JEWS AND THE AMERICAN CITY: Planning, Developing and Imaging Urban Space and Jewish Space. November 10, 2010.

Lila Berman: I’d like to welcome you all here. My name is Lila Corwin Berman and I am an associate professor in the history department at Temple, the Murray Friedman Chair for American Jewish History, and I direct the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, and I’m thrilled to see all of you here. Thank you so much.

I thought I’d start this day by talking about where we are right now and what that means as a way into the topic of Jews in the American City that we’re going to be talking about today. So here we are-some of you took planes, some of you walked, some of you took a train or a subway. We’re at Temple. Temple was founded in 1884. But we’re also at the Edwin H. Rosen Hillel Center and I want to talk about this center and why it’s here and what that means.

In 1928, a Jewish student house was established at Temple. This was the first time that there was any such thing like that at Temple, and it eventually morphed into Hillel and there has been some kind of Hillel presence at Temple ever since. In the 1940’s through the Sixties or so there was a pretty sizeable Jewish population here at Temple, but it’s important to keep in mind that these students were commuters, as were most of the students at Temple until really quite recently. So the Hillel center was some place that somebody would use if they happened to be on campus for the day, but it wasn’t something for residential life.

Fast forward-with the urban crises of the 1960’s, Temple’s appeal for Jewish students, and for that matter white students waned, because here was Temple in the center of an area plagued by urban disinvestment, by economic depression, by white flight. Any of you who lived through those years in Philadelphia will know that this was the area where the 1964 so-called riots or urban uprising occurred. This was the neighborhood that by 1969 was really in full-scale depression. This was ground zero, so to speak, for the urban crisis in Philadelphia, or what critics call the urban crisis.

Then, at the tail end of the last millennium, something rather striking occurred. Hillel at Temple started a multi-million dollar capital campaign to erect a new building here. It reflected the reality, in part, of a growing Jewish population, but also of Temple’s plan to redevelop North Broad Street to become the new center of Temple. But even more so, those people who were invested in building this Hillel Center were hedging their bets on future trends, believing that Jewish students would return to Temple, not just to commute in and out, but to live, to eat, to pray, to celebrate, to socialize here in North Philadelphia. And last year, the Edward H. Rosen Hillel Center was dedicated in a ceremony that actually took place in this room. It was Arlen Spector standing up here, not me.

So who is Edward H. Rosen? He didn’t go to Temple. He went to Yale. He grew up in Philadelphia and he did come back here after his higher education, though he raised his children on the Main Line, in Narbeth. Rosen’s father was Raymond, and Raymond, for many years built public houses complexes. If any of you drove here from the West, you may have passed the Raymond Rosen Public Housing Complex, one of the

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complexes he built. Later, Rosen’s father became an appliance distributor. But why did Edward H. Rosen care about Temple? What did this mean? My contention is that it had something to do with his sense of civic responsibility and urban responsibility. It wasn’t because he went here. It wasn’t out of some sort of sense of bolstering one’s own alma mater. It was about what the city meant to him, what he wanted the city to be for him, for Jews and for frankly the broader white middle-class and perhaps upper middle-class community, and he saw this in many ways as a good investment. And so when it came time for Hillel to find someone to spearhead this project, Rosen made good sense. In fact, as an aside, part of the seed money for this Hillel came from Rosen’s Yale buddy, Allen Slivka. What did Allen Slivka give money for? Does anybody know?

Yale Hillel.

Yale Hillel. Another Hillel, but this is a little bit of a stretch. Another Hillel in a city that has been remaking itself as well. So here we are in North Philly, where one can find boarded up synagogues and Hebrew letters and Stars of Davids set next to crosses and signs for Pentecostal Churches, and one can also find in this building and all that it means about how the Jewish funders who supported it envisioned Jewish life in what they would consider their city.

This gets us, I think, to the question, on some level, of the nature of Jewish urbanism. How can it be that Jews have remained so deeply invested in American urbanism? Generally we know that after World War II, Jews left cities rapidly. They did so faster than most other white ethnic populations did. They embraced the suburban ideal. They were propelled forth by subsidies given by the federal government to white Americans to leave cities. And historians have characterized the Jews as good at moving. They’re the wandering people. Jews know how to leave places, know how not to be too attached to one specific place-a sort of strategy of existence.

Yet, in the research I’ve done and in talking to my colleagues and in reading some of their fantastic books, it really does seem that even as Jews left cities, they maintained an enduring, albeit often remote and ambivalent urban attachment. So if we move past the post World War II era and past the era of the so-called urban crisis, we’d find new, complicated and often very troubling ways in which Jews have tied their fortunes, their fates and their visions to urban life. Today, we are extremely fortunate to really have some of the finest minds and the finest urban activists to help us think through what it is that connects Jews and American urbanism, especially over the last handful of decades.

We have three panels today. We’re going to start by talking about development and then move on to planning and politics. I think we’ll all see that these categories, on some level, are artificial and that they all overlap in interesting ways and that hopefully will be, in part, the basis of our discussion. This conference is really framed as discussion-based. The participants will give ten-minute or so presentations about where they’re coming from, about their perspectives, and then it’s going to be about conversation. We really welcome you into that conversation as well.

I now want to just take a minute or two to offer some thanks, because we certainly wouldn’t be here without the support and encouragement from many different people and institutions. First and foremost, I am grateful to the panelists and the moderators for giving their time and their intellectual energy to this pursuit, and for their enthusiasm. I

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also want to thank the history department at Temple University for their co-sponsorship, and this department is really in part defined by its commitment to studying urban history. The Center for the Humanities at Temple, the Foundation for Jewish Culture in New York, the Gershwin Y, which is in Center City, and the National Museum of American Jewish History have all also supported this conference. Hillel donated the space and in fact Edward Rosen himself e-mailed me and encouraged me to have this conference here. Something else to think about in terms of what he envisioned this space to be. I’m very grateful to Hillel for donating the space.

There are two people without whom this conference would not have happened. Sarah Robey, who is a graduate student at Temple and who functioned as the assistant for this conference and dealt with so many loose ends. We would not have been able to do it without her. And Nancy Isserman, who works with me at the Feinstein Center, who has done more conferences than I have, which could just mean she’s done two, but in fact she’s done even more. I am extremely grateful for all of her support and wisdom.

Without further ado I want to introduce Heather Thompson, who’s going to be the moderator for the first session. She’s an associate professor of history at Temple and also the associate director for the Center of Humanities at Temple.

