Zeckendorf
Page 23
At the time of the incident, however, I expended little thought and even less emotion on mourning any loss to Montreal from our defeat in the City Council. I was too engrossed by another kind of discovery: our little setback with the city fathers was putting the whole of Place Ville-Marie in jeopardy.
It may at first seem unlikely that this relatively minor upset of our site plans could have seriously threatened the whole project, but such was the case. It came about because insurance companies, in the early negotiating stages, can be quite flexible about the details of a project, but become more and more rigid as an agreement reaches the signing stage. By the time an arrangement has been reached and written up into preliminary contract form insurance companies have developed a ritual inflexibility that only the priesthood of ancient Egypt may have been able to equal. Every income augury and cost incantation must be precisely spelled out, every minor detail of planning and construction must be exactly as prescribed by codicil, or the whole magical process of mortgages, loans, and grants will be contaminated by uncertainty, and the entire delicate process must be started up again from the beginning.
Our mall was to become a magnet for people (like the one I had created between Macy's and Gimbels on Thirty-fourth Street in New York). And our mall had just been blown out of existence. With an important subelement, one we had been touting as a profitable link to retailing, removed from our plan, I was in great fear of Metropolitan Life deciding to reconsider the whole matter of backing Place Ville-Marie. To forestall this, it was necessary that we persuade first ourselves—and then Metropolitan Life—that the mall was a piece of frosting. We had to convince ourselves that visitors drawn to Place Ville-Marie from St. Catherine Street by the mall would still go there by the lower-level route under the plaza, and that escalators could then take them up to the next level. We had to convince ourselves that there were advantages to the change (there were) and that the new lower-level, or promenade, route on which pedestrians would now tend to move would be a great windfall for the many shops on this level (which it was). Having convinced ourselves, we now had to convince our friends. Our associate architects, angry at the Council's blow against good design and a better city, were ready to march on City Hall in protest against the stupidity of the decision against us. But if we were to throw any more forces into the battle, the resulting publicity would only convince Metropolitan Life that the mall was indeed vital to the project. Then, if we lost, and the odds against us were great, we might lose not only the promenade but also the whole project. It took soft-spoken Henry Cobb five hours to do so, but he finally talked our allies out of staging a grand battle for a principle, in order to save a cause.
After a week with one foot in limbo we also convinced Metropolitan Life that the mall, though useful, was not vital, and Place Ville-Marie, sans sloping causeway, was once more on its way. Then the great steel crisis of 1959–1960 hit us like a torpedo in the bow. It put a five-million-dollar gap in our finances, and it is a profound tribute to the concept and basic design of Place Ville-Marie that we could keep going and eventually reach safe haven after such a blow.
Place Ville-Marie's cruciform tower contains forty-nine thousand tons of steel. A significant percentage of that steel was not necessary, but the putting in of that extra steel cost us five million dollars. The nominal cause of this staggering cost hike was a Quebec law aimed at questionable practices and ethics. This law puts responsibility for design of steel structures not only on the engineers and builder but also on the steel company that supplies the materials. Such a law can be useful in discouraging suppliers from providing inferior-quality products. However, this law, in effect, also puts the steel company in the designer's seat, with some built-in conflicts, for the objectives of the builder and those of his suppliers are necessarily opposite. In the case of Place Ville-Marie, for instance, this law and a number of other factors began to play one upon the other, to create our crisis. One prime factor was that our forty-five-story cruciform building was something new in the world, and calculations as to how winds would effect such a structure were quite abstruse. Another was that Canadian steel engineers, especially at that time, had had very little experience in high-rise technology. Like engineers the world over, they did not like to think they were behind anybody in anything, and made up for any insecurity by being hyper-conservative as regards stress and safety margins. A third factor was that steel companies like to sell steel. They sell it by the ton and take pleasure in selling as many tons at a time as possible. So the situation all but reduced itself to the fact that ultraconservative engineers, whose chief interest was the sale of steel, had veto power on our designs.
When we originally contracted for our steel there was a recession under way and excess steel on hand, so we got the very favorable price of 280 dollars per ton. But now the recession was over, and the equivalent steel was getting 300 dollars or more per ton on the market. Finally, there was a clause in our contract having to do with the complexity of the steel delivered to us. This clause opened up the possibility of renegotiations if this complexity were to increase beyond a given amount.
Our principal design consultants were a reputable New York firm who boasted a wealth of background in steel design. Their signature on a design would normally be quite enough to guarantee its acceptance in New York. In Canada, however, over the course of some six months of discussion, our consultant was not able to convince local designers that his stress formulas and designs should be accepted in Canada. Gradually, parts of the design began to change, more steel was added, more fabrication was called for.
Over a period of time, our local suppliers, because of their special legal position, were forcing a drastic redesign of the steelwork on the building. Finally, claiming that the forced design changes now made this an entirely new job, they upped the price, not of the extra steel, but of all the steel on the job, from the original 280 dollars to 320 dollars per ton.
