EVERY HISTORICAL PERIOD HAS ITS urban Bell-wethers—that is, cities that command attention because they embody the values of their particular epoch. These cities are appreciated for their culture, envied for their prosperity, and admired for their dynamism; frequently, they are also the cities whose architecture and urban design is imitated. The Rome of Pope Sixtus V (1521-90) was such a place; its imposing civic monuments and Baroque planning influenced town planning across Europe. In the eighteenth century, London, a comfortable, rambling city of townhouses, private residential squares, and public pleasure gardens, became the model to emulate. During the 1850s, attention shifted to Paris. The transformation of that city from the sixteenth-century city created by Henri IV to a modern industrial metropolis occurred during the Second Empire (1852-1870), and was due chiefly to the enterprise of Napoléon III and to Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the man he appointed as prefect of the Seine. Haussmann’s powerful post combined the roles of mayor, minister of public works, and chief city planner. Paris got new railroad stations, hospitals, markets, and numerous civic buildings; Haussmann himself built new aqueducts and sewers, introduced public gas lighting to the streets, and created almost 5,000 acres of parkland, including the Bois de Boulogne. But he is best remembered for relentlessly pushing wide boulevards through old residential quarters, a strategy that combined a concern for sanitation with traffic engineering, as well as an interest in facilitating rapid troop deployment in a city prone to public disturbances.
It was during this period that Paris acquired its modern persona, the image of a city with an atmosphere of urban gaiety, a preoccupation with fashion and food, and a taste for grand architectural gestures. The composer Jacques Offenbach provided the gaiety. Napoléon’s wife, the Empress Eugénie, popularized the crinoline skirt and the plunging neckline, and Charles Frederick Worth, a transplanted Englishman, was the first of a long line of couturiers who made Paris the world’s fashion center. Brillat-Savarin and Carême had established la grande cuisine earlier in the century, and fashionable restaurants such as the Petit Moulin Rouge (where Auguste Escoffier was employed) lined the boulevards of a city also renowned for its elegant hotels. Architects provided the grandeur. Charles Garnier, the magnificent new opera house; Henri Labrouste, the cavernous reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale; and J. I. Hittorff, the cathedral-like Gare du Nord; even the central market (Les Halles, designed by Victor Baltard) was impressive. The architectural heritage that we admire today depended on material prosperity, of course. Industrialization, land speculation, and profitable colonial ventures had made some Parisians rich, and this had produced a society dominated by the making and spending of money, just like Chicago’s, although with different results.
Paris was the destination not only of the fashionable upper classes but of a broad range of people, for starting in mid-century, the city became the world’s leading locale for international exhibitions. Eleven million people visited Napoléon Ill’s Great Universal Exhibition in 1867; sixteen million came in 1878 and saw the Trocadero palace (a Moorish confection that stood on the present site of the Palais de Chaillot); an extraordinary thirty-two million came in 1889 and saw the city from a completely new vantage point—the top of the Eiffel Tower; and even more attended the Universal Exhibition of 1900.
Visitors admired the technological marvels and exotic exhibits that were—and still are—the staple of international fairs. But since the French exhibitions, unlike the relatively concentrated Columbian Exposition of Chicago, were spread over a large part of Paris, the city itself was on display. There was much to see: architectural novelties such as the multistoried department stores (the world’s first electrical arc lights were installed in a Parisian department store in 1877); monumental railroad stations, topped by the lavish Gare d’Orsay, built in 1900; aboveground, omnibuses, and underground, the new subway with its striking Art Nouveau station entrances designed by Hector Guimard; and boulevards illuminated by electricity, giving rise to the sobriquet City of Light. Soon versions of these Parisian innovations appeared as far afield as Cairo and Mexico City. Along the newly widened streets, like the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Boulevard de Sébastopol, were luxurious apartment buildings and hotels built by property developers. It was these apartment houses, designed according to strict height, setback, and projection regulations established by Haussmann, that so impressed architects like Charles McKim and Edward Bennett, who as young men came to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and who later tried to introduce the lessons of Paris to American cities.I
World’s fairs were obviously an important part of nineteenth-century urbanism, not only because of the civic monuments and the public works they left behind, but also because the fairs themselves served as highly visible laboratories for innovation in urban design. For example, the Crystal Palace erected in London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exposition of 18 51 spurred the construction of large glass-roofed shopping arcades in many European cities. The Paris exhibition of 1889 introduced the world to large-scale electrical street lighting. Ideas spread quickly. The French, impressed by Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, incorporated grand neoclassical buildings—the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais—into their Universal Exhibition of 1900.
