sociology

11!

,:!;

xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The National Science Foundation (DUE-0088657), the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Haynes Foundation provided additional financial support. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of these

foundations.

IMTRODUCTIOM

The New York and Los Angeles Schools ·

David Halle

lhis book compares and contrasts politics, society, and culture in Los Angeles and New York-the cities as well as their surrounding re-gions. New York, with 8 million residents in 2000, and L<l,s Angeles, with 3.7 million, are America's two most populous cities. Los Angeles County is the nation's most populous county, with 9.5 million residents in 2000, while the 21.2 million people of the New York region (i.e., the New York consolidated metropolitan statistical area,·[CMSA], as de- fined by the Census Bureau) exceed that of any otherregion (see fig. i.r).

Los Angeles and New York symbolize the two major, but apparently contrasting, developments of the modern American megalopolis. In Los Angeles, no longer does a central urban core organize the hinterland, Instead, there are multiple clusters of economic and social activity dis- persed around the region, "Los Angeles," in short, connotes sprawl and decentralization.

"New York," by contrast, has for the past three decades represented renewed interest in the central city as a place to work and to live, albeit punctuated btperiods of economic recession, high crime, and now ur- ban terrorism. It has symbolized the rediscovery of, and refocus on, the urban core, especially in this case Manhattan, but also inner sections of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. 1

Thus Los Angeles and New York are ideal laboratories for studying the two most interesting developments in urban America: the vitality of urban peripheries and the return to the urban core, to the city. The es" says in .this volume capture much of what is new and exciting in urban and suburban studies ..

The contrasts between the way: the two cities and regions are often

Atlantic Ocean 30

Population Change 2000 population listed for each county.

Population change from 1970 to 2000 census indicated in parentheses.

Los Angeles and NewYor1<Cily

c::::J State Boundaries

i.I. A, City of Los Angeles and CMSA: Boundaries and Population 1970-2000. B, New York City and CMSA: Bol1ndaries and Popula-

1970-2000

INTRODUCTION

Figure i.2. Disney Hall under Construction, Bunker Hill Area of Downtown Los Angeles, February 2002. In 1992 Frank Gehry was picked to design the future home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, but because of cost overruns and leadership problems only the $n6 million underground parking structure was built. Energized by the triumph of Gehry's Guggenheim Mu- seum in Bilbao, work resumed on Disney Hall in 1999. A major concern is the limited street life in the area, especially on Grand Avenue "You have to bring life to that street," cautioned Gehry. "There ain't no there there."

viewed are partly based on' real differences, but the differences should not be exaggerated. For example, the city of Los Angeles has long had a project to make the central city attractive to the wealthy and middle class. This has focused, for instance, on the construction of a series of major cultural centers downtown, of which the latest is the Disney Cen- ter designed by Frank Gehry and built as the home of the Los Angeles Philarmonic ( fig. i.2 ). There is also an emerging urban parks movement, referred to as the "greening of Los Angeles," that seeks to develop for- saken and blighted inner-city areas into parks, bikeways, and nature pre- serves. The centerpiece of this movement is the restoration of the Los Angeles River (Mozingo 2000 ). Still, only IO percent of the land within the city limits of Los Angeles is currently designated as open space, com- pared with 27 percent of the land in New York City. Also, it will be hard to convince locals that, in the semisecluded banks of the river (fig. i.3), they will not be easy crime targets. Further, the new cultural centers are

4 DAVID HALLE

Figure i.3. The Los Angeles River, Downtown (Fourth Street). The Los An- geles River bank is typically desolate and viewed as too isolated for safe recre- ation. Also, the water is polluted and often used by local residents as a gar- bage repository. There is a citywide move to make the river bank a desirable recreation site. Perhaps the hardest part will be to ensure that, as people de- scend to the semisecluded riverbank, they feel safe from crime (along the lines of William Whyte's successful plan to open up Bryant Park in New York City [fig. i.ro ]).

beset by doubts as t_o whether audiences will wish to live nearby rather than just drive in and out of the cavernous pa~lcing entrances and exits that dominate Grand Avenue (Goldin 2002). Thus the project to make downtown Los Angeles an attractive place for residence by the well-to- do as well as the poor is fraught with difficulty. (For a detailed history of the redevelopment efforts in downtown Los Angeles, see Loukaitou- Sideris and Banerjee [ 1998].)

