The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  Urban vibrancy had dimmed when resources were directed to the war effort, but the solution was definitely not to demolish whole swaths of the urban fabric and hope that what remained would not fall apart. The value of social and economic networks was greater than the new structures to be built by dispossessing them. Mending the urban fabric, repairing and replacing different pieces around the whole city, could have included many new projects, large and small, but never on the ripping scale of what Moses proposed and never at the same staggering social or financial cost. For example, investing more in the neglected public transit instead of just the convenience of the private car would not have precluded vehicular access, just not made it the priority. Today we struggle to re-create a transportation balance.

  Was the city better off after Moses? We had thirteen expressways to help people get in and out of the city, but we had less mass transit to get people around the city. We had some celebrated new projects like Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Coliseum (now gone, replaced by Time-Warner Center), and a money-losing 1964 World’s Fair that gave the city Flushing Meadow Park. But we still had a crumbling infrastructure and a maintenance burden for the new projects that continue to cost dearly. And as investigative reporter Fred J. Cook wrote about Moses’s slum-clearance program in a 1956 exposé in the World-Telegram and Sun: “It is a system under which neighborhoods actually have deteriorated; it is a system under which the number of apartments, already inadequate, has been reduced for years to come. It is a system . . . beginning again the cycle of overcrowding and bad housing that creates slums.” And as architect and planner Robert Goodman observed, “The inhabitants of our dormitories for the poor have all the ‘symptoms’ of poverty as those living in adjacent tenement areas, without even the consolation of the corner stores, storefront churches, street life and lack of bureaucratic administration of their old ‘slum.’”39

  DENSITY IS NOT THE PROBLEM

  Moses and many planners since made the fundamental mistake of thinking density was the problem, failing to distinguish between density and overcrowding. Diminishing density, which almost all urban renewal and slum-clearance projects did and still do, does not diminish or solve problems. Problems are just shifted elsewhere and, in fact, exacerbated as new units built are rarely in the same quantity as those destroyed. Fewer units mean more chances of overcrowding.

  Density is critical to vibrant urbanism. Mass transit, local retail and the jobs that go with it, well-used public spaces, and other elements of genuine urbanism can’t survive without density. Car-based neighborhoods in a city function like suburbs out of the city. They are holes in the urban fabric, undermining the whole by weakening specific parts. There are, as the late New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp described, “projects physically located in a community but contributing little value to it.” And as Jacobs explained, “Densities are too low or too high when they frustrate city diversity instead of abetting it.”40 They can’t be determined by the formulas and ratios planners favor.

  Moses diminished both density and the number of affordable dwellings, thus guaranteeing continued overcrowding. He also guaranteed inflexible projects that stood like islands apart from areas of the city that would eventually dynamically and organically rebuild themselves around those islands. The real causes of slums were unaffected and in many cases made worse.

  Ironically, today people assume that high-rise means high density when, in fact, the modest low-rise mixture of individual buildings bulldozed for urban renewal was higher in density than the tower replacements that were purposely less dense than what was demolished.41 Three- or four-family modest-scale houses built close together with tenements and slightly higher but still small apartment houses in between provided the density of once vibrant neighborhoods. That is what was lost. Today, this same density is so admired and expensive in Brooklyn.

  The myth of density was so promoted that today the idea remains pervasive that density causes crime, poverty, and other urban ills. Ironically, in communities where density has either been thinned or resisted, overcrowding is often the result.

  THE SOCIAL AND PSYCHIC DIMENSION

  Moses dismissed all suggestions of alternatives to total clearance and to the misery caused by displacement. “No one has yet suggested a way to clear slums without dislocating people,” he said. He was correct. Clear slums without dislocation, no; regenerate slums with minimum dislocation, yes. One is strictly physical and simple, the other organic and complex.

  But what were the causes of slums? Redlining, racism, blockbusting, land speculation, disinvestment, rent gouging by slumlords, migration of rural Southerners into the city, and the gradual departure of the middle class all undermined healthy urban neighborhoods across the country. Slum clearance solved none of these problems and, in fact, exacerbated many of them, especially land speculation, racism, and poverty.

  Urban renewal and highway building reduced the number of low-income housing units, dislocated between five hundred thousand and one million people in a city of approximately eight million, and increased rents for many, all while providing a financial bonanza for private interests. Those interests profited from slum-clearance land sales, construction loans, and subsidies. The kind of societal damage described earlier by Elizabeth Yampierre was the result. Much of the social dysfunction created by such dislocation led to so many of the social problems that peaked in the 1970s. “Indeed, when the construction was done, the real ruin of the Bronx had just begun,” wrote author and CUNY political science professor Marshall Berman, who as a child was displaced by the Cross Bronx Expressway.42

  The impact of serial displacement was already a citywide issue in 1958. Only Caro has focused on the human side to a notable extent and only in the one case of the Cross Bronx Expressway. The dimension of the problem and its lasting impact were and are citywide. Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia, wrote a revealing book, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It, analyzing in excruciating detail the social and psychological effects of the displacement caused by urban renewal and highway construction in cities. Her study covered several cities, with similar patterns appearing in each. Referring to the effects of all the cataclysmic disruption, serial dislocation, and the shattering of the critical web of social connections and familial relationships, she wrote:

  It was in a state of overwhelming injury that black people faced a series of crises: the loss of unskilled jobs, the influx of heroin and other addictive drugs, the slow collapse of the family, and the incursion of AIDS, violence, asthma, and obesity. Each disaster increased the impact of the next, and the spiral of community disintegration began to spin faster and faster, just as the last domino seems to fall much more quickly than the first. The present state of Black America is in no small measure the result of “Negro removal.”

  That is a powerful conclusion, one that most officials ignore or reject rather than take seriously. “We have had a series of policies that continue to displace people,” Fullilove noted, “and no real policies to stabilize places.”43 The poor are just placeholders for the next development plan, she observed. The value of the places they are relocated to is destroyed and then can be bought cheap when the time is right. Any genuine stabilization plan or policy, Fullilove argued, echoing Jacobs’s articulation of “unslumming,” would include investment in an area while keeping the people in place. This preserves the social networks and all the other components of a stable urban neighborhood.

  The bottom line is that social dislocation, whether in small numbers or large, is a primary cause of urban instability, costly to the people affected, and costly to the larger city. This is not just logical, an assumption easily understood by anyone who recognizes the authentic urban process. But it is also shown to be true in clinical studies that Fullilove and others have conducted. Between 1991 and 1995, for example, Fullilove interviewed people living in randomly selected househol
ds in Harlem. Of those interviewed, twenty-five reported that they had been homeless at some point in their lives. An astounding 25 percent had come from dislocated homes and had been separated from their parents for at least a year prior to the age of eighteen. Some experienced both. “This geographic area,” Fullilove points out in conversation, “experienced dramatic disinvestment where familial and social bonds had come apart.” What keeps people healthy, she adds, are the “social connections and social solidarity that come with dense social networks.”

  THE RESURGENT CITY

  The city hit bottom in the 1970s. The spiral of urban decay had descended pretty low, following the massive disruption caused by the Moses era. The worst damage was done. The rest was left to burn through most of the 1970s.

  Between 1950 and 1975, the city lost one million people. The federal money for big clearance projects eventually either diminished drastically or went dry. Forced to change course, government leaders found new, creative solutions, often following citizen-led efforts. The natural organic process that was taking root around the city finally had a chance to take hold and grow. Where successful, that process enhanced rather than displaced the rich assortment of people, culture, and economy we now celebrate. The unarticulated strategy was to improve conditions and lives where they lived, not try to move people around, what Jacobs described as “unslumming.” Unslumming comes not when new people are moving in but when people choose to stay, make their own neighborhoods. This is distinguished from gentrification.

  What has evolved organically since the 1970s is exactly what was advocated by Moses’s critics, first led by attorney and housing activist Charles Abrams and later Jacobs, Whyte, and others. Demolish judiciously. Replace the unrepairable strategically. Leave standing viable buildings ranging from modest apartment houses to structurally sound tenements to run-down brownstones in need of remodeling. Discourage erosion of industrial space. Invest in transit. Respect and enhance existing schools, community services, and social institutions, all of which contribute to the critical social fabric necessary for stable neighborhoods and cannot be created from scratch. This strategy—Urban Husbandry was how I described it in The Living City—left plenty of room for needed demolition of the hopeless tenement or commercial building. But the basic stability of socially cohesive neighborhoods was not further destroyed. And a good deal of the city’s wide variety of economic activity was not massively dislodged. (Studies have shown that one-third of dispossessed firms went out of business—a rate significantly above normal business failures.)

  Revisionists argue that Moses did what he did because of his love for the city. Even that is questionable. He didn’t love New York City as much as he loved his view of what it should be, how it should function, what should replace it. He reshaped New York in his image and with it cities near and far. As Lewis Mumford points out, “In the 20th century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person.”

  Of all the harmful urban strategies Moses perpetrated, none is as long-lasting and economically destructive as the idea that industry was either dying or dispensable or that its location is easily manipulated. As we will see next, Moses’s thinking on this subject remains fully ingrained in the thinking of New York’s city planners with the power to continue what Moses unleashed.

  6

  THE FACTORY

  The Secret Life of New York Industry

  Urban manufacturing is mostly unrecognized by economic development experts, or seen as an anachronism. This is a mistake.

  SASKIA SASSEN,

  economist

  A city is a settlement that consistently generates its economic growth from its own local economy.

  JANE JACOBS,

  The Economy of Cities

  Donald and I were married in May 1965, five months after I became a full reporter. We returned from our honeymoon, and without telling him, I changed my byline from Roberta Brandes to Roberta Gratz. It did not seriously occur to me to keep my maiden name, something so many professional women do today, including our two daughters, Laura and Rebecca. But three months later my father died. I learned from my mother that my father had been saddened—though he did not tell me—that I had dropped the family name. In his memory—not for feminist reasons—I retrieved the maiden name and changed the byline to Roberta Brandes Gratz. To some of the editors this was a nuisance at best, an annoyance at worst.1

  6.1 Ramsammy Pullay, nicknamed Dez, has been with the company since 1996. Here he is “benching” or bending a steel furniture component. Joshua Velez.

  Donald, like me, had been living in the city with no interest in leaving. He had moved in happily after college, having grown up in Pelham, a near-in Westchester suburb. He took a one-room ground-floor apartment facing a small courtyard on East Twenty-sixth Street. He walked to work.

  In 1955 Donald had joined the family metal fabrication business, started in 1929 by his father and a partner.2 Metal fabrication simply means a process by which objects are made out of metal. Steel, aluminum, and copper, primarily, are bent, drilled, welded, polished, and assembled into chairs, tables, architectural elements, exercise equipment, and custom-designed objects. None of this is mass produced. Instead, skilled and semiskilled workmen individually operate the assorted machines that make up the process. Treitel-Gratz (now Gratz Industries) was located on the sixth floor of a six-story loft building on East Thirty-second Street between Lexington and Third Avenues.

  Watching the fate of this building and business unfold was for me another source of learning about both the changing city and the working of the urban economy. The evolution of the Gratz family business continues to be instructive, just as my own father’s dry-cleaning business provided urban lessons. Gratz Industries, like most city manufacturers, faces an ever-changing array of challenges from both the national economy and city policies. More than eighty years old, it is as contemporary as it ever was.3

  A 1997 report, Designed in New York/Made in New York, noted about the city’s “large, complex manufacturing sector”: “Although manufacturing in New York struggles with high costs and a continual need to reinvent itself, the frequent public pronouncements of its demise are, as the pundit said, premature. Twelve thousand firms employing a quarter of a million production workers endow New York with what is still one of the densest concentrations of manufacturing in the United States.”4

  MANUFACTURING: EVER CHANGING

  Treitel-Gratz had moved to Thirty-second Street in the 1930s from a small brownstone on lower Lexington where it started in the 1920s. The East Thirties were filled with furniture manufacturers. By the 1960s, an assortment of small manufacturers and esoteric businesses occupied this loft building: a menu printer, a bra manufacturer, a cabinetmaker, three decorative wood finishers, a manufacturer of machines for glove makers, a type-setter, an umbrella manufacturer, a drapery and slipcover maker, a dinette furniture seller, a gold stamper, a store display maker, and a woman who raised rats. Quite a combination! Some of the businesses worked together on special jobs and were spontaneously and conveniently clustered for the decorating trade. We did metalwork for the cabinetmaker and store display maker and used the upholsterer when we needed that work. Everyone did odd jobs for one another. It is difficult to place a monetary or operational value on this kind of synergy. “By the early 1930s, the company had established itself as the metal shop of choice for, among others, the celebrated industrial designer Donald Deskey,” wrote Charles Gandee in an article about the company titled “Heavy Metal” in the New York Times Home Design Magazine in spring 2003. Deskey was then doing the celebrated interior furniture for Radio City Music Hall, including the Art Moderne furniture for the office of the great impresario S. L. Rothafel, known as Roxy. Other great industrial designers, like Raymond Loewy with his iconic Coca-Cola machine, George Nelson with his furniture prototypes, and John Ebstein with his toy models for Gabriel Industries, were also customers. The company’s history parallels the history of twen
tieth-century design.

  In 1948, Hans Knoll, a German émigré, wanted to bring the furniture of legendary Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe to the United States and enlisted the company to engineer and manufacture the Mies line of chairs and tables now considered classics—Barcelona, Bruno, Tugendhat—all first exhibited at the 1929 International Industrial Exposition in Barcelona. In 1958 architect Philip Johnson turned to Deskey for the interior of the Four Seasons Restaurant when it opened in the base of the Mies-designed Seagram Building on Park Avenue that was also filled with Mies furniture. Johnson was a protégé of Mies and coarchitect on the building, and he designed the restaurant interior with Garth Huxtable. That restaurant, a city-designated interior landmark, was—and still is—furnished with the classic Mies furniture.

  In the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, American furniture design was in its heyday. Treitel-Gratz furniture and metalwork were going into scores of new office buildings in New York, Chicago, and other cities and suburbs, especially those designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill.