The ZSQ^farious 'Philadelphia Plan and Urban ^America: iA Reconsideration N THE relentless pursuit of historical explanations capable of shedding light on the "crisis" in urban America a surprising I and unjustified amount of attention has been given to the Philadelphia plan or gridiron pattern of street layout. Philadelphia, as a trend-setter in the colonial and early national periods, frequently influenced the planning of other towns and cities. This meant that a simplistic pattern in which half of a city's streets met the other half at right angles became pervasive. Furthermore, as towns and cities grew in the nineteenth century there was a tendency to simply extend the initial grid system. In short, as America's towns and cities grew in size and complexity the street systems remained remarkably simple.1 This simplicity has bothered Lewis Mumford, John W. Reps, Sam Bass Warner and others who believe that more than a few urban ills are directly traceable to the grid system. The most serious criticism leveled at this mode of urban design is that it has not been responsive to human needs. Warner argues that the "grid pattern provided ... no point from which city dwellers could define their own vicinity visually and socially against the endless metropolitan complex."2 He further asserts that one nineteenth-century building boom resulted in a "city without squares of shops and public buildings, a city without gathering places which might have assisted in focusing the daily activities of neighborhoods."3 Mumford notes the tendency to think of cities

1 Put another way, the passion for order so evident in William Penn's Philadelphia con- tinued to cast its shadow over nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban design. See Margaret B. Tinkcom, "Urban Reflections in a Trans-Atlantic Mirror," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, C (1976), 287-313. 2 Sam Bass Warner, The Urban Wilderness (New York, 1972), 21. 3 Sam Bass Warner, The Private City (Philadelphia, 1968), 54. 103 IO4 THOMAS R. WINPENNY January purely in terms of a "physical agglomeration of rentable buildings/' If cities are nothing more than this, according to Mumford, a simplified plan could have been justified; but when human needs are taken into consideration something more complex than the gridiron pattern is required.4 In brief, the ubiquitous Philadelphia plan, a product of short-sighted thinking, was insensitive to human needs. If the grid system ignored human needs, why was it so popular? Mumford and Warner contend that the basic attraction was greed. Simplistic planning was basically a tool of "the capitalist regime." More specifically Mumford notes: the ideal layout for the business man is that which can be most swiftly reduced to standard monetary units for purchase and sale. . . . An office boy could figure out the number of square feet involved in a street opening or in a sale of land—even a lawyer's clerk could write a description of the necessary deed of sale, merely by filling in ... the standard document. With a T-square and a triangle . . . the municipal engineer could without ... training as either an architect or a sociologist, "plan" a metropolis.. . .5

Warner concurs: "It was an ideal method, since it treated all land similarly, for a real estate market composed of hundreds of land speculators and home builders and thousands of petty landlords."6 All of this suggests that alternative approaches to street layout were rarely considered. In addition to claiming that the Philadelphia plan ignored human needs and was a blatant manifestation of capitalistic greed, critics spend considerable energy bemoaning the monotony and basic lack of beauty it produced. Complaints of this sort, of course, are hardly new. Pierre L'Enfant writing to Thomas Jefferson in the early 1790s described such planning as "tiresome and insipid" as it lacks "a sense of the real grand and truly beautiful."7 Charles Dickens, writing in the 1840s, described Philadelphia as "a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street."8

4 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York, 1961), 422. fi Ibid., 421-422.

