CHAPTER 5
“Seeds of Self-Regeneration” for City Deserts
And still the deserts of the city have grown and still they are growing, the awful endless blocks, the endless miles of drabness and chaos. A good way to see the problem of the city is to take a bus or streetcar ride, a long ride, through a city you do not know. For in this objective frame of mind, you may stop thinking about the ugliness long enough to think of the work that went into this mess. As a sheer manifestation of energy it is awesome. It says as much about the power and doggedness of life as the leaves of the forest say in spring. Hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of plans and purposes built the city and only they will rebuild the city. All else can only be oases in the desert.
—Jane Jacobs, 1955
On August 2, 1954, President Eisenhower signed the U.S. Housing Act of 1954 into law, creating the federal Urban Renewal program. Three months later, in November 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously on the constitutionality of the police power that was necessary to make “urban renewal” a reality.
City rebuilders like Robert Moses had been waiting since the early 1930s for developments like these. Whereas the U.S. Housing Act of 1949 had provided for slum clearance and “urban redevelopment,” the new act, which introduced the term “urban renewal,” inaugurated a sweeping approach to the problems of slums and blight. Whereas the previous objectives had been clearing slums and redeveloping the razed areas, the act now granted local governments the power to attempt to prevent the spread of urban blight and the “cancerous growth” of new slums through conservation, rehabilitation, modernization, and razing—a much more ambitious, subjective, and constitutionally questionable set of tasks.1
Nevertheless, Berman v. Parker, a case stemming from a slum clearance master plan for Washington, DC, cleared away the remaining obstacles in the path of the nation’s city planners and rebuilders. According to a news story in the November 1954 issue of Architectural Forum, just a few weeks before the Supreme Court’s ruling, “cities in the past few years have been challenged repeatedly on the constitutionality of their slum clearance laws. … As of last month, in 21 of 23 states where the question has been put to test, the laws have been validated.” Berman v. Parker put the question to rest at the federal level by achieving a ruling against the plaintiff, whose viable and nonblighted department store was slated to be taken through eminent domain and razed as part of the District of Columbia Redevelopment Land Agency’s blight-fighting plan. In a unanimous decision, the Court declared on November 22, 1954, “It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled.” It followed, the Court argued, that urban renewal “need not, by force of the Constitution, be on a piecemeal basis—lot by lot, building by building.” Even sound structures could be taken and destroyed if they fell within the determined urban renewal area.2
Thus, Berman v. Parker upheld the ambitions of federal and state urban renewal programs, as Forum’s writer (perhaps Jacobs herself) anticipated, and it “cut back an undergrowth of litigation that is hampering … efforts.” Disentangled from the understory of grassroots resistance, beginning in 1955, the number of urban renewal projects in planning and construction rose dramatically each year through the early 1960s.3
Although the Housing Act of 1954 accepted compromises that had precedents in the Housing Act of 1949, the historian Richard Flanagan characterized the new act as a historic turn in national urban policy. Before 1954, he wrote, “New Deal politicians and liberal interest groups struggled against conservatives to expand federal sponsorship of public housing construction. Liberals argued that federal aid was needed to replace slum housing and meet potential housing shortages for the poor and working class. Conservatives retorted that public housing was expensive, unnecessary, and socialistic.” However, the Housing Act of 1954 “transcended the acrimonious divide between liberals and conservatives, forging a new consensus that emphasized commercial redevelopment instead of public housing as the answer to central city decline. … The Eisenhower administration sought to satisfy moderates in both parties with urban renewal, a policy intended to revitalize the commercial prospects of downtown business districts and increase the size of the urban economic pie.”4
FIGURE 29. A graph showing the number of planned, initiated, and completed urban renewal projects between 1950 and 1962—the same years during which Jacobs wrote about the subject in Amerika, Architectural Forum, and Death and Life. Relatively few projects were executed following the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, but numbers climbed after the 1954 act, which enabled a more aggressive approach to “urban renewal.” Drawn from data from the 1962 annual report of the Urban Renewal Administration, the graph is included in Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949–1962 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 43, which cited Death and Life. Courtesy of Martin Anderson.
Thus, despite the fact that urban renewal, and its theorists and practitioners, was later vilified by Jacobs and others, its federal policies initially received sustained and broad social support. And, in this context, Jacobs’s own early acceptance and even advocacy of urban renewal were not surprising, especially at a time when completed Title I redevelopment projects were few in number.
What distinguished Jacobs from others was how quickly she not only perceived the failures of urban renewal, but also developed a new vision of the city. Within ten months of the passage of the housing act, her idealized view of city planning began to dissipate. In this, she was not alone and not the first. In April 1955, Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and her colleague Walter McQuade (also a Greenwich Village resident) joined an ongoing battle with Robert Moses in order to save Washington Square from reconstruction. Shirley Hayes, the Greenwich Village Community Planning District parks committee director, led the charge. By then in its third year, Hayes’s Committee to Save Washington Square Park organized a petition and letter-writing campaign to oppose Moses’s continued attempts to widen the roads through the park. In its latest incarnation, the road would take the form of a depressed expressway, a miniature version of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which had recently resumed construction a few miles to the north after overcoming lawsuits and protests.
The petition, signed by Jacobs on April 30, 1955, marks the start of her Greenwich Village activism. It read: “I am opposed to the proposed plan for a depressed four-lane roadway, or any other highway through or around Washington Square Park. I am for the Alternate Plan to close Washington Square Park to all vehicular traffic with a bus turn-around back of the Arch.” Handwritten at the bottom was Jacobs’s personal note to Hayes: “Thanks for your good work. I’ve written the Mayor and Borough President, each, the attached letter. Please keep me informed of any other effective action that can be taken.”5
Jacobs’s short letter to Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. and the borough president Hulan Jack is revealing of not only changes in her frame of mind, but also her shock. Jacobs, the person perhaps most closely associated with opposition to urban renewal today, and at the time an architectural journalist, seems to have been unaware, at the time, of the plans for her own neighborhood. “I have heard with alarm and almost with disbelief, the plans to run a sunken highway through the center of Washington Square,” she wrote.6
Moreover, although the letter reveals her love of the city, it suggests that perceptions about slums infiltrated even her thinking. She recognized that transforming a storefront building into a family home, as she and her husband had done, was considered eccentric at a time when developments like Stuyvesant Town and Levittown were the popular middle-class choices for dwelling. “My husband and I are among the citizens who truly believe in New York,” she continued, “to the extent that we have bought a home in the heart of the city and remodeled it with a lot of hard work (transforming it from slum property) and are raising our three children here.” The Jacobses’ daughter, Mary, their third child, had recently been born.
