Andrew Jackson Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America (1841, multiple editions thereafter). This pioneering work is freely downloadable from archive.org here:
https://archive.org/details/treatiseonthe00down/page/n5
Frederick Law Olmsted, Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society (Library of America, 2016).
Daniel H. Burnham & Edward H. Bennett, Plan of Chicago, Prepared Under the Direction of the Commercial Club (1908). Freely downloadable from archive.org here:
https://archive.org/details/planofchicagopre00comm/page/n11
Dennis McClendon, The Plan of Chicago: A Regional Legacy (2008). Available online at
http://burnhamplan100.lib.uchicago.edu/files/content/documents/Plan_of_Chicago_booklet.pdf
Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902). Available online at
https://archive.org/details/gardencitiestom00howagoog and http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46134
Christopher Silver, "Zoning in 20th-Century American Cities," American History: Oxford Research Encyclopedias (May 2016). (excellent overview)
http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-209
The Skyscraper Museum, "A 3D CBD: How the 1916 Zoning Law Shaped Manhattan's Central Business Districts": excellent tutorial on the origins of one of the most influential laws in the history of zoning.
http://www.skyscraper.org/zoning/
Seymour I. Toll, Zoned American (1969).
Michael Allan Wolf, The Zoning of America: Euclid v. Ambler (2008).
Richard F. Babcock, The Zoning Game: Municipal Practices and Policies (1966).
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017). Compelling analysis of the many ways in which zoning has been used to promote and enforce racial segregation.
Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974). One of the greatest works of biography and urban history ever written. Despite its length, it reads like a novel. Wonderful summer reading: don't miss this one!
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). (the most influential book on urban planning of the second half of the twentieth century, a sweeping indictment of modernist urban design)
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, & Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2000). Lively New Urbanist critique of traditional Car Country zoning, with suggestions for alternatives to liberate neighborhoods from some of the more pernicious effects of automobiles.
The Wikipedia entry on zoning is well worth reading for review:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States
Today's lecture is about planning and zoning, which are crucial to understanding the U.S. landscape in general, and especially to understanding urban landscapes in the 20th and 21st centuries. Planning and zoning are inherently linked together. Zoning is a tool of planning, an instrument of the law for enforcing on private property owners certain kinds of real estate practices and standards. In the class History/Geography/Environmental Studies 460, I talk about planning mainly as a practice shaped by romantic ideas of nature, as well as by the emergence of regional planning and strategic planning; I won't do that today except in very broad brushstrokes so you'll understand this background. But I do today want to remind you of certain features of planning that can help us understand why zoning has the attributes it does.
One place to start is in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1831: the Mount Auburn Cemetery, unquestionably among the most influential landscapes in all of American history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Auburn_Cemetery
In a odd way, you might think about this site as a landscape zoned for the dead. Whenever you cross into a shopping area, or a residential area, or a cemetery, you are entering into an area zoned for a particular use. Mount Auburn Cemetery was created by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society to embody romantic ideas of nature to help individuals contemplate their own mortality in the natural world, and also as one of the first arboretums in the U.S., serving as a kind of living museum of tree species organized on the principles of Linnaean taxonomy (unlike UW-Madison's own Arboretum, which was the first arboretum in the world to be organized not on taxonomic but on ecological principles). Mount Auburn was a completely planned landscape, designed to express a particular idea of romantic nature, with complicated rules and regulations for burials, plantings, and other features to make sure that its ideas of nature were carefully maintained. Because of its design, it became a model for romantic cemeteries and parks all across the U.S., including in Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery. You can learn more about Forest Hill Cemetery at this website created by a group of students for a class here at UW-Madison:
http://foresthill.williamcronon.net
Andrew Jackson Downing played a crucial role in the history of American landscape gardening, rural romantic architecture, and orchard growing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson_Downing
Downing loved romantic landscapes, which he contrasted with the formal landscapes of French aristocratic estates like Versailles. In his influenctial 1841 work, A Treatise of the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, he cataloged design principles for creating picturesque landscapes, beautiful landscapes, etc., usually to provide the gardens and grounds surrounding great country houses for elite New York families with summer estates on the Hudson River.
Downing died young, so it was another man who became the most influential landscape architect of the nineteenth century, and almost certainly one of the greatest individual influences on the American landscape in the nineteenth century: Frederick Law Olmsted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted
Downing had suggested that New York City should have a great park at the center of Manhattan Island, its design to be chosen from competing submissions. Olmsted and his business partner, Calvert Vaux, submitted the winning design to the contest, and in that plan laid out what would become one of the most famous designed landscapes in all of the U.S.: Central Park.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park
Central Park in their plan combined rural, wild, and picturesque landscapes with much more urban and formal spaces. Olmsted's hope was that Central Park would become a place where the educated classes would rub shoulders with the working classes, and in this beautiful setting all would become more civilized—a vision that was deeply a part of Olmsted's republicanism.
