An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890–1920: Chicago in th ...

condition and physical comfort of the city and represented the physical manifestation of “booster” campaigns to surpass rival cities in the quest for regional economic domination.

For middle-class Americans of the Progressive Era, physical improvements possessed an often unrecognized social significance beyond these physical and financial characteristics. Focusing only on the financial dimension of improvement, for example, historian Kenneth Jackson suggested, “[I]mprovements were often resisted in order to hold down taxes” in immigrant neighborhoods. Jackson's analysis neglects to recognize that such decisions were also indicative of an indifference, sometimes antipathy, to the class-based ideological dimensions of improvement. Hinting at a more expansive definition of improvement without identifying it as a distinct, temporally and spatially dependent ideology, Jackson also noted sewers were “absolutely essential to most native white American neighborhoods” in the late nineteenth century.¹⁶ As a discrete historical entity, the grassroots ideology of improvement exerted a profound influence over urban growth and suburbanization in Progressive Era metropolitan regions. Rising to prominence around 1900, urban improvement provided direction for the developing town planning profession, but more importantly, it was the most significant ideology defining the physical content and sense of place among inhabitants of residential neighborhoods.

Contrary to such uncritical references is the work of a small number of historians elaborating on the ideological underpinnings of improvement in a national context. Writing in the Journal of Urban History in 1976, Jon Peterson found the ideology, described as “civic improvement,” to be among the “forgotten origins and lost meanings” of the City Beautiful movement.¹⁷ “Civic improvement,” wrote Peterson, “began as a laymen's cause and flourished initially in small to medium-sized cities.” Grassroots practitioners, added Peterson, concentrated on “piecemeal programs,” and “blended images of small-town beauty with order, cleanliness, and moral uplift.”¹⁸ Following from this brief treatment, the ideology featured in a discussion of “municipal improvement” as part of William Wilson's 1989 The City Beautiful Movement. The comprehensive, civic design