by Joel Kotkin
The Soviets had equally little reverence for the role of sacred place or the past in the evolution of cities. In short order, Nizhniy Novgorod became Gorky; Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad; Yekaterinburg, where Czar Nicholas II and his family were liquidated, became Sverdlovsk, after another Soviet leader. In elegant, newly renamed Leningrad, the urban landscape became dominated by massive new housing blocs, office buildings, and commercial spaces designed in what one writer called “a ponderously neoclassical” style. 43
Moscow underwent an even more dramatic transition. Joseph Stalin, a provincial from distant Georgia, displayed even less appreciation for urban values than Hitler, who had spent his formative years in Vienna and Munich, or the Japanese nationalists, who still revered aspects of that country’s urban past. To the horror of much of the architectural community, the Soviet dictator ordered the construction of a new Palace of Soviets—a monument to what Stalin called “the idea of the creativity of the multi-million Soviet democracy”—on the site of the city’s magnificent Cathedral of the Savior, a structure built with the pennies of Russia’s faithful.
Nikita Khrushchev, who eventually would follow Stalin as leader of the “Soviet democracy,” shared these less than delicate sensibilities. “In reconstructing Moscow,” he said in 1937, “we should not be afraid to remove a tree, a little church or some cathedral or other.” 44 Khrushchev proceeded to destroy much of the old city, including its Triumphal Arch, its old towers, and its walls. When his own architects pleaded with him to spare historic monuments, he replied that his construction crews would continue “sharpening our axes.”45
The Communist drive to expand manufacturing capacity—by the 1930s, the Soviets had surpassed czarist industry by a wide margin— engendered an ambitious surge in town building. Magnitogorsk, rising adjacent to a giant iron and steel factory on the steppe, typified the new Soviet city: no mosques, churches, or free markets, a population of forced laborers driven by legions of zealous Young Communists. Like the victims of Britain’s early capitalist industrialization, the forced workers of the Socialist state endured wretched conditions, subject to epidemics of typhus, typhoid, and other infectious diseases.46
In one respect, Soviet urban policies did succeed: They utterly transformed a predominantly rural country into a largely urban one. By the 1930s, cities such as Moscow and Leningrad ranked among the largest in Europe; other smaller cities, particularly factory towns like Sverdlovsk, Gorky, Stalingrad, and Chelyabinsk, expanded even more rapidly. Between 1939 and 1959, the urban population of the Soviet Union grew by 30 million people, while the rural component dropped by 20 million. By 1960, 50 percent of Soviet citizens were city dwellers.47 There were also some notable accomplishments, such as the Moscow subway and major new electrification systems.
COMMUNISM’S URBAN LEGACY
After World War II, urban conditions in the Soviet Union gradually improved. Food became more plentiful and the long acute housing shortage less acute. Nevertheless, as places to live, Communist cities remained gray and cheerless; spontaneous commercial activity was restricted to the occasional farmer’s market or the hidden machinations of a growing underground economy. Social life centered less in the streets or public spaces than among friends crowded into small but often cheerily maintained apartments.
Most telling—particularly given the system’s “materialist” value system—the Soviets failed to create an urban standard of living even remotely comparable to those in the the West. Khrushchev’s boasts as late as 1970 that the USSR would “outstrip” the United States in quality of life must have seemed incongruous, if not painfully comic, to city dwellers whose level of amenities lagged well behind those of not only the West, but also some rising Asian countries.48
As the Communist regime slouched toward its inglorious dénouement in the late 1980s, conditions worsened. The vast complex of high-rise apartments around Moscow and other major cities became increasingly dilapidated. Two-thirds of heavily urbanized European Russia’s water supply no longer met minimal standards; air pollution levels in most large Soviet cities were many times worse than those in any city in the West.49
Born to remedy the failures of the industrial city, Communist urbanism failed in virtually every respect to meet its promise, and nowhere more than in the moral sphere. Communism, Nicolas Berdyaev once noted, sought to develop a “new man” of higher aspirations, but its materialist philosophy ultimately transformed its subject into a “flat two dimensional being.” Robbing cities and individuals of their sacred character and often their history, the Soviet experiment left behind a somber and destitute urban legacy. 50
PART SIX
THE MODERN METROPOLIS
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SEARCH FOR A “BETTER CITY”
Like so many who came to Los Angeles in the waning days of the nineteenth century, Dana Bartlett could sense the emergence of “a great city . . . forming by the sunset sea.”1 Los Angeles, then a settlement of fewer than one hundred thousand souls, was abuzz with new construction as developers struggled to keep pace with newcomers streaming in from the East.
The business leaders in the once sleepy Mexican pueblo envisioned a metropolis, in the words of the railroad magnate Henry Huntington, “destined to become the most important city in this country, if not the world.” 2 Bartlett, a Protestant minister, heartily shared the booster faith but also yearned for something more—the promise of a healthful and beautiful urban form.
