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the Progressive Era. Improvement comprised a dynamic cluster of ideas that were adapted to the shifting demands of social change during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the core principle of improvement in the context of landscapes such as the Highlands was based on an enduring assumption that built environments that reflected and shaped the moral, political, and cultural character of individuals and communities. This assumption was shared by elites and reform leaders, who were profoundly affected by their evangelical experience of the Great Awakening during the 1830s and 1840s, particularly its emphasis on the malleability of character and society. Responding to the increasing diversity and chaos of late nineteenth-century cities, reformers and elites applied this idea in formulating plans for ideal urban environments that would encourage moral uplift, social order, and democratic sentiments. In Chicago, the monumental “White City” of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition provided one of the earliest and most striking examples of a specially planned, regulated, and carefully designed urban environment.7 This environmentalist assumption subsequently informed the planning impulse of the “City Beautiful” movement that produced grand visions of citywide regeneration, including architect Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago.8 To be sure, the idealized plans of elites and reform leaders helped transform the physical form and culture of cities, though equally decisive were the grassroots improvement efforts of numerous middle-class Americans striving to create more “desirable places of residence.”9
The orderly, aesthetic residential landscapes produced by middle-class grassroots improvers were expressions of their ambivalent attitudes toward the rise of cities. The growing number of improved residential landscapes in Chicago after 1890 were visually distinguished by their well-maintained, paved streets and sidewalks; street lamps; “street trees” and landscaping; and their sanitary appearances. The creation of such landscapes represented a variant of the “positive environmentalism” identified by historian Paul Boyer. “Positive” reformers, wrote Boyer,