Urban Renewal; The Neighborhoods Were Labeled ‘Slums’ for a Reason
Even in the ‘look to the future’ 1950s it would have been hard to garner taxpayer support for a government program to raze vibrant & cohesive neighborhoods. So the neighborhoods that were a target of Urban Renewal had to be rebranded as slums.
By the time Federal urban renewal funds made it to St Louis many of the oldest areas were likely showing their age. Many of these areas were now 75+ years old and had been through the great depression when there was no money for maintenance. Federal lending policies also meant people couldn’t get loans to buy and update a house in the old neighborhood even if they wanted to.
To many these old brick structures, often lacking indoor bathrooms, looked very dated relative to the new cul-de-sac streets of suburbia. Of course anything 75+ years old (with technology of that era), and with deferred maintenance, is going to be easy to pass off as a slum to those with newer places.
Many Planners & Architects wanted a chance to play a real live version of SimCity. They weren’t satisfied with just erasing old structures but they also wanted to rid cities of the old connected street pattern. Out with the old, on with the new. To them the buildings and streets had to go
This was the era when density got a bad rap and got confused with overcrowding. Density in terms of the number of housing units in a given acre is quite different than the number of people in a single housing unit. In the 1950s St Louis enjoyed a wonderful urban density that helped support the corner market and mass transit — both outcasts in the new sprawling suburbia. St Louis was also overcrowded which was made only worse as urban renewal & highway projects began to remove large sections of the city, displacing those residents. The market solution would have been to build new buildings with more units per acre — where a four family stood build an 8-12 unit building. That did happen in small doses but urban renewal took the concept too far — taking entire blocks at a time.
“But they were slums,” people exclaim today. Yeah, they had been assigned the label of slum. Functionally these “slums” worked far better for the residents than anything new in suburbia and certainly better than that which replaced their former homes and businesses. Within walking distance of their homes was all the services they needed — several markets, cleaners, streetcars, etc. While their home may have lacked a toilet and could have used some paint these areas were anything but slums. Slums, the government could blight and take but functioning neighborhoods no. The neighborhoods, home to so many across this city and country, were poor yes but they were home to families, established businesses and so on. Besides buildings and streets, Urban Renewal destroyed social networks in every city it touched. People lived their entire lives in areas now being labeled a slum so it could be taken and cleared.
Ironically the projects that replaced these neighborhoods almost universally became genuine slums, completely dysfunctional collections of people that were placed in a location only because their prior homes were leveled. City after city the pattern was repeated — poor but functioning neighborhoods were razed and replaced with either a highway or monolithic housing projects. In St Louis one such neighborhood labeled as a slum and slated for demolition was Soulard. In Boston they have the North End. Each was once given the title of slum and each today is considered a desirable place to live, if you can afford it.
Urban Renewal policies screwed up St Louis and every major city in the US. We are still dealing with the aftermath more than a half century later.
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A huge misconception that density means overcrowding. It does not. Census defines overcrowding as I believe more than 1.5 persons per room in a single dwelling. One can have 70,000 people in a square mile and as long as each dwelling doesn’t have 20 people then it’s not overcrowded. Dense areas might have crowded streets, but that does not mean their residents are living in overcrowded squalor. Quite the opposite. Dense areas, with diverse housing and land uses, often command high real estate values. Examples locally would be the Central West End, Tower Grove South, and Downtown.
Thank goodness for urbanism and the arguments in favor of revitalization. If DPZ were to rapidly build a neighborhood-scale development that reintroduced the appropriate densities and use/occupancies, favorable to strong neighborhood form, on the former P-I site and up into the many largely vacant blocks of St. Louis Place across Cass, would we call it ‘urban renewal’?
Re: lack of indoor toilets. I live in one of those “lack of indoor toilets” neighborhoods. Many of our big multi-family buildings were built pre-plumbing, and the typical floor plan was one big room after another on a fairly open plan. The toilets were out back, but these were not some shacky lil outhouses. They were more like full-masonry cabanas, one for each unit in the multi-family. They had full masonry sewers serving them, dug very deep, which fed into the big alley sewers. All this was maintained by the Sewers & Streets dept before MSD.
As modern plumbing came along, sometimes instead of carving out little toilet rooms in the big floorplan, which would have wrecked the interiors and also destroyed the wonderful brick courtyards to lay the laterals, they often modernized the plumbing in the cabanas. Then sometimes you see the next phase, which was to build a frame addition or breezeway that hooked the house up to the cabana. Voila, problem solved, with good German ingenuity too. Nothing destroyed, just tweak what you already have.
Baths were often already in the rear of the house in the traditional kitchen/utility area. In my building, there was a roof cistern for rainwater that drained down into tubs and washing sinks. Or until the mid 60’s, you could go to the local bathhouse. Again with the efficiency! It is almost like something you would do for the environment!
However, if you want to label something a slum, “outdoor toilets” is a simple shorthand for a lifestyle that did not conform with the new shiny “nuclear family” suburbs.
In recent years blight has been defined as not having a two-car garage or large enough sidewalks in some neighborhoods. The power of eminent domain was unleashed and local leadership had found new excuses for their grand visions that included strip malls, large parking lots and expanded highways. Elected leadership discovered new sources of campaign contributions too.
I think we need to be realistic here; while certainly a large percentage of neighborhoods that were labeled ‘slums’ in the 1950’s were really just dense, thriving neighborhoods, some slums really were slums. The Historical Society has amazing photos of the neighborhoods along the Mill Creek Valley; raw sewage just feet from people’s doors and buildings crumbling even before the Great Depression. In Washington, DC, where I lived for six years, there was one tenement block that supposedly had 4000 people living in squalid conditions. Blocks are not that big in DC.
