FROM FUTURAMA TO MAIN STREET U.S.A.: ARCHITECTURAL REVIVALISM, NEC-TRADITIONALISM AND HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN A CONTEMPORARY SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE by JONATHAN VINES SMITH A THESIS Presented to the Interdisciplinary Program: Hi s toric Preservation and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science December 1995 J ii " From Futurama to Main Street U. S.A . : Architectural Revivalism, Nee-Traditionalism and Historic Preservation in a Contemporary Suburban Landscape," a thesis prepared by Jonathan Vines Smith in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of science degree i n the Interdisciplinary Studies Program : Historic Preservation. This thesis has been approved by: Date Committee in charge: air of the Examining Committee Michael Hibbard, Chair Kenneth I . Helphand James A. Winders Vice Provo t and Dean of the Graduate school iii An Abstract of the Thesis of Jonathan Vines Smith for the degree of Master of Science in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program: Historic Preservation to be taken December 1995 Title: FROM FUTURAMA TO MAIN STREET U.S .A.: ARCHITECTURAL REVIVALISM, NEC-TRADITIONALISM AND HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN A CONTEMPORARY SU I~ ! :.. ._ .!. .: I .!. • Approved: :t • • • ard Modernism and urban renewal rapidly altered America's landscape through large-scale suburbanization and reconstruction of inner cities . The conclusion of urban renewal, however, coincided with trends which reject modernism, including historic preservation, neo­ traditionalism and postmodernism. Whereas confidence and the allure of a futuristic utopia dominated postwar development, and helped obscure its shortcomings, the more tentative appeal of the past marks contemporary movements . After a literature review which discusses this shift away from modernism, this paper describes its impact on contemporary planning and design in a suburban area near Charlotte, North Carolina. The case study suggests that iv while contemporary trends arose in reaction to modernist planning they do not significantly alter postwar development patterns, but simply repackage them in revivalist architecture and historicist imagery . Like the futuristic images of postwar suburbanization, this tends to obscure, rather than confront, the problems which result from low density auto-dependent development. CURRICULUM VITA NAME OF AUTHOR: Jonathan Vines Smith GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon Appalachian State University DEGREES AWARDED : V Bachelor of Science in History, 1990, Appalachian State University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Cultural Landscapes, Cultural History, Land Use, Transportation. AWARDS AND HONORS: School of Architecture and Allied Arts Travel Scholarship, 1994. Magna Cum Laude, 1990. Honors in History, 1990. Scholarship for Academic Achievement, 1990. PUBLICATIONS: Smith, Jonathan. Review of East Tennessee Cantilever Barns, by Marian Moffett and Lawrence Wodehouse. In Vernacular Architecture Newsletter (Spring 1994): 23-24. Chapter I. II. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PERCEPTIONS OF THE PAST AND FUTURE IN WESTERN URBANIZATION .... Urbanization, Suburbanization, and Nostalgia ........ . Modernism: Planning, Design vi Page 1 6 6 and the Future .............. 27 Contemporary Trends in Planning and Design: The Past as an Answer to Modernism ........... 35 III. DEVELOPMENT TRENDS IN THE CHARLOTTE METROPOLITAN REGION . . . Introduction ....... . Early Settlement Patterns in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Area Examples of Early Residential Development ...... . Conclusion ........ . . 52 . 52 . . 58 . . 61 . . 81 IV. CONTEMPORARY PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT TRENDS IN THE STUDY AREA: IMAGES OF V. TRADITION AMIDST RAPID SUBURBANIZATION . 83 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 The Charlotte-Mecklenburg South District: Automobile Suburbs and Revivalist Architecture ...... .. . 85 Suburban Development in Union County: The Idealization of the Countryside and Small Town America . . . . . . . . 96 Lake Park Village: Yesterday's Village, Today! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 CONCLUSION SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 135 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 1. Howard's Model Provides the Best of "Town " and "Country" . . . . . . . . . . 10 2. Howard's Model Realized in the Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3. cameras Throughout Uptown Charlotte Monitor Public Areas . . . . . . . . . . 18 4. The 1995 Historic Preservation Week Poster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 5. Yesterday's Cities of The Future : New Cities for Old . . . . . . . .. .... 31 6. The Rational Planning Model ... 37 7. Today's Cities of the Future : Old Cities for New ................ 44 8 . Conceptual Relationships Between Landscape Types ............... . 51 9. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and the Carolina Region ..... . 10. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Union County 11. A 1907 Map of the Weddington/Waxhaw . 53 . . . 54 N.C. Area ................... 62 12. Late Nineteenth-Century Architecture in Weddington. . . . 64 13. Typical Farm Site Plan 14. Photo of Farm Site and Diagrammatic Section Looking West ... . . . 15. Sanborn Map of Waxhaw, N.C., 1925 16. Early Twentieth-Century Advertisement for 66 . . 67 . 69 Mill-Worker Housing in Monroe, N.C. . .. 73 17. 18. Mill-Worker House Site Plan .. Photo of Mill-Worker House Site and Diagrammatic Section Looking East 19 . John Nolan's 1911 Plan For Myers Park 20. Myers Park Site 21. Photo of Myers Park Site and Diagrammatic viii Page . 74 75 77 79 Section Looking North . . . . . . . . 80 22. Typical South District Commercial and Residential Architecture . . . . .... 90 23. Typical South District Commercial and Residential Architecture ..... 91 24. Site Plan of Typical Residence in Providence Country Club . . . . .. 93 25. Photo of Providence Country Club Site and Diagrammatic Section Looking South 94 26 . Providence Country Club Master Plan. . 95 27 . Welcome Home To Monroe . 98 28 . Scenes From Waxhaw, N.C. 99 29 . Historic Architecture in Weddington, N.C. 103 30 . Neo-Historic Architecture in Weddington, N.C. . . . . . . . 105 31. Weddington Town Seal 108 32. Rapid Development at NC 16 and NC 84 in Weddington, N.C. . . . . 110 33 . Sign for Lake Park Village, Heading South on NC 74 . . . . . . . . . . . 114 34 . Aerial of Lake Park Looking West 115 35. Lake Park Site Showing Little Emphasis on New Urbanism . . . . . . . . . 118 36 . Photo of Lake Park Site and Diagrammatic Section Looking North . . . . . . . 119 37. Row Houses 38. 39. Lake Park Master Plan . Friday Night Carriage Rides at Lake Park Village ... ix Page 121 122 124 CHAPTER I I NTRODUCTION The post-World War II era ushered in some of the most rapid and large scale changes American cities have ever experienced. Financed by a strong industrial economy, the country tackled complex urban problems on a nati onal scale. Deteriorating inner cities were demolished and rebuilt on 1 the revolutionary principles of modern design. Interstate highway projects, housing construction and automobile sales boomed. Suburbanization spread rapidly along the urban fringe, promising an idyllic combination of country life and modern technology for the burgeoning middle class. The ultimate goal, as described by Robert Fishman, was nothing short of "urban utopia. 11 1 The latter years of urban renewal, however, coincided with, and helped spur on, a larger cultural trend in America marked by decreased confidence in the country's ability to improve the present or future through modern technology and design. Internationally, Modernism was reevaluated on all f ronts, especially by critics of high modern architecture 1Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias i n the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard. Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (New York: Basic Books Inc ., 1977). and urbanism, such as Jane Jacobs, whose Death and Life of Great American Cities 2 became a classic text on the shortcomings of modernist planning and design. 2 The cultural shift that accompanied the failures of urban renewal, despite sweeping promises and massive government expenditures, spurred the rise of alternative design trends such as historic preservation in the 1960s and nee-traditionalism in the 1980s. Similar to revivalist architecture of the nineteenth century, these movements rejected an aesthetic of the New, calling for either the preservation of historic architecture or a reliance on historic design precedent. Many popular contemporary designers, therefore, speak less about the promise of modernism, technology and the future and more about nature, history and tradition as prudent guides. Both avant-garde modern architecture and the liberal politics which funded its realization in the built environment were rejected for more conservative agendas. With this alternative emphasis and within a vastly different socio-economic context, the United states now confronts urban problems even more daunting than those of the postwar era. With the shift from a production to information based economy, the explosion of Edge Cities and 2Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1961). auto congestion on the urban fringe, rising crime rates, poverty and homelessness, the optimistic rhetoric of the postwar era has been replaced by the more tentative contemporary emphasis on the past. Whereas the allure of futuristic images and the promise of utopia helped 3 popularize postwar policy, and obscure its shortcomings, the contemporary appeal of the past and the promise of stable small town life mark current trends. The Charlotte metropolitan region, in the southern Piedmont of North Carolina, exemplifies many contemporary planning and design trends . It is one of fastest growing urban centers in the country and its continuing economic shift from agriculture and textile production and increasing national prominence in banking and finance is rapidly transforming the surrounding rural landscape. Historically dominated by farms and mill towns, the area is home to a growing number of edge cities and upper-income suburbanites . Despite the pronounced physical and socio-economic transition, references to tradition are commonly mingled with the rhetoric of growth and development . As large metropolitan areas in the Northeast decline and Charlotte's economy continues to expand, the city has experienced a considerable population increase. The stereotypical image of a traditional Southern lifestyle helps entice potential homebuyers fleeing ailing suburbs throughout the nation. For many, the city's pro-business, pro-suburb and pro-automobile climate offers another chance to achieve the suburban ideal promised by postwar development, but with a veneer of tradition which places additional emphasis on stability and security. While the imagery is appealing to many, it tends to obscure, as did popular images in the postwar era, critical land use and transportation issues that will determine the area's development patterns for years to come . If not seriously confronted, the persistence of large lot zoning, low density and auto-dependent development will inevitably undermine the lifestyle touted by local policy-makers and developers. This paper is an examination of some of the prominent popular images that help obscure these critical planning issues . A review of literature that discusses the shift away from the modernist emphasis on the future and new design, to the contemporary emphasis on the past and architectural revivalism will help frame the issue. The review will be followed by a case study which will clarify how some of aspects of this trend are realized in a contemporary suburban landscape south of Charlotte, North Carolina. 