New York and Robert Moses: Policy Innovation or Abuse?
A 1940 New York City Planning Commission plan offered a strategy:
to rehouse the poor, stabilize the dwindling middle class, and restore order to the city landscape with modern city-planning principles … “in accord with a master plan” and should include the assembly and clearance of slums and blighted areas, and their rebuilding for a variety of purposes—including privately financed housing for upper income and middle income groups, public housing for families of low income, commercial projects, recreational facilities, parks and playgrounds. (Zipp, 2010, pp. 15–16)
The plan, which was never approved (Moses blocked it in the Board of Estimates), turned the post-1938 movement away from slum clearance purely for public housing, to commercial and housing for all incomes.
Manhattan’s Lower East Side was perceived as ripe for redevelopment, and to MetLife that spelled opportunity.23 Between 1942 and 1943, the company formulated a plan to clear 18 blocks and replace residences, tenements, businesses and warehouses with two middle-class residential villages (Stuyvesant and Peter Cooper) to be built in Le Corbusier/Modernist style. The idea was MetLife’s (Frederick Ecker, board chair, took the credit). The project was perceived not only as an investment for MetLife but also as a way to “give back to the city.” The Stuyvesant project brought “life in the country in the heart of the city,” say it in other words, a suburb in the city (Zipp, 2010, p. 17). MetLife had a track record for projects of this nature. Parkchester, the largest private housing development in the United States (129 acres), had just opened in the Bronx in 1941. But “Parkchester was really a suburban development built on open land at the end of a subway line” (Zipp, 2010, pp. 77–8). Stuyvesant and Peter Cooper was redevelopment in its purest form—in the heart of downtown Manhattan. Business Week and MetLife insisted that the immediate problem triggering Stuyvesant was blight and slums, but its ultimate purpose was to halt “the process of decentralization which has been undermining the financial soundness of every major city in the United States” (Zipp, 2010, p. 83, quoting Business Week). What Ecker and MetLife needed to make this happen was not money, they had plenty of that; rather, they needed control of the real estate involved in the project.
Into that vacuum stepped Robert Moses. Without knowledge of MetLife’s plan, he saw the same Lower East Side opportunity and linked MetLife to it. Before meeting with Ecker, Moses got La Guardia on board with a revolutionary urban redevelopment framework. On February 1, 1943:
Ecker, Moses, city comptroller Joseph McGoldrick and Met Life’s general counsel sat down in Mayor La Guardia’s office and signed an agreement for ‘the redevelopment of a blighted area of eighteen city blocks … [in which] Metropolitan Life would ‘provide all the money necessary to execute the project. The company would buy as much of the area as it could, and the city would step in to acquire the rest through its powers of eminent domain and then sell it to Meet Life at cost’. The City would give Met Life “all lands in streets closed” … Met Life would give back to the City any land needed for its streets … [and] would build access roads, paths, landscaping, and buildings that could cover up to 28% of the land and reach a height sufficient to produce not less than 32,000 rooms and not more than 34,000 rooms. (Zipp, 2010, pp. 80–81)
MetLife’s tax bill would remain fixed based on the value of the property before redevelopment. And there we have it: the first known project memorandum of understanding (MOU) outlining a private–public partnership. The fusion of necessary powers and responsibilities took place in the housing/redevelopment agency.
Little of this was legal. New York’s 1941 Redevelopment Companies Law did not include all the elements specified in the MOU. A new law was needed. Off to Albany went Moses. Moses wanted to separate the Act’s redevelopment powers from the iron grasp that only public low-income housing could be built on acquired land. He wanted to delink slum clearance from housing and public housers. Also he stripped out the requirement to provide “adequate provision for displaced tenants’ (Zipp, 2010, pp. 81–2) and removed restrictions on profits and limited dividends (Mitchell, 1985, p. 261). Dutifully the state legislature agreed; the Hampton–Mitchell Redevelopment Companies Law was approved on March 30, 1943: “Stuyvesant Town was a crucial moment in the process by which downtown business interests transformed the housing reform movement into an effort offset decentralization and promote the central business district” (Zipp, 2010, p. 83). The New York City Housing Authority was empowered to conduct privately owned commercial housing redevelopment for middle/upper-class residents.
Approximately 10,000 low-income residents were displaced, and 24,000 mostly middle-class residents took their place in the high rises. Doors opened in August 1947, and were fully leased two years later. When the project was resold to BlackRock in 2015, the sale was hailed by Mayor De Blasio as the best way to preserve NYC’s affordable housing—time apparently heals all wounds. In 1943 there were wounds. Protests essentially no different than heard today immediately appeared. “Class warfare” it was called; noted housing reformers (like Charles Abrams) attacked the project and model vociferously. From day one private sector-led commercial/central business district redevelopment was not on CD’s agenda.
Pittsburgh
From the beginning Pittsburgh’s CBD-focused redevelopment was driven by the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD). But ACCD’s beginning, under the guise of “the citizen’s group of the Allegheny Region,” crystallized around 1941 (Tarr and Stewman, 1985, pp. 63–4). ACCD was a private organization composed of and led by the one-percenters. It spun off from the Pennsylvania Economy League and the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association (PRPA). Planning was a dominant strand and chief policy focus through each of ACCD’s predecessor organizations. Initially formalized as an EDO in 1918, the Citizens Committee on City Plan (CCCP), it changed name to the Municipal Planning Association (MPA) in 1920 and again in 1938 to the PRPA. In the 1920s the CCCP/MPA stressed the CBD’s adjustment to the automobile, concluding that decentralization threatened its vitality. Metropolitan federation was their preferred counter to suburbanization. Voters rejected the federation in 1929.
In 1939 RPAA brought in a consultant/planner, Robert Moses by name, to fabricate an “Arterial Plan for Pittsburgh.” It linked CBD to the suburbs through a network of highways. Moses was instructed to focus on “the Triangle,” which was to be the hub of the network and developed into a park. The Moses Plan’s bottom line was CBD hegemony. Moses stressed the need to eliminate the railroad yards that pervaded that sensitive area—also the elimination of congestion by removing trolleys from the CBD. Park Martin, director of the City Planning Commission, got his feathers a bit ruffled by the rather dominating role played by the PRPA business elites around the Moses Plan, but the Pittsburgh Chamber to set up a “Golden Triangle Division” with Richard K. Mellon as its chair. Its purpose was to “crystallize citizen effort behind a movement to stop depreciation of real estate values within the Golden Triangle by making it a better place in which to work and transact business” (Lubove, 1995, p. 105). The “godfather” behind the ACCD was always Richard K. Mellon, whose corporate empire included large financial institutions (Gulf Oil and Alcoa)—”a man of means, by no means.” Mellon lived up to his middle name, “King.” He was among the ten richest men in America. He served stateside in the army during World War II and at war’s end was discharged. In his early forties, he had recently inherited several businesses (including Mellon Bank). Mellon is representative of a generation of one percenters “coming of age” in postwar America’s business and political leadership.
ACCD by 1945 developed 12 committees, including “housing and neighborhood development” and “economic problems.” To coordinate advocacy and policy research, it hired executive director Park Martin (former Allegheny Planning Commission director—of ruffled feathers fame). Its “real guts,” however, was its executive committee, which included only CEOs of the most powerful businesses in the metro— attendance and voting were restricted to the CEO personally. As Moses had done two years earlier, ACCD’s first order of business to pursue their downtown-focused agenda was to acquire political clout. Just as the Baltimore Plan was the creature of Mayor McKeldin and Stuyvesant Town a partnership of La Guardia and Moses, Mellon needed a friend in City Hall.
The Republican Party machine had controlled state and Big City governments since the 1860s. That was fine with Mellon, who was a stout Republican. Pittsburgh, however, had broken from the machine and elected David L. Lawrence, the former Democratic Party state chairman. Elected mayor in 1945 to his first term, Lawrence served four terms, leaving the mayor’s office in 1959 and becoming in 1961 Pennsylvania’s first Catholic governor. Lawrence, born in the working-class Pittsburgh Golden Triangle neighborhood, committed himself in his campaign platform to working with Mellon and the ACCD. He personally committed himself to CBD redevelopment; one of his first acts was to appoint Park Martin to the city’s Planning Commission—creating a formal link between ACCD and city administration. Several top ACCD members possessed considerable informal access to Lawrence—Mellon was not Lawrence’s go-to connection.
Lawrence’s campaign platform and ACCD’s downtown strategy overlapped; they comprised three related simultaneous initiatives—“smoke” or pollution abatement, flood control and the Point Park (Golden Triangle) redevelopment. In 1945 and 1947 the state approved a series of empowering legislations, nicknamed the “Pittsburgh Package,” that both cleared the way for local action—authorization for municipalities to create urban redevelopment authorities for example—and satisfied necessary preconditions for private investment (smoke and flood control). To pursue these initiatives, with ACCD support if not instigation, in 1946 Lawrence created the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) (he was chair, the board included city council and business leaders). Lawrence’s personal assistant, John Robin, was appointed its first CEO. In later years two additional authorities, a parking and an auditorium authority, were created to conduct CBD redevelopment projects.
Within weeks of Lawrence’s 1945 election, Republican Governor Martin accepted Point Park as a state park, a decision which required the removal of several bridges and acquisition of land, followed by demolition. ACCD was designated the state’s administrative coordinator, and by 1949, with $7 million of state funds, the land (36 acres) had been assembled and demolition of 15 acres of freight yards, elevated bridges, railroad tracks, terminals, 26 commercial buildings and Pittsburgh’s old Exposition Hall commenced. Earlier, in 1946, a second Golden Triangle initiative (the 23-acre Gateway Center) started—funded by Equitable Life (MetLife declined). The 59-acre Point Park district was certified as “blighted” by the City Planning Commission in 1947. Construction commenced in 1950. Gateway Center redevelopment continued through 1964. First to be completed were three 20–24 story office buildings in 1952 and 1953. Mellon himself funded the new headquarters for Mellon Bank and another for Alcoa in the early fifties, outside “the Point”—intended to demonstrate his commitment to other private CBD investment. In 1949 the Mellon Foundation provided $4 million for a public parking garage.
Four years previous to the July 15, 1949 Housing Act, the nation’s first formal postwar CDB redevelopment program was on its way—with state, local and private funds. Today called Renaissance I, the two-decade (1945-65) initiative followed closely the 1939 Moses Plan:
By 1967, 19 renewal projects were completed or under construction. These encompassed approximately 1500 acres (765 clearance). Of the total acreage 465 acres were committed to industrial reuse, and another 103 to commercial office reuse. The total public costs were estimated at $171.5 million (including $112 million spread over 8 [post-1954] of the projects. According to the URA $125 million in tax assessments [resulted] … 50 industrial firms had been accommodated in new modernized facilities, and 55,000 persons worked in firms located in renewal areas. (Lubove, 1995, p. 128)
The United Nations Project
The United Nations Project has much to teach us about CBD redevelopment or the urban renewal strategy. First, the UN Project, whatever else it might be, is a CBD redevelopment project. Second, it is evident who the vanguards of postwar urban redevelopment are. Third, the UN Project exposes the seldom appreciated “soft side: of urban redevelopment—the popular culture and media, the optimism, the symbolism— and insight into how Washington policy-makers, devising the Housing Act of 1949, learned from New York City’s adventure in urban redevelopment. They negotiated the Act while the soft side, the golden years of popular, Policy World and media infatuation with the promise and the symbolism of urban regeneration were at their height.
Description of the UN Project is surprisingly simple. Big Four agreement at Yalta in February 1945 approved the UN. By the time the UN elected its initial leadership, secured financing and began searching for a site, it was the very end of 1946. New York City did not have a lock on the site—far from it. Paris, London and Geneva were very much in play, and Philadelphia (neutral ground from Wall Street and Washington DC) became the lead US site. Moses offered the 1939 World’s Fair (Flushing Meadows) site (where the UN had temporary headquarters); but the Flushing site “bored” diplomats, and soil composition issues complicated high-rise construction. The Moses site simply wasn’t acceptable.
In New York City’s favor, however, was that New York City was where the UN leadership/delegates wanted to be.24 In December 1946, a week from the final decision, the UN had the votes to locate in Philadelphia, not New York. At that point, nationally prestigious NYC real estate developer William Zeckendorf got involved. Zeckendorf had been working on his “X-City” redevelopment project, a six-block site along Manhattan’s East River. The project was a massive private, commercial office redevelopment that would demolish the few residences that stood there (fewer than 200 families), along with mostly vacant apartments, warehouses, factories and a not so symbolic, huge, functioning slaughterhouse. Cows and pigs were literally herded through some streets to slaughter. Still in the design stage, Zeckendorf had purchased much of the site.
At this last moment Zeckendorf told Mayor William O’Dwyer he would sell the site to the UN if they wanted it. Moses and Trygve Lie (first UN Secretary-General) had previously walked the site, revealing Moses’ behind the curtain role. O’Dwyer didn’t have money, so he called Nelson Rockefeller. On the night before the final decision meeting, Nelson went to Dad, John D. Rockefeller, and asked the skinflint for money to buy the site, which he would deed to the UN. Generous soul that he was, Dad reached into his piggy bank and came up with $8.5 million ($85 million today), which did the trick—Zeckendorf sold the site that night, the UN leadership was notified and next day New York won the competition.
As to urban redevelopment’s nitty-gritty, the UN was certainly not a housing project, but otherwise was neither fish nor fowl: not commercial; built on land not subject to US sovereignty; functionally a mere office building, perhaps a corporate headquarters. Its ambiguity opened the door to all sorts of initiatives that offered hope for central city revitalization. While financing was private, the city brought to the table, through the good offices of Robert Moses, its usual incentives:
Robert Moses delivered a roster of municipal incentives … Moses … believed that the provisions necessary to protect United Nation’s investment—tax exemption [and] for site and street closures needed to form a superblock—would be the same minimum incentives necessary to encourage the private clearance and rebuilding of expensive in-town land for urban renewal projects to come. (Zipp, 2010, p. 51)
Tossed in were tunnels, and zoning changes. Design was by a team of the world’s most noted architects. Le Corbusier was a team member, and his design was selected. The city handled residential and business relocation (the latter so inconsequential it was done honorably, the former not so good). Site demolition, at UN expense, was also handled by the city. The site was not a slum (although virtually no one lived there) and did not meet the technical letter of being blighted (businesses were profitable and paying taxes); but much of the site was vacant. Compared to the UN, the existing uses were obsolete, inferior—and in the way. They needed to be demolished, and that was the message imparted to future urban redevelopers.
Blight was not a technical or legal description; it was an image of decay, obsolescence and a past that was no longer working (Zipp, 2010, p. 59). These elements, then, were incorporated into the popular, the business, the media and the Policy World’s rationale—the “story” of why we needed urban redevelopment. Successful redevelopment of six blocks along New York City’s East River would be visible proof that urban redevelopment constituted a viable strategy to restore the central city. Construction started in 1947, a financial crisis averted in 1949; UN staff started working in the building in 1950, and in 1952 the first session of the General Assembly was held.
And, since we mention the Policy World, despite misgivings by a few, the Policy World joined in the story as well: “Planners and architects ratified this symbolic linkage, claiming that overcoming urban disorder was not just the matter of cityrebuilding, but analogous to the United Nation’s fundamental mission” (Zipp, 2010, p. 59). Most urban-relevant and policy journals of the day supported the project and endorsed its promise as being the future for the city. Le Corbusier claimed that the United Nations and “the whole East River will be brought to life, will awaken … and will thrive as a ‘Radiant City’” (Zipp, 2010, p. 62). So did the New York Times. Even Lewis Mumford climbed on board. Despite initial skepticism and his general belief in dinosaur cities, by the end of the UN Project Mumford was gushing. The UN became to him a new opportunity to “found a new kind of urban community … A new city … could be carved out of an older metropolis ‘by a large-scale process of slum clearance, removal, and rebuilding, financed wholly by the United Nations’” (Zipp, 2010, p. 60). Coming from Mumford, this hopeful image of the future resulting from urban renewal shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Through the prism of the United Nations the reader can see the larger picture, the usually unspoken backdrop justifying urban redevelopment through slum clearance as the best hope of the central city. Infused with meaning:
[T]he United Nations [Project] and the ethic of city-rebuilding stood together in the minds of progressives and liberals. Both were legacies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s political idealism … Both seemed to many liberals to be the fruits of the struggle in World War II: replanned and rejuvenated cities went hand in hand with a world free from war and strife. Both, too, were imperiled. (Zipp, 2010, pp. 66–7)
The UN Project personified hope and a sense of urgency. Lost today is that postwar urban redevelopment rested on popular, not only business, consensus—a first order state and sub-state priority. While business elites blazed a path to urban renewal, they put their money where their mouth was. They were not merely greedy, self-interested, profit-seeking capitalists inflicting their miserable mentality—and the bulldozer—on poor and black people. That ignores an idealism: the soft side of urban physical redevelopment as the audacity of hope, embraced by most urban residents, political leaders and private business. Government, through partnership with the private sector, could remake the Big City and save it from Mumford’s extinction.
Ron W. Coan 