Cities: Light in the Frightening Corners

(See Cover)

Once a land of farms, fields, forests and neat white towns, the U.S. today is a nation of “metropolitan areas.” Last year the Census Bureau listed 224 of them,* containing 70% of the U.S. population.

Through some cultural lag, Americans continue to speak of “the cities” in accents implying that they are something different and special. But the cities today are America, and “the problems of the cities” are pretty much synonymous with the problems of America. To be sure, there are vast physical and psychic differences between Manhattan and some of the leafy streets of its sister borough of Queens, and between Queens and Scarsdale, and between Scarsdale and Levittown, and between all of them and Duluth, Minn. But they are all “urban,” and they must all contend with traffic jams, parking, pollution, shortages of hospitals, parks, police and even water, usually with inadequate schools and spreading slums, and always with taxes and America’s weird tangle of municipal jurisdictions.

Just as most of the problems besetting Americans grow out of the conditions of city life, so do most of the things that make the U.S. tick. Fully 90% of the gross national product comes out of the cities; most of America’s ideas are thought up in the cities, most of the culture is centered there. Yet in a summer of racial wrath that has already shaken dozens of American cities, the problems of urban life suddenly seem all but insuperable.

Many Hats. “All the things we’ve tried to help the cities with aren’t working out very well, are they?” asks Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 40, a former Assistant Secretary of Labor and currently the most controversial of urban-affairs analysts. The question may sound over jaunty, but in fact it reflects the chief preoccupation of Pat Moynihan’s life and the central domestic issue, one that is increasingly engaging the nation’s intellectual community.

Across the country, more and more universities are setting up centers for urban studies. Founded in 1959, the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, which Moynihan heads, is the most creative of the nation’s new centers, † At Harvard, a course in urban problems that was introduced only in 1964 is now among the top three in popularity among undergraduates. At Chicago, graduate students, who once showed little interest in slum problems, are becoming urban specialists by studying the pathology of urban life.

In the process, a new scientific diagnostician has been born. Not just a city planner, not just an educator, not just a politician, he is some of each—and something more. The “urbanologist” aspires to be a student of the entire city, an ecumenist of the metropolis, whose concerns go beyond brick and mortar to budgets and laws, souls and sensibilities. Just as the word urbanology is a cross between Latin and Greek, the science—or is it an art?—is a melange of many disciplines.

Moynihan himself is a historian by training (Ph.D., Tufts, ’61), sociologist by bent, politician by inclination, and intellectual gadfly by design. He stirred a furor that has not yet subsided with a 1965 report on the disintegration of the Negro family. When he turned 40 last March, his Cambridge staff placed an array of hats on his desk with the note: “To the only man we know who could wear them all so well.”

New Keys. In seeking solutions for the embattled cities, the urbanologists would agree with Architect Philip Johnson that “there is no little key that opens all the doors.” In city after city, coping with problem upon problem, they have, however, forged a few new keys and opened some important doors.

Baltimore and Hartford, Conn., include in their city-planning organizations not only the engineers and architects of old, but sociologists and architectural historians as well. New Haven, Conn., under the farsighted command of Mayor Richard C. Lee, has leaned heavily on the ideas of top urbanologists to organize community schools, revitalize a dying downtown area and yet preserve as much as possible of the old neighborhoods’ historical character. Detroit, under Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh, has created a “Human Resources Development” program, budgeted at $27 million this year, to provide adult and youth employment centers, medical clinics, neighborhood youth corps, and to aid small-business development in poor areas.

Skin-Close. The solution that is most urgently needed has so far eluded everybody, and until it is found, the cities will teeter on the brink of violence. That alchemical formula, of course, is the one that would transmute the ghettos from hostile enclaves—impoverished, ugly, seething with resentment—into integral, integrated parts of the cities. “For the present,” says James Q. Wilson, Moynihan’s predecessor at the Joint Center and now his right-hand man, “the urban Negro is, in a fundamental sense, the urban problem.”

The nation’s 22 million Negroes constitute only 11% of the U.S. population—but make up something like 20% of the inner cities. Between 1950 and 1966, some 5,200,000 of them, most from the rural South, moved to the cities. Today, 63% of Washington’s population is Negro, followed by Newark (55%), Baltimore (41%), St. Louis (37%), and Philadelphia and Chicago (30% each). For the great mass of these Negroes, poverty or near poverty seems as much a part of their condition as the color of their skin.

