Satellite cities; a study of industrial suburbs

Front matter

'.7

■I

The

Foreword

Congestion, with all that it means in choked streets, dark work rooms and high taxes, has been forcing factories to our city limits and beyond. To direct attention to this process and particularly to its civic consequences is the purpose of this book. It endeavors to set forth the opportunity in these outskirts for applying the technique which is being developed and (the idealism which is finding expression in the new science of town planning. For while industrial managers have shown extraordinary foresight, skill and ingenuity in the arrangement of their plants in the outlying areas, no such expert planning has gone into the accompanying community development.

These pages are not an attempt to solve the resultj ing complex problems. They are an effort to set forth definite facts from typical communities where these problems and the general situation which embodies them are seen in bold outline. The writer went , about his investigation with no preconceived opinions or theories to substantiate, but with human values first j in his mind and the common welfare uppermost in his purpose. Criticism of civic shortcomings on the part of the industrial control and public authorities is made not so much to place responsibility as to point the way toward constructive progress. The main thing to be

vii

Vlll

FOREWORD desired is the cooperation of public officials, working people, industrial leaders and enlightened citizens to secure better living and truer democracy.

Most of the material in this volume appeared first, as a series of articles in The Survey. To its editor,) Paul U. Kellogg, whose cooperation during the col-^ lection and arrangement of the data and whose editorial help were of the utmost value, the author acknowledges his great debt. Miss Jane Addams’ courtesy in permitting the use of a paper she originally read before the Chicago Woman’s Club and the' Twentieth Century Club of Boston is especially ap-i predated. For suggestions in manuscript revision' the author is grateful to Francis Hackett, formerly m literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post and now [ on the staff of The New Republic. To those who contributed to the symposium in the appendix, and to those who helped in the field work, the revision of | chapters, and the preparation of maps, diagrams and illustrations, the author also extends his thanks.

More deeply than he can well express, he feels what he owes to years of companionship with his father, whose work at Chicago Commons and outreaching influence in civic and industrial relations j have unfailingly emphasized the human point of view. This companionship, this work and influence, have constantly strengthened a faith in that democracy which W is essential if citizen and worker are to gain all that should come through the community’s guidance of its own growth.

Introduction

Several years ago Graham Romeyn Taylor, then, as 1 now, one of the editorial staff of The Survey, visited the various communities which had grown up in the ! vicinity of the larger cities of the country. He saw ■ the several situations with the eyes of a trained obi server of civic affairs, and possessing a strong reportorial instinct, he proceeded to tell what he saw to the readers of The Survey. He was not content, however, merely to tell what he saw. He was keen to find out what it all meant, and start his readers thinking about the conditions. This he proceeded to do under the happily chosen title ‘‘ Satellite Cities.”

I It seemed to the Editor of the National Municipal t League Series that these illuminating papers should have a more permanent form. And so it was proposed that they be gathered and rounded out into a volume and made available to students of urban problems and Aof industry. This task Mr. Taylor has performed ,|with skill and effectiveness, and has brought home the /Wessons of experience to those dealing with the in- *:|volved questions of manufacture, land, labor and popyulation.

These ‘‘ made-to-order ” cities — for “ satellite cit- I ies ” are really made to order, not thrown off the parent body at a given moment — not only have

IX

INTRODUCTION

‘XT'tll

problems of their own, and serious ones, but they have lessons for the city planner and the student of the larger municipal problems. We can see in the experience of these cities how carefully made plans work out in practice. Here we study in detail the results of policies which have been urged for the larger cen- i ters. For, as Mr. Taylor points out, they have ' come to share in the common lot.” j

Mr. Taylor’s volume, which is the first in this series * to be illustrated, will form an admirable complement to John Nolen’s volume, “ City Planning,” which is j | now in press. It might be given the sub-title of Ap- | plied City Planning,” for the developments which are described are just that.

The discussion of an “ Employer’s Utopia ” leads to the inclusion of a parenthetical chapter by Jane Addams, an analysis of the results of the late George M. Pullman’s effort to care in a fatherly way for the great army of employees necessary to build his cars. Miss Addams and Mr. Taylor both face the problem involved in the attempt to impose good government, which is the idea of so many, but which so far has not^ worked out in our American communities. These may | '

not be wholly democratic; but they are democratic iff j their tendencies, and to an increasing degree they are- ; preferring democracy to efficiency, although striving for both.

