THEN AGAIN, she wouldn’t find the Greenwich Village of the 1950s if she returned to the Village now, and revisited the 500 block of Hudson Street, where she lived, raised her family, and wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
This block of Hudson Street in New York’s Greenwich Village was the model for Jane Jacobs’s idea of diverse and harmonious urban living in the 1950s. Jacobs’s own house (in the center, with the large glass window) sold for more than $3 million in 2010. (photo credit 3.2)
The West Village that Jacobs knew has managed at the same time to move dramatically upscale and yet show tangible signs of trouble. The candy store that occupied the ground floor of a Hudson Street building is long gone, as are the tailor, barber, and hardware store that combined to make Hudson a thriving mixed-use street half a century ago. When Jacobs’s own three-story redbrick townhouse at 555 Hudson went on the market for $3.5 million in the spring of 2009, it was vacant for several months, finally selling for $3.3 million to an owner who rented the first floor to a boutique glass store displaying cups for $45. Most of the local merchants who served as Jacobs’s “eyes on the street,” who watched over its activity and thereby kept it safe, do not have counterparts today. That is not because Hudson Street has been unlucky, but because locally owned candy stores, fruit markets, and hardware stores have largely disappeared throughout America, the victim of market forces that have made them economically unsustainable. The mom-and-pop stores still in business on Hudson are essentially convenience stores trying to provide as many different services as they can: The store two doors down from Jacobs’s old townhouse offers faxing, copying, mailboxes, and film developing.
The coffeehouse and deli have disappeared, along with the Hudson Corner Café that served as a neighborhood gathering place for years. Da Andrea, the popular Italian restaurant that constituted another social center, moved in 2008 due to rising rents, as have the short-lived Hunan Pan, MaMa Buddha, and Monster Sushi. Hudson Street in 2009, in the midst of recession, had become a victim of its own success: Its properties had grown so expensive that hardly anyone could afford them. The one conspicuous survivor on the block is the White Horse Tavern, where Jacobs mingled with longshoremen who went there to drink after their day’s (or night’s) work at the nearby docks, and where Dylan Thomas claimed to have downed eighteen whiskeys at a sitting shortly before he died. The White Horse made it to the twenty-first century in part on tourist dollars, but it is almost unchanged from the 1950s: The floor inside is still made of old wooden planks, and one can sit comfortably at one of the sidewalk tables in the late afternoon, drink a glass of ale, and look for reminders of the street life that Jacobs cherished.
There is plenty of activity on the street, if not the intricate “sidewalk ballet” that Jacobs talked about. It includes children, but not children romping delightfully in the street; most of them are in strollers or walking back home with nannies after school or organized playtime. Of course, one rarely finds children playing on the street unsupervised in any affluent neighborhood in America these days; to find that, you have to go to much poorer places, like south Bushwick. There is a curious mixture of adults on Hudson Street, though, many of them riding bicycles and parking them at meters, and their appearance and demeanor seem like an odd throwback to the old days. There are elderly men with ponytails who look as if they might be returning from a Jack Kerouac poetry reading at the White Horse in 1957. They tend to wear black, even on an afternoon when the August sun is beating down and the temperature is in the nineties. If one watches the people walking down Hudson, and stares at the old brick buildings that have survived, and if one can forget about the absent longshoremen and the myriad of businesses that have come and gone, then it is almost possible to see Hudson Street as Jane Jacobs saw it half a century ago.
Or one can ponder all the elements now missing from fifty years ago and recall what Jacobs herself wrote in Death and Life: “We must understand that self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not by failure.”
ONE THING WE HAVE LEARNED about the modern city is that even the smartest of observers, trying to predict the possibilities for revival and change in almost any urban neighborhood, are likely to be wrong. Anybody making a list in 1960 of places in New York likely to become centers of renewed residential life would almost certainly have put Wall Street at the bottom, as Jacobs did. Anybody making a similar list in 1980 of places unlikely ever to attract young white professionals would have put crime-ridden, drug-plagued Bushwick at the very top. And yet both, in very different and complex ways, have emerged as symbols of the transformation of the American city in the early twenty-first century.
