The Past and Future City

How Historic Preservation Is Reviving America's Communities

ISLAND PRESS

Contents

Downtown Is for People: Competing Visions of the Ideal American City

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

— Jane Jacobs

America's welcome urban revival invites important questions: What makes a city successful? Why does one neighborhood thrive and another fail? What are the key urban ingredients for prosperity and happiness?

In 1961, one theory was offered by a remarkable writer and observer who celebrated her centenary in 2016: Jane Jacobs. At the height of an "urban renewal" movement that demolished many richly textured historic neighborhoods in the name of progress, she argued that, in fact, older buildings provide critical and necessary space for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and a diversity of residents to thrive. Their destruction meant that neighborhoods were being drained of economic opportunity, culture, and life. As she wrote, "Cities need old buildings so badly, it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them."

We may take historic neighborhoods for granted now. But, as author Anthony Flint has pointed out, this declaration was as revolutionary in its own way as 1960s treatises like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed. Jane Jacobs's contention stood against not just the entire direction cities were moving at the time, but against the deeply held philosophy and well-funded ambitions of the era's master builders, most notably the shaper of modern New York, Robert Moses.

Before we talk about the important implications of Jacobs's arguments for cities today, we should look back at how her views challenged the established orthodoxies of the time. Doing so reveals much about how our cities were shaped in the twentieth century, how historic preservation rose up in response, and what we should try to accomplish going forward.

Building "The Radiant City"

Suffice it to say, urban planners before Jane Jacobs felt rather differently about the old buildings in their midst. "Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs," observed the enormously influential architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret Gris, better known by his adopted moniker, Le Corbusier. "The great task incumbent on us is ... clearing away from our cities the dead bones that putrefy in them."

Le Corbusier instead envisioned a "Radiant City" made up of gleaming skyscrapers, surrounded by vast lawns, connected by elevated superhighways, and organized along a grid. Because "it is essential that motors can travel as directly as possible," he argued, all curved roads would be banished, and all paths would be made straight. As for older buildings, they would all obviously have to go — they were "not worthy of the age; they are no longer worthy of us." In 1925, at a design exposition in Paris, Le Corbusier even proposed tearing out the city's entire Marais District and converting it into a real-life prototype of his ideal metropolis. (His countrymen, while intrigued by his ideas, said no thanks.)

In the end, Le Corbusier only ever built one building in the United States, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, but his grand ambitions inspired generations of city planners in the United States. The "Radiant City scheme became the only model for urban redevelopment in America," wrote James Howard Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere. "From the late forties through the eighties, thousands of [projects] in the Radiant City mold went up all over America: housing, office complexes, hospitals, colleges. The defects of the concept quickly became apparent — for instance, that the space between high rises floating in a superblock became instant wastelands, shunned by the public — but this hardly stopped anyone from building them."

If Le Corbusier was the thinker who most helped shape the modern urban environment, Robert Moses was the one who best translated his ideas into action.

Robert Moses's plan for New York's future — with its enormous housing projects, vast green spaces, and cross-cutting highways — accorded very closely with the vision of the Radiant City. Over the course of decades — primarily as the head of his own municipal fiefdom, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority — Moses built 637 miles of highways, 658 playgrounds, 17 miles of beach, thirteen bridges, two tunnels, and state and city parks in and around the city, doubling the city's green space. Like Le Corbusier, Moses believed that, in our "motorized civilization," "cities are created by and for traffic." So in 1945, he proposed more miles of superhighway in and around New York than existed at that time in all the other cities of the world combined. "What will people see in the year 1999?" he once declared. "The long arteries of travel will stand out."

To make this vision real, the existing fabric of New York often paid a heavy price. Moses demolished eighteen city blocks on the Upper West Side to make way for his Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (after which, he argued, "the scythe of progress must move northward"). His Cross-Bronx Expressway, built over fifteen years at a cost of $128 million, in Flint's words, "broke up thriving and diverse immigrant enclaves and jump-started the economic and social decline of the Bronx." In total, to forge a more Radiant New York City, Moses is estimated to have displaced 250,000 people from their existing homes.

One can argue, as Moses did, that you cannot make an omelet or remake a city "without breaking eggs." Indeed, Moses is responsible for many New York landmarks that are now woven into the fabric of the city and considered historic in their own right, such as the United Nations, the World's Fair Pavilion, and the Central Park Zoo. He was also a stalwart defender of urban living at a time when suburbia was in full flower.