Panel One: Jews and Development

Heather Thompson: Thank you, Lila. Welcome. This is a fabulous event, both that Leila and her cohort have put together, and also the Feinstein Center has supported. I just want to speak very briefly to kind of identify what this panel is about and to, in one shot, introduce all the panelists and then I will completely turn it over to them.

As you know, this particular first panel is dedicated to the question of Jews and development. We asked the panelists, but also we asked the audience to consider some general questions when we come to this topic and I will very briefly identify what those are. One has to do with the issue of spaces of development. Really, to put it most simply, what are the political and historical elements of this question of urban development. Second, the question of investment in economics when it comes to urban development. What kinds of networks determine investment, determine development and determine the success or failures of such. The third is the relationship between the city and the suburb. This is a question of huge interest to historians such as myself, but also, of course, to developers. What is the relationship? Is it contested? Is it symbiotic? Is there a change over time? So that’s another theme. And finally, the issue of where the personal and the political really intersect-that is philanthropy and activism. What is this personal phase of development? What motivates development? How do people understand development? Why do they fight for certain development? So those are the general themes that we’ve asked everyone to at least think about.

So let me just introduce to panelists in the order I guess that they’re seated and that they will speak. First I want to introduce Paul Levy. Paul Levy has a Bachelors from Lafayette College, an MA and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and currently teaches graduate planning courses at the University of Pennsylvania. We are very lucky to have Mr. Levy here as the founding chief executive of Philadelphia’s Center City

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District. The CCD is extremely important to Philadelphia. It has managed to develop and to create a space, a very rich space, within which private development can take place. Streetscapes, lighting, park development and so forth. So when we think about development in this city in particular, we are very eager to hear from Paul Levy.

Next we’ll hear from Deborah Dash Moore, who I am particularly thrilled to see as a fellow historian here from the University of Michigan. She’s a professor of history and also the director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at Michigan. She specializes in 20th century Jewish history. She works on culture and spaces, gender, identity. Her first book, At Home in America, Second Generation New York Jews is extremely important to the field. She also has numerous other publications, but let me just call attention to one because it won the best book of the year, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation. So welcome to Deborah Dash Moore.

Then we are also equally lucky to have Beryl Satter here. She’s a professor of history, again, at Rutgers University, Newark. Someone who now lives in New York but was raised in Chicago. She has an MA from Harvard University but received her Ph.D. from Yale in American Studies. She is another award winning author. Her book, Family Properties, Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black Urban America won several prizes, the National Jewish Book Award in History, the Liberty Legacy Award from the Organization of American Historians and also honorable mention from Lou Koch, which is very interesting because, of course it means that people other than scholars are reading the book. A real honor indeed.

And finally we have Suleiman Osman, who is an assistant professor of American Studies at George Washington University. Another specialist in US urban history and also brings the additional perspective of the built environment and how this all intersects with cultural and social history. We’re really thrilled about his upcoming book, the one that he’s finishing working on now, Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn, Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Brooklyn, and it’s going to be released by Oxford University Press in 2011. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and a BA also from Yale. Please help me welcome our entire panel.

Paul Levy:

Good morning. It’s a real pleasure to be here. It’s not often I get introduced by my academic credentials. I usually keep those hidden in my job today. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. When I was first called to ask to speak on Jews and development I kind of scratched my head and then made a list of developers who I regularly work with in Philadelphia and the list goes as follows: Ken Bailen, Bart Blaustein, Alan Casnoff, John Binswanger, Eric Blumenfeld, Carl Dranoff, David Marshall, Jim Perlstein, Will Rappaport, Ron Rubin, Sam Sherman, Wayne Zukin and Joe Zuritsky, many of them with family businesses. On the other hand, I also work with John Conners, Tom Scannapieco, David Grasso, Martin Belini and Randy Scott, so Jews don’t own this business. Let’s start with that.

But the simple question I asked myself, which was what the hell am I going to say when I get up here, was what is it-why are so many Jews apparently, and I don’t know if

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anybody has done this study, but why apparently are so many Jews involved in real estate development. When I asked most of the developers on that list, they had a very, very simple answer, which was at the time they or their parent were growing up, most professions were closed to Jews. This was one that wasn’t so real estate was an opportunity and it was a path they took very simply.

But that’s clearly not a sufficient answer and on Sunday I had the pleasure of hearing Lila speak at the Gershman Y-and really got my thinking-and read her article which she went to many of us. Obviously, she talked about Jews that were in some cases the first to suburbanize in post World War II era and they obviously both left behind the city but maintained very deep attachments. Because, as you heard, I was actually trained as an historian, this tapped into my bad academic habits, and so I went back in my memory and decided to develop my own theory. I went first, obviously, to Max Weber’s Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, which made the argument that capitalism was created when a market economy was created first in Protestant countries because of the secular legacy of fundamental orientation in Protestantism, which is Protestants did not consider faith or prayer in the cathedral as the primary means of salvation. It was rather diligence and hard work which was proof of salvation and that outward manifestation of inward faith is really the passport of salvation-By your deeds you shall be known. So I think Weber made the point that Protestantism was much more this-worldly and Catholicism initially was much more other-worldly.

It’s not hard to extrapolate that in my mind and to take the Jewish imperative to mend the world or the imperative to give back and to see as that secularizes. That can take at least two forms-one, social activism and charitable giving, but also the physical transformation that real estate development involves. I can’t prove this theory but if Max Weber could get away with his, I can get away with mine at this point.

Obviously, Reform Judaism and Conservative Judaism are much more this-worldly than Orthodox Judaism, so you have to start making a separation there. If you then take the role of Jew as outsider, that is Jews obviously prohibited from owning land in Europe and the only path being that of a merchant or traveling salesman, it’s not hard to understand how once Jews arrive in the golden land of America, where you could actually own land, which was a remarkable idea, that they might have a much more instrumental and transactional attitude towards land than those people who inherited it from generation to generation, much less of an emotional attachment or an inherited attachment.

I think about my wife’s grandfather who immigrated after immigration controls of the 1920’s, and they came in through Mexico. He came in as a merchant, had everything stolen when he landed in Mexico, rebuilt his merchant business, but even before he came into the States he was driving into California saying I need to buy land. And he was buying land in California. He thought my G-d, if Jews could own land, and this was a golden land. So this notion of buying land is a unique opportunity. If you combine that, as I said, with the fact that well into the 1960’s many professions were closed to Jews, it’s not hard to draw a line between the religious orientation towards this world, the barriers of anti-Semitism and the narrow paths that open up.

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I think about my own family history which we were asked to at least reflect upon. Both of my grandparents came into New York in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Both of my grandfathers became tailors, which was a very traditional New York and Newark, New Jersey profession for Jews. My mother’s father was quite Orthodox. He went to shul twice a day. He didn’t own his own business. You couldn’t do that and go to shul twice a day, so he worked for someone else. My father’s father was very secular as a Jew, even in the 1890’s. His mother apparently brought him and left him here in Philadelphia, which was unusual, and then went back to Europe. He was left here as a twelve year old with his older sister, in Philadelphia, who he apparently hated, and so he then migrated to Albany where he heard there was work for tailors, because he had been trained in that. He then migrated down to Newark, New Jersey, where he partnered with an Italian who also had the garment industry as an avenue, and they formed Fiorido and Levy and it was a garment industry, a sweatshop, which in the Twenties became very successful and then the Depression completely ruined them.

But what was the tradition he brought with him? He brought with him a tradition that learning is important, that professions are important. My grandfather always used to say in Russia, Jews couldn’t go to school. In America, they send you to jail if you don’t send your kids to public school. This was remarkable to him. One daughter married a dentist, another daughter and her husband formed Liz Claiborne, the garment industry. My father went into being a lawyer. I think if you take the Jews as People of the Book, studying Talmud and studying law strikes me as a very easy transition that many people went through.

So very quickly, if you talk about post-World War II suburbanization, it seems to me very explainable on a couple of levels. One, redlining made mortgages in almost every one of these cities unattainable, so you could not really get mortgages in most of the old neighborhoods. Certainly that was true for my father, who was a World War II veteran, who used the GI Bill. He looked to buy houses in Newark, New Jersey and was totally redlined so he, like everybody else, looked for homes in the suburbs. I was eight years old. It was 1955, and we moved to the new frontier, to the suburbs. I think, obviously, suburbs were heavily marketed because real estate development was being done in scale. The extreme of that, of course, is Levittown, but any time you’re developing 100, 200, 300 units, you could afford huge amounts of newspapers ads, so the image making of the suburbs, I think, was very, very powerful.

I think you could fast-forward and say precisely because of that low attachment to place, that transactional attitude towards real estate, that when demographic and economic trends began to tilt in favor of the cities, Jews just might get there first. Just to talk about today, very quickly, one, I want to make a very clear point, that the flight from cities is not a typical international pattern of urban development. It is a very severe American aberration and we should be explaining our aberration, not the fact that people have come back to the cities. It’s a result of very bad and unsustainable public policy choices. The middle class in Europe and Asia never left their cities, so we have an aberrational experience which we’re finally getting over.

If you think about residential reinvestment that begins in all-American cities in the late Seventies and early Eighties, first of all, it’s not a back-to-the-city movement. It starts as a stay-in-the-city movement. By that I mean urban renewal facilitated in this

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city, University of Pennsylvania, Drexel, Temple-a whole series of academic institutions which are urban-based. Baby boomers who fill up the schools start coming into the colleges and universities in the Sixties and Seventies. Jews have a kind of cultural predilection for education, for the professions of law and medicine, because those have been open for a long time, and they’re here at the Universities. You want a classic case? Look at Ed Rendell. Comes from New York City and studied law at Penn and stays in the city. So much of early investment in New York and Philadelphia and Boston was not back-to-the-city. It was stay-in-the-city.

The other clear factor, and then I’ll quickly come to an end here, is the revival of cities is very much driven by tremendous change in demographic realities, just as the development of the suburbs was driven. Obviously, you understand that women entering the workforce, women deferring childrearing means a huge growth in two-income households. Graduating from universities, a significant percentage staying in the cities. Let’s take these numbers-the world I grew up in, Mom and Dad and two kids at home in the suburbs. In 1960, American households with children were 48% of American households. In 1970 it was 40%. In 2000, it was 24% and the census bureau projects today it is 21%. The so-called typical American household is an aberration. 70% of American households are without children. Empty nesters, young professionals or lots more single person households.

So if you think about cities in the 1980’s and 1990’s with demographic realities changing, urban renewal setting the stage for new office districts, new campuses for universities, the beginning and the birth of the post-industrial economy, cities diversify in the Eighties and Nineties, arts, entertainment, restaurants, convention centers, hotels-the amenity package of cities has dramatically improved in the Eighties and Nineties. And outdoor cafes filled by the Nineties and the first decade of this century with young professionals. I like to call outdoor cafes filled with young professionals Empty Nester Bagel. How does that work? George and Sara are out on the Main Line. Their kids have gone off to college. They go down to the Kimmel Center for theater. They go out for dinner and see all these young people having a great time sitting outdoors at cafes, and George says Sara, I’m sick of cutting the lawn every day. The kids aren’t home. Why can’t we have fun like these young people? That’s when the back-to-the-city movement begins. It’s empty-nesters coming back and seeing all these people having a good time in the city. That’s obviously a slight exaggerated version. Back-to-the-city comes second. The huge return in the Nineties and in this decade of empty-nesters driven by a gigantic demographic bulge I think explains the tremendous amount of return.

I bought my first car in 1971 and I paid twenty-eight cents a gallon for gas. That world is over. Recentralization forces are existing in the American economy that I think are restoring the tradition of cities as they’ve always been in civilized countries. So if you take all of that together, I just think real estate developers, ethnic Jews, Italians, whatever, see opportunities in cities. The market has returned. If Jews get there first, it’s because they’re less attached to the places they were in.

I’ll just end with one thing, which is, I think, the creative myth of the old neighborhood and its importance in terms of in every ethnic group there is this recollection of the old neighborhood. Myth or true, it doesn’t matter. It’s a powerful motivating force, and again, if you think about the abandonment of cities as an

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aberration, it’s actually quite healthy that that myth is being fulfilled, of people coming back and revitalizing our cities. I thought I’d end with that provocative thought. Thank you.

Deborah Dash Moore: That was great, and since you said you’re not usually introduced with your academic credentials, I usually am and in a very brief conversation over e-mail with Lila the other night, she said why don’t you actually introduce yourself with your non-academic credentials, as it were. So I thought about it, and in terms of this conference I thought it would be not inappropriate. There’s good feminist reasons to talk about your subject position, as we call it. Therefore, I’m going to begin very briefly by saying that I’ve never lived in a suburb. I grew up on the 11 th floor of a building, so I’m used to-what should we say-the view from above. Looking down on the world of the street, Seventh Avenue actually, 16th street. Looking up the Avenue north where you could see the lights of Times Square. Obviously, the iconic Empire State Building. My parents never made that decision to leave the city. They didn’t make the decision to leave the city. Obviously, I had no choice of where I grew up. They didn’t make the choice to leave the city because of certain things that the city had that they particularly valued. My mother loved the theater and it took ten minutes by subway to get from where we lived to Times Square, so it was very easy to go to the theater. My mother didn’t want to be a woman alone with children in a household without her husband, who was working in the city. In fact, he worked across the street, so you could look from our 11th floor building down into the 7th floor which was he was working. And when he worked late, it was very easy to bring him back, as it were.

