The following is an adaptation of a two-part series of Flashback columns that appeared in Richmond magazine in 2017.
Hear more about the past and present of land use in Richmond on Tuesday, Oct. 1, from 6 to 8 p.m. in The Valentine’s first installment of its latest Controversy/History series, which this year is partnering with Richmond 300, the city’s master planning process, to explore big questions about the kind of city we hope to become.
The event is co-hosted by Valentine Director William Martin and “Coffee With Strangers RVA” host Kelli Lemon and will include guests Dr. Brittany Keegan of the VCU Land Use Education Program and Bernard Harkless of Richmond 300.
Harland Bartholomew, circa 1931-41 (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons/Missouri History Museum)
“This is A MASTER PLAN, not a DREAM. If you hastily consider it as such, you are doomed to disappointment.”
The emphatic declaration opens Richmond’s first citywide master plan, drafted in 1946 by Harland Bartholomew, considered at the time to be the nation’s foremost authority in such matters.
By the end of his four-decade career, he and the firm he started in 1919, Harland Bartholomew & Associates (HBA), had designed plans for more than 500 cities and counties. He helped plan the Metro subway system in Washington, D.C., and he assisted the John D. Rockefeller Jr.-led reimagining of a near-dead Tidewater town that today is Colonial Williamsburg. Known for his methodical, exacting approach, Bartholomew became a preeminent city planner at a pivotal moment.
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.
Locally, his mixed legacy includes surrendering significant portions of the city fabric to expressways and parking, while also supporting neighborhoods anchored by schools and parks. Bartholomew, in a way, anticipated the “New Urbanism” of walkable neighborhoods.
When confronting poverty and urban blight, he and his peers favored removing dilapidated housing viewed as an impediment to progress. This led to the wholesale destruction of blocks of historic property. In Richmond, that often meant majority African American neighborhoods. Ardent preservationist Mary Wingfield Scott derided Bartholomew and his ilk as the “bulldozing brotherhood.”
Harland Bartholomew’s 1946 plan prepared the way for Richmond’s expressways. (Image courtesy City of Richmond Planning Commission)
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 295 and another “Cross-town Street” conforms to the Chippenham Parkway.
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.”
An opponent of sprawl, Bartholomew championed managed growth and opposed expansion beyond Richmond’s then-existing boundaries. He described the dislocation of population to the outer suburbs and efforts by the city to expand outward as “an extravagant waste” destined to bankrupt Richmond. He arrived here in 1945 as the expert consultant in time to usher out the trolleys, which he viewed as being in the twilight of their efficiency after more than 60 years of service.
The automobile — a technology not even 60 years old when Bartholomew came to Richmond — required adapting cities never designed for them, and the challenge occupied much of HBA’s headspace. The Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike, which almost exactly followed HBA’s 1946 recommendation for a proposed “Inter-Regional Highway,” fit like a piece of Hot Wheels track into the models of federal interstate building.
Planner Eldridge Lovelace, who joined Harland Bartholomew & Associates in St. Louis in 1935, wrote a book in 1993 on Bartholomew’s career and legacy. He defends Bartholomew’s role in creating the interstate system, saying, “We cannot blame members of the [Inter-regional Highway] Committee or Harland Bartholomew for not seeing the full extent of the dispersion and decentralizing of the American city.”
Bartholomew encouraged the preservation of certain 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. He established a model “neighborhood improvement act” under the National Association of Real Estate boards that suggested a blending of clearance and rehabilitation to arrest neighborhood blight. When HBA developed Richmond’s plan, the city’s first public housing project, Gilpin Court, was already 5 years old.
In 1946, Bartholomew observed that “the large Negro sections in Richmond are of old homes, unsanitary conditions, and generally bad or inadequate facilities.” 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 business and industry made people more dependent on either the automobile or public transportation.
Bartholomew couldn’t solve the endemic conditions of poverty. His solution was to engineer a city’s development either through or around them. Between “clearances” of blighted property and highway construction, by the end of the 1950s, 4,700 housing units in primarily black neighborhoods were swept away.
His plan to make Richmond more automobile-friendly also 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 many ways the city that Bartholomew built.
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