The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  One wonders whether the cause of Park Centre’s economic woes may be not the venality and greed of the local merchants but the curious view held by chambers of commerce across the country that what the public wants is something cute. Is it for being cute that the suburbs appeal to so many millions of people nowadays? If so, the chambers of commerce in cities like Cleveland are fighting cute with supercute. It is the brand of cuteness that seems to think it is cuter, or fancier, to spell “Centre” Britishly, rather than the way most Americans—and certainly most Middle Westeners—spell it, and that feels dining will be enhanced when it takes place in something called “Eat Street.” Cuteness abounds in Park Centre shop-naming. An emporium called Incredible Edibles, for example, is a delicatessen. A clothing shop is called Clothes Circuit. One of Eat Street’s fast-food outlets is named Tummy Acres. And so it goes.

  Because all the cuteness smacks of Madison Avenue hucksterism, or at least an imitation of it, and because the merchandise offered at the cute-named establishments is of an assembly-line quality that can be found in an airline in-flight gift catalogue, cuteness not only becomes quickly cloying but begins to smack of the second-rate and of retailing desperation. Cute becomes synonymous with cheap—with sandal shops and candle shops and shops that sell macramé and inexpensive jewelry. (Along Scottsdale’s much-touted Fifth Avenue, the “exclusive” shops now confine themselves almost exclusively to extravagant examples of the sandalmaker’s and the candlemaker’s arts, along with a number of stores that sell nothing but imitation Indian squash-blossom necklaces and artificial turquoise rings.)

  What the real estate developers of these costly complexes have failed to realize, along with the chambers of commerce with whom the developers work in happy collusion, is that all the archness and coyness add up, in most Americans’ minds, to silliness and vulgarity. They underestimate Americans’ present sophistication and, in terms of taste, are at least twenty years behind the times. Even the man who delivers your milk has, in all likelihood, been to Europe at least once, and having seen the real thing, he will not be impressed by—in fact, he will be repelled by—a fake trattoria in the basement of a Midwest high-rise.

  Cuteness is certainly one of the forces that is doing in Park Centre. In Boston, on the other hand, the restoration of the Quincy Market area—where, among other things, the nineteenth-century architecture around Faneuil Hall was treated with respect—real charm has been substituted for cuteness, and the venture has been a great popular and commercial success. But then inner-city Boston has always been an appealing place to live and visit.

  One thing that has happened in the affluent suburbs over the years is that their affluent residents are growing older. The young couples who flocked to suburbia in the years immediately after World War II and who, in a deflated postwar real estate market and with GI loans, bought properties and built houses—to which have been added swimming pools, saunas, tennis courts, and burglar-alarm systems—are now past middle age. Their children are grown and in many cases have children of their own. In Rye, for example, the average resident in 1955 was thirty-six years old. Today, he is forty-seven. With age has come a conservative stance—an opposition, for instance, to increased school taxes, from which suburban school systems have suffered. If the cities have become predominantly Democratic, the wealthy suburbs have become predominantly Republican. In the so-called Five Towns area of southeastern Long Island, everyone talks of how things have changed. The Five Towns—Hewlett, Woodmere, Cedarhurst, Lawrence, and Inwood (the first four were considered fashionable, while the fifth, Inwood, was “where the help lived”)—were originally settled by prosperous Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe around the turn of the century. They had made money in such endeavors as New York’s garment industry, but they still had decidedly socialist and trade-unionist views that they had carried with them from the pogroms of czarist Russia and Poland. For years—particularly during the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s—the Five Towns comprised a truly golden ghetto, and life revolved around the Lawrence Beach Club and Woodmere Academy, a private school. Five Towns boys and girls married each other and moved away and so, in time, did their parents—back to the convenience of Manhattan or to the roomier reaches of Westchester County. Into their pleasant houses moved conservative Orthodox Hasidic and Yemenite Jews. Today, according to novelist Beverley Gasner, who, along with her husband, grew up in Lawrence and now lives outside Washington, “It’s all different. It used to be lovely—cozy and homey, like a little club, like an extension of your family. Today, the streets are deserted on Saturday because of the Sabbath. The rest of the week, it’s a sea of beards, side curls, and yarmulkes.”

