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The economic development of the British coal industry: From industrial revolution to the present day
Journal of Historical Geography,7, 1 (1981) 95-100
Review article
The urban idea on America’s western frontier Peirce Lewis JOHN W. (Princeton:
REPS, Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning Princeton University Press, 1979. Pp. xii + 827. $7530)
It is usually foolish for a reviewer to pronounce any newly-published book to be a classic. Yet it is obvious that John Reps’ Cities of the American West is an unmistakable and instant scholarly classic--a book which treats an important subject so thoroughly and with such authority that it will surely serve as the base-line from which any future work on the subject must begin. From now on it will be unthinkable that any serious student of western American urban geography or history can fail to consult this massive book at the outset of his research. And, like any other classic, Reps’ new book provides the foundation and impetus for asking large questions about the United States that could never have been posed intelligently before this monumental work was published. None of this will come as any surprise to those who are familiar with John Reps’ earlier work, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (1965). Indeed, Cities of the American West is really a sequel to the earlier book, which it greatly resembles both in content and format. The two books differ mainly in the times and places they describe. The Making of Urban America is largely (though not entirely) concerned with town planning and plotting in the east, and mostly (though not entirely) describes events which came to fruition before the Civil War. In Cities of the American West, Reps focuses attention on the cities and towns of the American frontier -mostly west of the Mississippi, and mostly products of the nineteenth century. There are twenty chapters, and the organization is straightforward. An introductory chapter describes the beginning of frontier city making in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, a brief but useful review of material treated in greater detail in the earlier book. The next three chapters concern the planning and building of Hispanic towns on the southwestern borderland from Texas to California. Most of those towns trace their putative ancestry to the sixteenth-century Spanish Laws of the Indies, but tended in fact to depart more or less drunkenly from the rigid forms which the Laws prescribed. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the creation and expansion of south-western towns under the administration of Mexicans, Texans and Americans in the pregnant pause before gold was discovered in California. If one overlooks the characteristically flamboyant behaviour of the Texans, the urban events of those years were relatively unexciting, but they underscore the truly radical differences between Hispano-American and Anglo-Saxon approaches to settlement and town making. Typically, the forms of Hispanic towns were laid down according to rigid rules by a distant, theocratic and disastrously absentminded government. The American towns were inevitably planned by free-wheeling private-enterprisers whose main purpose was financial profit, and to whom government control over town planning was literally unthinkable. 0305-7488/81/010095
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Although these matters consume almost two hundred pages, they are really introductory to the main body of the book: 14 chapters which recount how Americans set about to build their western cities-most of which sprang up between the time of the California Gold Rush and the last great gold rushes to the Black Hills of the 1880s. At the beginning of that period the American West was almost townless. By 1890 no large region remained without its spattering of real or imaginary towns and cities. That period was perhaps the fastest and most intensive episode of town making in the history of the human race. It was not a tidy process, of course, for everything was in motion during those amazing years in that amazing place, everything larger than life. Any one of several western gold rushes could have stood alone as the most fabulous in human history, but instead of one gold rush, there were dozens-not to mention numerous stampedes after silver and baser metals. Building one transcontinental railroad would have been marvellous enough-but there were four or five or six built, depending on how they are counted. Americans had seen large-scale land speculation before, but now half a continent was up for grabs. Each of these episodes provoked the founding of new towns by the tens and hundredsthe enlargement (or abandonment) of uncountable numbers more. And it all happened in 40 years. Reps tells the lurid, flamboyant story in a wealth of detail, subdividing the episodes into more or less discrete historic and geographic units. Chapters 7 and 8 concern the towns of California-those provoked by the gold rush in northern California first, then by the land-booms of the 1870s and 1880s in southern California. Chapters 9 and 10 recount the epic story of Mormon town planning and town building, from the urban revelations of Joseph Smith to the very practical work of Brigham Young in his Deseret kingdom, which extended at its zenith from the Snake River valley to the San Bernardino plain. (I found these chapters on the Mormons especially fascinating, and they could well stand as a separate book without other support.) Chapters 11 through 15 deal with town planning before the railroads arrived in the Pacific northwest, the central plains of Kansas and Nebraska, and the mining towns of Colorado and the northern Rockies. Chapters 16 through 18 discuss the wholesale planning and building of western railroad towns, a dramatic episode not simply in a few places, but all over the West. Although it is hard to imagine how anything could be more amazing than what the railroads did, chapter 19 manages to top it all, with the story of the “overnight cities” of Oklahoma, and the outrageously improbable events that brought those cities into being. The final chapter ends diminuendo around 1890 with what Reps calls the “end of the frontier era” of city planning, when “the basic framework” of western towns was finally complete. A description of chapter