New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis, Part 43

Author:
Publication date: 1938
Publisher: New York : Random House
Number of Pages: 630

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This pattern was favored over the hub-and-spokes and "Main Stree systems for obvious reasons. It adapted itself to the crucial main center the region, split by the Hudson River. It promised to break up incomis traffic on the periphery and shunt a good part of it into circumferential ar by-pass routes. It would help to prevent overcrowding along the rad offer easy communication between outlying towns, and draw industries t ward the outskirts by providing better facilities at the circumference.

Adapting themselves to terrain, the location of communities, and faci ties already in use, the systems evolved for trunk line, rapid transit a highway communication differed widely in each case from the abstract p. tern. It is impractical to attempt to trace the systems in detail. Only t

3 8

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THE URBAN PATTERN

ap can convey an adequate sense of these ground plans for movement ; it major proposals must be noted.

The framers of the Regional Plan considered the clarification of railroad ervices as perhaps the most important factor in the life of the region. Tilliam J. Wilgus recommended electrification and unification of all trunk hes. An outer belt, thrown about the region at an average distance of miles from City Hall, Manhattan, was planned to connect with all in- rsecting railroads. A broad inner-belt loop in New Jersey and two in a ine 10 ew York-one following for the most part a proposed underground ght-of-way inside the shoreline of Manhattan, the other a lariat flung own loosely over Brooklyn and Queens-would be hooked up by six ossings over or under the Hudson and East Rivers. Six union passenger in rminals were proposed for the New Jersey inner belt. In Manhattan, be- des Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station, a new major rminal at about 178th Street and Amsterdam Avenue would be supple- emented by others in the neighborhood of 149th Street and Mott Avenue, e Bronx, Queens Plaza in Queens, and Prospect Park Plaza in Brooklyn. githe Plan also suggested the transfer of commuting traffic from railroads rapid transit lines at specified inner points in New Jersey, Queens and fole Bronx, as a preliminary to rapid transit extension all over the region. rne int The regional highway system conformed more closely to the pattern grid an trunk lines or rapid transit. The metropolitan loop, largely an express ute, was projected so as to cross from Fort Lee on the George Wash- gton Bridge, traverse Manhattan in an open cut to a proposed new bridge er the Harlem, and so through the Bronx and over the East River by er ay of an Old Ferry Point-Whitestone Bridge (under construction in . ar )38) to Queens. A wide obtuse angle through Queens and Brooklyn ould carry it to the long-discussed Narrows Crossing, a bridge or tunnel ree er om Fort Hamilton to Staten Island, over the Goethals Bridge to Union punty, New Jersey, and deep into Essex and Passaic Counties in a broad rve back through Bergen County to Fort Lee.

As in the railroad trunk line (it was intended, in fact, that trunk line, pid transit and highway programs should use the same differentiated or rallel routes at many points), radials splayed out from the loop to con- ct with the main long-distance highways. An express highway circuit out the Manhattan waterfront (more than half completed in 1938) was tanso projected. Three transverse inner routes, running east-and-west across tpalanhattan, were intended to facilitate intra-regional traffic between New y tirsey and Long Island. The southernmost would use the Holland Tunnel,

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418

CITY PLANNING

a Canal Street crosstown express highway, and follow Manhattan Brid, JU to Brooklyn. The midmost highway would reach Manhattan through til Lincoln Tunnel, underpass at midtown, and go under the East River In way of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The most northerly inner route w proposed as a vehicular tunnel from Fort Lee and an express highway cros town at 125th Street to the Triborough Bridge.

The other major feature of the highway program was the metropolitaN by-pass, well inside the extreme circumferential route, which would coi nect with all the chief radii. This would enable long-distance vehicl southbound from New England on USI, for example, to turn west Bridgeport through upper Westchester County to Peekskill, cross the Hu son on the Bear Mountain Bridge, and come down through New Yo Ro State and New Jersey in the vicinity of Suffern, Boonton, Morristown, Be minster and South Somerville to the mainline south. Besides the maj lo highways, and often consolidated with their routes, the Plan advanced well-articulated net of parkways, boulevards and freeways laid down ovde the whole region.

Its proposals in regard to land use are necessarily somewhat comple the Stripped of explanations and coordinating data, these advocated a futu policy of regional zoning in terms of fixed qualities legally imposed fili land-i.e., areas permanently devoted to business, industry, residence recreation. They maintained the primary distinction between open ai ! closed development. They favored, whenever possible, the tendency towa and industrial dispersal into nuclei on the periphery. It was suggested thine these nuclei should be wedge-shaped developments along the radial lind interspersed with residential areas and green spaces, rather than urban be ket woven indiscriminately across sectors better suited to other uses.

