USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 41
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plants, animals and environment that result in organic communities." Rotaf ert Murray Haig mentioned in 1927 that ecological studies were not thef co sufficiently advanced to be available for immediate use; ten years late In Marie Swabey could write that on the whole the social sciences were stagi "at the descriptive and classificatory level." But since the planning scien hat is in part an attempt to anticipate future social situations, even the broadche and more basic framework of ecology could not help but be invaluable as a more elastic scheme of orientation.
The characteristic terms of the planning science-land economics, ejust cient pattern of population, primary and ancillary economic functions, felleer tor of safety, ratio of friction-indicate that it attempts no primary cu fo tural analysis beyond the exposition of current or anticipated plant antese process. Its basic orientation is in effect an extension of civil engineeriniewi Perhaps in part as a reaction from the somewhat wide-eyed school of t.und City Beautiful popular in America early in the 20th century, or more in portantly, out of prejudice for and training in the tradition of the gework metric approach and the mechanistic sciences, its sponsors-with certa mass notable exceptions-have been content to work within the broadened c 1 teria of Victorian utilitarianism. lac
It is obvious that this must have been influenced to some extent by tolar necessity for "practical" presentation. The real reasons lay deeper ; th suc were all involved in the fact that modern community planning, fromgo Haussmann to Walter Curt Behrendt, has been in the main a technique reclamation. "In the larger community," said the architect Clarence Stektio in 1938, "we have city patching, not city planning." It could not-exce it in the new Soviet industrial cities, or in the towns set up by the Resettlema ment Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority-begin with The fresh site, as Alexander of Macedon had done, or as Peter the Great defeat with St. Petersburg: a site so ill-chosen that floods, commemorated in Pus - kin's The Bronze Horseman, repeatedly overran the city from the Nere and Lake Ladoga.
Paris is perhaps the typical example of a long tradition of city pla se ning as reclamation. Seven times in its history it has broken out of a gird tief of fortifications, each time adding one more ring of growth. Under Loutrel XIV, great monumental buildings went up and the old Portes Saint-Der and Saint-Martin became triumphal arches. Napoleon Bonaparte develop:t 60 new streets, among them the Rue de la Paix. Under Napoleon Il bar Georges Haussmann and his executive engineer, Deschamps, spent $2( l 000,000 a year-an enormous sum in those times-toward opening uff
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Rolaffic with great avenues broad enough to serve as military roads. These, the course, were instances of planning by fiat. late
In the present century, heights of buildings have been regulated by zon- stig in the central quarters of the city; but the major problem of Paris, like endat of most metropolises, has been the problem of the suburbs. It is, in adher words, an end-product of unregulated industrial expansion in the tablileotechnic age: the benighting of whole regions with industrial waste oducts and the housing of workers in semi-rural slums. Jules Romains etis made this world and its causes explicit in Flood Warning; and in The freek, he recreates a horrifying fragment of squatters' life in "the zone," cu former military area outside the fortifications. After the World War, arese squatters multiplied until they numbered some 100,000 in 1929. A injw regulating the development of such marginal areas was passed in 1924 toud a correlating and planning board, Direction de l'Extension de Paris, int up. Since that time the fortifications-400,000 cubic meters of stone gefork-have been demolished, most of the 59 gates widened and under- tajissed with tunnels for circumferential traffic.
cn The area of the old walls and "the zone," long obsolete and now re- aced by the new strategy of the Maginot Line, is being occupied by thanned developments: University City to the south, the great Boulevards thouchet and Jourdan, workers' colonies and other dwellings (more than rop,ooo new apartments were built during the period 1933-7), all inter- e coven with a green belt of playgrounds, gardens and parks. In 1932 regu- teitions were set up establishing a General Plan of Greater Paris-the area cetithin a radius of 22 miles about Paris proper-intended to provide sys- tl matic development zones for housing, business, industry and recreation. h hese regulations granted certain legal powers necessary to survey and dieate a coordinated city plan.
ist This characteristic history of remedial planning has been duplicated all fewer the modern world. Sir Patrick Geddes suggested a pattern in the biol- is of great cities: metropolis becomes megalopolis, which puffs itself up lanke a balloon; next parasitopolis, in which every man necessarily turns dlief or chiseler; and the end-phase, pathopolis, "the city that ceases effec- ulvely to function." Nearly every modern world city has gone through one en: more of these phases, complicated by the primary and drastic stresses pdf the first industrial age; all over the world, authorities and advisory Ilpards have been set up to recast cities and whole regions.
d In Italy, for example, "the first modern town planning legislation," the uxpropriation Law, was passed in 1865; but it turned out to be so com- .
