The Roots of New Urbanism: John Nolen's Garden City Vision for
Florida
by Bruce Stephenson
The New Urbanism has invigorated city planning by invoking the tradition
of American civic design to solve the conundrum of suburban sprawl.
This "Florida-grown movement" originated with Andres Duany
and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk’s plan for Seaside; a plan, James
Kunstler writes, "straight out of John Nolen." Nolen,
America’s preeminent planner in the early 20th century, is a
New Urbanist patron saint. It stands to follow that if the New Urbanism
is to fulfill the historic vision it has unearthed, the visionary
plans Nolen produced in the "great laboratory of town and city
building," as he called Florida, requires scrutiny.
In 1919, Nolen stood at the apex of his profession. He had edited
two books, written two others, published over 50 articles and plans,
and presided over the nation’s largest planning firm. Nolen’s
success stemmed from a blend of idealism and business acumen, which
gave his work an innovative, yet pragmatic bent. Still, the difficulty
in implementing plans made him feel more a missionary than planner.
Two years later, Nolen concluded that re-planning the American city
was hopeless. The nation’s cities were "cursed," he
wrote, "with nearly insolvable social and political problems." To
complicate matters, planners seemed more intent on drawing up zoning
ordinances that secured mediocrity rather than on implementing new
models for a nation that had over half its population classified as
urban. After this revelation in the 1920 census, Nolen initiated the
planning of new towns based on the garden city ideal. In this endeavor
Nolen owed much to Englishman Raymond Unwin, the designer of the first
Garden City.
From their first meeting in 1911, Nolen and Unwin became fast friends.
Close in age and interests, these pioneer planners corresponded regularly
for 25 years, exchanging social views, planning expertise, and their
visions of a new civilization. Unwin’s plans for Hampstead and
Letchworth greatly influenced Nolen’s most lasting presentation
of the American Garden City, Mariemont, Ohio.
Designing Eden: John Nolen in Florida
After his initial success with Mariemont, Nolen moved on to Florida
to plan what he called, "the last frontier." In February
1922, he contracted with St. Petersburg to design Florida’s
first comprehensive plan. The city, he found, occupied a "site
blessed by a benevolent Nature" and possessing "the same
characteristics as southern France." After signing the contract,
Nolen wrote an associate, "This seems to be an opportunity to
do rather more than we have ever been given the chance to do before."
In March 1923, Nolen completed an ambitious plan to imbue this "resort
city" of 15,000 with a "form and flavor unlike that of
other places." A greenbelt of preserves and parks encircled
the lower third (45 square miles) of the Pinellas Peninsula, setting
the city’s "natural boundaries" and creating a lure
for tourists. He also presented plans to improve traffic connections
and establish a Civic Center. Mixed-use neighborhood centers were
clustered to prevent the unsightly spread of commercial uses and traffic
problems along city thoroughfares. A system of parkways united the
city, providing pedestrian access to parks and "local neighborhood
centers" with "store groups, churches, and public
buildings."
Nolen’s plan rested on the "adequate control of private
development." He proposed a series of land use controls to insure
that development followed the efficient outlay of public facilities,
rather than outline speculative desires. Without these regulations,
Nolen was hardly sanguine about the city’s future. "It
has been said and with reason," he wrote, "that man
is the only animal who desecrates the surroundings of his own
habitation."
In the midst of the great Florida land boom, the desire to make
quick profits outweighed any lofty notion of city building. Moreover,
the
idea of investing public funds to improve the squalid conditions
in "the
colored section" found little sentiment in a place, where one
anti-planning editor advocated replacing black laborers (17 percent
of the population) with immigrants from the "agricultural sections
of England." In a referendum, Nolen’s planning initiative
received only 13 percent of the vote.
The St. Petersburg experience disheartened Nolen, but he remained
optimistic. His firm worked on 54 projects in Florida, including
city plans for Clearwater, Sarasota, and West Palm Beach,
new town plans
for Clewiston and Bellaire, and neighborhood plans for University
Park (Gainesville) and San Jose Estates (Jacksonville). In
1925, Nolen finally found in "Venice an opportunity better…than any
other in Florida to apply the most advanced and most practical ideas
of regional planning." Nolen planned Venice for the Brotherhood
of Locomotive Engineers (BLE), a labor union looking to capitalize
on the land boom. The BLE, however, was also investing for the long
term. BLE officials envisioned a regional center for agriculture and
light industry, "a place where the ordinary man could have
a chance to get all that the rich have ever been able to get
out of
Florida."
"
Nature led the way" and the plan, Nolen wrote, "followed
her way." Greenbelts protected important natural features, and
parkways extended from the hinterlands into Venice’s downtown
(Figure 1). A greenbelt bounded the town to the east and south, while
Venice Bay marked the northern edge and the Gulf of Mexico lay to
the west. Nolen paid special attention to the town’s
Gulf front location. A linear park ran along the waterfront,
with an
amphitheater
and beachfront park lying at the terminus of Venice Parkway,
which connected the beach to the Civic Center.
The Civic Center’s grouping of parks and public buildings offered
a view of the Gulf and marked the western edge of the commercial core.
From this point east, Venice Parkway narrowed to Venice Avenue, which
ran the center of a three-block commercial core between the Civic
Center and Rialto Avenue. The Civic Center not only defined the town
center, but it stood midway between the commercial core and Venice’s
most sublime natural feature — the Gulf of Mexico.
In Venice, Nolen effectively balanced his design between two
transcendental ideals — civic virtue and Nature. From City Hall, one could
view the palette of Nature while surrounded by the physical form of
the "civic spirit." An ideal site for contemplation,
a vision of Nature was always at hand, but it never remained
the same,
shifting with the tides and the seasons.
