Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  When Harris addressed the National Commission hearing in 1967, he was challenging the authority of the urban renewers, Mayor Lee, and the black establishment. Harris contended that Mayor Lee was a dictator who used CPI not to improve people’s lives but to consolidate his power, including buying off “the black leadership”—older, more affluent, and more integrationist.73 When Sviridoff protested that democracy was indeed at work—after all, Lee got reelected every two years, and with a strong black vote—Harris retorted that it was “because the people who have to eat work for him. That’s why he wins.”74

  It turned out that Harris had a sensitive finger on the pulse of black New Haven. His verbal disrupting of the National Commission hearings was one thing. A much greater racial challenge to Lee’s urban renewal regime would follow three months later, in August 1967. The nonfatal shooting of a young Puerto Rican man by the white proprietor of Tony’s Snack Bar in the Hill area, in what he claimed was self-defense against a knife attack, set off four nights of rioting in the city’s low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods. Although observers differed in how tightly they tied the riot to the city’s experience with urban renewal or linked it to the chain of urban uprisings across the country, it was hard not to hear echoes of the discussion at the Conté School the previous May. The turmoil of urban renewal and the failure to substantially improve conditions for many poor and minority residents had led to great frustration and anger, particularly among young men.

  New Haven’s civil disorders were not as violent as many that coursed through the nation’s cities that summer. The rioters mostly were black teenagers who threw rocks at windows and passing cars, set fires, and looted neighborhood stores. No one was killed, and only three were seriously injured. But more than four hundred people were arrested (the number was disputed), and damage totaled $1.1 million. New Haven’s worst day rated a B4 on the Kerner Commission’s scale of riot intensity, which ranged from a high of A1 to a low of E1, putting it at a middling level. Yet this score was still devastating in a city that, as Time magazine put it, “has pioneered nearly every program in the Great Society’s lexicon. Months and years before the Federal Government showed any interest in the cities, it had its own poverty and manpower-training projects, a rent-supplement demonstration, and a promising Head Start program. Washington had rewarded the city’s imaginative urban-renewal administration with a greatly disproportionate share of federal renewal money.”75

  The close student of New Haven Douglas Rae has concluded that “the fundamental issue behind the city’s incapacity to ‘deliver’ was the drying up of plant-gate opportunity for people without advanced education.” But as neither city leaders nor struggling black residents of New Haven could control the labor market, they blamed one another. Harris and other activists felt betrayed by the mayor when the police chief—tied more closely to the traditional party machine than Lee’s administration—ignored Lee’s promises to reduce police provocations and lift curfews.76 For his part, the mayor would remain disheartened by the riots and the city’s generally more polarized political atmosphere. In 1969, he would decide not to seek a ninth term, even though polls indicated that his popularity remained high, particularly among the city’s African American voters, where his approval hovered in the 80 to 90 percent range.77 Lee’s retreat paved the way for the return to power of the Democratic town committee chair Arthur T. Barbieri, marginalized for the better part of sixteen years as Lee built autonomous power bases with his federally funded urban renewal operation, CPI, and the CAC. Barbieri put his own man, veteran alderman Bartholomew Guida, in the mayor’s office, officially bringing to a close Lee’s urban renewal chapter.78

  PROBLEMS OF THEIR OWN MAKING

  Many of the difficulties that Lee and Logue encountered in successfully renewing New Haven could be attributed to factors outside their control: the unstoppable momentum of suburbanization and deindustrialization, limitations in what could be done under the housing acts, pernicious racism, a punishing tax structure, and political fragmentation in the metropolitan area. But they also made miscalculations that undermined their success in the long run. One of the most damaging was the way they went about redeveloping downtown New Haven. The renewers’ image of what a modern downtown New Haven should look like required attracting major retailers that promised to offer the city economic stability, workers plentiful jobs, and consumers the latest merchandise. Old downtown New Haven’s standard fare of dated stores, modest personal services, and cheap luncheonettes—many employing few staff beyond the owner’s family—seemed a remnant of the provincial past, not a path to a modern future.

  To be fair, the major chain and department stores that New Haven hoped to attract sent an unequivocal message rejecting having small local retailers as neighbors. According to an official of Sears Roebuck, these merchants—who rarely appealed to high-spending customers and often opposed changes downtown—discouraged the big stores from expanding downtown just as much as the better-known impediments of highway access, parking, and project delays.79 It also didn’t help that the private-sector financiers, particularly insurance companies, whose investment was making the Church Street Project possible, required that 65 to 70 percent of tenants have credit ratings equivalent to AAA, meaning a million dollars in net assets, which disqualified most Church Street merchants. Only the most financially secure could make the move to the Chapel Square Mall.80

  Motivated by their ideal of a modern downtown and faced with these external pressures, the urban renewers decided to marginalize small downtown retailers. Not surprisingly, Dahl identified them as the major opponents to downtown urban renewal. In fact, a jeweler, Robert R. Savitt, unhappy with the compensation the city offered for taking his store by eminent domain—located as it was smack in the middle of the area being leveled for the mall—embroiled the city in a suit that delayed the entire project for a couple of years.81 Savitt was not alone in fighting back. One hundred and twenty small downtown merchants, fearing for their livelihoods, banded together in 1958 as the Central Civic Association (CCA), mockingly perhaps inverting letters of the CAC.

