Making It Uglier to the Airport

Every building in the United States is an offense to invested capital. It occupies space which, as greed acknowledges no limits, can be better utilized. This depressing fact can be thought of as a kind of disease of the American city for which the only specific is law, and, to make a wild gesture toward common sense, aesthetics. One might as well say that multiple sclerosis can be cured with cough drops.

In Chicago six years ago they tore down Adler and Sullivan’s Old Stock Exchange, a perfectly useful building. That it was bone and blood of Chicago history, that it was an architectural landmark, that its ornamentation was beautiful and irreplaceable were arguments that could not save it. Money has no ears, no eyes, no respect; it is all gut, mouth, and ass. The Heller International Building went up in its place, a glass cracker-box forty-three stories high. Its mortgage payments are $400,000 every first of the month: interest—interest, money which bankers earn by tightening their shoelaces, yawning, and testing teakwood surfaces for dust—on a $48,300,000 loan. The building cost $51,000,000, and is up for grabs, as the speculators can’t hold onto it. This time nobody cares if, as they shall, they tear it down and put up something more “economically viable,” as they say.

Heaps of New York are being torn down because what’s left over after property taxes isn’t quite what our greedy hearts would like to take to our investment broker. Between the banker and the tax-collector, life can be very hell. But then, they built the cities in the first place. One of the greatest of architects built snowmen for the Medici children (a use of Michelangelo we would have expected of J. Pierpont Morgan sooner than Lorenzo the Magnificent); all architećts are now sculptors in ice.

Ada Louise Huxtable, who writes about architecture and city planning for the Times, has collected a batch of her terse essays on buildings going up and coming down, on design, and practically anything else that her lively eye hits on.¹ Her comments are all arrows of the chase, released when the aim seemed good, and with some fine hits. Like all such writing, you can feel the pressure of the deadline on her attention. She turns up many problems (the war, apparently to the death, between city design and real-estate adventurers; the coherence of American cityscape; the preservation of landmarks; the tension between contemporaneity and tradition) that I would like to have seen her expand and explore.

While I was reading her essays, I happened to run across Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, which I saw in the MIT catalogue when I was ordering Dolores Hayden’s fine survey of American utopian communities.² Tafuri traces the decay and disorder of cities to the rise of commercial centers during the industrial revolution, causing cities to enter a paranoia of identity. His little book is worth reading—worth studying with care—but it gleams and blinds with too much Marxist intellect for me to pretend to discuss it here. The one idea that I want to take from it is that what we call a city bears little resemblance to the historical city or to cities outside the United States. Yet our cities still sit on top of a living archaeological base that used to be a city in the old sense. The automobile and the truck have shaved the yards to mere margins in the quiet residential sections; the streets have become freeways all over every city and town. Automobile exhaust, equal in volume daily to that of the Atlantic Ocean, has replaced breathable air. The automobile is an insect that eats cities, and its parking lots are a gangrene.

The simple fact is that cities in America came into being not as the historical city did, for mutual protection and to be the home of a specific family of people, but as commercial ports. That is, their model was the kind of prosperous city Defoe describes in the first inventory the mercantile class made of itself, his Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26). All important elements were in walking distance of each other; nearness defined the city. If it grew large, each neighborhood (as in Paris and London today) remained a conglomerate of components within easy reach.

Within the last twenty years the automobile has gradually cancelled this definition of the city as a community. And the smaller the city, the larger the inconvenience has grown. When I moved to Lexington, Kentucky, fifteen years ago, I could walk to three supermarkets in my neighborhood, to the post office, and to the mayor’s house, which happened to be around the corner. All three markets have moved miles away, to the belt line; God knows where they have put the post office. I have been there but once since they moved it. It took me an hour to get there, and an hour to get back. It is technically in the next county, and is near no habitation of any citizen. Only some desolate warehouses does it have for company. This happened when Nixon and his government of scoundrels, liars, and sneaks had us scrotum in mano and I assumed that sheer hatefulness snatched the post office from downtown and put it out in the horse pastures.

