Downtown is for people.
Jane Jacobs, Fortune Magazine 1958
This is a critical time for the future of the city. All over the country civic leaders and planners are preparing a series of redevelopment projects that will set the character of the center of our cities for generations to come. Great tracts, many blocks wide, are being razed; only a few cities have their new downtown projects already under construction; but almost every big city is getting ready to build, and the plans will soon be set.
What will the projects look like? They will be spacious, park-like, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well kept, dignified cemetery.
And each project will look very much like the next one: the Golden Gateway office and apartment center planned for San Francisco; the Civic Center for New Orleans; the Lower Hill auditorium and apartment project for Pittsburgh; the Convention Center for Cleveland; the Quality Hill offices and apartments for Kansas City; the Capitol Hill project for Nashville. From city to city the architects’ sketches conjure up the same dreary scene; here is no hint of individuality or whim or surprise, no hint that here is a city with a tradition and flavor all its own.
These projects will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it. For they work at cross-purposes to the city. They banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its variety…
There are, certainly, ample reasons for redoing downtown — falling retail sales, tax bases in jeopardy, stagnant real estate values, impossible traffic and parking conditions, failing mass transit, encirclement by slums. But with no intent to minimize these serious matters, it is more to the point to consider what makes a city center magnetic, what can inject the gaiety, the wonder, the cheerful hurly-burly that make people want to come into the city and to linger there. For magnetism is the crux of the problem. All downtown’s values are its byproducts. To create in it an atmosphere of urbanity and exuberance is not a frivolous aim.
We are becoming too solemn about downtown. The architects, planners — and businessmen — are seized with dreams of order, and they have become fascinated with scale models and bird’s-eye views. This is a vicarious way to deal with reality, and it is, unhappily, symptomatic of a design philosophy now dominant: buildings come first, for the goal is to remake the city to fit an abstract concept of what, logically, it should be. But whose logic? The logic of the projects is the logic of egocentric children, playing with pretty blocks and shouting “See what I made!” — a viewpoint much cultivated in our schools of architecture and design. And citizens who should know better are so fascinated by the sheer process of rebuilding that the end results are secondary to them.
With such an approach, the end results will be about as helpful to the city as the dated relics of the City Beautiful movement, which in the early years of this century was going to rejuvenate the city by making it park-like, spacious, and monumental. For the underlying intricacy, and the life that makes downtown worth fixing at all, can never be fostered synthetically. No one can find what will work for our cities by looking at the boulevards of Paris, as the City Beautiful people did; and they can’t find it by looking at suburban Garden Cities, manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities.
You’ve got to get out and walk. Walk, and you will see that many of the assumptions on which the projects depend are visibly wrong. . . . If you get out and walk, you see all sorts of other clues. Why is the hub of downtown such a mixture of things? . . . Why is a good steak house usually in an old building? Why are short blocks apt to be busier than long ones?
It is the premise of this critique that the best way to plan for downtown is to see how people use it today; to look for its strengths and to exploit and reinforce them. There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans. This does not mean accepting the present; downtown does need an overhaul: it is dirty, it is congested. But there are things that are right about it too, and by simple old-fashioned observation we can see what they are. We can see what people like.
HOW HARD CAN A STREET WORK? The best place to look at first is the street. . . . [T]he street works harder than any other part of downtown. It is the nervous system; it communicates the flavor, the feel, the sights. It is the major point of transaction and communication. Users of downtown know very well that downtown needs not fewer streets, but more, especially for pedestrians. They are constantly making new, extra paths for themselves, through mid-block lobbies of buildings, block-through stores and banks, even parking lots and alleys. Some of the builders of downtown know this too, and rent space along their hidden streets….
The animated alley The real potential is in the street, and there are far more opportunities for exploiting it than are realized. Consider, for example, Maiden Lane, an odd two-block-long, narrow, back-door alley in San Francisco. Starting with nothing more remarkable than the dirty, neglected back sides of department stores and nondescript buildings, a group of merchants made this alley into one of the finest shopping streets in America. Maiden Lane has trees along its sidewalks, redwood benches to invite the sightseer or window shopper or buyer to linger, sidewalks of colored paving, sidewalk umbrellas when the sun gets hot. All the merchants do things differently: some put out tables with their wares, some hang out window boxes and grow vines. All the buildings, old and new, look individual; the most celebrated is an expanse of tan brick with a curved doorway, by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The pedestrian’s welfare is supreme; during the rush of the day, he has the street. Maiden Lane is an oasis with an irresistible sense of intimacy, cheerfulness, and spontaneity. It is one of San Francisco’s most powerful downtown magnets.