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plicated that not very much could be done. Under Premier Mussolir national planning became a major ambition, and the rebuilding of Rome especially in the central parts, was begun on a scale equalled nowhere el in the world. But this was to a considerable degree a work of archaeology cal restoration, compromised by an oversimplified system of radial mio tary avenues of the type generally considered unsuitable for modern traff
A town planning law similar to the Italian act was passed in Sweden 1874 and amended in 1907, 1917 and 1919. In Stockholm, a buildirs board-two architects, a physician, a lawyer, a contractor-determine a chitectural taste and land use. Aside from the older government grouf the Stockholm Town Planning Board is developing a civic center in tif middle of the city. As Marquis W. Childs has shown, one remarkable fe ture of Stockholm planning was the early capture of suburban areas ar harbor islands for low-cost housing financed in part by municipal loar Except in scale, Stockholm's problem of accommodation to a complicat system of waterways resembles that of the New York area. It is being solv with a regard to order and the amenities equalled nowhere else, perhajde but in the more ingenuous disposition of Rio de Janeiro about its harbola
The Russian single-function industrial cities are related more closely the ancient Kahun or the modern Dearborn than to multi-functional wor cities. In 1932 and later, as Thomas Adams writes, "the Commun Academy of Russia, which deals with the problem of Socialist distributi of the population, has evolved a concrete program of town planning whi takes into account all technical and social factors characteristic in the pre sent period of building." A ten-year plan for the development of Mosco submitted by the Union of Soviet Architects and made effective July 1 1935, specifies that (I) the area of the city shall be increased from 140 768 acres to 148,260 acres by 1945; (2) Greater Moscow is to be su te rounded by a forest belt some six miles deep (probably for military pi poses ) ; (3) there will be three new boulevards of extraordinary width Ilyich Avenue, for example, is to be 328 feet wide; (4) the new city wa converge upon the Palace of the Soviets, 1,360 feet high, one-third of on mile long and 820 feet deep; (5) population growth will be limited 5,000,000 by means of control of factories, evictions for slum clearandfor and a passport system.
At the end of 1937, Albion Ross reported in the New York Times that plans were being laid to convert Berlin into a monumental capital c organized about two huge squares and a mall. This Roman pattern w . intended to refurbish the old city of "disjointed and formerly independeas
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liwns," in which there were few impressive structures other than the Im- serial Palace and the Reichstag Building. The latter was to be pulled down. el make way for a massive Fuehrer Haus. Near its old site, two of "the oadest avenues in the world" would intersect each other. Behind the potsdamer Platz, the section in the middle of the city long occupied by rail- ad tracks was to be built up as a new district.
n In England, aside from the establishment of such limited garden cities Letchworth and Welwyn, London has made notable advances. The pture of the Thames Embankment, beloved of Whistler and Carlyle, Ou 1862-70, and the commercial developments involved in the Kingsway construction project prepared the way for a combination of local au- forities in the Greater London Joint Committee, which deals with co- an dinated problems involving the greater city and considerable areas in the ounties of Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent, Surrey, Middlesex and Bucking- ateamshire.
Against this drastically simplified perspective of world planning, which ecessarily leaves out of account such projects as the great Ruhr Regional bdlanning Federation, the situation of any large American city region, New ork in particular, shows certain obvious differences. Even among Ameri- orlin cities, many of which went up like tent colonies, New York had an nixcessively rapid growth which did not taper off to any great extent even tid the years after the World War. While the French were instituting their nidational compulsory planning law in 1919-24, the plummets of the land repeculator and the hammers of the cheap contractor swung over all the outlying boroughs of the city. Gazing at those interminable rows of houses, ften unsound in construction and exorbitantly priced, the observer may- I eckon for himself the overhead of unplanned and insufficientlv regulated evelopment. Y
Aside from private losses, "it can be shown," as Charles D. Norton hrote, "that without a plan hundreds of millions of dollars have been rasted in and near New York during the past century in desultory or ill- fonsidered public improvements." The cost goes deeper than that. It is: Reflected, not only in the measurable relation between unhealthy living conditions and disease, crime and misery, but in the whole tone of a so- ety. A policeman standing forever on point duty in the man-made night hf lower Broadway may feel that "timeless melancholy, dry, reckless, de- dieated and perverse," which Malcolm Cowley mentioned as the under- wing mood of New York in the 1920's; or a truck-driver, his willing elusto turned sour by an eternity of exasperation in jammed parking, red
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lights, sidewalk loading, and traffic like cattle in a chute, may wear a chi on his shoulder for all men, as Stephen Crane's Jimmie Johnson did.
More often than not, the functional ills of Manhattan and to an exter, those of the other boroughs have been blamed on a single scapegoat: thu Randall (Randel or Randell) Manhattan Plan of 1811, which still gov erned the main pattern of the borough in 1938. This was the gridiro la street plan drawn up by the engineer John Randall, Jr., under the direc tion of a three-man commission appointed by the legislature on April : 1807, at the request of the Common Council of New York. The commi: sion was authorized to plot the undeveloped area of Manhattan "in such manner as to unite regularity and order with the public convenience an benefit, and in particular to promote the health of the city." Under th more precise terms of the act, these large words meant that the commi sioners-Gouverneur Morris, Simeon DeWitt and John Rutherford-wer limited to the laying out of a system of streets and parks. They had r. authority to regulate building on private land, though the necessity of co relating street plan with land use and other elements had been understoc as early as the Babylon described by Herodotus. The Manhattan commi sion plotted a street and park system from the existing limits of the ol town at about the present East Houston Street north to 155th Street. Tl plan was submitted on March 22, 1811, and the legislature approved it the same year.
Europeans of the day regarded the checkerboard design as a prime strol of Yankee skill in mechanics, and it was later adopted in the plans f many American cities. When its defects began to appear, especially in Ma hattan, the Randall Plan lost face rapidly. Often its mathematical patte was unfavorably contrasted with the outline for the city of Washingto drawn up in 1791 by Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant in collaboration wi Washington and Jefferson. This contrast is in part a misconception born short memory and in part a failure to perceive the relatively light al simple functional demands made upon Washington as against other lar cities in the industrial age. The gridiron system, of course, was not ori inal with Manhattan's commissioners. Surveyors in the Roman Empire la out farms in squares; the 13th century plan of Peking was rectangular a fault. Traditionally, surveyors tended to carry over rural practice in t city. Thus Philadelphia's virgin start under William Penn was affected the rectangles of farms and the American householder's determination build whatever he pleased on his own land.
