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Title I was a good idea, but it did not work. The trouble was that the law concentrated only on housing. It takes much more than the razing of slums and putting up of clean new apartments to revitalize a great area stricken with a combination of social and economic ills: revitalizing parts of a city's core calls for a change in its human chemistry. The best way to achieve this is through new or better land use (as happened in Montreal). Housing can, and in most instances should be, a key part of this change, but you also have to create supporting commercial and aesthetic elements in the area or have them already available nearby, otherwise your housing will eventually succumb to the decay around it. The 1949 law took none of this into account.
Many cities, while much interested in Title I, were unwilling to commit their limited resources to take advantage of the new law, because major builders and institutional investors were leery of becoming involved in obviously complex and politically prickly projects in cities. These investors had become accustomed to getting Federal Housing Authority (FHA) mortgage insurance on all their projects. And the FHA, while freely funneling funds to the suburbs, treated proposals to build in slum areas with about as much enthusiasm as your maiden aunt getting an invitation to a strip tease show.
In response to the poor showing of Title I and the suggestions of a special commission appointed by President Eisenhower, Congress in 1954 passed further legislation enabling the FHA to insure urban developments by using formulas based on the value of property once a project was successfully completed. In other words, the FHA insurers were called upon to begin thinking and acting as propagators of seed money and not as money guardians. Also, under this new legislation, mixed commercial and residential developments were encouraged. Eventually things were so set up that sponsors need put up only three to five percent of the total cost of a development in cash. Thus, even though total profit on such developments might be held to a modest six percent, the relatively low amount of cash involved promised the sponsors great leverage on their investment.
With passage of the new law, numbers of major builders and investors developed an interest in urban redevelopment. A slow-moving but impressive procession of urban-redevelopment projects began to get under way across the nation, with Webb & Knapp sometimes twirling the baton, at other times beating the drums, and always leading the parade.
Billions of dollars were invested under the above-mentioned legislation. It is obvious that the urban-redevelopment programs of the 1950's were merely the forerunners of something much greater that is yet to come—the United States seriously directing itself to the task of rehabilitating and humanizing its cities. Meanwhile, there may at this time be some virtue in adding to the record something of what we did in urban redevelopment.
▪ 16 ▪Washington, D.C.
LATE IN THE FALL of 1952, John Price Bell, my public-relations vice-president, flicking through a back issue of The Architectural Forum magazine, came across an illustrated article on Southwest Washington, D.C. The story dealt with the ancient slum by the Potomac that, spreading out of its old confines like a cancer, had begun to nibble at the very edges of Capitol Hill. Thus far, said the article, there had been much debate but no action to rehabilitate this enormous and growing area.
Bell knew I was interested in the great cities. On his own he flew to Washington. Taking a cab to the Southwest, he toured the site, returned to New York, and began promoting the project. I turned him down. Phil Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and that city's renaissance man-about-town-and-politics, had already tried to get me interested in the area. I had said no: I was not interested in becoming entangled in a government-involved project.
Nonetheless, Phil Graham kept in touch. He had read a speech I gave at the Harvard School of Design, which was reprinted in The Atlantic Monthly. The burden of my message was that city cores could and should be saved. I found myself being invited as a speaker to one or two Washington conferences and, once there, kept hearing more about their local project. With Bell still touting Southwest Washington and with Graham giving me arguments from my own speech, I began to undergo a change of heart. Besides, Eisenhower was now our President-elect. He, too, was reported to be very much in favor of redevelopment of the Southwest. With the backing of people such as Eisenhower and Graham, maybe something actually could be done in Washington. The least we could do, I decided, was take a look at the area.
Early that winter, Pei, Tex McCrary, our public-relations consultant, Bell, my son, and I flew down to Washington from New York. We met with local officials. Then, by car and on foot, we toured the proposed redevelopment site. The end result of our walk in a slum was that it is now one of the most valuable pieces of Washington real estate. Parts of it are second only to Georgetown in residential snob appeal. The L'Enfant Plaza office center and its approach mall (which we conceived that day) are important tourist attractions and, in all, over half a billion in development funds were eventually attracted to the area. And yet, Southwest Washington was the most long, drawn-out, and frustrating of all our projects. Had we had a true idea of what it is really like to get a great, innovating project under way in Washington, we would never have tackled the job. Fortunately, we had only an inkling of what we were in for, and that was quite bad enough.
