Water, the City Beautiful & Progressive Conservation in Los Angeles, 1890-1913

(1)

Water, the City Beautiful

& Progressive Conservation in Los Angeles,

1890-1913

Tracy Doyle

tdoyle8@gmail.com

Research Master’s Thesis

Department of History

Graduate School of Humanities

Universiteit van Amsterdam

Prof. dr. Ruud Janssens

Advisor

July 2, 2013

(2)

2

List of Images

Image 1. Birdseye Map of Los Angeles, California (1877). ... 5

Image 2. California orange crate labels ... 7

Image 3. Bird’s-eye view of Los Angeles, 1894. B.W. Pierce. ... 8

Image 4. Los Angeles River watershed ... 15

Image 5. Charles Dudley Arnold, 'Court of Honor, World's Columbian Exposition' (1893).. ... 40

Image 6. Bird’s-eye view of the McMillan Plan, 1901-1902 ... 40

Image 7. Plan of Chicago, with aerial view toward lake.. ... 45

Image 8. Proposed site for the Public Library and Art Gallery and Approaches, City Beautiful Plan for Los Angeles, (1907). ... 54

Image 9. The Fontaine Molière, Paris. ... 55

Image 10. Joseph B. Lippincott ... 68

Image 11. Crowds at the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct on November 5, 1913 .. 83

(4)

4

Introduction

If the West was dominated by the theology of infrastructure, Los Angeles was its Rome. Cobbled together out of swamp, floodplain, desert, and mountains, short of water and painfully dependent on far-away resources to survive, Los Angeles is sited on inhospitable terrain, located where the continent runs out of land. No city should be here. --Kazys Varnelis in The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles1

Los Angeles, as the saying goes, should never have existed where it does today. “There is no lack of water here,” Edward Abbey claimed in his 1968 book Desert Solitaire, “unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”2_{The natural conditions}

needed to support a population of any size—water, arable soil, natural resources—are not found naturally in the semi-arid desert of the western United States. The search for and more importantly the control of water is inherent to the story of the development of the region. The area’s economic, social, political and environmental history can be attributed to the role of water in its formation. Nowhere in the West has water played a more significant role in shaping a society than in twentieth-century Los Angeles.

Los Angeles was built on the nostalgic image of past eras. The agrarian myth promised simpler times of green pastures, independence and democratic values. Modern technology watered the desert to turn the dry land into the Garden of Eden. This man-made Eden offered redemption and salvation to the lost souls of the Eastern cities in the form of sunshine, Mediterranean gardens, and irrigated oases.

Los Angeles boosters in the 1890’s were enormously successful in attracting large numbers of Easterners and Midwesterners to the region on the promise of sunshine and opportunity. The warm climate offered relief for those suffering from respiratory disease and other illnesses, while the open spaces and rugged natural landscapes lured those seeking a new Eden-like paradise. As early as 1873, doctors were advising their well-to-do patients to travel to Southern California, “the Italy of

1_{Kazys Varnelis, “Introduction” in Kazys Varnelis, ed., The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los} Angeles (Barcelona: Actar, 2009), 9.

(5)

5 America,” as a cure for their ailments.3_{The city’s population grew exponentially in the}

fifty years that followed, transforming itself from an agricultural landscape of Mexican rancheros to the fourth most populous city in the United States in less than half a century. Boosters understood that in order to sustain the continued population growth they had envisioned, a greater and more sustainable source of water than what existed would be needed. The result was an unprecedented drive for an additional water source that reached beyond the region to import water to this fast-growing urban area.

Image 1. E.S. Glover, Birdseye Map of Los Angeles, California (1877).

Water was the most important element in ensuring the success of Los Angeles. The drive to maintain and control a sustainable source of water has defined the city’s history throughout the twentieth century. The Los Angeles River supported the region’s agricultural community with irrigation for many centuries prior to 1900. As growth projections increased, engineers and boosters alike needed to find a secure source of water that would sustain the city’s future vision through the Progressive years.

Boosters and the Land of Sunshine

Prior to the arrival of Spanish colonists in 1769, the region around what is now Los Angeles was inhabited by the indigenous San Gabrielino indians who settled along the banks of what was later known to the Spanish as the Río Porciúncula. They built irrigation canals along the river, but did so as not to leave an imprint on the natural landscape. This reflected the Native American belief in the symbiosis of nature and

3_{Tom Zimmerman, “Paradise Promoted: Boosterism and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce” in} California History, Vol. 64, 1 (Winter 1985), 23.

(6)

6 humans; they believed that both water and land were “interconnected with all of nature and [were] essential for both human and animal survival.”4_{The seasonal ebb and flow}

of what later came to be known as the Los Angeles River provided irrigation for their fields and respectfully left the fewest marks on the landscape.

Spanish colonists arriving in the Alta California region of Mexico brought the European conviction that nature in all its forms was a divine gift to be dominated and exploited by humans in the name of God. Early Spanish colonial law declared that “[m]an has the power to do as he sees fit with those things that belong to him according to the laws of God and man.”5_{Spanish missions in California were established near}

rivers that could provide irrigation for the surrounding lands. The Río Porciúncula— meaning “little portion” in Spanish—was such a place. The Pueblo de la Reina de Los

Angeles was established in 1781, where its Mexican governors felt that “the benefit of

irrigation” should be available for land cultivation. The Mexican system of irrigation canals (zanjas) fed off the waters of the Los Angeles River; they were the dominant form of water management for both agricultural and domestic use in the city.

The Los Angeles River is the only indigenous water source in the semi-arid coastal plains of southern California. From its headwaters in groundwater reservoirs in the San Fernando Valley north of present-day Los Angeles to its discharge point in Long Beach at the Los Angeles Harbor, the river was used primarily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for irrigating farmlands and ranches on the city’s outskirts. It also served as a source of domestic water for residents living in the city center. Spanish colonial water law stipulated that the pueblo had an exclusive right to the river’s waters, making the water itself the property of the pueblo. This was in contradiction to the riparian principles of English common law adopted by the rest of the country at the time—a principle dominated by the need to regulate areas of water abundance compared with Spanish policy that was more focused on arid regions.6_{In these regions}

water sources needed to be managed to ensure fair and equal use. This inherited water policy stood unchallenged throughout the nineteenth century and remained the cornerstone of water supply management by the city of Los Angeles.