Even Moses's allies, however, concede that "if it came to a project or people, he'd take the project." And even as more voices raised the alarm about how he was transforming the city, Moses continued pushing New York — and the many other cities inspired by him — ever closer to Le Corbusier's vision. In his desire to remake the modern metropolis, Moses was an unstoppable force. But there was also an immovable object, and she happened to live on 555 West Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, right in the path of Moses's grand designs.

Queen Jane

A writer and journalist by trade, Jane Jacobs had no formal schooling in urban planning or architecture. She was brilliant, iconoclastic, and, most important, possessed the laudable ability to see the world as it is, not as theory or conventional wisdom said it should be. Even before Moses's ambitions threatened her home, she began to wonder if urban planning had not gotten lost somewhere in its own designs.

Given an assignment to write about urban renewal in Philadelphia in 1954, Jacobs met with the executive director of the city's Planning Commission, Edmund Bacon. Along with Edward Logue, who occupied a similar role in Boston, Bacon was another of the era's master builders and is still hailed today as the Father of Modern Philadelphia. (For those who enjoy the "Kevin Bacon game," he's also the father of the famous actor.)

Unlike Le Corbusier's "all skyscrapers and no history" aesthetic, Bacon worked to maintain the historic character of neighborhoods like Society Hill and fought to ensure that no building rise taller than the William Penn statue atop City Hall, in the heart of Philadelphia. (He lost that fight in 1987, inaugurating a curse that haunted Philly sports fans for two decades.) Otherwise, he shaped the City of Brotherly Love in much the same way as Moses changed New York City. Often through liberal bulldozing of the existing fabric, Bacon helped forge places like Independence Mall, JFK Plaza, Market East, and Penn Center, and he was the driving force behind the three major highways bisecting the city today: the Schyulkill, Vine Street, and Delaware Expressways. A fourth — the Crosstown Expressway — was envisioned but ultimately never built.

At the time of their meeting in 1954, Jacobs was a great admirer of Bacon and generally thought positively about "urban renewal." As they toured Philadelphia together, however, she quickly noticed a fly in the ointment. "First, he took me to a street where loads of people were hanging around on the street, on the stoops, having a good time of it," she wrote later, "and he said, well, this is the next street we're going to get rid of. That was the 'before' street. Then he showed me the 'after' street, all fixed up, and there was just one person on it, a bored little boy kicking a tire in the gutter. It was so grim that I would have been kicking a tire too. But Mr. Bacon thought it had a beautiful vista."

When Jacobs asked the planner where all the people had gone, Bacon responded, in very Le Corbusier terms, about the need for an underlying order and clear sight lines in a modern city. The buzzing of people going about their daily business on the street left him cold. To Bacon, it was a bug that needed fixing. To Jacobs, it was the whole point.

In a 1958 article for Fortune focused on the American city, "Downtown Is for People," Jacobs began to articulate, for the first time in writing, her comprehensive critique of "master builders" like Moses and Bacon. First, she explained, it did not do just to plan out a Utopia on paper. Any planner worth his or her salt should begin by leaving the office and touring the city on foot. "He should insist on an hour's walk in the loveliest park, the finest public square in town, and where there is a handy bench he should sit and watch the people for a while." In this manner — through "an observant eye, curiosity about people," and humility rather than hubris — a builder "will understand his own city the better — and, perhaps, steal a few ideas." He or she will also find "that many of the assumptions on which the projects depend are visibly wrong."

Foremost among them was the idea that older buildings were bad. "One of the beauties of the Fort Worth plan," Jacobs wrote, citing a city she thought was doing renewal right, "is that it works with existing buildings. ... This is a positive virtue, not just a cost-saving expedient. Think of any city street that people enjoy and you will see that it characteristically has old buildings mixed with the new." These old buildings, she argued (a point she'd later develop further), provided affordable space for both new enterprises and low-overhead, socially minded concerns. By contrast, she wrote, "notice that when a new building goes up, the kind of ground-floor tenants it gets are usually the chain store and the chain restaurant."