Now, those were two important reasons. My mother also clearly-and it’s important-I’m gendering this because I think it was my mother’s decision about the choice of where we lived. My mother also didn’t care about nature. There were no trees on our block. In fact, I can remember when they put trees in. I’m thinking boy, isn’t this silly-they’re putting trees. How are these poor trees going to survive? And now the trees are great. They’re really healthy. My parents still live in the same apartment. They haven’t moved. They’re the ones who never left.

Surely thinking about this upbringing of my own, I have to cope with not just my own fascination for the city which was my lived environment as someone growing up, and therefore also as an adult, the choices that I’ve made, which meant a choice, for example, of not to have too much space. My mother didn’t care about that either. We shared rooms. Everybody shared rooms. I never had a room of my own until I was a senior in college and it was only for one year because I got married and shared a room again. So the notion of privacy, which is one of the attractions of suburbs, and a room of your own never happened. These, I think, surely influenced my own ways of thinking about cities and suburbs.

Finally, I should add that my mother really despised the suburbs. She just did not like anything about the suburbs. It took me years to sort of overcome a certain bias about the suburbs. Many years ago I remember, Bob, you did a paper that began with a Mad Magazine takeoff on the suburbs. I was thinking that could have been my mother. All the mistakes and the problems that the suburbs have.

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We were asked to answer a number of questions and one of them asked us to contrast the difference between doing development as growth into farmland and open space as compared to development as rebuilding or urban renewal or as it later got to be called gentrification. There’s no question that for many, many years, growth was looked upon most favorably by not just developers but by American society. Purchases of new homes, politicians, all kinds of Americans valued growth. This was a positive idea. Therefore, the cost of preparing land, building new roads, providing utilities, were often borne by political units in anticipation of the additional tax revenues that would come with growth. There were, relatively speaking, few impediments to such development.

By contrast, development in urban areas has a lot of competing stakeholders involved. There are landlords and tenants. There are government agencies that favor rebuilding and there are government agencies opposed to rebuilding. There are ethnic, racial and religious groups, all of them with diverse commitments to the city and the possibilities of urban living. And most importantly, there are neighbors. So living in a city involves living with neighbors. One meets neighbors on the streets, in local stores, in schools and even in one’s own building if it’s a multi-family dwelling. Neighbors then bring in the question of diversity-class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality. Not everyone is comfortable living next door to people who are different. Indeed, American patterns of urban and suburban development are premised on the assumption that most people like to live next door to people who are similar to them. People of the same class, of the same race, same religion, ethnicity and the same sexual preference.

However, in the last decades of the 20th century, American law increasingly has emphasized that discrimination on some of these grounds, especially those of race, ethnicity, religion and sexual preference, is illegal or if not illegal, immoral. So where do Jews fit into this? Jewish attitudes towards cities and suburbs have changed over the course of the 20th century, as have Jews’ ideas about neighbors. When American Jews were largely an immigrant population, they preferred to live among their own kind, where they could trust their neighbors or at least speak the same language. Of course, this meant that their neighbors, at times, exploited them. Jewish landlords exploited Jewish tenants. These were internal Jewish fights, however. The anti-conviction campaigns of the 1930’s were Jewish tenant campaigns, usually against Jewish landlords who were kicking them out.

As an American-born and educated generation came of age, they often preferred to live in less visibly Jewish neighborhoods with fewer Jewish neighbors but enough Jews to make them feel comfortable. That comfort index usually was a good deal higher than any random sprinkling of Jews throughout the city would have yielded. So for example in New York, which I know best since I’ve done research on it, where Jews were close to 30% of the population prior to World War II, a neighborhood felt Jewish if it had forty, fifty, sixty, seventy percent of its population as Jewish. Needless to say, non-Jews living in such a neighborhood often defined the area differently, according to their own religious and ethnic calculus. So neighbors lived next door to each other but not exactly in the same neighborhood. In fact, we know that Catholics often called the neighborhood by its Parish name, which Jews would not have used at all. Jews used a different name. In using those different names, they were in actuality describing a

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different place. Physically it could have been the same place but it was not the same place in terms of the associations that Jews had there.

By the time children who had grown up in these ethnic urban Jewish neighborhoods looked for homes, they often chose to live in suburbs along with other Americans. It was an American thing to do, encouraged by post-war prosperity, promising a life that was sufficiently different from their parents to make their own arrival. They were ready to buy a single-family house. They had the GI mortgages which were extremely important. They were even ready to live where there were no sidewalks. In fact, I remember when I taught in Israel, one of the things students could not understand is why you would want to live in an area that had no sidewalks unless, of course, you were living on a kibbutz or something. So their children grew up in suburbs, where Jews were identified less by the houses where they lived than the malls where they chose to hang out, how they dressed and the holidays that they celebrated.

When I ask my students today at the University of Michigan, most of whom grew up in suburbs, whether they plan to live in the same suburb as their parents, almost all of them say no. The exceptions-the handful of Jews who grew up in cities-New York, Miami, LA, Atlanta. Those handful of places, Jews are ready to go back to. No one wants to go back to the suburbs, or at least they don’t want to go back to the suburbs of their childhood.

We don’t need to believe them. But it’s interesting how strong the desire is to move away. This desire to move away is characteristic of many Americans and also of many American Jews. Not all, of course. The observant Orthodox aren’t as eager to move away. Louis Wirth, a social scientist, once said-if you told him the view from a Jew’s kitchen window, he could tell you not only her socio-economic position but also the stage in what he called the assimilation process, how far away from immigration was this person. Wirth thought that where you lived said a great deal about who you were.

So if Jews are not going to move back to their parent’s suburbs, where are they going to move? The answer, of course, is that they’re going to move to places with jobs, and if that means moving back into cities, they might just try that. Most of these young Jews have very little experience of urban life. They never went into cities as kids. Their parents often worked in the suburbs. So cities don’t necessarily come with the same baggage as the parents recall them, that is to say, as dangerous places from which their parents fled-that is the grandparents. How will they find a place to live? They’re going to use the same ethnic connections that their parents and their grandparents used-word of mouth, friends of friends, extended family ties-all of these help to guide choices of where to go. This means that Jewish developers have opportunities to redevelop city spaces that previously were ignored. They can return to urban development or they can seek to preserve properties that they already own and to fix up. I think Paul is right in emphasizing that the decision of people to stay in the cities is the first choice.

