Quick quiz: What city saw famed urban planner Daniel Burnham’s dream of a unique street design become reality: San Francisco? New York? Chicago? Answer: none of the above. Only El Granada has that distinction.
In 2003, the year Erik Larson’s “Devil in the White City” was published, I thought the San Mateo County coastal town of around 5,000 would finally get some national recognition. No such luck. Larson’s best-selling book intertwined the infamous crimes of serial killer H.H. Holmes with the famous Burnham, the architectural genius whose fertile mind gave birth to the backdrop for the horror — the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The world fair in Chicago was only one of many credits on the resume of Burnham who died in 1912 when he headed the world’s largest architectural firm. His other accomplishments included the Flatiron building in New York, Union Station in Washington, D.C. and several department stores, among them Selfridges in London.
Burnham is often called the father of the skyscraper as well as the founder of “the city beautiful movement” that sought to integrate parks and other open public places with residential areas. Burnham laid out such plans for major cities, including Chicago and San Francisco, but only El Granada was completed, according to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Historian Barbara VanderWerf said the fact that El Granada “is the only Daniel H. Burnham town built in the United States” is enough to make it “a national treasure.” It’s hard to disagree with that assessment once you take a stroll through El Granada as the cool and calming sea breeze weaves through its landscaped boulevards, curving streets, traffic circles, parks and plazas.
A plaque at El Granada contains a spider web-like diagram that shows oceanfront promenades radiating from the town center to join park areas and tree-shaded streets that are “reminders of Burnham’s vision.”
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In her book, “Granada, A Synonym for Paradise,” VanderWerf credits the Ocean Shore Railroad for making Burnham’s plan see the light of day in the early 1900s. The Ocean Shore commissioned Burnham to design El Granada when thousands of people bought lots in newly laid out tracts along the line of the railroad that had a catchy slogan of “Reaches the Beaches.” But few buyers actually built houses on their lots.
The coastal railroad, which hoped to link San Francisco and Santa Cruz, was unable to compete with the automobile and stopped running in 1920. Farmers bought the “empty suburban tracts along its line and planted artichokes and Brussels sprouts,” VanderWerf writes.
“The railroad with its depots and tracts with their sidewalks, snug bungalows and eucalyptus trees shaped the coastside landscape we move about in today,” she continued. There are still traces of the line’s right-of-way as well as the trees planted by the hundreds, if not thousands.
Burnham himself summed up his dreams best when he said “Nowhere on earth is the ocean availed by men as it should be. Perhaps we can inoculate the men of the Pacific Coast with the right ideas.” The quote comes courtesy of the Burnham archives at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is better known for this quote: “Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.
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