The Washington Metro and the Rise and Fall of American Urbanity

The Washington Metro and the Rise and Fall of American Urbanity Blair Lorenzo

Presented as a thesis in completion of a Master of Arts in Theories of Urban Practice

The New School Parsons School of Design

May 15th, 2014

Dr. Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Thesis Advisor Dr. Aseem Inam, Program Director Cover Image, Left-to-Right, Top-to-Bottom: Metro train at Dupont Circle, Metro System Map (WMATA 2014), Vienna Station, Columbia Heights, The Razing of the Southwest (Gutheim 2006, 270), New Buildings in Shaw

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Table of Contents Introduction««««««««««««««««««««.............................................«.5 The Urban««««««««««««««««««««««..«««««««....7

Part One: Context Chapter 1- A Brief History of American Urbanism to 1955: The Power of Transit, of Central Places, and the Fall of Urbanity«..««««««««««.....«««.15

Chapter 2- The Urban Environment of Washington to 1955«««««......«««.31 Part Two: Contestation Chapter 3- Metro Genesis: Harland Bartholomew and the 1959 Mass Transportation Survey««««««««««««««««««««««««««««««««45

Chapter 4- Stolzenbach, Jacobs, JFK, and the (Re)Emergence of American Urbanity««««««««««««««««««««««««««55

Chapter 5- Other Publics, Other Purposes: Race, Politics, and Backlash Social Welfare, Race, and Riots««««««««««««««««...«69 Backlash««««««««««««««««««««««««««««««...72 Fumbling for the Future«««««««««««««««««««..««««.76

Part Three: Looking Critically Chapter 6- Driving in Vienna, Walking in Arlington, and Running out of Money in Columbia Heights««««««««««..««««.85

Conclusion«««««««««««««««««««««««««««««.««97

3

Introduction

U

rban environments are hot right now in America. From coast to coast, traditional urban cores are being filled by not only by young professionals, but also all manner of families, households, and individuals. As the 2010 census dramatically demonstrated, for the first

time in over fifty years, cities grew faster than their suburbs. Neighborhoods which for a generation could not buy the attention of developers are sprouting newly constructed, high-rise luxury condominiums, high-quality offices, and boutique retailers and eateries. Famous "starchitects" like Frank Gehry and design prophets like Jan Gehl tour the world, selling and sharing their abilities to transform moribund environments. Urban property values are skyrocketing, and concerns over gentrification and the concomitant displacement of the less well-off dominate many a large city's political discourse. Indeed, in the leading cities of this urban renaissance, places like Boston, New York, and San Francisco, demand is driving prices so high that there is real concern that soon none but the very wealthy will be able to afford most of the urban environment.1 But this urban shift is more than economic and demographic, it is social and cultural, as well.

Real estate developers and local-booster groups alike tout the urban-ness of their projects and neighborhoods, their walkability, their access to transport, and the quality of their street life. Many cities explicitly compete to attract the so-called creative class by touting their diversity, their cosmopolitan nature, and the urban forms which support them. Emblematic of this cultural shift is the 2014 return of one of the old guards of mainstream, American television, The Tonight Show, to its original home in New York City. In order to attract more and younger viewers, and to stay culturally relevant, is leaving one of the cradles of American suburbanism, Los Angeles, for one of the epicenters of the urban world2.

And yet, barely more than twenty years ago, the suburban world was still king in America.

Talk of an urban renaissance existed, but was often just as quickly dismissed as a mirage or as a minor aberration, something easy to ignore as statistical noise. Crime, and more importantly, fear of crime, was rampant. Terms like inner-city and urban were at best short hand for city-dwelling African Americans and other minorities, and at worst, carried connotations of blight, of crumbling, abandoned, and dangerous areas containing many of the country's problems with little, if any, potential. Fifty years of FHA-subsidized single family housing often constructed in sprawling 5

subdivisions, of automotive lust, of binging on arterial roads and federally funded Interstates, on strip malls, and on isolated office parks, had reshaped the American landscape. Even this masks the older sociocultural narratives celebrating the picturesque home whilst demonizing the dirty, crowded city. While acknowledging that urban agglomerations had an economic role, many theorized that even this could soon be supplanted by telecommunications technology, freeing humankind from the no-longer-necessary evil of density. Many planners and theorists were nostalgic or sympathetic to older ideals of urbanity, but the path of American history and the strength of entrenched cultural beliefs seemed overwhelming. Some continued to plug away at rebuilding and repairing existing cities, while others found solace looking for the reemergence of urban trends in suburban phenomenon, such as edge cities. Few could know that things would change quite as quickly as they have3.

This thesis seeks to begin to formulate an answer as to how and why this shift has occurred.

It does so through the lens of an unusual project, one which came about just as serious objections to the suburban revolution were being raised and reevaluations of the virtues of urbanity were being formed: the Washington Metro. In 1955, at the height of American, auto-driven suburbanization, greater Washington began planning for what would become the second largest rail transit system in the United States. Metro's birthing pains, the arguments over whether it should be built, where, for what purpose, and to serve whom, were part and parcel of the same debates that were the crucible in which American urban theory and urban appreciation were being formed. Metro construction would finally start in the turbulent year of 1968, the same year that national race riots would reignite and reinvigorate white urban fears and white flight, and though parts of the system were rushed to completion for the 1976 bicentennial, the financial turmoil of the 70s and the Conservative Revolution of the 80s would delay its completion, including many of the parts serving the most urban neighborhoods of Washington, for decades. The planning, construction, and effects of the Metro not only mirror America's turbulent understanding of and relationship to urbanity, but played a crucial role in the evolution of American urban ideals and beliefs. Understanding how the Metro was shaped by ideas about quality urbanity and good city form, how it in turn reshaped those beliefs, and its role and presence in Washington today, provides not only a way of understanding how the American urban renaissance has come about, but provides guidance on how to mobilize meaningful changes in urban environments4.

To that end, this writing is divided into three parts, with three interlocking goals. First, it puts the Metro project in the historical context of the evolving, shifting, and often difficult 6

understandings of American urbanism. In particular, it focuses on how transportation technologies have both shaped the urban environment and how they have enabled or inhibited certain cultural visions. Second, it performs a discursive analysis on the specific history of the Metro, initially as a savior of monumentality and of Central Place Theory, but then, through shifting contestations, becoming something more. These contestations mirror larger American urban trends, and were a part of the rise of movements to understand, advocate for, and ultimately to create meaningful and functional urban environments. Finally, it examines and critiques some of the specific outcomes of this 50-year infrastructure project, partly to highlight as examples the outcomes of some of the trends mentioned, but also to examine and help to begin to define and analyze evolving conceptions of American urbanity.

It does so through a syncretic application of three research methodologies. First is a historical analysis of primary and secondary source material, seeking out trends and pulling out meaning. Second is an analysis of the historical record through the lenses of various theoretical perspectives, not merely to put theory to the test, but to track its development, its uptake, and its shifting role in public debate. Finally, it utilizes my own personal site visits and accompanying photography to both illustrate and analyze these concepts.

The Urban But, before all that, we need to start with a difficult question: what, exactly, is meant by the word urban? Urbanity is a poorly theorized concept, both nebulous and often taken for granted. It is something separate than being a city, alone. Take Houston, for example³if urbanity were simply a checklist of the items that define a major city, population, cultural amenities, sports teams, universities, and the like, Houston would certainly make the grade. But if we took a slice out of greater Houston and showed it to random Americans without context, to many it would appear anything but urban, as nothing but subdivisions, strip malls, office parks, and acre after acre of asphalt roadway and parking lot. Conversely, consider the center of an archetypical American small town. While it might house only a few thousand residents, the texture of the street, its density of stores, of buildings, and of walkers, might appear quite urban. It can sometimes seem that, to paraphrase a famous decision of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, we cannot define urbanity, but we know it when we see it.

This would seem to suggest that urbanity is neither an either-or phenomenon, but one of gradations, a matter of degree and of scale. In other words, the more urbanistic elements a place 7

has, the easier time we have referring to it as urban. Even this approach encounters a strong problem: much of the work surrounding urbanity is concerned not merely with urban form, but explicitly with good urban form. Separating what is sufficient to call something urban, therefore, from perceptions of what high quality urban environments are, is a difficult problem. Making matters worse, some would be happy to define urbanity solely in terms of physical typology and its use. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to separate such structures and uses from the questions of ownership, culture, and political meanings that define and underlie them.

As we shall soon go into in depth, the American relationship with urbanity has often been a hostile one, conceiving of the urban in negative terms. It was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s, and in particular with the seminal work of Jane Jacobs, that movements which began to identify, understand, and celebrate urban environments began to arise. What follows is a tentative and evolving definition of urbanity which builds upon her work, and the work of those who followed, including William Whyte, Kevin Lynch, Christopher Alexander, Allan Jacobs, James Kunstler, Jan Gehl*, and a host of others5. These thinkers, each in their own way, have in some way taken up the call of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who implored us in 1958 to understand the interrelation impacts of the physical environment on the human condition, on ourselves, our activities, and our beliefs, and in turn how human understanding impacts the physical world6. The definition below is not meant to be didactic nor comprehensive;; rather it works to lay the groundwork for a more complicated understanding.

Urbanity has at least four quintessential categories of characteristics which define it: First is function. As Jacobs teaches us, the most functional urban environments are those that reach a certain intensity of use, and which have a liberal mixture of uses, in particular mixing commercial and residential use. It should have a mix of people on the street at as many different times as is possible. Walking should be the primary mode of travel. It should facilitate safety via eyes on the street, and at the same encourage the social encounters, the bonds of trust and rules of separation, and the dynamic, unplanned interactions which define urban life.

Second is physicality, which is perhaps the most readily identifiable characteristic of urbanity.

The physical urban environment needs to be designed to support the functions outlined above.

This tends to imply a number of things: a relative density of buildings and/or dwelling units,

*

Whilst Gehl is most certainly not American, his work is a vital and influential in regards to defining and qualifying urban environments.

8

storefronts, at least in certain regions, and open space where it can and will be well used. The most important characteristic of physicality is the human scale. Urban environments, by definition, are built for human beings, and should be sized and shaped appropriately for their size, mobility needs, and travel speed. Other modes of existence, such as that of the automobile, can exist, but need to be kept secondary to the primary goal of creating a human environment. Things which hurt the physical environment, such as barren landscape, tend to hurt the urbanity of the landscape.

Aesthetics is a contentious, but undeniably important part of physicality, as, attempting not to privilege one style choice over another, the more the aesthetics support the human scale, and the more pleasant they are for the user, the more they encourage urban uses.

These first two categories viscerally tie to the environmental quality of a neighborhood, and form the fundamental basis of an urban environment.

Without some level of this type of

functionality and physicality, a region or space is not urban. The last two categories, however, are more esoteric, and relate closer to the quality of urbanity than its absolute presence. That said, if either of these two categories are lacking entirely, an environment may be compromised to the point that, no matter how it looks, it cannot be considered urban. They are also far more contentious than the above points.

Third is the economic dimension of urbanity. Urban form tends to have smaller lots with differently priced properties. Buildings of differing ages help, as they provide a variety of styles, configurations, and prices. This allows for different types of uses to exist near each other, and for different segments of the population both to find homes and to interact. Some prize ownership for the connection it gives one to the environment, others disagree entirely. Regulations should allow for a reasonable evolution, change, and freedom in the selection of economic activities. Many different classes of individuals should have the opportunity to start or run firms. The economic system should allow for new interactions to occur, and new and different combinations and forms to arise.

Fourth and finally, urbanity has a political dimension. Urban environments should provide a connection to the street, and allow a sense of political ownership over public and shared spaces.

Urban space should allow for individuals to be seen when they want to be seen, such as protesting, and be protected when they do not, as blending into the crowd. Denizens should have some sort of input to the purpose of the place, and preferably democratic input into how it is run. Environments that are overly planned, overly controlled by above, tend to inhibit urbanity.

9

There are surely more things which could be added, and many things which will surely be controversial, but that is to be expected as this list, like our understanding of urbanity, is tentative and evolving. Urbanity is primarily about environments, and some of the above criteria tend to blur the line between the physical and the social;; this line is hard to define as the physical and social are directly related. Urbanity is a complex phenomenon, and much work still remains to be done to identify exactly what urbanity is.

Still, from this tentative list, we can see that not all places which have urban characteristics are cities, nor do all cities have urban characteristics. An American shopping mall, for instance, has a degree of urbanness to it: it is human scaled, encouraging walking with a variety of things to do and look at, a small modicum of mixed use (often including eating and socializing spaces as well as retail), and is full of people, allowing for all sorts of potential interactions. At the same moment, it fails at being an urban environment because of its limited, dominant commercial use, its centralized ownership and planning, and the lack of political ownership, either legal or psychological. A suburban city like the aforementioned Houston, in contrast, might have a handful of urban-like characteristics, particularly in nodes that might encourage meetings, different activities, and the like, but on the whole fails to be urban both because the bulk of its physical environment fails to be human scaled or to support an intensity of use. Houston is still clearly a city, and supports human social, political, and economic needs in certain ways, but the ways the environment goes about it happen in different ways and to different degrees than they do in urban environments.

This conception of urbanity can be critiqued as almost teleological in nature;; that just as a seed necessarily contains the future essence of the tree it can produce, humans carry within them the making of their own habitat, urban environments. There is truth to this criticism, as taken to its logical extreme, it could seem that there exists a Platonic Ideal of a city, a potentially dangerous conception. And while, like the structural linguistics of Noam Chomsky, theory and analysis based on human factors can sometimes begin to highlight seeming universalities, the spectrum of cultural differences and individual preferences is incredibly broad. Therefore, this tentative definition of the urban explicitly does not proclaim its universality.

Rather, like the approach of the architect

Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language, it represents neither absolute truth nor is it simply a list of preferences. Rather, it is a set of patterns which have, to date, proven successful in encouraging certain functionalities and certain types of cities.

This provisional outline is an open-ended

definition for those who seek a certain desired outcome, as well as a reminder to those who deviate from it that, while it is more than okay to do so, extra caution and car must be taken, for such is an 10

experiment whose functional outcome is unknown. It is but one lens, albeit a potentially powerful one, through which to understand what a city is, how it works, and how it can be improved.

Finally, before we begin, a moment of honesty. While these work attempts an honest historical analysis, we all have our biases, and this author is decidedly pro-urban. To paraphrase the urban theorist Kevin Lynch, the first step towards constructing and improving our environments is to ask what kind of cities we want. The story of Metro shows us that, with understanding, planning, advocacy, and time, we can choose to create urban environments if we so desire. By doing so, we are also furthering our understanding of what urbanity is in the American context.

11

End Notes for the Introduction 1 Paul L. Knox, Cities and Design (London: Routledge, 2011).

2 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class-Revisited

%DVLF %RRNV QG HGLWLRQ %LOO &DUWHU ´¶7RQLJKW· 6KRZ 5HWXUQV WR 1HZ <RUN $IWHU 1HDUO\ <HDUV µ The New York Times (Feb. 16 2014, Accessed May 10th, 2014: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/17/business/media/tonight-show-returns-to-new-york-after-nearly-42-years.html).

3 Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987). Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (New York: Touchstone, 1993).

William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Doubleday, 1988).

4 Zachary M. Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, "Metro History" (Accessed October 27th, 2013, http://www.wmata.com/about_metro/docs/history.pdf). American Public Transportation Association (APTA) , "APTA Ridership Report - Q4 2013 Report" (Accessed April 17th, 2014, http://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Pages/RidershipArchives.aspx).

5 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1969). William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 1980). Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). Lynch, Good City Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, & Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford University Press, 1977).

Kunstler 1993. Jan Gehl, Cities for People (Washington: Island Press, 2010).

6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2 nd Ed, 1998[1958]).

12

Part One: Context

1

A Brief History of American Urbanism to 1955: The Power of Transit, of Central Places, and the Fall of Urbanity

C

ities are shaped by many forces. Some are very tangible: the decisions of a politician, master plans, referendums, or massive infrastructure projects. Others are less easily discerned, but of no less import: technological systems, societal beliefs (and the beliefs of

subsets of society), mores and norms, and collective desires. Like with any of their residents individually, there is a constant interface between the exogenous forces of history and society, the realities both physical and social with which one must contend, and the very real decisions and choices of individuals and groups. To understand the shift that the Washington Metro represents, it is necessary to understand the historical contingencies and cultural desires out of which it was born.

Many of the trends discussed below would either be built upon or directly challenged by those involved in the Metro project. What follows is brief introduction to the trials and tribulations that American urbanism has faced up until 1955. Those familiar with this history, and with the history of Washington, DC, or those seeking a focus solely on the Metro project, should feel free to skim these chapters and proceed quickly to Part Two. Few forces have the ability to affect and shape the structure of a city than its transportation infrastructure. Transportation mechanisms affect the lives of urban denizens every day, and the physical characteristics of transit modes often end up defining the physical morphology of the regions they cross. Transportation can be a grand enabling force, making it possible for individuals to choose the type of habitat in which they want to live, and for business owners to find new and potentially more effective ways of reaching customers, providing services, or making products. It not only shapes how regions within a city communicate and interact, but also can have profound effects within any given region, on a very local level. In this way, D SODFH·V primary means of transit cannot help but have an impact not only on the building typologies of that region, but on the lives of the people living within it1.

Prior to the invention of mass transit, cities were by necessity limited in size by the distance the average person was willing to walk in one day, an area roughly equal to a circle with a three mile radius. Any larger and that city would lose cohesion: people and the information they carried could simply not propagate in any meaningful way.

This information-spreading effect was doubly

important for merchants and manufacturers. In order for to receive pricing information, reach the 15

maximum number of customers, and to keep up with trends and competitors, firms generally found it best to cluster as close as practical. This fact was exacerbated by the difficulty of transporting both the intermediate factors of production and final goods2.

Thus, by necessity, large cities were compact, dense, and multiple uses had to coexist.

Homes were built atop or behind storefronts, merchants stored goods in basements, and workers' lodgings could not be all that far from their places of employment. To be sure, there were areas that were more tuned to industrial, commercial, or residential use, and there were often neighborhoods of high repute (and high value) and those that were considered slums, but the boundaries of these regions tended to be fuzzy, and the space between them nonexistent. Under these conditions, a physically urban city, one that is dense, has a multitude of uses, an intensity of use, and a human scale (for there was almost no other scale to which to build), was inevitable3.

Early innovations did little to change this situation. Steam railroads, steam ferries, and the horse-pulled omnibus (multiple-passenger carriages pulled by teams of horses and operating akin to modern busses) were all too expensive for all but the wealthiest stratas of society to use them for commuting purposes. While ferries and railroads tended to increase travel speed, allowing their well-heeled clientele to have weekend or summer homes apart from their aptly named town houses, the omnibus, limited by the power of horses to pull a heavy load through mud or rough-hewn cobblestone streets, was on average no faster than walking. It simply spared society's finest the indignity of physical exertion4.