So let’s just realize that while wonderful neighborhoods such as Old North St. Louis, Soulard and Lafayette Square were all once labeled slums doesn’t mean that people were living the high life in every slum cleared in the 1950’s.
The language of “redevelopment”, including disastrous urban renewal, is highly prejudicial and illogical, almost by design, so to speak. A state statute requires legal confirmation of “blight” in order for a municipality to grant real estate tax abatement. The term “blight”, like “slum”, is one that can mean virtually anything or nothing, unto itself. An example: despite historically robust sales, huge traffic counts and company plans to substantially reinvest in the Target site at the entrance to St. Louis Hills, the whole corner was declared blighted by ordinance in order to make tax abatement and the provision of eminent domain available to facilitate these plans. The former architecturally nondescript structure was perhaps “obsolescent” (yet another vexing term) but was particularly so when compared to the BIG! SWELL! FABULOUS! NEW! store Target planned for the site. Using the same logic, someone could come along today and say they wanted to build another retail operation on the same site that would be even MORE fabulous, visible from the moon, and with hundreds of more new jobs for the local economy. The current building/site could then be declared blighted and “functionally obsolescent”. Realistically of course, such an attempt would be deemed absurd by local authorities. That is the point.
The new trend is urban condo projects that attempt to displace locals with the wealthy and elite.
http://www.joelkotkin.com/Urban_Affairs/TWI%20The%20Urban%20Bubble.htm
Steve wrote: “City after city the pattern was repeated — poor but functioning neighborhoods were razed and replaced with either a highway or monolithic housing projects. In St Louis one such neighborhood labeled as a slum and slated for demolition was Soulard. In Boston they have the North End. Each was once given the title of slum and each today is considered a desirable place to live, if you can afford it.â€
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Ironically, the North End in Boston and Soulard are two neighborhoods that have been benefitted by unsightly nearby highways.
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In his infamous takedown of Jane Jacobs in the New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote, “the problems of the 20th-century city were vast and complicated. Ms. Jacobs had few answers for suburban sprawl or the nation’s dependence on cars, which remains critical to the development of American cities. She could not see that the same freeway that isolated her beloved, working-class North End from downtown Boston also protected it from gentrification.â€
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(In fact, Boston violates just about every rule in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, and is still more urban and lively than about 95% of American cities.)
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Soulard is often referred to as the “Island of Soulard,†and for good reason. Soulard is clearly separated from other neighboring areas and this has made it easier to break away and foster the image of Historic Soulard. People know when they’re in Soulard and when they’re not. We rarely see serious crime bleed into Soulard from surrounding neighborhoods (as has happened recently in Tower Grove South) because Soulard is surrounded by moats, er, I mean highways. It’s easy to walk around in Soulard, but very difficult to walk to Soulard.
I don’t believe Soulard has benefited from highways, particularly when I consider the loss of historic structures that occurred when they were constructed. It’s also quite easy to walk to Soulard from any direction. When the Peabody Darst Webbe projects were in full flower, Soulard Market was a brief walk down Lafayette Avenue. Several thoroughfares, including Broadway/7th Street, connect Soulard with Downtown to the north and to neighborhoods to its south. Even Benton Park, which is becoming more Soulard-like all the time, is connected across I-55 at InBev, er, Anheuser Busch. A lot of the violent crime that occurred in Soulard and Lafayette Square over past decades was related to their respective proximities to PDW, which has been erased and replaced. It is no coincidence that the full, TIF-driven flowering of Lafayette Square, including the Wire Works project, new commercial/retail and infill housing, occurred almost immediately after PDW bit the dust. It happened FAST. The neighborhood had been steadily “revitalizing” since the ’70s, but the rate of revitalization took a big leap after the projects were demolished.
Just imagine how much more attractive and valuable the property in Soulards could be if those moats, er, I mean highways, were parks-green zones conducive to fun, learning, raising children and fostering friendships and romance.
I wish that 55 and 44 were not there and instead all the cool buildings that got zotzed to allow their construction were still standing. I love parks and green space, but think there are few things more “conducive to fun, learning, raising children and fostering friendships” than beautiful historic structures and neighborhoods.
I do think that eminent domain is abused and I absolutely loved it when a hotel was proposed on Justice Souters home when he rendered his decision in favor the Pfizer developement. That was funny, although not all saw the humor in the revenge of a judges decision, as it was called. However, if it passed that would have made him think just a little.
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However, not all buildings are worth saving. Not all structures can be reused for another purpose once they have truly expired. Some places truly are slums in need of development. I reserve to judge everything on a case by case basis. Put it this way I was personally struck when the first ball hit the Century building. I was on eigth street just south of the Mayflower watching that strike and you could hear gasps in the small crowd assembled nearby. People were truly passionate about that one and I agree that it should have stayed.
Chris,
Sewage is fixed by addressing the sewage problem, not by demolished the entire neighborhood. Disrepair is fixed by repair, through enforcing building codes. The City should have punished slumlords, however, like today they do not.
In the end Slum Clearance was better for ribbon cutting. Fining slum lords isn’t as glamorous.
James Baldwin and Malcolm X kinda screwed their own kind with “urban renewal is negro removal BS.” New York still has many tenements. Are THEY worth saving?? Some victorian houses are pretty but plaster is messier than drywall. True the high rise PJs are a disaster for any number of reasons…and the low rise condo style types are no prize either. The South Bronx did “Gut Renovation” of many buildings but that is expensive and only b/c they are close to Manhattan did hoods like that come back…and then not all the way back. There are still very bad buildings there from early in the last century. Google NY worst landlords and buildings and you’ll see. I’m from the Detroit area. The housing stock there…or what’s LEFT of it..is in total chaos!