Harland Bartholomew was an American urban planner. He was a civil engineer by training. Harland himself was the first full-time planner employed by an American city, and he remained a planner with St. Louis, Missouri for 37 years.
Early life
Bartholomew was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts on September 14, 1889 but moved to New York City when he was 15 and attended Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. He completed two years of a Civil Engineering degree at Rutgers, but due to lack of funds, was unable to continue his studies. He received an honorary degree in Civil Engineering from Rutgers University in 1921. In 1912 he landed a position with E.P. Goodrich, a civil engineering firm that happened to be a strong advocate for the efficient planning of cities. His work with Goodrich consisted principally of conducting traffic counts on bridges, a task that Bartholomew found dreary but that prepared him for a life of planning around infrastructure and automobility.
Career
In 1914, the Newark, New Jersey plan commission retained Bartholomew as the first full-time, public-sector city planner in America. In 1915, prominent civic reform advocate Luther Ely Smith, on the advice of the architect Henry Wright, recruited Bartholomew to St. Louis to serve as the city's first planner. He served in that capacity until 1950. In 1917 Bartholomew was a founding member of the American City Planning Institute and headed one of the largest planning consulting firms in the United States. In 1919, he established Harland Bartholomew and Associates and served as its chairman until his retirement in 1962. From 1918 to 1956 Bartholomew taught civic design at the University of Illinois and made substantial contributions to the scholarly and practice literature in city planning. In 1932 he completed his landmark study Urban Land Uses, published by Harvard University Press in the City Planning series edited by Theodora and Charles Hubbard. Bartholomew also published dozens of studies and articles in venues including the City Planning Conference Proceedings, American City, The "Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science", American Civic Annual, City Planning, the "Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics", and the National Conference on City Planning Bulletin. His writing covered a wide range of practices. He wrote on topics such as the theory and practice of zoning, street widening, cost distribution, placement of railroads, easements, federal buildings in cities, growth controls, economic disintegration, subdivision layout, slum clearance, metropolitan and regional planning, and the role of neighborhoods in the plan process. Bartholomew's career received notice by the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, particularly for his work on the Washington Metro, as chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, and as a leading advocate of society first planning for freeway building. He was appointed to Federal planning committees by three US Presidents—Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. However, many of Bartholomew's views are discredited today. For example, he pioneered urban renewal decades ahead of its time through the use of eminent domain in 1938 to clear the St. Louis Waterfront for the Gateway Arch National Park, which was then known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. He advanced the concept of identifying obsolete neighborhoods through cost accounting, and was a major advocate for functional, single-use zoning and for automobile-oriented planning.
Racial segregation
In St. Louis, Bartholomew used planning to maintain racial segregation in cooperation with local realtor associations. In several other cities, Bartholomew's planning was found to be in line with racial, social, and economic segregation. Bartholomew also drew upon racially inequitable metaphors in the 1947 St. Louis city plan to spur residents to accept the necessity of his planning recommendations. His exclusionary approach, if adopted, meant only whites would see the promising future he envisioned. In St. Louis, Bartholomew said an important goal was to prevent movement "by colored people" into "finer residential districts." He estimated where Blacks were likely to live, and created restrictions to keep Blacks out of white areas.