All this would begin to change with the coming of the horsecar. By putting the omnibus on slippery steel rails, friction was reduced tremendously. The same team of horses could now not only pull a larger vehicle carrying more people, but could do so at about twice a normal, walking pace. More people per vehicle and less strain on the horses dropped prices by half, making horsecar travel open to far more of the public on an everyday basis. Cities could now begin to expand: the same amount of travel time could now cover twice the

16

The last horsecar line in America, New York City, 19135

distance. If we think of a city as an expanding city around a central core, doubling the radius of reasonable commuting distance will square the potential settlement area6.

Horsecars were first experimented with in the 1830's by New York and Harlem Railroad in New York City, but saw little expansion until 1852 and the invention of the grooved rails. In contrast to the Harlem Railroad's standard track, which involved raised rails above the street, and was an impediment to horses, carts, and pedestrians alike, the grooved rail could be set in pavement.

Horsecars quickly took off, and within a decade almost all cities of any size had a horsecar system*7.

Horsecars had numerous disadvantages, however. Barn space, hay storage, and, above all, the problems of manure became major urban issues. Worse, the sheer number of animals required meant the cost was still relatively high. Wealthier citizens could separate themselves from their workplaces, but a large number of workers still had to walk to their places of employment. Various innovations attempted to overcome these problems. Most notable was the cable car, a vehicle which gripped an underground cable that was powered by a centralized, stationary steam engine. Cable cars could travel ½ again as fast as horse cars on flat terrain, and could scale grades that horses could not. This was the reason for their uptake in San Francisco. Cable cars, however, had an immense capital cost, and only one other city, Chicago, installed cable cars in great number. Chicago's uniquely explosive growth (it had grown from a city of less than a dozen in 1833 to the second most populated city in the country a mere forty years later) meant that any innovation which increased Diagram indicating the effect of transit speed on potential city size.8

*

It is an interesting question to ponder whether the grooved rail itself was an enabling moment in history, allowing cities to expand, or if the causality is reversed, and the invention came out of transportation demands of ever growing, industrialized cities.

17

settle able area was valuable, no matter the cost*9.

A more practical solution came in 1883. In that year, an inventor named Frank J. Sprague perfected the first system for electrically propelling streetcars. Once again, the technology spread like wildfire, and within a decade electric streetcar lines crisscrossed not only the nation's cities, but even much of its small towns and rural areas in the form of interurban railways. Electrification could easily be retrofitted onto existing rails, and the last horsecars ended service in 1913. Two facts help clarify the scale of the impact of the electric streetcar on the American landscape. First, while the devastating Panic of 1893 was brought on in large part by the overexpansion of traditional railroads, an investment binge in electric street railways and interurbans in lines far above and beyond that which the country's population could support played no small role in collapsing

the

nation's

financial

system.

Second, though it is a fact that is hard to verify, it was said that after the turn of the century, it was possible, if one had the time, to travel all the way from New York to Chicago on local streetcar systems, transferring from system to system one nickel at a time10.

But such facts cannot quantify the effect electric streetcars had on the landscape of American cities and towns.

Whereas

humans had first been limiting to walking speed, around 3MPH, then the horsecar speed of around 6MPH, and for a lucky few, cable car +RPHU +R\W·V 0DS RI +RUVH-, Cable-, and Streetcar Lines in Chicago, 189111

speed of 9-10MPH, electric streetcars could average 12MPH in busy streets, and more than

*

Indeed, though the Loop, Chicago's central business district, is famously metonymic with the loop of elevated trains that encircles it, the name is actual older, referring to a loop of horse-, cable-, and streetcar tracks that followed the same general path.

18

double that in sparsely settled regions.

The readily settleable area of the city again grew

exponentially, and cheap land was suddenly available for city residents. This combined with other factors, such as the reduction in building costs allowed by balloon framed housing and the growth of the nation's industrial economy, which was finally beginning to show a growth of a middle class of professionals and managers, as a well as a subset of industrial workers able to scrimp together significant savings, to allow the metaphorical dam to break and cities to spread their growing number of residents outward. Middle class professionals were the first to follow the wealthy, building new houses on plots an easy trolley ride or two away from not only their places of business, but places of shopping and relaxation. Ever lowering housing prices also soon allowed immigrant and working class families to follow, and generation after generation toiled to save a small nest egg which would allow them to leave the crowded tenements of the city's poorer neighborhoods for housing on the growing edges of the metropolitan environment. While most could not afford the home of their dreams, they could achieve a better quality of life through sharing multifamily units as well as taking on boarders, offsetting what were still high housing costs. At the same moment, freed from the burden of keeping residences nearby, and able to pull in ever more workers from a far greater area, central business districts were free to focus on what they did best: make money.

Offices, warehouses, and light manufacturing, all of which could command higher land values than other uses, began a trend towards condensing downtowns towards zones of only a single category of use12.

None of this was necessarily inevitable. While each transportation improvement enabled a new form of settlement-few would be willing to walk ten miles round trip per day for a nicer homethey did not deterministically lead to this specific outcome. Easy linear transportation could have easily lead, for example, to an even distribution of businesses, residences, and other institutions along an axis, somewhat akin to Arturo Soria's Ciudad Lineal. After all, fast transportation could allow for fast and easy communication, and cheaper land could allow like businesses to cluster without competing for land with other, unrelated enterprises. But instead, American cities tended to centralize, with businesses pilling up in a deep center surrounded by ever increasing rings of ever lower density housing13.

19

One reason for this is economics.

Urban economists

often

about

talk

the

scale

economies of agglomeration and of urbanization, the concepts that each business that is added to a commercial cluster, even if in unrelated fields, either increases the productivity or lowers the costs of doing business for all other enterprises in that zone.

There

are

many

potential

explanations for this effect: the importance

of

face-to-face

communication, the

ability

to

quickly interact with new suppliers or customers, the ability to share intermediate producers or services, to share employee pools, and even the sharing of information and techniques

between

disparate

fields.

Whatever the reasons,

studies

have

agglomeration strong.

shown

that

economies

are

It logically follows, then,

that in an age prior to the

+RPHU +R\W·V 0DS Showing Centralization of Values in Chicago.14

widespread adoption of the telephone and of cheap methods of moving large quantities of goods locally, that the desire to concentrate would be very strong15.

Another reason is cultural. The concept of land ownership has been deeply ingrained in American culture from the earliest days of European colonization. Many Europeans saw the New World as an essentially uninhabited continent, with ample land for each and every family to claim their own piece of earth, an escape from the Ricardian economics that tied rent to ancient 20

landowners. Thomas Jefferson pushed the early United States government to subdivide the entire country into a grid of parcels which could easily be sold, hopefully enabling his conception of America as a country of independent, land owning farmers. To be a full citizen, and to be fully free, meant to own property16.

In the context of the early city, where land was by nature scarce, this took the form of row houses, where shared walls did not diminish the fact that the building and the land on which it stood belonged to the owner. In contrast, renting in America has almost always been seen with moral suspicion, even though the vast majority of urbanites lived in this condition. Multiple dwelling units larger than a multifamily house were almost universally referred to as tenements, a term that has almost completely fallen out of use. While in European cities, especially +DXVVPDQQ·V Paris, stacked flats akin to modern condominiums became the city residence of choice, these accommodations were viewed with suspicion in America. Such "French flats" didn't gain respectability until the turn of the 20th century, when a subset of wealthy citizens in dense New York City began to inhabit them*. Laws enabling multiple ownership of property did not arise until relatively late, the end of the 19th century for housing cooperatives and well into the 20th for condominiums17.

Given such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that as soon as it became practical, an individual or family seeking to be respectable and upstanding would leap at the chance to move to the closest simulacrum of single family living they could afford. For many, this took the form of renting a newly-built row house or unit in a multifamily structure;; for others, it meant constructing multifamily houses and renting or selling the other units to make ends meet18.

But perhaps most important reason for the shape the American city was taking were the powerful and growing anti-urban movements that flourished in the 19th century. The urban historian Robert Fishman traces the origins of suburbanization to wealthy 18th century English Evangelicals. The word suburban originally had a moral connotation, of a region of individuals and places of a lesser character than those inside the city. It was the shantytowns that existed outside the city walls, where brothels and criminal enterprises could flourish. But according to Fishman, these religious groups began to flip this understanding. They saw the city as a world of materialism and commercialism lacking in spiritual fiber, where women often worked, where children would roam the streets seeing the range of human depravity, and where man was separated from the natural world of God19.

*

And even then, they did so mainly out of the ability to share the cost of new amenities, such as in-building electric generators (predating the arrival of the electric grid) and centralized vacuums.

21

These merchants sought to change that. They could not give up their city businesses, those were what provided sustenance for their families, but with their money, they could afford to build simulacrums of nature outside the city;; settlements of a "feminine" nature that would allow for a wife to take care of the household and their children in protection. The world of commerce, of unfit persons, and separation from the natural world, that is, the world of the urban, was safely separated, a carriage ride away. It also did not hurt that in doing so, they were following the all too human desire to emulate one's social superiors, carving out miniature manor houses for their families in the county side20.

The embryos of these ideas migrated with colonists to America. Some experiments, early Boston in particular, sought to reform urban life, to make it fit these high moral ideas, but as with almost all utopian communities, these either failed or were compromised by the needs of pragmatism.

Many wealthy families purchased country estates, and as soon as reliable steam

railroads allowed it, began to leave their town houses for ever longer periods of time, returning to the city primarily to work and to shop. This was the same centralizing force as before, but now with a moral connotation: the city was best left, as the economists would put it, to the so-called highest and best purposes of commerce and industry, while housing was best left separate, in a healthy environment as close as possible to "nature. "21 This conception of nature was, ironically, as much a product of human minds and human hands as the city it sought to supplant. Inspired in no small part by Romantic painting such as that of the Hudson River School, first Andrew Jackson Downing and later his protégé Frederick Law Olmstead set out to create new, pastoral, picturesque physical landscapes. Utilizing curving paths, water, lush foliage, and above all, scrupulous planning, they created their impression of idyllic Edens, exemplified in famous project's like Olstead's Central Park in New York. These were places that could be the "lungs" of the city, a phrase which was not meant metaphorically. Miasma theory, the theory that diseases were carried by bad air, was the dominant belief, and was so deeply rooted in the cultural consciousness that not only did it take nearly twenty years for germ theory to become accepted, but for decades afterwards concerns over bad air would remain a critical concern22.

For Olmstead, however, this was only the beginning: if it was beneficial to visit such parks, it only stood to reason that, if it were possible, living in them would be even better. The railroad and streetcar made that dream possible. If there was a single blueprint for suburban America, it was Olmstead's 1869 plan for Riverside, Illinois. Linked to Chicago's commercial core by commuter train, its winding roads and widely separated houses were a deliberate escape from the urban nature 22

of the city. It was human scaled, to be sure, but it was deliberately residential, a place where families could retreat from interaction and from the outside world.

And to

insure its essence, like the parks it was based on, it was meticulous planned and layered with regulations to maintain its character.

Olmstead

would spend much of the rest of his life advocating for such "pastoral" environments as an explicit remedy 2OPVWHDG·V 3ODQ IRU 5LYHUVLGH ,/23

for themoral and health-related ills of the urban environment24.

And yet, given all these factors that were pushing American cities away from traditional urban forms and towards a proto-suburbia, the texture of many these newly created places was surprisingly urban. This was partly out of financial necessity: few except the wealthy and the upper middle class could afford the land, the structure, or the transportation costs that came with achieving the anti-urban visions of Olmstead and his ilk. Rather, many were happy, for the time being, to settle with a step up from tenement life: an apartment with views of green space, owning or renting part of a multifamily house, or best of all, an individual row house with a small yard. If and when times got better, an individual or family could then move towards something closer to the ideal*. The nature of the transit system itself also played a strong role. Though less dense than the packed districts they replaced, such streetcar suburbs were relatively compact, and walking was still the primary form of transit, even if much of it was travel to and from the tram. Moreover, the street corridors formed by streetcars, uninhibited by zoning regulations or strict use controls which would come later, became lined with apartment buildings and street-level retail, ensuring an active streetscape. As we shall see, in the current urban renaissance, such neighborhoods often contain some of the most expensive and sought after real estate in the modern city25.

*

It should also be noted that, although these generally trends were strong, they were not absolute. Some percentage of residents, regardless of wealth, have always preferred (and been able to afford) urban environments of their choosing, and neighborhoods like Boston's Beacon Hill or New York's Brooklyn Heights have never truly been left for the use of other classes or to decay.

23

This urbanization was even more strongly felt, albeit in significantly different form, in central business districts. The Central Place Theory of Walter Christaller describes cities in economic terms as the closest places to residents, that is, workers and consumers, which can support a degree of economies of agglomeration and urbanization. Businesses and people will travel to the nearest node that offers the product, service, or (in the case of businesses) locational amenities that they are looking for. Fixed rail transit in America, whether it has been streetcars, heavy rail subways, elevated trains, or even commuter rail, has tended to make the downtown a place more central than any other. By being radial in nature, converging on a neighborhood or region, they effectively make that place closer to ever point on the transit armature, usually making it quicker and easier to access than other centers that may be geographically closer. Commercial activity therefore, both in terms of the retail and basic economies, concentrated at the center. New developments like the elevator and the steel-skeletoned skyscraper reinforced this economic concentration26.

Central business districts were, and to a large extent still remain, absent of residents. This deprives them of at least one of the key aspects of healthy urbanity: true multiple use, and along with it, intensity of use at different times of day. American downtowns of the streetcar and early mass transit era, however, somewhat made up for this fact through their sheer concentration of people and activity. In addition to basic commerce, retail and entertainment soared. This was the era of the introduction of department stores, vaudeville theaters, and eventually, large movie houses. The role of the downtown as such an easily (and cheaply) reached place, combined with the fact that residents were moving outward far faster than businesses, combined such that, for a generation or more, a trip in and out from the center was a regular occurrence for all but the most basic of consumer or entertainment trips. The central business district in many cities served a similar purpose to the ancient Greek agora: not merely a marketplace, but a concentrated place of social and political activity, entertainment, and many other types of human interaction. Like the English evangelicals, many may have preferred a more picturesque, isolated home, but not at the expense of a having easy to access to the amenities, excitement, and human contact of a bustling, urban core27.

These changes were not unnoticed at the time.

Two social scientists working at the

University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, the historian Homer Hoyt and the sociologist Ernest Burgess, constructed, through data and observation, a model that seemed to fit the ongoing changes in American cities. They visualized the city as a series of concentric rings, centered on central business district and reaching out through various eras of residential settlement to the farthest lands that transportation was making accessible. Their theory is predicated on two assumptions: that 24

businesses would continue to centralize, taking up more and more of the central land, and that residential desire would always be for new structures on virgin land, hence the growing outskirts.

Residents, depending on their socioeconomic class, entered a sort-of game of hopscotch, leaving older structures for the newest, most outlying ones they could afford*. Meanwhile, around the core, the oldest buildings were repurposed for tenement housing or absorbed, demolished, and reconstructed in the capital intensive process of downtown expansion28.

Burgess and Hoyt's model included a strong version of the same moralistic reversal of urban and

suburban

in

their

conception of the so-called "Zone in Transition." This was the zone closest to the central business

district,

faced

externally with the rising land pressures of the growing center, and internally by containing oldest structures of the region, repurposed to uses they were not designed for. Though the land value of the zone in transition was high, Hoyt and Burgess's

writings

tend

to

almost ignore this, and focus heavily instead on the perceived problems of this region: its population density, particularly +R\W %XUJHVV·V &RQFHQWULF =RQH 0RGHO VKRZLQJ WKH =RQH in Transition.29

of the urban poor and of recent immigrants, its concentration of

converted (i. e. formerly single family) tenement structures, and the concentration of illicit or low *

Hoyt would also, later in his career, seek modify the concentric ring model to solve for the problem of relatively centrally located areas of high residential value, such as Chicago's North Side or the aforementioned Beacon Hill and Back Bay of Boston. This sector theory modified the rings to include wedges for middle-class and upper-class regions.

While matching the data, it broke some of the fundamental assumptions driving the model, namely that outer land and newer structures were always the most desirable. At the time, the evidence for the concentric model, however modified, seemed strong enough to quell all such doubts as mere sampling noise.

25

brow institutions, such as speakeasies and brothels. The urban commercial core was tolerable for the economic value it brought, but the moral failings and perceived technical obsolescence of the urban residential city was hard to tolerate30.

But even as they were researching, Hoyt in particular couldn't help but notice a new trend: decentralization. Where crosstown streetcar lines met their more densely utilized axial cousins, new outlying nodes of activity and value were beginning to show up. Stores were opening at these busy nodes, freeing residents of the need to travel downtown for all their needs. Though this started with small businesses, it quickly expanded to include other, larger industries, including the first outlying locations of department stores, national five-and-dime chains, smaller movie theaters, and bank branches. Often, such neighborhood centers started small chambers of commerce or other similar organizations to promote themselves as an alternative to downtown. However, it was not until the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, as the automobile took hold, that central business district power players truly started to fear such outlying regions as distinct threat31.

The automobile allowed the suburbanizing trend of the streetcar era to explode. Rapid, point-to-point, on demand transit not only allowed for still larger metropolitan regions, but fundamentally reorganized the psychological and spatial organization of cities. Freed from the necessity of walking at all but the very ends of trips, uses could become completely geographically separable. Moreover, in addition to opening up new land, new legal instruments such as zoning (for instance, mandating a minimum lot size) and new policies like FHA-subsidized 30 year mortgages made the picturesque suburban dream not only readily attainable, but also the path of least resistance. For at the same time that the FHA was subsidizing suburban loans, it was putting out its infamous red-lining maps, all but explicitly denying urban neighborhoods, especially those with any level of race mixing, the capital needed to improve themselves. The moral urban-suburban reversal was nearing its zenith, and American governments at all levels began denying urban environments access to resources whilst simultaneously privileging newly built suburban environments legally, economically, and physically, through infrastructure investment32.

At the same time, like the streetcar and indeed all transit infrastructure, the physical nature of the automobile has an effect on the texture of the city. Cars take up tremendous amounts of space.

By one estimate, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the area occupied by a parked car was larger than the average American's office space, and that figure does not include the space it takes to get that automobile to or from that location. To hold traffic and parking, structures must be pushed ever farther apart. At the same time, cars have the ability to travel at very high speeds, but the 26

environments they require to enable this speed, with large signs, wide curves, and broad sightlines, appear distorted and barren to the person on foot.

