The Battle for Gotham (30 page)

The physical achievements, whether judged good or bad, are undeniably mighty in breadth, scale, and obstacles overcome. But the danger in a revisionist view of history is that it takes on a life of its own. That life often becomes myth, like the incorrect belief that Mussolini “at least got the trains to run on time.” Two questions are critical: Did the damage he wrought outweigh the good? My answer is yes. Were alternatives available to meet the city’s need for infrastructure, transportation, and neighborhood repair? My answer again is yes. Without Moses, those alternatives had a chance; with Moses, they did not.

If you want to put Moses in a positive light, then favoring the car-centric, lower-density suburban vision of the city goes with it. Fortunately, many understand that under that scenario, cities are doomed. The reviving cities today, in fact, are redensifying; rebuilding local transit; revaluing existing assets like traditional neighborhoods, historic and plain architecture, and shopping streets; and taking down elevated highways and sky-ways. A good observer can’t miss seeing this.

WHOSE URBAN VISION?

Moses’s own view of his era and rationale for his actions was that the city needed saving, but the question should be, “From what?” After the war, cities had problems that needed to be addressed. The infrastructure of existing roads and transit needed repair and expansion. Deteriorated buildings needed upgrading and some replacement. Public facilities needed renovating and additions. Slums were a problem, but how to define the problem and the solution was open to question and debate that Moses would not permit. No consensus existed that wiping out whole working-class neighborhoods was a solution to real problems nor that the towers-in-the-park were the answer to anything. Social and economic challenges cannot be met solely by physical creations.

Urban vibrancy had dimmed when resources were directed to the war effort, but the solution was definitely not to demolish whole swaths of the urban fabric and hope that what remained would not fall apart. The value of social and economic networks was greater than the new structures to be built by dispossessing them. Mending the urban fabric, repairing and replacing different pieces around the whole city, could have included many new projects, large and small, but never on the ripping scale of what Moses proposed and never at the same staggering social or financial cost. For example, investing more in the neglected public transit instead of just the convenience of the private car would not have precluded vehicular access, just not made it the priority. Today we struggle to re-create a transportation balance.

Was the city better off after Moses? We had thirteen expressways to help people get in and out of the city, but we had less mass transit to get people around the city. We had some celebrated new projects like Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Coliseum (now gone, replaced by Time-Warner Center), and a money-losing 1964 World’s Fair that gave the city Flushing Meadow Park. But we still had a crumbling infrastructure and a maintenance burden for the new projects that continue to cost dearly. And as investigative reporter Fred J. Cook wrote about Moses’s slum-clearance program in a 1956 exposé in the
World-Telegram and Sun
: “It is a system under which neighborhoods actually have deteriorated; it is a system under which the number of apartments, already inadequate, has been reduced for years to come. It is a system . . . beginning again the cycle of overcrowding and bad housing that creates slums.” And as architect and planner Robert Goodman observed, “The inhabitants of our dormitories for the poor have all the ‘symptoms’ of poverty as those living in adjacent tenement areas, without even the consolation of the corner stores, storefront churches, street life and lack of bureaucratic administration of their old ‘slum.’”
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DENSITY IS NOT THE PROBLEM

Moses and many planners since made the fundamental mistake of thinking density was the problem, failing to distinguish between density and overcrowding. Diminishing density, which almost all urban renewal and slum-clearance projects did and still do, does not diminish or solve problems. Problems are just shifted elsewhere and, in fact, exacerbated as new units built are rarely in the same quantity as those destroyed. Fewer units mean more chances of overcrowding.

Density is critical to vibrant urbanism. Mass transit, local retail and the jobs that go with it, well-used public spaces, and other elements of genuine urbanism can’t survive without density. Car-based neighborhoods in a city function like suburbs out of the city. They are holes in the urban fabric, undermining the whole by weakening specific parts. There are, as the late
New York Times
architecture critic Herbert Muschamp described, “projects physically located in a community but contributing little value to it.” And as Jacobs explained, “Densities are too low or too high when they frustrate city diversity instead of abetting it.”
⁴⁰
They can’t be determined by the formulas and ratios planners favor.

Moses diminished both density and the number of affordable dwellings, thus guaranteeing continued overcrowding. He also guaranteed inflexible projects that stood like islands apart from areas of the city that would eventually dynamically and organically rebuild themselves around those islands. The real causes of slums were unaffected and in many cases made worse.

Ironically, today people assume that high-rise means high density when, in fact, the modest low-rise mixture of individual buildings bulldozed for urban renewal was higher in density than the tower replacements that were purposely less dense than what was demolished.
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Three- or four-family modest-scale houses built close together with tenements and slightly higher but still small apartment houses in between provided the density of once vibrant neighborhoods. That is what was lost. Today, this same density is so admired and expensive in Brooklyn.

The myth of density was so promoted that today the idea remains pervasive that density causes crime, poverty, and other urban ills. Ironically, in communities where density has either been thinned or resisted, overcrowding is often the result.

THE SOCIAL AND PSYCHIC DIMENSION

Moses dismissed all suggestions of alternatives to total clearance and to the misery caused by displacement. “No one has yet suggested a way to clear slums without dislocating people,” he said. He was correct. Clear slums without dislocation, no; regenerate slums with minimum dislocation, yes. One is strictly physical and simple, the other organic and complex.