We have also learned that retail business, especially the kind of everyday retail business that newcomers to a neighborhood most want, is very difficult to attract or sustain. It is much easier to lure people of means to live in an area than it is to give them the locally oriented commerce that Jane Jacobs considered essential to a thriving community. Thus it is that one can find a Tiffany & Co. in the heart of the Financial District but not a delicatessen that stays open late at night. If the merchants one seeks are barbers, candy store owners, and independent hardware dealers, it is a fruitless effort. Modern market forces have made them obsolete, even in places where a townhouse costs $3.5 million. This does not make newly wealthy inner-city neighborhoods unattractive, but it is a limitation they must face and a problem that no city has fully solved.
Finally, we have learned from both the Financial District and Bushwick (as we did from Sheffield) that the relative importance of travel time compared to other commodities is increasing as the years go by. To repeat the succinct aphorism of the Bushwick real estate broker, “These days, convenience trumps aesthetics.” This is likely to become even more important as a new urban generation emerges. It is an idea we will continue to pursue in the remaining chapters of the book.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NEW SUBURBIA
IT MAY SEEM FAR-FETCHED to compare the Hispanic construction workers of modern suburban Atlanta to the peasants from southern France who built Baron Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards. But it reinforces an important point about the ways in which the American suburbs of the present mirror the European suburbs of 150 years ago: They are, in large part, the gateways to which newcomers come from far away to perform the entry-level work the society wishes to have performed.
The story of Hispanics in suburban Atlanta begins with the preparation for the 1996 Olympic Games. Those games, like every Olympic extravaganza, produced an enormous burden of immediate building needs. These included an eighty-five-thousand-seat Olympic stadium; temporary housing for more than ten thousand athletes; and a brand-new Centennial Park to serve as a gathering place for the two million spectators who were to attend the events.
Given the limited supply of workers and the time constraints, the Olympic organizers and the Atlanta building and development industry imported an army of laborers from the outside. Virtually all of these were Hispanics, some from the southwestern United States but most of them from Mexico. Few questions about legal status were asked. It was later estimated by the Urban Institute that at least 40 percent of the foreign-born workers in Georgia were undocumented.
Many of the people who built the Olympic facilities left after the games ended in August of 1996, but most stayed. The numerical increase was extraordinary. In 1990, Hispanics had comprised 1.7 percent of the entire population of Georgia. In the ensuing decade the numbers grew by 300 percent, and virtually all of this growth was in metropolitan Atlanta. By the time of the 2000 census, the Atlanta area as a whole was 7 percent Hispanic.
Relatively little of this post-Olympic increase came within Atlanta proper. The Hispanic population began to boom in DeKalb County, on the city’s eastern border, and especially in Gwinnett County, the much larger and less developed territory just north of DeKalb. In the late 1990s, Gwinnett was in the midst of a spectacular residential building boom that would boost its overall populat
ion from 352,000 to 588,000 in the course of a decade. Much of this can reasonably be described as white flight, a response to the emergence of Atlanta’s African American majority population and its control of city politics.
Gwinnett was a largely rural expanse of 437 square miles, 80 percent unincorporated, and in the 1990s it was being packed with subdivision after subdivision, cul-de-sacs and shopping centers and multicar garages. It was developed as a place of safety and homogeneity for white middle-class families, and for many years it was. In 1990, Gwinnett was 90 percent white. There was a black presence of roughly eighteen thousand people, but most of this was a legacy of the county’s rural, cotton-growing past. Nearly everyone assumed the proportions would stay that way for a generation to come.
But labor was needed in large numbers to build the highways and the subdivisions, and this was work that the former Olympic laborers had the skills to perform, and were willing to perform at relatively low wage rates. Almost none of these workers lived in the new subdivisions, or anywhere near them. But they did gradually move into the county, into the closer-in towns such as Norcross and Duluth. They settled in modest apartment complexes built for the white working class in the 1960s and 1970s along and adjacent to Buford Highway, a ten-mile corridor running through both DeKalb and Gwinnett.
