SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E13
past. This was the same period
that saw the creation of the first
statewide preservation group in
the nation, the Association for the
Preservation of Virginia Antiqui-
ties, one of whose most promi-
nent supporters lamented that
“civilization has grown material-
istic, and greedy, and full of lust
and ambition, and has become
dominated by the will to power.”
Aspects of the New South — its
burgeoning industry, its new
class of entrepreneurs, its gaze
fixed on “modern” cities to the
North — were deeply threatening
to the old guard who ran groups
like the APVA. So, too, were the
new working classes, the influx of
immigrants and labor unions. So
the New South businessmen who
built Monument Avenue em-
braced the Old South’s racism,
while sidestepping the anti-mod-
ernism reactionary elements that
threatened their material ambi-
tions. They made common cause
with Lee and the fantasy of the
Lost Cause, built Colonial-style
houses — and continued to get
rich.
The challenge of remaking
Monument Avenue has always
been its fusion of design and
myth. It’s one thing to argue with
idea — that, say, celebrating racist
traitors makes no sense in a mod-
ern, pluralistic, democratic soci-
ety. It’s another thing to argue
with myth, which goes deeper
than merely a set of facts that are
wrong or invented. Myth carries
with it ideals of character, and
beauty, along with lies and distor-
tions. The fusion of aesthetic
ideas about beauty and character
to ugly ideas about race and histo-
ry is one source of the Lost Cause’s
enduring power to many people.
One day earlier this summer,
the de-monumentalizing of Mon-
ument Avenue continued under a
blistering afternoon sun. Men
and women sat under tents near
the statue to Lee, offering T-shirts
for sale and free water andthe Confederacy, they weren’t the
sort of men with whom Robert E.
Lee would have socialized. The
entrepreneurs and speculators of
Monument Avenue represented
the “New South,” a postwar nou-
veau riche whose wealth came
from industry and development,
men who posed a political and
social threat to the hierarchy once
dominated by the old Colonial
and planter classes.
Just as the designers of the
White City appropriated Europe-
an architecture to create a new
American mythology — of a rising
power, a cultural and technologi-
cal juggernaut with imperial aspi-
rations — the creators of Monu-
ment Avenue appropriated the
Lost Cause pantheon to lay claim
to their own social legitimacy.
At the same time, they were
also embracing ideas of urban
design that were in some ways
progressive and that seemed at
the time rational and modern.
Although Monument Avenue was
mainly a private space, it incorpo-
rated new ideas about the design
of the civic realm, including the
necessity for green space and the
sacrifice of individual whim and
absolute property rights to a col-
lective idea of coherent and con-
sistent aesthetics. Its builders
were self-conscious about status,
and looked to such cities as Bos-
ton and Baltimore for precedents.
Not coincidentally, Richmond
was the first city to have a practi-
cal electric streetcar system, one
that offered a prototype for other
cities around the world.
By embracing the racist ideolo-
gy of the Lost Cause, the makers
of Monument Avenue also were
partly neutralizing one of the few
ideas that might have threatened
them. Even as Richmond erected
a statue to Lee in 1890, the old
guard of Virginia was settling
into an anti-modernism reaction,
celebrating an ideal of Anglo-Sax-
on hegemony that was deeply
nostalgic for a fictional, colonialand messy one, a visionary new
city with splendid vistas and a
central “court of honor.” Unlike
the haphazard and improvised
urban spaces of 19th-century
America, this forward-looking ur-
ban ensemble included abundant
green and public spaces, it fused
such infrastructure as a railway
terminal and boat docks into the
design, and it inspired Chicago to
think on a grander scale about
how it wanted to grow and use its
land to best purpose.
The White City’s influence
went well beyond Chicago, inspir-
ing generations of planners, de-
signers and architects to remake
city centers across America. It
also marked an early example of
ideas flowing not into America
from European powers, but out-
ward, too, in some cases to the
United States’ fledging empire,
where the City Beautiful move-
ment influenced urban design in
cities in Puerto Rico, Cuba and
the Philippines.
Monument Avenue, which be-
came one of the most fashionable
and architecturally significant
streets in the country as it took
form around the turn of the last
century, borrowed heavily from
the ideas popularized in Chicago,
but it was a quintessentially
Southern take on the City Beauti-
ful. Unlike the redesign of central
Washington, D.C., in the early
part of the last century, led by
many of the same men who built
Chicago’s White City, Monument
Avenue wasn’t a centrally con-
trolled, top-down urban redesign.
Rather, it was an urban show-
place built mainly through pri-
vate speculation — a coherent,
parklike avenue that came to-
gether largely piecemeal, and al-
most by accident.
And it is full of paradox. Al-
though the private developers
who laid it out (and profited from
building and selling houses along
its tree-lined way) created a uni-
fied procession of memorials tourban design
PHOTOS BY JOHN MCDONNELL/THE WASHINGTON POSTsnacks, and engaging passersby
who wanted to talk about the
issues. A carload of young people,
both Black and White, made its
way up the avenue, stopping at
each empty pedestal before join-
ing the small crowd gathered on
Lee’s circle. A man climbed the
base of the statue, holding several
white snakes in his hands, and
had his photograph taken.
