Detroit's City Beautiful and the Problem of Commerce

Detroit's City Beautiful and the Problem of Commerce

Edward H. Bennett and Frank Miles Day's plan for Detroit's Center of Arts and Letters in nineteen thirteen culminated the local City Beautiful movement. Cass Gilbert's Detroit Public Library and Paul Cret's Detroit Institute of Arts were built on axis, on either side of Woodward Avenue, in the middle of the center. In scrutinizing the center's origin and form, this essay outlines a broader interpretation of the City Beautiful movement, one that goes beyond explanations that focus primarily upon the formal model presented by the design of the eighteen ninety-three World's Columbian Exposition. In late nineteenth-century American cities, commercial forms increasingly disrupted a traditional hierarchy in which civic, cultural, and religious buildings had dominated the cityscape and the skyline. Looking at the earlier architecture and the urban context of the institutions housed in the Center of Arts and Letters, this essay argues that the City Beautiful represented a powerful and conservative attempt to restore the dominance of civic buildings and landscapes in the face of commercial monumentality. The City Beautiful in Detroit set out to redress the "most unworthy contrast" presented to the civic landscape by commercial forms and interests.

IN THE eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds, proponents of the City Beautiful movement advocated extensive changes in the form, structure, and design of American cities. They envisioned the harmonious development of the civic landscape. Proposals were offered for grouping and uniting public buildings with one another and with the landscape. Generally conceived in classical architectural style, these public buildings were to provide the focal point for stately plazas and systems of embellished boulevards, radial avenues, and waterside promenades. The plans included settings for prominent public statues, fountains, and memorials. City Beautiful plans called for a thoroughgoing reconfiguration of the urban landscape.

Historians as well as contemporaries have acknowledged that the looming spectacle of Chicago's eighteen ninety-three World's Columbian Exposition, with its Court of Honor, provided an important aesthetic model for many City Beautiful plans and their groups of classical buildings. In the nineteen thousand nine Plan of Chicago, the most notable expression of City Beautiful ideals, Daniel H. Burnham and his advisors declared, "The origin of the Plan of Chicago can be traced directly to the World's Columbian Exposition. The World's Fair of eighteen ninety-three was the beginning, in our day and in this country of the orderly arrangement of extensive public grounds and buildings." It was a narrowly formalistic account of City Beautiful origins, one that, not incidentally, credited the creative genius of Burnham and the other architects of the fair with initiating the movement. Burnham's creation chronicle suggested that the fair itself converted American philistines to a vision of urban art and beauty. As historians have noted, however, such an interpretation obscures the extent to which both the exposition and the City Beautiful participated in a common aesthetic and cultural movement-a movement rooted less in ideal models than in the complex patterns of late nineteenth-century urbanism. Challenging the primacy of the exposition as a source of the City Beautiful movement, these scholars have traced the important contributions to City Beautiful ideals made by American park planning and by nineteenth-century campaigns for municipal art, civic improvement, and outdoor memorials. This essay explores further the social and cultural as well as aesthetic sources of the movement. It argues that in seeking to reconfigure the urban landscape City Beautiful planners hoped to redefine public life.

Focusing on one American city, this essay traces the connection between the concrete forms and dynamics of nineteenth-century urbanism and the recourse to City Beautiful aesthetics. It analyzes the City Beautiful plans drawn up in the early nineteen hundreds for Detroit, Michigan, and in particular the designs for the city's Center of Arts and Letters. Although the focus here is local, the social and cultural issues central to the City Beautiful ideal also operated in other cities. It is not merely that national leaders of the City Beautiful movement-Edward H. Bennett, Paul Cret, Frank Miles Day, Cass Gilbert, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Charles Mulford Robinson-contributed to Detroit's plans. In fact, Detroit leaders often knew precisely what improvements they wanted before calling in national figures. But Detroit planners and civic leaders were responding to a series of problems that confronted the local elite in other American cities. Like civic planners elsewhere, Detroit City Beautiful proponents conservatively sought to preserve a traditional urban order and a preferred building hierarchy in the face of unprecedented growth and change.

Indeed, City Beautiful proponents in Detroit and elsewhere were centrally concerned with restoring the dignity and dominance of the civic and cultural landscape. In pursuing this ideal, architects, planners, and civic leaders faced a rather unwieldy set of problems. Simply stated, the commercial interests shaping late nineteenth-century urbanism had aggressively disrupted an established hierarchy in which civic buildings, public institutions, and churches had visually dominated skylines and major urban public spaces. Sprawling railroad yards, warehouses, industrial structures, and a range of specialized buildings such as hotels, department stores, and-above all else-the skyscraper office building established a new canon of urban monumentality. In the face of this obvious challenge to civic and cultural expressions, the aesthetic formulas of the City Beautiful promised a great deal. Although generally conceding the skyline to the skyscraper, City Beautiful plans strove for extensive monumental control of the ground.

In Detroit, this strategy was most impressively demonstrated in designs for the Center of Arts and Letters. Occupying sites on either side of Woodward Avenue, the Renaissance style white marble buildings of the Detroit Public Library designed by Cass Gilbert and the Detroit Institute of Arts designed by Paul Cret form the harmonious, axially symmetrical nucleus of the center, located two miles north of Detroit's downtown courthouse. The opening of the library and museum, in nineteen twenty-one and nineteen twenty-seven, respectively, culminated years of political and architectural debate. The center's architecture and planning exemplified the desire of civic leaders to distinguish Detroit's cultural institutions and pursuits from the surrounding commercial life of the city.

In the early twentieth century, Detroit industrialists founded a national automobile industry upon a diversified commercial base that drew on the region's rich timber lands and iron deposits. Between nineteen hundred and nineteen twenty the city's official population rose from two hundred eighty-five thousand seven hundred four to nine hundred ninety-three thousand six hundred seventy-five, making Detroit the fourth largest city in the United States. For many trustees of the Detroit Museum, like Frederick Stearns, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, William H. Brearley, a newspaper publisher, and Dexter M. Ferry, an agricultural seed distributor, the commercial expansion of the city raised the specter of lives and cities too narrowly devoted to the pursuit of Mammon and thus subject to decadence and decline. True, fears of Mammonism and luxury had concerned many political theorists as early as the founding of the republic. Yet, in the course of the nineteenth century as commerce and industry expanded, the terms of the debate shifted. In both private and public life, many upper-class people came to view cultural pursuits and philanthropy as justification for lives committed to commerce; they accepted commerce not as an end in itself but as a means to some higher, more cultured and civilized purpose.

In the midst of Detroit's business expansion many trustees of formal culture feared that their initiatives would be swamped by commercial forms and pursuits. They looked to the emerging Center of Arts and Letters for a clear sign that the evolution of formal culture could parallel commercial prosperity. This framing of the relationship between commerce and culture appeared to establish a realm apart, yet it also justified the unencumbered pursuit of commerce. Cultural stewards envisioned a didactic and uplifting role for their institutions; however, since cultural institutions rose on a foundation of commercial prosperity, city boosters often pointed to cultural institutions as part of a commercial strategy to win new residents and investments. In many late nineteenth-century American cities cultural institutions simultaneously embodied an implicit critique of and an apology for commercial life.

Tensions between commercial pursuits and civic ideals found expression in religious sermons, political rhetoric, cultural debates, and other forms of contemporary discourse. Such tensions were interpreted and expressed architecturally as well. The relationship between civic and cultural buildings and commercial structures, both in terms of urban site and architectural style, reflected the divergence of commercial and cultural ideals. In Detroit a useful way to analyze these dynamic influences is to look at the architectural decisions concerning civic buildings made prior to the City Beautiful movement. The library and museum founders, for example, constructed their first buildings in eighteen seventy-six and eighteen eighty-six, respectively. Scrutinizing the response of the trustees of these institutions to the changing cityscape helps clarify later decisions to abandon these buildings and sites and to adopt larger City Beautiful plans.

Civic expression and Woodward's plan of eighteen oh five

The City Beautiful was not the first attempt in Detroit at grand city planning. After fire destroyed the frontier settlement in eighteen oh five, Judge Augustus B. Woodward, one of the Michigan Territory's first officials, produced a grandiose plan for the future metropolis. Woodward developed a street and building plan based upon equilateral triangles with four thousand-foot sides radiating from a central park called the Grand Circus. Generated from ideal geometric forms-circles, squares, triangles-the Woodward plan also provided for the sale of standard rectilinear urban lots.

Woodward's baroque plan encompassed a systematic and inventive provision for civic buildings and public spaces. The reconciliation of the Detroit plan's overall triangular forms with more-or-less rectilinear urban lots left a number of triangular plots at the center of the street system's larger triangular subdivisions. Woodward designated these areas as public parks and sites for monumental public or religious buildings. Public squares, markets, firehouses, schools, the Michigan capitol, a penitentiary, and "houses for the meeting of religious, moral, literary, or political societies, or other useful associations, and generally for such purposes of utility or ornament" would fill these interstices. These sites were dispersed evenly around the city and clearly provided for the dominance of civic buildings over private residences and commercial buildings.

As Detroit developed in the early nineteenth century, the cupolas and domes of public buildings and the spires of churches dominated the skyline and the city's important public spaces. In the decades following Woodward's design, political intrigue and more pragmatic commercial conceptions of land subdivision led to the abandonment of many of the grandest features of the plan. The Circus ended up as a semicircular park, broad avenues were narrowed, and a rectilinear grid intruded upon the axial grandeur of the Woodward design. Yet despite these compromises, important vestiges of the Woodward plan survived in Detroit's downtown, including the distinction between sites for commercial and civic buildings. In late nineteenth-century Detroit, civic buildings still generally stood as isolated monuments. However, the Campus Martius, the city square at the heart of Woodward's plan, did provide a focus for civic buildings. The city hall of eighteen thirty-five had occupied a site facing the Campus, and the new city hall of eighteen seventy-one stood on a section of the Campus itself. The four-story Italianate building, topped with a modern French mansard roof and a Georgian cupola, set a new standard of civic monumentality in late nineteenth-century Detroit. The impressive French Renaissance-style, mansarded, two thousand-seat Detroit Opera House, the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, and the Central Market Building all enhanced the civic qualities of the Campus. In the late nineteenth century the Campus Martius stood as "the admitted center of the City."