As late as the 1960s, old-timers will tell you, Gwinnett County didn’t even consider itself part of the Atlanta area. It was farm country, and getting to the big city required a tedious journey over poorly maintained two-lane roads. No town in Gwinnett had more than four thousand people. When the county made news at all, it was usually for some form of crime or corruption, often relating to conditions at the infamous Buford Rock Quarry Prison for Incorrigibles, where in 1956 more than forty prisoners on a chain gang broke their own legs in a gruesome protest against abusive treatment. TIME magazine reported that the men “had been driven to their madness by the brutality of prison bosses.”
The economic activity that drew the most notice was not agriculture but the transportation of moonshine liquor that was brought to hiding places in Gwinnett from stills in north Georgia, then transferred to other locations in the Atlanta area. Even completion of the early portions of Interstate 85 did little to alter the county’s reputation for sleaziness: The highway became home to a string of chop shops trading in stolen auto parts. In 1964, proprietors of one of these chop shops murdered three policemen.
But in the mid-1960s, as the interstate stretched farther to cover most of the county, Atlanta began to discover Gwinnett not as a sleazy backwater but as a place with huge development potential. In 1965, the interstate had reached all but the eastern edge of the county. Two years later, I-85 was open from one end of Gwinnett to the other, creating a forty-five-mile corridor primed to attract legitimate businesses, at first mainly warehouses and distribution centers for manufacturers. But soon the dominant industry, as it turned out to be for the next thirty years, was residential construction. The first major subdivision, Cardinal Lake Estates, near Duluth, opened in 1959 with four hundred ranch houses surrounding a forty-acre lake and clubhouse. It continues to thrive half a century later with a population that is largely Korean. Similar projects followed. “Gwinnett County, which has suffered under national notoriety,” the Atlanta Constitution wrote in 1966, “someday may be the prestige area of metropolitan Atlanta.”
Gwinnett was a developer’s dream: mile after mile of land that was empty, cheap, flat, and easy to build on. It was one massive greenfield. There was no real political establishment, few old families nervous about change, and few large landowners determined to drive hard bargains. The small-scale farmers who sold out to developers were almost incredulous about their good fortune. Some of them became millionaires literally overnight.
In 1971, the new Technology Park opened on the outskirts of Norcross, with transistor manufacturers comprising most of the original tenants. Two years later, the crucial breakthrough occurred. Western Electric, the Bell Telephone manufacturing subsidiary, opened a plant not far from Technology Park, with a workforce that would eventually reach nearly four thousand. Gwinnett had begun to acquire the physical character it has today: a vast expanse of low-rise residential subdivisions interspersed with business parks along the main thoroughfares. And the population had begun its relentless climb: to 352,000 in 1990, 588,000 in 2000, and 808,167 in 2010.
The developers who built the subdivisions that housed all these people were not surprised in the least by the extent of the county’s growth. It was what they had planned for and invested in. But they were not prepared for the demographic changes that accompanied the growth. In 1990, there had been only 8,470 Hispanics in the entire county; in 2000, thanks to the Olympic Games and post-Olympic construction boom, there were 64,137. The black population continued to rise as well, and by 2000 also represented more than 10 percent of the overall numbers. Some perceptive planners had understood that this would happen. What they did not expect was that in the 1990s, and even more in the first decade of the new century, Gwinnett would become a magnet for newcomers from faraway places.
The Hispanic influx was merely the precursor of a much larger immigration of the foreign-born from seemingly all parts of the world, from India, Vietnam, and Korea, from sub-Saharan Africa, from refugee camps in eastern Europe. It has altered the face of Gwinnett County more quickly and more massively than that of any suburban jurisdiction of comparable size anywhere in the United States. When data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey were released in September of 2008, they showed a degree of change that many of the white residents could scarcely comprehend. Gwinnett had become a majority-minority county, with a white Anglo population of 49.93 percent. The 2010 census confirmed this transformation. Census Bureau figures also showed that of all foreign-born newcomers to the Atlanta area, only a small percentage were settling in the city. The rest were becoming suburbanites. And the largest percentage of them were becoming Gwinnett residents: nearly a quarter of them by 2005, almost certainly more than that by now.
