The Columbus Circle area before slum clearance. Source : Committee on Slum Clearance, Columbus Circle , inside cover. 

Contexts in source publication

Context 1

... The aerial view of the drawing was important because a bird's-eye view was the most suitable way to represent the physical order of this style of modernist architecture. In comparison, the site to be cleared was a hodge- podge of residential and commercial buildings as well as parking lots that existed next to each other without amounting to an orderly whole ( Figure 2). The existing built environment was the outcome of layers of unplanned growth and shrinkage with the parking lots taking the place of obsolete buildings that had been demolished. ...

Context 2

... these two terms did not usually have an identical meaning and the change of this section title was not accidental. Facing its first serious legal challenge, Moses’s organization changed the title, because its staff members felt that it was more accurate to characterize the areas subject to clearance as blighted. 17 It was in the 1930s that the term blight was elevated and joined the term slum . Both terms were used to explain urban decline and advocate various forms of rehabilitation. 18 Economist Mabel Walker defined a blighted area as ‘‘an area in which deteriorating forces have obviously reduced economic and social values to such a degree that widespread rehabilitation is necessary to forestall the development of an actual slum condition.’’ 19 Walker used blight and obsolescence as synon- ymous terms with obsolescence having both a physical and an economic connotation, even though she followed a tradition that considered obsolescence and blight to be mainly economic problems. This economic aspect of urban blight, which usually ignored the people who lived in these areas and their problems, persisted; many public officials, social scientists, and businesspeople discussed urban blight in terms of depreciation, speculation, usefulness, taxation, and investment. If blight for Walker was something that eventually led to a slum, Harland Bartholomew attempted to identify the location of these blighted areas. He argued that blighted areas were sandwiched between the outlying affluent areas of a city and the slums that surrounded the downtown. 20 Although some people would disagree with Bartholomew’s location of blight, most of them would agree with his insight that blighted areas were not as bad as slums. This did not mean that blighted areas were not subject to clearance. According to Robert M. Fogelson, the elevation of the concept of ‘‘blight’’ was useful because by the 1940s it provided ‘‘a rationale for razing the run-down residential neighborhoods near the central business district even though many of them were not slums.’’ 21 This rationale was aided by the fact that improper and frequently illegal land use was considered one of the main causes of blight. In the beginning of 1953, C. Clarence Kaskel, an owner of a pawnshop in the Columbus Circle clearance area, sued the City of New York; one of his arguments was that the site did not constitute a slum. Although the staff members of The Committee on Slum Clearance were confident that the city would prevail in court, the change of the name of the most important section of the brochures from ‘‘Demonstration of Slum Conditions’’ to ‘‘Demonstration of Blight’’ was significant. In case that this was required by the courts, Moses’s slum clearance organization would no longer have to prove that an area was a slum; its staff members would simply claim that the area was blighted and on its way of becoming a slum. This did not mean that suddenly precision of definitions became an important aspect of slum clearance in New York City. 22 The change of the title meant that the burden of proof was lessened and that if the City of New York prevailed in this legal case, it would be impossible for any other entity to successfully challenge future designations of slum clearance sites. 23 The change of the title of the most important section of the brochures signified a minor paradigm shift. On one hand, there were no significant changes in seeing and representing the clearance areas in the brochures after the renaming of the section. Moreover, the existing priorities of the paradigm were not reordered and no new political, economic, or technical elements were introduced. On the other hand, the Committee on Slum Clearance tacitly accepted that the areas represented in the brochures were not slums. Whether they were actually blighted and what this meant was irrelevant. Moses’s organization continued to represent blighted areas in the same way that it had represented slums. If the slum designation had worked, then the blighted designation would work as well. In some ways, one could argue that ‘‘Demonstration of Blight’’ was always the more appropriate heading. The characterization of areas as blighted by Moses’s brochures can be better understood by looking at what was going to replace them. Each slum clearance brochure included an architectural drawing representing an aerial view of the rebuilt site. For example, the Columbus Circle brochure included an aerial view of two free-standing apartment buildings surrounded by gardens as well as the New York Coliseum (a convention center) with a parking lot (Figure 1). 