City: Urbanism and Its End (ISPS) (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies) - Softcover

Rae, Douglas W

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300107749 ISBN 13: 9780300107746

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2005

Synopsis

A new understanding of the modern city, its challenges, and why old ideas about urban renewal won’t work

How did neighborhood groceries, parish halls, factories, and even saloons contribute more to urban vitality than did the fiscal might of postwar urban renewal? With a novelist’s eye for telling detail, Douglas Rae depicts the features that contributed most to city life in the early “urbanist” decades of the twentieth century. Rae’s subject is New Haven, Connecticut, but the lessons he draws apply to many American cities. City: Urbanism and Its End beginswith a richly textured portrait of New Haven in the early twentieth century, a period of centralized manufacturing, civic vitality, and mixed-use neighborhoods. As social and economic conditions changed, the city confronted its end of urbanism first during the Depression, and then very aggressively during the mayoral reign of Richard C. Lee (1954–70), when New Haven led the nation in urban renewal spending. But government spending has repeatedly failed to restore urban vitality. Rae argues that strategies for the urban future should focus on nurturing the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing and so civilized. Cities need not reach their old peaks of population, or look like thriving suburbs, to be once again splendid places for human beings to live and work.

About this title

About the Author

Douglas W. Rae is Richard Ely Professor of Management and professor of political science at Yale University. In 1990–91 he served as chief administrative officer of the city of New Haven under John Daniels, the city’s first African-American mayor. Currently, he teaches politics to MBA students at the Yale School of Management, and urban studies in Yale College.

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CITY

URBANISM AND ITS ENDBy DOUGLAS W. RAE

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Yale University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10774-6

Contents

Preface.........................................................................................xi1 Creative Destruction and the Age of Urbanism..................................................1PART ONE / URBANISM2 Industrial Convergence on a New England Town..................................................353 Fabric of Enterprise..........................................................................734 Living Local..................................................................................1135 Civic Density.................................................................................1416 A Sidewalk Republic...........................................................................183PART TWO / END OF URBANISM7 Business and Civic Erosion, 1917-1950.........................................................2158 Race, Place, and the Emergence of Spatial Hierarchy...........................................2549 Inventing Dick Lee............................................................................28710 Extraordinary Politics: Dick Lee, Urban Renewal and the End of Urbanism,.....................31211 The End of Urbanism..........................................................................36112 A City After Urbanism........................................................................393Notes...........................................................................................433Bibliography....................................................................................477Acknowledgments.................................................................................499Index 503

Chapter One

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION AND THE AGE OF URBANISM

Industrial mutation ... incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.-JOSEPH SCHUMPETER, 1946

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.... During its rule of scarce one hundred years, [capitalism] has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. -KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS, 1847

The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail's pace; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express. The United States, the growth of a single century, has already reached the foremost rank among nations, and is destined soon to out-distance all others in the race. In population, in wealth, in annual savings, and in public credit; in freedom from debt, in agriculture, and in manufactures, America already leads the civilized world.-ANDREW CARNEGIE, 1886

An old customer ambles into a downtown New Haven shop looking for a small roll of tape, yet leaves with two larger rolls and a heavy-duty dispenser: "Seven dollars' worth, I give it to you for six." Joseph Perfetto is still a businessman after seven decades on the job. He needs to be good, because New England Typewriter & Stationery is under water. As we talk, rain drips into a large coffee can on the table between us, the last of a storm ended the night before. Rust on the can's rim suggests this isn't its first tour of emergency duty catching water. Rain has made its way layer-by-layer through the remnants of four stories above the shop-those floors currently constitute the abandoned corpse of the old National Hotel.

During the worst of yesterday's storm, whole buckets filled with rainwater in an hour's time. I had called the store, one of the longest-surviving small shops in downtown New Haven, hoping to speak with the owner, only to hear: "No, I don't want to talk about business, there isn't hardly any business, and the rain's falling into the store by the bucket." The conversation was over. A few hours later I drove downtown to Crown Street, thinking I might help mop up and make enough of a friend to earn a conversation. The door was locked, the goods covered in plastic, buckets placed strategically throughout the store. The next day I stopped by unannounced and found the proprietor in a better frame of mind. He introduced himself as Joseph Perfetto-Italian for perfect, he says-age eighty-eight. Energetic, witty, urbane in a gruff fashion. Much as he hates the idea of retirement, Perfetto is looking for someone to buy his stock of office supplies, his aging display racks, and his printing equipment.

