I VISITED PARIS IN THE fall of 1992, After An Absence of more than fifteen years. People had changed, of course. There were more nonwhite faces on the Métro, and, generally, many of the faces seemed less cheerful, or was that just my imagination? The subway cars themselves were much the same, with the flip-down seats near the doors, and places reserved for the elderly and for crippled war veterans—a grisly reminder of the 1914-18 conflict. There were no survivors of the Great War in evidence, but I didn’t even see many people who looked, well, French. No elderly gentlemen wearing pale leather gloves and rosettes in their lapels, for example. No businessmen with those curious suits with short, ventless jackets and wide shoulders that I associated with actor Lino Ventura and French gangster movies. Workers were wearing nylon windbreakers rather than traditional blue overalls. Parisians, who had previously seemed to me, a North American, slightly old-fashioned, with their distinctive customs and elaborate courtesies, now appeared familiar.
Like young Germans and young Britishers, many young Frenchmen and Frenchwomen were wearing some combination of that now international uniform of jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts. People carried plastic shopping bags instead of the traditional stringed filets, and some wore Walkmans instead of berets. At first glance, I saw nothing that would look out of place in an American mall, or at least a New England mall, since fashionable young Parisians favor Ivy League styles—pressed chinos and penny loafers, for example, or button-down shirts and tweed sports jackets. On second glance, I realized that though the clothing was certainly inspired by American fashions, it was an imagined version of America, not the real thing. Like the imitation cowboy outfits—dude clothes, really—worn by French country-and-western singers. On the whole, there were, I thought, fewer fashionable women; perhaps in Paris it wasn’t chic to be chic that year, I’m not sure. People appeared less formal, but they still spoke rapidly and they still smoked a lot. I was told that the government was instituting a ban on smoking in public places the following month; there seemed to be general agreement that such a ban would be ineffectual. Not that anyone thought smoking was good for you, but it was a personal decision, none of “their” business—this said with a great many oufs and shrugs. When the ban did go into effect, one restaurateur put up a sign saying, “We also welcome our nonsmoking patrons”; another, more direct, simply advertised “Smoking.” At least the French attitude toward authority hadn’t changed.
Everyone looked more prosperous—or perhaps I, with my less valuable Canadian dollars, simply felt poorer than fifteen years earlier. The prosperity was evident in the generally high prices, the many new automobiles, and the expensive shops. For some reason, clothing boutiques in particular bore American names—Mister Cool, New York Jeans—or at least names that the French imagined sounded American. Some things in Paris were new, but many more were old: the names of streets were indicated by the familiar blue and white metal signs, some buildings still displayed those touching historical plaques (so-and-so lived here), and there were still standard stenciled warnings on walls proclaiming Loi de 1881, Défense d’afficher (“Posters forbidden”). As before, the sidewalks were crowded with café terraces, newsstands, and kiosks. I didn’t see any smelly public pissoirs; these have been replaced by unisex cabins that look like enclosed telephone booths. There were still some subterranean public toilets with uniformed attendants and turnstiles; it cost me fifty cents to relieve myself.
The streets themselves were cleaner than I had remembered. Household garbage is picked up seven days a week and there were sweepers everywhere. The French have their own way of doing things—after all, who else would have gone to the trouble of designing plastic brooms to look like straw? In an attempt to keep things tidy, the municipality has installed curbstones with inlaid canine silhouettes to indicate appropriate places in the gutter for pets to defecate. From the evidence underfoot, this anti-poop campaign has not been a total success, but the effort impressed me. Public hygiene, as Eugen Weber, a historian of modern France, has noted, arrived slowly in France. It was the French, after all, who invented bottled mineral water because their tap water was not fit to drink, and who used to ridicule the American obsession with cleanliness. Weber recounts that when the Duc de Broglie, one of the richest men in France, bought what was considered to be a luxury mansion in Paris in 1902, the house had no bathrooms, no indoor toilets, and only one water tap per floor. This can be compared to George Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue mansion, which contained a full bathroom as early as 1885; by the turn of the century, even ordinary middle-class Americans could enjoy “A Bed and a Bath for a Dollar and a Half” at the popular Statler Hotel in Buffalo, where every room had a private bathroom with a tub, sink, and water closet. The French, for whom such amenities were a novelty, often referred to them as “American comforts.”
