Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Prospective retail tenants confirmed that access to parking and the Connector mattered significantly in their decisions. Malley’s, in fact, chose to move from its historic home facing the Green to a new location closer to the Connector and the new massive Temple Street Parking Garage. Macy’s made it clear that it would use New Haven as a foothold for its planned expansion into the New England market only if its store enjoyed proximity to highways and parking. Soon after the garage was completed in 1963, Macy’s officials congratulated Mayor Lee and acknowledged “the chief reason we are coming to New Haven is to tie into that structure.” They also lauded the “spur connect[ing] the Connecticut Turnpike to the downtown section of New Haven” and “the ramps which lead directly to Macy’s parking facilities.” Jack I. Straus, chair of Macy’s board, could not have been blunter: Macy’s will go “where there is good ingress and egress to a city, plus inexpensive parking provided by municipally operated setups … We at Macy’s will not build any store without this assurance.”99 Pressure was on closer to home as well. In a survey Lee commissioned of New Haven’s voters before the November 1959 election, parking downtown emerged as their greatest concern.100

  The importance that New Haven’s postwar planners gave to the automobile was hardly surprising. Since the 1920s, depictions of what the city of the future would look like—in architectural circles as well as popular magazines and movies—centered on the wonders of the car. Le Corbusier famously imagined future urbanity as nodes on superhighways; drivers would speed from one “auto-port” of high-rise office towers or residential skyscrapers to another.101 In the late 1930s, another prominent European modernist, Sigfried Giedion, argued that highways were “the new form of the city,” requiring that “the actual structure of the city … be changed” to better suit the automobile. When, in the late 1950s—just as Lee and Logue were reinventing New Haven—the modernist architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer had the opportunity to construct a new futurist city from scratch for Brazil’s new capital of Brasilia, they designed it around two “radial arteries” to facilitate traffic flow that were lined with separate superblock sectors designated for civic life, commerce, and residences.102 Even the utopian urbanism of homegrown American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright, Broadacre City, revolved around the automobile.103

  Ordinary Americans encountered the same message that the future belonged to the car everywhere, but particularly at the enormously influential world’s fairs mounted frequently during the interwar period in Chicago, San Diego, Dallas, and New York. These fairs introduced visitors to all forms of modernism—in architecture, industry, and domestic life—but the automobile took pride of place. Exhibitions, many sponsored by auto manufacturers eager to sell cars and, even more importantly, to sell Americans on the nation’s need to invest heavily in massive highway construction, hammered home that the automobile was the key to social and economic progress. At the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40, with its theme of “Building the World of Tomorrow,” the biggest hit was the General Motors “Highways and Horizons” pavilion, featuring a sixteen-minute “Futurama” conveyor-belt ride. Twenty-eight thousand visitors a day peered down from moving armchairs onto a thirty-six-thousand-square-foot miniaturized model of the United States as imagined in 1960. In this America of tomorrow, multilane “Magic Motorways” traversed the landscape, safely accommodating automobile speeds up to a hundred miles an hour as they shot across elevated overpasses and wide-span suspension bridges, through rugged mountain passes, and around dramatic cloverleafs. Just to make sure they got the point, visitors received buttons reading “I Have Seen the Future” upon disembarking.104 Given the persistent linkage of the car with progress, it was no wonder that a promotional brochure for Malley’s new downtown New Haven store celebrated its proximity to the futuristic Connector with “We’re a real Turnpike head-turner!”105

  SEPARATING FUNCTIONS

  Rotival’s proposal for the physical renewal of New Haven introduced Lee and Logue to several other modernist planning principles, beyond the importance of accommodating the automobile. Among the most fundamental was the concept of separation of functions. As Rotival put it in Tomorrow Is Here, “Each section of the city would be defined so that housing will not interfere with industry, nor industry with the market, nor transportation with parks and playgrounds. Yet all are tied together so that each section operates efficiently.”106 Here was the city made up of parts of a well-calibrated machine that Logue had appreciated from his aerial perspective as a bombardier during World War II. With this ideal of separated functions in mind, the renewers targeted areas of mixed use—where residential, commercial, and light industrial overlapped—for renewal activity. In the immigrant gateway of Oak Street, the largely Italian Wooster Square, and the predominantly African American Dixwell, garment sweatshops or machine shops were often cheek by jowl with grocery stores or rows of tenement flats.

  In these neighborhoods, Lee and Logue determined to separate uses, convinced that their proximity contributed to disorderly, run-down residential areas and overlooking how that mix might have kept them affordable. A disastrous fire in a Wooster Square garment factory in 1957, which killed fifteen people, helped the renewers make their case for the necessity of separating functions. When the developer of University Towers, the first high-rise apartment building slated for the Oak Street redevelopment area, tried to convince Lee and Logue to permit a supermarket and restaurant on-site, going so far as forwarding a newspaper article praising a Parisian-style eatery in a similar project in New York, Logue shot back, “Dear Pete, We love Paris, but we are not interested in a banquet facility for the University Towers area.” They feared that any deviation from the purely residential character of this project could undermine the challenging task of selling apartments to middle-class New Haven residents already tempted by comfortable suburban living.107

