Ryan Sullivan
Introduction
For many years, West 98th and 99th Streets between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West was the site of a vibrant African-American quarter known as the “Old Community.” The area started out as a small settlement, but by the 1920s, had blossomed into something of a miniature Harlem with its own Renaissance. Billie Holiday, Arturo Schomburg, and the actress Butterfly McQueen of “Gone with the Wind” fame all called the Upper West Side neighborhood home. After the Second World War, the Old Community was still populated by African-Americans, but bohemians and free spirits had given way to poor and working-class families. Despite their lack of wealth, residents possessed a tremendous amount of comradery, togetherness, and local pride. It was the type of place where households relied on their next-door neighbors as much as they did each other. As Jane Jacobs would say, there were “eyes on the street,” her metaphor for the natural protective surveillance that occurs on vibrant city blocks. Jim Torain of the West 99th and 98th Street Old Community Association described the area as “like a big extended family.” Linda Burstion, who grew up on 98th Street recalled; “it was just a great neighborhood to live in, I remember playing jacks, eating ices, playing stickball and dodgeball, jumping double Dutch and when it got really hot out, they would open up the fire hydrants.” This is not to say that the Old Community escaped the problems that plagued minority enclaves, but communal bonds and kinship ties provided residents with a strong sense of hope for the future. Then, almost overnight, the Old Community was gone.
The Old Community’s disappearance was the product of mid-century urban reform and slum clearance which culminated in the sweeping 1949 Federal Housing Act. The bill’s infamous Title I clause, “Slum Clearance and Community Development and Redevelopment” federally authorized $1 billion in loans to help cities acquire “slums” like Old Community for public or private use. The law did not, however, require that affordable accommodations be built for ousted tenants, and many of those who lost their homes to demolition were not re-housed at all. The few that did get relocated found themselves in massive housing projects, cut off from the intimacy of street communities and segregated as never before.
Renewal advocates relied on the word blight more than anything else to secure public and political approval for their efforts. Blight, they explained, was a malignant disease that threatened to turn healthy areas into slums. But lawmakers included no legislative definition for blight, which allowed these local leaders and developers great discretion about where and what parts of the city were suitable for clearance and replacement. To demonstrate blighted conditions to a wide audience, Title I proponents used a range of visual aids including brochures, maps, and most importantly—photographs. Examining these images reveals a great deal about the attitudes and presumptions held in postwar America about the urban poor.
The Birth of City Planning
To understand how blight emerged as a concept, we must understand the professionalization of city planning. In its modern form, city planning is very much a response to the changing dynamics of urban America in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Rapid urbanization, immigration, and industrialization created lamentable living conditions which shocked middle class onlookers. Most agreed with pioneering documentary photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis when he said, “cities had become nurseries of crime, and of the vices and disorderly courses which lead to crime.”
Riding the wave of popular urban reform movements, institutions like Harvard and Yale began granting degrees in city planning, urban design, and architecture. By the 1910s city planners were building a new lexicon of terms filled with quasi scientific metaphors. The first use of “blight” to describe urban areas is uncertain, but scholars have pointed to the area around the Brooklyn Naval Yard which was described in a 1911 edition of the New York Times, as “a blighted neighborhood.” In the mid-1920’s, C. Earl Morrow and Charles Herrick, two students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Landscape Architecture published an influential article in City Planning. In the essay, they defined blight as “… a district [where] normal development has been frustrated. Ordinarily property values are an index of the situation: wherever property values fail to keep pace with the increase in other similar districts in the same city, or have decreased, the district may be termed a blighted district” Therefore, blight is defined as slowing of the property values in one portion of the city when compared to other parts of the city, the result of which is a hindrance to “normal development.” While Morrow and Herrick’s definition of blight has several weaknesses, it stands as a landmark. It is the first serious attempt to give a precise, scientific, urban definition to the word—and it placed the meaning of blight firmly within a capitalist framework that defined good and bad areas of a city narrowly on property values alone.
Despite the efforts of city planners to define blight using scientific and empirical data, the term remained vague and amorphous throughout the first half of the 20th century. The slum, being the ultimate nadir of physical urban conditions, was relatively easy to define, but blight was something that existed in the eye of the beholder. Without a universal definition, the only metric to judge blight was perception. In other words—we all know it when we see it. With the term almost always applied to spaces where Anglo-American families did not live, blight became infused with racial and ethnic prejudice. By mid-century, most city planners could not—or did not care to—distinguish blighted areas from minority areas and vice versa.
Photographs as Conveyors of Truth
The birth of the modern city planning profession coalesced with the rise of documentary photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, many in the public believed photographs were inherently true and that cameras presented subjects as they really were. This credence also dominated Progressive reform and intellectual settings. Pictures thus became a reliable form of qualitative research and were used as evidence to advance the specific ideological underpinnings of the reformist vision in the areas of housing, philanthropy, education, and public health.
