78 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
The city planner Ed Logue cared deeply about racial and economic inclusion.
BOOKS
WE BUILT THIS CITY
What can we learn from a long-reviled master of “urban renewal”?
BYADAM GOPNIK
PHOTOGRAPH: LEROY RYAN/THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY (MAN)
ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID PLUNKERT
M
y first memories of life are in a
public-housing project. My par-
ents, then college students, had two kids,
and then quickly three, and soon found
subsidized housing in a new high-rise
in Philadelphia, with brightly colored
plastic doors and gray concrete terraces,
where we lived for three years. At the
tail end of the great period of the fifties
Western, all the kids on the concrete
balconies played at “Davy Crockett” and
“Gunsmoke,” riding hobbyhorses and
firing cap guns up and down their gray
length, a form of play as alien now as
Homeric poetry.
This was the heyday of urban rede-
velopment, when city planners, doing
what was then called “slum clearance,”
created high-density, low-cost public
housing, often on a Corbusian model,
with big towers on broad concrete pla-
zas. In the still optimistic late fifties and
early sixties, it was possible to imagine
and actually use public housing as its
original postwar planners had imagined
it could be used: not as a life sentence
but as a cheerful, clean platform that
people of various racial and ethnic back-
grounds without much money could use
in a transition to another realm of life.
It was a dream that was over almost
before it began and has since been con-
demned by all sides: by urbanists who
came to hate the uniformity of its struc-
tures and their negation of street life; by
minority communities who increasingly
recognized these places as artificial ghet-
tos, without the distinctive character and
variety of real neighborhoods; and by the
city officials who had to police the pla-
zas. As Alex Krieger, a Harvard profes-
sor of urban design, writes in “City on a
Hill: Urban Idealism in America from
the Puritans to the Present” (Harvard),
“Having an address in such places was
like wearing a scarlet letter—perhaps a
P, as in ‘I am Poor.’ ” Such places were
publicly executed throughout the eight-
ies and nineties, imploded with dyna-
mite by despairing state and city gov-
ernments. (All the great implosion
videos are of either casinos or public
housing, a sign of the American times.)
Schuylkill Falls, the public-housing proj-
ect of my happy early memory, was among
them, demolished in 1996 after sitting
abandoned and desolate for twenty years.
Now, however, for the first time in a
half century, the people who built the
bad stuff are reëmerging as possible mod-
els of how we might yet build good
stuff—with a reclamation of such once-
banished terms as “urban renewal” and
“high-rise housing.” This revival has
been pushed forward by the same force
that has recently pushed other forms of
public neo-progressivism, at least rhe-
torically: a desire for public action in
the face of the obvious impasse of the
private, with free-market mechanisms
having left city housing so costly that
teachers and cops often live two hours
outside the neighborhoods they serve.
You “can’t trust the private sector to pro-
tect the public interest” was the city
planner Edward Logue’s most emphatic
aphorism on the subject, and it is one
that has taken on new life.
Even New York’s “master builder,”
Robert Moses himself, a hate object for
later urbanists, who preferred preserva-
tion to innovation and the small-scale
to the large, has come in for a revision-
ist look: whatever his faults, he built city
amenities for city people—playgrounds
and parks and the Triborough Bridge—
rather than splinters filled with condos
for the ultra-rich. Not since the Beaux-
Arts revival of the mid-seventies, when
neoclassical ornament and elaborate
façades became fashionable again—
when Philip Johnson could put a Chip-
pendale edifice on the A.T. & T. build-
