Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

by Samuel Zipp

Moving beyond the usual good-versus-evil story that pits master-planner Robert Moses against the plucky neighborhood advocate Jane Jacobs, Samuel Zipp sheds new light on the rise and fall of New York's urban renewal in the decades after World War II. Focusing on four iconic "Manhattan
projects"--the United Nations building, Stuyvesant Town, Lincoln Center, and the great swaths of public housing in East Harlem--Zipp unearths a host of forgotten stories and characters that flesh out the conventional history of urban renewal. He shows how boosters hoped to make Manhattan the capital
of modernity and a symbol of American power, but even as the builders executed their plans, a chorus of critics revealed the dark side of those Cold War visions, attacking urban renewal for perpetuating deindustrialization, racial segregation, and class division; for uprooting thousands, and for
implanting a new, alienating cityscape. Cold War-era urban renewal was not merely a failed planning ideal, Zipp concludes, but also a crucial phase in the transformation of New York into both a world city and one mired in urban crisis.

Genres: New York, Nonfiction, History, Cities, Urbanism, American History

488 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2010

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

While "urban renewal" has become a dirty word in recent decades, this book discusses New York City's projects from the standpoint of the renewers, pointing out that a) some of what was torn down was not quite up to mid-20th c. standards and b) some renewal projects (such as Lincoln Center and the Stuyvestant Town housing development) worked out nicely.

Zipp adds, however, that even the best projects suffered from one major flaw: government did not build enough housing to house everyone who had been displaced by public works projects. When government did build housing, the resulting projects were often because the inhabitants were all poor and because the government bulldozer had wiped out neighborhood businesses.

[Colin K-D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book! A really interesting complement to The Power Broker that adds much needed context from architecture, urban studies, and political economy to the history of urban renewal in NYC. So helpful for understanding how the NYC I now live in came to be, and the long history of grassroots efforts to preserve the neighborhoods that continue to be threatened by gentrification, renewal, etc.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book from my comps list I haven’t actually read until now… I’m not sure how to judge it because I have all the spatial sense of a dead horseshoe crab. I admire architects in much the same way I admire mathematicians and pole vaulters, as people who might as well be doing magic as far as my abilities to do the same go.

I guess I better judge based on the historical narrative, then, because architectural details are lost on me. In that, the book is fine, though a tad thesis-heavy: major urban renewal projects in Manhattan were influenced by the Cold War, in that planners wanted both to prove they could do (x planning task) better than the Soviets and as they sought to make New York the capital of 20th century modernity. This is true of the UN HQ, the Stuyvesant Town housing project, Lincoln Center, and the East Harlem housing projects. All of these are “superblocks,” lifted out of the street grid on oversized plots of land and one way or another isolated from the rest of the city to form self-contained units. All of them were major top-down projects that made heavy use of eminent domain to clear out slums in order to make these modernist utopian constructions.

All of them faced resistance, along an accelerating course- less for the UN HQ and then steadily more until the East Harlem projects got caught up in years of political fighting. In part, this was the resistance of people displaced from these “slums,” in part it was other people resisting the divisive results of slum clearance and new building in terms of race and class. The Stuyvesant Town apartments were only desegregated after a protracted fight, and the drive to rebuild the city in general entailed breaking up some of the city’s more racially diverse neighborhoods and kicking thousands of people, disproportionately black and Puerto Rican, out of their homes.

The usual story is that urban critic Jane Jacobs came along and curbed the abuses of “high modernist” superblock neighborhood-destroying city planning in favor of more human-scaled, mixed-use development strategies. But Zipp shows it was much more complex than that. Well before Jacobs, there were those arguing for the value of messy-seeming urban arrangements. Moreover, the equation (city rebuilding support = racism and classism) always and everywhere wasn’t right, either. There was widespread support for rebuilding the city’s housing stock among working-class, poor, and communities of color in New York in the late 1940s- their housing stock was generally dilapidated, after all. Most of them just wanted improvements within their communities, not getting bulldozed out of the way, but they didn’t share the nostalgic aspect of the vulgar Jacobs-ism, which has foisted on us the “creative city,” with its “mixed” use of luxury condos and the kind of coffee shops luxury condo dwellers like. All in all, a solid book, as far as my non-expert, spatially-challenged self can tell. ****

[The Book : An Online Review at The New Republic]

WHEN JOHN LINDSAY was elected mayor of New York City in 1965, he “summoned” his fellow citizens to fight against “greed, ignorance, bureaucracy, prejudices, and defeatism” in order “to revive the hopes of the downtrodden, the sick, the exploited” and to create “a city in which there will be new light in tired eyes, and the sound of laughter in our homes.” Twelve years later, Lindsay was discredited and Edward Koch began his mayoralty by saying that “all too often those who were charged with caring for the disadvantaged turned the generosity of New Yorkers into a form of folly.” Read more...

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid story about urban renewal in the city that captured about a third of all federal urban renewal funds. Zipp does a surprisingly good job relating the projects of Stuyvesant Town and Lincoln Center to an ubiquitous rhetoric of Cold War competition with the Soviets, and he also does a good job of relating the rise and fall of urban renewal to the rise and fall of urban liberalism. Only problem, the book is just too damn long.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A smart and excellently written book about the intersection of development and Cold War politics. Very very good.

[Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know much about urban renewal - and now I do, lol.

[Amy Hawley Alvarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed account on projects in NYC. Provides well-researched background on the enormous impact housing plans and outcomes had on NY residents.