Jeffry M. Diefendorf. Not for quotation without permission.

I Love that City, but which City? Urban Change and Urban Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne [for presentation at the Warren Center, Harvard University, conference on Reconceptualizing the History of the Built Environment in North America, April 30, 2005] [Not for quotation without permission] Jeffry M. Diefendorf University of New Hampshire For nearly twenty-five years I have been working on a range of problems relating to the rebuilding of cities bombed in World War II. What started as a comparison of three German cities, Cologne, Munich, and West Berlin, became a study of rebuilding all over West Germany.1 Moreover, I found that I could not just start in 1945. In order to understand underlying developments in planning, architecture, and public attitudes toward cities, I had to go back well before the war. As this work went on, my interests expanded to rebuilding cities all over Europe and Japan.2 How did peoplecitizens, planners, architects, officialsin different places deal with the issue of recreating structures that had been totally destroyed? How did they resolve the conflicts between planners who wanted to guide reconstruction and property owners who had their own ideas about how to rebuild? What sorts of planning models were used? What aesthetic principles prevailed, and why? The answers to these and other questions were based on empirical findings, that is, what actually happened in each place. The research, however, raised other interesting questions that went beyond rebuilding cities destroyed in war. I can only point to a few here, but they can suggest the direction of my current thinking about cities. Nearly everywhere after World War II, most planners, a great many architects, and critics of the industrial city saw the wartime destruction as presenting a great opportunity to modernize and improve the basic structure of the city. New forms of housing, new greenery, new zoning, and new roads would lead to healthy, well-functioning cities. The old cities had been crowded, filled with slums, made dangerous by disease, social conflict, and criminality. They had badly needed reform and renewal. The unprecedented, wide-spread destruction seemed to make it possible to speed up radical change. People who thought this way, and they ranged from left to right on the political spectrum, admired Haussmanns radical transformation of Paris, and certainly Nazi planners believed that they had the opportunity to transform radically German cities. The idea of transforming old cities was widespread. The degree to which cities were rebuilt in new, modern forms after World War II varied considerably due to the particular interaction between local interest groups, the abilities of key planners and politicians, and so on, but the fact that so many cities modernized rather than trying to replicate the

prewar city raised new and very interesting questions: to what extent did the bombing really matter in the longer-term development of cities? Would the cities that had been destroyed look and function like they do today anyway, even without the bombing? Second, if this impulse to reform and modernize cities was more or less universal, shouldnt one trace the spread of planning and architectural concepts across borders and periods? Scholars of postwar Germany and Europe often like to talk of the Americanization of Europe. Perhaps this is true, but it doesnt take much to show that ideas moved in both directions across the Atlantic. In other words, how do internationalized conceptions of what makes up a modern, healthy city, shape urban change over the long term? Third, how should we judge the success of urban rebuilding when seen both as part of postwar reconstruction and as long term transformation? When looking at the process of postwar rebuilding, we must certainly acknowledge enormous quantitative achievements. Vast amounts of rubble were cleared surprisingly quickly. A huge amount of damaged housing was repaired and new housing built. Businesses and cultural monuments were reconstructed; the urban infrastructure put back in service. Deciding whether this was a success in qualitative terms is more difficult. Did residents at the time, or do we now, like the results of reconstruction? To the extent that rebuilt cities were modernized, did citizens or do we prefer those cities to older, prewar cities? Fourth, on what grounds do people prefer one city over another? During the time Ive spent working in Cologne, Ive been made aware of the strong rivalry with nearby Dsseldorf. Both cities had been badly bombed and rebuilt. Dsseldorf claimed to be the more modern; Cologne was admittedly less orderly. The preference of one city over another is an individual choice, but it is also of public importance. Such preferences influence, for instance, flows of capital investment, in and out-migration, and tourism. This is important if cities are to stay healthy. If residents dont love where they live, they are likely to moveto a suburb, or to another cityif they are able to do so. Flight from a city, as we know, brings with it a host of problems: a declining tax base, dilapidated buildings, closed business, slums, and so forth. Loving a city and identifying with a city, on the contrary, is a measure of that citys vigor and robustness. As part of a promotional effort, Cologne adapted the I New York slogan, but put it in the local dialect. But why should one in fact love Cologne, or any other city, like Boston? What are the objects of this love? The buildings? The streets? The shops? Customs or food? Certain cultural institutions, such as theaters, museums, orchestras, or, yes, sports teams? Who loves which of these? Moreover, to make matters more complex, both the people who love the city and the objects of love change over time. Generations change, people move in and out, the ethnic composition of a city changes.

And institutions and structures change too. Wartime destruction and reconstruction is an extreme example, and, as Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella have observed in their recent book, cities can be extraordinarily resilient in the face of catastrophes.3 But even in the normal course of events, buildings burn or are torn down. Buildings that some might consider historic are demolished in favor of new structures. Theaters close. Teams go into decline or move away. So what is the relationship between changes in the cityeveryday changes and catastrophic changes--and the ways and degrees to which people love and identify with the city?4 Attempting to answer questions like these must, at the least, go beyond the study of rebuilding bombed cities. As I noted earlier, when I started my work on postwar reconstruction, I began with a comparison of three cities. Though that approach exploded into a bigger enterprise, the initial comparison had been a very good place to start. The comparison served a valuable heuristic function by helping to identify common issues and features unique to each city. Comparison helped produce an analytical framework--questions to ask, types of evidence to seek, concepts to usethat applied to all bombed cities, even if, in the end, the variations in postwar reconstruction defied simple formulas or conclusions. Consequently, I decided to start again with three cities. I wanted to take a city that had been bombed and rebuiltan example of catastrophic changeand compare it with cities that had not been bombed. Since most German cities had in fact been bombed, that suggested looking outside Germany. Having already seen that many ideas about cities (such as in planning) were international, international comparison seemed appropriate. The period I was interested in had to span the Second World War and its orgy of destruction. Since part of what I was interested in had to do with the efforts to modernize cities, that suggested going back into the 1920s, with the flowering of the modern in architecture and planning, and ending in the 1960s, with the beginnings of the successful critiques of modernist architectural and planning models. In terms of both periodization and approach, I could expect to build on the important comparative study of European cities by Helen Meller, who tackled the period prior to World War II but who also paid close attention to civic identity, urban planning, and cultural institutions.5 I have not been worried about finding a perfect set of cities for comparison. The goal, again, was to find cities where the process of comparison would serve a heuristic function for research and reflection about urban history. I chose Cologne, Basel, and Boston. Why these three? From the start, I must admit to bowing to the pragmatic. Cologne is a city I already know rather well, and many of the questions I posed earlier grew out of my work there. It is a city that has ranged between 750,000 and one million in population. It expanded and sought to modernize in certain ways in the 1920s under Mayor Konrad Adenauer. Cologne is an ancient city founded by the Romans; the medieval city was built on the Roman ruins. It became a commercial power on the Rhine and then an

industrial center. It has a proud architectural legacy. It features old elites, an important university, and a distinctive cultural tradition (linguistic, culinary, religious, artistic). The target of the first 1000-bomber raid during the war, Cologne was in ruins and largely depopulated when the allies marched in in the Spring of 1945. The recovery of the city was surprisingly quick, though it was not accomplished without internal disagreements about the sort of city the new Cologne ought to be. Basel seemed a possible choice for comparison with Cologne because it is actually a sister city, with representatives attending each others major anniversaries. Also a trading city on the Rhine, also originally a Roman city, also a city with old elites and a distinct cultural tradition (its own dialect, a university, important art collections), Basel has an interesting counterpoint to Colognes famed Lenten carnival. Though Protestant, Basel celebrates Fasnacht. The direct contacts between the two cities are also interesting. When, in the 1930s, Basel considered a program of urban renewal in its ancient inner city, it corresponded with Cologne to find out about the latters efforts at renewal. Major renewal in Cologne, of course, came after the bombing. Basel, in neutral Switzerland on the border with both France and Germany, was not bombed, but it did consider major changes in the citys infrastructure. Indeed, the Basel architect Hans Bernoulli published before the war a powerful and famous argument for the regular renewal of all cities. Finally, the idea of adding Boston to the mix was partly pragmatic (the material is close at hand), but it was also an outgrowth of work on German reconstruction. Postwar German planners interested in reforming or renewing their cities took great interest in urban renewal in Boston and especially in the construction of a great urban freeway, the late and not lamented Central Artery. If one includes Cambridge as part of greater Boston, Walter Gropius and Martin Wagner, who came to Harvard in the 1930s, helped make the Boston area a key point for the spread of European modernist ideas in architecture and planning. Wagner, in fact, was a main proponent of the radical rebuilding of cities blighted by bombs and general decay. His radical proposals for the transformation of Boston fascinated German planners, even if they were ignored in Boston itself. Beyond that, however, Boston is an old (by American standards) metropolis with something of the feel of a European city. A port city like Cologne and Basel, it has a distinct architectural tradition, important universities, and was a pioneer (as were Cologne and Basel) in developing programs of historic preservation. It takes pride in its cultural institutions and popular festivals.6 Yet in spite of its age and heritage, Boston felt compelled to produce a New Boston in the 1960s. There are, of course, great differences between the cities. Basel is much smaller than Cologne and Boston. Bostons population is ethnically, racially, and religiously much more diverse. Boston is a state capital. Cologne was a provincial capital before the war but lost that function to Dsseldorf. The

city of Basel is the capital of a small canton (Basel-Stadt): in 1950 the city contained 93.4% of the population of 196,000 and encompassed 65% of the territory of the canton. The rural Basel-Land canton in 1950 had about 10,000 more inhabitants. Today, metropolitan Basel, if one can call it that, includes over 650,000 people including those from neighboring France and Germany who cross the border to work, shop, or enjoy the city.7 In spite of these and other differences, I felt that there were enough commonalities to make comparisons fruitful. All three cities have always had fiercely loyal partisans. All three offered ways to explore the relationship between urban change and elements of urban identity or, as Gerald Suttles put it, the cumulative texture of local urban culture.8 And comparison, I believe, ought to be a good way to highlight significant similarities and differences. When, however, I began to itemize the developments that I wanted to examine and compare, the list became extensive, and intimidating. It included: historic architecture and historic preservation; town planning; urban renewal projects; popular customs, festivals, and celebrations; recreation and sports; high cultural institutions, such as museums, symphonies, and universities; and efforts at self-promotion and image cultivation. All of this needs to be set against a background of economic, social, demographic, and political change. The risks here are great. The temptation is to slide into writing comprehensive histories of three cities over five decades, a project that would be overwhelming, especially since most of my work has been in German, not Swiss or American urban history. As I continue my research, I hope that a topical approach within the broad framework of urban change, culture, and identity will produce useful insights. It is too early to reach grand conclusions either about the method chosenthis transnational comparisonor about the long term relationship between urban change and identity in the mid-20th century. However, at least on specific topics, the research has proved most interesting. Here I want to discuss briefly my work on traffic planning, historic preservation, urban renewal, and identity formation through the staging of public festivals.