Clinton Rogers Woodruff.

August, 1915.

SUMMARY

Chapter I

Xity planning as process — Industry seeks the city’s edge — rj'Pullman and other pioneers — Made-to-order towns incidents T^^n a vast movement — Its meaning in workers’ lives — Inge- Fnuity and foresight in factory arrangement, not applied to \iitown planning — Land values and home ownership — Trans- -portation and community life — Irregular work serious in a ji. |>ne industry town — Attempt to take workers away from |)f:enters of labor “ trouble ” — Company control and local polimdcs — Industrial exodus and civic opportunity.

Chapter II

Pullman and its meaning — The “ model ” town in the eighties — Paternalism broken up by annexation to Chicago, the f strike of 1894 and court decision against company holding of |;eal state — Change from company to public control — Hous- I ng — Population and racial shift — Steel cars bring new tirocesses — Work and wages — Civic conditions — Adjacent Bumtown ” — Old and new in recreation, schools and health Pullman’s place in Chicago’s plan — How the people felt oward the company — Civic independence and ward politics !— Chicago’s first socialist alderman — Genius of great men ’ ijnd faith in democracy.

CHAPTER HI

A MODERN LEAR. A Parenthetical Chapter by Jane Addams

The industrial tragedy at Pullman — Its lesson for to-day — -King Lear and a captain of industry — Ingratitude in chil-

SUMMARY

I dren and employees — The benevolent autocrat — Good deeds in place of human relationship — The sheltered daughter finds a larger life — Pullman employees emerge in the labor movement— Individual virtues and social ethics' — The selfrighteous philanthropist in a changing age — Brotherhood of the workers must also recognize the employer — “The consent of men ” in industrial relations and social progress.

CHAPTER IV p

Trend of factories to the outskirts more important than spec- f tacular company towns — Workers left behind at Cincinnati

— Commuting from city tenements to suburban plants — I No loss of workers though hours and wages unchanged — j A well-planned “factory colony’’ — No planning for people '

— Land cheap for plants but high for homes — Making roomi for wage-earners in a residential suburb — The Schmidlappj housing experiment — Cooperative housekeeping — Where “ bright lights ” are not shining, neighborhood recreation must' be planned — Public spirit and the suburb — The challenge of. the “ factory colony ” to the scheming of community life.

CHAPTER V ! I

An “ east side ” in the west — St. Louis and her Illinois' satellites — Usual economic advantages — The “ arbi-^ trary ” on coal — Civic barriers in a great river and a state line — Creating a town and its land values — Meager recrea-^j tion but short hours of work — Three eight-hour shifts in-f| stead of two of twelve hours in steel plants — The companies^ , save money — What leisure means to men — Trade unions —

A socialist mayor — Frank differences but no bitterness — Greater isolation for foreigners — “ Hungary Hollow Bui V garians and Macedonians — Their neglected conditions ^e need fpr civic unity in a metropolitan industrial district

CHAPTER VI A CITY BY DECREE

Creating a city by fiat — Gary’s sand dunes and destiny —

The chosen spot of a master industry — Bending nature to i

SUMMARY

Xlll the needs of steel — Twenty square miles of elbow-room — Scientific plant arrangement and civic rule-o’-thumb — The I works gate as a town focus — A gridiron street scheme — Kidnapping towns — Strategy for industrial stress — Industry holds the lake front against the people’s use — Fundamental utilities — Company houses — Cement construction —

V‘ Hunkvville ” — Inadequate housing for immigrants — The

^jframework ready for life.

CHAPTER VII lihe human side of the steel city — Wholesale provision for [immunity life — The town’s life seeks its own expression —

’ frontier conditions and pioneer spirit — Gary’s people — jm- ^igrajits and real-estate exploitation — High rents for shacks Ij- Needed housing regulation-— Living costs — Eighteen wmes as much for police as for health — Saloons — Labor Tganization — The town denies a trolley franchise to steel !en — Turbulent politics and civic independence — Schools IJid a man — The community’s big achievement — Schools Jval steel in making Gary famous — Growth of community ^operation — Tonnage methods of industry inadequate for PHe. “ “

CHAPTER VIII

Jta TOWN BUILDING BY PRIVATE ENTERPRISE p 2.5^ filgfhe key city of the ‘‘ new South ” — Three types of industrial . I iatellites — A down-at-the-heel cotton mill village — A dreary ) ^eel town of the eighties — A “ model town ” through a real- •fetate company — Fairfield’s modern plan — Applying inven- : ihlon to streets and houses — Civic center and community in- ■j Jitutions — A zoning scheme — Large lots and attractive ' ^'ingalows — Putting thought into back yards — Neighbor- '^JceDod cooperation — Influence of an example — Where the i<Jnc^wn falls short — No houses for low-paid labor — Real-es- ^ iite speculation at the workers’ expense — But plants escape J^ixes by jogs in a boundary — Trolley franchise granted in ?ry erpetuity before the town was born — Contrasts with the I jmglish Birmingham — The need for civic statesmanship.

XIV

SUMMARY

CHAPTER IX COMMUNITY PLANNING

The speed of industry’s outward thrust — A vast unnoticec movement — Exploring the city’s outer rings — Common welfare at stake — Left to industrial captains or real-estate specJ ulation — Problems which challenge community foresight an* intelligence — Applying constructive genius to outlying ares — The English garden suburbs — Scheming living and live’/ hood — The co-partnership tenants’ principle — Land valv' for the community — Tenants’ advantages — Better than | dividual home ownership — Success of the co-partnersl* tenants’ associations — Adaptability to America — Englanf town planning act — Legislation for suburban developmeni Public guidance for city growth — Democracy’s door\ from politics into industry and everyday life.

SATELLITE CITIES FROM VARIOUS VIEWPOIN

“ The Human Emphasis ” by Charles Mulford Robinson “The Way Out” by George B. Ford — “Co-partners Housing ” by Henry Vivian — “ Factors in Plant Efficiencj by Irving T. Bush — “Planning for Metropolitan Neecj by Andrew Wright Crawford — “Factory and Home”! John Nolen — “The Employers’ Part” by Flavel Shurtl! — “ From the Housing Point of View ” by John Ihlder.

<3:'

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Vt the city’s rim

Frontispiece rom city center to suburb 3

'4n years’ growth of suburban industry 5

^iiicago satellites 9

^'•1 •

Lbncinnati satellites Louis satellites .

\ rmingham satellites

-7-lvertising a Chicago satellite

'j|i'burban advantages set forth to manufacturers liman in the early days .... . .

liman and vicinity

»(Lusing at Pullman

li'odern shops at Pullman

'odern municipal provision for community needs

/factory in a suburb

^Ity tenements for workers’ homes

/ here Cincinnati suburban workers live

II tie “ factory colony ” 104

) Louis industrial district 131

\factor in civic isolation 134

home on land or water 137

Jvlacedonian saloon in “ Hungary Hollow ” . . . . 153

cedonian lodging house in “ Hungary Hollow ” . .157

nee pavilion in “Hungary Hollow” . . . . • . 159

ry in 1906 and three years later 167 xvu xviii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Map of Gary

Gary steel mill and harbor

At the mill gate

Between steel mill and town

How workers lived in construction days

Concrete houses at Gary

“ Hunkyville ”

In Gary’s best residential section

Real-estate exploitation of workers

An example of community achievement at Gary .

Froebel School ... . .

Y. M. C. A.. Building: Gift of Elbert H. Gary .

Public Library: Gift of Andrew Carnegie . . . .

Steel company hospital

At Avondale

Fairfield’s town plan

Housing for steel workers at Fairfield

The plaza at Fairfield

City outskirts — haphazard or planned?

The new planning for residential areas on the outskirts

of English cities

Streets in Harborne, co-partnership suburb, Birmingham,

England

Community facilities at Harborne co-partnership garden suburb, Birmingham, England

A J

2;

AT THE CITY S RIM

PLACE YOUR HAND OVER THE TOP HALF OF THE PIC- TURE. YOU SEE THE CORN STUBBLE AND STRAGGLING ORCHARD OF AN OLD PRAIRIE FARM. PLACE YOUR HAND OVER THE LOWER HALF AND THERE STAND THE TANKS, FACTORY BUILDINGS AND STACKS OF A HUGE INDUSTRIAL PLANT. THESE ARE NOT TWO PICTURES BUT ONE, THE TRANSFORMATION WHICH IS GOING ON AS INDUSTRY IS MOVING OUT TO THE OPEN. THIS BOOK DEALS WITH HU- MAN BEINGS SWEPT OUT BY THE PROCESS.

