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

Local, grassroots improvement occupied a marginal position at the 1901 reform conference, despite its important relationship to the emerging City Beautiful movement and its increasingly decisive impact on the politics, culture, and physical landscape of Chicago. The conference program was dominated by papers concerning tax reform, public health, education, and municipal art, although Gertrude Blackwelder did present a brief paper on “Local Improvement Societies.”⁵ By 1900, there were already twenty local NIAs in Chicago, and during 1901 three more were established on the Southside and one in Ravenswood.⁶ As historians Jon Peterson and Bonj Szczygiel suggested, grassroots improvement played a fundamental role in launching the City Beautiful movement and guiding its development.⁷ Moreover, local improvement, according to historian William Wilson, helped shape the “national progressive goals of civic responsibility, efficiency in government, and nonpartisanship.”⁸ Like many elements of progressivism, local improvement was derived directly from rural sources, reflecting the pre-urban, protestant origins of most reform-oriented city dwellers during the early 1900s.⁹ Indeed, Chicago's early grassroots improvers and their NIAs were strongly influenced by the village improvement efforts undertaken in small towns throughout rural America after 1850.

The following chapter offers a systematic explication of the ideology of village improvement and analyses its impact on emerging ideas and practices concerning urban improvement. After reviewing the historiography of improvement, the chapter outlines and contextualizes the major intellectual influences on the developing ideology of village improvement. The chapter subsequently examines the dissemination of village improvement from its origins in the northeastern United States and traces its passage to cities and transformation into urban, neighborhood improvement.

The form of village improvement provided numerous foundational principles for its urban counterpart and progressivism, more generally. For example, village improvement directed attention toward the beautification of public, rather than private space, as part of a rising middle-class attempt to promote civic consciousness and a sense of communality