Planning the City Beautiful with McKim, Mead & White (2)

The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was transformational for the town of Naugatuck. However, it began long before the fair had begun, in November, 1891, McKim, Mead & White had commissions in the town. Among them to design a new school on the hill above town and to design a formal town green below the school, between the Episcopal and Congregational churches where a stream from the hillside flowed east toward the river across a level plateau that had always been an informal green. The first town meeting had been held on that green almost a half century earlier, and a Civil War monument had been erected there in 1888. 

 

At the center of the formal Green, in an age before automobiles, MM&W, under the direction of William Rutherford Mead, would design a water fountain to bring cold, fresh drinking water to those who passed. Architecturally, the fountain established a formal axis from the head of Maple Street in the east, across the center of the level square that formed the Green, and up the hill, climaxing in the symmetry of the proposed Salem School. This core of Naugatuck’s future City Beautiful cityscape would be in place by 1895. Over the next quarter century McKim, Mead & White would play a major role in designing many of the buildings that surround the Naugatuck Green, the only green in Connecticut designed entirely by an architectural firm, truly a product of the City Beautiful Movement.