Likewise, the stereotype that "Los Angeles" is hyper spread out com- pared with New York (and other urban areas in America) is true only if stated carefully arid with a distinction between geographic spread, where it is basically correct, and population density/housing size, where it is far less true. Considering geographic spread, the city of Los Angeles's 496 square miles exceeds but certainly does not dwarf New York City's 303 square miles. But Los Angeles County, which includes and sur- rounds the city of Los Angeles, contains 4,089 square miles, over twice as much as the combined land of New York City and thle six New York/

INTRODUCTION

New Jersey counties that surround New York City, which together con- stitute r,746 square miles (see fig. i.r). Finally, at the level of the region, defined as the Census Bureau's consolidated metropolitan statistical area, the contrast sharpens further. The Los Angeles CMSA, which con- sists of Los Angeles County and the four counties that surround it, con- tains an enormous 34,040 square miles of land, while the New York CMSA, which includes New York City, Long Island, several New York counties north of New York City, a large part of New Jersey, parts of Connecticut, and Pilce County, Pennsylvania, contains n,670 square miles, only about a third of the square miles of the Los Angeles CMSA.

But if Los Angeles is so geographically spread out why do the ap- proaches by air to the city of Los Angeles reveal residential areas as densely packed with single family housing as much of the single family housing in the New York region (fig. i.4)? The answer is that simple comparisons of square miles can be misleading when considering pop- ulation density /housing size, for large parts of the five county Los An- geles CMSA are too hilly or mountainous for residential, commercial, and industrial purposes (see fig. i.5). About three-quarters of San Ber- nardino's 20,069 square miles are unusable for development, and San Bernardino County constitutes about two-thirds of the five-county Los Angeles CMSA. Substantial parts of the land in Riverside, Ventura, and Los Angeles Counties are also too hilly for development. There is no question that much of New York City is far more densely populated than anything in the Los Angeles region. Manhattan's fantastic 68,200 people per square mile contrasts with the city of Los Angeles's 7,027 persons per square mile and, together with Manhattan's other at- tractions, fully justify the popular image of this dense urban maelstrom. Still, even some sections of New York City are comparable here to Los Angeles. Staten Island's population density (7,043 persons per square mile) resembles that of the city of Los Angeles. Outside the two cities, the contrasts should be drawn more carefully still. Ventura, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties in the Los Angeles CMSA have low pop- ulation densities, even when adjustment is made for the fact that much of the land there is too mountainous for residential development. 2 But Orange County's population density of 3,410 persons per square mile is substantially higher than that ofWestchester (1,948) and Suffolk Coun- ties (1,427) in New York and not much lower than that of Nassau County (4,439). Indeed, much of the single family, detached tract housing in the Los Angeles region is as closely packed as the single fam- ily housing in the New York CMSA outside the borders of New York City, Newark, and other older cities.

Thus the central aims of this collection are to highlight, and to subject

Figure i.4. Overview of the City of Los Angeles, Looking Southeast from Mulholland Drive, with Downtown in Background (February 2002). De- tached, single family houses in the city and region of Los Angeles are often as densely packed as in the New York region, for much of the land in the Los Angeles region is too hilly or mountainous for residential use.

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INTRODUCTION

PACIFIC OCEAN 7.5 15

miles

Figure i.5. Los Angeles CMSA in 3-D Relief, with Neighborhoods

7

to critical analysis, the stereotypes of the two cities and regions and to compare them along a set of central themes on which researchers in each region have long focused, and which I outline below.

THE "LOS ANGELES" AND THE "NEW YORK" SCHOOLS

In Los Angeles and New York, a cluster of researchers have, for many years, been analyzing what is occurring in a way that is, in each place, sufficiently distinctive to constitute a "school." The main, though by no means the only, focus of the Los Angeles school is the "sprawling, polycentric character of the urban, built environment" (Scott and Soja 1996, 6). The New York school, by contrast, is characterized by an inter- est in the central city. What is going on there, what should the central city be like? Can it be a place where the wealthy, the middle class, the working class, and the poor reside? And, after the World Trade Center attack, how can New York City, and other urban concentrations, be de- fended against terrorism? Thus the foci of some of the two region's most important researchers reproduce, to some degree, the popular d,istinc-

8 DAVID HALLE

tion between Los Angeles, representing the decentered megalopolis, and New York, representing a focus on city; efpi::cially central-city, life.

The Los AngelesBchool Although the term "Los Angeles school" is:r~cent, school's found- ing text is arguably Robert Fogelsop's The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 18so-I930, written in 1967.3 Fogelsop. traces the evolution of Los Angeles from a "nondescript agricultllral,yiilage" in 1850 to a.large city of r.2 million in 1920 and thence, already.by 1930, to a dispersed and decentralized "metropolis": "More than any other American metropo- lis-and with remarkably few misgivings-Los Angeles succumbed to the disintegrative, though not. altogether undesirable, forces of subur- banization and progressivism. And as a result it emerged by 1930 as the fragmented metropolis par excellence, the archetype for better or for worse of the contemporary American metropolis;"

