AMERICAN 
January, 1906 
HOMES 
ANDY GAR DENS 17 
** Armsea"’—The Outlook from the Water Front. 
Jamestown and the Dumplings Beyond and Narragansett Pier in the Distance 
Ideals for Suburban Improvement 
By Charles Mulford Robinson 
T IS coming to be the exception for an en- 
terprising town or suburb not to have an 
‘improvement society.” In fact, there 
would be some to say that the society was a 
sine qua non, that if it did not exist there 
was proof of the community’s lack of enter- 
In certain States, in Massachusetts, New Jersey and 
prise. 
California, at any rate, there is hardly any sort of town that 
does not have an association for bettering its appearance. 
The last report of the Massachusetts Civic League notes 170 
village improvement societies in that State. As if that were 
not enough, there are about as many more organizations 
known as civic societies, and a total of 639 organizations 
of all kinds that are concerned with this sort of improvement 
effort. There seems no more need to tell how to form an 
improvement society than how to hold a town meeting, but 
the question of what the society shall do, once it is formed, 
is quite another problem. 
Those who organize the association are more commonly 
actuated by a vague ideal, an indefinite desire for community 
attractiveness, than by a concrete purpose or by a carefully 
thought-out programme which is based on appreciation that 
appropriateness is an essential factor in real beauty and that 
art is not an added ornament but an exact and satisfying 
adjustment of ends. ‘‘ Let us make the town more attrac- 
tive,” they say; and beginning with the narrow, local view, 
they never get a broader outlook, rarely do more than patcn 
and sweep and decorate—as if a housemother should make 
her task the dusting of furniture and not the creation of a 
beautiful home. ‘To be sure, radical changes might be re- 
quired, and these cost money; but it is something to dream 
nobly, for our visions influence our work, and what may not 
be possible to-day or to-morrow may become easily practi- 
cable on some other day in the long life of a town. 
To consider suburban towns in general necessitates such a 
broad view, for peculiar and local characteristics have to be 
disregarded. If we ask ourselves what ideal the members 
of an improvement society in the usual suburban community 
may properly have in mind, we shall run little risk of con- 
fusing the essentials with the purely accidental. 
The first thing to consider is, why people who might live 
in the city or on a farm choose to live in a suburb. There 
will be a few of them—“ the butcher, the baker, and candle- 
stick maker’’—who live there because the others do, but this 
service tends to lessen in importance as communication with 
the larger center improves, and in any case the question, why 
do the others live there, remains. If it were merely love of 
nature, desire for seclusion and out-of-doors, they would live 
in the real country. There must be a social instinct coupled 
to that sentiment and modifying it. In other words, the 
town will most please these people if it has plenty of roomi- 
ness, if it is rich in the abundant beauties of vegetation, and at 
the same time is neighborly, socially convenient and readily 
accessible. They do not want pure country and they do not 