The Negro Family. It is a problem that deeply fascinates the author of the still controversial “Moynihan Report” on the Negro family. Reading the Washington Post one day in 1963, Moynihan, then special assistant to the Secretary of Labor, was drawn to a three-inch story: 50% of the young men who had recently been called for armed forces preinduction tests had failed either the physical or mental examinations. Moynihan decided to follow the well-known statistic to its source.

Burrowing through masses of data, he isolated one factor—family background—linking poverty and poor performance on the induction tests. Cen tral to both was the Negro. Fewer than half of all Negroes reached the age of 18 having lived all of their lives with both parents; 21% of Negro families were fatherless; at least 25%, and maybe as many as 40%, of Negro children were illegitimate.

Journalists, clergymen and social workers had said some of the same things before, but never under the federal imprimatur. In the circumstances, the conclusions were shattering. Said the report: “The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. For vast numbers, the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.”

Decent Liberal. Some eloquent and sympathetic passages from the report that were incorporated into President Johnson’s famous Howard University address in June 1965, won universal applause. But in the weeks that followed, civil rights leaders became increasingly disturbed by blunter items from the report that leaked into newspapers and magazines. Many of the stories emphasized the report’s sensational findings about the family, often overlooking Moynihan’s analysis of the causes, notably centuries of discrimination and economic deprivation.

When the full report was released, many Negro leaders and white liberals were primed to pounce on it as an attack on the Negro family itself. Among other things, Moynihan was called a racist and accused of having given encouragement to segregationists. By the time a White House planning session on Negro problems convened in November, both Moynihan and his report were anathema. “There is a certain kind of decent liberal mind,” he reflected later, “which feels any criticism of liberal programs is illiberal, because everything is so precarious that any criticism is just going to give the enemy ammunition. That’s not the way to make things work. We have to call things as we see them.”

A Girl Like Diahann. Moynihan does that with a vehemence and a candor that earn him enemies. Like the 19th century Irish immigrants, he says, “the harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time,” America’s Negroes “are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing.” Eventually, the Irish closed that gap, and Moynihan has no doubt that the Negroes will too. But they need help.

One major key, of course, is education, and Moynihan endorses any program that will improve schooling for Negroes—whether by means of bussing, where it is politically or physically feasible, or, where it is not, by “compensatory education” that upgrades ghetto schools.

A political realist, Moynihan realizes that genuine integration in many Northern schools is a long way off. That realization is reflected in the U.S. Office of Education’s Coleman Report. “The report shows that in educational achievement, mixing helps the lower class, but does not help the middle class,” notes Moynihan. “If we are going to persuade these [white, middleclass] parents to act differently, we will have to give them a powerful incentive.” Like most sociologists, Moynihan feels that young Negro boys suffer from overexposure to women—in schools as well as fatherless homes. A firm be liever in military training as a spur to selfdiscipline, he says: “When these Negro G.I.s come back from Viet Nam, I would meet them with a real estate agent, a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll, and a list of jobs. I’d try to get half of them into the grade schools, teaching kids who’ve never had anyone but women telling them what to do.”

But education is only one phase of the self-perpetuating cycle that entraps the Negro—a low-paying job, or none at all, leading to housing in a slum, leading to a segregated, second-rate school, leading back to an inferior job. The basic way to break the vicious circle, thinks Moynihan, is with money. “Beef up the family income,” he says, “and everything else will follow in its train.” Moynihan proposes two measures. The Federal Government, he says, should guarantee jobs by becoming the “employer of last resort” any time the national unemployment rate is above 3%. Merely putting the Post Office back on two residential deliveries a day, he points out, would give jobs to 50,000 men, while hundreds of thousands more could be usefully employed in providing such public services as work in hospitals or street and building repair. The cost, at the current rate of unemployment (4%), would be about $1 billion a year and, to Moynihan, well worth it. “The biggest single experience anyone has,” he says, “is working.”

Family Allowances. His second solution to the plight of the urban poor is to give allowances to families with children. “We are the only industrial democracy in the world,” he told a Sen ate subcommittee last winter, “that does not have a family or children’s allowance. And we are the only industrial democracy in the world whose streets are filled with rioters each summer.”

Moynihan’s plan is patterned after the 23-year-old Canadian allowance, based on the age of the child. He suggests something like $8 a month for each child under six, $12 a month for children between six and 17. For a family of four, this would mean a raise of about $40 a month, or roughly $500 a year. Small as the sum is, he says, it should be enough to “sharply reduce the number of Negro families living in poverty.” Cost: about $9 billion a year, at least part of which would be offset by reduced welfare costs.

