Our involvement in Pittsburgh followed a personal letter, in April, 1957, from B. A. Tompkins, one of my special vice-presidents, to General Richard Mellon of the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh. On June 6, 1957, Mellon stopped in at our New York office to discuss development possibilities in Pittsburgh, with special emphasis on the ninety-five-acre Lower Hill Development to be built around a new civic auditorium. On June 12 Mayor David Lawrence of Pittsburgh also stopped by for an exploratory talk. By June 19, Tompkins, my son, and I were lunching with Mellon at his Pittsburgh headquarters. Eventually, via design competition against three other developers, Webb & Knapp was on its way to the three-building, twenty-million-dollar apartment project we started there.
Webb & Knapp's actual negotiations with any one city varied greatly, but there was a general pattern to the process. First came a rough screening of possible cities. From my own knowledge of a town, from our staff's informal visits with city officials, through map studies, and through a few telephone calls to local figures, we could decide what potential a city had and how ripe it was for development.
If after preliminary talks and studies things looked promising, we might arrange for a formal visit of inspection. These formal visitations were normally five- or six-man affairs. I would usually bring Pei, my son, Slayton, Tompkins, and two or more other planners and aides with me. We would arrive in our own plane, where we could get some work done during the journey; with a photographic map of a city in hand, we'd circle over the town, as we had done in Montreal. Once on the ground, we might be met by the mayor or members of his office, plus the local press. Climbing into waiting limousines, we would take a motorcycle-led trip to City Hall and then to the development area. On our first visit to Cincinnati, Mayor Taft also took me on a forty-minute helicopter tour of the town. In Cleveland, Mayor Celebrezze took all of us on a boat tour of his lakefront and river city, but an auto and foot tour was the principal part of this see-the-city ritual. These were working trips. I would ask questions: "Who owns that property?" "What volume do your department stores do here?" "What are your bankers doing to help?" "Who can you count on for backing?"
I would also make comments to the city officials: "You'll need a bigger area than this." "That factory there could move and do better on the edge of town." "I can envision a great mall and shopping center tying in to the center here."
And to Pei: "That street will have to be blocked." "Keep everything at an elevation, and the hotel and office tower can use the plaza."
These on-site tours were followed by a luncheon or dinner conference with local political and business figures. We would give an analysis of what the city could and should be doing in redevelopment. The city newspapers gave a great play to the whole performance. This general publicity was part of what the visits were all about. Then, the stage being set for phase two of the operation, we would leave.
During phase two we would seek to develop a Memorandum of Understanding (à la Washington), giving us certain rights and privileges in part of the development. In return, at no cost to the city, we would prepare a detailed master plan for the total area. This master plan was the key to the whole process. To create a plan we would (as in Montreal and Washington) send in teams of planners, engineers, and architects. They would analyze the total city. Next would come site planning and preliminary building designs, and finally we would build a three-dimensional model. All this work, plus the ultimate gilding of the lily with the model, might take six months to a year; it might cost $60,000 or $250,000 or more, but it was utterly necessary. And the model, in phase three of the process, became our most potent selling tool.
An amazing number of people have tremendous difficulty in reading a map or in visualizing structures—even from etchings. With our models, we could bring planners, businessmen, and laymen into a room and give them a three-dimensional sense of an actual development-to-be. We had our own model-building company, which worked for us full time, and these "toys" helped us win quite a few design contests. For instance, our Pittsburgh venture, the combination of high-rise apartment buildings and townhouses that we built in Chicago's Hyde Park, and the Society Hill development (three high-rise towers plus townhouses) that we put up in Philadelphia were all won in design competitions.
