Vital Little Plans
Page 15
What will we have in its place? Now I will go out on a limb and make some predictions, based on what is beginning to happen in other cities, and on what seems to be happening inside some of the heads I encounter.
In place of bulldozer unplanning, we will have urban renewal planning, much more sensitive to exactly what is cleared out of an area, what is left in, what is put back and why. The West Side Urban Renewal study of the City Planning Commission, which is to be released this Wednesday, is our first small portent of this approach.*7
We will also begin to examine and to care about what is good about the city, instead of concentrating only on what is wrong about the city as we have in past rebuilding. I think we will find much wisdom practically embedded in city features we have considered beneath notice or have been willing to toss away because they are bedraggled. For instance, as we find out more about the ways a great city, full of strangers, polices itself, I think we shall find the old city was not so stupid in orienting all its eyes and activities toward the street. As we find that a neighborhood has to do with the numbers of people, not geographic size, we may find that our drugstore owners were not so stupid in the frequency of their locations. As we learn more about big-city magnetism we will discover something that Mr. Dowling has known all along, that our commercial theater owners were not so stupid in their instinct to mix in where it is lively and make it livelier.*8
We will begin to think of traffic as part of the whole problem of land use, and as part of the total problem of transportation of people. We will stop thinking of it in terms of nasty little destructive piecemeal expediencies, and use it as a positive constructive framework in ways which Victor Gruen has brilliantly shown us are possible.
We will recognize that any community within New York needs all kinds of activities and people mixed up in it to make it work. We will especially avoid fostering communities composed only of the transient, either rich or poor transients. We will recognize that public housing should have outgrown the theories of the 1930s, something Charlie Abrams has been trying to tell us for years.*9 I think we are at last ready to listen, and to plan for the publicly housed to be part of the normal community.
We will discover that we can get parks and space for light and air, and sound planning, in rebuilt areas by the simple expedient of taking direct responsibility for these matters, instead of going all around Robin Hood’s barn to do this. At present we have to find a developer big enough and then see that he has a territory big enough and buildings repetitive enough and write-down subsidy enough so that he can afford to throw in the parks and also pay himself for five years of life spent in the negotiations.
We will find economic means of rehabilitating structurally sound buildings without booting out an old, well-rooted population in the process. At present rehabilitation of buildings and upgrading of neighborhoods is usually nothing but pure misfortune to our middle-income families with children, people the city needs. If we can figure out a way to pay public subsidies for new apartments that rent at $70 a room,*10 as we have, surely we will find a way to save such families for the city even though their habitations need new heating plants or bathrooms. It only depends on what we want.
We will be locating our public facilities—schools, health centers, welfare offices, and the like, much more astutely to strengthen our communities. At present, I know of only one public body, the circulation division of the Public Libraries, which studies the networks of the community, the people and their paths and activities, to determine just where to locate.*11 We will get smarter about the importance of this; when our schools learn it, we will take a big jump ahead.
Many years ago, when I came to New York to seek my fortune,*12 I found a job in a very big clock company where I was put to work typing numbers and places on pink pieces of paper. Nobody told me what the pink papers were and I still don’t know. But I could see very well what they represented—dozens and dozens and grosses and grosses of clocks, going everywhere. This made me very happy. “Why, we are supplying the whole world with clocks,” I thought. And from morning to night I typed just as hard and as fast as I could, to help reach the day when we would have the whole world supplied with clocks, and we could wind up that job and get on with something else.
But after about a week, it suddenly dawned on me that this job was never going to be finished. Clocks would wear out, and new people would come along wanting clocks, and there was no end to it. This made me sad. I could no longer care about the pink papers, and the next day I quit to find a job where a person could get something done, for heaven’s sake.
As you can see, I was very young and very impatient.
Now, I think most of us are apt to retain something of that feeling when we think of the job of repairing and rebuilding the city. It is very tempting to want to fix it in such a way that things will get finished and stay put and that’s that, and whatever we didn’t think of or was too much trouble or might not pay, can be written off as undesirable confusion. But New York is like the clock business; it is never going to get finished. This should not really be discouraging to anybody over the age of eighteen.
In fact, it is pretty exciting to think of repairing and rebuilding the city in such a way that its people will continue to have freedom and opportunity to make thousands of intricate, big and little adjustments; to repair it in such a way that new needs, as they come along, new uses, new opportunities, new relationships, new immigrants’ orientation clubs, new New Schools will find scope to grow and turn around in, instead of a massive set of masterminded straitjackets. It is pretty nice to think of people coming along in the future, who will have opinions and notions and plans and problems of their own, very big problems no doubt, but will take it for granted that the most alive, exciting, interesting, challenging, various place in the world is New York City.
That is what we inherited and we ought to pass it along even more so. Whether we can will depend on how much more bad rebuilding and community destruction we are stuck with, and how fast and well we can get to work at doing the job better.
