The first contribution to the pioneer’s comfort was Franklin’s
ingenious stove (1745). After that came a number of material
appliances. Central heating gave the American house a Roman standard of
comfort, the astral-oil lamp captivated Edgar Poe; and cooking stoves,
gas-lighting, permanent bathtubs, and water-closets made their way
into the better sort of house in the Eastern cities before the middle
of the nineteenth century. In the development of the city itself, the
gridiron plan was added to the list of labor-saving devices. Although
the gridiron plan had the same relation to natural conditions and
fundamental social needs as a paper constitution has to the living
customs of a people, the simplicity of the gridiron plan won the heart
of the pioneer. Its rectangular blocks formed parcels of land which he
could sell by the front foot and gamble with as easily as if he were
playing cards, and deeds of transfer could be drawn up hastily with the
same formula for each plot; moreover, the least competent surveyor,
without thought or knowledge, could project the growth of New Eden’s
streets and avenues into an interminable future. In nineteenth-century
city planning the engineer was the willing servant of the land
monopolist; and he provided a frame for the architect--a frame in which
we still struggle today--where site-value counted for everything, and
sight-value was not even an afterthought.
In street layout and land subdivision no attention was paid to the
final use to which the land would be put; but the most meticulous
efforts were made to safeguard its immediate use, namely,
land-speculation. In order to further this use hills were graded,
swamps and ponds filled, and streets laid out before these expenditures
could be borne by the people who, in the end, were to profit by
or suffer from them. It was no wonder that the newer towns like
Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago by the middle of the century had
forfeited to the gambler in real estate, to pay the cost of street
improvements, generous tracts of land which the original planners had
set aside as civic centers. Planned by men who still retained some of
the civic vision of the early republic, the commercial city speedily
drifted into the hands of people who had no more civic scruples than
the keeper of a lottery.
The gridiron plan had one other defect which was accounted a virtue by
the pioneer, and still is shared by those who have not profited by the
intervening century’s experience. With its avenues that encompassed
swamps and wildernesses, with its future growth forecast for at least
a hundred years, the complete city plan captivated the imagination.
Scarcely any American town was so mean that it did not attempt to
grow faster than its neighbor, faster perhaps than New York. Only by
the accumulation of more and more people could its colossal city
plan and its inflated land values be realized. If the older cities of
the seaboard were limited in their attempts to become metropolises
by the fact that their downtown sections were originally laid out
for villages, the villages of the middle west labored under just
the opposite handicap; they had frequently acquired the framework
of a metropolis before they had passed out of the physical state of
a village. The gridiron plan was a sort of hand-me-down which the
juvenile city was supposed to grow into and fill. That a city had
any other purpose than to attract trade, to increase land values,
and to grow is something that, if it uneasily entered the mind of an
occasional Whitman, never exercised any hold upon the minds of the
majority of our countrymen. For them, the place where the great city
stands _is_ the place of stretched wharves, and markets, and ships
bringing goods from the ends of the earth; that, and nothing else.