The middle-class suburbs of London were not models for the American suburbs that sprouted up after World War II. Londoners who moved there were not fleeing racial change or failing schools, and they were not fleeing crime. But they were seeking more space; in that respect, the two institutions share a common connection.
IT WOULD BE ABSURD to make the claim that the great European cities of the late nineteenth century will reappear in this country in anything like their original form. No American city will create a Ringstrasse; none could reproduce the City of London even if it wanted to; it is impossible to imagine a Haussmann (or even a Robert Moses) emerging anywhere. But it would also be a mistake to deny the relevance of these older cities to the evolving urban experience, or not to notice that Donald Olsen, hyperbole notwithstanding, was onto something.
American cities all but lost their street life in the last decades of the twentieth century; anybody walking around downtown Philadelphia or Boston or Chicago after five in the afternoon found the streets deserted and dangerous. Today, in various forms, street life is returning. One can walk down Michigan Avenue in Chicago or Walnut Street in Philadelphia long after dark and find the place throbbing with activity and nearly always safe.
Much of this activity, as in the Paris or Vienna of another time, is clustered around entertainment. In the twenty-first century, this is less likely to mean performances at an immense concert hall, although a few cities have built them, and more likely to mean plays at storefront black box theaters and live music coming out of the bars that line the street. Most of all, however, street life in the emerging city means restaurant life. Walk along Tryon Street in downtown Charlotte, that highly untraditional American city, and you will see diners at sidewalk tables on every block. There is little retail shopping in downtown Charlotte, but there are restaurants almost everywhere.
And there are cafés. One can make fun of the ubiquitous presence and the uniformity of Starbucks, but the fact remains that just twenty years ago, the idea of coffeehouses in urban centers seemed a quaint vision of the vanished past. Now one can walk into a Starbucks in the center of any large American city at ten in the morning or eight in the evening and find clusters of coffee drinkers deep in conversation, many of them lingering as much to talk as to consume. It is not going too far to say that Starbucks resurrected the coffeehouse experience in present-day America: Small independent cafés have returned to the street along with it. We have not re-created the Ringstrasse café—but we have taken a step in that direction.
We have also taken a step toward the urban diversity and tolerance that prevailed in Paris a hundred years ago. People with widely different backgrounds and modes of living come together on the sidewalks of Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and a growing number of other cities in ways that would have been unthinkable in 1980. American cities are also returning to diversity of use: The idea of zoning for segregation of uses is slowly dying in America; virtually every city planning official is now looking for ways to promote mixed-use zoning, perhaps not the chaotic jumble of the old Paris, but a mixture of uses nevertheless.
At the level of the metropolitan region, modern American urban patterns are coming to resemble older ones in a more dramatic fashion. The late twentieth century was the age of poor inner cities and wealthy suburbs; the twenty-first century is emerging as an age of affluent inner neighborhoods and immigrants settling on the outside. The movement of singles, couples, and empty-nest baby boomers back to the center gathered momentum in the first decade of the new century, stalled in the recession at the end of the decade, and will eventually resume.
When it resumes, American cities will come to resemble not only the European capitals of a century ago, but cities all over the globe today. Current European cities have their problems with suburban sprawl, but almost without exception they follow the historic pattern: affluent people in the center, migrants and the poor on the outskirts. The cities of the developing world follow it as well, perhaps more dramatically. Mumbai, Cairo, and Rio de Janeiro all consist of central districts where tourists and rich locals congregate, surrounded by shantytowns populated by newly arrived urbanites who have left zones of rural poverty to try to make a fresh start amid the chaos of a mushrooming metropolitan population. So do other fast-growing cities on every continent. There are no shantytowns surrounding American cities, and there will not be any. But even the briefest consideration of the rest of the world makes it clear that the inversion taking place in the United States is no global aberration, but a distinctly American version of a phenomenon that exists in large cities everywhere.
