The genuine concern of my city friends was overwhelming. It was almost as if it had happened to them. In a sense it has. They have been brought one step close to the reality. Many people reacted by saying we should all walk around with guns in our pockets. Yes, the same people who wanted all firearms banished in the wake of the Kennedy and King assassinations were now telling me I should carry a gun.
To the first such comment, my husband observed: “I would have shot my foot off going for it.” Even if it were not a frightening solution, it would remain an impractical one. We never would have had the chance to reach for a gun. And would we have wanted to risk shooting a bystander, ourselves or even our assailants? . . .
I don’t know where it will all lead. Were our assailants drug addicts? It seems likely. Even if they weren’t we know that the habit’s cost is the genesis of much of our city’s crime. God knows, we are not doing enough about that problem.
I haven’t yet tried to resume my normal routine, which kept me traveling around the city a good part of each day. Soon I will be physically up to it, but God I’m scared. I have ventured out of my house a few times, mostly to walk my dog. I know I will only feel safe when I have that dog at my side. The fear has not left me. I wonder if it ever will.
Now, like so many people, young and old, I move around the city at all hours of the night without fear, ride the subways, always finding many people around. Safety, or the feeling of safety, comes with the numbers of people around us. If you hadn’t lived through the 1970s in New York, it is easy to wonder what all the safety talk is about.
URBAN RESETTLEMENT
Until the 1973 oil crisis, the trickling trend of returning young urban settlers went almost unnoticed. Experts declared the numbers of returnees insignificant. Statistically, they were correct. But meaningful urban change evolves only slowly and doesn’t even show up statistically until the trend has dramatically progressed. Thus, experts were oblivious to the on-the-ground shift that was definitely occurring—until, that is, the oil shock of 1973 when the questioning of the auto-dependent lifestyle began in earnest. This was a good example of a totally spontaneous trend, the kind that undermines highly developed, inflexible official plans. No plan can anticipate cataclysmic events that are bound to occur. Questioning the car-centric lifestyle until then was almost sacrilegious. The automobile industry had by then reshaped the country’s lifestyle values.
By the 1970s, as noted, the trend of returning urban residents was gaining visibility but did not accelerate and gain much media notice until the late 1970s or early 1980s. The Brownstone Revival Movement had already begun in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Cobble Hill where Everett and Evelyn Ortner had organized the Brownstone Revival Committee in 1965. Their newsletter, the Brownstoner, inspired like-minded urban pioneers around the city. Dedicated brownstoners banded together to beat back urban renewal programs that targeted brownstones for demolition. They cajoled the banks into giving mortgages, the same banks, in fact, that had earlier redlined their neighborhoods. They also harassed speculators to prevent stripping of precious ornamentation and proselytized among friends about the brownstone life. In a May 1973 article about books that had just been published aimed at the brownstone renovator, I wrote, “In the early ’60s the ‘brownstoners’ were called New York’s modern pioneers, long on guts but short on sanity. Later they were seen as the most hopeful sign that the city would not lose all of its middle class to the sprawling suburbs and as—maybe, just maybe—the ones with the best idea of how to live in a city of vacancy decontrol and spiraling rents.”3
The state of the Upper West Side in the 1970s had its parallels in other cities where slum clearance had not totally erased the nineteenth-century building form—whether brick or limestone row houses, clapboard or brick triple-deckers, or freestanding Victorians with back and front yards separated from neighbors only by driveways to rear-yard garages. In 1970 the first Back to City Conference was held in New York. Activists attended from eighty-two cities across the country, representing reviving historic neighborhoods. They compared stories, shared problems, and learned lessons from each other’s successes and failures. Most important, they discovered they were not alone. Clearly, something bigger than their individual efforts was going on. Small efforts, almost unnoticeable, were evolving around the country, the beginning of a big, in fact monumental, national shift. The event led to formation of the national group Back to the City, Inc., an informal network of reviving communities. In January 1974, I wrote in part:
For years, urban loyalists have been predicting that those fresh air and free school seekers would return. Well, it’s happening, although slowly for now. But if there’s one new factor ready to turn the current trickle into a full-fledged trend it’s fuel.
In short, the energy crisis is stemming the exodus and bringing suburban residents back. The two-car family with the roomy oil-heat dream house, the shopping center miles away and children with distant friends and schools is “going bananas,” reports one former Bronx resident seeking to return from Long Island.
7.2 Park Slope brownstones, probably the signature housing style of the borough of Brooklyn. Ron Shiffman.
THE WEST SIDE: THE HAPPENING PLACE
The Upper West Side reflected the best and the worst of what was happening in New York in the 1970s. It was one of the most concentrated Robert Moses battlegrounds but also in the vanguard of incremental renewal. This area was a trendsetter nationally for row-house living in a similar way that SoHo was for loft living. The New York City lifestyle, personified here, made good media copy. Brownstone living, especially the “urban duplex,” was making it into national magazines. My editors recognized what was happening and knew I was living in the midst of it. They assigned me to write at length about the West Side.
Today, the West Side is actually chic, a shocking development for longtime residents like myself. But in 1974, it was far from it. In fact, you had to be a keen observer to recognize the precursors of good things to come. In December 1974 I wrote:
The area seems to spawn more urban chauvinists per square foot, more promoters of community spirit and defenders of have-not groups than any other neighborhood. It seems, as well, to contain more activists in far-flung causes, more aspiring politicians, more improvement groups and, certainly, more beards and blue jeans than any area outside Greenwich Village.
Most West Siders will recite as if by rote the same litany of advantages that makes their neighborhood so appealing—sound housing of every kind, sometimes even at rational prices; excellent transportation including two subway lines and a variety of buses; ethnic diversity that is not only reflected in the faces and accents of residents but in the local stores, restaurants and cultural groups; small playgrounds and large parks; museums, uncrowded movie theaters and of course, Lincoln Center.
Back then, West Siders lamented the loss of local businesses, the pushing out of more low-income residents, and the unending influx of the rich and famous who do not share the civic activism that was once the West Side trademark. Movies were getting crowded. Tourists seemed to be everywhere, and the idea that, as one observer noted at the time, “the city seems smaller here” was a fading memory.
Historically, the West Side has always been “the other side of town.” It was always twenty years or so behind the East Side in development trends, and it wasn’t until mansions and townhouses spread over the East Side that the developers gave serious attentions to the West Side north of Fifty-ninth Street.
When in 1880 Singer Sewing machine heir Edward S. Clark began construction of the city’s first luxury apartment house—a chateau of gables, bay windows, and incomparable detail at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West—observers teased that he was building so far into the country that he might as well be in Dakota Territory. The name Dakota stuck, and today it is still considered one of the city’s most exclusive addresses.
Soon after, the Ninth Avenue El (elevated train) was completed, opening the West Side to the firs
t of many waves of upwardly mobile middle-class families and the beginning of serious development. Row houses were built in great numbers for single-family elegance through the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century. Gracious high-rise apartment houses—not as opulent as the Dakota—started going up slowly on Broadway after the turn of the century with the Beaux Arts Ansonia at Seventh-third Street and the more sparsely ornamented Apthorp at Seventh-ninth Street and Belnord at Eighty-sixth Street. By the 1920s and ’30s, Central Park West, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive were lined with fashionable high-rises that remain the housing anchors of the entire area.
After World War II, as the middle-class Irish and Jewish occupants moved farther north to the Bronx, to the East Side, or to suburbia, brownstones were subdivided to house waves of new immigrants—blacks from the South and the West Indies, Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and South America. Because the units were small, overcrowded, high in price, but low in maintenance, many rapidly deteriorated.
CATACLYSMIC CHANGE KICKS IN
Then, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, came the beginnings of the city’s two largest urban renewal programs—the twelve-block (fifty-three-acre) Lincoln Center and the twenty-block West Side Urban Renewal Area between Eighty-seventh and Ninety-seventh Streets—and construction of two large-scale middle-income developments, Lincoln Towers at West End Avenue in the Sixties and Park West Village at Central Park to Amsterdam, Ninety-seventh to One Hundredth Streets.
When I referenced this urban renewal area in my 1974 articles, I didn’t mention Robert Moses’s connection to Urban Renewal policies up to that time. But I did note in my article a major population shift taking place: “Co-operative conversions of pre-war high-rises started in the 1960s, anchoring the professional middle-class that had moved there for the large rent-controlled apartments. The brownstone movement spread north and south from and west of the Urban Renewal Area, reclaiming some of the most solidly built housing in the city for young middle-class families seeking space, elegance, value and backyards.”
The article noted that the scores of low-income residents displaced by assorted Urban Renewal projects were now concentrating along Amsterdam Avenue and north to the Manhattan Valley area, 107th to 110th Streets, Central Park to Broadway. Many also relocated into the ten public housing projects containing 4,628 apartments scattered around the area or in buildings leased by the Housing Authority and rented to low-income families. The West Side’s low-rent apartment supply filled up, and many displaced families moved to other boroughs.
More than just the housing supply was rapidly changing when I observed this scene in the mid-1970s. Seven new public schools had been built since 1960. Private schools, too, had built new facilities or expanded old ones. And there were now seventeen day-care centers, including four Head Start programs. Block associations had planted trees; Broadway malls had been relandscaped. Playgrounds had been rebuilt.
Signs of renewal were showing more and more in the commercial fabric of the West Side as well. The impact of the women’s movement was evident in the growing number of entrepreneurial women opening the small, local businesses appearing on the scene. This trend—women-owned businesses—was new, and it was emerging early, as many trends did, on the Upper West Side. Restaurants and bars, in the blocks from the Eighties through the Nineties along the avenues, offered live jazz and had become favorite spots for the steadily growing black middle class moving into the area.
Slowly but surely, theater groups were taking hold, with Godspell in its fourth year at the Promenade Theater and Sgt. Pepper at the newly renovated Beacon. New restaurants gained a loyal local following. “We won’t eat anywhere but on the West Side, where prices are still reasonable,” I quoted one resident saying.
In the second of the two articles I wrote on the Upper West Side, I focused on the problems. I wrote in part:
Behind the facade of renewal and renaissance that covers great chunks of the West Side from 59th to 110th St., there are areas of great discontent and frustration.
The “great sore” of the West Side—the Single Room Occupancy-Welfare Hotel problem—floods the area with unsupervised former mental patients, alcoholics, junkies, multi-problem families, and leaves the elderly vulnerable and the younger families scared.
A 1969 city-wide study of SRO buildings indicated that almost 50 per cent of the entire city’s SRO tenants live on the West Side, occupying some 25,000 apartment units between 74th and 110th Streets. Although the hotels Hamilton and Hargrave have been converted to housing for the elderly and the Kimberly at 73rd and Broadway is vacant, not much has changed in five years.
The West Side Urban Renewal Program was initiated in the 1950s as the nation’s model for economic integration within buildings. Promoted by Planning Commission chair James Felt as an alternative to Moses’s clearance strategy, the plan had been stumbling past the half-completion mark with a few years of stormy community debate. Some groups called for increasing the proportion of low-income housing. Others claimed any increase would cause the community to tip into a slum or ghetto. The argument was whether 20 or 30 percent was the right amount of low-income housing. And while the conflict was enough to cause some of the bitterest community battles the neighborhood had seen in years, federal housing funds stopped and made things worse.
The spreading phenomenon of the fast-food chains was another issue of debate. At one point a rumor circulated in the area around Seventy-ninth Street and Columbus Avenue that a McDonald’s would open. “The community was up in arms,” said the late councilman and then congressman Ted Weiss. “Five years ago a McDonald’s would have been considered a neighborhood improvement. Today it’s an anathema.”
Fast-food chains have become an accepted way of life today in almost all urban neighborhoods. Now they are not as threatening as in the time I was writing these articles. A generous selection of local food outlets of every scale and price exists and flourishes.
Crime, of course, was a constant worry, but statistics don’t seem to affect the way people live with the reality of crime as much as people’s “feel” for it does. As more stores stayed open late, as new restaurants proliferated and nightlife in general picked up, many residents felt the community had gotten safer. One guide was the newsstands. Only a few years earlier, none stayed open late except at Seventy-second Street. Now they were open late up and down Broadway.
The article also noted the small-town feel of residents:
Consistently, when you speak to residents about what’s good and bad on the West Side, they will tell you everything that’s happening within a small radius of their home. They know who lives above and below them, those their children meet in the playground. They organize food co-ops or babysitting services and they know the local shopkeepers as well as their neighbors.
Actor Jordan Charney, who lives in a 10-story apartment house on 74th between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, talks of “the marvelous shops offering home-made things” and “the assortment of people going into their own business.”
“Lincoln Center has pushed problems uptown,” Charney says, “hiding them a little better because they’re out of my neighborhood. Up there it’s as scary as it used to be when we moved here seven years ago.”
Boundaries differed. Problems varied. But a do-it-yourself state of mind pervaded each subcommunity. Whether it was tree planting, day care, playgrounds, block-by-block security guards, or housing problems, West Siders didn’t wait for City Hall to solve them. Residents lived with the realities of the problems; alternatives were less desirable. Sometime in the 1970s and ’80s, however, a real upward shift began. Government money for big projects had stopped flowing, as it had in the heyday of Urban Renewal in the 1950s. The city was flirting with bankruptcy. The state was suffering serious financial setbacks, and the federal government was no friendlier to New York than in the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” 1970s days. The cessation of the big projects gave license to the smaller ones to advance. No one thing is identifiable.
Instead, an accumulation of successive steps occurred. It was a clear case of incremental change, if ever there was one.
A variety of new stores opened, more upscale now, a sign that someone thought the area was an underserved market to which nonneighborhood shoppers would also come. New children’s clothing stores appeared, a clear reflection of the increasing number of new families. Until then, one small children’s department store, Morris Brothers, had been the sole outpost for shopping parents.4 East Siders began to consider the West Side’s private schools for their children. An assortment of new banal apartment houses went up across from Lincoln Center, a sign that big developers decided the district had value. And young singles and families kept buying and fixing up the brownstones not destroyed by Urban Renewal.
THE LINCOLN CENTER MYTH
Credentialed experts often attribute urban regeneration of any kind to the official plans and developments of the day. Most planners and government officials and observers don’t give credence to the gradual block-by-block and business-by-business improvements that mark organic incrementalism. They can’t recognize it until it is full-blown. They insist that ad hoc change is insignificant. They are wrong on all counts. One needs to recognize the often small precursors of positive change to understand its emerging appearance. The precursors were in abundance on the West Side, as all the gradual changes already mentioned indicate.
The Battle for Gotham Page 28
