Under the Knife, or All For Their Own Good
The status symbol among U.S. cities these days is the bombed-out look.
Every self-respecting city seems to want to be hideous with rubble and raw earth, crawling with helmeted workers, snorting earthmovers and angular cranes. These are the signs and portents of the biggest civic building boom the U.S.--or any other country--has known. It goes by the name of urban renewal, but it might also be called emergency surgery. The metaphor is thoroughly consistent. Considerable pain is involved, and sometimes shock. There is inevitable destruction of healthy tissue, the operation is sometimes a failure, and the patient is really sick or he wouldn't be there in the first place.
Death at the Heart. Professional critics such as Lewis Mumford have long warned that the U.S. city in general had something more than a slight case of congestion and aching joints. But most people thought of the problem only in terms of slum clearance and better housing for the poor--a worthy but not exhilarating objective. Only gradually did it become clear that the sickness of the cities was a kind of heart disease; they have been dying at the center, where the great stores and great buildings and great enterprises are supposed to be. The suburban sprawl, in leeching the center city's lifeblood, was imperiling the whole urban organism. Suddenly everybody--bankers, businessmen, politicians, newspapers and civic associations of all shapes and sizes--found themselves united in a new concern for the city in a mustering of community forces unparalleled in recent times.
Boston, for instance, has laid waste to 60 slum acres in the center of town and is erecting there a $200 million Government center; Washington has turned a 560-acre jungle south of the Capitol into a paradise of gracious living; New York City has so much private building that the streets are all but impassable, and with the help of Government funds, has rehoused a population that, taken together, would make the 28th largest city in the U.S. Chicago has 27 redevelopment and four conservation projects that in five years will have transformed 514 city blocks; even Los Angeles, a laggard among the U.S.'s major cities, has 17 projects on 917 acres under way. St. Louis has miles of riverfront teeming with bulldozers and unfinished dreams; San Francisco is ripping and riveting at the rate of about $1,000 a minute; Cleveland is trying to turn itself completely around to re-embrace the waters of Lake Erie (see color pages).
The process involves a delicate meld of drawing board and bulldozer, budget and ballot box, bludgeon and crystal ball. Technically, every time an enterprising builder tears down an old building and replaces it with a new one, it is urban renewal. But only in recent years has the process been conceived in terms of an overall plan to reshape the city.
Trigger for the whole thing was the Housing Act of 1949, which authorized the Federal Government to pay cities for at least two-thirds of the difference between the cost of acquiring and clearing a blighted area, and the price the land brought when sold to a private developer. The act's chief aim was to clear slums, but it was quickly realized that slums were not all the city had to worry about. In successive broadening acts and amendments, the legislation has been expanded to finance the redevelopment of the heart of the city by authorizing clearance of land for "nonresidential" reuse, and setting up other funds for the rehabilitation and conservation of old houses and neighborhoods. Altogether there are today 1,634 federally assisted urban renewal projects going on and being studied in 777 U.S. cities.
Since the program's inception, the Federal Government has spent a total of $1.02 billion as of December 1963.
But this outlay is more than compensated for by the private building it has generated. Last week Urban Renewal Commissioner William L. Slayton reported proudly that, excluding the cost of land, approximately $6.90 of redevelopment investment is made for every $1 of federal grants.
Tearing Down, Digging Up. Of all the cities under the planner's knife, none has been so deeply and continuously committed to renewing itself as the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed: Philadelphia.
For twelve years, the nation's fourth largest city has been tearing down and digging up, burrowing, building, restoring, condemning, relocating, and spending what will amount to more than $2 billion in private, city, state and federal funds to carry out the most thoughtfully planned, thoroughly rounded, skillfully coordinated of all the big-city programs in the U.S.
In central Philadelphia this week, workmen were finishing two towering modern office buildings that will substantially complete one of the nation's biggest chunks of center-city reconstruction in 30 years--a $120 million complex of transit and bus terminals, hotels, shops, restaurants, offices, underground concourses, sunken gardens and pedestrian malls called Penn Center. Near by an underground garage was taking shape in a block-square crater, and a stone's throw down Benjamin Franklin Parkway a crane was hoisting marble panels onto the top floors of a new circular apartment building.
