The Renaissance
(See Cover)
Spring crept warily over the U.S. last week, bringing the first familiar signs of nature's rebirth. For many, it was a time to be in the country, where the streams quickened and the air was soft and inviting. But it was in the great cities, where nature is often no more than a slit of sky above the concrete canyons or a bouquet on a secretary's desk, that the rites of spring were most warmly celebrated. In Manhattan, the center stripe down Fifth Avenue turned leprechaun green (as it always does in spring), and 120,000 people marched in honor of an ancient Irish saint. In German Bierstuben, Milwaukee toasted spring with the first malty bock of the season. Philadelphians filled the benches of Rittenhouse Square, turning their pale faces upward to greet the warming sun. And Washington was in an April mood as the first boisterous busloads of visiting students arrived on spring vacation.
The cities stirred--but it was more than the zephyrs of spring that stirred them. For thousands of years, since ancient Ur rose on the banks of the Euphrates, man has sought out the city as a place of wonder and opportunity, a citadel of art and learning, the home of kings and gods. In the U.S., in the spring of 1962, he did not have to look far in any direction to find its towers near at hand. Never in history has a society been so urbanized: seven out of every ten Americans, 125 million strong, live in cities and towns, and each year another million acres of rural land are consumed by the spreading environs. It is to the big city, with its consuming appetite for life, that the nation turns for its leadership and its challenge.
Never has the big city offered so much. And never before has it grappled with such problems--so complex and enormous that the President is fighting for a federal Department of Urban Affairs to help the nation's cities deal with them. "We are going to have an urban department," said John Kennedy. "It may not come this year, but in my opinion it will become as necessary and inevitable as the Department of Agriculture and HEW." Many people, in and out of the cities, take sharp issue with the President, holding that the cities are already doing the job themselves and do not need another federal crutch. But no one denies that, whoever does it, there is a lot yet to be done in the big cities.
Making Tradition. The civilized world savors the pleasures and treasures of Rome, Paris and the other Old World cities whose everyday lives are still corseted in tradition. Beside them, the modern American city seems a muscular, lunging, rollicking giant, straining toward new heights and making up his own tradition as he climbs. Yet for all their indiscriminate bustle, the big cities of the U.S. have developed distinct personalities of their own, with much deeper differences than a palm tree or a peep show might suggest. Of them all, five cities, spread from coast to coast and north to south, reflect both the endless variety of metropolitan America and the ties that bind the cities of the U.S. together, for better or for worse, in their common problems and strivings.
New York is the overwhelming, rich and powerful woman, the pacesetter and arbiter of national taste, a woman of contrasts whose feet are planted firmly in the subway while her tiara punches the clouds. On the shore of Lake Michigan stands big-shouldered Chicago, a gambling man, a gandy dancer, a latter-day John Bunyan whose self-conscious gazes into his mirror reflect the pride and simplicity of the U.S. heartland. There is intellectual Boston, a lady of quality with whalebone traditions, who has hitched up her skirt and gone to work without losing her manners, keeping her balance with an infusion of wild Irish blood into her Yankee veins. In the bayous of Gulf Coast Texas stands Houston, a young, lusty oilman with a fat wallet, unfenced-in tastes and opinions that tend to be conservative. And Los Angeles, on the Pacific shore, is a fast-growing, outdoor girl--a lady with jet contrails ruffling her hair, celluloid coiled around her feet, and a reputation for capriciousness that she does not wholly deserve.
The job of running these big, often balky cities, with their honking traffic problems, endless building and demolition, civic scandals and sinister crimes is one that would tax and unnerve a Caesar. The proper mayor of the modern U.S. city is not merely a civil servant, a political boss and a ceremonial ribbon snipper; nowadays he must be a skilled sociologist, a knowledgeable planner, a first sergeant, a public relations expert and a television performer. For better or worse, he is the image of his city--and, to a remarkable degree, His Honor usually mirrors his city's personality:
P: New York's Robert Ferdinand Wagner, 51, son of a German immigrant who became a U.S. Senator, rules over 250,000 city employees and nearly 8,000,000 citizens with a mixture of detachment and passionate involvement. Democrat Bob Wagner has won three terms as mayor under two hats: one of a Tammany Hall choice and supporter, the other of a reformer fighting the machine. Wagner has a talent for attracting controversies, but he is fortunate in his enemies; they always manage to make him look better with their own gaffes. Though his administration has been pockmarked by scandal, Wagner is an honest and hardworking mayor who, like many other mayors, sees his statewide dominance over his party as a gantry for a higher flight--in his case, to the governorship. Says Wagner: "It's an amazing city. I get a great thrill from being mayor here."