Specifically, the Graphic Plan recommended these projects, among otherte for industrial close development: satellite districts along the proposed ra lose road outer belt line; a major portion of the Hackensack Meadows; reci dere mation of Upper Bay areas in the vicinity of Bayonne and Jersey City ; tocat western shore of Newark Bay and related territory; the Raritan River and New Jersey Ship Canal sector; further concentrations at Newtown Credit Astoria and Long Island City; and the westerly shore of Jamaica Bay. T A larger part of the bay land area was to be reserved for recreation faciliti

Quoting the fact that 75 percent of urban land is normally devoted residential purposes, the Plan recommended large areas for such use

the Est Staten Island, in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx; a 15,000-acre tract

#do- the upper end of the Hackensack Meadows; and portions of Middlese

Amb

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THE URBAN PATTERN

[nion, Essex, Passaic and Bergen Counties, New Jersey, and Westchester ounty, New York. These proposals had special reference to extensions of ilroad and highway belt lines, and more particularly to the enlargement rapid transit routes.

ro In the category of open development, the Plan submitted an extensive urk program considered under two heads: large parks in the environs and New York City parks. These were subdivided into so-called compact and ciobon parks. The environs proposals contemplated, among others, reser- ications along the Highlands of Navesink, in parts of the Watchung Moun- st ins, and a section east of Lake Hopatcong. A large extension of Bear Hmountain Park, a four-by-five mile tract north of Peekskill, and the Lake Y onkonkoma and New Mill Pond sections on Long Island were also picked Fait for treatment. Among 83 large or small park proposals listed for New nafork City were those covering areas of the East River islands, Flushing ed :eek Meadows (the 1939 New York World's Fair site, which has been developed with subsequent park use in mind), the Jamaica Bay islands, a terfront extension at Canarsie, a Marine Park addition in Brooklyn, and plther parks at Willow Brook, Great Kills, Prince's Bay and Ward Point ut. Staten Island-the least developed borough. Studies of water supply and d Military reservations and a strategically laid out system of 46 airports for ce id and seaplanes filled out the program.

a The second volume of the Regional Plan, led off by a comprehensive waard luminous rationale of the planning art in a democratic society, took up the problems of planned land use, zoning, housing, maritime and railroad lingminals, and the dovetail interdependence of streets and buildings. It beletched out plans of treatment for a variety of typical or specific sites, eas and neighborhoods in New York City, metropolitan New Jersey and there outskirts. So far as architecture was concerned the slightly advanced I ranservatives seemed to be in the majority; but the projects themselves rechere at worst inappropriately fantastic-the suggested Battery Park res- station, for example, with its armillary spheres and enormous obelisk- er af d at best brilliantly practical realizations of what the city and the region Creeight become.

T Among the major proposals were those for a civic center about City Hall ilitidrk and a West Side waterfront development in downtown Manhattan ted use ract he Miller Express Highway was roundly disowned) ; a replanned lower st Side ; elevated promenades for pedestrians-once envisioned by Leon- lo-in the Times Square district; a watergate on the Hudson for Co- lesanbia University, which would form a part of the Riverside Drive apron

420 CITY PLANNING

development; and a tremendous project for remaking the Harlem Valley tied in with a new railroad terminal and civic center for the Bronx : Mott Haven. The pattern of borough civic centers was further elaborate by suggestions for remodeling the Brooklyn Bridge approach neighborhoo in Brooklyn and for the establishment of a borough center and airport ju. east of the junction of Grand Street and Borden Avenue in Queens.

The selective sampling undertaken in this outline hardly suggests tł. organizing values of the Regional Plan: its generosity of conception in th democratic idiom, its immense and precise scale, its allowances for tim and the unpredictable, its coherent interlinkages, its evidence of cooperativ harmony in the labor and vision of many workers. It has been criticize -soundly enough in some cases-for an orientation largely outside thqu social sciences; for an insufficient realization of the neighborhood's pr 43 dominant role as the chief unit and type phase in the city's growth; anfat for various minor errors of judgment or attack.

But the beginnings of the Plan's vindication are woven into the story ( New York's change of heart in the 1930's. In the past such changes hayfr been periodic and subject to violent relapse. (A British psychiatrist, S. Fthe Kraines, diagnosed national psychologies for a professional journal : 1937, with an effect of high satire. He gave as his opinion-no doubt winner a particular eye to New York-that the United States was suffering from "a typical manic-depressive psychosis.") Certainly there are Grand Cafe yons and Himalayas in the landscape of the city's spirit. But after eachtar climb or descent the works remain: the bridges raised, the songs sung, tl Eas formulae put to use.