The Urban Highway By the 1920s, planners and officials in all three cities recognized that the expansion of the city into outlying areas and the growth of motorized traffic were posing challenges for the old, densely builtup city centers.9 The increasing use of private automobiles and trucks might be desirable to some and reprehensible to others, but it appeared irresistible. Because this was an international phenomenon driven by the combination of industrialization and technology, it drew the attention of planners everywhere, and ideas were shared through publications, conferences, and study visits. One solution that enjoyed widespread currency was the construction of an urban highway system. The city center would remain a

hub, with radial arteries (spokes) feeding traffic to and from nesting ring roads. Outer rings would carry traffic that did not need to flow through the central city. There was nothing new about this as an urban form. What was new was that planners sought to quantify the flow of traffic and calculate desired capacity of the spokes and rings, widening them or constructing new roads as needed to absorb greater volumes of motorized traffic. Rationalized traffic flow would relieve congestion in the inner citya desirable goal for planners and critics of the crowded modern city.10 Inner-city merchants, however, feared that rationalized traffic flow would deprive them of customers, and some vehicle owners objected to long detours around ring roads. Hence the idea to make some of the spokes or inner rings into highcapacity urban freeways. If and when realized, urban highways had the potential to transform the physical character of old cities every much as had the construction of railroad lines and terminals in the 19th century. Cologne was the first of the three cities I am studying to propose new urban highways. Mayor Konrad Adenauer brought in Hamburgs planner, Fritz Schumacher, to develop a new city plan. In 1923 Schumacher proposed not only to widen streets and build broad new arteries but also to construct a northsouth axis and an east-west axis to carry traffic through the heart of the old city and across a new Rhine bridge.11 (Figure 1) Similar proposals appeared in both Basel and Boston in 1930. In Basel, a new general plan called for a major artery to be cut through the historic center that would connect to a a new bridge over the Rhine. Ancient buildings would be sacrificed for improving the flow of motor vehicles through the city.12 (Figure 2) In the case of Boston, that citys Planning Board published a Report on a Thoroughfare Plan for Boston in 1930 that proposed new tunnels connecting Boston and East Boston, an elevated north-south Central Artery along the eastern edge of the central business district, and a new network of radial roads.13 For all three cities these were radical, costly proposals, and none were immediately implemented. The ideas remained on the table, however. In Basel and Boston, first the impact of the Great Depression and then the uncertainties of World War II meant postponing any grand initiatives. In Cologne, however, the Nazis made a start after seizing power in 1933. On the one hand, the Nazis were outspoken advocates of expanding the use of automobiles (the Peoples car, the Volkswagen) and building both freeways to connect cities and highways through cities. On the other, they had no qualms about radically transforming historic city centers to match their grandiose conceptions of modern, monumental cities. Nazi plans for Cologne called for both north-south and east-west axes through the historic core, and actual demolition was begun before the war to prepare for construction of the east-west axis.14 (Figure 3) The war, however, led to a freeze on all further work. The urban highway projects reemerged after the war. Planners of postwar Cologne, like planners

in other German cities, made freely flowing motor vehicle traffic a central priority.15 They saw the vast wartime destruction as an presenting an opportunity to build an updated street infrastructure which otherwise would have been too costly. Colognes chief planner between 1946 and 1952, Rudolf Schwarz called, once again, for high-capacity north-south and east-west axes, along with a grid of medium capacity streets. (Figure 4) Further elaborations were included in a comprehensive traffic plan in 1956.16 (Figure 5) A partial urban highway system was in fact built. The east-west axis begun by the Nazis was completed first, as a broad artery, not a freeway. The north-south axis, another broad artery, was completed in 1967, with a section tunneling under a pedestrian shopping street. Still within the historic inner city, it connects with another axis coming from Barbarossaplatz that becomes a limited-access freeway onto the new Severinsbrcke crossing the Rhine. Still another high-capacity roadway was built along the Rhine itself. Within more or less the same time frame, Boston moved ahead with its own version of urban highways. In 1944, anticipating the postwar opportunity to plan a better future Boston, a Boston Contest was staged to solicit ideas on all kinds of urban matters, including traffic planning. The top prize winners all call for variants of a hub and spoke road network, some form of north-south elevated freeway east of the business district, and perhaps additional freeways reaching into the center from the west.17 (Figure 6) Though none of the proposals submitted to the Boston Contest were directly realized, what became the Central Artery, first proposed in 1930, was part of the 1948 Master Highway Plan, and work on the Central Artery began in 1951.18 The elevated urban highway opened in 1959. The 1950s saw the building of Storrow Drive along the Charles, and in the same period, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority was getting ready to extend the turnpike into Boston, which took place in the 1960s. This eastwest highway, combined with the north-south Central Artery, certainly facilitated the flow of motor vehicles in and out of the city, but, as was the case with Colognes new arteries, these roads cut off sections of the city from each other. The story in postwar Basel is a bit different. The growth of the chemical industry on the edge of the city and growing trade with both France and Germany again made traffic planning a priority. City planners took up the prewar suggestions and in 1946 proposed a partial ring system, with tangential feeder roads and widened streets going into the city core.19 Work began on part of the ring road, but preservationists stalled projects that would have made incursions into the historic center. In 1955 the city brought in Kurt Leibbrand, a specialist in traffic planning from the Technical University in Zrich to draw up a new plan. Leibbrand suggested new arteries placed on tangents to the central core.20 In 1963, a local association of engineers and architects drew up still another traffic plan, this one calling for a city-ring of high-capacity streets instead of an urban freeway to move traffic around the central city.21 Any major

artery through the center was rejected. Planners in all three cities, then, started in the 1920s and early 1930s from similar premises. Concerned with what seemed an inevitable growth in motor vehicle traffic, planners initially wanted to build urban highways into the city centers as well as systems of ring roads, spokes, or tangential feeder roads. They used similar analytical toolscalculating the patterns and volume of traffic and the value of work-hours lost to commuting--to study the growth in motor vehicle traffic and support their arguments. The outcomes, however, differed. Boston built its elevated highway, and Cologne built a system of major arteries connecting to a partial freeway. Basel did not. What accounts for the differences? In Cologne, bomb damage appeared to present too great an opportunity to pass up. Preservationist efforts focused on restoring or rebuilding major religious and secular monuments and preserving the old street pattern in specific neighborhoods. This did not preclude building major arteries or highways. Moreover, the growth in vehicular traffic was seen as a sign of renewed health and vitality in a badly damaged city. Basel, undamaged in the war, pitted its identity as a city characterized by historic streets and buildings against the ideal of freely flowing traffic. As cautious Swiss, the Baslers were unwilling to bear the high cost of the proposed ring and urban highway system, opting instead for the city-ring. And Boston? Why was the Central Artery, which proved to be a hated, ugly barrier in the heart of the city and has just been torn down, not opposed? Of course, it was opposed, especially by the merchants and residents of the North End and Chinatown, but a major urban highway did not sufficiently challenge the way in which the elites of Boston and the state conceptualized Bostons identity. Furthermore, the successful war effort created confidence in the efficacy of both planning and large-scale projects. If America could mobilize the resources to win the war, why could it not also reform and modernize its old cities? Once under construction, the city council objected to its route. However, the artery had become part of the governors state highway plan, and that made state funding available. The Central Artery took nearly a decade to complete, but completed it was.