But, at the same time, Jacobs’s letters to the mayor and borough president reveal the unraveling of her idealism, which, by the time she finished writing Death and Life, had turned close to cynicism. “It is very discouraging to try to do our best to make the city more habitable,” she concluded, “and then to learn that the city itself is thinking up schemes to make it uninhabitable.”7
By contrast, Mumford’s contribution to Hayes’s Washington Square campaign—a letter to the editor of The Villager, also in April 1954—was far less polite. Foreshadowing Jacobs’s later rhetoric, Mumford’s letter (which may have inspired hers) sanctioned public outrage and protest. “The proposed plan to connect West Broadway with Fifth Avenue, by means of an open-cut speedway running through Washington Square is almost too inept to be taken seriously,” he wrote. “If there were any general planning intelligence among those responsible, it would have been laughed out of existence long before this.” Alluding to his prevailing belief in the functional zoning of the city, Mumford argued that “to preserve Fifth Avenue for display and business, and to preserve the Washington Square district for residence are both more important than to provide a traffic link to the downtown tunnels and bridges, only to clog these passages even worse than they are now clogged.” The Washington Square viaduct, he concluded, “is a masterpiece of mis-planning; and those who oppose it are serving the public interest.”8
Although Mumford had not altered his views about the need to rebuild South Greenwich Village from the ground up, he was now less assertive about Village renewal than in his editorial of February 1952, in which he had proposed a rebuilding plan even more extensive than Robert Moses’s. The once-favorable public opinion of Moses for city redevelopment had begun to change, and this just when his “blockbusting” approach was determined to be both reasonable and legal. Following an eye-opening visit to East Harlem in early 1956, Jacobs would become convinced that urban renewal was doing more harm than good and that her hopes for city planning had been misplaced.
Philadelphia’s Redevelopment
After three years of writing about the city indirectly, Jacobs wrote her first major city feature, “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment: A Progress Report,” for Architectural Forum’s July 1955 issue. It was a transformative moment for which she had been preparing in various ways for almost twenty years, since her first essays on the city. Moreover, in Philadelphia, she would encounter new ideas about the city and its redevelopment, conceived by Ed Bacon and Louis Kahn, that were very different from the approach in New York and that resonated powerfully with her own sensibilities. She assimilated many of Kahn’s and Bacon’s ideas into her own understanding of the “ecology of the city,” as she later described it.9
As a first assignment on urban redevelopment, “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment” was an ideal assignment. Jacobs knew Philadelphia well as a native Pennsylvanian, from her parents’ connections to the city, and from her assignments for The Iron Age and Amerika. She already served as Forum’s Philadelphia liaison. Moreover, “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment” had the advantage of being a follow-up story to “The Philadelphia Cure: Clearing Slums with Penicillin, Not Surgery,” which, a few years earlier, had prepared a foundation of praise for a noninvasive approach to urban redevelopment.
At liberty to write about the city at last, Jacobs’s familiar voice and many of her characteristic ideas came to the fore. Having recently come to believe that city planners were thinking up schemes to make the city less habitable, the scales had, for the most part, fallen from her eyes. Thinking of the plan to run a road through Washington Square, she was prepared, in the opening sentences of her essay, to dismiss a half-century of city planning movements with a recognizable skepticism for simplistic slogans and unrealistic solutions. “Once upon a time the general problem of the City Chaotic looked so simple. Boulevards and civic monuments were going to create the City Beautiful,” she wrote. “After that proved insufficient, regional plans were to create the City Sensible. These proved unadoptable and now we are struggling, sometimes it seems at the expense of everything else, to improvise the City Traversible.”10
FIGURE 30. “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment,” published in July 1955, was Jacobs’s first major feature on urban redevelopment. In it she praised Kahn and Bacon’s master plan proposal, and she admired Kahn’s Mill Creek housing project. The article reproduced this plan by Kahn and his partners. The Mill Creek project is in the lower right. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
After idealized hopes for city planning and urban redevelopment, “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment” gives the distinct sense that Jacobs cast all that aside. As in Plato’s allegory of the cave, Jacobs ascended out of the cave of shadows, in her case on a bus ride through Philadelphia, and saw the city anew. And, as she would do again in the opening pages of Death and Life, she recommended that others do the same. With the landscape of the city unfolding block after block, as the bus drove on, she came to realize that the parts of the city redeveloped and renewed without public participation could only be “oases in the desert.”11
Despite her recognition of these truths, Jacobs’s ascent, to follow Plato’s parable, was not yet complete; she accepted shadowy half-truths that she would later reject. She still saw the city as an ugly and chaotic “mess” and the redeveloped parts as “oases.” Moreover, she described the idea that “people with hundreds of thousands of plans and purposes built the city and only they will rebuild the city” as an “appalling fact.” Philadelphia, she wrote, “is a city, perhaps the only US city thus far, that has looked at this appalling fact and begun to deal with it.”
A likely reason for this choice of words is that, in 1955, the city’s dogged and awe-inspiring life force was still a mystery to her. While Jacobs observed in Philadelphia an “unprecedented display of public-spirited, private rebuilding” and praised the work of individuals and citizen’s groups, she could point to no particular reason for the collective effort. “What is happening in Philadelphia,” she related, “is of such scope and involves so many people there is no neat and easy explanation for what started it or why. Physical rejuvenation of the city seems to be related to a booming hinterland, dissatisfaction with long do-nothing, a surge of municipal reform and citizen activity, the jolt of the war years.”12
What Jacobs did understand, and what made a great impression on her, was that Bacon and Kahn respected the city’s history, its neighborhoods, and democratic, grassroots rejuvenation. “Philadelphia’s abrupt embrace of the new, after long years of apathy, has by some miracle not meant the usual rejection of whatever is old,” Jacobs wrote. “When a city can carry on a love affair with its old and its new at once, it has terrific vitality.”