One Parisian comfort that is distinctly un-American was evident to me one evening, as I returned to my hotel from the opera. A month earlier I had walked late at night on the Upper East Side of New York, probably among the wealthiest urban residential neighborhoods in the world. It may have been the cardboardshrouded figures sleeping in the darkened entrances of expensive stores selling ormolu clocks and handmade chocolates, or the almost continuous background whine of police sirens, but I couldn’t shake a slight but persistent sense of wariness. Here in the Fourth Arrondissement, I didn’t feel in the least edgy. Not that there were many people about at midnight—the boulevard Henri IV down which I was walking was quite empty except for passing cars—but the emptiness in the street felt pleasant, not threatening at all. That American cities now have homicide rates higher than those anywhere else in the Western world, sadly, goes without saying. That Paris felt and is safer, however, is not only the result of fewer social problems in what is still a relatively homogeneous culture. The City of Paris with its 2.3 million inhabitants is policed by 35,000 officers, the equivalent of more than 15 gendarmes per 1,000 citizens; New York City, on the other hand, fields only about 4 policemen per 1,000. By American standards, however, this is a high rate of policing (Los Angeles has about 2 officers per 1,000 citizens), which is probably why New York ranks relatively low in urban crime—thirty-eighth among large cities—according to the 1990 FBI Crime Index.
The day I arrived in Paris my publisher, Liana Levi, took me to lunch, and I was pleased to find that good food is still a part of French culture, although the cooking was nouvelle, not bourgeois, more Evian was consumed than wine, and the desserts were distinctly on the light side. Still, the excellent bread was unchanged, the coffee was as strong as ever, and the crowded restaurant was noisy and convivial. It was an atmosphere that I recalled from my earlier visits.
The conversation turned from matters literary—I was there to promote a new book—to architecture, and so inevitably to the Grands Projets. This refers to the monumental government-sponsored additions to Paris—there are nine buildings, thus far—that have been undertaken by President François Mitterrand. Mitterrand’s architectural ambition vastly exceeds that of his three predecessors in the Fifth Republic. Charles de Gaulle, who ruled longest, built least—the undistinguished, doughnut-shaped Maison de la Radio—but he did leave one magnificent architectural legacy. In 1958, he ordered the ravallement, or cleanup, of the facades of Parisian public buildings, which dramatically altered the appearance of the capital, erasing centuries of accumulated dirt and grime. De Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, was a mediocre president whose tenure was cut short by his death, but he managed to build a lot, most of it bad. He permitted the construction of the first skyscraper in Paris, the looming Tour Montparnasse, inserted expressways along both banks of the Seine, tore down the old market of Les Halles, and cleared a large residential area of the Beaubourg to make way for a multifunctional museum—now called the Centre Pompidou—which, paint peeling and steel rusting, today more than ever resembles an oil refinery (as its unkind critics originally nicknamed it). Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, pointedly reversing Pompidou’s policy of demolition, initiated the conversion of the vast Gare d’Orsay into a museum of nineteenth-century art, and at La Villette, on the northeast edge of the city, created a museum of science and industry to be housed in a beautifully restored nineteenth-century market building.
Although the record of presidential intervention in the architecture and urbanism of Paris is mixed, one must admire the sentiment embodied in this type of national leadership. The same kind of leadership is in play in Great Britain, where Prince Charles is an outspoken critic of modernist architecture and planning, and in Canada, where Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau played a personal role in the construction of several important public buildings in the national capital. In the United States, recent presidents have shown no interest in the art of building, beyond redecorating the White House.I An exception was Franklin D. Roosevelt, an amateur architect who largely designed his own presidential library in Hyde Park—a building of considerable charm—as well as several other projects. The lack of architectural awareness in the American presidency is striking, since the United States is probably the only country in the world that can boast a national leader who is also a celebrated architect, Thomas Jefferson. The contemporary lack of leadership in architecture appears to be a part of the modern technocratic presidency: the president’s wife may attend to the arts, as Jacqueline Kennedy did; the president himself must be seen to be interested in touch football, cutting brush, speed-boating, or jogging, but not in culture, lest he be accused of elitism.
The French, on the other hand, see no difficulty in comparing their president to Louis XIV, who transformed the architectural face of Paris; certainly, Mitterrand seems intent on emulating the Grand Siècle. So far not only has he moved the ministry of finance out of the Louvre and into a new building, renovated the Louvre itself, and endowed Paris with a brand-new opera house on the Place de la Bastille, but he has also built an Arabic institute, a music center, and a new public park at La Villette, and at La Défense in the northwestern suburbs, he has erected an unusual office building in the shape of a huge arch. This modern counterpart to the Arc de Triomphe will be overshadowed by his latest, and likely his last, project: an enormous new national library, a building that will add more than a billion dollars to the three billion that have already been spent on the Grands Projets.
“We will have achieved nothing if in the next ten years we have not created the basis for an urban civilization,” President Mitterrand announced portentously after he was elected. It’s fortunate that Paris was already the seat of a great urban architectural tradition, for Mitterrand’s Grands Projets are not very good buildings. Even I. M. Pei’s new glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre is, finally, a timid gesture, and Jean Nouvel’s Institut du Monde Arabe, while it fits well enough into its surroundings, is fussy and contrived in its details. What the Grands Projets chiefly exhibit is size—they are huge: the largest opera building in the world (almost three times the size of New York’s Metropolitan Opera), the world’s tallest habitable arch at La Défense, and Europe’s biggest library. Judging from the published drawings, the latter will be a banal composition resembling four half-open books. Its glass-fronted stacks have already been the cause of controversy among bibliophiles: not only are all the books exposed to harmful daylight, but most of the public reading rooms are underground. The huge opera house reminded me of a supertanker that had been grounded in the newly restored seventeenth-century district in the east of Paris; the Pare de la Villette is a collection of goofy pavilions in an arid landscape; and the grandiose government office building at La Défense recalls less a triumphal arch than a huge marble-covered coffee table. Mitterrand is not Louis XIV, or rather his architects on the whole haven’t lived up to the standards set by the Sun King’s architects—Claude Perrault (designer of the east front of the Louvre), Jules-Hardouin Mansart (builder of the Dôme des Invalides), and André Le Nôtre (creator of the Tuileries gardens). Mitterrand has imported talent from around the world—the arch of the Défense was designed by a Dane, the Opéra by a Canadian—but instead of delicacy, refinement, and delight, there is bureaucratic heavy-handedness, technical gimmickry, intellectual pretension, and brittle modernism.
Nevertheless, despite the onslaught of new cultural monuments, and despite the modernization and the prosperity, the streets of central Paris that I saw had not changed all that much in fifteen years; indeed, the city remained in many ways as I remembered it from my first visit as a college student in 1964. Then, enchanted by this beautiful place (and also in love), I strolled the same tree-lined avenues, the same romantic quais along the Seine, and the same narrow streets in the Latin Quarter; sat on the same park benches and in the same noisy bistros, drinking the same café au lait. Being in Paris almost thirty years later brought it all back.
* * *
“Why aren’t our cities like that?” asked my friend Danielle, who also had just returned from Paris, obviously impressed by what she’d seen. We were sitting around the dinner table in the Boathouse, our country home. The plates had been cleared away and our respective partners were engaged in close conversation nearby. What did she mean? I asked. Well, she answered, Paris had formal squares, stately parks, and tree-lined boulevards with wonderful vistas. I agreed that it was a beautiful city. Then why didn’t we—Danielle is a Montrealer—have anything as elegant as the Place des Vosges, she wanted to know, or as stately as the Palais-Royal, as architecturally complete as the arcades along the Rue de Rivoli, as impressive as the Grands Projets! Where were the elegant avenues, the great civic spaces, and the impressive public monuments?
I sensed accusation in her voice. You architects, she seemed to be saying, have slipped up: You could have built a beautiful city like Paris. Why didn’t you? I tried to explain the difference in history, in politics, and in economics that had formed the two cities. In any case, I argued lamely, this was North America, the New World; if our cities looked different, well, that was to be expected. I sensed myself getting defensive and I could see that I wasn’t making much headway. Danielle regarded me with a tolerant but skeptical look. Thankfully—for me—our conversation was interrupted by a noisy dispute at the other end of the table on the merits and follies of Canada’s ongoing constitutional crisis. Everyone in Quebec has an opinion on this arcane topic. The state of our cities was soon forgotten.
Though Montreal is sometimes described as the most European city on the North American continent, and though about half of Montrealers are descendants of immigrants from France and still speak French, no one could ever confuse Montreal with Paris.II Unlike Paris—and like all North American cities—Montreal is ringed by suburbs comprised mainly of individual houses, and it has a clearly defined commercial downtown of tall office buildings distinct from the residential neighborhoods of lower buildings that surround it. The center of Paris generally is made up of eightstory masonry buildings, which provide a pleasant uniformity of color and scale. The center of Montreal is a typically North American free-for-all: tall buildings of various shapes, steel-and-glass buildings, brick buildings interspersed with empty lots and parking lots. The effect suggests happenstance and improvisation, not planning—a Monopoly board in midgame.
Paris, unlike almost all North American cities, shows evidence of having been planned according to an aesthetic vision. A tradition of building and city planning has guided the Parisian authorities for almost four hundred years. Despite the fact that this tradition is derived from building royal palaces and gardens, it has proved admirably adaptable to planning entire cities: instead of gravel walks, boulevards; instead of box hedges, residential blocks; instead of fountains, civic buildings. Moreover, this formal language of symmetry, vista, and the grand gesture has been adhered to with a consistency that is on the whole admirable. The Place de l’Etoile, for example, dates back to the seventeenth century; at that time the circle, built by Louis XIV, was merely a grandiose clearing in the countryside. In 1806 Napoleon decided to use the circle—now at the edge of the city—as the site for a great symbolic city gate, the Arc de Triomphe. This provided a termination to the vista from the courtyard of the Louvre, a vista that had been first established by Le Nôtre’s remodeling of the Tuileries gardens in the 1660s, and reinforced by the majestic Place de la Concorde, which was begun in 1753. By the end of the nineteenth century, Baron Georges Haussmann had surrounded the Place de l’Etoile with buildings and extended the line of the Champs Elysées another two and a half miles to Neuilly on the Seine. More than three hundred years after Louis XIV, the project has finally been completed by Mitterrand in the shape of the arched office building at La Défense.
The idea of the urban axis appealed equally to king, emperor, and president, for it was and is a symbol, not of individual hubris, but of Frenchness. What is striking about this example is the consistency with which planning was carried out despite the different political ideologies of the planners. Equally striking is the degree of state intervention in urban development. When a shopping mall was built on the site of Les Halles in the center of Paris, the design had to be approved by President Giscard d’Estaing. When the authorities thought that the Champs Elysées was becoming too “American,” they declared the boulevard a national landmark and forced it to be remade in a more acceptable, European manner. The same desire for explicit order is visible in the terminology of streets, avenues, and boulevards—indeed, the origin of the last two words is French. Avenues are important diagonal streets, usually linking two public squares; boulevards are broad promenades resembling linear parks that were originally built on the site of the old city walls and are heavily planted with trees.
Montreal, too, has boulevards, but they’re boulevards in name only. René Lévesque Boulevard is a windy downtown artery whose chief adornment is a bleak concrete median strip. The city’s best-known boulevard is Boulevard St-Laurent—the Main of Mordecai Richler’s nostalgic and satirical novels of Jewish life in Montreal in the 1940s. The Main is a narrow commercial street whose most famous emporium is neither a haute couture boutique nor a luxury department store but Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen, a smoked-meat eatery of local renown but distinctly un-genteel. Montreal is not without charm, of course. The Main may not be a real boulevard, but it is a real shopping street, lined with Portuguese, Greek, and Italian produce stores that overflow onto the jammed sidewalks and recall nineteenth-century photographs of crowded immigrant neighborhoods in Philadelphia and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Likewise old-fashioned are many of the residential districts of Montreal: ornate Victorian terraces, mountainside luxury apartment buildings, and turn-of-the-century middle-class suburbs that have grown in with large trees and lush gardens. Montreal working-class neighborhoods have long narrow streets flanked by three- and four-story walk-ups draped with steep exterior stairs and wrought-iron balconies that produce an atmosphere of tough, gregarious urbanity.
There have been attempts to make Montreal more like Paris. The most famous symbol of Paris is the Eiffel Tower, and in 1967, Jean Drapeau, the mayor of Montreal, tried to have a tower included in the World’s Fair. He wasn’t successful, but nine years later a tower was made part of the Olympic Stadium. It isn’t as tall as Gustave Eiffel’s 1,056-foot construction, but it is designed by a Frenchman, and because it is tilted and twenty stories high, it is taller than Pisa’s Leaning Tower. The Montreal tower slants above the stadium and acts as a support for a huge, retractable fabric roof. The mayor’s attempt to import Parisian grandeur and Parisian autocracy to Montreal proved problematic: the Quebec concrete industry was simply not up to the challenge posed by novel French engineering, and French engineering itself was confounded by the harshness of the Canadian climate. Cracks have appeared in the foundations of the tower, and recently a seventy-ton piece of the stadium fell to the ground. As for the retractable, tentlike roof, it has developed an unpredictable tendency to self-destruct, so much so that it was finally decided to replace it with a permanent structure. Montreal’s now-superfluous leaning tower looks neither beautiful nor magnificent, only eccentric. When Eiffel’s tower opened to the public in 1889, it was an immediate popular success, although intellectuals like de Maupassant and Zola hated it—but then Zola was wrong about Cézanne, too, whom he considered a failure. Nobody likes the Olympic stadium: it’s a source of embarrassment and irritation, an expensive and irksome symbol of technical ineptitude and frustrated political dreams.
Most cities have places of which the visitor can say when he reaches them, “Now I’m really here.” These hallmark places can be famous monuments like the Eiffel Tower and Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate or famous buildings like Buckingham Palace. More often than not, they are large public spaces: the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Red Square in Moscow, Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Montreal is different. Ask people the location of the symbolic center of the city and the answer is likely to be “Peel and Saint Catherine.” Other famous North American street corners include L.A.’s Hollywood and Vine, San Francisco’s Powell and Market, Toronto’s King and Bay, Winnipeg’s Portage and Main, and New York’s Times Square, which despite its name is really a street intersection, not a square. With very few exceptions—the Mall in Washington, D.C., a city planned by a Frenchman, and Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland, Oregon—we have made street corners, not plazas, into symbolic civic places. This suggests that if our cities are different—and clearly they are—it may be not only because we build them differently and use them differently but also because we imagine them in a different way.
* * *
The Paris that I visited as a college student in 1964 had not yet been subjected to the heavy hand of Georges Pompidou; there were no expressways along the Seine, no Tour Montparnasse, and no Centre Pompidou. But even with these unwelcome additions, and even after Mitterrand’s monumental building spree, the center of the city—its Renaissance and Haussmannian character—remains essentially unchanged. On the other hand, if I was returning to a North American city after a twenty-eight-year absence, I would be most struck by how much had changed. During the last three decades, cities across the continent have retired streetcar systems, demolished railroad stations, and built new subways and urban freeways, not to mention airports. One of the major innovations in many cities has been the creation of what are in effect enclosed sidewalks. In Houston, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis, one can now walk from building to building without ever going outside by using an elevated system of walkways and bridges; in Montreal, a subterranean pedestrian network has turned large parts of downtown into a huge underground shopping mall.
Downtown skylines have been altered by three generations of skyscrapers. First, the severe modernist flattops of the 1960s; then the more picturesque postmodern towers, spires, and turrets of the 1970s; finally, in the 1980s, neoclassical and neo-Art Deco high-rises. The downtown towers are the work of our captains of industry—captains of sinking ships, it often turned out—but our city fathers have been busy too, financing new stadiums, convention centers, world trade centers, symphony halls, and a host of new museums.
Where there were once buildings, there are now parking lots; where there were once vacant lots, new buildings have arisen. A few of the old buildings remain. Some, having succumbed to architectural face-lifts, have become eerily ageless; many have fallen to the wrecker’s ball. Old family-owned businesses on the main shopping streets have been supplanted by neon-fronted franchise retailers and fast-food outlets. Landmark hotels disappear or are converted into condominiums; downtown movie houses, with rococo interiors and chandeliered lobbies, are subdivided into dull cineplexes; department stores are giving way to downtown shopping malls.
This building and rebuilding of North American cities since the 1950s demonstrates how much city planning is affected by changing fashions. One decade favors modernity and pulls down old buildings in the name of progress; the next decade discovers its heritage and promotes historic preservation. The artificial environment of tall buildings is a source of pride for one generation and a health hazard for another. A fad for closing streets and converting them to uniquely pedestrian use swept American and Canadian cities and towns in the 1950s; two decades later many of the so-called pedestrian malls had reverted to their original form. During the fifties and early sixties, progressive politicians replaced slums with public housing; their successors denounced “The Projects” as responsible for perpetuating poverty and promoting crime, and in several notorious cases public housing was torn down. Also during the fifties, downtown boosters welcomed federal highway construction funds; during the 1980s, they were more likely to be refusing them. In cities such as Miami, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New Orleans, proposed urban highways were rejected; some cities, like Toronto and Portland, Oregon, actually demolished sections of urban highway.
Mass transit has also been affected by fashion. Starting in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888, and until about the 1930s, virtually every large North American city and many small ones had electric trolley cars. In Los Angeles, the “Big Red Cars” of the Pacific Electric Railway operated on over one thousand miles of track.III When diesel-engine buses appeared, with a few exceptions—Toronto, New Orleans, San Francisco, parts of Philadelphia—most cities dismantled their trolley tracks. This was sometimes due to economic reasons (a drop-off in ridership), sometimes to political and lobby pressures, and sometimes simply to a feeling that trolleys were old-fashioned. Today trolleys are making a small comeback. Saint Louis has built an eighteen-mile line that connects downtown with Busch Stadium, the University of Missouri, and the airport (the Saint Louis trolley, unlike most mass transit, has turned out to be extremely popular with the public). Buffalo has a six-mile system. Detroit has built a two-mile trolley along the waterfront, and New York City is studying a trolley line that would run along 42nd Street from one side of Manhattan to the other. The old interurban streetcars that used to run into the suburbs and which ceased operation during the early 1900s are being revived in the form of high-speed light-rail systems in cities like Portland and San Diego.
Changes in North American cities are often the result of what economists call market forces, a reminder that our cities are shaped not only by planners but also by the often idiosyncratic decisions of large numbers of separate citizens. Money magazine annually compiles a list of “The Best Places to Live in America.” It is based on a survey of a cross section of readers who are asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, forty-four variables that they feel are desirable in a community: plenty of doctors, many hospitals, good public schools, proximity to colleges, inexpensive living, low taxes, strong local government, and so on. These ranked preferences are then combined with statistical information describing the three hundred largest metropolitan areas in the United States to find how these cities correspond to people’s current inclinations. What is surprising about the resulting list is its volatility. Only three of the top ten cities in 1991 made the top ten in 1992; on the other hand, Minneapolis/Saint Paul, which reached only sixty-third place in 1991, jumped to fourth in 1992, and the first and second places in 1992 were occupied by Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Columbia, Missouri, which had ranked twelfth and twentieth the year before.
This rise and fall reflects not only changes in the cities themselves but also changes in what matters to people when choosing a place to live. Although the public’s chief concerns remained stable between 1991 and 1992—clean air and water, low crime rate, and quality of health care—other preferences varied. For example, proximity to skiing areas was less important in 1992 than in the year before, and received a ranking of only 4.1 out of 10, much lower than proximity to lakes or ocean (7.4), or sunny weather (6.4). Which may explain why Billings, Montana, slipped from sixth place to seventy-third, and why Honolulu jumped to seventh place from twenty-seventh. In 1992, Americans gave more importance to living close to good colleges, which helped to raise the ranking of northwestern New Jersey and Philadelphia.
It is unlikely that Sioux Falls will turn into the hub of a prairie megalopolis merely because it happens to have clean air, clean water, and a low crime rate, but the factors that made it number one on Money magazine’s list are real enough, and they have had real effects. Compared to number three hundred on the list—Water-bury, Connecticut, a city of roughly the same size (about 100,000 inhabitants)—Sioux Falls has a higher per capita income, more doctors, twice as many college-educated people, a 50 percent lower unemployment rate, and a 50 percent lower crime rate (hence needing a much smaller police force, which results in lower taxes). Does all this make it a more attractive place to live? Apparently so: Sioux Falls is growing by almost 20 percent annually according to 1990 figures; the population of Waterbury, on the other hand, shrank by almost 1 percent the same year.
The history of American cities has always been marked by citizens voting with their feet, but never more so than in the twentieth century. People decide they like living in houses with gardens, and inner-city neighborhoods shrink while outer-city neighborhoods expand. Shopping habits change, with drastic effects on the department stores that were once the largest downtown buildings. Young couples develop a taste for Victorian houses and run-down streets acquire new life—and the previous rooming-house tenants are obliged to move on. Corporations decide that it might be a good idea to relocate nearer the highway, and so-called office parks spring up on what had been farmland. Air travel becomes cheaper, more people fly, new airport terminals are built, and new warehouses appear around them; inevitably, old warehouse districts are abandoned. Industry relocates factories to the Sunbelt, and Phoenix and Dallas boom while Flint, Michigan, and Youngstown, Ohio, suffer. Or people are simply attracted by safe, clean, and prosperous cities, and Sioux City grows while Water-bury declines.
