1 Chapter One" Setting, Landscape, Architecture, and the Creation of Civic Space in the United States, 1790-1920 At the beginning of his pathbreaking study, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1971), social historian David J. Rothman posed this question: Why did Americans in the Jacksonian era suddenly begin to construct and support institutions for the deviant and dependent members of the community? Why in the decades after 1820 did they all at once erect penitentiaries for the criminal, asylums for the insane, almshouses for the poor, orphan asylums for homeless children, and reformatories for delinquents? (xv). "Institutions," he wrote, "became places of first resort, the preferred solution to the problems of poverty, crime, delinquency, and insanity" (xv). The architecture of these institutions, Rothman continues, "became the central concern of reformers of the period" (83). They focused their attention on physical arrangements and carefully scheduling inmates' activities with the expectation these were central to the task of rehabilitation. These "advocates of moral architecture," Rothman wrote, did not see the impact of their work restricted to the deviant and dependent: they expected that penitentiaries, asylums, and other institutions would, by example and by virtue of their being based on "proper principles of social organization," would serve as models for society as a whole. These initiatives were framed by a peculiar sense of urgency that went well beyond concerns about the poor and the criminal. To the reformers, according to Rothman, "nothing less than the safety and future stability of the republic was at issue, the triumph of good over evil, of order over chaos" (85). Dependence and deviance, the reformers believed, were symptoms of a breakdown in traditional community. Through "moral architecture" and the practices associated with in, they hoped to "point the way to a reconstitution of the social structure" (84). This essay argues that the wave of institution building so insightfully analyzed by Rothman actually began much earlier and, while motivated by the same desire to rehabilitate and reform, focused its energies not only on the dependent, diseased, and deviant, but also on society as a whole. The problems of deviance that penitentiaries and asylums sought to address were, I suggest, only the most extreme and dangerous symptoms of a much broader breakdown of community and authority

2 that concerned certain religious and political leaders in the decades following the American Revolution. This more comprehensive response, rather than creating specialized agencies targeting selected portions of the population, sought to redesign the physical environment -- the setting, landscape, and architecture -- in which all Americans lived their public and private lives. The intentions and methods were similar: the Federal period reformers, like their Jacksonian successors, sought to use "moral architecture" and didactic landscape to shape the values of their fellow citizens. In doing so, they created unique kinds of public spaces that not only channeled and formed the ways in which individuals pursued their economic and political interests, but also framed them in ways that made them affirm rather than negate community and its authority. The Foundations of Community Community life rests on underlying shared values and agreements that are often unstated and barely recognized. They are shaped by religious and cultural traditions or by the exigencies of a group's living situation that have created ways of doing things that powerfully shape organizational patterns, willingness to volunteer and participate, feelings of legitimacy in government and safety in the face of authority. Social activities that Talcott Parsons called “latent pattern maintenance” are the topic here: religious practices, civic rituals, and the development of the symbolism of community. Although social scientists often refer to “traditional communities” in the United States, the reality is that most American communities were intentional ones. Unlike other countries, where collectivities were deeply rooted in ethnic identity and place, from colonial times onward, immigration -- whether trans-Atlantic or internal -- offered Americans opportunities to make choices about the kinds of communities they wanted to live in. This capacity of choice was not only a product of place, but of historical moment. From the seventeenth century on, as philosophers, jurists, and theologians challenged (or defended) the feudal order, concerns about the nature of political, social, and religious communities moved to the forefront of interest. The opportunity for colonization of new lands shifted this interest from the domain of theory to the domain of practical experiments in creating new kinds of communities.

3

The extent to which religious belief moved people to migrate and to form new collectivities gave the question of community a particular urgency. As John Winthrop's remarkable homily to the Massachusetts Bay colonists, while still on board the ship that had carried through the perils of the Atlantic suggests, the nature of the new community the little band intended to create, the extent to which it would embody their beliefs, and its place in God's ultimate plan for mankind, was at the forefront of their concerns. For groups moved by religious belief, scripture and theology were the source not only for defining man's place in the cosmos, but for spelling out the nature of community, the kinds of obligations believers had to one another and to unbelievers, the character of family life, as well as aspects of everyday life, including food ways, parenting, and sexual practices. The intentionality of early American communities is evident from the beginning. Most settlements were based on charter documents. Some were corporate charters, like those of the Massachusetts Bay Company or Virginia Company. Others, like the Connecticut Charter, created colony leaders as a body politic and empowered them to delegate property and political authority in specified ways. Still others, like the charter awarding Pennsylvania to William Penn, set forth the nature and extent of the proprietor's powers. In virtually every case, colonial settle, and character of local communities. Although nearly all the settlers of the east coast of North America were English Protestants and the charters on which their settlements were based were products of English law, there was remarkable variation in the kinds of communities the colonists created. Some of this variation was due to the settlers' origins: because most of Massachusetts's leaders came from manorial villages, the township was adopted as the basic unit of political organization. Because Virginia's leaders came from England's land-owning gentry, the plantation and the county became the basic units of organization. Other variations stemmed from economic differences. Parts of the South that embraced commodity agriculture also favored the plantation agriculture. The climate, soil, and topography of

4 New England, on the other hand, favored subsistence agriculture, small-scale farming, and, on the coast, such sea faring occupations as fishing and trade. Religious differences introduced additional variations. In colonies with established churches (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, Virginia), church, clergy, and worship were central to social and political life of communities. In colonies like Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, which tolerated religious diversity, the social and political centrality of the church and social status and authority of the clergy depended on the preferences of local communities. How long did it take for the relatively free intentionality of colonial settlements to become institutionalized and embedded in established and authoritative practices? Certainly the colonies' disconnection from England during and after the Puritan Revolution (1640-1660), as well as the isolation of inland settlements, helped to give practices originally chosen the aura of authority. The consolidation of political, economic, and religious leadership in the hands of leading families also played a role. By the end of the seventeenth century, the same names begin to appear year after year, decade after decade, as members of legislatures, courts, and town councils. The standing of families was enshrined in how worshipers were seated in church and listed on college catalogs. At the same time, these communities remained far from traditional in the European sense. Founded in law rather than in kinship and loyalty, fundamental social arrangements were vulnerable to challenge. The colonial economy also threatened permanence and stability. British efforts to reintegrate the colonies into the mother country's trading system disrupted legal and political arrangements (the suspension of colonial charters and the appointment of new cadres of royal officials with authority over local leaders). Mercantilism created new economic opportunities. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, the hegemony of landed wealth was threatened by challenges from new men whose wealth was derived from trade and royal favor. Religion contained disruptive potential. Indigenous and imported evangelicalism threatened religious establishments and clerical authority beginning in the 1730s. A decade later, the Great Awakening, a wave of revivalism, swept the colonies, splitting congregations and challenging the

5 authority of religious leaders. Inevitably, where religion was established by law, religious conflicts took on a political character. Despite the increasingly unstable nature of the late colonial social order, Connecticut clergyman-poet Timothy Dwight's epic poem, Greenfield Hill (1793) celebrated the traditional New England community, with its overall equality and harmony: Our Sires established, in thy cheerful bounds, The noblest institutions, man has seen, Since time he reign began. In little farms They measur'd all thy realms, to every child In equal shares descending; no entail The first-born lifting into bloated pomp, Tainting with lust, and sloth, and pride, and rage, The world around him: all the race beside, Like brood of ostrich, left for chance to rear, And every foot to trample. Reason's sway Elective, founded on the rock of truth, Wisdom their guide, and equal good their end, They built with strength, that mocks the battering storm, And spurns the mining flood; and every right Dispensed alike to all. Beneath their eye, And forming hand, in every hamlet rose The nurturing school; in every village, smil'd The heav'n inviting church, and every town A world within itself, with order, peace, And harmony, adjusted all its weal (In Parrington, 1969, pp.187-88). Dwight further celebrated on unique character of American communities in his Travels in New England and New York (1821). Outside of New England, colonists settled on scattered plantations, “each placing his house where his own convenience dictated” (Dwight 1821, I: 335). While this was convenient for the planter, the system was, according to Dwight, “subject to serious disadvantages” (I: 336): Neither schools, nor churches, can without difficulty be either built by the planters or supported. The children must be too remote from the school and the families from the Church, not to discourage all strenuous efforts to provide these interesting accommodations. Whenever it is proposed to erect either of them, the though that one's self, and one's own family, are too distant from the spot to derive any material benefit, will check the feeble relenting of avarice, the more liberal dispositions of frugality, and even the noble designs of a generous disposition. . . (I: 336).

