Superblock stories, or, ten episodes in the history of public housing

Abstract

This essay analyzes ten disparate but linked moments in the history of the depiction of the spaces of public housing. Investigating the image of public housing that emerges from a range of cultural forms and practices – from hip-hop to literature to social reform to urban planning to boogaloo – the essay inhabits the perspectives of a host of different actors with an interest in the life of public housing. By surveying a range of attitudes towards public housing from different moments in its history, it hopes to renew a vision of the public goals at the heart of its creation. Understanding the creative use of public housing's superblock spaces offers a way to imagine a form of shared ownership over its fate.

Keywords:

• public housing
• urban history
• cultural history
• New York City
• East Harlem

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank James Goodman and the anonymous journal reviewers for insightful comments and advice. This piece, in an earlier form, benefited from the comments and questions offered by participants in the Boston Seminar on Immigration and Urban History at the Massachusetts Historical Society, particularly Jeff Melnick, Chris Capozzola, Marilyn Halter, and Conrad Wright. My thanks to all of them.

Notes

^1. See http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11374. The question arrives at about 13:00. Jay-Z reprised this role, on an even grander stage, in September and October of 2012, when he headlined eight sold-out nights at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn. As owner of a small percentage of the Brooklyn Nets, the NBA franchise that will play at the new arena, the concerts were another, far more public, homecoming to Brooklyn and the ultimate symbol of his having made it. While many welcome the return of professional sports to the borough, others had been protesting the arena plan since it was announced almost a decade earlier. Part of a larger real estate scheme that will feature housing and retail, the Barclays Center benefited from state eminent domain and required demolishing homes and businesses like the public housing and urban renewal programs of an earlier era. The still raw question of whether the arena represents Brooklyn's final arrival on the world stage or the end of its own particular culture and descent into gentrification and ‘Manhattanization’ suggest questions about Jay-Z similar to those I'll raise in this essay. See N. R. Kleinfeld (New York Times, September 28, 2012, A18).

^2. Miller (1959, 15). Page numbers in text hereafter.

^3. For this reading of Miller see Rotella (1998, 247). I am indebted to Rotella's recuperation of Miller and his analysis of The Cool World. See Rotella (1998, 238–68) for extended interpretation of Miller's career. Ironically, when the director Shirley Clarke made her 1964 film version of The Cool World, she filmed in abandoned tenements in the South Bronx owned by the New York City Housing Authority. These were properties the Authority had acquired and intended to tear down for public housing. Clarke had to assure the Housing Authority that her script (an adaptation of a stage version of Miller's novel) did not call for any shots of public housing and did not ‘reflect in any way upon the public housing program’; see Ira S. Robbins to Harold Sole, ‘‘The Cool World’ – Use of Empty Site Buildings for Filming Movie,’ March 8, 1962, Box 59A7, Folder 4, New York City Housing Authority Records, LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, Queens, NY (hereafter NYCHA).

^4. See Rotella (1998, 249–51).

^5. See Baldwin (2010, 273–5).

^6. James Weldon Johnson Community Center, ‘A Statement on Public Housing in East Harlem,’ March 8, 1961, Box 1, Folder 19, James Weldon Johnson Community Center Papers, Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY (hereafter JWJCC).

^7. For an investigation of the place of popular culture in public housing see Melnick (2005).

^8. Ellen Lurie, ‘Community Action in East Harlem,’ March 1962, paper presented to the American Orthopsychiatric Association symposium ‘The Environment of the Metropolis,’ 5, typescript in Box 35, Folder 8, Union Settlement Association Records, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, NY (hereafter UnSett). Later published as Lurie (1963).

^9. For Lurie's reactions to Washington Houses see Ellen Lurie, ‘A Study of George Washington Houses, A Federally-Aided, Low Cost Housing Project in East Harlem: The Effect of the Project on its Tenants and the Surrounding Community,’ Conducted by Union Settlement Association, 1955–1956 in Box 11, Folder 13, UnSett.

^10. JWJCC, ‘The Johnson Center Story,’ December 12, 1950, Box 1, Folder 30, JWJCC. JWJCC, JWJ Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 2, March 1962, 2, Box 1, Folder 37, JWJCC. JWJCC, ‘Reclaiming A Wasteland,’ 1960, Box 11, Folder 14, JWJCC and ‘The East Harlem Project,’ n.d., 1, Box 17, Folder 3, UnSett.

^11. Ellen Lurie, ‘A Study of George Washington Houses,’ Section V, page 2.

^12. For the full story of their efforts see Zipp (2010, 299–350).

^13. Mildred Zucker, Report of the Housing Committee … for the Year June 1958 Through May 1959, May 19, 1959, 2, box 73C3, folder 11, NYCHA. Ellen Lurie, reply to Catherine Bauer, in ‘The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing – How to Break It,’ AF, Volume 106, June 1957, 140–141. See also Ellen Lurie, ‘Architectural Forum,’ n.d., typescript in Box 35, Folder 7, UnSett.

^14. Jacobs (1956, 132–3). For more on this effort see Zipp (2010, 327–30).

^15. See Paul Goldberger (New York Times, October 16, 1981, B6); Mayer quoted in NYCHA, Monthly Housing Report, The New Face of Public Housing (Broadcast over Radio Station WNYC on October 11, 1962), 2–3 in Box 59C8, Folder 4, NYCHA; Mayer (1967, 20, 28).