Webb & Knapp had by now evolved a pragmatic and consistent redevelopment philosophy, which our designs usually illustrated. For example, we had early determined that any urban renewal program must meet a number of criteria. One is that a project must reach a certain critical mass in order to generate a self-sustaining reaction. Second, the components of this mass must be properly balanced. For instance, it is usually a mistake to build only housing or only commercial projects in a given area. In any event, and this is the third and closely related element, the development must be properly connected to the city of which it is a part. City planners often concentrate projects in the very worst part of a city core but do not touch adjacent areas that are still more or less viable. In other words, they conceive of their projects as planners' ghettos or oases, with no real connection to the economic forces in a city. This is a grievous and substantial error. If it is to serve, a development must add to the existing or potential flow of business and people through an area. If this means expropriating and acquiring some nondeteriorated properties as a form of bridge between areas, so much the better for the best long-term results.
As it turned out, one of our functions in city after city was that of pointing out such planning gaps. Take the St. Louis Mill Creek project, an enormous rectangle of land to the west of the city's center and the river. The planning of this development was almost completely topsy-turvy. Commercial and residential areas were being so placed that they would almost automatically block, rather than augment, the actual and potential flow of people and commerce in that city. Usually we pointed out such planning flaws through countersuggestions or by stipulating certain minimum conditions under which we would tackle a project. In Hartford and in Cincinnati, as previously in Washington, D.C., we prodded local authorities into expanding projects in order to take full advantage of their potential. Often it was the planning rationale we provided, plus the publicity focused on it, that stimulated the public backing needed to carry forward these plans. Thus, in the course of our free-hand planning seminars and flying trips around the country, we became the construction-minded American mayor's friend, exemplar, and favorite lure. This last was because, whether or not we finally won the prize, we generated many kinds of activity. Word of our interest in a city project in time brought all manner of local as well as outside interests around to bid with or against us on a development. Like a gentleman caller with six younger brothers, we were sought after, not only for ourselves, but for those who tagged along behind us.
I am as fascinated by cities, how they grow and where they go, as by the men who make them go. It is the men, of course, who count for most; what they are, their city is. As a result, there were some cities where, for quite different reasons, we could never seriously consider working. In Dallas and Houston, for instance, local business groups were so confident in the future of their communities, so well heeled, and so eager to invest locally, that they felt they did not need and certainly did not want any outside help. The City of New Orleans similarly frowned on our approach, but since this was a town that desperately needed redevelopment, what we had here was a horse of another color.
New Orleans has by the grace of God inherited more natural advantages than any other city on the continent. It lies at the base of a great waterway that runs like a spine through the nation. It has water, inexhaustible quantities of water, for all possible uses. It has a great harbor; natural resources in the form of gas, oil, and sulfur; amazingly fertile soil; and plentiful labor. And yet, in the 1950's it was obviously one of these sad cities where an informal alliance between a moneyed clique and a venal political machine had kept the town in a comfortable-for-its-rulers state. The economic and behind-the-scenes control of New Orleans was for the most part in the hand
s of old-time, pre-Civil War landowners and families of entrenched capital, a great many living away from New Orleans as semiexpatriates. The major preoccupation of those establishment members in town seemed to be that of living from year to year for the next Mardi Gras. What success and prosperity came to New Orleans came not from the efforts of its elite but from the bountiful accident of geography and strategic location. The closely held power of the establishment has loosened of late. New leaders have come forth to challenge the once unassailable powerhouse headed by the Whitney Bank. For instance, Louis Russo, a Cajun who fought his way up from poverty to prominence in banking and in oil, is now a leader in that town. He and others have joined hands to get things moving and have forced the old guard reluctantly to follow suit. But as recently as five or six years ago, if you had taken a picture of New Orleans and compared it with one taken forty years previously, you would have been hard put to find many differences. And, in the mid- and late 1950's, word to the members of the town's principal social bastion, the Boston Club, that a Zeckendorf was approaching their city would automatically see them raising the drawbridge, standing to arms against the infidel. We were unable to buy property in meaningful continuous lots, and as for Title I projects, we might as well have been preaching racial integration.
