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cultural confusion, physical disorder, lawlessness, and corruption. Chicago's staggering population growth was unprecedented among nineteenth-century cities. During the late 1830s, Chicago was a small village of fewer than four thousand people and was described by one visitor as a “raw and bare” place whose “insignificant” houses appeared to be “run up in various directions, without any principle at all.”29 By 1850, the population had increased to almost thirty thousand and Chicago had become the railroad hub of the West, though the city was still only ranked twenty-forth behind New York City and its 515,547 inhabitants.30 However, by 1900, Chicago had ascended to become the second largest city with almost 1.1 million people and was the primary inland center for commerce, manufacturing, and industry.31 “New” immigrants from Russia, Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were a primary source of this rapid increase. Indeed, during the decade before 1900, over 587 thousand new immigrants arrived in Chicago, bringing the foreign-born population of the city up to over 40 percent of the total.32 This influx of people generated kaleidoscopic changes in public behavior that confused, excited, and disoriented white, middle-class, native-born Chicagoans.33
In the minds of middle-class Chicagoans, population growth and rapid urban expansion were largely responsible for the kinds of social ills described by journalist Lincoln Steffens. Publishing his reflections on Chicago in 1903, Steffens asserted that the city was “first in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nation.” Even though Chicago had managed to create a “magnificent system of public parking,” added Steffens, it was “too poor to pave and clean the streets.”34 This view of the city informed the multiplicity of progressive reform initiatives and prompted numerous middle-class Americans to focus on the creation and maintenance of improved residential landscapes.
The practice of grassroots improvement emerged gradually in northeastern rural towns and villages after 1840 and was guided by a succession of leaders, beginning with landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing employed the term improvement infrequently to