The West Village: Let There Be Blight
Zoll, Stephen
The Housing and Redevelopment Board has replaced Robert Moses's Slum Clearance Committee, and a new order has been proclaimed for the on-going work of tucking in New York's residential shirt...
...Orders were served on a surprised Mayor, on the City Planning Commission on the Housing and Redevelopment Board, on the Board of Estimate and the Corporation Counsel...
...It is clear that this puppet group was being used by the city in an effort to achieve the semblance of community support...
...Sailors by night, post office workers and callers by day, truckers by day and night, industrial white collar workers from nine to five, residents leaving just before nine and returning just after five, shoppers at all times of the day and evening, all make this area a highly trafficked and heavily patrolled beat...
...What these realtors are apparently incapable of seeing is that when they kill a city's diversity, they kill the city...
...The Saturday following the postponement large numbers of West Village residents turned out for a hastily announced meeting...
...WHAT IS CLEAR in all of this is that the city has changed neither its objectives nor its tactics...
...The largest is a processor of non-ferrous metals...
...If the city is as natural a state to civilized man as a game preserve to lions and gnus, it makes little sense to appoint a biggame hunter as head keeper...
...ing calendar numbers were called above an angry furor...
...And that tenants, price-tagged and segregated, are then made subject to a conformity of living space that is reinforced by the disengagement of the project from the fabric of the city...
...A high-rise project, clutching a grassy plot to its center, resembles nothing so much as a wagon train turned in a circle to fend off the Indians...
...Later, as the city grew north, it became a bar for the predominantly Irish immigrant population...
...The city replied that they had not been proceeding under that law at all but under the older 72-k, which provided for the complete demolition of an area and which, in comprehensibly, required no public hearing...
...Briefly, the procedure by which eligibility for federally assisted renewal is established involves first the City's Master Plan and Map...
...There are enough sailors to be secure in their own company and not cause trouble in anyone else's...
...But the process of spontaneous regeneration proves that there was enough interest and liveliness in the area to retain a stable concentration of residents who might have left, but preferred to stay...
...When federal moneys are used for Title I, one very large stipulation is made: construction may not cover more than about 20% of the cleared land...
...Moses was able to condense nearly all these operations into one session, and make the map change retroactive...
...For the West Village it was proposed that six of the fourteen blocks be given over to industrial revelopment, and that all residential uses be confined to the remaining eight blocks...
...Mayor Wagner, dragged in as the chief responsible figure, announced that he was sorry the thousand-odd residents had been inconvenienced by coming to the meeting, but the matter of the Urban Renewal proposal was being turned back to the City Planning Commission...
...There are quick-lunch counters, two truckers' hotels, garages, a sailor's slop chest store, warehouses and a post office in an imposing federal building...
...With such people the West Villagers sought an alliance...
...Chief victims were the Puerto Ricans, least able to defend themselves...
...This puppet group, ostensibly a middle-income, co-operative, limited stock company, who, if selected as sponsor of any part of the redevelopment, would have had as much right to the enormous participation in sponsor, builder and management profits as any developer of the order of Tishman or Uris...
...The damage had been done: banks had blacklisted the area and would not allow further mortgage money to be invested there...
...There are some superficial resemblances to surburbia: of a Saturday morning, residents, who until their designation didn't know each other as well as they do now, nevertheless felt the security of familiarity enough to nod to each other or even stop to talk while doing the week-end chores...
...The chief obstacles were the people and their laws...
...Also during this time legal aid arrived...
...Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, $5.95...
...In the best sense, one can say that this is urban renewal...
...The residents remain guilty till they may prove their innocence...
...Title I sponsors held the land to which they had title and milked the rents from the gift real estate on it for as long as they could get away with it...
...but in a curious way the opaque waters of the law offered Moses protection: no one, apparently, underderstood the law as well as he did...
...The ships support a number of marine maintenance machine shops...
...Title I has meant wholesale demolition of desirable property, the massive dislocation of tenants, the complete destruction of neighborhoods and the overcrowding of those adjacent...
...The average monthly rent is $65.30—which is quite low for the city—and the average apartment has 3.2 rooms...
...Lindenbaum has processed eviction notices through the State Rent Commission for a client of notorious reputation as a real estate speculator...
...Because the price of real estate has been low, the area has accommodated both people of means who wanted to remodel and tenants content with space in which they were not overcrowded...
