I'm here at Schenley Plaza, in the center of Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood.

Oakland is widely considered to be the cultural center of the city of Pittsburgh.

And yet it's nearly five miles from downtown.

The development of Oakland is just one legacy of the city.

Beautiful movement.

I'm Noles I'm here to explore and explain.

Pittsburgh is among the prettiest cities in the United States, if not the world in terms of immediate natural surroundings.

It's kind of in a class of its own.

In order to realize the true beauty of a city's surroundings, the built environment, the city itself needs to be made beautiful.

City planning today fills this gap, but city planning hasn't always been a force to reckon with.

So today, I want to touch on one major milestone in the history of city planning.

And that's the City Beautiful movement.

This was a city planning, architectural and philosophic trend at the beginning of the 20th century, which aimed to embolden civic pride and raise the morals and quality of life for the lower classes by beautifying the city.

This beautification most notably consisted of large scale plans containing grand civic centers in the neoclassical Beaux-Arts style, but it was also made up of plans and efforts to expand parkland, create boulevards, protect vistas, destroy billboards, and clean the air.

City beautiful remains controversial because of its top down approach and the fact that it was not comprehensive.

Just because your city looks nice doesn't mean it's a nice place to live.

I don't want to get too into the weeds in this video about the origins of the City Beautiful movement, and I don't even think it's particularly relevant to discuss its relation to other methods of urban planning that arose later.

But I do want to look into some of the proto city beautiful things, if you will, that kind of lead into the movement.

So we can use those as a method to examine its effects on the city of Pittsburgh.

So City Beautiful has three antecedents, and we'll touch on these again later.

But just for starters, they are one municipal art, two civic improvement, and three outdoor art.

Now municipal art.

That's a zeal for sculptures, murals, stained glass, other decorative elements that can be added to public squares and buildings to make cities, works of art in and of themselves.

It began with the New York Municipal Art society in the 1890s.

Civic improvement was simply piecemeal, yet organized improvements to cities over time as opportunities presented themselves.

It began in villages in New England in the 1840s, and by the 1890s it had largely matured and spread across the country.

Outdoor art, which was rooted in the romantic movement and it was largely unorganized during its time, championed cultivation of the landscape beauty, especially as found in city parks.

And the Outdoor Crusade was still alive in the 1890s.

Now, you'll notice that I mentioned the 1890s in all three of those antecedents, and that's because the 1890s is generally what's considered the birth of the City Beautiful movement.

And specifically, it's the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus landing in the New World.

The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was something unprecedented.

It was built in less than two years, and it transformed the sandy waste land on the shore of Lake Michigan into a serene green park, complete with a large lagoon and canals.

And it put Chicago on the world stage, and it showed the world that America was capable of monumental things, which, of course, would be proven time and time again in the coming century.

The main attraction was the White City, a Court of Honor arrangement composed of some of the world's largest buildings and a spotless promenade over which millions of visitors walked during the fair six month run.

These stark, white columned building showcased wonders from all around the world and all over the nation, and everything was lit up at night with electric light bulbs.

The first event of its kind to be so trash was removed each night.

Overhead transit served some parts of the fairground, and most substantially, the group of architects led by Daniel Burnham, had created order from the chaos of one of the world's fastest growing cities.

The buildings are long gone, but Jackson Park and the midway remain today.

Basically, the White City was so beautiful and unparalleled that everyone who visited thought, wow, I'd like my city to look like that.

The spirit of the White City was kept alive in the expositions in Omaha in 1898, Buffalo in 1901, which was also called the Rainbow City, and Saint Louis in 1904, also known as the Ivory City.

Two Pittsburghers played an immense role in the popularity and lasting image of the 1893 World's Fair.

George Westinghouse won the bid to electrify the fairgrounds, and a young steel inspector named George Ferris built an experimental wheel, which soon dominated the midway and became one of the biggest attractions.

There's actually so much to cover when it comes to the 1893 World's Fairs and World's Fairs in general, and what we've lost by not holding them anymore, that I want to make a separate video on those topics at a future time.