When I finally realized that we were in the gentle hands of our suppliers, I tried everything I could think of to better the situation. But canceling the contract and turning to other sources would still mean steel at the market price. It would also be difficult and time-consuming and could subject us to legal harassment and delays. Further extensive delays would end up costing us more than would bowing to the new prices our suppliers insisted on using. In effect, we were trapped deep in a steel-lined box. All we could do about this was tap on the sides, note the watertight construction, and pour in enough more money to eventually float to the top. What with redesign, new construction to new specifications, and new prices, our Canadian steel crisis totaled up as a five-million-dollar misunderstanding.
At this point our British fellow investors of the Eagle Star and Covent Garden companies were in the process of joining with Webb & Knapp to form Trizec (Tri + Z for Zeckendorf + E for Eagle Star + C for Covent Garden) Corp. Trizec began as a fifty-fifty agreement between Webb & Knapp (Canada) and the British investors. Our partners, however, arranged to supply more capital, and credit for capital loans, in exchange for a proportionally greater interest in Trizec, with Webb & Knapp holding the option of reacquiring its percentage of the ownership in the project upon repayment of its share of the loans and interest. So the project went on.
In the summer of 1961 the last piece of steelwork on the building was topped out. We had a ceremony with the mayor, Cardinal Léger, and a great many other guests and notables present, with one sad exception. This exception was my volcanic friend Jim Muir. Jim had died. The white-hot fires that had kept him fuming and roaring so impressively down on St. James Street went out before he could test his vocal effects at the new locale at Place Ville-Marie, but we thought and spoke of him. Then, in September, 1962, with Montreal's transformation and renaissance underway and with our great, masculine building standing up against the Montreal skyline like a man surrounded by boys, we held an official opening. Here I toasted Muir once more. He was not unlike the giant building which he, Gordon, Phillips, and I, with invaluable help fr
om others, had gambled, cajoled, and fought to bring into reality.
At the time of the opening, only fifteen stores in the lower-level promenade under the plaza had been rented, and these (I must admit) largely to second-string retailers. At the opening, however, the town's top merchants came to look, and realized just what a magnet for people the promenade was going to be, and they began lining up for available space. Stores in the promenade that once went for six dollars per square foot now rent for fifteen dollars per square foot and find no dearth of tenants. As to the plaza, some had argued that in a city of long winters and strong winds its open space is wasted, but every city desperately needs well-planned open spaces. Besides, a basic element of the CNR's agreement with the city was the promise of a public space and plaza on the site—and the plaza does see use. After the building was completed, a fervent group of young French nationalists, in public protest against what they held to be the CNR's discrimination in the employment and advancement of French Canadians, held a noisy rally on the plaza. The climax of the meeting was the burning of an effigy of Donald Gordon. About Gordon's reactions to this display I have not inquired, but I do know that Henry Cobb, the architect, was delighted: the town plaza was serving its function.
Because of what we did at Place Ville-Marie, Montreal's financial center moved uptown. Shopping and commuting patterns in the city were drastically changed and improved, and helped make Montreal's fabulous Expo '67 possible. Because of the building and commercial expansion which we precipitated, the city received an unexpected windfall in tax revenues. With the help of these new tax moneys, Montreal was able to raise capital in New York for a subway system, the Metro. With a subway under construction, our practical but also visionary ally, Mayor Drapeau, (now back in office), was able to bid and win approval for a World's Fair which millions of people will remember as Montreal's architecturally delightful and intellectually disciplined gift to Canada and the world.
The new Montreal has something to offer to all metropolitan centers. Montreal has a city core so planned that the flow of pedestrian, auto, and other forms of traffic actually complement each other, to help make the center more usable and attractive. This "model" system grew out of and around our project, with its various and separate levels for train, truck, auto, and pedestrian traffic. In Montreal, which has seven months of winter weather, our wide, well-lighted pedestrian passageways offered a handy all-weather pathway so popular that some shops in the promenade found themselves doing business at the rate of four hundred dollars per square foot of space, compared to one hundred dollars in most successful shopping centers. The Metro was tied into this all-weather network. Other builders joined the system. As a result of both city and private planners tying into an existing "good thing," Montreal has become a place to which city administrators and planners come in search of lessons they can apply at home.
Finally, as regards Toronto, Montreal has once more moved several strides to the fore as Canada's true queen city.
I received verification of this during a visit to Toronto. I had been to Toronto a number of times trying to get a major project off the ground there. On this particular visit my son and I were invited to call on Fred Gardner, who was to greater Toronto what Bob Moses in his heyday had been to New York. He was a tremendously successful and productive public servant who knew how to overawe politicians and get things done. He redeveloped the water front and built multiple roads, parks, subways, and throughways, to bring some cohesion to Toronto's urban sprawl. During our visit with him Gardner said, "I wanted to meet you to tell you something. . . . I am retiring. . . . I've been planning to do so for five years or more, but now I am doing so with a great deal of grief and worry. I was convinced once that Toronto had decisively passed Montreal to become the leading city in Canada. In fact, I was sure we could keep this position forever, because Montreal was asleep while we were growing. . . . You pulled Montreal ahead and now the momentum and initiative lie with them. You made one city of Canada pass the other and changed Canadian history."