For our purposes, notice this: Olmsted and Vaux's planning created an curvilinear network of winding paths and lanes (akin to those of Mount Auburn Cemetery) amid the relentlessly rectilinear street grid of the 1811 Street Commissioners' Plan for Manhattan. Central Park was also a planned landscape carefully bounded and partitioned so that different areas would be assigned to different uses: carriage roads, walkways, wild "natural" areas, picturesque landscapes, and—later on—ball fields, restaurants, a zoo, and the great Metropolitan Museum of Art. All were carefully designed to achieve their desired landscape effects.
Olmsted would go on to design the romantic suburban town of Riverside, Illinois on the south side of Chicago (1869).
http://lalh.org/olmsted-and-vauxs-riverside/
The contrast between the ideals and the realities of the American suburb—a place originally designed to have most of the amenties of urban life without any of the city's attendant dangers—is a topic I'll return to several times in today's lecture. To set that up, notice that historically, suburbs had as their inhabitants the wealthier classes. Racial and class boundaries operated beneath the surface of these idealized communities—not always very far beneath the surface—in the ways the boundaries associated with planning and zoning got enacted in suburbs in particular.
George Pullman is an example of an early industrialist who designed a town built around the segregation of uses, an intended planned utopia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pullman
Pullman was the nventor of the Pullman Sleeper Car, which enabled railroad passenger to sleep in their own beds while traveling in luxury railroad cars, their every need met by African American "Pullman porters" who were among the highest-status African American employees in the railroad system. (Clarence King told his wife Ada Copeland that he worked as a Pullman Porter to explain his frequent absences from home.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_car
George Pullman decided to design and build a utopian town for the workers building these sleeper cars — the town of Pullman, Illinois. As owner of all the properties in town, Pullman set rents in the town at commercial rates. This was fine initially, but in moments of economic downturn, as in the early 1890s, the high cost of rent in relation to fixed wages fueled worker resentment. So the supposedly utopian town of Pullman became the site of enormous labor conflict during the Pullman Strike of 1894
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
Another important planner in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was Daniel Burnham, whom we've met before as the designer of the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 (also known as the White City and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition
The enormous success of the fair and its neoclassical revival architecture, thrust Burnham into the national spotlight. Burnham went onto create master plans for various cities, including Chicago, Manila (Philippines), and downtown Washington, D.C. Burham was himself inspired by the French planner Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Eugène_Haussmann
who re-redesigned Paris in the 19th century in an ambitious plan that was meant to renew what he saw as Paris's many blighted areas while also controlling working-class unrest and rebellion with wide boulevards that would be harder for workers to barricade during times of upheaval.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris)
Burnham's 1908 Plan of Chicago echoed many of Baron Haussman's decisions: as in Paris, Burnham introduced in Chicago wide Parisien boulevards, set building heights limited to no more than 5-6 stories (like many aspects of the Chicago Plan, this proposed reform never came to pass); and sought also to rationalize the regional transportation system.
The 1908 Chicago Plan is available online at
https://archive.org/details/planofchicago00burnuoft
and summarized on Wikipedia at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnham_Plan_of_Chicago
In addition to ideas of landscape design promoted by Downing, Olmsted, Pullman, and Burnham, there were other ideas of urban planning at work by the early twentieth century. For many, the suburb was an ideal, particularly as envisioned by the English planner Ebenezer Howard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Howard
Howard tried to imagine an integration of the urban and the rural as Garden Cities of To-Morrow, the title of his influential 1902 book on this subject, available online at
https://archive.org/details/gardencitiestom00howagoog
Full-scale planned towns would be built in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s as Greenbelt Towns in places like Radburn, New Jersey (1929); Greenbelt, Maryland (1937); and Greendale, Wisconsin (1936). Notice in plans from Howard and in Greenbelt areas the segregation of school areas from residential areas from commercial areas: the separation of uses is a key feature of the urban planning and zoning that we'll now watch emerge across the 20th century.
