manufacturing Suburbs: Building Work and Home on the Metropolitan Fringe (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004); Robert Lewis, Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Fred W. Viehe, “Black Gold Suburbs: The Influence of the Extractive Industry on the Suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1890–1930,” Journal of Urban History 8 (November 1981): 3–26; Richard Harris, “Industry and Residence: The Decentralization of New York City, 1900– 1940,” Journal of Historical Geography 19 (1993): 169–190; Robert Phelps, “The Search for a Modern Industrial City: Urban Planning, the Open Shop, and the Founding of Torrance, California,” Pacific Historical Review 64 (1995): 503–535; Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); on Philadelphia, Anne E. Krulikowski, “A Workingman’s Paradise: The Evolution of an Unplanned Suburban Landscape,” Winterthur Portfolio 42 (Winter 2008): 243–285; on Knoxville, Kevin David Kane and Thomas L. Bell, “Suburbs for a Labor Elite,” Geographical Review 75 (1985): 319–334; and what Lewis et al. claim as their antecedent, Edward K. Muller and Paul A. Groves, “The Emergence of Industrial Districts in Mid–Nineteenth Century Baltimore,” Geographical Review 69 (April 1979): 159–178. For Canadian examples, see Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Robert Lewis, Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Paul-André Linteau, The Promoters’ City: Building the Industrial Town of Maisonneuve, 1883–1918, trans. Robert Chodos (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1985). For a related study of another major suburban land use, see Louise Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011). For a theoretical overview, see Richard Walker and Robert Lewis, “Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier: Industry and the Spread of North American Cities, 1850–1950,” in Manufacturing Suburbs, ed. Robert Lewis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 16–31; for more quantitative detail, see Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, “The Geography of North American Cities and Suburbs, 1900–1950: A New Synthesis,” Journal of Urban History 27 (March 2001): 262–292. For a review of this first wave of revisionist suburban history, see Mary Corbin Sies, “North American Suburbs, 1880– 1950: Cultural and Social Reconsiderations,” Journal of Urban History 27 (March 2001): 313–346; the rejoinders in Andrew Wiese, “Stubborn Diversity: A Commentary on Middle-Class Influence in Working-Class Suburbs, 1900– 1940,” Journal of Urban History 27 (March 2001): 347–354; and Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, “Introduction,” The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1–10. Not that the existence of these un-genteel spaces was denied outright: the earliest book-length work on suburbs, Harlan Paul Douglass, The Suburban Trend (New York: Century, 1925), especially 74–122, was careful to acknowledge “suburbs of production” within an elaborate taxonomy of suburban kinds. Earlier still, Graham Romeyn Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York: D. Appleton, 1915), which collects the author’s serial publications in The Survey, is a thorough and valuable document of Progressive Era moral suasion. And, for their part, not all midcentury geographers failed to connect industrial location with suburban development; see Howard J. Nelson, “The Vernon Area, California: A Study of the Political Factor in Urban Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 42 (June 1952): 177–191; Edgar M. Hoover and Raymond Vernon, Anatomy of a Metropolis (New York: Doubleday, 1959); James B. Kenyon, Industrial Localization and Metropolitan Growth: The Paterson–Passaic District (Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography, 1960); and Allan R. Pred, “The Intrametropolitan Location of American Manufacturing,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 54 (June 1964): 165–180. Within sociology of the same era, see the earnest taxonomies of Chauncy D. Harris, “Suburbs,” American Journal of Sociology 29 (July 1943): 1–13; and Leo F. Schnore, “Satellites and Suburbs,” Social Forces 36 (1957): 121–127. And see Roderick D. McKenzie, “The Rise of Metropolitan Communities,” in President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends (New York: McGraw– Hill, 1933), 443–496, for an in-house counterweight to the mainline Chicago School model.
13 countryward” he saw “one of the most hopeful tendencies in modern society,” one that would “solve a considerable share of our housing problem.”25 Harvard’s James Ford, a prolific writer on “slum” housing and, later, a prominent advocate for homeownership in the age of Hoover, was similarly bullish about the pairing of these two functions: “Industrial decentralization unaccompanied by residential decentralization is of slight value.”26 John Nolen, by 1916 something like the unofficial “dean” of the profession, claimed in his state-of-the-field collection City Planning, “The evils of undesirable and unintelligent land subdivision in the case of residential property are…more apparent and more in the public eye, although perhaps not more important, than in the case of industrial and business property.”27 “The problem of distribution,” one visitor to New York’s “Exhibit of Congestion” clarified, “is a problem of distributing work.”28 If, as Frederic Howe claimed, “planning for housing,” “the laying out of suburbs,” and coordination of industrial infrastructure were the beautifiers’ three definitive blind spots, then well-ordered industrial suburbs, it stood to reason, could correct for all three at once, demonstrate their interlocking consequences for metropolitan structure, and, region-wide, rein in “haphazard” decisions, aesthetic and locational alike.29 In these rethought industrial suburbs, the spheres of “work” and “life,” of production and consumption as we (now) intuitively distinguish them, were being marked out, made scrutable, indeed constituted in the very act. Work and non-work were “intimately allied,” Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., said, but they were both analytically and visibly separate.30 A clean line or a buffer between them — one legible to the distanciated planner or map-reader and intelligible to workers and visitors traversing the site — would be the clearest testimonial to a rationalized science of land use. “Things must be put where they belong,” wrote Harlan Douglass in 1925: “there must be a ‘proper adjustment of activities to areas,’” and “suburbs of the future must have a structure permitting people to find their work and do it.”31 Within the bounds of the integral town “whole,” or “unit,” it was the dyadic relation between factory and home — distance, transportation access, orientation with respect to winds, and so on — that became the pivotal variable to be optimized in the planners’ felicific calculus. Workers’ industrial “efficiency” could be boosted only by finding, in J. C. Nichols’s words, “a reasonable compromise between more favorable surroundings and close proximity to the industries themselves.”32 When scaled up, the
25 Aronovici, “Suburban Development,” 238, 234. 26 James Ford, “Residential and Industrial Decentralization,” in City Planning, ed. John Nolen (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 338. 27 John Nolen, “The Subdivision of Land,” in City Planning, 22; emphasis added. See also Howe, “The Remaking of the American City,” 192–3, for a similar epochal statement. And Peterson, The Birth of City Planning, 180, concurs. 28 John Martin, “The Exhibit of Congestion Interpreted,” Charities and the Commons 20 (4 April 1908): 34. 29 Frederic C. Howe, “The Remaking of the American City,” Harper’s Monthly 127 (July 1913): 186–197. Whether the professionalized City Practical planners adequately addressed worker housing, of course, is a matter of some dispute. See Peter Marcuse, “Housing in Early City Planning,” Journal of Urban History 6 (February 1980): 153– 176, for a forceful critique. As Marcuse notes, the National Housing Association, which at first convened along with the National Conference on City Planning, started holding separate meetings in 1911. 30 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., How to Organize a City Planning Campaign (New York: The Civic Press, 1913), 7. Note also that functional “specialization” implicates the visual register as a matter of etymology: land use, describable in purely operational terms, is never outside the reach of spectacle and the specular. Functional zones look orderly and efficient. 31 Douglass, The Suburban Trend, 275, 282. 32 J. C. Nichols, “Housing and the Real Estate Problem,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 135.
14 argument went, these lessons of proportion and balance could stably redistribute the entire region — which would require its own comprehensive plan. All too often planners’ rhetoric on the suburban question partook of an arch-modern, almost millennial optimism, by turns hopeful and militant. In 1899 the labor statistician Adna Ferrin Weber closed his sober compendium on a century of urban (over)centralization with a sudden burst of emotion: “The ‘rise of the suburbs’ it is, which furnishes the [only] solid basis of a hope that the evils of city life…may be in large part removed.”33 By 1925, Douglass was even starker: “The suburban trend presents a cause to be espoused, and if necessary a battle to be fought. The whole of urban life is at stake…. A crowded world,” he averred, racializing more than a little, “will be either suburban or savage.”34 Allusions to industrial “utopias” and “ideal” cities—which the nineteenth century had birthed in quantity — continued to proliferate in the literature.35 Graham Romeyn Taylor, the Chicago reformer whose Satellite Cities (1915) represents the age’s fullest and most confident exposition of these themes, saw in the “industrial exodus” — his language epic, redemptive — “repeated opportunities for shaping the civic and social conditions under which large groups of working people are to live for decades to come” (Figs. 1.1–1.4).36 Suburbs were places to glimpse and intervene on the urban future. This grand decentralist project, rendered technical, decomposed analytically into variables for independent adjustment and study, was never fully separable from considerations of labor power. “Efficiency” was a bloodless term for it, but these isolated environments, regimented and in a strong sense enclosed, were participants in a thoroughgoing technics of industrial discipline. Planners planned for industry, and frequently in direct service to industrialists. If plans proceeded, as Benjamin Marsh had counseled, “in justice to the working population,” that justice presumed the survival of industrial capitalism.37 Employers, policymakers, and reformers — capital, state, and civil society — converged on this point. Not incidentally, as James Ford noted, “Labor costs may be lower in the rural community [i.e., the emergent suburban fringe], if labor is less well unionized than in the city.”38 (Land was far cheaper too.) The flight from organized labor, if frequently unstated or euphemized, was central to industrial strategy in a generation for whom memories of the 1894 Pullman strike were still fresh. Suburban flight held fast as industrialists rethought the “modern” company town in line with Progressive orthodoxy, and it underlay waves of industrial and managerial decentralization in the 1920s and 1950s.39 These productive suburbs were last resorts, but resorts of a kind
33 Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 475. 34 Douglass, The Suburban Trend, 274, 327. 35 Historians conventionally reproduce the language of “utopia” in describing this period’s worldview. See Wiebe, The Search for Order, 170, for instance: “When a band of urban progressives went in search of utopia in 1916, they travelled not to a country retreat but to an industrial subdivision of Cincinnati where they tried to build a model for the professionally serviced city.” 36 Taylor, Satellite Cities, 26. 37 Marsh, “City Planning in Justice to the Working Population.” 38 Ford, “Residential and Industrial Decentralization,” 337–338. For a standard justification of the all-around economies of dispersing industry, see John Nolen, “The Factory and the Home,” in Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Housing (New York: American Housing Association, 1912), 114–120. In this piece, Nolen does not directly harp on complete (and politically autonomous) “suburbs,” but industrial “districts.” 39 There is a robust literature, related to but conceptually distinct from that on industrial suburbs, on the legacy of company towns for the American landscape — as object lessons for, stimuli to, and still-active ingredients of the planning imagination. The most extensive treatment, which proposes the category of the self-consciously “modern” company town, is Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise (New York: Verso, 1995). Notable case studies include Anne E. Mosher, Capital’s Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855–1916 (Baltimore: Johns
15 radically unlike the gleaming Riversides and Roland Parks of historiographic lore. They were spaces of escape, and of one flavor of the central city’s abandonment, but the resulting industrial middle distance, which might look like a negation of urban production, testified in fact to its expansion. Never ascribable to a pat, essentialized American anti-urbanism, the suburbanization of industry was a basic urban strategy, a constitutive if imperfect “solution” in an age of unrest.40
Enclosure: Giving Form to Life We can also read the very morphology of the modal industrial suburb — as prescribed and as actually built — at least partly in line with these directives of discipline. Manufacturers and planners, realtors and social scientists alike worked concertedly to compose environments in and through which laboring bodies would learn new senses of decorum, temperamental moderation, quiescence to their station, and, on the affirmative side, something like a reenergized work ethic. One of the main items forged in these suburbs of production, in other words, were new kinds of workers—models of the (always malleable) human subject, modulated by the diacritics class, of course, and, as we will see, race. The exact physical instruments purported to achieve these results varied considerably. Their conflicted emergence awaits fuller exposition in Chapters 5 and 6, which work in more sited and empirical ways than the present discussion. One physical instrument, however, invites immediate mention. It is hard to ignore the immense stakes, indissolubly aesthetic and practical, planners and their patrons assigned to spatial enclosure, or the appearance thereof, at the scale of the subdivision, the district, and the town. “The present point of view” on industrial housing, Geddes stated categorically in 1915, distilling the thought of a “long succession of philanthropists and reformers,” insists on “definite areas and groupings,” lest a town’s form unravel into “the hive disordered and swarming.”41 Firm boundaries were crucial. John Nolen, urging generous “open margins” encircling industrial settlements, stressed the challenges involved in “obtaining and holding employees” securely
Hopkins University Press, 2004); James Michael Buckley, “A Factory without a Roof: The Company Town in the Redwood Lumber Industry,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 7 (1997): 75–92; Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); and Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Russell Sage, 1910), produced under the aegis of the sprawling Pittsburgh Survey. A standard text, albeit with only some direct commentary on the built environment, is Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). A less denunciatory history can be found in John S. Garner, The Model Company Town: Urban Design through Private Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982); see also J. D. Porteous, “The Nature of the Company Town,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 51 (November 1970): 127–142, for a typology and qualified appreciation of such settlements. A useful popular treatment is Hardy Green, The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2010). For a recent effort to expand the discussion beyond U.S. borders, see Oliver J. Dinius and Angela Vergara, eds., Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Some of this literature is systematic in linking company-town landscapes to capitalized decision-makers located in the metropolis, but some is not. For our purposes, the pronounced physical isolation of most company towns, particularly those dedicated to resource extraction, sets them apart analytically from industrial suburbs located at or just beyond the urban edge. 40 After Richard Walker, “The Suburban Solution: Urban Geography and Urban Reform in the Capitalist Development of the United States,” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1977). “Industrial middle distance” appears in Stilgoe, “Moulding the Industrial Zone Aesthetic.” On Americans’ perceived anti-urbanism, the classic work is Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), which registers many shades of ambivalence about city life. A less satisfying recent book in this vein is Steven Conn, Americans against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), in which ambivalence is in short supply. 41 Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 149, 148.
16 within “an attractive local community on the outskirts of cities near factories.”42 A glance at the proposed street plans appended to just about any programmatic text from this period confirms as much: discrete, specialized units of space, legibly bounded, with “nothing” to speak of going on between them — that is, outside of the circuits described by daily rounds of home, work, rudimentary consumption, and restorative play.43 Commentators on the more nakedly paternalist nineteenth-century company towns that, by 1909, most planners were self-comfortingly disowning as passé, had often played up motifs of spatial enclosure and glossed them as instruments of confinement. In his famous 1885 exposé in Harper’s, the economist Richard T. Ely remarked that “it is avowedly part of the design of Pullman to surround laborers as far as possible with all the privileges of large wealth”; in practice, “[t]he citizen is surrounded by constant restraint and restriction.”44 Always sensitive to Pullman’s overreach, which had been confirmed by the bloody strike of 1894, post-1909 planners worked to resignify enclosure from a tool of brute constraint to a guarantor of pleasing placehood and its embrace. It is in the very tension between these two motives, and in their blurring, that the enclosure form became a key criterion and key implement of “rationalized” industrial suburbs in an age of urban re-form (Fig. 1.5). The notion that enclosure might make town form conceptually intelligible — to inhabitants, employers, visitors, and consumers of maps and visual culture — has a much longer lineage. Ebenezer Howard’s diagrammatic, endlessly reproduced Garden City, as first published in To-Morrow (1898), is one inescapable reference point in this respect; a growth-controlling edge of town, bright rather than blurred, was the formal linchpin of his scheme.45 The aesthetics of his fellow Briton Raymond Unwin, who had closer and more sustained liaisons with American planners, privileged a grammar of “picturesque street pictures [sic] and closed vistas,” and “a frame and centre points which render the whole really simple and easily comprehensible to the stranger.”46 Earlier still, the Austrian architect Camillo Sitte had sought refuge from industrial modernity — well within the city, not at its edge — in plazas “rigorously closed off from the outside.” Even to be fully visible, he wagered, a place required enclosure: “art demands
42 Nolen, “The Factory and the Home,” 114, 115, 119; emphasis added. 43 And to the extent that the internal structure of the street plan itself — its widths, its density, the unending bout between grids and curves — “has always been regarded as the foundation of all city planning,” in these scaled-down contexts of suburban manufacturing the chief concern seems to be that circulation patterns double in on themselves, forming an intelligible circuit. For the quotation, see Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., “Introduction,” in City Planning, ed. Nolen, 6. For a similar, even stronger identification of “city planning” with streetcraft, see Andrew Wright Crawford, “The Interrelation of Housing and City Planning,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 163, 164, 166. For historical overviews of city planning as street planning, see Charles Wolfe, “Streets Regulating Neighborhood Form,” in Public Streets for Public Use, ed. Anne Vernez Moudon, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987), 110–122; and Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph, Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities (New York: McGraw–Hill, 1997). 44 Richard T. Ely, “Pullman: A Social Study,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 70 (May 1885): 459, 461. 45 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow [1902; published in 1898 as To-Morrow] (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). 46 Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice [1909] (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), 85, 89. For the argument that American reformers, for the most part, managed to build only “garden suburbs,” pleasing but functionally incomplete, or “industrial housing estates,” rather than fully realized garden cities, see John S. Garner, “The Garden City and Planned Industrial Suburbs: Housing and Planning on the Eve of World War I,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, eds. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 58.
17 convexity.”47 Forty years later, under the aegis of the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, and hemmed in by the ubiquitous automobile, Clarence Perry’s eye-catching “neighborhood unit” scheme for the reconstruction of the suburban subdivision achieved spatial and social definition by reference to the high-speed arterials establishing its boundaries (Figs. 1.6, 1.7).48 But there is a further sense, reducible neither to raw constraint nor to the phenomenological verities of placehood, in which we should understand this premium on enclosure (or the effect thereof). More than the aged urban centers, far more than the (frankly outnumbered) elite residential preserves, industrial suburbs were in a non-metaphoric sense laboratories of urban form, experimental domains within which new forms and regularities, new socio-spatial knowledges, could be induced, observed, adjusted, streamlined, in principle improved, and, once intact, abstracted and made portable to sites farther afield.49 New relations, proportions, and ratios — new dis-positions and com-positions of “men and things” — were more easily worked out at this scale and with this extra, assiduously buffered room to maneuver.50 These spaces functioned as backstages, testing grounds for both planners and industrialists, public-facing reformers and private capitalists, who valued “system” in distinguishable but very much complementary ways. Laboratory space is a peculiar kind of space. Controlled experiment depends on physical isolation from social and natural interferences that would interrupt the play of variables, elements, and types in their abstracted state. Yet laboratories must at crucial moments be open to witnessing by (select members of) the public. The ability to open and close the laboratory, to decide on more or less permeability for its walls, might be the scientist’s most basic political
47 Camillo Sitte, City Planning according to Artistic Principles [1889], trans. George R. Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (New York: Random House, 1965), 32, 133. “Place” itself, we might note, as distinct from “space,” has since Plato’s Timaeus connoted some kind of enclosure. See Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 23–49; and Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [1959], trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994), passim, for the relation among enclosure, interiority, and intimacy. Within a discussion of “landscape,” see Edward S. Casey, “The Edge(s) of Landscape: A Study in Liminology,” in The Place of Landscape, ed. Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 91–110. And see the contemporaneous aesthetic essays of Georg Simmel, undervalued as a theorist of landscape but diagnostic (and a bit dogmatic) in his insistence that form (Forme) itself is not form unless a discernible outer boundary (Grenze) “withdraws” it from the ambient flux of the world. See, especially, Georg Simmel, “The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study” [1902], trans. Mark Ritter, Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1994): 11–17; Georg Simmel, “The Handle” [1911], trans. Rudolph H. Weingartner, in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper, 1959), 267–275; and Georg Simmel, “The Philosophy of Landscape” [1913], trans. Josef Bleicher, Theory, Culture & Society 24(7/8) (2007): 20–29. 48 Clarence Arthur Perry, “The Neighborhood Unit,” in Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, Volume VII: Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York: Regional Plan of New York, 1929). For fuller thoughts on the intellectual lineage linking Howard, Perry, and the intervening generation of planners, see Howard Gillette, Jr., Civitas by Design: Building Better Communities, from the Garden City to the New Urbanism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 49 The Chicago School sociologists, on whom more below, would popularize this analytic language in the 1910s and 1920s, but a sensibility favoring controlled spatial experiment preexists their texts, unverbalized. See the reformer Charles Zueblin, “The World’s First Sociological Laboratory,” American Journal of Sociology 4 (March 1899): 577–592, on Patrick Geddes in Edinburgh. As we will see, various industrialists too, planning before the existence of professional “planning,” inhabited a similar ideational world. 50 After the discussion of town form in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population [1978], trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), especially 11–23; and the adaptation to contemporary colonial urban planning, ever more extreme in its model-making, detailed in Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
18 capacity.51 These suburban worlds were laid out from the first for display. Though inhabitated, though put in working order, planners presumed that they would be looked at, ruminated on, and comprehended from a distance. Industrial suburbs were physically framed as unitary objects, set apart from and subordinated to the newly expert planner subjects. Observers and technicians characterized these edge spaces over and over as “models,” “object lessons,” “exemplary” environments that were didactic all the way down, contagious templates of more extensive and enduring reform (on which more in Chapter 7). Howard himself had closed his tract pleading for “a working model.”52 Signing off Satellite Cities, his 1915 review of actually existing suburban mishaps, Graham Romeyn Taylor was unwavering: “The great need is for demonstration and example…. A successful achievement in the form of a garden suburb or city, meeting the needs of an industrial population…would go farther than any other one thing to give point and effectiveness and stimulus to the movement.”53 If city planning signaled the rise of a new “knowledge that has something of the character of a science,” the task of producing tutorial object lessons, visitable directly on the landscape, was at the very core of its corresponding method.54 Suburban object lessons, out beyond the built-up city’s edge, in order to be intelligible and replicable as wholes, required enclosure within edges of their own.
Satellite Cities marks the full-fledged emergence of the industrial suburb as a specific object of planning knowledge and target of intervention. Aside from the characteristic outbursts of Progressive confidence that bookend it, religious in tone if technocratic in their implications, Taylor’s text is studiously analytic, carving his problem into right-sized subsets — housing stock, journey to work, labor relations, municipal politics, street and landscape plans — and illustrating each by way of a different American town, ratifying and reproducing something like the division of labor that period sociologists had pronounced the distinctive hallmark of industrial capitalism. Taylor and other reformers presented the city and its suburbs as amounting to a complex machine, never quite more than the sum of its parts, composed of discrete criteria that could be isolated and independently worked upon by experts. Between his more specialized 1915 volume (which itself collected pieces he had published in The Survey) and Nolen’s comprehensive-seeming collection City Planning (1916), we have something close to a compendium of the salient, always interlocking parts of “efficient” urban reform as it stood on the brink of the First World War. In 1911 a slim volume appeared bearing the name of another Taylor: Frederick W. Taylor, lately of Philadelphia’s Midvale Steel Works. Directed at industrialists, The Principles of Scientific Management famously inspired an “efficiency craze” in which disciples remade workplaces, political parties, military bureaucracies, home economics, and countless other organizational domains in line with its methods — time-and-motion study, record-keeping, the
51 A truism, however important, in science studies since at least Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). On how scientists work up and dissolve laboratory-like spaces out in the field — which always entails a project of boundary- marking — see Bruno Latour, “Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest,” in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 24–79; and Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” in Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, eds. Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (London: Sage, 1983), 141–170. 52 Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, 159. 53 Taylor, Satellite Cities, 300. 54 Crawford, “The Interrelation of Housing and City Planning,” 162.
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“task idea” — and its mechanistic maxims.55 Taylor’s mantras of “method” overlap considerably with those of the first generation of city planners, his rhetoric universalistic and severe: “This one…best method becomes standard, and remains standard…until it is superseded.”56 Hs influence on City Scientific planners was widely acknowledged: by 1913 George B. Ford was full-throatedly claiming to have “systematized, standardized, ‘Taylorized’” the science in replanning Newark and Jersey City.57 By the end of the decade Taylor’s ideas were standard currency for planners. Industrial designers, too, and of course a newly minted hierarchy of managers digested Taylorism and applied it at the scale of the plant. “In the past the man has been first,” their guide had announced; “in the future the system must be first.”58 In their fervor, reformers often posited “utopias,” but that locution only re-dualizes things, sorting the world into the topian here and the ideal-typical nowhere, ontologically off limits.59 Far from utopias — abstracted symbols of modern planning thought or, less fantastically, composites of all its best practices — industrial suburbs were tangible sites, both laboratories and theaters, in which and around which new formations of knowledge and expertise, new professional networks, new publics, and new politics could gather. If planners and their publics were to be believed, the methods of the City Scientific proved themselves nowehere more clearly than in the Suburb Productive.
Critiques of Rationality and the Rationalities of Critique We can ask again: what sort of shift took place in 1909, or 1910, or another nearby year in which “everything” — technique, but also worldview, values, common sense, even human nature itself — seemed to change in kind? So far, this story of the so-called City Scientific has been readable in terms of a familiar narrative of the modern Fall: a deadening and rendering-predictable; an a- local knowledge of “classifying, tabulating, and reducing”; a devaluation of chance, incident, and idiosyncrasy in the name of science triumphant; a remaking of the urban landscape, in turn, in the image of only One optimized, prescribed Best Way.60 It is tempting to read this professionalization project as yet another plodding march toward technical rationality, the conscious imposition of method to discipline, sort, sanitize, and circumscribe spaces and, by determinist extension, their subjects. Many historians of planning have diagnosed — in order to critique it — an odious “rational city” imaginary at the absolute heart of discipline and
55 Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 51–74. Versions of scientific management had been applied in factories as early as the 1880s. Taylor coined the term in 1895, but the full-on craze had to wait. For the leading example of domestic Taylorization, see Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1913). 56 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management [1911] (New York: Norton, 1967), 118. 57 Ford, “Efficiency in City Planning,” 142–143; note that the term is still appearing in scare quotes. They would soon disappear. See also John D. Fairfield, “The Scientific Management of Urban Space: Professional City Planning and the Legacy of Progressive Reform,” Journal of Urban History 20 (February 1994): 179–204. 58 Taylor, Principles, 7. 59 The “utopia” framing seems to have something of an elective affinity, too, with (critical) histories of variously classed suburbs. Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia and Mosher’s Capital’s Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855–1916 are two differently classed examples. It is worth asking whether this diction, even as it supplies self-assured strawmen to be triumphantly, and usefully, ironized, ends up privileging planning ideals — and assigning them causal predominance — over the messier recalcitrance of suburban sites, located someplace, where designs were subtly foiled or modified in the event. 60 Taylor, Principles, 36.
20 profession.61 Diverse historians, for their part, have glossed the period’s new suburban spaces as uniquely telling deposits of Taylorized capitalism and its artifices — be they unthinking middle- class Babbitthoods, on the one hand, or quiescent working-class colonies, where “big capital could write its industrial narrative unimpeded,” on the other.62 And a jarring concordance of scholars has seen fit (generally without attending to landscape) to locate some truly epochal shift in the organizational life of industrial capitalism right around 1909: the final “integration” of Alfred Chandler’s managerial revolution; of the status quo against which Henry May’s multiform “questioners,” never again “innocent,” would inveigh; or indeed of the Taylorite moment itself as, in a host of Marxian portrayals, the final run-up to maximally massifying regimes of “Fordism.”63 From our vantage point, it is easy to chafe at the early planners’ tone, with its anachronistic brew of reformist optimism and more aggressive, instrumental forms of conquest. But to gloss the story in this familiar way takes rationalization to be one-directional and transparently intentional, dutifully prising apart the planning subject from his (typically his) passive urban objects. It narrows attention to planners’ enframings and exclusions, casting the category of power solely in terms of proscription and constraint rather than its productivity. It reproduces the packaged narratives of modernity-as-disenchantment that have founded knee-jerk forms of criticality since at least Max Weber — who, of course, commented on these shifts in real time — and the left flank of his epigones.64 More to the point, it accepts “rationality” or “order” as a fait accompli, an end state rather than, at best, a tendency, a motif, an orienting vocabulary.65 These provisos all matter a great deal as we sort out what kind of critique — of the
61 This has been the legacy of, most notably, M. Christine Boyer’s Dreaming the Rational City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), a nominally Foucauldian synthesis of American planning history. 62 See Evelyn M. Cobley, Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 113–149, on the “ideology” of middle-class environments. “The ‘iron cage,’” Cobley fairly growls, “turns out to be the gilded or ‘gated’ suburb” (128). The in-text quotation comes from the otherwise more measured Richard A. Walker, “Industry Builds Out the City: The Suburbanization of Manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940,” in Manufacturing Suburbs, ed. Lewis, 122. 63 See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 85–152, for a classic statement on Taylor and “the habituation of the worker.” The classic, if overdrawn, successor that theorizes Taylorism, with a new directness, as a science of “conscious social production” is David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977), 264–277. On Taylor as the apotheosis of “practicalism,” see Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959),132–136. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), is the less dissident account, more Weberian and Sombartian than Marxian; on scientific management, see 272–281. On the application of Taylorist and Fordist methods within an officially Marxist context, see Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia, Part I: Albert Kahn,” IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 36 (2010): 57–80; and “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia, Part II: Saul Bron,” IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 37 (2011): 5–28. 64 See Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 56–90, for a wise upending of Weber’s “tale” of the modern Fall, along with those of Hans Blumenberg and Simon Critchley, diagnostic of Frankfurt School Marxism and first-edition philosophical poststructuralism, respectively. 65 After Wiebe, The Search for Order. An alternate, and differently politicized, version of the tale is available in Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (Boston: Hill and Wang, 1982), but “incorporation,” too, presumes forcible encompassment and ultimate coherence. Capitalism as
21 undead past, mounted from the elapsing present — is ultimately worth pursuing. One time-tested genre privileges frontal denunciation, demystification in the name of the occluded “real,” and substitution of an alternate, ostensibly larger, but still rule-bound structure that would explain away appearances. Marxist, postmodern, and variously poststructural critiques since 1968 or so have each, in their way, been beholden to this critical instinct; various “oversocialized” sociologies of the immediate postwar moment prepared the way, forever positing hidden, airtight structures of “the social” behind or beneath it all. But this critical temperament has been enduringly mournful, fixated on deadenings, simplifications, and systematizations of the world that may never categorically have obtained in practice.66 Analytically, then, and ethically, we confront a puzzle: how to think the force of something like the messily assembled “modern” without granting it a coherence or an autonomy it surely lacks?67
rationalization, and on those grounds to be vilified: such has been the Marxist and para-Marxist line since Harry Braverman; for a lightly skeptical suburbanization of this thesis, see Walker, “The Suburban Solution,” 316, 319. 66 For important considerations on the moods of critique, see Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason [1983], trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 67 See Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) for a similar question directed at “capitalism” writ large. For two very different renderings of industrial capitalism as an essentially disordering force, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), xxi–xxxiv; and T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 23–78. See also Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), on the ontological dishonesty knit into any uncritical deployment of the concept of “modernity,” even as a prologue to its demystification.
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Chapter 2
Rethinking the Rational City: Urban Form and the Revolt against Formalism
Landscaping the “Cult of Life” Another historiography has portrayed this spirit of 1909 (or so), quite apart from the march of “rationality,” as defined by an open-ended vitalism, attuned to the ways in which the insurgent forces of life demonstrably elude calculability, overflow bounded categories and formulae, course tensely through embodied experience, and suffuse everyday encounters, vibrant, ambient, enchanted. Staid systems, it occurred to so many, had fallen out of date. In the academy, a broad- based “revolt against formalism,” according to Morton White’s classic formulation, was well underway by 1912.1 “Life-worship,” which often took the form of nature worship, achieved remarkable popular currency. “Americans yearned to reconnect with some pulsating primal vitality,” Jackson Lears has asserted, anointing “‘life’ as a value in itself,” even if it was, by its nature, constitutively unenclosable, “always just out of reach.”2 We would do well, this chapter argues, to think the rise of a “scientific” planning as grasping toward a life science in this sense — and as redirecting precisely these antiformalist currents into the design and governance of built form. Versions of this multiform mania — endless, crisscrossing glosses, anyhow, on the words “life” and “vitality” — were all but atmospheric from the late 1880s to the outbreak of the First World War, increasing markedly in pitch around 1910, when, in Tom Quirk’s (schematic) words, “there was a sudden and general liberation from a mechanistic worldview.”3 The British sociologist Victor Branford testified breathlessly to its affirmation across the Atlantic: “A quickening spirit penetrates everywhere…. There is an ever-growing cult of life in all its protean manifestations.”4 Virginia Woolf, too, had quotably averred, with at least some irony, that “[o]n or about December 1910 human character changed.”5 Social reform, political initiative, artistic protest, literary experiment: all were recoded as life-affirming, life-enhancing, regenerative to the fullest extent. So was the possibility of planning. City Scientific planners took life as their dynamic object of intervention. Further chapters will elaborate what forms that took in practice. This chapter, for its part, may read as a lengthy aside, but it behooves us to compass the broader resistance to “form” — as its own self-evident desideratum — that was setting in precisely as planners and other mainline Progressives mouthed rational mastery, method, system. The antiformalist impulse was one that savvy planners and their patrons worked to assimilate.
1 Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (New York: Viking, 1949). 2 T. J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper, 2009), 232. Lears’s is probably the best survey of this pancultural urge. 3 Tom Quirk, Bergson and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 1. 4 Victor Branford, Interpretations and Forecasts (New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 1. 5 Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth, 1924), 4. Henri Lefebvre, no stranger to sloganeering, dates a strikingly similar epochal shift to 1910: “The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge, of social practice, of political power, a space thitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought, as the environment of and the channel for communications.” See The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 25. Note: “space,” but not “landscape.” Lefebvre says very little about changes in urban form.
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Amid it all, “life” per se was seldom defined outright. Hans Driesch, the biologist-turned- philosopher whose 1907 Gifford Lectures found a surprisingly wide audience, confessed that “[i]t is absolutely impossible for us to say anything definitive on this subject” of its origins.6 In The Wine of the Puritans (1908), the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks skirted the issue, a bit censoriously: “We never think what life is — we are continually intent on what life brings.”7 It was always easier to draw the line, more or less on sight, between living beings and non-living things than to specify what property one camp either possessed or lacked. Recent rounds of neo- vitalist revival within the discipline-puncturing halls of critical theory have been similarly vexed by this question, though surely more attentive to the dangers that follow from its occlusion. For Giorgio Agamben, whose latter-day theses on biopolitics and a darker “thanatopolitics” historicize the issue, “one of the first and most instructive observations to be made is that the concept never gets defined as such…. [E]verything happens as if, in our culture, life were what cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly articulated and divided.”8 Yet the historian cannot wish this vagueness away. However disruptive, it is diagnostic of how vitalisms at the turn of the century could permeate, differently tinge, and in submerged ways draw together disparate efforts from across the intellectual and cultural spectrum. A cluster of associated terms infused popular language in tandem. “Life” was the most clinical-sounding locution. “Energy,” drawn from physics but just as polysemous, did similar cultural work.9 “Force,” too, in principle had its own volatile “cult,” bridging Theodore Roosevelt’s physical culture of the strenuous and vigorous, the “Nietzsche vogue” in middle-class letters, and a more openly martial ethos in an age of “American nervousness.”10 Alongside, then, and in tension with all the symptoms describable as mechanization — as “materialism” in the pecuniary sense, as self-arrogated professional expertise, as instrumental rationality of all kinds — swelled a robust sense that the world was swirling, revolving in ways that technicians, with planners squarely among them, would ignore at their peril. “Reality flows; we flow with it; and we call true any affirmation which, in guiding us through moving reality,
6 Hans Driesch, History and Theory of Vitalism [1905], trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Macmillan, 1914), 205. 7 Van Wyck Brooks, The Wine of the Puritans (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1908), 47. 8 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal [2002], trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 13; emphasis original. Note also that the vitalist upsurge indexed by Driesch and his contemporaries was itself a revival: “Everyone thought vitalistically” around 1800, too — and, married to the Romantic vocabulary of “life,” suffered from the same definitional imprecisions. See Driesch, History and Theory of Vitalism, 113. 9 See, synthetically, Howard Mumford Jones, The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865–1915 (New York: Viking, 1970). And see Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 14–41, on the “indeterminist” philosophical implications of the late-nineteenth-century shift from a physics of matter to one of matter–energy. 10 Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), is an estimable guide to the age’s diffuse vitalism, refracted through one polarizing foreign import. See Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), on Roosevelt, especially, and the antinomies of “force.” For a remarkable attempt to quantify the aggregate “life” of America as a resource for conservation and asset for investment — which showcases the slippage between the prosaic sense of vitality as lifespan and vitality as normatively approved vigor — see Irving Fisher, Report on National Vitality: Its Wastes and Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), 13, 126, and passim, written by a political economist under the aegis of Roosevelt’s 1908 Conference on Conservation. Jürgen Habermas, a rationalistic skeptic on the “hoary,” “neo-ontological wave” of pre–World War I Lebensphilosophie who sees its import primarily as a precursor to Heidegger, has written that vitalists use “life” in a sense as pervasive as Foucault’s “power.” See The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity [1985], trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 296, 141, 254.
24 gives us a grip upon it and places us under more favorable conditions for acting.”11 These words issued from Henri Bergson, and it was that French philosopher who more than anyone defined the intellectual moment. In 1911, the very year Taylor’s Principles leapt efficiently off the press, another, competing bona fide American craze erupted when Bergson’s opus Creative Evolution (1907) finally saw English translation. The country’s first philosophical celebrity in the modern, mass-mediated sense had shown his face. “Who to-day is not reading Bergson,” John Dewey wondered to his colleagues just a year later.12 That Bergson’s 1913 visit to Columbia caused New York’s very first traffic jam may, of course, be apocryphal, but the legend persists.13 His Time and Free Will (1889) had been required reading for the French middle classes, minting a novel vision of experience as process, time as fleshy, felt “duration,” and promising something more appealing than the ossified verities of either Spencer’s or Comte’s positivist social sciences, Kant’s stalemated metaphysics, or forcibly telic readings of Darwin’s evolutionism.14 With Creative Evolution (1907), which most famously argued for the real presence of an underlying élan vital moving through and ceaselessly modifying the only- apparent stases of the everyday, Bergson took on the mantle of prophet, offering a new ontology, that of a world passionately aflame, and a new, para-poetic style of composition adequate to affirm and “intuitively” follow the seepage of bíos beyond the purview of lawful control.15 Our categories merely “fix what really are but ‘tendencies’ of a cosmic flow.” The world itself leans, rushing on with an ineffable propensity; in Jane Bennett’s words, the élan, whatever it is, “self- dirempts as it flows…gain[ing] strength as it distributes itself” luminously in all things.16 This was not an abdication of science. It was an explicit assertion of a new biology in and for
11 Henri Bergson, “The Philosophy of William James” (1911), in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 182. 12 John Dewey, “Perception and Organic Action,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 9 (1912): 645; emphasis added. 13 On this event, see Larry McGrath, “Bergson Comes to America,” Journal of the History of Ideas 74 (October 2013), 599; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 64; Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 228. Freud had visited America in 1909; Bertrand Russell made his passage in 1914. The popular appeal of Nietzsche (and the abusable neologism “Nietzschean”), it bears mentioning, might be discussed here in Bergson’s stead: an intense, politically diverse “vogue” was inescapable in the years following H. L. Mencken’s Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Boston: Luce, 1908) — although English translations of his work date back to 1896. See nearly every page of Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche, and especially 45–51. On his valences with France’s own “Generation of 1912” and earlier movements, see Christopher E. Forth, “Nietzsche, Decadence, and Regeneration in France, 1891–95,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (January 1993): 97–117. But Bergson is the more germane import in our moment for several reasons. Nietzsche had died in 1900; by the time of Freud and Bergson’s Americanization, he could not be reached for comment. The contours of the two men’s thought, both broadly “vitalist,” also differ greatly when addressed to questions of space and time, matter and life — themes voiced with purpose by Bergson, but only orthogonally by Nietzsche. The Bergson craze was unique, and uniquely telling in an age of urban metastasis. 14 Spencer in particular. Of him, one contemporary could claim, in earnest: “In the history of thought there is, beside the establishment of the second law of thermodynamics, [only] one systematic effort to discover a general law of nature governing the whole process of evolution.” See Lawrence J. Henderson, The Order of Nature [1917] (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 121. For a powerfully non-determinist reading of Darwin, see Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 15 The redemptive language of “prophet” was never far from hand. See, for instance, paeans to Bergson in John Burroughs, “A Prophet of the Soul,” The Atlantic Monthly (January 1914): 120–131; and the more journalistic Edwin E. Slosson, Major Prophets of Today (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914), 44–103. 16 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 76, 78.
25 philosophy: “vitality,” Bergson assured readers in the introductory chapter, “is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but such points are, as a fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines stops at various moments of the movement that generates the curve. In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.”17 The full logical architecture of Bergson’s thought is hard to summarize. His adopters and adapters channeled it in wildly varied ways. It could mean “nearly anything,” depending on context, and his avowed premium on “the fringe of vague intuition that surrounds our distinct — that is, intellectual — representation” could quickly license the anti-intellectual slogan as a “short-cut to truth.”18 As a philosophical temperament, however, it was “optimistic, scientific, yet wide open to the claims of the spirit…. It was new, and yet not destructive.”19 There are many ways to tease out the sociology of fads, intellectual and otherwise. Little in Bergson’s corpus, vocabulary aside, was essentially new: Romantics had lodged an anti- mechanistic critique decades prior; a dissident ontology of mobile forces and fluids had been well established since Goethe’s forays into plant morphogenesis; Emerson and Whitman had peddled less systematic vitalisms of their own; and a well-institutionalized current of pragmatist philosophizing had since the 1880s gradually habituated Americans to more provisional sorts of truth claims lodged in the vagaries of sensory experience. The psychologist William James, in particular, in a series of essays and talks, had primed the public for “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism” (1909).20 Not that the embrace was ever total: some philosophers were openly hostile, finding his convergence with pragmatism derivative and his deviations “regressive.”21 From Berkeley to St. Louis to much of James’s own department in Cambridge, rationalisms and idealisms continued to hold sway.22 What yearning did this new “creative” intellect satisfy? Were the middle classes simply bored, seduced by a yea-saying poet?23 Was Bergsonism, anyhow, solely a middle-class phenomenon, a new metaphysics for the sheltered and the pretentious? Not necessarily: one journalist observed at the master’s Paris lectures many “less
17 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1907], trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 31. 18 Quirk, Bergson and American Culture, 54; Bergson, Creative Evolution, 49; Walter Lippmann, “Bergson’s Philosophy,” New York Times (17 November 1912), BR665. 19 May, The End of American Innocence, 227–8, 229. 20 Quirk, Bergson and American Culture, 36, 50, 53. On James and Bergson’s extensive mutual infections, see Kennan Ferguson, “La Philosophie Américaine: James, Bergson, and the Century of Intercontinental Pluralism,” Theory and Event 9, no. 1 (2006). For one pragmatist’s attempt to contrast their oeuvres, see Horace Meyer Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914). For James’s most emphatic plea that the American public pay Bergson heed, see William James, “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism,” in A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green, 1909), 223–274. On the trans-Atlantic exchanges that were the very lifeblood of Progressive Era intellectual culture, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). Realistically, these ideas were directly reaching only a portion of the stratified American populace, but James, more than most, did his serious thinking in public. As Quirk (30) notes, an astonishing percentage of turn-of- the-century philosophy — texts canonized and still cited — was first aired in lectures before non-academic audiences. 21 See, for instance, Addison Webster Moore, “Bergson and Pragmatism,” Philosophical Review 21 (1912): 397– 414. 22 Indexed, respectively, by George Howison, William Torrey Harris and the St. Louis Hegelians, and Josiah Royce. Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), remains a superb overview of tensions within Harvard’s department. 23 When Bergson won the Nobel Prize — in 1927, a bit belatedly and well after his vogue — it was in literature, not philosophy.
26 familiar figures: representatives of the yellow and dusky races, militant social revolutionists, an astonishing number of cassocked priests, a goodly sprinkling of Germans.”24 West of the Atlantic, another onlooker, Louise Collier Willcox, was of the mind that “the rank and file have found in him…their solace. The world is more and more impatient of authority…. Democracy believes in itself; not in authority. It accepts snap judgments” — that is, the method of intuition.25 Bergson’s vitalism, biological in the first instance, could be made deeply political in the last. As for the card-carrying life scientists, their field had oscillated between strains of vitalism and mechanism for generations: Donna Haraway, for one, has noted a protracted, if inconclusive, disciplinary “crisis” unfolding between 1850 and 1930 along precisely these lines.26 And despite periodic declarations, often vitriolic, of vitalism’s eventual or actual “death,” its affective charge — its mood and its argot more than its isolable precepts — was impossible to expunge once and for all.27 The very ambiguity of the “force” conceit, in particular — by turns biological, physical, metaphysical, mystical — ended up being immensely generative. These vague, passionately affirmative premiums on “life” must be reckoned with as a kind of rider to, and an ingredient of, the apparently static technocracies Progressives tried to install with such bluster in an age of “reform.”28 “Our whole cubic capacity,” William James had written in 1890, “is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility.”29 It is amid and in conversation with this mood — not with another rendition of modernity as disenchantment — that the methods and materialities of urban and, especially, suburban planning must be thought. Such is the wager, and the interpretive challenge, of the
24 Alvan F. Sanborn, “Bergson: Creator of a New Philosophy,” The Outlook, 15 February 1913, 358. 25 Louise Collier Willcox, “Some Implications of Bergson’s Philosophy,” North American Review 199 (March 1914): 448. For another popular approbation of Bergsonism, see J. W. T. Mason, “The Bergson Method Confirmed,” The North American Review 197 (1913): 90–104. For the latest paperback rendition of Bergson as motivational speaker, see Michael Foley, Bergson (New York: Pegasus, 2015), which joins volumes on Nietzsche and Freud in a series called “The School of Life.” 26 Donna Jeanne Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 17. See also Hilda Hein, “The Endurance of the Mechanism–Vitalism Controversy,” Journal of the History of Biology 5 (Spring 1972): 159–188; and Philip C. Ritterbush, “Organic Form: Aesthetics and Objectivity in the Study of Form in the Life Sciences,” in Organic Form: The Life of an Idea, ed. G. S. Rousseau (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 25–60. 27 See Jones, The Age of Energy, 332, for the notion that scientific vitalism was “dead” by 1915. For concurrence from a period social scientist, see Edward Cary Hayes, “The ‘Social Forces’ Error,” American Journal of Sociology 16 (March 1911), 614. Countless texts demonstrate that Bergson and assorted crypto-Bergsonians (once his sell-by date had passed) still had to be reckoned with in philosophical and scientific debate through at least the 1920s. Public intellectuals include J. B. S. Haldane, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the polymath Lewis Mumford, mid- career John Dewey on experience and aesthetics, and others. 28 See H. S. Jennings, “Doctrines Held as Vitalism,” The American Naturalist 47 (July 1913): 385–417, for complaints from an experimental biologist about this vagueness. See also his contemporaneous debates on these questions with the ur–historian of ideas A. O. Lovejoy: especially, Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Metaphysician of the Life Force,” The Nation, 30 September 1909, 298–301; Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Meaning of Vitalism,” Science, 21 April 1911; H. S. Jennings, “Vitalism and Experimental Investigation,” Science, 16 June 1911, 927–932; Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Import of Vitalism,” Science, 21 July 1911, 75–80; H. S. Jennings, “Driesch’s Vitalism and Experimental Indeterminism,” Science 4 October 1912, 434–435; and Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Meaning of Driesch and the Meaning of Vitalism,” Science, 15 November 1912, 672–675. 29 William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course [1892] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2001), 245. This text, condensed a bit for public consumption, is a portable version of The Principles of Psychology (1890).
27 remainder of this chapter: How did a diffuse temperamental resistance to formalistic systems of thought inform and subtly imbue the work of those professionals charged with conceptualizing, prescribing, and intervening on urban form? What theory of environment, thought now as process, emerged? What would a vitalist planning look like? How might the built fabric of cities and their edges come alive?
The Option of Organicism Before we reengage the planners and (sub)urbanists, we ought to situate them still further amid the day’s social science, taking stock of the available senses in which “life” had emerged as a specific propensity in need of analysis and direction. The obstacles to sketching a robustly urban or spatial vitalism, adequately historicized with respect to the likes of Bergson and his moment, are many. For one thing, despite Bergson’s resolutely affirmative mode of concept deployment — vitalist concepts literally emerge from and work in contact with the shifting stuff of the world — his thought can easily seem withdrawn and atavistic, assimilated to period anti-modernism and what Whitehead would in time call the “Romantic reaction.”30 Aside from the unfalsifiable élan vital, it can be difficult to discern what in this world Bergson is normatively for. More to the point, predominant framings of Bergson’s vitalism have positioned its celebration of “life” irrevocably against and apart from the constraints of “matter,” slouching toward something like a subject-centric idealism. Creative Evolution closes with a confounding, disappointingly dualist view of the order of things: matter only ever “descends,” “weighted with geometry”; “life and consciousness,” always primary, are “ascension.” Matter is denigrated time and again as “inert,” awaiting vitalization by the categorically distinct population of living, thinking things. It is there — Bergson is not Bishop Berkeley — but it has nothing to do. (Creative Evolution’s otherwise exacting index of subjects reads, “Inorganic matter. See Inert matter.”)31 This devaluation of matter can extend without hesitation to a denigration of space, spatial thinking, and the disciplines that love it. Geography “was most difficult for him” as a schoolboy, the roving journalist Edwin Slosson noted, and for most of Bergson’s twentieth-century epigones his truly novel privileging of time has seemed to imply the relegation of space to “an empty homogenous medium” (most sharply in Time and Free Will, his doctoral dissertation and the first of his major works, but unknown in English until 1913 and so subsumed into the “Bergson” of the American mania).32 Vitalist life is an “acting ‘into’ space,” in Hans Driesch’s words, but never vice versa.33 By the 1970s, when another craze for French thought was palpable on
30 After T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880– 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), in which Bergson is seen appropriated by neo-medieval Catholics as a theorist of primitive, unmediated faith; and Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World [1925] (New York: Free Press, 1997), 75–94. 31 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 369, 389. Larry McGrath suggests that Bergson’s popularizers played up the “frankly dualistic” aspects of his thought, the better to make the Frenchman digestible to an American audience. See McGrath, “Bergson Comes to America.” See Hein, “The Endurance of the Mechanism–Vitalism Controversy,” for the traditional philosophy-of-science characterization of vitalism as an immaterialism. For the credulous John Burroughs, Bergsonian life is only ever “struggling with” matter, “hampered and retarded by it.” See “A Prophet of the Soul,” 126. And see the biologist Lawrence J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter [1913] (Boston: Beacon, 1958), 296: “Bergson, indeed, very definitely, and it would seem gratuitously, puts aside…the properties of matter as of no essential consequence in organic evolution.” 32 Slosson, Major Prophets of Today, 47; Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will [1889], trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen, 1913), 95. 33 Driesch, History and Theory of Vitalism, 204–5.
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American shores, Michel Foucault’s first, coerced grasps toward an engagement with geography held Bergson genealogically responsible for his own belatedness: “Did it start with Bergson, or before? Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.”34 The vitalist “cult of life,” in turn — what the geographer Derek McCormack generalizes as a “cultural–corporeal structure of feeling” celebrating the “kinesthetic” — has seldom been read as all that consequential for this moment’s spatial sensibility, much less for the specific manipulations of the built landscapes abiding in or just beside the city: architectural practice, industrial location, packagings of “natural” landscapes, the cultural economies of real estate, the disciplining of planning, and so on.35 The commonest translation has been into the language of an urban “organicism”: organic holism, always “more” than the sum of its parts, as the approved corrective for (and ostensible opposite of) mechanical assembly; organic urban form as centered, balanced, equilibrated, essential; the Geddesian “neotechnic” as opposed to the satanic mills’ “paleotechnic.” Bergson’s texts do celebrate organismic life; they do express trepidation at modern machinery; evidence for a plainly dualist reading of Bergson is manifest at times in Creative Evolution, wherein “it is one thing to manufacture, and quite another to organize…. To manufacture is…to work from the periphery to the centre, or, as the philosophers say, from the many to the one. Organization, on the contrary, works from the centre to the periphery…. The organizing act…has something explosive about it.”36 Bergson’s tone is normative, admiring of the naturalness of organismic form: the stability of its center, its unidirectional centrifugal growth, and most especially the legibility of its outer edge.
34 Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography” [1976], trans. Colin Gordon, in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 70. The reflex that leads so many geographers to define dynamism as perforce “dialectical,” or optimally so, has also contributed to Bergson’s marginality in the discipline. Lefebvre, for one, was a vocal opponent. On his rejection of vitalism, but also on his indebtedness to Bergson in certain texts, see Benjamin Fraser, “Toward a Philosophy of the Urban: Henri Lefebvre’s Uncomfortable Application of Bergsonism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (2008): 338–358. But note: Foucault himself took many years to be accepted as a spatial theorist; so too, and first a bit bluntly around hidden-in-plain-view theses on “territorialization,” did Deleuze and Guattari. Appearances can and do deceive. On the American rapport with Continental thinkers, see François Cusset, French Theory: How Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States [2003], trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Cusset’s account of the trans-Atlantic borrowings that amount to the “prehistories” of poststructuralism (17–32) excludes Bergson, and geography is almost entirely absent from his story. 35 Derek McCormack, Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 43. For recent, overly frontal attempts to force a marriage of “vitalism” and “urbanism,” see Margo Huxley, “Spatial Rationalities: Order, Environment, Evolution and Government,” Social & Cultural Geography 7 (October 2006): 771–787; and John Pløger, “In Search of Urban Vitalis,” Space and Culture 9 (November 2006): 382–399. See also Abid Mehmood, “On the History and Potentials of Evolutionary Metaphors in Urban Planning,” Planning Theory 9 (2010): 63–87. Mehmood rightly questions the tendency to conflate “vitalism,” “organicism,” and “evolutionism,” but he, like so many others, hews to an absolute distinction between “organic” and “inorganic” matter, granting vitality and temporality only to the former (and locating the vital force itself somewhere metaphysical). Keller Easterling has hinted at the Bergsonian inheritance of the critical regionalisms of Mumford, MacKaye, and their confrères, evident by the mid-1920s, but this skirts the issue of Bergson’s own spatial sensibilities or, temporally, the elective spatial affinities his work found upon first publication/translation. See Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). 36 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 92. The standard pre-Deleuzian commentary on Bergson, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson [1931, 1959], trans. Nils F. Schott (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), begins with a chapter entitled “Organic Totalities.”
29
Bergson’s dicta are not universally transferrable: the quotations adduced here refer most immediately to spermatozoa, not cityscape. But the basic template of centered, edged wholes, inwardly integrated while outwardly bound, is clear enough, and it is as organisms that planners and scholars, then and now, have been most willing to biologize the “life” of urban environments.37 The City Practical planners fairly brim with this sentiment. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., calls the city plan “a live thing…a growing and gradually changing aggregation of accepted ideas or projects…all consistent with each other, and each surviving…by virtue of its harmonizing with the rest.”38 Edward H. Bennett envisions “an orderly development” of industrial suburbs that would redound favorably to “the whole city. There would be an organic whole, functioning properly in all its parts.”39 Grosvenor Atterbury champions the “vital essence” and organic “balance” of the Sage Foundation’s experimental subdivision at Forest Hills Gardens in Queens.40 Frederic C. Howe presents urban utilities as “vital organs,” “life- giving,” that would amount to a “circulatory system.”41 Charles Mulford Robinson feels the same way about streets, which are “arteries” in a very literal sense.42 And organismic criteria are implicit in the era’s polymorphous complaints about “congestion” and its remedies, e.g., the urban “osteopathy” prescribed by one visitor to New York’s 1908 “Exhibit of Congestion.”43 This habituated seeing and seeming like an organism runs deeper in time, of course, and wider in its associations. Bodily and, especially, circulatory figurations have long haunted political philosophy, variously extrapolating William Harvey’s physiology to naturalize the monarchic state, the self-organizing market, the ethnic nation bound by blood and soil, and other contraptions of organizational life.44 The social formations that Spencerians posited as the theaters of competitive struggle were typically imagined as self-equilibrating organisms.45 A
37 And the tendency has stickily been to understand this organicity solely as “metaphor.” See the still-useful Gilbert Herbert, “The Organic Analogy in Town Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 29 (1963): 198– 209; the less satisfactory functionalist sociology of Leo F. Schnore, “The City as a Social Organism,” Urban Affairs Review 1 (1966): 58–69; and Mehmood, “On the History and Potentials of Evolutionary Metaphors in Urban Planning.” Mehmood and others commit hard to a language of “evolution,” seeing it as inseparable from things “organic.” The remainder of this chapter, to preface a bit, will demonstrate the urgently non-metaphorical assumptions (and stakes) of this biologizing trope. But it is worth noting the conventional wisdom, even among its most passionate advocates. 38 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., “A City Planning Program,” in Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on City Planning (Boston: National Conference on City Planning, 1913), 5. 39 Edward H. Bennett, “Planning for Distribution of Industries,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 217 40 Grosvenor Atterbury, “Model Towns in America,” Scribner’s 52 (July 1912): 22. 41 Frederic C. Howe, “The City as a Socializing Agency: The Physical Basis of the City: The City Plan,” American Journal of Sociology 17 (March 1912): 594, 592. 42 Charles Mulford Robinson, “The Sociology of a Street Layout,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914), 193. 43 John Martin, “The Exhibit of Congestion Interpreted,” Charities and the Commons 20 (4 April 1908): 38. See also Edward Ewing Pratt, Industrial Causes of Congestion of Population in New York City (New York: Columbia University, 1911), the work of a spatially minded economist who expresses great faith in industrial decentralization. 44 See I. Bernard Cohen, “Harrington and Harvey: A Theory of the State Based on the New Physiology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 187–210; and Catherine Packham, “The Physiology of Political Economy: Vitalism and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002): 465–481, on “circulation.” See F. W. Coker, Organismic Theories of the State (New York: Columbia University, 1910), for an earlier critique. And see Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), for a qualified defense of “organismic” nation talk in the context of postcolonial politics. 45 Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1944), remains a valuable summary of these currents.
30 long discourse praising “organic form” has inhabited literary, and especially poetic, criticism.46 In each case — really, as Donna Haraway has noted, in any theoretical armature that naturalizes “form” — the organism motif, no less than the mechanism that is so often posited as its antithesis, has committed thinkers to a version of structuralism, hierarchical through and through, in which specific polities, bodies, or spaces, specific regions or local stabilizations of otherwise less-than-orderly life, are subordinated to, and explicable by, one overarching law.47 Such organicisms have lived on, with severe ethico-political consequences welling not far beneath the chipper just-so stories of harmony and equilibration. They pose two initial, probably insoluble problems. First, rhetorics pinned to an organismic baseline allow the already empowered to enforce sameness — as “purity,” now granted the imprimatur of biology — and then to “antagonize arbitrariness and capriciousness” as unnatural.48 Organic paradigms enforce the boundaries of an essentialized social or spatial whole. Second, while the organismic model, attended or not by something like an explicit élan, does introduce a dynamism to the world — a becoming, a restless thrust toward the not-yet that Newtonian mechanism arguably excludes — it presumes that all occupants of that world incline directionally toward the same goal. It is, in short, a classic teleology. And, crucially as we wend our way back to things urban, its consequences — the enforcements it ratifies, the socio-spatial derogations it enables as “inorganic,” “formless,” incompletely “alive” — are so dire precisely because organicism was never quite a metaphor to begin with. Metaphor admits a gap between the material world and the linguistic contraptions used to summarize or simplify it; the latter hover above the former. Organismic versions of vitalism, by contrast, amount to a set of theses on the natural tendencies of matter itself, space itself. Openly “organic” schemes of planning, by conventional wisdom the logical way to domesticate the broader vitalist mood for environmental design, entail a specific, vexed ontology of urban landscape and life.
From Organism to Milieu: The Spaces of a Vitalist Social Science The organism motif held powerful sway in the newly consolidated social sciences as well, mainstreaming descriptions of “society” as a functional, self-equilibrating whole into which more particular groupings and interests — professions, political parties, families, religious sects, classes, races — could then be slotted, hierarchically and in right proportion.49 Ferdinand Tönnies could declare in 1905 that “biological analogies” had, among sociologists at least, “almost universally been abandoned.”50 But countless thinkers enthusiastically gave him the lie, toeing and traducing the extremely perforated line between “social” and “natural” sciences. Durkheim was the best-institutionalized theorist of the solidary social organism, dominating French sociology and regularly appearing on American reading lists. In Britain, Victor Branford, editor of the Sociological Review, developed an explicit “biological sociology…an integrate body of doctrine as to the origin, place, and purpose of man…. It selects impartially from the
46 Rousseau, ed., Organic Form: The Life of an Idea. 47 Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 61–62. For corroboration, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 18n26: “While the organic and mechanical metaphors bore varied meanings, their closed, systematic character and consequent historical reductionism were identical.” Both were holist. 48 Coker, Organismic Theories of the State, 199. 49 For a (much) extended discussion of the falsity of this split, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 50 Ferdinand Tönnies, “The Present Problems of Social Structure,” American Journal of Sociology 10 (March 1905), 569.
31 founders of sociology and of biology.”51 Social scientists, indeed, and sociologists above all, may have invested even more heavily in the natures of the organism than had biologists themselves.52 Yet this conception of social “life” and its environment — holist, stably articulated, unitarily growing toward one shared goal — never went unchallenged. A closer look at Progressive Era social science, consequentially as we situate the scientization of planning enterprise, reveals another, looser kind of animacy working at cross-purposes to the integral orderings and boundings that organismic models take for granted. Although organicism and vitalism can overlap, they are not coextensive. They name different intellectual and practical tendencies. They enshrine radically different sense of whether and how spaces cohere, how beings respond to their surrounds, and what kind of interventions, on what kinds of objects, the processes of planning and building can be. Indeed, in coming chapters we will be able to think planning’s sharpest internal tensions as manifesting just such a division between organicist and vitalist moments, the former privileging landscape’s form, the latter an expanded sense of its force. This alternative, vitalist spatiality — which we will now explore within history, sociology, and geography, in that order — is that of the milieu. Intimations of the milieu coexist uneasily with the pat certainties of the organism. This more unruly spatiality had been described as early as Newton, transferred from physics to biology by the proto-evolutionist Lamarck in the Zoological Philosophy (1809), and worked over by (social) scientists for the next hundred years at least. If the organism hews to a self-evident form, the milieu is a field of forces, material to be sure, but never stationary and not always visible. Milieu thinking posits a more atmospheric consistency for space, a vague volumetrics within which persons, things, and everything in between are ensconced, indeed permeated, by something like an ether (a concept physicists had not yet discredited). The milieu lacks a single center; its edges are always in question; there is “just a little order”; there is also no whole for its singular components to add up to.53 (Indeed, Lamarck only ever spoke of milieux in the plural.) If organismic spaces essentially function, the milieu begins and remains “an ensemble of variables,” of fluids that resonate internally but resist external closure. As Georges Canguilhem,
51 Branford, Interpretations and Forecasts, 410. Branford’s marriage of “Civics and Eugenics,” anachronistic today, was entirely thinkable at this juncture. Francis Galton, a “saintly figure” in Branford’s book, published his most succinct guide to “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” (1904) as the lead article in the American Journal of Sociology 10 (July 1904): 1–25. 52 “In philosophical discussions the term organic has had a broader application than to the phenomena of biology, and this extension has often been deliberately adopted with the object of providing some general category that should embrace plants and animals as well as particular things which were to be newly designated as organisms.” Coker, Organismic Theories of the State, 192. 53 And note: the truly “singular,” unlike the “particular,” is not subordinate, either as confirmation or deviation, to some knowable “general.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? [1991], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 201. In context, the authors extrapolate this under-ordering quite dramatically to the brain and the world. For the clearest Deleuzian renditions of the “milieu” as a mode of territorialization, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [1980], trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 310–323. Deleuze and Guattari’s organizing dualism of “arborescent” and “rhizomatic” consistencies maps well enough onto the distinction between organism and milieu. Another generation, if forced to theorize the built environment, which was not their wont, might have mapped organism and milieu onto the split between a Saussurean “synchronic” system of relations and reference and a “diachronic” one perpetually “deferring” that system’s closure. “Deconstruction” is not the present study’s argot, but for one valiant period attempt to give deconstruction a geography, do see Deborah P. Dixon and John Paul Jones III, “My Dinner with Derrida, or Spatial Analysis and Poststructuralism Do Lunch,” Environment and Planning A 30 (1998): 247–260.
32 the philosopher most attentive to the concept’s career and vicissitudes, puts it, the milieu is “an indefinitely extendable line or plane, at once continuous and homogeneous, and with neither definite shape nor privileged position.”54 Milieux unfold chancily and without telos: they swirl and swerve; they are essentially eventful; “the slight surprise of action” is not exception but rule.55 And some non-negotiable margin of activity is restored: environments do not “impose” but “propose” lines of conduct. There is not only contact but a kind of interchange, an overlapping, between suggestible subjects and their continually modified spaces.56 Change is constant. For Lamarck, “subtle and ever moving fluids contained in the environment incessantly penetrate these organized bodies and maintain life in them”; “nature…borrow[s] from the environment the excitatory power for vital movements” and “convey[s] that power right into the interior of these beings,” who then have it at their quasi-autonomous “disposal.”57 Milieux act, but presumptions of unidirectional “evolution,” of before-and-after environmental determinism, of eventuality or endpoint, quickly go by the wayside. Milieu ontologies attend, haunt, and quietly unravel the essentialized wholes and determinant goals of organism talk. Ever active, and ever tending toward entropy, they supply a more adequately vitalist sense of inhabited space that, upon inspection, can be seen tensely embedded within the intellectual projects of city planning and early social science, broadly neo- Lamarckian both, even as its most eloquent actors seem to be exalting (or simply defaulting to) organismic models.58 As Peter Hanns Reill has clarified, vitalism and organicism, though often twinned, are must be kept distinct: authentic vitalism privileges “the assembly of forces and their free play” without granted organicism’s “single directing power or ‘royal’ force.”59 The
54 Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” in Knowledge of Life [1952], trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 99, 102, 103. On the productive motif of “fluids” in French science, see John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), xiii–xiv, 4, and empirically passim. 55 After Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 266–292. On the larger late-nineteenth-century awakening to chance — and attempts to tame it both philosophically and statistically — see Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 177–200. On the reality of the world’s “swerve,” see Gilles Deleuze, “Lucretius and the Simulacrum” [1961], in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 266–279, and a small cottage industry of modernizers of Lucretius that would begin with Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter; and Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011). For another use of Lucretian atomism, see Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” [1982], in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2006), 163–207; and, before him, the dissertation of Karl Marx, “The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” [1841], trans. Dirk J. and Sally R. Struik, in The First Writings of Karl Marx, ed. Paul M. Schafer (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2006), 84–184. 56 Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” 109. 57 Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy [1809], trans. Hugh Elliot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5, 6; emphasis original. 58 On the prevalence (and variety) of Lamarckian thinking outside the confines of biology departments, see George W. Stocking, “Lamarckianism in American Social Science, 1890–1915,” Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (April– June 1962): 239–256. On the use of coercive renditions of Lamarckian ideas in justifying the colonial governance of populations and spaces, see Rabinow, French Modern, and Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 59 For a forceful statement of this distinction, see Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 11–12. Reill classes Bergson and Driesch in with organicism and paints them as nostalgic conservatives; the present account does not. For a similar distinction to Reill’s, see Gabriel Tarde, “Sociology” [1898], trans. N. Claire Ellis, in Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence, ed.
33 hallmarks of organicism are surely more conspicuous; they attract the eye of skeptical genealogists and more bluntly invite critique. Yet, at the very moment of its self-definition, each of the major American disciplines concerned with the social life of space contained, unresolved, a version of this confrontation organism and milieu, form and force.60 It is common to read planners’ 1909 pivot to unspectacular, post-aesthetic “science” as its integration with the social sciences and their going conceptions of society and environment. The impulse is not completely misguided, but we need to grasp those disciplines’ complexities. A closer look reveals a freer- flowing, broadly vitalist ontology of “life” and its “forces” overcoming the verities of organic form, multiplicity unbinding static unities. Reweighting these disciplinary conversations toward the form-thwarting forces, material if invisible, that social scientists posited as basic, we can better situate (and then defamiliarize) the objects of that generation’s scientized urban knowledges and interventions.
Currents Historians were the first to set “forces” against organismic form and to rule in their favor. Many scholars deployed both languages at once. In “Problems in American History” (1892), a methodological piece that was a sort of draft for his declamation of “The Significance of the Frontier” a year later at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, Frederick Jackson Turner wagered that political institutions could be analyzed as “the anatomy of the body politic; its physiology is the social and economic life molding this framework to new uses…. Let the student survey this organism, the American commonwealth.” Methodological holism was ready to hand. Nations, juridical orders, sovereign and expanding territories: these complex unities were formed out of “organs.” The organs would interlock, interact, and always add up. Political regimes, economic infrastructures, especially patterns of settlement and territorialization: these would coalesce eventually into “a complex nervous system for the originally simple inert continent.”61 A (sanitized) rendition of the bloody frontier experience, he claimed at Chicago with not a little bravado, imparted an overall shape, an “explanation,” to the course of American history. It is, unsurprisingly, against the telos and forcible evacuations of this last, lawlike claim that Turner has been revised.62 But even more pervasive, read closely, is the dynamic flux roiling beneath his summary tidyings-up of blood and soil: we find a language of environmental fluids “pushed” or “poured” into new crevices; a somatics of the frontiersman’s suggestible, a-rational body and its “restless, nervous energy.” Turner made a critical distinction: even more basic, lodged “behind…forms and modifications, were the vital forces that call these organs into life
Terry N. Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 79: “the social organism aside, there is still room for a certain social vitalism…the reality of ‘social life’ is not in doubt” (emphasis original). 60 Deleuze has remarked that “every” apparently stable “form is a compound of relations between forces.” Gilles Deleuze, Foucault [1986], trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 124. For Foucault on Deleuze, see Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” [1970], in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 165–196. 61 Frederick Jackson Turner, “Problems in American History” [1892], in Frontier and Section (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice–Hall, 1961), 30, 32. 62 Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (Boston: Hill and Wang, 1982), 11–17, is as good as any account in puncturing Turner’s “telos of closure,” “scientific” posturing, and “justifying” attitude toward the unsavory past, as well as his imagined cast of Westerners, self-evidently divided between “savages” and redeemers. See also Gerry Kearns, “Closed Space and Political Practice: Frederick Jackson Turner and Halford Mackinder,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2 (1984): 23–34.
34 and shape them to meet changing conditions.”63 The two are in conflict. Turner’s forceful, flowing ontology of land and life cuts against his bad habit of organicism. By 1911 he was operationalizing the term “social forces” as the methodological prerequisite for a more scientific history — prefacing blander positivists today, for whom “forces” stand in generically for “root causes” or “larger context” — but his baseline vitalism of flows insurgent had not been tamed. Geographic environments, never quite inanimate, would eventfully “reveal” and “exert” themselves; events were “streams, “eddies,” and “channels” that routinely upended attempts to enforce historical law, of which “the pathway of history is strewn with the wrecks.”64 Causal historical science was born amid and upon this vitalist ferment. Even those fin-de-siècle historians most bent on subjecting the past, all of it, to calculable law were soon privileging the unbuilding forces of entropy and progressive scatteration. In 1894 Henry Adams, as president of the American Historical Association, challenged its membership to state “no opinion” within earshot of the public “unless we have some scientific theory to offer.” “Science,” for Adams, rather drily “assumes a necessary sequence of cause and effect.”65 But by 1909 — that date again — the only rule he would admit was that of the world’s material decomposition: “rudimentary forces” had accelerated and “acquired a volume and complexity which could no longer be enclosed in rigid forms, and had expanded into freer movement”; “everything, animate or inanimate, spiritual or material, exists in Phase…all is equilibrium more or less unstable…our whole vision is limited to the bare possibility of calculating…the degree of a given instability.” Adams’s idiosyncratic way of scientizing the world was drawn proximately from physics, not biology — it was a radicalization of Newton’s Second Law — but the material fluxes he diagnosed were every bit as vital as those of Bergson: “Lines of force go on vibrating, rotating, moving in waves, up and down, forward and back, indifferent to control.” Historical time, he suggested, behaved as a fleeting “current,” “always dissolving whatever it meets…in the ocean of ultimate solution.”66 Lexicons drift and shift. Specific borrowings between the softer and harder sciences change according to whim, fad, and professional incentive. Even and especially as statistical techniques made their entry in earnest, history remained “the Science of Vital Energy in relation with time.” That non-determinist mood, that affirmation of (and awe before) force: these had cut across (social-)scientific discipline and profession, and thrown the very possibility of organic (and implicitly spatial) form, whether as analytic construct or observed state, into disrepute. As Adams noted in his valedictory “Letter to American Teachers of History” (1910), more epochally than he may have known, “Vitalists are of many kinds.”67
63 Turner, “Problems in American History,” 31; Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” [1893], in Frontier and Section, 61; Turner, “Problems in American History,” 29. 64 Turner, “Social Forces in American History” [1911], in Frontier and Section, 163, 164, 170. See the sociological journal Social Forces (the intellectual offspring of Howard Odum the elder, and still run out of Chapel Hill) for a sampling of what the mainstream use of the term connotes. 65 Henry Adams, “The Tendency of History” [1894], in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 133, 129. 66 Henry Adams, “The Rule of Phase Applied to History” [1909], in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 298, 283, 279–280, 281. And recall above that the “milieu” first appeared not with the biologists, but with Newton. 67 Henry Adams, “A Letter to Teachers of American History” [1910], in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 207, 146. As a matter of sequential intellectual history, for Adams it was Schopenhauer’s apotheosis of “Will” (with a secondary assist from Nietzsche) that was decisive, setting off a kind of century-long semantic chain reaction past which point “the old idea of Form…slipped readily over the idea of Energy…so that henceforward it mattered little whether the schools, in their rage for nomenclature, called the result
35
Forces If historians first committed to a language of unbundled “forces,” the first generations of American sociologists subjected the term to its most varied use and abuse. Already in 1911 Edward Cary Hayes could complain of its banalization, portraying a widespread “‘social forces’ error” whereby his colleagues, claiming in the name of scientific precision to have isolated a countable set of specifically social forces (thus demarcating the objects of his discipline), would in fact reintroduce a “demiurgic” metaphysics of “One Force.” Lester Ward, the principled critic of Social Darwinism, was Hayes’s main offender here, too vitalist for his own good, but the Spencerian hangers-on spoke in similar tongues as well. “Force” and the plural “forces” were the building blocks of sociology’s secular theology. But they came from a very specific lineage, Hayes noted, without flattery: this language was redolent of “the biologists.”68 By 1925 the literature on “forces” was so voluminous and inconsistent that Floyd N. House, a graduate student at Chicago, could pen an entire dissertation tracing sociologists’ spirals around the term. There was “fundamentally…a logical need for the concept,” he wrote. Historians’ early adoption of “forces” to represent “main trends and influential conditions and institutions” had “determined in part” its place in the sociological toolkit. Sociologists, even more than historians, understood “forces” ordinarily and originally to mean calculable causal factors exerting power over society. But what forces were was abundantly open to question: this diffuse life-philosophic shorthand could designate inborn motives or instincts, in Ward; proto- Freudian drives, in social psychology; an unchanging set of economic interests, in the work of Albion Small; a backlogged accretion of historical events; constraint and enablement by social “institutions,” still a neologism; and virtually anything else. The claim to have identified one unique kind of force around which the discipline could structure and wall off its research program: this move had become a cliché. There was a kind of contagion at work. The terminology of “force” proliferated and shape-shifted beyond any semblance of precision.69 It was in the nascent sciences of social space that these vitalist frameworks most arrestingly achieved traction. True, in his cabinet of methodological curiosities House had acknowledged the existence of a more geographic sense of “forces,” in which ambient environmental “conditions” were their key transmitters, but in his discipline such a usage was very much an outlier. Sociologists had by and large experienced “difficulties…in their attempts to fit into their general doctrines…an account of the role of the environment, taken as an external, physical, material force.”70 Urban sociologists were the partial exception to his rule. Robert Park’s circle of researchers at the University of Chicago are diagnostic. There is no better starting point than the papers written between 1915 and 1925 and collected in the canonical The City. This work, too, is largely beholden to thinking the force of environment through organismic motifs. For Park the city is physically and morally “a living entity,” unambiguously bounded off
‘Will,’ or ‘Entelechy,’ or ‘Dominant,’ or ‘Organic Principle,’ or ‘Trieb,’ or ‘Strebung,’ or ‘Intuition,’ or ‘Instinct,’ or just simply ‘Force’” (194). 68 Edward Cary Hayes, “The ‘Social Forces’ Error,” American Journal of Sociology 16 (March 1911): 618, 613. For Ward’s use of a vitalist framework to contest Galton’s eugenics, see Lester F. Ward, “Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics,” American Journal of Sociology 18 (1913): 737–754. Environmental “variation,” he argues, precedes and exceeds the deterministic strictures of genetic “selection.” 69 Floyd N. House, “The Concept ‘Social Forces’ in American Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 31 (1925): 794, 796. That journal published House’s full dissertation that year in nine parts; far-apart page numbers are drawn from different, consecutive issues of AJS 31. 70 House, “The Concept ‘Social Forces’ in American Sociology,” 356.
36 from things rural, and in that sense a controllable “laboratory or clinic” for social study.71 A naturalistic jargon, imported from plant biology, of measurable “metabolism,” “succession,” and “decay” marks the contribution of Ernest Burgess: one unquestioned center anchors normal city form, again the city’s edge is unproblematically firm, and while “disorganization” occurs as a matter of course, it is perpetually self-repairing, reinforcing the physico-moral order.72 These holist tropes, poised uneasily between metaphor and literality, have been conspicuous targets for those revisionist urbanists, Marxist and otherwise, who have since the 1970s rejected the Chicago School as just another determinism, an automatism of the urban that elides conflict and complexity.73 But organicism never held absolute sway to begin with, and reading Chicago-style urban “ecology” in a looser and more granular way can suggest some openings onto a more underdetermined vision of cities as milieux. Park and Burgess are thought of as staid systematizers, even as their curricular Chicago School “Bible” of 1921 admitted a panoply of anti-rationalist voices into the fold.74 With the work of Roderick McKenzie, who in The City is charged with outlining “The Ecological Approach” in a methodological spirit, something else entirely is afoot. McKenzie foregrounds the exception and the infraction. If in one breath he “is fundamentally interested in the effect of position,” thought within a synchronic inventory of mutually exclusive positions, in the next he is propounding an absolutely “continuous” process ontology of the lived city. Chancy “mobility” outruns the circuits of routine “movement”; urban life is subject to “sudden pulls” and “unusual forms of release” that de- and restructure space according to no direction or plan. His method — theirs — posits an
71 Robert E. Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment” [1915], in The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 4, 46. 72 Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” in The City, 50, 56, 54. For a quite doctrinaire empirical extension of the organismic framework (and its signature zonal diagram of concentric circles) north of the U.S. border, see C. A. Dawson, The City as an Organism, with Special Reference to Montreal (Montreal: McGill University, 1926). For its postwar legacy in urban sociology, amplified by a strong dose of Durkheimian functionalism, see Leo F. Schnore, “The City as a Social Organism.” We might even locate figures of organismic life at the root of the tradition of city “biography” and, as especially in Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), its nagging concern with the visualization and vicissitudes of the city’s overall morphological silhouette. 73 David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 131–134, is the starting point. Harvey expresses concern about the Chicagoites’ proclivity to naturalize “order” and “disorder,” and with their “cultural” (rather than political-economic) stratum of explanation. But Harvey’s rejoinder, and that of most Marxist urbanists in his wake, has been to substitute another self-enclosed system of “circulation” in place of Burgess’s eternal concentric circles, rather than to diagnose other forces, other and less ordered “ecologies,” that would dissolve that model from within. 74 Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, eds., Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921), is a more diverse and bizarre compendium than reflexive Chicago School deniers realize. Its section on “Human Nature,” which precedes things properly sociological, includes the work of anti-rationalists from J. B. S. Haldane to William James to the biologist J. Arthur Thomson, serial co-author of Patrick Geddes. The section on “Social Forces” privileges the factors of “wish,” “interest,” and “sentiment.” Readings on animal behavior figure crucially in the sections on “Collective Behavior” (flocks, herds, packs) and “Conflict.” To understand “Social Control,” Park and Burgess believed, a focus on intentions, strategies, and plans was insufficient; the irrationalism of Georges Sorel and Walter Lippmann needed to find a place. “Progress,” the heading of the volume’s final section, involved forces well outside the tradition of Enlightened mastery — and, for Park and Burgess, demanded a familiarity with Schopenhauer, Santayana, and the “cosmic urge” diagnosed by none other than Bergson.
37 ecology of forces — “the selective, distributive, and accommodative forces of the environment” — that, pushed to their limit, would logically erupt the bounded city form.75
Influences But it is the period’s human geography, not its history or sociology, that supplies the most decisive escape from the trappings of the organismic — and that demands our attention at some length. “Forces”: the word is somewhat less prominent here than in companion disciplines, but the ontological challenge, only glimpsed above, of thinking the animacy of space itself was at the very core of geographers’ generation-long obsession with puzzles of environmental “influence” and its cognates.76 The discipline was young, politically reactionary for the most part, and topically at its all-time narrowest. But geographers’ vacillations on this one question are more complex than they appear — “environmental determinism” comes away a deficient label, as we will see, for several reasons — and their work deserves our scrutiny as one unruly bequest to the age’s diffuse common sense of space and time, and laterally to the nascent discipline of city planning, which came to theorize the vital minglings of spaces and subjects in its own way. Organismic tropes were no doubt present at several spatial scales in this incipiently modern geography, promising the elusive pairing of an integrated explanatory scheme with some measure of dynamic process, growth, and change. Friedrich Ratzel, for instance, like Turner, who had read him closely, (in)famously posited health-seeking life forms at the scale of the nation state, naturalizing territorial boundaries as “peripheral organs” and their violent expansion as the only evolutionary way to stave off “weakening and decay.”77 These worldviews were joined by other totalizing schemes that were more essentially mechanistic, still positing in Montesquieuian fashion one-to-one correspondences between the world’s varied regions (their landforms, their crops, their “climates” above all) and the peoples who inhabited them.78 Inescapable, too, between 1880 and 1920, was a notably clunky fixation on environmental
75 Roderick D. McKenzie, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community,” in The City, 64, 71, 63. See also “Movement and the Ability to Live” [1926], in Roderick D. McKenzie on Human Ecology, ed. Amos H. Hawley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 134–140. For a slightly awkward attempt to reclaim McKenzie for a Wallersteinian world-systems materialism, see David A. Smith, “The New Urban Sociology Meets the Old: Rereading Some Classical Human Ecology,” Urban Affairs Review 30 (1995): 432–457. For the latest qualified defense of Chicago School human ecology, now under the banner of the “neighborhood effect,” see the fairly colorless Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 76 For Albert Perry Brigham, the shifting human “relation to the earth and its forces, viewed as a unity” was geographers’ distinctive area of expertise, and to the extent that the age’s historians acknowledged the possibilities of interdisciplinary work — Turner encouraging it, Adams “manifest[ing] a little concern” — they were seeking to tap those very forces and better pursue “that study of environmental influence which must be common ground for all.” See Brigham’s “Problems of Geographic Influence,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 5 (January 1915): 16; emphasis added. On the shifting “catchment areas” of geography and early sociology in the U.S., see Matthias Gross, “Human Geography and Ecological Sociology: The Unfolding of a Human Ecology, 1890 to 1930 — and Beyond,” Social Science History 28 (2004): 575–605, which argues that Chicago sociology’s methodological hallmark was almost entirely poached from foregoing work by geographers (who, by the 1920s, were happy enough to cede the territory). 77 Friedrich Ratzel, “The Laws of the Spatial Growth of States” [1896], trans. Ronald Bolin, in The Structure of Political Geography, eds. Roger E. Kasperson and Julian Vincent Minghi (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 23, 27. 78 See Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 210–213, on the solace eighteenth-century geographers took in positing discrete climates as static “belts” rather than confronting the necessarily eventful (and for him quintessentially nineteenth-century) temporality of weather.
38 causality and rote human “response.” For the Englishman Halford Mackinder and many Americans, the only “true” human geography would ask, “How does it act on man in society, and how does he react on it?” “No other analysis,” he held, could achieve the “true perspective.” The environment’s only “force” was a causal force: the two concepts were entirely synonymous.79 As late as 1924, William Morris Davis, who had cut his teeth in Mackinder’s heyday, was still blithely insisting that “the progress of geography” as a “science” was contingent on its passage from “purely empirical” description to positive “explanation.”80 And the only authentic explanation was a causal explanation. The only thinkable temporality led from cause to effect, land to life, before to after. There were, in this sense, no environmental events, no chance, no flux.81 But we should be able to recognize other animacies submerged within even the most poisonous deposits of the “determinist” moment. Mackinder’s “Geographical Pivot of History” (1904), which anxiously announced the geopolitical importance of the Central Asian steppe, assumed an overarching “world organism,” a “closed political system” subject to “coercive” laws of eventuality. But pulsing beneath it all, the globe was a field of fluxes and immanent swells: “more elemental movements” were unceasing; “expansive forces” would “gather,” “stimulate,” and “grip”; “nomad-power” always threatened to exceed and topple the brittle orrery of bounded nation states.82 Albert Perry Brigham of Colgate would insist that same year that geographic conditions “have power in human affairs,” but in quite Bergsonian fashion he was loathe to impute obvious causation: nonhuman environments, weirdly animate, fully partake of “the complication and mystery that belong to life everywhere.”83 Reserves of this earthly “power” reside in situ, intensive, not exhausted by the events they (might or might not) have caused. But what kind of power was this? Ellsworth Huntington’s gnomic assertion that “a great force is constantly operating upon us for good or ill” openly resisted translation into discrete independent and dependent variables: “it would be of little use,” he insisted, “to stop and consider” what was causing what.84 Even Ellen Churchill Semple, Ratzelian cartoon of many a geography textbook, was by 1911 avoiding a language of causation, prefacing her Influences of Geographic Environment that “the eternal flux of Nature…warns against precipitate or rigid conclusions.” “Influences” were sufficiently dynamic, she allowed; “determinants” were something to “shun.”85 “Influences” increasingly won the day in geographers’ parlance, and the methodologies approved for their empirical study were dynamic indeed. W. J. Sutherland urged his colleagues in 1906 to heed the incalculable “abundance” of “life,” an abundance catalyzed in no small part
79 Halford J. Mackinder, “On the Scope and Methods of Geography,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 9 (March 1887): 147, 155. 80 W. M. Davis, “The Progress of Geography in the United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 14 (December 1924): 210. 81 See William H. Sewell, Jr., “Events as Transformations of Structures,” Theory and Society 25 (1996): 841–881, for a sense of the true “event” as one that ruptures routine. For a more messianic version of “the” event as that which “brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable” (9), see Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event [2010], trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2013). 82 Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23 (April 1904): 422, 423, 430, 428, 432. 83 Albert Perry Brigham, “Geography and History in the United States,” Journal of Geography 3 (October 1904): 359. 84 Ellsworth Huntington, “Work and Weather,” Harper’s Monthly January 1915, 244. 85 Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo- Geography (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), vii.
39 by the “variety of influences” and “many relations” traversing bodies in space.86 Huntington ontologized human subjects as packets of “energies” and “powers” that were “constantly varying in ways of which we are often quite unconscious.”87 Flux was all. “Problems of Geographic Influence,” Brigham’s 1915 presidential address to the Association of American Geographers championed complexity all the way down. Well before Carl Sauer laid down his bidirectional “possibilism,” with the imprimatur of Paul Vidal de la Blache and the French regionalists, Brigham was embedding the “physiological and psychical” within an awesome “plexus of relations,” “a total of infinitely variable factors producing infinitely diverse results upon the body and mind.”88 Environmental “coercion” and “control,” Mackinder’s causal mechanisms, gave way to a multiple, distributed milieu without essential center, outer boundary, or direction. Within all the ostensible organicisms and mechanisms, then, the most prominent geographers writing as the science of suburbia came of age partook fully and flexibly of the open-ended vitalism we have been tracing in its many permutations. Determinism connotes limitation, constraint, terminal enclosure from without. Influence, if etymology is any guide, resolutely does not: its spatiality is that of an unenclosed field of flows into and through bodies. “Geographic influence” bequeaths a spatial ontology of contact and connection, a provisional assembly of energy packets that is always in the process of interacting and coming undone. Without saying so directly — certainly without enthroning the generative agency of culture or “man” — these anachronistic geographers posited a more diffuse, atmospheric milieu, a pure betweenness of bodies and spaces traversed by a fluid very much like the lawless élan that Bergson named and many, many others sensed. And these academic geographers found wide popular appeal, informing the American “geographical imagination” well beyond the confines of the university. Brigham was instrumental in transferring problematics of environmental “influence” into primary- and secondary-school geography textbooks. Semple was a popular writer in her own right. Huntington published his major disquisitions on “climate” in Harper’s and comparable venues.89 More than a set of causal formulas or geopolitical doctrines, these geographers inflected the contemporary “culture of time and space,” to poach Stephen Kern’s words, with a vision of
86 W. J. Sutherland, “Geography and Life,” Journal of Geography 5 (March 1906): 122. 87 Huntington, “Work and Weather,” 238. 88 Brigham, “Problems of Geographic Influence,” 7, 15. Brigham, for his part, cites Jean Brunhes to shore up “the ‘humanized surface’ of our planet.” The classic statement of Vidalian possibilism is Paul Vidal de la Blache, Principles of Human Geography [1918], trans. Millicent Todd Bingham (New York: Henry Holt, 1926). For a careful rundown of anti-determinist rumblings in American geography, predating Sauer’s “Morphology” by as much as ten years, see Earl W. Kersten, “Sauer and ‘Geographic Influences,’” Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 44 (1982): 47–73. For Sauer’s own state-of-the-field roundup, which not only urges but asserts, as already existing, the non-dominance of environmental determinism, see Carl O. Sauer, “Recent Developments in Cultural Geography,” in Recent Developments in the Social Sciences, ed. Edward Cary Hayes (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1927), 154–212. For a serviceable survey of related ideas, see Armin Hajman Koller, The Theory of Environment: An Outline of the History of the Idea of Milieu, and Its Present Status (Menasha, Wisc.: George Banta, 1918). Compare with two period books, located nominally within sociology: Franklin Thomas, The Environmental Basis of Society: A Study in the History of Sociological Theory (New York: The Century Co., 1925); and the more mechanical Carl Kelsey, The Physical Basis of Society (New York: D. Appleton, 1916). 89 Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 83–91. On Semple specifically, see Harriet Wanklyn, Friedrich Ratzel: A Biographical Memoir and Bibliography (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 31–33.
