The Strangled City, 1945-1980
by James Passarelli
In the quarter-century after World War II, as suburban America saw its most rapid growth, its urban counterpart was left in crisis. Between 1950 and 1990, the proportion of Americans living in the suburbs rose from a quarter to half, a phenomenon aptly deemed the “doughnut effect.”[1] The post-war rotting of the city center was not completely unprecedented. The urge to flee stifling urban areas dates back at least to the early nineteenth century, and gained momentum into the early twentieth century, when Harper’s Magazine bemoaned the displeasure one felt toward the city’s “noise, dust, smell, crowding, the pressure of the clock, in negotiating traffic, in great stretches of bleak and dour ugliness…”[2] In 1939 a decidedly more optimistic H.G. Wells predicted the obsolescence of the city and population dispersal “so rapid…that the difference of town and country will vanish altogether.”[3] Still, despite the steady momentum that dispersal had gained in the first half of the century, few were prepared for the sheer speed and force with which the suburbs would relegate the city to a space of decay in the momentous aftermath of the People’s War.
City Drain, or How I Learned to Drive a Car
An increase in automobile production, the building of interstates, and higher incomes made easier what in the nineteenth century would have been a costly and inconvenient method of escape.[4] Thirteen cities lost population during each decade from 1950 to 2000, the most drastic example of which was St. Louis, which lost 230,000 residents (a fourth of the population) from 1950 to 1960.[5]
Furthermore, mid-1920s legislation subsidized private building in the suburbs, decreasing the quality of public housing projects, most of which lay within the city borders, through the 1950s. As middle and upper class families, as well as large corporations, fled downtown locations, cities paid an increasing share of taxes for numerous public projects that often benefitted commuters more than the residents themselves. Instead of tracing a direct line from automobile manufacturing to the rise of suburbs, one suburban scholar has pointed out indirect ways in which federal subsidies facilitated the automotive boom. Hidden subsidies were, “in the mid-1950s, applied to asphalt, trucks, and automobiles, when the Interstate Highway Act provided for the construction of 42,500 miles of roads with 90% federal financing. Legislation specifically excluded public transportation form sharing in the subsidy.”[6] Highways like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Cross-Westchester Expressway, and Bronx River Parkway in New York, therefore, forced lower-class residents on the urban fringe back towards city centers, while at the same time allowing middle- and upper-class New Yorkers access to those same fringes.[7]
Black-White Divide
“In some respects, San Leandro has been lucky,” read a 1966 Wall Street Journal article about a small suburban city south of Oakland. “Unlike some cities, it hasn’t been forced to absorb a heavy influx of minority groups and unskilled workers.”[8] The surprisingly blunt observation gives the reader a sense of the tensions comprising what one scholar has called “the defining characteristic of the urban crisis” in the 1960s: race.[9] Americans increasingly saw metropolitan space divided along racial lines, especially between the black city and the white suburb. Between 1960 and 1968, the number of American whites living in cities decreased, while the city population of blacks increased by over a quarter.[10] Large northern and Midwestern cities had to accommodate the majority of the three million African Americans who moved from the South during the Second Great Migration of 1940-1970, increasing the area and population of already crowded black ghettos.[11] In Chicago, for instance, the area of black ghettos tripled between 1940 and 1960 as whites abandoned the inner city in favor of neighborhoods on the city periphery.[12]
“Almost every urban problem in the United States has a racial dimension,” posited one sociologist in 1970 in a statement that reveals more about academic theorists at the time than it does about the effects of such racial tension on the ground.[13] A 1961 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report perhaps put it best when addressing racial inequality in the housing market: its “effects cannot be understood merely in terms of statistical tables. It is a problem of people and its effects on the human spirit cannot so readily be calculated.”[14] While social scientists desperately sought to explain race’s role in urban decay, riots of the late 1960s and early 1970s literally destroyed the city centers in which minorities increasingly felt trapped. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report called the explosion of suburban housing a “white noose,” echoing William Laas’s metaphor eleven years earlier in 1950, used as the title for his article, “The Suburbs are Strangling the City.”[15]
Utter Destruction
Perhaps the most striking reflection of the post-war city crisis lay in the devastation caused by landlords and real estate developers who set fire to their own properties to collect insurance money. The year 1967 saw 25,000 arson cases, a number which had quadrupled a decade later; an estimated 40% of them were economically motivated. According to then New York City Deputy Chief Fire Marshal John Barracato, “Arson is a barometer of urban decay.”[16] Scenes of ash-strewn apartment ruins served as a far more effective deterrent to would-be city residents than any crime statistic could. Writers in the 1970s commonly referred to the “sick city,” urban “crisis,” and even city extinction, while abandoned lower-class neighborhoods drew comparisons to post-war Dresden.[17]
Irrelevant
Desperate city leaders would eventually champion and fund urban renewal programs to varying degrees of long-term success, but in the early stages they fostered little hope in the future of the city. One mid-1970s writer called the targets of urban renewal “social sinkholes,” while another referred to the programs themselves as “placebos.”[18] What Laas saw in 1950 as a budding geographical battle between city and suburb proved to be a war of attrition that would last over a quarter century. “During the twentieth century,” he wrote, “everything has changed in New York except the city limits…” he explained, “a fact which may ultimately spell ruin for the greatest city on earth.”[19] Twenty-five years later, the city seemed to have gained little ground. A city survey described the city as “irrelevant” for those who were born outside of it. “It is nothing to them,” wrote one researcher, “just another place…in their sprawling metropolitan home territory.”[20]
Notes:
[1] William Schneider, “The Suburban Century Begins,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1992, 33. The other two population samples were “rural” and “urban.” The term “doughnut effect” comes from George Sternlieb and James W. Hughes, “The Changing Demography of the Central City,” Scientific American, v. 243, no. 2 (August, 1980), 48.
[2] Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, New York, 25-44; quote from Stuart Chase, “The future of the great city,” Harper’s Magazine, 160, 83.
[3] H.G. Wells, “World of Tomorrow,” New York Times, March 5, 1939. Wells’ words were inspired by the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the theme of which was “world of tomorrow.”
[4] William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II, New York, 2011, 106-117.
[5] Robert Beauregard, When America Became Suburban, Minneapolis, 2006, 20-3. The thirteen cities are Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, New York, St. Louis, Syracuse, and Washington, D.C.
[6] Dolores Hayden, unpublished paper, quoted in The Suburb Reader, ed. Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, New York, 2006, 279. Hayden’s findings do not diminish the decidedly enormous impact of large-scale automobile manufacturing in the first decades of the twentieth century on the forging of suburban America. The number of automobiles rose from four in 1894 to twenty-seven million in 1930. David L. Ames, “Interpreting Post-World War II Suburban Landscapes as Historical” in Preserving the Recent Past, ed. Deborah Slaton and Rebecca A. Shiffer, Washington D.C., 1995.
[7] For an in-depth history of the precedent-setting Bronx River Parkway, see Barbara Troetel, “Suburban Transportation Redefined: America’s First Parkway” in Westchester: The American Suburb, ed. Roger Panetta, New York, 2006, 247-289.
[8] Lew Phelps, “Model Municipality: San Leandro, Calif., Manages to Surmount Many of the Problems That Plague Cities,” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 1966.
[9] Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, Cambridge, 1993, 161.
[10] Ibid. 171.
[11] James Gregory, “The Second Great Migration: A Historical Overview” in African American Urban History Since World War II, ed. Kenneth Turner and Joe Trotter, Chicago, 2009, 21.
[12] Ibid. 30-1. The study uses socialexplorer.com, an online interactive mapping site that draws from US census data.
[13] Quoted in Nathan Glazer, Cities in Trouble, Chicago, 1970, 24.
[14] US Commission on Civil Rights, Housing: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961).
[15] William Laas, “The Suburbs are Strangling the City,” New York Times Magazine, June 18, 1950.
[16] “Arson for Hate and Profit,” Time, October 31, 1977, 22.
[17] Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History, Chicago, 2005, 46-8.
[18] Peter O. Muller, The Outer City: Geographical Consequences of the Urbanization of the Suburbs, Washington, D.C., 1976, 45.
[19] Laas, “The Suburbs are Strangling the City.”
[20] Joseph Zikmund, “Sources of the Suburban Population: 1955-1960 and 1965-1970,” Publius, v. 5, no. 1, 43.