Fogelson thus lays out the central idea of the current Los Angeles school, among whose major representatives are Michael Dear, Jennifer Wolch, Allen Scott, Edward Soja, and Michael D.avis. For example, in 1993 Wolch and Dear wrote that "the Los Angeles prototype-with its patterns of multicentered, dispersed, low-density growth-is perhaps a new paradigm of metropolitan growth." They contrasted this new ur~ ban paradigm with the formerly dominant "Chicago model," which an- alyzed urban development as a number of zones, concentric circles in their tidiest forms, radiating out from a . perennially dominant core composed of the central business district (Wokh andl. Dear 1993).4 In similar vein, Scott ( 1996, 2 76) pointed out how, by the end of the twen- tieth century, southern California and especially the Los Angeles re- gion, is made up of a "multiplicity of discrete industrial districts (some of which are individually comparable to Silicon Valley in size and rapid- ity of growth) scattered over its entire geographic extent." Following the Los Angeles school's tendency to argue that a new vocabulary is re- quired to capture what it is uncovering, Scott proposed the term "tech- nopoles" for these dispersed, high-technology, industri.al districts.

Joel Garreau's Edge City, a book often cited by the Los Angeles school, explores the way these industrial districts and other recent sources of employment combine with residential development to con- stitute new urban centers on the periphery of traditional cities. He ' defines edge cities (another neologism) as places that have substantial leasable office and retail space, have more "jobs than bedrooms," are perceived by their populations as a unitary place, and have appeared in the past thirty years.5 Although Garreau writes about edge cities throughout America, he sees the Los Angeles region as the prototype.

INTRODUCTION 9

SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS

Figure i.6. Edge Cities, Los Angeles CMSA, 2002

His opening sentence proclaims that "every single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores" (Le., edge cities). In the last half century, Garreau says, Americans moved, first, their homes, then their marketplaces ( shopping malls), and finally their jobs out of the traditional city. The resulting edge cities constitute the "biggest change in a hundred years in how [Americans] build cities" (Garreau I988, I-J). Figures i.6 and i.7 depict the edge cities in the Los Angeles and New York CMSAs, respectively, as of 2002. 6 There is now a small cottage industry that tracks edge cities, with an edge city newsletter.7 However not everyone is enamored with the concept. In a review of the first edition of Garreau's book, Herbert Gans argued that these do not merit the term "cities" but are really shopping malls and office areas or, for short, "CONs, commercial-and- office nodes" (Gans 1991, 35).

Developing a related idea to Garreau's, Robert Fishman (I987) coined the term "techno-city" to refer to edge cities and "techno- burbs" to refer to the entire peripheral zones that have emerged beyond traditional cities and that, containing industrial parks, shopping malls, campus-like office complexes and a full range of housing types, are largely independent of the traditional city. He argues that the classic

IO

Figure i.7.

DAVID HALLE

Cities, New York CMSA, 2002

County Lines

Major Highways

suburb, defined as a serene bedroom community (a "bourgeois uto- pia," as he dubs it) from which people commuted long distances to jobs in the older city, is now almost obsolete. It can be recognized, in retro- spect, to have been a transitional phenomenon paving the way to self- sufficient technoburbs on the periphery. This is why he titles his book Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. 8 And this is why other , members of the school argue that the region beyond the central core of tl1e city of Los Angeles is not "suburban" but "postsuburban." (Kling et al. 1995; Soja 1996, 426-42).

The Los Angeles school is often uneasy about much of what it finds, especially the untrammeled growth. This unease at the dark or, to use the term its writers like to borrow from literary and film analysis, "noir" side of Los Angeles life is also a hallmark of its approach. Mike Davis, for example, patrols the periphery in dismay at the ecological effects of urban sprawl. Writing in 1990 about the development of the Antelope Valley (fig. i.8), a vast area of the Mojave Desert about 50 miles wide around the northeastern border of Los Angeles County, Davis com- ments: "The Antelope Valley has nearly doubled in population over the last decade, with another quarter million new arrivals ex~)ec1:ea by 2010 .... The pattern of urbanization here is what design critic Peter

INTRODUCTION II

Plagens once called 'the ecology of evil.' The desert ... has been pre- pared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis; hun- dreds of square miles of vacant space engridded to accept the future mil- lions .... The region's major natural wonder, a Joshua tree forest.with individual specimens often 30 feet high and older than the Doomsday Book, is being bulldozed into oblivion" (1990, 3).9

Along with the idea of a sprawling, multicentered urban environ- ment, the Los Angeles school stresses the weakness and fragmentation of the political structures, both those of the city of Los Angeles and those of the areas beyond. In a book jointly edited with Michael Dear and G. Hise, Eric Schockman (1996) titles his essay on city government, "Is Los Angeles Governable?" The central point is the notoriously weak mayoralty system of Los Angeles, hedged around by a powerful set of city council members (dubbed by some people as "mini-mayors") and by quasi-independent groups of civil servants (boards/commissions) that control such crucial functions as transportation, harbor, airports, and police. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, many people outside California discovered to their astonishment that mayor Tom Bradley could not fire his truculent police chief, Daryl Gates, since the latter had civil service protection. More recently, the federal government had to step in to deal with the city of Los Angeles's police scandal known as

Figure i.8. Antelope Valley-Development. Antelope Valley, at the northeast- ern edge of Los Angeles County, is about fifty miles from downtown Los An-

Here, construction of new housing in the desert is shown.