Thomas Adams has suggested that even L'Enfant's Washington pl
Ate
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was a combination of radial and rectangular streets, and its chief defect as that the diagonal lines were superimposed on the right-angled pattern stead of the reverse." Its orientation about the "Federal House," or apitol, which occupied the central position of the forum in Roman towns; e placement of the Capitol in relation to the "Grand Avenue," the latter- Ly Mall, which strikingly resembles the configuration of Paris between e Place de la Concorde and the Louvre, even to the right-angled situation the "President's House" corresponding to the Palais Royal; the "Presi- ent's park," with its suggestion of the royal parks later converted to pub- use in many European cities; the satellite squares which answered to e minor squares of Paris ; the disposal, more architecturally symmetrical an functional, of the great avenues-all these betrayed the 18th century's farming love for classic geometry, quite aside from the Francophilia of young French officer in exile and two Virginia gentlemen in a young untry which had a good deal more than classic charm to be grateful for. The plan was well suited to display those great masses of showy archi- cture subsequently laid down on it, many of which, as Lewis Mumford marks, have developed out of "a common failure of the American im- jination-a failure to realize that a mode of building that was in inter- tional vogue in 1789 is neither appropriately international nor properly pressive of our much broader and richer national tradition in 1937." ut to argue that L'Enfant's design for a single-function city indicated a ok teater prescience than the Manhattan commissioners showed, or that it ould have withstood the torque of rapid industrial and commercial expan- afon which was mainly responsible for the distortions of the 20th-century en.ulti-functional community, is to defend a case that has never come to tolial. vit n en
The defects of the Randall Manhattan Plan were for the most part of a different order. No doubt there are things to be said for it. Even in 1938, an's simple east-and-west division of numbered streets to either side of Fifth revenue, traversed by other parallel avenues and bounded by three rivers, "mained the simplest and quickest system of orientation available in any af orld city. The original plan and the slightly later one signed by William ridges, City Surveyor, apparently did not call for those broader streets at Intervals-Fourteenth, Twenty-Third, Forty-Second and so on up to Dyck- han (200th) Street-which served as cross avenues and helped to fix the hopping cores of neighborhoods and the placement of subway express ops. In any case, these were a practical extension of the plan. Besides a large public market, the commissioners laid out "ten public places, seven
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squares and three triangles," including a 230-acre parade ground in th center of the island between the present Madison Square and Thirt Fourth Street; but these were mostly gobbled up when the reservation ( Central Park was approved. Only Manhattan Square, present site of th American Museum of Natural History, and the parade ground nibble down to Madison Square, survived the rape of commercial developmen Too, the commission, limited by instructions and their own good sens were prevented from attempting what would have been the crowning moi strosity of classical grouping about a plaza on so narrow a strip of lar. as Manhattan. Quite properly, they saw that the functional nexus of tl island would continue to be its waterfront.
The chief criticism usually leveled against the Randall Plan is that failed to anticipate the much greater volume of north-and-south as again river-to-river traffic. In his excellent monograph on New York's plannir history, Henry James, consultant to the Regional Plan Committee, di cusses the relevant points in detail. The report accompanying the Plan 18II suggested that "it may be a subject of merriment that the commi sioners have provided space for a greater population than is collected any spot on this side of China." (In New York, then and later, there w always the tongue of the satirist to consider. But the commissioners rec oned without their host; the population actually developed about twi as fast as those honorable gentlemen, who were resigned to being calle grandiose, had anticipated. )
James shows that Gouverneur Morris in particular, a member of tl Manhattan commission and promoter of the Erie Canal, had what seeme to be a very plausible notion of New York's future. He wrote in 1814 th the Erie Canal would "make the shores of the Hudson in sixty years a most a continued village." Seen thus, the contemporary perspective fal together in all its parts. New York traffic would feed up and down tl Hudson exactly as the Mississippi steamboats did in relation to New Of leans half a century later. No matter how far to the north the city sprea it would spread along the banks of the Hudson, and water transport wou. be its dominant means of communication. Easy access between the mat expected barge terminals on the North River side and the concentration ocean vessels along the East River waterfront was therefore the first co: sideration. It was a sensible view; but in the onrush of the paleotechn era, in the waves of immigration, and more especially because the adve. of the railroad caused a basic division in transport methods and broug its own problems of transshipment by land, most of the hypothesis whi
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ad dictated the 1811 plan went by the board. A century later, the auto- obile broke loose on the narrow deck of Manhattan like the carronade Victor Hugo's novel.
The commissioners set aside a total area for streets approximately equal one-third of the whole land surface plotted, exclusive of open spaces; t as James suggests, their too literal gridiron did not make sufficient lowance at intersections or provide the necessary long diagonals. There ere broader and graver faults of conception. Mumford mentions that an curate topographic survey had been made for the commission. Its contour nes appear on the plan; but it was disregarded as completely as if the city ere to be laid out with a spirit level. Regard for grades is, of course, as sential in the plotting of a city as in drainage systems, highway or rail- ad construction. In this case, blocks were laid out even on the escarp- hients of the island, many of which-Riverside Drive and Morningside ark among them-were subsequently recaptured for public use by the rilliant Frederick Law Olmsted. The old drainage streams, crossed by hakeshift culverts, backed up into insanitary areas of swampland. The atural water entrances along the lower island were disregarded or filled and most of the available waterside preempted for commerce.