Two diagonal avenues defined the neighborhoods lying between
the Gulf and the Civic Center. School sites and the commercial
center
provided
focal points for neighborhoods. Common greens and playgrounds
were provided in each neighborhood, while a wedge-shaped golf
course
buffered the eastern section of town from the railway and industrial
uses.
 Nolen
also placed Harlem Village east of the railway, surrounding
it with "white farms." Segregation was a staple of southern
life, and if Nolen failed to fight the southern caste system directly,
he remained adamant that African-Americans receive the benefits of
good planning. In Venice, like other southern cities, he connected
African-American neighborhoods to the larger community via a parkway.
In cities separated by race, interconnected parkways offered the hope
of uniting diverse people through "nature" and to, Nolen
wrote, "the brotherhood of man."
The BLE invested heavily in infrastructure, before the land
boom crashed in 1927. Nolen’s plan remained a guiding vision (although Harlem
Village was nixed), and Venice stands as the most complete example
of the Garden City in Florida. Neighborhoods segregated by class and
cost were connected by parkways and linked to the Civic Center. Combining
the lines of Nature with a civic orientation, Venice offered, Nolen
wrote, "an inspiration to those who would make this world
a better place to live."
At the 1926 National City Planning Conference, held in St.
Petersburg, Nolen presented Venice in his presidential address, "New Communities
to Meet New Conditions." More than any other state, Nolen believed,
Florida needed "a state plan" to "regulate reasonably" the
location of future towns and cities. Nolen envisioned a state of interconnected
garden cities based on Venice’s regional and town plan. Although
Nolen’s agenda never moved beyond the conference, his
vision drew admirers.
A year later, Lewis Mumford, in the keynote address to the
same conference, proclaimed, "At least one planner realizes where the path of
intelligent and humane achievement will lead during the next generation." Both
Mumford and Nolen advocated regional planning and the new town as
the means to channel urbanization into a higher level of civilization.
They also saw planning as an art form that revealed mankind’s
highest htmirations. "City design" could only "succeed," Mumford
remarked in his conclusion, "when the city planner tries
to fathom and express...what the best life possible is."
The Nolen Legacy
Nolen’s planning ideal fell victim to, what Mumford called, "the
departmental routine of the municipal engineer’s office." Even
before Nolen passed away in 1937, civil engineering and social science
had replaced landscape architecture as the basis of planning. This
shift moved planners to see their profession as a science rather than
an art. In 1943, a planning firm hired by St. Petersburg dismissed
Nolen’s work as "the optimistic opinion of what the ideal
city should be." Bartholomew and Associates traded Nolen’s
Garden City for a more "efficient physical structure" based
on a "thorough analysis of the facts." The plan provided
guidance for traffic engineers, but failed to recognize the economic
value of "beauty and nature," the chair of the city planning
commission wrote. In 1976, ecological catastrophe forced St. Petersburg
officials to adopt an environmentally based plan that closely paralleled
Nolen’s.
In 1977, the City Council of Venice dedicated a memorial to
John Nolen. The city "built in close conformance with" Nolen’s
plan had, the resolution read, "developed into one of the
most beautiful cites of its size in the Nation. The Nolen
memorial was
placed in the Art Sculpture Area, where Venice Parkway intersected
City Hall. The only memorial to an American city planner rests,
fittingly enough, at a place planned for the contemplation
of Nature and the
potential of the civic spirit.
The most fitting memorial to Nolen, perhaps, came from Raymond
Unwin. In a hand-written note rushed from his New York hotel
to Nolen’s
deathbed near Boston, Unwin offered his friend "this consolation — The
value of your work in the pioneer period of planning over here is
recognized and is most highly appreciated in England…I cannot
tell you how much I have valued your help, your experience, and above
all your personal friendship…I wish there were something
more than this poor letter I could do to help you, and in
some little way
to repay the many kindnesses I have had from you!"
In the 80 years since John Nolen presented his Garden City
vision, his assertion that "man is the only animal who desecrates his
own habitation" is painfully obvious throughout Florida. Yet,
this is not the most troubling point. With inner cities ghettoized
and gated subdivisions proliferating, the promise of the good life
revolves ever more tightly around flights of escapism. The problem
is not just what is walled out, it is what is walled within. Alexis
de Tocqueville argued that once a free people isolate themselves from
others the bonds of democracy dissolve. This demise is marked by the
individual, he wrote, who even when close to fellow citizens "does
not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them;
he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his
kindred still
remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his
country."
Yet there is room for optimism. The genius of African-American
culture has always been extolling whatever degree of freedom
existed to
move toward American democratic ideals. Nolen’s vision of a "brotherhood
of man," however hindered by the prejudices of that day, rested
on the democratic ideal that immortalized Lincoln and King. The progression
of civil rights from Lincoln to King offers hope and, after almost
a century, the Garden City still inspires visions of a better community
life. New Urbanists have resurrected Nolen’s vision, but the
ability of a free people to create a better civic life still remains
as much a question of the spirit as of bricks and mortar. September
11th has given Americans every incentive to pursue this vision, but
can we muster the faith to believe, like Nolen, "that we could
raise the whole plane and standard of the common life, physical, mental
and aesthetic...by good planning"?
|
Brief
Bibliography:
"The New Urbanism: A Florida Grown Movement" Forum
(Summer 1997)
James Kunstler, Geography of Nowhere, (New York, 1993)
Millard F.
Rogers, Jr., John Nolen and Mariemont (Baltimore, 2001)
R. Bruce
Stephenson, Visions of Eden (Columbus, OH, 1997)
John Nolen Papers,
(Cornell University, Ithaca NY)
Lewis Mumford, "The
Next Twenty Years in City Planning," Nineteenth Conference
on City Planning
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
|