The graffiti on the statue’s base
is now multilayered, words over
images over more words. A pa-
limpsest of messages has re-
placed the single narrative of
greatness the statue once spoke,
and an explosion of color has
been overlaid on the old, pale
blankness of the stone. Lee is no
longer the focal point of the circle,
but a ridiculous figure who seems
to have wandered in on his horse
from a cheesy Western or cos-
tume pageant. No one pays him
any attention.
Monument Avenue is just one
example of how the City Beautiful
movement established a canon of
urban beauty across America.
The Richmond iteration is partic-
ularly problematic because its de-
sign was harnessed to an explicit-
ly racist narrative. But other city
centers have other narratives,
and not surprisingly, given that
the movement had its first suc-
cess at the Columbus quadricen-
tennial, more than a few of these
grand spaces celebrate the Geno-
ese sailor whose voyage to Ameri-
ca initiated so much misery.
The messages of City Beautiful
design vary from place to place,
but often share a set of basic
assumptions grounded in Ameri-
can exceptionalism, for which Co-
lumbus was an icon. The United
States was the repository and
rebirth of all that was glorious in
the past, and thus, it was the best
hope for the future, too. It was the
White European ideal reborn, on
pristine new ground.
Now, on a grander scaler and
with more seriousness than any
time in recent memory, we grap-
ple with the fact that none of this
was true. And so, great crowds
spill out into beautiful spaces, full
of myth and replete with ugly lies.
The focus now is on particular
statues, memorials and monu-
ments. But it will inevitably go
deeper, because these things
weren’t merely ornaments graft-
ed on the larger urban design.
The disentangling happening
now, by fits and starts, will be
hard and, for some, painful, be-
cause these cities were designed
to appeal to the sense that White
America was confident and cer-
tain, powerful and energetic, and
that it could remake the world
just as it was remaking its cities:
in its own image.
[email protected]Jefferson Davis and the Confeder-
ate leader and naval officer Mat-
thew Fontaine Maury. Just to the
east of Lee’s traffic circle — now
used as a community garden, a
gathering spot and information
hub, an impromptu basketball
court, and a memorial to the
victims of police violence — lies
another empty plinth, once dedi-
cated to an equestrian statue of
Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart.
As protesters have remade this
avenue, forcing the removal of
memorials to men who betrayed
their country, covering the re-
maining plinths with graffiti and
activating the street day and
night with new forms of protest
and community, they also have
underscored deep connections
between urban planning and old
ideologies of whiteness, great-
ness and cultural ambition. They
have made problematic the idea
of the City Beautiful, a powerful
late 19th-century American con-
tribution to the annals of urban
design. And they are a beginning
to force a reckoning not just with
the symbols of the Confederacy,
but also with a larger repertoire
of American symbols, deeply em-
bedded into the center of such
cities as Washington, Chicago, St.
Louis and Cleveland.
What do we do with an ideal of
urban design that celebrated a
hierarchy of spaces as an allegory
for social hierarchies, that cher-
ished order and celebrated the
beauty of conformity? The City
Beautiful made buildings march
together, with grace and power.
On streets like Monument Ave-
nue, it created an appealing spec-
tacle of controlled rooflines and
setbacks. And in other cities, it
gave consistency to the facades,
almost always drawn from the
same European-derived idiom of
classic design. What do we do
with a design ethos that affirmed
through a fusion of design, plan-
ning and symbolism America’s
sense of its own greatness?
And what do we make of the
legacy of what was once known as
“the White City,” the Chicago ar-
chitectural spectacle that in-
spired the City Beautiful?
The “White City” was the popu-
lar name for the magnificent,
temporary fairgrounds laid out in
Chicago to host the 1893 World’s
Columbian Exposition, a vast en-
semble of Beaux-Arts buildings
covered with white plaster. The
world fair was an international
spectacle in honor of the 400th
anniversary of Christopher Co-
lumbus’s “discovery” of America.
The influence of the fairgrounds’
design and architecture was
enormous. It was an ideal, tempo-
rary city constructed next to a real
RICHMOND FROM E1
Richmond’s evolving Monument Avenue unmasks myths
CLOCKWISE
FROM TOP: The
remaining base of
Confederate
president Jefferson
Davis’s monument
on Richmond’s
Monument Avenue.
A crew removes the
statue of
Confederate leader
and naval officer
Matthew Fontaine
Maury. The statue
of African
American tennis
legend and
humanitarian
Arthur Ashe. The
Ashe memorial, a
controversial 1996
addition, looks west
to the suburbs,
away from the state
Capitol, which was
designed by Thomas
Jefferson and was
the center of a city
that was the capital
of the Confederacy.