Charles Moore (city planner)

Charles Moore (1855-1942) was an American journalist, historian and city planner.

He was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, west of Detroit. He attended Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts and Harvard College (now University), where he studied under Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard’s first professor of art history. Norton emphasized the moral value of art and the equivalence of architecture with the other arts, and these ideas provided a lasting inspiration for Moore. During his college years Moore was editor of the Harvard Crimson and also wrote weekly columns for a couple of Detroit papers.

After graduation from Harvard in 1878, Moore spent ten years as a journalist in Detroit, eventually becoming Washington correspondent for the Detroit Evening Journal. He became acquainted with Detroit businessman and Republican politician James McMillan, and when McMillan was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1889, Moore accompanied him to Washington as his personal secretary. McMillan was appointed chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia and, as clerk, Moore drafted many committee reports outlining progressive policies to improve utilities, social services, transportation, and recreation in the city. In 1900 Moore completed a Ph.D. in history at Columbian College (now George Washington University).

In 1901, Moore played a key role in securing passage of a bill to establish the Senate Park Commission, also known as the McMillan Commission, convened to formulate a plan for the future growth of Washington that would recapture the aims of the 1791 L’Enfant plan for the city and create a monumental appearance for the National Mall. The commission was composed of four men—architects Daniel Burnham and Charles Follen McKim, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.—all of whom had been intimately involved with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago. The fair’s classical buildings embodied the ideals of the City Beautiful movement, a revival of classical architecture in the Victorian era as a means of encouraging civic betterment through unified groupings of buildings that integrated typically allegorical sculpture, painting, and landscape with architecture. Burnham had been the fair’s director and was currently president of the American Institute of Architects. Moore served as the McMillan Commission’s secretary, and in the summer of 1901 accompanied the commission on a seven-week visit to European cities and estates that had influenced the L’Enfant Plan. With Olmsted, he wrote the 1901 Report of the Senate Park Commission, also known as the McMillan Report or McMillan Plan, still used as a template for the growth of Washington’s central area. Moore promoted adoption of the plan as the legitimate successor to the L’Enfant Plan, sharing its principles concerning the reciprocal relation of key sites and the need for an overall unity. Moore believed deeply in the symbolic importance of Washington as the capital of the nation.

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