headings, however, scarcely begins to do justice to the mass of material that this monumental book contains. Literally hundreds of individual places are described, and the book makes good reading, for Reps is careful to put details in the large historic context, and he writes plain lucid prose, free of jargon and special pleading. Equally, it serves as a fine basic reference book. Whether one wants to know about Lawrence, Kansas, or Virginia City, Montana or Nevada (take your pick), or about Los Angeles or San Francisco (both treated with rich and loving detail), the basic material is here-the legal and technical circumstances which surrounded the original planning of the town, followed by detailed descriptions of how it grew (or failed to grow) through any of a convoluted series of additions, speculations, land booms, depressions, panics, swindles, dreams and natural disasters. The cast of characters makes one wish that Cecil B. DeMille were still alive. There are cowboys and Mormon saints and prostitutes and railroad barons and petty swindlers and Diamond Jim Brady, all supported by a cast of thousands. And underlying it all is a truly formidable mass of documentation: 50 pages of footnotes alone, and a “selected bibliography” that runs to 26 pages of close-packed citations. Although its descriptions and documentation alone would make the book a classic, I daresay that this is not why Cities of the American West will attract attention and will
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be lovingly used for years to come. The main glory of the book is its lavish and sumptuous illustration. As readers of The Making of Urban America know well, John Reps is the country’s best-known authority on the use of old city plans, maps and birds-eye views, and they will remember the 1965 volume as a marvellous repository of historical urban illustrations. So it is with the present book, and a scholar or layman who wants to learn about the planning of east Los Angeles, California, or Aspinwall, Nebraska, will find at least one contemporary map or panoramic view of the place. For places of any importance at all, Reps is likely to include several. In his discussion of Lawrence, Kansas, for example, he shows us a city plan dating from c. 1858 (shortly after the town was founded) and two bird’+eye views, one from 1858 when Lawrence was three streets of houses and a largely empty grid, and a second from 1869 by which time the town had filled up its grid and spilled across the Kansas River. There are plenty of lesser places than Lawrence that merit at least one map or birds-eye view-and often both. Nearly all of these maps or views occupy a full page, approximately 16 x 21 cm. Until one actually picks up the book and examines it, it is hard to appreciate the sheer volume and gorgeousness of illustration. But the numbers alone are formidable. I counted 265 individual city plans or maps of varying degrees of detail, 202 birds-eye views or panoramas, 27 “scenes” (mostly engravings made from photographs of street scenes in the late nineteenth century) and 20 contemporary maps of regions the size of a state or less. Thirty-two of the prints are in colour-mostly bird’s_eye views of well-known places. Although most of the prints date from the last half of the nineteenth century, the earliest (of Santo Domingo) is from 1600 and the most recent is an “aero view” of Tulsa from 1918. Even at first browsing of the opulent book, it is obvious that the assembling of these old maps and panoramas was for John Reps more than a work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Who beside the most ardent cartophile could cite 99 individual sources of illustrations-everything from the magnificent collection of city plans and views in the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division to the Bozeman, Montana, Public Library to a private collection of Stockton, California? It seems safe to guess that except for a few privileged map curators in the Library of Congress nobody has personally examined as many American urban maps and prints as has John Reps. Reps tells the reader that the illustrations are not mere window-dressing, but serve as important evidence to support and amplify verbal descriptions and arguments. Under ordinary circumstances, that would be an unmitigated blessing, for it is a rare book which combines the use of words and pictures effectively. Cities of the American West emphatically does. But the reader should be warned: most of the maps and panoramas are so extremely reduced that much of the detail cannot be appreciated and much of the printing cannot even be read without a magnifying glass. To be sure, there is good reason for such extreme reduction. Many of the original illustrations are large, and to have reproduced them at or near original scale would have required a gigantic book, one that would spill off the edges of the most Texan-sized coffee table, and cost more than most scholars and many libraries could afford. As it is, Cities of the American West is a hefty volume, both in weight (nearly seven pounds) and in price. So the book is physically a compromise, and a reader like me-with an avid curiosity about nineteenth-century American town plans but afflicted with mild presbyopia-must expect a certain amount of frustration. As I read the book, I alternated between cursing and praising the Princeton University Press : curses at having to cope with titles and legends reduced to two-point type-praise for the very high quality printing which reproduces that two-point type crisply enough to be legible under magnification. But I repeat the warning: you will need a magnifying glass. Without it, be prepared to put the book aside in frustration. With it, the book will grudgingly give up its treasures. The glass is a nuisance to be sure, but the book is well worth the trouble. The bulk of the book, overwhelmingly, is devoted to description, both verbal and pictorial, and Reps is parsimonious about making broad generalizations concerning the
