Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (54 page)

WHY
DID
SO MUCH PUBLIC HOUSING end up on the East Side's waterfront and not the West Side's? For one thing, the East River gave up
its port functions earlier than the Hudson River, leaving it open to such transformation. With shipping firms and other maritime businesses gone, these deserted, brownfield industrial sites became relatively cheap to acquire—certainly cheaper than slum property further inland. As the urban historian Peter Marcuse told me, “The general picture is, when waterfront property was rundown, stinking, or abandoned, it was considered suitable for public housing. Now the developers of the world would love to get their hands on it.”

Another reason was that the city's two most notorious ghettos, the Lower East Side and Harlem, happened to border on the East River and its tributary, the Harlem River, buttressing the arguments of reformers to clear the slums and place housing projects there. The Lower East Side was particularly ripe for renewal, because it had been thinning out. At one time the most overcrowded spot on earth (450 persons per acre in 1870), largely populated by European immigrants, their children began quitting the ghetto as fast as they could, and immigrant restriction acts cut off the supply of new arrivals. During the 1920s, the Lower East Side's population dropped by 40 percent.

Stimulated by the imminent riverfront roadway (later known as the FDR Drive), several proposals were circulated by the Regional Plan Association, the Manhattan borough president, and the Lower East Side Chamber of Commerce, to raze the slums and rebuild the Lower East Side for luxury housing, along the lines of Chicago's Lakefront Drive. But the coming of the Great Depression put an end to those fantasies. What limited market remained for luxury housing located to the less image-tarnished Upper East Side: Sutton Place, Beekman Place, and River House. So the new dream became to raze the slums of the Lower East Side and replace them with better low-cost housing, more in keeping with the neighborhood's history and its current residents. There was an unquestionable need for decent low-cost housing in the Lower East Side: despite declining population, it had remained the second-densest part of the city, except for Harlem. Since many old-law tenements (cramped, squalid, dark) were too dilapidated to inhabit, and Depression-era jobs were scarce, poor families were obliged to double up in the cheap-rent lodgings available. However, the conclusion that the remedy would have to be
public
housing, built by the government, had been reached only after considerable resistance.

Ever since Jacob Riis began agitating to do something about the squalid tenements in which “the other half ” lived, the city had been employing a series of tax abatements and other incentives to encourage private developers to build decent low-income housing, and the developers had, by and large, failed to take up the offer, preferring instead to service better-off clients. Though a few limited-dividend companies, such as those of Alfred T. White (whose slogan was “philanthropy plus five percent”) or the City and Suburban Corporation, showed it was at least theoretically possible to build quality low-income housing that turned a profit, most developers wanted more than a five-to-seven-percent return. Riis had put the issue as starkly as possible: “It is just a question whether a man would take seven percent and save his soul, or twenty-five and lose it.” To which developers might in fairness respond that they were under no obligation to be social benefactors. Their predecessors had built the slums because old-law tenements had made a lucrative profit. Ironically, the reformist housing standards that were passed for new-law tenements, coupled with rising expectations (hot and cold running water, a toilet in each apartment, light and air, adequate fire protection), had raised construction costs to a point that put rents out of the reach of the poor.

If low-income citizens were to be housed, the government would have to step in and make up the difference in rents between what poor tenants could afford and what the rooms cost to build, or else it would itself have to construct new housing. In short—and here a radical mental leap took place—the government would have to view housing as a basic right, a service owed to all its citizens, like drinking water or garbage collection.

Not only did conservatives view the prospect of the government's constructing housing units as “creeping socialism”; even certain staunch housing reformers, such as Lawrence Veiller, found it anathema. The predisposition of Americans to rely on the private sector and eschew state intervention in such matters ran so deep that only a crisis as immense as the Great Depression could have drawn federal, state, and municipal governments into the role of housing provider. It may help to remember that in the 1930s, shanties were erected in Central Park and Riverside Park, and massive evictions occurred. “One hundred eighty-six thousand families were served dispossess notices during the eight months ending in June 1932 in New York City,” wrote Peter Marcuse. “Sometimes small bands used
strong-arm tactics to prevent marshals from putting furniture on the street; more often crowds spontaneously gathered to interfere with evictions.”