The Columbian Exposition marks the moment when Europeans first took notice of urbanism in the New World. The French were influenced by American railway stations when they built the Gare d’Orsay. The British were also aware of American town planning. A City Beautiful conference was held in Liverpool in 1907; three years later, at the Town Planning Exhibition and Conference in London, Daniel Burnham was an invited speaker, and the impressive drawings of the Washington, D.C., plan were prominently displayed. The latter did not necessarily influence British urban design, however. Opportunities for large urban projects were rare, nor did the monumental scale of the American work suit most architects, who were more interested in exploring the indigenous vernacular of British towns and villages. One exception was the talented Edwin Lutyens, probably the greatest English architect since Wren. Lutyens loved grand gestures and classical design, and he did eventually get a chance to implement a Burnhamesque urban plan in the imperial capital of New Delhi.
When American urbanism took center stage, after the 1920s, it was precisely the nemesis of the City Beautiful movement, the skyscraper, that captured the world’s imagination. Like so many later American inventions—blue jeans, fast food, rock and roll—the skyscraper had mass appeal, and for the rest of the century, the American skyline of tall towers epitomized the modern metropolis, just as Parisian boulevards had earlier.
Although the skyscraper originated in Chicago, it was New York that became the exemplary skyscraper city. The first true New York skyscraper was the Flatiron Building, designed by Chicago’s Daniel Burnham in 1902. At twenty-two stories, the Flatiron was not the tallest building in the city, but it was the most dramatic. Its site is a narrow triangle facing Madison Square Park, which meant that unlike previous skyscrapers, which were simply taller versions of conventional street-frontage buildings, the Flatiron really did look like a slender freestanding tower (an image captured successfully in the famous photograph by Alfred Stieglitz). Some Chicago skyscrapers were taller, but none as striking. The public loved the Flatiron, and businessmen and their architects took notice.
The vertical growth of New York was partly a result of immigration that swelled the population of the entire city, partly caused by the limited space of Manhattan Island, and partly a function of geology. Hard rock is the most economical base for extremely tall buildings and eliminates the need for expensive foundations, and Manhattan has shallow bedrock chiefly in two areas: at the southern tip of the island around Wall Street, and in Midtown south of Central Park. The following decade saw many more corporate stalagmites in both locations, and notable skyscrapers included the 600-foot neoclassical Singer Tower and the Woolworth Building, with its cathedral-like lobby and Gothic-revival exterior, which soared up 792 feet, making it the tallest building in the world. On the Upper East Side, verticality was evident in the form of apartment buildings, a Parisian import that had become extremely popular with fashionable New Yorkers.II
Never before had American civilization been so resolutely urban. By 1920, more Americans were living in cities than ever before, and most of the people who could be classified as urban lived in the largest cities. But America also had become urban in another sense: cities like New York (after World War I the biggest city in the world), Chicago, and Philadelphia, as well as Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and many smaller cities, were home to a new, dynamic, metropolitan way of life. The hallmarks of this way of life were above all architectural: great railroad stations and department stores, nightclubs and musical theaters, impressive public libraries and concert halls, grand hotels and luxurious apartment houses.
Although many of the most prominent manifestations of this urban civilization were associated with the upper-middle class, there was also a parallel urban culture with broader appeal: mass-circulation newspapers (including such innovations as comics, color supplements, and women’s pages), amusement parks, professional spectator sports, and movie palaces. While not all of these were American inventions—popular movies, for example, were pioneered in Germany and France—the prosperity of American cities ensured enthusiastic application and acceptance of such innovations. Amusement parks like New York’s Coney Island and Chicago’s White City (the successor of the Midway Plaisance) were more extravagant than elsewhere; movie palaces, even those in small cities, were grander; and downtown streets were more crowded—with pedestrians, pushcarts, horse-drawn wagons, streetcars, omnibuses, and automobiles.
As far as architecture was concerned, the period leading up to the Depression was marked by eclecticism. Beaux Arts classicism, neo-Gothic, and Art Deco competed for attention. Atop the Chrysler Building were eagle gargoyles that mimicked the hood ornaments on the company’s cars; the twin towers of the San Remo apartments were capped by finialed Roman temples; the 1,250-foot Empire State Building was crowned by a tall mast, intended for mooring airships. It was an epoch that remains unrivaled for the sheer exuberance of its architecture, its technological inventiveness, and its structural accomplishments. The result was hardly the polite and carefully orchestrated urbanism of Burnham’s dream, however. It was brash, pragmatic, and often vulgar. Bright lights, skylines, activity, excitement—there was little intellectual underpinning to the vertical city, whose appeal was visual and visceral. Jazz had originated in the South, but during the twenties it blossomed in the cities of the North: Chicago, Kansas City, Philadelphia, and especially New York. Like jazz, the vertical city was marked by improvisation—like the colonial builders of Woodstock, Vermont, who modified their plans to suit changing circumstances, the builders of New York made it up as they went along.