« Warner, The Private Cityy 52. 7 Elizabeth S. Kite, L Enfant and Washington, 1791-1792 (Baltimore, 1929), 48. 8 Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (London, 1957), 97-98. 1977 THE NEFARIOUS PHILADELPHIA PLAN IO5 This basic complaint persists, and, in the work of John W. Reps, reaches dramatic proportions as he writes of "the relentless pattern of Chicago's oppressive grid," the "almost intolerable rhythm" of the grid, and of Philadelphia sharing "blame for the ubiquitous gridiron." This relentless and intolerable pattern, he believes, possessed "simple appeal to unsophisticated minds."9 The reader is permitted to imagine, logically, that sophisticated minds rejected it. Warner is less extreme on the subject of aesthetic impact as he describes the result as a "mixture of dreariness and confusion."10 Both Reps and Warner agree, however, that the extension of grid systems in rapidly expanding nineteenth-century cities was aestheti- cally disastrous. Beyond the three major criticisms already cited, objections range over a wide area and are not readily categorized; nevertheless, some are worth noting. For example, Mumford also objects to the fact that those applying the Philadelphia plan frequently gave no thought to "either the direction of the prevailing winds . . . the salubrity of the underlying soil, or any of the other vital factors that determine the proper utilization of an urban site."11 He ob- serves that: "On steep hilly sites, like . . . San Francisco, the rec- tangular plan, by failing to respect the contours, placed a constant tax upon . . . the inhabitants . . . measurable in tons of coal and gallons of gasoline wasted. . . ."12 An urban geographer notes that it is inconvenient to travel "at an angle to the orientation of the grid. . . ."13 Finally, Reps believes that in New York commissions recognized the economy of grid planning and feared the use of any other plan lest they be charged with extravagance.14 In a sense, Reps is arguing that the very existence of the Philadelphia plan negated other possibilities. Thus it might even be said that the gridiron system stifled imagination. Warner's argument that gridiron plans provided no point from which people "could define their own vicinity visually and socially

0 John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America (Princeton, 1965), 174, 294, 302. 10 Warner, The Private City, 50. 11 Mumford, 423. 12 Ibid. 13 James H. Johnson, Urban Geography (London, 1967), 26. 14 Reps, 299. IO6 THOMAS R. WINPENNY January against the endless metropolitan complex"15 suggests that the Phila- delphia plan created emotional or psychological insecurity for urban dwellers. There are two problems with this line of reasoning. First, Warner offers no psychological theory or empirical evidence to support the contention. Second, what the uniform grid design really provided was predictability and therefore a degree of security. Indeed, Kevin Lynch, who has studied and surveyed human per- ception of urban environments, concludes that:

The line of motion [a street] should have clarity of direction. The human computer is disturbed by long successions of turnings, or by gradual, ambiguous curves which in the end produce major directional shifts. The continuous twistings of Venetian calli or of the streets in one of Olmstead's romantic plans, or the gradual turnings of Boston's Atlantic Avenue, soon confuse all but the most highly adapted observers. A straight path has clear direction. . . .1(i

In short, a street system that is comprehensible is more effective in meeting human needs than one that generates confusion. Or, re- calling LeCorbusier's dictum, "a curved street is a donkey track, a straight street, a road for men." As previously noted, Warner further suggests that a grid-domi- nated city was one "without gathering places which might have assisted in focusing the daily activities of neighborhoods."17 This is simply another way of saying the Philadelphia plan was not con- ducive to developing or maintaining a sense of community. The difficulty with this criticism is that no one seems to know just how to go about testing for the existence of "a sense of community." In 'The "Private City Warner argues that Philadelphia's rapid growth had destroyed a sense of community as early as i860.18 He supports