6 Without public institutions or opportunities for social intercourse, community would fail to develop. “The state of manner, and that of the mind,” Dwight continued, are mutually causes and effects. The mind, like the manners, will be distant, rough, forbidding, gross, solitary, and universally disagreeable. A nation planted in this manner can scarcely be more than half civilized; and refinement of character and life must necessarily be a stranger" (I: 336). "New England," wrote Dwight, presents a direct contrast to this picture. Almost the whole country is covered with villages; and every village has its church, and its suit of schools. Nearly every child, even those of beggars and blacks, in considerable numbers, can read, write, and keep accounts. Every child is carried to the church from the cradle; nor leaves the church but for the grave. All the people are neighbors: social beings; converse; feel; sympathize; mingle minds; cherish sentiments; and are subjects of at least some degree of refinement (I: 338). In reality, the settled, prosperous, harmonious, stable communities that Dwight celebrated did not exist in 1793 -- and may never have existed. Rather than describing a reality, Dwight was projecting an ideal of community that he and his associates held forth as a model for the future development of American society. American Independence and the Crisis of Authority As president of Yale College, the Vatican of New England Congregationalism, and as head of Connecticut's Federalist Party --, Timothy Dwight viewed with alarm the consequences of the American Revolution, particularly the breakdown of older forms of community and authority and the legal and political legitimation of unrestrained individualism. The state constitutions adopted after the Revolution not only broke the power of religious establishments in many states, but also enabled citizens to pursue their economic and political interests with a minimum of restraints -- freedoms were that both ratified and extended by the U.S. Constitution. These fears were intensified by the French Revolution, which coincided with the emergence of an organized political opposition, led by Thomas Jefferson, which was determined to break the power of the Standing Order -- the "wealthy, learned, and respectable" who looked to men like Timothy Dwight as leaders. Conservatives' fears were not unfounded. In fact, Americans were falling away from organized religion in droves in the decades following the Revolution. By some estimates, barely one

7 in ten Americans belonged to any church by 1800 (Finke & Stark 1992). Farmers, artisans, and laborers, even in conservative bastions like Connecticut and Massachusetts, were flocking to support the Jeffersonians -- "Infidels," Dwight called them -- who proposed to abolish religious establishments, secularize education, and broaden political participation to include the propertyless. "The influence of the French Revolution," Dwight wrote, "for a time threatened us with moral ruin," until its excesses persuaded every wise and dispassionate man saw with conviction, that Infidelity is hostile to all public and personal happiness; that without the influence of Religion, political freedom can never be long enjoyed; and that a connection with the leaders, and disciples, of this revolution would only be baleful to his own country (I: 384-285). The threat that concerned Dwight and his associates came not only from without, in the form of adherents of foreign radicalism, but also from within, in the form of unfettered individualism. In Greenfield Hill, Dwight suggested that character, like a garden, had to be cultivated and guided by virtuous leaders. In his view, reason alone was insufficient as a basis for public order; the republic required citizens who were virtuous as a matter of habit, not as a matter of rational choice. Vain hope! by reason's power alone, From guilt no heart was ever won. Decent, not good, by reason make him. As weeds, self-sown, demand no toil, But flourish in their native soil. Root deep, grown high, with vigor bloom, And send forth poison like perfume; So faults, inborn, spontaneous rise, And daily wax in strength and size. Ripen, with neither toil nor care, And choke each germ of virtue there. Virtues, like plants of nobler kind, Transferred from regions more refined, The gardener's careful hand must sow; His culturing hand must bid them grow; Rains gently shower, skies softly shine, And blessings fall, from realms divine. Much time, and pain, and toil, and care, Must virtue's habits plant, and rear; Habits alone thro' life endure, Habits alone your child secure;

8 To these be all your labors given; To these, your fervent prayers to HEAVEN (Dwight, 183-184).

It is no coincidence that Dwight chose to use gardening and landscaping metaphors to frame his ideas about civic order, for this generation of conservative leaders, physical setting, landscape, and architecture were both metaphors for public order and means to creating it. Historian Peter Briggs calls attention to Dwight's understanding of the "affective dimension to scenery" and the ways in which it "reflected the emotions and imaginative qualities of its artistic maker," while simultaneously shaping the "perceptions and feelings of its beholders" (Briggs 1988, 361). In Greenfield Hill, published the year he assumed the presidency of Yale, Dwight sketched out a conception of didactic landscape in ways that seem to have guided his actions once he arrived in New Haven. While the poem celebrates "not only orderliness, a composure of mind and of art, but also the essential unity of groves and fields, of land and sea, of beauty and usefulness, and, within the larger design of the poem, of human purposes with providential ones," these idealizations are tempered with an awareness of human fallibility and historical tragedy (Briggs 1988, 366-367). "In Dwight's presentation celebration and warning are nearly simultaneous, for the Connecticut of the future may be threatened by internal dissention or by vices and corruptions engendered by its current prosperity" (367). In his poem, Dwight was portraying an existing landscape. As he assumed the mantle of civic leadership in New Haven, he viewed the Green -- the impressive sixteen acre square in the center of the town -- as an opportunity to create an ideal landscape that would both be beautiful and didactic, embodying within it the historical and moral lessons he wished to impart to the citizens of the city and the new republic. A part of New Haven's original town plan, the Green served a wide variety of public purposes: “The Green,” according to Center Church pastor and Yale Divinity School Professor Leonard Bacon, “was designated not as a park or a mere pleasure ground, but as a place for public buildings, for military parades, for the meeting of buyers and sellers, for the concourse of the people,

9 for all such public uses as were reserved of old by the Forum at Rome and the ‘Agora’ at Athens” (quoted in Blake 1898, 10). “It has, in fact,” a nineteenth century chronicler noted, been put to more uses than Doctor Bacon enumerates, for within its limits six generations educated their children and buried their dead, purposes to which the Forum, the Agora, and the market place were not devoted, and which practically complete the range of possible uses of a public nature. Hence New Haven Green has been identified, to a degree that the Boston Common has not, with all the important transactions and events connected with the religious, political and civil life of the surrounding community, and so is richer in associations of a local character" (Blake 1898, p. 10). The "Public Square," as it was originally known, was "an uneven wooded plain, sloping from west to east." At the foot of the slope " was a swamp occupying the greater part of the lower Green." Stocks and a whipping post were erected on the Square within months of first settlement and, by the fall of 1639, it was the site of the colony's first execution -- of an Indian, "whose head was cut off and pitched upon a pole in the market place" (Blake 1898, 15). Shortly afterwards, the Meeting House was completed, a structure which housed the town's religious congregation and its civil government. Following English tradition, the area around the Meeting House became the town's burial ground. By mid-century, other structures were erected, including a "watch house," to accommodate New Haven's watchmen, and a "prison house." Despite these improvements, the Green remained a treeless space with an irregular surface "rough with stumps and stones" on which geese, swine, cattle, and "horsekind" grazed. In the mid-eighteenth century, halting efforts were made to improve the appearance of what was coming to be known as the Green: buttonwoods and elms were planted; a rough board fence, painted red, was constructed around the burial ground; a second church was built, along with a court house and school house.

10

The New Haven Green in 1748. This central space is dominated by the Meeting House, which housed the town's church and government. Behind the meeting house is the cemetery. Miscellaneous smaller structures include the Hopkins Grammar School, the court house, and the jail. Yale's scattered buildings stand to the north of the Green.

When Dwight arrived in New Haven to take charge of the college, the Green "was entirely unenclosed and was used as a thoroughfare for all sorts of travel. The road from Litchfield and the west, cut across it diagonally to a tavern. Another rutted road cut across it from north to south. At its southeast corner stood a pen for swine. A market house, erected in 1785, sheltered farmers stalls. Buildings on the upper Green included the court house, the jail, and two churches, Center Church surrounded by the burial ground, overgrown with weeds and crowded with tombstones. The stocks

11 and whipping post were gone, replaced by a "liberty pole," the rallying point for rebellious demonstrations during the Revolution. The lower Green remained a swampy and unimproved wilderness on which cattle grazed. More than being a space in need of improvement, the Green was a metaphor for the lamentable state of civic order and the possibilities for its transformation: this central public space, a panorama unplanned individual and collective activities, could be turned into a model which, if properly designed, could embody Dwight's vision of a new republican civic order. Working with James Hillhouse, Yale's Treasurer, Federalist leader, and leading New Haven real estate developer, Dwight began envisioning ambitious plans for the Green. Both were steeped in English landscape and gardening literature and interested in architecture. Both saw the possibilities to using setting, landscape, and architecture to express their civic vision and to shape public values. Because they were not starting with a blank slate, they understood that transforming the Green would be a long-term project. The Green itself would have to be regraded, its swampy places filled and its stumps and rocks removed. Public authorities would have to be persuaded to raze or relocate structures irrelevant to civic purposes. Churches would have to rebuild edifices in styles appropriate to the Green's new purposes. And, most difficult of all, the burying ground would have to be moved. The first order of business was to establish legally who had authority over the Green. As long as decisions about its design were subject to the uncertainties of the democratic process, implementation of Dwight's and Hillhouse's plans would be subject to endless delays. Hillhouse argued that realized the Green did not belong to the city, but was legally the property of an ancient and almost forgotten body, The Proprietors of the Common and Undivided Lands. Groups of this kind had been set up throughout New England in the 1670s, when an English royal governor had threatened to take possession of all lands held by municipalities. To prevent this, towns had transferred ownership of town lands to their citizens as a body. They had been active as long as the towns had substantial undistributed common lands.