With the 1930s New Deal, we see the emergence of planning as a governance and land-use ideal. One of the most important tools of planning would be zoning. Zoning exploded in American law in the 1920s and 1930s. The Regional Plan Association of New York helped lead the way with its 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Environs, which included maps for a new highway system of ring roads around the city that foreshadowed the transformation of the metropolitan area for automobiles to a remarkable degree. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal embraced planning on a national scale with the National Resources Board, which encouraged the creation of planning boards all across the U.S. at the regional, state, and local levels.
In Madison, the process of city planning had gone back to the 1880s and 1890s, instigated by a group of wealthy private citizens who formed the Madison Parks and Pleasure Drive Association to create a city parks system, initially as a private initiative.
https://lakeshorepreserve.wisc.edu/visit/mppda.htm
This is a reminder that although we often think of government regulation as a point of friction between private wealth and state power, it is often private interests that sought governmental regulation, typically as a way to ensure the stability of land values. In conflicts between private citizens over different land-use functions that might have negative effects on nearby property values—a pig farm next door to an expensive house, for example—we see the emergence of zoning as a tool to segregate different land uses.
In New York, the density and height of buildings became a point of conflict with the growing number of skyscrapers built during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edward Bassett, the creator of the 1916 Zoning Ordinance in New York, is often called "the Father of Zoning."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bassett
Bassett established this reputation for himself when he was called in to resolve a dispute caused by the construction of the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway in Manhattan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)
That building, constructed in the heart of Manhattan without any setbacks from the street, and tens of stories taller than any surrounding building, obstructed sunlight to nearby buildings and caused owners of those neighboring structures to protest their loss of light. So zoning laws emerged intending to avoid lawsuits between property owners, and to collectivize the decision-making process about which land uses were appropriate in which places.
But there are also underlying social issues that need to be named here. There was a fair number of Southern cities that tried to initiate zoning in the early part of the 20th century by declaring explicit racial boundaries to try to prevent African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. In New York City, we see similar racially and ethnically-motivated disputes. Garment factories, at the time primarily employing working-class Jewish men and women, were moving uptown and into neighborhoods and upscale shopping areas that were predominantly wealthy and non-Jewish. Many residents of these neighborhoods objected to new rubbing of shoulders with Jews, raising questions about whether regulations could be used to avoid these class and ethnic frictions.
Bassett came up with a model report to resolve height disparities between buildings (as in the case of the Equitable Building). His commission recommended these measures: tying the number of feet a building was required be set back from the street to its height, and tying legal limits on the height of the building to the width of the street. The result was New York City's influential 1916 Zoning Resolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916_Zoning_Resolution
Maps of setback and height restrictions were made for all of New York City. By regulating the densities of different neighborhood, these maps also had the effect of limiting the expansion of the garment district into areas not zoned for that kind of density or use. These maps would govern urban development until the 1960s.
You know from personal experience one result of these zoning maps: the "layercake" buildings that created a new aesthetic for skyscrapers, most famously in structures like New York's Empire State Building and Chrysler Building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Building
So when you see the New York skyline today, you are in part seeing the results of Bassett's 1916 Zoning Ordinance. This story is well told by New York's Skyscraper Museum's website:
http://www.skyscraper.org/zoning/
From this start in 1916 New York, Herbert Hoover—then U.S. Secretary of Commerce under two Republican presidents in the 1920s—created a general model plan for what this type of ordinance might look like communities all over the U.S. Even before the New Deal, the federal government was promoting zoning as a way to rationalize and improve American cities.
In a suburb of Cleveland called Euclid, residents were disatisfied with the migration of industrial uses (and ethnic working-class residents) into suburban areas, so the town passed a zoning ordinance prohibiting industrial uses on many of its lots. Ambler Realty owned a 68-acre piece of property in Euclid that it had intended to develop as an industrial site, so Ambler sued Euclid for what it declared to be a legal "taking"--reducing the real estate value of its would-be industrial property by making that industrial use illegal. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1926 decision of Euclid v. Ambler, the Court held that such rezoning did not constitute a taking, but instead that it was a valid use of local police power and fulfilled a legitimate public interest. The court's ruling set the legal precedent for the future of zoning for at least the next half century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Realty_Co.
Racial hierarchy and perceptions of racial, ethnic, and class difference are structured into the American landscape in myriad ways, not least by the law of zoning. Euclid v. Ambler is a clear example. Though Euclid v. Ambler was decided in support of segregating land uses, U.S. District Court Judge David C. Westenhaven, whose earlier ruling the Supreme Court overturned, wrote the following about what he saw as the potential long-term implications of the case:
It is equally apparent that the next step in the exercise of this police power would be to apply similar restrictions for the purpose of segregating in like manner various groups of newly arrived immigrants. The blighting of property values and the congestion of population, whenever the colored or certain foreign races invade a residential section, are so well known as to be within judicial cognizance.
