Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment - Volume 2

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Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment

Notes from the Critical Conservation Colloquia Volume 2: Spring 2017 at the

Harvard University Graduate School of Design

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Critical Conservation

POWER & PLACE Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment

Notes from the Critical Conservation Colloquia Volume 2: Spring 2017 at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Edited by Susan Nigra Snyder & George E. Thomas with Javier Ors AusĂ­n

CONTENTS 3 INTRODUCTION

5 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

6 CITY OF GODS Religious Freedom, Immigration and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens R. Scott Hanson

42 A WORLD MORE CONCRETE Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida N. D. B. Connolly

96 PRESERVATION Keeping Out the Unwashed Kenneth T. Jackson

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INTRODUCTION This publication is a record of lectures that were part of the Critical Conservation Colloquia, organized in Spring 2017, by the Master in Design Studies (MDes) program in Critical Conservation at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The goal of the Critical Conservation Colloquia was to foster an understanding of urban ethics and an awareness of the political uses of history and identity. The present booklet presents conversations with noted scholars in support of 04479: Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment. This course was part of a wider GSD initiative borne out of distress over the rising awareness of discrimination and violence against the African American community that resulted in the fall 2015 Black in Design Conference. At that time, Dean Mostafavi remarked that, “The relationship between race and space, the way in which one could say the racialization of space is becoming more extreme, is continuing. These issues have remained absolutely pertinent.” Critical Conservation is a natural center for this discussion because we focus on places where cultural conflict and the spatial patterns of exclusion such as historic districts and red-lining have suppressed racial, ethnic, economic and religious differences, leaving an indelible imprint on the material character of the city. The array of ideas and scholars presented here exemplifies the broader investigation that Professors Susan Nigra Snyder and George E. Thomas are leading through the Critical Conservation research agenda.

The lecture/workshop course 04479: Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment was offered in Spring 2017 as part of the MDes program in Critical Conservation. It was taught by Professors Snyder and Thomas, with Teaching Assistant Javier Ors Ausín. Three cities in North America were chosen representing different demographics and expressions of power: Portland, OR: the whitest city in America—76% white; Miami, FL: a multicultural identity city—more than 50% of the population is foreign born and Flushing, NY: a community of religious pluralism—more than 200 churches and a predominantly Asian population. The goal was to foster an awareness and discussion about processes and expressions of power in urban form and design in the built North American environment.

The MDes program in Critical Conservation has been formed to shape a broader conversation about design and development that engages 21st century questions of environmental, social and economic sustainability to serve an ever more pluralist and global society. Critical Conservation provides designers with a methodological foundation to research the cultural systems that frame conflicts inherent in making progressive places—the cultural ecology of place. It provides a theoretical understanding of the social construction of dynamic cultural meaning associated with places, artifacts and history. The knowledge gained provides an understanding that decisions involving the uses of history and group identity—critical to place-making— demand that urban ethics be considered as part of the design process.

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CONTRIBUTORS R. Scott Hanson, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania and a Project Affiliate of The Pluralism Project at Harvard University. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of twentieth century United States history with urban history, civil rights, race, ethnicity, immigration, and religion. His book City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration and Pluralism in Flushing examined the history and extreme case of religious pluralism in modern Flushing. The book resulted from his work in Queens as a researcher for Diana Eck’s Pluralism Project at Harvard.

He is Director of the Social Justice Research Academy at the University of Pennsylvania that exposes high school students to the historical importance and the contemporary relevance of struggles to overcome inequality and injustice.

N. D. B. Connolly, Ph.D. is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He writes about racism, capitalism, politics, and the built environment in the twentieth century with special attention to people’s overlapping understandings of property rights and civil rights in the United States and the wider Americas. In A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida he revived discussions of racism’s profitability by treating Jim Crow segregation in Greater Miami as a variation on the colonial and postcolonial practices afflicting tropical populations around the world. It received the 2014 Kenneth T. Jackson Book Award from the Urban History Association, the 2015 Liberty Legacy Foundation Book Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the 2016 Bennett H. Wall Book Award from the Southern Historical Association. In 2015-2016 he was a Visiting Associate Professor of History and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Connolly is a co-host on the weekly podcast BackStory.

Kenneth T. Jackson, Ph.D. the Jacques Barzun Professor in History and the Social Sciences and Director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for the Study of American History at Columbia University is the pre-eminent urban historian and authority on New York City. His books include: The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930; The Almanac of New York City; American Vistas; Cities in American History; Atlas of American History; Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States; Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery. He is Editor-in-Chief, The Encyclopedia of New York City; Editor-in-Chief, Dictionary of American Biography; The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn; Empire City: New York Through the Centuries; Editor-in-Chief, The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives; and was co-author of Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York.

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February 6, 2017

CITY OF GODS

Religious Freedom, Immigration and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens R. Scott Hanson, Ph.D.

Good afternoon, and welcome. Today I’d like to talk to you about the history of Flushing, Queens in New York City. It is a town with a remarkable and often overlooked history that is now perhaps the most religiously diverse community in the world. And, by the way, I recommend if you’re ever in New York and looking for an alternative experience, jump on the No. 7 train and head out from Times Square on one end of the train line and out to the other end on Flushing Main Street. It’s a journey between two different worlds. One is thought to be the core, the other the periphery in some ways. Plus, the No. 7 train itself is an experience. It was declared a national historic trail by Hillary Rodham Clinton in the ‘90s, and it is sometimes called the International Express.

This map (Fig. 1.1) gives you a quick glimpse into the modern religious pluralism seen in Flushing. If you’re not familiar with Flushing, it’s about a five minute cab ride from LaGuardia. You are in the vicinity of the former Shea Stadium, now rebuilt and renamed Citi Financial Field, and the site of the US Open and two World’s Fairs here. Those sites are just minutes away from the downtown area of Flushing. In this area here, about 2 1/2 square miles, there are over 200 different places of worship. 150 of them are churches, but 100 of those 150 are Korean churches. In addition, there are 30 Buddhist temples (Chinese and Korean), seven Hindu temples that represent all of the Indian subcontinent, six synagogues, four mosques, two Sikh gurdwaras, two Taoist temples, and a Falun Gong office as well. I’ll come back to this slide later, but it gives you a quick glimpse of my claim to Flushing being perhaps the most religiously diverse neighborhood, maybe, in the history of the world.

I’d like to start by briefly re-visiting Flushing’s colonial history, and tracing how it began to transform in the 20th century in the post-World War II era. We have to go back almost 375 years ago to the Dutch colonial period of New York when it was then called New Amsterdam, or New Netherland. And Flushing was called Vlissingen, which was too difficult for the British to say, so ultimately it anglicized into Flushing. At the time it was located on Lange Eylandt, or Long Island. When 15 Englishmen applied to the Dutch Governor Kieft at the time for the privilege of settling on land purchased from the Matinecoc tribe in 1645, the charter they were granted on October 10, 1645, was one of the most liberal arrangements for any settlement in Colonial America, by or on behalf of any government. The patent seemed to offer almost complete religious freedom: “We do give and grant, unto the said Patentees... to have and Enjoy the Liberty of Conscience, according to the Custome and manner of Holland, without molestacon or disturbance, from any Magistrate or Magistrates, or any other Ecclesiasticall Minister, that may extend Jurisdicon over them….” Holland’s R. Scott Hanson

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Fig. 1.1

“Custome and manner” regarding religion then was the most lenient attitude of all European nations, but Flushing’s charter did not extend to the rest of the colony; the new residents of Flushing would learn that the liberty of conscience promised in their charter was a loosely defined concept.

The Dutch Reformed Church was the official state religion, and the government had the power to forbid, as they put it, “assemblies or conventicles” of other faiths. Inhabitants could disagree with the Dutch Reformed leaders, but only if they kept silent about it publicly with dissent only inside their home, and only if their beliefs led to no visible actions in society. Governor Willem Kieft, however, did little to enforce these limitations during his incumbency [1638-1657], and the presence of a diverse population speaking 18 languages gave rise to a variety of religious groups.

This lenient policy changed in 1647, when Peter Stuyvesant became Director General; under Stuyvesant the liberty that had been enjoyed by many was jeopardized. Stuyvesant was a strict Calvinist and in 1652, under pressure from churchmen in Holland and in the colony, he began persecuting certain groups who arrived in the colony—including Jews and Lutherans. The Dutch West India Company rebuked Stuyvesant for his treatment of the Lutherans, and also wrote to him saying, “Jews and Portuguese people may exercise in all quietness their religion within their houses.” But when several boisterous members of the Religious Society of Friends, who were derogatorily called Quakers 8

Fig..1.2

because they seemed to be quaking with the fear of God, arrived by ship in August 1657, Stuyvesant quickly jailed them, and soon issued a proclamation on placards throughout the colony banning all public worship except that of the Dutch Reformed Church. These were mild punishments compared to what Quakers would face after their arrival in 1657, when several first visited and held meetings on Long Island in Gravesend, Jamaica, and Hempstead.

Stuyvesant issued an ordinance forbidding the harboring of Quakers, and arrested Robert Hobson, who was dragged to jail behind a cart and brutally tortured in a dungeon until Stuyvesant’s sister intervened. Some in Flushing had attended the nearby Quaker meetings and had already become converts by 1657. Now, they were forced to meet secretly in the woods on the boundaries of Jamaica, Newtown, and Flushing. Their plight became a town cause. Two days after Christmas in 1657, 359 years ago, 30 people of different faiths who were gathered from the general group of the inhabitants, banded together— including the town clerk and Sheriff—to sign what came to be known as the “Flushing Remonstrance of 1657” (Fig. 1.2). It reminded Stuyvesant of the conditions under which their patent and town charter had been granted. As you can see from this image, it survives in the State Archives in Albany and shows damage from a fire in the state Archives in the early 1900s.

What’s most remarkable about this document is that none of the signers, except perhaps one, were Quakers themselves. Yet they clearly believed in the fundamental goodness of other religious people, and in extending, as they R. Scott Hanson

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put it in the Remonstrance, “the law of love, peace, and liberty in the states of Holland” to the Quakers seeking refuge in Flushing—in addition to anyone else, including Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, as well, “Jews, Turks, and Egyptians.” Stuyvesant chose, however, to follow and enforce a strict interpretation of the law as he interpreted it, and he jailed, fined, and removed those from office those signers whom he suspected as leaders. Incidentally, last year a local Congresswoman from Flushing, Grace Meng, sponsored a bill to study the historical significance of the Flushing Remonstrance and sites in Flushing. It was signed by President Obama, and it’s now being studied by the National Park Service to turn this area around some of the sites that I’ve been describing into part of the National Park System.

Fig. 1.3

A few years later in 1661, a man named John Bowne began to welcome Friends to meet in his newly built house every Sunday, or first day, as Quakers called it (Fig. 1.3). Bowne was a merchant and farmer from England who had migrated first to Boston in 1651 with his father. But dissatisfied with the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he became a Friend or Quaker in 1657 after moving to Flushing and marrying Hannah Feake, who had herself been converted during the Friend’s recent wave of evangelism in New Amsterdam. Magistrates in Jamaica soon learned of the meetings, and a sheriff came out to arrest Bowne and take him to jail. When Stuyvesant was unable to get Bowne to pay a fine and agree to refrain from holding meetings, he banished Bowne from the colony, sending a letter of complaint to his superiors in Amsterdam.

Bowne ultimately made his way to Amsterdam to appeal his case and plead his

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case to the Dutch West India Company, bringing with him a copy of the town charter. They were convinced and sent a letter back to Stuyvesant, rebuking him again for his intolerance and effectively, albeit reluctantly, restoring liberty of conscience in Flushing, if not the entire colony, because they thought it was good for business. They too did not really care for Quakers and other religious minorities, but they knew that they wanted their colony to prosper. Bowne left Holland in March of 1663, eventually making his way back to his family the next January.

Later in 1663, the English wrested control of Amsterdam from the Dutch, and the colony’s name changed to New York. Vlissingen was anglicized into Flushing, and in a letter to the new Governor— British Governor Nicolls— the Dutch strongly advised him not to make any alteration in their church government, or to introduce any other form of worship among them than what they had chosen. As historian Evan Haefeli has stated, “the result was a remarkable degree of continuity into a new colonial life no longer dominated by the Dutch, but still very influenced by what they had created.”

Residents of Flushing later would proclaim their community to be “the birthplace of religious freedom in America”— and to some considerable extent they would be right. In a very limited local colonial context, Flushing does appear to be the first colonial town to have and defend liberty of conscience so explicitly and consistently. This is especially so when the town charter is taken together with the Flushing Remonstrance and Bowne’s defense of both. There was, of course, no nation yet in Bowne’s time, and the liberty of conscience in Flushing’s charter did not extend to the rest of the colony, nor was it reinstated in Flushing, until 1663. Despite this constellation of significance though, Flushing is often clouded over in historical tugs of war over which group was first to grant full religious freedom, and thus has been largely overlooked in the history of religious freedom in America. In Rhode Island for instance, similar claims are made on behalf of the Portsmouth Compact of 1638. The town of Providence was founded by Roger Williams in the summer of 1636. And through a royal charter obtained in 1644, the so-called “lively experiment” and “full liberty in religious concernments,” for which Rhode Island became so well known, was not officially granted until a second charter was granted in 1663. Maryland’s charter of 1632, as well as an Act Concerning Religion in 1649, gave liberty to Catholics who were otherwise excluded from the British realm. William Penn’s charter for the province of Pennsylvania also came later, in 1682. Finally, the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay colony (and Connecticut) lagged further behind: many so-called heretics had already escaped to found or join other R. Scott Hanson

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colonies if they did not suffer a fate similar to those of The Salem witch trials in the 1690s. The Massachusetts colony did not grant full religious freedom until the state constitution of 1780. Thomas Jefferson, who apparently was moved by the persecution of the “poor Quakers” and had seen how the “sister states of Pennsylvania and New York… have long subsisted without any established religion at all,” wrote his statute for religious freedom in Virginia in 1777.

Although there is no evidence to date that the Remonstrance itself was later read by Jefferson or by James Madison, the evolution of liberty of conscience and sequence of events in New Amsterdam, New York, and Pennsylvania does appear to have made an impression on the minds of the Founding Fathers – whose independence and constitutional debates took place in Philadelphia with its tradition of religious freedom.

Fig. 1.4

Despite its significance, the Remonstrance, Bowne, and Flushing’s history in general largely faded, at least outside of Flushing, until the 19th century when some of the first comprehensive histories of New York were published, including some local histories of Flushing. Consequently, some church historians took note and began to include references to the Remonstrance and Bowne in their surveys of religion in America as early as 1898. Despite these occasional references, the dominant narratives of American history and religion, at least

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until the late 20th century, stressed the primary importance and legacy of New England Puritanism and British colonial settlements along the North Atlantic coast in general.

The history of Flushing shifts attention to the Middle Atlantic colony of New Netherland, and its long experiment of pluralism that is still perhaps even more relevant today. But this focus on the region’s religious tolerance is recent.

Histories of New York and even broader histories of religion in America didn’t reach a wide enough audience to make Flushing’s history well known. This would begin to change somewhat by the mid-20th century, when Flushing was thrust into the international spotlight as it celebrated a series of anniversaries that coincided with 1939-40 New York World’s Fair (Fig. 1.4), followed by the end of World War Two, and the height of the Cold War. Here (Fig. 1.5), you see a picture of 1945 of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (in the middle) holding a radio broadcast in the living room of the Bowne house to mark the 300th anniversary of the founding in Flushing, and dedicating the house as a “national shrine to religious freedom.” So you begin to see this narrative emerging, touting it in the wake of the end of World War Two, when the Allies defeated the Nazis and so forth, to celebrate this idea of religious freedom.

Fig. 1.5

Similarly, in this image (Fig. 1.6), Mayor Robert Wagner is holding the original copy of the Remonstrance, with security guards looking on kind of nervously.

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This took place in 1957 for the 300th anniversary of the Remonstrance. Also in 1957, the U.S. Postal Service released a special 3 cent stamp (which you can sometimes find on eBay) that celebrated religious freedom in the United States (Fig. 1.7). If you look carefully you can see the banner which reads “The Flushing Remonstrance – 1657-1957.” There were many cultural issues at the time pointing to why national leaders might have been stressed freedoms in the mid to late 1950s. Eisenhower had added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance then. And it was a time to demonstrate one’s religiosity at the height of the Cold War. In the two centuries after the Quakers moved into Flushing, there were many changes to the region, among the worst being the infamous Corona Ash Dumps that New Yorkers used get rid of the burned remnants of their garbage (Fig. 1.8). It was easily accessible by barge from the city and soon filled the creek valley along one side of the village. It was the ugliest site in New York City into the 1930s until New York’s planner, Robert Moses, the “power broker” as he was called by Robert Caro, decided to turn this blighted area into the most beautiful part of the city in 1939, as the setting for first New York World’s Fair in 1939-40.

A few years later, after the fair ended, the United Nations first location of its General Assembly was held in the former building of the New York City building from the World’s Fair (Fig. 1.9). So from 1947 to 1953 the UN was there. Because of that location, one rabbi told me “You know, Israel was born

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Fig. 1.7

Fig. 1.6

in Queens”, and to some extent, he was right. These events began to really put Flushing in the international spotlight. It was close to JFK and LaGuardia airports. It’s actually the largest intermodal transportation point in the city with several buses and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road passing through.

It is very convenient—and easy to get to. And New York had always been the gateway to America in many ways. It’s just that in the 20th century, people—

instead of coming through the old immigration system of Ellis Island, after Ellis Island closed, they come by airplane and enter the United States at JFK airport.

Fig. 1.8

Another change that I should mention is a New York City zoning law from 1961.

The Land Use Resolution of 1961 allowed many different immigrant groups to build so-called community facilities, which includes religious institutions, in residential neighborhoods as long as they met building and fire department codes. Nowhere else in the city, to the same degree, did people do this.