I was touched, because this was a great as well as generous gentleman speaking to us. We had a great plan for Toronto which could do much for that city as we had done for Montreal, and I said, "Actually, Toronto's ripe for masterful development, but you need three or four big funerals here among your vested interests, because they are not about to make any imaginative moves."
"Name them," he said.
"I can't, because I'd be touching on areas that might hurt me," I replied, "but I'll tell you one thing; Eaton's is the biggest single stumbling block to progress in this city."
Eaton's is Canada's greatest store chain. Its sales of over one billion dollars per years would be the equivalent of ten billion dollars in the U.S. market. Eaton's is the Canadian Sears Roebuck plus the next six or seven largest U.S. store chains combined. This great enterprise, controlled by a single family, is headed by John David Eaton. Mr. Eaton is a merchant prince, but in pride of city or sense of service, no Medici. Almost by happenstance, Eaton's had a geographic stranglehold on the natural growth of Toronto, by virtue of the land space they owned in and around their store, which lies just to the north of the heart of town and in the line of natural growth from Lake Ontario. A greater part of this land lies idle, either as parking lots or as dusty, truck-chocked warehousing. Sprawled out like a great patch of crabgrass on a lawn, the Eaton holdings effectively choke any new growth trying to get under way alongside.
We had worked with Eaton's in establishing various shopping centers throughout Canada. In consultation with Eaton's and at considerable expense to Webb & Knapp, we also devised a plan for their Toronto holdings. Our development, centered about a beautiful open plaza to replace their present nest of buildings, included high-rise office buildings and a great new Eaton store. Aside from developing much new traffic for the store, our project promised impressive returns as a real-estate development. The management of the company, however, turned us down. John David Eaton would not even attend our presentation of the project, and the plan was aborted. As a result, Montreal has maintained its developmental lead, and Toronto lost out.
After we had left the Canadian scene, Eaton's, in part emboldened and in part stung by our example and commentary, did make a stab at rehabilitation of their properties along the lines recommended by us. Through lack of imagination and of boldness in execution the project died stillborn.
Three
▪ Prologue
BY THE LATE 1940'S and early 1950's it was obvious that the central core of every one of our major cities was falling in on itself. During the 1930's there had been almost no new building and a cut in the maintenance of most older ones. Meanwhile, population continued to grow. With World War II, the country underwent some further population shifts to certain cities (i.e., near training camps or industrial centers), but shortages and controls curtailed construction of new buildings as well as the maintenance of old ones. In other words, the key cities grew more crowded and continued to deteriorate.
After the end of World War II one might have expected to see a wholesale revival in the cities, but a great percentage of those who could afford to moved to the suburbs, deserting the cities. Urban America became suburban America, and the new megalopolis flourished—in part at the expense of the cities. For instance, corporations that had originally established themselves in great cities to be near a supply of labor, sources of materials, customers, and a railhead, began building their new plants near the new homes outside of town.
The result of this outflow of people and absence of new industries was a loss of tax revenues and the creation of a vacuum, especially in the older residential and manufacturing sections of the cities. As a consequence, urban blight began to spread out of the ancient slums and into once pleasant residential neighborhoods.
Then, compounding their problems, the cities found themselves invaded by a postwar influx of rural Americans. These newcomers, the bulk of them unskilled laborers, had for several decades been leaving the farm countr
y for work in the cities. The trend gained impetus during World War II, but after the war it became even more pronounced. Spilling out from the traditional ghettos where they first moved in with friends and relatives, the newcomers flowed into the partially evacuated nearby neighborhoods. This in turn accelerated the flight of the remaining old residents to the suburbs or other parts of town.
The newcomers, the majority of them uneducated and unskilled, had difficulty in finding good jobs and steady work. Because they were poor, they crowded together, which of itself tends to create a degree of urban blight. Besides this, the immigrants, many because they were ignorant and unaccustomed to the mores and disciplines of city living, others because they were exploited and resentful, and some because they were renters rather than owners, proved indifferent if not destructive caretakers of property.
Today some explosive events and television have made most of us dramatically aware of the situation which I have laid out in barest detail. The interrelated problems of jobs, housing, and education in the great cities we now recognize as the great challenge of our ultraurban society. In 1952 this was not the case. The outflow to the suburbs was too evident to be denied, but what this exodus meant and what the speed and size of the migrations to the cities foretold was something many tried to ignore or deny.
There was some awareness, though, and in 1949 a proposal, first broached in 1937 for the elimination of slum areas, was enacted by Congress. This act, a variant of the land subsidies through which our early railroads were built, was known as the Title I Urban Redevelopment Act. The basic idea of urban redevelopment was that a city, using its right of eminent domain, would acquire slum or blighted land at fair market prices to the owners. It would clear this land, then offer it to private developers at less than the cost to the city. On this low-cost land the developers could then erect low- and medium-income housing. One-third of the cost of the newly cleared land was to be borne by the city, and two-thirds by the federal government.