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Yeah, but urban not-renewal was even more damaging to Jane Jacobs' conception of NYC than urban-renewal was. Think Greenwhich Village. Completely destroyed as far as Jane Jacobs line or reasoning goes. Median income of around $100,000, lucky to get into a studio where you can practically touch all four walls for $2,000/month, white as NYC gets. Find me a Rober Moses slum clearance that did as good a job of slum clearance as Jane Jacobs and I'll eat a hat.
San Francisco's slum clearance is a bit different. You have some neighborhoods that were destroyed (Fillmore) explicitly in slum clearance, but for the most part you just didn't have any because the majority of the city was destroyed in the 1906 quake. So while you had plans pre-1906 to do slum clearance in the Civic Center neighborhood, it really wasn't slum clearance that cleared the slums. Depending on how you look at it, San Francisco was definitely either the most "destroyed" by slum clearance or the least "destroyed." I actually prefer the term changed. "Destroyed" is subjective. Is Stuytown an example of destroyed? How about Gaslamp in San Diego? Opposite approaches to renewal, neither of which I would apply "destroyed" to, but that's subject to interpretation. How about Seattle? Is Denny Regrade, now Belltown, destroyed? I mean, literally, it was completely destroyed.
Well, what happened in the Village wasn't slum "clerarance," for all the buildings remain standing. Only the old residents were removed, and by a gradual rather than a wholesale process to boot. That's probably more in keeping with Jacobs, who didn't worry much about the socioeconomic aspects of urban evolution, than not.
"Changed" is also the better term to describe the transformation of the West Village therefore.
Philadelphia is not one of the cities that urban renewal spared — it got its share of towers-in-the-park, all but a handful of them since demolished as in St. Louis — but it also gained national attention for an urban renewal project that did not bulldoze a neighborhood wholesale. The Society Hill urban renewal project was a surgical affair; only the most deteriorated buildings were removed (along with the old wholesale food market along Dock Street, where Society Hill Towers now sits) and replaced with new infill in keeping with the scale of the existing neighborhood (SH Towere excepted). The effort proved quite the success, and it landed Philly's city planner at the time, Ed Bacon (Kevin's dad), on the cover of Time in 1966, the only city planner ever so honored.
And the socioeconomic transformation that followed in the wake of the Society Hill urban renewal project was similar to what happened in the West Village, San Francisco, or the West End of Boston (only with the added insult of wholesale demolition there; still, the West End stands out alongside New York's Stuyvesant Town as the only wholesale towers-in-the-park project that the middle class moved into.
Yeah, but urban not-renewal was even more damaging to Jane Jacobs' conception of NYC than urban-renewal was. Think Greenwhich Village. Completely destroyed as far as Jane Jacobs line or reasoning goes. Median income of around $100,000, lucky to get into a studio where you can practically touch all four walls for $2,000/month, white as NYC gets. Find me a Rober Moses slum clearance that did as good a job of slum clearance as Jane Jacobs and I'll eat a hat.
Those old building are really only suitable for singles/couples residences. They had terrible layouts for families to live in. Railroad flats, rooms off rooms. No privacy.
Yeah, but urban not-renewal was even more damaging to Jane Jacobs' conception of NYC than urban-renewal was. Think Greenwhich Village. Completely destroyed as far as Jane Jacobs line or reasoning goes. Median income of around $100,000, lucky to get into a studio where you can practically touch all four walls for $2,000/month, white as NYC gets. Find me a Rober Moses slum clearance that did as good a job of slum clearance as Jane Jacobs and I'll eat a hat.
Jane Jacobs is to blame for gentrification??
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dehumidifier
Those old building are really only suitable for singles/couples residences. They had terrible layouts for families to live in. Railroad flats, rooms off rooms. No privacy.
That's a surprising statement. Have you ever been to the Bronx, or East Harlem? A good portion of the LES was bulldozed to put in all those ugly, brown high rises that border the East River. In my mind, replacing tenements with housing projects was the height of folly. Just look at rehabbed "slums" where the old housing has been restored and is now considered beautiful and historic. Because NYC has the most housing projects in the nation, I would say it has been the most negatively affected by urban renewal, not y the least. Think of what was lost to build those high rise slums. It was a cheap attempt at social engineering that didn't work.
I believe the tenements in that area that were bulldozed were the "Old Law" style -- common toilet in the hallway and bathtub in the kitchen. Interior rooms with no ventilation and as I said above, bad layouts in general.
I think you are thinking of old townhouse areas that fell into decline (like Park Slope in Brooklyn.) They were a different type of building to begin with.
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