P: Chicago's Richard Joseph Daley, 59, is not only mayor but absolute boss of the state Democratic machine and a formidable political manipulator with considerable "clout" on the national scene. Almost the last of the oldtime big-city bosses, he is a capable, Buddha-like civic leader who has used his political power to make Chicago one of the best-run cities in the U.S. He still lives in the humble back-of-the-yards district where he was born, works late into the night at his office, and was embarrassed last week to learn that he had been chosen one of the best-dressed men in America.
P: Boston's John Frederick Collins, 42, has the necessary Irish pedigree but, two generations removed from Cork, represents the new, hard-driving breed of Irish politician typified by the Kennedys. Polio permanently crippled him in 1955 but did not prevent him from winning the mayoralty four years later and setting out to revivify Boston. He has excellent relations with the Yankee hierarchy that rules Boston's business and finance, is the ablest mayor that the city has had since James Michael Curley first flexed his young muscles. In typical Boston fashion, Collins believes that "there is a little bit of Boston everywhere."
P: Los Angeles' Samuel William Yorty, 52, is a maverick liberal turned conservative, whose close election ten months ago was considered a fluke. Politically ambitious, he has been learning his job while staying aloof from fellow Democrats, who are skeptical of his political leanings, and Republicans, who are pleased that he is a conservative. To him, "the West is still the land of opportunity," and, like most Angelenos, he was born "back East"--in Lincoln, Neb.
P: Houston's Lewis Wesley Cutrer, 57, who has been elected mayor three times, is a hardworking, continually optimistic man who believes in listening to the voice of the community before he takes any stand, reflects Houston's pride in private enterprise and self-reliance by saying: "I am not one to run to Washington with my hand out." The only one of the five mayors who opposes a Federal Urban Affairs Department, he welcomes the Government's presence in a limited sphere: NASA's decision to move its astronaut program to Houston, which inspired the Chamber of Commerce to subtitle the city "Space Center, U.S.A."
These men and their colleagues throughout the nation stand astride one of the greatest concentrations of wealth and power in history. New York City banks alone hold 39% of all the demand deposits in U.S. banks. Chicago's metropolitan area accounts for 5% of the gross output and income of the entire U.S. In metropolitan areas of more than 1,000,000 population are 44% of all U.S. manufacturing companies, 43% of all their employees, and 48% of the nation's manufacturing payroll; these areas also boast 62% of all the retail stores in the U.S. In providing for its citizens' needs, the big cities are the nation's biggest customers: it takes 800,000 truck trips daily to provide Chicagoans with their food, clothing and other necessities; New Yorkers each year require about 23 billion Ibs. of food--including 2.1 billion Ibs. of meat, 4.7 billion Ibs. of fruits and vegetables and 155 million dozen eggs.
Suburban Doughnuts. But for all their accumulation of power and wealth, the cities have long been deep in trouble from which they are just beginning to emerge. Through the Depression and World War II, money that could have been spent on improvement, planning and maintenance was diverted to other, more urgent causes. But the cities continued to grow as never before, as millions of unskilled and unschooled migrants from the South and other enfeebled areas poured in. Slums proliferated, crime grew alarmingly, and many middle-class families ran for the hills of suburbia. By 1947, when the municipal authorities began to take positive action, there was widespread talk that the great central cities would become empty holes, surrounded by vast suburban doughnuts.
Today, many problems remain as a heritage from the past, but the big cities are riding the crest of a renaissance that has turned their eyes determinedly toward a better future. The most dramatic sign of the renaissance is the biggest building boom in metropolitan history. Building permits totaling nearly $10 billion were issued in 1961, with each permit a vote for the city's future.
New York's giant Pan Am Building, under construction adjacent to Grand Central Terminal, is the world's largest office building, big enough to contain all the business offices of Little Rock, Spokane and Akron combined. Boston has $1 billion worth of construction under way or being planned, including a $150 million Prudential Center that will transform the city's Back Bay. Houston, with $353 million worth of new construction either just completed or under way, is rushing to finish its 44-story Humble Oil & Refining Co. Building, a status skyscraper that will be the highest west of the Mississippi. Chicago has changed its profile with 26 new skyscrapers, will top it all off with a 631-ft. glass courthouse. And even sprawling, earthquake-prone Los Angeles is reaching upward with steel fingers for a skyline that can be seen without stooping.
