This is the paradox of Greenwich Village: an historic artists’ quarter panders its worst trivia with the civic pride of Zenith’s Chamber of Commerce. Nowhere else in New York is the city’s ghetto-complex so challenged as by the interracial atmosphere …
This essay is both more and less than a portrayal of the beats of Greenwich Village and its environs. More, because much of it holds good for beats elsewhere. Less, because I have not depicted some of the Village beat …
John D. Rockefeller III, President of the Lincoln Center of Performing Arts, says, “Lincoln Center is a story in the American tradition of voluntary private initiative and of what it means in service to- the public…. It can be one …
The city planner’s approach to the improvement of society differs sharply from that of the intellectual. The planner seeks improvement by manipulating spatial relationships, that is, through the coordination of the natural environment, space, and man-made land uses such as …
In 1956 about two out of every three Americans lived in a metropolitan area. The greatest growth since 1950, however, was not in the central cities themselves, but in the surrounding country. Fully half of the increase occurred in territory …
In New York City Robert Moses is the most prominent exponent of the credo that the end justifies the means; that he, “the great doer” always knows best; that the public should shut up, or in any event not be …
The giant city of today lives by a miracle: it survives contradictions of policy and endless administrative improvisations. But if its life is miraculous, then its decline, even its terminal illness, is not at all impossible. And in the pathology …
The Housing and Redevelopment Board has replaced Robert Moses’s Slum Clearance Committee, and a new order has been proclaimed for the on-going work of tucking in New York’s residential shirt tails. Robert Moses, who now deals only with sovereign nations, …
By June 30, 1960, the New York City Housing Authority had become the country’s largest landlord, housing some 567,000 lower-class tenants in 109 projects. Anyone who has visited some of these projects, however, knows that the problem of slums in …
Growing up in New York during the thirties meant, for me, the Jewish slums of the East Bronx, endless talk about Hitler, money worries of my parents migrating to my own psyche, public schools that really were schools and devoted …
Elizabeth She was a big blousy red-headed woman with a good-natured face and eyes that squinted at you between long lashes. She was goodlooking in her way, but the day she came in to us she was filthy from sleeping …
In 1956, the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit research agency, asked the Harvard School of Public Administration to conduct an economic and demographic survey of the New York metropolitan region—a 7,000-square-mile, 22-county complex that, with its core, inner ring, and …
I sing of the city revived. Citizen, I cry to you in favor of integration and municipal reconstruction. It is time that you reckoned up the cost of your own follies. Consider: a city wasted at the guts like present-day …
WEEKEND IN DINLOCK, by Clancy Sigal. Houghton Mifflin Co. 197 pages, 1960. THE WAR IN ALGERIA, by Jules Roy. Grove Press. An Evergreen Target Book. 128 pages, 1961. Here are two books—neither very large—both fitting quite easily into the pocket …
THE ALIENATED VOTER, by Murray B. Levin. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Political poll-takers have asked the American people many questions in their years of investigation, but seldom have they tried to find out what the American people think about politics …