Gillette’s Metropolis – Passing Strangeness
Gillette’s Metropolis
Published by
Paul Drye
on
May 12, 2026
Metropolis, King Camp Gillette’s proposed mega-city in the vicinity of Niagara Falls.<br>" data-large-file="https://passingstrangeness.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/metropolismap.jpg?w=1024" />
One of the rules of thumb for architectural megalomania is that you want to be a success before developing your ideas. Looking at the examples we’ve seen already, Henry Ford was one of the world’s richest men before launching Fordlândia, while Sir Edward Watkin had made his packet in railways before attempting Watkin’s Tower. Neither was anything like successful, but their backers’ prestige at least got them started. Generally speaking, if a visionary starts talking up a stunning-but-doomed bit of architecture while they’re still obscure it never amounts to anything.
A major exception to this rule is King Camp Gillette. He’s that Gillette, the man who popularized the safety razor and made a fortune on it starting in 1903. Most of a decade before, though, Gillette had tried his hand at technological utopianism, publishing The Human Drift in 1894. Possibly because he was, by Ford and Watkin’s standard, essentially penniless at the time the plan never left the drafting board. On the other hand, you can just as easily argue that it never went anywhere because of its sheer scale. Gillette was interested in creating the world’s largest city—and even argued that Metropolis (as he named it) could be The United States’ only city, leaving the rest of the country to leisure, agriculture, and resource extraction. Considering that the entire population of the US in 1894 was about 75 million people, that was quite the claim.
For his site he chose the Niagara River. The famous falls where it passes from Lakes Erie and Ontario had been discussed as the world’s greatest potential source of power since the burgeoning electrical industry (Thomas Edison had started distributing power in New York City in 1882) had started pointing to the next stage industrial revolution. The area had other advantages as well. The Erie Canal connected Lake Erie with the Atlantic, and so it also contained Buffalo, New York. That might not seem like much of an advantage these days, but until the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 the canal was the main way to get from the Great Lakes to the ocean, making Buffalo a major transportation hub—it was actually larger when The Human Drift was published than it is today. So on top of its electrical and industrial potential, the region Gillette selected lay astride trade routes that stretched from the northeast United States to Minnesota. It’s not too hard to see where he was coming from.
A schematic of one "cell" in the residential area. The cog’s teeth are individual apartment buildings and the interior ring is open space (as are the truncated triangles, which are green areas). The circle labelled "C" is a common eating area.
Unfortunately for his plan, Gillette’s firm grip on economics was matched with a poor understanding of people. Metropolis was planned down to the last detail, the most telling of which was the criss-crossing of its streets to produce a honeycomb pattern; he seems to have thought of industrial workers as something akin to bees. This can be backed up by taking a closer look at the map which heads this article. The smaller, dashed area was where he planned to put his residential spaces. Everything else, lining the shores of the two lakes and the banks of the Niagara River, were for industrial plant. Their utility trumped their beauty, in an extreme resolution to the tension found in any port city: shores and rivers may be useful but people also want to look at them and wander along their shores. In the 21st century de-industrialized developed nations are scrambling to open up their waterfronts for parks and residences; Gillette didn’t think twice about going in completely the opposite direction.
Metropolis’ intersection between people and governance was even more problematic. Metropolis was to be a company town with a dedicated ‟United Company” (later renamed ‟World Company” when Gillette revisited the topic in 1910) that used Standard Oil’s trust building and methods as a model, but with the trusts engulfing all production and not just petroleum. The monopolistic Company would make it so there were ‟no contending [economic] forces, no parties, no politics, but a united and homogeneous intelligence, with one object in view,— the continual improvement of products and the machine of production.” His arguments as to how, exactly, it would do this are weak, needless to say.
One of the ceramic buildings at the centre of a city cell, as shown in the previous image. The central ‟open” area is covered with a glass dome.
Individual satisfaction would be obtained paternalistically, with such innovations as ceramic buildings that would be easy to keep clean,...