Charles Moore (city planner)

During his college years Moore was editor of the Harvard Crimson and also wrote weekly columns for a couple of Detroit papers.

[2] In 1901, Moore played a key role in securing passage of a bill to establish the Senate Park Commission, also known as the McMillan Commission, convened to formulate a plan for the future growth of Washington that would recapture the aims of the 1791 L'Enfant plan for the city and create a monumental appearance for the National Mall.

The commission was composed of four men—architects Daniel Burnham and Charles Follen McKim, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.—all of whom had been intimately involved with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago.

The fair’s classical buildings embodied the ideals of the City Beautiful movement, a revival of classical architecture in the Victorian era as a means of encouraging civic betterment through unified groupings of buildings that integrated typically allegorical sculpture, painting, and landscape with architecture.

In 1910, he was a founding member of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), in Washington, a presidentially appointed federal commission of seven nationally recognized experts on the arts and architecture charged with overseeing design on federal property in the city; Moore remained a member for almost 30 years, serving as chairman from 1915 to 1937.

The first major project reviewed by the CFA was the Lincoln Memorial, which anchored the western end of the Mall and established its central design theme of national unity.

After an epic battle over the appropriate form of the national memorial to Thomas Jefferson, Moore resigned his chairmanship in September 1937 and retired to a son’s home in Washington state, where he died in 1942 at the age of 86.

[4] In addition to his work with the CFA, Moore also served as director of the Detroit Museum of Art (1914–17)[5] and as acting chief of the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress (1918–27).

For the library, he acquired the papers of notable Americans, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

Moore was the author of numerous essays, articles, and histories, many related to city planning and architecture, and biographies of Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, and George Washington.

Affable and politically adroit, Moore was a friend of presidents, including McKinley and Coolidge, and was skilled at working behind the scenes to gather support for the CFA’s planning goals.