Historic Preservation Having said that historic preservationism played an important role in Basels rejection of a major inner city artery, let me now elaborate on the issue of the role of historic preservationism in these cities. What is meant by the term? Outside of cities, preservationists have sought to conserve particular landscapesa phenomenon that goes back into the romantic period in the 19th century. In the case of cities, the objects of preservation have included religious monuments, civic monuments, private residences and commercial structures, but also sites (and memorials at sites), spaces (and parks), street patterns, and ensembles made

up of some of the above. The task of preservationboth advocacy and actionhas sometimes been carried by private individuals and associations and sometimes by government offices. Private and official associations might be based in the city, but they might also be regional, state, or national. The reasons behind preservation are also varied and can be based on aesthetic, religious, political, cultural, and military values. Acts of preservation are shaped by laws (direct preservation laws but also indirect laws, like zoning), matters of funding, and technical issues such as accurate cataloging, engineering, and the like. Historic preservation is the apparent opponent of change, but only partly. Historic objects in cities changefrom weather, accidents, fire, and use. The non-preserved settings change, as neighboring buildings are torn down. Plants grow up, or die. Buildings stay the same on the outside but are changed inside, sometimes without anyone knowing it. Very old structures acquire modifications (a new wing or floor), new internal decoration (a baroque altar is placed in a gothic church), and so on. Advocates of historic preservation, in other words, are constantly faced with crucial decisions about what to preserve, why something should be preserved, and in what state. If something is to be restored, to what state or to what point in time? Circumstances in each place shape the answers to these questions. Among major German cities, Cologne was in the forefront in terms of historic preservation. The city preservation office dated from 1912. Lacking legal authority to mandate the preservation of historic buildings or sites, it exercised moral suasion by cataloging buildings and then pressuring private owners or public authorities to preserve and/or restore them. Colognes old city (the Altstadt), the area within the Ring boulevard built on the location of the Roman and medieval walls and the focus of preservationist efforts, was huge. While many old structures remained, the nineteenth century had seen the construction of all sorts of buildings, ranging from apartments to large banks, in all sorts of styles. Disliking the eclectic, imitative architecture of the nineteenth century, preservationists tended to think that something had to predate 1800 to be really worth saving, but even this was complicated by the fact that many old buildings were delapidated and badly needed work or even demolition.22 The bombing of the city changed all this. Around 95% of the buildings inside the Ring were destroyed. After the war, the city preservation office, reconstruction planners, and outspoken citizens bemoaned the loss of historic Cologne. Indeed, for many of these civic leaders, Cologne was its old city. Faced with the massive destruction, they concentrated in practice on preserving as much as possible of the old street layout and rebuilding the medieval churches and a few civic monuments like the town hall. 23 Only the long choir of the damaged but still-standing Gothic cathedral, which dominated the city silhouette and served as the citys symbol, was truly medieval (the cathedral had been finished in the late nineteenth century as part of Prussian-led nation building), but its restoration was also essential.

Rebuilding housing and commercial buildings in the old city center was mostly left to their owners. Hence a great many damaged but possibly restorable buildings were demolished for the new, postwar Cologne.24 Although the preservationists disliked the new big axes cutting through the central city, as long as the planners and traffic engineers left the old churches and the street pattern of most of the old parishes alone, the preservationists could begrudgingly accept broad, high capacity streets as necessary ingredients of the recovery of the city. Historic preservation was well-established in Boston long before the Central Artery was built. Indeed, as Michael Holleran has shown, Boston pioneered the urban historic preservation movement in the United States.25 After the great fire of 1872, expansion and changes in the city, including population shifts, threatened the existence of the historic Old South Church and Old State House. Citizen initiatives, led by some of Bostons elites, resulted in their preservation. Restoration of the statehouse by Bulfinch, Holleran notes, was the subject of the countrys first major preservation controversy in which architectural history was more important than political, military, or religious history.26 A state law of 1875 made it possible for citizens to protect a public park from encroachment by streets or rail lines, which, in turn, led to the building of the subway under rather than through the Common. Other legislation provided for zoning to restrict building heights, partly for reasons of safety but also to keep new buildings from restricting the view of and from the statehouse. The efforts to restore and preserve Paul Reveres house in 1905 culminated in the creation of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) under the leadership of William Sumner Appelton Jr. SPNEA acquired and preserved historic buildings in Boston and elsewhere, and it compiled inventories of and encouraged scholarship on historic structures. Although the Massachusetts legislature in 1918 amended the state constitution to say that The preservation and maintenance of ancient landmarks and other property of historical or antiquarian interest is a public use, and the commonwealth and the cities and towns therein may, upon payment of just compensation, take such property or any interest therein under such regulations as the general court may prescribe,27 and although in 1924 Boston itself joined other cities in passing zoning legislation to protect residential areas (in this case the Back Bay) from commercial development, active preservation efforts remained in the hands of private organizations, such as the Bostonian Society, SPNEA, and the Beacon Hill Association. These organizations, Holleran argues, defended the landmarks they had already saved, but they took few new initiatives. While Boston eventually became the first northern city to enact historic district zoning, for Beacon Hill, that happened only in 1955, after the Central Artery project was underway.28 The preservation of some public spaces like the Common and of some historic buildings like the Old South Church, and the introduction of some zoning legislation was not enough to slow or stop the

redevelopment of much of old Boston, especially in the face of the enthusiasm for reform and modernization that appeared during World War II.29 Why were there no new preservation initiatives in this pioneering city from the mid-1920s until the mid-1950s? Was there a change in the ways in which civic leaders conceptualized Bostons identity? Or were there competing conceptions reflecting competition between different populations? It is interesting to contrast the work of SPNEA, acquiring and preserving significant buildings throughout Boston, with the views of Lewis Mumford in 1969. Mumford declared, on the one hand, that what has given Boston its firm urban identity and its unique character up to this point has been the maintenance of its domestic scale and low density of population, and on the other hand, it was in the Back Bay that Boston first established itself as one of the centers of world culture.30 For Mumford, the citys identity was rooted in the ensemble of the Back Bay, with its townhouses and the elegance of Commonwealth Avenue, and not in its old downtown, old neighborhoods, or individual historic buildings that might be considered antiquities. He railed against the arrogance of highway engineers who conceive traffic as the only important function of urban life, to which every other urban need must be sacrificed.31 He denounced Storrow Drive, the widening of Memorial Drive in Cambridge, and the building of other highway improvements that threatened the human scale of Boston. Like the Central Artery, however, these improvements had already been made. Traffic planners had muscled their way to the forefront, in good part because privately-based institutions like SPNEA lacked the power to oppose them. Indeed, it seems that historic preservation in Boston required a boost from outside. As will be discussed below, the 1930 tercentenary celebration in Boston focused on historic sites from the revolutionary era, but this did not produce a broad preservation movement. In 1935 the US Congress passed legislation to authorize the federal government to identify, acquire, and preserve historic sites, buildings, and objects of national significance for the inspiration and benefit of the people of the United States.32 Twenty-four years later, follow-up legislation led to the creation of a Boston National Historic Sites Commission, which issued a report in 1961 lamenting that the ravages of time and change have been so overwhelming and destructive of the physical setting that produced the movement and events which weighed so heavily in transporting the American Colonies from a status as dependencies of England into full-fledged independence. The Commission, which included among its members US Representative Thomas P. ONeill, jr. and the Boston historian Walter Muir Whitehill, shouldered the agreeable and dutiful task to take the necessary measures to convey those meaningful segments that do remain from the past into the future, successfully preserved, renewed, and maintained for the inspiration and benefit of posterity.33 This was to be accomplished both by cataloging and helping preserve individual buildings and sites from the colonial and revolutionary eras and by supporting legislative

initiatives in the Massachusetts General Court to create historic districts in the Commonwealth.34 However, even federal and state encouragement failed to bring rapid results. Only in 1984 did a Downtown Interim Planning Overlay District establish historic preservation as a city priority and grant municipal legal protection to many of the citys historic structures.35 It was critical that Basel made historic preservation a priority much, much earlier than Boston. A private association of Basel citizens (the Freiwillige Basler Denkmalpflege) had been formed in 1913 to inventory historic buildings and raise funds for restoration projects, but, like comparable associations in Boston, this group on its own would surely have been unable to stop urban highway construction. It took an unusual conjunction of developments in the 1930s to turn historic preservation into a major force. In 1934 Basels Great Council approved a very ambitious plan, prepared by its new planner Adolf Schumacher, that called for a central artery, a new bridge, and even an underground tram system, along with a program of renewal of some badly run-down areas near the city center.36 In fact conditions were not conducive to these dramatic initiatives. The Great Depression seriously hurt the city's economy and made many features of the plan prohibitively expensive, not to mention producing considerable unemployment. There was growing discontent in some middle-class, conservative circles about the demolition of noted historic buildings. For example, in 1932 the Wrttembergerhof was torn down to make way for a new art museum, the design of which clashed with other architecture in Basel. (The museum's style was seen as an unsatisfactory variant of monumental neoclassicism.) Second, in the Spring of 1935, voters elected a socialist-led government. Socialist Fritz Ebi took over the building department and, as a vehicle to stimulate the construction industry and provide jobs, he launched an ambitious building program that included a large new police headquarters and new buildings for the university, the school system, and the harbor. These projects also entailed tearing down some historic buildings, which stimulated increased efforts in the ranks of those favoring historic preservation. Third, 1936 saw the creation of an officially recognized preservation office, the Staatliche Denkmalpflege, which was headed by Rudolf Riggenbach. Represented on most special commissions that reviewed individual street plans as well as larger building projects, it remained a quasi-public, quasi-private, but highly influential organization subsidized by city until incorporated fully into city government in 1980. Fourth, in an attempt to provide work for the unemployed and underemployed and to bring a measure of peace to the labor market, the city (both the Great Council and a referendum) passed a special tax (the Arbeitsrappen) in late 1936 to finance a job-creation program. Local banks loaned the city money (partly on condition of a wage freeze in key trades), and the loan was to be repaid by the new 1% tax on income. Some 60% of Basel's unemployed were in the construction trades, and hence the Arbeitsrappen program focused on the renewal or repair of substandard buildings, many of them in the historic core of the city.