CHAPTER I i p Back to the land ” has come, to mean more than migration of a few tenement dwellers to farms. ) i'lne big opportunity for the escape from crowded cities Ithrough the wholesale removal of the work which tw people do. Huge industrial plants are uprooting emselves bodily from the cities. With households, njall stores, saloons, lodges, churches, schools clinging f jthem like living tendrils, they set themselves down ri miles away in the open.

I [While we spend years of effort in reconstructing our i iHc centers, only to have our schemes stalled by costly ^blstructions of brick and mortar and suspended by conu'\i

IS

T^tonation proceedings, city extension as a process i ing on every week and every month on the edges of

!r cities.

Towns made to order entirely, or with some little lage as a core, snatch bundles of papers from the jrning trains, smudge new postmarks over sheet ter sheet of red postage stamps, edge their way into .^'afe telephone toll books and the freight tariffs, scrawl li(bir names on the tags of new-coming immigrants at

Ellis Island and become part and parcel of up-and- / j doing municipal America before most of their slower going sister cities have even heard of their exist-i ence. j

From the middle of Philadelphia, several depart- ) ments of the Baldwin Locomotive Works have been | shunted out into a small suburb. Flint, Michigan, tw6 hours from Detroit, has been seized as the place for | huge automobile factories. While the population was trebling in the first three years, several hundred operatives had to be housed in tents throughout one summer. A big corn-products plant moved from the middle of Chicago to the near-by prairies and a glucose city,” Argo, started up. It occupies part of a tract of ten square miles, which one promoting company is developing as an '' industrial district ” and into which Chicago has already emptied more than two dozen establishments. Just outside Cincinnati a residential suburb, Norwood, is now the home of a score of manufacturing concerns. Impelled partly by the arbitrary tolls charged on coal carried across the Mississippi River, industrial plants have moved over t' la bridges from St. Louis and founded a group of ne to towns in Illinois. The Standard Oil Company, a foal years ago, poured out $3,500,000 on the bank of t ls- Missouri a few miles from Kansas City, .and the to\/)Uof Sugar Creek sprang up. Yonkers long since lo< its staid old character in a smother of hat and carpcnt factories. The metropolitan manufacturing distriarstretches out in belts and flanges from New York intell

From City Center to Suburb

1 and New Plants, Corn Products Refining Company, Chicago.

Long Island, Staten Island and New Jersey, while J eastern Massachusetts is a mosaic of mill towns. Ir i some sections of the South scarcely a city of any siz .e lacks one or more satellites thrumming with spind^i'e and shuttle.

Gary, with its population nearing 50,000, whe in 1906 there were only rolling sand dunes covero - with scrub oak, is thus seen to be but the larger • and most spectacular example of the far-reaching is ■ dustrial exodus. Far-reaching and fast-moving, /*.cr Gary had scarcely attained four-year-old dignity whiei work started on a still newer member of the Unijiied States Steel Corporation’s brood of steel townsi — Fairfield, first known as Corey, on the edge of I >irmingham, Alabama. On the heels of Fairfield cs^m^ the news that more millions and another plant wQfild found another steel town near Duluth. ^

This industrial exodus from city center to subi^rb was first seen conspicuously in the establishment lOt Pullman and Homestead in the early eighties. Thi;se two places were by no means the only foreruniKcrs. South Omaha, for example, in 1883, sprang up arc. id the stockyards at a railway junction so rapidly as to win the name “ Magic City.” These exceptioial towns, suddenly created at the dictate of pioneer mister minds of the new industrialism, thrilled the po»ular imagination. >

But they were freshets where the present movemmt has taken on the proportions of a big sweeping cirrent. It is spreading through suburban areas as \ell as creating made-to-order towns. The Census Bureau has gathered data from thirteen “ industrial dis-j tricts/’ each of which covers a large city and its vU cinity.

