Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

    42. National Commission Hearings, 115.

    43. National Commission Hearings, quotes from 147, 148, 151, 152, 153. Other critics amplified Harris’s comments. The commission’s executive director, Shuman, would later write, “Unknown to us until the end of our day of hearings there, the New Haven police had been stationed inside and outside the hall in case our hearings got out of hand. We prevented that by welcoming the views of unscheduled as well as scheduled witnesses. In fact, the ‘walk-in’ witnesses talked with a fire and an eloquence which the others did not match”; Shuman, “Behind the Scenes,” WM, in Powledge, Model City, 121.

    44. National Commission Hearings, 178–80; Miller, Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, 244–59. On Papa’s long, mostly unsuccessful career in New Haven politics, see Singerman, “Politics, Bureaucracy, and Public Policy,” 304.

    45. Asbell, “They Said It Wouldn’t Happen in New Haven,” NYT Magazine, 31.

    46. U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population, New Haven, Connecticut, 1950, 1960, 1970.

    47. Logue, “Can Cities Survive Automobile Age? New Haven Used as a Test Case,” Traffic Quarterly 3, no. 2 (April 1959): 175. See Christopher S. Schell, “Oak Street Unearthed: The Households in New Haven’s Low-Income Housing 1913–1957” (term paper, Yale Law School, 1998; New Haven Museum and Historical Society), 67, which documents that blacks had greater difficulty than Jews moving out of the Oak Street neighborhood.

    48. New Haven Human Rights Committee, “Report of Findings and Recommendations 12–14,” 1964, in Ellickson, Urban Legal History, 590.

    49. Rae, City, 340–43. Also, Family Relocation Office, “Report of the Progress of Family Relocations in Oak Street Redevelopment Area,” March 10, 1957, cited in Gregory Ruben (paper for Robert Gordon on lawyers in urban renewal of New Haven, June 2006 draft), 36n184, in possession of the author.

    50. For a thorough investigation of the state of black organizations in New Haven, see Williams, Black Politics/White Power, chapters 1–3. The Reverend Edwin Edmonds, a civil rights activist from North Carolina, criticized the moderate views of New Haven’s civil rights leaders when he became the minister of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church in 1959: “This was one backward town”; Rev. Edwin Edmonds, interview by Sarah Hammond, February 16, 2004, New Haven, CT, New Haven Oral History Collection, YMA.

    51. NAACP, “The Urban Renewal Program and NAACP Guidelines to Integration,” n.d. but c. 1963, 2, cited in Jennifer Hock, “Race and Class on the Drawing Boards,” paper for the American Society of City and Regional Planning History Conference, October 22, 2005, 7, in possession of the author. Andrew R. Highsmith found many of the same racial dynamics at work in Flint, Michigan’s, urban renewal in Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

    52. Jennifer Hock, “Political Designs: Architecture and Urban Renewal in the Civil Rights Era, 1954–1973” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2012), 44–46, 50–51, 53–55, 63–66, 73–74; see 51 for quote from Memo from Logue to Richard Lee, August 23, 1960, New Haven Redevelopment Authority Papers, Box 36, Folder 791. Redevelopment Agency staff members claimed that the final city hearing on the Dixwell renewal plan, which “climaxed hundreds of smaller meetings with neighborhood residents and businessmen” organized by the Dixwell Renewal Committee, was “attended by over 600 persons from the neighborhood” and “the only criticism of the plan at that time was that it did not include enough acquisition of properties for demolition”; Melvin J. Adams, Donald Kirk, and Louis Onofrio, “The Wooster Square and Dixwell Projects in New Haven, Connecticut,” in Residential Rehabilitation, a compilation of papers presented at the Training Institute in Residential Rehabilitation, ed. M. Carter McFarland and Walter K. Vivrett, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, July 19–30, 1965 (Minneapolis: School of Architecture, University of Minnesota, 1966), 294–96.

    53. Harris and Associates, “Survey of the Race for Mayor of New Haven,” EJL, 6.

    54. “A Post-Election Analysis of Voter Opinion in New Haven,” December 1965, 21–25, in Singerman, “Politics, Bureaucracy, and Public Policy,” 253–54.