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overall nature of and processes at work in the urban planning of the American West. His few generalizations, however, must be taken seriously, if only because they are based on such a massive body of evidence. Reps argues basically that Frederick Jackson Turner was incorrect in propounding his idealized sequence of western settlement: from trappers and hunters to farmers and only finally to the makers of towns and cities. Plausible, says Reps, but untrue. “Turner either did not know or failed to appreciate that, in much of the West, the founding of towns preceded [my emphasis] rural settlement or took place at the same time . . .” (p. ix). So far, so good. Reps, of course, is not the first scholar to urge revision or reversal of basic Tunerian doctrine about frontier cities. The earliest such revision, according to Reps, came in 1911 in an essay by Edmond Meany about the towns of the Pacific northwest, where a similar argument was advanced. And, in lecture notes drawn up in 1925, Turner himself had evidently begun to question the neatness of his own model. What Reps has done, however, is to assemble the overwhelming evidence to prove finally that Turner was wrong not just in a few places here or there, but generally across nearly the whole of the American West. The author’s second point is equally interesting and, given his overwhelming documentation, equally incontestable. Western towns, he says, were not the random ad hoc creations that popular mythology often makes out. Instead, most western towns were planned affairs-not well planned, to be sure, but laid out in advance of settlement. Furthermore, he notes, these plans laid down a network which established permanent patterns, not only in the location of towns, but in their internal morphology. “History has a heavy hand,” he remarks (p. 694) “and we are still held within its grasp”. It is an idea that any historical geographer will find familiar and comfortable. I would have been content with Reps’ argument if he had stopped there, but his urban enthusiasms tempt him further than some scholars might be willing to go: “The establishment of urban communities, whatever their origins, stimulated rather than followed the opening of the West to agriculture. As vanguards of settlement, towns led the way and shaped the structure of society, rather than merely responding to the needs of an established agrarian population for markets and points of distribution. . . .” (the emphasis here is mine). Reps continues: “Contrary to the Turnerian thesis, these urban centers did not take shape through a process of gradual and random incremental growth that transformed a crossroads hamlet into a town and then perhaps to a major city. Instead, the typical procedure involved the selection of a promising site by an individual, group, church, railroad, corporation, or governmental agency. The tract was then surveyed into streets, blocks, lots, and open spaces. Only after this initial design was determined were houses, shops, mills, churches, stores, and public buildings erected on predetermined locations. The western frontier thus had its origin in hundreds and thousands of planned communities” (pp. ix-x). But it is one thing to say that western towns were planned and filled up by the use of predetermined street and lot plans. It is quite another to say that those planned towns were the core and soul of the western frontier: “What Turner and his followers failed to grasp is that by 1890 a significant part of the West’s population resided in urban places and that it was those towns and city dwellers who were largely responsible for whatever distinctive Western characteristics the region possessed.” And it is less than clear to me how a history of town planning, no matter how meticulous, can form the empirical basis for such sweeping cultural judgments. At the very least, to say that cities called the tune in the creation of western culture is a remark that would have astonished the admirers of such varied folk as Buffalo Bill, or Hamlin Garland, or Frederick Remington, or William Jennings Bryan. Equally, Reps’ comparisons of eastern and western cities may cause discomfort to some readers. There can be little question that western town plans looked a good deal like many eastern town plans, and it is also true that up-to-date houses and storefronts in Helena looked remarkably similar to those back in Hartford. Nor is there much
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doubt, as Reps stresses, that the waterworks and streetcar lines of Denver and Los Angeles were as good as or better than those back East. But it is quite a leap from those incontrovertible statements to an assertion that “the attitudes of [western urban] citizens and their political and social institutions differed little from those of urban areas settled earlier in the nation’s development” (p. 668). It may be true, but I am inclined to doubt it; westerners were different from easterners, if only because they chose to pick up and move, while easterners did not. Today, of course, there are plenty of differences in attitude, as election returns repeatedly show, and these differences obviously were not born yesterday. Meantime, however, there is acute need for more solid information about the origin of vernacular attitudes, in the West and in other American regions, and until we have such information, we should probably return a Scotch verdict on Reps’ judgment in this matter. There is no harm in doing so, and it says something for the monumental quality of Reps’ scholarship that this is the most serious flaw in the whole book that I could find, It is a fairly minor cavil. By and large, however, Reps leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions, and they are sometimes very dismal conclusions indeed. Most sobering, I think, is the very limited urban vision which those early western town planners possessed. As one reads the history and scrutinizes the maps of those hundreds of places, it is impossible to escape the certainty that the western town makers were not engaged in anything remotely resembling what we would today call “city planning”. They were platters or plottersnot planners-and most of their “plans” are really just a system of streets (and sometimes lots) and little more, glued on to railroads and rivers or other acts of God. The most far-sighted planners were those who reserved a block or two here and there for a park or public ground or cemetery, but Reps shows repeatedly how such public lands were alienated for private profit-parks sold, boulevards narrowed, river-fronts automatically consigned to use by wharves or factories or railroad yards. Man perhaps does not live by bread alone, but many of those