Older buildings were important for more than just economics: they gave streets and neighborhoods character. "A sense of place is built up, in the end, from many little things too, some so small people take them for granted, and yet the lack of them takes the flavor out of the city; irregularities in level, so often bulldozed away; different kinds of paving, signs and fireplugs and street lights, white marble stoops." As it was, however, urban planning was proceeding in a completely wrongheaded fashion. "Great tracts, many blocks wide, are being razed" in city after city, all with "no hint of individuality or whim or surprise, no hint that here is a city with a tradition and flavor all its own." What will be built in their place "will be spacious, parklike, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean and impressive and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery." Such projects "will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it," Jacobs concluded. "For they work at cross-purposes to the city. They banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its variety."

If Jacobs's Fortune piece wasn't already incendiary enough to those in planning circles, she also disparaged a number of grand projects by name, among them Robert Moses's Lincoln Center. "This cultural superblock is intended to be very grand," she wrote, "but its streets will be able to give it no support whatsoever." "My God, who was this crazy dame?" exclaimed the publisher of Fortune upon reading the piece. "Of all things to attack, how could we give aid and comfort to critics of Lincoln Center?"

In fact, the disagreement between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs was already well on its way to a full-fledged feud by then, moving beyond magazine think pieces and into the streets. In the 1950s, Moses made a renewed push to extend bustling Fifth Avenue right through Washington Square Park, the heart of Greenwich Village and not far from Jacobs's home on Hudson Street. Once the stomping grounds of Edith Wharton and Henry James, the park was in Jacobs's day a hangout for beatniks and small children alike, and already fast becoming the center of the '60s folk revival. Now, Moses wanted to make it yet another forlorn stretch of four-lane highway — his "temple to urination," as Jacobs's husband quipped.

The opposition to Moses's plan (and to his subsequent compromise to run the road under the park instead) was already established before Jacobs got involved. With her background in public relations and incisive ability to read a situation, however, her hard work against what she called a "monstrous and useless folly" helped propel the neighborhood movement to new heights. Jacobs brought on local celebrities like Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, and her editor William Whyte. She enlisted up-and-coming New York politicos like John Lindsay and Ed Koch. She put local kids (including her own) at the forefront of the backlash, as petitioners, pamphleteers, and photo opportunities for the newspapers. She also studied up on her new nemesis and helped journalists connect the dots between Moses's plans for the city and the wealthy developers and other financial interests who stood to gain from them.

These efforts paid dividends. "The American city is the battleground for the preservation of diversity," exclaimed Columbia professor Charles Abrams, "and Greenwich Village should be its Bunker Hill." "Washington Square ... has a claim to our historic respect," wrote Lewis Mumford in his own letter, "a respect that Mr. Moses seems chronically unable to accord any human handiwork except his own." The local paper of record, the Village Voice, opined that "any serious tampering with Washington Square Park will mark the beginning of the end of Greenwich Village as a community" and make it just "another characterless place." When these respected voices helped change the minds of powerful city officials, Moses stood down. "There is nobody against this," he grumbled in retreat. "Nobody but a bunch of mothers."

It would not be the duo's last heavyweight bout. In February 1961 — in what might well have been one of Moses's political retributions — Jacobs opened the New York Times to discover that fourteen blocks in the West Village — her exact neighborhood — was "blighted" and had been slated for "urban renewal." Once more she took the reins of a neighborhood organization and worked to defeat the proposed overhaul of her home, taking the fight all the way to the New York Supreme Court.

Not long after, she was enlisted by desperate Little Italy residents to help them defeat Moses's proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, or "Lomex." Proposed to run along Broome Street — once a thriving nineteenth-century commercial district and site of many historic and beautiful cast-iron buildings — this particular superhighway would have carved through SoHo, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and Little Italy and would have resulted in 416 buildings demolished, 365 stores closed, and 2,200 families displaced. During this fight, Jacobs ended up getting arrested and charged with "inciting a riot and criminal mischief." In part because of these obviously overblown charges against a now public figure, Jacobs and her allies defeated Moses a third time. The buildings saved as a result are today some of the most desirable in Manhattan.

Death and Life

Jacobs's most enduring victory over Moses and his ilk was The Death and Life of Great American Cities, since described by the New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning." "What I would like to do is create for the reader another image of the city," she said before embarking on the 1961 book, "not drawn from mine or anyone else's imagination or wishes but so far as this is possible, from real life." To do that, she first had to smash the reigning false idols. "To put it bluntly," Jacobs began, the city planners of her time "are all in the same stage of elaborately learned superstition as medical science was early in the last century, when physicians put their faith in bloodletting. ... Years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense."