"I have seen the future": Selling the unsustainable city

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 3-15

  Hayden, Dolores ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

1939 1940 World's Fair; Eero Saarinen; embodied space; Futurama; General Motors; highways; Highways and Horizons; Norman Bel Geddes; Setha M. Low

Indexed keywords

AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY; CONFERENCE PROCEEDING; FUTURE PROSPECT; URBAN TRANSPORT;

CITY; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ENVIRONMENT; ETHNIC AND RACIAL GROUPS; ETHNOLOGY; FORECASTING; HISTORY; HUMAN; LEGAL ASPECT; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PUBLIC HEALTH; PUBLICATION; REVIEW; TRAFFIC AND TRANSPORT; UNITED STATES;

CITIES; ENVIRONMENT; EXHIBITS AS TOPIC; FORECASTING; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 21ST CENTURY; HUMANS; POPULATION GROUPS; PUBLIC HEALTH; TRANSPORTATION; UNITED STATES;

EID: 84855694924     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: 15526771     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0096144211420635     Document Type: Review

References (76)

1. Excellent documentaries on highways include Driving Passion: America's Love f Affair with the Car (Judith Quain, WGBH Boston, 1995)
2. Divided Highways: The Interstates and the Transformation of American Life (Lawrence R. Hott and Tom Lewis, Florentine Films, 1997).
3. Also see two pleas for road building, Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip by Ken Burns, 2003; and Give Yourself the Green Light, by General Motors, 1954, included in the DVD The Story of Sprawl (Planetizen Press, 2009).
4. Notable books on the history of highways in the USA include James J. Flinck, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998);
5. Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York: Penguin, 1997);
6. Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991);
7. Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994);
8. Mark Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939-1989, rev. ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990);
9. Owen Gutfreund, 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
10. Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 200-10, was one of the first books to look at Geddes and industrial designers who might tackle "everything from a match to a city."
11. Also see Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future (New York: Summit Books, 1984), 47-50;
12. Roland Marchand, "The Designers Go to the Fair, II: Norman Bel Geddes, The General Motors -Futurama,' and the Visit to the Factory Transformed," Design History: An Anthology, ed. Dennis P. Doordan, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 108-09.
13. Christopher Innes, Designing Modern America: Broadway to Main Street, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), includes an extended look at Geddes as a theater designer, and a detailed analysis of the technical effects achieved by Geddes, 128-43, 173-81.
14. On the Shell campaign, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, The City of Tomorrow: Model 1937, Pentagram Papers 11, (London: Pentagram Design, 1984).
15. Robert Coombs, "Norman Bel Geddes' Highways and Horizons," Perspecta 13/14 (1971): 11-27 includes much original text from the show without adequate citation. Collections of Geddes material include The New York Public Library, Museum of the City of New York, The Queens Museum of Art, and the Norman Bel Geddes Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.
16. David Gartman, "Harley Earl and the Art and Color Section: The Birth of Styling at General Motors," in Design History: An Anthology, ed. Dennis P. Doordan (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 122-44.
17. Also see Stephen Bayley, Harley Earl and the Dream Machine (New York: Knopf, 1983);
18. Stephen Bayley, Harley Earl (New York: Taplinger, 1990);
19. Alfred P. Sloan Jr., My Years with General Motors (New York: Doubleday, 1963).
20. Flinck, The Automobile Age, 234, "constant upgrading of product," 234.
21. For an excellent overview of "Highway Federalism," see Gutfreund, 20th-Century Sprawl, 7-59;
22. on Pennsylvania Turnpike, see Lewis, Divided Highways, 47-70.
23. On Geddes's lack of formal education, see Cliff Ellis, "Lewis Mumford and Norman Bel Geddes: The Highway, the City, and the Future," Planning Perspectives 20 (January 2005): 52. Geddes's Manhattan firm in the 1930s included about thirty employees with degrees in architecture, engineering, and related fields.
24. Innes, Designing Modern America, 173-76. The narration on the Shell film was by Miller McClintock, a traffic engineer who headed the Harvard University Bureau of Street Traffic Research, funded by Studebaker. (There was a similar program at Yale.) The Shell advertising campaign was repeated in 1938.
25. Marchand, "The Designers Go to the Fair, II," 108-09.
26. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited, 201, 230 n.32 says Saarinen did forty-six days of work on the project.
27. Also see Eeva-Lisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht, eds., Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 101-08, 327-28.
28. Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theater Starring S. Charles Lee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 1.
29. Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York: Random House, 1940), 3.
30. Norman Bel Geddes, transcript in Coombs, "Norman Bel Geddes: Highways and Horizons," 15.This piece transcribes much of Geddes sales pitch to GM and his original text of the show.
31. Futurama, souvenir booklet distributed at General Motors' Highways and Horizons Exhibit, New York World's Fair, 1940. Collection of the author. No page numbers. All exhibit facts and figures are from this booklet.
32. Lewis, Divided Highways, 45-46; Geddes, Magic Motorways, xx.
33. Built by George Wittbold, with animation created and maintained by architect Adolph Witschard. (Credits in Futurama, n.p.)
34. Innes, Designing Modern America, 142-43, says 8,307,600 through August 1939 and fifteen million total in a year and a half; Geddes, Magic Motorways, 1 estimates five million summer 1939 alone.