Whenever I think of American cities, I always find myself comparing New Orleans, which had everything handed to it, and Houston, which made itself what it is. New Orleans had a one-hundred-year head start over most U.S. cities. Seventy years ago, Houston could not have been more than an overgrown village. True, Houston found oil, but so did New Orleans. It was the dynamic leaders in Houston who made their town the true top city on the Gulf Coast. And they weren't even on the coast, they were many miles inland in the hot flatlands. What Houston did was cut a canal to the Gulf to become a seaport. Then they built a chemical center and, later, a space-age technological center. Houston has now safely bypassed Galveston and undercut Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange, Texas, which once might also have been rivals. And farther down the gulf, New Orleans, for all its free gifts of nature, will not catch up to Houston in our lifetimes.
In contrast to towns such as New Orleans, Pittsburgh, where a new Democratic mayor, David Lawrence, formed an alliance with all those deep-dyed Republicans to make a better town, is a grand example of a creative response to challenge. What's more, Pittsburgh's major companies have resisted the enormous centripetal pull of New York, and built new headquarters in Pittsburgh. Chicago, in spite of great troubles, has also kept its dynamism. Atlanta is another city where an enlightened and forceful local citizenry took responsibility for their own town. Robert Woodward of Coca-Cola and a great many other men were involved there.
Taken together, our successful projects and our aborted nonprojects prove that a prime requisite for a successful program is a mayor strong enough to control the local demagogues and predators who inevitably rise up to attack or to fatten off a great development. It is not enough, however, that a mayor be politically powerful; he also has to have strong backing from the truly important business leaders of his town. And this leadership group must be sufficiently sophisticated so they do not insist that what is best for their city can only be homegrown.
In cities where the mayor did not have the will or the muscle to protect our flanks, even though we might have backing from certain local interests, our projects succumbed to factional politics. In Boston, for instance, where we proposed an excellent plan for revival of the area around South Station, we found ourselves getting absolutely nowhere in that political Congo. Again, in Cleveland, our ally, Mayor Celebrezze, was so deeply embroiled in feuds with elements of the City Council that he was severely handicapped in getting the proper business backing and, in the end, was also unable to get the public's agreement to taxes needed for city improvements. Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, though it was the publicity and the prospect of our participation in the program that did much to make a construction bond issue acceptable to the voters, we, over the course of several years, were in effect eased out by the interests of local developers.
Title I projects take time, and during this time some quite powerful local forces can develop to challenge the newcomer who, when first on the scene, meets no real competition or resistance to his plans. In the case of Hartford, for example, we generated an economically and aesthetically well-balanced plan for a shopping-mall, high-rise office, hotel, and apartment complex to reknit the town's raveled core. Our project, however, with its plans for new stores, disturbed the sleep of the Aurbach family, who owned Fox's, Hartford's main department store. A man named Putnam, whose hopes for Hartford were even greater than his years, gave us the prestige of his backing. As long as he was alive, so was our plan, but when he died the Aurbach and other interests were able to block our development effectively. Webb & Knapp dropped the project.
We were quite hopeful for our St. Louis proposal and fully expected to get the job. However, another out-of-town developer, James Scheuer, from Area B in Washington, also came to St. Louis. He developed various local contacts, made a proposal, and, to our chagrin, also made off with the prize. As it turned out, Scheuer was not able to follow through in St. Louis. Webb & Knapp, I should note, did have a way of somehow or other seeing through those projects it started, and every one of our projects wound up making money for its eventual owners.
Some years after this surprise flanking maneuver and rejection on the Mississippi, I was invited out to St. Louis. I was asked if I had any advice for this stalled city. When I flew in, St. Louis looked as if it had been bombed. Aside from the great open cut of acreage around Mill Creek, the center was scarred with half-block- and block-sized parking lots using the space formerly occupied by buildings. Touring the town by car, I found that the slums razed to clear the Mill Creek area had merely spread to other parts of town. There had been some redevelopment near the river, but when you see federally subsidized housing for retired people in what was originally intended to be a luxury area, you know a city's redevelopment program is dying. St. Louis in the late 1960's was a monument to a 1950's political regime that had no vision and to a complacent business elite who would not act forcefully or generously to save their city. For all its brave talk and hopeful bicentennial plans for 1967, I was looking at a sad, dry husk of a city surrounded by a politically insulated and presently healthy, but soon to be contaminated, ring of independent townships.