All of downtown can’t be remade into a bunch of Maiden Lanes, and would be insufferably quaint if it were. But the basic principles illustrated can be realized by any city and in its own particular way. . . . Think of any city street that people enjoy and you will see that characteristically it has old buildings mixed with the new. This mixture is one of downtown’s greatest advantages, for downtown streets need high-yield, middling-yield, low-yield, and no-yield enterprises. The intimate restaurant or good steak house, the art store, the university club, the fine tailor, even the bookstores and antique stores — it is these kinds of enterprises for which old buildings are so congenial. Downtown streets should play up their mixture of buildings with all its unspoken — but well understood — implications of choice….
The pedestrian’s level Let’s look for a moment at the physical dimensions of the street. The user of downtown is mostly on foot, and to enjoy himself he needs to see plenty of contrast on the streets. He needs assurance that the street is neither interminable nor boring, so he does not get weary just looking down it. Thus streets that have an end in sight are often pleasing; so are streets that have the punctuation of contrast at frequent intervals…. Narrow streets, if they are not too narrow… and are not choked with cars, can also cheer a walker by giving him a continual choice of this side of the street or that, and twice as much to see. The differences are something anyone can try out for himself by walking a selection of downtown streets.
This does not mean all downtown streets should be narrow and short. Variety is wanted in this respect too. But it does mean that narrow streets or reasonably wide alleys have a unique value that revitalizers of downtown ought to use to the hilt instead of wasting. It also means that if pedestrian and automobile traffic is separated out on different streets, planners would do better to choose the narrower streets for pedestrians, rather than the most wide and impressive. Where monotonously wide and long streets are turned over to exclusive pedestrian use, they are going to be a problem. They will come much more alive and persuasive if they are broken into varying parts….
Maps of reality But the street, not the block, is the significant unity. When a merchant takes a lease he ponders what is across and up and down the street, rather than what is on the other side of the block. When blight or improvement spreads, it comes along the street. Entire complexes of city life take their names, not from blocks, but from streets — Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, State Street, Canal Street, Beacon Street.
Why do planners fix on the block and ignore the street? The answer lies in a shortcut in their analytical techniques. After planners have mapped building conditions, uses, vacancies, and assessed valuations, block by block, they combine the data for each block, because this is the simplest way to summarize it, and characterize the block by appropriate legends. No matter how individual the street, the data for each side of the street in each block is combined with data for the other three sides of its block. The street is statistically sunk without a trace. The planner has a graphic picture of downtown that tells him little of significance and much that is misleading.
Believing their block maps instead of their eyes, developers think of downtown streets as dividers of areas, not as the unifiers they are. Weighty decisions about redevelopment are made on the basis of what is a “good” or “poor” block, and this leads to worse incongruities than the most unenlightened laissez-faire….
If redevelopers of downtown must depend so heavily on maps instead of simple observation, they should draw a map that looks like a network, and then analyze their data strand by strand of the net, not by the holes in the net. This would give a picture of downtown that would show Fifth Avenue or State Street or Skid Row quite clearly. In the rare cases where a downtown street actually is a divider, this can be shown too, but there is no way to find this out except by walking and looking.
The customer is right In this dependence on maps as some sort of higher reality, project planners and urban designers assume they can create a promenade simply by mapping one in where they want it, then having it built. But a promenade needs promenaders. People have very concrete reasons for where they walk downtown, and whoever would beguile them had better provide those reasons.
The handsome, glittering stretch of newly rebuilt Park Avenue in New York is an illustration of this stubborn point. People simply do not walk there in the crowds they should to justify this elegant asset to the city with its extraordinary crown jewels, Lever House and the new bronze Seagram Building. The office workers and visitors who pour from these buildings turn off, far more often than not, to Lexington Avenue on the east or Madison Avenue on the west. Assuming that the customer is right, an assumption that must be made about the users of downtown, it is obvious that Lexington and Madison have something that Park doesn’t….
The deliberately planned promenade minus promenaders can be seen in the first of the “greenway” streets developed in Philadelphia. Here are the trees, broad sidewalks, and planned vistas — and there are no strollers. Parallel, just a few hundred feet away, is a messy street bordered with stores and activities — jammed with people. This paradox has not been lost on Philadelphia’s planners: along the next greenways they intend to include at last a few commercial establishments….
