Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 12

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is a masterpiece of urban criticism. In that eye-opening book, Jane Jacobs not only provided a new perspective on the recent past, but also a prescription for future urban living. From transportation policy to zoning, historic preservation to urban planning, Jane Jacobs has been invoked as a guide and an authority. Voiced or unvoiced, “What would Jane do?” is the question floating above urban policy issues great and small.

No one can doubt that the values espoused by Jacobs have largely benefited our nation’s cities. Diversity of scale; diversity of economic activity; urban density sufficient to promote a vibrant street life; small, locally owned shops; solid housing stock of generally modest scale; a city accommodating pedestrians rather than automobiles; local input on policy issues affecting neighborhoods—these are the bedrock principles of the livable city today, accepted and applied from New York to Seattle. But should all of these ideas be uncritically applied everywhere and under all circumstances? Are those families choosing to live in suburban neighborhoods, places antithetical to Jacobs’s vision, simply wrong?

Jane Jacobs famously began her iconoclastic work with a forthright declaration of war: “This book is an attack on city planning and rebuilding.” Her attack was “not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hairsplitting about fashions in design,” but rather “on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding.”¹⁷ At the time she was writing, federal urban renewal and highway construction programs had been eviscerating entire neighborhoods in cities across the United States for a generation. Her book was a reaction to the uncompromising destruction of what she saw as viable residential and commercial places to make way for multilane expressways and superblocks sprouting forbidding towers in the park.

But she went further than simply critiquing and condemning the planning practices of her time. She traced their origin to the urban thinkers of the early twentieth century who sought to reform cities. In fact, there was much to reform in their day, from overcrowding and poor sanitation to the absence of greenery and spaces for recreation. Jacobs, however, characterizes their critique as simply an anti-city, pro-suburban agenda. The targets of her criticism were the very designers and critics who provided the intellectual capital for the creation of Sunnyside Gardens. It is quite a leap to blame the planners of Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn for suburban sprawl and the monstrous postwar public housing projects, but that is what she does.

For all the history in Death and Life, it is ahistorical in that it ignores the main current of New York City’s growth and, not incidentally, the way the majority of New Yorkers lived. When Jacobs published her book in 1961, Manhattan had been losing population for half a century. From a peak of 2.3 million residents in 1910, the number had dropped to 1.7 million by 1960, and Manhattan’s population continued to fall into the 1980s.¹⁸ Looking only at Manhattan, one would have to conclude that New York was a city in decline. No city losing a quarter of its population could be called a success. And yet, this is precisely when New York became the largest and richest city in the world, the capital of the arts and the capital of capital.

As Manhattan lost residents, the outer boroughs grew at a fantastic pace. In the decade of the 1920s, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx each added more than half a million residents, a transformation that simultaneously lowered population density in Manhattan. This was the avowed goal of the planners Jane Jacobs criticizes, and as the intention was to improve the quality of life for the majority of residents who had few housing options beyond the tenement, it was undeniably a great public good. Much of the new housing beyond Manhattan was of a decidedly suburban character—detached one-family houses, low-rise two-family houses, and garden apartments. This was the antithesis of the tenement districts of the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, Yorkville, and Jacobs’s own neighborhood of Greenwich Village. Given the chance, many thousands of families willingly fled the environment Jacobs would praise so uncritically decades later.

Lewis Mumford reviewed Death and Life in the New Yorker, a piece dismissively titled “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies for Urban Cancer.” “Strangely,” he wrote, “the city that so insistently drives its population into the suburbs is the very same city that Mrs. Jacobs describes as ‘vital.’” The movement “into the vast, curdled Milky Ways of suburbia,” as he put it, was a century old process, attracting “millions of quite ordinary people who cherish such suburban desires, not a few fanatical haters of the city, sunk in bucolic dreams.”¹⁹ Having written about cities and planning and architecture for forty years, Mumford gave no ground to this interloper. Moreover, she was attacking him personally, for he was a lifelong adherent to the ideas she was condemning.

