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Chapter 3

URBAN RENEWAL . . .

Cities are always growing or shrinking, hence remaking themselves. Sometimes this reordering is haphazard, and sometimes it is planned, carried out according to the agendas of those paying for the improvements. The messy, medieval city of Paris came in for such planned improvement, and it was the first capital city to be rebuilt without a massive fire first clearing the land. The coup d’état that made Louis Napoleon Bonaparte emperor of France in 1852 gave him the absolute power needed to undertake the massive renovation of Paris. He had three major goals: to bring water into the city and to improve the circulation of air among the buildings; to unify its parts; and to make it more beautiful. A powerful administrator was needed, given that this massive project was to be carried out while the busy life of the capital went on around it. In 1853, the emperor selected Georges-Eugène Haussmann, whom he made a baron, to be that man.¹

Though Haussmann’s name is the one attached to the changes in Paris and many other French cities, he was not the person who created the ideas. Rather, the plans drew on wisdom acquired during several hundred years of city making. Years earlier, kings of France, eager to make their capital as beautiful as Rome, had begun deciphering the strategies needed to achieve that end. The leaders that followed them added to those aesthetic concerns the need to control frequent epidemics, such as those caused by raw sewage running in the narrow alleyways of the city. As the years passed and modes of transportation changed, the people of Paris found that they couldn’t move through the narrow medieval streets squeezed between the tightly packed buildings; street widening became a pressing goal of city beautification.

Over the years, a concept evolved. At its heart was the creation of wide avenues called percées (“pierced”), because they were to cut diagonally through the old city’s massive blocks of housing. By the mid-nineteenth century, a few of these avenues had been created with great success. Their width permitted light and air to enter the city and their style added to its beauty.

Haussmann’s job was to apply these proven techniques on a scale large enough to transform the city. At the same time, while the streets were being carved out of the old city, sewers could be installed. A new street face was installed, incorporating buildings, street lamps, pissoirs, and other “street furniture” carefully designed to create unity in the “look” of Paris as one traveled from arrondissement to arrondissement, ward to ward.

In the series of figures shown here, we see the section of Paris that was “pierced” to create Avenue de l’Opéra, one of the greatest of the Haussmann boulevards. In the first map, we see the outlines of the tight and somewhat random streets of the old Paris. In the second map, we see the proposal for a boulevard to cut diagonally through the urban tissue. In the final map, we see the Paris of today, with Avenue de l’Opéra successfully built.

Lithographs drawn while the piercing was in progress show the deep trenches that were dug to permit the placement of the sewers. We also see the sorrow of those who were moved away. Although most of the housing destroyed in the center was eventually replaced, its costs were prohibitive for the poor, who were forced to move to outlying areas that were added to the city during the Haussmann period.

Fig. 3.1. The strategic design of renovations in Paris in the area of the Avenue de l’Opéra. Upper plan: the area as it appeared under Louis XV, 1773. Middle plan: the plan for the new avenue overlaid on the existing street grid, in 1876. Lower plan: actual construction (in 1929). REPRODUCED FROM L’ILLUSTRATION, 1929.

It is not, I think, an accident that social critic Victor Hugo—one of thousands of republicans exiled under the Empire—used the images of sewers to animate the persecution of Jean Valjean in his 1861 masterpiece, Les Misérables. Nor was it an accident that the new boulevards became a central character in the paintings of the Impressionist school and on the picture postcards of the era. The city’s transformation aroused the pain and the wonder of the population.

In 2000, I spent two months living in a neighborhood bounded by two great Haussmann boulevards—Boulevard Saint Michel and Boulevard Saint Germain des Prés. Every day I walked through the old city into the new, examining the manner in which Haussmann had cut the great boulevards at an angle through the urban fabric and had pasted the new Paris over the old.

Fig. 3.2. Root shock in Paris. Compare with root shock in Pittsburgh, fig. 7.3, and root shock in New York after 9/11, fig. 8.5. Upper lithograph: Honoré Daumier. From the series “Locataires et Propriétaires”: Scene from a neighborhood in process of demolition. REPRODUCED COURTESY OF THE PHOTOTHÉQUE DES MUSÉES DE LA VILLE DE PARIS. Lower lithograph: Demolition for the Avenue de l’Opéra. REPRODUCED FROM L’ILLUSTRATION, 1929.

French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart wrote of that neighborhood, “At the base of Boulevard Saint Michel, Haussmann had demolished the Church of Saint André des Arts, which was the parish church for the riverside neighborhood that stretched from the Pont Neuf to the Pont Saint Michel. According to their residence east or west of the new boulevard, the parishioners were reassigned to Saint Germain or Saint Séverin. One was in the 6th arrondissement, and the other in the fifth. Boulevard Saint Michel, although it united traffic towards Paris, proved to be an almost unassailable obstacle to the urbanism of the neighborhood. Though it has been more than a century since the demolition of the church, the neighborhood has remained disorganized. The village never regained its authenticity. It had lost an essential organ.”²

The sense I was getting—that the renovation entailed a massive, irreparable upheaval—was heightened by the realization that Haussmann was thrown out of office in 1870. At about the same time as the fall of Haussmann, Emperor Napoleon III entered into a disastrous war with Germany. France was quickly beaten back, and a siege laid around Paris. Over the months of the siege, and during the peace negotiations that followed, residents of the city lost whatever faith they had had in the emperor’s government. In fact, that government collapsed and was replaced by a provisional government, which appeared to be just as unreliable in its negotiations with Germany and in its treatment of the capital. Obviously, much had happened by the point at which, in an effort to save the country and themselves, the working people of Paris rose up in revolt and declared a new democratic government, the Paris Commune.

War, siege, and abandonment by the national government might seem to have been enough to provoke the Commune. Research has demonstrated that upheaval played a part as well. The Commune was organized by people who had been displaced from the center of the city by the Haussmannian renovations. Living and struggling together in the newly annexed peripheral arrondissements, the displaced people had gathered strength and solidarity from one another.³ Displacement both added to the other layers of frustration and reorganized neighboring, creating new spaces within which relationships and ideas were developed.

The Commune, with its generous reforms and democratic concerns, was quickly overthrown. A bloodbath ensued, during which as many as thirty thousand Communards were murdered. Reading this part of the story of Paris provided me with new ways to think about urban renewal and its consequences. I thought it was probably a good idea that the United States hadn’t gone to war just after urban renewal. Then I remembered Vietnam.

The Housing Act of 1949

The term “urban renewal” is used generically to refer to improvements in cities. In the United States the phrase is also used to refer to a program of the federal government, begun under the Housing Act of 1949, and modified under a number of later acts, the most important of which, the Housing Act of 1954, actually introduced the term into the law. Those acts were designed to provide the money for retooling the city, preparing for the postwar era, and switching from the war machine to new means of productivity. In 1950s America, urban renewal was a synonym for “progress.”⁴

Progress meant new technologies, new jobs, and—here is where urban renewal comes in—new uses for the land. Those who sought to maintain the old city stood in the way of progress, and progress was a magic word back then: normally honest people would hide their true feelings on any issue in order to be able to say, “I’m for progress.”⁵ General Electric went a step forward, reminding us through its advertisements, “Progress is our most important product.”

Reclaiming land for new uses has an important precedent in American history in the abrogation of treaties with Native Americans. In the beginning of the westward push, Native Americans were asked to move west of the Appalachians. Then they were asked to move west of the Mississippi. Then they were settled on reservations, which were relocated repeatedly. In the 1950s, children like me grew up with the story of Native Americans being settled on wasteland dotted with black puddles, but being moved when it was discovered that those black puddles were oil.

There is a joke that circulated on email a few years ago. It went like this. Two Navajos, an old man and his grandson, were walking on the reservation one day and ran into a group of white scientists from NASA, standing around a spacecraft. The grandson asked what they were doing and the scientists explained they were preparing a trip to the moon. The grandson translated this to the old man, who spoke only Navajo. The old man pondered this information for a moment, then asked if he could send a message to the Man in the Moon. The NASA scientists, amused by this request, got out their tape recorder. The old man spoke briefly in Navajo and nodded with satisfaction when he was done. The scientists asked the grandson what he had said. He told the Man in the Moon, “Watch out, they’ve come to take your land.”⁶

The land-claiming strategy embodied in the Housing Act of 1949 was straightforward. An interested city had first to identify the “blighted” areas that it wished to redo. Having defined “slum” and “ghetto,” we must add this concept of blight, which was invented specifically for purposes of redoing aging downtown areas, and meant, quite simply, that buildings had lost their sparkle and their profit margin.⁷ Quite a remarkable array of buildings could fit under the definitions of blight that were enacted into law.⁸

Once those areas had been defined, the city had the task of developing a “workable plan.” This had largely to do with figuring out a new use for the area once it was cleared of blight. The workable plan was forwarded to regional urban renewal offices for approval by the federal government. Once the plan was approved, the designated areas could be seized using the government’s power of eminent domain. The people and businesses that occupied the site were given a minimal amount of compensation and were sent away. The seized land was then cleared of all buildings and, thanks to federal subsidies, sold to developers at a fraction of the city’s costs. The developers then built businesses, educational and cultural institutions, and residences for middle- and upper-income people. In some instances, high-rise public housing projects were built on the cleared land.⁹

Marc Weiss summed up the overall impact of the twenty-four-year program by saying, “Urban renewal agencies in many cities demolished whole communities inhabited by low income people in order to provide land for private development of office buildings, sports arenas, hotels, trade centers, and high income luxury buildings.”¹⁰ Rather than providing decent homes and suitable living environments, urban renewal created a massive housing crisis. Weiss noted, “As of June 30, 1967, 400,000 residential units had been demolished in urban renewal areas, while only 10,760 low-rent public housing units had been built on these sites.”¹¹ You might well ask: How did a plan that subsidized developers, and dramatically worsened the conditions of the poor, come to be the law of the land?

Saving Downtown

American business leaders and mayors of large cities believed that the civic organization that had evolved over the first part of the twentieth century, that is, a central downtown surrounded by an array of manufacturing, trading, and residential areas, was becoming obsolete as the population began to overrun the borders and fill the nearby suburbs. In their view, a postwar retooling of the American city was needed, one designed to respond to the changing spatial dynamics and to prepare for competition with other nations. The changing needs of American capitalism were the impetus for the reorganization of the cities, and it was powerful men who sought solutions and pushed for their enactment into law. Weiss noted: “Urban renewal owes its origins to downtown merchants, banks, large corporations, newspaper publishers, realtors, and other institutions with substantial business and property interests in the central part of the city.”¹²

In Pittsburgh, for example, the leadership for urban renewal came from the Allegheny Conference on Post-War Community Planning, a group of civic and business leaders that was started in 1943 to chart the course for ensuring the city’s prosperity. A photograph of the executive committee of the conference depicts a large group of white men, dressed to suggest wealth and authority, and seated under portraits of two members of the Mellon banking family.¹³ Just to list those seated in the first row:

• Edward J. Hanley, vice president of the conference and president, Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation;

• Edward J. Magee, executive director of the conference;

• Leon Falk, Jr., industrialist;¹⁴

• John T. Ryan, Jr., chairman of the conference and president, Mine Safety Appliances Company;

• Carl B. Jansen, president of the conference and chairman of the board, Dravo Corporation;

• Gwilym R. Price, vice president of the conference and chairman of the board, Westinghouse Electric Corporation;

• Leslie B. Worthington, president, United States Steel Corporation;

• John A. Mayer, vice president of the conference and president, Mellon National Bank and Trust Company.

Conspicuously absent from the picture, and from the decision-making processes, were poor people, black people, and women. One way of understanding urban renewal is to contrast the discourse that was taking place in different settings. Clearly, when the industrialists themselves were at the table, the looming and fundamental changes in methods and places of production were part of the conversation.

Outside of those rooms, however, the public concern of white officials was largely cast as physical improvements that entailed “no social loss.” George Evans, a member of the Pittsburgh City Council, wrote a 1943 article that put forward the public face of urban renewal. In “Here Is a Postwar Job for Pittsburgh . . . Transforming the Hill District,” Evans argued, “The Hill District of Pittsburgh is probably one of the most outstanding examples in Pittsburgh of neighborhood deterioration . . . There are 7,000 separate property owners; more than 10,000 dwelling units and in all more than 10,000 buildings. Approximately 90 per cent of the buildings in the area are substandard and have long outlived their usefulness, and so there would be no social loss if they were all destroyed. The area is criss-crossed with streets running every which way, which absorb at least one-third of the area. These streets should all be vacated and a new street pattern overlaid. This would effect a saving of probably 100 acres now used for unnecessary streets.”¹⁵ (emphasis added)

The Hill District, which served as a newcomer neighborhood of Pittsburgh, had welcomed tens of thousands of African Americans to the city in the first half of the twentieth century. For those migrants, the tight streets of the Hill were not a waste of territory, but the nidus for making essential relationships.

As Sala Udin, who grew up in the Hill District and later served as its councilman, put it, “The sense of community and the buildings are related in an old area. The buildings were old, the streets were cobblestone and old, there were many small alleyways and people lived in those alleyways. The houses were very close together. There were small walkways that ran in between the alleyways that was really a playground. So, the physical condition of the buildings helped to create a sense of community. We all lived in similar conditions and had similar complaints about the wind whipping through the gaps between the frame and the window, and the holes in the walls and the leaking and the toilet fixtures that work sometimes and don’t work sometimes. But that kind of common condition bound us together more as a community. I knew everybody on my block, and they knew me. They knew me on sight, and they knew all the children on sight, and my behavior changed when I entered the block. And so, I think there was a very strong sense of community.”

For Thelma Lovette, Barbara Suber, Henry Belcher, Agnes Franklin, George Moses, Ken Nesbitt, and others I talked to from the Hill, those close-knit relationships were essential to life. The dispersal of the community and the loss of those connections had ominous implications. Thus, a third part of the discourse on the changing city was the African American community’s sense of threat, which was captured in the expression “Urban Renewal Is Negro Removal.”¹⁶

But George Evans, writing before the integration of baseball, before the integration of schools or buses, was living in a world that promulgated racist imaginings while prohibiting genuine contact. The power structure offered no forum for Thelma Lovett or any other African Americans to argue for their version of reality. Furthermore, George Evans could speak in that manner with the full backing of white social scientists who, themselves no better informed than George Evans, concluded that African American communities were “disorganized,” the technical term for “no social loss.” In the words of a leading academic researcher, “The Negro who hesitates to leave Harlem or the South Side is chiefly reacting negatively to the unknown ‘white man’s world’ out there. His own fellow ethnics share no distinctive heritage excepting a rural origin and a common reaction to the rejection by white society.”¹⁷

Tension Building Up . . .