  The same commitment to dividing functions guided the relocation of the proposed north-south Route 91 so that it divided Wooster Square into a more purely residential quarter and an industrial district, which then was expanded to include a new 350-acre area named Long Wharf, built on reclaimed land along the harbor.108 Long Wharf housed a new wholesale food distribution center, a modern reinvention of the outdoor street market that planners relocated from downtown. In the old market, just minutes from the stately Green, vendors had hawked fruits and vegetables from the open backs of trucks; butchers had weighed squawking poultry on open-air scales; and cars, trucks, handcarts, and shoppers all had competed for space on refuse-filled streets.109 To those like Rotival, Lee, and Logue, who dreamed of a gleaming downtown New Haven, this market was an unfortunate vestige of a bygone era—inefficient, unsanitary, inaccessible to transportation, and an impediment to the retail and office development they considered more appropriate for an up-to-date CBD. Refrigerated units, well-ordered wholesalers’ stalls, and ample parking away from downtown in Long Wharf seemed much more appealing.

  Logue hoped that by consolidating industry and wholesale commerce at Long Wharf—convenient to I-95 and rail and water transport—the city’s new industrial center would serve as a beacon attracting further investment and jobs. As a former labor man, Logue knew how dependent the city and its workers still were on industry. He watched with alarm how the proportion of New Haveners employed in manufacturing jobs was plummeting: 50 percent in 1950 and 31 percent in 1960; by 1971, it would be only 25 percent. If cities were to remain “the best sites for industry,” Logue wrote in The New York Times, then their traditional attractions of “skilled workers” and “variety of suppliers and networks of communications and transportation” would not suffice. Cities must also encourage the replacement of “factory buildings which are obsolescent, or worse” with new-style, horizontally sprawling plants in proper industrial corridors, and not simply allow them to flee to the open stretches of suburbia. So it was considered a great victory when the Armstrong Rubber Company, Gant Shirtmakers, and C. W. Blakeslee, a longtime local manufacturer of pre-stre
ssed concrete, all opened substantial new factories in the city’s new Long Wharf industrial area.110

  BUILDING MODERN

  Although remaking the city to welcome cars and separate functions followed the rule book of modernist planning precepts, the third major goal of Lee and Logue’s physical renewal of New Haven came more from their own inclinations than from Rotival’s instruction. They decided that constructing architecturally modern buildings would send just the right message that New Haven was reinventing itself. Vincent Scully, a Yale architectural historian who was a native New Havener and later an apostle of postmodernism and a harsh critic of the city’s urban renewal, recalled how around 1950 even he embraced modernism. “We wanted Modern Architecture. What did we mean by that? On the whole we meant that we wanted forms nobody had ever seen before … Somehow we wanted to wipe the present clean of the past, to sweep it pure of contaminating objects. Everything had to begin anew and be closed anew. We would brook no compromise.”111

  Modernism of the 1950s era fulfilled this ambition well, as one of its central tenets was that new standards of design were universally appropriate and superior to indigenous and historical styles. With their “curtain walls” of glass, shunning of ornament and other inessentials for a more austere “functionalism,” and innovative use of steel, reinforced concrete, and other alternatives to the traditional building materials of wood, brick, and stone, modern structures worldwide would have more in common with one another than with their own particular local and national architectural traditions.112 Scully connected New Haven’s renewal to this larger modernist design project when he recalled, cynically in retrospect, that after Rotival returned to Yale from Caracas around 1950, he regularly encountered him at the college where they both were fellows: “He would often reappear in the common room after a long absence, rotund, genial, and well turned out, with the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole. I would normally say something like ‘Ah, Maurice, where have you been?’ and he would reply ‘I have been planning—[pause]—Madagascar.’ It was all very impressive and utterly destructive of places, and it achieved its full scope in the Redevelopment of New Haven.”113

  Making decisions about New Haven’s architecture might well have reminded Logue of debates that had raged in India. Architects, employing an almost utopian, physical determinism, felt they could modernize the developing world through imposing “advanced” aesthetic concepts that would erase a more “primitive” or colonial past. So, for example, Le Corbusier’s design for the new Punjabi capital of Chandigarh in India rejected Albert Mayer’s original plan, which valorized indigenous materials and styles. Backed by the modernizer Nehru, who sought a city that expressed the nation’s faith in the future, Le Corbusier insisted on “brut concrete” rather than local brick and stone and set out to expunge all references to Indian tradition, which Mayer had promoted as a way of being modern “without robbing the Indians of what is distinctly theirs.”114 Likewise, modern building in New Haven, the urban renewers thought, could help New Haven transcend its architectural—and thereby other sorts of—provincialism, so evident in the dreary, old-fashioned Victorian buildings and shabby storefronts downtown. Cutting-edge modern architecture would signal New Haven’s embrace of the future as well as differentiate cosmopolitan New Haven from both middle-brow suburban Connecticut, overrun with ersatz colonial-style home building, and its rusting urban neighbor of Bridgeport.115

