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.