These were symptoms: of the plan's inflexibility, of its lack of concern -in part prescribed-with the incidence of any street pattern to topog- aphy, land use, character of transport, types of architecture. In a very efinite sense, the plan was a portent of advancing Victorianism, with its ften exclusive criterion of immediate and immediately "practical" use. More significantly, perhaps, it symbolized a cultural attitude which in other manifestations was to kill off the passenger pigeon and the bison, destroy helter belts in the plains states, and make the outskirts of most industrial ities and towns so many paleotechnic hells. Framed in the spirit that alled for "the conquest of nature" instead of an accommodation between ature and man, it preferred to iron out the hills of Manhattan by force ather than attempt to blend them into the contexture of a more habitable ity.
The rectangular plan, in the main unhampered by building regulations, naturally encouraged fliers in land values and helped to develop "the vorld's greatest real estate enterprise"-an ambiguous honor. This forced peculative development in terms of a rigid plan was the mode of Man- attan's growth through most of the 19th century. It is important to note how the city's most characteristic method of expansion-the gradual emer- gence of distinguishable but interlinked neighborhoods, in a process which
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resembles Boveri's classic sketch of the development of a sea urchin-wathe obscured and distorted by these speculative methods, especially in the late fak promotion of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
Meantime there were hitches and starts in city planning. A commissio pla appointed in 1860 to map the island north of 155th Street handed over itja powers to the new Commissioners of Central Park before very much hai been done. This time topography was carefully considered; and the effecten of such concern are particularly evident in the Fort Tryon-Inwood sectioras The Central Park Commission was given jurisdiction over the Bronx are p west of the Bronx River, with fairly broad powers. In 1871 this commisge sion was superseded by the Department of Public Parks, which was als tin charged with planning for railroads, pier and bulkhead lines. During thisbe period the elder Olmsted worked with Andrew H. Green and J. J. R. Croc on the notable job of laying out upper Manhattan and the Bronx.
Olmsted was everywhere. He drew up a masterly report showing the ren lationship between high land prices, the standard 100-foot lot depth, an by the long, unventilated, sunless houses of the day. He fought as hard foh green earth and light in Manhattan as the Michigan or Wisconsin settler were doing to cut their lands from the wilderness. He sponsored the de ter sign for Riverside Park, which was acquired after 1872, and collaborate P with Calvert Vaux on Prospect Park in Brooklyn (1864-9) and the super arrangement of Manhattan's Central Park, opened in 1857. This period between the Randall Plan and the greater city also saw the beginnings of Van Cortlandt, Pelham Bay, Forest and Bronx Parks, the Croton an Brooklyn Water Systems, and the 1867 Tenement House Law-this lat ter a poor patch on a useless garment.
After the consolidation of Greater New York under the 1898 charter the Board of Estimate and Apportionment was empowered to pass on street and park plans for each borough, which were to be submitted by th respective borough presidents. Nelson P. Lewis, Chief Engineer of th Board of Estimate during the period 1902-20, did much to establish provisional order in the hodge-podge of the city. In particular he under stood very thoroughly the sea-urchin process of New York's expansion As secretary to the New York City Improvement Commission-the so called McClellan Commission of 1903-he pushed hard for anticipator planning of marginal and other undeveloped areas. This was a shrew‹ point, as has been noted in the case of Paris and Stockholm. Instead, the McClellan Commission recommended projects which "were confined il great measure to the built-up portions of the city and the cost of acquiring
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whe land needed for them was so great that few of them were ever under- tiken."
This commission had been instructed to draw up "a comprehensive olan." The phrase itself indicates a beginning realization that processes interrelated in fact could not usefully be studied piecemeal. The short- a ved Committee on the City Plan, 1914, was notable in that (I) it ex- ended the idea of comprehensiveness to include a radius at least as broad os that which might "be reached within one hour by the most rapid means rf communication at present developed for the transportation of passen- i ers," and (2) its advisory committee was headed by Charles D. Norton bond Frederic B. Pratt. Norton later served as chairman and Pratt as a mem- er of the Regional Plan Committee.
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