Mira Lloyd Dock and the City Beautiful
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
On December twentieth, nineteen hundred, a botanist and photographer named Mira Lloyd Dock stood before the Harrisburg Board of Trade and showed them a set of lantern slides. Many of the images were European cities: Paris, Vienna, London, with their tree-lined boulevards, their river promenades, their parks. The rest were Harrisburg: raw sewage running into the Susquehanna, garbage piled along the riverfront, the capital city of Pennsylvania looking like an afterthought.
The audience was a room full of businessmen, and Dock was neither a politician nor a man. But the force of her presentation changed the city.
Within a few years, Harrisburg voters approved a bond issue to fund what became known as the Harrisburg Plan. Over the following decade, the city built a water filtration plant, a sewage treatment system, reservoirs, and a connected system of parks and greenways. The Susquehanna riverfront was transformed from a dumping ground into a public promenade. Wildwood Park was carved out of a swamp north of the city. Parks across the city grew out of the same push.
Mira Lloyd Dock went on to become the first woman to serve on Pennsylvania's Forestry Reservation Commission, appointed in nineteen oh one before women had the right to vote.
The City Beautiful movement she helped ignite in Harrisburg influenced urban reform efforts across the country. What looks like thoughtful city planning today, the parks, the riverfront, the filtered water, was once someone's radical argument made with a projector and a box of lantern slides.
