The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

by Alan Ehrenhalt

  The people who are moving downtown are doing so in part to escape the real or virtual “gatedness” of suburban life. The condos that house them in the coming years may feature elaborate security systems, but the inhabitants will not be walled off from the street. They will want to be in contact with the street.

  This will mean different things to different people. Some will want the funky qualities of Jane Jacobs’s 1950s version of Hudson Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, with locally owned and slightly messy bookstores, coffeehouses, and bars, and a concentration of art galleries and studios. Others will be willing to accept the less adventurous urban world invaded by chain stores, with street-level rows occupied by the Gap, Cheesecake Factory, and Barnes & Noble, and with apartments perched above them on upper residential floors, either rental or condominium. Some of these will be, already are, in the middle of downtowns. Others will be in neighborhoods on the fringe of downtown, in close-in suburbs on the city border, or even in more distant suburbs trying to create an urban ambience of some sort. But the crucial component will be the desire for an atmosphere of urbanism, with the opportunity to walk between living space and commercial and recreational opportunities.

  Christopher Leinberger, the real estate developer and urban planning scholar, believes that a dramatic increase in middle-class central-city population will in fact take place throughout America, and today’s tract homes in the far suburbs will deteriorate into the slums of 2030. I don’t think this will happen, at least not in such extreme form; there simply are not enough lofts and townhouses to double or triple the number of people living in the center of most large American cities. The central-city population will continue to grow, but massive growth would require concentrations of skyscrapers that very few cities have shown much inclination to accept. Nor does it seem likely that exurbia will turn into a wasteland. The prices of the houses will continue to go down and render them more attractive for newcomers trying to rise in the American economy and society. Urbanists have complained for years that immigrants and poor people in the inner city have a hard time commuting to the service jobs that are available to them in the suburbs. If they live in the suburbs, they will be closer to the jobs. Transportation will remain a problem, but not one that can’t be solved.

  Demographic inversion will also mean different futures for different cities. It goes without saying that the phenomenon will not apply in the same way or at the same pace in every big city in America. It will not come to Detroit or Buffalo in the way it is coming to Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. Some cities will lack the central job base to generate a large-scale affluent urban revival, and will lag behind their more fortunate counterparts by a long period of years, if they ever get there at all. This is the argument of scholars such as Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida, who see an increasing bifurcation between cities economically equipped to regenerate themselves in the twenty-first century and those whose obsolete industrial economies will leave them mired in the downtown blight and exurban outward pressures of an earlier era. They have a point. There is no evidence that Detroit will produce a large cohort of downtown dwellers anytime soon. But despite the unevenness, demographic inversion will apply in more cities than many critics have imagined thus far. The living habits and preferences of the emerging adult generation are simply too strong to prevent it from occurring to some degree in every healthy urban area.

  Somewhere in the midst of all these differing prophecies lies the vision of Jane Jacobs. Much of what Jacobs loved and wrote about will never return: The era of the mom-and-pop grocer, the shoemaker, and the candy store has ended for good. We live, for the most part, in a big-box, big-chain century. But I think the youthful urban elites of the present are looking in some sense for the things Jane Jacobs valued, whether they have heard of her or not. They are drawn to the densely packed urban life that they find vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world that they grew up inhabiting. And to a great extent, I believe central cities will give it to them. At the same time, much of suburbia, in an effort to stay afloat, will seek to reinvent itself in a newly urbanized mode. That is already taking place: All over America, the car-created suburbs of the 1970s and 1980s have built “town centers” in the past five years, with sidewalks and as much of a street grid as they can manage to impose on a faded strip-mall landscape. None of these retrofit efforts looks much like an old-fashioned city. But they are a clue, I think, to the direction in which we are heading.

  In the 1990s, a flurry of academics and journalists (me among them) wrote books lamenting the decline of community and predicting that it would reappear in some fashion in the new century. I think that is beginning to happen now in the downtowns of America, and I believe that, for all its imperfections and inequalities, demographic inversion ultimately will do more good than harm. We will never return—nor would most of us want to return—to the close-knit but frequently constricting form of community life that prevailed fifty years ago. But, as we rearrange ourselves in and around many of our big cities, we are groping toward the new communities of the twenty-first century.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A BACKWARD GLANCE

  IN THE LAST QUARTER of the twentieth century, as poverty, violence, and abandonment settled over most of the big cities in America, the great urban historian Donald Olsen made an intriguing remark. “If we are to achieve an urban renaissance,” Olsen wrote, “it is the nineteenth-century city that will be reborn.”

  It was a cryptic comment, and Olsen is no longer around to be asked precisely what he meant, but he was not the only urbanist of taste and judgment who voiced similar sentiments. Jean-Christophe Bailly, the French architect and critic, looked at cities all across North America around the same time and declared that “the nineteenth century invented modernity, and it must now be reinvented to make up for the damage done by the systematic negligence of twentieth-century urban planners.”

  Two decades later, at least a part of this vision seems to be coming true. Not all of it involves changes that most of us would desire. It does not take much effort to enumerate a long list of the features of pre–World War I urban life that none of us would wish to emulate, features that were ubiquitous in the old-fashioned cities we actually tend to admire the most.

