Metropolis: Creator or Destroyer?; 8; Three Cures for a Sick City

In 1793, major Pierre-Charles-Laufon, planned Washington for monumental splendor. Its broad vistas and grand colonnades were designed to reassure the young republic that it could be just as rich and powerful as any old world empire. Today, Washington's sights can still impress the visitor, but most of the time, the several 100,000 people who work here get a different view. Laufon couldn't have anticipated the automobile, yet his low-density city with its broad avenues

and parks made this a metropolis dominated by automobile transportation much earlier than most. Even 25 years ago, Washington was choking on its own traffic, and each new bridge, tunnel and expressway built since then, has given only temporary relief. Most Washingtonians will agree that the capital is a fine place to visit, but they hate to live here. Two-thirds of them are commuters to Virginia and Maryland. There's no rail-rappled transit system, so most work-a-day Washingtonians, along with most urban workers in America, digest their breakfast and anticipate their dinners trapped in their own cars. Who commutes? Mostly white people. Of metropolitan Washington's million and a half white people, less than 23% live in the city proper.

Of its half million Negroes, 85% live in the city. Once again, this wasn't something that concerned Laufon, but it is a major worry today, and for shadows the kind of racial concentration in central city that is taking place in almost every metropolis in the country. Laufon's grand plan was not concerned with such mundane things as the location of shops or housing for government workers. These, he left a chance. Results? Just beyond those grand vistas, you find the familiar American city story of speculative building, exploitation, neglect, and decay. Drained by the suburbs, plagued by racial ghettos, blighted by slums, Washington is

urban America with 10 degrees of fever. Washington is also a place where some of the boldest action is being taken to cure our urban hills. In this program, we are going to examine three large undertakings in some detail, because they represent the three dominant, often incompatible, approaches to urban renewal found throughout the country. This Lisa Sergio, editor of the Georgetown Guide, tells the story of her neighborhood's renewal. You must go back almost 200 years to understand what has happened here.

Georgetown was a thriving port when Washington was still only a mud flat. Merchants and planters had built fine houses on the main streets and hobbles for their slaves in the back alleys. By 1819 or so, the more fastidious among Washington's new government families were showing a preference for this established community, a preference over the confusion of the capital city, which was a mile across Rock Creek. And so Georgetown became perhaps, I would say, the nation's first fashionable suburb. A hundred and fifty years later, Georgetown is again the center of fashion and wealth. Both its mansions and back street hobbles have been lovingly and expensively restored. The fact that Georgetown has a large number of handsome and historic houses made it an

ideal place for urban renewal through preservation. Yet the vast majority of its 12,000 inhabitants live in row houses, put up by speculative builders in more recent times. Georgetown houses that sell today for $60,000 if located elsewhere in Washington would go for $20,000. Let us kept Georgetown from following the usual American city pattern of prosperity, exploitation and decay into slums. A generational soul ago, Georgetown really was on its way to becoming a slum. By 1920, some of the very old beautiful mansions had really become rooming houses. Yes, the white people were living in some of them and I would say that perhaps there were as many as eight or ten persons living in one room in a little house, such as mine. The families thronged some of the back alleys. The better group of people, the more moneyed element, was definitely on its way out.

But some of the property owning old Georgetown families that had never moved out and some of the newcomers who loved old houses and did move in decided to fix things up, to stay and to restore and renovate and make the place livable. Of course, it was really not an organized effort, but it went this way. One person would restore one house. The neighbors would admire it and would do exactly the same thing. It was 15 years before smart money in real estate decided Georgetown was a good thing. Meanwhile, these Georgetown pioneers were setting a style for their neighborhood, giving it their, making it some place. They were proving that neighborhood improvement can be just as infectious as blight, a fact often ignored by the professional urban renewers. In 1954, organized Georgetowners finally were able to get a law passed that gave to the Fine Arts Commission a certain amount of power to see that people who renovated houses

