The Case Against Citicide

...In June 1961 the Mayor of New York moved cautiously to arrest the city's self-destruction by appointing a powerless Committee for the Preservation of Historic and Esthetic Structures...

...There is money, and hence political power, in slum housing...

...Even more vitally New York needs a master plan that addresses itself to the interdependent problems of growth and conservation, of slums and mansions, parks and parking...

...No worthier tercentenary could have produced a feebler commemoration...

...The Parisians share this sense of continuity, for they celebrated their 2,000th anniversary as an event of world importance, marking those years which human beings redeemed from transience and consecrated to the growth and splendor of culture within the city gates...

...In the brief interval between the two events, a real estate syndicate announced plans for razing the Savoy Plaza Hotel to make room for commercial offices, thereby irreparably defacing New York's most elegant square...

...Paris, one feels, will continue to shelter the Virgin in Notre Dame and the lovers in her parks as long as Europe remains habitable...

...In addition, the city should attract more Lever and Seagram buildings, and fewer of their over-stuffed, bastardized imitations by favoring a civically responsible use of site, such as the provision of landscaped plazas or arcades...

...If the Council irons all this out, you won't recognize the bill...

...John D. Rosenberg, Assistant Professor of English at Columbia University, is author of The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius, and editor of the critical anthology The Genius of John Ruskin (Braziller...

...No master plan guides the city's growth, for there is no awareness of a common good...

...Perhaps there was a kind of unintended honesty in this official neglect of ceremony...

...The public is going to be heard fiom," he warns, as if a bill to save the city posed some grave civic threat...

...At least it seems appropriate to a city which randomly destroys its historic buildings and loveliest squares, and which now proposes to house garbage trucks in its "underutilized" parks...

...Instead, New York and the nation go on wrecking and building as if we were caged and blind...

...Finally, if itsvmembers acted in concert, the American Institute of Architects could pressure the city into higher professional standards by no longer tolerating the hackneyed and the corrupt in dealing with the Department of Buildings...

...In this cripplingly belated effort, New York hobbles behind Philadelphia (the nation's model city in point of preservation laws), Boston...

...As a footnote to the ceremonial farce, the city proclaimed its support of historic monuments in the brand-new New York University Loeb Student Center...

...New York's suicide through strangulation and self-dismembcrment advances unnoticed, like the city's own stony disregard for the pedestrian felled in the streets...

...What all future New Yorkers must see in place of the present perfect corner now rests with one Anthony Campagna and his son John: a civic trust absurd to leave in their hands...

...Politics and real estate being as neighborly as they are in New York City, no one can assume that the Commission will be legally empowered to save a doomed building from the hands of the "developers...

...New York is indifferent to its present and actively hostile to its past, which it destroys with an eager energy that most civilized communities give to preservation...

...The official is himself in the Real Estate Department—a naive man, to be sure, not a wicked one...

...much more money is to be made, indirectly, by exploiting the conditions that slums breed...

...The high-rise apartment rather than the private home, the open shopping mall unfouled by automobile traffic, modern public transit designed for human beings and not animated freight—these are the inevitable forms in which urban solutions must come, if they can come at all...

...Thus he denies cognizance of what he does not own, rather than create with his ample resources a public environment that is, in the root sense, civilized...

...It contains land too "valuable" to use for public purposes, and it tears down magnificent buildings for the increased tax revenue that inferior structures yield...

...it is a temporal eunuch living rootlessly in the dimensionless point of the present, unnourished by the past, unseeded for the future...

...In May of this year the Commission placed its proposals for enabling legislation on the Mayor's desk, where they languished until October, when they were forwarded for debate to the City Council and the Board of Estimate...

...The Council starts hearings on the Bill this week, but prospects for uncmasculated approval are poor indeed, to judge from the words of Council majority leader David Ross: The bill "will require a multitude of changes...

...The present tax schedules characteristically favor a structure—the Pan Am building heaves into mind—that overcrowds its site...

...For our monuments will continue to vanish until the Preservation Commission has the authority to enforce preservation, not merely to advise it, as it has already done, unavailingly, with the Brokaw Mansion...

...Yet one is still dazzled by the virtuosities of hypocrisy which led the Mayor and legislators to ignore the city's tercentenary on September 8 and to proclaim September 28-October 4 as "Landmarks Preservation Week...

...The historic buildings constituted for every New Yorker real if incalculable wealth in the form of civic grandeur and human delight...

...The New Yorker's experience of "belonging" consists largely of jostling his neighbor in the barbaric squalor of the subway...

...A city official close to the Council adds that "this will create an uproar...

...His defining folly is his failure to perceive the bond between the city's good and'his good, the public loss and his loss...

...The press and the City Council appear more distressed by alleged conspiratorial plots among the reformers than by real rats that bite real children...

...Even the blindly self-regarding must perceive the increased anxiety and effort required merely in going about one's business: the unending pavement with no adequate public place of rest, no interval of green or of ornament to relieve the eye, only the tangle of cars below and the canyons of steel and glass above, each reflecting the other and pressing to enclose the last square inch of unsold space...

