The Past and Future City

How Historic Preservation is Reviving America's Communities

Stephanie Meeks, Kevin C. Murphy

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781610917100
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

At its most basic, historic preservation is about keeping old places alive, in active use, and relevant to the needs of communities today. As cities across America experience a remarkable renaissance, and more and more young, diverse families choose to live, work, and play in historic neighborhoods, the promise and potential of using our older and historic buildings to revitalize our cities is stronger than ever.This urban resurgence is a national phenomenon, boosting cities from Cleveland to Buffalo and Portland to Pittsburgh. Experts offer a range of theories on what is driving the return to the city—from the impact of the recent housing crisis to a desire to be socially engaged, live near work, and reduce automobile use. But there's also more to it. Time and again, when asked why they moved to the city, people talk about the desire to live somewhere distinctive, to be some place rather than no place. Often these distinguishing urban landmarks are exciting neighborhoods—Miami boasts its Art Deco district, New Orleans the French Quarter. Sometimes, as in the case of Baltimore's historic rowhouses, the most distinguishing feature is the urban fabric itself.While many aspects of this urban resurgence are a cause for celebration, the changes have also brought to the forefront issues of access, affordable housing, inequality, sustainability, and how we should commemorate difficult history. This book speaks directly to all of these issues.In The Past and Future City, Stephanie Meeks, the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, describes in detail, and with unique empirical research, the many ways that saving and restoring historic fabric can help a city create thriving neighborhoods, good jobs, and a vibrant economy. She explains the critical importance of preservation for all our communities, the ways the historic preservation field has evolved to embrace the challenges of the twenty-first century, and the innovative work being done in the preservation space now.This book is for anyone who cares about cities, places, and saving America's diverse stories, in a way that will bring us together and help us better understand our past, present, and future.

Chapter 1

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Downtown Is for People: Competing Visions of the Ideal American City

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

—Jane Jacobs¹

America’s welcome urban revival invites important questions: What makes a city successful? Why does one neighborhood thrive and another fail? What are the key urban ingredients for prosperity and happiness?

In 1961, one theory was offered by a remarkable writer and observer who celebrated her centenary in 2016: Jane Jacobs. At the height of an “urban renewal” movement that demolished many richly textured historic neighborhoods in the name of progress, she argued that, in fact, older buildings provide critical and necessary space for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and a diversity of residents to thrive. Their destruction meant that neighborhoods were being drained of economic opportunity, culture, and life. As she wrote, “Cities need old buildings so badly, it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.”²

We may take historic neighborhoods for granted now. But, as author Anthony Flint has pointed out, this declaration was as revolutionary in its own way as 1960s treatises like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. Jane Jacobs’s contention stood against not just the entire direction cities were moving at the time, but against the deeply held philosophy and well-funded ambitions of the era’s master builders, most notably the shaper of modern New York, Robert Moses.³

Before we talk about the important implications of Jacobs’s arguments for cities today, we should look back at how her views challenged the established orthodoxies of the time. Doing so reveals much about how our cities were shaped in the twentieth century, how historic preservation rose up in response, and what we should try to accomplish going forward.

Building “The Radiant City”

Suffice it to say, urban planners before Jane Jacobs felt rather differently about the old buildings in their midst. “Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs,” observed the enormously influential architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret Gris, better known by his adopted moniker, Le Corbusier. “The great task incumbent on us is . . . clearing away from our cities the dead bones that putrefy in them.”⁴

Le Corbusier instead envisioned a “Radiant City” made up of gleaming skyscrapers, surrounded by vast lawns, connected by elevated superhighways, and organized along a grid. Because “it is essential that motors can travel as directly as possible,” he argued, all curved roads would be banished, and all paths would be made straight. As for older buildings, they would all obviously have to go—they were “not worthy of the age; they are no longer worthy of us.” In 1925, at a design exposition in Paris, Le Corbusier even proposed tearing out the city’s entire Marais District and converting it into a real-life prototype of his ideal metropolis. (His countrymen, while intrigued by his ideas, said no thanks.)⁵

In the end, Le Corbusier only ever built one building in the United States, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, but his grand ambitions inspired generations of city planners in the United States. The “Radiant City scheme became the only model for urban redevelopment in America,” wrote James Howard Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere. “From the late forties through the eighties, thousands of [projects] in the Radiant City mold went up all over America: housing, office complexes, hospitals, colleges. The defects of the concept quickly became apparent—for instance, that the space between high rises floating in a superblock became instant wastelands, shunned by the public—but this hardly stopped anyone from building them.”⁶

If Le Corbusier was the thinker who most helped shape the modern urban environment, Robert Moses was the one who best translated his ideas into action.