Jane Jacobs wrote in response to the urban renewal of the 1940s and 1950s that erased still vital neighborhoods. But this was also when the outer boroughs of New York City steadily grew. Queens alone added nearly half a million new residents between 1950 and 1970, even as Manhattan lost another quarter million people. And where did those new residents live? Many of them moved into one-family houses and garden apartments made possible by automobile ownership. Thousands of families moved into Stuyvesant Town, Parkchester, and other high-rise neighborhoods inspired by Le Corbusier’s vision of towers in the park, and by all accounts the new residents enjoyed living there. In sum, people were choosing to live in places Jane Jacobs did not approve of at all—places that did not resemble Hudson Street in Greenwich Village in the least. Despite the “grandiloquent title,” commented Mumford, “her great American city has as its sole background the humble life of a very special, almost unique historic quarter … a backwater whose lack of dynamism accounts for such pleasant features as it has successfully retained.”²⁰

Jacobs began Death and Life with a critique of Ebenezer Howard and his garden city ideal, asserting that he hated not only “the wrongs and mistakes of the city,” but the city itself as “an outright evil and an affront to nature.” To save the people, she wrote, Howard would “do the city in.” His garden city would be neither a dormitory suburb nor a city, but a self-sufficient town—in a word, a kind of utopia. She did not mean that as a compliment. In a remark similar to the intellectuals’ dismissal of postwar suburbia, Jacobs summarized Howard’s concept as “really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own.”²¹

Far from wanting to “do the city in,” the advocates of the Garden City idea sought to create an environment where the best attributes and advantages of urban life could flourish, in a setting offering ample open space and greenery. Furthermore, they intended their new communities to provide more healthy and humane living conditions for the working poor who had no option beyond slum housing. Their hope was that with the process of decentralization and the thinning out of urban populations, the ills of the city would be cured and a renewed sense of community would be engendered in the efficient, verdant, and self-contained garden city.²²

In Jacobs’s reading, Howard’s spirit infused the “conceptions underlying all American city planning today.” In particular, she objected to “the sorting and sifting of simple uses; the provision of wholesome housing as the central problem, to which everything else was subsidiary.” Furthermore, she rejected his defining “wholesome housing in terms only of suburban physical qualities and small-town social qualities.”²³ Howard, of course, was one of Mumford’s heroes, and Mumford strenuously countered her assault upon a man who “devoted the last quarter of his life to the improvement of cities, seeking to find by actual experiment the right form and size, and the right balance between urban needs and purposes and those of the rural environment.”²⁴

In the United States, Howard’s ideas immediately found a receptive audience among a new generation of planners, architects, and urbanists—among them Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Frederick L. Ackerman, and Catherine Bauer. Bauer became involved with the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) through Mumford, whom she met through the literary circles of Greenwich Village (she and Mumford were soon lovers). In 1934 she published Modern Housing, which advocated nonspeculative workers housing such as had been built in Europe. Bauer called their group “Decentrists” because they sought “to decentralize great cities, thin them out, and disperse their enterprises and populations.”²⁵ But for Jacobs, decentralization was a city-destroying idea responsible for the wounded state of contemporary cities.²⁶

Roberta Gratz knew and admired Jane Jacobs.²⁷ She was a member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission when the agency designated the Sunnyside Gardens Historic District. Her immediate reaction on visiting the place for the first time was, “Your problem here is too little density.”²⁸ True, Sunnyside, with its small brick houses and landscaped courtyards, was not as dense as a block in Manhattan, but that was the point. For Sunnyside’s planners, low-rise housing and lower density was the solution, not the problem. It was the reform impulse made manifest.

As a practical matter, had the city not expanded beyond Manhattan it would have surely choked on its own success. Decentralization was not the threat Jacobs saw, but a necessary outcome, and during the first three decades of the twentieth century that is exactly what happened. The question, therefore, was not whether the city would thin out; indeed, that was greatly desired in terms of both the quality of life for those crowded into the tenements and the economic growth of the city as a whole. The question was what shape the new city would take. With options ranging from suburban one-family houses to high-rise apartment buildings, one thing was certain—no one wanted to replicate conditions in the slums.

It was not so much the physical city itself that troubled Mumford and his colleagues as it was its negative effects upon its inhabitants. They looked at the early-twentieth-century city and saw failure. The new garden suburbs, they believed, would unleash human potential as much as tenement life stifled it. Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic of the New York Times, saw in their “humane physical planning” an understanding of “the relationship between the built world and people’s physical and spiritual needs” and a belief that “the answer to many of the ills of society seemed to be a better place to live.”²⁹

Again, Jacobs disagreed with such assumptions and simply dismissed the garden suburb as profoundly anti-urban. Speaking at the Conference on Urban Design at Harvard University in 1956, Jacobs said, “We are greatly misled by talk about bringing the suburb into the city. The city has its own peculiar virtues and we will do it no service by trying to beat it into some inadequate imitation of the non-city.”³⁰ (When one considers Charlotte Gardens, the neighborhood of one-family houses built in the South Bronx in the early 1980s, one must concede that she had a point.) The cure, in Jacobs’s view, was worse than the disease. “Model housing schemes by Stein and Wright, built mainly in suburban settings or at the fringes of cities, together with the writings and the diagrams, sketches and photographs presented by Mumford and Bauer, demonstrated and popularized ideas” now ingrained among urban planners: The street is bad; houses should turn inward to green spaces; a plan with frequent streets is bad; the superblock is good.³¹ She was explicitly damning the planning principles successfully applied at Sunnyside Gardens and its sibling, Radburn.