High & Low Life. In the face of a population decline in many central cities, the mayors and city planners are working hard to lure back suburban defectors--and head off any further exodus. "There is a great disenchantment with the suburbs," says New York's Mayor Wagner. "Many people are moving back to town." To attract them, Chicago is planning the construction of 50,000 new dwelling units in the heart of the city by 1980, has already cast at least one spectacular lure: the 65-story, twin-towered Marina City, with pie-wedge apartments and balconies with a fine view of the lake. Los Angeles has reversed its historic trend to single homes, is now building more apartments than houses.
Actually, city and suburb together--skyscraper offices and apartments in the center, surrounded by nuclei of bedroom towns, golf courses and freeways--are the wave of the present. The center provides most of the livelihood, the liveliness, and the nervous jostle; it is the gregarious gathering place of those who romanticize the wide-open spaces but prize the city's endless variety. Its attractions may be artificial or superficial, but they lure: a wide choice of movies to see, of restaurants to eat in, of places to go. For many, the city is where the good jobs and the bigger incomes are--and they adjust as they can to its annoyances and hazards. In the city almost everything can be found but peace and quiet.
The New York Public Library has 7,000,000 books at the city dweller's disposal, and the daily crowds in its large reading rooms show that city folk keep them moving off the library's stacks. Boston, besides sponsoring one of the great symphony orchestras of the world and a host of chamber-music groups, offers 4,700 adult education courses. It would take months to see every painting in the 25 acres of the leading art museums of New York, Chicago and Boston, and no one knows how long it would take to traipse through New York's more than 300 art galleries.
A Nice Fat Monkey. New Yorkers can browse in shops devoted exclusively to cheese, doors, spices, buttons, magic charms, knishes. When a Manhattan radio station once called several pet shops jocularly asking for "a nice fat monkey to serve four," not a single pet-shop owner thought the request unusual. Nearly 3,000 birds and animals are available for scrutiny at the Bronx Zoo, which boasts the only mossy-throated bellbird in captivity. Most of the country's polished diamonds change hands on West 47th Street; but to make them less tempting to diamond-fancying thieves, no diamond exchange has a back door.
Dining out in Los Angeles can vary from the chandeliered elegance of Perino's, to any of hundreds of drive-ins featuring everything from pizza wedges to, so they say, gopherburgers. New York is no place for the hesitant diner though: its 17,000 restaurants purvey every type of cooking known to man, and some that may come from outer space, e.g., the Zen Tea Room. At the crowded bar of "21" at lunchtime, the urbane urbanite may rub elbows with celebrities. At the Forum the menu is written in mock Caesarian, and high above the city in the Tower Suite, lovers can drink up the city's gaudy glass-and-steel view with their martinis. Or on a lower level, the tired businessman's lunch at a Sunset Strip eatery features a parade of bosomy ladies modeling lingerie. Chicago has a Chinese key club.
Los Angeles and Houston, being younger and warmer cities, have developed indigenous ways of urban life. In Los Angeles, it is the alfresco patio party almost all year round. In Houston, not only are offices, theaters and buses air-conditioned, but also many homes and thousands of cars--in fact, almost every enclosed place for at least six months every year. Without air conditioning, explains a new Texan, Houston would have remained a torpid tank town, and never made it to the status of a big city.
Far-Out Forum. The city overwhelms with its bigness but spawns littleness too. On Broadway, the near miss no longer survives. The theater goes for broke--a hit or a failure. And so off-Broadway begins as a low-budget protest, and soon becomes so sizable a financial investment that it, too, prices out the adventuresome. But the far-out still have the coffeehouses as a forum for beatnik poetry, strained through the beard.
The city seems to bring together likes: people united by their specialized work (the clusters of intellectuals around the city campuses, the scientists, the editors, the admen, the garment workers) or by their special interests at play (the bowlers, the painters, the weekend sailors). It is they who supply the metropolitan vitality. Unhappily, the part of the metropolis that advertises itself most blatantly to the passing tourist points to the jazz joints on Rush Street or the celebrity seekers in the Peppermint Lounge. Luckily for civilization, the flint of genius strikes its sparks generously on the steel of the city. Artists, writers, philosophers, scientists--all have made the city their natural habitat.
Dante's Inferno. For all its opulence and glamour, life in the big city is still a country mile from utopia. Rents are astronomical, and in New York, garaging a car can cost as much as $95 a month, without service. New York's subway system, which carries 4,600,000 passengers a day, often resembles something straight out of Dante's Inferno. A snowstorm that could be ignored or scoffed at elsewhere can paralyze a big city for days. Smog often covers Los Angeles, Chicago has its biting wind, and New York is covered by 525 million lbs. of soot each year. The stark anonymity of living in a big city crushes as many as it invigorates. Loneliness is a common malaise, and the bars are full.
