| The Have: Puttin' on the Ritz |
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| October 2005 | |
| Written by Andrew Stegmaier | |
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A Review of City by Doug Rae During his 1951 campaign for mayor of New Haven, Richard “Dick” Lee visited the impoverished Oak Street neighborhood, not far from the Yale campus. What has long since been paved over with a grotesquely overbuilt highway stub and parking garage was then a functioning, though poor, urban neighborhood. Lee walked up and introduced himself to a crippled man who was drawing water from a gas station fountain. After Lee explained that he was the mayor, the man invited him in for some coffee. At the sight of this man’s living conditions — the overcrowdedness, the lack of central heating and water and the cockroach infestation—Lee went outside and threw up. 
This event, according to Doug Rae, was pivotal in forging the Dick Lee
who would go on to be “the greatest mayor of New Haven’s twentieth
century and among the most remarkable mayors who served anywhere in the
United States during that century.” New Haven in the 1950’s was facing
serious problems. Rae spends the first half of the book describing New
Haven in its “golden summer” around 1920. By 1950, the things that had
characterized the “urbanism” of the 1920s—dense and diverse
neighborhood retail, peace and order maintained by the “sidewalk
republic” of personal connections, and strong local civic
organizations—was coming undone. After a brief spike during World War
II, the supply of factory jobs declined. The flood of automobiles
paralyzed downtown commerce and increased competition from suburban
retailers. The tax base declined as the majority of the region’s poor
was left in the city, in neighborhoods like Oak Street.These radical problems, many people thought, required radical solutions. Lee ran for mayor in 1953 on the platform of “urban renewal”—an idea that was growing powerful in cities all across the country. Nowhere, however would “renewal” be as intense as in New Haven under Lee. Blessed by Yale intellectuals, emboldened by a popular mandate, and funded by massive grants from Washington, Lee engaged in a publicly funded reconstruction of the city. Small downtown tenants were evicted en masse as Lee assembled and demolished the large parcels of land that would be necessary to create the now-vacant Chapel Street Mall. Entire neighborhoods like Oak Street were deliberately wiped out. All these projects brought New Haven to spend more than twice as much per capita on urban renewal than the next closest city, Newark. Rae has peculiar admiration for the man who wielded such incredibly destructive powers, ultimately to no good end. He describes how Lee took personal control of all the organs of city government and subordinated them to a handpicked crew of technocrats nicknamed “the Kremlin.” Perhaps Lee was admirable, but only in the same way that Stalin or Hitler may have been. And at the end of the day, as any Yale student could tell you - and as Rae admits - he did not succeed in restoring New Haven. Dick Lee’s failure to revitalize New Haven, is, in fact, the central point of the book. The city that peaked in the 1920s was created and has been destroyed by factors outside of any politician’s control, even a politician wielding extraordinary powers. The urbanism of the earlier city was largely the result of “centering technologies”—steam railroads and steam manufacturing power—that developed simultaneously. These things combined to give center-city locations a decisive economic edge over the rural or suburban hinterland. New Haven’s Winchester Repeating Arms, Sargent Hardware, and New Haven Clock were all word class competitors in their market in no small part because their location in an urban area allowed them to take advantage of cheap coal power, access to railroads, and a large population of workers living nearby. The main reason why New Haven and other cities were suffering by mid-century was because the “centering technologies” had been replaced by “de-centering” ones. The truck replaced the train as the primary mode of land transport, allowing factories to locate away from railroad junctions. Because electricity could transport power anywhere cheaply, factories were no longer tied to the old coal distribution networks, and it became more efficient to grow them horizontally instead of vertically, making a compact urban location less attractive. Today, New Haven has almost none of the manufacturing activity that was its lifeblood only a century ago. If the city has a future, as Rae believes it does, it will be as just another player in a larger regional economy. Never again will New Haven regain the hegemony it enjoyed during the age of urbanism. This argument, as presented by Rae, is not without problems. For instance, the role of federal, state, and local government in promoting the propagation of the automobile might have had a larger significance than Rae gives it. Consciously through road-building, and unconsciously through the assumption that roads must be constructed and maintained through tax revenues, government has certainly contributed to the end of urbanism. Ultimately, though, Rae makes a very solid point. Politicians, even in Dick Lee’s city, frequently make promises about the “revitalization” of urban areas. They might do well to remember that the city of old is dead, and whatever form a revitalized city might take, it will be fundamentally different from the centers of the past. Andrew Stegmaier is a sophmore in Calhoun College and the Webmaster of The Yale Free Press. |
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