...What finally will convince city officials of their error is not at all clear...
...unanimous opposition...
...Residents whose boiling point had been reached too many times were weary with yet another outrage...
...This position was sustained by the eleventh-hour arrival of papers still wet with the signatures of a Justice of the Supreme Court of New York...
...This isn't what the machinery produces...
...in 1949 the designation was contested and finally removed in 1954...
...There is an area west of Greenwich Village, some 14 small blocks which border the Hudson River, whose residents learned in the New York Times of February 21, 1961, that their homes had been declared blighted, which is to say substandard and insanitary, and that two days later, on on the 23rd, the Board of Estimate would be petitioned to allow a request for $350,000 of federal planning funds...
...A staff of three lawyers was recruited, one a resident, one on loan from one of the Greenwich Village organizations opposed to the proposal, and the third donated by the State Assemblyman from the district...
...The population before the Depression was three times what it is now, overcrowded into about the same number of housing units...
...Governor Rockefeller a week later requested funds tomake an over-all survey of the entire cityof Albany, and thought $150,000 sufficient...
...The second trip to the Chamber of the Board of Estimate at City Hall saw the faithful turn out 700 strong on a sleety day...
...Hudson Street's traffic flows north, one way, rapidly, over a rough cobblestone surface, and its broad sidewalks support an amazing variety of pedestrians...
...There is no other explanation to the planning dictum that mixed uses, residential and industrial, are evil...
...The Urban Renewal laws were gone over with enormous care and vigilance, and the Committee was prepared for the third vote at City Hall...
...Assessed values have risen steadily and real values have increased by millions of dollars...
...But a prophet is a prophet, and he knows what is best even if he has to resort to force to provide it...
...To do this, however, all remaining eight blocks will have to be consolidated into one plot to provide a base sufficiently broad from which may rise the requisite number of floors...
...The streets here are dotted with an amazing display of urban diversity and lively activities...
...Nor did Moses's crimes begin and end with bulldozing...
...One of the first evidences of bad faith was the City Planning Commission's false use of the old map (1949) in making their proposal...
...James A. Felt, Chairman of the City Planning Commission, is the chief officer of Jas...
...But diversity is clutter and no two ways about it...
...The Mayor's plea to disperse met cries of outrage, but the administrative mill ground on, and succeed...
...and Mr...
...Uptown, the very latest look in Urban Renewal, the West Side Urban Renewal Project, in a section where the blocks were large to begin with, and demolition could be kept to a minimum, was running into some very vicious weather...
...It was this law that the plaintiffs cited...
...But the more citizens object, the more justified the City Planning Commission feels in masking its intentions and subverting the law in the name of progress...
...Having started with a coherent, integrated neighborhood of great diversity with small blocks and maximum variety in residents, houses and apartments, Urban Renewal will substitute a high-rise project of a scale totally out of keeping with the surrounding area, whose streets, that once knit the nieghborhood into the rest of the city, will be removed, and whose apartments, stacked one above another in perfect duplication, will be about as distinguishable as the salt pretzels hawked from a tall wooden dowel...
...Suddenly, an extremely complicated business became a matter of communal knowledge...
...The residents of the last ten years in the West Village are for the most part professionals: lawyers, artists, editors, people with definite ideas on how they want to live, and bent on achieving a personal expression in the design of their homes...
...One senses that these residents have been able to express choice, that these homes weren't merely provided but were made by their occupants...
...Even the Board of Estimate found this hard to take and postponed the vote until the next month...
...Developers, after having held the Title for a profitable length of time, defaulted and sold out, only to turn up as sponsors on another project...
...The order answerable in court the following Monday, enjoined the defendants to show just cause why they should not be restrained from the pursuit of their proposal...
...Those who have moved in more recently were obviously attracted by this liveliness and added to it...
...There is only one answer: straight up...
...Lincoln Square, the Coliseum, Washington Square Village, Bellevue, Cadman Plaza were first the names of projects and later cries of anguish...
...Robert Moses, who now deals only with sovereign nations, has been declared the villain of Title I, and his successors, previously his assistants, have announced themselves the heroes of Urban Renewal...
...Under Mr...
...A number of industries bring nonresidents to the area...
...while wearing another hat, this same Mr...
...The month between votes was filled wtih clouds of war and much letterwriting...