In the chapters that follow, we will visit a cross section of cities and suburbs in diverse parts of America, take a detailed look at the way they are changing, and hazard some guesses about what they might look like a generation from now.
CHAPTER TWO
A NEIGHBORHOOD IN CHICAGO
IT IS SIX THIRTY IN THE MORNING in Sheffield, a quiet neighborhood three miles north of downtown Chicago. I’m sitting by the window at a bagel-and-coffee shop just off the corner of Sheffield and Armitage, across the street from the Armitage elevated train station. Every few minutes a Brown Line train rumbles by directly overhead, its noise so consistent and regular that it feels like an icon of neighborhood life, not an annoyance of any sort.
Armitage Avenue is no Parisian boulevard; there are no boulevards in Sheffield, only business streets and residential streets. But the buildings are about the same age as those in central Paris; nearly all of them were built between 1880 and 1910. The Argo tea shop on the other side of the street reveals the date 1885 in large letters on the second-story wall. By city ordinance, none of the buildings can be more than thirty-four feet tall.
A parade of early risers marches down the street in front of me: joggers, men in suits on their way to the train, art students from nearby DePaul University carrying their supplies to the studio. It is not a picture of diversity as we have come to define it—there are very few blacks or Hispanics on the street—but it is the sort of diversity Jane Jacobs saw in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, a diversity of occupations, ages, and daily schedules. There are people on their way to nine-to-five jobs, others returning from night shifts, young singles who jog this route every morning, older people who cover the same route at a slower pace.
The businesses that line this block of Armitage are, for the most part, neither chic nor shabby. There is a Rugby Ralph Lauren boutique, but that is about the only hint of cosmopolitan sophistication. The others are nearly all local. There’s a sports bar that has huge Cubs and White Sox banners displayed with seeming impartiality in the window, also a chiropractor and a dry cleaner. Around the corner on Sheffield is a Caribbean restaurant. If you look down the next block of Armitage, you can see empty storefronts.
Armitage Avenue, in Chicago’s Sheffield neighborhood, has managed to retain its workaday appearance while serving as a commercial center for one of the city’s most affluent communities. (photo credit 2.1)
But the day-and-night street life is undeniably interesting. “There’s so much activity at Armitage and Sheffield,” one resident says, “it almost feels like a movie.” Another boasts that “in Sheffield, you wonder what you’re going to see next, maybe a famous pro athlete next to a Filipino immigrant.” A third is more grandiose: “This is like the Left Bank of Paris seventy years ago.”
THE ONE THING you won’t notice about Sheffield through the windows of the Chicago Bagel Authority may be the most important thing about the place. It is rich. Actually, very rich. As of 2009, in tract 711, where comparatively modest old houses fill most of the residential blocks north of Armitage, the median family income was $201,125. When mid-decade projections were released in 2007 by Esri, an independent demographic research company, the median home price had surpassed a million dollars. “Gentrification” is not a word that accurately describes Sheffield. It is a neighborhood of stable and substantial affluence where scarcely any of the people we normally consider gentrifier
s can afford to live.
It is easier to demonstrate that Sheffield is rich than to explain why. “At first glance,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in 2006, “it’s hard to see why some of Chicago’s most wealthy people have chosen this formerly nondescript area as their new enclave. It doesn’t have a lake view. It isn’t even that close to the lake.” And the land is flat as a pancake.
In fact, Lake Michigan is a little more than a mile from the center of Sheffield, and one can walk there in half an hour at a leisurely pace. But few of the residents do that very often. There are other factors that clearly have something to do with what has happened—the fourteen-minute train ride to downtown, the presence of a university, the tree-lined streets and pleasingly eclectic stock of houses—but none of these quite suffice as explanations. It is more instructive simply to say that Sheffield is a small piece of a much larger demographic phenomenon that has enveloped much of Chicago over the past couple of decades. “The city is changing,” then-mayor Richard M. Daley proclaimed shortly after taking office in 1989. “You’re not going to see the factories back.”
