His father, who came from Massachusetts, was a traveling peddler; his mother, a native of New York state, had taught school.
On May 14, 1890, he married Annie Rebecca Preston, daughter of a Congregational minister of Bath, N. Y.
He graduated from the Watertown high school and entered Hamilton College in Clinton, N. Y. , on a scholarship, but transferred for his senior year to Amherst, from which he received the A. B. degree in 1884.
While teaching at a private school in Brooklyn, he attended afternoon and evening classes at Columbia Law School and earned an LL. B.
degree in 1886.
Ten years later he formed the firm of Bassett and Thompson (later Bassett, Thompson and Gilpatric), with which he was to be associated for four decades.
He was elected to Congress in 1902 but did not seek reelection.
Applying methods developed in other cities, he recommended the replacement of "stub-end" terminals, which became congested at peak hours, with a "pendulum" system by which trains would move from outlying areas through the central city and into outlying areas on the opposite side.
This would better distribute the passenger load to several stations and help create a two-way traffic flow.
He visited several German cities in 1908 to examine their pioneering work in zoning, and the following year he attended the first National Conference on City Planning held in Washington, D. C.
In 1911 he joined with Alfred T. White and Frederic B. Pratt to form the Brooklyn City Plan Committee, and during the next two years he worked with reformers like Lawson Purdy and George McAneny to develop ways to protect the city from unrestricted growth.
Within months the commission recommended that the city be divided into districts, each with stipulated standards for maximum building height and bulk, and also for building use.
Yet the New York law fell short of the hopes of many reformers who viewed zoning as the cornerstone of a broader urban plan.
Bassett, determined to frame an ordinance that would not be overruled in the courts on constitutional grounds, had minimized the restrictions it imposed.
The law reflected Bassett's fundamental conception of the purposes of zoning.
"My interest in zoning, " he later wrote, "was largely based on sunlight" (ibid. , p. 134).
To this extent the ordinance was a success.
He also served as counsel to the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs (1922 - 1928), for which he wrote a series of reports on zoning.
During these years, however, it became increasingly clear that zoning ordinances, which were often circumvented by powerful interests, were having a negligible effect on the development of large cities.
Even Bassett began to suggest in the 1930's that the real impact of zoning would be on the unbuilt periphery of the city and on the suburbs.
Bassett remained unconverted by the social planning schemes of the 1930's.
(1939), an anecdotal account intended for his family, is useful on his early life.
He also wrote Zoning: The Laws, Administration, and Court Decisions during the First Twenty Years (1936); and, with Frank B. Williams, Alfred Bettmann, and Robert Whitten, Model Laws for Planning Cities, Counties, and States (1935).
Thomas Adams, Outline of Town and City Planning (1935), makes favorable mention of Bassett, as does Seymour I. Toll, Zoned American (1969); more critical is Mel Scott, Am.
See also Stanley J. Makielski, Jr. , The Politics of Zoning: The N. Y. Experience (1966); Belle Preston, Bassett-Preston Ancestors (1930); N. Y. Times obituary, Oct. 28, 1948; and Nat.
Cyc.
Am.
Biog. , XLIV, 548-549. ]
He loved to travel, and was an active layman in the Congregational church.
Bassett then joined his brother in a contracting firm to build waterworks in upstate New York cities, with headquarters in Buffalo.
Hailed in later years as the "father of modern zoning, " Bassett received honorary degrees from Hamilton College and Harvard and was elected president of the National Conference on City Planning for 1928-1929.
They had five children: Preston Rogers, Marion Preston, Isabel Deming, Howard Murray, and Helen Preston.
Between 1907 and 1911 he served on the newly created Public Service Commission (for the district including New York City and Long Island), to which he was appointed by Gov. Charles Evans Hughes, a former Columbia classmate.
