The expansion of the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century had enabled the creation of commuter towns, the first inklings of contemporary suburbia. By commuting, the American upper middle class could own a large country lot and still participate in the city economy. In step with this fundamental change in the urban fabric is a valorization of the country lifestyle and a reaction against dense, industrial cities. The dream of the time, as expressed by the New York Tribune, was that through the expansion of railroads “nearly every citizen may take a [rail]car within two blocks of his store or shop, and be swiftly carried out to his residence amid green fields”(Jackson 1985, 38-39). A flurry of landscape gardening books, published between 1840 and 1870 and directed at the growing American middle class, advocated for suburban or proto-suburban lifestyles. Both Victorian Gardens: The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds and Beautifying Country Homes: A Handbook of Landscape Gardening revealed and contributed to the gradual social establishment of suburban lawns. Drawing on a Victorian garden ideals, these guidebooks spread suburban aesthetic ideals just as those ideals were becoming feasible for a far broader swath of Americans. Commuter suburbs provided the “half-country, half-town life”that was considered “the happy medium, and the realizable ideal for the great majority of well-to-do Americans”(Scott 1870, 31); the push lawn mower, meanwhile, enabled the maintenance of the “smooth, closely shaven surface of grass”that Francis Scott saw as “by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban home”(Scott 1870, 107). Commuter rails enabled affluent fringe development, which took advantage of low land prices to establish detached housing on larger lots, at the same time that improved technology made lawn-care a more practical pursuit. Together, the two created the quintessentially suburban large and more manicured front setback that presented “an unbroken ornamental lawn”(Weidenmann 1870, 1). It is intriguing how early the historical connections between commuting, suburban development, and lawn aesthetics were established, with these notions intertwined well before the invention of the automobile and the creation of Levittown.
While commuting suburbs were springing up far away from city cores, cities themselves were undergoing dramatic changes due to a combination of this suburban aesthetic and the rapid improvement and expansion of urban transit. In many urban areas, “legal covenants written into property deeds form the 1880s onward required that structures be set back from the street by a minimum number of feet”(Jackson 1985, 59). In Portland, front setbacks are mandated for all single-household residences, with setbacks ranging from 10 to 20 feet. The code justifies setbacks using reasoning drawn from suburban aesthetics, claiming that the zoning “require[s] larger front setbacks than side and rear setbacks to promote open, visually pleasing front yards”(Portland Zoning Code, 33.110.220). Having been incorporated in 1851, and only reaching above 10,000 residents in the 1880 Census, Portland is a city whose fundamental urban design has formed with the influence of the suburban aesthetic which codified front setbacks, and that revolutionary transit technology of the late nineteenth century: the streetcar.
Invented in the 1880s, and being a huge improvement over horse-powered urban transit in terms of speed, comfort, and cost (Jackson 1985, 107-09), the streetcar was a major impetus for development in Portland and many other American cities. The original commuter suburbs “were joined by streetcar suburbs offering smaller lots and smaller houses to middle-class families,”(Jenkins 1994, 23) In many ways, the urban form spurred by the streetcar was suburban development for the masses. With lines “radiating outward form the central business districts, the tracks opened up a vast suburban ring…encompassing an area triple the territory of the older walking city”(Jackson 1985, 110-11). In Portland, the streetcar network allowed development to spread from the original downtown to the vast stretches of land east of the Willamette, raising the total population of the city from 17,577 in 1880 to 258,288 in 1920 (Engeman 1969, 13). Expansion of streetcar service led, at least initially, to intensification of existing towns within the metro area, and development of formerly forested land; “the connection between land values and easy transportation was well enough established that numerous lines were constructed by or for real estate subdividers”(Engeman 1969, 29). The formerly marginal, and still relatively cheap, tracts of land that the streetcars developed changed the urban form of cities; streetcars were lauded by anti-urbanists as a solution to perceived overcrowding (Jackson 1985, 117), with the rhetoric regarding them essentially parallel to that of Francis Scott, Andrew Jackson Downing, and other fetishists of rural life. One social reformer cheered that “the laying out of subdivisions far out beyond the city limits makes cheap and desirable home sites obtainable for a multitude of working men, where they are able to build their bungalows”(Bartlett 1907, 74). Such bungalows—humble “single-family dwellings on fairly large lots, in a setting that promised such rural treasures as a small garden, trees and grass”(Engeman 1969, 28), yet still reasonably accessible to the business center of the city, have come to characterize much of Portland’s urban design. It is interesting to view modern discourse about “New Urbanism”and transit-oriented development—which seek to create denser, urban living through public transportation and grids—in the context of this urban design history. The original Portland streetcars in fact enabled a great quasi-suburban expansion, and relying on a resurrection of this suburbanizing technology to create true urbanism seems highly suspect.
Despite the yard space provided by streetcar suburbs and the growing influence of the Victorian garden ideal on middle class Americans, many lawns in the early twentieth century were still unkempt and utilitarian (Jenkins 1994, 32). The establishment of garden clubs, collections of predominately affluent women with a passion for gardening, played an important role in spreading lawn practices and culture, through both direct tips and the propagation of peer pressure to have a well-kept lawn (Jenkins 1994, 37). The Garden Club of America,founded in 1913 out of thirteen local organizations, was committed to the beautifying of American yards, largely with the installation and improvement of lawns. In the early twentieth century, “lawns were difficult to establish and maintain,”with lawn care necessitating a large amount of labor (Jenkins 1994, 37-38); weeds had to be pulled by hand, early lawn mowers were relatively expensive and unwieldy, and grass was fertilized with a compost heap of “decaying vegetable matter, lawn rakings, spent manure, and dead leaves”(Garden Club May 1921, 46-48). The Bulletin of the Garden Club of America offered tips on lawn care that included the proper mowing schedules and techniques (Garden Club Jan. 1921, 25-26), how to judiciously use dynamite to rejuvenate dried grass (Garden Club Jan. 1921, 21), and a method for killing dandelions that involved “dipping a small pointed stick into sulphuric acid, [and] then punching the center of the dandelion”(Garden Club Jan. 1921, 26). These methods illustrate the occasionally extreme lengths taken by lawn care enthusiasts to construct “open, closely cut greensward”(Parsons 1891, 6), prior to the development of commercial chemical fertilizer and herbicides.