Just as I had previously found Denver to be a caricature of American cities, so too, at the other extreme, was Washington. Denver's problem was that it had no home-grown group capable of keeping a self-satisfied, second-rate establishment on the qui vive. Washington's trouble was that too many forces kept tugging it in separate directions —and, as regards civic government, it was a headless monster. With no mayor, no strong city officials, and a U.S. Congress intent on keeping things that way, the city could not move in any one direction for more than one month at a time. Technically Washington was run by three commissioners appointed by Congress. It was Congress that legislated for the district; the citizens did not vote. Actually, various administrative officers and members of boards and of the courts were appointed respectively by Congress, the President of the United States, and the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Park Service, the Fine Arts Commission, the Planning Commission, and a dozen other agencies officially and unofficially also shared in the operation and control of various parts of the capital. Though they may have lacked broad executive power throughout the city, the members of these various groups had veto power over great parts of each other's operations. Builders couldn't build what the Planning Commission opposed. The Fine Arts Commission had to approve what the Planning Commission proposed—and so on. Given the above, it was axiomatic that back scratching was the order of the day in Washington. The time-honored way to kill many proposals was to send them to a committee for a time till they died or were emasculated beyond recognition. With changes in the national administration and in Congress, prospects of a given project changed drastically from year to year. One result of all this was that only innocuous projects tended to get through this forest of committees easily. The small amount of effective planning and governing done in Washington, D.C., was accomplished by a self-anointed coterie of well-to-do long-term residents and members of Congress who were, as long as they got nobody excited, permitted by the others to make this their hobby. Solid, stolid local stalwarts such as Ulysses S. Grant III sat on one commission after the other without ever upsetting anybody with new ideas.
Since Washington had always been a small noncity, a government employees' bedroom and retirement area, none of this mattered very much. The capital remained, at core, a small, semirural, semi-Southern city. Then, in quick succession, the New Deal, World War II, and the postwar mushroom growth of big government changed all this. New people, new or greatly expanded government agencies, and new problems began to crowd into town. Washington and its environs became a boom area. In real estate, the greatest growth took place in the towns and new suburbs that had begun to ring Washington the way weeds ring and eventually choke a shallow pond. There was migration o
f whites from parts of the city into the suburbs. There was also a migration of blacks from the rural South into the District. The city was changing, but in 1952 the town fathers still held the levers of power in Washington, feeling it was their duty to steadfastly ignore any change going on around them—and it was an impasse created by this resistance to change that brought Webb & Knapp to Washington.
The Redevelopment Land Agency, a new agency whose job it was to redevelop Washington's slums, had locked antlers with the National Capital Planning Commission over how this redevelopment job was to be done. At the time my associates and I were cruising through the proposed Southwest development site in 1952, the impasse was entering its second year.
On the map, the proposed site formed a giant five-hundred-acre triangle. The triangle's northern side ran parallel to Independence Avenue and the great Washington Mall that lies between the Lincoln Memorial and Capitol Hill. On the westernmost side of the area lay the Potomac, whose potentially beautiful and valuable riverside land was cluttered by old warehouses, a produce and fish market, decayed wharves, and a few seafood restaurants. On the east the project was flanked by shabby homes slated for demolition and replacement by public housing. Independence Avenue was the project's northern boundary, but, in effect, it was the elevated tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which rose just below the avenue and cross the river to Virginia, that form the visual and psychological boundaries of the area. The Chinese Wall effect of these tracks had, since the 1860's, separated and segregated Southwest Washington from the rest of the city. Once fashionable, the site had long ago become a workingman's and eventually a black man's ghetto. On our tour we found numbers of pleasant, tree-lined streets, but the houses were falling apart; porches sagged, windows were cracked, rain gutters hung awry, and the paint looked like something left over from the Civil War. Many homes had no running water and outdoor privies—all this within sight of the Capitol dome.