The post office, in any case, was only good for buying stamps at. When I tried to renew my passport there a few years ago, a passport kept functional for thirty years, I was told that if I couldn’t show a driver’s license I couldn’t renew my passport. (I will not spin out the Gogolian scene that ensued, though it featured my being told that I didn’t deserve to live in this country, my pointing out that I could scarcely leave it without a passport, and on around in circles that left the art of Gogol for that of Ionesco, until I got the State Department on the phone, and had my new passport, together with an apology, in three days.) The point of the anecdote is that the pedestrian is officially a second-rate citizen and definitely an obsolete species.

Where the mayor moved to I do not know. The neighborhood is now zoned for business. Henry Clay’s townhouse, part of the neighborhood, sits in a tarred-over parking lot.³

I had not realized before reading Dolores Hayden’s Seven American Utopias that the Civil War marked the end of Utopian experimentation in American communities. We now know how very much of modern design derives from Shaker clarity and integrity, and how useful, if only as models to modify or tolerate, the Owenite, Fourierist, Moravian, and other eccentric societies were.

Acceleration in culture is demonic, and there ought to be periodic recesses to look back and reclaim elements that were ditched along the way. To read Dolores Hayden is to see how much we elbowed aside, or smothered, or deliberately obliterated. Fourier’s phalanx seems to be a congenial mode of life that might have forestalled our present alienation of the young, the old, and the lonely. Shaker respect for materials is certainly the corrective we need for our present norm of tacky shoddiness, for mushroom proliferation. Shaker morals wouldn’t be amiss, either.

Backward surveys can also turn up some astonishing forks in the road. Alison Sky and Michelle Stone have compiled what amounts to a treasury of American designs, from cities to individual buildings, that never made it from the blueprint into actuality.⁴ One purpose of this book was to assess our architectural legacy—designs, for instance, that might still be realized. There is a postmortem career awaiting Frank Lloyd Wright; all great architects are ahead of their times. Sadly, many of these plans have been chucked into the wastebasket. An architect’s firm is a business, not an archive. Not even so distinguished a figure as Frederick Law Olmsted was spared this kind of careless destruction. A vigorous society might well build Thomas Jefferson’s President’s House, if only in Disneyland, where, in effect, Jacques J. B. Benedict’s Summer Capitol for President Woodrow Wilson (projected for Mt. Falcon, Colorado) already stands—it looks like an Arthur Rackham drawing for Mad Ludwig of Bavaria. Many of these rejected designs are lugubrious and hilarious: a robber-baron New Versailles for Manhasset Bay, Long Island, that would have been the biggest building in the world, something that Hitler and Albert Speer might have drooled over; art-book cathedrals recapitulating the whole span of the Gothic in Europe, beacons taller than Everest, Babylonian banks, war memorials that would have trivialized the Pyramids, linear towns with highways for halls, space islands, underground metropolises, a New Harmony phalanx that looks like a Victorian penitentiary crossbred with Flash Gordon’s spacecraft port. And yet these designs are full of attractive and charming ideas: a Manhattan with separate thoroughfares for pedestrians and traffic, garden cities, beautiful vistas that would have made Chicago as handsome as Paris, and buildings that ought to have existed for the fun of it, William McKinley Xanadus, palaces, follies—outrageous flowers for the granite forest.

The depressing obliteration of communities can sometimes be as thorough as Noah’s Flood. New Burlington, Ohio, a town between Dayton and Cincinnati, is now at the bottom of a lake created, as it often seems, to keep the Army Corps of Engineers busy. Before New Burlington went under, an extraordinarily sensitive writer, John Baskin, talked with the old-timers and recorded their memories. The resulting book is poignant and, if you’re in a reflective mood or of a pessimistic turn, heartbreaking. The obituary of an entire town has the aura of doom all over it. The only horror of death is in waiting for it, and here was a community that knew its doom: not of life, but of so much of it that the difference perhaps is not accountable. The terror of Hektor’s death was that, moments before his heart tasted Achilles’ blade, he had to run past places where he had played as a boy. John Baskin carefully avoids dramatics in this book. His business was to hear the past. In the process, however, it dawned on him that American life has changed. What’s different is that whereas just a few years ago we all had something to do, now we don’t.

