Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (55 page)

Those advocating peripheral development countered that slum property, however decrepit, could be costly: slum dwellers are often charged comparatively higher rents for wretched accommodations, and pay because they have no choice. Some housing reformers evinced distaste for building in the slums because it would mean bailing out slumlords by purchasing their property at market value. Others felt that the influence of the surrounding slum would corrupt these isolated islands of quality and pull down the new public housing to its level. The attraction of outlying areas, to these reformers, was that you could start on vacant land with a clean slate, and place the buildings sufficiently apart from each other to ensure plenty of light and air, lower densities, and lower coverage. Land or lot coverage (the amount of ground that buildings take up, relative to the space surrounding them) could be held to 30 percent or below, which seemed at the time fabulously desirable. Nirvana was thought to be 20 percent.

Today the obsession of these housing reformers with low land coverage seems poignantly wrongheaded, bespeaking an innocent faith that open space could itself heal and protect the poor. This open-space ideal dovetailed with the Corbusian tower-in-the-park model, then the hottest idea in city planning. Le Corbusier had declared that “sun, vegetation, and space are the three raw materials of urbanism”; his tower-in-the-park solution reflected a fundamental hostility to the traditional city street. Many reformers and settlement workers shared this dislike for the street: the New York grid system of blocks, sliced into small twenty-five-foot properties or fifty-foot double lots, seemed too adaptable to the slum tenement. A continuous street wall, with stoops and gutters, was like a theatrical stage that highlighted everyone's comings and goings and threatened, they felt, to expose children prematurely to the sexual facts of life. Congested quarters, too, spread tuberculosis and other communicable illnesses. Because the worst New York slums had been notoriously congested, density itself came to be seen, simplistically, as evil.

Actually, cities often thrive on density: fashionable Park Avenue has one of the highest residential densities per block in the country. In working-
class neighborhoods, mixed-use, day-and-night street life can make a place feel safer, by adding more “eyes on the street,” whereas amorphous, deserted open space—often the result of low coverage—can easily fall victim to misuse. Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 book
The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
brilliantly articulated these insights. Under her influence, city planners have come around to replenishing the holes and dead spots in the urban fabric (the positive term for which is “infill”). But at that time the trend of progressive planning flowed in the opposite direction. The Regional Planning Association, following the intellectual lead of Mumford and Stein, advocated thinning out the dense metropolis through decentralization: building garden cities in the outlying boroughs (such as Sunnyside, Queens) or in then-agricultural regions (such as Radburn, Maryland). If big cities were bad, it followed that public housing should be cordoned off from the contaminating influences of congested neighborhoods nearby. Streets running through the projects would have to be closed off, creating superblocks along the perimeter. Formerly the New York grid had been almost sacrosanct, but the federal government had the power to block off the streets in its projects, if it wanted to (and it wanted to).

For all their refinements, both the Williamsburg Houses and the Harlem River Houses had established the problematic precedent of the superblock. The Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalog explicitly singled out Lescaze's Williamsburg Houses design with this praise: “The regular gridiron of the city street system has been modified to triple-size superblocks…. This reduces the dangerous through-streets and permits a more advantageous arrangement of the buildings.” The use of the adjective “dangerous” as modifier tells us much about the anti-street prejudice of American architectural modernism in its utopian mode. Among urban visionaries, such as the illustrator Hugh Ferriss, much thought was given at the time to separating pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The irony is that the elimination of through-streets actually added to the danger of most projects, by isolating them and removing a potential stream of casual passersby.

Retail, which had been present at street level in all the early projects—Harlem River Houses even had a liquor store and several restaurants—began to be phased out as “not appropriate” for the dignity and nonprofit status of public housing. Social service agencies serving the projects were happy to step in and take over these ground-floor spaces. The buildings
themselves were often positioned in such a way as to turn their backs to the street, making it necessary for residents seeking their entrances to take long, winding paths into the project grounds. So a moat went up. Step by step, through a combination of misguided good intentions and budgetary considerations, the isolated, high-rise tower enclosures that we associate today with public housing came into being.

High-rise towers undoubtedly offered certain economies: compared with building two or three times as many low-rise walk-ups, the costs would be lessened for roofing, foundations (one of the high-ticket items in construction), and laying underground pipes. Since the most expensive part of a high-rise was its elevator core, the builders and architects of these massive housing towers were preoccupied with maximizing a core's efficiency. Hence the bow-tie configurations and “letter” layouts (H, X, L, Y, or U) of much public housing, which allowed several wings to share the same elevator core.

During the 1950s, Robert Moses took over the city's slum clearance program and construction of public housing, and rammed through thousands of units, most of them boxes of relentless banality, angled more or less arbitrarily—no feng shui here—onto a cleared field. In defense of these stark, Stalinist projects, such no-frills construction may have been the only way to get quantities built for the budget allotted. The logic was: the more we lower costs, the more units of low-cost housing we can build overall. It was true. Far fewer units would have resulted by pursuing a refined, low-rise model based on Harlem River Houses, much less a tenement rehabilitation model, such as First Houses.

It was only in the 1980s, under Ed Koch's second mayoral term, that the city relinquished its policy of high-rise public housing construction for the neighborhood preservation strategy of gut rehabilitation, keeping the trusted shell of old six-story walk-ups or brownstones, while replacing the interiors with wooden floors, clean white walls, and new plumbing. Even so, that vast housing effort, the equivalent of a small city rising in the Bronx without violating the existing urban fabric—one of the great untold stories of modern town planning—was made possible only by the city's inheriting a large stock of buildings, via arson and landlord abandonment, in remission of unpaid taxes.

THE STIGMA THAT CAME TO BE ATTACHED to low-income projects issued partly from their unadorned dreariness, a point borne home by comparing them with dozens of tonier complexes built around the same time for the middle class, under a New York State subsidy program for limited-profit housing companies, known as the Mitchell-Lama Act. However subliminally the differences registered, you could instantly tell whether a set of brick high-rises was Mitchell-Lama by the presence of
any
design elements, such as limestone roof trim, pretty window treatments, string courses running around a building's façade, a canopy or bit of stonework at the entrance; balconies were a dead giveaway.

Unfortunately, the lack of architectural adornment in public housing issued not merely from budgetary constraints, but from mean-spiritedness. Project tenants were allowed only one closet with a door in each apartment; curtains were installed on the remaining closets to save money and encourage tidiness. No doors were permitted between the kitchen and the living room: an “open plan” meant fewer wall partitions. The floors were now an unforgiving concrete. In some projects, elevator service stops skipped every other floor. The use of cheap brick and aluminum sash windows, institutional tiles, and the most durable, vandal-resistant materials, usually reserved for prisons or hospitals, sent a message to project residents that they were not to be trusted with anything nicer.

It was presumed that the average American taxpayer would be deeply offended at seeing those benefiting from government housing receive something beyond the bare minimum. Many Americans were loath to spend any sums on the poor, regarding welfare assistance or food supplements as “handouts,” while not at all averse to accepting the govern-ment's vastly larger handouts in the form of corporate or mortgage tax breaks. In a Brookings Institution study, Henry Aaron calculated that “for a typical year (1966), the government subsidy provided to the poor by public housing programs was $500 million, while the subsidy provided primarily to middle-class home owners through the income tax law was almost $7 billion.” (Richard Plunz,
A History of Housing in New York City
.)

In any event, because of this parsimonious approach, the Housing Authority had to spend massive amounts later for maintenance against vandalism, graffiti, and other acts of hostility directed at a dour physical
plant, not to mention the social costs occasioned by more serious crimes of burglary and rape as well as other violence.

PUBLIC HOUSING
'
S IMAGE PROBLEMS went far beyond questions of design. The projects were stigmatized mainly for warehousing the poor, the nonwhite, the failures of an affluent society. But initially, public housing had been meant to serve families of the so-called working poor and lower middle-class, who were reeling from the acute shortage of low-cost housing, first in the Depression, then immediately after World War II. These units were not even imagined as permanent residences, but as steppingstones for upwardly mobile workers to escape the slums, on their way to something better.

The first tenants of public housing, reportedly “ecstatic” with their new apartments, had been screened carefully, according to a point system that included employment, housekeeping skills, and morals. After a family was accepted, a social worker would visit the tenants once a week to collect rents and offer assistance, while casually checking that all apartments were being properly maintained. This system of “friendly visits” may strike us today as offensive paternalism. Yet the housing projects with the tightest screening and scrutiny procedures remained safer and better run, while those that left tenants to their own devices tended to deteriorate.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the left helped organize citywide tenant unions, which demanded more resident control of the projects, including tenant selection, and less management snooping. By the 1950s, the tenant unions began finding it hard to enlist the new nonwhite residents of the projects, who, according to the historian Joel Schwartz, “never did share the sense of project citizenship that their predecessors had enjoyed in the 1930s. They took up their tenancy as successors rather than hardy pioneers, at a time when public housing was no longer heralded but widely maligned.”

A change in our notions of poverty had also transpired. As long as the have-nots were white, poverty was seen not as a chronic condition but as an unfortunate rite of passage, to be overcome in an individual's lifetime, or certainly by the second generation. It was only when nonwhites proliferated in public housing, from the mid-1950s on, that poverty came to be regarded as a self-perpetuating “cycle,” and the projects as last-ditch hotels for the neediest.
This perceptual shift may be tied partly to racism and partly to the worsening economic situation for nonwhite blue-collar workers. During the 1950s, for instance, Puerto Ricans arrived en masse in New York at precisely the moment when the manufacturing and port sectors, which traditionally had provided entry-jobs for unskilled labor, started to leave the city.

Meanwhile, the destruction of miles of ghetto neighborhoods uprooted many more poor people from their homes than could be counterbalanced by the number of new public housing units built. By the mid-1950s, more than 50,000 households had been displaced by slum clearance, and the $100 maximum compensation allowed under law for their pains did not go far. Slum clearance and the construction of low-income housing, often lumped together, were in fact two different phenomena with separate agendas. A section of the 1949 Housing Act called Title 1 had provided $1.5 billion for slum clearance and redevelopment, or what came to be known as “urban renewal,” a euphemism for the razing of poor neighborhoods and their replacement with middle- or upper-class districts. Robert Moses summed the matter up with his usual brusqueness: “Title 1 was never designed to produce housing for people of low income. The critics failed to understand that Title 1 aimed solely at the elimination of slums and substandard areas. It did not prescribe the pattern of redevelopment, leaving this to local initiative.”

In New York City, both results occurred: tenement housing was replaced with redevelopments such as Lincoln Center, the Coliseum, college campuses, parks, and highways, while substantial units of low-income projects were also built, many on the same blocks where older tenements, bars, and bodegas had been razed. In this manner, approximately one-third of East Harlem came to be covered with postwar subsidized housing, much of it resented and despised.

WE CAN DATE THE POINT when the projects began to seem hell on earth from this famous passage in a James Baldwin essay, which appeared in 1960:

The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal. And they are hated for the same
reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil rights commissions are set up.

The projects are hideous, of course, there being a law, apparently respected throughout the world, that popular housing shall be as cheerless as a prison. They are lumped all over Harlem, colorless, bleak, high, and revolting…. Even if the administration of the projects were not so insanely humiliating (for example: one must report raises in salary to the management, which will then eat up the profit by raising one's rent; the management has the right to know who is staying in your apartment; the management can ask you to leave, at their discretion), the projects would still be hated because they are an insult to the meanest intelligence…. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.