Perfetto must close his shop not because of his own age, not because of his store's decrepitude, and not because his building has lost some of its roof. The man remains strong enough to sell transparent tape and typewriter ribbons all day long (two years later I found him climbing a ladder to clean windows at his home). The store could be refurbished and the roof repaired in weeks if there were still a market niche robust enough to justify the investments. Perfetto has to close his doors because the city in which his business is designed to operate is gone-having disappeared little by little in fits and starts for decades, beginning even before New England Typewriter & Stationery had begun making serious money in the 1950s. To be sure, the older city has been replaced by one that uses many of the same bricks and much of the same asphalt, along with nearly all of the old names for streets and neighborhoods. These material and cultural fossils invite an illusion of continuity: these same streets were here a century ago. But only in the most superficial sense is that so, for the streets have changed utterly-in their daily functions, their social meaning, even their moral standing-for those who use them, and for those too timid or prideful to come near them. The old streets belong to a place whose scent is everywhere inside New England Stationery & Typewriter, and whose ghosts are just across the street as I take my leave (figure 1.1).

From Perfetto's shop window I look across Crown Street and confront an expanse of undulating asphalt forming a cheaply engineered parking lot, along with some nondescript commercial buildings, now largely empty. What stood here, and what life occurred within, at the crest of urbanism? Later, in the crowded stacks at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, I learn what was arrayed, east to west on the north side of Crown Street, in 1913.

Theodore Martus residence, also home to Bertram Martus, who is a toolmaker, 101 Crown.

Emil Scheuerman's Saloon, 103 Crown.

Hugo J. Simon & Sons Delicatessen, 105 Crown.

The Charlton Hotel, 107 Crown, also the home of Lorin Benson, perhaps the hotel's manager.

Oscar G. Billiau, caged bird retailer, 111 Crown.

Christian J. Berg, barber, 113 Crown.

J. C. Heinrich's Restaurant, 115 Crown.

John C. Heinrich residence, 117 Crown.

Gray's Club, the residence of Gertrude Carter, and the residence of Ernest Koelbl, all at 119 Crown.

Adam Ziegler Saloon and Camp Gray, Inc., both at 121 Crown.

This mixing of uses-a little commercial hotel, people's homes, a club, a deli, a restaurant, booze, birds, and a barber-has been reduced to the single purpose of parking cars. The place seems to have been full of urban vitality-crowding enterprise next to enterprise, irregularly textured, scaled to the unsystematic and varied needs of ordinary humans. Just to the left of the parking lot, facing Church Street, I see what was once the Connecticut Savings Bank. Its Crown Street facade is decorated by six mammoth Greek Revival columns, the building's birth year MCMVII (1907), and the motto "Thrift, Industry, Enterprise." In the time of urbanism, such a bank was directed by New Haven citizens and channeled money mostly to local borrowers-perhaps to people like Oscar Billiau for his bird store or Emil Scheuerman for his saloon. Today, renamed First Union, this structure houses a minor branch outlet buried four layers deep in a large financial corporation (Wachovia) headquartered six hundred miles south of New Haven. The bank building remains, still an imposing stack of Proctor white marble, even as the bank itself is lost to its former city. Scarcely discernable in these few artifacts is a city in its era of urbanism.

That city was a crowded place filled with people, their money sunk into the ground as tenements and machine shops and saloons. Economic energy and ingenuity flowed inward because high-value manufactured goods flowed outward. Investors and skilled workers came to town in pursuit of the dollars they could earn at Winchester Repeating Arms, Sargent Hardware, New Haven Clock, Osterweis Cigars, and scores of other firms that exported goods to national and world markets. These exporters fed cash to thousands of wage-earners and to a multitude of smaller specialty manufacturers and machine tool shops that in turn furnished them with supplies and expert services. All the while, this inward-flowing torrent of money was creating opportunities for smaller entrepreneurs to sell groceries, clothes, furniture, movie tickets, beer, souvenir photographs, religious statues, and a hundred other things to those who brought home a weekly paycheck. Such a check conveyed revenue from consumers across a continent who saw fit to purchase hardware, wristwatches, guns, bird cages, and rubber boots made in New Haven. Every such dollar raced through a thick web of transactions in the city, running from corner grocer to her wholesaler to the wages of a delivery man to his tenement landlord to a Saturday night at the neighborhood saloon then perhaps to the Sunday morning collection plate. Deep down in this web of economic relationships were typewriter ribbons and the scores of other products that Joe Perfetto sold in downtown New Haven during his seven-decade career. The way Joe Perfetto got into a business of his own tells us a lot about his vitality and the vitality of the city he recalls:

By the time I was seven, I had a little business lighting stoves and turning switches for the religious Jews who lived around the old synagogue on Rose Street. I was also in charge of delivering magazines to students over at Yale while still in grade school. In 1924 I started out working for Barnes Typewriter at the age of fourteen. Barnes would take off for Florida, leave the place in the charge of his daughter, and she was never there, always out with some guy. So I ran the place, more or less. Took my first typewriter apart the first day there and put it together. Mechanically inclined, I suppose. Worked for him five, six years until the Depression started in.