Because New Haven’s Proprietors had not met in nearly a century and had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist as a legal entity, Hillhouse was able to boldly move to create a corporation

12 that assumed their rights. This five member self-perpetuating group was empowered to make decisions about the activities and structures permitted on the Green. In a stroke, Hillhouse had privatized governance of New Haven's most important public space. This gave him the power to restrict its use to purely civic purposes and to transform it into a space that embodied his vision of a new civic order. While nominally democratic, this civic regime assured that real power would, in fact, be in the hands of the wealthy, learned, and respectable merchants and professionals who presided over the city's businesses and eleemosynary institutions. This differentiation of the public domain of democratic government from the private civic domain would become a hallmark of community life in many American communities. Resistance to this scheme was doubtless allayed by Hillhouse's willingness to mobilize private funds to initiate improvements to the Green. In 1798, when he received permission to plant trees and to “rail both sections of the Green without expense to the city” – with funds from private donors. The following year, Hillhouse was given permission to drain, regrade, and fence the Green -a task for which he raised $2,000 from a variety of donors. Hillhouse also began planting the elm trees that would, by the end of the nineteenth century, become the city's hallmark. Hillhouse also undertook the longer-term process of persuading the two congregations then located on the Green to raze their old buildings and replace them with new ones. He engineered the town's grant of permission to the Episcopalians -- who were attracting growing numbers of the city's prosperous merchants, professionals, and artisans -- on the Green. By 1812, the old churches had been razed and construction of the three new edifices was well underway, the two Congregationalist churches designed in high Classical Revival style by Asher Benjamin and Ithiel Towne -- perhaps to two most notable American architects of the period -- the Episcopal Church in Gothic Revival style by Towne. (It was, in Dwight's view, “perhaps the only correct specimen” of Gothic architecture in the United States at the time).

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"A Large View of the Three Houses of Public Worship on the Public Square, New Haven," depicts the three recently completed edifices (from left to right) of Trinity Episcopal (1813-14), First Congregational/Center (1812-15), and United Congregational (1812-15). Aligned along newly laid out Temple Street, the three churches occupied the center of the Green.

City of the Living and City of the Dead The most difficult task of all involved the unsightly burial ground that occupied the center of the Green. Doing this required not only the creation of a new burial space, but a new kind of burial space. Although New Haven's burial ground was unsightly, weed-grown, and neglected, it also occupied a central place in the lives of the citizenry. Burial places are more than spatial and architectural embodiments of a communities values, beliefs, and history. The rituals and ceremonies that took place in the iterated and affirmed those beliefs: funerals, processions, and patriotic rites. As social anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner wrote, “are collective representations which reflect and express many of the community's basic beliefs and values about what kind of society is, what the persons of men are, and where each fits into the secular world of the living and the spiritual society of the dead” (Warner 1959, 280).

14 The cemetery is a distinctly modern institution. It is more than a burying ground. It is a planned space, set apart from areas used by the living, which not only contain the dead, but are places to mourn and memorialize them. Before the Reformation century, the vast majority of Europeans were buried anonymously in common graves; only the titled and the well-to-do were memorialized (Colvin 1991). With its emphasis on the believer's personal relationship to God, and the growth of modern legal ideas, democratic forms of government, and capitalism economies, the Reformation transformed not only the role of the individual in this life, but the way he was treated in death. Cemeteries accorded the deceased citizens the same respect and dignity that modern polities accorded them in life. The corpse, once treated casually and anonymously, became sacralized, interred like a precious object in a casket, and remembered individually with a permanent monument. The burial practices of colonial New Englanders represented a transition between traditional and modern practices. While memorializing the dead with individual burial plots marked with stones, recent archaeological work has suggested that, when burial grounds became crowded, the colonists didn't hesitate to displace older graves or to place newer graves on top of older ones. In 1812, New Haven's Center Church was built directly over a portion of the old town grave yard. The stones and graves under the church were left undisturbed. Today, while the crypt of New Haven's Center Church contains 137 marked graves, ground penetrating radar shows more than 1,000 bodies lying in this small space (Center Church 2006). Given the fact that the whole burial ground contained 5-10,000 graves by 1800, it is hardly surprising that it presented a distressing spectacle! “Burials were continued in the old ground,” writes the Green's chronicler, and this was becoming not only more and more crowded with permanent occupants, but, as we learn from repeated town votes on record, it was also a common thoroughfare for bipeds, feathered and unfeathered, and for quadrupeds of grazing and rooting and burrowing propensities, and a nursery for unsightly and malodorous weeds and barberry bushes, so that its condition and appearance were, to say the least, discreditable (Blake, 1898; 250). Though the disreputable condition of the burial place had been long recognized, changing the town's burial practices came about because of Dwight's and Hillhouse's determination to use the cemetery as a way of transforming their fellow citizens' understanding of community and their place in it. “It is always desirable,” Dwight wrote that a burial ground should be a solemn object to man;

15 “because in this manner it becomes a source of useful instruction and desirable impressions.” But, he continued, criticizing traditional burial customs, when placed in the center of a town, and in the current of daily intercourse, it is rendered too familiar to the eye to have any beneficial effect on the heart. From its proper, venerable character, it is degraded into a mere common object; and speedily loses all its connection with the invisible world, in a gross and vulgar union with the ordinary business of life (Dwight 1821, I, 191). In 1796, Hillhouse obtained a charter of incorporation for the New Haven Burial Ground -- the first private nonprofit cemetery in the world. Once the new cemetery was established, Dwight and Hillhouse persuaded New Haven's government to enact an ordinance forbidding further burials on the Green and authorizing the removal of the hundreds of monuments that had been placed there since the 1630s. These measures were not greeted with universal enthusiasm. In December of 1812, when it became known that Center Church intended to build a new edifice over a portion of the old burial ground, strenuous opposition developed. At a public meeting in March of 1813, a petition signed by 178 angry citizens denounced the proposed location of the building. Some time later, when workmen began to excavate the trenches, a number of persons assembled with shovels and began to throw back the earth as fast as it was thrown out. The opposition was, however, without leadership or general support, and as the remains which were found were carefully preserved, and removed to the new cemetery, it was soon withdrawn (Blake, 1898, p. 253). With evident reluctance, citizens ultimately bowed to the inevitable. Many bought family plots in the new cemetery. Other contented themselves with less costly single graves. While the gravestones were removed, bodies, in most cases, were left where they were. Within a few years, as the new cemetery became one of the city's major tourist attractions, New Haveners began to take pride in it. Unlike New Haven's old burial ground on the Green, where people worshipped (it was the location of the town's most important church), politicked and governed (it was the location of the State House), traded (it was the location of the town's open-air market), and conducted public ceremonies (the militia drilled there), the new cemetery was a place set apart from the bustle of everyday life.

16 The new burial ground was a planned space. It was, Dwight wrote, “leveled, and enclosed,” then divided into parallelograms, handsomely railed, and separated by alleys of sufficient breadth to permit carriages to pass each other. The whole field, except for four lots given to the several congregations, and the college, and a lot destined for the reception of the poor, was distributed into family burying places; purchased at the expense actually incurred; and secured by law from every civil process. Each parallelogram is sixty-four feet in length. Each family burying-ground is thirty-two feet in length and eighteen in breadth; and against each an opening is made to admit a funeral procession. At the divisions between the lots trees are set out in the alleys; and the name of each proprietor is marked on the railing (192). The cemetery's physical arrangement was intended to communicate the core values of the conservatives’ ideal society, in which all citizens were encouraged to see themselves not as individuals, but as members of larger corporate groups. The cemetery itself represented society as a whole, encompassing within it all elements of the community; within the cemetery, the deceased were arranged as members of congregations and families. Set apart from the “ordinary business of life,” as a place for contemplation and edification, it was a place not only where families could mourn the departed, but ponder their place in the secular and sacred order. The didactic intentions of the cemetery's organizers extended to arrangements within particular lots. Ostentatious monuments and mausoleums were discouraged, reflecting the city's leaders' egalitarian convictions: The monuments in his ground are almost universally of marble. . . . A considerable number are obelisks; others are tables; and others slabs, placed at the head and foot of the grave. The obelisks are placed, universally, on the middle line of the lots; and thus stand in a line, successively, throughout the parallelograms. The top of each post and the railing, are painted white; the remainder of the post, black (Dwight, p. 192). The projectors had other purposes as well. The cemetery was to serve as a civic pantheon, celebrating New Haven's leaders and heroes, and as a touchstone for the community's history. The history of Yale could be read in the stones of its deceased presidents, faculty, and students (whose monuments were moved from the Green into the College's lots). The history of important families like the Trowbridges were displayed on monuments which recounted their lineage back to earliest settlement. Family founders lay in the centers of lots, with spouses, children, and other descendants arrayed around them, visually affirming the patriarchal order of society.

17 “It is believed,” Dwight wrote a quarter century after the cemetery's founding, “that this cemetery is altogether a singularity in the world. . . , happily fitted to influence the views, and feelings of succeeding generations” (192). In fact, the cemetery became a model for burial places throughout the United States and Western Europe. Paris's famous Pere Lachaise cemetery, established in 1804, was modeled on it, as were the famous urban necropolises of England and Scotland. The private corporate secular burial place idea came back to the United States when Bostonians, emulating European models, organized Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831. During the first half of the nineteenth century, older towns and cities reformed their burial practices along New Haven lines and newer settlements throughout the country followed suit. Completing the Green The Green landscaped, fenced, and cleared of obstacles, presented an impressive spectacle. “The churches,” Dwight wrote are all placed on the Western side of Temple Street, in a situation singularly beautiful, having an elegant square in front, and stand on a street one hundred feet wide. . . . Few structures, devoted to the same purpose on this side of the Atlantic, are equally handsome; and in no place can the same number of churches be found, within the same distance, so beautiful and standing in so advantageous a position (Dwight, 1821, p. 185). The churches offered not only an impressive visual experience, but an auditory one as well, for each had its own bell by which citizens regulated their lives. The bells, wrote the Green's chronicler, summoned citizens To religious, civil, and political gatherings, in voicing public sentiment whether of joy or grief, as heralds of alarm when danger was pending, and in maintaining a uniform time for the community when clocks and watches were few" (Blake 1898, 35). The impressive statement of civic order offered by the rehabilitated Green was enhanced in 1828 with the construction of a new State House in the Greek Revival Style, designed by Ithiel Town. In the early nineteenth century, the Greek Revival Style -- identified with the ideals of ancient democracy -- became de facto the official style for such public buildings as churches and court houses throughout the nation.

