City limits

“ We twisted and turned among broad, clean, tree-lined, sunlit boulevards and avenues, all sluiced down with an air that forbade any thought of fatigue, and talked of city government and municipal taxation, till, in a certain silence, we were shown a suburb of uncared-for houses, shops, and banks, whose sides and corners were rubbed greasy by the shoulders of loafers. Dirt and tin cans lay about the street. ”

“ It has clearly appeared, from the evidence submitted to us, that the present system of laying out new streets or widening or altering existing ones, under which only the land actually required for the street is taken, is, especially in those parts of cities which are covered with existing buildings, productive of serious public disadvantages ”

“ The urban tendency of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities. There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked the evil. Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of domestic happiness. Between the two, night and morning, by electric road, steam railway, and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class population. And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement evil. In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist. ”

“ Esthetically the city suffers because it can not protect its streets, its parks, and boulevards by an effective control over the abutting land, and its show places are disfigured by a use of this land not in keeping with the character of the surroundings. ”

“ Public buildings are often badly placed because political influences rather than public convenience determines their location. The congestion of traffic on the down-town streets, the lack of parks and open spaces in certain sections of the city, the unsightliness 207due to the myriad of poles, wires, signs, and billboards in many of the city’s thoroughfares—these things are all due in large measure to the absence of planning. ”

“ Hence the necessity which occasionally arises of thinning the inhabitants of certain districts—an exigency which, like that of war, often subverts civil authority, and demands the exercise of the most arbitrary power. We have recently seen our New York neighbours compelled to thin the population in some parts of their city, and we may yet be forced to have recourse to a similar measure. ”

“ In many cities there would be no danger of the erection of high buildings in such locations and of such a number as to affect materially the public health or safety, and no statutory restrictions are necessary. ”

“ Burns, supra, pages 93-95 (149 N. E. 788) , in sustaining a comprehensive building zone ordinance dividing the city into eight districts, including exclusive residential districts for one and two family dwellings, churches, educational institutions, and schools, said:
'The constantly increasing density of our urban populations, the multiplying forms of industry and the growing complexity of our civilization make it necessary for the state, either directly or through some public agency by its sanction, to limit individual activities to a greater extent than formerly. ”

“ Whole streets of the city are suddenly deserted and the business houses closed, for this or that lightly given reason, and the next 292hour that street, under obscure leaders may be filled with a howling mob, that seems to be howling about nothing. ”

“ But nothing of that sort amounts to much unless it reaches out to all: that’s it, to all. No city is fine or lasting, or ought to last, if the set of people that are making fine avenues and boulevards let its poor folk live in holes and sow tin cans instead of roses in the alleys. ”

“ The strain on local transportation, already enfeebled by a publicservice system designed for a city one twentieth its size and a complete lack of those facilities mandatory in every other large center of population, increased by the necessary rerouting around the affected area, threatened disruption of the entire organism and the further disintegration of the city's already weakened coordination. The values of realestate dropped, houses were sold for a song, officebuildings for an aria, hotels for a chorus. ”

“ The very aspect of the street population was novel; compared to New York, the city was as silent as a country village, and the passers, who have the fashion of walking in the middle of the street upon the asphalt as freely as upon the sidewalks, had a sort of busy leisureliness, the natural air of thousands of officials hived in offices for a few hours and then left in irresponsible idleness. ”

“ He can be compelled to build a certain distance from the street,—that is, the city demands a strip of his land for common use. He can build only a certain height,—the community wants the sunlight. If his older buildings are dilapidated, the city tears them down. ”

“ Controlling Suburbs Where civic pride and organization promote intelligent efforts in a city to control real estate speculation, unregulated building and congestion, it often happens that the area just outside the city accepts all the evils cast forth by the city. A factory or plant, pushed to the outskirts where a suburb is quickly developed by land speculators to meet the new housing situation, may easily, and does often, become the center of a community totally without plan and where the evils of congestion appear in their most exaggerated form. ”

“ The direction of growth of residential areas on the one hand and of industrial concentration on the other refuses to be governed by such artificial lines. Changes in methods of transportation as well as in living conditions have served only to accentuate the unreality in dealing with zoning problems on the basis of the territorial limits of a municipality. ”

“ Once each year all the great leaders come for a stay, long or short, to the metropolis. The birds leave the desert to seek the oasis, with its palm trees and springs of water. Young men, for two generations, have been deserting the farm and the village, to make their home in the great city. Many unexpected perils have sprung up from this massing of population. Among these dangers are the tenements, saloon, gambling houses, dens of vice, the tendency to anarchy, incident to [Pg x] the contrast between the palaces on the avenues and the rookeries on the Bowery. ”

“ The tendencies all seem to be toward steady concentration in great centers. The evils of congestion do not deter the thronging multitudes. The attractions of the city are irresistible, even to those who exist in the most wretched conditions. The tenement districts baffle description, yet nothing is more difficult than to get their miserable occupants to leave their fetid and squalid surroundings for the country. ”

“ Independently of any constitutional restrictions, nothing would seem more just and reasonable, or better designed to meet the wants of the population of an immense city, consistently with the interests of commerce, than the 10 minutes rule, and the assignment of the morning and evening hours which the city ordinance has prescribed. ”