12 DAVID HALLE

Rampart-among the worst scandals in the history of the U.S. police- on the grounds that the mayor either could not or would not deal with police corruption. (Rampart is discussed later in this introduction.) The mayor has also, for several years, been fighting a battle against the at- times powerful secession movement of the San Fernando Valley, which would deprive the city of 170 square miles, just over a third of its to- tal area.

Further, the region around the city of Los Angqles is highly frag- mented politically. Scott and Soja (1996, n) point out that from 1970 to 1990 "over 30 new municipalities were incorporated, mostly in the re- gional periphery ... these included the fastest growing small cities in the United States: Irvine, Mission Viejo, Lancaster, Moreno Valley, Santa Clarita." Here, too, the Los Angeles school is uneasy. The existing re- gional political structures are seen as too fragmented and weak to coor- dinate all the economic and social activities, especially those associated with rapid growth. For example, Wolch and Dear (1993, xxiii), writing about the acute problems faced by the homeless in the Los Angeles region (in 1984 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment dubbed Los Angeles the "homelessness capital of the US"), com- plain that extreme political fragmentation impedes solutions: the re-, gion's "social heterogeneity, geographic sprawl, and economic vitality have encouraged an intense and effective localization of politics, work, personal life, and culture. One important consequence is the difficulty of formal urban governance. The region is split into many separate fief- doms, their leaders in constant battle. As the urbanized area continues to expand geographically, local government becomes increasingly re- mote and less able to respond to grass-roots concerns."

Likewise, Scott and Soja (1996, 19-20)-after arguing for the ur- gency of reforms to take greater account of Latino, Asian, and African- American communities, to provide affordable housing, and to permit more regional planning, especially for public transport-complain that the political structures make such changes difficult: "Behind all these ef- forts looms the need to rethink and reorganize regional government and planning. None of the programs identified above is likely to succeed if the present, highly fragmented, government structure of the region remains intact .... The new metropolis is regional in scale, scope and functioning more than ever ... some organizational structure for co- ordinating local economic development strategies and for seeking to build agreements between important local constituencies ( e.g. banks, industrial associations, labor organizations, government agencies) is highly desirable."

Thus two motifs-the development of urban peripheries and the

INTRODUCTION 13

fragmentation of politics-are central to the "Los Angeles" school. Neither motif is new on the intellectual scene or unique to Los Ange- les, but even when first stated by their original authors it was usually said that Los Angeles was in the vanguard and presented the traits in pro- nounced form. 10 Indeed, another characteristic of the Los Angeles school is to suggest that developments in Los Angeles may be the new model that other urban areas will follow. This claim is typically hedged. Perhaps the Los Angeles region is the harbinger of the future, if not al- ready the present, of many of America's other major urban areas. On the other hand, it may be unique (both claims are often contested by ob- servers outside the Los Angeles region). For example, Wolch and Dear (1993, xxiv) write: "It is already self-evident that southern California's emergent urbanism possesses more than local or regional significance. Given its implications as the prototype for future urban dynamics ... Los Angeles is preeminently qualified to serve as a laboratory for our analysis .... Whether or not Los Angeles represents the model 21st cen- tury urban development is a question we shall leave to others." 11

The claim that the Los Angeles region represents the future of Amer- ica's major metropolises has certainly been disputed. For example, the geographer Jan Nijman ( quoted in Miller 2000) and the urban historian Robert Schneider (Schneider 2000, 1672) argue that Los Angeles is too gargantuan to be typical of other American metropolises. Nijman sug- gests Miami exhibits many of the tendencies of Los Angeles but, being smaller, is more typical of the future of U.S. cities. Schneider suggests that Los Angeles, with its large population of homeless, may be more typical of contemporary First World cities such as Mexico City, Cairo, Calcutta, and Sao Paolo than of urban areas in the United States. Still, it is plausibly argued, the study of Los Angeles is important. Even if Los Angeles turns out to be unique rather than the future of other urban re- gions in the United States, its sheer size make developments there of great interest.