Judge Westenehaven saw zoning as a tool likely to be applied to segregate classes and races, and suggested that the courts would want to be aware of such implications. One mechanism for achieving racial segregation in the wake of Euclid v. Ambler were the mortgage maps made during the 1930s by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government-sponsored corporation created as part of the New Deal in 1933. HOLC created maps of every major city of the U.S., including Madison. One goal of these maps was to identify supposedly "blighted areas" where banks might not want to give mortgages or loans. These were colored red, and often coincided with neighborhoods that were working-class, heavily immigrant, or non-White. The consequence was that people living in such neighborhoods had much more trouble obtaining loans, paying higher interest rates if they were able to get mortgages at all, further depressing property values.
If you're interested in exploring the original HOLC maps for cities you know, you can access them at this remarkable website put together by the University of Richmond (the same folks who have so helpfully made Paullin's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States available for your use this semester):
https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining
Watching racial categorizations get inscribed or reinforced on the landscape reminds us that history matters. As William Faulkner famously remarked in his Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." History keeps happening, and is all around us in places we experience every day.
The Comprehensive Plan for Madison is a massive document that was authored in 2006 and is available online:
http://www.cityofmadison.com/dpced/planning/comprehensive-plan/1607/
On it, you can see water, parks, residential areas—all sorts of zoned areas of the city, and you'll also see many overlaps with our past discussions of underground systems.
In this section of the lecture I'm going to concentrate on land use, and how land use gets converted into zoning regulations. As we've noticed more than once this semester, among the many other ways of looking at landscape that we've experienced in this course, landscape is also a legal construct. Law makes landscape. We saw that with the 1785 Land Ordinance. The kind of law we're talking about today may make some people's eyes glaze over, but before you start falling asleep please try to remember that such laws structure to quite a profound extent the entire landscape we inhabit. They affect almost everything we do. Wherever you live in Madison today, your home and your neighborhood are intricately tied up with the city's comprehensive plan and zoning ordinance.
Here's a map of annexations by the city of Madison:
http://www.cityofmadison.com/dpced/planning/documents/v1c2_5.pdf
As the city grew, it moved onto adjacent lands that were not within its legal jurisdiction but that it was physically occupying or using. So lands that were in rural townships were accreted into the city's boundaries through the process of annexation, a process that was largely complete in many older American cities by the late 19th century. By the early 20th century, wealthy suburbs began to object to being annexed because residents of these wealthy communities often didn't want to become part of the tax base for a poorer nearby city. If you look at where annexation happened in Madison in the 20th century, it was in agricultural areas on the west and north, and not in suburban areas like Fitchburg (and not in the wealthier suburban areas of Shorewood Hills or Maple Bluffs, which made sure they never became part of the City of Madison).
So we have residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, and park lands in Madison. We can also look at future land use plans. Zoning codes always consist of two things: a set of maps showing which region of a city is zoned for which use, and then a set of technical rules about what you can build and do in these different zones of land use. Under Madison's current zoning regulations, these technical rules include regulations about how large the lot can be, how many cars can be parked there, what the maximum height of the building on the lot is, how much of the lot can be occupied by the footprint of the building, how many people from how many families can live in the building … and so on and on:
https://cityofmadison.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=89737c066cda41eea5d986dd71291576
https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=COORMAWIVOIICH20--31_CH28ZOCOOR
As these laws were written in the middle of the 20th century, they helped create Car Country. By specifying lot size or setback requirements, they made it impossible to build those houses with porches abutting Washington Avenue that we saw in the earlier lecture in which we took a driving tour out of Madison from the Capitol. Notice, too, that the lot area and the footprint of the building can be used to keep poorer people out: by specifying a quarter-acre lot with a large minimum size of the house that can be built on it, we can insure that the property will be so expensive that no poor person could ever afford to buy it. Without saying anything explicitly about race or class, the zoning code can insure that only people with certain economic attributes can afford to buy a house in that area. Likewise, requiring that houses be owner-occupied, as opposed to renter-occupied, has big implications for who can live in such structures.