or restored them or even rebuilt them did so always in keeping with a certain style in order to preserve the feel, the atmosphere of the place. I would say that even today it is mostly a matter of friendly persuasion. Today in Georgetown, you will find tiny row houses where school teachers live across the street from a millionaire's mansion. The variety of Georgetown's houses helps make possible a much greater variety in income levels, occupations and family sizes than is found in most upper-class city neighborhoods. Here no zoning ordinances or FHA requirements force people to surround their houses with sterile lawns. No houses designated sub-standard from one of the second bathroom. Georgetown has also refused to follow this supposedly sacred dictum of many planners and

realtors that when residential and commercial buildings are mixed, blight is inevitable. Actually, this mixture gives it a variety of street life as well as convenience of living that is all but vanished from most city neighborhoods. Today Georgetown is indisputably a good address. There's one the intense loyalty of its residents and perhaps inevitably the enmity of some who live in less fashionable neighborhoods. We like the cosmopolitan flavor of the Georgetown village. We live in an over a hundred-year-old house. We have colonial flavor. We have a lovely small but very nice little garden. We get an awful lot in good food and good shops and character of our neighbors and we have a very good life here. The galleries, the beautiful shops, the sense of pride, a respecting craftsmanship.

And I like the excitement generated in Georgetown, intellectual stimulation where people and mates are much more intellectual than the people you find in Siberia. And I get shops here that I don't get anywhere else. I can buy French food and Italian food and all sorts of things I wouldn't find in the normal American supermarket. It's the freedom to express yourself as an individual, whether you perform, you know, cut them all on a Sunday with everybody else. It is a place that you can honestly be an individual. Georgetown has scruely accommodates where the smiths are trying to keep up with the Joneses. In essence, you are paying a premium. You're paying a royalty, just for the fact to say that you live in Georgetown. I think it's expensive to live in Georgetown, but we think we get our money as well. Since Georgetown is often cited as proof that government-aided slum clearance is not needed,

here are two more facts about it to be pondered. Georgetown's present population of 12,000 mostly well-heeled citizens have all but replaced 15,000 mostly poor ones who lived here as late as 1930. Georgetown is a racially tolerant community, yet its Negro population in 1930 numbered 3,200. Today, it is less than 400. Three handsome old Negro churches still stand in the middle of fashionable Georgetown. Today, most of their members are commuters from that former mud flat called Washington just across Rock Creek. In some, Georgetown is a fine place to live if you can afford it and like this kind of thing. But the Georgetown approach to urban renewal is probably reserved for a few special people in a few special neighborhoods. Washington Southwest offers a more usual picture of American urban renewal, acres of cleared

land and high-rise apartments. Some 23,000 people once lived in this cleared area about the size of Georgetown. A principal architect for this development is Miss Claude Thiel Smith. I wouldn't shed a tear about what used to be here. I don't know whether people really like it the way it is now, but for 100 years this area with the capital dome in the background was a real slum. Not even a glamorous slum like the lower east side, but a real slum. There were a few proud streets, but most people were miserably housed and desperately poor. As late as 1955, a fourth of them still had to use backyard privies. Some families were refugees from refurbished Georgetown's high rents. Others were three generation residents who had never been as far out of the neighborhood as the capital mall, a few blocks north. The rents made this a welcome home for the city's failures, its cripples, its outcasts.

When the area was approved for renewal, 5,600 families were moved out and the planners, architects and builders took over. We've talked about, wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to fall a lot and we could design 30 acres at one time as we have done here. But the aesthetics of 30 acres, thinking of maybe 4,000 people are going to live here. They're little people, medium-sized people and big people. And what are we designing for, a place to live, a place to shop, a place to stand around and talk by a pool, get home at night, walk through a lobby, all these spaces are involved in design. It's a balcony, it's a roof garden, it's a view of the capital, it's lights done right at night.