35. On Fairchild, see Thomas J. Campanella, Cities from the Sky: An Aerial Portrait of America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001)
36. on aviators and Geddes see Adnan Morshed, "The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 63 (March 2004): 74-99.
37. Marchand, "The Designers Go to the Fair, II," 110.
38. Innes, Designing Modern America, 118-43. The author details the theater design precedents for the Futurama and the sound systems devised by Geddes. It is worth noting that architects and planners (such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Harvey Wiley Corbett, and Hugh Ferriss) who relied on a combination of drawings, renderings, books, and presentation models to promote their designs used no equivalent theatrical or multimedia tools. Documentary photographers of the 1930s, such as Berenice Abbott, who gave her attention to "Changing New York," emphasized scale in the built environment with low aerial views taken from skyscrapers, but had no corporate agenda.
39. Geddes, Magic Motorways, 12-13.
40. On postcards, Alison Isenberg, Downtown America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 42-77.
41. Setha M. Low, "Towards an Anthropology of Space and Place," Semiotica 175 (2009): 21-37.
42. Marchand, "The Designers Go to the Fair, II," 115.
43. E. L. Doctorow, World's Fair (New York: Random House, 1985), 253.
44. On the role of landscape, see Don Mitchell, "New Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Paying Attention to Political Economy and Social Justice," in Political Economies of Landscape Change, ed. J. L. Westcoat and D. M. Johnson (Dordrecht, NE: Springer, 2008), 44-45.
45. Norman Bel Geddes, transcribed in Coombs, "Norman Bel Geddes' Highways and Horizons," 17.
46. Scharff, Taking the Wheel; McShane, Down the Asphalt Path, 149-72, discusses cars and gender stereotypes up through 1917.
47. Lewis, Divided Highways, 269-71.
48. Victor H. Green's The Negro Motorist's Green Book: An International Travel Guide is the subject of Calvin Alexander Ramsey, Ruth and the Green Book (Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 2010)
49. Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2000), 94-95; note that African Americans demonstrated against job discrimination at the New York World's Fair on opening day in 1939.
50. Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2003).
51. GM Futurama 1939, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74cO9X4NMb4 (accessed September 24, 2010).
52. Rose, Interstate, 11.
53. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited, 208, says Roosevelt seemed more interested in Geddes' model of a streamlined yacht than in highways.
54. Photomontage reproduced in Adnan Morshed, "The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 63 (March 2004): 94.
55. Marchand, "The Designers Go to the Fair, II," 118-19.
56. Geddes, Magic Motorways, 181, 261.
57. "Eisenhower Interstate Highway System," Federal Highway Administration, Department of Transportation, FAQ, http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ interstate/faq.htm (accessed October 5, 2010)
58. On protests, see Ray Mohl, "Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities," Journal of Urban History 30 (July 2004): 674-705.
59. Helen Leavitt, Superhighway, Superhoax (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
60. Gutfreund, 20th-Century Sprawl, 1-59.
61. Catherine Rampell, "How Many Jobs Depend on the Big Three?" New York Times Economix blogs, November 17, 2008, http://economix.blogs.nytimes. com/2008/11/17/how-many-jobs-depend-on-the-big-three/ (accessed October 6, 2010).
62. She quotes Gov. Jennifer Granholm and also a 2003 study by the Center for Automotive Research. "In 1950, one-sixth of the nation's jobs were somehow related to the automobile industry," according to Thomas J. Sugrue's article, "From Motor City to Motor Metropolis: How the Automobile Industry Reshaped Urban America," on the website "The Automobile in American Life and Society," http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R-Overview/R- Overview.htm (accessed October 6, 2010).
63. Federal Highway Administration, Department of Transportation, Our Nation's Highways 2010, 6-7. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/ pl10023/onh2010.pdf (accessed September 25, 2010).
64. Nick Bunkley and Bill Vlasic, "General Motors Files for an Initial Public Offering," New York Times, August 19, 2010
65. Bill Vlasic, "U.S. to Sell G.M. Stake over Time," New York Times, September 17, 2010.
66. Bill Vlasic, "To Make Tiny American Car, G.M. Also Shrinks Plant and Wages," New York Times, July 13, 2011.
67. Michael J. de la Merced, "Winding Down the Bailouts and Trying Not to Lose Money, New York Times, May 26, 2011, reported that the Treasury Department would probably sell the remainder of its shares in G.M. in mid-August or September of 2011. This did not happen.
68. Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Pantheon, 2003)
69. Dolores Hayden, A Field Guide to Sprawl (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).
70. Federal Highway Administration, Department of Transportation, Our Nation's Highways 2010, 6-7.
71. Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
72. "Room for Debate: Car-Free in America?" http://roomfordebate. blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/carless-in-america/.
73. www.physicsgames.net/game/Demolition-City.html.
74. Bettina Wassener and Andrea Deng, "-Straddling Bus' Offered as Traffic Fix in China," New York Times, August 18, 2010. Design by Shenzen Huashi Future Parking Equipment, estimated at $7.4 million for one bus and twenty-five miles of route. On Oregon, see Portland: Search for the Livable City, DVD from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
75. Helene Cooper, "Obama Rolls Out Midterm Metaphor," New York Times, August 18, 2010
76. Michael Muskal, "As Elections Near, Obama Ramps Up Car in a Ditch Pitch," Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/ 2010/sep/21/news/la-pn-obama-economy-20100922 (accessed September 26, 2010).