4 The case study describes three early residential settlement patterns and contrasts them to contemporary development. With these contrasts established, it moves to a discussion of (l)historicist reproductions; (2)"neo- traditional'' or "new urban" developments and; (J)the emphasis placed on tradition by planners, local officials, and developers . In an attempt to understand how a particular landscape compares to national trends discussed 5 in the literature review, three questions will be explored: (l)What roles do contemporary planning and design trends which rely on history or revivalism - such as postmodernism, historic preservation and new urbanism - play in shaping planning policy, development and/or architecture? (2)Because these trends emphasize historic precedent, how does contemporary development compare to previous settlement patterns in the study area? (J)Why, is an image of tradition effective for marketing housing a nd suburban development? CHAPTER II PERCEPTIONS OF THE PAST AND FUTURE IN WESTERN URBANIZATION Urbanization, Suburbanization and Nostalgia Apart from the eclecticism of recent art and architecture, there are myriad repetitions in the postwar period: how are we to distinguish them in kind? How to tell the difference between a return of an archaic form of art that bolsters conservati ve tendencies in the present and a return to a lost model of art made in order to displace customary ways of working? Or, in the register of history, how to tell the difference between a revisionist account written in support of the cultural status quo and a genealogical account that seeks to challenge it?1 Is [ our preoccupation with history] anything more than a well-known habit of using the past, the "good old days," as a stick to beat the present? 2 In an age marked by an increased popular interest in the past in every realm of culture, the questions posed by Foster and Williams should be considered, not only by 6 artists and architects, but within a wide range of disciplines, including urban planning. Confronting problems inherited from modernist cities, policy-makers, designers and the public are challenged by a des i re to draw from the 1Hal Foster, "What's Neo About the Nee-Avant-Garde?," October 70 (Fall 1994): 5. 2 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 12. past, without slipping into naive nostalgia for nineteenth and early twentieth century urban and architectural forms. The challenge includes, not only coping with rapidly changing metropolitan areas and global economies, but looking critically at what Raymond Williams called "the recurrent myth of a happier and more natural past" that, it is often suggested, offers remedies for contemporary economic and social problerns. 3 The urge to idealize the past is a hallmark of any period experiencing rapid shifts in technology and urbanization. Yi-Fu Tuan argued that nostalgia for rural life has been present during periods of urbanization at least since the Roman Empire. 4 Likewise, Williams traced 7 the long tradition of Western literary pastoralism which portrays a romantic arcadian lifestyle in opposition to contemporary life. Similarly, Leo Marx detailed the relationship between pastoralism and technology in American literature and philosophy. 5 More recently Michael Bunce argued, while nostalgia for the countryside has been present during periods of urbanization throughout history, it has reached unprecedented intensity in contemporary Anglo- 3Williams, 40. 'Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 107. 5Williams, The Country and the City; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 8 American society. The ambivalence toward the city inherent in the idealization of country life has marked American intellectualism, popular culture and our dominant settlement pattern, suburbia. 6 According to Bunce, it is in the modern city, especially among the middle-class of Victorian England, that the countryside begins to acquire a truly idealized status. This phenomenon was not simply a sentimental reaction but "an ideal which . emerged from the very nature of modern urbanism itself." 7 The modern era intensified the distinction between country and city by clearly defining the latter as the primary seat of industrial production, commerce and government. In contrast, the countryside ideal arose in the arts and in the landscape as an arcadian alternative for an affluent and mobile middle-class seeking to distinguish itself from the urban poor. Ebenezer Howard, in Garden Cities of Tomorrow, was a seminal figure in the definition of the ideal Anglo-American suburb. 8 He described Garden Cities as a combination of 6 In The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and M.I.T. Press, 1962), Morton and Lucia White trace the anti-urban tradition in American thought. 7 Michael Bunce, The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1994), 11. 8 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (East Sussex: Attic Books, 1985). First published in 1898 as To­ morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Reprinted in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow. 9 the best of town and country; without the vice and corruption of the former and the isolation and provincialism of the latter. Howard's Garden City offered relief from the modern metropolis and blended two powerful images in Anglo­ American culture (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). As Williams argued, the common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future .... The pull of the idea of the country is toward old ways, human ways, natural ways. The pull of the idea of the city is toward progress, modernization, development. 9 Suburbia, even before its defining elements were distilled in Howard's diagrams, was an attempt to blend the best of the city and the country, the present and the past. And, as popular views toward these poles shift, so too does the image of suburban landscapes and architecture. Central to this idealization of rural existence, and in subsequent waves of suburbanization, is an ambivalence toward the city and a nostalgic yearning for a safer and simpler life which sidesteps the pressures of contemporary urbanization. In contemporary suburban landscapes, like those of the nineteenth century, the middle and upper-middle classes seek order by pursuing a lifestyle associated with nature or with the past. "Every age has a distinct sense of the past," argues Steven Kern. His comments regarding popular late nineteenth 9 Williams, 297. Figure 1. Howard ' s model provides the best of "Town " and "Country ." From Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To­ morrow, East Sussex : Attic Books, 1985 . 10 Figure 2. Howard's Model realized in the landscape. Howard claimed Garden Cities provide the country's "beauty of nature" and the town ' s "social opportunity." A group of families in Eugene, Oregon " camp out'' in their suburban neighborhood. I-' I-' 12 century views toward history highlight similarities with contemporary cultural and design trends in American. This generation looked to it for stability in the face of rapid technological change. Its thinkers developed a keen sense of the historical past as a source of identity in an increasingly secular world ... [They tried to develop] the most effective way to recapture a past that had been forgotten. io Prominent designers of the period also tried to "recapture the past." Camillo Sitte, through his revivalist designs in fin-de-siecle Vienna, was intent on creating a sense of community and a link to history through his work. Sitte argued that "city building must not just be a technical question but an aesthetic one of the highest sense." He therefore set out to create interior spaces - plazas and squares - that would promote the preservation and even re-creation of a sense of community. He sought "to overcome fragmentation" and provide a "community life­ outlook" for people as a whole. This deployment of art in the shaping of space to create a real sense of community was, to Sitte, the only possible response to modernity. 11 i 0 steven Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1888-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 37. Similarly, historian Robert Wiebe describes Americans' response to the rapid changes of the late nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth as a "search for order." Quoted in David R. Goldfield, "North Carolina's Early Twentieth-Century Suburbs and the Urbaniz i ng South," in Early Twentieth-Century Suburbs in North Carolina: Essays on History. Architecture and Planning, ed. Catherine Bishir, and Lawrence s. Early (Raleigh: Archaeology and Historic Preservation Section, Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cu l tural Resources, 1985), 9. 11Harvey, 276. Harvey draws heavily in this discussion from Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1981). 13 Similarly, David Harvey argues that the "ideological labor of inventing tradition" became important in this "era when transformations in temporal and spatial experience implied a loss of identity with place and repeated radical breaks with any sense of historical continuity. 111 2 Historic preservation, revivalist architecture and antique collecting all became fashionable in the late nineteenth century as preservation organizations developed in England, France, Germany and the United States. The increased interest in history and historic artifacts was reflected in responses to improvements in popular media. The invention of the camera and phonograph earlier in the century allowed a much more thorough and meticulous recording of events. They were both praised for their provision of the "objectivation of our memory function. 1113 Harvey argues contemporary technological advances have resulted in an even more pronounced transformation of spatio-temporal experience than that of Europe during the Industrial Revolution. The collective sense of disorientation and discontinuity with the past (a break striven for by modernists) has precipitated similar 12David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 272. 13Kern, 38. nostalgic and romantic notions as those in Europe of the Romantics. 14 Harvey's emphasis on the disorienting nature of contemporary spatial experience is supported by Kevin Lynch's ground-breaking work, The Image of the City. Lynch argued that in the modernist city the physical elements, such as landmarks, which allow people to orient themselves have been destroyed or misused. A healthy urban environment, according to Lynch, is one which allows individuals to develop a cognitive image of the city, made up of five defining elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. The incomprehensibility of contemporary cities results from continual destruction, expansion and the lack or misuse of these structuring elements which had more clearly delineated spaces within premodernist settlement. 14 The modernist city as spatially and conceptually disorienting is the dominant theme that arises from arguments put forth by geographers and designers such as Harvey and Lynch. Lynch i n fact devoted his career to teaching how more "legible" contemporary urban areas might be designed and his efforts to conceptually "map" the 14Kevin Lynch, The Ima e of the Cit (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). Lynch's work is praised by Christian Norberg­ Schulz. In The Conce t of Dwellin: On the Wa to Figurative Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 31, he likewise argues the "actual loss of place mentioned in connection with the settlement as a whole, corresponds to a loss of [well defined] urban space." 