Moreover, Jacobs understood that Kahn and Bacon’s idea of redevelopment was to create catalysts, not “oases” or “spectacular” architectural projects. Anticipating ideas she would repeat in Death and Life, she wrote, “In Philadelphia, a redevelopment area is not a tract slated only—or necessarily—for spectacular replacements. In short, it is not simply to be an oasis. … Some of Philadelphia’s redevelopment money is to be spent very thinly and very, very shrewdly in interstices of these areas to bring out the good that already exists there or play up potentialities. … Whether a new oasis is public or private, Philadelphia’s planners look at it not simply as an improvement, but as a catalyst.” Anticipating what is today called “urban acupuncture” and “tactical urbanism,” she concluded, “Philadelphia’s inexpensive devices toward the enormous gain of restoring the neighborhood to the desert may be its greatest contribution to city planning.”13 (In Death and Life, Jacobs also used the “oasis” metaphor in a discussion of the use of neighborhood parks, and she wrote at length about the effects of urban redevelopment funding in the chapter titled “Gradual Money and Cataclysmic Money,” in which she compared catalyzing versus revolutionary city change to the difference between life-giving irrigation and a torrential, eroding flood.)14
Jacobs also greatly appreciated Bacon’s and Kahn’s personal and intimate understandings of the social life and physical fabric of city neighborhoods, especially the fragility of poorer ones. Kahn himself was a native of Philadelphia’s “slums”; his understanding of city life was not theoretical. In the 1952 article “The Philadelphia Cure,” Kahn was quoted as stating that “a slum is the most closely knit social neighborhood of all. There is more kindness and more natural behavior than anywhere else. There has to be. So you have got to make any redevelopment a product of the neighborhood, or it fails. You have got to search for the things which give the neighborhood its patriotic unity, and retain them. The amateur quality of the building should not be a consideration.” Similarly, Bacon had been shown to be a keen observer of what Jacobs later described as the “unslumming” process and was quoted as observing that the city had the “latent capacity” to restore itself. Bacon was quoted in the same article as saying, “In almost any neighborhood in Philadelphia it is a shock, as one wanders about decaying sections, suddenly to come upon three or four houses, a half-block or a whole street where each property owner has kept his home in fine condition, all of the houses painted, new fronts, and sometimes even a whole street with the same colored awnings. … These cells have within them the latent capacity to restore themselves.”15
Although Jacobs later saw the flaws in Kahn’s Mill Creek redevelopment project, in 1955 she saw it as an example of the latent capacity for unslumming. She praised the “wonderfully clever and practical devices for jacking up the district, almost by its own bootstraps.” Among these were Kahn’s reinforcement of important local institutions and landmarks such as churches, schools, and playgrounds. Quoting Kahn, the Mill Creek plan sought to “bring out, instead of burying, the things built by unselfish effort.”16
Although Jacobs also complained of promenades with no promenaders in Death and Life, she also wrote favorably in 1955 of Kahn’s metaphorical “city of movement”—where expressways were like rivers, parking garages were harbors, through-streets were canals, and stopping places were docks—and the Philadelphia’s “greenways” plan. “Philadelphia is a long way from becoming Kahn’s city of movement, but the seeds of this thinking are germinating and a few of their tender sprouts can even be seen in the pages that follow,” she wrote, using a familiar organic metaphor.17
Developed with the landscape architect Christopher Tunnard, the greenways plan was a historically important work. Tunnard, who was associated with the British Townscape movement, which, as discussed later, captured Jacobs’s and her Forum colleagues’ attention and admiration around this time, had founded what was perhaps the earliest manifestation of the revived civic design discipline in the United States at Yale in 1949. Similar to Townscape ideas, what was groundbreaking about the greenways plan was its restraint in ground breaking and its attention to city fabric, texture, and landscape. As Jacobs explained, the greenways were an effective alternative to imposing large-scale order through architectural means, especially by a single architect. It was a landscape approach that worked “as a unifier of new projects, as a unifier of time, as a unifier of scale.” As she explained,
The greenway is conceived as a strong, clear system of grove-shaded walks, patterned and textured pavements, little open squares and vistas. The vistas focus mainly on the older significant institutions of the neighborhood, creating a sense of depth in time. Commonly these institutions are visually overpowered and lost behind new construction. Curiously, the problem of unifying a variety of new projects by different architects is an even more difficult problem than reconciling old and new. … Nor is giving a large area over to one architect usually satisfactory; without the variety of differing minds and viewpoints, urban scale and texture are sacrificed. Planning Director Ed Bacon thinks that the new greenway device will go far toward solving this problem by making most of the problem disappear.18
In other words, as compared to the typical redevelopment plan, the green-ways constituted a new infrastructure of public space, “a new kind of Main Street, primarily for pedestrians.” It was additive, not subtractive. Despite her subsequent criticism, it was city building.19
In Death and Life, Jacobs wrote that Philadelphia’s planning department was probably the best in the country, although her most memorable nod to Bacon was to repeat the anti-urban renewal slogan “Fry Bacon!” Having become disappointed with things he did later, this was clearly too delicious for her to resist repeating. (Although Bacon’s redevelopment plan for Philadelphia’s Society Hill was meant to attract middle- and upper-income earners back to Center City, and was ultimately effective for that purpose, it also involved evicting about one thousand families from their homes, permanently tarnishing his reputation.) Despite the remark, and although Kahn’s and Tunnard’s names are absent from her book, their influence on her cannot be easily dismissed. The enthusiasm with which she described their ideas in 1955 is clear. She was certainly moved by Bacon’s assertions that the balance between top-down and bottom-up decision making would be tipped in favor of the latter. She quoted Bacon as stating, “The efficiency and order which the planner desires is less important than the preservation of individual democratic liberties and, where the two are in conflict, the demands of the democratic process must prevail.” It was an idea very close to her heart.20
Moreover, her understanding of the city as a complex and dynamic organism, ideas of its “death and life” through the process of “unslumming,” and even the words that she used to describe the process, were similar enough to theirs as to suggest that she owed Kahn and Bacon a certain debt. Bacon’s description of the city at the 1956 Harvard Urban Design Conference, which Jacobs also participated in, could easily be mistaken for her own words when he said, “We developed [in Philadelphia] a hypothesis: neighborhoods are dynamic organisms which have within themselves the seeds of self-regeneration. They consist of pockets of decay intermixed with substantial sections, which with proper stimulus can be induced to fix themselves up.” In the concluding sentence of Death and Life Jacobs would repeat the regenerating seed metaphor when she wrote that “lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.” Similarly, in a two-part profile of Kahn cowritten and edited by Jacobs—“Architect Louis Kahn and His Strong-Boned Structures “ (October 1957) and “Louis Kahn and the Living City” (March 1958)— Kahn was celebrated for his appreciation of the city’s concentration and diversity of uses and for his advocacy for the “twenty-four-hour city,” commonplaces later attributed to Jacobs. Kahn’s theory of “the living city”— that “if you give the city the right and capability to live, the living city will inevitably solve its own problems—creatively, colorfully, humorously, and ever changingly; that planning serves only to initiate life, not dominate it”—became very much her own.21
Diversifying Cleveland
Jacobs’s experiences in Philadelphia show that it is a mistake to associate her exclusively with New York, let alone Greenwich Village. From the mid-1950s, her experiences in other cities show a diversity of her influences, in terms of places, people, and cultural issues, and a continuity of development of her ideas. Indeed, the month after “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment” was published, Jacobs’s article about redevelopment in Cleveland echoed some similar themes. As in her discussion of Philadelphia, she remained optimistic about city planning. “City planning, per se, is not a problem in Cleveland,” Jacobs wrote in “Cleveland: City with a Deadline,” “because it is being done so well. … The city has some of the finest slum clearance and low-income housing in the country.” This was because, as in Philadelphia, the planning process was not wholly top-down. “Most important, planning has a real democratic foundation under it; every step of the way Cleveland’s planners work with a remarkable local institution, the neighborhood ‘area councils’ which cover most of the city, poor and well-to-do both,” Jacobs wrote admiringly. “In effect, they are active, grass-roots planning bodies. They are a bright omen for success of the city’s program of rehabilitation under the urban renewal law.”22
In “Cleveland,” however, Jacobs focused on different problems of city planning than in her Philadelphia article, namely social and racial dynamics, and particularly the problems of segregation and what became known as “white flight.” Anticipating similar themes in Death and Life, she argued that Cleveland needed to “diversify [its] central city population.” No great city, she wrote, “can afford to allow its heart to become a ghetto for the underprivileged, surrounded by prosperous suburbs.”23
FIGURE 31. In “Cleveland: City with a Deadline,” Jacobs wrote, “No big city can afford to allow its heart to become a ghetto for the underprivileged, surrounded by prosperous suburbs.” AF (Aug. 1955), 130–31.