  Their president, Leo S. Gilden, also the president of “Gilden’s, Inc., Jewelers for Four Generations,” then sent a letter to Mayor Lee, bitterly outlining the group’s grievances: They had not been informed of the Church Street Project or consulted before the public announcement; they were not invited to the Lawn Club celebratory luncheon disclosing the plans to the public but instead “first learned of all this via radio and newspaper”; and they—as taxpayers and servants of the New Haven public for many years—took great offense at the mayor’s recent statement “that you realize that perhaps some of the smaller businessmen could not survive this change but that in the long run the city would benefit from it.” Reminding Mayor Lee in the common parlance of the era “that this is a democracy that we live in,” Gilden insisted that “certainly the livlihoods [sic] and welfare of the thousands of people involved in this must be considered before the interests of outside capital,” referring to the project’s New York developer Roger Stevens and the major New York department store that Logue and Lee hoped to attract.82 The CCA then brought suit against the city. After a year, they got temporary quarters in prefabricated metal structures, with adjacent parking, and the promise of a 10 percent rental discount if and when they reopened in the Chapel Square Mall. But many dislocated businesses never made it to temporary headquarters, unable to foot the moving bill nor survive the long wait. And even some of the relocated fell by the wayside by the time the Chapel Square Mall finally opened in 1967, with its very high rents, almost a decade after the project’s announcement.

  Betting on big retail over small local merchants turned out to have been a questionable decision. Malley’s closed in 1983, Macy’s in 1993, and the Chapel Square Mall took a fatal dive not long thereafter. Department stores and national chains expected a certain margin of profit. When sales declined, they went under or abandoned downtown locations for more profitable suburban
malls. In contrast, small-scale independent merchants might have survived better, with their lower expectations for profit, stronger ties to the city, and greater flexibility to diversify their merchandise to suit the local market.83 The renewers’ decision to redevelop Church and Chapel Streets to mimic the architecture of a suburban mall—with its solid-wall exteriors, interior-facing courts, and attached parking—also limited whatever spillover effects might have benefited downtown more broadly, as customers arriving by car were contained inside the shopping center complex and not encouraged to venture beyond it. But Lee and Logue did not anticipate these obstacles to downtown’s long-term success when they enthusiastically set out to rival neighboring suburban shopping centers and to satisfy the big retail fish they hoped to hook. When running for office in 1963, Lee reassured voters that a “very real, live, vital, dynamic, and prosperous central city” was just around the corner. After “a long haul,” city residents could now look forward to much “better than what we had—a lot more than what my opponents wanted me to settle for, a hot dog stand and a Dairy Queen at Church and Chapel.”84

  ADAPTING TO A PARADIGM SHIFT

  The same year that Logue’s success in New Haven was rewarded with a job offer from Boston and Dahl clinched his reputation as a democratic theorist with the publication of Who Governs?, another influential treatise hit the bookstores, this one promoting a very different conception from Dahl’s about how democracy should work in cities. In time it gave ballast to participatory democratic critics of urban renewal in New Haven and elsewhere. It was Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, not a book of academic scholarship but nonetheless a learned one that would help transform expectations about what the “public” side of the equation should consist of (government officials were not sufficient) and what it meant to have citizen involvement in planning (more than organized interests must participate).85 The success of Death and Life would challenge urban renewers like Logue in new ways. By the end of the 1960s, any claims to a democratic city-building process would require tapping the local knowledge of neighborhood residents and giving them an explicit public role. Even in New Haven, citizen participation would gradually become more accepted and even expected, just when the funding faucets from Washington, it should be noted, were being shut off.

  In 1968, with surprising candor, Mayor Lee acknowledged how dramatically the ground had shifted away from established and expert pluralist democrats and toward more community control by participatory democrats. He told an interviewer, “The important thing now is neighborhood and community participation. People become involved in planning their own destiny and working out their own problems, neighborhood by neighborhood, and this can be the most exciting and perhaps the most rewarding of all.” Accordingly, CPI was decentralized into eight neighborhood corporations, and the CAC was quietly disbanded in 1969. Lee even admitted the CAC’s limitations:

  We were selecting people who were members of the Establishment, I suppose in one sense to provide the leadership on the grounds that we had no other leadership to turn to. And the people in the individual neighborhoods, to a certain extent, were accepting this passively … There were many participants in the neighborhood improvement programs, but there wasn’t any real sense of involvement. Everything in a sense came from City Hall. The thrust today, which is just getting under way, is from the neighborhood to City Hall.

