Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Big cities, she began, were getting ready to build again; new downtown redevelopment projects were in the pipeline. What would they be like?

  They will be spacious, parklike, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept dignified cemetery.

  She cited several of them by name—Golden Gateway in San Francisco, Lower Hill auditorium complex in Pittsburgh, the Convention Center in Cleveland. And a dreary business they would be: “The projects will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it. For they work at cross-purposes to the city. They banish the street.”

  Jane’s piece ran about six thousand words, about twenty-five double-spaced pages. It ranged over broad territory, referred to numerous cities, was accompanied by arresting illustrations. But at bottom, Jane was devoting a sizable swath of Fortune’s expensive editorial real estate to city streets. But just what were cities if not streets? Didn’t the awful failures of city life all come down to streets that weren’t safe, streets strangled with traffic, streets that were ugly, dirty, and depressing?

  Maybe so, but any hope for cities, Jane said, lay in lively, interesting streets; streets were where the city lived. Taking readers by the hand, she deposited them on San Francisco’s Maiden Lane, a “narrow, back-door alley” facing the backs of some nondescript downtown buildings. Local merchants had adorned it with redwood benches, trees, vines, and window boxes, making for “an oasis with an irresistible sense of intimacy, cheerfulness, and spontaneity.” What you needed downtown, said Jane, was variety, contrast, and busyness, old buildings mixed with new, delightful focal points, like the steeple of Arlington Street Church suddenly hoving into view for shoppers on Boston’s Newbury Street. Here was what the city could be and sometimes was. But the new projects coming down the pike? These, she groaned, turned their backs on the street—which, in the new way of planners, didn’t matter anymore. Now what counted were superblocks, tracts of prime urban real estate set back from and ignoring the old streets.

  The East Harlem housing projects lay within such superblocks. So did Stuyvesant Town. So did Lincoln Center. A bird’s-eye view, a map even at the coarsest scale, revealed whatever might be of interest in these gargantuan geometries—overlarge modernist objects, apartment complexes, shopping malls, and hymns to Kultur, plunked down into the old city’s tight fabric. Big and boring garnished with green.

  “The smallness of big cities.” This was the title Jane, or an editor, gave one section of her essay. “We are apt to think of big cities as equaling big enterprises, little towns as equaling little enterprises,” Jane wrote. “Nothing could be less true.” Rather: Think city, think small. The small, specialized, shoestring operation, like the storefronts now gone from East Harlem, “must draw on supplies and skills outside itself.” It needed the breadth of the city market, needed other shoestring operations. The new downtown redevelopments, on the other hand, didn’t think anything but big—great homogeneous blocks, dedicated to a single purpose.

  Like Lincoln Center, which was what had gotten her into trouble with Mr. Jackson of Fortune. “This cultural superblock,” Jane wrote of it, “is intended to be very grand”— coming from Jane this was no compliment—“and the focus of the whole music and dance world of New York.” It was soon to go up west of Broadway in the West Sixties, the sort of cultural complex that would become the fashion for cities around the country. Step 1: Tear down whatever was there before. Step 2: Insert opera house, symphony hall, or arts center. But, insisted Jane, Lincoln Center simply did not fit the New York streetscape. It would neither profit from the surrounding urban texture nor contribute to it. Whatever cultural uplift it afforded New York, the city as a whole would suffer.

  At least as they appeared in print—perhaps softened in the aftermath of that lunch with Jackson and Whyte—Jane’s points verged on the technical, showing how, street by street, Lincoln Center would be severed from the rest of the city: “To the north, the street will be shared with a huge, and grim, high school. The south will be another superblock institution, a campus for Fordham.” But Jane was talking about more than Lincoln Center—about how superblocks generally worked to undermine cities. The complex and intricate interplay of forces of city life, the visual and social variety of its streets, the diversity of its people, buildings, and parks, was yielding to a sterile new vision. Sacrificed to it was “the cheerful hurly-burly that makes people want to come into the city and to linger there.” That’s what was being lost.

