Shaping the city

The Municipal Art Society was founded in New York City in the wake of the World's Columbian Exposition, when the Great White City in Chicago ushered in a new conception of what American cities could achieve through coordinated planning and the collaboration of the nation's best classical architects and artists. In 1890s New York, much of the population lived in apartments that had no toilets; developers considered it their inalienable right to build a skyscraper on a twenty-foot lot: and graft, not need, determined the city government's construction priorities. If this situation has changed, we owe it less to the councilmen and mayors who enacted legislation than to the citizen activists who persuaded them to do so. . Shaping the City is a stirring account of a century of just such citizen activism, not a dry institutional history but the inside story of city government as it affects the physical environment. We know of MAS today as the organization that led the fight against overdevelopment at Columbus Circle and the battle to retain the honky-tonk character of Times Square, but in its early days, MAS was the guiding force behind the City Beautiful movement. Its members built the