The program employed not only workers, but also architects, draftsmen, and engineers who otherwise would have been unemployed.37 All of this combined meant that the central proposals in the 1930 and 1934 plans--the underground tram, the traffic artery through the central city, the new bridge, and massive urban renewal-were pushed into the background by a large number of much more modest construction projects, most of which were dedicated to renovating rather than demolishing the historic substance of the city. Here the conservatives interested in historic preservation and the socialists interested in work creation found a common ground. When a new building law was submitted to the Great Council in 1939, it contained not only technical provisions regulating building heights and redrawing property lines but, even more important, a general zoning plan for the city. While certain areas were designated for housing, industry, and future development, large parts of the historic core were given special protection from development by being including in a special Altstadt district. (This became known as the "violet zone" from the color used on the plan.) (Figure 7) The law stipulated that the building department now had the general responsibility to see that any new construction, demolition, and street alterations in the violet zone did not harm the overall artistic and historic character of the area.38 Note that the emphasis is on the overall character of the Altstadt, not in the preservation of a specific list of buildings. Whereas earlier planning, motivated primarily by traffic considerations, was frustrated by pragmatic fiscal restraints, henceforth considerations of historic preservation also constituted a major, legally sanctioned obstacle to traffic planning. The Arbeitsrappen was repealed in 1947 and the original bank loan had been long since repaid, but this left a revolving fund of 16 million francs which continued to be used to support the restoration of historic buildings, especially in the city core. In other words, by the time the war ended, the movement to restore and preserve the Basel Altstadt had gained institutional, political, and financial strength. When the ambitious traffic plans from the early 1930s were revived, the proponents of conserving the Altstadt were well situated to throw up obstacles. The Altstadtas an ensemble of streets, spaces, and buildings--was now widely considered as the embodiment not just of Basels history but of its contemporary culture and identity. Thus, for example, Friedrich Lodewig, for many years president of the Basel chapter of the Swiss Union of Engineers and Architects, found the unique cultural character of the city in the Altstadt, even though it occupied but a twentieth of the citys area. There one experienced how buildings were bound up with history, with the cultural life of our city, its traditions, its unique qualities. It defines the citys Volkscharakter (identity), ties the present with the past, and sets it apart from the identities of people elsewhere.39 Similarly Rudolf Suter could tell the general meeting of the Basel Association of Engineers and Architects that the preservation of the Altstadt concerns everyone because this determines whether a

city retains its unique urban character or sinks into become a mere settlement. Except for perhaps the cathedral, Suter argued, Basel lacked truly noteworthy architecture, but the organic evolution of the city core, preserved in its street pattern, its human proportions, its intimate city-image (Stadtbild), and the citys silhouette, all created an ensemble that determined what it meant to be a Basler.40 This all sounds a bit like Mumford on Bostons Back Bay, except that Lodewig and Suter were talking about Basels historic core, not a nineteenth century development built on land fill.

Urban renewal Urban renewal programs, like the construction of urban highways, had the potential to transform the character of cities. The preservation of pieces of the built environment, ranging from individual buildings to ensembles, was sometimes able to thwart traffic engineers but sometimes not. As noted above, Basels historic preservationists could accept a measure of renewal and renovation in the Altstadt when they were limited in scale. I will return to this in a moment because Basel initially used Colognes urban renewal program of the late 1930s as a model. In 1937 Colognes city conservator Hans Vogts published a essay in which he declared that fully one third of Colognes Altstadt was in need of renewal, and he helped lead a kind of pilot project for an area near the Romanesque church of Gro St. Martin.41 (Figure 8) The goals were both aesthetic and social. Built up block interiors would be opened up, reducing densities and bringing in natural light and fresh air. Some medieval house faades would be cleaned up and kept, and other old architectural elements would be salvaged and inserted into new structures. Interiors would be updated for residences and shops for craftsmen. The renewed buildings would fit in with their ancient surroundings. In keeping with Nazi ideas on social engineering, the process would allow the authorities to relocate what were considered asocial and criminal slum dwellers. The cost was to be shared by the Reich (17%), the city (31%), property owners (22%), and other lending institutions (30%). Nearly half of the funding from the Reich and almost all of that from the city was in the form of subsidies that were not to be repaid. The renewal project was mostly completed when bombs fell on the Altstadt in 1941, and the air war undid what had been accomplished. It is likely, however, that this model would have been applied to other parts of Colognes Altstadt had the war not intervened. Indeed, had the Nazis won the war, the urban renewal program along with the radical redesign of the city along Nazi monumental lines would have drastically changed the face of historic Cologne. Instead, the destruction was itself the beginning of a different and almost complete renewal of the central city. After 1945 Vogts and the preservation office concentrated their efforts, as noted earlier, on restoring the medieval churches and a few civic monuments, a task that took forty years, and trying to save some of the street layout. Though a few

property owners in an area south of the cathedral and around Gro St. Martin did reconstruct their bombed buildings to resemble the medieval originals, in fact Colognes rebuilt Altstadt is new, not alt. Basel also considered radical plans for renewal in the 1930s, but even without the disruption of war, the outcome in this city was very different from Colognes. In June 1936, just prior to the passage of Basels Arbeitsrappen, the special tax to put the unemployed to work on public projects, the town council and building office considered a proposal for construction of a new building to house the administrative offices of the police. The new socialist government wanted to consolidate the police administration, now under its control, into a single location, and the project would be part of the renewal of the Spiegelgasse. The initial design called for a building of modest proportions that would harmonize with attractive old buildings on the Petersgasse, and this design was endorsed by the preservation office.42 In fact the final design resulted in a modern, flat-roofed building with uniform windows in an undecorated faade, something which did not please those who valued historic Basel. The building office also wanted to press ahead with extensive widening of some streets. The momentum for change seemed to be growing. In 1937, with the funding from the Arbeitsrappen now secured, city officials requested from Cologne a long description of the planned renewal of the district around Gro St. Martin. This they studied with close attention with an eye to applying the model to renewal projects in several parts of Basels old city center, including the block bordered by Nadelberg and Spalenberg streets, though they were more interested in having the results be friendly to workers than was the Nazi city government in Cologne.43 Discussion of fairly large scale renewal projects, combined with the actual work on the new police building, helped lead to the passage of the zoning law and creation of the violet preservation zone. For example, at a meeting of the Basel chapter of the Swiss Association for Historic Preservation in April 1938, several Basel architects rejected large-scale renewal projects in favor of careful restoration of selected old buildings that would create high-quality housing for workers without destroying the historic character of the Altstadt. The architects also called for a new law to protect the whole Altstadt.44 Five months later, they introduced a formal proposal to the city council for a historic zone, the object of which would be to protect the character of the city by requiring respect for the characteristic architectonic features of the townscape.45 The creation of the violet zone effectively put an end to large renewal projects, then and in the decades after the war. Since substandard buildings remained in the Altstadt, new proposals for renewal of whole blocks were made, but they did not move forward. Instead, renovation and renewal took place on a case by case basis. In spite of the existence of the violet zone, some property owners still managed to demolish old buildings and put up new ones, but, on the whole, the character and identity of the city core remained. And Boston? Here proponents of urban renewal joined the highway builders in a prolonged

assault on old Boston. Indeed, the goal became the building of a New Boston, not the preservation of the old city, even if the Back Bay was spared. State and Boston politicians and business leaders wanted to revitalize Bostons economy and, in some cases, pad their own pockets. Local initiatives calling for urban renewal and development began during the war and set the tone for what would follow. After the war, the federal government did its part to support new housing and development by providing funding under the Housing Act of 1949.46 In what became the most notorious project, in the 1950s the neighborhood of the West End was sacrificed for the construction of the Charles River tower apartment complex.47 Another neighborhood disappeared in the clearance of the so-called New York Streets area of the South End. The Prudential Center rose on the site of an underused rail road yard off Huntington Avenue. Scolley Square was torn down in favor of Government Center, with its new city hall and federal building.48 Plans for a New Boston effectively began in June 1943, when William Stanley Parker, Chairman of the Office of the City Planning Board, sent Mayor Maurice Tobin a study entitled Rehabilitation in Boston, the work of an Advisory Committee on Community Rehabilitation. This advisory committee was made up of planners like Dean Joseph Hudnut of Harvard and representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, Boston Society of Architects, Boston and Massachusetts Real Estate Exchanges, New England Mutual and John Hancock Life Insurance Companies, and other companies. The report also included a draft of a proposed Urban Redevelopment Corporation bill that was submitted to the Governors Recess Commission on Limited Dividend Housing by the Boston City Planning Board. The advisory committee began by declaring that its purpose is something much wider than 'slum clearance'. Instead, it wanted to explore ways by which changes take place as parts of a planned process.49 In other words, it wasnt just that outmoded or run-down buildings needed to be replaced. New building and new uses for underutilized land should be shaped by a vision of the citys future. The committee observed that Corporate Boston, which the Boston City Planning Board is directly created to serve, is largely built up, so that its immediate problem is the deterioration of the center of the metropolitan area, rather than the competitive, loosely related growth of the outlying areas.50 Rather than trying to prepare a plan for rehabilitating all of old Boston, it identified limited areas to study, the first being the New York Streets area in the ethnically mixed South End. This area had deteriorated such that reconstruction could only follow extensive demolition along with reconditioning a few salvageable structures. Even this limited project, however, should be carried out within a comprehensive master plan for the city. The alliance of corporate Boston, the City Planning Board, the Boston Housing Authority, and new Mayor John Hynes moved energetically forward from 1950 on, basing their efforts on the 1950 General Plan for Boston.51 Hynes had run for office under the slogan of A New Boston, and the general

plan endorsed the wartime ideas on urban renewal as well as earlier transportation studies, including the Central Artery. The Boston Housing Authority prepared a proposal for obtaining federal funding for the renewal of the West End, a project subsequently brought to fruition in large part through the work of Jerome Rappaport, a lawyer and aide of Hyness.52 (Figure 9 and 10) Although there was opposition from West End residents, urban renewal was supported by business and civic leaders who expressed their views in a series of extraordinary conferences or Boston Citizens Seminars held on the campus of Boston College.53 Only a handful of old buildings, including the Old West Church, survived the wrecking ball. In 1957, the planning and housing offices were merged into the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and when Hyness successor as Mayor, John Collins, brought in Edward Logue to head the BRA, it had the leadership necessary to move other projects to completion, including Government Center.54 The New Boston was one of urban development and renewal, and this is why the Boston National Historic Sites Commission report warned in 1961 that the last vestiges of a glorious past were in danger of being unsuitably altered or thoughtlessly swept away.55 Thus for Bostons business community, politicians, and planners, the identity of Boston was to be that of a dynamic, modern city, not one rooted in its historic past. This resembles only in part what happened in Cologne, where major monuments were restored and parts of the ancient street pattern were retained while most of the rest of the bombed citys buildings were rebuilt in new forms. The new Cologne sought to maintain some continuities with historic Cologne. Basels encounter with urban renewal was the most conservative of the three cities, since its Altstadt was protected by the prewar zoning system.

