FIG. 224 New Haven in 1907: looking west from Chapel and State Streets. New Haven Colony Historical Society.

Poli, a prominent businessman, "in order that our Italo-American citizens might be represented."¹⁶

The committee's first tasks were to take up a private subscription to underwrite the cost of the plan and to hire the experts who would produce it. Seymour lobbied successfully for *Cass Gilbert* (1859-1934), who was retained shortly thereafter as the architect of the new public library as well.¹⁷ To complement Gilbert's skills, the committee also hired the landscape architect *Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.* (1870-1957), of Brookline, Massachusetts. A leading figure in the City Beautiful Movement and the nascent city planning profession, Olmsted was also the son of the great Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Central Park and founding father of the nineteenth-century Park Movement. Like Gilbert, he had extensive experience designing and implementing city, campus, and park improvement plans across the country.¹⁸

Another important figure in the City Beautiful Movement became briefly involved with New Haven's improvement effort in these first few weeks. Charles Mulford Robinson, a journalist who had published two influential books synthesizing and popularizing the varied activities of the urban reform movement, wrote to Seymour offering his services as a "civic advisor":

> You have two good men on your commission in Messrs. Gilbert and Olmsted but my work supplements that of these other men. There is the profession of architect, the profession of landscape architect, and the profession which I seem to have succeeded in creating, of civic advisor, or specialist in municipal improvement...who looks at matters neither from the standpoint of the architect nor of the landscape man, but from that of the city as a living organism.¹⁹

Although Robinson lobbied further in a letter to the *New Haven Register*, recalling his own childhood memories of New Haven's "elm-shaded streets, broad green, and...the wonderful Rocks,"²⁰ the committee did not take up his offer. Gilbert apparently thought little of his expertise, considering him to be "something of a Beaux-Arts man," that is, more concerned with municipal art than serious city planning.²¹ Yet Robinson's proven skills as a spokesman and advocate for city planning were quite formidable.²² In the years to come, Seymour may have regretted not retaining such an adviser, whose public relations skills would have served the master plan well in the face of increasing citizen apathy and political opposition.

*In all this we are participating in a national impulse for civic improvement. My own feeling about the movement*

236 VOGT