As Milwaukee’s chief park planner in the early to mid-twentieth century, Charles Whitnall responded to the various underlying ideologies of the period within which he worked. His preference for parks was a political and physical response to and remedy for the industrialized and heavily congested city he called home. By examining the Progressive Era discourse associated with planning, this article situates Whitnall’s work within the political, aesthetic, and environmental contexts of geographic thought that influenced his plans for Milwaukee. In promoting a physical awareness associated with the natural features of the region and responding to the sociopolitical framework of contemporaries such as Ebenezer Howard, Whitnall incorporated a sense of compassion within his planning. He responded to the preexisting beer gardens of Pabst and Schlitz, as well as Olmsted-designed park spaces, by advocating for decentralization as part of a broader socialist agenda that had swept through Milwaukee during the early 1900s.
Currently known as the Riverwest neighborhood (because of its location due west of the Milwaukee River), the area is relatively diverse, generally perceived as politically progressive and active in civic affairs. The neighborhood is home to many artists, students, and civic-minded residents, in addition to an assortment of local shops, restaurants, and institutions. The Whitnall property, though shadowed on one side by the recent construction of a four-story condominium, still sits amid a small knoll north of Locust and east of N. Dousman in the Riverwest neighborhood. "Quaint Old Whitnall Home Is Durable," Milwaukee Journal, January 7, 1968.
2.
See William George Bruce, History of Milwaukee City and County (Chicago: Clarke, 1922); and John Goadby Gregory, History of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Chicago: Clarke, 1931).
3.
"The House of Philosophy and Flowers,"Milwaukee Journal, July 25, 1953.
4.
Harry Anderson, "Recreation, Entertainment, and Open Space: Park Traditions in Milwaukee County," in Ralph Aderman, ed., Trading Post to Metropolis: Milwaukee County’s First 150 years ( Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1982), 255-323.
5.
John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2006), 62-64.
6.
Ibid., 121-22.
7.
"A Park for Milwaukee," Milwaukee Sentinel, August 22, 1872. Also see Victor Greene, "Dealing with Diversity: Milwaukee’s Multiethnic Festivals and Urban Identity, 1840-1940,"Journal of Urban History31, no. 6 (September 2005): 820-49 for a discussion of the establishment of Milwaukee as a preeminent German city (along with St. Louis and Cincinnati), which contributed to the development of both the beer gardens and, later, the socialist framework that ultimately contributed to broader urban planning ideals in the early twentieth century .
8.
Ernest Louis Meyer, Bucket Boy, a Milwaukee Legend (New York: Hastings House, 1947), p. 21.
9.
Christian Wahl , "Public Park System in the City," in H. Louis Conrad, ed., History of Milwaukee County from its First Settlement to the Year 1895, vol. 1 (New York: American Biographical , 1895), 300-306.
10.
Ibid.
11.
For analysis and description of Olmsted’s work, see Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Anne W. Spirn, "Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted," in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 91-113; S.B. Sutton, Civilizing American Cities: A Selection of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Writings on City Landscapes ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971); and C. Beveridge and P. Rocheleau, Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape ( New York: Rizzoli, 1995).
12.
Sutton, Civilizing, 93.
13.
William H. Wilson , The City Beautiful Movement ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 10.
14.
Ibid., 24-25.
15.
Lorne Platt, "Pastoral and Political Nature: Historical Planning and the Environmental Justice of Parks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin" (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2008).
16.
Gandy, Concrete, 87.
17.
Milwaukee Metropolitan Park Commission, "8th Annual Report,"Milwaukee County Parks Files, 10.
18.
Letter of August 13, 1890, in response to letter sent by Milwaukee Park Commission Mr. Fr. Olmsted c/o World’s Fair Directors, Chicago, Ill.
Interview with Kurt Holzhauer (July 8, 2008), son of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Holzhauer, who acquired the property in 1951. The Whitnalls and the Holzhauers are the only owners of the property, as Kurt Holzhauer now owns and lives in the home his parents purchased from the Whitnalls in 1951.
22.
Gurda, Making, 268.
23.
24.
Rutherford H. Platt, The Ecological City ( Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); see in particular the introduction and the overview chapter, which provides a summary of the historical planning ideologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
25.
Peter Kropotkin , as quoted in Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 145.
26.
Hall, Cities, 147.
27.
Ibid., 148-55.
28.
Judith Kenny, Deanna Benson, and David Bump, "Beyond the ‘Zone of Workingmen’s Homes,’" Wisconsin Geographer21 (2006): 15-40.
29.
Gifford Pinchot, "Conservation and the Progressive Ideology," 84, and Edward Dalton, "Combating Disease and Pollution in the City,"136-37, in Donald Worster , ed., American Environmentalism (New York: John Wiley, 1973)
30.
Peter Hall and Colin Ward, Social Cities (New York: John Wiley , 1998), 4; Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard ( Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1988), 7. Though Howard was in Chicago from 1872 to 1876, after the great fire of 1871, it is argued that the name "the garden city" helped influence the title of his future work.
31.
For a comprehensive discussion of the intertwining influences between planners in Europe and the United States, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 42-50.
32.
Lisanne Radice, Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists (London: Macmillan, 1984); see 57-58 for a description of the practical origins of the Fabians. Though the society had been in existence prior to Webb and Shaw’s involvement, they are largely credited with moving it into a prominent position.
33.
Beevers, Garden City, 30-31.
34.
Hall and Ward, Social Cities, 30 for details on the influence of Sidney Webb for the Fabians. Furthermore, many Fabians, including their secretary, Edward Pease, openly ridiculed Garden Cities. In addition, Pease would state in reference to Howard’s "Garden Cities of To-Morrow": "Now Mr. Howard proposes to pull them all down and substitute garden cities, each duly built according to pretty plans, nicely designed with a ruler and compass. The author has read many learned and interesting writers, and the extracts he makes from their books are like plums in the unpalatable dough of his utopian scheme." Quoted in Beevers, Garden City, 71.
35.
Hall and Ward, Social Cities, 28.
36.
Hall, Cities, 87.
37.
Ibid., 87.
38.
Ebenezer Howard , Garden Cities of Tomorrow ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 46.
39.
Many thanks to John McCarthy who-during several conversations at the Society for American City and Regional Planning History conference in Portland, Maine, during the fall of 2007-enlightened me to the relevance of Whitnall’s Fabian socialism.
40.
Elizabeth Jozwiak, "Politics in Play: Socialism, Free Speech, and Social Centers in Milwaukee,"Wisconsin Magazine of History86, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 10-21.
41.
Milwaukee Metropolitan Park Commission, "1st Annual Report," January 1909.
42.
Milwaukee County Regional Planning Department , "1st Annual Report,"1924.
43.
Diane Eagan, "Park’s Planners and the People" (master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1970).
44.
Charles B. Whitnall, Lecture at University of Southern California (USC), 1937, Milwaukee County Historical Society, Whitnall File. Please note, there is no specific page number for this document. In 1902, only Boston and Baltimore exceeded Milwaukee in density as defined by persons per acre. Milwaukee vied with Detroit and Buffalo for the largest percentage of citizens belonging to the working class. In addition, along with New York City, Milwaukee led the nation’s cities in terms of percentage of foreign-born residents.
45.
Milwaukee Metropolitan Park Commission, "1st Annual Report," January 1909.
46.
"Principles Which Led to the Organization of the County Park Commission" report of the Milwaukee County Park Commission, January 1906, as quoted in Eagan, "Park’s Planners,"2.
47.
Susan M. Wirka , "The City Social Movement: Progressive Women Reformers and Early Social Planning," in Mary C.Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning in the Twentieth-Century American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 55-75.
48.
Ibid., 60.
49.
David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1925 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 111-12; M. Melosi, "Environmental Crisis in the City: The Relationship between Industrialization and Urban Pollution," in M. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930 ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 3-31, for a general discussion of public health and cities.
50.
