Book Description

Excerpt from A Plan for Civic Improvement for the City of Oakland, California Gentlemen: You have instructed me to examine the city of Oakland with a view to suggesting such changes as may add to its attractiveness and enhance its civic beauty. Since concluding the investigations made in response to this request, the city of San Francisco has suffered from such a calamity that in the first rush of sympathy it has seemed a heartless and inappropriate act to plan for the pleasures and beauty of a neighboring community. But in the larger view, in the light of calm consideration rather than of emotion, this must appear to be a wise procedure. The citizens of San Francisco themselves are planning for a greater city; and however necessary for you such forethought may before have seemed, the recent events has added vastly to its importance. Oakland can hardly fail, now to increase even more rapidly than heretofore in population and in business. To increasing extent it must become more than the dormitory of San Francisco, - while becoming that also with more than former emphasis. You have to plan for a great city, and for a population that to a peculiar extent will need parks and pleasure grounds; and if these reservations are not chosen now, the cost and general difficulties of securing them will grow much more rapidly than will your ability to meet them. What is not planned for at this propitiously early date may never be obtained. Indeed, there are few cities that, with a power to prepare for the future, are given the opportunity to for see it with such clearness as it may now be confidently predicted here. Nor is it heartless thus to consider your own future. The future Oakland will certainly be the home of many of tho see who have recently suffered in San Francisco. It can scarcely be doubted that in anticipating that you are as certainly planning for the pleasure and comfort of thousands of them as for the happiness and well-being of yourselves. But before drawing a picture of the Oakland you ought to make, we must consider the Oakland that is. It were idle to contemplate revolutionary schemes. In order that the city may prosper while it grows there is needed, not a new Oakland, but a developed Oakland. I conceive it my duty to study what can be made out of Oakland, not how it might be made over. And let me say here that I have found the pursuit of these investigations a most inspiring and pleasant task, not alone because of the city's lovely natural setting and the need that advantage be taken of this while time remains, but because of the administrations tireless and cordial co-operation in the work and of the confident and generous backing by the press. City Building A Science. Nor shall we be dealing with only esthetic needs. Modern city building is a science quite as much assert. It has to do also with social, moral, commercial and industrial problems, for the beautifying of a city is not artistically done and, therefore not well done, unless it incidentally helps to solve such questions just as these problems -have not been solved properly until their solutions incidentally add to the- beauty of the city. For beauty is not an ornament to be stuck on. Its essence lies in its structural utility. We must consider, therefore, not merely the superficial beauty of the city, but the convenience of its traffic, the social and economic as certainly as the toporraphical divisions of the urban territory; the items of fire protection and of hygienic requirements, of property values; the future needs as well as the present, and the consistency of the whole plan as well as excellence of details. I shall go into no discussion of all this, as it would take a volume; but, underlying every recommendation, I can assure you, there will have been consideration of these many factors.