It is tempting to believe that New Burlington, Ohio, was built before the Civil War (partly by Methodists, partly by Quakers) by people for whom skill and hard work were as natural a fact as breathing, and that it went underwater because a society had emerged that is neurotic with idleness and pointlessness. (The Red River Gorge in Kentucky was saved from flooding by the Corps of Engineers because when our governor asked the corps why they wanted to obliterate so much natural beauty, they could not give an answer.)

It is good to know, on the other hand, that a small community can fight and can win against the restless greed of investment capital and botchers of all breeds. A nameless town in California has so far held out over a sudden influx of developers and do-gooders working together. The do-gooders noticed the town when it was gunked up by an oil spill (halt and give some time to the ironies that crisscross here). During the cleanup it was noticed that the community had an inadequate sewer system. This attracted the money boys from a water company, who convinced the state that vast sums must be spent to get everybody onto a flushing toilet. This alerted the osmagogue bankers, who alerted the real-estate gang. As long as this community—half retired folk, largely hermits, half young utopians who had fled the city—was to be modernized, so thought the developers, let’s pop in resort hotels, Burger Kings, miniature golf, redwood-shingle condominiums, and let’s see these old geezers and hippies clear the hell out.

The struggle and triumph of this commuity (not named, for its own protection) is presented in a thoroughly good book.⁵ Orville Schell, who has written well and humanely about Chinese communes, shows how a community that is eccentric, almost centerless, and even casual, can knit together and drive away the bulldozer, sanitary engineer, and real-estate shark. He presents his problem in a paragraph that it would be brutal to paraphrase:

A town which is a community is a delicate organism. As yet, it has virtually no legal means at its disposal by which to protect itself from those who choose to search it out. Unlike an individual, it cannot sue for invasion of privacy. It cannot effectively determine how many people can live in it. It cannot even decide for itself the number of visitors with which it feels comfortable. The roads are there; anyone may travel on them. A commercial establishment is free to advertise the town’s name and its desirable attributes in the hopes of attracting people to it in order to make money. If the people who call that town home find the influx of people, cars, and money unsettling, they have little recourse.

If those words were attributed to a New England Conservative complaining about Italian immigrants, or to Robert Moses complaining about the influx of Puerto Ricans, they would outrage Liberal ears. Paradoxically they illustrate how accurately we must understand a writer’s point of view. “Organism” is the word to hold onto. Schell’s words are true, and astutely stated. The nature of the organism determines what kind of turbulence it can tolerate.

Poland survived the Second World War better than my hometown in South Carolina. Main Street has rotted into a wasteland. Gracious old homes came down to make way for used-car lots, tacky little finance companies, and drive-in hamburger pavilions. The seven ancient oaks that stood around the house where Thomas Wolfe’s sister lived fell to the power saw, and the house itself, deporched, hoked up with neon and Coca-Cola signs, was islanded in a desolation of tar paving and converted into an eatery called, with that genius of the destroyer for taunting, The Seven Oaks. Some two miles of magnolia shade became a glare of festooned light bulbs, and all the used-car dealers are named Shug and Bubber, a semiology I am not equipped to explore. The ugliness of it all is visual migraine. And yet a mayor and his councilmen let it happen. The American politician may be a psychological type, like the kleptomaniac, peeping tom, or exhibitionist. He is the only professional who may apply for a job and present as his credentials the blatant and unashamed fact that he has none. (Lincoln Steffens was surprised to discover that city management throughout Europe requires a college degree.) But the explanation of why our cities are being uglified is not to be found wholly in political venality, capitalistic exploitation, greed, carelessness, or any one force.

