Saving America's Cities
Page 12
The planning profession had emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century when urban residents and their local governments wanted more control over how their mushrooming cities were developing. Planners’ role was strengthened when the crucial tool of zoning was upheld in 1926 by the United States Supreme Court in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty, which confirmed localities’ constitutional authority to regulate private property in the broad public interest. The New Deal accelerated planning activity, but it was really the needs of World War II and the postwar boom that transformed a half-hearted, often Chamber of Commerce–dominated operation in most cities and towns into the responsibility of full-time professionals, employed in municipal government and armed with new zoning ordinances.107 In keeping with these trends, New Haven had established its City Plan Commission early, in 1913, but the body had neither funds nor a professional staff until 1941. Soon thereafter, at Alderman Lee’s encouragement, Rotival was hired to develop the city’s first comprehensive plan. By the time Lee and Logue took over in 1954, the city’s planning department had become a legitimate part of New Haven’s municipal government.108 But although its size grew under Lee’s administration, “it had a curiously subordinate place,” Wolfinger observed, as the new “cosmopolitan professionals” were “much more self-consciously pragmatic and accustomed to negotiation rather than subordination in their dealings with politicians and businessmen.”109
In the 1960s, some planners—unhappy with how their profession had become subservient to redevelopment—responded by reinventing themselves as advocates for ordinary residents in the urban renewal process, positioning themselves to explicitly challenge their cities’ redevelopment programs. “Advocacy planners,” they called themselves, adopting the language of Paul Davidoff, a professor of planning at the University of Pennsylvania and then Hunter College, who published a call to arms in the field’s major journal in 1965: “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning.”110 Although advocacy planners sought to salvage their profession from what they considered the taint of autocratic redevelopment, they in their own way, and quite intentionally, contributed to the decline in the planning profession’s authority as experts, as they aspired to become “value-driven” rather than “value-neutral” public advocates. Planners came out of the urban renewal era with more work than ever but with an altered professional standing—weaker politically in elite urban policy circles and with a radical wing that explicitly challenged practitioners’ claim to expertise.111 Logue summed it up with his characteristic bluntness: “Planners are losing ground. Responsibility for the replanning of cities is moving into the hands of administrators.” And he added, wishfully perhaps, “Surprisingly, the planners do not seem to mind.”112
Architects fared somewhat better in urban renewal’s new pecking order of professions. Rudolph’s Temple Street Parking Garage became one of Logue and Lee’s prime showplaces, and they put great effort into attracting other prominent architects to redesign downtown. These designers benefited from the new government patronage made possible with urban renewal, even as their work was constrained by strict federal regulations and cost limitations. Architects were partners in urban renewal, designing civic buildings and defining the aesthetics of this ambitious national program. The architect Ieoh Ming “I. M.” Pei, who worked as a staff architect on urban renewal projects for the developer William “Big Bill” Zeckendorf in the 1950s (and did the plan for Boston’s Government Center for Logue soon after forming his own firm in the early 1960s), explained that “after the war, there was a very difficult time. What little building other than that [urban renewal] was probably all captured by S.O.M. [Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a major American architecture firm] … Those of us who were outside had to pick up just these little things, you know, like urban redevelopment, low-cost housing.”113
The architect John Johansen, whose Florence Virtue Homes and neighboring school and church in the Dixwell section of New Haven were among his first civic commissions, poignantly recounted how getting the New Haven job changed his career. “Until I was forty years old [1956], only commissions for houses came my way. I may say for the solace of the young struggling architects of any generation that this was a long wait. I was filled with impatience and envy of established architects … I was bitter and in despair observing the inequities of my profession.” Johansen also recalled how competing for urban renewal work made him by necessity more innovative with materials: “In the desperate effort to gain commissions for public buildings, the young architect promises and somehow produces designs for buildings at dangerously low budgets. One inexpensive material with some substance is concrete block. In three early commissions in New Haven, Connecticut,… a community development was realized in concrete block.”114 Pei, too, claimed that he learned a lot from the ten years he spent doing urban renewal projects, particularly “how to work within the constraints of a budget and a lot of other design demands that were very concrete and specific.”115
Urban renewal work in New Haven changed the career trajectory of Paul Rudolph as well, giving him just the patronage he sought to design monumental civic buildings. An analysis of his oeuvre demonstrates that his publicly funded commissions clustered between 1956 and 1975, almost the exact bookends of government investment in urban renewal. Of Rudolph’s forty publicly funded commissions over this period, twelve occurred under the direct oversight of Logue and another five originated from officials with close ties to Logue, such as Dick Lee, Tom Appleby, and Ed Logue’s brother Frank, who became mayor of New Haven in the 1970s, together totaling 43 percent of Rudolph’s lifelong public work.116
But as much as architects may have benefited, they still found themselves subject to redevelopment administrators’ tight control. When Logue got wind that the developers of the University Towers project on the fringe of downtown had dropped the prominent modernist architect Hugh Stubbins of Cambridge and were substituting the New York firm of Kelly & Grutzen, he was furious and, in the words of eyewitness Wolfinger, “in violent, abusive and obscene language” he told them that K&G would never participate in any redevelopment program in New Haven. They finally compromised on another New York firm, Kahn & Jacobs.117 Not far from downtown, the architects of the Conté School in Wooster Square also had to contend with Logue’s strong views. Natalie de Blois, who as a young architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill worked with Gordon Bunshaft on the school, recalled a dispute with Logue over the siting of the building. Bunshaft’s original scheme, which set it back from the street, met with Logue’s “No way are we going to have a plaza in front of that building.” She went on, “So Gordon had to listen to him … Logue said there had to be a building right on the building line. It was very important. I certainly thought it was a valid criticism.”118
Although some architects would complain he was intrusive, working with architects remained one of Logue’s favorite activities throughout his long career in urban redevelopment. As Ted Liebman, a staff architect for Logue in Boston and New York, put it, “He loved them [the architects]. He loved the architectural meetings … The picture of him that I thought was the best [has him] looking at that model, [thinking] this is something that’s going to be a new idea. And you see the twinkle in his eye.”119 Logue would in fact work with many of the major architects and firms on the East Coast, most of them well-established second-generation modernists. And he would return repeatedly to proven architectural veterans of urban renewal, who accepted his authority as development administrator. He even prided himself on contributing to architects’ maturation. “There are many good architects who have talent, who have not had the opportunity to show it prominently enough. And there are other architects who haven’t been stretched enough, and we help to provide a little of that stretching.”120
Logue was not alone in arguing that architecture and urban renewal mutually benefited each other. Charles Abrams, chair of the City Planning Division at Columbia University and at times a critic of urban renewal, applauded “its serious effort
… to make design a major factor,” citing in particular the “plazas and pedestrian malls, underground parking, and a better relationship between buildings.” He even singled out New Haven for incorporating “schools as part of the project” and successfully convincing factory owners “to employ architects” rather than depend “on stock plans pulled out of a file by an industrial engineer.” Delighted that prominent architects were working in urban renewal all over the country, Abrams concluded that redevelopment was teaching cities and developers “to add design to profit criteria.”121
Not everyone, however, praised the architectural legacy of urban renewal. Robert A. M. Stern, already embarked on his own path toward postmodernism, accused urban renewal’s architects of promoting “heroic” designs rigidly loyal to orthodox modernist principles rather than more flexibly responding to how people actually used a particular urban site. He singled out “piazza compulsion,” obsession with towers, and technologically innovative “mega-structures” as common mistakes.122 Even the Temple Street Parking Garage, designed by Stern’s Yale professor Paul Rudolph, came in for criticism, with its “arbitrary” and “unbending geometry of stacks of identically sized structural elements”—the aqueduct-inspired arches much beloved by Logue and Lee—and for an accommodation to the automobile that was “perhaps too expensive and too prominent.”123 Logue, Abrams, and many other patrons of the era’s urban architecture would not have agreed with Stern’s critique. But both champion Abrams and critic Stern recognized that architects played a major role in shaping the aesthetic vision behind the urban renewal program.
Downtown New Haven’s renewal also sheds light on how a third group—real estate developers—was affected by the federal government’s effort to incentivize them to invest time and treasure in American cities. Once an urban renewal agency had planned, cleared (using its powers of eminent domain if necessary), and prepared the site, it hired a developer to purchase the land at the much-reduced price made possible by government subsidies. From there the developer’s job involved arranging financing, overseeing design and construction, getting extensive approvals, and marketing the project. Many of the problems that Logue and Lee encountered with the Church Street Project—beyond the gross mismatch between their grand ambition and the declining appeal of downtown New Haven—could be traced to the inexperience of the developer Roger Stevens, with whom they began meeting in 1955 and employed in 1957. Stevens was a real estate investor who had bought the Empire State Building and “flipped” it for a hefty profit. He had also produced Broadway shows, was a bigwig in the national Democratic Party, and had close connections with Yale. From 1953 to 1955, Stevens had tried—and eventually failed—to develop a proposal for the Prudential site in Boston that shared with the Church Street Project the ambition to combine the shopping ease of the suburban mall with the appeal of the big city. That this New York sophisticate was interested in redeveloping downtown New Haven thrilled Lee and Logue—until they discovered, too late, that there was an enormous difference between being a successful real estate entrepreneur and having the kind of know-how required of a real estate developer working within the complex environment of urban renewal.
Logue acknowledged to Eugene Rostow, dean of Yale Law School, what a big mistake he had made with Stevens. “At every turn we have either had to club him or solve his problems for him.”124 Later, he reflected, “We overestimated his ability as a developer. Roger was a strong real estate man, and there were few who could match his ability to buy existing buildings, rearranging the financing, and turning a profit. But developing raw land…” Yale would temporarily bail Stevens out with a $4.5 million loan to the Church Street Project, but by early 1964, having concluded that he “just got tired of throwing money away,” Stevens recruited two construction companies to take over and bowed out.125 Two years later, in the pages of Fortune magazine, Logue and Stevens were still duking it out. Stevens complained of the excessive government bureaucracy. “All along the line you had to have five commissioners approving everything … I wouldn’t go into another urban-development deal for anything.” Logue retorted acidly, “That’s a very wise decision.”126
Other developers working in downtown New Haven proved more successful at figuring out how to make urban renewal work for them. The developers of the University Towers apartments—a partnership of Jerome Lyle Rappaport and Theodore Shoolman of Boston and Seon Pierre Bonan of Connecticut and New York—succeeded because they understood subtleties in the rules of federal urban renewal. (That sophistication would also help them in Boston, where they developed the controversial Charles River Park luxury apartment complex on the site of the city’s leveled West End neighborhood.) In New Haven, Rappaport, Shoolman, and Bonan made use of an esoteric provision allowing developers to lease with an option to buy rather than purchase the land outright. This stipulation limited the Rappaport group’s financial exposure and allowed it to outbid Yale for the University Towers site, upsetting Logue and Lee’s expectation that Yale and the developer Stevens would win the auction required by the federal government.127 On the morning of May 8, 1957, in the aldermanic chambers of New Haven’s city hall, the bidding mounted to $1.15 million—far above the $700,000 minimum bid set and squeaking past Yale’s authorized limit of $1.14 million. Logue described the startling turn of events as “an auction that would probably chill your soul.” It certainly chilled the friendship between Dick Lee and the Yale president Whitney Griswold for a long while.128
Excluding developers from early planning gave enormous power to redevelopment agencies, but it also increased the risks of embarking on unfeasible projects and not attracting capable developers down the line. As late as 1971, a third of the projects begun nationally between 1950 and 1959 had property still lying empty; more than half of those started between 1960 and 1964 contained unsold land.129 (These vacant plots, often left overgrown and strewn with junk, did little for urban renewal’s reputation.) Like architects, those developers who did take on projects needed great skill and long patience to work with government agencies—and within government regulations and restricted budgets.
Ralph Taylor’s decision to leave his job as executive director of redevelopment in New Haven to become CEO for the developer James H. Scheuer testified to the burgeoning opportunities urban renewal brought to those Taylor described as this “new breed of businessmen … concentrating on the redevelopment of areas cleared by the redevelopment process.” Scheuer’s impressive track record of promoting racial integration in housing attracted Taylor, and Taylor’s considerable experience as a redevelopment official appealed to Scheuer. During the next seven years Scheuer and Taylor sponsored over $100 million worth (almost $835 million today) of housing in redevelopment areas, including a huge 1,739-unit project in Southwest Washington called Capital Park.
In 1964, Scheuer was elected to his first of thirteen terms as a liberal congressman from the Bronx, thereby moving from being a developer astute about federal legislation to a federal legislator. A couple of years later, Taylor followed Scheuer into government, becoming assistant secretary for model cities and governmental relations.130 Scheuer’s and Taylor’s easy shuttling between the private and public sectors indicates how well integrated the realms of government and development became under federal urban renewal. Another developer, Pei’s boss Zeckendorf, embraced redevelopment work once he figured out in 1952 “the kind of financing you can get—city and state participation and the [federal underwriting] of real estate,” Pei recalled. “He told me that for the first time I don’t need bankers! Uncle Sam’s going to bank.”131
In the reshuffling of professional standing that resulted from urban renewal, planners, architects, and developers all continued to play crucial roles, and many benefited greatly from lucrative opportunities. If scoring, one might say that architects and developers were winners as direct recipients of government largesse, planners much less so. “In the days of urban renewal,” Pei confirmed, “the developer, the architect, and the city and st
ate [were] really working together. I’m not saying all equal, but they are all important.”132 But there was no question that all three specialized experts became dependent on the favor of urban renewal administrators like Logue, who were empowered through federal funding, insulated from local politics as usual, and connected to peers nationally by strong professional ties.
Through the programs it initiated and the money it spent, federal urban renewal in cities like New Haven extended the liberal state-building of the Great Depression and World War II into the postwar era. In fact, one might say that, beginning as it did in the 1950s, urban renewal bridged the two great mid-twentieth-century reform movements of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. A former New Haven alderman explained the work of the optimistic, “young, ambitious men” who undertook to renew New Haven in just this way. “They’d New-Dealed themselves to peace and prosperity, and they thought, ‘Now we’ll New-Deal ourselves to urban renewal.’”133