Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Logue and Lee’s ability to use federal funding for New Haven’s urban renewal was made possible by the Housing Acts of 1937, 1949, and 1954 and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The programs those acts created—put most simply as public housing in 1937, urban redevelopment in 1949, urban renewal in 1954, and massive interstate-highway construction in 1956, for the first time prioritizing urban rather than rural roads—made federal dollars available to cities to address the deteriorated housing, economic disinvestment, and suburban competition that cities like New Haven faced all over the country.70 Historians have emphasized how federal actions like the Homeowners Loan Corporation of the New Deal era, designed to help people hold on to their homes during the Depression, and the GI Bill of Rights of 1944, which created many new homeowners after World War II, encouraged the exodus of people and capital from cities to suburbs. Both made mortgage money available only in areas deemed sound investments for banks, essentially redlining urban areas considered poor risks because their populations were too immigrant, black, or poor. The Highway Act, with its forty-one-thousand-mile network, similarly channeled the white middle class into suburbia.

  Often missing in this telling, however, is the extent to which the U.S. government, pressured by city leaders, also supported urban revitalization, albeit in careful consultation with powerful real estate interests. In “writing down”—in other words, subsidizing—the costs of demolishing or rehabilitating areas deemed “blighted” (assumed to be unredeemable), they hoped to attract a reluctant private sector to invest in city rebuilding. Money was also made available to address the serious shortage of decent housing resulting from the cumulative deprivations wrought by years of depression and war.

  It came naturally to Logue and Lee, as committed New Deal Democrats, to turn to the federal government to foot the bill for much of New Haven’s redevelopment. They saw urban decline as no different from many other social problems—such as unemployment, labor strife, or security in old age—that the federal government had proved itself capable of tackling. Sure, the private sector would ultimately have to step up and invest in projects for the long-term health of a city. But public authorities should be firmly in control. As Logue said often, “[You] can’t trust the private sector to protect the public interest.”71 Logue despaired of the self-interest he saw rampant around him in New Haven. “One of the freedoms Americans seem to value most is the freedom to use or abuse their privately owned property as they see fit,… regardless of its impact on … neighbors, or the whole neighborhood, or indeed the whole city.” The result: “The public interest is a lonely, unattended, silent spinster.”72

  The approach that the New Haven leaders crafted put Logue’s redevelopment operation squarely in charge of making renewal plans and applying for government assistance, which was doled out with a required one-third local match to two-thirds federal funds. Logue and his team’s genius became minimizing the city’s outright cash contribution to the required local one-third by counting already funded capital expenditures for schools, roads, and parking garages.73 During Lee’s years in office, New Haven would attract more than $130 million in federal aid (more than $1 billion in today’s dollars), which in 1965 put it sixth among the twelve cities receiving the largest federal renewal grants, the smallest city by far on that list. New Haven easily ranked first among the twelve for grant money per capita: $745.38 for each of its 152,000 people—almost three times what the next highest, Newark, received. While John Lindsay’s New York City was enjoying the moniker “Fun City” in the 1960s, its smaller, northern neighbor would become known in some circles as “Fund City.”74

  Logue and Lee’s early enthusiasm for federally funded urban renewal gave them an advantage over many other cities. By the mid-1950s, when they got started, Congress had authorized $500 million but only $74 million had as yet been claimed. Meanwhile, New Haven’s leaders were already geared up, according to Allan Talbot, who worked in New Haven’s redevelopment operation. “They would unroll their maps, gesture magnificently, argue persuasively, and feign a professional assurance that created the impression they were direct descendants of Baron Von Haussmann,” the master builder of Paris in the 1860s.75

  THE IMPORTANCE OF A TOTAL PLAN

  Lee and Logue were able to move so quickly because they had no problem meeting the federal government’s requirement that a general redevelopment plan be made and approved before funds would be authorized. New Haven’s leaders themselves favored having what they called a “total plan.” Lee had campaigned on the idea. Logue elaborated the concept in an article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine titled “Urban Ruin—or Urban Renewal?” Here he rejected the old-style “master plan” that, he argued, was nothing more than a theoretical exercise by planners who “dream[ed] what the good city ought to be … and never seemed to have a section on how they were to be carried out.”76 Logue scolded, “Too many theoretical planners preferred the applause of elegant critics to the earthier appreciation of politicians who had to try to carry out the plans and get re-elected, too.” New Haven had already endured that fate. In 1910 the New Haven Civic Improvement Association had hired the nationally prominent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and the architect Cass Gilbert to prepare an elaborate plan for the future of the city. It sat ignored for forty years. By contrast, the new approach advocated by Lee and Logue required pragmatic and comprehensive planning that “focuses on the city as a whole and treats all urban problems as interrelated.”77 The resulting “total plan” would ensure a rational coherence unachievable through the all-too-common small, scattered projects initiated by individuals, private enterprise, real estate developers, and government.

  Lee and Logue felt that while all cities would benefit from more ambitious planning, New Haven especially needed it, given its double jeopardy of a steep economic decline and a long history of political paralysis that stymied effective action. From the start, Lee was constrained by a difficult political structure: a weak mayor facing reelection every two years; an unwieldy board of thirty-three elected aldermen, one of the largest of such boards in the country; and a “hodgepodge of boards and commissions which made efficiency impossible,” as The Saturday Evening Post put it in 1949.78 Twice over his sixteen years as mayor, Lee mounted a campaign to revise the city’s charter, and twice he failed. Frustration with New Haven politics more than anything else propelled him to set up Logue in early 1955 as an independent, powerful development administrator reporting directly to the mayor and insulated from New Haven’s calcified politics as usual by the enormous amount of federal money underwriting urban renewal.

  Lee’s move now gave Logue official oversight of all departments concerned with physical development, which long had operated independently or antagonistically toward one another. These included the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, the City Plan Department, the Housing Authority, the Building Inspector, Traffic and Parking, and relevant aspects of the Health Department.79 Under Logue, the now supreme New Haven Redevelopment Agency became so powerful that locals jokingly referred to it, in this height of the Cold War, as the “Kremlin,” with Logue as “czar.” Frank O’Brion, the banker who chaired the New Haven Redevelopment Authority, endorsed the importance of having someone like Logue at the helm: “We learned—and all cities doing this will learn—that it is essential to have a co-ordinator with power to get things done.”80

  The plan for physically redeveloping New Haven that Lee and Logue embraced had originally been commissioned from Logue’s former professor at Yale, the planner Maurice Rotival, in 1941. A version had been distributed publicly in 1944 as a thirty-four-page pamphlet titled Tomorrow Is Here (cleverly referencing Le Corbusier’s 1929 classic, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning) and then had been updated by Rotival several times, most recently in 1953. Rotival’s plan called for reversing the city’s declining fortunes by substantially remaking its physical face. Such a call for dramatic action fit well with the times. After all, a herculean full-blown American
effort had recently won World War II for the United States’ floundering allies, and now, after the war, the nation was helping reconstruct severely damaged European cities. Logue made the analogy explicit when he urged that “the Marshall Plan has much to teach us about how to approach slums and blight.”81

  Logue’s admiration for Rotival as his Yale Law School teacher contributed to his enthusiasm for utilizing Tomorrow Is Here as the basis for the city’s required general plan. Back then, Margaret Logue had even tagged along to watch Rotival’s fabled performances. “He would say, ‘You’ve got this going up the coast, and then you’ve this going up the river valley, and they all converge here, and’—drawing with different colored markers—‘see what could be done if you could do this?’”82 The Logues often brought home the large paper sketches that Rotival dashed off in his lectures to adorn their student-apartment walls. Lee and Logue had dismissed other planners as useless theoreticians, but they trusted Rotival, who, Logue explained, “was unusual,… a planner who had seen his plans happen.”83

