 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.In 1914, the Newark, New Jersey plan commission retained Bartholomew as the first full-time, public-sector city planner in America.In 1915, prominent civic reform advocate Luther Ely Smith, on the advice of the architect Henry Wright, recruited Bartholomew to St. Louis to serve as the city's first planner.