Claes Oldenburg's The Street and urban renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960

Modernist Renewal and New York City

From at least the 1930s, American urban planning had been shaped by the hegemonic European modernism of Le Corbusier. In his books The City of Tomorrow and When the Cathedrals Were White, Le Corbusier had proposed the wholesale destruction of chaotic, dirty old cities such as Paris and New York. (7) In their place would rise gleaming, new cities of uniform towers, surrounded by parks and connected by ribbons of high-speed automobile expressways (Fig. 8). This sort of urban planning became a kind of official program among Europe's leading architects when, in 1933, the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) adopted the Athens Charter, a manifesto for the new city. Meanwhile, in the United States, the means of engineering the new express-ways were being worked out by the German immigrant Fritz Malcher, whose 1935 book The Steadyflow Traffic System proposed soft curves, dedicated turn lanes, median strips, and separated parking areas in order to promote the ceaseless, signal-free flow of cars across cities. (8) His book, which began by excluding any discussion of sidewalks, formed the foundation of American urban traffic engineering. The tower-in-the-park program and the expressway program became the two chief elements of modernist urban planning.

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Although the sheer scale of Le Corbusier's schemes made them virtually impossible to adopt completely, at midcentury many governments found ways to incorporate aspects of the Athens Charter in their urban plans. Brasilia is the ultimate example of this kind of planning, but it was constructed from scratch. If existing cities were going to adopt the modernist model, they needed laws of eminent domain allowing them to dynamite existing blocks to make way for the new towers and greenery. (9) In the United States, such a possibility was opened by Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, which appropriated $1 billion to initiate a national program of urban renewal, and which allowed governments, for the first time, to seize private property in order to offer it, below cost, to private developers. (10) (The developers, who stood to profit neatly when areas were declared blighted, were often under no obligation to provide affordable housing in their new buildings.) In New York City alone, $267 million had been spent on Title I housing reconstruction by 1957, twice as much as in all other American cities combined. (11) This private development was accompanied by the public projects of the New York City Housing Authority, which by 1960 had completed fully a third of the multiple-dwelling construction in the city since World War II--virtually all of it by razing old brick tenements in order to put up neo-Corbusian towers. (12)

Meanwhile, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 established the interstate system, guaranteeing federal money to cover 90 percent of the cost of its construction, and initially committing $25 billion. Despite confusion at the highest levels of government about whether the interstates were meant to continue within city limits at all, 7,000 miles of urban highways were planned as part of the system, an amount that would more than quadruple total city highway mileage. (13) Greater New York's urban highway boom was particularly robust, with 899 miles existing or under construction by 1964, twice as many as in the runner-up, metropolitan Los Angeles. (14) A plan adopted in 1951 called for the easing of street traffic as well, and by 1960, Manhattan had converted nearly all of its avenues to one-way flow. (15) Over roughly the same period, the borough narrowed sidewalks on over 450 of its streets. (16)