4_{Norris Hundley, Jr. The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s (Berkeley: University of}

California Press, 1992), 4.

5_{Ibid, 26.}

6_{William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles’ Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Los}

(7)

7 Water use in Los Angeles in the mid-nineteenth century was used for irrigation and domestic purposes. When California claimed independence from Mexico in 1846 and was ceded to the United States after the Mexican-American War, the region’s farmers were using the water from the Los Angeles River for irrigation and as a water source for their livestock. Excess water from the Los Angeles River was sold by the city to neighboring communities, industry, and agriculture and provided a consistent source of revenue for the city coffers.7_{The completion of the transcontinental railroad from}

the east coast directly to Los Angeles in 1876 marked the transition of the city from a rural to an urban oasis, enabling droves of tourists and health-seekers to come experience the wonders of the new Garden of Eden that boosters had so enthusiastically and strategically promoted.

Image 2. California orange crate labels which sold the paradise image of southern California to East Coast residents. Photo courtesy of Calisphere/University of California Digital Archives (right) and the Orange County Archives (left).

Los Angeles’ population exploded from just over 5700 residents in 1870 to more than 102,000 at the turn of the century. This explosive growth did not come without its challenges. Boosters and members of the civic elite—a group comprised primarily of those who had emigrated to Los Angeles from the Midwest—tried to stay one step ahead of the growing population in providing infrastructure and social services. These individuals had much to gain from ensuring the region’s growth: open land was bought up as property values soared, making wealthy men out of those who had taken the risk of moving to the region; others profited from selling commercial services to the growing droves of newcomers. In all cases, it was in these individuals’ best interest to ensure the continuity of the city they referred to as the “Land of Sunshine.” More specifically, they questioned the capacity of the Los Angeles River’s water supply for the city and the role

(8)

8 of water in the city’s future. What had once been the lifeblood of the agricultural paradise of southern California in the nineteenth century had by 1900 become a depleted, sewage-strewn waterway neglected by its surroundings.

Image 3. Bird’s-eye view of Los Angeles, 1894. B.W. Pierce. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Southern California.

Until recently, most residents of Los Angeles would have neglected to mention the fact that the city even has a river; those that did would have hardly called it one. Yet the Los Angeles River enabled early growth and expansion of the city up to 1913. It served as the city’s only source of water until the turn of the twentieth century, supplying drinking water to residents and irrigation to the groves of fruit and vegetables on the outskirts of downtown. In the halo of population growth, more demands were put on the river’s water flow and its groundwater was pumped to extract additional supplies. By 1900 the city’s Board of Water Commissioners proclaimed that it needed to look for an additional source of water to support the growing metropolis, leading William Mulholland to Owens Valley in 1905 to search for a new supply.

Nature, Progress and the American West

Nineteenth-century America was struggling to reconcile its agrarian past, industrial present, and technological future. Irish historian J.B. Bury wrote in 1920 that “the idea of human Progress [sic]…is a theory which involves a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future.” He stated that “the hope of an ultimate happy state on this planet to be enjoyed by future generations—or of some state, at least, that may

(9)

9 relatively be considered happy—has replaced, as a social power, the hope of felicity in another world.”8_{The role of nature in nineteenth-century American society was}

transitioning as a sign of divinity representing God’s work on Earth to a tool of technological and scientific achievement. Historian David Nye writes of the notion of a technological sublime in relation to nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization, modernization and technological progress. Evoking the eighteenth-century classical theories of the natural sublime, Nye refers to the ideas of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant in which “natural grandeur could deepen and strengthen the mind of the observer”.9_{The individual person, when confronted with the magnitude and vastness}

of the natural landscape, experiences a process of humiliation at the grandeur of the object he is observing and a feeling of awe at the sublime power of God and divinity in creating such landscapes. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century, a technological sublime commenced in which “awe and reverence once reserved for the Deity and later bestowed upon the visible landscape is directed toward technology, or rather the technological conquest of matter.”10_{The awe that nature used to inspire in}

humans was replaced by an awe of the technology and machines used to direct that nature.11

Progress in America was marked throughout the nineteenth century by geographic expansion across the continent. Land—and the domination over it—was part of the American Myth. Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of agrarianism formed a pillar of American identity, driving Americans further west in search of land ownership for the small farmer. The West was the new American Empire, a place to be dominated and inhabited by Americans who sought opportunity and democratic virtue through the working of the land. In an era of growing urbanization at the end of the nineteenth century, cities were challenged with a range of social ills: overcrowding, disease, crime and pollution led to a degrading of living conditions in urban areas that were seen as the pinnacle of industrialization and progress. The agrarian myth and ideal of the yeoman

8_{J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (Original publisher unknown, 1920),}

Project Gutenberg, release date January 5, 2010, http://www.gutenberg.org/4/5/5/4557/.

9_{David Nye, “The Electricfied Landscape: A New Version of the Sublime” in Modern American Landscapes}

(Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), 77-78.

10_{Ibid, 78.} 11_{Ibid, 82.}

(10)

10 farmer thus provided many Americans with an image of open space, freedom and independence that was quickly disappearing in America’s urban centers.

The migration of Americans westward across the continent was embodied in mythical and ideological frameworks. The idea of Manifest Destiny invoked God in the expansion of the American Empire across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. American progress was paramount, and divinely ordained development of the West fed settlers to forge past the established frontiers and conquer the West with their religion, knowledge, technology and culture. In this sense the West played a dual role: first, it appealed to the agrarian ideal by providing the opportunity for individual Americans to own land and live from it; and second, it fulfilled the ambition of American progress and growth by allowing the empire to expand across the continent. The expansion of democracy across the frontier, willed by God and the Protestant work ethic, would ensure the posterity of the American empire. Wilderness, Native American Indians and uncultivated land stood in the way of settlement but brought American’s closer to the divine hand of God in nature.

