The American City

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Excerpt from The American City: July 1910 There is an awakening on the part of hundreds of cities that have been striving for the high-up places in finance to the importance of equipping themselves for dis tinction in other directions as well. To this general awakening to higher and finer things, may be attributed the rapidly grow ing interest in a study of what is termed City Planning - that which aims to com bine the practical with the esthetic in city building. St. Paul, Minnesota, is in the class of those cities that have seen the new light, and it has set its goal on a high pinnacle. When it attains one great accomplishment which it seeks St. Paul will occupy a posi tion unique in American municipalities. It will be possessed of a feature that will have no counterpart in this country and few in foreign lands. St. Paul is different from most capitals, it is a big, prosperous, growing commercial and industrial center, with a citizenship ambitious to develop a metropolis of wealth and vast resources, but also ambitious, to a marked degree, to make of St. Paul a city beautiful and ef ficient, and one that shall be known the world over for those qualities. St. Paul is proud to be the capital of a great state, and it proposes to take advantage of that fact, to utilize even the physical opportun ities that are offered for esthetic develop ment by having in its confines a State House that shall exceed that of any other American capital city, with the exception of Washington, the capital of all the states. The opportunity is before St. Paul to bring to a successful issue a great undertaking, and the enterprise of the men of St. Paul will not let that opportunity pass by. Ever since the completion of the building erected by the commonwealth of Minne sota as its official home, there has been a growing desire on the part of the people of St. Paul to give that beautiful structure a setting and an approach equal to its dig nity and its beauty. Set, as it is, on a hill, there is still the feeling that the building is hidden, to a greater or less extent, and that there is no one splendid viewpoint from which may be obtained at a distance a vision of the building in its full gran deur. The visitor finds the building itself a gem, but he can find from no point a dis tant prospect. Until recently the imme diate surroundings have been almost squalid. They have not been in accord with the structure. The State Legislature has seen the importance of acquiring more land about the capitol site and has gone as far as it could by the expenditure of many thousands of dollars in the acquirement of adjacent properties and in their decora tion, and yet St. Paul has not the capitol approach it wants. Upon St. Paul as a city, and not Minnesota as a state, must rest the great undertaking of creating an approach that will be adequate, and St. Paul will not be satisfied with merely an adequate approach. But proposes to have one that will command world-wide atten tion, as being the finest and most perfect in every detail. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.