But just what Chicago was to see in the ensuing years was not predicted by Daley or anyone else. When the mayor spoke those words, the city had suffered through nearly a generation of economic and demographic decline and social disorder, to which no clear end was in sight.
In fact, however, by 1989 many of Chicago’s problems were already beginning to ease up. The loss of factory jobs was indeed horrendous: four hundred thousand of them between 1969 and 1983 alone, or 32 percent of the city’s total manufacturing employment base. This was roughly comparable to what was happening in other Midwestern industrial cities, except in one respect: Virtually all the other cities—Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis—were unable to come up with new kinds of jobs to replace them. Chicago did. In Chicago, the downtown Loop and lakefront corridor running north from it gradually became a magnet for service and professional work: banking, brokerage, insurance, architecture, and various forms of temporary office employment. In 1950, Chicago had three times as many jobs in manufacturing as in services; by 2001, services led by more than two to one. “Manufacturing was still more important in Chicago than in most other big urban areas,” journalist David Moberg wrote a few years later, “but smoky mills, clanging presses, and fast assembly—or disassembly—no longer defined the regional economy.” Between 1990 and 2006, if you exclude factory jobs—admittedly a large exclusion—Chicago was a net job gainer. It ceased to be one in the recession years that followed, but demographic inversion was well under way, and it has not receded in the years since.
The question of why Chicago escaped the fate of other industrial cities is a subject that has been much debated, but in the end the most satisfying answer may be the simple reality of size. One can argue plausibly that there was room for only one Midwestern city to compete in the new service- and technology-based global economy that was emerging, and Chicago, by far the largest among these cities, was the obvious candidate, even with its serious problems of poverty, weak schools, and scattered violent crime.
Chicago’s civic leaders were startled and discouraged to learn in early 2011 that the previous year’s census had reported a citywide population decline of 6.9 percent, leaving a population of 2,695,598, fewer people than have lived in Chicago at any time since the 1920s. These are difficult numbers to present optimistically; the media tend to equate raw population growth with urban success, and Chicago had boasted when the 2000 census showed it with a small population gain, in contrast to the losses of other Midwestern cities. But a closer look at Chicago’s population changes in the past decade reveals more precisely what happened: In part because of the demolition of the high-rise housing projects, the black population declined by 177,401, accounting for more than three-quarters of the total decline. Many went to suburbs surrounding the city on all sides, including suburbs many miles distant from the city limits. There was a small overall decline in the white population as white working-class families living just inside the city’s borders decamped to the suburbs, while Hispanics moved in to replace them, their numbers growing by three percentage points, and constituting the only major population group whose numbers increased in the city in the past decade. The more affluent population of the central areas remained stable. The census did not tell Chicago what it wanted to hear, but when one examines the numbers in detail, one conclusion is inescapable: Between 2000 and 2010, Chicago became a whiter city with a larger affluent population.
LIKE NEW YORK, but unlike most large American cities, Chicago has long had a reasonably large affluent population within a short distance of its commercial center. For most of the twentieth century, though, this population was limited to a narrow strip along the shores of Lake Michigan, stretching north from the Loop. These urbanites lived in tall and elegant apartment buildings constructed during the boom years of the 1920s, when completion of Lake Shore Drive made downtown offices easy to reach by car.
Except for this lakefront strip, however, Chicago roughly resembled other industrial cities: Hardly anyone resided in the center, and the neighborhoods immediately beyond it, most of them abutting factories and warehouses, were not considered fashionable or attractive places to live. During World War II, only 1 percent of what is now called the “central area” was in residential use.
This did not change for a long time. It finally changed mostly because of a widely held civic illusion: that Chicago’s population was about to grow substantially. The city’s official projection in 1959 was that by 1980, the city would increase from 3.7 million to 4.2 million. The housing director declared that “all large centers of population must plan for accommodating an ever increasing number of people.” In fact, he and the other experts were massively mistaken. By 1980, the city’s population hadn’t increased at all.
