Pruitt Igoe

I would love to see this documentary:


Pruitt-Igoe.com

Other historical footage:

Downtown as a Shopping Mall

Via a Fresno Downtown Association, here is a video that was produced by shopping mall architect Victor Gruen. He starts by reviewing the decline of the city from prewar to 1960 via the automobile and freeway development. He then offers a solution of separating cars and people by building more parking garages and making a car-free pedestrian mall of a big chunk of downtown. It is 20 minutes, so you may not want to watch it, but I found it a fascinating look back on the prevailing thought pattern of the time (which was that cities needed to become more like the suburbs):



Fulton Street, pre-plan, crowded but "declining":
 

Fulton today 

I found it interesting that a commenter on the video stated that today Fresno is often dissed as being the most midwestern-like city in California.

Urban Planning Cartoon 1948

Related to the post last week: documenting the dirty dangerous cities and advocating clean suburbs:

Evolution of a Block

When I was looking through the Sanford Insurance maps of the Washington Park area, I was struck by the fact that there is a tendency to remove whole blocks of smaller, diverse buildings and replace them with much larger, single use structures. Then it would just so happen that I came across a student who documented the history of a single block in NYC:

I decided to try a more mammoth task, compiling a complete record of the life cycle of a single city block. That's what I've presented here. Beginning in the 1780s with James Delancey's farm, and ending with the present public housing structures, erected in 1985, this is a record of eight generations of buildings on two-thirds of an acre.:
In the Youtube video, it is sped up a bit too much. Better to go to his site and watch it.

It is fascinating, and unfortunately the end result is this:
 

The location in Google Maps.

Power House Detroit

 

I recently reconnected (via Facebook) with an old friend who I met in OTR 15 years ago. Perhaps, growing from what she learned in OTR, Gina and her husband Mitch, have been taking action in vacated buildings in Detroit:

...So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together... - NY Times

They have been getting LOTS of media attention lately. See here, here and here. Their website is here. Don't miss their recent post about the inquiries from people interested in following their footsteps.

UPDATE: Here is a link to a good video about the $100 house

Gambling and Drinking Gasoline

The ultimate cause of our current depression is that we overspent. The savings rate in this country is the lowest in 75 years and it is the lowest in the developed world. Is this a good time to encourage wasteful gambling? Is this a great time to start building casinos in Ohio? Twenty years after they left Atlantic City and Vegas and started spreading across the whole country? Is this another example of Cincinnati being 20 years behind, and generally missing the trend?

Gambling discourages savings. Gambling feeds people's belief that money will make them happy and it encourages fantasies of getting something for nothing. I've been in a Las Vegas casino once and I have visited the outside of the casino "riverboat" in Lawrenceburg. Seeing the chain smoking zombies rush to spend their last nickels on a weekday afternoon was sickening.

I don't want to live near a casino and I don't want to raise my kids near one. However, if gambling is legalized in Ohio, (which may be inevitable) I would rather see one in an urban area like downtown than in Lebanon or wherever last year's proposal was supposed to go.

Maybe it can work at Broadway Commons, next to the Courthouse and the jail. The location definitely has the space and the highway access. But when I think of all the beautiful, hard working cities that I would love our city to emulate, I struggle to think of any that have a casino downtown. It just doesn't sit right with me.

(Somewhat not-relevant cartoon by Andy Singer.)

Percy Jenkins Pleads to Save Home

Some things never change, but often the specifics do drastically change. For example, people still get forced from their homes. Years ago often it was government doing the demolition under the banner of Urban Renewal. Today it is more likely to be foreclosure or condemnation.

I found this compelling photo in an old book in the office, and thought it was worth sharing:

In this photo, a man threatens suicide in an attempt to prevent the authorities compulsorily purchasing his home as part of a London redevelopment project. "Percy Jenkins made a last defiant bid to save his home yesterday...but failed. For four hours he resisted bailiffs and police, council officials and welfare workers. He roared at them from the rooftop, threatened to hurl himself from a 30 ft high window ledge and barricaded his doors. But in the end, weeping he had to concede defeat." - Daily Mirror June 19, 1969. (from the book "Architecture vs Housing", 1971, by Martin Pawley

Broken Windows and Incremental Repair

[Where: 1810 Elm Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202]

Last summer, this building was fully occupied. It was built in the 1880s, occupied as rental housing with a storefront for 80 years, then rehabbed under the project-based Rental Rehab program in the 1970s by Tom Denhart. During the 1970s rehab, it was sandblasted, and gutted. Much of its historic character was removed. The storefront was converted to housing. Smaller aluminum windows were installed in the bigger brick openings.