The Los Angeles school's tendency to propose new terms to under- stand these developments has already been mentioned. Going further than most here, Dear and Flusty (1998) have suggested an extended family of concepts including "global latifundia," "privatopia," "cyber- geoisie," "protosurps," "holsteinization," "praedatorianism," and oth- ers to capture what is new about life in the Los Angeles region. The au- thors cheerfully acknowledge that some critics, upset at so many new categories, have accused them of "neologorrhea" (Dear and Flusty 1998, 68) .12

Three other ideas, each with a long lineage in urban studies, are as- sociated with, if not the hallmarks of, the Los Angeles school. These

i, ' '.

I4 DAVID HALLE

ideas are not especially closely related to the previous three motifs but they are closely related to each other. There is the idea of a "post- Fordist economy," the idea of a bifurcated labor force, and the stress on the impact of immigration on the economy and labor force.

Thus the Los Angeles school highlights the distinctiveness of the Los Angeles economy. It is post-Fordist in that it is based on high-tech and small-scale craft production, rather than on large-scale, mass produc- tion. Unlike the economies of paradigmatic American industrial me- tropolises such as Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, which were based on "Fordist," mass production industries churning out automobiles, steel, machinery, and domestic appliances, the economy of Los Angeles is composed of "enormously diverse, flexible production sectors, in- cluding financial and business services, high-technology industries, and various craft, fashion, and cultural product industries ranging from cloth- ing and jewelry to motion pictures and music recording" (Scott and Soja 1996, vii).

Related to the idea that the economy.of Los Angeles is based on the twin pillars of high-tech and small craft production is the idea of the bi- furcated labor force. Thus Scott and Soja write that the social structure of Los Angeles is no longer characterizable in terms ofa (numerically) dominant, unionized, and moderately well off blue-collar working class (the labor force associated with "Fordist" mass production). Instead, they argue, it is "deeply divided into two distinctive segments, as rep- resented on the one side by an upper tier of highly paid managers, pro- fessionals, and technicians, and on the other side by a lower tier com- posed oflow-skill, low-wage workers." 13

Immigration is, of course, a central topic of the Los Angeles school (as it was of the classic Chicago school of urban sociology in the 1920s). Los Angeles's immigrants, predominantly from Latin America and Asia, are "part of an extraordinary global migration that has made Los An- geles one of the most culturally heterogeneous metropolises the world has ever seen." Immigration is related to the bifurcated labor force. For "the vast majority of the lower tier workers are immigrants, many un- documented" (Scott and Soja 1996, viii). (However an important pro- portion of immigrants also move straight into the upper tier of the la- bor force.) 14

In sum, the Los Angeles school of research is characterized by a stress on the multicentered nature of the region, by a stress on the region's political fragmentation, by pessimism and, in some cases, a deep strain of "noir" about the possibility that .serious problems can be reformed, and by a view that Los Angeles may be the prototype of the future ur- ban development of America's cities. Secondary ideas associated with

INTRODUCTION IS

th·e Los Angeles school are the importance of immigration and the ex- istence of an economy that is "post- Fordist," along with a labor market that is bifurcated into a prosperous managerial and professional elite and a struggling lower sector. None of these ideas is new, and all have been stated about other urban regions. Moreover there are, not sur- prisingly, numerous splits and disagreements among researchers associ- ated with the Los Angeles school.15 Still, the core notion of the need to explore urban regions in general (not just Los Angeles) as multicen- tered is, these days, associated with the Los Angeles school. It is a per- fectly reasonable, and still largely unfulfilled, research goal, in part be- cause the task is, by definition, huge.

The New York School

To be frank, I like dense cities best, and care about them most. Jane Jacobs (1961, 16)

The New York school, by contrast, is characterized by an interest in the central city. What is going on there, what should the central city be like? Some of its key figures are Jane Jacobs, who is the doyen of the school, Sharon Zukin, Kenneth Jackson, Robert Stern, Richard Sennett, and William Whyte. 16 They share a fascination with contemporary New York City, especially with Manhattan, and a belief, in some cases pas- sionate, in the superiority of city life over suburban life. They also often see New York City as a place for the middle class and the rich, not just the poor and working class.

The New York researchers have not, so far, been explicitly identified as a "school," partly because they do not tend to identify themselves ex- plicitly in this way. But arguably their views are as distinctive as those of the Los Angeles school, and their history goes back at least as far. It is true that members of the Chicago school, which dominated urban stud- ies in the 1920s and 1930s, shared with the later New York school a ten- dency to see city life as of great interest and value and were interested in reforming it. But they differed from the New York researchers in sev- eral ways. Above all, they often agreed with the value judgments of res- idents at the time, who saw the outer suburban zones as the preferred places to live. They did not envisage the central city as an especially de- sirable place for the residences of the middle class and, still less, of the rich. The i_nner city was a place for central business, new immigrants, vagrants and hobos, and the working class. Indeed, they were often alarmed about the potential for "social disorganization" in the central

