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

Crawford, appeared in the 1880s when George Pullman, proprietor of the Pullman Palace Car Company, constructed his new company town fourteen miles south of downtown Chicago. The widely publicized “improved housing conditions and ‘improving’ paternalist institutions” of New England company towns were embodied in the rational and aesthetic urban environment of the new town of Pullman.¹¹ Pullman himself drew upon the improvement ideology when stressing the “commercial value of beauty” in the town's architecture and plan and in asserting his “faith in the educational and refining influences of beauty, and beautiful and harmonious surroundings.”¹² Many working residents of Pullman did not share this conviction in the social power of the improved company town. Prompted by high residential rents, Crawford noted, many workers “moved to one of the communities that grew up around Pullman, where, although they lacked ‘improvements,’ they were free from Pullman's rules and could purchase their own homes.”¹³ An equally significant cause of this relocation was the indifference among Pullman's working class toward the distinctly middle-class notion of improvement, expressed through the landscape of the company town.

More common than remarks implying the latent ideological dimensions of improvement are uncritical references employed by historians describing the construction of urban infrastructure and public works. Attention to the exclusively physical and financial components of improvement is understandable since these were important considerations of city inhabitants and governments alike. Urban and suburban historiography has devoted substantial attention to the construction of public works such as streets, bridges, water mains, and sewers, and the creation of these amenities has previously been recognized by historians as the “unheralded triumph” of the nineteenth-century American city.¹⁴ As a number of scholars have noted more recently, much of the physical development of urban infrastructure was privately financed by a range of individuals and associations, including NIAs, who were able to influence and, in some cases, direct patterns of settlement through their involvement in the improvement process.¹⁵ Developments in urban infrastructure were the result of an ongoing attempt to enhance the sanitary