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The advocates of the profitable city had been correct: unleashing commercial forces had produced a dynamic urbanism that was the envy of the rest of the world—certainly, after 1918, of war-weary Europe, whose own cities seemed tame and old-fashioned by comparison.III One European who visited the United States was a Parisian architect, Swiss-born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, or Le Corbusier, as he preferred to be called. He arrived in 1935. Like Tocqueville a century earlier, Le Corbusier traveled by ship, but his vessel, the Normandie, was not detoured, and he was greeted not by the sight of the little houses of Newport but by the towers of New York. “We saw the mystic city of the new world appear far away, rising up from Manhattan,” he recounted. “It passed us at close range: a spectacle of brutality and savagery. In contrast to our hopes the skyscrapers were not made of glass, but of tiara-crowned masses of stone. They carry up a thousand feet in the sky, a completely new and prodigious architectural event; with one stroke Europe is thrust aside.”
Where Tocqueville came to America to learn, Le Corbusier came to instruct. He was already well known as a leading practitioner of the new International Style that had been sanctioned by the Museum of Modern Art in a prominent exhibition three years earlier. It was the museum that invited Le Corbusier and, together with the Rockefeller Foundation, organized a speaking tour that took the French architect to twenty cities, including Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Boston. He also visited college towns, lecturing at Princeton, Yale, and Vassar.
Le Corbusier spent two and a half months in the United States. He recorded his impressions in a short travel memoir published in France immediately on his return. He wrote quickly, and his book, titled When the Cathedrals Were White, is an uneven collection of architectural bombast, self-serving anecdotes, and canny insights. Like Tocqueville, Le Corbusier admired American practicality, and he enjoyed the informality of American social life; he also deplored and commented on the treatment of black Americans. Like Tocqueville, he was condescending toward American high culture, especially when it imitated Europe—although he loved jazz—and he too was impressed by the cleanliness of American cities. After a visit to Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal, for example, ignoring the grand classical architecture, he observed that “the beautiful stone slabs of the floor are shining and spotless at all times. Papers never lie about on it.”
New York fascinated him; “the City of Incredible Towers,” he called it. Although Manhattan was Le Corbusier’s first experience of skyscrapers, he had been thinking of a vertical city for more than a decade. In 1922, undaunted by his lack of experience in city planning, he prepared an exhibit for a “contemporary city for three million inhabitants.” The plan was an unremarkable grid, but its downtown was composed uniquely of huge freestanding office towers. Three years later he suggested razing a 600-acre section of Paris around Les Halles, the rue de Rivoli, and the Faubourg St-Honoré, and building eighteen sixty-story skyscrapers and a crosstown expressway. Although his so-called Voisin Plan preserved the Louvre and Notre-Dame Cathedral, the medieval street pattern was totally obliterated. These projects and other concepts were included in two books: The City of Tomorrow, published in 1925, and The Radiant City, which appeared just before his American trip.
Radical urban surgery—one might describe it as a lobotomy—like the Voisin Plan gave Le Corbusier notoriety. Looking back, it is difficult to understand how someone who could make such absurd—not to say despotic and inhumane—proposals might be taken seriously. But he was, at least by intellectuals; to Le Corbusier’s continued chagrin, his projects never garnered much political or popular support. Perhaps politicians saw through the mask he presented to the world; although he dressed in sober, dark suits, and wore thick, circular eyeglasses that gave him the air of an accountant, Le Corbusier was really a bohemian. He had received his only formal professional education as an engraver in a school of applied arts, and by temperament and inclination he was an individualist and an artist. He was about as prepared to be a town planner as, say, Andy Warhol.
Nevertheless, by dint of his formidable ego and a Warholian gift for self-promotion, Le Corbusier made himself into an urban expert. His architecture was certainly original—in the spare, progressive fashion of the time—and his vaguely socialist theories appealed to New Deal liberals (he himself seems to have been a political chameleon). Le Corbusier is now best remembered for his architectural work, but he devoted a great deal of time to town planning. He was one of the founders of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), a series of international conferences whose intent was to introduce modern urbanism to Europe. He made a tour of South America. As he plane-hopped from city to city, he sketched unsolicited proposals for the radical reconstruction of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires; he also had plans for Algiers, Barcelona, Geneva, Stockholm, and Antwerp.
