ABSTRACT
The landscape architect was in a unique position at mid-century to influence the planning of the American city. There was a strain, however, in the uneasy partnerships forged between planners and city governments. The nineteenth-century landscape architecture movement was a vestigial part of the apparatus responsible for the meteoric growth of the city. It was vestigial in the sense that landscape architects, committed to an agrarian ideology, enthusiastically cooperated in the development of urban areas that were, in totality, not hospitable to their Jeffersonian notions of the land. Their historical rôle is a dramatic acting out of a conflict implicit in American democracy. Their problem was how to maintain cultural ideas associated with a preurban society in the face of rapid urbanization. But at mid-century it was too late effectively to change the basic social and economic conditions of the American city. The landscape architect thus found himself in the inglorious position of trying to salvage what he thought to be the essence of American democratic life from the philistinism of the commercial city. His solution was to design park lands for the urban centers.