  AUTOMOBILITY FOR ECONOMIC SURVIVAL

  Rotival’s vision for a new New Haven that inspired Lee and Logue was heavily influenced by the sensibilities of Le Corbusier, with whom he had collaborated in the 1930s in Algeria. The French-born planner and engineer Rotival went on to work extensively in the developing world, including in such cities as Baghdad and Caracas, giving him a shared experience with Logue.84 A basic principle that Rotival drew from this background, and which he applied to New Haven, was that the modern city must be oriented around the car. Accordingly, Rotival’s plan for New Haven tied the city’s future to updating its historic role as a distribution center: whereas once ships and rails had dispersed New Haven’s industrial products, now highways must serve as the lifeblood of the city’s future development as a trade and service center for the entire southern New England region. “Fresh, healthy arteries,” Rotival told Architectural Forum in 1958, “encourage all kinds of tissue to grow around them,” conveying optimism about the future with the same bodily metaphors that at the time commonly portrayed slums as “diseased” and cities as “dying.”85

  From his first 1941 plan, Rotival had proposed positioning New Haven at the crossroads of highways, many of which became realities: a shoreline interstate that would eventually be I-95; the Connector (Route 34) that would transport people from there to a reinvigorated downtown and link the harbor to the Green; a north-south roadway (Route 91) that would tie New Haven to points northward; and a “circumferential route” to move traffic efficiently around the city, which would inspire much discussion but never be built. When the dramatic swirls of blue ink on his plans became new highways, Rotival promised, office buildings and retail stores would follow as the engine rooms for the city’s new postindustrial economy. And classic Corbusian “towers in the park” would replace blighted neighborhoods, housing residents in more modern and sanitary homes surrounded by green space.86

  New Haven’s urban renewers unambivalently embraced Rotival’s recommendation to improve road access. In a 1959 article published in Traffic Quarterly Logue asked, “Is it possible for a city, any city, to make its peace with the automobile and to provide an environment where car and man can get along together?” He answered by arguing that highways were the only way to protect cities from being destroyed or abandoned by the large quantity of cars flooding the nation. Highway planning had been in the works in Connecticut since the 1930s, and after the interruption of depression and war, massive construction—like it or not—was remaking the landscape. By 1950, this tiny state had more roads per square mile than any other.87 The hugely expensive Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 only further fed the state’s appetite for roads, providing as it did federal subsidies covering 90 percent of construction costs. Lee, Logue, and Rotival concurred that New Haven’s future health would depend on shrewdly locating the city in Connecticut’s emerging highway grid. Staff worked hard negotiating with state road planners in Hartford to place I-95, Route 91, and the Connector in locations that they felt would best serve the city.

  The urban renewers also pinned their hopes on improving car mobility within New Haven. They had inherited a city laid out in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with narrow streets for horses and carriages, later adapted to electric streetcars. New Haven had only recently given up its trolleys, the last city in Connecticut to do so.88 When automobiles had arrived on the scene in the first decades of the twentieth century, congestion mounted. Motivated by Rotival’s plan, Lee and Logue called for wider, straighter, faster-moving main streets; abundant—preferably off-street—parking; and secondary streets dead-ended to discourage drivers from threading their way through residential neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs, critic though she was of urban renewal, praised New Haven’s traffic commissioner William McGrath in her Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961 as “brilliant” for schemes that she felt would ultimately favor more efficient bus and truck service over automobiles.89 Lee and Logue had no doubts that New Haven would have to be more motor-friendly to survive. Lee promised his constituents, “We are taking the town out of the eighteenth century and projecting it into the twenty-first.”90

  Adjusting New Haven to the automobile shaped new residential projects as well, in hopes that mimicking aspects of car-oriented suburbia would increase their appeal. New luxury apartment towers in the Oak Street area close to downtown were publicized as “town living in the modern manner,” which meant plenty of parking on the landscaped grounds.91 John Johansen designed the Florence Virtue Homes in the African American neighborhood of Dixwell as a modernist, concrete-block, garden apartment–type complex with buildings occupying only 16 percent of its landscaped site. Front and back yards for each townhouse, curvy roads, and off-street parking contributed to a suburban feel.92 The adjacent Dixwell Plaza extended the anti-urban, village-like concept with a new K–4 school topped by a bell tower, a church, a library, and a community center. A shopping arcade that resembled a suburban-strip shopping center with parking was intended to serve as the new commercial heart of the Dixwell neighborhood.

