Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  Riverside Church, one block to the west, was also completed in 1930, the bottomless Rockefeller money seeing the project through the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Depression. The church seemed to fly up, especially when contrasted with the painstaking, barely discernible stone-by-stone progress at St. John the Divine seven blocks to the south. At 392 feet, Riverside Church remains the tallest church in America.

  MILE 9

  122ND STREET TO 143RD STREET

  CHAPTER 34

  “HONEST TO GOODNESS SLUM LAND”

  ON OCTOBER 28, 1935, CHARLES-ÉDOUARD JEANNERET-GRIS, a forty-seven-year-old Swiss-born architect who called himself Le Corbusier, his mother’s maiden name, lectured at Columbia’s architecture school. It was his first visit to New York and his first stop on a planned national lecture tour. Whisked around the city, he turned up his nose at much of what he saw, famously proclaiming the new Empire State Building “too small.” At Columbia, Le Corbusier spoke from a few sparse notes scrawled on index cards and drew feverish sketches of bridges, museums, and skyscrapers on long sheets of paper. Returning to Columbia on November 19 for another lecture, he arrived late, entering the auditorium in Havemeyer Hall casually munching on French bread, before enthralling his audience with “swift and nervous” drawings of towers marching across a park-like landscape.

  Ten years earlier Le Corbusier had proposed demolishing the center of Paris and replacing it with a phalanx of cruciform towers set amid a grid of parks and highways. In L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, a short film about his work produced in 1930 and shown during his 1935 American tour, Le Corbusier is seen on screen drawing a portentous black line across Paris and then blacking out the center of the city with a crayon. New York, Le Corbusier told his audience at Columbia, was the perfect laboratory for what he called la Ville Radieuse—the Radiant City. When Le Corbusier closed his eyes and imagined it, he saw a happy place.

  THREE MONTHS BEFORE Le Corbusier appeared at Columbia, a woman sitting on a bench in Morningside Park was stabbed to death. Students were warned away from the park, but the blocks surrounding campus, where muggings and assaults had become commonplace, were dangerous enough. The fabled Acropolis, it seemed, was rapidly sliding toward desolation. Even its newer architecture faced withering criticism: “Columbia has lost conviction,” Lewis Mumford wrote in 1938, “so that her latest buildings are neither studied Renaissance nor clear-cut expressions based upon modern engineering.”

  By the end of World War II much of Morningside Heights had devolved into a streetscape of rundown single-room-occupancy “hotels.” As blacks, Puerto Ricans, and returning veterans in need of affordable housing began moving into the neighborhood, landlords, rather than renting entire six-to-twelve room Subway Boom–era apartments, cut them up and rented them by the room.

  In 1947, Columbia, Barnard, Teachers College, St. Luke’s, International House, Corpus Christi Church, Jewish Theological Seminary, Juilliard, Riverside Church, Union Theological Seminary, and St. John the Divine, alarmed at the changing demographics and deterioration of the area’s housing, banded into a consortium called Morningside Heights, Inc. David Rockefeller, son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and brother of future New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, served as president and city planner Lawrence M. Orton as executive director. Board members included Dwight D. Eisenhower, then president of Columbia, Barnard president Millicent C. McIntosh, Riverside Church pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick, and architect Wallace K. Harrison.

  Orton blamed the neighborhood’s decay on high density, poor maintenance, and “obsolete design.” In October of 1948, Morningside Heights, Inc.’s Executive Committee, having analyzed data on housing and schools in the area, concluded that “nothing short of substantial rebuilding along the northern and southern border of Morningside Heights would assure the maintenance of a community in keeping with the interests of the local institutions.” Rockefeller aggressively lobbied Robert Moses, chairman of the mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance Plans—Moses wore many hats: He was simultaneously the city’s parks commissioner and construction coordinator, as well as chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority—to help Morningside Heights, Inc., build housing for the faculty, employees, and graduate students of its member institutions.

  Moses informed Rockefeller that he would support Morningside Heights, Inc., only if they built new housing on “honest to goodness slum land.” That’s when Morningside Heights, Inc., set its sights on Manhattanville.