THE PROMISE OF LOS ANGELES
Before arriving in Los Angeles, Bartlett had ministered in St. Louis, where crowded slums and belching factories seemed to scar both souls and the landscape. With its mild climate and spectacular scenery, its clear vistas, ample land, and lightly industrialized economy, Los Angeles, Bartlett hoped, could become “a place of inspiration for nobler living.” 3
In his book The Better City, written in 1907, Bartlett laid out a vision for a planned “City Beautiful” that would offer its residents easy access to beaches, meadows, and mountains. Taking advantage of the wide-open landscape, manufacturing plants would be “transferred” to the periphery, and housing for the working class would be spread out to avoid overcrowding. Rather than confined to stifling tenements, workers would live in neat, single-family homes.4
Many in Los Angeles’s political and economic elites embraced this more sprawling notion of urbanism. The city’s form did not develop by happenstance; it was designed to be an intentional paradise. In 1908, for example, Los Angeles created the first comprehensive urban zoning ordinance in the nation, one that encouraged the development of subcenters, single-family homes, and dispersed industrial development.5
Huntington’s sprawling Pacific Electric Railway had set the pattern for the city’s expansive geography. Later, the growing use of the automobile further accelerated Los Angeles’s dispersion. As early as the 1920s, Angelenos were four times as likely to own a car as the average American and ten times as likely as a Chicago resident. At the same time, in contrast with most contemporary American cities, Los Angeles’s historic downtown was already becoming less important as the region’s economic and social center. 6
The usual motivations—the quest for greed and power—motivated these developments. But many among the region’s bureaucrats and developers also believed they were creating a superior, more healthful urban environment. In 1923, the director of city planning proudly proclaimed that Los Angeles had avoided “the mistakes which have happened in the growth of metropolitan areas of the east.” This brash new metropolis of the West, he claimed, would show “how it should be done.”7
The local press, eager for new residents and readers, promoted such notions. The city had laid out its tracts and transit lines, boasted the editor of the Los Angeles Express, “in advance of the demands.” The prevalence of single-family residences, with their backyards, would transform the city into “the world’s symbol of all that was beautiful and healthful and inspiring.” Los Angeles, he continued, “will retain the flo
wers and orchards and lawns, the invigorating free air from the ocean, the bright sunshine and the elbow room.”8
By the 1930s, large elements of this vision had been realized. Single-family residences accounted for 93 percent of the city’s residential buildings, almost twice the rate in Chicago. These houses spread over an area that made Los Angeles the world’s largest city in terms of square miles.9 The city proved markedly less successful in achieving the ideals espoused by Bartlett and his contemporaries. Turning aside a 1930 detailed open-space plan known as the Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan, Los Angeles for all its vastness sadly included only a small amount of park space. Increasingly, the city not only lacked the great public areas of earlier cities, but was also rapidly losing the small-town atmosphere advertised so heavily by the city’s promoters.10
Los Angeles, however, could not be dismissed as a failure. Sprawling from the ocean to the deserts and down the coast to the edge of San Diego, it had provided for its many millions a “better city,” experienced not in great public spaces, but in individual neighborhoods, private homes, and backyards. In the late twentieth century, the ranks of Angelenos swelled with a large number of immigrants, largely from Latin America and Asia. Like earlier generations, they began buying homes, starting businesses, and building new lives in the region.11
Most important, Los Angeles demonstrated to the world a new model of urban growth—dispersed, multicentered, and largely suburbanized. For modern cities, whether elsewhere in America, in old Europe, or emerging in Asia, Los Angeles now represented the prevailing form of urbanity, the original, as one observer put it, in the Xerox machine.
A SHORT HISTORY OF SUBURBIA
The rise of the suburban model in Los Angeles suggested a radical break with the evolution of cities. Throughout history, cities have gloried in their towering landscapes and the liveliness of their public spaces. The most sacred and awesome public structures inevitably rose in or around the core. The most dynamic ancient cities—Tyre, Carthage, and Rome— responded to a burgeoning population by building upward and cramming ever more residents into the central space.
The onset of the Industrial Revolution greatly accelerated the rate of urban growth, placing unprecedented pressure on the geography of cities. By 1800, European cities had become at least twice as dense as their medieval antecedents; some American cities, notably New York, were even more crowded. 12 Once refuges of security, the inner city had also become increasingly crime-ridden.13
Even so, early in the industrial era, it was not at all clear that the future lay in the periphery. Initially, it was the poor who led the move to the urban periphery, in effect exchanging longer commutes for lower rents. “Even the word suburb,” noted the historian Kenneth Jackson, “suggested inferior manners, narrowness of view, and physical squalor.”14 Suburbs often remained the abode of all manner of undesirables, the rejects of the city.15
“ONIONS FIFTY TO A ROPE”
One solution to managing the growth of cities would be to reorganize and revitalize the core urban space, as occurred in the mid-nineteenth century in Paris under the leadership of Napoleon III and his prefect, Baron Haussmann. Britain, the world’s most urbanized country, chose a dramatically different direction, one that would ultimately find its most complete expression in distant Los Angeles.