In any case, the city had begun to work toward a negotiable future.at the end of 1937 the Regional Plan could report striking progress in i s schedule of improvements. During the first four years after publication the Plan, 15 out of 51 projects recommended as "urgent" were complet pat or in process and 13 others had been officially approved or studied. Amor sh items on the agenda for the next four years, a bulletin of December 1937, showed that 20 projects were finished or under construction and lai had been acquired for five more, out of a total of 47 "urgent" proposa 00

The clover leaf of the Triborough Bridge and the south tube of ti ht Lincoln Tunnel already carried their shining ranks of cars. The Quee Non Midtown Tunnel shields were inching forward under the plans of the Ne dalf York City Tunnel Authority. The ribbons of the Henry Hudson Parkw led across the new Henry Hudson Bridge, its Number Two deck still u

phi der construction. The Old Ferry Point-Whitestone Bridge was advancis T

42I

THE URBAN PATTERN

Hver the East River. The Interborough Parkway from Kew Gardens to rooklyn had been completed and the Marine Parkway Bridge laid across ockaway Inlet. In New York and its environs some 207 miles-or about vo-thirds-of the express highway system advocated by the Plan were men to traffic or about to be opened.

Even in a city in which school children carve soap models of housing hits and adults play a game called "Skyscraper," a city in which acute nateur appreciation of architecture and engineering is by way of being a tilinor amenity, the carrying out of such projects on such a scale would tot have been possible without broad popular support of an extraordinary ind. This same support gave Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia the chance to it his intelligent and truculent energy at the service of the city. It encour- ged the resourceful Robert Moses, his Commissioner of Parks, in the exe- tion of a program which included Jacob Riis Park and Orchard Beach, e recapture of Wards and Randalls Islands for recreation use, and the velopment of Juniper Valley Park in Queens and Red Hook Park in ha ooklyn. Light began to cut into the dense formations of New York and ere was sun over new beaches.

Other influential factors were involved. The Port Authority's achieve- ents have been elsewhere noted. The Mayor's Committee on City Plan- frding had done creditable work and the City Planning Commission author- ded under the new charter effective January 1, 1938, made an interesting ez art early in that year with a project for reclamation of areas on the lower ist Side. Most important of all, perhaps, the Federal Government's work lief agencies supplied labor and technicians to do the job of public recla- ation and construction. al

Such effects signalized a profound change in the social tone and habitude the city: in what it wished to be, in its conception of a desirable life- ttern. This change was remarked by the French novelist, Jules Romains, ho came to the United States in the summer of 1936 and later reported s impressions in Visite aux Américains-a Voltairean title for a book at offers New York in particular the tribute of a singularly discriminat- g admiration. Romains' last previous visit had been in 1924. An expert the human resonance of great cities, he compared his precise recollec- ons of that earlier year-its equivocal ethics, at home in the guarded If-light of the speakeasy, its neurotic drive to make each moment pay full, its violent emulation of the machine-with the New York to nich he returned in 1936.

The effect was decisive. There had been some extraordinary change in

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422 CITY PLANNING

the face and character of the city. Its very streets were fresher, the sky ha opened, there was a luster on the flanks of great clay shafts, the intimatio of an unbelievable tranquillity. True, it was summer ; but the deeper sigr were plain. They appeared in the faces of the people, in every turn an feature. The old, abrasive will-to-action for its own sake was gone. The: men and women were freer, more open, casually good-natured, even happ They had time for a new and more relaxed gaiety. He felt in them a pr found reinvigoration of the democratic spirit.

So it must come back to the people: the lives they wear-and since, :| John Dewey wrote, "walking implicates the ground as well as the legs"- the city they make, the city they hope for. The symbolic instant of ligi coming up in a face as the coin is dropped in the subway slot and tl turnstile jerks, a face unknown before, unlikely to be seen again-nurs pickpocket, showgirl, newsboy, grandmother, artist, wife-defines the i numerable lives. These are the faces of the city's children, patient ar furious, mad or indestructible calm; relentless, vain, wandering, gleeft obdurate or lost; faithless and lonely, or ennobled by an infinite practic tenderness for mankind. The city is their companion and their mothe their schoolmaster and executioner. They are constructed in its image; at the city itself is an image of the disparate and enduring heart of man.