...Section 72-m of the Municipal Code described above requires a public hear ing before any area can be designated as blighted...
...The bestcomparison I can make in describing thevolume is to say that it resembles an extremely lively study of geology: we seethis outcrop and, over there, rock similarto it...
...if in fact the area hadn't been a slum when so designated, it rapidly became so...
...I should note that there is in the history of West Village evidence enough that the area was once a slum...
...And the other pressure is exerted by local real estate developers, the new millionaires, who want a booty to exist so they might cut in for a sizable chunk of it...
...Now it is up to the Committee to answer the accusation that the West Village is "blighted, substandard and insanitary...
...The amount of privately financed rehabilitation of century-old and rundown buildings in the area is prodigious...
...Therefore the project is good, and its opposite, by simple logic, bad...
...Jacobs has deduced connective strata that relate the interdependence of urban formations...
...Deals had fallen through...
...The actual plans for renewal are subject to further public hearings...
...Abraham Lindenbaum of the Brooklyn law firm of Young and Lindenbaum serves as a member of the City Planning Commission...
...Albert M. Cole, predecessor of Robert Weaver as Administrator of the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, now holds an executive position with Reynolds Aluminum Company in charge of that firm's sponsorship of Urban Renewal Projects...
...Only it doesn't work that way...
...That this profit was to be made at the expense of residents, rankled the most placid onsite breast...
...Judge Henry Clay Greenberg heard the case...
...The tavern was originally a coach stop...
...This makes sense only if strangers from the city-at-large are regarded as Indians, a useless concept...
...The Norwegian-American Lines shares its docks at the foot of Christopher Street with two passenger vessels of Italian registry, and the sound of rollicking Scandinavian and Latin sailors is popular up and down Christopher Street...
...It became clear that this favored group of citizens were merely a tool of the City Planning Commission, and were themselves undecided whether their best policy was to insinuate or overwhelm—citizen pitted against citizen was a grim, bitter battle...
...There is a fair density of bars, workmen's by day and social by night, a beautiful Flemish brick three-story home which was once a farmstead when this land was open country, a cabinetmaker's shop whose proprietor also reproduces Renaissance musical instruments, and a manufacturer of Chinese fortune cookies...
...This may seem like a cumbersome pros cedure...
...In 1940, West Greenwich Village was put on the City Master Map as a blighted area...
...Obviously, what gets developed is the land, not the communities that live on it and make use of it...
...ing an organ chord two Es an octave apart and the A in between...
...With slogans that everyone can understand, James A. Felt, the City Planning Commissioner, promises an end to bulldozing first and questions later...
...she hasmade clear the organization of seemingly unorganized urban clutter...
...Hudson Street, actually the lower end of Eighth Avenue, is, for the four blocks that constitute the eastern boundary of this special area, a marvelously diverse artery...
...However, in his decision, although he found "great merit in the plaintiff's case . . . fortunately for all parties concerned the point was academic as a public hearing is to be held...
...Two more pressures are exerted to make such a project design inadvertable...
...Suburbs do not tolerate strangers—a city is made up of them...
...his objective was arrogantly monumental architecture, and his method was expressed in contempt for obstacles—he had help...
...While he makes a sponsor's and realtor's profit using long-term Federal mortgage funds, he is promoting the use of aluminum in construction— surely a curious and special use of such funds...
...But the lifetime of residential construction is long, the space it occupies valuable, and its effect within the fabric of the city profound...
...Judge Greenberg sternly lec tured the Counsel representing the city...
...in some instances this meant that tenants paid full rent for three years or longer on property that, since it was soon to come down, needn't be kept up—no heat, no hot water, bad garbage disposal, infestation...
...The Committee to Save the West Village was formed, with a particularly skillful and energetic woman as its chairman...
...1.3 rooms per person, and $20.37 rental per room per month...
...ventilation between buildings will magically keep the area as sweet as a lamb's bleat, and children, led by the prophet Moses, will be reintroduced to their rightful heritage of nature, sun and freedom...
...It was thought that some 35 million dollars would be required for the project...
...In the West Village, rich and poor live close together in houses built mostly in the 19th century: tenements that are quite solid and have apartments with large rooms, and many privately remodeled three- and four-floor brick attached houses with gardens behind...
...Buildings must be surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of sacred grass...