FOCUS No matter how interesting, raffish, or elegant downtown’s streets may be, something else is needed: focal points. A focal point can be a fountain, or a square, or a building — whatever its form, the focal point is a landmark, and if it is surprising and delightful, a whole district will get a magic spillover. All the truly great downtown focal points carry a surprise that does not stale. No matter how many times you see Times Square, with its illuminated soda-pop waterfalls, animated facial tissues, and steaming neon coffee cups, alive with its crowds, it always makes your eyes pop. No matter how many times you look along Boston’s Newbury Street, the steeple of the Arlington Street Church always comes as a delight to the eye.
Focal points are too often lacking where they would count most, at places where crowds and activities converge. Chicago, for instance, lacks any focal point within the Loop. In other cities perfectly placed points in the midst of great pedestrian traffic have too little made of them — Cleveland’s drab public square, for example, so full of possibilities, or the neglected old Diamond Market in Pittsburgh, which, with just a little showmanship, could be a fine threshold to Gateway Center….
THE ECHO Backers of the project approach often argue that giant superblock projects are the only feasible means of rebuilding downtown. Projects, they point out, can get government redevelopment funds to help pay for land and the high cost of clearing it. Projects afford a means of getting open spaces in the city with no direct charge on the municipal budget for buying or maintaining them. Projects are preferred by big developers, as more profitable to put up than single buildings. Projects are liked by the lending departments of insurance companies, because a big loan requires less investigation and fewer decisions than a collection of small loans; the larger the project and the more separated from its environs, moreover, the less the lender thinks he need worry about contamination from the rest of the city. And projects can tap the public powers of eminent domain; they don’t have to be huge for this tool to be used, but they can be, and so they are….
WHERE IS THIS PLACE? The project approach thus adds nothing to the individuality of a city; quite the opposite — most of the projects reflect a positive mania for obliterating a city’s individuality. They obliterate it even when great gifts of nature are involved. For example, Cleveland, wishing to do something impressive on the shore of Lake Erie, is planning to build an isolated convention center, and the whole thing is to be put on and under a vast, level concrete platform. You will never know you are on a lake shore, except for the distant view of water.
But every downtown can capitalize on its own peculiar combinations of past and present, climate and topography, or accidents of growth. Pittsburgh is on the right track at Mellon Square (an ideally located focal point), where the sidewalk gives way to tall stairways, animated by a cascade. This is a fine dramatization of Pittsburgh’s hilliness, and it is used naturally where the street slopes steeply.
Waterfronts are a great asset, but few cities are doing anything with them. Of the dozens of our cities that have river fronts downtown, only one, San Antonio, has made of this feature a unique amenity. Go to New Orleans and you find that the only way to discover the Mississippi is through an uninviting, enclosed runway leading to a ferry. The view is worth the trip, yet there is not a restaurant on the river frontage, nor any rooftop restaurants from which to view the steamers, no place from which to see the bananas unloaded or watch the drilling rigs and dredges operating. New Orleans found a character in the charming past of the Vieux Carré, but the character of the past is not enough for any city, even New Orleans.
A sense of place is built up, in the end, from many little things too, some so small people take them for granted, and yet the lack of them takes the flavor out of the city: irregularities in level, so often bulldozed away; different kinds of paving, signs and fireplugs and street lights, white marble stoops.
THE TWO-SHIFT CITY It should be unnecessary to observe that the parts of downtown we have been discussing make up a whole. Unfortunately, it is necessary; the project approach that now dominates most thinking assumes that it is desirable to single out activities and redistribute them in an orderly fashion — a civic center here, a cultural center there.
But this notion of order is irreconcilably opposed to the way in which a downtown actually works; what makes it lively is the way so many different kinds of activity tend to support each other. We are accustomed to thinking of downtowns as divided into functional districts — financial, shopping, theatre — and so they are, but only to a degree. As soon as an area gets too exclusively devoted to one type of activity and its direct convenience services, it gets into trouble; it loses its appeal to the users of downtown and it is in danger of becoming a has-been. In New York the area with the most luxuriant mixture of basic activities, midtown, has demonstrated an overwhelmingly greater attractive power for new building than lower Manhattan, even for managerial headquarters, which, in lower Manhattan, would be close to all the big financial houses and law firms — and far away from almost everything else.
