Harland Bartholomew’s 1946 plan prepared the way for Richmond’s expressways. (Image courtesy City of Richmond Planning Commission)
Second of two parts
City planner Harland Bartholomew’s handiwork is seen throughout the country and abroad. He created the open space on the Mississippi River that allowed for the St. Louis Gateway Arch. His efforts started the regional airport system of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 appointed Bartholomew to a committee that formulated ideas for a national highway system.
In Richmond, Bartholomew’s 1946 master plan prepared the way for the disruptive cuts of expressways. His “Circumferential Cross-Town Street” matches the eventual path of Route 288 and another “Cross-town Street” conforms to the Chippenham Parkway. The Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike follows the plan’s recommendation for an “Inter-Regional Highway.”
Steve Patterson, author of the blog “Urban Review: Saint Louis,” sees Bartholomew’s plans for hundreds of cities as, at best, insensitive, and at worst, cookie-cutter — “each one a repeat of the prior: widen streets, build a highway loop around downtown, build parking, require high parking standards for new construction, make the zoning even stricter.”
Bartholomew encouraged the preservation of some neighborhoods, while advocating destruction of others. He helped provide the impetus for the federal Housing Acts of 1937 and 1949, which offered financing for public housing projects. Between “clearances” of blighted property and highway construction, by the end of the 1950s, 4,700 Richmond housing units in primarily black neighborhoods were swept away.
Planner Eldridge Lovelace, who joined Harland Bartholomew & Associates (HBA) in St. Louis in 1935, wrote a book in 1993 on Bartholomew’s career and legacy. He underscored Bartholomew’s intertwined three-strand professional life as a planning director, head of a firm and teacher at the University of Illinois and Washington University in St. Louis.
A serious man of practical experience, he also possessed some aesthetic sense. One evening he and his wife visited the Lovelaces for an evening of bridge. Lovelace put on classical music recordings and at one point, Bartholomew expressed admiration for a piece. “I told him it was Bizet’s first symphony. Then, as an afterthought, I told him that Bizet had written it when he was 17 years old.” Bartholomew sat in quiet reflection for some moments until he frowned. He said, “We just aren’t getting anywhere at all are we? No young man of 17 is doing anything like that today.”
Lovelace also remembers a well-concealed “puckish sense of humor” that helped him reconcile “the many follies, peccadilloes and outrageous behavior of municipal officials he had to work with.”
One such moment occurred in 1936, when HBA’s suggestion of a 1,200-foot tunnel under Williamsburg for the Colonial Parkway caused U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, according to Lovelace, to angrily denounce “the most damn fool idea that he had ever heard of.” John D. Rockefeller Jr. intervened and eased in Bartholomew to explain how the alternatives didn’t work and that the tunnel would save money. It was built.
The proliferation of the automobile required adapting cities never designed for them, and the challenge occupied much of HBA’s headspace. Lovelace defends Bartholomew’s role in creating the interstate system, saying “We cannot blame members of the [Interregional Highway] Committee or Harland Bartholomew for not seeing the full extent of the dispersion and decentralizing of the American city.”
Another problem that concerned Bartholomew — determining the best housing solutions for poverty-stricken neighborhoods — remains a massive social issue. To upgrade housing for the poor, Bartholomew adhered to the concept of the “neighborhood unit” from sociologist and planner Clarence A. Perry (1872-1944) who emphasized the rigid separation of residential, commercial and industrial uses. But shifting residents away from businesses made people more dependent on the automobile or public transportation.
Bartholomew died in 1989 at age 100, outliving three wives, two sons, and a sister who essentially raised him.
His plan to make Richmond more automobile-friendly enabled many middle-class residents to trade urban living for a suburban commute. Combined with the razing of historic neighborhoods and development of public housing, that resulted in a city that continues to have one of the highest poverty rates in Virginia. Today, even as some of its neighborhoods are seeing a resurgence, Richmond remains in significant ways the city that Bartholomew built.
