Finally it got on his nerves, evidently. He tried to ignore it for a long time; we just kept at it. So he turned around, and I happened to have the horn in my hand. We were all taking turns. He said that this was a city, not a state, matter. I disputed him on that. I said it was on the state highway map, and we wanted it taken off. He said that he believed in local government, and the state would do whatever the mayor and the Board of Estimate wanted. So I pinned him down. I said, “If the Board of Estimate turns down this plan, will you have the state take it off the highway map?” And he said yes, he would.
I really pinned him down: “You promise that if the Board of Estimate turns this down, that you will take it off the state map?” “I promise I will,” he said. “It’s your own government that wants this; don’t come after me about it. We will do whatever the city wants.” Okay, that was the great big lie, because then we got the Board of Estimate to turn it down. We promptly began trips to Albany to get it off the state map. Governor Rockefeller promised this. Thousands of people heard him. He promised it to me!
[But in Albany] we got a great runaround from everybody. Everyone was sympathetic. God, we saw a lot of people. They all would say you have to have the city liaison people . . . and the city liaison people would say that it was up to the people in Albany. What it came down to was that the governor wouldn’t allow it to be taken off in spite of this grand public promise before thousands of people. So, that’s the only person-to-person communication I ever had with Rockefeller, and all it amounted to was a huge lie. If the only thing somebody ever told you was a lie, would you like him?
After that, in 1964 she thought, it was rescheduled, and this time the opposition lost. Dozens of construction workers showed up, as they often did for big projects (and still do). One can always tell if they’re paid; they leave right at five o’clock. The new hearings were on technical aspects of land acquisition, not whether it should or shouldn’t happen at all. Many postponements followed for one reason or another. “All kinds of shenanigans were occurring. We kept finding out new things, such as that they were promising a housing project and that it would transgress the new pollution laws soon to be passed.” Much was “going on at top speed,” she said. “Eventually came the time when they had to change their tune because of those pollution laws.”
NEW AMENITIES PROMISED
The pollution laws had a significant impact on the course of this fight, since increased traffic would logically increase pollution. The idea that the speed of the cars diminished the pollution did not prevail. Thus, the proponents changed the argument for the expressway to what was to be built with it. “All of a sudden they were going to have this great, glorious swatch of land right across Manhattan that was going to be full of fountains, gardens, and new buildings of all sorts,” Jacobs explained. “That’s what they now tried to say the expressway was all about. It wasn’t about how many cars it would carry anymore, for heaven’s sake.”
The new school and park proposal apparently stiffened the resolve of people in Chinatown. They would get enough carbon monoxide at their children’s school to do them harm. About this time, Jacobs recalled, it became known that in the apartment houses built over the newly constructed approach to the George Washington Bridge, people couldn’t open their windows.1 “The whole idea of combining housing or schools with expressways, for the first time, was frightening people,” Jacobs observed. “People there were complaining they had headaches all the time. The Department of Health, I think it was, warned people not to open their windows. The song and dance about, ‘Oh, there’s less pollution, because the cars are going fast,’ just didn’t hold up in real life. There was concentrated pollution there.”
So the pollution issue, because of the new laws, was becoming a real problem. The proponents had already given figures about how many cars this expressway would carry.
I think they were inflated for cost-benefit purposes. Using those figures creates the pollution problem. Now all of a sudden they have to argue that they won’t have many cars. They never would discuss these two things—cost benefits and pollution—at the same meeting.
So, they tried very hard to change the subject. This is the first time the subject had to be changed, because it was the first time that these things came into conflict—the amount of pollution as against the cost? That was in ’67 when they began changing the subject, without much success, because this had gone on for so many years, people understood what an expressway would do. It was something very real to them.
ARREST
One of the great eccentric stories about Jane Jacobs is her arrest during the expressway fight. Many versions are told. Some who say they were with her during the incident even tell a different version from her own. She recounted in detail how it really happened in our conversation of March 1978, some of which is included here.
The state held a hearing to focus on a new big promotion for all this great land development that was going to occur, all of a sudden softpedaling, or ignoring, the number of cars, because now they worried about the pollution factor. The plan for the school had been found out. A committee was researching the pollution impact, and they were very frightened. So now comes a hearing on the grand physical environment that was going to be built around the expressway, downplaying the number of cars. They kept talking about fountains, fountains everywhere, so many beautiful fountains. And gardens and things to appeal to the environmentalists.
People tried asking: if it wasn’t going to increase the pollution because there would not be so many cars, then how could the cost be justified? They would say that’s not what this hearing is about. It was a great charade.
Then a hearing was scheduled that she knew was meant to pacify the community. According to Frances Goldin of the Cooper Square Committee, Jacobs arranged with a few of them to stage some kind of protest action. When they got to the meeting, something new was happening. Instead of the lectern for speakers from the public facing the stage where officials were supposed to be listening, it was instead facing the audience, as if citizens only needed to address each other. This was like adding salt to a wound. The public already felt the elected leaders were not interested in what they had to say. This was proof.
