A PRELIMINARY REPORT UPON A CITY PLAN: City of Ladue, Missouri

[Ladue, Missouri]: City Council, City of Ladue / Harland Bartholomew and Associates, (1939). 11" x 8 3/4." Stapled brown card wrappers with printed title at front. 40pp. with 10 illustrated, partial and full-page, plates (architectural renderings and maps) throughout text. Area of creasing to upper corner of front wrapper, otherwise remarkably well preserved ; about near fine.

A Harland Bartholomew and Associates-authored preliminary report for a city plan for Ladue, Missouri, a tony inner-ring suburb of St. Louis and as of the writing of this, one of the wealthiest communities in the United States, the wealthiest in Missouri, and Platonic ideal of an all-white, exclusionary American suburb. Prepared in 1939, it followed an updated zoning ordinance of 1938 amid an accelerating exodus from St. Louis City to the east, to its myriad emerging, and often racially-restricted, suburban enclaves to the west, about a decade ahead of the national postwar trend.

"In all the larger cities of The United States, St. Louis included, there is a marked tendency towards suburban development. The older residential districts in the central areas of the large city are being abandoned before they have outlived their usefulness, and the area of abandonment exceeds by far the possibilities of commercial or industrial expansion. Our methods for city growth have been chiefly marked by too rapid and too speculative development, and by impermanence of value and the rapid spread of blighted areas. We should plan to avoid this condition in the City of Ladue. The best way to prevent blight is too maintain as firmly as possible existing standards of development, provided of course that these standards are entirely reasonable and sound." (pp. 10-11)

The plan provides details on Ladue's then-rapid, recent growth (a "100 percent increase in eight years" pp.7) and measures for a plan to seemingly limit it going forward, with an eye on capping total population below 10,000 people via "reasonable and sound" development standards which included a strict limiting of commercial and/or industrial development and an outright ban on multi-family residential construction:

“There is more than ample opportunity for apartment house construction too meet the needs of the whole St. Louis region in the City of St. Louis and in certain of the other suburban communities where such construction is already permitted, without the necessity of introducing it into the City of Ladue, where the overwhelming majority of people own their homes and where they have come in the hope that they could avoid this class of urban development.” (pp.12)

St. Louis-based Bartholomew and Associates were a prolific and singularly influential American urban planning firm, one many consider the architects of postwar urban segregation and decline through their preliminary and comprehensive plans for cities too numerous to mention from the 1910’s through the end of the 20th Century. In writing of its notable 1948 plan for St. Louis City, historian Walter Johnson notes they provided the postwar blueprint for segregationist urban planning; or “a first draft of the material fabric of our contemporary lives” and “a beginner’s guide to building a racist city – incising and intensifying existing differences of race and class in the physical form of the built environment.” (THE BROKEN HEART OF AMERICA: St. Louis and the Violent History of The United States ; 2020 ; pp. 296-297)

Indeed, following Johnson's lead, if the 1948 plan for St. Louis can be called a blueprint for cities, this 1939 guide for Ladue could be said to have provided the same for the racial buttressing of exclusive white flight suburbs, in the St. Louis region and beyond. An important publication, thus, and scarce. We locate only 7 copies in American libraries (Missouri History ; Mercantile Library (St. Louis) ; Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) ; Truman State ; Princeton ; Columbia ; Harvard) and none in commerce (as of April 2023).