For the city, says Moynihan, the most important benefit from the plan would be a vast expansion of the “working class” and the elimination of what he calls the “lower class.” The difference is not merely dollars and cents, but an attitude toward life. “In the lower class,” he explains, “they don’t take care of property; in the working class, they do. In the lower class, the men don’t work; in the working class, they’re trying to get overtime. It’s the difference between the rioter and the cop.”

Hard Up. Pat Moynihan was never likely to become a rioter (though at 6 ft. 5 in. and 195 Ibs., he would make a colorful one), but he knows all too well the effects of both poverty and a broken home. Son of a newspaperman with an Irish love of talk, travel and spirits, Pat was born in Tulsa, Okla. When the boy was eleven, his father walked out of the house for good. Pat never saw him again. Next stop: a cold-water flat in East Harlem, followed by similar apartments on the upper West Side, Hell’s Kitchen and other hard-up neighborhoods in Manhattan.

Pat staked out a shoeshine stand on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, learned the art of “hustling” newspapers with his brother Mike. Considerably smaller, Mike would carry a stack of papers into a bar. Big, red-faced Pat would appear, throw the papers on the floor and order Mike never to come into “his” territory again. The bully would then hustle off on other business, leaving Mike behind to sell out his stack to sympathetic customers.

Still in high school, Pat became a longshoreman. A high school friend met him in a bar near the docks one day, mentioned that the City College of New York was giving entrance exams. His stevedore’s hook in his pocket, Pat sauntered over just to see how he would do. He did well, started college. The Navy’s V12 program during World War II sent him later to Middlebury, in Vermont, for a year and then, finally, to Tufts University, outside Boston. Though the war ended before he won his commission, Pat spent a year as a seagoing communications officer on the U.S.S. Quirinus, a transport named for the Roman god of war, returned to a brief but thoroughly educational summer helping his mother and Mike tend bar at Moynihan’s on New York’s wild West 42nd Street, then won a Fulbright Scholarship and packed off to the London School of Economics.

A Taste for the Best. There, during his off-hours, he attended Labor Party meetings, went to dinners at the home of Howard K. Smith of CBS, and brushed elbows with British political figures. Along the way, he developed a taste for the best cheeses, vintage wines and well-cut clothes. A Savile Row tai lor makes his suits to this day.

In 1953, he entered New York Democratic politics as an aide to Robert Wagner and Averell Harriman. Later, working in the Governor’s office as a liaison man in various areas of “the Irish vote,” he met another Harriman aide, pretty Elizabeth Brennan. “You,” he informed her after one long and noisy party, “are going to marry me.” And about two months later, she did. They now have three talented children: Timothy Patrick, 11 (who draws cartoons), Maura Russell, 10 (who writes poetry), John McCloskey, 7 (who designs family Christmas cards), and a wire-haired fox terrier named Whiskey.

Slow & Painful. A regular contributor to magazines—one of his articles was a major critique of automobile safety, which inspired one of his Labor Department coworkers, Ralph Nader—Moynihan wrote a piece on Democratic politics that attracted Sociologist Nathan Glazer, who asked him to write a chapter on the Irish for a book on New York’s ethnic groups, Beyond the Melting Pot. With the same careful eye that he was later to focus on the Ne gro family, Moynihan surveyed his own brethren, and found that Irish progress in America by most standards has been slow and painful. “Paddy and Sambo are the same people,” says Moynihan —both from rural, unschooled backgrounds, both shattered by urban experiences, both falling into patterns of drink and violence.

Moynihan worked in the Kennedy campaign of 1960, and J.F.K. rewarded him by making him, at 34, the youngest sub-Cabinet member in Washington. He stayed through two Secretaries of Labor and even into the Johnson Administration. Shortly after the President’s Howard University speech, Moynihan went back to New York to run for the city council presidency. Bobby Kennedy had some part in persuading him to make the run, though the two have never been close friends; Moynihan feels he should be as critical of Kennedy as he can be within the framework of their similar ideo logical positions. “I didn’t have much to lose,” says Moynihan of his only try for elective office. “It was like a $2 bet at the races.” He lost the bet—Queens District Attorney Frank O’Connor defeated him handily. The day after the election, the telephone rang: the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center asked him to be director. Moynihan decided to spend a quieter year first, took a fellowship at Wesleyan (in Connecticut), then accepted the center’s offer.