...Two generations ago, random grabbing and thrusting produced, by some miracle, the surging grace of New York's skyline...

...How account for a city that tears down what it should treasure but perpetuates its shame...

...GREED THE New Yorker shares with his neighbor at large, the human race...

...But now the frontier upward, like the frontier Westward, has reached its practical limit...

...Yet a city which despises its past can have no future...

...The retreat into privacy, with its parallel attrition of public facilities, must fail of its goal, for where land is so limited and costly, and people so many, they must pile up rather than spread apart...

...a few of them may still be seen, overtowered and crushed by the latest cliché in luxury living...

...Eight months ago 38 New Yorkers ignored the cries of their neighbor Catherine Genovese as she was stabbed to death—mora...

...The following April the Committee was superseded by the still powerless Landmarks Preservation Commission...

...even the official delegated to preside over the pitifully shabby birthday party was unavoidably absent...

...Part of the answer is simple: greed...

...the shining building faces north on Washington Square, where, appropriately, both city and university let the speculators destroy one of the half dozen finest rows of Greek Revival houses in America...

...Bell Telephone's new windowless building portends the architectural braille of the future...

...It guts, wrecks, and mangles under the fool's misnomer of "progress...

...This apathy is the final enemy of the city, an apathy that is akin to brutality...

...Architecture has never been required to play a more significant role in accommodating men to a new environment, in making the patterns of urban life, if not liberating, at least not compulsively monotonous and enslaving...

...In short, he has no sense of community...

...mutes, like the eight million more who dumbly witness the dismemberment of their city...

...When, just a few weeks ago, New York City celebrated its 300th anniversary, the Mayor was regretfully out of town...

...The Mayor's proclamation pledges New York's "support to worldwide programs calling for the preservation of landmarks...

...In the present saturated city, wanton destruction and shabby construction become more and more esthetically irreversible and socially damaging...

...The city is in a vicious cycle whereby the surrounding ugliness produces a defensive blindness, and blindness further feeds the tolerance for ugliness...

...Recent programs aimed at the root of the problem—haryol'-act and the Community Council on Housing, for example—have met intense opposition and aroused intenser fears...

...New York does not evolve organically but lurches erratically, like some spastic giant too torpid to anticipate its wants or gratify its true needs...

...These ironies fade before the larger tragedy of misdirected human energy, of alienation from all sense of the public good, that leads New York to preserve Harlem for posterity while wantonly wrecking Fifth Avenue...

...In the absence of such a plan, only organized and fierce public pressure can force the Mayor, the City Council, and the Board of Estimate to realize that, if they subvert the current preservation proposals, they are playing venal politics with the life of the city they presume to serve...

...No social organism of comparable size and complexity (only six states in the Union have larger populations) combines so much trained intelligence and private wealth with so much willed chaos and communal discomfort...

...He naturally retreats into privacy because his public encounters—on dirty streets, in mean civic buildings, in truncated railroad terminals, on overcrowded buses, in underpoliced parks—arc so deliberately shabby...

...The issue is not one of sentiment but of survival...

...and speculative apartment-house builders got hold of the Brokaw Mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Ninth Street, a building especially singled out by the Preservation Commission as worthy of being saved, and described by the Times, in a rare obituary to a house, as "among the finest examples of the baronial homes of New York's kingly merchants...

...His withdrawal is so total that he can tolerate the smell of urine in the subway corridors and ignore the obscenities scrawled in his apartment house lobby...

...Narrowing the sidewalks, widening the roads, turning Fifth Avenue into a one-way expressway—such temporizing merely displaces the pedestrian, for whom the Avenue exists, in order to serve the machine, which is intended to serve him, not crowd him off one of the few promenades in New York that retain the power to delight...

...Yet the richest of cities pleads that it is too poor to afford its past...

...To compensate owners of historic structures that are insufficiently rent-producing, the city must grant tax remissions or purchase the property outright...

...New York has become the irrational victim of its own affluence...

...Purchases could be financed by a fund drawn from the real estate tax, a logical source since the presence of historic and esthetic landmarks raises the value of the adjacent, commercially exploited structures...

...New York is ceasing to be a viable organism at the very time when, with the leveling of the countryside and the growth of the megalopolis, an expanding population is crowded within the walls of a supercity that reaches 400 miles from Washington to Boston...

...The object of a city, after all, is to provide an environment that enhances life, not to serve as a conduit for cars to pass through...

...Such a plea amidst such affluence is a confession of public incompetence and private indifference...

...Providence, Charleston, New Orleans, and 70 other cities that already have some legal authority to preserve their own historic monuments...

...One notes the sly stress that falls on "worldwide," as if to absolve us from preserving such resident derelicts as our own Penn Station, or the underdeveloped northern wastes of Central Park, which a city official recently proposed to appropriate for apartment houses...