Typically one has to build a meeting space in commercial areas, or put up 10 feet of landscaping in residential areas to soften the juxtaposition with adjoining houses. They usually also have to have a parking space for every fixed pew. But think about that— for every fixed pew. This would apply mainly to churches and synagogues, right? But in mosques and Hindu temples and Buddhist temples, people would often sit on the floor. So that is a different law for a different time.

Over the years, this, combined with the processes of white flight beginning in the ‘50s and ‘60s and deindustrialization and suburbanization in the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s, led to a lot of commercial vacant space and residential space. And that led, ultimately, after the passage of the new immigration laws after 1965, to many new immigrant groups coming in to take advantage of the free space.

Together they would transform Flushing over the next 30-40 years. This was the situation in the 1970s, when many whites began to leave Flushing and many new immigrants began to arrive. This also coincided with a time when Queens began to suffer from a somewhat negative image in popular culture. There were several TV shows set in Queens, for instance, including “All in the Family”, with

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the loudmouthed but somehow lovable bigot, Archie Bunker (who may remind you of another person from Queens as well: Donald Trump, who grew up in Jamaica Estates but seems to forget that he’s actually from Queens— the most ethnically diverse county in the country. And there are other shows as well— “The Nanny”, which starred the “flashy girl from Flushing,” Fran Drescher, and “The King of Queens”, which is a more recent show. All three of these, though, basically show Queens stuck in the 1970s. They don’t show the diversity that we see today in Flushing. I’m waiting for a more up-to-date sitcom about life in Queens today.

Most recently, in 2004, a new law was passed in New York— the Community Facilities Text Reform Bill that sought to address the issue of community facilities and this loophole in the zoning law. But it ran up against something else that the U.S. Congress passed in 2000 – namely “The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000”, which protected religious liberty. So for better or worse, Flushing was stuck with the diversity that had developed by 2000 and others would have to learn how to live with it.

Anyway, this is how I initially came to study Flushing. Here are a few slides of Queens. This one shows an old theater in Flushing, the RKO Keith Theater, a great theater that goes back to the 1920s (Fig. 1.10). Now it is boarded up and for sale. It has been an eyesore in Flushing for some time, but it represents that decline and decay that I was describing earlier in the ‘60s. But that would be the moment when much of the rest of Flushing would be bought up by entrepreneurs from Taiwan and Korea to transform the downtown area.

This particular part of Flushing where the theater stands still has yet to be revitalized. It’s going to happen soon, I believe. One last picture before I switch gears for a bit. This is from the second New York World’s Fair of 1964-’65 (Fig. 1.11). Among the different landmarks from the 1930s Fair that remain are the Trylon and Perisphere, to which was added the prophetic Unisphere of the 1964 Fair. In front of the Unisphere here in this picture is one of the families that I interviewed for the book. On the far right, the little girl there is now much older.

Her name is DJ Rekha Malhotra, and she runs the hippest, biggest, Bhangra dance party in New York City called Basement Bhangra. She grew up in Flushing and she was kind enough to share this old family photo.

I’d like to switch now and exhibit some data, some figures, and charts and tables. I came to my study of Flushing when I finished my Masters of Religion at Columbia and I was looking for something to do. I heard about this new project at Harvard called The Pluralism Project. It started in 1991, directed by Diana Eck. I was one of the early researchers for that project in the early ‘90s, and because 16

Fig. 1.9 Fig. 1.10 Fig. 1.11

I lived in New York, I was given the task of covering New York City. The goal of the Pluralism Project was to send student researchers across the country to document how communities have changed since the Immigration Act of 1965. Before 1965, you typically had Protestant, Catholics, and Jews, whites and blacks. That was pretty much it, with much smaller communities of Asian immigrants before that. After 1965, things began to really change, and it led to the diversification of the country that we see today. I ended up spending a lot of R. Scott Hanson

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time in the different boroughs of the city, but mostly out in Queens. And finally, I spent almost all of my time in Flushing. So what began as research for The Pluralism Project which, last September, just celebrated its 25th anniversary, turned into a much larger project of my own in time for graduate school.

I did a lot of archival research and oral histories and actually lived in Flushing for two and a half years to do the kind of work that is required for ethnographic research and observation. I took a thousand slides to capture Flushing at every time of the day and night; I visited most of its streets, and certainly, all of its places of worship. I was very busy on the weekends, which started Friday around lunchtime for Jumu’ah, or Friday prayers at the mosques, leading into Jewish Shabbat services, then to the Hindu and Buddhist and Sikh temple services over the weekend, and, of course, to Christian churches on Sunday.

Flushing was transformed from a small rural outpost in 1910. At that time it was a very desirable locale for Manhattan’s elite to own estates, and so forth. It had a very rich horticultural history— the Parsons Nursery was there, which supplied some of the first trees and plants to the rest of the country. You can now still see many of these plants in the Queens Botanical Garden by the park. By the late ‘20s though, the subway extended out to Flushing making it possible to live in Flushing and work in New York. With the subway, Flushing’s population expanded greatly. The World’s Fairs, in the 1930s and 1960s attracted many more people. And then finally, the Immigration Act of 1965 led to what we see today (Fig. 1.12). The Immigration Act of 1965 has also been very much in the news recently. You probably heard over last weekend (February 4th and 5th, 2017) about the defense mounted against the so-called Muslim ban because the Immigration Act of 1965 outlawed discrimination on the basis of national origins. These charts shows Flushing’s population by race, beginning in 1950 and using census terminology from the time which was limited in its choices to white, other, and Negro (Fig. 1.13-19). As you can see the proportions do not change much from 1960 and as late as 1970 there was still not much change.

Finally, about 1980, the census terminology switched from Negro to black. Asian appears as a category for the first time in that census. In Flushing there was a much larger Asian population in 1990 and finally, in 2000, the Asian population outnumbered whites for the first time. These changes mirrored trends that were beginning to happen across the country, as evidenced in a cover story in Time magazine that you may have seen, which predicted whites would be a minority in the country by the year 2054. (I think that’s what they said) Multiracial also appeared as a new category for the first time in 2000. This line graph shown here makes sense of the changes over time (Fig. 1.20).

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Fig. 1.19

Fig. 1.18

Fig. 1.17

Fig. 1.16

Fig. 1.15

Fig. 1.14

Fig. 1.13

Fig. 1.12

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Fig. 1.26

Fig. 1.27

Fig. 1.28

Fig. 1.29

Fig. 1.25

Fig. 1.24

Fig. 1.23

Fig. 1.22

Fig. 1.21

Fig. 1.20

Fig. 1.31

Fig. 1.30

Fig. 1.33

Fig. 1.32

Population density is also interesting to consider. Here, you see the area in downtown Flushing that is most densely populated (Fig. 1.21). This makes sense given proximity to transit and the building types. When you look at Flushing by race (Fig. 1.22), you see by 2000 whites have essentially moved to the periphery. Hispanic populations were intermixed. The black population was effectively segregated in two housing projects here, although the original black population goes back to colonial Flushing. The Asian population had largely taken over the downtown area by 2000. This is the map that I showed you previously (Fig. 1.23). Here are Christian denominations (Fig. 1.24), which are very detailed and covers many different groups, as you can see. (Good luck trying to find this particular shade of green on the map!) Synagogues are interesting for how spatially spread out they are, as are Non-Western places of worship (Fig. 1.25-26).

Here are a few more pie charts (Fig. 1.27-33). The Flushing Hispanic population by place of origin in 1970 was mostly Cuban and Mexican with some Puerto Rican migration. fig.And finally, indicating how much more diverse Flushing was becoming— Filipinosfig.The earliest Asian population group from 1980 was Japanese, and then they moved out as more Koreans began to move in. Then came Chinese, Asian Indians— so now there are three major groups, Asian Indians, Chinese, and Koreans. It’s interesting that when reporters or visitors to Flushing get out of the subway, it depends where you get off in Flushing, but if you get off on Main Street, you might think that Flushing is Chinese. If you R. Scott Hanson

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get to wander a few streets away, you’ll see that it’s primarily Korean. If you go further down Main Street, you’ll see it looks more Asian Indian. There are different ethnic neighborhoods— or niches, if you will— depending on the part of the neighborhood you’re talking about.

Now, I return to some of the places of worship. Professor Thomas has noted before that sometimes you can tell a lot about a city when you look at the oldest places of worship. This is the oldest place of worship of Flushing, the Friends’ Meeting House from 1694 (Fig. 1.34). It’s actually the oldest place of worship that has been in continual use in all of New York City. Next came Saint George’s Episcopal Church (Fig. 1.35). You can see, it’s now surrounded by lots of public buildings and planes overhead flying to LaGuardia. But they were the second group in town to try and throw their weight around and remind the Quakers who was boss because they were still a British colony. The third place of worship that I show is the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church, or AME, from 1811 (Fig. 1.36). That denomination developed in Philadelphia created by its first bishop, Richard Allen. More recently though, the church, Macedonia AME, has been surrounded by a parking lot (Fig. 1.37). All around it used to be a large black community but they were asked in a not so kindly way to leave their historic center in the name of eminent domain to make way for this local parking lot and other buildings and businesses nearby. That reflected, again, a trend that was happening in many American cities throughout this time. Next came Saint Michael’s Roman Catholic Church— when Irish Catholics begin to arrive in the 1840s, 1850s (Fig. 1.38). It is now a multiethnic congregation that has Spanish, English, and Chinese services. The original Dutch Reformed Church—is now allied with the United Church of Christ and is the home of a Taiwanese congregation (Fig. 1.39). The Unitarian church shares space with a Korean congregation (Fig. 1.40). The Baptist Church is another historic congregation with many ethnic groups meeting in it (Fig. 1.41).

The oldest synagogue in Queens— a Conservative synagogue—is the Temple Gates of Prayer (Fig. 1.42). The Free Synagogue of Flushing from 1926 is a Reform congregation (Fig. 1.43). And the Kissena Jewish Center is an Orthodox synagogue (Fig. 1.44).

This interesting gentleman’s name is Alagappa Alagappan (Fig. 1.45). He was a retired UN civil servant. And in 1970 in his living room right there, he and other South Asians established the Hindu Temple Society of North America, which purchased this defunct Russian Orthodox church (Fig. 1.46), and converted it, and ultimately demolished it to make this, the first Hindu temple in the western hemisphere (Fig. 1.47). It was consecrated on July 4, 1977. (The date is telling as it makes clear that they were intent on being both American and Hindu). It 22

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Fig. 1.43

Fig. 1.42

Fig. 1.41

Fig. 1.40

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Fig. 1.36

Fig. 1.35

Fig. 1.34

Fig. 1.44

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Fig. 1.47

is quite striking to see traditional South Indian Hindu temple architecture on a quiet residential street in Flushing.

[Question] I think before, you mentioned that more than once that it is common that as populations change, all religious buildings can be used by other religious groups.

Is that primarily how they’re reused? Are there other examples? Do populations continue to linger for a while? What happens to these buildings?

Yes, it’s a fascinating phenomenon of adaptive reuse of religious spaces. You see it happen again and again to these dying congregations. This is especially true in rapidly changing neighborhoods like Flushing, you either embrace diversity and you become a multiethnic congregation, or your congregation dwindles and they die. And buildings go up for sale.

[Question] I have a question about your race categorizations. So my understanding of the census is that Hispanic and Latinos are considered white as race. And so I just was wondering if you put that into consideration maybe like when you were doing break up as to like— Latino and Hispanic is different than race. So you can be Hispanic and white. But this kind of saying is originated in the ‘50s all white.

So if you don’t know how the percentage was…

Right, you don’t. That’s how the census reported it, so I was just using the census terminology.

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Fig. 1.48

[Question] May I ask you— you said that the black neighborhood around the AME church was asked to leave. Has any other ethnic group been asked to leave?

Well, recently, there are some really large development plans that are taking place in Flushing. And that same parking lot is being demolished to make way for a very large new building, including a multi-floor parking lot, and so forth.

[Question] What is it? What are they going to be used for?

It will be a combination of more businesses, parking, and so forth. And so the people of Macedonia AME have actually been asked to leave again. They’re temporarily located in a church in Jamaica right now, as we speak.

[Question] So their church is actually being pushed out?

The church will get to stay, but it’s going to be even more surrounded by new structures.

But I do find, on the other hand, that many religious groups will often use any kind of structure to start a place of worship, from a storefront, to a warehouse, to a house, as you’ll see.

This image (Fig. 1.48) is of the annual birthday procession of Chaturthi— of Ganesh Chaturthi— going into the streets of Flushing by the Orthodox R. Scott Hanson 25

Fig. 1.50 Fig. 1.52 Fig. 1.54

Fig. 1.49 Fig. 1.51 Fig. 1.53

synagogue I mentioned. So you begin to see now the juxtaposition of all these different groups. It’s quite striking. Here they are sharing a stoop with a neighbor across the street from the Hindu Temple Society who has come to welcome them and not be upset about things (Fig. 1.49). However, other neighbors were not always so friendly in terms of sharing their space when thousands of people show up for these large processions. This is a North Indian Hindu temple around the corner (Fig. 1.50). A West Indian Gujarati temple, the Swaminarayan Mandir, which is actually across the street from the Orthodox synagogue I just mentioned (Fig. 1.51). A Sikh gurdwara is being built here (Fig. 1.52). You can see it is directly across the street from Temple Gates of Prayer, the Conservative synagogue (Fig. 1.53). A much smaller Sikh gurdwara is located in a storefront that’s right next to a Chinese evangelical Christian bookstore, with graffiti proclaiming Jesus is Lord on the riot gate there (Fig. 1.54). This store and the gurwara are no longer there.

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Fig. 1.56 Fig. 1.58

Fig. 1.55

Fig. 1.60

Fig. 1.57 Fig. 1.59

Here is the oldest mosque in Queens, the Muslim Center of New York (Fig. 1.55). This was taken as people were leaving from Friday prayers. Of course, on the dome of the mosque (Fig. 1.56) is the common Islamic saying, “There is no deity except Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” This just takes on interesting meaning in such a diverse neighborhood. Here is an Afghan mosque on the other side of Flushing (Fig. 1.57). You can see the dome and minarets above the neighboring houses. And so everywhere across Flushing there are interesting juxtapositions of architecture (Fig. 1.58). They received 24/7 police protection for two weeks after 9/11. Here is a much smaller mosque in a converted house (Fig. 1.59). This is the 9/11 Memorial the Sunday after 9/11 at the Flushing library (Fig. 1.60), which is the busiest library branch in the country.

The Japanese Zen Buddhist temple is located in a converted house (Fig. 1.61). A Japanese Soka Gakkai Buddhist temple looks kind of like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water (Fig. 1.62). Everywhere there are juxtapositions as R. Scott Hanson 27

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Fig. 1.67

Fig. 1.68

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Fig. 1.72 Fig. 1.74 Fig. 1.76

Fig. 1.75

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Fig. 1.71

here with a Chinese evangelical church across the street from the gurdwara (Fig. 1.63). Chinese churches also serve as schools (Fig. 1.64). And here is a Chinese Buddhist temple in a house (Fig. 1.65). But there are also larger Chinese Buddhist temples, some of which are very large (Fig. 1.66). This is another Chinese Buddhist temple (Fig. 1.67) with a temple in the front and a martial arts kung fu training center in the back, that trained all the actors for the movie, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”. It’s led by a 37th generation kung fu master from Shaolin, China. Tai chi is practiced in local parks. and Lunar New Year Parades take over public streets while members of Falun Gong are free to demonstrate outside the library (Fig. 1.68-70). The largest Korean Presbyterian Church in Flushing, which has 3,500 members is what would be called a megachurch (Fig. 1.71). Other megachurchs look more like a hotel (fig.

1.72). And here is yet another post-modern Korean megachurch (Fig. 1.73). But there are also smaller ones (Fig. 1.74-75). This one is interesting. Here (Fig. 1.76), you have one church in the front of this building, and then in the back, another one in the garage— a separate church. So this shows you how desirable it is for

R. Scott Hanson 29

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Fig. 1.83

Fig. 1.84

Fig. 1.85

Fig. 1.86

Fig. 1.82

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Fig. 1.79

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Fig. 1.77

Fig. 1.88 Fig. 1.89

Fig. 1.87

many young Korean men to pursue the ministry and go to seminary school. And they often want to start their own church, even if it’s tiny.

[Question] Are they all primarily still Korean?

Yes. Completely. This is the Korean commercial part of town with churches everywhere (Fig. 1.77). You find them next to an auto supply place and a gentleman’s club (Fig. 1.78). Sacred and the profane, right? Here, a separate Korean Won Buddhist temple (Fig. 1.79). Or they can share space in a former colonial revival house with the Latin American evangelical congregation at Iglesia Presbiteriana (Fig. 1.80). There are Mormon missionaries on the streets of Flushing who speak Chinese, Spanish, and Korean (Fig. 1.81). There are women from Jehovah’s Witnesses passing out copies of The Watchtower by the subway (Fig. 1.82). There are Chinese missionaries distributing pamphlets by the library (Fig. 1.83). Here is a Korean missionary by the bakery (Fig. 1.84). And here, you see some examples of a nascent interfaith movement in Flushing that is beginning to gain some steam. And just recently, (Fig. 1.85) Mayor de Blasio R. Scott Hanson

31

Fig. 1.90

started a Center for Faith and Neighborhood Partnerships, similar to what the White House has had since Obama and Bush. And it marks an interesting step in the history of New York to try to connect the many different groups of New York City in this way, through interfaith activities.

Finally, multiethnic congregations, as I was saying earlier, offer another glimpse into the future— this one (Fig. 1.86-87) consciously calling itself “a multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual church.” Flushing’s First Baptist church actually is studied by other evangelical Christian, especially Baptist churches as a model for how to be a successful, multiethnic congregation (Fig. 1.88).

