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1 6 0 29 A Moment of Remarkable Optimism Nick and Sally Webster on the Upper West Side JUNE 20, 2010 Nick and Sally Webster, pioneer settlers in the West Side Urban Renewal Area, in their twice-renovated brownstone. (Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times) 1 6 1 Half a century on, it’s hard to remember the starry-eyed idealism that marked the birth of the West Side Urban Renewal Area, the widely praised effort to replace 20 blocks of festering slums with housing for a broad mix of social and economic groups. But Albert and Sara Webster remember. The Websters—Nick and Sally to everyone who knows them—are 72. But in the early ’60s, when the urban renewal plans were being hatched, the couple were recently married 20-somethings from suburban New Jersey drawn together partly by a shared desire to live in New York. In 1963, they and another couple began the paperwork required to buy adjoining brownstones on 94th Street near Columbus Avenue. The Websters’ building, for which they paid $25,000, dated back to the 1890s and had once been a handsome dwelling. By the time the structure came to the couple’s attention, it was dilapidated and had spent decades as a rooming house, with some of its dozen apartments lacking even a window. Rats and drug paraphernalia were the block’s defining elements; gunfire followed by the whine of police sirens was its sound track. It would take five years, interminable paperwork, and a $90,000 gut renovation before the Websters could move in. Despite the neighborhood’s troubles, those were heady times, punctuated by protests against the Vietnam War, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and stirring sermons on behalf of both causes at nearby Riverside Church. The world around the Websters was being remade even as they were seeking to remake their corner of the world. The goal in the urban renewal area—to create an economically integrated neighborhood that included housing for the poor, the middle class, and those who could afford a degree of luxury—was one the Websters embraced. “We were tuned into the whole ethos,” Mr. Webster says. “All the things that people were talking about, those were the things we believed in.” His wife felt the same way. “It was a moment of remarkable optimism,” she says. “This was going to be an integrated neighborhood, with housing for people at every income level. What could be a more inspiring prospect?” Not everyone shared their lofty sentiments. “My mother, who by then lived on Sutton Place, had a heart attack when she learned what we were doing,” Ms. Webster recalls. “She said to me, ‘What will I tell my friends?’” Nor did anyone make the process of acquiring even a decrepit [3.141.41.187] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 14:03 GMT) A M O M E N T O f R E M A R k A B L E O p T I M I S M 1 6 2 building quick or easy. To underscore the point, Mr. Webster tells a story: “I remember spending one solid hour signing papers for a $160,000 construction loan. When I was done, the lawyer showed me two legal-sized drawers full of documents. ‘That’s for your loan,’ he told me. Then he showed me a folder maybe an inch or two thick. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was for the sale of the Empire State Building.’” As the Websters struggled with paperwork, government regulations, bureaucracies, and the challenges of taking part in an ambitious social experiment, the world around them seemed to mirror the sense of upheaval . This is illustrated by an aging piece of paper that Mr. Webster unearths from his voluminous files. The document, which lists key dates in the acquisition and renovation of their brownstone, traces a timetable that begins in November 1963, the month President Kennedy was assassinated , with the notation “Investigation begun, lawyer engaged” and concludes in June 1969, the month of the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, with the notation “Final closing, FHA, Bowery.”Every date in the history of their building reverberates with an event in the outside world. The couple moved into the house in 1968. “We were still optimistic,” Mr. Webster says. “But that’s not to say that our life was easy or peaceful .” By the 1970s, many of the high hopes fueling the renewal project had curdled as neighborhoods throughout the city teetered. “It was...

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