western town makers seemed to be trying. Except for the authoritarian and semi-communistic Mormons, there was little concerned effort to make cities into anything but places to make money. Some easterners may have dallied with the idea of building new Zions, or cities upon a hill, and Brigham Young obviously had such ideas when he laid out Salt Lake City. But if we read Reps correctly, there were few who thought that way in Great Falls, or in San Francisco either. None of that is surprising, of course. Simply making a living was the primary business for western Americans a century ago, and Senator Kerr of Oklahoma was not voicing a minority opinion when he derided attempts to control roadside land-use as mere “assthetics”. The need for a popular land-ethic-much less a land-aesthetic-did not grip the public imagination until well after the beginning of the twentieth century, by which time most western towns had been laid out, both on paper and on the ground. And the ethics of town planning were relaxed. Reps rather generously notes that “what from the perspective of our own time appears to be the most blatant lack of corporate and personal integrity was in [that] age accepted as ordinary sharp American business practice” (p. 580). Such a tolerant view probably helps explain the behaviour of General William Jackson Palmer of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, who solicited bribes from the citizens of Pueblo, Colorado, to build a new main line through the existing town, then when he had the money in hand, broke his promise and put the line on the other side of the river, where he plotted a new town on land which he had privately secured for himself. (The locals were outraged, not apparently because Palmer took the bribe, but because the general didn’t give them their money’s worth.) But Palmer evidently knew what he was doing, for instead of going to jail, he went on to polish his reputation by laying out Colorado Springs, one of those rare western towns with pretensions of grace. Significantly, General Palmer retired to live in Colorado Springs, which helps explain why he troubled himself to make it an agreeable place. But most land speculators and railroad barons did not live in the towns they plotted, and the results showed. Some of these results, to put it mildly, were fairly dismal, and if one pays attention
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only to the layout of streets, Cities of the American West makes suffocating reading. Even travellers of the time were loud in lamenting the lost opportunities for better planning in those seemingly interchangeable western towns, and many subsequent historians have agreed enthusiastically with that criticism. Easiest to lament, perhaps, is the ubiquitous grid-pattern which marches unrelieved across the continent from the banks of the Mississippi to the shores of the Pacific. Many, of course, have seen the grid-pattern as a colossal monument to greed, and it is certainly true that it eased the job of subdividing land and selling lots, irrespective of their location half-way up cliffs, in river channels, or even under the blue waters of San Francisco Bay. As one looks at those hundreds of gridded maps, it is easy to conclude that western town planners were clods at best, scoundrels at worst. But the grid-pattern, commonplace as it became, surely represented more than a device to make money. A failure to recognize that fact, I think, can lead to a serious misreading of Cities of the American West, and a distorted understanding of American history. Those western town planners were looking, above all, for order-and who can blame them? The times were chaotic, and while the western wilderness offered opportunity, in its unaltered state it offered very little hope of safety or security. Formality provided a kind of order, however-whether it was a formal architecture or formal manners or formal street plans. Significantly, when western town planners departed from the grid-plan (which they seldom did), they usually offered some geometric pattern or other: circles, ellipses, hexagons, or spiderwebs-orderly, formal patterns which could be drawn a priori anywhere, and stamped on landscape anywhere. Most ordinary westerners, of course, did not participate in the design of street-plans, but there is little evidence that the average western citizen objected to the grid-plan. Quite the contrary. As for adjusting street-patterns to irregular local topography, that was ever rarer. In 1873, for example, fresh from his triumphs in the East, Frederick Law Olmsted was invited to lay out a plan for Tacoma, Washington, and his plan (shown in fig. 17.6) bore strong family resemblance to his design for Riverside, Illinois, in 1869 (Making of Urban America, fig. 204), with streets winding romantically and gently up Tacoma’s precipitous waterfront hills. Tacomans would have none of it, and Reps gives us an instructive quotation from a decisive local critic: “The most fantastic plan of a town that was ever seen. There wasn’t a straight line, a right angle, or a corner lot. The blocks were shaped like melons, pears and sweet potatoes. One block, shaped like a banana, was 3,000 feet in length and had 250 lots. It was a pretty fair park plan but condemned itself for a town” (p. 568). Clearly, romance and artistically curving streets were very well for cemeteries or for the effete East, but romance in a western town plan was merely seen as disorderly and consequently intolerable. Thus, in the normal course of events, Tacoma was given a grid-plan, and embossed it on the hillsides as a recognizable stamp of an orderly civilization. In the final analysis, Tacoma is unusual because once upon a time it flirted with romance. Most western towns would not have gone nearly so far. But there are worse crimes than trying to impose order on a wild land. The endless grid-plans did not mark the end of western town building, or even town planning. And, as J. B. Jackson has eloquently shown us, the vernacular landscape that people eventually built and planted within those western grids was not necessarily dull or ugly. Drawing those plans was only the end of the beginning. As Reps himself remarks in the concluding passage of the book, “what had scarcely been started in 1890--and which remains today remains unfinished-was the shaping of an urban civilization” (p. 694.) That tantalizing matter sounds as if it might be the subject of John Reps’ next classic work. The Pennsylvania State University
