Capital city

“ They are tearing down the ugly buildings and building upon their sites the beautiful, weaving in the almost gentle creations of the modern architects, a new city which after a little time will cease to be modeled upon Europe but which will serve, in itself, as a model capital for the entire world to follow. ”

“ There is too great a disposition among our men of capital to congregate in large cities, where their influence is, in a measure, entirely lost. To be sure, the advantages accruing to some, from a city settlement, are infinitely greater than a country one ”

“ The city, on the contrary, cannot exist without the supplies produced in the hinterland and transported to the city.
Urban centers of civilization have for their background a pastoral and agricultural source of food supplemented by fabrication, merchandising and financing. Instead of the occupational uniformity of the countryside, the city offers a wide range of occupations, increased productivity, quick and substantial profits resulting in a build-up of capital on one side and enlarged consumer spending on the other. ”

“ We shall think not only of the lordly mansions environing the parks that are spread out before us, but equally of the commercial city on the banks of the river, and of the moiling and toiling, the rough and gin-drinking myriads of the manufacturing quarters of this world-capital. ”

“ Your new city, supposing it to be a metropolis, is invested with all the elements of prosperity. Capital comes to it abundantly from abroad, induced by the opportunities of profitable investment, and labor is equally attracted by high pay. Population increases, together with all the enterprises of industry, and your land, conveniently divided into small lots, changes hands from one purchaser to another, each realizing a satisfactory and handsome profit. ”

“ This mildness of climate has greatly influenced the life of the capital. The streets, except during the noon siesta, are full of people at all times. To judge from the crowds, one might think the capital a city of a million people. ”

“ In the second place, though a town may grow to some importance as a mere place of transhipment, it will never acquire the importance of a capital nor even of a great city—it will never have a great political place unless, round the handling of its imports destined for the interior, there grows up a considerable local power of demand for values. ”

“ Is not the improvement of our towns and cities, as such, a field which capital might well enter? Recent investigations by Captain Francis V. Greene, of New York, and other experts, demonstrate that, were the city's pavements as good as they should be, horses could draw threefold greater loads over them, with an immense abatement of both noise and filth. While the improvement of the metropolis due to individual enterprise and taste has been marvelous of late years, its mansions and business structures vying with the finest in the world, the city as a city is little changed. ”

“ All cities are symptomatic of the men who built them, towns no less than bodily organisation being that unknown something which we call mind or spirit made manifest in material form. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians—to name them in alphabetical order, are not more distinct in their several faults and virtues than are London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome, in the impression they leave on those who see them. How closely in each case does the appearance of the city correspond with the genius of the nation of which it is the capital. ”

“ Consequently the successful competitor in the race for supremacy develops productivity, accumulates wealth, expands capital spending, enlarges the scope of the arts, thereby augmenting the city's attractiveness to business enterprise and migrants from the hinterland.
As the capital city grows in wealth and opportunity it requires larger imports of food, raw materials, building supplies, manpower. Growing internal need leads to greater external expansion. ”

“ Furthermore, even assuming the case where the capital does not function as the only centripetal city in all domains of politics, economy, society and culture, the location of the capital widely and significantly influences the life of the people in all of the above domains. ”

“ To prevent the Capital of the Republic becoming the latter the Constitution deprived it of the elective franchise. The majority in Congress opposed the idea of a great commercial city as the future Capital of the country. Nevertheless when a plan for the city was adopted it was one of exceptional magnificence. It was a dream of the founders of the Capital to build a city expressly for its purpose and to build it for centuries to come. In view of the vast territory now comprehended in the United States their provision for the future may seem meagre and limited. ”

“ Economic, political, administrative and cultural needs not only increase the demands of the city on its existing hinterland, but they lead to a demand for a more widely extended hinterland.
The countryside is the goose that lays the golden eggs. The city gathers, guards and eventually consumes the eggs or converts them into capital forms and lives in part on this unearned income.
The city is the mecca which attracts by its wide ranging opportunities. It is also the center in which policies are made and offered to the countryside as normal facts of life. ”

“ Not only do these cities return none but their own citizens, but the country districts, often unable to find within their limits men who have the time and money to make them able to attend throughout the sessions at the capital, elect the city traders to represent them. ”

“ About 1880 the city began to take on the appearance of a modern ambitious metropolis. As wealth increased the people resorted in ever increasing numbers to the capital, to enjoy the schools for their children and the best civilization for themselves. ”

“ In most European countries, the seat of government and residence of the ruling powers and foreign ambassadors is the capital, and generally the largest, most populous, most wealthy, and most influential city of the kingdom—the place of all others to which travellers would resort to become acquainted with its political, literary, and social spirit. ”

“ It is hard to conceive that this was once a great capital with a population of two hundred thousand souls. You can easily walk from one end of the city to the other in less than half an hour, and the houses that remain seem comfortably filled by eighteen thousand inhabitants. ”

“ By capital he means "a city which is not only the seat of political government, but is also by the size, wealth, and character of its population the head and centre of the country, a leading seat of commerce and industry, a reservoir of financial resources, the favoured residence of the great and powerful, the spot in which the chiefs of the learned professions are to be found, where the most potent and widely read journals are published, whither men of literary and scientific capacity are drawn." ”