In. large cities 40.8 per cent.

In <^ourrounding zones 97!.7 per cent.

Ten Years’ Growth of Suburban Industry

For twelve of them the statistics are available for the j^ats 1899, 1904 and 1909. From 1899 to 1904 the number of persons employed in industries in the surrounding zones increased 32.8 per cent., while

I

within the limits of the central cities there was only 14.9 per cent, increase. From 1904 to 1909 the increase in the surrounding zones was 48.8 per cent., and within the cities 22.5 per cent. But taking the figures for the whole decade, the increase in the surrounding zones was 97.7 per cent., and in the cities but 40.8 per cent.

Many reasons are readily apparent for the location of these new industrial communities. The impulse toward cheap land, low taxes and elbow-room throws them out from the large centers of population. These are the centrifugal forces. The centripetal forces are equally powerful and bind them as satellites beyond the outer rings of the mother city. Even the towns which, like Gary, have attained a considerable measure of self-sufficiency and lie perhaps across state boundaries are bound by strong economic ties. Through switch-yards and belt-lines, practically all the railroad facilities developed during years of growth, which are, at the disposal of a downtown establishment, are at the service of the industry in the suburb. It means mi|.ch to be within easy reach of at least one large marker /|.or finished product. Proximity to a big labor mark^: is a more important factor. (

The purpose of these pages, however, is not primarily to discuss the economic causes which lead to jthe sudden investment of large sums of capital in esijablishing suburban plants. It is rather to ey'yl'^jfe a little way into what the movement means f or the great numbers of work-people who are caught up and s\i^ept out with it. How do these new work places pan out as communities of people living together — families, meighbors, citizens?

The census bulletin referred to sums up the industrial exodus in numbers of manufacturing establishments, in value of products, etc. From the standpoint of the common welfare, it should be reckoned also in terms of citizenship and human values. What of health and housing? Of leisure and income to make it count? Of playgrounds and schools? Of livingcosts? Of city government, politics and civic spirit?

There is a public challenge in the very fact that in these localities civic and industrial conditions are being created brand-new, on a wholesale scale^ without the handicaps and restrictions which high land values ^and prior improvements impose on every effort to reconstruct the congested centers. Are we-turning these advantages to account? In our general municipal development we pay more and more heed to the counsel of city planner, housing expert and sanitarian. We struggle to reshape our rigid, old-established conditions to fit newer and more workable molds, just as the manufacturer has to tear out, rebuild and build higher if he stays in the midst of congestion while his business expands.

But have we set ourselves to inquire whether these made-to-order industrial cities, involving living conditions for thousands of people, are so shaped at the outset? In the planning of the great suburban industrial plant, marvelous skill and foresight are shown in adapting buildings and machinery to the processes through which stuff becomes finished product. Is a similar skill and foresight applied to the development of the things through which houses may become homes, a construction camp a community, and livelihood life? Apparently the answer is often in the negative.

Whereas in the Gary plant, for example, the utmost ingenuity was shown in scheming out shortcuts, the street planning of the town was on the old checker-board system. The placing of the blast furnaces was dictated by the speed of a laboring locomotive on a curving switch track. Instead of setting the stacks parallel or at right angles to the tracks, they were “ placed at an angle of twenty-two degrees, allowing a 200-foot radius for the entering switch.” By such careful computations it was sought to avoid the moment wasted, to save the smallest fraction of a degree of heat which must otherwise be regained. So much for transporting metal. But a workman who lives a mile away from the mill gate has needlessly to crisscross the checker-board streets of the town, for a distance easily calculable by the old formula that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

Our general failure to bring city planning to bear where it will count for most — that is, in zones of new construction — was personified in this instance by those Middle Western officials of the Steel Corporation who, as members of the Commercial Club of Chicago, were at this time contributing from their own pockets toward the $100,000 fund raised to work out in map and design the present magnificent city plan for Chicago, in which the genius of Daniel H. Burnham had its final expression. Yet as company officials they had not thought to secure the services of an expert cfty planner to lay out a brand-new town which, including the plant, involved an investment of over seventy-five million dollars. The Chicago city plan calls for a cutting of diagonal streets through old territory at enormous expense; the Gary town plan is likely to create in a decade conditions which can only be remedied by a similar Caesarean operation.

