That’s the last of my Providence photos and it’s quite the cliché: it’s the view from my hotel room window. On the lower left is the Tilden-Thurber Building.
What strikes me about this picture is how obviously American the view is. Nearly all of the buildings visible are over one hundred years, which makes them old for the US and middle-aged for Europe, but there’s no mistaking this for a similar-size European city and it’s worth a moment to discuss why.
Starting at the left, we have in the foreground a 4-story nineteen-century office building, a slightly later 9-story office building, a brownstone gothic church, a modern hall built to superficially resemble the church, and yet another brick and terra cotta office building. In the middle distance we have a theater with a huge knife sign, a modern multi-story garage, what looks like another church (this time with a dome). In the distance we have a bunch of mill buildings, at least one high-rise apartment house, another garage, and some electric-turbine windmills. In short, we have a little bit of everything.
Until World War II*, European cities tended to have fairly homogenous neighborhoods reminiscent of modern zoning. There were business districts**, retail districts, residential districts, and industrial districts.], and within each there tended to be some degree of architectural uniformity. Paris is the most extreme example of uniformity, largely because it was intentionally remodeled that way in the mid-1800s. London was probably the least uniform. Most cities were somewhere in between, but (in my experience) with huge swathes of relatively uniform architecture. By “uniform” I mean one or more of a number of basic aspects of buildings: overall height, cornice height (if different), facade material, the amount and type of fenestration, overall size, and architectural style.
Without going into the forms and jurisdiction of local governments all over two continents – something I would love to take a look at if I had a couple of years with nothing else to do – I’m going to make the broad generalization that land-use controls were weaker in the US than in Europe until well into the twentieth century. Paris’s extreme uniformity was literally the result of an imperial edict, something that was unlikely in Providence. To compare cities of similar size, London was far more uniform than New York.
In short, views of various cities circa 1900 showed reasonable uniformity for the majority of European cities and a lot of unevenness for American cities. Things have converged some since then, thanks to skyscrapers making the leap to Europe and real land-use controls making their way to the US.
* From here on, this is just my opinion, although I think I could back it up with sources if I tried.
** I’m using “district” rather than “neighborhood” because each district might be comprised of several distinct neighborhoods.