Traffic is both loud and dangerous to

pedestrians. This of course meant that the existing built environment of American cities was often not readily amenable to cars without massive reconstruction. But even in newly built areas, a fundamental fact remains: the more an environment is driven by automotive concerns, the larger the spacing and more barren the landscape, the less human scale, one of the key defining factors of urbanity, it can be. Conversely, densely built, human scale environments, with close building spacing and mixed uses leaves only a little room for auto traffic. Building an environment for one type of transit modality, cars, directly conflicts with building for another, the pedestrian, with almost every amenity for one being a detriment to the other33.

Thus, American cities were at a crossroads. They could radically decentralize, building new car and suburban friendly environments à la Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities or Le Courbusier's Ville Radieuse. Conversely, they could double-down on their cores, attempting to maintain their central place as well as the value of property in the city as a whole. Given the accumulated power and capital of downtown business interests, combined with their newfound unity formed in opposition to decentralization, it is not surprising that in most established cities this latter option prevailed. Local governments, steered by these business leaders and advocacy groups, utilized the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 not, as the original promoters of the legislation intended, primarily as a way of building public housing, but rather to tear down the "blighted" "slums" of the zone in transition, and to replace them with higher income, modern housing, as well as the expressways that would allow suburban commuters to access the core34.

It originally did not have to be expressways;; in the 1920s and 1930s numerous cities, most notably Los Angeles and Detroit, put to voters competing ballot initiatives, one for highway investment, another for mass transit, either downtown subways for streetcars or completely new systems.

Streetcars fighting with automobiles for valuable street space.35

And though the votes were often closer than history might remember them, auto27

dominant plans usually won. For many, this was simple technological evolution: cars were not merely powerful symbols of the future, but a better form of transportation, which would inevitably take its rightful place on top, just as the electric streetcar had supplanted horse power. To support this desire to reinforce the center of cities, the desire to enable suburban living, and this sense of technological progress, everything which was not a car, including both pedestrians and streetcars alike, began to become seen as impediments to traffic flow36.

Paradoxically, it was in this suburban moment, this moment of anti-urban sentiment and massive automotive investment, that the Washington Metro was conceived and designed. As Washington, DC, like so many American cities before it, was faced with the decision to centralize or decentralize, to sacrifice its built environment to the car or to preserve its urban environments.

Through the decisions that were to follow, and particularly through the loud, public contestations of a number of activists, public servants, and intellectuals, the scales would begin, very slowly, to tip back in the reverse direction, back towards imaging urban environments as a core part of American cultural desire. In order to fully understand how that shift came about, however, we also need to have an understanding of the peculiar history of the District of Columbia.

28

End Notes for Chapter 1 1

Terry Moore and Paul Thorsnes, with Bruce Appleyard, The Transportation/Land Use Connection (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2007). Susan Handy, "Smart Growth and the Transportation-Land Use Connection: What Does the Research Tell Us?" International Regional Science Review 28(2005): 146-167. Vukan R. Vuchic, Transportation for Livable Cities (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research, 1999). Jan Gehl, Cities for People. (Washington: Island Press, 2010).

2 Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (1870-1900) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Brian J. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990). Kevin Lynch, Good City Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).

3 Warner 1978. Lynch 1981. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

4 Cudahy 1990. Warner 1978. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

5 Joe ThompsRQ ´7KH /DVW &DEOH &DU LQ 1HZ <RUN µ $FFHVVHG 0D\ th, 2014, http://www.cable-carguy.com/images/ny_last_horsecar_001.jpg) 6 Cudahy 1990. Warner 1978.

7 Cudahy 1990.

8 Warner 1978, 63 9 Ibid. Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of Chicago to the Rise of its Land Values, 1830-1933 (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2000[1933]).

10 Cudahy 1990. Warner 1978.

11 Hoyt 1933, 145.

12 Warner 1978. Jackson 1985. Hoyt 1933.

13 Sprio Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1991).

14 Hoyt 1933, 187 15 Arthur O'Sullivan, Urban Economics (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004).

16 Jackson 1985. Warner 1978.

17 Ibid. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Elizabeth Hawes, New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

18 Warner 1978.

19 Fishman 1987.

20 Ibid.

21 ,ELG -DFNVRQ 2·6XOOLYDQ 22 Jackson 1985. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic- and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).

23 Frederick Law 2OPVWHDG ´*HQHUDO 3ODQ RI 5LYHUVLGHµ 9LD WKH 2OPVWHDG 6RFLHW\ $FFHVVHG 0D\ th 2014, http://www.olmstedsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/general-plan-of-riverside.jpg).

24 Jackson 1985.

25 Warner 1978.

26 2·6XOOLYDQ &XGDK\ -DFNVRQ Hoyt 1933.

27 Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Alison Isenberg, Downtown American: A history of the place and the people who made it (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Fishman 1987. Lynch 1981.

28 Hoyt 1933. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984[1925]) 29 Park 1925, 55 30 Ibid 31 Hoyt 1933. Fogelson 2001. Isenberg 2004.

32 Jackson 1985. Fishman 1987. Vuchic 1999. Robert E. Lang, Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003). Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States (New York: 29

Routledge, second edition, 2010). Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

33 Vuchic 1999. Gehl 2010. Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us) (New York: Vintage Books, 2009).

34 Fogelson 2001. Schwartz 2010.

35 8QNQRZQ SKRWRJUDSKHU ´6WUHHWFDUV ILJKWLQJ WUDIILF LQ 'RZQWRZQ 6W /RXLV LQ WKH Vµ $FFHVVHG 0D\ th, 2014, http://www.city-data.com/forum/st-louis/1567119-how-different-urban-layout-infrastructure-now.html).

36 Fogelson 2001. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).

30

2 The Urban Environment of Washington to 1955 "Washington, D.C., has a long history of ambitious failure. Despite all of the plans to develop the national capital and the incalculable amount of money spent toward their fulfillment, Washington has always to a notable degree backfired."

-Sarah Luria1

A

ll cities have a particular, endogenous history, but Washington, DC is a peculiar city above and beyond most of its American counterparts. It is a manufactured city that owes its existence to a specific political compromise between Northern business interests

represented by Alexander Hamilton and Southern agrarian interests represented by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Madison had argued that the nation's capital had to be independent of any state to guarantee its autonomy and safety, and the Constitution over whose drafting Convention he had overseen included an explicit clause allowing for an independent district. Thus, from day one the District of Columbia was a very strange beast: it was not located in the normal political sphere, and would be constructed first and foremost not for economic, cultural activity, or even for its own residents, but for governance. This strange relationship of city and federal government, of a population not only outside of any state, but with say over local affairs, has not only colored the city's politics, but also affected its relationship to national urban trends. The history of Washington is a case study in the importance of political and social ownership in healthy urban HQYLURQPHQWV $W WKH VDPH WLPH XQGHUVWDQGLQJ WKH FLW\·s strange relationship with its political status is a prerequisite for understanding Metro. Washington's role as national symbol, as icon, and as the seat of government would be vital to Metro's construction, but at the same time the Metro UHSUHVHQWV D EUHDN LQ WKH FLW\·V VWUDQJH SRVLWLRQ 7KH SURFHVV RI JUHDWHU :DVKLQJWRQ ILJKWLQJ IRU LWV political voice would be directly connected to its upcoming fight for urbanity2.

The FLW\·V VSHFLILF ORFDWLRQ ZDV FKLHIO\ WKH ZRUN RI George Washington, and the city was located only seven miles downstream from his family estate at Mount Vernon, Virginia. This was in his economic interest, to be sure, but it was also seen as more, a moment when rational self-interest and public good could happily coexist. Sitting at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers, the city was located in a protected waterway that sea going ships could reach. More, President Washington was hopeful that a canal could be dug between the Potomac and the Ohio, PDNLQJ WKH FLW\ D QH[XV EHWZHHQ WKH (DVW FRDVW DQG WKH \RXQJ FRXQWU\·V EXUJHRQLQJ LQWHULRU 'RLQJ 31

so would not only make the city an economic powerhouse, it would be symbolic of the success of the new federal government, a living testament to power of enlightened governance. Add in that the Potomac site sat as near as makes no difference to the middle of the United States as then existed, and the picture is complete. The capital would thus be triply symbolic: it would demonstrate the economic power of the young government, would physically connect East and West, and symbolically connect North and South3.

Washington, DC is also notable in that it is a planned city. It seems inevitable that a city created sui generis would require a detailed plan, but it did not have to be: the ten mile square chunk taken out of Maryland and Virginia contained two existing settlements, Georgetown, MD and Alexandria, VA. These towns, with their existing populations and economies, could have been expanded upon. Such a plan would, however directly conflict with the political and symbolic goals of having an independent capital.

As was becoming common in the young republic, competition came down to two competing plans from the two growing political factions. Thomas Jefferson, first Secretary of State and the leader and figurehead movement,

of

the

anti-administration

proposed

a

simple,

straightforward, and modest grid plan. The city would start on the banks of the

-HIIHUVRQ·V 3ODQ IRU :DVKLQJWRQ '&4

Potomac, and could grow to fill the site as needed. The plan was rife with Jeffersonian symbolism, including a grid over the land for easy and rational land ownership, and was intentionally small.

Jefferson's ideal-type for the American citizen had always been the small, independent farmer, and he had a strong distrust and distaste for the cities of the North and the economic and moral disrepute they brought with them. Such a vision was directly at odds with what the first President

32

desired for the city that would eventually bear his name, a thriving center that was monumental both physically and in living, economic presence5.

This agrarian-city split, the ideal of a morally upright farmer against the economic depravity of a city versus the ideal of city as economic and cultural engine, neatly prefigures the conflict that, as we have seen, would soon arise between the urban and the suburban.

Questions of the

desirability and shape of urbanity are deeply rooted in the American psyche, and has always been contested. Moreover, the founding of Washington, DC demonstrates that background and political disposition are not necessarily tied to their beliefs about urban environments, something which 0HWUR·V KLVWRU\ ZRXOG UHSHDW %y far the city's biggest proponent was a wealthy Virginian plantation owner who, at the end of his life sought little more than to retire to his country home. And, as was usual in the early days of the repuEOLF *HRUJH :DVKLQJWRQ·V vision, driven by his influence, would prevail.

Washington found his plan from a Revolutionary War comrade, the Franco-American army engineer

L'Enfant*.

Peter

L'Enfant had no background in city planning, and indeed could not have, for the discipline did not yet exist.

But he brought three things to the table: his engineering knowledge,

his

with

architecture

the

Versailles,

and

experience a

of

driving,

almost maniacal desire to receive the commission. His selectionwas due in no small part to his persistence and /·(QIDQW·V 3ODQ IRU :DVKLQJWRQ '& 6

cajoling of both President Washington

and

other

*

L'Enfant's first name is generally given as Pierre, the name of his birth. However, the planner and historian Frederick Gutheim points out that L'Enfant was deeply proud of his adopted home country, and would probably be aghast to see his name rendered in the French manner. Gutheim points out the referring to him as Pierre did not come about until late in the 19th century, during a revival of American sentiment for French art and culture.

33

leaders7.

L'Enfant's plan ignored the existing settlements, for all intents and purposes. Instead, it focused on the physical terrain of the site, placing the two most important buildings, the Capitol and the White House (née the President's Mansion) atop the two highest hills. The axes between these two structures was to be kept clear, and the center reserved for a monument (later, the Washington Monument). The city would have its prerequisite rational grid, but would also be crisscrossed by broad avenues symbolically named after the states, which aimed to create impressive promenades, parade routes, and grand vistas. Though each avenue was important in its own way, the most prominent was the southern path of Pennsylvania Avenue, forming a monumental corridor between the Capitol and the White House, and providing not only a processional promenade, but representing the symbolic separation between the legislative and executive branches. As if this wasn't enough, the grand meeting points of the avenues would each contain a public square suitable for smaller monuments and other government symbols8.

The plan was massive in scope, mapping out hundreds of square blocks, massive distances, and dwarfing the two existing towns. It was also massive in cost. In addition to the government buildings, the number of roadways, and the like, the plan, rather than building on the coast, included the construction of a canal through the center of the city, bringing water traffic, and hopefully, economic activity to the city's heart, whilst being capped by a dramatic waterfall to be built in front of the Capitol. Never one to miss a symbolic beat, L'Enfant preemptively named this canal the Tiber. Later, with its Roman aspirations in taters, the murky waterway would simply be referred to as the Washington City Canal. Even President Washington himself had to rein in his overzealous engineer/architect, realizing that the grand plan would take decades to fill, and seeing that the Congress, already hesitant about the cost of the capital city, was starting to buckle. The city was to be a republican Versailles, replete with the iconography of a history and of a power that the young country simply did not yet possess. L'Enfant's prickly personality and zeal would eventually cost him his job as chief architect DQRWKHU PLUURU DV ZH VKDOO VHH EHWZHHQ WKH FLW\·V IRXQGLQg and the construction of its Metro. His plan, however, is also the basis of the city which still exists today9.

As previously noted, one of the most problematic aspects of urbanity is the political, not only the impact of residents on governance, but also their senses· of political ownership. In his seminal Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas defines the public sphere, the zone of political discourse vital to a democratic society, as existing in direct opposition to the state. Habermas theorizes the public sphere as an outcome of bourgeois society, 34

arising quite literally from the political discussions inside 18th century European coffee houses. By definition, the public sphere is the outcome of rational discussions by private individuals, open to all and free of coercion;; by nature, it is critical of state power, and has worked to redefine representative government as the legitimate use of force in response to public opinion. The plans for the City of Washington lack any but the most naïve conception of a public sphere.

In

Habermas's terms, they rather represent a pre-liberal mode of government representation: a mass of symbolically resonant, publically accessible spaces which are meant to represent and be used by a people without them having had a direct impact in their design or their creation. Though meant to symbolize a democratic republic, the public as a whole, particularly the local public, had no voice in WKH FLW\·V FUHDWLRQ It can be argued, of course, the capitals of all states are, due to the unique symbolic capital they carry, are to some extent unique exceptions: their landscapes, mimicking the position of the District politically, instead belong to all citizens of the country as much or more so than they do to local residents. Even so, if Habermas's thinking holds, it would follow that few individuals of political status would feel immediately at home in a city whose shape was dictated by ideology and not by public political engagement10.

Perhaps then it should come as no surprise that, for much of its early history, Washington, DC was a bit of a failed experiment. Hot and swampy, and with few cultural amenities, the city attracted only a paltry full time population. Physically, L'Enfant·s avenues and vistas acted as an impediment to urbanity, thwarting density of people or of activity. This was the era of the walking city, and distances such as the over 1 ѿrd miles that exist between the Capitol and White House were tremendous for everyday intragovernmental, economic, or social communication. Such long streets also felt empty even when Congress was in session;; when it was not, the majority of those who could leave the city did so, returning to their 'real' homes. The story was the same economically.

L'Enfant had planned numerous specialized districts, most of them distributed along the canal. But given the small size of the federal government and the population of the young city, it was hard enough to attract commerce at all, let alone distribute it into neat neighborhoods. The same scale that kept residents apart kept businesses apart as well, inhibiting any true economies of agglomeration or urbanization. Whatever political, social, or economic sparks the city might have been generating, they were spread thin, and had no nucleation sites to encourage their growth11.

The city was unloved and under-constructed. The situation was so bad that those living on the Virginia side of the Potomac, sick of the lack of attention by the federal government and their own lack of representation, demanded retrocession of land back to Virginia. They succeeded in 35

1847, forming the independent city of Alexandria and the County of Arlington, leaving the District with its current, truncated shape. As late as 1851, there were speculative plans to move the capital westward towards the new geographic center of the expanding country, near the site of present day Metropolis, Illinois12.

Washington

was

spared this fate in large part due

to

the

Following

Civil

the

War. massive

bloodshed (there were over a million casualties-3% of the country's population at that time-including over 600,000 dead), and the concomitant psychological trauma of near disunion, the city's symbolism became truly dear to the nation.

Icons like Thomas

Walters·

newly

completed

Capitol

dome

took

on

powerful meaning.

Pressure

grew

complete

to

embarrassments like the halfAn 1851 map of the Illinois Central Railroad showing a VSHFXODWLYH ´:HVWHUn 'LVWULFW RI &ROXPELD µ13

finished Monument,

Washington on

which

construction had stopped in the early 1850s, and which represented the rough, half-finished state of the nation's capital. This and other projects would be completed as the city slowly grew in the postwar years. L'Enfant's city, which had been designed as a monument to a grand government, finally had the symbolic meaning to match its dimensions14.

The wartime expansion of the federal government and the administration of reconstruction helped with growth, as well. The same was true of Washington's status as the southernmost Northern city: the city was a migration point for many newly freedmen and women seeking to escape some of the enmity of the South. To this day Washington has one of the largest African 36

American communities in the nation. This slow growth took place in the era of the horsecar, and the city slowly expanded outwards into neighborhoods of densely packed, Victorian row houses and small shop fronts, many of which still exist in the core of the city to this day15.

Real expansion and growth, however, would have to wait until the twentieth century. Two World

Wars,

a

Depression, and a New Deal meant a swelling federal government, and with

it,

steady

jobs

and

a

permanent population.

The

District would hit its all-time high of just over 800,000 people in 1950, having

nearly

A present-day view of horse- & streetcar row houses around Dupont Circle.

doubled over the previous 20 years. Much of this growth occurred during the streetcar era, and Washington, DC's streetcar network, run by a company named Capital Transit, was the envy of the nation. In an era when streetcar companies were almost universally reviled, Capital Transit was generally viewed with pride as an efficient, well-managed company providing an essential service.

Streetcar suburbs began appearing in each of Washington's four quadrants, first filling, and then expanding, the plan laid down by L'Enfant. With quick access to downtown jobs and shopping, newly arriving government workers found cozy small houses and newly constructed apartments in the outer reaches of the district and, sometimes, beyond. And as is almost always the case, the presence of this growing population acted as an economic multiplier, providing a market for small, outlying, decentralized businesses, attracting more residents and giving life and a level of urbanity to outlying streets16.

None of this changed the fact that Washington was still, for all intents and purposes, a ward of the state. If anything, the situation was worse than it had been at the city's founding. A shortlived experiment with home rule in the early 1870s had ended disastrously, and all power returned to 37

the federal government. DC's position was so strange that, for example, all engineering decisions within its borders had to be approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, perhaps the only time in American history when civilian government had to answer to military authority17.

Data from the US Census.

This odd situation was all the more obvious when it came to matters of the public realm.

The early 20th century saw a rise of interest in matters of civic pride and civic beauty, led and exemplified by the City Beautiful movement. If the urban center was a necessary evil for a city to function, than the least the progressive-era could do was to make it as pleasant as possible. City Beautiful was one of the first movements for understanding and improving urbanity and urban life, and though often problematic by modern urban conceptions, was a major step forward for ubanity.

City Beautiful was concerned with exactly what its name implies, the aesthetics of the city. In part, this came about through increased sanitation and the like, but the major change would be the creation of impressive Beaux-Arts buildings, or even better yet, massive collections of Beaux-Arts buildings in civic units. Taking a page directly out of the writings of Ebenezer Howard, City Beautiful thinking emphasized the separation of uses, and +RZDUG·V WHQWDWLYH GUDZLQJV, focused on a monumental civic core. These civic centers were aptly named: they would include the seat of government as well as cultural structures like libraries and museums. City Beautiful fully embraced the ideal of separate regions for residence, but in turn, it sought to humanize the remaining urban core with civic and social purpose18.

38

In Washington, City Beautiful took off to a level arguably not achieved anywhere else in America. Washington possessed the symbolic resonance the movement thrived on, the resources of the resources of the federal government, and most importantly, absolute Congressional control over local affairs. In 1902, led by a commission chaired by Senator James McMillan, Congress would pass a comprehensive redevelopment plan, and to oversee it, created the National Capital Park Planning Commission (or NCPPC). Amongst its early ranks, the NCPPC counted the famous architect Daniel Burnham, later architect of Washington's Union Station and arguable progenitor of the City Beautiful movement. The NCPPC set out 'improve' and complete L'Enfant's monumental plan for the city.

Much of what is famous in present-day Washington, the tidal basin, the

neoclassical designs of countless government buildings, and the modern design of the National Mall, were all designed by this body to glorify and symbolize the country, with little input from the public at large and almost no direct concern for local residents. For the moment, Washington still existed LQ +DEHUPDV·V SUH-liberal mode, first and foremost for the federal government and the country as a whole, and not for local residents19.

Perpetual

Cold

War

and

the

concomitant expansion of government and government related defense industries meant that the population boom which had started before World War II showed no signs of slowing.

Technology-wise, however, the city

was shifting. Auto-centric planning, which had started before the war, started to seem more and more inevitable. Americans rushed to spend the money that they had saved during wartime on automobiles, a good which due to production requisition hadn't been available for half a decade. Following the examples of suburban mass-manufactured housing like Levittown in New York, as well as government sponsored new towns, such as Greenbelt, Maryland, population began to settle in suburban Maryland

1950 NCPC Decentralization Plan for greater Washington.20

39

and Virginia in massive numbers21.

Cracks were starting to form in the streetcar city. More suburban living meant more auto traffic into and out of the district, competing with streetcars for precious road space.

Decentralization began to take hold in force, and businesses began to settle outside the District, both to be closer to their consumers and to their workers. But this was not solely the outcome of the progression of demand: the NCPPC, the federal government, and the governments of Maryland and Virginia all actively encouraged this decentralization. In 1950, the NCPPC published a report calling upon the General Services Administration, the federal agency which oversees government office space, to begin the process of geographically decentralizing the bureaucracy of the government, of moving offices to the suburbs. The two states and the District already were forming plans for expressways to serve these areas. The policy was a formalization of a process that had been ongoing. Whereas in the early 1930s, as part of the McMillan Plan, Federal Triangle was constructed in downtown Washington, the largest office construction project of its era and a focal point for a centralized, transit-driven city, in 1943 the Department of War completed the Pentagon, still the largest office building in the world, in an isolated location across the Potomac from

Washington

and

surrounded by parking lots22.

Greater Washington's population explosion meant it was becoming one of the major cities of the country, no

longer

simply

symbolically, but in size and in economic power. It was 7KH UD]LQJ RI :DVKLQJWRQ '&·V 6RXWKZHVW 4XDGUDQW 23

doing so at exactly the same moment that pro-suburban,

anti-urban sentiment was at its peak. The moment was punctuated by the early 1950s razing of Washington's Southwest district, one of the first acts of so-called urban renewal in the country.

Traditionally dense and primarily African American, the neighborhood, like many, was seen as blighted and obsolete, too far gone for a modern age. The only solution would be to replace it with 40

highways, larger streets, and a new residential neighborhood that mainly ignored L'Enfant's small blocks in return for large buildings with ample parking at their feet. To a contemporary observer, urbanity may have well seemed doomed24.

And yet, only a few short years later, a new plan would arise that would seek to stop this decentralization.

Arising out of combination of a resurgence of Central Place Theory, of

preservationism, of public outcry, and of the emergence of a movement dedicated to understanding and appreciating urbanity, rather than replacing it, the Washington Metro would mark the beginning of a shifting of the cultural tide.

End Notes for Chapter 2 1 Sarah Luria, Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, DC (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press,

2006), xxi 2 Richard Brookhiser, James Madison (New York: Basic Books, 2011). James Madison, The Federalist No 43 (Independent Journal, January 23, 1788., via the Constitution Society, accessed April 10th, 2014, http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa43.htm). Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L'Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

3 Luria 2006. Gutheim 2006.

4 7KRPDV -HIIHUVRQ ´6NHWFK RI WKH )HGHUDO &L\ 0DUFK MSJµ $FFHVVHG 0D\ th, 2014: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jefferson_sketch_of_washington_march_1791.jpg) 5 Brookhiser 2011. Luria 2006. Gutheim 2006.

6 $QGUHZ (OOLFRWW UHYLVHG IURP 3HWHU /·(QIDQW ´3ODQ RI WKH &LW\ RI :DVKLQJWRQ 0DUFK µ $FFHVVHG 0D\ th, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:L%27Enfant_plan.jpg).

7 Gutheim 2006. Luria 2006.

8 Ibid. Sprio Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1991).

9 Ibid 10 - UJHQ +DEHUPDV ´7KH 3XEOLF 6SKHUH µ LQ 6HLGPDQ (G Jürgen Habermas on Society and Politics: a Reader (Beacon Press, 1989).

11 Luria 2006. Gutheim 2006. Arthur O'Sullivan, Urban Economics (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004).

12 Gutheim 2006.

13 ´ PDS RI WKH ,OOLQRLV &HQWUDO 5DLOURDG DQG 1HZ 2UOHDQV DQG 2KLR 5DLOURDGµ $FFHVVHG 0D\ th, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1850_IC.jpg) 14 Luria 2006. John W. Chambers, The Oxford Companion to American Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Gutheim 2006.

15 Luria 2006. Gutheim 2006.

16 Zachary M. Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Wasington Metro (Baltimore: Johns hopkins University Press, 2006). Peter C. Kohler, Capital Transit: Washington's Street Cars: The Final Era 1933-1962 (Colesville, MD: National Capital Trolley Museum, 2001). 2·6XOOLYDQ 17 Schrag 2006. Gutheim 2006.

18 Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Alison Isenberg, Downtown American: A history of the place and the people who made it (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Gutheim 2006. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (Classic Books International, 2010).

19 Gutheim 2006.

20 Schrag 2006, 20 21 Gutheim 2006. Schrag 2006. Ed Cray, Chrome Colossus: General Motors and Its Times (New York: McGraw Hill, 1980).

22 Gutheim 2006. Schrag 2006.

23 Gutheim 2006, 270 24 Gutheim 2006.

41

Part Two: Contestation

3

Metro Genesis: Harland Bartholomew and the 1959 Mass Transportation Survey

"If people and goods could be transported instantly and without cost by rubbing a magic lamp³if there were no need for automobiles, buses, trains and trucks³urban centers in their present form would not exist. Cities bring together, at low transportation cost, workers and jobs, buyers and sellers, students and schools³this is the basic function of cities."

-Introduction to the Mass Transportation Survey Report of 1959.1

V

ery early in the 1950s, the District of Columbia was passed by its suburbs in relative population: it no longer held a majority of the residents in the immediate area. Not only were the suburbs growing, but the city itself was beginning to shrink. This situation was

all but endorsed by the National Capital Park Planning Commission, who saw new-built suburban growth as a healthy, spacious, and modern alternative to the 18th century city of Washington. A lower population density in the district, in addition to being a positive end in and of itself, would make the eventual reconfiguring of the district easier. And though it was a concern that the demographics leaving were primarily white and comparatively well off, threating the local tax base by leaving a city of mainly minorities and the poor*, Washington was fundamentally a federal city, and that government could make up the difference. Besides, if all went according to plan, urban renewal projects like those in the Southwest would soon attract the upper- and middle-classes back to the city. The most pressing problem for the moment was to design and construct a transportation

Data from the US Census.

*

Two descriptors that unfortunately run together all too often.

45

system to serve the new residences, businesses, and government offices that were starting to fill what had been the countryside2.

One of the men who played a major role in the 1950 NCPPC decentralization report was Harland Bartholomew. Bartholomew was an engineer by training, but his real passion lay in understanding something far more complex than the mathematics of structures: he wanted to understand and to shape the functioning of the city as a whole. Bartholomew was hired in 1915 as the Planner for the City of St. Louis, and would retain that position for the next 37 years. From it, he worked to define what city planning was, and what it would mean, in America. Bartholomew was in many ways the father of modern city planning.

Using St. Louis as his laboratory and his example, he was invited to city after city across the country to spread best practices, to talk with and train other planners, and to work on and share advice about their various plans. He worked tirelessly to professionalize and legitimize the planning profession, as well as to give planners power. $PHULFD·V VWURQJ KLVWRU\ IRU WKH respect of property rights and a laissez-faire attitude towards the actions of business meant he was often punching above his weight class, and he and his colleagues would spend much of their lifetimes striving for the legal powers they needed to compel cities and their residents to comply with their plans.

Harland Bartholomew.3

Bartholomew could work the front room as well as the back: he was skilled at reading the tea leaves of

elected officials and powerful local business leaders and boosters, and worked to utilize their power to achieve both his and their goals4.

At heart, Harland Bartholomew was a technocrat. For him, the role of a planner was exactly what the name implied, to plan for what the city needed and then to insure that it was provided with a minimum of waste. The role was an apolitical one, one of numbers and basic rules. Though it was to be inhabited and used by the public at large, a group that Harland well-knew could be rambunctious, contrarian, and disagreeable, their needs and the needs of the cities they inhabited were fundamentally reducible to engineering problems. His comprehensive plans were some of the 46

first to lay out, in detail, programs dictating all forms of infrastructure and land use over large periods of time. Late in his career, as computers became powerful enough to model things like water and traffic flow, Bartholomew mused that perhaps planners could be, if not replaced entirely, greatly reduced in number and workload as machines did the deterministic aspects of their work5.

Bartholomew was also steeped in the City Beautiful tradition. Why was a man who was so attached to technical knowledge attracted to a movement with such strong aesthetic undertones?

Partly it was a matter of timing: the beginning of Bartholomew's career was at the height of the City Beautiful moment. But there were also ways in which the movement was a technical discipline: if one assumes, as many did, that the tenets of light, air, vistas, separated uses, and the like were generalizable rules, things that improved the economic function of a city and the physical health of its residents, than putting those rules into practice was simply a matter of course. At the very least, beautiful civic centers seemed to boost real estate values and the prestige of a city. Bartholomew was not shackled to the beaux arts style: for him, it was more about the general principles than any specific aesthetics. It also helps that he was not an architect, but a planner, a distinction which his career helped emphasize. All of this came together in perhaps Bartholomew's most notable project, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis. A massive riverfront park and sculpted mall reaching deep into the downtown, it is capped by the monumental Gateway Arch (designed during, but completed after Bartholomew's tenure) that has become the symbol of the city. To this day, the sightlines that reach these monuments are protected by St. Louis zoning codes first articulated by Bartholomew6.

By the early 1950s, Harland Bartholomew was reaching the end of his distinguished career.

His postwar work with the NCPPC, like his work in so many American cities, was involved, but was also primarily a consultancy. It is not clear if he knew he was planning his next job, but in 1953, Congress reorganized the NCPPC into two related bodies. The first was now called the National Capital Planning Commission (or NCPC), its title recognizing the ERG\·V evolvement into a city planning organization first and foremost. To work with the NCPC and underscoring the capital's growth beyond its political boundaries, another body, the National Capital Regional Planning Commission (NCRPC) would take over planning activities outside of the District proper. There was only one man with the gravitas and respect to run the NCPC, and Bartholomew became its first chair. His first, and by far his most pressing, task was to utilize his comprehensive planning skills to work out a transportation plan to ease Washington's growing pains. The same legislation that

47

created his position tasked Bartholomew with chairing a committee consisting of the NCPC, the NCRPC, and the various local governments to draft a master plan for the region's future7.

The timing was auspicious, at least for a planner seeking influence. 7KH 'LVWULFW·V WUDQVLW needs were brought to a head when, in 1955, Capital Transit, the private streetcar operator which ran essentially all mass transit services in the District, went on strike. Well-run during the war, Capital Transit had built up a strong cash reserve from the hundreds of thousands who, in those times of gas rationing and zero automobile production, had no choice but to use its services.

Following the war, the company was sold a new investor who, rather than reinvest in his service or raise wages, attempted to siphon off as much money as he legally could. Seeing this behavior, and coupled with the fear of all public transit employees at the precipitous nationwide drop in transit ridership post 1950, employees felt they had no other choice. The Capital Transit strike had two strong effects in Washington. First, it underscored the level to which transportation planning was needed. Without its streetcars and busses, the city could simply not handle the volume of traffic.

For all intents and purposes, the capital was forced to shut down during the strike. Second, in order to get its city running, Congress was compelled to end the strike, and as part of a mandated sale of Capital Transit, the company was forced to agree to dismantle all of its streetcar tracks and replace service with busses by 1962. Political sentiments were fervently convinced that the trolley was now best left to history, and that the time of the automobile had come. Capital Transit's new owner would try numerous times before the deadline to have that decision delayed or repealed, citing both ridership and cost, but Congress would not budge. The era of the streetcar was coming to an end in Washington, DC, whether its residents wanted it to or not8.

Then, in 1956, one year after the NCPC transportation leaders began their meetings, Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act. Strongly advocated by President Eisenhower, and couched in the language of defense and of generating economic prosperity, it would be that largest public works project in American history. By providing the almost unheard of largesse of 90% federal financing for expressways, the Act set out to connect almost every city of consequence by high-speed roadway. It also went further: the plans included in the infamous "Yellow Book" of the same year outlined not only how this road network was to connect cities, but also hypothesized how they would be built through them as well. The same 90% federal funding used to build expressways in the countryside could and would be used to run these roadways into and around the nation's urban environments. In this climate, it was widely expected that the NCPC would propose a massive highway system9.

48

Within the study's committee itself, however, the story was to be more nuanced. Bartholomew was no stranger to urban freeways. Indeed, in the 1940s he had outlined principles for locating urban highways.

But his position as

chair and his reputation gave him tremendous power, and Bartholomew was nothing if not committed to the idea of comprehensive planning. He made sure to include mass transportation experts

on

representatives

the

study,

including

from

Parsons

Brinckerhoff, the engineering company behind the construction of New York City's subway system, and individuals

7KH ´<HOORZ %RRNµ SODQ IRU :DVKLQJWRQ '&10

like David Hyde, a transportation planner and the originator of Cleveland's heavy

rail Red Line. This was more than just a token gesture. Bartholomew made sure that these transit experts had room to work, separate from the chorus of highway engineers that tended to dominate the committee, and he would lobby hard to make sure that their work played a major role in the final report11.

Why would the previously dispersionist master planner turn to rail, a technology many considered an obsolete, Victorian relic?

For one thing, Bartholomew was nothing if not an

iconoclast, and relished a moment when he could problematize the consensus of others.

Bartholomew had a need to be in control, and was not one to be bullied, particularly by traffic engineers whose work he saw as fundamentally limited in scope, unlike his own approach12.

But there was more. Bartholomew had a keen engineer's eye. He knew from both the ongoing traffic studies and from decades of experience that automobiles simply could not carry the daily workforce of the District into and out of the downtown. The roadways themselves could not carry the peak traffic, to say nothing of the necessary parking. The amount of destruction required would be immense, and the NCPC was already starting to feel the backlash from the leveling of 49

:DVKLQJWRQ·V Southwest quadrant.

But this anti-destruction tone can also be traced back to

Bartholomew's City Beautiful heritage. His predecessors on the NCPPC had been aghast at the idea of cars parked around the mall, marring the vistas they had labored so hard to create. Destroying a significant percentage of those vistas and the monumental buildings that lined them for highways and parking garages would be orders of magnitude worse. Bartholomew had built his career around constructing monumental civic cores, capped by the one he had overseen in St. Louis. Now, he was tasked with the care of the largest, most impressive, and most important civic center in the country, one whose monumentality and symbolic resonance had been designed by L'Enfant long before America had much to monument. Perhaps logically, in Bartholomew's eyes, decentralization and suburbanization were preferable to the evils of congestion and the density of urban forms. But unlike a Le Corbusier, whose speculative plans included leveling most of Paris, Bartholomew was not willing to destroy the same types of fabric he had spent a lifetime creating, especially not in a place as important as the nation's capital.

Harland Bartholomew would throw his weight behind the construction of a significant rail system. To say this was an uphill battle would be an understatement. The majority of the study's members were from the Departments of Transportation of the District, Maryland, and Virginia, as included representatives from the Army Corps of Engineers. These were people whose career was based upon building roads. Not only were expressways the future, but with the federal government willing to pay 90% of the construction costs, building them would essentially be free for local government. The cost of mass transit, on the other hand, would either have to be entirely footed by local taxpayers, an enormous burden, or would require new Congressional legislation. It also didn't hurt that the construction and automotive industries, freshly enlivened by the same federal financing, were becoming a major lobby. Some sort of public transit was needed, on that much they could agree, but most of the highway evangelists believed it could be provided in a more cost effective way by busses travelling on their new freeways. Perhaps even a lane could be dedicated for them, though that was not guaranteed as it would reduce automotive capacity. The situation was so bad that Bartholomew and the transit team could not receive replies on their requests for traffic data from the various DOTs. The automotive explosion and rush to claim federal funding meant that the Departments were jubilantly up to their ears with planning work, and had no time for what they saw as extraneous requests. Even so, the transit team soldiered on with what they had13.

The inclusion of rail transport was a move that was radical and conservative in equal measure. At heart, Bartholomew was still a technocrat. Put simply, his view was that, if people 50

wanted to live in suburban developments, and had to work in the core, it was his job to enable them to do so as much as was practical.

Bartholomew and the

transit team knew that rail was the only mode of transit able to move the requisite number of people into and out of the core on a daily basis. Even in the bestcase scenario, cars and busses simply couldn't handle the flow alone. But what they proposed would be a rail system for the suburban era. Downtown, it would be a subway, not only preserving the historic core physically, but enabling it to retain its role as a central place, economically and socially. Outside the MTS Rail and Bus Plan14

District, by contrast, it would serve as commuter rail, running on existing rights

of ways or in the medians of the new highway system, speeding commuters into and out of the center. Using the techniques that David Hyde had pioneered in Cleveland, including the invention of the "kiss'n'ride" pickup and drop-off area, these surface stations would be widely spaced, and contain both ample parking as well as provision for transfers to local bus service. These suburban outposts were marketed as, "Stations for the Motor Age." Though speculative, Bartholomew reasoned that the federal government would cover Ҁrds of transit construction costs, a number that seems to have been pulled out of thin air as a compromise between all local funding and the 90% of the Interstate act. This would be achievable as, if everything went according to plan, the system would eventually be able pay for itself out of the fare box*. The plan only theorized ridership for commuting use, with a hint of mid-day shopping trips mixed in;; the idea that the existence of a quality transit system could spur more rides and support different uses was either not considered or

*

Whether this payback mechanism was actually believed or merely a political selling point is an open question.