Lastly, there are the children of Flushing. This was the YMCA there outside of my apartment, where we are looking down on the playground (Fig. 1.89). I didn’t get to interview many children from the book. I did speak to some high school principals and so forth about some of the issues they face, because the students that they teach represent the future of Flushing, of course.

Finally, this is a diagram that I had in the book that helps describe my view of religious pluralism (Fig. 1.90). Pluralism, we can simply define— it has a long history that I’ve written about in other publications. But we can take it simply to mean the coexistence of different racial, religious, and ethnic groups in the same community, and the range of responses to diversity that you see. Very often, some books that look at more of a macro picture of religious diversity or pluralism in America don’t take into account the full range of different responses to diversity that we see when you look at it close up and one small community like this. I won’t get into covering all of this just for time, but it 32

gives you some sense of the different possible reactions from no interaction, or reclusion, to interaction and either cooperation or conflict, which can lead to either passive forms of intolerance or active forms of intolerance, which could possibly be proselytism, or conversion, or nativism, and overt hostility.

Tolerance, on the other hand— that could be active or passive. And again, either could be ecumenism—like interfaith— or inclusivism— just seeing another group through the lens of your own religious tradition. I go into more detail in my book about this, beyond the map of the many different places of worship in Flushing.

So to what extent, though, does a neighborhood New York City mirror the rest of the United States? What I call the microcosm of world religions in Flushing may be a unique extreme case, but its story runs parallel to the larger story, and reflects something that, to some extent, is beginning to happen— it will happen almost everywhere. Many Americans in the countless predominantly Christian communities across the country have not had reason to think much about religious pluralism before, although this is changing almost everywhere. There are suburbs and towns and vast stretches of land that had been comparatively devoid of religious diversity. But whatever new immigrant religious groups that may exist are often largely unknown to most locals, perhaps in a storefront, converted house, or building off the radar. To be sure, New York City is different from most places in America, and Flushing even more so. As I discuss in the book, urban areas are fundamentally different from suburban and rural areas in terms of population, density and size, and heterogeneity. And this can give rise to different forms of religious life and behavior. But it is hard to find a community in America today that does not have at least some level of diversity.

Even if a town is primarily white and Protestant, chances are the families are descendants of various European nationalities and denominations that didn’t always get along. But in areas where one would least expect to find diversity there are often examples of people who have overcome challenges and difference and learned to live together. Hasidic Jews, undocumented Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants have come to Postville, Iowa and refugees from around the world have settled in Lincoln, Nebraska while neighborhoods from Fremont, California to Silver Springs, Maryland and Flushing, Queens have become what I call microcosms of world religions.

The central question that I was exploring in this book was one that the Catholic theologian, John Courtney Murray, asked in 1960— in a very different time, when the country was primarily Protestant-Catholic-Jew. He asked in 1960, “how much pluralism, and what kinds of pluralism, can a pluralist society stand?

And conversely, how much community and what kinds of unity does a pluralist R. Scott Hanson 33

society need to be a society at all?” This seems especially relevant for Flushing, which may be the most diverse place ever. I found that the good news is that people did not seem to be killing each other on the streets of Flushing. They could live together in civil coexistence. Yes, there have been moments of hate crimes and bias crimes over the years— vandalism, graffiti, that kind of thing— but nothing like you see in Ireland, Gaza, or in India, or in Pakistan. So that’s the good news, that the US can absorb a tremendous amount of diversity and still turn out OK. But there are some limits— other kinds of limits. There are spatial limits. As you’ve seen, parking can be a real problem sometimes on the weekends. There are social limits as well. The urban theorist, Louis Wirth wrote this essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, in which he described how urban behavior is affected by the size, heterogeneity, and density of a city, and how that affects how we will behave in a city. Jane Jacobs also wrote about the need for privacy that urban people have in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. And I think that says something about urban people. You know, people who are on the subway trying to hide behind a book. This [holding up City of Gods] is a good one to hide behind, everyone, if that’s what happens up here.

Or they put on their iPods or iPhones, and just block people out. So there’s something about living in an urban space that allows us to both be amongst diversity, and be OK with it— be tolerant of it— but only to a certain extent, right? There’s that division between public and private that Jacobs talks about in Death and Life. There are linguistic limits, right? Signage can be an issue sometimes. Professor Thomas mentioned that there’s a lot of great new signage in Flushing that marks many different things in the history of Flushing, and the diversity of Flushing— but it’s pretty recent. There used to be a little problem that there were many businesses that had signs only in Chinese or Korean. And so to people who had lived there for generations, it was a kind of quality of life issue. Sometimes, even a safety issue. Police— when a crime was reported by a Korean business, the police tried to come to the scene but couldn’t find it because they couldn’t read the sign. There are structural limits of race. We’ve seen that the African-American communities that had largely been segregated in a few areas don’t enjoy the same job opportunities, and access to affordable housing in many cases. There are theological limits as well. As Rousseau said, in The Social Contract, “It is impossible to live in peace with those one believes to be damned.” There are some who would like to be involved with interfaith efforts and dialogue and so forth, and there are others who would rather convert their neighbors? That’s a problem as well. I think this shows us something of the complexity of responses to diversity. That it’s not just— when the people come to visit Flushing quickly for a day, it may seem as if everything is fine. But dig a little bit deeper, and there’s good news and not-so good news.

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Fig. 1.91

R. Scott Hanson 35

When the French philosopher, Voltaire— he was exiled and lived in London for several years in the early 1730s, when he compared the Catholic Church’s power in France to more diverse societies like England, he concluded: “If there were one religion, its despotism would be terrible. If there were only two, they would destroy each other. But there are 30 so therefore they live in peace and happiness.” I think that his description of London in the 1730s can still describe some of what happens today in diverse societies like Flushing. America’s long experiment with religious freedom, immigration, and pluralism continues— and history shows that communities that undergo rapid demographic change can learn to live together with new immigrants and other religions despite growing pains and challenges along the way.

Fig. 1.92

During a time when many unfairly equate Islam with terrorism after 9/11 and the threat of ISIS at the highest levels of our government, and hysteria continues over how to secure US borders from illegal immigration— building walls and such— it is important to remember that immigration and religious diversity have always been major themes in our nation’s history and sources of strength.

When the people of Flushing stood up for Quakers by signing the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657 they also spoke of “the law of peace, love, and liberty… extending to Jews, Turks, and Egyptians.” As Eboo Patel has written recently, “the Flushing Remonstrance belongs in the tradition of imagining America as a beloved community, a country that welcomes the contributions of all people” (Fig. 1.91).

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The story of Flushing is more relevant now than ever, as it demonstrates at the neighborhood level how religious pluralism works in a nation committed to the fundamental human right of religious freedom. When Bowne House (Fig. 1.92) was dedicated as a national shrine to religious freedom, in 1945, Mayor La Guardia had had no idea how much his words would still ring true in 2017. He said it belongs to our country because it’s typical of America, and it belongs to the world because it’s a symbol of what the world is looking for today.

Thanks very much.

R. Scott Hanson 37

[QUESTION] You mentioned about the time police couldn’t read signs. Now there’s presumably some new Korean police officers?

[HANSON] There are now, yes. The police force is quite diverse now.

Yes. And they’re quite aware of all the different religious festivals and processions that very often traverse the same streets. Not only that, but that you’re beginning to see, since 2000, many Asian-Americans running for political office as well— as the City Councilman John Liu became councilman in 2001. And then he ran for Comptroller and then for mayor. He didn’t win the mayoral election, but you may hear from him again. As I mentioned before, Congresswoman Grace Meng has been quite active, and others. And so we’re beginning to see that even— we talk about the 1990s, many Asian-Americans in Flushing were not that politically engaged with the civic processes, and so forth.

But by the second and third generation, we see that beginning to change. And that fits with some of the things we’ve learned from other studies for instance, those by Robert Putnam in his recent book and writings.

[QUESTION] I’m curious if you know what’s the percentage of the property of the city is used for religious purposes, and what does that do to the property tax rates for the city?

[HANSON] Hmm. I’m not sure I can offer you anything with authority. I’ll have to look that up. But I can say that at least in Flushing, this loophole in the zoning law does seem to have been taken advantage of in the ‘80s and ‘90s to lead to the diversity that we’ve seen here. Another thing that’s important to note is that Flushing has become, in part, a fairly affluent neighborhood. For instance, the Chinese and Korean community in Flushing is more middle to upper class, I’d say, than the Chinatown in Manhattan— with really nice cars zooming around and some very expensive apartments and condos. So at least amongst Korean and Chinese Americans, those two communities are doing fairly well compared to other parts of the city, I think especially compared to the other Chinatown in Manhattan. But yes, not everyone’s enjoying that same economic success. The African-American community for example has been excluded from that. And many Anglos feel like they’re becoming strangers in their own town in some ways, lamenting the disappearance of diners and Irish pubs and so forth.

38

[QUESTION] Has there been any experience with gentrification stretching out into Flushing, with all the New York Times articles writing about how great the food is and everything?

[HANSON] A little bit. I was living there doing my research in the late ‘90s or early 2000s, and I tried to get my friends from Manhattan or Brooklyn to come visit me, and they were like, no, why don’t you come to Williamsburg? Why don’t you come to the other side of the river? Every once in a while, I would have some takers, but not very often. That’s beginning to change somewhat as the apartments closer to the city are more expensive. So people are beginning to discover Flushing, but I have not seen evidence of hipsters yet. Maybe it’s happening a little bit, but I’m not sure.

[QUESTION] Can I ask a follow-up?

What do you think is the impact of having a young— I would assume that a hipster is generally not a religious person— so having a large influx of nonreligious individuals into a community like this?

[HANSON] I don’t know about religiosity of hipsters, but they’re— I like to think of myself as one, but I’m too old. And I’m a Unitarian, so I don’t know. I’m sorry. I was going to make my own point after yours, but when you asked about the religiosity of people like that— yes, I think that’s kind of a hard thing to gauge.

[QUESTION] Would there be conflict as people come in who are not getting up on Sunday morning because of an up-late Saturday night? Does that create the types of tensions?

[HANSON] Yes, I mean, you see people moving to rundown areas to have band practice and artist space, and you just don’t have that same kind of spaces— those same kinds of spaces in Flushing. But the dive that it took in the ‘70s is what opened it up to become the place of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

[QUESTION] Can I ask are blacks being ghettoized? And what is their economic status in Flushing? Are they the general sort of middle class blacks, or is it being R. Scott Hanson 39

ghettoized, or what is the status? You said that they were asked— as community, they were asked to move again. Is that an economic thing? And also is there discrimination based on color?

[HANSON] Yes, it is sometimes, but there was, for quite a while. In the ‘90s, I remember a number of articles in the local paper, some criticism leveled against some Korean store owners for not wanting to make eye contact or put change in people’s hands if they were African-American, and sometimes with whites also. That’s not quite the same, but that’s a subtle— there’s something going on there. But in terms of employing blacks in the Korean stores or Chinese businesses, this hasn’t happened. And you don’t see it. You don’t see it.

[QUESTION] I was wondering about how is it [INAUDIBLE].

[HANSON] Right, well, there’s long been a black community in Flushing. Again, it goes back to the colonial period, and there are some affluent black families in Flushing.

Lewis Latimer invented the carbon filament for the light bulb. He was a Flushing native. And so there were some historic black families in Flushing as well. But in the mid-1950s and ‘60s, during the de-industrialization and so forth, many fled Manhattan for some new housing projects that went up in Flushing in the ‘50s.

At the same time, even those— the parking lot that was created, and displaced the older black community.

[THOMAS] One interesting side narrative is that when we interviewed the Episcopal minister who was actually Hispanic at Saint George’s. And he asked the black choir members why they didn’t sing spirituals. And they looked at him and said, “We are not blacks; we are English. They were not from the American south but instead were all from the islands, and identified with the Anglo culture. And so to them, spirituals were not part of their world— not part of their thing. And he said, well, maybe we should learn some to sort of reach out. But it was an interesting point that there are multiple groups of all these groups, and they don’t fall in any one category.

Scott, thank you so much.

[HANSON] Sure. I needed to answer one more question up here.

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[QUESTION] Oh, I just have a question if you noticed what the pulse was post-election in the city?

[HANSON] What the pulse was?

[QUESTION] What the pulse is post-election in the city?

[HANSON] For all New York City?

[QUESTION] No, no, no. In Flushing.

[HANSON] Oh, in Flushing. Just those 200,000 people.

It’s hard to say. I think in general, you know— it’s interesting. I’ve given some talks and sometimes some of my subtle Trump jokes would be met with some resistance among some older white folks from Flushing who, I think, celebrate his victory. You know, the comment about Archie Bunker and Trump both being from Queens, etc. And it’s interesting you have this dynamic of those who celebrate Flushing’s history, calling it a shrine to religious freedom and so forth, but are grumpy about all the changes that have come with that over the years. So I think we’d like to think of New York as a very progressive place that probably voted for Hillary and so forth in general, which is probably true. But there is still the old guard, if you will. If Trump were ever to visit Queens again, I don’t think he’d recognize it. But it might be worth a visit for him.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE] Thanks again for coming, everybody.

R. Scott Hanson

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March 1, 2017

A WORLD MORE CONCRETE

Real Estate and the Remaking ofJim Crow South Florida N. D. B. Connolly, Ph.D.

I’ve lectured a lot of places, but never among mannequins. It does actually add something a little bit different to our experience together. This is not my first time at Harvard. I was a circulation desk supervisor some 17 years ago at the Harvard Divinity School, the Andover-Harvard Theological Library. My dear colleague Steve Beardsley and I worked the circulation desk together many moons ago. That experience led me to go back to school and from that research I ended up writing a book. Steve went on to become a big head honcho here at Harvard and head of the library system of the professional schools. But it’s always amazing to be back on the Harvard campus because we used to walk together to lunch, and passed this building all the time. But I had never actually been inside the building until today. This is a very touching moment for me, personally.

In the process of writing this book, which took every bit of 10 years, I did a fair amount of time traveling. History is an extraordinarily immersive discipline, and you spend a lot of time reading old newspapers, getting access to old conversations, trying to figure out what the world view was at a particular point in time. I say that as a preface because I’m going to share some things with you today – some artifacts, some language, and images from this bygone era. Some of it may seem a bit troubling. Some of it may actually shock you.

Parts of how you imagine America will be recast in a way that you did not actually think possible. I know I’m setting a high bar there, but I can deliver on that promise. Believe me. I know I sound like Donald Trump—but believe me.

What I want to do is to introduce some of you to the book itself by presenting some of my slides in very formal fashion. But occasionally, I also want to drop you into the book and some of the language that gives you a sense of the world that people lived in, in the Jim Crow era.

This is how the book begins (Fig. 2.1). “It seemed like a good idea at the time.

During the afternoon of 30th July, 1969, more than 1,000 men, women, and children gathered beneath interstate 95 in the heart of Miami central Negro district. The occasion was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for one of America’s first under-expressway parks.” That’s a quote. “Over the previous year, city officials and corporate and individual donors cobbled together $30,000 to erect jungle gyms, swings, and other amusements on nearly five acres of what city planners had already deemed dead land.” Again, that’s a quote. “Playground equipment replaced hundreds of houses and apartments that state road builders bulldozed just a few years earlier to make room for I-95. The park was the brainchild of the city’s first black city commissioner, M. Athalie Range.

N. D. B. Connolly 43

The owner of three funeral homes and several rental properties, Range had become the most recent entrepreneur to assume prominence as a nominal leader of Miami’s so-called Negro community. A widow with children, she was also notably the first woman to do so. The city’s under-expressway park would bear Range’s name and enjoy endorsements from an influential interracial coalition that included the city’s mayor, several white city commissioners, and past and present heads of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”

The city of Miami’s tourism bureau took scores of photographs at the opening ceremony and later publicized the event in national news outlets. Shadowed beneath a bustling freeway, Mayor Stephen Clark spoke to the residents of South Florida’s poorest neighborhood with what was likely unintended irony.

Quote, “Miami does not shove socioeconomic problems under the rug,” the mayor assured. “But in the spirit of enterprise, copes with them.”

“Celebrants at the park’s opening paid little attention to the new and already wilting grass, which lay at some places, right up against the legs of playground equipment (Fig. 2.2). Somehow dry sod hastily planted was supposed to grow in weak soil and scant sunlight. No one would say that a similar expectation had been placed on Miami’s poorer black children, even if the comparison seemed apt in the midst of underfunded schools, substandard housing, and minimal access to decent city services. Nor would anyone comment on the potential symbolism of a park that effectively rendered these kids invisible to travelers whisking along above between the region’s airports, beaches, and suburbs. Below that freeway, in one of the most spectacular year-round climates in America, the embodied future of black Miami looked up at a concrete sky.”

The title of my book is A World More Concrete. And with that title, I try to convey two things. One is the gradual amendment of the Jim Crow system and its becoming more concrete as the overt markers of segregation come down and other more distant, more ephemeral markers of segregation went up. Now when you think of Jim Crow, you tend to think of these kinds of artifacts [holds up “Colored Waiting Room” sign]: a “colored only” sign in a waiting room at a train station or water fountains or something else fixes your attention on the nature of segregation— as a set of positions, as a clear case of white over black. What many people don’t know about the Jim Crow moment is that these kinds of signs were actually the product of very careful negotiations between blacks and whites. Because the default position, as it concerned the color line, was actually to have no waiting room at all for 44

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

N. D. B. Connolly 45

black people. The creation of a colored-only space, whether you’re talking about a colored-only beach, colored-only seating in a stadium, colored-only days on city golf course, all of these had to be fought for through very careful negotiations.

I make this point to get to the second piece of the story about concrete, which is that infrastructure is, itself, a product of conflict. The concrete buildings in and around Miami were the result of constant pushing on the part of housing activists and others who basically forced revisions of Jim Crow’s old residential economy into a new Sunbelt, progressive, white-collar economy, for which Florida is currently widely known, the so-called “Capital of the Caribbean” in Miami’s case.