Jacobs also described an urban phenomenon that was typical of American cities in “Cleveland”: the migration of well-to-do city dwellers from aging city center neighborhoods to newer rings of development. As city residents’ economic status improved, she wrote, “they moved further out, sometimes renting the old house to the next comer, sometimes selling. The next wave of inhabitants moved on, and the next and the next, with the housing progressively deteriorating.” This sociogeographic evolution had broken down, however, because African Americans were denied access to the suburbs. Beginning in the 1920s, she continued, African Americans moved in but “they have not moved on, because the suburbs will not let them in. Today 98% of the Cleveland metropolitan area’s 207,000 Negroes live in the city proper, many in this central city area.” The area she was referring to was considered a slum.
As a means of improving deteriorated conditions, Jacobs was already searching for an alternative to slum clearance. Echoing Bacon’s observations about neighborhoods’ “latent capacity to restore themselves” and anticipating her own idea of unslumming, she noted that the residents of Cleveland’s central city slum “who can afford to own homes, have upgraded the rundown districts they inherited.” But it was clear to her that even if the neighborhoods could be physically improved, an enormous problem would remain. In another generation, she wrote, “All of eastern Cleveland might well become a giant Negro ghetto backed up against white suburbs—a financial and social catastrophe.”
Reintegration of the city and society was essential. “The solution is not simply to replace the ghetto housing with better housing,” she concluded, “but to break up the ghetto pattern itself by bringing some of the suburb back into the central city.” By “bringing some of the suburb back into the central city,” Jacobs meant white, middle-class residents, and, to this end, she went on to describe and commend a mixed-income Cleveland redevelopment project called Garden Valley.
Jacobs described Garden Valley as “one of the boldest and most imaginative redevelopment jobs conceived by any city.” She had high hopes for Cleveland’s city planning department, and she later described Ernest Bohn, the director of Cleveland’s Housing Authority, and James Lister, the director of its Planning Commission, along with Bacon and a few others, as among the country’s best city planners. “Out in Cleveland, a supposed tour by car with Planning Officials Ernest Bohn and James Lister actually amounts to a series of short automobile hops and long exploratory stops.”
She had high hopes for Garden Valley’s mixed-use and mixed middle- and low-income housing development, which she believed “will permit families hitting hard times, or those graduating out of low-income housing, to move without breaking ties”—a common problem in typical urban renewal. “Green Valley could turn out to be city-rebuilding in a profound sense,” she wrote, “because, as one observer of the [nonprofit Cleveland] Development Foundation has said, ‘Here are a group of topflight business and industrial leaders learning their way around in city planning, in urban renewal, in race relations and in housing financing. … If Garden Valley can stimulate the city’s powerful men to look at Cleveland again with the vision of what can be built, it will indeed be a key to rejuvenation.’ “ The city was the key to social transformation and reintegration. Jacobs concluded that “only in the city proper can middle-income relocation housing be built without restriction of the color of residents.”
Jacobs’s hope for Green Valley was buoyed by Cleveland’s public housing history. She remarked that after fifteen to twenty years of use, public housing in Cleveland showed “how humanely and well the city began the job of replacing slums with something better.” Moreover, its directors respected those they served: “Cleveland has never called its low-income housing units ‘projects.’ They are called ‘estates.’ The people who live in them are not ‘tenants’; they are ‘residents.’ And they [accordingly] behave like residents and treat their homes like estates.”24
Unfortunately, like Philadelphia’s Mill Creek, Green Valley—which was then called “the community of the future” and a “model neighborhood for all of Cleveland”—did not live up to the high hopes Jacobs and others had for it. Within two years of the construction of the first units in 1957, Garden Valley was already considered run-down and undesirable, and its bad reputation grew and deepened with time. Designed by a young Cleveland native, Allan Jacobs—who had just graduated from the City Planning program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with William L. C. Wheaton, Lewis Mumford, and Martin Meyerson (all of whom Jacobs herself would cross paths with in the years ahead)—the development could not overcome the larger problems: poor management; failure to follow through with the plan to foster a diverse housing demographic, resulting in de facto segregation; and failure to complete key design elements such as landscaping and a transit line in the wake of the city’s economic downturn.25
Allan Jacobs (no relation of Jane or Bob) would later blame some of Green Valley’s problems on a lack of public participation in the design process, despite Jane Jacobs’s hopes for its “grass-roots” approach. He also later saw flaws in his own design. In his Greenbelt-influenced, superblock master plan, where both single-family homes and row houses were ruled out in favor of apartment blocks surrounding open space, connections to the surrounding urban fabric were minimal. Later known as the champion of “Great Streets,” Allan Jacobs came to believe that the development’s street design was inappropriate and that the placement of buildings and roads “fostered neither a sense of publicness nor a feeling of ownership and responsibility.” He described how, at the time, it was virtually impossible for city planners to imagine keeping or re-creating the inherited city fabric. There was no way to design “a street pattern like the existing neighborhoods. The mindset of decision-makers was so different. They had in mind places like Radburn and Greenbelt,” he said in 2005. But he also remarked that it was unlikely that any physical design could have significantly mitigated the problems of poverty and racism faced by many of Garden Valley’s residents.26
Allan Jacobs learned from his experiences as Jane Jacobs did from hers. In Death and Life, Jacobs would call segregation and racial discrimination “our country’s most serious social problem.” She would describe urban renewal as a segregating process. “Look what we have built with the first several billions,” she observed. “Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism, and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity.” Moreover, her overarching thesis about city complexity and diversity can be regarded as the exact opposite of such segregating mechanisms. However, at the time, Jacobs still believed in urban renewal. She praised a promising redevelopment plan that would “transform a desolate industrial wasteland and an enormous, steep, barren ravine into a neighborhood … [and] integrate it with an existing neighborhood which will be rehabilitated under the urban renewal law.” Although her ideas about this changed by the time she wrote Death and Life, like others at the time, Jacobs believed that breaking up “the ghetto pattern” and bringing back middle-class residents into the central city was the right thing to do, even if this meant suburbanizing the city with a superblock redevelopment plan.27
The “Old Pattern” of Washington, DC
Published in Architectural Forum’s January 1956 issue, “Washington: 20th Century Capital?” was Jacobs’s first bylined article. Around that time, the magazine’s policy regarding bylines for staff changed; she was therefore indicated as a staff writer, while Carl Feiss (an itinerant architect and planning consultant) and Frederick Gutheim (a Washington-based city planner) served as editorial consultants. The twenty-four-page feature on a variety of architectural and planning projects in “exploding Washington”—a description that anticipated “The Exploding Metropolis” series to which Jacobs contributed two years later—was Jacobs’s public debut as an architectural critic; it came after more than three years of writing for Forum, but at a time when thinking about urban redevelopment, as suggested by the title of Jacobs’s article, was at a turning point. In June 1955, The Architectural Review had published a special issue titled “Outrage,” which blasted redevelopment practices in England and made a significant impression on both Douglas Haskell and Jacobs; Haskell had just extended a “warm handshake” to their counterparts at the Review in a December 1955 editorial, and, as discussed in the next chapter, Jacobs would collaborate with the Review writers Ian Nairn and Gordon Cullen and acknowledge them in Death and Life. Thus, with “Washington,” Jacobs made good on Haskell’s invitation to push architectural criticism into the realm of urban design.28
FIGURE 32. “Washington” was Jacobs’s first bylined feature. In it she discussed redevelopment and urban design proposals in the capital city at length. She regarded it as symbolic of the various problems facing the nation’s cities. AF (Jan. 1956), 92–93.