Many of the small towns in Gwinnett, such as Norcross, Lilburn, and Duluth, still have quaint old downtown main streets, built across from railroad stations in the early decades of the twentieth century, now sporting wine bars and bookstores and coffeehouses. These downtowns continue to be upper-middle-class Anglo enclaves—one rarely sees any immigrants there at all. But walk three hundred yards back from the pleasantly gentrified main streets, and you are in another world entirely: Buford Highway, where virtually all the faces belong to people from somewhere far away.
White residents were generally slow to catch on to what was happening in Gwinnett, but some perceptive outsiders picked up on it almost as soon as it began happening. “Six lanes of black hardtop,” Tom Wolfe called Buford Highway in A Man in Full, his 1998 novel about Atlanta, “bounded by blasted heaths of concrete and hard-baked dirt studded with low tilt-up concrete buildings and wires strung with fluttering Day Glo pennants, signs that rose far above the buildings on aluminum stanchions, and every other device that might catch the eye of someone driving along a highway at 60 miles an hour beneath a broiling Georgia sun. Across the road … the Pung Mie Chinese Restaurant, but also Collision City and an astonishing array of pawnshops.”
That could stand as an evocative description of Buford Highway more than a decade later, with a little bit of updating. The signs are now displayed in Asian languages as often as they are in Spanish, and the collision shops and pawnshops—still present—have been augmented by Vietnamese nail salons and Korean-owned businesses whose clientele is largely Spanish speaking.
Buford Highway, built for automobiles and almost entirely lacking in sidewalks, has ironically grown dense with pedestrians, mostly Asian and Hispanic women who are not afraid to walk long distances down the six-lane road. They are buying groceries and carrying them back home, crossing the street at crosswalks that are sometimes as much as a mile apart. The creators of Buford Highway had no interest in making it pedestrian-fr
iendly, but the pedestrians have persevered despite them.
Strip malls, owned and patronized by immigrants, have become thriving commercial centers in suburban Atlanta’s Gwinnett County, which had virtually no immigrant population in 1990. (photo credit 4.1)
Today, strip malls are becoming abandoned relics all over America, but the ones on Buford Highway are mostly thriving, with vacancies among their modest-size storefronts comparatively rare. Meanwhile, just down the road, Gwinnett Place, the quintessential regional mall that was Georgia’s largest shopping center when it opened in 1984, and whose gross sales placed it among the top 5 percent of malls in the United States, was by 2009 pockmarked with vacancies, including a big and embarrassing one at the conspicuous corner anchor spot where Rich’s department store once served huge numbers of middle-class Anglo families. By 2011, the Rich’s store (later briefly Macy’s) had become a multistory Asian emporium called Mega Mart, specializing in fresh groceries appealing to Asians and fashions and merchandise from Korea.
On and around the asphalt lanes of Buford Highway, low-slung garden apartments still house Hispanic families and groups of unrelated Hispanic laborers. Much of the demand for construction labor ceased with the real estate recession in 2008, and many of the male breadwinners left the area, but many of them also left wives and children living in poverty in the apartment courts or in “extended stay” motels, where families can join together and rent dilapidated rooms by the week, sometimes staying a year or more and continuing to send their children to the Gwinnett public schools.
There are probably as many as three thousand people living in extended-stay conditions in the towns of western Gwinnett County; some count them as homeless, though the county commission regards their presence as a matter of personal choice. The county school system as a whole is now about two-thirds minority, and some of the elementary schools, such as Beaver Ridge, near the Buford strip, are virtually 100 percent black and Hispanic, with most of the black enrollment coming not from African Americans but from new arrivals who have left Ghana, Nigeria, or Gambia for the opportunities of the Atlanta suburbs. In the close-in towns such as Lilburn and Norcross, which contain large apartment complexes, some of the schools are reporting a 50 percent student turnover between the start of the academic year in August and its conclusion in late May. “It’s almost like migrant workers,” says Bucky Johnson, the Norcross mayor. “We don’t mind having our share. We’ve gotten the lion’s share.”
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 10