In structuring the book and in structuring my remarks for today, I’m going to have three sections. And I use as an analog the building of the tenement house. Now when you first have a house, you have to lay a strong foundation.

And in the context of Jim Crow America, the foundation of the social order was violence, and, particularly, spectacles of white power, spectacles of violence. The foundation of the Jim Crow order and the post-Jim Crow world was violence— part one of the talk is “Foundation.”

When you have a foundation, you then erect the walls and the frame, and you put in the hardware. Construction becomes the second part of the project.

“Construction” is the second part of the today’s talk, the second part of the book. With “Construction,” I try to illustrate all of the transactions, all of the political culture, the mores, the creation of a vibrant South Florida that proved necessary for the creation of an affluent South that, in some ways, made growth in Miami profoundly dependent on Jim Crow’s political culture. So “Construction” is section two.

After a certain number of days, of rainstorms, and winds, especially in a place that’s in the hurricane beltway, like South Florida is, you eventually have to make renovations or updates to this structure in order to keep it livable. In the case of South Florida, the winds of change, the activism that was pushing against the color line, the ways in which the old Jim Crow order was not going to be able to be sustained because there was constant pressure from a variety of corners, economic, civic, social, cultural, meant that you had to revise or renovate the Jim Crow house. “Renovation” will be the third section of the talk today. In order to appreciate just how foundational violence is to economic growth, you have to think about what south Florida was prior to the emergence of Miami as a global city (Fig. 2.3). Basically, we begin by thinking 46

about what a swampland required, thinking about what economic growth demanded, by way of draining the water, by way of building roads, by way of constructing docks, by way of dredging bays, all of this had to be done to transform South Florida into a livable space. The city itself was established in 1896, the same year as the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. And that’s important because Plessy vs. Ferguson was the foundational ruling of Jim Crow America, basically establishing that separate could somehow be equal in America.

So the fact that Plessy vs. Ferguson and Miami are roughly the same age is critically important.

But even more important is the fact that Jim Crow’s political culture had embedded in it a series of contradictions that, in many cases, seemed untenable for any long period of time. Nonetheless, segregation in this country, formal American apartheid, lasted over 70 years. And the negotiations that emerged around economic growth became critical for sustaining that culture.

The first principle negotiation revolved around how one procured the taxes to do all the infrastructural development that was needed. So many cities that were made in the New South era, the 1880s and 1890s needed to be able to levy taxes on property. That meant that you couldn’t necessarily discriminate against anyone who was interested in buying land, if you could, ultimately, marshal taxes from that property. So African Americans and whites, immigrants from other places were deeply encouraged in places like Tulsa, Oklahoma and Miami, Florida to buy property.

But herein lies a problem. You need to still create some kind of clear social order that affirms the emerging white power of the late 19th century. So you have the situation in which people could actively buy property and own it, but not live on it— buy property and own it, but who were regulated by way of segregation statutes to not be able to live on it. This creates an amazing contradiction— black owners and white tenants. You had people who owned the land on which they could not live, so they, instead, rented it out to whites who were, in fact, allowed to live in that area (Fig. 2.4). Here for example is a lease signed by one Dana Dorsey, and then signed by two ranchers, an A. Anthony and a Mr. Bogiages. Both of these men were of Greek extraction. And they paid their rent every Saturday to an African American landlord.

So right off the top, you have to imagine the Jim Crow space as a world. It had colored-only infrastructure on the one hand, but at the same time, had an inversion of the Jim Crow order where whites had to actually pay their N. D. B. Connolly 47

Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4

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Fig. 2.5

N. D. B. Connolly 49

money to a black landlord. Similarly, you have whites who had black bosses, employees who worked at printing presses, who worked at small shops, who literally, had to go to work every day leaving their white enclaves and going into the black spaces, and reporting to an African American boss. Imagine the kinds of everyday tensions that these situations generate in people, to think about there being one clear sense of what makes for an appropriate social order, white over black, and then the reality of what it meant in the day-to-day when the landlord showed up for his rent or when you went to the place of work every single day, with black over white.

At the very same time, there was a sense that the entire balance of Jim Crow had to be monitored by law enforcement and by different forms of informal white power. Again, this image is of a document highlighting the way in which the FBI was keeping tabs on interracial life in the black enclave in Miami.

Because of the black ownership class, you had not just African Americans, but also West Indian blacks who owned land. And there were constant conflicts between West Indians and African Americans over which property owners were, in fact, in charge of the day-to-day life of the community.

So another important thing, just from the outset to appreciate is that there is great diversity within so-called colored-only spaces. Not only do you have white/black inversions of various kinds, but blackness itself is constantly up for debate. And in the case of Miami in 1919 or 1920, you have conflicts over whether or not Miami was even part of the United States. This was because the majority of black people living in the city at that time were actually British subjects from the British colonial islands.

Black West Indians made the argument that because most blacks in Miami were of UK citizenship, they should not be beholden to Jim Crow’s social and political mores, and instead should be allowed to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day and Boxing Day and teach their classes on a British curriculum, etc. There was actually a gunfight in the streets between West Indians and African Americans over one particular episode in which a West Indian was lynched after being handed over to whites by African Americans. A West Indian man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman was turned over so that that black community could show that they, indeed, participated in the “good old boy” forms of law and order that existed at that time.

The only thing I’ll draw your attention to with this document— which again, is dated 1920, about a group called the Overseas Club, a West Indian political group— is that it’s signed by the eventual director of the F.B. I., J. Edgar 50

Hoover (Fig. 2.5). Hoover was keeping tabs on black radicalism from as early as 1920 or even 1919, well into the 1970s with the COINTELPRO program.

This gives you a sense that the same characters are involved in the long sweep of countering black political power in this period.

In the American south and lower Midwest, power did really begin and end with the lynching tree in this period (Fig. 2.6). And to understand why so many decisions around American institutions happened the way that they do, you have to appreciate that white power, in particular, the idea of white popular sovereignty continues to govern a considerable number of the debates that are happening around the institutional life of this country at this moment.

What “white popular sovereignty” effectively means is that white American citizens are sovereign to the state, and that the state, in fact, must serve their needs. And so if there is any moment in which the state doesn’t do what the white population believes it ought to do, relative to policing particular ethnic groups and minorities and immigrants, then the masses of white people have the right to take the law into their own hands (Fig. 2.7). This language about “the American people” becomes critical for how people negotiate whether or not to allow for there to be breaks in the Jim Crow system.

The emergence of what we consider today to be modern liberalism or the government stepping in to try to regulate this kind of violence begins around this problem of lynching. If there needs to be law in place, if you have to somehow protect the frightened black masses, you need a strong government— the man with the badge to be in charge. Much of what emerges in the 20th century as a kind of regulation of white violence is basically a desire to keep the state as responsive as it can be to the needs of those people who are suffering under the pall of racial violence. This matters because, as I mentioned earlier, with property being so important and white violence really being at the center of the way that the modern city is built, there is a way in which black property owners themselves were being targeted, even as their tax money was necessary for building cities; indeed they were also targeted by virtue of their economic success.

In this picture of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, what you see here is a very clear example of what happens when white popular sovereignty is not served (Fig. 2.8). Very quickly, one African American youth, again, is accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. This is the kind of constant narrative that became very much a kind of cover story for any number of attacks on black prosperity.

Ida B. Wells established this over 100 years ago, through her investigative work. In the case of Tulsa, Oklahoma, like Miami, you had a very prosperous N. D. B. Connolly

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Fig. 2.7

Fig. 2.6

Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9

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black property class that owned land on which whites lived, and that owned businesses at which whites worked. And at the thought of this one youth escaping the lynch mob, a white mob literally attacked the entire financial district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Greenwood District or what was known colloquially as Black Wall Street. Now this matters because this is not the age of cloud computing. This is not an age where there are all kinds of electronic versions of whether one has a stake in the land of a given area. Very surgical attacks by white mobs on black landlords and black employers happened as a result of the 1921 attacks in Tulsa. People literally went and burned the records of the land on which they lived. They burned the records of the owner of that business. And this resulted in a mass property transfer from black to white hands by simply destroying any records of the actual owners. Similar attacks happened across the country. In 1919, especially, but again, in 1923 in Florida (Fig. 2.9). All of this was part of what people knew was just beyond reach if the sovereignty of white officials, white Americans, in general, were not served through a kind of touch and go negotiation.

In Florida specifically, the spectacles of violence take on an even more profound layer. Florida is a place of Native Americans. It was that way since before the Spanish colonists arrived. So you have, in South Florida, a desire to celebrate the centrality of Native Americans as part of building a really robust tourist infrastructure, particularly in the 19-teens and ‘20s (Fig. 2.10).

This image is of a Seminole Indian poling a dugout canoe in a swimming pool in front of a large crowd. In the distance there is another Native American wrestling an alligator on a platform in the pool.

If you go today to South Florida, Fort Lauderdale in particular, you can ride a riverboat called the Jungle Queen, and still, literally take a trip through the canals and affluent mansions of South Florida and then see a preserved Indian village where someone still wrestles an alligator for mere dollar tips. In this particular instance in the 1920s, you have a number of people who are very savvy in their ability to control the industry of tourism at this time. The gentleman in this photograph is Hath-wa-ha-chee or “Tony Tommie,� in his anglicized name (Fig. 2.11). He was a master of pulling on the strings of white racial spectacle. He would do things like hold Native American weddings. And Native American couples who had been married for years would get married again two and three and four times over and Tony Tommie would charge admissions to those ceremonies, even if they already had several children. He would have people carve totem poles reminiscent of Northwestern tribes. He would have them build Indian villages so you could observe people engage in day-to-day activities.

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Fig. 2.10 Fig. 2.11

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Fig. 2.12

In this particular episode, which was his most dramatic spectacle, he got 150,000 acres of Native American land that he claimed to preside over as the chief of the Seminoles, and then negotiated a deal to transfer that land to the head of the Miami Chamber of Commerce (Fig. 2.12). He got a headdress from a local Indian collector and put it on. He got a peace pipe. And he basically created this elaborate ceremony in which you had a number of Native American women with wooden implements digging holes in the ground.

Behind them came Native American men planting seed in the earth that had just been planted. Behind them, came a row of tractors made of steel and rubber that tore up all the soil that had just been planted. And behind them, were white women dressed as farmers, as pictured here, representing the 13 original colonies and the City of Miami itself. And they planted new seed in the earth that had just been torn up.

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Fig. 2.13

Now Hath-wa-ha-chee spoke perfect English, but he presided over this affair speaking his native Miccosukee and saying, “The white man is a child of destiny. The red man is a child of nature. It is time for the child of nature to surrender to the child of destiny.” He invented the flag for the occasion, just so he could surrender it. He then took a couple puffs of the peace pipe, transferred the headdress onto the head of the Miami Chamber of Commerce and then proceeded to hand over 150,000 acres of extraordinarily fertile farmland to the head of the Miami chamber of commerce.

The current cities of Hialeah and Miami Lakes stand on this property that was transferred to the head of the Miami chamber of commerce, the Graham family, to be exact, led by Ernest Graham. And Ernest Graham took over what was then the Pennsylvania Sugar Corporation’s land and created dairy farms.

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And he had three sons. One was named William, one was named Philip, one was named Robert. William carved up the suburbs that became Miami Lakes, and sold them off, and made a killing. In addition to the family’s dairy farms, he became an extraordinarily prominent suburban developer. Philip went on with the family’s wealth to gain influence in Washington circles and became the publisher and co-owner of the Washington Post. Young Robert, who had a talent for book learning and reading, went on to Harvard University for undergraduate and Harvard Law School. He then became US Senator Bob Graham, and eventually Governor Bob Graham of Florida, and was head of a major Democratic family.

Tony Tommie, within a year was dead after this transaction. He was basically of the belief that tribal leadership had fixed “bad medicine” on him. You see, the Seminoles don’t actually have a chief. There was a council of elders living over 100 miles away around Lake Okeechobee. When they heard about this transaction, they were very upset. But they were not able, because of the legal power of the Miami Chamber of Commerce, to get any of their lands back. It all stayed in white hands. And like I said before, it’s currently part of the critical residential life that is South Florida today.

“Transactional liberalism.” It’s a bit of a mouthful. But suffice it to say that as you move from the 19-teens and ‘20s into the 1930s and ‘40s, the federal government began to take a more prominent role in trying to bring the economy into some level of stability. Part of that includes, of course, making sure that you can account for the standard risk that goes into doing business in the real estate economy.

Those of you in the room who are urban historians will recognize this as a map from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (Fig 2.13). The term redlining comes largely from the term of use of the red lines here to mark areas that were considered high risk zones. Miami, in the 1930s and 1940s was part of a number of cities around the country that were carved up into a series of risk communities, risk sectors. These maps were part of an elaborate system which determined whether or not somebody’s mortgage would be rescued by the federal government based on where they live, and especially in what risk assessment color community they lived.

Other agencies, notably the Federal Housing Administration determined whether or not you can get access to a loan going forward depending on where you lived, relative to these colors representing classes of real estate on the map. This is to say that the city and federal agencies could determine 58

where the growth would be and whether mortgages would be available based on a pretty rough set of criteria, one of them being of course, if any black person lived in a community, which resulted in a red designation.

Fig. 2.14

In Miami itself, this federally sponsored discrimination created a pretty dense community. You had the Central Negro District, which was a beehive of shotgun shacks and small jerry-built buildings that were all wood construction (Fig. 2.14). Through the early part of the 20th century deep into the 1940s you had the wooden shotgun shack as the most predominant architectural form in that part of the city. People lived, on average, 150 people to an acre, densely packed in one-story wooden shacks. Just to give you a sense of the comparison, the other side of town on the other side of the railroad tracks, and in Miami Beach, there were roughly 15 people per acre. So 10 times the amount of density existed in this black enclave. And density matters because once you pack people onto these blocks, you can then charge them more for the lack of options. You can have blocks that you own where you can cram houses that generate more and more income.

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Fig. 2.16

Fig. 2.15

This map of African American Miami is meant to basically show you is two things: One, the density of the shotgun shacks- each one of these small rectangles is a small shotgun shack, in which as many as seven people lived, seven people for each one of those rectangles (Fig. 2.15). OK? The name shotgun shack actually comes from the term of being able, in folk-lore at least, to shoot a gun through the front door and have it pass through the back door without hitting an interior wall. There was the central hallway with tiny rooms off it. Many of these shacks had no indoor plumbing. You can see with the gray here, and again all through here, that these were areas that had no pavement at all. So these houses are underserved infrastructurally by way of sewage, by way of pavement, and the numbers themselves are the tax-assessed values of these various blocks. So again, the more homes you could cram on a given block, the more you could expect to make in this period. Now, at the level of the street itself, of course, the housing was deplorable (Fig. 2.16). This is just a small sampling of the kinds of wooden-built tenement housing that black folks were forced to live in around the country, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Miami.

One of the things that are really important to bear in mind about this kind of housing is that it was extraordinarily profitable. If anybody here has ever been to Disney World, with a kid, you know you don’t really want your kid buying a lot or asking for a lot once you get through those gates. If you were a kid and went to Disney World, you may remember your parents telling you, don’t ask for anything. Because it’s really expensive. I have that memory, myself. Now nobody here I’m going to guess goes shopping for clothes or groceries at the airport. Is that safe to say? And you know why, right? Because again, once you go through that security gate, everything that’s on the other side of that security marker is more expensive. Even if you need socks and forgot to pack socks, you don’t buy socks at the airport. You wait till you land and you get them somewhere else, right?

Living in Jim Crow America was like living in Disney World without the rides. Everything on the other side of the color line costs more. The kinds of housing that you’re seeing here with no indoor plumbing, with seven people living to a house, with no mosquito screens, with no pavement outside your door, can cost, in 1949 dollars, about $18 a week. And every Saturday, you got a knock on the door from the landlord at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning because he knew you’d be home, collecting that $18. That was the indignity of living in these spaces. On the white side of town, in a hotel room, oftentimes with beachfront access, a telephone, and in some cases even a television, the cost was $17.50 a week, or $0.50 less than living in one of these shacks. By carving N. D. B. Connolly

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up the city into a set of racially segregated niche markets, they could actually drive up the cost of the most deplorable housing that was available at that time.

Fig. 2.17

Into this world, in the 1930s, the Federal government under Franklin Roosevelt began its first efforts to counter the Depression. For the first time since President Woodrow Wilson, who had presided over the mass-demotion of African American government workers in 1913, the 1930s represented a resurgence of black access to federal power. As part of a broader reformist moment that included real estate, labor, and banking programs, President Roosevelt convened what some called his “black cabinet,” or what was called more pejoratively, his “kitchen cabinet” (Fig. 2.17). These were people who were able to work their relationships at the local level, they were businesspeople, and they got access for the first time to conversations about regulating the housing markets around the country. Roosevelt’s kitchen cabinet advocated for public housing as an option that would help to alleviate the pressures in these slum communities. They had to make deals to determine where the housing would be built, would it challenge the existing landlord lobby? How would you determine who was given access or not? It was not for the poorest of the poor, because if public housing failed, that cast a pall of suspicion over the entire project. But you could find the right people to enter the new housing— upwardly mobile, working-class people— who could use public housing as a stepping stone, hopefully, into the middle class.

All of this was part of the negotiation that a few black elites had to make in city after city after city, just to give people access to decent standard housing in contrast to what was being offered in those wood tenements.

