How A Federal Housing Law Led To The Displacement of Hundreds of Thousands of Poor People
The Housing Act of 1949 transformed American cities, but at a high human cost
Lincoln Center today
When the producers of the 1961 movie version of the huge Broadway hit musical, West Side Story, were looking for somewhere to shoot the opening scene, they had the perfect place available to them. It was on Manhattan's West Side, which obviously fit. The tenement buildings and gritty streets were appropriately seedy. Even better, it was practically empty because almost all of the people who lived there were conveniently gone — permanently.
The neighborhood where they would shoot the menacing finger-popping members of the Jets gang was called San Juan Hill. But, by then, it wasn't really a neighborhood anymore. It was a ghost.
Residents of San Juan Hill neighborhood, 1939
photo credit: Lincoln Center, from Museum of the City of NY
In the late 19th Century, Black New Yorkers were on the move. Not by choice. The city's African-American population was being pushed north by the implacable forces of racism, housing discrimination, and violence, from Greenwich Village to the Tenderloin district and, at the end of the 19th century, into an area just above West 59th Street, San Juan Hill.
Marcy Sacks, a history professor at Albion College in Michigan, described it in her book, Before Harlem.
"(It) became one of the most congested residential areas in the city as southern and Caribbean migrants crowded into its dilapidated apartments,” Sacks wrote. “By 1910, the bulk of Manhattan's black population, which had reached 60,000, settled in the region. A single block accommodated upward of five thousand people. The tiny apartments often opened into air shafts or narrow courtyards that admitted no fresh air, only the smell of garbage below. Many rooms had no windows at all."
San Juan Hill -- no one really knows where it got its name -- was desperately poor, unsanitary and dangerous. Crime was rampant. It was racially mixed well into the mid-20th century, though typically segregated by building or block, but those tensions often boiled over into clashes. It was a tough neighborhood.
Despite its many problems, for the people who lived there, it was home. There were hundreds of small shops and eating establishments. People who had come to New York from the same distant places formed a kind of ad hoc mutual support network. Music -- especially jazz -- thrived in clubs and basements. The legendary jazz musician James P. Johnson lived there, and the great pianist Thelonius Monk moved into the area as a child and raised his family there.
Thelonius’s son, T.S. Monk, a jazz drummer, would recall, “There were candy stores, lots of little shops. It was a very, very vibrant community."
In the years following the Second World War, as a flood of veterans returned home, the nation was plunged into a severe housing crisis. In the nation's biggest cities, the central urban cores contained dense populations packed into enormous swaths of sub-standard apartments like those in San Juan Hill.
In 1949, Congress passed and President Truman signed into law the Federal Housing Act of 1949, ambitious legislation to address the problem, famously declaring that every American deserved "a decent home and a suitable living experience."
The mortgage provisions of the Act would make it possible for millions of Americans to buy homes and spur the growth of the suburbs. But it was Title I of the Act that would transform the nation's largest cities by providing federal funds for what it called "urban redevelopment," which would later be dubbed urban renewal.
"Title I ... extended the power of eminent domain, traditionally used in America only for government-built projects, so drastically that governments could now condemn land and turn it over to individuals -- for them to build on it projects agreeable to the government," wrote Robert Caro in The Power Broker, his epic biography of Robert Moses. "Under Title I, whole sections of cities could be condemned, their residents evicted, the buildings in which those residents had lived demolished -- and the land turned over to private individuals. Here was power new in the annals of democracy."
Power that was ripe for misuse and abuse.
It wasn't long before San Juan Hill was selected for urban renewal by Moses, who was chair of the city's Slum Clearance Committee among his many titles and sources of immense political power. Moses also designated the Lincoln Square neighborhood, just to the east, as a site for a large performing arts complex and the Manhattan campus of Fordham University.
Amsterdam Avenue, 1937
Photo credit: Lincoln Center, from NY Public Library
By the time San Juan Hill was targeted in 1955, much of it had become a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. It remained poor. Part of it had already been razed in the 1940s to build a massive public housing project, the Amsterdam Houses. But many of the original tenements remained, home to thousands of families -- white, Black and increasingly Puerto Rican -- and hundreds of small businesses.
They would have to be removed.
In theory, the displaced residents would be able to return to bigger, better, newer apartments in their old neighborhood. The problem was that Title I did not require the private developers to build housing the poor could afford. So, they didn't.