    55. Irving L. Allen and J. David Colfax, Urban Problems and Public Opinion in Four Connecticut Cities (Storrs: Institute of Urban Research, University of Connecticut, 1968), 58, also 49, 59, 170; Singerman, “Politics, Bureaucracy, and Public Policy,” 252.

    56. The most vocal critics of urban renewal in the neighborhoods during the 1950s were those displaced by the redevelopment of the Oak Street area. Although there was very little organized resistance to the project before it happened, within a few years of the razing, former residents, mostly white ethnics, began holding annual reunions to reminisce about the old days; see Ted Gesing’s documentary film Model City (2003) for footage of one of these reunions.

    57. Alvin A. Mermin, Relocating Families (Washington, DC: National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials [NAHRO], 1970), 4, in Rae, City, 338. Mermin became the second director of the Family Relocation Office and would serve for ten years, according to Doug Rae “with decency and ingenuity, attempting to mitigate the trauma of relocation.” On Redevelopment Agency concerns about finding relocation housing for nonwhites ineligible for public housing, see S. Carroll to Mr. Logue, Mrs. Craddock, Mr. Sweet, Mr. Feiss, June 10, 1955, Rotival, Box 36, Folder “N.H. City, 1954–55.”

    58. Logue, interview by Deborah Sue Elkin, September 18, 1993, New Haven, CT.

    59. On Wooster Square urban renewal in general, see New Haven Redevelopment Agency, Redevelopment and Renewal Plan for the Wooster Square Project Area (New Haven, CT: 1958, amended 1965); Mary Hommann, Wooster Square Design: A Report on the Background, Experience, and Design Procedures in Redevelopment and Rehabilitation in an Urban Renewal District (New Haven, CT: New Haven Redevelopment Agency, 1965), in which she claims that there was a racial mix on rehabbed Court Street, 60; Sherman Hasbrouck, “Transformation: A Summary of New Haven’s Development Program” (M.A. thesis, Yale University, 1965), 37–48; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 136–45; Powledge, Model City, 39–41; Mary S. Hommann, “New Haven Skid Row Rowhouses Being Rehabilitated as Link in Renewal Chain,” JH 18, no. 7 (July 1961): 337–39, 57; Mary S. Hommann, “Neighborhood Rehabilitation Is Working in Six Projects in New Haven; Here’s How,” JH 19, no. 4 (May 1962): 185–89; Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time, 463–89. The 80 percent homeowner figure is from Adams, Kirk, and Onofrio, “Wooster Square and Dixwell Projects in New Haven, Connecticut,” in Residential Rehabilitation, 268–69.

    60. On Dixwell urban renewal, see New Haven Redevelopment Agency, Dixwell Redevelopment and Renewal Plan (New Haven, CT: 1960); Hasbrouck, “Transformation,” 49–56; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 146–47; Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time, 489–506. The New Haven Redevelopment Agency used its leverage with the local Tradesmen’s National Bank, where it deposited its federal urban renewal funds, to pressure the bank to make money available for rehab in Dixwell; Logue, interview, Schussheim, 18; “Master Pieces: Ed Logue Talks with Rebecca Barnes AIA,” AB 1, no. 2 (1998): 33–34; Adams, Kirk, and Onofrio, “Wooster Square and Dixwell Projects in New Haven, Connecticut,” 286, 298. Mary Hommann gave even more details: before renewal, because of their race, “Dixwell homeowners were denied equitable financing and often carried two mortgages at 12 percent each. Now they can get 25-year mortgages at 5 ¾ per cent, cutting payments in half even after the principle is increased for renovations. Dixwell is also using the new Federal rehabilitation grants of up to $1,500 for low-income owners and 3 percent mortgages. Each owner is given rehabilitation advice of all kinds, from architectural to financial, by the project staff”; Mary Hommann, “Symbolic Bells in Dixwell,” AF (July–August 1966): 56.

    61. “Florence Virtue Housing, New Haven, Connecticut,” JJ, Box 3, Folder 2.