  MANHATTANVILLE, THE NEIGHBORHOOD directly north of Morningside Heights, is situated in a valley that runs in an easterly direction from the Hudson River to Harlem. The valley is a geological fault line, one of two faults underlying Manhattan (the second crosses under Broadway farther to the north, along Dyckman Street in Inwood). In Dutch times the valley was called Moertje David’s Fly; in Revolutionary War days it was called the Hollow Way.

  Manhattanville was founded around 1806 by drug merchants Jacob Schieffelin, his brother-in-law and business partner John B. Lawrence, and Thomas Buckley, a neighbor, and quickly grew into a bucolic village of tidy, working-class dwellings clustered around St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, which was consecrated in 1826 on land donated by Schieffelin. Manhattan Avenue, present-day 125th Street, was the village’s main street, a broad path connecting Harlem Cove, an inlet on the Hudson River, with the village of Harlem to the east.

  In the 1830s the D. F. Tiemann & Company Paint and Color Works—owner Daniel F. Tiemann, whose father had founded the factory, served a term as New York’s mayor from 1858 to 1860—relocated from 23rd Street to Manhattanville and built a sprawling complex of buildings on the south side of Manhattan Avenue just west of the Bloomingdale Road. In 1851, Manhattanville became the Hudson River Railroad’s first station north of New York, and the population exploded. Irish and German immigrants seeking work in Manhattanville’s factories and mills moved in and the village grew into a factory town, although as late as the 1890s vacant lots were still plentiful.

  In 1860, Manhattanville was still a bucolic village along the Bloomingdale Road.

  The Subway Boom of 1900–1904 brought new tenements and apartment buildings and more people, and by 1909 the neighborhood’s black population had doubled. By World War II the neighborhood was a dense urban landscape of tenements, breweries, garages, coal yards, and milk-pasteurizing-and-bottling facilities. Manhattanville wasn’t very pretty, but it was hardly the slum that Morningside Heights, Inc., imagined. Morningside Heights, Inc.’s own survey of Manhattanville residents, undertaken in 1950 and funded by Rockefeller, revealed that over half of respondents weren’t dissatisfied with their housing situation in the least and that there was “no exceptional incidence of [over]crowding” in the neighborhood.

  THE LINK BETWEEN Morningside Heights and Manhattanville is Broadway, which, beginning at 122nd Street, descends into the valley while the subway continues in a straight line across a steel viaduct, the tracks disappearing into a tunnel again on the far side of the valley at 135th Street. Morningside Heights, Inc., homed in on two square blocks just north of the Jewish Theological Seminary, on the east side of Broadway between 123rd and La Salle streets, as the possible site for a middle-income housing project catering to the employees of its member institutions.

  The site consisted of 71 buildings on about 10 acres. Sixty-four of the buildings were five-story “old law” tenements that predated the city’s housing act of 1901. But there were newer buildings, too, including the seven-story Columbia Hotel at the corner of Broadway and 124th Street, which had a well-regarded Japanese restaurant, Chidori, on the ground floor. The two blocks were densely populated and down at the heels, but not necessarily beyond redemption. But Morningside Heights, Inc., anxious for the support of the Housing Authority and Moses, was more than ready to tear it all down.

  Morningside Heights, Inc., formed its own real-estate arm, Remedco, and on October 1, 1951, Morningside Heights, Inc., and Moses’s Committee on Slum Clearance Plans announced that the Ma
nhattanville site would be demolished and a Title I middle-income cooperative housing project, called Morningside Gardens and sponsored by Morningside Heights, Inc., would rise in its place.

  The announcement prompted an immediate outcry from Save Our Homes, a committee of residents formed to protest the forced displacement of residents from the Morningside Gardens footprint. In response, Bernard Weinberg of Morningside Heights, Inc., characterized the members of Save Our Homes as “hysterical.”

  “[The] aim of the redevelopment of the community is to decongest the area,” he said. “Naturally, some people will be hurt, but it is for the good of the community.”

