Book Review: Field Notes Spring 2016 Issue

John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner by R. Bruce Stephenson. Amherst: University of Press, in association with the Library of American Landscape History (LALH), 2015, 312 pages.

Among enthusiasts of landscape and urban design, John Nolan (1869-1937) is a respected figure, but he has never become a household name, except perhaps in those households located in communities that he designed or improved. Madison, , for instance, named a boulevard for him. Kingsport, TN, Venice, FL, the Myers Park neighborhood of Charlotte, NC, and the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, MO are other communities whose reputations derive from the quality of his planning. Mariemont, near Cincinnati, OH has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

The American Society of Landscape Architects and the Library of American Landscape History teamed up in 2005 to reprint Nolan’s book, New Towns for Old: Achievements in Civic Improvement in Some American Small Towns and Neighborhoods, originally published in 1927. This includes a list of his firm’s more than 450 completed projects, among which are plans for 29 cities and 27 new towns. Now the LALH has followed up with a full-scale biography. Its author, R. Bruce Stephenson, director of the Department of Environmental Studies and Sustainable Urbanism at Rollins College, deftly weaves Nolan’s career and personal life together with the rise of the professions of landscape architecture and urban planning.

Nolan was born in and qualified for admission to , a distinguished school for orphan boys there, because his father had been shot during an election dispute little more than a year after his birth. He graduated first in his class, and following a degree from the Wharton School he became a professor of adult education. He turned to landscape studies after reading the biography Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, and entered Harvard in 1903 when he was already 34 and had a wife and two children. There he studied with Frederick Law Olmsted, Junior, who was a year younger than himself. His first important commission, with the Charlotte park system, came through the recommendation of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, the father of Charles Eliot and author of his biography.

In Charlotte, Nolen encountered racist attitudes and institutions that became a troubling factor in his work in the south, particularly in his extensive town planning in Florida, where he struggled to avoid using zoning to enforce racial segregation. Stephenson’s forthright treatment of these issues is a distinctive feature of this book.

Nolan was one of the first in this country to promote the new ideas of town planning that were emanating from England, which he visited many times. He saw Letchworth, the first British “new town,” in 1906, just three years after its founding. His efforts to integrate new town concepts into planning for existing cities made the title of his 1927 book especially apt.

Stephenson’s engaging style, along with the well-chosen and beautifully printed illustrations, many in color, make this volume a good introduction to the early-20th-century history of planning as well as to the man himself.