City urbanism and its endTHE INSTITUTION FOR SOCIAL AND POLICY STUDIES AT YALE UNIVERSITYTHE YALE ISPS SERIESDOUGLAS W. RAECURBANIISMT AND ITYS ENDYALE UNIVERSITY PRESS ? NEW HAVEN AND LONDONFrontispiece: Construction workers posing for an on-the-job portraitduring urban renewals Church Street Project, c. 1963. NHCHS.Copyright ? 2003 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This bookmay not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, inany form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 ofthe U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press),without written permission from the publishers.Unless otherwise specifically noted, all photographs are by permissionof the New Haven Colony Historical Society (NHCHS). All rights reserved. Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Scala type by The ComposingRoom of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley, Harrisonburg, Virginia.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataRae, Douglas W.City : urbanism and its end / Douglas W. Rae.p. cm. (Yale ISPS series)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-300-09577-5 (cloth : alk. paper)1.New Haven (Conn.)Politics and government20th century.2.New Haven (Conn.)Economic conditions20th century.3.New Haven (Conn.)Social conditions20th century.4.Cityand town lifeConnecticutNew HavenHistory20th century.5.IndustrializationSocial aspectsConnecticutNew HavenHistory20th century.6.Urban renewalConnecticutNewHavenHistory20th century.I.Title.II.Series.F104.N657R34 2003974.6 8043dc212003009974A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for BookLongevity of the Council on Library Resources.10987654321For my favorite citizens of New Haven:Ellen, Hugh, Katie, Kim, and their families,even as they stray to the canyons of Manhattan and Colorado, and even into the swamplands of New Jersey and CambridgeThe trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for abeer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man,comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello tothe two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eyeing the girls while waiting to becalled for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from thehardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring the newbabies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded. Customs vary: in someneighborhoods people compare notes on their dogs; in others they comparenotes on their landlords. Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum isnot trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local levelmost ofit fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyoneis a feeling for thepublic identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource intime of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized.Jane Jacobs, 1961CONTENTSPreface, ix1Creative Destruction and the Age of Urbanism, 1PART ONE / URBANISM2Industrial Convergence on a New England Town, 353Fabric of Enterprise, 734Living Local, 1135Civic Density, 1416A Sidewalk Republic, 183PART TWO / END OF URBANISM7Business and Civic Erosion, 19171950, 215CONTENTS8Race, Place, and the Emergence of Spatial Hierarchy, 2549Inventing Dick Lee, 28710Extraordinary Politics: Dick Lee, Urban Renewal, and the End of Urbanism, 31211The End of Urbanism, 36112A City After Urbanism, 393Notes, 433Bibliography, 477Acknowledgments, 499Index, 503viiiPREFACECity: Urbanism and Its Endpursues the course of urban history across theboundaries that separate political science from sociology, geography, economics,and history itself. The books origin, however, goes back to a collision betweenacademic political science and the actual politics of one city. In January 1990, Ileft the chairmanship of the Yale political science department to become chief ad-ministrative officer (CAO) of the city of New Haven, Connecticut, under its firstAfrican-American mayor, John Daniels. Over the eighteen months spent in thatjob, I came to see the city in a more complicated way than before. I was often, infact, puzzled by the oddness of fit between my thoughts on urban politics andpower, and the things I found myself doing from day to day. Dazed by the rush ofwork, I had no time to theorize about the city while I was working for it. On myreturn to Yale in the fall of 1991, I began trying to make sense of my experiencein City Hall.I had spent two decades as a colleague of Robert Dahl, whose Who Governs?wasthe best known-work on the subject. In that justly famous book, Dahl had focu