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Charles Mulford Robinson of Rochester, New York, was the nation's leading missionary of civic improvement — author of The Improvement of Towns and Cities (1901), the first American guide to city planning, and later the first professor of civic design at the University of Illinois. In 1909 the Fort Wayne Civic Improvement Association hired him to evaluate the city, and his Report of Charles Mulford Robinson for Fort Wayne Civic Improvement Association — presented in 1909 and in print by 1910, the year under which the Parks Department's chronology files it — was Fort Wayne's first park and boulevard master plan and one of the earliest comprehensive city plans in Indiana.
Griswold summarizes it in a sentence: Robinson "made an exhaustive report recommending extensive works of beautification and sanitation." The report itself ranged far beyond parks. Robinson treated street widening and legally established building lines, so that new building would recede to the widened line; limits on building heights in proportion to street width; the elimination of alley houses by converting alleys into minor streets; and sanitation as the basic principle underneath beautification. He read the city's riverfronts as assets being wasted — low river land, he wrote in his general argument, is "quite likely to be distinctive" and picturesque, yet "frequently, until thus taken charge of, a menace to the health of the community, for it is probably made a dumping ground, if not an open sewer, for the neighborhood." Local historians note that he saw the automobile coming: he criticized plats whose streets did not align and spaces too narrow for the motor age, and urged a city that had "realized suddenly that a future, long permitted to look out for itself, has at last arrived" to correct the omissions of the past. His closing argument was civic psychology — "Confidence and civic courage have frequently had the power to achieve that which doubt and hesitation would have rendered an impossibility." Fort Wayne cannot be said to have adopted Robinson's whole program; what it did was hand his framework to a landscape architect and tell him to draw it.
Sources: Charles Mulford Robinson, Report of Charles Mulford Robinson for Fort Wayne Civic Improvement Association (1909/1910), passages as published; Griswold (1917), Ch. XLVIII; Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department, published chronology (entry for 1910); National Register nomination, Fort Wayne Park and Boulevard System Historic District (2010), for the 1909 presentation and Robinson's role; Input Fort Wayne, "How we got here: The role of transportation in Fort Wayne's growth" (historian Creager Smith on Robinson and the automobile).