How Jane Jacobs fought 'urban renewal' in the West Village
"It's the same old story. First the builder picks the property, then he gets the Planning Commission to designate it, then the people get bulldozed out of their homes."
- Jane Jacobs
Under Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, federal funds became available to cities for demolition or rehabilitation of blighted areas, and throughout the 1950s, Robert Moses' Slum Clearance Committee lived up to its name, razing entire New York neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. In 1960, the city's Housing and Redevelopment Board took over those duties, promising to displace residents less brusquely than had been Moses' way. But the city Planning Commission continued to support the basic tenets of urban renewal, believing that New Yorkers would ultimately be much happier in modern, less crowded housing with lots of open spaces.
Jane Jacobs, a 45-year-old editor at Architectural Forum, had another opinion: Urban planners, she believed, were destroying America's cities. She blamed the influence of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, whose 1920s Utopian visions placed urban residents in skyscrapers surrounded by parkland. This "towers in the park" approach, Jacobs argued, resulted in dangerous housing projects and sterile downtown areas that were deserted at night.
She and her family had been renovating their three-story house on Hudson St. since 1947. Throughout the West Village, many other families had purchased similarly rundown dwellings and restored them. In 1961, the neighborhood was on the rise, interesting, affordable, safe. Jacobs was finishing a book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," using the West Village as an example of a successful urban environment, when, on Feb. 20, Mayor Robert Wagner announced the latest New York City neighborhood to be designated as blighted. This was 14 blocks bounded by 11th, Hudson, Christopher, Washington, Morton and West Sts. This was where Jane Jacobs lived.
On Saturday night the 25th of February, 300 angry people crowded into St. Luke's School at Hudson and Christopher Sts. to form the Committee to Save the West Village. "The aim of the committee is to kill this project entirely," announced co-organizer Jacobs, "because if it goes through, it can mean only the destruction of the community."
By early March, small children were making posters and passing out protest petitions while their parents staffed tables in taverns and coffee shops. This was no slum area, they insisted to the politicians. On March 21, after touring homes and admiring high ceilings, large fireplaces and hand-hewn beams, Manhattan Borough President Edward Dudley agreed with them; West Villagers, he announced, were "clearly not slum dwellers."
But James Felt, chairman of the Planning Commission, insisted that urban renewal would "stabilize and protect neighborhoods, not disrupt or destroy them." Opponents, he said, were "well-meaning" but "misguided" people "rebelling against our architecture, our technology, our mores and our culture in general [WHO]have sought to single out urban renewal as the villain."
Jacobs' committee presented Wagner with a petition demanding Felt's ouster, and as the summer wore on, the mayor, who was in the midst of a reelection campaign, began to buckle under the activists' pressure. On Aug. 17, he hailed Greenwich Village for its "small-town character, its residential qualities, its local color, its rich heritage and its cultural undertones." He pledged that any urban renewal would respect "Village tradition."
Dismissing these promises as "pious platitudes," the committee leaned harder and on Sept. 6, just before a Democratic primary vote against an opponent, Arthur Levitt, who was on the committee's side, Wagner agreed to ask the Planning Commission to kill the West Village urban renewal project.
To save Felt's face, however, Wagner asked the committee to agree to the "blighted" designation and in return for this, he said, the project would thereafter be quashed.
Jane Jacobs refused this stipulation.
And so, at City Hall on Oct. 18, the Planning Commission approved urban renewal in the West Village.
Mrs. Jane Jacobs; Leon Seidel and Mrs. Rachele Wall looking at plans for new housing at 116 Charles St. (Pat Candido/ NYDN)Angry villagers, led by Jacobs, rushed the commissioners, charging that secret deals had been made with a builder named David Rose. "This decision will take us back to the dark ages of Robert Moses," declared Assemblyman Louis De Salvio. Felt called police and had the noisiest protesters removed. "A disgraceful demonstration," he said. Cops stood by as the hearing resumed.
The next day, Jacobs called a press conference to present her evidence of a pre-arranged deal to develop the West Village. The resume of an architect named Barry Benape stated that "as consultant to Rose Associates" he had "prepared sketch plans and perspectives" for "a renewal plan for the West Village." Benape's documents had been typed on the same typewriter that had produced petitions supporting urban renewal that had circulated in the West Village and they were dated October 1960, months before the renewal plan had been first announced.
Benape tried to explain that the date was a typo, that the resume had actually been prepared in October 1961 but the thunder built. Louis Lefkowitz, Wagner's Republican opponent in the upcoming election, pronounced the West Village flap "further proof" of Wagner's "fumbling leadership." Days before the election, Wagner declared himself vigorously opposed to the project, and the Housing and Redevelopment Board officially killed it.
For Jacobs, this was just a partial victory: "The next step," she said, "is for the Planning Commission to remove the slum label from our area."
On Jan. 31, 1962, the Planning Commission voted unanimously to do just that.
First published on October 1, 1998 as part of the "Big Town" series on old New York. Find more stories about the city's epic history here.
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