This myth of nature in the American West has formed the basis of the American character for most of the twentieth century. Historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Henry Nash Smith have eloquently documented the paradoxes that have shaped the perception of the American West. Expansion in the West was expected to provide new farming and agriculture opportunities, ensuring American democracy and a new American empire. Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed in 1893 that the nation need look towards the West for its future, away from the eastern seaboard and European ideals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The West was the convergence of civilization and savagery, Turner announced, and best represented the American persona.12_{The West was the future of America and migration in that direction reflected}

the growing influence of the ideals of progress in forming the national vision. Entwined in this vision of progress was the development of scientific and technological solutions to assist American settlers with the development of these new territories.

During the 1890s, not only were cities looking to move from private to public ownership of water systems, but the U.S. federal government was taking steps to regain

12_{Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company,}

(11)

11 control of its western lands for irrigation. Progressive Era ideals in the age of Teddy Roosevelt championed social progress, economic growth and the belief that the American empire was to be elevated and defended—“the greatest good for the greatest number” was the era’s slogan. In this light, the empire of the American West was to be treasured, encouraged and sustained. The government, which had promoted westward expansion and the promise of economic development, could not neglect Eastern settlers who had moved west in search of the elusive agrarian myth. The ideal of the family farm linked the Progressive principles of social progress and economic development with resource conservation.13_{President Roosevelt stated in his 1901 annual message to}

Congress that “Our aim should be not simply to reclaim the largest area of land and provide homes for the largest number of people, but to create for this new industry the best possible social and industrial conditions.”14_{The arid lands of the Western empire}

could not support this new population of settlers without irrigation—with no way to harness rain and snow run-off for use during the dry season, settlers could not sustain a reliable water supply for agriculture. To complete the vicious circle, large-scale irrigation and water storage works that were required to support the vision of growth for the West were too costly for both farmers and state governments to undertake.

Conservation in the Progressive Era developed from advancements in science and technology at the turn of the twentieth century, such as hydraulic engineering. Professional specialties had developed in the fields of hydrology, forestry and geology. With this professional insight and technological capability, Roosevelt and his supporters believed that any natural resource that was not being applied to American economic advancement was a wasted resource. Water that was not being captured or stored for agricultural or human use was considered wasted. Thus conservation in the early twentieth century came to be defined as the sustainable use of natural resources for economic benefit. Through rational planning and efficient development, conservationists in the federal government felt they could control natural resources to provide the greatest benefit for the longest period of time. It promoted expansion, possibilities, and mitigated fears that future resource shortages would infringe on the

13_{Kahrl, 31.}

14_{Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Controversy (College}

(12)

12 promise of economic development of the West.15_{Under pressure from Western states,}

the federal government looked to reclamation as the means of securing their future. Congress passed the Reclamation Act in June 1902 allowing the federal government to fund irrigation projects in sixteen Western states through the sale of federal lands.16_{Water from these projects would then be sold back to farmers}

interest-free as repayment on the investment of construction costs from the irrigation from which they benefited. Owens Valley sits to the east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and is a three to four hour drive from downtown Los Angeles. It was chosen by the Reclamation Service as a possible reservoir site and irrigation project in the West before William Mulholland—then superintendent of the Los Angeles Board of Water Works— identified the region as a possible site for from which Los Angeles could obtain an additional source of water. Convinced of the area’s potential to provide a water supply that could support two million people (ten times the population at the time), Mulholland and his counterparts proceeded with plans to absorb water rights surrounding the Owens River and construct the Los Angeles Aqueuct. The further unfurling of events in the un-fairy-tale-like ending of this story reflects schemes of personal gain, municipal power and federal embarrassment, weaving a story worthy of noir scenarios of the 1930’s and 1940’s (Roman Polansky’s 1977 film Chinatown is one such example).

The construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct was an indirect result of the Conservation program in California. The aqueduct replaced the trickling Los Angeles River as the main source of water for the city. Combined with the ability to produce hydroelectric power, the Los Angeles Aqueduct provided the platform upon which the city’s boosters attracted almost 400% more population by 1920. Yet the water source from which the aqueduct drew in the Owens Valley—designed to provide enough water for fifty years and support a population of two million—was being diminished more rapidly than Mulholland had calculated. This supposed fifty-year supply was consumed by Los Angeles in just four years. Within ten years of the completion of the Los Angeles

15_{Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement,} 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 2.

16_{Currently the U.S. Census Bureau considers thirteen states comprising the West: Arizona, Alaska,}

California, Colorado, Idaho, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The Reclamation Act of 1902 also included North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma as western states. Texas lands were originally not included in the act as they did not contain any federally owned lands as of 1902.

(13)

13 Aqueduct, the city would again go searching for another greater, more abundant source of water to support its still growing population, this time turning east to the Colorado River for possible solutions. Instead of developing the region for agriculture and irrigation, Progressive Conservation turned into a source of urban growth in Los Angeles.

Metropolitan Nature: The Los Angeles River and Urban Ecology

Nowhere in the history of the United States was the paradox of urban living and the agrarian ideal more pronounced than at the turn of the twentieth century. The American metropolis had become tarnished with corruption, vice, poverty, and overcrowding; traditional American values had been lost or gambled away in the name of capitalism. The nation was seemingly divided into an urban and rural realm.

Metropolitan Los Angeles is widely viewed as an example of what not to do in the realm of urban planning and city building. From its origins as an eighteenth-century Spanish colonial mission, through its nineteenth-century Mexican heritage, to its emergence as a twentieth-century global metropolis, the history of Los Angeles has been punctuated by extremes and contradictions. Widely perceived as a “museum of failed urbanism,” the city represents a general ideology that the “growth for growth’s sake” drive by boosters and politicians throughout the twentieth century has left an indelible imprint on the environment in the form of smog, sprawl, traffic, and concrete.17

The historical discussion of urban and natural environments has evolved since the second half of the twentieth century from one of separate spheres to the development of ‘second nature’ to the integration of human culture and urban environments. Cities have historically been viewed as a human construct, “an expression of human culture, antithetical to the natural world.”18_{Urban sociologist and}

historian Lewis Mumford’s adage that “as the pavement spreads, nature is pushed away” demonstrates the earlier view that cities are intrinsically diametrical to the natural environment. William Cronon buffered this viewpoint in Nature’s Metropolis by

17_{William Deverell and Greg Hise, “The Metropolitan Nature of Los Angeles” in Land of Sunshine: An} Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 2-3. 18_{Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Los Angeles and Berkeley:}

(14)

14 introducing the concept of a ‘second nature’ where the boundaries between cities and nature blur. Chicago, as the only true metropolis of the nineteenth-century Great West, developed within the interaction between its hinterland and the cultural environment created by humans. In the West—Chicago included—cities no longer sat in stark contrast to their natural surroundings. Western cities reconciled their existence with their dependence on the natural elements.