Review article
The urban idea on America’s western frontier Peirce Lewis JOHN W. (Princeton:
REPS, Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning Princeton University Press, 1979. Pp. xii + 827. $7530)
It is usually foolish for a reviewer to pronounce any newly-published book to be a classic. Yet it is obvious that John Reps’ Cities of the American West is an unmistakable and instant scholarly classic--a book which treats an important subject so thoroughly and with such authority that it will surely serve as the base-line from which any future work on the subject must begin. From now on it will be unthinkable that any serious student of western American urban geography or history can fail to consult this massive book at the outset of his research. And, like any other classic, Reps’ new book provides the foundation and impetus for asking large questions about the United States that could never have been posed intelligently before this monumental work was published. None of this will come as any surprise to those who are familiar with John Reps’ earlier work, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (1965). Indeed, Cities of the American West is really a sequel to the earlier book, which it greatly resembles both in content and format. The two books differ mainly in the times and places they describe. The Making of Urban America is largely (though not entirely) concerned with town planning and plotting in the east, and mostly (though not entirely) describes events which came to fruition before the Civil War. In Cities of the American West, Reps focuses attention on the cities and towns of the American frontier -mostly west of the Mississippi, and mostly products of the nineteenth century. There are twenty chapters, and the organization is straightforward. An introductory chapter describes the beginning of frontier city making in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, a brief but useful review of material treated in greater detail in the earlier book. The next three chapters concern the planning and building of Hispanic towns on the southwestern borderland from Texas to California. Most of those towns trace their putative ancestry to the sixteenth-century Spanish Laws of the Indies, but tended in fact to depart more or less drunkenly from the rigid forms which the Laws prescribed. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the creation and expansion of south-western towns under the administration of Mexicans, Texans and Americans in the pregnant pause before gold was discovered in California. If one overlooks the characteristically flamboyant behaviour of the Texans, the urban events of those years were relatively unexciting, but they underscore the truly radical differences between Hispano-American and Anglo-Saxon approaches to settlement and town making. Typically, the forms of Hispanic towns were laid down according to rigid rules by a distant, theocratic and disastrously absentminded government. The American towns were inevitably planned by free-wheeling private-enterprisers whose main purpose was financial profit, and to whom government control over town planning was literally unthinkable. 0305-7488/81/010095
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Although these matters consume almost two hundred pages, they are really introductory to the main body of the book: 14 chapters which recount how Americans set about to build their western cities-most of which sprang up between the time of the California Gold Rush and the last great gold rushes to the Black Hills of the 1880s. At the beginning of that period the American West was almost townless. By 1890 no large region remained without its spattering of real or imaginary towns and cities. That period was perhaps the fastest and most intensive episode of town making in the history of the human race. It was not a tidy process, of course, for everything was in motion during those amazing years in that amazing place, everything larger than life. Any one of several western gold rushes could have stood alone as the most fabulous in human history, but instead of one gold rush, there were dozens-not to mention numerous stampedes after silver and baser metals. Building one transcontinental railroad would have been marvellous enough-but there were four or five or six built, depending on how they are counted. Americans had seen large-scale land speculation before, but now half a continent was up for grabs. Each of these episodes provoked the founding of new towns by the tens and hundredsthe enlargement (or abandonment) of uncountable numbers more. And it all happened in 40 years. Reps tells the lurid, flamboyant story in a wealth of detail, subdividing the episodes into more or less discrete historic and geographic units. Chapters 7 and 8 concern the towns of California-those provoked by the gold rush in northern California first, then by the land-booms of the 1870s and 1880s in southern California. Chapters 9 and 10 recount the epic story of Mormon town planning and town building, from the urban revelations of Joseph Smith to the very practical work of Brigham Young in his Deseret kingdom, which extended at its zenith from the Snake River valley to the San Bernardino plain. (I found these chapters on the Mormons especially fascinating, and they could well stand as a separate book without other support.) Chapters 11 through 15 deal with town planning before the railroads arrived in the Pacific northwest, the central plains of Kansas and Nebraska, and the mining towns of Colorado and the northern Rockies. Chapters 16 through 18 discuss the wholesale planning and building of western railroad towns, a dramatic episode not simply in a few places, but all over the West. Although it is hard to imagine how anything could be more amazing than what the railroads did, chapter 19 manages to top it all, with the story of the “overnight cities” of Oklahoma, and the outrageously improbable events that brought those cities into being. The final chapter ends diminuendo around 1890 with what Reps calls the “end of the frontier era” of city planning, when “the basic framework” of western towns was finally complete. A description of chapter headings, however, scarcely begins to do justice to the mass of material that this monumental book