1918: St. Louis's Planning Commission and engineer Harland Bartholomew beg you to consider zoning "A Fundamental Part of the City Plan" archive.org/details/Zoning… 
They're coming out swinging right away against the horror of new tall buildings. "Canyons" like this "do not permit the sun's rays to reach the lower floors of these buildings as they should."
This is not the zoning code, this is the St. Louis City Plan Commission and their friendly engineer Harland Bartholomew sharing their heart's deepest secrets, explaining why zoning is needed when it never was before.
We are fighting "evils": "haphazard arrangement of buildings", what we would call a mix of building uses today, too many buildings in some places, not enough in others, and "instability of values". Bartholomew considers this the world city planning will get rid of.
Bartholomew tried to make "districting" happen as another name for zoning.
Last year the Supreme Court overthrew explicit segregation across the country. "Obviously" we're a little touchy about that.
Finally, some italics. Channeling Malthus, it turns out tall buildings reduce property values. It's a "significant fact". I'm reminded of the Yogi Berra quote "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
The fear of "overcrowding" is driven by "the space required" for "vehicular traffic" so we can achieve "the highest efficiency." This is 1918, there are 5.5 million cars across the country. If you're a 1918 reader, you probably don't own a car and your friends don't either.
Apartment buildings will kill your babies, give you tuberculosis, force you into a life of "adult crime and immorality" (prostitution and gambling I think) and corrupt the precious youth.
This conflation of poverty and housing to rationalize slum clearance in the name of efficiency appears to have started in 1875 Birmingham, England, and is celebrated by American reformers, including those in St. Louis
If we ban apartment buildings, we won't need hospitals, prisons, or asylums anymore "and the heavy expense they entail"
Pages 14 and 15 are missing from this resource. @Google kindly digitized this here: babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.… . Not as nice a scan, but it has the missing pieces.
Wow, it's domino theory. One apartment building leads to another, "carrying the evil to a new district and blighting the old one." Also this may be the oldest use of the sneaky segregationist term "blight" I've seen.
Bartholomew, 1918: buildings higher than 12 stories are "not a good paying investment" because elevators etc. Ban them.
Behold the terror. This home is "vacated" because an apartment building and a hotel were permitted to either side. "Tremendous losses" like this will be solved by banning "inappropriate growth" like apartment buildings and hotels.
There is so much happening in this sentence. Okay, so slums are bad, and the reason we have them is too much housing in one place, called "congestion" at this time. But hey, fancy neighborhoods are slums too and you can't even tell, because they have too much housing too. Boom!
Back to the nicer scans. Here we're getting real. Bartholomew doesn't say African Americans, but that's what he's talking about when he talks about "invading". "Individuals are damaged, but the city is damaged most."
Last year St. Louis's segregation ordinance was struck down and thousands of white men burned down East Saint Louis and murdered 40-250 people, leaving thousands homeless. White St. Louis has a clear idea of who the "invaders" are in 1918. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_St._…
Let's talk building heights. Bartholomew's argument here is surprisingly moderate. He argues the "only" reason to limit building heights is to make sure it doesn't block light and air to surrounding buildings and heights should be limited as a function of street width.
More zoning gore. This neighborhood store "violates the building line" meaning it's closer to the street, "often greatly reducing the value" of the whole block. Ban neighborhood stores.
I know this picture is supposed to horrify me that a garage was permitted next to a residence, but I'm mainly just impressed at how attractive garages used to be. Most of them were converted carriage houses.
Bartholomew likes regulations on how much space a building should take up on a lot since 1. there is no downside and 2. this allows each building to get light and air from its own land. Germ theory exists, but most people at this time think still smelly air causes disease
Bang, there's the smoking gun I was looking for. Harland Bartholomew introduces single family zoning in St. Louis in 1918, one year after segregation is banned and the East St. Louis Massacre. I believe this is the first use in the world.
Bartholomew helpfully adds a state of zoning section, talking in glowing terms about work in NYC and LA to regulate building heights and eject existing businesses retroactively (Chinese laundromats, a clumsy early effort at racial segregation).
1918: Apartment buildings are being built on single-family home blocks, "to the great detriment of whole neighborhoods".
Bartholomew gets excited about placing "restrictions on individual members of a community" which are "merely an incident in conferring greater security and permanence to the community as a whole." He's talking about racial segregation to benefit the white St. Louis community.
And on that chilling note, Bartholomew ends this piece. Thank you for going through this weird journey into segregated 1918 St. Louis with me.
