Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

    84. In a helpful analysis of the multiple Rotival plans, Rico Cedro argues that Rotival’s proposals for New Haven were inspired by Le Corbusier and Manhattan, the epitome for Europeans of the modern city in the 1920s; Rico Cedro, Modern Visions: Twentieth Century Design in New Haven (New Haven, CT: New Haven City Arts Gallery, 1988), 255. Many of Rotival’s plans were rendered in aerial perspective. On Rotival’s career, see Carola Hein, “Maurice Rotival: French Planning on a World-Scale (Part I), Planning Perspectives 17 (2002): 247–65; and Hein, “Maurice Rotival: French Planning on a World Scale (Part II),” Planning Perspectives 17 (2002): 325–44.

    85. “New Haven: Test for Downtown Renewal,” AF 109, no. 1 (July 1958): 80.

    86. Maynard G. Meyer and Maurice E. H. Rotival, Master Plan, Report to the City Plan Commission (New Haven, CT: New Haven City Plan Commission, 1941); New Haven City Plan Commission, Tomorrow Is Here, 1944; Lloyd B. Reid and Maurice E. H. Rotival, Short Approach Master Plan with Particular Reference to Highway Design and Urban Redevelopment (New Haven, CT: New Haven City Plan Commission, 1953); “Map of New Haven, Including Redevelopment and Renewal Boundaries,” New Haven Redevelopment Agency Records, YMA, Box 319, in Francesca Ammon, “‘Town Living in the Modern Manner’: A History of the Postwar Redevelopment of Downtown High-Rises in New Haven, CT” (seminar paper, Yale University, 2006), 43, in possession of the author.

    87. Logue, “Can Cities Survive Automobile Age?,” 176, also passim; on road mileage, Kenneth A. Simon, “Suburbia: The Good Life in Connecticut?,” http://www.simonpure.com/suburbia_print.html, 4.

    88. Leeney, Elms, Arms, and Ivy, 58.

    89. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 365–68.

    90. Quote in “Richard C. Lee, 86, Mayor Who Revitalized New Haven,” NYT, February 4, 2003.

    91. Promotional brochure, “The Distinguished Apartment Residence in New Haven: University Towers, 100 York Street,” RCL, Box 29, Folder 29, in Ammon, “‘Town Living in the Modern Manner,’” 17 for quote; 28, 31–33, 48–50 on parking.

    92. JJ Papers, Boxes 2, 3, 11, 12 on the Dixwell Project; John M. Johansen, John M. Johansen: A Life in the Continuum of Modern Architecture (Milan: L’Arca Edizioni, 1995), 38; Brown, New Haven, 173, 176; John Johansen, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, November 13, 2010, Wellfleet, MA; Don Metz and Yuji Noga, New Architecture in New Haven (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 18–19; Sherman Hasbrouck, “Transformation: A Summary of New Haven’s Development Program” (M.A. thesis, Yale University, 1965), 55, which notes that utilities were placed underground, common in suburban developments.

    93. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

    94. Harry Barnett, interview by Robert Dahl, August 13, 1957, New Haven, CT, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Interviews A–H,” 1.

    95. On the condition of New Haven retail and competition from suburban stores, see retail trade statistics and details about Hamden Plaza in Jeff Hardwick, “A Downtown Utopia? Suburbanization, Urban Renewal and Consumption in New Haven,” Planning History Studies 10, nos. 1–2 (1996): 43–44; Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 298–99, 342; and Dahl, Who Governs?, 139. For the breakdown of changes in sales by category of merchandise, see the chart (based on the U.S. Census of Business) in Daniel W. Kops to Mayor Richard C. Lee, May 23, 1957, EJL, Series 5, Box 71, Folder 595. For New Haven’s small share of the area’s growth in retail sales, see “CBD Data from Census Report,” EJL, Series 5, Box 71, Folder 595. Clearly, Logue’s office undertook extensive analysis of New Haven’s retail position. Also, “2 New Haven Stores Battle to Boost Downtown Role,” WWD, December 6, 1961; Samuel Feinberg, “From Where I Sit,” WWD, November 8, 1963.

    96. For the Harris survey of 1956, see Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 299; Logue to Richard C. Lee, memorandum RE: Louis Harris Survey, November 21, 1956; Lee Comments, December 7, 1956; and “A Proposed Study of What the People of New Haven Think of Their Downtown Shopping Facilities” with sample questionnaire, all in EJL, Series 5, Box 57, Folder 395.