51

dismissed as mathematically unprovable. The system would thus preserve a dense, human scale, primarily single use downtown, while enabling suburbanization to proceed uninhibited15.

The results of all this wrangling were finally published in 1959 as the Mass Transportation Survey (or MTS), notable for being one of the first transportation planning documents in American history to unify both automotive and mass transit planning. It was a detailed, highly illustrated, and lavishly polished document that represented a massively expensive plan. If built, it would cut concrete chasms through the dense federal city, not only for radial highways, but also in the center of the city itself, plowing through a large, figure-eight shaped inner ring. But it also included a plan for over 80 miles of railways tied into an extensive express bus system. Though appearing as a comprehensive plan, the astute reader can notice the essential lack of compromise in the document.

Since the highway and transit sides could neither find the time nor the compassion to reach a compromise, the plan simply included everything, relying on federal largesse to get it all built. In many ways it is an exemplary example of the decline of consensus that Habermas feared: large interest groups, the outcome of a government interested in maintaining the general welfare, could neither achieve public consensus nor

make

the

hard

decisions

necessary. The plan relied entirely on the power of the state and the knowledge of experts, and made no room for truly public discussion.

But whatever its flaws, the MTS sowed the seeds for the Washington Metro in the public imagination, and it would never again leave the public discourse on transportation in greater Washington.

His job completed, and with 3ODQ IRU '&·V ,QQHU 5LQJ

16

President coming

Eisenhower's to

an

end,

term Harland

Bartholomew retired soon after the MTS was published. His time in the District had included other planning documents, including a Vision for the Year 2000 which advanced similarly mixed goals of

52

density and suburbanization. The decision had been made to preserve the historic urban core of Washington for governance and for commercial activity, and while decentralization would continue, the center would neither be obliterated and replaced, nor left to decay. At the same time, like American cities since the invention of the electric streetcar in 1883, the political and seeming popular consensus was that while urbanity was okay for commerce, residences were destined to be located in picturesque, low-density environments. Very soon, that assumption would begin to be challenged17.

End Notes for Chapter 3 1 National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), Mass Transportation Survey Report (Washington, DC: 1959), 1.

2 Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L'Enfant to the National Capital

Planning Commission (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Zachary M. Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Wasington Metro (Baltimore: Johns hopkins University Press, 2006).

3 ´+DUODQG %DUWKRORPHZ LQ $SULO µ ´8QEXLOW +LJKZD\V µ Slate (Accessed May 13th 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/features/2010/unbuilt_highways/washington_dc_the_1956_freeway_pla n.html).

4 Ibid. Zachary M. Schrag ´Mapping Metro, 1955-1968: Urban, Suburban, and Metropolitan Alternatives µ Washington History (Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 2001, pp. 4-23). -RVHSK +HDWKFRWW ´ 7KH :KROH &LW\ ,V 2XU /DERUDWRU\ +DUODQG %DUWKRORPHZ DQG WKH 3URGXFWLRQ RI 8UEDQ .QRZOHGJH µ Journal of Planning History (4, 2005. DOI: 10.1177/153851320528213).

5 Schrag 2001, 2006. Heathcott 2005.

6 Ibid. Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

7 Schrag 2001, 2006. Gutheim 2006.

8 Schrag 2001, 2006. Peter C. Kohler, Capital Transit: Washington's Street Cars: The Final Era 1933-1962 (Colesville, MD: National Capital Trolley Museum, 2001). Brian J. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990).

9 Schrag 2006. Gutheim 2006. United States Government, General Location of National System of Interstate Highways 1956.

Richard F. Weingroff, "Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, Creating the Interstate System," National Atlas (Retrieved April 15th, 2014, http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/transportation/a_highway.html) 10 Wikipedia contributors, "Washington, DC 1955 Yellow Book," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (Accessed December 8,2013 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Washington,_DC_1955_Yellow_Book.jpg) 11 Eldridge Lovelace, Harland Bartholomew: His Contributions to American Urban Planning, Chapter IX (Accessed April 29 th, 2014, https://stlouis-mo.gov/archive/harland-bartholomew/). Schrag 2006.

12 Schrag 2001, 2006. Heathcott 2005.

13 Schrag 2001, 2006. NCPC 1959.

14 NCPC 1959, 53 15Schrag 2001, 2006. NCPC 1959. 1&7$ ´5HFRPPHQGHG WUDQVSRUWDWLRQ V\VWHP IRU WKH QDWLRQDO FDSLWDO UHJLRQ µ (Washington, DC: 1963).

16 Schrag 2006, 26 17 Schrag 2001, 2006. NCPC, Vision for the Year 2000 (Washington, DC: 1961).

53

Stolzenbach, Jacobs, JFK, and the (Re)Emergence of American Urbanity

4

"No urban critic was more effective than Jane Jacobs. Her book ... became an immediate bestseller. ... Jacob's manifesto found a sympathetic audience in many urban residents at a key time in American history."

-Frederick Gutheim, official historian of the National Capital Planning Commission.1

R

osalyn Deutsche, an art historian, critic, and urbanist, has written at length on the problematic nature of public art and public space. All too often, in Deutsche's opinion, art and space are neutered of their individual discursive qualities by existing power

structures, a desire to serve the lowest common denominator, or both. For her, if space, art, or to extend her work to the case in hand, infrastructure, is to be truly democratic, truly public, it must embody ongoing contestation. Unlike Habermas, Deutsche has no preconceptions of a singular popular opinion that can be reached through rational dialogue. The ideas at hand are too powerful, the splits in opinion too great, and the balance of power too unequal for that ever to be the case. To this point, the story of Metro has encompassed a few contestations: Should transportation planning work to (re)concentrate urban life, or should it push towards dispersal? Is the automobile the way of the future, or does rail still have a role to play? What is the role of the 'expert' vis-à-vis the role of the public at large? What is the role of the government? These issues were highly contested by planners, politicians, and academics. But in becoming reality, they would by necessity affect far more than the select few in positions of relative power2.

The MTS plan would carve canyons of concrete through the densely populated District as well as through similarly settled parts of the surrounding, suburban counties.

Not everyone,

however, was quite ready to except a suburban, expressway-driven future. Many residents, especially those of white, middle- and upper-class neighborhoods were, unsurprisingly, none too enthused at the prospect of highways in their backyards. Homes would be destroyed, communities cut in half, and noise and exhaust, it was feared, would envelop entire neighborhoods.

With no local

government in the District to turn to, concerned residents had little choice but to turn to organization, activism, and protest. Within months of the publication of the MTS and the routes of the proposed expressways becoming clear, residents in both the District and some old-line suburban neighborhoods began to demonstrate. Washington, DC was fast becoming home to the first of the 55

so-called freeway revolts, large-scale, local protests over the destruction caused by building urban expressways. Soon, these protests would begin to show up in other urban centers across America, challenging the power and omniscience of the political and planning establishments3.

In Washington, the heart of these protests was Cleveland Park, a white, middle to upper class neighborhood in the city's Northwest quadrant.

Centered on Connecticut Avenue, Cleveland Park was, and to this day retains the typology of, a streetcar suburb. The bulk of the neighborhood contains a mélange of differently sized, but relatively closely spaced, single and Cleveland Park in 2014.

multifamily houses.

These give way to medium density housing and,

eventually, apartment buildings as one approaches the main corridor.

Connecticut Ave. itself is lined with small retailers and restaurants of all sorts,

accessible by broad, people-lined sidewalks. A library, post office, and apartments buildings lie interspersed amongst the stores in a model of multiple use that enables easy, pleasant walkability.

Rock Creek Park, itself a creation of Olmstead and then preserved and completed by the NCPPC, darts in and out, occasionally touching the main street and providing a faux-natural respite from the city life only mere blocks away. It is easy to see why residents would fear destruction of the neighborhood, and particularly of Rock Creek Park, one of the proposed routes of the Northwest Freeway4.

Independent protest movements in Cleveland Park were methodically organized by local lawyers into what would become called the Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning.

Working with activist groups in other neighborhoods, they labored hard, protesting, publishing documents, and lobbying Congress and the media, attempting to make visible the destruction they perceived as imminent. And while the effort to prevent destruction drove a majority of their work, 56

they went further, as well, attempting to shift the public discourse. For instance, they bemoaned the 1956 Interstate Act's 90% federal financing of roads as well-intentioned but short-sighted. Because there was no equivalent federal money for transit, local planners were given a false choice between nearly free road projects or paying for expensive, increasingly unprofitable transit infrastructure alone5.

Even more important, however, was something which went largely unsaid, but which clearly underpinned the SURWHVWRUV· UKHWRULF 7KHLU complaints were not mere NIMBY-ism;; they were no happier to see another neighborhood torn apart by freeways than their own. Rather, their position had a strong undercurrent of rejection for the entire suburban project. After all, they were satisfied with their urban environment³with stores, parks, and amenities in walking distance, and being only a brief streetcar trip away from the center of the District and beyond.

Why should their

environment be sacrificed to secure a vision with which they did not agree? Transportation policy, plans, and technologies have always, as we have seen, been core to both the public and private fabric of the city. Previously, decisions about it had been left either to policy makers or private investors.

Now, transit and its associated effects, both positive and negative, were becoming part of the democratic public sphere.

Numerous people involved in the Cleveland Park freeway revolts would go on to important positions, but for the story of the Metro, none is more important than C. Darwin Stolzenbach*.

Stolzenbach had been born in the Midwest, but had come of age in Washington, graduating from George Washington University. By day he was a systems analyst, an esoteric field which MerriamWebster's defines as, "the process of studying a procedure or business in order to identify its goals and purposes and create systems and procedures that will achieve them in an efficient way.6" The interdisciplinary nature of the field meant it was easy to segue his skills to his hobby and his passion, city and transportation planning. Protest, as it almost always does, had made amateur planners out of much of the neighborhood, but not only had Stolzenbach been involved in the field for far longer (over the

Darwin Stolzenbach.7

*

Though his full name was Charles Darwin Stolzenbach, he almost always went by Darwin.

57

previous few years, he had unsuccessfully tried to achieve several planning positions), his background made him almost uniquely qualified for the task. As someone who made a living observing the interactions of systems and their origins, he could see both how transportation could influence the physical and social shape of cities, as well as how the goals of Bartholomew and the other MTS authors were quite different from those of the protesters. And whereas others were fixated on the negatives of the MTS report, Stolzenbach saw an opportunity. Quickly rising in the ranks of the protestors, gaining the ears of both the leaders and their followers, Stolzenbach encourage the activists to augment their narrative of neighborhood destruction through utilizing the proposed transit system as a counter narrative. Instead of automotive inevitability, this already government-sanctioned plan could be used to promote a radically different vision for what the District and its surrounding environs could be. The seemingly apolitical, technocratic ideals of Harland Bartholomew were in fact anything but: his own document could be used as proof that the shape of a city is not an inevitable outcome, but a matter of choice8.

The protesters received a Democratic boost in 1960 with the election of John F. Kennedy*.

Kennedy was (and remains) the youngest president ever elected to the office, and brought with him an air of the urbane and the cosmopolitan, perhaps best exemplified by his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy. President Kennedy grew up in both Boston and New York, and cut his political teeth as first a congressmen and then as a senator from Massachusetts, meaning he was well steeped in urban affairs .

He had also witnessed, from a distance, the destruction of Boston's West End

neighborhood, making him no stranger to the potential tragedy of "urban renewal." He also, despite an occasional quip to the contrary, took a deep interest in the affairs of the capital city, partly as a political and monumental center, as many of his predecessors had done, but also as a place in and of itself. As but one example, the Beaux-Arts architecture of City Beautiful had remained the federal standard long after it had fallen out of architectural fashion. In much of central Washington it was hard to find a vista that did not include in it some variety of neoclassical building. Kennedy took an active role in shaking up the architectural standards of the federal government and of the city. Both to keep the city architecturally relevant as well as to keep the environment varied for residents and

*

Pun intended.

Indeed, the historian Zachary Schrag keenly notes that Kennedy was the only president to have grown up in cities with subway systems. Given the substantial Kennedy fortune and the copious amounts of time spent at boarding schools and tucked away at Hyannisport, it is questionable exactly how much firsthand experience he might have had with them.

Still, the very fact that he was familiar with transit and cities in general seems to have clearly influence his policies towards them. Ώ

58

workers, he appointed a host of well-heeled, Modernist architects to the Commission of Fine Arts, the body which oversees all design and aesthetic concerns within the District9.

Like many presidents eager to make their mark, Kennedy dismissed many of Eisenhower's officials and replaced them with his own. In District-related affairs, this meant that the highway evangelists were out, and, to fill the vacuum they left, the administration turned to the next best available source: the protesters. Following the advice of the MTS report it had commissioned, in 1961 Congress acted to create the National Capital Transit Administration (or NCTA) in order to begin the process of designing and building the transit system the plan recommended. To run this new organization, Kennedy turned the establishment on its head and appointed an outsider: Darwin Stolzenbach10.

The tenor of public discourse around urbanity was rapidly changing in the early 1960s. In his pioneering work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn attempts to understand the history of scientific knowledge. In Kuhn's conception, the advancement of knowledge and understanding does not simply occur at a linear rate. Rather, scientists work within a paradigm of assumptions, facts, and theories;; a paradigm which not only underpins an era of thought, but provides the very questions that define the path of advancement.

While growth is fairly linear within a paradigm, every once and a while an individual or group will come up with a new theory or discovery that will radically alter our understanding, significantly changing the questions we ask and the assumptions we make. There are "paradigm shifts" (a term Kuhn coined), like those of Copernicus and Galileo, Newton's Laws of Motion, or Einstein's Theories of Relativity: concepts which so thoroughly change the substructures of understanding that, by their implications, affect fields far outside their original scope11.

In 1961, at almost the same time as Stolzenbach's appointment, Jane Jacobs published her seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs too had made a name for herself with freeway protests, and like the Cleveland Park activists, her work was a scathing critique of current practice.

But it was also more: in the field of urban planning, Jacobs' work was a Kuhn-ian paradigm shift. In copious detail, she saws away at the intellectual pillars and assumptions that had held up the field prior, while at the same time artfully outlining a new framework of understanding. Instead of viewing urban form as a problem, she seeks out its strengths. Instead of treating the city as an architectural whole, Jacobs focuses on the interactions between the people and businesses within it, and how a city's structures not only affect these interactions, but how they can enable them. Jacobs· work turned the historical assumptions that had driven planning for a century or more on their head: 59

maybe density wasn't a problem, but a benefit;; maybe not all green spaces are universally good;; and maybe mixing uses has positive benefits for urban dwellers. She savages the urban renewal projects of post-war America not only as functional and aesthetic failures (though clearly, in her view, they were), but as forms of "catastrophic capital," massive changes that rip and stretch the fabric of the city almost to a breaking point. At the same time, even in her Jane Jacobs.

12

darkest critiques, Jacobs is deeply optimistic

about the future of urban spaces, hanging on to the belief that if planners and governments would simply tone down destructive changes, allow direct community involvement, and focus on a different set of fundamentals, cities would thrive13.

Jane Jacobs took a conflict that was based on narratives of opposition and destruction and, by examining and reevaluating their epistemological and historical underpinnings, created a positive and generative mode of understanding.

Within the year, the Cleveland Park protesters,

Stolzenbach's NCTA, and even the Administration would begin to echo both Jacobs' language and the newfound respect for the urban mode of life it brought with it. In 1962, President Kennedy wrote to Congress that, "To conserve and enhance values in existing urban areas is essential. But at least as important are steps to promote economic efficiency and livability in areas of future development. ... The ways that people and goods can be moved in these areas will have a major influence on their structure, on the efficiency of their economy, and on the availability for social and cultural opportunities they can offer their citizens. Our national welfare therefore requires the provision of good urban transportation, with the properly balanced use of private vehicles and modern mass transport to help shape as well as serve urban growth.14"

The shift from the technocratic ideals of Harland Bartholomew is clear: even at the highest levels it was being recognized that the shape of the city is not an inevitable outcome, but a matter of choice15.

Kennedy took action to back up those words. He pushed for the passage of Urban Mass Transit Act, which, though it would not come close in either absolute dollars spent, nor would it 60

approach the 90% contribution promised by the Interstate Highway Act, would allow for federal financing of urban mass transportation systems*. Perhaps more strikingly, in 1962, he appointed Elizabeth Rowe, a Cleveland Park resident and alumna of the protests, as chair of the NCPC. In some ways, Rowe can be seen as the District's analogue to Jacobs. A lifelong Washingtonian, Rowe had cut her teeth on the DC Auditorium Commission, a body which was in charge of what would later be known as the Kennedy Center. The course of her work led her to see the changes being wrought on the banks of the Potomac and in Washington's Southwest, and she was aghast at boththe destruction and the ugly, inhuman landscapes of

Elizabeth Rowe.16

highways, parking lots, and modernist boxes that were taking shape.

Rowe would spend her career at the NCPC striving to convince the other committee members to see the city as a collection of neighborhoods, and would fighting for historic preservation, for plans that embraced urbanity and livability, and against what she saw as the, "vertical ice-tray school of architecture,17" that is, high rise Modernism 18.

Meanwhile, Stolzenbach and the NCTA were doing their part to help ensure Washington's urbanity via transportation. One thing Stolzenbach shared with his predecessor Bartholomew was a desire to make the system as attractive as possible. For Bartholomew, the idea was simple: the more attractive the system was, the easier job it would have of attracting potential riders from their cars.

Stolzenbach shared this goal, but added more to it. The NCTA recognized early on that Metro stations were to be some of Washington's most important public spaces, and as such, they needed to be physically attractive and inviting. There were strong fears that any system which resembled the New York City subway of the era, dark, confined, and graffiti covered, would be disastrous for the health of both the system and the city alike. To accomplish this, rather than follow the usual transportation project paradigm of hiring an engineer to build the system and an architect to decorate the details, Stolzenbach and the NCTA opted to bring in both parties as coequal partners

*

Though pushed for by Kennedy, the UMTA would not pass until 1964, after his death. As an additional note, UMTA allowed Metro to use the Ҁrds federal contribution proposed by Bartholomew, a nod to the power of having an idea officially established in the public discourse. Other and later projects would get far less. Ώ It is both interesting and sad to note how, in Frederick Gutheim, in his official history of the National Capital Planning Commission, spends but a few paragraphs touching on Rowe's tenure before continuing with descriptions of massive plans and projects that came before and after. It seems clear that board of the time, primarily made up of members of the old planning guard, were not readily receptive to such a dramatic change in direction and priority.