The threat of these protests taking a Bolshevik turn was used as an argument by public housing advocates. “Let us face facts squarely,” said Langdon Post, the first director of the New York State Housing Authority. “All revolutions are germinated in the slums; every riot is a slum riot. Housing is one of the many ways in which to forestall the bitter lessons which history has in store for us if we continue to be blind and stiff-necked.” Thus, public housing should be seen in the larger perspective, as part of the New Deal's tactical circumventing of revolution through ameliorative social reforms.

Even so, public housing had to be sold initially as a jobs program (the first projects were funded by the Public Works Administration) rather than a shelter-providing one. With 70 percent of building trade workers on relief by 1933, something had to be done to stimulate employment. Helping to put across the public housing agenda was a critical mass of housing reformers, which had been gaining in numbers and political sophistication over the years. Let us recall their praiseworthy names once more, before they sink into oblivion: Catherine Bauer and Mary Simkhovitch, Charles Abrams and Carol Aronovici, Frederick Ackerman and Charney Vladeck, Langdon Post and Helen Alfred, Ira S. Robbins and Dorothy Rosenman, Nathan Straus and Senator Robert Wagner, Clarence Stein and Stanley Isaacs, Talbot Hamlin, Lillian Wald and Edith Elmer Wood. Some came from the settlement-house movement; others were planners, architects, developers, writers, and politicians. Together they fought to introduce legislation that established the New York City Housing Authority in 1934, and the Federal Housing Bill in 1937.

The first municipal public housing effort in New York City was appropriately named First Houses, and it was located at Avenue A and East 3rd Street on the Lower East Side. The city acquired most of the land from Vincent Astor, the civic-minded millionaire who, embarrassed to be holding title to this shabby row of tenements, was looking to unload it. The remaining two parcels had to be wrenched by the courts from a recalcitrant landlord named Muller, establishing an important precedent: the right of the state to condemn slums and replace them with low-cost housing. The project was completed in 1936. A more modest, streetwise beginning
could hardly be imagined. It aimed to rehabilitate (with indoor plumbing and fortified walls) a series of old-law tenement buildings, demolishing every third building in the row to leave a sawtooth effect that would permit more light and air, while also creating a combined yard in the rear for the occupants' enjoyment. Some original buildings proved too fragile to undergo rehabilitation, and were replaced by new five-story ones, which mimicked the same humble, Lower East Side tenement façades. Nine connected storefronts occupied the ground floor, to let the project blend inconspicuously into the surrounding neighborhood.

In fact, if you visit it today, you would be hard-pressed to detect the ensemble as public housing, were it not for the wall plaque. First Houses is protected by landmark preservation status, and the sweetly designed inner courtyard has a frozen-in-time WPA air, displaying the same children's ceramic ponies, their colors much faded, and the same uneven, buckling, charcoal-gray octagonal paving stones that testify to the eager but untutored relief labor used. (Union members protested, and afterward only members of the building trades could be employed on public housing construction jobs.) In its small-scale, artisanal quality and its streetscape-preservationist strategy, First Houses represents the road not taken. Would that it had become the dominant model; but it ran enough over budget (costing three times more than starting from scratch) to deter replication.

The quality design work that went into all three of the city's earliest projects—First Houses, the Williamsburg Houses, and the Harlem River Houses—had been greatly influenced by European public housing (or, as it was called on the Continent, “social housing”). These worker housing-block experiments of the 1920s, particularly in Germany, Holland, Great Britain, and Austria, had attracted some of the finest talents in progressive architecture, whose solutions were human-scaled, fine-grained, and attentive to nature. Operating from a similar sensibility, the Swiss-born architect William Lescaze gave the Williamsburg Houses, which opened in Brooklyn in 1937, a distinctive look by angling all the buildings artily at fifteen degrees to the city grid—a design the Museum of Modern Art honored in its tenth-anniversary show in 1939.

