Glendale: America's First Planned Suburb

Just north of Cincinnati sits a village that got there first. Glendale, incorporated in eighteen fifty-five, is widely considered the first planned residential community in Ohio and a strong contender for the first in the nation. The layout was radical for its time: curving streets that followed the natural contours of the land instead of the standard grid, a central park called Floral Park, three other parks, and a lake, all designed before Llewellyn Park in New Jersey, which usually gets the credit for inventing the American suburb.

The whole thing was made possible by the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton Railroad, which opened through here in eighteen fifty-one. The railroad gave Cincinnatians a way to live in the countryside and work in the city, and developers immediately platted a picturesque village around the station. The design drew on the rural cemetery movement, the same landscape philosophy that shaped Mount Auburn in Boston and Spring Grove just down the road in Cincinnati. Glendale's historic district of nearly four hundred acres is now a National Historic Landmark, the curving streets and Victorian houses essentially unchanged since the Civil War era.