But there is one more element to the city beautiful that I'd like to cover first.

So, as I just said, the conventional origin story of the City Beautiful movement is that America was so enraptured in the beauty of the White City of 1893 that neoclassical architecture and courts of honor, Baroque style planning, took over the hearts and minds of both ordinary folk who visited the fair and city leaders and experts alike.

However, the more scholarly planners will tell you that the 1901 Macmillan Plan is the true origin.

Urban historian William H. Wilson, for instance, notes that the term city beautiful wasn't even in usage until 1899, and that the general adoption of Chicago Exposition features waited until 1902.

So what's the Macmillan plan?

In 1901, a century after Pierre Long laid out the street grid for the city of Washington, and after railroads and canals and bad decisions had altered it quite significantly, the Senate created a commission headed by Senator McMillan to rectify these issues.

The man hired to implement the plan was none other than Daniel Burnham himself, who had risen to national fame almost a decade earlier with the White City.

So the reason we no longer have railroad tracks running down the National Mall, and the reason the monuments and parks and museums of the city are so well defined and so beautiful.

And the reason Union Station exists as it is, is because of the plan that this commission set up.

In fact, I think of any city in North America.

Washington is the clearest and best example of city beautiful planning.

So with these three elements in mind, three antecedents the White City and the McMillan plan.

Let's see what the movement gave to Pittsburgh.

So in case you haven't heard, Pittsburgh in the decades between the Civil War and World War two, was not a good place to live.

Iron and steel production had brought wealth to the city, but destroyed the natural beauty wrought by the intense topography of the area.

Typhoid rates were through the roof.

Soot covers everything you have meaning you have to sweep your porch multiple times a day if you want it to stay clean.

Buildings are stained black from the polluted air.

Raw sewage is being dumped into three rivers.

Streetlights are sometimes turned on at noon.

And until 1889, the whole teeming city has one small block of parkland, which is essentially a widened median on Second Avenue between Grant and Ross Streets.

In 1907, the chief probation officer of the city named Alice B Montgomery, reaches out to the social work journal Charities and Commons, requesting a survey of the conditions to be put in print so they do this research over the next couple of years, and then they serialize this survey in their magazine for the whole nation to see.

And it finally makes clear to Pittsburgh and everybody else that something needs to change.

The people responsible for this change at the turn of the century is actually the upper crust of the city.

Even though they live in fashionable neighborhoods, they want to implement, order and raise the living conditions of the working class.

Whether this is coming from a place of altruism or if this is just an impetus to control the lower classes.

That's not really the scope of this paper.

And I don't think anybody really knows for sure.

But it is important to keep in mind that this is where the public private partnership really takes off in Pittsburgh.

Most famously, the same method is later used for the Pittsburgh Renaissance, which follows World War Two.

In regards to the Pittsburgh Survey, which was published from 1907 to 1909.

Local urban historian Roy Labov wrote, I would not claim that the origins of advocacy for esthetically pleasing architecture and design in Pittsburgh are rooted entirely in a reaction to such ridicule, but it surely played a part.

The survey found, to nobody's surprise, dreadful social consequences to spectacular industrial development and a weak sense of civic responsibility.

Corrupt political machines, extreme political fragmentation, lack of civic consciousness, overloading and absentee owned corporations.

Lack of labor organization, and abysmal working conditions.

It served largely to sting the city's pride.

However, it would be a mistake to act as if nothing was done in Pittsburgh until the worst parts were splayed open for the nation to read.

Let's talk about those three antecedents from earlier.

One of the most influential men in Pittsburgh history is Edward M Bigelow.

He was appointed city engineer in 1880 and later became Director of Public Works until he left the city government in 1906.

There's a statue of him outside of Phipps Conservatory, and for good reason.

In 1889, he changed the landscape of the city with two major parkland additions.