61

from the beginning.

The NCTA's public request for designs mimicked both Stolzenbach's

background and the words of Jacobs: they wanted an architect who understood that they were designing a comprehensive system of moving people, and that the system was to be first and foremost designed around human parameters and human needs. This humanistic focus is very much characteristic of the urbanist turn represented by Jacobs19.

The architect they selected, Harry Weese, sought to embody these ideals. He set out to design spaces which would not only be symbolically resonant, but which would fit in with existing federal architecture;; spaces which could not only handle massive amounts of people, but which

+DUU\ :HHVH·V 6WDWLRQV would make these people comfortable. Weese and his team traveled the world studying various subway systems and analyzing how each was utilized, mimicking the contemporaneous sociological work of William H. Whyte on public plazas. Weese envisioned the system as an extension of the street. It was to be freely accessible and was to allow for easy movement, yet would also provide spaces of repose and comfort.

The system would function as well as possible both as an

architectural and as an urban space20.

Even Weese's work, however, could not escape the strange duality of designing for a shifting public need whilst being beholden to the aims of other, more traditionalist, experts. As noted, all federal architecture in the capital had to be approved by the Commission of Fine Arts. Kennedy, in order to keep the District and the CFA relevant, had appointed such Modernist luminaries as Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen, men who were, to put it very mildly, very self-assured and determined to have their say. They all also readily admitted that none of them regularly rode a 62

subway. Though the final design, the famous coffered barrels, was all Weese's, he had originally toned the plan down to save on cost and improve the ease of construction. With no need to worry about anything as base as the cost or the art of building, the CFA ordered the return of the vaults.

Even with its new members, the CFA's concern remained rooted in the monumentality of the capital instead of the needs of local residents. They cared far more about the consistency and iconography of the system, and left the "minor" concerns of its functionality to Weese. For better and for worse, an unelected and unaccountable board had again shaped the future of Washington's public realm, with a direct cost to the taxpayer21.

This fledgling urbanist narrative, however, was hardly universal: it was highly contested.

Suburbs, not only around the District, but in the country as a whole, were still exploding in population, often at the expense of the older, urban cores they surrounded or, in the case of the Sunbelt, forming a whole new type of metropolis. Like all paradigm shifts, particularly those in the realms of social science and human culture, where facts and evidence are rarely clear-cut, the uptake of the urban ideal was not, nor would it ever be, immediate, inevitable, or bloodless. The NCTA still has to contend with the Maryland, Virginia, and District of Columbia Departments of Transportation, the latter of which was still under the heavy influence of the Army Corps of Engineers, all of whom were still hell-bent on expressways. Stolzenbach would soon demonstrate the costs and potential pitfalls of non-Habermasian contested discourse22.

Stolzenbach took a far wider view of his agency's role than most. Even though the NCTA had been created to build mass transit, he chose to read the enabling legislation in such a way as to give the agency control over all transit decisions for the District.

Combined with his hard-

headedness and his sometimes acerbic personality, Stolzenbach was making many enemies both inand outside of the then under construction Beltway. Riding the highs of the media success of the protests, the influence of Death and Life, Rowe's appointment, and Kennedy's general support, in 1962 the NCTA published its first report. It called for essentially building the bare minimum of highways, only completing those which were already under construction or which were considered absolutely necessary. It then took the system proposed by the MTS, including its express bus routes, and proposed building it almost entirely as a rail system, over 100 route-miles of transit in all.

Reactions were swift and aggressive. Stolzenbach and the NCTA were out of touch, the arguments went, were damaging the potential of Washington's future growth by denying it the highways it needed, and were putting a huge operating burden on taxpayers via a "gold-plated" transit system to be built on the public dime. Even the polish of the planning document itself came under attack for 63

its extravagance*. There was still support for the plan within Congress as well as in the District, to be sure. But just like with the MTS, neither Congress nor the public at large were prepared to make hard decisions, nor to seek difficult consensus. If the government could and would build both transit and highways, we should have both, even if, as the freeway revolts were demonstrating, such a policy was schizophrenic. Unable to achieve Congressional support, and under attack from all angles, including critiques from many who were otherwise on their side, the NCTA and Stolzenbach were forced, for the moment, to retreat with their tails between their legs23.

This urban-suburban debate was the crashing together of the new paradigm and the old, and like most such cross-paradigmatic meetings, could not be resolved simply. Fundamentally different beliefs meant that the sides were talking at cross-purposes, with goals that were mutually exclusive.

Deutsche would almost certainly celebrate this contestation, for it meant that, unlike in the falsely rational discourse of Habermas's public sphere, the political issues at hand were being explored democratically and full-heartedly. Absolute victory by either discourse would represent the death of democracy. At the same moment, the debate was starting to strain the region internally, as well as its relationship with Congress and the nation at large. Something was going to be built, and whatever it was, it was going to shape the landscape for a generation at the very least. This debate, heated by the high stakes and the immense sums of money involved, was the crucible in which a fledgling new school of urbanists, planners, and activists were attempting to formulate their plans and refine their ideologies, and the strain was taking its toll. When most of your energy is spent protesting and critiquing, you often have little time left for clear, forward vision. An ideological rift was growing between those who sought preservation and the avoidance of destruction first, and those who sought more generative understandings which could improve urban spaces and, hopefully, create them de novo.

As some critics have pointed out, even Jane Jacobs' work and life can at times embody this divide. Detractors bemoan her hyper-focus on her home neighborhood of Greenwich Village, an environment they contend is relatively rare. Jacobs criticality of de novo urban environments may be justified, but it also arises out of the assumption that such spaces would be created by destroying existing environments. What's more, her career outside of her work, her strong protest and activist side, leaves no clear path for those seeking to create rather than to preserve. Such a priority makes

* That the equally well produced MTS report did not receive a similar criticism speaks volumes to respective power of the highway narrative versus the transit and urban narrative.

64

logical sense when it looks like cities are shrinking, and urban environments are threatened at every turn. Although the Metro was to reach new environments with little notable existing development, even Stolzenbach was starting to be forced in to a preservationist mindset born out of protest24.

Ultimately it was the urge towards preservation that would save the Metro project. Spurred on by a Congressman from North Carolina named Basil Whitener, the NCTA slimmed down its proposed project to the bare essentials. Whitener was one of the many who had witnessed firsthand the

destruction

of

Washington's

Southwest, and wanted to ensure that such destruction never happened again under his watch.

The new NCTA

proposal, nicknamed the "bobtail," was barely 25-miles long. It only served what were generally considered the core urban environments

of

the

District:

the

Northwest, including Cleveland Park, downtown, Union Station, and some of Mid-City via a spur to Columbia Heights.

It was the bare minimum to protect and serve the existing urban core, and as such, it had a much better chance of passing a skeptical Congress. The bobtail plan was published in 1965, this time 7KH ´%REWDLOµ 3ODQ

25

hardly any mention of expressways.

humbly printed via typewriter, and with Even this had difficulty passing Congress: Stolzenbach's

abrasive and contentious nature had become so associated with the NCTA as a whole that few were willing to support the agency with him at the helm. The plan could only be passed through a combination of his forced resignation and the skilled political maneuvering of Whitener. Exactly as KDSSHQHG ZLWK /·(QIDQW D FHQWXU\ DQG D KDOI HDUOLHU Fonstant contestation had cost the Metro's prime mover his job, and had come perilously close to endangering the entire project. At the same time, the battles fought by Stolzenbach, Rowe, and their compatriots ensured that, at the end of the day, not only would a transit system be built, but there would be something resembling an urban city left for it to serve26.

65

And yet, looking at the modern day Metro map, it is clear that the system built ended up being closer to Stolzenbach's vision than that of the bobtail plan. The urban-suburban divide was to yield one last, potentially unexpected, surprise. Through 1965, the suburbs of DC, much like the city proper, had little say in their transit planning. Regional coordination was accomplished by the NCRPC, essentially a federal body with state representation, local highway decisions were being made by distant, unaccountable Departments of Transportation (who in turn were utilizing federal money), and mass transit planning for everything beyond local busses was tied to the NCTA, a federal agency. Ever since the era of Harland Bartholomew, the seven municipalities surrounding the District had strived to find some way to coordinate their planning activities and infrastructure needs*. Getting consensus from this hodgepodge of cities and counties (Prince George's and Montgomery Counties in Maryland, and Fairfax County, Arlington County, and the independent cities of Alexandria, Fairfax, and Falls Church in Virgina) was nearly impossible, and Bartholomew believed that some sort of agency which could unify decision making was necessary in order for his master planning to have any power. As these regions grew during the suburban explosion, each began to develop its own distinctive identity and local power, and the desire to unify slowly began to fade away, piece by piece. Yet, for all their desire for autonomy, these governments saw a Congress which, while physically only a few miles away, felt a world apart, fumbling their transportation prospects. If they were going to get a say in their local future, they needed to act quickly27.

In 1968, these seven governments, the governments of Maryland and Virginia, and the fledgling government of Washington, DC, which was finally beginning to transition towards having a level of autonomy, all banded together and petitioned Congress to create the Washington Area Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or WMATA. After over 150 years of primarily federal control, one facet of infrastructure planning was now in local hands. And this local group, driven by the suburbs, did something surprising: they returned to Stolzenbach's (and, to a degree, Bartholomew's) plans. There were many reasons for this. Some had moved to the suburbs following the promise of easy transit to the core. Most were sick of the seemingly endless traffic snarls that engulfed the region's substantial, if still incomplete, highway system. None wanted to miss out on the potential federal money and promised associated economic development. But above all, the population still believed in the non-compromise of the Mass Transportation Survey: if they could have both an urban Washington based around a rail system and a suburban landscape driven by highways, then there was no reason not to have both. Metro had consistently been

*

Fairfax City, the seventh regional local government, separated from Fairfax County in 1961.

66

popular ever since the MTS was published, and when the bond issues for a massive, 103-mile transit system were finally put to voters, they passed. The political work done, WMATA could turn to Walter McCarter, a technocratic transportation expert from Chicago, to build the system28.

There is irony in the fact that, following the era which gave birth to modern American urbanism and which had begun, ever so slowly, to reverse a century and a half of anti-urban sentiment and suburban longing, their master project was ultimately achieved through the voices of suburban voters. Like with President Washington, background does not necessarily determine ones desired view of the landscape. At the same time, this should not take anything away from the achievements of the early urban evangelists. Not only would their theories and their work continue to grow in influence, in depth, and in popularity, but put simply, without them, there would be no plans for the suburban population (or any other, for that matter) to embrace. Going forward, each county and city would have its say in how, exactly, Metro was planned, and what effects it was going to have on the local environments.

A few were converts to the fledgling school of urban

environments, others stayed true to Bartholomew's rail system for the suburban age.

But there is still one more bit to cover before the story of Metro and urbanity is complete.

To this point, the focus has been primarily on physical, built environments, and secondarily on issues of political power. Over the next thirty years, however, as the system was constructed, new issues would begin to crop up, issues much more strongly tied to politics, race, and economics.

These issues would problematize the conceptions of urbanity that this era had brought to the fore, raising issues that still trouble an ever-more urban American landscape.

End Notes for Chapter 4 1 Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L'Enfant to the National Capital

Planning Commission (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 289.

2 5RVDO\Q 'HXWVFKH ´7KH 4XHVWLRQ RI 3XEOLF 6SDFH µ LQ Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, MIT Press: 1998).

3 Zachary M. Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L'Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). Brian J. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990).

4 Schrag 2006. Gutheim 2006.

5 Schrag 2006. Cudahy 1990.

6 Merriam-Webster Dictionary (Online edition, accessed May 10, 2014, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/systems%20analysis).

7 Schrag 2006, 46 8 Schrag 2006. =DFKDU\ 0 6FKUDJ ´0DSSLQJ 0HWUR - 8UEDQ 6XEXUEDQ DQG 0HWURSROLWDQ $OWHUQDWLYHV µ Washington History (Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 2001, pp. 4-23).

9 Schrag 2006. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2003).

67

10 Ibid 11 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press: 2012).

12

Wikipedia contributors, "Mrs. Jane Jacobs, chairman of the Comm. to save the West Village holds up documentary evidence at press conference at Lions Head Restaurant at Hudson & Charles Sts.," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (Accessed December 8, 2013 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jane_Jacobs.jpg).

13 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City (New York: Random House, 2009). Gutheim 2006.

14 John F. Kennedy, "Special Message to the Congress on Transportation," April 5, 1962 (The Public Papers of President John F. Kennedy 1962: 129).

15 Schrag 2001, 2006. Gutheim 2006.

16 Wikipedia contributors. "Elizabeth Ulman Rowe - NCPC," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (Accessed May 10, 2014. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth_Ulman_Rowe_-_NCPC.jpg).

17 Gutheim 2006, 296.

18 Gutheim 2006. Schrag 2006. Cudahy 1990.

19 Schrag 2006.

20 Schrag 2006. Stanley Allan, For the Glory of Washington (Harry Weese Associates, 1994). William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 1980). Stanley AllaQ ´$ PDQ RI many words and works, 1915- µ Inland Architect (113/1, 1999, p48-64).

21 Schrag 2006. Allan 1994. Allan 1998.

22 Schrag 2006.

23 Ibid. US National Capital Transportation Agency, Transportation in the National capital Region: Finance and Organization. A Report to the President for Transmittal to Congress (Washington, DC, 1962).

24 Max Page and Tomothy Mennel, eds, Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2011). Flint 2009.

25 William Hannah, Metro Stop? Metro, Stop! The Politics of Transportation Planning, (Urban Studies and Planning Program, The University of Maryland, College Park, 1994).

26 Schrag 2006. US National Capital Transportation Agency, Appendix to November 1, 1962 Report to the President, vol.5: System Planning (Washington, DC: 1965).

27 Schrag 2006. Gutheim 2006.

28 Ibid

68

Other Publics, Other Purposes:

5

Race, Politics, and Backlash

"Transit can be a powerful tool to shape development, but only if people agree on the goals."

-Zachary Schrag.1

Social Welfare, Race, and Riots

I

n her famous critique of Habermas's public sphere, the political philosopher Nancy Fraser notes the problem with bourgeois rational discourse: even if all groups were invited to the table, which more often than not, they would not be, the power structures of society are such

that marginalized groups often cannot effectively shift the dialogue.

Even worse, such

underprivileged groups might well end up silenced under the power of the majority's views. Fraser suggests that such groups are "subaltern counterpublics" in a sea of multiple publics, and that a healthy public sphere is one which not only allows for the reality of multiple publics, sometimes interacting, sometimes left to their own devices, but celebrates it2.

To this point in the story, the majority of the individuals and groups driving the discourse surrounding Metro have been white, privileged, and usually male. This hardly constitutes the majority of the public, and during the 1960s in Washington, this fact was becoming ever more apparent. Counterpublics are not always subaltern, of course. One can view David Hyde and the others on the pro-transit group of Harland Bartholomew as a counterpublic which had to fight to be heard. The early urbanists were also a bit of a subaltern counterpublic.

In

addition to bringing their own ideals,

their

language,

own

and

in-group

their

own

discourses, the urbanists were

The Racial Distribution of Washington, DC3

69

also led by women in Jacobs and Rowe.

But in Washington, DC in the 1960s and 1970s, one specific subaltern counterpublic began to play a pivotal role: the predominantly poor, urban population of African Americans.

As

mentioned in Part One, from the Civil War onwards, the District has had a significant black population, usually hovering around twenty percent. As the suburbs exploded in the 1950s and 60s, however, the white population began to leave the city, and the relative percentage of black residents increased. When they became the majority in the 1950s, Washington became the first major US city have an African American majority. The numerical shift did little change African American's relative power, however. Long marginalized through racism, a lack of local representative government also meant they still had little say in how their own city was run4.

Matters were not helped by the 1968 riots which followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Large swaths of the historically black Shaw and Columbia Heights neighborhoods were burned to the ground, including much of their commercial cores. The remnants of redlining, a lack of access to financial resources, and a pre-Community Reinvestment Act banking system which was under no regulation requiring it to lend to urban neighborhoods meant the damaged districts remained

unrepaired

for

decades. Worse still, the riots came

very

close

Washington's downtown.

to

traditional The images of

burning urban environments in 1968 reignited and reinvigorated white fears of urbanity, and white flight intensified.

From

1960 to 1970, years of some optimism Shaw after the 1968 Riots.5

about

an

urban

future, the population of DC had seemed to stabilize, if not

grow again. For the next thirty years, it would plummet*6.

The African American community did have a strong political root system. Many had participated in the freeway revolts, protesting just as hard as their white brethren, albeit with far less

*

See the population chart on page 38.

70

media coverage. Civil Rights organizing was also very strong in the District. These factors were to come to the fore in the years following the riots, from 1968 through 1972. For the first time in nearly a century, and after tireless lobbying by President Lyndon Johnson, the District of Columbia finally won home rule. As the new provisions slowly faded in, the black political establishment quickly took control of most of the organs of the new city government.

The subaltern

counterpublic was subaltern no more, at least on the local level7.

When it came to matters of the Metro, anything related to those who were rapidly gaining the quasi-derogatory appellation of "inner city residents" had been, at best, a minor issue in the years prior to home rule.

Bartholomew had primarily envisioned the system as a way of moving

suburbanites into and out of downtown. Stolzenbach had played with the idea of adding a line to service primarily black communities, but cost concerns caused him to retreat his plan to service primarily existing, white, middle class communities;; regions which, thanks to better resources, had better chances of "unslumming." Serving poorer, predominately black neighborhoods was simply not a priority: not only would building a Metro line through some of the densest urban typology in the District be extraordinarily expensive, but poorer riders would be the least able to shoulder the fare increases that such construction would seem to entail8.

This logic would be challenged by President Johnson's War on Poverty, part of his grand Great Society strategy. Johnson had always been amenable to the urbanist goals of his predecessor;; he had actually lived in Cleveland Park for a number of years in the late 1930s at the beginning of his Congressional career.

First Lady Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson was deeply involved in the

preservationist movement, and had fought for the passage of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act.

But President Johnson's goals went beyond the bounds of white urban

neighborhoods. If the government was going to provide aid in the form of transportation, shouldn't it provide it to all? And if so, might it not be a moral imperative to provide it to those most dependent upon it first? WMATA had an answer which had been prepared by Stolzenbach and his team: the Mid-City line (today's Green Line), which had appeared on and off of planning documents for years. The agency was more than willing to build it if Congress and the agency's patron counties and cities were willing to pay for it9.