40 space itself as a force, ineffably animate, enveloping bodies and elapsing in social and political time.90 Their normative missions were clear enough. Their justificatory politics of territory and racial conquest are easy to deduce and easier to refuse. But the vitalist-cum-materialist spatial ontology that subtended these geographers’ stances is more equivocal and interesting: a patchy, three-dimensional milieu of plasmas and ethers; a crisscross of physical currents and all-but- occult forces; a shifting and finally underdetermined vision of a world, an earth, eventfully alive in thoroughly modern spacetime. George Santayana sounded very much like a geographer in 1911 when, pronouncing the end of the “genteel,” or rationalist, inheritance of American philosophy, he counseled, “The whole world is doing things. We are turning in that vortex.”91
The Built Environment and the “Life of Things” “Environment” and its impress on human subjects: these were broadly shared concerns. “Environmental determinism” had a career, but a more fluid spatial sensibility, that of the milieu, finally won the day. Planners had milieu ontologies at hand as they set out to redistribute the industrial city into a constellation of scalable suburbs. The chief geographers working through “influences” at the turn of the twentieth century, however, were not engaged in urban geography in any specialized sense. As late as 1924, reviewing the literature that might yet call such a subfield into existence, Marcel Aurousseau had to admit that “it is not [a] specialization at all.”92 Ratzel’s analytics of Lebensraum were designed to encourage agricultural expansion.93 Semple dashed off a brief paper on the development of Louisville, but her task was hardly more capacious than an inquiry into the why of its “situation” along the Ohio.94 The specific heft of the built environment had almost no place in these analyses. The consequential “forces” uniquely within geographers’ purview seemed to radiate from soils, landforms, airs, waters — unbuilt “nature” rather than artifice. But these silences must not mislead. That period geographers had little explicitly to say about the built environment is interesting, but it hardly prevents their more diffuse vitalism — their attunement to a world inorganically but truly alive — from imbuing all the accoutrements of the urban scene. “Geography has to do with complexes,” writes Canguilhem, “complexes of elements whose actions mutually limit each other and in which the effects of causes become
90 On Ratzel and geopolitics, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226. Kern considers a related set of intellectual and cultural transformations in his well-known overview, but his implication is that the period’s loosenings of space and time (or their Einsteinian conjunction as spacetime) were necessarily avant-garde, like Cubism resistant to and liberatory from nineteenth- century bourgeois mindsets. The present analysis is a bit less sanguine. 91 George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” [1911], in The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 10. 92 Marcel Aurousseau, “Recent Contributions to Urban Geography: A Review,” Geographical Review 14 (July 1924): 444. 93 See Woodruff D. Smith, “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum,” German Studies Review 3 (February 1980): 51–68. 94 Ellen Churchill Semple, “Louisville, A Study in Economic Geography,” Journal of School Geography 4 (December 1900): 361–370. For another, similarly reasoned early example, see Frederick Valentine Emerson, A Geographic Interpretation of New York City (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1909). On another of the earliest urban geographies, also concerned with Louisville, see James O. Wheeler and Stanley D. Brunn, “An Urban Geographer Before His Time: C. Warren Thornthwaite’s 1930 Doctoral Dissertation,” Progress in Human Geography 26 (2002): 463–486.
41 causes in turn, modifying the causes that gave rise to them.”95 Full stop. “Complexes of elements”: from the first, the geographers’ very refusal to single out an exclusive domain of objects for analysis has allowed a more capacious attention to things, “natural” and not, as they come into being, coincide in space and time, interact, wear out their welcome, and pass out of view. Geographers have ever traced the shifting dimensions of ensembles, of milieux — of assemblages, if we accede to today’s parlance — without respect for their constituent parts.96 In this sense, geographers’ very permissiveness — or nebulousness, or raw curiosity — has shown a way beyond the stable spatial wholes, first, or temporal goals, second, that organismic frameworks enforce. And grasping built spaces as “complexes” or “milieux” occasions a third departure from organicism — theoretically the most crucial as we incline back toward this period’s rationalities and technics of (sub)urban life. The predominant tendency, in effect if not in intent, within organismic frameworks has been to restrict attention to organic kinds of matter, presuming a priori a qualitative split between life and non-life, organic and inorganic stuff, and granting agency only to the former. But the transactional composition of the milieu necessarily undoes any such boundary. Particularly as we approach the question of what built environments do as participants in life and work, the salient encounters, contacts, impacts, and impresses will routinely occur across and in violation of traditional boundaries between persons and things.97
95 Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” 109. 96 For one period geographer’s methodological credo that the discipline fundamentally studies “secondary compounds,” rather than “complexes,” see Nevin M. Fenneman, “The Circumference of Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 9 (1919): 6. 97 Much ink has been spilled in the name of “rematerializing” social inquiry, reanimating materiality itself, and refocusing cultural geography in ways sensitive to nonhuman agencies that predominant theoretical armatures have foreclosed or ignored. Loosely Deleuzian in character, keyed to the “inorganic life proper to matter” and correcting for 1990s-vintage poststructuralists’ Derridean fixation on signs and symbols, a constellation of “new materialisms” has posed questions that students of landscape and the built environment should be well equipped to answer. Important reference points on the “matters” of social and political theory include the essays in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore, eds., Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Richard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). See, in particular, Pheng Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialism,” in New Materialisms, 70–91; and Isabelle Stengers, “Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora’s Box?” in Political Matter, 3–33. A concise, hopeful manifesto for “vital materialism” can be found in Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. For many-splendored materialist provocations from a literary critic, see Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–22; and Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On the philosophical challenges of thinking things in themselves, independent of human consciousness, see the searching “object-oriented ontology” of Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re:press, 2009); Bruno Latour, “Irreductions” [1984], in The Pasteurization of France, trans. John Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 153–237, Harman’s starting point; Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011); Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things [2011], trans. Jon Cogburn and Mark Allan Ohm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); and Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Mel Chen, Animacies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), explores how processes of “mattering” underwrite the performance (and stigmatization) of race, gender, and sexuality. One important entrée to questions of materiality — transdisciplinary all the way down, but especially ready-to-hand thus far for geographers — has come by way of theories of “affect.” See Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), for particularly compelling statements on the felt texture of everyday life.
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The milieu, after all, as Canguilhem has shown, is less a place (lieu) than a purely processual betweenness (mi), thickly and inseparably in the middle, in the midst of all kinds of things — buildings, say, or streets, vehicles, infrastructures, soils, airs, other species, and, yes, other people.98 Without determining their outcomes, buildings actively participate in relationships: they organize or dissolve social groupings and divisions, channel or obstruct various kinds of movement, give affective color to the everyday, slowly but unceasingly erode (demanding maintenance), and sometimes, of their own accord, collapse. So do streets; so do fences; so do lawns. So, too, with varying degrees of interest and aesthetico-political import, does every-thing else.99
Within geography proper, new materialisms and vitalisms have drawn heavily on the work of Nigel Thrift as collected in Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2007). See also Derek McCormack, Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces, for diverse empirical extensions of this framework. For the beginnings of a “non-representational” approach to landscape, see Mitch Rose and John Wylie, “Animating Landscapes,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 475–479. For broader-based reflections, see Sarah Whatmore, “Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a More-Than-Human World,” Cultural Geographies 13 (2006): 600–609; Ben Anderson and John Wylie, “On Geography and Materiality,” Environment and Planning A (2009): 318–335; and the series Hayden Lorimer, “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-than-Representational,’” Progress in Human Geography 29 (2005): 83–94; Hayden Lorimer, “Cultural Geography: Worldly Shapes, Differently Arranged,” Progress in Human Geography 31 (2007): 89–100; and Hayden Lorimer, “Cultural Geography: Non-Representational Conditions and Concerns,” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 551–559. On architectural matters, see Jane M. Jacobs, “A Geography of Big Things,” Cultural Geographies 13 (January 2006): 1–27; Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An Ant’s View of Architecture,” in Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 80–89; Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories [1983], trans. Anne Boyman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); and Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque [1988], trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3–38. On the practice of planning, see Robert Beauregard, Planning Matter: Acting with Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Contrast with Neil Harris, Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), in which the agency of the built is metaphorical, conferred by human subjects and confined to an anthropomorphic, if suggestive, “as if”; Thomas Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” Theory and Society 31 (2002): 35–74, in which what buildings mainly do is constrain, circumscribe, negate, reinforce, and order; and Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Penguin, 1994). For techno- vitalist understandings of urban space more generally, see Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reassembling the Urban (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2002); and Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender, eds., Urban Assemblages: How Actor–Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (London: Routledge, 2010). In no sense should the present work be read as adjudicating the perfect blend of these literatures; still less should it be seen as “applying” a particular framework wholesale to the histories and landscapes at hand. Indeed, just the opposite might be true: many of these contemporary theorists have marshaled resources from the very fin-de-siècle debates unraveled in this chapter — another, diffuse sense in which this study might be read as a prehistory. 98 On this distinction, see Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” 117. 99 The present account of “things” and their activity — buildings and landscapes especially — should be set in relation to (but mostly apart from) several disciplinary traditions of thinking about materiality, material culture, and its relations with human subjects. For decades cultural geographers asked what landscapes and artifacts might mean, seeking to decipher spatial form as “reflecting” less visible symbols or social facts. Landscapes could matter, on this reading, but not act outside the bounds of human perception and interpretation. A classic statement is Peirce F. Lewis, “Axioms for Reading the Landscape,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, ed. Donald W. Meinig (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 11–32. Even another generation of geographers, newly “critical,” harnessed Marxist and postmodern theories to their project, the emphasis was still manifestly on symbolic power, as in Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); and Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1989). Amid this ostensible materialism of the “new cultural geography,” built things themselves largely receded from view.
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The first generation of self-conscious planners, without exactly philosophizing about it, sensed this ambient animacy of things — and in vernacular form fought out the battles between organic holism and a more textured, inorganic material vitalism. They sought to harness it, to foster it, to redirect it to new and profitable ends. Ensuing chapters’ treatment of those productive middle landscapes conceptualized and built amid the ferment of a nervous capitalist modernity ought, in some way, to force the question of what “a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered.”100 Issues of materiality and animacy, as Deleuze has remarked, are geographic to the core: “If things endure, or if there is duration in things, the question of space will need to be reassessed on new foundations.”101 And they are anything but abstract. To rethink the doings of the object world is, at once, radically to rework the capacities, vulnerabilities, and very constitution of the human subject.102
The meanings of landscape, too, in this work seemed more often than not unitary, consensual, total; see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Kabyle House, or the World Reversed” [1970], trans. Richard Nice, in The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 271–283, for a clever anthropological sketch of interior space as used and symbolically parsed that is nonetheless beholden to a scheme of airtight correspondences and homologies. Other anthropologists have eagerly explored “things” as they are circulated and differently valued; see Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Again, however, the agency in these accounts is uniquely human: objects figure as repositories for subjects’ mental projections, as media or tangible instruments of their realization, or as microcosmic “expressions” of national context or character. More complex graspings toward material agency have come from heterodox art historians: see George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), on the eventful “relays” among the “commotion” of artistic materials; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), on “abduction” by the artistic object; and Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), a recent and more aggressive takedown of subject-centric criticism. Historians and sociologists of science have also worked hard to rethink the boundary between persons and things; see, among many others, Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2007). The purchase of actor–network theory has been particularly acute in these quarters. For two empirically driven examples straight from the source, see Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” in Knowledge and Society, eds. Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1984), 1–40; and Bruno Latour, “Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest.” And see Bruno Latour, “Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?” Isis 98 (2007): 138–142. 100 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 411. Versions of this formulation recur in the later Deleuze (and Guattari). In What Is Philosophy? we are told: “Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things” (213). Crucially, in that same work the authors single out architecture, “the first of the arts” (186), as a domain of unusually lively matter: “The house takes part in an entire becoming. It is life, the ‘nonorganic life of things’” (180). 101 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism [1966], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Brooklyn: Zone, 1988), 49. 102 A truism inherited from the Marxian tradition, but an important one in need of redirection away from those theorizations that, confronting “things,” perforce assume a denunciatory pose against “reification.” Lukács is of course the canonical reference point on this question, but a generation earlier see Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money [1900], trans. David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1978), undeterred by a host of splenetic misreadings of his “new storey beneath historical materialism” that either assimilate Simmel’s comments on the “culture of things” to a proto-Lukácsian position or condemn it (as did Lukács himself) as insufficiently materialist. In any case, the impulse for Marxists has been to decry “things” — commodities, of course, but also technologies, architectures, and so on — as intrinsically opposed to “life.” The critique is purely negative in both its tone and its postulates: things reduce, constrain, and deny life; they have none of their own. Versions of this dualist argument reverberate through the thought of Victor Branford, Lewis Mumford on “technics,” much of Bergson, and other period vitalists. Sanford Schwartz even calls Lukács’s position “vitalist” in this sense; see “Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism,” in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, eds. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 297. Such jeremiads were amplified in the immediate aftermath of World
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Deleuze wrote these words apropos of none other than Bergson. We first encountered Bergson as the object of a fad. To the extent that we engaged his thought, it was as a thinker of time, not of space — not even of matter in any strong sense. And yet, popular American Bergsonisme circa 1911, if Deleuze is not deluded, inescapably introduced a new geography. It rendered explicit, and made popularly digestible, a new set of assumptions about the constitution of space itself. Indeed, reading Bergson’s cultic texts generously and against the grain, amid the more obvious acclamations of “time” and “duration” as they reside in knowably “organic” life forms, we can tease out a coherently lively and eventful theory of built environments — of inorganic things that are nonetheless robustly, weirdly animate.103 The “creative imagination,” Bergson ever insisted, “must not lose sight of space and matter.” Too many of his acolytes had imposed a false dichotomy for the sake of convenience; for Bergson “reality itself, absolute reality,” was revealed within, not in transcendence of, matter.104 But what kind of matter, with what texture? By the time of Creative Evolution, his greatest American hit, Bergson’s animism of all things, almost pantheistic in its upshot, was hard to miss.105 “Matter…must be a flux rather than a thing”; “a reconciliation between the inert and the living,” blurring both categories, was required. “Life…is essentially a current sent through matter, drawing from it what it can.” As his famous, if prosaic, example of a dissolving sugar cube would attest, “succession is an undeniable fact, even in the material world.”106 But even as early as Time and Free Will, episodically, in examples and asides, Bergson’s writings had worked to reenchant ordinary landscapes. Even as space is denigrated in one breath as merely the “homogenous physical universe” against which “the heterogeneity of our sensations” stands out, built environments play unexpectedly active roles in his thought.107 Buildings are quietly paradigmatic for Bergson’s theses on matter writ large: “My environment produces on me…impressions,” and to inhabit the space of a town, he ends up showing, is to persist amid a collection of houses that are always in the process of becoming, never at any moment quite the same as “[w]hen…I take my first walk in [that] town.” Indeed, “these objects, continually perceived by me and constantly impressing themselves on my mind, have ended by
War I, the “storm of steel” (after Ernst Jünger) that, in an industrialized war, seemed to imbue things themselves with a new violence and a new “objectivity”; see Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air [2002], trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2009), 25, 30. But even within the Marxist canon, there are ways out, affirmations and careful attempts to redirect thingly animacies to new, progressive ends. See, in the East, Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing” [1925], trans. Christina Kiaer, October 81 (1997): 119–128; and in the West, minimally, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), trans. Harry Zohn, 217–251. There is a strong case to be made, moreover, that Marx’s paradigmatic commodity, the dancing table that “stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas,” itself partakes of a similar temperament — a materialism in which things act and occur in ways that exceed human designs. See Karl Marx, Capital [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), vol. 1, 163. 103 “Of course, there is no reason to think that all matter is confined to the physicochemical strata: there exists a submolecular, unformed Matter. Similarly, not all Life is confined to the organic strata: rather, the organism is that which life sets against itself in order to limit itself, and there is a life all the more intense, all the more powerful for being anorganic.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 503; emphasis added. 104 Bergson, quoted in Slosson, Major Prophets of Today, 79. 105 For Sanford Schwartz, this signals Bergson’s move from dualism to monism. Animating the world itself, Schwartz argues, and not only the living beings who inhabit it, makes Bergson’s thought more, or more broadly, political. See “Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism.” 106 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 186, 265, 9. 107 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 205.
45 borrowing from me something of my own conscious existence; like myself they have lived, and like myself they have grown old.”108 To live is to live in contact with buildings; everyday life is this ongoing commerce of borrowing, impressing, and affecting; built things themselves, in but also out of their interactions with humans, can be said to live, act, occur, endure, and die. Buildings never quite stand still, he intimates: the “startling immobility” of architecture is only apparent, masking “effects analogous to those of rhythm.” Bergson discloses a material but incompletely visible architecture of impacts, lures, and cues: architecture “aims at impressing feelings on us rather than expressing them: it suggests them to us…command[ing] the resources of rhythm.”109 And if “the enclosedness of a house” has generally seemed like its very sine qua non, for Bergson these rhythms and resonances inherently resist closure, merging buildings with the rest of the landscape. An artist may sketch the tower of Notre Dame by itself, for instance, but the “tower is an inseparable part of the edifice, which is no less inseparably a part of the soil, the surroundings, the whole of Paris, etc.”110 This “is” is entirely non-metaphorical. Built form, thinkable as enclosure and isolation, is actually overtaken by the material forces that bind buildings to the landscape, to their inhabitants, and to each other. Bergsonian space is a milieu of “broken rings,” of boundaries traversed and traduced by restless fluids in trajectory.111 Matter does not come predictably “whirling on invisible circular belts,” but rather stubbornly runs off course.112 To inhabit this milieu is to live ensconced, permeated, acted on, and continually urged by such fluids. One of Bergson’s chief contributions, then, and one key affordance of the broad- based “cult of life,” was a curiosity about built environments as they happen. William James, the public philosopher who was Bergson’s correspondent and closest confidant on American shores, had little to say on built environments as such, but in his materialist Principles of Psychology (1890) and a series of popular articles leading up to Bergson’s vogue we can glean how fundamentally the period’s vitalism of things could rework the relation between bodies and spaces. For James, space must always be thought in three dimensions: more robustly than in Bergson, more explicitly than in contemporary human geography, the spaces of urban modernity volumetrically enfold the “cubic capacity” of bodies and their everyday lives. To wit, “the quality of voluminousness exists in all sensations.”113 He had been theorizing a version of the active, mind-independent milieu, in defiance of Kant, since 1879: “The spatiality comes to the intellect, not from it”; body and environs are “woven of one tissue, and not chopped into joints.”114 The materiality of one’s surroundings cannot be cast off: space atmospherically courses through the body, sensibly but invisibly inhaled. Individual- seeming “consciousness” itself is originally distributed throughout, and only then drawn from,
108 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 129–130; emphasis added. 109 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 15–16. 110 See Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones [1924] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1955), 104, on “the bare essentials of an object: the chairishness of a chair, the washiness of a basin, the enclosedness of a house…” Michel Serres comments that Bergson “invented this whole business about opened and closed, interior and exterior.” See The Parasite [1980], trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 68. But such distinction, while vivid in Bergson’s later moral philosophy, is blurred in his treatment of buildings and other “subdivisions” of space. For a related, Deleuzian take on the “myth of interiority,” see Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012). For Bergson’s tower-in-the-landscape example, see “Introduction to Metaphysics” [1903], in The Creative Mind, 143. 111 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 356. 112 Jones, The Age of Energy, 23. Jones is ascribing this ontology of eventless circulation to classical mechanism, but we could align it with bodily analogies that, while obviously more biocentric, are every bit as enclosed. 113 James, Psychology, 245, 202. 114 William James, “The Spatial Quale,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 13 (January 1879): 86.
46 the air. James is a theorist of atmospheres: “the stream of thinking…is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing.”115 And sentient bodies, James exclaimed again and again to a receptive public, are the suggestible, but by no means foreordained, products of the environments that envelop them. James’s proprioceptive vitalism could seem a bit vaporous: his fluid “streams” and distributed “tissues” of experience are material, but they are hard to localize. Elsewhere, though, his thought turns quite concrete, shifting from “space” as such to things in a way compatible with Bergson’s rhythmic architectures of impression. His treatise on the Principles of Psychology, reprinted in digest form as the best-selling Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892), defines “the self as known” in a most telling way: “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.”116 This soundbite, coupled with his ur-pragmatist utterance on the “cash-value” of ideas, has often led commentators to deride James as crudely “materialistic” in a pecuniary sense: depthless in the first instance, acquiescent in the last.117 Taking “things” more broadly, though, and actively — well in excess of “the goods life” — James puts forth a richly interactive ontology in which built environments can call out to us, color our affective lives, make demands on our time, inspire us, discomfort us, threaten us, or even kill us. James’s humans are only ever attached to things, in transaction with things: there is no escaping “all those habitual goings and comings and rearrangements of ourselves which fill every hour of the day…which incoming sensations instigate so immediately.”118 James dramatizes the essential betweenness of the mi-lieu. Subjects possess objects, yes, but are possessed by objects as well.119 Subjects are surrounded, gripped, encouraged, and in a strong sense produced by everyday material culture. James is sometimes read as a psychologist of interiority: his famous “stream of consciousness,” on this telling, elapses wholly within the mind, unextended but deep in a way compatible with Freud’s welling unconscious or, say, the steeled subjective withdrawal from urban stimuli that his contemporary Georg Simmel, all too Kantian in his earlier writings, seemed truly to believe possible.120 Modernist fiction of the 1920s, for which the “stream”
115 William James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1 (1 September 1904): 491. 116 James, Psychology, 43. The literature on James is staggeringly large, but for a sense of James’s popularity — and of how “Jimmy,” the nickname given to his saleable 1892 volume, came to underpin his later thoughts on religious experience — see Louis Menand, “William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient,” in American Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), 3–30. 117 On “cash-value,” and on truth as utility, see William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” University Chronicle 1 (September 1898), 307. For the view that James’s thought was “permeated by the smell of the Gilded Age,” see Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day [1926] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1968), 97. See also Robert Westbrook, “Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, and the ‘Pragmatic Acquiescence,’” in Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual, eds. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 301–322. 118 James, Psychology, 290–291. 119 Bill Brown contends that the dawn of the twentieth century, literarily and culturally, marks a turning point in American (awareness of, susceptibility to) being “possessed by possessions.” Inverting the Victorian attitude toward consumption, this new thinghood amounts to “a kind of possession that is irreducible to ownership.” See A Sense of Things, 5, 13. 120 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” [1903], trans. Edward A. Shils, in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324–339. Such is the predominant reading. It is also the case that Simmel, theorizing “mental life,” supplies almost no detail whatsoever on urban landscape (in his proximate case, Berlin). But we could, and should, tease out a more porous model of the subject in Simmel, whose work swung between an interiorized rationalism and a trans-subjective
47 conceit was a touchstone, is often read as effecting a similar dissociation of mental depth from environmental breadth.121 But these readings misstate James’s premium on relations. Experience is an interactive “conflux.” Felt events always “compenetrate.” “Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions…flower out of the stream of pure experience.”122 To think space as a living, acting volume, as James does, and then to submerge impressionable human subjects in a sea of objects, concrete but blurred, is to theorize a shared landscape of vulnerability. And such, finally, is the tragic value of James’s intervention: the “cult of life,” celebratory in so many respects, disclosed mounting popular anxieties about the precarious urban “with-ness” of persons and ambient things.123
Planning Suburban Milieux: To the Things Themselves In sum, philosophical vitalists had by 1915 deployed a vocabulary of “forces” and “influences” in ways that recast the texture and activity of space as such; of material things more locally; of built environments in particular; and of porous, excitable human bodies amid them. Social scientists, behind methodological fronts that were more austere and totalizing, had never fully prevented something like a panurgic élan from overflowing their frameworks. The spaces treated in these specialized discourses, as we have seen, were sometimes, but by no means always, explicitly urban. Returning now — for good — to the congeries of planners and builders with whom we began, and reading them differently, as theorists and technicians of the milieu, we can detect a strikingly similar vitalism at work, presumed if not always directly argued within the key texts of the City Scientific. Dynamic appreciations of matter and (its) life cannot be counterposed to, and so kept apart from, the emergent “rationality” of planning.124 A lay vitalism of all things runs sub rosa through the key documents, programmatic and applied, that from 1909 enduringly rendered technical the problem of how best to compose landscapes — suburban landscapes above all — vitalism all his life. See Donald N. Levine, “Soziologie and Lebensanschauung: Two Approaches to Synthesizing ‘Kant’ and ‘Goethe’ in Simmel’s Work,” Theory, Culture, & Society 29 (2012): 26–52; and Georg Simmel, “Life as Transcendence,” in The View of Life [1918], trans. John A. Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1–17. 121 For Virginia Woolf, the cultural landscape could not have been more distant from “the far more difficult business of intimacy.” For her, “house property” is in modern times a paradigmatically “useless” tool by which to gain access to affective relations. The built environment is distinct from and opposed to “life.” Pre-modernist writers “have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.” See Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 17, 18. 122 William James, “The Thing and Its Relations,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 2 (19 January 1905): 30. 123 The shifting play of “‘is,’ ‘isn’t,’ ‘then,’ ‘before,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ ‘next,’ ‘like,’ ‘unlike,’ ‘as,’ [and] ‘but,’” the very scaffolding of everyday sociality, transfixes James in “The Thing and Its Relations,” 30. “Where the experience is not of conflux, it may be of conterminousness…contiguousness…nearness… simultaneousness…in-ness…on-ness…for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of mere and-ness” (35). On the political promise of James’s prepositions for a society of essentially relational selves, see Alexander Livingston, “Excited Subjects: William James and the Politics of Radical Empiricism,” Theory and Event 15, no. 4 (2012). 124 Even in the spirit of arguing that one might be sympathetic to elements of “both,” a formulation that leaves each realm walled off and essentially untouched. This is the conceit that underlies Samuel Haber’s discussion of Walter Lippmann, whom we are to understand as exceptional: “With one hand Lippmann held to science and order, but he stretched to grasp indeterminacy, emotion, imagination, and even mysticism with the other. He praised the city planners and the efficiency experts, but he also praised William James, who respected the findings of the spiritualists, and Henri Bergson, who taught the doctrine of Life Force.” (Note that city planning seems commonsensically to be the anti-vitalistic profession.) See Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 91.
48 for residence and industrial work. Despite quite a few grandiose (and easy-to-lampoon) assertions to the contrary, “scientific” suburban planning did not involve the expert subject’s imposition of overarching order on empty landscapes or quiescent populations. Its distinctive “modernity” did not herald a wholesale break with past practices or ontologies, and what shifts did obtain cannot easily be labeled “rationalization” or “mechanization.” Nor, read carefully, did most of the profession’s standard-bearers articulate their projects in this way. The dichotomies typically enrolled to make sense of how this new urban knowledge emerged and constituted its objects, then, require several rounds of revision. We have already gestured at the many continuities between City Scientific planning and its City Beautiful forebears: aesthetics and technics, ideal and real, just do not mutually exclude.125 One constellation did not supersede the other. The point is not merely that the ascendant technicians somehow failed to loose themselves from an inertial past, or that modernity remains embroiled in a kind of dialectic with distinctly pre-modern hunches — i.e., that both discernible camps coexist and each has its proportional say. Nor is it enough to mock period mantras of order and system, or, by invoking their opposites, to undermine the cult of the concrete, the observable fact, the underlying principle. Rather, and more subtly, the very programs understood to be hallmarks of technical urban rationality presume the immanence of a-rational vital forces, provisionally harness them, and redistribute them through space. Their rationality, if the term can be salvaged, was itself a novel communion with, a reconfiguration and not a negation of, such forces. Their technics were always already biotechnics. Their machines were always, in the historian John Tresch’s suggestive sense, a little romantic.126
Few urbanists were directly sketching the filiations between landscape and life philosophy — reading or even comprehending the import of Bergson’s words. Patrick Geddes, in this as in so many other respects, was an outlier, insisting in Cities in Evolution that planners could inculcate “civic feeling” only by recognizing that “[i]deas, as Bergson rightly teaches, are but sections of life: movement is of its essence. The life-movement proceeds in changing rhythm initiated by the genius of the place, continued by the spirit of the times.”127 But a kindred language of form- erupting flux inhabits the work of countless workaday texts, technical in intent, generated by planners, builders, architects, realtors, and their extended network of mainline Progressive reformers. These professionals were demonstrably as committed to an underdetermined language of vital force and process as were the more speculative thinkers glimpsed above. In one intuitive (and still organismic) sense, many Progressives were wont to characterize the centrifugal thrust of suburbanization itself, mappable at the metropolitan-regional scale, as one such “force” of its
125 If for someone like Camillo Sitte there was an “innate conflict between the picturesque and the practical,” even Charles Mulford Robinson, whose historiographic reputation is as a prim aesthete, could introduce his 1906 plan for Oakland, California, within a language of science: “For beauty is not an ornament to be stuck on. Its essence lies in its structural utility.” See Sitte, City Planning according to Artistic Principles, 100; and Charles Mulford Robinson, A Plan of Civic Improvement for Oakland, California (Oakland: Enquirer Publishing, 1906), 3. On another rapprochement carried out in the borderlands between aesthetics and technics, see Robert Freestone, “Reconciling Beauty and Utility in Early City Planning: The Contribution of John Nolen,” Journal of Urban History 37 (2011): 256–277. 126 And see Tresch, The Romantic Machine, 3, for a list of other, associated binaries that this recognition should perforce undo. 127 Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 333, 363. For an unusually direct French appropriation of Bergson in the 1920s and 1930s, see Charissa Terranova, “Marcel Poëte’s Bergsonian Urbanism: Vitalism, Time, and the City,” Journal of Urban History 34 (2008): 919–943.
49 own, natural and ineradicable, that might then be gently directed into prescribed channels.128 But they were even more committed, at the scale of the workplace, the subdivision, the block, lot, and house, to exploring how such forces might (already) imbue the very objects amid which everyday life unfolds. Their raw materials were, in a strong sense, alive. Reading these technicians as ontologists of a sort, we can trace many gradationally different theses on the animacy of built things and their impingement on the human sensorium. But note: this less-than-ordered Progressive kinetics of “things” is very much unlike the counterpart discourse to which Cleveland’s Frederic Howe, supervening on “The City as a Socializing Agency,” had given voice in 1912. For the municipal reformer Howe, as good an emblem as any of the stern practicality of post-1909 planning, “the life of a community is controlled by physical things.” A city fundamentally is just such a collection of things: “We have thought of men rather than things. We have [therefore] had no city program.” But for this kind of reformer, the built environment is only ever a structural “frame” for living, an inert series of constraints on non-things. Individual things — buildings, rails, pipes, roads — exert their effects only insofar as they occupy slots within interlocking systems that can be comprehensively “planned before they are built.”129 Control, constraint, pre-emption: in this disenchanted modernity, landscape is the ultimate naysayer. But other, more vitalist renditions of the object world were ready to hand. Pronouncing on “The Architectural Side of City Planning” in 1915, and claiming only to be triangulating “the utilitarian and the esthetic,” the New York architect Frederick L. Ackerman recast the very makeup of the built environment, its stewards, and its effects using language that Bergson and James would recognize. Architecture is a “physical composite,” surely, but never inert: it is “a vital thing related to life.” Buildings are “the resultant of endless varying impulses acting through those who design and those who fabricate”; the architect, correspondingly, is never a hermetic mind-in-a-vat, but a channel for “the forces of our day,” indeed a conductive “medium through which the forces shall be adequately expressed.” Such “impulses,” Ackerman implied, do not originate inside the subject, but are externally present in the world, ambient, mind- independently flowing across and through the architect’s body, equipment, and materials. Architectural education, Ackerman urged, to keep pace with modernity, would need to be reshaped, cultivating each architect more as the “coordinator of many things” and their propensities than the originator or imposer of formal order ex nihilo. And buildings, once built, would in turn not only mean — or symbolize, represent, express — but impress themselves
128 An association which the cultural-geographic locution “morphology” in fact preserves. That term can casually refer to synchronic forms, but in the sense proper to Goethe, who coined it with respect to plant biology, form always harbors, indeed is, a reservoir of underlying force. Form is only ever a moment in the ongoing, diachronic process of formation. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants [1790], trans. Douglas Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). Carl Sauer, who appropriated the term for landscape study, cites Goethe directly in “The Morphology of Landscape,” 326–7. On Sauer’s longstanding affinity for “Goethenia,” see Martin S. Kenzer, “Milieu and the ‘Intellectual Landscape’: Carl O. Sauer’s Undergraduate Heritage,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (June 1985), 264; and on Ratzel as the intermediary between Goethe and Sauer, see Wanklyn, Friedrich Ratzel, 41. For two founding texts appointing an urban morphology, see James E. Vance, Jr., The Continuing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), and M. R. G. Conzen, Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis (London: George Philip, 1960). 129 Howe, “The City as a Socializing Agency,” 596, 590.
50 biophysically, in “intimate relation,” on “the impulses of our lives,” working “through many subtle forces and influences, both conscious and unconscious.”130 Ackerman’s propositions were broadly, if tacitly, shared among his contemporary architects and planners: One variegated, but finally undivided, mass of sensible stuff yokes together the living and its milieu. One current of liveliness jointly animates them both. The things called buildings result from some unnamed set of “forces,” the conversion of which depends on human assistance, but then, once standing, they spark another. The large objects that fill up the urban world themselves emit forces that embrace, loosely synchronize with, and redirect our bodies’ already-existing impulses. Buildings participate in milieux, resonant atmospheres of a sort that never quite settle into self-evidently bounded wholes. Ackerman himself figured serially in many of the flashpoints conventionally used to mark out planning history as it unfolded from the 1909 origin story to 1929, when market failure slowed urban development and prolonged depression diverted the “planning” concept into other social and economic channels, dilating it well beyond the physical environments with which the term had been coextensive.131 Ackerman can serve as a transplanter and implanter of this vitalist planning imaginary — from heady Progressive law-giving to the experimental subdivisions of the First World War to the withering critiques formulated by the Regional Planning Association of America as the nation’s cities grew in ways that deviated from their plans. But the travels of a sensibility exceed the words and deeds of any single carrier. The coming chapters should not be read as a sequential progression, an unfolding of these ideas, but as a multiplication of their applications, any one of which might serve as a point of entry into this prehistory of the postwar suburb — a history of landscape’s forces, not its forms.
The fact is that this vitalist ontology of landscape intensified considerably around the planning of suburbs. Suburbs, more than “central” cities, were laboratories for its application, assessment, and refinement. Industrial suburbs, where landscape might animate work as well as repose, gave the active “life” of landscape still more urgent stakes. Of course, it was easy enough for hardened urbanites — certainly those with temperaments and aesthetic preferences as conservative as those of Henry James — to see “nothing” in particular going on beyond the city’s edge. In Washington Square the suburban fringes of southern Brooklyn, out by Green-Wood Cemetery, are nearly invisible, good primarily for “clandestine visits” between forbidden lovers, where, “in a thick veil…they would endure a period of romantic privation.” Such edge realms seemed radically other to the city’s core, unmarked “neutral ground” thinkable principally in terms of their “empty lots and undeveloped pavements,” i.e., in terms of what they were not.132 Facile oppositions of city and suburb, center and edge, have enjoyed a long career. More often than not, these have been premised on dichotomies of urban work and suburban residence, urban production and suburban consumption. Figures of suburban emptiness, nothingness,
130 Frederick L. Ackerman, “The Architectural Side of City Planning,” Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference on City Planning (Boston: National Conference on City Planning, 1915): 107, 109, 116, 117, 118, 108, 110. A shorter version, edited for another thematic emphasis, was published as Frederick L. Ackerman, “The Battle with Chaos,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 3 (October 1915): 444–447. 131 Franklin Roosevelt adopted his more-than-spatial concept of “planning” directly from the tradition we have been describing. On these continuities, see John Hancock, “The New Deal and American Planning: The 1930s,” in Two Centuries of American Planning, ed. Daniel Schaffer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 197–230; and John L. Hancock, “Planners in the Changing American City, 1900–1940,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 33 (September 1967): 290–304. 132 Henry James, Washington Square [1880] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998), 70, 129.
51 quietude, or at best overweening order — keyed by default to spaces specialized for middle- class, non-industrial land uses — run deep in scholarly and popular discourses, and they have roots that antedate the First World War. For Van Wyck Brooks, for instance, born 1886 in the “Wall Street suburb” of Plainfield, New Jersey, suburbs were non-places to which their dwellers remained unattached: “Our families were in it but not of it…. [T]he two great cities that flanked the state on east and west had as it were depolarized the New Jersey mind.”133 Depolarized, dislodged from anything like the bodily imbrications of a bona fide mi-lieu, and “devitalized” besides by “the industrial process” itself: suburban landscapes, on this telling, could seem singularly antithetical to the insurgent “cult of life.”134 For someone like Brooks, in his youth a Nietzschean and episodically a socialist, they were immaterial voids, convenient holes left by the ossified “formalism” against which urban Lebensphilosophs could then be said to “revolt.” But these readings obscure. As the leading edge of outward-bound “overflow,” the period’s new suburban landscapes were broadly imagined, by their stewards and shapers, to be unusually conducive to just those forces, invisible but in every sense material, that vitalists of so many stripes were diagnosing with zeal: not less animate, but differently animate spaces, than the humanly dense urban core; not truly blank templates for top-down spatial order, but laboratories in which ambient, underdetermined forces might then be tapped, loosed, tilted in new directions, and harnessed to new ends. These turn-of-the-century edges — “middle landscapes,” in an established American parlance, poised between city and non-city and susceptible to the influences of both — figured in their very betweenness as exemplary mi-lieux where vaguer, atmospheric spatialities of ambient “force,” channeled through built things but finally in excess of human control, could most palpably achieve grip.135
So far we have treated these questions within conversations that, if not centralized, were the province of self-appointed “experts,” professionals dedicated to formalizing and (inter)nationally disseminating knowledge, in writing and on the landscape, about how best to shape suburban space. But many other actors deployed or contributed to these emergent knowledges with less explicit reflection and in vernacular spaces that were ostensibly “unplanned.” Only by scaling down empirically to a single metropolitan region, and indeed to the lives and afterlives of a limited set of workplaces on its periphery, can we meaningfully grasp the materiality of landscape as imagined, planned for, confounded, and endured. It is to California, the continent’s western edge, that we turn in ensuing chapters. Environment, climate, nature, culture, race, property, work: the intersection of these categories has followed a different genealogy in and around California’s cities, site and referent of a distinctively, darkly American vitalism of landscape. On the eastern edges of San Francisco Bay, in particular, where industrial development was ascendant just as the earnest methodologizing of the City Scientific achieved
133 Van Wyck Brooks, Scenes and Portraits: Memories of Childhood and Youth (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1954), 2. 134 Van Wyck Brooks, “Letters and Leadership” [1918], in Three Essays on America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934), 118. 135 After Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). For Marx, the ideal of the “middle landscape” first appears in the eighteenth century as a principle of social solidarity. “But no one, not even Jefferson, had been able to identify the point of arrest, the critical moment when the tilt might be expected and progress cease to be progress. As time went on, accordingly, the idea became more vague, a rhetorical formula rather than a conception of society, and an increasingly transparent and jejune expression of the national preference for having it both ways” (226). Marx does not nominate suburban landscapes, exactly, as analogues of this “preference,” but many historians subsequently have. See, for instance, Peter Rowe, Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
52 its highest pitch, a series of ventures in town planning — some failed, some barely visible — both intensified and challenged received wisdom about what suburban landscapes, in a climate of self-conscious experiment, might do.
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Chapter 3
“Problems Peculiar to This Coast”: Vitalist Planning and Metropolitan Dispersal in the Bay Region
It was 1913 before Californians laid eyes on the City Planning Exhibition that had done so much to instill “the planning idea” in cities of the Northeast and Midwest, and 1914 before an autochthonous California Conference on City Planning met for the first time. Coming together organizationally toward the tail end of the Progressive Era and redoubling their efforts as the state’s cities and suburbs mushroomed in the 1920s, the state’s planners articulated a distinctive sensibility of the built environment as a composite of forces, atmospheres, and affective charges. Astride all the trappings of God’s-eye technical rationality, these men (nearly all of them men) posited novel ontologies of landscape, “nature,” matter itself, and their respective reservoirs of “life.” As they grappled with what Charles H. Cheney, an evangelist for the planning discipline and in 1914 arguably the leading figure adapting it to local needs, called “problems peculiar to this coast,” Californians pointed up a new set of both–and compromises between matter and life, mechanism and vitalism — peculiar indeed, darker than popular canons of nature worship would let on, and promiscuous in their application.1 Natural philosophy informed how Californians conceived of their cities. Ideas drawn from the unbuilt “wild” saw translation into the design, governance, and appraisal of densely built environments. A peculiar strain of the vitalist imaginary that, as we have seen, oriented the first generation or two of American planners came vividly to the fore in and around the cities of California. There, planners and builders assumed, drew on, and redirected an extensive storehouse of lay and scientific intuitions about the immanent “forces” or “energies” coursing through landscape and rendering it unpredictably active as a participant in social life. They imported a version of this baseline animism, more-than-human in its emphasis but never entirely describable as a strict “environmental determinism,” into their calculations on what the built environments they were configuring might be able to do.
Nature, Naturalism, and the Dark Enchantment of Landscape Scientists, philosophers, novelists, travelers, and others had long imputed some ineffable kind of animacy to California’s landscape. A centerless but potent consensus seemed convinced of that environment’s notional capacity to affect, incline, suggest, call forth, or influence unique kinds of human endeavor. California, indeed, figures as a privileged site in the intellectual networks sustaining life philosophy, American-style, and the geographical imagination it entailed. William James’s first enunciation of “pragmatism” as a name for his premium on “life rather than logic” took place at the University of California, Berkeley, before an audience he suspected would be intuitively receptive. “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” (1898) is a statement in which the landscapes of “this wondrous Pacific Coast” incline philosophers to behave not as didacts but as sited “path-finders,” ever “marking and fixing” provisional solutions: “what their formulas express leaves unexpressed almost everything that they organically divine and feel.” In his peroration James again consults “this wonderful Pacific Coast, of which our race is taking possession,” wagering that here, uniquely here, “the principle of practicalism [a term later
1 Charles H. Cheney, “How California Cities Can Profit by Active City Planning,” Pacific Municipalities 28 (1914): 31.
54 discarded, but here still co-starring with “pragmatism”]…will come to its rights.” Californian space was a proving ground for this new, needed American anti-foundationalism, and it was the stage for — but also evidence for, and a participant in — an intuitional, intensely sensed philosophy of landscape written in terms of its doings, not its meanings.2 James was hardly alone in this premonition. Other visitors from points east made similar consultations of the Californian scene, earnest if somewhat gestural, to shore up excited, more- than-logical philosophies of nature’s vital force. James’s colleague George Santayana, who had for years been mounting his own expressive critique of reason, delivered his most celebrated address, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911), on the Berkeley campus. Insisting that “perpetual hazard, perpetual experiment keep quick the edge of life,” he portrayed the interpenetrating context of that activity, too, as anything but inanimate: “The whole world is doing things. We are turning in that vortex.” Landscape, he said, like music offered “spiritual resources” to “those whose cannot or dare not express their unfulfilled ideals in words.” To think, and to sense, landscape was already to exceed the faculties of human reason. For philosophers of a certain cast, its intricacy and sheer muchness helped cinch the materialist case for a flight from mind-in-a-vat rationalism. Inescapably at issue on the Pacific coast, Santayana felt, were the tenuousness of human agency as a philosophical category — and of anthropocentric baselines more broadly. Santayana had the heights of the Sierra in mind, whose “non-human beauty and peace” could “stir the sub- human depths and the superhuman possibilities.” Crucially, though the lessons these sublime peaks and valleys seemed to impart could not help but suffuse voyagers’ daily life upon their return to the city and the campus: “if the philosophers had lived among your mountains,” Santayana pronounced, “their systems would have been different from what they are.”3 Santayana spoke these words on the eve of his repatriation to Spain, the Sierra burned into his mind as the diagnostically American landscape. He never returned to these shores. It would be too much to suggest that a coherent community of Pacific Coast philosophers was consciously taking shape. As late as 1957, Elmo A. Robinson could insist that “[i]f one excepts the pseudo-philosophical cults of the southland, California has produced no school of philosophy, no point of view, no unique contribution…. There is no native school. This may be bad or it may be good.”4 In a more distributed sense, though, among its visitors and habitués
2 William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” University Chronicle 1 (September 1898): 287, 288, 289, 310. On James’s travels in California, see Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 376–380, 468–477; and, on a later trip, Linda Simon, “William James at Stanford,” California History 69 (1990): 332–341. The 1898 talk was sponsored by the Philosophical Union, a group headed by the idealist George H. Howison that, from 1889 to 1919, hosted discussions and annual addresses that gave “occasion for several of the important philosophical utterances of the time.” For a compendium, see Folder 8, Records of the Philosophical Union of the University of California, C-U 200, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 3 George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” [1911], in The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 16, 14, 18–19. Much of the essay is a gloss on James’s thought as it developed since his Berkeley address thirteen years prior. There are differences between the two men’s programs, as well as their politics. The more conservative Santayana pursued a “naturalism” that was not strictly equivalent to “pragmatism.” But commensuration was at least imaginable (if the following syllogism of Santayana’s can be endured), and, crucially for their engagements with landscape, both were firmly trained on the material: “the more materialistically we interpret the pragmatist theory of what the mind is, the more vitalistic our theory of nature will have to become” (15). 4 Elmo A. Robinson, “One Hundred Years of Philosophy Teaching in California (1857–1957),” Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 383.
55 alike, we can trace something like a set of ontological hunches constellating around the California landscape. This added up to a vitalism that could reside in rather than skirt the materiality of our surrounds. It included an allergy to anthropocentrism and a sort of reverence before — but a willingness to speculate on — the various agencies that non-human landscapes might be said mutely to evince. Academic philosophers had nothing like an exclusive claim on these insights. John Muir, who had decamped to California from Wisconsin on the trail of some vaunted “wild,” is diagnostic of how lay Californians on either side of 1900 saw fit to invest the natural landscape, at several scales, with a kind of roiling, more-than-subjective life. Muir’s exclamatory My First Summer in the Sierra, issued widely in 1911 but itself a digest of journaled impressions made in 1869, is suffused with a language that is classically vitalistic at root. One moment of his thought has Muir celebrating the natural world as index, deposit, or sign of some supernatural quiddity. This obligates him to render the landscape as a kind of text, “a grand page of mountain manuscript that I would gladly give my life to be able to read.” Subjects and spaces, in this first instance, stand apart, two distinct strata mediated only by the semiotic. More often, though, Muir presents a monist vision of human bodies and landscapes — topography, vegetation, atmosphere — materially interpenetrating. “We are now in the mountains and they are in us,” runs his most quotable quip, which, taken as a statement of ontology, harmonizes Muir with much of the period’s crypto-Lamarckian social science. Muir is a theorist of the milieu, attuned to the frictions and interchanges, the phenomenological betweenness of having-a-body and being-in-the world: these, for Muir, are primary, uncancellable by idealist flights of fancy. His claim is not only that the landscape ensconces and occupies our volumes, “entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat” — not simply that it is compresent or consubstantial with us. Every bit of matter, for Muir, “so-called lifeless rocks as well as water,” is active, dynamically acting with, on, and irrespective of human deeds. Those self-same rocks quite literally “hol[d] the eye in devout admiration, cal[l] it back again and again.” The verbs matter. Like many nature writers in his wake, Muir is not above anthropomorphizing to cinch a point — “The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly” — but he is not beholden to it. Ontology first: “Everything,” at every scale, “is flowing,” influencing, impinging, “building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing,” and — only then the judgment — “ever beautiful.”5
Muir was peculiarly purple in his execution, but California had loomed for decades as a limit case for thinkers interested in probing the nexus between the physical environment and its effects on social life. Human geographers, in particular, framed it as a laboratory, found rather than made, in which to pose anew, observe, and trouble one of that discipline’s broadest and most basic dyads. In their brittle, inimitable way, contemporary academic geographers imagined California to be an uniquely apposite place to confront, and perhaps even to quantify, the more- than-human “forces” of landscape as a source of social order. Their criteria were more self- consciously formal than Muir’s, but the underlying hunches about the inorganic life of landscape were broadly shared between discourses expert and lay. Californian encounters, whether born of field study or thought experiment, occasioned some of the more weirdly vitalistic pronouncements to come of the crude social theories issuing from the field’s single-mindedly “environmentalist” moment. Studies worrying over “California” as independent explanandum
5 John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra [1911] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004), 56, 9, 71–2, 130, 64, 131.
56 intensified all the trappings of geographers’ “determinism,” but, read closely, they also came to call that label into question. For Colgate University’s Albert Perry Brigham, who addressed the Association of American Geographers as its president in 1915, at the acme of the deterministic mania, California presented a dynamic environment that was quite literally “compelling” of human response. “Sky and mountain, ocean and plain, forest and desert, mine and field” all conjointly did their work. California’s natural landscapes, in sum, were both stimuli and guarantors of a new human subspecies “with wandering in the blood…recognition of no barriers” and “fulness of life.”6 The environment, Brigham reasoned, actively and over time produced subjects in its image. Ellsworth Huntington of Yale, a broadly public intellectual in his time, understood Californians, selected and then encouraged by the peculiarities of their environment, to evidence “unusual vigor and initiative, strong in body and mind.”7 “Health, energy, and progress,” his darkly biosocial The Human Habitat (1927) suggested, were clearly correlated with aspects of the landscape. (These traits could be summarily renamed “civilization” as context required.)8 Both Brigham and Huntington shored up their claims by looking back to Josiah Royce’s synthetic California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (1886), decades old by this time but still, into the 1920s, taken as its own kind of unsuperseded common sense. Royce had sought to specify the essences of California’s “character,” its “community,” and a more or less Hegelian rendition of its Statehood, but his methodological thesis, that beneath events the historian had to ferret out the more fundamental “forces of local life,” led him first to treat of “the land.”9 This energetics of landscape, a rhetoric that could bend toward nationalistic programs of blood-and-soil, had marinated over the course of the nineteenth century. Usually it carried generic references to “the West,” not to California as such. Frederick Jackson Turner, most often read for his celebratory specification of the “frontier” at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, had also posed “The Problem of the West” (1896) as an exercise in regional geography. The West was, he said, historically the nation’s “region of action”: an “open field” active upon bodies with an embrace firm enough then to unleash their own “energy, incessant activity,”
6 Albert Perry Brigham, “Problems of Geographic Influence,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 5 (January 1915): 2. 7 Ellsworth Huntington, “Geography and Natural Selection,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 14 (1924): 10. Huntington, one of the traditional arch-villains named in contemporary histories of the geography discipline, was by the 1920s steeped in a racialist eugenics, which, pushed to its extreme, could factor environment out of the equation in order to treat purely of the gene pool. But environment would not go quietly; see his poisonous but popular The Character of Races (New York: Scribner, 1925) for a characteristic attempt to reconcile inheritance and milieu; and Geoffrey J. Martin, Ellsworth Huntington: His Life and Thought (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1973). For a recent accounting of race and the history of geography, in which the era of determinism is a key inflection point, see Audrey Kobayashi, “The Dialectic of Race and the Discipline of Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (2014): 1101–1115. 8 Ellsworth Huntington, The Human Habitat (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1927), 136–147, and passim for further permutations of the race–space nexus. 9 Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886), 1. And, subsidiarily, the climate that accompanies that land. Royce was a Harvard colleague, and often a critic, of James and Santayana. See Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); and Kevin Starr, “‘Because I Am a Californian’: The Loyalties of Josiah Royce,” in Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 142–171.
57 minting a “new political species.”10 Turner’s work was the more triumphalist face of it, but, as the historian Linda Nash has argued persuasively, “[f]or nineteenth-century Americans,” most of them anyhow, “the body itself was not a clearly bounded entity, separate and distinct from its surroundings…. The body flowed into the environment, and the environment seeped into an individual body,” operating in everyday ways as “an agent of sorts,” diffuse but no less material for it.11 And it was in the West that most insistently used this taken-for-granted ontology of transactional bodies-in-space to anoint distinctions of race, class, gender, and other social diacritics, explicated in the neutral terms of health and sanitation, as natural, and of national import.
The historiography on Muir and his generation of naturalists has been less than critical. Muir’s adulation of nature’s “one general harmony” more often than not comes off as innocent.12 It is easy enough, and appropriate, to lampoon the “back to nature” industry’s assurances and exclusions piling up as it accrued strength during the long nineteenth century.13 And on the face of it, most California nature writing from this era bears a strongly anti-urban stamp. (American human geographers of the time, as Chapter 1 showed, said precious little about city life as such.) Muir, who spent his later years adjacent an apple orchard in the small East Bay city of Martinez, could only barely tolerate life even in the precarious, encroached-upon “middle landscape” between town and country.14 This chapter rotates the explanatory task, following these philosophies of the “wild” and the “natural” back into Northern California’s cities, where their transcribers, ostensibly “regenerated,” for the most part continued to live and work. In cities and suburbs, intuitions about an environment, natural or built, that was in essential ways active on the human sensorium could then assume radically, riskily new forms. These lively ontologies of nature became subtly more corrosive when enrolled to order or denounce the crowded urban scene.
10 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Problem of the West” [1896], in Frontier and Section (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice–Hall, 1961), 73, 69, 68, 64. 11 See Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 24, 8. Nash suggests that the late nineteenth century, with the rise of germ theory, consolidated a medical and cultural understanding of the enclosed “modern body” as decisively cut off from the environmental flows that might seep into or stimulate it. The more transactive sense of inseparable bodies– spaces, wherein “health” is then a matter of management and provisional balance, corresponds for her to an earlier, notionally “pre-modern” age. But Nash resists hard-and-fast periodizations, and a shift from mainline medical discourses to the lay environmentalisms propelling mundane practices of spatial planning should point up the continued viability of this ontology of malleability and porosity — certainly into the early twentieth century, and perhaps, in disguised forms, to the present day. (Nash does narrow her study to California’s Central Valley, but see 31–33 for a discussion on the recapitulation of colonial medical discourses west of the Mississippi but east of the Sierra.) For a similar ontological vision, see Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies–Cities,” in Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995), 103–110. 12 Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 40. Smith, who happens to give Santayana pride of place in his introduction, seems to posit a truly liberatory, humbled non-anthropocentrism that prospers even and especially in scientific practice. His folk geography of knowledge, noting “how universally scientists in California attributed changes in their thinking to the influence of their new environment” (62) goes unremarked; only with the explicitly imperial ambitions of Panama, circa 1915, and with a predictable Taylorization of science, does his account sour. On Santayana, see pages 1–8. For an exception to those who would adulate Muir, see Jake Kosek, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 142–182. 13 See Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), for one classic survey of how this urge became manifest. 14 On which see David Hickman, “John Muir’s Orchard Home,” Pacific Historical Review 82 (2013): 335–361.
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City Life: “Energy,” “Vigor,” and the Edge By the turn of the century it was common, even banal, for literate visitors to remark on Western cities’ dynamic “atmospheres” and to distinguish them in terms of their ambient “energy.”15 The forms this rhetoric took, the environmental features used as its proxies, and the economic predicates it bespoke could vary widely. Since the 1830s Europeans touring New England’s textile centers had noted “an atmosphere aptly described by the then current American adjective ‘go-ahead.’”16 In the larger cities this designation most often denoted the fluidity of American commerce, positing the “passions” that Smithians had taken for a metaphysical “propensity to truck and barter.” When, in 1907, William James defined the “energy” of cities by “[t]he rapid rate of life, the number of decisions in an hour, the many things to keep account of,” he had non- industrial work in mind: the office hand, the bookkeeper, the latter-day Bartleby, the captain of industry (but not his labor force). The previous year’s earthquake, he said, in its aftermath served chiefly to apprise San Franciscans of “the stores of bottled[-]up energy and endurance they possessed.”17 “Atmosphere,” loosely used, could smack of the metaphorical, an imperfect way to apprehend a given city’s genius loci, felt but unspecifiable. Yet “atmosphere” might allow us to name an epochally distinct way of theorizing landscape and its activity, a consistency more in line with ethers (still unfalsified in the physical sciences) or plasmas (a relatively recent addition to the life sciences’ lexicon) than with the obvious bounded geometries, defined by their exclusive insides and outsides, that usual talk of urban “form” requires.18 Atmospheric apprehensions of landscape run through realist and naturalist literature, in particular, which from about 1880 persistently cast dense center-city scenes as motile, animated milieux of energies and charges, murmurs and whirls — tangible, quaking mediums that could stimulate, but also finally suffocate, their subjects. In Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1894), for instance, Stephen Crane’s tale of the working-class Bowery, the atmosphere of a “collar and cuff establishment,” i.e., a sweatshop, “strangled” the unsuspecting: “The place was filled with a whirl of noises and odors.” In one “hilarious hall,” i.e., a vaudeville theater, the “usual smoke cloud” was so palpable that “heads and arms seemed entangled in it…. Plenteous oaths heaved through the air…. The smoke eddied and swirled like a shadowy river hurrying toward some unseen falls,” all of which “seemed to impart wildness to the half-drunken crowd.” Flexibly
15 A growing literature addresses techno-natural “atmospheres” as an alternative way to intercut the social and the spatial dimensions of urban life. See Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces [2010], trans. Sarah de Sanctis (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2014); and “The Atmospheric ‘Skin’ of the City,” Ambiances (2013): 2– 14, for one version of the concept’s (admittedly vague) philosophical foundations. For a more widely used and abused formulation, see Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres I: Bubbles [1998], trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2011). On the challenges involved in grasping “atmospheres” as produced, or as emitted by things built, see Christian Borch, ed., Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2014); and David Gissen, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 16 Marvin Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness: The European Response to American Industrialization, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 47. 17 William James, “The Energies of Men,” Science 635 (March 1, 1907): 324. 18 See Olli Pyyhtinen, Simmel and the “Social” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 175–6, on how Georg Simmel, then, and Bruno Latour, now, might be read as propounding geographies of “plasma,” plenist understandings of space in which matter may assume all manner of forms but begins from a pre-morphological state of flux. For a related analysis of “individuation,” see Gilbert Simondon, “The Physico-Biological Genesis of the Individual” [1964], trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter, in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 297–319.
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Lamarckian mergings of body and environment obtain for Crane indoors, within enclosed buildings specialized for work or for play. They obtain outdoors, too, in public: “On the corners” one hanger-on “was in life and of life. The world was going on and he was there to perceive it.”19 Cities were canonical sites of artifice, but once erected they were powerful generators of new natures — and conductors of just the affects, vigors, and vitalities that James and Bergson had diagnosed in all things. These tropes came vividly to a head with Henry James, William’s itinerant younger brother, whose The American Scene (1907), a dense reportage of impressions redacted upon returning to the country after twenty-one eventful years abroad, brims with commentary on the charged, felt material “airs” and “mediums” of urban life. In New York at length, but equally in cities up and down the Eastern seaboard, James transmits a plenist sense of the built-up world in which space is volumetric more than areal, subjects and surroundings thickly interpenetrate, and the critic’s sensorium in medias res is at once taxed and enchanted by the “formidable foreground…there is more than enough of this pressure of the present and the immediate to cut out the close sketcher’s work for him. These things are a thick growth all round him.” The scene is more than human; it is more than he can process, anyhow, and James tries his best to catalogue everything that “mixes intimately with the fulness of my impression”: “the assault of the turbid air,” “the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence,” “a welter of objects and sounds” that resist analytic separation. The American scene, we glean in an ontological key, acts on us; it proposes itself; it impresses itself; it emits a milieu of forces, vague but material, that shoot through and exceed even the most careful recorder’s body. There are no empty spaces. And we — the wide-eyed prodigal James, but by implication all of us — only ever seize on a specific structure, Trinity Church or the Waldorf–Astoria, thickly through such a milieu: “We commune with it…through the encumbered air…an architectural object addressed…and permitting thereby a relation of intimacy.”20
19 Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets [1893] (New York: Bantam, 1986), 26, 44, 14; emphasis added. Sound and odor are the senses Crane privileges to apprehend these scenes from within. But even visual perception, for him, is a material contact, admitting no vacuum between subject and object, seer and seen: one child’s inurement to the brutal muchness of the slum is cast in terms of the “inexperienced fibres of the boy’s eyes” becoming “hardened…. He became a young man of leather” (13). 20 Henry James, The American Scene [1907] (New York: Penguin, 1994), 99, 65, 61. James’s aesthetic is one in which form, architectural or otherwise, does not “express” something else, but impresses itself on its unwitting beholder. His trans-Atlantic contemporary George Santayana had recast aesthetic theory in a related, naturalistic way in The Sense of Beauty [1896] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1955). Value resides in form: “what does the circle express except circularity, or the oval except the nature of the ellipse?” (54). These American buildings will neither stand still nor keep to themselves. James’s built environments are every bit as active as he is. The age-old Bowery Theatre is “bristling, amid the traffic, with posts and piles that were as the supporting columns of a vast cold, yet also uncannily-animated, sepulchre.” “Place speaks,” for James; “constructed and achieved harmonies,” i.e., buildings, “mostly speak.” At certain moments, he even assigns dialogue to the space between buildings (“the voice of the air seemed to say, if I may so take it up…”). James, The American Scene, 145, 80, 83; and see Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 177–188, for a consideration of this “proclivity for declamation” (177), wherein James “transforms substance into thought by giving voice to objects” (178). This, for Brown, is “the radical gesture within his reactionary cause” (186). For the most sustained attempt to recover a non-conservative cultural politics in James, see Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), in which The American Scene’s “open, mimetic stance” (142) as wanderer plays no small part. But the activity of James’s varied thingscapes does not depend on these occasional recourses to anthropomorphism. For James, built environments manifest an a-subjective kind of agency that is discernible entirely in its effects — on inhabitants, on observers, on the air, on each other — without assigning some notional
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A swirling atmospherics of urban life could underwrite a whole new way of understanding the spatial distribution of the industrial city. For vitalists, industry was not a negation of the natural, but a way of tapping and dispersing it. To make sense of industrialization, Santayana had counseled a blurring of nature and artifice: “When you transform nature to your uses, when you experiment with her forces, and reduce them to industrial agents…[y]ou must feel…that you are an offshoot of her life; one brave little force among her immense forces.”21 Walter Wyckoff, who as a transient had worked in factories dispersed to Chicago’s West and Far Southwest Sides, in 1901 characterized the Loop in terms of “the reach and the strength of the industrial forces which are centered there.” “Energy and skill,” “productive powers,” “life” that could be “distributed” or “wasted”: these were his ontological building blocks of the American manufactory.22 Questions of industrial location, of architecture, of management science: all could be rethought in a a naturalistic key. At its most unguarded, this streak in urban criticism could reduce the city to a domain of animal urges. The city could figure as one dilation of Muir’s “wild,” relocated but never stamped out by the preponderance of built things. Western cities, distinctly more so than Eastern ones, were the site and reference of these animalizations, which were frequently pejorative in character. Turner denigrated frontier cities as “dens”; at best they were the outlet for “swarms of settlers” ejected from Eastern “hives.”23 These slippages quickly acquired a racial cast. The German journalist-turned-geographer Friedrich Ratzel, whose 1873–74 rail tour of a continent’s worth of cities culminated in San Francisco, mused for pages on the “bracing influence” of that city’s air (mocking the cliché with scare quotes), the thickness and visibility of the “really terrible” dust that seemed always to cloud it, and the burdens, vocational and then moral, it imposed on the bodies daily within its caress. He then began his inventory of social types, marshaling folk wisdom on groups’ relative responsiveness to that atmosphere. The upshot of Ratzel’s work was to set up criteria by which one could tell apart the city’s “feverishly energetic people, with a feverish love of life,” from the “dull, stolid group” inhabiting Chinatown, the landscapes of which could be transmitted only in less-than-human terms: its “teeming life,” its “anthill-like appearance,” the “limited, passive beings,” under-vitalized by their air supply, who only ever “chatter like a bunch of geese.”24 Vigor, energy, atmosphere, life: as ontological terms these were indeterminate, and in recontouring the interface between spaces and subjects, they could work to degrade as well as describe. Similar intersections of animality, race, and atmosphere run through the urban fictions of Frank Norris, the Californian around whose work and public persona these linkages were unusually, and tellingly, tight. Over the course of several novels, Norris marked out a position that was certainly less systematic and more spasmodic than those his academic counterparts
consciousness or intent to, say, a column, a streetlight, a brick. And if we apprehend buildings only by way of the “American air,” the fine materiality which bathes and “lends a felicity to all the exactitudes of architecture and sculpture” (138), then buildings, it stands to reason, have to make the same detour to secure their effects on us. They disturb that materiality, that milieu to which we are susceptibly attached, and so disturb our bodies. Buildings act, but indirectly. Buildings act at a distance. 21 Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” 18. 22 Walter A. Wyckoff, “Incidents of the Slums,” Scribner’s 30 (October 1901): 492. 23 Turner, “The Problem of the West,” 70, 71. 24 Friedrich Ratzel, Sketches of Urban and Cultural Life in North America [1876], trans. and ed. Stewart Stehlin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 281, 283. And see Carl O. Sauer, “The Formative Years of Ratzel in the United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61 (1971): 245–254, for further reflections on these travels.
61 dared to put in print. His program of “naturalism,” however, a discernibly, darkly vitalist ontology of the world — a philosophy congenitally related to what readers could glean from James or Santayana. “Force” is the term of art. Norris posited great “external forces” everywhere motivating (and largely overcoming) human actors. In an age of urban transformation, wrote the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, “[t]hese forces were certainly real enough, the forces that were changing the American scene.”25 But, curiously, critics routinely laud Norris himself for evincing the very same qualities. Even William Dean Howells, the novelist so representative of Santayana’s bygone “genteel,” descended into a life-philosophic argot upon his counterpart’s death: “The vitality of his work was so abundant, the pulse of health was so full and strong in it.”26 It was McTeague (1899), Norris’s inescapable novel of San Francisco, that best transposed these questions of vital forces and their violent upsurge into a compacted, brutally under-varnished urban space. Personality, in the naturalist novel, is essentially subservient to these inhuman fluxes. Norris’s titular dentist, slow-witted, gigantic, and murderously jealous at the gold his wife has won in the recent lottery, is less a unified thinking subject than a bundle of urges. He courts the woman, such as it is, only because a “virile desire in him tardily awakened, aroused itself, strong and brutal. It was resistless, untrained, a thing not to be held in leash an instant.” He does not decide courses of action so much as fight “the old battle…the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted.” Sex, violence, and greed are the basic founts of human action in McTeague: bodies navigating the city are “gripped” and “thrust” about, shaking “with a formless, uncertain dread.” Some bodies, as the depictions of McTeague’s neighbors attests, are always more animal and instinct-bound than others: the domesticated Mexican maid who can muster only rote responses in conversation; the hunched, taloned Jew who palpably hungers after a set of golden dishware. But all are decisively overcome by the capitalized city’s moving atmosphere itself — all “murmur,” “rattle,” “shuffling,” and “trundling” — which remains unstanchably alive.27 Tellingly, though, these premia on essentially uncontainable vital impulses ended up directing attention to the outer limits of the city. Ontologizing urban landscape and urban “life” as fundamentally a crucible of mobile, unstable forces, commentators raised the question of where their impatient trajectories might ultimately lead. Any full-blown urban vitalism, that is, contains in germ a vitalist suburbanism.28 McTeague is very much a novel of the city — and its
25 Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years: 1885–1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952), 220. 26 William Dean Howells, “Frank Norris,” North American Review 175 (November 1902): 770. To research The Octopus, Howells said, Norris “went to California and renewed his vital knowledge of his scene.” And see the obituary for Norris, San Francisco Examiner, 26 October 1902, for the same impulse: the author was himself “strong, vigorous, and very fecund.” 27 Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco [1899] (New York: Norton, 1997), 19, 21, 39, 9. For one exploration of the racial entailments of this and other of Norris’s works, see Colleen Lye, “American Naturalism and Asiatic Racial Form,” Representations 84 (2004): 73–99. On the bio- and neuro-politics of Norris’s work in the age of “neurasthenia,” see Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 132–165 and passim. 28 “The will to grow was everywhere written large, and to grow at no matter what or whose expense.” Some of Henry James’s most searing images in The American Scene turn on the rising of “impudently new, and still more impudently ‘novel,’” skyscrapers, and on the everyday reality that “such and such a house, or a row, is ‘coming down.’” Up from, then down back into the self-same plot of land: in Manhattan especially, James by and large verticalizes urban flux. Yet, more quietly but no less consequentially, his forces and flows sweep across space horizontally: “Overflow,” he comes to realize, “is the main fact of life.” James, The American Scene, 43, 60, 85, 100. James can be read, in germ, as a theorist of suburbanization.
62 most distant antithesis, the deserts and mountains where, having murdered for a share of his wife’s gold, the dentist eventually flees — but Norris seems especially curious about the ambivalences of those nascent, unfinished realms at or just beyond the city’s edge. He has his overheated principal “taking long and solitary walks beyond the suburbs of the city,” in the name less of repose than a brusquer, more violent renewal: after a few hours’ “unreasoned enjoyment” marching west of San Francisco’s Western Addition, the “instincts of the old-time miner were returning.” Before one decisive peri-urban stroll, McTeague calls upon a dog hospital just to liberate “four of the convalescents” for company, “crazed with joy at their release.”29 Southern Californians, too, yoked this nature talk to transformations in urban form. The journalist Arthur S. Phelps, in 1906 glancing inward at Los Angeles from the eastern outpost of Redlands, moored himself to similar assumptions as he foretold a “coming exodus” from the city. A decentralization of population and urban form, he averred, was the logical outlet for restless “[f]orces no less fierce than Kipling’s animal folk” that were “letting in the jungle of the heart of man.” Said exodus was an eventuality: “[m]an,” after all, “is an animal that does not thrive long in captivity.” In suburbanization — a swelling, redoubtable “force” all its own — he and others saw a redemptive escape for the “life” that swirled about the city and could not but seep out. And, crucially, for Phelps the erupting city was a distinctly gendered centrifuge in which “katabolism, the male element,” predominated: suburbs were originarily for labor and laborers’ regenerative play, and only secondarily for a demure domesticity.30 Forces disperse. Energies escape. Atmospheres shift, drift, and overflow. Such were the reigning vocabularies in urban criticism as Northern California’s cities metastasized.31 The
Already in 1880, in Washington Square, he was dramatizing the tension between “old” New York, organized like his titular square as a series of inward-looking enclosures, and the newer growth, the lengthwise “tide of fashion” that “set steadily northward, as…thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do.” New New York was “the long, shrill city” of “the great longitudinal thoroughfare.” And James was fascinated — bemused, but fascinated — by that northern periphery, incomprehensibly between city and country, where one might dwell on “an embryonic street with a high number — a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter.” Forces, fluxes, waves: James and his more eagerly vitalist contemporaries site the origins of this chaotic spatiality at the putative urban center, where compression of “life,” or numerically of human lives, is by conventional canons most intense. But if overflow is primary, as James’s fluid ontology so strongly suggests — if urban form intrinsically gives way to elongation, eruption, cross-cutting forces of extension — then “the breaking public wave” must ultimately head somewhere else. To characterize the urban scene, at whatever scale, as a milieu fundamentally made up of forces and impacts is already to raise the question of how those forces intensify or wither at the city’s advancing edge. Henry James, Washington Square [1880] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998), 10, 11–12; James, The American Scene, 77. 29 Norris, McTeague, 183, 32. On period rhetorics of male, not female, “regeneration” by suburbia, see Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990). On how such “regeneration” related to the twinned turn-of-the-century affects of confidence and fear, see Alan Gowans, The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 2–13. Gowans’s architectural specificity is impressive, but he does little to situate this talk within the different biological or philosophical currents of the age. 30 Arthur S. Phelps, “The Coming Exodus,” The Arena 35 (April 1906): 391. 31 By 1933, reviewing “the last two or three decades” of prodigious residential and industrial expansion in the “outer zones” of the American metropolis, the early urban geographer Charles C. Colby was deploying a very similar language of functional “overflows” that would cast doubt on the bounded, holistic city form that Park and Burgess had enshrined — and sounding a bit like Henry James, minus all the style points. If on the one hand Colby ontologizes “the modern city” as “a dynamic organism,” with all the dispassionate trappings of the Chicago School sociologists he knew so well, on the other he sublates an ontology of “impulse” and “impetus,” a real but
63 discourse was flexibly naturalistic in tone, and equally descriptive of bodies, economies, infrastructures, buildings, and landscapes. As its developers and reformers began, in the early 1900s, to make more deliberate attempts to plan this growth, the question became how to direct or distribute these forces. California large-scale urbanization was sudden if perhaps not “instant.” The coast lacked great, inertial urban centers that could only slowly and grudgingly be decanted to the periphery. Questions of how to collocate home and industrial work at or beyond the city’s edges — or how to methodically disperse them from the very first — were on the agenda with a new, disciplined insistence. Questions of how to suburbanize extant urban functions were at the absolute heart of the nascent “scientific” planning profession. Planners — native Californians and, especially, not — routinely imagined the state as a kind of laboratory where techniques of redirecting these “forces” and giving them provisional “form” could be experimented with, tinkered with, exhibited, observed, and in time exported farther afield.
Distributing the Californian City: Vitalism and Decentralism Between 1900 and 1930, each of Northern California’s major cities was the client and object of at least one published plan. Mayors, chambers of commerce, and other, more specialized groups of reformers commissioned studies and eventual reports of formidable scope from some of the leading American planning practices — based almost entirely in the Northeast and working with, indeed embracing, some degree of unfamiliarity with the conditions regnant on Pacific Time. These “expert” planners sought putatively comprehensive order; California, with its peripheral location and somewhat belated urbanization, could seem like the optimal blank slate in which planning-from-scratch, whether guided by City Beautiful or by City Scientific dictates, could at last come to fruition. But each plan is more complex and equivocal. Each manifests a tense negotiation between the more and the less absolutist faces of planning. Each plays out, and then gives point to, the polarities between mechanism and vitalism that lent structure to Chapter 2. Indeed, each, read closely, can seem like a struggle over the very definition of planning’s proper objects — and whether any of them will ever stand still. Two visions, two ontologies, continually interpenetrate: one voiced as a problem of abstractable technics, deducing solutions from general and site-neutral principles of formal order; the other appealing to the immanent vitalities or forces of the site, insisting on singularities, on felt textures, on the excessive and less-than-fixed materialities of space. One is redolent of the Weberian “modern” in its objectification and rendering-passive of the landscape; the other admits persistent or recoverable forms of landscape’s own animacy. The first privileges motifs of
“imperfectly recognized set of forces.” Urbanization, his analysis suggests, in large measure is suburbanization. Cities consist of forces, and thus they decentralize. Edge landscapes are the very product of, and morphological testament to, such forces. Space itself is recast as a questionably mappable field of naturalistic pushes and pulls — “an urge to leave and an invitation to come” — rather than a constellation of fixed points. However desirable “organic form” may have been as a guiding ideal, it was not ontologically prior. Forces, pulses, paths beyond: these were. Colby writes from the far side of the metropolitan, motorized 1920s, when decentralization led many observers quite basically to rethink what kind of spatial unit a “city” or “region” even was, but the ontological shift toward “force” had been worked out a generation prior. See Charles C. Colby, “Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces in Urban Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 23 (March 1933): 1, 3, 4; and, for a more general methodological elaboration, in which “[t]here are forces” and “variables,” even if geography has no “objects,” see Charles C. Colby, “Changing Currents of Geographic Thought in America,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 26 (1936): 1–37. And note: Colby does speak a language of discrete urban “zones,” but unlike Burgess — and unlike many empirical documents of the Chicago School that begin by actually reprinting Burgess’s diagram before zooming in ethnographically on one neighborhood or trend — Colby, a geographer, includes no maps.
64 spatial enclosure at several scales; the second admits the porosity of boundaries, seeking to harness and enhance the cross-cutting flows of “nature.” The first focuses on the supervenient urban center as anchor, icon, and animator of the urban whole, sometimes made sensible by talk of the integral “organism” and its one clear “nucleus”; the second, admitting the flux and overspill of urban life, focuses its attention on the shifting, ever redrawn and reconceptualized suburban edge. The remainder of this chapter examines how these planning logics could work together. It traces some of the counterintuitive ways in which non-Californians — Burnham, Robinson, Nolen, and Hegemann, at first, in San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, and Oakland — understood “problems peculiar to this coast” to inhere in the question of the animacy of landscapes natural and built. Through a generation’s worth of their designs, we can begin to understand some of the tacit aspirations, anxieties, and conflicts over how planners and other shapers of space might address the profession’s central reformist concern: the methodical dispersal of industrial work, workers, and their homes. It was around this problem, in a region where even the leading “cities” had, and have, physical forms that are in a strong sense suburban, that planners worked out their distinctive mandate and modus operandi, which, by the First World War, was neither “environmental determinism,” as most critical histories of Progressivism suggest, nor its wholesale renunciation, but a freighted biotechnics of what we have been calling the milieu — an indirect intervention on sensate social life by way of the basically unpredictable animacies of landscape, natural and built.32
32 Mansel G. Blackford, The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), is an efficient volume that touches on some of these plans and the economic conditions under which each planner was retained. Blackford addresses projects in Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles as well. “Variety characterized the resulting plans” (155). “Most fundamentally,” however, Western “reformers and planners believed that people could be changed — and changed for the better — by altering their environments” (154). Mel Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), is another essential reference, told from a normatively regionalist standpoint that becomes unignorable by his 1920s chapters and nearly obstructive by the 1950s. For those looking to support the thesis of a fully anesthetic technicization of city planning — and, with it, a retreat from visual strategies of exhortation — 1918–1920 would seem a more appropriate cutoff, in California at least, than the 1909–1910 signpost conventionally used to divide City Beautiful from City Scientific. For examples of post-visual planning (be it “urban” or “regional”), see Charles H. Cheney, General Report on Progress of a City Plan for Fresno (San Francisco: Charles H. Cheney, 1918), which depicts one extremely grand civic center but largely skirts aesthetics; Carol Aronovici and Guy Wilfred Hayler, Recommendations on City Plan for Richmond, Based upon a Social Survey and a Series of Eight Plans (Richmond, Calif.: Carol Aronovici, 1922); and Harland Bartholomew and Associates, A Proposed Plan for a System of Major Traffic Highways, Oakland, California (Oakland: The Major Highway and Traffic Committee of One Hundred, 1927). The ineffectual Regional Plan Association, on whom more later, disseminated diagrams and maps but was always light on images. On Cheney’s late-blooming interest in aesthetics, which he pursued after moving to Southern California in the 1920s, see Fukuo Akimoto, “Charles H. Cheney of California,” Planning Perspectives 18 (2003): 253–275. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., produced street and traffic plans for Los Angeles and Santa Barbara in the 1920s, but nothing more conspicuous than that (and no significant Californian work to match his peers Burnham, Nolen, Robinson, or Hegemann in the pre–World War I period). Susan L. Klaus claims that Olmsted, Jr., had lost faith or interest in comprehensive planning as early as 1918; see “Efficiency, Economy, Beauty: The City Planning Reports of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., 1905–1915,” Journal of the American Planning Association 57 (Autumn 1991): 456–470. But see also his lately rediscovered park-and-parkway plan of 1930 (with Bartholomew and Cheney) as republished in Greg Hise and William Deverell, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted–Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
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Daniel Burnham’s grand-manner Report on a Plan for San Francisco (1905) is a logical starting point, drawn up on the eve of San Francisco’s earthquake and, despite the ostensible blank slate that event deposited, never realized in its aftermath. For the skeptical, Burnham’s plan, like his Plan of Chicago four years later, has long served to illustrate the pretensions of the high City Beautiful moment. It is not difficult to see why. Before descending to his sponsor city, Burnham furnishes a purely “Theoretical Diagram of the Plan of Paris” (Fig. 3.1), marks out its ironclad axes, and calls for San Francisco — or any other city by chance standing in for it — to be “conquered by girdling the city with a boulevard,” delimiting, or constituting, the comprehensive “whole” for subsequent management. He outlines a completely “General Theory of the City,” transferrable ad infinitum, marking out all of its significant “elements” and “districts” in advance of any specific intervention. The signature parks that line his design are chiefly to be “studied for their effects from afar.” Burnham himself devised most of the plan’s features and flourishes while stationed in a cabin purpose-built for his stay on the city’s steep, sparse Twin Peaks. And, while matters economic and domestic do in time fall within his scope, the ornamented civic center, whence the glory of “administration” radiates, is always “the real being of the city proper.”33 But, between the bold brush strokes, even Burnham softens his absolutes. In a sense, the topography and atmosphere of San Francisco do it for him. The jagged hills, the gridiron street system running indiscriminately over their peaks: these “render a typical description impossible.” The city’s odd, all-too-material fog imposes itself in such a way that the architecture of any proposed civic center will need to body forth with uncommon “vigor” to be visible, as “the atmosphere softens profiles and silhouettes.” Elsewhere, the ambient wind and the copious dust it carries are among the variables Burnham wishes to harness, accommodate, and redirect. There is a thickness, a knottiness, to Burnham’s inventory in three dimensions of San Francisco’s rough Pacific landscape and how it might (not quite) articulate with his tidy Classicist impositions.34 And if Burnham indexes the viability, indeed the very being, of his retouched city to its ceremonial center, all statuary and coordinated cornice lines, his banishment of certain land uses to and beyond the city’s edge is a key component of what is finally a quietly distributive program for urban structure. The Report concludes by attending to the hospital, the almshouse, the cemeteries, decisive “block[s] to the city’s progress and circulation” that “belon[g] on the outskirts,” where the “atmosphere” might be more accommodating. Burnham’s triumphal city- centrism also includes, and depends on, a methodical dispersal — never a mere “scattering” — of needed but unruly uses to the ragged middle distance that extends indefinitely beyond the strictures of the “girdle,” southward on down the Peninsula.35
With Charles Mulford Robinson, the Rochester-bred, Cambridge-based beautifier, the rhetoric was never so stark, the imperial gestures never so grandiose as with Burnham. His commissions for Oakland and then San Jose dramatize a similar compromise between a distanciated urban
33 Daniel H. Burnham, Report on a Plan for San Francisco (San Francisco: Sunset Press, 1905), 37, 36, 39, 145, 40. On its non-implementation, see Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area, 101–107. The standard study of Burnham is Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); and see Samuel Kling, “Wide Boulevards, Narrow Visions: Burnham’s Street System and the Chicago Plan Commission, 1909–1930,” Journal of Planning History 12 (2013): 245–268. On several cities’ experiences with City Beautiful–style planning, see the sympathetic William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 34 Burnham, Report, 88, 180, 181–2, 67. For an early criticism of San Francisco’s grid plan in light of its hills, see M. G. Upton, “The Plan of San Francisco,” Overland Monthly 2 (February 1869): 131–136. 35 Burnham, Report, 182–3, 67.
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Reason and the subtler, unenclosable sorts of natures that blur the city form at its edges but might yet be economized. In San Jose, to which the Outdoor Art League, a group of female reformers, had brought him in for consultation, Robinson exalted his own expert’s perspective, precisely because non-local, as conducive to something like total circumspection. The Beautifying of San José (1909) begins with a lament and a request: “I am not sure that [the city’s] exact character is appreciated by the citizens themselves…take with me an abstract view of just what San Jose stands for today, and wherein, to the eyes of an outsider accustomed to the study of such matters, its future seems to lie.”36 In Oakland, which he had visited just three years prior on a separate visit, Robinson had worked at the behest of Mayor Frank Mott, an archetypal scion of efficiency- worship, and his Plan of Civic Improvement (1906) contains its share of overdone science talk, prizing clean edges, enclosures, and functional separations before all else: order itself. Beauty would be a matter of “structural utility”; open spaces were, more than scenes of everyday assembly, opportunities to “make an attractive object”; the clean, associatively middle-class lines produced by uniform setbacks on residential streets and enhanced by “scientific trimming” of street trees were recommendable for reasons related to both aesthetics and fire prevention.37 Scaling up to the city as a whole, Robinson, not unlike Burnham across the bay, sketched out a linked system of parks and boulevards radiating from Lake Merritt, “as worth while to frame adequately the landscape picture…as to frame adequately a painting.”38 Yet Robinson also depended, as a matter of counterpoint, on a vision of nature undisciplined. Here his faith in its rational control visibly slips, and in his thrusts toward a properly Californian rendition of the garden-city ideal he gave the lie to his outward premiums on airtight form. By the 16th Street rail terminal in West Oakland, which at this time offered a chance to compose the fullest and most formal “entrance to Oakland, and of civic worth,” Robinson gave in to the already-existing palms lining Sixteenth Street: “not usually the best of trees for a city street,” he counseled, but in their own native way affording “unusualness and essential stateliness,” and amenable to an “informal simplicity suited to the plain neighborhood.”39 He leavened his San Jose will-to-abstraction with a series of surprising, site- specific appeals to the affordances and activities of the natural landscape. Some were a bit predictable, and all too providential, bowing to vague natural “advantages” and the small city’s sense of “destiny.” At other points he cited the authority of an intentional-seeming, telic life force that had itself planned out the city, and that his own efforts would only ratify: “How does Nature surround a spring?” Robinson asked apropos of park planning. “She is the master designer.” “Nature has done much for us.” That “[y]ou call it already the ‘Garden City,’” he felt, indicated something essential, although “[c]alling San Jose the Garden City does not make it so” (Fig. 3.2). Direct, considered consultation of the landscape would be necessary.40 In these acts of communion, Robinson suggested, San Jose — and, by extension, all Californian cities outside of San Francisco, which “in glitter and garishness…is sure to outdo
36 Charles Mulford Robinson, The Beautifying of San José: A Report to the Outdoor Art League (San Jose, Calif.: Charles Mulford Robinson, 1909), 5. For a commentary on the subtle gendering of “beauty” in civic art, see Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13–41. 37 On class and the symbolic politics of setbacks, see Paul Groth, “Workers’-Cottage and Minimal-Bungalow Districts in Oakland and Berkeley, California, 1870–1945,” Urban Morphology 8 (2004): 13–25. 38 Charles Mulford Robinson, A Plan of Civic Improvement for Oakland, California (Oakland: Enquirer Publishing, 1906), 3, 18, 19, 6. 39 Ibid., 15; emphasis added. 40 Robinson, The Beautifying of San José, 32, 5, 6.
67 you” — might become in nuce a wholly new kind of city. It would be a distributed “city of homes” such as the Eastern states had never been able to know. The defining features by which San Jose could “attract” attention and capital — always active verbs appended to the city as a whole — were congruent with the middle-class suburban best practices that reformers nationwide were then codifying: “in beauty of gardens, in tree-lined avenues, in the convenience of a small community, in its better housing, its freedom from crowding, in the easy access to a pleasant outdoor life” (Fig. 3.3). Robinson understood the threats unchecked suburbanization could pose to San Jose’s limited downtown nucleus — “[i]t will be much to the city’s interest to hold the trade and attention of this section” — but sensed that the impulse toward further outward-bound development was inevitable: “small towns will develop nearer the homes…and San Jose will lose the ordinary business and banking of a community so wealthy and so numerous as to be well worth catering to.” Much of his report, indeed, can be read as a grappling with how to recognize, value, harness, draw on, and induct (by annexation if nothing else) the tentacular development already puncturing the city’s de jure edge, “even if these form only strips…just as Los Angeles has a ‘shoestring’ strip leading to the sea” (Fig. 3.4).41 To urbanize, here, would be already and unrestrainedly to suburbanize. In California, Robinson came to believe, to suburbanize was natural.
When city commissioners brought John Nolen in to reimagine Sacramento, the state capital, in 1914, the unofficial dean of the planning profession took the opportunity to reframe questions of functional and aesthetic order, even more sharply, as questions of suburbanization. California’s cities, he would later remark to a realtor friend, “need to be planned with more elbow room.”42 What Nolen had in mind were not the prosaic pastorals that so animated Robinson on the outskirts of San Jose. Conscious that aesthetic beauty might be symbolically even “more important here,” in a capital, “than in other cities,” Nolen nonetheless focused his energies on planning the conjoined decentralization of residence and industrial work — on a far less stylish or eye-catching landscape type, hardly monumental in the fashion typical of most capital cities.43 In his final report of 1916, he proposed as the “most urgent” item a scheme of “definite building districts or zones,” and within it a tiered system sorting residential areas by class. Working-class housing ought to be carefully collocated with workplaces themselves: “This land is of low value,” but “being near the industries is suitable for the location of the houses of wage earners.” The “efficiency of industry” depended crucially on this most “appropriate and orderly building development.” And these industrial edges, where workers might yet keep small farm plots, could instate a “combination of city and country life” that was both “agreeable” and, crucially, “economic.”44
41 Ibid., 6, 26, 29; emphasis added. 42 John Nolen, “Survey of Berkeley’s Needs, 1925–1935” (March 1925), 33; Box 18, John Nolen papers, #2903. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library (hereafter ‘Nolen papers’). 43 Nolen’s earliest jottings for the Sacramento project promised an “impartial collection of facts about Sacramento, especially facts affecting industry and residence”; see “Outline for a Proposed City Planning Board,” 5 December 1914, Box 34, Folder 14, Nolen papers. Not that he was immune to planning for the wealthy and their property values as well. Nolen collected all manner of pamphlets from existing higher-class subdivisions: Arcade Park, Sacramento, “the Pasadena of Northern California,”; various McDuffie developments in North Berkeley; Cerrito Park, El Cerrito (“Glance again at the picture. ‘IT TELLS ITS OWN STORY.’”). And he hoped to include for Sacramento a “City Suburban Park,” a “Park Beautiful” approximating the “rural pleasure grounds of transcendent beauty and splendor.” See Box 34, Folder 15, Nolen papers. 44 John Nolen, Sacramento City Plan: Final Report to the City Commissioners (Cambridge, Mass.: John Nolen, 1916), 31, 33, 34, 3.
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Nolen is better known for the two plans (1908 and 1926) he drew up for San Diego, but he was a crucial importer of planning ideals and techniques to Northern California as well, which furnished an uncongested testing ground, an exhibition space, and an eager audience for his ventures in the composition of ordinary industrial suburbs. Californians frequently consulted him for advice on precisely these topics. The Oakland developer Walter Leimert sought him out in late 1913, having just toured Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.’s Forest Hills Gardens development in Queens, Edward Bouton’s Roland Park in Baltimore, and the current planning exhibition on display in New York, and would host Nolen for a talk on street widths during the latter’s Sacramento-facing 1914 visit. H. A. Lafler, a colleague of Wickham Havens, the community builder who would lay out residence districts along streetcar lines throughout the East Bay, wrote to Nolen in 1917 that “[t]he question of industrial housing,” owing largely to his influence, “is becoming a lively one here in Oakland.” Nolen concurred: “there is nothing else in connection with planning that is now so much on the boards.”45 Charles H. Cheney, of Berkeley, was the planner who kept Nolen closest at hand in the years following his work at Sacramento, and who kept techniques related to industrial suburbs most firmly on the agenda for other Californian planners. Cheney had secured the nomadic City Planning Exhibition for Oakland in March 1914 and convened the state’s first official planning conference that same year in San Francisco. He would sing the praises of Mariemont, Nolen’s more genteel new town on the edge of Cincinnati, in the early 1920s. When Nolen sent his son Jack, another aspiring planner, to California for the sowing of wild oats, it was Cheney who got him a short-term job. In 1915, having invited the authority to address the Second California Conference on City Planning (held in Oakland), Cheney noted that “there is more real meat in your article on Subdivisions than anything that I have been able to find.”46 Looking out on Sacramento, Nolen managed to translate the grid, one of the first- generation planners’ most common bêtes noires, into a specifically suburban question. Directed at the “checkerboard street plan” that in “regular western…fashion” had “already” and without forethought consumed its landscape — in an early rehearsal of anti-“sprawl” rhetoric — Nolen’s was not an abstract horror, not a simple charting of infractions from the knee-jerk picturesque that most anti-grid critics tended to hold in mind. Nor, conversely, was the grid for Nolen testament to an overweening, oppressive urbanity. Its faults were simpler still: the quadrilinear geometry prised the domains of home and work needlessly far apart, unknitting the compact, self-contained units that Nolen had so consistently advocated. It “made distances between working and dwelling places unduly long. The gridiron plan upon which Sacramento is built renders certain suburbs peculiarly remote because accessible only by following the right angle
45 See Nolen’s notes on a breakfast meeting with Walter Leimert, Box 97, Folder 5, Nolen papers; H. A. Lafler to John Nolen, 26 November 1917; Nolen to Lafler, 5 December 1917; Box 58, Folder 10, Nolen papers. On Nolen’s southern exposure, see John Hancock, “‘Smokestacks and Geraniums’: Planning and Politics in San Diego,” in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City, eds. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 161–186. 46 Charles Cheney to Charles Livingood, 28 June 1922; Cheney to John Nolen, 18 August 1915; Cheney to Nolen, 1 September 1915; all in Box 63, Folder 22, Nolen papers. Fred Reed of Oakland’s Realty Syndicate recommended Nolen for a regional-planning job in Santa Cruz in the 1920s; Box 8, Folder 22, Nolen papers. Nolen was also engaged with Berkeley’s Chamber of Commerce, especially surrounding street design, from 1923 on, and had some contact with Carol Aronovici regarding plans for Richmond, the industrial satellite five miles to the north; Box 22, Folder 9, Nolen papers. Berkeley, contrary to popular wisdom, was both a “high grade residential suburban community” and “an industrial center,” and thus “a more or less self-contained city”; Nolen, “Survey of Berkeley’s Needs, 1925–1935,” 33.
69 o[f] a triangle instead of following the hypotenuse.”47 Problems of basic geometry, lent a moral charge, became recoded as problems bearing urgently on the coming suburban future.
Nolen did not conjure these insights of out thin air. He arrived at them by way of a longer history of anxieties about the primordial degradation-by-grid of Western cities. In his 1916 report, Nolen adduced long quotations from Werner Hegemann, the German planner who had made his own (largely unheeded) report on Sacramento for the Chamber of Commerce in 1913. (Charles Mulford Robinson, whose boulevard-studded 1908 report for the state capital saw citation by both successors, was also essentially ignored.) Hegemann was forthright: Sacramento “seems to grow without any hope or direction towards efficient or, at least, orderly development.” Pronouncements of “disorder” in all its forms come cheap. In Sacramento, though, Hegemann insisted there was a truly “extreme monotony”; indeed, “the monotony of Sacramento struck me in a very surprising way.” The issue was not merely that a capital city, charged with setting some kind of civic example, made aesthetics “more important here than in other cities,” but that this grid, against this underlying Californian landscape, was uniquely, originarily destructive. Hegemann had been raised in the German city of Mannheim, he noted, which offered a useful counterpoint: its streets were also gridded, but they articulated around several distributed foci, not just one (the capitol building). Existing Californian cities, then, doubly called out for methodical dispersal: their youth and limited extent left plenty of room to sift out the various rounds of daily life; and their flawed existing forms, flouting this opportunity, might in perpetuity give stimulus to such a quest by their negative example.48 Hegemann crossed the Atlantic again two years later to assemble, by almost any measure, the most comprehensive city plan to emerge from Progressive Era Northern California. It was also the most “regional” in character, predating planners’ explicit adoption of that terminology amid the centrifugal 1920s, when car and, crucially, truck ownership aided the decentralization of homes and workplaces.49 His Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley (1915), a touchstone for Bay Area planners going forward — if never quite a binding template — merits extended comment as we sort out the state of industrial suburbia, endured and reimagined, on the eve of world war. Hegemann’s prose was more pleading and insistent than that of Nolen or his forebears. He was guided by a sense of “modernity” more complex than that adopted by either the beautifiers or the practicalizers crowding the American profession. He also maintained commitments to (and some criticisms of) a very specifically Californian logic of how the animacies of the natural might mingle with the built at the city’s edge. Hegemann’s Report allows us, in microcosm, to condense and critique the prevailing assumptions planners felt could be tested on the edges of the bay. The arch-methodical tenor of Hegemann’s text cannot be downplayed. Following a preface by Frederic Howe, Cleveland’s archdeacon of the City Efficient, Hegemann begins on a programmatic note. Before delving into any itemized prescriptions, he devotes pages to defining spatial “modernity,” for which his own reimagined East Bay will provide both argument and evidence. Like previous planners working on the bay’s various edges, Hegemann defines his
47 Nolen, Sacramento City Plan, 4, 2, 8, 6. On varieties of anti-grid sentiment, and for something of a rejoinder, see Paul Groth, “Streetgrids as Frameworks for Urban Variety,” Harvard Architecture Review 2 (Spring 1981): 68–75. 48 “Report of Dr. Werner Hegemann on Sacramento Planning” (1913; prepared for the Sacramento Chamber of Commerce), 1, 8, 4; Box 34, Folder 19, Nolen papers. 49 Fittingly, the annual publication of the flagship planners’ conference changed its name in 1925 from Proceedings of the National Conference on City Planning to Planning Problems of Town, City, and Region. The 1927 reprinting of John Nolen’s 1916 City Planning collection included two new chapters: “Zoning” and “Regional Planning.”
70 neatened modern city against “the failure of the old cities.” Congestion, crowding, dust, dirt: the usual scapegoats, dutifully othered, wend their way into Hegemann’s text in unremarkable ways. And the skeletal structure of his recommendations, though asserted here with especial enthusiasm, could have appeared in any mature Progressive plan: “The Structural Rank of the Different Elements in a City-Plan” appears in full, numbered and lettered, right at the outset. There is a hierarchy of interventions that descend from “City Economic” to “City Recreational” to “[City] Beautiful.” This founding act of classification, ensuring that “no collision between the different objects of city-planning ever could arise,” seems itself to argue for the technical authority of the planner-as-sorter. Unlike his forebears, though, Hegemann’s “other” was local: “the” city of San Francisco, its mixed land uses, the “wilderness” projected by its downtown, and the clash of its “fashionable coats, but dirty underwear.”50 Hegemann’s chief criteria for the East Bay’s metropolitan modernity — which bleeds into its “efficiency” — are three. First, where “the English or American system” has not already prescribed it, he strives to differentiate the domains of home and work. To be spatially modern is to specialize spaces, from the outset, as built for one or another use, and to accommodate “the traffic need, by far the most important in the American city,” that will allow daily circulation between realms. (Burnham’s San Francisco plan, Hegemann remarks, reliant as it was on Eugène Hénard’s entirely theoretical diagram of the ideal-typical city, made no systemic affordance for this basic fact of traffic flow.) Second, he urges the bundling of like or interdependent industries into “manufacturing districts in units of efficiency.” This packaging of industrial space — with workers’ homes sited nearby — ought urgently to obtain at Oakland’s harbor, for whose reconstruction Hegemann adduces examples from the recent addition to the harbor at Frankfurt am Main, from Houston’s concrete-bedecked municipal wharf, and from the storied Bush Terminal on New York Harbor abutting Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. It is evident in Hegemann’s plan for the Pacsteel freight station in East Oakland, “which, though on a smaller scale, is superior to the Bush terminals” (Fig. 3.5). And the same “unit” logic governs Hegemann’s treatment of West Berkeley’s “spotless” multi-industry “suggested factory districts,” which require “certain areas specially suited for them…. [s]creened off [but not altogether distant] from the residential sections…by a chain of parks, parkways, and playgrounds…under the heading ‘Midway Plaisance.’”51
50 Werner Hegemann, Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley (Oakland: Kelley– Davis Company, 1915), 10–13, 18. See Christiane Crasemann Collins, Werner Hegemann and the Search for Universal Urbanism (New York: Norton, 2005), which thoroughly situates this report, one of Hegemann’s less celebrated works outside of Californian circles, within his long American sojourn (interrupted: 1910, 1913–14, 1915–22), which most famously led to his collaboration with Ohio’s Elbert Peets on the company town of Kohler, Wisconsin, and the book American Vitruvius (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1922). Hegemann has not seen much sustained analysis, outside of Collins’s work. He appears in, but is in no sense the focus of, the discussion of trans-Atlantic planning work in Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 181–208. Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area, 160–162, treats of Hegemann, but too securely under the heading of the economized “City Beneficial.” 51 Hegemann, Report, 13, 81, 28, 58, 55. On planned manufacturing districts, wherein several concerns would economize by sharing rail spurs and other critical infrastructure, taking shape at the same time in Chicago, see Robert Lewis, Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 141–188. Zoning codes as such had appeared in some American cities, but not a majority, by the time of Hegemann’s report. But a concern with managing the fundamental dyad of home and industrial work was at the heart of numerous forms of zoning avant la lettre. Charles Cheney, who saw California as potentially the leader in building new, fully zoned cities, articulated the case in 1917: “Chief…is that there should be in each city on the one hand a safe, unhampered place for industry with the highest facilities of fire protection, transportation, hauling streets, etc., side by side with the protected home neighborhood where workers may live in health, comfort and
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Third, and a shade more abstractly, for Hegemann modernity requires not only the exemplary existence of a few bounded units juxtaposing smokestacks with gardens. It demands a coordinated city- and region-wide decentralization of home and work as variables — calculable in the abstract and accounted for at the level of their aggregate “balance.” Decentralization is Hegemann’s ultimate mantra, the salve for a numbing variety of urban problems. He expects it, somewhat crudely, to assist in the “spreading of land values.” He prescribes it for the siting of Oakland’s schools and playgrounds — “a school system really worthy of a modern well decentralized city.” And this consummate “principle” of the efficiency-minded has aesthetic and moral valences as well: decentralization might soon usher in a new image of the good city, outmoding “that teeming congestion, which, to the old fashioned mind, still largely seems to be the test of prosperity.”52 It is tempting, but finally unsatisfactory, to assume that this imperative to decentralize operated as merely the new planning “rationality” — a substitute for the physical center-worship that guided the City Beautiful and its invented traditions, but still the product of a highly centralized administrative apparatus. To disperse, to distribute, to decongest: these might be little more than new names and new predicates for a very familiar kind of technicized order. Hegemann has not fully dissolved his allegiances to that species of rationality. In certain kinds of spatial sorting, bounding, specializing, and clarifying, his faith never wavers. But there is a competing, regionally specific set of appeals in Hegemann’s plan to nonhuman nature, its agencies, and its affordances. They complicate matters in what most historiography writes off as the “rational city” produced under Progressive planning. His naturalist appeals take diverse forms. Some are aesthetic, some economic, most somewhere in between. Proposing a new design for Berkeley’s Shattuck Square, Hegemann insists that “the aesthetic point of view” on green space “must be considered in building up the psychology of a business center.” Elsewhere he writes of scaling up the lessons exemplified by tony subdivisions, indeed “converting” entire cities into “parks”: “Oakland and Berkeley should take a page from the real estate men’s books,” planting “shapely and uniform avenue trees” and “great masses of geraniums.” Such was California’s distinctive middle landscape: “Any new city, especially cities in so happy a climate as California, must be real garden cities.” Moreover, Hegemann wagers, the logic of the complete “district,” “unit,” or “ensemble” — “the grouping of connected or seemingly connected buildings” — is that much easier to experience and understand in California, “where the climate makes every walk from one building to another a real delight.”53 “Nature’s” agency matters in less intuitive ways at those moments — and they are numerous — when Hegemann claims he is not, by fiat, imposing specialization from above. “High ranges of hills” rim the East Bay; the “peculiar and interesting physical situation” might
contentment”; Charles H. Cheney, Procedure for Zoning or Districting of Cities (San Francisco: California Conference on City Planning, 1917), 4; emphasis added. Indeed, “[w]e cannot discuss residential zoning…without first considering its objects, with relation to industry and retail business…. [T]he best way to draw boundaries of residence districts is to work out first the business and industrial boundaries”; Charles H. Cheney, “Zoning in Practice,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh National Convention on City Planning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), 162. And see Sonia A. Hirt, Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014). 52 Hegemann, Report, 12, 19. 53 Hegemann, Report, 96, 104, 114, 155. Berkeley was a city, Cheney allowed, but a “suburban city”; see “Zoning in Practice,” 171. On Oakland’s “atmosphere” and identity as a kind of suburb, even as late as the 1910s, see Blackford, The Lost Dream, 16; and Beth Bagwell, Oakland: The Story of a City (Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1982).
72 be harnessed, celebrated, consulted, communed with, and used. The jagged hills of San Francisco had long angered planners and other onlookers with interests in efficiency, basic convenience, and the interconnections constitutive of something like an industrial “organism.” (The etymology of “plan,” recall, presumes in abstracto a flat plane.) It only worsened things that the gridiron form had been run, heedless, over those peaks. In the East Bay, Hegemann recodes the topography as a critical assistant. The foothills and sloped sections extending from Richmond to San Leandro “will without doubt constitute a large well protected residence section.” The flatlands already stand apart and shall be industrial. “While the science and practice of creating efficient industrial districts and of protecting the residential districts…is developing only gradually, the features of the East Shore’s topography gave to the cities of Oakland, Berkeley and their neighbors, the great gift of industrial districts mapped out by nature and of natural protections for ideal home districts” (Fig. 3.6). San Francisco loomed as one problematic “other.” Flat Midwestern cities were another extreme, Hegemann lamented, where “railways enter from nearly every direction and…tend to prevent any considerable part of the city from being strictly and purely residential in its character.” In greater Oakland, nature could be a highly cooperative actor. The urban landscape, Hegemann concluded, would to a large degree sort itself.54 Physical distribution was integral to Hegemann’s vision of modernity. And the science underwriting his work — and justifying his faith in the constructive “force” of landscape — was a vitalist biology, not an exercise in physical mechanics. To decentralize, for Hegemann — really, to add or bolster new “centers” distinct from San Francisco — was not to throttle, to deaden, to make submit or fix in place. It was to imbue the region with a new kind of “life,” talk of which laces Hegemann’s Report. “Vigor and rapidity” would attend the East Bay, suburban in its way but no longer merely “distant suburbs of San Francisco.” Areas that “at present are tributary” would be infused by a “life-spreading center of activities.” This was “modernity” indeed, but its affects could not have been more foreign to what the stifled iron-cage imagery continues to connote. With “sufficient breathing space” harnessed, built in as guarantor of a more suburban-seeming density, the East Bay “must be a place — a foremost example of the modern city — an enchanted place to live in.”55 With Hegemann’s plan, moreover, we see the explicit consummation of what earlier planners with designs on the bay had only assumed or left to the imagination: a commitment to the edge as the key site on which regional-scale planning interventions would hinge. At seemingly every scale, Hegemann’s plan enshrines the physical and conceptual edges of places, more than the centers or interiors of places themselves, as sites of high-stakes risk and reward. This strategic preference is matter-of-fact enough in the context of, for instance, his regional traffic plan, which, approving “a strong and steady outflow of population from the congested center [i.e., San Francisco] toward the outskirts,” proposes to decentralize sites of consumption as well. Hegemann’s thoughts on through-routing, “the ideal railroad arrangement,” are oddly instructive as well. Again the choked Midwestern city form is his scapegoat; again, as with his vision of topography-as-zoning, he sees the East Bay flatlands “already…at least in embryo” encouraging a thinning of the urban fabric and a speeding up of circulation. But Hegemann goes further: he is planning not only for the East Bay as the region’s ultimate edge, but as a vast nested hierarchy of centers, each of which can be decanted to its own set of edges. In little Berkeley, in San Leandro to the south of Oakland, in El Cerrito to the north, in each of the
54 Hegemann, Report, 47. 55 Ibid., 43, 85, 139; emphasis added.
73 subsidiary units within his purview, Hegemann excitedly pushes the rails and their associated industries to the periphery, founding “the terminals and the great yards, not in the middle of the city, but nearer the boundary or beyond the boundary of the city.” Decentralization might not, then, necessarily lead to a program of nodal recentralization — the option that became the Regional Planning Association of America’s reformist calling card in the 1920s, and that today’s New Urbanists, who canonize Hegemann and Peets, would surely approve.56 “Instead, the city can be stretched, growing along the entire length of the tracks. Possibility of easy growth is what the city needs,” indefinitely, its outer limit perpetually overridden and deferred.57 To preach decentralization, Hegemann shows, is to get curious about the farthest-flung, least composed edges of town, ever slipping and softening, as the city’s various “forces” and “flows,” themselves resistant to the strictures of form, seep out and touch down. The edges of the Progressives’ city were mysterious; in most popular imaginaries, they were anything but legible. Many observers found them to be something of a mess. McTeague is again instructive. Frank Norris lingers on the industrial half-world hugging West Oakland’s bayfront, precariously poised between culture and nature, built and unbuilt, without any appreciable order or control:
About a quarter of a mile back from the station was the edge of town of Oakland. Between the station and the first houses of the town lay immense salt flats, here and there broken by winding streams of black water. They were covered with a growth of wiry grass, strangely discolored in places by enormous stains of orange yellow. Near the station a bit of fence painted with a cigar advertisement reeled over in to the mud, while under its less lay an abandoned gravel wagon with dished wheels… Across the flats, at the fringe of the town, were the dump heaps, the figures of a few Chinese ragpickers moving over them. Far to the left the view was shut off by the immense red-brown drum of the gas-works; to the right it was bounded by the chimneys and workshops of an iron foundry. Across the railroad tracks, to seaward, one saw the long stretch of black mud left bare by the tide, which was far out, nearly half a mile. Clouds of sea-gulls were forever rising and settling upon this mud bank; a wrecked and abandoned wharf crawled over it on tottering legs; close in an old sailboat lay canted on her bilge.58
This was a striking antithesis to the usual arcadian sublime that stoked standard genteel imaginings of what might be accomplished at or just beyond the limits of the denser city. Yet, for Hegemann and so many other planners in his wake, the Bay’s under-ordered peripheries had to be recoded as sites of opportunity — as places to glimpse the new, the emergent, and the to- come. On these frayed urban edges — and farther out, in industrial suburbs of last resort — planners and their allies in industry and real estate expected, in relative isolation, to develop new models of social and spatial order, sorting home and work space into comprehensible, portable wholes. It would take time for planners’ audiences to learn quite how to look at these edges. But they were hardly invisible. Working-class suburbs, then, more than the composed enclaves of the middle class, would be the really critical laboratories where “scientific” Bay Area planning would come
56 See Emily Talen, “Beyond the Front Porch: Regionalist Ideals in the New Urbanist Movement,” Journal of Planning History 7 (2008): 20–47. 57 Ibid., 64, 61, 62. 58 Norris, McTeague, 48–49.
74 decisively into its own. Nolen had hinted at this aspiration. Hegemann ratified it. His extended section on “Residential Streets” quotes deferentially and at length from Olmsted, Sr.’s 1866 disquisition on Berkeley’s university campus and a leafy residential retreat adjoining it.59 But then he turns once and for all to more ordinary, less fashionable or conspicuous suburban environments. His subheadings scream out: “The Majority of the People Have Comparatively Small Incomes.” “Modern Wholesale Methods Are Needed.” “Will the American West Establish New Standards?” “‘What House Can One Get for $10 a Month?’ This Is the Most Important Question in City Planning.” Hegemann is catholic in choosing examples of successful street treatment and the considered grouping of houses. Some, to be sure, come from the higher end: Roland Park’s garden-city ethos demonstrates “interesting variety”; St. Francis Wood, across the bay, is pressed into service to exhibit the “architectural harmony” of one “little ‘court of honor’” on San Benito Way. But, tellingly, Hegemann then rotates things, and he winds up insisting that working-class districts, well planted, well platted around tidy “streets and squares” (Figs. 3.7, 3.8) finally “will surpass everything that can be seen in the often fancy-stricken lanes of wealthier suburbs with their hodge-podge mixture of styles.” At the abstract level of spatial order, he and many others sensed, these middle landscapes of industry held many lessons in store.60
By 1915, when Hegemann crystallized so many of these working assumptions, scientific in effect if never in unproblematic fact, the region’s advancing urban edge had become planners’ leading scene of action. Berkeley’s Duncan McDuffie, doyen of East Bay realtors, seemed content to abandon traditional city centers, where “there is no land left to subdivide” and things “can be rectified only at tremendous cost, if at all.” The edge — inevitably, he thought — was the future, and to think about suburbanization was to privilege the future as one’s object of intervention: “We must, therefore, now give our greatest attention to the land lying outside of our cities, the land which is soon to be subdivided.”61 And in each case these operators worked within a faith — distinctly materialist, subtly vitalist, but not quite the brute environmental determinism of yore — in the capacity of landscape, of rightly configured material culture conjoined with volatile nonhuman nature, to be enrolled in making live and making work. The edges of the bay were critical laboratories for new techniques of attaching spaces and subjects, and of harnessing their respective energies into new forms of habitation and habituated labor. These ragged edges became thoroughgoing technical milieux for reconstituting the human — or trying to — by way of the nonhuman. The “enchantment” of landscape, planners wagered, could both intensify and darken just outside the city, tilted to new, productive ends.
59 Frederick Law Olmsted, “Berkeley: A University Community” [1866], in Civilizing American Cities, ed. S. B. Sutton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 264–291. 60 Ibid., 118, 124, 122, 119. Many of these prophecies remained only that: Hegemann did not himself build full-scale industrial towns or subdivisions in California equivalent to his work at Kohler, Wisconsin, with Peets. 61 Duncan McDuffie, “The Planning of Cities,” Pacific Municipalities 29 (1915): 619. The extra-urban edge was also cheaper, Grosvenor Atterbury explained, due to faulty in-city building codes that mandated excessively thick foundations and walls: “The waste is often euphemistically termed ‘a factor of safety.’ It would come nearer the mark to call it the factor of stupidity. Could you call it anything else where but recently the same mixture of concrete, in accordance with the ordinances of Manhattan and Queens, was decreed to gain some 30% in strength by crossing the East River and locating in the suburbs?” See Grosvenor Atterbury, “How to Get Low Cost Houses,” Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on Housing (Cambridge, Mass.: The University Press, 1916), 91–92. Atterbury makes another version of this claim, notable even in its irony for associating suburban location with shifts in the material constitution of buildings themselves, in “Garden Cities,” Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Housing (Cambridge, Mass.: The University Press, 1912): 110–111.
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Northern California’s cities, if their planners and associated schemers are to be believed, were, from the first, in some sense “edge cities.” Their shapers converged on a broadly decentralist or distributive ideal, preaching the coordinated sorting of homes and workplaces, consumption and production. The precarious intermingling of built and natural features, machine and garden, was so entrenched as a regulative mandate that these categories’ own conceptual edges lose much of their force. Their aesthetics, technics, and moralities manifest a distinct commitment to middling landscape densities that would later be labeled “suburban” and opposed to both a notionally “urban” core and the unalloyed “rural.”62 For urban historians, Los Angeles remains the canonical example of the regional metropolis “fragmented” by physical decentralization and economic privatism. Yet the congeries of cities, suburbs, and satellites ringing San Francisco Bay ought to be cognized and investigated along much the same lines — the bay itself, not “the” city in increasingly imprecise local parlance, being the area’s bona fide central feature and a source of its regional dispersal.63 “City” and “suburb” might mislead as exclusive analytic categories, whatever their purchase in everyday practice. The urban edge takes precedence in coming chapters, which explore how specific builders, users, students, and sellers of space adjoining the East Bay’s farthest-flung industrial installations articulated their hopes and apprehensions about how the working landscape — and, in the process, its workers — might yet be materially remade.64
62 There is of course a long cultural and intellectual history, and not only an American one, of wondering about how to reconcile industrialism with pastoral landscape values. For “middle” visions from Jefferson through the nineteenth century, see, at minimum, Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and the important, if less original, Marvin Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness: The European Response to American Industrialization, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). For foundational early-republic statements from Hamilton, Jefferson, and Tench Coxe, and for commentary, see Michael Brewster Folsom and Steven D. Lubar, eds., The Philosophy of Manufactures: Early Debates over Industrialization in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982). On certain aesthetic dimensions of this struggle as it unfolded through the twentieth century, see David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994); and Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). For one influential French resolution of this dualism within the realm of town planning, see Dora Wiebenson, Tony Garnier: La Cité Industrielle (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 98; Garnier’s scheme was not made public until 1917, but he concocted it in 1904, “isolated” from Anglo- American planning currents “but possibly the earliest” of its kind. 63 Since Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). On Los Angeles’s largely planned dispersal, see Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). For “privatism,” see Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968). On the Bay Area’s profound fragmentation, see Richard Walker and Alex Schafran, “The Strange Case of the Bay Area,” Environment and Planning A 47 (2015): 10–29. 64 The present account has hesitated to theorize “edgeness,” or to chart its philosophical history, with the degree of rigor that questions of “matter,” “life,” and “form” have elsewhere required. But note that the very concept of urban “form,” as usually deployed, depends on some notion, stated or not, of urban edges. Form resists “formlessness” by virtue of its edges. According to one recent account, “The term ‘urban form’ refers to the spaces, places, and boundaries that define urban life”; Sam Bass Warner and Andrew H. Whittemore, American Urban Form: A Representative History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 1. “Space” has not, but “place” emphatically has, tended to connote a concept of edgedness. Places have edges; places, at whatever scale, are someplace (affectively, cognitively) insofar as an edge marks them off from someplace else, or from no-place. To enclose, to frame, to surround, mark off, and define a spatial unit by imparting its own set of delimiting edges: this might be the distinctive act of town-building. Recall that the etymology of “town” is the German Zaun, or hedge. Explicit philosophies of place, especially the phenomenological varieties that have informed human(ist) geography since the 1970s, have sub rosa been philosophies of edges. See, for instance, Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Edward S. Casey, “The Edge(s)
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of Landscape: A Study in Liminology,”in The Place of Landscape, ed. Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 91–110; and a precursor, Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [1959], trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994). See also Georg Simmel, “The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study” [1902], trans. Mark Ritter, Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1994): 11–17; and Georg Simmel, “The Philosophy of Landscape” [1913], trans. Josef Bleicher, Theory, Culture & Society 24(7/8) (2007): 20–29. These accounts unfold on a level that is generally quite uncoupled from questions of specific urban landscapes or urban forms. But see Stephen Kern’s consideration of fin- de-siècle “form” in The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 181–210, for some speculations about how notions of urban and suburban form changed once — owing to the convergence of vitalists, Cubists, and quantum physicists, among others — space itself could be appreciated as an active “configuration of energy alignments” (183), an actor rather than a container, a plenum rather than a void.
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Chapter 4
“Terra Incognita, Although Close at Hand”: Capitalist Regionalism and the Specialization of the Carquinez Strait
“San Francisco Bay is the golden band that unites the cities about its shores,” announced the Richmond booster Augustin Macdonald in 1928. A “Bay Brotherhood” of industrialists, he said, ought to take shape in recognition of this fact, pursuing “a coordination of development commensurate with its possibilities.” Rhetoric of this sort, announcing or helping to constitute some essential transbay unity, was standard fare by the 1920s. Macdonald’s qualification is more telling: “Bays, however, like cities have choice corners and possess selective sites.”1 To follow the Bay Area’s planners, builders, boosters, and capitalists as they made designs on the bay’s outer limits is to narrate the specialization of these edges — or corners, quarters, vectors, sectors, realms, belts — into different visible, differently viable, differently valued theaters of action. It is to reenact the strategic sorting of suburban space into durably uneven kinds. The nine- or thirteen-county Bay Area metropolis is vast and fragmented, with not a built-out landform but a sizable body of water at its geographic heart. This fact often goes unremarked, but it has been immensely consequential in inclining the metropolis toward dispersal. Arguably centerless, the region encompasses several discrete worlds of suburban development, each with its own dominant land uses, physical constraints, metonymic scenery, class connotations, imaginative geographies — and edges.2 The siftings and striations prising apart the region’s many suburbias, path-dependent distinctions which have their roots squarely in the nineteenth century, have become all the more pronounced over time. They have endured within the context of the Bay Area’s diverse and repeated graspings toward some kind of regional coordination — regional economic unity having been a favorite capitalist desideratum well before professionalized planners, scaling up from the single municipality and appealing to a less partial-sounding “public interest,” made compatible designs. The ensuing chapters linger over one specific edge: a thin strip of land in Contra Costa County, extending east from Richmond to Antioch along the shores of San Pablo Bay, the Carquinez Strait, Suisun Bay, and the brackish waters of the incipient Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. The waterway itself, an offshoot that is San Francisco Bay’s only direct maritime outlet to the state’s vast agricultural Central Valley, joining coast with heartland, occupies a peculiar standing: neither ocean nor river in the absolute, it behaves intermittently as both. The Carquinez Strait, which officially denotes the narrowest seven miles of water between Crockett and
1 Richmond Harbor, San Francisco Bay, California (Oakland: Augustin S. Macdonald, 1928), 3, 4. 2 Mel Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), remains a strong reference on the interaction of physical geography and urban regional development, as does Charles Wollenberg, Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives on Bay Area History (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1985). James E. Vance, Jr., Geography and Urban Evolution in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1964), is an essential early recognition of the ways in which the region’s urban form might be thought of in terms of a series of more or less autonomous parts, or “realms.” Vance, moreover, stresses how certain high-“friction” physical features compelled “gaps” (5, 42, and passim) in the urban fabric. Thought as a multi-county region, the Bay Area was highly dispersed from the start. On the expansive bay itself as a “back space” to the cities that ring it, and as a source of spatial division, see the profusely illustrated Around the Bay: Man-Made Sites of Interest in the San Francisco Bay Region (Culver City, Calif.: Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2013).
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Martinez on the south, and between Vallejo and Benicia on the north, struck Vera Esta Rigdon, the first geographer to give the region systematic study, as tantamount to “the Pacific Dardanelles,” and only slightly less important from a strategic point of view.3 And the Carquinez, as we will denote the adjoining built environments for short, enjoys relatively level terrain at water’s edge, seeded between 1880 and 1940 with compact, remotely financed company towns and industrial suburbs of several shapes and sizes strung discontinuously along the Southern Pacific rail line that arrived in 1878, snaking north from its terminus in West Oakland. The flats are punctuated by sudden hills, steep but bulbous, that pin town life up against the shoreline and turn bright yellow in the summer. The dry air is consistently ten degrees hotter than that ensconcing the shores of Berkeley and Oakland, which face the Golden Gate head-on, and a solid twenty hotter than San Francisco most days.4 There is an atomized, detached quality to the urban form of maritime Contra Costa, which to this day strikes the unprepared visitor as a series of enclosed pods, a centerless archipelago trailing off indefinitely to the east, to which only the bulkiest and most noxious land uses, awkward and unwelcome in any downtown, have been time and again abandoned. It is a part of the larger region, but it is also decidedly apart. Its landscapes can be hard to grasp. Walking these streets, it is hard not to feel a bit disoriented — a bit on edge.
As planners — Burnham, Robinson, Nolen, even the regionally minded Hegemann — made designs, beautiful or practical, on the Bay Area, they had remarkably little to say about the landscapes tucked just beyond the high East Bay hills. Yet, as these chapters will argue, the Carquinez experiments in industrial suburbia — initiated by industrialists and boosters themselves, well underway by the time anything like a soi-disant “scientific” planning was on the scene, and scaling up in number and size, after 1909 or 1910, precisely as city and then regional planning went in search of a method — are diagnostic examples of just the sorts of disciplined and disciplining edge spaces their treatises came repeatedly to champion. The Carquinez served from 1880 to 1940 as the area’s most reliable laboratory in which interested actors with some capital at stake might endeavor to work out new ways in which the animacy of the environment — the built environment, the natural environment, and all conceivable articulations between them — might be called upon, rearranged, and deployed indirectly to quite literally make new, suburban kinds of workers, and to make them work.
3 Vera Esta Rigdon, The Geography of the Carquinez Strait (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1923), 4:7. (Pagination in this work restarts with each chapter; this citation refers to the seventh page of the fourth chapter.) Carol A. Jensen, Maritime Contra Costa County (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2014), 103, notes that the riverine landscape of the Carquinez was used by Hollywood at various times as a stand-in for the Mississippi River, or for the Netherlands. (Jensen’s volume belongs to the ubiquitous sepia-toned Arcadia series, which most historians will agree varies dramatically in quality. The present account draws selectively on a few publications, some offered up to the pay-to-play publishing house Arcadia, that are the products of local historical societies. Owing perhaps to the classic Californian anxiety about rootlessness, about subjection to a peoplehood “without history,” Contra Costa County is home to several extremely active groups at the town, sub-county, and county level. Their works vary in utility, but their documentary function cannot be written off wholesale.) 4 Some urbanization (though little in the way of industry) predates 1878. On boosters’ grandiose visions for New York of the Pacific (later renamed Black Diamond and then Pittsburg), see Ernest A. Wiltsee, “The City of New York of the Pacific,” Quarterly of the California Historical Society 12 (March 1933): 25–34. As late (or as early) as 1869, although he thought it obvious that San Francisco would win out, the assemblyman M. G. Upton could adjudge the Carquinez cities (Martinez and Benicia especially) to represent a competing developmental pole. See “The Plan of San Francisco,” Overland Monthly 2 (February 1869): 131–136. These were discrete urban areas before they were suburban; they became suburban through the linkages of San Franciscan industrial capital.
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The next chapters will attend to two main clusters of towns, all financed from San Francisco, all built and administered through a kind of remote control. One is a set of bona fide company towns in West County, no farther east than Crockett or Port Costa, that were in working order by 1900 and adjoined single, stand-alone, capital- but not labor-intensive industries. The numerous powder works sited between Point Pinole and Hercules, which will receive extended glosses, are metonymic for this first formation. The other comprises a set of multi-industry suburbs or satellites built out after 1900, beginning with Richmond to the west but hitting stride in East County from Martinez to Antioch, whose variety, scale, and morphology vitiate the “company town” designation.5 It was on this low-priority, low-visibility, quite far- flung edge, at this notional midpoint between city and non-city, that the tensions between the rationalist and vitalist, the more and the less holist, faces of suburban planning — between premiums on the constraining form and the animating force of landscape — can be glimpsed, made sensible, and critiqued in their distinctively Californian guise.6
5 One booster pamphlet from 1921, claiming that Contra Costa “challenges attention as a site for any industrial plant,” nonetheless drew a distinction: “Richmond, Pittsburg, and Martinez are important industrial centers; there are [also] smaller communities that have been built up by a single large industry.” Contra Costa County, California: The County of Health, Wealth, Prosperity (Martinez, Calif.: Gazette Print, 1921), n.p. 6 Some caveats suggest themselves with respect to the “edge” terminology. Its usage should not automatically imply that the region has a single discernible “center” to which the “edge” is essentially subordinate. Indeed, the whole charged discourse of “centers” (and of a vaunted “city” status, relative to that of a mere “suburb”) may be an artifact of the period’s boosterist conventions. The terms were malleable. An 1892 digest of local history was titled The Bay of San Francisco: The Metropolis of the Pacific Coast and Its Suburban Cities: A History (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1892), but in the header that adorned each page, the locution shifted: “Its Cities and Their Suburbs.” An 1887 pamphlet confidently foresaw a bustling industrial waterfront in Martinez, and an “urban” future in that sense — but that very prosperity, coupled with certain natural amenities, would cause the city to become suburban relative to San Francisco, “a most desirable place for the San Francisco business man, who desires country air and country life for his family, convenient to his business”; Contra Costa County: Its Climate, Its Soil, Productions and Location (Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Board of Trade, 1887), 27. But most Contra Costa chambers of commerce, in boom times and bust, saw fit to promote their settlements in robustly “urban” and “central” terms. Rigdon, she of the “Pacific Dardanelles” bons mots, argued that Martinez, the city at its head (and located a good thirty miles from San Francisco), was actually “situated at the center of the San Francisco Bay district”; The Geography of the Carquinez Strait, 4:9. A 1907 pamphlet on Richmond was typical, if a bit tortuous in its logic: “Richmond is the only city on San Francisco Bay which is not a suburb of San Francisco. The people who live in Richmond are employed in Richmond, and this condition makes her an independent community, just as much as if she were a hundred miles from this great metropolis.” Then, in the next breath: “She is as near San Francisco in miles and point of time as any of the residential suburban towns, and is therefore a very desirable place of residence”; Richmond, the Pittsburg of the West (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1907), 8–9. A pamphlet of 1915 qualified further: Richmond was “not a suburb, yet it has community interests with San Francisco and Oakland”; Richmond, California (San Francisco: Sunset Magazine Bureau of Information, 1915), 5. If their partisans were to be believed, industrial suburbs, or satellites, or, yes, cities truly could have it both ways. On boosterism, too, certain caveats are again in order. The line of argument pursued in the present study runs through discourses somewhat less grandiose than the classic boosterisms of the antebellum “West” writ large — of William Gilpin, Jesup Scott, and their ilk — or those orbiting individual cities within it. On such ideas, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950); Charles N. Glaab, Kansas City and the Railroads: Community Policy in the Growth of a Regional Metropolis [1962] (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Carl Abbott, Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); and William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 23–54. “Few people read the boosters anymore” (46), Cronon noted then, and it is equally true of scholars and students a quarter-century after his major work. But there is much to recommend these sources as more than anachronistic flights of fancy: they sold; they resonated; they circulated and persuaded. They represent a genre of economic thought, per Abbott. They can also be used to index popular ontologies of space as seen, felt, projected, inhabited,
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Inventing the Disfavored Quarter The story of the Carquinez sees a loose conglomerate of developers and financiers continually setting aside a terrain for formal experimentation and economic exploitation — a contained but underregulated middle distance that is almost the exact opposite of the “favored quarter” figuration that recurs in popular urbanist discourse today to describe suburbs of greater repose.7 San Francisco industrialists, a handful based in Oakland, and by the 1910s a coterie of national concerns locating branch plants found themselves squeezed for space in the “center” cities and rebuffed in the elite suburbs of the San Francisco Peninsula (Fig. 4.1), towards which heavy- industrial tentacles had extended almost as long as there had been a city, and not only a mission, at its tip. These captains came to envision a notionally empty landscape on which to compose towns subject to something approaching comprehensive order, direction, and discipline (Fig. 4.2). These were “instant cities” writ small.8 From 1878, when the American Smelting Company relocated its shot tower from San Francisco’s North Beach to a spot renamed Selby, Contra Costa invited tiny settlements “owing to the nature of its industries…capital-intensive high- throughput operations that generated less total employment than the myriad workshops of Oakland and San Francisco.”9 Space was plentiful, land was cheap, and laborers could be
and capitalized: “economies” of nature, bodies, and things; ecologies, on the urban scene, of flesh and stone. Looking just beyond the clichés of “destiny,” “progress,” their “naturalness,” and stereotyped canons of “beauty,” we can ask what else these popular philosophies contain, entail, and foreclose. And, although the point may be obvious, we do well to understand that these texts were themselves material objects that circulated through space and could be experienced physically and affectively by their readership. Never “merely” representational, promotional literature occasions a study in material culture. See Veronica della Dora, “Travelling Landscape Objects,” Progress in Human Geography 33 (2009): 334–54. 7 After Christopher Leinberger, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2010). For the intellectual ancestor of this conceit, see the sectoral theory of the land economist Homer Hoyt in The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Washington, D.C.: Federal Housing Administration, 1939). On such specialization at the national scale, and on the American geographical imaginary of an industrial “belt” (as semantically unlike the Canadian “horseshoe”), see Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 18–40. 8 After Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), which does not treat of “suburbanization” as such. 9 Richard A. Walker, “Industry Builds Out the City: The Suburbanization of Manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940,” in Manufacturing Suburbs: Building Work and Home on the Metropolitan Fringe, ed. Robert Lewis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 92–123, is the key descriptive reference here. The quotation comes from page 119. For a companion piece dealing with mostly non-industrial suburbs, see Richard Walker, “Landscape and City Life: Four Ecologies of Residence in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Ecumene 2 (1995): 33–64. On industrial development on the bayfront just south of downtown San Francisco, see Nancy Olmsted, Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Mission Creek Conservancy, 2010), 72–92. On South San Francisco, “made to order” for Gustavus Swift and in the author’s view the “first industrial suburb” (125) in the West, see Joseph A. Blum, “South San Francisco: The Making of an Industrial City,” California History 63 (1984): 114–134. For an awestruck account of the “many” and varied suburbs of the Bay Area, which harbored a greater diversity of land uses and class characters than the suburbs ringing Los Angeles, Portland, or Seattle, see Elmer Grey, “The New Suburb of the Pacific Coast,” Scribner’s 52 (July 1912): 36–51. Employment figures at the largest workplaces on the Carquinez at its peak in 1928, just before the Depression halted further expansion for a decade: Standard Oil employed 3600; the Pullman car shop, 750; the Santa Fe rail yard, 800; the Selby smelter, 325; California Cap Company, 200; C&H Sugar, 1530; Giant Powder, 122; Shell Oil, 1129; Mountain Copper (or Mococo), 60; Nichols Chemical, 200; Pioneer Rubber, 450; Booth, 500; California Redwood, 500; Columbia Steel, 1460; Hercules Powder, 250; Union Oil (at Rodeo), 686; Port Costa, 300 in warehousing, 60 in brickmaking. The first three employers listed were located within Richmond, drawing from a vaster and arguably more “urban” agglomeration of close-built working-class neighborhoods, but each of the
81 isolated from the more fractious (and unionized) environs of the region’s twin cities. Moreover, the East Bay hills, recessed just so along most of the Strait, could provide a buffer and an absorbent for the “blasts both planned and accidental” that typified life at the powder works in West County, and to a lesser extent at the canneries, the brick works, the sugar refineries, and the bewildering variety of steel, oil, chemical, lumber, and rubber concerns that trailed off to the east, increasing in sheer physical heft past Martinez (Figs. 4.3, 4.4). “The prevailing winds through the Golden Gate,” moreover, as Gray Brechin notes, would “dr[i]ve the smoke, ashes, and dust rich in heavy metals and asbestos, along with the stench of petrochemicals and acids, back upon the town[s]” and down the strait toward Stockton. The financiers stayed upwind; their effects were felt all down the Strait.10 As the geographer Richard Walker has convincingly argued, “[s]uburbanization of industry appears to be the normal mode of growth” in the Bay Area. “In fact, the tendency for industry to seek spacious quarters at the fringe is so marked from the outset that it makes no sense to speak of an ‘old industrial core’ that later suburbanized.”11 The region has long evidenced a massively dispersed geography of home and work, which decentralized in tandem, that confounds the monocentric Chicago School model (which was always an ideal-typical caricature) or Homer Hoyt’s alternative geometry, which saw suburbias self-specializing like so many slivers of pie. The Bay Area’s suburbanization proceeded more as a scattering of industrial clusters, each basically self-sufficient, than as a steady, residence-led progression outward from an obvious core in decreasingly industrial rings (Fig. 4.5). Even the boosters crowing in 1904 of Contra Costa as “The County of Homes” closed with an admission: “The outlook for the future is very promising” only insofar “as a number of large manufacturers have bought lands and are building towns of their own beside their factory plants, which will also tend to the building up of the county around these towns.”12 Industries established the place, and homes then followed: work, then workers. At a regional scale, it had generally been the East Bay — Oakland, its own constellation of suburbs to the south, Berkeley, the corporate haven Emeryville, the satellite city of Richmond and its own peripheries, and the fragmented, less populated Carquinez — where space-extensive industries, from the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, had been inclined to locate. In a widely read study of post–World War II Oakland, Robert Self has demonstrated the persistence of a decentralist imaginary in forming popular (and cross-class) understandings of the East Bay’s role and distinctive (sub)urban fabric. The “industrial garden” was “[m]ore than a metaphor…a concrete political and spatial formation” which began with “class harmony in pastoral cities where factories and homes existed in unobtrusive balance.” This ideal of a sanitized, productive middle landscape — where “[m]anufacturing plants,” one booster pamphlet ensuing workplaces was located in relative isolation, commanding the better part (if not all) of the male workforce in a given town or unincorporated settlement, with unbuilt gaps of at least a mile in between. Figures are drawn from “Commanding Position of County in Industrial World,” Contra Costa Gazette, 25 April 1928, 2. 10 Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 251, 254. 11 Walker, “Industry Builds Out the City,” 122, 123. See Richard Harris, “Suburbanization and the Employment Linkage,” in Manufacturing Suburbs, 221–236, for the claim that industrial modes of suburbanization “led the way” to a greater extent outward from San Francisco and Pittsburgh than from New York, Chicago, or other major metropolises of the nineteenth century. The balance between residential and industrial suburbs varied from case to case, based on the nature of the leading industries, the composition of the labor force (gender, stability of tenure, etc.), transportation options for the commute, and other factors. 12 Contra Costa County, California: The County of Homes (Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Development Association, 1904), 43–44.
82 sought to demonstrate, “are for the most part as clean and tidy as well kept homes” — found even wider acceptance in the suburbanizing 1950s, as Self shows, but it was “no postwar invention,” and it scoped over how inhabitants and observers made sense of the East Bay’s putatively urban, not strictly suburban, landscapes from the late nineteenth century on.13 To build was to work on and in nature; there were only middle grounds. Boosters defined the East Bay, that is, in relative terms, always attentive to the region’s striations — the weave of not particularly small patterns that consigned heavy industry to some “gardens” and not others.14 This vision guided the machinations of San Francisco capitalists as they gazed across the bay in search of more generous plant locations, and as they imagined a transbay coordination of industrial interests that would pay dividends to its captains. The East Bay was “industrial” and a “garden” only relative to the denser and more commercial land uses of the West Bay metropolis. Try as they might to tell the story of Oakland “as an entity apart from the surrounding territory,” Edgar Hinkel and Edward McCann, publishing in 1939 on behalf of the WPA Writers’ Project, fell back on clichés that tellingly situated Oakland, again and again, in relative terms, as the region’s specialized, subordinate workshop: intermittently “the Glasgow,” “the Marseille,” “the Detroit of” its coast.15 The great East Bay’s metonymic association with industrial work — its definition, markedly and not without some spite, against San Francisco, “the” alpha city — has long, tangled roots. By the 1920s the sectoral sorting was so entrenched as to seem natural. The capitalists and technocrats who joined up in 1923 under the aegis of the Commonwealth Club of California’s short-lived City Planning Section, decided that the East Bay was manifestly and essentially unlike the more genteel San Mateo County to San Francisco’s south, the preferred location of the country estates that had cropped up during the Gilded Age, from the Pullman- descended Carolands to the Mission-inflected Filoli. The planner Fred Drake addressed the group in 1927, lamenting that the imminent bridge spanning the bay would lure “home- and garden-loving families of San Francisco” to the smoky east “instead of down the peninsula — San Francisco’s real suburbs.”16 The abortive Regional Plan Association, which formed in 1925 as an offshoot of the Commonwealth Club section, redoubled this emphasis on producing a useful, industrial East. Why decentralize? W. H. Morrow and Fred Dohrmann answered this question quite simply in a 1927 speech: to “make room” for San Francisco’s specialized central business district, on the one hand, and to “settle the toilers of industry beside their work,” on the other.
13 Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 8, 9; Oakland: California’s Third Largest City (Oakland: Oakland Chamber of Commerce, 1925), Carton 5, Regional Plan Association, Inc., of San Francisco Bay Counties records, ca. 1925–1931, BANC MSS C-A 301, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For a suggestion that Oakland might itself be considered a suburb of San Francisco, see Beth Bagwell, Oakland: The Story of a City (Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1982), 118–120. 14 After “the weave of small patterns” named by Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (1870–1900) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962). 15 Edgar J. Hinkel and William E. McCann, eds., Oakland, 1852–1938: Some Phases of the Social, Political and Economic History of Oakland, California (Oakland: Oakland Public Library, 1939), i, 864, 879, 886. 16 Minutes, 1 November 1927, Commonwealth Club of California, City Planning Section records, 1923–1927, BANC MSS 77/136 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See Werner Hegemann’s Report, 23, 30, for a similar schism between the “very hilly” peninsula and the “naturally” more industrial East Bay, and for the observation that siting heavy industry in East Oakland would be preferable to West Oakland, the better to keep smoke from blowing eastward over established residential areas.
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The imperative to coordinate the decentralization of workers and factories, men and things, was at the absolute heart of the Bay Area’s capitalist-led regionalist synthesis (Fig. 4.6). Dohrmann, the San Francisco businessman who led the RPA for six years to no great effect, meant for the East Bay to serve as a safety valve where his city could sift out, settle, stabilize, and sequester its working classes. In a 1927 address curtly titled “Role of East Bay,” he held that greater Oakland already pointed the way to a balanced, authentically capital-friendly regional planning, leading by extant example: “Strange to say, almost every point mentioned, which might be taken care of by a wide system of regional planning, has already the model after which the planning should be designed, existing right here in this locality.”17 For the Oakland newspaperman Addison N. Clark, whose 1930 “‘Empire’ series” pushed regional federation, Richmond, not Oakland, held the key: it “sings bass in this chorus of Bay Industrial Area chain of cities [sic].”18 The East Bay’s distributed industrial landscape, the result of many conjoined if contingent locational decisions over the years, came to seem different in kind from San Francisco’s foggy urbanity, the Peninsula’s resort world to the south, or the genteel wooded hideaways of Marin County across the Golden Gate to the north.19 San Francisco’s own commercial and imperial centrality — or the image thereof — depended crucially on making peripheral a specific set of less sightly land uses and their stewards.
Sensing the Suburban Open As Oakland and adjacent towns along to the bayfront filled up with industries between 1870 and 1900, the shores of the Carquinez seemed to promise even more room, an even blanker slate, for capitalists’ untrammeled maneuver and the building of complete, bounded — because isolated
17 Résumé of address by Fred W. Dohrmann to Regional Plan Association, April 1927, Carton 5, Folder 35; Address by W. H. Morrow and Fred W. Dohrmann, 22 September 1927, Carton 5, Folder 35; Mel Scott papers, BANC MSS 70/73 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For “offshoot,” see Minutes, 30 April 1925, Commonwealth Club of California, City Planning Section records, 1923–1927, BANC MSS 77/136 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The RPA group marked the most concerted declaration to date of a “regional” vision — regional planning being, along with the formalized zoning code, one of the profession’s two main innovations in the 1920s — but, as the rest of this chapter ought to show, de facto regionalisms emerge from how industrialists and property developers mentally carved up and acted upon the area’s edges. It remains an important precursor to other kinds of regional coordination around the bay, from multi-county park and utility districts to the Bay Area Council (founded 1947) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (1961 to present). See Industrial Survey Associates, San Francisco Bay Area: Its People, Prospects and Problems: A Report Prepared for the San Francisco Bay Area Council (San Francisco: Industrial Survey Associates, 1948), 26, for a sense of how the imperative to advertise the “whole” bay, “more impressive…than a single community could be,” persisted in the post–World War II imagination. This was an interested regionalism, far less idealistic or heterodox than New York’s similarly named Regional Planning Association of America, which counted Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and other left-of-chamber-of-commerce voices among its number. The membership of Dohrmann’s group, even more than the Commonwealth Club group, skewed noticeably to businessmen and those planners friendly to them. 18 For regionalist verbiage as it stood around 1930, see nos. 34 and 43–46 (30 March and 10–13 April 1930) of the hortatory “‘Empire’ series” published by the Oakland newspaperman Addison N. Clark, Carton 26, Folder 6, Mason–McDuffie Company records, BANC MSS 89/12 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: “If, then, we crystallize ALL of the Bay Metropolitan Area cities and towns into ONE SOLID METROPOLITAN GROUP” (no. 34), and, crucially, produce one “unit set of maps of available Bay Area industrial properties drawn to the same scale” (no. 43), prosperity will result. The “chorus” quotation is drawn from no. 44. 19 For another rendering of these intra-regional distinctions, see the high-end realty concern Mason–McDuffie’s pamphlet The Story of a Berkeley Home (Berkeley: Mason–McDuffie, 1910), Carton 5, Mason–McDuffie Company records, BANC MSS 89/12 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, in which an imagined buyer considers properties in San Francisco, Marin, and San Mateo counties before settling on the East Bay.
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— units marrying stable suburban residence with disciplined work. And once industrialists turned their attention to the Carquinez, their rhetorics of futurity and destiny reached new heights. The scale of the new industrial installations was indeed gargantuan, summoning a new sense of the industrial sublime. While “the refining process is complex and technical — suitable only for scientific discussion,” wrote Frederick Hulaniski, “[d]espite this fact, an oil refinery is by no means an uninteresting place to the layman.”20 The pace of transformation invited comment all its own. Werner Hegemann could find a parallel for Richmond, the county’s largest bona fide satellite whose growth took off in 1900, only in Gary, Indiana: “huge and suddenly developed.”21 In the secondary-school textbook on California geography that was standard statewide by the 1920s, Harold W. Fairbanks stated of the Carquinez, as a matter of simple fact, that “[n]o other place in all California is destined to become of so great importance commercially.”22 From a certain angle, it could seem like a kind of utopia. Suddenly, the unassuming shores of the Carquinez had taken on a new visibility as part of the Bay Area’s interlocking industrial complex — whether “organism” or “machine” was the analogy of choice to stress the region’s essential interdependence. This is not to say that, prior to its exploitation, San Franciscans or Oaklanders had ever blocked out the existence of the Carquinez. Jack London had convalesced on a boat near present-day Pittsburg, reporting on its pleasing prospects in the also-ran memoir John Barleycorn (1913), which detailed the making and unmaking of a known alcoholic. Every ’49er boating between San Francisco and Sacramento had laid eyes on the pre-industrial shoreline. With heavy industry inlaid, the Carquinez was even more formidable a spectacle. In a pamphlet, the Netherlands Route, which ran ferry service along that same waterway at the turn of the century, called explicit attention to the wharves of the C&H sugar refinery at Crockett, to the “picturesque” boats loading up on that product, and on the “costumes” of working-class Greeks and Sicilians that might just be glimpsed from the water.23 During the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, and for years thereafter, Contra Costa boosters invited visitors to an observatory atop Mount Diablo, the county’s highest peak at 4,000 feet, from which, peering through a telescope, they could observe the working landscapes of Martinez, Concord, Pittsburg, and other towns: “A lecturer will be present,” its orchestrators promised, as reward for the day’s travel a good thirty miles out from the Jewel City’s fairgrounds atop what would become the Marina District, “to explain the industries and the wealth of the various factories in the upbuilding of the community on which the lens is focused.” Their smokestacks, even from afar, would be a “permanent advertising medium” for the entire county.24
20 Frederick J. Hulaniski, ed., The History of Contra Costa County, California (Berkeley, Calif.: Elms Publishing Co., 1917), 351. 21 Hegemann, Report, 27. On Gary, see S. Paul O’Hara, Gary: The Most American of All American Cities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 22 Harold W. Fairbanks, California: The New Progressive Geographies Developed According to the Problem Method (San Francisco: Harr Wagner, 1920), 155. 23 On file in Box 34, Folder 15, Nolen papers. Nolen collected this and other pamphlets to situate Sacramento in its extended regional context. 24 Contra Costa County, California: Leading County of the West in Manufacturing (Martinez, Calif.: Gazette Print, 1915). The PPIE-era line on “permanent advertising medium” recurs verbatim in a local history written over two decades later, Mae Fisher Purcell, History of Contra Costa County (Berkeley: Gillick Press, 1940), 74. Critique of the aerial “God’s-eye view,” imagined and actually orchestrated, has been a well-worn trope in critical geography since the 1980s. It needs no belaboring here. But the Bay Area’s craggy terrain has lent itself to a wide range of premiums on relative elevation and the power-laden prospects it enables. On planning for aerials “looking down at the industry below” on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, see also Burnham’s Report, 53, 146.
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Enthusiasms ran high: the visibly working Carquinez, wagered those who stood to gain from its enrichment, could be exhibited, thrilled to, wondered at, learned from, harnessed, controlled, and, finally, known. But there is another sense in which these suburbs’ very invisibility — their concealment from everyday gazes originating in other segments of the Bay Area — was their most compelling strategic warrant. In the 1990s, when central Contra Costa County, along today’s Interstate 680, saw itself given over in large part to corporate-managerial “edge cities” and won inclusion in Joel Garreau’s book of same name, that giddy journalist made at least one telling distinction regarding local mind-mapping: “At least San Franciscans concede these places [Wine Country, Silicon Valley, Oakland, Berkeley] exist. That is not true for the land beyond the Berkeley and Oakland Hills.”25 A century before these words saw press, Contra Costa had already taken on an aura of vaguely unsavory indistinction: east of the East, edge of the edge, unbridgeably apart from and obscure to all but those orchestrating its finances by a kind of capitalized remote control. It was “terra incognita,” Wendell Easton of the Pacific Coast Land Bureau wrote in 1884, “although close at hand.”26 And usefully so: the suburbs of the Carquinez were fundamentally products of industrial flight, of unloading, and of relegation: “Close enough to San Francisco…to enjoy certain advantages,” one 1939 report euphemized, “and, yet, far enough to escape various problems of a congested metropolis.”27 A part, but apart: celebrated, but essentially denigrated: the pre-1940 Carquinez amounted, in this sense, to a very different optimization of the age-old “middle landscape” desideratum. What could not be accomplished in San Francisco, or even in Oakland or Vallejo — the latter a crucial site of military production where labor proved less quiescent than initially hoped — might yet be forced through on another, fresher edge where “no one” bothered to look: the suburbs of last resort.28
One way to read this history of the Bay’s rough-hewn specialization of suburban kinds is in terms of the imposition of an archetypically capitalist sort of spatial “rationality.” On this telling, the industrial suburb, urban-dreamt and purpose-built, gets sifted out from other peripheral “resorts” of more sylvan (and complex) disposition. There is some validity to this reading: the City Practical planners who did finally turn their attention to the “open” fields of the Carquinez often spoke as though their workaday character would allow a failsafe simplification of the
25 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 311. 26 Wendell Easton, Contra Costa County, California, and Its Offering for Settlement: Geography, Climate, Soil, and Productions (San Francisco: Pacific Coast Land Bureau, 1884), 2. On the remote-control conceit as a model of urbanization, see Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, and on the pre–World War II East Bay as a constellation of “distant outposts” or even “colonies” of San Franciscan and Eastern capital, see Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 13–16. 27 Contra Costa County, California, as a Factory Location: A Preliminary Report (Richmond, Calif.: Contra Costa County Development Association, 1939), 1. 28 A “sink,” perhaps, in Grady Clay’s sense: “Sinks are places of last resort into which powerful groups in society shunt, shove, dump, and pour whatever or whomever they do not like or cannot use…. [Most of] society acts as though all these were identical undesirable elements to be pushed over the bank, heaved off the edge, out of sight, out of mind, down into the sink. Sinks are special-purpose places produced in such predictable quantities by American cities [or beyond their official boundaries] that it would appear that a form of geopolitical conspiracy has been at work. For all cities create sinks.” See Close-Up: How to Read the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 143. These were “resorts” in a double sense, as suggested above, and doubly “utopias” as well. See Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), for the classic distinction between “Country House” and “Coketown” varieties of utopian escape. And see John Stilgoe, “Moulding the Industrial Zone Aesthetic: 1880–1929,” Journal of American Studies 16 (1982): 5–24, for a (persuasive) suggestion of the mysterious, Turnerian blurring, the visual indistinction, that most visitors experienced as they looked at these edges (east of the Mississippi, in this article) through a haze of steam and smoke.
86 planning process as well. When Carol Aronovici, the planner practical who had made his name in Philadelphia before taking up in California for a time, drew up a scheme for Richmond with Guy W. Hayler in 1922, his report reproduced a familiar frictionless blank-slate imaginary as planning’s very precondition. Richmond’s needs were “simple.” His zoning prescriptions enjoyed an “obvious feasibility.” There was a place for some “esthetic curvature of the city” by carefully routed boulevards (Cutting Boulevard, Macdonald Avenue, Richmond Parkway, and others), but “planning” — which for Aronovici and Hayler hinged almost entirely on zoning the whole city into non-overlapping land uses — was recommendable above all for its “unimpeachable bearing on industry.” The United States, the men announced, with California at its leading edge, had entered nothing less than the “age of classification, segregation, specialization, and efficiency.”29 To do modern city planning, at or just beyond the city’s edge, was to order, to separate, to clarify, and to bound: it was to put work and workers in their proper place. Such was the conventional wisdom. For planners trained to desire comprehensive control, a satellite city such as Richmond, visible from the denser “center” but securely beyond its limits, seemed to provide the scale of least resistance, a comprehensible unit — a whole — to which well-proportioned spheres of home and work could intelligibly add up. Precisely this effect of system and scientificity, once achieved, could then be endlessly chattered about, depicted from above, reported on, circulated, and commodified: “The City,” Richmond’s mayor was quoted as saying in a pamphlet that same year, “has a scientific and well considered city plan, with zoning provisions…. We have a most admirable working climate.”30 It was not unusual to find capitalists and their lubricators in municipal government speaking the same language: “planning” could, and did, serve both parties at once. The pattern repeats in all the Carquinez towns, small and large, from Richmond downwind to Antioch, developed in the years leading up to the 1929 crash. The editors of the Martinez Gazette, in what could just as easily have been a sales pitch, noted earnestly that “it take[s] communities years to attain that development which makes them a ‘safe and sure bet.’” Inviting “the editors and publishers of the nation [to] enjoy their visit” to these golden shores and then to pass on the good word, they insisted, a bit anxiously, that all this planning had not been in vain: “When an investor or industrial head seeks a place of operations or plant site, that man goes forth quietly in quest of the community where industry is favored, where manufacturers are welcomed.”31 That place was Contra Costa County. One way or another, as art or science, tragedy or farce, American cities had to be sold.
The “Nature” of Industry and the “Romance” of Growth A brief aside on method is merited before we resume thinking questions of landscape ontology as these suburbs forced them open. It is easy enough in hindsight to mock these risible declarations of faith, to lampoon the manias of past ages, as anachronistic and overdetermined, in the name of some tell-all ideology critique. In documents both high-boosterite and ostensibly
29 Carol Aronovici and Guy Wilfred Hayler, Recommendations on City Plan for Richmond, Based upon a Social Survey and a Series of Eight Plans (Richmond, Calif.: Carol Aronovici, 1922), 12, 9, 4. 30 Richmond, California: The Industrial City (n.p., 1922). For comparable rhetoric from South San Francisco, the peninsula’s one solidly industrial utopia since the 1890s, see South San Francisco: The Industrial City (4 March 1926), Carton 5, Regional Plan Association, Inc., of San Francisco Bay Counties records, ca. 1925–1931, BANC MSS C-A 301, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: The city was “ideally zoned…carefully laid out into three distinct districts,” producing “among the [several] industries as a whole a unity advantage which cannot be enjoyed where industrial districts are not consolidated.” 31 “Contra Costa County — A Great Industrial Center,” Martinez Gazette, 19 March 1926.
87 technical, the skeptical historian can easily excavate, to then deflate, all sorts of paeans to developmental “vision” that exalt capitalist-cum-planner-cum-capitalist as yet another prophet of heretofore “virgin” land, imparting “form” or “order” where there was none before. Reams of hyper-local history, prideful in their sheepish way, eagerly reproduce “the vision thing” in their histories of small-time great men.32 They ratify the purest of environmental determinisms, especially as these have enabled boosters to claim “natural advantages,” and a causal unfolding foretold, for their chosen site.33 But this predictable style of critique — whose hallmarks are demystification, inversion, negation of the negation — comes up against limits. Most seriously, it risks forgoing attention to anything like an old-fashioned morphology of landscape or, hardly incompatible, to a new- fashioned excavation of boosters’ tacit theses on the ontology of landscape in the first place. Critique by negation can foreclose any textured attention to what the built form of a town, in three dimensions, is, does, or ought to be able to do: what animacies, with what effects, we can materially impute to ordinary suburban landscapes built in the name of production and a kind of social control. (It can also foreclose any serious intellectual history of shifting concepts, however overblown, of landscape’s activity.) Classic environmental determinism — cause and effect, before and after — occupied one, but just one, level of the suburbanizers’ working assumptions. “Vision” and the “visible,” too, jostle uneasily with their designs on landscape’s palpable but quite invisible force. We can provincialize the conventions of the breathless, more-than-verbal industrial sublime: “It is difficult,” one local historian exclaimed in 1940, “to put words together in a way that conveys to the mind just how great the industrial achievement of Contra Costa really is.” So, too, must we open a line of inquiry into how that very ineffability of the working landscape, less-than-conscious in its operation, might be one of the main levers of town planning as a concealable, quietly coercive — because appealing — form of power.34 These working suburbs, championed according to criteria that resolutely exceed the usual canons of landscape aesthetics that claim Olmsted and Downing, Riverside and Llewellyn Park, at their root, offer an avenue to thinking about agencies that operate through senses and sensibilities other than the visual. The settlements lining the Carquinez were “suburban” in all the senses we have outlined, but they simply never looked like classic “romantic” suburbs or
32 Within Contra Costa, see, for instance, see John V. Robinson, Crockett (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2004), 8: “From the hill to the west of Crockett,” John Strentzel, its founder, “saw the developing business opportunities” and so laid out a town to realize them. One much-reproduced origin story concerns the founding of Richmond, which officially came to Augustin Macdonald one day in a vision. See Augustin Macdonald, “Historical Sketch of Richmond,” Richmond Daily Independent, 30 December 1939, for his own telling, in which the “realzation [sic] of a dream city” occurred to him while poking around one day on a weekend excursion and “I speculated why such a delightful section was so isolated and had been neglected for either pleasure or profit as not alone its beauty but its commercial possibilities appealed to me for I could visualize all kinds of activity there.” See both Joseph C. Whitnah, A History of Richmond, California (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1944), 29; Susan D. Cole, Richmond: Windows to the Past (Richmond, Calif.: Wildcat Canyon Books, 1980), 41, for its uncritical repetition. And recall that spec-ulation connotes a specific way of seeing; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 33 See, for instance, John Leykam, Contra Costa County: A Chronicle of Progress (Concord, Calif.: Windsor Publications, 1989), 13, 17, written as corporate “edge cities” came to define the county for many: “Climate, geography, and topography…continue to dictate the maturation process today.” “The very distinctive features of different portions of the county lend themselves to particular kinds of business. Thus, there will always be agriculture in Brentwood and heavy industry along the waterways near Pittsburg and Martinez” (emphasis added). Anyone who has visited the region since 1980 can testify to the falsity of this last promise. 34 Purcell, History of Contra Costa County, 650.
88 their packaged, middle-class Progressive Era simulacra.35 Their planners articulated built and natural features in generally less composed or stylized ways than, locally, the slopes of North Berkeley’s Maybeck country, the curvilinear mounds of the island town of Belvedere, or the in- city suburb of St. Francis Wood, which Duncan McDuffie rather hyperbolically pitched as having “lifted” — cured or simply opted out of, we may never know — “the curse of San Francisco” and its repulsive row houses.36 Contra Costa rode the crest of another pattern of flight that was less “anti-urban” in toto than predicated on the distribution of urban functions from the outset. If the canonically romantic suburb nestled buildings in nature, consciously blurring where either one ended or began, the industrial towns could seem a bit awkward by comparison. They could strike onlookers as assemblages more than integral wholes, even as a vocabulary of the “organism” or “unit” remained fully on the table. And if the successfully “romantic” resort became so by giving the impression of age and its dignity, the industrial outcroppings along the Carquinez were developed so “instantly” as to prevent them from accruing anything approaching what the fin-de-siècle art historian Aloïs Riegl named “age value.”37 In the years just after 1900, which saw the coming of the Santa Fe Railroad’s terminus and, with it, the hulking Standard Oil refinery, Richmond’s boosters felt pressed to compensate for their city’s youth: “the Pittsburg of the West” (so designated before the East County hamlet of Black Diamond adopted that very name, down to the elision of the terminal ‘h’) was, they boasted, “the greatest city in the state of California,” but with a crucial caveat: “age considered.”38 Yet, on another register, capitalists attending to Contra Costa’s growth understood the landscapes in question as quite romantic indeed. Looking backward in an aside from his official History (1917) of the county, Frederick Hulaniski saw the very pace of Richmond’s awakening as indicative of something “more like romance than history,” a wonder irreducible to mere transcription as a series of facts.39 Hulaniski himself had speculated in Richmond’s property market, as he admitted in that same volume. His was a thoroughly capitalized, self-inflating romanticism. The real-estate magnate Frank C. Havens, who had given shape to abundant low- density sections of Oakland, trafficked in similar tropes in 1926, touting the hillside subdivision Smith Reserve, where “Borax” Smith, another high-volume developer, had lived, with purple reflections on the “romance of a city’s growth and its magical effect on property values.”40 It would limit our interpretive scope to explain away these tensions in terms of a simple “contradiction.” Suburban speculation, that favorite capitalist pastime, as well as the industrialization it both accompanied and reacted to, do not oppose themselves to a register of
35 For the conventional historiography of what counts as a “romantic” suburb, see John Archer, “Country and City in the American Romantic Suburb,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 42 (May 1983): 139–156; and portions of the more extended John Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). On some nineteenth-century Bay Area examples of studied rusticity, see Richard Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 142–188. 36 “Outdone by San Francisco,” San Francisco Examiner, 13 May 1917. 37 Aloïs Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development” [1903], trans. Karin Bruckner with Karen Williams, in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, eds. Nicholas Price et al. (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1996), 69–83. 38 Richmond, the Pittsburg of the West, 1. 39 Hulaniski, History, 326. 40 Smith Reserve, the Princely Estate of F. M. “Borax” Smith (Oakland: Realty Syndicate, 1926), Box 2, Frank C. Havens papers (hereafter ‘Havens papers’), C-I 64, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See “Map File,” Box 4, Havens papers, for a complete inventory of his property holdings, which ran as far north as San Pablo and North Richmond.
89 romantic enchantment, but can include and harness it. Indeed, if Jane Bennett is to be believed, it is precisely because “modern” capitalists can maintain, and even amplify, this sort of “commodity enchantment,” producing spaces and surfaces of everyday life that shimmer and stubbornly appeal to the senses, that “capitalism,” an abstraction, remains so difficult to grasp, the precise operations of its lasting hold so challenging to critique in a more-than-reactive way.41 Boosters worked tirelessly to render the fluctuations of property value as something ineffably more than a symptom of calculative rationality. Havens’s hymn to the romance of growth itself appeared alongside paired photos of Smith’s “princely estate” taken six years apart, both before and after the “magic” of becoming- subdivision had taken place. If “romance” as a genre could not, like ordinary history, simply be told, it could, through carefully curated indices, be shown. So wagered an embarrassing number of realtors and crack local chroniclers interested, like Hulaniski, in the invention of tradition, and in their own return on investment.42 Real estate parses and packages the landscape; it banks on how to harness and siphon off the “forces” of growth; it works to make the occult fluxes of property value physically awe and impress. In this way, real estate is a singularly telling domain in which to chart the give-and-take between capitalist imperatives to abstract space into its generic, placeless qualities — to commodify it — and to make its immanent energies enchant, affect, compel, enfold, and excite. Suburban real estate, where landscape’s “life” and “force” meant something more specific than back in the city, occasioned its own genre of capitalist romanticism. And there is a stubbornly romantic quality to the visual culture — to the landscape photos, stylized sketches, maps, icons, diagrams — that adorns promotional literature from even the smokiest edges of the bay. This imagery depicts a different middle landscape, a different compromise between Leo Marx’s comfortably nestled “two kingdoms of force”: an abstractly middle ground or “industrial middle distance” that may or may not add up to an integral whole. The cover image to the booster brochure Contra Costa County, California: An Empire within a County (1922) is diagnostic, a near-Geddesian valley section in which waterways, boats, factories, their smoke, foothills and mountain as their backdrop and frame, sky, and birds enact the capitalized continuum between suburban nature and industrial second nature (Fig. 4.7). Standard Oil in Richmond, C&H Sugar in Crockett, Hercules Powder (“Several pages would be necessary to do the plant justice pictorially”), the cement works at tiny Cowell: all, readers learned, were spectacles to be gazed upon and wondered at.43 All were routinely depicted in and amid the green-and-brown-and-yellow contact zone between the bay’s hypertrophied urban realms and their unbuilt outside. “Already” in 1904 “the towering smokestack o’ershadows the
41 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossing, Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 111–130. On the “sheen” of the everyday and the tactile stimulation, not the deadening, of capitalist environments, see Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005). The capitalist co-optation of vital energy, theorized more and more today in a biopolitical key, was an item of particular derision a century ago for Van Wyck Brooks: “Just those elements which in other countries produce art and literature, formulate the ideals and methods of philosophy and sociology, think and act for those disinterested ends which make up the meaning of life; just that free, disinterested, athletic sense of play which is precisely the same in dialectic, in art, in religion, in sociology, in sport — just these, relatively speaking, have in America been absorbed in trade.” And, we might add, in real estate. See “America’s Coming-of-Age” [1915], in Three Essays on America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934), 70. 42 After the analyses of nationalism collected in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 43 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 227–353; Stilgoe, “Moulding the Industrial Zone Aesthetic”; Contra Costa County, California: An Empire within a County.
90 dairyhouse, and the busy hum of wheels deadens the click of the mower.” But if boosters were to be believed, these machines only enhanced Point Richmond’s claim to be “one of the garden spots of the county.”44 Suburbanized industry was not to be scorned, hidden, or fled from, but accommodated within — and as — the natural. This is all to say that in the process of planning and selling, the edgewise stewards of the Carquinez pieced together a recognizably enchanted ontology of the active and constitutive landscape. They posited vital forces operating well below the threshold of visibility that, more than any discrete artifacts of their interested ways of seeing, argue for their darkened affinities with the conventions of an expanded romanticism.45 Inexactly classed as aesthetic but never aridly procedural either, a decidedly vitalist appreciation of the promise of landscape’s own suasive and productive forces emerges from this planning-cum-promotional literature. In ways deeply indebted to the Californian canons of nature worship we have surveyed around figures on the order of Muir, and to human geographers’ more avowedly scientific claims on the morality and causality of climate, actors engaged in decentralizing the Bay Area’s workplaces and sculpting its new edge realms maintained a faith that their newly composed built environments could decisively affect productive bodies and minds — whether or, especially, not anyone was looking. In lay ways, they posed the question of that nexus between subjects and spaces, dear to geographers since time immemorial, in new, vitalized (if finally instrumental) terms. They figured and configured their suburban spaces as charged, moving atmospheres of impacts, lures, and cues. Planners planned texturally, anticipating how spaces might be felt, inhaled, drawn in, drawn sustenance and motivation from, and, finally, taken as natural. It was at the very edge of visibility, they wagered, that the materiality of landscape, never inanimate, could most usefully come to life.
These edges also gave rise to a distinctive, dynamic, position on landscape’s influence on social life. To apprehend landscape’s doings in a vitalistic way carried with it a raft of assumptions — or aspirations — about human sensori-motor response that could easily have been excerpted from the loquacious playbook of Bernard Maybeck, the mystic whose rustic architectures within and without the city, which were rising at this very moment, more than any other can index a Bay Area landscape sensibility dedicated aesthetically and philosophically to a program of explicit Romanticism. As the architectural historian Richard Longstreth has explained, “more important to [Maybeck] than any aesthetic objective was how people responded to architecture.” Emotion and instinct, for Maybeck, were raw materials one could build with — involuntary forces that inhere and well up in bodies, whatever the ratiocinative mind happens to be doing — and material qualities of the human body’s changeable surfaces that buildings, once standing,
44 Contra Costa County, California: The County of Homes, 16. 45 As W. J. T. Mitchell has written of its early-nineteenth-century formation, “Romanticism is not only the age of desire (sentiment, feeling, and passion)” — humanist attributes all — “but also the age when vitalism, organicism, and animism first posed a powerful challenge to mechanistic models of the physical world.” For Mitchell, Romanticism is a form of enlivened materialism. He does not extend that animacy in a strong sense to landscapes, built or unbuilt, but he might as well have. Moreover, awareness of these reservoirs of vitality, which Mitchell sees as predating, postdating, and inhabiting Modernism, is so pervasive that “we have always been Romantic,” which “may just be a historicizing label for the juncture of mechanism and vitalism, inanimate objects and organic bodies, obdurate matter and spectral imagoes.” W. J. T. Mitchell, “Romanticism and the Life of Things,” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 170, 187. On the compatibility of machines and vitalist thinking, in particular, see a very different study, of early-nineteenth-century France, John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)..
91 might strike.46 To read Maybeck’s own description of his work, worded in terms of the perceptual effects it ought to ignite, is to encounter, in a matter of five pages, a fully vitalist philosophy of the body, the multisensory role of the built environment in affecting it, and the unique ways in which this body–building dyad might — must — be shot through by some ineffable genius loci when staged amid the topographic, climatic, cultural, and vaguely world- historical singularities of California. Maybeck published only one interpretive essay as an accompaniment to one of his own buildings. It is a peculiar but telling text. He begins with first principles. Resolved: “there are mental processes that are not expressed in language.” A building, usually classed among the solids, has a consistency more like the flowing cadences of music: it is a “conveyor,” always in process, “of ideas and sentiments.” It generates “a succession of impressions” on whosoever should walk in or near it. Never confined to things visible, it manages to “play…on the feelings and the mind.” It evokes, and quite literally calls into being, an “atmosphere.” Through “the real things of this,” and not some other-worldly, “life,” architecture can autonomously “affect the sentiments” and “produce on the individual” (also in, but importantly on) all manner of sensations.47 That text was Palace of Fine Arts (1915), explicative of the monument Maybeck had erected at that year’s Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. The specific sensation he wished this structure to impress on its visitors was a “modified sadness” — modified, that is, “by the feeling that beauty has a soothing influence.”48 With few exceptions — on which more later — Maybeck’s efforts were preponderantly directed toward residences for the comfortable classes, almost-bohemian suburban resorts of a more reposeful kind than those consigned to the Carquinez. He also executed campuses and monuments, highly symbol-laden, that, for most, are places to visit and contemplate, not to live or work amid.49 Such has been the dominant reception — by scholars and by a veritable cult of fans — for Maybeck’s stated “romanticism” of the built environment. But, averting our eyes to the bay’s near east, we might well hold his vitalist ontology in mind and take it off site — to see it performed in far more ordinary environments. And if these peripheral production sites, attaining an industrial sublime if any at all, can still seem like canonical products of a mechanized, constraining “modernity,” the next chapters will give us cause to reontologize these suburban milieux as participants in a far more equivocal — if still insidious — vision of the middle landscape come alive.
46 Longstreth, On the Edge of the World, 316, 346. 47 Bernard R. Maybeck, Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco: Commonwealth Club of California, 1915), 369, 370, 371, 372. Maybeck’s verbs demand scrutiny throughout. A recent analysis of the PPIE’s bequests to architecture and urbanism is Laura A. Ackley, San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama–Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Heyday, 2014). 48 Maybeck, Palace of Fine Arts, 372. 49 Kenneth H. Cardwell, Bernard Maybeck: Artisan, Architect, Artist (Santa Monica: Hennessy + Ingalls, 1977), is a respectful survey. On Maybeck’s campus design for Principia College in Missouri, see 203–206.
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Chapter 5
Enclosure and the “Idea of a Town”: Composing Suburban Units for Life and Work
Along the Carquinez, having fled the roiling “disorder” of the region’s denser centers, well- capitalized employers built towns from scratch that, on their accounting, would give form, once and for all, to life and work. But which forms, exactly, did they settle on? Which forms could best intervene and participate in industrial work while naturalizing their own doings, silent and seemingly inert? To answer these questions, we need to summon the methods of a skeptical, scaled-down urban morphology, which can shed unique light on working suburbs as designed, depicted, lived, endured, and sold.1 Employers and their planners placed a premium on spatial enclosure, imparting legible outer edges to their towns. They counted on the clarity of those edges to constitute the town and its putative community, and then to enforce their unity. These actors also took pains, in an age before “zoning” by that name was the rule, to sort these towns into specialized, non-overlapping domains of home and work — and then to depict the achieved classificatory order, visible from a distance, as testimony to their good handiwork. They tended to buffer their industrial compositions, from the outset marking off a belt of unbuilt space that would discourage regulatory intrusion or employee desertion and, again, help constitute towns as ontological wholes. These became ordered units scoping over all rounds of daily life — work, home, play — for those on the inside.2 Together, this threefold, honed in working suburbs, describes an
1 Aspects of this and the next chapter rely on information gleaned from a number of topographic maps: United States Geological Survey, Karquines quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: United States Geological Survey, 1898), scale 1:62,500; United States Geological Survey, Antioch quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1907), scale 1:62,500; United States Geological Survey, Mare Island quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1916), scale 1:62,500; United States Geological Survey, San Francisco quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: United States Geological Survey, 1916), scale 1:62,500; United States Geological Survey, Honker Bay quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1918), scale 1:62,500; United States Geological Survey, Carquinez quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: War Department, Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army, 1942), scale 1:62,500; and United States Geological Survey, Mare Island quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1949), scale 1:62,500, 7.5-minute series. For questions of town form and land use at closer resolution, the following fire-insurance maps are particularly useful: Sanborn–Perris Map Company, Crockett, including Port Costa, Selby, Valona, and Rodeo (New York: Sanborn–Perris Map Company, 1889), 1:600; Sanborn–Perris Map Company, Port Costa, showing location of ware hos. &c. along Straits of Carquinez (New York: Sanborn–Perris Map Company, 1889), 1:600; Sanborn Map Company, Richmond, Contra Costa County, California (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1903), scale not given; Sanborn Map Company, Richmond, Contra Costa County, California (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1909), scale not given; Sanborn Map Company, Richmond, Contra Costa County, California (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1916), scale not given; Sanborn Map Company, Bay Point, Contra Costa County, California (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1912), scale not given; Sanborn Map Company, Bay Point, Contra Costa County, California (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1919), scale not given; Sanborn Map Company, Bay Point, Contra Costa County, California (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1925), scale not given; and Sanborn Map Company, Port Chicago, Contra Costa County, California (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1925), 1:6,000. 2 “The towns the companies built” command their own subheading in the standard text John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 414–438. Reps, rightly, does not over-massage the distinction between the forethought of “planning” and the pre- reflective act of mere “building.” Neither should we.
93 imaginary and a technics of how landscape, inorganic but never quite inanimate, might assume an active role in sustaining capitalist life. The built environments of the Carquinez bear the stamp of this logic of enclosure: an archipelago of inward-facing pods of suburbanization, administered from afar (Figs. 5.1–5.3). This chapter scrutinizes the assembly, promotion, and governance of disciplinary landscapes along the Carquinez at several discrete locations whose founding predates the widespread accession to automobility around 1910 — before reflecting on some of the associated shifts that set in between 1910 and 1930. It asks about the conjoined material and symbolic work that the palpable bounding of space can carry out, and then considers the eventual eclipse, under a new technological order, of enclosure as the primary organizing principle for suburban life. At a deeply recessed level, the polarity of aperture and enclosure came to organize how suburban landscapes in the later twentieth century could be built, appraised, and then, crucially, criticized. Well beyond the encroaching edge of the metropolis, in ordinary suburbs of last resort, the basic criteria of urban form — and the stakes of its infraction — came into sharp relief. The Bay Area’s rendition of the City Scientific ethos — in new towns that seemed to display its principles in microcosm — came into its own on the Carquinez.
Before the City Scientific: Sorting the Company Towns of West County, 1880–1910 The Selby Smelting and Lead Company established its Contra Costa works in the early 1880s, and while it may not have been the first heavy industry to so decamp from San Francisco, it was easily the most conspicuous (Figs. 5.4–5.7). Its smokestack, visible for miles, was a common landmark by which seafarers and other Bay Areans could orient themselves, as well as a common day-trip destination for visitors to San Francisco.3 Adjacent to the Selby smelter, but carefully closed off behind the nearest hills, the company built the town of Tormey. It manifest all the physical signatures of company-town order that would be reproduced at several scales down the strait. Thirty to forty houses materialized on a spare, two-street subdivision just east of the Old County Road, today’s U.S. 40 and San Pablo Avenue. The streets were variously called A and B or Front and Back. Another fourteen houses lined the county road. The company implanted a set of approved institutions describing the limits of daily life for its workforce: a company store, a dance hall, and, for the periodic visitors on business, a small hotel. The town’s skeleton was eminently legible. It could, at a glance, be read as an integral whole. Crucially, though, and by design, that whole was differentiated — socially, spatially, and racially at once. Its multiethnic population, which never eclipsed 400, was rigorously sorted according to a divisive principle of ranked kinds. English- and Irish-descended smelter-tenders perched on the hillside; Portuguese and Italian, still racialized but “provisionally white” in David Roediger’s formulation, occupied flat land at the base of the hills; a Mexican “ghetto” abutted the trafficked county road without so much as a glimpse of the bay. Descent dictated each group’s insertion into the division of labor, too, along patterns that would be repeated down the diverse Carquinez. To its builders, and to the casual observer, Tormey could project nothing short of total order: enclosed as a unit, sorted internally, set to specialized work, and, as passersby or visitors desired, framed for visual consumption, a didactic landscape explicative of something like industrial modernity and the possibility of relative labor peace. The forms of the Bay Area’s high company town came into their own in West County between 1880 and 1910, at Selby and at several nearby experiments. Workers’ recollections of company-town life tend to seize on those forms, ratifying order for its own sake and playing
3 Mae Fisher Purcell, History of Contra Costa County (Berkeley: Gillick Press, 1940), 638, 637, 724.
94 down its antitheses. Dick Zampa, scion of a prominent family of ironworkers and building-trades unionists, in 1987 looked back fondly on precisely that sense of isolation that, as we have seen, was so strategic for the dictates of capital. Tormey’s middle landscape was “God’s Country,” he said, with opportunities to hunt, ride horses, boat, and fish — and this despite the perpetually chemical-thick air, the sulfur-scented grass downwind from the works. Local historians, too, have tended to apply positive glosses to the spatial hallmarks of the company town, writing off enforced racial domains as looser “clusters,” segregation as affiliative “congregat[ion].”4 From a distance, enclosure clarifies. Boundaries reassure. Another, larger experiment took shape at Crockett, where at the narrowest point of the Carquinez we can add dimensions to the hard-and-fast disciplinary logics that typified the classic company town. Crockett’s original plan spanned 31 acres and 18 blocks, all laid out in 1882 by I. L. Heald, who had crossed the strait from Vallejo to site his foundry and barley mill along the new Southern Pacific line. That year, the foundry struck the chronicler J. P. Munro-Fraser as “the most important and extensive industrial enterprise of permanent character ever undertaken in Contra Costa,” and it was conspicuous indeed: a brick compound, unmistakable from the water, that could also be regarded from the crescent of hills that pinned the town up against the strait and became the vantage point for a postcard view that would quickly become de rigueur.5 “The idea of a town,” as boosters and local chroniclers alike still recite, seemed to come preformed into the mind of Heald. It visited John Strentzel, too, who laid out Crockett’s “next-door rival,” the four-block town of Valona, so named for the site’s resemblance to the Polish village Strentzel had left behind.6 In Crockett, Heald commissioned a “large three-story hotel” not far from the industry, and workers’ cottages came to fill in the streets of the grid. Those houses, however, were not, as at Tormey, company provisions. Private speculators were welcomed into Crockett to fill that role. Employees, too, built “several well-planned cottage dwellings” of their own, as Munro-Fraser remarked with some admiration.7 Some scholars hold that company housing is the one defining mark of the verifiable company town, and in this way the case of Crockett allows us already to trouble that category somewhat, unbundling it into a package of variables that combined differently at different places and times along the Carquinez: more or less comprehensive in execution, more or less paternalist, more or less policed at its boundaries and seams, and with different structures of tenancy.8
4 “Richmond Was a ‘Big City’ of 25,000,” West County Times, 2 April 1989; “A Bit of Heaven in Tormey,” San Francisco Chronicle, 16 March 1987. The latter includes commentary from a descendant of Al Zampa, the ironworker whose name now graces the suspension bridge spanning the Carquinez between Crockett and Vallejo — and whose span, in burnt-orange silhouette, today graces countless unlicensed tourist t-shirts in San Francisco as a stand-in for the Golden Gate Bridge. The original cantilever span, the 1927 Carquinez Bridge, is no longer extant. On recollections (more or less fond) of the ethnic and racial sorting of space, see “Tormey, Old Company Town, Lives On,” Contra Costa Times, 31 December 2000; and George Emanuels, California’s Contra Costa County: An Illustrated History (Fresno: Panorama West Books, 1986), 172. On the processes underpinning how “whiteness” was reserved for only some European immigrants, and how its lines were redrawn to encompass gradually more “provisional” whites, see David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 5 J. P. Munro-Fraser, History of Contra Costa County, California (San Francisco: W. A. Slocum & Co., 1882), 416. 6 See the journalist Nilda Rego, Days Gone By in Contra Costa County, California (Pleasant Hill, Calif.: Contra Costa County Historical Society, 2005), vol. 3, 6. And cf. how motifs of constitutive enclosure attend Joseph Rykwert’s classic The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Strentzel was an unorthodox horticulturalist in Martinez and the eventual father-in-law of John Muir, who retired to an orchard in that county seat. 7 Munro-Fraser, History, 416. 8 See, for instance, Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (New York: Verso, 1995), 1–3.
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When Heald’s physical plant saw conversion to sugar refining in 1905, under the California and Hawaiian (C&H) Sugar Company (Figs. 5.8–5.10) — a process boosted by U.S. acquisition of those cane-rich islands amid the imperialist ferment of 1898 — Crockett’s neat, graspable physical enclosure, so crucial in cinching that putative “idea of the town,” remained at odds with the rather more hybrid forms of its administration.9 The sugar barons built a public sphere for its captive workers, sponsoring parks, restorative recreation in the form of company sports teams, various sorts of holiday pageantry for workers and their families, and periodic community dances at one social hall. There were public lectures, tennis matches, and campfires.10 The company built swimming pools, a commodious “men’s club,” and an “up-to- date” laundry replacing one that had been run by Chinese workers in the early 1880s before their expulsion (on which more later). As at Tormey, racial distinctions were given physical expression: English, Irish, Welsh, and German workers inhabited Crockett, while Italians, Portuguese, and Mexicans were dealt segments of Valona, uphill and out of everyday sight. C&H interposed a still-firmer buffer between these strata, in the form of a demilitarized strip of parkland, “Crolona,” that prised the already-white apart from the provisionally so (Fig. 5.11). But Crockett lacked the ur-paternalist company store run on scrip.11 Its houses were anything but uniform, and most workers owned them. Correspondingly, observers sought out all sorts of middle grounds in characterizing the place. “Crockett is a company town,” the San Francisco Chronicle hedged in 1948, but “in the better sense of the term.” It could be mistaken for “a middle-class community.”12 Crockett’s landscape was always somewhat conspicuous. Eyeing its machine-in-the- garden refinery, which in sheer heft far overpowered the town’s houses, parks, and stores, a German trade publication for the sugar industry counted tiny Crockett as among the country’s great operations, in league with the Domino megaliths at Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Baltimore Harbor.13 A blinking neon sign went up in 1956, marking the fiftieth anniversary of C&H dominion, that still fairly enchants drivers careening over the Zampa Bridge on Interstate 80.14 Most outsiders, now as then, see Crockett from above, and they see its bite-sized urbanity enclosed as a whole — in concealment of the fractures that were among its founding principles. What did enclosure feel like? To ask this question is to open a dialogue on the relations between landscape and power. Even amid the nakedest paternalism, formal enclosure was only one instrument in the making and remaking of a docile workforce habituated to indefinite labor in (relative) isolation. The visible cues of landscape always interact with less formalizable affects and atmospheres conducing — or so employers wagered — to discipline. We ought to couple our analyses of imposed constraint, then, with a consideration of how employers sought to induce worker restraint.
9 Purcell, History, 662. Purcell’s volume, though clumsy in many respects, is nonetheless a useful digest of facts, and a diagnostic document of the not-quite-postwar imaginings of how the county might (have) fit within its regional context. 10 Vera Esta Rigdon, The Geography of the Carquinez Strait (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1923), 4:12–13; Purcell, History, 713, 715. 11 Emanuels, California’s Contra Costa County, 176–177. 12 “The Pay Roll Stopped — But Crockett Took It Calmly,” San Francisco Chronicle, 8 December 1948. 13 “Die Deutsche Zuckerindustrie,” 15 September 1928, in Gutleben’s Sugar Thesaurus, 1958–1965, BANC MSS 79/81, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 14 Dutifully recorded by the C&H News, which, with the Cubelet Press, fills out Crockett’s workaday local color from 1936 on. See Gutleben’s Sugar Thesaurus.
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The Cupel, the employee magazine that circulated among workers at Selby Smelting, supplies some cues. The publication had been founded, said its superintendent in the late 1920s, to “pave the way to such an understanding and feeling that will help each other over the rough spots, which will finally bring peace and contentment of mind and make for a more happy and pleasant home life.” Managers had specific affective profiles in mind as they sought to recontour their workforces out beyond the city’s edge. “What are your sensations when you arise in the morning?” one prying article asked. “Are You a Morning Grouch?” If so, “Grouchiness, as desplayed [sic] by some in the morning is habit,” and it can be remedied. The Cupel was compiled under the understanding that “as to work, you need that to make you into a well- rounded being.” It stood against those “dissatisfied with things as they are.” And, crucially, it did so by inducing the collaboration of workers themselves, who were invited, even expected, to contribute their thoughts, however inchoate and impulsive: “You need not be a literary expert. Just write down what is in your mind…. If it needs a little touching up before printing, we will attend to that.”15 Whether these gambits were measurably successful, in any causal sense, in stanching labor unrest is hard to estimate, but unionization was scarcer and slower along the Carquinez than in the older industrial vectors veining the Bay Area, as the historian Robert Knight has shown.16 Town form at Tormey — Back, Front, A, B — could smack of the mechanized, the rationalized, the serialized, the depersonalized, the imposed. And yet, this overweening attention to habit and affect suggests something less streamlined as we approach the question of how these landscapes, purpose-built to discipline and confine, might have done their work on workers. Edges can both discourage and encourage; they can proscribe the “outside” of everyday life, but they can also, in the affirmative, prescribe its tenor. Enclosure, in short, could also feel like an embrace. All the same, it was as formed enclosures that observers, visitors, scholars, and others initially made these towns sensible. Crucially, it was in terms of their deviation from legible form that towns were appraised and compared. The third link in West County’s maritime industrial sublime rose in 1882 at tiny Port Costa — or “Wheatport” — which for a generation was the Pacific coast’s major point of shipment for the grain issuing from California’s Central Valley. J. P. Munro-Fraser, the county’s first historian, noted “immense storing facilities in mammoth warehouses…truly gigantic” structures extending along the shore toward Crockett.17 Along the way was Eckley, “almost a town,” where the Grangers had built their own warehouses two years prior to the railroad’s arrival, George McNear established the coast’s largest flour mill, and the ferryboat Garden City docked (Figs. 5.12, 5.13).18 At the grain trade’s height, around 1900, there were 23 separate warehouses, all of which were abandoned and rotting by 1940 due to both neglect and the appetite of the teredo, a wood-eating insect.19 One resilient warehouse at the foot of Port Costa’s main street, unenticing to the teredo, was built 1882 in concrete, the first Pacific project of the architect Ernest Ransome and, according to Reyner Banham, the country’s
15 The Cupel employee magazine, December 1925 and May 1929, “Selby” folder, Contra Costa County Historical Society, Martinez, California (hereafter ‘CCCHS’). 16 Robert Knight, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1900–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 387. 17 Munro-Fraser, History, 415; John S. Hittell, The Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast of North America (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Co., 1882), 204, 205. 18 Purcell, History, 411, 415; “On the Waterfront: Eckley and Port Costa Were Links in Grain Trade,” Contra Costa Times, 2 October 1994. 19 Purcell, History, 23, 721.
97 first example of a full-scale concrete building for industrial use.20 The town never comprised more than a single street, which dead-ended at the rails and the water after a shock of false fronts and irregular balconies. “Its situation at the foot of a considerable bluff precludes the possibility of its ever extending into a town of any magnitude” — just the sorts of “natural,” form-giving topographic bequests to which Charles Mulford Robinson and his peers were still lending credibility in the recesses of their master plans. Port Costa presents a peculiar sort of pivot, however. Numerous visitors were truly puzzled by its irregularity, reading its landscape as resistant to enclosure, incipiently formless and so a bit suspect. The geographer Vera Esta Rigdon noted, “A stranger, making his first visit to Port Costa is impressed with the peculiar arrangement of residence.” Namely, “Nearly all of the houses of the town are built along the main and only street.”21 There was none of the symmetry, none of the orderly allocation of uses and users that more thoroughgoing company towns, by fiat, were nearby coming to evince. “The idea of a town” seemed lost on Port Costa’s builders. The biologist Nathan Augustus Cobb, visiting from Australia to conduct a government survey of the Californian wheat industry, was openly unnerved by this “one-sided” town.22 Along the Carquinez, the integrity of place had become twinned in so many minds with a predictable set of spatial features. Enclosure and sorting, long since incidental, had become enforceable criteria of “good,” because legible, form.
The morphology of these enclosures varied quite a bit. There was no uniform mould to which all adhered, no standard kit of parts that all builders deployed to center, sort, or bound each unit in just the same way. Some, like Port Costa, projected “disorder” to the middle-class eye. Other one- or lopsided towns, like Rodeo, were almost entirely self-built by workers “to one side” of the workplace, which, heedless, had planted the flag. A local historian remarked of Rodeo’s Union Stockyard Company, a classically noxious industry, that “[i]ts activities” and nothing else “make Rodeo a town.”23 Comprehensive design in any strong sense was the exception: the Carquinez lacked any showpiece quite on the order of Pullman, Vandergrift, or other such experiments where professional architects, trying their hand at town layout, had free reign. The effect of enclosure — its proscriptions and its affordances for life and work — took priority, and it could be summoned by diverse means. (And these were, of course, not walled towns — exceedingly uncommon in nineteenth-century America.)24 Union Oil set up its refinery at Oleum and in 1895 marked off another classic company town in the mold of Selby and Tormey. Again the capital remained in San Francisco; again unrolled the full complement of clubhouse, tennis courts, executive hotel, and, here, dormitory- style housing for the 35 laborers to rent. Edward Dixon Heise later recalled his upbringing in the
20 Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 32–38. Banham observes that the arched tops of its windows, which in concrete strictly bear no load, are evidence that Ransome was still working in a “transitional mode”: the material was new, but older shapes lingered, taken for granted. 21 Rigdon, The Geography of the Carquinez Strait, 4:15. 22 Nathan Augustus Cobb, The Californian Wheat Industry (Sydney: W. A. Gullick, Government Printer, 1901). 23 Purcell, History, 715; Emanuels, California’s Contra Costa County, 167. 24 Although for some exceptions drawn from across American history, see Howard J. Nelson, “Walled Cities of the United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 51 (March 1961): 1–22. On the walling of political territory, see Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010). “Enclosure” is of course a persistent motif in Marxian renderings of the expansion of capitalism, particularly in the wake of Polanyi, but in those contexts the term is frequently decoupled from its spatial referent, denoting commodification in the abstract, not morphology.
98 manager’s Mission-style mansion, two stories high unlike the remainder of the town, with a patio and ornamental fountain for good effect. Other senses had to be enclosed at Oleum: Heise’s father took pains to screen their private realm from the fragrant workplace and its workers, ordering, in addition to a cement gate topped with globe lights, a wall of eucalyptus trees planted to mitigate the settling ponds, which were “easily identified by the smell.”25 Employers varied, too, in the degree to which they sought to ensure visibility for their operations. When they built with display in mind, the intended viewer was often normatively an urbanite. All manner of employers invited day-trippers; some organized factory tours; others simply presumed that passengers on the rails snaking by the plants, or else enjoying the tableau from a passing boat, would inspect plant and plat in the spirit of a reassuring advertisement for the wares and, by proxy, the probity of their producers. Those building Winehaven, the company town the California Wine Association commissioned near the old Point Molate whaling station (Fig. 5.14) on the western edge of Richmond, knew that sightlines were such as to make their factory visible from the northern bayfront of San Francisco. Suburbanization, as we have seen, is a constituent part of urbanization, not its antithesis. Industrial suburbanization is predicated on particularly enduring linkages between center and edge, core and (domestic) periphery. We can think those linkages at the level of capital outlay, and profitably so, but we might also think about urban gazes guided, gently, out toward the spectacle of the industrial middle distance. Along the Carquinez, those sightlines have often been more carefully cultivated than those between suburb and adjacent suburb. Indeed, as preservationists later charged with sizing up Winehaven admitted, “few people outside the immediate area know that Winehaven exists.” That selective visibility — and that prevailing invisibility — can be adjudged one crucial part of the visual culture of industrial suburbanization as strategy. What did the lookouts back in San Francisco see? Winehaven was a 47-acre site connected to mainland Richmond by its own private electric railroad. There were sections of Colonials and Craftsman cottages (and some Colonials fitted with Craftsman interiors), but within each category the houses were “so identical as to look like paperdoll cut-outs.” But it was the factory itself (Fig. 5.15), which replaced a San Francisco facility that collapsed during the 1906 earthquake, that dominated the landscape, a crenellated red-brick pile that toed the line between fortress and “Rhineland castle.” There was a military discipline to it all — and the buildings were indeed later appropriated by the Navy as a fueling depot.26 In Winehaven — or within view of it — as elsewhere, techniques toward total urban order were being tested out in miniature, glimpses of an urban otherwise that, scaled up and transposed, might yet reorder the “central” industrial city. Still other iterations of the enclosure ideal took shape eastward along the straits by 1910, each slouching toward total order by diverse physical means, each composed with an eye to shaping a worker subjectivity that was docile or civil or strong. East from Martinez, the settlements were smaller and sparer, “towns” only in an expanded sense — and by this point
25 Purcell, History, 716; “Manager of Oil Company Is Mr. Fred L. King, a Man of Cordiality and Business Ability,” Contra Costa News, 1 July 1897; Recollections of Edward Dixon Heise (1997), “Oleum” folder, CCCHS. 26 See Lucretia Edwards, Winehaven nomination for the National Register of Historic Places (1976); and materials from the Historic American Buildings Survey for “Winemaster’s House,” “Rectangular Three-Bedroom-Plan Residence Plan,” “Two-Bedroom Cottage,” “Elongated Three-Bedroom” (1996), in “Winehaven” folder, CCCHS. See Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America: From Prohibition to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 357–8, on the California Wine Association; “The Spirits of Winehaven,” San Ramon Valley Times, 2 October 1994; and “The Day Wine Flowed into the Brine,” Oakland Tribune, 28 January 1996. Edwards noted that the town was “virtually unchanged” since 1919, an “astonishing” feat in the Bay Area.
99 upwards of thirty miles distant from the capitalists funding their construction. Across the tracks from its workplace, founding a town called Nichols, the General Chemical Company laid out a street grid and, as the ceremonial central feature, “The Green” (Fig. 5.16).27 Associated Oil cobbled together an almost-town called Avon out beyond the edge of Martinez (Fig. 5.17). British capital built an outcropping of a hundred homes at the settlement called Mococo after the Mountain Copper Company, which mined in the system of hills leading up to Mount Diablo.28 The Cowell Lime and Cement Company began operations on the edge of Concord without a corresponding town for its workers, but after the manager’s son assumed control in 1903, realizing one became his “pet project” (Fig. 5.18).29 The limestone was exhausted by 1946, but most workers, newly auto-mobile, continued to live in the houses. In its overweening order, the scene became a source of anachronistic amusement to some. Cowell was redolent of “an English industrial village,” observed one journalist in 1969 — “[e]xcept for the palm trees.”30 The outlier, for sheer elaborateness of its formal conception, was the plan for Bay Point. Several industries had occupied the maritime site in succession, availing themselves of access to the Oakland, Antioch, and Eastern Railroad. That interurban passenger railroad, in fact, always allowed many workers to commute from Oakland; Bay Point never quite rounded itself off as a full-on work-and-home company town. Such was ostentatiously true of management as well. W. H. Daily, the principal manager at the Copper King Smelter, which rose in 1898 and fell, busted, in 1903, lived at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel for four years, administering the plant’s affairs at a considerable remove — and earning the hoteliers’ awe as “the most liberal spending guest day in and day out the Palace ever saw.” The C. A. Smith Lumber Company arrived in 1907, building an employee clubhouse that was “notable for a city of its size.” Again Gilded Age personas were making designs on the place: Smith himself, a Swede, was a major Republican donor and a protégé of Minnesota’s Governor Pillsbury. In 1908, the company charged the Walnut Creek developer R. N. Burgess with devising a layout for the residential and commercial sections of the growing, eventually multi-industry town. Having heard of Washington, D.C.’s McMillan Plan, which from 1902 had reintroduced essential elements of Pierre L’Enfant’s classicist original, Burgess traveled to the capital for inspiration. Upon return, he laid down an unambiguous central axis for Bay Point, ran striking diagonals across the gridiron in explicit imitation of L’Enfant, and at the town’s hillier southern edge drew up an intricate crisscross of streets designated for homes (Figs. 5.19, 5.20).31 A thousand people filled in the little City Beautiful by 1917, when the industrial plants saw conversion to shipbuilding for wartime, and as it grew, boosters represented Bay Point’s shapely plan from dramatic angles, testimony to both sides of the going slogan that the town had been “designed by nature” in the first instance and “developed by man for any industry.”32
27 For more detail, see map in The Nichols Subdivision (San Francisco: Punnett, 1912), “Nichols” folder, CCCHS. 28 Purcell, History, 640, 657; Nilda Rego, Days Gone By in Contra Costa County, California (Pleasant Hill, Calif.: Contra Costa County Historical Society, 1997), vol. 1, 75. 29 Rego, Days Gone By, vol. 1, 145, 87–88. 30 “Bastion against Progress Will Soon Vanish,” Contra Costa Life, 26 January 1969. 31 “Unable to Meet Its Debts — Crash in Affairs of the Bay Point Smelter,” 6 June 1903; Frederick J. Hulaniski, ed., The History of Contra Costa County, California (Berkeley: Elms Publishing Co., 1917), 391; Rego, Days Gone By, vol. 1, 179, 81. 32 Bay Point: Designed by Nature and Developed by Man for Any Industry (Martinez, Calif.: Ricks and Hayden, 1918), George A. Applegarth collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley. A decade after the war, the reference point shifted from Washington’s imperial grandeur to a more workaday example: Bay Point was renamed Port Chicago in 1931, a name “chosen with no desire to imitate the racketeering fame of the Illinois metropolis,” but as an acknowledgment that the lumber and ships and their neighbors were now bulking up
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Enclosure as a Way of Life: The Powder Towns These techniques of enclosure, sorting, and buffering prevailed with a new intensity in towns adjoining the assemblage of explosives manufactories that studded the landscape of West County from 1878. More than the spectacles at Crockett, Port Costa, or points east, the “powder towns” distilled containment as a — the — basic regulative principle of the everyday, and this for reasons tied intimately to the unruly materiality of the work in question. Remoteness, seclusion, and the attendant legibility of a bounded town form: these had different predicates in a uniquely hazardous suburbia where “blasts both planned and accidental” were expected parts of the cyclical rhythms of the workplace.33 Explosives plants, that is to say, explode. Un- or under- regulated, they explode frequently. Powder-town layouts reflect that fact, and their plans — which always included a buffer zone, not merely a functional boundary, between homes and the workplace — can be read as strategies of anticipation. Their builders took advantage of topography, too. Striation by “natural” barriers such as hills and bluffs became newly useful: landscape harnessed as infrastructure. In so many ways, the powder towns, “noxious” sites of “nuisance” on a scale unapproached by, say, a warehouse full of grain, modeled enclosure as a way of life — and they point up the various, interacting sorts of social work boundaries can do as participants in the differential production of subjects. At and around Point Pinole most notably, and in a ten-mile crescent extending from Albany in the south to Hercules up north, a significant crop of explosives concerns traced and retraced a familiar path of capital flight from San Francisco to the suburbs of last resort. Manufacturers specialized West County as a reliable backstage for operations that had become unwelcome, “inefficient,” or simply too visible to the polite set, or the suspicious, back in San Francisco. Demand for explosives had been driven in the first instance by what Gray Brechin has called the “pyramid of mining,” a complex installed during the Gold Rush and ramifying among diverse branches of the regional economy, massively extra-“urban” in its extent. As explosives production scaled up — again, capital- and space- but not typically labor-intensive — San Francisco captains began a complex locational dance, settling on this specific edge as the blankest slate for exploitation. Vulcan Powder, sited within the town of San Pablo, arrived first, employing fifty at the “largest and chief manufacturing establishment” as of 1878.34 Others settled nearby in short order. There was the Tonite Powder Company, at Stege (later annexed to Richmond), and the California Vigorit Powder Company, at a spot named California City. There was the California Cap Company, at San Pablo, which jostled with Safety Nitro and Excelsior Powder. Granite Powder, né Hardy, stayed sequestered in Vallejo at first before joining its competitors in San Pablo.35 All were vigorously un-unionized, although it became common for employers and boosters to trumpet workplace cohesion. This habit persists among local historians and clouds incautious attempts to write critical histories of these sites. The indefatigable Nilda Rego, whose musings on Contra Costiana were a regular feature in the local Times during the 1980s and 1990s, insisted that the Safety Nitro Powder Company, at Point Pinole, was bound together,
into a whole “industrial district.” See “Bay Point Name Change Opposed,” Richmond Daily Independent, 26 January 1931; “Birth of New City Chicago Occasion for Fete at Clyde,” Contra Costa Gazette, 27 January 1931. 33 Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 251. 34 Illustrations of Contra Costa County, California, with Historical Sketch (Oakland.: Smith & Elliott, 1878), 17. 35 Hittell, The Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast of North America, 709.
101 capital and labor, just “like a family.”36 When observers held off from pronouncing on the powder towns’ social order, they resorted to familiar signifiers of spatial order. The Giant Powder Company had begun operations in San Francisco’s Mission district in 1869, decamped to its Golden Gate Park as the Mission filled up with residences, and then in 1879 jumped the bay to Albany. After 23 of its 38 workers were killed in a blast soon thereafter, the capitalists crept north to Point Pinole, arranging the suitably disciplinary company town of Giant. Mae Fisher Purcell, whose 1940 History of the county melded triumphalism and nostalgia from within the relative stasis of the Depression, lingered on the rise of the powder towns as diagnostic of “one of the epics of American industrial growth.” When Purcell looked at Giant, she saw a pleasingly “modern village,” socially intact and spatially complete: a unit landscape unrealizable in the denser city, at least for the working classes.37 And each unit looked inward, defined by the boundaries providing its defense as much as by any internal principle of connection: “Each,” wrote Rego, biologizing a bit, “was allergic to the other because of their respective explosion hazards.”38 West County took shape as an archipelago of enclosures, industry-specific enframings that were legible both on site, to their users, and from afar, to the curious or critical. To the interested, they could seem every bit as natural as the suburban landscapes they remade. Scaling down from the putatively “whole” town to its fractures, it becomes clear that the powder towns’ version of spatial order presumed a subdivisive, classificatory logic, single- minded in ways that bordered on the maniacal. Their builders co-defined land uses and users in a single stroke, and differentiated workers according to an inexorable table of viable and expendable races. The company town at Hercules, California, affords the richest look at these processes of exclusion. At first glance, the raw data of industrial location — the befores and afters, heres and theres — can place the building of Hercules within a familiar regional plot. The California Powder Works, its patron, was founded 1861 in Santa Cruz, ostensibly “to fill the void in ocean-shipped powder from East” that had set in during the Civil War. It shifted its operations to San Francisco’s outlying Sunset district, and then, availed of rail access, leapt to West Contra Costa in 1879, naming the town Hercules after their most powerful powder. The Hercules Powder Company took on the name only in 1882, and in time found itself reshuffled at the cutting edge of Gilded Age malfeasance. Delaware’s DuPont Corporation commanded a majority interest from 1903 and assumed responsibility for managing the town, which had incorporated in 1900. Hercules Powder was a DuPont subsidiary only until 1912, however, when a highly visible antitrust case forced them to relinquish control and Hercules became, once again, simply Hercules.39
36 Rego, Days Gone By, vol. 3, 104. 37 Purcell, History, 646, 648. Giant was eventually subsumed by the Atlas Powder Company, headquartered in the usual tax haven Delaware. For a sense of their Western reach, published on the occasion of the Colorado River Aqueduct, see On the Aqueducts of the Pacific with Atlas Giant Powder (Wilmington, Del.: Atlas Powder Company, 1935), which says nothing about where the explosives are produced but closes with an aerial view of the tiny town of Giant: “Pictures like this are seldom seen.” 38 Rego, Days Gone By, vol. 3, 13, 16, 19, 22. 39 For the basic sequence of events on this instance of corporate flight, see the materials on Hercules and DuPont gifted by Ed Armstrong (1977) in “Hercules Powder” business ephemera, California Historical Society, San Francisco; and “Hercules Explosive City Where Safety Rule Is Paramount,” Oakland Tribune, 28 March 1954. A useful corporate history of Hercules Powder nationwide is Davis Dyer and David B. Sicilia, Labors of a Modern Hercules: Evolution of a Chemical Company (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1990). And for an indelible document of 1920s corporate triumphalism, see Conquering the Earth: An Elaboration of the Events, Through the Ages from Stone Hatchets to Dynamite, Upon Which a Series of Historical Advertisements Was Based (Wilmington, Del.: Hercules Powder Company, 1924), which makes analogies between the twentieth-century output of Hercules
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The built landscape of the town changed only in increments. The most conspicuous alterations took place at the workplace itself as new industrial processes entered the repertoire. Dynamite was the company’s initial be-all product, but the plant expanded to black powder in 1913, at which point management brought in additional workers from Santa Cruz. The plant worked at war speed from 1917, producing TNT en masse, sprouting new outbuildings, and increasing its workforce to 250. In the 1920s, the product line expanded to other frontiers in industrial chemistry. The stations of the industrial process were specialized from the first into separate buildings — the acid house, the mixing-and-packing house, the magazine — and nestled preventively into mutually exclusive gullies and ravines.40 The whole factory grounds — “a mammoth institution,” said Richmond boosters conducting a 1902 countywide review “under the Vitascope” — were “enclosed with a high board fence,” discouraging absenteeism, and “kept in palatial condition” (Fig. 5.21). Form spoke clearly, or seemed to: “Perfect system prevails and strict discipline and precaution has proven a safeguard.”41 Management even put a team of 3000 sheep to work in the fields abutting the workplace so as to gnaw the grass down to fire-resistant length (Fig. 5.22) — and employed a full-time company herder who would shear and sell the wool.42 When buffers could not conveniently be built, “nature” could once again be tapped to do the work. Paternalism took particularly grotesque forms at Hercules as well, above and beyond the bromides on “order” recited at Selby, Tormey, and their kin. Within the town’s enforced enclosure, virtually every aspect of employees’ lives became notionally subject to inspection, limitation, direction, and recomposition. The Hercules Mixer, a monthly company magazine, presents this paternalist complex in full bloom, charting the recent progress of the house baseball team, the escapades of the nationwide sales force, various day-in-the-life portraits at various echelons of the pay scale, English classes underway for immigrant workers, “practical first aid” classes, fire-prevention measures, births, deaths, marriages, and even an exclusive sit-down with one Mr. Bacchus, the chief executive as of 1919: “He calls them ‘my boys’…and they like it.”43 If this all can read as textbook biopower, making live and letting die, Hercules’s top brass zealously tried to consolidate a heavy-handed moral authority as well. Alongside the railroad tracks, not far from the edge of town, had stood a statue of the muscle-bound deity Hercules. Management had never been altogether comfortable with the figurine, which stood unclothed in the tradition of classical statuary. After some deliberation in the later 1910s among a particularly squeamish management, who found no easy way to clothe it and save face, they dynamited the landmark, the better to unwarp worker morals. and a host of past projects, from the Egyptian pyramids to Roman tunneling to “the most productive fishing trip in history,” on the James River in colonial Virginia. In turn, it positions explosives, and the mining they enabled, as the key element in securing human “freedom from our primitive dependence upon nature’s bounty” (6). 40 Munro-Fraser, History, 419. 41 Contra Costa County as Reviewed under the Vitascope (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Record, 1902). 42 Cori Ojala and Kevin McGrath, Remembering Days Past: Hercules, California, 1879 to 1979 (Vallejo, Calif.: Wheeler Printing), 21. This practice was discontinued at midcentury. The company turned to controlled burning, and then the cutting the grass by hand. 43 See the Hercules Mixer, vol. 1, no. 2, “Hercules” folder, CCCHS. The industrial hospital at Hercules was one of California’s first to keep a physician resident on site. The Mixer also exhibits interesting attempts at forging community among the disparate branch plants of Hercules Powder, which, from 1906 under the aegis of DuPont, was linked up with operations in Salt Lake City; Chattanooga; Pittsburgh; St. Louis; Denver; New York; Chicago; Joplin, Illinois; Hazleton, Pennsylvania; and Pittsburg, Kansas. Truly hard pressed to put a shine on its Kenvil, N.J., operation, the Mixer waxes absurd: “the plant is situated in that delightful section of Jersey which surrounds New Brunswick.”
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It is, however, the landscapes of residence, their constitutive bracketing off from the workplace, and their internal striation that give the most articulate testimony to how the powder towns applied principles of spatial division in the service of industrial discipline — and mainlined race as a central component thereof, in ways that a tale of distanciated locational strategy, first, and a micro-managed paternalism, second, can elide. “Zoning” was not the term of art as Hercules grew; nor, just yet, was “segregation.” The terms do important analytic work, however, and their untoward convergence in Hercules — sorting land uses and land users at once, as just so many cases of objective “incompatibility” — suggests much about how built form can participate in the production and reproduction of race and class. Management split Hercules into four discrete, governable pieces. One was for institutional structures, buildings devoted to the day’s labor and its administration. One was social, featuring a sizable whites-only clubhouse, which rose three stories, and a mess hall. Uphill was a pod of housing allocated to management, at its apogee the mansion “White Columns,” surrounded by generous grounds that were themselves cordoned off behind a gate (Fig. 5.23). Downhill, “The Village” amassed housing for the rest of the workforce, which never exceeded 450 in number.44 But that Village itself was rigorously subdivided by pay scale. Each of its five differently priced subdivisions had its own mix of architecture, which drew from familiar period vernaculars. Queen Anne, Italianate, and Colonial styles predominated. Some elevated bungalows appeared. Some duplexes were implanted between 1915 and 1920. Stubby new palm trees accompanied the cottages (Fig. 5.24), completing what a later generation of urbanists would call the street picture.45 Such was the landscape order for the Anglophone segment of the workforce — the white or the conditionally so. The Village broke down further, and even more inexorably, according a logic of race. Quite another landscape was dealt to the town’s numerous Chinese workers, who were crowded into barracks-style housing, three bunks high, in a long, narrow lodging house sited significantly closer to the combustible workplace (Fig. 5.25). The ensuing chapter will trouble this project of racialization more intently, but it is worth noting from the outset — in powder towns, which exposed “bare life” in more immediate ways than other industrial outposts — that a reading of these landscapes as simply bifurcated, “reflective” of a streamlined capital– labor dyad, only obscures these racial lines. These suburban sortings and allotments of space did sustain a kind of class discipline, but the working classes of the Carquinez were themselves diverse. If such towns were planned in a “deterministic” way, remaking subjects in a way that presumed straight-line causation between built form and behavioral outcome, it was a highly variegated determinism, with certain spatial recipes prescribed for whitened bodies and others
44 See Lee D. Fridell, The Story of Richmond, El Cerrito, San Pablo, Pinole, Hercules (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Union High School District, 1954), 158, for a (very) local textbook’s appreciation of Hercules. “California’s Smallest Town” — which, among incorporated towns, it was — was a spatial curiosity for almanac-wielding Californians who never laid eyes on it. Fridell compensated: the town was “smallest but on occasion the loudest” — a “‘Boom!’ Town,” using a pun that many, many boosters would deploy later in the twentieth century. Even at the turn of the century, though, Hercules stood out, metonymic for West County’s powder landscapes. The booster pamphlet Contra Costa County, California: The County of Homes (Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Development Association, 1904), 43, lists Hercules (incorporated, but still listed “at Pinole”) first among all the county’s industries. Purcell, History, 711, wonders at the “incorporated miniature town.” 45 Ojala and McGrath, Remembering Days Past, 3–5. And see the nomination form for the National Register of Historic Places (1980), which includes an inventory of building types and other minute particulars of land use, “Hercules” folder, CCCHS. The preservationists call the social and functional divisions “activity zones.” They admire the “cohesiveness of the original village fabric” and thrill to “one of the last remaining company towns in California.” In 1980, 36 original buildings remained.
104 imposed for the “indispensable enemy.”46 At Hercules and towns like it, for all the talk of labor harmony, all the rosy assertions that “there was little difference between management and workers” — and even the “village” label, in fact, can render mortal danger pastoral — the built environment could atomize as well as integrate, mutely enforcing a gradated scale of kinds.47 Hercules was built from scratch as a calculably tiny fiefdom of, by, and for industry. Everyday circulation within its bounds was meant to be predictable: a closed pedestrian circuit revolving to and from work, and seldom if ever beyond the limits of the town, across the sheep fields that hemmed workers in. Indeed, the balance its planners struck between home and work space made systemic sense — as a functional “whole” — precisely because the outer edges closing off that spatial system were so bright on the landscape, so directly graspable as limits discouraging more aleatory wanders out of town. Enclosure, edging, bounding, buffering: these formal contraptions were commonplace in company towns far and wide, as we have seen, and multivalent in terms of how they might act on everyday life. But sites of explosives production presented the single most extreme case of their application. A very specific spatial formula followed from the eventuality of explosion. The town included a buffer zone between home and work, and then another gulf beyond the edge of town — one of Ebenezer Howard’s greenbelts, almost, minus the socialism. More than casual boundaries, simple lines on the map, these were calculated discontinuities, active, constitutive edges with “nothing” built in between the units they called into being. Hercules was centered economically on its powder works, but as a town it was constituted through this preventive and strategic constellation of edges. In so arranging the working landscape, its stewards — and those around Point Pinole and so on down the Carquinez — enacted scalable models of “good,” because sorted, urban form that Progressive reformers and speculators alike, far from negating the nineteenth-century industrial landscape in toto, would learn from, selectively curate, abstract, communicate, and make portable for translation farther afield, in the “modern” Cities Scientific pronounced so confidently from 1909 on. Within the indistinct Turnerian middle distance of steam, steel, and speed, these bounded industrial micro-worlds served as laboratories for the clarification of new, “efficient,” and finally promiscuous spatial techniques for reconstituting “whole” communities. The home–work dyad founded and organized the classification system, defining operable spatial “variables” in an age of nascent social science.48 The boundaries between those realms became
46 On race and labor in the age of Chinese exclusion, Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), remains a crucial reference. For contemporary activites upstream from the powder towns, see George Chu, “Chinatowns in the Delta: The Chinese in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, 1870–1960,” California Historical Society Quarterly 49 (1970): 21– 37. 47 Ojala and McGrath, Remembering Days Past, 15, 2. 48 Following World War II, ascertaining the “balance” of home and work spaces became a major concern in urban sociology, urban geography, and an ever more quantitative planning. Leo F. Schnore, “The Separation of Home and Work: A Problem for Human Ecology,” Social Forces 32 (1954): 336–343, is the clearest example of this trend. For Schnore, the last best hope of the Midwestern human-ecology tradition forwarded by Amos Hawley, home and work were not mere variables, but the most basic poles between which, and in terms of which, the overall equilibration of a given metropolitan region could be adjudicated. The dynamics of the “journey to work,” which motivated the research agendas of countless postwar sociologists and geographers, emerged as a social-scientific variable in the wake of generations of desired, though not always rigorously coordinated, dispersal. And “the regular ebb and flow of community activity” — something as humble as the daily commute — “is viewed as itself expressive of community structure,” indeed as its guarantor against stasis or collapse. Schnore quotes Hawley for further legitimacy: “Recurrent movements involve no break with the past, no disruption of an established order. They are the means by which an existing equilibrium is maintained” (341). See also Leo F. Schnore, “The City as a Social
105 ever starker, and the urge to keep the two apart became one of the founding impulses behind landscapes that in the later twentieth century so many would pillory as “sprawl.”
Selling the Machine in the Garden: Booster Logic and the Visual Culture of the “Unit” Although industrial suburbs were crucibles for the separable techniques that in ensemble came to define best practices for the first generation of self-conscious scientific planners, industrial employers were by no means the only actors cobbling together “whole” new landscapes or circulating the visual culture persuading publics that home and work ought to be bound together in this way. Builders, speculators, realtors, and other private actors had a crucial part to play in normalizing this specific “idea of a town” — and, of course, in towns where company control was less than absolute, in financing, selling, and populating such working-class residential districts near, but just far enough from, the shop floor. Savvy realtors had absorbed most of the lessons of the company town by 1910, and after echt company towns had become cause for suspicion, they disseminated them, packaged for sale, throughout the 1920s. This section attends to how the unit idea and related contrivances fared on the private market, thinking real estate culturally and intellectually as an interested mode of seeing and shaping landscape, in which promotional literature again can disclose something at the intersection of economic ideas and landscape ontology. Absent the capital or wherewithal that would allow them to realize a town from scratch, private builders of the late Progressive Era, in laying out residential subdivisions, could seem to be doing industrialists’ work, consciously supplying housing that employers would not. Many, many subdivisions from Richmond to Antioch found themselves marketed as adjuncts to industry, specialized parts within a composite whole whose anchor was the factory itself. Indeed, the nearness of “noxious” industry was a fact that few selling to workers saw fit to conceal. The New Richmond Land Company, for instance, promoting Wall’s Second Addition, in Richmond, announced their bona fides as “The Factory Locators.” The company had not directly built any of that satellite city’s workplaces, but, as the pamphlet announced, “We have secured more manufacturing plants for Richmond than all other concerns combined. Two-thirds of the population of Richmond,” somewhat astonishingly, “reside on our tracts.” Richmond was too large and dispersed, with too many competing industries, for one paternal decider to orchestrate the whole, but land companies could work as surrogates. And, without ever controlling the shop floor, the “locators” did have a sense of where industrial space ought to be found relative to the available homes. They thought land uses together. Of their addition, publicists noted that “this Tract is adjacent to the great industries of Richmond” — and a close inspection of the multicolored aerial view they commissioned does indeed show a faithful representation of the Pullman car shop, Western Pipe and Steel, and their respective plumes of smoke, which still connoted prosperity rather than pollution. Crucially, the speculators looked ahead in time, labeling light-green “factory sites” that were purely anticipatory (Figs. 5.26–5.28).49 Home and work: seeing like a speculator meant seeing like a planner — and doing so for profit. Other subdividers reproduced these tropes ad infinitum — and certain oblique angles used to represent greater Richmond, in particular, in time became clichés of East Bay real estate’s visual culture. The cover of one 1912 pamphlet touting the Richmond Annex (near
Organism,” Urban Affairs Review 1 (1966): 58–69; and Leo F. Schnore, “Metropolitan Growth and Decentralization,” American Journal of Sociology 63 (1957): 171–180. 49 Wall’s Second Addition to the City of Richmond (San Francisco: New Richmond Land Company, 1915), Carton 27, Folder 5, McD.
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Richmond, but in the town of El Cerrito) similarly played up the home–work linkage, foregrounding the Pullman shops and relegating the green residential pastures to a modest role in the background (Fig. 5.29). The requisite aerial encompassed smokestack after smokestack, the emissions all drifting with the prevailing winds. The pamphlet’s interior panels were quite straightforward about the why and the where, declaring beneath a robust photo of Richmond’s Standard Oil complex that “[s]cores of Richmond workmen who live in Berkeley and Oakland can now have their homes closer to their work” (Figs. 5.30, 5.31). Even the more comfortable classes, the realtor E. N. Tapscott wagered, seemed to take solace in living within view of industry, if not of its sooty workers. His pamphlet for the Richmond Junction subdivision, sited just uphill from the San Pablo streetcar line, shows two women recreating in smart dresses beneath their umbrellas as the tableau of “Richmond’s Inner Harbor” announces itself in plain view (Fig. 5.32).50 The speculators locating, laying out, and boosting working-class districts began to talk like industrialists, too, or like planners — the dividing lines among these professional groups having long since blurred. In the age of the City Scientific, the effect of plannedness — order, system, forethought, and the anticipated spike in property value— was precisely the product realtors put on offer. “Logic” was one common watchword. When the San Francisco concern Baldwin & Howell, who had developed the comfortable Glen Park district to some acclaim, came to lay out the Pullman Park subdivision in the eastern reaches of Richmond, their publicists twinned home and work as a matter of course. This was a suburban landscape defined almost entirely relative to the workplace: “Logical location for the homes of the employes [sic],” they wrote. “We have never offered a tract of this character so well ‘located.’” This subdivision, they said, would win out as “the very cream of Pullman properties” — there were several subdivisions nearby vying to house the workers — precisely because it was legibly enclosed, “bounded on all sides by features that will make it valuable,” that is, by the car shop itself.51 Promoters called the Pullman shop “the finest example of modern factory architecture and equipment on the Pacific coast.” Its physical plant attracted considerable attention upon its opening in 1910, displaying new signifiers of “modernity” in its concrete construction and fully electric power. (The latter feature, in fact, in its smokelessness, was what had made housing workers downwind in the “immediate vicinity” thinkable in the first place.)52 The manufacturers expected this Pacific edition of Pullman to equal the Illinois original in size (and said so, paternalist aftershocks notwithstanding), employing a full 2000 men and housing up to 8000 once nuclear families were accounted for. Indeed, simultaneous with the first concrete factory
50 Richmond Annex (Oakland: Richmond Annex Land Company, 1912), Folder AR40, McD. Richmond Junction (Oakland: E. N. Tapscott, n.d.), Carton 27, Folder 5, McD. 51 “Pullman Park to Be Opened,” San Francisco Call, 22 October 1910.” 52 On electrification as a social phenomenon more generally, and as a potential source of urban dispersal, see Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); and David E. Nye, Electrifying America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). Beyond these arguments, note also that electricity was a major motif in eighteenth-century biology. The phrase “spark of life” survives from this period. Schopenhauer, later, conceived of electric charge as the will proper to matter. Lamarck held, but did not truly show, that each species contained its own kind of electricity and transmitted it in the course of reproduction. Electricity was one among his pervasive “subtle fluids” that swirled through the “milieu.” See Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy [1809], trans. Hugh Elliot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 212–3. On “subtle fluids” as a broader concern since Newton, see Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 79–82. There is a long life-scientific history undergirding how Westerners have thought about things electric; thinking electrification only in terms of a nature-denying technics is incomplete.
107 structure, the company built a second, exactly duplicate plant next door in anticipation of the expanded operations.53 That expansion never came to pass, but Pullman Park developed into a solid patch of cottages and bungalows, both for sale and for rent, in what boosters, amid a relatively poor market, called “[o]ne of the most successful sales ever conducted in the state.” Throughout the process of its sale, they recited the virtues of sorted adjacency, which so many had glimpsed experimentally at Pullman the First and normalized in less conspicuous industrial suburbs of all stripes: “Of course, there are other lots farther from the factory, but the average workingman prefers to live near his work, and if he can go home to lunch so much the better.”54 Order itself was the selling point, and that order, they insisted, was plainly visible on the landscape: “as near perfect, as far as general appearance is concerned, as it could possibly” be. “The property has been laid out systematically and with uniformity,” with careful grading of land, tidy curbs, and smooth cement sidewalks.55 If anyone was uncertain, Baldwin & Howell invited urbanites, whether tempted to buy or merely curious to see the latest in suburban form, to pay a visit to “Richmond, the biggest money making city around San Francisco bay.” For much of 1910 and 1911, the realtors commissioned “a big Santa Fe excursion and sight seeing train” on weekends.56 Industrial suburbs were on display, their principles shown and learned in a heady brew of aesthetics and technics. In an age of subdivision science, they held, the public needed to be taught how to see things whole. These spatial principles came into sharpest focus in what we have been calling the suburbs of last resort, but such forms of constitutive enclosure had aesthetic currency across the class spectrum. Techniques clarified in working-class suburbs established formal principles used in the design of quite elite preserves, where determinist anxieties about “protections,” property value, and racial purity had slightly different valences. Moreover, individual realty concerns, it must be said, by no means confined themselves to housing just one class constituency. The Richmond Annex, for instance, issued from “the same men who built up Berkeley, Piedmont and the Scenic Boulevard Districts,” drawing off some of their prestige but streamlining it into sparer, simpler forms that would not seem out of place between smokestacks.57 The Mason–McDuffie Company’s many developments are diagnostic of the enclosure ideal as it manifested on the more affluent edges of the Bay Area. The Berkeley firm’s promotional literature touts precisely this physical effect — the palpable closing of ranks — as constitutive of community, regulative of security, and protective of property value. Claremont, Duncan McDuffie’s hillside subdivision in the southeast of Berkeley, because cordoned off from the nearby grid, could be “planned for homesites…not merely as rectangles on a real estate agent’s plat.” Of St. Francis Wood, his best-known production, sited in the southwestern corner of San Francisco that boomed with ostentatiously ungridded suburbs-in-the-city once reached by streetcar around 1910, McDuffie declared that the development’s gates (and, of course, the deed restrictions in force therein) “are a shield”: they “ward off,” “prevent,” and “deny entrance to”
53 “New Car Plant Is Nearly Finished,” San Francisco Call, 29 November 1910. 54 “Successful Sale at Pullman Park,” San Francisco Call, 5 November 1910. Mere convenience was just the beginning of it. The idea was that workers’ quiescence, too, could be cultivated environmentally. Those peddling the Electric Loop Properties in East Oakland trafficked in similar ideas, addressing their publicity to industrialists in search of a location and wagering that “morale and loyalty” would result from “a home surrounded with happiness and contentment.” Such loyalty, the thinking went, would then be fungible into “the greatest efficiency from their help” at work. Electric Loop Properties (Oakland: E. J. Henderson, 1914), Carton 27, Folder 5, McD. 55 “Pullman Shop to Be Duplicated,” San Francisco Call, 19 November 1910. 56 “Richmond Draws Many Investors,” San Francisco Call, 11 June 1911. 57 Richmond Annex.
108 declassé noncompliants. Though spacious and “open” in its yard-by-yard aesthetic, “[t]he map shows how completely St. Francis Plaza [a later “resubdivision” of one portion of St. Francis Wood] is encircled.”58 Among Bay Area realtors, Duncan McDuffie was probably the most aggressive and innovative player capitalizing on those middle grounds between “planning” as such and property speculation. The exchange between for-profit realtors and officially disinterested planners was plentiful, the lines always blurry. McDuffie, more than most, couched in appeals to the virtues of plannedness — aesthetic, moral, economic — or of its effect. The text of a 1924 promotional pamphlet touting his several developments in North Berkeley let readers know in no uncertain terms: “Cities should be planned. Hence, Berkeley has long since decoded that she should not ‘just grow’ like Topsy. With this in view, the City Planning Commission,”
58 Claremont (Oakland: R. S. Kitchener, n.d.), Carton 18, Folder 25, Mason–McDuffie Company records, BANC MSS 89/12 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter ‘McD’); St. Francis Wood: A Place of Homes (Berkeley: Mason–McDuffie, n.d.), Carton 22, Folder 19, McD; The Homes of St. Francis Plaza (Berkeley: Mason–McDuffie, n.d.), Carton 22, Folder 21, McD. For background on McDuffie, Cheney, and St. Francis Wood — understood as a “garden suburb” nestled within a broader City Beautiful metropolitan structure — see Fukuo Akimoto, “California Garden Suburbs: St. Francis Wood and Palos Verdes Estates,” Journal of Urban Design 12 (2007): 43–72. On other area subdivisions sold for their wholeness, putative community, and spatial enclosure, see Lynne Horiuchi, “Object Lessons in Home Building: Racialized Real Estate Marketing in San Francisco,” Landscape Journal 26 (2007): 61–82, on the gated community Presidio Terrace; Woody LaBounty, Ingleside Terraces: San Francisco Racetrack to Residence Park (San Francisco: Outside Lands Media, 2012), not far from St. Francis Wood in southwestern San Francisco; and the promotional pamphlet Buckingham Park (San Francisco: Baldwin & Howell, 1930), Box 3, Baldwin & Howell records, San Francisco History Room, San Francisco Public Library (hereafter ‘B&H’). For more on the southwestern corner of the city, see Carolyn S. Loeb, Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers’ Subdivisions in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). By 1916, Baldwin & Howell could claim membership in an identifiable southwestern district — “the chain of residence parks already in existence” — that was jurisdictionally in the city, but in every sense suburban in its form, and often restricted by “nationality.” See “Bulletin #1” on Westwood Park, 9 October 1916, Box 3, B&H. The out-and-out gated communities were exceptional; Baldwin & Howell’s Presidio Terrace lines what is to this day San Francisco’s only totally private roadway. But the sense or effect of enclosure could be conjured through diverse material-cultural means. Streets, more often than vertical walls, were the preferred instruments. Streets had pride of place for the first generation of planners — those with City Beautiful and City Practical leanings alike — in the establishment and maintenance of urban “form.” For three strong statements, see B. Antrim Haldeman, “The Street Layout,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 182–191; Andrew Wright Crawford, “The Interrelation of Housing and City Planning,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 162–171; and Charles Mulford Robinson, “The Sociology of a Street Layout,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 192–199. (That number of the Annals is a themed issue on “Housing and Town Planning.”) For an earlier assertion of streets’ absolute primacy, see John Nolen, “Street Widths and Their Subdivision,” in Proceedings of the Second National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion (Boston: The Conference, 1910), 147–148. By 1916, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., could claim that the street plan “has always been regarded as the foundation of all city planning”; “Introduction,” in City Planning, ed. John Nolen (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 6. Grosvenor Atterbury held that street layout had a unique “bearing on this question of economy”; “Garden Cities,” Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Housing (Cambridge, Mass.: The University Press, 1912), 109. Duncan McDuffie, addressing himself to planners more than to realtors, was certain that “a street plan, once adopted, is almost never changed”; see Duncan McDuffie, “The Planning of Cities,” Pacific Municipalities 29 (1915): 618–619. To reprise a framework from urban morphology, we see street, block, and lot patterns outliving either the buildings or the particular uses they host, as in the classic M. R. G. Conzen, Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis (London: George Philip, 1960). Indeed, as Herbert Croly, the Progressive Zelig who began his career as an architectural critic, confirmed, “a house is but an incident in a general scheme”; “The Contemporary Suburban Residence,” Architectural Record 11 (1902), 71. For efficient surveys of these and related ideas, see Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph, Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities (New York: McGraw–Hill, 1997); and Charles Wolfe, “Streets Regulating Neighborhood Form,” in Public Streets for Public Use, ed. Anne Vernez Moudon, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987), 110–122.
109 with whom he had liaised extensively, “was established for the regulation of this city’s planning as well as her beautification.”59 Still, industrial towns were the clearest laboratories for these new instruments, sequestered realms of experiment where failure could go largely unpunished. By 1910, when freshly professionalized planners began to formalize these principles, many middle-class Californians, lay and proto-“expert” alike, had already come to sense, if not formally “know,” them as distilling a kind of spatial common sense — the “logic” of sorted collocation that so many argued for in print and image. The urban middle classes had seen such units rising on the edges of the bay, or heard tell, commuted by them and craned their neck in curiosity, perhaps paid them a visit, perhaps invested in them sight unseen. We can speculate on the mechanisms of their transmission — and will do so in later chapters. Whatever the case, by 1910 — that year again, that putative break point into the new — suburban visions of the unit, its bounds, and its exclusions had materialized on the least prepossessing edges of town. A new, sorted city had seen a test run in microcosm.
After Enclosure: Decoupling Home and Work in Industrial Satellites, 1910–1930 And yet, the fact is that precisely as the “comprehensive” idea, rendered “scientific,” took hold in official circles, it was becoming difficult to sustain a vision of the metastasizing city or most suburbs as an edged enclosure in any strong sense. The company-town logic of metes and bounds had a shelf life, and its appeal was profoundly unsettled by, among other things, new technologies of mobility and dispersal that were ascendant just as the planners closed ranks professionally. The larger outposts urban capitalists composed along the Carquinez, multi-industrial “satellite cities” of an extent and complexity unknown to Crockett or Hercules, grew from 1910 in ways that finally attenuated the force of the enclosure idea. Richmond’s founding in 1895, to take the most visible example, had occasioned credulous booster rhetorics of “instant” urbanity and telic growth under its own “star of destiny.”60 But Richmond decisively overflowed the strictures of “organic” form in short order. The Standard Oil refinery’s industrial sublime pulsated from the city’s western slopes as of 1902, attracting much comment. “The refining process,” Frederick Hulaniski warned readers, “is complex and technical — suitable only for scientific discussion. Despite this fact, an oil refinery is by no means an uninteresting place to the layman.”61 But Standard Oil’s claims to primacy in Richmond were never unproblematic. Standard Oil had followed on from the establishment of the Santa Fe rail terminus, which was a massive employer and pole of attraction, on flatter land in 1900. (Its workforce comprised many Mexicans, plus a group of Native Americans brought in from New Mexico and hired according to stipulations of treaties the railroad had signed when laying trackage in the nineteenth century. The Natives lived at the classification yards in boxcars.) Pullman followed a decade later, as did numerous other heavy industries connected up by a continuous grid plan that filled up piecemeal with (mostly) open-lot houses. In a multipolar city of this sort, abstract faith in the discipline installed by a bounded, single-industry company town and its “image of the city,” in Kevin
59 Why Berkeley? (Berkeley: Berkeley Realty Board, 1924), Folder M1, McD. 60 Joseph C. Whitnah, A History of Richmond, California (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1944), 128, is an example of local credulity on Richmond’s “instant” appearance, and its essential “destiny.” On, if not instant, at least greatly accelerated development as a distinctively Western mode of urbanization, see Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 61 Hulaniski, History, 351.
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Lynch’s durable sense, became unthinkable, even risible.62 Each large factory was ringed by its own set of tributary subdivisions. The city was an irregular assemblage of smaller, potential “wholes” — but hardly “organic” on its own terms. As the twentieth century ripened, Richmond’s boundaries blurred still further with the annexation of nearby company towns, folding Stege, Rust, Schmidtville, and Pullman into the city grid by 1912.63 And note: grid plans are extendable; they lack well-defined outer edges. They lack discernible centers, too, even as their geometric regularity (and the tendency to number, letter, or alphabetize streets) has struck so many observers over the years as the deposit of a crushing centralized authority.64 At the level of form, the uncoordinated agglomeration of industries in Richmond cut against, and helped to unbound, expectations that cities should or could form enclosed units encompassing a “complete” and “balanced” set of functions. The introduction of mass automobility, too, unignorably sped along the process of unbundling, decoupling home and work from the propinquity that was taken for granted in the pedestrian — and lingeringly in the streetcar — city. Contra Costa workers, by the 1920s, were quite often drivers. “No tract of land in the entire industrial district of Richmond,” ran one Chamber of Commerce rag, “is more than 30-minutes [sic] from established zoned residential districts, where employees live in their own bungalows and cottages.” Thirty minutes’ walk? No: “Rapid street railway service, and the almost universal ownership of automobiles place the workingman’s home at the door of the factory where he works.”65 These words saw publication in 1926. At least some of Richmond’s workers had become commuters, and an ever more dispersed geography of home and work reflected that fact.66
62 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), deals slightly if at all with industrial environments, but his fivefold model of landscape cues as a source of perceptual order — “edges” prominent among them — remains provocative. See Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910–1963 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 7–39, on the racial and ethnic complexity of Richmond’s industrial workforces from 1910 to 1940. Mexican railroad workers (at the Santa Fe) and Japanese agriculturalists (on the edge of town) outnumbered African Americans, who worked at the Pullman shop and elsewhere. African American women worked at Richmond’s canneries in significant numbers. Although deed restrictions and other collusions confined the African American working class to residence in unincorporated North Richmond, Moore is clear that no full-fledged “ghetto” formed until the 1940s, when war production remade Richmond and most local histories begin. (Nor was there a black middle class to speak of — quite unlike the cities most touched by the Great Migration.) 63 “Communities Plan Formation of City,” San Francisco Call, 16 July 1911; “Voters Decree a Bigger Richmond,” San Francisco Call, 29 May 1912; “Stege Section Added to Richmond District,” San Francisco Call, 3 July 1912. As it happens, the portion of neighboring El Cerrito known, then as now, as the Richmond Annex was the one eligible area that this act of annexation omitted. 64 On grid morphology, see Dan Stanislawski, “The Origin and Spread of the Grid-Pattern Town,” Geographical Review 36 (1946): 105–120; Leslie Martin, “The Grid as Generator,” in Urban Space and Structures, eds. Leslie Martin and Lionel March (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 6–27; Edward T. Price, “The Central Courthouse Square in the American County Seat,” Geographical Review 58 (1968): 29–60; and Reuben Rose-Redwood and Lisa Kadonaga, “‘The Corner of Avenue A and Twenty-Third Street’: Geographies of Street Numbering in the United States,” The Professional Geographer 68 (2016): 39–52. 65 Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1926), 9. 66 By the 1920s, many African Americans drove to work at Richmond industries from Berkeley, Oakland, or even the island city of Alameda. See Moore, To Place Our Deeds, 16. In California, mass automobility was by no means confined to suburban realms. As Charles Wollenberg notes, the modal 1920s-era row house in San Francisco, too, was built with a garage. See Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives on Bay Area History (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1985), 215. And we should not lose sight of the role of the truck — not only the private car — in speeding dispersal beyond the fixed trackage of the railroad.
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They were also becoming homeowners, as the middle classes looking on noted with some pride (far more in Hercules, say, or the more austere industrial colonies farther afield). That same 1926 pamphlet, Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves, claimed that 53 percent of Richmond’s industrial workers owned their homes, and that the figure was particularly high for a city of its size. “Thus,” the authors reasoned, “there can never be in Richmond what all Eastern and most Western cities call a ‘housing problem.’” The coding was not hard to penetrate: ownership was immediately indexed to “labor effectiveness.” If the boosters were to be believed — always a risky proposition — California was minting a peculiarly “middle-class” version of the American worker.67 So wagered their employers, anyhow. To take hold, these sentiments did not await the 1920s, when Hoover and a range of allies on the right flank of public life proselytized tirelessly for ownership as a core component of “normalcy.” The working suburbs of the Carquinez, with exceptions, had long given comfort to those interested in reclassing the workers populating this “county of homes.” A 1907 pamphlet naming Richmond The Pittsburg of the West adduced ownership statistics “assuring a thrifty, steady, contented body of workers.”68 A 1904 communiqué concurred: “At our very doors you will find the employees of many factories, foundries, warehouses, powder works, sugar mill, oil works, etc., all being non- producers but good consumers,” which is to say, homeowners, home improvers, and gardeners, ostensibly remade and regenerated in their communion with open-lot suburban nature.69 These statements were consistent with broader currents in reformist thought. The joys of ownership, planners and reformers tended to argue, might yet pay dividends back at the plant. One’s own house “strikes at the very source of the family pride and manhood,” J. C. Nichols wrote, “and stimulates the noblest aspirations in the laborer” — to work longer, harder, and without complaint. The house was not only a respite from work, but an indirect participant therein. And the resolutely ordinary working-class house, Nichols suggested, could propose itself as still another place of work: it “would be a stimulation to this man by his own labor to further improve his home and grounds; and in this way greater results would be attained upon the character of these individual homes than frequently comes from the better home.” The work of home improvement, these middle-class reformers understood, was essentially unfinishable. And work it was. But these new suburbanites could — should — be compelled to learn “the joy of the
67 Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves, 14. On widespread pro-homeownership thinking in the 1920s, see Janet Hutchison, “Shaping Housing and Enhancing Consumption: Hoover’s Interwar Housing Policy,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes, eds. Bauman et al., 121–141. The historical literature on homeownership in one form or another is vast. On its export, see Nancy H. Kwak, A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Industrial, and not only middle-class, suburbs were prime sites for the cultivation of new owner subjects. To acquire suburban property — near but not too near the factory — was “a new motivation for life,” noted Harlan Douglass. To suburbanize industry, he hoped, was to produce a new class of workers who were also contented owners: “The motives of human beings as allowed or encouraged by the terms on which their homes are held and their work done are likely to have profounder authority over the future” than most anything else. Douglass, The Suburban Trend, 313, 314. “There can be no doubt,” wrote Graham Romeyn Taylor in 1915, “that employers appreciate fully that home ownership tends to anchor the workman in the community,” preventing labor shortages in “slack times”; Satellite Cities, 21, 22. 68 Richmond, the Pittsburg of the West (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1907), 16. 69 Contra Costa County, California: The County of Homes, 37, 38. Again we can bracket making final designations on whether Richmond “really” was or is a “suburb” or its own “city.” Those drawing Pittsburgh analogies were intent on its being “not a suburb.” Why? “Its mechanics and laborers are not transient,” not subordinate for their livelihood to some greater urbs. “The people who live in Richmond are employed in Richmond, and this condition makes her an independent community.” The authentic “suburbs” of Contra Costa County were Orinda, Lafayette, and other towns planted along the railroad that since 1876 had run between Oakland and Antioch. See Richmond, the Pittsburg of the West, 16, 8.
112 actual doing of the physical work upon his home or laboring in the soil with his own hands.”70 The mechanisms of how this would actually transpire — and whether they could be directly observed — were always a bit obscure, but many agreed that homeownership would make for contentment. “The county has the advantage of contented labor,” asserted those calling Contra Costa An Empire within a County (1922). Then, through a kind of alchemy: “Where living conditions are good, labor is efficient.”71
Over the years, the physical footprints of West County’s powder towns expanded scarcely if at all. Their workforces remained in the dozens to hundreds, even as their capitalization rose. Hercules Powder added a set of Aladdin “Readi-Cut” homes during World War I and upped production to war speed. American Smelting — formerly Selby — added new cottages and a clubhouse at Tormey.72 But by the 1910s and 1920s, the truly substantial expansion was taking place at Martinez and points east, where more and more national concerns made their inscriptions on the Pacific coast. The factories of East County were built on another physical scale entirely, differently sublime in their isolation. The towns that grew beside them overflowed the forms of enclosure that some 1920s planners were still championing as good or best practice — albeit on the basis of found models left over from a generation prior. Martinez, the county seat, had begun life as another “little hill-encircled village,” “romantically situated” where the steep bluffs of the Carquinez recess somewhat and the technical Carquinez Strait opens onto the broader waters of Suisun Bay.73 Heavy industry was a relative latecomer. From 1905 there was the odd smelter to be found out beyond the hills that described the old town’s eastern edge (Fig. 5.33).74 Associated Oil then joined in 1913, with a “modern” and “complete” town all its own, called Avon, to boot.75 Then, in 1915, when Shell Oil established “the first modern, continuous refinery in America”, Martinez was radically remade. New housing filled in toward the incipient refinery district out east, far from the existing downtown.76 Martinez had become a full-on satellite, varied, multi-industrial, and populous, only through infusions of urban capital. By the 1920s, claims that Martinez was actually “situated at
70 Nichols, “Housing and the Real Estate Problem,” 138. On the obscured history of home improvement more generally, see Richard Harris, Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). On how another totemic example of nonhuman suburban property can exert constant demands on its owner, see Paul Robbins, Lawn People (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007). 71 Contra Costa County: An Empire within a County. 72 See Ojala and McGrath, Remembering Days Past, 9, on war-speed Hercules. See Alan Gowans, The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 59–63, on the phenomenon of Aladdin and other “mail-order towns.” For a sense of the Aladdin Company’s varied offerings at the time, see Aladdin Homes “Built in a Day” Catalog No. 29 (Bay City, Mich.: The Aladdin Company, 1917). Atlas Powder also purchased their wares. American Smelting at Tormey added not only houses but new in-town institutions in preparation for the war. See plan for alterations to Tormey town hall, 4 April 1917, Folder 1; plan for a Tormey “workingman’s cottage,” 1919, Folder 3; and plan for the Tormey “booster club house,” Folder 3, American Smelting and Refining Company blueprints, BANC MSS 75/80 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 73 Contra Costa County: Its Climate, Its Soil, Productions and Location (Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Board of Trade, 1887), 14. 74 John Mercurio, “Fairview, a Contra Costa Ghost Town,” Lateral Connection: The Central San Employee Newsletter (October 2005), “Fairview” folder, CCCHS. 75 Hulaniski, History, 423; Purcell, History, 659. 76 Kendall Beaton, Enterprise in Oil: A History of Shell in the United States (New York: Appleton–Century–Crofts, 1957), 6.
113 the center,” not the edge, “of the [multinodal] San Francisco Bay district” — something boosters had noted in the 1880s, but which had seemed a mere geographic technicality — had increased traction.77 Martinez was sprouting its own constellation of suburbs. Already in the 1920s, the edges of the region had become their own economic centers of gravity. Strong forces pulled the Bay Area’s built fabric outward, thinning if not hollowing the industrial base of San Francisco and making room for a new downtown.78 And yet, still another potential “center,” another more-than-suburban satellite city, was coalescing at Pittsburg, still farther inland from Martinez and a full fifty miles from the Golden Gate. Its town fathers had long had pretensions. As early as 1849, in one of the more grandiose episodes in California boosterism, the site was named New York of the Pacific, rigorously gridded out in boosters’ imaginations, and marketed for its “convenience” to the world of mining.79 No one expected the new city to contest San Francisco’s primacy, exactly, but by 1850 this new New York had forfeited even second place to Vallejo, San Jose, and other outlying poles. “No power could create a city where economic principles at that time required none,” wrote the amused historian Ernest Wiltsee. “The ‘boom’ collapsed immediately; the City was deserted at once.” From 1862 to 1885 the town underwent a “renaissance” and was renamed Black Diamond, honoring the lignite coal that had been discovered in the nearby hills, before that resource reached exhaustion.80 Past 1900, though, capital flowed in from San Francisco industrialists, who erected vast facilities for lumber, steel, and electric generation. C. A. Hooper “immediately laid out a town site,” gridded of course, in 1900, and California Redwood Manufacturers opened for business in 1903. Columbia Steel joined the fray in 1910, employing sixty men on nineteen riverside acres until the very next year, when U.S. Steel repossessed the plant and scaled up the workforce to 6000 (Fig. 5.34).81 Only then, and only by a popular vote, did the citational name “Pittsburg” become official.82 Town form changed in kind. “A big year was 1912,” William Tornheim recalled, when the street grid saw additions in all directions and familiar street names were replaced with numbers.83 A bewildering variety of industries large and small moved in by 1929: Cowles Chemical, which became Stauffer, in 1912; Great Western Electro-Chemical in 1916; Diamond Flour, Diamond Brick, a model dairy, the roofer and insulator Johns–Manville, and many others. The grid expanded piecemeal; the town’s edges, wherever they were, blurred; and it was harder and harder, as at Richmond, as at Martinez, to make the landscape all legible as a whole. By the 1920s, when explicitly “regional” planning was afloat in public with renewed vigor, the San Francisco–based Regional Plan Association took note of the town’s ascent, filing
77 Compare Contra Costa County: Its Climate, Its Soil, Productions and Location, 27, with Rigdon, The Geography of the Carquinez Strait, 4:9. 78 By the 1920s, the Bay Area was showing unmistakable signs of the decentered morphology of clusters described in Chauncy D. Harris and Edward L. Ullman, “The Nature of Cities,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 242 (1945): 7–17; if not what Peirce Lewis would later label “The Galactic Metropolis,” in Beyond the Urban Fringe, eds. Rutherford H. Platt and George Macinko (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 23–49. 79 See the advertisement touting lots for sale in New York of the Pacific, Alta California, 24 May 1849. 80 See Ernest A. Wiltsee, “The City of New York of the Pacific,” Quarterly of the California Historical Society 12 (March 1933): 32. Wiltsee pronounces the original scheme “not a mistake; not an illusion; it was only somewhat over fifty years in advance of its time!” (34). 81 Emanuels, History, 227–230. 82 Purcell, History, 676, 698. 83 Recollections of William Tornheim, Smith family papers, typescript, BANC MSS 72/150 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Pittsburg, the Business and Industrial Center of Contra Costa County, California (1926) away with literature on other credible “centers” around the bay, which together — only together — would sketch out the region’s massively dispersed geography of industry.84
All along the Carquinez, as we have seen, those composing new suburban forms did so under the pretense — sometimes declared openly, sometimes not — that the materiality of landscape, inorganic but never inanimate, could be counted on to act on everyday life, inciting physical work and scripting the limits on permissible dissent. One way or another, they understood landscape — whether street plans, curbstones, house types, park strips, gardens, natural hills and hollows — as a participant in the cultivation of new suburban subjects habituated to efficient and indefinite work. At first, they wagered, in the company towns of West County, landscape secured its effects on life and work — gave them form — only to the extent that it enclosed bodies and minds within the visible, sensible edges of geometrically “whole” industrial units. Landscape, in this first mode, was fundamentally restrictive in its activity, a disciplinary naysayer in no uncertain terms. Clarifying its edges was the very condition of possibility for establishing a town’s identity, indeed its very being, as an intelligible place.85 On or about 1910, this vision fell into eclipse. Planners and industrialists, realtors and speculators, builders and boosters in their shifting alliances continued to construct new working landscapes, of course, and they continued to make probabilistic calculations, of specious precision, on the causal chains yoking landscape to life, space to subject, industrial “environment” (to parrot the day’s geographers) to worker “response.” But they arrived at another working understanding of landscape, another consistency, another ontology that in an age of dispersal and putative disorder — and amid the first stirrings of chaotic “sprawl,” as many would come to know it — could give an account of its agency without relying on the clean boundary lines sorting suburban space into self-contained “units.” This chapter has given that rationalist toolkit its due. The next turns to other, weirder ontologies of landscape, differently vitalist and differently materialist, that coexisted with these technologies of enclosure as a kind of rider, exceeded them, and routinely gave them the lie. What landscape does: in the suburbs of last resort, the dominant devised a variety of answers to this question.
84 Pittsburg, the Business and Industrial Center of Contra Costa County, California (n.p., 1926), Carton 5, RPA papers. 85 Arguments made familiar, in an absolutely non-industrial key, by Heidegger: “Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing…. Things which, as locations, allow a site we now in anticipation call buildings.” Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” [1954], in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 152; emphasis original.
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Chapter 6
“The World’s Best Working Climate”: Nature, Race, and the Involuntary
The Carquinez yielded visions of a new form for suburban life. Those with something to gain from its buildup tested out hypotheses on how specific material-cultural trappings of the reordered landscape — boundaries, edges, enclosures — would act on the everyday, setting limits on life and work and setting them right by a kind of compulsion. In time, this faith in redemption by form, which always flirted uncomfortably with determinism, softened somewhat. But there was always another, countervailing notion of landscape’s putative agency that the stewards of the Carquinez channeled when scripting life on the working edges of the bay. To catch it in the act, we need to pivot our canons of evidence from the where-and-when particulars of built form — solid, shapely, showable in images, hefty if never totally inert — to those more diffuse aspects of the milieu typically classed as natural. As industrialization gripped the county during the 1880s, the Contra Costa Board of Trade came at the question from a very different angle, shifting attention from towns and their forms to the ambient local climate. We have a “climate that is almost perfect,” they wrote in 1887, “sheltered from the harsh winds and fogs of the bay by a coast line of hills, and from the hot blast of the norther.” The boosters were not, or not only, fixated on the homes or industrial plants, impressive though those may have been: “Climate, and what it produces, is the magnet.” Boosters put questions of nature, in other words, firmly on the agenda — but in a specific sense. We have seen mantras of nature diversely at work in previous chapters: Hegemann’s prophecies about Oakland’s topography self-sorting by elevation into functional zones, various earthen buffers throwing up resistance to runaway or “formless” growth in the company towns of West County, and so on. Booster literature throughout the nineteenth century had fairly bubbled with grandiose appeals to preordained destiny, summoning an entirely vague (and spatially unextended) naturalness as having dictated any given city’s developmental course. But suburban landscapes of industrial work summoned a very different ontology of nature. Climate talk relied on a diffuse, atmospheric sense of the physical world that was quite at odds with the edges and enclosures detailed in the previous chapter. Climate called forth a differently material register of landscape vitalism. Climate appeared as the vital source and force swelling up behind the productive bodies and machines arrayed along the Strait, a series of dynamic fluxes and flows coursing through and across the apparent stases of the landscape. Climate ineluctably penetrated bodies, ensuring physical “vitality,” boosters promised, in a medical sense: “The effect of this equability of temperature on the health is no less salutary and remarkable. It has been acknowledged for a long time by our most intelligent physicians…. But few appreciate what a sanitarium we have at our very door.”1 And, by their inexorable calculus, that climate was economically fungible: before all else, it energized physical work. If one pole of the landscape ontology boosters worked out when pronouncing on these unassuming suburbs stressed order and form, edges and enclosure, sorting and shape, this second, complicating pole was more flexible and atmospheric, a divergent folk geography of the suburban milieu, invisible but ceaselessly, materially at work on suburban bodies and minds.
1 Wendell Easton, Contra Costa County, California, and Its Offering for Settlement: Geography, Climate, Soil, and Productions (San Francisco: Pacific Coast Land Bureau, 1884), 3, 11–12, 13.
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It behooves us again to read the boosters as popular ontologists, looking through their just-so and ever-thus stories of progress to see them as relayers of a specific, elusive genre of social and geographic thought. Questions of climate, in particular, prove deceptively complex, encoding social goals as so many predicates of an imputed natural order of things. And we need to be as specific as possible about how the terminology of climate operated in ways metonymic for other, darker kinds of structures and relations. Suburban scenes dialed up the sociality of climate in new, unnerving ways, and indexed it to the problem of work. It was common enough by the 1920s for officials to advertise a propitious “business climate,” taking that term in a non-environmental, non-spatial sense. The editors of the Martinez Gazette used that language in 1926 in an editorial pitched directly at national firms, incentivizing relocation to Contra Costa County, where unions were weaker and oversight was thinner, over and against the Bay Area’s other vectors.2 Their use of the term was essentially metaphorical, tied down to no obvious cues on the landscape or in the atmosphere. Elsewhere, though, it was local “climate” in an entirely literal sense that boosters, scholars, planners, and capitalists, from 1880 to 1940, singled out as an agent of industrial modernity — not a before-the-fall nature that industry had to override. These appeals took extremely diverse forms; the correlations and imagined causations were anything but exact. John Hittell opened his Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast of North America (1882) with what he called a “comparative meteorology,” sorting the coast’s nascent metropolises by their air before descending into the morass of names, dates, and figures that an inventory of industries would require.3 In 1939, Edgar Hinkel and William McCann could still open their Works Progress Administration guide to Oakland with an assurance that “[t]he climate of the Eastbay [sic] is healthful and bracing. Oakland is in the same latitude as Smyrna, Palermo, and Seville but is not subject to the extremes of heat and cold.” Moderation in all things, they counseled. Climate had to be classified and compared, they assumed, before they would deign to say a thing about the East Bay’s surface — the usual stuff of landscape analysis — or its people, its economy, or its politics. And climate had an unignorable economic life: “The fog is thus a climatic asset as it maintains an equable temperature surcharged with oxygen.”4 It was in Richmond that the most explicit linkages of topography to climate to industrial work marked public discourse. Observers forged these linkages at several nested scales. County, city, and district, climate and microclimate: no spatial unit was too small for the booster class to naturalize and declare irreducibly unique. “See for yourself,” the Richmond Chamber of Commerce wrote to would-be factory locators in 1907. “Our only object…is to induce you to investigate.” Climate was a bit more difficult to represent in pamphlet form than, say, a handsome civic center or a subdivision plan; boosters courted entirely different sensory registers, mandating firsthand inspection, embodiment, and inhalation of the landscape in three dimensions. But what would the curious find once on site? Booster climatology became more elaborate as the twentieth century matured. In Richmond, the Pittsburg of the West (1907), the chamber-of-commerce mouthpiece was content to report simply an “immense local plain and
2 “Contra Costa County — A Great Industrial Center,” Martinez Gazette, 19 March 1926. 3 John S. Hittell, The Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast of North America (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Co., 1882), 59–62. 4 Edgar J. Hinkel and William E. McCann, eds., Oakland, 1852–1938: Some Phases of the Social, Political and Economic History of Oakland, California (Oakland: Oakland Public Library, 1939), 9, 8; emphasis added. The work periodizes Oakland’s history into “expansion and consolidation” (1870 to 1900) and “The Age of Industrial Fulfillment” (1900 to 1938); 827, 862. For a map that clearly displays the region’s prevailing patterns of wind and fog, see Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area, 298.
117 equable climate.”5 Their 1915 pamphlet Richmond, California got more specific, folding topography, ambiance, and labor into their own causal chain: “These hills are a factor in giving Richmond an unusual climate, mild throughout the year but bracing — a climate making it possible to secure the maximum of work.”6 In Richmond, the Industrial City (1922), the current Mayor Garrard made reference to Aronovici and Hayler’s recent handiwork: “The City has a scientific and well considered city plan, with zoning provisions,” which were common in American cities by this time but not yet taken for granted. Garrard, though, immediately reached for justification from another sort of science: “We have a most admirable working climate.”7 Richmond’s officials dialed up these climatic enthusiasms in Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves (1926), their last major publicity statement before the crash, calling attention to a graph headed “THE WORLD’S BEST WORKING CLIMATE” (Fig. 6.1). The graph itself was a simple summary of average seasonal temperatures, but the city fathers went a step further: “Labor effectiveness is 10 to 25 per cent greater in Richmond than in Atlantic Coast and Middle Western factories.” This had all been “proven,” they promised, although the scientific sources were not forthcoming. Richmond, readers learned, had been “characterized by Charles M. Schwab” of Bethlehem Steel as the country’s best location if year-round outdoor production was the goal.8 Who knew? The pamphlet delved into the minutiae of Bay Area physical geography in ways that may or may not have been intelligible to the Eastern manufacturers who were its target audience. In any case, the boosters again urged capitalists to come by to glean a haptic, sited, empirical sense of place: “We ask you to verify these pages by investigation, and can truly promise you that they will be found to contain facts.”9 The age of the City Scientific, then, seemed not to override the natural, but to harness it, articulating the rationalistic urge of the zoner with the more-than-controllable muchness of ambient air flow. The specious precision of their language — the folk geographies, the inexorable graphs — covered over what were at their core a set of hunches about landscape, life, and work. The suburban genius loci could be distilled into more specific elements as the situation required, each granted its own calculable “efficiency,” but the underlying assumption was simple, taken on faith: landscape and climate, in tandem, perpetually acted on working bodies, and planners could tap into their forces, without exactly controlling them, in order to optimize their workforce. Speculations on climate and microclimate interacted with the harder facts of built form, but they gave rise to imaginations that posited a far more diffuse register of activity for the environment — and a far more indirect, concealable mode of intervention on everyday life. To think about the social lives of climate — its putative agency, its rhetorics of naturalness, its economic rationalities — is to test the limits of morphology, which is the usual stock in trade of any descriptive, empirically responsible landscape analysis. When describing the built environment, we tend to deal in solids. The vaunted climates of the Carquinez — and of the Bay Area writ large, which more than other American metropolises has accommodated fanatics of “perfect” weather, “just right” in its moderation — lead us into another, no less material register of landscape ontology that suasive precisely in its pervasiveness, in its
5 Richmond, the Pittsburg of the West (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1907), 56, 7. 6 Richmond, California (San Francisco: Sunset Magazine Bureau of Information, 1915), 7. 7 Richmond, California: The Industrial City (n.p., 1922). 8 Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1926), 12, 19, 23. 9 Contra Costa County, California: The County of Homes (Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Development Association, 1904), 45.
118 indistinction. To size up these folk climatologies is to delve into a history of best guesses about the animacy of that which is invisible, arguably formless, and always in motion. Engagement with suburban atmospheres as an accompaniment to the strictures of suburban form, as we will see, also forces us to think differently about landscape and racialization. These climatic “natures” reformulate longstanding questions about embodiment, and about the body’s involuntary responses to landscape’s impress — questions that have been anything but innocent, and to which regnant answers have taken highly stratified forms. As we will see, the very line between voluntary and involuntary action, rational and irrational response to environment, has been drawn in ways that politicize, divide, and finally denigrate. Stories of climate economized and set to work: these expand our history of suburbs as sites of power.
“Moral Climatology” and the Habits of Industry Formal techniques of sorting, buffering, and enclosure, as we saw in Chapter 5, while elaborated within view of the factory, found application well beyond working-class suburbs. Nor were atmospheric appeals to the force of climate, which enjoyed a career in more elite preserves, whose history is not complete without some understanding of how builders tactically culturalized suburban natures, economized them, and enlisted them in the remaking of suburban life. Around the Bay Area, where the narcissism of microclimatic differences has always been acute, proselytizers championed suburbs for the comfortable according to senses and spatialities that exceeded the strictures of form. Real estate thrives on exaggeration, but what we see emergent at this time among Bay Area boosters is not a boundless romanticism: it is, instead, a fairly matter- of-fact stock-taking of the naturalness of landscape’s animacies and value. In fact, one of the dominant tropes in period promotional literature is the disavowal of fancy. “It is the custom for compilers of booklets treating of real estate to drift into poetry and romance,” the Schmidt– Skilling Company admitted, prefacing a North Berkeley property. “We shall endeavor to limit our simple story to facts.”10 Of the Thousand Oaks district in Berkeley, realtors claimed that “there is no overstatement of fact contained in this folder…. Nature made here a park.”11 Those behind Elmhurst Heights in East Oakland summoned speculators to their “outlet” that was busily siphoning off urban “congestion,” citing a bit of physical science that was perhaps ill selected: “Growth and demand for property are factors that regulate realty values as positively as the workings of the law of gravitation.”12 Climate, too, decoupled from the exigencies of industrial labor, might yet be optimized for the comfortable: McDuffie’s Northbrae section of Berkeley — “to San Francisco what New Rochelle is to New York; what Evanston is to Chicago” — trapped an “even, bracing climate” that was somehow “cooler in warm weather and warmer in cool weather than any other residential section near San Francisco.”13 And so on. Naturalness was a promiscuous concept on the suburban edge, industrial and otherwise. Various kinds of “vitality” or “vigor,” in turn, were then said to redound environmentally to the suburban bodies enclosed within. Middle-class suburbs were sites for very different rhetorics of biologization than those applied from above to working-class spaces. If their “climate” or general “atmosphere” did not impinge directly on residents’ places of work in the same way — the elite tended to work indoors — these factors might still, during recreation at home, restore the (normatively male) body to toil another day. Of its Moraga Redwood Heights
10 North Cragmont (Berkeley: Schmidt–Skilling Company, n.d.), Carton 27, Folder 5, McD. 11 Thousand Oaks (Berkeley: Thousand Oaks Properties, n.d.), Carton 27, Folder 5, McD. 12 Elmhurst Heights (Oakland: Henderson and Tapscott, 1910), Carton 27, Folder 5, McD. 13 Sales materials on Northbrae, Berkeley, Carton 21, Folder 3, McD.
119 subdivision, Frank Havens’s Villa Site and Development Company wondered, “Why burn ‘gas’ and your vitality [living in the city] — when half a gallon and half an hour will bring you to a place as beautiful and as woodsy, with reserve strength for hiking, dancing, and fun?”14 This was another suburban vitalism, the shibboleths of which we can recognize by now without trouble. Non-visual senses were at play: climate and atmosphere exercised a kind of affective grip on bodies that could not necessarily be captured by representation or rational thought. The journalist Elmer Grey’s worshipful aesthetic appreciation of the East Bay’s rusticized hillsides in “The New Suburb of the Pacific Coast” (1912), though illustrated, trafficked almost entirely in more- than-visible, more-than-verbal terms: Duncan McDuffie’s landscapes must be “lived with,” not merely seen, “in order to be understood”; they kindle “enthusiasm…and there is a lack of words” upon first contact.15 Crucially, climate linked up in these middle-class appeals with the presumptive whiteness of those who would call the more sylvan resorts home. McDuffie, much imitated and in many ways the subdivider of record, wrote explicit racial language into many of his covenants as just another planning principle, blocking the “undesirable races” at Berkeley’s Northbrae or the Maravilla tract he developed in Concord at midcentury. (“Servants, chauffeurs, and gardeners” were excepted.) But these hard-and-fast boundaries, marking out clear geographies of enclosure and exclusion, are less interesting conceptually than his innuendos yoking health to prosperity to environment to race and back. His publicist quickly chased acknowledgments of deed restrictions with allusions to “natural advantages,” to a “dry, fog-free, and fume free climate,” and to environments notionally purified — racially and spatially at once — and “bathed in that so-desirable country atmosphere.”16 McDuffie was at the forefront of Bay Area attempts to both
14 Moraga Redwood Heights (Oakland: Villa Site and Development Company, 1921), Box 3, Havens papers. Of the modal dweller at its Buckingham Park community north of the Bay, Baldwin & Howell insisted that nature would not pacify but “intensify his life”; Buckingham Park (San Francisco: Baldwin & Howell, 1930), Box 3, B&H. There was a fiscal dimension to this life worship as well. It was suburban homeownership, by a peculiar middle-class alchemy, that would above all else decisively seal the vital bond between subject and object. And there were grave consequences. In 1915, Baldwin & Howell’s vice president Marshall addressed an audience at the University of California, Berkeley’s Charter Day: “I would be willing to die for my home, but my dear friends, I shall never shoulder a musket in defense of a boarding house”; pamphlet for Mission Terrace, Box 5, B&H. 15 Elmer Grey, “The New Suburb of the Pacific Coast,” Scribner’s 52 (July 1912), 46, 47. Many middle-class publicists seized on these other, ineffable registers of landscape’s physical impress. At Eastlawn, an Oakland subdivision marketed by the (Mayor) Frank K. Mott Company, “There is an indescribable something that favorably impresses you” upon arrival; Eastlawn (Oakland: Frank K. Mott Company, n.d.), Carton 27, Folder 5, McD. In middle-class suburban “resorts,” realtors and others often assumed that the landscape’s primary force inhered in its capacity to bestow improved health — and with it morality — upon inhabitants. Much historiography on Progressivism and public health assumes that these environmentalist beliefs died hard around 1890 as germ theory, following Pasteur, supplanted miasmatic understandings of diseases’ contagion. For an example of this conventional sequencing in the context of Southern California, see Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 63–84. See also John E. Baur, The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870–1900 (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1959). For ripostes insisting that miasma and germ theories could and did coexist, see Susan Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 170; and Martin J. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present [2000], abridged ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 77–81. And, as has been stressed above passim, this was an open environmentalism of fluxes that admitted chance and event in the landscape’s workings, not a blockish, stochastic “environmental determinism.” 16 Sales materials on Northbrae, Berkeley, Carton 21, Folder 3, McD; Maravilla Tract in Sunny Concord (Berkeley: Mason–McDuffie, 1949), Carton 20, Folder 17, McD; advertisement for Maravilla Tract, Concord, Richmond Independent, January 1949, Carton 19, Folder 26, McD.
120 define and provide the basic elements of suburban “livability” — a concept whose full bloom awaited the post–World War II moment — and there was a racial tinge to the vitalist concept of “life” undergirding it.17 Race, McDuffie and others agreed, could be confirmed via a set of visible indices — colors, shapes, textures — on the body. But the “environment” environing those distinguishing marks, molding them and making them durable, establishing “fit” between atmosphere and some, but not all, bodies, was so pervasive as to go unseen.18
For a fuller history of ideas about these linkages, however, we do well to turn to industrial suburbs, where the materiality of climate seemed to pay dividends in the form of physical work. Period human geographers had been working over these themes ad nauseum. Indeed, how to specify the nexus between “environment” broadly conceived and (again male) subjects’ capacity or fitness to work was very nearly the basic question worrying America’s academic geographers in the Progressive Era. The most aggressive attempts to give a final answer came from Ellsworth Huntington of Yale, in a seemingly endless series of popular and scholarly publications. “Work and Weather” (1915), one of his serial contributions to Harper’s, is a logical starting point. “We all know that we are influenced by the weather,” he began. “That is why we talk about it so much. Yet few of us have any definite idea how it affects us…. Is the effect of the weather produced chiefly through its external influence on the senses or through some more subtle internal influence?” These were the core research questions, and Huntington set out with charts and graphs to ascertain the differential effects of “changeable” and “uniform” climates (the latter “like California”) on “brain-work” and “physical work,” which he held to be different in kind.19
17 For this language, see, e.g., The New American Home (Berkeley: Mason–McDuffie, 1939?), Carton 21, Folder 19, McD. 18 It was with reference to suburban projects that City Scientific planners most tellingly articulated their own atmospherics of landscape. In so doing, they effected a basic sensory realignment. We can read this generation of urbanists, for whom built things actively and intimately “influence” lives, as theorists of the more-than-visual, less- than-cognitive ways in which bodies might apprehend, draw in, appreciate, confront, obey, or resist their physical surrounds. Once “beauty” was demoted as the master criterion for urban design, so too was the status of vision itself. As for the Jameses, as for Bergson and dozens of more acerbic figures in the ensuing century of French thought, our coterie of planners granted scant privilege to the overwhelmed eye. On this inheritance, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), on developments from Bergson to poststructuralism, by way of, especially, Bataille. The ocular language of aesthetic “form” was never extinguished from planners’ toolkit, of course, but such forms were rethought as events to be bodily endured, “blocs of sensation” to be felt, not gazed upon from afar. Spaces were reimagined, in this key, as ambient volumes, inhabited piecemeal and in process, not the level planes, aerially surveyed, that, owing either to etymology or convention, talk of “plan” so easily conjures up. Without always theorizing as directly as Frederick Ackerman had, the reformers devised and executed their projects with non-visual senses and responses quite consistently at the fore. On such “blocs of sensation,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? [1991], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 179. Part and parcel of this foregrounding of sensation, for them, is a refusal of representation as well: “no art and no sensation have ever been representational” (193). The most cut-and-dry practicalizers, in fact, may have helped along this move beyond representation, exalting the invisible and anti-sublime in their hardnosed evacuations of all things “merely” aesthetic. Nelson Lewis, for instance, the engineer on record against the eye-catching “limelight” sought by planners in the Olmstedian mold, held that “imagination…does not mean a capacity to dream and to produce results which he may think artistic, but the ability to estimate the future by the past, to grasp the probable.” Sight was subordinate to a generalized foresight, and in any case the urban futures foreseen would more meaningfully be captured by statistical aggregates than by illustrations. Nelson P. Lewis, “The Engineer in His Relations to the City Plan,” Proceedings of the Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia 29 (July 1912): 204. 19 Ellsworth Huntington, “Work and Weather,” Harper’s Monthly (January 1915): 233.
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Huntington’s work could be read as merely banal, iterating a how-to empirics that industrial employers could apply for profit. Soon, though, he saw fit to scale up climate’s explanatory force dramatically. “Climate and Civilization” (1924), which he test-ran in Harper’s and worked up into a truly fatuous book of the same name, mapped out global differentials in “energy,” which in Huntington’s mind conduced — correlated, caused, or reciprocally reinforced, we may never know — to relative degrees of “civilization,” reproducing a West-and-the-rest world map that had become familiar through the age of empire (Figs. 6.2, 6.3). And yet, in 1924 as in 1915, Huntington had based his entire conceptual scheme on observations taken at workplaces on the edges of humble Connecticut cities: Bridgeport, New Britain, New Haven. Industrial suburbs, in other words, were his microcosms, scalable laboratories for some of the most sweeping claims to come out of American geography in its high-environmentalist period. Throughout it all, worker efficiency was the basic explanandum: “The most essential fact in the lives of the majority of mankind is work. Therefore the climate which is best for work is ideal from that point of view.”20 Had he been at Berkeley, where Carl Sauer was soon to make his brand of determinism unwelcome, Huntington may well have looked to the Carquinez — to Richmond, Martinez, or Pittsburg, perhaps — if he could stand making the outbound trip. Huntington had long supported very general theses on climate and environment as active agents — a position that he held unalloyed into the 1920s and past its date of disciplinary expiry — and on the uneven “vigor” of bodies as dependent variable.21 So had most professional geographers, such as Albert Perry Brigham and Ellen Churchill Semple — and, as we have seen, California struck many them as a slice of the globe where vigor was at a high point. Climate was a puzzle: Brigham admitted that “there is no subject, unless it be politics, on which men say so much and know so little as about climate.” And yet, Brigham was confident that climate, in its productivity, had to be measured in terms of the work it did and the work it induced in others. “I hesitate to use the word direct of such activity,” he demurred. “Such is our ignorance of the precise efficiency of these forces.” This did not, however, keep him from trying. “Problems of Geographic Influence” (1915), his most programmatic statement, presses the point over and over: “what element of climate does the work?... What does each climatic factor do[?]… Here is a vast field” for investigation.22 In his vitalist musings on the fauna of the Sierra, John Muir had written compatibly of nature as a kind of worker, with various agencies that humans might enroll without ever autonomously controlling: “Nature as a poet” made sense only insofar as it was “an enthusiastic workingman” too.23 Harold Fairbanks’s standard school-geography primer, California: The New Progressive Geographies Developed According to the Problem Method
20 Ellsworth Huntington, “Climate and Civilization,” Harper’s Monthly (February 1915): 373, 367. Geoffrey J. Martin, Ellsworth Huntington: His Life and Thought (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1973), 212, points out that these contributions to Harper’s, which Huntington supplied regularly through 1931, accounted for one of his main sources of income. 21 Ellsworth Huntington, “Geography and Natural Selection,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 14 (1924): 1–16. For a slightly later statement of this biologized vision of human existence, see Ellsworth Huntington, The Human Habitat (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1927). 22 Albert Perry Brigham, “Problems of Geographic Influence,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 5 (January 1915): 19; emphasis added, mainly for clarity. 23 John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra [1911] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004), 87. “The mountains,” he continued, “are fountains — beginning places, however related to sources beyond our ken.” The summer in question, 1869, was, by the time of publication, well in the past.