As a collection of redevelopment proposals and critiques, Jacobs wrote about the proposed National Air Museum (which she argued should not be located on the Mall, but at Bolling Field, a defunct military airport); the new façade for the Capitol (of which Haskell had been a staunch opponent for many years); the preservation of historic buildings, including Robert Mills’s Patent Office (which was threatened by a proposed parking garage); the city’s parking problem (which prompted Jacobs’s description of Washington as “the city of magnificent parking lots” because of the way parked cars “greedily devour[ed] the grand spaces”); and the city’s recent neoclassical architecture (which she described as a “failure” and a “dead end” as an architectural style, another example of her intellectual preference for modern architecture). The remainder focused on Washington’s urban renewal and rehabilitation projects.29
As the nation’s capital, Washington represented the threatened livability of America’s exploding cities. It was poised for gigantic change—$250 million in new construction with a “dominance of overpass and underpass, cloverleaf and ramp” highway building—likely to overwhelm L’Enfant’s city plan. And although change was coming at a rapid pace, Jacobs remarked that time had “been standing stock still in the brains of many of the men who will have much to do with shaping the 20th century capital,” anticipating a similar barb in Death and Life. “The emerging 20th century capital will become a miserable hodge-podge instead of the inspiring city Americans deeply desire, unless thought catches up with event,” she affirmed. Washington had an inheritance to work with—“its downtown streets are lined with trees, the air is clean, and there are many little downtown parks, assets becoming recognized in other cities.” But it was also beset with the same problems as every other booming city. A “choked downtown, haphazard suburban sprawl, blight at the heart” made it emblematic of cities and city planning during the mid-twentieth century. Its inheritance, like a natural resource, was being similarly depleted. “Exploding Washington simply cannot avoid remaking itself as a 20th century capital of some kind or other,” Jacobs stated. But “what kind?” she asked.30
Her optimism still intact at this crossroads, Jacobs did not yet believe that city planners, decision makers, or larger forces were conspiring to destroy the city. In fact, although she was increasingly apprehensive, she held out hope for the kind of city that Washington could become through urban renewal. In this regard she quoted Supreme Court Justice William Douglas’s decision in Berman v. Parker: “It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled.” This idea, she opined, “has always been the idea behind Washington; this is why George Washington commissioned from L’Enfant a grand plan, why Washington has its temples and columns and memorials, its parks and its wealth of trees. It is something that must not be lost.” Still believing in urban renewal’s potential, Jacobs saw signs of hopeful change in the Justement-Smith plan for Southwest Washington and an urban design proposal by Frederick Gutheim and Willo von Moltke for “a new heart” at the Washington Monument end of the Mall.31
Whereas Mary Mix Foley had criticized the Justement-Smith plan in “What Is City Redevelopment?,” Jacobs saw things differently. Regarding the part of the plan for the section called Area B—the “national testing ground” where the department store at the center of Berman v. Parker had since been razed—Jacobs supported Chloethiel Woodard Smith’s opinion that design decisions should not be predetermined by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and zoning overlays. In practice, Jacobs observed that such regulations meant the difference between isolating an apartment building on a “sacrosanct high-rise block” or allowing it to be surrounded by row houses and increasing overall density. “Architect Chloethiel Smith (co-author of the Justement-Smith plan, forerunner to current plans for the Southwest, as well as architect on this project),” Jacobs wrote, “thinks that a simple, over-all density and utility-access specification … should be the only operative land-use regulations for a project like Area B.” Part of Jacobs’s subtitle for this section of her article expressed her opinion: “Who shall draw the site plan—FHA, local zoners, or the men who know the subject best?”32
For the overall Southwest plan, Jacobs sided with the architects, I. M. Pei and Harry Weese, and the developer William Zeckendorf of Webb & Knapp. “Whatever goes on in the [planning] committee’s head, planning does not,” she chided. “Planning implied, at the least, a sense of progression and enlightenment of the public, while the committee runs in secret circles.” By contrast, she praised the “architecture of city space” created in Pei and Weese’s plan for the “South Mall,” a new monumental axis that would run perpendicular to the Mall along 10th Street, for being “brilliantly and harmoniously suited to [its] local, citywide, and national functions, each aspect supporting the others and the whole adding up to a genuine architecture of city space.”33
Representative of her ability to appreciate modern architecture and traditional urbanism at the same time, what most appealed to Jacobs in the designers’ “civic planning” was their “break with recent planning practice by returning to an old pattern.” Where the South Mall was in keeping with the formality and monumentality of the old L’Enfant and McMillan plans, Pei and Weese’s designs for so-called Area C, like Gutheim and von Moltke’s design for the Great Plaza, were similarly sympathetic with inherited city patterns. In Area C, Pei and Weese broke with the superblock planning typical of renewal projects in order to propose modern “town or row houses … built to the street line.” The advantage of the old pattern, Jacobs observed, was that “the street becomes an interesting architectural space, instead of a road between ends of buildings.” Other advantages included gardens and interior courts that were really private; parking directly offstreet under the houses; the preservation of existing streets, trees, and historic buildings; and an economy of city utilities.34
Jacobs similarly praised Gutheim and von Moltke’s design for the Great Plaza at the west end of the Mall for its reinterpretation of old city patterns. She admired how their “new park squares and the related plaza would all be treated in the great tradition of urban squares, not as transplanted suburbia. They would make an exciting complex of vista and grand enclosure.” Moreover, this would be done without mimicking traditional architecture. Their modern parking structure, for example, “would be handsomely clothed, respecting its monumental neighbors in the essentials of mass, skyline, color, materials and scale, but not attempting to imitate their renaissance details.” “Neo-classicism,” she wrote, “is a failure. When the supposed non-essentials of the classic styles are removed, all the subtle, complex play of light and shadow depart too. Gone is the sense of softness against hardness, and this turns out to be vital to the style. What remains is hardness against hardness.”35
A new conception of urban design was thus taking form in Jacobs’s mind. Learning from the work of Pei, Weese, Gutheim, and von Moltke, she recognized that city design could return to “an old pattern,” without either reviving “traditional” architecture or resorting to suburban models.
Kahn’s Poetry Made Practical in Fort Worth
Some months after Jacobs reviewed Gruen’s Northland shopping center, the Harvard Business Review published “Dynamic Planning for Retail Areas,” a November 1954 essay in which Gruen proposed applying the lessons of shopping malls to cities. The article, which cited such diverse sources as The Heart of the City and Women’s Wear Daily, was read by a Texas businessman, who commissioned Gruen to develop a plan for Fort Worth. Jacobs, who knew Gruen and his work well from covering his shopping center projects, was a natural to cover the story for Forum. Indeed, she may well have encouraged him to apply the lessons of Northland, which reminded her of historic market towns, to downtown America, and, since she knew them both well, may even have suggested that Gruen study the work of Kahn, who had made a similar proposal to “stimulate more imaginative development of our [Center City] shopping areas along the lines of the new suburban shopping centers” for Philadelphia.36
Gruen opened his 1954 essay with an analysis that Jacobs would have found compelling. He argued that the positions staked out by both “decentralizes,” the city-hating advocates of suburbia, and the “downtowners,” those who regarded “the regional trend as a satanic device,” were both wrong for being mutually exclusive. He argued that the city, with its concentration of commerce, finance, and industry, “cannot escape fulfilling its role as a social and cultural center.” At the same time, it was a “fantasy” to believe “that somehow people will stop building in the suburbs.” Thus, while he thought that there was “no choice but to accept the establishment of outlying shopping centers,” he felt that the time had come for urban redevelopment “on a broad scale: slum clearance, creation of green areas within our city cores, provision of parking areas, improvement of traffic arteries, and enrichment of our social, cultural, and civic life.” He made the case, in other words, for urban renewal.37
Gruen’s thinking was paradoxical. He had pioneered and continued to design the regional shopping centers that were contributing to downtown’s decline, but he wanted to save the city and its downtown shopping core. His malls were surrounded by parking lots, but he hated cars. He championed private enterprise, the diversity of consumer choice, and “a democratic responsibility for the condition of our urban environment,” but he designed “planned” centers “under the control of a single owner.” Nonetheless, Gruen’s “organic solution” to the centralization/decentralization question clearly appealed to Jacobs, who praised his Fort Worth plan in Forum and Death and Life38
The full headline and hook of Jacobs’s May 1956 article read, “Typical Downtown Transformed: The Fort Worth Plan; The architects who designed today’s most successful shopping center have come up with a plan for bringing similar success to the dense heart of the city.” Jacobs described the plan as “brilliant,” “realistic,” and “less authoritarian than the alternative of a car-infested downtown.”39
FIGURE 33. Jacobs was a strong advocate for Gruen and Contini’s redevelopment plan for Fort Worth, Texas, in “Typical Downtown Transformed” (May 1956) and in Death and Life. This diagram shows their proposal for preserving the city from the car and for the pedestrian by locating parking garages on the downtown’s perimeter.
Indeed, at the heart of the plan, and Jacobs’s praise for it, was the problem of cars, which is why she discussed it at length in chapter 18, “Erosion of Cities or Attrition of Automobiles,” of Death and Life. Like in Kahn’s plan for Philadelphia, ring roads provided access to downtown, visitors parked in peripheral garages, and the city center (like a shopping center) was reserved for pedestrians; only buses and electric carts, “like those used at world’s fairs,” would be permitted in the pedestrian zone. However, as compared to Kahn’s metaphorical plan, which received no mention in Death and Life, Jacobs preferred the realism and research methods employed by Gruen and his associate, the city planner Edgardo Contini. “The way the traffic problem was posed” was of the essence. “This seems to be the first city for which actual dimensions of the problem have been calculated and faced,” she wrote. “The method shows up usual traffic ‘planning’ for what it is—pursuit of expedients to solve an unmeasured problem.” Given various rates of population growth, Gruen and Contini calculated how much space in roadway and parking would be required by a given number of cars. The figures were staggering, suggesting that the city center would have to expand physically just to accommodate the cars, and this in turn would increase the distances between things, making cars even more necessary. The effect, as Jacobs indicated in Death and Life, was a “positive feedback” loop: a self-increasing or accelerating dynamic.40
But Jacobs’s praise was not just about methodology. “The way the planner’s part is conceived” was even more important. In her estimation, the physical Fort Worth plan respected “the plans of others”—the plans and ambitions of the city’s many inhabitants. “Remarkably little of what exists is interfered with,” she wrote. “The Plan respects the variety of healthy city growth, and provides for it.” As compared to the wholesale clearance of typical urban renewal projects, Jacobs emphasized that “Gruen’s planners surveyed every single building in Fort Worth’s downtown, noting use, height, structure, age, condition. Thus guided, the plan places garages and roads for minimum destruction. Not a single major building is touched.” “The close analysis of the plan’s effect on the interests of everyone involved,” she claimed, was “something new for city planning.”41
Unlike “Olympian” planners who repressed all plans but their own, Gruen’s team “resisted the temptation of confusing their wishes with the will of the citizenry.” Moreover, “there was no attempt to force it over or finagle it backstage”—as Jacobs had seen done in Washington and New York. The result of Gruen’s public presentations was that there were probably “more citizens, especially more leading citizens, in Fort Worth who understand what city planning is about than in any other U.S. city— including the largest,” she opined. This satisfied her. At that point she believed that “the citizens must assume initiative.” As in her analysis of the U.S. Constitution in Constitutional Chaff, the plan provided “a strong skeleton … [but] fleshing out is left to the city’s users.”42
In an editorial published concurrently with “Typical Downtown Transformed” in Forum’s May 1956 issue, Jacobs celebrated the planning approach she observed in Fort Worth, and she praised Contini, along with Bacon, as being among the “pavement pounders.” As compared with the “Olympian” planners, who understood their cities only from bird’s-eye views, maps, and statistics, pavement pounders knew their cities intimately, having studied them by using their eyes and feet. She recounted how Bacon delighted “in having figured out, by trial and error, a zig-zag route across Philadelphia, from river to river, that never subjects the walker to a dull vista or uninteresting street.” Contini, more recently, had walked with her in Fort Worth and they both wore out their shoes. Remarking on the walk, she wrote, “He knew that square mile of downtown, on foot, the way most people know their own block. Between side excursions into back yards, prowls into alleys, sallies into the middle of the street (future domain of the pedestrian), and plunges up stairs (for a different angle of vision), he enthusiastically detailed the history of this store, the activities on that block, the qualities of the restaurant yonder, the potentialities of around-the-corner.”43
The pavement-pounding city planners, Jacobs concluded hopefully, were “coming up with by far the best planning,” and they were “a breed which seems to be on the increase.” However, she didn’t believe that walking, or the firsthand knowledge gained from it, was exactly the reason for their better ideas. Rather, she saw better planning as the result of a habit of thought that stemmed from a curiosity about the “living city.” Walking and good planning, she wrote, “are two sides of the same attitude, two sides of the pavement pounder’s fascination, on an intimate level, with all details of city life and city relationships, of his consuming curiosity about the way the city develops and changes, of his endless preoccupation with the living city, and—at the bottom of it all—of his affection for the city.” As compared to the Olympian planners, who studied statistics and traffic patterns and “then waved their clearance wands,” the pavement pounders were those “who want to change and rebuild the city not out of fundamental disgust with it, but out of fascination with it and love for it.”44
The East Harlem Experiment
Having written stories about urban redevelopment in Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Washington, Jacobs seems to have known more about urban redevelopment in cities other than in her adopted hometown of New York until 1956. Around the time she prepared her Fort Worth story, however, she had an eye-opening tour of East Harlem with two of its most knowledgeable residents. In early 1956, William Kirk, a community leader and director of Union Settlement Association, showed Jacobs around the neighborhood, while Ellen Lurie, a Union Settlement social worker, described to her a January 1956 research report that explained the damage done to the neighborhood by the creation of ten housing projects. Later, in Death and Life, Jacobs credited Kirk with showing her how to see “the intricate social and economic order under the seeming disorder of cities.”45
Founded in 1895 by the Union Theological Seminary, like other turn-of-the-century settlement houses, Union Settlement offered social services for some of the millions of immigrants arriving in the city and transitioning to a new life in America. Following service at a St. Louis settlement house and his ordination in 1935, Kirk, a reverend, was hired as the director in 1949, and, with his colleagues, he watched East Harlem change as each new housing project appeared. In 1955, he began reaching out to newspapers and magazines to bring attention to the neighborhood’s plight. He first contacted Architectural Forum in March 1955, at the suggestion of his friend Phil Will of Perkins & Will Architects, wanting to describe to Haskell the changes that had been taking place. “I think fairly recently Phil Will spoke to you concerning a conversation that he and I had about many of the things which are going on here in East Harlem,” he wrote. But it was not until January 1956, when Haskell and Jacobs were outlining a major feature on city planning, that the East Harlem story was followed up on. Haskell wrote Kirk that they had become “seriously interested in a study of city patterns, and we recall how explicit you were about the structure of neighborhoods in Harlem and what produces this structure.”46
As Jacobs later affirmed, Kirk and Lurie had a very good understanding of their neighborhood’s intricate social and economic order. A New York Times reporter had listened, and in a May 1955 article titled “Shops a Problem in East Harlem,” Kirk explained that demolishing storefront buildings to build superblock housing projects was destroying the neighborhood’s social and economic sustainability (to use an anachronistic term). Offering an explanation that Jacobs later repeated almost verbatim, Kirk explained that, “in an area where income is depressed, a store is not only a place where articles are vended, but a social center … a meeting place. Storefronts are also used for churches and for political and social clubs. None of this is taken into account in the new housing projects.”47
By the time Jacobs visited East Harlem, ten housing projects—East River Houses, James Weldon Johnson, Lexington, Washington, Carver, Madison, Franklin, Jefferson, Taft, and Wagner Houses—had consumed fifty-seven blocks, more than two-thirds of East Harlem, and more were planned. Lurie and the East Harlem Small Business Survey and Planning Committee documented the eviction of 1,569 small businesses, affecting the employment of more than 4,500 people. Going door to door, storefront to storefront on the five-block site of the Franklin Houses superblock, they documented the elimination of 211 enterprises, including the following: two appliance stores, four baby carriage storage locations, four bars, eight barbershops, eleven bakery and pastry shops, two beauty shops, one bicycle shop, fourteen candy stores, two carpenters, ten cleaners, eleven clothing and dry goods merchants, five building contractors, three cheese stores, two drugstores, two egg stores, seven fruit shops, two funeral parlors, six furniture and rug stores, one fortuneteller, five parking garages, fourteen grocery stores, two hardware stores, two jewelry stores, six laundries, two law offices, two liquor stores, one loan maker, one luggage store, one mattress store, four meat markets, one moving and storage company, one novelty shop, three paint stores, one stationer, one pet shop, one plumber, one poultry store, four printers, three radio and TV repair shops, one real estate and insurance business, seven restaurants, four shoe repair shops, two toy stores, two travel agencies, thirteen manufacturing businesses, fifteen wholesalers, two union locals, three churches, eight social clubs, and one political club. Kirk remarked that he was skeptical that anything could save the shattered community, but he thought some good might come from it if the results could be told about in time to save other city communities from the same mistakes.48
Although the members of the East Harlem Small Business Survey and Planning Committee acknowledged that much of the housing in East Harlem needed improvement, they argued that “real improvement” included the diversity and various community functions provided by schools, public institutions, small businesses, churches, and political and social clubs. It meant “keeping the best of our old housing and our established businesses” and maintaining “a community made up of all peoples, not creating a segregated neighborhood, economically or culturally.” In her January 1956 report, Lurie concluded that it was “not desirable to root out and eliminate all owner-occupied dwellings and enterprises,” and she urged the city “to carefully review and study all changes made in East Harlem since World War II.”49
Later, an increasingly frustrated Lurie would describe East Harlem, in an essay edited by Jacobs, as “the world’s most extensively experimented public-housing guinea pig.” But while she argued that fourteen project housing experiments were far more than was needed to reveal the experiment’s failure, within two months of Berman v. Parker, the Lower East Side and Harlem had been designated, more or less in their entireties, as urban renewal “areas suitable for development and redevelopment.”50
At the same time, however, there was an undeniable need for housing, and not all of the experiments had been failures. Harlem River Houses (1936–37), the city’s first federally funded, owned, and built housing project, was considered a success and among the best-designed public housing anywhere. Moreover, in the 1940s, well before the passage of the housing acts of 1949 and 1954, East Harlem’s planning and housing experiment was progressive, locally driven, and apparently so successful that it became the testing ground for the nationalization of urban renewal policy.