When I first came to OTR, I thought that the biggest problem was getting the vacant buildings rehabbed. But since I've stuck around long enough, I now see that is not enough. It is not enough because many buildings that were completely rehabbed in the 70s, 80s and 90s are now vacant again...

I think it is worth pondering what the difference is between a building that is continually occupied vs. one that is periodically vacant. It is the difference between incremental repair and major construction, the difference between ownership and absentee landlords, the difference between salvage and gutting.

See, the building above is owned by a corporation, Hart Realty. The owner is old and supposedly bankrupt. But the remnants of the corporation still litter the city. And these windows will stay broken and will attract more stones, probably for years, until someone comes up with a very large mortgage to completely rehab it again. And if it is done by a another corporation, who just sees this building as a way to make money, it will probably be vacant again in 30 years.

(And by the way, I don't know about every one else, but standing there looking at these broken windows, with stones laying at my feet, I was tempted to break some glass too. Now I would never do that, but it is interesting that these tendencies are so strong. )

But, if the building were to be bought by someone who could give it some love and care, it could really blossom. The front still has remnants of its former beauty, and structurally it is solid. Part of the problem in OTR is that many of the buildings are too big for small time owners. It is one thing to buy a single family rowhouse in Newport or Northside and do all the work yourself, but it is quite another to take on a 5-unit building with a commercial space in OTR.

But it is possible...

New Office of Urban Policy

Obama has announced he will establish an Office of Urban Policy. HUD (The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development) never quite filled the bill for addressing the holistic approach to city issues. It will be very interesting to see who is assigned to head this new office.

Crime and Vouchers Redux

A liberal retort to the Atlantic article a few weeks ago that claimed a link between Section 8 vouchers and spreading crime. I linked to the original article here. After reading both articles, I really don't think they disagree as much as they purport. Both see the old "projects' as largely problematic and also believe support of some kind must follow the vouchers. The new article points out that there is no evidence that the actual voucher recipients are the criminals, and also points out that the poor economy in cities like Memphis are the more likely culprit.

Downtown Parks Support Revitalization

Interesting article in the Eugene Weekly advocating using parks to help drive development:

Given that Eugene has been trying without success to reinvigorate its downtown, it would be wise to learn from other cities. Eugene's focus has been on buildings. not parks. That is the first mistake. Buildings and their tenants come and go. In Eugene's case, after spending countless staff hours and thousands of taxpayer dollars on elaborate plans and complicated financial projections, the buildings did not even come...

Eugene's approach to economic development has been to prime the pump of the private sector with parking garages, tax abatements and other forms of public subsidy. This is Eugene's second mistake.

The redevelopment focus in Eugene should change from buildings to parks. Public funds should go to public infrastructure — and the highest return on investment is with downtown parks..

Mt. Aurburn Historic Conservation Plan

This plan, published by the City in 1981 was found on a shelf in my office. I think it was my partner's. He worked on several projects in Mt Auburn in the 70s and 80s. I just scanned a few of the more interesting pages:

Cover of report with historic photo of Milton Street.

 

Credits page. Many of the people listed are people you will still meet around city government or in OTR meetings: Steve Schuckman, Ron Kull, Bob Richardson, Don Lenz, Genevieve Ray. In the small print it also says that this report relies heavily on the Findlay Market Guidelines of 1972 and the Mt Auburn Design Plan of 1975:

 

Map of District with noted buildings. I like how flat the area looks in map form:

 

I like this drawing demonstrating acceptable roof configurations. Hand drawn with ziptone dots added for shading. There are similar drawings showing acceptable doors, windows fencing etc:

 

Isometric drawing of Liberty Hill intersection:

 

Proposed Improvements at Sycamore and Liberty:

 

Photo of Liberty Hill and Liberty intersection:

 

You won't see junk car lots like this anymore in this area:

 

Quote - how Robert Moses Got-r-Done

If ends justified means, and if the important thing in building a project was to get it started, then any means that got it started were justified. Furnishing misleading information about it was justfied; so was underestimating its costs.