The history of a city ought to disclose how it came to be what it is. John and LaRee Caughey have put together a composite “history” of that monster metropolis Los Angeles.⁶ The apologies for the word history are because the book is an anthology of short passages from over a hundred writers. The method seems appropriate for a sprawling subject, the locale of such contrasts (Hollywood and Watts, UCLA and Sunset Boulevard). I suspect the book is of greatest interest to Angelenos themselves, though it is a marvellous book to read around in. It makes the tacit assumption that no American city of such size can be got between the pages of a book. The word history is wonderfully tricky when applied to a city. One can write the history of England better than the history of London. In another sense, the history of Los Angeles can be written sometime in the next century, but not now.

A more thorough and integral history of a city is of Roger Sale’s of Seattle.⁷ This is a model of how city histories should be written. Seattle is a perfect example of the American city in that it was not an accidental pooling of settlers in its beginning, but a deliberate act by stalwart citizens who had come to found a city. The university, the neighborhoods, the businesses, the bank, practically all the elements were decided on as the first buildings went up. We think of the westward expansion as so many pioneers clearing the wilderness for farms; that’s mythology—they were colonists who had the plans of cities in their heads, the first since Greeks and Romans set out from mother cities (metropolites) to reproduce examples of the model they came from.

Prof. Sale, a highly skilled and spirited writer, gives us each epoch of Seattle’s history in fine detail. He knows that cities are really so many people, and inserts full biographies throughout. He gives a lucid account of the city’s economic and sociological history; he knows its institutions and newspapers. Most importantly, he knows the city’s lapses and false steps; not a syllable of chauvinism or whitewashing mars these pages. The book is therefore vigorous in its honesty and in the range of its considerations; it is as good on labor leaders (Dave Beck) as on intellectuals (Vernon Parrington). It is a speculative book that can discuss the benefit of good high schools and parks, and can explain how the American labor movement, which by rights ought to have emerged as leftist and radical (as the Seattle friend of Mao, Anna Louise Strong, urged), became rightist and conservative.

A city’s history can be done in finer and finer detail. You can zone off a decade, as Michael Lesy has done with the twenties in Louisville, or study neighborhoods family by family, as Roslyn Banish has done with a London and a Chicago neighborhood, or trace a single family through six generations.⁸ Lesy, who began his method of composite history with Wisconsin Death Trip, repeats that work with Louisville in Prohibition times. Using photographs from the commercial firm of Caulfield and Shook, police and insane-asylum records, he constructs, with what seems to me like morbidity and gratuitous cynicism, a sustained surrealistic picture of the period. His point, of course, is that’s the way they chose to see themselves—Masons in all their gaudy trappings, blacks at lodge banquets, society folk looking superior, T-Model wrecks, prehistoric Gulf stations, promotion photos by go-getter salesmen. A lot of the surrealism is, I’m afraid, mere psychological tone. Similar photographs of the 1860s we would perceive as History. These things come in phases: today’s junk is tomorrow’s antique, etc., but the process has some subtle quality one can’t pin down. Lesy makes the age seem indecent; I grew up in it, and don’t remember it that way at all. The present moment is far tackier (he would probably agree), and it is true, as he claims, that newspapers speak in a tongue all their own. And all documents in a neutral voice (police recorder, case histories from the asylum) tell us more about the institution keeping such files than about the subject. It is Lesy’s hope that raw documents speak for themselves, and that captionless photographs are powerfully meaningful. I have my doubts. The method seems to me to be a bit cocky and fraudulent. The truth of a period cannot be summoned by a few eloquent photographs and a batch of newspaper clippings. It is the equivalent of trying to understand the Second World War from newsreels alone.