Finally, I want to remind you a point I made ten minutes ago: it is not just governments that writes zoning codes. It is also industry groups and the building trades that shape the legal regulations determine the attributes of the built environment we inhabit. In addition to zoning codes, electrical codes, fire codes, and building codes also shape what can and can't be built in a given location, and determine quite exactly the technical requirements for any given form of construction. These codes are set at least in part by non-governmental organizations representing the interests of say, electricians, builders, or plumbers--acting, of course, in what they argue is the best interest of the public. The authorship of zoning and building codes thus becomes a fascinating example of the balancing act between public and private interests that shapes what we build and how we build it. Boring though these codes may seem to you, they are well worth getting to know if you want to understand your world and the making of the modern American landscape.
In my last few minutes, I'm going to move from Madison, Wisconsin to the consequences of these zoned landscapes beyond the 1910s and 1920s.
We've seen much earlier in the semester how the automobile suburb became a defining feature of the American landscape by the middle of the twentieth century. Especially symbolic of automobile suburbs in the post-World War II era were mass-produced communities like Levittown, making suburban lifestyles accessible for the first time middle- and working-class families.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Levitt
Los Angeles was the mid-century poster child for automobile-based surburban development. Exhibits like General Motors' Futurama display at the 1939 New York World's Fair very much shaped public perceptions of what the future built environment should look like, particularly showcasing cross-country travel and forecasting the landscape of the interstate highway system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World's_Fair)
If you'd like to tour Futurama by film, here's a 1940 video documentary of its vision of the automobile future of America:
https://archive.org/details/ToNewHor1940
Futurama would eventually help inspire the Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
These automobile suburbs and interstate highway systems point us toward a kind of modernist architecture: the discarding of old urban forms and the leaning toward new mass construction connected by automobiles. The Swiss-French planner Le Corbusier was an especially important originator of and polemicist for this modernist aesthetic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
In New York, the key figure who drove this process of modernist urban planning was Robert Moses, almost certainly the most important individual shaper of the New York landscape in the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses
It is almost impossible to detail all Moses did—perhaps we better understand the reach of his efforts when we note that, at the height of his power, Moses held twelve different appointed governmental positions. He was responsible for building Jones Beach on Long Island; the Triborough Bridge (1936) (he would then became head of the commission that would collect all of the tolls from the bridge); the New York World's Fair of 1964; and a large number of expressways crossing through what had formerly been neighborhoods in New York City. Robert Moses was a powerhouse shaping New York for 40 years. Robert Caro's biography of Moses, The Power Broker, is among the greatest American biographies of the twentieth century, and is must reading for anyone interested in the history of urban America.
The overt dilemma Moses was trying to fix was traffic problems on the streets of New York to make the city friendlier to automobiles. Like many urban planners in the mid-twentieth century, his vision of bringing Car Country to New York City also implied the destruction and removal of the "blighted" neighborhoods through which his new federally funded highways would be constructed, a process that was known as "urban renewal" but that had stark implications for the working-class racial and ethnic neighborhoods that lay in the path of the new highways and parks that planners like Moses sought to create. We've already seen in a much earlier lecture the effect that this urban renewal/removal process had on Madison's Greenbush neighborhood, a working-class Italian and Jewish neighborhood that by the time of the Second World War was being described as "blighted" ... and so underwent "revitalization" in the 1960s.
https://isthmus.com/archive/people/remembering-the-greenbush/
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/neighborhoods/greenbush-neighborhood-is-still-recollecting-the-days-of-old/article_13aff520-6fe3-5c32-a8a8-c64e0485de8c.html
In New York, Robert Moses began to encounter resistance to his modernist renewal projects when neighborhoods began to oppose his plans for highways in downtown Manhattan in the 1950s.
The Mid-Manhattan Expressway, and the Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have cut through Washington Square Park, became examples of proposed projects that elicited serious public resistance. Jane Jacobs, a writer and political organizer, began to counter Moses by bringing together those who saw him as overreaching in his plans for the city. In 1961 she authored a classic book that would transform urban design and urban architecture right down to the present: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It had as great an impact on urban planning and design as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had on the birth of modern environmentalism. No one was more important than Jane Jacobs in pushing back against the modernist vision of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier.To see one end to the modernist moment and its buildings, we can look to St. Louis. As in New York, St. Louis saw the replacement of so-called "blighted" neighborhoods with expressways and highrise buildings in the 1940s and 1950s. Pruitt-Igoe, a set of highrise public housing buildings in St. Louis, were constructed in the early 1950s but quickly began to deteriorate, so much so that they were demolished in iconic fashion in the 1970s, signalling the end of architectural modernism and ushering new ideas about how to plan the city. For a powerful set of images of this history, see:
https://nextstl.com/2016/05/urban-renewal-st-louis-jane-jacobs-100th-birthday/