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Show NPS Form 10-900-a Utah WordPerfect 5.1 Formal (Revised Feb. 1993) 0MB No. 10024-0018 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section No. _8_ Page _7_ Highland Park Historic District, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County, UT single family home that accommodated private space inside and outside. By 1910 things changed and the middle- and working-class citizens were moving out to the suburbs by the thousands, facilitated by public transportation. People moving in from the farm and out from the city combined to create an altered architectural pattern. With this came the creation of a significant architectural type - the suburban house form. 14 It wasn't until the advent of the post-WWII housing development that the pastoral qualities of the suburb of the late 19th and early 20th century began to vanish. 15 The urban space, divided into plain rectangular strips without concern for topography or aesthetics and whose gridiron plan produced straight streets intersecting at right angles, appealed to the city residents' preference for rational solutions and scientific methods. It was a practical approach for ordering space and simplified surveying and facilitated speculation. Early suburbs followed this plan because the rectangular layout of the streets extended beyond the city to make easier the sale and resale of lots possible in advance of settlement; it also stimulated promotion of undeveloped areas. "The price that the grid exacted in ugliness appeared small in a strange world where monotony also suggested familiarity."16 Just after the turn of the century the suburban form began to change. The increased cost of real estate in the city led land speculators and real estate developers to survey fields and meadows, imprinting streets and creating a landscape, neither rural nor urban, where people could enjoy both city and country lives. 17 Profits were abundant for developers of the early twentieth century. Some learned that greater profits could be realized from "new arrangements of streets and structures, from new building materials, and from integrated beauty." People in search of rural settings and something "unique would force private developers to reach new levels of residential design and new levels of profit."18 Large-scale suburbs on curvilinear street systems, like Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, were planned as early as 1895 by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. 19 Olmsted (landscape architect of the nineteenth century) had outlined the requirements of city planning. His plan stated that first, main thoroughfares "should be direct, ample, and convenient no matter how they cut the land." Second, other roads must be "quiet, attractive" residential streets, not "fantastically rooked," but laid out "so as to discourage their use as thoroughfares." Third, was the necessity of park land and public open spaces.20 Some suburban 14Gowans, Alan. The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture. 1890-1930. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1986, p. 16. 15ln the early 1930s a debate about the tackiness of the suburbs began, establishing the lines of argument still evident today (Stilgoe, John R. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb. 1820-1939. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1988, p.5). Automobile transportation of the 1930s changed the dynamics between urban and suburban lifestyles. "The freedom of movement the automobile produced undermined the unity achieved by streetcars and eventually made suburbs independent entities (Barth, p.57). Also, massive federal intervention fueled the exodus of middle-class Americans from troubled cities and helped to change the concept of the suburb (Stilgoe, p.5). 16Barth,p.31. 17Barth,p.41. 18Stilgoe, p.226. 19Gowans,p.21. 20Stilgoe, pp. 226-7. X See continuation sheet |
