As I hammer out my thesis, wanted to share a couple nuggets about Harland Bartholomew who many know to have been the person to draft up the first CoV town plan. Welp, HB was also a white supremacist committed to ensuring racial segregation in cities. A lil thread #vanpoli #vanre

HB was America's first professional planner and was based in St. Louis. In 1916 when the US supreme court struck down Louisville, Kentucky, city zoning ordinance that explicitly prohibited blacks from moving into majority white n'hoods, HB figured out a work around....

"Instead of explicitly banning Black ppl frnintegrating, Bartholomew zoned the city in a manner that assigned “first residential neighborhood” status to existing white-majority n'hoods whose homes’ deeds legally prohibited sale to Blk ppl thru restrictive covenants..

(see Pt Grey & British Properties). Because they were private contracts as opposed to public plans, covenants could work around the Supreme Court decision. "First residential n'hoods" generally allowed only high-quality, single-family residential homes

N'hoods that Black ppl lived in were designated as “second residential” and largely contained dense, multifamily housing. Black residents of Saint Louis were left with little choice than to live in the n'hoods zoned for them, where deeds did not legally preclude their residence.

Also the 1920 HB plan mandated that new polluting industry construction occur only in n'hoods w the designation of “second residential,” ensuring not only segregation but also inequality in hsg and n'hood quality (see also how lands adj to Hogan's Alley were rezoned to industrial

Whereas white n'hoods were zoned as residential only, sometimes with light commercial use on the outskirts (see Kerrisdale), black n'hoods were allowed to be zoned for the mixed uses of dense residential, commercial, and industrial. Source: Benton, Journal of Urban History 44(6)

If ya don't know, now ya know.