Just over a mile away, at the edge of the oldest part of town, a power shovel clawed out a hole for a swimming pool beside the most elegant recent addition to Philadelphia's skyline, the three Society Hill apartment towers by Architect I. M. Pei. Around them, through what was a disheveled market area five years ago, stretch the broad lawns of a five-acre plaza, and in this historic neighborhood, remodelers were busy restoring to their original elegance dozens of 18th century row houses that had most recently been seedy boardinghouses. To the southwest, work began on a new shopping center at Eastwick, a 2,508-acre city-within-a-city that is rising in what was recently a wasteland of marshes, junkyards, trailer camps and crumbling shacks.
The list could go on, through some 54 federally aided urban renewal projects that Philadelphia has completed or has in the works, plus 21 others that did not involve direct federal cash.
Cutting Teeth. One man coordinates, advises and stimulates all this activity--and the array of civic groups, politicians, architects, builders and real estate men necessary to keep it going.
Edmund Norwood Bacon, 54, is a tall (6 ft. 2 in.), thin (160 Ibs.) Philadelphian with sharp blue eyes and an intensely intellectual air that hardly seems the right equipment for moving and shaking a major city. But his total dedication to his special art and to his native town--plus an impressive gift of gab--is changing the look and feel of the town that was once the butt of comedians as the sleepiest city of them all.
Bacon's concern for cities in general and Philadelphia in particular began early. His senior thesis, as an architectural student at Cornell in 1932, was on "Plans for a Philadelphia Center City." After graduation, he used a $1,000 legacy to bicycle through Europe, walk through Greece and sail up the Nile. He got his architectural start working as a designer under Architect Henry Killam Murphy in Shanghai. "It's a good idea to cut your teeth where the product won't be around to haunt you later," says Bacon. Back in the U.S. after a year, he wrote to the late great architect and city planner, Eliel Saarinen, asking for a fellowship at Saarinen's Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
"Eliel Saarinen was my great master and teacher," says Bacon. "He emphasized design as the relationship of form and space; so the real design problem is the city. Saarinen taught us that harmony of form and mass doesn't stop at property lines but continues." The Bacon generation at Cranbrook included such notables of arts and architecture as Designer Charles Eames, Sculptor Harry Bertoia, Eliel's late son Eero, and Designer Florence Knoll.
"At Cranbrook in our time, everybody was talking about what a wonderful thing the suburbs were going to be--discussing civic centers, working, shopping and living centers--that sort of thing," recollects Eames. "It was all quite new, and we were full of hope for the pastures. We were all gliding out of town on the freeways. But Ed Bacon looked at the first seep of city rot and saw the real crisis." After leaving Cranbrook in 1936, Bacon served for two years as a city planner in nearby Flint, then landed a job back in Philadelphia as managing director of the Philadelphia Housing Association. It was one of the earnest but powerless organizations that existed in many cities across the land before cities realized that their inner renewal and reshaping was not just a matter of esthetics but of vital budgetary economics.
By the 1950s, the city's businessmen recognized that Philadelphia was a city in a state of collapse, to use Bacon's phrase. Industries were beginning to move out, sales in the center city were declining, and stores were moving to the suburbs, or talking about it.
The businessmen did not wait for the Federal Government. They organized themselves into the Citizens Council on City Planning. Bacon and Architect Oscar Stonorov mounted an elaborate display of their notions for reconverting downtown Philadelphia in a complete-scale model with animated parts. The exhibit drew 385,000 people when put on display at a downtown department store. Bacon personally visited 13 public schools and encouraged schoolchildren to work up models of how they would like their local district to look. Result was a climate of enthusiasm for improvement and change that ranged through the whole community, from self-interested businessman to self-interested slum dweller.
In 1949 Bacon was made executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission.
Fallen Wall. But Bacon's breakthrough happened only by chance--or at least by the kind of chance that only total preparation makes into a real breakthrough. The 1952 election installed a new, reform-minded mayor, Democrat Joseph Clark, and a new city charter, in which the planning commission was given real authority. A few months later came an announcement from the Pennsylvania Railroad that it had at last decided to tear down the inner city's historic eyesore: the old Broad Street station and the mile-long stretch of elevated tracks behind it that had been known as "the Chinese Wall." At the same luncheon when the railroad announced its decision, Bacon presented what he called "a challenging proposal" for development of the entire area. "If you wait until someone else does a plan, you're licked," says Bacon. "We always have a proposal ready." The plan, worked out with a young architect named Vincent Kling, called for a sunken garden concourse three blocks long, lined with shops, bridged by the cross streets and straddled by three 20-story office buildings.