In the past decade, historians of urban environments have focused much more on the relationship of the built and natural environments, emphasizing urban nature as a social construct. Ari Kelman and Jared Orsi take clear positions on this in their discussions of the Mississippi River and the Los Angeles River. Kelman’s argument centers on the interconnectivity of humans and their landscape by exploring the relationship between the people of New Orleans and the Mississippi River. In his examination of the city’s riverfront, he argues that instead of pitting cities against nature “the New Orleans waterfront represents a mingling of built and natural environments, and that the production of space in New Orleans has been a natural and social process.”19_{Jared Orsi takes a slightly different angle in his portrayal of the Los}

Angeles River as a flood control system. He focuses on the need to understand urban ecosystems as the relationship between natural and human structures. In his argument on how floods and ecological disasters in Los Angeles are the result of humans’ historical interaction with the region’s landscape, Orsi highlights the technological solutions put in place to protect the city from annual flood damage. Human interaction with nature has altered the course of the environment, bringing into question the notion of separate natures. Is a river engineered by humans—in this case, the concrete-lined bed of the Los Angeles River—still a river or a construct of the human environment? His answer is found in his definition of an urban ecosystem as one of “political, social, economic, cultural, and physical feature of the city [with] climate, geology, biology and topography” – a unique combination of elements that create a distinctly urban nature.20

Water in Los Angeles, especially that of the river and the aqueduct, demonstrates this type of urban nature.

19_{Kelman, location 224.}

20_{Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angles (Berkeley and Los Angeles:}

(15)

15

Urban Water Imperialism

Throughout its tumultuous first century, Los Angeles has excavated its way as an exceptional city. This exceptionalism can be identified on many planes, not all of which have carried a positive connotation. Historians, residents, outsiders and critics have all offered their share of criticism about the City of Angels. The city’s meteoric population growth at the beginning of the twentieth century, its position on the Western edge of the continent far from the eyes of the east coast, its climate and resulting paradise-like image, and its rather unconventional method of city building have all served as a source for this criticism. Each of these perspectives has served to delineate a sort of Sonderweg for the city and its surrounding region—a history and identity carved by a unique pattern of growth, planning and attitudes towards nature for more than a century.

Image 4. Los Angeles River watershed, indicating the length of the Los Angeles river and its feeder streams. Source: United States Geographical Survey.

The historiography of water use in Los Angeles and the West is important for understanding the role and meaning of the Los Angeles River in the city’s development. The construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, completed in 1913, reveals the core of the city’s relationship with its environment. Water—the lifeblood of the city—has been the central protagonist in this relationship. What is known in local L.A. history as the “Owens Valley Water Controversy” has permeated the debate about the city’s impact on the local environment. From the earliest discussions of this encounter, the “controversy” has been enveloped in moral tones. The Story of Inyo, published by Owens Valley resident Willie Chalfant in 1922, first outlined the victimization of Owens Valley residents by Los Angeles water seekers in building the aqueduct. He described the

(16)

16 “rape of the valley” by the crushing power of the Los Angeles power elite. Remi Nadeau’s The Water Seekers (1950) attempted a neutral historical account of the events leading to the transfer of water from the valley to the city, giving credit to engineers and hydrographers in their vision of a growing metropolis.21

The rise of the environmental movement in the 1960’s ushered in a new historical perspective at the end of the twentieth century of the role of water in the development of Los Angeles and the American West. These revised perspectives counteracted the earlier view points on the history of water. Donald Worster’s Rivers of

Empire (1985) outlined the theory of hydraulic societies in establishing great empires

and civilizations. Norris Hundley, Jr. wrote specifically about California’s water history and the relationship between water and human values in The Great Thirst: Californians

and Water, 1770s-1990s. In Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner applied a more journalistic

approach in detailing the alleged corruption and conspiracy that have surrounded American’s desire to dominate nature in the West. Two works that focus specifically on the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy, William Kahrl’s Water and Power:

The Conflict over Los Angeles’ Water Supply in the Owens Valley and Abraham Hoffman’s Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy, take

distinct positions in the moral debate generated over these events. Where Hoffman defended the L.A. empire builders in their attempts to build a civilization, Kahrl played to the middle ground in the argument by stating that both good and evil intentions were mixed in a no-win situation in the search for a sustainable water supply for Los Angeles.22_{In each of these cases, the debate was heavily weighted to one side or the}

other of this ethical question. By the end of the 1990’s, one was either for or against the city of Los Angeles in its defense of its twentieth-century “urban water imperialism.”23

21_{See Remi Nadeau, The Water Seekers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1950) and Willie Chalfant,} The Story of Inyo (Published by the author, 1922).

