Mariemont

Ohio. Mary M Emery, developer. John Nolen, planner. 1918

Mariemont is a planned village east of Cincinnati, the product of Mary M Emery's desire to found an exceptional suburban community. Although not a paternalistic enterprise, Mariemont was intended as a limited-profit, model town for industrial workers, the first of that type designed as an automobile suburb. Influenced by the economic predictions of Roger W Babson of the Babson Institute, Massachusetts - 'Wage earners', said Babson in the 1910s, 'during the last period of prosperity spent their money for motor cars; in the next period of prosperity they will buy country homes' - the town was located on the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad as it ran into Cincinnati but without a passenger station.¹ The areas around the tracks were given over to industrial uses.

The Emery family was an important force in real estate in Cincinnati, but because their previous developments had not included suburban housing, Mrs Emery brought in the experienced town planner John Nolen to design the project she had envisioned since before the First World War.² Land was acquired almost immediately thereafter, with construction of the Memorial Church beginning in 1923, and of the residential units in the spring of 1924.³ Emery and Nolen imagined a community that would benefit from recreational facilities including a golf course, a lagoon for boating in summer and skating in winter (these were badly damaged in floods in the 1930s and never restored), and more mundane considerations such as sewer systems, steam heat piped from a central power generator, and paved streets with sidewalks. But by the late 1920s it had become clear that too much money had been invested in en-

vironmental improvements before houses were developed for sale. Even before the stock market crash of 1929 curtailed the town's development, many houses were sold below cost to improve the project's cash flow.

Once the town began to grow again after World War II, the idealism of its origins was ignored, so that much of Mariemont's architecture is indistinguishable from that of any other suburb of the post-war period. Nonethe-less, the 26 architects, many of national stature, involved in the early design of Mariemont raised public buildings such as Louis E Jallade's Memorial Church and isolated clusters of housing which lend distinction to certain sectors of the town.

The early housing runs the gamut from simple shingled cottages to more complex groupings combining flats and stores. Edmund B Gilchrist's distinguished experiments with suburban multi-family housing in Philadelphia made him especially qualified to design a 39-house group with a honeymoon cottage arch-ing over a street and commercial centre, all built in a subdued brick Georgian vocabulary, not unlike the one R Clipston Sturgis explored at Bridgeport. Though not a dazzling composi-tion, Gilchrist's houses have, as Mumford observed in 1929, 'simple and inexpensive materials used with great directness'⁴ and, confidence, which lend a comforting solidity present in so much 1920s architecture. Another Philadelphia architect, Robert Rodes McGoodwin, designed 12 six-room brick houses, including three two-family houses on Albert Place with a service road at the rear. Grosvenor Atterbury's ten-house Elizabethan group, begun in 1925, has a similar charm.

1 John Nolen, plan

Notes

1 John Nolen, New Towns for Old: Achievements in Civic Improvements in Some American Small Towns and Neighborhoods, Marshall Jones, Boston 1927, pp 111-131

2 Warren Wright Park, The Mariemont Story: A National Exemplar in Town Planning. Creative Writers and Publishers, Cincinnati, Ohio 1967, pp 11-14.

3 Arthur C Holden, 'Realty Developments and the Architect' Architectural Record 69, April 1931, pp 331-358.

4 In his article 'American Architecture Today', Part 2, Architecture 57, June 1928, pp 301-308.

2 Edmund B Gilchrist, 'Philadelphia Row', 1924

3 Robert Rodes McGoodwin, Albert Place, 1924 (ph: RAMS)

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