FIGURE 34. The Plan of Sections Containing Areas Suitable for Development and Redevelopment (1954) shows the concentration of housing and redevelopment projects (listed in the upper left) in East Harlem and the Lower East Side. Jacobs learned about the impact of the projects built and the proposed project in East Harlem in early 1956. Columbia University Libraries.
In the late 1940s, many of East Harlem’s problems had stemmed from the utter lack of building and redevelopment, which led vacant and neglected urban land to become dumping grounds. In a September 1948 expose, the New York Times city columnist Charles Grutzner described the scene that rail passengers traveling through Harlem and the decrepit parts of the Upper East Side saw as they were carried to the downtown train stations. The city’s “front door,” as this railway entrance to the city was described in words and photographs, was a scandalous mess: “Courtyards were found to be garbage dumps; alleys between buildings were repositories for refuse of all kinds; and lots made vacant by the razing of condemned buildings were covered with piles of junk, some of them afire.”51
A subsequent Times opinion piece took a step toward making “the East Harlem problem” a larger social problem. The editors opined that the neighborhood’s plight should “engage the determined attention of the whole city government and, beyond that, the conscience of the people of New York City.” They continued: “We, as a city, are not providing decent living conditions in that area—and there are other areas as well, of course.”52
Nevertheless, consistent with the paternalistic attitude toward slum residents that was a familiar aspect of otherwise well-intentioned housing reform, commentators came to the conclusion that the city’s responsibility was to help “remake” East Harlem, physically and socially. Sharing an idea held by many architects and city planners at the time, the Times proposed physical rebuilding as the means of remaking the people of East Harlem:
The basic problem here, of course, is to remake people—the people of East Harlem. We are not at all sure we know how that can be done, but New York, officially and unofficially, cannot rest easy while these people are living up there in that condition and in the frame of mind it helps to produce. … We shall, for one thing, have to remodel, rebuild the physical Harlem before we make more sympathetic good citizens out of the Puerto Rican, Spanish, Italian, Negro, and other families who now live there in such drab and cheerless surroundings.53
Just a few days later, in September 1948, another opinion-page piece titled “Rebuilding East Harlem” recommended “a broad, frontal approach” to building new housing and providing new community services. This would “encourage these neighbors of ours in East Harlem to feel that they are accepted as good Americans, that we are genuinely interested in their welfare, and that they enjoy the benefits and have the obligations of all decent Americans.”54
Despite the patronizing attitude expressed for “these neighbors of ours,” the Times coverage of the East Harlem story, which continued for three months, resulted in some immediate and positive changes. It caused a shakeup of the Department of Sanitation and the Department of Housing and Buildings, prompted discussions about the conversion of vacant lots into neighborhood playgrounds, and instigated a neighborhood clean-up campaign that spread throughout the city in the following year. It also helped to precipitate the campaign for the wholesale rebuilding of East Harlem, which was, at least initially, a welcome development.
Exemplary of the breadth of belief in the ineffectiveness of “piecemeal” city redevelopment, the idea that East Harlem needed comprehensive rebuilding was shared by local community groups. In December 1948, the Times published a letter by the East Harlem Council for Community Planning, which argued that while turning empty lots into playgrounds was a good idea, “a unified plan for the land use in East Harlem” was needed. In agreement with city planners, they wrote, “Piecemeal or patchwork planning for land use will not help. New housing, which is so badly needed, and playgrounds, recreation centers, health clinics, schools and other public services should be integrated into a total plan.” They suggested that “the Mayor and the City Planning Commission designate East Harlem as an area in the city in which an experiment in integrated planning should be done.”55
“Bottom-up” community support started the process, and less than two years later, in August 1950, the East Harlem Council for Community Planning got at least part of its wish. Robert Wagner, then borough president, developed a plan to divide Manhattan into twelve community planning districts. (One of these was the Greenwich Village Community Planning District, of which Shirley Hayes was a committee member.) Elected mayor in 1953, Wagner saw this structure as a way of involving communities in planning decisions and as the beginning of “a new method for more comprehensive planning of the borough.” In a celebrated moment of harmonious thinking among city officials and community leaders, Wagner and the East Harlem council worked together on an experimental redevelopment “pilot project” for a new East Harlem hospital, described by Wagner as “a first-rate example of how neighborhood groups could aid borough officials in important phases of borough planning.” To help facilitate the redevelopment process, the council expedited the clearing of the site for a new hospital by assisting with “the removal of tenants from the site and finding new homes for them.” At the outset, the redevelopment of East Harlem was exactly the sort of cooperation between a community and city planners that Jacobs advocated at the time.56
In fact, the East Harlem “experiment in integrated planning” was so “successful” that, by mid-1955, housing projects had replaced one-third of the seventy-block neighborhood. But with “success” came the unwelcome signs that the experiment was a failure. Just under five years after the city backed the East Harlem council’s “pilot project,” the Times reported that “East Harlem civic leaders are alarmed about the effect that ‘a stereotyped approach to housing’ is having” upon the area. More widely known by this time as urban renewal, the slum-clearance experiment was degrading the quality of neighborhood life. Paradoxically, “slums” now seemed to be better than new, modern housing. Assisted by Lurie and Kirk, Union Settlement and community groups now tried to reverse the redevelopment process.57
As is clear from her comments in Death and Life, Jacobs was quickly convinced by Lurie’s and Kirk’s analyses and arguments. Soon after visiting, in April 1956, she told East Harlem’s story to a crowd of distinguished architects and planners at the first Urban Design Conference at Harvard. The combination of events—coming to understand East Harlem’s situation and then seeing at Harvard how disconnected practitioners were from consequences on the ground—was a turning point in her understanding of the plight facing cities. And compared with Kirk, Lurie, and many architects and city planners, Jacobs was prepared to understand this plight like few others at the time. Having followed the course of city redevelopment since at least 1949, she understood East Harlem’s problems as not unique to the neighborhood or people of East Harlem, as some wanted to believe. Jacobs agreed with Lurie’s assessment that East Harlem was “the world’s most extensively experimented public-housing guinea pig.” She would become a board member of Union Settlement; work with Kirk, Lurie, and Will on developing better housing prototypes for the neighborhood; and refer to East Harlem more than a dozen times in Death and Life. But she also saw a larger story: not the failure of urban renewal and project housing in East Harlem, but the failures of urban renewal and project housing at large.