    97. On vacant stores and the CBD tax burden, see Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 298–99; “Malley’s, the New Haven Central Business District, and the South Central Renewal Project,” May 23, 1957, EJL, Series 5, Box 72, Folder 608, 2.

    98. “Malley’s, the New Haven Central Business District, and the South Central Renewal Project,” EJL, 2; Nick Wood to Logue, memorandum, February 26, 1958, EJL, in Hardwick, “Downtown Utopia?,” 47. On the effort to lure women shoppers, see City of New Haven, New Haven: New England’s Newest City—Pulling Power, Buying Power, Growing Power (New Haven, CT: City of New Haven, 1960), n.p., RCL, Box 60, Folder 1183. See Alison Isenberg on the effort to lure female shoppers in Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 175–87.

    99. Macy’s quote in “Paul Rudolph Designs a Place to Park in Downtown New Haven,” AR 133, no. 2 (February 1963): 148; Macy’s Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended August 1, 1964, 26; “Downtown Goes Up in Macy Estimation for New Stores,” WWD, November 13, 1964; Richard Longstreth, The American Department Store Transformed, 1920–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with the Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2010), 232. On Macy’s strategy, see WWD: “Macy Deals for Unit in New Haven,” September 18, 1962; “New Macy’s in New Haven: Big Store, Big Competition,” December 20, 1962; Samuel Feinberg, “From Where I Sit: No Sacred Precincts for Any Retailers,” November 8, 1963; Samuel Feinberg, “From Where I Sit: What’s in Macy’s Star over New England?,” November 13, 1963; and “Government Aid Stressed to Redevelop Downtown,” May 27, 1964.

  Logue’s papers contain a marked-up article discussing the desire of downtown merchants to help shoppers bring cars downtown: Mabel Walker, “The Impact of Outlying Shopping Centers on Central Business Districts,” Public Management 39, no. 8 (August 1957): 170–74.

  100. Daniel W. Kops to Richard C. Lee, May 23, 1957, EJL, Series 5, Box 71, Folder 595; Louis Harris and Associates, “A Survey of the Race for Mayor of New Haven,” February 1959, EJL, Series 4, Box 26, Folder 59, 27. Norris Andrews, head of the New Haven Planning Department, pointed out that downtown also faced serious competition from the new-style, freestanding professional building; Norris C. Andrews to Logue, memorandum, April 28, 1959, Rotival, Box 38, Folder “#1,” 2.

  101. Alexander Garvin, The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 154–55.

  102. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 169, 302, 306–7. On Brasilia, James Holston, “The Modernist City and the Death of the Street,” in Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader, ed. Setha Low (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 245–75; Jonathan Barnett, “The Modern City,” in The Elusive City: Five Centuries of Design, Ambition and Miscalculation (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 107–56.

  103. Milton Cameron, “Albert Einstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and the Future of the American City,” Institute Letter (Spring 2014): 8–9.

  104. Dolores Hayden, “‘I Have Seen the Future: Selling the Unsustainable City in 1939,’” Presidential Address to the Urban History Association, October 2010; Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo, eds., Designing Tomorrow: America’s World Fairs of the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Folke T. Kihlstedt, “Utopia Realized: The World’s Fairs of the 1930s,” in Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future, ed. Joseph J. Corn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 97–118; Stanley Appelbaum, The New York World’s Fair 1939/1940 in 155 Photographs by Richard Wurts and Others (New York: Dover Publications, 1977).

  There is a large literature on the impact of automobiles and highway building on U.S. cities. See, for example, Clay McSh
ane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), and Owen Gutfreund, 20th Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  105. Edward Malley Co. brochure, November 21, 1962, Malley’s Clipping File at New Haven Free Library, in Hardwick, “Downtown Utopia?,” 49.

  106. New Haven Plan Commission, Tomorrow Is Here, n.p.

  107. Seon Pierre Bonan to Richard C. Lee, March 15, 1960, RCL, Box 38, Folder 809; Edward J. Logue to Seon Pierre Bonan, March 22, 1960, RCL, Box 38, Folder 809; both in Ammon, “‘Town Living in the Modern Manner,’” 20; also Ray Wolfinger, memorandum, November 2, 1958, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Special Interviews,” 9–10.

  108. New Haven Redevelopment Agency, Redevelopment and Renewal Plan for the Wooster Square Project Area (New Haven, CT: 1958; revised 1965); Leeney, Elms, Arms, and Ivy, 67.

