Megan Marshall, the acclaimed biographer of Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Bishop, has passed along to the Day a curio of Cambridge history she had stashed in her home. We’re dusting it off because it set our minds turning toward the future. Cambridge Fifty Years From Now is a pamphlet occasioned by the city’s centennial in 1946. Frederick J. Adams, Chairman of the Cambridge Planning Department, dared to imagine what the city would look like fifty years hence, in 1996.
What did the vision get right? Our Plan E form of government did remain in place, as Mr. Adams prophesied of the recent charter initiative. The new management did work to replace the trolley cars with bridges, arteries, and elevated highways. But the march of technological progress never delivered us “noiseless buses,” much less flying cars to whisk us to Logan Airport in minutes. Rapid transit was to have transformed the city, lessening population density and easing the burden of commuting in the same stroke. Cambridge was to have become a garden city.
“Would the future city realize the best dreams or the nightmares of city planners?” Mr. Adams mused. “Would it achieve an attractive, wholly congenial atmosphere in which to live, or would it go from bad to worse and succumb to even greater monstrosities—taller buildings with more people jammed into every square mile, greater accumulations of brick and concrete in an effort to realize the highest assessed valuation per square foot, even fewer green areas and trees, to say nothing of masses of snarled traffic along every main highway and secondary route?”
What happened to the city prophesied in Cambridge Fifty Years From Now? Robert J. Gordon’s Rise and Fall of American Growth explains that most city planners in 1946 erred in presuming the rate of economic productivity would continue in perpetuity. Critics of neoliberalism argue a political cause behind the unrealized short work week predicted in the pamphlet. In “The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan,” yours truly delineates the myriad ways our innovation cluster in Kendall Square, the machine in our garden, reshapes community for its own purposes and ends.
What will our future look like? Send us your predictions. And download the pamphlet to behold the maps and drawings contributed by Elva Marshall, Megan’s mother, who was at the time a draftsman for the Cambridge Planning Department.
Thanks, Megan, for sharing this piece of Cambridge history.
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Dear Reader,
See here for a PDF text-only version of the Cambridge Fifty Years from Now pamphlet.
This story has been updated to note that Elva Marshall created her maps and illustrations while employed by the Cambridge Planning Department.
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This pamphlet is a gem! Thank you for posting.
It is remarkable that the author thought that building more freeways would alleviate traffic.