Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  The decision to rename Welfare Island for the former New York governor and later president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who surprisingly had no other major monument in the state, similarly embedded the new project in the state’s past and particularly in the nation’s history of progressive government. Logue commissioned the prominent modernist architect—and fellow Roosevelt admirer—Louis I. Kahn to design an FDR memorial for the southern tip of the island in 1972. It was long delayed by an unfortunate series of events. Kahn flouted the project’s $4 million budget (to Logue’s great annoyance) and then died suddenly in 1974. A search followed for a colleague to finish the drawings. Mitchell Giurgola Architects agreed, but their work was further postponed by a shortage of funds and litigation brought by foundation donors over public crediting. The Four Freedoms Park finally opened in 2012. One of Kahn’s last designs, it is a four-acre memorial park consisting of a garden and a roofless roomlike space enclosing a sculpted Franklin Roosevelt.105

  Roosevelt Island’s nod to the past was well matched by its embrace of futuristic, environmentally friendly new technology. A Swedish-inspired automated vacuum sanitation system (known as AVAC) whisked all domestic trash through giant pneumatic vacuum tubes buried under the street to a central refuse disposal site for compacting. Free, quiet, nonpolluting, battery-powered electric minibuses transported residents around the car-free island to and from the central thousand-car Motorgate garage, near the only bridge access, from Queens. This complimentary public transit and plentiful pedestrian pathways eliminated any social distinctions based on automobile ownership, putting all residents on an equal footing. When it became clear that the subway would be delayed beyond the opening of the first apartments (it didn’t actually operate until 1989), Logue’s team came up with the clever idea of installing a gondola-style aerial tramway—which soon became the island’s icon—from there to Manhattan’s East 60th Street, its first use in an urban environment worldwide. This $7 million innovation created a 3,100-foot-long, three-and-a-half-minute soaring ride.

  As with the other UDC New Towns, Roosevelt Island as built did not fully realize its visionary plan. Some found the architecture too forbidding, constructed as it was in the austere concrete and brick typical of the 1960s and 1970s, not unlike the brutalist buildings of Boston’s Government Center. Completion was also slow. By the end of 1978, three years after the UDC’s downfall, only 2,139 of the anticipated 5,000 dwelling units were available, about half of them low- and moderate-income units built with Section 236 funds, with three hundred of those offering additional rent supplements. The other half consisted of 761 middle-income units with Mitchell-Lama state funding and 375 upper-middle-income cooperative apartments. Five schools with a total capacity of 850 children in grades kindergarten through ninth were open, falling short of Logue’s goal of thirteen. Nonetheless, they were operating, which Logue later considered “one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life.” And although the marina was never built and the lack of a subway limited retail and offices, by late 1978, the 5,500 Roosevelt Island residents had a U.S. post office, bank, supermarket, drugstore, stationery and liquor stores, an Italian restaurant, and a delicatessen. The two remaining hospitals merged to become Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility, with room for almost two thousand patients and long-term-care residents.106

  Despite its incompleteness, Roosevelt Island in name, conception, and planned memorial paid homage to the ideal of Roosevelt’s New Deal and its successor, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, that government could help improve lives and make the nation more just. Ironically, however, just as Roosevelt Island underwent construction, President Nixon began unraveling the federal programs needed to realize it. Cuts in funding necessitated compromises in the Johnson-Burgee plan, which had already miscalculated in providing for only four thousand rather than the five thousand units of housing needed to balance the books.107 To ensure that the project’s finances still worked out despite this mistake, the height of the buildings along narrow Main Street was increased, which gave it a more cavernous feel, and a fourth side was added to some apartment courtyards along the river, blocking views. Amenities like air-conditioning were also scaled back in the lower-income housing, which widened the gulf in accommodations between social classes.

  Logue complained bitterly about the impact of the Nixon White House’s urban policies on Roosevelt Island in June 1973: “I think they are trying to make clear, in a variety of ways, that the idea of government as a solver of social problems is an idea that has been around long enough … This Administration does not really feel that the users of low and moderate income housing are a part of its constituency.”108 Logue’s New Town utopia on the East River may have pioneered a new model of an urban neighborhood—being both a part of and apart from a great city—but its survival as originally conceived faced mounting challenges.

  ESTABLISHING DIVERSE COMMUNITIES

  Logue looked to New Towns to achieve his long-standing ambition of creating communities integrated along the lines of income, age, and race. Over the years, Logue had become convinced that a mix of residents was the key to ensuring more stable and better-resourced urban communities. Efforts to implement this goal in previous redevelopment efforts, however, had gotten Logue into trouble. Too often, integrating centrally located, predominantly low-income black communities like Dixwell in New Haven or the South End in Boston had meant that more white, middle-class residents moved in, understandably antagonizing current inhabitants. In contrast, Logue hoped, constructing new socially mixed communities from scratch would achieve greater residential diversity without displacement or gentrification. As he wrote for the large readership of the popular Saturday Review magazine, the danger of “destructive confrontations with opponents already on the turf” would thus be much diminished, “since all the occupants of the new community are, so to speak, volunteers,” meaning “no outside force is imposing a change in the character of an already existing community.” Logue further dismissed his critics with, “And if they don’t like our mix, well don’t bother to come.”109