But such human pitfalls, for many the price of enjoying the city's advantages, are far removed from the big and basic problems that today's mayors must grapple with. The automobile has become the dragon in the streets of the city, choking off traffic, polluting the air, challenging pedestrians to perform incredible veronicas. In 1911 a horse and buggy could move through Los Angeles at a rate of 11 m.p.h.; in 1962 during the rush hours, the average car makes the same trip at 5 m.p.h. The touted freeways designed to aid entrance to and exit from the city are already outgrown, will reach their peak in 1968--eleven years before the entire 1049-mile system will be completed. Most cities have seen their commuter lines dwindle, and lean heavily on inadequate transit systems. Says Boston's Mayor Collins: "If we were to adapt an urban civilization to everybody who's lazy enough to get out of the house right into his car, drive to the office and want to park near it, you'd have nothing in city after city but a big hole and an underground parking garage.'' The possibility of banning auto traffic altogether from midtown Manhattan is seriously discussed.
"No Cockroaches." On his way to the gleaming new office buildings and hotels, the motorist often sees the least attractive side of many big cities: blight. Cities have always had their slums, but they are no longer taken for granted. With $16.3 billion allocated for urban renewal across the U.S. since 1949 ($2.5 billion by the Federal Government), the battle against blight is slowly being won. New York's urban renewal program has consumed as much money as the programs of all other U.S. cities, has cleared 7,000 badly blighted acres. Boston has a far-reaching urban renewal program that is currently demolishing the old Scollay Square area to make room for a $150 million government center. While many big U.S. cities are still at the bulldozer stage, Chicago's major surgery is almost at an end; it has completed or nearly finished 26 clearance projects at a cost of $121,500,000. Last week Truck Loader Willie Adams and his family of five moved into Chicago's newest (and the nation's largest) public housing project. After living in three verminous rooms in a rooming house, the Adamses found it a paradise. Said Mrs. Adams: "It's like a dream, only better. Everything is new and clean--and no cockroaches." By 1967. Mayor Daley hopes that Chicago will have eliminated all its slums.
The urban renewers have come under heavy fire for displacing people who had nowhere to go, tearing down neighborhoods that could have been saved. Now they are trying to avoid both faults. New York and Boston are using "selective redevelopment'' aimed at sprucing up old neighborhoods--such as Boston's historic North End--without heavy demolition and rebuilding. In many cities local citizens' committees are consulted at every step of redevelopment. Says Chicago's Mayor Daley: "You can't just rebuild a city physically without looking into the needs and wants of the people." When a Tennessee family in Boston refused to be budged because they were ashamed to expose their shabby furniture, authorities arranged for a local Roman Catholic Church to provide them with a more presentable set, got their agreement to move.
Crime for Christmas. Despite such progress, the slums persist. As soon as a flophouse bed is vacated, it is immediately filled by one of the hordes of migrants who are once more moving north and west at the rate of thousands a day. In Charleston, Atlanta and other Southern cities, anonymous pamphlets urge Negroes to go north and live off fat charity provisions; their steady flow northward is creating an enormous and potentially explosive problem for the big cities. "What Chicago really needs," says a Chicago politician, "is a Point Four program in Mississippi." The Negro population of Chicago has jumped from 8% in 1940 to 23%--and experts believe that at the present rate it will reach 40% in 1970. New York, with a steadily growing Negro population that now stands at 1,087,000 has also taken in three-fourths of its 600,000 Puerto Rican citizens since World War II. Often unskilled and unemployed, the newcomers are forced to live in dark and dingy tenements at exorbitant rents, often five or six to a room. They cause a drain on city welfare programs, often breed racial conflict.
The slums, the lack of employment and the ever shifting masses of people ill-prepared to live like sardines are reflected in the big city's high crime rate. The impression lingers in the public mind that crime in the big cities is still the special business of organized mobs. Chicago got rid of Al Capone, but it cannot get rid of Al Capone's body. The fact that there were 15 gang-style killings in Chicago last year--an unusually high number--helps sustain the impression.* Actually, the Chicago police look on the rise in rubouts as a hopeful sign that the mob is in trouble.