Not all cities necessarily can succeed in luring young people to new urban spaces, empty from manufacturing, because there have to be jobs available. However, it is generally recognized that artists are often pioneers because they hope to stabilize declining neighborhoods, and I lived in one of those neighborhoods in New York City. I lived in Washington Heights in Manhattan which is located in the northern part of the

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city. This was a neighborhood of German Jewish refugees and when I moved into the neighborhood, not a month went by where there wasn’t a sign that said Shiva and the apartment number located on the front door. People were dying and therefore the neighborhood was going to turn over. The question was how was it going to turn over. Most of the apartment buildings were owned by Jews who had developed the neighborhood in the Twenties and Thirties. We’re running out of time so maybe later I’ll talk more about that.

I think one of the big differences now between what existed before is that Jews are much more willing to buy apartments. Previously, Jews basically rented them. But they have the notion that you buy property to live in and whereas before they would use their money to invest in businesses or in social capital, as Paul described, in education, they’re now ready to buy apartments and that makes for a difference in terms of what it means to move back into the city itself. I think the other difference is that Jews are used to purchasing and shopping in a mall experience which is very different from what had been classic urban smaller stores and stuff, and that that too is going to have an impact in terms of the move back into cities. Finally, I think that one of the other things that’s different is that list of names that you read, which was a great list of names, is that you now have multi-generations of Jews in real estate. It’s not just the first generation and maybe a son who goes into it but daughters are involved. These are often granddaughters as well as grandsons. This phenomenon of multi-generations in real estate development is also something that’s quite new. I’ll end here.

Beryl Satter: I’m a historian so the thing I’m going to talk about is…I’m not going to elaborate and try to hypothesize about the present because I don’t actually know much about the present. I don’t watch TV. I don’t know anything that’s going on. I only know through about 1970. That’s what I’m going to talk about.

This panel was very challenging for me, this title of Jews and Development. I wrote a book called Family Properties, which describes the fate of a Chicago West Side Neighborhood that began in the 1930’s and 40’s as an overcrowded, working class Jewish ghetto and came to be by the 50’s and 60’s an overcrowded and impoverished African-American ghetto. My book covered the history of this neighborhood from the mid-Thirties through the late Seventies. I’m going to try and extract from that to say something about Jews and development. We’ll see how much I can get.

The book did not deal with developers at all but with mid-Twentieth century real estate speculators. These were people of all faiths and backgrounds but a significant number of them were Jewish. These men and women took advantage of African-Americans who were desperate for housing but, as we know, could not get mortgage loans no matter what their individual credit histories. In that sense, my book is about, could be said to be about Jewish involvement in the destruction, not the development, of urban spaces. Most of the speculators that I wrote about were smart, working-class guys. They had rough manners and they were absolutely ruthless. Their practices often…usually stayed on the side of legality but not always. They were related to organized crimes, sometimes crossed over, whatever they could get away with. They often didn’t

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mean to break the law because the laws were flexible enough to allow them to do whatever they wanted without breaking the law, but they broke the laws as well at times.

What they would do is buy properties from whites. This is, again, starting around the late Forties but reached its height from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Sixties, 1960’s. They would buy properties from whites at close to market value and then resell these properties to blacks, usually at double the market value, sometimes as much as quadruple market value. The speculators that I wrote about sold blacks these overprices properties on contract, because the blacks couldn’t get mortgages. That means they would sell it on an installment plan, and blacks who bought on a contract this way would make a down payment, just like you would for a mortgage. They were responsible for taxes, insurance, maintenance and interest, like a mortgage. But they didn’t get title to the building until the purchase price had been entirely paid off. Remember, the price is dramatically inflated so it’s hard to do that. If they missed one payment, the speculator had the right to reclaim the building. This was in all the contracts. Since the prices were, again, widely inflated, it was pretty common to miss a payment and then common to repossess properties again and again. You had some of these big contract sellers repossessing seventy, eighty properties a year. They owned a lot and they repossessed a lot. Certain buildings could be repossessed once a year, twice a year even. Sometimes they lasted longer.

This was not a manageable situation. By the early 1960’s, approximately 85% of properties sold to black Chicagoans were sold on contract because there was a huge migration of black people who were desperate for housing. So 85% of properties that they bought were bought on contract and there were close to a million black people in Chicago. That’s a lot of properties being sold on contract.

My father, a Jewish attorney, who fought exploitative contract sellers in court, estimated that these speculators were draining Black Chicagoans of one million dollars a day. That would be about seven and a half million dollars a day in today’s money. So Black contract sellers were trying to make their contract payments. They would work extra jobs. They wouldn’t do any maintenance because they couldn’t afford it. They would overpopulate the property, stuff in as many tenants in the property that they sort of owned as possible, to get money to make the payments. White neighbors saw the results. They saw unsupervised children, jam packed schools, decaying buildings and it was a problem. They saw what was happening and they looked around and they said well, well black people move in, suddenly it’s jam packed, suddenly there’s no maintenance, everything is falling apart. Our kids can’t learn in the school. There were three kids in every seat when there should have been one. They would say what’s with the black people that they’re doing this. They didn’t understand the whole mechanism behind it.

In the Jewish West Side of Chicago that I wrote about, many Jews did want to stay on, even after significant numbers of African-Americans began moving to their neighborhood. But they clearly understood that the longer they stayed, the less the property was worth because the same speculators who were selling on contract to blacks were coming to their houses week after week saying the property is worth $10,000, I’ll offer you nine. If you said no they said well, don’t worry, I’ll be back in a few weeks and I’ll offer you eight, and if you really want to hold back no problem, I’ll come back in six months and offer you seven. It’s up to you. So they knew, the longer they waited the less

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was offered. It was a ticking clock and as the neighborhood spiraled out of control and the property became worth less and less, they left, Jews and non-Jews alike. Whites in the West Side were out of there. But many of the black neighbors also didn’t like what was going on. The first to move in paid top dollar, middle-class black people wanting to live in integrated neighborhoods. They see too, the more people moving in, it’s getting more crowded, the schools are falling apart, the kids aren’t supervised, the parents never seem to be around, what’s going on? But they can’t move because they bought on contract. They can’t sell because they don’t own. If they leave, it means…their choices are to stay and keep making these punishing payments and make sacrifices to do it or to leave, giving up the down payment, all the money they invested. A lot of times the first things that happened when they moved in was they had to replace the boiler. They find out there were code violations. They’re trying to hold on and they’d have to give all that up to leave. So their choices of leaving is limited, and they stay, mostly. Where are they going to go? And it was heartbreaking for them because they had had such high hopes moving in.