Journalists gave Le Corbusier much free publicity because he was the source of colorful quotes. The day after his arrival in New York, the Herald Tribune carried the following headline over an article featuring an interview with the French architect: FINDS AMERICAN SKYSCRAPERS MUCH TOO SMALL. Although he admired Manhattan, Le Corbusier thought there was room for improvement. In an article he wrote for the American Architect he unveiled a version of his Voisin Plan for Manhattan: he replaced the clusters of office towers with giant skyscrapers set far apart. (Le Corbusier had already proposed a huge office building for Algiers that could accommodate 10,000 workers, which was more even than the recently completed Empire State Building.) Between the skyscrapers, a park extended over the entire island; instead of sidewalks there were winding footpaths, and instead of streets, high-speed expressways.
Le Corbusier realized that most New Yorkers lived in brown-stone rowhouses, walk-ups, and low-rise tenements. “Between the present skyscrapers there are masses of large and small buildings. Most of them small,” he noted. “What are these small houses doing in dramatic Manhattan? I haven’t the slightest idea. It is incomprehensible. It is a fact, nothing more, as the debris after an earthquake or bombardment is a fact.” The convoluted language aside, the message was clear: the debris had to be done away with. Le Corbusier had the answer to that, too. He proposed apartment blocks—lower than the office buildings, about sixteen stories—organized in long slabs that each could house three thousand people. Instead of streets and sidewalks, there were elevators and corridors, or “interior streets,” as he called them. It was all very rational—“Cartesian” was a favorite Le Corbusier term—cars over there, living over here, work above, play below. Voilà! The city of the future.
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But the city of the future would have to wait. When Le Corbusier visited America in 1935, the country was in the midst of what one historian has called a period of arrested urban development. Thanks to the Depression and World War II, the years between 1930 and 1945 saw relatively little building activity. The Public Works Administration did undertake urban beautification projects, civic buildings, and some public housing. But with a few notable exceptions—Rockefeller Center in New York—there was no downtown construction, and with massive unemployment and factory closings, the suburban home-building industry all but disappeared.
Not until the postwar decade were long-delayed investments made in buildings and urban infrastructure. It was high time. In addition to fifteen years of neglect, cities like New York and Chicago had a nineteenth-century heritage of hurriedly built tenements with truly awful living conditions. One of the consequences of the war and returning veterans was an enormous need for new housing. The favorite solution was to start afresh. Old buildings were demolished to give way to new; downtown blocks were razed; and new versions of the City Beautiful civic centers were built, this time including convention halls, hotels, and performing arts centers. Billions of dollars poured into cities in what was probably the largest burst of construction since the boom period of the late nineteenth century.
Urban renewal, as this initiative was optimistically termed, was not only the result of private investment; for the first time, cities became recipients of massive government spending. The 1949 Housing Act called for “a decent home and a suitable housing environment for every American family,” and mandated the use of federal money for the acquisition and demolition of slums, providing funds for the construction of more than 800,000 units of public housing. This by itself was an enormous urban intervention (most of the public housing was in cities), but shortly it was followed by an even bigger government program: the Federal-Aid Highway Act, passed by Congress in 1956. Interstate highway construction was not originally intended to affect cities, since federal planners wanted to avoid building in congested urban areas, but with the active lobbying of big-city mayors, the 41,000-mile interstate highway system was altered to include 6,100 miles of expensive urban freeways, and more than half of the entire proposed budget of $50 billion was diverted to urban construction. Highway construction represented a massive injection of capital into the urban economy but proved a Pyrrhic victory. There was temporary creation of construction jobs, to be sure, but the highways (usually elevated) wrought physical havoc in the established urban fabric, reducing the older housing stock, creating physical barriers between neighborhoods, and often cutting cities off from their waterfronts. Urban highways also ultimately accelerated central city decline by providing ready access to the suburbs from downtown.
The removal and replacement of deteriorated parts of the city is always a painful process. (Haussmann’s beautification of Paris had been bought at great human cost, as had Sixtus V’s reconstruction of Rome.) It is never easy to identify “the slums,” since physical deterioration of neighborhoods is never consistent. In any case, what appears an eyesore to some is home to others. Inevitably, people are displaced, everyday life is disrupted, and neighborhoods are thrown into disarray. Inevitably, too, greed corrupts the political process and the wrecker’s ball—a crude instrument under the best of circumstances—is swung with casual recklessness. Such a destructive process finds its only excuse—if any excuse is possible—in the quality of the results. Only an extremely successful end justifies the means.