contains. Literally hundreds of individual places are described, and the book makes good reading, for Reps is careful to put details in the large historic context, and he writes plain lucid prose, free of jargon and special pleading. Equally, it serves as a fine basic reference book. Whether one wants to know about Lawrence, Kansas, or Virginia City, Montana or Nevada (take your pick), or about Los Angeles or San Francisco (both treated with rich and loving detail), the basic material is here-the legal and technical circumstances which surrounded the original planning of the town, followed by detailed descriptions of how it grew (or failed to grow) through any of a convoluted series of additions, speculations, land booms, depressions, panics, swindles, dreams and natural disasters. The cast of characters makes one wish that Cecil B. DeMille were still alive. There are cowboys and Mormon saints and prostitutes and railroad barons and petty swindlers and Diamond Jim Brady, all supported by a cast of thousands. And underlying it all is a truly formidable mass of documentation: 50 pages of footnotes alone, and a “selected bibliography” that runs to 26 pages of close-packed citations. Although its descriptions and documentation alone would make the book a classic, I daresay that this is not why Cities of the American West will attract attention and will
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be lovingly used for years to come. The main glory of the book is its lavish and sumptuous illustration. As readers of The Making of Urban America know well, John Reps is the country’s best-known authority on the use of old city plans, maps and birds-eye views, and they will remember the 1965 volume as a marvellous repository of historical urban illustrations. So it is with the present book, and a scholar or layman who wants to learn about the planning of east Los Angeles, California, or Aspinwall, Nebraska, will find at least one contemporary map or panoramic view of the place. For places of any importance at all, Reps is likely to include several. In his discussion of Lawrence, Kansas, for example, he shows us a city plan dating from c. 1858 (shortly after the town was founded) and two bird’+eye views, one from 1858 when Lawrence was three streets of houses and a largely empty grid, and a second from 1869 by which time the town had filled up its grid and spilled across the Kansas River. There are plenty of lesser places than Lawrence that merit at least one map or birds-eye view-and often both. Nearly all of these maps or views occupy a full page, approximately 16 x 21 cm. Until one actually picks up the book and examines it, it is hard to appreciate the sheer volume and gorgeousness of illustration. But the numbers alone are formidable. I counted 265 individual city plans or maps of varying degrees of detail, 202 birds-eye views or panoramas, 27 “scenes” (mostly engravings made from photographs of street scenes in the late nineteenth century) and 20 contemporary maps of regions the size of a state or less. Thirty-two of the prints are in colour-mostly bird’s_eye views of well-known places. Although most of the prints date from the last half of the nineteenth century, the earliest (of Santo Domingo) is from 1600 and the most recent is an “aero view” of Tulsa from 1918. Even at first browsing of the opulent book, it is obvious that the assembling of these old maps and panoramas was for John Reps more than a work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Who beside the most ardent cartophile could cite 99 individual sources of illustrations-everything from the magnificent collection of city plans and views in the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division to the Bozeman, Montana, Public Library to a private collection of Stockton, California? It seems safe to guess that except for a few privileged map curators in the Library of Congress nobody has personally examined as many American urban maps and prints as has John Reps. Reps tells the reader that the illustrations are not mere window-dressing, but serve as important evidence to support and amplify verbal descriptions and arguments. Under ordinary circumstances, that would be an unmitigated blessing, for it is a rare book which combines the use of words and pictures effectively. Cities of the American West emphatically does. But the reader should be warned: most of the maps and panoramas are so extremely reduced that much of the detail cannot be appreciated and much of the printing cannot even be read without a magnifying glass. To be sure, there is good reason for such extreme reduction. Many of the original illustrations are large, and to have reproduced them at or near original scale would have required a gigantic book, one that would spill off the edges of the most Texan-sized coffee table, and cost more than most scholars and many libraries could afford. As it is, Cities of the American West is a hefty volume, both in weight (nearly seven pounds) and in price. So the book is physically a compromise, and a reader like me-with an avid curiosity about nineteenth-century American town plans but afflicted with mild presbyopia-must expect a certain amount of frustration. As I read the book, I alternated between cursing and praising the Princeton University Press : curses at having to cope with titles and legends reduced to two-point type-praise for the very high quality printing which reproduces that two-point type crisply enough to be legible under magnification. But I repeat the warning: you will need a magnifying glass. Without it, be prepared to put the book aside in frustration. With it, the book will grudgingly give up its treasures. The glass is a nuisance to be sure, but the book is well worth the trouble. The bulk of the book, overwhelmingly, is devoted to description, both verbal and pictorial, and Reps is parsimonious about making broad generalizations concerning the