22_{See Norris Hundley, The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s (Berkeley: University of}

California Press, 1992); Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles

Water Controversy (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1981); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Viking Penguin Press, 1986); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press,

1985); William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles’ Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

23_{Norris Hundley uses the phrase “urban water imperialism” to define the growth of San Francisco and}

Los Angeles in the twentieth century: “The rapid development of both areas [SF and LA] accompanied and encouraged a vigorous boosterism in which local leaders, particularly those in Los Angeles, viewed growth as an end in itself and water as the chief means of sustaining it. The result was a new kind of

(17)

17 The following discussion of these events doesn’t necessarily ignore this moral debate, but rather looks at more recent historical research that places the human relationship with nature and the role of urban nature in mutual light. Work done by urban environmental historian Ari Kelman on the intertwined influence of New Orleans with its Mississippi River riverfront has heavily influenced my discussion of the Los Angeles River and the attitude of city residents towards its natural waterway. The scale of the rivers is significantly different, but Kelman’s message that urban nature influences the definition of public space can be found in my discussion of the City Beautiful in Los Angeles. Similarly, Jared Orsi looks at the role of human engineering in the development of urban nature. By focusing specifically on the channelization of the Los Angeles River in the 1930’s as a flood control channel, Orsi identifies the point of intersection between human influence and chaos of nature. What distinguishes these discussions from earlier historical debates about urban environmental history is the perspective that decisions made by humans that influenced their natural surroundings not only aren’t relevant but ignore the contingency of nature in urban settings. They reject the idea such as Lewis Mumford’s line of demarcation between the world of people and the world of nature, appealing to a more integrated approach to the understanding of human use of nature in cities.24

Failed Urbanism: Twentieth-Century City Planning in Los Angeles

In much the same manner that Los Angeles has been criticized throughout the twentieth century for its imperialistic behavior towards water, so too have urban critics, city planners and architectural historians looked unfavorably on the development of Southern California infrastructure in this same period. Los Angeles is often perceived by these groups as “the great what-not-to-do of twentieth-century city building and civic enterprise.”25_{Urban sprawl, the rise of the automobile, and a total lack of city}

planning contributed to the city’s apparent inability to form a coherent structure: a geometric downtown, a stately city hall, and beaux-arts forms of architecture for civic imperialism—an urban water imperialism led by public, not private, entities which aimed at controlling local and then ever more distant water sources….” See The Great Thirst, 120.

24_{See Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis; Ari Kelman, A River and Its City; and Lewis Mumford, The Culture} of Cities (1938; reprint San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1970).

25_{William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los} Angeles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 2.

(18)

18 administration buildings are largely absent in Los Angeles. When compared to the gems of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban planning such as Chicago, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, and held up against the romanticism of European capital cities, Los Angeles harrows in comparison.

The City Beautiful movement is seen as the foundation of city planning during this period. Los Angeles caught on to this movement not so much to restructure the urban problems and civic ills that other U.S. cities were struggling to overcome, but rather to build a city on par with the expectations of its boosters. Charles M. Robinson’s 1907 City Beautiful Plan for Los Angeles was never adopted and is frequently written off as one of the failures of Los Angeles urban planning. Planning historian Jon Peterson writes about Robinson’s Los Angeles plan, but describes its failure to achieve success as the result of the planner’s small-scale vision, large price tag, and a vision “strung too loosely together to restructure an already disjointed metropolis.”26_{This image of a}

disjointed metropolis frequently recurs in the city’s planning historiography. William H. Wilson’s study of the City Beautiful movement, the only work solely dedicated to the discussion of the movement, doesn’t even mention Robinson’s Los Angeles plan. Similarly, historians of Los Angeles dismiss the plan as failing to achieve any civic aesthetic and render it a lost opportunity in the city’s past to achieve true greatness. Carey McWilliams, Robert Fogelson and Mike Davis have each criticized this and other episodes in L.A. urban planning with a heavy hand.27

Urban and planning historians and theorists since the 1990’s have started to suggest another perspective on the seemingly failed urbanism of L.A. In the last decade, Los Angeles has undergone a transformation of perception. Michael Dear, professor of city and regional planning at U.C. Berkeley, refers to Los Angeles in the twenty-first century in the way that Chicago was viewed in the twentieth century. He has identified the establishment of a “Los Angeles School” of urban theory in the tradition of the Chicago School of urban sociology founded by Robert E. Parks, Ernest Burgess and Louis

26_{Jon A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840-1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins}

University Press, 2003), 197. For a specific discussion of the development of the City Beautiful movement, see William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

27_{See Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan &}

Pearce, 1942); Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

(New York: Vintage Books, 1998); and Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London and New York: Verso, 2006).

(19)

19 Wirth. Dear’s perspective is that “… for most of its history, [Los Angeles] has been regarded as an exception to the rules governing American urban development, an aberrant outliner on the continent’s western edge…. The region has become not the exception to but rather a prototype for our urban future.”28_{Los Angeles seems to be}

reconciling its sinful past with a more forgiving and understanding future.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Progressive reform movements looked to promote moral, civic and capitalist values to cure the social ills plaguing America and to preserve American democratic values. Two key movements during this period—the City Beautiful movement and the Progressive Conservation movement—both looked to nature to achieve various reform goals. One focused on urban reform while the other looked to formulate policy for the management of natural resources. Both functioned under the umbrella of Progressivism and each program ultimately strove to enhance productivity and stimulate economic growth.

Los Angeles exploded as a metropolis at the height of the Progressive Era between 1890 and 1920 despite lacking the natural resources traditionally needed to establish a major city. By the beginning of the twentieth century, boosters and civic promoters had bent, pried, and coaxed nature—specifically water—into providing the resources needed to support the needs of a growing population. With the growing influence of social and civic reform movements such as City Beautiful, politicians and civic leaders utilized the available water resources to promote the city’s growth and expansion. Proposals for civic improvements showcased water as a means of promoting health and moral improvement in the city. Yet the city’s relationship with water was better defined as a blending of the beautification goals of City Beautiful with the engineering and scientific goals of Progressive Conservation rather than as exclusively one against the other. This combination of moral, economic and scientific virtue was embodied in the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct between 1905 and 1913, demonstrating the attitudes of city planners, civic reform groups and engineers towards nature in the early twentieth century.