[:city associated with the new immigrants. 17

The New York school, or at any rate Jane Jacobs, has won at least one

16 DAVID HALLE

major political victory, over the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which was finally defeated in 1969. This ten-lane highway, to have been lined with huge apartment towers, would have cut Manhattan in two frorq east to west and wiped out the entire neighborhood that later became known as Soho and, also, much of neighboring Little Italy and China- town. The battle against the expressway, which several of its opponents argued would "Los Angelize" New York City, lasted from 1959 to 1969. It was led by Jane Jacobs, whose preface to her 1961 seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, dedicates the book to New York City. The victory against the Lower Manhattan Expressway had national significance for American cities. It was one turning point against the urban renewal programs that, since the end of World War II, had enabled city governments, in collaboration with the federal gov- ernment, to destroy so many downtown neighborhoods in American cities. These programs typically tore down older, often working-class, housing and replaced it with grand projects-high-rise corporate office buildings, entertainment centers for the well-to-do (such as Lincoln Center in Manhattan), and so on. 18 (A major reason why urban renewal programs faded was protest from those outer neighborhoods who were designated to receive the mostly poor people whom urban renewal dis- placed.) The defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway was also pre- sented, with some exaggeration, by some as a grassroots victory over top-down, autocratic planning.

Soho was a one-time industrial district whose cast-iron buildings artists had moved into and converted to loft residential-work spaces. Demand for these buildings had been weakened first because industry was moving from New York City anyway and second because they were apparently doomed by the projected Lower Manhattan Expressway. Af- ter the defeat of the expressway, Soho became a prototype for neigh- borhood preservation and for the "recycling" of buildings both in New York City and nationwide. One study argued that the Soho syndrome had done more to retain the middle class in the cities and stimulate new economic innovations than any planning or government funded pro- gram ( Gratz and Mintz 1998 ). Indeed a number of the numerous down- town districts that have developed in the last thirty years so as to re- semble the Soho model in some way acquired names that stressed the link. "Soho" stands for south of Houston Street (in Manhattan). Ex-. amples of areas with names mimicking Soho include NoHo (north of Houston Street, in Manhattan), Dumbo (down under the Manhattan Bridge), LoDo (lower downtown, in Denver), SoMa (south of Main Street, in San Francisco), WeHo and NoHo (west and north Holly- wood, in Los Angeles), and So Do ( south of downtown) in Seattle. The

INTRODUCTION I7

Figure i.9. Soho and Its Influence on Other North American Cities

influence and cachet of Soho has also spread abroad. By 1980, Paris building owners were advertising "les lofts" (Zukin 1982, 1). Figure i.9 sketches out the "Soho" syndrome for other North American cities.

In 1982 Sharon Zukin published her pioneering study ofloft living in Soho. It was also one of the earliest accounts of urban "gentrification," for she situated the Soho loft movement in that context. Gentrification she defined as typically occurring when "a higher class of people moves into a neighborhood, makes improvements to property that cause mar- ket prices and tax assessments to rise, and so drives out the previous, lower-class residents" (5). A concern with those driven out gave Zukin's study a sharp, reformist edge. She was interested in, countering the claim of the real estate industry, city officials,. and the New York Times that loft living had social and economic benefits for all those involved. Instead, she pointed out that the gentrification process associated with loft living claimed specific victims. First, by raising rents it displaced the existing owners of the small, manufacturing businesses, who were often lower middle class, and it also displaced their employees. Later, as rents and the price of apartments continued to climb, the gentrification pro- cess devoured many ofits early practitioners-artists, craft workers, per- formers, photographers-who had moved into Soho in the first wave before 1970 but could no longer afford to live there.

Zukin's study is one of the seminal texts of the New York school.

18 DAVID HALLE

Reflecting their stub born affection for the city in the face of the subur- ban alternative, then highly touted by many people, she dedicated her book on loft living to her parents "Who have never understood why I wanted to live in New York." 19

Another doyen of the New York school is Kenneth Jackson, who has spent most of his academic life at Columbia University in New York City. His magnum opus Crabgrass Frontier is a history of the subur- banization of America from 1814 to the present (Jackson 1985). But a central "subtext" of the book is a regret-filled analysis of how policies of the federal government undermined the economic and social health of America's central cities and urban neighborhoods in the twentieth century, especially for about fifty years starting in the 1920s. Such poli- cies, often acting under severe pressure from real estate and construc- tion lobbies, for example, wrote public housing legislation that almost guaranteed it would be clustered in the central city rather than spread evenly through the region and followed mortgage policies that discrim- inated against central city neighborhoods, especially those with large concentrations of minorities, thus undermining the value of the hous- ing there. Jackson also shows how twentieth-century suburbanites, act- ing through their state legislatures, which establish city boundaries, set about throttling older American cities by preventing them doing what they had done throughout the nineteenth century-namely, expanding their borders geographically to capture for the city the new economic and residential developments on the periphery.