  No one would wish to cope with the East End of London as H. G. Wells described it in 1910: six-story walk-up tenements, bedrooms little more than ten feet square, and all through the stairwells the smell of unwashed bedding and stale food. There were nine hundred thousand people living in the East End in 1910, and one-third of them, according to the London Poor Law Commission, were living in extreme poverty.

  Nor is there any reason to be nostalgic for the conditions of working-class Vienna, in which hundreds of thousands of immigrant factory workers lived in the shadow of the textile mills and chemical plants where they worked, many of them seven days a week, at jobs whose nonexistent health and safety standards all but guaranteed them frequent illnesses and short life spans. Similarly, the most passionate advocate of urban density would be wary of the physical environment of even middle-class Paris flats, where, as historian Sharon Marcus wrote, paraphrasing the cultural criticism of Honoré de Balzac, “Apartment houses destroy private life by making each apartment simultaneously function as an observatory, theater, and mirror in which the residents of one apartment spy on those of another, provide unwitting spectacles for each other, and see their own lives reflected or inverted in their neighbors’.”

  So let us stipulate one point right away: To admire London, Paris, or Vienna in 1900 is not to admire squalid tenements, lethal working conditions, or the absence of privacy. It is instead to admire other qualities that those cities possessed.

  Street life, for one. The late twentieth century considered the street so preeminently an instrument of movement that we forget what it was in the great European cities of a century before: a center of activity, much more than of motion, a center of commerce and sociability, of nonstop human drama, of endles
s surprises and stimulation. One might call it, as many did at the time, a theater for living. To talk about a crowded city thoroughfare of the nineteenth century as “mixed use” urbanism in the modern sense is to miss the point altogether. This was essentially “all use” urbanism.

  Of course, people were out in the streets of London, Paris, and Vienna in part because they did not want to be inside. In 1860, in a piece of social analysis aimed at describing and understanding Parisian social life, the critic Alfred Delvau wrote that “as soon as it awakes, Paris leaves its abode and steps out, and doesn’t return home until as late as possible in the evening—when it bothers to return home.” He went on to write that “Paris deserts its houses. Its houses are dirty on the inside, while its streets are swept every morning.… All the luxury is outside—all its pleasures walk the streets.” Delvau did not specify particular streets, but he did not need to. In mid-nineteenth-century Paris, anything wider than a narrow lane, any street twenty-five or thirty feet across, was bursting with activity day and night. Left and Right Bank, east or west of the city center, all hosted essentially the same form of raucous street life. They differed considerably in the wealth and status of their residents, but the scene at ground level was essentially the same throughout.

  These were streets in which traffic was often gridlocked and nothing moved very fast, so there was plenty of time for the resident or visitor to take in the human drama at leisure. At first glance, there was little charm to them. They were not the quaint European streets down which foreign tourists like to stroll today. To a great extent, they resembled the streets of New York’s Lower East Side that nearly all of us have seen in pictures: unrefined, menacing to some, and occasionally violent, but full of the raw energy of day-to-day human existence.

  Everything and everyone was visible on these streets: prostitutes; horse-drawn carriages filled with well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who traveled at speeds of no more than a few miles an hour, or walked if they wanted to arrive at their destination more quickly; vendors who crowded the sidewalk; peddlers with no fixed place of business carrying their goods in handcarts or wheelbarrows, or on their backs; children inventing games and playing them all day in the midst of the confusion.

  In a work published in 1862, Delvau had argued that “we find it tiresome to live and die at home … we require public display, big events, the street, the cabaret, to witness us for better or worse … we like to pose, to put on a show, to have an audience, a gallery, witnesses to our life.” Some Parisians even warned that the street was becoming too enticing, almost irresistible. The Goncourt brothers, perhaps the city’s most important publishers, lamented that “the interior is going to die. Life threatens to become public.” As a later historian put it, Paris was an extroverted city.

  AFTER THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, Paris became a different sort of urban example: a city of boulevards, created with autocratic efficiency and painstaking attention to detail by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann under the direction of the Emperor Napoléon III in the 1850s and 1860s.

  The Paris of the boulevards is the place that foreigners romanticize and tourists love to visit. In many ways, it represents a break with the street-dominated city life that preceded it; in other ways, it is remarkably similar. When people make the claim that Paris is the most beautiful city in the world, as they often do, it is normally the boulevards that they have in mind. Sometimes it is difficult to see why. The boulevards Haussmann created are, for one thing, monotonous; he made sure of that. They are long corridors of stylistically similar, often nearly uniform stone apartment buildings, invariably gray, because Haussmann disliked color as a form of surface building ornamentation. Virtually every building had an identical number of window openings, all the same size. Each one had cast-iron balconies. The mansard roofs were almost all the same. Only the doors presented much opportunity for individualization. One critic commented that the long rows of apartment buildings looked like books neatly arranged in a bookcase. It is easy to understand how any one of these buildings can be admired for craftsmanship, sense of proportion, and overall aura of elegance. Understanding why endless boulevards full of them seem beautiful is a more complex question, but visitors have been lavishing praise upon the boulevards for the past century and a half.