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(1920), took this point entirely for granted: “Nature,” he instructed students, “is everywhere at work.”24 It is not, however, the case that this environmentalist thesis went unchallenged. It was challenged, and robustly. The Michigan geographer Mark Jefferson, an early critic, took issue mainly with his colleagues’ going mechanism of action. The precise causal power — the where, when, and how — of climate and atmosphere over “character and habits,” he noted, was fundamentally unclear: “A great part of what has been written is vague and fanciful rather than cautious and well-based. If no other explanation of qualities is available one may always refer to the ‘climate.’”25 In his 1924 state-of-the-field analysis, Harvard’s William Morris Davis noted that Huntington had really stated nothing more than synchronic “correlations,” not causations, between climate and “human activities.” 26 Huntington’s differentiated climatic zones struck Davis as static points within a closed system, a great planetary filing cabinet of synchronic grades and kinds where nothing, fundamentally, ever happened. In eighteenth-century thought, as Jan Golinski has shown, a “climate” referred to a place, a bounded region — etymologically a “belt” — before denoting anything about the “rapidly changing…atmospheric formations” roiling therein.27 Read ungenerously, Huntington could seem only a step removed from Montesquieu. From the early 1920s on, Sauer, Chicago’s Harlan Barrows just before him, and many others under Sauer’s spell concertedly sought out theoretical middle grounds in which environment and social actors could share determinative power.28 Many geographers were already wary about reifying bounded spaces as denotative of social or racial essences. Those relating climate to work were the most visible culprits. But Huntington and his peers also proposed a second, countervailing ontology that was more dynamic. Theories of climate and work could also, and robustly, be theories of landscape in process: “change is a stimulus,” Huntington noted, and although there were “constants” in climatic “force,” its behavior posed empirical questions that one could hope to answer only over time: “The only way to learn is to discover what nature is actually doing to us day by day.”29 Air moves; climates become; life rushes on. His was importantly a theory of flows, of environments mingling constitutively and continuously with the bodies they enfolded: land meeting flesh meeting air. It was a biophysics of the world based on contacts and impresses, on material interchanges between body and atmosphere, landscape and life. Suburbs were sites that seemed
24 Harold W. Fairbanks, California: The New Progressive Geographies Developed According to the Problem Method (San Francisco: Harr Wagner, 1920), 64, 61, 116, 115. 25 Mark Jefferson, “Some Considerations on the Geographical Provinces of the United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 7 (1917): 4. 26 W. M. Davis, “The Progress of Geography in the United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 14 (December 1924): 176. On closure as a problem in this era of geographic thought, see Gerry Kearns, “Closed Space and Political Practice: Frederick Jackson Turner and Halford Mackinder,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2 (1984): 23–34. See also Antje Schlottmann, “Closed Spaces: Can’t Live with Them, Can’t Live without Them,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (2008): 823–841. 27 Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 210–213, on this point, and on the solace eighteenth-century geographers took in positing discrete climates as static “belts” rather than confronting the necessarily eventful (and for him quintessentially nineteenth-century) temporality of weather. 28 See Harlan H. Barrows, “Geography as Human Ecology,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 13 (1923): 1–14; and Carl O. Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape” [1925], in Land and Life, ed. John Leighly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 315–350. On Barrows’s influence on Sauer, see Michael Williams, To Pass On a Good Earth: The Life and Work of Carl O. Sauer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 22–39. 29 Huntington, “Work and Weather,” 244.
123 to stage and intensify this betweenness, dynamic mi-lieux in the sense historicized in Chapter 2. Along the Carquinez, the problem of suburban work, amid the ostensibly outstanding “vigor” of California, led its orchestrators and observers to posit landscapes that did their work in diffuse and atmospheric ways — agencies that a formalist imaginary of edges and bounds, though not finally incompatible, could not capture.
Such were the academic stakes of the question. Scrutinizing once again the booster imaginaries, it becomes clear that those selling and speculating on up and down the Carquinez made a remarkable range of appeals to climate. Climate, rendered as an economic instrument and ally, opened up a broad swath of speculative thinking on landscape’s animacy that was far more varied and peculiar than the broad-brush charge of “determinism” can connote. One set of climatic logics was still residually zonal: climates, in the plural, as enclosable provinces whose boundaries had to be jealously defended if “natural advantages” were to become competitive advantages. In 1904, a Martinez-based development association laid out “three distinct zones” of the Carquinez — West, around Richmond and the powder towns; Central, within the tentacles of Martinez; and east, out by Pittsburg — noted that warmer air prevailed farther inland, and from these differences attempted to derive principles of factory location, industry by industry.30 Climatic distinctions, at seemingly every scale, became tractable and economizable. Richmond’s boosters admitted that their appeals fell into a predictable Californian genre: “Californians all have a great forensic combat on the question of climate. It is a theme for discussion at any and all times in every city and hamlet from Shasta to San Diego…. Each section claims some delightful bit of immunity or choice bit of extra not enjoyed by other sections.”31 And yet, absurd though they may have known it to be, they worked constantly to make the case. Just as Oakland’s tiered “terraces” seemed in Hegemann’s plan to self-specialize by land use, Richmond’s boosters prised areas for “the counting room” from those hosting “the workshop,” arguing that the fine “working climate” intensified in the latter.32 A subtler set of appeals treated climatic affordances in a less classificatory way. Although boosters always tried to entrench distinctions between their locality and the next, a ritual which presumed some sort of fixable boundaries on the map, in characterizing the working climate they tended to set the air in motion, sketching a swirling energetics in which the environment was perpetually entering and leaving bodies, vitalizing them without ever quite settling them down. These interested climatologies normalized an ontology in which the working landscape had to be thought as a three-dimensional volume, not the merely areal geometry that standard City Scientific standard renderings of zones and plans were coming to entrench. One line of argument tied climate to a racialized concept of health. Some subdividers took refuge in quantification. The sellers of the Richmond Junction subdivision asserted that Richmond alone had been “proved, by authoritative statistics, to be the most healthful city on the
30 Contra Costa County, California: The County of Homes, 9. 31 Richmond, the Pittsburg of the West, 32. 32 Richmond, the Pittsburg of the West, 50. The present focus on industrial production does not, however, exhaust the scope of bayside attempts to economize climate. Boosters drew connections between climate and consumption practices, too. See San Francisco and Its Sphere of Advertising Influence, a report by the national advertising department of the San Francisco Examiner, 1928, Carton 6, Regional Plan Association, Inc., of San Francisco Bay Counties records, which touts, above all, the constancy of the region’s “Even All-Year Climate!” “Climatic conditions have a great effect on the buying and living habits of a population.” The relative stability of temperatures diachronically across seasons, in turn, seemed only to accentuate the synchronic areal differentiation into microclimates.
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Pacific Coast” (Fig. 6.4). (Never mind that the claim appeared on the same page as a photograph of a chemical works.)33 Some boosters appealed straight to the authority of geographers. Smith and Elliott’s 1878 compilation of Illustrations of Contra Costa County, California, with Historical Sketch invoked no less than the Swiss scholar Arnold Guyot, best known in the U.S. through his association with Louis Agassiz, for support on all things right with “The Climate of California.”34 More often the preferred scientific authority came from physicians — major accomplices in the selling of Californian property — who lined up in the pages of the booster press to offer testimony on suburbs as “sanatoria,” at least in relation to the benighted “center” cities from which speculators were hoping to entice new white residents.35 “Contagious diseases introduced into our county,” Smith and Elliott asserted, without substantiation, “refuse to spread…. Children born in this county are more vigorous, better developed physically, and freer from the pests of vermin, scabies and eruptions of childhood, than in any other part of the world.”36 The imaginations of Richmond boosters bordered on the biopolitical, tabulating charts of “Life and Health,” specifying comparative death rates per thousand, and enrolling a salubrious climate in the name of a specific crusade: “Protection of Life and Property.”37 “‘The city without a “For Rent” sign’ is what Richmond is called.”38 The discourse on climate’s affordances interacted with ideas about the goodness of homeownership, too, which management expected would help keep working bodies “fresh.” In Richmond, for the most part, these were “real California homes,” open-lot homes “surrounded by gardens well-kept and inviting” where laborers at rest could take the air and regenerate. Promoters were eager to clarity this condition by contrast with its urban antithesis: “There are no slums, no congested apartment house districts, no spasmodic employment.” If the racial connotations were not yet clear, their urge to mint a “fine type of labor” laid the assumptions bare.39 Decongestion whitened. So, implied its advocates, did homeownership. These linkages marinated through the nativist 1920s, and they may never have fully lifted. As late as 1936 the rhetorical link between climate, “without extremes at any season,” and “a high degree of efficiency” still had legs and could be adduced to sort Contra Costa’s “parade of towns” into discernible agricultural, industrial, and residential types.40 Some invocations of climate were less grandiose and more banal. There were, of course, some practical arguments to be made for warm ambient air. When pamphleteers claimed that
33 Richmond, California, 61. 34 Illustrations of Contra Costa County, California, with Historical Sketch (Oakland.: Smith & Elliott, 1878), 48. 35 Munro-Fraser, History, 51, 52, 13. Some actual sanatoria built in the age of tuberculosis had been sited in the East Bay. On one grand facility at Richmond, see Susan D. Cole, Richmond: Windows to the Past (Richmond, Calif.: Wildcat Canyon Books, 1980), 29. On other turn-of-the-century suburban sanatoria in the Bay Area, in Marin County and elsewhere, see Craddock, City of Plagues, 161–197. 36 Illustrations of Contra Costa County, California, with Historical Sketch, 17. 37 Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves, 19. 38 Richmond, California, 5. 39 Contra Costa County, California: Combining Agriculture and Industry (n.p., 1926), 7; emphasis added. 40 The Story of Contra Costa County, California (Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Development Association, 1936). Harlan Douglass made climate a specifically suburban problem, turning to Southern California to sustain his thesis on its implications for metropolitan structure: “It is perhaps too much to argue explicitly that a warm climate makes for the decentralization of cities” in a straight causal sense. And yet, “In the Los Angeles suburbs particularly, a distinct type is to be recognized based upon climate.” Industrial suburbs, which Douglass gave their due in ways few other analysts so far had, seemed best to prove the point: “the worker in the newly opened oil-fields does not in the main settle in congested industrial towns, but, by grace of his flivver, scatters out into many cheap bungalow suburbs.” Harlan Paul Douglass, The Suburban Trend (New York: Century, 1925), 114, 115.
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“[t]he climatic conditions at Pittsburg are so ideal that it is usually called ‘Nature’s Dry Kiln,’” they had specific industrial processes in mind: the California Redwood Manufacturers, whose facility adjoined U.S. Steel, dried vast quantities of their product outdoors.41 Some industrial climatologies recycled formulas that Californians had used for years with respect to agricultural labor, which took place outdoors and perhaps called out for certain atmospheric niceties in a way that railcar production inside Pullman’s concrete enclosure, for instance, did not. Wendell Easton, glossing Contra Costa’s farmscapes, had in 1884 trumpeted “constant sunshine, with a gentle breeze stimulating outdoor labor.”42 “The setting of this county insures an exceptional climate — a mingling of that which belongs to the sea and that which is of the land,” wrote partisans at the Martinez Gazette in 1915. “The air…is always in motion…. [B]y the time it has reached midway of this county the air is just right.”43 Versions of this trope inspired many Contra Costans with an interest in climate’s work. Some observers, more literal with their geography than colloquial usage has it today, considered San Francisco Bay the optimal midpoint between Northern and Southern California, and derived the virtues of the Carquinez from that fact.44 Frederick Hulaniski defined Contra Costa’s “golden mean” in terms of west and east, coast and valley.45 Pittsburg’s stewards made a similar estimation in 1926: the steel town enjoyed climatic conditions at “a medium between that of the coast and of the interior.”46 The geography of the “just right”: indexed to atmospheric currents, this amounted to a very different spatiality of “middle landscape” than what is typically derived from Leo Marx’s classic formulation. Faith in climate’s optimization intensified at the notional midpoint, wherever it was, between city and country, built and unbuilt landscape. Suburbs, that is, as middle grounds posed the question of working climate in a uniquely pressing way. This could all seem a bit mundane, the stuff of primary-school geography or freshman- year dialectics. But the language of “medium” may contain more complexity than it appears to. It suggests something more than either a self-evident spatial midpoint or a pat averaging out of quantitative extremes. A medium is both a betweenness — defined by the opposing ends of the spectrum — and its own kind of self-sustaining thickness. Climates were mediums insofar as they were ethereal milieux exerting physical pressure on practice: an unignorable presence within and in communion with which all activity unfolded. Mediums mediate action. “Medium” did semantic double duty in working suburbs, and it points up their stewards’ competing goals. In suburbs, employers expected, on the one hand, to get labor and location “just right” once and for all. On the other, they worked to produce new forms of life unforeseeable according to the law of averages. And once climate’s pervasive, gauzy materiality was at stake, rather than the bounds and zones that more readily disclose themselves to superficial visual historians, a whole geography of labor’s encouragement, of its (differential) vitalization, of biopolitical yeasaying by the materiality of landscape was on the table: “Growth is certain. It is in the air, for Climate goes a
41 Contra Costa County, California: An Empire within a County (n.p., 1922); Nilda Rego, Days Gone By in Contra Costa County, California (Pleasant Hill, Calif.: Contra Costa County Historical Society, 1998), vol. 2, 177. 42 Wendell Easton, Contra Costa County, California, and Its Offering for Settlement: Geography, Climate, Soil, and Productions (San Francisco: Pacific Coast Land Bureau, 1884), 5. 43 Contra Costa County, California: Leading County of the West in Manufacturing (Martinez, Calif.: Gazette Print, 1915); emphasis original, but converted from bold type to italics. 44 Munro-Fraser, History, 49. 45 Hulaniski, History, 88, 91. 46 Pittsburg, the Business and Industrial Center of Contra Costa County, California.
126 long way toward molding Progress, and here,” at Stege’s East Shore Park subdivision, a Dohrmann production, “is the climate that inspires energy and makes life well worth the living.”47 Climate quite literally bound workers to the landscape — habituated them to their place of work— with every passing breath. On these working edges, then, we can see a dramatically different sense of the suburban “middle landscape” being worked out, rationalized, and naturalized. It had its own distinctive visual culture, and how renderers saw and depicted this betweenness would make for a compelling study in landscape aesthetics. But another set of logics was at work on a less- or more-than-visual level. The ontologies and animacies of climate took on moral valences from the first. The “medium” of climate entered quite directly into capitalist designs for the production and reproduction of laborers. There were “no dangerous extremes” in this county, boosters asserted in 1921.48 “Mild but not enervating,” its carefully selected climate would vitalize bodies to work, but also devitalize their tendencies to differ or resist.49 There were no “extremes,” but neither was there “monotony.” “Moderate variations” in temperature were essential if employers were to guarantee “no cessation of outdoor work.”50 The risible hard-scientific gestures that would quantify “the best working climate” in graphs and tables fell out of fashion somewhat following the Second World War, but hunches about its productivity lived on. Climate was a “bromide,” admitted those pushing the industrialization of Santa Clara County in those years, but one that “really pays dividends”: “less [sic] work stoppages — better employee health — less
47 East Shore Park (Oakland: W. C. Dohrmann, 1918), George A. Applegarth collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley. 48 Contra Costa County, California: The County of Health, Wealth, Prosperity (Martinez, Calif.: Gazette Print, 1921). 49 A similar argument on nature as capitalist “ally” appears in Mike Davis, “Sunshine and the Open Shop: Ford and Darwin in 1920s Los Angeles,” Antipode 29 (1997): 356–382, a provocative piece reasonably well known to students of California’s cities. In his critiques of the Chamber of Commerce set, however, Davis evinces excessive faith in the extent to which boosters’ folk climatologies actually accomplished what they said they would. His claims are causal to a fault: e.g., “Home-ownership as a result sapped the will of workers to fight for higher wages and better working conditions” (372). His invocations of an intermunicipal “Darwinism” are gestural at best, the “Ford” foil goes unexplored, and the claim that “[r]acial-selectionist ideology, of course, was in perfect resonance with open[-]shop philosophy” (376; emphasis added) raises more questions than it answers. Davis rightly sees climate and landscape “aggressively capitaliz[ed]” (375), diagnoses racial-sounding selection talk at work in those municipal rivalries in which climate might offer an advantage, and is no doubt attentive to sedimented notions that specific racial groups might be “naturally adept” at — and might physically adapt to — prescribed forms of labor (Mexican women, for instance, were thought to be born seamstresses). But Davis does not pursue the ways in which ideas about groups’ relative sensory responsiveness to climate itself figured in these racializing calculations. He turns away from a phenomenology, real or imagined, that would link race with the materiality of climate as lived and inhaled. Davis’s thinking is brutally causal at times. At others, he seems airily content with mere guilt by association when causation would in fact help his case. Davis finally undersells how capitalists enrolled Californian climates in the production and spatial sorting of a distinctive racial order. For an Angeleno rendition of Progressive “climate” and “nature” talk, see the settlement-house official Dana Bartlett, The Better City: A Sociological Study of a Modern City (Los Angeles: The Neuner Company Press, 1907), especially chapters 1, 2, 8, and 10. Resonances are plentiful, from climate’s “cash value” to the “unfettered energy” (19) with which it would infuse workers — lubricating the “amalgamation of races,” from “Northmen” to their “romantic and poetic” others, into a “new and splendid type” (201). “In the first place,” Bartlett sets out, “there is the asset of climate” (18). And yet, these natures were always social natures: “It is not so much a question of what climate, but how a climate is used that is of the first importance” (160). This rhetorical climatology was by no means confined to Northern California, although its painstaking division into enclosable microclimates likely was. 50 Mae Fisher Purcell, History of Contra Costa County (Berkeley: Gillick Press, 1940), 99, 101.
127 absenteeism.” (Fig. 6.5). To moderate: this, thought in the affirmative, was the key suburban verb.
One offhand historiography of the edges of America’s industrial cities might suggest a steady denaturing underway from about 1870 to about 1930: a supersession of idyllic “natures” under the weight of planners’ rationalism and capitalists’ Fordist industrialism. Another, subtler and politically more complex history sees ideas of landscape’s “vitality” originarily and indefinitely harnessed to the question of production. As early as 1878, when the California Powder Works and Selby Smelting had just begun to consider the Carquinez in their search for fuller industrial Lebensraum, Smith and Elliott had held “salubrity” and “manufactures” in close counterpoint. The “unusual facilities” for industry depended first on there being “no malarial cause in the county, no pestilential marshes, no decaying forests, no stagnant pools of stinking water, simmering under a summer’s sun, to sorrow the land with sickness.” To produce goods, the argument ran, one had first to produce workers — and to select natures that would imbue them with “an active, vigorous constitution.”51 Fifty years later, in a vastly more urbanized society on the precipice of depression, this vital biology had not been outmoded, but dialed up, reworked, normalized, socialized, and hybridized. If visions of spatial enclosure had once pressed landscape into action as a series of limits and constraints, these flowing, unenclosable climatologies, which intensified just as planners were declaring triumph for their “science” of the sorted city, implied a less localizable but finally more exuberant role for environment as agent, one that did its work on bodies and minds indirectly — not by saying no, but by saying yes.52 All aong the Carquinez, the activity of landscapes both found and made became newly, vividly at issue in the quest to remake cities and citizens.
Planning Habit: An Aside on Power and the Involuntary Planners and industrialists making investments along the Carquinez began from the proposition that buildings and landscapes could be arranged in ways that would both energize and resculpt the bodies within their purview. It was around the period’s new suburban workplaces, in these towns and others like them, that a distinctively vital materialism of landscape came most meaningfully — and riskily — into its own. Working suburban bodies, newly “expert” voices asserted, were uniquely porous, suggestible, and open to reconfiguration by their environments — the built environment, the solid and fluid matters of ambient natural environment, and all the middle grounds synchronizing their forces. In ontologizing environments and their activities in this way, they drew sustenance from, and for our purposes belong to, the broadly materialist and vitalist intellectual history we have sketched around the first generation of “scientific” and professionalized city planners. In this section we will reengage that Progressive intellectual moment, steering wide of California in our points of reference. The move is irreducibly crucial: by specifying these tight imbroglios of
51 Illustrations of Contra Costa County, California, with Historical Sketch, 17. 52 By looking into popular rather than academic variants of environmentalism, we can modify or even reverse Carl Sauer’s sequential distinction between Mackinderite determinism and, his own preference, the Vidalian possibilism that admitted give and take between spaces and subjects. Sauer claimed that the latter school was decisively winning winning the day by 1927, the time of writing. For Sauer, Vidalian theories of the “milieu” see environments in as agents only insofar as they quietly set limits on practice, without ever causing specific forms of practice — a far more modest repertoire of action than that arrogated to “the world’s best working climate.” Carl O. Sauer, “Recent Developments in Cultural Geography,” in Recent Developments in the Social Sciences, ed. Edward Cary Hayes (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1927), 180.
128 rationality and vitality, machine and life, we can recast, without exculpating it, the founding methodical how of planning with landscape as an instrument of power. Indeed, questions of landscape’s animacy — what landscape does — prove quite inseparable from reflections on power. What kind of power do the shapers of towns exercise? If the very targets of a “scientific” planning won’t stand still — if “this scene is itself living,” if objects of all kinds persistently object — then the town planner’s distinctive mode of intervention must be rendered subtler and less direct: a deceptively liberal sort of power that does its work indirectly on the milieu, not frontally, in ways that could be named and shamed, on bodies themselves.53 If, as Michel Foucault noted in 1978 apropos of the Lamarckian tradition, humans “fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live,” then, by making that materiality itself the target of intervention, one can positively plan lives — encouraging, fostering, distributing, directing “an indefinite series of events that will occur” — while seeming not to. The techniques devised to plan the Progressive industrial suburb, more-than-disciplinary “political technique[s] that will be addressed to the milieu,” were solidly neo-Lamarckian in their indirection. They formed a set of experiments on how to carry out action at a distance, through inorganic things and on a “complex of men and things” that, in living and working, is “continually going from one point to another.”54 In their words and deeds, planners and industrialists explored with a gruesome granularity what the optimal suburban milieu was made of, how it held together, what senses it would engage, and how, without brute determination, it could acclimate subjects to ongoing and indefinite industrial labor. Landscape must be thought as a critical locus of subject formation, but in a specific and indirect way. Suburban landscapes became instruments of habituation, cultivators of new routines, new everydays, for life and work. Planners induced, even when they seemed to impose. They planned for the involuntary. They were, at root, planning habit.
Relocation to the edge, Progressives admitted, however “rational,” was just the beginning of this broader process of remaking labor by landscape. “Through this exodus,” as Carol Aronovici put it, the effect was to “improve living conditions and create a closer cooperation and deeper sympathy between the worker and his work.”55 At the scale of the town, in turn, and on down to
53 After Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape,” in Land and Life, 321. For an account of interwar realtors’ and architects’ “mobilization of a form of planning that had the appearance of its opposite, a lack of planning” — an account that is ultimately more convinced of the “underlying coherence” of it all — see Carolyn S. Loeb, Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers’ Subdivisions in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 9. 54 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population [1978], trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 21, 20, 23, 65. Foucault is prepared to see renditions of this governance of and through things as early as the sixteenth century, in a treatise on sovereignty by Guillaume de La Perrière. Similar theses on indirection have long motivated the historiography of Progressive Era power. The present interpretation is not, for instance, unrelated to the concept of “positive environmentalism,” which Paul Boyer long ago diagnosed as the more “hopeful and visionary” face of reformist urbanism: “Their goal was to create in the city kind of physical environment that would gently but irresistibly mold a population of cultivated, moral, and socially responsible city dwellers.” See Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 190. But Boyer, focused as he is on moral control, does little to tease out the life-scientific concepts (formal or lay) that imbue their schemes. Still less does he theorize the various agencies or animacies imputed to the built environment itself — or what Foucault calls its “perpetual intrication…with the human species” qua species at precisely “that point of connections where nature, in the sense of physical elements, interferes with nature in the sense of the nature of the human species” (23). 55 Carol Aronovici, “Suburban Development,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 234.
129 the workplace, the residential subdivision, and the individual home, to lay out an industrial suburb was to specify and array the objects — buildings, streets, lawns, gardens, climate — that might encourage such affective “sympathy” and close off paths to its refusal. The working body, planners reckoned, was, for its very existence, submerged within, attached to, and dependent on what Henry James elsewhere called its “muddy medium, all one with every other element and note as well, all the signs of the heaped industrial battlefield.”56 This was a thickened, three-dimensional, finally plenist ontology of space. Something like the “welter” of buildings and objects, airs and sounds, that for the James of The American Scene had stoked endless fascination in New York’s charged downtown, then became instrumentalized on the industrial periphery, where managers might govern by ambient, everyday mood as much as by direct punishment. The atmosphere, the climate, what James called the inescapable “assault” of the very air: these were imagined as yet another conductor for planners’ action at a distance. More chemical than physical in their imagination, planners envisioned a thick but never impenetrable suburban solution, if we may redirect Richard Walker’s strategic turn of phrase, that could be tilted gently and imperceptibly, and from which there was no escaping.57 This was a mode of power in which the ambient environment would propose, not impose, contented labor. True, planners of the Suburb Productive sometimes spoke a grandiose, still Pullmanesque language of constraint and enclosure — and it is hard, retrospectively and in two dimensions, to see the street plan of an isolated, comprehensively planned industrial town as anything but bounded. But as a matter of course planners pursued forms of intervention that were gentler and more affirmative. Environments would ensconce but not immobilize working subjects. A less carceral mode of power would be needed, one that would preserve, capitalize on, and reassure by invoking most of the pleasant associations between suburban landscape and spatial aperture — the city’s leading edge as escape, not renewed captivity. How, having fled the city, to govern subjects out in the relative suburban open? Planners and employers pondered this question at length. Was formal enclosure ultimately necessary? Would it reinstate the found problems with the “congested” city? For the New York architect Frederick Ackerman, who theorized “The Architectural Side of City Planning” in 1915, this was a specifically American conundrum: our cities “differ in a fundamental way” from Europe insofar as they “discard the moat…destroy the walls…and therefor to substitute parks and rural homes.”58 These, where home and industrial work were planned in tandem, were the environments that most strikingly provoked reflection on how to work with the “influence” and “life” of things. It was a question of optimizing fit: not too loose, but certainly not too tight either. The built environment itself, never inanimate, would have to harmonize ever more subtly with the human body, its senses, and its affects. The problem of “obtaining and holding” suburban employees, as Nolen had posed it, was adaptive, not determinative, solved more by an embrace than a fierce grip. Such a vision found confirmation in the work of contemporaneous life scientists as well. Lawrence J. Henderson wrote in The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter (1913), a widely assigned text, that “it has been the habit
56 Henry James, The American Scene [1907] (New York: Penguin, 1994), 61. 57 Richard Walker, “The Suburban Solution: Urban Geography and Urban Reform in the Capitalist Development of the United States” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1977). And see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 80–109, on the political stakes Hobbes, for one, and many anxious early-modern Christians assigned to the defense of plenism. A void would signal the existence of realms beyond the reach of authoritative power. 58 Frederick L. Ackerman, “The Architectural Side of City Planning,” Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference on City Planning (Boston: National Conference on City Planning, 1915): 110.
130 of biologists since Darwin to consider only the adaptation of the living organisms to the environment…. Yet fitness there must be, in environment as well as the organism.” This latter point distinguished Henderson from a Darwinian biology. Darwin’s “selection” mechanism, he submitted, was purely negative, “the brake rather than the steam or the rails for the journey of life; or,” backing away from mechanism talk, “instead of guiding the ramifications of the tree of life, it would…do little more than apply the pruning knife to them.”59 “Fit” and “adaptation,” charting the ceaseless give and take between subjects and surrounds: using these concepts in more flexible, vitalist ways — and Henderson cited no less than Patrick Geddes for support at this juncture — allowed one to take stock of the environment as an active, productive agent. These were eminently interdisciplinary concepts, pleasingly noncommittal, and promiscuous in their applications. Henderson himself was a biological chemist, but he engaged extensively with social scientists. He published a book on Vilfredo Pareto and in effect introduced the latter’s methodology to the sociologists at Harvard, where he was also instrumental in establishing the History of Science program. His interactions with urbanists were few — and his titular “environments” are not obviously built environments — but he had captive audience: by the end of the 1920s Ackerman’s regional-planning colleague Lewis Mumford was routinely including, and favorably glossing, Henderson’s Fitness in his famously catholic annotated bibliographies.60 Rethinking environmental “fit,” planners rendered newly technical the question of worker habit. What planners and employers expected of their suburban subjects was not docile submission, but an iterative habituation, a kind of contented communion with their surrounds. To fit the landscape of an industrial suburb to its labor force was to produce subjects who, from the very first, were quite literally attached to material things — and adrift if cut loose from them. William James, who with John Dewey was a standard philosophical reference point for even the most practical-minded Progressives, had in his Principles of Psychology famously and at length detailed the non-metaphysical basis of habit formation: it was “a chapter in physics rather than in physiology or psychology.”61 The brain was just a specialized, sensate part of the body. Scientific-management types in the wake of Taylor had schemed about how to impose industrial discipline from without, most especially at the point of production. Model subjects would be habituated to their workplaces as places. They would also self-monitor their daily performance. “Habit,” after all, suggests etymologically a kind of self-possession, a hold over one’s energies that keeps their uncancellable fluctuations within some optimal, if inexact, range.62
59 Lawrence J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter [1913] (Boston: Beacon, 1958), 5, 6, 274–275. On Henderson’s work with the “Pareto Circle” and History of Science at Harvard, see Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), especially 63–91. At least some readers saw how his theses on “environment” writ large could be appropriated for the production and instrumentalization of life. In a preface to the midcentury reissue of Henderson’s book, the neurobiologist George Wald concluded: “What Henderson says in this book is that here and there nature has set the conditions within which life occurs. I think some day we ourselves will set the conditions…. Then we will watch, as a bit of living material forms itself, though in our exuberance we may claim that we have formed it. That will be this book’s fulfillment” (xxiv). 60 Mumford cited Fitness in several of his books, long after these ideas (or those of Bergson, James, et al.) had ceased to be fashionable. See the annotated bibliography in Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 460: “A brilliant and original contribution which reverses the usual treatment of adaptation.” 61 William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course [1892] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2001), 2. 62 This watchfulness over the self was, of course, an essential hallmark of Weber’s “Protestant ethic.” But reading Weber in more biological terms — capitalism as a provisional, unfinishable process of bodily habituation rather than the hard-and-fast dawn of a condition like “modernity” or mind-directed “rationality” — forces us to rethink how power itself works on and with the physical world. The “iron cage,” restrictive and immobile, is actually something
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“Residential” and “industrial” could be clinically abstracted, mapped and planned from above as mutually exclusive land uses. That impulse to separate and to simplify — to order space by punctuating it with gaps — abounds in City Scientific rhetoric, as we have seen in abundance, drily part and parcel of the larger prehistory of zoning.63 But, differently, the house and factory themselves, the street plan, the ambient and insistent atmosphere within which work elapsed: planners ontologized all of these elements and their interactions, suasive physical things with propensities and potentials of their own. They then tried to harness the animacy of these materials — always difficult to verbalize, diagram, or observe — to produce remade, optimized subjects whose emotional attachments to their most familiar spaces might then be leveraged to productive ends.
Once we foreground how suburban designs presumed the perpetual frictions and adaptations between never-static milieux and habit-forming bodies, we are obligated quite basically to rethink not only the ontological primitives of power, but also some predicates of the Progressive premium on scientific “method.” An ontology of lines rather than points, flight rather than fixity, motion through rather than position in a warpable spacetime: this points to a more dynamic science, more responsive to its objects, than that let on by the abstracted, site-unspecific, and replicable One Best Way encrusted on the surface of so much of the “efficiency”-crazed technical literature that was the common coin of planners, industrialists, and builders alike. If planners were at root vitalists of a sort, planning active life, their procedures were necessarily life-scientific. And, as Georges Canguilhem has adroitly shown at length, “life” is a very peculiar sort of object of intervention. It requires methods that essentially become and self-update, never patly fixed in place: “Experimental method — as the etymology of the word method shows — is also a sort of road that the human biologist traces through the world of the hedgehog, the frog, the fruit fly, the paramecium, or the streptococcus.” Along that road, over time, “the knowledge of life must take place through unpredictable conversions, as it strives to grasp a becoming whose meaning is never so clearly revealed to our understanding as when it disconcerts it.”64 Life science thus entails more than the usual best-guess temporal “foresight” that is the minimum criterion of anything calling itself “planning.” Scientific method itself is that path through, rapport with, and affective wonder at the details of animate “men and things.”65 more like a shell, a prosthesis that attends, follows, moves with, and material-culturally becomes part of the subject. See Peter Baehr, “The ‘Iron Cage’ and the ‘Shell as Hard as Steel’: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” History and Theory 40 (May 2001): 153–169. We might note, too, the etymological links between Gehäuse and “housing.” A dwelling, which affords shelter, comfort, and identity, impinges on subjects in ways quite unlike a cage. 63 Literature on that prehistory must include the morphologically exacting work of Diane Shaw, City Building on the Eastern Frontier: Sorting the New Nineteenth-Century City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), which deals with the cities that sprouted along the Erie Canal from its completion in 1825. The most comprehensive treatment of American zoning codes is now Sonia A. Hirt, Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 64 Georges Canguilhem, “Experimentation in Animal Biology,” in Knowledge of Life [1952], trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 24. 65 On the broader inseparability of science and affect, method and wonder, technics and aesthetics, see, minimally, Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment; and Jane Bennett’s discussion of Paracelsus, Kant, and Deleuze in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossing, Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 33–55. In each of these cases, affect spurs on scientific inquiry, drawing the never-distanciated thinker along through the successive “stages of thought.” The object of knowledge actively calls out to the subject. And the trappings of hard science — quantification, diagramming, and so on — do not perforce extinguish that affective
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Too many historians misrecognize Progressive Era planning as a variety of rationalism. Methods adequate for experimentation on life — and, uno actu, power over life — by way of its environment necessarily self-defeat if they abstract to fixed absolutes. Clues to the contrary are not all that deeply submerged. Even the Taylor Societies were thrilling to William James, angling on how best to harness the irruptive “Energies of Men” the philosopher had posited in a 1907 essay — which was by 1912 a staple of the efficiency crowd’s official reading lists.66 Indeed, scientific management, as a breeze through Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management will disclose, was itself a dark spin on bioscience, deeply and interestedly attuned to the capacities, affects, motives, reserves, and recalcitrance of fleshy human bodies. It was, in this sense, a robust, interested vitalism all its own. “Scientific management and vitalist life-worship,” as Jackson Lears has crucially observed, “shared an antiformalist style of thought.” Philosophies of life were never immune to enrollment (or call it co-optation) in the name of compelling industrial work.67 This synthesis was manifest in the post-1894, post-Pullman era, even in communities we would securely classify as amenity-free company towns. The prescriptive literature of the time is already filled with ritual disavowals of paternalism, which are always followed swiftly by the search for subtler methods of effective (and affective) industrial discipline. In 1901, Charles Buxton Going counseled engineers and managers of “village communities of the factory, machine works, and mine” that “healthy fostering care” was ultimately more strategic than “bossism.”68 For R. A. Woods, teaching the “human touch in industry” in 1903, “the successful industrial captain of the future will win, not compel, the effective service of his subordinates…. They will be encouraged to give themselves to their work, not as machines, but as the possessors of selecting minds and determining wills.”69 This modality of power was quite unlike the “Strong Man” approach championed contemporaneously in Social Control (1901) by the sociologist Edward A. Ross, for whom the bare life of the Western mining camp was the Platonic ideal.70 The kinesthetic excesses of bodies were to be encouraged and captured for new ends, not tamped down as a matter of course. It bears repeating: this did not add up to a cause-and-effect environmental determinism of the sort that “critical” geography textbooks caricature, before dismissing it, as the one-size-fits-
charge. See Victor Branford, Interpretations and Forecasts (New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 354–363, for one British vitalist’s genuine awe at the Pittsburgh Survey and kindred empirical efforts: “Under its impulse and sanction is everywhere astir a penetrative spirit of enquiry into the facts and tendencies of city life” (356). 66 Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 57–58. And see William James, “The Energies of Men,” Science 635 (1 March 1907): 321–332. 67 T. J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper, 2009), 266. Histories critical of Taylorism — and few these days are not — are, however, routinely blinded by the more mechanistic blandishments of the Principles: its physics rather than its underlying biology. 68 Charles Buxton Going, “Village Communities of the Factory, Machine Works, and Mine,” Engineering Magazine 21 (April 1901): 62. 69 R. A. Woods, “The Human Touch in Industry,” Munsey’s Magazine 29 (June 1903): 328; and, for similar thinking, see Lawrence Lewis, “Uplifting 17,000 Employees,” World’s Work 9 (1905): 5939–5950. 70 Edward A. Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 41–48. On the variegated forms of “ethico-aesthetic capture” effected around this time through the built environment, see McCormack, Refrains for Moving Bodies, 6. See also Ben Anderson, Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (London: Routledge, 2014).
133 all consensus of a radically anterior yesteryear.71 Planning historiography, too, particularly of a suburban stripe, is usually content to write off early schemes of “comprehensive” design as enshrining a simple stimulus–response environmental psychology, at home or at work, which leaves the essential coherence of their spatial form unquestioned.72 Company towns are paradigmatic examples, to the point of cliché, that such historians adduce to illustrate determinism at its purest.73 The point is not that such voices were ever absent on the suburban scene: Arnold Brunner’s 1915 essay on “The Influence of Surroundings,” for instance, informed the readership of the Countryside Magazine that “unity of effect” was something builders could reliably, and without obstacles, expect to plan for.74 But these tellings decouple comprehensive town planning from the livelier currents of philosophy and science that relentlessly seeped into their practice. The broadly Bergsonian sensibility that haunted Progressive postures of centralized “expertise” understood (all) matter itself in terms of an accretive durée, a spacetime that was never not becoming. The broadly Jamesian model of piecemeal habituation to milieu, of rapport-forming, of projected “fit” or “sympathy” between body and space: all foregrounded the involuntary founts of action, but all militated against the overweening lawfulness that the stochastics of “determinism” presume. The Progressive industrial suburb, along the Carquinez as elsewhere, was in this expanded, biotechnic sense a laboratory: it was a site where the ongoing activity of the environment, built and natural, even and especially in its deviations from best-laid plans, could be observed, calibrated, and then redirected. It was an eventful space, a milieu, where chance was alive and well. Its landscapes harbored complexities that published diagrams and reports would routinely paper over in order to project lawful, chartable “efficiency” — but complexities that those with power over the ragged edges of the metropolis nonetheless felt, wondered at, feared, reckoned with, and tried, imperfectly, to harness.
Colonies, Climates, and Bodies What kind of power, then, did this many-splendored climate talk serve? What kinds of differences did it rationalize, naturalize, and encode? What work did these concepts of action’s involuntary levers, indexed to landscape and atmosphere, do? In the final section of this chapter, we will think these ad hoc climatologies in terms of how they recast the relationship between suburban landscape and race — enabling new productions and enforcements of racial difference, as well as new vulnerabilities. Social theories of climate were all but inseparable from racial thinking. In social science and in colonial administration — and in social science that served colonial administration — a chorus of voices entrenched climatic distinctions as racial distinctions. “Moral climatology,” to use the geographer David Livingstone’s term, “both a widespread tendency to deploy moralistic language in depicting climatic conditions and a conviction that it is entirely reasonable to read moral order straight off patterns of global climate,” was a leading colonialist pastime. Colonial habits of mind puzzled ad infinitum over how to intricate climate and race, granting touch-and- go legitimacy to whatever linkage suited their needs. There was no one hegemonic thesis on how
71 See, for instance, Richard Peet, Modern Geographical Thought (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 12–14; and Tim Cresswell, Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction (Malden, Mass.: Wiley–Blackwell, 2013), 47–52. 72 One example is Sies and Silver, “The History of Planning History,” in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City, 5, on “a widely shared environmental determinism rooted in the reform tradition of the Progressive Era.” 73 For an example that surfaces in the mire of one of critical geography’s touchstone texts, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 318–319. 74 Arnold W. Brunner, “The Influence of Surroundings,” The Countryside Magazine 20 (January 1915): 54–55.
134 climate made, reflected, or was entangled with racial difference. As an -ology, Livingstone notes, this was an “inclination,” a “propensity,” a “presupposition” rather than a fixed system of principles.75 Its colony-by-colony application, and the lived consequences of that application, varied considerably. But certain themes emerged. Ann Laura Stoler has documented how Indonesia’s Dutch rulers maintained distinctions between Europeans and Asians by way of an elaborate, fickle climatology that had medical predicates. Tropical atmospheres were “debilitating” to (male) colonizers, inducing fatigue, languor, and a broad-based “degeneration” of both musculature and morals — which would, of course, exempt Europeans from physical labor. Extensive discourse circled around the “problem” of Dutch administrators staying “too long” in the colonies, whose climate may have sped the onset of neurasthenia (according, as Stoler notes, to a very different etiology than back in the metropolises, where that fin-de-siècle malady was invented). The Dutch and their abetters held that the climate may have reduced fertility among European females. A whole raft of ad hoc cures cropped up in turn. The mechanisms of all this — how climate did its work — were highly dubious. And yet, climate was a medium through which diverse “experts” were thinking the interaction of space and subject, landscape and the body. One way or another, as René Maunier’s 1932 treatise on “colonial sociology” concluded of the modal European, “The climate affects him, his surroundings affect him, and after a certain time, he has become, both physically and morally, a different man.”76 But different bodies were “affected” differently, and physical work amplified these differences: as the British geographer H. J. Fleure held, “the little dark, long-head better resists factory conditions, mining conditions, and town overcrowding than the big fair type.”77 Susceptibility to climate was a crucial cipher for the introduction of cleavages between cultures and within them. Such racial propensities lingered in the work of countless American geographers and their disciplinary neighbors, who may have wanted for opportunities to administer colonies in any direct sense, but whose work on climate to about 1930 came enthusiastically to ratify these naturings of race. Ellsworth Huntington was an outright eugenicist by the early 1920s, rebranding his almost-benign ideas from “Work and Weather” as a full-blown theory of “Geography and Natural Selection” (1924), one in which different strains of migrants could be ranked by their “average quality” — and the core of whose plight, Huntington seemed to think, was largely a matter of adapting to their adopted climate.78 Sociologists, too, in whose disciplinary crucible “environment” was a resolutely marginal variable — pace Columbia’s Franklin Giddings and select others — also routinely sought to correlate climate and race,
75 David N. Livingstone, “Race, Space, and Moral Climatology: Notes toward a Genealogy,” Journal of Historical Geography 28 (2002): 160, 163; emphasis added. Collate this article with David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), 221–241, on geographers’ direct involvements with colonial rule; and David N. Livingstone, “The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations on Race, Place and Virtue,” Journal of Historical Geography 17 (1991): 413–434. Livingstone gives so-called climatic determinism both a prehistory (that predates colonization) and, usefully, a later date of expiry than is generally admitted. See “Race, Space, and Moral Climatology,” 170–173 for evidence of this sort of moralizing taking place among geographers well into the 1950s. The canonical example from outside geography remains Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws (1748) prescribed specific forms of government, more tyrannical or less, to nations according to their climate. 76 For these and other examples, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 66–75, which deals primarily with the Dutch colonization of Indonesia. Maunier is quoted on page 66. The dubious physiology of environmentally disturbable “nerve juice” goes back at least to Newton; it figures in Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy under the guise of “subtle fluids.” 77 H. J. Fleure, 1923, quoted in Livingstone, “The Moral Discourse of Climate,” 426. 78 Huntington, “Geography and Natural Selection,” 11.
135 defining the latter according to criteria of relative “energy” and, again, “climatic adaptability.” Edward A. Ross, the peripatetic sociologist who championed the social order of the mining camp, had plenty to say on climate in “The Causes of Race Superiority” (1901), which rendered technical the concept of “race suicide.” Migration as such was suspect, he argued. It set off chaotic processes of “climatic selection,” such that unclassifiable “new varieties” of racial energy “are constantly being created.” Ross put forth no systematic theory of environment, but he wrote of races again and again in terms of their relative susceptibility to ambient stimuli. Humanity could ultimately be classified into those irrationally “moved by sense-impressions and by sensory images” and those higher, “ideo-motor” types enjoying full rationality in defiance of environmental cues. Voluntary seats of decision and action typified some races, but only some; involuntary response was the rule for others. Ross the eugenicist reserved abstract thought for the lighter-complected.79 We cannot easily think the contemporary planning of industrial suburbs apart from this history. The “best working climate” of the Carquinez drew off colonial understandings of how atmosphere pressed itself on the activity of bodies. Forms and rationalities that other planners had modeled off in the colonies then came “home” to — quite directly — reshape industrial suburbs on American shores. Around San Francisco Bay, the Carquinez was the crucial testing ground for these principles. The connections go beyond vaporous rhetoric — although there was plenty of that to go around. Admirers of Crockett’s C&H refinery, for instance, often couched their praise in encomiums to the sugar-cane “pioneers” who had used the latest “science” to reap the benefits of newfound sovereignty over Hawaii.80 Around 1915, with Contra Costa in the throes of its development, the Panama–Pacific Exposition loomed across the bay and the attendant canal it honored had become a common infrastructural reference point in public life. Subdividers and those who loved them began the marketing of their working suburbs with odes to Pacific empire. “Advance is a certainty,” reasoned a contemporary pamphlet for the East Shore Park subdivision in the Stege section of Richmond. “Improvement is in the air.”81 No: more than these gestures would suggest, the colonized world itself was a constant reference point for industrialists and location analysts. This fact absolutely hounds the boosters’ quantified climate talk. “It has been stated,” readers learned in the indelible Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves (1926), “by men who have had years of experience at labor in the countries where the extremes of heat and cold hold sway that a man is capable of at least one fourth more product for his labor with the same effort here, as elsewhere.”82 That pamphlet proliferated statistics of distinctly mixed quality, depositing graphs and tables that just might persuade the next factory locator. In the end, though, Richmond pressed its case on the strength of direct testimony from those who had bodily completed the travel circuit between the Carquinez and more “languorous” lands, submitting to their air and making conclusions about its grip. To ascertain the “best” climate, it turned out, a capitalist had to let himself be affected.
Taking these promiscuous climatologies at their word — and thinking closely about the eventful encounters they presupposed between bodies and the materiality of their surrounds — forces us
79 Edward A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (July 1901): 68–70, 76. He was on the faculty at the University of Nebraska when this particular article emerged, but he also taught at Stanford, Cornell, and, over the long term, Wisconsin. 80 Purcell, History, 661–662. 81 East Shore Park. 82 Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves, 33.
136 to think the suburban spatialization of race in a way quite different from that addressed in Chapter 5. There, most especially in the high-disciplinary powder towns, where morphology echoed the division of labor and conspired to sort workforces into non-overlapping and hierarchized kinds, we glimpsed “race” as a grid of discontinuities: Crockett, Valona, Crolona; the bunkhouse and the bungalows of Hercules. Boundaries, buffers, gaps, gates, walls: the material culture implanted to keep races apart may have differed, but the classificatory impulse, naming categories, kinds, and types, was quite consistent.83 With climate in play, the very substrate of what “race” materially is — its ontology — changes profoundly. The climatologists, normalizing a vision of subjects as perpetually affected by their milieu, and unthinkable in isolation from its thick materiality, recast race as a question of susceptibility or vulnerability to environment. That susceptibility played out in acutely differential ways, as we have seen, but climatic thinking introduced a landscape in which those differences manifest not only as breaks or striations in the physical fabric, but as gradients of attunement, degrees of conjunction with a pervasive, patchy atmosphere of forces and flows that itself resisted ever being parceled out into zones. Livingstone has distinguished “distributive” from “derivative” versions of this racialized climatology. The former is a project of sorting and segregation. The latter theorizes how racial bodies derive their traits, their “mental and moral worth” and their propensities to work, physically from the environment; it attaches subject and space and thinking about their transactions in far more localized ways.84 Derivative climatology is the more placial rendition; it is the extraction of colonial climate science that better accommodates how landscape, and not merely distances across abstracted space, might participate in the assemblage of racial complexes. Along the Carquinez, where suburban employers endorsed countless lay environmentalisms in the hopes of remaking their workforces, it was the derivative, not the distributive, vision of race and climate that better accommodated attempts to intervene materially on the working body — indirectly, transitively, by way of the
83 On explicitly segregationist zoning schemes written into law, with Baltimore’s 1910 city plan as the prototype, see Christopher Silver, “The Racial Origins of Zoning: Southern Cities from 1910–40,” Planning Perspectives 6 (1991): 189–205. For treatments of the more hidden interdependencies of land-use zoning and racial segregation, the former dealing in putatively neutral technics, see David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For further elaboration of these linkages, see Paige Glotzer, “Exclusion in Arcadia: How Suburban Developers Circulated Ideas about Discrimination, 1890–1950,” Journal of Urban History, 41 (2015): 479–494; and N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). The anthropological and sociological literature on classification is varied, vast, and growing. Salient works include Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); Barry Schwartz, Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Rodney Needham, Symbolic Classification (Santa Monica: Goodyear, 1979); and Marion Fourcade, “Ordinalization,” Sociological Theory 34 (2016): 175–195. For classic statements, see Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification [1903], trans. Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); and Robert Hertz, “The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand” [1909], in Right and Left, ed. Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 3–31. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [1966] (New York: Vintage, 1970), remains essential. A colorful cultural history of species taxonomy can be found in Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Sociologists under the sign of Pierre Bourdieu, for their part, often invoke the “classification struggle” as coined in his Distinction [1979], trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 479–481. 84 Livingstone, “Race, Space, and Moral Climatology,” 168. For a theorization of race as a complex of physical attachments and viscosities, as opposed to a project of boundary-making, see Arun Saldanha, “Reontologising Race: The Machinic Geography of Phenotype,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 9–24.
137 inescapable milieu. Those suburban climes became laboratories for new, long-lived concepts and techniques that would specify the attachment of landscape, race, and work.
The Race to Blame Crucially, though, the atmospheric ontology so proposed ramified well beyond conversations on climate. The contraptions climate talk made respectable — a diffuse, three-dimensional model of inhabited space, a gradient of bodily “fit” and involuntary response — came to impinge on thinking about the dynamic materiality of the built environment too. Industrial suburbs, where nature’s “forces” were every day subject to various kinds of technical conversion, opened a broader set of reflections on workers’ vulnerability to those forces — issues that became unignorable in the event of industrial disaster, and that shaped the recriminations that tended to follow in its aftermath. The powder towns must again be our key site. There, where the industrial product was combustible and the wholesale wreckage of the workplace was a periodic occurrence, we can articulate landscape, race, and blame in illustrative ways. Indeed, inadvertently, the “blasts” that won West County its reputation just may end up, in the breach, clarifying the basic materialist ontology that employers had posited as an operating principle — and racializing its stakes. “We begin to confront the thingness of objects,” Bill Brown has written, precisely “when they stop working for us.”85 Matter acts most, that is, when it acts out of turn — when raw matter and its forces are unleashed from their enrollment into form and allowed free play. In this way, the events of explosion may tell us more about who controlled and who suffered these landscapes, who orchestrated and who endured them, than the street plans and sheep-grazed buffer zones that kept them, the rest of the time, in visibly working order. It would be possible to give the powder towns a history of labor and race in which these moments of collapse were purely exceptional. One could narrate the riots that pockmarked the landscape in the age of Chinese exclusion: at the canneries of Martinez, in 1882, when precarious Greek, Italian, and Portuguese workers let loose; at the brick works in Black Diamond, which maintained a Chinatown with some 400 residents.86 One could mark out unambiguous geographies of segregation all along the strait, from the two faces of Crockett to the enforced ghettoization of Chinese, Mexican and later African American workers in Antioch, for years a sundown town. One could develop brutal histories of Chinese removal from the Hercules workforce, which the whiter townfolk accomplished by referendum in 1913, and their wholesale replacement by nearby reserves of Portuguese labor.87 “The Chink is a thing of the Past [sic] at Hercules,” the Pinole newspaper reported. “The last of that ambitionless yet careful and faithful race has gone…. The sun has set in the powder world on this once indispensable race.”88 We have already charted the wanton exposure of the Hercules Chinese to the carnage of industrial accident, in barracks abutting the inner edge of the buffer zone that had been put in place to protect their colleagues.89 When one fire broke out in the Chinese quarters in 1892, leaving a hundred workers destitute, the San Francisco Call merely remarked: “Bad Place for a Fire.”90
85 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 4. 86 Antioch Daily Ledger, 2 April 1990; Antioch Daily Ledger, 1 January 1990; Nilda Rego, Contra Costa Times, 13 June 1992. 87 Ojala and McGrath, Remembering Days Past, 7. 88 “Exit Chinaman from Hercules Powder Plant,” Pinole Times, 26 May 1914. 89 Ojala and McGrath, Remembering Days Past, 2, 17–18. 90 “Bad Place for a Fire,” San Francisco Call, 17 May 1892.
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Known explosions struck the powder towns in 1882, 1892, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1901, 1904, 1905, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1915, and 1919. How local organs reported these events — particularly in their visions and elisions of race — is telling. After Vulcan Powder combusted in 1882, J. P. Munro-Fraser named only the white dead — and in the same breath noted the factory’s “charming site.” Of the blast at Hercules that same year, he seemed to take comfort that “only one white person was in any manner hurt.” When the Chinese workforce was acknowledged, it was largely in order to criticize how they handled their dead: “The mongolians [sic] would not approach” a felled body, storing it in a warehouse and earning Anglo condemnation.91 When a plant at Point Pinole blew up in 1908, the Call appended names to the four white dead, leaving twenty Chinese anonymous.92 “Two lives lost,” the headline asserted when Hercules exploded in 1904; the three Chinese lives were noted later, in an aside tucked well within the article’s body.93 “Of course he spoke only of white men,” one reporter said of a manager taking stock after one blast, at Point Pinole in 1895; two Chinese workers, fearing for their lives, had deserted camp.94 Many Anglo newsmen seemed unsure if Chinese workers themselves knew how to grieve: one reporter visiting in the aftermath of a Pinole blast heard them “chattering” — he could not translate — and thought their affect seemed insouciant.95 No Anglo seemed to count the Chinese lives among the grievable. And yet, these blasts were just about the main thing outsiders knew about the landscapes of the powder towns, which, as we have seen, were by design imperfectly visible to the polite gaze. Episodes of destruction remain the prism through which their local history is told, their reputation made. Some of the more extreme explosions actually had been felt, and so known, elsewhere in the bay: when Point Pinole suffered acutely in 1908, the shocks radiated as far south as Berkeley.96 The towns were known as volatile landscapes, environments where matter seemed to have its own ideas about how to live. The blasts became a kind of second nature — and found themselves characterized in terms usually reserved for nature: some “artificial lightning and thunder,” a “wild beast.”97 Tourists started to flock to the come-again ruins of Pinole, making the trip out from San Francisco or Oakland to gawk.98 “There is never,” after all, “any danger in the ruins of an explosion at the powder works.”99 From a distance, at a delay, and on one side of the racial buffer, that may have been true. Still more telling, however, is how onlookers saw fit to make judgments about the denizens of the powder towns, deriving racial traits from how different bodies weathered the assertions of the environment. Some of these derivations had a positive cast. When Rodeo, for instance, at one point went up in flames, Frederick Hulaniski claimed this only proved the “virility” of its (surviving) citizens.100 More often, though, the default impulse in the aftermath was to denigrate. How to allocate blame, though? How to diagnose causality, responsibility, even intent? Sometimes the charge was conspiracy: “Work of a Fiend,” declared the Call, without
91 Munro-Fraser, History, 422, 424, 419, 420. 92 “Twenty-Four Killed and Five Injured by Dynamite Explosions,” San Francisco Call, 21 February 1908. 93 “Hercules Powder Mills Destroyed,” Los Angeles Herald, 5 June 1904. 94 “The Pinole Horror,” San Francisco Call, 32 May 1895. 95 “Explosion at Pinole,” San Francisco Call, 2 September 1896. 96 “Bay Region Feels Shock of Temblor,” Los Angeles Herald, 21 February 1908. 97 “Explosion at Pinole.” 98 Rego, Days Gone By, vol. 1, 161. 99 “An Explosion That Marks a New Departure,” San Francisco Call, 5 May 1899. 100 Hulaniski, History, 407.
139 evidence, after the explosion of 1898.101 Sometimes journalists devolved responsibility, blaming the dead for “their own carelessness.”102 Sometimes a clear story seemed impossible to impute: “As has been the case in every explosion at these works, the cause will never be known.”103 And sometimes a version of this diffusion of blame invoked the vagaries of the industrial environment, indeed of lively matter itself: “The powder at Pinole,” wrote the Los Angeles Herald in 1899 from afar, “seems given to premature explosion.”104 The question of blame quickly enfolded questions of race — and did so in ways that complicate the categories of the intentional and the rational, which as we have seen achieved their definition in terms of the (in)voluntary springs of action that period environmental theorists obsessed over but allocated unequally. One investigative report following the 1919 blast at Stege fixated on one lingering “Chinese,” whose perfidy was glossed as childish, even subhuman in its submission to the merely sensory: “Says He Blew Up the Stege Station to Hear Noise.”105 Elsewhere, the racialization of blame could tilt in the opposite direction: certain denigrated races could assume excessively rational stances toward their environment, leading to its destruction. Three “dark-skinned” rail travelers were said in 1898 to have “craned their necks” when passing the powder works at Pinole, a gesture which the conductor deemed suspicious. “While the town is thoroughly American [again un-seeing the Chinese], still there are a number of Portuguese and Mexicans in the surrounding country…whose sympathies are not known.”106 There was no single formula for whether, when, and how to adjudicate the relationship that obtained between racialized others, their bodies, their “reason,” and their environments. In some ways, the disaster- prone powder towns, at times of their fragility, allowed commentators to produce a useful zone of indistinction between the rational and the irrational, the voluntary and the involuntary, within which the dominant had room for rhetorical maneuver. These were the criteria according to which action in and on the environment — or mere submission to it — was appraised. There was a strong but finally indeterminate urge to racialize these categories. Just as the planning imagination, citing climate or citing form, sought out methods of indirection, arranging life by arranging the things around it, so the assignment of blame proceeded in this sidelong way, indebted to theories of the milieu. Involuntary, less-than-rational response to the “working climate” was all but a precondition of employment, but it also established the grounds for denigration and exclusion. That repertoire of denigration — heightened when form itself was ambiguous or in eclipse — may have outlived the landscapes themselves, which, as we have seen, were fragile.
We have pitched battles between two different ontologies of landscape, pointing up some of the complexities that the emergent “sciences” of “rational” planning both inherited and concealed. We have considered (at least) two senses in which their stewards called upon landscape to act on life and work — and at once theorized that animacy in seemingly technical ways. We have marshaled morphology, visual culture, and broader cross-sections from lay and expert rhetoric to
101 “Work of a Fiend,” San Francisco Call, 28 July 1898. 102 “Dead Men Blamed,” San Francisco Call, 29 June 1904. 103 “Powder Mills Are Blown Up,” San Francisco Call, 9 July 1901. See also “Blaze at Hercules,” San Francisco Call, 30 June 1895, said to be “caused by carelessness.” 104 “The Powder at Pinole Seems Given to Premature Explosion,” Los Angeles Herald, 7 May 1899. 105 “Chinese Says He Blew Up the Stege Station to Hear Noise,” Richmond Daily Independent, 22 January 1920. 106 “Spaniards Plot to Kill and Destroy,” San Francisco Call, 7 May 1898. Similar rumors cropped up a year later, still amid the country’s first echt imperialist war; see “The Fuse Is of Foreign Manufacture,” San Francisco Call, 25 May 1899.
140 make the case. In each case, we have seen how elites, especially, expected suburban landscapes to give form to life, objects to give form to subjects — and “good” form to be habituated, naturalized as a kind of common sense. In Chapter 5, landscape mainly posed as a guarantor of constraint. In Chapter 6, its power appeared more in the affirmative, a genre of yeasaying and encouragement. The next chapter turns to a rather different register of landscape’s putative activity, thinking concertedly about suburban forms built to compel their own imitation: the “model towns” that have sub rosa accompanied this history so far, but whose distinctive theories of environment and response have escaped scrutiny. Still more, they allow us to complicate the category of form as a vector for making sense of how the materiality of landscape, thought as a constellation of forces, might secure its influence over life and work.
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Chapter 7
The Force of Example: Display and Demonstration on the Carquinez
Publicizing the Forest Hills Gardens suburb that he and the Russell Sage Foundation, with an assist from Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., had just opened in eastern Queens, New York, the architect and planner Grosvenor Atterbury reflected at length in Scribner’s magazine on the topic of “Model Towns in America.” It was 1912, the organized planning profession was still young and in search of a method, and while there was little doubt that Forest Hills (Fig. 7.1) amounted to a “model” suburb, and should be recognized and commended as such, even its builder wondered what, exactly, that meant. “What…is the function of a model town?” he asked. “What is this new architectural species calling themselves city and town planners? Our good citizens have been harangued ad nauseam on the ‘city beautiful’—and too much of their good money already spent on monumental boulevards, public fountains, and impossible statues. Why, then, must we now suffer an invasion of ‘town-planners’ preaching ‘garden cities’ and ‘model towns’?”1 The “model town”: it is difficult to narrate the material or intellectual history of Progressive Era planning and urbanism in the U.S. without confronting this trope, which the nascent profession’s prime movers circulated, counted on, and recombined with a host of synonyms: the “demonstration,” the “example,” the “showpiece,” and so on. On this point, the historiography of urban and suburban planning is inconsistent at best, vague at worst, and mostly silent throughout, even as it deploys “model” as a category of analysis, on what might distinguish model from non-model towns. In most of the literature, the term seems to be little more than a placeholder for “planned.”2 Yet, whatever it finally was, the visible, tangible, notionally complete suburban model — or the “object lesson” — was perhaps the privileged instrument involved in constituting the distinctive “method” of the self-conscious “City Scientific.” And the broadly shared expectations regarding what such models could do, this chapter will argue, disclose something pervasive, if finally threatening, about the period’s middle-class investments in the “life of things,” the nature of spatial expertise, and the distinctively suburban repertoires of denigration that a prescriptive valuation of “good” form can equip. The foregoing chapters, while allowing that they might work in tandem, distinguished two senses in which the working suburban landscapes lining the Carquinez were called upon to act: first, by enclosing, delimiting, and restraining working bodies; second, by animating,
1 Grosvenor Atterbury, “Model Towns in America,” Scribner’s 52 (July 1912): 22. For a fuller treatment of the execution of the project, see Susan L. Klaus, A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). 2 Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) is the classic study of the classic “model” company town. John S. Garner, The Model Company Town (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) is a later take on an earlier example at Hopedale, Massachusetts. Millard F. Rogers, Jr., John Nolen and Mariemont: Building a New Town in Ohio (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), foregrounds that planner’s assertion that “This is to be a model town” but does little to clarify what he might have meant. In Jon Peterson’s synthetic The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), “comprehensive” planning takes precedence; “models” typically earn the designation by manifesting comprehensive order in miniature.
142 vitalizing, and optimizing their conduct. In each case, we saw aspects of the physical landscape — whether made or found — instrumentalized in the name of their participation in industrial production, and equally in the production of industrious bodies and minds. For middle-class planners and reformers, for boosters and employers, most of them looking out from denser urban environments and preaching “decongestion” or a more coordinated “decentralization,” edge spaces like the Carquinez were privileged, if fundamentally ordinary, terrains for the sorts of formal experimentation that might secure industrial capitalism itself — carried out upon sensate bodies, materially but always indirectly, through the environment. That environment was inorganic, by usual metrics, but it was hardly inanimate. This chapter, in turn, moves to a subtler register of these landscapes’ animacy, one that lurks within the most conventional language that planners, builders, and their sympathetic publics have used, then as now, to describe and prescribe interventions on suburban form: the work done by the “model” town.
“The Great Need Is for Demonstration and Example”: On the Didactic Landscape Although planners tended to tout the essential novelty of their science, registering “breaks” with a disavowed premodern past, there was on older discourse on “modeling” from which Progressive reformers selectively culled: the paternalistic “model company town” now besmirching the age of Pullman (Fig. 7.2); its British forebears at New Lanark, and at Bourneville, Port Sunlight, and Saltaire; the “model tenements” legislated in turn-of-the-century New York; the circuit of fairs and exhibitions (Figs. 7.3, 7.4) where models proliferated for display; the larger tradition of “ideal city” design that crested during the Renaissance; and indeed, in very recent memory, the ‘comprehensive’ City Beautiful set pieces that were the movement’s hallmarks.3 Yet Atterbury was clear: “model towns” post-1909 were thoroughly modern models of a different, more didactic and deliberate kind: “While any town, whatever its birth and family history, may aspire to set such a high standard of living that it may be called in a general sense ‘model,’ the word is now taking a new and special meaning, following the beginning of organized attempts to apply scientific, aesthetic, and economic principles and methods to the problem of housing civilized humanity.”4 Model towns at or just beyond the edge
3 For the collected entries from one diagnostic model-subdivision competition, held in 1913 by the Chicago City Club, see Alfred B. Yeomans, ed., City Residential Land Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916). On the exhibition circuit generally, see Robert Freestone, ed., Exhibitions and the Development of Modern Planning Culture (London: Ashgate, 2014); and Pierre Chabard, “Competing Scales in Transnational Networks: The Impossible Travel of Patrick Geddes’ Cities Exhibition to America, 1911–1913,” Urban History 36 (2009): 202– 222. On the outsized, nearly totemic influence of Robert Owen’s New Lanark experiment (1798) in Scotland, “more than any other town of remotely comparable size,” see Colin and Rose Bell, City Fathers: Town Planning in Britain from Roman Times to 1900 (New York: Praeger, 1969), 179–186. On Saltaire and Port Sunlight, see also Robert A. M. Stern, ed., The Anglo-American Suburb (London: Architectural Design Profile, 1981), 51, 53. A contentious, deeply moralized set of debates had emerged in the Victorian age, too, at the scale of the “model home.” See Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Kevin Lynch, Good City Form (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 73–81, on the cosmic “ideal city” up through the Renaissance. For another Progressive Era variant on “model towns,” from a report that emerged from Roosevelt’s 1908 Conference on Conservation, see Irving Fisher, Report on National Vitality: Its Wastes and Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), 6: “Washington, our national capital, might be made by the Federal Government a model city of healthfulness, as a preliminary to its becoming a model in every other way.” 4 Atterbury, “Model Towns in America,” 21. The term “didactic landscape” comes from David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 37–56, who uses it initially to make sense of rural cemetery projects — laid out “for the living” — circa 1840.
143 of the city — legibly bounded within a set of newly imparted edges all their own — might be the optimal laboratories for the display of these lawful verities in microcosm. It was in and around suburbs, residential but especially industrial, that the rhetoric of modeling achieved its highest pitch. Recall Graham Romeyn Taylor signing off Satellite Cities (1915), which in substance was a review of actually existing suburban mishaps: “The great need is for demonstration and example…. A successful achievement in the form of a garden suburb or city, meeting the needs of an industrial population…would go farther than any other one thing to give point and effectiveness and stimulus to the movement” toward dispersal and decongestion.5 Welfare capitalists, tonier suburban builders, and card-carrying planners erected countless towns that, intentionally or not, by their example advanced these goals. Crucially, suburban models readily crossed class lines in their application: Taylor’s disquisition on the scrappy “outer rings of industry” cited Roland Park, the sylvan enclave north of Baltimore; Forest Hills Gardens; and J. C. Nichols’s Country Club District in Kansas City. Atterbury’s “Model Towns” piece was illustrated with images of Roland Park, but also of Gary, Indiana; of Garden City, Long Island (the name of which predates Howard’s text by almost three decades), but also of Pullman. New Towns for Old, John Nolen’s 1927 summation of best practices, commingled the “old seacoast town” of Cohasset, Massachusetts, with the “industrial town built to order” at Kistler, Pennsylvania.6 Exclusive middle- and upper-class landscapes figured, vaguely if unsurprisingly, as models for the reconstruction and “uplift” of industrial netherworlds. Principles of order, in turn, worked out with greatest focus and precision in industrial realms came to lay certain formal foundations for the ordinary middle-class residential suburbs that rose en masse in the 1920s, and with a vengeance after World War II. By the 1920s, planners squarely in the political and economic mainstream — John Nolen, say, at Kingsport, Tennessee, or Mariemont, Ohio — would as a matter of course promote project after project as yet another potential “model.”7 Countless associations promising regional, not merely urban, planning cropped up in the 1920s, and they inherited this sensibility, modeling their interventions on object lessons conceived, or found, at another, larger scale. The abortive City Planning Section of the Commonwealth Club of California, for instance, based in San Francisco and casting its gaze across the nine-county Bay Area, held up Detroit and Los Angeles as models of efficient industrial dispersal.8 In 1925, the landscape architect Stephen Child, taking heed of the Commonwealth Club’s and the feckless local Regional Plan
5 Graham Romeyn Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York: D. Appleton, 1915), 300; emphasis added. 6 John Nolen, New Towns for Old: Achievements in Civic Improvement in Some American Small Towns and Neighborhoods (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1927). 7 See “Mariemont, America’s Demonstration Town,” The American City 27 (1922), no. 4, 309–310. Mariemont was always “essentially a business proposition,” one of those towns “not dependent upon philanthropy, but that will pay for themselves.” Again we run up against the intimacy between public-facing planners and privatistic developers, which cannot be wished away. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., declared Forest Hills Gardens “A Suburban Town Built on Business Principles,” New Boston 1, no. 9 (January 1911). Models sold; models paid dividends. Andrew J. Thomas of the Bayonne Housing Corporation, who built garden apartments for workers at Rockefeller’s Standard Oil complex in Hudson County, N.J., “as a demonstration of an ideal method of producing wage-earners’ housing,” leavened his high-minded claims to this effect with the matter-of-fact statement that these represented an ever “more rigid application of business methods in housing.” See Andrew J. Thomas, Industrial Housing (Bayonne, N.J.: The Bayonne Housing Corporation, 1925), 9, 10, and passim. 8 See address of 18 December 1923, Commonwealth Club of California, City Planning Section records, 1923–1927, BANC MSS 77/136 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter ‘Commonwealth Club records’).
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Association’s near-misses, and citing a study tour he had embarked upon with British and Belgian planners, proposed a bay-centric “community of interest,” with a wildly grandiose marble Acropolis atop Yerba Buena Island, whose formal and political template had been perfected in Germany’s Ruhr Valley.9 The imperative to model animated those, too, working at the avowedly critical margins of planning. If most of the nation’s regionalist groups were essentially multi-city chambers of commerce, the same arsenal of concepts was basic to the counter-modeling launched by the New York–based Regional Planning Association of America, scions of the vaguely socialistic left, whose 1923 preamble promised “to illustrate concretely” their Modernist- and Garden City– inspired programs for the measured dispersal of residence and work by building a visitable site, “organic” and “complete” in its articulation of parts.10 The force of ordinary, functional landscapes as models was central to the variously politicized Modernisms of the CIAM era, as Reyner Banham’s still-gripping detective work attests.11 And if Radburn, New Jersey, the RPAA’s second demonstration site, today stands alone as a residential enclave, recall that an industrial zone was planned, but then put on indefinite hold in 1929 when the Depression interceded.12
Yet the “model” suburb, planners hereby came to intuit, was an entirely relative category, thinkable only within a wider ecology of attractions and repulsions. For all his moral grandstanding around the Forest Hills project, Atterbury himself had acknowledged as much: “the words may be applied to a rapidly increasing number of more or less attractive and
9 See minutes of 6 January 1925, Commonwealth Club records, for what seems to be the group’s first exposure to the idea of this compatibility. Their guest that day was Stephen Child, would two years later publish his thoughts as “The Regional Planning Organization of the Ruhr Adapted to the Bay Region,” Architect and Engineer 90 (September 1927): 70–71, and Architect and Engineer 91 (October 1927): 49–52. Though fanciful in some of its particulars — it all came to Child in “a vision,” though “not a dream” (70) — this latter document is an essential reference in charting some of the unrealized possibilities for a baywide federation of municipal units, and for grand, shared infrastructure and parks “stretching away as far as the eye could reach toward Richmond” (52). 10 “Preamble” and statements of “Method” that came of the RPAA’s first meetings, Minutes of the RPAA, 8 June 1923 and 12 June 1923, Box 180, Folder 8033, Lewis Mumford papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. On this imperative, see, among many other documents, Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962); and the 1925 papers (originally published in a special issue of Survey Graphic) collected in Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America, ed. Carl Sussman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976). 11 Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), especially 3–19. Banham argues that, “more than ‘influenced’” by American factories, European Modernists “explicitly adapted” their non-industrial designs from these unassuming object lessons; “there is a causal, cultural, and conscious connection” (3). But, between the lines, Banham makes a compelling case for the unconscious influence a building can exert on thought — the suggestive, disruptive work an inhabited landscape can do “as a concrete and monumental object large enough, complex enough, yet logical enough to engage his imagination and his moral and religious sensibilities and to set him meditating on the necessary laws of industry, architecture, man, and the universe” (248; emphasis added). Things force thought. That thought may become reflective, conscious, willed, but the event of its initial transmission, object to subject, may be anything but. Banham’s chief American examples, we may also note, are squarely at the heart of Buffalo’s waterfront, but back on the Continent he seems to grasp how industrialists have used the relative isolation of suburban space to frame and clarify principles of form: “This plant [the Fiat Lingotto factory at Turin] seems to exist in itself, like a moral concept, a model of the structure of the Law” (248). 12 Eugenie Birch, “Radburn and the American Planning Movement: The Persistence of an Idea,” Journal of the American Planning Association 46 (October 1980): 424–431.
145 successful housing developments, largely of a commercial nature, that stand out in marked relief — conspicuous not so much from their intrinsic merit as by contrast — among the ordinary towns and suburbs of Topsy-like growth and aspect.” Contrast was all; non-disorder was more efficacious than order. Modeling, in any case, was a process: “Any town,” indeed, “becomes model by raising its standard sufficiently high.”13 Once built, there was no telling where a given model’s path of influence might lead. Some of the impetus to model, of course, can be read as a variant of the Garden City inheritance, still alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic. Ebenezer Howard had famously supplied “a diagram only” (Fig. 7.5), but he closed his widely circulated, widely abused treatise To-Morrow (1898) recommending the composition of an actual “working model” and enjoining readers to “consider briefly some of the more important effects which such an object lesson, by the light which it will throw upon the pathway of reform, will inevitably produce on society.” He foresaw imitators building up a “line of immediate action” and weaving it indefinitely across the landscape.14 By the 1910s in America, there was a redoubled insistence on the compelling materiality of the object lesson qua object. To characterize the “City Scientific” moment as ushering in only a logical, lawful “rationalization” of space actually skirts the question — to which planners routinely did attend — of how its resultant landscapes would be physically encountered, lived with, learned from, and internalized. We ought to reckon with these model towns, as did their contemporaries, as lived-with material culture — not as mere expressions or transcripts of some more abstract process of reasoning, but as objects around which and in encounter with which profession and discipline took shape.
Three Modes of “Modeling” Suburban Form Working landscapes on the Carquinez operated as a kind of demonstrative backstage for models that would see application in the other suburban vectors veining San Francisco Bay. In tracing their execution, appraisal, and dissemination, we can distinguish three ontologies of the “model.” In one conventional sense, when publicists and observers declared towns to be models, they had
13 Atterbury, “Model Towns in America,” 20, 21. 14 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow [1898], ed. F. J. Osborn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), 128, 159. The literature on the Garden City movement, its tributaries, and their reception is of course vast. A review might begin with Walter L. Creese, The Search for Environment: The Garden City Before and After (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Stanley Buder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City and the Modern Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Mervyn Miller, English Garden Cities: An Introduction (Swindon: English Heritage, 2010). Marc Weiss makes the claim that the entire history of spatial innovation in twentieth-century America can be understood as a gradual privatization of the Garden City idea, which on Howard’s watch included a fairly radical, collectivist set of economic reforms; “Developing and Financing the ‘Garden Metropolis’: Urban Planning and Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America,” Planning Perspectives 5 (1990): 307. The edges of the high industrial city were, of course, by no means the first American scenes conceived — or received — as “working models” by and for a distant, interested audience. If Perry Miller is to be believed, the entire purpose of the experiment at colonial New England was to set up a portable “working model” for the eventual remaking of British life — in terms of its religious, not its spatial, structure. See Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 11. All of America was, in this global sense, a kind of laboratory. Various nineteenth-century imaginaries positioned the American West — glossed or not as a “safety valve” — in similar relation to the established East: a site where extant problems could be staged, allowed to run their course, intervened upon, resolved, and, once purified, reimported. But for an inversion of this — the East’s long history, rather, as mere trial period for suburban forms that the West would assume nearly finished, and would then perfect — see Elmer Grey, “The New Suburb of the Pacific Coast,” Scribner’s 52 (July 1912), 36: “The East has been an experimental substation for the West in the matter of suburb planning; and this is fortunate.”
146 an idealist conception in mind: “model” was roughly synonymous with “best”; models were congruent, in microcosm, with some abstractable set of principles, symbols, or values that would endure, and that could be paid tribute to, known, sensed, and prescribed, with or without recourse to a visitable site. Often explicitly moral values sprang to mind. When, for instance, the local historian, booster, and speculator Fredrick Hulaniski looked out upon Bay Point in 1917 and saw its corporate benefactor arranging “a model village at no cost to the taxpayer,” he was praising its temperance. Bay Point was a dry town.15 Order itself, an abstract order verified only by its lack of disturbance, was on display; the physical morphology of the town, the axial boulevards and the frequent reproductions of the town’s unusual street plan, would ratify that notional purity, but only as a subsidiary. So would a quiescent workforce. Hulaniski turned to Crockett, “Queen City of the Carquinez Straits,” and found a truly “ideal industrial city,” a model of how social and industrial relations might be retouched, in macrocosm, under the sign of labor peace. Alcohol flowed freely in Crockett, but social order nonetheless seemed to have been vouchsafed from on high: labor was “intelligent and contented,” showing “pleasure and comfort” in “friendship and reciprocity.” Unionization was perhaps too much to ask, the author hinted, and no less than C&H Sugar itself sponsored the annual May Day celebration.16 As late as 1931, when the paternalist order of things was being subjected nationwide to rather more questioning, comfortable Contra Costans, according to J. D. Keith, still looked upon Crockett as “an unincorporated community of the ideal type, often described as a ‘model town.’”17 And there were very specific spatial indices that, in Crockett sharply and in other towns more loosely, helped frame these sites visually as eligible, intelligible models. Nestled within a bend in the Strait, and marked off by a crescent of hills from which the town, as postcard views ever since have reproduced, could be grasped at a glance, Crockett manifested, without exactly having been “planned” as such, the very forms of physical enclosure that planners prescribed and builders variously enacted in the name of consummating “complete” suburban “units” for sale. We have considered how formal enclosure and the sense of edgedness might participate in the physical and affective discipline of working bodies: bounding home and work into a sensible unit, organizing the circuit between these two domains as the thinkable totality of daily movement, and instilling some less effable sense of belonging, or submission, to the town qua town. We have considered San Francisco industrialists’ strategic premia on the dispersal and isolation of their labor forces into ever smaller, less organizable units. But if the company towns of the Carquinez were isolated, they were never outright hidden from view. “Model” towns presume display; they become model as they are shown. Even in the clearest, most absolutist company towns, managers and publicists came to understand the value of opening their towns, selectively, to outside observation. If the didactic landscape was addressed at one level to its working inhabitants, it had other crucial audiences and appraisers as well, drawn from the middle and managerial class, and they were domiciled far off site. A reporter for Advertising & Selling turned his attention in 1920 to the Hercules Mixer, the wonderfully paternalist employee magazine we have seen chronicling and directing daily life at Hercules Powder. The reporter,
15 Frederick J. Hulaniski, ed., The History of Contra Costa County, California (Berkeley, Calif.: Elms Publishing Co., 1917), 392. See Rego, Days Gone By, vol. 1, 179, for a contemporary assent that Bay Point was a “a model, sober town” — i.e., model because sober. 16 Hulaniski, History, 395. 17 J. D. Keith, “The Story of Crockett” (1931), in Gutleben’s Sugar Thesaurus, 1958–1965, BANC MSS 79/81, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Harry Roberts, Jr., thrilled to the Mixer’s “excellent uses” in “building up internal cooperation.” The publication was “designed primarily for members of the organization,” he wrote. “This is kept constantly in sight. Nevertheless, there is a large exchange list…. In this way, it undoubtedly has advertising value, and in many cases helps to make friends for the company.”18 The enclosure of the model town had to be thought in degrees — as a variable, the control of which was a contested stake. Indeed, the ability to open and close the model town, to decide on more or less permeability for its walls, might be the planner’s most basic political capacity. Still, in Hercules, in Crockett, and in countless other avowed “models,” under this first mode the moment of display served only or chiefly to confirm a set of ideal principles. This could be true whether the spectatorship was mediated by the page of a magazine or enacted physically on site in the form of a visit. Organized factory tours enjoyed a vogue among the middle classes.19 And Baldwin & Howell occasioned a similar language in publicizing their Pullman Park subdivision in Richmond, to which they organized regular day trips by train for prospective buyers: “When an old established responsible concern takes it upon itself to spend approximately a thousand dollars upon a free excursion and lunch in order to show investors a new subdivision and the surrounding country, you can depend on it that the property to be shown and sold must be of exceptional merit.”20 Merit inferred, order deduced, stability of investment vouched for: the site could serve as index, evidence, or confirmation of this verities, but not yet as an agent calling them into being.
When Pullman Park first opened to buyers, in October 1910, its publicists appended an ambitious claim to the announcement: “Farsighted speculators…figure that Pullman will ultimately develop into one of the largest manufacturing cities on the coast. It follows that the history of Pullman, Illinois, will be repeated at Pullman Park.”21 The predicate is fairly astonishing in light of nineteenth-century labor history — workers had struck bitterly at Chicago’s Pullman just sixteen years before, despite or because of the overweening provisions to workers in that ur-“model” company town. But it discloses a second identifiable modality of modeling regnant at this time: towns denoted as model precisely because they are modeled on someplace else, i.e., are derivative. Model towns in this second sense were not necessarily exact copies of their antecedents — in street plan, architectural detailing, or anything else — but even if they were, Progressive Era Californians showed no evident shame about their readiness to cite, channel, and suggest the original, even if that meant looking “back” east for legitimation. When Carquinez Brick and Tile set up shop at Eckley, just upstream from Port Costa, publicity actually embraced the concern’s belatedness: “Everything about the plant is of the newest and best pattern — the establishment
18 Harry Roberts, Jr., “Building Up Internal Cooperation: The Excellent Uses to Which the Hercules Powder Company Puts Its Magazine, ‘The Mixer,’” Advertising & Selling, 8 May 1920, 16. 19 On tours for the curious middle classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exemplary works include Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and, differently, Elspeth H. Brown, “Welfare Capitalism and Documentary Photography: N.C.R. and the Visual Production of a Global Model Factory,” History of Photography 32 (2008): 132–151. Stuart Brandes was among the first to point out how welfare capitalism’s public-relations impulse was always also a “defensive strategy”; American Welfare Capitalism, 1880– 1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 31–32. 20 “Richmond Draws Many Investors,” San Francisco Call, 11 June 1911. 21 “Pullman Park to Be Opened,” San Francisco Call, 22 October 1910.
148 being modelled after the best Eastern experience.”22 The Walnut Creek–based developers, as we have seen, who platted Bay Point’s distinctive diagonal boulevards in the shadow of the Smith Lumber Company, and consciously athwart the more prosaic grids of neighboring company towns, had traveled to Washington, D.C., shortly after the completion of the classicizing 1902 McMillan Plan in search of a formal template to imitate.23 (Farther inland, the Fresno banker Thomas W. Patterson laid out a speculative agricultural “colony” in 1911 with a form explicitly modeled on the boulevards and roundabouts of Washington, and before it Haussmann’s Paris, although the stimulus for his efforts may have been Burnham’s thwarted City Beautiful attempt on San Francisco more than any direct experience of the capital itself.)24 And a not-insignificant number of towns founded during this period of industrial expansion called familiar Eastern and Midwestern models to mind by their very nomenclature, with less aestheticized sorts of spatial recognition as the goal: Pittsburg (sans ‘h’), Albany, even the short-lived New Chicago experiment at Alviso, adjacent to the San Jose Watch Factory and furnished with streets named after those girding the original.25 Avowedly “model” towns, situated along tangled chains of descent, likeness, and distinction, are one place to begin thinking about how to spatialize what literary critics have called the “anxiety of influence” — both its acceptance and its denial.26
More often, though, and more crucially for our case, builders of “model” towns expected their compositions to do precisely the opposite work — or, rather, to occupy an earlier, more active spot along these chains of influence and inspiration. Rather than the settled endpoint of a process — passively, dutifully encapsulating, say, “Pittsburgh” in microcosm, and drawing off the forebear’s reputation — the model towns of the Carquinez earned that designation by actively modeling the new. True models, in this third and final sense, exist to be replicated: they incite further spatial experiments in their image. These contagious landscapes suggest, instigate, and propel. They are publicized — or perhaps they publicize themselves — as transferrable, modular templates for best or better practice. The Carquinez became a specialized laboratory for display and demonstration on the strength of this understanding of what models do and how they do it. “Model” workplaces and towns proliferated, in a spirit of capitalist experiment, all of them from the first notionally portable, imitable in concept if not always in physical fact. The Shell refinery at Martinez, wrote the company’s official historian, from its appearance in 1915 “set the pattern of all the Shell refineries that were to follow it,” and was publicized as such.27 If those touting the brick-and-tile concern at Eckley were in one breath content to tap sedimented Eastern best practices for support, they also expected their own workplace to compel its own imitation, erecting a small building on the edge of the brickyard as a perpetual “showcase” for consumption by visitors or,
22 See the pamphlet Carquinez Brick and Tile (San Francisco: Carquinez Brick and Tile, 1908), “Eckley” folder, CCCHS. 23 Rego, Days Gone By, vol. 1, 81. 24 On this episode, see Peter Ekman, “‘A Town Should Be Built to Make the Whole Thing Work’: Modeling Patterson, City Beautiful of California’s Central Valley,” Journal of Urban History 41 (2015): 460–478. 25 On the latter’s failure, see James R. Curtis, “‘New Chicago of the Far West’: Land Speculation in Alviso, California, 1890–1891,” California History 60 (1982): 36–45. 26 After Harold Bloom’s well-known The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 27 Kendall Beaton, Enterprise in Oil: A History of Shell in the United States (New York: Appleton–Century–Crofts, 1957), 6.
149 more fleetingly, passersby on the rail line just feet away.28 The architect Ernest Ransome, who had been behind the massive McNear Warehouse in Port Costa, or Wheatport, a few years prior, used Stege, a nondescript town nestled amid the powder houses of West County, as a kind of staging area in the early 1880s to work out the principles that, scaled up, would see realization in his acclaimed Pacific Coast Borax Company warehouse (1888–9), a vision of reinforced concrete, on the island city of Alameda.29 The Carquinez was a kind of backstage — sequestered from everyday inspection while experimentation was underway, but opened to view once the tinkered-with spatial models seemed ready to impress. By 1915, this particular edge’s demonstrative function and penchant for display seemed well established. It had to be seen to be believed. Although the telescope built atop Mount Diablo during the Panama–Pacific Exposition would also distance observer from landscape, “[t]o those who gaze through the giant lens, the beautiful surrounding country will seem to be close at hand.” The telescope would serve as a “permanent advertising medium,” a form of entertainment, and an instrument through which the county’s aggregated industrial sublime, its scale nearly unimaginable from ground level, might be objectified, naturalized, modeled, and learned from.30 Yet these moments of concerted distancing — mediated aerials being a favorite tell-all flashpoint for the critical geographer, whose theorizations so often exploit anachronism — tell us less than they seem to about the materiality and the notionally contagious activity of suburban models upon the sensorium. The role of ground-level haptics and habitation — concrete encounters with didactic landscapes — cannot be wished away, overshadowed by these more spectacular paeans to the idealist empire of the eye. As a question of method, we need to ask, skeptically and in earnest, about the mechanics of these built-out models’ transmission: the senses with which, spacings within which, and occasions on which their display came literally to matter. Vision was one of those senses, but only one, and these more orchestrated stagings of the suggestible gaze finally distract from the subtler, less spectacular workings of “model” landscapes as everyday, felt presences on the urban edge.
“Teaching the Worker to Feel the War”: Federal Shipbuilding Towns on the Carquinez It was during the First World War, American mobilization having come just two years after the suitably imperial PPIE closed for business, that the Carquinez Strait took on strikingly new visibility as a laboratory for model-making at the scale of the town. Attending to the material conditions and the rhetoric surrounding two hurried housing developments thrown up with federal backing in 1918 adjacent to shipbuilding concerns — in the heights of Vallejo, as an adjunct to war-speed production at the Mare Island Navy Yard; and at the new town of Clyde, sheltering workers engaged at the nearby shipyards of Bay Point — we can glimpse the consolidation, rendering explicit, and redefinition of the modeling imagination, and indeed of the planning profession itself, local and national, in these suburbs of last resort.
28 “On the Waterfront: Eckley and Port Costa Were Links in Grain Trade,” Contra Costa Times, 2 October 1994. 29 Roland Oliver, “Recollections of Early Industries in Stege, 7 August 1959, “Stege” folder, CCCHS. The Stege dry run resulted in what was indeed a working model: the American Lucol Company assumed it as a base for its paint manufactures. The building was eventually dismantled and moved to Carteret, New Jersey, where it saw new use. On Ransome in California, see Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 32–38. 30 Contra Costa County, California: Leading County of the West in Manufacturing (Martinez, Calif.: Gazette Print, 1915); Hulaniski, History, 140.
