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Interurban Knowledge Exchange
in Southern and Eastern Europe,
1870–1950

Around 1900, cities in Southern and Eastern Europe were persistently

labeled “backward” and “delayed.” Allegedly, they had no alternative
but to follow the role model of the metropolises, of London, Paris or
Vienna. This edited volume fundamentally questions this assumption.
It shows that cities as diverse as Barcelona, Berdyansk, Budapest, Lviv,
Milan, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw and Zagreb pursued their own agendas
of modernization. In order to solve their pressing problems with respect
to urban planning and public health, they searched for best practices
abroad. The solutions they gleaned from other cities were eclectic to fit the
specific needs of a given urban space and were thus often innovative. This
applied urban knowledge was generated through interurban networks
and multi-directional exchanges. Yet in the period around 1900, this
transnational municipalism often clashed with the forging of urban and
national identities, highlighting the tensions between the universal and
the local.
This interurban perspective helps to overcome nationalist perspectives
in historiography as well as outdated notions of “center and periphery.”
This volume will appeal to scholars from a large number of disciplines,
including urban historians, historians of Eastern and Southern Europe,
historians of science and medicine, and scholars interested in transnational
connections.

Eszter Gantner (1971–2019) was a research fellow at the Herder Institute

for Historical Research on East Central Europe from 2013 through 2019.

Heidi Hein-Kircher is head of the department “academic forum” at

the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in
Marburg, Germany.

Oliver Hochadel is a historian of science and a tenured researcher at the

Institución Milá y Fontanals de Investigación en Humanidades (CSIC,
Barcelona).
Routledge Advances in Urban History
Series Editors: Bert De Munck
(Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp)
Simon Gunn
(Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester)

This series showcases original and exciting new work in urban history.
It publishes books that challenge existing assumptions about the history
of cities, apply new theoretical frames to the urban past, and open up
new avenues of historical enquiry. The scope of the series is global, and it
covers all time periods from the ancient to the modern worlds.

3 Urbanizing Nature
Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature Since 1500
Edited by Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid and
Bert De Munck

4 Cities, Railways, Modernities

London, Paris, and the Nineteenth Century
Carlos López Galviz

5 The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History

Edited by Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, Silja Laine and Richard Dennis

6 The Rise and Fall of London’s Ringways, 1943–1973

Michael Dnes

7 New Approaches to Governance and Rule in Urban Europe Since 1500

Edited by Simon Gunn and Tom Hulme

8 Migrants and the Making of the Urban-Maritime World

Agency and Mobility in Port Cities, c. 1570–1940
Edited by Christina Reimann and Martin Öhman

9 Interurban Knowledge Exchange in Southern and Eastern Europe,

1870–1950
Edited by Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher and Oliver Hochadel

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Advances-in-Urban-History/book-series/RAUH
Interurban Knowledge
Exchange in Southern and
Eastern Europe, 1870–1950

Edited by
Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher
and Oliver Hochadel
First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher and Oliver
Hochadel to be identified as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gantner, Eszter B. honoree. | Gantner, Eszter B., editor. |
Hein-Kircher, Heidi, 1969– editor. | Hochadel, Oliver, 1968– editor.
Title: Interurban knowledge exchange in Southern and Eastern Europe,
1870–1950 / edited by Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher and Oliver
Hochadel.
Description: 1st Edition. | New York : Routledge Taylor & Francis Group,
2020. | Series: Routledge advances in urban history ; vol 9 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020025820 (print) | LCCN 2020025821 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367333294 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429319235 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781000207637 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781000207644 (mobi) |
ISBN 9781000207651 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns—Europe, Southern—Effect of technological
innovations on. | Cities and towns—Europe, Eastern—Effect of
technological innovations on. | City planning—Europe,
Southern—History. | City planning—Europe, Eastern—History. | Cities
and towns—Growth. | Civilization, Modern.
Classification: LCC HC244.5 .I58 2020 (print) | LCC HC244.5 (ebook) |
DDC 307.1/1609409041—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025820
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025821
ISBN: 978-0-367-33329-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-31923-5 (ebk)
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 In memoriam
Eszter Gantner (1971–2019)
Contents

List of Figuresx
Prefacexi

Introduction: Searching for Best Practices in Interurban

Networks 1
ESZTER GANTNER, HEIDI HEIN-KIRCHER
AND OLIVER HOCHADEL

PART I
Building a Modern City: Networks in Urban Planning23

1 The Ghetto and the Castle: Modern Urban Design

and Knowledge Transfer in Historic Prague Before
and After 1918 25
CATHLEEN M. GIUSTINO

2 In Search of Best Practices Within the Confines of the

Russian Empire: The Port City of Berdyansk 50
IGOR LYMAN AND VICTORIA KONSTANTINOVA

3 Traveling Architecture: Géza Maróti’s Art Between

the Regional and the Global 75
ESZTER GANTNER

4 The Exchange of Urban Planning Theory and Practice

Along the Austro-Hungarian Periphery: Zagreb as
a Case Study 90
TAMARA BJAŽIĆ KLARIN
viii Contents
PART II
Aiming at the Healthy City: Experiments With Best
Practices117

5 Learning From Smaller Cities: Moscow in the

International Urban Networks, 1870–1910 119
ANNA MAZANIK

6 Best Practices From a Polish Perspective: Improving

Health Conditions in Lviv Around 1900 134
HEIDI HEIN-KIRCHER

7 Improving Health in a Mediterranean City: Barcelona

and the European Network (1931–1937) 153
CELIA MIRALLES BUIL

PART III
The New Urban Space: Experiences and Institutions173

8 A Discourse of Modernity? Warsaw’s Press on Urban

Poverty (1880s–1910s) 175
CLARA MADDALENA FRYSZTACKA

9 Going East: Gustave Loisel and the Networks of

Exchange Between Zoological Gardens Before 1914 197
OLIVER HOCHADEL

10 Architectural Conversations Across Europe’s

Borderlands: Transnational Exchanges Between
Barcelona and Bucharest in the 1920s 219
LUCILA MALLART

11 In the Driver’s Seat of Modern Urbanization: A Case

Study of Automotive Development in the Emerging
City of Barcelona, c. 1900–1950 237
BARRY L. STIEFEL

12 Crossing the Iron Curtain: Milan’s Museum of

Technology and Transnational Exchanges Before
and After World War II 261
ELENA CANADELLI
 Contents ix
Afterword: Goodbye to Center and Periphery 285
COR WAGENAAR

List of Contributors297
Name Index 301
Subject Index305
Figures

1.1 The “Finis Ghetto” plan, Prague 1887. 32

1.2 Model of Jože Plečnik’s design for a boulevard looping
upwards toward the Prague Castle, 1931. 42
1.3 Jože Plečnik’s design for a boulevard running alongside
the Castle’s Northern face, 1934. 43
2.1 Plan of the city of Berdyansk, 1862. 54
2.2 Postcard: Berdyansk Boys’ Gymnasium, early 20th century. 55
2.3 Postcard: Pier of Berdyansk, early 20th century. 56
3.1 Budapest, Abonyi Street 1; decoration by Maróti, 1911. 78
3.2 Map of the Hungarian pavilion at World Fair in Milan, 1906. 80
4.1 Zagreb Regulatory Plan, 1865. 93
4.2 The so-called Green Horseshoe, Zagreb Plan, 1889. 95
4.3 Zagreb Plan, 1923. 100
4.4 Zagreb aerial view, 1928. 102
4.5 Zagreb Regulatory Plan, 1932. 108
6.1 Hetman’s dam/Waly hetmanskie, postcard 1915. 139
6.2 Academic Street/Ulica Akademicka, postcard 1917. 139
7.1 Area of influence for the tuberculosis dispensaries in
Barcelona, 1930. 159
7.2 Locations of tuberculosis dispensaries and mortality
rates, 1924. 162
7.3 The Central Dispensary of Barcelona, 2014. 162
9.1 Letterhead Gustave Loisel, 1912. 202
9.2 Statue of the famous gorilla of the Breslau Zoo, 1907. 205
10.1 Plaça de Catalunya, project by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, 1927. 223
10.2 Bucharest City Hall, 2019. 225
11.1 Interior of the Hispano-Suiza factory, Barcelona c. 1910. 241
11.2 Interior of the Hispano-Suiza factory, Barcelona 1934. 247
12.1 The former Renaissance S. Vittore monastery, Milan
late 1940s. 268
12.2 Panel dedicated to the MUST at the Museum of
Technology, Prague 1957. 272
12.3 Museum of Technology, Warsaw, late 1950s. 277
Preface

This book is dedicated to the memory of our esteemed colleague and dear
friend Eszter Gantner. She passed away in August 2019 as the manuscript
for this book neared completion. In fact, her last e-mail reached us a few
days before her death, resolving some final details concerning the images
and captions for her chapter. The idea for this book owes very much to
Eszter’s vision of how to invigorate urban history and Eastern European
history with new ideas and interdisciplinary alliances. Thanks to her ini-
tiative, two historians of Eastern Central Europe and one historian of sci-
ence from Barcelona formed a team. We were interested in urban history
from different but complementary viewpoints. What brought us together
was the “periphery perspective” – and what might connect urban spaces
in Eastern and Southern Europe.
We organized a double conference inviting historians of science, urban
historians and historians of public health and urban planning to talk
about the interurban knowledge exchanges taking place in “their” cities.
The first part of the conference took place at the Institució Milà i Fonta­
nals (CSIC) in Barcelona in September 2016. The second part, with more
advanced drafts of the papers, was hosted at the Herder Institute for
Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg in May 2017.
Both events were funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, and we are most
grateful for their support (Ref. 30.16.0.074GE).
In the years leading up to this publication, Oliver Hochadel benefited
from the following projects: “Science and the City. Natural History,
Biology and Biopolitics in the Divided City: Barcelona and Buenos Aires
(1868–1936)”; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (HAR2013–
48065-C2–1-P); “¿Ciencia en la periferia? La cultura científica de ciu-
dades en el Sur y el Este de Europa alrededor de 1900: paralelismos,
contextos y redes” (201510I030) “Proyecto intramural especial” Con-
sejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; and “Science, Technology
and Medicine in modern Catalonia (18th–20th centuries)”; Grup de
recerca consolidat i finançat (SGR 2014–1410 and SGR 2017–1138,)
AGAUR-Generalitat de Catalunya.
xii Preface
Heidi Hein-Kircher was inspired by the discussions and contribution
to this project and in turn she could contribute ideas from her project
on local government in Lviv (Lembergs “polnischen Charakter” sichern.
Kommunalpolitik in einer multiethnischen Stadt der Habsburgermon-
archie zwischen 1861/62 und 1914, Stuttgart: Steiner 2020) and ideas
stemming from methodological and conceptual discussions within the
collaborative projects “SFB/TRR 138 Dynamics of security. Types of
Securitization from a Historical Perspective.” She and Eszter Gantner
were also enriched by the conceptual discussions of the Hessian Loewe-
focus project “Conflict regions in Eastern Europe.”
Much needed support and input in different ways came from our col-
leagues Sean Brady, Miquel Carandell, Andras Hecker, Goran Hutinec,
Christine Krüger, Agustí Nieto-Galan, Harald R. Stühlinger, Ned Sumer-
ville and Jan Surman. William Connor proved to be an excellent proof-
reader and Iryna Dolnytska did a great job on the index. We thank Iryna
Dolnytska for indexing. We also would like to thank the anonymous
reviewers for their critical and constructive feedback and Bert De Munck
and Simon Gunn for including our book in their series “Routledge
Advances in Urban History.”
This book is also about interurban knowledge exchanges in a different
sense. Scholars from a dozen countries participated in it and exchanged
knowledge, ideas and methods. We tried – pretty successfully, we dare say –
to learn from each other. Adaptation, eclecticism, local circumstances,
national particularities, transnational networks – all these factors shaped
our articles, just like they had transformed the urban spaces we were
studying. All this pleased Eszter very much.
Heidi Hein-Kircher and Oliver Hochadel
Marburg/Barcelona, December 2019
Introduction
Searching for Best Practices
in Interurban Networks
Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher
and Oliver Hochadel