28_{Michael Dear, “Los Angeles and the Chicago School: Invitation to a Debate,” in City & Community, Vol. 1,}

(20)

20 This study seeks to locate the point at which ideas about the function of nature— specifically water—intersected in Los Angeles. I am not looking to identify which ideology prevailed in the history of Los Angeles urban planning and development— utility has clearly been dominant in the twentieth century. Instead I hope to establish that the utility and aesthetics of nature were not opposing ideals in early twentieth-century Los Angeles, but that both were means to the same end of economic growth. Similarly, I believe that the City Beautiful movement in Los Angeles—as drawn up by Charles Robinson in 1907—did not fail to achieve lasting success in the region as a tool of city planning. The area’s reputation as a haphazard, fragmented city often points to the failure of large scale planning efforts in making Los Angeles into an icon of urbanism rather than an example of what not to do in urban planning. Instead, I look at the role of key engineers in the city’s water program at the turn of the twentieth century, specifically Joseph Lippincott, to determine how the doctrine of science and technology intersected with the aesthetic goals of the City Beautiful program in Los Angeles. Although little is known about him, Lippincott operated within the context of both City Beautiful and Progressive Conservation, bridging the gap between these two ideologies to establish a unique form of urban nature that reflected the exceptionalism of Los Angeles. As the question of Los Angeles’ future arose in the early years of the 1900’s it is important to remember that the city’s boosters did not choose science and engineering over nature and the environment. These individuals blended the seeming paradoxes of science and nature to secure a water source for the future of Los Angeles.

By examining the perspectives of the city’s boosters and administrators together with the engineering developments that enabled the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a clearer view of the role of nature in Los Angeles at the turn of the twentieth century is gained. In chapter one, the background of the City Beautiful aesthetic is traced. I look at how the movement’s origins and ideology shaped the way cities combined nature with utility and functionality to promote civic virtue, public interest, and democratic values in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s. While urbanization and industrialization reflected the path to the future, landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmsted were unable to let go of the idyllic, agrarian past in their designs. Chapter two examines the role of city planners such as Daniel Burnham and Charles Robinson in merging the use of nature—and water in particular—to create new city plans based on the rising science of professional city planning. The White City at the 1893 Chicago

(21)

21 World’s Exposition and the 1902 McMillan Plan for Washington D.C. served as prototypes for the emerging science of city planning. The role of water in Robinson’s 1907 City Beautiful Plan for Los Angeles is analyzed in the third chapter as the means with which other aesthetic elements throughout the city could be realized. The utility of the city’s water as seen in the use of the Los Angeles River in city improvement jargon was simply a means to an end. Although the plan failed to be implemented, it served to validate the vision of southern California as the Garden of Eden. Finally, the city’s civic improvement doctrine is considered in chapter four within the context of the Progressive Conservation movement of the same era. By setting this program of federal irrigation and water storage development next to the City Beautiful movement, a distinct pattern appears. Individuals such as Joseph Lippincott functioned within the context of these two ideologies, allowing them to merge to create a unique view on urban nature at the turn of the twentieth century. By blending the ideals of civic improvement, social reform and scientific progress, Los Angeles citizens were able to use water as a canvas for growth, progress and beautification. In this sense, the city’s efforts at using nature in an urban setting didn’t fail but represented the exception of Los Angeles to the rules of other American cities of the era.

(22)

22

Chapter 1 - The City Beautiful

The City Beautiful movement was a response to the urban and social challenges of late nineteenth-century America. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration turned American cities into overcrowded, dense, and polluted areas. Poverty, vice, and decaying economic conditions were the result of urban neglect, unchecked capitalism, and the loss of civic virtue. The rural ideal of the agrarian past was no longer attainable in the urbanized world of the early twentieth century. Instead of lamenting this lost agrarian vision, proponents of the City Beautiful offered an “optimistic acceptance of the city” while “rejecting a return to the arcadian past.”1_{The emphasis was now on the city}

as the future of America rather than the rural, agrarian landscape ideal of the nineteenth century. By blending its vision with the function and expertise of the new professional field of city planning, it was able to achieve new ideas about urban nature.

The City Beautiful movement was an interlude between the village improvement movements of the 1890s and the development of city planning as a profession in the early decades of the twentieth century. The belief that traditional civic values were being challenged by the political, moral, economic, and environmental conditions of urban life pushed reformers to create plans that preserved established morals and virtues. This began in towns and cities on a small scale with a focus on improving city government. Reformers believed that government now had the responsibility for regulating the well-being and virtue of its citizens. It moved away from the unregulated individualism that led to the industrial and capital boom of the late nineteenth century towards a need to ensure the welfare of the public good. Emphasis on “municipal reform” and “good government” led to the creation of hundreds of local organizations that collectively advocated the development of a new sense of civic pride and responsibility.2_{Organizations focused on a myriad of urban issues, from city politics,}

labor issues and vice, to parks and playgrounds, public hygiene, pollution, and outdoor

1_{William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,}

1989), 78.

2_{Jon A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the U.S., 1840-1917 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins}

(23)

23 art. It reflected a new optimism towards cities and embodied the new social gospel of redemption and altruism in civic values.3

Harboring the Protestant conviction in the restorative power of order and harmony, City Beautiful reformers believed that beauty and aesthetics could enhance worker productivity and economic growth.4_{During the height of the movement}

between 1900 and 1910, City Beautiful reformers believed that if cities were to become both functional and beautiful, they would become integrated with the rural landscape.5

From flower beds and billboards, to municipal parks and boulevard systems, to water and air sanitation efforts, the City Beautiful movement reflected a broad range of civic improvements that sought to restore the visual and economic virtue of American cities. Beauty and aesthetics were the goal of civic reformers wanting to cure the social ills plaguing America during the Progressive Era. Yet instead, the emergence of a new field of professional city planning blended function and expertise with these aesthetic goals to achieve various reforms.