So by enforcing these very harsh terms and extracting millions from an already hard-pressed community, my book describes how speculative contract dollars destroyed whole neighborhoods. I quote a 1973 newspaper expose that said that the contracts “moves like a reaper through Chicago’s West Side, leaving behind a wasteland of abandoned buildings, road-strewn lots and crushed hopes.” My book also describes the activists who fought these practices, and like the speculators themselves, the activists were of all races and all religions, but included a respectful percentage of Jews, including my father, attorney Mark Satter.

Jews are on both sides of this. What’s Jewish about this story of urban destruction? I find that actually hard to elicit what’s particularly Jewish about it. I concentrated on the history of the Jewish neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, but pretty much identical processes occurred in the former Catholic neighborhoods on the city’s south side. Some of the Jewish activists who fought contract sellers were motivated by a post-Holocaust anti-racist politics, but they worked closely with Catholic and Protestant activists and were more united by the remnants of an anti-racist 1930’s popular front ideology than by their specific religious traditions, and the story of James T. Fischer has referred to the close relationships between Jewish and Catholic activists in the 1950’s and 60’s. He called it a spiritual front, a push for ecumenical activism that these men at the time knew was new, even a little transgressive, to work together, Catholic, Jews and Protestants. They’re pushing the limits here. They really enjoyed it and they worked together.

As far as the exploitative contract sellers, they too were ecumenical in spirit. While families and friendship networks were important, some of them had known each other’s children and were related to each other, there were also men of different faiths who worked very closely together to sell the overpriced properties. One of the biggest sellers in Chicago were Lou Fushanis, Greek and Moe Forman, Jewish. So what does this have to do with this theme here? Well, I do think one think that my scholarship adds to the discussion is the importance of the marginal operator in shaping urban space. This is something that Dolores Hayden has said in her recent book, Building Suburbia: A field Guide to Urban Sprawl. She says people also talk about what Americans want.

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Americans like this, Americans like that. But actually, a created environment is generally not in response to…I just really want to be out there, in ex-urban sprawl. I just love it. It’s about real estate people making as much money in as short amount of time in the easiest possible way, and that’s what shapes developed space, newly developed space. I think that’s right.

This is a long-standing dynamic. In the Fifties, scholar Rose Halper showed that the biggest and cleanest and most reputable names in real estate worked for marginal operators, the men that I’ve read about, to sell properties to blacks on exploitative terms, but they did it sort of on the sly. They used these men as covers so that they could dump stuff and know that these guys could take care of it for them.

In the 1960’s, mortgage lenders and banking and savings and loan leaders often positioned themselves publicly as anti-racist by supporting open occupancy legislations. This was their symbol of their civic mindedness. At the same time, these same reputable businessmen were creating the slums by refusing to loan to, as we know, qualified black African-Americans while funding real estate speculators who bought those properties only for the purpose of using them as bait to attract people…contemporary prices, where it was all about using debt to just turn off capital for yourself. It has nothing to do with helping anyone realize any kind of goal, other than money. In other words, it’s not to help them live in a nice house.

I think the marginal and the mainstream form a single system and I think we need to look at the whole system to understand urban space and urban development. As far as Jewishness, I’m not sure. Maybe people could help me. In Chicago, the few things…some of the first blacks to move to the Jewish sections of the West Side…the West Side had Jewish and Catholic people. It’s not a wholly Jewish place. The first blacks to move to the Jewish parts had often been invited by progressive Jewish people, their Jewish neighbors and friends. They said to them we’ll help you get in here. You can move here. The Jews who welcomed black neighbors had an ideological commitment to integration. At the same time, you had real estate speculators, including Jews, who had no political vision whatsoever and they only sold to blacks because they knew blacks were desperate and would sign on to any terms no matter how harsh to get in.

The irony is, and other scholars have pointed this out, that the Jewish people who were politically committed to integration considered themselves the absolute opposite of their co-religionists who were using real estate just to rip people off, but they were both attacked together, lumped together, as Jewish blockbusters by white gentiles who thought that the unforgivable crime of real estate speculators was not exploiting black people but integration on any terms whatsoever. Therefore they were all called Jews-anyone who let blacks in, who pushed for integration, on whatever terms.

The speculators that I’ve wrote about didn’t seem to have been personally racist themselves, from what I’ve read. Many had black office staffs that they worked with, which is part of the reason why blacks would…oh, this guy needs a black secretary. He’s got a black guy showing me around. It should be fine. At least one had a long term affair with a black woman real estate agent. They actually considered themselves…well, we’ll work with them. Many justified their behavior by saying that they are helping blacks find homes and nobody else will. But at the same time as they did unleash this devastation,

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repossessing homes and then the homes becoming more and more decayed, they drew on the same racist ideology typical of the 1950’s and 60’s, saying oh, these are just raw people. It’s their fault that the place is falling apart. I could have kept it together but they can’t. Not my problem. Not my fault.

I want to say just a little bit about funding because that was one of the things that came up. I want to just say something about the networks of investment that allowed this rapaciousness to go unchecked for a decade, a critical decade, the decade of flat migration, the decade when blacks were finding, after having moved North, had the capital to make an effort to purchase property, enough capital to have it taken.

So how did this work in terms of investment? The interesting thing is that the contract sellers that I read about usually acquired their properties with very small down payments, so they had to buy the property to resell, usually, at most, six percent of the property’s cost, and they borrowed the rest from savings and loans. I didn’t see any kind of Jewish network in the savings and loans that provided the contract sellers with their capital. From what I can see, Jews in Chicago during these years had not made inroads into the savings and loan business. It was not a Jewish profession. It was non-Jews funding Jewish and non-Jewish speculators to buy properties with almost none of their own money and then flip them over and sell them at huge markups to blacks.