"Moses was not even making a pretense of creating new homes for the families displaced; to replace the 7,000 low-income apartments being destroyed, 4,400 new ones were being planned - 4,000 of them luxury apartments,” Caro wrote.
Some residents tried to fight their evictions. They lost, of course.
Photo credit: Lincoln Center, from NY Public Library
Years later, Moses would sneeringly dismiss the neighborhoods he had destroyed.
"That was the worst slum in New York," he said in an interview in 1977, clapping his hands for emphasis. "And we cleared it out."
Razed site of Lincoln Towers (foreground) and Lincoln Center (background)
Photo credit: John Rooney
Where San Juan Hill had existed above West 65th Street, Lincoln Towers, a massive high-rise complex, rose.
Variations of this West Side story played out throughout the country through the 1950s and into the 1960s.
In Boston, the predominantly Italian and Jewish neighborhood of the West End was wiped out to make way for hundreds of high-rise, high-rent apartment and office buildings.
Demolition of Boston’s West End
Photo credit; West End Museum
In Detroit, the African-American Black Bottom neighborhood -- so named for its fertile land -- was erased to build the Chrysler Expressway and a new neighborhood that few Black Bottom residents could afford.
The Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit
Photo credit: Detroit Historical Society
Black Bottom neighborhood, Detroit
Photo credit: Wayne State University
In Seattle, residents of the city's Central Area were evicted and their properties condemned and torn down. The New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, a Black church, was paid $34,000 for its land. It became a small park. The minister of the church says that the same land is now worth $2 million.
I found on-line a recording of a 1967 public hearing on a proposed urban renewal project. A woman whose home and beauty shop were slated for demolition spoke in a sad, weary voice.
"Why do I have to give up my place just because urban renewal wants to come in and wipe us completely off the map?" Mary Collins says. "I have no place to go."
Aurora Vargas being evicted from her home in Chavez Ravine, 1959*
In Los Angeles, the Mexican-American villages in the hills of Chavez Ravine above downtown were bulldozed to build a massive public housing project. The project was never built. Instead, the land was given to the owners of the Brooklyn Dodgers to build a stadium as an inducement to relocate to L.A.
In all, hundreds of thousands, perhaps more poor people -- many of them Black or Latino but plenty of white people too -- were kicked out of their homes. Most were left to fend for themselves, a mockery of the stated goal of the Housing Act.
Samuel Zipp, professor of American Studies and Urban Studies at Brown University, said, "Over the decades, many have lost faith in this just-so story. The old neighborhood may have been run down, a source of hardship and deprivation, but the cure was worse than the curse. Clearance and rebuilding scattered neighbors, broke apart fragile social networks, uprooted working class communities, destroyed jobs, targeted people of color for removal and deepened racial segregation."
"(Slum clearance) is always the excuse," Sacks told me recently. "The answer isn't to raze it and destroy it. It's to make it more habitable."
Seattle urban renewal meeting, 1962
Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives
On the 50th anniversary of the Federal Housing Act, Robert E. Lang and Rebecca R. Sohmer of the Fannie Mae Foundation, said, "The consensus is that Title I urban renewal mostly failed... By steamrolling people and places and replacing them with office buildings, convention centers, high-rising housing and (all too often) vacant lots, urban renewal typically worsened the conditions it sought to relieve by spreading the problem to other parts of the city.”
In the 1970s, urban renewal, as it had been practiced, effectively ended.
There is a bitter irony to what had taken place. According to Abraham Von Hoffman of Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies, when the dust and debris settled, urban renewal, launched with fanfare as a solution to a housing shortage, had resulted in the destruction of more apartment units than were built.
Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center
This past fall in New York City, a long overdue reckoning took place. As part of an effort to "confront injustices in its founding history," Lincoln Center* commissioned the jazz trumpeter Étienne Charles to compose and perform a musical score as a tribute to the neighborhoods that once existed. He and his band, Creole Soul, performed San Juan Hill: A New York Story at the re-opening of Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic.
"This piece is about showing the magic of the culture that was created when these people came together here," Charles told NPR. "Gullah dance here, paseo rhythm there, Antillean waltz here, Sicilian folk chant there, Irish drunk song there -- all these pieces mixed up, the blues from the South."
On the northern façade of Geffen Hall, there is a series of panels of colorful murals by the artist, Nina Chanel Abney. The work is called San Juan Heal.
* Chavez Ravine photo credit: Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Library Special Collection, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA
Interesting read
A sad tale, very well told. I can almost hear the woman who would lose her home and business speak in a weary voice.