His work with Goodrich consisted principally of conducting traffic counts on bridges, a task that Bartholomew found dreary but that prepared him for a life of planning around infrastructure and automobility.

The following year, prominent civic reform advocate Luther Ely Smith, on the advice of the architect Henry Wright, recruited Bartholomew to serve as the first planner of St. Louis, Missouri.

[1] From 1918 to 1956, Bartholomew taught civic design at the University of Illinois and made substantial contributions to the scholarly and practice literature in city planning.

[4] In 1932, he completed his landmark study Urban Land Uses, published by Harvard University Press in the City Planning series edited by Theodora and Charles Hubbard.

He wrote on topics such as the theory and practice of zoning, street widening, cost distribution, placement of railroads, easements, federal buildings in cities, growth controls, economic disintegration, subdivision layout, slum clearance, metropolitan and regional planning, and the role of neighborhoods in the plan process.

[6] He advanced the concept of identifying "obsolete neighborhoods" through cost accounting (amount of taxes garnered versus city services expended), and was a major advocate for functional single-use zoning and for automobile-oriented planning.