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Fig. 2.19 Fig. 2.21 Fig. 2.22

Fig. 2.20

Fig. 2.18

In Miami in particular, it meant that you had to craft a kind of development vision that would see the Central Negro District, pictured here, as ultimately being destroyed or razed or remodeled for the sake of creating a much more prominent, global Miami (Fig. 2.18). People were already aware that the housing projects that were being built 10, 15 miles away would hopefully be a safety valve that would push future black growth into these areas (Fig. 2.19) (Fig. 2.20). It was all part of a long-term vision. Miami itself was still trying to sell itself as being part of this Caribbean space that included Haiti, and Cuba, and Jamaica, but it was decidedly white on its own, as this ad from Delta Airlines suggests (Fig. 2.21). You have rhythm in Haiti, Jai Lai in Havana, the natives’ market in Jamaica, and finally Miami’s Magic, was reflected by the white couple shopping up and down Miami Beach. Island-hopping packages like these became part of the aviation industry’s most exclusive tourist packages at the time. Black Miami was also a place of black tourism (Fig. 2.22). And in addition to creating the conditions whereby white tourists could

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Fig. 2.24

Fig. 2.23

arrive, again very much in the spirit of transactional negotiations, African American business people, many times landlords, negotiated for the building of the colored-only beach in Miami, 1944. They negotiated for the creation of the black police force in Miami, 1945.

There were no black cops in the entire neighborhood until a series of negotiations and careful backroom deals between black property owners and their white counterparts helped to create the first black-only police force. Now these police couldn’t arrest whites, they couldn’t do anything that would mean persecuting anybody for a felony. They had a black judge as well. They could only prosecute misdemeanors. But imagine a kind of “Judge Joe Brown.” That was like the black judge of the Jim Crow moment. They were very small cases and a lot of moral teaching from the bench. But this court and police force served to mark these people as being on the path to citizenship.

Outside of these black enclaves, of course, the story that we know about explosive post-war suburbanization was continuing apace. Levittowns were emerging around the country. Other kinds of bedroom communities were erupting all over the countryside (Fig. 2.23). Farms were being turned into subdivisions. These are places of consumption. They were places of gender performance where women would entertain men who had come back from the battlefront, and build families together and create some kind of nest egg that would, hopefully, drive the country’s prosperity further still. Places of consumption.

When African Americans attempted to do the same thing, they were oftentimes hemmed in (Fig. 2.24). But it’s important keep in mind that the explosion of post-war suburbs is not the beginning of the suburban story. There were already, through these other negotiations, these early negotiations, black suburban communities that existed all across the country.

And in fact, what happened in many instances is that white communities that were surrounding these black enclaves, found it was in their interest to try to push these black neighborhoods out.

This map of Miami shows a square, surrounded on three sides by the yellow area; the area was called the Railroad Shop Colored Addition (Fig. 2.25). It was bordered by, what was perceived at the time, to be a downwardly mobile white community called Allapattah. Around 1940, the residents of Allapattah decided to petition to have the railroad shop community demolished under the authority of eminent domain.

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Fig. 2.26

Fig. 2.25

By eminent domain law, you had to use a public good to justify the taking of private property. And so they decided that they were going to use the land of the Railroad Shops Colored neighborhood to build, with city funds, a firehouse, a park (again, paid for with city money) and a local elementary school, the Andrew Jackson school, to be exact— all to go on this one site for whites only, still in the Jim Crow mold. The city decided that it was such a good idea, that it was unanimously approved; it just didn’t have the money just yet. So they waited until after the war. And when the financing got together, they kicked out the residents of Railroad Shop district in one fell swoop (Fig. 2.26). This actually happened during a rainstorm, where people were approached by motorcycle cops; again there was a knock on the door between 10 and 12 in the morning, and people were thrown out of their homes into the rain, their possessions were lifted from their homes, some of them gathered under trees. Some of the privately owned fruit trees on the property were dug out and sold to local growers at a discount.

Anybody who had a decent attorney could find a way to get their physical house moved; the fortunate ones had their house cut off of its foundation and moved to a location 15 miles away into an area now known as Carver Ranches.

The houses in Carver Ranches sat in the dirt, unmoored for about a month, before the hurricane of 1947 came and swept them all away. Entire families were ruined. This is what gentrification looked like in the Jim Crow era, much more invasive, much more violent.

Now, in the meantime, negotiations were happening between these homeowners and other people who had power. There was, in particular, one individual who I spent a considerable time on in the book, who was generally seen as being the defender of black property rights— the one to help black people advance their claims relative to these kinds of land takings.

His name was Luther Brooks (Fig. 2.27). Brooks is important for a couple of different reasons. He was a southern man from Georgia. For those of you who have heard of the Great Migration, which was the mass migration of African Americans from rural to urban America, you know that many of the rural property managers followed the masses of black people into these cities in a way that the Sioux might follow the buffalo. You go where the profit is. More to the point, the majority of black people who left the rural South did not go to cities like Chicago, or New York, or Cleveland, or parts of the North. They typically went to the urban South. They went to places like Atlanta, and to Miami, and to New Orleans. What this means is— 75% of all the black people who left rural America went to the urban South, not the urban North. What N. D. B. Connolly 67

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Fig. 2.28

Fig. 2.27

Fig. 2.26

this also means is that, through men like Brooks, the urban South was a place of deep, deep connections to rural paternalism, with its ongoing dilemma and struggle with white supremacy. It merely shifted from a rural to an urban context.

And it also meant that people like Luther Brooks came who knew how to try to manage the mores of segregation in ways that kept him abreast of black politics and also kept him plugged in with the black elites, who themselves had power relative to the poor blacks in the city. Miami, in the context of this migration and the post-war growth period, was going through its own “renovation.”

This included getting rid of some of the more overt markers of Jim Crow’s political culture. Lynching was not considered to be a proper way for a functioning democracy to operate. So between the 1920s and the late 1940s, there were increasing regulations of white supremacist groups. The Klan was targeted in particular (Fig. 2.28). You were no longer allowed to wear hoods in public. You were no longer allowed to burn crosses. The modern urban South was all about regulating these forms of violence and putting them in the hands of professionals, i.e., police. The explosion of police departments was part of this need to regulate the white popular sovereignty that had been the foundation of lynch law prior to the 1940s. At the same time, the old Jim Crow landscape, with its wooden shacks, had to similarly be revised (Fig. 2.29). And so slum clearance efforts from 1940s were initiated to try to change the reputation of the Old South. They wanted to get rid of the wood shacks and put up something much more modern, again, something much more concrete (Fig. 2.30).

This image shows the Central Negro District picture differently, with the Florida East Coast Railroad and a bright, glistening, sunbelt downtown, made of concrete, shining in the sun. So much of the goal of the picture was to try to get this part of the city to look like this other part of the city (Fig. 2.31).

But they had a very difficult time because of landlord lobbyists, who, with their profit margins, were able to constantly block different eminent domain initiatives at the state level.

This was still Dixie, folks. So the good old boys were still in charge. And the taking of private property was considered to be beyond the pale in southern politics. So every time urban elites tried to initiate some kind of slum clearance, they weren’t just being fought back by black residents who were having their homes taken. They also were being pushed back by the white N. D. B. Connolly 69

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Fig. 2.30

Fig. 2.29

landlords, many of whom were absentee landlords, who owned the majority of the property in this black neighborhood. 70% of all the black housing in the Central Negro District was owned by whites who didn’t want their property taken.

Here is another picture to give you a sense of the difference of the new architecture in the concrete modern downtown, contrasting with the more antiquated, wooden, low-rise developments over here (Fig. 2.32). Some of the few concrete buildings that did exist in the black downtown were owned by the most elite African Americans. For example, the Mary Elizabeth hotel was owned by Dr. William Sawyer. He and his family also owned 300 rental properties, none of which were kept in terribly good condition. Members of the African American Sawyer family, which was considered iconic and important, were also some of the region’s most egregious landlords.

Black Miami was a site of black consumption (Fig. 2.33). The Mary Elizabeth Hotel was in the pages of Ebony Magazine where you could also see, alongside it, Manischewitz kosher wine for sale. And the members of the black “kitchen cabinet” who had connections in DC were also part of this tourist real estate boom of the 1940s and ‘50s (Fig. 2.34). Educator and civil rights heroine Mary McCloud Bethune, a member of Roosevelt’s kitchen cabinet, owned beachfront property given to her by her connections in Washington.

Black college football games, black motels, black resorts, all subsidized by the profits were being built, and built from poor people living in these tenements (Fig. 2.35). What we think today of as a kind of golden ghetto of the Jim Crow era where blacks owned their own homes and ran their own space, in fact was largely white-owned and largely funded by black tenants.

The other thing I want to point out here is this children’s baseball team was actually sponsored by Luther Brooks. The young boy in the picture below is named Leo Barfield. I entered Leo Barfield’s name in Facebook about seven, eight years ago and his face came up. And I sent him a note. And I said, excuse me, are you the nephew of a man named Luther Brooks? He said, “Yes I am.”

I said “Would you happen to know anything about his business because I’m actually writing a book where he figures in very prominently.” He said, “Yes I do. In fact, both his daughter and his daughter’s husband, who was the accountant for Bonded Collection Agency, the rental company that Brooks owned, they’re also still alive. Would you like me to put you in touch with them?” “Why, yes, I would. Thank you, very much.”

So I get on the phone with George Harth and his wife Margie, Luther Brooks’s N. D. B. Connolly

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Fig. 2.37

Fig. 2.38

Fig. 2.39

Fig. 2.40

Fig. 2.36

Fig. 2.35

Fig. 2.34

Fig. 2.33

Fig. 2.32

Fig. 2.31

daughter. And I had to take a very careful path during the course of this conversation. Because I wanted to get to a point, but I couldn’t start with discussions of predation and lynch law.

I began by talking very openly about Brooks’s contributions, which were many.

He put black kids through medical school. He acquired all of his cars by way of a black dealer, did all of his printing by way of a black newspaper owner.

All of this is coming out through the course of our discussion. And she knows about all of this and sees his citations on the wall and has a great sense of him as a benefactor to the race. About an hour and a half into the conversation, I start talking about the business and talking about the property management and all these various aspects of it. And again, it takes another half an hour or so before I feel comfortable enough to say, “So is there some sense of what the profit margins might be for the clients who used the services of Bonded Collection Agency?” What Bonded did was they collected all the rents, did all the repairs, they managed all of the day-to-day life. And they only took 8% of whatever rent that was collected. And they sent the rest in a check up to the landlord, wherever they lived, whether it was in Massachusetts, or in Jacksonville, or in other parts of Miami. I said, “Do you have any sense of what the overall profit margin was for landlords who were managing these properties and who owned these properties?” And without missing a beat, George Harth, the accountant, said, “Between 25% and 33% return.” Margie gets flustered hearing these numbers. Because you know how it sounds. “I’m not entirely sure how accurate that is.” And he interrupted her, cut her off, he said, “Margie, I managed the books for 14 years. I know what I’m talking about.

All right?” This was then corroborated by the investigative journalistic work being done in Miami at the time.

As a point of comparison, if you own rental property in today’s real estate economy, you can expect, as a profitable return, between 4% and 6% return on your investment, compared to 25% to 33%, in some cases 66% return on that investment in a very different kind of economy. In this situation of deeply impoverished housing, you don’t necessarily build equity in the properties. But you extract as much as you can from the tenants themselves. Luther Brooks was well known in black circles. Here he is shaking hands with the head coach of the Florida A&M football team during the Orange Blossom Classics season (Fig. 2.36). He actually bought the coat for the coach, Jake Gaither.

Here is Luther Brooks sending a check of $1,000 for the creation of a black nursery with black ministers very much in tow (Fig. 2.37). Here’s a client of Luther Brooks’s who is giving Christmas dinners to all their tenants who live in Brooks’s managed properties (Fig. 2.38). Over 14,000 apartments were under N. D. B. Connolly 73

Brooks’s direct supervision during the height of his business.

Half of all the black people in Dade County, the largest county in Florida, lived in a property managed by Luther Brooks. It was a massive operation.

Mr. Brooks made about $650,000 a year in 1959 dollars from this business.

He was extraordinarily wealthy. But the negative press that came from the dirtiness of the slum business kept him constantly on the defensive against muckraking reformers, against civil rights activists, against any number of so-called “do-gooders” (his term) who were trying to improve the conditions of the housing. So in response, the Miami landlords decided, we are going to use an old approach. We’re going to find a way to do this, not with the federal government invading our space, but through direct government subsidies paid to landlords themselves.

Now I mentioned before the Federal Housing Administration. Now many people don’t know, but the FHA didn’t just fund mortgage insurance for single family homes. Eventually, and in direct response to the threat of slum clearance, they supported the use of mortgage insurance for the development of concrete tenement housing (Fig. 2.39). What this means is that, rather than having the government take your property and give you a small payout, you could allow them to basically update your real estate under, again, a federal subsidy, and turn it from a wood property into a concrete property.

So the development of concrete housing in Miami came by way of subsidies from the federal government. 99% of all rental housing built between 1951 and 1953 was built with mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration. The conversion of the wood to the concrete economy came at the expense of the taxpaying public. Most people have no sense of this at all.

But the landlords themselves knew that if they could control what amount of government spending they got, what kind of government spending they got, it could be in their interest in the long run.

At the very same time, of course, the landlords were building new suburbs.

They were trying to find ways to give blacks access to that consumer’s republic I mentioned earlier. Lake Meadows in Chicago, Pontchartrain Park in New Orleans, Richmond Heights in Miami (Fig. 2.40). Richmond Heights, in particular, had to be built as part of this negotiation culture at a location so far from the downtown, that some called it “living behind God’s back”, some 15 miles away (Fig. 2.41). But it was a place where you could have green spaces and, again, domestic spaces. You could have celebrities come and show that they too were part of the emerging black bourgeoisie. This is an area of Brownsville, Florida, just north of the downtown area. And you could, if you 74

were talented enough and wealthy enough, even get a black worker of your own, to manicure your leisure lifestyle (Fig. 2.42).

Here I am going to skip ahead a bit to describe the violence that was also part of this world. The new concrete housing, obviously didn’t mean that there was an end to the racial violence. The emergence of the post-war moment didn’t mean there was an end to it. In fact, what we now understand as the story of the civil rights movement with the bombing attacks on black churches, the bombing attacks on black homes— so much of that was actually done by white American veterans who fought in World War II and Korea and had gotten explosives training as part of their military experience. So there was an actual battle on the home-front between white veterans and black veterans who patrolled their neighborhoods and tried to make sure that the neighborhoods remained safe. In 1951, as the economy continued to blossom and grow, you had this constant pressure between homeowners and landlords for the black populace— landlords trying to push ever-further into white areas, white homeowners trying to keep them at bay.

Fig. 2.41

This is one message to the governor of Miami (Fig. 2.43). “As a property owner in Miami, will you please help us in our fight to protect our home from infiltration of the colored race?” Here is another telegram, “Don’t want nigger

N. D. B. Connolly 75

Fig. 2.43

Fig. 2.42

neighbors in Edison Center. Let’s get them out or else riot” (Fig. 2.44). It was signed “Mr. And Mrs. Fred Coleman, 1052 Northwest 65th Street.” You could actually use language like this in correspondence with the governor and still put your name and address on it. It wasn’t considered to be beyond the pale.

The Carver Village Apartments, one of the new concrete developments for African Americans, was, in fact, bombed (Fig. 2.45). No one was killed in the episode, but it created such bad publicity that somebody had to act. This type of activity, again made the old language of white popular sovereignty a bit too incendiary. By the time you got to the late ‘50s, you could use the same

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kind of language in public, but as you can see in this photograph, you had to actually cover your face when the photographer came around (Fig. 2.46).

The final section for our understanding is “Renovation.” You cannot sustain the kinds of profit margins, the kinds of poverty, the depth of the difficulty of going house by house to try to renovate the wooden slums on a piecemeal basis (Fig. 2.47). You must get into something much more dramatic. The front pages of the newspapers were still seeing any number of tragedies associated with the slowing economy of South Florida. Ultimately, you have to have a more dramatic revision. So again, when you revisit the Central Negro District in 1948, you get a sense of its scale, of its size, of its density. Within 20 years, it was a site of a massive highway interchange (Fig. 2.48). 9/10ths of the condemnation fees were paid for by the federal government because when you use a highway to do this kind of clearance, Uncle Sam picks up 90% of the bill. Landlords who were aware of this and who knew the project was coming, actually went so far as to build expensive high-end concrete projects in the path of the expressway knowing it was going to be demolished. They did this because they knew that the government had to compensate them, not just for the value of the land and the property, but for projected rents that could be gleaned from that unit. They found ways to turn even highway building into a kind of boondoggle for themselves.

Let me skip ahead to give you some sense of the geography (Fig. 2.50). The imaginings of the space had to be of an empty site. This is from a Metro-Dade planning document (Fig. 2.51). The idea was that no one actually lived under where the expressway would go. This was just meant to be the interchange that would then feed into the more affluent, concrete downtown. The actual experience, of course, for those living on the ground along these expressways was typical of construction sites, dust, public health dilemmas that were breathed in by the neighbors in the name of this kind of progress (Fig. 2.52).

The discourse at the political level was that this was all wonderful. This was part of the gradual tearing down of the Jim Crow system. “Urban renewal would encourage integration,” read one headline in Miami’s black newspaper (Fig. 2.53). It would tear down the Jim Crow system. Now what people didn’t realize was that, of course, it was a particular kind of integration that people were after. It was only affluent blacks who would be allowed to move out of this neighborhood and live in white suburbs that had previously been denied to them.

Theodore Gibson who was considered to be the Martin Luther King of Miami, a local black activist (Fig. 2.54), went on record in 1962 and said N. D. B. Connolly 77

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Fig. 2.50

Fig. 2.51

Fig. 2.52

Fig. 2.53

Fig. 2.49

Fig. 2.48

Fig. 2.47

Fig. 2.46

Fig. 2.45

Fig. 2.44

(paraphrasing) that, “We need realtors to protect white people because white people are too afraid of black people moving into their neighborhoods. And they should not be afraid. So we need realtors who are much more discerning and discriminating against black poor people to prevent them from moving in and scaring off the good white folk. We need to be treated, not as Negroes, but as individuals.� And this language of being treated as an individual as opposed to as a group that had group rights and that suffered group slight was part of what was being sold to people as they were told to move out to the suburbs. You can be an individual. You can be a consumer. You can be separate from your community if you buy a concrete house with a barrel tile roof (Fig. 2.55). And you can have your slice of the suburban dream for only $495 down. You can basically be part of the American body politic (Fig. 2.56).

