Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 127, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 June 1918 — Home Town Helps [ARTICLE]

Home Town Helps

IS NO LONGER EXPERIMENT Garden City Has Been Proved to Be Complete Success by Its Development in England. While the community idea in thia country should not exactly be called a negative expression, tt> development to date hardly warrants terming it a positive enterprise. Concerning this movement Noble Fost Haggen says: “The garden city and town-planting movement has reached the highest point of effectiveness in England and nas proved something more than a successful experiment. “The model villages of Letchworth, Port Sunlight, Bournville, which provide homes, real homes, for working people, are artistic creations of men possessed of splendid imagination and sympathetic understanding. Add to these Hempstead Garden suburbs, the Garden village near Cardiff, with their picturesque winding roads and vinecovered dwellings, and one may look In vain for their counterparts In America. They are nothing less than fairy garden spots. ■. “The difference between the garden city and the garden suburb is that the first is a separate entity, a self-sus-taining unit; the latter lies on the outskirts of large cities and becomes a part thereof. “There Is no distinct and overwhelming element of philanthropy as a basis for the creation of these model towns. They are paying Investments from the practical point of view. The plan has been for a number of manufacturers to give serious thought to the furthering of the garden city movement. The congestion in our large cities, contrary to all natural laws, has about reached its limit. We can no longer excuse ourselves for past errors in town planning on the theory that this is a young country. New towns are being laid out today with the same pitiful lack of constructive Imagination as heretofore; paralleled streets, giving the aspect of a great, ugly checkerboard; no civic centers, no playgrounds, Insufficient parks. •The garden cities that are destined to bloom in America and that are to be the result of a movement fathered by American industrial institutions, should be equal, if not superior, to any like developments anywhere in the world.”