* * *
In his 1992 Nobel Lecture, Derek Walcott described the sunny, pretty market towns of his native Caribbean and observed that these picture-postcard places appear frivolous and shallow to outsiders, who find them hard to take seriously. “Ours are not cities in the accepted sense,” he admitted, “but no one wants them to be. They dictate their own proportions, their own definitions in particular places and in a prose equal to that of their detractors.” No one would describe most North American cities as picture-postcard places, but they too are not cities in the accepted sense, or at least not in the traditional sense. Socially fragmented, recklessly entrepreneurial, relying almost completely on the automobile, and often lacking a defined center, they are without many of the conventional trappings of urbanity that have characterized cities in the past. According to their detractors, they are not real cities at all. At least they are not real cities if one assumes that real cities have cathedrals and outdoor plazas, not parking garages and indoor shopping malls; that they have sidewalk cafés, not drive-through Pizza Huts, and movie theaters, not cineplexes; that real cities are beautiful, ordered, and high-minded, not raucous, unfinished, and commercial.
No, our cities are definitely not like Paris. But then what are they like? And how did they get that way? If the City of Light can be described as a stage on which the dreams of emperors and kings and presidents are played out, the American city is more difficult to characterize. No kings, certainly, nor emperors, although there have been individual dreamers, men such as William Penn, the founder of colonial Philadelphia, which was the most ambitious planned city of its day; or William Levitt, the home builder who pioneered the model postwar suburb on Long Island and set an example that altered urban history; or William Zeckendorf, a property developer of the 1960s whose real estate ventures transformed the downtowns of many North American cities then caught up in the process of urban renewal. But above all, the American city has been a stage for the ideas of ordinary people: the small business man on Main Street, the franchisee along the commercial strip, the family in the suburbs. It all adds up to a disparate vision of the city. Perhaps the American urban stage is best described as cinematic rather than theatrical. A jumbled back lot with a cheek-by-jowl assortment of different sets for different productions—the dusty back alleys of High Noon next to the tree-lined small-town streets of It’s a Wonderful Life beside the drive-in highway strip of American Graffiti around the corner from the metropolitan nightmare of Blade Runner.
The cinematic analogy is apt because there is something fleeting about the American city, as if it were a temporary venue for diversion, a place to find entertaining novelty, at least for a time, before settling down elsewhere. The historian John Lukacs has written about Americans’ restlessness: the tendency to want to move around, not only from one part of the country to another, but from one neighborhood to another, even from one house to another. For such a mobile people, street corners would be appealing. The permanence of residence that was and is the stable foundation of European cities has always been absent in America, and accommodation to this transience has had an effect on the way that cities evolve and are altered. Lukacs speculates that this restlessness may have something to do with the vast, open continent itself. The architectural historian Vincent Scully agrees. Scully cites two examples of American peoples who voluntarily gave up their sedentary life in the face of a new mode of transportation: the Plains Indians, when confronted by the horse, and twentieth-century Americans, when confronted by the automobile. “Similar, too, are the human qualities which brought the primitivistic and nomadic patterns forth, alike among post-conquest Plains Indians and contemporary Americans: a sense of open horizons, an impatience with communal restraints, an instinct for the continuation throughout life of childish joys, a taste for violence, hard use, quick turnover, lonely fantasies, eternal change.”
Eternal change is certainly the hallmark of American urban history, which, as we shall see, is the story of a series of urban ideals—some mundane, some high-minded, some wonderful, some wrongheaded, some elitist, some popular—that were often interrupted by unforeseen events, interruptions frequently accompanied by calamitous consequences. What is surprising is the continuing sense of public optimism throughout. Despite the setbacks, urban expectations go on unabated. Sometimes the past is impatiently discarded, sometimes it’s resurrected, sometimes it’s ignored, but throughout the making and unmaking of cities, there is evidence of a constant striving to correct and improve, of an attempt finally to get it right.
I. Montreal was for a long time the world’s second-largest French-speaking metropolis after Paris, a distinction now accorded Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire.
II. The interurban electric railway was spread over the entire Los Angeles basin, linking downtown to Santa Monica, San Fernando, Newport Beach, Pomona, San Bernardino, and Riverside. This is a reminder that it was the Pacific Electric, not the automobile, that created this sprawling metropolitan region.
III. Jimmy Carter’s prominent involvement in building homes for low-income families occurred after the end of his presidency.