The tragedy of the urban renewal projects of the fifties and sixties is not just that money was often squandered in unfinished projects or that many people were adversely affected (in total, more housing was demolished than constructed). That was bad enough, but what was worse was that all this was done in the name of a misbegotten ideal. The postwar notion of progress and technological improvement suggested that cities should be modernized, a notion that in itself was not the problem. The problem was that this period coincided with a time when urbanism and architecture were in the grips of planning theories that, in hindsight, were profoundly mistaken about the nature of cities and of urban life. The core of this misunderstanding was the assumption that old ways of building cities should be supplanted by twentieth-century so-called modern urbanism. Modern urbanism meant abandoning the traditional street layout wherever possible, and in the name of separating drivers and walkers, replacing sidewalks with pedestrian malls and underground or elevated walkways. Buildings no longer lined streets in the time-tested manner, but stood free in plazas. Streets were merely for transportation—the faster the traffic moved, the better. Above all, these modern improvements defined themselves by their isolation from the rest of the city, not only by the style of their architecture, which was aggressively and uncompromisingly modern, but also by their size, which was huge.
The process of piecemeal urban growth—plot by plot, building by building—had always provided variety and scale to the city, adding new buildings side by side with old ones. Even the ambitious projects of the City Beautiful movement, like the renewal of North Michigan Avenue, were based on progressive addition: Burnham, like Haussmann before him, made big plans for streets and avenues, but assumed that these would be filled in with relatively small buildings. The advocates of urban renewal, on the other hand, were impatient with such a process. In the rush to garner the economic benefits of new construction, city administrations helped developers assemble huge parcels of land. Now urban redevelopment schemes encompassing entire blocks, and even multiple blocks, were being built by a single developer and designed by a single architect. The long-term effect of ponderous, inward-looking complexes such as Philadelphia’s Penn Center and Montreal’s Place Bonaventure on the surrounding street life was deadening. Even bigger were the so-called megastructures. Architects such as Paul Rudolph and Buckminster Fuller proposed different designs for projects that were in effect enormous beehives, large enough to encompass entire urban districts. Fortunately, these single-minded urban visions remained unbuilt.
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There is no better way to understand the failure of the urban renewal episode in American urban history than by looking at one of its most ambitious endeavors: housing for the poor. Although the first federally funded urban public housing was the result of the relatively modest Housing Act of 1937, with the 1949 act the Truman administration embarked on a policy that aimed to build more than 800,000 new public housing units across the country. For a number of reasons, including an earlier federal court decision that struck down the right of the federal government to use its powers of eminent domain to build publicly owned housing, and the tying of public housing provision to slum clearance, most public housing ended up in inner-city locations. The size of this undertaking, combined with the large scale preferred by most urban planners, produced the great public housing projects of the 1950s.
Modern planning advocated the separation of different functions within the city. The tendency of American cities to become functionally specialized has already been noted—people lived in one part of the city and worked in another—but in the 1950s this separation was not complete. Only suburbs were exclusively residential; in the city, working-class homes within walking distance of factories were common. In the downtown area, shops, bars, movie houses, and apartment houses were within a few blocks of each other, and shopping streets ran through the center of the older neighborhoods. This mixture ensured the sort of animated street life that Jane Jacobs tried to describe in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Modern planners replaced the mixture of stores, theaters, and office buildings with large, exclusive shopping zones, entertainment zones, and commercial zones. Even culture was zoned: New York acquired Lincoln Center; Montreal, Place des Arts.
The earliest and most extreme cases of single-use zoning were the new public housing projects. Large areas of land—usually cleared slums—the size of small towns were to be set aside exclusively for housing. No stores, no businesses—no uses at all other than housing (and no housing other than public housing)—were to be allowed.IV Instead of a grid of streets, there would be large so-called superblocks, for pedestrians only; instead of small buildings, there would be mammoth widely spaced apartment buildings; instead of being subdivided into private gardens, the spaces between the buildings would be public parks. These were essentially the design rules Le Corbusier had set down in his American Architect article. The acceptance of modernist architecture and planning, at least by the authorities and the architectural and planning professions, ensured that what had appeared outlandish twenty years before now seemed like a sensible idea.