15 Warner, The Urban Wilderness, 21. 10 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, i960), 96. 17 Warner, The Private City, 54. 18 Carol Hoffecker's recent and excellent study of nineteenth-century Wilmington, Dela- ware, argues, in contrast, that rapid growth need not destroy a sense of community. She points out that "in some ways community spirit and social institutions were strengthened as the process of urbanization unfolded to create wholly new social forms. The remarkable developments in transportation and manufacturing . . . drew large numbers of people into urban areas, altered the class structure of cities, and undermined social forms inherited from the past. City dwellers confronted unprecedented problems in the readjustment of both their private lives and civic structures. It was only because of the zest that urbanites dis- 1977 THE NEFARIOUS PHILADELPHIA PLAN IO7 this contention by noting the large number of "organized lodges, clubs, and benefit associations" existing in i860 which he believes were created to fill the vacuum. In a footnote on the same page, however, Warner makes reference to the existence of many of these same organizations as early as 1840 when, apparently, Philadelphia's sense of community was still intact.19 Furthermore, even if he had demonstrated that many new clubs and lodges were created in the 1860s, that would not be the same as demonstrating that they were formed to compensate for a declining sense of community.20 In con- trast, it is instructive to recall the medieval urban setting in which public squares and guilds coexisted. Mumford's observation that human needs can only be met by "something more complex than the gridiron pattern"21 assumes some manner of mystical relationship between human needs in an urban environment and the complexity of the street system. Unfortunately, Mumford fails to explain just what this mystical relationship be- tween human needs in an urban environment and the complexity of the street system is and how it operates. He overlooks the possi- bility that the two points in question may not be related; or that, if they are, the relationship might be far different from that which he imagines. For example, Kevin Lynch's findings, cited earlier, suggest that simplicity of design rather than complexity had the more benign impact on urban dwellers. Basically, Mumford's con- tention is too vague to be refuted in any detail. The thesis of both Mumford and Warner that grid design was a tool of greedy capitalists hoping to make the most of urban ex- pansion is overstated and ignores dramatic benefits created by this kind of planning. Such benefits are apparent in Philadelphia and Baltimore where nineteenth- and twentieth-century expansion pro- duced thousands of modest row homes packed efficiently into grid

played for creating a host of new social institutions that humane urban life was possible in the industrial age. The dynamics of their response was impressively wide-ranging and in- clusive." Carol E. Hoffecker, Wilmington, Delaware: Portrait of an Industrial City, 1830- IQIO (Charlottesville, 1974), xii. 19 Warner, The Private City, 61. 20 Surely Warner is not prepared to argue that two developments that coincide in time and place automatically assume a cause-and-effect relationship. 21 Mumford, 422. IO8 THOMAS R. WINPENNY January settings. In ''Housing the Poor in the City of Homes," John F. Sutherland has pointed out: "The horizontal expansion of the city relieved the pressure of congestion. ... As late as 1898, Philadelphia had 83,000 acres upon which to build. . . . The small row house could be extended on adjacent, inexpensive land."22 The inexpensive row home and grid layout became inseparable. The significance of this kind of expansion and development is that for the first time many working-class families were able to either own their own homes or reside in single family dwellings. No doubt these same families might have preferred large, detached houses with rolling lawns, but the modest row house with little or no greenery was the only house they could afford. An elitist might see this as a modest accomplishment, but ownership of any kind of home was no small accomplishment in the eyes of the working-class family. As Stephen Thernstrom has noted: "Brought to the city, the Jeffersonian ideal became the belief that the urban laborer might enjoy a surrogate freehold farm in the form of a substantial bank account and title to his home."23 A few statistics help to further develop this point.

Table 1 PERSONS PER DWELLING 1880-TEN LARGEST CITIES24 Philadelphia 579 New Orleans 5-95 Baltimore 6.54 San Francisco 6.86 St. Louis 8.15 Chicago 8.24 Boston 8.26 Brooklyn 9.11 Cincinnati 9.11 New York 16.37

22 John F. Sutherland, "Housing the Poor in the City of Homes: Philadelphia at the^Turn of the Century," in Allen F. Davis and Mark Haller, The Peoples of Philadelphia (Philadel- phia, 1973), 176. 23 The worker's view of home ownership is discussed in Stephen Thernstrom's Poverty and Progress (New York, 1969), 115-122. 24 U. S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States: 1880. Population, I, 670-671. 1977 THE NEFARIOUS PHILADELPHIA PLAN IO9

Table 2 FAMILIES PER DWELLING 1890 AND 1920-TEN CITIES25 1890 1920

Philadelphia 3MO Philadelphia 1.14 Detroit i[.14 Baltimore 1.22 Baltimore i[.20 Detroit 1.43 Cleveland ][.21 Cleveland 1.57 Milwaukee ][.26 Buffalo 1.57 Buffalo i Milwaukee 1.59 St. Louis i[.51 St. Louis 1.61 Boston ][.70 Chicago 1.86 Chicago ][.72 Boston 2.07 New York c1.95 New York 3.49

In examining persons per dwelling in 1880 and families per dwelling in 1890 and 1920, Tables 1 and 2 clearly demonstrate that grid-dominated cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore housed relatively few persons per dwelling, and came close to providing a separate dwelling for each family. Another way of looking at the same question is found in a survey made by the Regional Planning Federation of Philadelphia for 1929.