  At the time Jane wrote of Lincoln Center, its groundbreaking, with President Eisenhower at the dais to proclaim a great day for American culture and a “stimulating approach” to urban blight, was still a year away. But just then, before the first wrecking ball toppled the first of five hundred or so tenements in August 1959, people still lived in the blocks around Lincoln Square—fifteen thousand of them. They were mostly from the working and lower-middle classes. Largely white and native born, though with a growing Puerto Rican minority. To Lincoln Center supporters, of course, it was all a slum, period. The project’s leading local proponent in 1959 predicted it would become “a symbol of victory in a great war—a war against disease, darkness, filth and vermin-infested homes. A fight to give children born and reared in basements the right to sunshine, fresh air, and beautiful surroundings.”

  Not everyone felt that way. “Save Our Homes” groups sprang up. “Shelter Before Culture,” declared picket signs wielded by protesters, representing the Lincoln Square Residents Committee, in front of City Hall. It didn’t get them very far. In the end, West Sixty-third Street was gone, West Sixty-fourth Street was gone, both displaced by the superblock that became Lincoln Center. The opening scenes of the film West Side Story, which pictured a Romeo-and-Juliet romance transplanted to New York City tenements, was filmed in and around the neighborhood; when the movie was released in 1961, the streets where it was filmed were gone, become part of a great block of twenty-eight-story apartment buildings also part of the project.

  On balance, many might count the transformation a good one. But, as in East Harlem and Stuyvesant Town, a world had been erased—not just individual buildings, not just especially run-down streets, not just notorious pockets of crime, but the whole thing. “The pain brought on by clearance and rebuilding,” writes Samuel Zipp, in his study of the affair, “extended beyond the losses of individual homes and shops to the loss of a whole urban world, an informal system of connections that would disappear along with the tenements, factories, and corner stores.” Maybe real slums were mercifully gone, along with real gang-war mayhem never so aesthetically choreographed as Jerome Robbins did for West Side Story. But something of worth had been swept away with them.

  The architects, planners, and businessmen responsible for this wiped-clean vision, Jane wrote, were “seized with dreams of order,” fascinated by scale models and bird’s-eye views, the street-scale city lost to them. “The logic of the projects,” she wrote, “is the logic of egocentric children, playing with pretty blocks and shouting, ‘See what I made!’ ” The citizen, Jane wrote, needed to step in and exert his claim. “It is his city, after all.”

  Jane’s article appeared in the April 1958 issue of Fortune, and soon letters were pouring in. “Look what your girl did for us!” Holly Whyte scrawled at the top of a seven-page collection of excerpts that went to Doug Haskell. “This is one of the best responses we’ve ever had!”

  The letters came from planners, businesspeople, developers, mayors, consultants, architects, and ordinary citizens. Delightful, they said. Fascinating, refreshing, provocative. Jane’s “plea for the human scale is a welcome note among so many faceless plans,” a Washington, D.C., man wrote. György Kepes, the Hungarian-born MIT designer and art theorist, who’d probably heard Jane at the Harvard conference, wrote to say he’d read it “with great interest and great joy”; her article expressed not just knowledge and understandin
g “but a human warmth.” In many letters, you could sense a personal connection, as if, somehow, Jane spoke for them, channeled them; as if what she said was what they felt but hadn’t been able to express themselves.

  An English journal, Architectural Review, editorialized about The Exploding Metropolis as a whole what could fairly be said of Jane’s article in particular: it was “like the first blink of the fire-warning light in the aircraft cockpit,” the nervous, insistent blinking that signals something wrong—in this case with the architectural and planning wisdom of the day.

  —

  “How enthusiastic we were in the young days of the 55’s,” Doug Haskell warmly reminisced to Jane a few years later when she was leaving Forum, “and how invaluable you were…as a cement, keeping the staff enthusiastically together on a high enterprise. I thought we had a very fine espirit.” Jane would stay with Doug and the others for almost a decade, and they were good years. But Forum was quite the mainstream place, differing from its rivals, Progressive Architecture and Architectural Record, but not too much. When she was hired there, “the editor in chief gave me quickly to understand that I must shun critical comment,” else lose access to the architects who were the magazine’s lifeblood; this was pragmatic or self-interested, take your pick, but it was alive in every editorial decision. Any architectural “criticism” Forum offered didn’t include the kind of harsh verdicts meted out to books or films; most of the time the magazine reported on buildings or projects “we could unreservedly admire, or that the editor in chief unreservedly admired.” What they didn’t like they’d ignore. Forum represented the center, not the periphery. The prevailing ethos mattered there. The big names in the field mattered. “We were attuned to reputations within the profession, and we bowed obsequiously to [architectural] fashion,” dominated, as it was then, by the movement and spirit known as modernism.

  Consider the Barcelona Pavilion, a smallish building of great horizontal planes, sumptuous expanses of marble, onyx, and tinted glass, virtually devoid of decoration. It is open, spare, and clean, its surfaces uncorrupted by intricate curves and curlicues, an exercise in simplicity, proportion, and broad, sweeping space. The wonder of it—what can make you gasp, really—is that, designed by the German architect Mies van der Rohe for an international exposition in Barcelona, it reaches back to 1929 and a world thick with baroque ornamentation and Victorian clutter. The exposition was temporary and the pavilion was torn down the following year. But so emblematic was it of the architectural style, modernism, it had helped usher in that, in 1986, it was reconstructed from the original plans, on the original site, with some of the original materials. The Barcelona Pavilion belongs comfortably in the modern world; it helped make the modern world.

  You couldn’t do much better if you were looking for an icon of modernism. But the movement’s antecedents actually go back before 1929 to the late nineteenth century, when iron, steel, and glass began to displace age-old stone, brick, and wood as building materials; when builders and architects began to revolt against Victorian gimcrackery and turn to new building technologies, new visions of what a building, or a city, could be. In drawing after drawing, building after building, with the embrace of one new material, structural device, or idea after another, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, and the other modernist masters created the architectural style that dominates today’s built world.

  Modernism expressed itself, though, at not only the scale of the individual building but also that of the city, and of society as a whole, and was not solely a matter of aesthetics and design. A social vision ran through it, too: to fix the world and make it better. Good architecture, the idea went, mattered, made better cities, better lives. “What is the ideal city for the twentieth century, the city that best expresses the power and beauty of modern technology and the most enlightened ideas of social justice?” The historian Robert Fishman began his book, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, by asking that question. Modernist planning can be seen as a century-long search for answers to it.

  One day in 1930, one of the most influential of the creators of modernism, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the Swiss-French architect better known as Le Corbusier, stood before a map of the city of Paris and, as the camera rolled, drew a bold line from west to east, slashing across a broad swath of the city he wanted to see razed. Le Corbusier called for office skyscrapers to rise up against the flattened landscape of the city, one every four hundred yards in mathematical precision, each employing thousands, obliterating the harmony of five-story structures that made Paris what it was. More deliberate drawings he made of Paris and other French cities—no operatic slashes staged for the camera now but meticulously rendered in black ink on fine drawing paper—showed how serious he was. Le Corbusier would wipe out the intricate, small-scaled past, blighted as it often was, and replace it with skyscrapers set in spacious parks—towers-in-the-park. “The Radiant City,” was what Le Corbusier called it.

  That was one influential modernist vision. Another was one determined to bypass the city altogether, replacing it with small communities leapfrogging their way into the country—towns of thirty thousand or so, with adjacent agricultural belts, areas set aside for local industry. This late-nineteenth-century idea originated with an unassuming Englishman, Ebenezer Howard, a stenographer by trade—a “heroic simpleton,” George Bernard Shaw once called him. Shamed and horrified by the damage wrought on cities by the Industrial Revolution—“ill-ventilated, unplanned, unwieldy, and unhealthy cities—ulcers on the very face of our beautiful island”—Howard conceived a city that wasn’t a city at all but that re-created its functions in discrete, sharply demarcated areas: homes here, parks and gardens there, factories over here, all neat and tidy. “The Garden City,” it was called, and it was progenitor to England’s New Town movement.

  In 1948, a British government information office produced a perky animated film pushing the idea, Charley in New Town. Charley looks like Stan Laurel of the old Laurel and Hardy movies. As a tune lilts away in the background, we see him pedaling his bike through town, red pompadour flopping and bouncing cheerfully, offering friendly “G’morning”s to passers-by. “My, this is a grand way to start the day,” he says, turning to the viewer. “A bit different from what it used to be.”

  And as we step with Charley into a benighted recent past, the cartoon’s palette shifts from pastel greens to angry blacks. Coal smoke obscures everything. The houses are drab, the factories ugly. The lilt’s gone from the music now, the beat’s become urgent, troubled. “Not even a bloomin’ place for the kids to play,” says Charley. A child’s ball bounces out from a dark alley. “Poor little blighters.” Insect-like, verminous hordes of workers are discharged from double-decker buses. Back then, Charley had been one of them. “I’ll tell you, by the time I got to work I was all in.”

  Finally, though, Charley and his friends had enough of the old city and met with a bow-tied, waistcoated, and wise elder gentleman who showed them how cities had turned out so bad. How might they make their lives better? New skyscrapers, maybe? No, no, the townspeople objected, as we see their houses start to mushroom into high-rises. They wouldn’t want to live in them. What about their gardens, their pubs?

  Inevitably, it is made to seem, they converged on the idea of a new town, on a new site. “First thing we all agreed on was to separate industry from dwelling houses,” Charley remembers. Yes, said their new leader: “Industry here…Residential areas there, with not more than five minutes travel from home to work.” The great idea was realized. We see little factories sprout up; the wind, of course, always sweeps the smoke away. We see Charley himself running a bulldozer. Open spaces, parks, playing fields, flower gardens—paradise. “And so,” Charley remembers, “we moved right in.” In the end, we see him back on his bike, in the present. “I’m telling you, it works out fine.” And as he cycles offscreen, he points to the viewer. “Just you try it.”

  In real English towns embodying Howard�
��s ideas, like Letchworth in 1903 and Welwyn in 1920, and then in Radburn, New Jersey, and urban enclaves like Sunnyside Gardens in New York during the 1920s, thousands did try it, or something like it. Then, after World War II, in countless variations and permutations of the Garden City movement and inspired by similar impulses in suburbs across England and America, so did millions more.

  Howard reached out into the countryside, Le Corbusier reached up for his towers-in-the-park. But both streams of modernist thought turned their backs on the confused jumble of the city street, the jangle, noise, and thrill of the city as generations knew it. Both redistributed its parts—homes, offices, factories, parks, stores—into discrete parcels, separate and distinct. Both echoed the lesson of a postwar world of bombed-out European and Japanese cities: Clear out the rubble. Build anew.

  Certainly there was plenty of rubble to clear. Since she’d first visited New York in 1928, Jane had seen for herself the toll of years on the American city—in crumbling old-law tenements in New York; brownstones in Brooklyn and row houses in Baltimore and Philadelphia carved up into cramped apartments for war workers; poor blacks escaping the Jim Crow South crammed into overpriced, under-maintained slums. The Depression and the war made for two long, debilitating decades of stagnation and neglect during which no one, it seemed, had the time or money, or after a while the inclination, to fix up the old city.

  All across these years, modernist dreams, too, had been placed on hold. But now, with the guns stilled after World War II and every sign of buoyant prosperity returning—automobiles taking on the Forward Look, air travel granting mile-high vistas—modernism reasserted itself. Something close to a social consensus emerged, one rejecting the old, ragged past, proposing to scrape it away, often literally, and replace it with a swept-clean, squared-away future: superblocks of Corbusian towers in town and great, green park-like tracts in the new suburbs. In both cases, the street, the heart of the old carcinogenic city and its evils, would be erased. And these sensibilities came on now with such ferocity, as if embracing the urgency, scale, and force of the war itself, that this New Truth could appear self-evident: no need to mend the postwar world’s tattered social and physical fabric; best to obliterate it and start over.