New Yorkers in Transit

THE VAULTED MAIN ROOM OF GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL

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WALL STREET'S EMPLOYEES EMERGING FROM THE SUBWAYS AS THE CLOCK ON TRINITY TOWER POINTS TO NINE

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Top: "EL" STATION AT HANOVER SQUARE, NEAR THE FINANCIAL DISTRICT

Bottom : MILLIONS EACH DAY SURGE THROUGH THE NARROW PLATFORMS OF SUBWAY STATIONS

Top: THE S.S. Normandie NOSING HER WAY INTO NEW YORK HARBOR Bottom: GIANT PIERS THRUST WELCOMING ARMS INTO NORTH RIVER

Above: "CITY LINE TO CANAL STREET WITHOUT A RED LIGHT," ON THE NEW HIGHWAY ALONG THE HUDSON

Below: TRAFFIC AT COLUMBUS CIRCLE, LOWER END OF CENTRAL PARK

INCOMING TRAINS

INCOM NO TRAN

PENNSYLVANIA STATION'S GLASS-ROOFED TRAIN SHED

Above: BUSES, TAXIS AND PRIVATE CARS ON FIFTH AVENUE Below :. THE HOMEWARD RUSH ACROSS THE BAY TO STATEN ISLAND

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Top: THE S.S. Normandie NOSING HER WAY INTO NEW YORK HARBOR Bottom: GIANT PIERS THRUST WELCOMING ARMS INTO NORTH RIVER

Above: "CITY LINE TO CANAL STREET WITHOUT A RED LIGHT," ON THE NEW HIGHWAY ALONG THE HUDSON

Below: TRAFFIC AT COLUMBUS CIRCLE, LOWER END OF CENTRAL PARK

INCOMING TRAINS

INCOMING

PENNSYLVANIA STATION'S GLASS-ROOFED TRAIN SHED

Above: BUSES, TAXIS AND PRIVATE CARS ON FIFTH AVENUE Below :. THE HOMEWARD RUSH ACROSS THE BAY TO STATEN ISLAND

ROCKKLYN

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KALUNTEN DRUGS

TIMES SQUARE, BUSIEST TRAFFIC INTERSECTION IN NEW YORK

Below: A SUBWAY ROAD COMES UP FOR AIR IN BROOKLYN. (MANHATTAN IN BACKGROUND)

XXII. HOUSING

One-Third of a City

LHE HOUSING problem in New York, becoming each year more pressing 's the city has developed, was already an inherited evil more than a cen- ury ago. Today it has grown into an overwhelming menace, calling for eroic measures and large-scale planning to remedy the cumulative effects f greedy land speculation, low building standards, and faulty city plan- ing. Housing designed to bring in a profit from the lowest income group admittedly no longer possible under existing minimum standards with- ut government subsidy. A century of protest has at last resulted in an wakened and intelligent approach to the problem.

Indeed, analysis has gone sufficiently far to show that even many worthy Knickerbocker landlords are themselves inadequately housed, and that ele- cant Park Avenue-despite brass-braided doormen, glassed-in showers nd air-conditioning-is essentially a super-slum, lacking such fundamen- als of good housing as pleasant and wholesome surroundings for each welling, plenty of fresh air and sunshine for each room, adequate play- pace and other amenities of civilized living. New housing for the un- lerprivileged has gone far to incorporate these standards; and though ontingent upon subsidies in one form or another, modern housing devel- pments are progressively tending toward higher living standards. Slum learance, city planning, government subsidies, improved building prac- ices, and ever more stringent housing regulations are all various aspects of the housing problem as it is envisaged today.

Existing Conditions

In the predominantly residential blocks of Greater New York as a whole, housing of the multi-family type constitutes only a little more than a third of the total. But in Manhattan nearly 94 percent of the housing is of this ype, in the Bronx nearly 70 percent and in Brooklyn more than half. In he much newer boroughs of Queens and Richmond, single-family housing

423

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HOUSING

prevails to the extent of about 79 percent and 94 percent respectively. Tw ich family homes, while still relatively numerous in Brooklyn especially and 83 of a lesser degree in the Bronx and Queens, are virtually non-existent in Manruste hattan.