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*1 Jacobs carried her disdain for prophecy to the end of her life. As she puts it succinctly in Dark Age Ahead, “Life is full of surprises….Prophecy is for people too ignorant of history to be aware of that, or for charlatans” (pp. 25–26). Likewise, see chapter 7 of The Nature of Economies, “Unpredictability,” or her comments regarding the future in “The End of the Plantation Age” in this volume.
*2 The Manhattan Redbook or “Red Book” was a guide to the city’s street addresses, residences, public and private amenities, and principal points of interest published in various versions over the course of the twentieth century.
*3 The scheme in question is Robert Moses’s attempts to run a roadway through Washington Square Park in the Village, a plan he pursued, futilely and against much opposition, across the 1950s. See “Reason, Emotion, Pressure” in this volume for more on Washington Square Park and Moses.
*4 Harrison Salisbury (1908–93) wrote a much-followed series of articles about kids in the city, a common theme at a time in which “juvenile delinquency” was seen as a new social problem. The series became an influential book in 1958, called The Shook-Up Generation.
*5 In chapter 8 of Death and Life, “The Need for Primary Mixed Uses,” Jacobs calls those uses with a strong ability to attract users, such as residences, workplaces, and leisure destinations, “primary diversity,” and the additional uses they support, such as restaurants, “secondary diversity.” She also observes that municipalities can treat their civic uses as “cultural chessmen,” using different pieces in concert. For instance, an opera house could be placed in an area without enough nighttime uses (pp. 167–68).
*6 This roll call of projects underway or completed in New York by the late 1950s includes both urban renewal and public housing projects, which includes those built by both private developers using federal funds available through renewal laws—including nonprofits, universities, hospitals,
insurance companies, real estate developers, and unions—as well as public agencies, primarily the New York City Housing Authority. Here Jacobs is concerned about their impact on the physical shape of the city, but the way she lumps public and private projects together suggests as well that she objects to the fact that both public and private projects are enabled by top-down sources of what she would later call “cataclysmic money.”
*7 In the margins next to this paragraph of the original manuscript Jacobs scrawled “Haw!” We can’t be sure, but this was likely a retrospective touch on her part, signifying how much she’d changed her mind about this revision of urban renewal. The West Side Urban Renewal Study was heralded as a revision of Moses-style urban renewal in the Philadelphia vein, with more attention to local context and less clearance. Mayor Robert Wagner ordered the study as a response to protests over Moses’s methods. Jacobs, as she says here, hoped that what she called “spot renewal” would end the abuses of modern clearance and rebuilding. A few years later, though, just as she was finishing Death and Life, a renewal project guided by these principles was announced for Greenwich Village, and seeing the effect it would have on her own neighborhood she lost all faith in this piecemeal revision of urban renewal. See box 19, folder 3 of the Jacobs Papers at the Burns Library, Boston College.
*8 Robert Dowling (1895–1973) was a real estate investor and patron of New York City’s theater scene.
*9 Charles Abrams (1901–70) was an urbanist, author, and housing expert. He was one of the first—in the 1940s—to draw attention to the way racial discrimination in housing created a stratified metropolis and to protest federal subsidies for private redevelopment, which he labeled the “business welfare state” (Zipp, Manhattan Projects [101–13]). He held a number of stations over the years, from first counsel for the New York City Housing Authority to chairman of the New York State Commission Against Discrimination. He was also a resident of the Village and a commercial landlord on Eighth Street, one of the neighborhood’s major business strips. In Death and Life, Jacobs praises his attempts to preserve the strip’s commercial diversity after the street’s success resulted in a growing restaurant monoculture (pp. 244–45).
*10 This would have been considered a high rental cost at the time, at least for the “well-rooted population,” equivalent to roughly $574 per room in 2016.
*11 For more on how the New York Public Library located its branches, see “Downtown Is for People” in this volume.
*12 In a touching play on this phrase, Jacobs dedicated Death and Life “to New York City where I came to seek my fortune and found it by finding Bob, Jimmy, Ned and Mary,” her husband and children.
A Great Unbalance
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SPEECH AT THE FIFTH MONTHLY WOMEN DOERS LUNCHEON, SPONSORED BY MRS. LYNDON B. JOHNSON, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C., JUNE 16, 1964
This is an age when we talk more and more about city amenity and produce it less and less. Many outrages are committed in its name. Poor people, Negroes and businesses on which many livelihoods depend are tossed out of their neighborhoods in the name of somebody’s idea of amenity. Here and there our cities are given a slick, artificial mask. But neither that aberration, nor the drabness, dirt, and dispiritedness in other places answers the profound need we have for character, convenience, visual pleasure and vitality—all those things we lump together as amenity and cherish in cities.The attractiveness of cities…builds up from lots and lots of different bits and details, lots of different bits of money, lots of different notions, all coming out of the concern, the affection, and the ideas of lots and lots of different people.