15 contemporary city reflected in other disciplines as well. 1 5 Representations of the city ranging from planning debates to popular literature reflect the same struggle to understand the modernist city. In Visions of The Modern city, Wil l iam Sharpe and Leonard Wallack address the issue, not by studying the city itself but, by emphasizing metaphorical representations of the city in history, art and literature. Because language and metaphor reflect and shape the way in which we view the world, these theorists interpret them as reflections of changes in urban environments and as indications of our reactions to those transformations. The inabil i ty to arrive at an agreed upon description of the contemporary city, (attempts include: non-place urban realm, polycentric city, geography of nowhere, decentered city, edge city, cyburbia, technoburbia, disurb, etc. ) 1 6 is similar to our difficulty in conceptualizing the city as described by Lynch. According to these theorists, the phenomenon indicates a deeper crisis in our ability to comprehend, and therefore cope with and manage, the contemporary city . 1 7 15Tridib Banerjee and Michael Southworth, eds., City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990). 1 6 See Sorkin's Variations on a Theme Park for a discussion. 17Williarn Sharpe and Leonard Wallack, eds., Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History. Art and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987). Burton Pike, in The Image of the City In Modern Li terature (New Jersey: 16 Just as recent design and cultural debate centers on the city as a disorienting and/or unattractive physical environment, the importance of our perception of the city as a threatening and dangerous place has, according to Mike Davis, become an increasingly powerful image in shaping urban policy. Rising urban crime rates and burgeoning middle class fear of the city have driven both increased security measures in urban/suburban areas and nostalgic tendencies that bolster suburban development. Davis describes the extreme security measures taken in Los Angeles in an attempt to provide middle and upper middle class Princeton University Press, 1981), makes a complimentary argument, asserting the value of literature as a non-linear route providing access to a better understanding of cities. He relies on the assertion that Nathaniel Hawthorne's image of a "paved solitude" forms the Western archetypal concept of the city. The images of London evoked by Dickens in the opening lines of our Mutual Friend, the streets of Paris in Baudelaire's "The Eyes of the Poor," or of New York in Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" provide impressions of the nineteenth century city that are unobtainable from official documents, such as Daniel Burnham's famous plan for Chicago. Likewise, contemporary authors, such as Italo Calvino, in his poetic Invisible Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972), 156-157, offer insight into the contemporary experience of the city. You advance for hours and it is not clear to you whether you are already in the city's midst or still outside it. Like a lake with low shores lost in swamps, so Penthesilea spreads for miles around, a soupy city diluted in the plain .... If you ask the people you meet, "Where is Penthesilia?" they make a broad gesture which may mean "Here," or else "Farther on," or "All around you," or even "In the opposite direction" .... some raise their arms obliquely toward an aggregation of oblique polyhedrons on the horizon, while others indicate, behind you, the specter of other spires. 17 residents "personal insulat ion .. . . from 'unsavory ' groups and individuals, even crowds in general. n 1.s Walled developments, surveillance cameras and armed guards have become standard e l ements i n many cities and s uburbs (see Figure 3). In areas where crime is actually increasing, s uch as Downtown Washington D. C., most is contained within class or ethnic groups . However, middle class suburbanites , rarely exposed to inner city conditions, perceive a substantial threat . Surveys show residents of Milwaukee suburbs a nd of Washington's inner city residents are " just as worried about crime . .. despite a twenty- fold difference i n relative levels of mayhem . 11 111 Media images of urban chaos reinforce the popular that any chance for safety and security exists in suburbs rat her than cities . Further criticism of contemporary cities results from the increasing awareness that the postwar suburb, which promised relief from t he maladies of urban l i fe, has i ns t ead created tremendous problems. Once a vision of utopia , the low-density automobile suburb saddles metropolitan areas with increased auto congestion, failing environmental quality, loss of agricultural land and economic disparities. Literature regarding contemporary planning problems inevitably defines automobile suburbs as a central issue . 18Mike Davis, City of Quartz : Excavating the Fut ure in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992) , 224 . Figure 3. Cameras throughout Uptown Charlotte monitor public areas including streets, building entries and parking lots. Increasingly common in American cities they indicate continuing fear of urban areas which encourages middle-class f light. 18 The literature ranges from those who take an accepting but critical look at this dominant American settlement pattern and suggest practical improvements, and those who reject suburbia out of hand as modernist inanity. Girling and Helphand argue, while there currently are substantial costs associated with low-density suburbs: loss of agricultural land, a decline in air and water quality, and exorbitant costs for sewers, power and roads .... [they can provide a] landscape supportive of individual fulfillment, and environmental sustainability ... [provided we exercise) a broader, more comprehensive view of open space. 20 In contrast, James Howard Kunstler states flatly, Eighty percent of everything built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading .... n 19 The disorientation associated with the contemporary city, rapid technological and social change, deteriorating built and natural environments and uncertainty regarding the country's future all contribute to a yearning for stability. As David Harvey argued, The greater ephemerality, the more pressing the need to discover or manufacture some kind of eternal truth .... The revival of interest in basic institutions (such as family and community) 20cynthia Girling and Kenneth I. Helphand, Yard Street Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space (New York: John Wiley and Sons Inc., 1994), 3. 21James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (New York: Touchstone, 1993), 10. While Kunstler's polemic has been well received by many, he largely reiterates, with the benefit of hindsight, criticism put forth more subtly and eloquently in the postwar era by Lewis Mumford. and the search for historical roots are all signs of a search for more secure moorings and longer­ lasting values in a shifting world. 22 20 In this context, preservationists and nee-traditionalists search for stability and community. Nee-traditionalism is "family values architecture'' according to Witold Rybcynski, "the real estate developer's answer to the inchoate yearnings for a proverbial simpler time. 11 23 • Like their predecessors in the nineteenth century, preservationists and nee-traditionalists see the restoration or emulation of historic architectural and urban form as central to the task. While these movements are not wholly naive yearnings for the past, nostalgia is a very significant element in their development and increasing popularity (see Figure 4). Nostalgia itself, in Europe of the Romantics and in contemporary culture, has been an important issue in cultural debates. From its inception, the term was associated with the concept of place. According to Jean Starobinski, "nostalgia" was coined by physician Johannes Hofer, from the Greek for "return" and "sorrow." He recognized it as the cause of "exiles [who] languished and wasted away far from their native land ... 1124 In 22Harvey, 2 9 2 . 23Wi told Rybcynski, "The Rise of Family Values Architecture, This Old House," The New Republic, 8 May 1995, 14-16. 2"Jean Starobinski, "The Idea of Nostalgia," Diogenes 54 (Summer 1966): 84. Figure 4. The 1995 Historic Preservation Week Poster. The appearance of authenticity is appealing in an increasingly ephemeral and uncertain age . As Harvey argued, The greater ephemerality, the more pressing the need to discover or manufacture some kind of eternal truth .... Photographs, particular objects (like a piano, a clock, a chair), and events (the playing of a record of a piece of music, the singing of a song) become the focus of a contemplative memory, and hence a generator of a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of consumerist culture and fashion. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernit~ (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 292. Poster reprinted, by permission, from the City of Eugene, Oregon. the eighteenth century people were fearful of long trips that might bring on the deadly disease. While doctors and philosophers argued over its cause, "throughout all the countries of Europe, all doctors recognized nostalgia as a frequently fatal disease .... " = The quotes below give an indication of the era's preoccupation with nostalgia. Hofer claimed that Nostalgi a is born of a disorder of the imagination, from which it follows that the nervous sap always takes the very same direction in the brain and, as a result, excites the very same idea, the desire to return to one's home 1 and . 26 22 As a doctor, he sought the physiological cause of nostalgia in an attempt to cure what was viewed as a disease. Immanuel Kant disagreed with Hofer's place specific argument and claimed what a person wishes to recover is not so much the actual place where he passed his childhood but his youth itself. He is not straining toward something he can repossess, but toward an age which is forever beyond his reach. 27 Disgusted with the era of nostalgia and historicism, Niestchze said that his age was 2 5 Ibid, 95. 2 6 Ibid, 87. Many medical practitioners argued that the most rapid and immediate cure was to send the patient home. The less benevolent claimed that nostalgia could be cured by "insighting pain or terror ... One should tell the nostalgic soldier that a 'red-hot iron applied to his abdomen' will cure him immediately." 27 Ibid. , 94. suffering from a malignant historical fever .... [Anyone] who wished to feel everything historically would be like a beast who had to live by chewing a continual cud. 28 23 More recentl y, Frederic Jameson has argued that nostalgia is also a prominent aspect of postmodern culture. He describes the current world of art and literature as "the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. 29 He continues, echoing Kant, "· we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach. 11 30 28Quoted in Kern, 52. n Jameson, Frederic, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodernism ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 118, 115. Also see Fredric Jameson in "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): 53-92. For criticism of Jameson's article see Mike Davis' "Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism," New Left Review 151 (May/June 1985): 106- 113. Jameson emphasized the popularity of "nostalgia films" and the prominence of revivalism and pastiche in the visual arts and architecture. Revivalism is also a force in other art forms which were very recently driven by more avant­ garde perspectives. For example, New York Times jazz critic, Peter Watrous claims that [ N]ever has a movement as influential as the young jazz renaissance been as historically motivated. Young musicians .... have created a vocabulary that takes history and tries to manipulate it, to see if the past can be made new again .... [They ignore] the avant-garde of the 60s .... [in a] process of reexamining the past ... . In, "Young Pianist Tries to Reinvent the Past," New York Times, 14 May 1995, H28. 30Jameson, "Consumer Society," 118. 24 Many social theorists and literary critics, such as Jameson, argue the decline of modernism has resulted in a general pessimism toward the deepest held beliefs of the Enlightenment. Assumptions regarding the ability of human rationality and science to overcome social, environmental and economic problems, the ameliorative power of technology and its ability to effect a utopian future, and the ability of democratic institutions to provide an equitable and stable society, have all met serious challenges in the late twentieth century. Questions arise, not only from theoretical inconsistencies in Enlightenment thought, but from the failure or negative impact of so many modernist technological programs that relied on those assumptions. This, it is argued, has precipitated and/or accompanied a new era in political, cultural, economic and art history marked by nostalgia, pessimism and fear. 31 As Robert Fishman argued, in contrasting the utopians of the early twentieth century to contemporary planners, Our present crisis is, in part, a crisis of confidence. The decay of our central cities and the wasteful, ever-expanding sprawl that threatens to replace them are national problems whose magnitude would seem to make some form of large­ scale urban planning and reconstruction a national imperative. The tools for such a reconstruction exist, but we seem to lack the will to use them. For many contemporary planners ... any action on 31Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983) remains one of the most impressive attempts to bring together the disparate and often contradictory viewpoints on postmodern culture. the scale advocated by [Ebenezer] Howard, [Frank Lloyd] Wright, and Le Corbusier is a dangerous delusion. They argue that cities are too complex for us to comprehend, and that their problems are too deep-seated to yield to our limited understanding and even more limited resources. The best that we can hope for are small-scale renovation projects which might keep pace with the decay. 32 As Fishman emphasized, the pace and form of growth in American cities is cause for alarm. As computer and information technologies revolutionize national and international economies, widespread suburbanization 25 continues as the dominant postwar development pattern. Jobs have steadily followed upper and middle-income capital to outlying areas. A new generation of suburbs, "Edge Cities" as described by Joel Garreau, is expanding further into the urban fringe. Michael Sorkin ominously claims the built environments (especially shopping malls) in these areas are totally foreign to traditional urban form and mark the end of public space in America. Manuel Castells and Peter Hall identify specific exurban areas as "technopoles" which will rapidly transform the global economy. Garreau sees Edge City as a new frontier and our migration there as the 32Fishman, in Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1977), xi, criticized the likes of Jane Jacobs, for the suggestion that planners could never comprehend, and therefore never effectively deal with, the complexities of a metropolitan area. Anticipating the more conservative tone of current urban policy, Jacobs argued that the encouragement of small, independent entrepeneurialism, not large scale government intervention, is the key to a thriving city. largest change in the past one hundred years of American urbanizati on33 Edge City marks a shift in urban organization. 26 However, it is also an intensification of the suburban migration which began in the late nineteenth century and became a large-scale national trend in the postwar era. In Edge City, as in previous American suburbs, affluent and middle class Americans l i ve in suburban areas that are far from their work places, in homes that they own, and in the center of yards that by urban standards elsewhere are enormous. [American suburbs are therefore defined by] population density, homeownership, residential status, and journey to work. 3 4 33Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991). Edge Cities generally take root at freeway interchanges and reflect American reliance on the automobile and an ever-decreasing dependence on older core areas for jobs, retail and services. They are the employment base for the information economy, commonly providing software engineering, production and other high­ tech jobs. Manuel Castells, in "European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy," New Left Review 204 (March/April): 18-32, and with Peter Hall in Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes (London: Routledge, 1994), describes several prominent technopoles throughout the world as the production base for the emerging global economy. Technopoles are to the 21st century what steel mills and other heavy manufacturing were to the industrial age; loci of power and wealth that increasingly direct the economy and, therefore, urban form. Also see Michael Sorkin's Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Noonday Press, 1991). 34Kenneth T. Jackson's one-sentence definition of the American suburb in Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 6. While employment has moved to exurban areas, there is a low jobs/housing balance in Edge cities. Rather than reducing trip length, suburb to suburb commuting has increased it. See Anthony Downs, Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion (Washington D.C.: 27 As Bunce and others have suggested, traditional images of suburban life are also associated with a tendency to idealize the past. So, while suburbia is defined by the demographic characteristics above, it also relies heavily on the mediation of powerful images - such as "country" and "city," "past" and "present'' - discussed by Williams, Marx and Bunce. It is therefore "both a planning type and a sta.te of mind based on imagery and symbolism. '13 Much of this symbolism is associated with nostalgic yearnings for the country or for small town life: an escape from the modern city of industry, commerce and vice to a simpler and safer life associated with the past. Modernism: Planning. Design. and the Future Marketing of early twentieth century and post-World War II suburbs emphasized the value of new design and technological convenience. These suburbs "coupled the promise of modernity and technological facility with the national cure-all, the elixir of nature - truly 'a machine in a garden.'" 3 6 In the words of Howard Mansfield, with the aid of modern technology we would leapfrog into the future invention by invention, toaster by blender, appliance by Brookings Institution and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1992). 35Jackson , crabgrass, 4. 36Girling and Helphand, 12. appliance, until at last, all our devices in order, we would arrive at a utopia somewhere the other side of the checkout counter. 37 Influential utopian designers such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Norman Bel Geddes, like much of the public, believed technology would save early twentieth century cities. 38 In Fishman's words, they were inspired by the prospect that a radical reconstruction of the cities would solve not only the urban crisis of the time, but the social crisis as well .... They did not seek the amelioration of old cities, but a wholly transformed urban environment. 39 Their rhetoric and design work sparked Americans' imagination, especially in exhibits such as "Futurama'' at 28 the 1939 World's Fair. Designed by Bel Geddes and sponsored 37Howard Mansfield, Cosmopolis: Yesterday's Cities of the Future (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1990), 1. 38Robert Fishman in Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia and Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1977), offers a history of the utopian aspects of modernist planning and architecture. In the former, Fishman traces the history of suburbs from Manchester and London to America. He claims that suburbs have given over to exurbs, or actual cities outside of traditional suburbs and independent of core areas. This development, he claims, has brought the long history of suburbanization to a close. In the latter, Fishman compares the ideal cities designed by, and the lives and personalities of, the three men. Howard, in his plan for the Garden City concentrated on mutual cooperation and group ownership of land . Wright and his plan for Broadacre City concentrated on individual freedom, private property and the nuclear family. Le Corbusier's plan for the Contemporary City, Plan Voisin (the 1925 "Urban Renewal Plan" rejected by Parisians), and his Radiant Ci ty, all concentrated on the centralized authority of capitalists or the government. 39Fishman, Urban Utopias, 4. 29 by General Motors, the immensely popular scale model of an American city in the "World of 1960" drew heavily from Le Corbusier and Wright. It featured skyscrapers set amidst parks and massive highways (from Corbusier's "Ville Radiuse.") and was surrounded by small experimental farms freely accessible by automobile (from Wright's "Broadacre City"). Like many popular and academic predictions it presented an effortless future based on technological conveniences. "Futurama" helped whet the public's appetite for subsequent large-scale urban renewal projects which sought to liberate American cities from restrictive historic urban form. Le Corbusier's poems were exemplary of popular and academic sentiment. A new world: a high speed world. A new life: the machine age. A new ideal: use of the machine to liberate the individual. A new daily round: productive, recuperative, joyful, healthy; the daily round of the machine age man in the Radiant City. New cities for old. 4 0 Wright and Corbusier saw the skyscraper and automobile as saviors of the American city. "The highway," according to Le Corbusier, "is our means of salvation."4]_ He emphasized the skyscraper's potential to intensify urban development, bring nature into the city and do away with suburbs. He strove for a nation dominated by cities in the ' 0 Le Corbusier, Radiant City (New York: The Orion Press, 1967), 331. First published in France in 1933. 41.Ibid., 139. machine age. Wright, reflecting an American b i as, envisioned a Jeffersonian suburban culture of i ndependent farmers. He emphasized the automobile's potential to provide increased mobility and access to the small farms that were to make up much of his "Broadacre City'' (see 30 Figure 5). According to Wright, technology would ultimately preserve democracy by assuring the romantic Jeffersonian ideal of a republic based on a stable yeomanry. Post-World War II suburbs, like their predecessors in the nineteenth century and in "Futurama,'' promised stability to a populous threatened by the state of contemporary cities. Modernists embraced the machine but still offered the stability and romanticism of pastoralism. Post-World War II planners also had unprecedented funding to rebuild cities that had languished since pre­ Depression years. Eisenhower's interstate highway system, Urban Renewal and the social programs of Johnson's "Great Society'' gave planners tremendous influence and freedom to shape American landscapes.• 2 Their's was a vision of urban and suburban utopia in which the union of technology, especially the automobile, and nature would provide a safe and healthy environment for modern living. Ironically, many contemporary planners target postwar planning, especially the emphasis on automobile use, as the source of our worst 4 2 Gwendolyn Wright, Building the American Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1981). I ,/ ,.,,u ~•·~ ,ii,•~"'f- - ~ .,:,, ,, - . ' Figure 5. Yesterday's cities of the future: New cities for old. Scene from Wright's Broadacre City. Reprinted, by permission, from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Copyright 1995 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. w I-' 32 urban problems, certainly not the solution. 4 3 So many bold promises were made regarding planners' power to shape a utopian urban/suburban environment that the endemic problems of many American cities have, with the benefit of hindsight, made the profession appear both naive and arrogant to contemporary critics of modernist urban plans. 44 Modernist planners and designers exemplified cultural beliefs that stern in large part from the Enlightenment tradition of optimism in the future, rationality and technology. They felt the future was their's to shape and the past something to be continually surpassed for a brighter future. Like the Cubists, whose aesthetic inspired so much modern design, postwar planners saw "new positive answers whose authenticity seemed to be guaranteed by the existence of new forces .... [they] believed, if not for themselves then for the future, in victory. 114 5 It was this intense optimism, coupled with the abstract Cubist aesthetic, which helped drive and shape urban renewal 4 3Anthony Downs, Stuck in Traffic; Anthony Downs, New Visions for Metropolitan America (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution and Cambridge: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1994). 4 "Robert Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974), details one of the most extreme and extended examples of the postwar emphasis on progress, change and modernity being used to shape a major city with many long term disastrous results. 4 5 John Berger, "The Moment of Cubism" in The Look of Things (New York: Viking Press, 1974) , 140. 33 policy.'6 Just as modern art, through Cubism, heavily influenced postwar architecture and urbanism, by the 1940s, Ezra Pound's turn of the century directive for the modern avant-garde, "Make it new!," was realized in urban landscapes throughout the country. Massive demolition and reconstruction of inner urban areas were welcomed signs of progress. Federal housing loan programs and interstate highway subsidies opened the "crabgrass frontier" to World War II veterans. Relative income levels were high, unemployment low, and the nation's future appeared stable and prosperous. However, as the glut of contemporary criticism of modernism and urban renewal attests, modernists and the public in general, would have been well served by a more critical look at their assumptions regarding technology, progress and the future. With their eyes fixed on an inevitable utopia, the problems that would result from exclusive zoning, low density development and auto dependence were difficult to foresee.' 7 46To such an extent that Berger argues, 11 [ a J 11 modern design, architecture and town planning seem inconceivable without the initial example of Cubism." Berger, 134. ' 7 Some did foresee the problems of modern planning. Much of Lewis Mumford's writing focused on its shortcomings before and after they were realized in the landscape. His The City in History: Its Origins. Its Transformations and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1961) is not only a world history of urbanization but a strong critique of postwar planning in America. Jane Jacobs',~ Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961) is also a classic critique of modernist planning. A more recent but likewise scathing and readable critique of modernist planning is Lisa Peattie's Planning: 34 Many negative impacts inherent in the recommendations of designers such as Corbusier, Wright and Howard have been realized but most of the strengths have been overshadowed. Mounting traffic congestion and environmental problems from widespread automobile use and low-density development, economic disparities between fringe and core areas, declining urban infrastructure and rising urban crime rates are among the most pronounced. 4 8 Rethinking Ciudad Guayana (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987). Like Jacobs, Peattie stresses the need for planners and designers to be engaged with "the site." She argues that without an intimate knowledge of the complexities of a place, its idiosyncracies, strengths and weaknesses, planners will inevitably fail. In a brief but powerful book Peattie elucidates all the hubris and shortsightedness of, not only our attempts to transplant the modern city into the jungles of Venezuela, but of planning in general. Peattie's The View From the Barrio (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), is a memoir of the months she spent working as an anthropologist on the Ciudad Guayana project. 48While there was substantial optimism surrounding a purported middle class "return to the city" in the 1980s the actual demographic shift from suburbs to cities was negligible. Highly publicized preservation efforts in Baltimore and San Francisco for example, brought together civic government and developers' interests for large-scale highly publicized rehabilitation efforts. Likewise, the movement of artists into previously derelict buildings in areas such as Manhattan's Tribeca or the influx of a large upper-middle class gay population into San Francisco raised hopes about the revitalization of urban areas and anxieties over the impact of gentrification on lower income groups. See Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Neil Smith and Peter Williams, eds., Gentrification of the City (Boston: Allan and Unwin, 1986). Small historic areas in mid-sized cities throughout the country, such as Charlotte's Dilworth neighborhood, were sought after and rehabilitated by young professionals. Rather than a large demographic shift however, these revitalization efforts often resulted in "islands of prosperity in a sea of decay." Contemporary Trends in Planning and Design: The Past as an Answer to Modernism As a result of persistent urban problems, the contemporary city itself is cited as justification for casting off the design principles of the immediate past, which is viewed as naive and oppressive. The view is ironically similar to that held by modernists. Many designers and planners today do not attempt to "make it new," but rather, look to a more distant past, to local traditions or to nature for direction. 4 9 11 (B]y returning to 35 Historic markets such as Boston's Fanueil Hall or San Francisco 1 s Ghirardelli Square, bolstered consumption and tourism in core areas; neighborhood revitalization increased tax bases and preserved historic architecture but the inner city has retained the highest concentration of crime and poverty. 4 9 See Christopher Alexander's A Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), and A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Alexander claims there are certain design solutions that are objectively superior, functionally and aesthetically, to others. Many are represented in vernacular forms. His very influential books attempt to provide practical tools for delineating these timeless solutions. Architectural critic and theorist Kenneth Frampton also recognizes the value of drawing, not only from historic precedent, but from the qualities of a specific building site and regional vernacular traditions. In his "Towards a Critical Regionalism," In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed., Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 10,16-30, he encourages a "Critical Regionalism" but warns against the conservative political implications of idealizing the past and vernacular traditions. He points to the rise of Nazi Germany and its emphasis on folk traditions and revivalist architecture. He is also critical of those who encourage us to "to return to traditional forms and to render our new buildings - almost 36 traditions established in the nineteenth century, [ they ] explicitly jump over the city of modernism, hoping to drive that representational order out of sight. " 50 These planners reflect broader cultural, social and economic trends which view the past and future in a much different light than did postwar America. The negative impact of many postwar programs has forced a reevaluation of modern planning among designers, planning practitioners and academics. Their struggle echoes the broader theoretical critiques of Enlightenment thought which supported modern architecture and Urban Renewal. The "Rational Planning Model," the basic conceptual tool of the profession and a classic example of Enlightenment epistemology, has met with focused criticism from John Forester and other planning academics (see Figure 6). 51 without regard for their status - in the iconography of a kitsch vernacular." Similarly, David Harvey argues in The Condition of Postmodernity, 283, that "Geopolitical and aesthetic interventions always seem to imply nationalist, and hence unavoidably reactionary, politics. He, like Frampton, refers to Nazi appropriation of public spaces which Camillo Sitte designed in an attempt to create a sense of community and a link to the nation's vernacular past. 5°Christine M. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 5. 51Ernst Alexander, "After Rationality, What?" Journal of the American Association of Planners 50 (Winter 1984): 62-69. Alexander, relying on Thomas Kuhn's ground-breaking work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), claims a paradigm breakdown has occurred in the field as the inherent / I I .,,,---- 6 Implement the Pre ferred Policy I 5 Select the Preferred Policy 1 1 Define the Problem 4 Evaluate Alternative Policies 2 Determine Evaluation Criteria 3 Identify A lternat ive Policies Figure 6. The Rational Planning Model. The basic conceptual tool of planning and policy analysis. 37 38 Practitioners, on the other hand, have been forced to reevaluate their assumptions regarding the relationship between professionals and the public (due to increased citizen involvement), between the built and the natural environment (through increased environmental and historic preservation activism) and between technology and progress (due to problems resulting from industrial pollution and an automobile dependent culture). "Community" and the environment have been asserted as critical aspects of planning, challenging the modernist view of the city as a "machine for living." Anthropocentrism and technology are questioned as valid directives for planning just as contemporary theorists and artists reevaluate the same modernist assumptions in other cultural arenas. Reservations among many planners have sparked debate regarding what might be the most effective means for weaknesses of the rational planning model become apparent. In The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), Frank Fischer and John Forester present a series of essays that struggle with how the planning profession, born from the Enlightenment tradition, might surmount the shortcomings of the rationalist approach. Not surprisingly, these planners are not prepared to reject the modernist impulse altogether and rely on the theoretical work of Jurgen Habermas. Habermas argues that modernity is an "incomplete project" and denies the arguments of post-structuralists who claim modernism and the enlightenment tradition are practically and theoretically bankrupt. The Argumentative Turn is an impressive attempt to integrate theory into planning practice. See John Forester ed., Critical Theory and Public Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), for a more narrowly theoretical discussion of the integration of Habermasian theory and public policy. instilling the profession with a sense of purpose, solidarity and renewed respect, especially in an era of fiscal uncertainty and conservative emphasis on deregulation. This challenge helped spark, especially in the eighties, an increase in planning history scholarship, along with calls for a return to the "roots" of planning. 