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About 17 square miles, or nearly 10 percent of the greater city's priond dominantly residential blocks, consist of slums or blighted districts; ar. A of these, ten square miles have been condemned as unfit for human habit the tion. In extent of condemned slum area, Brooklyn holds first place witlive 5.3 square miles, and Manhattan follows 4.4 square miles. Throughout thetory entire area, according to the New York City Housing Authority, "mo.gsca than a half-million slum-dwelling families are condemned to lives cloth squalor and degradation." Rents in New York City are higher, both abseem lutely and in proportion to income, than anywhere else in the world; anwn these families pay from $10 to $30 a month for their slum apartments. into

In few foreign cities outside of Italy and France and Germany, and jaar no other American city save Boston, are housing conditions comparable t those in New York. Certainly not since the days of Imperial Rome hay so many people been so packed and piled together. Most densely populated of course, are the slum areas of the lower East Side and Harlem in Mar

loc Ipa 25 A hattan ; Brownsville, Williamsburg and the Red Hook and Navy Yard se tions in Brooklyn. The average population to the acre for the city's res dential area as a whole is 266; but in the slums numerous acres contai as many as 600 people each. A single block in Harlem, probably the mo: densely crowded in the city, has a population of 3,781. Negroes in the cit are segregated and exploited, the higher rent they are forced to pay amount ing in many cases to 40 or 50 percent of the family income. The conges tion in Harlem has made common what are known as "hot beds"-i.e beds rented in three eight-hour shifts.

As related by the editors of Fortune, an architect of model towns i! England told a New York conference that he had seen the slums of Eu rope and South America but had nowhere found conditions that were none preferable to those in New York City. The latter's tenement history, he de clared, is "one of the most shameful of human records. Nowhere have theder estates of early landowners benefited more richly from an increase in reallast estate values for which their founders were very slightly responsible, anche nowhere have the heirs ripened their benefice with greater harm." In 1894ate the trustees of Trinity Church, richest religious organization in the countryn and one of the largest of early landowners, refused to heed an ordinanceind requiring them to supply water to each floor of their tenements in Green-par

ONE-THIRD OF A CITY 425

vcich Village, in spite of a Board of Health report that the death-rate in ty of the Trinity tenements was a third higher than the general rate. The arjustees have since changed their attitude, but the fact remains that in gen- al even the most elementary advances in the improvement of housing renditions can be effected only through stringent enforcement of the law. in At least a glimpse of New York's principal tenement area is afforded tale visitor who speeds over the long approaches to one of the great East itliver bridges. He will note the monotonous unbroken rows of five or six thory structures, the façades of red-brick or brownstone, the outside fire- orcapes, the first-floor shops, the interspersed factories and warehouses, the gotheslines and bulkheads and pigeon coops on the huddled roofs, and the sdeming activity of the narrow streets. But, perhaps fortunately for his nwn peace of mind, he cannot see beyond the walls and beneath the roofs ito the fetid and roach-infested interiors where slum-dwellers spend by ir the greater part of their lives.

A common type of slum apartment consists of four rooms occupied by six ave seven persons. It contains no toilet or bathtub. It has beds, a sink (but eqo hot water tap), a washtub, a dresser, a stove, a table and a few chairs. public toilet (used by a score or so) is in the hall, either on the same por or on the floor below or above. If there are windows the outlook is pon a grimy blank wall, an elevated structure, or the windows of a similar partment.

Where massive Knickerbocker Village now squats Gulliver-like on the wer East Side there stood until as late as 1933 the dark and infamous nt es Lung Block." Of one of its buildings, known as the "Ink Pot," Ernest oole wrote: "Rooms here have held death ready and waiting for years. e. pon the third floor, looking down into the court, is a room with two ttle closets behind it. In one of these a blind Scotchman slept and took 10 e Plague in '94. His wife and his fifteen-year-old son both drank, and e home grew as squalid as the tenement itself. He died in the hospital. le Only a few months later the Plague fastened again. Slowly his little daugh- hær grew used to the fever, the coughing, the long sleepless nights . . . At alist she, too, died. The mother and son then moved away. But in this room che germs lived on . . . they can live two years in darkness. Then one year enter, in October, a Jew rented this same room. He was taken ill and died ry the summer. The room was rented again in the Autumn by a German cend his wife. She had the Plague already, and died. Then an Irish family nume in. The father was a hard, steady worker . .. But six months later

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426 HOUSING

he took the Plague. He died in 1901. This is only the record of one roor in seven years."

The "Lung Block," happily, has been demolished; unhappily, however nearly all of the vacated tenants were crowded into similar tenement nearby-and at higher rentals. Only three families of the Lung Block wer able to pay the Knickerbocker Village average rental of $12.50 a room month.

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New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis, Part 43

Author: Publication date: 1938 Publisher: New York : Random House Number of Pages: 630

Author:
Publication date: 1938
Publisher: New York : Random House
Number of Pages: 630