You can have what whites have long had, in terms of, again domestic spaces for husband and wife, great schools for children.

Fig. 2.54

The only problem with this, of course, is that planners already knew that if you had mass displacements, you needed mass relocations. Where did the relocation housing go? Smack dab in all the black suburbs that they were basically promising to African Americans who were upwardly mobile. As I come down to the end here, I just want to show you a couple of things. Again, this is in some ways the set of images that inspired the title of my book because it captures where African Americans lived.

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Fig. 2.56

Fig. 2.55

The Central Negro District occupied a space with the highway interchange in between small areas of smaller black populations (Fig. 2.57). You can see concentrations in distinct areas. What happened by the time you got to the 1980, these small scatterings were actually getting more and more condensed. The areas that were darker in the lower level are starting to lighten up because the displacements are happening. For example, this formerly African American district in Coconut Grove becomes lighter by way of gentrification, lighter by way of displacement in the relocation housing. At the same time, people were moved into other areas that until then had no darkness at all; those areas you now see start to get darker, and darker still, in 1990 (Fig. 2.58). There is now almost a full concentration of black-occupied housing between the Central Negro District and the county line here in North Miami, what is called Carol City.

What was so remarkable about this moment in time, and again what blows people’s minds when they learn about it is, that if you had a property-owning class that was largely white, that owned the property in the Central Negro District, one would assume that with suburbanization, at least, there were opportunities for new forms of black ownership. But that is incorrect.

What in fact, happened was the liquidation of black assets and the displacement, the uneven displacement of African American landlords relative to their white counterparts, so more black families lost their economic solvency. And the suburbs of Miami actually end up becoming places of new concrete development for real estate speculators. And families that were

Fig. 2.57

ruined through displacement could not, in fact, recoup their wealth. And they became renters themselves in absentee landlord situations.

N. D. B. Connolly

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Fig. 2.59

Fig. 2.58

Fig. 2.60 Fig. 2.61

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In the Jim Crow years, 70% of the black downtown was owned by whites.

By the 1990s, 90% of the black suburbs were owned by white absentee landlords! When whites fled these black arrivals, they didn’t take their equity with them. No, the whites didn’t sell their house in many instances. They maintained their ownership and simply rented to these communities, with landlords building other projects around them.

What you have in the 1960s and 1970s, again, in the 1980s and 1990s, are a series of suburban riots, riots in America’s suburbs (Fig. 2.59). They’re downwardly mobile suburbs like Ferguson, Missouri, for instance. That was foretold in the story of Liberty City. These neighborhoods that were thought of as being Promised Lands that are, in fact, places of new kinds of predation (Fig. 2.60). And it was into this space, in this moment, in the late 1960s, that the Under-expressway Park Fig (Fig. 2.61). was offered as a kind of token gesture to try to keep kids off the street, to try to make sure that there would be some kind of new answer for the old problems of the post-Jim Crow city (Fig. 2.62).

Fig. 2.62

Again this is Athalie Range pictured here (Fig. 2.63). She too was also a pretty egregious landlord. There’s an amazing documentary, you can actually watch it live-streaming on the University of Georgia website called “Miami Condemned,” where camera crews go through the houses that Range owns and shows you exactly what the conditions were. But the moment pictured here was one of congratulations (Fig. 2.64). It was written about in the press.

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Fig. 2.63 Fig. 2.64

N. D. B. Connolly 85

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Fig. 2.65

“Great idea, Commissioner Range!” And one of the reasons I love showing this image is that it shows the permanence of the profiteering moment. On the very page where the story about “The Mini Park is a Big Hit,” there is a quarter page ad from Luther Brooks’s Bonded Rental Agency (Fig. 2.65). He kept his hands in the business.

This is my last image (Fig. 2.66). And it’s my favorite image, because for me at least, it captures the best representation of what the political culture of Jim Crow really was all about, which was about white elites and black elites literally going back and forth and up and down with the poor left out, often without the means of shirt and shoes and standing there, removed, watching the entire affair unfold.

Fig. 2.66

Thank you all very much for your attention. I look forward to your questions.

N. D. B. Connolly 87

[QUESTION] So thank you for this. I haven’t had the time to actually read the whole book.

But I’ve worked with someone who has written on this period of time in terms of Latino immigration to Miami and their settlement into the Miami-Dade area and how that intertwined with the creation of the Miami-Dade county system and planning structures and so forth. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the work that you’ve done dovetails with work that people are doing on Hispanics during this same period.

[CONNOLLY] Yes. That’s a great question. One of the things that became really clear for me, as I was working on this project, was just how durable the white-black system really was. So Miami, for those of you who haven’t been there, has an extraordinarily rich Latino culture. It now has an increasingly Brazilian presence, as opposed to just Hispanophone. There are a number of business people from around the world that have always kind of cycled through there.

And one of the empirical questions that drove the project was how is it that you still have such deep segregation, even as you have this diversity?

And I actually reached the conclusion that, in a lot of ways, Miami’s past was America’s future, that you didn’t have to have mixing, necessarily, if you had cultural diversity, that you could find ways to order black-white binary, even with people coming in from all these different corners of the world. I say that as preface because what happens in Miami, really in the 1930s, is you start to see really strong ties develop between the elites of Latin America and the elites of the region, particularly along color lines.

There was what was called the “Pan-American problem,” where the country was trying to strengthen its ties to Latin America, during World War II, especially, to keep the Germans out of the US sphere of influence by strengthening ties with Latin American governments. They had elaborate ad campaigns encouraging that people come and spend their time in the US. They were talking to Latin American heads of state. All of this was about building American influence. Now of course, as you pay attention to Latin America and encourage people to come to the US, you get all kinds of things you didn’t necessarily plan on. You get people of color who have resources who are coming in from Cuba, who are coming in from the Dominican Republic, who are coming up from Haiti. And they have to find a place for them in this Jim Crow system. So the foundation of what becomes global Miami is actually the creation of these racial Pan-American enclaves.

The black district from the 1940s has school yearbooks that are written in three languages, Spanish, French, and English reflecting the cultural diversity 88

of that space. On the white side of town, you get white Cubans who are there, white people from the Dominican Republic who are building networks with banking, with commerce, with trade. There’s also the occasional person of color, a little bit too dark, who simply, by virtue of them speaking another language, can get access to the white side of life.

There is a great literature about the way in which many African Americans, if they wanted an occasional moment of transgression, they would fake a French or Spanish accent and be allowed into the whites- only movie theater, for instance. So the foundation of what becomes the Miami of the post-Cuban revolution period is absolutely Jim Crow. And when the Cuban revolution happened, and you had people who were being divested of their real estate in Cuba, many of them are able to pick up and begin a life anew in the United States. Because some of them already own land here. Some of them already had bank accounts. Some of them already had connections with Catholic churches, all on the right side of town. And all of that serves to basically frame what becomes the so-called Cuban success story in Miami, and really the broader Hispanic success story. As another point of fact, there was a geopolitical impulse to try to make sure that these populations succeeded relative to the communist country next door.

The Central Intelligence Agency, the Small Business Administration, and the Catholic Church threw over $1 billion of subsidies toward the population that came in from Latin America to show that they could, in fact, succeed. As a third point, welfare policy as it existed, had a clear cultural/color line built into it as well. You could get welfare payments from the federal government as a Cuban migrant and not have to give up your job, and you did not have to force male heads of household from their homes to be eligible for welfare. Because these actions were part of the rescue strategy being put forward by the State Department.

Conversely, if you were African American, part of just regular welfare folk, you actually had to have a black father move out of the house to be considered eligible for welfare payments. And, believe it or not, it was Luther Brooks, the property manager who broke the story before Congress. He testified before Congress over this. And said look, I’m in the slums every day. I know exactly what’s going on. I know that there are families who are actively separating the husband and the wife just so that they can get additional payments from the government because the father is not making enough money to actually sustain the household. Now he is, of course, charging top dollar rent in the meantime.

N. D. B. Connolly 89

There was a very clear set of layered discriminations that then help to explain why, for whatever reason, the Cuban community in Miami has done so much better than the Puerto Ricans in New York, the Mexicans in Chicago, than Dominicans in New Jersey. There’s all these reasons that you needed to basically put millions and, in some cases, over $1 billion of funding into helping this population succeed because it was in the country’s Cold War interests to do so.

[PROFESSOR ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN] Wow. Such wonderful, horrible stuff. There are so many stimulating aspects of your talk. One of these things that, just because of my own interests, and because you touched on several times, are our federal programs, and also the complexity that you’re so well aware of private, local, individual behaviors.

I mean, that’s a naughty thing. But one thing that comes up in my work on housing and low-income housing programs and urban redevelopment is— so I’ll just toss this out to you— would it have been better, given the historical circumstances and given that— I’ll just posit— it’s probably that, because of the market situation you talked about in the beginning, that a lot of these color lines are hard to enforce without legal means. When you see the breakdown, for example, of deed restrictions, racial covenants everywhere.

Not that they didn’t do a lot of damage while they were there, but they’re very hard to sustain over time. So with that as a background, when you look at the postwar era, or actually from the New Deal on, would it have been better if there had not been federal programs?

And I’ll name them. You mentioned FHA. I’ll leave HOLC out. Or throw it in, but really the ones I’m talking about are the long-term. So HOLC is not too long-term. FHA, public housing, those two, and then the 1949 act with urban renewal— you know what I’m getting at. This comes right to the heart of a liberal dilemma. And liberals pushed, at least the two programs, public housing and urban renewal. So when you look at Miami, and you look at the forces there, do you have any opinion as to whether it might have been better, in the long run [not to have these programs— even though people are living in shacks, and so on, and so forth?

[CONNOLLY] I can answer that. So this is, as Professor von Hoffman has pointed out, an ongoing debate and a site of hand-wringing for a number of very wellmeaning urban historians. The story as told in urban history is largely one of government failure, by and large. And it ends up— you know, (the University of Pennsylvania’s) Michael Katz, the late great Michael Katz, wrote a really 90

important essay in dissent about the existential problem of urban studies that asked if urban historians spend so much time berating the federal government, are we actually providing fodder for those who want to dismantle federal programs?

Here’s what I would say. And this is why I begin where I do with lynching.

You have to be able to appreciate the fact that, even seemingly objective, technocratic, disciplined, rigorous, economically-grounded responses to the problem of poverty are shot through with this expectation that we have to solve the problems of white Americans first. We have to basically do what white Americans need us to do. We have to use their perspective as the standard by which all other kinds of questions are being asked. When you think about, for instance, the fact that the way that real estate prices are being set— and the literature on this is explicit in the housing archive, it’s being set in relation to the perceived value of said property to the average white buyer. That’s in the papers of the federal agencies. The notion that a black community can be considered valuable is not even allowed to enter the conversation. Because the notion is, your standard, white buyer is the bar by which any community’s value will be determined.

There are other ways in which this plays out. For example, there was the segregation of blood supplies during World War II, an absurdly, expensive, ridiculous, unnecessary program. The science had refuted it for over a generation. And yet, the military brass went through the elaborate process of segregating the blood supplies because they thought, and the record on this is clear, that whites would riot if they believed that blood supplies were being integrated. The questions about urban renewal, again, were built around the notion that you cannot have black relocation housing in white communities.

That was going to cause backlash of some kind. So you have to put black homes in black spaces.

There was a moment in 1964-65 when African Americans were protesting the location of relocation housing in their neighborhood. Basically saying, why can’t we have economic segregation like the whites are allowed? They’re allowed to have poor people over here. And they’re allowed to have their affluent bedroom communities over here, but our physicians, our judges, our most elite black people are forced to live cheek by jowl with the black poor.

That’s patently unfair. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to start our own homeowner’s association, the Brownsville Homeowners Association.

We’re going to create the same kind of restrictive instruments that have been used against black people, like restrictive covenants and housing N. D. B. Connolly

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discrimination. We’re going to use those tools ourselves. We’re going to create an LLC. We’re going to build our own tenement projects, which they did. And then they said, we’re going to determine who gets to live in our neighborhood by using the same kinds of discrimination that were used against us.

Now this doesn’t work. But what it teaches us is that you have a kind of dialogue, either it’s explicit or simply by virtue of observation, between homeowning whites, home-owning blacks, landlords on both sides of the color line who are trying to manipulate the instruments of exclusion. What makes a New Deal program so dangerous— and subsequently the post-war growth programs and the urban renewal programs— is that they were constantly bent to the will of these various lobbying groups and interests. Landlords have been trying for decades to get access to federal mortgage insurance for their tenement projects. But they don’t want to actually build housing that meets the standards of the FHA, in terms of numbers of windows, ventilation, concrete construction— that is, until they’re threatened by another program, slum clearance in the late 1940s, that was going to basically take their entire property away if they don’t meet the standards of basic construction.

So what I’m talking about is the fact that people are literally pitting different forms of state power against each other to meet very basic and kind of base material interests. If my interests are served by having high profit margins, wood construction— there were myths about the fact that black people don’t like walking on concrete floors anyway, you could come up with any number of stories about this. It’s there in the archive. Then they say well, if you’re going to have to take the property, that’s socialism. So now I’m going to use free enterprise, by way of federal subsidies, for my mortgage insurance to build my property anyway. I mean, the kinds of mental gymnastics people have to do to basically say oh yeah— and you see this now. Not to be indelicate about it, in terms of modern Republican politics, all kinds of federal spending is OK on the military, it’s OK, like, corporate tax breaks. But it’s really bad for public option health care. There’s no logical consistency to what the government is supposed to do based on philosophical grounds. It’s much more about which interest, which lobbying groups have their hands on the pulse of the government. And the intervention that this project really tries to advance is the fact that you can’t understand that slipperiness about redlining, both pre and post-war, about urban development, pre and post-war.

You can’t understand this without someone like Luther Brooks. Because when you actually get down to street level and know that there are people who are working the halls of state legislatures, there are people who are basically 92

telling senators that they need certain kinds of favors. Luther Brooks would have senators on his fishing boats and doing these excursions. He would find ways that he would write the legislation, and then basically get it put into the books the state— I mean like the Koch brothers. That’s literally how he operated. He wrote the legislation that then wound up being voted on and approved at the state level. And so it’s not even a question of whether it is federal spending or not. The real question is which interests are being served at each moment of federal innovation and each moment of federal intervention that you have new programs being rolled out at their outset, like with the case of redlining? They’re being compromised by a set of really base interests, that oftentimes, are serving very old masters.

[VON HOFFMAN] Can I just— and I accept everything you just said, but if that is so, and it is so. And it is so into the 19th century zoning. When you take these programs that might look good in some other county, I don’t know, and you drop them into our political racial culture and relations they become just what you said, the instruments, but now you’ve turbocharged them. Because now you’ve pumped all that money into it. So I just put it, maybe we would have been better off to let that struggle stay local.…

[CONNOLLY] People need housing, bro. The impulse was the right one.

[VON HOFFMAN] So you think urban renewal could have worked?

[CONNOLLY] Sure. Sure. Why not?

[VON HOFFMAN] If lots of other things were different?

[CONNOLLY] Sure. Just don’t put the housing in black neighborhoods. Don’t force a relocation to black neighborhoods, number one. Two, don’t privilege landlords N. D. B. Connolly 93

versus homeowners. Because landlords got sometimes 10 times the amount of payout that homeowners got, relative to this place. All of the racialized symmetries are built into the programs. The programs themselves, in theory, aren’t necessarily the problem. Anyway, thank you.

[THOMAS] I want to thank Nathan for his incredible presentation. Great lecture. So powerfully shaped and presented— and to remind all of us that the task of great historians is to explain causes and to bring them out in all their richness.

And you do it.

[CONNOLLY] Oh. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.

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April 3, 2017

PRESERVATION Keeping out the Unwashed Kenneth T. Jackson, Ph.D.

It is my pleasure to be back in Cambridge. I was for a few years a member of the visiting committee of the Graduate School of Design so I became familiar with the school. Today, I’m going to play the bad guy and attack motherhood and apple pie. Certainly, that’s the way it seems in New York. There was a program last night on Channel 13 on historic preservation, which was really nothing more than a PR piece for historic preservation, in which they roll me up in the last 10 minutes as the bad guy. I had no idea that the program was going to be on. It was filmed five or 10 years ago. I don’t want to just say “I’m against historic preservation,” because I’m not. I’ve been a member of the National Trust for at least a quarter of a century. In New York, I’m on the board of the Historic House Trust, which is concerned with about 30 buildings which are genuinely historic. These houses have significance. And I live in a historic district.

The real issue is that we should confront today is what is historic? Who gets to decide? What have been the reasons offered for preservation? To what extent is preservation a phenomenon of the elite? When did it begin? It’s like arguing about where the first motel is, or the first drive-in movie. We don’t really know. But we do know that historic preservation occurs as an activity whenever you paint your bathroom and whenever you take care of your property. These activities are historic preservation as a personal activity, as opposed to a government activity. We will be talking today about the government activity. And we will focus on New York City. That may seem to be a weird choice, because the city is so big, and because so many of its buildings represent modernism. But in many ways, New York is at the leading edge of historic preservation, a strong movement, supported by tens of thousands of members.

Here are some key issues. Whose past is important? Who and why do some get to choose the landmarks? Whose interests are served? Are aesthetics subjective? Clearly, in the case of New York Landmarks, certain views are privileged over others. In some ways, historic preservation is like the work of a historian. We go out and rummage around in piles of documents; we take a little bucket down into the ocean, and we bring it up and examine what we have pulled out of the ocean with careful curiosity. But the historian doesn’t analyze everything; he can’t. Instead he chooses and in the process shapes the discussion. Historic preservation is the same way. Who gets to decide?

