City: Rediscovering the Center

Foreword

FOREWORD William Hollingsworth ("Holly") Whyte died in 1999. His life was celebrated by a generation of urban planners, architects, and advocates. He wrote three major works. The Organization Man, first published in 1956, deconstructed corporate tribal values and offers timeless insight into the postwar psyche. It remains today a brilliant portrait of American values of the '50s. The Last Landscape, published in 1968, provided some of the foundation of the modern environmental movement. It talked about green before "green" meant green. In the volume you have in your hands, City: Rediscovering the Center, first published in 1988 and considered the author 's magnum opus, he threads the knowledge of his earlier work into his treatise on the health and well-being of the American city. No other book has been more central to the rebirth of the metropolis than this one. It summarizes the life's work of a remarkable American whose gift was the ability to observe and make sense out of what he saw. Holly was utterly and completely comfortable with his White Anglo Saxon Protestant roots. He grew up in the wealthy suburbs of Philadelphia. Fancy prep school, Princeton, U.S. Marine Corps, Fortune magazine. By all rights he should have ended up back at Princeton as a distinguished professor of journalism or at the Harvard Business School teaching business ethics . Somewhere along the way something happened: Holly fell in love with the idea of the city and, especially, New York. His urbanism came with the janissary passion of the converted. [xii] CITY Is the love of cities peculiar? It's important to put Holly and his book into historical perspective. Through much of the 1950s and '60s, middleclass Americans fled the urban core. They had good reason. Pollution, crime, miserable public education, crumbling public transportation, and endemic political corruption are some of the factors regularly cited for urban flight, to which Holly added vagrancies of an architectural and planning profession that had lost touch with the human scale. There are more than a few of us to whom William H. Whyte had godlike status. He had a romantic vision of the ideal city, a fascination with rules and order—the daily dance of a crowded sidewalk on New York's Lexington Avenue delighted him. He cataloged the manners of the city and understood what density meant to people. He found street characters—like the charming Mr. Magoo, who directed traffic from the sidewalk around Macy's, wearing a bowler hat and carrying a slightly aged shopping bag; or Harry the Husbands Liberation Guy, with his handmade signs and Fifth Avenue stomping grounds; or the East Side witch, with her clown lips and spitting cackles. The nonromantic or nontheatrical urban characters Holly called undesirables, and his thesis was that, if you had the right people there the wrong people would stay away—an intellectual Yogi-ism. That said, what he talked about was logical and had a real street feel to it. As a young student, he inspired me. The first time I listened to him, I walked out of the lecture hall and had a vision of what I wanted to do with my life. We remember Holly for his pixie dust, but this volume reminds us that at his core he was an indefatigable researcher and highly motivated journalist. The first two-thirds of this book lead the reader through Holly's investigation of what makes a city work. While the examples he uses are dated, the information remains invaluable. In his writing as in the man, there is the Boy Scout from suburbia diligently and lovingly exploring a city with the same delight evident in Darwin's exploration of the Galapagos. Holly's mantra was that the love of cities starts at the street level—while skylines impressed him, pavement and patches of grass were the abiding building blocks of urban life. This book is filled with telling details, from an exhaustive treatment of the design of stairs to a short history of zoning regulations that governed for decades the design of towers and plazas of the American city. There is primitive power in the tools Holly used to craft his thesis: simple observation, time-lapse Super 8 movie cameras, hand-drawn maps, and charts made with press type. He draws material from his work with the Street Life Project and Project for Public Spaces—neither organization having a history of being flush with cash—but like good Marines, Holly and his troops got...