Mark Zuckerberg, Meet George Pullman

The Wall Street Journal:

Facebook Inc.’s sprawling campus in Menlo Park, Calif., is so full of cushy perks that some employees may never want to go home. Soon, they’ll have that option.

The social network said this week it is working with a local developer to build a $120 million, 394-unit housing community within walking distance of its offices. Called Anton Menlo, the 630,000 square-foot rental property will include everything from a sports bar to a doggy day care.

One of Facebook’s corporate goals is to take care of as many aspects of its employees lives as possible. They don’t have to worry about transportation—there’s a bus for that. Laundry and dry cleaning? Check. Hairstylists, woodworking classes, bike maintenance. Check.

Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice:

Pullman, Illinois, was built on a little over four thousand acres of land along Lake Calumet just south of Chicago…The town was founded in 1880 and substantially completed, according to a single unified design, within two years. [George] Pullman…didn’t just put up factories and dormitories, as had been done in Lowell, Massachusetts, some fifty years earlier. He built private homes, row houses, and tenements for some seven to eight thousand people, shops and offices (in an elaborate arcade) schools, stables, playgrounds, a market, a hotel, a library , a theater, even a church: in short, a model town, a planned community.

And every bit of it belonged to him.

Back to the future.

8 Comments

  1. casino implosion October 3, 2013 at 5:09 pm | #

    If the libertarian tech weenies who work for Facebook ever summon the moxie to pull off a Pullman Strike against Zuck, I’ll eat my shoe.

  2. Jd Hoff October 3, 2013 at 5:29 pm | #

    Ha! Nice Headline!! I don’t see FB employees going on strike anytime soon, though, unless it’s over the dearth of bean bag chairs in the lunch room.

  3. BarryB October 3, 2013 at 6:40 pm | #

    If the king keeps them happy, they don’t ask themselves why they need a king, and why he leases out all the land as though he owns it by right.

  4. Blinkenlights der Gutenberg October 3, 2013 at 8:26 pm | #

  5. Harald K October 4, 2013 at 7:57 am | #

    Is Zuckerberg going to be an abusive paternalist or a benign one? There are some very interesting model villages through history, not all of them seem to be horror stories.

  6. Robin October 4, 2013 at 12:26 pm | #

    Maybe Mark Zuckerberg will help more than 12,000 students pay for college. George did.
    http://www.pullmanfoundation.org/

    • Jean October 4, 2013 at 4:19 pm | #

      George had/has nothing to do with it. His idea of ‘helping’ was to let people starve until he got his pal Gov. Altgeld to call in troops to break the strike of 1894.

      • Mitchell Freedman October 5, 2013 at 4:12 pm | #

        Altgeld was known as pro-labor. He did not call out troops. President Grover Cleveland did, following the advice of the US Attorney General Richard Olney, a notorious railroad company lawyer before ascending to that government position. Altgeld is the one who pardoned the surviving Haymarket Strikers.

        Just sayin’…

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