The City as Stage Set: Creating and Celebrating Identity The ways in which planners, civic leaders, and citizens imagined their cities provided a context for the debates about the direction of change in the built environment. Modernization might be welcome when leaders and citizens fixed their eyes on an imagined future, but if their gaze was fixed on the past, major changes might be resisted. In fact, imagining a city was not something vague and abstract. In different ways, Boston, Cologne, and Basel all committed considerable energy and expense to creating images of their cities, and they hoped that their efforts would facilitate citizen identification with the cities. The city, and especially the central city, was used in all three cities as a setting for celebrations and festivals crafted to create or reinforce the ways in which citizens understood their cities as well as to project images of the cities to outsiders. That is to say, buildings, streets, and public spaces were the places where these cities celebrated their histories and character, and a central objective of the celebrations was the formation of a sense of place.56

That the slogan of the New Boston of the 1950s and 1960s really contained a new self-image or new identity can been seen by contrasting it with the image Boston sought to foster in 1930 during the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the founding of the city in 1630. This well-documented event (or events, since they went on for months) is revealing about the way in which Boston portrayed and understood itself.57 The celebration included parades, historical pageants, a public holiday, a juried art exhibition, the commissioning of poems and memorials, renaming of streets, special radio broadcasts, nighttime illumination of the Charles River Basin, and other events. On several days up to 2 million people flocked to the city, and on October 7, it staged a 28-mile, 9-hour long parade.58 (Figures 11, 12, and 13) In his forward to the tercentenary volume, John F. Fitzgerald, chairman of Boston Tercentenary General Committee, wrote: It has been said that Boston is a state of mind rather than a place, but this is only partly true. It is a state of mind engendered in a place. The Latin motto on the shield of Massachusetts declares that she seeks Peace under Liberty. The proudest title of every true Bostonian is that of Liberal.59 The thrust of the tercentenary was clear enough. The state of mind was the commitment to independence and liberal democracy that played a leading role in the events of the American Revolution and the founding of the republic. The place consisted of an ensemble of the buildings and sites where revolutionary deeds had taken place: Fanueil Hall, Old South Church, Old North Church, Boston Common, and so on. William L. Aldrich, the architect for the Commonwealth, designed a neo-classical tribune to stand on the Common, which, along with the Garden, was the site of parades, town meetings, and a historical pageant. Not counting the main parades, over 100 events were attended by over 800,000 people, including some 10,000 at a town meeting on the Boston Garden. A triumphal arch was constructed at Dock Square, the turning point of the biggest parade, which started moving east along the north side of the Garden and Common and returned along the south side of the Common and onto Columbus Avenue. This Boston Day Parade, on September 17, 1930, was the largest parade in her history, with 40,000 participants, 200 floats, 108 musical organizations, and over a million spectators lining the three-mile-long route. It took six hours to pass the reviewing stand.60 When a new memorial to the colonys founders was dedicated on the Common, Governor Frank G. Allen quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said that the Boston State House is the hub of the solar system. The Common was more than a park. In its freedom, and by its location, it stands forever as a living fulfillment of the implied pledge of freedom and liberality which grew to fine flower here in this Hub city. The Common is a symbol of that liberty of thought, speech, and action which have kept Boston not only, as the genial poet and essayist said, the hub of the solar system, but an unchanging star in the firmament of freedom.61

This was the message that the city broadcastliterally in a series of NBC radio broadcast and figuratively in advertisements placed both locally and across the country by the mayors Advisory Committee on Advertising.62 Boston was to be seen physically, historically, and metaphorically as the cradle of democracy and the Mother City of Liberty.63 And to make sure that this special state of mind was firmly embodied in a sense of place, the city used the tercentenary as an occasion to erect monuments and plaques at key locations, for example, at the house of Paul Revere and at historic Fanueil Hall.64 David Glassberg has argued that historical pageantry, by involving masses of people in a celebration of such cultural symbols, sought to display the illusion of consensus in places where there were in fact real differences between classes and ethnic groups, but surely this massive event in Boston helped create a kind of common identity for its citizens that was focused on the citys illustrious past.65 The great tercentenary celebration was an extraordinary event, and it was all the more remarkable that it was staged in the first year of the Great Depression, an economic crisis that undermined the countrys self-confidence. Unfortunately the city did not follow up on the enthusiasm for the tercentenary by creating a historic district containing the sites and buildings celebrated in 1930. Instead, for the next two decades, Boston became rather quiet and complacent. The huge urban renewal projects of the New Boston re-energized the city and transformed it. But while the backers of the New Boston looked forward, opposition to urban renewal stimulated interest in the preservation of historic sites. This, plus a growing desire to attract tourists, helped lead to the creation of the Freedom Trail, a celebration of historic sites and events that rhetorically and physically echoed the tercentenary.66 To both inhabitants and tourists, civic leaders sought by 1970 to portray the New Boston as a city based not just on new development but also on the revitalization of old Boston. A centerpiece of this effort was Rouses transformation of Fanueil Hall and the Quincy Market into a shopping and dining complex. It opened in time for another important celebration, the Bicentennial of the United States, which presented Boston with a wonderful opportunity to claim once again that its blend of place and mind--historic achievements, buildings, and sites, though now part of a modernized cityrepresented the founding of a free America. This was the image Boston sought and still seeks to sell.67 Just as Boston staged its tercentenary to forge a clear identity for the city in a time of crisis , so Cologne staged festivals in 1948 and 1950 to do the same. Both festivals were conscious, deliberate efforts at myth-making and the shaping of collective memory on the part of the city's political and cultural elites. In August 1948, Cologne celebrated the beginning of its great cathedral 700 years earlier and its reopening after preliminary repairs of bomb damage. Two years later, Cologne celebrated its founding 1900 years earlier by the Romans.68 Both celebrations, orchestrated by the city's leaders, used the wartime ruins as stage sets to focus public attention on the damage wrought by the war, the difficult

process of physical reconstruction, and the spiritual, economic, and political revival of the city that would come from successful reconstruction. Both celebrations stressed the revitalization of the Heimat, identification with one's home town, and the special place of Cologne in Germany and in Western Europe. As lavish public events, supported with funds from the city treasury at a time when funds were scarce, the celebrations sought to tap collective memory and at the same time create that memory. The 1948 and 1950 celebrations shared common goals. The organizers believed that working together to stage the great celebrations would help all citizens identify with the citys more distant and honorable past, gloss over the recent Nazi years, and focus on building the city of the future. The effort, declared the Social Democratic assistant Mayor Robert Grlinger, would help the citizens form a constructive community and boost morale for the tasks facing them. A city image irrevocably sunken under the rubble can not be reconstructed as a perfect copy of the past [emphasis original], he added. As necessary as it is to allow the architectonic witnesses of the spiritual past of a city of the importance of Cologne to reappear, it is equally necessary to orient town planning as a whole toward the social requirements of the present.69 The physical structures and the inhabitants of the city were depicted as suffering victims of both fate and Nazi barbarism. The physical and economic recovery of the city, though very far from complete, was supposed to represent Cologne's claim to be the most important city in West Germany, more important than its traditional rival, Dsseldorf, but also Bonn, the new capital of the Federal Republic. Lord Mayor Hermann Pnder emphasized "the extremely great meaning of this [1948] jubilee for the entire culture of the West and also for Christianity throughout the world.70 After the twelve years during which "the scourge of Attila plundered the world and left it in ruins," Cologne should serve as the place from which "the Germans reach out a hand of peace in the spirit of Western Christianity to all the peoples of the world."71 This was image-making, or myth-making, of a high order. For the first of these celebrations, the city and Church put on an impressive show. There were special concerts and plays, an international exhibition of contemporary Christian art, and the showing of religious films. 60,000 copies of a 32-page booklet about the cathedral were printed and distributed to school children. The festivities were attended by representatives of all levels of the military government, city and state governments, faculty of the university and other educational institutions, and invited dignitaries from elsewhere in Germany and abroad. On August, 15, forty different groups took part in a formal processional through the streets to the cathedral, led by the highest church leaders. An estimated half million people--perhaps two-thirds of the city's population--watched the procession, many standing atop piles of rubble. Another 100,000 people heard speeches in the soccer stadium by bishops from several countries, including the United States, Britain, and France.

