New-York tribune., 1921-11-20
By Willis Fletcher Johnson

LONDON OF THE FUTURE. BY the
London Society. under the cditorship Of
Sir Aston Webb. Illustrated. Published
by r. p. Dutton & Co. Price SIS
TT IS often said, thoughtfully, that
the administration Of large cities
b is the least creditable and least
satisfactory part of the entire
American system of government, and
with the recent examples of New York,
Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco
and other communities before US, we
should hesitate to dispute the justice
Of that judgment. Negligence, profit
gacy, peculation and other vices may
and do now and then, and here and
there. mark the conduct Of affairs in
rural communities, but it would be rash
to suggest that in proportion to the
population they amount to anything
like the frequency and magnitude of
such evils in the great cities
Nor are our municipal ills altogether
those Of misgovernment. They are
scarcely less noticeable in the processes
of city planning and building. Wash
ington commonly regarded as the best
planned city in America, if not the
cnly large city well planned; and 1t
was laid out by foreigner and mod
eled by him after q foreign city. The
rest of our cities may be roughly
divided into three classes A few, like
Bost7n, are almost wholly irregular in
the arrangement of their streets, close
~ resembling most Of the large cities
of Europe. Others, of which Brooklyn,
Baltimore and Philadelphia are exam
rles, consist of numerous formerly sep
arate communities grown together, each
with its own street system, and, while
each of those systems is regularly
rectangular, no two have the same
base lines, so that they come together
at all sorts of angles and the whole eff
feet is confusing. Still others, such as
Chicago and Detroit, are pretty much
all on the one rectangular plan, in
which, however, the need of diagonal
avenues is generally much felt. And, of
course, there are numerous mixtures
of two of these classes, such as New
York itself (meaning the old city of
Manhattan and the Bronx, which in
the middle is more severely rectangular
than Chicago Or any part Of Philadel-
phia, and at each end surpasses Boston
itself in serpentry.
There are other problems than street
planning. The waterfront facilities
of our ports, the railroad stations and
terminals, the parks and schools, the
water supplies, the lighting, the local
passenger and freight transportation,
the libraries and museums, the police
and fire departments, and what not
else, all differ in city from city and
too often differ chiefly in degrees of
unsatisfactoriness. Some cities may
have solved some of the problems we'll.
We should hesitate to name any that
has solved them all in even approx
mately successful fashion.
Now it is obvious that most of these
problems should be more easy of solu-
ton in the comparatively new cities
of America than in so Anticipated
metropolis as London. Yet we are
compelled to doubt if any American
city has taken then, in hand quite as
Systematically, as scientifically and. in
deed. as radically and effectively as the
ancient city on the Thames. We
thought that we did great things here
and we did-in the Flatbush Avenue
extension and the widening of Varick
Street; though in the latter was com
mitted the objectionable crime of de-
stroylng one of the finest old build
ings in the city But these were small
achievements compared with the cut