Despite the insistence that photographs represented objective conditions, photographers and social reformers found themselves working harder and harder to establish the ideological meaning of the photographs they took. Jacob Riis, who made a career out of exposing urban conditions is an example of how ideology and photography are interconnected. Riis never allowed ambiguity to creep into his photos, not wanting his audience to draw conclusions that did not align with his reformist agenda. In lectures, Riis frequently included anecdotes about his subjects to advance ideological narratives that included the people photographed as well as his audiences. The result was a combination of entertainment and morality with photographs functioning as the mediated visual truth. Even when he was not lecturing, Riis always presented his photos with captions and text, making sure that his interpretation was always clear.
Policymakers discovered the power of photographic interpretation when they sought to portray the poor during the Great Depression. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) desperately wanted to legitimize many of its controversial programs such as the resettlement of landless farmers, the building of model towns, and the establishment of rural cooperatives through publicity. FSA officials made calculated decisions over which photographs to include, how to present them, and what captions to write. The FSA documentary photographer thus became not only a cameraman “but a scenarist, dramatist, and director as well,’’ aiming at ‘‘not only the influencing of the subject before the camera, but also the influencing of the person looking at the finished print.” According to Tim Cressel, author of The Tramp in America: “FSA photography was an important propaganda tool that served to legitimate the New Deal . . . they [the photographs] were part of a national attempt to order society and nature through the application of rational scientific principles during a chronic depression . . . The images of migrants were a way of saying that things need to be made better for these people living disordered lives. They needed migrant camps—nicely ordered, geometric simulations of ‘normal life’, which the FSA also photographed.”
The photographs used by urban renewal advocates may not have been as prominent as those of the FSA, but it is likely that Title I proponents were aware of the influence photographs had on the public. By employing this medium, they sought to combine scientific objectivity and rationalism with emotional appeal and popular understandings of the meaning and conditions of poverty to shape public opinion and further their ultimate agenda.
“Demonstrations of Blight”
An invigorated push for urban redevelopment gained political steam once the Second World War ended. When President Truman signed the 1949 Housing Act, he proclaimed that the legislation “opens up the prospect of decent homes in wholesome for low-income families now living in the squalor of the slums”, and will equip “the Federal Government, for the first time, with effective means for aiding cities.” Idealists hoped the bill would uplift the poor, eliminate unsanitary conditions, and bring order to the messiness of urban life. But others, specifically businessmen and civic leaders, saw an opportunity to redevelop areas in strategic parts of their city that had experienced undesirable demographic and racial changes.
The Title I provision delegated leadership to local municipalities to acquire local lands for the purpose of redevelopment, and Robert Moses was soon named chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance. Between 1949 and 1960, Moses made New York City the capital of renewal, planning thirty-five slum clearing projects, completing seventeen, and receiving $65.8 million in Title I funds. To justify and promote these urban renewal projects, Moses published brochures for each renewal site (See Figure 1 for an example). These brochures were made of glossy paper and filled with statistics, graphics, charts, and photographs. According to historian Samuel Zipp, “the clean, orderly feeling of the designs, bold titles, seemingly objective amassing of data and photographs bled to the edges of the page.” This made for a heightened sense of contrast with the dark, seemingly all-pervasive decay on display in the uncaptioned photos. Moses instructed his underlings that he did not want long texts in the slum clearance publications: ‘‘It’s the schedules themselves, the plans and pictures that count with the statement that we mean business, that the procedure will be entirely fair and orderly and that hardships will be, so far as humanly possible, avoided.” Moses’s direction gave the impression that the brochure’s photographs captured objective slum conditions that could be universally understood and accepted. Taking cues from both Riis and FSA photographers, these brochures presented a powerful visual argument and further demonstrated how a sophisticated use of visual material can shape perceptions.
Given that the brochures were intended to justify the clearance of areas designated as ‘‘slums,’’ the most important section was entitled ‘‘Demonstration of Blight” (Figure 2). Here, the authors described matters such as land use, the condition and age of existing structures, zoning, and population density. The photographs that displayed ‘‘blighted’’ conditions in the most persuasive manner explored three themes: empty lots, back alleys, and abandoned buildings. Empty lots (Figure 3) appeared twenty-two times in the brochures and represented the most popular depiction of blight. Moses and his team implied that when a building was missing, that space was underutilized and would eventually be filled by garbage. Back alleys appeared twenty times. Mostly dark, these photos indicated that portions of the buildings did not receive proper sunlight. Abandoned buildings appeared seventeen times. Once again, abandoned buildings were viewed as natural statements of urban blight. They had a similar representational function as empty lots; abandoned buildings were uneconomic and the fact that their owners had not repaired them meant they were beyond repair or that their owners were not optimistic about the profitability of these buildings.
