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Show ! -t f J The Dream of a City 1 I 53y Frederic J. Haskin. j f CHICAGO. July 20. A woman who was born in Chicago when it boasted a population popu-lation of 40i"J people recent iv celebrated her eiffhty-rifth birthday. That this city of millions should have prown up in a human lifetime is one of the most astonishing aston-ishing facta in the story of America. Never before has a great metropolis sprung into being In anything like so short a time. And the most formidable phase of the mat tor is the evident fact that Chicairo in still an infant. It has all the characteristics of youth. It is active, crude, naive, enthusiastic, undaunted. And it is still growing like a milk-fed chicken. The present Chicago has its problems. Its downtown section is a roaring confusion con-fusion of traffic, and it already faces the necessity of building two-story streets. South Water street, its market place, which was a country lane not long ago, is now engulfed in the midst of the city, and produce often rots becau.se congestion conges-tion prevents It from reaching the stalls. The problem of getting Chicagoans to and 1 from the working center of the city is , becoming constantly more serious. P.ut if the Chicago of today faces these stupendous and vexing problems, what , , may it expect with the onrush of the decades? Try to imagine' Chicago three times its present size, with its suburbs flung three times as far up and down the lake shore and its business section three times as crowded, noisy and smoky as it is at present. Fernaps aircraft will solve the transportation trans-portation problem, and all the smoke will be done away with by electrification, and all the streets will be three stories high. The giant city which seems sure to come will present no problems for which science sci-ence and engineering have not suggested a solution. But that solution must be planned and worked out gradually. Chicago realizes this. It has a plan for its future which is as complete as human foresight can arrange. It is proper to personify tho city . In this connection, for, to a most unusual extent, the Chicago plan belongs to the whole of Chicago. This plan has been preached on all occasions; occa-sions; it has filled thousands of columns in the newspapers; sixty-three thousand copies of a text book about it have been used in the public schools, and pictures of this future dream city have been widely displayed. And always the fact has been emphasized that this is a plan for the whole city, one which will benefit all the people, and not merely a class or a section. sec-tion. Every Chicagoan with a mite of 1 imagination carries a picture of the fu-, fu-, ture Chicago in his mind, lie sees the now barren and ragged lake front con- : verted into an enormous park with miles and miles of beach and protected water- way, where he and his family will bathe and picnic, enjoying all the advantages of . a lake shore summer resort within sight of the factories and office buildings that give them a living. He sees many miles of narrow and congested thoroughfares, where he now adroitly dodges traffic, con- t verted into spacious boulevards. He sees ; swift and commodious traction lines, which will whisk him to and from his home, and will carry him in a, few minutes min-utes from the heart of the business district dis-trict to cool forest glades, set .aside for his pleasure. These beauties and delights of the future fu-ture Chicago have been preached to all the people all the time. Anybody in Chicago Chi-cago can tell you about them, and almost anyone will register enthusiasm in doing so. The Chicago plan is really the dream of a city a great unifying ideal and purpose. pur-pose. The Chica'go plan had Its beginning a good many years ago when the great architect Burnbam presented the city with a set of plans tor parking the lake front-From front-From this nucleus has grown a comprehensive compre-hensive plan which comprises, in addition to the lake front project, the widening and extending of hundreds of miles of streets, the double-decking of two streets at once and of more later, and the creation crea-tion of many square miles of forest. playground play-ground on the very edge of the city. Chicago's linances are badly muddled, but this does not seem to cause any hesitation hesi-tation about carrying out the city plans. Chicago is like a young and-vigorous business busi-ness man who is heavily in debt, but is so confident of his energy and earning capacity tlrat he does not let his debts put any check on his constructive operations. op-erations. The city has already spent about ?55,O0O,OO0 on public works, and In so doing reached the limit of its bonded indebtedness. Then the assessed value of its property was raised from one-thirdt to one-half, making it now possible to borrow bor-row an additional $27,000,000. The city is to vote in November as to whether this amount shall be used in carrying out the program of the Chicago plan commission, and the indications for this authorization are favorable. The honorary head of the Chicago plan commission is the permanent chairman, Charles H. Wacker. He Is a 63-year-old millionaire who has devoted a good part of his time to the plan commission for some ten years, and who possesses a quiet determination in going ahead which is valuable to the city. But the chief evangelist of the future Chicago is Walter D. Moody, managing director of the plan commission. He is a young-looking but gray-headed man. He has linguistic capacities ca-pacities which, for endurance and fluency, flu-ency, have never been equaled in ancient or modern times. And nearly all of his eloquence is on one subject city planning. plan-ning. He firmly believes that city planning plan-ning is the salvation of the modern world. He believes it will cure everything every-thing from rickets to Bolshevism, and he makes a stout argument to that effect. He has facts by the ton. He has studied almost every city on the face of the earth with an eye single to enlarging his knowledge of city planning. He knows not only all the cities that are, but all the cities that ever were. In his recent voluminous book, "What of the City?" he, writes with charming familiarity about how Belshazzar wrestled with the sewage problem in ancient Babylon. As a city planner, Moody has become something of a national figure. One hundred hun-dred and thirty-six American cities have applied to Chicago for aid and advice in city planning, which means that they applied for and received the aid and advice ad-vice of Walter D. Moody. People come from all over the world to see Moody about city plans. One of his recent visitors vis-itors was A. Kimena, commissioner of prefecture, Tokio, Japan. A commissioner commission-er of prefecture in Japan seems to be about what we would call a city engineer. engi-neer. After listening to Mr. Moody from dinner until 2 o'clock in the morning, Mr. Kimena requested permission to translate his book into Japanese and went back home to straighten out Tokio. Moody has fired another gun that is being heard around the world. And you get the impression that he never ceases iiring except for meals and sleep. Moody himself insists that he is not a city planner. He says that he is simply a promoter pro-moter of city plans, which are made by architects and engineers. Promotion, he says, is what most city plans lack. Some two hundred American cities have city plans, and not half a dozen of them, according ac-cording to Moody, hold forth any promise prom-ise of comprehensive success. The trouble with most of them is that they are only plans for a part of city, not for a city as a whole. He says the first thing to do is to get a plan for 'the whole city which will benefit bene-fit ali parts of it equally and direct its growth as a whole. The next thing is to sell that plan to the people. That is where the promoter comes in. He must convince all the people of the necessity for that plan and of its equitable and democratic intent. Then it is time enough to pass a law and ask for a bond issue. Most cities are starting at the wrong end of the process. Moody thinks there is no excuse for this. American industry and science are callable of housing all "these people well, 1 and feeding them well. It is possible to provide them with playgrounds and amusement and education. And most of these people are willing to work for these things, and they do their share in creating cre-ating these things for others. Say what you "will about the survival of the fittest, the majority lit to survive is getting smaller all the time. It could be made much larcrr-r if the conditions of the struggle were a little less hard. The world owes a man a chance to develop himself in return for his labor. It owps him a good place to live in, and clean air and recreation. The cities owe these things to the people, for it is the people who have piled up th wealth -of the cities. And this is nor Socialism or radi-ciali:--m of any kind. It's equity and common com-mon sense. |