In March 1904, Spanish entomologist Manuel Martínez de la Escalera

reported in the popular journal Alrededor del Mundo about the jour-
ney he had undertaken the previous summer. Escalera and his superior
Ignacio Bolívar visited numerous museums in Western and Central Europe
to inform themselves about the latest advances of others working in their
field. They were looking for inspiration for their soon-to-be-built museum
in Madrid. At the time, it had been decided to move the national natural
history collections from its cramped quarters to a new site overlooking
the Paseo de la Castellana, where the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Natu-
rales (as it was called since 1913) still resides today.
Surprisingly, at least from our present-day-perspective, the two Span-
ish emissaries were quite underwhelmed by the Muséum National
d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Escalera complains about the gallery of
mammals, describing it as the “most ludicrous and bad” that one might
get to see. Obviously, the metropolis did not offer the model the Spanish
naturalists had hoped for. Yet they found what they were looking for in
other cities, in:

Brussels and Altona and Dresden, and now in Leyden. There is a

whole series of buildings for museums of natural history being built.
This highlights that it is no longer Paris, London and Berlin, but ten
other cities of the second and third order, not happy with their old
museums, that are following the movement that the times demand
and are constructing new ones, swiftly and generally well.1

This episode comprises in a nutshell some of the central themes of this

book: study travels across Europe backed by an urban institution for the
purpose of gathering models for reform “at home”; the imperative of
modernization, that is, the “movement that the times demand”; doubts
with respect to models provided by the major metropolis; instead lear­
ning from “ten other cities of the second and third order”; the crucial
role of well-connected experts such as Escalera and Bolívar using their
international networks; and the public dimension of this discourse on the
2 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
improvement of the urban space, as Escalera published his travel report
in a popular illustrated magazine.
This example highlights the closely-knit interurban networks and the
search for best practices we would like to address in this volume. In its
first part, this introduction will try to build a theoretical and conceptual
framework, using different strands of urban history as well as the schol-
arship on knowledge transfer. Equipped with these concepts and tools,
we shall then try in the second part to highlight the numerous connec-
tions and common themes between the 12 case studies of the volume.

The Modern City and Applied Urban Knowledge

The modern city (more on this notion later) took shape in the second
half of the nineteenth century. What made it modern was not only the
exponential growth of the population and the creation of a new urban
infrastructure. The urban space was marked by a high concentration
of short-distance relations, multi-directional exchanges within and the
acceleration of movement and communication; for example, through the
replacement of horse-drawn carriages by tramways or local trains. This
modern city faced a whole range of interrelated problems such as rapid
industrialization, a new working world, a serious housing crisis, “uncon-
trolled” immigration, high mortality, social inequality, crime and shock-
ing poverty. These two factors – the “densification” within the city and
the numerous social challenges – were instrumental for the development
of new fields of “applied urban knowledge” such as urban planning,
hygiene and “cultural infrastructures” (these three fields serve as headings
for the three parts of this book). In other words, the inherent dynamic of
the urban space and the production of applied urban knowledge entered
a dialectic relationship.2 The municipal administrations had to tackle the
long list of problems they faced by modernizing the city in a comprehen-
sive and informed way. The construction of a well-functioning sewage
system and sufficient drinking water supply, providing city-dwellers and
the growing industry with gas and later electricity and devising a tightly
knit public transport system (trains, trams and trolley-buses) were the
most pressing challenges city councils had to face. “Knowledge became a
major resource for the future of urban development.”3
This leads us to our central questions: Which models did the cities try
to follow in their reforms? How did they inform themselves about the
newest advances in, say, tuberculosis treatment or museum architecture?
In short: how was this applied urban knowledge produced, communi-
cated and appropriated?

Transnational Municipalism and Best Practices

Solutions were sought after in the form of “best practices” from other
urban contexts. They were esteemed as “recipes for success” in order
 Introduction 3
to modernize the cityscape according to a city’s specific conditions.4 In
the decades after 1850, an interurban network emerged in Europe (and
beyond) in which urban knowledge in its different forms was being con-
stantly exchanged. Urban historians have coined the concept “transna-
tional municipalism” which will be central for our book.5 Disregarding
national borders, urban reformers in different cities became increasingly
aware that they were facing similar problems with respect to public
health and urban planning. Many city councils reached out to other cit-
ies all over Europe or even across the Atlantic in order to modernize their
own. There existed “a kind of European market in urban ideas, strate-
gies and models.”6 In fact, best practices could literally be found around
the globe. Through study trips of specifically appointed commissions,
participation in international congresses and exhibitions, architectural
competitions and other available sources of information, cities searched
for best practices and then tried to adapt them back home. Reception
and appropriation are two complementary processes of city-making,
according to historians of technology Mikael Hård and Thomas Misa.7
Or as Jens Lachmund put it: “Appropriation is always a selective process
through which circulating concepts and objects get mixed with locally
existing traditions.”8
Thus, city councils and other municipal institutions were quite eclectic
in their choice of best practices. They were well aware that the metropo-
lis – as Escalera found out in Paris – might not always have the proper
solution for their specific urban problems, or one they could afford. Cit-
ies of comparable size and with similar structural problems might have
developed concepts that would fit their own needs and parameters much
more suitably. This distinctly pragmatic approach also promised to avoid
errors that had been committed elsewhere. Being “late” or “backward”
might turn out to be advantageous, and could be used by reformers rhe-
torically as political leverage to demand new technologies or urban plan-
ning concepts in order to modernize their city.
This volume posits that the knowledge that circulated in this inter-
urban space is “knowledge in transit,” a concept from the history of
science.9 This concept argues against the so-called top-down model (or
deficit model) in science communication. In this hierarchical model, sci-
entific knowledge is produced in a clearly delimited space (such as a labo-
ratory) and then transmitted in a simplified way to an allegedly ignorant
audience. Yet this assumption does not do justice to the complexities of
the generation of scientific knowledge. Rather, historians of science argue
that knowledge is “co-produced” in the act of its communication. They
stress the diversity of audiences, who may appropriate the transmitted
knowledge in their own specific – and productive – ways.10
Applied to urban history and transnational municipalism, “knowledge
in transit” implies that urban knowledge is permanently altered, com-
bined, hybridized and adapted to fit the specific needs of a city. Empirical
research will have to show to what degree this transfer was successful
4 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
or not. Obviously, there is no guarantee that the interurban exchange
of knowledge was going to work out. Time and again, the chapters in
this volume will highlight the crucial importance of the local urban con-
text and its specific political, social, economic and cultural characteris-
tics in the analysis of this transfer of urban knowledge. Each city will
appropriate best practices from elsewhere in creative ways, produce new
knowledge through their syntheses and serve as a testing ground of new
technologies.
This search for best practices can surely be found well before the mid-
nineteenth century. And in the time span covered by this volume, cities
were not the only actor eager to glean useful knowledge from homolo-
gous actors abroad. Searches for best practices may be found at a state-
level or in transnational contexts,11 but also at different institutional
levels; for example, between prisons or in the realm of education to name
but two examples.12
Yet as the rapid growth of the cities led to ever more pressing prob-
lems with regard to public health and dire living conditions from around
the 1870s onwards, this interurban search is more problem-driven and
systematic than earlier attempts. It is intrinsically connected with the for-
mation of large bureaucracies at both the municipal and national levels
at the same time. Local governments changed in character from a pure
financial administration to a diversified administrative body defining new
tasks and responsibilities in which the state did not intervene. Municipal
government forms part of the increasing administrative penetration of
the state (“Durchstaatlichung”)13 at the local and regional level, whereby
more and more areas of public life became state-regulated and controlled.
At the same time, municipal government was increasingly politicized and
developed its own agendas. Hence, the modernization processes could be
interpreted as a result of this politicization of local affairs. For this very
reason, the applied urban knowledge in question is intrinsically political,
marked by ideologies as well as distinct and often conflicting ideas of
“modernity,” “progress,” “morality” and “nation.”
The growth of municipal administration and the need for specific
urban expertise created a new group of historical actors: experts in urban
reform. These local politicians, council members, city planners, archi-
tects, physicians, hygienists, engineers, museum directors, journalists and
business men are, in a sense, the protagonists of this book.14 We will try
to show that these actors were deeply embedded in both local and trans-
national networks.
Apart from transnational municipalism as practiced by these urban
elites, we would also like to add another important but rather infor-
mal and indirect mechanism of knowledge exchange, the “interurban
matrix.”15 This concept was coined by Nathaniel Wood, taking as a case
study the city of Cracow. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards,
both the number of newspapers and the literacy rates increased vastly
 Introduction 5
across most of Europe. Wood argues that, through the ubiquitous daily
press urbanites learned what was going on elsewhere, often comparing
Cracow with other cities. The idea of the interurban matrix helps us to
pursue the ideas of urban improvement beyond the circles of urban elites.
Millions of newspaper readers became aware that they shared a very
similar urban space with millions of other city-dwellers across Europe.
They were bound together by a set of experiences, aspirations and values
that found its most condensed form in the expression of the “European
civilization,” which was both a role model and point of reference, mean-
ing modern transport systems, public health services, and cultural institu-
tions such as the opera or the theater; in short: “modernity.”

Modernity and Modernities

The terms modern, modernity and modernization seem omnipresent in
the discourse about the city around 1900, both in the sources and in the
secondary literature. The concept of “the modern city” is often used syn-
onymously with the “European city” (and sometimes the “Western City”
to include North America).16 Often implicitly rather than explicitly, it
posits the metropolis – “Paris, London and Berlin,” in Escalera’s words –
as the urban model per se. Depending on the discourse, the “modern
city” may also stand for the close link between industrialization and
urbanization, with Manchester as the archetype.
Such a concept presupposes a historical teleology and thus a center-
periphery model that is both hierarchical and normative. In particular,
cities outside of the United Kingdom, France and Germany seem to
be relegated by definition to an “inferior” position, “backward” and
“delayed.” (Urban) historians, trained to think anti-teleologically, have
long been weary of these models. Yet in actual historiographical practice,
it is quite hard to shake off these preconceptions, not least because much
of the relevant scholarship has focused on the – supposedly – technologi-
cally more advanced Western European cities, the alleged vanguards of
modernity.
“European history was dressed as universal development and treated
as a yardstick and a model,” as Sebastian Conrad put it.17 And this is
maybe even more the case in urban history. The “plot” of teleological
modernization is deeply ingrained in our vision of the “modern city.” It
is this assumption that established the European (and North American)
city as the model of reference in urban history and beyond. Even in their
critique of this master narrative of modernity, many historians often still
move within the Western world. Despite the recognition of the differ-
ences that other cities represent, there appears to be a strong tendency to
treat them – in one way or another – as “deficient.”
Some urban historians have suggested post-colonial theory as the best
antidote in order to deconstruct the claim that Western civilization is
6 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
the one and only root of modernity. It highlights the ubiquitous “oth-
ering” in a binary discourse of “modern/European” and “underdevel-
oped,” “civilized” and “uncivilized,” “advanced” and “backward,” that
marks – often more implicitly than explicitly – urban history.18
In the meantime, it has nearly become commonplace to criticize a
monolithic understanding of “modernity.” The idea of “multiple moder-
nities,” formulated two decades ago by sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt,
has been influential here.19 He criticizes the notion that there was only
one “cultural program of modernity” that was supposed to spread from
Europe to the rest of the world. Many accounts of urban history estab-
lish a tight link between the concept of modernization and technologi-
cal progress. The most recent technologies seemed to pave the way to a
better urban future. For local actors, becoming modern meant applying
the latest technologies and promising to make the city “healthier” and
more “beautiful,” a link that some of the chapters address. In the same
vein, urban historians have long been attentive to the particularities of
non-European cities and speak of “alternative” or “different moderni-
ties.” Beatriz Sarlo, for example, refers to Buenos Aires as representing
a “peripheral modernity.”20 The historiography about the evolution of
Indian cities around 1900 is enormous. Urban historians describe the
negotiation with and resistance to British models, thus stressing the
unique character of Indian cities and their own contributions to urban
modernity.21 In these municipal networks, there was “at no stage a lim-
ited ‘one-directional’ flow of knowledge from Britain to the outer reaches
of the Empire.”22
Other scholars, while agreeing with the critique of one master nar-
rative of modernity, have warned that this might lead to the idea of a
fragmentation of modernities, as if they existed parallel to each other but
were not intrinsically connected. Sociologist Göran Therborn therefore
suggests the concept of “entangled modernities.” Similarly, global histo-
rian Sebastian Conrad takes issue with Eisenstadt’s concept of “multiple
modernities” and instead proposes to speak of “variations on modernity
i.e., one modernity with a diversity of cultural manifestations.”23
Within cultural studies modernization is nowadays understood as a
tightly interwoven and interdependent “clew of strings.” These processes
do not only transform economic conditions, but also social and cultural
life, including mentalities.24 Hence, different paths and understanding of
“modernization” developed, depending on the starting point. As mod-
ernization is a dynamic process of diversification, each city could find and
define its own way to become modern.