  Save Our Homes also agitated for low-income housing for the neighborhood, and on November 12 the city announced plans to build a federally funded low-income housing project, called the General Ulysses S. Grant Houses, on a huge site extending from Broadway across Amsterdam Avenue to Morningside Avenue, just to the north of Morningside Gardens. To assuage Save Our Homes and other critics, Morningside Heights, Inc., promised that every displaced resident would get first preference for apartments in Morningside Gardens. Second preference would go to the employees and members of its nine sponsoring institutions, and those who couldn’t afford Morningside Gardens would have places in the Grant Houses.

  The city’s Board of Estimate voted to approve Morningside Gardens on January 15, 1953, contingent on construction of the adjacent Grant Houses. That summer the Morningside Heights Housing Corporation, which consisted of nine of Morningside Heights, Inc.’s fourteen institutions, with Barnard president Millicent C. McIntosh acting as Chairman of the Board, purchased the Morningside Gardens site—10 acres in total—from the city for the “upset price” of $1,302,046.

  ON JANUARY 11, 1954, in the midst of a driving blizzard, a “demolition ceremony” was held on the Morningside Gardens site. Rockefeller, McIntosh, Fosdick, Fr. George B. Ford of Corpus Christi Church, and Bernard Segal of the Jewish Theological Seminary were among the speakers. At the time the Morningside Heights Housing Corporation acquired the property there were 1,317 families and 68 commercial tenants on the site. A mass exodus was already underway when the bulldozers and dump trucks moved in. By the spring of 1955 only 305 families and 9 commercial tenants remained, and 42 buildings had been completely emptied and turned over to the demolition crews.

  “After one or two futile attempts . . . the opposition disintegrated,” Elizabeth R. Hepner crowed in a promotional booklet published in 1955 by Morningside Heights, Inc.

  That summer Gertrude Samuels wrote a feature article about Morningside Gardens in the New York Times Magazine. Samuels rejoiced as Manhattanville’s “antiquated rat traps” were “wiped off the map,” while dismissing Save Our Homes as an “extreme left-wing group.” But Samuels also took note of a despairing public school principal, Anne Ruddy, whose school, P. S. 125 on 123rd Street, already overcrowded and underfunded, was about to be overrun by the children of Morningside Gardens’ and the Grant Houses’ new residents. Referring to the institutions of Morningside Heights, Inc., Ruddy said, “The people on the hill still have a long way to go to be sold on their responsibilities to the community and to the schools.”

  CHAPTER 35

  MURDERVILLE

  GROUND WAS BROKEN ON THE GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT Houses on July 14, 1954; demolition of the site’s existing buildings, and relocation of its residents, had begun the previous summer. The project, designed by the architects Eggers & Higgins, consisted of 1,940 units in eight 20-story towers and one 14-story tower situated on 15 acres of land. The towers, unadorned red brick with swatches of beige set between small windows, were placed like chess pieces amid a vast greensward of playgrounds and lawns that erased sections of Moylan Place, Tiemann Place, La Salle Street, and 124th Street.

  The following year, on September 16, 1955, amid mountains of rubble, Morningside Gardens broke ground on the south side of LaSalle Street. Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Robert Moses, David Rockefeller, and Millicent C. McIntosh all gave speeches. Seventy-five percent of the site’s buildings had been demolished at that point, while five of the new towers had been completed up to the fourteenth floor.

  The firm of Harrison & Abramovitz—that was Wallace Harrison, one-time Morningside Heights, Inc., board member—designed the project, which consisted of 980 units in half a dozen twenty-story towers arranged around a central garden. Like the Grant Houses, the towers of Morningside Gardens were reductively Modern, brick and rectangular, with little detail except for balconies cantilevered from the façades.

  The Morningside Gardens and General Ulysses S. Grant Houses projects, 1958.

  As construction continued on the Grant Houses and Morningside Gardens, another gargantuan housing project got underway two blocks to the north, on an L-shaped, 12-acre site on the east side of Broadway between 129th and 133rd streets.

  Financed by New York State and originally intended for middle-income residents, the Manhattanville Houses ended up, like the Grant Houses, as a low-income project. The architect was William Lescaze, a Swiss-born, pipe-smoking Modernist at the forefront of a generation of European and American architects who, having cut their teeth on the English “Garden City” movement of social theorists Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes, embraced a “towers-in-the-park” aesthetic that inflated scale and ignored existing street patterns in the name of “efficiency.” The Manhattanville Houses was Le Corbusier’s la Ville Radieuse imported to New York.

