My first memories of life are in a public-housing project. My parents, then college students, had two kids, and then quickly three, and soon found subsidized housing in a new high-rise in Philadelphia, with brightly colored plastic doors and gray concrete terraces, where we lived for three years. At the tail end of the great period of the fifties Western, all the kids on the concrete balconies played at “Davy Crockett” and “Gunsmoke,” riding hobbyhorses and firing cap guns up and down their gray length, a form of play as alien now as Homeric poetry.
This was the heyday of urban redevelopment, when city planners, doing what was then called “slum clearance,” created high-density, low-cost public housing, often on a Corbusian model, with big towers on broad concrete plazas. In the still optimistic late fifties and early sixties, it was possible to imagine and actually use public housing as its original postwar planners had imagined it could be used: not as a life sentence but as a cheerful, clean platform that people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds without much money could use in a transition to another realm of life.
It was a dream that was over almost before it began and has since been condemned by all sides: by urbanists who came to hate the uniformity of its structures and their negation of street life; by minority communities who increasingly recognized these places as artificial ghettos, without the distinctive character and variety of real neighborhoods; and by the city officials who had to police the plazas. As Alex Krieger, a Harvard professor of urban design, writes in “City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present” (Harvard), “Having an address in such places was like wearing a scarlet letter—perhaps a P, as in ‘I am Poor.’ ” Such places were publicly executed throughout the eighties and nineties, imploded with dynamite by despairing state and city governments. (All the great implosion videos are of either casinos or public housing, a sign of the American times.) Schuylkill Falls, the public-housing project of my happy early memory, was among them, demolished in 1996 after sitting abandoned and desolate for twenty years.
Now, however, for the first time in a half century, the people who built the bad stuff are reëmerging as possible models of how we might yet build good stuff—with a reclamation of such once-banished terms as “urban renewal” and “high-rise housing.” This revival has been pushed forward by the same force that has recently pushed other forms of public neo-progressivism, at least rhetorically: a desire for public action in the face of the obvious impasse of the private, with free-market mechanisms having left city housing so costly that teachers and cops often live two hours outside the neighborhoods they serve. You “can’t trust the private sector to protect the public interest” was the city planner Edward Logue’s most emphatic aphorism on the subject, and it is one that has taken on new life.
Even New York’s “master builder,” Robert Moses himself, a hate object for later urbanists, who preferred preservation to innovation and the small-scale to the large, has come in for a revisionist look: whatever his faults, he built city amenities for city people—playgrounds and parks and the Triborough Bridge—rather than splinters filled with condos for the ultra-rich. Not since the Beaux-Arts revival of the mid-seventies, when neoclassical ornament and elaborate façades became fashionable again—when Philip Johnson could put a Chippendale edifice on the A.T. & T. building—has there been such a return of the architectural repressed. It is even possible to speak again in praise of the brutalist style in which much of that fifties and sixties public building was done. When people begin to cast a fonder eye on the Port Authority Bus Terminal, it means an epoch has altered.
Ed Logue was the consensus villain of the old urban planning. In a 2001 interview between the writer James Kunstler and the sainted urbanist Jane Jacobs, Logue was the subject of an extended hate:
Simple sides-taking exercises between good guys and bad guys turn out to betray the far more complicated fabric of big-city life. Logue’s mixed achievement is a testament either to the inadequacies of his proposals or to the intractability of his problems, and probably to both at once. (...)
What defeated Logue’s vision in the magazines and universities was the rise of Jane Jacobs and the conservationist left. For Jacobs, “dated stores, modest personal services, and cheap luncheonettes” were the city. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), she showed a generation how small enterprise helped sustain the complex ecology of mutual unplanned effort that makes cities work. Logue and Jacobs once had an onstage debate, in which Logue needled Jacobs about her highly romantic vision of her West Village neighborhood—he’d been out there at 8 p.m. and hadn’t seen the ballet of the street that she cooed over. (Jacobs was an instinctive Whitmanesque poet, not a data collector: you don’t count the angels on the head of a small merchant.) Logue also made the serious point that the emerging anti-renewal consensus was fine for someone who already had a safe place in the West Village. For those who didn’t, it was just a celebration of other people’s security.
But what defeated people like Logue on the ground was the increasingly agonized racial politics of big cities. In 1967, Logue ran for mayor of Boston, and, though regarded as a serious contender, was squeezed between another reformist candidate, Kevin White, and Louise Day Hicks, a ferocious anti-busing activist. (Her slogan: “You know where I stand.”) Determined to protect Irish neighborhoods from interfering outsiders who wanted to bus their children, and from “the element”—that is, minorities who wanted to take over their beloved blocks—Hicks is a reminder that the fault lines visible now in America are a long-standing feature of the American foundation.
Cohen makes a larger point about the context in which Logue and his colleagues rose and fell. In the early years of the Cold War, “expertise” was seen as a powerful support of liberal democracies. This was the expertise of engineers and architects—and of a growing class of professionals who had been able to go to colleges that their parents could not attend. The traumas of the sixties upended faith in experts. The same people who designed the Strategic Hamlet Program, in Vietnam, had remade downtown New Haven (and, one could argue, on similar principles: replacing the exposed, organic village with a secured fortress, the mall). The expertise of the urban planner was undermined as well, by the new prestige attached to the preservationist, which, for good or ill, remains undiminished. As the next generation of development would show, however, what tends to replace expertise is not the intelligence of the street. What replaces expertise is the idiocy of the deal.
by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Plunkert; photograph by LeRoy Ryan / The Boston Globe / Getty (man)This was the heyday of urban redevelopment, when city planners, doing what was then called “slum clearance,” created high-density, low-cost public housing, often on a Corbusian model, with big towers on broad concrete plazas. In the still optimistic late fifties and early sixties, it was possible to imagine and actually use public housing as its original postwar planners had imagined it could be used: not as a life sentence but as a cheerful, clean platform that people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds without much money could use in a transition to another realm of life.
It was a dream that was over almost before it began and has since been condemned by all sides: by urbanists who came to hate the uniformity of its structures and their negation of street life; by minority communities who increasingly recognized these places as artificial ghettos, without the distinctive character and variety of real neighborhoods; and by the city officials who had to police the plazas. As Alex Krieger, a Harvard professor of urban design, writes in “City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present” (Harvard), “Having an address in such places was like wearing a scarlet letter—perhaps a P, as in ‘I am Poor.’ ” Such places were publicly executed throughout the eighties and nineties, imploded with dynamite by despairing state and city governments. (All the great implosion videos are of either casinos or public housing, a sign of the American times.) Schuylkill Falls, the public-housing project of my happy early memory, was among them, demolished in 1996 after sitting abandoned and desolate for twenty years.Now, however, for the first time in a half century, the people who built the bad stuff are reëmerging as possible models of how we might yet build good stuff—with a reclamation of such once-banished terms as “urban renewal” and “high-rise housing.” This revival has been pushed forward by the same force that has recently pushed other forms of public neo-progressivism, at least rhetorically: a desire for public action in the face of the obvious impasse of the private, with free-market mechanisms having left city housing so costly that teachers and cops often live two hours outside the neighborhoods they serve. You “can’t trust the private sector to protect the public interest” was the city planner Edward Logue’s most emphatic aphorism on the subject, and it is one that has taken on new life.
Even New York’s “master builder,” Robert Moses himself, a hate object for later urbanists, who preferred preservation to innovation and the small-scale to the large, has come in for a revisionist look: whatever his faults, he built city amenities for city people—playgrounds and parks and the Triborough Bridge—rather than splinters filled with condos for the ultra-rich. Not since the Beaux-Arts revival of the mid-seventies, when neoclassical ornament and elaborate façades became fashionable again—when Philip Johnson could put a Chippendale edifice on the A.T. & T. building—has there been such a return of the architectural repressed. It is even possible to speak again in praise of the brutalist style in which much of that fifties and sixties public building was done. When people begin to cast a fonder eye on the Port Authority Bus Terminal, it means an epoch has altered.
Ed Logue was the consensus villain of the old urban planning. In a 2001 interview between the writer James Kunstler and the sainted urbanist Jane Jacobs, Logue was the subject of an extended hate:
Q: He went on to inadvertently destroy both New Haven and much of central Boston by directing Modernist urban renewal campaigns in the 1960s. Did you watch these schemes unfold and what did you think of them?
A: I thought they were awful. And I thought he was a very destructive man and I came to that opinion during the first time I met him, which was in New Haven.Lizabeth Cohen’s new book, “Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is an attempt to salvage the villain’s reputation, mostly by putting it in the Tragedy of Good Intentions basket instead of the Arrogance of Élitist Certainties basket, albeit recognizing that these are adjacent baskets. Cohen, an American historian at Harvard, reminds the reader, as any first-rate historian would, that what look, in the retrospective cartooning of polemical history, like obvious choices and clear moral lessons are usually gradated and surprising. Logue, whose career was more far reaching and ambitious than that of any other urbanist of his time, helped remake New Haven, Boston, and New York, and his ambitions for city planning were thoroughly progressive: “To demonstrate that people of different incomes, races, and ethnic origins can live together . . . and that they can send their children to the same public schools.” Despite his reputation as a “slum-clearer,” Logue was uncompromising about the primacy of integration. “The pursuit of racial, not just income, diversity in residential projects animated all his work,” Cohen writes. (Jane Jacobs, to put it charitably, didn’t really notice that her beloved Hudson Street, in the West Village, tended toward the monochrome.)
Simple sides-taking exercises between good guys and bad guys turn out to betray the far more complicated fabric of big-city life. Logue’s mixed achievement is a testament either to the inadequacies of his proposals or to the intractability of his problems, and probably to both at once. (...)
What defeated Logue’s vision in the magazines and universities was the rise of Jane Jacobs and the conservationist left. For Jacobs, “dated stores, modest personal services, and cheap luncheonettes” were the city. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), she showed a generation how small enterprise helped sustain the complex ecology of mutual unplanned effort that makes cities work. Logue and Jacobs once had an onstage debate, in which Logue needled Jacobs about her highly romantic vision of her West Village neighborhood—he’d been out there at 8 p.m. and hadn’t seen the ballet of the street that she cooed over. (Jacobs was an instinctive Whitmanesque poet, not a data collector: you don’t count the angels on the head of a small merchant.) Logue also made the serious point that the emerging anti-renewal consensus was fine for someone who already had a safe place in the West Village. For those who didn’t, it was just a celebration of other people’s security.
But what defeated people like Logue on the ground was the increasingly agonized racial politics of big cities. In 1967, Logue ran for mayor of Boston, and, though regarded as a serious contender, was squeezed between another reformist candidate, Kevin White, and Louise Day Hicks, a ferocious anti-busing activist. (Her slogan: “You know where I stand.”) Determined to protect Irish neighborhoods from interfering outsiders who wanted to bus their children, and from “the element”—that is, minorities who wanted to take over their beloved blocks—Hicks is a reminder that the fault lines visible now in America are a long-standing feature of the American foundation.
Cohen makes a larger point about the context in which Logue and his colleagues rose and fell. In the early years of the Cold War, “expertise” was seen as a powerful support of liberal democracies. This was the expertise of engineers and architects—and of a growing class of professionals who had been able to go to colleges that their parents could not attend. The traumas of the sixties upended faith in experts. The same people who designed the Strategic Hamlet Program, in Vietnam, had remade downtown New Haven (and, one could argue, on similar principles: replacing the exposed, organic village with a secured fortress, the mall). The expertise of the urban planner was undermined as well, by the new prestige attached to the preservationist, which, for good or ill, remains undiminished. As the next generation of development would show, however, what tends to replace expertise is not the intelligence of the street. What replaces expertise is the idiocy of the deal.
by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker | Read more:
