The Project: 2010

100th Anniversary Facsimile Edition of the 1910 Plan of New Haven
A Major Document of American History

The 1910 New Haven Plan of Development, or the Report of the New Haven Civic Improvement Commission, as the official publication is entitled, is an important and characteristic document of the formative period of American city planning.  This period is usually thought of as having been inaugurated by the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and its best known products are the 1901 MacMillan Commission Plan for Washington D.C. and the 1909 Plan of Chicago (also known as the Burnham Plan, after the architect who led both efforts, along with countless others around the country and the world).

The 1910 New Haven Plan deserves a place alongside these plans and others in San Francisco, Denver and Cleveland, to name only a few, as part of what is most often referred to as the City Beautiful Movement.  However this grand, but misleading, generalization does not do justice to the sophisticated and empirically grounded pragmatism and also environmentalism that shaped these plans, as much as the more visible preoccupation with aesthetics and monumentality.  Indeed, the authors of the New Haven Plan represent both ends of the ideological spectrum at this crucial moment in planning history: New York architect Cass Gilbert’s work in New Haven, Waterbury, New York and Minnesota representing the civic grandeur of classical monumentality, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. continuing the older American tradition of environmental and town planning pioneered by his famous father.  Together they produced a bold and visionary, but also humane and practical, framework for the future development of New Haven which, if little appreciated at the time, still contains many lessons of continued relevance for shaping livable and sustainable cities today.

Alan J. Plattus, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism,
Yale School of Architecture