    62. Criticism of Florence Virtue Homes in Jackson, Mode
l City Blues, 54–56, 58–59; refuted by Bass, “Write Your Own Caption,” New Haven Independent, May 16, 2008. The 55-to-45 black-white racial balance comes from Hommann, “Symbolic Bells in Dixwell,” 56; other reports put it at 60-to-40. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 147, explains that when the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church’s low-key outreach to potential white buyers failed to deliver enough white customers, the Redevelopment Agency hired an ex-newspaperman to market the project more aggressively as “University Park–Dixwell” and attracted greater interest. Talbot was optimistic about the integration of Dixwell: “There are few cities genuinely attempting to use renewal as a means of transforming a Negro ghetto into an integrated neighborhood with integrated schools.”

    63. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 166; Ed Logue, “Mike Sviridoff Tribute,” March 26, 1998, EJL, 2002 Accession, B23, Folder “March 1998 Mike Sviridoff,” 2. Although blacks had been living in Elm Haven, New Haven’s first public housing project, since its opening in 1940, individual buildings were racially segregated; Solomon, “Symposium: Building a Segregated City,” 16, a very good history of public housing in New Haven.

    64. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 191–92.

    65. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 179–81.

    66. Remarks of Richard C. Lee, “Occasion: International Sunday School Convention of Church of God in Christ,” July 28, 1960, EJL, Series 5, Box 110, Folder 1114; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 171, 257; Jackson, Model City Blues, 52–54.

    67. Miller, Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, 40–49; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 182–88.

    68. Miller, Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, 84–98. That expansion was never easy. Miller’s white, middle-class Fifteenth Ward was the contested site of one of the first “scattered houses.” The neighborhood Congregational church had inherited the house and, after some soul searching, made it available to the New Haven Housing Authority. After the uproar, the city returned the house to the church.

    69. Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 199.

    70. Miller, Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, 66–67 for quote, also see on busing 50–83, 126–143, 22; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 189–210.

    71. “The Vote in New Haven,” editorial, NYT, October 30, 1965; Miller, Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, 260–63; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 223–24.

    72. Logue to Chester Bowles, letter draft, May 15, 1957, EJL, Series 4, Box 23, Folder 13, 2; Logue to Walter P. Reuther, November 16, 1953, requesting that he take a leadership role in a movement to put pension funds “to socially useful ends, such as moderate rental housing. Eisenhower is not going to do the housing job. We will have to do it ourselves.” Logue also tried to get Mike Sviridoff’s help lining up a progressive union to take the mortgage on the first of the Oak Street apartment buildings, which “will be the first one in the United States in which there is a specific and binding agreement between the developer and the municipality for insuring that the apartments will be open to all, regardless of race, creed, or color”; Logue to Mitchell Sviridoff, September 15, 1958, EJL, Series 5, Box 85, Folder 786.

    73. On the divisions, generational and ideological, within New Haven’s black community organizations, see Williams, Black Politics/White Power, 14–18, 24–43, 49–64.

    74. National Commission Hearings, quotes from 147, 148, 151, 152, 153.

    75. “Cities: No Haven,” Time, September 1, 1967.

    76. Rae, City, 351–55, quote on 354; Hugo Lindgren, “New Haven,” Metropolis 13 (January–February 1994): 30. Additional sources on the riot informing my discussion include Powledge, Model City, 91–93, 109–14, 215; Jackson, Model City Blues, 138–52; Asbell, “They Said It Wouldn’t Happen in New Haven”; Williams, Black Politics/White Power, 81–105; and Robert J. Leeney, Elms, Arms, and Ivy: New Haven in the Twentieth Century (Montgomery, AL: Community Communications, in cooperation with the New Haven Colony Historical Society, 2000), 67–70. Observers on the Left often linked the rioting to the city’s urban renewal and poverty programs: “Urban Planning and Urban Revolt? A Case Study,” PA 49, no. 1 (January 1968): 134–56; and Archer, “New Haven: Renewal and Riots,” 729–32. Jane Jacobs told the NYT, “Logue tosses people and small business around ruthlessly. If you want to know what he does, ask the rioters in New Haven”; NYT Magazine, March 1, 1970. In contrast, the conservative local paper, the NHR, emphasized youth violence and praised the police. To the extent that “costly and ‘expert’ programs” were mentioned, it was to claim that the protests showed the “waste and carelessness of the do-good bureaucracy”; NHR, front pages and editorials, August 20–27, 1967, passim.