City Beautiful Origins & Ideology

City Beautiful advocates held much in common with other Progressive Era reformers. They were largely middle or upper-middle class men and women, elite business owners and professionals who had a vested interest in improving the economic appeal of their local communities. They viewed order, structure, harmony and cleanliness as the keys to improving the moral stature of their fellow citizens and the means for uplifting the democratic values and civic virtue of their neighborhoods and cities. They held a strong belief in the capacity of beauty and nature to shape human thought and behavior. They envisioned a secular view of nature as a source of healing for the nation’s moral demise—a shift away from the nineteenth-century vision of the sublime power of divine nature as the definition of the nation’s greatness.6

Supported by women’s groups, civic associations, and volunteer organizations, the City Beautiful movement looked to nature to achieve its reform goals. A more attractive, orderly, and efficient city could ensure growth and expansion for American

3_{Peterson, 101.} 4_{Ibid, 1.} 5_{Ibid, 86.} 6_{Wilson, 80.}

(24)

24 cities. City Beautiful advocates made use of the romantic notion of nature of the late nineteenth-century to promote urban development. Nature formed the basis of all elements of the City Beautiful ideal, from order and harmony in architecture, to parks and open space in urban environments, to waterways and fountains in cities. Yet the role of natural elements was exalted by the City Beautiful planners not only for beauty’s sake, but for utility as well. In this sense the municipal improvement movement used nature not only to achieve moral progress through beauty, but to achieve economic progress through utility and function as well. Instead of approaching aesthetics and utility separately, City Beautiful planners merged the two ideals to create an inseparable combination of functional beauty designed to promote civic virtue, public interest, and democratic values at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The City Beautiful movement surfaced at a time when efficiency, scientific expertise, and technology merged to address the nation’s social and economic problems. In the wake of urban growth, American cities and towns were viewed as failures for breaking down the moral character and democratic virtues ingrained in the national mindset.7_{The growth of U.S. cities had represented the dominance of American}

economic strength, the success of democracy, and the promise of Manifest Destiny in the expanding western American empire. The effects of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration tarnished this view. Dense population, urban sanitation, and health and welfare problems were prevalent in every major American city. Expertise was sought to solve these urban problems.

City Beautiful advocates wanted to centralize civic functions and politics, protect property and land values, and exercise a form of class and social control over what to them seemed the dangerous urban masses.8_{Historian William Wilson makes the case}

that City Beautiful reformers sought a form of social control, but then more an “inculcation of social religion….an idealized, transcendental bond among members of a community and among members of a nation or society.”9_{It sought cultural hegemony}

by controlling the definition of beauty and civic symbols rather than through totalitarian methods of social control.10_{The movement intended to centralize}

7_{Peterson, 175.} 8_{Wilson, 76.}

9_{Edward Ross, Social Control (1901) as quoted in Wilson, City Beautiful, 81.} 10_{Wilson, 81.}

(25)

25 democratic and economic functions in civic centers in the city’s retail-commercial core.11_{This functionality developed into a public art project, a promotional piece}

designed to attract people and commerce to the city center. A well-organized, beautiful, practically-planned municipality would instill moral virtue and civic pride in its citizens while simultaneously filling the city’s tax coffers through increased property values.

No national organization existed to expound this new ideology of civic improvement prior to 1894. The movement’s ideology was executed by local groups and remained a largely uncoordinated effort by disparate groups of volunteer organizations throughout the 1890’s and early 1900’s. Between 1894 and 1895, about fifty splintered organizations in fourteen states increased to more than 180 groups in thirty-one states spread across the union. Three national groups mobilized in 1895 to provide a strategy and advocacy platform for municipal improvement organizations. The National Municipal League, formed in 1894, was the largest of these groups. The American Society for Municipal Improvements was founded in that same year and enlisted engineers and public works officials to promote the efficient operation of public utilities. The American League of Municipalities focused on “the practical and political betterment” of towns and cities.12_{These groups provided a national framework and}

platform for the expanding civic improvement ideal, allowing local reform groups to become better organized and better able to take advantage of a cohesive rhetoric around citizenship and virtue.

During its formative years between 1897 and 1902—when this rhetoric and organization was being fine-tuned—municipal improvement plans focused on small-scale projects that could produce immediate and tangible results. Most plans were the work of voluntary improvement organizations, which meant that these sorts of smaller plans could be managed and executed with the limited resources these groups could accumulate. Within these limited means and with the help of newly formed national organizations, city beautification projects and rhetoric mushroomed into a cohesive movement. These men and women believed that “all citizens shared, or should share, a concern with the attractiveness and order of their cities.”13_{While grand, large-scale}

projects seemed unattainable, the focus on public art as a beautifying and unifying

11_{Wilson, 92.} 12_{Ibid, 100.} 13_{Peterson, 102.}

(26)

26 element in cities bridged the initial gap between ideology, rhetoric, and the physical embodiment of the City Beautiful ideal.

Outdoor Art & the Aesthetics of City Beautiful

The City Beautiful ideal had its roots in the nineteenth-century landscape architecture of Frederick Law Olmsted.14_{Olmsted’s trademark systems of connected parks and}

boulevards reflected the romanticism of natural landscapes. He utilized the healing qualities of nature to counteract the bane of nineteenth-century urban life. His focus was on planning parkscapes and “middle landscapes” as locales for escape from city life. Olmsted was averse to urban life, yet he designed his urban parks to be meeting places, a “locale of class reconciliation.”15_{Using open, sweeping spaces of land and natural}

contours, Olmsted incorporated hills, water, lakes, and trees in his park designs to emphasize the physical and psychological boundaries between the city and nature.

Olmsted’s park planning wasn’t designed to be purely environmental or aesthetic in purpose; his designs were economically beneficial too. Investment in landscape beauty, he argued, would be paid back directly through the raised value of property bordering the park space, thereby increasing city tax revenues.16_{In a career ranging}

from his creation of New York’s Central Park in the mid-1850s, to the establishment of the nation’s first metropolitan park system in Boston in 1880s and 1890s, to his involvement in the 1893 Chicago World’s Exposition, Olmsted had a striking influence on the beginnings of American landscape architecture and urban planning.17

The idea of public art took shape as municipal improvement associations turned to more comprehensive city improvement plans. Drawing on Olmsted’s park and landscaping aesthetics, early supporters of city beautification drafted plans to construct large-scale parks in urban spaces. These open spaces provided not only fresh air and rejuvenating activities for all city residents, but were intended to beautify and soften the harsh and industrialized landscapes of nineteenth-century cities.

Municipal art reflected the ideal of the city itself as a work of art. Urban elements could be shaped and sculpted into an ideal just as an artist created a masterpiece.