A combination of Johnson's pressure and the rising political power of the African American community, now assured a seat on WMATA's Board thanks to home rule, meant that the Green Line would be built. But between the delays of home rule implementation and the necessary engineering work, it was too late for the Green Line to be given priority. It would be built, but it 71

would be built last. With little to be done on that front, the African American leadership, on both the WMATA Board and on the District government, began to demand other things for their constituents. They aimed to ensure that Metro construction employed a minimum percentage of black-owned firms, a highly contentious issue given the specialized expertise involved.

The

involvement of predominately white construction unions didn't aid the situation, either.

The

leadership was successful at forcing WMATA to hire a significant percentage African American workers, as well as in leading the charge for the agency to take over the failing, privately-owned local bus companies, and instituting unified routes and fares. Perhaps most importantly, as inflation began to skyrocket with the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, District board members refused to allow WMATA to raise fares to cover inflating costs. They argued, along the lines of the Great Society of only a few years before, that their communities were already stretched to the breaking point. As nominal costs soared and the actual value of Metro revenue fell, they also fought hard to prevent the plug from being pulled on incomplete sections of the system, especially the Green Line10.

Following the logic of Deutsche and Fraser, a counterpublic was successfully shaping the public sphere through contestation. The implicit and explicit goals of the Metro system started to shift away from simply providing less destructive transportation to white urban- and suburbanites towards one of infrastructure as a matter of social justice. This took the form of jobs, of subsidized transit services, and it was hoped, of a method of using the resources of government to encourage private capital to reinvest in depressed areas. After all, many predominately black areas, like the U Street commercial corridor between Shaw and Columbia Heights, still lay in ruins following the violence of 1968. Even though, as Habermas feared, this was government action born out of class consciousness, the public sphere grew through discourse, some of it even rational. Issues of social justice and infrastructure were debated voraciously on the pages of the local press and by local politicians. Sometimes this was supportive, sometimes it appeared crypto-racist, bemoaning that the inmates were running the asylum. Above all, however, the conception of urbanity was growing. It was not enough to simply preserve: subaltern communities needed help to rebuild their communities, and given the chance to organize, they would seek to achieve it11.

Backlash Another set of counterpublics was anything but subaltern. It is a sad matter of fact that almost any massive infrastructure project, no matter how necessary or noble, will generate a huge amount of backlash, and the Metro would be no different. These counter-narratives would not only 72

affect the built form of Washington by threating and delaying the completion of Metro, but would also greatly complicate the world for the slowing growing camp of pro-urban supporters and professionals.

Some of the earliest parts of this backlash came from the academic community. One of the first of these came from a born-and-raised Washingtonian, Martin Wohl. Wohl was an economist focused on transportation planning, and from the 1959 publication of the MTS report, he was aghast at the cost of the proposed rail system, a cost he projected would never be gained back through fares. Wohl lobbied hard against the system as proposed, and in 1965, along with his colleagues John R. Meyer and John F. Kain published an influential book, The Urban Transportation Problem. Put simply, it attempts to "scientifically" analyze transportation planning. Wohl's (and his colleague's) work is dense, nuanced, and highly mathematical. Neither is it without merit: The Urban Transportation Problem, for example, was one of the first works to identify the cycle of trip generation, the concept that adding more lane-miles of highway is not a panacea for congestion. Each road or land added makes it easier to drive, thus attracting more cars, and leaving the situation as congested as before. But Wohl's work is fundamentally limited by its assumptions. His models assume an automotive default;; the role of transit is to remove automotive trips from the highway network.

Cost projections ignore both the public and private subsidies that go to automotive transit, including everything from a military and diplomatic corps working year after year to ensure the flow of oil to the land and labor requirements of every small business constructing a parking lot. In contrast, transit is left stand on its own, paying every cent of its construction and operating costs out of the fare box. Most importantly, however, Wohl's work has no conception of environmental choice;; that a city or a region might wish to make social and political choices on the way in which it structures itself. Urban environments, as we noted at the very beginning, affect the social, cultural, and economic functioning of a society (and, in turn, those societies affect conceptions of urban environments) in ways that make quantifying value in economic terms incredibly difficult, if not impossible. There are simply too many interrelated variables. The work of Martin Wohl represents a kind of economic technocracy, and just like the technocracy of Harland Bartholomew, it cannot escape the political assumptions buried within it.12 It wasn't only economists who lashed out at rail transit. In 1980, the renowned British urban planner Sir Peter Hall published perhaps the weakest book of his distinguished career, Great Planning Disasters. Hall does not talk about the Metro directly, but rather about a sister rail project built at the same time, with similar goals and similar outcomes: BART in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like 73

Wohl, Hall focuses on the massive cost of the project, and how it seems the system will never recoup its cost. But he also goes further, diving into why BART's ridership numbers and physical effects had not, to that point, lived up to expectations. Hall's conclusion was simply that the planners were wrong: that the drive for a suburban lifestyle could not simply be sublimated through building rail. To some extent, he was correct: rail without physical or cultural changes can have only limited impact. But, as anyone who has been to the Bay Area knows, Hall made a fundamental miscalculation. Today the BART system is fifth-most ridden transportation system in the nation, is struggling to fit more trains into its core sections, and defines the region in substantial ways.

The built

environment takes a significant amount of time to change, and it can take an even longer amount of time to build the political will and social desire to enact those changes. The less than eight years that Hall gave BART was simply nowhere near enough time to reverse years of anti-urban sentiments and suburbanization. And yet, if even a distinguished urbanist like Hall could find fault with massive rail infrastructure investments, it could seem like the urban dream behind projects like Metro would never come13.

By far the biggest backlash, however, was political. Like the narratives above, this reaction was overtly about money, but just as before, financial concerns masked deep-seated sociocultural differences. Metro's expense had always been an issue, as the rejection of Stolzenbach's 1962 plan partially illustrates. However, in the early 1970s, as Metro construction was just beginning, funding for the entire system was to be held hostage by the Democratic chair of the House Subcommittee for District Affairs, Congressman William Natcher. Natcher was ardently pro-highway, and was fed up with seeing the expressway portion of the MTS plan blocked or, worse yet, cancelled by contentious local planning agencies. For years, Natcher would prevent the District from making its contributions to WMATA unless the District approved every highway plan on the table, denying the young agency the funds it needed. In an important way, even post home rule Washington, was still a ward of the state. Worse still, these delays happened during the heart of 1970s inflation, meaning that every day of delay caused the nominal price of Metro to skyrocket14.

74

As Natcher shows, in these years Metro made strange political bedfellows. Urban and suburban, as we have seen, were often difficult conceptions to fit neatly into political boxes, and the modern conception of urban created by Metro pioneers was still quite young. To override Natcher, President Nixon would ally with pro-Great Society Congressional Democrats. Against him would be Congressional Republicans and his own Vice President, Gerald Ford, whose home state of Michigan as well as his own name were synonymous with the automotive industry. Metro won the battle and soldiered on, but the delays and their associated cost increases meant constant returns to Congress and the president for funds, hat-in-hand. Faced with the specter of stagflation, neither President Ford nor President Carter were quick to reopen the purse strings. The focus of opposition in this era was consistently on cost, but cost was in many ways a red herring. Those opposed to Metro were not against largescale government spending, as their continued support for expensive urban highways demonstrates. Rather, it was a continuation of the feud over the future shape of American

Congressman William Natcher15

cities. This was highlighted by a Ford-era directive to the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (today's Federal Transportation Administration). From that point on, local projects not only had to be designed to be built one operable leg at a time, they had to include detailed analyses of smaller, cheaper alternatives. Such policies may be seen as one of the main reasons transit developments following Metro generally took the form of less expensive, and generally less effective, light rail systems16.

Things would only get worse for Metro with the arrival of Ronald Reagan and the Conservative Revolution. The urban-suburban divide would be forced into the left-right politics of the United States. Publicly, Reagan was against large government outlays, particularly for social services. The undertones were harsher still. The Reagan-era espoused to represent the silent "moral majority," a majority which was both white and suburban. Urban environments were continually linked to crime, the crack epidemic, and so-called "welfare queens." A Democratically controlled Congress meant that Metro funding would always eventually pass, but it was a slow, laborious process17.

75

As a result of all this wrangling, the entire 103-mile Metro system would not be completed until 2001, some 25 years after the system began taking passengers. Washington would have to wait long years to see the effects of the system it had decided to build. But also, the scars from the battles over Metro still haunt transit projects to this day, and limit the ability of urban proponents to utilize transit investment to achieve their goals18.

Fumbling for the Future In the meantime, the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts were taking a long time to come to grips with newfound notions of urbanity. As shown by Elizabeth Rowe's short tenure at the NCPC, such large organizations could be slow to change. But as the 1970s and 1980s progressed, these institutions would, in fits and starts, begin to take on a role of exploring the impact of government planning on revitalizing urban environments19.

As the urbanists Kelly Shannon and Marcel Smets note, ´%\ SURYLGLQJ DFFHVVLELOLW\ WR WKH ZLGHU ZRUOG DQG DFWLQJ DV DQ LQWHUIDFH between people and goods of different origins, transportation networks have always been a source of interchange. For that reason, urbanization has DOZD\V GHYHORSHG DURXQG WUDIILF QRGHV« ,QIUDVWUXFWXUH LV WKXV LQWHQWLRQDOO\ set up by public authorities as a meeting place for different layers of society WR LQWHUDFW DQG DV D EDFNERQH RI JHQHUDO FLYLF LPSURYHPHQW« Infrastructural investments thus allow for a form of public management or partnership in a more complex urban transformation. Judiciously planned infrastructure may indeed be one of the most effective means of both achieving quality control over private development and realizing strategic urban improvements. For that reason, the creation of infrastructure always potentially involves a more inclusive landscape or urban project.20µ

Reinvestment had always been a goal of the Metro, though its importance and focus waxed, waned, and shifted over the course of its history. The first place this reinvestment became visible, however, was where the nodes of Shannon and Smets were densest: downtown.

Prior to Metro's

construction, Washington, DC's downtown had been rapidly losing offices and stores to decentralization. The 1968 riots made matters worse, scaring away customers and businesses. To add insult to injury, Metro construction itself, starting when the neighborhood was at its nadir, defaced the region for years, creating dust, noise, and dirt, and making the area difficult to navigate either on foot or by car. Indeed, many of the same actors who had taken part in the freeway protests, appalled at destruction that looked far too similar to what they had feared from expressways, began to turn on Metro. In the long run, however, Metro would turn into a saving grace for central Washington21.

76

The District of Columbia can, in actuality, be seen as having two distinct downtowns:

the

traditional,

old

downtown, centered on Pennsylvania Avenue and G Streets to the east of the White House, and a newer downtown around Farragut Square, to the west of the White House. Ever since Metro had been proposed, businesses that had sought to locate centrally had generally been building in the new downtown, constructing the sleek, personality-less, International Style buildings that so angered Rowe.

Public

sentiment at the time was not kind to Washington's old downtown, just as it was to old central business districts across the nation;; it was generally seen as déclassé and outmoded. But once the central section of Metro was complete, matters would begin to change.

Two of Metro's primary

$ERYH 0DS RI '&·V 'RZQWRZQV %HORZ Development in Gallery Place, in the heart of the old Downtown.22

transfer stations, Metro Center and Gallery Place, are in the heart of the old downtown, making the neighborhood easily and quickly accessible. Moreover, emphasizing the old goal of maintaining Washington as a central place, the Metro's stylized, schematic map emphasizes these downtown stations by placing them at the center. The uniform scaling also increases their prominence, making stations, some barely ѿrd of a mile apart, seem far larger in stature. Metro's opening brought with it large upticks in retail businesses for the area, as nearby office workers started taking midday trips to these central stores. Another major boost came when the General Services Administration, the agency which manages federal office space, made a conscious decision to start moving offices to the old downtown. Not only were these locations now easily accessible to workers from all over the region, and not only were many of the buildings available and undervalued, but the GSA, just like it 77

had

in

the

decentralizing

era,

relished the opportunity to take a leading

and

prestigious

role.

Through

the

Reagan-era

office

boom, and then again in the boom of the middle to late 1990s, both of Washington's downtowns continued to grow, both in size and in importance23.

The

NCPC

and

other

federal agencies were warming to PADC Plans for Pennsylvania Avenue.24

the ideas of the urban and, as this redevelopment was underway, came

together to form the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation. The PADC was active on both sides of the urbanist rift, seeking both preservation and creation. Its primary goal was to restore Pennsylvania Avenue as the "Main Street" of Washington. Through various early attempts at placemaking, such as planting trees and replacing street fixtures with those of a uniform design, the PADC sought to visually improve the street. It fought for the passage of, and encouraged local developers to take advantage of, historic preservation tax credits, either to refurbish existing buildings or, at the very least, rebuild them internally whilst maintaining their exiting facades. At the same time, the PADC attempted to be generative, planning for a variety of new squares and developments along the Avenue, only some of which were built. Their plans echoed Jacobs on the surface, seeking to inject street life via retail and twenty-four hour activity by adding housing units.

But unlike Jacobs, whose work primarily dealt with residential and full-service neighborhoods, the PADC was attempting to graft a fuller conception of urbanity onto what had been a traditional commercial core. Would resources have been better spent spreading influential interventions across the city, as Jacobs explicitly argued for, been more effective than focusing on a single, central neighborhood? It is hard to say. PADC developments like Penn Quarter and the Verizon Center (nee MCI Center) have certainly added a degree of street life, activity, and residences to the area, but the quality of that street life can be questionable, particularly given the general lack of individual political participation and ownership.25

78

Whatever one's views of locations like Penn Quarter are, however, there can be no doubt that central Washington is as economically strong as it has ever been. A public discourse centered on decentralization, suburbanization, and white fear joined forces with expressway and housing investments to move people and capital away from the downtown. Capital investment in Metro, combined with the work of the GSA, downtown business associations, the PADC, and other planners, reshaped that discourse yet again, and has turned the old downtown into one of the District's most valuable neighborhoods26.

End Notes for Chapter 5 1 Zachary M. Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2006), 242.

2 1DQF\ )UDVHU ´5HWKLQNLQJ WKH 3XEOLF 6SKHUH µ LQ &UDLJ &DOKRXQ HG Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

3 Peter Tatian, "Demographic Change in Washington, D.C.: Taking the Long View," Urban Institute: MetroTrends Blog (Published, March 29th 2011. Accessed December 8, 2013, http://blog.metrotrends.org/2011/03/demographicchange-in-washington-d-c-taking-the-long-view/).

4 Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L'Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

5 Leffler, Warren K "D.C. riot. April '68. Aftermath." Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, accessed October 30th, 2013, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.04301 6 Zachary M. Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Gutheim 2006.

7 Ibid 8 6FKUDJ =DFKDU\ 0 6FKUDJ ´0DSSLQJ 0HWUR - 8UEDQ 6XEXUEDQ DQG 0HWURSROLWDQ $OWHUQDWLYHV µ Washington History (Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 2001, pp. 4-23).

9James M. Goode, Best $GGUHVVHV $ &HQWXU\ RI :DVKLQJWRQ·V 'LVWLQJXLVKHG $SDUWPHQW +RXVHV (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988). Schrag 2001, 2006. William Hannah, Metro Stop? Metro, Stop! The Politics of Transportation Planning, (Urban Studies and Planning Program, The University of Maryland, College Park, 1994).

10 Schrag 2006. Stephen C. Swaim, Transit for the 70s: Why Public Transit is Dying in Washington, A Strategy for Revitilization (Washington, DC: Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies, 1972).

11 Schrag 2006. Swaim 1972.

12 Schrag 2006. Meyer, J.R., J.F. Kain, and M. Wohl, The Urban Transportation Problem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). ´2ELWXDULHV MartiQ :RKO 7UDQVSRUWDWLRQ (FRQRPLVW µ The Washington Post (August 8th, 2008, accessed April 30th, 2014: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/08/07/AR2009080703304.html). Vukan R. Vuchic, Transportation for Livable Cities (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research, 1999).

13 Peter Hall, Great Planning Disasters (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), chap 5. American Public Transportation Association (APTA) , "APTA Ridership Report - Q4 2013 Report" (Accessed April 17th, 2014, http://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Pages/RidershipArchives.aspx). Jason Henderson, Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).

14 Schrag 2001, 2006. Gutheim 2006.

15 Wikipedia contributors, "William H Natcher," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (Accessed May 13, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_H_Natcher.jpg).

16 Schrag 2006. Vuchic 1999.

17 Ibid. James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (New York: Touchstone, 1993).

18 Vuchic 1999. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, "Metro History" (Accessed October 27th, 2013, http://www.wmata.com/about_metro/docs/history.pdf).

19 Gutheim 2006.

79

20 Kelley Shannon and Marcel Smets, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (Nai Publishers, 2010) 21 Schrag 2006.

22

Gutheim 2006. Swaim 1972. Hannah 1994.

Schrag 2006. Wikipedia contributors, "Gallery Place," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (Accessed September 18, 2013, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gallery_Place.jpg).

23 Schrag 2006. Gutheim 2006. Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

24 Gutheim 2006, 326.

25 Gutheim 2006. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).

26 Gutheim 2006.

80

Part Three: Looking Critically

6

Driving in Vienna, Walking in Arlington, and Running out of Money in Columbia Heights

T

he Metro has had significant impacts on the urban nature of Greater Washington.

Transportation prognosticators, analysts, and theoreticians argue endlessly about the impact of transit systems, with some arguing that transit has no impact on settlement

patterns, and others arguing that transit access can drive density, vitality, and economic growth.

Washington, DC, however, is a special case, because it provides its own counterfactual. Ever since the 1959 Mass Transportation Survey, Washington, DC has embarked on a program of building both a transit-oriented city in the center, and a suburban, expressway-driven expanse surrounding it. In many ways, greater Washington can be seen as two cities overlaid upon each other, one urban, one suburban. Sometimes they interact, but not often. One can work for a defense contractors in one of the suburban office parks that line the Dulles Toll Road, live in a pleasant, modern house somewhere in Fairfax County, Virginia, shop in nearby malls, and generally, have no need ever to go near the District proper. Or one could work in the heart of Downtown Washington, commuting by Metro from a row house somewhere in the Northwest, with no need of owning a car, and no physical connection to the previous world, except perhaps for the occasional cab ride to Dulles Airport1.

To look at these environments is to look at the urban-suburban divide writ large. But it is also more. The three different regions examined below all represent the different goals behind Metro, and each illustrates different issues of urbanity. Examining them not only makes the history of the urban turn that Metro represents real, but also provides us an insight into the state of urbanity and the problems associated with our understandings of it in 2014, both in Washington and in America at large.

Vienna, Virginia As soon as you come above ground, you realize you aren't in the city anymore. The Orange Line rises out of tunnel in the middle of Interstate 66, and it takes a moment for the eyes to adjust.