Table 3 FAMILY ACCOMMODATIONS 192928 Philadelphia 257 Cities Per cent in one-family houses 69.0 40.0 Per cent in two-family houses 2.7 11.0 Per cent in apartments 28.3 49.0

Table 3 reveals that, compared with the rest of urban America, Philadelphia housed an extraordinary percentage of its families in single-family dwellings. Many of these families, of course, were renting. It is equally instructive, where census information permits, to examine the question of home ownership.

25 Ibid., Mortgages on Homes (Washington, 1923), 59. 26 Regional Planning Federation, The Regional Plan of the Philadelphia Tri-State District (Philadelphia, 1932), 389. IIO THOMAS R. WINPENNY January

Table d PER CENT OF HOMES OWNED 1920-TEN CITIES27 Baltimore 46.3 Philadelphia 39.5 Buffalo 38.6 Detroit 38.3 Milwaukee 35.5 Cleveland 35.1 Chicago 27.0 St. Louis 23.8 Boston 18.5 New York 12.7 (Average for the ten cities 25.3) The high percentage of homes owned in 1920 in Baltimore and Philadelphia is striking. Furthermore, by 1930 some 50.7 per cent of Philadelphia's homes were owner-occupied.28 This impressive level of home ownership was primarily a function of the relatively low cost of homes in the two cities.29 Table 5 AVERAGE VALUE OF OWNhD MORTGAGED HOMES 1920- TEN CITIES30 Baltimore St. Louis 4,921 Philadelphia 5>°32 Milwaukee 5>39° Buffalo 6,210 Chicago 6,459 Cleveland 6,495 Boston 6,880 Detroit 7>595 New York 9,008 (Average for the ten cities $6,582)

27 U. S. Bureau of the Census, Mortgages on Homesy 59. 28 Edith Elmer Wood, Slums and Blighted Areas in the United States (Washington, 1936), 40. 29 A particularly active building and loan association movement has also been cited as an explanation for the impressive level of home ownership in Philadelphia. While this move- ment no doubt generated interest in buying homes and made additional mortgage money available, there is no reason to believe that the building and loan associations influenced such critical considerations as building costs or mortgage interest rates. For example, the 1920 "average rate of (mortgage) interest for ten cities" was 5.8 per cent while the average rate in Philadelphia was 5.9 per cent. U. S. Bureau of the Census, Mortgages on Homes, 126. 30 Ibid., 6$. 1977 THE NEFARIOUS PHILADELPHIA PLAN III The low averages for Baltimore and Philadelphia were largely a product of the highly efficient construction technique of cramming row homes into a gridiron framework. The application of this technique in Philadelphia was described in the following manner: ground is usually obtained in blocks of about five acres and is divided by streets that must run from one public street to another in a straight line. The best price for construction is made on a basis of twenty or more houses, and the specifications for each subcontractor are so systemitized for the uniform rows of houses ... that the work can be done at remarkably low figures when compared with the cost of building a single house.31