First, he convinced Mary Shanley to donate the Mount Airy tract in Squirrel Hill to the city, and also he bought up the farm surrounding the city's reservoir in an area that would later be called Highland Park.

Around that same time, construction began on Grant Boulevard, which stretched from downtown at Seventh Avenue to the burgeoning area in Oakland known as Schenley Farms.

That road was renowned for its views and how easy it made travel to Oakland, and it was later renamed in his honor.

He was also a member of the Shade Tree Commission, which sought to line residential streets with well shade trees in order to beautify neighborhoods.

In 1911, a municipal art commission was formed and they approved projects such as the Murray Avenue Bridge, the Bloomfield Bridge, and the Aspinwall Pumping Station.

In one of his last big efforts as director of public Works, Bigelow imagined in 1898 a large neoclassical arched gateway for the Oakland entrance to Schenley Park to symbolically separate the brutal, mechanized world of the city from the serene natural world of the park.

It was never built, but it is a fitting capstone for the proto city beautiful, and its ideal is one that city planners are still trying to trace today.

From those initial few hundred acres that Bigelow acquired, the city now operates 3800 acres of parkland, which is more than 10% of the city's total land area.

Bigelow Boulevard remains a quick way to get to Oakland from downtown, and many streets are still lined with shade trees.

The biggest effect that the Pittsburgh survey had was the public private hiring of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr in 1909 to create a report on what could be done to beautify and better plan the city.

In 1911, he delivered his report to the Pittsburgh Civic Commission, entitled And Bear with me.

Pittsburgh.

Main thoroughfares in the downtown district.

Improvements necessary to meet the city's present and future needs.

Much of it was never actually implemented.

For then, just as now, money ruled everything.

But there are some examples of this McMillan esque plan.

And by the way, Pittsburgh was a late entrant into the City Master plan sphere.

Already, by the time Pittsburgh even got around to creating its commission.

New York, San Francisco, Saint Louis, and even smaller cities like Roanoke and Honolulu had plans to call their own.

All were less industrial than Pittsburgh, sure, but many were less prominent on the world stage.

Remember that at this time, Pittsburgh was in the top ten cities in the United States in terms of population.

Here are some elements in the Olmstead Plan.

Grant Street Hill, commonly known as The Hump, was a natural rise on Grant Street between Diamond and Sixth, which impeded easy movement in commerce.

Though Olmsted's plan was hardly the first to call for its removal, this was the charge that stuck, and by 1914 the hump was a memory.

Its rocks and dirt were used to fill Saint Peter's Ravine in Oakland, thus beautifying that neighborhood as well.

The report also called for the radical widening to fifth, sixth, and Diamond Streets downtown and the creation of a high level artery from downtown to the East End.

Thus, construction began on Monongahela Boulevard in 1920, which was renamed Boulevard of the allies a year later.

The Liberty Bridge and Tunnel had been conceived in 1908 as a means to spur growth beyond Mount Washington, but Bigelow and others had argued about the elevation of the two homesteads.

Report sided with Bigelow, favoring the lower elevation route.

He pictured the Liberty Bridge becoming a grand entrance to his proposed civic center at the base of the hill, topped by Holy Ghost College.

The Civic Center was to be built atop a decked over railroad, with grand new public buildings and formal gardens built in the eastern shadows of the courthouse.

In an unusual departure from City Beautiful conventions, Olmsted wrote, the site clearly does not call for any nicely balanced, refined Beaux Art architecture.

He did not elaborate.

The Civic Center, of course, never came to fruition.

Crosstown Boulevard now cuts through the site.

Olmsted also recommended the widening of Water Street and Duquesne Way, and their transformation into tree lined riverfront parkways meant for both commerce and recreation, an idea that was partially implemented at the time and came back during the Renaissance.

In addition to these wharves as parkways, the report outlined the need for an inner loop to circulate traffic around rather than through the crowded downtown.

Parts of this were also implemented during the Renaissance.

Finally, and most unique to Pittsburgh, Olmsted envisioned the point should be reshaped as one single monument worthy of its natural beauty and historical significance.