But the most urbanely impressive of the new public housing, which opened a few months after the Williamsburg Houses, was the Harlem River Houses. As a direct result of the Harlem Riots of 1935, the black
uptown community had been promised its own public housing development. What made that commitment more urgent was that the Williamsburg Houses had been already pledged to whites. In the beginning, the government assumed that projects should reflect the racial makeup of the surrounding neighborhoods, so that no white project would be placed in a black neighborhood, or vice versa. Ultimately this policy meant that public housing reinforced racial segregation patterns. But in the 1930s, black leaders agitated for public housing in their areas, and seemed pleased with the “separate but equal” results, calling it “a godsend for Negro Americans …a new high ground for racial policy” (Robert Weaver,
The Negro Ghetto
).

The Harlem River Houses was the first housing project in the nation built wholly by the federal government. The Public Works Administration paid for it, partly as a work relief effort. As with First Houses, a certain amount of arm-twisting by the courts had been necessary for the city to acquire the land, this time from the Rockefeller family. It covered eleven acres from 151st to 153rd Streets, between MacCombs Place and Seventh Avenue (now Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard).

Because the scale of its buildings resembled the typical tenement walkup, the Harlem River Houses today looks like the neighborhood around it—only better. The façades—Hudson Valley brick, the same as was used in Federal-era townhouses, and other traditional New York buildings—have been cleaned recently, and shine a brilliant orange-red. As the brick facing approaches the ground, the pattern changes slightly and protrudes, for a corbelled effect. Such subtleties would later become unthinkable in public housing construction. The apartments were built with large, generous windows and hard oak floors. The diverse design team (which included Archibald Manning Brown, a patrician architect and classmate of FDR; Horace Ginsbern, a master of middle-class garden apartment complexes; and John Louis Wilson, the first black architect to graduate from Columbia) was determined to prove by this demonstration project that public housing could work well in the inner city.

The project featured the classic social-housing arrangement of four-story walk-ups surrounding a courtyard. Most noteworthy were the meticulous treatment of the public spaces. Writing about them fifty years later in an
Architectural Forum
appreciation, “The Harlem River Houses,” Roy
Strickland and James Sanders singled out the housing development's “tightly framed” landscape design, which gives the courts the quality of “outdoor rooms,” and the block-through pedestrian mall, benches, and sculptures. “Nowhere in New York has the social activity of the street been so successfully transferred to and reshaped for the special conditions of the center-block court.”

An effort was even made—perhaps the only such by any riverfront housing project—to connect the Harlem River Houses to the water. Originally, lawns and pedestrian paths stepped down to the water's edge. Photographs of the day capture this progression from street to treetop, urban to nature, with the river restrained by a graceful, Gaudi-like serpentine wall. All that disappeared in 1957 to make way for the Harlem River Drive. Today the project's tenants are as cut off from the waterfront as every other uptown community.

Still, the Harlem River Houses remains a shining achievement. “Here, in short,” enthused Lewis Mumford when it opened, “is the equipment for decent living that every modern neighborhood needs: sunlight, air, safety, play space, meeting space, and living space. The families in the Harlem River Houses have higher standards of housing, measured in tangible benefits, than most of those on Park Avenue.”

VERY LITTLE PUBLIC HOUSING got built during World War II, resources and materials being requisitioned for the military effort. When the war ended, however, the returning veterans found a nationwide housing shortage, and again the government was prodded into action. At first it built only transitional housing for veterans. But then the Housing Act of 1949 allocated federal money for public housing, reopening the argument about how to do it right.

Part of the debate revolved around site selection: whether to place public housing in the heart of the slums, or at the city's outskirts. Anthony Jackson summarized the debate in his book
A Place Called Home:
“Specialists such as Clarence Stein and Catherine Bauer argued that well-designed neighborhoods with lower densities could be built only on cheap peripheral land and that as the demolition of slums inevitably displaced their occupants, they might as well move away to better conditions. Other
specialists contended that central sites were already intensely developed with services, that these huge costs would have to be duplicated in new suburbs, and that rehoused families naturally wished to remain near their social and business connections.”