You did have particular groups of speculators who were closely associated with particular savings and loans. Sometimes these were based on older personal relationships. An example is the president of one savings and loan, William Szarabajka, he was a Polish guy, he had known speculator John Karras, who was Greek, since Karras was a child of fourteen. Szarabajka ended up funding Karras’ purchases through his savings and loan and then becoming a co-partner in Karras’ contract selling business. Basically, his savings and loan became just a bank for the contract selling. That was a personal tie there. Cross ethnic tie. Others-there didn’t seem to be any personal or ethnic tie. Austin Waldron was a savings and loan president who funded a largely Jewish group of speculative contract sellers in return for very, very high service fees or kickbacks. Waldron got his payback in the late 1960’s when the contract sellers he funded just decided to stop paying on their mortgages. They said fine, let him take the property back. We don’t care. They’re kind of run down right now. So Waldron had to repossess these properties with a fraction of what he loaned on them, finding himself stuck with hundreds of decaying properties in the city’s worst slum neighborhood. Waldron desperately tried to recoup some of the money by putting the properties up for sale. Again, these were properties on which he loaned 20, 30 thousand dollars he put up for sale for 3000. And then guess who decided that’s a good buy? 3000-I could buy that. The same speculators. They went back and bought. They said for 3000 bucks, fine, it’s ours. So that way, they stripped the mortgages. They stripped the buildings of the mortgages. They got it for 3000. They continued to rent them or even sometimes resell them on contract and let them decay, decay. Then when it was all over and the places were too crumpled for anything, they got insurance and set fire to them. That was another way. And then some went to jail for arson.

In any case, the point as far as the savings and loan is that Waldron worked with these guys and got years and years of kickbacks. In the end, though, they turned back to

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bite him and the contract sellers got the buildings and he got…his savings and loan, First Mutual Savings and Loan was bankrupt by 1969.

Race and religion-where does it fit? Again, I’m not sure. Certainly race, but religion. The core fact that enabled this devastation was the federal level racist segmentation of the credit markets. That’s what made it happen. We talked about the ethnic and racial segregation and discrimination in professions that pushed Jews as well as other mid-twentieth century white ethnics into middlemen positions. In 1968, when Chicago Rabbi Robert J. Marx tried to figure out why Jews were emerging as a symbol for slumlord exploitation in black communities, despite the fact that a scholar noted that Jewish holdings in black ghettos represented “an infinitesimal fraction of the American Jewish economy.” Nevertheless, their visible symbols…Marx came up with what he considered an explanation. He said that Jews have a…interstitial, or the people in between-either part of the power structure or part of the masses. Marks argued they had historically been used by these to fulfill certain vital yet dispensable functions. So in Poland, Jews are barred from owning land but are free to sell liquor and collect taxes, and in times of stress, elites could refocus part of their anger on Jews and away from themselves. Marx felt a similar dynamic was working in the case of the Jewish slumlords and contract sellers, that Jews were in fact excluded from the core of power in the Fifties and Sixties. They were not in the senior management of banks or utility companies. But they were fine, welcome to act as middlemen, ghetto merchants or contract sellers.

Marx wasn’t trying to say that Jews were more heavily in this profession than other people, but he was trying to get out the symbolism of it. Whatever Jews do, there’s a two thousand year symbolic weight to it that affects the way we think about it. You can’t separate these things. I think he was on to something in terms of this symbolism and we can just continue to think through some of these things with the rest of the panel.

Thank You.

Sulieman Osman: Thank you for having me. I had a little bit of a printer problem last night so I’ll use a little bit of technology and read or at least glance to the screen. Thanks for having me. I’m a late edition to the panel and I think it’s a fascinating topic. Although I don’t specifically work on the specific topic of the panel, I do do research about ethnicity, about urbanism and about development in Brooklyn, so I want to talk a little bit about my research related to the panel and then also maybe a little bit about family history or about my own biographical connections to these spaces.

My project is about what would be described as either back to the city movement, the stay in the city movement, by beginning to look at the origins of-although it’s a loaded term-gentrification in Brooklyn after World War II. While a lot of historians have looked and traced what we’ve talked about, the broader trend of people moving to the periphery of cities after World War II…We know the story, the flight from the Center City even as early as the Forties, even tracing to the Twenties. There’s always been a significant population that stayed in the city that was moving into older tenement districts. The origins of the type…there have been a lot of neighborhoods similar built environment to here, sort of townhouse districts. You can think of Society Hill or Rittenhouse Square or University City. I don’t know Philadelphia that well. I was trying

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to make a connection to Philadelphia neighborhoods, but certainly Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C…definitely a place like San Francisco. I’m sort of tracing the history of the origins of this kind of revitalization and rooting it a lot earlier in post-war history. Rather than looking at the 1990’s and developers and real estate agents in the 1990’s, I look at the 1960’s or the 1970’s and link this back to the city movement, to the counter culture, to the new left, to sort of a search of authenticity for baby boomers. A kind of rediscovery of central city districts as sites of authenticity, critiques of mass consumer, the emergence of a new generation that grew up in the suburbs and was beginning to look towards older central city districts, particularly old townhouse districts, as potential refuges or sites in the critique of the suburbs.

A lot of these sort of older industrial districts and town house districts also began to emerge. If you think of Hanson’s Live, the idea that the grandchild wants to remember what the son wishes to forget. They were beginning to look towards the landscapes of their grandparents as sites of ethno-genesis, a place where you could return, sort of beginning to chafe against the perceived assimilation of the suburbs and beginning to rediscover ethnicity in the central city.

A lot of the spaces, a lot of the neighborhoods-we think of things like Little Italy or the Lower East Side, Sugar Hill in Harlem-are both memories of the 1920’s but also linked to sort of the 1970’s, people beginning to look to these spaces, both real and imagined, as sites of what the panels refer to as sort of the myth of the neighborhood, which has real benefits in sort of revitalizing the central city and also some aspects of the city that’s begin re-imagined. I sort of look at these shifts in the central city in a kind of…what are the benefits and drawbacks to the back to the city revitalization of the central city, but then also anxiety about higher prices.

I wanted to talk a little bit about…rather than Brooklyn, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Lower East Side. There’s certainly both this sort of landscape, although I’m not going to focus on the brownstone Brooklyn landscapes of the Lower East Side, and look at actually…look at a different sort of landscape. There is much in the Lower East Side that’s similar to brownstone Brooklyn. You can sort of see, you can really trace in a certain area, let’s say the East Village, a similar history of the emergence of a counter culture, sites that were also…sites I forgot to mention, a real kind of movement against urban renewal, like a lot of these central city districts you think of. Greenwich Village or East Village or brownstone Brooklyn were sites of neighborhood resistance to post-war development, this sort of anti Robert Moses movement, in a lot of these central city districts.

The Lower East Side had a similar kind of history, where you have the burgeoning counter culture, the squatter’s movement, a lot of activism and anxiety about redevelopment, eventual sort of concerns about gentrification in the 1980’s. Rich debates about the contemporary Lower East Side-is it museumification of the past or is it a sort of celebration of local place that’s a contrast, a sort of stark modernism of older forms of development in the Fifties and Sixties? But I want to kind of look and take a different look on a panel about development and kind of do an analysis not of familiar ground, let’s say Katz’s Delicatessen or the tenement museum or former sweatshops turned into artist studios, and look at another striking landscape of the Lower East Side when you’re

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driving on the FDR, which is the modernist landscape and ostensibly destroyed much of the Lower East Side.