    77. “A Survey of the Political Climate on New Haven, Connecticut” (October 1967), Study #619, and “A Scouting Survey of the Political Climate in New Haven, Connecticut” (November 1967), Study #630, cited in Singerman, “Politics, Bureaucracy, and Public Policy,” 249–51.

    78. On the end of the Lee regime, see Powledge, Model City, 256–57, 296–98, 304–6.

    79. Charles Abrams, “Some Blessings of Urban Renewal,” in Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy, ed. James Q. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 571. Also see in the same volume, Basil Zimmer, “The Small Businessman and Relocation,” on a study of three hundred businesses displaced by urban renewal and highway building in Providence, Rhode Island, from 1954 to 1959. Nearly seven out of ten employed fewer than three workers; 380–403. On the active campaigning of large chains and department stores against smaller businesses, see Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 195.

    80. William N. Kinnard, Jr., and Zenon S. Malinowski, The Impact of Dislocation from Urban Renewal Areas on Small Business (Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut School of Business Administration, 1960), 63, cited in Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 319, also 332–37; Hardwick, “A Downtown Utopia?”: 47–49.

    81. On the Savitt suit, see Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 120–21.

    82. Leo S. Gilden to Richard C. Lee, June 15, 1957; Logue to Mayor Richard C. Lee, August 12, 1957; and L. S. Rowe to Leo S. Gilden, August 13, 1957, all in EJL, Series 5, Box 7, Folder 596. Also see in same folder: “Merchants Bid for Help on Project Data,” NHR, July 18, 1957; “Sound Redevelopment—but No ‘Railroading,’” editorial, NHR, July 21, 1957. On the CCA suit, see Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 119. The detailed story of the small merchants and the city is well told in Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 315–24, and in a candid memo he wrote to Dahl, “City Hall Memos from RW,” July 7, 1958, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Special Interviews–Wolfinger 1958,” 4–7.

    83. One of the small businesses that did survive the redevelopment of downtown New Haven is Louis’ Lunch, which claims to be the birthplace of the hamburger. When the small restaurant moved four blocks to its current location at 261–63 Crown Street, the owner constructed a “wall of tears”: “I decided to collect the bricks. So on that wall there is a brick for every shop torn down from the Green all the way to the end of the parking garage”; interview in Gesing, Model City film.

    84. 1963 Campaign “Downtown Campaign Q&A” (120 seconds), film footage, RCL.

    85. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961).

    86. Interview with Richard Lee quoted in Powledge, Model City, 250–55. The Kerner Commission concurred in its report released in February 1968, drawing a “lesson” from New Haven and Detroit, “where well-intentioned programs designed to respond to the needs of ghetto residents were not worked out and implemented sufficiently in cooperation with the intended beneficiaries”; quoted in Archer, “New Haven: Renewal and Riots,” 732. More openness to citizen participation did not keep the Lee administration from trying to discredit Harris and other HPA leaders after the riot, however. Harris was arrested for possession of drugs and stolen goods, charges he claimed were part of a campaign of police harassment; Neu, “Hill Pa
rents Association,” 39–46.

    87. Powledge, Model City, 133–42; Inventing Community Renewal, 180–92, on Sviridoff’s personal resistance to implementing a great deal of popular participation at CPI.

    88. Jean Joyce, “Grassroots Democracy Comes to Rajasthan,” in “The Ford Foundation Program Letter: India,” Report No. 109, March 21, 1960, EJL, Series 4, Box 26, Folder 54, 1.

    89. John Barber, “Black Power in New Haven: Problems of Land and Police,” AIM Bulletin 3, no. 11 (October 29, 1968): 16.