  The project consisted of six twenty-story towers with a total of 1,272 units. Each tower had three sectors fanning out from a central elevator-and-stair core, a pinwheel arrangement that made the towers resemble the invading Martian tripods in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. Lescaze was a master stylist—his previous projects had included the streamlined Philadelphia Savings Fund Society skyscraper and the jazzy, ocean liner–like CBS Columbia Studios in Los Angeles—but, confined by the Housing Authority’s budget and design restrictions, in the end all Lescaze could do to distinguish the Manhattanville Houses from every other public housing project in the country was to specify blue-glazed brick for the service cores and red-metal panels for the balconies. The towers had nothing to do with the older blocks around them, and not even much to do with one another. And all of them ignored Broadway.

  BROADWAY’S COMMERCIAL, cultural, and social vitality came from its buildings—its department stores, shops, theaters, hotels, meeting halls, offices, and barrooms—crowding right up to the sidewalk. Land was expensive on Broadway, and only in a few instances—New York Hospital, City Hall, Peter Goelet’s mansion just north of Union Square—had buildings been set back from the street. Both the east and west sides of Broadway had developed into almost unbroken walls of buildings, and the rare open spaces—City Hall Park and Union, Madison, Herald, and Times squares—were welcome aberrations from the pattern. The stretch of Broadway in Manhattanville wasn’t exactly picturesque, but it didn’t help matters that Morningside Gardens and the Grant and Manhattanville houses turned the east side of Broadway into a nebulous, undefined smear of garbage-strewn grass.

  The elusive energy of neighborhoods that Jane Jacobs, in her groundbreaking 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, called “buoyancy” was largely absent from Manhattanville’s three new projects, and much of what was missing was due to the architects’ casual approach to the life of the street. A few concessions here and there—the Housing Authority added a supermarket at the corner of Broadway and 125th Street and preserved an existing branch library on 125th Street, while Harrison & Abramovitz provided storefronts along the Amsterdam Avenue edge of Morningside Gardens—couldn’t make up for a general lack of interest on the part of the projects’ designers for the complexities of what Jacobs called our “complicated and ornery society.” Harrison & Abramovitz’s acknowledgment that Broadway defined the western edge of Morningside Gardens was to build a windowless, brick parking garage along its entire length between 123rd and LaSalle streets—hardly a celebration of America�
�s most famous street.

  MORNINGSIDE GARDENS’ first tenants moved in on June 24, 1957. One-third of them came from the staffs of Columbia, Barnard, St. John the Divine, and the other sponsoring institutions of Morningside Heights, Inc. Seventy-five percent of Morningside Gardens’ first residents were white, 20 percent black, 4 percent Asian, and 1 percent Puerto Rican—racial demographics that, at the time, were considered ideal. Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel of the NAACP, was among the project’s first residents, and over the next decade, as the cash-strapped Housing Authority struggled to build more projects, Morningside Gardens was held up as an aspirational model. In 1982, twenty-five years after it opened, the buildings and grounds of Morningside Gardens were still well maintained. Its demographics hadn’t changed much—by then, 60 to 65 percent were white and 30 percent black—and residents felt generally safe and content.

  The Grant and Manhattanville houses didn’t fare so well. The Grant Houses opened on August 20, 1956, its first five families—two white, two black, and one Puerto Rican—welcomed with speeches, cookies and punch, and dancing. As night fell, the Housing Authority spelled out hello by turning on lights in the windows of one of the towers. Considering all that was to befall the Grant and Manhattanville houses in the coming decades, that final “O” might as well have been left off.

  Well-intentioned people had conceived the Grant and Manhattanville projects as bulwarks against urban decay, poverty, disease, overcrowding, and “juvenile delinquency.” But the 1950s image of youths ditching school and battling over turf in vacant lots, Jets-and-Sharks-style, would come to seem quaint compared to the horrors that visited the Grant and Manhattanville projects beginning in the early 1960s.