The Wellbeing of Waterloo

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Excerpt from The Wellbeing of Waterloo: A Report to the Civic Society of Waterloo, Iowa, 1910 In submitting this report on civic improvement possibilities in Waterloo, I want at the very beginning to meet a criticism which is certain to be made. It will be said that there are recommended many things which Waterloo is unable at this time to do. That is perfectly true. It is a just criticism of any city-plan report that looks ahead for a term of years, and the report which did not do that would be of only a days interest, since it would fail to present a plan to work to. This does look ahead. There is no proposal that the recommendations be, as a whole, carried out this year or next year. Some of them must wait a long time for realization. The officials and people will decide what is most urgent, in what undertaking delay is most dangerous, and what the city can afford year by year to do, but all the time there will be a goal to work to. The Report for Waterloo looks ahead also to a greater extent than is necessary in most other places. For this there are two reasons: The fact that the city is now developing with such extreme rapidity, and the fact that Waterloo is so exceptionally ti well built. As a rule, the city planner, as he goes about a town, making notes of the points that should be improved, is able to jot down memoranda of a great many things that might be done I at once. There are poor sidewalks, fences that should come out, there is old-fashioned curbing and a lack of street name signs little things, not difficult to correct, and making, by the frequency of their recurrence, a deal of difference in the aspect of the city. But in Waterloo one cannot make those particular criticisms. In its residence sections Waterloo is one of the best built little cities I have ever seen. There are almost no front fences, the sidewalks are almost uniformly good, the parkings between curb and walk are well proportioned and generally well cared for, admirable and modern work has been done by the city engineers a office, neat name signs are on the street corners, and, thanks to the Civic Society, even the billboard is less aggressive than usual. It is a very exceptional and very pleasant experience to be able to begin a report by paying such a tribute to a city. But these very excellences involve obligations. In the first place, they clear the way for other and more ambitious undertakings, making failure to act the less excusable, and in the second place, they throw into the strong light of contrast the shortcomings that do persist, making these incongruous, even ridiculous, and inviting our scorn. Let us take up first the shortcomings, and with them cleared out of the way we shall have indeed a well built, attractive city of which to make study for larger improvement plans. 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.