ABOUT THIS BOOK

In the early twentieth century, developers from Baltimore to Beverly Hills built garden suburbs, a new kind of residential community that incorporated curvilinear roads and landscape design as picturesque elements in a neighborhood. Intended as models for how American cities should be rationally, responsibly, and beautifully modernized, garden suburban communities were fragments of a larger (if largely imagined) garden city—the mythical “good” city of U.S. city-planning practices of the 1920s.

This extensively illustrated book chronicles the development of the two most fully realized garden suburbs in Texas, Dallas’s Highland Park and Houston’s River Oaks. Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson draws on a wealth of primary sources to trace the planning, design, financing, implementation, and long-term management of these suburbs. She analyzes homes built by such architects as H. B. Thomson, C. D. Hill, Fooshee & Cheek, John F. Staub, Birdsall P. Briscoe, and Charles W. Oliver. She also addresses the evolution of the shopping center by looking at Highland Park’s Shopping Village, which was one of the first in the nation. Ferguson sets the story of Highland Park and River Oaks within the larger story of the development of garden suburban communities in Texas and across America to explain why these two communities achieved such prestige, maintained their property values, became the most successful in their cities in the twentieth century, and still serve as ideal models for suburban communities today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson, an independent scholar with interests in architecture, suburban and city planning, fine arts, historic preservation, and decorative arts, was a Fulbright Scholar at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, and holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware. She is the coauthor of Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast.

REVIEWS

The city planners of the early twentieth century, the first generation of professionals in that field, left behind memorable schemes for reshaping central cities, along with high-minded comprehensive plans for entire metropolises. Yet from New York’s Forest Hills Gardens and Baltimore’s Roland Park to the Country Club District in Kansas City, that era’s celebrated urban designers had the most latitude to test their ideas and exercise their skills when commissioned to lay out exclusive suburban neighborhoods. Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson’s meticulous study of Houston’s River Oaks and Dallas’s Highland Park details how this movement for private-sector neighborhood planning came to Texas’s largest cities and then spread across the state. For the Hogg siblings behind River Oaks and for the developers of Highland Park, high-end neighborhood planning was an investment and a vision. Thoughtfully designed by the country’s best talents and properly restricted and managed, River Oaks and Highland Park would turn a profit while leaving Houston and Dallas more elegant in appearance and sophisticated in atmosphere. Extensively illustrated, with clear explanations of architectural styles and design principles, Highland Park and River Oaks will be appreciated by Texas’s urban and architectural historians. For preservationists and public historians, the book is a resource, and for residents a treasure.

— Alan Lessoff, Professor of History, Illinois State University, and coauthor of Fractured Modernity: America Confronts Modern Times, 1890s–1940s

…a beautiful book with lovely illustrations and crafted prose that balances the narrative of neighborhood development with detailed insight into the construction and architectonic history of individual houses in both neighborhoods.

— Southwestern Historical Quarterly

[T]his book is a thoroughly researched, unique, and valuable contribution to the history of garden suburban community planning and development in Texas.

— Great Plains Research

TABLE OF CONTENTS