To start with, London’s problems were of a different order from those of Paris; by 1910, it was the world’s largest city, with three times the population of the French capital.16 Even to affluent Londoners in the nineteenth century, the city appeared to be choking of its own growth. Pleasant neighborhoods like Bloomsbury, Belgravia, and Regent’s Park increasingly seemed like isolated islands of graceful urbanization amid a sea of gray, dense, and staggeringly unattractive industrial slums.17
In their search for a “better city,” London authorities could not command massive resources, like Paris, to redevelop the core of its capital. Instead, the British simply allowed what had been occurring naturally, a gradual, inexorable expansion of the urban space.18 It started initially with the most affluent residents, but as the nineteenth century evolved, the increasingly prosperous middle and working classes joined the exodus to the countryside. If a nice apartment in the middle of the city was the dream of the upwardly mobile Parisian, the Londoner’s aspiration fixed upon a cottage, detached or semidetached, somewhere out on the periphery of the city. London, one observer noted in 1843, “surrounds itself, suburb clinging to suburb, like onions fifty to a rope.”19
Other major British cities evolved in a similar manner. In the great industrial centers of Lancashire and the Midlands, everyone from great industrialists to clerks sought to move away from the belching factories and congested commercial districts. “The townsman,” noted one observer of Manchester and Liverpool in the 1860s, “does everything in his power to cease being a townsman, and tries to fit a country house and a bit of country into a corner of the town.”20
A NEW URBAN VISION
Many Britons saw this pattern of dispersion as the logical solution to Britain’s long-standing urban ills. H. G. Wells predicted that improvements in communication and transportation technology, most especially commuter rail lines, would eliminate the need to concentrate people and industry in the central core. Instead of “massing” people in town centers, Wells foresaw the “centrifugal possibilities” of a dispersing population. He predicted that eventually all of southern England would become the domain of London, while the vast landscape between Albany and Washington, D.C., would provide the geographic base for New York and Philadelphia. 21
This vision was widely embraced by those who, like Dana Bartlett, were horrified by the ill effects of industrial urbanism. With the overthrow of capitalism, Friedrich Engels predicted the end of the large megacity and dispersal of the industrial proletariat into the countryside. The dispersing city dwellers would “deliver the rural population from isolation and stupor” while finally solving the working class’s persistent housing crisis.22
Suburbanization also appealed to more conservative thinkers. Setting the stage for later reformers, Thomas Carlyle believed the growth of the industrial city had undermined the traditional ties between workers and their families, communities, and churches. Moving the working and middle classes to “villages” in the outlying regions of major cities could “turn back the clock” to the more wholesome and intimate environment. In the small town or village, he hoped, women and children could be protected from the injurious influences of the city, with its bawdy houses, taverns, and pleasure gardens.23
The British planner Ebenezer Howard emerged as perhaps the most influential advocate for dispersing the urban masses. Horrified by the disorder, disease, and crime of the contemporary industrial metropolis, he advocated the creation of “garden cities” on the suburban periphery. These self-contained towns, with a population of roughly thirty thousand, would have their own employment base and neighborhoods of pleasant cottages and would be surrounded by rural areas. “Town and country must be married,” Howard preached, “and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”
Determined to turn his theories into reality, Howard was the driving force behind two of England’s first planned towns, Letchworth in 1903 and Welwyn in 1920. His “garden city” model of development soon influenced planners around the world, in America, Germany, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere. 24
“A SIX ROOM HOUSE WITH A BIG YARD”
Even before the first “garden cities” were being developed in Britain, America also embraced the notion of urban deconcentration. By the 1870s, prominent Philadelphia families already were escaping the crowded streets of William Penn’s old city for the leafier west side and toward Germantown to the north. The ensuing development of suburban railroads carried much of the city’s business and professional establishment away from the central Rittenhouse Square area to residences in Chestnut Hill and other Main Line communities.25
The shift to the suburbs was particularly robu
st in the far West and across the industrial Midwest. Land was generally less expensive and urban culture far less developed. The reasons for moving to the periphery seemed self-evident to working-class people, like one Chicago meat-cutter who in the 1920s exchanged “a four bedroom house on the second floor of an apartment house” for “a six room house with a big yard” in Meadowdale in the far western suburbs.26
As automobile registrations soared in the 1920s, suburbanization across the rest of the country also picked up speed, with suburbs growing at twice the rate of cities. Cities, noted National Geographic in 1923, were “spreading out.”27 The Great Depression temporarily slowed the outward migration, but not the yearning among Americans. 28 At the nadir of national fortune in 1931, President Herbert Hoover noted:
To possess one’s home is the hope and ambition of almost every individual in this country, whether he lives in a hotel, apartment or tenement. . . . The immortal ballads, Home Sweet Home, My Old Kentucky Home, and the Little Gray Home in the West, were not written about tenements or apartments ....29
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SUBURBIA TRIUMPHANT
Following World War II, the pace of suburbanization in America again accelerated, accounting for a remarkable 84 percent of the nation’s population increase during the 1950s. Thanks in large part to the passage of legislation aiding veterans, home ownership became an integral aspect of middle- and even working-class life. By the mid-1980s, America enjoyed a rate of home ownership, roughly two-thirds of all families, double that of such prosperous countries as Germany, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and Norway. Nearly three-quarters of AFL-CIO members and the vast majority of intact families owned their own homes.1