Posts about Urban Renewal
History
Historic aerials show the disappearance of Southwest
HistoricAerials.com is a Google Maps-like page featuring aerial imagery from decades past. Its database includes images of Washington from several years.
Photo by absentmindedprof on Flickr.
The earliest aerials they have of the area are from 1949. It's a fascinating way to watch neighborhoods change decade-to-decade.
The most visibly changed neighborhood in DC over the past 60 years has probably been Southwest. These historic aerials give us a bird's-eye view of the transformation.
Until the 1950s Southwest was a vintage rowhouse neighborhood, urban in every way and filled buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries. Of course, mid-century planners could have none of that, so under the auspices of urban renewal it was almost completely bulldozed, and replaced by "towers in the park."
Here is Southwest in 1949, before it was "fixed":
Here is the same view 14 years later, in 1963:
By 1979 the new Southwest was complete:
As if that weren't sad enough on its own terms, things got even worse in other cities around the country. At least Southwest was rebuilt, albeit it in an inferior, too-suburban form. The same can't be said for some neighborhoods in places like Detroit and Saint Louis, which through either misguided renewal efforts or simple neglect have gone from bustling to simply not there anymore.
Cross-posted at BeyondDC.
History
The shiny future, through the eyes of the past
In the 1950s, many center cities were in decline, crime-ridden, smelly, and crowded. Meanwhile, suburbs were new, shiny, and full of promise. Civic leaders very seriously believed that ripping out most of the old downtowns and replacing them with tall towers surrounding by parking would actually improve the quality of life in the city. This 1955 video from Pittsburgh extols leaders' wisdom in knocking down most of an older warehouse district, putting up giant freeway interchanges and some office towers in its place.
The irony of this video (and, I must say, the supposed congestion horror depicted here looks pretty tame) is that just about everything that's proposed here is the sort of thing that, half a century later, would be seen as a nightmare from which cities were trying to awake. ...This article summarizes the successes and failures of Pittsburgh's far-reaching mid-century urban renewal program. At the Point, the subject of the video, the clearing did bring some immediate benefits, drawing more jobs into the area than were there before. However, we can't know how much more vibrant that district might be today had the warehouses been preserved. Nearby, planners demolished the Lower Hill residential area largely because the immigrant families populating it had less political power to stop it.It's hard not to see Le Corb and Broadacre City all over that image of the tall tower, surrounded by acres of parking — my initial thought was, where would you go for lunch? It's the sort of mundane question the motopians never paused much to consider as they drafted their gleaming tomorrows.
The population of the Lower Hill dropped from 17,334 in 1950 to 2,459 in 1990. People forced to leave the integrated area moved mainly to neighborhoods that reflected their own race, thus worsening the city's segregation problem. By 1960, Pittsburgh was one of the most segregated big cities in America. ...Ironically, while today we talk about "human scale" in terms of smaller plazas that work for people, detail on buildings, ground-floor articulation, and other elements of a more walkable urban place, the advocates of urban renewal also used the same phrase. According to the Post-Gazette, Fortune Magazine said in the 1950s, "Pittsburgh is the test of industrialism everywhere to renew itself, to rebuild upon the gritty ruins of the past a society more equitable, more spacious, more in human scale."A 1968 editorial in The Pittsburgh Press read, "The men of the Renaissance have been unable to produce anything but a crop of weeds on 9.2 acres of prime public land next to the Civic Arena." The land remains a parking lot today.
At that time, planners thought that auto-dependent freeway cloverleafs were more "human" than historic downtowns.
History
The Master (Re)builder
The NYT writes about DC's Capitol Quarter project, which is replacing the failed Capper/Carrollsburg housing projects with new mixed-income townhouses. It includes enough low-income units to accommodate all residents of the old projects, but also has its critics.
The photo of Housing Authority Director Michael Kelly reminds me of another famous photo of an influential figure in housing project construction...
(Left: Photo by Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times, 2008. Right: Photo by Arnold Newman, 1959.)
Development
North Capitol: Competing visions for handling traffic
reported that developers have been chosen for Northwest One, which will replace the Sursum Corda and Temple Court projects near New York Avenue and North Capitol with mixed-use redevelopment that has the potential to become a walkable neighborhood. But it also reveals some very different views on how to handle traffic around New York Avenue and I-395.
The master plan from 2005 has a lot to recommend it. In addition to building mixed-income townhouses on the side streets and larger apartment buildings with retail facing the larger thoroughfare of K Street, it will reconnect many of the smaller streets like L Street. Right now, that area is a hodgepodge of dead-ends and superblocks; the more connected the street grid the more walkable a neighborhood.
But I noticed one very bad idea briefly mentioned on page 24 of the plan, the section on traffic. The neighborhood is very close to the intersection where the I-395 freeway comes out of the tunnel under the Capitol and dead-ends at New York Avenue. This is one of the last pieces to be built of the original DC interstate plan. The Northwest One master plan (from 2005, remember) says, "There is significant congestion along New York Avenue between the I-395 tunnel and North Capitol Street... This study recommends... the extension of the I-395 tunnel from its current terminus to Florida Avenue."
DC planners may have good ideas on smart growth, but at least in 2005 they still were stuck in the past on traffic. Adding more traffic lanes does not reduce congestion; at most it pushes it elsewhere. Extending the tunnel might allow New York Avenue to become a pedestrian-friendly road, but will also make I-395 even more appealing for drivers, increasing traffic volume there. If there are bottlenecks in the tunnel, more drivers may divert to the same city streets the plan aims to protect. And what about New York Avenue east of Florida Avenue? Enabling more traffic will make that area even more difficult to turn into walkable urban neighborhoods one day.
Continuing to surprise me, however, is the federal government: the National Capital Planning Commission conducted a charrette with Federal agencies and six consultants, which resulted in a report recommending the opposite of DC Planning's tunnel extension. Noting that many drivers use New York Avenue and 395 to cut through the District between Maryland and Virginia instead of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge on the Beltway, the report advocates designing New York Avenue to serve DC residents instead of suburbanites. It recommends planners "encourage more smart, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use development" and "create a corridor with a better balance of transportation modes (e.g. transit, walking, bicycling)."
For the New York/Florida Avenue intersection, the group suggests policies to "discourage drive-through, auto-oriented uses at the intersection" and "employ traffic-calming measures to slow traffic to a level compatible with the urban neighborhood." Most remarkably, the report recomments DC evaluate congestion pricing in the area, and even cutting I-395 back to end at Massachusetts Avenue (a road which leads to DC neighborhoods on both ends, rather than connecting directly to a Maryland freeway).
This is remarkably progressive thinking from a federal board. This is a major intersection that carries large amounts of traffic, but is also ugly and overly designed for cars. Most Departments of Transportation would only be able to think about increasing its traffic capacity, but NCPC is instead recommending restoring the area to a vibrant urban fabric. And it can be done while still enabling people to drive in and out of the city, just as people successfully do along the avenues to the north, which work relatively well as neighborhood main streets and commuter boulevards at the same time.
Roads
Replacing people with cars
Via DC Metrocentric, this is the intersection of Virginia Avenue and 8th Street SE, in 1928 and in 2007. When mid-century planners tore apart cities to enable large volumes of cars from the suburbs, neighborhoods like this one disappeared forever. DC's original plan for freeways would have destroyed more of what are now considered beautiful and historic; this one, though, lasts only in the occasional picture, a grainy black-and-white window into what could have been.
Development
Maybe they can build 'em like they used to
During the dark ages of urban planning (the 1960s and 70s), many old residential buildings were replaced with discredited the idea. Block after block of attractive row houses are gone forever, even though brownstones in places like Brooklyn, Boston, San Francisco, and DC sell for a million dollars or two, or more.
Can we ever go back? Most of today's urban developments are glassy high-rises, the better to capture the maximum possible revenue for the developer. They're better than 1970s concrete boxes, but is anyone building brightly colored townhouses with bay windows in front?
They are building them in one place, DC's "Capitol Quarter" development in Southeast DC near the new baseball stadium.
These aren't Dupont's ornate Victorian row houses or Brooklyn's brick brownstones, but they look quite nice nonetheless. And with many people interested in living in the city but not craving the high rise apartment life, we need more townhouses in mixed-use areas. This district is near stores, offices, and the Metro.
Hopefully, mixing mixing low- and middle-income housing with market-rate, all next to one another in buildings of similar appearance, will avoid mistakes of the "housing projects" where concentrations of poverty create high-crime zones. And hopefully this project will look as good as it does in the drawing, encouraging more construction of new townhouses and creating new Park Slopes or Capitol Hills for future generations.
Public Spaces
Hope for DC's waterfront
DC's Southwest Waterfront neighborhood is a classic example of failed urban renewal - old row houses and tenements (some nice, some less so) were razed, replaced with a freeway and 1960s/70s-era buildings where cars enjoy more square footage than people. The plans are being laid to redevelop the area. Like all modern redevelopment projects this area will surely tilt heavily toward big chains and Disney-esque controlled experiences rather than the organic feel of naturally grown public spaces, the developers have many of the right ideas, such as ample public spaces, mixed use housing and offices, and environmentally friendly building. If the final plan lives up to the promise, DC could be on the way to reversing some of the damage it did to its urban fabric during the dark ages of freeways and housing projects.
History
“Improvement”
Before:
After:
New York City's Park Avenue, before and after a 1922 "improvement" project to make room for motor vehicles. From Aaron Naparstek.
Development
Save Our Superblock
One of the travesties of 1950s-era urban planning was the "superblock", where cities disrupted the regular street grid to build large towers surrounded by windswept plazas. Most of these superblocks are now recognized as mistakes, such as Boston's City Hall Plaza, a huge barren space nearly empty all year round, and the World Trade Center superblock, where part of the old grid has already been restored including a little park.
But up at Park West Village, a residential superblock originally built by Robert Moses as an "urban renewal" project (replacing 4,212 apartments in lower height buildings with 2,662 apartments in large, impersonal towers), residents opposed to new development actually cite the superblock as an argument against change. The owner of the property wants to redevelop some retail space, and recently kicked out a C-Town, a low-cost supermarket, to build nicer, shinier retail spaces and a tall residential tower.
I certainly think this community group has many valid points. The zoning ought to require a significant amount of low- and middle-income housing on the site, and discourage replacing affordable supermarkets with smaller, upscale ones. I don't know enough about the plan to be able to judge the issue of cutting off access to Columbus, but a superblock is not something to be preserved, and the drawing here looks nice, from an architectural standpoint - it creates a continuous street wall with retail exposure, encouraging street activity.
Much of this construction will replace a parking lot, and parking lots neither build a sense of community, nor provide trees, nor generate more affordable housing. A tall tower could provide affordable housing, though the city needs to make sure it does. The residents surely have many valid concerns, and should be listened to in the planning process. I just wish that just because they live in an example of urban planning's least glorious ideas, that they wouldn't argue that everything that makes urban renewal projects awful is actually a great, important asset to the community that must be preserved.
History
Which is better?
Which street would you prefer?
In 1968, planners preferred the latter.
"As it can be" - and thankfully was not for the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC, which is now a thriving cultural district. Photos by Richard Layman.
@ggwash
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