As You Like It: A Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood

I love cities. I love the messy, vital, constant movement; the color, the busy sweep, the very insanity of so many people living and working together in a small space. The other day I found myself defending my love of cities to a woman who hated them. “I’m a farm girl at heart,” she told me proudly. While I share her love of the outdoors, I’m no Thoreau. If I stayed at Walden Pond for longer than an afternoon, I’d go nuts.

What makes me crazy is not the people who prefer the suburbs, but the city folks who itch to change their city without understanding how it works. They want it cleaner, safer, greener — all very admirable desires — but in the changing they destroy the very things that make them work. Tampering with a city is like fooling with an ecosystem — you never know what damage you will create by introducing new elements.

Jane Jacobs, a housewife from Scranton, a mother of three with no college degree, moved to New York and fell in love with its old neighborhoods. She came to learn how city neighborhoods worked and became a savvy community activist dedicated to preserving them. She wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, forever changing our understanding of cities. (from: In 2 visions, a blueprint to a livable city, Anthony Flint, 8/20/09, bostonglobe.com)

Though Jacobs may not have had fancy degrees, 50 years ago she came up against the ultimate PhD-developer-power-broker, Robert Moses, and won. Moses, who single-handedly built the New York we know today — its bridges and roadways, parks and swimming pools, Jones Beach, the UN building, Shea Stadium, and the housing towers that rose up in the era of urban renewal — ended up losing when he came up against Jacobs and the community groups that she formed. His idea of a city cleaned of its grittier elements was a sterile vision that left no room for one important piece: the people who lived there.

This idea of city cleansing began when Congress launched the Federal Urban Redevelopment Program in Title I of the Housing Act of 1949. During the next two decades, planners, mayors, and journalists dreamed up grand schemes to revitalize the nation’s cities. Architects drew slick glass and steel skyscrapers set in vast, sunny, empty plazas. There are very few people in these drawings.

Jacobs ignored these schemes until they hit home. When she learned that Moses’ plans included destroying her beloved Greenwich Village neighborhood, she began organizing her community. In one of the most quoted passages of American Cities, she described the sidewalk ballet that took place outside her window everyday — the comings and goings of the people who lived and worked there, who came to shop, enjoy themselves and live their lives from dawn till long after dusk. She explained how a safe street is always busy, filled with multi-use buildings and people’s eyes constantly on the street. Anyone who has ever been to areas of downtown Boston dedicated solely to office buildings knows how unsafe they feel at night.

Compare that to the North End where people live above stores, restaurants are open late, and every inch of street is used to its fullest, and you can understand the difference between a neighborhood that works and one that is a failure. It is not the shiny, glittery-glass skyscrapers that draw people, but the more homely buildings that welcome strollers at pedestrian levels. We feel safer sitting on a bench on a crowded city sidewalk than in a vast, concrete plaza.

Jacobs advocated low-rise streetscapes like Greenwich Village, but she was not against towers as long as the ground-floor experience was friendly for the pedestrian. She realized that density translates to activity in parks and open space and on the streets and sidewalks. There’s plenty of capacity in downtown Boston for all of this. (In 2 Visions)

So it was with great relief that I read Casey Ross’ article in the February 10 edition of the Boston Globe stating that:

Massachusetts transportation officials have severed ties with the developers of Columbus Center, the latest chapter in one of the most ambitious and controversial projects in Boston’s development history. The state Department of Transportation told the project’s developers they are in default of their 99-year lease, after stalling on plans to build an $800 million complex above the Massachusetts Turnpike that would have united the Back Bay and South End neighborhoods. Because of funding problems, the developers stopped construction on the six-building complex of condominiums, hotel, stores, and parks on a massive deck over the highway.

We’ve learned nothing. We still think that creating an $800 million complex will unite neighborhoods, this time actually building it all in the air. Who will shop in these expensive stores and live in these luxury condominiums? Would people looking for affordable housing in the Back Bay and South End live in this fantasy in the clouds?

Now that these grandiose plans have failed, the city supports the state’s move to reconsider plans for the property.

“Given the economic realities, it makes a lot of sense,” said Boston Redevelopment Authority spokeswoman Susan Elsbree.

State Representative Martha Walz said, “Any new public bidding process should require the developer to hew to guidelines established for the property in the 1990s that called for smaller-scale development. They may get some very positive creative ideas.” (Ross)

Especially if they leaf through Jacobs’ book. Might I suggest that the developers all be given a copy?

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Feb 25 2010. Filed under As You Like It, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.