Particularities of Eastern and Southern Europe

Much of the scholarship cited so far is attentive to the opposition of
“the West and the rest,” vindicating the active role of, for example, “the
 Introduction 7
Global South,” that may in no way be reduced to a simple receiver of
preordained models. Buenos Aires, Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay
(now Mumbai) obviously lay outside Europe. But what about the cities
located just around the “West,” i.e. the United Kingdom, France and
Germany? “The European city” used in an emphatic sense, as mentioned
previously, tends to exclude Southern and East Central European cities.25
Because they are not “central” enough for Western history and not suf-
ficiently “distant” for global approaches, they end up in the blind spot
of historical research, as Katalin Szende put it recently.26 How do we as
historians conceptualize these regions?
If, for a moment, we allow for some sweeping and obviously prob-
lematic generalizations: how was Southern Europe perceived around
1900? Spain and Portugal, once dominant colonial powers, and Italy,
once Europe’s leading cultural force, had lost touch with progressive
enlightenment ideas and therefore, in the nineteenth century, struggled
hard to catch up with the countries situated to their north. By contrast,
societies in Eastern Europe, never had a leading role, being dominated by
the large empires around them. To repeat: these categorical (dis)qualifica-
tions describe the perception of the historical actors, both in the center
and at the periphery.
Research on Eastern (Central) European cities has gained momentum
in recent years.27 Scholars have pointed out their specific features: “It was
particularly this ethnic-national, religious, and cultural diversity which
would become a defining characteristic of East Central European cities
until the twentieth century.”28 Urban historians argue that these cities
found their own way to modernity, which indicates a paradigmatic shift
in their reassessment of the history of these cities.29
The “Southern European city” is a far less used category in urban his-
tory. Historians have struggled to come up with a definition that comes
to grips with the immense variety of potential candidates of Southern
European cities. There is, for example, no clear consensus on how far the
South extends and which cities to include. What about cities in the Otto-
man Empire?30 Most of the research, for example on Barcelona, Madrid
and several Italian cities, focuses on the post-1945 era and the problem
of uncontrolled suburban growth.31 There is hardly any literature that
attempts to situate Southern European cities within interurban networks
around 1900.
As this book also shows, the tight and dynamic interconnections
between urban modernization, transnational knowledge transfer and
nationalization were perhaps the most important characteristics in the
age of nationalism, of modernization and of technological and structural
changes with respect to improvements in Eastern and Southern European
cities.
We have now neared the starting point of the research project that
culminated in this edited volume. From the very beginning, the three
8 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
editors of this book were wondering: What should we call these cities
that, allegedly, were not at the vanguard of urban modernization in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Our first workshop was
entitled “ ‘Urban Peripheries?’: Emerging Cities in Europe’s South and
East, 1850–1945.” We were well aware of the problematic connotations
of “periphery” and thus put it in inverted commas and added a ques-
tion mark. Yet in the end, we realized in the many discussions with our
authors and other colleagues that even with these two qualifications the
semantic “baggage” of a term such as “periphery” became too heavy.
Even if it is not the historian’s intention, the term tends to “downgrade”
these cities, carrying connotations such as “backward” and “delayed.”32
Quite a number of (urban) historians have used the term “second cities,”
and with different slants. The basic idea of this term is to distinguish these
second cities from the large metropolises and to identify characteristics
unique to them.33 Therefore, we entitled our second workshop “Inter-
urban Knowledge Exchange. Emerging Cities in Southern and Eastern
Europe, 1870–1945.” Yet another concept is “emerging cities,” a term
that two of us, Eszter Gantner and Heidi Hein-Kircher, have coined.34 It
refers in particular to Eastern European cities developing into modern
regional metropolises in the late nineteenth century and in some cases
into national capitals after 1918. The concept of emerging cities stresses
their proper agency. They understood that it was essential to compete
and that, while it was important to learn from other cities, the metropo-
lis, be it London, Paris or Berlin, was not by default the role model to
follow due to the difference in scale and general predisposition.
In our view, the concepts “second city” and “emerging city” certainly
carry analytical and conceptual merit. Yet in a sense they presuppose
the center-periphery hierarchy they would like to question. It seems to
be very hard to get rid of normative and teleological conceptions that
posit the Western metropolis as the ultimate goal. Ultimately, all these
adjectives – peripheral, second and emerging – define the city in reference
to the metropolis and not independently.
In order to avoid that, we decided to deploy a neutral expression for
the title of the book, simply calling it “Interurban Knowledge Exchange
in Southern and Eastern Europe, 1870–1950,” leaving aside semantically
charged adjectives such as “second” and “peripheral.” Even seemingly
affirmative terms such as “emerging” may still evoke ideas of hierarchies
and of having to “catch up.” What is more, a larger historical perspective,
dissolves quickly any kind of ranking. In the late Middle Ages and into
the early modern period, Barcelona, Milan, Buda, Prague and Warsaw –
to name but a handful of the cities that feature in our book – were centers
of political power and economic prowess well beyond their region and
hardly peripheral or secondary.
We would thus like to situate our research program in line with the
global turn in recent historiography that intends to “decenter” space,
 Introduction 9
and rather advocates concepts such as the mobility of actors and objects
and the circulation of ideas and practices.35 Yet this focus on intercon-
nectivity does not imply that all interurban hierarchies simply disappear.
First: while the historian may probably be well advised to avoid terms
such as center (or metropolis) and periphery, in an analytical sense, they
are highly relevant as actors’ categories.36 Searching for new ideas to
build the natural history museum in Madrid, Escalera initially thought of
Paris as providing the model and spoke of “cities of the second and third
order.” How historical actors perceived their cities and their relation to
the large European metropolises is clearly important.
Second: in trying to use neutral terms, we in no way intend to gloss
over the fact that in terms of political power, economic development or
technological capacities highly unequal relations between cities existed
around 1900 – and well before and well after that. The task of the his-
torian thus consists in continuously questioning narratives that ascribe a
monolithic version of modernity as represented by London, Paris, Ber-
lin and Vienna, while still acknowledging the strong influence of these
metropolises on so many cities and citizens in Eastern and Southern
Europe.
The solution this book proposes is to think in terms of networks.
Equipped with concepts such as transnational municipalism, knowledge
in transit and the interurban matrix, the focus on individual cities should
give way to concentrate on the multi-directional interchanges. A mere
comparative approach might be insufficient, as it tends to essentialize
the units of comparison, as the proponents of the histoire croisée have
argued.37 This is not simply a book about Eastern and Southern Euro-
pean cities, but rather about what is connecting them. It assembles an
array of cities that generally do not appear side by side: Barcelona and
Berdyansk, Milan and Lviv, for example. At the start of this research pro-
ject, we felt that there was something experimental about our perspec-
tive, combining two large and apparently very distinct regions, Eastern
and Southern Europe. What patterns of interurban knowledge exchanges
would we find, if any?

The Structure and Chapters of This Volume

For systematic reasons, this book is divided in three sections: (1) urban
planning, (2) public health, and (3) “cultural infrastructures.” Yet it goes
without saying that these three topics are generally closely interconnected
in the urban space. Rather than simply listing the 12 chapters in order,
in the remainder of this introduction, we will identify their common
themes: the multi-directionality of interurban exchanges, the relationship
between urban planning and nationalism, the tension between universal
versus local models and identities, the role of interurban actors and the
material dimension of interurban knowledge exchange. We thus hope to
10 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
answer at least some of the questions raised earlier. More than this, in the
following pages, we would like to draw attention to the historical com-
plexity of each case study, of each urban space and interurban network.
Indeed, there are numerous themes these chapters have in common, yet
what this spectrum of case studies also brings to the fore, just as impor-
tantly, is the enormous variety of interurban knowledge exchanges.

Multi-Directionality of Exchanges
Knowledge is not produced in one space, and this is a fortiori the case with
respect to urban knowledge. A number of chapters in this book exem-
plify the bi- or multi-directionality of interurban knowledge exchanges in
which the large metropolises such as London or Paris feature little if at
all. These transfers always changed what was being transferred, because
the knowledge and the associated practices needed to be adapted to the
local circumstances of a different urban space.
For example, in the 1880s, Moscow’s city administration launched
important urban reforms to improve appalling sanitary conditions, most
notably a complete overhaul of the sewage system. Due to their “late”
start, the sanitary reforms in Moscow could benefit from a paradigmatic
shift in the understanding, prevention and treatment of epidemic dis-
eases. Rather than “older” European metropolises, Moscow followed
“smaller” cities in their reform of urban sanitation. New forms of sewage
systems had been successfully tested, for example, in Toulon (France) and
Memphis (United States), and relevant aspects were adopted by Mos-
cow (Mazanik, Chapter 5). The other cases studies underline this finding:
when Czech experts pondered how to reconstruct Prague’s Jewish ghetto
just before 1900, they studied urban renewal practices in cities such as
Toulon, Naples, Florence, Berlin, Frankfurt-am-Main, and Nuremberg
(Giustino, Chapter 1). Eclecticism but also selectivity mark the case of
the planning of a modern tuberculosis dispensary in Barcelona in the
early 1930s. Dissatisfied with the “Northern European” model, Cata-
lan physicians and architects contemplated the architectural models in
both the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s fascist Italy. In the end, they built
a dispensary according to the “Mediterranean” model, conceived of as
a sort of multi-cultural melting pot. In this case, identity politics, ide-
ologies, avant-garde discourses of innovation (functionalism) and medi-
cal theories around how to best fight tuberculosis were enmeshed – and
hard to separate (Miralles Buil, Chapter 7). All these cases show, mutatis
mutandis, that the transfer of best practices created new ways to reform
the urban space.
Unknown except to specialists, prior to the Spanish Civil War, Bar-
celona had a thriving car industry and was home to several Spanish car
companies and foreign company subsidiaries. The strong influence the
US automobile industry had on Europe and on Spain in particular is
 Introduction 11
undeniable. Yet the transfer of technology and design was, in fact, bi-
directional. Spanish high-end cars were held in high esteem on both sides
of the Atlantic, in Europe and the United States. Some of their features
were even copied. The automobile industry is also by definition interur-
ban, disposing of production sites in a number of cities. The Hispano-
Suiza subsidiary in France near Paris is an example of the international
projection of Barcelona-based companies. And in the 1920s the Czecho-
slovakian brand Škoda had a license to make Hispano-Suiza cars for the
Eastern European market at their factory in Pilsen (Stiefel, Chapter 11).
On occasion, the assumed center-periphery-hierarchy is even inverted.
When in 1902 Swiss hygienist Friedrich Erismann became a member of
the Zurich City Council, he was able to use his vast experience in urban
sanitary reforms gathered during 27 years in Russia (mainly Moscow) to
spur on the reforms back home (Mazanik, Chapter 5). In 1907, Gustave
Loisel searched for models and best practices with respect to the planned
reforms of the Paris zoo and found them, among others, in some ani-
mal parks in Northern and Eastern Europe. He suggested to his French
superiors to take note of the exemplary features of institutions in Breslau
(Wrocław), Budapest, Stockholm and Pilawin in tsarist Russia. Hence
the so-called “periphery” could provide ideas and blueprints consid-
ered worthy of emulation for the “center,” in this case Paris (Hochadel,
Chapter 9).
In a chronological sense, the last chapter in this volume describes the
efforts of the Italian industrialist Guido Ucelli to create a Museum of
Technology in Milan before and after World War II. In his search for
best models and inspiration, Ucelli contacted and visited a large number
of technological museums. This included several Eastern European ones,
such as Prague, Warsaw and Budapest. Interurban knowledge exchange
between Eastern and Southern Europe did not stop even after the Iron
Curtain had cut the continent apart (Canadelli, Chapter 12).
In sum, applied urban knowledge did not circulate in linear or hier-
archical ways but rather in multi-directional ways via horizontal con-
nections between administrations, institutions and experts. Bi- or
multi-directionality also means that, through the import and adaptation
of foreign ideas, models and practices the local actors inserted themselves
in interurban networks. Thus they were able to position themselves as
players by presenting their results, for example Moscow’s new sewage
system, Barcelona’s new tuberculosis clinic or Milan’s new Museum of
Technology not only to their publics “at home,” but also within their
interurban networks.

