Vilna, a garden and a little electricity

I’m slowly getting to know early-twentieth-century Vilna for my detective opus. The city power station turns out to have an interesting backstory: it could quite easily have been built in Bernardine Garden (see the Vilnius tourism website). A sensible idea by the standards of the time: the city owned the land, so there was no need to buy it, and they even had a building design ready. Then someone realised that smoke would collect in the valley and part of the garden would have to be cut down. The early twentieth century was full of this sort of thing — “let’s knock something down and fell a few trees for the sake of industrialisation” — both here and much further afield.

I wonder how much similar schemes that actually went ahead influenced writers of the time. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, for instance, Saruman does much the same around Isengard while building his army of Uruk-hai. Coincidence?