Jackson, like Jane Jacobs, makes his preference for the city clear. In Crabgrass Frontier he writes: "A major casualty of America's drive-in culture is the weakened 'sense of community' which prevails in most metropolitan areas. I refer to a tendency for social life to become 'pri- vatized', and to a reduced feeling of concern and responsibility among families for their neighbors and among suburbanites in particular for residents of the inner city .... The life of the sidewalk and front yard has largely disappeared .... There are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon" (1985, 272, 279-80 ).

In a later essay, Jackson criticizes that suburban icon, the shopping mall. He complains about how suburban malls are allowed to flourish freely in America, to the detriment of the economic health of the down- towns of older cities with which they compete. By contrast, in England and Germany, he points out, public policy has aimed to protect older cities by restricting the growth of suburban malls (England) or the hours at which shopping can occur (Germany). Jackson's dislike of the American suburban mall is open: "In my view, the shopping mall and the automobile culture that makes it possible waste time, energy, and

INTRODUCTION 19

land that the United States can ill afford" ( 1996,rr2r.) By contrast, Jack- son's 1995 Encyclopedia of New York City pays homage to the city by as- sembling everything one would ever want to know about it. 20

The famous architect Robert Stern is another member of the New York school. In a massive three-volume work he charts the architectural history of New York City. Volume 3, which deals with the period from the start of World War II to 1976, is a tour de force of almost 1,400 pages (Stern et al. [1960] 1997).21 Although the book discusses New York City as part of an evolving, regional megalopolis, the heart of it is about Manhattan, New York City's undisputable core. The first 894 pages deal in exhaustive detail with Manhattan's neighborhoods, followed by just 131 pages on the other four boroughs, referred to as the "outer bor- oughs," and only thirty-three pages on the regional context. Stressing this focus, Stern writes: "Despite our opening up of the discussion to cover not only the outer boroughs but also the suburbs, our concentra- tion on Manhattan seems justified. As the city planner Charles Abrams noted in 1961: 'What saves New York is Manhattan-the city's "down- town." It is a kind of national downtown, a crossroads of America"' (Stern et al. [1960] 1997, ro ). Although Stern is here writing about how Manhattan was perceived in the early 1960s, and although his work and interests have ranged far beyond New York City, the lovingly detailed attention to the city in this volume assuredly makes him part of the New York school. So do his continuing interests. He was, for example, a cen- tral figure in the 1990s renovation of Times Square, a widely debated project that some people argued involved the "Disneyfication" or "Los Angelization" of Times Square and its conversion to a tame theme park along the lines of Universal City Walk in Los Angeles (see fig. 2.2). The sex shops peddling intercourse and peep shows were closed down. Every building that faced the square was required to display a large neon sign. Stern, a board member of the Walt Disney Company, was a key figure in getting Disney to purchase and restore Forty-second Street's grandest landmark theater, the New Amsterdam, and to open a Disney Store nearby.22

In 1969 William H. Whyte, already famous for his 1956 book The Or- ganization Man, a critique of white-collar life in the new Chicago sub- urb of Park Forest, began studying the use of space in New York City. The City Planning Commission had asked him to help draft a somewhat unusual plan, to do with the growth and workability of the city and its government rather than with specific land-use projections and the kind of futuristic projects typical of city plans. There was a strong empha- sis, too, on the use of incentive zoning to provide parks and plazas, an area in which New York City was doing pioneering work. Whyte set up a

20 DAVID HALLE

research project to study how these spaces were actually used by people in the city, with the goal of discovering how to draw people to them. In many cities at that time such public spaces were often avoided as dan- gerous. Whyte found that, ironically, the main culprit was the actions taken to keep away the "undesirables," that is, the people seen as mak- ing these spaces unattractive. Undesirables consisted of such groups as the homeless, derelicts, bag people, drug dealers, street vendors and muskians, and teenagers. The standard approach to containing them was to wall off the area and make it uninviting, providing few if any seats, placing spikes on low walls to prevent people resting there, clos- ing down restrooms, and so on. This, Whyte argued, was exactly the wrong clung to do. It made the place inhospitable to the rest of the public too, turning it into just the kind of semideserted setting that encouraged the occurrence of the bad things that people feared. The solution was to do the opposite. "The best way to handle the problem of undesirables is to make a place attractive to everyone else" (Whyte r988, 158). Whyte advocated opening up these spaces, making them vis- ible, and providing comfortable facilities such as ample seating and bathrooms.