18

The New Haven Green, c. 1830. In the foreground, Hillhouse's elms, not yet grown to full size, demarcate Temple Street, which bisected the "Public Square." Behind them are the three churches, Trinity (Episcopal), Center (Congregational), and United (Congregational). Further back is the Greek Revival State House. In the far background is Yale College. (Source: Blake 1898).

If the Green offered a model of civic order for the present and future, it also represented a significant reinvention of the community’s past. The Green before 1800, with its multitude of uses, offered a representation of the past that was diverse, complex, and ambiguous. The redesigned Green, in contrast, offered a representation of the past in which church and state, under the control of enlightened and public-spirited leaders, defined the common good. Reinventing the past in this way was a powerful way of legitimating the new civic regime. In later years, this power would be extended, as the elite created and controlled libraries and historical societies that made themselves the guardians of the community's history.

19 New Haven’s civic leaders were hardly alone in their desire to reimagine the community's past to serve the purposes of the present and future. As historian Gary Nash remarks in recounting the “forging of historical memory” in Philadelphia, every society must fabricate and sustain creation stories, and nearly everyone craves knowledge about his or her beginnings -- those who came first, those who blazed the trails, those who did great deeds. No sooner was the colony well established than it began, like most successful enterprises, to remember itself in selective ways (Nash. 2002, p. 14). This drive to selectively remember took institutional form in the early nineteenth century, when the city's historical society and library began systematically collecting manuscripts and artifacts. These institution's founders, Nash writes, hoped “a historical society might spread the values of genteel culture and impart a shared sense of identity among Philadelphians who, I the boisterous 1820s, seemed to be pulling in every direction while forgetting their precious heritage.” “By selecting and collecting the right historical materials,” the founders hoped ‘they could restore a collective memory that might nurture unity and order as people reflected on a less trammeled, more virtuous, and less materialistic past” (Nash. 2002, p. 17). This desire extended to the preservation of historic buildings, like Independence Hall, and to the establishment of Laurel Hill Cemetery. While it would be many years before New Haven had an historical society (1860) and longer still before the publication of a municipal history (1887), for New Haven citizens -- and for visitors to the city -- its history was not written, but displayed in the setting, landscape, and architecture of the Green and its structures and in the monuments of worthies in the Grove Street Cemetery. Yale's Campus: A Complementary Vision of Civic Order The Green's physical transformation was mirrored by the reconstruction of the adjacent Yale College campus. In this period, Yale was regarded as a public institution. Throughout most of its history, it had received generous support from the state. Its governing board (until 1870) included the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and six senior members of the state senate, as well as ten selfperpetuating Congregationalist clergymen -- representing the denomination that was, until 1817, Connecticut's established church. Again, Dwight and Hillhouse -- president and treasurer of the College -- were the leading actors in the process of transformation.

20 When Dwight was tapped by the Yale Corporation to head the college in 1795, he already had a clear vision of the challenges facing American society -- and the best way to address them. Like the cemetery and the Green, the renovation of the campus became a way of embodying his ideal of community. “Dwight extolled the virtues of New England’s unique township system,” notes architectural historian Erik Vogt, “which not only ‘converted the wilderness into fruitful fields’ but also imparted to its inhabitants a strong social cohesion” (Vogt, 2004, p. 75). “In equating physical propinquity with active civic life,” Vogt continues, Dwight was tapping into long-held Puritan beliefs and traditions. The township was a corollary to the congregation, a self-centered body circumscribed in size and arrangement by its central meetinghouse and church. Repeated as a type over time, it propagated a connected web of communities and improved the land toward human and, ultimately, divine ends (Vogt. 2004, p. 76). “New Haven's clarity of form and grace of setting constituted, for Dwight,” Vogt writes, a model of the type. The straight broad streets, shaded by Hillhouse's elms. . . organized in rows of “neat and tidy” houses, ornamented by tree-filled 'courtyards in front and gardens in the rear.' At its center was the Green, “the handsomest ground of this nature which I have seen.” Here Dwight's ideal of natural, social and spiritual harmony was distilled in its most resonant image, readily visible from his house in the college yard: “Rarely is a more beautiful object presented to the eye -- I have never met with one -- than the multitudes crossing the Green in different directions to the house of God. . . . Few places in the world present a fairer example of peace and good order" (Vogt, 2004, p. 76). The campus Dwight planned and built was a microcosm of the many villages he had admired and described in his Travels, forming with its 'neat and tidy' houses, spired chapels, and common yard a fundamental pattern of communal order. Though Yale had occupied portions of the area north of the Green since 1718, it could hardly be said to have a campus -- commonly understood to mean a clearly demarcated area occupied by a school or college. While students and classrooms were housed in the impressive three and a half story brick building given by the Colony in 1717, the rest of the block on which it stood was occupied by private residences and stores (see map on page 10); The president's house stood across today's Chapel Street from the college; until the 1750s, Center Church served as the college chapel, while students used the Green itself for recreation.

21

The original "college house" erected in 1717 to house Yale College. The building stood on an acre and a quarter lot at the corner of today's Chapel and College Street. The building was razed in 1782 and replaced by new structures that began to define the college's property as a campus.

Inspired by Harvard's impressive buildings, Dwight's predecessor, Thomas Clap (17031767), who served as president from 1740 to 1767, strove to create a Yale "yard" -- for reasons more "related to the life of the college than its appearance. Shepherding the flock within the campus bounds was his paramount concern" (Vogt 2004, 56). "The great flaw of the original College House," writes architectural historian Erik Vogt, "was its proximity to the street. Students, merely by crossing the threshold, could enter into the life of the town and fall prey to its temptations and distractions," including the currents of religious excitement associated with the Great Awakening that were shattering New England's religious communities (Vogt 2004, 57). Clap demarcated the college grounds with a fence (visible in the engraving above) and codified behavior in the college yard with an elaborate set of rules and fines governing noise, conduct, and etiquette, The fence itself established a real and symbolic boundary between the town and college; students who trespassed beyond its limits jeopardized their good standing. Within, the campus was to be a peaceable kingdom, a gathering place of pious repose where students were to conduct themselves with restraint and dignity (Vogt 2004, 57). Clap's vision of the college fell far short of reality. Students rebelled against his regime. Members of the Corporation, leaders of Center Church, and many members of the legislature opposed his plans. While he succeeded in erecting a chapel adjacent to the college hall, which enabled students to

22 worship within the school, the old college hall would remain Yale's major structure until the 1780s and the boundaries between town and gown would remain permeable until the arrival of Timothy Dwight in 1795. James Hillhouse had begun pushing for the creation of a campus for Yale in the early 1790s, in tandem with his efforts to transform the Green. He commissioned artist John Trumbull, a Harvard graduate, to develop a comprehensive campus plan that would include additional property and new buildings. Trumbull's design projected enlarged the campus, making Yale the sole occupant of its own "self-contained block" (Vogt 2004, 64). In addition to proposing buildings that would enclose a square very much like today's Old Campus, Trumbull designed an elegant landscape modeled on eighteenth century English picturesque gardens. The plan, Vogt suggests, was laden with didactic intent: it was in this guise, the college as a sheltering retreat, that the plan's landscape design resonated with the larger theological meaning implicit in the sacred square [the Green]. Set off from the world on its own "island," the campus was recreated as a type of Edenic harden, a cultivated pastoral sanctuary that harbored its inhabitants in their Christian mission. In this regard, Hillhouse's efforts to connect the campus and the Green took on deeper meaning. Although the new college square was self-contained, its landscape visibly united it with New Haven's great common; the towering elms knit them together as a continuous embowered garden (Vogt 2004, 65). “The architectural types of sacred chapel and secular dormitory,” Vogt continues, demarcated clearly defined distinction between “public and private realms within the college itself. They embodied both the daily round of collegiate life and firmly established the communal order” (Vogt 2004, 68). With funding from the legislature, the college began implementing the Trumbull-Hillhouse plan in 1793. By the time of Dwight’s inauguration, the Yale “yard” occupied half the block north of the Green with “ symmetrical row of halls, composed within its own self-contained square” (Vogt 2004, 70). This area expanded to include the entire frontage west of the Green when the college acquired land for a new president’s house. The house and its placement further elaborated Hillhouse’s and Dwight’s didactic vision. As Vogt notes, the structure’s design and placement “could be read as a form of domesticated chapel, conflating the types of temple and home” (72). This conflation of sacred and secular was reflected as well in the duties of the president, which included serving as college minister. The house’s position embodied these responsibilities; by forming the northern edge of the college of the college yard, it reinforced