  109. Film footage of downtown market taken by Ted Gesling, from RCL, 1985 March Accession. Also see Gregory Donofrio, “Attacking Distribution: Obsolescence and Efficiency of Food Markets in the Age of Urban Renewal,” JPH 13, no. 2 (May 2014): 136–59.

  110. Logue, “Urban Ruin—or Urban Renewal,” 28; Rachel D. Carley, “Tomorrow Is Here: New Haven and the Modern Movement,” report prepared for the New Haven Preservation Trust, June 2008, 34–40.

  111. Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale,” 294–95.

  112. Robert Stern made the case in 1969 that a second generation of modern architects, then the leaders of the profession, had split into two camps: the “exclusive approach,” which retained the orthodox modernist commitment to the abstract “prototypical solutions” of Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion, and the Bauhaus (with Mies van der Rohe as its emissary to the United States), and the “inclusive approach,” more attuned to the individual case and the realities of context. However one parses the evolution of modernism after World War II—and there are many analyses—the style became increasingly diverse from the 1960s onward, culminating in the split-off of postmodernism; Robert A. M. Stern, New Directions in American Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969).

  113. Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale,” 296.

  114. Albert Mayer, “Report on Master Plan of the New Punjab Capital,” May 12, 1950, Mayer, Box 18, Folder 30, in Cullather, Hungry World, 82, 84; R. J. Chinwalla, “Chandigarh: Breakthrough from the Past,” Times of India, April 15, 1962, A7, in Manish Chalana, “Chandigarh: City and Periphery,” JPH 14, no. 1 (February 2015): 62; Maristella Casciato, “Modern Chandigarh,” in The City and South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard South Asia Institute, 2014), 23–25. For more examples, see Daniel Immerwahr, “The Politics of Architecture and Urbanism in Postcolonial Lagos, 1960–1986,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (December 2007).

  115. Hardwick, “Downtown Utopia?,” 49. For similar connections between modern architecture and values of rationality and progress, as made by universities, see Michael H. Carriere, “Between Being and Becoming: On Architecture, Student Protest, and the Aesthetics of Liberalism in Postwar America” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2009). Yale is one of his case studies.

  116. Carriere, “Between Being and Becoming,” 61.

  117. “Death of the Gargoyle,” Time, November 15, 1963, 80–85.

  118. For a thorough, if opinionated, treatment of modern architecture on the Yale campus, see Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale,” 293–353.

  119. Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale,” 301.

  120. Margaret Logue to Logue, April 15, 1948; April 28, 1948; May 2, 1948; and January 25, 1949, in EJL, Series 1, Box 4, Folder 54; Kimberly Konrad Alvarez, “The Lustron House: The Endangered Species of the Post-war Prefab Industry,” Docomomo US Newsletter, Summer 2008, 1, 8–9.

  121. Logue to Louis Laun, March 21, 1958, EJL, Series 4, Box 27, Folder 68; “Logue Leaves New Haven with a Record of Success,” New Haven Journal-Courier, November 24, 1960; “Margaret and Edward Logue House, 8 Reservoir Street,” http://newhavenmodern.org/margaret-and-edward-logue-house; Margaret Logue, email message to author, November 2, 2005. When designed, the Logues’ house at 8 Reservoir Street was considered so avant-garde that they had trouble securing a mortgage. Times have changed. Recently, the New Haven Preservation Trust has singled out the Logue house as one of the city’s most important modernist buildings.

  122. Hugo Lindgren, “New Haven,” Metropolis 13 (January–February 1994): 27–28.

  123. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 233 for Lee’s office, 138 for the fire chief’s.

  124. Quote in WNBC-TV documentary, Connecticut Illustrated: A City Reborn, 1966, RCL.

  125. It took a long time for New Haven’s significant modernist architecture to be fully appreciated. Recently, the New Haven Preservation Trust has undertaken thorough surveys of buildings erected during the period 1931 to 1980, is encouraging their careful renovation, and has launched an informative website; see http://newhavenmodern.org, which includes an extensive report by Rachel D. Carley, “Tomorrow Is Here: New Haven and the Modern Movement,” June 2008, and “Survey of Modern Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, Phase II Inventory of Historic Resources,” June 2011. Mies van der Rohe was commissioned to design Church Street South, but he withdrew in 1967, soon replaced by Charles Moore, another prominent architect who was the newly named dean of the Yale School of Art and Architecture; Carley, “Tomorrow Is Here,” 31–33.

  126. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 116.