The attractiveness of cities is not gotten by subtraction. It builds up from lots and lots of different bits and details, lots of different bits of money, lots of different notions, all coming out of the concern, the affection, and the ideas of lots and lots of different people. The amenity of cities cannot possibly be planned or bought wholesale. It is so much more complicated and quicksilver than a choice between wall-to-wall pavement and wall-to-wall grass.Almost unnoticed and unremarked, a great unbalance has developed in cities between money for building things and money for running things.
Almost unnoticed and unremarked, a great unbalance has developed in cities between money for building things and money for running things. Let me give a current example from my own neighborhood. For years we have been begging for repair and restoration of our park. For years the park has been running down. Last month the city offered to destroy the park and build a new one. Why not use that money, the citizens asked, to restore and maintain the park, and several others besides? The parks commissioner candidly explained that his department is starved for maintenance funds but is relatively well off for capital funds. He has money to build an unwanted new park for $750,000 but is hard put to find money for repairing benches, planting flowers, and picking up papers.
The consequences of such unbalance go far beyond dirt and disrepair. The certainty of not having enough money to run things automatically rules out wide ranges of potential recreation in cities, and many forms of potential beauty—not so much because of what these cost to develop but because they take more than routine care. Even the devastating ugliness of parking lots is insured when the hospital director or housing manager or auditorium chairman knows in advance that his budget cannot possibly support maintenance of more than hot, unrelieved asphalt and chain link fence. And how can we make headway combating private devastation of this kind when everyone can plainly see that the public standards are as low or lower?
Variety and character in parks and in the total city scene will steadily become less and less possible, no matter how lavish our lip service to amenity, unless we get many, many more cleanup people, repair people, painters, gardeners—and soon—working for the public. Many of these jobs, incidentally, require little training.
The wild unbalance between capital funds and running expenses is typical of many municipal services, and of all cities. This unbalance is compounded by the present forms of subsidies for highways, institutions, public housing, most instances of urban renewal, and by the devices of public authorities with their own borrowing power. Most of these cases of aid to cities, especially nowadays the grants for highways, remove great territories from the local tax rolls, while they simultaneously increase welfare, policing and social work burdens. Yet the subsidies themselves provide only for construction. They do not provide the equivalent of tax funds, nor even funds for the public share of their own subsequent maintenance costs. The cities’ matching grants to projects can be in the form of capital improvements; this provision frequently stimulates capital expenditures that are unnecessary and even inane. The local borrowing power can be called on to finance these, but the interest comes out of the same pot as running expenses.
Theoretically, all these forms of aid are supposed either to cut running costs or bolster the local tax base; but they are not working out that way at all. The unbalance automatically feeds on itself and increases, because the harder it is to get maintenance funds, the greater the scramble for capital funds instead. Already, it has become easier for cities to let things disintegrate awaiting a big capital expenditure of some kind, and at that point sweep away the good with the bad, the beautiful with the ugly, and the productive with the unproductive. We see the paradox of cities actually impoverishing themselves by capital improvements.
The Decline of Function
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PUBLISHED AS “DO NOT SEGREGATE PEDESTRIANS AND AUTOMOBILES” IN ARCHITECTS’ YEAR BOOK 11, 1965
Solicitude for city pedestrians slips easily and naturally into preoccupation with the problems of traffic-separation. From this preoccupation, it is only a step to infatuation with tour de forces of gadgetry on a grandiose city-center scale. The pedestrians, having somewhere along the line become metamorphosed from whole and various human beings into abstract “pedestrian traffic,” become an excuse for a showy but fake, inflexible and limited pretense at city environment.
The Fort Worth scheme, for all its huge garaging and traffic service arrangements, subordinated these devices to the city center as an intricate, pluralistic, flexible collection of enterprises and establishments. The object was, quite literally, that the pedestrian was to inherit a busy bit of the earth (paved and unpaved) and it was to be a relatively various, adaptable and free piece of the earth at that.
In the East Island scheme, the gadgetry of circulation and of precinct separation has become an end in itself. Not only the pedestrian, but all of life is subordinated to it. The bit of earth under the sky which the pedestrian inherits as his purest precinct is a cold and dreary platform, little different from the monotonous promenades without promenaders that have become all too familiar in existing housing projects. The putative ingredients of a town center, along with the schools, are underground where they may be served by transportation in arrangements of endless ingenuity and perfect lifelessness. Nor is this a unique aberration. Much the same philosophy governs the long-range planning goals of center Philadelphia, for example, or the Golden Triangle center in Pittsburgh. The idea is to put underground as much as possible of what pedestrians use, and this is called providing the pedestrians with more light and air (where they will not be). In Philadelphia such an ideal must be compromised because of what exists already; and here we may venture a law about elaborate city pedestrian schemes: the more flexibility permitted the designer, the more inflexible the product.