Urban Planning and Nationalism

The burgeoning scholarship on transnational history38 of the last
two decades aspires to overcome “methodological nationalism.”39
12 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
“Transnational” or “transurban” histories even have become buzzwords.
In particular, transurban studies seem to be a much needed counterweight
to balance looking at this crucial period only through the lens of the “age
of nationalism.” “European cities are seen as nodes in communication
networks that created a transurban public sphere,” and therefore it is
doubtful whether the emerging nation-state of the late nineteenth century
should be the main frame of historical analysis.40 We subscribe to this
analysis, yet at the same time these two historical dynamics, national-
ism and transurbanism, are by no means exclusive or strictly opposed.
They are part of the same modernity, tightly interconnected, certainly not
without friction but often spurring each other one, as many of the case
studies illustrate.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities were focal
points – engines, really – of national movements. In particular, Eastern
European regional and/or provincial capital cities played a central role in
the nation-building process.41 This volume deals with cities such as War-
saw, Budapest, Prague and Zagreb that became capitals of new nation-
states after 1918 and thus political, economic and cultural centers. So,
the connection between nationalist discourse and urban reform is, in
most cases, self-evident. The point this volume would like to make is that
this connection comes in all kinds of forms.
Why did municipalities and other actors select certain models and not
others? This was in fact a complex process in which various interde-
pendent factors played a role. We need to ask: what were the concrete
needs of the city? In which pre-existing or emerging networks was the
city situated? And possibly most importantly: to what degree did the
local political constellations of the time shape the choices concerning
urban reform? Around 1900, the city council of Lviv tried to reform the
public health system, most urgently its sewers. In their search for techni-
cal solutions, the councilors consciously avoided the models from the
Habsburg Empire (to which their city formed part of) but looked rather
to Germany. Yet when it came to questions of identity politics, the Lviv
aldermen tried to follow Warsaw and other Polish cities. The city coun-
cil, dominated by ethnic Poles and their nationalist agenda, was eager to
transform Lviv into a “Polish town” (Hein-Kircher, Chapter 6). This case
study gives a clear hint that adopted best practices were “tinted” by the
locally dominant nationality with their own national agenda.
Similarly, in Croatia, historical actors were reticent to be influenced by
Hungarian architects and town planners due to their experience of feeling
dominated by Hungarians at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Originally, urban planning and architectural models were imported
directly from Vienna to Zagreb. Yet already around 1900, networks with
centers of urban planning in Germany and also in France emerged. These
networks proved long-lasting, well beyond World War I. In the interwar
period, Croatian politicians and town planners relied heavily on foreign
 Introduction 13
expertise in their quest to devise a plan for “Greater Zagreb.” Yet, the
international competition for this plan in 1933 raised questions about
expertise and authority. Who should be entitled to sit on the board of the
competition and make decisions? Does it matter which nationality they
are? (Bjažić Klarin, Chapter 4). The reformers of Moscow’s public health
system, too, needed the expertise of foreigners but avoided nationalist
overtones. Real “patriotism,” they argued, cared about providing Mus-
covites with the proper “conditions for healthy life,” not the nationality
of the engineer (Mazanik, Chapter 5).
Czech nationalism weighed in on the reform of Prague’s castle in the
interwar period, leading to tensions with Jože Plečnik, the Slovenian
architect in charge. Yet there were other, “non-nationalist,” factors in
play as well, all such as shifting local priorities and the personalities of
the experts. These factors affected how receptive or reticent the munici-
pal bodies were with respect to the import of foreign ideas and practices
(Giustino, Chapter 1).
Nation-building agendas were not necessarily incompatible between
“emerging nations,” in particular if they both came from “periph-
eral” contexts. A highly instructive example is the intense collabora-
tion between Catalan art historian, architect and politician Josep Puig i
Cadafalch and his Romanian interlocutors, the historians Nicolae Iorga
and Constantin Marinescu and the architects Petre Antonescu, Marica
Cotescu and Maria Irineu in the 1920s and early 1930s. In their work
on medieval history and architecture and the spread of Romanesque art
and architecture, they helped each other in laying intellectual founda-
tions in their respective projects of nation building in Catalonia and
Romania. This “transnationally produced national history” challenges
the widespread view that national history is disinterested in these kinds
of intellectual exchanges with foreign colleagues, as in this case between
Barcelona and Bucharest (Mallart, Chapter 10). Thus, caution is called
for. The connection between urban reform and nationalist agenda is
never uniform and straightforward as the various – quite different – cases
in this volume show.

Universal Versus Local/National

Many of the chapters in this book address the growing tension between
universal ideals on the one hand and the forging of local and national
identities on the other hand. The processes of modernization and
nationalization were deeply intertwined. Particularly in multi-national
and multi-confessional contexts, this often led to the exclusion of the
(ethnic or denominational) “other,” i.e. of minoritarian and subordi-
nate groups. In some of our Eastern European case studies, anti-Semitic
attitudes were virulent in the discourses on how to modernize the cities
of Prague, Lviv and Warsaw. Jewish communities (and quarters) are
14 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
often identified as “backward,” “unhygienic” and as an “obstacle” to
the urban reform agenda.
Around 1900, cities in Eastern and Southern Europe had to straddle
what turned out to be two interdependent, but also often contradictory,
agendas: on the one hand, the modernization of the urban space by fol-
lowing metropolitan models from abroad and, on the other hand, an
emerging sensitivity toward their own “cultural heritage” that might be
in need of preservation.42 With respect to the topic of this book, this
might be translated into the embrace of or the resistance to knowledge
transfer.
In their modernizing attempts, many cities aspired to a general notion
of “Europe” or the “myth of Europe.”43 This manifested itself, for
instance, in the spread of Hausmannian boulevards. In the case of Lviv
and Budapest this import from Paris served as a conscious – and highly
visible – defense against the urban model of the Austro-Hungarian capi-
tal Vienna. Other examples are the strong influence of German urban
planning in Zagreb and the implementation of sewage systems by British
engineer William Lindley in Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow, to
name only the cities that feature in this volume.44
Yet architects, engineers, journalists and local politicians often felt
uneasy. Would this import of standard models in the name of moderni-
zation not have an irreversible homogenizing effect on urban spaces all
over Europe? And would the tearing down of entire quarters not lead to
an irretrievable loss of historic architecture and thus national identity?
The Prague case study illustrates very well these tensions between
modernization and preservation. The ghetto was considered unhygienic
beyond salvation, its flattening in the 1890s a necessary step. Yet the
awareness for the historical value of urban structures increased. Novel-
ist Vilém Mrštík feared that the city’s attempt to “catch up” might lead
to a “headlong collapse of our national individuality, so that in a short
time, we will not understand what exactly about us is so valuable,” as
he warned in 1897.45 This specter of losing something specifically Czech
also marked the debate in the interwar years on how to reform Prague’s
famous castle (Giustino, Chapter 1).
We previously introduced Nathaniel Wood’s idea of the interurban
matrix made up by the increasingly large numbers of media and readers
since the mid-nineteenth century. This interurban matrix was crucial in
making city-dwellers aware of developments in other urban spaces. At
the same time, these media also looked inward, pointing out deficien-
cies but also achievements at home. Periodicals were thus spreading the
imperative of modernization well beyond the governing elites. Warsaw’s
popular magazines, for example, were constantly assessing and discuss-
ing the grade of modernization that their city had achieved. Seemingly
paradoxically, the issue of urban poverty was part of the discourse on
urban modernity. Yet, it did not go unnoticed that this modernization
 Introduction 15
effort may turn the city into a denationalized and standardized European
urban space. This was plainly at odds with the idea of Warsaw represent-
ing the “heart of Polishness,” in particular given the fact that there was
no Polish state at the time and Warsaw under Russian rule (Frysztacka,
Chapter 8).
Catalan architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch rejected the geometrical grid
of the Cerdà Plan (1859) that had been implemented in the large exten-
sion in Barcelona called Eixample. For Puig, due to its “universality,”
the Cerdà Plan lacked any kind of cultural (i.e. Catalan) specificity. Yet
modern urban planning was not incompatible or strictly opposed to the
historical fabric of a city. Puig designed a modern urban layout with
an inspiration in the vernacular. His transformation of the square Plaça
de Catalunya connected the new with the historic quarters of Barcelona
and aimed at reinstalling hierarchy in the urban space by creating a clear
center (Mallart, Chapter 10).
Hence, the “local” and the “universal” are not necessarily at odds with
one another. An instructive example of their hybridization is the career of
Hungarian artist Géza Maróti. His artistic “tool-kit” was gleaned from
a particular regional or national culture, but became easily adaptable
elsewhere, even in culturally very different urban settings, such as Mexico
City and Detroit. The motifs and patterns Maróti developed and trans-
ferred between continents were at the same time universally decipher-
able, but also offered a specific reinvented urban and/or national identity
for his customers. This demonstrates that neither the universal nor the
local are static but in constant change, and in the case of Maróti, the local
and the universal appear inseparable (Gantner, Chapter 3).
In the case of the port city of Berdyansk, situated at the southern mar-
gin of the Russian Empire, the constellation is quite different. Founded
only in 1827 on the shores of the Sea of Azov, Berdyansk had no his-
torical past to refer to while attempting to chart its path toward mod-
ernization. Trying to find its urban identity, this port city was rather
torn between defining its proper place within the Russian Empire (and
vis-à-vis its rival Odessa) and its multifold connections with Europe, in
particular through trade, enterprising businessmen and the considerable
number of foreign consuls from well over a dozen countries (Lyman and
Konstantinova, Chapter 2).

(Inter-)Urban Actors
Historical actors of different kinds were crucial for the processes of
knowledge production and exchange this volume tries to describe. This
includes urban actors such as mayors, city councilors and leading civil
servants in the cities’ administrations, as well as interurban actors such as
architects, urban planners, physicians and engineers working abroad and
well situated in international networks. New professional elites – mainly
16 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
technicians, but also bureaucrats – emerged in these local contexts. Due
to their common education, interests and networks, they were often well
connected with colleagues from other cities.
Urban and interurban actors are, of course, to be understood as ideal
types. In practice there was a considerable overlap between the two types.
These actors were ambitious, outward-looking and eager to modernize
the(ir) urban space. The exchanges they pursued were multi-directional.
In some cases, they deliberately eschewed the role model of the (imperial)
capital in their reform schemes. Not only applied urban knowledge, but
also historical actors, circulated in a multitude of ways and directions
between urban centers in Southern and Eastern Europe – and beyond.
Four chapters of this volume have a clear protagonist: the Italian
museum maker Guido Ucelli, the Hungarian artist Géza Maróti, the
Catalan art historian Josep Puig i Cadafalch and the French reformer of
zoological gardens Gustave Loisel. Other chapters feature “supporting
actors” such as the Czech hygienist Isidor Soyka, instrumental in transfer-
ring the latest German best practices in hygiene to Prague, Swiss hygien-
ist Friedrich Erismann working in Moscow, the tuberculosis-fighting
physician Lluís Sayé in Barcelona and the British entrepreneur John
Edward Greaves, who set up a reaper factory in Berdyansk. In one way
or another, these historical actors operated as cultural brokers between
institutions, cities and countries. As mediators, they were also crucial
contributors to these processes of interurban knowledge exchange. Thus,
it seems important to conceptualize the role of these interurban actors.
The question is how, given their enormous diversity in terms of their
background and agendas. They were by necessity multilingual and fre-
quent travelers, mobile and flexible, often insiders and outsiders at the
same time, and clearly aware of the potential advantages of inserting
themselves in interurban networks. How did they negotiate their individ-
ual aspirations (professional career or business interests) alongside their
“institutional” commitments, working for a municipal body, a ministry
or a museum? What made them interchange ideas with other interurban
actors? When and why did they decide not to? Clearly, more research,
both on a conceptual and empirical level is needed to adequately charac-
terize these interurban actors.46

