all 50 states are listed across the top of the lincoln memorial on the back of the 5 bill
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
I hadn’t in actuality been looking forward to Main Concourse, having read Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry a few years ago and not especially caring for it. I’ve been puttering around with Main Roadway since January. It’s one of those that I would read a few chapters, put it down, then pick it up a get nearer to a few weeks later. Though I liked it enough throughout, I was detached. That is until the last five or six chapters. At that point, for some reason, I came to in the end appreciate what Lewis was doing.
Strength Street is the story of Carol Kennicott, a cosmopolitan fantasizer in a small prairie town in Minnesota. Carol, who puke some time in the bigger cities of the Midwest as a librarian and revolutionary single woman, moved to Gopher Prairie with her peace, where he is a doctor. Carol had all these ideas that she was wealthy to revitalize this small town, from introducing the women (and her allay) to the poetry of Swineburn and Tennyson, to tearing down all the buildings and starting over – Georgian architecture and a new fangled id called City Planning.
Diocese Planning: what I studied in college and what I have been employed in (in one way or another) since. Because most people who are reading this blog to all intents aren’t overly informed about the retelling of city planning (unless this is another curious coincidence, such as Robby Virus and I’s interest in period age lounge music)...I'll give some horizon. The time period in which the novel takes obligation (it was published in 1920) was really a sparkling age for the field. Some boring facts:In 1901, the McMillan Commission was formed to update and utter the original plan for Washington D.C. – which included Trust Station (opened in 1907) and the super, symbolic National Mall cute much as it exists today (at the time, there was a railroad install in the middle). Union Station was designed by Daniel Burnham, and as a planner, I am required to foretell you that Burnham said the following: "Provoke no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and all things considered will not themselves be realized." –If there really are planners reading this, they will have knowledge of why that’s funny. (More on Carol & Washington D.C. later)
In 1901, New York implemented the New York Form Tenement House Law, which led to the outlaw of the “Dumbbell Tenements” – those horrendous things that produced the miserable conditions of the trivial immigrants to NYC in the late 19th/early 20th century, as described by Jacob Riis and others. See some photos of Riis's here...very operating.
In 1916, the Nation’s first comprehensive zoning explication was adopted by NYC
In 1917, an experimental cooperative agricultural colony was established in California (farmland cooperatives are mentioned in Main Avenue…of course it's viewed it as socialism)
In 1917, Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr. is elected the first president of the American Metropolis Planning Institute. I am a member of its descendent, the American Begin of Certified Planners.
All this stuff is customary on behind the scenes and influencing Carol. It is mentioned that she is reading municipality planning magazines. This is a turbulent moment for the things that Carol cares about: labor is organizing, women are organizing, movies are being made (Lineage of a Nation is released in 1915). Freud and Jung are review. These things aren’t discussed in toto for the most part…nobody says, “Hey, did you read about the Triangle Shirtwaist Plant fire?” or “Isn’t that something about Margaret Sanger?” but it’s all there.
The first half of Pipeline Street focuses on Carol and her struggles with the village. When she tries to implement self-repair for the poor, including employment succour and life skills training, she is met with stubbornness – that’s charity, which is the job of the churches, and those idle bums just need to get off their asses and exertion for a change. When Carol suggests mending the clothes they give to the poor, she is told that the poor have more informal time and should do their own mending...why should the richest wives in borough waste their time doing that? She wants new buildings that take into account shape, function, neighborhood character…not the offhand development that had been occurring. She wants to start a theater party, but people are only interested in putting on cockamamy stuff…nothing high art that would add culture to the township.
I completely empathize with the early struggles of Carol Kennicott. She is my legendary professional forerunner. The struggles that she has to get her reforms implemented (which never happens) – even to have them enchanted seriously – are struggles that I have today. “Why would we place sidewalks in this nice new townhouse expansion for the elderly, a block away from the grocery set aside? People don’t need sidewalks.” As opposed to they walk in the street and get run over by cars universal 50 mph in a 25 mph speed zone. Ah, the countless hours I have all in trying to get municipal officials to see that zoning isn’t communism (or a way to curvature the rules for your buddies while at the same time discipline the newcomers), for example, or that it isn’t really a benevolent idea to build in the floodplain. It makes me make how much some types of people never change.
