One of the most conspicuous effects of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was the City Beautiful movement in America. Led by architects, urban planners, and reformers, it gained popularity in the 1890s-1920s.
The Fair featured a civic center, many landscaped parks, wide boulevards, and buildings that were a balance of neoclassicism and Baroque architecture. The Fair’s planners felt the need to emphasize beauty but also to help the flow of pedestrian and vehicle traffic.
The City Beautiful movement’s goal was to make the city livable—The New York Preservation Archive Project states, “The fundamental idea expounded at the fair was that the city was no longer a symbol of economic development and industrialization, but could now be seen as enhancing the aesthetic environment of its many inhabitants.” The end of the 19th century saw an explosion of European immigrants, and the cities where they flocked suffered from unsafe and unhealthy conditions. There were no systemic approaches to traffic, sanitation, building codes, or pollution, and public space seemed to be vanishing. Charles Mulford Robinson published a book, The Improvement of Towns and Cities in 1910 to call attention to these issues and to prompt politicians to take on social ills and inspire civic virtue. One notable line from the book was “mean streets make mean people.”
There were connections to the Beaux-Arts aesthetic of Europe, which urban planners considered a significant aspect of their goals—connect America to European classical traditions and thus legitimate the country’s arts and cultures. Some prominent figures such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, however, contested this and felt that America should have its own truly unique architectural style. The Encyclopedia of Chicago explains, “The central ideological conflict surrounding the City Beautiful pitted invention and innovation against continuity and tradition. The newness and cultural nationalism espoused by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright lay in their quest for a uniquely ‘American’ culture, one with maturity and confidence enough to cease relying so heavily on Old World traditions. Burnham and his allies, by contrast, believed that the sometimes-frantic quest for ‘American-ness’—the obsession with New World originality and horror of all things European—was itself a kind of insecurity, and that maturity would consist in an acknowledgment that America was not culturally isolated from the rest of the world. Burnham and his associates saw the United States as a rightful heir to the traditions of Western culture and chose thus to recall, celebrate, and use those traditions themselves. Indeed, Europe and its traditions could provide a standard by which critics of America's urban 'ugliness' could appeal to the consciousness of a larger constituency.”
Washington, D.C. was the first city to implement a City Beautiful plan (the “Macmillan Plan”), limiting building heights and creating balance and harmony in the placement of buildings; it was responsible for the National Mall, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. Daniel Burnham, the overseer of the Fair, and Edward H. Bennett took on their city of Chicago, issuing a “Plan of Chicago” that would include a civic center, a rail system, a bi-level boulevard for traffic, and a network of parks and trails. This plan came to an end in 1929 with the start of the Great Depression, but much of it was indeed implemented. Burnham believed good citizenship was “the prime object of good city planning” and that his city’s work in this area meant “Chicago would be taking a long step toward cementing together the heterogeneous elements of our population, and toward assimilating the million and a half of people who are here now but who were not here fifteen years ago.”
Historians see the movement coming to an end starting around World War I and being replaced by the International Style. Critics vocally decried the focus on architecture and urban planning without any real attempt to improve social and economic ills.