Let us turn to Penn Station, which was torn down more than half a century ago (Fig. 3.1). Because most of you are young, you were not fortunate Kenneth T. Jackson 97

Fig. 3.1

enough to see it. But Penn Station has a particularly important role in historic preservation. I can tell you what nobody ever tells you— Penn Station was a lousy railroad station. Architecturally, it may have been exemplary. But it does not have enough tracks; indeed it never had enough tracks. When you travel from the modern Penn Station, you stand and look up at the signboard, and then you have to run to your train, because there are only two dozen tracks. Grand Central, which has less traffic, has 65 active tracks. There you go sit on your train, have a sandwich and a leisurely wait for the train to leave.

Anyway, in New York City, the holy grail of historic preservation is the horrible destruction of the grand waiting rooms that were the public part of Penn Station. I first came to New York immediately after its demolition so I never saw it. I wish I had experienced its grandeur instead of just experiencing the panic of running for a train. But it was a sorry station. Nobody ever tells you that.

The New York Landmark guidelines have as their goal to stabilize and improve property values. That tells you something right there. They intend to foster civic pride; to protect and enhance the city’s attractions to tourists. All these things are very capitalist. They intend to strengthen the economy of the city. The guidelines promote the use of historic districts and landmarks for education, pleasure, and the public welfare for the people in the city. Often landmarks are associated with famous architects. Penn Station was the design of the quintessential New York architects of the Gilded Age— McKim, Mead & White. After its demolition, in 1965 Mayor Robert Wagner signed 98

the landmarks preservation law. New York is very unlike Charleston, South Carolina, which focuses its history before the Civil War and has become a museum city.

In New York, the preservation law is not just about individual buildings. The Brooklyn Heights neighborhood was the first landmarked historic district in New York, as opposed to the designation of single buildings. It was designated in the fall of 1965. Georgetown in Washington, D.C. and Brooklyn Heights were also at the beginning of the historic district movement.

My argument about historic preservation is that it encourages gentrification. It helps preserve property values. In fact preservationists’ own rhetoric tells you that preservation tends to drive property values up because it limits supply.

And as economics 101 would tell you, if you limit the supply of something, it will become more valuable, especially in a giant city like New York. The museumification of Charleston, South Carolina makes that city a museum.

That is a good thing in Charleston which is a tourist city. But it makes the cost of living higher. Obviously there are important buildings that any city should save. Some are associated with famous people, whether it’s George Washington’s Mount Vernon or Massachusetts’ Plymouth Plantation. But you can’t save Plymouth Plantation, because it’s gone. So they rebuilt it. But I think all of us can see that there are buildings we need to save for our own heritage.

Today New York City has more than 36,000 buildings that are protected as landmarks. I could come up with 300 important buildings in New York City that need to be saved or maybe even 3,000 such buildings. But 36,000 landmarks to me are ridiculous. There just aren’t that many historic buildings in any city. Preservation creates construction restrictions, and this drives up the price. If you’re a developer in New York, you’ve got to jump through more hurdles around historic buildings and districts. There are 141 historic districts in New York; they even landmark interiors of buildings. My argument is we’ve just gotten a little bit excessive on this, and the people who live in the city pay a price.

In particular, lack of density in historic districts is a problem. Typically tall buildings bring property values down per rental unit. Just think of Boston— suppose you could double the number of units in Boston next week, and only build super luxury apartments. Real estate prices would go down. There would not be a market for all the new expensive units so the price goes down. If you can build more units, then the price will come down. If you limit construction, Kenneth T. Jackson 99

costs will go up (Fig. 3.2). Here, you see on the map of New York City with the focus on Manhattan, which is the little narrow thing in the middle of the map.

And you see Central Park in the middle of Manhattan, and the heavy numbers of historic buildings and districts around it. This is the area where Manhattan grew. Fifth Avenue is the central spine of New York. What makes New York different from so many world cities is that the dynamic areas of the present city have not been along the waterfront; they have been in the middle, where Central Park is, where Grand Central Station is. Most big cities, money goes toward the water. This is starting to happen in New York too, in the newly developing areas down in the Meatpacking District and in Brooklyn.

Preservation advocates tell you that in New York, only 4% or 5% of the city is landmarked. What they forget to tell you is that it is the 5% where everybody wants to be. It’s where all the subways are. It’s where all the attractions are.

There are perfectly nice neighborhoods in Queens and other more distant places. But you can’t get there unless you take a bus. Without the subway and sometimes even with the subway, those places are far from New York’s attractions. That is why if you look at Manhattan, it looks like it is all tall buildings (Fig. 3.3). If you look at Queens, the lower density means lower prices and less desire to be there. You can see the effect. In this map, the green area is Central Park. Yellow areas are historic districts, which mean the buildings can’t be changed. You can’t change the color of your doorway. You can’t change your window treatment. I have an apartment on 82nd Street. A doctor on top of a neighboring building wanted to build a glass addition to a penthouse. Good for him. But there was a landmarks restriction that claimed it would affect the appearance of the building. I live on that street. You really would have to look hard to see this addition. He never got to build it. I think adding value to the city is a good thing, especially when nobody can see the offending addition.

So what is the city? Landmarks adherents see the city as a physical container.

But the city is dynamic, a place of energy. It’s a place of diversity. It can be all sorts of things that are unrelated to the physical environment. Of course, there are works of architectural distinction in it. But we have to ask, do we want the city to be frozen in time? I have compared historic preservation to a root canal. A root canal saves a tooth by killing it. The dentist drills out the living nerve and the tooth never feels anything again. But you don’t want to kill the whole mouth, because then you’ve just have a dead mouth. Well, that’s what happens, in a way, if you push historic preservation too far. Then what you have done is kill the vitality of the city because New York, unlike 100

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

Kenneth T. Jackson 101

Charleston, has such dynamism that we could say that its tradition is change.

So we need to ask, is a structure so architecturally distinguished that it should be an unchanging artifact forever?

It seems to me that it would be the height of arrogance if we were to say— on Central Park West, the first thing ever built there is the best thing that we ever could build there. They got it right the first time. Isn’t that wonderful?

And since they built to 20 stories or 30 stories, there is something magic about that height. And so we don’t want anything new to be 60 stories. Or we don’t want it to be two stories. Who decides this? In New York, the big fights are usually led by an elite group reflecting the city’s class structure. I’m saying density can be a good thing.

In Crabgrass Frontier I wrote a book about how open space is attractive. But we can never forget the value of density. For so long, especially in the 1970s and 1980s we associated big cities with crime. What’s interesting now is in the last 20 years, crime has essentially disappeared in New York, meaning stranger-on-stranger crime. That type of crime is down by more than 90% in the last 20 years. So that means the chances of being knocked off by somebody you don’t know are slim. Only eight women in the entire city in 2013 were killed by someone with whom they were not intimate. The police can’t protect you in your bedroom. Essentially women don’t get killed, except by people they know. This is relevant to this discussion, because density instead of being seen as breeding crime, is now becoming associated with safety rather than crime.

People are being attracted back into Manhattan in such numbers that the property values in Manhattan are astronomical and growing fast. In fact, you could argue that suburbs are not growing at all, in terms of economic value, because people want to be back in the middle of this diverse, gigantic city.

But density cannot exist without new construction. I know New York looks dense. And it is dense. It’s even denser than it appears because New York combines residential density with office density. In London, they have a lot of tall buildings in the business district, but people in London don’t live in tall buildings. In Tokyo, they have a gigantic concentration of tall commercial buildings. But people don’t live in tall structures. They don’t want to live above two stories, because they’re afraid of earthquakes. What New York has, unlike most cities in the world, is it mixes everything up. So there is street life going on all the time. And it looks incredible. But the density that makes modern New York can’t occur if you don’t get new construction.

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This leads to economic realities. Does anybody know the former plan for an addition to the site St. Bartholomew’s Church? (Fig. 3.4). Forty years ago this Episcopal church on Park Avenue, was offered $100 million by a developer for its parish house; this was more money than was ever offered for any piece of property in the history of the world. In today’s dollars, that might be $1billion.

And the congregation agreed to sell for a high-rise apartment tower, because they said, we’re a church, and we’re supposed to be saving souls. But the Landmarks Preservation Commission said, no, you can’t demolish the building.

And so they didn’t and the church has struggled financially since then. That is one of the issues with landmarks. The government landmarks a building because someone likes it, but it doesn’t give you money to maintain what they have landmarked. In 2017, St. Bartholomew’s and its parish house still stand on

Fig. 3.4

Park Avenue.

Kenneth T. Jackson 103

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Fig. 3.5

Another case involves St. John the Divine, the Episcopal Cathedral that is the headquarters of the Episcopal diocese of New York (Fig. 3.5). The cathedral is the largest church in the United States. Notre Dame in Paris and St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in New York City would both fit inside of it. But as in St. Bartholomew’s, being landmarked doesn’t pay for the heat. And the Cathedral of St. John the Divine still isn’t finished. They started building it in 1898. Of course, it took the Cologne Cathedral 600 years. Recently the Episcopal Cathedral was economically faltering and needed to sell off part of its property, and/or air rights. Because it was not a landmark or in a landmark district, the vestry of St. John the Divine was able to sell part of its property.

The cathedral needed to keep the heat on and the lights as well. And nobody else was going to put up the money for it to continue its mission. So the bishop signed a 99-year lease for the land on which that new apartment building stands (Fig. 3.6).

There are good reasons for preservation. But problems persist. Perhaps you have heard of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village— one of the primary care facilities in Lower Manhattan. On 9/11, the ambulances and doctors on

Fig. 3.6

gurneys were lined up outside the hospital waiting for waves of the dead and

Kenneth T. Jackson 105

dying to be brought to them. And they just stood there, because there were none. Either you were killed in the World Trade Center or you weren’t. But the point was that this was the focus of medical care in Lower Manhattan.

If there were victims, this was the closest big hospital to the World Trade Center. A few years ago, they wanted to build a new twenty-one story, $1 billion hospital on 7th Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets. The current facilities were cramped. The hospital also owned an old union hall next door, and some houses that they wanted to demolish. St. Vincent’s Hospital proposed to sell these parcels to a developer for the funds to build the new hospital. To make a long story short, the landmarks commission refused St. Vincent’s petition to sell its building and to put up a new hospital, because the new building would not fit in with the character of the neighborhood. So the new hospital was never built and St. Vincent’s Hospital is now closed, after serving with distinction for more than a century.

Preservation can also be good (Fig. 3.7). This next picture is of the Morris— Jumel mansion. I doubt many of you have been there, because it’s in Upper Manhattan at about 162nd Street. Tourists are still fearful of going into Harlem, even though Harlem has changed a lot. But this building is one of America’s oldest landmarks and it has been a historic house museum since 1903. It is distinguished in many different ways; on the back side of the house is America’s first octagonal room. This building is an architectural gem.

Secondly, it is the oldest house in Manhattan. This was built in the 1760s as a weekend house of a British army colonel. It was important in the American Revolution because George Washington made it his headquarters for about six weeks in 1776. And while he was there, he figured out how to win the war.

That’s an interpretation, rather than a fact. He learned from the battles around New York, just as he learned in the original Bunker Hill battle in Boston. The British discovered they had a fight on their hands and they were going to have to forget about Boston because it is out in left field. But New York was critical, because it’s where the Hudson River flows into the ocean. Whoever holds New York essentially controls most of the continent.

Washington lost badly in the battle of Brooklyn, which we’ve never heard of. Anybody know why? Because we lost. We lost badly. We hear about the Boston Massacre or Lexington when essentially nobody was killed. And this massive battle in Brooklyn, we have forgotten. We remember Washington crossing the Delaware, when his troops sneaked up on the Hessians on Christmas night. That was the one way we could win. Fighting Britain was sort of like fighting the United States today. It’s not easy. And then after the 106

Fig. 3.7

Kenneth T. Jackson 107

Fig. 3.8

war, the richest woman in America, Eliza Jumel lived there. The point is, the Morris-Jumel house is certainly an historic building. It’s got a lot of reasons to be preserved. When George Washington was President, during his first term when the national government was in New York City, he took his cabinet up there. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Jay made the long ride from Lower Manhattan, because Washington wanted to remember what had happened 13 years before when all seemed lost. And now, he was President of this new nation. And he wanted to ride up there to remember the formation moments with his colleagues in the Revolution. It must have been one of the great meals in all of American history.

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Fig. 3.9

Other New York buildings are also important— the South Street Seaport was developed as New York was becoming the leading seaport in the United States (Fig. 3.8). This neighborhood was preserved, not because of its landmark status, but because it was off the beaten track, a few blocks away from Wall Street. As a result it has survived. And it’s still wonderful as a place with a distinct character. It has a hard time staying alive for all sorts of reasons.

Some of them have to do with climate change.

Here’s Lever House (Fig. 3.9). I don’t know anybody who would fights the designation of a building as important as this was in the history of modern architecture; the top part looks like it’s floating above the bottom part. It’s on Park Avenue. But it’s an early 1950s building— it is nearly 70 years old.

The Seagram Building is just a block or two away. Those are both important American landmarks. And Carnegie Hall is a landmark as well (Fig. 3.10). It is maybe the world’s most famous performance space, funded of course by Andrew Carnegie, who I think is interesting because he was ruthless in dealing with his workers. “Work harder, but I will pay you less, because if I give you more money, you’re going to do something stupid with it, like buy another dress, or another pair of shoes.” But if Carnegie kept the money, he intended to part with it. Carnegie said “He who dies rich, dies disgraced. I want to give it all back. What I’m going to do is build libraries, and concert halls, and things that are good for everybody.” I often have a nice discussion with students Kenneth T. Jackson 109

Fig. 3.10

about that one, that Carnegie knew better than you how to spend your money. The Woolworth Building is another obvious landmark (Fig. 3.11). In the second picture, the other building is the World Trade Center, the new one, going up beside it.

Public and private spaces can be landmarks too. Here is Grand Central Station which is probably the world’s nicest railroad station (Fig. 3.12). One of the interesting things about New York is how they managed to create a train station in the middle of the city rather than on the edge as many are.

You come into New York City underground. Unlike London or Paris, or even Boston, when you arrive by train, you arrive almost on the edge of the city. But New York, if you ask, “What’s the center of New York?” It is probably Grand Central, because the trains access it underground like a subway, meaning that they could build the station without disrupting the streets of the city. It was the proposed alteration of Grand Central Station that launched a big part of the preservation movement around the country. Pennsylvania Station was gone. And when the railroad wanted to sell air rights above Grand Central and put a second giant office building on it. And Jackie Kennedy, among others, led the fight against it, to say, we’ve got to save this. Rockefeller Center is another public private creation, but is now a landmarked complex (Fig. 3.13).

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Fig. 3.11 Fig. 3.12

And in 2000, the city proposed a height limit law that would limit the city to something between five and 15 stories, which would be good sized for most of America, but not for New York. It’s a different scale there.

So let’s think about the bad. You saw Pennsylvania Station that they tore it down (Fig. 3.14). You saw its columns, and how big it was. And they tore it down and put Madison Square Garden on top of it. But just think about this.

Kenneth T. Jackson 111

Fig. 3.13 Fig. 3.14

New York City has more than 36,000 landmarks, pieces of property. What doesn’t get designated? Well, you don’t have to be a baseball fan to think that Yankee Stadium is the most important sports building in the United States, and certainly in New York (Fig. 3.15). This is where Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, “Mr. October” Reggie Jackson and so many others played. But they tore it down because it wasn’t landmarked. Now, it’s demolished for a Little League baseball field. I’d like somebody to list for me landmarks that are more important than Yankee Stadium in New York City.

You wouldn’t get to 100.

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Fig. 3.15 Fig. 3.16

And then what about Coney Island? (Fig. 3.16). It was and is the world’s most famous amusement park. A few of the rides are left but nobody can ride on the rides. They have a parachute jump that’s still there. But the boardwalk is long gone. Now, a good day at Disney World is 100,000 visitors. At Coney Island it was a million. So Disney World is a little nothing compared to what Coney Island was at its peak, when there were six roller coasters. Like Yankee Stadium, Coney Island was never designated. Clearly designation is often about social class.

Kenneth T. Jackson 113

Fig. 3.17

A bad part of landmarking is that it creates restrictions. Why are so many places landmarked? Again, whose interests are served? Where might better be preserved? And how might we do it in a more thoughtful way with a view toward the future? Well, I just made this up— the good, the bad, and the ugly. If I could live anywhere in the world, I would live on the Upper East Side. It’s clearly a vibrant, diverse, well-served neighborhood (Fig. 3.17). And many people love it. I don’t even go to the East Side, unless I’m forced to. In 1985 an organization was created on the Upper West Side called Landmarks West. They put together a list of 337 buildings to be a landmark district.

That was already a few too many buildings, I’d say. But it is a really interesting neighborhood. In the 20 years since then, they have added more than 2,000 more buildings to the district. And they are still adding to it. What they want to 114

Fig. 3.18

do is add 100 buildings per year, not to all of New York City, but to the Upper West Side district, which means it’s soon going to be totally frozen. It has a human scale. But my argument is, you don’t need hundreds of blocks of these buildings to be landmarked. It is not Charleston. Most people don’t go to New York to look at old buildings. They go to see the skyscrapers, to experience the dynamism, the energy, the famous places on Broadway, or the Statue of Liberty. If they wander onto a street like mine, it’s by accident, because there are many places in the world where you can see charming rowhouses. And, yet, they are slowly landmarking the whole place (Fig. 3.18). Here is a picture of the Leech residence at 520 West End Avenue. It’s landmarked. It doesn’t matter that they can’t find anybody to fix it up. These are not bad buildings.

But you could imagine one could build something else, sometime that might approach them in distinction. Is it a proper goal of a municipal land use regimen to preserve the context of older neighborhoods? Or should it provide enough flexibility that neighborhoods can change, and new neighborhoods can emerge as economic and social trends dictate?

