Manhattan Projects occupies a unique space in the study of post-World War II New York City. Samuel Zipp positions his very accomplished analysis of urban renewal between the two great voices that debated the shape of the metropolitan core of this global city. He does not denounce Robert Moses, but allows the Master Builder to speak and act for himself, a powerful self-indictment. He does not lionize Jane Jacobs but gives her the last word, a coda articulating human-scale urbanism for his engaging book. Zipp deftly gives the readers the tools to disarm one of the most potent documents of early 1950s transformative urban propaganda, the slickly produced slum clearance pamphlets produced by Robert Moses’ minions that portrayed bulldozer demolition as a cleansing, inevitable sign of progress, opposed only by civic whiners, recalcitrant inhabitants and left-wing organizers.
Zipp examines in detail four different ‘interventions’ (a word he uses too much) in the fabric of the city: United Nations headquarters on the East River in Midtown; Stuyvesant Town, a massive development that wiped out portions of the Gas House District on the East Side north of 14th Street; Lincoln Center, the paean to elite culture that submerged an area west of Broadway in the mid-1960s under concrete and marble; and East Harlem, a patchwork of superblock developments that sprang up north of Mt Sinai Hospital east of Fifth Avenue. These projects are picked with an intimate knowledge of the city. The United Nations project represents an application of international capital (with significant help from John D. Rockefeller) and Le Corbusier-style modernism to the American version of a world city. Stuyvesant Town remains the best example of a post-World War II private development executed in the name of civic betterment with the state's power of eminent domain. Lincoln Center projects American high culture on urban space, a sculpting so significant that the president of the United States, no great purveyor of the arts, appeared more than once to sing its praises. East Harlem maps the consolidation of an ethnically diverse population into a non-white ghetto, stripped of the intimate connections of neighbourhood and stacked into vertical towers, themselves a cruel echo of a modernist aesthetic that had produced the UN complex.
Zipp is not infatuated with the logistics of clearance and construction, although his study offers one of the most detailed and perceptive accounts of these processes to date. He focuses on the dynamic between a monolithic vision of the global, vertical metropolis and two resistant, allied positions: tightly woven, intimate cultures of urban neighbourhoods and alternative urban visions based on these smaller, horizontal units. He prepares the reader for Jane Jacobs and, at the same time, shows that she was by no means the first to articulate another way of seeing the city. The UN project was a good place to start. Amid the abattoirs and warehouses people did live, but they were easily silenced and removed. The displacement of parts of the Gas House District was harder, requiring that the neighbourhood could be portrayed in the past tense; Stuyvesant Town gave the area a future. Lincoln Center, the best case-study in the book, presents vigorous, contrary residents engaged in what would become familiar actions in Jane Jacobs’ New York – demonstrations, impassioned testimony, street theatre, photo-ops and largely futile political lobbying. East Harlem interposes another definition of neighbourhood formulated by white social workers and activists who spoke (problematically) on behalf of minority residents.
On several occasions, Zipp enumerates the complex commercial environments that existed in these areas before clearance. This is important work that counteracts the Robert Moses effort to portray these areas as economically blighted, unproductive wastelands. Zipp chronicles in detail the failures of relocating those displaced by development, an unfulfilled promise made by the Housing Act of 1949 that was scorned by Moses. His extensive research, much of it in the Housing Authority archives, reveals ground-level photographs and aerial views that cause the viewer to question the definition of ‘blight’, the aesthetic underpinnings of which were masked by a massive superstructure of selective statistics. His before-and-after maps of blocks of building footprints startlingly illustrate what clearance and superblock consolidation did to the fabric of the city. Through his discussion of the East Harlem projects, the uneasy, decade-long accommodation between urban renewal enthusiasts, who advocated large commercial projects, and ‘housers’, who concerned themselves with the construction of apartments for the poor and lower middle class, is plain to see. Zipp's viewpoint is particularly interdisciplinary in his consideration of the Lincoln Center project, layering references to West Side Story, urban politics, neighbourhood activism, planning and Cold War ideology.
Some of the maps that are reproduced from existing sources rather than redrawn for this volume are so small that they are readable only at the level of shape or pattern. Some readers wishing a more particular reading of street names and building types may be frustrated by this cubist aesthetic. The phrase Cold War, deployed in the book's subtitle, can refer specifically to the battle of cultures and ideologies between the US and the USSR manifested on the streets of New York or, more generally to a period of American cultural life between 1949 and the demise of urban renewal in the early 1970s. One could wonder, therefore, whether to put Zipp's work on the same shelf as Penny von Eschen's or Stephen J. Whitfield's. Zipp masterfully demonstrates, though, that Manhattan Projects deserves to be surrounded by the best studies of the evolution of post-World War II urbanism, for it is surely one of them.