  Improving automobile access to downtown New Haven became the linchpin of the strategy. Although retaining and recruiting manufacturers who offered good jobs to New Haven’s large working class were top priorities for the urban renewers, they recognized that they must simultaneously nurture a postindustrial economy. Businesses specializing in communications, television, hospitals, and medical research, they hoped, would eventually put down roots alongside the Connector, with its easy access to downtown, Yale, and the world outside via I-95. For now, their best hope lay with capitalizing on the city’s traditional importance as a market town for the region and reinvigorating its retail appeal. If mass consumption was driving prosperity in postwar America, then it should work in New Haven as well.93

  Before the 1940s, New Haven had faced little commercial competition from the surrounding area. In fact, since the early twentieth century, Malley’s department store had promoted itself as “the Metropolitan Store of Connecticut.” A manager of a large downtown clothing store, J. Johnson & Sons, remembered back to the 1920s, when “New Haven was the leading city in the state for shopping” and “we used to wait for the buses to bring people in from [the] towns.”94 But times were changing: Gamble-Desmond department store shut its doors in 1953, Sears Roebuck left its cramped downtown New Haven home for a spacious new branch store in suburban Hamden in 1956, Stanley Dry Goods Co. and Shartenberg’s department store closed in 1962, and shopping centers popped up one after another in suburbs surrounding the city. Downtown’s share of all retail sales in the New Haven metropolitan area plunged from 88 percent in 1948 to only 48 percent by 1963. In the first year after the twenty-nine-store Hamden Plaza Shopping Center opened in 1955, it did $33 million in sales, most of it diverted from New Haven stores. By 1960, a new ninety-store complex, the Connecticut Post Shopping Center, opened in Milford a few miles southwest of New Haven, convenient to both the new Connecticut
Turnpike and the Merritt Parkway. A smaller development would soon follow to the east. And Hamden Plaza to the north was doubling in size.95 The City of New Haven was fast losing shoppers to fierce competition from its own suburbs.

  But what really set off alarm bells was learning from a Louis Harris survey that Logue secretly commissioned in 1956 that not only were a growing number of suburbanites shunning downtown New Haven, but also city residents were increasingly patronizing the new suburban shopping centers. Forty percent of the respondents said they visited the central business district (CBD) less often than they used to, while only 12 percent claimed to go more frequently. Fifty-six percent testified to doing more shopping in nearby Hamden. They cited congested streets, inadequate parking, and old-fashioned stores as their reasons for heading out of town—not downtown—to shop.96 A decline in downtown customers meant both lower profits for retailers and fewer tax dollars for the city, whether from falling downtown property values or, even worse, empty stores. By the mid-1950s, 17 percent of the floor space in the area that would become the Church Street Project, a modern retail center, was already vacant. Although the CBD made up less than 1 percent of the city’s total land area, it contributed a quarter of all tax revenues. Continued retail deterioration, on top of the steady departure of manufacturing, would prove devastating to the city’s coffers.97

  Faced with this impending disaster, Lee and Logue hatched plans to demolish the three square blocks at the heart of downtown New Haven and replace them with the Church Street Project, consisting of new Malley’s and Macy’s department stores, the Chapel Square Mall with smaller specialty shops, and a huge attached parking garage. In many ways, it was an effort to beat the suburbs at their own game, to build a bigger, better “regional shopping center in the heart of the city,” as Logue’s office put it. The Redevelopment Agency carefully studied suburban shopping centers for models, going so far as taking staff on a field trip to Shoppers World in Framingham, Massachusetts. The goal was to introduce features into the Church Street Project, such as interior walkways between the parking garage and stores, that made shopping in the city as comfortable—and safe—as shopping in the suburbs, particularly for women. One promotional brochure claimed that the shopper would be “protected from the elements wherever she may walk within the New Haven Center.” Multiple images of a blond, middle-class consumer with shopping bag and purse in hand were superimposed on a baseball diamond–shape map of the New Haven metropolitan area, with all roads heading toward home plate.98