In those less planning-conscious days, this scheme seemed like something out of Jules Verne -- after all, the railroad owned the land, which was already zoned for profitable high-rise office buildings. But prestigious Robert W.
Dowling of New York, successful developer of Pittsburgh's Gateway Center and Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, came to the rescue. Called in by the railroad as a consultant, he approved the superblock with underground connections to the rail transit outlets -- the Pennsylvania suburban station and a stop on the Market Street subway -- and added the idea of a bus terminal at the west end of Penn Center to anchor it.
Respect for Dowling's business acumen carried the day. But Dowling felt the office buildings would have to cover 45% of the ground space to produce enough rent to make them pay, instead of the 30% envisioned by the Bacon-Kling plan. The extra 15% would not permit the office buildings to be oriented on a north-south axis across the sunken esplanade, and the concourse would have to be covered. "We were very crushed by this," says Bacon, "but instead of sulking, we tried to figure out how much we could salvage." In the end, he managed to get a series of holes punched through to the underground. A skating rink fills one of them; a pleasant garden facing a subterranean restaurant occupies an other. The city is now filling a third with a landscaped garden next to the Penn Center subway station. Subway passengers will step out into a garden as their entrance into the central city.
The Idea. Penn Center was not everything Bacon had wanted it to be.
But it was a great beginning, a source of what he calls -- capitalizing the words as he says them -- the Power of an Idea.
A valid planning idea, he feels, has a life of its own. His hero is Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), who was inspired to erect an obelisk before three of Rome's churches of obligation for pilgrims and to connect them with roads. These obelisks established axes and "thrusts of space" that hundreds of years after Sixtus' death were still shaping the ideas and actions of Rome's architects and builders. Bernini constructed his marvelous colonnade around the one that Sixtus had planted outside St. Peter's.
Axis for the Old. Old Philadelphian Bacon starts with a vision and a memory. His memory is of William Penn's "greene countrie towne." It was laid out on a grid at the narrowest point between Philadelphia's two rivers (see map) and anchored by an axial crossing of the two central arteries, Market and Broad streets, where City Hall now stands. In each of the resultant quadrants Penn placed a park. Latter-day developers enhanced this basic plan with the dynamic diagonal Benjamin Franklin Parkway, leading from City Hall to the 4,076-acre Fairmount Park.
Bacon's vision cherishes the old and adapts it to the new. He particularly likes the baroque City Hall as the pivot of the city. His planned vistas swing from it; his planned parks set it off. He gazes with delight, bouncing up on his toes with excitement, as he looks through a two-story-high window in Kling's new Municipal Services Building at City Hall and the complementary facade of the Masonic Temple.
His new plan keeps Penn's axis and provides new anchors. One anchor is the three Pei towers on Society Hill, which he thinks of as an equivalent of Pope Sixtus' obelisks. Another, still unbuilt, will be the Port Tower at the Bel aware River. The tower will command the eye of any traveler down Market Street, and also provide the focus for a redevelopment area, which Bacon hopes will restore the waterfront to Philadelphians as a place to saunter, sun themselves, or just watch the bustle of a busy harbor.
Back to Feet. The inner city, he is convinced, as are most planners, must be restored to the pedestrian, and there are plans for parking garages at the center's edge. Unlike some city theorists, Bacon does not try to talk the automobile out of existence. "The automobile must be treated as an honored guest," says Bacon. But he does feel that the entrance to the city must be attractive, and the vistas must be visually exciting, designed to lead the visitor into the heart of the city. He cites the expansion of the spirit that any walker experiences in Venice, emerging from the crowded alleyways into the huge open space of St. Mark's Square. It is these shared experiences, says Bacon, that give citizens a sense of belonging to and concern for their city. And without them, the city withers.
To bring Philadelphians back from suburban shopping centers to the big stores and little shops in the center of town, Bacon is promoting a $200 million plan for a gigantic terminal east of City Hall on Market Street, which will unite the city's two suburban railroads in a single terminal, and also achieve one of the basic goals of city planning--the separation of wheeled traffic from pedestrian. Bacon's plan also includes widening the sidewalks of Chestnut Street, the city's other main shopping thoroughfare, and making a traffic-free mall of it, with little electric trolleys to carry shoppers.