52 The sentiment is similar to contemporary designers' return to historic precedent. Michael P. Brooks speaks to the sense among many planners that the profession has lost its way. Remorseful over planning's current lack of leaders and heros, like Olmsted and Burnham, he argues that we must return to the "historical conceptions of the planners role." Planners need to, once again, "visualize the ideal future community and ... work toward its realization." Utopian planning, 52As Seymour Mandelbaum has suggested in "Historians 39 and Planners: The Construction of Pasts and Futures" Journal of the American Association of Planners 51 (Spring 1985): 185-188, the tendency to look to the past has increased recently as planning "practitioners and academics have turned to the past to remedy what they charge is the amnesia of the profession and to bolster its flagging sense of identity and purpose." Recent works in planning history include: Carl Abbot and Sy Adler, "Historical Analysis as a Planning Tool," Journal of the American Association of Planners 55 (Autumn 1984): 467-473; Christine M. Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983); Richard E . Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Donald A. Kruekeberg, ed., The American Planner: Biographies & Recollections, 2d ed., (New Brunswick: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1994). 40 in Brooks' view is central to the vitality of the profession and Peter Marcuse likewise calls for a return to the utopian tradition. 53 It is not surprising to find policy-makers and the public, mindful of failed postwar projects, looking to a more distant past for indi cations of how to handle the future. In uncertain times our references to history provide, in the words of Williams, the idea o f an ordered and happier past set against the disturbance and disorder of the present. An idealization, based on a temporary s i tuation and on a deep desire for stabil i ty, served to cover and to evade the actual and bitter contradictions of the time. 5 4 This turn to the past represents a profound shift from postwar planning and design. Amidst these professional, stylistic and cultural trends, suburbia has remained the primary home of the middle and upper-middle class. Suburbs have therefore become a primary stage for the contemporary idealization of the past. Witold Rybcynski has claimed, "Traditional neighborhood development is about to become the hottest idea in suburban 53Michael Brooks, "Four Critical Junctures in the History of the Urban Planning Profession: An Exercise in Hindsight," Journal of the American Association of Planners (Spring 1988): 241-248. 5 4Williams, 45. planning." ~ In the words of Peter Calthorpe, neo­ traditionalism or the new urbanism, is the search for nothing less than a new American dream, . one that restores public life to our communities, that trades half its 10,000 automobile trips per person each year for light rail and exchanges television and computers for face-to-face communication. 56 In contrast to the traditional American view that postwar suburbs are the ideal place to live and raise a family, criticism of suburban life and an interest in traditional communities have become widespread in popular media and in urban and suburban real estate marketing . 5 7 41 The trend to look toward the past for alternatives is evident in various design and planning movements, including historic preservation, new urbanism, and postmodernism. 5 5 Wi told Rybcynski, "The Rise of Family Values Architecture, This Old House," The New Republic 8 May 1995, 14. " Barbara Flanagan, "The Search for the New Hometown : Yearning for Community, Americans Rethink the Suburbs," Metropolitan Home (March 1992): 57. 57Jerry Alder's "Bye-Bye, Suburban Dream" was the cover story for Newsweek, 15 May 1995, 40. Also see Barbara Flanagan's article referenced above. From contemporary film to real estate adds, criticism of postwar suburbs has become widespread. The close knit neighborhood, rather than the "sterile" suburban environment, has become a preferred image. In Spike Lee's "Crooklyn," a film about a middle class black family in Brooklyn of the 1970s, the neighborhood and its street life are portrayed as thriving and stimulating areas for local families. Human contact, the chance encounter with neighbors, and the sense of community are contrasted to scenes set in the suburbs of Virginia. There, cinemagraphic distortions, mildly neurotic characters and social isolation make the suburb pale in contrast to life in the neighborhood. These movements roughly correspond to three different theoretical approaches to historic architecture and landscapes: preserving the past, using the past as design precedent, and 'quoting' from or replicating historic building types. Historic Preservation seeks to preserve historic environments for what are seen as intrinsic values and as ''doc uments " of archit ectural and cultural significance. A wide range of cultural resources, from historic 42 battlegrounds to factories and worker housing are protected or restored. It is argued that historic buildings and landscapes are aesthetically valuable and offer information regarding previous building techniques, social customs, ways of life, and so on. Likewise, they are seen to embody and/or represent an irreplaceable legacy, providing important insight into historical periods that cannot be gleaned from written or photographic documentation alone. Therefore, preservationists stress preserving or restoring buildings and landscapes with as much accuracy as possible. New urbanism, emphasizes the past as precedent from which to learn and draw design principals for building new, or improving existing, communities. Early suburban designs, such as Clarence Stein ' s Radburn Plan, are seen as time tested experiments that can provide insight for contemporary design. 58 By i ncreas i ng residentia l dens i ties, provi ding alternative transportat i on, and reasserting mixed use development, new urbanism calls for more compact and pedestrian oriented communi ties that provide more human interaction than postwar suburbs. They hope to decrease automobile dependence, environmental degradation, and the social fragmentation of postwar American cities. New Urbanism is therefore not preoccupied, necessarily, with preservation or restoration of historic environments, but with using previously built or designed communities as design precedent and tools for social engineering (see Figure 7). " Postmodern architecture uses architectural ref erences from the past in a piecemeal fashion. Designers reference disparate periods of architectural history with little emphasis on duplicating proportions or architectural 43 details. Postmoderni sm is often denigrated as a superficial stylistic technique that "turns towards a past without any ~ Cynthia Girling, "The Pedestrian Pocket: Reorienting Radburn," Landscape Journal 12 (Spring 1993): 40-50. 59A very complimentary and largely uncritical discussion of new urbanism is provided by Peter Katz in The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (New York: McGraw Hi l l, 1994). The book includes essays by Peter Calthorpe, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Andres Duany and Vincent Scully. Peter Calthorpe details his own approach to the New Urbanism in The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993). Calthorpe calls for linking nee-traditional communities with the central city via light rail lines. ~ :---"' . ~'!/ ;.. ~' . '.r . . ,_ ' i~ ~~, II Lake Park Union County. North Carolina , I ' ~ '( • ·, ,, , .. , . (~ '· I ,,.~- ·v'. ' ~ 1; ... 1, " , ., • ( :.__;_,-- ~;{"""'; ! ; ~ 2 • ~ ?, • t; • 1':'fv~• • · ~ · -~~--- ~~~ --- ~ ~ > ~ • • • ~ ,, • :¥J ' ,· f • ~ , • ·,, , , I : , . ' • ~ . ,-, • f ; ,t ,,./:,"· ~ -,~. .,,;' \ -l.. J. : • • • . I ~ .J'~~~l,; ' , Iv. I' Figure 7 . Today's cities of the future: Old cities for new. A s treet scene from Lake Park Vi llage, Union County N.C. Reprinted, by permi ssion, from EDI Architecture. 45 idea of how to use it." 60 • Some critics see postmodernism as a welcomed shift from modernist abstractions and elitism while others claim it is "pop architecture" that has uncritically embraced consumer culture. Postmodernism is therefore, less concerned with restoration or precedent than with, "pastiche," the fragmentary use of architectural details from various periods as a stylistic technique. 6 1 Another significant trend in popular design is the replication of historic buildings. A less critical stance, in which historic houses are reproduced but include technological conveniences. This trend gives up, not only modernism, but the possibility of good new design altogether. The technique is more concerned with effective marketing than criticizing or reevaluating modern design and may or may not emphasize accurate architectural reproduction. The emphasis is generally on creating a marketable product by stimulating a "feeling" of the past. Whether this is accomplished through careful reproduction or proportional distortions, as in Disney's Main Street USA, 60M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 286. 6 1Robert Venturi in Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977) and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, with an introduction by Vincent Scully (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977) spurred and celebrated the use of pop images and pastiche as a liberating turn from minimalist modern design. either technique is acceptable. In the words of Charles Moore, Main Street USA allows v isitors to start their exploration of the park at home. And since the street is not an accurate reconstruction of anything but a dreamlike evocation of that era, it finds resonance in many visitors ancestral memories. 62 46 These are the 'hypperreal' landscapes that prompted Umberto Eco to suggest "that there is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, f or which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy ... 11 63 Each movement is an attempt to assert the past as a tool for contending with modernism. These brief descriptions place each trend - historic preservation, new urbanism, postmodernism and replication - in a general category regarding specific perspectives and treatment of the past. However, the discuss i on becomes much more complicated and contradictory when we view the actual results of these varied approaches. The most rigorous and conscientious preservation projects or new urbanist designs can result in environments that have an effect more closely associated with reproductions or Disney landscapes. Further, nee-traditionalists and preservationists, recogn i zing the powerful appeal of nostalgic imagery , may 62Charles Moore, The City Observed : Los Angeles (New York: Random House, 1984), 39. 63 Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), 6. 