Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CITY

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface.........................................................................................xi1 Creative Destruction and the Age of Urbanism..................................................1PART ONE / URBANISM2 Industrial Convergence on a New England Town..................................................353 Fabric of Enterprise..........................................................................734 Living Local..................................................................................1135 Civic Density.................................................................................1416 A Sidewalk Republic...........................................................................183PART TWO / END OF URBANISM7 Business and Civic Erosion, 1917-1950.........................................................2158 Race, Place, and the Emergence of Spatial Hierarchy...........................................2549 Inventing Dick Lee............................................................................28710 Extraordinary Politics: Dick Lee, Urban Renewal and the End of Urbanism,.....................31211 The End of Urbanism..........................................................................36112 A City After Urbanism........................................................................393Notes...........................................................................................433Bibliography....................................................................................477Acknowledgments.................................................................................499Index 503

Chapter One

Industrial mutation ... incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.-JOSEPH SCHUMPETER, 1946

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.... During its rule of scarce one hundred years, [capitalism] has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. -KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS, 1847

The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail's pace; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express. The United States, the growth of a single century, has already reached the foremost rank among nations, and is destined soon to out-distance all others in the race. In population, in wealth, in annual savings, and in public credit; in freedom from debt, in agriculture, and in manufactures, America already leads the civilized world.-ANDREW CARNEGIE, 1886

An old customer ambles into a downtown New Haven shop looking for a small roll of tape, yet leaves with two larger rolls and a heavy-duty dispenser: "Seven dollars' worth, I give it to you for six." Joseph Perfetto is still a businessman after seven decades on the job. He needs to be good, because New England Typewriter & Stationery is under water. As we talk, rain drips into a large coffee can on the table between us, the last of a storm ended the night before. Rust on the can's rim suggests this isn't its first tour of emergency duty catching water. Rain has made its way layer-by-layer through the remnants of four stories above the shop-those floors currently constitute the abandoned corpse of the old National Hotel.

During the worst of yesterday's storm, whole buckets filled with rainwater in an hour's time. I had called the store, one of the longest-surviving small shops in downtown New Haven, hoping to speak with the owner, only to hear: "No, I don't want to talk about business, there isn't hardly any business, and the rain's falling into the store by the bucket." The conversation was over. A few hours later I drove downtown to Crown Street, thinking I might help mop up and make enough of a friend to earn a conversation. The door was locked, the goods covered in plastic, buckets placed strategically throughout the store. The next day I stopped by unannounced and found the proprietor in a better frame of mind. He introduced himself as Joseph Perfetto-Italian for perfect, he says-age eighty-eight. Energetic, witty, urbane in a gruff fashion. Much as he hates the idea of retirement, Perfetto is looking for someone to buy his stock of office supplies, his aging display racks, and his printing equipment.

Perfetto must close his shop not because of his own age, not because of his store's decrepitude, and not because his building has lost some of its roof. The man remains strong enough to sell transparent tape and typewriter ribbons all day long (two years later I found him climbing a ladder to clean windows at his home). The store could be refurbished and the roof repaired in weeks if there were still a market niche robust enough to justify the investments. Perfetto has to close his doors because the city in which his business is designed to operate is gone-having disappeared little by little in fits and starts for decades, beginning even before New England Typewriter & Stationery had begun making serious money in the 1950s. To be sure, the older city has been replaced by one that uses many of the same bricks and much of the same asphalt, along with nearly all of the old names for streets and neighborhoods. These material and cultural fossils invite an illusion of continuity: these same streets were here a century ago. But only in the most superficial sense is that so, for the streets have changed utterly-in their daily functions, their social meaning, even their moral standing-for those who use them, and for those too timid or prideful to come near them. The old streets belong to a place whose scent is everywhere inside New England Stationery & Typewriter, and whose ghosts are just across the street as I take my leave (figure 1.1).

From Perfetto's shop window I look across Crown Street and confront an expanse of undulating asphalt forming a cheaply engineered parking lot, along with some nondescript commercial buildings, now largely empty. What stood here, and what life occurred within, at the crest of urbanism? Later, in the crowded stacks at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, I learn what was arrayed, east to west on the north side of Crown Street, in 1913.

Theodore Martus residence, also home to Bertram Martus, who is a toolmaker, 101 Crown.

Emil Scheuerman's Saloon, 103 Crown.

Hugo J. Simon & Sons Delicatessen, 105 Crown.

The Charlton Hotel, 107 Crown, also the home of Lorin Benson, perhaps the hotel's manager.

Oscar G. Billiau, caged bird retailer, 111 Crown.

Christian J. Berg, barber, 113 Crown.

J. C. Heinrich's Restaurant, 115 Crown.

John C. Heinrich residence, 117 Crown.

Gray's Club, the residence of Gertrude Carter, and the residence of Ernest Koelbl, all at 119 Crown.

Adam Ziegler Saloon and Camp Gray, Inc., both at 121 Crown.

This mixing of uses-a little commercial hotel, people's homes, a club, a deli, a restaurant, booze, birds, and a barber-has been reduced to the single purpose of parking...