Lots ranged in size from fourteen by fifty feet to fifteen by sixty, and these narrow fronts had significance as Philadelphia's building standards for foundations, walks, and joists were substantially lower for houses sixteen feet or less in width. Thus there were im- pressive savings in both labor and building materials enabling a worker in 1910 to purchase a two-story, brick, row home with four rooms and a bath for #1,750 or a two-story, brick, row home with six rooms and a bath for $2,ooo.32 In short, the speed and efficiency with which some cities expanded through the extension of the grid system and the construction of inexpensive row homes may well have produced windfall profits for developers, but it is far more significant to note that this same process also provided unprecedented levels of privacy and home ownership for those who otherwise would not have been able to afford such amenities. As Maxwell Whiteman has pointed out, Philadelphia was "spared the tenement house system."33 In re-evaluating aesthetic considerations it is important to recog- nize that opponents of the Philadelphia plan argue that grid patterns existed in a vacuum, in effect, as opposed to having been an integral part of a complex physical environment. Put another way, they seem anxious to stress their persuasion that various street plans have or lack beauty of and by themselves. Additional reflection,

31 Helen Parrish, "One Million Small Houses—Philadelphia," The Survey, XXVI (May, 1911), 234. 32 Ibid., 230, 233. 33 Maxwell Whiteman, "Philadelphia's Jewish Neighborhoods" in Allen F. Davis and Mark Haller,rTfo Peoples of Philadelphia, 249. 112, THOMAS R. WINPENNY January however, might well suggest that the beauty and attractiveness of a city, or a portion of a city, are not determined exclusively by the direction and order of the streets, but rather by a wide variety of factors. For example, what can be said of the architecture ? Perhaps a setting that retained some eighteenth-century structures was more interesting than one which was exclusively nineteenth century in origin. How were buildings arranged in relation to one another? Jane Jacobs has pointed out: "The same building can be physically distinctive in one matrix . . . but indistinctive in another. . . ,"34 What about topography? Even Reps admits that grid-dominated San Francisco with its "magnificent hills and spectacular views of the ocean" is visually magnificent.35 What kinds of materials were used for street surfaces and sidewalks? It is likely that cobblestones, Belgian blocks, and bricks produced more interesting results than asphalt. Were the streets tree-lined ? A touch of greenery may well have rendered one city's thoroughfares more attractive than those of another. The fact that street patterns are but one of a multitude of con- siderations in determining how a city is perceived is further sup- ported by Kevin Lynch's analysis in The Image of the City. Lynch notes that "There seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images, each held by some significant number of citizens. . . ."36 Lynch divides the contents of these images into five types of elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. It is interesting that streets constitute only a fraction of one of the five elements in Lynch's scheme. That is, within the concept of paths he includes: streets, walkways, transit lines, canals and railroads. He also points out that: "along these paths the other environmental elements are arranged and related."37 The words "other environmental elements" are crucial to the immediate argument. The point is that cities employing grid design may be monotonous and ugly or they may be exciting and beautiful, but these qualities are not determined by the layout of the streets. The same must be

34 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961), 385. 35 Reps, 314. 36 Lynch, The Image of the City, 46. 37 Md.> 47. 1977 THE NEFARIOUS PHILADELPHIA PLAN II3 said for cities with radioconcentric layouts and curvilinear streets. Indeed, in a consideration of this sort it is awfully hard to forget the Levittowns so recently thrust upon us and laid out in a complex fashion with swirling, curvilinear streets. They have yet to be acclaimed as interesting and attractive. In short, the notion that curvilinear streets are inherently beautiful and straight streets and right angles are inherently unattractive is unfounded. It is time to look beyond this bias and view street patterns as merely a part of a very complex environment. In re-examining the three major objections raised by Mumford, Reps, and Warner certain conclusions emerge. First, to the extent that opponents of grid planning are permitted to define human needs, the grid system failed to meet these needs. A redefinition of human needs, however, such as the one in this paper clearly suggests that the Philadelphia plan had a benign impact on city dwellers. Second, rapid urban expansion produced by placing uniform, row homes in grid frameworks can be viewed as a tool of capitalist greed, but a more complete analysis must note the gains in privacy and home ownership that accrued to many urban dwellers with modest incomes. Third, aesthetic objections to cities with straight streets meeting at right angles only make sense if street systems exist in a vacuum as opposed to being part of a complex environ- ment. In short, the conventional wisdom of critics of gridiron plan- ning may well be questioned.

Slizabethtown College THOMAS R. WINPENNY