47 market their agendas by manipulating images in a similar fashion. In practice and in the landscape, preservation, neo-traditionalism and replication often become difficult to distinguish. To some extent, all produce environments which result in a "feeling" of another time. There is an element of nostalgia whether the landscape results from meticulous preservation of buildings, meticulous use of historic precedent or meticulous reproduction. As Alexander Wilson points out, It is difficult for our experience of an old farmstead, for example, to be uncontaminated by a gauzy commercial with Grandma sitting at her spinning wheel and serving up Kraft slices. Our experience of historical landscapes is all too easily appropriated by the marketers of nostalgia and the status quo. 6 4 These inter-relationships are highlighted in John Dorst's The Written Suburb: An American Site, An Ethnographic Dilemma which describes an example of the "hyperreal" historic community. The Pennsylvania town of Chadds Ford is an upscale suburb and tourist destination. The town markets "tradition" through its annual celebration "Chadds Ford Days" and through house museums and art galleries. The local historical society and art museum have constructed a highly selective and readily consumable version of local history. One of the tendencies Dorst 6 4Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscapes from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991), 212. emphasizes is the particular interest among consumers for the illusion of tradition. This is most evident at the Chadds Ford Days celebration which reproduces a global image of a social environment characterized by symbolic exchange. The Historical Society [which sponsors Chadds Ford Days ] devotes itself to the image of a general mode of social relationship and social time .. The raw material of this image is the domestic sphere of late colonial life [as depicted at the fair and house museums ] , including especially domestic crafts, foodways, architecture and the artisan mode of production in general. 65 48 Dorst interprets Chadds Ford as a community which has been shaped entirely around the production and consumption of a decontextualized image of history. In its gradual shift from an agricultural economy and landscape of production to a service economy and landscape of consumption, the image of a colonial past serves to legitimize, authenticate and stimulate the experience of consumption. In the shift from rural community to up-scale suburb, a consumable history has been written for the town and historic preservation functions as a tool for sustaining the imaginary. Both Dorst and Bunce discuss the central role that images of history play in contemporary suburbanization. Sharon Zukin also emphasizes the power of historic imagery. 66 A central theme in her work is the emphasis 65John Dorst, The Written Suburb: An American Site, An Ethnographic Dilemma (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 15. 66Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disneyland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). placed on an "ambience of authenticity" in contemporary consumer society and the role that history can play in creating such an image. Similar to the arguments of Dorst and Harvey, Zukin claims Aspirations toward cultural power primarily clear the landscape of socially obsolete, and segmented, vernacular. But this process relies on a shift of perspective that in turn is tied to the social production of a new group of cultural mediators. They enable vernacular to be perceived, appreciated, and consumed as landscape - but then also appropriated, marketed, and exchanged in a more intensive way. 67 49 In contrast to the postwar era fascination with artifice, in the form of modern consumer gadgetry, contemporary designers and marketers rely on images of the traditional, authentic or vernacular. A valuable example is the work of developers such as Peter Brown, who argues "we need hometowns again." For Brown, history is a critical factor absent in the construction of new hometowns. As a result, in Montgomery Township, New Jersey he has proposed constructing the town in a manner which suggests it, "like a typical town of the region, had actually evolved from Dutch­ colonial farms into a modern municipality. 1168 As Harvey and Zukin argue, the illusion of tradition is just as appealing, possibly more so, than an actual historic landscape or building. In Montgomery Township, as in twentieth century utopian cities and in places like Chadds 67I bid. , 214-215. 68Flanagan, 57. 50 Ford, designers and planners not only construct cities and buildings, they also create images which may conceal the more pressing socio-economic and environmental issues which accompany suburbanization. In the words of Patrick Wright, Abstracted and redeployed, history seems to be purged of political tension; it becomes a unifying spectacle, the settling of all disputes .... Where there was active historicity there is now decoration and display; in the place of memory, amnesia swaggers out in historical fancy dress. 69 The cultural, architectural and planning trends outlined above are not restricted to academic discussions and a few extreme landscapes, such as Chadds Ford, Montgomery Township or Disney's Main Street USA. Like any cultural or design trend, they are expressed in varied, often contradictory, ways across a wide spectrum of potential design and policy solutions (see Figure 8). In some cases, they are expressed in the careful use of precedent as a guide for altering inefficient postwar land use/transportation patterns and improving the environment. In others, the past is used simply as a real-estate marketing tool. In either case, and in examples that fit between these poles, the past remains an appealing image in contrast to the uncertainties of contemporary life. In the case study that follows, these issues are discussed in relation to a contemporary suburban landscape south of Charlotte, North Carolina. 69Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country (London: Verso, 1991), 68, 78. "Authentic" Historic Sma11 Town The oppearance of Mauthenticity" 1s a powerful marketing i•age. Fabricated artifacts or p l acas often Ersatz take the placa of the "authentic." Theme Park Productive Residential Landscape. Ref1ects v~rnacula~ trbditjons and local economy. St.riving ror e~pansion, growth, change. Postwar Auto su_burb ~esidentiai A~enity Landscape. Country+ town✓ futuristic, utopian, auto cu~ture, sing1 e family detached dwelling. Disney ~and, Tourist Amenity Landscape . ~utu.rlstic, Utop~an, eiements of ~antasy, detachment. t Historic ei6~onts pre.served/m.arkete:d i ~•stored Historic Town t>6tacbed :from City, Safety Au.ra Of Authenticity, Architectural Precedent utoplan, &n.pbasis on techno.J.ogy P~ntasy , Safety, Fabricated traditions Theae Park t .£leme.nts of fantasy, Touris"ftl, Safety - 'O Q} .µ C: Q} ·H ~ 0 Q} l-1 :;j .µ ::i ~ I 'O (I) .µ s:: (I) .,; l-1 0 .µ {/.I !il il, I Tourist A~enlty Lind.scape. Historic architecture and aura of autbentlcity stlauiate acono~y and tourism . History/ tradition as commodity . Neo-Trad!tionai Suburb Resldentla1 A■anlty La.nd~c~pe. Town • country , nostalgic, arcad~ah, pedestrian/auto environ•ent, sing1e fami i y detached dwelling. olsney 1s f.1ain Street U.S.A. Nosta19ic , elenents of fantasy, de~achme.nt, fabricated traditions ailows "visitors to start their explora.tlon of the pa.rk at hom.~" Figure 8 . Conceptual Relationships Between Landscape Types CJ " :, +> :, .. II) r-15 • (l) ~ 'O "' ... "e O e o ~ ,...g 8' ~ .µ ...... ti) g i., !il .,:: I +> ~ ,:: ... .... 'O a ~ \04' . ., e a" ...... "a ll-0 0 'O CHAPTER III DEVELOPMENT TRENDS IN THE CHARLOTTE METROPOLITAN REGION Introduction 52 The Charlotte metropolitan region, in the southern Piedmont of North Carolina, is one of fastest growing urban centers in the country (see Figure 9 and Figure 10). Its continuing economic shift from agriculture and textile production and its increasing national prominence in banking and finance is rapidly transforming the surrounding rural landscape; historically dominated by farms and mill towns, the area is home to a growing number of upper-income suburbanites. Despite the pronounced physical and socio­ economic transition in suburbanizing areas, references to tradition are commonly mingled with the rhetoric of growth and development. While bringing together the best of "town" and "country," or "past" and "future," has always been a defining feature of American suburbanization, development within the study area reflects a shift from modernism to the contemporary preoccupation with historic precedent discussed in Chapter II. Planners attempt to change land use, transportation and urban design policy i n a manner Catie Ut1tetH Figure 9. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and the Carolina Region. Reprinted, by permission, from the UNCC Department of Geography and Earth Sciences and the Urban Institute. 115 ,., '" 100 ]85 200 •• 140 -,., >O 91 ., 2l 1 '" t◄ J 26 '40 203 81 (J1 w ME CK LEN BURG CO UNION CO. N.C. S.C. Figure 10. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Union County. Study area in grey. The "Charlotte- Mecklenburg South District" lies approximately at the southern corner of Mecklenburg County, bounded by I - 77 to the wes t and NC 74 to the east. 54 55 consistent with ideas which spring from new urbanism. Developers, on the other hand, apply historicist pastiche to architecture set amidst a land use pattern consistent with postwar suburbanization. In other cases , an idealized rural landscape or the nostalgic image of small town life on the urban fringe are used to market and develop outlying agricultural areas. The local population is surging toward Charlotte- Mecklenburg's South District and adjacent Union County. Home construction and sales in the area are boomimg as homebuyers respond positively to the lifestyle provided by outlying towns and the revivalist architecture which dominates the housing market. An increased interest in historic preservation in downtown Monroe ( the Union County seat) , Waxhaw and other communities, the proliferation of postmodern residential architecture , and examples of nee-traditionalism all suggest an increased recognition that history, in one form or another, may provide a better quality of life while boosting the local economy . However, despite the growing interest in revivalist and historic architecture, contemporary growth in the region is dominated by what can be characterized as postwar suburbanization; land intensive , auto-dependent, low density development. While contemporary trends - such as preservation, new urbanism and postmodernism - arose largely as reactions to postwar aesthetics and planning, they generally are 56 integrated with, rather than used to alter, suburban development in the case study area. And, as Charlotte continues to expand, the area's long history of low density development, or "urbanization without cities," has become both its most potent marketing image and its most problematic planning dilemma. For instance, adjacent Union County, which serves as a bedroom community to Charlotte, relies on its small town image to attract wealthy suburbanites. In the case of the Town of Weddington, the preservation of the rural setting is the rallying cry of suburbanites who rely on local zoning requirements to ensure exclusivity, and low density, auto dependent development. In Lake Park Village, a recently incorporated upscale subdivision is marketed as a neo­ traditional community, a genuine small town lifestyle is offered, "where your neighbors are vistin' neighbors." A little taste of the fictional