The city was pleased with the results. The crowds and varied events turned this Catholic celebration into a true public celebration, an echtes Volksfest that appealed to citizens and outsiders. Newspapers all over Germany and abroad carried large stories and photographs of the event--nearly all based on the packet distributed by the city's news officer. The publicity was important in creating an image of a recovering city. The celebration was also a great economic success, bringing in large numbers of people who rode on revived public transportation and dined in the city's reopened restaurants. The volume of business was even greater than that generated by the soccer finals played the previous week.72 The 1950 celebration of the city's founding was still more elaborate and more spectacular than the cathedral celebration.73 Four years before, city councilman Peter Josef Schaeven had called for a jubilee to stimulate the city's physical recovery and to recover the city's history, which some feared would remain buried in the rubble. Never before had Cologne celebrated its founding; now it needed to show that it was not like Carthage, sunk into "wreckage and ruins, rubble and ashes, death and destruction," but rather very much alive.74 A jubilee would certainly attract visitors, but perhaps more important, it would make the city's long history part of the consciousness of its citizens and distract them from their current misery. Moreover, the twelve years of Nazism would shrink to a small moment in Cologne's illustrious history. The jubilee began with a special concert of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on New Year's Eve. The concert was followed during the next seven months by a music festival, special illumination of the cathedral, a major historical exhibition, a series of scholarly lectures, outdoor events at the fair grounds, a special celebration of the reopening of the Grzenich hall, a badly damaged medieval building which had previously hosted important city receptions as well as the meetings and balls of the carnival societies, publication of books (subsidized by the city) about Cologne's history, and an elaborately staged historical drama, which was performed outdoors on a stage built on the Altermarkt, a square in the old center surrounded by ruins.75 In short, there was something for everyone: the celebration of history, orchestrated by the city's leaders, was transformed into a festival for the entire public, another true Volksfest. The historical exhibition drew over 250,000 visitors.76 The opening of the medieval Grzenich hall was a high-profile, symbolic event for the city elite and invited guests. With the town hall still lying in ruins, reopening the Grzenich hall revived old secular civic traditions. 753 of the 1200 seats went to inhabitants of the city, carefully chosen from all segments of society, and the rest to special guests, including representatives of the Allied High Commission and Bonn diplomatic corps, delegations from the Hague and Basel, and members of all levels of state and national government. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was to attend but had to cancel at the last moment, sending in his place several federal ministers. The speeches were broadcast over loudspeakers to a nearby square, though rain kept the crowd

down.77 Upon adjourning to the Excelsior Hotel for a reception, everyone was surprised by a brief speech by Chancellor Adenauer, sent over shortwave. Adenauer said: Cologne, my Vaterstadt, today I call on you to: always remember your traditions, and dwell on them above all during your reconstruction. Do not be just a city just like dozens of others. Adopt the features of progressive urban design as your own, but protect your uniqueness, which is much more valuable than one minute saved for an automobile. The structure of a city is a vessel that shapes the spirit of its inhabitants. Cultivate your language! I say deliberately language rather than dialect; it is an expression of your essence. . . . Nurture your customs, care for your festivals, both religious and secular! Above all, rebuild as soon as possible your medieval monuments, religious and secular, your town hall and your Grzenich, whose first rebuilding phase is just ending. Rebuild your magnificent old churches! All these things together form the unique character of Cologne.78 For Adenauer and his audience, the physical reconstruction of Cologne, the preservation of an old urban culture, and the preservation of the memory of western European religious and secular traditions were inseparable. The historical drama was staged daily for 2 weeks in July on the Altermarkt and viewed by over 5,000 spectators seated on temporary bleachers lining all 4 sides of the square.79 Ruined houses and the remains of the Romanesque church of Gro St. Martin formed the immediate setting, with the Gothic towers of the great cathedral looming nearby. The author of the initial script believed that the festival has the pedagogic goal of cultivating the love of the Heimat and in the great and small to awaken a just Burgher's pride in the city. It should grow out of local materials, on local grounds, and be presented by the Cologne population; it should be a true Volksfest that brings honor to the famous history of the city and awakes anew in this sorely tested people a love of life and a joy in life in a time of great need.80 The drama presented selected historical and cultural events in order to shape a collective memory that would stimulate strong identification with the physical and spiritual city of the past and create the energy and morale to rebuild a new Cologne that could also look to the future.. Since the nineteenth century Basel had also staged big festivals to celebrate its history, unique character, and identity.81 These festivals featured many of the same sorts of ingredients used in Boston and Cologne, such as historical pageants and long parades, and here too the citys streets and public spaces formed the setting. Of particular interest for Basel are festivals in 1944, 1951, and 1957. August 26, 1944, was the 500th anniversary of the battle of St. Jakob, when a small force of Basel soldiers attacked a larger French army, and although they perished in the unsuccessful effort, the event had always been considered an important marker of civic courage. Planning for a festival to mark the

date began in mid-1943. Critics thought a huge celebration was tasteless in the midst of a brutal war taking place in neighboring countries. By the time the anniversary arrived, the Allies had by this point landed in Normandy and the battle for France was underway, making Basel very nervous about the possibility that the war would cross its borders. The economy was still depressed, and rationing was in force. The organizers, however, believed it would raise morale, teach young people about historic values, reinforce the ties between the city-canton and the Swiss confederation, and act as advertising for the city.82 The festival took place on August 25th and 26th. On the first evening, a festive reception was held in the town hall, attended by invited civic leaders, prominent national political figures, and the commander of the Swiss army, General Henri Guisan. Speeches praised Switzerlands armed neutrality and solidarity among all classes and parties. A historical pageant was performed in a big hall at the city fair grounds. Some 5,000 people attended the pageant, which was put on by 900 performers and supporting staff. On August 26th the festival lasted the entire day. It began with a parade through the city center, where buildings were decorated with flags and banners. Perhaps 12,000 Baslers joined the parade, representing the citys guilds, clubs, schools, unions, military units, and so forth. Many were in costume. 50,000 or more people watched. The parade ended at the battlefield site on the southeastern edge of the city, now a sports field. There everyone ate and listened to patriotic speeches. The whole was an exercise in myth-making. The defeat of 1444 was hailed as an act of heroic sacrifice that represented the courage and desire for freedom and independence of both Basel and the Swiss. In July 1951, a similar celebration took place when the city celebrated the 450th anniversary of Basels entry into the Swiss Confederation with a big exhibition in the art museum and three days of ceremonies, parades, concerts, banquets, church services, and fireworks.83 Dozens of groups participated in the main parade, including Fasnacht societies, the clubs based upon the ancient guilds, church-based and secular youth groups, music clubs, sports clubs, student associations from the university, gymnastic clubs, workers clubs, and military units. A separate part of the parade was devoted to events in the citys history. A huge Volksfest was staged once again on the site of the 1444 St. Jakobs battle against the French. The Volksfest began in the afternoon, and there was room for 10,000 people to be seated in the tents and another 30,000 to be seated outdoors. An important part of this festival was a historical pageant in several acts.84 The citys orchestra and more than two dozen choirs accompanied the drama. All told, over 1,000 persons participated in the six performances, which were held on a hall at the city fair grounds. Some of these same events were repeated in 1957, when Basel celebrated the 2000th anniversary of its founding. Dignitaries were invited from throughout Switzerland and from other countries; they entered the city formally by boat, with the population lining the bridges and shore in greeting. Once again

there was a play about the citys history. To make it clear that the play was addressed to true Baslers, the text was written in the local dialect by Rudolf Suter, one of the leading spokesmen for historic preservation in the Basel Altstadt. Scenes of the play, each devoted to a different period in the citys history, were staged on the squares in front of the cathedral, the main market, and the Barfsser (Franciscan) church.85 The similarities between these celebrations and popular festivals in the three cities are quite remarkable. In every case, civic leaders turned public places into grand stages on which to portray histories that were simultaneously intensely local and something that transcended the local. The instrumental use of historic buildings, streets, and spaces was self-consciously intended by city leaders to help residents identify with their cities. At the same time, these events sought to embody values of more universal appeal: in Boston, liberty and democracy; in Basel, national courage and independence; in Cologne, western civilization and Christianity. A sense of place was to foster a state of mind. And in each case, huge numbers of citizens actively participated or turned out to watch, and they were joined by visitors from outside. Conclusion The title of this paper both posed a question (what does it mean to love a city?) and suggested a way to begin to answer it (through a comparison of the relationship between change and identity in three cities). More specifically, I have sought to locate the answer within a matrix of changes (in traffic planning and highway construction, urban renewal, and wartime destruction), resistance to change in the evolving forms of historic preservationism, and deliberate efforts to define and celebrate the identity of Cologne, Basel, and Boston in the middle half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, planners and officials in all three cities were discussing the modernization of the central areas through combinations of highway construction to carry the growing flood of motor vehicles and renewal of what were considered blighted or run-down neighborhoods. The degree to which these ideas were implemented varied considerably. Initially they were put on hold by the Great Depression and the war. During the war, nearly all of Colognes historic center was devastated, though of course Basel and Boston went unscathed. Postwar Cologne rebuilt or restored its medieval churches and major secular monuments, and it retained much of its old street pattern. Otherwise it gave the city a new face with new buildings and high-capacity arteries for motor vehicles. Postwar Boston, energized by confidence in planning, was transformed by its urban highway and massive urban renewal projects. Basel changed the least, deciding against an urban highway and large-scale urban renewal. The mere existence of a tradition of historic preservation was, in itself, not enough to block or limit modernization. Nor was it simply a matter of resources. Frugal Basel was reluctant to spend money

on large projects, but postwar Cologne, in dire straits in every possible way, saw the construction of new arteries and buildings as an opportunity for much needed renewal and as an engine of recovery. Boston was reacting to a fear of decline in its inner city and a fundamental confidence in the possibility of reversing this decline through aggressive change. Equally important were the ways in which the forces of development and change interacted with the nature of each citys identity. Leaders wanted their citizens to love their cities and identify with their cities, but what exactly it meant to be a true Bostonian, Klner, or Basler depended upon a particular understanding of the past, present, and future that could be shaped, encouraged, and manipulated through debates about transportation or development policy but also by preservation of parts of the historic city and by the use of the city as a stage for celebrating the past.

