The volume in which this article is located is part of the Making of America Project at the University of Michigan. In its original form it is a little awkward to use, as the only way to find it is by volume of the journal from which it was taken, followed by looking page by page. I've converted it into a .pdf file which may be a little easier to use.
In the western country where the land is level or gently rolling it seems as if convenience and economy alike dictate that all roads should be made straight and at right angles, and that if the streets of a new town are wide enough to give good circulation to the air, no further thought need be given to reserving space for health or pleasure. While all would admit the advantage of varying the roads from straight lines in a hilly country, and the dullest person can be persuaded that it is no farther around than over a hill, but few will understand the expediency of curving roads where the surface is as open to travel in one place as another. This is a serious mistake and stamps all the new towns of the west with such a stereotyped resemblance that a traveler might be excused if, landed on a dark night at the wrong depot, he should go up the main street, turn to right or left, and try his door-key in the same number which marks his own house in his native town.
Robert Copeland, attacking the grid plan
Note, too, that as late as 1872 Copeland (p. 58) can complain about suburbs using language which would have been appropriate in Roman times: “Instead of these pleasing combinations, this blending of town and country, we enter every town between stiff houses, without a vine to decorate or a tree to shade, through the suburbs given up to squalid inhabitants, redolent with bad smells, the pathway disputed by rampant pigs or predacious cows.”
Read, in Jackson, Kenneth T., Crabgrass Frontier,
Chapter 5, The Main Line: Elite Suburbs and Commuter Railroads
In the United States the brewing, shipping, railroad, iron, and banking millionaires followed this British tradition of the country gentleman or the French pattern of an aristocratic chateau in the Loire Valley. The American nouveaux riches embraced the notion of conspicuous consumption in the form of ornamental real estate and decided that the most fashionable way to display great wealth was to invest in a rural estate of appropriately grand dimensions.
One doesn't have to travel to Newport to see one of these "Summer Cottages" for the rich. Blithewold, almost across from our campus, is a very good example. This is the view from the waterside. Perhaps when the weather gets nicer we might take a trek over, though we'd have to do it outside of class time. One hour wouldn't do the mansion justice.
This chapter focuses a bit on choices of where one wanted to live--those choices limited by economic level. He begins with the mega-wealthy, and proceeds to look at choices for the Upper Middle Class (including "railroad suburbs" of various degrees of wealth).
The volume in which this article is located is part of the Making of America Project at the University of Michigan. In its original form it is a little awkward to use, as the only way to find it is by volume of the journal from which it was taken, followed by looking page by page. I've converted it into a .pdf file which may be a little easier to use.
In the western country where the land is level or gently rolling it seems as if convenience and economy alike dictate that all roads should be made straight and at right angles, and that if the streets of a new town are wide enough to give good circulation to the air, no further thought need be given to reserving space for health or pleasure. While all would admit the advantage of varying the roads from straight lines in a hilly country, and the dullest person can be persuaded that it is no farther around than over a hill, but few will understand the expediency of curving roads where the surface is as open to travel in one place as another. This is a serious mistake and stamps all the new towns of the west with such a stereotyped resemblance that a traveler might be excused if, landed on a dark night at the wrong depot, he should go up the main street, turn to right or left, and try his door-key in the same number which marks his own house in his native town.
Robert Copeland, attacking the grid plan
Note, too, that as late as 1872 Copeland (p. 58) can complain about suburbs using language which would have been appropriate in Roman times: “Instead of these pleasing combinations, this blending of town and country, we enter every town between stiff houses, without a vine to decorate or a tree to shade, through the suburbs given up to squalid inhabitants, redolent with bad smells, the pathway disputed by rampant pigs or predacious cows.”
I'd like to have each of you investigate ONE of these suburbs according to the list below.
Find the suburb on Google Maps. Put the link in your resource folder.
Find out if the suburb has a website. (Many of them will have more than one.) Chose one and put the link in your resource folder.
Extra Credit: See if there is a Panoramic Mapor other 19th century map available for your suburb. There may not be one. if there is, at it to your resource folder as well. Old Maps Onlineor the David Rumsey Collection would be other places to look.
