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

describe the cultivation of trees and flower gardens, and the arrangement of “pieces of artificial water” and “decorative accompaniments of the house and grounds.”³⁵ Downing helped establish the initial ideological framework and practical program of improvement, particularly through his focus on public and semipublic spaces and his insistence on a causal link between physical order, morality, and social stability. Numerous historians have detailed the longer history of the middle-class and elite belief in the relationship between morality and domestic architecture.³⁶ However, as chapter 1 will demonstrate, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, middle-class Americans increasingly applied this belief to the totality of residential landscapes. Downing prefigured later improvement ideologues by claiming that local associations or village improvement societies (VISs) provided the most suitable medium for propagating improvement ideas and practices, provided their occasionally wayward, “tasteless” activities were informed by the opinions of new professionals, particularly landscape architects.

The number of middle-class VISs increased steadily during the latter nineteenth century under the direction of journalists, lay religious leaders, educators, and landscape architects, who significantly expanded the meaning of improvement. Chapter 1 documents the rise of VISs and examines their intellectual and practical contributions to urban grassroots improvement. Village improvement ideologues such as educator Birdsey Grant Northrop proceeded from an understanding that improvement projects should work toward bettering the homes and home life of all American people. This new nexus between improvement, residential landscapes, and cultural notions of home would be a central feature of the ideology when applied in an urban context after 1890, and it was an important development that created a fillip for the participation of women in reform beyond the domestic sphere. Village improvement leaders affirmed the social inclusiveness of VISs and their ostensibly nonpartisan local projects, suggesting that they moderated class conflict and provided a solvent for political and religious animosities. However, such advice reflected an assumption that middle-class villagers were best equipped to define the nature of local public interest, and it revealed