The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Externally, as a piece of metropolitan stage decoration, 488 is “clean,” unlike most of the city’s skyscrapers between 1908 and 1931, or from the Singer Building to the Irving Trust Company. But that mere absence of insipid or irrelevant detail, which in the mid-twenties would have been a triumph, is by now a minimal requirement of large-scale urban architecture. The architect has thoughtfully used for contrast with his continuous glass windows smooth horizontal hands of cream-white brick rather like the brick used in the neighboring Best’s, and he has most delicately underlined the horizontal accent by inserting two bands of headers—bricks laid with their ends showing—for the bond. He has, I think, carried the principle of unity too far by employing for the lowest band of masonry, above the big show windows of the ground floor, a granite of almost the same tone and textural reticence as the brick. Here a treatment much richer in color or texture might have been used to separate the great mass of 488 from its base. Verdict: a good architect pitted against a problem of site incapable of a sound organic solution.

  · · ·

  The Crowell-Collier Building is another matter. It is indecisive in aesthetic intention, confused and contradictory in detail, lacking in visual relation to its Rockefeller Center neighbors, and embellished (over its side entrance) with some extremely depressing ornamental sculpture. I have looked at this building repeatedly without discovering what the designers were doing, or even what they thought they were doing. The base of the building is dedicated to the National City Bank: great oblong upright windows, opening on a very spacious interior—an interior that is classicism without Corinthian columns, dignity “humanized” by some insipidly colossal and colossally insipid wall paintings, of the kind indigenous to insurance calendars and banks. The architects are not to blame for these last embellishments, but they are nevertheless in keeping with the side-entrance sculpture.

  Viewed a few blocks away, from the south, the profile of the building is rather handsome, but its planes and setbacks seem all awry when approached from the east. The facing is a fine-grained limestone, almost smooth enough to be called marble. At certain points, the blocks are shaped and laid to emphasize the horizontal, but the uprights between some of the window panels are carved to emphasize the vertical. This aesthetic indecision characterizes the whole structure. The best feature of the Crowell-Collier Building is probably the lobby—smooth, unostentatious, wholly consistent. In sum, this building is an example of eclecticism without conviction. In attempting to reconcile the traditional and the modern, it has managed to combine the saddest features of each.

  · · ·

  But my most serious objections to these buildings are not aesthetic objections, and the blame does not lie with their architects. These buildings fail as sound architecture, philosophically speaking, because their builders committed themselves to an obsolete program of land development based upon getting hold of a few lots, originally plotted for single-family residences, and covering them completely with buildings designed to afford the maximum possible amount of rentable space. That is the formula that produced New York’s present chaos, and though it still seems to suit the investors it has become a headache for everyone else. As long as land values are what they are in the midtown section, there is no way of making a fresh start; in fact, no one investor can afford to do anything but what he is now doing. Unfortunately, every new building that follows this obsolete pattern imposes new burdens upon the city as a whole: traffic delays, increased cost of delivering goods, higher taxes to pay for all the fresh engineering palliatives that must be introduced to repair the immediate effects of congestion without ever bringing about a cure—in short, economic waste and human frustration. Inevitably, some drastic step must be taken to nullify the damage that is being done. Our zoning and heights-of-buildings regulations are almost farcical because of their failure to deal with the acute problems of overbuilding, but their existence has long lulled people into thinking that something has in fact been done. There are no effective laws to restrain builders and investors from overcrowding the land; the City Planning Commission, though it has the legal power to control heights, can in practice do this properly only where land values are low, and it hardly makes more than a pretense of doing it anywhere. The city’s whole tax structure is based on congested densities and high land values, so the city, no less than the investor, is caught in a vicious circle of our own making. Furthermore, there has been no private or public effort to assemble parcels of land the size of Rockefeller Center on which an efficient group of office buildings, more conducive to successful business as well as to successful architecture, could be erected. Only the mud-wasp mind has been working. The result is neither architecture nor civic order.

  If we wish to keep traffic from complete coagulation in Manhattan, we shall have to impose strict limitations on the height and plot coverage of all future office buildings. They may, perhaps, have to be less than ten stories, at least along the midtown streets. The place for new office groups is on the outskirts of our overcrowded business districts, in the derelict areas east of Third Avenue, west of Eighth Avenue, and south of Washington Square. The City Planning Commission has always had some able men, but as a body it has lacked the courage and the imagination to buck the tide that is rapidly undercutting the foundations of the city. The Commission should ask the state legislature for the power to condemn land for business purposes, and it should then replan the proper sections of town expressly for office buildings of the proper height and size. This would do more to overcome the strangulation of its activities than a dozen Robert Moseses pushing through a dozen more super-colossal arterial highways.

