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.
IV
With business booming and vanishing, with people coming and going, with land continually changing hands, what encouragement was there for the stable achievements of architecture? In vain does the architect antic and grimace to conceal his despair; his business is to put on a front. If he is not a Pecksniff at heart, he will at any rate have to serve Mr. Veneering. A guide book of 1826 refers to a Masonic Hall “somewhat in the Gothic style”; and we can characterize all the buildings of the period by saying that they were “somewhat” like architecture—a little more than scenery, a little less than solids.
For a while it seemed as if the Gothic revival might give the prevailing cast to nineteenth-century building; for if this mode was adopted at first because it was picturesque and historic it was later reinforced by the conviction that it was a natural and scientific mode of construction, that it stood for growth and function, as against the arbitrary character of the classic work. The symbols of the organic world were rife in the thought of this period, for in the sphere of thought biology was supplanting physics, and Gothic architecture was supposed peculiarly to be in the line of growth, while that of the Renaissance cut across and, heretically, denied the principle of organic development. Unfortunately the process of disintegration had gone so far that no one current of thought had the power to dominate; and the Gothic style proved to be only the first of a number of discordant influences, derived from industry, from history, from archaeology.
Indeed, the chief sign that bears witness to the disintegration of architecture during the formative days of the pioneer is eclecticism; but there is still another—the attempt to justify the industrial process by using solely the materials it had created in abundance. In discussing the plans for the Smithsonian Institution, Robert Dale Owen observed that “of late years a rival material, from the mine, seems encroaching on these [stone, clay, wood] and the next generation may see, arising on our continent, villages, or it may be cities, of iron.”
What Owen’s generation actually did see, apart from sheet-iron façades and zinc cornices, was the Crystal Palace, which was built in New York in 1853 in imitation of London’s exhibition hall of 1850. Ruskin described the original Crystal Palace, with sardonic justice, as a magnified conservatory; and that is about all that can be said for either building. As exercises in technique they doubtless taught many lessons to the iron masters and engineers; but they had scarcely anything to contribute to architecture. A later generation built the train sheds for their smoky railways on this pattern; but the precedent lingers today chiefly in subway kiosks and window-fronts, and even here it has created no fresh forms for itself—unless the blank expanse of a plate-glass window framed in metallic grilles can be called a fresh form.
The growth of eclecticism, on the other hand, had by the middle of the century given the American city the aspect of a museum and the American countryside a touch of the picture-book. Washington Irving’s Sunnyside and the first Smithsonian building were in the predominant Gothic mode; but Poe described the mansion of a not altogether imaginary Arnheim as semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic; and the old Tombs prison in New York got its name from the Egyptian character of its façade. Who can doubt that the design for a Byzantine cottage, shown in The