Roslyn Banish supplements her photographs of London and Chicago families with responsible statistics and with commentaries by the subjects themselves. She also allowed the subjects to choose their setting (almost invariably the best-looking room, as they thought) and pose. Ms. Banish is a canny photographer, giving us in splendid light just enough detail to complete the portraits (a coat hanger inexplicably in a living room, a dimestore Gainsborough over a policeman’s mantel), and an even cannier sociologist to have conceived and carried out her project. She has made a book from which one learns about people in a particular and piquant way without any violation of their privacy, without condescension, and with gentleness toward their vulnerability. There is more respect for human beings in these photographs than I have ever seen a photographer achieve. One falls in love with the eighty-year-old Alice Williams in the first photograph (lovebirds, electric heater, paper flowers) and remains in awe of the dignity of these homefolks right up to a smiling Irish Chicago police sergeant in the last. I liked Douglas Humphreys (butler, Buckingham Palace), who looks like the Hon. Gally Threepwood in Wodehouse, part of whose interview recalls a buffet supper for heads of state after Churchill’s funeral: “I was entertaining myself a few moments with Mr. Khrushchev. Oh yes, now he had two bodyguards and an interpreter with him. I took off his greatcoat and I felt the eyes of those burly guards. I hung his greatcoat up and I said to the interpreter, ‘Just tell your two men to relax. I’m on duty on the occasion of Her Majesty’s Royal Household.’ And I added, ‘One day I should like to pay a visit to your country, sir.’ He … actually shook hands.” One feels that Humphreys was comforting Comrade K., and not even Trollope could have thought of such a wonderful moment.

Dorothy Gallagher’s Hannah’s Daughters is an oral history, taken down in a series of interviews, of six generations of a Washington family of Dutch descent, members of all of them being alive in August 1973, a chain of daughters reaching from the ninety-seven-year-old Hannah to her two-year-old great-great-great-granddaughter. The hundred photographs illustrating the narratives progress from tintype to Polaroid. The text has the interest of good talk, and covers a great deal of American history in very American voices: “… everybody was kissing everybody. It was really something. That was V-E Day. It was absolutely wild. I didn’t think there were that many people.” Gertrude Stein would have liked this book, and even tried to write it, the wrong way round, in The Making of Americans. Family history has traditionally been a woman’s preserve. And what a distance there is from “They’d kill a hog and I’d get the fat cleaned off the hog intestines to make lard. I was quick at that” to “Even if Tony had an affair, if it was a quickie affair, I’m sure we’d still be together. If it was a long one, I’m sure we’d get a divorce.”

The inner life of the city—voices, children, baths, meals—has not undergone any substantial change since Jericho, the oldest city still inhabited. When Odysseus was finally united with Penelope, they talked all night in a cozy bed, under sheepskin covers. Children and the old are the same the world over. Only public lives are different: the automobile and airplane have made us nomads again. The city seems to be obsolete; a sense of community evaporates in all this mobility and stir. As persuasion is impotent in so distracted a world, and as our legislators seem to be mere pawns of lobbies, their hands hourly open to bribes, we must stoically wait out whatever awful hiatus there is to be between the technological destruction of the only known unit of civilization, the city, and its logical and natural reinvention, however that is to come about. Meanwhile, as a voice says in Zukofsky’s “A”-18,

…all

their world’s done to change the world is to

make it more ugly to the airport.

¹Ada Louise Huxtable, Kicked a Building Lately? (New York: Quadrangle, 1976).

²Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge: MITPress, 1976).DoloresHayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976).

³There is an excellent essay on the kinds of cities bequeathed us by history as paradigms, in Salmagundi No. 24 (Fall 1973), “The City under Attack” by George Steiner. This isarich essay, with long historical perspectives. He shows us that much of what we take to be peculiarly modern ills are in fact very old, and that our double tradition, classical and Judaeo-Christian, gives us two distinct ideas of what a city is.

⁴Alison Sky and Michelle Stone, Unbuilt America: Forgotten Architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the Space Age (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).

⁵Orville Schell, The Town That Fought to Save Itself, with photographs by Ilka Hartmann (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).

⁶John and LaRee Caughey, Los Angeles: Biography of a City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

⁷Roger Sale, Seattle, Past to Present (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976).

⁸Michael Lesy, Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976). Roslyn Banish, City Families: Chicago and London (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976). Dorothy Gallagher, Hannah’s Daughters: Six Generations of an American Family: 1876–1976 (New York: Crowell, 1976).