It's all of these things put together, but it's on a scale that we never did it before. And it's an experiment. Mrs. Smith and her colleagues, like Georgetown's improvers, have striven to give their neighborhood's style and distinction, to make it some place. And the Southwest is winning the loyalty of its new citizens. We have always lived in houses and this is something new to be living in an apartment. And we love the view, we have a balcony, the people are friendly, we take good morning, good afternoon in the hall, and it is most convenient, like it very much. We like it also, especially the balcony, that was one of the reasons we entered this apartment in a capital part-tower, because we like it very much, we can cook outside and see outside and it's not like living in one of these buildings downtown, you're 14 streets where they have these windows and you can't get out, it looks like modern prison to me.

Besides that, it's very convenient where we live now, because my husband doesn't have to commute for hours to get home, it's not like living in suburbs, especially in winter when the traffic is bad and it's not, he is home in 10 minutes. It's so convenient to the stars and to the all and lovely museums and so on, enjoy it, it's so nice they left the big trees at the park, it's wonderful, they can build all around them and not into these trees in any way. The old trees were saved, and half dozen old houses, all the rest went, houses and people. I said and I still believe it was right, tear the whole thing down, there isn't enough worth saving, but rebuild it for a whole range of people, not just poor people, not just rich people, people all the way across the board. To build for a whole range of people, this is the dream of many who design new city neighborhoods

that follow the bulldozer, yet when costs are assessed, the range they can build for is often sharply limited. In Southwest Washington, the rents start at $110 a month for the cheapest one-room efficiency of park. Two bedroom townhouses rent for $250 a month and up. The approved long-range plan calls for a few middle-income houses, yet to be built, and no low-rank housing. By coincidence, outside the limits of the new development, stand three low-rank public housing projects, all built or in plan before Southwest was level, with the tremendous demand for this kind of housing among the many low-income families of Washington, only a handful of the refugees managed to get into these projects. Yes, that is lovely apartments for those who can afford it, but 90% of the people who once lived there cannot afford to live there now. One of the things that the Urban Renewer Program did was to raise the hopes of many of

the people there, it was said that they could come back when it was rebuilt. But today, we see that this is not something. The bulldozer destroyed their hopes. One thing that the bulldozer did do, however, was to create these two worlds here in Southwest. In one hand, we have the very, very poor living across the street under the very, very rich. Just because people are going to be moved out of an area if you're going to rebuild, it doesn't mean that the same people have to move back in. There was a big fight about this. Where, in fact, did the 5,600 families go? It took a team of dedicated social workers 10 years to get them all settled in new houses. A whopping 38% were finally placed in low-rent public housing all over the city.

More found better and usually much more expensive private housing than they had in the Southwest, but at least 20% were, in fact, forced settle in the older, drearyer neighborhoods of Washington where their poverty and enforced overcrowding speeds the creation of still more slums. You know, a lot of people say they actually are playing with blocks, and I guess we really are. Only they're very big blocks. We put one block on another and hope that we are going to recreate a city. Some place people want to live. And this is what architecture is always all about and has always been. Architecture is for people, and that's all it is. Southwest Washington has been honored repeatedly as an example of good civic design, yet what

has happened here suggests that the bulldozer approach is at best a desperate remedy for the social ills of our cities. Some width has said that you could solve the problems of the city quite easily if you don't get rid of the people. This is what the citizens of Adams Morgan are determined they will not do. Adams Morgan is a 42 square block area in northwest Washington within a mile of the White House. Here live 20,000 people of all classes and races. Some 45% are negroed. The heart of the neighborhood is a teeth street in Columbia Road, a lively crossroads where a wide variety of needs and taste can be satisfied. Here are a fashionable restaurant, an elegant first shop, and many less expensive establishment.

The new stand sells publications in a dozen languages, reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of the neighborhood itself. You find the same wide variety in residences. There are spacious and well kept old apartments and streets of dilapidated row houses where four, five, and six trench and families may live in near-swaller. On the next street over, the same type of row houses may have been so well restored they would be at home in Georgetown. And still other blocks behind reasonably neat facades you can find the same unfortunate conditions that were bulldozed from the southwest and some of the same people. Many fine old mansions have been turned into rooming houses.