Jacobs wanted to “send a message” to officialdom. No one of official consequence was on the stage to listen anyway. Her strategy of “sending a message” was to just quietly walk across the stage from one side to the other in protest. She invited anyone who was similarly inclined to follow. As they walked across the stage, an apparently frightened stenotypist grabbed her steno machine, clutched it to her chest, and, in the process, dropped the tape, which began unraveling all over the stage. Protesters apparently helped send it in the air, grabbing it and tossing it around like confetti. At this point, Jacobs declared that the hearing didn’t happen because there was no record.2
What ensued was quite serious in Jacobs’s mind. She didn’t like being arrested and charged with inciting to riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing public administration. The community had to hold fund-raisers to pay for her defense. Of course, charges were eventually dropped but not before she was actually booked, charged, and eventually ordered by a judge to pay for damages. She didn’t believe for one minute that any damage occurred, but she and her lawyer kept asking the city for receipts of costs of damage in order to fulfill her responsibility. They never received any. The matter simply ended.
In various conversations, Jacobs repeated the point that lawsuits are most useful in these fights just for the benefits of delay, delay, delay. “Some issues you fight with lawsuits and buy time that way,” she explained. “With others, you buy time by throwing other kinds of monkey wrenches in. You have to buy time in all these fights. The lawsuit way is the most expensive.”
THE IMPACT OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS
“We accomplished something with all this mess,” she pointed out. “The feds held a hearing, declaring the expressway environmentally unacceptable. Well, well, that verdict really changed
the subject, you see what I mean? [laughter] So my arrest bought some time, and it was well worth it. That’s why I plea-bargained, to buy more time. I would have gone to jail if necessary. But the only point of it was to buy time to continue working in Washington on the environment and get a judgment against the expressway based on figures about that school, for instance, and about the general pollution that it would cause based on their own figures on new traffic to be generated.”
By the time the decision was made in D.C. on the environmental questions, the Jacobs family had moved to Toronto in 1968. “It was a little like the West Village fight,” she said. “After a while, Washington wanted the West Village thing to end. It was giving the urban renewal program a bad name all over the country. There were editorials in the Saturday Evening Post about the West Village. [laughter] There were pictures all over the U.S. of people protesting it with adhesive tape and x’s on their glasses. It was a bad image for them, a bad press that they were getting. I think highway people in Washington began to feel the same thing was happening with the expressway, too.”
The pollution laws were still new. “It was one of the earliest cases to go this way. And it was an unequivocal thing. You could see how much pollution would occur. The state had used these increased car figures very early to justify spending this much money and doing this amount of destruction because of how much traffic it would accommodate. But now it was over and, eventually, demapped.”
EXPRESSWAY KILLED; SOHO EMERGED
After years of protracted battles, the expressway was killed by the Lindsay administration.3 By then, the district was an empty shadow of its former self.
With the expressway out of the way in 1969, the Landmarks Commission held a hearing on the district’s designation proposal in 1970, the first historic district in a primarily commercial area. There were then eighteen districts. Also that year, the city legalized the residential use by artists of lofts in commercial buildings. Buildings with artists illegally occupying them had small signs put on the front door, AIR for “artist in residence,” to alert the fire department in case of a fire. Occupied buildings were given this designation also to protect people who had fixed up derelict spaces. Art galleries, boutiques, restaurants, and a few artist-entrepreneurs were already sprouting around the area, coexisting comfortably with the more than twenty thousand people who still worked in a variety of light manufacturing industries. No one doubted that industry would probably continue to leave the area.
The significance of SoHo and the critical importance of its preservation for the course of urban development and downtown regeneration nationwide was unclear to most people at the time citizens were vigorously seeking its designation as a historic district. Certainly, it was not yet clear to me. I wrote several stories about the civic campaign, but my focus was on SoHo as an internationally significant architectural district and the fight to gain historic district status for it. My recognition of the multidimensional significance emerged slowly. Eventually, SoHo’s profound impact on the course of American urban history became apparent.4
The designation of SoHo as a historic district in August 1973 marked a turning point in the evolution of historic preservation in New York and the country. It was the first gritty, working commercial district so designated and thus expanded preservation thinking from the limitations of individual architectural treasures and residential districts with a cohesive style. Its rescue and landmarks designation broadened the understanding of what makes areas historically, culturally, and economically important, not just architecturally significant. Until then, the Georgian, Federal, brownstone, and other period-dominant districts were the convention. Georgetown, Greenwich Village, Rittenhouse Square, Beacon Hill, the French Quarter, and similar revered districts were the favorites.