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Two new federal agencies, the United States Housing Corporation and the Emergency Fleet Corporation (the latter a division of the United States Shipping Board), cropped up in the summer of 1918 to find or, crucially — a first for the federal government — to build housing developments for shipbuilders in line with the received best practices worked out piecemeal, as we have seen, in an array of more or less composed working-class suburbs between about 1877 and 1917. The USHC and EFC executed 55 neighborhood-scale projects — planned and justified, in terms that should by now be familiar, as socio-spatial “units” or “wholes” — to some degree of completion, accommodating 48,000 male workers and about as many of their family members. (The agencies’ fiscal and administrative procedures were somewhat different: the USHC directly funded construction, while the EFC generally partnered with existing employers, who would themselves set up real-estate corporations for the purpose of the project.) Construction continued on some projects, conspicuously unfinished when the war unceremoniously ceased, through 1919. Historians of planning and urbanism, particularly those focused on housing questions astride the dictates of the speculative real-estate market, have long maintained a curiosity about the aesthetics and politics of these federal subdivisions, which antedate the New Deal’s housing interventions and, for some, signal possible paths around the two-tier system of provision — public housing projects in “inner” cities, mortgage help and subdivision guidelines for what became “the” suburbs — that the 1930s initiatives installed or reinforced. Yet the World War I towns remain gravely understudied, and the complexities of their position within the development of “scientific” planners’ propensities to build working “models” have not been teased out with any thoroughness. Moreover, most historical work, not unjustifiably, has focused on a select few, quite completely realized projects sited along the Atlantic seaboard near traditional shipbuilding centers: Electus Litchfield’s shapely Yorkship Village in Camden, New Jersey (Fig. 7.6); the Atlantic Heights section of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and John Nolen’s Union Park Gardens project in the western part of Wilmington, Delaware (all EFC projects, incidentally, not USHC). But the same assembly of planning principles can be glimpsed in microcosm on the edges of numerous large and midsized cities from Bath, Maine, to Newport News, Virginia; along the Great Lakes in lesser number; and, while that war is not known for a crucial western theater, at Bremerton (EFC) and Vancouver (USHC), Washington, in addition to California’s two experiments along the Carquinez.31 And these outlying projects, when set in context, may have something distinctive to tell us about how “models” travel, touch down, and locally morph.
31 One book-length treatment can be found in Richard M. Candee, Atlantic Heights: A World War I Shipbuilders’ Community (Portsmouth, N.H.: Portsmouth Marine Society, 2012). For an increasingly detailed catalogue of USHC projects, see also the ongoing “Workers’ Paradise” project, under the direction of Eran Ben-Joseph, accessed 1 November 2016, http://web.mit.edu/ebj/www/ww1/ww1a.html. On other dimensions of the shipbuilding towns as “models” of urban form, and of middle-class habits and aesthetics as delivered to the working class, see Roy Lubove, “Homes and ‘A Few Well Placed Fruit Trees’: An Object Lesson in Federal Housing,” Social Research 27 (1960): 469–486; Christian Topalov, “Scientific Urban Planning and the Ordering of Daily Life: The First ‘War Housing’ Experiment in the United States, 1917–1919,” Journal of Urban History 17 (November 1990): 14–45; Kristin M. Szylvian, “Industrial Housing Reform and the Emergency Fleet Corporation,” Journal of Urban History 25 (1999): 647–689; and, for a list of USHC and EFC projects nationwide, Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37–43. Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 143–147, briefly folds the war towns into a history of “subdivision science” centered on the 1920s. And see Robert Leavitt Davison, “A Check List of the Principal Housing Developments in the United States,” Architectural Review n.s. 5 (April 1917): 83–91, for a sense of the lineage as it stood on the eve of war.
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As Christian Topalov, one of the towns’ more conceptually adventurous historians, notes, wartime has tended to furnish a “prodigious crucible of social reform,” enabling new, consciously experimental, because limited-engagement, schemes promising a “science” of this domain or that — or clarifying, at least, the conditions under which “comprehensively” scaled programs might flourish.32 Roy Lubove, the earliest serious historian of the towns, is even more emphatic: the Great War’s housing experiments themselves finally made planning fully a profession, after several years of grandiose gestures to that effect, and codified its optimal scale of intervention: the “neighborhood,” built from scratch, which could without appreciable loss of information be abstracted to the district, the town, the city, the region.33 The wartime subdivisions can, in this sense, be seen as summarizing, honing, and making visible in physical form a generation’s worth of planning knowledge and planning method. And, indeed, the USHC and EFC quite directly convened a collaborative who’s-who of the high City Scientific. The EFC’s Housing Committee was headed by the prolific New York builder Alexander Bing; its Design Department was guided by Frederick Ackerman, whose pregnant theorizations of architecture and planning’s intersections we have already glimpsed. The USHC principals included I. N. Phelps Stokes, the New York architect, developer, tenement reformer, and historian. Its Architectural Division adopted guidelines laid out by Lawrence Veiller, the tenement crusader of record, who had ascended to head the National Housing Association. Its Town Planning Division included Arthur Comey, Arthur Shurtleff, Horace McFarland, and various other codifiers of industrial suburbia, all under the direction of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.34 The wartime episode also rendered official, in a series of technical bulletins assembled during and after the period of active war production, a set of spatial principles — how working- class suburbs ought to be laid out — that, while visible in the City Scientific’s law-seeking professional literature, could appear a bit disaggregated, spread over several scales and sites. USHC and EFC housing typologies varied quite a bit from town to town: some single-family homes, some attached or semi-attached, some duplexes, some more inelegant dormitory-style housing for single workers (with all of these options allotted according to skill and other social criteria). Chiefly for our purposes, however, at the level of site planning the shipbuilding towns entrenched as desirable, even necessary, the sculpting of “complete” suburban “units” of development: balanced in their complement of land uses, sorted into non-overlapping parts, visibly shapely in their negation of the simple “monotonous” street grid, and, above all, intelligibly enclosed, kept distinct from the preexisting town by an unambiguous edge: “A circular road often bounded the area; sometimes too a natural feature of the landscape or a railroad track would help mark it off; and sometimes it would be built in open countryside. Access roads were few, and entrances were often given some kind of symbolic emphasis.”35 Working suburbs could be worlds unto themselves. Such was the policy context as San Francisco Bay militarized anew and federal agents began scouring its edges for suitable development sites to house war workers. One unbuilt project, peripheral but still within San Francisco’s limits, would have commandeered 200 acres of Visitacion Valley, a straggling neighborhood “on the southern edge of San Francisco proper, close to the bay shore belt of industries.” The ubiquitous Charles Cheney laid out the settlement
32 Topalov, “Scientific Urban Planning and the Ordering of Daily Life,” 14. 33 Lubove, “Homes and ‘A Few Well Placed Fruit Trees,’” 480. 34 Topalov, “Scientific Urban Planning and the Ordering of Daily Life,” 18–19. 35 Topalov, “Scientific Urban Planning and the Ordering of Daily Life,” 29.
152 along Anglophilic garden-city lines, arraying single and attached dwellings, for rent and for (limited-dividend) sale, across a sloping site.36 In the publicity piece “Must California Industries Provide Good Homes for Their Labor?” he put forth a diagram and scale model of the site (Figs. 7.7, 7.8), which onlookers praised for the exactitude of its zoning — Cheney’s known subspecialty as a planner, mainly for his work on Berkeley’s 1916 citywide code, which predated the acclaimed and imitated New York City ordinance by four months.37 The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce was visibly excited about the prospect of this new “model” town right in town, including it, still unrealized, in the “Site Seeing” column of its periodic Activities as a bona fide spectacle of spatial order — which the touristic faculty of “S-I-G-H-T” would readily confirm.38 The in-city option at Visitacion Valley, remote though it was, ultimately lost out in favor of larger and more tractable plots of flat land lining the Carquinez. Mare Island and Clyde were certifiably “auxiliary,” to use the terminology favored by USHC officials. James Ford, the planner and reformer who had prominently weighed in on “slum” housing and various schemes of “decongestion” during the earliest days of the City Scientific, headed and set criteria for the vast federal “homes registration” effort of 1918, canvassing the surrounds of each anointed shipbuilding center to determine “all acceptable suburbs” — where the housing stock was under- occupied or their land, to a certain sensibility, could still be called “empty” — that might be tapped to house war labor.39 The federal preference was to fill existing housing; new-build was the exceptional solution of “last resort,” and so was thinkable only in relatively abjected suburban locales.40 “Auxiliary”: the term summoned a very specific center–edge imaginary. Auxiliary sites were well “outside of the heart of an established city,” but, never isolated outright, they enjoyed some linkage by transit, on which war labor, if not housed on site, would daily rely for commuting.41 Auxiliary sites, acceptable sites, if already occupied, were also decidedly working-class in character: the federal canvassing and classification reiterated, to the letter, the visible sorting of suburban vectors into more and less genteel, more and less
36 “Progress in Zoning in California,” Housing Betterment 7, no. 2 (1918): 72. For his own account, see Charles H. Cheney, “Must California Industries Provide Good Homes for Their Labor?” Western Architect and Engineer 53 (June 1918): 87–95. On this project briefly, and on Cheney generally, see Fukuo Akimoto, “Charles H. Cheney of California,” Planning Perspectives 18 (2003): 253–275. 37 On Cheney’s innovations in zoning, see Marc A. Weiss, “Urban Land Developers and the Origins of Zoning Laws: The Case of Berkeley,” Berkeley Planning Journal 3 (1986): 7–25. For Cheney’s own statements on the matter, see Charles H. Cheney, Procedure for Zoning or Districting of Cities (San Francisco: California Conference on City Planning, 1917); Charles H. Cheney, “Zoning in Practice,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh National Convention on City Planning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), 162–194; and Charles H. Cheney, “Architectural Control in Relation to Zoning,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 155 (May 1931): 159–165. 38 “Site Seeing in San Francisco: Exhibit Number Fifty-Five,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Activities 5 (1918): 208. 39 See James Ford, address to U.S. League of Building and Loan Associations, 24–25 July 1918, Entry 58, Box 4, Records of the United States Housing Corporation, Record Group 3, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland (hereafter ‘Archives II’). 40 Lubove, “Homes and ‘A Few Well Placed Fruit Trees,’” 475. 41 James Ford, “Housing for War Workers Engaged on Army and Navy Contracts,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 79 (September 1918), 274, 271. Ford described successful efforts to provide train service from Asbury Park, N.J., to “the highly congested district of Perth Amboy, South Amboy, and Morgan,” and from “the Indiana Steel Towns” — Gary, Hammond, Indiana Harbor, and East Chicago — to South Chicago.
153 productive.42 As a specifically suburban strategy, concocted at regional scale, federal interventions during the First World War presumed, fed on, and intensified the uneven, generations-long sorting and specialization of the Bay Area’s various edges. The naval shipyard at Mare Island, sitting a full thirty miles northeast of San Francisco, was a production site of long standing, since 1854 one pole of the region’s strategically dispersed geographies of defense — a dispersion which, of course, the area’s central feature, the bay, had itself enabled.43 The question of where exactly to locate new housing, and then how to arrange and shape it, had less readymade answers at hand. In the end, USHC officials settled on a site located off the island itself, across the Mare Island Strait in one of the sparser sections of Vallejo, the satellite city and onetime state capital located across from tiny Crockett at the point of articulation between the Carquinez Strait, in its strict fluvial definition, and San Pablo Bay proper. There, along curving streets lining a 5.5-acre hilltop site two miles from downtown, the planner Percy R. Jones, engineer Stephen E. Kieffer, and architect George W. Kelham, San Franciscans all, planned housing enough, both detached and semi-detached, for 419 families of petty officers and, more numerously, civilian workers. By war’s end, they had satisfactorily built for 227 of them. Downhill, on a separate 7-acre parcel, rose dormitory-style housing, cafeteria and all, for 400 unattached men. Back up in the heights, which publicists noted was one of the USHC’s steepest and most picturesque sites, builders installed a school, a “moving picture hall,” a set of small parks at bends in the roads, and, for the drivers, a system of community garages located on the interior of the blocks (Figs. 7.9–7.12).44 “Suitably centralized and grouped,” Olmsted, Jr., would claim — and the postmortem Report of the United States Housing Corporation (1919) would repeat — these community facilities would “give a dominant point of definite effect.”45At the level of form, then, Mare Island combined most if not all the features of the complete, intelligible, model industrial suburb. As war production proceeded apace, the USHC’s Town Planning Division worked in real time to codify the formal principles that the shipbuilding towns evinced, argued for, and just might physically prove. Good form, their mission statement clarified, resided in the “arrangement” of interlocking parts, intelligible as discrete parts, into a working whole. Carl Parker, the Olmsted Brothers employee who managed that division, in 1918 outlined a forthcoming book on suburban form, a sort of argumentative treatise in which the war towns would serve as the main witness. “Good looks,” he wrote, inhered in the “appearance of separate elements,” so long as the “appearance of compositions of elements” was equally present. Said “elements,” in Parker’s confident scheme, encompassed a broad category of experienced physical embellishments: sightlines, color schemes, attention to “background” and “balance,” and more.46 In every permissible application, however, they added up to a sense of stable, legible
42 James Ford, “Homes Registration Service” (1918), Entry 61, Box 1, Record Group 3, Archives II. Ford cited examples from the cities of northern New Jersey: Vallejo was to San Francisco as Pompton Lakes was to Paterson and Kenilworth was to Elizabeth. Perth Amboy, another shipbuilding site in that state, he deemed too far outside Newark’s sphere of influence to be its auxiliary. 43 See Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), for a discussion of military drivers of dispersed urban form in the Bay Area and other California metropolises. The processes of decentralization became more intense and explicit during the Second World War, but they were not without precedent. 44 Town plan (1918) for Bay Terrace at Mare Island, California, Project #581, Record Group 3, Archives II; Ben- Joseph, “Workers’ Paradise.” 45 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., “Suggestions to Town Planners,” Landscape Architecture 9 (October 1918): 85. 46 Notes of Carl Parker (1918), Town Planning Division, for untitled forthcoming book, Entry 111, Box 1, Record Group 3, Archives II. The book did not see publication.
154 form. Overall form at the scale of the subdivision, moreover, would by some transitive property help in “stabilizing the residence.” Parker and his colleagues agreed that this formedness would come easier in relative isolation, sequestered just beyond the built-up edge of even little “old Vallejo,” where “there are few houses of quality” and even fewer in-town opportunities to build at the neighborhood scale.47 As built “models,” these developments courted the attention of — physically did their work for and on — two very different audiences: first, workers themselves, and second, planners and other (middle-class) onlookers in the general public. The first level will concern us for now. Therein, within tight, localized, bounded geographies, these models were chiefly addressed to their inhabitants; quietly, through their ordered geometry, however arbitrary it was at root, they stood, as Eric Karolak has noted, as models of “right living.”48 The curved streets, the axial gestures, the sorting, ordering, and punctuation by green “lungs”: these transmitted what could be seen as middle-class aesthetics and proprieties to a working-class clientele, receptive or not. Workers, the reasoning went, were over time to sense the comprehensiveness of this form and the mode of living it might prescribe. “There will be a certain amount of bustle and apparent confusion on the surface,” declared one official manual on conduct, centrally generated and reprinted in local organs like The Contra Costan. “Bear in mind that beneath it all lies a well- thought-out plan.”49 Dictates came down on proper suburban conduct, enjoining residents to keep their unsightly dogs off the lawn, their children out of the (yet unpaved) streets, and their speedometers at a reasonable level.50 Workers were also expected to sense, and to cherish, their living compliance with a scheme of explicit, moralized modeling: “Our town will be on exhibition,” an Operating Division circular announced. “Each of us must feel that ‘our house’ is ever in order for the unexpected visitor.”51 Headlines ran over and over to this effect, leveraging the attachments of homeownership, in cases where it obtained, to secure workers’ allegiance: “You own part of [a] large model city — get acquainted with it!” (Fig. 7.13). This represented the simpler, more blockish face of the planning imaginary: stable form, rationally planned and, upon top-down imposition and bottom-up compliance, rationally seen and sensed. And it is possible indeed to read the wartime subdivisions in terms of their formal bequests to residential districts, whether adjacent to or decoupled from industry, built well into the later twentieth century. We can and should mine the USHC and EFC projects as crucial points of articulation in the professional and physical prehistory of the postwar suburb. But the suburban spaces of the First World War disclose a second prehistory that cuts across, and finally exceeds, those told in the language of visible, unambiguous “form” or “composition.” These wartime subdivisions give rise to a second, more difficult and insidious philosophy of the built environment’s animacies and effects — a novel investment in the productive, more-than-human forces of landscape. If, as Charles Eaton, mouthpiece of the USSB’s National Service Section, insisted, militarism depended on “teaching the worker to feel the war,” we should be prepared to inquire into how the ordinary lived spaces of the war — the landscapes purpose-built to stoke
47 Correspondence of William Hays (1919), Entry 67, Box 4, Record Group 3, Archives II. 48 Eric J. Karolak, “‘No Idea of Doing Anything Wonderful’: The Labor-Crisis Origins of National Housing Policy and the Reconstruction of the Working-Class Community, 1917–1919,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, eds. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 76. 49 “Lesson No. 7 — Your Health,” The Contra Costan, 24 August 1917. 50 R. A. Petit, “Community Letter #2,” Entry 137, Box 649, Record Group 3, Archives II. 51 Operating Division, “To the occupants” (1918), Entry 137, Box 649, Record Group 3, Archives II.
155 what commentators had only just begun calling the “war machine” — might have been configured to inculcate that affective, less-than-rational compliance.52 Thomas Adams, who leveraged insights from the Letchworth Garden City outside London to advise American war housers, also wagered on biology and the racialized unsubtleties of physical culture: the details of war housing, done expertly, would “improve the character and physique of their citizens”; they would cultivate workers’ “vitality,” which Adams made synonymous with their “efficiency”; these middle landscapes would “conserve the human life and energy that is being wasted in the slum of the big city and the isolated hovel of the country”; they would, finally, “train and improve a mixed people, including many [immigrants] who are without traditions of political freedom, advantages of education, or ambition to enjoy a better standard of comfort in their homes.”53 More explicitly still than the mainline “scientific” planners since 1909, the stewards of wartime suburbs articulated a peculiarly lively vision of the landscape, which, never static, had to be reontologized as parcels of matter and energy addressed to bodies, to their impulses, habits, and moods — the influence on which, and the responses of which, would be largely involuntary. Built suburban “models” would strike the worker, suggesting lines of conduct in ways more fluid and less coherent than their diagrams’ hard geometries could convey. If “right building” were to commission “right living,” producing model subjects in the process — the precise mechanisms of transmission, unsurprisingly, remained somewhat unclear — it would do so through the vital affordances of materials and their surrounds. It would encouragingly govern — and not only discipline — by saying yes to the passions and better “natures” of the working body. These ontological commitments were uniquely explicit around the California projects, whose planners repurposed for wartime longstanding local calculations on how natural landscape, ambient climate, and built forms together, once more with feeling, ought to compel workers to work. Legible town form may have set the parameters for efficient production, the administrator William Hays wrote, but the Mare Island development did not, on that level, much deviate from a standard, nationwide type. Less formalizably, he reckoned, the particular building materials on offer in California — the stucco above all, variously colored and textured — would “add piquancy to the whole.” Here especially, moreover, “[w]e may confidently add the work that Nature will do, with almost uncanny rapidity, under the California sun,” both in cultivating the garden plots many workers and their families would maintain out back, and in stimulating energetic, contented, indefinite suburban labor.54 The planners’ diverse appeals to the vitalizing force of landscapes found and made should, upon close inspection, finally disturb. The circumstances surrounding the EFC project at Clyde, more than Mare Island, bring to the fore how planners came to militarize this polyvalent naturalism. Clyde, which from 1918 served to house 103 workers and their families in three- to five-room stucco bungalows, each one a slightly different color, lay just over a mile by trolley from the yards of the Pacific Coast Shipbuilding Company at Bay Point.55 Planners laid out shops and offices around a ceremonial public square, plantings and gravel walkways in a small central park, a sizable hotel by the San Francisco somebody George A. Applegarth for executives and government officials on their periodic visits, and an “amusement” district promising
52 Charles A. Eaton, “Teaching the Worker to Feel the War,” Scientific American (7 September 1918): 190–191, 198–199. 53 Thomas Adams, “Community Development in Wartime,” Landscape Architecture 8 (April 1918): 110, 124. 54 Correspondence of William Hays (1919). 55 “A Deserted City,” Western Architect and Engineer 65 (April 1921): 106.
156 wholesome options for time off the job (Figs. 7.14–7.17).56 With slight modifications, Clyde’s site plan was recognizable within the broader USHC–EFC paradigm, and there as elsewhere its executors familiarly trumpeted “reasonable houses,” restorative “pleasure places,” and countless spaces of “hygiene.” But Clyde was different in crucial respects. Its planner and supervising architect was none other than the mystic Bernard Maybeck. Applegarth and his colleague E. W. Cannon, also a San Franciscan, had “begun in a hurried way” and sketched out the street scheme before Maybeck was added to the project staff. It will not come as a surprise that Maybeck quickly introduced curves and undulations into what had been a strict gridiron, appealed to the affordances of the hillside topography for his warrant, argued for the removal of sidewalks (“somewhat after the manner of a country road”), and varied the bungalows’ setbacks from those streets all throughout the plan.57 He was the one to concoct the non-repeating color scheme for the houses in this “Rainbow City,” and he summarily refused to construct any two of the houses with exactly the same massing, plan, or ornamentation.58 And, cryptically if characteristically by this point in his career, Maybeck averred of Clyde that, beyond his or anyone else’s human ken, “[t]he natural forces at work mold the destiny of any town.”59 More to the point, Clyde’s case allows us to glimpse how these naturalistic gestures dovetailed with the imperatives of the specifically nationalist forms of production — the production, doubly, of materiel and of subjects — that, prototyped in wartime, would survive well into the age of postwar “normalcy.” It also allows us to explore the sundry, illiberal sources on which this putatively model town itself was modeled. “Hygiene” and “reasonable” spatial form were not abstract desiderata for Maybeck: they were, his January 1919 report argued, exactly “[t]he same principals [sic] that were employed by successful colonies.” It was in this precise context that Clyde’s odonyms, which reached for other British status markers than those which Americans crafting garden cities tended to cite, begin to make symbolic sense: streets took the names Wellington, Stratford, Sussex, and Trafalgar. Maybeck was applying the planning lessons of the British Empire, now glossed as romantic, and syncretizing them with various
56 “Plot Plan of Hotel and Business Section,” Blueprints, George A. Applegarth collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter ‘Applegarth collection’). 57 Bernard Maybeck, “Reports of Supervising Architect,” 1 February 1919, Box 1, Folder 9, Applegarth collection; A. H. Markwart to C. E. Sloan, 24 January 1919, Box 1, Folder 6, Applegarth collection. Formal irregularity issued its own warrant, Maybeck thought: “It must be remembered in reading these notes that these houses are in California…. One is impressed with the fact that there is no impression of standardization.” Others supported this studied informality and extended it to the landscaping: Carl Purdy, Maybeck reported, “wants an irregular planting of trees and shrubs…because he says the streets are rambling and a set cadence and severe regularity would not look right.” 58 For the individualized house designs, see Maybeck’s sketchbook, 27–31 November 1918, Box 13, Folder 62, Bernard R. Maybeck collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter ‘Maybeck collection’). (Note that November has only thirty days; the vast majority of these house sketches are dated to the nonexistent 31st). There was much debate among the principals on the color scheme. Maybeck appealed to context, noting that “the modern tendency in California is to paint the houses in bright colors” that would reflect nearby flowers; see “Reports,” 1 February 1919. Maybeck let the Foster and Kleiser Company, “an agency of billboard advertisers” who had begun to employ artists in the face of the anti-billboard sentiment that intensified as automobile usage rose, pick the colors for the first sixteen houses; Bernard Maybeck, “Reports of Supervising Architect,” 20 November 1918, Box 1, Folder 8, Applegarth collection. Some worried about the use of the orange and red paints, in particular, under the belief that the houses’ plaster would not absorb the color and a single rainstorm could wash it away; A. H. Markwart to C. E. Sloan, 24 January 1919. 59 Bernard Maybeck, “Reports of Supervising Architect,” 4 January 1919, Box 1, Applegarth collection.
157 forms of nature worship, to vitalize, by way of the built environment, racialized citizens of “nature’s nation.”60 There were other spatial models in the mix, too, to be sure. In the same report, Maybeck cited Veselay, a fortified medieval town in France, as a formal predecessor. The rural communities Elwood Mead had recently begun planning for the State Land Settlement Board — notably at Durham and Delhi, in the Central Valley — struck Maybeck as a fruitful “laboratory” for spatial “prototypes.”61 He no doubt channeled his experience planning the lumber-company town of Brookings, Oregon, which featured a similarly monumental, clean-lined hotel alongside worker housing.62 His official “Street Suggestions” for Clyde culled examples from the suburbanizing edges of Oakland, enclosing a photo of a street intersection from that city’s Haddon Hill district, east of the improved Lake Merritt.63 He perused a copy of the deed restrictions McDuffie placed on properties at St. Francis Wood.64 Other local sites stood as negative object lessons, productive in their very repulsion. Bay Point proper, despite the radial gestures of its Washington-manqué street system, Maybeck found ugly. South San Francisco, the multi-industry satellite where Gustavus Swift had been rendering meat since the 1890s, he found spectacularly so. Neither of these industrial towns, he suggested, manifested the comprehensive order that a peripheral location should have been able to guarantee. Even Western mining towns, built in total isolation, could better demonstrate how to “safeguard the investment” and make a purpose-built town “livable” when sudden abandonment seemed in the offing.65 But the British colonies were the securest template for the wartime subdivisions thought as animate, romantic machines. His interventions at Clyde made newly official a theory, with clearly colonial derivation and valences, of the environment as emitter of “forces” onto sensate, involuntary bodies. We have already come across Maybeck’s more recondite pronouncements on the affective charges of buildings — initially with reference to the exalted Palace of Fine Arts — but some version of his position was actually quite mainstream, by 1915 if not before, in American reform circles concerned with planning and housing. It entailed a vitalist and materialist, not finally a rationalist, understanding of how the object world strikes, suggests, and works on human subjects. “Force” was routinely the watchword. The New York architect Frederick Ackerman, a principal in the USHC experiments and that coterie’s most acute theorist of “The Architectural Side of City Planning,” in 1915 suggested that the very materiality of the built environment had to be understood as a conjunction of discharges, fluxes, impresses, and impacts,
60 Maybeck, “Reports of Supervising Architect.” Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), is the classic, obviously non-American case study of the application “back home” of colonial planning techniques. 61 Bernard R. Maybeck to Elwood Mead, 29 April 1918, Box 13, Folder 62, Maybeck collection. Maybeck had been considered as a contributor to Mead’s team, but was rejected. Writing to Mead, he urged the addition of a landscape architect to the staff — possibly Jules Guérin, who had overseen the color scheme at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition. On Mead’s “island communities” and their provenance, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 345–366, passim. 62 On Maybeck’s planning work at Clyde and Brookings, see Kenneth H. Cardwell, Bernard Maybeck: Artisan, Architect, Artist (Santa Monica: Hennessy + Ingalls, 1977), 191–196. 63 “Street Suggestions,” Box 4, Applegarth collection; R. W. Blaine to Bernard Maybeck, 10 October 1918, Box 13, Folder 62, Maybeck collection. E. W. Cannon’s Dutton Heights development, also east of the lake, was another reference point. 64 Carl Purdy to Bernard Maybeck, 29 November 1918, Box 1, Folder 5, Applegarth collection. 65 Maybeck, “Reports of Supervising Architect.”
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“the resultant of endless varying impulses acting through those who design and those who fabricate.” Such “impulses,” Ackerman elaborated, do not originate inside the mind, but are externally present in the world, ambient, mind-independently flowing across and through the architect’s body, equipment, and materials. Buildings, once built, then impress themselves biophysically, in “intimate relation,” on “the impulses of our lives,” working “through many subtle forces and influences, both conscious and unconscious.”66 In more clinical, plainspoken terms, Ackerman’s underlying theory of environment, body, mind, and their ongoing frictions absolutely suffuses the USHC and EFC’s plentiful prescriptive literature.
Vitalizing the “War Machine” The passions and paranoias of the First World War lent a specific tenor to these very general theses on subjects and spaces, human “nature” and built material “culture,” and all their ongoing interrelations. Indeed, one of the first things “human nature” did, having “changed” by acclamation “on or about” December 1910, was go to war. Stephen Kern has famously documented the extent to which wartime rhetoric both bore the stamp of and furthered the wide- angle perceptual shifts dynamizing space and time that Woolf, Einstein, and others had keyed to 1910. For Kern the Great War was in some non-fetishistic sense an aesthetically “Cubist war.”67 By way of the new work, spatial and plainly more-than-spatial, that now-militarized “force” talk did amid this mobilization, we should be prepared to diagnose that this was philosophically a vitalist war as well. Patriots across the ages had appealed to bio-logics of naturalness when grandstanding on the topic of their telic national destinies, and this manner of speaking no doubt persisted post-1914. But a different, less deterministic, finally more violent naturalism came to the fore, a blood-and-soil hydraulics of “flows” and “energies” that owed much to the lingua franca of life philosophy and, of course, geography as they had developed during relative peace, against and astride the rationalist gestures for which Progressive politics is still most remembered. And we should understand this dark energetics in a way capacious enough to bring the animacies of industrial technology within its fold. It was, after all, during this conflict that nationalists began urging the assembly of — and mass affective attachment to — a new, hybrid, unimaginably vast entity called the “war machine.” “War to-day is industry,” W. B. Wilson insisted in a crusading Saturday Evening Post piece, “Labor and the War.”68 The USHC and EFC concurred, channeling the “forces” and “influences” of the built environment in the name of national regeneration through violence. Numerous philosophers of a vitalist persuasion, for their part, whose celebrations of “life” in and for itself could once have passed for general social theory, now redirected their insights to shore up viscerally partisan positions on the relative “vitality” of nations. In The Meaning of the War (1914), a palpably peeved Bergson retooled his still-modish philosophy to celebrate the ablutionary rush of killing. His basic conceit was to interpret the German–French antagonism as a question of “matter and life in conflict.” Germans had pursued “the mechanization of spirit instead of the spiritualization of matter.” The French, conversely, would “replenish” and “renew their vigour” only “by a thorough comprehension of their objects.”
66 Frederick L. Ackerman, “The Architectural Side of City Planning,” Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference on City Planning (Boston: National Conference on City Planning, 1915): 107, 109, 116, 117, 118, 108, 110. A shorter version, edited for another thematic emphasis, was published as Frederick L. Ackerman, “The Battle with Chaos,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 3 (October 1915): 444–447. 67 On various once-progressive vitalist ontologies retrofitted to celebrate the “Cubist war,” see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 287–312. 68 W. B. Wilson, “Labor and the War,” Saturday Evening Post, 22 June 1918; emphasis added.
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Bergson closed with a flourish, claiming biotechnical grounds for the coming French triumph: “Have no fear, our force will slay theirs.”69 Across the Rhine, Georg Simmel, who by 1910 had shifted from his early interests in a neo-Kantian sociology of “forms” to a distinctive philosophy exploring the ongoing tensions between those forms and a pulsing, vitalist “life,” dove hard into justifying German militarism.70 John Dewey, interlocutor of these Europeans and after the 1910 death of William James clearly the most visible American figure pursuing alternatives to Kant’s rationalism, led the great “pragmatic acquiescence” to violence.71 A darkly vitalist current came during the war to subtend mainline American nationalism, outside the academy, more broadly. Charles Eaton, Baptist preacher and in-house affect theorist of the Shipping Board’s National Service Section, held forth on the country’s “innate powers of self-regeneration.” Eaton’s diction harnessed a pop-Nietzschean sense of coming annihilation to a sunnier line on better-living-through-production: “At the very moment when we seem to be approaching the abyss there emerge those hidden energies, which all the while have been at work underneath the surface preparing us for a new era of greatness, efficiency and labor.” His speech reran the seesawing dualism that Simmel and others had marked out between form and life, reason and its overtaking: despite his assurances that “[t]his attitude [of fervent nationalism] is not emotional; there is no hysteria,” Eaton could still confidently assert that, at the below-surface level of ontology, “there is flowing, like a great Niagara, a flood of dedication which will bear upon its bosom our Government until this war is won.”72 The war machine, in other words, converted ambient reserves of energy that were anything but mechanical. These tightened linkages among war, race, nation, “energy,” “life,” and “force” came drastically to remake official American conceptions of how landscape might itself participate in the “machine.” And if war past a certain point “is industry,” it would stand to reason that the landscapes the federal government crafted for the express purpose of boosting that industry might point up how a fully vitalized ontology — by 1917 in the open, but at work sub rosa for years prior — came to inhabit the imaginations of those planning specifically suburban spaces for years to come. Planners reconceived these spaces as affective atmospheres, thinkable only in three and four dimensions as they enter and leave, enliven and deaden working bodies. Peter Sloterdijk has recently argued that the introduction of gas warfare at Ypres on April 22, 1915 — which enabled a newly indirect violence, one operative on its target only by way of the environment — dramatically transformed popular sensibilities of our being-in-volume, and more broadly of the never-immaterial textures of the air as something affectively felt.73 The war housers spoke this language as they touted the benefits of homeownership and the lessons of
69 Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War: Matter and Life in Conflict [1914], trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915), 36, 17, 46, 47. On this moment in Bergson’s thought, see also Mark Sinclair, “Bergson’s Philosophy of Will and the War of 1914–1918,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77 (2016): 467–487. 70 On Simmel’s jolt of German patriotism, see Patrick Watier, “The War Writings of Georg Simmel,” Theory, Culture & Society 8 (1991): 219–233. Bizarrely, Nicholas J. Spykman, a key figure in neo-Mackinderite geostrategy by 1940, began his career assembling the first English-language digest of Simmel’s benign writings on “form” and “life,” The Social Theory of Georg Simmel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925). 71 On Dewey’s support for American intervention, and on some of the reactions to his position, see Robert Westbrook, “Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, and the ‘Pragmatic Acquiescence,’” in Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual, eds. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 301–322. For a review and partial critique of Deweyan planning as technocratic, see Niraj Verma, “Pragmatic Rationality and Planning Theory,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 16 (1996): 5–14. 72 Eaton, “Teaching the Worker to Feel the War,” 191. 73 Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air [2002], trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2009).
160 domesticity their subdivisions ought to teach. “More than a group of houses,” wrote the engineer Morris Knowles, the model town was a “vital, breathing community of homes.”74 Community came into being and self-sustained, that is, as workers inhaled their environment. And workers were to develop attachments to these animate objects called houses in ways true to the a-rational, specifically animal forces they already harbored: a “homing instinct,” one official asserted, would set in through sustained interaction with owned property, “as it is developed in the homing instinct of the pigeon.”75 Planners presumed the existence of these instincts, which they sensed were flowing, roiling, pulsing out of sight as an ontological matter of course. They carried out their town-scale projects, in turn, as instruments for the production of citizens, “model” subjects whose attachments to work and nation, never only rational, might be affectively forged through their attachments with and to the forceful built environment. This federally infused episode in worker housing, while it lasted, came as close as we have seen to the induction of a vital materialism into official policies on suburban form. It did not last. In its suburban afterlives, though, to which we now turn, that biotechnic vision has lived long and prospered.
Aftermath and Imitation: The Afterlives of Models After the armistice of November 11, the USHC and EFC worked rapidly to sew up the building projects or halt them at various stages of becoming-subdivision. Public buildings came to a standstill at Mare Island on December 17, 1918. Individual houses, the USHC declared, could be finished within the next year’s time if construction had already begun.76 Then, whatever their architectural fate, every particle of these federal built environments was to enter the private market. The USHC might auction off an entire subdivision to a nearby industrial employer, converting it de facto, despite some significant union opposition, to one of the company towns its form had, from the first, both drawn on and remade. Some 6,000 houses nationwide were dispatched in this way from July 1919 forward.77 The EFC towns, though profoundly state spaces in terms of their subsidy, were already held by the employers.78 We should not overlook just how suddenly this whole experiment had to be wound down and reassigned. The biography of Clyde, whose construction was barely underway when the armistice came, very nearly begins with its desertion and liquidation.79 Meyer Lissner, the USSB commissioner, deemed Clyde “probably the greatest failure of any of our housing projects.” It was a great “white elephant” that, for 1920 and most of 1921, proved fiendishly difficult to sell off.80 Maybeck’s dreamworld was unusually distant from the Pacific Shipbuilding workplace to begin with; workers came to resent the mile-plus trolley ride across an eerily unbuilt landscape. This made Clyde unlikely to be reused as worker housing in the postwar period, which
74 Morris Knowles, Industrial Housing (New York: McGraw–Hill, 1920), 73. For a view from inside the USHC, see also the baseline faith in environmentally conditioned “vitality” that subtends Charles Harris Whitaker, “Housing as a War Problem,” in Housing Problems in America: Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Housing (New York: National Housing Association, 1917), 3–12. 75 George H. Maxwell, quoted in Karolak, “‘No Idea of Doing Anything Wonderful,’” 67. 76 Entry 111, Box 2, Record Group 3, Archives II. 77 Entry 136, Box 3, Record Group 3, Archives II. 78 Topalov, “Scientific Urban Planning and the Ordering of Daily Life,” 36. 79 As its builders more or less foresaw: during the war, Maybeck and his colleagues “discussed the possibility of Clyde becoming a deserted town should the shipbuilding industry cease and no other industry locate there. The United States in that case would hold a mortgage on a deserted town”; “Memorandum — District Housing Representative,” 23 August 1918, Box 1, Folder 4, Applegarth collection. 80 Meyer Lissner to J. W. Powell, 2 September 1921, Records of the United States Shipping Board, Entry 281, Box 22, Record Group 32, Archives II.
161 condemned the handsome hotel to neglect as well. The Oakland engineer M. K. Muller concurred with Lissner. “Total extinction” was Clyde’s only conceivable future, and this as a matter of urgency: the task was to “dispose of [the houses]…before they are wrecked by vandals, thieves, and the elements.”81 More often, the federal towns simply became suburban real estate. Maybeck hoped this would be Clyde’s postwar lot: the place, he wrote in early 1919, “must be made so attractive that [middle-class] people will go there and settle after the workingmen are through with the town.”82 There had been profound anxiety all along from the political right, who appraised this very first state-led housing experiment as indistinguishable from socialism (and this despite the approved aesthetics: homologous forms of spatial enclosure, functional specialization, and street curves, of course, marked privately owned middle-class suburbs as well). These reactors welcomed the privatization of the towns; realty concerns, interested to assume the properties and sell them as “stable” individual, not collective, family units, quickly got in touch with the USHC as auction time approached. The subdivider Paul C. Murphy wrote to Mare Island’s stewards from as far away as Portland, Oregon, where he had launched the Laurelhurst district, with advice on how and why to place the homes on the market: government agencies could not help people “become individual home owners,” he felt, without consulting “a thoroughly experienced real estate man.”83 The Oakland developer Fred Reed, who had consulted with the Mare Island team in a general way as early as June 1918, contacted the managers in peacetime to urge on their privatization scheme. Reed had assumed a position as Bay Area regional director for the Own Your Own Home movement that would carry weight throughout Hoover’s 1920s. In his correspondence, Reed decried the “Bolshevism” that alternatives to ownership would ferment. He enclosed a brochure on homeownership punctuated with doggerel that strains belief: “Real towns are not made by men afraid / Lest somebody else gets ahead; / When everyone works and nobody shirks / You can raise a town from the dead.” The war had convinced Reed and his allies of one thing, presented in syllogism: “Be an American: Own your own home” (Figs. 7.18, 7.19).84 “In the Spring,” the Operating Division’s Charles Partridge wrote in early 1919, “when things are green, man’s fancy turns to suburban real estate.”85 With fiscal alterations in place (but none needed at the level of form), the working-class subdivisions of wartime became fully middle-class suburbs of the bigger-business 1920s. The ownership model was of course the key instrument in making the transition. But as the saleable Mare Island “unit” newly closed ranks as a defensible parcel of property, the USHC moved to intensify its specialization, and in so doing they pivoted from the regulation of uses to specific kinds of users. They screened prospective postwar tenants, enforcing criteria that bound race and nativity to these landscapes in newly insistent ways. During the war, lest we forget, Ford’s frantic Homes Registration Service had sprouted a “Negro Division” to administer black life as a native but somehow less vitally energetic component of the workforce, and quite routinely to allocate to blacks pods of dormitory housing that were as separate as the site plans allowed.86 The USHC’s 1919 Report,
81 M. K. Muller to William Haines, 18 April 1921, Entry 281, Box 22, Record Group 32, Archives II. 82 Bernard Maybeck, “Reports of Supervising Architect,” 4 January 1919, Applegarth collection. 83 Correspondence of Paul C. Murphy, 25 August 1919, Entry 21, Box 7, Record Group 3, Archives II. 84 Correspondence of Fred Reed, 7 June 1918, Entry 39, Box 7, Record Group 3, Archives II; Own Your Own Home materials, Entry 103, Box 1, Record Group 3, Archives II. Duncan McDuffie requested five copies of Reed’s Own Your Own Home pamphlet. 85 Memo of Charles Partridge, Operating Division, 13 January 1919, Entry 136, Box 2, Record Group 3, Archives II. 86 Materials from U.S. Homes Registration Service, Entry 211, Box 1, Record Group 3, Archives II.
162 which circulated widely among planners, was quite clear that all developments could be classified into “types,” which in turn would correspond to “what types of people are to be housed.” “Wages earned” was one factor planners might consider before selecting house types; “local customs as to building” amounted to another; workers’ “nationality, race, and customs” were quite officially a third. Only on the basis of this preliminary survey would it be possible to provision “the necessary facilities for effective self-respecting living and work.”87 This principle of racial specialization, too, smacked of Maybeck’s found models in the colonies, which were segregated cities as a matter of policy. After the armistice, amid the great sell-off, USHC operating procedure was more delicate in its language, but the criteria by which they screened new suburbanites held fast: explicitly nativist, casually anti-rural, normatively middle-class, and uneasy about darker Americans along each one of these axes. During that interregnum year, 1919, when the war had ceased and no new construction was allowed to break ground but the USHC still owned the land and buildings, Willard Howe, the Mare Island manager, wrote to headquarters, suspicious that one of the lingering residents, fond of keeping chickens in his backyard and basement, might not be native- born. “It is to be expected that among 227 families, some of which are transient, they will vary in a degree of desirability,” the Pacific Coast Manager replied, enclosing a USDA manual, produced during wartime for this purpose exactly, on Back-Yard Poultry Keeping (1917) as a stopgap.88 The wartime experiments, under duress, tangibly modeled these principles of exclusion as well, formalizing notions of “desirable” bodies and habits fitted to suburban space. After the war let up, they caught on, granted a new legitimacy.
There is a second, semantically distinct sense in which the Carquinez staged “model” suburbs during wartime. If on one level Mare Island or Clyde became model by satisfying some ideal criteria of spatial and social order, on another, more dynamic level, these were model towns only, or mainly, insofar as they provoked their own imitation: they were models insofar as, once observed, they modeled ways of building and, further on down the chains of influence and contagion, demonstrably caught on. If the USHC and EFC planners addressed their composed landscapes, with not a little moralizing, at first to their inhabitants, by war’s end it was clear that the suburban experiments were courting the attention of another, differently classed audience entirely: other planners, who might pay visits in the name of either concerted study or less calculable moments of inspiration. The possibility of the towns’ replication off site had, in point of fact, concerned planners and managers from the start of the endeavor. One Operating Division circular implored of workers in 1918, “Let us make our town a model which will be copied by others.” Responsibility for safeguarding the object of imitation was, on this account, distributed: “The result rests largely in your hands.”89 And during the war, planning principals were already looking ahead, trying to assess the viability of their state-of-exception housing developments in conditions of peacetime. During the canvassing stage, James Ford granted that temporary, essentially flimsy construction and ad hoc street plans would do near workplaces that would be decommissioned immediately. But “permanent communities,” established industrial centers, should be given permanent
87 Olmsted, “Suggestions to Town Planners,” 80. 88 See letters of complaint filed with the Operating Division, 23 August 1919 and 26 April 1919, Entry 137, Box 649, Record Group 3, Archives II. 89 Operating Division, “To the occupants.”
163 housing, “so located that they will be readily salable when after the war is over.”90 (Ford, of course, had been an ardent advocate of homeownership since early in the Progressive Era.) Thomas Adams, the Canadian former manager of Letchworth, was resolute that the “social and industrial problems which are having to be faced because of war conditions do not differ in character from those which have to be faced in times of peace.” He was writing in April 1918, before the USHC’s funding was even certain, but by establishing this basic equivalence he was arguing for lubricating the eventual travel, copying, and reapplication of the very techniques the wartime towns had so compellingly brought into focus. Adams was an evangelist for “method” and “system”; the wartime towns mark high water for those Progressive planning tropes as well. Finally, Adams mused, planners would get “to impregnate some system and methods of organization into community development on this continent.” Indeed, he continued, “We do not want reform of our system of land and housing development; we want to begin to employ system.” The tangible, suggestive “object lesson” was absolutely central to this quest, for “no amount of theory will have a value equal to that of a practical demonstration in educating the people [planners and the public] regarding the best methods of housing and community development.” These methods, he specified, would prove their worth during the “real reconstruction” that, in victory or in defeat, would follow armistice.91 The facts, for once, are clear: these suburban models, as contagious objects proposing their own direct or abstracted imitation, did the better part of their work on the larger planning imagination in the postwar period — in their official afterlives. The historian Jennifer Light has detailed the many urban technologies that, following the Second World War, by necessity made the transition “from warfare to welfare.”92 But the same basic template of domestication vividly defined the normalizing 1920s as well, and questions of urban form are one illustrative starting point to think about these afterlives and aftermaths. The subdivisions disclosed diverse lessons: physical on the one hand, financial on another, social and routinely moral through and through. In November 1918, Olmsted remarked, “Much of this material can be used in actual construction and still more can be the inspiration [diffusely] of further efforts.” The USHC’s technical innovations were “only part of a movement, general throughout the country and receiving increasing interest.”93 In a 1919 digest of “lessons” deduced from the shipbuilding towns, Olmsted noted the essential promiscuity of their application, which readily exceeded the grasp of trained, notionally expert or even public-minded “planners”: “They will be helpful to the individual home builder, to the so-called speculative builder…. They will also be useful to cooperative building organizations or to manufacturers or other investors who may desire to build houses on a large scale.”94 A 1919 federal report on the war towns was explicitly “aimed at the consumer”; its content was “practical, technical, but simple.”95 The towns courted, and proliferated, audiences in the plural; if the founding act of their modelness could be localized in
90 Ford, “Housing for War Workers Engaged on Army and Navy Contracts,” 274. 91 Adams, “Community Development in Wartime,” 109, 114, 112, 123. 92 Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 93 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., to Burt Fenner, 21 November 1918, Entry 111, Box 2, Record Group 3, Archives II. 94 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., “Lessons from Housing Developments of the United States Housing Corporation,” Monthly Labor Review 8 (May 1919): 27–38. This statement should be read in tandem with the composite Report of the United States Housing Corporation, December 3, 1918 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), which collects materials from throughout the war effort (and reprints many administrative documents in a series of appendices). 95 Bureau Report (1919), Entry 111, Box 1, Record Group 3, Archives II.
164 time and space, the outer limits of their influence could not. Physical representations of the subdivisions, too, coursed throughout the state-fair circuit while the war was still being fought to the hilt. After the war, James Ford arranged for scale models of Mare Island and other developments to appear in peacetime planning exhibitions, a circuit that had been interrupted but not cut by the conflict. When the tangible models, which he preferred, proved physically fragile, Ford settled for their mediation by photograph.96 Either way, visual culture — models seen if not bodily experienced on site — was by consensus crucial to the dissemination of these “object lessons.” Visibility, far more than their quantification or vivid description, was the avenue to posterity. National Builder magazine wrote to the EFC asking for images of Clyde, which could provide “an important influence on small-house design only so long as their superior qualities are kept before the building public.” Clyde, that glaring “white elephant,” in miniature greeted visitors to a 1920 conference in Brussels, and then again that same year in Uruguay at the Pan- American Congress of Architecture.97 The key fact about model towns, in this second, dynamized understanding, is how they travel, proliferate, impress themselves on observers, and, perhaps, over and against their simple replication, diffusely produce the new.98 It is as we consider their suasive travel — quite literally the force of their tangible example — that planners’ original expectations about the vital animacy of these landscapes becomes newly, differently clear. Whether or not docile compliance was ever truly secured on site among workers, and whether or not any human bodies stuck around after the war to act out their American dreams, these suburban landscapes themselves continued to act insofar as, in their indefinite afterlives, they enchanted onlookers, provoking wonder about this potent experiment cut short and suggesting their own imitation.
96 Correspondence of James Ford, 13 June 1919 and 23 June 1919, Entry 67, Box 2, Record Group 3, Archives II. When it came to the design of display booths, Ford and the USHC took cues from the Department of Agriculture. 97 Correspondence from National Builder magazine, 27 July 1920, Entry 281, Box 104, Record Group 32, Archives II. 98 See Veronica della Dora, “Travelling Landscape Objects,” Progress in Human Geography 33 (2009): 334–54, for an argument similar in form, if not in content. Many intellectual historians have lately made a methodological shift toward work that privileges tracing the messy interpersonal and institutional transmission of ideas over parsing, statically and ad infinitum, either the resonances among thinkers, each taken in textual abstraction, or the more conventionally sequenced begats of intellectual “influence.” This poses a drastically different historiographic challenge, an ongoing, piecemeal, perhaps unfinishable quest to investigate where ideas go and how they catch. For fine examples among intellectual historians, see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, on various domains of left-leaning social policy; and Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), on conservative economic thought. A literature with similar, if noticeably narrower, concerns has coalesced among geographers under the umbrella of “policy mobilities.” See its agenda-setting text, Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward, Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and, among many other empirical exercises, Ian R. Cook, Stephen V. Ward, and Kevin Ward, “Post-War Planning and Policy Tourism: The International Study Tours of the Town and Country Planning Association,” Planning Theory & Practice 16 (2015): 184–205. These geographers do well to introduce an explicit spatiality to the transfer of “best practices,” particularly as concerns liberalized urban and economic policy ideas. But, to date, this literature has paid precious little attention to the physical character of the landscapes built out in their image — or to intellectuals’ physical encounters with and impress by those landscapes. The ideational flows these geographers critique traverse space and remake space, but as physical artifacts participating in these mechanics of transmission — by design or not, suggesting their own imitation — their urban landscapes are essentially passive stages, seen but not felt.
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A Science of Imitation Contagion, suasion, suggestion: the premium the self-appointed scientists of suburban form placed on these mechanisms of landscape’s “influence” is telling as we work to situate the distinctive objecthood of the suburban “object lesson.” For the object lesson to obtain, it required the existence of bodies, shot through by vital forces beyond their control, whose principal levers of action and response were instinctual and involuntary. The culture of the object lesson presumed, and perhaps incrementally worked to call into being, a human subject whose main faculty was to imitate. As the Progressive figurehead and architectural critic Herbert Croly observed, “Americans are the most quickly imitative people in the world.” The thought occurred to him in 1902 within a discussion of “The Contemporary Suburban Residence.”99 Imitation had theoretical valences well outside the planning profession. It was a signally important category for Progressive Era American social science, and for sociology in particular, which had not yet acceded to the blockish functionalism typical by midcentury, in which “society” or “the social” is nothing—really nothing—if not a cohesive unit. Mainstream theorists aplenty, prior to 1930, began from the position that social order itself, never closed or total, was an accomplishment, an additive production, and that the main mechanism suturing the bits together and making them compatible was contagion. Before the holism of Émile Durkheim definitively assumed pride of place, by way of Talcott Parsons, in sociologists’ “classical” canon, the ideas of that Frenchman’s rival, Gabriel Tarde, were still the source of vigorous American debate. His The Laws of Imitation (1890), especially, which reached Anglophone readers in 1903 with the blessing of Columbia’s Franklin Giddings, had opened the possibility that “[t]hings are not born alike, they become alike.”100 So do people. Moral codes, technical advances, beliefs, aesthetics, fads: these became “social” only to the extent that, by calculation or osmosis, they demonstrably caught on. The generalities of social life, and planners’ settled-seeming canons of best practices, could be said to exist, fragilely, only in the ongoing transmission of half-rational object lessons. Tarde’s treatise probably overreached, and today, despite some concerted attempts at revival, it can read as the work of an eccentric, at all costs redescribing traditional sociological material, a bit too lawfully, in terms of imitation. Despite some attention from geographers, he has not often been read as a theorist of landscape. Gustave Le Bon’s fearful The Crowd (1895) was certainly the more influential French import for those urbanists intent on correlating involuntary and “irrational” behaviors with their environmental causes—whether then to tamp down putative unreason or to harness it to new ends.101 But to cinch his case, Le Bon had made recourse to a clumsy, still holist “collective mind”; he never inserted landscape into the equation. Tarde did. It is not often remarked, but architecture was one of Tarde’s privileged domains of imitation: “Here, in this sphere of pure art, or rather of almost pure art, for architecture will always be an industrial art, my formula relating to imitation as the unique cause of true social resemblances, applies to the very letter.” Built environments—buildings and compositions of buildings—propose their own imitation because they literally do not stand still; they “generate” imitation because, at the molecular level of their very constitution, they “undulate.”102
99 Herbert Croly, “The Contemporary Suburban Residence,” Architectural Record 11 (1902), 80. 100 Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation [1890], trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), 71. See the premium on contagion in Henri Bergson’s under-studied work on the social spread of Laughter [1900], trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1921). 101 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd [1895] (New York: Viking, 1960). 102 Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, 53–54; emphasis added. Even the contagions that concern traditional, textual forms of intellectual history earnestly hinge for Tarde on these invisible animacies: “Generation depends on undulation,
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The world Tarde sketched was populated by contagious subjects whose every action could internalize, buffet along, and disseminate further chains of imitation. His modal human body was itself to be understood as a waystation, a conductor of ongoing imitation rather than its endpoint: “If…people end by becoming examples themselves, this also is due to imitation. Suppose a somnambulist should imitate his medium to the point of becoming a medium himself and magnetising a third person, who, in turn, would imitate him, and so on indefinitely. Is not social life this very thing?” Imitation was involuntary, a-rational. It was also multiple, processual, and essentially inexact. Tarde’s sociology had distilled imitation into its ostensible “laws.” And yet, “The supreme law of imitation seems to be its tendency toward indefinite progression…to scatter itself through the whole of the indefinitely broadened social field.” Not that this foretold the landscape’s eventual homogenization: “Repetition exists for the sake of variation.” Similar things, for Tarde, could be said of the very condition of modernity, which had little to do with the usual mantras of enlightened mastery: modern subjects, Tarde maintained, are simply “less and less aware that they are imitating.”103 Modernity itself, we might say, could but undulation does not depend on generation. Imitation depends on them both, but they do not depend on [i.e., they precede] imitation. After two thousand years, the manuscript of Cicero’s Republic was recovered and published. It became a source of inspiration. This posthumous imitation would not have occurred if the molecules of the parchment had not surely continued to vibrate (if only from the effect of the surrounding temperature)” (34). For Tarde’s fuller exploration, down to the atomic level, of the animation of all matter — its “highly varied internal movements” (9) and “antecedent diversities” (38) that every conceptual contrivance will occlude — see Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology [1895], trans. and ed. Theo Lorenc (Melbourne: re:press, 2012). And for recent commentaries that affirm Tarde’s skepticism about a preexisting “social” sphere, see Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lépinay, The Science of Passionate Interests (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2011); Éric Alliez, “The Difference and Repetition of Gabriel Tarde,” Distinktion 5 (2004): 49–54; Christian Borch, “Urban Imitations: Tarde’s Sociology Revisited,” Theory, Culture & Society 22 (2005): 81–100; Andrew Barry and Nigel Thrift, “Gabriel Tarde: Imitation, Invention and Economy,” Economy and Society 36 (2007): 509–525; Lisa Blackman, “Reinventing Psychological Matters: The Importance of the Suggestive Realm of Tarde’s Ontology,” Economy and Society 36 (2007): 574–596; and Tony D. Sampson, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Compare with Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). For period attempts to fit Tarde’s “extra-logical” notions into the larger field of (American) sociology, see Gustavo Tosti, “The Sociological Theories of Gabriel Tarde,” Political Science Quarterly 12 (1897): 490–511; Lester F. Ward, “Contemporary Sociology, III,” American Journal of Sociology 7 (1902): 749–762; Franklin H. Giddings, “The Concepts and Methods of Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 10 (1904): 161–174; Robert H. Gault, “Psychology in Social Relations,” American Journal of Sociology 22 (1917): 734–748; and Robert E. Park, “Sociology and the Social Sciences,” American Journal of Sociology 26 (1921): 401–424. Terry N. Clark has noted that Tarde saw more citations than Marx, Weber, or Durkheim, since Giddens the standard triumvirate, in the 1921 “Bible” of Chicago School sociology, Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, eds., Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921). See Clark’s introduction to Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence, ed. Terry N. Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 68. Not all of these commentators writing in the age of Bergson labeled Tarde’s thought “vitalist,” but he himself claimed the mantle on occasion and was explicit in specifying that position’s non-congruence with a more holist organicism. “The social organism aside, there is still room for a certain social vitalism,” he wrote in “Sociology” [1898], trans. N. Claire Ellis, in Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence, ed. Terry N. Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 79; emphasis original. Tarde was quick to downplay Auguste Comte’s putative social laws and Herbert Spencer’s overweening model of the social organism, favoring styles of social inquiry more akin to the biologist Xavier Bichat’s “discovering the elementary properties of living tissue” (78). 103 Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, 366, 7 84, 82. Invocations of the “involuntary” or the “instinctual” present difficulties. Le Bon’s work was far easier to co-opt than Tarde’s. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 122–125, for an account of how his simplistic crowd psychology was enrolled in colonial administration, under the assumption that some subjects (people, races, populations) were more irrational than others — more dangerous as a result, but also more easily manipulated as a collective. Tarde is
167 be defined in terms of the transformed, and ever more intimate, relationship between excitable subjects and their object lessons. On the edges of the American city, versions of this thesis had circulated since Andrew Jackson Downing, aesthete of the suburban house and grounds in their “Romantic” antebellum phase, whose recommendation that a right-thinking and right-building “apostle of taste” be planted in each community to diffuse his principles, had presupposed just such a model of the subject: a sensorium materially and (mostly) involuntarily impressed, through vision and other senses, by the force of neighboring example.104 Self-consciously “modern” planners, eschewing Downing’s niceties at surface level and promising a City Scientific in all things, had nonetheless made the same wager.
Californian Planning and the Belatedness of Expertise The planners had so wagered, a bit cynically, with respect to the working classes who would use and putatively submit to their designs—thereby imposing a split, or trying to, between their own “expert” minds and the inexpert laboring body. It is not particularly hard, for a skeptical historian, to document examples of overconfident, vaguely deterministic faiths in the disciplining power of landscape, particularly in and around the workplace. But there is a strong sense, too, in which the very “rationality” arrogated to the City Scientific presumed and fed on planners’ own less-than-rational propensities. To the extent that the goal was enchantment of, and imitation by, other planners and industrialists—and legitimation of the planning function before an order- a more benevolent and affirmative thinker generally. His dressing down of the intentional subject of “modernity” serves its purpose. But when he turns to the narrower question of who tends to imitate whom, the default position is that the “inferior” follow the “superior.” See The Laws of Imitation, 368; and David K. Underwood, “Alfred Agache, French Sociology, and Modern Urbanism in France and Brazil,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50 (1991): 130–166. Tarde’s theory, too, can be redirected to naturalize and govern a ranked hierarchy of human kinds. This caution about the slipperiness of the “involuntary” opens onto a larger caveat about history and/of theory. Affirmatively vitalist styles of thought, those that invoke pre-cognitive or more-than-human forces to efface the reasoning mind, have been aligned with a wide variety of political and ethical programs, some distinctly unsavory. Fin-de-siècle manias for “renewal” or “regeneration” often coalesced as eugenic responses to putative “decay” or “degeneration.” See Victor Branford, Interpretations and Forecasts (New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 410, on the tight linkages of “civics and eugenics.” On the questionable racial underpinnings of Bergsonian theories of “intuition,” see Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 77–128. On Geddes’s work in the colonies, and on his ideas about racial kinds’ differential “closeness” or “vulnerability” to the natural world, see Naveeda Khan, “Geddes in India: Town Planning, Plant Sentience, and Cooperative Evolution,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 840–856. Santayana’s post-genteel naturalism was conservative from the start; Van Wyck Brooks and Walter Lippmann, whose Progressive Era vitalisms tended toward the socialistic, were conservatives by the 1920s. These individual, within-career swings rightward and toward violence shed only so much light on the volatility of vitalism as a philosophical position. People change their minds sometimes. But there are subtler politics that attend the writing of the history of ideas. How concepts are received and reused often runs uncontrollably counter to their authors’ designs. Co-optation, it seems, is not exception but rule. 104 On some of these conundra, see Bernard St-Denis, “Andrew Jackson Downing and the Paradox of Artistic Imitation in Landscape Gardening,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 24 (2004): 97–115. For a deep treatment of Downing’s “apostle” concept, see David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). On the broader valences, mostly in-city rather than suburban, of an American “materialist psychology” in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Dell Upton, “The City as Material Culture,” in The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology, eds. Anne E. Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1992), 51–63. The present analysis follows Upton’s lead in many respects, but the renditions of this materialism we have traced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries maintain different and more explicit relationships with the problem of “method,” with the ontology of “life” itself, and with the extent to which that life, or animacy, might reside in inorganic matter itself.
168 seeking middle class upset by the possibility of unrest—the whole phenomenon of didactic “models” and “object lessons” might disclose even more about the slipperiness and non- absoluteness of aesthetic and technical expertise than it does about the frankly more transparent imperatives of industrial discipline. Charles H. Cheney, a Californian evangelist for “the planning idea” and in 1914 arguably the leading figure translating it to “problems peculiar to this coast,” could not have been more direct: “City planning is the science of knowing and profiting by other cities’ experiments in civic development, and of making the finest and strongest local application possible.”105 Science itself as imitation; experimentation as potential source of imitation; knowledge as collection and citation; planning, then, as repetition, with a difference, of object lessons involuntarily learned: this associative chain underwrites the intellectual history of middle-class designs on the working- class suburb. And Cheney, a realtor’s son whose works on the fringes of California’s cities helped set the template for that state’s industrial zoning codes (in Berkeley and Oakland in the 1910s), for packaged industrial suburbs (at Visitacion Valley, San Francisco, during World War I; at West Sacramento just thereafter), and for suburban form generally (at the tony Palos Verdes Estates, near Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the 1920s) was an avid collector of models, assembling four unpublished volumes on “The Most Notable American Art” that gave pride of place to quite a number of the towns we have discussed.106 To plan was inescapably to cite and to imitate. There was no evident shame in being derivative, least of all in California, where planning’s self-conscious professionalization had lagged a few years behind the East—until none other than Cheney secured the nomadic City Planning Exhibition for Oakland in March 1914 and convened the state’s first official planning conference that same year in San Francisco. California serves, in this way, as a valuable, because slightly belated, Progressive Era test case in how models travel and how their lineage is accounted or obscured. At the St. Francis Wood subdivision in southwestern San Francisco (Fig. 7.20), the high- style developer Duncan McDuffie disclosed that his palette of formal and racial covenants were inexactly “modeled on restrictions that have proved extremely successful” at other sites in East, and in the proximate East Bay region that includes Berkeley and Oakland.107 Elsewhere, McDuffie was intent on situating his own subdivision products, a bit anxiously, relative to those ringing other, more established American cities: his sylvan Northbrae development in North
105 Charles H. Cheney, “How California Cities Can Profit by Active City Planning,” Pacific Municipalities 28 (1914): 31; emphasis added. 106 Charles H. Cheney, note of 15 November 1933, for The Most Notable American Art, Box 1, Charles H. Cheney papers, BANC MSS 81/81 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. On the unbuilt Visitacion Valley garden city, which was to cover 200 acres on the southeastern edge of San Francisco, see Charles H. Cheney, “Must California Industries Provide Good Homes for Their Labor?” Western Architect and Engineer 53 (June 1918): 87–95; “Progress in Zoning in California,” Housing Betterment 7, no. 2 (1918): 72; and “Site Seeing in San Francisco: Exhibit Number Fifty-Five,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Activities 5 (1918): 208; and on Cheney generally, see Fukuo Akimoto, “Charles H. Cheney of California,” Planning Perspectives 18 (2003): 253– 275. 107 Map of St. Francis Wood (Berkeley: Mason–McDuffie, 1915), Folder AR30, Mason–McDuffie Company records, BANC MSS 89/12 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter ‘McD’). The Newell–Murdoch Company, having put several deed-restricted subdivisions on the market in the East Bay, engaged in a feat of self-citation when it came time to market the Forest Hill development in San Francisco, which would reuse the model and ineffably improve it. Newell–Murdoch Company, Forest Hill broadsheet (1912), Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco, California.
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Berkeley was “what New Rochelle is to New York, what Evanston is to Chicago.”108 That district was “modeled somewhat,” he said, but only somewhat, “along the lines of the famous residence parks in Los Angeles.”109 St. Francis Wood, he claimed in a later pamphlet, took cues from the planning innovations on display at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition.110 McDuffie and others claimed to have carried out close, firsthand study of Atterbury’s Forest Hills Gardens, J. C. Nichols’s Country Club District to the south of Kansas City, Bouton’s Roland Park on the edge of Baltimore, and other talismans of (upper-)middle-class suburban legitimacy.111 In time, California’s suburbs were offering up their own object lessons at several scales. Having visited Duncan McDuffie’s St. Francis Wood district in southwest San Francisco in 1917 in a suggestible mood, Senator Francis Newlands of Maryland publicly declared that Chevy Chase, the well-known suburb he was developing on the edge of Washington, D.C., would explicitly “adopt” its “pattern,” citing and so reaping the benefits of its right order.112 Numerous non-Californian planners, some of national renown, working on temporary commission in the 1910s found it hard to shake the premonition that California’s every move potentially offered up, for better or for worse, a new model and a spur to its own imitation. In the introduction to his decentralist regional plan for Oakland and Berkeley, Werner Hegemann justified his forceful, regional-scale intervention on the grounds that California’s cities would come to supersede the “supposed model cities, [which] though they present most valuable material for study and suggestion, represent an old type.”113 John Nolen, a friend and sponsor of Charles Cheney, produced a comprehensive plan for Sacramento in 1914, conscious that intelligible aesthetic beauty might be symbolically even “more important here,” in a capital, “than in other cities,” suggesting formal leads and associations to less ceremonial spaces the state over.114 Hegemann himself had prepared a largely unsung plan in 1913 rethinking Sacramento. Cheney sent it to Nolen for reference. Nolen, tellingly, deemed its conclusions, like his own, primarily useful elsewhere, “of even greater value to outside cities.”115 Such object lessons also served, before a still skeptical public, to make the prospect of continual and comprehensive planning feel natural. They helped planners appeal affectively to,
108 Sales materials on Northbrae, Berkeley, Carton 21, Folder 3, McD. 109 Letter to “Fellow Berkeleyan,” 31 May 1912, Carton 21, Folder 5, McD. 110 St. Francis Wood: A Place of Homes (Berkeley: Mason–McDuffie, n.d.), Carton 22, Folder 19, McD. The pamphlet is undated, but it could not have made much sense to readers earlier than 1915, the year of the fair. 111 Elmer I. Rowell, historical materials on St. Francis Wood (1932); and Duncan McDuffie, historical materials on St. Francis Wood (1932), Carton 22, Folder 22, McD. McDuffie stressed modeling, imitability, and precedent in his understanding of zoning, too, on which he wrote from a legal perspective; see Duncan McDuffie, “A Practical Application of the Zone Ordinance,” Berkeley Civic Bulletin 5 (1916): 10–17, on the tidy Elmwood Park neighborhood in South Berkeley. For a consonant local view, see Berkeley’s mayor, Louis Bartlett, “The Importance of Zoning a Municipality,” Pacific Municipalities and Counties 34 (1920): 101–104. 112 “Outdone by San Francisco,” San Francisco Examiner, 13 May 1917. McDuffie’s publicists would then reprint this very article, in facsimile straight off the news page, in the pamphlet St. Francis Wood: A Great Civic Achievement (Berkeley: Mason–McDuffie, 1917), Carton 22, Folder 21, McD. The sub-headlines fairly scream: “Sen. Newlands Adopts St. Francis Wood as Pattern for Latest Development in Washington”; “Tribute to Home Planners”; “Considered Roland Park at Baltimore Finest Residence District Until He Saw St. Francis Wood.” 113 Werner Hegemann, Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley (Oakland: Kelley– Davis Company, 1915), 11–12. 114 John Nolen, “California’s Civic Opportunity,” California Outlook (June 1915), Box 241, Folder 23, Nolen papers. The published result of his investigation is John Nolen, Sacramento City Plan: Final Report to the City Commissioners (Cambridge, Mass.: John Nolen, 1916). 115 John Nolen to Charles H. Cheney, 18 February 1916, Box 63, Folder 22, Nolen papers.
170 and to enroll, a wider public. Or, it was around and in common exposure to an emergent canon of such reference sites that a new, dispositionally pro-planning set of publics might be more or less reliably assembled.116 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., pinned the future of the planning “campaign,” as of 1913, on its ability to ignite and sustain the vital passions. Sober, manly administrative expertise had its place, but “[u]nofficial busybodies must be relied upon to disturb the peaceful routine of the office by…jolting episodes, and to see to it that sufficient spasmodic creative energy and imaginative power are put forth to keep the plan well ahead of the march of events.”117 Object lessons, rightly arranged, could surprise and so “disturb” the senses. The goal, Cheney held, was through the things themselves to “set every citizen thinking upon these subjects as he has never done before.” Reflective thought was to be induced materially, on the surface of the skin, in the encounter with the landscape, rendered didactic with a new urgency: “No amount of agitation by committees in our chambers of commerce or even city councils can create a public sentiment comparable with the enthusiasm aroused by showing what has actually been done.”118
Despite the scant historiography on the wartime subdivisions, it is conventional for planning historians to appreciate their importance as a node in the consolidation of best practices and the offering up of models and counter-models for 1920s suburbia and beyond. It is not hard to diagnose the formal linkages among the shipbuilding towns, the foregoing brew of garden cities and company towns, and the postwar spectrum running from privatized Babbitt suburbs to the RPAA’s reformist interventions at Sunnyside and Radburn. Nor are the personnel linkages at all obscure: Frederick Ackerman, Clarence Stein, and Alexander Bing, among other core RPAAites, honed their craft in close contact during wartime. But perhaps the most crucial bequest of this wartime episode does not reside at the level of specific forms or techniques. Its import is threefold. First, the evidence in this chapter has suggested that the modeling imperative itself — the assumption that “modern” suburbs can and should be built as models, and that such models, never abstract, tangibly propose their own imitation — is what the USHC and EFC’s landscapes threw into most forceful relief. Second, this vision of modeling-as-contagion minted as normal and operational a very specific understanding of the animacy of objects — particularly those charged ensembles of objects apprehended as “landscape.” The rhetoric surrounding the “object lesson” — indeed, the inescapable term itself — strongly suggests the predominance of a vitalist and materialist understanding of the physical world and our responses thereto, one in which “things,” as Lorraine Daston has written, in the first instance “give rise to talk” and thought.119 Third, the (material) culture of the suburban object lesson argued for, when it did not simply assume, a corresponding ontology of the human subject and its susceptibility to the “force” of
116 For the fuller explication of this vision, indebted to Lippmann and Dewey, of additive, incremental becoming- publics that constellate around specific issues or material objects, see Noortje Marres, “No Issue, No Public” (Ph.D. diss., University of Amsterdam, 2005). 117 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., How to Organize a City Planning Campaign (New York: The Civic Press, 1913), 6, 8. 118 Charles H. Cheney, “What the City Planning Exhibits Have Accomplished in California,” The American City 11 (July 1914): 35, 40. Similar assumptions undergird those proselytizing for the village-improvement societies, proto- planning and proto-suburban in their prescriptions, that remade many American landscapes in the late nineteenth century, albeit bereft of the “comprehensive” idea. See Mary Caroline Robbins, “Village Improvement Societies,” Atlantic Monthly 79 (February 1897): 212–221, on the imperative to “stir” villagers’ interest, harness “that energy,” and awaken “latent…enthusiasm” for an aesthetics of equipoise. 119 Lorraine Daston, “Speechless,” in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 9–26; the quotation appears on page 11.
171 example. Planners’ premiums on the more-than-rational components of involuntary imitation — and the ways in which the propensity to only imitate seemed, to their “science,” to vary according to class and race — bound subject and space together in new, newly official ways. And if we can refer to a select few suburban “models” or “object lessons” that attained the standing of spectacle, compelling commentary, explicit citation, and pilgrimage, we do well to note that these intimations about form and its force came into their own in unassuming, truly ordinary suburbs, in industrial vectors of the forgettable and the “auxiliary” that to most middle- class onlookers had long been marked off as spaces of last resort. Beside San Francisco Bay, that vector lined the Carquinez. These towns and others like them were staging areas for the standards that, by the Depression, came to define suburban form across the class spectrum — and, even more, to specify the stakes of its infraction. This regnant ontology of imitable spaces, susceptible subjects, and the primacy of the involuntary had other, darker predicates as well. The planners and theorists most invested in promoting the imitability of exemplary suburban “good form” also equipped a very specific repertoire of middle-class denigration: they assumed the redoubled contagion of bad form, or of “formlessness,” and routinely devolved blame not to its builders but to the déclassé elements living amid, and irrecoverably degraded by, all things “tawdry” or “cheap.” Addressing the American Civic Association in 1917 on how to supply “a good home for every wage-earner,” John Nolen clarified the stakes of object lessons gone awry: “this ugliness is not external merely. It strikes in,” corrupting minds and bodies.120 Olmsted, Jr., was certain that malformed subdivisions would create “conditions unfavorable to that self-respecting home life upon which the security of our democracy rests.”121 Planners well beyond California were emphatic on this point: “If environments can enliven and inspire,” Charles Mulford Robinson had reasoned in 1914, “they must also have the power to deaden and discourage.”122 And yet, suburban California was again a crucial incubator and intensifier of this line of reasoning. Charles Cheney addressed a civic meeting in Oakland in 1927 in no uncertain terms: “When some architecturally horrible structure is built or some house is painted a color that sets the nerves on edge, personal rights are violated also, and property is depreciated in value all around the mute and nauseating offender.” “His argument,” one reporter remarked, “seemed to be that cheapness is as contagious as chicken pox.”123 This sordid biologizing was hardly accidental, and in its premium on the involuntary — on uncontrollable “spasms,” on the “nerves” and the specter of “devitalization” — it could carry tangled, declensionist connotations regarding class, loudly, and race, more quietly. The stakes were higher in the suburbs of production, these leading voices intimated: if workers’ bodies and minds were essentially porous, they were all the more susceptible to malformation by environments badly composed. And this seemed, in the breach, to prove the animacy of landscape-as-lesson. “Man must have something tangible with which to work,” insisted Frederick Ackerman: “He is blind to the errors of his reasoning until those errors confront him as forms which he can see and feel.”124
120 Frederick H. Sykes, quoted in John Nolen, A Good Home for Every Wage-Earner (Boston: American Civic Association, 1917), 2. 121 Olmsted, “Lessons from Housing Developments of the United States Housing Corporation,” 33. 122 Charles Mulford Robinson, “The Sociology of a Street Layout,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 196. 123 “Under the Master Plan,” Oakland Tribune, 16 December 1927. 124 Ackerman, “The Architectural Side of City Planning,” 112.
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It is to the codification of these forms — and to an ever shriller anxiety about landscapes classed as “formless” — that the next and final chapter turns.
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Chapter 8
Sensing Suburban Ruin: Abandonment and the Afterlives of Form
The foregoing chapters have articulated a specific prehistory of the post–World War II suburb, asking how planners and others imagined their work as yielding imitable “models” of spatial form. It is now incumbent upon us to consider where these mobile suburban models might have traveled, how far, and how many translations occurred along the way. This chapter begins by pointing up several strands of influence, committing to no one of them as containing the supervenient endpoint or decisive consolidation of the trajectories inaugurated in the prewar. The postwar order was variegated; “consensus” talk only obscures. And our conclusions, such as they are, are necessarily speculative, arguing for a diffuse and multifarious scattering of the instruments so honed — always attentive to their misreads, perversions, partial applications, and inexact translations. There was no innate or telic endpoint, knowable in advance, for the forms and techniques that so many experimented with on the edges of American cities — and that intensified on all counts in the suburban laboratories of Northern California. Such designations are difficult to make without lapsing into tidy causality tales. Still, it is essential — it is the justification for this project so far — that we think of the postwar suburb as an inheritance, not as the “break” that so many of its sellers, promising newness in all things, habitually announced as a fait accompli. If, as the planner Melvin Webber reflected in 1964, “the characteristics that may once have been California idiosyncrasies [have] become common traits of urbanization elsewhere,” we should be prepared to look for their signatures in as many domains as possible.1 The chapter then pivots to expose a less visible but arguably more consequential afterlife for the forms, concepts, and criteria worked out on the edges of the prewar city. The “comprehensive” plan, the “whole” new town, the sorting of work space from home space, the techniques of buffering and enclosure, the commitment to multinodal dispersal at the regional scale, and, throughout, the broadly vitalistic understanding of landscape’s animacies as a participant in the human lives so ordered: these ingredients may, in ensemble, finally be significant less for what they prescribe than for the denigrations and negations they enable. Indeed, the loudest proponents of suburban “form” and “order” came to articulate a companion ontology of “formlessness” and “ruin” that they attached almost exclusively to suburbs housing the working classes. In the suburbs of postwar California, to a degree unrecognized in the historiography, concepts of formlessness and ruin came to be almost interchangeable, licensing inattention to a host of suburban problems. The intellectual history of how this perverse equivalence came to seem plausible has enduring consequences for how we apprehend the landscapes of actual abandonment and privation that have marked the Carquinez since the 1970s.
Inheritances: Enclosure and the Prehistory of the Postwar The baywide suburbanization of industry continued at an impressive clip after the cessation of war, intensifying the trends we have surveyed. More and more plants rose along the Carquinez Strait, and just back from the water as well, near burgeoning Concord, Walnut Creek, and other postwar poles of attraction. By 1963, in a “reference study” commissioned by Contra Costa
1 Melvin M. Webber, Foreword to Explorations into Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 6.
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County, the Industrial Development Manufacturing Record could note the landscape’s “distinctive industrial complexion.” The report dialed up pastoral tropes familiar in germ from the prewar, placing the newer suburban industries in aesthetic contradistinction to the unlovely powder-town landscapes of West County: “With 70 miles of waterfront to choose from, the installations are scattered rather than clustered…. There is no vast expanse of dreary and poorly maintained industrial–commercial–residential clutter, and sheep graze on hillside pastures alongside Shell’s Martinez refinery.” The imperative to sort and specialize had become common sense. It was all but taken for granted that suburban locations were the industrialist’s preference. Since the war, select corporate headquarters had joined production sites in the march out from older downtowns. Research-and-development facilities, too, had wised to the Lebensraum afforded by the edge: “Science Seeks Seclusion,” the report announced. And it was seclusion of a decidedly pastoral sort: “The industry in the area fits in with the idyllic surroundings and can be as embattled as any garden club delegation in combatting any hint of a non-conforming use.”2 By 1961, when the San Francisco Chronicle themed their Sunday magazine around the question of “Industrial Horizons,” they stylized an angular, Jetsons-ready landscape and placed it somewhere indeterminately east of San Francisco Bay, in either Alameda or Contra Costa County (Fig. 8.1). “Green,” the editors averred, “is an industrial color no one can overlook today.”3 The Carquinez no longer had absolute primacy for urban capitalists seeking industrial elbow room. Automobile-assembly plants of considerable horizontal extent migrated to the southern reaches of Alameda County, too. Dodge established a streamlined operation in San Leandro, just south of Oakland (Fig. 8.2). Ford abandoned Richmond for capacious quarters well to the south, in the town of Milpitas, as the sociologist Bennett Berger’s Working-Class Suburb (1960) semi-famously detailed.4 San Mateo County, down the peninsula from San Francisco, attracted its share of production. Although that suburban vector, as we have seen, had largely staved off industrial nuisances since the late nineteenth century — “Mention industry around here ten years ago,” one local was quoted as saying, “and you’d be deported” — by 1953 the developer David Bohannon was openly proposing factories as adjuncts to his Levittown-sized subdivisions. This was “a perfectly natural thing to happen” in the suburbs, he said. “We’re building a new metropolis down here.”5 Santa Clara County, ensconcing San Jose at the bay’s southern tip, industrialized with a new intensity, and its promoters repackaged many familiar prewar tropes promising suburban redemption. The 1950s pamphlet New Industry Speaks — About Santa Clara County, California
2 “Industry in Central Contra Costa: New Residents,” Contra Costa Times, 2 July 1961; Contra Costa County: A Reference Study by Industrial Development Manufacturing Record (1963), 38, 45, 52, “Industries” folder, CCCHS. That 1963 report wrongly adjudged Contra Costa unusual for having its development led by industry, but rightly noted that industry’s spatial extent would have been anomalous on the fringes of Eastern cities. “Increasingly,” too, “this has been supplemented by bases where headquarters and plant are both in Contra Costa, and the boss and most of the men on the shop live there.” See Louise Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), on headquarters relocation in the postwar period. For an overview of the national scene, see Benjamin Chinitz and Raymond Vernon, “Changing Forces in Industrial Location,” Harvard Business Review 38 (1960): 126–136. 3 “Industrial Horizons,” San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, 18 June 1961. 4 On southern Alameda County, see Bennett M. Berger, Working-Class Suburb: A Study of Auto Workers in Suburbia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), which argued against prevailing suggestions that the mere fact of suburban relocation would erase working-class mores, rendering workers conservative; and Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 5 “San Mateo — Where Everybody Lives,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5 July 1953.
175 cast the South Bay as a salutary, “semi-rural” sort of place. Again the middle landscape seemed to moderate the working classes, breeding a strain of euphemistically “independent” labor, “workers rather than organizers” who would enjoy no more than a nine-minute commute to the nearest factory and “arrive on the job fresh and ready to do a full day’s work.” “Contented people,” after all, “are invariably efficient producers.” And if all else rhetorically failed — and if the solid stuff of landscape was insufficient as a draw — “It’s the climate! A California ‘bromide’ that really pays dividends.”6 Most period commentators, in their euphoria, spoke as if this postwar suburbanization of industry was truly new. Some scholars unwittingly still do. The physical scale of the average factory was indeed greater than before; single-story, low-and-wide architecture was newly dominant; and of course more workers were driving, which now prised home and work apart across ever greater distances, decoupling the components of the prewar suburban “unit,” to say nothing of the company town. But the basic pattern of industry-led suburbanization — factories, then homes; work, then workers — and the genres of its justification were well entrenched. The Carquinez, though, remained a fine place to glimpse industrial futures, as well as a strategic linchpin for the regionally minded. In 1952, the planner Mel Scott and a group of Berkeley graduate students drew up a “preliminary investigation” for a Contra Costa master plan. They insisted that further developing the “narrow strip” along the strait from Martinez to Antioch — what they now called the county’s “Northern Industrial” zone — into an integrated “Central Manufacturing District” had to be a “priority” for the region’s future. Prewar industry along the Carquinez had set the pattern in motion, of course. By the 1950s, though, certain of its landscapes were also supplying useful negative object lessons for the path ahead. The Berkeley team called on planners to prevent residential and industrial land uses from mixing, using as their exhibit the “bottle-neck problem area” concentrated directly along the strait by the Southern Pacific tracks, insufficiently sorted, to their satisfaction, and thus harboring “the possibility of extreme conflict.” The “Western Industrial” zone, the oldest company towns which stretched from Richmond’s fringes as far east as Port Costa, no longer seemed a propitious site for conjuring the future.7 Defense production, too, during wartime had redoubled the industrial importance of the Carquinez shore. Richmond was the Bay Area’s most conspicuous boom town, swelling by nearly 80,000 in population with the Kaiser shipyards at full speed and minimal suburban subdivisions sprouting on its fringes (Figs. 8.3–8.5). But industry along the whole Carquinez was militarized for the occasion. Munitions came and went through a revamped Port Chicago (née Bay Point), too, and Pittsburg’s Camp Stoneman became a major staging area for troops by the thousand. All three towns inducted sizable African American populations, most of them from the rural South, who remade the cities’ everyday lives but endured pronounced segregation, relegated to the newly enlarged “wrong” side of the proverbial tracks along lines that would outlast the war and further peripheralize those subject to the formula “last hired, first fired.”8
6 New Industry Speaks — About Santa Clara County, California (1950?), Carton 6, Folder 8, Mel Scott papers. 7 Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley, “Contra Costa County Master Plan — A Preliminary Investigation” (1952), Carton 6, Folder 15, Mel Scott papers. 8 On the Bay Area’s, and especially Richmond’s, transformation during the war, see Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992); and Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900– 1954 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993). For texts written in the moment, see Richmond, California: A City Earns the Purple Heart (Sacramento: California State Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission, 1944);
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Hercules and other explosives manufactories scaled up their output. The Concord Naval Weapons Station, just inland from Bay Point and Clyde in the shadow of Mount Diablo, punctuated acres’ worth of flatlands with a cryptic array of bunkers. The prewar suburbanization of industry established patterns and prototypes for life and work; emergent wartime production scaled them up; postwar builders and industrialists applied these techniques as the suburbanization of all things proceeded apace. So much should be uncontroversial. But the prewar “models” worked out in places like the Carquinez traveled farther and wider than this. It is, for instance, hard not to see the spatial hallmarks of sorted industrial suburbs reflected in the enclosed forms that became normal for strictly residential suburban environments in the 1950s. “After total war can come total living,” read one ominous 1943 pronouncement from the Revere Copper Company, which saw a nuclear family gazing out on a modernistic suburbia, cars flying by in the foreground like little spaceships (Fig. 8.6).9 It may not be too much to see industrial environments, rather than the Olmstedian lineage of more sylvan retreats, as setting the terms for both components of this vision: the total, indexed by “whole” new subdivisions, intelligibly enclosed in the fashion of the remote-controlled company town or satellite city; and a specific sense of living defined in terms of the cross-cutting vitalist upsurges that a sensate milieu could encourage but never quite contain.10
and J. A. McVittie, An Avalanche Hits Richmond (Richmond, Calif.: The City Manager, 1944). On death and retribution at Port Chicago, see Robert L. Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny (New York: Amistad, 1993). Whether the wartime building pioneered truly new forms is debatable, but at the level of techniques for their assembly, and for the industrial scaling-up of those techniques to what would become Levittown proportions — houses by the 10,000 or more — the war cannot be ignored as a suburban crucible. On the “minimum” house, see Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 56– 85. 9 Revere’s Part in Better Living 10 (1943). 10 Much scholarship has traced these forms of the postwar suburb — and the financial instruments designed to populate them — to ideas codified during the 1930s, particularly by the Federal Housing Administration, which from mid-decade, in a series of technical bulletins sketched what postwar living, should depression ever lift, ought to look like for those racially lucky enough to be granted mortgages. See, minimally, Planning Neighborhoods for Small Houses (Washington, D.C.: Federal Housing Administration, 1936); Planning Profitable Neighborhoods (Washington, D.C.: Federal Housing Administration, 1938); and Subdivision Standards (Washington, D.C.: Federal Housing Administration, 1939). The literature on the FHA’s exclusions is vast; Kenneth Jackson, “Federal Subsidy and the Suburban Dream,” in Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 190–218, is a venerable starting point. We can see inklings of its prescriptions a few years earlier, in the publications produced by the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. In 1930 Herbert Hoover had called a conference of 540 “outstanding individuals engaged in one way or another in activities affecting housing.” Its committees finessed aspects of the housing question at every scale — utilities, taxation, plantings, “kitchens and other work centers” — “reveal[ing] for the first time the immense scope of the subject as well as its organic unity.” From its sessions came a series of programmatic reports, together a useful cipher for planners’ state of the art — which is not to say consensus — at the close of the 1920s. John M. Gries and James Ford, eds., Planning for Residential Districts (Washington, D.C.: The President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, 1932), the best known, emerged to a wide readership in 1932 and, in its diagrams and heady pronouncements, prefaces so much of what the Federal Housing Administration would codify as acceptable: self-contained “neighborhood units” in the manner of Clarence Perry; a mixture of confidence and barely submerged anxiety about the watertightness of single-use zoning; and abundant deposits of all those criteria of social and racial desirability that would install the fractured mortgage geography of whitened housing starts and non-white non-starters that has for many defined the post– World War II suburban landscape. The formal ingredients of the FHA’s modal residential subdivision were in place by the early 1930s, the product of at least twenty years of tinkering. Less often recognized is that industrial dispersal was recommended — presumed — as their very condition of possibility. A second, less consulted volume from Hoover’s conference, John M. Gries and James Ford, eds., Slums, Large-Scale Housing, and Decentralization
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Enclosed totalities: this desideratum marked the residential subdivisions that came to stud Contra Costa County in the 1950s — housing workers or the lower middle classes, perhaps, but no longer sited directly alongside industry as a matter of course. By the 1960s, it was impossible not to notice, as the Contra Costa Times did, that developers were certifiably “on a spree.”11 The county’s population had grown by 196 percent in the 1940s alone. Population nearly doubled again between 1950 and 1970, when it topped 550,000. Duncan McDuffie, still active, made his move on central Contra Costa in short order, establishing several subdivisions, each of which he sold precisely in terms of its bounded security. “Control your future,” his brochures bellowed, at Arlington Manor, which opened in 1949 promising “a new kind of living.”12 Such environments drew their identity and integrity from the boundaries that marked them off. Enclosure — the great “turn inward” that Dianne Harris has identified at the scale of the individual postwar home — became an ever more pronounced sales feature of subdivisions.13 But it was in no absolute sense a new trick. McDuffie seemed to sense this fact, touting “time-tested planning” techniques in force at his Maravilla subdivision in Concord, where buyers might find 71 homes “bathed in that so-desirable country atmosphere,” from the people who had brought “ageless Claremont, St. Francis Wood, Park Hills…and other residence parks of enduring value” into existence.14 McDuffie, indeed, seemed intent on instructing new suburbanites in the benefits of plannedness and enclosure: “We will gladly explain this Plan to you in detail,” the literature promised, “so you may see how it preserves” and “protects” what lies within.15 And what physical form — hedges, gates, retaining walls — could not alone accomplish, deed restrictions would. To live in a “whole new world” became a self-justifying selling point all its own. It held sway into the 1980s, at least, and arguably beyond. On the Carquinez, little Hercules, revamped, became one such world. The town ballooned in population after 1977, when the powder works’ old buffer land was sold off to Centex Homes and other factors. In the bullish 1950s and 1960s, the industrial colony, hemmed in by the exigencies of production and repulsive to most of the Bay Area’s suburbanizing populace, had been bypassed on the developers’ march inland up I-80 to Vallejo and Solano County. In the 1980s, however, Hercules became California’s single fastest-growing city: 10,000 population by 1985, 20,000 by 1989.16 “Pure suburbia,” one reporter declared. Residents made the jump from various corners of the bay, including a sizable Filipino population, a few thousand strong, drawn across from Daly City by word of mouth and the area’s apparent “rural feeling.”17 The local press, meanwhile, spun its industrial history and nomenclature into every conceivable double entendre: “Town of Hercules Is Exploding,” “Boom
(Washington, D.C.: The President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, 1932), made it official: “the social order will be best served by a deconcentration of population, to which industry through its location holds the key. A deconcentration of population implies a decentralization of industry” (176). 11 “Builders on a Spree,” Contra Costa Times, 10 December 1961. 12 Oakland Tribune, 20 September 1953. 13 Dianne Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). For a similar argument with reference to outdoor space, see Christopher Grampp, From Yard to Garden: The Domestication of America’s Home Grounds (Chicago: Center for American Places, 2008). 14 Richmond Independent, January 1949; Your Home in the Sun (Berkeley, Calif.: Mason–McDuffie, 1949), Carton 19, Folder 26, McD. The press release for Maravilla Tract in Concord made similar linkages to McDuffie’s prewar restricted enclaves; 4 July 1949, Carton 19, Folder 26, McD. 15 Maravilla Tract in Sunny Concord (Berkeley, Calif.: Mason–McDuffie, 1949), Carton 20, Folder 17, McD. 16 Contra Costa Times, 28 May 1990. 17 Contra Costa Times, 23 November 1988.