...The more they hide, the more is hidden from them, and the more likely that the machinery, uninstructed, will spit out another high-rise monstrosity precisely where its dead presence is most cataclysmic —obliterating lively urban clutter...
...Increasingly the roles of real estate speculator and city planner are becoming interchangeable...
...There are about a hundred Puerto Rican families in the area, and their integration is, though not complete, very successful...
...Sleep had been lost, feelings hurt, property libeled...
...11 The city has made the mistake of con fusing low-rent areas with slums, a mistake only possible because the planners have so tenacious a grip on the idea of what a city should look 29I like...
...These separate features, the bad and the worst, the good and the surprising, are mingled inextricably in a community, that is a rare and valuable part of a city...
...A public hearing and Board of Estimate approval must precede any map change whereby an area is officially listed as blighted...
...Again the proposal was postponed, but this time the impression was strong that the city officials, alarmed at the vehemence of the opposition, wanted time to regroup their forces...
...But the figure is nearly ideal according to current planning elsewhere in the city...
...Neighborhoods disappeared not so much by bulldozer as by fiat...
...Felt & Co., Inc., Real Estate...
...They would schedule a public hearing, he said, and discharge their legal duty...
...The Housing and Redevelopment Board has replaced Robert Moses's Slum Clearance Committee, and a new order has been proclaimed for the on-going work of tucking in New York's residential shirt tails...
...The inventory of housing units was to be doubled on a little more than half the land, providing a net gain of only about 350 apartments...
...Let me characterize the neighborhood...
...So the days of Moses are past...
...A solution to the housing emergency in New York has two complicated parts that must first be separated in order to describe the problem itself: first, how to go about it, and second, what to end up with...
...The degree of sophistication necessary to allow sharing their part of the city with strangers, also recognizes in the act of sharing that it is with the resident themselves that true ownership resides...
...Now, the planners have a very difficult problem—how to put twice the number of people on half the land, while leaving eighty per cent of the site given over to sylviculture...
...These are canny people...
...By truly urban, I mean that this is not a small town isolated within the ocean of the city...
...There is a glimpse of the open river that is the only one to be had between the solid pier fronts from 14th Street a mile north to Battery Park two miles south...
...Or—on a hot summer night, with strollers from Greenwich Village come to catch a cool river breeze at the crumbling dock once used by the Hoboken Ferry and not yet converted to some sanitized purpose, with tenement dwellers on their balconies, with idlers from the Three Penny Opera a block east taking a fast look at the river before retreating to the dense interior of Manhattan, with music coming from windows—a hot summer night is constant and lively commotion...
...Iii The residents of the West Village had two days, one a holiday, George Washington's Birthday, to stop the city's request for permission to seek $350,000 in planning funds.* Walter S. Fried, former Regional Federal Housing Administrator and approver of Robert Moses's Title I projects, now Vice-Chairman of the Housing and Redevelopment Board pushed the request for funds before the Board of Estimate: "It is only money for a study," he assured the small knot of very angry citizens who showed up in opposition, "there isn't any plan...
...Nor are the new projects designed for the old residents...
...And from the number of times it hasn't worked, the citizens of New York have a right to expect that their prophets might have learned a lesson...
...Jane Jacobs points out that if the city planners were really serious about raising the tax base, a far simpler way of doing it would be to help the lower-income class rise unobstructed to their destined middle-class status, rather than pulling the land out from under them...
...they ignore the vehicular traffic...
...Only then may the City Planning Commission direct the Housing and Redevelopment Board to request permission of the Board of Estimate to ask for federal study funds with which to decide how to renew...
...During this month, the Committee to Save the West Village made contacts with other beleaguered civic groups...
...More recently, it was given some sort of fame as a favorite hang• out of Dylan Thomas, and now workers and intellectuals imbibe peacefully together...
...Opposition never had a chance...
...In the West Village, 350 apartments for 35 million dollars sounds very much like a 100 grand a pad, and the likelihood of any of the present site tenants affording to return to the location is remote...
...It was clear where the Judge's sentiments lay, but he was not about to give away what would have amounted to a very lucrative damage suit against the city...
...Favored speculators had been appointed as sponsors of redevelopment projects even though some of them had not the first piece of equipment with which to do the redeveloping...
...The crime rate, a useful index of squalor, is one of the lowest in New York...