INDUSTRIAL USES DISPLACED
Manhattan manufacturing during the Depression decreased less than in the rest of the country. During World War II, it increased moderately. The biggest cause of subsequent decline in New York City was the clearance for urban renewal at numerous sites around the city, including the dozen square blocks south of Washington Square Park to Canal Street, where SoHo now starts, and east of City Hall in lower Manhattan for vehicular access to the Brooklyn Bridge. Remember, these businesses were not planning to close. They were forced out. Some survived elsewhere; others closed for good.
In the 1960s decline accelerated considerably, as more neighborhoods were cleared and the new highways made cheap suburban sites readily accessible. It is difficult to recognize even today the viable economic uses in messy, down-at-the-heels working districts. Such areas are rarely pretty, seldom freshly landscaped, and hardly ever located in new, pricey buildings. Trucks proliferate. White-cloth restaurants are a distance away. On the surface, nothing significant seems to be happening. This is very deceptive. Incubation of the new and growth of the established are difficult to detect easily. This is the process Jacobs described as “adding new work to old,” the real expansion of economic activity. This definition of growth is quite different from the conventional economic development today.
This Lower Manhattan district had the kind of mix of size, style, and age of buildings that observers today recognize as cradles of diverse and productive activity. This is obvious today because so many districts have followed the SoHo pattern, but when Jacobs et al. were fighting the expressway, few recognized this economic occurrence. “Innovators like to be around people and environments that are friendly to them versus rigid environments,” Jacobs observed. “They want the SoHos of the world where they can function in idiosyncratic ways.”
A 1963 study of SoHo by Chester Rapkin, an economist and unconventional planner, revealed some fifty categories of industrial activity, including furriers and makers of dolls, rags, belts, pens, wheel hubs, and boxes, among other things. The twelve-block district contained 416 buildings, 2,000 housing units, 800 commercial and industrial businesses, and 12,000 jobs. Most workers were minorities; almost half were women.5
Rapkin’s report officially changed nothing. “Good planners are powerless,” Jane Jacobs observed. The official word remained that the district was dead or dying, a collection of moribund, out-of-date, falling-down buildings. This is always the well-publicized, often-repeated official description of a district for which a new agenda has been written. Probably every rejuvenated district in the country has been, at one time, declared moribund and always “blighted” by the so-called experts, hired to justify the new political or development agenda. SoHo is probably the best known of them.
In this case, the new agenda was Robert Moses’s plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway and his large-scale housing schemes mentioned earlier. Thus, SoHo offers a sharp lens into urban change, Robert Moses style. Here, a highway is central; later, we’ll see on the Upper West Side, Lincoln Center and housing developments were central.
Nowhere was the Robert Moses approach to cities more clear. Vast highway networks and urban renewal plans were valued more than organically evolved cities; elaborate schemes gratuitously ripped through neighborhoods, setting a pattern of highway building, centralized planning, and urban annihilation for the country. Robert Moses was the earliest, most visible, and most powerful exponent of this view, as the next chapter demonstrates. From New York, the Moses doctrine took hold all over the country. Ironically, the Lower Manhattan Expressway battle began the shift away from the Moses doctrine to the views expounded by Jacobs.
CHANGING ART
Once the expressway was announced, serious deterioration set in. Vacancies multiplied. Artists grabbed the opportunity of vast, cheap space and pioneered the organic rebirth of the district. They began filling the vacant lofts illegally, creating attractive, functional living and work spaces. Residential use in the industrial area was against the law. But landlords, unable to find business tenants, welcomed the artist-occupant. It was a cash agreement and kept secret until the highway project was killed and the move began to legalize artists’ living and work spaces.
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Coincidentally, contemporary art experienced a radical shift to large-scale work in the 1960s. Lofts averaged twenty-five hundred square feet of open floor space. (Manufacturers remained longer in the bigger ones.) The large windows of Cast Iron construction flooded each floor with natural light. Freight elevators provided useful access. Rents were affordable. It was a perfect prescription for artists.
Even before the SoHo loft trend took hold, Westbeth, an innovative industrial conversion, had occurred. This complex of thirteen attached buildings was built over twenty years starting in 1880 and served as the research center of the American Bell Telephone Company. In 1965, with critical support and guidance from the J. M. Kaplan Fund and designs by architect Richard Meier, the complex was converted to live-work spaces, the first on a large scale. The media attention it attracted surely helped the loft-conversion momentum.
Elsewhere, urban renewal and market high-rises were demolishing artists’ lofts and studios, along with whole neighborhoods, particularly in Greenwich Village, the artists’ neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s. Artist space was at a premium. The destruction in the Village was halted with its designation as a historic district in 1969. The expanding grassroots group pushing the Landmarks Commission for designation counted on the same result for SoHo.
With the defeat of the expressway and gradual occupancy by artists, the transformation of SoHo had begun. City planning, zoning, and land-marking policies just had to catch up.
The Battle for Gotham Page 17