The successful redesign of Bryant Park, next to the magisterial New York Public Library (fig. i.ro ), showcased Whyte's ideas. In the 1970s Bryant Park was a haven for drug dealers who had the run of the place because most of the public tended to avoid it. The park was surrounded by a spiked iron fence and thick, overgrown shrubbery that blocked the view from outside of what was going on inside, tlms malting being in- side hazardous. Whyte suggested some simple measures to open up the park and mal<e it more friendly. The fences and shrubbery were taken down, replaced by grand, welcoming entrances. Inside were placed nu- merous chairs and tables, and open -air cafes were installed, which, Whyte argued, were the best security measures, Thdse days Bryant Park during the day is a well-used facility for office workers, families, tourists, and homeless and poor people who coexist ( Gratz and Mintz 1998, chap. 2 ). However, at night the homeless are often not permitted by the police to remain, and some critics have argued that the Bryant Park Restora- tion Corporation, a private organization that essentially runs the park, has inappropriately imposed a "middle-class" cuiture on a public space (e.g., Zukin, 1995, 29-34).

A central interest of Richard Sennett, another important member of the New York school, is charting the changing history of interpersonal life in the West since classical Greek times. Sennett argues that the qual- ity of modern interpersonal life is markedly deficient in some ways. The

INTRODUCTION 2I

i.IO. Bryant Park, Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street, with New York Public Library in Background. In the r97os, the park became the site for open dmg dealing and other lawlessness. Following the ideas of sociologist William Whyte, restoration in the late 1980s and the 1990s opened the park to full view and made it a hospitable place for the public, with numerous chairs and cafes, The park is now a congenial place for almost everyone.

problem, he maintains, is that Christianity has taught us to hide our pri- vate selves so that we are unable to interact in an emotionally engaged way with "strangers." He uses the case of New York City, which hear- gues has so much potential because ofits diverse and dense population, to underline the difference between interpersonal life as it is and as it ought to be: "New York should be the ideal city of exposure to the out- side. It grasps the imagination because it is a city of differences 'par ex- cellence.' ... By walking in the middle of New York one is immersed in the differences of this most diverse of cities .... [But] in New York City people are emotionally walled off from each, they conceal their private emotions" (Sennett 1990, 128).

Sennett does not think that interpersonal life is better anywhere else in America. On the contrary, life in the modern American suburbs, he believes, is far worse than urban life. New York City is his bench- mark because of its wasted possibilities: "A New York street resembles the studio of a painter who has assembled in it all the paints, books of other artists, and sketches he will need for a grand triptych that will

22 DAVID HALLE

crown his career; then the painter has unaccountably left town" (Sen­ nett I990, 129).

To justify their choice of city to study, the New York school tends to use one of the same two opposite strategies as members of the Los An­ geles school use to justify their study of Los Angeles. Some argue that what they uncover is typical of many other big cities and helps us to un­ derstand them. Jane Jacobs, for example, wrote: "In trying to explain the underlying order of cities, I use a preponderance of examples from New York, because that is where I live. But most of the basic ideas i n this book come from things I first noticed or was told in other cit­ ies" (Jacobs 196I, IS). Others justify what they do on the grounds that New York City is unique or, at least, extremely unusual (Duneier 1999) .23 W hat makes it unique-for example, its size and cultural importance together with the economic power of Wall Street-tends to be what make it a crucial object of study.

In sum, the influential group of researchers whom I have called the New York school are distinctive in at least one, and usually more than one, of the following ways. Either they write more about New York City than about what is going on beyond the borders of the city. Or, when they examine contempdrary life beyond the borders of New York City, they compare it unfavorably with life in the city or they complain about the favored treatment of suburban areas by comparison with New York City and with American cities in general. Further, they are often inter­ ested in New York City, and especially Manhattan, as a place for the middle class and rich as well as the poor and working class.

There are, of course, many important researchers in New York City and the region whose work scarcely, or only partly, fits this New York school model. An example is Herbert Gans, a towering force in urban sociology. In his 1962 ethnography of the West End ofBoston, Gans took on urban renewal programs. He argued that many inner-city neighbor­ hoods slated for demolition under such programs were not typically "slums" but supported a viable and dense working-class lifestyle and should not be bulldozed (Gans I962b ). In opposing urban renewal Gans sounds like his contemporary, Jane Jacobs.24 But Gans was never against tall apartment buildings in the city. Furthermore, unlike Jacobs and several others, Gans has resolutely refused to agree that urban life is superior to that of the suburbs. In his classic 1967 account ofLevittown; a large suburban tract development in New Jersey, Gans chastised those who denigrated the suburban lifestyle of its working- and middle-class inhabitants as dull, homogenized, or lonely. For most of those who lived there, Gans insisted, it was none of these ( Gans 1967). Rev iewing Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Gans criti-

INTRODUCTION 23

cized her, too, for denigrating the suburbs. Further, he said her argu­ment that urban life was intrinsically superior to suburban was elitist since the lack of space in the central cities means that only a minoritycan live there anyway, a point that many others have reiterated ( Gans 1962a).25