This, of course, became the crowning achievement of the postwar Renaissance.

Deca Olmsted was not the only plan for the point over the decades.

In fact, there's been very many, and that topic will get its own video at some point in the future.

Two local historians, Edward K Muller and John Baumann, have called Olmsted Jr's plan not a blueprint or a master plan, but a permanent mechanism for rationally planning the continuous development of the city.

Charles Mulford Robinson, who coined the term City Beautiful and wrote extensively on the topic, recommended that Radial Avenue should be added to rectilinear grids to offer shortcuts to traffic and for beauty as affording variety and street intersection, revealing pleasant vistas and making easy the provision of little open spaces.

Boulevard of the alley certainly fits that description.

Robinson also wrote that parkways, which trace the land contours and connect parks, have the duty to transform separate parks into a park system in Pittsburgh's East End.

Beachwood Boulevard performs this function.

Originally conceived as a larger parkway including Grant Boulevard and Washington Boulevard, it connected Schenley Park to Highland Park, though its grace was later marred by the addition of the Squirrel Hill exit on I-30 76, and it was later truncated at Fifth Avenue.

It gives us some insight into the role that just a single road played in the minds of the city.

Beautiful planners.

Through these few examples that we just talked about, we can see the effect of McMillan style city beautiful planning had on the city.

The third and final variety is white city type city.

Beautiful planning.

This is the most recognizable today because it differs most radically from the modern built environment and planning practices most visible in the Oakland neighborhood.

This type of city beautiful is exemplified by Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic contributions to the neighborhood.

Henry Hornbostel various buildings and his stillborn pit.

Acropolis Plan Andrew Carnegie, sitting atop Heron Hill one day in the early 1890s, chose the site for both his library music hall museum complex, commonly called the Carnegie Institute, and his technical School complex called Carnegie Tech.

He viewed these two as compliments to each other, one to celebrate the fine arts and one to teach the industrial arts.

They were to be architectural compliments, two located across from one another, separated by Junction Hollow, but always visible.

Carnegie was clearly inspired by the White City, calling the fair the greatest combination of architectural beauty which man has ever created.

The Carnegie Institute, built in 1895 and expanded in 1907, really put Oakland on the map.

Local architect Henry Horne won the design competition for the Carnegie Tech campus, creating a grand Baroque design that recalls the campus of the University of Virginia.

As with most Baroque designs, perspective plays an important role.

At Carnegie Tech, the Court of Honor effect is most impressive when entering campus from the East, and Hornbostel was adamant that the main entrance be placed there where Hunt Library stands today.

Explicit comparisons between Carnegie Tech and the White City's Court of Honor began around 1912, likely by Hornbostel himse He was known to have a healthy ego.

On an interesting note here.

Just as the white city had been manifested from the wasteland to the lake's edge.

Carnegie Tech was brought up from a steep, irregular parcel along the edge of a cliff.

A few years later, as Warren Basile designed the adjacent Bureau of Mines complex on Forbes Avenue.

Carnegie Tech President Arthur Hammarskjöld commented that the area will look like a world's Fair.

Hornbostel actions and design show the importance of esthetics in the City Beautiful movement, at least among the designers.

As Carnegie was throwing money into his Oakland projects.

Land developer Franklin Nikola had his own ideas for a white city in Pittsburgh.

Nikola completed the Schenley Hotel in 1898 and consulted with Olmstead Jr to weave the Schenley Park entrance and the Schenley Hotel grounds into one.

However, Olmsted's plan, for whatever reason, was not followed, and no copy is known to exist today.

When Mary schenley died in 1903, Nicola bought up all of her undeveloped land holdings in Oakland and quickly got to work.

His biggest influence may have been who he resold certain parcels to the Western University of Pennsylvania, about 45 acres for their new campus.

The county bought a parcel in 1906 for their Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall.

The Pittsburgh Athletic Association bought a parcel for their new clubhouse, and in 1908, Ernie Dreyfus bought seven acres for his new Forbes Field.