One of the first large public housing projects was Cabrini-Green on Chicago’s Near North Side. It is not the biggest housing project in the city—not as big as Robert Taylor Homes, which is said to be the largest housing project in the world—but it is big enough. Cabrini-Green, which was begun in 1955, houses 10,000 people and extends over seventy acres, about the area of the entire Loop. Cabrini-Green followed the Chicago prototype: between 1957 and 1968, the Chicago Housing Authority built about 16,000 public housing apartment units, almost all of them in high-rise buildings. The decision to house low-income families in high-rise buildings is sometimes explained by the need to reduce land-costs. In fact the net density of a project like Cabrini-Green, about 70 dwelling units per acre of residential land, could easily have been reached by building traditional walk-up houses.V But that would have required conventional streets and sidewalks, which did not accord with the modernist vision of freestanding buildings in a parklike setting.
In the name of housing the poor, the social reformers of the 1950s adopted the urbanism of postwar, rebuilt Europe and introduced a new type of planning, quite foreign to any previous American ideal. (Curiously, the same architectural historians who railed against the foreign influences in the City Beautiful movement had no objection to this latest import.) The architecture, too, was unfamiliar. The Cabrini-Green apartment slabs, which ranged from ten to nineteen stories high, resembled high-rise factories with exposed concrete frames filled in with glass and brick. They followed the architectural style pioneered by Mies van der Rohe, who had built his first concrete-frame commercial apartment building in Chicago in 1949, after arriving from Germany eleven years earlier. Public agencies were probably attracted to this kind of architecture for the same reason that many real-estate developers are partial to modernist design: repetitive, stripped-down, and undecorated buildings can be erected quickly and inexpensively.
However, it’s one thing to build apartment towers for the upper-middle class—as Mies usually did—and quite another to embrace them as solutions for housing the poor. The well-off have doormen, janitors, repairmen, baby-sitters, and gardeners; the poor have no hired help. Without restricted access, the lobbies and corridors are vandalized; without proper maintenance, broken elevators do not get fixed, staircases become garbage dumps, and broken windows remain unreplaced; without baby-sitters, single mothers are stranded in their apartments, and adolescents roam, unsupervised, sixteen floors below; without gardeners, the exterior landscaping deteriorates, and is replaced by beaten dirt and asphalt parking lots. Aesthetics aside, these open pedestrian areas are problematic: windblown, unconducive to walking, and less safe than conventional streets and sidewalks overlooked by individual homes. There are also problems with the design of the buildings at Cabrini-Green: to save money, no private balconies or terraces were provided, access galleries and elevator lobbies were left open to the elements (in frigid Chicago!), and the unshaded windows of the tall buildings face east and west, with no air-conditioning.
Among housing experts, Cabrini-Green has had a bad reputation for some time, but it attracted national attention in October 1992, when one of its residents, Dantrell Davis, a seven-year-old boy, was murdered. He was walking to school and was shot (for no apparent reason) by an unknown sniper in one of the empty high-rise buildings. (At the time, one-third of the apartments at Cabrini-Green had deteriorated so badly that they were abandoned; two of the worst buildings were completely closed.) Television journalists drew parallels with violence-ridden Sarajevo. This sounds far-fetched, but I was struck by how much the bleak background behind the television reporters did indeed resemble a war zone. The littered expanse of bare earth, the abandoned cars and broken windows, the battered apartment blocks with walls covered in graffiti and piles of garbage in the corridors. This place had been beaten into the ground, but it had obviously not been loved for a long time.VI
In 1993, the centenary of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the Chicago Tribune held an architectural competition whose subject was Cabrini-Green. Entrants were asked to reconfigure the housing project “to provide a model for decent and humane public housing.” They were free to suggest demolishing or retaining existing buildings, and were not obliged to follow existing zoning and building regulations. There was no cost limitation, but it was pointed out that “the Chicago Housing Authority is a cash-strapped public agency,” and although the program was hypothetical, the emphasis was clearly on practicality rather than utopianism.