Where you find the liveliest downtown you will find one with the basic activities to support two shifts of foot traffic. By night it is just as busy as it is by day. New York’s Fifty-seventh Street is a good example: it works by night because of the apartments and residential hotels near by; because of Carnegie Hall; because of the music, dance, and drama studios and special motion-picture theatres that have been generated by Carnegie Hall. It works by day because of small office buildings on the street and very large office buildings to the east and west. A two-shift operation like this is very stimulating to restaurants, because they get both lunch and dinner trade. But it also encourages every kind of shop or service that is specialized, and needs a clientele sifted from all sorts of population.
It is folly for a downtown to frustrate two-shift operation, as Pittsburgh, for one, is about to do. Pittsburgh is a one-shift downtown but theoretically this could be partly remedied by its new civic auditorium project, to which, later, a symphony hall and apartments are to be added. The site immediately adjoins Pittsburgh’s downtown, and the new facilities could have been tied into the older downtown streets. Open space of urban — not suburban — dimensions could have created a focal point or pleasure grounds, a close, magnetic juncture between the old and the new, not a barrier. However, Pittsburgh’s plans miss the whole point. Every conceivable device — arterial highways, a wide belt of park, parking lots — separates the new project from downtown. The only thing missing is an unscalable wall.
The project will make an impressive sight from the downtown office towers, but for all it can do to revitalize downtown it might as well be miles away….
WANTED: CAREFUL SEEDING When it comes to locating cultural activities, planners could learn a lesson from the New York Public Library; it chooses locations as any good merchant would. It is no accident that its main building sits on one of the best corners in New York, Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, a noble focal point. Back in 1895, the newly formed library committee debated what sort of institution it should form. Deciding to serve as many people as possible, it chose what looked like the central spot in the northward-growing city, asked for and got it.
Today the library locates branches by tentatively picking a spot where foot traffic is heavy. It tries out the spot with a parked bookmobile, and if results are up to expectations it may rent a store for a temporary trial library. Only after it is sure it has the right place to reach the most customers does it build. Recently the Library has put up a fine new main circulation branch right off Fifth Avenue on Fifty-third Street, in the heart of the most active office-building area, and increased its daily circulations by 5,000 at one crack.
The point, to repeat, is to work with the city. Bedraggled and abused as they are, our downtowns do work. They need help, not wholesale razing….
THE CITIZEN The remarkable intricacy and liveliness of downtown can never be created by the abstract logic of a few men. Downtown has had the capability of providing something for everybody only because it has been created by everybody. So it should be in the future; planners and architects have a vital contribution to make, but the citizen has a more vital one. It is his city, after all; his job is not merely to sell plans made by others, it is to get into the thick of the planning job himself. He does not have to be a planner or an architect, or arrogate their functions, to ask the right questions:
● How can new buildings or projects capitalize on the city’s unique qualities? Does the city have a waterfront that could be exploited? An unusual topography?
● How can the city tie in its old buildings with its new ones, so that each complements the other and reinforces the quality of continuity the city should have?
● Can the new projects be tied into downtown streets? The best available sites may be outside downtown — but how far outside of downtown? Does the choice of site anticipate normal growth, or is the site so far away that it will gain no support from downtown, and give it none?
● Does new building exploit the strong qualities of the street — or virtually obliterate the street?
● Will the new project mix all kinds of activities together, or does it mistakenly segregate them?
In short, will the city be any fun? The citizen can be the ultimate expert on this; what is needed is an observant eye, curiosity about people, and a willingness to walk. He should walk not only the streets of his own city, but those of every city he visits. When he has the chance, he should insist on an hour’s walk in the loveliest park, the finest public square in town, and where there is a handy bench he should sit and watch the people for a while. He will understand his own city the better — and, perhaps, steal a few ideas.
Let the citizens decide what end results they want, and they can adapt the rebuilding machinery to suit them. If new laws are needed, they can agitate to get them. The citizens of Fort Worth, for example, are doing this now; indeed, citizens in every big city planning hefty redevelopment have had to push for special legislation.
What a wonderful challenge there is! Rarely before has the citizen had such a chance to reshape the city, and to make it the kind of city that he likes and that others will too. If this means leaving room for the incongruous, or the vulgar or the strange, that is part of the challenge, not the problem.
Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.