Building the metropolitan house

An Allegory of Metropolitan Planning

Once upon a time 38 families agreed to build a house. They had enough land, considerable borrowing capacity and unlimited self confidence. Each family wanted to build its own part of the house exactly as it pleased. The cellar and the roof were admitted to be common to all, and after some discussion they decided to go shares on these parts of the building and have a builder and a building committee to look after them. Then they started to draw their plans. And the Brooklines planned an elegant suite with tiled baths, French windows, open fireplaces and white marble exterior. The Miltons schemed a cosy flat with English half timbered work outside and leaded windows, the Bostons laid out three stories of rooms, 26 in all, the lower story fireproof, the upper two warranted to burn in any weather. The Nahants wanted sleeping porches and white stucco, the Somervilles chose concrete blocks, the Wakefields stained shingles and the Winchesters a Colonial effect in white clapboards. The differences did not stop with the outside, for the Quincys stood for 7-foot studding while the Reveres on the same floor wanted 12. The Lynns were content with a narrow entry, while the Swampscotts beyond them wanted a wide one, and everybody quarreled over the placing of the stairs. The families on the ground floor didn’t need stairs and didn’t want to pay for any. The top story families didn’t care to deaden their floors, and most of the plumbing pipes had to run through a neighbor’s best rooms and could be heard if not seen. When the plans were completed, the heads of families held an interesting meeting at which each proclaimed his own needs and intentions to be carried out regardless, or else he and his would go on living in a back street in an inconvenient ugly house all by themselves. At last some one said, “Let us call in an architect and show him our plans. I don’t suppose he can give every one of us exactly what we are asking for. Maybe some of our climbers will have to comfort themselves with cut-glass door knobs and silk rugs just for their own use, but if he knows his business he will give us the right kind of entries and halls and stairs and lifts, and will make the house look better, sell better and cost less than our brilliant but inharmonious efforts. If we don’t like his plans we can make him show others till we get what we want—within reason. Shall we do it?” And the 38 families saw the light and employed the expert and he builded better than they knew.

Edward A. Filene, J. R. Coolidge, Jr., and John Nolen, Report of the Metropolitan Plan Commission, (Boston: Wight & Potter, State Printers, 1912), pg. 57–58.