The new. narrow-brim look in crime is disorganized, and therefore harder to spot than in the days of Eliot Ness--and much harder to control. Crime also has other disturbing new characteristics. Negroes make up 70% of the jail population in Chicago, where they are less than a fourth of the population, and have accounted for as much as 53% of all crimes of violence in Los Angeles, where their numbers are much smaller. But, though they make a hefty contribution, newcomers are far from the big city's only source of crime. Criminals naturally migrate to the big city to make good, just as the vaudeville acts used to do. New York's 24,500 police even have a seasonal run of criminals from Thanksgiving through Christmas because, says Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm, "the criminal has the same problem as everybody else. He wants money for Christmas shopping."
Great Obstacles. City officials believe that the answer to much of the rising crime rate lies in better education for the city's less fortunate citizens, but the sickness of the slums has spread to the schools in some big cities. Many parents of moderate income refuse to send their children to the public schools because they are either overcrowded or below accepted educational standards, either put them in expensive and increasingly difficult-to-enter private schools or move on to the suburbs. For the ordinary city student, there is no such escape. The cities are fighting to improve their schools, but the obstacles are great: a serious teacher shortage, ancient and even (in New York) rat-infested buildings, gross overcrowding, crime on the school grounds.
Los Angeles, which theoretically needs one new elementary school of 15 classrooms every week to keep up with its expanding school population, last week was building seven elementary schools and 23 additions to elementary schools, four new junior high schools and eleven additions, three new senior highs and four additions. Yet the mobility of its population often frustrates its planning: in some schools the turnover rate is as high as 155% in a semester. Even worse is the drop-out problem, which is particularly acute in cities with heavy immigration. Chicago's drop-out rate before high school is 50% (v. a 40% national average), and the rate zooms among Negroes. New York has a similar problem: nearly two-thirds of the students in its public schools are now either Negro or Puerto Rican, and 17% of the Puerto Rican schoolchildren cannot speak English.
Unbelievable Domination. But the biggest job of education faced by the cities--one that dynamically affects many of their problems--is the enlightenment of the state legislatures. Many big cities struggle under almost unbelievable domination by the legislatures. Boston's Mayor Collins, for example, has no direct control over his own school system, transportation or police force--and has control over only 50% of the city's expenditures. New York City feels the heavy hand of Albany in many of its affairs; last week Mayor Wagner was unable to settle a citywide bus strike because he first had to confer at length with New York's Governor Rockefeller.
What irks the big cities even more is that for years they have borne the heavy burden of state financing as the heaviest payers of taxes, while the state legislatures, dominated by rural representatives, give back such niggardly sums to the cities that they are strapped for funds for such vital functions as education, law enforcement, urban renewal and transportation. Individual and corporate income taxes from Boston give the state of Massachusetts $5,000,000 more than it returns to the city, and state aid granted to other cities and towns frequently includes the dastardly words "except Boston." "Los Angeles," complains Mayor Yorty, "has been badly neglected by the state of California." Yet it is hard for the cities to fight back. In California, State Senator Richard Richards of Los Angeles County is the sole representative of 6,000,000 people--while his 39 colleagues in the legislature represent 9,700,000.
If their country cousins turn a deaf ear to their pleas, the cities have another course, which is the bogey of every state legislator who opposes the creation of a federal Department of Urban Affairs. The cities may be forced to bypass the state governments, which show little interest in their unique problems, and go directly to Washington for financial help. If that day comes, the states may lose their control over the big cities, thus eroding the U.S. system of federal-state government. In New York, there is the old proposition of seceding from Albany and joining the Union as a separate state; the city already has a population that exceeds that of 43 states.
Strip Cities. The immensity of the big cities of the U.S. holds a looming clue to their future. Experts predict that within 20 years most of the great cities will join together in massive megalopolitan complexes. Airline pilots first noted the trend, from the outstretching lights of the cities, a dozen years ago. Before long, the nation may be engulfed in great strip cities: a 600-mile giant stretching unbroken from Boston to Washington; another lining the Florida Coast, from Jacksonville to the Keys; a San Diego-San Francisco strip on the West Coast, and a Milwaukee-Chicago-Gary, Ind. megalopolis looping around Lake Michigan. The problems of such supercities defy imagination.
As they and their problems grow and grow, will the great cities of the U.S. be able to survive? The answer seems to be that they will survive just so long as man feels the need of their witness to his accomplishments and grandeur, just so long as he continues to heed that siren song of pomp, pleasure and stimulation. "They will not last if we do not care," said City Lover Leland Hazard, a Pittsburgh businessman, before a Boston conference on community problems. "A city does not endure by the work of hirelings. A city endures when its least and its greatest citizen love it alike and will live and work and die that it may be glorious."
* The alltime total of Chicago-style killings: 962, with just 18 solved.
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