Misleading and underestimating, in fact, might be the only way to get a project started...But what if you didn't tell the officials how much the projects would cost? What if you let the legislators know about only a fraction of what you knew would be the projects' ultimate expense?

Once they had authorized that small initial expenditure and you had spent it, they would not be able to avoid giving you the rest when you asked for it. How could they? If they refused to give you the rest of the money, what they had given you would be wasted, and that would make them look bad in the eyes of the public. And if they said you had misled them, well, they were not supposed to be misled. If they had been misled, that would mean that they hadn't investigated the projects thoroughly, and had therefore been derelict in their own duty...Once a Legislature gave you money to start a project, it would be virtually forced to give you the money to finish it.

-The Power Broker by Robert Caro, on Robert Moses
(via Andrew Sullivan)

1111 Spring Street

This building was not saved by the Local Historic District, because at the time, Over-the-Rhine had only National Designation as a historic district. A National Designation does not stop demolition.

The struggle over this building in 1988 explains a lot about the recent (past few decades) history of OTR. The following is my understanding and recollection, without doing research. If anyone wants to correct or add to this, please do so.

A lot of project-based Section 8 Rehab occurred in the Pendleton area in the 70's. About this time, a plan deveoloped to renew the area around the Old St. Paul's Church. Spring Street was re-routed, and buildings were demolished to create a new plaza, and the church was adaptively re-used by Verdin Bell. After this "urban renewal" process, one vacant building, 1111 Spring Street was somehow left in the City's posession, just south of the plaza. I don't have easy acces to any old pictures, but the building was a deteriorated shell, just like many in OTR.

A map of the area, with the building highlighted:

 

[where: 1111 Spring Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202]
Notice the open space, mostly parking all around it?

In 1988, (was it bastille day?) buddy gray and several housing activists took the boards off the 1111 Spring Street and occupied it, demanding that the city not demolish it, but rehab it into housing.

When he heard what was going on, Jim Tarbell came over and attempted to remove buddy himself. They had a physical fight, involving wrestling and allegedly attempts to push each other out a window. I don't know the details, and they don't really matter, but it was a significant moment in the history of OTR.

The protestors were forcibly removed by police. However, eventually City Hall relented and the building was transferred to the newly formed, OTR Housing Network, and after several years of hard work, restored into decent housing for several families, which it remains to this day. The fight unified the activist community, but also unified the opposition, represented by the OTR Chamber. It would be an extreme understatememt to say it was polarizing. There were battles before and after this one, but this one marked a tipping point.

Here is a picture of the building today:

 

I am writing about this to help people understand the battles fought to save buildings, and save OTR. On thing that always struck me: despite the disagreements over who would live-in or control the buildings, most people on both sides did agree on one thing: The buildings should be saved.

Today, this is not always the case. The Community Council is a smaller institution with a full plate of issues. The OTR Chamber of Commerce has younger leadership that doesn't see demolition as a major concern. There are groups like the Cincinnati Preservation Association and the OTR Foundation, as well as individuals who speak up now and then, but what good is their voice if a building collapses from neglect or is emergency demolished by the City?

Much seems to be in 3CDC's hands right now, including some buildings that will be a challenge to rehab. They have stated that they intend to save anything that is salvageable. We will soon see.

Water Damage

 

This is what you get after one winter when a Florida starchitect is hired to design a building in a midwestern climate.

Jane Jacobs Quote #2

We can see around us, from the days preceding project building, many examples of decaying city neighborhoods built up all at once... Every city has such physically homogeneous neighborhoods.

Usually just such neighborhoods have been handicapped in every way, so far as generating diversity is concerned. We cannot blame their poor staying power and stagnation entirely on their most obvious misfortune: being built all at once. Nevertheless, this is one of the handicaps of such neighborhoods, and unfortunately its effects can persist long after the buildings have become aged.

When such an area is new, it offers no economic possibilities to city diversity. The practical penalties of dullness, from this and other causes, stamp the neighborhood early. It becomes a place to leave.

Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule. The little physical change that does occur is for the worse - gradual dilapidation, a few random, shabby new uses here and there. People look at these few, random differences and regard them as evidence, and perhaps as a cause, of drastic change. Fight blight! They regret that the neighborhood has changed. Yet the fact is physically it has changed remarkably little. People's feelings about it, rather have changed. The neighborhood shows a strange inability to update itself, enliven itself, repair itself, or to be sought after, out of choice, by a new generation. It is dead. Actually, it was dead from birth, but nobody noticed this much until the corpse began to smell.

Finally comes the decision, after exhortations to fix up and fight blight have failed, that the whole thing must be wiped out and a new cycle started... A new corpse is laid out. It does not smell yet, but it is just as dead, just as incapable of the constant adaptions and permutations that make up the process of life.

There is no reason why this dismal, foredoomed cycle need be repeated. If such an area is examined to see which of the other three conditions for generating diversity are missing, and then those missing conditions are corrected as well as they can be, some of the old building must go: extra streets must be added, the concentration of people must be heightened, room for new primary uses must be found, public and private. But a good mingling of the old building must remain, and in remaining, they will have become something more than mere decay from the past or evidence of previous failure. They will have become the shelter which is necessary, and valuable to the district, for many varieties of middling-, low- and no-yield diversity. The economic value of new buildings is replaceable in cities. It is replaceable by the spending of more construction money. But the economic value of old buildings is irreplaceable at will. It is created by time. This economic requisite for diversity is a requisite that vital city neighborhoods can only inherit, and then sustain over the years.

page 198, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published 1961

Against Change or Against Improvement?

I don't like it when a childhood haunt is demolished, and I can understand a person expressing sadness at the loss of a neighborhood.

But what if you grew up in a disfunctional 15 story housing project with elevators that smelled of urine and broken glass in the dusty playground? I have to admit, I would still be a bit saddened to see it demolished. I hate demolition. I think most all buildings can be saved and improved.

That said, some forms of housing are proven disasters, and the most disaster prone is high-rise government housing. Study after study has shown that they are unsafe and unsalvageable. In his ground-breaking studies Oscar Newman used scientific methods to successfully design what he termed "defensible space", something high-rise government housing always lacks. You can read his book for free on the HUD website.

An article on the AP today is about a woman who gives what I would term sentimental tours of the old ghetto:

..this "Ghetto Bus Tour" is.. the last gasp in her crusade to tell a different story about Chicago's notorious housing projects, something other than well-known tales about gang violence so fierce that residents slept in their bathtubs to avoid bullets.

"I want you to see what I see," says Beauty Turner, after leading the group off the bus to a weedy lot where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. "To hear the voices of the voiceless."

Turner, a former Robert Taylor Homes resident, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Chicago Housing Authority's $1.6 billion "Plan for Transformation," which since the late 1990s has demolished 50 of the 53 public housing high-rises and replaced them with mixed-income housing.

City officials have heralded the plan. But Turner believes the city that once left residents to be victimized by violent drug-dealing gangs is now pushing those same people from their homes without giving them all a place to go.

In many ways similar to Cincinnati's City West Project, the Chicago Housing Authority is demolishing Robert Taylor Homes, which consisted of 28 high-rises and over 4,300 apartments and replacing it with a "mixed income" development. This is all part of a Federal Program called Hope VI, which was a controversial program to help Housing Authorities demolish housing.

I have concerns about any wholesale change of a neighborhood. To paraphrase Jane Jacobs: "Any neighborhood, built at once, and built to be unchanging, is bound for failure" (I'll try to look up the exact quote later and insert it here).

My concern with City West is that it is overly new and built to be unchanging. A mixture of old and new structures is essential to a vibrant city district because small, new ventures require the affordable places that old buildings provide. Only established businesses of large size can afford new construction.

Also, the new homes in City West are all wood framed construction with brick veneer fronts and vinyl siding on the sides and rears. This may be expected in the suburban neighborhoods that Drees typically builds in, and it is certainly the cheapest per square foot, however, it seems out of place in a city that is mostly brick.

Despite my reservations about the new City West, I am only slightly sentimental about the housing projects that it replaced, and think that a mixed-use, mixed-income project, with defensible space is certainly an improvement.