From political outsider to power broker in two "Great American cities": Jane jacobs and the fall of the urban renewal order in New York and Toronto

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 309-332

  Klemek, Christopher ^a  

^a GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

City planning; Community organizing; Housing; Jane Jacobs; Urban renewal

Indexed keywords

COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION; URBAN HISTORY; URBAN HOUSING; URBAN PLANNING; URBAN POLITICS; URBAN RENEWAL;

CANADA; NEW YORK [UNITED STATES]; NORTH AMERICA; ONTARIO [CANADA]; TORONTO; UNITED STATES;

EID: 37349002545     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: 15526771     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0096144207308669     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. On the Pruitt-Igoe demolition as a watershed, see David Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), 39; and Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2002), 9. The most thorough surveys of U.S. postwar urban history are Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) and (for the respective regions) Richard M. Bernard, ed., Snowbelt Cities: Metropolitan Politics in the Northeast and Midwest since World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Both volumes find politically and spatially fragmenting cities unable to cope with the mounting demands of racial animosities, deindustrialization, dilapidated infrastructure, and social problems attendant to concentrated poverty.
2. Some scholars have begun to articulate a narrative for the post-urban renewal period, including Alexander von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford, 2003) and Lawrence J. Vale, Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). These studies focus on the efforts by residents of public housing projects and impoverished areas to utilize community-development corporations and other organizations in their own interests.
3. For the origins of postwar urban renewal, see Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America 1933-1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). On its execution see, Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998) and Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993). Also, neo-Marxist social scientists in the 1970s and 1980s used urban renewal as a field in which to study urban political power; principal among these are political scientist John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) and sociologists John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
4. Quote from Eric Larrabee, " In Print: Jane Jacobs, " Horizon 4, no. 6 (July 1962): 50. See Jane Jacobs, " Downtown is for People, " Fortune 57, no. 4 (April 1958): 133, collected in William H. Whyte, ed., The Exploding Metropolis (New York: Doubleday, 1958). Robert Fishman has argued that Lewis Mumford fought so hard against Death and Life because he "recognized in Jacobs's blunt and irreverent treatment of the regionalist tradition some of his own growing self-doubts. " By 1963, Mumford was favorably citing Jacobs's analysis of the destructive effects of "cataclysmic finance. " Fishman, "The Mumford-Jacobs Debate, " Planning History Studies 10, no. 1 (1996): 4. For an interesting contemporary comparison of Jacobs and Goodman, see John W. Dyckman, " The European Motherland of American Urban Romanticism " Journal of the American Institute of Planners 28, no. 4 (November 1962): 277-81.
5. Quoted in Jewel Bellush and Murray Hausknecht, eds., Urban Renewal: People, Politics and Planning (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967), 278. On the Bellevue area, see 189-97.
6. John Sibley, " Model Slum Plan Beset by Delays; 'Pioneer' Project Drafted a Year Ago Not Yet Started," New York Times, May 28, 1961, 48.
7. City Planning Commission release (May 1, 1961), departmental series: City Planning, box 16, folder 243; also see Davies to Mrs. John Norment (April 7, 1961) and to Joseph Oelhaf (April 10, 1961), subject files, folder: "Housing-West Village, 1961-, " Mayor Wagner Papers, New York City Municipal Archives (NYCMA).
8. Davies to Oelhaf and also to Mitchell Brower (April 10, 1961), ibid.
9. The section was bounded by West 11th Street, Hudson Street (Jacobs's home was at 555 Hudson Street), Christopher Street, Washington Street, Morton Street, and West Street. See the petition to remove Felt and Davies, Mayor Wagner Papers, subject files, folder: " Housing-West Village, 1961- " Jacobs wrote in Architects' Journal (November 22, 1961) that " both the city's selection of the area and its schemes for converting it into inane anti-city were about as neat a case study as could well be imagined of the intellectual idiocies and ignorance of city workings that I had been writing about. " Also see John Sibley, " Planners Hailed on New Approach; Rehabilitation Draws Praise in Hearings on 4 Areas, " New York Times, May 25, 1961, 37.
10. " Downtown Planning, " an address Jacobs before the 24th annual meeting of the New York State Motorbus Association, New York City (November 10, 1958), Mayor Wagner Papers, general correspondence, 1958, folder: " Jacksona-Jamerz. " " Villagers Celebrate Victory on Traffic; Burn Car in Effigy," New York Times, June 13, 1959, 23. Also " Save Sidewalk Committee Formed, Eleven-Year-Old Sparks Village Civic Effort, " The Villager, March 10, 1960, reprinted in Max Allen, ed., Ideas that Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs (Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada: Ginger Press, 1997), 67-68. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 70, 124-25, 360-62. Jacobs to Citizens Housing and Planning Council, March 27, 1961, Mayor Wagner Papers, subject files, folder: " Housing-West Village, 1961-. "
11. Interview by author with John and Gerry Six, New York City, June 2002. Joel Schwartz questions the substance of the Villagers' self-image, based on the collaboration during the late 1940s and early 1950s between the Greenwich Village Association and those, such as Robert Moses, who sough to redevelop the area to the exclusion of low-income housing. He dismisses the subsequent resistance to these plans as a homeowners' revolt in reaction to overzealousness on Moses's part. See Schwartz, The New York Approach, 144-50, 183-84, 262-66.
12. Neighbors Committee statement and Kirk cover letter to Mayor, October 19, 1961, Mayor Wagner Papers, subject files, folder: "Housing-West Village, 1961-. "
13. See Richard Plunz History of Housing in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 309.
14. On April 27, 1961, Mayor Wagner was informed by his law department that he had been served in a suit from Jane Jacobs, Elizabeth Squire, and Leon Seidel, et al., plaintiffs against the city of New York. The suit formalized Jacobs's assertion regarding the illegality of actions by the city's agencies. When the New York Supreme Court ruled on Jacobs v. City of New York, its decision supported the Villagers' claims, concurring that the agencies' actions were "without warrant in law. " Official Communication, April 27, 1961, Mayor Wagner Papers, general correspondence, 1961, folder: " JACO "; also published in the New York Law Journal (May 17, 1961). For accounts of Jacobs's organizing, see Architects'Journal (November 22, 1961); and Priscilla Chapman, " City Critic in Favor of Old Neighborhoods, " New York Herald Tribune, March 4, 1961.
15. Davies to Lindsay, April 3, 1961, Mayor Wagner Papers, subject files, folder: "Housing-West Village, 1961-. "
16. Press release, September 6, 1961, ibid. With or without the mayor's approval, the City Planning Commission continued pursuing the West Village plan into early 1962 before finally abandoning it; Chairman James Felt submitted his resignation shortly thereafter. See Mayor's release, December 18, 1962, Mayor Wagner Papers, departmental series: City Planning, box 16, folder 243. In addition, according to the New York Times, May 5, 1963, 42, " The decision [to abandon the West Village project] is understood to have been a factor in the resignation of J. Clarence Davies Jr. as chairman of the city's Housing and Redevelopment Board. "
17. Mademoiselle interview (October 1962); Perkins & Will Architects Newsletter (November 1962), 10; Articles of Association of the West Village Committee (undated, probably February 1962), folder 2, box 27, Jane Jacobs Papers, Burns Library, Boston College. Jane Kramer, " All the Ranks and Rungs of Mrs. Jacobs' Ladder," Village Voice (December 20, 1962). Letter to Wagner from Hugh Byfield and West Village Committee (April 9, 1962), Mayor Wagner Papers, subject files, folder: "Housing-West Village, 1961-. "
18. West Village Plan for Housing brochure (published 1963 by the West Village Committee), folder 2, box 27, Jacobs Papers. Figures quoted in New York Times, May 6, 1963, 42.
19. Frank S. Kristof, " The West Village Plan for Housing-Some Questions, " Housing and Redevelopment Board interdepartmental memorandum (June 25, 1963); " Analysis and Comments on the West Village Plan for Housing, " folder: " West Village, 1964-1965, " Chairman Ballard Papers, NYCMA.
20. Charles Grutzner, "State Voters Reject Subsidy Plan On Low-Income Family Housing," New York Times, November 7, 1962, 16. The twin goals of avoiding Title I subsidies and demolitions yet qualifying for Mitchell-Lama mortgage and tax exemption required a density slightly above that which the new zoning allowed, saddling "the plan with a built-in Gordian knot." Folder: "West Village, 1964-1965," Chairman Ballard Papers.
21. Memo from Theodore Berlin to Samuel Joroff, regarding field inspection survey (November 18, 1964); A. Leshan memo to Chairman Ballard (October 28, 1964); "Chairman Ballard reports City Planning Commission findings to the Housing and Redevelopment Board (December 22, 1964), folder: "West Village, 1964-1965," Chairman Ballard Papers.
22. John V. Lindsay, The City (New York: Norton, 1970), 114-21. Donald H. Elliott, Counsel to the Mayor, memorandum to Chairman Ballard, copied to Lindsay (July 11, 1966), folder: "West Village Housing," Commissioner Goldstone Papers, NYCMA. John Zuccotti, " How Does Jane Jacobs Rate Today? " Planning (June 1974): 23-27.
23. Full page ad in Sunday New York Times, June 27, 1965, 18. Allen, Ideas that Matter, 78-79, 168. C. Gerald Fraser, "Writers and Editors to Protest War by Defying Tax," New York Times, January 31, 1968. Notice for " Literary Auction for Peace " (April 23, 1968), box 1, folder 1, Jacobs Papers. Jacobs letter to Richard Barnett of Kate, Gardner Poor and Havens (November 1, 1968) regarding her defense fund, folder 6, box 11, Jacobs Papers.
24. Richard Seveso, "Mrs. Jacobs's Protest Results in Riot Charge," New York Times, April 18, 1968, 49. West Village Committee notice of benefit at Village Gate for Jacobs's Legal Defense Fund (May 27, 1968), published in Allen, Ideas that Matter, 73.
25. Quote from James T. Lemon, Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits: Great Cities of North America since 1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 257. See also John Bacher, Keeping to the Marketplace: The Evolution of Canadian Housing Policy (Montreal, Quebec, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993).
26. Jacobs, "Spadina Expressway," Canadian Dimension 6 (February-March 1970): 8.
27. See Volker Roscher, ed., Hans Blumenfeld, Stadtplaner: Autobiographie, 1892-1988 (Boston: Birkhüuser, 1993), 218-19; D. Nowlan and M. Nowlan, The Bad Trip: The Untold Story of the Spadina Expressway (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: NewPress/Anansi, 1970); and Darryl Newbury, Stop Spadina: Citizens Against an Expressway (Mississauga, Ontario, Canada: Commonact Press, 1989).
28. Jane Jacobs, "A City Getting Hooked on the Expressway Drug," Globe and Mail, November 1, 1969. Many documents related to Jacobs's experiences in Toronto are reprinted in Allen, Ideas that Matter, 115-31. Jacobs related her family's disbelief in " Spadina Expressway," 8: "They must certainly, we thought, have reflected upon the lesson of Los Angeles." Also see Chatelaine 42 (April 1969), 4: "She says it's a good place to live, but that in another fifteen years it probably won't be, because Toronto is going to destroy itself with expressways, as American cities such as Buffalo have done. 'For the time being, it's a splendid city,' she says... Jacobs thinks Toronto has better public transportation now that it will in a few years."
29. "Jacobs Raps Expressway Plan," Architecture Canada (February 16, 1970): 1. Robert Fulford, The Accidental City (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: McFarlane, Walter & Ross, 1995), 76.
30. Toronto Telegram, April 7, 1970, reprinted in Allen, Ideas that Matter, 116.
31. Roscher, Hans Blumenfeld, 219.
32. See the first three major writings Jacobs published following her relocation to Canada: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty (New York: Random House, 1980); The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969); and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, 1984).
33. Sean Purdy, "'Ripped Off' by the System: Housing Policy, Poverty, and Territorial Stigmatization in Regent Park Housing Project, 1951-1999," Labour 52 (2003): 45-108. On citizen participation and resistance to redevelopment projects, see Kevin Brushett, " Blots on the Face of the City: The Politics of Slum Housing and Urban Renewal in Toronto, 1940-1970," (PhD diss., Queen's University, 2001); Kevin Brushett," People and Government Travelling Together: Community Organization, Urban Planning and the Politics of Post-War Reconstruction in Toronto 1943-1953," Urban History Review 27, no. 2 (1999): 44-58.
34. Sewell was elected together with another neighborhood advocate, Karl Jaffary. Sewell's campaign touted his work in Trefann Court, Don Mount, Regent Park, St. James Town, Sherbourne-Dundas, and elsewhere, calling for "meaningful participation" and "concerned about the way decisions are made and who makes them." Once on the council, Sewell transformed the Trefann Court redevelopment project, proposed by the City of Toronto Planning Board in 1956, into a process of community participation planning. Graham Fraser, Fighting Back: Urban Renewal in Trefann Court (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Hakkert, 1972), 168-69.
35. Magnusson divides the reform into "urban conservative" and "urban radical" wings. See Magnusson, "Toronto," in W. Magnusson and A. Sancton, eds., City Politics in Canada (University of Toronto, 1983), 115. Lemon, Liberal Dreams, 262. Also see John Sewell, Up Against City Hall (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: James Lewis & Samuel, 1972); and J. Sewell, D. Crombie, W. Kilbourn, and K. Jaffary, Inside City Hall: The Year of the Opposition (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Hakkert, 1972). On the reform movement, see Dimitros Roussopoulos, ed., The City and Radical Social Change (Montréal, Quebec, Canada: Black Rose, 1982), contains Bill Freeman "John Sewell and the New Urban Reformers Come to Power" and M. Goldrick "The Anatomy of Urban Reform in Toronto." F. Frisken, City-Policy Making in Theory and Practice: The Case of Toronto's Downtown Plan (London: University of Western Ontario, 1988); Jon Caulfield, "Canadian Urban Reform and Local Conditions," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12, no. 3 (1988): 477-84; Caulfield " Reform as a Chaotic Concept, " Urban History Review 17, no. 2 (1988): 107-11.
36. Quote is from Fulford, Accidental City, 87. Also see Caulfield, The Tiny Perfect Mayor: David Crombie and Toronto's Reform Aldermen (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Lorimer, 1974); and Caulfield, "David Crombie's Housing Policy: Making Toronto Safe-Once More-for the Developers," in James Lorimer and Evelyn Ross, eds., The City Book: The Politics and Planning of Canada's cities (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: James Lorimer, 1974), 138-47.
37. This story is frequently recounted by veterans of the reform movement. See, for example, Fulford, Accidental City, 82, where he concludes, "When the city builds a monument to Jacobs, it should probably go there." Jacobs is quoting from Chatelaine 43 (November 1970): 14.
38. Fulford, Accidental City, 84.
39. For his reflections, see John Sewell, The Shape of the City: Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 191.
40. For participant observation conducted by a sociologist in the West Village during the time when the West Village Houses were being completed, see Peter Melser, Confrontation over Control of Neighborhood Renewal: The Relationship between City Agencies and Local Residents in the Renewal of the West Village (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1979).
41. See Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000); Vincent Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003); Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). A study of even earlier white grassroots revolts against the liberal consensus is Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). The long-term political consequences are explored in Charles Brecher, Raymond Horton, et al., Power Failure: New York City Politics since 1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and John Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). On Nixon's transportation policies, see Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939-1989, rev. ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); and Zachary M. Schrag, "The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.: The Three Sisters Bridge in Three Administrations " and Raymond A. Mohl," Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities, " both in Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (July 2004): 648-706.
42. Lemon, Liberal Dreams, 20-24. A full study of the cultural dynamics of this process is Jon Caulfield, City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto's Gentrification and Critical Social Practice (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
43. See Richard Harris, "More American than the United States: Housing in Urban Canada in the Twentieth Century," Journal of Urban History 26, no. 4 (May 2000): 456-71; also see Harris, " Housing and Social Policy: An Historical Perspective on Canadian-American Differences: A Comment, " Urban Studies 36, no. 7 (1999): 1169-75.
44. See Bill Freeman, "Toronto's Sewell and Urban Reform," in Dimitros Roussopoulos, ed., The City and Radical Social Change (Montréal, Quebec, Canada: Black Rose, 1982).
45. Eric Larrabee, "In Print: Jane Jacobs," Horizon 4, no. 6 (July 1962): 50, further quQtes Jacobs:" There seems to be a notion that I run these people, but I wouldn't have dreamed of telling them how to behave. I wouldn't have been chairman next week if I had."