In the quarter-century after World War II, as suburban America saw its most rapid growth, its urban counterpart was left in crisis. Between 1950 and 1990, the proportion of Americans living in the suburbs rose from a quarter to half, a phenomenon aptly deemed the “doughnut effect.”[1] The post-war rotting of the city center was not completely unprecedented. The urge to flee stifling urban areas dates back at least to the early nineteenth century, and gained momentum into the early twentieth century, when Harper’s Magazine bemoaned the displeasure one felt toward the city’s “noise, dust, smell, crowding, the pressure of the clock, in negotiating traffic, in great stretches of bleak and dour ugliness…”[2] In 1939 a decidedly more optimistic H.G. Wells predicted the obsolescence of the city and population dispersal “so rapid…that the difference of town and country will vanish altogether.”[3] Still, despite the steady momentum that dispersal had gained in the first half of the century, few were prepared for the sheer speed and force with which the suburbs would relegate the city to a space of decay in the momentous aftermath of the People’s War.
City Drain, or How I Learned to Drive a Car
An increase in automobile production, the building of interstates, and higher incomes made easier what in the nineteenth century would have been a costly and inconvenient method of escape.[4] Thirteen cities lost population during each decade from 1950 to 2000, the most drastic example of which was St. Louis, which lost 230,000 residents (a fourth of the population) from 1950 to 1960.[5]
Furthermore, mid-1920s legislation subsidized private building in the suburbs, decreasing the quality of public housing projects, most of which lay within the city borders, through the 1950s. As middle and upper class families, as well as large corporations, fled downtown locations, cities paid an increasing share of taxes for numerous public projects that often benefitted commuters more than the residents themselves. Instead of tracing a direct line from automobile manufacturing to the rise of suburbs, one suburban scholar has pointed out indirect ways in which federal subsidies facilitated the automotive boom. Hidden subsidies were, “in the mid-1950s, applied to asphalt, trucks, and automobiles, when the Interstate Highway Act provided for the construction of 42,500 miles of roads with 90% federal financing. Legislation specifically excluded public transportation form sharing in the subsidy.”[6] Highways like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Cross-Westchester Expressway, and Bronx River Parkway in New York, therefore, forced lower-class residents on the urban fringe back towards city centers, while at the same time allowing middle- and upper-class New Yorkers access to those same fringes.[7]
Black-White Divide
“In some respects, San Leandro has been lucky,” read a 1966 Wall Street Journal article about a small suburban city south of Oakland. “Unlike some cities, it hasn’t been forced to absorb a heavy influx of minority groups and unskilled workers.”[8] The surprisingly blunt observation gives the reader a sense of the tensions comprising what one scholar has called “the defining characteristic of the urban crisis” in the 1960s: race.[9] Americans increasingly saw metropolitan space divided along racial lines, especially between the black city and the white suburb. Between 1960 and 1968, the number of American whites living in cities decreased, while the city population of blacks increased by over a quarter.[10] Large northern and Midwestern cities had to accommodate the majority of the three million African Americans who moved from the South during the Second Great Migration of 1940-1970, increasing the area and population of already crowded black ghettos.[11] In Chicago, for instance, the area of black ghettos tripled between 1940 and 1960 as whites abandoned the inner city in favor of neighborhoods on the city periphery.[12]
“Almost every urban problem in the United States has a racial dimension,” posited one sociologist in 1970 in a statement that reveals more about academic theorists at the time than it does about the effects of such racial tension on the ground.[13] A 1961 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report perhaps put it best when addressing racial inequality in the housing market: its “effects cannot be understood merely in terms of statistical tables. It is a problem of people and its effects on the human spirit cannot so readily be calculated.”[14] While social scientists desperately sought to explain race’s role in urban decay, riots of the late 1960s and early 1970s literally destroyed the city centers in which minorities increasingly felt trapped. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report called the explosion of suburban housing a “white noose,” echoing William Laas’s metaphor eleven years earlier in 1950, used as the title for his article, “The Suburbs are Strangling the City.”[15]