But Mayor Richard J. Daley (Richard M.’s father), a fervent believer in population growth, had spent the two decades of his mayoralty (1955–1976) doing everything he could to house the added residents he expected to see. A 1957 zoning code made it much easier for residential developers to build luxury high-rise housing virtually anywhere they chose. Within a decade after that, the developers responded, and in the 1950s and 1960s, 350 new high-rise towers went up. At first, they were still mostly a lakefront phenomenon, pushing just a little farther west of Lake Michigan, onto such streets as Marine Drive and Sheridan Road. But they attracted thousands of upper-class renters and owners who decided they wanted to live the lakefront life. The city was responding to a projected population growth that never took place, but in the process it made possible moves by thousands of affluent residents to close-in apartments they found appealing.
In the 1960s, the elder Daley and the developers discovered downtown itself. The turning point was the construction of Marina City, on the Chicago River just north of the Loop, one of America’s oddest residential complexes, but also one of the most influential. A pair of sixty-five-story cylindrical towers that vaguely resembled corncobs, nine hundred apartments perched on the banks of the Chicago River with boat docks for the residents, Marina City was, at the time of its opening in 1964, the tallest apartment building in the world. It was derided by critics but proved to be a huge financial success. In the words of the urban historian Joseph Schwieterman, Marina City was “a watershed in Chicago planning history.… [I]t showcased the cosmopolitan lifestyle available to those living in the greater Loop.” Never before had Chicago seen residential development on this scale so close to the heart of the city.
Marina City was followed in 1968 by Lake Point Tower, a seventy-one-story curved glass International Style building on the Lake Michigan shore that replaced Marina City as the world’s tallest all-residential structure. Lake Point Tower was infinitely more pleasing to look at than Marina City, although it was equally controversial—it obstructed the view of Lake Michigan for passersby and some area residents. It turned out to be equally successful. It drove home the idea that even a city with a declining populat
ion, as long as it is large enough, can attract the upper middle class to downtown living.
By 1970, an increasing number of new residential towers were going up in the old commercial sector surrounding the Loop. They brought in enough year-round urban dwellers to support a raft of new businesses that catered to them: restaurants, nightclubs, boutiques, and more than one multistory shopping mall. The more people came to central Chicago to live, the more successful the businesses became; and the more diverse and interesting the businesses became, the more people wanted to live nearby. It was, for the city government and the developers, a truly virtuous circle.
And it was a circle that kept expanding its dimensions—north, south, and especially west, where older blue-collar neighborhoods were filled with compact nineteenth-century houses close to the downtown action and waiting patiently to be reclaimed. That is, in part, the story of how Sheffield became rich.
NOBODY LIVING IN SHEFFIELD in 1970 would have guessed that anything like a demographic inversion was about to take place. The neighborhood was indeed undergoing a transition, but it was a transition from modest working-class enclave to semislum.
The Latin Kings had their official headquarters on the second floor of the 1885-vintage Mueller Building, at the corner of Armitage and Sheffield, and sold drugs next to the tracks of the Armitage El station. The Kings’ rival, the beret-wearing Young Lords, were all over the neighborhood, not only selling drugs but demanding protection payments from local businesses. Anyone who chose to refurbish a house—there were just a few at the time—would likely be asked to pay the Lords $2 a month to guarantee that the windows would not be broken. In 1969, the Young Lords and their leader, Cha-Cha Jimenez, seized a building on the nearby DePaul University campus and demanded that the university donate money to the group’s “antipoverty” program. Teenagers from the huge Cabrini-Green public housing project, less than a mile away, used to make quick trips into the neighborhood to steal bicycles and ride off. In the early 1970s, the minister of the Armitage Avenue Methodist Church was murdered on the sidewalk in front of the church’s entrance.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 5