  When pressed about whether this enormous change threatened him politically, Lee responded, “I’m more thoughtful than people appreciate, and I recognize the need for adaptation to different approaches.”86 Lee was surely also pushed to greater adaptability by a Ford Foundation report on CPI, carried out in June 1967 between the National Commission hearings and the riot but not made public until March 1968. While acknowledging CPI’s achievements, it was highly critical. The Ford evaluators insisted on the inadequacy of what “Professor Dahl” had described as Lee’s “executive-centered coalition” at “a time when urban people are demanding more of a voice in the decisions that control their lives.” The Ford Foundation, founding parent of CPI almost a decade earlier, had also changed with the times and now called for “a more contemporary and aggressive strategy … in order to broaden resident participation in the decision-making of the organization.” Speaking the language of participatory democracy, surely acquired through anxiously watching the upheavals in urban America during the 1960s, Ford concluded that “within a developing national climate of open urban democracy, no city can successfully keep to a control strategy in social development programming … No amount of technical expertise and public relations can make the control approach work.”87

  Much earlier, Ford had encountered similar pressures for greater popular participation in the community development work it funded in India. A Ford Foundation program letter from March 1960, titled “Grassroots Democracy Comes to Rajasthan,” detailed how this Indian state had implemented “democratic decentralization” of community development, “a step recommended urgently by all students of community development programs in order to transfer initiative and power out of the hands of the bureaucracy into the hands of the people.” Logue kept a copy of the Ford letter, written by a former colleague in Delhi, in his New Haven files, at the time surely unaware of how challenges in the development world would once again anticipate dynamics in his own.88

  Although from here on, ordinary American citizens like the Hill parents would demand a decision-making role in matters of urban redevelopment, as in many other areas of social policy, they still expected the hand-up from the federal government that had empowered pluralist democrats in the past. As a New Haven black activist argued in 1968 when the HPA tried to convert black tenants of public housing into “equity-holding owners rather than powerless renters,” they “should be assisted in this by the federal government which abetted whites in establishing lilywhite suburbia.”89

  But implementing a more decentralized participatory democracy in a city like New Haven raised challenges of its own. While it held out the promise of a more humane and equitable urban redevelopment, it did not offer easy answers to big structural problems, such as how the city might hold on to crucial property-tax payers and reinvigorate its economy to create more jobs when the winds of change were blowing them away. Or how it should judge whether those speaking the loudest in a community in fact represented the majority’s will and not the self-interest of a vocal minority. Or what might be best for the city as a whole and not just the residents of one neighborhood like Wooster Square, where activist members of the community wanted to keep out African Americans. Or how to make sure that bold new architecture enlivened the city when many residents preferred the familiar styles of the past. Much that had seemed clearer and simpler in the era of top-down pluralist democracy would now become messier and more difficult as it became harder to differentiate between public and private interests, to define a singular “common good,” and to assign distinctive roles to the expert and the citizen.

  The New Haven that Dick Lee left behind when he stepped down as mayor in 1970 was a very different city from the one he and Ed Logue had eagerly and rather naively begun to renew sixteen years earlier. Physically, downtown had been modernized—or as some critics would complain, suburbanized—and it was attracting more retail business than it had in previous decades, though that success would not last too many more years. Neighborhoods had been rebuilt, some, like Oak Street, through drastic demolition; others, like Wooster Square, through more sensitive rehabilitation. The city was attracting new commerce and industry to its Long Wharf district, but not enough to stem the tide of departing manufacturers and their good working-class employment. About twelve thousand factory jobs disappeared between 1954 and 1967, about 43 percent of the almost twenty-eight thousand that had existed right after World War II. By 1997, only 10 percent of that total would remain. “The problem … was,” Logue came to recognize, “we started to renew an old city without a secure economic base … We tried to solve it, but you d
on’t solve it.”90 Yale complicated matters; it was as much a curse as a blessing to the city. Years later, when even Lee and Logue admitted to the failures of the city’s urban renewal, they put much of that blame on Yale’s lack of investment in improving the city.91

  It should be evident that urban renewal was no one thing from 1954 to 1970. Rather, it was constantly evolving, due to changing ideas, successes and failures on the ground, the shifting power of allies and enemies, and new government legislation that repeatedly changed the rules of the game. One longtime New Haven resident noted that they used the tools available to them at the time. “If we had the Tax Credit Act of 1978 in 1958 [to encourage historic preservation] … Parisians would come here to look at all that stuff! But we didn’t.”92 Logue and Lee made mistakes, but sometimes they learned from them. An ideal of rehabilitation replaced demolition, disappointing new architecture inspired higher design standards, and some top-down social programs devolved to more neighborhood control.