The Material Dimension of Interurban Knowledge Exchange

We previously stressed that best practices were always adapted, altered,
combined and improved in order to fit the specific local circumstances.
It is thus of considerable interest to look at the concrete mechanisms by
which these best practices were “translated” into a different urban con-
text. This concerns the material dimension of knowledge exchange; that
is to say, the large spectrum of media that gather, convey and discuss this
genuinely urban knowledge. As we have seen, interurban networks of
 Introduction 17
knowledge exchange, both formal and informal, existed between munici-
pal governments, academics of all disciplines, engineers, architects, physi-
cians, institutions such as museums and zoological gardens and other kinds
of associations. These networks were sustained by study trips, exhibi-
tions, international congresses and fairs, prize competitions, private let-
ters and publications of all sorts ranging from books, expert reports and
catalogs to articles in journals and newspapers.
Many chapters in this volume pay attention to the material dimen-
sion in which information circulated. In most cases, this will be writ-
ten records, but it also includes all sorts of visualizations (maps, plans,
models) and quantitative information. Such a focus will allow us to
investigate how knowledge was received and appropriated by different
audiences. Archival evidence shows, for example, how Catalan architect
Puig i Cadafalch strategically sent his programmatic booklet La Plaça
de Catalunya, bursting with plans and maps, to a larger number of his
international contacts, while Catalan physician Lluís Sayé selected and
used statistical data on tuberculosis from at least half-dozen countries,
and received numerous cut-out articles from both specialist and general
media through his international network. In order to write his three fact-
packed Rapports totaling almost 600 pages for the French Ministry of
Education, zoo reformer Gustave Loisel had to devise a complex agenda
of gathering and preparing “raw” information from nearly 100 foreign
animal-keeping institutions, mostly zoos, including their budgets, archi-
tectural drawings of animals’ enclosures and photos, including postcards
of their exhibits. Warsaw’s popular weekly magazines, some of them richly
illustrated, helped their large readership to understand their own urban
space by constantly comparing and contrasting it with reports on other
European cities. The reports of consuls from the port city of Berdyansk
provided their governments in London, Brussels, Athens, Rome, Madrid,
Oslo and many other capitals with up-to-date information, pointing out
business opportunities that in turn helped to modernize the city on the
Sea of Azov. The international competition on the urban master plan
for Zagreb generated over 50 entries containing architectural drawings
and city maps, and thus served as an important platform for interurban
knowledge exchange. Even buildings such as the tuberculosis dispensary
built in the Raval quarter of Barcelona in the mid-1930s reflect the mul-
tiple influences and adaptations of both medical theories and architec-
tural styles. A focus on the materiality of interurban knowledge exchange
should be very fruitful with respect to future investigations in this field.

Conclusion
From our particular perspective from Eastern and Southern Europe, the
notions of center and periphery, of a dominating metropolis, and merely
receptive second cities, have dissolved. (The afterword of Cor Wagenaar
18 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
asks for the implications of this dissolution, going beyond our European
framework and fin-de-siècle focus). To be sure, they remain important as
actors’ categories, as they have shaped the perception and actions of our
protagonists, and we would like to stress that the symmetrical approach
we pursued should never lose sight of the multiple asymmetries of politi-
cal and economic power or the cultural influence that persisted.47 Think-
ing in terms of networks seems crucial, yet hierarchies of all sorts need to
be taken into account. As historians, we must try to grasp the dynamic of
the period in question.
The circulation of applied urban knowledge followed its own log-
ics und undercut center-periphery relationships. Often, this exchange
of knowledge bypassed the metropolis and on occasion even inverted
center-periphery trajectories. These logics of circulation are multifold, as
this introduction has tried to show, and as the chapters of this volume
describe in great detail. The interurban knowledge exchange included
a large number of fields addressing concrete problems; it was multi-
directional, highly eclectic and very much shaped by local factors (cov-
ering the entire spectrum between embracing and resisting knowledge
from outside); it was also propelled by a new class of interurban actors
and depended on networks of different sorts (institutional, personal and
combinations thereof); and it was characterized by a constant tension
between a transnational municipalism and processes of forging urban
and national identities. This eclectic appropriation of ideas and practices
from other cities often proved productive and innovative. We therefore
consider our experiment of looking at two putative peripheries to be
fruitful and promising with respect to future investigations. Our focus on
knowledge exchange has brought to light both the numerous interurban
connections and the individuality of urban spaces between Barcelona and
Berdyansk.

Notes
1. Manuel Martínez de la Escalera, “Los museos a la moderna,” Alrededor
del Mundo (March 10, 1904): 149–150; our translation. For the context
see Santiago Aragón Albillos, En la piel de un animal. El Museo de Cien-
cias Naturales y sus colecciones de taxidermia (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, Ediciones Doce Calles, 2014), 155–157.
2. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
3. Heidi Hein-Kircher, “The City and the Knowledge in East Central Europe:
Plea for a Stronger Tie-Up in Research,” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 4
(2017): 625–638, p. 633, https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442177053478.
4. Eszter Gantner and Heidi Hein-Kircher, “ ‘Emerging Cities’: Knowledge and
Urbanization in Europe’s Borderlands 1880–1945 – Introduction,” Journal
of Urban History, 43, no. 4 (2017): 575–586.
5. This historiography started off with Marjatta Hietala, Services and Urbani-
zation at the Turn of the Century: The Diffusion of Innovations (Helsinki:
 Introduction 19
Finnish Historical Society, 1987). Instructive case studies are to be found in
Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen, eds., Another Global City: Historical
Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Nicolas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin,
eds., Cities Beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to
Urban History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
6. Felix Driver and David Gilbert, “Imperial Cities: Overlapping Territories,
Intertwined Histories,” in Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity,
eds. Felix Driver and David Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1999), 1–17, p. 9.
7. Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa, “Modernizing European Cities: Techno-
logical Uniformity and Cultural Distinction,” in Urban Machinery: Inside
Modern European Cities, ed. Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2008), 1–20, pp. 10–11.
8. Jens Lachmund, “The City as Ecosystem. Paul Duvigneaud and the Ecologi-
cal Study of Brussels,” in Spatializing the History of Ecology. Sites, Journeys,
Mappings, ed. Raf de Bont and Jens Lachmund (London and New York:
Routledge, 2017), 141–161, p. 142.
9. James A. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis 94, no. 4 (2004): 654–672.
For three recent (and very different) examples of case studies see Anna Nils-
son Hammar et al., eds., Circulation of Knowledge: Explorations into the
History of Knowledge (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2018); John Krige,
ed., How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science
and Technology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
2019); Johannes Feichtinger, Anil Bhatti, and Cornelia Hülmbauer, eds.,
How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making: Interaction, Circu-
lation and the Transgression of Cultural Difference (Dordrecht/London/New
York: Springer, 2020).
10. Agustí Nieto-Galan, Science in the Public Sphere: A History of Lay Know­
ledge and Expertise (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
11. Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher and Aleksander Łupienko, “On the
Search for Best Practices: Emerging Cities and Their Transatlantic Rela-
tions,” Yearbook of Transnational History 3 (2020): 1–13. The Japanese
state, for example, sent several fact-finding missions to Europe from the
1860s onward, see Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Flughöhe der Adler. Historische
Essays zur globalen Gegenwart (München: C.H. Beck, 2017), 109.
12. Martina Henze, “Transnational Cooperation and Criminal Policy: The
Prison Reform Movement 1820s to 1950s,” in Shaping the Transnational
Sphere: Experts, Networks, and Issues (c. 1850–1930), ed. Davide Rodogno,
Bernhard Struck and Jakob Vogel (New York: Berghahn, 2014); Damiano
Matasci, L’école républicaine et l’étranger: Une histoire internationale des
réformes scolaires en France, 1870–1914 (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2015).
13. On the general process: Jörg Ganzenmüller and Tatjana Tönsmeyer, “Einlei-
tung: Vom Vorrücken des Staates in die Fläche. Ein europäisches Phänomen
des langen 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Vom Vorrücken des Staates in die Fläche:
Ein europäisches Phänomen des langen 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Jörg Ganzen-
müller and Tatjana Tönsmeyer (Köln: Böhlau, 2016), 7–32.
14. The literature on these new experts is considerable. See for example: Rodg-
ers, Atlantic Crossings; Martin Kohlrausch, Stefan Wiederkehr, and Katrin
Steffen, eds., Expert Cultures in Central Eastern Europe: The Internationali-
zation of Knowledge and the Transformation of Nation States Since World
War I (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2010); Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and
Jakob Vogel, eds. Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks, and
Issues (c. 1850–1930) (New York: Berghahn, 2014).
20 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
15. See Nathaniel Wood, “Urban Self-Identification in East Central Europe
Before the Great War: The Case of Cracow,” East Central Europe/ECE 33
(2006): 11–31; Nathaniel Wood, Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood
and the Making of Modern Cracow (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press 2010), in particular 74–78 and 192–202.
16. Urban historians have discussed this issue at large, e.g. Friedrich Lenger and
Klaus Tenfelde, eds., Die europäische Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert. Wahrneh-
mung – Entwicklung – Erosion (Köln: Böhlau, 2006).
17. Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2017), 25.
18. Pedram Dibazar et al., “Questioning Urban Modernity (Introduction Special
Issue),” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 6 (2013): 643–658,
p. 655.
19. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (2000):
1–29, pp. 1–2.
20. Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930 (Bue-
nos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1999).
21. To cite but two recent monographs: Anindita Ghosh, Claiming the City:
Protest, Crime, and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1860–1920 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016); Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian
Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920
(London: Routledge, 2016).
22. John Griffiths, “Were There Municipal Networks in the British World
c.1890–1939?” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37,
no. 4 (2009): 575–597, p. 581.
23. Göran Therborn, “Entangled Modernities,” European Journal of Social
Theory 6, no. 3 (2003): 293–305: Conrad, What is Global History? 60.
24. Hans van der Loo and Willem van Rijen, Modernisierung. Projekt und Para-
dox (München: dtv, 1992), 11–12, 45.
25. This has been pointed out by a number of urban historians, e.g. Martin
Baumeister and Rainer Liedtke, “Probleme mit der ‘europäischen Stadt’:
Städte in Südeuropa,” Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte 1
(2009): 5–14, p. 7.
26. See the abstract of her paper “Medieval Cities and Towns in East Central
Europe as Trading Hubs in a Global Perspective,” for the conference “The
Pursuit of Global Urban History: A Dialogue Between Two Fields,” Leices-
ter, July 2019.
27. Markian Prokopovych et al., Special Issue “Urban History in East Cen-
tral Europe,” East Central Europe/ECE 33, no. 1–2 (2006); Kohlrausch,
Wiederkehr and Steffen, eds., Expert Cultures in Central Eastern Europe;
Markian Prokopovych, ed., Special Issue: “Thematic Block on East Euro-
pean Cities,” Urban History 40, no. 1 (2013); Jan C. Behrends and Martin
Kohlrausch, eds., Races to Modernity: Metropolitan Aspirations in Eastern
Europe, 1890–1940 (Budapest and New York: Central European University
Press, 2014).
28. Hein-Kircher, “The City and the Knowledge,” 3.
29. Ibid., and see the case studies of Jörg Gebhard, Lublin: Eine polnische Stadt
im Hinterhof der Moderne, 1815–1914 (Köln: Böhlau, 2006); Frank Hen-
schel, “Das Fluidum der Stadt . . .” Urbane Lebenswelten in Kassa / Košice /
Kaschau zwischen Sprachenvielfalt und Magyarisierung 1867–1918 (Göt-
tingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017).
30. Cities in the Ottoman Empire were certainly also part of interurban know­­
ledge exchanges; see Nora Lafi, “Mediterranean Connections: The Circulation
 Introduction 21
of Municipal Knowledge and Practices at the Time of the Ottoman Reforms,
c.1830–1910,” in Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the
Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000, ed. Pierre-Yves Saunier and
Shane Ewen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 35–50.
31. See, for example, Baumeister und Liedtke, “Probleme”; Martin Baumeister,
“Grenzen der Stadt: Masseneinwanderung und Öffentlichkeit in Barcelona
und Turin 1950 bis 1975,” in Die europäische Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert.
Wahrnehmung – Entwicklung – Erosion, ed. Friedrich Lenger and Klaus
Tenfelde (Köln: Böhlau, 2006), 417–436; Anna Pelka, Urbaner Wandel
und Öffentlichkeit: Die Peripherien Madrids und Barcelonas in der Zeit der
Franco-Diktatur (Köln: Böhlau, 2019), 20–22.
32. For a more detailed discussion of the term “periphery” in the urban history
(of science), see Oliver Hochadel, and Agustí Nieto-Galan, “How to Write
an Urban History of STM on the ‘Periphery’,” Technology and Culture 56,
no. 4 (2016): 978–988; Oliver Hochadel, “Introducción: Circulación de con-
ocimiento, espacios urbanos e historia global. Reflexiones historiográficas
sobre las conexiones entre Barcelona y Buenos Aires,” in Saberes transatlán-
ticos. Barcelona y Buenos Aires: Conexiones, confluencias, comparaciones
(1850–1940), ed. Álvaro Girón, Oliver Hochadel and Gustavo Vallejo
(Aranjuez: Doce Calles, 2017), 15–37.
33. Maiken Umbach, “A Tale of Second Cities: Autonomy, Culture, and the Law
in Hamburg and Barcelona in the Late Nineteenth Century,” The American
Historical Review 110, no. 3 (2005): 659–692; Shane Ewen, “Transnational
Municipalism in a Europe of Second Cities: Rebuilding Birmingham with
Municipal Networks,” in Another Global City: Historical Explorations into
the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000, ed. Pierre-Yves Saunier
and Shane Ewen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 101–117; Jerome
I. Hodos, Second Cities: Globalization and Local Politics in Manchester and
Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); Juliana Adel-
man, “Second City of Science? Dublin as a Centre of Calculation in the Brit-
ish Imperial Context, 1886–1912,” in Urban Histories of Science, ed. Oliver
Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan (London: Routledge, 2018), 122–140.
34. Gantner and Hein-Kircher, “Emerging Cities.”
35. Conrad, What is Global History?; for the history of science, see Kapil Raj,
Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge
in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
36. Hochadel and Nieto-Galan, “How to Write an Urban History”; Oliver
Hochadel, “Periphery and Metropolis: Some Historiographical Reflections
on the Urban History of Science,” in Science in the Metropolis. Vienna in
Transnational Context, 1848–1918, ed. Mitchell G. Ash (London: Rout-
ledge, 2020), 43–63.
37. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison:
Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45,
no. 1 (2006): 30–50, p. 37.
38. The literature is enormous. See, among the more recent publications, e.g.
Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak, eds., Making Cities
Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). A good guide is Conrad, What is Global
History?
39. Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann, “Global History and the Spatial
Turn,” Journal of Global History 5, no. 1 (2010): 149–170, p. 155.
40. Claus Møller Jørgensen, “Nineteenth-Century Transnational Urban His-
tory,” Urban History 44, no. 3 (2017): 544–563, p. 558.
22 Gantner, Hein-Kircher and Hochadel
41. Emily Gunzburger Makas and Tanja Damljanovic Conley, eds., Capital
Cities in the Aftermath of Empires: Planning in Central and Southeastern
Europe (London: Routledge, 2010).
42. Cathleen M. Giustino, “Prague,” in Capital Cities in the Aftermath of
Empires: Planning in Central and Southeastern Europe, ed. Emily Gunz-
burger Makas and Tanja Damljanovic Conley (London: Routledge, 2010),
157–173, p. 164; Nathaniel Wood, “Conclusion: Not Just the National:
Modernity and the Myth of Europe in the Capital Cities of Central and
Southeastern Europe,” in idem, 258–269, p. 264.
43. Wood, Becoming Metropolitan, 193; Wood, “Conclusion: Not Just the
National,” 260.
44. Harald R. Stühlinger, “Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand: Les Promenades de
Paris, 1867–1873,” in Manuale zum Städtebau. Die Systematisierung des
Wissens von der Stadt 1870–1950, ed. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani et al.
(Berlin: DOM Publishers), 30–49.
45. Vilém Mrštík, “Bestia Triumphans,” Rozhledy 6 (1896–1897): 588.
46. For a possible starting point, see the dossier edited by Antje Dietze and
Katja Naumann, “Revisiting Transnational Actors from a Spatial Perspec-
tive,” European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 25, no. 3–4
(2018): 415–430. Also see David Pretel and Lino Camprubí, eds. Technology
and Globalisation: Networks of Experts in World History (Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018).
47. As Nygård and Strang put it with respect to intellectual exchanges: “the
emphasis on hybridity, entanglement, and reciprocity that has dominated
recent discussion on transnational history should be complemented with an
acknowledgment of center – periphery tensions and the asymmetrical nature
of transnational cultural interaction”; Stefan Nygård and Johan Strang,
“Facing Asymmetry – Nordic Intellectuals and Center-Periphery Dynamics
in the European Cultural Space,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, no. 1
(2016): 75–98, p. 96.
Part I

Building a Modern City

Networks in Urban Planning
1 The Ghetto and the Castle
Modern Urban Design and
Knowledge Transfer in Historic
Prague Before and After 1918
Cathleen M. Giustino

Prague is an old city with a long history. It dates back to the ninth century
when Prince Bořivoj built the first castle on one of the surrounding hills
while below it, alongside the Vltava River, settlement and trade began to
develop. In the decades leading up to World War I, Prague was the capital
of Bohemia, a province in the multi-national Habsburg Monarchy. By
then, centuries of native and foreign rulers had bequeathed the historic
urban center a dense network of winding streets and stone buildings dat-
ing from the Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque eras. The late nineteenth
century was a time of growing national conflict in Prague. During it,
Czechs dominated the levers of municipal power in the Bohemian capi-
tal, while Germans were far less involved in City Hall decisions, but not
entirely absent. Local medical experts were eager to learn about modern
urban design practices in foreign countries and apply the most useful of
them to municipal plans for the improvement of public health in Prague.
After World War I, Prague was named the capital city of the new inde-
pendent state of Czechoslovakia. In the interwar period, Czechs contin-
ued to dominate decision-making about Prague’s built landscape, but
by then, the constellation of professional interest groups active in the
shaping of the city’s physiognomy had changed. Architects and others
interested in the preservation of built heritage were now very involved.
Their reception of foreign ideas about modern urban design was mixed
compared to that of the pre-war medical experts; some were very enthu-
siastic, others were resistant.
Both before and after 1918, nationalism played a role in the construc-
tion of Czech attitudes toward the transfer of knowledge on urban mat-
ters but, as this chapter will show, so did a number of other important
factors, including both the positions of experts, who competed for author-
ity on a playing field of power, and the abilities of insiders and outsid-
ers to work together.1 To shed light on these reasons for differing Czech
stances toward foreign modern urban design practices, this chapter will
discuss two important projects in historic Prague – one carried out prior
to World War I and the other conceived during the interwar period. For
the pre-war example, the late nineteenth-century urban redevelopment
26 Cathleen M. Giustino
of Josefov, Prague’s former Jewish ghetto, will be examined. This sig-
nificant modernization project, which tremendously changed the archi-
tectural and social composition of part of the city center, was mostly
completed by 1914.2 For the interwar example, the work of the now
world-renowned Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik on the reconstruction
of the Prague Castle, a former imperial seat of power overlooking the
symbolic city center, will be explored. While Plečnik’s brilliant designs
for renovations inside the Castle walls were largely realized, his plans for
streets leading to those walls remained unbuilt.3
At first glance, it might seem incongruous to compare the modern
urban design histories of a former ghetto and a castle, one once the home
of a persecuted minority and the other a past residence of kings and
Holy Roman Emperors. Yet, the two projects shared something signifi-
cant in common: both were perceived as important for the projection of
Czech national status and power through the architecture of the capital
city, and both garnered attention from university-trained experts who
used the spaces of the Bohemian capital in their quests for leverage and
authority.4
Through examination of urban plans for Prague’s former Jewish ghetto
and the Castle, we can observe a process in which professionals, some
emerging and some established, used the architecture of a historic city to
promote and empower a consolidating nation and also themselves.5 Stud-
ying expert interest groups is also a useful way to move beyond reifying
notions of monolithic nations and expand appreciation of negotiation
and struggle in the construction of national identities. Additionally, it
opens up methodological possibilities for the study of knowledge transfer
by calling attention to ways in which the shifting priorities, positions and
personalities of experts inside and outside of nations can affect receptiv-
ity to foreign ideas and practices.6

Historic Prague and Its Place in the Modernizing World

In the decades before World War I, the Austrian Municipal Statute of
1850 specified the duties and powers of Prague’s local government.7 The
Statute gave municipal managers in the Bohemian capital significant
autonomy over the administration of public health, sanitation, streets
and buildings, all important aspects of modern urban design. It created
two elected representative bodies, the City Council and the Board of
Aldermen. They met in the City Hall on the Old Town Square, a political
and symbolic center in historic Prague and an important place for the
gathering and dissemination of knowledge about science and the city.
Prior to World War I, representatives of municipal Prague were elected
according to a very narrow suffrage, allowing only a small oligarchy of
men access to local parliamentary power. Annual tax payments and gender
 The Ghetto and the Castle 27
determined who enjoyed the citizens’ right to vote or run for municipal
positions. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Czechs always
controlled Prague’s elected municipal bodies. Their domination over the
levers of local power was further strengthened following Mayor Tomáš
Černý’s 1882 “Golden Slavic Prague” speech. His words so affronted the
small number of German elected representatives in the Aldermen Council
(five out of a total of 90 representatives) that they gave up their seats,
with only one German again holding elected municipal power between
then and the start of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.8
The German absence made Prague’s City Hall a local bastion of Czech
power used to shape the city’s spaces as its managers argued best pro-
moted their nation’s interests. Still, this was no system of monolithic con-
trol. Two Czech political parties, the Old Czechs and the Young Czechs,
competed against one another for domination over municipal resources.
The parties, both of them liberal and national, argued heatedly over
many issues, most notably over the role of religion in education and gov-
ernment. The Young Czechs, in contrast to the Old Czechs, wanted strict
separation of church and state.
Still, despite their differences, the two political parties had something in
common. They were united in their desire to participate in the advances
of the industrializing, modernizing West – or at least in their readiness
to use the idea of belonging to the progressive world order as a political
resource. The Old Czechs were not so “old” that they spurned participa-
tion in scientific progress; the Young Czechs were not so nationalist that
they refused to learn from other parts of Europe, including Germany.9
The fact that neither of these pre-war Czech political parties was averse
to foreign knowledge can be seen in the history of the urban redevelop-
ment of Prague’s former Jewish ghetto, where the city’s poorest residents
lived – many of them Christians – after the full emancipation of Prague’s
Jews in 1859. This was a “sanitation” project entailing extensive demoli-
tion and reconstruction, in addition to population transfer.10
In order to appreciate the history of the tearing down of Prague’s
Jewish town, it is necessary to consider the physical borders of historic
Prague prior to 1918. In the final decades of Austro-Hungarian rule, the
Bohemian capital consisted of a much smaller area than after the break-
up of the old monarchy and the creation of Czechoslovakia. Under the
terms of the 1850 Municipal Statute, its borders included the five historic
wards of Old Town, New Town, the Little Side, Hradčany and Josefov.
The latter, Josefov, contained Prague’s former Jewish ghetto. By 1910, the
borders of municipal Prague, a relatively small urban area, had expanded
to include the new wards of Vyšehrad, Libeň and Holešovice.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Bohemia was a place
of intense industrialization and migration from the countryside to the
city, as people sought work following the abolition of serfdom under the
28 Cathleen M. Giustino
monarchy in 1848. These momentous changes contributed to the growth
of an “iron ring” of suburbs with factories and workers’ housing that
encircled historic Prague. The surrounding suburbs, which sat at a higher
elevation than the center, each had their own independent municipal
governments.
The industry and population growth in the “iron ring” challenged
public health conditions in the historic city, which was built down along
the banks of the polluted Vltava River where stone houses, narrow
streets and shallow, wooden sewers had been constructed to accommo-
date the needs of a much smaller, pre-industrial population. The historic
city and the new industrial suburbs made little effort to coordinate their
municipal projects. Streets were built in the new areas of development
without considering their relations to established arteries in the historic
core and in a manner that obstructed the flow of traffic and fresh air to
the increasingly toxic center, contributing to worsening health condi-
tions for its residents.
The declining level of public hygiene in historic Prague, particularly
in the ward of Josefov, the former Jewish ghetto, led municipal lead-
ers to raise concerns about the well-being of the local population. Very
importantly, those concerns became linked to dire warnings about the
Czech nation lagging behind the progressive world order. This language
of backwardness, while undoubtedly at times the result of genuine worry,
also functioned as a tool of interest-group struggle when members of the
Young Czech and Old Czech parties competed against one another for
municipal power.
Leaders of both parties compared their city to other urban centers in
Europe and elsewhere in the world, painting a bleak picture. For exam-
ple, in a speech he gave in December 1878, Julius Grégr, a leading Young
Czech, told his audience,