^16. Mayer (1962, 450, 453–6); NYCHA, Monthly Housing Report, October 11, 1962, 3. See also Mayer (1963, 142). In 1965 Mayer expanded his Main Street idea, proposing to create a new ‘Main Street or Pedestrian Promenade’ cutting across East Harlem on an east – west axis. It would have joined a major Park on the east with the Park Avenue Market on the west, passing through the grounds of both James Weldon Johnson Houses and Jefferson Houses. See Albert Mayer, ‘For East Harlem: A New ‘Main Street’ or Pedestrian Promenade,’ December 28, 1965, 1–2, in Box 14, Folder 6, JWJCC. For more on Mayer's designs see Zipp (2010, 333–9).

^17. Mayer quoted in NYCHA, Monthly Housing Report, The New Face of Public Housing (Broadcast over Radio Station WNYC on September 13, 1962) in Box 59C8, Folder 4, NYCHA and in ‘New York City Tries A Just-For-Fun Venture,’ Journal of Housing, August-September, 1960, 306. See also JWJCC, ‘The Story of the ‘Gala East Harlem Plaza,’’ December 1959; JWJCC, ‘The Gala East Harlem Plaza,’ n.d., both in Box 73C3, Folder 13, NYCHA; NYCHA, Press Release, Address of Ira S. Robbins, Vice-Chairman of the New York City Housing Authority at the Dedication of the East Harlem Plaza, Jefferson Houses, Monday, May 16, 1960,’ May 17, 1960 in Box 59D1, Folder 2, NYCHA; New York Times (May 17, 1960, 33); ‘Harlem's Playful Playground,’ Architectural Forum, Volume 114, Number 3, March 1961. For Mayer's comparison of the Plaza to Lincoln Center see ‘Search For Community Comment,’ Handwritten Notes and Typescript, n.d., in Folder 11, Box 13, JWJCC.

^18. JWJCC, ‘The Arts and East Harlem,’ n.d., in Box 1, Folder 19, JWJCC. See also Mildred Zucker, ‘How Can The Settlement Movement Best Serve The Purposes of the Anti-Poverty Program?’ April 21, 1966, in Box 14, Folder 3, JWJCC; and Muriel Fischer (New York World-Telegram and Sun, May 9, 1961).

^19. Sam Rand, ‘Monday Night Concert Series at the Gala East Harlem Fountain-Plaza, 1962,’ September 21, 1962, 5, 7, in Box 8, Folder 8, 2 – 3, JWJCC. On average Rand estimated that they got about 1700 people a night and more than 12000 over the course of a summer.

^20. Rand, ‘Monday Night Concert Series …,’ 2, 1.

^21. Rand, ‘Monday Night Concert Series …,’ 1–4.

^22. See Alan Rich (New York Times, July 31, 1962, 18). Gerterlyn Dozier quoted in Marjorie Rubin (New York Times, August 21, 1963). See also Rand, ‘Monday Night Concert Series …,’ 1–6.

^23. Rand, ‘Monday Night Concert Series …,’ 3–4.

^24. Rand, ‘Monday Night Concert Series …,’ 3–4. Fischer, ‘East Harlem Can Hardly Wait’.

^25. East Harlem: A Community in Transition … (New York, James Weldon Johnson Community Center, Inc., n.d.) in Box 2, Folder 1, JWJCC.

^26. For reactions to the social workers' influence over the neighborhood see Cayo-Sexton (1965, 99–100, 167–9).

^27. See East Harlem Council for Community Planning, Luncheon Meeting: ‘The Revitalization of East Harlem – The New Upper East Side,’ October 16, 1961 in Box 26, Folder 2, UnSett. Ellen Lurie delivered a report on the ‘new name or image’ they were using at Franklin Plaza – ‘The New Upper East Side.’

^28. Preston Wilcox to Walter Lord, Chairman of Union Settlement, September 9, 1963, 2 in Box 17, Folder 4, UnSett. Wilcox quoted in Cayo-Sexton (1965, 100).

^29. For an analysis of the ‘neighborhood unit’ theory see Fairfield (1993).

^30. Ellen Lurie, ‘The Neighborhood Concept and Integration – Is There A Conflict?’ Paper presented at New York City chapter of National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, December 13, 1963, in Box 5, Ellen Lurie Papers, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos, Hunter College, CUNY, New York City. Ironically, the advocates of community control often found that their strategy, designed to get power for local people, ended up redoubling the isolation that Lurie worried ‘neighborhood unit’ thinking might have engendered.

^31. Podair (2002, 60); ‘Preston Wilcox, Harlem Elder, Passes Away,’ New York Amsterdam News, August 17, 2006. For more on Lurie's work in Washington Heights see Hoffnung-Garskoff (2007). One wonders if her commitment to community control in the later 1960s might not have been shaken if she looked back on her doubts about the ‘neighborhood unit’ in 1963. Because what was ‘community control’ but demand for local, decentralized authority, power that, as ideologically pure or idealistic as it might have been, was always limited by the degree of real power that any locality had to actually win resources from the city or the market. Podair, for instance, shows how ‘community control’ backfired against the black freedom movement when its rhetoric was easily and thoroughly co-opted by the conservative defensive localism of white communities with far more ability to win and wield the power that made local control a viable political and economic strategy.

^32. On life in public housing see Williams (2004); Feldman and Stall (2004); Vale (2002); Bloom (2008); Umbach (2011). For a recent defense of life in public housing, see Right to the City Alliance (2010).

^33. Bataan (1971). See also Wang (2008, 68–79).

^34. Bataan (1968).

^35. Jay-Z (2010, 3–4, 292). Page numbers in text hereafter.

^36. The history tells us that public housing's failure stems from its chronically lackluster operating budgets. Built with federal monies, they have relied inordinately on local budgets for upkeep and maintenance ever since the 1950s, when Congress, favoring private housing, began decreasing their outlays to public housing programs.