An Urban Awakening
As American cities were significantly altered through slum clearance and urban renewal, activists and the philanthropists coalesced to challenge existing power dynamics and give voice to the communities being destroyed.
1954
An estimated 80 million Americans tune in to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings – approximately half the US population at the time.
1955
Jane Jacobs and Urban Activism
Image: Frank Lennon via the Toronto Star
Jane Jacobs transformed a Greenwich Village storefront building into a home with her husband, architect Robert Hyde Jacobs, in the location where Robert Moses had plans to raze a large portion of the neighborhood to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX). In 1955, she joined the movement against Moses’ planned redevelopment and assisted with a letter writing campaign to New York’s mayor and the Manhattan borough president. One such letter included the following:
“I have heard with alarm and almost with disbelief, the plans to run a sunken highway through the center of Washington Square. My husband and I are among the citizens who truly believe in New York—to the extent that we have bought a home in the heart of the city and remodeled it with a lot of hard work (transforming it from slum property) and are raising our three children here. It is very discouraging to try to do our best to make the city more habitable, and then to learn that the city itself is thinking up schemes to make it uninhabitable”
Jane Jacobs, 1955
Peter Laurence, “The Death and Life of Urban Design,” Journal of Urban Design 11, no. 2 (2006).
Architectural Forum, where Jacobs worked as an editor, took interest in the growing battles over urban design and sent Jacobs into the field. Philip Will, co-founder of Perkins & Will Architects, relayed first-hand accounts of social worker Ellen Lurie from Union Settlement House Association of the struggle in East Harlem over urban renewal. This is where Jacobs became aware of the dynamics and problems of urban rebuilding practices. This account of East Harlem’s struggles led to one of Jacobs’ first by-lined articles at the Architectural Forum and became a conference paper that was shared at the Harvard Urban Design Conference in 1956. The presentation received attention from the Rockefeller Foundation, which decided to support the writing of Jacobs’ landmark text The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
In the book, Jacobs critiqued the prevailing urban planning practices of the time and championed the importance of vibrant, mixed-use neighborhoods. Jacobs argued for community engagement and organic urban growth, emphasizing the need to preserve the social fabric and diversity of neighborhoods. Her ideas resonated with activists and communities fighting against the destructive consequences of urban renewal, and her work provided the intellectual grounding for those advocating for a more people-centered and inclusive urban development.1
While East Harlem suffered the worst of urban renewal, Lower Manhattan was a different story. Moses’ Lower Manhattan Expressway was defeated as activists and journalists, including Jacobs, galvanized public opinion against the destruction of some of the borough’s oldest historic neighborhoods. Longtime Assemblyman of Lower Manhattan delivered a blistering testimony at a city hearing on the project:
“Except for one old man, I have been unable to find anyone of technical competence who truly is for this so called expressway. This cantankerous and stubborn old man should realize that too many of his technicians’ dreams turn into a nightmare for the city.”
NY State Assemblyman Louis DeSalvio, testimonial against the LOMEX plan
Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder… (New York: Random House, 2009).
Rockefeller: Benefactor of Urban Studies
“The Division of Humanities has no intention of entering the general field of city planning. Urban design, however, is one of the fields in which the arts have most direct impact on the quality of human life. In view of the relative neglect of aesthetic aspects in connection with city planning during the last few decades, an effort to restore the balance in thinking in connection with city design seems well justified under the Foundation’s program in the arts.”
Rockefeller Foundation, 1954 Annual Report where Kepes & Lynch awarded a grant for research
Peter Laurence, “The Death and Life of Urban Design… ,” Journal of Urban Design 11, no. 2 (2006).
Jacobs was not alone in her support from the Rockefeller Foundation. From 1944 onward, the foundation played an important role in financing the research to better understand cities. In 1953, the first grant made to urban practitioners was awarded to Gyorgy Kepes and Kevin Lynch of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) School of Architecture and Planning.2
Image: Kevin Lynch via the Dome at MIT Libraries
A research study conducted by Frederick Adams of MIT, a colleague of RPAA’s Clarence Stein, discovered that more than two thirds of America’s planning programs were founded after World War II. Many of these programs lacked critical rigor and academic maturity. This provided justification for the Rockefeller Foundation’s support in developing a systematized knowledge and training in this burgeoning professional field.
1958
Urban Design Criticism Forum
Image: The University of Pennsylvania Library
When Chadbourne Gilpatric, humanities officer at the Rockefeller Foundation, spoke with Douglas Haskell, one of the leaders of the Architectural Forum, Jane Jacob’s reporting on urban renewal came up. At Gilpatrick’s urging, a Conference on Urban Design Criticism was arranged in October 1958 at the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The list of attendees was a veritable who’s who of the design world: Jacobs, Lynch, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg, I.M. Pei, J.B. Jackson, Catherine Bauer Wurster, Grady Clay, Louis Kahn, and multiple others.
The conference gathered leading figures in architecture and planning and exposed them to Jacobs’ ideas. Gilpatric remarked that the conference incited attendees into publishing works that furthered the critique of planning. The foundation of community design and development was established at this meeting, pushing urban discourse away from the totality of the expert planner and into the realm of the activist.3
1959
Organizing Against Renewal: Morningside & Cooper Square
Image: The Cooper Square Committee
After suffering an ego-bruising defeat by Jacobs and her allies, Moses redirected his attention to Morningside Heights and the Lower East side as the next sites of his large-scale urban renewal plans.
A committee of residents formed Save Our Homes in Morningside Heights to challenge plans to demolish two square blocks composed of seventy-one buildings, including sixty-four old-law tenement buildings. The developers called the activists ‘hysterical’, and commented, “The aim of the redevelopment of the community is to decongest the area. Naturally, some people will be hurt, but it is for the good of the community.” This comment was characteristic of the urban renewal ethos, which made light of the scores of people who got displaced. Despite Save Our Homes’ efforts, Morningside Gardens opened in 1957 as an owner-occupied cooperative development that received subsidies from the City of New York. The new development accommodated 972 middle-income families in an area that was once home to 6,000 people. This complex also laid the groundwork for the Mitchell-Lama Housing Program: a middle-income housing cooperative with an effectively unlimited subsidy to ensure long-term affordability.4
In the Cooper Square section of the Lower East Side, a more transformative community organizing took place that would lay the groundwork for forthcoming locally led development. The Cooper Square Committee (CSC) was organized from the grassroots in 1959, with an artist, urban planner, settlement house director, housing organizer, and business owners among its founders. It was a cross-class, cross-cultural organization where all believed in the right to decent, affordable housing and that affordable housing was a critical component of a socially just city.5 While the initial housing project planned for the area was canceled, the CSC remained emboldened to challenge city laws so they could plan their own neighborhood, which they accomplished in 1970. They formed a Community Land Trust in 1990 which allowed them to develop their own affordable housing.
Civil Rights & Housing Reform
Image: Harambee City Digital Archives
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was a civil rights organization founded in Chicago in the early 1940s that used nonviolent direct action to challenge discrimination and segregation. Richard Gregg’s The Power of Non-Violence (1937), which chronicled resistance based on the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, was the first American text to develop a theory of nonviolent action and it influenced civil rights leaders from Martin Luther King Jr. to Bayard Rustin, one of CORE’s founders.
Image: The Center for Brooklyn History via the Brooklyn Public Library
The Brooklyn and Harlem chapters of CORE took a more nuanced approach in challenging the systemic inequities faced by urban African Americans. Their community organizing was instrumental in challenging racial discrimination in housing, particularly in the spaces where segregation and redlining were prevalent. Their efforts included sit-ins, protests, and legislative advocacy in later decades. The civil rights and housing reform they fought for in New York were so interwoven that their efforts produced stronger renter protections compared to most other cities in the United States.6
Footnotes
- Peter Laurence, The Death and Life of Urban Design Jane Jacobs, The Rockefeller Foundation and the New Research in Urbanism 1955-1965 (2006) ↩︎
- Charissa N. Terranova, The Distributed Image of the City: The Collaboration between György Kepes and Kevin Lynch (2016) ↩︎
- Laurence, The Death and Life… ↩︎
- Eric Dirnbach, How the Construction of My 1950s, NYC Housing Cooperative was Delayed by Several Strikes – and Why That Was a Good Thing (2020) ↩︎
- Marci Reaven, Neighborhood Activism in Planning in NYC 1945-1975 (2017) ↩︎
- Joel Schwartz, The New York City Rent Strikes of 1963 – 1964 (1983) ↩︎