24 The aerial view of the drawing was important because a bird’s-eye view was the most suitable way to represent the physical order of this style of modernist architecture. In comparison, the site to be cleared was a hodge- podge of residential and commercial buildings as well as parking lots that existed next to each other without amounting to an orderly whole (Figure 2). The existing built environment was the outcome of layers of unplanned growth and shrinkage with the parking lots taking the place of obsolete buildings that had been demolished. 25 The Pratt Institute Area brochure made a similar point. The aerial drawing of the redeveloped area included three superblocks that had replaced the traditional street-oriented gridiron site with its fourteen city blocks (Figure 3). The northern superblock comprised of four free-standing residential towers surrounded by gardens and parking lots as well as a playground and a small retail area. The southern superblock comprised of another four free-standing residential towers surrounded by gardens, parking lots, one garage, two retail areas, a couple of playgrounds, and one public school. The middle superblock was mostly devoted to facilities of Pratt Institute, a private arts and design institution of higher education. Although existing facilities of Pratt Institute, three factories, and one apartment building (all of them shaded in Figure 3) remained in the redeveloped site, the rest of the area was new with almost all of the buildings being demolished and all of the streets closed. This implied that Pratt Institute would be able to have its own continuous campus and that the new housing developments would occupy their own campus-like areas. 26 In contrast, a photograph of the area to be redeveloped showed an overcrowded and unplanned area with multifunction buildings of different heights and sizes (Figure 4). Despite the fact that the site appeared to be filled with buildings, it was unclear whether the space was used efficiently. What was clear is that the space exhibited a sense of visual disorder, which was even more obvious when juxtaposed to the modernist architectural design that was going to replace it. 27 There have been many proponents of this kind of modernist rebuilding, though none of them has been as influential as Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born French architect; in his slum clearance projects, Moses appeared to be executing Le Corbusier’s principles of architecture and planning. 28 Le Corbusier did not invent but combined many elements of architectural and planning theory that existed since the Renaissance to insist that visual order based on urban design was a major precondition of urban order. Architects have historically assumed a connection between order in architecture and order in society and have aimed to regulate and anticipate social relations through architectural design. Efforts to avoid chaos through the use of architecture were stimulated by the French Revo- lution. The events of 1789 confirmed the fears of political elites that society was essentially disorderly and unstable and that measures had to be taken so that it would not degenerate into chaos. Experiments that began in prisons following John Howard’s architectural designs and Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon were applied to buildings of all kinds of institutions that dealt with potentially dangerous people at the margins of society such as the poor, industrial workers, the young, the insane, and the sick. Thus, there was an emphasis on the architectural design of factories, asylums, schools, hospitals, and workhouses, so that social disorder could be anticipated, easily controlled, and minimized. Urban planners have also presumed that cities are inherently chaotic and that urban order can be achieved only through meticulous and rational planning that would include the careful arrangement of buildings, streets, and squares. 29 Baron Haussmann’s modernization project of Paris in the 1860s, under which overcrowded neighborhoods with narrow streets were torn down and replaced by bourgeois housing and wide boulevards, represents an influential example of physical ordering. 30 The older neighborhoods were conducive to revolts because people frequently barri- caded the narrow streets for defense purposes during times of upheaval; the new urban design displaced and dispersed many of these rebellious populations while the wide avenues allowed troops to easily march into certain neighborhoods and restore order. 31 This belief in urban design and its taming effects continued to have currency into the twentieth century and Le Corbusier adopted it in his conceptual expositions. In fact, David P. Jordan has characterized Le Corbusier’s proposals of clearing and rebuilding central Paris as ‘‘ haussmannisme raised to another level.’’ 32 In the 1920s, Le Corbusier used conceptions of the garden city in order to advance his idea of the Radiant City; this was an area of twenty-four skyscrapers surrounded by lawns where pedestrians were separated from automobiles and businesses from residences. Le Corbusier believed that formal order in city planning was a precondition of efficiency. He advocated that the lessons ...