Race equals Blight
Many images included in “Demonstration of Blight” emphasized elements that made the built environment appear disorderly, obsolete, and beyond repair. Squalor and idleness were often associated with Black and Latino neighborhoods. But surprisingly, people are centered in only a few photos. According to urbanist Themis Chronopoulos “in these types of photographs, the presence of people is incidental,” because Moses and his staff members viewed “blight as a physical problem that required physical solutions.”
But upon closer look, the human subjects included in the photos are much more than incidental passersby. In one photograph, two Black men appear to be chatting on a stoop (Figure 4). At first glance, one might think the picture is meant to show the decay of the townhouse behind them. But there is a more coded message being relayed. The two Black men appear to be conversing in broad daylight, implying idleness or even unemployment. In another image, a young man is pictured crossing the street (Figure 5). This photograph was intended to show that commercial establishments existed in residential buildings and that the people frequenting these stores were doing so in a disorderly fashion. Although this photo is meant to demonstrate blight, the neighborhood appears to be quite vibrant, active, and safe. Taken on West 63rd street, this area was once called San Juan Hill— a minority community made up of Black and Latino residents. The only evidence of blight in this photo is its subject’s apparent ethnicity. In a third photograph, also taken in San Juan Hill, a grocery store is shown with a soft drink sign on the ground floor of a brownstone (Figure 6). This image made the point that commercial establishments existed in residential streets, which according to modernist planning theories was unacceptable. Further, there is a sign advertising furnished rooms and apartments in the photograph. This detail implied that some of the buildings had been converted into single-room occupancies, attracting low-income and possibly homeless people. A caption for this photograph asked the question: ‘‘Is this a place for a woman and her child?” Although the picture is not in focus, the woman and boy’s dark features and complexion is meant to reinforce blight.
For the people who resided in these neighborhoods, the 1949 Housing Act destroyed lives and broke up families. In San Juan Hill, more than 7,000 lower-class families were displaced. Few, if any, of the 4,400 new housing units were intended for the area’s previous residents. Similar demolitions occurred in the Bronx, Stuyvesant Town, East Harlem, and Manhattanville. The ousted population was 40% Black or Hispanic at a time when those demographics made up only a little over 10% of the city’s overall population, meaning that a large proportion of evicted tenants faced extreme discrimination in finding new housing. Today, most experts believe that the 1949 Housing Act and its urban renewal programs were in fact fostering the slums they were meant to erase. Although policy makers abandoned the methods of the bill, the widely viewed images created by Title I proponents made a lasting impression on the American public by reinforcing negative racial stereotypes.
Conclusions
In postwar New York, renewal advocates used photographs and visual aids to show blight. Images of empty lots, abandoned buildings, and nonwhite subjects were all used to demonstrate malignant urban decay and disease, and harmful visual depictions have continued to plague communities of color. In the 1990s, Rudolph Giuliani campaigned on the “broken windows theory,” which suggested that cleaning up the visible signs of disorder — like graffiti, loitering, panhandling and prostitution — would prevent more serious crimes. Such tactics did not make crime go down, but they helped minority incarceration rates go up.
As for the term blight— it is still used by those in power. In 2017, President Trump delivered his “New Deal for African Americans” at a Black church congregation in North Carolina and said: “I will … propose tax holidays for inner-city investment, and new tax incentives to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods. I will further empower cities and states to seek a federal disaster designation for blighted communities to initiate the rebuilding of vital infrastructure, the demolition of abandoned properties, and the increased presence of law enforcement.” His repeated use of the word blight is telling.
Epilogue
The neighborhoods destroyed by Title I were not slums or blighted areas, and many former residents recall vibrant and supportive communities. The Old Community was one of the first neighborhoods to be destroyed by the 1949 Housing Act. But for the actual people who lived on blocks like 98th Street, the old neighborhood was never far from their minds. Sixty years after displacement, a bit of a reunion took place. A handful of former residents happily gathered and laughed at Frederick Douglass Center on Columbus Avenue (Figure 7). It seems all the seams all that was missing was the block, cleared long ago.
Bibliography
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Figure 1 Excerpts from the Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan released by Robert Moses’s Committee on Slum Clearance in 1956. Images courtesy of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., Archives.
Figure 2 Buildings demonstrating ‘‘blighted’’ conditions in the Manhattantown slum clearance site in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Manhattantown: Slum Clearance Plan Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949.
Figure 3 Empty lot with children playing in the Lincoln Square site. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square: Slum Clearance Plan Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 as Amended (New York: The Committee, May 28, 1956)
Figure 4 Buildings that were viewed as obsolete in the Pratt Institute slum clearance area. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Pratt Institute Area
Figure 5 Commercial area in Lincoln Square. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square
Figure 6 Brownstones with rooming houses and a grocery store in Lincoln Square. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square
Figure 7 West 99th and 98th Street Reunion, Circa 1981. Photo courtesy of John Cornwall Collection
