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.We are waking up tothis fact.We are coming to see that if a battleship costs $42,000,000and we have been able to build a eet of them, the actual building ofan entire city is a mere incident in terms of dollars but of the mostmomentous importance to the present and future welfare of everycitizen.10Mariemont and KingsportTwo notable examples of the war-town planning science, Kingsport,Tennessee, on the Kentucky border and Mariemont, Ohio, a satelliteof Cincinnati, were the work of John Nolen s of ce.Both were in theplanning stages before World War I, but completed the rst stages oftheir growth between the postwar business as usual period of the1920s and the Hoover years of the Depression.Critiques of these twotowns have usually focused not on their organization but on their ap-pearance.Considered together, these two towns provide a compara-tive framework for assessing both the deliberate and default protocolsof residential subdivision development during the interwar period.Inboth, the simple grid of streets developed by lot sales was adjustedwith intermediate organizational agents, related to sponsorship, tim-ing, and housing aggregate ( gures 3.1.3 and 3.1.4).|Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science 1483.1.3 Plan of Mariemont, Ohio.John Nolen Papers, The Department of Manuscripts and UniversityArchives, Olin Library, Cornell University.Kingsport was an American mongrel, an industrial city func-tional, initially sponsored and directed by railroad executives.Mariemont, on the other hand, was a pastoral, landscaped satellite,sponsored by a philanthropic organization.Mariemont was developedby members of both the Commercial Club and the Municipal Art So-ciety in carefully tended steps.Inspired by Letchworth in England,Mariemont, like other American versions of the Garden City, wasstyled after a picturesque English village.Kingsport, on the otherhand, was developed by the members of the Chamber of Commerceand the Boosters.The town s history was not chronicled and cele-|3.1 149brated by an adoring citizenry as it was in Mariemont, but rather un-derstood through real estate artifacts and the publications of theRotary Club.Mariemont was comprehensively planned, whereasKingsport received the most minimal planning treatment and was de-veloped in the midst of a less genteel and more anarchical pattern ofgrowth.At 365 acres, Mariemont was a self-contained satellite that hasremained true to its initial plat and boundaries over its several decadesof growth and has served as a kind of time capsule of the spatial vol-umes associated with vintage 1920s planning science.At 1,100 acres,Kingsport was almost three times the size of Mariemont and compara-ble in size to other small American cities.Throughout its several de-cades of growth, the town has become a museum of various twentieth-century approaches to subdivision design.Neither town was a garden-variety American small town like Sin-clair Lewis ctional town of Zenith, though Kingsport more closelyresembled the old Zip City.Mariemont was one of Nolen s favoriteexamples of town-planning arrangements, while Kingsport was a kindof problem child over which the of ce had little control.Touted as anational exemplar, Mariemont was internationally recognized as asuccessful model of the Garden City as urban satellite.In 1924, theNew York Times Magazine called the town, The City Set at the Cross-roads: A New Experiment in Town Planning to Fit the Motor Age.21Soviet planners inspected the town.Raymond Unwin also visited andpraised Mariemont.Cited in books and articles as a noteworthy Amer-ican variation on the Garden City idea, the town stood as precedentfor federal experiments during the New Deal period.Kingsport alsodrew many visitors during the building of neighboring TVA experi-ments.But the leadership of both towns, particularly Kingsport,steered clear of all associations with social experiments to maintainthe character of a traditional nancial venture.Kingsport s land was bought by railroad executives for reducedrates because of their advance knowledge of the railroad s route.Dif-ferent from its company-town predecessors like Pullman, Illinois;Alcoa, Tennessee; or Kohler Village, Wisconsin, Kingsport was spon-sored by allied industries, including glass, dyes, synthetic bers, char-coal briquettes, and textiles.The town congratulated itself as amodern model community with well oiled, Taylorized industrial|Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science 1503.1.4 Early aerial views of Kingsport, Tennessee.John Nolen papers, #2903.Division of Rare andManuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. 151 152arrangements, motivated businesses, diversi ed industry, access torailroads and resources, and inexpensive labor.Avoiding the mistakesof other industrial boom towns, Kingsport provided housing as ameans of settling and pacifying its workers.In 1916, Nolen was askedto consult on an initial plan for Kingsport
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