Louis Brownlow, right, at the White House during the FDR administration.
Louis Brownlow was an organizational genius. He was appointed by Woodrow Wilson to run Washington, D.C., and tasked by Franklin D. Roosevelt to set up the modern Office of the President.
He also created the political and organizational infrastructure for a model community unlike any other: Radburn, New Jersey.
But the title of Browlow’s autobiography, A Passion for Anonymity, may explain why today his role is almost forgotten in the famous suburb he helped found.
Brownlow is not mentioned in the histories of the Borough of Fair Lawn, and gets only one mention in Daniel Shaffer’s Toward Garden Cities for America: The Radburn Experience. The commemorative plaque outside the farmhouse where he lived – now a history museum – does not mention him.
Yet without Brownlow, Radburn might not have taken shape – or remained part of Fair Lawn.
Louis Brownlow in 1945
Louis Brownlow became Radburn’s de facto community manager before there was a community to manage.
He arrived in 1928 with the title “municipal consultant’’ to find a muddy construction site with no residents and no plan for how the community would function when it had them.
The following year he helped set up the Radburn Association to govern the settlement, and provided for residents’ eventual control of it.
He persuaded borough officials to OK a street plan for Radburn unlike any they’d ever imagined, one with cul de sacs grouped around parks in something called “superblocks,’’ and houses that faced the yard instead of the street.
Brownlow helped devise property deed restrictions to protect Radburn’s parks in perpetuity, as well as a code of architectural and aesthetic standards to preserve its physical character. Together, these rules created the prototype for the contemporary homeowners association.
He facilitated the establishment of water, sewer and street light service. He helped start the Radburn Citizens Association, the Church in Radburn and the Radburn Volunteer Fire Department.
He chose Radburn’s street names, some of which honored visionary community planners such as Ebenezer Howard (Letchworth Garden City in England) and Robert Owen (New Harmony, Indiana).
He even rented the Holland Tunnel for a few hours one night in 1929 to truck the cupola of the Plaza Building from New York City. Cost: $50.
Brownlow’s service was not just to Radburn. At a time when Fair Lawn was only 4 years old, he helped its inexperienced officials to comply with state laws, and to make the semi-rural village a functioning municipality.
And he insisted that Radburn should remain part of Fair Lawn, even if it outgrew the rest of the town.
Though a native Southerner whose father had fought for the Confederacy, he was at home in the Northeast. He was equally comfortable with Rockefeller Foundation executives and Fair Lawn’s Dutch farmers, whose friendships and feuds, he was amazed to learn, went back to 16th Century Holland.
“There is something sound about Louis Brownlow,’’ Radburn’s chief architect, Clarence Stein, once wrote. “He makes you want to believe.’’
Southern man
Brownlow was born in 1879 in Buffalo, Missouri, where his father was postmaster. He was a sickly child, and received little formal education. But in 1900 the young man everyone called “Brownie’’ began a journalism career that eventually led him to Washington. There he met President Wilson, who appointed him to the commission that ran the District of Columbia.
After Wilson left office in 1920, Brownlow worked as city manager in Petersburg, Virginia, and Knoxville, Kentucky. But there were problems. Charles Ascher, a lawyer who worked for Brownlow at Radburn, recalled that Brownlow was a reformer hired to “drive out the crooks.’’ But the crooks made his life miserable – for instance, phoning his home anonymously at all hours. He retreated briefly to journalism.
In 1928, Brownlow was hired by the City Housing Corporation to help establish its “garden city” development, which was designed to separate pedestrians and vehicles and provide residents with everything they’d need – schools, stores, playgrounds – within walking distance.
Brownlow’s special mission was relations with the borough in which Radburn was located.
At the time Fair Lawn had three municipal employees, only one of them full time. Many of its leading citizens were truck farmers, who, he later recalled, “thought the whole thing was a crazy idea some crazy New Yorkers had been inveigled into financing.’’
But Brownlow, unlike other CHC executives, lived in Fair Lawn, and won its residents’ trust. He was named a director of the Fair Lawn-Radburn Trust Co., the bank that opened at River Road and Fair Lawn Avenue in 1930.
He persuaded local officials to cooperate, and tried to assuage their jealousy over what Radburn had and they did not, including garbage collection, playgrounds and swimming pools.
He also dealt with county and state officials, utilities, and the Erie Railroad. It took Brownlow three trips to Washington just to move the local post office 120 feet to the new Radburn train station.
Cadmus House, pre-1928
In his autobiography Brownlow fondly recalls his home, a rudimentary Dutch colonial farmhouse with a red sandstone foundation on Fair Lawn Avenue. The house had been purchased by the CHC. Before Brownlow moved in, a second floor was added with bedrooms and a bathroom. He later described it as the only home he and his wife Elizabeth ever had with an actual garden.
A search of Census documents, local directories and CHC land records shows that Brownlow’s old house is the one known today as the Cadmus House, a museum run by the Fair Lawn Historic Preservation Commission.
The Brownlows were Radburn’s first residents, although the location of the house at the time is outside Radburn’s current boundary. (It was moved several hundred yards in 1985 to its current location near the Radburn train station.)
Brownlow was the first vice president of the Radburn Association (and at the time the only board member who lived in Fair Lawn.) His most crucial move may have been to hire John O. Walker, who’d worked for him in Knoxville and Petersburg, as Radburn's first manager. Walker’s stamp on Radburn would extend to interviewing (and approving) every new resident.
Under Brownlow, Radburn became a model of best public administration practices, including a focus on recreation. In 1930 he hosted a national recreation conference in Radburn; in the same year the former Fair Lawn Grange Hall was turned into a gym with showers and a basketball court.
The Brownlows lived in Fair Lawn until 1931, when Louis was named to head a new organization on public administration based in Chicago and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. But he kept an office in the Plaza Building until 1933, and -– underscoring his dedication to Radburn – did not resign his seat on the RA board until 1936.
The Brownlow house in Washington, D.C.
‘The President needs help!’
By the mid-1930s, Brownlow was again working in Washington, this time for Franklin D Roosevelt. In 1937 his Brownlow Committee released a report that famously stated, ”The president needs help!” It became the blueprint for the modern Office of the Presidency, including an expanded presidential staff and reorganized Cabinet departments.
His work in Washington led Brownlow to coin the phrase he used as the title of his autobiography. A Passion for Anonymity. It referred, he said, to the dedicated public servants with whom he worked in the Roosevelt administration.
But Radburn remained a highlight of his career.
At the big 1931 going-away party at the Plaza Building for what one newspaper termed the “Planner of Radburn” and its “First Lady,” Brownlow said that he would always consider himself at heart a Radburnite, and never forget what he called “the town of friends.”
When he died in 1963 at age 84, the eulogist at his funeral in Washington was an old City Housing Corp. colleague from the Radburn days, Herbert Emmerich.
Brownlow, Emmerich said, was so appealing that people from all circles of life “came to accept him as an honorary member.’’ That included the new settlers of Radburn and the old residents of Fair Lawn.
This is one of the best Radburn history articles I have ever read, it has so much great information no one knows about, which is also your point, he is anonymous. And key to so much that is good about Radburn, including protecting the parks and the architecture. Would love to read more about the cupola moving by truck from NYC if you do an article about the Plaza Building. They closed Holland Tunnel to do it? Wow!