One morning I was home, supposedly on vacation, which most of the time I never got-got paid for it but worked anyway. I got a letter saying that he was gonna reduce my pay from $27 a week to $20 a week, on account of the Depression. Everybody was cutting-the telephone company, Winchester. They weren't paying anything, $13 a week. So I asked how come he had to cut mine. He said, "We're not making any money, everybody's doing it, we have to do it." I said, "Mr. Barnes, I'm making about $400 a month for you, all your work, all your guarantee work, any deliveries not included, just what I tell you to charge customers for my work. Think about all that work for the Register. You're only givin' me $100 a month, taking in $400, think about it." [Barnes responds:] "You don't know what you're talking about." "Yes, I do, every time I give you a slip, I keep a duplicate." [Barnes retorts:] "You're not supposed to do that. Anyway, I treat you like a son, I'm like a father to you." I says I'll go to work for Blakeslee with a pick and shovel but I still gotta have that $27. He wouldn't do it so I said I'm gonna have to quit. I emptied out my tool bag, all the spare parts, and put 'em in the drawer, left 'em there. I said, "How about a letter of recommendation?" He said, "You won't need it, you'll be back next week." I said, no, I'd like to have a letter. He wrote one about how I was honest and trustworthy, nothing about how good I worked. Not that I was the errand boy, the shoeshine boy or what: I was just honest and trustworthy.

So I went out, that was on a Saturday. I went down to a friend of mine used to help out at Dorer's Music Shop; he was quite famous there. I told him, and he said, "What are you worried about?" He took me over to Commerce Street, to a print shop there, and we had some name cards made up. Monday morning I went out, passed out some of those cards, telling people I was working for myself now, and if they could use me I'd appreciate it. Would you believe I made $113 the first week working for myself? I didn't have anything but a tool bag, not a ribbon to sell, not anything. So I made the $113 that first week, and I've been at it ever since.

Even as the Depression set in, the city churned out enough demand that a smart kid could find his way into the money stream on a weekend's notice.

Later, bored with the asphalt parking lot, I turn left (west) down Crown Street, toward the city center, where I immediately confront an edifice radically alien to the texture of urbanism. The building's surface consists almost entirely of bricks, many of them glassy white, others forming unglazed dung-brown rectangles. No windows interfere with the aridity of design, and the few remaining doors are boarded shut. This great box-about 300 by 200 by 40 feet high-appears big enough to swallow up several hundred shops like Joe Perfetto's New England Stationery & Typewriter. The big box-for about thirty years home to a Macy's department store-dates to the era of urban renewal (1954-70), and to the demolition of several city blocks constituting the core of the central business district. It was created in an attempt to restore the lost city of urbanist New Haven, although it gives every appearance of hostility to the smallness, the unevenness, the very humanity of a place that could harbor saloons, delis, hotels, and a caged bird store along one little stretch of sidewalk. Walking around the block, to the far side of the big box, I see that a massive parking garage, crafted by Paul Rudolph in what architects call brutalist style, abuts the Macy's box and extends south well beyond it to a zone formerly occupied by a very similar department store building (Malley's), recently demolished.

Glancing down George Street, south of the garage, I survey two additional Jurassic structures-the War Memorial Coliseum (slated for demolition in 2003) and the world headquarters of the Knights of Columbus-arising from the same mid-century era and expressing the same urgent desire to create something grand in the central city. These buildings, along with the wavy asphalt parking lot on Crown Street, are material artifacts from the end of urbanism.

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

In the course of a single generation, capitalism creates new wealth and new demands for its consumption scarcely imaginable at the outset. In the generation between 1880 and 1910, for example, the real value of the U.S. gross domestic product per person rose from $3,835 to $5,905-a spurt of better than 50 percent (all figures are inflation-adjusted to year 2002 dollars). In the years separating 1940 from 1970, GDP per capita leapt from $7,909 to $19,070-about 240 percent. As the generations pass generations, growth compounds growth: an average American living in the year 2002 is eight to ten times as well off as she would have been in 1880. Anyone who has walked the streets of an American city or driven those of its suburbs in recent decades knows that the fruits of this abundance are deposited very unevenly: economic growth and economic equality are very different things, but the brute fact of relentless long-term growth is beyond dispute, and it stands at the very core of American urban history.

Capitalism drives growth by remorselessly refusing to preserve the past (even when it markets the sentiment of a remembered past in film, fashion, and architecture). No manufacturing plant is permanently secure against novel competition, no system of transportation permanently withstands disruptive change, no corporation is immune to takeover or bankruptcy. No store can be insured against the disappearance of its customers or the obsolescence of its merchandise. No profitable line of business-from hotels to stores specializing in caged birds, from stationery stores to saloons-will stand for long undisturbed by the curiosity of would-be competitors. No place-city, suburb, hamlet, or farmstead-is secure against the emergence of a new economic geography that drains vital populations and investments in the space of a few decades. In seeking ever fresh forms of production, ever larger markets, ever higher returns on investment, capitalism routinely destroys older ways of doing business, older technologies, older plants-and in so doing profoundly transforms the communities that have formed around them.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300107749
• ISBN 13: 9780300107746
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544