23 the president’s role as community guardian, giving him a constant watchful presence in the daily campus rituals” (72). Vogt might have added that the placement of Dwight’s house also affirmed his preeminent role as civic guardian. The house stood at the highest point of ground, overlooking the Green from its northwest corner, giving the president oversight not only of the campus, but of the city itself. This reordering of the campus was an expression not only of local civic values, but also of a far more ambitious effort to transform Yale into an institution for training the nation's leaders. Fueled by the second Great Awakening, which Dwight helped to spark, Yale’s enrollment doubled within ten years of his inauguration and had trebled by his death in 1817 – becoming the largest American college (Pierson 1983, 3-4). In contrast to the past, when most students came from Connecticut, under Dwight increasing numbers came from outside the state. By 1820, 40 percent of Yale's matriculants were born outside of Connecticut and 75 percent settled outside the state after graduation (Hall, 1982, p.310). Within the decade, the faculty would set forth a bold plan of undergraduate education in the Yale Report of 1828, which would declare its intention to supply its graduates with “the discipline and the furniture of the mind;” to provide the values, the “balance of character,” that would enable them not only to successfully pursue their occupations, but to fulfill a broad range of duties “to his family, to his fellow citizens, to his country” in ways enabling “to diffuse the light of science among all classes of the community.” “Our republican form of government,” the Report continued, “renders it highly important that great numbers should enjoy the advantage of a thorough education. In this country, where offices are accessible to all who are qualified for the, superior intellectual attainments out not to be confined to any description of persons. The active, enterprising character of our population,” the Report concluded, renders it highly important, that this bustle and energy should be directed by sound intelligence, the result of deep thought and early discipline. The greater the impulse to action, the greater is the need of wise and skillful guidance. When nearly all the ship's crew are aloft, setting the topsails, and catching the breezes, it is necessary there should be a steady hand at the helm. Light and moderate learning is but poorly fitted to direct the energies of a nation, so widely extended, so intelligent, so powerful in resources, so rapidly advancing in population, strength, and opulence. Where a free government gives full liberty to the human intellect to expand and operate, education should be proportionally liberal and ample. . . .

24 Just as Yale offered itself as a model for educating a democratic citizenry, so New Haven held itself forth as a model of civic order – one in which values and behavior were more shaped by the physical structure and organization of the community than by coercive rules and regulations. While the city became more heterogeneous over the years, not only in the social and geographical origins of its citizens, but also in their economic interests and religious preferences, this increasing individuation was inexorably framed and constrained by physical setting, landscape, and architecture. While Congregationalism remained the state’s official religion until 1817, religious dissenters were accommodated by Dwight’s and Hillhouse’s civic framework: the Episcopalians’ unorthodox choice of Gothic Revival style for Trinity Church was framed by the by the civic order of the Green itself, as was the Methodists radically plain meeting house, constructed in 1812. As the city expanded and new neighborhoods were built, they tended to center on squares that replicated the civic nucleus represented by the Green. New Haven, New England, and the Model of Civic Community How is it that a small town like New Haven should have exercised such an extraordinary influence on shaping American communities? Part of the reason is the clarity and intensity of its leaders' vision of community and their desire to propagate it far and wide. Part of the reason has to do with Yale's self-consciously embracing and effectively pursuing a role as an educator of leaders. Part of the reason has to do with demographic trends in New England generally, and Connecticut in particular. In the course of the nineteenth century, Yale would become the ‘Mother of Colleges,” its graduates fanning out across the country to establish some fifty institutions -- most of them modeled on their alma mater -- including Williams, Middlebury, Trinity, New York University, Hamilton, Rutgers, Lafayette, Kenyon, Western Reserve, Transylvania, Oberlin, and the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi (Hall, 1982, p. 162). Perhaps not surprisingly, the layout of campuses and their buildings would follow the Yale model (Vogt 2004, 68).

25 While Harvard graduates tended to settle in Boston and other major cities, Yale graduates dispersed to smaller towns and regional center, where they inevitably became civic leaders. As Tocqueville noted, A single fact will suffice to show the prodigious number of individuals who thus leave New England to settle in the wilds. We were assured in 1830 that thirty-six of the members of Congress were born in the little state of Connecticut. The population of Connecticut, which constitutes only one forty-third part of that of the United States, thus furnished one eighth of the whole body of representatives. The state of Connecticut itself, however, sends only five delegates to Congress; and the thirty-one others sit for the new western states (De Tocqueville, 1944, I: p. 294).

When New Englanders went west, they did not cut their ties with their places of origin. Not only did they maintain on-going connections with relatives and friends, they often sent their sons back to New England for schooling and apprentices and their daughters for husbands, while their New England relatives often sent their sons west to seek their fortunes. Moreover, all participated in a dense network of associations which spanned the country. Some were religious, the so-called “evangelical machinery” created by Dwight protégé Lyman Beecher and other Yale graduates. Others were secular, like the lyceums -- the national network of public lectures that brought notable speakers to the hinterlands. New England-trained teachers organized schools and academies which taught their lessons from school books written by Yale graduates like Noah Webster (whose “Blue Backed Speller” would sell 41 million copies by 1860). New Englanders thus constituted a larger kind of community that transcended locality. The leaders of institutions like Yale recognized this as early as they 1830s, when the college initiated its first general endowment fund drive. Historically, Yale had depended on the generosity of the legislature and the citizens of New Haven for funding. But as its graduates migrated to the West and South in ever greater numbers, it recognized that its alumni and Christians who subscribed to the tenets of the “New Haven Theology” were potential supporters. To stimulate interest in the college, Yale created an alumni association and encouraged graduating classes to convene regularly and published reports of their post-graduate careers. While New Englanders constructed national associational networks, their most visible impact was on the localities in which they settled. As the New England diaspora pushed westward through

26 New York state and into the Midwest, the township model of settlement became the standard. Throughout Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, villages and towns replicated the New Haven model of a nucleus of churches and public buildings, usually designed in the Greek Revival Style. Like New Haven, the social and cultural life of these towns was defined by the activities of religious and secular associations. New England's impact on communities throughout the country was recognized as early as the 1830s, when Alexis De Tocqueville wrote The principles of New England spread at first to the neighboring states; then they passed successively to the more distant one; and at last, if I may so speak, they interpenetrated the whole confederation. They now extend their influence beyond its limits, over the whole American world. The civilization of New England has been like a beacon lit upon a hill, which, after it has diffused its warmth immediately around it, also tinges the distant horizon with its glow (De Tocqueville, 1945, p. 31). This influence persisted. Writing of the Midwest's rural towns in the mid-twentieth century, an English journalist wrote, “they follow a distinctive over-all pattern from Ohio to Minnesota or Missouri with but slight, though important, local differences.” Along the sides of the square, if the town is a county seat, are the county buildings and courthouse, the bank or banks, a battery of lawyer's offices. . . two or three drug stores, some taverns, barber shops and at least one beauty parlor, doctors', dentists' and veterinaries' offices, the newspaper, and the usual array of hardware, clothing, and other stores. . . .The first church -- Methodist or Presbyterian or Lutheran or Baptist or (more rarely) Episcopalian -- is "on the square." The other churches, like the movie and the grade and high schools, are usually a block or two from it, as the town grew (Hutton 1946, 78-79). The square and the buildings on it are both symbols of community and the backdrop for rituals and ceremonies of community solidarity. “There is always one leading hotel in or near the central crossroads,” Hutton continues. Here meet for lunch, on their respective days, if the town is large enough, the Rotarians, Lions, Elks, Kiwanis, Buffaloes, or other service clubs; banquets are given; and local functions take place. . . . On the mezzanine of the second floor is usually the local Chamber of Commerce, if the town boasts one. . . . The Farm Bureau, Grange, or Union has an office or chapter in the town. There are often in the larger towns a Y.M.C.A. and, less generally, a Y.W.C.A. If the rural town is the county seat, there will probably be a public library. . . (Hutton, 1946, p. 80).

27 Creating Neighborhood: Redefining Community in the Expanding City The creation of New Haven's first elite neighborhood, the Hillhouse Quarter, suggests that the creation of distinctive elite enclaves was an extension of the same process of community building that produced the Green, the Grove Street Cemetery, and the Yale campus as planned spaces charged with moral and didactic purposes. Until the 1820s, New Haven's wealthy merchants, manufacturers, and professionals lived on or around the Green, their homes cheek-by-jowl with shops, offices, taverns, and the houses of more humble folk. Early in the century, ownership of large tracts to the north of the Green was divided between two families, the Hillhouses and the Bishops. The Hillhouses closely identified themselves with the Federalist communitarian ideal and, as noted, led the translation of that ideal into planning, landscaping, and architecture. The Bishops, in contrast, identified with the Jeffersonian ideal of unfettered individualism. Their contrasting values would be embodied in the ways in which they developed their properties. Abraham Bishop (1763-1844) divided his New Haven holdings, lying to the east of the Hartford Turnpike (now Whitney Avenue) among his three daughters and their husbands. They proceeded to lay out streets and to subdivide their properties into modest residential lots, a process that would take decades to complete. In 1823, James Hillhouse (1752-1832) gave his properties on the west side of the Turnpike to his son, James Abraham Hillhouse (1789-1841), on the occasion of his marriage to New York heiress, Cornelia Lawrence. Before his marriage, the younger Hillhouse, who had literary ambitions, had spent years in Boston, London, and New York, where he became familiar with the latest literary and architectural fashions. A child of the ages of Jefferson and Jackson, the younger Hillhouse was preoccupied with the problem of leadership. His father was a self-made man; he was an inheritor not only of wealth, but the mantle of his father's civic preeminence. In his father's time, the wealthy, learned, and respectable could expect the unquestioning deference of their communities. By the younger