  Blacks have begun moving to the suburbs too—in small numbers, to be sure, but still at a rate that has not particularly delighted the predominantly white suburban establishment. Economic factors—particularly the high price of land and houses—remain the primary barrier to suburban integration. But equal-opportunity programs over the past decade have placed more and more black families at an income level where they can afford the open space and green lawns that first attracted whites. Still, black leaders say that there is a strong psychological reason why blacks remain reluctant to buy homes in white suburbs, where they have been conditioned to expect snubs and discrimination. As one black woman declares: “It’s easy enough to get kicked around where we are. Why spend a hundred thousand dollars to get kicked around somewhere else?”

  Economically successful blacks have therefore tended either to stay in their old neighborhoods or to move to affluent black communities—such as Collier Heights outside Atlanta, or Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights, and Leimert Park, south of Los Angeles. In the sprawling San Fernando Valley northeast of Los Angeles, only 2.4 percent of the population was black as recently as 1975, as opposed to a 19 percent black population in Los Angeles as a whole. Recently, a campaign sponsored by the Fair Housing Council and the Ford Foundation has been urging middle-class blacks to move into the Valley. A commercial jingle that chants: “Move on in, move on in, move on in to L.A.’s Valley,” has been promoted on local black radio stations, while billboards depicting black and white families sipping cocktails together and enjoying other convivial suburban social situations have sprouted along local highways. Mr. Ken Kelly, a black real estate man and chairman of the campaign, conducts guided tours of San Fernando Valley towns for prospective black buyers, and says: “What we’re trying to do is communicate that times have changed, that the mainstream is open to blacks—use it if you want to. I won’t say that all discrimination is gone, but we are trying to tell them that it’s a lot different than it used to be.” It is too early to say how successful this particular promotion will be, and Mr. Kelly admits that many blacks are unwilling to leave black communities because of generations of fear of what happens when a black tries to rock the white man’s boat. The campaign came at a time when the Los Angeles Board of Education faced a court order to bus in order to integrate schools, and emotions were running high among both blacks and whites on the busing issue. But Mr. Kelly takes the attitude: “If somebody had done something like this ten years ago, maybe you wouldn’t have needed busing. The schools would already be integrated.”

  The suburban population growing older, more stodgy, more set in its ways … neighborhoods changing, either for the worse or becoming prohibitively expensive … integration, or the lack of it … school systems that are threatened … taxes … battles for (and against) zoning changes … widening streets to accommodate heavier suburban traffic … the noise from the thruways … the air-pollution level. These are the topics that dominate the suburban Friday- and Saturday-night cocktail parties in the late 1970s, that are discussed around the pool and outdoor barbecue, within the indoor sauna, at the beauty parlor, in the supermarket, and at the garage sale. These issues, and others like them, have turned a younger generation sour on the suburbs, and sent them fleeing to farms in rural Vermont, or back to the cities their parents fled, in order to see whether, per
haps, the answer isn’t city living after all. “We worked so hard to get away from Houston Street!” wails a New York Jewish mother whose daughter has moved into a SoHo loft.

  The back-to-the-city movement has already had disruptive side effects, because as the middle-class young move back into the urban core, the poor—who were originally forced in—are now being forced out. Not long ago, the New York Times reported the cases of two Washington, D.C., neighbors who had never met and yet whose fates were closely linked. One was a twenty-eight-year-old white architect named Robert Corcoran, and the other was a poor black woman named Beatrice Poindexter, who lived just down the street. Mr. Corcoran, repelled by what he called the “sterility” of suburban living, had bought a run-down house on a mostly black street in Washington’s Adams-Morgan section, not far from downtown. He had paid very little for his house, but had the wherewithal to undertake an elaborate plan for its renovation and restoration. All at once, the street became “hot” real estate property, and Miss Poindexter was being evicted from her $84.50 a month apartment because a real estate developer wanted to convert the whole row of houses on her street into “town houses” to sell for $70,000 and up. Miss Poindexter had no idea where she was going to go.

  This “resettlement of urban America,” as the sociologists call it, is of course an ironic reversal of the blockbusting that turned many cities black in recent years. In Washington, for example, the 1970 census showed the city to be 71 percent black. In mid-1977, however, the Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies reported that the city had begun to gain white population again, and that most of these newcomers were young, and college-educated, and from the middle and upper middle class. Suddenly, this is a process that is being repeated in many cities—in the South End of Boston, the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, and Queens Village in Philadelphia.

  On the one hand, the well-to-do young newcomers are a blessing to the old cities. By rehabilitating once-fine houses, they are reviving decayed neighborhoods. Run-down tenements are being sand-blasted and gutted, fitted with skylights, new plumbing, and air conditioning. Run-down areas become both prettier and safer, and they attract new businesses—all of which help a city’s often sagging tax base. But then there is the inexorable consequence. Like displaced war refugees, thousands of the poor are pushed elsewhere, often deeper into the poorer black or Puerto Rican ghettos. Already a torrent of eviction notices is falling on the residents of Adams-Morgan, and the area is now nearly one-third white. It is getting whiter by the day.

  Though Beatrice Poindexter does not know Robert Corcoran, she bitterly resents what is happening to her old neighborhood. She refers to the man who gave her a two-week eviction notice as a greedy “speculator,” and it does not help that the particular developer who bought her building happens to be Jewish. Blacks have long distrusted Jews, and regarded them as their natural enemies. The developer, Jeffrey N. Cohen, sees things somewhat differently and says: “We are not speculators—we are investors and developers.” He insists that he does not buy and then sell houses to run up their prices, a tactic known in real estate circles as “flipping.” Instead, he renovates houses in order to deliver a “quality product,” and gain a good but not excessive profit for himself. Like many developers, he blames the woes of people like Miss Poindexter on the city government, which encourages the middle class to come to—and stay in—town, without making any provision for the poor who are supplanted. “I say the developer has the moral responsibility to pay for an evicted tenant’s moving,” says Mr. Cohen, “but he should not have to subsidize them to stay in the area—which is what most of them seem to expect us to do.”

  It is, meanwhile, another irony that one of the aspects of the street which Mr. Corcoran particular likes is its “racial diversity”—though he admits that this pleasant diversity will soon disappear as more people like him move into Adams-Morgan. And as more people like Mr. Corcoran move in, it will not only be poor rental tenants who will be displaced. A number of black property owners in the Adams-Morgan area are nervous—but for economic, not racial, reasons. One of these is Robert Corcoran’s next-door neighbor, Ernest Gordon, a fifty-four-year-old black man who is a clerk at the Pentagon. Mr. Gordon gets along well with Mr. Corcoran—in fact, the two men are quite friendly—but Mr. Gordon is unhappy with what’s happening to his block. The reason is that his property taxes have nearly doubled in the last two years, since Adams-Morgan all at once became chic. The fact that his house has also soared in value does not impress Mr. Gordon, for the simple reason that he has no wish to sell and move. “Where would I go at age fifty-four?” he asks. Still, he may be forced to go—somewhere—if the day comes when he can no longer afford to pay his taxes.

  A number of community advocates have been searching for means to allow at least some city residents to buy their houses—cooperatively, perhaps—before prices climb out of reach in neighborhoods like Adams-Morgan. Margarita Suarez, head of Adelante, a Hispanic group in Washington, said before a hearing of the Civil Rights Commission not long ago: “The only way to stay in a community is if you own some of the land, because then you can control what happens on it.” Thus far, however, no way has been found to accomplish this “only way.” Others are more cynical about the situation. Paul Tauber, a businessman who recently opened—and then sold at a considerable profit—a tavern that caters to the well-heeled newcomers to Adams-Morgan, says that the displacement of the poor by the better off is just “part of city life.” When it happens, it happens. When change occurs, he says, “Someone has to suffer, someone has to lose,” adding that the city, in not making adequate provision for the displaced, “was not reacting to the reality of what is required.” What the reality of what is required is, Mr. Tauber does not say.

  One requirement that seems obvious is that the cities cannot survive if they are abandoned to the poor. One reality is that city, state, and federal governments have failed so abysmally and systematically in helping the poor that both the middle class and the poor have despaired of this sort of salvation’s ever coming from any government at all. Another reality is that government cannot afford to intrude itself into the redevelopment of inner-city life, nor can it afford to leave matters to the realtors and developers with whom government politicians have worked so profitably hand-under-the-table-in-hand.

  Neighborhoods, throughout history, have always had an uncanny ability to care for themselves. Even the most egregious-looking block in Harlem has its sense of neighborhood. But when, under the guise of slum clearance or better housing, these old neighborhoods have been razed and replaced with government housing projects, the results have been, without exception, disastrous. On the other hand, old neighborhoods have been, and can be, revived by individuals in the neighborhoods themselves. Salvation of the cities can be accomplished through personal involvement—people in neighborhoods being encouraged to work for their neighborhoods. City politicians must realize that only the middle and upper classes—not the poor—can rebuild cities, but they can do so only if the terms are made attractive to them, if they are not penalized for upgrading neighborhoods through increased taxes, and if they are convinced that the money they spend will allow them to live a life free of terror. Encouraging the rich to come back to the city, and not penalizing poorer property owners like Mr. Gordon by doubling his taxes in two years’ time because he happens to live on a street that is taking on an air of swank, should not result in the displacement of the poor. Instead, such neighborhood renewal should create more jobs for the poor, which would give them more money to live wherever they chose—in the suburbs, for example. Though there are doubtless some who would say that this approach to urban renewal would never work, it must be conceded that it has never been tried on any sort of consistent basis. And meanwhile, in neighborhoods like Adams-Morgan, the rich and the poor, the white and the black, circle each other like suspicious dogs, sniffing and snarling at one another.

  Elsewhere, this sort of thing happens: In the Mount Adams section of Cincinnati
, a number of people have bought old houses and expensively renovated them. The neighborhood has not “gone rich” in any sense, but less affluent neighbors have caught the newcomers’ spirit and have added decorative touches, such as window boxes, to their houses, and all at once, a formerly dowdy neighborhood has taken on an air of turn-of-the-century graciousness. One Mount Adams man, who is not rich, owns an empty lot next to his house which he operates as a small parking lot, and from which he derives a small income. Recently the city raised his taxes on the lot, offering as an explanation: “A nice house could be built there.” Now the owner of the lot is forced to raise his parking rates, and this neither helps the garage-less, less well off neighbors who use his lot, nor does much to build good feeling in the neighborhood. “If cities would leave neighborhoods alone,” he says, “neighborhoods would get along just fine.” Which makes more than a little sense.

  One wonders what the next generation—Mr. Corcoran’s children, say, if he has children—of the affluent in-city people will do. Will city life lose its luster for them, will rising taxes push them outward to some unnamed suburb of the future? Will neighborhoods like Adams-Morgan and Mount Adams in time become slums again—the rich and the poor shifting backward and forward against each other as inexorably as the tides of Lake Erie? After all, once upon a time Adams-Morgan was a good address. Then it deteriorated. Now it has become fashionable again. Are American life and American living always to be engaged in this seesaw interaction? Some city planners believe so. “The traditional approach in America is that we use up places, and then move on,” says Harvey S. Perloff, dean of architecture and urban planning at the University of California at Los Angeles. When Adams-Morgan is “used up,” the likes of Robert Corcoran will find another address.