Nolen, John

John Nolen (1869–1936) was one of the leaders of the city-planning movement in early-20th-century America. A member of numerous civic and professional associations, he directed one of the most important planning firms in the United States. Famous in his time, Nolen has been recently resurrected by leaders and supporters of New Urbanism.

Trained at a Philadelphia school for fatherless boys, Nolen earned his way into the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1893. Wharton was a harbinger of progressivism under the leadership of Edmund James and Simon Patten. Nolen learned and shared the progressives' predominant interests in cities and their problems. As executive secretary of the Society for the Extension of the University Teaching from 1893 to 1903, and later as landscape architect and city planner, Nolen fulfilled his goal of a life of urban activism.

In search for a lifelong civic vocation, Nolen entered the School of Landscape Architecture at [Page 552]Harvard University, from which he received his M.A. degree in 1905. During the next 32 years, he became widely known internationally for inventing and contributing to the vocabulary, field, theory, and profession of city planning. He relentlessly toured America with his lantern slides, addressing chambers of commerce, civic commissions, elected councils, and students. His Cambridge firm was a buzzing place in the 1910s to 1920s, when it ran dozens of plans for company towns, residential developments, parks, and cities. Nolen was not a master drafter, but he was the managing spirit of the agency and kept it going thanks to his connections with the business elite. The residential developments of Mariemont, Ohio, commissioned by the wealthy Mary Emery, and Venice, Florida, assigned by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, were Nolen's practical planning major achievements. He was a pivotal force in the social and professional planning milieu as a savvy networker, a prolific writer, and a directing figure in the local, regional, and national professional and civic city planning societies. On the international scale, Nolen was an assiduous Atlantic crosser, attending congresses and study tours abroad while maintaining a sustained correspondence with city planners in most European countries, as well as in Japan and Latin America. Nolen also occupied consulting, contracting, and technical positions in U.S. government, at the local, state, and federal levels. He died in 1937, to be forgotten in the postwar period. His work and writings have met with a new popularity since the 1980s, when Andres Duany and other New Urbanists established him as one of their references.