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Town,” “The Strength of Hercules.”18 And, crucially, contemporary accounts noted that this was the second time a whole new Hercules had come into being.19 City Manager Ralph Snyder, hired in 1975, indicated that he had taken the job specifically for the “opportunity to build from scratch.”20 And, he said in retrospect, “we planned every square inch.”21 The industry was gone — on which more soon — but the urge to plan completely and from scratch lingered on, an artifact of the age of the company town. We might, too, see the forms of the company town lurking behind the gated “privatopias” that became common features of suburban residential landscapes in the later twientieth century: defensive enclosures of a “fortress America” notable more for their exclusions than for any putative community they might constitute among the protected.22 Typically, critiques of gating have focused on environments built to shelter the upper classes. In the Bay Area, though, one of the fiercest battles over suburban territory took place in the name of “a sort of blue-collar paradise in the golden hills of Contra Costa County”: the old Maybeckian shipbuilding town of Clyde, inhabited, to be sure, but isolated as ever.23 In 1966 a group of protestors had descended upon the town to stage demonstrations against the adjacent Concord Naval Weapons Station, which was directing munitions toward combat in Vietnam. An unusually violent backlash ensued as the self-appointed “storm troopers” of the Carquinez, armed, began to threaten the protestors, citing their town’s “safety” as the chief concern. The CNWS remained controversial on the left. A remarkably similar episode flared up years later, in 1983, and then again in 1987, by which point journalists were noting a pattern: a “repeat” performance for defensive Clyde, which was “somewhat of a blue-collar town, and everybody here worked pretty hard for what they have.” In protesting the protestors, Clyde’s residents made explicit reference to their town’s enclosure. In 1987, to the aggrieved it had seemed like a source of vulnerability — were the Navy to close down Port Chicago Highway, the subdivision’s one access road, they would be all but trapped, rendering commutes difficult — but a year later, amid even more protests addressing U.S. policy in Central America, the townspeople voted for the Navy to put up a new fence, gating a town that, while isolated, had never been walled. “Do fence us in,” the headline read.24 Over the years,
18 San Francisco Chronicle, 4 May 1977; San Francisco Examiner, 6 March 1988; San Francisco Examiner, 21 November 1993. 19 San Francisco Chronicle, 21 October 1981; City of Hercules, Hercules General Plan (1993), I-1. The mantra of newness becomes a refrain: “The present city is essentially a new town with a new housing stock and recently arrived residents.” 20 San Francisco Examiner, 16 August 1981. 21 San Francisco Chronicle, 21 October 1981. 22 Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Setha M. Low, “The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear,” American Anthropologist 103 (2001): 45–58; and Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), remain strong analyses. These forms of “defense” do overlap with, but are not identical to, Oscar Newman’s designs for community-sustaining public housing in Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Collier, 1973). Newman held that turning housing developments inward, and so marking clear interruptions in the urban fabric, was actually required in order to sustain an “open society.” See also the later, official, rendition of this scheme in Henry G. Cisneros, Defensible Space: Deterring Crime and Building Community (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1995). 23 “A Small Town’s Trouble,” San Francisco Chronicle, 22 September 1966; “Contra Costa’s Storm Troopers,” San Francisco Chronicle, 22 September 1966; “Clyde Posse Hangs Up Its Guns,” San Francisco Chronicle, 23 September 1966. 24 “Clyde’s 450 Residents Gird for Protestors,” Contra Costa Times, 10 June 1987; “Clyde’s Residents Protest Protestors,” Oakland Tribune, 15 September 1987; Contra Costa Times, 16 September 1987; Contra Costa Times,
179 the enclosed folk of Clyde would take harder and harder lines again any form of intrusion: a new water tower, an office building visible from within the subdivision, and a shelter for battered women, which, those on the right contended, “will attract violent estranged” elements and “will lower property values.” Clyde’s physical form in no sense foretold these politics of exclusion, but those politics — perhaps the Bay Area’s shining example of a precarious working-class conservatism gradually closing ranks — made eager use of that form for their support. The enclosure of the old industrial town, isolated by design, lent itself to a keep-out revanchism and a surveillant ethic of everyday life. Community bred an ethic of immunity, one that licensed protectionist bounding, anxious purification in all its forms. Dissent, within such an enclosure could that much more readily be policed by neighbors: “You can establish anonymity in Concord,” one local clarified, “in a way you can’t in Clyde.”25
The postwar suburban landscape was, in so many ways, a landscape of enclosures. But not all enclosures are created equal; not all enclosures mean or do the same thing. In fact, we can just as viably take heed of a set of voices, generally left-identified, marshaling many of the same lessons from prewar industrial suburbs in order to critique the modal suburban forms that had come to dominance by the late 1950s. These critics, prescribing legible enclosure and “organic” form at the scale of the subdivision, district, or town then argued, at a regional or even national scale, for a more coordinated program of dispersal. Wholes were nested within larger wholes. Recentralization of form at one digestible scale was embedded within broader, networked patterns of decentralization, industrial and otherwise, that just might elude the label “suburban” — which, by the 1960s, had become for many a new kind of epithet. The Regional Planning Association of America, from its founding in 1923, attained an outsized influence among those working to articulate alternatives to suburbia. The coordinated collocation of home and work was the basic fulcrum of their program for land use. In 1916, Lewis Mumford, who achieved prominence as a polymathic critic of architecture and urban life, in his first sustained act of research had proposed a program of spatial decentralization for New York’s garment industry.26 The group’s serial demonstration projects — at Sunnyside and Radburn in the 1920s, chiefly, and in Clarence Stein’s derivative work at Chatham Village in Pittsburgh and Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles — are not generally classed as industrial towns, but they took shape within programs that presumed measured foresight and a commitment to preventing the undue mixture of workplaces and homes. The “organic” new town at Radburn,
29 February 1987; Editorial, Contra Costa Times, 24 February 1988; “Residents Protest Protestors,” Contra Costa Times, 28 February 1988; “Clyde Says: ‘Do Fence Us In,’” Oakland Tribune, 29 April 1988. Just a year before the troubles, the Times had cast these qualities in a positive light in the human-interest piece “Small Is Beautiful, Says Town of Clyde,” Contra Costa Times, 7 February 1986. Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), grasps how spatial enclosure became an ever more defensive tool in the postwar era, a means of keeping out as well as keeping in. 25 “Navy Water Tower Angers Some in Clyde,” Contra Costa Times, 11 December 1991; “Clyde Residents Trying to Bar Women’s Shelter,” Contra Costa Times, 12 December 1993; “Clyde, Navy at Odds over Office Building,” Contra Costa Times, 12 March 1998. And see Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life [2002], trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2011). 26 On Mumford’s 1916 garment report, see Donald L. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Grove, 1989), 79– 81.
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New Jersey, as we have seen, was supposed to include a zone of factories, but the economic downturn of late 1929 prevented its construction.27 In Northern California, the RPAA’s approach to resuturing regional wholes touched down mainly by way of the group known as Telesis, which the Berkeley planners Francis Violich and T. J. Kent formed in 1938, having read Mumford’s The Culture of Cities and dedicated themselves, through a series of lunchtime seminars, to a concerted “self- intellectualization” in its image.28 For Telesis, questions of ontology preceded any concrete prescriptions for design: “Beliefs or Forces[?],” they puzzled when drafting a “Statement of Beliefs” at their first meeting. The “aesthetic,” they held, was in any case “a result of forces, not an end in itself.”29 Mel Scott remembered the group’s inclinations as “very philosophical,” even “militant.”30 But what sort of philosophy? Their program for the urban future bore a decidedly vitalist tinge. An exuberant language of “life” and “force” — which is not to say “life force,” exactly — courses throughout their written pronouncements, overshadowing any specific forms the group came to prescribe. Even the group’s name harkens back to the anti-Spencerian sociologist Lester Ward, who had sought ways to harness social “forces” without subordinating them to a coercive, organismic understanding of social order. (The Telesis crew later claimed that they had not known of Ward when choosing the name. Fred Etzel, a member, would allege that they came to the name “intuitively.”)31 This decidedly prewar ontology, which was hardly in vogue anymore amid the Depression, sustained Telesis’ critical regionalism well into the postwar era. As with many before them, it underwrote their well-marinated, almost deterministic faith in form: “Modern home makes modern people,” reads one note from the minutes of their first meeting.32 Le Corbusier, another of their touchstones, could not have said it better. When they joined with San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art to mount 1940’s “Space for Living” exhibit, they asserted “four distinct parts” of daily life — “live,” “work,” “play,” and “services” — that needed to be kept distinct as a matter of principle (Fig. 8.7).33 Telesis committed to scaling up and making Californian a vision of the sorted, specialized landscape, and of its compelling force over human life, that had been worked out most clearly in prewar suburban domains.34
27 Eugenie Birch, “Radburn and the American Planning Movement: The Persistence of an Idea,” Journal of the American Planning Association 46 (October 1980): 424–431. 28 See 1973 interview with Francis Violich, Box 3, Folder 27, Telesis records; “A History of the Department of City and Regional Planning” (1979), Box 3, Folder 7, T. J. Kent Papers; “Notes from the Telesis Study,” Box 4, Folder 4, Francis Violich collection of Telesis records, BANC MSS 99/48 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter ‘Telesis records’). 29 See “Statement of Beliefs,” Box 1, Folder 1, Telesis records. For their most diagnostic publication, see Regional Planning, the Next Step for the Bay Area (San Francisco: Telesis, 1940). 30 Mel Scott interview, Box 3, Folder 24, Telesis records. 31 “Material on Lester Ward,” Box 4, Folder 7, Telesis records. Etzel dutifully noted the term’s migration from Ward (Outlines of Sociology, 1897) into the OED (1919) and into the work of Franklin Giddings (1924), before being adopted by Pacific Telesis, the local telephone company. 32 Minutes, Box 1, Folder 1, Telesis records. 33 Summary, January 1942, Box 1, Folder 5, Telesis records. 34 And that broader New Deal powers legitimated. Roosevelt was familiar with the RPAA schemes, at the scale of the region and the state, from his time governing New York. Many prominent postwar planners had, of course, refined their ideas under the aegis of New Deal programs. For New Deal social science that either affirmed existing patterns of urban dispersal or urged further decentralization, see, inter alia, Daniel B. Creamer, Is Industry Decentralizing? A Statistical Analysis of Locational Changes in Manufacturing Employment, 1899–1933 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935); Regional Planning (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1938); F. Stuart Chapin, Jr., Communities for Living: Prepared for the Advisory Panel on Regional
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Other postwar forms of regional coordination, in turn, retained the focus on sorting and industrial dispersal without signing on to Telesis’s explicitly theoretical gambits. The Bay Area Council joined planners and industrialists from 1944, insisting on a “greater” nine-county unit in a more precise and consistent way than had regionally minded capitalists back in the 1920s (Figs. 8.8, 8.9.)35 (Whether their reform credentials were finally more believable than those of the 1920s-vintage RPAs is an open question.) The Association of Bay Area Governments formed in 1961, cheering the suburbanization of industry and positing a similar-sized regional whole as the object of their interventions. Prewar techniques of sorting and enclosure resurfaced in standalone new-town projects across the country that promised alternative suburbias — from official “New Towns In-Town” under Johnson’s Great Society to various “planned communities,” at Columbia, Maryland, and elsewhere, whose provenance was not federal.36 Their sponsors, sensing that the standard subdivision was in some sense incomplete, again and again asserted that these were whole new towns, displaying in imitable miniature the principles and proportions of a reordered suburban life. James Rouse, the Christian idealist who spearheaded the conspicuous project at Columbia, addressed an audience of bankers, in 1966, in precisely these terms: “How to Build a Whole New City from Scratch.”37 American-led developmentalist projects in postcolonial contexts, too, exported a sorted, suburbanized vision of the good city as common sense. When planners from the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies signed on in 1961 to consult with regional governors on a putative “resource frontier” in southern Venezuela, their resulting prescriptions for the brand-new Ciudad Guayana sounded strangely familiar: “The whole city must have a design structure which gives order and meaning to the urban areas. The residential, commercial and institutional districts must be well defined and related each other. The industrial areas…must be separated, but not too far removed, from the residential areas.” The whole thing “must stimulate, challenge and inspire its citizens.”38 They could have been describing Pullman or Vandergrift, Hercules, Bay Point, or Clyde. Some seeking alternatives to postwar suburbia proposed the construction of new towns. Others looked back, mining the extant landscape for found models of good, or better, urban form built out during earlier waves of industrial dispersal. Along the Carquinez Strait in the 1960s, amid ambient “mass” suburbanization, on the one hand, and heavy-handed redevelopment schemes downtown, on the other, many middle-class observers found resources with which to
Materials of Instruction for the Tennessee Valley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1941); and Charles S. Ascher, Better Cities: Building America (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942). 35 For an early articulation, see Industrial Survey Associates, San Francisco Bay Area: Its People, Prospects and Problems: A Report Prepared for the San Francisco Bay Area Council (San Francisco: Industrial Survey Associates, 1948). And see the pamphlets Formula for the Future (1947) and Cooperation Makes It Greater (1948), Carton 5, Folder 26, Mel Scott papers. 36 Martha Derthick, New Towns In-Town (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 1972), remains a classic, distinctly sour analysis of one episode in federal new-town construction carried out before Nixon quashed such programs. Roger Biles, “New Towns for the Great Society: A Case Study in Politics and Planning,” Planning Perspectives 13 (1998): 113–132, is a necessary policy history. Ann Forsyth, Reforming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), is a useful reference on three well-known experiments. 37 James W. Rouse, “How to Build a Whole New City from Scratch,” Savings Bank Journal (October 1966): 26–32. 38 See “Guayana Project — Work Outline,” 13 October 1961, Box 1, Joint Center for Urban Studies Records of the Guayana Project, AC 292, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
182 curate a vision of the prewar, prelapsarian company town, which they saw as offering its own enduring source of lessons. Nostalgia, in other words, motivated its own limited genre of suburban critique. An Oakland Tribune writer thrilled to Clyde’s neatly bounded form, honoring it in 1965 as the Bay Area’s “town that time passes by.”39 Crockett found even wider appeal among those seeking a usable suburban past. C&H’s policies of paternalism had been phased out — as insufficiently “modern” — in 1951, but in its form, which had not substantially dilated, and general atmosphere the town continued to project an image of the integral town where capital and labor just might make peace. “The town time almost forgot,” as an interested glance would confirm, was demonstrably in working order.40 South San Francisco, the multi-industry satellite in San Mateo County, won praise on similar grounds. A starry-eyed appreciation from the late 1960s saw only “the balanced city where industry is a good neighbor.”41 Even as its industrial output thinned somewhat, in the early 1970s, San Francisco–based journalists were lionizing South City’s “balanced” form and, transitively, the perceived stability of its community life.42 It was the Carquinez, though, that best lent itself to company-town nostalgia. Port Costa, even more than Crockett, won a spate of new admirers, who glossed the old grain port as “a town-size antique show” that “lives in yesterday” — and, using a credulous language that in coming decades would come to ease the marriage of historic preservation to capitalist redevelopment schemes, credited the “renaissance” brought on by “one man,” Bill Rich, “a genie whose magic touch has brought new life” to the town (Fig. 8.10).43 One suburban age, as it played out east of the bay, called forth nostalgia for another. The latest version of this nostalgia for right-sized living has come by way of the Congress of the New Urbanism, whose “neo-traditional” ministrations against prevailing patterns of the postwar suburb have trafficked at every scale, almost obsessively, in talk of bounded, sorted “wholes.” In a series of confident publications and endless conferences, the New Urbanists have curated a catalog of acceptable prewar suburban form, with John Nolen’s 1920s work as the apparent apogee and 1929 as a hard cutoff for the end of history. They have also channeled — and intensified, sometimes to the point of deterministic parody — most of the assumptions about landscape and life that those composing company towns, on the Carquinez and elsewhere, had made mainstream. The enclosure idea, perhaps before all else, has enjoyed a new career in New Urbanist hands. The second principle detailed in the group’s Charter could not be more explicit on this point: “Metropolitan regions are finite places… The metropolis is made up of multiple centers that are cities, towns, villages, each with its own identifiable center and edges.” Centers and edges: the whole ontology of a town qua town — as a finite, appreciable unit — depends on the legibility of its outer limit. And the edge must be a hard edge: “Development patterns should not blur or eradicate the edges of the metropolis.”44 Life can — must — be given form.
39 “Town That Time Passes By,” Oakland Tribune, 19 November 1965. 40 “C And H Calls Halt to Paternalism,” Oakland Tribune, 16 September 1951; “C&H Ends Paternalism in Crockett,” Oakland Tribune, 17 September 1951; “Call on Crockett!” San Francisco Chronicle, 22 November 1964; “The Town Time Almost Forgot,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner Chronicle, 27 August 1978. 41 “South San Francisco, the Balanced City Where Industry Is a Good Neighbor” (n.d.; 1960s), “South San Francisco” folder, Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library. 42 Tom Ench, “Life in South San Francisco,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, 16 January 1972. 43 “A One-Man Town…Almost,” San Francisco Chronicle, 2 July 1964; San Francisco Chronicle, 23 April 1972; California Living, 27 November 1966; “Lives in Yesterday,” San Francisco Examiner Chronicle, 12 July 1970. See also “Contra Costa Looking Back at Last — Now No One Laughs at Her Class Idea,” Oakland Tribune, 25 September 1985, on a schoolteacher whose interests in local history predated broader interests in preservation. 44 Michael Leccese and Kathleen McCormick, eds., Charter of the New Urbanism (New York: McGraw–Hill, 2000), 23–28, 35–39. The New Urbanism has invited copious and highly contentious debate. The movement is hard
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The New Urbanists have also committed wholesale to prewar faith in the contagious “model” town, which by its example ought to radiate, in microcosm, all the elements of a re- formed city. Their earliest models took shape on the Atlantic Coast: Trenton, New Jersey’s “Capital District” came under the New Urbanist knife in 1989; Kentlands, Maryland, a section of the Washington suburb of Gaithersburg, received the treatment beginning in 1988; the first full municipality so planned was Seaside, Florida, some 25 miles up the Panhandle from Panama City. Peter Calthorpe soon phased in a Pacific variant of New Urbanism at the Laguna West development in West Sacramento. Then, starting in 1998, when New Urbanists mounted their first full-fledged town in the Bay Area, they sited it in a suburbia that had long been conducive to experimentation: on the shores of the Carquinez, papering over the remains of the powder works at Hercules (Figs. 8.11, 8.12). Again, its boosters announced, Hercules would be built “from scratch.” Again, and explicitly, the town would offer an imitable model that, translated, might reorder other, distant landscapes: Nelson Oliva, the city manager, maintained that the new Hercules would stand as a “product” that other developers could “point to.”45 Its planners, the known New Urbanist firm Dover, Kohl & Partners, and their allies in the local press consistently, insistently spun visions of millennial Hercules as an integral unit, “one puzzle rather than individual pieces of land pieced together like dots.”46 This wholeness, this enclosure, aided the town’s ongoing negation of other, ostensibly less planned suburbias off to the east: “We especially,” one official said, “did not want to be another Concord.”47 And at the brownfields of Hercules, more than at most analogous projects, the stark trope of total order so dear to New Urbanists — finite villages, legibly centered and edged — does indeed revive a very “traditional” spatial form. Industrial work is not returning to Hercules, but the resulting landscape resembles nothing so closely as a company town.
Abandonment from the Outside In: The Dispersed Landscapes of Deindustrialization So far this chapter has traced how prewar forms, forces, models, and sensibilities persisted or mutated in the postwar. It has treated of these inherited techniques in the affirmative — as
to place. Rejecting Modernism and reviving an edited version of the premodern city, New Urbanism might in fact amount to a kind of postmodernism; see Sonia A. Hirt, “Premodern, Modern, Postmodern?: Placing New Urbanism into a Historical Perspective,” Journal of Planning History 8 (2009): 248–273. The possibility that the New Urbanist program might itself have reproduced, not reformed, the patterns of suburban life has not gone unnoticed; see Dan Trudeau and Patrick Malloy, “Suburbs in Disguise?: Examining the Geographies of the New Urbanism,” Urban Geography 32 (2011): 424–447. More than anything, in the Charter and in most concrete implementations, New Urbanists have maintained a clear, causal faith in the ability of physical form to conjure up a united “community” in its image. For three accounts critical of this assumption, increasing in pitch, see David Schuyler, “The New Urbanism and the Modern Metropolis,” Urban History 24 (1997): 344–358; Dell Upton, “New Urbanism,” in Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, eds. Karen Christensen and David Levinson (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003), vol. 3, 992–997; and David Harvey, “The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap,” Harvard Design Magazine (Winter–Spring 1997): 68–69. Other key documents from the first wave of New Urbanists include Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater- Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000); Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993); Peter Calthorpe, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001); and, for one geographer’s take on their place in the intellectual history of planning, Emily Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2005). 45 The Herculean newsletter (Summer 2009), 1; “Hercules” folder, CCCHS. 46 Contra Costa Times, 3 July 2000. 47 San Francisco Chronicle, 21 October 1981.
184 regulative ideals toward which those imparting form to new suburban spaces might still orient their practice, or else ideals against which non-conforming spaces might yet reasonably be appraised and held to account. And yet, the fact is that since the 1970s the industrial landscapes of the Carquinez have borne the marks of large-scale abandonment. Out on its specific edge of the bay, the Carquinez has become a belt of ruination, a dispersed archipelago of idiosyncratic husks and residues that can be difficult to cognize in full. The vectoral and sectoral specialization of suburban kinds, so strategic in an age of industrial expansion, ended up producing a highly vulnerable set of suburban landscapes, economic monocultures that, built of a piece, have been vacated just as readily, subject to swift and stark rounds of abandonment by still-mobile capital. Alongside the broad-based deindustrialization of San Francisco and Oakland, which began in earnest in the 1950s (Fig. 8.13) — and to which the suburbanization of industry of course contributed — the region’s working edges have long since found themselves in an advanced state of fraying: jobs fewer and farther between, downtowns quieter and emptier, the effaced ruins of old, hefty workplaces cryptic in their solicitations. Suburban ruins: these are among the defining artifacts of the Bay Area’s late-twentieth-century landscape.48 There are established American canons in place for seeing and making sense of ruins as they materialize downtown. The experience of Urban Renewal, from the first federal legislation in 1949 to its eventual phasing out under Nixon, normalized scenes of large-scale demolition and displacement at the core of nearly every major American city and many smaller ones (Fig. 8.14).49 With those scenes, with those emplotments of “obsolescence” and “renewal,” have come
48 Histories of deindustrialization are numerous. Much of that literature, until recently, has proliferated basically homologous tales of rise, fall, and, sometimes, rebirth. For a sense of the standard emplotments of “decline” and the “postindustrial,” one might profitably begin with Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); John P. Hoerr, And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988); Howard Gillette, Jr., Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post- Industrial City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); S. Paul O’Hara, Gary: The Most American of All American Cities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); and, for a round of deindustrialization that predates World War II, Laurence F. Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835–1955 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). On Detroit alone, extant commentary (of decidedly mixed quality) could fill shelves. Salient analyses include Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Dora Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit (Göttingen: Steidl, 2010); and Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy (New York: Penguin, 2013). Studies in the visual culture of the postindustrial and the “ruined” have drawn heavily, whether they say so or not, from Camilo Vergara, The New American Ghetto (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997); and Camilo Vergara, American Ruins (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003). Critiques of Vergara’s ways of seeing have themselves assembled into a genre of scholarly disavowal; see, for instance, Elvin Wyly, “Things Pictures Don’t Tell Us: In Search of Baltimore,” City 14 (2010): 497–528. On American “decline” thinking and catastrophism more broadly, see Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993); and Mike Davis, Dead Cities (New York: The New Press, 2002), which includes a rich treatment of abandonment in Vernon, the “exclusively industrial” suburb southeast of Los Angeles. See also Neil Smith, Paul Caris, and Elvin Wyly, “The ‘Camden Syndrome’ and the Menace of Suburban Decline: Residential Disinvestment and Its Discontents in Camden County, New Jersey,” Urban Affairs Review 36 (March 2001): 497–531. 49 The literature on Urban Renewal is too vast to survey in this context, but among recent work see Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Francesca Russello Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Michael Johns,
185 stock metaphors of the city’s “rotting core,” its stopped “heart,” organismic tropes that, like City Beautiful programs before them, presume wholesale redemption and cure radiating out from the city’s densest center. The edges of abandonment prove far more difficult to cognize, even properly to see, for those expecting spectacles of ruination at the core. Richmond’s flatlands are consumed by postindustrial husks of every shape and size. Down the strait, specks of ruin materialize at least every mile, nestled irregularly in vegetation. The last whaling run left Point Molate in 1971; the red-brick station was destroyed in 1989.50 Company-town hotels for visiting executives closed down serially beginning in the 1940s, at Eckley and many other of the smallest Carquinez settlements.51 The piers that once supported the grain warehouses of Port Costa protrude from the water, crumbling of their own volition and that of the teredo (or the naval shipworm) which has bored through the wood with impunity. Eckley now consists of a half-hearted park, an isolated monument to pasts real and imagined, one leftover scale model from the Port Costa Brick Works, a too-serene fishing pier, and, still marinating just offshore, the disintegrated ferryboat Garden City, out of service since 1922 and a testimony, in name anyhow, to the supersession of one venerable suburban vision (Fig. 8.15).52 Elsewhere absence is the only presence. The cement plant at Cowell ceased production in the 1960s, and the palm-bedecked mill village, tarred by 1969 as a “bastion against progress,” was condemned to demolition. The only signature of industrial Cowell these days is a grassy mound, visible from the nearest subdivision, that conceals the old slag heap (Fig. 8.16).53 Some industry, certainly, survives. The U.S. Steel plant at Pittsburg now goes by USS–POSCO, having been acquired by South Korean capital (to the vocal dismay of local nativists, as the geographer Allan Pred detailed) in the 1980s.54 C&H, its air sickly sweet, keeps refining the sugar Bay Areans encounter in inch-square packets on restaurant tables across the region, even as its workforce now resides almost exclusively outside the town — many in Solano County, across the Zampa Bridge on Interstate 80 — and commutes by car. Shell presses on on the straggling east side of Martinez, recalling headier times at a boosterish employee museum not far from the refinery. By the 1990s, however, the trend was no longer deniable: the county’s “industrial foundation” was in a state of unrecoverable “erosion.”55 The miscellany of these ruinscapes can confound well-intentioned local historians, who often default to stereotyped tales of rise and fall, decline and renewal. Their lurid, still-life optics of landscape, too, obey certain regularities that can shade into cliché. Those charged, for instance, with “remembering days past” at Hercules Powder, which shuttered in 1976, opened their city-commissioned volume with a predictable tableau: “The plant is rusted and decaying,
Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), supplies an efficient cultural history of this moment. 50 “U.S. Orders End to Whaling,” San Francisco Chronicle, 2 March 1971; “Last U.S. Whaling Station Destroyed,” Pittsburg Post–Dispatch, 24 August 1989. 51 “Old Hotel Razed,” Oakland Tribune, 13 July 1947. 52 “Eckley Park Will Salute Past,” Contra Costa Times, 8 October 1998; “Setting Sights on a Shoreline Park,” Contra Costa Times, 11 September 1992. When the ferry was retired, in 1922, the local memory-makers anthropomorphized in a big way, holding a full-on funeral for the boat. The “life” and ceremonial “death” of things: these have a long history. “Boat Is Given Funeral,” Red Bluff Daily, 17 June 1922. 53 “Bastion against Progress Will Soon Vanish,” Contra Costa Life, 26 January 1969; “Lost Cities of the East Bay,” Contra Costa Times, 23 October 1994. 54 Allan Pred, “Outside(rs) In and Inside(rs) Out: South Korean Capital Encounters Organized Labor in a California Industrial Suburb,” in Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent, eds. Allan Pred and Michael John Watts (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 155–191. 55 “East County Witnesses Erosion of Its Industrial Foundation,” Contra Costa Times, 3 March 1997.
186 the Clubhouse doors are boarded up, and vacant Village houses are vandalized. The company town of Hercules Powder Works is no more. Across the freeway new life abounds.”56 At Hercules, at Pinole, at Giant and the other weakly regulated powder towns, as we have seen, destruction was a periodic occurrence, an event that observers could locate in time; the ruins so deposited, though scenes of serial and unevenly distributed death, became touristic sights for urbanites before their reconstruction (Fig. 8.17). Once abandoned, once left to their own devices, the ruins of deindustrialization are slower sorts of things. They linger. They decay. They haunt. They endure. As time passes, some would say, they “await” and come to “invite” redevelopment. Indeed, the new, self-consciously whole Hercules became conceivable only once the powder works had shuttered — and the brownfield site, extensively remediated, was cleared of its old pipes. The clubhouse, the old mess hall, the odd cottage: these residues still stand at Hercules, facing the neo-traditional new town across the street. Yet they have eluded direct interpretation or theming, neither preserved, exactly, nor condemned to erasure (Figs. 8.18–8.22).57 It matters acutely how we see these ruins. It also matters why so many around the bay don’t see them — what keeps these scenes outside everyday fields of visibility. What sorts of presences and absences we ascribe to these landscapes, how we make them sensible, what stories we bother to tell about their pasts: these conjure or foreclose specific senses of the suburban future. The dominant tendency — scholarly, popular, journalistic, political — since the 1970s has been to render such landscapes in the negative: that is, in terms of what used to be there, but what they now lack. At best, this has equipped a non-obvious politics of memory, a contest over how to curate, critique, and leverage the past — and over who, exactly, might make such designations.58 Still, the dominant argot of ruin-gazing is quite hopeless, invested in deep
56 Cori Ojala and Kevin McGrath, Remembering Days Past: Hercules, California, 1879 to 1979 (Vallejo, Calif.: Wheeler Printing, 1979), i. 57 Some worker housing has been salvaged in the name of industrial memory — Queen Anne cottages, for the most part, restored and relocated to two streets on the edge of town — and it twice won awards from preservation societies: the 1987–88 Western Home Awards and the Renaissance ’85 Prize. See Historic Homes of Hercules brochures, “Hercules” folder, CCCHS. 58 Recent work has charted directions beyond “ruins” as fetish, as inert matter, or as taken-for-granted endpoint, the “after” to an industrial “before.” One generation of cultural-studies scholars dedicated themselves almost entirely to questions of popular memory, official memorialization, and their disjunctures. See, e.g., Mike Wallace, “Industrial Museums and the History of Deindustrialization” [1987], in Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 87–100; Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo, Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); and Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). On the unreliability of this analytic frame, do see Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 127–150. Other, divergent cultural histories of the postindustrial include Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), which sacrifices landscape analysis to some degree; Mark Binelli, “Fabulous Ruin,” in Detroit City Is the Place to Be (New York: Picador, 2012), 269–287, which is skeptical in all the right ways; Alice Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), an ethnography conducted amid the ruinscape; and Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), which compares meaning-making in the Midwestern “belt” and Southern Ontario’s “bowl.” Sean Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), bears with the tools of network analysis to diagram Youngstown and Allentown’s divergent fates since midcentury. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press, 2010), embroiders a broader cultural history of class. Jeff Byles, Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (New York: Harmony, 2005), moves from the ruins left by abandonment to the mechanics of th3eir removal.
187 nostalgia without much in the way of mourning. Numerous columns have run on the “lost cities” of the Carquinez, entirely passive “ghost towns” where, we learn, there is “nothing” to see and no reason to visit.59 An organismic, all-or-nothing vocabulary of erasure takes the lead: Tormey met its “date of death,” journalists crowed, in 1971.60 The Selby smelter “died.”61 Elsewhere Carquinez ruinsspeak has been almost fanatically hokey. When Selby’s tower was felled in 1973, giving way to an expanse of black pavement that still confuses drivers passing by San Pablo Avenue, or U.S. 40, the San Francisco Chronicle ran what became a stock image of the demolition with the caption “How to Blow Your Stack” (Figs. 8.23, 8.24).62 After Winehaven closed shop, local journalists proved helpless in the face of available puns regarding the town’s ghostly “spirits.”63 In a rare glimmer of scholarly attention, the environmental historian Richard White took notice in 2012, writing in a magazine piece on Mare Island that the Carquinez had “become driveover country…reduced down to the Carquinez and Benicia–Martinez bridges” but finding hope in the “grim grandeur” of its “emblematic messes.” “Past and present,” White wrote, “cohabit in a grand, confusing jumble. The ugly and the beautiful are not so much juxtaposed as combined. Let the light change, or step back a few yards, and what seemed sad and derelict becomes,” as it had for the best Romantics, “enchanting.”64 In the main, however, these ruins remain quite peripheral in academic histories and geographies of the region, which still attend with a vengeance to San Francisco, Oakland, and the expanses of Silicon Valley before thinking to jump the East Bay Hills. Why? The raw dispersal of ruin may explain the inattention up to a point. There has been little truly eye-catching monumentalization, either: nothing like the row of smokestacks standing guard outside Pittsburgh at the site of the Homestead strike (Fig. 8.25), no Lowell system to re-experience, no large-scale reuse — yet — resulting, as at Allentown’s Bethlehem Steel plant, in a casino. Nor, as with San Francisco’s earthquake, which in an age of seismic retrofitting continues to frame bayside imaginaries of destruction, can these sites of
59 John Mercurio, “Fairview, a Contra Costa Ghost Town,” Lateral Connection: The Central San Employee Newsletter (October 2005), “Fairview” folder, CCCHS. 60 “June 1: Date of Death for a Small Town,” Oakland Tribune, 28 February 1971. 61 “Ghost Town Stays as Industry Dies,” Oakland Tribune, 19 June 1971. 62 “How to Blow Your Stack,” San Francisco Chronicle, 15 June 1973. See also “A Peaceful Façade, A Stormy Past,” Contra Costa Times, 18 March 2001; and Keith G. Olsen, “Where in the H___ Is Tormey?” Crockett Signal (April 1998), “Selby” folder, CCCHS. The very unlocatability of some of these ex-towns, whose identities had been so tied to specific production sites, provoked its own kind of amusement in local-history circles. The Selby site remained toxic, and there was an outcry in 2001 when inspectors discovered that cracks in that pavement were allowing fumes to seep into Tormey and adjacent communities; “Former Slag Site Continues to Pollute the Bay,” Contra Costa Times, 18 March 2001. 63 “The Spirits of Winehaven,” San Ramon Valley Times, 2 October 1994. 64 Richard White, “Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,” Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 2 (Summer 2012), 55, 69, 57. Two wide-ranging histories of ruin-gazing as a source of fascination, not mourning, are the lordly Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953); and Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay (Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968). The landscapes anchoring such accounts are most often the ruins of classical antiquity, which provoked wonder and rumination well into the nineteenth century and became indexical sites for the Romantics’ pronouncements on the passage of time. The ruins of war, differently, have also been common foci for popular canons of ruin-gazing. On these, see Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); and Karen Till, “The New Berlin: From Kiez to Kosmos,” in The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 31–58. On the complexities of nostalgia, with or without cues from the built environment, see Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2000), especially 3–247; and Susan Stewart, “Our Ruin,” The Kenyon Review 19 (Winter 1997): 145–152.
188 abandonment — of matter’s own slow decomposition — be traced to individual, catastrophic moments of collapse.65 These fundamentally ordinary, anonymous ruins of the middle landscape remain ambivalent, sublime, perhaps, only in their scatteration, their extent. And yet, if the suburbanization of industry is and has been normal, then we should be prepared to recognize that many of the indexical ruins of the postindustrial age — at Ford’s River Rouge plant way out on the edges of sprawling Detroit, in Camden (not Philadelphia), in low-slung Watts and Compton — are suburban ruins. These are the ruins that a certain slice of the educated reading public has learned to aestheticize by way of the Chilean photographer Camilo Vergara. His The New American Ghetto (1997) and American Ruins (2003) have pored over those scenes, which loud voices in public still pathologize as certifiably “inner” cities, somehow constitutively un-suburban. And yet, when, following on the acclaim won by American Ruins, Vergara decided to add a Northern California site to “Invincible Cities,” the digital portion of his longitudinal “Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto,” he settled not on San Francisco’s more ragged precincts, not on Oakland’s abundant rust, but on Richmond.66
Industrial ruin, then, has been one of the dominant facts about the landscape of the Carquinez for close to half a century. “Sprawl,” so called, has been the other. These are standard themes in postwar urban history. Most accounts have them mutually exclude, designating opposed poles, the center and edge, inside and outside, of the urban region. Or, alternatively in these narratives, while they may never touch, their relationship is causal: flight to new suburbs produced, indeed was a case of, the central industrial city’s abandonment. We have already seen unambiguously that the deep-seated logics of industrial suburbanization led, in the breach, to a dispersed landscape of industrial ruination, one that we should be prepared to recognize, visualize, get close to, and describe with the finest affective and morphological grain. But the argument here takes a different tack. We will think ruin and sprawl — “ruin” and “sprawl” — together in a new and perhaps untoward way. By the mid-1960s, Contra Costa County had achieved another sort of notoriety. As it industrialized in its postwar phase, vast residential subdivisions began to fill in the land between its new, horizontal machines in the garden. Santa Clara County, granted, was perhaps better known than Contra Costa on the national scene. T. J. Kent could write confidently of that valley as “the Bay Area’s world-famous, early postwar example of growth-by-sprawl, auto-based suburbia, and environmental depredation.”67 In The Last Landscape (1968), William H. Whyte could reflect that Santa Clara had been “so splattered with subdivisions as to be the prime
65 On the earthquake, its “ruins,” and their perception as such, see Rebecca Solnit, “The Ruins of Memory,” in Mark Klett, After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 18–31; Monica Sutherland, The Damndest Finest Ruins: The Full Story of San Francisco’s Great Earthquake–Fire (New York: Coward–McCann, 1959); and Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 191–242. On early Anglo San Franciscans’ ways of seeing (or unseeing) the ruins of Spanish and Native settlement atop which the new city rose, see Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 95–100. 66 See “Richmond, CA Database” at “Invincible Cities,” Vergara’s photography site with annotations by Howard Gillette, Jr., accessed 1 May 2016, http://invinciblecities.camden.rutgers.edu/intro.html; Camilo Vergara, The New American Ghetto (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997); and Camilo Vergara, American Ruins (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003). 67 “San Francisco Bay Area regional planning: essay outlines, 1978–1981,” Box 1, Folder 19, Thomas (T. J.) Kent Papers, BANC MSS 99/33 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
189 example of urban sprawl in all the U.S.”68 Regionally, though, Contra Costa loomed just as large, a frequently wielded example of how not to grow. Assemblyman John Knox of Richmond spoke out in 1964, pillorying the “row-upon-row sameness” that had come to define Concord and Martinez (Fig. 8.26), “poor subdivision planning” that was “sterile and unimaginative.”69 Councilman Robert Schroeder noted “a number of new developments in Walnut Creek that do not enhance our city,” and the editors of the Contra Costa Times sorrowfully agreed: “planners in general,” it had come to seem, “don’t plan. They too often merely approve or disapprove proposals brought to them” by speculators. This led, they said, to “subdivision blight.”70 In his hectoring How to Kill a Golden State (1968), William Bronson slotted a Contra Costa backyard under the heading “Ticky-Tacky” and declared that the county — not Santa Clara, not San Mateo, not the southern reaches of Alameda — had “undergone perhaps the worst-planned growth in the state.” It had “given its shoreline and most of its water-view land over to industry” long ago, and now “already half of its rich agricultural land over to housing like that which is pictured here [in a backyard image crisscrossed with power lines, so shadowy as to make its reproduction futile]…. Pure, undiluted California ‘outdoor living.’”71 One of the most common tropes in characterizing these new, thinly spread suburban landscapes, curiously, was as a species of ruins. Standing, it seemed, in stark contrast to the prewar criteria for suburban form whose lineages and aftershocks we have traced, new residential suburbs came in for critique, over and over, as constitutively “formless.” Formless suburbs, according to their critics, in their “contagion” became ruinous of outlying nature: agricultural lands, residual open space, watercourses, soils, and so on, which yielded to the new subdivision geometry; there was an ecological correlate to this line of attack. And yet, sub rosa, the more persistent and telling streak in this criticism was to render these new built environments — at the very moment of their appearance on the landscape — as themselves ruins, “new ruins,” paradoxically, without age, history, or viable futures. It was in California — Northern California, not the usual scapegoat to the south — that this line of thinking came most arrestingly into focus. It drew in surprising ways from the vitalist intellectual history we have sustained, and it had one very influential carrier westward in the figure of Lewis Mumford.
“Ruin” as Diagnosis: Lewis Mumford and the “Suburban Myth” The broadsides against Contra Costa took shape amid far broader anti-suburban jeremiads that achieved their highest pitch in the late 1950s. Lewis Mumford’s voice in those jeremiads was
68 William H. Whyte, The Last Landscape (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 178. 69 “Knox’s War on the ‘Little Boxes,’” Contra Costa Times, 24 April 1964. Joel Garreau kept up the assault twenty- plus years later, in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 311: “At least San Franciscans concede these places exist. That is not true for the land beyond the Berkeley and Oakland Hills…At the other end of the Caldecott Tunnel the world ends. That is the edge of urbanity, of hope for one’s esthetic soul. ‘No one’ lives beyond Tilden Park.” 70 “The Attack on the ‘Little Boxes,’” Contra Costa Times, 26 April 1964. See also “County Looks at Planning Horrors,” Contra Costa Times, 30 March 1962. Contra Costa County created its Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), which oversees annexations, in 1963 to achieve some degree of growth control; “More Cities, Fewer Special Districts Seen in Future,” Contra Costa Times, 29 October 1965. 71 William Bronson, How to Kill a Golden State (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 90–91. Bronson was clear- eyed about the fact that “sprawl” was by no means a Southern California peculiarity: “Worse scenes might be found in Los Angeles, but then Los Angeles doesn’t claim to be America’s most beautiful city” (67). Oakland’s highway overpasses, too, “are classic city-wreckers, and in sheer brutishness match anything Los Angeles and other unfortunate Southland cities can offer” (117). Bill Owens set his classic photo-essay Suburbia [1973] (New York: Fotofolio, 1999), in the Alameda County town of Livermore.
190 difficult not to hear. Toward the end of The City in History (1961) the polymathic critic considered those landscapes recently deposited by speculative subdividers on the edge of the American metropolis. In short, they were a mess, and Mumford’s vitriol turned chiefly on criteria of their “formlessness.” “The forces that automatically pumped highways and motor cars and real estate developments into the open country,” he wrote, “have produced the formless urban exudation”; a “formless mass of thinly spread semi-urban tissue” had filled what was notionally empty; this amounted to “not in fact a new sort of city, but an anti-city. As in the concept of anti-matter, the anti-city annihilates the city whenever it collides with it.”72 Urban, semi-urban, anti-urban: formless on all counts, incomprehensibly between city and country, and in turn barely there. For Mumford, suburbia was thinkable principally in terms of what it was not. His text is peppered with the language of negation: falsity, emptiness, anonymity, ennui. With highways everywhere, he had asserted in 1958, “the city would be nowhere: a mechanized nonentity.”73 But something materially did remain. It was, for him, a landscape of ruins: not just “mess,” not just “mass,” but “total urban wreckage.”74 Historians have provincialized Mumford’s polemics in recent years for his class blinders, his too-normative definition of “community,” and his reliance on the homogenizing shortcuts typical of that era’s pop sociologies of a dulled “mass society.”75 The rudiments of that critique were largely intact by the Depression, forged amid a different ideational climate and out of encounters with speculative landscapes built out during earlier waves of suburbanization — those of the 1910s and 1920s more than the 1950s. So far this study has attended to prescriptions for “good” or “best” suburban form, which were intact by 1929 and codified during the 1930s, with all the attendant exclusions, by the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration. We now turn to the underside of those prescriptions. Simultaneous with the rise of these approved ideals and modular forms, the essential repertoire of anti-suburban denunciation, only later redeployed in the age of Levittown and Lakewood, took shape as well.76 We do well to reperiodize, then, pursuing through Mumford a different intellectual prehistory — of suburban ruin. If Mumford’s judgments can often seem resolutely ex cathedra, enforcing an unswerving metaphysics of “organism” and “form,” most of his habits as a seer and sensor of landscape arose out of concrete passages through varied and inchoate suburbias on either American coast. Tracing these encounters — first with greater New York, then over the course of an extended relationship with Northern California — we can observe Mumford working out a very specific
72 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961), 508, 505. 73 Lewis Mumford, “The Highway and the City” [1958], in The Highway and the City (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 245. 74 Mumford, The City in History, 508. 75 See, notably, Becky Nicolaides, “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs,” in The New Suburban History, eds. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 80–98. For a contemporary account that covers many of the same authors, see Scott Donaldson, The Suburban Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). See also Bennett M. Berger, “The Myth of Suburbia,” Journal of Social Issues 17 (1961): 38–49. On aspects of Mumford’s declensionism with respect to traditional urban cores, see Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), passim. 76 The best-known attempt to historicize some of these reactive ideas, Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 117–120, says only a little about “anti-sprawl” agitation in the 1920s, focuses on Britain more than the U.S., sees Mumford’s work as essentially derivative of British ideas, and cites Mumford’s pre–World War II writings only to document the occurrence of the word “sprawl,” not to explore the framework within which he deploys it.
191 and durable repertoire of denigration, characterizing the built environment of speculative suburbs as a new, uniquely volatile sort of ruin. The standing of these “ruins” — built environments that amount to signal infractions of good urban form — may tell us more about reigning ontologies of suburban landscape than do the various spatial “models” reformers lauded or, in Mumford’s case, along with the Regional Planning Association of America, actively helped to realize. Specifically, attending to these putative suburban “ruins” allows us to reappraise Mumford — the third component of the argument — as a distinctively vital materialist for whom the built environment, even or especially when formless, harbors a non-negotiable animacy all its own. Ruins, too, live.
Between 1916 and 1919, having bowed out of enrollment at City College, Mumford spent his days wandering the developing edges of greater New York (Fig. 8.27). The idea was to undertake a comprehensive survey in the style of the geographers he was studying with gusto — the Scotsman Patrick Geddes, his declared “master,” and French regionalists in the tradition of Paul Vidal de la Blache. “I began to walk systematically over every neighborhood,” he recalled, “reading the buildings as if they were so many pages of a book.”77 But if legibility and system were the stated desiderata — if “survey” implies a synoptic view from above — Mumford’s notes, typed each evening and occasionally joined by a watercolor or sketch, evidence another, more restless sensorium at work: an irregular series of glimpses and glances, an ambular body materially imprinted in three dimensions by the structures around him, accruing a lasting set of “habits…of seeing, appraising, sketching, and looking ahead” that for the rest of his life would “spontaneously go into play and vivify even chance impressions.”78 Mumford was at that time a Manhattanite, but the suburbanizing edges of the metropolis were the laboratories of these critical habits, sites of both fascination and bewilderment. An odd temporality attends Mumford’s earliest suburban gapings. In a strong sense suburban ruin is already with us. These stillborn landscapes are ruins from the outset; speculative suburbs, for Mumford, do not fall but unromantically rise into ruin (Figs. 8.28– 8.30).79 In Queens, “disease is already sporadically manifesting itself” — it was latent, he suggests — “on the strip that edges the North River,” the result of “swamp land, factory land, home-land, trucking land mixt in one weltering, sprawling muddle.”80 Land-use mixture was enough for Mumford to decry, betokening a kind of contagious ruin by proximity, but he eagerly pathologized “little buildings” themselves, rows of them, that “were living a degraded life” off in
77 Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: The Early Years (Boston: Beacon, 1982), 18. Robert Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–20, treats of these strolls in brief, as, more substantially, does Aaron Sachs, “Lewis Mumford’s Urbanism and the Problem of Environmental Modernity,” Environmental History 21 (2016): 638–659. There is a fairly vast literature on urban walking as a way of knowing. Recent attempts to theorize it include Joseph Pierce and Mary Lawhon, “Walking as Method,” The Professional Geographer 67 (2015): 655–662; Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, eds., Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2008); Evrick Brown and Timothy Shortell, eds., Walking in Cities: Quotidian Mobility as Urban Theory, Method, and Practice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015); Jon Anderson, “Talking Whilst Walking: A Geographical Archaeology of Knowledge,” Area 36 (2004): 254–261; and John Wylie, “A Single Day’s Walking,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 234–247. 78 Mumford, Sketches from Life, 155. 79 For an excellent and sustained tracing of this imaginary through urban scenes of the nineteenth century, see Yablon, Untimely Ruins. 80 Lewis Mumford, 21 August 1916, “Notes on Greater New York (1916),” Lewis Mumford Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania (hereafter ‘LM’), Box 180, Folder 8027.
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Astoria. They were “jerry-built” — Mumford pushes this term into service over and over — slapped together piecemeal, never fully intact to begin with, unfinishable to his satisfaction, and so primordially decayed.81 What we see here is something other than “obsolescence,” justificatory watchword of the Urban Renewal regime, if that term is to convey anachronism, a simple temporal mismatch.82 Rather, Mumford’s brand-new ruins are actively in the process of coming apart: they exist only insofar as they decay; cheap row houses “live” insofar as they “die.” Tendency toward ruin, on this telling, is the built environment’s basic activity. Yet learning to see, or to sense, this ongoing ruination, he felt, was a uniquely suburban challenge: “As one approaches the city this tendency becomes plain, but on the fringes of the city it is only barely detectable.”83 More pronounced in these prewar notes is Mumford’s assured futurism, his intimations of ruin foreseen but deferred. In the “Jersey hinterland” of Hackensack, Bergenfield, and Tenafly, “suburban settlements, they are scarcely villages, amble over the territory,” amounting only to “a solid foundation for massdom three decades hence.”84 Forest Hills, in central Queens, is “fairly open” for the time being, but Woodhaven, the area southwest of it, is “portentously big and still spreading”; “in a few years the transitional section between the two ‘developments’ will be obliterated, and the houses themselves will lapse into dinginess” (Fig. 8.31).85 Now and then Mumford harnesses his aesthetic points to a more thoroughgoing critique of capitalist speculation itself, and on this front Queens, where elevated rail, in the form of the IRT Flushing Line (today’s 7 train), had just recently arrived (Fig. 8.32), is his most reliable exhibit: “every acre…has already been laid out into streets. My Hammond’s [atlas] makes this assertion in black and white, and local signs, lampposts, and advertisements lend corroborations, but on ocular evidence…[t]he thriving urban boro of Queens is something that at yet exists only on paper.” He is a bit ashamed that real-estate concerns are “the only groups…that will exercize foresight in such a vital matter as housing…. I also look forward to this kind of ‘development’ (so-called) but I do not choose to think it brilliant.” But his target is more consistently the built environment, imminent physical disorder itself. On the leading edge of the Bronx, one even “prays for a good, strong, devastating fire to cleanse that festering semblance of a city.”86 Ruins foreseen as inevitable, in the first instance, become ruins wished, in the last. Mumford’s negative capability — turning on that fascinating indeterminacy of the not-quite and not-yet — slips into outright negation. Suburban ruins, the brand-new and the foretold, would populate Mumford’s published utterances throughout the 1920s. In “The Wilderness of Suburbia” (1921) we hear of “dingy-new
81 Lewis Mumford, 13 March 1917, “Notes on Greater New York (1917),” LM, Box 180, Folder 8028. 82 See Daniel M. Abramson, Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), on the complexities of this term. 83 Lewis Mumford, 17 August 1917, “Fringe of the Boros,” in “Notes on Greater New York (1917),” LM, Box 180, Folder 8028. 84 Lewis Mumford, “Manhattan Conurbation: Jersey Hinterland,” n.d., in “Notes on Greater New York (1917),” LM, Box 180, Folder 8028. 85 Lewis Mumford, 3 December 1917, “Notes on Greater New York (1917),” LM, Box 180, Folder 8028; emphasis added. 86 Lewis Mumford, 10 March 1917, “Notes on Greater New York (1917),” LM, Box 180, Folder 8028. Max Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), supplies a wide-ranging history of this trope, and is strangely essential reading.
193 apartment houses” in southern Brooklyn.87 In Sticks and Stones (1924), his first crack at architectural history, urban “development” itself has the scare quotes removed but is cast as actively “tolerating and producing blasted and disorderly landscapes” that are, crucially, “frayed at the edges.”88 In “Botched Cities” (1929) he tried excavating the abandoned traces of earlier suburbias: “who has not come upon developments…defined by a buried curb, a standpipe, a weatherbeaten street sign — relics of a boom fifty years ago.”89 Instant or imminent ruins are the backdrop for many of the 1920s pronouncements issued by Mumford’s colleagues in the Regional Planning Association of America. “New quarters of our cities are scarcely in existence before they begin to ‘run down,’” the architect Henry Wright, instrumental to that group’s demonstrations at Sunnyside and Radburn, had written in 1925 (Fig. 8.33). “The eventual fate of the extravagant neighborhood is to be added to those ill-kept and blighted districts which occupy the intermediate areas of our extending cities…. [T]he city consecutively destroys its border developments.”90 And such figurations permeate The Culture of Cities (1938), of which Mumford’s National Book Award–winning City in History, lest we forget, was largely a rewrite.91
87 Lewis Mumford, “The Wilderness of Suburbia,” The New Republic, 7 September 1921, 44. Brooklyn, Queens, and New York’s other outer boroughs had been municipally part of the city since 1898, but for Mumford, and for the present analysis, their landscapes were suburban. 88 Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization [1924] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1955), 96. 89 Lewis Mumford, “Botched Cities,” The American Mercury (October 1929), 145. 90 Henry Wright, “The Road to Good Houses” [1925], in Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America, ed. Carl Sussman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), 121, 124. This piece is drawn from the RPAA’s themed issue of the Survey Graphic; the contributions by Mumford, Clarence Stein, Stuart Chase, and Robert Bruère, too, are worth examining with these tropes in mind. On their collective style of working, see Kermit C. Parsons, “Collaborative Genius: The Regional Planning Association of America,” Journal of the American Planning Association 60 (1994): 462–482. After Mumford, Wright was the most persistent critic of suburbia. His piece includes a farcical poem entitled “Suburbanitis.” And Wright, too, was fixated on the outer boroughs of Brooklyn and, especially, Queens. In Upper Astoria, parts of Jamaica, Ozone Park, and developments near Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Long Island City, “we have people of evidently most limited potentiality getting a taste of what New York might be if it wasn’t New York”; see “Report of D. M. Kendall and Henry Wright on Their Investigation of the Present Speculative Building Operations Now in Progress in Brooklyn and Long Island” (May 1924), 21, Henry Wright Papers, Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Box 1. Wright warned ominously of “contagious habits” in subdivision design: “The habit persists though the infection long ago passed away.” See “No Man’s Land of Real Estate” (1919), Box 1, Henry Wright Papers. Note that Wright was concerned most especially street width, lot shape, and lot size, more than the buildings that rose on those lots. “If there could be another Nobel prize,” he wrote, “it should be offered for a new type of standardized street layout for our cities”; “Wanted: A Substitute for the Gridiron Street System” (n.d.), Box 3, Henry Wright Papers. The conventional wisdom by the Depression was that 1920s Queens “grew vastly and hideously” — the vector of New York that was most like Los Angeles, the single-family flatlands of Detroit, or, most conspicuously, the many aborted suburban developments of the mid-decade Florida boom. For even earlier intimations that Queens was doomed to ruin, Benjamin Clarke Marsh, “Statement of Mr. Benjamin Clarke Marsh,” in City Planning: Hearing before the Committee on the District of Columbia, United States Senate, on the Subject of City Planning (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), 17; and Henry C. Wright, “Rapid Transit in Relation to the Housing Problem,” in Proceedings of the Second National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion (Boston: The Conference, 1910), 125–135. The Queensboro Bridge had just opened when the first NCCP convened, and its implications for the edges of New York were very much on the planners’ agenda. 91 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), especially 210–218.
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New York ever remained Mumford’s evaluative standard. He subjected no other city to the same physical scrutiny, either as employed architectural critic or amateur wanderer.92 But he traveled the U.S. a great deal between The Culture of Cities and The City in History, refining his diagnoses and prognoses of suburban ruin during weeks or months spent in places physically quite unlike his home. Los Angeles would seem New York’s canonical Other, and Mumford, who visited but really never lingered long enough to look around, did join the growing chorus.93 But it is Mumford’s extended relationship with Northern, not Southern, California that merits special attention as we follow the realignments of his suburban jeremiad. To Mumford’s eyes, San Francisco suggested with unusual clarity the kind of organic wholeness to which other cities might aspire. In 1941 he addressed the California Housing and Planning Association. San Francisco gives off “that feeling of absolute uniqueness,” he said — notable praise from a theorist of massification — and its well-edged form was somehow inherent in the landscape, to be drawn out rather than imposed: “You have something here…. I could still discern the topographic natural order — the native greenbelts and open spaces following the lines of the hills.” Mumford had seldom really sung the praises of before-the-deluge Queens, except as an honest workaday landscape of truck farming. By San Francisco Bay, an aesthetic, and very Californian, valuation of “nature” took center stage, raising the stakes of its ruination and throwing all things jerry-built into even sharper relief: “The amazingly beautiful natural heritage” faced off against an “atrocious man-made heritage.” Mumford’s targets this time were not the row houses and “interminable” grids, not the “welter” of his New York youth, but the “hot-dog stands and signboards” snaking southward out of town, and the Peninsula’s adjoining subdivisions, constitutively unnatural, inorganic, producing inhabitants who, it stood to reason, were somehow, biologically, less fully alive.94 Mumford was resident on the Stanford campus from 1942 to 1946, called in on special assignment to launch that university’s new, maximally generalist humanities curriculum. He taught a survey course on “Man,” with a proviso: the humanities were to be “part of man’s
92 The geographer Jean Gottmann may have eclipsed Mumford in the 1960s, in the public eye anyhow, as a chronicler of New York’s sheer extent. See Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961); and, on their relationship, Elizabeth Baigent, “Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Jean Gottmann: Divisions over ‘Megalopolis,’” Progress in Human Geography 28 (2004): 687–700; 93 It “already demonstrates” that “these forces [of unchecked dispersal] will automatically destroy the city.” Mumford, The City in History, 503. For an alternative view on Southern California from another visiting New York intellectual, see Nathan Glazer, “Notes on Southern California: ‘A Reasonable Suggestion as to How Things Can Be’?” Commentary, 7 August 1959. 94 Lewis Mumford, “California’s Possibilities,” address to California Housing and Planning Association, 17 June, 1941, LM, Box 9, Folder 710. An interview covering some of the same themes was published as “California’s Possibilities; Aims for the Post-War World; The City of the Future; Planning in a Democracy,” Agenda for Western Housing and Planning 1 (July 1943), 3. The rhetoric of the California landscape’s “naturalness” was not, of course, unique to Mumford, but he spun it anew, most particularly in his discussion of “The Architecture of the Bay Region,” in The Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949), n.p., which accompanied a museum exhibit. For Mumford at this juncture, the “Bay Region Style” — which would include the work of Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, Greene and Greene, and the more modernistic circle around William Wurster — “seem[ed] embedded in the very character of the region.” These buildings “have given form to their very informality.” Their style was, in this sense, “organic” — “unforced,” but “vigorous.” Mumford had first announced the existence of such a style in “The Sky Line: Status Quo,” The New Yorker, 11 October 1947, 104–110.
195 natural history.”95 His welcome address to the faculty cast California as a “garden spot”; English professor John Dodds, a friend, found this all a bit redolent of the usual “California Chamber of Commerce attitude,” but agreed, tidily echoing a generation of determinist human geographers, that “all these natural advantages will be a central part of whatever new culture we can create.”96 Mumford consulted on campus planning, and here too he found in Frederick Law Olmsted’s “essential” unit an integral whole under threat. His final report, a cautious, preventive document in the main, also trafficked in a language that was by now familiar: “every tendency toward scattering and suburban isolation should be resisted as ruinous.” The campus was “the last large open area in what has become practically a single great suburban development.”97 His tone and tropes were shifting, his place-based stock of references widening. But Mumford’s method was growing more detached, more knee-jerk and offhand. He had reached his conclusions regarding San Francisco not as an impressionable pedestrian, but “on the top of Telegraph Hill, looking over the city.”98 (Parenthetically, such a vantage point, pointed south and confined to city limits, vastly scales down, and assigns a speciously easy center and edges to, what has long been a dispersed multi-county region with not a city, but a sizeable body of water, at its core.) In the same 1941 address, he admitted, “I haven’t been able to see much of California.”99 At Stanford, the first time Mumford had dwelt in a setting he deemed entirely suburban, he felt particularly confined, and a combination of ill health and his inability to drive kept him from engaging built environments beyond the campus with anything like the thick- descriptive mandate he had obeyed on the stimulating edges of New York. When he returned to visit at the University of California, Berkeley, for the 1961–62 academic year, offering a course on “The Nature of Life” — not self-enclosed “community” in the sociological sense, he clarified on day one, but “life” itself, a more “complex partnership” which, opening outward, would be “undefinable except in terms of total environment and total span” — he similarly eschewed exploring the Bay Area’s edges.100 Nevertheless, it was in, and in view of, Northern California that Mumford’s optic of suburban “ruin” became more intense and pessimistic, the corresponding landscapes more irredeemable, than ever before. In 1962 he traveled to the university town of Davis, addressing a crowd on “California and the Human Horizon” — his most direct commentary on what might be distinctive about the state and its cities. The stakes were unusually high, he felt: California was visible on the (inter)national stage, metastasizing in population, and always potentially a model, instigating its own imitation (or trying to) elsewhere in the world. Mumford recycled tropes of
95 “Humanities course materials,” LM, Box 182, Folder 8076. For the curricular vision Mumford would attempt to install during his stay, see “The Unified Approach to Knowledge and Life,” in The University and the Future of America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1941), 108–136. 96 John Dodds to Lewis Mumford, 19 April 1942, LM, Box 62, Folder 4649. 97 Lewis Mumford, 6 March 1947, LM, Box 182, Folder 8074. Clarence Stein also took an interest in Stanford’s campus, proposing “a large-scale, blight-proof city” on its adjacent land holdings — and taking the recent housing developments put up by major insurance companies, including MetLife’s Parkmerced, in San Francisco, as examples. “The use or abuse of any part will affect every part. Blight is like a contagious disease: it is practically impossible to prevent its spread”; “Proposal for a Comprehensive Long-Time Program for Development of the Stanford University Property,” 14 August 1951, Clarence Stein Papers, Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Box 4, Folder 23. 98 Mumford, “California’s Possibilities.” 99 Ibid. 100 See University of California, Berkeley, lecture notes, LM, Box 184, Folder 8104. On Mumford’s sedentary habits while in Berkeley, and on the fascinating spectrum of relative “care” and destitution he was ignoring in the peripheral environments of the Central Valley, see Glen Burch to Lewis Mumford, 28 December 1961, LM, Box 66.
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“disorder, blight, dingy mediocrity, screaming neon-lighted vulgarity.” San Francisco and Olmsted’s Stanford remained bite-sized object lessons in urban form. He focused with a new intensity on the suburb as a kind of “slum,” a “green ghetto, half natural, half plastic,” that, edgeless at one scale, was all too enclosed at another.101 But something was different in Mumford’s California, and something about the setting occasioned an iconography more explicit than anything yet dared. He recalled a visit some years prior to Pompeii, whose surrounding landscape “is not too different from that of many parts of California” — vineyards, olives, rolling hills, and the like. But the ancient ruins of Pompeii, by all accounts a “dead city,” compared favorably with the “jumbled junk-edged surroundings” by the bay, the speculative “makeshift” substituting for vital “civic equipment.” “Even in its ruined state,” Pompeii “gives a less ruinous impression.” Ruins are of many kinds. Along the fringes of the bay, and most especially in the Santa Clara Valley surrounding San Jose, what Mumford sensed, “already” and before their world-historical time, was quite literally a set of brand-new ruins. On Pacific Time, this required a brand-new term: he labeled them, between scare quotes, “slurban.”102 That vexing pejorative took on a life of its own in coming years. It peaked in 1970 with “The Making of Slurban America,” a remarkable essay by Karl Belser, Santa Clara County’s director of planning and a colorful intellect in his own right, in which “flagrant ruination” was revealed to be the inborn impetus of the Californian suburb. “A completely irrelevant urban development,” “wild urban growth” with “absurd city boundaries,” had centrifugally “attacked the valley much as cancer attacks the human body.” The planner’s measured prognosis then gave way to diagnosis of instant, sudden ruins in the here and now, coming undone with a wholly new pace: “speedy deterioration” unbuilt the “jerry-built dwelling”; individual postwar houses “began to fall apart before they were completed.”103 Resonances with Mumford’s world of ideas were hardly accidental. Other RPAA alumni had come west over the years. Belser had liaised with Clarence Stein, Mumford’s longtime ally, during Stein’s own extended visits to the Bay Area from 1956 on. Stein deemed Santa Clara “one of those exceptional counties,” “an ideal natural region, such as would have given delight to Patrick Geddes.” In 1957 it was Stein who put Mumford and Belser in touch.104 Belser, for his
101 Lewis Mumford, “California and the Human Horizon” [1962], in The Urban Prospect (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 5, 11, 10. This was an address to the Institute of Planning for the North Central Valley, at the University of California, Davis. 102 Ibid., 20, 6, 4; emphasis added 103 Karl Belser, “The Making of Slurban America,” Cry California 5 (Fall 1970), 1, 5, 8, 15, 13. Similar temporal motifs of unbuilding and premature ruination, though not always foregrounded, are seeded throughout the literature of the late-1950s suburban backlash. See, inter alia, William H. Whyte, Introduction to The Exploding Metropolis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958); Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson, 1964); and much of the criticism collected in Ada Louise Huxtable, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), which, though focused on New York’s traditional urban cores rather its edges, traffics in slogans of “instant blight” (11) and “built-in obsolescence” (176). See, above all, John Keats’s grotesquely satirical novel The Crack in the Picture Window (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), in which the protagonists’ newly bought tract home, complete with its “already-warped door” (21) and titular inbuilt crack, “already” needs “important repair” and can only “descend” along the “certain plunge to slumhood.” Precarious “jerry-building,” Keats assumed, was familiar to anyone with memory of the country’s industrial cities; in the suburbs their collapse “merely began sooner than in any other kind of community, including hobo jungles” (125, 126). 104 Clarence Stein to Karl Belser, 5 October 1957, Clarence Stein Papers, Box 8, Folder 59; Clarence Stein to Lewis Mumford, 5 December 1957, Clarence Stein Papers, Box 8, Folder 63. Belser was also the San Francisco Chronicle’s chosen reviewer for The City in History. Stein had also visited the Bay Area in 1933 and cast aspersions on the subdivisions of southwestern San Francisco, denigrating the “‘dog-house bungalow’ type with practically no
197 part, had been speaking a language of pulsating suburban “entropy,” “humity,” and “welter” since at least 1955, when, having relocated from Michigan, he first attracted national attention for an innovative zoning classification designed to protect agricultural land uses.105 But the convergence of Belser and Mumford, planner and critic, on this one “slurban” trope was hardly foreordained. New suburban environments already in ruins: such a claim is different in kind, and far more specific, than the much-repeated specter of mass suburbia as the abandonable “slums of tomorrow.”106 The implication is not merely that suburbanization, pushing horizontally outward, Chicago School–style, from some originary core, leaves each previous ring of development successively “behind.” Rather, the very life course of new suburban environments, of each individual prefabricated house — thinking vertically now — essentially is just such a fall, an unraveling. A contention about aggregate “formlessness” at the level of street morphology,
lawn or garden space”; Report on San Francisco (1933), in “Miscellaneous Surveys — Secaucus, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, San Francisco,” Clarence Stein Papers, Box 2, Folder 1. He is, however, better known for his work in Los Angeles, especially at the streamlined garden city Baldwin Hills Village (1942). 105 See “Urban Dispersal,” address to the University of Southern California Planning Conference, 17 June 1955, in “Regional Development” folder, Box 2, Karl J. Belser Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Still earlier, in 1953, Belser wrote: “In my opinion the term ‘fringe’ is no longer a valid one. It implies that the area within the corporate limits is a whole piece of goods which is in perfect order and that there is attached at its edges some threads which are moth eaten. The truth is that the moths are active on the whole urban fabric and the eating is much better in the urban core.” See Karl Belser, “Misuse of Land in Fringe Areas and Inadequate Subdivision Standards,” Western City (July 1953). Like Henry Wright before him, Belser defined “blight” in a way that could include “faulty subdivision,” i.e., street patterns rather than the condition of buildings occupying those streets. See outline of address to San Jose Realty Board, 12 March 1954, Box 3, “Subdivision Problems” folder, Karl J. Belser Papers. The suburban jeremiads of Santa Clara County in particular, for all the eventual moral bravado surrounding architecture and aesthetics, had their roots in campaigns with ecological, quite practical goals in mind. On certain of these, see Richard Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), chapters 4 and 6. See also Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The increased pitch of Mumford’s writings by the 1950s, and especially his ecological pessimism, owes in part to contacts he had forged in the Bay Area. The antimodernist Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer had tapped Mumford, as a “moral philosopher,” for the 1955 Wenner-Gren conference “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth,” held at Princeton, specifically to shed light in a post-disciplinary way on the “ethos” of conservation and related questions of “esthetic satisfaction”; see Carl Sauer to W. L. Thomas, 16 March 1954, Box 5, Folder 1, Carl Ortwin Sauer Papers, BANC MSS 77/170 c, The Bancroft Library , University of California, Berkeley; Carl Sauer to Lewis Mumford, 2 March 1954, Box 16, Folder 1, Carl Ortwin Sauer Papers; Michael Williams, To Pass On a Good Earth: The Life and Work of Carl O. Sauer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 154–164. Sauer’s rather doomsaying work was one of Mumford’s key sources on early urbanization as he drafted The City in History. The two corresponded well into the 1970s, but “Man’s Role” was the occasion of their first contact. 106 This imaginary of the “formless” and the “already” ruined has colonial valences as well. When Claude Lévi- Strauss traveled to Lahore as an “archaeologist of space, trying in vain to repiece together the idea of the exotic with the help of a particle here and a fragment of debris there,” he fixated on the city’s unromantic edges. Their indistinction was enough to damn the whole: “A captive in these unmeaningful expanses, I felt my objective slipping beyond reach. Where could it be, the old, authentic Lahore? … [A]t the far end of the badly laid-out and already decrepit suburbia.” See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [1955], trans. John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 43–44. On colonial and postcolonial motifs of “abandonment” more broadly — in the social and economic senses, without too much on landscape — see Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), a book that, along with the work of Giorgio Agamben, has set the agenda for many contemporary theorists who rely on the term. For the physical dimensions of the postcolonial, see Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology (2008): 191–219.
198 visible only on a map or from the air, somehow comes to entail formless buildings that lack the discernible shape of other, non-ruinous house types.107 Belser and Mumford effected a truly surprising slippage, and in so doing they conflated the natural and the cultural landscapes. Confronting subdivisions that, whatever the merits of their design, acted by their presence as ecological agents ruinous of one-time farmland, the critics cast these built environments — counterintuitively and a bit counterproductively — as uninhabitable ruins in and of themselves. Deployed in postwar California, the “slurban” slur came to connote a radically premature agedness-unto-death setting in across a landscape that boosters and health seekers, then as now, had sold as a space of rejuvenation, promising perpetual youth.108 “Slurban” itself had been coined in 1961 by Alfred Heller, leader of California Tomorrow, the organization whose mouthpiece, Cry California, had come to publish Belser’s exercise in ruin-gazing. In California Going, Going…, that group’s 1962 pamphlet regarding “our state’s struggle to stay beautiful and productive,” Heller and Samuel E. Wood equated “slurbs” with “sloppy, sleazy, slovenly, slipshod semi-cities,” holding Santa Clara up, by way of definition, as a test case “readily understood” to any local.109 In The Phantom Cities of California (1963), their follow-up pamphlet, they redeployed the epithet at regional scale, lambasting the “unrelieved slurban mass” in the presence of whose “no-form, no-structure type of ugliness” “we pollute our own bodies, minds, and hearts.” They concluded with a stark dualism: “Home Rule or Home Ruin?”110 The Great Society urbanist Paul Ylvisaker used the
107 For a local Urban Renewal case in which an unsystematic street network was enough to merit official classification as “blight,” see Richard Brandi, “San Francisco’s Diamond Heights: Urban Renewal and the Modernist City,” Journal of Planning History 12 (2012): 133–153. For classic reflections on the anxieties provoked when spatial distinctions of “inside” and “outside” are unclear, see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [1959], trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 211–227. On the category of the “outside,” see Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). Of course, to a certain cast of mind, the irregularity of “ruined” form was precisely its attraction, as in John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic” [1853], in Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 1985), 77–109. 108 Even when in his Modernist mode, and so sympathetic to the economies achieved by prefabrication, Mumford had seen how oversimplification could give the (unwelcome, unromantic) effect of agedness: “Today the prefabricated house is still a pretty half-baked job. That explains why it looks and acts so much like an old-fashioned house.” Lewis Mumford, “Onward and Upward with the Arts: The Prefabricated House,” The New Yorker, 7 November 1936, 42. 109 Samuel E. Wood and Alfred E. Heller, California Going, Going… (Sacramento: California Tomorrow, 1962), 10. California Tomorrow members were present at the 1962 Davis conference where Mumford spoke of Pompeii. Wood sent Mumford a copy of this pamphlet a few days in advance, alerting him to the group’s existence; Samuel Wood to Lewis Mumford, 5 January 1962, California Tomorrow Records, MS 3641, California Historical Society. The claim that Heller coined the term “slurb” in 1961 is found in “Tomorrow’s Goals for California,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 March 1971. Whether Wood and Heller ultimately defined “slurb” as a specific type of place is debatable. Wood’s reference in a later pamphlet to “the suburbs and [i.e., as distinct from] the slurbs” suggests some attempt at precision; see Samuel E. Wood and Daryl Lembke, The Federal Threats to the California Landscape (Sacramento: California Tomorrow, 1967), 7. But the 1962 string of “sl-” slang, quoted in text, was as close as they came. And it surely includes “slum.” The intimacy of “slum” talk with “suburban” space has a longer history than that suggested in Alex Schafran, “Discourse and Dystopia, American Style: The Rise of ‘Slumburbia’ in a Time of Crisis,” City 17 (2013): 130–148. Indeed, the best-known synthetic history of suburbia, Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), which concentrates almost entirely on middle-class environments, begins with a consideration of the stigmatized early- nineteenth-century “suburbs as slums” adjoining European cities, where that pattern has largely held, and American ones, where Emerson and others documented them. Mumford’s observations of the 1910s and 1920s alter and intensify the discourse on suburban “disorder,” but they cannot be said to found it. 110 Samuel E. Wood and Alfred E. Heller, The Phantom Cities of California (Sacramento: California Tomorrow, 1963), 23, 22, 41.
199 word in 1965, in a special issue of Life, to describe part of Daly City, San Francisco’s southern neighbor — not the well-documented “little boxes” of Henry Doelger’s Westlake Village subdivision, but a single winding line of houses, again an affront to “beauty,” “marching in Indian file” up San Bruno Mountain on the small city’s east side.111 (California Tomorrow took the anthropomorphism one step further: “slurbs,” they wrote, “shamelessly wander the boulevards.”)112 It was a key term for William Bronson, whose popular How to Kill a Golden State eclipsed even his “confreres” Heller and Wood in sheer rage.113 Across the country, Ada Louise Huxtable appraised Reston and other mid-1960s New Towns as having opted for “‘Clusters’ Instead of ‘Slurbs.’”114 Even the established Berkeley planner Catherine Bauer Wurster, who was sharply critical of “slurb” talk (it “doesn’t suggest alternatives”) and the “new generation of intellectuals…against decentralization in any form,” had to acknowledge its currency.115 Belser’s 1970 tract was reprinted nationwide and illustrated with great big aerials of subdivision geometry, the preferred vantage point for most participants in the backlash (Fig. 8.34).116 A peculiar set of tropes elaborated decades earlier by Mumford with respect to
111 Paul Ylvisaker, “Villains: Greed, Indifference, You: Amid Slurbs and Junks, We Must Find Ways to Save Beauty,” Life, 24 December 1965, 92. On Westlake, see Rob Keil, Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Midcentury Suburb (Daly City, Calif.: Advection Media, 2006). 112 Wood and Heller, The Phantom Cities of California, 59. 113 William Bronson, How to Kill a Golden State: “slurban,” passim; “confreres,” 6. Bronson tapped into more traditionally conservative philosophic sources, citing Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke to argue that “lovely” aesthetics were needed to cultivate a certain “temper” in the populace (92). 114 Ada Louise Huxtable, “‘Clusters’ Instead of ‘Slurbs,’” New York Times Magazine, 9 February 1964, 36. 115 “The Fur-Lined Fox Holes” (1964), Carton 1, Catherine Bauer Wurster Papers, BANC MSS 74/163 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; “The Physical Environment: Goals for a New Decade” (1960), Carton 3, Catherine Bauer Wurster Papers. She, too, a member of California Tomorrow’s advisory board, was at the 1962 Davis conference with Mumford and adduced the Geddesian “valley section” in her remarks; see “The Role of the Region” (1962), Carton 3, Catherine Bauer Wurster Papers. And see Catherine Bauer Wurster, “The California Environment: Must It Be Ruined by Growth and Prosperity?,” in Papers from the Governor’s Conference on California’s Urban Areas and the State Highway System (Sacramento: Department of Public Works, 1960), for her own rendition of Mumfordian ruins foreseen. The language of “ruin” struck Bauer as less spiteful or more constructive than that of things “slurban.” She, too, was prone to pathologize “formlessness,” however, and, like California Tomorrow, was quite convinced of the need to protect landscape’s “amenity” value, which bridged “culture and economy,” beauty and productivity. Mumford’s influence had been felt in Bay Area planning circles since 1938, chiefly through the Berkeley- based regionalists in the group Telesis, whose number included Bauer. The Culture of Cities made an indelible impression on its members, as well on as the University of California president, Robert Sproul, and the philosophy professor Stephen Pepper. Francis Violich named Mumford “among our heroes”; T. J. Kent called Culture “one of the major events that led to” the formation of a department of city and regional planning. See 1973 interview with Francis Violich, Box 3, Folder 27, Telesis records; “A History of the Department of City and Regional Planning” (1979), Box 3, Folder 7, T. J. Kent Papers; “Notes from the Telesis Study,” Box 4, Folder 4, Telesis records. See Francis Violich, “The Planning Pioneers,” California Living, 26 February 1978, 29–35, for an in-house history of the group. Not that the influence was purely by osmosis: there was some “firsthand contact,” in person and in writing, over the years. Mumford, for instance, commented on a draft of the catalog accompanying “The Next Million People,” the group’s 1950 exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Art; Box 2, Folder 16, Telesis records. 116 A complete compendium of reprints of “Slurban America” can be found in Box 4 of the Belser Papers. It is difficult, of course, to quantify how front-and-center the San Jose–Santa Clara cautionary tale really was nationwide, but Belser himself was already known to William H. Whyte by 1958 for Santa Clara’s “Class A” agricultural zoning code, which had gone into effect the summer of 1954, earning commendation in The Exploding Metropolis, 118, 121; and The Last Landscape, 48–50, 177–178. “By 1954 the place was a mess” (48).
200 ostensibly “formless” working- or lower-middle-class suburbs, disseminated, incubated over the years, had in California become a singularly derisive staple of middle-class common sense.117
The Animacies of Ruin Accusations of formlessness, of course, presuppose the possibility of “form,” a highly ambiguous word in Mumford’s ontologies of landscape and social life. (When, with The Culture of Cities newly in press, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the feature article was titled, not altogether helpfully, “Form of Forms.”)118 And Mumford, to a degree unlike the other prime movers articulating the age’s aggrieved “Suburban Myth” — Peter Blake, William H. Whyte, the novelist John Keats — never ceased being a philosopher. His sited critiques of built forms cannot be separated from a larger philosophy of form as such. “Form,” in his odd but consistent metaphysics, jostles, and largely overlaps, with a scale-jumping vocabulary of “organism,” appropriated from Geddes as a counter to brittle nineteenth-century “mechanism.” Cities — but also neighborhoods, individual buildings, certain machines, certain works of art, and entire societies — add up, or ought to add up, to self-sustaining, legibly bounded, stably interconnected, notionally complete units.119 As we have seen, however, organism thinking is intrinsically holist. Although he had faith in the “insurgence” of life as history’s motive force, Geddes remained an inveterately diagrammatic thinker — precisely the reason Mumford finally broke with him in the mid-1920s — and the American’s vocal self-enrollment as “disciple” to his “master” misleads.120 In Mumford’s work, cutting across the moments of pat organicism and routinely giving them the lie, there is a far less ordered vitalist ontology of fluxes and forces, of a life that preexists, courses through, and, crucially, spills over all imposed forms of closure, blurring edges physical
117 And of academic discourse, to a certain extent. See the geographers Peirce F. Lewis, David Lowenthal, and Yi- Fu Tuan, Visual Blight in America (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, 1973). Lowenthal, minting an “excrescential geography,” takes a special interest in “the endless wilderness of the urban fringe,” finding “entire environments” blighted by “a general infusion of the undesirable, not just a stray element of it” (30, 31). 118 Time, 18 April 1938, 40–43. 119 On this dimension of his metaphysics, see Leo Marx, “Lewis Mumford: Prophet of Organicism,” in Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual, eds. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 164–180; and Robert Casillo, “Lewis Mumford and the Organicist Concept in Social Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (January–March 1992): 91–112. Organicism was a common starting point for popular urbanists concerned with the city’s vulnerability to dispersal. From across the age of Mumford, see Robert A. Lesher, “National Arteriosclerosis,” The Survey, 1 October 1932, 456–460; Decentralization: What Is It Doing to Our Cities? (Chicago: Urban Land Institute, 1940); and Thomas H. Reed and Doris D. Reed, “Does Your City Suffer from Suburbanitis?” Collier’s Weekly, 11 October 1952, 18–22. At the scale of the individual building, Mumford imported organicist ideas from Louis Sullivan and Claude Bragdon; see the latter’s Architecture and Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1918), in particular. Marx suggests that the organism conceit is most clearly and concretely made operational as a criterion in his architectural criticism; see “Lewis Mumford: Prophet of Organicism,” 173. More broadly, Mumford found Oswald Spengler’s organicist rumblings on “decline” nourishing. For a sense of how postwar intellectuals fit Spengler into the history of urbanism, Don Martindale, “Prefatory Remarks: The Theory of the City,” in Max Weber, The City, trans. Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York: The Free Press, 1958), 9–62, is an efficient survey. And see Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, 75, which suggests, rightly, that Mumford used “organism” primarily to indicate what actually existing buildings had not achieved. 120 On the structure of Geddes’s thought, see Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner (London: Routledge, 1990); and John Scott, “The Social Theory of Patrick Geddes,” Journal of Classical Sociology 16 (2016): 237–260, which even out-diagrams Geddes himself.
201 and imagined.121 His thought is situated firmly within the polarities marked out in Chapter 2 and troubled over the course of the present study. Organicism, as we have seen, subordinates all flux to a “single directing power or ‘royal’ force”; for vitalists “the assembly of forces and their free play” come first.122 The two worldviews — two biologies, really — are often correlated, but they are really quite different, and they have different predicates when leveraged to make sense of what the landscape materially is and does.123 Mumford’s peculiar vitalism, not his organicism, is the more significant influence in making sense of his anxieties about the threat of suburban “ruin.” To understand it, we need to look to other of his intellectual sources. Alongside Geddes, notably, the young Mumford was imbibing the thought of none other than Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution (1907) was required reading for even the casually intellectual by 1911, when it saw English translation. In 1914, a year after Bergson’s visit to Columbia (and the attendant traffic jam that beset Morningside Heights), concurrent with his suburban scavenging, Mumford enrolled in a Columbia course on “The Modern World” with Edwin Slosson, the journalist who had just sought out Bergson at his villa in the suburbs of Paris and sung his praises in Major Prophets of Today (1914).124 In 1935, long after the Frenchman’s middle-class vogue had withered, Mumford confessed in a letter, “My own philosophy could be treated as a modification of Bergson’s.”125 The latter’s motifs of aperture and enclosure were touchstones for The Conduct of Life (1951) and Mumford’s other middling forays into nuclear-age moral philosophy.126 In 1962 he reflected that Geddes’s sense of historical time was, against all odds, actually derivative of Bergson’s durée.127 He assigned Bergson at Stanford in the 1940s, Penn in the 1950s, Berkeley in the 1960s, and beyond.128
121 For the intimation that Mumford’s “life” is more basic than, and cannot be kept within the bounds of, “organism,” see Park Dixon Goist, “Lewis Mumford and ‘Anti-Urbanism,’” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (1969), 344; see also “Seeing Things Whole: A Consideration of Lewis Mumford,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 38 (1972): 379–391. On the daunting multifariousness of “life” as a category in his thought, see David R. Hill, “Lewis Mumford’s Ideas on the City,” Journal of the American Planning Association 53 (1985), 417. For an admission that his organicism, too, is a bit vague, see the otherwise amenable Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, 112. 122 Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 11– 12. 123 Observe the tension between settled organicism and the mantra of throbbing “vigor” or “vitality” that marks other contributions to Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, from the modernists Richard B. Freeman, Elizabeth Kendall Thompson, and Gardner Dailey. 124 Mumford, Sketches from Life, 163. And see Edwin E. Slosson, Major Prophets of Today (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914), 44–104. 125 Lewis Mumford to Van Wyck Brooks, 1935, in Findings and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 342. 126 Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951); and see Frédéric Worms, “The Closed and the Open in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion: A Distinction That Changes Everything,” in Bergson, Politics, and Religion, eds. Alexandre Lefebvre and Melanie White (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 25–39. 127 Lewis Mumford, Introduction [1962] to My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 10. In Evolution (1911), the biological text Mumford read before either City Development (1904) or Cities in Evolution (1915), Geddes (and Thomson) provides an extended gloss on Bergson (notably, within a chapter on “Function and Environment,” classically geographic concerns). Even if the French savant had admitted a bit “too much of the intangible” into his scheme, Bergson had pointed the way to “a new conversion of the philosopher into the biologist.” In a preface to the bibliography, onto which he had imposed a tiered system of asterisks designating the order in which a neophyte might approach the literature, Geddes admits that Bergson’s program uniquely defies classification: “It is too difficult to affix marks to suggestive thoughts — shall we say of Bergson, for instance — which may turn out to be of much more value than many concrete studies. The idea of confining ‘research’ to the
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Mumford was also reading William James, Bergson’s counterpart and closest confidant on American shores, “with an indescribable priggish elation” as he cultivated his own embodied habits as a wanderer. He would channel James’s materialist psychology all his life, attentive, in an environmental way, to “all those habitual goings and comings and rearrangements of ourselves which fill every hour of the day…which incoming sensations instigate so immediately.”129 James’s Principles of Psychology (1890), where the physicality of “habit” first came into focus, was a “masterpiece” joined only by George Perkins Marsh on “that very special shelf of American scholarship” where, on the eve of its release, Mumford none too humbly predicted The City in History would secure a place.130 The littérateur Van Wyck Brooks, too, a longtime friend and correspondent, and himself an underrated critic of suburban cultures, had infected Mumford by the 1920s with a specifically American vitalism of his own. The country’s landscape, he had written in America’s Coming-of-Age (1915), was “like a vast Sargasso Sea…everywhere an unchecked, uncharted, unorganized vitality…a welter of life which has not been worked into an organism.”131 Brooks, too, had languished west of the Sierra — resident at Stanford and, most unhappily, at Carmel between 1911 and 1913 — and had remarked, contemporary with Mumford’s New York strolls, on the phenomenon of America’s all-too- young ruins: “How many thousand villages, frost-bitten, palsied, full of a morbid, bloodless death-in-life, villages that have lost, if they ever possessed, the secret of self-perpetuation, lie scattered across the continent! Even in California I used to find them on long cross-country walks, villages often enough not half a century old but in a state of essential decay.”132 objective is grotesque.” See Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 209, 206, 249; and see 189–204 on the assorted vitalisms of Hans Driesch, J. S. Haldane, their Lamarckian inheritance, and more. On the sequence of Mumford’s readings, see Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, 14. 128 LM, Box 182, Folder 8076; Box 184, Folder 8098; Box 184, Folder 8104. Not that Mumford’s embrace was ever uncritical. He was sensitive to how the faddishness of Bergsonian thought (and other popularized philosophies) might corrupt. In 1922, Mumford attended a lecture by Waldo Frank and dashed off a series of sketches, which survive. “He’s terribly ignorant,” Mumford jotted to himself. “Ten years ago he would have been singing a hymn to Bergson instead of to Einstein.” See Vincent DiMattio and Kenneth R. Stunkel, The Drawings and Watercolors of Lewis Mumford (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2004), 40, 78. 129 William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course [1892] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2001), 245. When William took up at Stanford in 1906, he wrote to his wife in Cambridge, “Multiply the Irving Street circle by 100 or 1000, throw in the crudest business block, composed mainly of telegraf poles, and you have all California. As for any past, you can listen and actually hear the historic silence. It is startling.” Quoted in Linda Simon, “William James at Stanford,” California History 69 (1990): 336. And see Henry James, “The Suburbs of London,” The Galaxy 24 (December 1877): 778, for some choice words on suburban scenery in America. 130 Mumford, Sketches from Life, 160; My Works and Days, 177. James’s positioning as a theorist of space is not always self-evident. Nor did all of James’s readership, surely, seize on his heady temporality — many have read the pragmatists as cautious epistemologists before all else — but this vitalist onrush was precisely what excited Mumford. His copy of Pragmatism (1907), read in 1914, contains an annotation inside the front cover: “To my mind the futuristic attitude of pragmatism is the most attractive, the most valid…. Pragmatism…may call itself ‘Evolutionism’ made conscious.” This volume is stored in the Lewis Mumford Collection, Monmouth University Library Special Collections. But for Mumford’s rider, by the 1920s, that James’s thought was “permeated by the smell of the Gilded Age,” see The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture [1926] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1968), 97, 183–195. 131 Van Wyck Brooks, “America’s Coming-of-Age” [1915], in Three Essays on America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934), 78. 132 Van Wyck Brooks, “Letters and Leadership” [1918], in Three Essays on America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934), 91; emphasis added. Richard Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), suggests that numerous late-nineteenth-century observers had made a similar point about San Francisco, whose “streets also conveyed a sense of age, despite the fact that the city had existed for only a few decades…. The jerry-built structures were aging rapidly, and many of
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Mumford’s influences, then, were diverse. His writings on “formlessness” and “ruin” enact, and argue for, the interpenetration of several longer, tangled intellectual histories, never quite disciplinary but very much trans-Atlantic, that are usually treated in isolation: his urbanism was a subset of his philosophy and social theory, his cultural criticism in several media, his histories of technology, and, subtending them all, his engagements with the life sciences. More than perhaps any other figure, Mumford draws together the vitalist and materialist currents animating American urbanism in the first half of the twentieth century — and then redirects them for the purpose of denigration. Mumford was a vitalist before he was an urbanist. And he continued to cite heterodox prewar “philosophic biologists” long after their vitalisms had been declared scientifically “dead”: among them Hans Driesch, whose 1907 and 1908 Gifford Lectures posited a life force called “entelechy” that was even more extreme than Bergson’s élan; H. S. Jennings, who in 1911 had sparred with his colleague, the Johns Hopkins historian Arthur O. Lovejoy, over the experimental consequences of vitalism; J. S. Haldane’s many popular critiques of mechanism; Lloyd Morgan on “emergent,” as opposed to “creative,” evolution; and Harvard’s discipline-bending Lawrence J. Henderson, theorist of the “fit of the environment.”133 This irruptive mood was all but atmospheric, Mumford noted, “the underlying faith of the best minds of the period,” as he came of age intellectually.134 Vitalisms came in many shapes and sizes. But Mumford was more receptive than most, and more explicit in his agonizing over how to reconcile a resolute anti-formalism with theories of urban form. In subtle ways his distinctive spin on this chaotic philosophy, only obliquely spatial in its original expressions, was to apprehend the built environment itself as a roiling field of forces imbued with a precarious, eventful life of its own. While some mainline vitalists were content to imagine “life,” whatever it was, as locked in incessant conflict with the constraints of matter, Mumford, unique among urbanists, collapsed this distinction, granting buildings and landscapes a vitality of their own. He never exactly spelled out what kind. This was frequently a “negative vitality,” but it was all the same a vitality, an animacy and an activity more basic than — and resistant to — whatever stabilization its human stewards might intend.135 “Form,” “order,” the stably centered and edged “organism”: these were desirable prescriptions at the scale of the building or the town. Forms set criteria against which non-conforming landscapes could be criticized. But for Mumford, as both
them had begun to decay” (70–71). On the concept of “age value,” see Aloïs Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development” [1903], trans. Karin Bruckner with Karen Williams, in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, eds. Nicholas Price et al. (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1996), 69–83. 133 For “philosophic biologists,” and on Morgan over and against Bergson, see The Conduct of Life, 307. 134 Mumford, My Works and Days, 21. 135 For “negative vitality,” see Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 271. The traditional understanding, then and now, of fin-de-siècle vitalism has presumed a duality of “matter” and “life.” Vitalists, on this reading, (re)assert the claims of fluid life insurgent against the inertia of matter. See, e.g., the historian of ideas Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Practical Tendencies of Bergsonism,” International Journal of Ethics 23 (1913): 253–275, 419–443, for an early American statement to this effect. There are moments in Mumford’s oeuvre in which he seems, like Geddes and Victor Branford, to endorse this dualism. But the evidence suggests that, from the first, he read, and celebrated, Bergson as imputing an animacy to inorganic matter itself. His copy of Bergson’s Creative Evolution, the kingmaking text he read in 1914 under the philosopher B. R. Redman, is annotated feistily and tellingly. Mumford takes issue when Bergson seems to withhold “duration” from matter except to the extent that human minds imagine it there: “Then for an inanimate object,” he jots, “there can be no duration except that duration which we conceive of as belonging to the object” (19). Rereading the book in 1958, Mumford singles out (as “Good!”) Bergson’s assertion that “matter, looked at as an undivided whole, must be a flux rather than a thing” (186). Bergson’s things and built environments are livelier on the whole than Geddes’s.
