Civic Center and Cultural Center: the Grouping of Public Buildings In
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Civic Center and Cultural Center: The Grouping of Public Buildings in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit and the Emergence of the City Monumental in the Modern Metropolis by Donald E. Simpson BA, University of Pittsburgh, 2007 MA, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2013 © Donald E. Simpson 2013, all rights reserved. UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences This dissertation was presented by Donald E. Simpson It was defended on April 1, 2013 and approved by Franklin Toker, Professor, History of Art and Architecture Edward K. Muller, Professor, History John Lyon, Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures Dissertation Advisor: Kirk Savage, Professor, History of Art and Architecture Committee Co-Chair: Christopher Drew Armstrong, Professor, History of Art andArchitecture ii © Donald E. Simpson 2013, all rights reserved. Copyright © by Donald E. Simpson 2013. All rights reserved. iii © Donald E. Simpson 2013, all rights reserved. Civic Center and Cultural Center: The Grouping of Public Buildings in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit and the Emergence of the City Monumental in the Modern Metropolis Donald E. Simpson, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2013 Abstract The grouping of public buildings into civic centers and cultural centers became an obsession of American city planners at the turn of the twentieth century. Following European and ancient models, and inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the McMillan Commission plan for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1901, architects sought to create impressive horizontal ensembles of monumental buildings in urban open spaces such as downtown plazas and quasi-suburban parks in direct opposition to the vertical thrust of commercial skyscrapers. Hitherto viewed largely through the narrow stylistic prism of the City Beautiful vs. the city practical movements, the monumental center (as Jane Jacobs termed it) continued to persist beyond the passing of neoclassicism and the rise of high modernism, thriving as an indispensable motif of futurist aspiration in the era of comprehensive and regional planning, as municipalities sought to counteract the decentralizing pull of the automobile, iv © Donald E. Simpson 2013, all rights reserved. freeway, air travel and suburban sprawl in postwar America. The administrative civic center and arts and educational cultural center (bolstered by that icon of late urban modernity, the medical center) in turn spawned a new hybrid, the center for the performing arts, exemplified by Lincoln Center and the National Cultural Center (the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), as cities sought to integrate convention, sports, and live performance venues into inner-city urban renewal projects. Through the key case studies of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit, one-time juggernauts of heavy industry and twenty-first century regions of rust-belt collapse, this study examines the emergence of the ideology of grouping public buildings in urban planning as well as the nineteenth century philology of the keywords civic center and cultural center, terms once actively employed in discourses as diverse as Swiss geography, American anthropology, Social Christianity, the schoolhouse social center movement, and cultural Zionism. It also positions these developments in relation to modern anxieties about the center and its loss, charted by such thinkers as Hans Sedlmayr, Jacques Derrida, and Henri Lefevbre, and considers the contested utopian aspirations of the monumental center as New Jerusalem, Celestial City, and Shining City on a Hill. v © Donald E. Simpson 2013, all rights reserved. Table of Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ ix Preface .................................................................................................................................... xxv 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 The Monumental Center in America ..................................................................... 1 1.2 The Ideology of Grouping Public Buildings ....................................................... 15 1.3 Methodology: Invention as Facture, Notionality, and Ostensive Naming .......... 19 1.4 Terminology: City Beautiful, Civic Center, Cultural Center .............................. 28 1.4.1 City Beautiful: The New Jerusalem................................................................. 28 1.4.2 Civic Center: The Church Militant and Triumphant ....................................... 37 1.4.3 Cultural Center: Archipelago in the Modern Metropolis ................................ 44 2 Pittsburgh: The Attainment of a Civic Center ............................................................. 54 2.1 A Strategic Cultural Center, a Real Civic Center ................................................ 56 2.2 The Gospel of the World’s Fair ........................................................................... 64 2.3 The Andrew Carnegie Memorial Fountain .......................................................... 73 2.4 St. Pierre’s Paved Plaza ....................................................................................... 82 2.5 Postwar Progress in Pittsburgh ............................................................................ 92 3 Cleveland: Civilization and Cultivation in the Forest City ........................................ 123 vi © Donald E. Simpson 2013, all rights reserved. 3.1 The Group Plan for Cleveland: The Unfinishable Civic Center ........................ 127 3.2 University Circle: A Museum in Wade Park ..................................................... 136 3.3 The University of Cleveland: The University Improvement Company and the Museum and Educational Council, 1914-1924 .................................................................. 140 3.4 The Cleveland Conference for Educational Cooperation, 1924-1926 ............... 153 3.5 Branch Cultural Centers and the Educational Group Plan, 1926-1930 ............. 160 3.6 Conclusion: Fountainhead of the Humanities.................................................... 173 4 Detroit: A Civic Center As Distinct From Art Center ............................................... 191 4.1 Historic Downtown Detroit ............................................................................... 193 4.2 Charles Moore and the Planning of Modern Detroit ......................................... 198 4.2.1 Gibraltar on the Strait: Improvement of the City of Detroit, 1905 ................. 198 4.2.2 Exiles on Main Street: A Center for Arts and Letters, 1913.......................... 204 4.3 A Temple of Democracy and Mad Anthony’s University ................................. 214 4.3.1 “More in the Way of a Civic Center”: The Battle for Veterans’ Memorial Hall ....................................................................................................................... 214 4.3.2 The Purpose of a Civic Center: Eliel Saarinen and Memorial Hall............... 222 4.3.3 Meanwhile, Back in the Art Center: Wayne University and Campus Expansion ....................................................................................................................... 228 4.4 The Cranbrook Sphere of Influence and the Master Plan of Detroit ................. 235 4.4.1 The City Plan Commission and Detroit’s Master Plan ................................. 237 4.4.2 “Detroit 1990” and the Architects’ Civic Design Group ............................... 239 4.4.3 An Advance-Plan Program, 1942, and Your Detroit, 1944 ........................... 245 4.4.4 More than a Group of Buildings: The Civic Center Plan, 1946 .................... 247 vii © Donald E. Simpson 2013, all rights reserved. 4.4.5 Wayne University and Proposed Cultural Center Plan, 1948 ...................... 252 4.4.6 The Detroit Medical Center, 1958, and Detroit Cultural Center, 1965 ........ 260 4.5 Conclusion: Detroit Beyond 1990 ..................................................................... 266 5 Conclusion: The Search for the Center ...................................................................... 322 5.1 Decentered Modernity ....................................................................................... 324 5.2 Harmony, Utopia, Heterotopia .......................................................................... 329 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 334 Notes .................................................................................................................................... 374 viii © Donald E. Simpson 2013, all rights reserved. List of Figures (Note: All images included in this electronic edition are either from freely available public domain sources or are copyright © the author. Images from copyrighted sources or obtained from archives requiring special permission for reproduction have been omitted, and a gray box has been substituted.) Figure 1-1: From Charles Mulford Robinson, “The Plan