The Redevelopment Land Agency was headed by a volunteer chairman, John Remon, a wise and public-spirited executive of the phone company. What Remon and his executive assistant, John Searles, wanted to do was clear the site of old buildings. They planned to change the area's chemistry altogether by putting up high-rise residential buildings, upgrading the commercial areas, and developing the waterfront. In this way the Redevelopment Land Agency hoped to once more tie the Southwest into the city proper. The National Capital Planning Commission, however, felt that the Southwest, "traditionally a low-income area" (for "low-income" read "black") should remain so. Buildings and streets should be rehabilitated, but their general appearance not changed. In other words, the Southwest should be made into a poor, black Georgetown. What the commission was actually promoting was a policy of containment. Since the ghetto had long since broken out of its confines and was now flanking Capitol Hill and spreading out through the rest of town, this containment policy was obviously defunct. Besides, it takes enormous sums for house-to-house rehabilitation. The money that was available would rehabilitate only a small pocket of homes, which would, as has happened in other cities, soon be swept under by the tide of decay around them.
Nonetheless, without the blessings of the Planning Commission, the Redevelopment Land Agency could do nothing. With local pressure groups pushing to "get something done," seventy-five acres of land were being converted to government low-cost-housing projects. Such "relief housing" was the ultimate fate predicted by many Washingtonians for the entire project, because there was not a major builder in America who would touch a Title I project. It was at this point, however, that we entered the scene. The beleaguered Remon and his allies quickly flashed us eager messages of welcome.
Webb & Knapp announced its interest in taking on the entire Southwest redevelopment in March, 1953. We were too late to take over the seventy-five-acre Area B low-cost-housing development, but Pei went to work studying the remainder of the project site. In November, Redevelopment Land Agency chairman John Remon came to New York to see if we were really interested in the whole project. We gave him a couple of dry martinis and a good lunch in the tower dining room over my office. Then, as proof of our interest, we unveiled a master plan for the entire area.
The key to our plan was a three-hundred-foot-wide mall stretching south at right angles to Independence Avenue. The mall commenced across from the Smithsonian Institution at Tenth Street. This was the one spot where the railroad tracks dipped below the relatively high ground near Tenth Street. By constructing an esplanade, a form of land bridge, over the tracks, over the site of a proposed eight-lane expressway, and into the heart of the Southwest, we could literally reconnect this area to Washington proper. Think of the railroad tracks as a giant wall and the expressway as a river of cars. Our mall bridged both these obstacles. Alongside this mall, in the crescent-shaped island of land between the tracks and expressway, we proposed a special office, cultural, and entertainment center to be named L'Enfant Plaza, in honor of the original planner of Washington. To the west and north of L'Enfant Plaza we proposed a series of government office buildings. Below this business and cultural escarpment, and along the river, we planned a magnificent marina and recreation area. Finally, east of this waterfront we placed a combination of high-rise elevator buildings and, something new in urban redevelopment, a series of common-cornice-line townhouses. All but two major streets would be closed to through traffic. The existing rights of way, and the fine trees already on them, were to become local-access streets, pedestrian ways, and open courts.
Our plan, which went beyond anything that had yet been proposed, made an obvious unity of the Southwest and the rest of the city beyond. A jubilant Remon promised all the assistance and support he could muster. We consulted further on plans and strategy and prepared to move in 1954.
There was a four-part sequence and logic to our plan. A prime concern was to get a number of new government office buildings put up in the northern tier of the project along Independence Avenue and/or parts of our Tenth Street mall. These buildings would blend in with existing structures nearby. More important, the quick rise of various new offices in the Southwest would help the rental of new apartments in Area B, which was upgraded into middle-income housing, and in the Town Center apartment complex Webb & Knapp would build. The rise of our new apartments would in turn give a boost to the buildings and activities planned for L'Enfant Plaza. A successful plaza would, in its turn, create a market for even more homes and apartments throughout the Southwest. This phased development of mutually supporting elements is part of what good planning is all about. But it was just as important to present or plans properly.