Mayberry, North Carolina for upper income families who have recently arrived, primarily from the ailing cities of the Northeast, to take advantage of Charlotte's hometown image arid rising status as the region's financial powerhouse. This case study briefly describes the settlement history of the study area through examples of three prominent types of residential development: a dispersed agricultural community, a turn-of-the-century mill town, and an early streetcar suburb. These examples illustrate the 57 area's shift from a primarily agricultural population in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to a suburbanizing population in the early twentieth. The initial discussion puts contemporary development into a historical context, providing comparisons and contrasts between past and present trends. The case study will then move to a discussion of various examples of contemporary historicist architecture, nee-traditional developments and the emphasis placed on tradition by planners, local officials, and developers. First, development in Mecklenburg County's South District is reviewed; second, contemporary suburbanization in the town of Weddington; and lastly, Lake Park Village, a neo­ traditional development near Monroe. In an attempt to understand how a particular landscape compares to national trends discussed in Chapter II, three questions will be explored: (l)What roles do contemporary planning trends, such as postmodernism, historic preservation and new urbanism, play in shaping planning policy, development and/or architecture? (2)Because these trends emphasize historic precedent, how does contemporary development compare to previous settlement patterns in the study area? (3)Why, is an image of tradition effective for marketino housino and suburban develoornent? 58 Early Settlement Patterns in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Area Charlotte is located in the Piedmont, a plateau which runs from Virginia to Alabama and is flanked to the east by the low lying coastal plain and to the west by the Appalachian mountains. The majority of the state's population is concentrated in the more urbanized "Piedmont Crescent" which follows the present I-85 corridor between the state capital, Raleigh, and the state's largest city, Charlotte (see Figure 9). The Piedmont became the prominent region for industry and commerce in the nineteenth and twentieth century when trade through the port at Wilmington, shallow and inferior to those of Charleston and Norfolk, was surpassed by interior overland trade. 1 Geography played a prominent role in early European settlement of the Piedmont. All streams run northwest to southeast and only one major river, the Cape Fear, feeds directly into the ocean. It is navigable for only eighty miles inland, to the fall line which forms the Piedmont's eastern boundary. Early white settlers followed two major routes into the region in the early to mid-1700s. The Scotch-Irish and Germans from Pennsylvania followed the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road from the north. The Scotch, 1James W. Clay and Alfred W. Stewart, eds, Charlotte: An Analytical Atlas of Patterns and Trends (Charlotte: Department of Geography and Earth Sciences and the Urban Institute at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 1992), 2. English, German Huguenots and Swiss came up the Santee­ Catawba River Valley from Charleston, South Carolina. 2 Settlers were limited to notoriously substandard overland transportation. Even one hundred years later, during Frederick Law Olmsted's travels through North Carolina in the early 1850s, he described a harrowing passage by coach. The road was as bad as anything, under the name of a road, can be conceived to be. Wherever the adjoining swamps, fallen trees, stumps, and plantation fences would admit of it, the coach was driven, with a great deal of dexterity, out of the road. When the wheels sunk in the mud, below the hubs, we were sometimes requested to get out and walk. An upset seemed every moment inevitable. At length, it came .... 3 59 Poor roads and the absence of major navigable waterways stunted Charlotte's growth in early years but was overcome by development of the railroad in the nineteenth century and, more thoroughly, by the increased role of the automobile in the twentieth. Development of the North Carolina Railroad in the 1850s reinforced emerging Piedmont Crescent cities. Charlotte's prominence among them was assured by the termination of several rail lines at its 2 Ibid. , 1. 3 Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slaves states In the Years 1853-1854. With Remarks on Their Economy, with an Introduction by William P. Trent (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 348. 60 depot.• Its central location in the Piedmont of the two Carolinas, which had made it a hub for overland indian trade and a distribution center for early agricultural products, likewise positioned it as an important rail hub. Rail lines reinforced the early north-south orientation of transportation and Charlotte became a link between northern cities and the rest of the South. The city played an important role in trade and finance with the surrounding area made up of small mill towns and self-sufficient family farms. 5 Early transportation limitations (and colonial restrictions on the size of tracts available to settlers) 6 resulted in an economy based on small subsistence farms rather than larger slave plantations which marked the state's tidewater region. One traveller described the area as follows: A single laborer, with an ox, a horse, plough and wagon, can, on a few acres, live independently and comfortably; and the lands are divided among a multitude of small farmers of this sort. 7 4Allen W. Trelease, The North Carolina Railroad. 1849- 1871. and the Modernization of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 345. 5Clay, 1, 2. 6 Douglas Swaim, ed., Carolina Dwelling: Towards a Preservation of Place. In Celebration of the North Carolina Vernacular Landscape Place (Raleigh: Student Publication of the School of Design, Volume 26, 1978), 14. 7 Allen Tullos, Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 137. 61 The Piedmont, therefore, developed a dispersed population of self-sufficient yeoman farmers. On small subsistence farms, with limited trade opportunities, small piedmont farmers relied primarily on their own resources. Examples of Early Residential Development Subsistence farming generated a settlement pattern in the region based on dispersed farms with modest houses and a few minor out buildings, usually a barn, corn crib and smoke house. The most common house types in the Piedmont, many of which remain in the agricultural areas around Charlotte, was the I-House form. While staple crops of cotton and tobacco increased incomes in the post-bellum era of rail transport, small farms continued as the dominant unit of the agricultural economy. 8 Weddington: A Dispersed Agricultural Community Figure 11 shows the western portion of Union County, including the towns of Weddington and Waxhaw, in 1907. Weddington developed along what is now Providence Road/N.C. 8 Carl Lounsbury, "From Craft To Industry: The Building Process in North Carolina in the Nineteenth Century," (Ph.D. diss., The George Washington University, 1983), 30-31. More than one half of the small farmers owned at least a small amount of land which was uncommon in the rest of the state. Few had slaves and less than 25% of the total population was made up of slaves in the Piedmont by 1860. Most farmers lived in log or frame houses. Hewn log houses were common in Rockingham County and other areas of the Piedmont. Some can still be found in the Charlotte vicinity. /4' 1/AA.:.. _,.,AIL ,/PtlV TA- S ___.,. No SI ,MoN Aoll',l« ._T l'VAJlll"A W JVg , , , ; ,Y • . / ,,...,. / - N, 3 62 •""t-◄o ....... ,. NH . ,.. 7 • ,.. ,,. ., l, ~J . ~u . ... , .. - • - TO WNSHIP !./NE -· . Sc t{OO /... D1s r.L1NE • L A N D OwNCRS H E SIDE/ICE ~ ;CNAN T /-lovsE ,. >>>> ,; .- -f , JI,,,. .,~,,v,L t. c l GOLD VE"IN 5cHOOL. H ouSE CH v R CH • V, r ,,o; ,,..~ C ff CJ~ • " i.. lf.,. ,l't • ,...--:. , ~ ••~·~,.,~_ •-y~. C .J ;.,,,, .I SI••• •:' 1:~.:T=~~r, ,, N• I .,,,, ;J Figure 11. A 1907 Map of Weddington/ Waxhaw, Court esy Union County History Room. N.C. area. 63 16 in one of the earliest settled inland areas of the state. The modest agricultural community experienced an economic boom with the arrival of the railroad in Waxhaw in 1888, evidenced by the prominent houses existing from that period (see Figure 12). The town itself developed at this spot due to the value of local farmland and the intersection, providing overland access to Charlotte (15 miles) to the north, the county seat of Monroe (ten miles) to the east and Waxhaw (seven miles) to the South. 9 The store, cotton gin, school and church, formed the community's economic and social nucleus at this intersection . Small outlying farms were dispersed around these services. The cotton gin provided a convenient location for processing the local cash crop. The area had value for farmers who settled there due to the productive capacity of the land and climate which, before the railroad, allowed them to continue a primarily 9 John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country: Together with the Present State thereof. And a Journal of a Thousand Miles, Travel'd thro' several Nations of Indians . Giving Particular Account of their Customs, Manners, etc. Edited with an Introduction by Hugh Talmage Lefler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 46. Lawson, was a royal surveyor dispatched from Charleston in 1699 and passed through this area, known as the Land of the Waxhaws, on his journey. He raved about the area's agricultural value claiming the land was as red as Blood ... so durable that no Labour of Man, in one or two Ages, could make it poor .. Here were Corn-Stalks in their [the indians' J Fields as thick as the Small of a Man's Leg, and they are ordinarily to be seen. Figure 12. Late nineteenth- century architecture in Weddington, reflects the area's prosperity at the time. 64 65 self-sufficient existence. It gained value as accessibility to markets for cotton increased. The Two-Horse Cotton Farm: The Integration of Production and Amenity Within the Context of a Larger Productive Landscape. Examples of piedmont yeoman farm sites exist in areas throughout Union County. The small subsistence farm in Figure 13 and Figure 14, although built in 1933, represents the long tradition of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer which dominated the North Carolina Piedmont from early settlement to the mid-twentieth century. 1 0 The site stands much as it did in 1933. The modest house was built along a field road. Existing outbuildings include a smokehouse in the rear yard adjacent to the kitchen, a garage southwest of the house, the barn directly south of the house, a cotton house east of the barn, a chicken house and storage shed east of the cotton house. The tenant house which stood across the road no longer exists. While the descriptions of farm life provided by early twentieth century farmers suggests theirs was an idyllic 1°Former farmers, interview by author, 7 August 1995, Uni on County, North Carolina, tape recording. The farm included fifty cultivated acres at its peak. The standard unit of measurement for local farms was the number of mules required for its operation. Twenty-five acres was normally cultivated by one man and a mule. This farm with two mules, the owner and a transient tenant included fifty cultivated acres. - 1,:·, - ) c:::~"' (\ 1-1) i\ ~ I I ~~. ~ 0 J ':: ~ L ~ ~ ~ I\ " 1' 0 .. , i' ••• ~~1 i O o ··,\· o \ 0 :'.·. 0 ::!Q o ·-- a o _o 11 I 0 l