By the end of the decade, six more clubs and societies and six churches would be located in Oakland, which was quickly becoming the civic center that Nicolet and Carnegie had envisioned.

Furthermore, Nicholas ought to round out his plans by developing Schenley Farms into a model upscale residential neighborhood replete with extensive landscaping shaded streets, buried wires, and 96 homes set back from the streets.

Finally, in an act which appropriately ties together one spectrum of the city beautiful to the other, Nicola continued Grant Boulevard through his development to the new Schenley Plaza.

In 1911, architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler lauded Oakland.

There is no other civic center in this country to be compared with it.

In summary, Nikola was a visionary and saw Oakland as a new Pittsburgh.

Apart from and safely above the industry, smoke floods and crowded conditions.

A model city, Schenley Park, arguably the heart of both Pittsburgh's park system and the city's east side, is surrounded by other cultural institutions which improve quality of life in various ways.

Phipps Conservatory built in 1893.

The University of Pittsburgh, built in 1907.

Carnegie Mellon University, built in 1900, and the Carnegie Institute, built in 1895.

It could be considered merely an extension of Oakland Civic Center or Civic Center in its own right.

Perhaps the greatest example of city beautiful planning in Oakland is a gargantuan plan that was never fully implemented, and today is mostly been forgotten and demolished.

When the Western University of Pennsylvania moved their campus from Observatory Hill to Oakland in 1907, they began a design contest for a grand new campus or in Basel, one with what became known as the Acropolis Plan.

30 Beaux-Arts neoclassical buildings would have been spread from Fifth Avenue to the top of the hill, along an axis nearly in line with that of Carnegie Tech.

Of these structures, only four were built.

The School of Mines, which later became State Hall, Saw Hall, the School of Medicine, which later became Pennsylvania Hall, and the School of Dentistry.

The plan was simply too large for a fledgling university.

Plus, the planned effect really only worked if one stood on the campus of Carnegie Tech.

Ultimately, Pitt bit off more than they could chew and quickly ran out of money for the plan.

The Great War killed any momentum that was left, and a decade later, Chancellor Bowman took the university to new heights with a Collegiate Gothic skyscraper known as the Cathedral of Learning.

Though Pitt's campus never reached its city, beautiful majority, the white beaux art buildings that do remain and the impression of a grand plan remind Pittsburghers of a time when architecture and planning was heralded as the antidote to urban woes.

As a final note of interest here, Pittsburgh's Union Station is an extant and isolated example of City Beautiful construction.

It's actually the third station to be built on its site, and it went up in 1903, in the midst of city beautiful fervor, replacing a temporary station which had been used since the first was burned down in the riots of 1877.

The current building was designed by Daniel Burnham, father of the White City, and the McMillan plan.

Burnham went on to design several other buildings in downtown, including the Frick Building and the Oliver Building, as well as the Union Station in Washington, D.C., which he based on sketches for Pittsburgh.

Though the original outdoor art landscaping is long gone, and the building is not nearly as important for the city as it used to be, the building itself, cast in the hand of Daniel Burnham, is a direct link to the city beautiful ideals and architecture.

By the time of the First World War, a City beautiful had waned from its height of influence, and it was replaced by the International Style.

In the interwar years.

As Bauman and Mueller make clear, the City Beautiful movement in Pittsburgh progressed haltingly and in piecemeal fashion.

It hardly addressed the larger issue of urban squalor and decay.

Despite the movement's valid criticism, City Beautiful launched city planning into the mainstream and taught Americans in Pittsburgh and elsewhere that beauty can be found despite the ugliness decades later, within the ugliness and chaos of Big Steel's collapse, Pittsburgh had found and continues to find, ways to rise above its circumstances and make the Steel City beautiful.

Oh, hey, you're still here.

Thanks for sticking around.

If you like today's video, you can learn more by looking at my work cited in the description.

I left a couple links in there too.

I guess that's about it for this one.

So see you next time.