204 pre- and postwar suburbs had confirmed, form was not ontologically prior.136 Formlessness came first. Ruins were, in this sense, natural.137 Suburban spaces were provokers and testing grounds of Mumford’s landscape ontology, laboratories of a sort where the weird, excessive animacy of material culture — of built things — might be sensed, evidenced, and (imperfectly) communicated.138 That risky, form-thwarting life of matter, Mumford anxiously wagered, was even more intense, and in that way more instructive, on the fraying edges of California’s vast conurbations than in New York, where he first discerned it. Other of his postwar peers were quick to animate suburban landscapes in order then
136 When, for instance, Mumford penned the concise “What I Believe” for popular consumption, there was a sizeable caveat: “Whatever I can say will be only a faint symbol of that deeper urge of life, that rationality beneath all reasons, which bottoms one’s existence.” See Lewis Mumford, “What I Believe,” The Forum (November 1930), 264. 137 Form contains the trace of formlessness; order contains ruin; prescriptions imply and equip denigration, establishing criteria against which infractions can be identified and punished. In some ways these dualisms have founded the planning imaginations this study has surveyed. Specters of “ruin” haunted American planners in the Progressive Era, a kind of rider, accompaniment, and motive force to their visions of “order.” Examples proliferate. Daniel Burnham, for instance, justified his downtown set pieces for San Francisco by showing that incipient suburbanization had already “honey-combed” the city’s core with pockets of “neglect”; Report on a Plan for San Francisco (San Francisco: Sunset Press, 1905), 67. Carol Aronovici and Guy Wilfred Hayler, who were forthright about their intentions to “fix” property values, framed scientific planners’ foresight as a form of “protection against deterioration” and adduced the extant “deterioration” of Richmond’s pavement as evidence that their services were needed; Recommendations on City Plan for Richmond, Based upon a Social Survey and a Series of Eight Plans (Richmond, Calif.: Carol Aronovici, 1922), 11, 10. Federal pronouncements on right suburban building in the 1930s were equally given over to this split screen. For every expression of confidence that Hoover’s 1932 Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership could once and for all stabilize the basic enclosure form of suburban life — “it shall be a self-contained unit,” compelling “[l]oyalty to a community of comprehensible size, something between the family and the great metropolitan city” — there is equal or greater anxiety about “shanty slums, town-edge slums, that are [nonetheless] yielding a fair financial return on the investment.” See Gries and Ford, eds., Planning for Residential Districts, 7; Gries and Ford, eds., Slums, Large-Scale Housing, and Decentralization, 44. This is a slightly different entanglement of ruins and the planning imagination than what surfaces with the many Americans who have gazed out on scenes of dilapidation as the very precondition for composing new, ordered cities from scratch. We have already seen how defense production during the First World War offered opportunities on a new scale to planners interested in “comprehensive” and “scientific” design. The ruins left by that war, unlike any seen before, became instigations all their own. Even as the conflict still raged, John Nolen was angling on rebuilding European cities according to American models. In 1914, while in California, he was proposing “to build a new Belgium” with San Francisco as the template; “To Build a New Belgium,” Boston Transcript, 30 December 1914. It was George B. Ford, he of “The City Scientific,” who most capitalized on the postwar ruins as an occasion for planning anew. His Out of the Ruins (New York: The Century Co., 1919), becomes a statistic-heavy position paper as the author makes the case for rebuilding France. (His international reputation was secured at Rheims.) But Ford ultimately has the ruins themselves issue the call in ways that numbers cannot. One must “see it again and again” (21) if one hopes ever to understand. For more on his program, see “War and City Planning,” New York Times, 29 July 1917; “Rebuilding France for Posterity,” La France (February 1921); and the critique by David Lloyd, “American Makes Rheims First New French City,” New York Evening Post, 3 July 1920, who felt that Ford, all too American, “treated Rheims like a town in the Far West.” For more, see Box 4, Folder D, George B. Ford Collection, Special Collections, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Design School. 138 Lacking a robust vision of “the renewal of life,” we might add — the theme that motivates his work through The Conduct of Life, and that was common parlance among Geddes, Branford, and their generation of biosocial thinkers — Mumford’s is a non-traditional sort of jeremiad. The jeremiad has a long and varied rhetorical tradition; it is not a term of abuse or dismissal. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), is the classic statement on the essentially futuristic, redemptive, and thus optimistic orientation of American “decline” talk from the Puritans on. “Diagnosis before treatment” was Geddes’s motto. On the suburban edge, Mumford carried out an increasingly biologized form of diagnosis, but in the postwar era he shook loose from pursuing its affirmative rejoinder.
205 to denigrate them. The California Tomorrow crew — Belser, Bronson, Heller, Wood — had biologized with especial relish: “galloping” subdivisions “eat their way” into farmland, “amoeba- like” activity abounds, and “like the great California grizzly, the slurb paws its way across that land of gold.”139 Many commentators resorted to some version of personification or animalization, still organismic in the last instance, and probably figurative besides, to make sense of insensible suburban “chaos.” In his more exacting redirection of the vitalist tradition, Mumford, “than whom no one [found] suburbia more repellent,” took a different tack. Mumford’s optimism was gone by 1960, but his awareness of the built environment’s immanent propensities was all the more acute.140 Despite the ever more spectatorial vantage point, the postwar slogans of mass “nothingness,” the announcements of “disease” and “contagion,” the diffuse recriminations, the troubling slippages between his pathologizing “wild,” “out-of- control” subdivisions and their differently classed and complected residents, Mumford’s built environments, curiously, seem most animate, most challengingly and unignorably present to the senses, precisely when inorganic, when deformed and coming apart.141 “Organisms” finally die.142 “Vitality” endures, even and especially in ruins.
139 Wood and Heller, The Phantom Cities of California, 44, 54; Wood and Heller, California Going, Going…, 30, 63. See also Grady Clay, Close-Up: How to Read the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 87, for a more sanguine appraisal of “strip” form as “serving a vital function as a surplus disposal area for surplus urban energies.” 140 Donaldson, The Suburban Myth, 61. For a recent, more-than-spatial contextualization of Mumford’s postwar pessimism — which owed much to the conditions of the war itself, in which Mumford lost his only son — see Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: American Thought and Fiction, 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 57–60, which convincingly aligns Mumford’s The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944) with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s theses on the destruction wrought by what seem to be programs of enlightenment. 141 It is just as they exceed (or recede from) the form intended by their builders, we might say, that buildings become more autonomously things — as distinct from objects, which presume subservience to thinking human subjects. On ruins, in this sense, as unusually active and suggestive sorts of things, and on the need to grapple with them as presences rather than absences, see Tim Edensor, “Sensing the Ruin,” The Senses and Society 2 (2007): 217–232; Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” Progress in Human Geography 37 (2012): 465–485; Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); Gastón Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); and Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs, Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014). On ruins’ “atmospheres,” see Hanna Katharina Göbel, The Re-Use of Urban Ruins: Atmospheric Inquiries of the City (New York: Routledge, 2015); and on their affects, see Antoine Picon, “Anxious Landscapes: From the Ruin to Rust,” Grey Room 1 (Fall 2000): 64–83. See Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 100–107, on finding hope in the “unseen intensities” of vacant buildings; Neil Harris, Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 115–166, on the metaphors and rituals involved in “saying good-bye” to buildings; and J. B. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). For more general theorizations, drawn from what is a growing literature on ruins and their cultural entanglements, see Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, eds., Ruins of Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). Walter Benjamin is the implicit master thinker in much of this discourse, especially via his The Origin of German Tragic Drama [1963], trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). But for an alternative theorization, see his predecessor Georg Simmel, “The Ruin” [1911], trans. David Kettler, in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper, 1959), 259–266, on how ruins’ suspension between form and formlessness confounds standard separations of culture from nature. 142 An unfortunate entailment, but not a peripheral one in the least, of organismic urban theory. Organisms live, and then they die. This insight has been taken up as self-evident at points scattered across the political spectrum — not only from the right. For an anachronistic, full-throated endorsement, from the anarchist left, of the inevitability of urban abandonment, see the geographer Élisée Reclus — a signal influence on Geddes’s turn to the urban — in his remarkable “The Evolution of Cities,” Contemporary Review 67 (1895): 246–264: “By the very fact of its
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The Afterlives of Critique Perpetually on edge, Mumford philosophized as he wandered, and where he wandered mattered. And for all his idiosyncrasies, Mumford’s impressions of “ruin” and its antitheses have had a long afterlife. He is no longer the American urbanist of record, but The City in History, in particular, remains a basic reference and a kind of talisman for assorted critics and practitioners today, within or without the academy, avowedly radical or squarely in the political mainstream.143 The New Urbanism is only the most visible and outspoken contemporary program to endorse Mumford’s apotheoses of legible urban form as constitutive of social order. That movement’s Charter (2000; 2013) classes his 1960s writings as “foundational.” Its prescriptions evince an obvious debt to the studied, multiscalar regionalism that Mumford’s RPAA colleagues had enshrined, descending deliberately from “metropolis” to “block, street, and building.”144 The interventions suggested in Galina Tachieva’s popular Sprawl Repair development, the city, like any other organism, tends to die. Subject like the rest to conditions of time, it finds itself already old while other towns are springing up around it, impatient to live their life in their turn…. [I]t tries to live on; but…no human group can incessantly repair its waste and renew its youth without a heavier and heavier expenditure of effort; and sometimes it gets tired.” 143 Whether or not they actually read it in full. A recent appreciation likens the formidable book to a “War and Peace for city lovers.” Karl Besel and Viviana Andreescu, “The City in History: Mumford Revisited,” in Back to the Future: New Urbanism and the Rise of Neotraditionalism in Urban Planning (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2013), 4. 144 The Charter of the New Urbanism (2000) cites The City in History (1961) and The Highway and the City (1963). The lightly revised Emily Talen, ed., Charter of the New Urbanism, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw–Hill, 2013), interestingly, calls The Human Prospect (1968), which houses Mumford’s most vitriolic California essay, “foundational” without making any reference to The City in History. Duany et al., Suburban Nation,, acknowledges only The City in History and one of Mumford’s RPAA-aligned essays from the 1920s. How direct his individual influence has been is, of course, hard to gauge. Besel and Andreescu, “The City in History: Mumford Revisited,” asserts but does not document such a connection. At the level of direct prescriptions, the New Urbanists are certainly more indebted to other regional planners of the 1920s and 1930s: other of Mumford’s RPAA colleagues (especially Clarence Stein), but more clearly to John Nolen, Clarence Perry, and the contributors to Thomas Adams’s Regional Plan of New York (1929), which Mumford strenuously opposed. See Emily Talen, “Beyond the Front Porch: Regionalist Ideals in the New Urbanist Movement,” Journal of Planning History 7 (2008): 20–47; and Bruce Stephenson, “The Roots of the New Urbanism: John Nolen’s Garden City Ethic,” Journal of Planning History 1 (2002): 99–123, for a sense of these lineages and divisions. Mumford himself, in his 1920s incarnation, has seemed “too radical and too socialist,” in Talen’s (34) words, for the market-compliant pragmatists who lead the CNU. This was no less than Friedrich Hayek’s contemporary estimation of Mumford as well: “The extent to which the movement for town planning, under the leadership of such men as Frederick Law Olmsted, Patrick Geddes, and Lewis Mumford, has developed into a sort of anti-economics would make an interesting study”; Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty [1960], ed. Ronald Hamowy (London: Routledge, 2011), 475n10. The peak-RPAA vision of a coordinated decentralization of right-sized garden cities, moreover, has struck New Urbanists, much as it did Jane Jacobs, as excessively top-down. And to the extent that that vision saw implementation, in the form of the few prototypical Greenbelt towns, New Urbanists have seen fit to blame the RPAA for instigating postwar sprawl. See Alex Krieger, “Since (and Before) Seaside,” in Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk: Towns and Town-Making Principles, ed. Alex Krieger (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 9–16, for this view. On Mumford v. Jacobs, see Robert Fishman, “The Mumford–Jacobs Debate,” Planning History Studies 10 (1996): 3–11. For an identification of Jacobs herself as having espoused an “urban vitalism,” see Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 100. For an assent, see David Seamon, “A Jumping, Joyous Urban Jumble: Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a Phenomenology of Urban Place,” Journal of Spatial Syntax 3 (2012): 139–149. On some of the problems with her valorization of “vitality,” see Herbert J. Gans, “Urban Vitality and Physical Determinism” [1962], in People, Plans, and Policies: Essays on Poverty, Racism, and Other National Urban Problems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 33–43. Peter L. Laurence, Becoming Jane
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Manual (2010) are similarly ordered.145 The New Urbanists are hardly uncontested — and their specific embrace of Mumford, relative to other 1920s-vintage regionalists, has never been unqualified — but their visibility demonstrates that Mumfordian hunches about, and criteria for, good urban form still inhabit many schemes put forward as correctives to the spatial modus operandi of the long American postwar. So, too, has his work informed contemporary efforts to link problems of urban form with those of long-term ecological degradation. Mumford’s apprehensions were never only cosmetic, as his more uncharitable critics have claimed. Indeed, his thought drew on a motif of specifically ecological “ruin” and “ruination” long central to American environmental agitation — at least since George Perkins Marsh, whose Man and Nature (1864) Mumford knew well, glossed at length in The Brown Decades (1931), and may have “rediscovered” for American human geography after decades of comparative neglect.146 Five years before the publication of The City in History, Mumford was reclassifying his work as having synthesized a global “Natural History of Urbanization” (1956), within which “suburban overspill” was only the latest interruption of an elusive “symbiosis” between city and country.147 His anxieties about the ecology of edgeless cities were tightly argued and consistent; it is almost a cliché among his allies to class Mumford as prescient in this respect.148 But, more to the point, the New Urbanism and its relatives have taken shape against a backdrop of naturalized anti-suburbanism that, more than any of his concrete proposals, is the more equivocal and subtly enduring legacy of Mumford’s jeremiad. His charged ontologies of form and formlessness still haunt how many Americans, “expert” or not, see speculative suburbs
Jacobs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), now her standard intellectual biography, says little on the derivation of “vitality” as a rallying cry — although the material Laurence furnishes on Jacobs’s engagement with the discipline of geography, and with Columbia, invites comparison with Mumford. For another contemporary urbanist movement taking “vitality” as its mantra, see Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape [1961] (London: The Architectural Press, 1971). 145 Galina Tachieva, Sprawl Repair Manual (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2010). Tachieva’s specificity (at several nested scales) about the physical problems that inhere in “sprawl” landscapes, and about the formal implements that might right them, suggest a finer-grained understanding ofpostwar suburban landscapes than Mumford’s prevailing language lets on: less outright “formlessness” than a radically simplified form that is lacking in certain beneficial elements. Neither can Dolores Hayden’s A Field Guide to Sprawl (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), another reference text for the New Urbanist set, be said to ignore the “physical elements” that such landscapes comprise, or to assign them “precise terms” (7) — even as, oddly, she credits Peter Blake as having inaugurated the polemic in 1964. 146 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action [1864] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931), 32–35. Mumford discussed Marsh with the Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer at the 1955 “Man’s Role” event (see note 104), which some called a centenary “Marshfest”; David Lowenthal, “Marsh and Sauer: Reexamining the ‘Rediscovery,’” Geographical Review 103 (July 2013): 409– 414. 147 Lewis Mumford, “The Natural History of Urbanization,” in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. W. L. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 382–398. Mumford held this synthetic piece to be the first of its kind: “even now the ecologists of the city, dealing too largely with late and limited aspects of urbanism, have hardly staked out the ground that is to be covered” (382). 148 See Peter Calthorpe, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2011), for a sense of how New Urbanism has renewed its emphasis in recent years on the ecological correlates of built form. For a heterodox appreciation of Mumford’s environmentalism, from one of the figureheads of subaltern studies, see Ramachandra Guha, “Lewis Mumford: The Forgotten American Environmentalist: An Essay in Rehabilitation,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 2, no. 3 (1991): 67–91. See also R. Bruce Stephenson, “A Vision of Green: Lewis Mumford’s Legacy in Portland, Oregon,” Journal of the American Planning Association 65 (1999): 259–269.
208 today. Or don’t quite see them: in his more dismissive, incurious postwar phase, he very nearly licenses inattention to the particulars of suburban space. This Mumford seems utterly uninterested in its distinctive physical presences, rather than in its absences or elisions, anesthetized to the affective dimensions of how it might every day be navigated, endured, and made meaningful in excess of developers’ intent.149 His propensity to diagnose as ruins what many others — their inhabitants, for instance — might deem intact, defensible, quite ordinary landscapes poses difficult questions for the makers and unmakers of suburban life today.
Ruins in Reverse Since 2008, that life has increasingly been lived amid actual abandonment — physical, economic, social, and quite sudden indeed — on a scale unknown to Mumford and his ilk. Mumford never set foot in the towns of the Carquinez.150 The language of “ruin” — and the still- life imagery needed to give it credence — has lately been a ubiquitous component of its public face amid the foreclosure crisis whose arrested suburban landscapes, more than anything else, have become its most visible signatures. Ubiquitous, too, have been rote promises of “revitalization,” which now more diffusely does much of the work that the organismic term “renewal” once did downtown. These concepts have longer and more conflicted suburban histories than we have realized. It is possible to tell the story of the foreclosure crisis in an abstracted way, adducing capital flows, quantitative indicators, or actuarial measures of risk that touch down lightly if at all on the landscape. And yet, certain segments of the American landscape — certain cities, certain vectors of growth, obeying lines drawn long ago — have endured this abandonment while others have remained solvent. Among the various suburbias of San Francisco Bay, the Carquinez has borne striking, if perhaps unsurprising, witness to this new privation. “It is not yet clear what areas of Alameda County will be hit the hardest,” the Contra Costa Times reported in April 2008. “Such is not the case in Contra Costa”: “the f[a]rther you get away from the 680 corridor” of middling to affluent Central County, the more desperate.151 Among the affected were many first-time homeowners — African Americans, especially, and Latinos, many of whom had occupied their houses for no more than five years before the uprooting — drawn out by predation from Oakland and Richmond to brand-new subdivisions in Pittsburg, Antioch, and farther east, along a vector of suburbanization already marked as capital’s last resort.152 Among
149 This problem afflicts much popular urbanist writing, e.g. Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (New York: Penguin, 2013); Benjamin Ross, Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and to a lesser extent Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (New York: Vintage, 2012). 150 Neither, so far as we know, did Jane Jacobs. It was the sort of suburbia, however, that was bound to provoke her fans. In 2006, after still more growth, John King, the Chronicle’s architecture critic, delighted in the irony of having learned of Jacobs’s death while driving Antioch’s Lone Tree Way, “a place that would make her roll over in her grave ” — “tough green Mount Diablo is the only clue you’re somewhere other than a name-brand netherworld.” See John King, “We Have Lost a Strong Voice against Sprawl,” San Francisco Chronicle, 2 May 2006. Jacobs, it must be said, had little distinctive to say on suburban landscapes, aside from a generalized refusal, and the tendency among some observers to oppose her to Mumford (among those “theorists content with their status quo,” King mumbles) does not serve the cause of clarity. 151 “Housing Slump Pinches Counties,” Contra Costa Times, 27 April 2008. 152 Alex Schafran, “Origins of an Urban Crisis: The Restructuring of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Geography of Foreclosure,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (2013): 679, 680. Since 1970, as San Francisco’s poverty rate has fallen, that of Antioch has risen; San Francisco had a poverty rate twice as high, but now they converge. Between 1990 and 2010, Antioch went from about 3 percent black to almost 17 percent black,
209 the unaffected, all manner of “slum” tropes got repurposed for these edge realms and their “gated ghettos,” with racializing coordinates that were difficult to miss. Poverty is a suburban fact. It has been suburban, or suburbanizing, for some time, one face of the macro-undulations that some popular writers have called “the great inversion.”153 But, as a crisis, it is spatially diffuse, difficult for urbanites to localize, visualize, or give form to.154 Many scholars — geographers and others — still tend to narrate “decline” as a patly “urban” phenomenon. It is easy to privilege denser centers, metaphorizing rotting cores rather than fraying edges, but this maneuver grants visibility and political salience to a select few landscapes of decay — residues of an earlier geography of abandonment — at the expense of their many suburban others. As banks withdrew their capital and subdivisions lay vacant, a whole genre of landscape ogling, with its own readymade tropes, crystallized among journalists drawn to these post-2008 “ruins” and content to name them as such. Many of them paid visits, however brief, to “ghost subdivisions.” Many yearned to identify an “epicenter,” “ground zero,” “capital,” or “poster child” for the broader crisis. Even within the expanded Bay Area, though, there was considerable disagreement about where, precisely, the indexical, tell-all ruins could be found. Brentwood was a common choice, surreal with its tapestry of “[p]artially built housing projects and neighborhoods filled with foreclosed homes.” One out of every sixteen houses in Brentwood, which had added 40,000 residents since 1992, found itself in default in 2008. The San Francisco Chronicle scribe who descended upon the town that year took note that “weeds sprout and newspapers pile up…. In projects halted by the downturn, handfuls of houses stand alone amid acres of dirt. Promised parks and community centers remain unfinished or fenced in.”155 Other
16 percent Hispanic to about 32 percent Hispanic. Brentwood declined somewhat in Hispanic population, but its black population rose from 0.8 percent to 6.2 percent. See also Alex Schafran and Jake Wegmann, “Restructuring, Race, and Real Estate: Changing Home Values and the New California Metropolis, 1989–2010,” Urban Geography 33 (2012): 630–654. For related ruminations, see Alex Schafran, “Outside Endopolis: Notes from Contra Costa County,” Critical Planning 16 (2009): 10–33. On the political economy of this phenomenon nationally, fine analyses are Kathe Newman, “The Perfect Storm: Contextualizing the Foreclosure Crisis,” in Jeff Crump, Kathe Newman, Eric Belsky, Phil Ashton, David Kaplan, and Daniel Hammel, “Cities Destroyed (Again) for Cash: Forum on the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis,” Urban Geography 29 (2008): 745–784; and Kathe Newman, “Post-Industrial Widgets: Capital Flows and the Production of the Urban,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (2009): 314–331. As Newman says, capital had access to communities, not vice versa. 153 After Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion. 154 One early, mostly unheeded recognition of suburban poverty came in the Final Report of the President’s Task Force on Suburban Problems, ed. Charles M. Haar (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1974), which appeared a long six years after Lyndon Johnson directed proactive federal urbanism to the suburban edge — and convened a study group including, among others, Grady Clay and the historian Richard Wade. The report is salient in a number of respects. In some ways it dials up the Mumfordian manias about “formlessness”: its mandate is “orderly development” (1), and “[m]ost problems of the suburbs derive from rapid, unregulated, confusing growth” (3). The usual broadsides obtain against “contrived homogeneity” and “cultural dehydration” (4). But, with a concern that Mumford by this point could not muster, the group documents that in 1968 poor suburban families already outnumbered poor urban families in 64 metropolitan areas, San Francisco among them (28). And yet, it is precisely because this privation is so “widely scattered” that “only a few of their more affluent neighbors are likely to be conscious of their existence” (44). “The problems of suburbia do not add up to a visible crisis, except in pockets…. It is also a quiet crisis” (40). 155 James Temple, “Brentwood the Poster Child for Housing Bust,” San Francisco Chronicle, 11 May 2008. Brentwood lies farther east than any of the industrial towns this study has scrutinized; for the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, Brentwood was rural. And yet, it has been drawn into the same vector of growth: the East Bay’s far edges as marked for experimentation, exploitation, and, when the time comes, abandonment.
210 observers turned to Lone Tree Way in Antioch, or to the fringes of Pittsburg, or still deeper into San Francisco’s never-huger hinterland.156 A predictable litany of “disordered” material culture — which the authors, posthumanists in their way, seemed to expect would speak for itself — had pride of place in this wave of ruin- gazing: the for-sale signs; the pools turned green; the unkempt lawns, indexing a feral “nature” to which these ruins of the middle landscape — already halfway there — would ostensibly revert. These were not Californian tropes alone. Landscapes bearing the marks of disinvestment and its aftermath have been luridly described on the edges of every Floridian city, in Arizona, around Las Vegas, on the inland face of Los Angeles’s regional empire, and elsewhere besides. George Packer’s tableau of North Tampa, in his successful “inner history” The Unwinding (2013), is literate but still typical: “On the more forsaken blocks the change was obvious — six inches of grass, weeds in the driveway, copper wiring ripped from the air conditioner boxes, a rash of green mold spreading across a beige stucco wall, a VACANT or ABANDONED notice tacked to a front door. But the collapse of the Ponzi scheme,” Packer clarified, “was unspectacular, with no demolished factories or abandoned farms. The ghost subdivisions were pretty, in a way. Under the brilliant aquamarine sky the houses looked like perfect cardboard cutouts, the surfaces smooth and regular, the blinds drawn, the landscape almost untainted by human life.”157 The journalist Timothy Egan’s New York Times article “Slumburbia” (2010), which in the spirit of Karl Belser coined another unfortunate portmanteau, scoured “foreclosure alley” in Lathrop, California, and its “tile-roofed versions of a 21st-century ghost town.” There, “[f]oreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms…. Nobody is home in the cities of the future.”158 Christopher Leinberger of the Brookings Institution, whose 2008 Atlantic essay “The Next Slum?” found an eager readership among the middle classes, may have set the tone — and prototyped a way of extrapolating from the objects dotting the landscape to the lives lived within them. “Once-tidy yards have become overgrown,” he wrote, “as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading.” In one Sacramento suburb, “many [homes] are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied,” seemingly of their own accord. “Decline” talk won the day.
156 The fringes of Antioch and Pittsburg saw massive disinvestment; Pittsburg had 18 percent unemployment by 2010. Other observers took Tracy, well to the southeast in San Joaquin County, as microcosmic of the crisis, with employment down 20 percent, and home prices down as much as 75. A Los Angeles Times reporter fixated on Stockton, at the head of the Delta, as “the most miserable place in the world”; Alana Semuels, “Where Recession’s Effects Are Magnified,” Los Angeles Times, 9 August 2010. Others leapt to Manteca, which like Tracy had been securely of the Central Valley, but that by 2008 had fit into a dispersed, mega-regional thirteen-county definition of the Bay Area, with two-hour commutes on either end of the day; “California’s Ground Zero in the Housing Crisis,” Newsweek, 24 August 2009. On other swaths of California, see, e.g., David Streitfeld, “In the Central Valley, the Ruins of the Housing Bust,” New York Times, 23 August 2008; Alana Semuels, “From Bucolic Bliss to ‘Gated Ghetto,’” Los Angeles Times, 30 March 2010; Dan Glaister, “There Goes the Neighbourhood: Mortgage Crisis Sees Suburbs Slump,” The Guardian, 28 April 2008; and Timothy Egan, “The Pools of Riverside County,” New York Times, 30 January 2008. 157 George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), 202, and 190–208 passim. Also on Tampa, also under the sign of literary journalism, see Paul Reyes, Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), probably the best on- the-ground treatment of foreclosed homes as built environments. 158 Timothy Egan, “Slumburbia,” New York Times, 10 February 2010. On the broader discourse, see, among many others, David Villano, “Suburbs — Our New Slums?” Pittsburgh Post–Gazette, 5 April 2009. For analysis and some design alternatives, see Barry Bergdoll and Reinhold Martin, eds., Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012).
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Leinberger, even more than most, seemed to relish sketching this dystopia of inversion: “two or three decades from now, the next Kurt Russell may find his breakout role” not in New York, but “in Escape from the Suburban Fringe.”159 How we describe these landscapes, of course, affects how we assign blame for their ruination. How we animate their components, more specifically, can open some lines of questioning and disable others. When objects lead the way — in staccato prose that cedes them, not the banks, not the realtors, the starring role — one peculiar gloss on the distribution of agency is imported into the analysis. Repossessed houses turned inside out, debris piling up at curbside and riling the sensibilities of solvent neighbors: these visible indices of “disorder” and the enemies they make are stock themes from the oldest sociologies of the suburbs.160 Overgrown lawns, above all, have seemed to unnerve those living within view of foreclosure: the journalist taking the temperature of Brentwood noted that the city had passed three separate ordinances to mandate mowing by owners, wary of the contagious “blight caused by unkempt lawns and landscaping.”161 These turns of phrase are more than clichés — although they are clichés. They add up to a very specific optics and haptics of landscape. And these scenes of sudden abandonment just might disclose something about the solicitations of landscapes left to their own devices. In practice, the seemingly “wild” or “uncontrollable” propensities of, say, untended lawns can quickly motivate a vindictive politics that tars the abandoned sooner than the abandoners, those (once) resident on site sooner than those lenders who lured them there — and, again, with innuendos on animalistic racial “natures” not altogether far off. Matter out of place, its animacy rendered as a threat, can equip this anti-social politics. But must it?
The ruins of 2008 are peculiar artifacts indeed. They are a species of what the architectural critic Owen Hatherley, attuned to the temporal paradox of it all, has called “new ruins.”162 The evacuated or stalled subdivisions of the greater Carquinez are doubly new: not only recently abandoned, but also among the youngest buildings in these areas. “Ghost towns” can give a kind of comfort, their bygone working order discernible somewhere beneath the surface. “Ghost subdivisions,” many of them “ruins” by virtue of their incompletion — still under construction at the time of the crash, and so suspended in time — do not (Figs. 8.35–8.37). They unsettle. “Asking about ruins makes locals pause,” one landscape historian has written. “Remarking on
159 Christopher B. Leinberger, “The Next Slum?,” The Atlantic, March 2008; emphasis added. These analyses are generally voiced in a way suggesting, not always accurately, that the subdivisions in question were once solidly middle-class. The journalists of foreclosure, like those of deindustrialization, amplify for effect the heights from which one might “fall.” For a much earlier analysis presenting the “ruins of former affluence” as evidence of human agency on the earth, see Carl Ritter, “The Historical Element in Geographical Science” [1833], in Geographical Studies by the Late Professor Carl Ritter of Berlin, trans. and ed. William Leonhard Gage (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1863), 269. 160 M. P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), for its part, is a worthwhile sociology of how suburbanites mutually surveil. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), is one of several midcentury sociologies that work in this vein. 161 Temple, “Brentwood the Poster Child for Housing Bust”; emphasis added. This conceit essentially suburbanizes the infamous theses set out in James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1982): 29–38. 162 Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (London: Verso, 2010), is an essential post-2008 polemic from east of the Atlantic, even as its author does not quite give his own definition of “new ruins.” See also Rob Kitchin, Cian O’Callaghan, and Justin Gleeson, “The New Ruins of Ireland?: Unfinished Estates in the Post– Celtic Tiger Era,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (2014): 1069–1080.
212 recent ruins stops talk, even makes some locals turn away.”163 Their etiology is not hard to impute in retrospect, but as artifacts these are among our most ambiguous ruins, constitutively between form and formlessness — that suburban distinction — between built culture and unbuilt nature. One conspicuously stalled deposit of the crash materialized on the shores of the Carquinez. The New Urbanist redo of the old company town at Hercules, prophesied by Duany and his local compradors, has not yet, in 2016, been finished. It may never be. For seven years its commercial centerpiece, “The Avenue” according to one of several cascading attempts at rebranding, was a Tyvek-wrapped monolith visible — per planners’ initial design — to all passersby on I-80, who might, under better circumstances, have been getting a glimpse of the second coming of the “walkable” prewar city (Figs. 8.38, 8.39).164 Particularly jarring landscapes result when abandonment besets places conceived, but in no way realized, precisely as whole places. It bears repeating: speculative “ruins” so condemned by their incompletion were not new in the early twenty-first century, either as landscape type or as rhetorical move. Mumford may have used the term in a bizarrely catholic way, scoping over all sorts of basically intact environments, but as he canvassed Queens on foot, and continued to scorn its extremities throughout the 1920s, an analogous set of interrupted landscapes commanded national attention from the South Florida land boom, whose speculative fictions — built well in advance of need — crashed hard in 1926, leaving rows of spindly palm trees lining roads to nowhere in particular. (A violent hurricane the same year added insult to injury, swamping even the mostly sold subdivisions before they could fill out.) The edges of greater Miami, wrote the popular historian Frederick Lewis Allen soon thereafter in Only Yesterday (1931), punctuated with “dead subdivisions,” had been “plainly overbuilt: as one drove out along the highways, one began to notice houses that must have stood long untenanted, shops with staring vacant windows, districts blighted with half-finished and abandoned ‘improvements.’” Other books followed, autopsies of what T. H. Weigall called the Boom in Paradise (1932).165 Florida’s abortive ruins became a touchstone for anyone alarmed by vaporous speculation — on the left among those already skeptical of capital’s “normalcy,” but also at the broad pro-capitalist center among those more cautious developers who had staked their livelihoods on not being mistaken for mere “curbstoners.” Photographs of hollowed-out Florida proliferated, freezing these developments in various states of becoming-subdivision. Visually, it could be hard to tell the before from the after.166
163 John R. Stilgoe, What Is Landscape? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015), 76. 164 The complications of 2008 were magnified beyond rescue by a “grim” situation involving the creative accounting practices of the Hercules Redevelopment Agency. Nelson Oliva, the city manager, steered nearly 50 million dollars of redevelopment funds to questionable transactions, many of which had missing or nonexistent records. The state Controller audited Hercules and deemed the transgressions “absolutely incredible”; “Hercules Misspent Millions, Audit Finds,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 September 2012. The town-center project, linchpin of the “complete” New Urbanist galaxy, swallowed 12 million dollars alone; “Death of Former City Manager Nelson Oliva Should Not End Pursuit of Hercules Case,” Contra Costa Times, 30 May 2014. 165 Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Harper, 1931), 238, 234, 239; and T. H. Weigall, Boom in Paradise (New York: Alfred H. King, 1932). For a crucial work of New Deal social science that uses Florida and other 1920s bubbles as cautionary tales, see Philip H. Cornick, Premature Subdivision and Its Consequences (New York: Institute of Public Administration, 1938). 166 Refer again to Fig. 8.28.
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One strategy among the new ruin-gazers has been to make peace — or try to — with the landscapes of abandonment. In his Tampa-centric Exiles in Eden (2010), Paul Reyes fairly thrilled to the “new life” bodying forth at the interface of houses and their muddy understory: “[a] life partially revealed,” that is, “by stuff marinating in a fetid stillness.” Reyes sought a kind of justice in the resurgent weeds, the frogs and insects that entered the newly porous bungalows or began life there in a pailful of standing water: “All around me, a new reclamation was avenging the reclamation that preceded it.”167 Stressing the re-equalization of things, in this way, and imputing new, higher unities, Reyes was rehearsing theses put forward a century prior by Georg Simmel, whose “The Ruin” (1911), slighted in circles more predisposed to the wares of Walter Benjamin, articulates what may be its classic philosophical statement. Simmel had a vitalist streak, but he was also, and always, a kind of Kantian. In “The Ruin,” he schematizes architecture — all architecture — as the outcome of a peculiarly “world-pervading original enmity” between Nature and Spirit, a “peace,” a “balance,” a “sublime victory” for Man. That balance is summarily undercut when built form begins, by some “cosmic tragedy,” to crumble. Ruin is, on this telling, a reversal — nature’s “claim” overtakes culture’s — but it is just as much a new harmony: Simmel closes announcing the ruin’s essentially “equalizing justice.” In ruin, then, in decay, we have “nature’s revenge,” a kind of negation of the negation.168 The conventional reading of Simmel’s essay consigns itself to the question of what ruins mean: what they symbolize, represent, connote, or in some sense “say.” Simmel has the ruin and its surrounds metaphysically add up to some articulate greater-than. In this way, he reinstates the holist program for landscape that we have surveyed in so many domains. He says very little, in specific, about the materiality of “the” ruin itself. What he does say renders the whole scene rather passive. New, ambivalent ruins, caught between form and its antithesis, are, however, dynamic things. We need conceptual resources to sense them, to think them, and to live with them. To do this requires that we scrutinize the landscapes of untimely ruination in a more concerted way. It occasions a pivot from the meanings to the doings of landscape, and broadly from metaphor to materiality. We need to specify their distinctive presences on the land, their heft, their animacies, and the anxieties they provoke. Their newness, moreover, poses challenges. The problem of what ruins do engages questions of temporality — recentness, suddenness, pastlessness, futurelessness — that are not easily resolved. And if at one register of visibility these halted suburban ruins result from moments of abandonment that are sudden, awkward, even violent, in terms of their activity once left alone their animacy is of a slower and more inertial sort. Ruins act inescapably in time, however, and must be thought in a more eventful way than dreams of new harmony allow. As it happens, there is a lineage of landscape criticism that takes precisely this tack — and that, before Mumford set out to play the geographer, wondered intently at the pacings and spacings of a speculative nation. Already in the 1870s, what struck Friedrich Ratzel most about the American landscape was its premature ruination. After touring the continent’s expanse by rail and making his last urban stop-off, in atmospheric San Francisco, he jotted a brief chapter, the
167 Reyes, Exiles in Eden, 4, 228. On some of the ways natural imagery might itself naturalize, and so rhetorically justify, the fact of abandonment, see Nate Millington, “Post-Industrial Imaginaries: Nature, Representation and Ruin in Detroit, Michigan,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (2013): 279–296. 168 Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” 260, 259, 266, 262. Simmel is utterly unspecific on the character, spatial form, age, site, material constitution, or appearance of “the” ruin that impels his commentary. He seems to have in mind Classical structures, mentioning the Roman Forum in passing.
214 book’s only thematic one, that might finally make sense of the scenes he had just surveyed. The last chapter of his Sketches of Urban and Cultural Life in North America (1876) is simply titled “Ruins.” It is illustrated with scenes of railside dilapidation somewhere in the great West (Fig. 8.40), landscapes caught forcefully in process, deposits of an onrushing historical sweep that has exceeded them and left them behind. “One has to keep in mind,” Ratzel wrote, “that even if civilization here is young in years, it has lived all the more rapidly.” But these new ruins were ambivalent artifacts, neither shocking in their decrepitude nor particularly romantic: “How different these witnesses of a swift life! They don’t comfort us because they are not grand enough nor lie sufficiently far enough in the past.”169 They had come too soon. In The American Scene (1907), Henry James arrived at similar conclusions about New York. The downtown hotels puzzled him: “monuments already these, in truth, of a more artless age, and yet with too little history about them for dignity of ruin. Dignity, if not of ruin at least of reverence, was what, at other points, doubtless, we failed considerably less to read into the cottage where Grant lived and the cottage where Garfield died.” Skyscrapers, James felt, were everywhere falling as soon as they went up. “Again and again, in the upper reaches, you pause with that pity; you learn, on the occasion of a kindly glance up and down a quiet cross- street…that such and such a house, or a row, is ‘coming down’; and you gasp, in presence of the elements involved, at the strangeness of the moral so pointed.” One kind of critic might read these words as disclosing something about the essential precarity of the new under capitalist spacetime. But James insisted that there were specific kinds of newness, some more disorienting than the rest: “the newness of New York…had this mark of its very own, that it affects one, in every case, as having treated itself as still more provisional, if possible, than any poor dear little interest of antiquity it may have annihilated.” And these ruins do not only, or even primarily, fall: “The word will perhaps be then — who knows? — for building from the earth-surface downwards; in which case it will be a question of tearing, so to speak, ‘up.’ It little matters, so long as we blight the superstition of rest.”170 Ruins — ruination — just will not stand still, a fact that makes unending demands on our attention as critics. Like Mumford, but with more wonder than vitriol, James redirects the discussion to ruins’ life. Simmel himself sensed this uncontainable animacy of the ruin and grasped at ways to theorize it — and, too, avoided defaulting to the pathologizing gestures Mumford had perfected. Alongside his idealist gestures at natural–cultural reconciliation, of justice and sublime peace, for Simmel the life of ruins always overflows the strictures of form, resists closure, opens in time onto futures that no human reason can exactly predict. Ruins are always somewhere provocatively between form and formlessness, culture and nature. If Simmel at first entertains the possibility of resolving these oppositions and drawing a moral out of them, he soon forgoes that possibility, unbundling buildings into recalcitrant materials and their propensities. The overriding calm and security Simmel imputes to decayed space loses out; even his memory of a bygone “satisfaction of form” seems wishful, belated. Looking inside Simmel’s ruin, then — looking at its matter out of place — we can see another, more promising lead. This is not a speculative or contrarian reading. In “The Ruin,” there is a competing interpretive current that renders this most passive space quite active indeed. Matter’s “carrying power” allows it to work according to “its own forces.” Decay, that peculiar form of destruction, surges from “within,” bred of forces never fully disclosed to human observers. The ruin produces
169 Friedrich Ratzel, Sketches of Urban and Cultural Life in North America [1876], trans. and ed. Stewart Stehlin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 285, 286. 170 Henry James, The American Scene [1907] (New York: Penguin, 1994), 10, 85, 84, 86.
215 new, immediately “felt” effects and affects.171 As Johannes von Moltke has noted, Simmel’s ruin creates.172 If, in their abandonment, buildings have a kind of commonsense passivity — some notional steward abandons them and lets them atrophy — it is a “positive passivity.” The ruin, then, that consummate landscape of absence, has its own suasive kind of presence. Ruined spaces have afterlives, whether we heed them or not. Their matter enters and leaves new assemblages: ruins are “things which, once immersed in life and accidentally cast on its bank, are by their very nature capable of being easily caught again by its current.” And it is not, for Simmel, only a question of reuse by intentional, form-giving humans: the ruin’s more diffuse “current” of “life” does the work.173 We can study atrophy in the affirmative as event and process, and the atrophied in its sometimes inscrutable afterlife. Simmel said nothing about suburban landscapes, but like Mumford he implies that those landscapes might actually be most active, most consequential in acting on human life, in forcing thought (or withdrawing from simple mastery by thought), when their form is most ambiguous. Simmel asserts the force of ruins and leaves the open the question of where it flows. In so doing, he refuses any normative temporality of the “too soon,” the “too late,” or the astonished “already” — and refuses an ethics or politics that would insist on remastering such landscapes, reinstating stable, profitable order or form. In that way, ruins resist. They are objects that persistently object to the uses that state and capital have marked out for them. Ratzel, too, arrived at such a settlement, counseling reflection in and on the lively matter of ruins, and on the possibilities opened up by their blurring. “There are so many different things and objects here,” he wrote of one decrepit scene, “but they all mean the same…. When one stands in their midst, one thinks one sees the outline of these shapes connecting, intertwining, and soon everything around dissolving into general rising and falling wave-like contours. One movement, encompassing and making everything alike.” In ruins, he sensed, we rediscover our connectedness; after form, we reencounter something like an expanded version of the commons. He noted, indeed, the unwalling tendencies of the ruin: “Soon the waves of life will hit the walls even more powerfully; they will look for ways to break up the inanimate stonework. But,” he asked, “what will there be in a couple of decades other than debris inundated by green and brown vegetation and the flowering beauty of creeping and climbing plants?”174 Ratzel didn’t say. He, too, left the question of ruins’ futures very much open.
Robert Smithson boarded a bus in 1967 from New York’s Port Authority to Passaic, New Jersey, where, alongside rusting riverine debris that he photographed with inscrutable gusto (Fig. 8.41), one stalled subdivision caught his eye. It was unfinished. He called these “ruins in reverse.” Smithson, a land artist, savored paradox more than most, but in this case he felt compelled to clarify: “This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.” Such ruins were a specifically suburban formation, Smithson held, and this for reasons of their temporality: “Suburbs exist without a rational past and without the ‘big events’ of history.” It was in suburbs, in those “elsewheres” that both fulfill and negate urban hopes, that the critic might get to know — really know — those “monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” If suburban edges presented “a set of opportunities for viewing” the
171 Simmel, “The Ruin,” 265, 259, 263, 261. 172 Johannes von Moltke, “Ruin Cinema,” in Ruins of Modernity, 398. 173 Simmel, “The Ruin,” 261, 265. 174 Ratzel, Sketches, 292–293, 294.
216 city, though, their lessons were absolutely ambiguous, a source of exciting disorientation that, usefully, could scramble obvious mantras of either progress or nostalgia. “The future,” Smithson wrote, “is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past” — that is, in ordinary suburbs.175 There is something appealing about Smithson’s anti-nostalgia. He accepts — even seeks — temporal disorientation in order to resist the temptation of telos. The ruins of incompletion — forms that resist closure, or draw back from it, or never attained it all — just might prompt a new politics, and a new aesthetics, of ambivalence. On edge, where form and formlessness continue their rhetorical dance, is where we might find ground to stand. These are ethical questions, too: How to live amid ruins? How to reckon with the eventuality of ever more, ever newer ruins — understanding ruination to be not an aberrant but a constitutive process in the formation of urban landscapes? One tentative set of philosophic answers, as it happens, was forged in Northern California. William James happened to be present in California when the 1906 earthquake struck, and he ventured north from suburban Stanford, where he holed up for the term, to survey the dilapidation of San Francisco and how the public seemed to be coping. Although he claimed that “[m]y business is with ‘subjective’ phenomena exclusively; so I will say nothing of the material ruin that greeted us on every hand,” his essay “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake” (1906) marks out how these jarring physical scenes, “with every familiar association with material things disserved” — “not only in the great city, but in the outlying towns” — might be productive of new attachments, new interdependencies and inclinations to experiment. With “a tendency more toward nervous excitement than toward grief,” with their receptors on high alert, those living amid ruins — impressed, affected by them in almost wholly aleatory ways — might develop new modes of humility, keyed to neither an anarchic anything-goes nor a baseline of command-and-control. James kept his promise and said little that was concrete on the buildings or infrastructure, nothing on the City Hall dome, suspended atop scaffolding and rubble, that graced postcards by the thousand. But he was clear: a generous response to collapse requires that we do our thinking within the landscape, enfolded, not repulsed, by the ruins and their ambiguities. “Mental pathos and anguish,” he noted, “are usually effects of distance. At the place of action,” physically at and amid the newly deformed, “healthy animal insensibility and heartiness take their place.”176 It is
175 Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” [1967], in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 72, 74; emphasis original. On Smithson’s fascination with New Jersey as “a set of opportunities for viewing New York,” see Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 77–121. Reynolds discusses Smithson alongside period discourses on suburban “order and ruin,” including those given voice by Peter Blake, and by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown. For an environmental treatment relating Smithson to both nineteenth- century landscape aesthetics and their recovery in the myth-and-symbol era of American studies, see Andrew Menard, “Robert Smithson’s Toxic Tour of Passaic, New Jersey,” Journal of American Studies 48 (2014): 1019– 1040. It was William Carlos Williams, of course, the poet of the Passaic, who had committed to a materialist credo — “Say it, no ideas but in things” — in Paterson [1958], rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1992), 6. His short fiction “Life Along the Passaic River” [1938], in The Farmers’ Daughters (New York: New Directions, 1961), 109– 116, is set on precisely the stretch that Smithson scrutinized. For Williams as new materialist, see Alba Newmann, “Paterson: Poem as Rhizome,” William Carlos Williams Review 26 (2006): 51–73. Bill Brown, meanwhile, usefully reminds us, “It’s not no ideas. ‘No ideas but in things’ doesn’t mean no ideas”; A Sense of Things, 1. 176 William James, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake” [1906], in Writings, 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1218, 1220, 1221, 1222. His classic statement on ethics and Others, which leans more toward a position of hands-off relativity than toward engagement, is William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Talks to Teachers (New York: Henry Holt, 1899), 113–129. For a superb rereading of James’s ethics and politics, a “molecular individualism” in which affects and attachments supervene, see
217 amid the most fragile landscapes, amid ruins and potential ruins, that we come to sense something about the arbitrariness of the social relations our environment can seem to congeal. We can also then, James wagered, start looking for other ways to relate. Ratzel, Simmel, Henry and William James: these are names we have encountered before. The list could be extended. As a matter of theory, and of intellectual history, the point is broader. Those very thinkers working to articulate a vitalism of landscape, to gauge how matter matters, have time and again come to sense the possibilities brought on by its unbuilding — and to wonder about those possibilities in the affirmative. Those most pointedly asking what landscape does in the first place have also come to ask what ruins do. Those have drawn their clearest object lessons from those scenes in which built form is abandoned or otherwise ambiguous. They have learned from scenes, suburban or otherwise, in which matter does its work in excess, or in refusal, of the order its human stewards prescribe. So should we. Ruins pose questions. They force thought. They impinge on the senses. They gather us into constituencies. They compel attention. How we then respond is and remains an open question. In the middle of things: there, and not outside the messes of history, is where we begin to think and, perhaps, to act. Mumford’s own antinomies might suggest a way forward. For the later, postwar Mumford, as we have seen, suburban ruins instigated no shortage of anxiety, no deficit of despair. By the 1960s, in California, such scenes served him almost exclusively as evidence and sentence for something gone irretrievably wrong, and he could hardly bear — or be bothered — to look. Their animacy came to seem, before all else, a contagion, a threat. And yet, recovering something of that immersive wonder with which the younger Mumford first wandered and philosophized on one city’s ragged edges, urbanists today might yet rotate that vitalism, materializing it differently and finding in it an invitation to approach suburban landscapes anew: to inquire, up close, how they live and are lived with, rather than to ignore or condemn them wholesale. His diagnoses might then be productive of new sorts of reflection, of a dark hope and another temper of critique that makes little recourse to the injunctions of form. Ambivalence can be salutary. So can discomfort. Both can help us work amid our newest ruins and rework their futures, without simply wishing them away.
Alexander Livingston, “Excited Subjects: William James and the Politics of Radical Empiricism,” Theory and Event 15, no. 4 (2012). On James’s “vivid” experience of the earthquake, see Simon, “William James at Stanford,” 338– 341.
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Illustrations
Figure 1.1 Chicago’s various “satellites” as seen by Graham Romeyn Taylor. Within or without city limits, reformers held, industrial suburbs or satellites could evince formal principles applicable downtown or farther afield. They were scalable laboratories for the resolution of “disorder” and other “urban” problems. Source: Graham Romeyn Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York: D. Appleton, 1915), 9.
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Figure 1.2 The satellites of St. Louis. Satellite cities might be located across state lines (in Illinois, in this case), complicating efforts at coordinated regional planning. Source: Graham Romeyn Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York: D. Appleton, 1915), 13.
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Figure 1.3 Promotional map of Chicago, indicating the locational advantages of the Argo–Clearing district. “Look at these Plants,” sited on land that was annexed to Chicago in 1915. Source: Graham Romeyn Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York: D. Appleton, 1915), 20.
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Figure 1.4 Bird’s-eye view of the Central Manufacturing District, the largest and most conspicuous planned industrial district in Chicago. There, several unrelated concerns could share rail spurs, warehousing facilities, and other services. The CMD was sited to the northeast of Clearing, but along the same industrial vector extending southwest from the Loop (and from the better-known Back of the Yards). The Central Manufacturing District: Chicago Junction Railway Service (Chicago: Central Manufacturing District, 1915), 9.
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Figure 1.5 Pullman, both scapegoat and unspoken ideal for a generation of industrialists, where home and work functions were compellingly decanted into two non-overlapping realms. Source: John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 423.
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Figure 1.6 Clarence Perry’s much-reproduced “neighborhood unit” diagram, decoupled from industrial land uses, distilled in miniature most of the spatial principles worked out adjacent to suburban industries. Source: Clarence Arthur Perry, “The Neighborhood Unit,” in Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, Volume VII: Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York: Regional Plan of New York, 1929).
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Figure 1.7 “Conventional” as opposed to “neighborhood” street systems. For Clarence Perry and others, the constitutive enclosure of the neighborhood unit proved its worth, particularly when contrasted to the centerless, edgeless grid plan that was in dominance throughout the nineteenth century. The majority of industrial suburbs did not reproduce the internal structure prescribed here, but it was de rigueur, by 1917 and doubly so by 1929, to package and market worker subdivisions as bounded, stably interconnected spatial units of some sort. Source: Clarence Arthur Perry, “The Neighborhood Unit,” in Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, Volume VII: Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York: Regional Plan of New York, 1929).
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Figure 3.1 “Theoretical diagram of the plan of Paris.” Daniel Burnham adapted this one-size-fits-all diagram of urban structure from the French architect and planner Eugène Hénard, and then used it to structure his recommendations for San Francisco and other American cities in need of “beautification.” Source: Daniel H. Burnham, Report on a Plan for San Francisco (San Francisco: Sunset Press, 1905), 37.
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Figure 3.2 An anti-billboard illustration from San Jose that predates mass adoption of the automobile. Charles Mulford Robinson and his ilk found commercial billboards “aggressive” and unsightly, interrupting the clean lines that proper “form,” to earn the name, required. Source: Charles Mulford Robinson, The Beautifying of San José (San Jose, Calif.: Charles Mulford Robinson, 1909), 39.
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Figure 3.3 Another didactic image from San Jose. Robinson’s City Beautiful featured no imperial negation of things natural, but rather a managed transition between built and unbuilt landscapes — one easily contravened by the inexpert. Source: Charles Mulford Robinson, The Beautifying of San José (San Jose, Calif.: Charles Mulford Robinson, 1909), 27.
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Figure 3.4 County and suburban roads on the edges of San Jose, which did not escape Robinson’s view. Grand- manner radials and diagonals downtown were part of the City Beautiful recipe for traffic circulation, but only a part. Source: Charles Mulford Robinson, The Beautifying of San José (San Jose, Calif.: Charles Mulford Robinson, 1909), 19.
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Figure 3.5 The “unit” ideal manifest in industrial East Oakland. Source: Werner Hegemann, Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley (Oakland: Kelley–Davis Company, 1915), 58.
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Figure 3.6 An illustration from Werner Hegemann’s 1915 plan, relating topography to the built environment. “Nature provided protection,” planners thought, giving cities form of its own accord. Source: Werner Hegemann, Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley (Oakland: Kelley–Davis Company, 1915), 103.
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Figure 3.7 The effect of enclosure, simulated at a street intersection — one way in which Unwin and Sitte saw their concepts adapted to the American urban grid. Source: Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley (Oakland: Kelley–Davis Company, 1915), 121.
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Figure 3.8 Hostility to the massifying “row,” plus thoughts on how to alleviate it. Source: Werner Hegemann, Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley (Oakland: Kelley–Davis Company, 1915), 120.
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Figure 4.1 The view south down the peninsula, to which space-intensive San Francisco industries routinely fled until about 1900, when well-off suburbanites in San Mateo blocked further noxiousness from settling there or at points south. Source: P. M. Sanford, Richmond, City of Destiny (1934).
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Figure 4.2 The view down the Carquinez Strait. Richmond and points east — as far as Antioch — are strung along a single rail line, the Southern Pacific trackage that opened in 1878. Many of the names registered here denote unincorporated areas that developed in conjunction with individual industries. Source: P. M. Sanford, Richmond, City of Destiny (1934).
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Figure 4.3 A “comprehensive map” of industrial employers lining the greater Carquinez as of 1915. Several massive concerns would not relocate there until the 1920s, when trucks as well as the rails aided dispersal, but by 1915 large installations already dotted East County: the (U.S.) “steel works” at Pittsburg, Shell Oil at Martinez, and others. Source: Contra Costa County, California: Leading County of the West in Manufacturing (1915).
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Figure 4.4 A crude but illustrative map of the Bay Region and its industries, ca. 1923, with considerably less Contra Costa detail than above. For “Grape Juice,” read California Wine Company. Source: Vera Esta Rigdon, The Geography of the Carquinez Strait (1923).
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Figure 4.5 Imagery from a 1930s booster pamphlet. The shoreline of the Carquinez, diligently traced here and routed around a block of text, continued to be metonymic for industrial prosperity. Source: The Story of Contra Costa County, California (Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Development Association, 1936).
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Figure 4.6 Capitalist regionalism as put forth by one particularly boosterish newspaper editor. The promise of a multi-county regional “unit” acting in concert inspired actors with diverse interests and politics. Source: Addison N. Clark, “No. 46 of the ‘Empire’ series,” Oakland Tribune, 13 April 1930.
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Figure 4.7 Industry naturalized in the alter-Geddesian valley section as seen, or imagined, from the strait. Source: Contra Costa County, California: An Empire within a County (1922).
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Figure 5.1 Detail from an 1898 USGS map of the Carquinez Strait. Isolation was a fact of company-town life as well a spatial strategy imposed from afar. Crockett, Port Costa, Martinez, and other strait towns existed as discontinuous pods of urbanization. Topography provided an assist: scarce flat land amenable to industrial uses was pinned between water and hills. Source: United States Geological Survey, Karquines quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: United States Geological Survey, 1898), scale 1:62,500.
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Figure 5.2 Detail from a 1907 USGS map of Eastern Contra Costa County. Again note the morphology of isolation: Pittsburg, Antioch, and, between them, the void. Source: United States Geological Survey, Antioch quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1907), scale 1:62,500.
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Figure 5.3 Small pods of urbanization strung along the rail line in West Contra Costa County, with more empty space than not. Source: Sanborn–Perris Map Company, Port Costa, showing location of ware hos. &c. along Straits of Carquinez (New York: Sanborn–Perris Map Company, 1889), 1:600.
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Figure 5.4 The Selby shot tower, packed into the grid of San Francisco’s South of Market district, before its two relocations. Source: Roy D. Graves pictorial collection, vol. 20, BANC PIC 1905.17500, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 5.5 The Selby smelter, at right, in its second location, along San Francisco’s northern shore. Seen from Fort Mason, 1870s. Source: Roy D. Graves pictorial collection, vol. 21, BANC PIC 1905.17500, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 5.6 Postcard view of the Selby smelter, its operations having jumped the bay in 1898. The adjoining company town of Tormey is obscured by the hills, which also provided a buffer against odors and explosions. The smokestack, visible for miles, was a common point by which travelers would orient themselves. Source: Crockett Historical Society.
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Figure 5.7 The new Selby smelter with a still taller smokestack — a recognizable landmark for navigators. Source: F. J. Geisler photographs of Martinez and other Contra Costa County locations, BANC PIC 2011.049, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 5.8 Postcard view of Crockett taken shortly after the completion of the Carquinez Bridge in 1927, with extremely sparse development visible north of the strait in Vallejo. Source: California Historical Society, PC-CO, Box 22.
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Figure 5.9 Company-town pastoral along the Carquinez Strait: a postcard view of the C&H Sugar Refinery in Crockett. Source: Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection, Indiana University Library.
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Figure 5.10 Postcard view of the C&H sugar refinery. This very angle, or one tilted a few degrees to the east, was standard on Crockett postcards and promotional materials by 1910. Source: California Historical Society, PC-CO, Box 22.
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Figure 5.11 Specialization by race and space: originally “white” Crockett (left), darker Valona (right), and, as a buffer between them, the parkland known Crolona. This photo dates to 1955. Source: George Emanuels, California’s Contra Costa County: An Illustrated History (Fresno: Panorama West Books, 1986), 177.
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Figure 5.12 Rail spurs feed into the vast citadel of grain at the California Wharf and Warehouse Company, Port Costa. Source: F. J. Geisler photographs of Martinez and other Contra Costa County locations, BANC PIC 2011.049, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 5.13 The wall of grain warehouses at Port Costa (formerly Wheatport), often remarked upon by ferry passengers plying the Carquinez Strait between San Francisco and Sacramento. Source: F. J. Geisler photographs of Martinez and other Contra Costa County locations, BANC PIC 2011.049, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 5.14 Whale-oil production at Point Molate, Richmond. Source: Richmond, California: The Industrial City (n.p., 1922).
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Figure 5.15 Winehaven, the company town housing workers for the California Wine Association, and its brick fortress, visible from San Francisco. Source: Richmond, California: The Industrial City (n.p., 1922).
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Figure 5.16 Nichols, sited in relative isolation to the east of Martinez, photographed from above in 1944. Note the clear, single-line separations between the domains of home (top) and work (bottom). Source: Contra Costa County Historical Society.
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Figure 5.17 Associated Oil and the town of Avon, another pod of development to the east of Martinez. Source: United States Geological Survey, Honker Bay quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1918), scale 1:62,500.
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Figure 5.18 The cement plant at Cowell, within what is today the city of Concord. Another rendition of the “machine in the garden” imagery: industry at and in nature, not against it. Mount Diablo looms in back. Source: California Historical Society, PC-CO, Box 22.
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Figure 5.19 Bay Point’s Washington-manqué boulevards, laid out in 1908 by speculators from Walnut Creek following a visit to see the McMillan Plan. Source: Contra Costa County Historical Society.
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Figure 5.20 Bay Point, renamed Port Chicago in 1931, as built out by the start of World War II. Especially on the more sparsely built east side of town, the diagonals’ axial grandeur, obvious from above, may not have been apparent at street level. Source: United States Geological Survey, Carquinez quadrangle, California (Washington, D.C.: War Department, Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army, 1942), scale 1:62,500.
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Figure 5.21 Inside the walls: the workplace at Hercules Powder. Undated photo. Source: City of Hercules.
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Figure 5.22 Photograph of sheep maintaining the buffer zone encircling the town of Hercules — enclosure by other means. Source: Cori Ojala and Kevin McGrath, Remembering Days Past: Hercules, California, 1879 to 1979 (Vallejo, Calif.: Wheeler Printing), 21.
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Figure 5.23 “White Columns,” the gated hilltop home reserved for the Hercules Powder superintendent. Source: California Historical Society, PC-CO, Box 22.
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Figure 5.24 A set of houses the company provided for the Anglo workforce of Hercules. Pinole Street is the site of today’s commemorative “Hercules Village,” which includes houses of several styles relocated from other parts of town. Source: Architectural Resource Group.
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Figure 5.25 The barracks-like dormitories allotted to Hercules’s 200 or so Chinese workers, who lived markedly closer to the combustible industrial plant than non-Chinese and endured the vast majority of casualties in its periodic explosions. Source: Hercules Historical Society.
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Figure 5.26 View of Richmond and vicinity from a real-estate pamphlet. The self-appointed “factory locators” made space for homes as well. Source: Wall’s Second Addition to the City of Richmond (San Francisco: New Richmond Land Company, 1915).
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Figure 5.27 Detail of the previous image: “factory sites,” both extant and foreseen, exist in close proximity to the subdivision in question. Home and work were allotted their own spaces in advance, linked but distinct. Source: Wall’s Second Addition to the City of Richmond (San Francisco: New Richmond Land Company, 1915).
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Figure 5.28 Further detail from above: the Pullman shops and adjacent Pullman Park subdivision by Baldwin & Howell. Industrial smoke routinely appears in the visual culture that accompanies promotional material of the period. It connoted prosperity, even as planners and others reclassified it as a “nuisance.” Source: Wall’s Second Addition to the City of Richmond (San Francisco: New Richmond Land Company, 1915).
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Figure 5.29 Cover of brochure touting the Richmond Annex subdivision, which rose near the Pullman car shop on Richmond’s east side. Again we see the machine in the garden — with a decided emphasis on the machine. Source: Richmond Annex (Oakland: Richmond Annex Land Company, 1912).
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Figure 5.30 Aerial view included in the Richmond Annex brochure, with the subdivision in question marked out in brighter green. Its builders sold the neighborhood as being just close enough to the billowing smoke plumes of Pullman and Richmond’s other shop floors. Source: Richmond Annex (Oakland: Richmond Annex Land Company, 1912).
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Figure 5.31 Informational panel from the same Richmond Annex brochure: industrial suburbia from “the same men who built up Berkeley, Piedmont and the Scenic Boulevard Districts.” Subdividers applied common techniques of enclosure and specialization across class lines. Source: Richmond Annex (Oakland: Richmond Annex Land Company, 1912).
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Figure 5.32 Image from a brochure advertising the Richmond Junction subdivision. Pullman and the industrial waterfront, clearly in view, presented a not-unpleasing prospect, even for the comfortable classes housed uphill from the smoke. Note World’s Fair site off in San Francisco, which dates this image to roughly 1915. Source: Richmond Junction (Oakland: E. N. Tapscott, n.d.).
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Figure 5.33 Photograph of Martinez, ca. 1910, looking east. Note smelter is at upper right, sited just beyond the hills, which act as a something of a buffer. Source: F. J. Geisler photographs of Martinez and other Contra Costa County locations, BANC PIC 2011.049, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 5.34 Specialized land uses at Pittsburg, looking west. U.S. Steel, the main player at work in the foreground, took over the mill established on site as Columbia Steel in 1910. California Redwood Manufacturers, whose yards appear at center right, had been on site from 1903. Source: Pittsburg, Calif., views and other photographs from the C. A. Hooper & Co. records, BANC PIC 2010.040, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 6.1 “The world’s best working climate.” Graphs such as this one performed a kind of precision. Booster science touted the microclimates of the Carquinez as “just right,” invigorating working bodies without imposing the fatigue that might follow from more intense heat, and counseling “moderation” in all things — social, moral, political — besides. Not surprisingly, the claim stated above this graph went unattributed. Source: Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1926), 12.
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Figure 6.2 “Civilization” mapped onto — and ostensibly caused by — differences in climate: a favorite pastime of the early-twentieth-century human geographer. Source: Ellsworth Huntington, The Human Habitat (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1927), 139.
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Figure 6.3 “Climatic energy” as a scarce resource. Huntington attached elaborate moral predicates to maps such as this one, mainstreaming a dark energetics of racial difference. Source: Ellsworth Huntington, The Human Habitat (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1927), 145.
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Figure 6.4 A page from a 1915 promotional pamphlet on Richmond. “The most healthful city,” town fathers could claim just beneath an image of Richmond Chemical Works. Better living through chemistry, indeed. Source: Richmond, California (San Francisco: Sunset Magazine Bureau of Information, 1915), 61.
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Figure 6.5 The postwar consensus on display in an industrial real-estate brochure: climate capitalized, amenity as efficiency, and “no extremes” in employee behavior. These syllogisms got mobilized across the class spectrum to sell housing developments distant from industry, but the connections had been forged most clearly with reference to prewar industrial towns — not only California’s migrant “health seekers” of lore. Source: New Industry Speaks — About Santa Clara County, California (1950?), Mel Scott papers, BANC MSS 70/73 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 7.1 A view of Forest Hills Gardens, the genteel “model town” that anchors the most programmatic statement penned by its architect, Grosvenor Atterbury — inadvertently the most cogent theorist of modeling as an emergent process. For “Long Island,” read Queens. The neo-Tudor Station Square, adjacent to the Long Island Rail Road trackage, is at bottom center. Source: Grosvenor Atterbury, “Model Towns in America,” Scribner’s 52 (July 1912), 20–35.
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Figure 7.2 One standard view of the central park at Pullman, an explicit “model town” and, by 1894, a cross-class synonym for paternalist overreach. Source: Grosvenor Atterbury, “Model Towns in America,” Scribner’s 52 (July 1912), 20–35.
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Figure 7.3 Photograph of New York’s 1908 Exhibit of Congestion. Explicit, didactic exhibition culture was a crucial feature of Progressive Era planning knowledge. Here, the scene featured still images, moving images, and scale models of all manner of “otherwise” scenarios held out as correctives to the urban “swarm.” Source: John Martin, “The Exhibit of Congestion Interpreted,” Charities and the Commons 20 (4 April 1908): 27–39.
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Figure 7.4 First prize–winning plan in a 1916 design competition. Competitions were one spur to post-grid experiments in subdivision science, as well as a venue for their display. This one went unbuilt. Source: Alfred B. Yeomans, ed., City Residential Land Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916).
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Figure 7.5 Ebenezer Howard’s widely reproduced “diagram only” of 1898, which its author expected would compel imitation far and wide. Source: Ebenezer Howard, To-Morrow (1898).
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Figure 7.6 A certain symmetry: Yorkship Village, Camden, N.J., by Electus Litchfield, perhaps the best-known shipbuilder subdivision to come of the First World War. Source: Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
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Figure 7.7 Unrealized garden-city visions for Visitacion Valley, located by the bayfront in the far southeastern corner of San Francisco. Source: Charles H. Cheney, “Must California Industries Provide Good Homes for Their Labor?” Western Architect and Engineer 53 (June 1918): 87–95.
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Figure 7.8 Mediation: a photograph of a three-dimensional scale model of Visitacion Valley’s proposed subdivision, which was itself to model imitable form for application farther afield. Source: Charles H. Cheney, “Must California Industries Provide Good Homes for Their Labor?” Western Architect and Engineer 53 (June 1918): 87–95.
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Figure 7.9 Best-laid plans for the USHC subdivision near Mare Island, 1918. Note the allocation of space for schools, automobile garages, commercial areas, open spaces, and “community” facilities of various sorts. Contour lines show a not-insignificant elevation gradient across which the curved streets unfold. Note also the distinction between buildings actualized and those merely “contemplated,” with Armistice Day as the dividing line. Source: Project #581, Box 4, Record Group 3–LS, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.
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Figure 7.10 A detail from Kelham, Jones, and Kieffer’s 1918 plan for the hillside Bay Terrace subdivision on the edge of Vallejo, whose workers would commute to the Mare Island Shipyard across the strait (at bottom). Source: Project #581, Box 4, Record Group 3–LS, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.
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Figure 7.11 The morphological contrast between the shipbuilders’ self-contained street system (left) and that of the rest of gridbound Vallejo is readily apparent. The curved streets were lined with open-lot houses. The one bold-lined square just right of center, and far closer to Vallejo proper, was the site of the dormitory housing for unattached male workers. Source: Project #581, Box 4, Record Group 3–LS, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.
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Figure 7.12 Selected plans and elevations for the Mare Island project, built out in stucco and other “modern” materials by the San Francisco architect George Kelham. Source: Eran Ben-Joseph, “Workers’ Paradise.”
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Figure 7.13 Model-consciousness as a social imperative. This advertisement was serialized in many local newspapers circulating near USHC developments during and just after the war. Source: Entry 22, Box 5, Record Group 3, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.
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Figure 7.14 Photograph of Clyde (looking downhill and gently to the southwest), still under construction in 1919, by J. L. Padilla for the Emergency Fleet Corporation. Source: Box 6, Record Group 32–H, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.
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Figure 7.15 Maybeck introduced slight undulations into George Applegarth and E. W. Cannon’s street plan for Clyde and gave those streets a set of maximally Anglophilic names. British garden-city concepts may have been top of mind, but Maybeck also sought to ensure “hygiene” and “reasonable” spatial proportion, among “[t]he same principals [sic] that were employed by successful colonies.” At right are the small public park, unbuilt commercial district, and hotel (since burned) that Maybeck planned as adjuncts to the residences. Source: George A. Applegarth collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 7.16 One of the individualized houses Bernard Maybeck purpose-built at Clyde for the Emergency Fleet Corporation to house 103 shipbuilders and their families. This image dates from 2016, as the full-grown trees reflect. Source: author.
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Figure 7.17 View west from Clyde. The town was sited upwards of a mile from the shipyards at Bay Point, a remove which spurred controversy, and which was unique among USHC and EFC projects nationwide. It was not in total isolation, though: the Shell Oil refinery, which had opened on the east side of Martinez in 1915, was in plain view from its slopes. Source: author.
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Figure 7.18 Advice for workers, 1919, along lines prescribed by the Own Your Own Home organization. That group displayed interest in the disused USHC subdivisions, well after the cessation of war, as productive models of “good” form and, should the houses be privately owned, crucibles of citizenship. Doggerel optional. Source: Entry 103, Box 1, Record Group 3, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.
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Figure 7.19 More didactic literature from the Own Your Own Home contingent. The open-lot house could act as “‘Kernel’ in the hard ‘Nut’ of costly living.” This would be the fate of the USHC and EFC subdivisions, which were sold off one at a time. Own Your Own Home counted the planner James Ford, a USHC principal, among its number. Source: Entry 103, Box 1, Record Group 3, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.
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Figure 7.20 Fire-insurance reference map of southwestern San Francisco, 1928. Once attached by streetcar, the city’s southwestern quadrant filled up with shapely self-described “model” subdivisions in the 1910s and 1920s, which packaged the trappings of plannedness as high-end product features. The curves and axes of St. Francis Wood, famously, and others such as Westwood Park, Westwood Highlands, and Ingleside Terraces presented a clear contrast to the rectilinear platting that had structured both the older downtown and the nearby Sunset District. St. Francis Wood’s example was widely cited by other area subdividers. Source: Sanborn Map Company, San Francisco, California (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1928).
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Figure 8.1 Industrial suburbs as the place to catch a glimpse of the future. “Green is an industrial color no one can overlook today,” reads the magazine’s “cover footnote.” The scene stylized here is located somewhere indeterminately east of San Francisco Bay, in Alameda or Contra Costa counties. Source: San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, 18 June 1961.
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Figure 8.2 Front façade, Dodge San Leandro plant, one of many postwar industries to relocate to the East Bay’s suburbs — in this case, to the southern reaches of Alameda County. The Ford assembly plant that decamped from Richmond’s waterfront to Milpitas, the subject of Bennett Berger’s Working-Class Suburb (1960), was perhaps the more famous local example of this trend. The scale and horizontal extent of postwar industrial plants were new; the basic decentralist strategy was not. Source: Lit San Leandro.
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Figure 8.3 Aerial view of Chabot Terrace housing project, Vallejo, 1940s. Like the Mare Island subdivision built for World War I (more or less visible at upper right), Chabot Terrace (foreground) and other “whole new communities” rapidly built for production during World War II could not be mistaken for older Vallejo’s unrelenting grid plan (upper left). Source: Mel Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 250.
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Figure 8.4 Map of Richmond’s wartime shipyards and “migrant ghettos.” Put together, Richmond’s many contiguous housing developments peopled a whole new “side of the tracks” that was marked off, and denigrated, along the lines of class, race, and the perceived rural lifeways of its African American newcomers. Source: Marilynn Johnson, The Second Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 102.
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Figure 8.5 A Richmond wartime development, circa 1943, of “minimum” suburban-style houses. Source: Marilynn Johnson, The Second Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
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Figure 8.6 A copper company’s wartime message to its workers, looking ahead to a suburban future. Postwar residential suburbs inherited criteria of spatial “totality” and “livability” that had been worked out in a host of prewar sources, industrial and otherwise, lay and expert. Source: Revere’s Part in Better Living 10 (1943).
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Figure 8.7 Catalog for Telesis exhibit, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1940, delineating of the midcentury planner’s fourfold. Source: Box 1, Folder 6, Francis Violich collection of Telesis records, BANC MSS 99/48 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 8.8 Cover image from a Bay Area Council pamphlet, 1947. Regional thinking in the immediate postwar moment touted “greater” and “greater” units. Source: Carton 5, Folder 26, Mel Scott papers, BANC MSS 70/73 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 8.9 Cover image from a Bay Area Council pamphlet, 1948. “Cooperation makes it Greater”: the BAC was not the first group to utter something to this effect, but in the postwar era the standard nine-country definition of the “Area” (or “Region”) became increasingly salient, partly through their efforts. Source: Carton 5, Folder 26, Mel Scott papers, BANC MSS 70/73 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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Figure 8.10 Photograph of Bill Rich, the prime mover behind the “gradual restoration” of tiny Port Costa, starting in 1964, as a “town-size antique show.” “Magic,” “new life,” and other preservationist shibboleths stud the article’s copy. Source: San Francisco Chronicle, 23 April 1972.
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Figure 8.11 Aerial view of Hercules’s built-out Waterfront Quarter, where residence meets the mixed-use “downtown”-style commercial strip. The leftmost business is the Powder Keg restaurant, where company-town nostalgia prevails. Source: City-Data.
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Figure 8.12 The backside of the commercial strip lining Railroad Avenue, Hercules. The Waterfront Quarter reaches but faces away from San Pablo Bay. This row establishes a hard edge enclosing the new Hercules. The undeveloped land in the foreground, in original plans, was to include a stop on Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor line, which connects Sacramento to Oakland and San Jose. Source: author.
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Figure 8.13 Western Sugar Refinery, at Potrero Point, San Francisco, being demolished in 1951. The deindustrialization of California’s larger cities began well before the 1970s. Source: San Francisco Examiner, 8 August 1951.
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Figure 8.14 The “Igloo” civic arena rising amid the cleared Lower Hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans consumed spectacles of demolition undertaken in the name of Urban Renewal — spurred by state programs during the 1940s, and then in its better-known federal guise following legislation of 1949 and 1954 — at the congested “heart” of their cities. Source: Pittsburgh Press, 22 May 1960.
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Figure 8.15 Minor, half-remembered ruins along the Carquinez, testimony to alternating cycles of investment and disinvestment since the 1870s. Here lie the teredo-eaten piers and the husk of the ferry boat Garden City, at the almost-town of Eckley, facing west toward Crockett. Source: author.
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Figure 8.16 The grass-topped mound that now occupies the site of the Cowell cement works, its slag heap, and its adjoining company town. Cowell is now located within Concord’s city boundaries. The site conceals more than it reveals. Source: author.
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Figure 8.17 Photograph of the “Ruins of Pinole,” June 1908, in the aftermath of the single most lethal blast to beset the powder works of West Contra Costa County. Source: Pinole Historical Society.
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Figure 8.18 The Hercules water tower, felled ca. 1980. The water tower had been recognizable from the Southern Pacific tracks, and then from Interstate 80, for years. “Rise,” “fall,” and “renewal”: every such emplotment of deindustrialization pivots on a scene such as this one. Source: Hercules Historical Society.
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Figure 8.19 Former mess hall at Hercules. Most of the ruins of Hercules Powder are more cryptic than the fallen water tower. This building, set well back from the nearest contemporary street, fairly sinks into the thriving stand of palms and eucalypti. Source: author.
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Figure 8.20 The former employee clubhouse at Hercules Powder. It remains vacant, neither directly framed for the nostalgia nor condemned to erasure. Source: author.
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Figure 8.21 The Hercules Powder brownfield site, early 1980s. By the time of this photograph, the factory site had been cleared, but a cluster of company-built and -owned houses still stood, with demolition or relocation in their future. Source: Hercules Historical Society.
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Figure 8.22 Two decaying Hercules Powder structures overlook the overgrown factory site, 2011, as it “awaits” redevelopment. The silhouette of the clubhouse is recognizable at center. Source: author.
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Figure 8.23 The Selby smelter’s smokestack, felled in 1973. The slow decomposition of ruins invites its own kind of scrutiny, but the event of their demolition can more loudly capture popular interest. Source: Contra Costa County Historical Society.
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Figure 8.24 Demolition puns. Reproduced, this became the image of deindustrialized Selby — far more eye- catching than the paved-over slag pile that took its place. Source: San Francisco Chronicle, 15 June 1973.
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Figure 8.25 Official memorialization at Homestead, Pennsylvania: ruins reframed as monuments. Source: Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins.
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Figure 8.26 Learning from Concord, circa 1960: the commercial strips of central Contra Costa County, which sprawled every bit as much as Southern California’s “Plains of Id” (after Reyner Banham). Source: Concord Historical Society.
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Figure 8.27 Photograph of Lewis Mumford the year he split from City College and set off on his regional surveys of greater New York, Vidal and Geddes weighing heavily on his mind. Source: Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: The Early Years (Boston: Beacon, 1982).
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Figure 8.28 Subdivision under construction in South Florida, 1920s. The Florida land boom, which fell hard by 1926, was a touchstone — and warning sign — for period critics of speculation and its “formless” landscapes. This subdivision may never have progressed beyond this stage of completion. Source: State Library and Archives of Florida.
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Figure 8.29 Residential districts under construction in Richmond, 1922. A whole genre of photography took shape in the early twentieth century depicting suburbs in the throes of construction. Might the same urge motivate these photos — landscapes rising — and those bearing witness to assorted “falls”? Confronted with still images, might we sometimes have trouble telling them apart? Source: Richmond, California: The Industrial City (1922).
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Figure 8.30 Another incipient subdivision in Richmond, seen from the intersection of Clinton and 36th, 1916. Source: Richmond History Museum.
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Figure 8.31 Dezendorf’s Delightful Dwellings, among the speculative fictions fraying the edges of 1920s Queens, and fraying the nerves of Mumford, Henry Wright, and many other onlookers. The optics of anti-“sprawl” talk sharpened on these pre–World War II edges. This photo was taken for the Farm Security Administration. Source: Library of Congress.
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Figure 8.32 The IRT Flushing line, or today’s 7 subway train, plunging into still-rural Queens in 1909 upon completion of the Queensboro Bridge. Subdivisions were in various, irregular states of incompletion as Mumford began his walks. Source: Greater Astoria Historical Society.
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Figure 8.33 Henry Wright diagnoses “Suburbanitis” as contagious ailment, 1925. Source: Henry Wright, “The Road to Good Houses,” Survey Graphic, Regional Planning Number (1925).
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Figure 8.34 One of several aerials — always aerials — that Karl Belser, the county’s planning director, used to condemn the Santa Clara Valley in 1970 after two decades of “crazy-quilt” growth. Source: Karl Belser, “The Making of Slurban America,” Cry California 5 (Fall 1970): 1–18.
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Figure 8.35 The vineyard-themed Diablo Grande development across Interstate 5 from Patterson, California. Since 2008, scenes such as this one have not been atypical on the farthest, post-1980 fringes of the Bay Area, a megaregion which some observers had expanded to a thirteen-county, not a nine-county, definition. Signposts and streetlights, foundations and water fixtures, rise — or do they fall? — where houses, planned by the thousand, never will. Source: author.
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Figure 8.36 One of several houseless culs-de-sac at Diablo Grande, 2016. Source: author.
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Figure 8.37 Abandoned house foundations on the edge of Diablo Grande, 2016. Robert Smithson glossed such suburban “ruins in reverse” as “monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” Source: author.
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Figure 8.38 “Town Centrale,” the intended commercial heart of “The Avenue” in Hercules, wrapped in Tyvek following the project’s abrupt halt in 2008. This photograph dates from 2011. Source: author.
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Figure 8.39 The commercial “white elephant” of the new Hercules, 2012, lurking behind one of the occupied residential segments of the Waterfront Quarter. Construction would not resume until 2015. Source: San Francisco Chronicle, 7 April 2012.
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Figure 8.40 The unidentified “ghost town in a mining area of the West” that Friedrich Ratzel appended to the “Ruins” chapter of his Sketches (1876). Already in the 1870s, what struck Ratzel most about the American landscape was its premature ruination. He rationalized it thus: “One has to keep in mind that even if civilization here is young in years, it has lived all the more rapidly.” But these ruins were ambivalent artifacts, neither shocking in their dilapidation nor particularly romantic: “How different these witnesses of a swift life! They don’t comfort us because they are not grand enough nor lie sufficiently far enough in the past.” Source: Friedrich Ratzel, Sketches of Urban and Cultural Life in North America [1876] (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 288–289.
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Figure 8.41 Monument with Pontoons: The Pumping Derrick, a “non-site” located along the Passaic River in New Jersey, as photographed by Robert Smithson. New Jersey was the suburban “elsewhere” whose industrial scars seemed to disclose of the entropy that Smithson held to reside at the heart of all things, unbuilding them from within. Source: Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” [1967], in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 69.
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Manuscript Collections
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley American Smelting and Refining Company blueprints California Redwood Association records Charles H. Cheney papers Photographs of Clyde, California Commonwealth Club of California, City Planning Section records, 1923–1927 Collection of photographs relating mainly to Contra Costa County, ca. 1900–1970 Photographs of Delhi, California (1920–1922) F. J. Geisler photographs of Martinez and other Contra Costa County locations Clarence J. Glacken papers Roy D. Graves pictorial collection Gutleben’s Sugar Thesaurus, 1958–1965 Frank C. Havens papers George H. Howison papers Thomas J. (T. J.) Kent papers Mason–McDuffie Company records Henry F. May papers Frank Norris collection of papers and related materials Oliver Family Photograph Collections Records of the Philosophical Union of the University of California Pittsburg, Calif., views and other photographs from the C. A. Hooper & Co. records Regional Plan Association, Inc., of San Francisco Bay Counties records, ca. 1925–1931 Sager’s Memoirs, 1891–1937 San Francisco industrial views including Western Sugar Refinery photographs, 1922–1933 Carl Ortwin Sauer papers Mel Scott papers Smith family papers, typescript Francis Violich collection of Telesis records Western Sugar Refinery records Catherine Bauer Wurster papers
Contra Costa County, California: An Empire within a County. Martinez, Calif.: N.p., 1922. Contra Costa County, California: The County of Health, Wealth, Prosperity. Martinez, Calif.: Gazette Print, 1921. Contra Costa County, California: The County of Homes. Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Development Association, 1904. Contra Costa County, California: Leading County of the West in Manufacturing. Martinez, Calif.: Gazette Print, 1915. Easton, Wendell. Contra Costa County, California, and Its Offering for Settlement: Geography, Climate, Soil, and Productions. San Francisco: Pacific Coast Land Bureau, 1884. Fridell, Lee D. The Story of Richmond, El Cerrito, San Pablo, Pinole, Hercules. Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Union High School District, 1954.
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A Health Plan for Employees of the Richmond Shipyards. Richmond, Calif.: N.p., 1942. Moraga Valley Homes. San Francisco: Moraga Land Association, 1893. Port Costa Brick Works. San Francisco: N.p., 1928. Richmond, California. San Francisco: Sunset Magazine Bureau of Information, 1915. Richmond, California: A City Earns the Purple Heart. Sacramento: California State Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission, 1944. Richmond, California: The Industrial City. Richmond, Calif.: N.p., 1922. Sanford, P. M. Richmond: City of Destiny. Richmond, Calif.: N.p., 1934. Whitnah, Joseph C. A History of Richmond, California. Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1944.
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan Karl J. Belser papers
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Photographs of Avon Photographs of Bay Point Photographs of Cowell Photographs of Crockett Photographs of Port Chicago Photographs of Richmond
Contra Costa County as Reviewed under the Vitascope. Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Record, 1902. Contra Costa County: Its Climate, Its Soil, Productions and Location. Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Board of Trade, 1887. Richmond, California, Where Industry Serves. Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1926. Richmond, the Pittsburg of the West. Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1907. The Story of Contra Costa County, California. Martinez, Calif.: Contra Costa County Development Association, 1936.
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