Renewers of the city want not only to bring people back from the suburbs to shop, but back to town to live. Philadelphia is now devoting 50% of its renewal outlay to residential work not involving major demolition, and some of Bacon's most interesting labor on this level is to be found in Society Hill--so-called after the Free Society of Traders, which originally bought 20,000 acres there from William Penn, rather than the Social Register. Society Hill is studded with 18th century houses and historic landmarks, and Bacon opened up vistas around them by chopping out factories and dingy warehouses, threading greenery through them and building new houses in harmony with the 18th century beauties.
Philadelphia's $593,000 yearly budget for its planning commission provides Bacon with a $20,000 salary and a staff of 65, including 14 architects, seven engineers, three economists, three experts in social science or government, a landscape architect and a mathematics expert. Appropriately enough, Bacon lives in a four-story brick row house in midtown, a 15-minute walk from his office. His outside activities are not exactly wide-ranging. During winter term he conducts an evening course (Historic Examples of Civic Design) at the University of Pennsylvania.
Several nights a week he talks to local gatherings.
As a result-of Bacon's highly articulate proselytizing, Philadelphia's urban renewers can count on a wide variety of voluntary civic groups to pitch in on specific aspects of the multifarious job. Says Banker Gustave Amsterdam, chairman of the Redevelopment Authority: "It's fashionable in Philadelphia to be interested in the city. I'm only one of dozens of men getting a great exposure to city problems. It's a delight to see them inspire one another." On the Table. Across the U.S., planners are carving up other U.S. cities, with varying degrees of success but invariably accompanied by cries of civic outrage (the cheers may come later). "After all, you are operating on a live patient," says one planner. "And the longer you keep him on the operating table, the worse it is for him."
In Boston the patient almost died on the table. In 1960, when newly elected Mayor John F. Collins called Edward J. Logue to be the head of Boston's redevelopment, the city was clearly in a bad way. Its symptoms included: 1) a central business district tottering toward skid row, where 14,000 jobs and $78 million of taxable assessment had evaporated in a decade; 2) a moribund waterfront; and 3) two fumbling attempts at renewal by Collins' predecessor that had turned out to be unmitigated disasters.
One disaster was the bulldozing of a 38-block, 41-acre low-rent neighborhood to put up a tasteless cluster of high-rent apartment houses. The other was the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway built by the state. This concrete homage to the automobile effectively screened the city from its historic waterfront, as though the sight of running water were something obscene.
Logue, who began life as a lawyer, made his mark in urban renewal by running New Haven's topnotch, $200 million program for Mayor Richard Lee. He is an expert at using the ins and outs of the Federal Housing Act to finance a big program with a little cash. The public cost of the projects he now has in the works will come to about $180 million, of which the Federal Government will put up about $120 million and the state of Massachusetts about $30 million. Boston's share is the other $30 million, and the city is getting a considerable run for its money. Items: > A multimillion-dollar Government Center to replace the flophouses, burlesque theaters, bordellos and tattoo parlors of the Scollay Square area with a complex of handsome federal, state, city and private office buildings.
> The rehabilitation of many of the century-old granite buildings on the waterfront, converting them into handsome apartments which command a superb harbor view.
Like most planners, Logue blames many of the city's woes on the automobile--aided and abetted by federal construction of highways and superhighways that encouraged people to move out of town. But he feels that automotive overcrowding at shopping centers, commuter stations and the approaches to town will bring them back to their own two feet and the city again, if the planners play their cards right.
"They'll never solve the traffic jams," opines Logue. "What we lack in open space, we will make up in convenience." Two Stories High. The third of the three top urban renewal men in the U.S. is San Francisco's pragmatic, perceptive and somewhat excitable M. Justin Herman. San Franciscans were shocked into action by the state-built Embarcadero Freeway, which they discovered was barreling along the edge of town, cutting off the view of their cherished waterfront. The resultant outcry halted the expressway (which now leads to nothing in particular), and incidentally aroused the city's leaders into more organized and enlightened planning. Herman presides over 991 acres of new projects that total $655 million in private investment, $81,720,400 in federal grants, $79,996,000 in noncash grants-in-aid and tax credits from the city.