“ But this capital will not be raised all at once, and here, far more than in London, the very same sovereigns would be employed in building many houses. For observe, money is not lost or consumed when it is spent. It merely changes hands. A workman of Garden City borrows £200 from a pro-municipal building society, and builds a house with it. ”

“ We find in a copy of The Philadelphia Herald of January 4, 1795, after a discussion of the Mall—the yet-to-be garden extending from the Capitol to the President’s house—the 53following far-sighted remarks on the creation of the Capital. It says: “To found a city, for the purpose of making it the depository of the acts of the Union, and the sanctuary of the laws which must one day rule all North America, is a grand and comprehensive idea, which, has already become, with propriety, the object of public respect. ”

“ Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. ”

“ The capital of a state and the city where the state institutions are located, likewise receive the benefit of an expenditure of public money out of proportion to their population. When we come to consider the distribution of the moneys collected by the Federal Government, we find that the cities, even in a larger measure, monopolize the incidental benefits that arise from the expenditure of public moneys. ”

“ In a word, the capital is much like many another modern city, somewhat bleak, cosmopolitan of population, with strong national lines of demarkation, and a caste system almost as fixed as that of India, but with none of the romance the reader of Prescott, Mme. ”

“ In each city the sections built up by the different factors may be clearly distinguished, these flourishing or decaying according to the prosperity or decline of their special factors. Thus the railroads, docks and warehouses evidence the city's commerce; the factories its industrial energies; the retail shops the consuming power of the population; the residence sections the wealth, social grades and numbers of the citizens; and the buildings of public and semi-public utility the standard of civilization and civic pride of the city. ”

“ Our city, with its population of over 1,500,000 inhabitants, its natural advantages, its incomparable harbor, its enormous commerce, and its great industries, is not only destined to be the centre of the commerce of the world, but could be made the most beautiful of the world if its affairs were administered on business principles, without regard to party interests. ”

“ If then, there are twenty such avenues to the metropolis, it appears that the total of the regular ingress and egress will be 16,000 persons, of whom perhaps 8,000 walk, 2,000 arrive in public conveyances, and 6,000 ride on horseback, or in open or close carriages. Such a phenomenon is presented no-where else in the world; and it never can exist except in a city which unites the same combined features of population, wealth, commerce, and the varied employments which belong to our own vast metropolis. ”

“ A bit of a surprise it was to find, dozing in the sun like a New England village, a town important enough to have given its name to a railroad; to mark the end of one trail, and be a station on another; to have been the capital of an ancient Empire of the New World; and now to be the capital of a state. Yet the world passes it by, leaving it on a railroad spur high and dry from transcontinental traffic. So much the worse, then, for the world; so much the better for Santa Fé. The town does not owe its personality to its railroad stations and Chambers of Commerce. ”

“ The GROWTH OF THE CITY
52Besides extension and succession, the general process of expansion in urban growth involves the antagonistic and yet complementary processes of concentration and decentralization. In all cities there is the natural tendency for local and outside transportation to converge in the central business district. In the downtown section of every large city we expect to find the department stores, the skyscraper office buildings, the railroad stations, the great hotels, the theaters, the art museum, and the city hall. ”

“ That great City is, like some of the capitals of Europe, built on a broad river, with the mass of the metropolis on the one bank, but a wide-spreading suburb on the other. As the Trastevere is to Rome, as Southwark to London, so is earth to heaven, the bit of the city on the other side the bridge. ”

“ It is the one great city in the world where you never saw the least trace of corporate emotion. It divides itself off into districts for the rich and districts for the poor, and districts for all the grades in between the two, which are the separate layers in the big, frowning edifice of British society ”

“ Nay, more, in each of them the division of cities is founded on that of schools, the most flourishing of which, at any given moment, raises its particular town to the rank of capital, thanks to the all-powerful favour of the public. ”

“ Social institutions correspond to the needs of the inhabitants, and while there are a few like those in the country, because certain human needs are the same, there is a much larger variety in the city because of the great number of people of different sorts and the complexity of their demands. Every city has its business centres for finance, for wholesale trade, and for retail exchange, its centres for government, and for manufacturing ”

“ Will these two cities ere then have been consolidated into one great municipality, numbering within its limits more than five millions of people? Will the right of self-government have been accorded to the great city, thus united, and will her people have learned how best to exercise that right? Will the progress of improvement and the preparation for commerce, manufactories and trade, and for the comforts of home for poor and rich, have kept pace with the demand in the great and growing city? ”

“ Then the iron horse would make his way in the young metropolis, and it would grow with a wondrous growth. Mayors, and churches, and rings, and subsidies, and aldermen, and defaulters, and debts, and boards-of-trade, and societies, and "bosses," and—all the paraphernalia that goes to make up a great city, would be grown on that sandbar where Ben stood. ”

“ That city will in the course of time become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations, and the concentrating point of vast, disposable and accumulating capitals, which will stimulate, enliven, extend, and reward the exertions of human labor and ingenuity, in all their processes and exhibitions. ”