Milwaukee Metropolitan Park Commission, "2nd Annual Report," November 1909.
51.
Judith W.Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982)
52.
Gurda, Making, 216.
53.
W. Clausen, "Early Planning for Land Use and Community Parks in the City of Milwaukee," in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Professional Improvement Conference on Historical Perspectives (1980), as quoted in Donna L. Erickson, "The Relationship of Historic City Form and Contemporary Green-way Implementation: A Comparison of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (USA) and Ottawa, Ontario (Canada),"Landscape and Urban Planning68 (2004): 199-221.
54.
Daniel Hoan, City Government: The Record of the Milwaukee Experiment ( New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 62.
55.
Board of Public Land Commissioners, January 1921, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee City Club Files box 7, file 10. Letter written to the Common Council signed by Geo. F. Stall, secretary of the Commission. However, it is likely that Charles Whitnall-based on his expertise and influence and because of the particularities of language choice-was involved in the writing of this document.
56.
Charles B. Whitnall, "Milwaukee County Parkways," Our Native Landscape1, no. 4 (April-July 1928): 3.
57.
Ibid., 3-4.
58.
David Schuyler , The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). See his discussion on Riverside, Illinois, in particular, 162-66.
59.
Gandy, Concrete ; Ulf Strohmayer, "Urban Design and Civic Spaces: Nature at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris," Cultural Geographies13, no. 4 ( 2006): 557-76. Though not focusing on American park planning, this analysis provides a context for contemplating the labor-intensive work in constructing urban parks in Paris.
60.
Charles B. Whitnall, "The Philosophy, Evolution and Objective of the Milwaukee County Parks Commission," Milwaukee County Historical Society, Whitnall File (1942), 4-11.
61.
Charles B. Whitnall, "How a Lecture Course Saved the Shores of Milwaukee County," American City (August 1941), 38-40.
62.
For a summary of discussions centering on the impact of industrialization on the landscape see, also see Andrew Hurley, "Fiasco at Wagner Electric: Environmental Justice and Urban Geography in St. Louis," Environmental History 2, no. 4 (1997): 460-81; G. Rowan and C. Fridgen, "Brownfields and Environmental Justice: The Threats and Challenges of Contamination," Environmental Practice 5, no. 1 (2003): 58-60; and Melosi, "Environmental."
63.
One such neighborhood, the Polish South Side, grew because of its proximity to industrial jobs and cheap land costs. For further detail on the location, demographics, and in particular the response of the community to housing density in the form of increased housing density, see Judith Kenny, "Polish Routes to Americanization: House Form and Landscape on Milwaukee’s Polish South Side," in Robert C. Ostergren and Thomas R. Vale, eds., Wisconsin Land and Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 263-79. For a discussion of the effect of growth on various neighborhoods in Milwaukee throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Roger Simon, The City-Building Process: Housing and Services in New Milwaukee Neighborhoods 1880-1910 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996); also see Judith W. Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), chap. 1 on Milwaukee’s health problems, where Leavitt provides a context to analyze the relationship between urban growth and its effects on community health in the city.
64.
John McCarthy, "The Reluctant City: Milwaukee’s Fragmented Metropolis 1920-1960" (PhD diss., Marquette University, 2005 ).
65.
Gurda, Making, 269.
66.
Erickson, "Relationship."
67.
Anderson, "Recreation,"290.
68.
Charles B. Whitnall , "The Philosophy, Evolution and Objective of the Milwaukee County Parks Commission," Milwaukee County Historical Society, Whitnall File (1942), 4-11.
69.
Whitnall, "How a Lecture."
70.
Ibid.
71.
For a comprehensive discussion on the conditions of urban America in the middle to late nineteenth century, see Ward, Poverty , 29.
72.
Martin Melosi, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy and the Environment ( Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 32.
73.
Charles B.Whitnall, lecture at USC, 1937, Milwaukee County Historical Society, Whitnall File.
74.
"The Bridge Builder," by Will Allen Dromgoole, from Milwaukee County Park Commission stationary, 1924.