  In the midtown area, between eleven in the morning and six in the evening, it is often quicker to walk anywhere than to take a taxi or bus. If the custom of overloading the land with twenty- and thirty-story skyscrapers persists, even walking will be reduced to the best speed one can now achieve on Broadway during the theatre rush—a mile an hour. Though there has been little construction of buildings for twenty years, the multiplication of motorcars has been enough to bring on a creeping paralysis, and now that this congestion is being aggravated by a series of new office buildings in mid-Manhattan, the grim end is in sight. As the city nears strangulation, because of the congestion of its streets, the overcrowding of its transit lines, and the lack of off-street parking space, our builders are cheerfully tightening the hangman’s noose by creating buildings that not only augment the traffic on the streets they abut but do not provide any off-street parking space for the vehicles of their occupants and visitors.

  Some weeks ago, in these columns, I pointed out a minor example of intelligent long-term planning and canny business acumen—the Parke-Bernet Galleries Building, owned by the City Investing Company. Our midtown business district desperately needs an even bolder and more imaginative approach. Instead, someone will soon be tearing down the Ritz to supplant it with a temporarily more profitable office building—replacing a fine hotel in the right place with a plethora of offices in the wrong place. That process will go on until the citizens of New York decide that they must begin planning for their own survival.

  APRIL 2, 1955 (ON A CONGESTED METROPOLIS)

  HAT HAPPENS IN New York to the art of building is bound up with what happens to the city as a place to work and live in. If it ceases to be a milieu in which people can exist in reasonable contentment instead of as prisoners perpetually plotting to escape a concentration camp, it will be unprofitable to discuss its architectural achievements—buildings that occasionally cause people to hold their breath for a stabbing moment or that restore them to equilibrium by offering them a prospect of space and form joyfully mastered. For a whole generation, New York has become steadily more frustrating and tedious to move around in, more expensive to do business in, more unsatisfactory to raise children in, and more difficult to escape from for a holiday in the country. The subway rides grow longer and the commuting trains carry their passengers from more distant suburbs, until as much t
ime is spent in transporting the human carcass as is gained by diminishing the work week. Because urban surface transportation often comes almost to a standstill, the cost of delivering anything to anyone is rising steeply and the futility of owning a car for any purpose but fleeing the city over the weekend is becoming clearer and clearer. Meanwhile, the distant dormitory areas of New York describe ever wider arcs. By 1975, the Regional Plan Association’s experts calculate, more people will be living in the suburbs within fifty miles of New York than will live in the city itself. When that happens, it will be impossible to build enough highways to accommodate the weekend exodus, just as it is already impossible to provide enough internal traffic arteries to handle Manhattan’s present congestion. And obviously, even if people could escape, they would then have no place within easy distance to go, since there would be no choice for recreation but metropolitan jam or suburban jelly.

  Fifty years ago, the upper-income groups here, as in most other big towns, began to move out of the city along the railroad lines, to provide their families with peace and quiet, open spaces and gardens, and tree-lined roads that brought them quickly into the country for a walk or a picnic. Life with Father took on a rural tinge, though Father rarely got home in time to do more than say good night to the children. Since then, the desire to escape the city has filtered down into every other economic group, and as a result of the suburb’s popularity in satisfying this desire, that haven of refuge is itself filling up. Despite village zoning laws, skyscraper apartments overtop the trees in regions that were rural only yesterday, and the load of metropolitan traffic on the parks and highways around New York, abetted by the subdivider busily turning farms into building lots, has enormously cut down the open spaces that gave the suburb, despite its inconveniences, an edge over the city.

  Were the eruption of vehicles and buildings in and around New York a natural phenomenon, like Vesuvius, there would be little use discussing it; lava inexorably carves its own channels through the landscape. But the things that spoil life in New York and its environs were all made by men, and can be changed by men as soon as they are willing to change their minds. Most of our contributions to planned chaos are caused by private greed and public miscalculation rather than irrational willfulness. During the nineteenth century, when more cities were built than ever before, the business of assembling them was entirely in the hands of those who were thinking only of their immediate needs or their immediate profit. “Officers and all do seek their own gain, but for the wealth of the Commons not one taketh pain,” a late-medieval poet commented at the very beginning of this urban breakdown. By now, hundreds of millions of dollars are poured every year into clearly obsolete and ineffectual efforts to overcome the ensuing congestion—street widenings, double-deck bridges, cloverleaf intersections, subways, garages—and the sole result of these improvements is to accelerate the disorder they are supposed to alleviate. Manhattan will soon be in the same predicament as imperial Rome; it will have to banish private wheeled traffic from the midtown area in daytime, as Julius Caesar did in Rome, to permit a modicum of public transportation and pedestrian movement. This will mean, as in Rome, the delivery of goods by night. That may temporarily relieve the congestion, but it will permanently increase insomnia, as Juvenal sardonically noted after Caesar issued his traffic ordinance.