Even when one does not consider the number of dead in hospitals,
Prague appears to be, in spite of everything, the fourth most unhealthy
city in Europe. Only three cities compete with Prague for this sad
precedence and, moreover, even two cities outside of Europe that are
famous for their unusually poor health, Bombay and Madras, some-
times demonstrate more favorable death rates.11

In their struggle for power, both parties made announcements about

how they would not only improve health in the Bohemian capital,
but also advance the Czech nation’s standing in the progressive world
order. This contributed to their willingness to pursue the urban redevel-
opment of Josefov, Prague’s former Jewish ghetto, a project that local
medical experts, using scientific measures and foreign knowledge, eagerly
promoted.
 The Ghetto and the Castle 29
Medical Experts and the “Finis Ghetto” Plan
Prior to 1900, medical experts were the university-trained specialists with
the most interest in and most influence over urban planning in munici-
pal Prague. In 1877, Czech medical experts called for the institutionali-
zation of their knowledge in the City Hall. In response, in May 1878,
the City Council created the Municipal Health Commission, which was
given responsibility for monitoring public health challenges and pursuing
solutions to them. Initially, the commission included only representatives
elected to positions in the City Hall, but before long, experts in medi-
cine, most of them Czech, were appointed to join its deliberations. Czech
architects and others who were knowledgeable and passionate about his-
toric Prague, including art historians and archeologists, were not asked
to participate; nor at that time did they show much interest in being
involved or in aspects of urban planning.
In March 1879, a report put out by the new commission called on sci-
ence to help ease Prague’s plight. It stated that,

Should the public sanitation service not fall into stagnation, but
rather experience a continuous transformation corresponding to pro-
gressive science and experience, then the constant contact with scien-
tific powers, which promote and strive for better hygienic standards
in various areas, appears urgently required.12

The institutionalization of medical expertise in Prague deepened in

November 1880 when the municipality appointed its first public health
director, the Czech physician Dr. Ignác Pelz. In 1884, Dr. Jindřich Záhoř,
also a Czech physician, replaced him. Záhoř, like other medical experts
in Prague, was familar with contemporary theories about the spread of
disease, including those of Max von Pettenkofer and Robert Koch in Ger-
many. He learned much about these theories from Isidor Soyka.
Soyka played an important role in the transfer of foreign knowledge
about public health and hygiene to Prague. As a Jew who could write
in Czech, but primarily worked in the German language and with Ger-
man institutions, Soyka did not neatly fit into standard categories used
to describe Prague’s complex ethnic mix. Regardless of his German ties,
he had a good relationship with Záhoř and other Czech members of the
Municipal Health Commission, helping them to appreciate and spread
the ideas of von Pettenkofer and Koch from Germany to the Bohemian
capital.
In 1874, Soyka completed his studies in medicine at Prague’s Charles-
Ferdinand University, which had not yet been divided along national
lines. From 1879–1884, he worked as an assistant to von Pettenkofer
in the latter’s Institute of Hygiene, which formed part of the Medical
30 Cathleen M. Giustino
Faculty at the University of Munich. There he focused on the study of the
spread of disease through soil and water, synthesizing information from
von Pettenkofer’s and Koch’s theories. In 1880, he also earned a degree
in construction hygiene (Bauhygiene), which involved studying building
from the perspective of public health and sanitation, at the Technical Uni-
versity in Munich, going on to teach the subject there from 1880–1883.13
By the time that Soyka returned to Prague in 1884, the Charles-Ferdinand
University had been divided into Czech and German halves. He was
appointed professor at the German half, where he founded the first Insti-
tute of Hygiene in the Bohemian capital. There he taught “sanitation”
(die Assanierung; asanace), among other subjects. After his appointment
in Prague, he traveled abroad to various meetings pertaining to public
health. For example, in 1884, he attended the Hygiene Exhibition in Lon-
don, and in 1885, he spent two weeks at Robert Koch’s institute in Berlin.
In addition to his teaching and research activities, Soyka also regularly
participated in municipal meetings regarding public hygiene. He served
as a respected and respectful member of the Municipal Health Commis-
sion and helped to transfer foreign knowledge important for modern
urban design and public health to Prague until his death in 1889.14
In 1885, Soyka helped Záhoř, who was still Prague’s director of public
health, and Václav Janovský, a Czech physician in the Municipal Health
Commission, to write the annual report on that year’s commission activi-
ties. Using records from municipal health inspectors, who gathered sta-
tistics about illnesses in the individual wards of municipal Prague, the
participants in this collaborative effort counted and compared cases of
infectious diseases and deaths resulting from them in each part of the
city. The diseases included smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles,
whooping cough and typhus.
Based on this comparison and knowledge about the growing science of
hygiene at home and abroad, the report concluded that Josefov had more
than twice the number of cases of sickness and death due to infectious
disease than the other wards in Prague, and that the diseases threaten-
ing residents throughout the urban center had, in many cases, developed
in the former ghetto and spread from there. In order to improve public
health in the Bohemian capital, the report argued that it was necessary
to completely demolish and rebuild Josefov. This was a bold and striking
conclusion. In summarizing it, the report stated, “Only a radical method
can help, that is, tearing down the ward and rebuilding it on the founda-
tion of modern hygiene and at state expense.”15
In the call for the radical urban redevelopment of Josefov, Záhoř and
his colleagues in the medical profession made reference to examples
of promising modern urban design and public health practices taking
place in other European cities, including Toulon, Naples and Florence.
Záhoř had not studied or worked abroad, as Soyka had, but he wanted
to deepen his knowledge of the science of hygiene in other cities, so in
 The Ghetto and the Castle 31
July 1885, he traveled to Berlin, Frankfurt-am-Main and Nuremberg to
investigate public health measures in those cities.16 Reports on his trav-
els were published on the front pages of the newspaper Pokrok (Pro-
gress), one of the daily publications of the Old Czech Party, thereby
helping to share knowledge of foreign urban practices with the public.
While his reports did not state why he had traveled to those particu-
lar cities and skipped others, they provided insights into what he had
learned from – and what he wanted other Czechs to learn from – his
travels. For example, he described his visit to the modern sanitation
and water works of Berlin with the important German engineer, James
Hobrecht, as one of his guides. He shared his great enthusiasm for how
successful this modern technology was at cleaning the polluted waters
of the German capital. “If I had not seen it with my own eyes. . . .
I would never have been convinced that so much waste water could be
without local health problems,” he wrote. He was impressed that he
barely noticed any bad smell. From his trips to Berlin and Frankfurt-am-
Main, Záhoř concluded that, on account of Prague’s hilly terrain, the
Bohemian capital would need a different solution for its sanitation and
water works.17
After accepting the Municipal Health Commission’s radical conclusion
that Josefov needed to be torn down and rebuilt, in October 1886, City
Hall officials announced that they would hold a competition for the best
plan for the urban redevelopment of the former ghetto and neighboring
parts of the Old Town. Four months later, on 22 February 1887, the
winning design was announced. It was entitled “Finis Ghetto” or “The
End of the Ghetto.” Alfred Hurtig (a municipal geometrician), Matěj
Strunc (an architect), and Jan Hejda (a municipal engineer) designed it.
They left no records about what inspired their design. It included a wide,
straight boulevard that ran through the middle of Josefov in a manner
reminiscent of Hausmann’s Paris and a street that encircled the western
side of it in a way that shared some resemblance to Vienna’s Ringstrasse
(see Figure 1.1).
A picture of Hurtig’s “Finis Ghetto” plan was printed in only one
place. This was the April 1887 issue of the illustrated weekly Golden
Prague (Zlatá Praha), a middle-class Czech publication. The brief and
anonymous commentary accompaning the plan is worth noting, as it
included statements that projected an image of the Czech nation’s infe-
rior position within a progressive world order. It suggested that Josefov
was an embarassment to Czechs and a cause of loss of respect for them
among advanced Westerners. The author denigrated the old ghetto as a
pocket of Oriental backwardness near the heart of Prague, saying:

on the right bank [of the Vltava] stands the monumental building of
the Rudolfinum and behind this rich entrance to a modern city, in
close proximity, is the repulsive labyrinth of twisting, narrow streets
32 Cathleen M. Giustino

Figure 1.1 The “Finis Ghetto” plan, Prague 1887.

Source: From Zlatá Praha, 4 (1887): 348; private collection of Cathleen M. Giustino

filled with foul-smelling odors from gutters, smoke gushing forth

from low chimneys, and animated figures and scenes, which look as
if they were carried to Prague straight from the Orient, from some-
where in Baghdad.18
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 HOW

THEY SUCCEEDED
 HOW
THEY SUCCEEDED

LIFE STORIES of SUCCESSFUL

M E N TO L D b y T H E M S E LV E S

B y O R I S O N S W E TT M A R D E N

EDITOR of “SUCCESS.” AUTHOR of “WINNING OUT,” ETC., ETC. ❧

ILLUSTRATED

LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY BOSTON ❧

C O P Y R I G H T,
1901, By
LOTHROP
PUBLISHING
C O M P A N Y.

ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

PAGE

MARSHALL FIELD 19
“Determined not to remain poor” 20
“Saved my Earnings, and Attended 20
strictly to Business”
“I always thought I would be a 21
Merchant”
An Opportunity 21
A Cash basis 23
“Every Purchaser must be enabled to 24
feel secure”
The Turning-Point 25
Qualities that make for Success 27
A College Education and Business 27
 CHAPTER II

BELL TELEPHONE TALK 30

HINTS ON SUCCESS BY
ALEXANDER G. BELL.
A Night Worker 30
The Subject of Success 31
Perseverance applied to a Practical 32
End
Concentration of Purpose 34
Young American Geese 36
Unhelpful Reading 36
Inventions in America 37
The Orient 38
Environment and Heredity 38
Professor Bell’s Life Story 40
“I will make the World Hear it” 41

CHAPTER III

WHY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 44

LIKE HELEN GOULD
A Face Full of Character 45
Her Ambitions and Aims 45
A Most Charming Charity 46
Her Practical Sympathy for the Less 49
Favored
Personal Attention to an Unselfish 52
Service
Her Views upon Education 55
The Evil of Idleness 56
Her Patriotism 56
“Our Helen” 59
“America” 60
Unheralded Benefactions 60
Her Personality 63

CHAPTER IV

PHILIP D. ARMOUR’S BUSINESS 65

CAREER
Footing it to California 68
The Ditch 70
He enters the Grain Market 71
Mr. Armour’s Acute Perception of the 72
Commercial Conditions for Building
up a Great Business
System and Good Measure 73
Methods 74
The Turning-Point 75
Truth 75
A Great Orator and a Great Charity 75
Ease in His Work 77
A Business King 78
Training Youth for Business 79
Prompt to Act 82
Foresight 83
Forearmed against Panic 84
Some Secrets of Success 85
 CHAPTER V

WHAT MISS MARY E. PROCTOR 87

DID TO POPULARIZE
ASTRONOMY
Audiences are Appreciative 88
Lectures to Children 89
A Lesson in Lecturing 90
The Stereopticon 91
“Stories from Starland” 93
Concentration of Attention 94

CHAPTER VI

THE BOYHOOD EXPERIENCE OF 96

PRESIDENT SCHURMAN OF
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
A Long Tramp to School 98
He Always Supported Himself 100
The Turning-Point of his Life 101
A Splendid College Record 103

CHAPTER VII

THE STORY OF JOHN 105

WANAMAKER
His Capital at Fourteen 106
Tower Hall Clothing Store 107
His Ambition and Power as an 108
Organizer at Sixteen
The Y. M. C. A. 109
Oak Hall 109
A Head Built for Business 110
His Relation to Customers 111
The Merchant’s Organizing Faculty 113
Attention to Details 115
The Most Rigid Economy 115
Advertising 116
Seizing Opportunities 117
Push and Persistence 117
Balloons 119
“To what, Mr. Wanamaker, do you 120
Attribute your Great Success?”
His Views on Business 121
Public Service 124
Invest in Yourself 124
At Home 126

CHAPTER VIII

GIVING UP FIVE THOUSAND A 129

YEAR TO BECOME A
SCULPTOR

CHAPTER IX
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 139
BUSINESS POINTERS BY
DARIUS OGDEN MILLS.
Work 139
Self-Dependence 140
Thrift 141
Expensive Habits—Smoking 141
Forming an Independent Business 142
Judgment
The Multiplication of Opportunities 142
To-day in America
Where is One’s Best Chance? The 143
Knowledge of Men
The Bottom of the Ladder 144
The Beneficent Use of Capital 145
Wholesome Discipline of Earning and 146
Spending
Personal: A Word about Cheap 146
Hotels

CHAPTER X

NORDICA: WHAT IT COSTS TO 149

BECOME A QUEEN OF SONG
The Difficulties 150
“The World was Mine, if I would 152
Work”
“It put New Fire into me” 154
“I was Traveling on Air” 156
In Europe 159
“Why don’t you Sing in Grand 161
Opera?”
This was her Crowning Triumph 162
She was Indispensable in “Aida” 166
The Kindness of Frau Wagner 167
Musical Talent of American Girls 169
The Price of Fame 170

CHAPTER XI

HOW HE WORKED TO SECURE A 171

FOOT-HOLD WILLIAM DEAN
HOWELLS.
A Lofty Ideal 172
Acquiring a Literary Style 174
My Workshop 175
How to Choose Between Words 177
The Fate following Collaboration 179
Consul at Venice 180
My Literary Experience 182
As to a Happy Life 184

CHAPTER XII

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 185

His Early Dream and Purpose 186
School Days 188
A Raft of Hoop Poles 191
The Odor of Oil 192
His First Ledger and the Items in it 193
$10,000 196
He Remembered the Oil 197
Keeping his Head 197
There was Money in a Refinery 198
Standard Oil 200
Mr. Rockefeller’s Personality 201
At the Office 202
Foresight 203
Hygiene 204
At Home 205
Philanthropy 206
Perseverance 207
A Genius for Money-Making 207

CHAPTER XIII

THE AUTHOR OF THE BATTLE 209

HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC HER
VIEWS OF EDUCATION FOR
YOUNG WOMEN.
“Little Miss Ward” 211
She was Married to a Reformer 212
Story of the “Battle Hymn of the 214
Republic”
“Eighty Years Young” 215
The Ideal College 217

CHAPTER XIV
A TALK WITH EDISON 220
DRAMATIC INCIDENTS IN HIS
EARLY LIFE.
The Library 221
A Chemical Newsboy 223
Telegraphy 225
His Use of Money 227
Inventions 228
His Arrival at the Metropolis 231
Mental Concentration 232
Twenty Hours a Day 233
A Run for Breakfast 234
Not by accident and Not for Fun 235
“I like it—I hate it” 236
Doing One Thing Eighteen Hours is 237
the Secret
Possibilities in the Electrical Field 238
Only Six Hundred Inventions 238
His Courtship and his Home 239

CHAPTER XV

A FASCINATING STORY BY 241

GENERAL LEW WALLACE.
A Boyhood of Wasted Opportunities 242
His Boyhood Love for History and 244
Literature
A Father’s Fruitful Warning 245
A Manhood of Splendid Effort 246
“The Regularity of the Work was a 247
Splendid Drill for me”
Self-Education by Reading and 247
Literary Composition
“The Fair God” 249
The Origin of “Ben-Hur” 250
Influence of the Story of the Christ 251
upon the Author

CHAPTER XVI

CARNEGIE AS A METAL WORKER 253

Early Work and Wages 254
Colonel Anderson’s Books 255
His First Glimpse of Paradise 256
Introduced to a Broom 258
An Expert Telegrapher 259
What Employers Think of Young Men 261
The Right Men in Demand 262
How to Attract Attention 263
Sleeping-Car Invention 264
The Work of a Millionaire 266
An Oil Farm 267
Iron Bridges 268
Homestead Steel Works 269
A Strengthening Policy 270
Philanthropy 271
“The Misfortune of Being Rich Men’s 273
Sons”
 CHAPTER XVII

JOHN B. HERRESHOFF, THE 276

YACHT BUILDER
PART I.
“Let the Work Show” 278
The Voyage of Life 279
A Mother’s Mighty Influence 280
Self Help 281
Education 282
Apprentices 283
Prepare to Your Utmost: then Do 284
Your Best
Present Opportunities 284
Natural Executive Ability 285
The Development of Power 286
“My Mother” 287
A Boat-Builder in Youth 288
He Would Not be Discouraged 288
The Sum of it All 289
PART II. What the Herreshoff
Brothers have been Doing.
Racing Jay Gould 291
The “Stiletto” 293
The Blind Brother 296
Personality of John B. Herreshoff 297
Has he a Sixth Sense? 299
Seeing with His Fingers 300
Brother Nat 301
 CHAPTER XVIII

A SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST: FAME 304

AFTER FIFTY PRACTICAL
HINTS TO YOUNG AUTHORS,
BY AMELIA E. BARR.
Value of Biblical and Imaginative 305
Literature
Renunciation 306
Delightful Studies 307
Fifteen Hours a Day 308
An Accident 309
Vocation 310
Words of Counsel 310

CHAPTER XIX

HOW THEODORE THOMAS 314

BROUGHT THE PEOPLE
NEARER TO MUSIC
“I was Not an Infant Prodigy” 315
Beginning of the Orchestra 316
Music had No Hold on the Masses 320
Working Out His Idea 323
The Chief Element of his Success 326

CHAPTER XX
JOHN BURROUGHS AT HOME: 327
THE HUT ON THE HILL TOP

CHAPTER XXI

VREELAND’S ROMANTIC STORY 341

HOW HE CAME TO
TRANSPORT A MILLION
PASSENGERS A DAY.

CHAPTER XXII

HOW JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY 357

CAME TO BE MASTER OF THE
HOOSIER DIALECT
Thrown on His Own Resources 357
Why he Longed to be a Baker 359
Persistence 361
Twenty Years of Rejected 362
Manuscripts
A College Education 364
Riley’s Popularity 365
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE

THE GREAT INTEREST manifested in the life-stories of successful

men and women, which have been published from time to time in
the magazine Success, has actuated their production in book form.
Many of these sketches have been revised and rewritten, and new
ones have been added. They all contain the elements that make
men and women successful; and they are intended to show that
character, energy, and an indomitable ambition will succeed in the
world, and that in this land, where all men are born equal and have
an equal chance in life, there is no reason for despair. I believe that
the ideal book for youth should deal with concrete examples; for
that which is taken from real life is far more effective than that
which is culled from fancy. Character-building, its uplifting,
energizing force, has been made the basic principle of this work.
To all who have aided me I express a grateful acknowledgment;
and to none more than to those whose life-stories are here related
as a lesson to young people. Among those who have given me
special assistance in securing those life-stories are, Mr. Harry Steele
Morrison, Mr. J. Herbert Welch, Mr. Charles H. Garrett, Mr. Henry
Irving Dodge, and Mr. Jesse W. Weik. I am confident that the
remarkable exhibit of successful careers made in this book—careers
based on sound business principles and honesty—will meet with
appreciation on the part of the reading public.
Orison Swett Marden.
I

MARSHALL FIELD

T HIS world-renowned merchant is not easily accessible to

interviews, and he seeks no fame for his business achievements.
Yet, there is no story more significant, none more full of
encouragement and inspiration for youth.
In relating it, as he told it, I have removed my own interrogations,
so far as possible, from the interview.
“I was born in Conway, Massachusetts,” he said, “in 1835. My
father’s farm was among the rocks and hills of that section, and not
very fertile. All the people were poor in those days. My father was a
man who had good judgment, and he made a success out of the
farming business. My mother was of a more intellectual bent. Both
my parents were anxious that their boys should amount to
something in life, and their interest and care helped me.
“I had but few books, scarcely any to speak of. There was not
much time for literature. Such books as we had, I made use of.
“I had a leaning toward business, and took up with it as early as
possible. I was naturally of a saving disposition: I had to be. Those
were saving times. A dollar looked very big to us boys in those days;
and as we had difficult labor in earning it, we did not quickly spend
it. I however,
 DETERMINED NOT TO REMAIN POOR.”

“Did you attend both school and college?”

“I attended the common and high schools at home, but not long. I
had no college training. Indeed, I cannot say that I had much of any
public school education. I left home when seventeen years of age,
and of course had not time to study closely.
“My first venture in trade was made as clerk in a country store at
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where everything was sold, including dry-
goods. There I remained for four years, and picked up my first
knowledge of business. I
 SAVED MY EARNINGS AND ATTENDED STRICTLY TO BUSINESS,

and so made those four years valuable to me. Before I went West,
my employer offered me a quarter interest in his business if I would
remain with him. Even after I had been here several years, he wrote
and offered me a third interest if I would go back.
“But I was already too well placed. I was always interested in the
commercial side of life. To this I bent my energies; and
 I ALWAYS THOUGHT I WOULD BE A MERCHANT.

“In Chicago, I entered as a clerk in the dry-goods house of Cooley,

Woodsworth & Co., in South Water street. There was no guarantee
at that time that this place would ever become the western
metropolis; the town had plenty of ambition and pluck, but the
possibilities of greatness were hardly visible.”
It is interesting to note in this connection how closely the story of
Mr. Field’s progress is connected with Chicago’s marvelous growth.
The city itself in its relations to the West, was
 AN OPPORTUNITY.

A parallel, almost exact, may be drawn between the individual

career and the growth of the town. Chicago was organized in 1837,
two years after Mr. Field was born on the far-off farm in New
England, and the place then had a population of a little more than
four thousand. In 1856, when Mr. Field, fully equipped for a
successful mercantile career, became a resident of the future
metropolis of the West, the population had grown to little more than
eighty-four thousand. Mr. Field’s prosperity advanced with the
growth of the city; with Chicago he was stricken but not crushed by
the great fire of 1871; and with Chicago he advanced again to
higher achievement and far greater prosperity than before the
calamity.
“What were your equipments for success when you started as a
clerk here in Chicago, in 1856?”
“Health and ambition, and what I believe to be sound principles;”
answered Mr. Field. “And here I found that in a growing town, no
one had to wait for promotion. Good business qualities were
promptly discovered, and men were pushed forward rapidly.
“After four years, in 1860, I was made a partner, and in 1865,
there was a partial reorganization, and the firm consisted after that
of Mr. Leiter, Mr. Palmer and myself (Field, Palmer, and Leiter). Two
years later Mr. Palmer withdrew, and until 1881, the style of the firm
was Field, Leiter & Co. Mr. Leiter retired in that year, and since then
it has been as at present (Marshall Field & Co.).”
“What contributed most to the great growth of your business?” I
asked.
“To answer that question,” said Mr. Field, “would be to review the
condition of the West from the time Chicago began until the fire in
1871. Everything was coming this way; immigration, railways and
water traffic, and Chicago was enjoying ‘flush’ times.
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