28 Hillhouse’s time, economic and political revolution had empowered the “common man” who were united in their opposition to inherited privilege. James Abraham Hillhouse took on the challenge of defining the role of hereditary leadership in a market democracy. Like his father, he chose to respond to this challenge aesthetically, through setting, landscape, and architecture. Much as his father's model of the town center and college campus would become national paradigms, James Abraham's model of the elite urban neighborhood would be widely emulated as a way of symbolically articulating the place of elites in industrializing and urbanizing communities. In the 1790s, the elder Hillhouse had sold a large part of his holdings to pioneer industrialist Eli Whitney (1765-1825). Whitney, who built his arms factory on New Haven's northern border, proceeded to create a kind of industrial community that would not generally serve as a national model: a self-sufficient industrial community, with workers’ houses grouped around manufacturing and agricultural operations. Though Whitney planned to build his own mansion as part of this complex, ill health prevented him from doing so. Though he lived with his workers for many years, on his marriage, he moved to a house near the Green in downtown New Haven. Because this quasi-feudal model of urban industrial community -- based on Whitney's experience of southern plantations -- was at odds with New England egalitarianism, it was generally not followed in the United States, where public values and preferences favored mixed neighborhoods characterized by shared economic and social characteristics. American communities, in a word, would generally be stratified by class, rather than clustered around dominant economic interests. The vision of laying out family land holdings as large estates rather than modest residential subdivisions, as the Bishops had done, was passed on from father to son. The younger Hillhouse sold large properties along Whitney Avenue to a number of wealthy families. But he directed most of his attention to developing his own estate, Highwood, and the area between it and downtown -Hillhouse Avenue -- as a model urban neighborhood.

29 The elder Hillhouse had anticipated the direction his son’s efforts might take as early as the 1790s, when, having decided that his properties to the west of the Hartford Turnpike “should be developed as a place of beauty and architectural distinction,” he laid out Temple Avenue (later renamed Hillhouse Avenue). It was to be an avenue of majestic width, with houses set back 50 feet from the right of way, the intervening strip planted with trees and called "the Grove." The overall effect, despite the strict initial Federal layout, was park-like, recalling with its white temples and villas glimpsed through the trees such prototypes as Regent's Park in London. . . (Brown, 1976, p. 134). Well in advance of any clear plans for building, Hillhouse began planting trees along the street. Rather than planting oaks, native trees which abounded in the area, he planted elms, a tree distinctively associated with public and civic spaces. In doing so, he drew an explicit symbolic connection between the Green and the new elite residential neighborhood. “Hillhouse's 1792 approach to the Avenue's elm planting was interestingly different form the one he had used in 1787 for the trees of Temple Street, then newly cut through the Green.,” according to architectural historian Patrick Pinnell, The town streets grew to become the city's most beautiful, indeed they large made New Haven's reputation as a beautiful city. They had very different characters, not only because one was religious and civic (its three churches and the Green) and the other residential, but because, thanks to Hillhouse, their trees created distinct moods. Temple Street, with its elms placed symmetrically just outside both sides of the roadbed (perhaps 45 feet separating their lines across the street) became a green cathedral, dark and vertical, because the tree crowns met overhead; Hillhouse Avenue, its trees outside the street and sidewalk lines (hence their lines perhaps 90 feet apart, too far for treetops to meet) grew into a horizontally proportioned grand corridor lit by a central channel of sky. Temple's elms helped produce an environment of civic-minded spirituality, the Avenue's trees pulled individual houses into civic unity. Both places resulted from the underlying notion that trees and buildings, together, define the city's essential nature (Pinnell 2004, 131).

30

New Haven, from Benhams 1847 City Directory. The Green is at the center of the map. The Hartford Turnpike, a Hillhouse enterprise, runs diagonally from the Green toward East Rock (from left to right). To the east of the Hartford Turnpike (now Whitney Avenue) lay the properties developed by the heirs of Democrat Abraham Bishop for modest homes and shops. To the west of the Turnpike is the Hillhouse property, set apart “as a place of beauty and architectural distinction” for the development of substantial estates.

The active development of Hillhouse Avenue began in 1828, when James Abraham Hillhouse commissioned architect Alexander Jackson Davis to design his own mansion, which

31 would stand on Prospect Hill at the northern end of the avenue. Inspired by a British publication, Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1762), the house, with its two-story Ionic portico, became an iconic structure in the burgeoning Greek Revival Style. Davis would design five of the dozen houses built on Hillhouse Avenue during its initial development in the 1830s before going on to become “most successful and influential American architect of his generation” (Wikipedia, N.D.).

Hillhouse Avenue c. 1850. In this view, we are looking north, with our backs to the city. At the end of the street, we can glimpse James Abraham Hillhouse’s mansion, Sachem’s Wood. The street’s magnificent elms echo the elms on the Green, as does the fence in the foreground, whose decorative motifs are identical to those on the Green. The fence – which lacks a gate,, while demarcating this residential neighborhood from the rest of the city, does not cut it off from the mainstream of civic life.

Davis himself favored less pretentious styles than the Greek Revival houses he designed for Hillhouse Avenue. His best-selling 1837 pattern book, Rural Architecture, criticized “The bald and uninteresting aspect of our houses” and “the wasteful and tasteless expenditure of money in building" “hat they represented (Davis, 1837, p. 1). The Greek Temple form, “perfect in itself, and

32 well adapted as it is to public edifices, and even to town mansions, is inappropriate for country residences, and yet it is the only style ever attempted in our more costly habitations,” he continued. Eventually his arguments proved persuasive and Hillhouse, who tightly controlled the design and ownership of houses on the avenue, relented and permitted the construction of two houses in the Italianate/Villa Style in the late 1830s. Like avenue's elms, the Greek Revival residences were an important symbolic link to the civic structures on the Green and, as such, a visual assertion of the elite's claims as a leadership class. The shift to more purely residential architectural styles -- Italianate and Gothic -- in the late 1830s is symptomatic of the elite's shifting understanding of its relationship to the rest of society. In 1829, frontiersman Andrew Jackson ousted patrician John Quincy Adams from the White House and initiated the second phase of America's democratic revolution. By the end of his tenure, he had definitively displaced old elites from political leadership nationally and locally. While not abandoning its claims to leadership, New England’s elites seem to have reframed them by more clearly differentiating public and private domains. When securely in power, its residences mirrored the styles of public buildings; as the elite’s hold on power grew more tenuous, the design of residences became more and picturesque and oriented to private pleasures. James Abraham Hillhouse seems to have sensed this shift. In 1838, he changed the name of his estate from the aristocratic “Highwood” to the more domesticated “Sachem's Wood.” He explained his reasons for doing so in a poem, Sachem's Wood: A Short Poem, with Notes (1838). The poem begins with an evocation of the view from his porch on Prospect Hill over the city that his family had done so much to shape: Now, from this bench, the gazer sees Towers and white steeples o'er the trees, Mansions that peep from leafy bowers, And villas blooming close by ours; Hears grave clocks, and classic bell, Hours for the mind and body tell; Or starts, and questions, as the gong Bids urchins not disport too long A blended murmur minds the ear That an embosom'd City's near.

33 See! How its guardian Giants tower, Changing their aspects with the hour!-- (Hillhouse 1838, 6). In this stanza, Hillhouse views the city's towers and steeples, its mansions and villas, framed by the “guardian Giants” -- the great elm trees -- planed by his father, who was popularly known as “The Sachem” (the Indian term for Big Chief). He refers to the “grave clocks, and classic bell” that regulated the lives of New Haven's citizens. In the new urban democracy, the aristocratic airs that he and people like him had so casually assumed would not do. “So farewell Highwood!” – he wrote. “‘Highwood-Park'/O'ersteps the democratic mark” (14). Ancestral woods! Must we forego An epithet we love and know, For some new title, and proclaim That steady folk have changed their name (14). Emulating European styles and fashions would not do for American leaders: A Yankee -- Whig -- and gentleman, Should be a plain republican -Proud he may be (some honest pride Would do no harm on t'other side,) Proud for his country, but not full Of puffy names, like Mr. Bull. . . (14). After a long recital of the history of the community and his father's services to it, he proclaimed Observe, there, people we admire; Of proven worth, urbane and true; Keeping the line their fathers' drew; A graceful vine, a noble shoot, Each from a venerated root; Good stock, good nurture, and a tone, I hope as Federal as mine own -I feel -- I blush to own the pain -And half am tempted to refrain. -But memory's glass as at mine eye;-And shadows pass of things gone by. The Sachem's day is o'er, is oe'r! His hatchet (buried oft before,) In earnest rusts; while he has found, Far off, a choicer hunting ground.