  I have put the whole urban picture within this ample frame to counteract the current habit of looking at one small corner of the problem—congestion at the Jersey end of the George Washington Bridge at 8:45 A.M. or at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street at 3 P.M.—and attempting to solve that. Perhaps the wisest words on the complexity of the traffic problem were uttered long ago by Benton MacKaye, who fathered the Appalachian Trail. To relieve the congestion of traffic in Times Square, he remarked, it might be necessary to reroute the flow of wheat through the Atlantic ports. But our one-eyed specialists continue to concoct grandiose plans for highway development, as if motor transportation existed in a social vacuum, and as if New York were a mere passageway or terminal for vehicles, with no good reasons of its own for existence. To these experts, a successful solution of the traffic problem consists of building more roads, bridges, and tunnels so that more motorcars may travel more quickly to more remote destinations in more chaotic communities, from which more roads will be built so that more motorists may escape from these newly soiled and clotted environments. If these planners realized that it is as much the concern of good planning to prevent traffic from going into areas that should remain secluded and stable as it is to bring new traffic into areas that should be developed, they would never have offered their recent proposal for undermining what is left of rural Long Island. About that particular outrage, I shall have more to say in a later article.

  The fact is that motor transportation is the sacred cow of the American religion of technology, and in the service of this curious religion no sacrifice in daily living, no extravagance of public expenditure, appears too great. Motor transportation is not merely an object of public worship; it has succeeded the railroad as the most powerful tool for either distributing or congesting the population—and it currently does both. Like any other tool, it must be used for some human purpose beyond the employment of the tool itself, and that further purpose represents the difference between carving and mere whittling. Our transportation experts are only expert whittlers, and the proof of it is that their end product is not a new urban form but a scattered mass of human shavings. Instead of curing congestion, they widen chaos.

  · · ·

  The best way to understand what has to be done to make both the city itself and the surrounding region livable and workable is to begin our exploration of the problem at the center of the town and work outward to the country. The same principles of modern planning apply to both areas, and are just as difficult to put into action. The problem affects the working of every organ of the city, and neither gentle poultices nor brutal surgery (like the latest roadway encroachments on Central Park) will restore the city to health. The gridiron plan of New York, with its standard block, two hundred feet wide by six hundred feet long, and its numerous intersections, is a product of the age of the public stagecoach, the private carriage, and the common cart. The massive network of streets and avenues that, back in 1811, the City Planning Commissioners projected up as far as 155th Street was more than adequate for its original job. In fact, it was actually wasteful of land in residential areas, for it gave these quarters the same vehicular space it gave the busiest commercial districts, and thus sacrificed land that should have been dedicated to squares and parks and schools. But as long as only horses and carriages used the streets and only a fraction of the population could afford a private turnout, the streets of New York—at least above Washington Square—met the demands of transportation. This is not to say that there were not occasional traffic snarls and bottlenecks. For the safety of the pedestrian, the municipality in 1867 built a four-pronged footbridge over Broadway at Fulton Street, and if laziness had not prevailed over prudence, it might have built a series of footways over every busy intersection, like those that now span the East River Drive.

  What caused traffic to become a serious problem was first the development of the multi-story building after the 1880s and then the rapid spread of the motorcar after 1915. There were forty persons per motor vehicle in the United States in 1915, a little over ten in 1920, and about five in 1925, and though at first New York didn’t go in for automobile ownership as wholeheartedly as other parts of the country, its density of population produced the same problems here just as quickly. During the Second World War, owners were permitted to use the public streets gratis all week long for parking, and since then the number of cars quartered along our curbs has grown year by year. Our streets and avenues were designed to serve a density of population no greater than could be accommodated in buildings four stories high. But in a large part of Manhattan we have overlaid the land with so many high buildings that we have in effect pile
d from three to ten early Manhattans on top of each other. If the average height of these buildings was only twelve stories, the roadway and sidewalks flanking them should, according to the original ratio, be two hundred feet wide, which is the entire width of the standard New York block. In other words, to alleviate the pressure of traffic, we should be tearing down all the existing buildings in certain areas instead of putting up still taller ones.

  As the city grew, the elevateds and subways took some of the load of traffic off the streets and temporarily stalled off strangulation of Manhattan’s north and south traffic, but these facilities effected practically no improvement in its crosstown traffic. Because our subway lines have opened up new sections of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens and are pouring the rising population of these districts into Manhattan, these lines now ease the difficulties of uptown-and-downtown circulation here only during the non-rush hours. The present area of our streets and avenues cannot be increased without adding to our already monstrous deficiencies in public parks and playgrounds in residential areas where the population densities have mounted to between two hundred and four hundred and fifty people an acre. After all, the most feasible means of expansion, the river and belt-line drives, have already been resorted to. The only way, therefore, of providing space for all the present-day transportation, short of resorting to even more elevated highways, and thus creating a hell of noise and shadowed buildings far worse than the one our “L”s produced, is to build multiple-level tunnels under every congested street and avenue—which, as Euclid used to say, is absurd, since even a fraction of this construction would land the municipality in irremediable bankruptcy. We could, however, make better use of the land in Manhattan by replanning our residential neighborhoods into great superblocks, with fewer streets and fewer intersections, and all but purely local traffic confined to wider arteries that run past but not through these neighborhoods. We have the beginnings of this kind of development in Stuyvesant Town and many of our public housing developments, but nowhere has it been done systematically enough to provide wider arteries for even crosstown traffic. No piecemeal improvements, however valuable in themselves, can take the place of a scheme that will consider the city and its problems as a whole, not as something to be patched up here and there while the rest of it goes to ruin.