I was interested in the competition and visited the Chicago Athenaeum, where a selection of the roughly three hundred entries was on display. The proposed solutions were a mixed bag. They ranged from the touching entry of two girls who lived in Cabrini-Green, whose recommendations included new stop signs at a dangerous corner and demolishing “a very bad drug building,” to the sort of intellectual posturing that characterizes so much of contemporary architecture. One entry, for example, mysteriously linked Cabrini-Green to the tidal cycles of Lake Michigan; another archly incorporated an amusement park into the public housing project; yet another nastily suggested “circling the wagons for safety” by creating fortresslike housing structures surrounded by masts with batteries of high-intensity spotlights. One technically inclined designer, apparently a devotee of Buckminster Fuller, produced a solution based on prefabricated concrete spheres—the houses resembled light bulbs. Thomas Beeby, a well-known Chicago architect, and his wife, Kirsten, suggested abandoning Cabrini-Green altogether and building small, unassuming single-family houses, to be owned by their low-income occupants, on sites scattered throughout the city. There would be not more than a hundred of any one particular design, and not more than three houses would be located in a given square mile. It is an attractive notion, but one that raises difficult administrative problems for a municipal body such as the Chicago Housing Authority.
The Beebys’ modest solution underscores the fact that scale is an important issue in public housing. Despite the argument of one of the Cabrini-Green competition entrants that “Architecture is not the solution, architecture is not the problem,” it’s obvious that large islands of standardized high-rise apartment blocks that contribute to social isolation are a problem, not only because they are inhuman in scale but also because they stigmatize their occupants. “One must avoid the danger of building for the poor under regulations or in a style very different from that to which the middle class is accustomed,” wrote Nathan Glazer more than twenty-five years ago. The winning project in the Chicago competition, the work of two assistant professors of urban design at North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota, Jim Nelson and Don Faulkner, addressed this issue by proposing that the Chicago Housing Authority demolish many of the dysfunctional high-rise buildings and sell off a good part of Cabrini-Green to private developers, who would build residential, commercial, and retail buildings; almost two-thirds of the 8,000 dwellings in the final scheme would be privately owned. The public and private housing would be indistinguishable, which holds out the hope that public housing might finally be socially and economically—as well as architecturally—integrated into the city.
Nelson and Faulkner’s urban design brims with midwestern good sense. Rebuild the old street grid, the designers suggest, and fill in the open spaces with traditional rowhouses oriented to the streets. Save as many of the existing apartment blocks as possible and mix in commercial buildings; introduce small parks and squares as well as civic buildings like police and fire stations, churches, and daycare centers. Create avenues linking two large neighborhood squares. Instead of the two large schools, build several small schools.
Although the Chicago Tribune competition was held only to elicit ideas, it seems likely that some of Nelson and Faulkner’s proposals will be implemented. Less than a year later, Vincent Lane, the activist chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, announced plans to demolish three buildings at Cabrini-Green and to lease the cleared land to private developers, who would be required to reserve one-quarter of the housing for low-income tenants; the remaining public housing was to be renovated. Chicago is not alone in rethinking its approach to public housing. In Newark, where most of the 10,000 public housing units are in high-rise towers, there are 3,000 empty apartments, all in buildings that the city considers unlivable. Plans have been announced to raze eleven towers and substitute townhouses with their own lawns and front doors. In other words, the vertical Radiant City is being replaced with its opposite, something approximating turn-of-the-century American urbanism. The urban renewal movement of the fifties and sixties is being laid to rest.
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The occupants of the first public housing on the Cabrini-Green site, built in 1941-43, were white. But the tenants of Cabrini-Green today are predominately African Americans, as are the majority of the 150,000 people living in Chicago’s public housing. This is a reminder that the period of urban renewal coincided with an event that would leave an indelible stamp on the American city: the black urban migration. Although southern blacks were moving to northern cities in significant numbers as early as 1917, the bulk of the migration took place between the mid-i940s and about 1970. During this relatively short period, five million people abandoned the rural South and moved to the urban North. Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land, has called this “one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history—perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation.” It changed the nature of black America. In 1940, three-quarters lived in the South, and about half were rural; by 1970, only half were Southerners and less than a quarter were rural. It also had a profound effect on American cities; after 1940, urban problems increasingly revolved around the question of black poverty and flawed race relations.
There were many reasons for the migration, among them the attraction of better-paying industrial jobs in the booming northern cities, as well as escape from southern racism. Another immediate cause, Lemann writes, was the successful introduction of the mechanical cotton picker in 1944. At one stroke, this machine, which did the work of fifty people at about one-eighth the cost, eliminated sharecropping, the occupation of most of the descendants of slaves. Seeking work, the unemployed sharecroppers headed for the largest industrial cities: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. In many cities, the black population doubled between 1940 and 1970; in some, it tripled. Chicago’s black population grew from 278,000 in 1940 to more than 800,000 in i960; in 1950, only one-sixth of the populations of Cleveland, Detroit, and Saint Louis was black, but by i960, all three cities were almost one-third black. Under the best of circumstances, the integration of so many poor and predominantly uneducated people would have been extremely difficult. But the circumstances could hardly have been worse. These were rural folk who had uprooted themselves from an especially backward environment (a backwardness that was not, obviously, of their own making), they were desperately poor, and although they were hard-working (the experience of sharecropping saw to that), they were ill prepared for life in a modern, industrial society. And of course they also faced segregation—often institutionalized—discrimination, and intolerance.