34 Here, were in life's aspiring stage, He planned a wigwam for his age, Vowing the woodman's murderous steel, These noble trunks should never feel; Here, where the objects of his care, Waved grateful o'er his silver hair; Here. Where as silent moons roll by, We think of him beyond the sky, Resting among the Wise and Good, Our hearts decide for SACHEM'S WOOD (pp. 15-16). In naming the estate in honor of his father, he asserted a distinctive tie to the community's past -and, in decades before the community had produced a written account of its own history, took charge of the community's collective past and the elite's place in it. This was not a withdrawal from leadership. Though he abstained from politics (in which his father excelled), the younger Hillhouse was an energetic entrepreneur. The life of a gentleman author, with European travels, extensive book buying, and lavish entertainments, was costly. Without an inherited fortune, Hillhouse expected to underwrite these costs with profits from his development schemes. Recognizing that leadership in the age of Jackson depended on “proven worth,” not pedigree, James Abraham Hillhouse set out to set an example of cultured enterprise for his fellow citizens. Another theme evident in Hillhouse's poem -- and his willingness to embrace departures from Classical architectural models -- is his embrace of nature. Throughout the poem, whether in the recurrent trope of trees framing the man-made landscape or references to his father, “The Sachem,” as embodying the virtues of New Haven's aboriginal inhabitants, nature, rather than reason, is cited as a source of authority. This embrace of the Romantic sensibility in no way constituted an abandonment of a commitment to civic order. Rather, it shifted the source of that commitment to a more sturdy foundation. “Central to the environmental awakening of the Jacksonian period,” writes environmental historian Thomas Campanella, was a belief that the contemplation of wild nature produced positive moral and spiritual effects upon the observer. Moreover, it was believed that a person could derive similar value by reproducing the essence of such scenes closer to home. In other words, by “improving” his grounds according to certain aesthetic principles, he could realize bountiful dividends both moral and spiritual. “Taste, the perception of the beautiful, and the knowledge of the

35 principles on which nature works,” wrote painter Thomas Cole, “can be applied, and our dwelling-places made fitting for refined and intellectual beings” (Campanella, 2003, pp. 7475). The private contemplation of the sublime in nature had powerful public consequences, he continues: This application of “taste” could be just as effective in the civic realm as it was in the domestic; improvement could transform village space just as it transformed home grounds. As an advocate of village improvement put it decades later, by affording to nature “the assistance of Art, its appropriate handmaid,” improvement could bring about “a most gratifying development of two kinds of beauty”: one, “in the most outward aspect of the village itself,’ and the other, "in the interior life of the people" (Campanella, 2003, p. 75). Within this framework, both public and private spaces could have powerful effects on engendering a sense of community by creating settings in which citizens could contemplate and come to understand their place in the larger scheme of things, sacred and secular. If civic elites could no longer demand deference, they could claim leadership in realms other than the political: in refinement, elevated sentiments, and an appreciation for beauty. Withdrawing from the kind of substantive political engagement that his father relished, influentials like James Abraham Hillhouse instead committed themselves to creating and maintaining settings that influenced the moral agendas and group identities that underlay politics. The example set by Hillhouse and Davis was hugely enlarged through their aggressive promotion of their ideas. Davis's 1837 Rural Architecture was only the first of a series of influential pattern books in which he had a hand. Teaming up with talented landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing, the pair produced a series of volumes -- including Cottage Residences (1842) and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) -- that sold by the thousands and influenced homeowners, architects, and builders throughout the country. After completing his work with Hillhouse, Davis teamed up with talented landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. “The muse of improvement spread far and wide with the help of . . . tastemaker Andrew Jackson Downing,” Campanella writes. “Although much of Downing's work focused on the domestic environment, instructing America's emerging bourgeoisie to create tasteful

36 and educative home grounds, he was also interested in the design of civic space.” "Downing's impact on his age -- and on the village improvement movement in general -- was profound.” Few men in the first half of the nineteenth century had a better grasp of the emergent interest in spatial beauty, or were better equipped to give it direction. Downing was the first advocate of environmental design to reach a wide audience, and he did so at precisely a moment when members of the growing middle class in American began seeking guidance on the tasteful appointment of their grounds (Campanella, 2003, p. 89). “In the 1830s,” thanks to the work of Downing and Davis, a “new craving for spatial beauty” swept across the United States. Village improvement societies were organized, beginning in western Massachusetts, to beautify the civic spaces of town and village. These groups engaged in a wide range of activities to enhance the attractiveness of their public lands, but first and foremost they planted trees -- elm trees. In doing so, they changed the face of New England, and forged one of the most powerful images of place in America -- the elm-tufted Yankee town. . . . Like the whitewashed steeple or the village green, the American elm became the symbol of New England throughout the United States (Campanella, 2003, p. 6). By the 1920s, Campanella continues, the elm trees which Hillhouse had so energetically promoted as a civic totem, had become an almost universal element of the American urban landscape. A survey in 1937 revealed that more than 25 million American elms embowered the cities, towns, and suburbs of the nation. Sacramento has as many elms as did New Haven, Connecticut; Dallas has six times as many elms as Boston, and Dubuque, Iowa had more trees than elm-rich Springfield, Massachusetts (Campanella, 2003, p. 1). The elm became a powerful symbol of civic community, identified in particular with the commitment of private citizens to give and serve. In writing of Yankee City's most elite neighborhood in the 1930s, W. Lloyd Warner would muse the beauty of the tree-lined street and the common sentiment of its residents for the venerable elms,” unify the homes of Hill Street in the minds of its people, the fine old trees providing an outward symbol of that superior region's self-regard. The trees themselves are part of a planting that physically and symbolically interrelates the contemporary families and their homes with the larger cultured world of their dwelling area, and this whole world with the values and beliefs of an upper class style of life of past generations. In the living presence of the elms, the past lives too. Hill Street is the most important public symbol of the upper classes of Yankee City. (Warner 1959, 44)

37 “Although rows of fine trees are the hallmark of old New England towns and villages,” Warner continued, it cannot be denied that in a fair-sized city, in the residential section, they constitute a public expression of the presence of upper-class manners and gentle refinement. Here on Hill Street, their age and the agreeable and historic style of most of the houses give eloquent testimony that good form, good breeding, and a proper ritualistic consumption of wealth have been and are being maintained by the families that have lived there for generations. . . . (44-45) Like the Green and the Yale campus, neighborhoods like the Hillhouse Quarter were models for similar neighborhoods throughout the country. Though serving the elites that resided in them as symbolic representations of their exalted status, they served public purposes as well. The couple standing in the foreground of the 1850 illustration of Hillhouse Avenue do not appear to be residents. Rather, the man raising his arm seems to be inviting his companion to admire the panorama of great trees and fine homes as a matter of civic pride. As a publicly accessible space, this private neighborhood had, as the younger Hillhouse hoped it would, taken on a public function in helping to show the role of civic elites in democratic society. The modern city, civic life, and the institutionalization of community As American cities grew in geographical extent, population, and diversity, symbols of civic community not only had to be continually reinvented, but also had to coexist with the proliferation of sub-communities. Some of these, like neighborhoods, were defined by location -- each of which tended to take on their own physical character and ethnic or class composition. Others, like occupational, professional, and associational communities, tended to become decoupled from specific places, instead defining themselves through social networks and sets of symbols that permitted members to recognize one another. Despite dramatic economic and political changes in the decades through the course of the nineteenth century, most citizens continued to live in villages and small towns, where older forms of community and the symbolic spaces and structures that embodied them, remained meaningful. In the larger cities, however, unrestrained capitalist enterprise, immigration (both from abroad and from our own countryside), and the geographic expansion of municipalities generated powerful forces inimical to civic community. Rising crime and public disorder, official and corporate corruption, and

38 deepening poverty were all symptoms of the decline of any shared sense of mutual identity or obligation. The initial responses to the decline of civic community in the cities were political movements to restore the integrity of the government. Citizens willing to challenge political machines, to demand accountability from big business, and to assume responsibility for the problem of poverty were, almost without exception, educated businessmen and professionals who identified themselves with older traditions of civic leadership. Ultimately, the civic reformers discovered that they could not best political machines at their own game: the bosses’ control of patronage, vast financial resources, and the unswerving loyalty of ethnic and working class voters, made them unbeatable. By the beginning of the twentieth century, municipal reform had shifted its strategy: it became non-partisan, basing its programs in arguments about the application of science and professional expertise to the administration, infrastructure, and physical appearance of cities. Like the creators of the new civic order of the early nineteenth century, the municipal reformers of the Progressive Era used private rather than public instrumentalities to achieve their ends. Higher education, which was overwhelmingly private before the Second World War, supplied the knowledge and training needed by the reformers. “Blue ribbon commissions” and civic improvement organizations gave them the visibility and the resources they needed to advance their agendas. One of the most influential efforts to reform the life of urban communities advanced under the banner of the City Beautiful Movement, an effort by middle and upper-middle class Americans to “refashion their cities into beautiful, functional entities.” Their effort involved a cultural agenda, a middle class environmentalism, and aesthetics expressed as beauty, order, system, and harmony. The ideal found physical realization in urban design, public and semi-public buildings, civic centers, park and boulevard systems, or extensions and embellishment of them, were the tokens of the improved environment. So were ordinary street improvements, including good paving, attractive furniture such as lampposts, and carefully selected and maintained trees. The goal beyond the tangibles was to influence the heart, mind, and purse of the citizen. Physical change and institutional