Mumford, of course, took Jacobs’s critique as a personal affront, as indeed it was. She was tearing down a belief structure that he had, in part, erected in the 1920s and then defended for the rest of his life. “For ten years I lived in Sunnyside Gardens,” he wrote in his review of her book, “the kind of well-planned neighborhood Mrs. Jacobs despises: modestly conceived for people of low incomes, but composed of one-, two-, and three-family houses and flats, with private gardens and public open spaces.… Not utopia, but better than any existing New York neighborhood, even Mrs. Jacobs’ backwater in Greenwich Village.” Against the “well-planned, visibly homogeneous” communities Stein and Wright designed, Jacobs held to “her belief, unshaken by irrefutable counter-evidence, that congestion and disorder are the normal, indeed the most desirable, conditions of life in cities.” Most damning for Mumford was the absence of beauty in the city Jacobs championed. “That beauty, order, spaciousness, clarity of purpose may be worth having for their direct effect on the human spirit even if they do not promote dynamism, increase the turnover of goods, or reduce criminal violence seems not to occur to Mrs. Jacobs. This is esthetic philistinism with a vengeance.”³² Mumford and Jacobs agreed that dehumanizing spaces had a deadening effect upon the human spirit, but they found little common ground as to what characterized such spaces.

Jacobs’s second villain was Le Corbusier and his Radiant City. While the Decentrists advocated the low-rise, lower-density, spread out city, Le Corbusier envisioned the city of the future as towers in the park, what he called the “vertical garden city” rising within a superblock. Ever arrogant, he claimed he did not have to justify his vision in either “humane or city-functional terms.” Jacobs thought that Corbusier’s ideal, like the Garden City, was “nothing but lies.”³³

Having established the villains of her story, Jacobs champions the actual, lived-in, historic city first ignored and then bludgeoned by the planners. “Unstudied, unrespected, cities have served as sacrificial victims,” she wrote.³⁴ Her plea is understandable in the context of the time she was writing—a historical moment when cities had few champions and did, in fact, need saving from big government, from the automobile, and from aesthetically inferior and alienating architecture. And her voice was not a solitary one. In the September 1964 issue of Fortune, Richard J. Whalen published an angry essay about his home town: “A City Destroying Itself.” The next year he expanded the essay into a book-length jeremiad subtitled An Angry View of New York. Looking at his city, he saw only “tragic deprivation and massive failure,” calling out especially the banality of most of the new construction.³⁵

The application of present-day certainties to events and conditions in the past generally results in a bizarre misreading of history, and in this instance is nothing less than the evisceration of a century of urban reform. It was the dismal conditions in British cities and the depopulation of the countryside in the late nineteenth century that gave rise to Ebenezer Howard’s ideas. Overcrowding, the absence of clean water, poor to nonexistent sanitation, the disease environment, and the prevalence of crime and vice in slums compelled Howard and other reformers to envision an alternative. Far from a tactic in a war on the poor, the garden city was to be the future of urban living for all classes.

We may critique some of the solutions offered by those reformers, but we ought not to mischaracterize their intentions. They sincerely believed that by improving the urban environment, by providing healthier, sunnier, and more verdant neighborhoods, we would also alleviate the social ills afflicting cities. Whether such a belief animates urban reform today is a worthy question.

Acolytes of Jane Jacobs would slavishly apply her ideas to the contemporary city at all times and in all circumstances and, in so doing, would misread urban history, misdirect contemporary urban planning, and erase from memory generations of housing reform.³⁶ Nevertheless, what remains is a multidimensional historic city, offering a wide range of housing choices. Urban historian Robert Fishman saw no reason why the urban virtues Jacobs championed had to be limited to older neighborhoods like her treasured Greenwich Village, as those virtues “might be achieved at many points in the region that combine the pedestrian scale and vitality of the best urban neighborhoods with rapid, efficient transit ties to the urban core.”³⁷ There is no inherent contradiction between low-rise, low-density neighborhoods and the livable city, but reconciling our admiration for Jane Jacobs with the fact that millions of New Yorkers live in the kind of places she claims have neither vibrancy nor validity is certainly a challenge.