A minute ago, you were in a standard Metro station, an unquestionably urban space, full of people, an underground extension of what you naturally presume is activity above. And now, you are in the 85

Top to Bottom, Left to Right: Playing Tag on I-66;; Exiting in the middle of an Expressway;; Beautiful Vienna, Virginia;; /RRNLQJ DW WKH 6WDWLRQ ,W·V a long walk WR DQ\ZKHUH« 7KH (QYLURQV WKHUH LV D person in this picture)

86

middle of one of the least human environments imaginable, the middle of an expressway. Stop after stop goes by, the train getting emptier an d emptier, while inbetween you play an eerie game of tag with the vehicles right outside the window.

In the distance is the

occasional disconnected office tower, and between them, mile after mile of suburban home. Arriving at the last stop, you disembark only to be startled by the noise.

Concrete walls try to hide it, but you are standing in the middle of an expressway. Freakishly large highway signs are visible over the train. After coming to the top of the escalators, you have to walk over one of two enclosed bridges over the Interstate to reach anywhere, although WKHUH LVQ·W PXFK WR UHDFK. On either side awaits a vast expanse of asphalt, barren of anything but parked cars and lonely, exposed bus stations.

Welcome to Vienna, Virginia. Or more precisely, somewhere to the south of Vienna, but close enough for the station to bear the town's name. Vienna is the type of Metro station envisioned by Harland Bartholomew and David Hyde. It exists solely for suburbanites to be able to drive to, park (or, if they are less fortunate, ride a bus to),

Top to Bottom: Where the Sidewalk Ends;; At Vienna Station;; Yield to Pedestrians

and then be whisked by train to a central place. Fairfax County was one of the original municipal governments that banded together to create WMATA, but their approach to system planning was also the one most notably stuck in a pre-urban world. Fairfax County wanted to keep their contribution to the system affordable, and that meant building in the middle of Interstate 66, letting the federal government pick up most of the tab for right-of-way acquisition. Stations would be spartan and designed to handle a maximum amount of parked cars. It was not a priority to locate the stations near existing towns: after all, a majority of riders would be driving from new subdivisions, and once you are in a car, a short extra drive is no matter. Besides, the system would 87

directly link to the urban environment, to potentially scary, poor, and black persons, who, it was feared, would ride the Metro out, commit crime, and then ride it back, all in relative comfort2.

Making matters worse, the Vienna station location was chosen over what was soon to be the edge city of Tysons Corner. Even in the late 1960s Tysons was growing rapidly, and WMATA officials pestered Fairfax planners about possibly rerouting the line. Doing so, however, might incur additional costs and delays, and Fairfax planners saw no reason to serve what was primarily going to be a business and shopping district. After all, the main purpose of Metro was to move residents into and out of the District;; there were no significant mathematical models that predicted substantial reverse commuting or transit-based shopping trips. Thus, mainly out of apathy, one of the largest concentrations of jobs and shops outside of the District would go unserved by Metro for decades.

Instead, trains capable of carrying thousands of people come and go in the middle of an Interstate, surrounded by asphalt3.

Now, that said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the concept of park-and-ride. It offers an excellent way to connect suburbanites to mass transit without building an unwieldy number of lines. At the same time, the Vienna Metro station, by design, can never be anything more than what it is. It is an explicitly non-urban place. It is a bleak, inhuman environment that shatters the human scale. Even if there were something to walk to, doing so would require trudging across thousands of feet of exposed parking lot, and crossing six-lane, arterial roadways with irregular sidewalks and laced with signs reminding drivers to yield to pedestrians. There is no commerce, no bodegas, no shopping facilities, not even a vendor with a cart, to take advantage of this nodal nexus between transit modes. Perhaps it is unfair to single out this one station on a system of 86, but it is an excellent example of a non-urban environment. It is truly, as the plans said it would be, an example of a, "...station for the motor age."4 And yet, at the same, in the distance, new construction is rising. Medium density, fauxurban townhouses are being built on the distant fringes of the station site. If anything symbolizes the turn towards urban life in early twenty-first century America, it is this. Some of these buildings pride themselves on their location, putting, "At Vienna Station" in their names.

This new

construction is dense, but it is not mixed use;; outside of the unpleasant walk to the station for commuting, one would have to drive everywhere else locally. Perhaps, as the history of Metro shows, times are changing, and this environment can change with them. But for now, this part of Vienna exists solely for cars.

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The Arlington Corridor: Rosslyn-Ballston The Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, located just a few stops up the Orange Line from Vienna, could not be more different than its further-out sibling. Arlington County, VA is made up of most of the former portion of the District of Columbia that was retroceded to Virginia in 1847 (the only part it does not include is the independent City of Alexandria). As such, it has a particularly close connection to the District, particularly as the earliest real developments were towns connected to the capital via streetcar. Arlington planners took a very different approach when confronted with the issue of Metro development. They explicitly wanted density and urbanity, and fought hard for a string of expensive, subterranean stations. Partly, this was attributable to their desire to get the maximum return for their hefty investment in Metro financing. But they also saw the potential of their county to be a true extension of the urban environment of Washington, particularly by utilizing their lack of a zoning height requirement to attract office development. The results of their efforts are decidedly mixed5.

The two end stations along the corridor, Rosslyn and Ballston, are by far the most distinctive. Surfacing in Rosslyn, one finds oneself engulfed by large office towers;; it is immediately apparent just how much Rosslyn was successful at becoming that second downtown. The area is decidedly mixed use, as well. Residential towers are mixed in liberally amongst the offices. Many buildings have at least some ground level retail, and the streets, while varying, tend to have a fair number of people on them. Rosslyn suffers from its age: it was built in an era when planners still envisioned that the automobile and urban spaces could coexist easily. Busy streets and grade separation mar the environment, making walking a chore and hurting the human scale. Ballston, by contrast, tried a different approach with similar outcomes.

Though more residential, the

neighborhood is also decidedly mixed use. However, a shopping mall, connected to the Metro entrance by pedestrian skyways, seems to work as hard as possible to hamper the ground level activity.

All parts of the Arlington corridor are fascinating because of just how quickly density drops off away from the main streets. This is the result of an explicit compromise with residents to allow density without marring the surrounding older suburban landscape. The result is a mix of housing types that, accidently, emulates a streetcar suburb quite well. Walking between Rosslyn and Ballston is like walking from oasis to oasis of pedestrian and commercial activity. Between the stations, street life and stores start to fade, and cars and parking lots become more and more common. The streets themselves are large and highway like, but not so busy as to ruin the environment. Even between 89

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stops, signs of life exist;; one can never walk far without seeing someone walking their dog or carrying groceries. But as one gets nearer to a station, stores and people start appearing in greater and greater numbers. The retail mix itself is quite varied, going from areas of nothing but chain stores to areas of boutique, independent restaurants and coffee houses to areas of very workmanlike pizzerias and foreign food markets6.

One thing is certain: the area is growing. Between stops, one quickly loses track of the number of residential buildings under construction, each with large amounts of ground level retail, and each with a rendering proudly displayed out front demonstrate a finished and lively urban building. These areas bear a striking similarity to the zone in transition of Burgess and Hoyt, but in reverse. Instead of the zone being a moral questionable area engulfed by commerce, it is now a zone very much in economic and cultural demand, being scooped up and developed into urban housing. It says something about the demand for twenty-first century urban life in America that, even now, post-2008 recession, residential units can be seen as playing that offices did in the 1920s and 30s, as the highest return on investment per acre7.

It is very tempting to be critical of the Arlington corridor, and its flaws are indeed many.

Streets are wide, and there is a touch of the automobile almost everywhere;; even corner stores tend to have a few parking spaces out back. The large office blocks and residences each required tremendous capital to build, but structurally tend to disconnect residents from political ownership and connection to the street. Perhaps the whole neighborhood is a result of -DFREV· FDWDVWURSKLF capital," even if there was little that it replaced.

There is too much Modernist, glass-curtain

architecture, a style which gives little or no care to the human scale. At the same time, it seems to meet many of the criteria of the urban environment: it has a mixture of uses, an intensity of use, and varied street level spaces, from the very expensive to the cheapest possible. While it falls somewhat short of some of the economic and political criteria laid out at the beginning, one has to wonder where the line between sufficient-to-be-called-urban ends, and the scale of simply being a better-orworse urban environment begins. After all, the neighborhood is barely thirty years old, and it can take time for the generations of buildings and uses that characterize quality urbanity to arise. If nothing else, the Arlington corridor demonstrates what the preservationists have argued since Jacobs: that building an urban environment de novo is, at best, very difficult. At the same time,

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Arlington, warts and all, deserves some credit for not being afraid to take the bull by horns and attempt to extend Washington's built environment8.

Shaw, U Street, and Columbia Heights To return to the words of the urbanists Kelly Shannon and Marcel Smets, "judiciously planned infrastructure may indeed be one of the most effective means of both achieving quality control over private development and realizing strategic urban improvements. For that reason, the creation of infrastructure always potentially involves a more inclusive landscape or urban project. 9µ Nowhere does this quote seem more applicable than in the neighborhoods of Shaw, the U Street Corridor, and Columbia Heights. When the shovels of Metro construction finally hit the dirt, these neighborhoods had just endured some of the most destructive race riots America had ever seen.

The Green Line, which serves these areas, had only recently been added to the plans, and as such, would be the last section completed. Indeed, the delays would be so bad that these portions of the Green Line would not open until between 1991 and 1999. Even in the best of times, it is hard to separate the growth caused by transit from the general urban growth characteristic of the current urban renaissance. That task is made no easier here, where Metro finally opened right as that renaissance was taking hold. Whichever direction the causality, the urban narrative which started in the early 1960s has transformed from that of a somewhat subaltern counterpublic to that of being a full blown narrative of the larger, American public sphere10.

These neighborhoods are hot right, and it is immediately apparent as one exits the U Street station. Mental images of photographs from the 1968 riots immediately clash with the presence of a Starbucks at the top of the station's escalators. The street is busy, filled with people, black and white, and lined with an incredible variety of stores, from expensive boutiques and restaurants to liquor stores with metal bars over their windows. The pace of change is palpable as one walks southeast, towards Shaw proper. Each block is different, each building is different;; while some are newly renovated, others look like they haven't seen a contractor's attention for decades. The same is true for the stock of neat row houses that line every side street. Some have been lovingly, and expensively, restored;; others retain bars on their windows and cheap, vinyl siding. These modest houses are at the base of a strange sight, however, as behind them, the sky is filling with newly built apartment buildings. Walking down 7th Street, towards the Shaw-Howard University station, one in particular stands out. It is brand new, and bears a gigantic banner proclaiming a trendy slogan: "Shaw Streets. New Beats." Just across the street is a building which has the unmistakable charm of 92

Top to Bottom, Left to Right: The U Street Corridor today;; New Apartments rising over old houses;; Eat The Rich;; Haning Out;; Shaw Streets, New Beats.

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public housing, and a mix of both old and young black men hang out around the trees out front, talking and chatting friendlily with a political ownership of the street that would make Jane Jacobs proud. For the moment, any animosity between them and the primarily white, young, and well-off incoming residents is not visible, though only residents know what is said when tensions run high.

Walking further, even the areas with sparser concentrations of retail still have busy streets. The sheer variety is invigorating, and for a moment, it easy to believe in Richard Florida's theories of diversity DWWUDFWLQJ WKH ´FUHDWLYH FODVV µ11 Taking

the

Metro

north

to

Columbia Heights provides more of the same, albeit in slightly different forms.

Racial-density

maps

show

a

white

population surging to meet the black (along with the Asian and Hispanic) populations in the area.

Local economic development

agencies put out glossy pamphlets actively selling the area as "urban," and celebrating its cosmopolitan mix of residents. This is palpable on the street, if one stops to people watch: young white couples window shop while in a nearby plaza, Hispanic mothers, sitting with their shopping, watch their children play on the sculptures and benches.

Columbia

Heights

has

That said, a

decidedly

consumerist bent. A newly constructed mall, of all things, towers on one side of

Top: Racial-Desnity Map of Shaw & Columbia Heights12 Bottom: Columbia Heights

14th Street, proudly covered with the signs of the major chains it contains. Luckily, the designers were smart enough to make the stores open outward, rather than inward, and it seems not to hurt

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the street life one bit. There are signs of developers hedging their bets, including parking garages tucked behind or above newly constructed stores, almost projecting that they do not trust the Metro to bring them their consumers. Other new buildings are the exact opposite, and seem to disprove the polemicist James Howard Kunstler's claim that we can have forgotten how to build truly urban environments. Though clearly new, they seem meld right into the existing fabric, encouraging people to walk by, to stop for cover or for a seat, or to stop in13.

Of course, these neighborhoods were never not urban, however we define that term, at least not physically. Closely packed buildings of varying ages offer both density and different levels of rent, both commercial and residential. The real question is if these neighborhoods, as they currently stand, with mixed populations and mixed economic uses, can be maintained. Gentrification is generally a poor term: its definitions are many, and its problems not well defined. After all, in a capitalist society, anything which tends to redefine rising property values as a negative cannot help but be seen as a non sequitur. Shaw and Columbia Heights are at crossroads outlined by Shannon and Smets ² making the potential of inclusive infrastructure investment a reality. If the challenge in Vienna and of Arlington is one of how to construct an urban environment, than the challenge is Shaw and Columbia Heights is how to maintain the finer economic and political points of that urbanism. Though it is perhaps cliché to say, this challenge is as difficult and pressing as any other facing urban environments in America today. The future of Shaw and Columbia Heights are at the heart of the next stage for the contestation of what the urbanity means in America14.

Perhaps Zachary Schrag says it best: "The experiences of the old downtown and the Mid-City neighborhoods taught planners and residents important lessons about technological solutions to social problems. They learned that rapid transit can be an immensely powerful tool for attracting people and capital to previously decaying neighborhoods. Moreover, it is a more precise tool than traditional urban renewal, allowing cities to restore neighborhoods without flattening them. But because it is so powerful, planners must decide on precise objectives, lest they produce a monoculture of offices downtown or luxury housing in close-in neighborhoods. However great the resources at hand and however flashy the technology, still central is [the Model Inner&LW\ &RPPXQLW\·V@ TXHVWLRQ RI :KDW .LQG RI QHLJKERUKRRG GR \RX want?"15

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End Notes for Chapter 6 1 Susan Handy, "Smart Growth and the Transportation-Land Use Connection: What Does the Research Tell Us?"

International Regional Science Review 28(2005): 146-167. Vukan R. Vuchic, Transportation for Livable Cities (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research, 1999). Terry Moore and Paul Thorsnes, with Bruce Appleyard, The Transportation/Land Use Connection (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2007).

2 Zachary M. Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

3 Ibid. National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), Mass Transportation Survey Report (Washington, DC: 1959).

4 6FKUDJ 9XFKLF 1&7$ ´5HFRPPHQGHG WUDQVSRUWDWLRQ V\VWHP IRU WKH QDWLRQDO FDSLWDO UHJLRQ µ (Washington, DC: 1963).

5 Schrag 2006. Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L'Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

6 Schrag 2006.

7 Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of Chicago to the Rise of its Land Values, 1830-1933 (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2000[1933]). Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984[1925]) 8 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (New York: Touchstone, 1993). Jan Gehl, Cities for People. (Washington: Island Press, 2010).

9 Kelley Shannon and Marcel Smets, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (Nai Publishers, 2010) 10 Schrag 2006. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, "Metro History" (Accessed October 27th, 2013, http://www.wmata.com/about_metro/docs/history.pdf).

11 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class-Revisited (Basic Books, 2nd edition: 2012).

12 Matt Johnson, "Maps show racial divides in Greater Washington," Greater Greater Washington, accessed September 18, 2013, http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/7220/maps-show-racial-divides-in-greater-washington/. Edited by the author.

13 Kunstler 1993.

14 Loretta Lees, "Gentrification," The Encyclopedia of Housing, ed. Willem van Vliet (SAGE Publications, second edition, 1998).

15 Schrag 2006, 220.

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Conclusion

I

n November of 2013, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority put out a solicitation for proposals by developers interested in building on parcels near five different Metro stations. Listed first among their selection criteria is, "...quality development and

placemaking," and the document goes on to state that, "all proposals should emphasize the principles of transit-oriented development: safe, walkable, and attractive communities providing synergy with the transit service. Wherever possible, a mixture of uses is preferred." This request, buzzwords and all, represents a massive evolution in the understanding of American urbanism.

WMATA is using its institutional might to encourage the creation of a specific type of city, an urban one, based around density, vitality, and activity1.

Given that, it can be easy to forget that the Washington Metro was conceived of, designed, and constructed at the height of auto-centric, American suburbanization. We have seen how transportation has, over time, affected the form of the American city by enabling different social, cultural, and political understandings of what a city should be to come to fruition. For much of American history, there has been a strong rejection of urbanity. From Frederick Law Olmstead to Ernest Burgess, so-called "natural" and "pastoral" environments were always preferable to the chaotic environment of the city. At the same moment, Washington, DC was demonstrating the difficulties of creating a new city, particularly one which paid far too little attention to the critical political and economic needs of its inhabitants. Washington, DC's political coming of age occurred at the same moment as its citizens, along with the rest of America, began to rediscover an appreciation for urban environments and recreate an understanding of what they are and how they work. The story of Metro shows both the power of established cultural narratives and political entities, as well as how determined, intelligent, and organized non-governmental organizations can dramatically affect the course of history. At the same time, the story goes on to demonstrate just how difficult it is to balance competing paradigms of understanding, or to justly and equitably provide for the political and economic needs of subaltern counterpublics.

This story of the design, the construction, and the effects of the Washington Metro is ultimately about both how Washington, DC and the nation came to understand, to appreciate, and to construct urbanity. It is an example of how cities are at once products of their time their culture, and their environment, but also the result of deliberate choices made by human actors. All actions 97

and cultural shifts, be they only attempted or successful, have lasting impacts, and we are still living in a world shaped by the after effects of the Metro megaproject and the movements that shaped it.

Sometimes, as with increasing knowledge about urban environments, this helps us, others times, as with the political backlash, it can make life incalculably more difficult. But what is more, for as much as the Metro can be seen as preserving, appreciating, and constructing quality urban environments, its present also reflects just how little we still understand the complex phenomenon of urbanity, and how much work still remains to be done.

End Notes for the Conclusion 1 Jonathan O'Connell, "Metro seeks developers for five sites in Maryland and D.C," The Washington Post (November 5th,

2013, Accessed November 10th, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/metro-seeksdevelopers-for-five-sites-in-maryland-and-dc/2013/11/04/7c763816-458a-11e3-bf0c-cebf37c6f484_story.html). :0$7$ -RLQW 'HYHORSPHQW 6ROLFLWDWLRQµ $FFHVVHG 1RYHPEHU WK http://www.wmata.com/business/joint_development_opportunities/Joint%20Development%20Solicitation%202013.p df), 3.

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