...Planners have done much to unbuild New York by working backwards from their procedural attack: that is, in order to get any major construction underway, they seem to have concentrated their attention on the difficulty of getting the cumbersome machinery cranked up and operating of its own inertia before they had a chance to think either of what they might build or of the appropriateness of the area in which they might build it...
...On a foggy night, the familiar sound of the Governor's Island fog horn is close and mournful, sound...
...High-rise apartments are the only possible solution...
...Felt, a Mr...
...This article is meant to describe how neither part has been fundamentally changed from the original destructive program, whatever the good intentions that have been declared...
...He was dumbfounded at the city's defense, or pretended to be...
...Without an environment that offers liveliness and urban possibility, the city dweller's spirit is cut off from the deepest springs of communal satisfaction and personal creativity...
...One is from Washington, from where, in effect, a hog call sounds forth: "Come and get it, if you don't some other city will...
...The residents possess a pride of place as great as can be seen in any truly urban neighborhood...
...The air in the Chamber was charged with rebellion...
...Residents were suddenly able to quote long lists of figures and cite past outrages of Title I. They knew that enormous sums of money in Title I had been wasted by arrogance, stupidity and venality...
...Jane Jacobs, resident in the area, seasoned veteran of clashes with city officials over a number of events vital to Greenwich Village, is proof again of the availability of specialists in urban communities...
...A quick run-down of figures shows that there are 710 units with 1,765 people living in them, 399 of whom are children...
...Dramatically, the tables were turned...
...it is a shopping center that sells nearly everything but garden tools—and here the similarity with suburbia ends...
...It is a process that took a great deal of time and has achieved a solid stability...
...It is these sounds that make the area alive...
...What the prophets have learned is that people object to having their homes demolished...
...The population density is 104 people on an acre, perhaps a little low, and accounted for by the amount of land given over to industrial use...
...Low rent equals slum particularly when a second equation makes urban clutter synonymous with blight...
...Once on the map, an area may be designated for renewal only after a second hearing, required by state law...
...Yet the waters which he parted to lead his children out of bondage remain con gealed from the very force of his passage, and the willing riff-raff of smaller prophets skip along dry-shod in his wake...
...The kind of thinking that produces the blight of conformity and deadness is in evidence even to the highest levels of the Federal government: Urban Renewal is good business, therefore it is good housing and sound city management...
...In the name of "decency and common morality" taxpayers should be heard on any subject that affected them so profoundly...
...Here, out of 16,000 families, 10,000 were to be relocated, somehow, and of these, 8,000 were low income...
...The precise moment that residents were most alarmed and angry at the thought of being planned for, the City cho3e to encourage a prospective sponsor...
...Jacobs is an editor of Architectural Forum, and the author of a book about the mistakes of city planning.** The bad faith of the city officials served to unite the neighborhood in * No one has made a serious effort to explain why quite so much money, $25,000 a block, is necessary...
...The machinery must be gotten into operation despite opposi tion, and this means again commitment to an inexorable plan before a study can be made of the area on which it will be imposed...
...J. Clarence Davies, Jr., Chairman of the Housing and Redevelopment Board is also President of the J. Clarence Davies, Inc., Realtors...
...certainly it did to Moses...
...In other words, to protect the investment new housing must not repeat the faults of the overcrowded slum it is replacing...
...Judge Greenberg gave as an example of the backwardness of the city's procedure, a theoretical case in which a building was constructed, and then all parties concerned could argue whether or not it was the proper kind of structure...
...Brooklyn had been ambushed, and Cooper Square...
...The Committee to Save the West Village took the position that since the proposal was "illegally and improperly" before the Board of Estimate, those august gentlemen were in danger of compounding a capricious and arbitrary act whose consequences could lead to damage suits against the city...
...But bulldozing is not a method, it is an inevitable result of bad planning...
...His way of getting things done involved manipulations of the City Charter, the Municipal Code, and federal and state regulations...
...The history of the White Horse Tavern can typify in miniature this congregation of strangers...
...It was a very early phase of the battle...
...Over and over again, they have substiuted monumental projects for the older urban clutter—a process which the law encourages and virtually requires...
...Whoever it is that operates all those cars and trucks, they are strangers just passing through...
...A book store flourishes mysteriously beside a worn-out parish cathedral...
...One resident remarked, "Now the virgin is raped, they are setting up a romance schedule for her...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