I had learned in Denver, and from our UN-approachway experience, that the finest and most beneficial of plans can be quietly starved or publicly drawn and quartered unless powerful friends and the general public have rallied to its support. In the case of Washington we had backing from key elements in the capital, but I wanted to be sure of enough public support to overawe the opposition. In January, 1954, we therefore launched a promotional and sales campaign. First we informally presented our plan to select members of the Washington Board of Trade. The next day we made a formal presentation of the project to the city commissioners, city officials, and the chiefs of a string of interested agencies—the Federal Housing Administration, the Housing and Home Finance Administration, and others. On February 15 we made another series of presentations and held a banquet at the Hotel Statler for members of Congress, their wives, and various civic leaders. Enthusiastic stories about our plan and our efforts blanketed local television, radio, and the newspapers. Up till that time the Southwest's redevelopment prospects were about as cheery as those of a terminal-ward TB patient's, but these presentations were like shots of a broad-spectrum antibiotic.
Webb & Knapp and the Redevelopment Land Agency next prepared a joint Memorandum of Understanding. By this agreement Webb & Knapp, entirely at its own expense, undertook to prepare a detailed master plan for the whole of the Southwest site. The Redevelopment Land Agency wou
ld not negotiate with other developers while our plan was in preparation. Upon acceptance of the plan by the City of Washington, Webb & Knapp would have the right to negotiate for fifty percent of the land involved. Those other developers who later joined the project would conform to the master plan. Meanwhile, the Redevelopment Land Agency would do all it could to assure acceptance of our all important Tenth Street mall. The memo specified that our entering the development depended upon acceptance of the mall.
In July we made a private presentation of the plan to President Eisenhower in the White House. He gave us his official blessings. Everywhere we had met kind words and promises of private and public support. True, some members of the Planning Commission had their noses out of joint, but they kept their own counsel. Through the rest of 1954 and part of 1955 our men worked with the Redevelopment Land Agency, the Planning Commission, and a dozen other departments and agencies through a coordinating committee, to forge the actual details of the plan. I had been hopeful we could break ground for the project by 1956. Then the silent opposition surfaced under the banner of the influential and prestigious Smithsonian Institution.
The Smithsonian, situated on the north side of Independence Avenue, considered the land south of the avenue as its domain. This was where we planned to put our mall, but now the Smithsonian moved to assert its territorial imperative and cranked out preliminary plans for a massive, vaguely airplane-shaped building which would be a new air museum. By right of institutional preeminence, they planned to place this new building athwart where our mall would touch Independence Avenue. We outlanders could adapt our mall accordingly or move it elsewhere. They did not care which.
I countered that it was our fondest hope that the Smithsonian build on either side of the mall but that they should not block it. The Planning Commission, however, immediately announced that in view of this conflict the entire matter of the mall would have to be reconsidered. A Planning Commission subcommittee headed by Conrad Wirth, director of the National Park Service, was appointed to look into the matter. The subcommittee met and suggested that we drastically shorten our mall, to branch its northern end out in a giant U, to sweep around both sides of the proposed air museum at Tenth and Independence. We once more explained how important it was to have a monumental connection from the Southwest to Washington proper. The subcommittee listened politely and in February, 1955, came out with another compromise solution. We should move our mall east to Ninth Street. True, this would put the mall below the grade of the railroad tracks, but this, they said, could be solved by moving and sinking the tracks. This new proposal would create enormous new costs, for which no funds were available. It would involve new planning, which would take at least two more years. The Southwest redevelopment might be delayed or crippled, but the Smithsonian must be left undisturbed. The Planning Commission, which had been putting off approval of our plan for a full year, gave an immediate "tentative approval" to the Wirth plan. To Washington insiders it was clear we had been mousetrapped.