“ The safety of the population of the city is provided for against density by the character of the houses, which ensures an equal distribution of the population. Tall houses overshadowing the streets, and creating necessity for one entrance to several tenements, are nowhere permitted. In streets devoted to business, where the tradespeople require a place of mart or shop, the houses are four stories high, and in some of the western streets where the houses are separate, three and four storied buildings are erected ”

“ In a region where freshly-built suburbs lie ending
'Mid plots of the glum market-gardener's ground,—
Its bare, tenantless frontages gloomily blending
With grime and neglect that are rampant all round,
Runs the street, so forlorn it could not be forlorner,
Where, looking straight down a "no thoroughfare" road,
With the blaze of a new public-house at the corner,
The sad "One-horse" Householder finds his abode! ”

“ The city does not deceive itself into supposing that that great building is a unit from which the police are to keep out and the civic authority to be excluded, but it says: "These are public highways, and light is needed in them, and control by the authority of the city." ”

“ Through the breaking up of the city into separate and independent fragments the whole burden of any difficulty had to be borne by the little company of inhabitants governed by the mayor; and so heavily did the common municipal charges and expenses fall on the scanty population of burghers shut into the narrow area which was under municipal government, and from which alone the [328] authorities could gather the fee-farm and the royal taxes, maintain the bridge and walls, provide householders for the nightly watch, and furnish men and arms for the defence of the city ”

“ The concentration of business and residences in the city had increased the average occupancy of houses to seventy persons each, or double the number of any city in Europe, and the want of room for extension had caused the building up of some twenty-five suburbs, towns and villages. The admission of light and air will lessen the mortality, which was in greater proportion to the population than in other well-regulated cities. ”

“ Sanitation, lighting, social organization—all these are products of men's experience in the city. But also every social ailment from which we to-day suffer originated and centres in the big cities. You will find the smaller communities living along in unison with the seasons, having neither extreme poverty nor wealth—none of the violent plagues of upheave and unrest which afflict our great populations. There is something about a city of a million people which is untamed and threatening. ”

“ The establishing of any building line outside of any park, parkway, or boulevard, as herein provided, in connection with the condemnation of the land for the same, shall be understood to be condemnation and the perpetual annihilation of all rights of the owners of property which shall front on such park, parkway or boulevard, or across which such building line shall run, to erect any building or structure whatever or any part thereof between such building line and such boulevard, park or parkway ”

“ WHEREIN THE CITYWARD DRIFT IS UNDESIRABLE.—In so far as the cityward drift brings to the city individuals unsuited to urban conditions, the movement away from the country may be undesirable. It is certainly undesirable when the individuals in question are really suited to rural life. ”

“ It neither authorizes the opening a street, nor fixing its grade, but permits opening 'agreeably to the plan of the city,' which contained the grade of every street, avenue, &c. The city cannot lay out a new street, nor fix the grade of an old one. Its power does not extend to either. ”

“ Borrowing freely from the dramas of Shakespeare, of Hauptman, of Gorki, Toller has re-created the bitter tragedy of the abortive English revolution killed so effectively by the Reform Bill of 1830.
The Law of City Planning and Zoning, by Frank Backus Williams (8vo, 738 pages; Macmillan: $5) is an exhaustive examination of the legal basis for city planning in the United States, or rather, of the legal hindrances to a more complete development of civic utilities. ”

“ It must seem to foreigners of all things the strangest, that, in a country where land is sold at one dollar and twenty-five cents the acre by the square mile, there should in any considerable part of it be a want of room,—any necessity for crowding the population into pent-up cities,—any narrowness of streets, or want of commons and parks. And yet it is an undeniable truth that our American cities are all suffering the want of ample thoroughfares, destitute of adequate parks and commons, and too much crowded for health, convenience, or beauty. ”

“ Although the degree of control over intensive and offensive uses of land which is desirable in the development of a city plan can not be attained under the exercise of the police power, the municipality may accomplish some of the same purposes by purchasing or taking under eminent domain an easement in the land which it is desired to control. ”

“ The narrow alleys in the interior of 200 or more of the large downtown city blocks of the District, although unfitted for habitation, have been notoriously congested with a large population for which adequate housing never has existed. ”

“ The city contends that its power over its streets is not limited to the making of reasonable regulations for the control of traffic and the maintenance of order, but that it has the power absolutely to prohibit the use of the streets for the communication of ideas. ”

“ Twenty years after the fields, once inclosed by the common fence, were thrown open and abandoned, the boundary of the city, its out lots and commons, was settled by the city authorities and a public officer of the United States, and a record duly made thereof in the proper department of the government. The city has ever since acquiesced in its reputed boundary. Private individuals have acquiesced, and it has never yet been disturbed. ”

“ If King Street, for example, were to end abruptly in the kind of landscape in which people hunt foxes and shoot partridges, both elements, the rural and the urban, would suffer from the contact simply because the town folk wouldn't and couldn't put up with the country roads, and the green fields and hedges wouldn't survive the friction, if I may so put it, of the citizens. In other words, a town of a certain density of population necessarily defies and defiles the immediate proximity of the country. ”

“ The Legislature here, while investing the city with the authority to determine it, in each instance, has carefully circumscribed the power by limiting its exercise within a definitely restricted area. The city may take less than this area, but cannot take more. ”

“ Most modern building codes interfere with the use of land by provisions limiting the amount of the lot which can be occupied and the height to which certain classes of buildings can be erected. Some cities impose an absolute height limit beyond which no building of whatever class of construction can be erected. ”