Ouija-Board Sociology. “From his position at the key institution on urban affairs,” says a top Administration urbanologist, Moynihan “has the greatest broker position in the world.” Moynihan, to be sure, is not universally admired, nor are his ideas. Some critics, like the Rev. Henry Browne, a Catholic priest on Manhattan’s upper West Side, accuse him of practicing “Ouija-board sociology,” while a friend from the London days, Broadcaster Paul Niven, notes that he has a “natural instinct for self-publicity.” Yet few have articulated the urban crisis so well, and few have put forth so many thoughtful, or at least ingenious, remedies. Among the other top urbanologists:

> Mitchell Sviridoff, 48, head of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, is attempting to bring all of the city’s “human” programs together in one coherent plan. On the theory that welfare recipients will cheat no more than ordinary taxpayers, 300 welfare families have been allowed to receive money on their own signed certificates of need, without the extensive and costly bureaucratic checks normally required. When welfare recipients go to work, many cities dock their welfare payments by the amount of their earnings, thus destroying the incentive to work. New York plans to allow welfare recipients to keep the first $85 of earnings, 30% of the remainder. Sviridoff suggests a thorough reorganization of the educational set-up that would break huge city school systems (New York, for example, currently enrolls 1,100,000 students) into “small, more manageable units” of 10,000 to 20,000 children each.

>Philip Hauser, 57, a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s Center for Urban Studies, the second most important urban research center in the country, advocates a federal “Human Renewal Administration.” “All of the welfare and educational provisions today,” he declares, “are only a Band-Aid on a gaping, massive wound. Should the present trends continue, we can expect guerrilla warfare on a scale terrible to contemplate.” Hauser contends that a great deal of effort is being dissipated. “What is the point of putting children in a Head Start program,” he asks, “and then into a conventional school system not designed to build on what he acquired?”

> Edward Logue, 46, of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, is both the most persuasive defender of urban renewal and the chief mover behind several of its successes. In New Haven’s Wooster Square and Court Street projects, he proved that old neighborhoods can be rehabilitated, thus helping to end the indiscriminate razing that had hitherto prevailed. He applied his New Haven techniques to the “new Boston,” is now running for the mayoralty. Urban renewal would work better, says Logue, if the Federal Government gave “more dough, less advice.” Logue would also decentralize city government so that neighborhoods could make many local decisions.

>Paul Ylvisaker, 45, New Jersey’s commissioner of community affairs, was busy last week trying to repair the damage wrought by the Newark and Plainfield riots—and ran into jeers of “Communist!” and “Nigger lover!” from some Northern rednecks when he restrained National Guardsmen from tearing apart one neighborhood in a search for arms. As a Ford Foundation director for twelve years, he distributed more than $200 million to city and state governments. Now, on the other end, he is attempting to show that states can play a vital role in uniting cities and suburbs. To take care of its growing urban population, the U.S., he says, must build the equivalent of “100 Clevelands” by the end of the century. Instead of merely placing ever wider suburban circles around present cities, he would build new cities. Not only would they take care of expanding population, they would also ease pressure on the ghettos. The ghettos grow by 500,000 Negroes a year, thanks to their high birth rate and migration from the South—which continues at much the same level as in the late 1940s and 1950s, despite the well-publicized difficulties of Northern-city Negro life. And the suburbs now absorb only about 40,000 Negroes a year nationwide. “If we don’t change this,” says Ylvisaker, “our major cities in 15 years will be predominantly Negro. The cities may well become a kind of Sherwood Forest, a prison for the people who live in them and a dangerous place for outsiders.”

All of the urbanologists agree that one of the most important ways of saving the cities is simply to have more cities. Ylvisaker has proposed that New Jersey create a city of 300,000 out of a vast, 21,300-acre swamp across the Hudson River from Manhattan—a “TVA in the meadows”—and has his eye on other undeveloped areas.

The U.S. has no overall “new towns” policy. While about 300 planned communities are now under way across the country, most are merely glorified housing developments. Only three—Reston, Va., Columbia, Md., and Irvine, Calif. —are nationally recognized as new towns. Because they must show a profit, however, even these will not be able to soak up more than a handful of low-income people. Without eminent domain and the resources of a government, the obstacles to building a new city are enormous. To acquire land for Columbia without driving prices to the sky, for example, developers had to use all kinds of cloak-and-dagger techniques in making 169 separate purchases.