Diefendorf: Urban Change and Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne, p. 26

Notes

1. Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (New York and Oxford, 1993). 2. Diefendorf, ed., Rebuilding Europes Bombed Cities (London and New York, 1990), and Carola Hein, Jeffry M. Diefendorf, and Ishida Yorifusa, eds., Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945 (London and New York, 2003). 3. Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, eds. The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (Oxford and New York, 2004). 4. For a number of interesting essays on the concept of identity, see Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle, eds. Identitt (Munich, 1979). 5. Helen Meller, European Cities 1890-1930s. History, Culture, and the Built Environment (Chichester, New York, Weinheim, Brisbane, Singapore, Toronto, 2001.) Another interesting comparative study is by the sociologist Patrick Le Gals, European Cities. Social Conflicts and Governance (Oxford, 2002), though the focus here is contemporary, not historical. 6. Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but as part of its self-promotional efforts after the war, Cologne placed advertisements in the US featuring an imagined but exciting visit of Bostonians to Cologne. 7. The Kanton Basel-Stadt (city) separated from the Kanton Basel-Landschaft (Basels rural hinterland) in 1833. Statistisches Jahrbuch des Kantons Basel-Stadt 1965 (Basel, 1966), 20, and Hans Annaheim," Die Basler Region--Raumstruktur und Raumplanung"in Die Wiedervereinigung der Kantone Basel-Stadt und Basel-Land. Akademische Vortrge gehalten an der Universitt Basel, vol. 3 (Basel und Stuttgart, 1963), 99. 8. Gerald D. Suttles, The Cumulative Texture of Local Urban Culture, American Journal of Sociology 90 (1984): 283-304. Suttles locates local urban culture in collective representation and urban iconography. (P. 284) For evocative essays on knowing and loving European cities, see Stefan Hertmans, Intercities (London, 2001). 9. For this comparative study I prefer city center or core to downtown, which has a distinctly American flavor, but for a good recent study using the latter term, see Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago and London, 2004). 10. Some planning theorists, of course, suggested total transformation of the city to harmonize new modes of transportation and building forms. Hence Le Corbusier and the CIAM modernists too a long time to address the role of the historic urban core in their theories of good urban form. 11. Fritz Schumacher, Kln: Entwicklungsfragen einer Grostadt (Munich, 1923). For a somewhat different treatment of traffic planning in Cologne, Basel, and Boston, see Diefendorf,

Diefendorf: Urban Change and Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne, p. 27 Motor Vehicles and the Inner City, in Urban Planning in a Changing World, ed. by Robert Freeston (London, 2000). 12. Festsetzung eines generellen Bebauungsplanes fr die innere Stadt. Staatsarchiv BaselStadt Ratschlag 2994, presented to Grosser Rat des Kantons Basel-Stadt, 23 January 1930. 13. City Planning Board. Report on a Thoroughfare Plan for Boston. (Boston, 1930). An excellent recent discussion of highway planning in Boston can be found in Karl Haglund, Inventing the Charles River (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2003), chapter 7. 14. Here, for example, see Wolfram Hagspiel, Die Nationalsozialistische Stadtplanung in und fr Kln, in Geschichte in Kln no. 9 (1981): 89-107. 15. For an excellent study of postwar German traffic planning, see Barbara Schumcki, Der Traum vom Verkehrsfluss. Stdtische Verkehrsplanung seit 1945 im deutsch-deutschen Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2001). 16. I discuss Schwarzs plans at some length in Diefendorf Stdtebauliche Traditionen und der Wiederaufbau von Kln vornehmlich nach 1945," in Rheinische Vierteljahrsbltter 55 (1991): 260ff. Key sources are Rudolf Schwarz, Das neue Kln: Ein Vorentwurf (Cologne, 1950), Kln: Generalverkehrsplan (1956) in Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln, and B. Wehner, Stellungnahme zum Generalverkehrsplan der Stadt Kln 1956," Typescript, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1956), copy in Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln. 17. The Boston Contest of 1944: Prize Winning Programs (Boston, 1945). The first prize of $5000 was won by a Harvard team chaired by Carl J. Friedrich, professor of government, that also included Seymour Harris, associate professor of economics, Talcott Parsons, professor of sociology, Charles Cherington, instructor in government, George R. Walker, Harvard trustee, and Walter Francis Bogner, professor of architecture and dean of the Graduate School of Design. The second prize of $3000 went to a team chaired by Henry I Harriman, vice-chairman, New England Power Association, Louis M. Lyons, writer, Boston Globe; Edward Dana, president, Boston Elevated Company; John C. Kiley, Boston real estate man, Joseph D. Leland, president, Boston Society of Architects, Philip Nichols, a Boston lawyer, and Robert Bottomly, a Boston lawyer. Professor Martin Wagner and a group of his students at Harvard's Graduate School of Design submitted a radical proposal that received neither a prize nor an honorable mention. Wagner proposed demolishing most of Bostons historic buildings and streets between the Common and harbor and building a two-level circular road lined with two-level parking garages for the cars that would flow into the business district. For a published version, see Martin Wagner, Der Neubau der City Baurundschau 38 (1948): 129-60. A manuscript version can be found in the Loeb Library, Special Collections, Harvard University. 18. Probably the best study of postwar Boston remains Thomas H. OConnor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970 (Boston, 1993). See pp. 81ff for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and the Central Artery. See also Haglund, Inventing the Charles River, 248ff.

Diefendorf: Urban Change and Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne, p. 28 19. Festsetzung eines Allgemeinen Korrektionsplanes fr das Grobasel. Ratschlag 4224, presented to Grosser Rat des Kantons Basel-Stadt, 23 Mai 1946, in Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt. 20. Kurt Leibbrand, Gesamtverkehrsplan Basel. (1958), 2 vols., in Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt. 21. Basler Ingenieur- und Architektenverein. Gesamtplan der Stadt Basel: Zusammenfassender Bericht ber die Planungsarbeit der Fachverbnde, Schweizerbauzeitung, 81, nr. 16 (1963): 253-73. 22. Hiltrud Kier, "Denkmalpflege in Kln," in Glanz und Elend der Denkmalpflege und Stadtplanung Cln 1906-2006 Kln, Rheinishcer Verein fr Denkmalpflege und Landschaftsschutz (Cologne, 1981) and Ursula von Petz, Stadtsanierung im Dritten Reich, Dortmunder Beitrge zur Raumplanung, vol. 45 (Dortmund, 1987). 23. For examples of this position, see the memoranda by Hans Vogts, the city preservation officer, in Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/ Acc. 171/ 429, and the book by Hans Schmitt, Der Neuaufbau der Stadt Kln (Cologne, 1946). Hans Schmitt (or Hans Schmitt-Rost, to use the name he subsequently used), served as head of the city press office starting in October 1945. See Ute Riechert-Stark, Die Altstadt ist Kln, nichts sonst: Klns Pressechef Hans Schmitt-Rost und das Bild der Stadt, in Kln in den 50er Jahren. Zwischen Tradition und Modernisierung, Jost Dlffer, ed. (Cologne, 2001). 24. Hiltrud Kier, Der Wiederaufbau von Kln, 1945-1975. Eine Bilanz aus kunsthistorischer Sicht, in Hiltrud Kier, ed. Die Kunst unsere Stdte zu erhalten (Stuttgart, 1976), 231ff., and Hiltrud Kier,"Das Jahr der Romanischen Kirchen in Kln--wozu eigentlich?", and Christoph Machat, "Der Wiederaufbau der Klner Kirchen," both in Deutsche Kunst und Denkmalpflege 43 (1985). 25. What follows is mostly based on Michael Holleran, Bostons Changeful Times. Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore and London, 1998). 26. Ibid., 135. 27. Quoted by Holleran in Ibid., 243. 28. Ibid., 268. 29. For wonderful images of the physical transformation of Boston, see Jane Holtz Kay, Lost Boston, expanded and updated version (Boston and New York, 1999) and Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, Cityscapes of Boston: An American City through Time (Boston, New York, and London, 1992). Campbell, the architecture critic of the Boston Globe and Vanderwarker, a photographer, regularly publish short before and now essays about changing Boston in the Globes Sunday magazine.

Diefendorf: Urban Change and Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne, p. 29 30. Lewis Mumford, The Significance of Back Bay Boston, in Lewis Mumford and Walter Muir Whitehill, Back Bay Boston. The City as a Work of Art (Boston, 1969), 30. 31. Ibid., 25. 32. Reproduced in Final Report of the Boston National Historic Sites Commission in particular to Major Problems of Historical Preservation in the Municipality of Boston, pursuant to the Act of August 4, 1959. US gov. Printing Office, Washington, 1961. 87th Congress, 1st Session, House Document No. 107. March 15, 1961, referred to the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, p. 260-1. 33. Ibid., 44. 34. Ibid., 257-9, for a reproduction of this legislation. 35. Reported in Alliance Letter: Monthly Newsletter of the Boston Preservation Alliance 8, no. 3 (March 1987): 3. The Alliance is an association of organizations such as SPNEA and the Boston Landmarks Commission. 36. Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt/ Ratschlag 3433: Bericht der Grossratskommission ber den Ratschlag 3370, 14 Juni 1934, with plan 1395, especially p. 37. 37. Local banks loaned the city the money for these projects. The loans were repaid out of the revenue from the Arbeitsrappen tax of 1% on all incomes above a certain level. A condition of the loan was that unions and business generally agreed to freeze wages in all sectors of the city economy. See Charles Stirnimann, Die ersten Jahre des "Roten Basel" -- 1935-1938: Zielsetzungen und Handlungsspielrume sozialdemokratischer Regierungspolitik im Spannungsfeld von brgerlicher Opposition und linker Kritik. Quellen und Forschungen zur Basler Geschichte, 13. (Basel: Kommissionsverlage Friedrich Reinhardt, 1988), Jacques Stohler, Der Basler Arbeitsrappen: Eine Studie zur Beschftigungstheorie und Beschftigungspolitik regionaler Krperschaften (Diss., Basel, 1957), and Bernard Degen, Arbeitsbeschaffung, sozialer Frieden und Denkmalpflege. Der Basler Arbeitsrappen (1936-1984), in Traverse. Zeitschrift fr Geschichte 2 (1996): 64-81. See also the essays in Eugen A. Meier, ed., Der Basler Arbeitsrappen 1936-1984: Die Geschichte eines genialen Sozialwerks und dess Auswirkungen auf die stdtebauliche Entwicklung Basels (Basel, 1984). 38. Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt/ Ratschlag 3765: Bericht der Groratskommission fr die Revision des Hochbautengesetzes zur zweiten lesung des Gesetzentwurfs, dem Groen Rate des Kantons Basel-Stadt vorgelegt am 16. Mrz 1939; and Ratschlag 3769: Ratschlag betreffend die Festsetzung von zwei Zonenplnen fr das Gebiet des Kantons Basel-Stadt, dem Groen Rate des Kantons Basel-Stadt vorgelegt am 13. April 1939. 39. Friedrich Lodewig, Die Altstadt im Spannungsfeld des modernen Lebens, in Basler Stadtbuch 1963: 210.