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overall nature of and processes at work in the urban planning of the American West. His few generalizations, however, must be taken seriously, if only because they are based on such a massive body of evidence. Reps argues basically that Frederick Jackson Turner was incorrect in propounding his idealized sequence of western settlement: from trappers and hunters to farmers and only finally to the makers of towns and cities. Plausible, says Reps, but untrue. “Turner either did not know or failed to appreciate that, in much of the West, the founding of towns preceded [my emphasis] rural settlement or took place at the same time . . .” (p. ix). So far, so good. Reps, of course, is not the first scholar to urge revision or reversal of basic Tunerian doctrine about frontier cities. The earliest such revision, according to Reps, came in 1911 in an essay by Edmond Meany about the towns of the Pacific northwest, where a similar argument was advanced. And, in lecture notes drawn up in 1925, Turner himself had evidently begun to question the neatness of his own model. What Reps has done, however, is to assemble the overwhelming evidence to prove finally that Turner was wrong not just in a few places here or there, but generally across nearly the whole of the American West. The author’s second point is equally interesting and, given his overwhelming documentation, equally incontestable. Western towns, he says, were not the random ad hoc creations that popular mythology often makes out. Instead, most western towns were planned affairs-not well planned, to be sure, but laid out in advance of settlement. Furthermore, he notes, these plans laid down a network which established permanent patterns, not only in the location of towns, but in their internal morphology. “History has a heavy hand,” he remarks (p. 694) “and we are still held within its grasp”. It is an idea that any historical geographer will find familiar and comfortable. I would have been content with Reps’ argument if he had stopped there, but his urban enthusiasms tempt him further than some scholars might be willing to go: “The establishment of urban communities, whatever their origins, stimulated rather than followed the opening of the West to agriculture. As vanguards of settlement, towns led the way and shaped the structure of society, rather than merely responding to the needs of an established agrarian population for markets and points of distribution. . . .” (the emphasis here is mine). Reps continues: “Contrary to the Turnerian thesis, these urban centers did not take shape through a process of gradual and random incremental growth that transformed a crossroads hamlet into a town and then perhaps to a major city. Instead, the typical procedure involved the selection of a promising site by an individual, group, church, railroad, corporation, or governmental agency. The tract was then surveyed into streets, blocks, lots, and open spaces. Only after this initial design was determined were houses, shops, mills, churches, stores, and public buildings erected on predetermined locations. The western frontier thus had its origin in hundreds and thousands of planned communities” (pp. ix-x). But it is one thing to say that western towns were planned and filled up by the use of predetermined street and lot plans. It is quite another to say that those planned towns were the core and soul of the western frontier: “What Turner and his followers failed to grasp is that by 1890 a significant part of the West’s population resided in urban places and that it was those towns and city dwellers who were largely responsible for whatever distinctive Western characteristics the region possessed.” And it is less than clear to me how a history of town planning, no matter how meticulous, can form the empirical basis for such sweeping cultural judgments. At the very least, to say that cities called the tune in the creation of western culture is a remark that would have astonished the admirers of such varied folk as Buffalo Bill, or Hamlin Garland, or Frederick Remington, or William Jennings Bryan. Equally, Reps’ comparisons of eastern and western cities may cause discomfort to some readers. There can be little question that western town plans looked a good deal like many eastern town plans, and it is also true that up-to-date houses and storefronts in Helena looked remarkably similar to those back in Hartford. Nor is there much
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doubt, as Reps stresses, that the waterworks and streetcar lines of Denver and Los Angeles were as good as or better than those back East. But it is quite a leap from those incontrovertible statements to an assertion that “the attitudes of [western urban] citizens and their political and social institutions differed little from those of urban areas settled earlier in the nation’s development” (p. 668). It may be true, but I am inclined to doubt it; westerners were different from easterners, if only because they chose to pick up and move, while easterners did not. Today, of course, there are plenty of differences in attitude, as election returns repeatedly show, and these differences obviously were not born yesterday. Meantime, however, there is acute need for more solid information about the origin of vernacular attitudes, in the West and in other American regions, and until we have such information, we should probably return a Scotch verdict on Reps’ judgment in this matter. There is no harm in doing so, and it says something for the monumental quality of Reps’ scholarship that this is the most serious flaw in the whole book that I could find, It is a fairly minor cavil. By and large, however, Reps leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions, and they are sometimes very dismal conclusions indeed. Most sobering, I think, is the very limited urban vision which those early western town planners possessed. As one reads the history and scrutinizes the maps of those hundreds of places, it is impossible to escape the certainty that the western town makers were not engaged in anything remotely resembling what we would today call “city planning”. They were platters or plottersnot planners-and most of their “plans” are really just a system of streets (and sometimes lots) and little more, glued on to railroads and rivers or other acts of God. The most far-sighted planners were those who reserved a block or two here and there for a park or public ground or cemetery, but Reps shows repeatedly how such public lands were alienated for private profit-parks sold, boulevards narrowed, river-fronts automatically consigned to use by wharves or factories or railroad yards. Man perhaps does not live by bread alone, but many of those western town makers seemed to be trying. Except for the authoritarian and semi-communistic Mormons, there