  127. NHR, February 19, 1960, in Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 296.

  128. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 80. Before the auction to select the developer, Ralph Taylor “emphasized [to all potential developers] the interest of New Haven in having top architectural execution of the apartment buildings within Blocks A, B & C”; “Minutes of Staff Meetings, August 15 and August 17, 1956, 9 a.m. each day,” EJL, Series 5, Box 55, Folder 363. Logue described the design difficulties with the apartment buildings in “About Jerry Rappaport,” n.d., MDL; also Ray Wolfinger, memorandum, 8–9.

  129. Logue to Roger Stevens, September 19, 1958, EJL, Series 5, Box 88, Folder 826, 1; draft of a letter by Logue to Stevens, September 12, 1958, EJL, Series 5, Box 88, Folder 826, 1.

  130. Richard C. Lee to Logue, memorandum, May 21, 1958, EJL, Series 5, Box 81, Folder 732; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 53; Ray Wolfinger described the negotiation between Lee and Logue over prominent versus local architects in Ray Wolfinger, memorandum, 15.

  131. Rudolph’s Church Street Redevelopment drawings in “Unprocessed in PR 13 CN 2001:126,” Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Logue to Paul Rudolph, October 9, 1958, EJL, Series 5, Box 88, Folder 826.

  132. Margaret Logue, email message to author, January 11, 2009. “Sensual” was used in a review of the garage in the architectural press: “Sensually Structured Parking Garage by Rudolph,” PA 41, no. 9 (September 1960): 51.

  133. Walter McQuade, “Rudolph’s Roman Road,” AF 118, no. 2 (February 1963): 108. For more on the garage, see Carley, “Tomorrow Is Here,” 26–27.

  134. “Paul Rudolph: How One of the Great Young Architects Lives and Works,” Vogue, January 15, 1963, 85–91.

  135. Logue, “Education of an Urban Administrator,” 177–78. After the telephone company building debacle, Logue wrote a clause into all subsequent contracts giving the city final approval of design; Jeanne R. Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time: Progress and Poverty in America’s Renewing Cities (New York: Random House, 1967), 451.

  136. Margaret Logue, email message to author, January 11, 2009. On Rudolph, see Paul Rudolph, Writings on Architecture, foreword by Robert A. M. Stern (New Haven, CT: Yale School of Architecture, 2008), particularly “Six Determinants of Architectural Form,” originally published in AR 120, no. 4 (October 1956): 21–29; John C. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, with a foreword by Vincent Scully, Conversations with Architects (New York: Praeger, 1973), 90–121.

  137. Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 3:42; Logue,
interview, Steen, April 9, 1990, Boston, MA, 20; also see Logue to Paul Rudolph, May 17, 1965, EJL, Series 6, Box 150, Folder 443, where Logue thanks Rudolph for sending Perspecta (a publication of Yale School of Architecture): “It will improve my education.” Logue wrote an enthusiastic letter supporting Rudolph’s nomination as a fellow of the AIA; Logue to Jury of Fellows, December 3, 1969, EJL, Series 5, Box 99, Folder 974. For quote, Logue, remarks in “Rethinking Designs of the 60s,” Perspecta 29 (1998), 11. For more on Rudolph’s work in urban renewal, see Lizabeth Cohen and Brian D. Goldstein, “Paul Rudolph and the Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal,” in Reassessing Rudolph, ed. Timothy M. Rohan (New Haven, CT: Yale School of Architecture, 2017), 14–29.

  138. Logue, “Education of an Urban Administrator,” 179.

  139. Emerson Goble, “Horrors! A Handsome Garage,” AR 133, no. 2 (February 1963): 9, and in same issue “Paul Rudolph Designs a Place to Park in Downtown New Haven,” 146; also, “Paul Rudolph, Temple Street, New Haven, 1959–63,” in Simon Henley, The Architecture of Parking (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 56–61. The challenge of creating monumental urban space had long preoccupied Rudolph. He argued for giving greatest scale to the governmental and institutional (and in an earlier era, religious); Cook and Klotz, Conversations with Architects, 114–15; Paul Rudolph, “The Six Determinants of Architectural Form,” AR 120, no. 4 (October 1956): 183–90; Paul Rudolph, “A View of Washington as a Capital—or What Is Civic Design?,” AF 118, no. 1 (January 1963): 70; Paul Rudolph, “Architecture and Society,” L’arca, no. 62 (July–August 1992): 1–5, in Rudolph, Writings on Architecture, 156.