Ning Site-Ning Site-America ComparedAmerica Compared

Kelsey TaylorKelsey TaylorHistory 141History 141

“The City in the Land of the Dollar”

European Cities

❖elegant avenues, great civic spaces, impressive public monuments, cathedrals, outdoor plazas, sidewalk cafes

❖beautiful, ordered and high-minded

American Cities

❖socially fragmented, recklessly entrepreneurial, lacking a defined centerparking garages, indoor shopping malls, drive-through fast food restaurantsraucous, unfinished, and commercial

“The City in the Land of the Dollar”

Chicago

❖fastest-growing city in the U.S., possible the world in the last decade of the 19th century

❖where American urbanism started

❖fire in 1871 led to the city being filled with all the new latest technology (telephone switchboard, electricity, cable cars, electric trolly, elevators, steel-frame construction, skyscrapers)

❖people now lived outside the city and “downtown” consisted of commercial buildings

❖parks sprang up as a counterbalance to the congestion of the city

❖the World’s Columbian Exposition brought Chicago together in a grand urban vision

❖combined naturalistic and formal landscaping with grand public buildings

“The City in the Land of the Dollar”

“City Beautiful”

❖1900’s slogan for an urban improvement campaign

❖brought together civic reformers, community volunteers, and municipal politicians with crusading architects and landscape architects

❖American cities started to look at themselves critically

❖produced the grand american railroad stations

❖advocates of civic art believed in the value of design, both architectural and urban- thought of parks and boulevards as places for leisure and public recreation and improvements to the very fabric of cities