Throughout the area most property owners have been struggling manfully to keep their neighborhood from becoming a slump. I've lived in this area since 1950. In 1958 it became clear to me and my wife that the area was deteriorating rapidly. As with most other people here we decided it was high time to get out. It was about this time that the American University project came in with urban renewal. This returned hope to myself and many other people that perhaps we could change the area. When my wife and I searched our conscience it became patently clear to us that the technique of isolation would no longer work. Sooner or later those things, those problems which bothered us here and were causing us to move would once again catch up to us and that we as all the rest of mankind must face up to these and try to do something else or perish. Dean Richard M. Bray of American University tells how they started.

First we thought we must know the community. We must understand what the problems of this community are and most important I think what the citizens think their problems are. This we tried to do. Look at our decorable alleys, they need cleaning. We only get them cleaning about once every four weeks. We have another problem here in this area. We have inadequate plate space. This is what we call our playground where our kids have to play daily. The problem in our area is in proper housing. The housing is a bad condition. If there is any repairs, the rent is increased. For the first time I think in any American city the citizens got together and said what they were going to do with their future. Instead of the conventional urban renewal plan imposed by professionals they hope to have a program of action developed by the residents themselves.

I'm in support of Adam's Morgan because this is a community that has decided that everybody who lives here belongs here and is entitled to live in decent surroundings at prices they can afford. This is reflected in its attitude towards the social problems of the area. For example if you were walking through a Jewish town or southwest you would never realize that this was a city in which a child 11 years old is prostituting herself in an alley because she's one of 14 children living in one room going to a bad school and playing in the street. These are the problems of Adam's Morgan. These are the problems it's trying to face. These people hope to be as free from outside pressures as the Georgetown Improvers but they soon found their plan to house all the people in their neighbourhoods couldn't be financed except by the federal government which meant accepting some federal controls on their plan. They were determined not to bulldoze large areas as was done in southwest Washington. Yet they soon found they couldn't get the additional parks, playgrounds and public housing

they needed without making enemies of people whose buildings their plan would destroy in the process. We operate a small offset printing plant here in the Adam's Morgan area and after observing the redevelopment land agency in operation for the last year and a half in this area we feel that there's not a lack of communication between the government agencies and the small business people that are effective. The thing that is more terrifying than anything else is that the statistics show that after relocation in the Washington area 50% of the businesses will be out of business one year from today. Bill A. Doyle of the DC redevelopment land agency replies. And obviously if you're going to improve a city, improve a neighbourhood, make physical changes, the people who live, the people who do business in that area are going to be disturbed to some extent. Many are going to have to find other houses, other places of doing business.

In Adam's Morgan we expect that we will have to clear about 25% of the structures containing approximately 25% of the dwelling units and that all the many of the families may be able to move directly in the new housing constructed in that area, a number will have to relocate outside of the area. Most residential improvement in the Adam's Morgan plan would be privately financed. Yet to upgrade a street like this it seems you must zone out rooming houses and furnished apartments. So, rooming house owners and tenants have become another well-organized minority fighting the plan. There have been many, many public hearings and debates on these matters. Who's right? Whose interests should come first? In November 1963 the citizens of Adam's Morgan were told by a Federal Reviewing Committee that their neighbourhood did not yet qualify for urban renewal funds. Evidently it isn't enough of a slum.

Not yet. Meanwhile, our Adam's Morgan citizen plan is expecting too much from urban renewal alone. Mr. Doyle thinks they are. People are not going to have their lives transformed solely by virtual fact that they are relocated into sound housing. Unless we move on our fronts it's almost inevitable that we will not be able to reverse the trend toward more slums. It's almost inevitable that slums will recur and that our cities instead of becoming better places to live or possibly 75% of our entire population will become worse places to live. In some there is no single cure for our six cities. Each nostrum we administer is likely to produce side effects that make life harder for a good many people.

Does this mean we should do nothing? Few who really know the truth about life in our cities would hold with that conclusion. Rather we who love the city must learn to live with compromise, be honest with ourselves about the likely consequences of the cures we choose. And finally to remember that no great city ever lived without variety. The city of taste and place and class and face and dream. So This is NET, National Educational Television.