  Roosevelt Island held the greatest promise. Describing it during construction in characteristically immodest, even grandiose, terms, Logue told an interviewer, “It is perhaps our last chance to demonstrate that people of different incomes, races, and ethnic origins can live together … and that they can send their children to the same public schools, and that two things are possible—racial and economic integration and the public schools can be a magnet.”110 The original plan had called for day care centers and mini-schools to be scattered throughout the various residential buildings, each containing only a few grades to encourage family-teacher interaction and to draw children of different incomes and races together. As he had in his Boston work, Logue put faith in schooling to create more socially integrated New York communities.

  After a great deal of internal discussion and debate, the UDC decided on its ideal social mix for residential projects, an allocation formula of 70-20-10: 70 percent subsidized moderate and middle income, 20 percent low income, and 10 percent elderly, who usually were also low-income. Their rationale was to ensure that only about a third of the residents were at the lowest end of the income scale while the other two thirds fell at different points along the spectrum. All needed assistance, but in differing amounts. Eligibility requirements for the various categories were left to local housing authorities to set, with federal monitoring.111

  Primarily focused on filling the gap in affordable housing, the UDC built only a very small number of market-rate units. Those were in the most desirable locations, such as on Roosevelt Island, where spectacular vistas of the Manhattan skyline made it possible to stretch the income span further. Everywhere the UDC worked, it promoted some version of socially and economically heterogeneous residential communities for what it argued was broad mutual benefit. As Logue explained the philosophy in a UDC prospectus in July 1972, although “our lowest income families have the greatest need for housin
g, in today’s market an acute need also exists for families with moderate and middle incomes.” Moreover, “It is our view, based on long American experience, that developments which cater exclusively to low-income families are undesirable. They will likely produce large-scale, institutionalized, apartheid projects of questionable value either to society as a whole or to the low-income families so housed.”112

  Creating diverse communities was easier said than done, however. Roosevelt Island, for example, was plagued by a major dispute over how best to sequence the construction and rental of low-income versus middle-income units. Logue had hired an old American Veterans Committee pal from Yale, Adam Yarmolinsky, as executive director of the Welfare Island Development Corporation, the UDC subsidiary established to oversee the project. Yarmolinsky brought little experience with urban development, but had impeccable liberal credentials. Logue also believed that he had gained administrative and technological know-how from having spent the last several years working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, most recently for the Department of Defense under secretary Robert McNamara, where he had pushed for the desegregation of military bases. Yarmolinsky had worked as well with Sargent Shriver on drafting LBJ’s signature anti-poverty programs, until anti-communist smears by southern congressmen whose support Johnson sought booted him out.113 Once in place overseeing Roosevelt Island, Yarmolinsky hired as his construction consultant an experienced developer in New York City, Richard Ravitch, whose family-owned HRH Construction was already well established as a builder of affordable housing. Ravitch insisted that the only way to make Roosevelt Island succeed financially was to construct upper-income housing first and recruit a satellite branch of a prestigious New York private school like Dalton. Otherwise, he argued, upper-income residents would resist moving into a low-income community and enrolling their children in public school.

  Logue minced few words when he angrily rejected Ravitch’s approach and dismissed him as a consultant, insisting, “Dick, this is my island, not your island. I’m sorry this had to come to that, but as far as I’m concerned one of my basic goals in this project is to prove that I can get people in that income level to go to these public schools, and for you to deny that destroys one of the basic reasons for my wanting to do this project.” In forcing out Ravitch for attacking “the heart of my social engineering,” Logue took a political risk that would later contribute to the UDC’s and Logue’s own downfall when Ravitch took his revenge. Soon after the departure of Ravitch, Logue fired Yarmolinsky as well, on the ostensible grounds that he was “junketing off,” more focused on advancing his career in international affairs than on developing Roosevelt Island, and for insulting their boss, Governor Rockefeller, by publicly endorsing his opponent, Arthur Goldberg, in the 1970 gubernatorial race. With his opponents out of the way, Logue went forward with his plan to start with the subsidized buildings, convinced that if the well-to-do arrived first they would never permit the low-income renters to follow. Robert Litke, Logue’s trusted lieutenant back to their Boston days, took over management of the project, resigned to having a deeply invested and sometimes intrusive Logue “looking over his shoulder,… driv[ing] him crazy,” Logue only half joked.114

  On Roosevelt Island, Logue broadened his definition of desirable diversity to include people with disabilities. This breakthrough, twenty years before passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, was likely inspired by the presence of patients in the island’s long-term-care hospitals who had remained there only because they couldn’t otherwise get around the city. The UDC not only built apartments for the disabled but also made their mobility around and off this pedestrian-oriented island possible with accessible transportation. Logue explained that he had learned a lot about the challenges of managing in a wheelchair from his former boss, the Boston mayor John Collins.115