There was and is one major exception to my generalizations about American cities. This exception was New York City. Though New York might lack a constitutionally or politically powerful mayor, or a cohesive business elite, it had Bob Moses. Moses, all by himself, is worth two dozen blue-ribbon citizens' commissions and is personally responsible for more urban redevelopment than any other man in the world. Between 1949 and 1960 he lined up a grand total of thirty-nine Title I projects and five billion dollars of construction for his city. While other towns, often under Webb & Knapp prodding, were still trying to decide what, if anything, they could do with Title I, Moses had buildings coming out of the ground and tenants moving into them. He cleared land for cooperative housing projects, for privately sponsored conventionally financed projects, and for FHA-backed developments. As head of his own superagency, the New York Slum Clearance Committee, he was Mr. Redevelopment. Admittedly, as Mr. Redevelopment, Moses made new enemies and eventually worked himself into trouble. A growing citizens' clamor about his bulldozer tactics, the low aesthetic or "human" quality of many projects, the very high rents in some developments, and various alleged as well as actual scandals among some of the sponsors of various projects eventually created so much political heat that Moses stepped down from this office. Moses, however, did that which he set out to do: he put up housing, and we helped him to do it in three key developments—Park West Village, Kips Bay, and Lincoln Towers.
An important element of Moses' phenomenal speed-up of the time-devouring Title I process was his method of allocating and clearing land. Most cities did their own relo
cation of tenants and clearing of land before turning it over to the designated sponsor. In New York, however, after a sponsor had signed for his land, he had to do his own moving, relocating of tenants, and clearing of the land. Moreover, when a sponsor took over an existing slum for redevelopment, he took over as a taxpayer and paid taxes throughout the clearance process. In this way the city never lost any of its desperately needed income, and the taxpayer-sponsor, once he had cleared his land, had an extra incentive to keep moving, to put up his new buildings and receive income with which to pay taxes.
However, with so many conventional investors already wary of Title I, the prospect of their having to do their own evicting proved a powerful deterrent. The last thing in the world that Metropolitan Life, for instance, would want to see would be a series of newspaper and magazine stories on their putting poor old people, women, and children out of their homes, however miserable these homes. There were a number of investors, however, who spotted a special sweetener in this "New York System." As "temporary" landlords, since they need do little or no maintenance on buildings slated for demolition, they would have very few expenses. As landlords, however, they would for a time receive rents which in aggregate were impressive. Considering the knockdown prices at which they would be acquiring the condemned but occupied buildings, the short-term return on their actual cash investment would be fabulous. However, because of the usual delays in Title I projects, owners would often have to stretch out the relocation and clearance process. If, in the meantime, they kept collecting rents, and if they could funnel off this income to salaries and other "special costs," the sponsors and their friends could wind up quite a few dollars ahead.
A number of men-about-politics-and-business, who were as interested in the short-term, slum-landlord aspects of redevelopment as in the long-term rebuilding effort, joined together to sponsor various developments. But some coincidence, a number of these particular projects began to fall seriously behind schedule. A 1954 congressional investigation brought forth evidence that, though their projects were stalled, some sponsors and their business associates were doing rather well financially from their slum properties. A full-blown newspaper scandal that lasted intermittently for three years was under way. The two most notorious projects were Manhattantown Project, a six-block section of tenements just west of Central Park and north of Ninety-sixth Street, and NYU-Bellevue, between First and Second Avenues on the Lower East Side. By 1957 the questionable Manhattantown Project had been taken over by the city for nonpayment of taxes and NYU-Bellevue was similarly about to go under. At the invitation of Robert Moses, we took over both these stalled projects by buying up majority control from the original sponsors and paying the back taxes. At this time we also arranged to be the sponsors of the Lincoln Towers Apartment project. Overnight, Webb & Knapp became the major redeveloper in New York.
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