Robert Moses’s plan for New York’s future—with its enormous housing projects, vast green spaces, and cross-cutting highways—accorded very closely with the vision of the Radiant City. Over the course of decades—primarily as the head of his own municipal fiefdom, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority—Moses built 637 miles of highways, 658 playgrounds, 17 miles of beach, thirteen bridges, two tunnels, and state and city parks in and around the city, doubling the city’s green space. Like Le Corbusier, Moses believed that, in our “motorized civilization,” “cities are created by and for traffic.” So in 1945, he proposed more miles of superhighway in and around New York than existed at that time in all the other cities of the world combined. “What will people see in the year 1999?” he once declared. “The long arteries of travel will stand out.”⁷

To make this vision real, the existing fabric of New York often paid a heavy price. Moses demolished eighteen city blocks on the Upper West Side to make way for his Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (after which, he argued, “the scythe of progress must move northward”). His Cross-Bronx Expressway, built over fifteen years at a cost of $128 million, in Flint’s words, “broke up thriving and diverse immigrant enclaves and jump-started the economic and social decline of the Bronx.” In total, to forge a more Radiant New York City, Moses is estimated to have displaced 250,000 people from their existing homes.⁸

One can argue, as Moses did, that you cannot make an omelet or remake a city “without breaking eggs.” Indeed, Moses is responsible for many New York landmarks that are now woven into the fabric of the city and considered historic in their own right, such as the United Nations, the World’s Fair Pavilion, and the Central Park Zoo. He was also a stalwart defender of urban living at a time when suburbia was in full flower.⁹

Even Moses’s allies, however, concede that “if it came to a project or people, he’d take the project.” And even as more voices raised the alarm about how he was transforming the city, Moses continued pushing New York—and the many other cities inspired by him—ever closer to Le Corbusier’s vision. In his desire to remake the modern metropolis, Moses was an unstoppable force. But there was also an immovable object, and she happened to live on 555 West Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, right in the path of Moses’s grand designs.¹⁰

Queen Jane

A writer and journalist by trade, Jane Jacobs had no formal schooling in urban planning or architecture. She was brilliant, iconoclastic, and, most important, possessed the laudable ability to see the world as it is, not as theory or conventional wisdom said it should be. Even before Moses’s ambitions threatened her home, she began to wonder if urban planning had not gotten lost somewhere in its own designs.¹¹

Given an assignment to write about urban renewal in Philadelphia in 1954, Jacobs met with the executive director of the city’s Planning Commission, Edmund Bacon. Along with Edward Logue, who occupied a similar role in Boston, Bacon was another of the era’s master builders and is still hailed today as the Father of Modern Philadelphia. (For those who enjoy the “Kevin Bacon game,” he’s also the father of the famous actor.)¹²

Unlike Le Corbusier’s “all skyscrapers and no history” aesthetic, Bacon worked to maintain the historic character of neighborhoods like Society Hill and fought to ensure that no building rise taller than the William Penn statue atop City Hall, in the heart of Philadelphia. (He lost that fight in 1987, inaugurating a curse that haunted Philly sports fans for two decades.) Otherwise, he shaped the City of Brotherly Love in much the same way as Moses changed New York City. Often through liberal bulldozing of the existing fabric, Bacon helped forge places like Independence Mall, JFK Plaza, Market East, and Penn Center, and he was the driving force behind the three major highways bisecting the city today: the Schyulkill, Vine Street, and Delaware Expressways. A fourth—the Crosstown Expressway—was envisioned but ultimately never built.¹³

At the time of their meeting in 1954, Jacobs was a great admirer of Bacon and generally thought positively about “urban renewal.” As they toured Philadelphia together, however, she quickly noticed a fly in the ointment. “First, he took me to a street where loads of people were hanging around on the street, on the stoops, having a good time of it,” she wrote later, “and he said, well, this is the next street we’re going to get rid of. That was the ‘before’ street. Then he showed me the ‘after’ street, all fixed up, and there was just one person on it, a bored little boy kicking a tire in the gutter. It was so grim that I would have been kicking a tire too. But Mr. Bacon thought it had a beautiful vista.”¹⁴

When Jacobs asked the planner where all the people had gone, Bacon responded, in very Le Corbusier terms, about the need for an underlying order and clear sight lines in a modern city. The buzzing of people going about their daily business on the street left him cold. To Bacon, it was a bug that needed fixing. To Jacobs, it was the whole point.¹⁵

In a 1958 article for Fortune focused on the American city, “Downtown Is for People,” Jacobs began to articulate, for the first time in writing, her comprehensive critique of “master builders” like Moses and Bacon. First, she explained, it did not do just to plan out a Utopia on paper. Any planner worth his or her salt should begin by leaving the office and touring the city on foot. “He should insist on an hour’s walk in the loveliest park,...