  One reason is very simple: the quality of light. It’s not entirely clear that Haussmann knew in advance what sort of reflection his long rows of gray buildings would create, but one must give him the benefit of the doubt. He did, after all, like to proclaim that “light before all else” was his guiding principle. And the unrelenting gray of Haussmann’s boulevards somehow gave off a visual impression that struck those who saw it as not only mysterious but somehow magical.

  “Gray does not have a good name,” the modern architectural historian Jean-Christophe Bailly wrote, “but in the very special light of Paris, it becomes a sort of receptacle for every nuance, creating a pearly refinement that excludes all shrillness.” More than a century before him, the Italian novelist Edmondo de Amicis, coming upon Parisian boulevards for the first time, put it even more lyrically: “It is not an illumination but a fire. The boulevards are blazing. Half closing the eyes it seems as if one saw on the right and left two rows of flaming furnaces. The shops cast floods of brilliant light halfway across the street, and encircle the crowd in a golden dust.”

  But for the most part, it was neither the light radiating from the buildings nor the buildings themselves that made the Parisian boulevards of 1900 into an icon of Western civilization. It was the scene at ground level.

  In part, this was a function of decoration. Haussmann was an artist of street furniture. The most trivial-seeming objects were designed with ingenuity and great care: Litter bins, sun and rain shelters, drinking fountains, public bathrooms, awnings, kiosks, pillars, and especially lampposts were decorated with silver or even small amounts of gold. The Métro stations, most of them appearing first in the 1890s, were decorated with the art nouveau signage and trim that makes them striking even today. There were iron benches on every boulevard, and long rows of trees. Haussmann preferred chestnut trees when he could get them; otherwise plane trees sufficed.

  Above all, the Parisian boulevard was another version of human theater, merely two or three times larger than the midcentury street. Edmondo de Amicis saw it with a foreigner’s clarity: “Everything is neat and fresh and wears a youthful air.… Between the two rows of trees is a constant passing and repassing of carriages, great carts and wagons drawn by engines and high omnibuses, laden with people, bounding up and down on the unequal pavement, with a deafening noise. Yet the whole air is different from that of London—the green open place, the faces, the voices, and the colors give to that confusion more the air of pleasure than of work.”

  The boulevards were crowded even at a width of eighty feet; the sidewalks were the most crowded part. Besides the iron benches, there were signs anywhere a spot could be found for them, and kiosks advertising and selling everything from luxuries for elite apartment dwellers to utensils for the day-to-day needs of their servants. All of this left little room for strolling on the sidewalks, often as little as four or five feet of room, but strollers were omnipresent nevertheless. “The sidewalks provided an outdoor living area for the city,” the modern historian Norma Evenson explains, “an all-day circus and fair accessible to everyone.” Those lucky enough to live in flats above these sidewalks could watch the circus from second- or fifth-floor balconies—and they could be watched themselves by pedestrians looking up from below.

  The Boulevard des Italiens, one of the four “grand boulevards” of Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was thronged with pedestrians, vehicles, and vitality almost twenty-four hours a day. (photo credit 1.1)

  The apartment buildings that lined the boulevards were highly desirable living spaces. Paris had more or less invented upscale apartment living as early as the eighteenth century, but Haussmann’s Paris refined it and created an apartment-dwelling po
pulation many times larger. These buildings, nearly all five or six stories high, preserved the hierarchy of class separation that had existed earlier. The more affluent tenants lived on the lower floors, with the most affluent of all generally on the second floor, in a large flat with a wrought-iron balcony, and one moved downscale as one climbed the stairs, so that the top floor was often the province of the servants who waited upon those below. Children had their own territory in the form of a large nursery, from which they emerged in late afternoon for inspection or tea before returning for the evening.

  This arrangement for living had its share of critics: The architect Viollet-le-Duc wrote that “nothing can more thoroughly demoralize a population than those large apartment houses which efface individual personalities and where love of family life is barely admissible.” But for most Parisians in the late nineteenth century, and for most critics ever since, urban boulevard life represented a genuine achievement in the progress of Western civilization.

  It was an ordered city, but it was one that proved remarkably hospitable to artists, bohemians, and misfits of various kinds. From the 1880s onward, the hill neighborhood of Montmartre, at the far north end of the city on the Right Bank, became the clubhouse of the creative class. As Nigel Gosling put it, “Montmartre was to become the dynamo charging the revolution which overturned the whole European art world.” Peter Hall wrote: “The young artists, thrown together by poverty and isolation, formed close and intense networks; in the cafés, in the cabarets, on the river, in the salons of the dealers and the critics. They lived and worked in each other’s pockets.” Haussmann had never touched the Montmartre hillside, so housing was far cheaper than on the boulevards down below. Cabarets, bars, and restaurants were ubiquitous. Picasso practically lived at Vernin Bistro, eating his meals on credit when he was broke. A member of his circle recalled that “the smells from the kitchen and the rough wine mingled pretty disagreeably. Nobody minded that, though. You could eat well and there was always a lot going on.”