Herman's most sweeping project is the "Western Addition" just west of the downtown business district, where a Negro slum, eleven by four blocks, is being leveled and replaced by apartment houses, office buildings, a hospital, a medical building, garages, a Japanese Cultural and Trade Center and a Roman Catholic cathedral, and a 299-unit, successfully integrated cooperative. But more conspicuous is the Golden Gateway project at the foot of Telegraph Hill. On the site of the fragrant old Central Market, which was moved, like Philadelphia's, to more efficient, truck-oriented quarters far from the center of town, three high-rise apartment houses have gone up with a cluster of little blue-roofed town houses in between. Both the houses and the apartment buildings rise from a platform two stories high; the covered area underneath will be used for parking, and will also serve as a pedestrian galleria of shops. San Francisco also has its own conservation program for neighborhoods of old houses that are going downhill, though not yet seriously substandard. In the first of these, the Pacific Heights area, almost all of 146 blight-touched buildings are now com pletely restored.
Mid-Century Urbanity. Spending the taxpayers' money is a heady pastime, and no town is too small to hanker after a bit of sprucing up when the price is as right as the URA makes it.
Cape May City, N.J., for instance, has applied for funds to restore the old Victorian mansions that were built in the 19th century when the place was a stylish summer resort. Portsmouth, N.H., has a grant to restore the town's colonial atmosphere. But certain cities can be taken as exemplary.
sbHARTFORD has recently completed what may well be, in a relatively small compass, the most successful redevelopment of a central city area. Constitution Plaza is a complex of five office buildings and a hotel surrounding a pedestrian terrace -- an arrangement that produces a pleasantly cloistered effect.
But it almost did not come off. There was considerable opposition to reclaiming the area, which was not really substandard, though a number of flophouses there were attracting more and more derelicts. Then there was trouble raising the money to develop the land after buying and clearing it with URA assistance. At this point, the Travelers Insurance Co. stepped in to bankroll the whole $35 million needed. Its motives were solidly self-interested; Travelers' own nearby building, the tallest in town, gave the company a stake in the central city area, which had been rapidly losing business of all kinds to the suburbs.
Constitution Plaza has successfully reversed this desertion. Hartford's biggest retailer, G. Fox, added a $12 million annex to its store just across the street, and Korvette's decided to occupy a long-vacant store near by. The Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Co., which had been planning to move to the sub urb of West Hartford, changed its mind and built a graceful, green-glass ship of a building, connected to the plaza by a bridge, that is the handsomest store that had just spent a million dollars on redecoration. But Wallace's plan was voted unanimously, and even though it is still about five years from completion, its presence has brought a new atmosphere of optimism to the business community.
Baltimore has also worked a small miracle of rehabilitation in a Negro district, 32 blocks of 2,000 dilapidated houses known as Harlem Park. By cleaning out old shacks and what were once servants' quarters, the city gave each block the choice of whether it wanted to use the liberated space as a playground for children or as a postage-stamp park for adults. House owners were given expert advice and help in floating loans and making repairs and improvements. The result has been dramatic. "Harlem Park is no Georgetown," says Richard L. Steiner, director of the Baltimore Renewal and Housing Agency. "Generally speaking, these are still poor people. But there is a great change. In the past it was an area for a person to get out of, if he could afford it. Now it's a place to stay in." The Beautiful Cities. The urban renewal operation, always painful and not always a success, requires a solid consensus of civic opinion and energy. In Buffalo, for instance, a $15 million renewal program has been stalled in its tracks for a year and a half while politicians bicker over which developers should get the job. But most renewal is still slum clearance, and slum clearance has critics aplenty. The far political right naturally attacks it as a new kind of Communist takeover. The left attacks it as displacement of the poor.
"Urban renewal," the slogan goes, "is Negro removal." On the financial level, critics think the bulldozer has been overworked.
They note that Pei's towers on Society Hill are still only 21% rented. In San Francisco's Western Addition, some apartments are still tottering along, and the reason is clear enough. They are surrounded by slums, and tenants hesitate to settle in a depressed area and send their children to a school that is 95% Negro.
Last Chance. But a start has to be made somewhere--it all takes time. A new development in a slum area will only slowly inspire reconstruction of the other slums around it. And it has been 30 years or more for instance, since Philadelphia's upper-and middle-class families considered living in the center of town. Until Bacon started its renewal, there was precious little reason why they should. But Bacon and other U.S. planners are, and properly should be, thinking in terms of the long future, to make the city attractive and stimulating again--creating new neighborhoods, bringing old ones back to life, seeding the streets with sudden green, opening up unexpected views, and giving men room to work and stroll and play and talk. To rediscover, in short, the pleasures of urbanity.
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