Diefendorf: Urban Change and Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne, p. 30 40. Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt/S.t.Z./Basel Altstadt/Rudof Suter, "Der eigentliche Sinn der Altstadtbewahrung," from Basler Nachtrichten, 18 Juni 1967, pp.23-24. 41. See Petz, Stadtsanierung, pp. 142-56. 42. Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt/Ratschlag 3567, betreffend die Erstellung eines Polizeiverwaltungsgebudes, to Groe Rat 18 Juni 1936, esp. pp. 9-11 and 16; and 3591, Bericht der Grossratskommission zum Ratschalg 3567, dem Groen Rate des Kantons Basel-Stadt vorgelegt am 8. Oktober 1936. 43. Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt/D30, 1: Arbeitsbeschaffung und Arbeitsrappen, AltstadtGesunding Kln. 44. Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt/D30, 1: Arbeitsbeschaffung und Arbeitsrappen, Heimatschutz und Altstadtkorrektion. Die Jahresversammlung der Sektion Basel der Schweizerischen Vereinigung fr Heimatschutz, report in the Nationalzeitung 25 April 1938. 45. Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt/D30, 1: Arbeitsbeschaffung und Arbeitsrappen, Vorschlaege der oeffentlichen Basler Denkmalpflege fr die besonderen Bestimmungen zur Wahrung des Stadtbildes in der Altstadtzone vom 22. September 1938. Submitted to Grossratskommission zur Ergnzung des Hochbautengesetzes, by Dr. Paul Roth, Prsident der Oeffentlichen Basler Denkmalpflege; and Lukas Burckhardt, Obmann, Sektion Basel der Schweizerischen Vereinigung fr Heimatschutz. 46. A useful study of this legislation is Alexander von Hoffman, A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949, Housing Policy Debate (Fannie Mae Foundation), 11 (2000): 299-326. 47. For these projects, and especially the political maneuvering behind them, see OConnor, Building a New Boston, and Lawrence W. Kennedy, Planning the City upon a Hill. Boston since 1630 (Amherst, 1992), 151ff. The fate of the West End residents received national attention through the study of Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers. Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York, 1962). For an interesting follow-up, see Howard Mansfield, In the Memory House (Golden, Colorado, 1993), the chapter entitled Nothing but Remember. 48. See David Kruh, Always Something Doing. Bostons Infamous Scollay Square, rev. ed. with foreward by Thomas H. OConnor (Boston, 1999). 49. Advisory Committee on Community Rehabilitation, Rehabilitation in Boston. Vol II. A Progress Report on Reconstruction. (Mimeograph, June 1943), 2. 50. Ibid., 4. 51. City Planning Board, General Plan for Boston: Preliminary Report (Boston, 1951)

Diefendorf: Urban Change and Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne, p. 31 52. A study of Rappaports career is currently being undertaken by Frank D. Barrett. 53. OConnor, Building a New Boston, 97ff. 54. Edward J. Logue, Seven Years of Progress (mimeograph, Boston, 1967). In this report to Mayor Collins from the Development Administrator of the BRA, progess is the watchword of the new Boston. 55. Final Report of the Boston National Historic Sites Commission, 48. 56. See Edward C. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London, 1976), and The Modern Urban Landscape (Baltimore, 1987), David Clark, Urban Geography (Baltimore, 1982), and Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1960). 57. Committee on Compilation. Tercentenary of the Founding of Boston. An Account of the Celebration Marking the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Site of the City of Boston, Massachusetts (Boston, 1931). The events of the tercentenary were covered extensively in the Boston and Massachusetts newspapers but also in regional papers like the Portsmouth Herald and the New York Times. The Times reporter, F. Lauriston Bullard, seemed unsure whether the even was simply designed to bring business to Boston or whether it was mainly a dignified commemoration of events which Massachusetts fondly feels did move the world. New York Times (September 14, 1930): 60. My thanks to my research assistant Isabelle Altman for surveying the press coverage of the tercentenary. 58. Ibid, 82-95. 59. Ibid, 3-4. 60. Ibid., 196. The Boston Daily Globes front page for September 17, 1930, was mostly devoted to the great parade, and the paper anticipated 2,000,000 viewers. 61. Ibid, 146-7. 62. Ibid., 96. 63. Ibid., vi. 64. These are the sorts of sites that the 1935 National Historic Sites Act wanted to protect. See note 32 above. 65. David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill and London, 1990), 2. Glassberg also notes (p. 24) that one of the most active members of the American Pageant Association, Frank Chocteau Brown, became a leading preservation architect with the Society for the Preservation of New England

Diefendorf: Urban Change and Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne, p. 32 Antiquities, a career that culminated in his direction of the Historic American Building Survey for Massachusetts in the 1930s. 66. As Steven Ward, Bruce Erlich, and Peter Dreier have noted, Boston proved a late-comer to self-promotion, not even forming an official tourist office until 1974. Stephen v. Ward, Selling Places. The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850-2000 (London, 1998), 190-91; Bruce Ehrlich and Peter Dreier, The New Boston Discovers the Old Tourism and the Struggle for a Livable City, in The Tourist City, ed. by Dennis R. Judd and Susan F. Fainstein (New Haven, 1999), 155-6. 67. This was an underlying theme of the 2004 Democratic Partys national convention in Boston. 68. For these festivals see Jrgen Brgger, Das Klner Domjubilum 1948: Vom Versuch, sich eine neue Vergangenheit zu geben, Jeffry M. Diefendorf, Das Stadtjubilum 1950 und die Selbstdarstellung Klns, and Thomas Kirschner, Ein Thingspiel zum Stadtjubilum? Die Wurzeln des Klner Jubilumsfestspiels 1950, all in Kln in den 50er Jahren. Zwischen Tradition und Modernisierung, Jost Dlffer, ed. (Cologne, 2001). 69. Grlinger, "Um Tradition und Zukunft Klns," Neuer Vorwrts (25 December 1948): 5, in Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/Best. 905, Robert Grlinger/44. 70. Tilman Pnder, "Hermann Pnder und seine Klner Zeit," in Jahrbuch des Klnischen Geschichtsvereins 59 (1988): 278; Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/Acc. 2, Oberbrgermeister/1478/33: letter of 20 November 1947. 71. Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/Acc. 2, Oberbrgermeister/1478/37-38, draft of speech of 30 December 1947. 72. Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/Acc. 2, Oberbrgermeister/1481/5: Redeskizze of 9 September 1948; Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/Acc. 2, Oberbrgermeister/1482/67: Prozessionsordnung; Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/Acc.148/ 1 and 7/ press clippings. 73. The archives contain many volumes of material on this event, but of special importance is the chronicle put together by Edmund Forschbach, one of the town officials who had primary responsibility for organizing things, as part of his final report. See Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/Acc. 29/Bro Stadtjubilum 1950/ 90: Dokumentenband zum Klner Stadtjubilum 1950, ms. by Forschbach, 438 pp. Henceforth cited as Forschbach. 74. Ibid., 5-6. Schaeven called for the festival in May 1946. 75. The jubilee was also the central theme of the Carnival parades and balls during 1950. 76. Forschbach, pp. 40, 75. The attendance was almost the exact total of visitors to the exhibition staged during the big festival 25 years earlier.

Diefendorf: Urban Change and Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne, p. 33 77. Ibid., pp. 111-16. 78. Reproduced in Forschbach, p. 141. 79. A wonderful panorama photo by Theo Felton shows the stage, the audience, and the ruins of the Rathaus, the partly repaired Grzenich, and the ruins of the private houses and shops on the square, with the cathedral in the background. See Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/ZSB 3/347/1. 80. Historisches Archiv der Stadt Kln/Acc. 29/Bro Stadtjubilum 1950/2, Sitzungsberichte des Sonderausschues zur Vorbereitung des Stadtjubilums 1949-50: 29. The jubilee organizers had originally planned to stage this drama in the big sports stadium on the western edge of the city and to follow a proposal submitted by Professor Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard. They soon decided that this would be a bit too grand and costly, so they moved the spectacle to Altermarkt and engaged another dramatist, but the general approach remained the same. The dialog was written mostly in Klsch, the city's dialect (or language, as Adenauer described it), 81. A model study of such festivals is Phillip Sarasin, Die brgerliche Traumgeschichte der Stadt Basel. Imaginierte Geschichte, nationale Mythologie und gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit im Basler Festspiel von 1892, in Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, ed. Bilder und Leitbilder im sozialen Wandel (Zrich: 1991). 82. Jakob Tanner, Man tanzt nicht, wenn im Nachbarhaus der Tod umgeht. Die 500-Jahrfeier der Schlacht bei St. Jakob an der Birs 1944, in EreignisMythosDeutung. 1944-1994 St. Jakob an der Birs, ed. by Werner Geiser (Basel, 1994), p. 195. What follows is drawn from this essay. 83. The following is based on 450 Jahrfeier des Eintritts in den Bund. Offizielles Festprogram (Basel, 1951). 84. The chief actors played the parts of the traditional central figures from Fasnacht: Vogel Gryff (a griffon), Leu (a lion), and Wild Ma (a savage or wild man.) For these mythic figures and their place in local customs, see Eugen A. Meier, Vogel Gryff: Geschichte und Brauchtum der Drei Ehrengesellschaften Kleinbasels (Basel, 1986). 85. Basler Stadtspiegel: 2000 Jahre Basel. Festauffhrungen, 23. bis 31. August 1957, in Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, Basel Conv. Nr. 943. See also Basel Conv. 574 and 743 for additional literature on this festival.