The artificial stimulus of wartime production was followed by a postwar boom, but by the early 1960s, the urban manufacturing that had provided well-paid jobs for workers with low skills was in decline. Some industries left the country altogether, but many merely left the old cities and moved to new locations—to the suburbs and to newly developing urban areas in the South and the West. Urban manufacturing closed down. Many southern blacks, who had entered the job market at the very bottom of the ladder, were the first to be let go. Poorly educated, with few technical skills, with weak social networks and fragile family structures, and with extremely limited economic resources, they were hard hit. Although many eventually followed the jobs to new locations and did begin a climb to middle-class status, a significant number remained in the old inner cities. Black workers had migrated thousands of miles in search of productive employment only a decade or two earlier, so what stopped them this time? The new ingredient, as many social critics have pointed out, was the Great Society, with its social agencies, welfare programs, and cash benefits. Since many of these benefits were not portable, people stayed put. It was the beginning of the urban underclass.
The old manufacturing cities of the Northeast and the Midwest began to feel the severe effects of what came to be called deindustrialization. They were doubly affected. At the same time as they were losing manufacturing and industrial jobs and the associated tax revenue, they were bearing the costs associated with increasing demands on the new social programs. As if that were not enough, the black urban riots of the sixties caused many middle-class citizens, black as well as white, to leave the city for the surrounding suburbs, causing tax revenues to fall still further. That most cities were ineffectively administered by bloated and entrenched bureaucracies didn’t help. Their efforts to deal with their fiscal malaise by crudely reducing services, raising property taxes, and optimistically—or Pollyannaishly—instituting income taxes and business privilege taxes only drove away even more residents and businesses. All this eventually led to bankruptcy, or near bankruptcy, for New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia.
The end of the sixties saw the once great American cities, battered and torn apart by the well-meaning but clumsy advocates of urban renewal, beaten down by economic forces outside their control, their cores scorched by the fires of black frustration, and increasingly abandoned by the middle class. It is hard to believe that less than thirty-five years had passed since the high hopes exemplified by the City of Incredible Towers. Part of the problem was that no one, least of all city officials, could believe that the big cities were no longer the economic—and cultural—magnets they had been in the past. That was why city governments perversely increased taxes and reduced services. They assumed that the slowdown in urban growth was temporary, and that it was only a matter of time before people tired of suburban life and returned to the city. After all, they reasoned, the suburbs could hardly compete with the attractions of city life.
I. Regulations were not the only reason for the agreeable architectural homogeneity of the Second Empire apartment houses. As Anthony Sutcliffe argues in Paris: An Architectural History, building permits were reviewed by municipal architectural overseers, who exercised a harmonizing influence on individual buildings; in some cases, Haussmann built model apartment blocks that served as prototypes; and the widespread use of dressed limestone also helped. So did the fact that virtually all architects favored the classical style, which proved remarkably adaptable to the needs of standardized, repetitive building. “Flexibility rather than creativity was the theme,” Sutcliffe writes, “and the result was a classical architecture for the industrial era rather than an industrial architecture.”
II. The first New York City apartment buildings, which were built in the 1870s, were called “French flats.”
III. Other forces were unleashed, too. Prohibition produced urban gangsterism on an unprecedented scale, and resulted in the corruption of public officials that lingers still.
IV. The only nonresidential uses permitted in the public housing projects were schools and community centers.
V. Jane Jacobs cites a number of residential neighborhoods that achieve high density with predominantly three- to five-story buildings: San Francisco’s North Beach-Telegraph Hill (80 to 140 units per acre), Philadelphia’s Ritten-house Square district (80 to 100), Brooklyn Heights (125 to 174), and Manhattan’s Greenwich Village (124 to 174).
VI. Architecture and urbanism were not entirely to blame. In the beginning, public housing projects were a success. Applicants were carefully screened, which ensured a balance between working families and welfare recipients, say, and between two-parent and single-parent families. But by the 1960s, bureaucratic inefficiency and lawsuits launched by the American Civil Liberties Union virtually eliminated the screening process, and public housing became de facto welfare housing, with all the attendant problems such specialization brings.