Utter Destruction
Perhaps the most striking reflection of the post-war city crisis lay in the devastation caused by landlords and real estate developers who set fire to their own properties to collect insurance money. The year 1967 saw 25,000 arson cases, a number which had quadrupled a decade later; an estimated 40% of them were economically motivated. According to then New York City Deputy Chief Fire Marshal John Barracato, “Arson is a barometer of urban decay.”[16] Scenes of ash-strewn apartment ruins served as a far more effective deterrent to would-be city residents than any crime statistic could. Writers in the 1970s commonly referred to the “sick city,” urban “crisis,” and even city extinction, while abandoned lower-class neighborhoods drew comparisons to post-war Dresden.[17]
Irrelevant
Desperate city leaders would eventually champion and fund urban renewal programs to varying degrees of long-term success, but in the early stages they fostered little hope in the future of the city. One mid-1970s writer called the targets of urban renewal “social sinkholes,” while another referred to the programs themselves as “placebos.”[18] What Laas saw in 1950 as a budding geographical battle between city and suburb proved to be a war of attrition that would last over a quarter century. “During the twentieth century,” he wrote, “everything has changed in New York except the city limits…” he explained, “a fact which may ultimately spell ruin for the greatest city on earth.”[19] Twenty-five years later, the city seemed to have gained little ground. A city survey described the city as “irrelevant” for those who were born outside of it. “It is nothing to them,” wrote one researcher, “just another place…in their sprawling metropolitan home territory.”[20]
Notes:
[1] William Schneider, “The Suburban Century Begins,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1992, 33. The other two population samples were “rural” and “urban.” The term “doughnut effect” comes from George Sternlieb and James W. Hughes, “The Changing Demography of the Central City,” Scientific American, v. 243, no. 2 (August, 1980), 48.
[2] Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, New York, 25-44; quote from Stuart Chase, “The future of the great city,” Harper’s Magazine, 160, 83.
[3] H.G. Wells, “World of Tomorrow,” New York Times, March 5, 1939. Wells’ words were inspired by the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the theme of which was “world of tomorrow.”
[4] William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II, New York, 2011, 106-117.
[5] Robert Beauregard, When America Became Suburban, Minneapolis, 2006, 20-3. The thirteen cities are Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, New York, St. Louis, Syracuse, and Washington, D.C.
[6] Dolores Hayden, unpublished paper, quoted in The Suburb Reader, ed. Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, New York, 2006, 279. Hayden’s findings do not diminish the decidedly enormous impact of large-scale automobile manufacturing in the first decades of the twentieth century on the forging of suburban America. The number of automobiles rose from four in 1894 to twenty-seven million in 1930. David L. Ames, “Interpreting Post-World War II Suburban Landscapes as Historical” in Preserving the Recent Past, ed. Deborah Slaton and Rebecca A. Shiffer, Washington D.C., 1995.
[7] For an in-depth history of the precedent-setting Bronx River Parkway, see Barbara Troetel, “Suburban Transportation Redefined: America’s First Parkway” in Westchester: The American Suburb, ed. Roger Panetta, New York, 2006, 247-289.
[8] Lew Phelps, “Model Municipality: San Leandro, Calif., Manages to Surmount Many of the Problems That Plague Cities,” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 1966.
[9] Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, Cambridge, 1993, 161.
[10] Ibid. 171.
[11] James Gregory, “The Second Great Migration: A Historical Overview” in African American Urban History Since World War II, ed. Kenneth Turner and Joe Trotter, Chicago, 2009, 21.
[12] Ibid. 30-1. The study uses socialexplorer.com, an online interactive mapping site that draws from US census data.
[13] Quoted in Nathan Glazer, Cities in Trouble, Chicago, 1970, 24.
[14] US Commission on Civil Rights, Housing: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961).
[15] William Laas, “The Suburbs are Strangling the City,” New York Times Magazine, June 18, 1950.
[16] “Arson for Hate and Profit,” Time, October 31, 1977, 22.
[17] Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History, Chicago, 2005, 46-8.
[18] Peter O. Muller, The Outer City: Geographical Consequences of the Urbanization of the Suburbs, Washington, D.C., 1976, 45.
[19] Laas, “The Suburbs are Strangling the City.”
[20] Joseph Zikmund, “Sources of the Suburban Population: 1955-1960 and 1965-1970,” Publius, v. 5, no. 1, 43.