  Logue’s notion of a diverse community included fostering “a cross-section of age groups … where the elderly are not isolated from the young.”116 Incorporating the elderly into UDC projects also became a strategy for expanding the low-income population to a third without burdening local schools and antagonizing middle-class residents. Roosevelt Island’s Eastwood building, for instance, had low- and moderate-income units, including specially equipped apartments for the elderly and a senior citizens’ center.117 Although mixing elderly tenants with families at first seemed to UDC planners an uncontroversial benefit to both groups, it turned out to be problematic in some locations. In Coney Island, “the old people were largely Jewish and the young people were largely black and the kids harassed the bejesus out of the elderly Jews,” recounted Logue. The UDC ultimately decided they had to separate these populations in different buildings.118

  Although the UDC paid most attention to income and age diversity, it carefully considered race as well, to a more explicit extent than is common today in an era of greater caution about racial quotas since the landmark Regents of the University of California v. Bakke Supreme Court decision of 1978. According to Louis Loewenstein’s assessment: “The UDC also sought to establish guidelines to preclude a project’s becoming identified with only one race or color. As a consequence of the policy, UDC attempted to have about 70 percent of each project rented to whites in the belief that if the figures were less, then it would be exceedingly difficult to rent units to white families and, therefore, the projects would quickly rent to minorities which would fill them completely. UDC was not able to adhere to either the racial or financial guidelines in every instance and it was criticized whenever it deviated from the policy.” Roosevelt Island did, in fact, manage to meet this goal of 30 percent minorities.119 Worried that its search for racial balance might be misunderstood as a lack of commitment to minorities, the UDC sought to publicly associate its projects with high-profile black celebrities such as jazz musician Lionel Hampton and baseball star Jackie Robinson, who was now a developer. Hampton, for example, not only lent his name and fame to a UDC apartment complex in Harlem; he willingly participated in a parade up 8th Avenue celebrating the ribbon cutting.120

  But the UDC policy of creating racially integrated communities was not always welcomed. In minority neighborhoods, Logue encountered the same kind of criticism as he had in Boston: that not enough housing was going to needy low-income residents of color. So, for example, the dedication of the Cathedral Parkway Houses in Harlem in 1972 attracted a picket line of neighborhood residents wielding signs reading “Logue Must Go” and “Down with Rockefeller” to protest that an inadequate number of units had been reserved for local people who had been removed from urban renewal areas.121 Nor did whites always cooperate. When the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark idealistically tried to create a racially integrated UDC project at Schomburg Plaza at the southern edge of Harlem, they could not find enough low- and moderate-income whites willing to move in and were forced to settle for balancing African American and Puerto Rican tenants.122

  The UDC’s dedication to social mixing could also exacerbate racial tensions. A notorious case was Twin Parks in the Bronx, where a cluster of architecturally distinguished buildings by major designers (Richard Meier, James Stewart Polshek, Giovanni Pasanella, and Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen) became the site of racial strife so intense that tenants hesitated to move in despite their desire for better housing. This UDC project of more than two thousand apartments aimed to attract low- and moderate-income residents—divided, it was hoped, into a third each of whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans—to a neutral oasis sitting on the boundary between Italian and black neighborhoods. Instead, open central plazas designed to encourage interaction became war zones for teenage gangs, forcing the UDC to install gates and other physical barriers to separate groups from one another and to make other residents feel more secure. By mid-1973, Logue opted for simply filling the vacancies rather than trying to socially integrate Twin Parks, and he became much more wary of including large public spaces in future housing designs.123

  Not surprisingly, the social engineering required t
o integrate UDC projects like New Towns by income and race offended Jane Jacobs and her followers, even when they sympathized with Logue’s goal. Jacobs explained her critique this way: “You take a clean slate and you make a new world. That’s basically artificial. There is no new world you can make without the old world … The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.”124 Counterbalancing Jacobs, however, was enthusiasm from one of the era’s most prominent anthropologists, Margaret Mead. In an epilogue that Mead wrote to a 1976 book on New Towns, she argued, “New Towns are necessary to a society that has lost its way.” Lamenting segregated suburbs, disrupted old neighborhoods, and other forms of social isolation, she considered New Towns a welcome corrective, “a kind of light that beckons us ahead … that can tell us how to … bring a slum to life, how to turn a suburb from a bedroom town where people are alienated and separated from their neighbors into a place where people work and meet and know each other.”125

  Despite these many challenges, the UDC nevertheless exceeded its goals for diversifying communities. By 1975, 33 percent of UDC residents statewide were low income and 42 percent were minority.126 For many residents of a place like Roosevelt Island—white and nonwhite—this social mix was part of the attraction. The journalist Mark Lamster recalled visiting his uncle, “a liberal among liberals [who] was one of the first to move in. He loved it there, as did my aunt. I think they felt they were part of a new and more egalitarian society.”127 And when the feedback was less favorable, Logue and his idealistic, determined staff learned to take the hits in stride. Concluded Logue, “If you think you are going to be warmly welcomed and enthusiastically supported by all elements of the community which you are seeking to change, don’t bother. That is not how it works.”128