was little concerned effort to make cities into anything but places to make money. Some easterners may have dallied with the idea of building new Zions, or cities upon a hill, and Brigham Young obviously had such ideas when he laid out Salt Lake City. But if we read Reps correctly, there were few who thought that way in Great Falls, or in San Francisco either. None of that is surprising, of course. Simply making a living was the primary business for western Americans a century ago, and Senator Kerr of Oklahoma was not voicing a minority opinion when he derided attempts to control roadside land-use as mere “assthetics”. The need for a popular land-ethic-much less a land-aesthetic-did not grip the public imagination until well after the beginning of the twentieth century, by which time most western towns had been laid out, both on paper and on the ground. And the ethics of town planning were relaxed. Reps rather generously notes that “what from the perspective of our own time appears to be the most blatant lack of corporate and personal integrity was in [that] age accepted as ordinary sharp American business practice” (p. 580). Such a tolerant view probably helps explain the behaviour of General William Jackson Palmer of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, who solicited bribes from the citizens of Pueblo, Colorado, to build a new main line through the existing town, then when he had the money in hand, broke his promise and put the line on the other side of the river, where he plotted a new town on land which he had privately secured for himself. (The locals were outraged, not apparently because Palmer took the bribe, but because the general didn’t give them their money’s worth.) But Palmer evidently knew what he was doing, for instead of going to jail, he went on to polish his reputation by laying out Colorado Springs, one of those rare western towns with pretensions of grace. Significantly, General Palmer retired to live in Colorado Springs, which helps explain why he troubled himself to make it an agreeable place. But most land speculators and railroad barons did not live in the towns they plotted, and the results showed. Some of these results, to put it mildly, were fairly dismal, and if one pays attention
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only to the layout of streets, Cities of the American West makes suffocating reading. Even travellers of the time were loud in lamenting the lost opportunities for better planning in those seemingly interchangeable western towns, and many subsequent historians have agreed enthusiastically with that criticism. Easiest to lament, perhaps, is the ubiquitous grid-pattern which marches unrelieved across the continent from the banks of the Mississippi to the shores of the Pacific. Many, of course, have seen the grid-pattern as a colossal monument to greed, and it is certainly true that it eased the job of subdividing land and selling lots, irrespective of their location half-way up cliffs, in river channels, or even under the blue waters of San Francisco Bay. As one looks at those hundreds of gridded maps, it is easy to conclude that western town planners were clods at best, scoundrels at worst. But the grid-pattern, commonplace as it became, surely represented more than a device to make money. A failure to recognize that fact, I think, can lead to a serious misreading of Cities of the American West, and a distorted understanding of American history. Those western town planners were looking, above all, for order-and who can blame them? The times were chaotic, and while the western wilderness offered opportunity, in its unaltered state it offered very little hope of safety or security. Formality provided a kind of order, however-whether it was a formal architecture or formal manners or formal street plans. Significantly, when western town planners departed from the grid-plan (which they seldom did), they usually offered some geometric pattern or other: circles, ellipses, hexagons, or spiderwebs-orderly, formal patterns which could be drawn a priori anywhere, and stamped on landscape anywhere. Most ordinary westerners, of course, did not participate in the design of street-plans, but there is little evidence that the average western citizen objected to the grid-plan. Quite the contrary. As for adjusting street-patterns to irregular local topography, that was ever rarer. In 1873, for example, fresh from his triumphs in the East, Frederick Law Olmsted was invited to lay out a plan for Tacoma, Washington, and his plan (shown in fig. 17.6) bore strong family resemblance to his design for Riverside, Illinois, in 1869 (Making of Urban America, fig. 204), with streets winding romantically and gently up Tacoma’s precipitous waterfront hills. Tacomans would have none of it, and Reps gives us an instructive quotation from a decisive local critic: “The most fantastic plan of a town that was ever seen. There wasn’t a straight line, a right angle, or a corner lot. The blocks were shaped like melons, pears and sweet potatoes. One block, shaped like a banana, was 3,000 feet in length and had 250 lots. It was a pretty fair park plan but condemned itself for a town” (p. 568). Clearly, romance and artistically curving streets were very well for cemeteries or for the effete East, but romance in a western town plan was merely seen as disorderly and consequently intolerable. Thus, in the normal course of events, Tacoma was given a grid-plan, and embossed it on the hillsides as a recognizable stamp of an orderly civilization. In the final analysis, Tacoma is unusual because once upon a time it flirted with romance. Most western towns would not have gone nearly so far. But there are worse crimes than trying to impose order on a wild land. The endless grid-plans did not mark the end of western town building, or even town planning. And, as J. B. Jackson has eloquently shown us, the vernacular landscape that people eventually built and planted within those western grids was not necessarily dull or ugly. Drawing those plans was only the end of the beginning. As Reps himself remarks in the concluding passage of the book, “what had scarcely been started in 1890--and which remains today remains unfinished-was the shaping of an urban civilization” (p. 694.) That tantalizing matter sounds as if it might be the subject of John Reps’ next classic work. The Pennsylvania State University