What I am arguing for is that you need to be careful about what you landmark, because there’s an opportunity cost, the opportunity of what would not be built there in the future. If, let’s say 125 years ago, if you decided then that you had to have a landmarks law because we really like the city as it is a lot – well then, you would never have had the Woolworth Building, which is considered one of the great buildings of the United States, built in 1911, opened in 1913.

You would never have Rockefeller Center, considered an iconic public space.

You wouldn’t have had the Empire State Building, because there was a grand hotel on the site. But these buildings, you can’t imagine not having. But we only had them, because we tore down something else that took their place.

So what I want to do is to just leave you with those ideas and thoughts, and then encourage a discussion right now. Thank you very much.

Kenneth T. Jackson 115

[JACKSON] So let’s have your thoughts and hopefully some disagreements.

[QUESTION] OK, you use the term elite group of preservationists several times. You talked about the St. Bart’s parish house for sale for I think $100 million. That was in like 1970.

[JACKSON] Yes [QUESTION] Do you think if someone bought that for $100 million, they’d be putting up middle income housing? I don’t think so.

[JACKSON] I think whatever kind of housing is built is good. The city needs housing at whatever price. Anything built in New York is one that lowers the price, for everybody in the city. The way you lower the price is by raising the number of units. It’s basic economics.

[QUESTION] I see. So this construction would lower the price of luxury housing?

[JACKSON] Of any housing. If you could open tomorrow a million new units of luxury housing, you’d lower the price of everything, because that’s supply and demand. There would be too much stuff. Yes? [QUESTION] And one reason Texas cities are cheap is because they build anything they want, relative to New York. Houston has virtually no restrictions. And it’s famous as an affordable city. I’m from Texas. Actually, I’m from New York City. I grew up on the Upper East Side. Now, I live in— [QUESTION] Elitist!

[QUESTION] I lived on the Upper East Side for a long time, and then Brooklyn. And now I 116

live in Dallas. I have to say, I don’t really think the city you described in New York is a city that I recognize as reality. There is no shortage of development in New York. So I think blaming the preservation community for the issues that are there is just shooting the wrong villain— to the extent that there are issues, preservation is not the problem. Look at Hudson Yards. Hudson Yards has more office space than the entire city of Dallas. There is no shortage of building going up in New York City. Look around the Upper East Side. There’s new towers everywhere. You talk about saving the Upper West Side, and how it needs new buildings. But like what? As if someone’s going to come in and build a new Woolworth. What you’re getting is these shitty Extel towers that suck. And, meanwhile, there’s plenty of space for building all over the city.

Also, St. Vincent, to correct you, I think, the problem— St. Vincent went out of business not because of landmarks issues. St. Vincent went out because the Bloomberg administration didn’t want to support its hospital policies.

And also, St. Bart’s now is completely successful and has a lovely restaurant in that area that you showed there. And I was able to go swimming in its pool.

So I don’t really see it like this giant trauma. And also, you also mentioned as landmarks, some buildings deserve to be saved. But landmarking is not even working. Look at Seagram. Abbie Rosen just tore out all the heart of Seagram.

So I’m not so sure that landmark process is as effective as you seem to suggest it is, in saving the things that people seem to think need to be saved.

And I think you really don’t understand Robert Caro, because that’s another story.

[GEORGE THOMAS] Let me just note, our consulting practice worked for St. Vincent’s. We were part of the team that St. Vincent’s used for over five years trying to get the opportunity to take their old buildings down and to replace them with a new I. M. Pei-designed hospital that would have served Lower Manhattan, as they had done for the AIDS crisis, and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and the survivors of the Titanic, and all of the things that they’d been involved with. And the new hospital would have been able to handle germ warfare. There is no hospital in New York that can handle that. It was not built because landmarks fought it for so long that the hospital went bankrupt. And they closed. They had other issues. There were economic issues and so on, no question about it.

But the thing that closed the door was the landmarking. And it was — [QUESTION] If the Bloomberg administration wanted a hospital there, there would be a hospital there, period.

Kenneth T. Jackson 117

[THOMAS] No, not so. The meetings were devastating to see. The witnesses were against any change to their neighborhood; they came pimped out in Prada, describing how if this hospital was changed, it would destroy their children’s experience on their way to school, and saying that the people from all the ethnic neighborhoods around there weren’t really part of their community. It was appalling.

[JACKSON] I mean, I don’t see how you can argue that landmarking isn’t a cost— it’s a cost the developers have to pay. It’s more hoops you have to jump to. It’s more lawyers you have to pay, and stuff like this. Whereas, there’s clearly a market for, or at least somebody thought, there was a market for a hospital.

In other cities, you can build hospitals if you want to easier than in New York. Everything in New York is harder than anywhere else. And landmarking doesn’t make it any easier. I mean, just putting up a skyscraper, where do you put the steel? I’ve got one going up next to my son’s apartment. Next door is a skyscraper, being built with the building materials. Where do you put it? It drives the price up.

So there are enough reasons to drive prices up in Manhattan, as opposed to Texas. But it’s also a fact that New York is being hurt by Texas.

Preservation is an added cost. There is no question about it. Just because it’s an added cost— I agree with your syntax. It’s just who gets to decide that St. Vincent’s Hospital shouldn’t be able to expand because there are seven buildings nearby that are too cute? Compared to what? That’s the issue, is who gets to decide? And in New York, the original thought was the landmarks board would be a mixture of people. Now, the preservationists dominate those communities. And they have the time. And now you’ve built up an industry. I mean, it’s an industry in New York now. And the Landmarks West, which is the Upper West Side, says in its publications, well, now, that we’ve got 4,000 buildings landmarked on the West Side, our goal is to get another 800. They could give a damn whether it’s attractive or not. Let’s just landmark it. And I think that a lot of people are using landmarking, because they don’t want change. And landmarking is a convenient way to stop new people from coming in to a neighborhood. But I would argue that the real tradition of New York is not its buildings, but change. Ethnic groups changing, neighborhoods changing, and that’s the secret of New York’s success. And if we begin to 118

freeze it, then the city dies— and most of the time the people who are trying to live there, people who have been living their 50 years are priced out.

Last night, the television reporter interviewed some of the people who were preserving Brooklyn Heights. And they said they had lived in there house for 50 years. And it’s a nice house. I wish I owned it. By the way, it was probably worth $5 to $10 million, even though it was built as an ordinary house.

So there’s no question that preservation raises property values in some neighborhoods. But the city is also being gentrified, especially Manhattan. And landmarking has got something to do with that, I think.

Not everything— it’s an island. There are too many people who want to be there. So space is expensive.

[QUESTION] Hi, two questions— would you rather see an art deco Bonwit Teller building or Trump Tower? And, number two, you mentioned several times that Charleston is a landmark in its own right as a city. What if someone early on had the foresight to start tearing down some of those buildings and building taller, inappropriate buildings to Charleston? How can you say that Charleston as a city is a landmark? You know what I’m getting at.

[JACKSON] By the way, I’m very fond of Charleston. I was just there. But the point you have to think about is Charleston is a failure as a city—an absolute failure.

In of the American Revolution, it was one of the five great cities, along with Boston, and Philadelphia, and Newport, and New York. But by 1820, it stopped growing. It died for 140 years. It’s not just that it has a swamp around it for about 75 miles. All the life of the South was moving west. And it was a dump.

The only reason it kept going is because there was this congressman in the 1960s, Mendel Rivers, from Charleston, who was Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and he poured military money into Charleston.

And then, somewhere in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the citizens decided that history is great. Old buildings are nice. In New York, if you say it’s a pre-war building, that’s a plus. But we also need to remember that Americans didn’t always feel that way. After World War II, they took a poll. And something like— I’m making this up but it’s not far off— only 18% of the people wanted to live in a used house. The idea that old buildings are good is something that’s developed mostly in the last 40, 50 years. I’m glad to see that too. But I think what’s right for Charleston may not be right for New York. New York is a world city. Some Kenneth T. Jackson 119

would say the world city. Its competition is Shanghai, and Hong Kong, and London. It’s not Charleston.

[QUESTION] Well, I also think New York is unique in its own right, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the values or the culture of the rest of the country.

[JACKSON] I agree. And that’s why I think whatever may be good for some other cities may not be good for New York. New York needs to save some buildings too.

There really are some wonderful historic buildings, both the design of them and what happened there. But 36,000, 40,000 is just getting a little high.

That’s just a number. Look at the area of New York City itself. It’s a huge area.

The landmarks, as I showed you with the map, are concentrated along the spine. On the spine, and on the places where people really want to be. Now, Queens is fine. But most people don’t want to live in outer Queens. Since we live in a capitalist society, you know how you tell when a place is popular?

What does it cost? The way you can tell that people still want to be in New York is because is they’re willing to pay more money to do it anywhere else in the country, except maybe San Francisco.

[QUESTION] But you’re also eliminating the social cost. I mean, some of these older neighborhoods where people watch each other’s kids sitting on the stoop are classic communities. And to tear down some of that to put up a tower for more people and density, you lose the cultural fabric. So it’s a double-edged sword, what you’re arguing. And I, frankly, don’t agree with your premise.

[JACKSON] I hear what you’re saying. And you’re making excellent points. But we’ve got to think of the flipside. Who are we not hearing from here? The young people who graduated from Harvard and who can’t afford to live the city. They’re willing to spend $4,000 for a walk-up apartment when they could get a new building in Dallas with a swimming pool, and a free parking place, and tennis court. But there’s a limit as to what they can do. They’re the ones who pay the price, not old professors on the Upper West Side like me. We add nothing to the city. Some people would say, you need to get the hell out of town. You add nothing to it. We need to have people who are 20-somethings. And many people who are 20-somethings, even if they go to Harvard, can’t afford New York City. It’s just too expensive. And all those people who never get a vote, 120

who never—because the buildings that they need are never built. And they want to be part of the show. And they can’t be.

[QUESTION] Could you talk about how you think about historic neighborhoods in this context? Because you’re talking about there being 100 buildings or whatever.

But you could get 100 buildings on a block very quickly if you have a historic neighborhood. So do you think historic neighborhood designations are valid?

Or is that part of the problem?

[JACKSON] I probably would not think they’re valid, except Greenwich Village, Brooklyn Heights, Harlem. These are iconic neighborhoods that are famous around the world. And maybe those should be preserved, and some individual buildings in other neighborhoods. But my building is in an historic district. It has no distinction. It just happens to be there. And I have to walk up, because it’s so old. And my legs are failing me. So I curse it every time. But, no, I don’t think such districts are valid. I mean your comments are serious. And I think these are serious issues. What is the best way to preserve the city for everybody’s interest— people who’ve been there and have loved it through the hard years, but people who also want their shot? And who can’t do it. And I don’t have an answer to that.

[QUESTION] I just have a question. So you said most of the historic districts are concentrated in Manhattan, right?

[JACKSON] Yes. [QUESTION] So what is the historic value which they are trying to preserve? Like, which group? Because, for example, how many of these historic districts are really located in neighborhoods, like Flushing for example?

[JACKSON] Flushing is not in Manhattan.

[QUESTION] No, I’m saying, you said that in the entire New York City, how many historic Kenneth T. Jackson 121

districts are in neighborhoods that are culturally extremely diverse and are now preserving the heritage of some other group, other than— [JACKSON] Well, there is that too. Sometimes the neighborhood has changed. And what they see as historic is not what the new group sees as historic. But let me just give you this statistic. There more than 3,000 counties in the United States. The wealthiest county in the United States per capita, not per family, per capita, is New York County. You know where that is? It’s Manhattan. So, obviously, anything that preserves Manhattan is benefiting mostly people who are pretty comfortable. Ten years ago, the per capita income on Manhattan was $70,000. And the poorest was somewhere in Nebraska. We are not talking about the Little Sisters of the Poor when we’re talking about Manhattan. And if they’re not wealthy, this city also owns some pretty valuable land. For example, I was president of the New York Historical Society (which amazing for a southerner to hold such a position!) I couldn’t be president of the Charleston, South Carolina Historical Society, because they’d say, you’re not from here. In New York, they don’t give a damn whether you’re from here or not.

Well, yes, these neighborhoods are— and Sunset Park, which is now a huge Chinese neighborhood. But it’s historic according to Landmarks, because it was Irish and Scandinavian. Are you going to put markers all over the place to reflect the ethnic groups that are no longer there, which you probably should.

If it were me, I would blanket the city with these makers. I love to stop and read that O’Henry wrote here. Or this is where Emma Goldman was captured, or other interesting events occurred. And by the way, they do not have a marker-- some of you may remember the Rosenbergs, the atomic spies. The whole thing swung on whether Ethel or her sister-in-law typed this thing on the 11th floor in the apartment. The building is still there. That apartment is still there. Is there a mention anywhere that the most famous spies in all of American history lived in this building? The Jews are glad they’re not marked up. But history is history. We should put it down. That’s an important event.

I love the history of the city. And the Eldridge Street Synagogue, I spent my whole life going to these places. But a lot of the places we’ve landmarked aren’t interesting to go to. They’re just landmarked because somebody likes their building.

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[QUESTION] Do you have a view on what a more balanced scenario might be?

[JACKSON] KJ: Well, you know, I think if 20 years ago you said, OK, make me a list of all the buildings that are historic in New York, and we’ll landmark those buildings.

But let’s limit it to 20,000 structures. Today someone buys a piece of property that is not landmarked. And then all of a sudden, they decide to landmark it.

And they have spent all this money on it. It’s the uncertainty of it. It’s not only what the Landmarks Preservation Commission is going to do, until you buy.

But they have to buy the property, and then after you bought the property, landmarks finds out that some second rate architect built it in 1910 as a good example of a stable. By the way, I’m not making this up. They wanted to landmark stables for horses, like in the Wild West in New York. Central Park is a monument, for sure. The Dakota, where John Lennon lived, you could say it’s a landmark because John Lennon was murdered there, or “Rosemary’s Baby” was filmed there, or Lauren Bacall lived there. Or you could say it’s one of the most important apartment buildings in the United States. A lot of buildings have historic preservation coming and going. I like the idea, I know you’d probably disagree with me, that “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” was where a young woman was picked up at a bar in New York, and taken home and murdered.

That was pretty famous. But the present bar doesn’t have a historical sign on it. A woman who was raped and not killed in Central Park, you can’t really put a landmark marker in the middle of the park. But you might, after all this was nationwide even world news. So as a historian, I think the places where things happened are important. There is a place in Wall Street, in 1920 where one of the biggest terrorist events in the history of the city took place. Somebody set off a bomb at High Noon outside the JP Morgan offices at Wall Street. That’s important. That led to the Red Scare. Does it have anything to do with the building? You can still see the pock marks.

[QUESTION] It’s exceedingly complex. It’s about the policies that the city establishes. It’s not landmarking. I mean, all your questions, I think, are absolute right on.

Whose past? Who chooses? Whose interests are served? I think, actually, there’s a relatively new book out written mostly by preservationists, Bending the Future. And they speak to all these issues that we need to look at - like social justice. We need to look at economic justice. We need to be expanding the criteria, the judgment, that is involved in landmarking. I live in Cambridge.

I consider myself a historic preservationist. I’ve done it for 40 years as my Kenneth T. Jackson 123

career on the national level. And I see in Cambridge the Historical Commission does not have the ultimate power. The power guys are impacting the policies in the development that is being pushed. And it’s those issues that are impacting people’s ability—young people’s ability, senior citizens, other people, middle class, whatever, that want to move, and want to reside in Cambridge.

So my point is, I know your goal here is to focus principally on the landmarking process in New York City. But you need to speak to this broader issue, and how it’s impacting the quality of life issues. You live in a historic district. You said you aren’t sure why you live there. But you should be asking yourself, why am I here? Is it because I like the tactile quality of the architecture?

[JACKSON] By the way, I was there before it was a historic district. And I liked it. Look, I hear what you’re saying. This is complex. You can see a tree-lined street, and say, isn’t this fabulous in the middle of this huge city, and these little trees here? I’m not trying to make it easier than it is. But I think it’s tipped. I think it keeps tipping in one direction. And Cambridge is not New York City. I mean, and it’s got this— it’s got this immensely rich institution, which somehow can work around it. But here’s an example. It’s not quite the same thing. Usually, the best hospital in the United States— I know this silly, the way we rank things. But Johns Hopkins Hospital usually comes off number one in the national ratings of hospitals. It is in Baltimore, one of the saddest cities in the United States, which has a horrendous crime rate, vast rates of abandonment.

So Baltimore has the reverse problem of too much landmarking. If you could save these houses by landmarking them, somebody would. Nobody wants them. Johns Hopkins Hospital can expand easily, because it’s expanding into these abandoned neighborhoods. Columbia University in New York pays a huge price because Harlem is so expensive. For the university to buy one piece of property, it’s $1 million or more. So it cuts both ways. In some ways, Johns Hopkins is so famous and so good that it can exist in the middle of this disaster zone. If you have pancreatic cancer, you want to go to Johns Hopkins Hospital. You don’t care about the neighborhood. You just want to know if they can make me well. Johns Hopkins is driving the economy of Baltimore.

And one reason is able drive the economy is it can expand easily is because there’s nobody to stop it.

I hope I didn’t lead you to believe that I have all the answers. I do know that I love New York. I want to do the best for it. But, I fear that if you stop development, let’s say around Grand Central, which they say it’s too 124

dense already— where else would you put high density than in the busiest transportation nexus in the United States? That’s the perfect place. And now, the buildings are too old to compete with Tokyo, and London, and other cities.

They were new 50 years ago, but not now.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed being here. Thank you for talking with me.

Kenneth T. Jackson 125

Editors: Susan Nigra Snyder George E. Thomas Javier Ors AusĂ­n Contributors: R. Scott Hanson N. D. B. Connolly Kenneth T. Jackson Special Thanks: John J. Aslanian 126

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