  Lee and Logue also hoped that showcasing the work of prominent architects would lend prestige to New Haven’s rebirth, particularly when combined with what was happening on Yale’s campus, where President Griswold commissioned no fewer than twenty-six new buildings between 1951 and 1963.116 As Time magazine noted, “In the past few years more advanced architecture has risen on Yale’s 150 acres in New Haven, Conn., than in all of Manhattan.” Rejecting traditional collegiate Gothic, Time continued, Griswold “turned to a number of the most lustrous and far-out contemporary master builders” who “adhered to no single style, only to the modern mood.”117 In particular, Griswold used modern architecture to mark Yale’s newfound commitment to the future-oriented sciences, long an underfunded and underappreciated stepchild at a university with historic strength in the humanities.118 Scully concurred that Griswold became “one of the greatest of architectural patrons” because “he built out of his own integral and long-standing passion to be modern.”119 Town and gown working together, the renewers thought, might put New Haven on the world’s architectural map.

  Lee and Logue came to their posts in 1954 already primed for modernist design because it fit well with their progressive cultural and political identities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ed and Margaret Logue had been attracted to modern styles when they fantasized in spring 1948 about furnishing their first apartment once Margaret graduated from Smith and joined Ed in Philadelphia. Margaret wrote to him excitedly about a feature she had read in Life magazine about homes by a modernist architect—“I want an Alden Dow house”—and a couple of weeks later, enthused, “I’m dying to be spending all our money getting some good furniture I can call ours. I want to go to the Museum of Modern Art before I get anything, ’cause I might get some good ideas there.” A few days later she wrote that she was eager to “look into the all-modern furniture store.” Margaret’s keenness for modern design was interspersed in her letters with political commentary condemning racial segregation and endorsing liberal candidates in Smith’s mock Democratic Party convention, indicating that all were a part of a consistent worldview. A year later, as Margaret contemplated their next move to Hartford, she wrote, “I’d love a Lustron home,” referring to the innovative, prefabricated, porcelain-enameled steel houses developed to meet the housing crisis after World War II.120

  Soon after the Logues returned to New Haven in 1953, they decided to build a new house in the modern style. They hired Chester Bowles’s son Ches, who had recently graduated from the Yale School of Architecture, to design it. “We live in the only modern house in our part of town,” Logue proudly reported to his Yale class secretary. A local paper described it as a “red-beamed, glass-walled house of somewhat Japanese design,” and in fact many of its features were inspired by a Japanese home designed by the modernist architect Junzo Yoshimura that was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953.121 This was the first of three modern houses Ches Bowles would design for the Logues, the latter two built on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Lee brought a similar passion for modern design with him to the mayor’s job. While working at Yale in the late 1940s, he did a part-time public relations stint for the Connecticut branch of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).122 One of Lee’s first symbolic acts upon becoming mayor was to redecorate his office in the modern style. He later urged the New Haven fire chief to put Danish modern furniture in purple and orange and bare concrete walls into his office in the new central fire station. The fire chief resisted, with, “Damn it, Mayor, the men will think I’m a fairy.”123

  Logue and Lee used modern design to make a cultural statement about themselves, and also about the city they were deeply engaged in revitalizing. Lee often bragged about the “panorama of greatest architects” who were remaking New Haven: “As we began to replace and rebuild after we had the blitz of demolition, I felt we were going to … rebuild our city once. We should build it [in] as beautiful a fashion as we could. And the answer to that was that we should get the best architects.”124 And indeed the New Haven lineup became a who’s who of modernist designers, among them Edward Larrabee Barnes, Marcel Breuer, Gordon Bunshaft, John M. Johansen, Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, Kevin Roche, Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, Chloethiel Woodard Smith, and Mies van der Rohe.125

  Despite their proclivity toward modernism, it took time for Lee and Logue to figure out how to incorporate good modern design into their urban renewal plans. Much of that learning happened on the job, often through disappointment. Their colleague Allan Talbot recalled how unhappy Lee and Logue were with the first buildings to go up alongsid
e the Connector, particularly the prosaic, squat, ten-story, five-hundred-thousand-square-foot Southern New England Telephone Company headquarters. “During the construction phase, the project was a source of pride to the administration, but when the buildings were finished, their drab design and the generally sterile appearance of the new Oak Street [convinced] Lee and his staff … that more attention would have to be paid to design.”126 It was particularly humiliating to have the editor of Architectural Forum describe the telephone company building as “that great green hulk of a building which looks like it was designed by the janitor.”127 Lee also confided to close associates that the first two apartment towers on Oak Street were “the most God awful-looking things I ever laid eyes on.”128

  For his part, Logue was having deep reservations about the design of the Chapel Square Mall by summer 1958. He wrote to the developer Roger Stevens rather grandiosely that “the final reputation of the Stevens project as well as its commercial success will depend a good deal on the architectural quality of the finished product. The project will have a much greater impact on New Haven than even Rockefeller Center has on New York.” When by mid-September he saw little improvement and had received a rebuke from the project’s architects “that my staff was not competent to review and criticize their work,” Logue insisted on hiring a design consultant for the city “who would assist with our review and who would be a man of such outstanding reputation that the question of our competence [to critique design work] could not be raised again.”