39 reformation would persuade urban dwellers to become more imbued with civic patriotism and better disposed toward community needs. Beautiful surrounding would enhance worker productivity and urban economics (Wilson, 1989, p. 1). The City Beautiful Movement came directly out of the New England-dominated culture of antebellum reform. Its founder, reform journalist and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), had spent the years before the Civil War writing anti-slavery propaganda. During the War, he worked with the United States Sanitary Commission, the private organization that assumed responsibility for deploying professional expertise to deal with problems of health and relief in the Union army. After the war, he became involved in planning New York's Central Park. He eventually founded a firm that pioneered modern landscape architecture. Olmsted was profoundly influenced by Andrew Jackson Downing's ideas about the moral and civic influence of physical settings. These were affirmed by Olmsted's observations of the impact of parks in cities like London. “The London parks,” writes historian William H. Wilson, realized Olmsted's social idea, the democratic intermingling of all classes. The display of riding horses and luxurious carriages moving among throngs of ordinary citizens was a visual affirmation of an interdependent organic society. Promenades in parks also encouraged the members of “the largest classes of people” to make "their best presentation of themselves" (Wilson, 1989, p. 16). Parks -- and in a larger sense -- the overall design of cities was a powerful mechanism for recreating community and responsible citizenship. In the 1890s, Olmsted's work and ideas had attracted the attention not only of academics, like Charles Sprague Sargent of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, but also political reformers and public officials committed to municipal improvement. Through a variety of national associations -- the National Municipal League, the Outdoor Art Association, and the municipal arts associations -- they debated, framed, and promoted their ideas. Just as Olmsted's ideas had emerged from earlier thinking about the design of urban communities, so the elaboration, institutionalization, and dissemination of those ideas drew on the older village improvement societies of the ante bellum years. Two factors made this new iteration of programs for the reshaping of community particularly powerful: one was the vigor of the national periodical press, which aggressively promoted reform ideas; the other was the propagation of these ideas through national federated membership associations, which depended on local chapters to

40 carry out their work. Ideas about city planning also received wide exposure through such extravaganzas as the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the world's fair which drew millions to a setting which used the best in contemporary architecture, landscaping, and technology to promote a unique kind of civic nationalism -- along with an awareness of the power of environment to shape collective identity. In its beauty, order, and efficiency, the fair showed the possibilities of the “‘fuller,’ cooperative, more leisurely urban life of the twentieth century” that could be realized through comprehensive planning and community-wide cooperation (Wilson. 1989, p. 71). The hallmark of the City Beautiful Movement was the civic center, the grouping of public and private buildings -- the court house, the city hall, the municipal auditorium, the public library, the major financial institutions, usually in the imposing Beaux Arts Style -- in the heart of downtown. “The civic center,” writes movement historian William H. Wilson, was intended to be a beautiful ensemble, an architectonic triumph far more breathtaking than a single building. Grouping public buildings around a park, square, or intersection of radial streets allowed the visual delights of perspectives, open spaces, and the contrasts between buildings and their umbrageous settings. . . . The civic center's beauty would reflect the souls of the city's inhabitants, inducing order, calm, and propriety therein. The citizen's presence in the center, together with other citizens, would strengthen pride in the city and awaken a sense of community with fellow urban dwellers. . . (White, 1989, p. 92). The civic center would stand both as powerful symbols of community and its shared values and purposes and would transmit these to the public. Its design principles and motifs would be embodied both in public structures -- city halls, court houses, school buildings, police stations, fire houses, and park structures -- and in the private properties regulated by the zoning ordinances championed by municipal reformers. Civic Space and Civil Privatism Like Dwight, Hillhouse and their allies of the federal period, the urban reformers of the Progressive era civic appreciated the capacity of setting, landscape, and architecture to shape public values and behavior. For both, values embedded in the physical arrangements of communities were far more powerful and enduring than legal or regulatory prescriptions or governmental arrangements. More significantly, for both the chief agencies for shaping these didactic environments were not governmental bodies, though both government and business were essential

41 allies, but private ones. The creation of the civic spaces which expressed symbolically the interrelationships of public and private interests were, almost without exception, the products of voluntary bodies – nonprofit organizations and privately-convened “blue ribbon” commissions. The power and historical persistence of this assumption of public leadership by private groups – civil privatism -- is a central theme in the development of American institutions. The limitations of democratic government, which is ultimately constrained by the preferences of electoral majorities and their willingness to be taxed, and of business, which is ultimately constrained by its competitiveness in the pursuit of profits, appear to have been remedied by the willingness of leaders acting in private capacities to serve the public interest. Perhaps the central theme in their endeavors has been the capacity to distinguish the public interest from the interests of government and business. The latter are, ultimately, no more than the sum of individual interests. The former, in contrast, seeks to create civic communities in which the whole is more than the sum of its constituent parts. According private actors this kind of power is not without its hazards. As contemporary critics of urban life have suggested, privatization of civic life can have profoundly undemocratic consequences. In an essay on Los Angeles, Mike Davis describes how the middle class's "obsession with security has supplanted hopes for urban reform and social integration” (Davis 1992, 155.)" The consequence of this crusade to secure the city from crime and violence, is, according to Davis the destruction of any truly democratic urban space. The American city is being systematically turned inward. The 'public' spaces of the new megastructures and supermalls have supplanted traditional streets and disciplined their spontaneity. Inside malls, office centers, and cultural complexes, public activities are sorted into strictly functional compartments under the gaze of private police forces... This polarization marks the decline of urban liberalism and with it the end of what might be called the Olmstedian vision of public space in America. Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of Central Park, conceived public landscapes and parks as social safety valves, mixing classes and ethnicities in common (bourgeois) recreations and pleasures; 'No one who has closely observed the conduct of the people who visit [Central] Park,' he wrote, 'can doubt that it exercises a distinctly harmonizing influence upon the most unfortunate and most lawless classes of the city—an influence favorable to courtesy, self-control, and temperance” (Davis 1992, 156).

42 “Genuinely democratic space is virtually extinct,” Davis laments: public amenities shrink with closing of libraries and playgrounds, the neglect of parks, and the desolation and increasing dangerousness of streets as resources are diverted to further privatize public space and subsidize new exclusive enclaves. Just as troubling, according to M. Christine Boyer, are privately shaped public spaces like New York’s South Street Seaport which, while insulated from the city as it actually exists, falsify the city’s past and engender illusions about its present. “On the surface of these tableaux,” she writes, everything seems steeped in tradition. The way it was has supposedly become the way it is. Yet these nostalgic constructions only refer to history obliquely by appropriating styles of clothing, architectural environments and furnishings to create a mood through which the past is filtered and perceived. These stylized historical tableaux, on one level, are self-conscious attempts to regain a centered world, to re-establish a mythical base on which American moral, political, and social traditions might stand.... [They] link the past to the present through visual recreations that gloss over real social change by capitalizing on the yearnings for lost innocence, heroic feats, adventures, explorations, and conquests (Boyer 1992, 191). Such enclaves, she concludes, insulate the privileged from disturbing realities — and from any sense of their civic responsibilities—they also serve as backdrops for forms of consumption that further distance the middle classes from awareness of their connection to a broader public. The civil privatism that emerged in places like New Haven at the end of the eighteenth century, that was elaborated in the nineteenth, and reached its fullest expression in the great designed public spaces of the first half of the twentieth century, was predicated on notions of mutuality and inclusion: Inequalities of ability and wealth, rather than diminishing mutual obligations, were viewed as the basis for extending them. Because taxpayers were reluctant to underwrite even such obviously public responsibilities as education and caring for the poor and dependent, enacting and extending these obligations fell primarily to privately funded voluntary associations, which established schools, churches, libraries, cemeteries, hospitals, and other public institutions. Even in places where private initiative was discouraged, private groups lobbied legislatures and municipal authorities to create public agencies and, once these agencies were established, often supported them generously out of their own pockets. Unlike today's enclaves, the creators of cemeteries and other civic institutions of the nineteenth century did not exclude the public. Rather, they understood that their effectiveness as educational instruments depended on their ability to serve as many people as possible.

43 Given the hazards involved, can democratic society continue to take the risk of ceding to private groups the power to define civic values and civic space? Civic space and the institutions it frames have historically rested on the public's willingness to concede to elites the power to shape consensus defining community identities and values. The capacity to maintain this consensus depended, in turn, on underlying ethnic and religious homogeneity and -- failing that -- the ability of elites to enforce belief in the legitimacy of their claims to be acting in the public interest. The increasing diversity of American society in this global age may preclude the existence of that kind of consensus and deference to any elite and its ideals. The notion of civic community may be doomed by the increasingly individualistic nature of American life. But here history -- at least the slice of it offered here -- may be instructive. Isn't the modeling civic order in the face of power centripetal forces precisely the challenge faced by the conservative reformers of the federal period? While their solution is hardly the answer to our own problems, the possibility that private citizens can succeed in creatively engaging the dilemmas of community and diversity -- when government cannot -- is intriguing. REFERENCES Bacon, L, (1860). Sketch of the life and public services of Hon. James Hillhouse of New Haven, New Haven : [s.n.], 1860. Blake, H. T. (1898). Chronicles of the New Haven Green from 1638 to 1862. New Haven, CT: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press. Boyer, M. Christine. (1992). “Cities for Sale: Merchandizing History at South Street Seaport.” In Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York, NY: Noonday Press. Brown, E. M. (1976). New Haven: A guide to urban architecture and design. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Campanella, T. J. (2003). Republic of shade: New England and the American elm. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Center Church, New Haven Website (accessed 11/6/06). Colvin, H. (1991). Architecture and the after-life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cremin, L. A. (1988). American education: The metropolitan experience, 1876-1980. New York: Harper & Row.

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