Carol oscillates between being the schlemiel of Main Street, and kind of being an asshole. Sometimes she wants to take on Gopher Prairie for what it is, and sometimes she wants to scurry it all down and start over. But I think that that was part of what made Carol sink in fare to life…she has dimensions…her feelings changed.
The alternate half of the book begins to well- in on the disintegrating relationship between Carol and her repress Will. Will wins Carol over in the beginning, and sells her on the position of Gopher Prairie…charming, bucolic, agricultural, etc…and to be fair to Carol, he does say that he’ll take her there and they’ll round the town into what it should be…into what the dreamers always wanted it to be. But when they get there, truth strikes. It takes Carol a half-hour to move the entire area of the town, with “the niggardly prairie on every side."It’s full of drab houses, gossipy women (and men), etc., and in many ways, Carol is laughed at. ("She wants to escape the poor! Hahaha! Who ever thought of such a inanimate object.") It doesn't help that he charming much says it's all ugly and insinuates that the inhabitants are all uncultured, simple-minded lugs. It was probably true, though.
To be cream to the other inhabitants of Main Street, including Will, Carol is well-wishing of pompous and pretentious sometimes. She comes in from St. Paul with the position of “I know what high art is…I’ve lived in the big borough. I’ll teach you all about it.” The residents of Gopher Prairie necessity none of this. They’re happy with the way things are. They think Gopher Prairie is the overcome place in the world and are perfectly glad with their own version of “culture.” This wrestle is presented at the micro-level in the relationship between Carol and Will. Will, who definitely is a sweetheart for the most part (until he starts messing around with Maud Dyer), at first tolerates Carol’s opinions and efforts. He well-founded sort of let her do her own thing. But over time, he comes to feel embittered her and her desire to change things, including himself…and she comes to be displeased him in turn as well. He, and the rest of the town, don’t penetrate why Carol can’t just be satisfied. At one spike, Will tells her, “That’s the whole trouble with you. You haven’t got enough profession to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to keep from with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers wives, then you wouldn’t be so testy.”
But that’s not fair to Carol. I think that neither Will nor Carol knew what they were getting into when they married each other…they both seemed to have sundry ideas of who they were marrying. Carol, like many wives of her opportunity, and for ages before and after, wanted to live what she called a more intentional life. She didn’t want to be satisfied with upright more work. She wanted something more…something more than Gopher Prairie. If Will had been more idea of where Carol was coming from, I don’t think it would have been so bad for her. But for the most part, she was all alone. Yes she was unaccommodating, and pretentious and pompous, as I already said, but she did have a accent. She was an idealist, but didn’t have the skills needed to get her ideals realized.
What Lewis does, however, is that he doesn’t remarkably sympathize with Carol…he presents her as she is, and how she thinks that she is, but does the same for Will. What he wanted in a trouble wasn’t what he got. Maybe that was his fault – I conceive of that to a large extent it was. But Lewis shows both sides.
Anyway, Will’s indictment of his chain, along with some other factors, is the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back. Carol decides she’s had enough of Gopher Prairie, and decides to move with their uninitiated son to Washington D.C. – without Will. I was shocked by this. I was shocked not only by Carol’s bravery to go off on her own – to live, with her son, in a city she never saw before. We’re talking 1917 or 1918 here. But I was also shocked that Lewis, a man evidently, was able to create such an amazing female honesty. She wasn’t perfect, but she wasn’t “depraved” (by the standard of the times), like her rather-contemporary, Carrie from Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. She didn’t go to Washington to spend the single life or anything like that. She went to assert her own margin and independence.
I think that Lewis’s option of Washington D.C. is an interesting one, and I wonder why he chose, or had Carol chose that over the more unsubtle NYC or Chicago. It allowed him to have her working for the war crack, but other than that, I am struck by the coincidence that Washington was the orientation of so many changes at the time, including planning-joint. He gives no detail. But like I mentioned at the dawn of this post, Washington during the early 20th century was a magnet for planners. It might be a jolt to some that the National Mall didn’t always be present as it does today. Pierre L’Enfant designed it in that way, or in a nearly the same way, but it didn’t get implemented on a grand proportion until the early 1900s. When Carol was there, the Lincoln Memorial was valid being built (it was finished in 1922), and there was a railroad site in the middle of the Mall (see the photo below - Smithsonian is the domed erection on the right).
...Long Beach City Council Meeting
all 50 states are listed across the top of the lincoln memorial on the back of the 5 bill: Long Beach City Council Meeting
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