But what were the causes of slums? Redlining, racism, blockbusting, land speculation, disinvestment, rent gouging by slumlords, migration of rural Southerners into the city, and the gradual departure of the middle class all undermined healthy urban neighborhoods across the country. Slum clearance solved none of these problems and, in fact, exacerbated many of them, especially land speculation, racism, and poverty.

Urban renewal and highway building reduced the number of low-income housing units, dislocated between five hundred thousand and one million people in a city of approximately eight million, and increased rents for many, all while providing a financial bonanza for private interests. Those interests profited from slum-clearance land sales, construction loans, and subsidies. The kind of societal damage described earlier by Elizabeth Yampierre was the result. Much of the social dysfunction created by such dislocation led to so many of the social problems that peaked in the 1970s. “Indeed, when the construction was done, the real ruin of the Bronx had just begun,” wrote author and CUNY political science professor Marshall Berman, who as a child was displaced by the Cross Bronx Expressway.
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The impact of serial displacement was already a citywide issue in 1958. Only Caro has focused on the human side to a notable extent and only in the one case of the Cross Bronx Expressway. The dimension of the problem and its lasting impact were and are citywide. Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia, wrote a revealing book,
Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It
, analyzing in excruciating detail the social and psychological effects of the displacement caused by urban renewal and highway construction in cities. Her study covered several cities, with similar patterns appearing in each. Referring to the effects of all the cataclysmic disruption, serial dislocation, and the shattering of the critical web of social connections and familial relationships, she wrote:

It was in a state of overwhelming injury that black people faced a series of crises: the loss of unskilled jobs, the influx of heroin and other addictive drugs, the slow collapse of the family, and the incursion of AIDS, violence, asthma, and obesity. Each disaster increased the impact of the next, and the spiral of community disintegration began to spin faster and faster, just as the last domino seems to fall much more quickly than the first. The present state of Black America is in no small measure the result of “Negro removal.”

That is a powerful conclusion, one that most officials ignore or reject rather than take seriously. “We have had a series of policies that continue to displace people,” Fullilove noted, “and no real policies to stabilize places.”
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The poor are just placeholders for the next development plan, she observed. The value of the places they are relocated to is destroyed and then can be bought cheap when the time is right. Any genuine stabilization plan or policy, Fullilove argued, echoing Jacobs’s articulation of “unslumming,” would include investment in an area while keeping the people in place. This preserves the social networks and all the other components of a stable urban neighborhood.

The bottom line is that social dislocation, whether in small numbers or large, is a primary cause of urban instability, costly to the people affected, and costly to the larger city. This is not just logical, an assumption easily understood by anyone who recognizes the authentic urban process. But it is also shown to be true in clinical studies that Fullilove and others have conducted. Between 1991 and 1995, for example, Fullilove interviewed people living in randomly selected households in Harlem. Of those interviewed, twenty-five reported that they had been homeless at some point in their lives. An astounding 25 percent had come from dislocated homes and had been separated from their parents for at least a year prior to the age of eighteen. Some experienced both. “This geographic area,” Fullilove points out in conversation, “experienced dramatic disinvestment where familial and social bonds had come apart.” What keeps people healthy, she adds, are the “social connections and social solidarity that come with dense social networks.”

THE RESURGENT CITY

The city hit bottom in the 1970s. The spiral of urban decay had descended pretty low, following the massive disruption caused by the Moses era. The worst damage was done. The rest was left to burn through most of the 1970s.

Between 1950 and 1975, the city lost one million people. The federal money for big clearance projects eventually either diminished drastically or went dry. Forced to change course, government leaders found new, creative solutions, often following citizen-led efforts. The natural organic process that was taking root around the city finally had a chance to take hold and grow. Where successful, that process enhanced rather than displaced the rich assortment of people, culture, and economy we now celebrate. The unarticulated strategy was to improve conditions and lives where they lived, not try to move people around, what Jacobs described as “unslumming.” Unslumming comes not when new people are moving in but when people choose to stay, make their own neighborhoods. This is distinguished from gentrification.

What has evolved organically since the 1970s is exactly what was advocated by Moses’s critics, first led by attorney and housing activist Charles Abrams and later Jacobs, Whyte, and others. Demolish judiciously. Replace the unrepairable strategically. Leave standing viable buildings ranging from modest apartment houses to structurally sound tenements to run-down brownstones in need of remodeling. Discourage erosion of industrial space. Invest in transit. Respect and enhance existing schools, community services, and social institutions, all of which contribute to the critical social fabric necessary for stable neighborhoods and cannot be created from scratch. This strategy—Urban Husbandry was how I described it in
The Living City
—left plenty of room for needed demolition of the hopeless tenement or commercial building. But the basic stability of socially cohesive neighborhoods was not further destroyed. And a good deal of the city’s wide variety of economic activity was not massively dislodged. (Studies have shown that one-third of dispossessed firms went out of business—a rate significantly above normal business failures.)

Revisionists argue that Moses did what he did because of his love for the city. Even that is questionable. He didn’t love New York City as much as he loved his view of what it
should
be, how it
should
function, what
should
replace it. He reshaped New York in his image and with it cities near and far. As Lewis Mumford points out, “In the 20th century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person.”

Of all the harmful urban strategies Moses perpetrated, none is as long-lasting and economically destructive as the idea that industry was either dying or dispensable or that its location is easily manipulated. As we will see next, Moses’s thinking on this subject remains fully ingrained in the thinking of New York’s city planners with the power to continue what Moses unleashed.

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THE FACTORY