14_{Wilson, 53.} 15_{Ibid, 31.} 16_{Ibid, 30.} 17_{Peterson, 1.}

(27)

27 Where Olmsted saw parks and boulevards as alternatives to the harshness of the city, the new ideal of civic art conveyed the view that parks and boulevards were integral parts of the beautiful city as a whole. To this end, the Municipal Art Society was founded in New York in 1893 and held its first national convention in 1899. Their goal, historian Jon Peterson states, was “simply put….to make an art patron of the city, to give art a civic role.” By linking civic pride, civic art and citizenship, Peterson suggests that the municipal art movement gave wealthy New Yorkers “something to be proud of” by providing a focus for their philanthropy. In other words, City Beautiful gave the rich the feeling that they were doing something constructive and helpful towards reforming urban values.18

Outdoor art incorporated the fields of landscaping, architecture, and gardening in developing ideas about civic design.19_{In 1893, New York writer, architecture critic,}

and social activist Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer published Art Out-of-Doors, a handbook for the installation of parks and landscaping as a form of art. Rensselaer was a close observer and great admirer of the development of New York’s Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Published in the same year as the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, her book signaled a change in the perception of nature from a private experience in the form of gardens, quiet space to a public space. Humans had the ability to shape nature just as sculptors, painters, and architects created art from their materials: “…he who raises useful crops is an agriculturalist, and he who grows plants for their individual charms is a horticulturist, and he who constructs solid roads is an engineer, [and] the man who uses ground and plants, roads and paths, and water and accessory buildings, with an eye to organic beauty of effect, is—or ought to be—an artist.”20_{Landscape architects deserved to be considered}

professionals and their art recognized as a legitimate element of civic design.

Mrs. Van Rensselaer’s writings also underscored the importance of understanding a city’s parts as comprising its whole: “The effort to produce organic beauty is what makes a man an artist; neither the production of a merely useful organism nor of a beautiful isolated detail can suffice; he must compose a beautiful

18_{Peterson, 103-4.} 19_{Wilson, 35.}

20_{Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer (Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer), Art Out-Of-Doors: Hints on Good} Taste in Gardening (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 3-4.

(28)

28 whole with a number of related parts.”21_{In her promotion of parks and landscape}

architecture as outdoor art, Van Rensselaer legitimized the profession of landscaping as a component in designing and creating city spaces. It indicated a shift away from Olmstedian ideals of landscape architecture towards more comprehensive thinking towards municipal beautification schemes.22_{Newly created plans designed for city}

improvement and beautification reflected this new ethic of linking various elements of cities together—parks, boulevards, civic centers— to form a cohesive urban whole.

The Institutionalization of Nature

The professionalism of landscaping that Mariana Van Rensselaer promoted reflected the emergence of a professionalizing of nature. The American Park and Outdoor Art Association (APOAA) was created in 1897 by a cross-section of park engineers, park architects, and park commissioners to incorporate comprehensive ideas about the planning and construction of public park space. The APOAA merged with the American League for Civic Improvement (ALCI) in 1900 to become the American Civic Association, focusing on reforming cities through the implementation of the urban ideal: a clean, beautiful and well-organized city.23_{In the midst of the Progressive reform movement,}

these and other such civic-minded organizations continued to seek the spread of middle-class values “through uplift of unfortunates & establishment of their own cultural hegemony.”24_{Yet the City Beautiful ideal still lacked a tangible definition and}

specific elements that could be applied by municipalities and cities to guide them in achieving the goals of urban improvement and beautification. Improvement ideas varied from city to city; initiatives ranged from the construction of parks and playgrounds to planting flower beds and lawns, to devising boulevards systems and constructing sanitary sewer systems. All aspects of civic improvement came into play as elements of the City Beautiful, and cities were left to fill in their specific needs at will.

The establishment of the American Civic Association (ACA) signaled an organizational shift in the communication of City Beautiful ideals and aesthetics. The appointment of J. Horace McFarland as the ACA’s president in 1904 gave the City

21_{Van Rensselaer, 3.} 22_{Wilson, 35.} 23_{Ibid, 41.} 24_Ibid.

(29)

29 Beautiful movement a national voice. As founder of the Harrisburg League of Municipal Improvements and avid supporter of civic improvement ideals, McFarland spread the news of the City Beautiful by lecturing to national civic and municipal organizations. He was a conservationist as well as a planning expert, and a keen photographer of plants and flowers that led to a career as advocate for landscaping and natural spaces. This affinity for the creation of city parks led him to pursue his two passions—planning and nature—into advocacy of civic beautification. The publicity from McFarland’s speeches, lectures and writings in widely circulated national opinion magazines generated national support for the City Beautiful ideal. His articles in Outlook Magazine and Ladies’

Home Journal in addition to the pamphlets he produced preached the virtues of civic

beautification. As president of the ACA, McFarland supported plans for urban renewal, “linking beautification to a civilizing impulse affecting the urban environment.”

McFarland also served as a key link between City Beautiful and the Progressive Conservation movement, advocating planning and conservation as the responsibility to “make the best use of [our] heritage of land and water resources for [our] own and coming generations.”25_{He spoke at conservation conferences (including an address to}

Theodore Roosevelt’s National Conservation Congress in 1908), served as a key supporter of the development of a National Park Service, campaigned to preserve Niagara Falls from commercial interests, and fought to save Hetch Hetchy Valley in California.26_{In this capacity, McFarland’s efforts embodied the spirit of progressive}

reform and united the renewing impulses of both civic beautification and scientific efficiency.

McFarland crafted and distributed the City Beautiful message through his various how-to pamphlets and magazine articles published nationally from 1904 through 1907. His how-to instruction bulletins covered diverse aspects of beautification written by specialists about home and yard improvement, billboard regulation, mosquito control, smoke abatement, playgrounds, recreation, and other aspects of village improvement. McFarland focused his advice and speeches on improvements in smaller cities, those with a population between 2,500 and 250,000; he contended that these smaller cities missed an advocate or civil servant that worked for

25_{Julian C. Chambliss, “Perfecting Space: J. Horace McFarland and the American Civic Association” in} Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Vol. 77-4 (2010), 8-9.

Water, the City Beautiful &amp; Progressive Conservation in Los Angeles, 1890-1913