The contention is raised, however, by some industrial leaders that they are in the business not of building cities but of establishing mills and factories, that the making of a town is a side matter into which they go only so far as necessity compels them. They want to avoid paternalism. It is significant to hear from their lips time and again a frank recognition of the mistakes of Pullman given as justification for a ‘‘ do-as-little-as-you-have-to ” policy in shaping town conditions.

Yet it must be entirely evident-that the early stage of choosing location and of laying the framework of plant and town is crucial. The citizens who are to people the town have not yet arrived. Their very absence imposes a greater obligation upon those with whose fiat goes such enormous power. Through such a serious miscarriage of judgment and stewardship by the company which built Lackawanna,^ in the outskirts of Buffalo, many of the workers were long housed on stilts in a swampy bottomland. The efforts of the present administration to overcome the situation in so far as is now possible illustrate the slow recognition (by a corporation which has learned through experience) that efficiency hangs on health

< See article by John A. Fitch in The Survey for October 7,

II and human well-being and that a mill town in a swamp is as misplaced as a garden patch on a slag pile.

A manufacturing concern which makes highly finished cardboard products recently moved from the center of a large city to its outskirts, stating as one reason for the change that the smoky atmosphere prevalent in

Cincinnati Satellites the city center caused great damage to the goods. Yet the effect of the same atmosphere on human lungs seemed to have been scarcely thought of. It was merely one of the fortunate coincidences of providence that what was good for keeping stock clean happened also to be good for the health of the workers.

The scientific thoroughness which would follow the technique of efficiency and health down to the details of street planning is illustrated by the drawings for the construction of a large state prison by the Westinghouse, Church, Kerr Company. The firm went to the length of studying astronomical observations to determine the exact angle of the compass at which the building should stand in order to secure in each twelve months the maximum amount of sunlight. If it is worth while to take such care in housing the prisoners of a state, it seems reasonable to think that the same care might also be expended on street plans and the housing of free city dwellers.

How far we have yet to go in these directions in guiding development with reference to the community as a whole is illustrated by the fact that even at Flint — where a few years ago public-spirited citizens secured a well-known city planner to lay out a scheme for parks, boulevards and other civic features — one section after another of the industrial quarter was laid out adjacent to the automobile plants without any special regulation except the understanding that no street was to be less than sixty feet in width.” Fairfield is an example of a planned mill suburb. It seems extraordinary that we do not require in the case of every new subdivision — just as we require of every new tenement house — a careful plan on lines broadly laid down by public authority and submitted to it for approval. The Washington (state) proposal that one-tenth of the area of every such subdivision must be set aside for parks and playgrounds is a step in the right direction. To safeguard the future in old towns as well as new, such broad legislation as is found in the English Town Planning Act is essential in this country.

St. Louis Satellites

From an economic standpoint, employer and employee — the plant and the home — are differently affected by the suburban movement.

Removal from the city center, where land values have greatly risen, to the outskirts where land is not so valuable, often means to the manufacturer other gains besides plenty of space in which to secure the most efficient plant arrangement. Indeed, the higher return which may be gotten from the land in the city center is not infrequently expected to defray a large part of the cost of erecting the new plant. It is said that the site of the Corn Products Refining Company in the heart of Chicago cost $147,000 in 1879, and that as much as $2,500,000 for it has been refused by the company since they moved to Argo in 1908.

A railroad president in Chicago has suggested that some of the terminal stations be moved only a few blocks outward from their present locations in the city center and lined up together on one street. He estimates that if the abandoned trackage property were devoted to office buildings and other business purposes, the investment return would be sufficient to pay for the entire cost of the whole series of great new stations. Much the same thing is doubtless generally true when industrial concerns move out. Yet there is another consideration of large importance. Merely to shift railway terminals a few blocks in the center of the city has little bearing on the homes of railway workers. But when a manufacturing establishment moves out into a specially prepared suburb, the cheap land soon begins to rise rapidly in value as workingmen’s homes begin to cover it. The question now arises whether this increase of land values accrues to the company, to the householders, or — a§ in the English Letchworth — to the community.