The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-10-15
Exclusive Service THE SURVEY
 Press Bureau.)

Exclusive Service THE SURVEY Press Bureau.)
 eve. are familiar with Chicago and Detroit Cleveland and St. Louis. But
 do we know overnuch about Argo and Gary, Flint and Woodlawn, Norwood
 elites which are springing up under
 the caves of the great urban centers2 The highest engineering skill lays out
 the suburban plant. What of the homes of working people who follow 1t? Who is paying the bills of the towns and what share. of the 1eaping land values are turned to social< ac- count as is done by the English town plannerS.)
 While we are talking about back to the land,'' huge industrial plants are uprooting themselves bodily from
 our congested districts. Towns made to order snatch bundles of papers
 from the morning trains, smudge new pOStmarkS on red postage stamps, edge their way into the telephone toll books
 and the freight tariffs and become
 part and parcel of up-and-doing mu-
 nicipal America before most of their
 slower going sister cities have esen heard of them.
 From the middle of Philadelphia, several departments of the Baldwin out into a. small suburb. Flint, Mich, two hours from Detroit, has been seiz- ed the place for huge automobile factories. A big corn produce plant moved from the middle of Chicago to the nearby prairies and a "glucaSe city, Argo, started up. Industrial plants have moved over the bridges from St. Louis and founded a group of new towns in Illinois The Stand ard Oil Company, a few years ago, poured out s3,50O,000 on the bank of sas City, and the town of Sugar Creek sprang up. Gary is but the largest and most spectacular single fact in a far-rea ching industrial exodus.
 Many reasons account for the lOca- ton of these new industrial commun- ities The impulse toward cheap land,
 them out from the large cities The centripeta1 forces are equally power
 ful and bind them as satellites close | beyond the outer rings of the mother city. It means much to be within | easy reach of at least one large mar
 ket sor the finished product. Proxim- ity to a big labor market is an even There is public challenge in the very fact that in these localities civ ic and industrial conditions are being created brand new without the handi- caps which high land values and prior 1 improvements impose on every effort 1 to reconstruct the, congested centers Are we casting in these advanta ges2 Apparently the answer is often in the nega tive.
 Whereas in the Gary. plant, for ex- ample, the utmost ingenuity was | shown in schening out shortcuts, the street planning of the town was on the old checker board system. A number of the middle western officials
 of the steel corporation, as members | of the Commercial Club of Chicago, | contributed toward the $1O0, 900 fund raised to scheme out in map the pres ent magnificent city plan for Chicago. Yet as company officials they did not think to secure the services of an eX- pert city planner to lay out brand new town. The Chicago city plan calls for cutting diagonal streets through ! old territory; the Gary town plan will create in decade conditions which | can only be remedfed by similar Cae- sarean operation
 Some industrial leaders contend that they are in the business not of build l ing cities but establishing mills and factories. Yet the early stage of choosing the locality and of laying the framework of plant and town is crucial Through a serious nliscar- riage of judgment by tine company which built Lackawanna in the out
 skirts of Buffalo, many Of the work
 CTS are to-day housed on sti1ts in a swampy bottomland. The efforts Of the present administration to over | come the situation, illustrates the slow l recognition (by corporation which has learned through experience) that efficiency hangs on health and human