Another means of relieving congestion in the big cities is to establish alternate points of concentration in nearby existing cities. One plan, originated by Greek Planner Constantinos Doxiadis, recommends that Port Huron, Mich., a Great Lakes town of 38,000 people, 55 miles from Detroit, be developed as an alternate magnet, to draw business and population from Detroit before the city strangles.

Another approach is the British “grid,” calling for the creation of several self-contained neighborhoods—complete with schools, theaters, shopping centers and parks. Along these lines, Mayor John Lindsay’s task force on urban design suggests that New York City, rather than pack even more skyscrapers into midtown Manhattan and Wall Street, should create a major business district along Harlem’s 125th Street. Governor Nelson Rockefeller, in fact, has encouraged the move by ordering the construction of a 23-story state office building for Harlem. But New York, typically at odds with itself, is also building two 110-story skyscrapers for the World Trade Center in the Wall Street area. That is the kind of act, says Urban Critic Wolf von Eckardt, that is tantamount to “ur-bicide”—city killing.

Don’t Walk. For the past three years, the Maryland-National Capital Park Planning Commission has guided development around Washington along six “corridors” radiating 40 to 50 miles out from the capital. Each corridor contains about five cities, some old, some new. Parkways and strips of greenery will keep the cities from blending into each other, thus preserving each city’s pride and identity. The Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission is doing the same in the seven-county region that includes Milwaukee and Racine.

One of the fondest dreams of the urbanologists is a return to coherent neighborhoods. Doxiadis, who spends much of his time in America, preaches that “we must re-establish the human scale by making man feel part of his environment, not overpowered by it.” His goal: communities of 30,000 to 50,000 people, measuring no more than 2,000 by 2,000 yds.

For him, as for many other planners, the car must be curbed if cities are to be made human again. “For the first time in history—since he came down from the trees,” laments Doxiadis, “man is losing the right to walk inside his cities.” Several cities—among them Philadelphia, Washington, Houston and Minneapolis—either have or are planning pedestrian malls.

Crabgrass Curtain. Los Angeles is usually cited as the chief victim of the automobile—with 55% of its core area given over to freeways, garages and parking lots—but Atlanta is in nearly as clogged a condition (50% of downtown), while Boston (40%) and Denver (30%) are not too far behind. According to one estimate, if New York were to double the capacity of every bridge, tunnel and expressway leading to the city, only 22% of all commuters could drive to work. For those who live within the city, driving is generally out of the question. They take a taxi if they can afford and find one (increasingly difficult), or the subway—which, according to the city’s design task force, is “probably the most squalid environment of the U.S., dank, dingily lit, fetid, raucous with screeching clatter.” And savagely crowded at rush hour.

To many urbanologists, the problems of the city will not be solved until closer links are forged between core and suburb. University of Chicago Historian Richard Wade speaks of a “crabgrass curtain” dividing the two, declares: “Two divisive elements frustrate at tempts to master the metropolis—division of the metropolitan area on the basis of race, and division on the basis of city and suburb.” Agrees New York’s Lindsay: “Whatever strengthens the core city strengthens the suburbs, and vice versa.” The problem, as Columbia University Urbanologist Charles Abrams puts it, is one of resources. “The wealth has gone to the suburbs,” he says.

U.S. cities have deteriorated considerably, but not irreparably. Money can help to salvage them. Chicago’s Hauser figures that an additional $20 billion a year in federal funds over the next decade should do the job; Harvard Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew sets the sum at $25 billion a year; the Senate’s Ribicoff subcommittee puts it at a neat $1 trillion. That kind of money, of course, even over a long period, does not come easily—nor is it all that easy to spend it wisely.

Whatever the level of federal bil lions, the U.S. is going to need the kind of overview offered by urbanologists like Moynihan if its cities are to survive and thrive. Last spring, Rhode Island’s Providence College awarded Moynihan an honorary degree that was accompanied by a particularly apt citation: “You have dared to throw light on some of the most frightening problems facing urban dwellers, not to elicit common agreement with your solutions so much as to force us to look where we would rather not.” Moynihan and the other urbanologists may not have all the answers for the crisis of the cities, but they are at least forcing America to peer into the frighteningly dark corners in search of them.

* Defined as “center cities,” each “with a population of at least 50,000, plus that of its adjacent suburbs,” the nation’s metropolitan areas house 140 million Americans in less than a tenth of the country’s acreage. † There are others at Columbia, New York and Boston Universities, Northwestern, the Universities of Chicago and Illinois, two branches of the University of California, and San Francisco State. Yale and U.S.C. are planning to establish centers.