If you drive on FDR, driving, you see these rows of red brick houses of public and middle-income subsidized housing. I’ll sort of make an argument or a suggestion that although they seemingly seem to be placeless, they seemingly seem to be stark and a contrast to this sort of colorful landscape of East Village, that in some ways these are also important sites of Jewish history and Jewish reform and that they are also, in some ways, authentic sites of history. We’ll talk a little bit about the development and politics of development.

To just talk a little bit about personal matters, I have lived…I grew up in both sorts of landscapes before my family moved to…Well, first of all, through my mother’s side of the family I’m from a mixed household. I’m Jewish through my mother’s side of the family. We’re descendant from…everybody is from Minsk in the 1880’s. Not through Ellis Island but through Boston, so mostly in the Worcester area. Before moving to Parksville in 1981, we lived in Masaryk Towers on the Lower East Side, on Columbia Street, which was a tall, urban renewal project from the last Sixties. It was a stark tower. I was on the 18th floor, right next to the Williamsburg Bridge. It was sort of a classic modernist…was critiqued as being a tower in the park but it was surrounded by open space with super blocks and unadorned…very similar to a lot of the landscape. Across the street from Masaryk Towers was the Baruch Houses, one of the largest public houses, low income. The one I was in was a Mitchell Lama project. It was a subsidized, low-income project. Across was the Baruch Houses, the largest low income project in Manhattan. I looked up some of the numbers about the Baruch Houses. Seventeen red brick towers ranging from seven to fourteen stories and home to five thousand people. The building I lived in, Masaryk Towers, was only a small section of an enormous landscape of public subsidized housing on the Lower East Side. It was like I was saying-you’re driving on FDR, it’s one of the most striking characteristics of the Lower East Side.

As you pass by the Baruch Houses, you’ll pass by the Vladeck Park Houses, named after one of the former managers of the Forward and a founder of the Jewish Labor Committee, original board member of the New York City Housing Authority. Next to that would be the William Wald houses, and along with the low-income housing built and operated by New York City Housing Authority are middle-income subsidized housing, limited equity coops, similar in design, similar red brick, similarly unadorned, similarly modernist, built by unions like International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and Abraham Kazan’s United Housing Federation.

Starting in 1936…you see, the Lower East Side has one of the most extensive collections of public housing or government subsidized housing for a variety of incomes in the country. A lot of it is really created during this era from the mid-Thirties to the late-Sixties or early-Seventies, an era that is colloquially referred to as the era of urban renewal, of urban redevelopment, with the striking remaking of the landscape.

How can I sort of make an argument that these kind of seemingly faceless buildings-I mean really no references to local place aside from the names, almost

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intentionally no references to ethnicity, seemingly indistinguishable from other projects on the part of the cities, how can I argue that these were also important sites in Lower East Side history or even more provocatively, as sort of authentically historic as, let’s say, Katz’s delicatessen up the street?

One can certainly point to either the names or the demographics of the developers or residents. Historians talk about, when they talk about urban renewal, this kind of mix, and I think they talked about. This mix of interest kind of came together to build and rebuild the center cities. They refer to them as either growth coalitions or the pro-growth machine, and a variety of kind of actors who unified, for a variety of sometimes conflicting reasons, to kind of knock down large sections of the cities and build these towers.

Certainly in New York or in this area you have figures like idealistic housing reformers like Charles Abrams. You have real estate developers like William Zeckendorf. You have non-profit hospital and university directors who want to expand their campuses. You have big, important part of union leaders and cooperative housing advocates like Abraham Kazan and of course, there’s the type of urban redevelopment of New York City, Robert Moses. So there are certainly figures you can point to as historic figures that can link this to at least New York Jewish history.

When we talk about what is sort of the impulse that united this group, is I think what people were talking about in maybe the first…sort of a sense of civic responsibility in this era of development. I don’t mean to be sanguine about the sort of negative aspects of urban renewal but these leaders were all of a generation that shared a type of faith in modernity as a solution to the city’s ills. They’re rooted in a spectrum of political views ranging from the sort of New Deal liberals but really also the old left. You can sort of use scientific progress, modernist design, slum clearance, to break from the sort of provincialism of the ghetto, to break free from neighborhoods where many of them grew up or many of them are second generation. A lot of people I mentioned-not Robert Moses-grew up in places like Brownsville or the Bronx and grew up in tenements, and the sense of looking towards the possibility of renewal, of modernization, later generation assimilation, as a source of mobility and freedom from being trapped. They had little nostalgia for dilapidated housing, for tuberculosis, for the industrial scene. And in these buildings we look at some of them, aside from this cost deficiency-these things being unadorned-was the sense of they’re intentionally unadorned, sort of a sense of universal…a universal mission of this housing. There’s almost intentionally no reference to local place. It was almost a faith in mass consumer culture. You can sort of link this to other spaces around the city, maybe to LeFrak City or to even William Levitt and other Brownsville raised…this sort of mass production, as being a possibility of a liberating force. In some ways you can detect, even in those sort of destructive elements of it, a perhaps misguided progressive element to the performist wing of development in this period, which makes it so interesting to sort of contest.

So in some ways it’s interesting. My parents moved from Masaryk Towers to Park Slope. When you walk from Masaryk Towers to the East Village, you’re really kind of shifting from two sorts of eras of urbanism and two different urban visions. You’re moving in some ways from maybe you can say pro-growth era of Judaism to a slow-growth era of Judaism. Perhaps a space that was an outgrowth of the old left to a space

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that’s kind of an outgrowth of the new left. From Robert Mosesesque Judaism to a Jane Jacobsesque Judaism. A reform tradition centered in areas like…a Jewish reform tradition centered in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative or Coop City to one centered more in Park Slope or the East Village or the Upper West Side. From the Thirties…something that’s an outgrowth from the Thirties to an outgrowth from the Sixties, or maybe you can say from a modernist urbanism to perhaps a post-modern landscape.

So the goal here, though, is not to commemorate urban renewal or sort of celebrate the tens of thousands of people who were displaced by some of these projects, or to kind of return to, let’s say, that sort of slum clearance of the 1950’s, but it is an interesting era now where a lot of that landscape is being dismantled, that era of housing from the Thirties to Sixties. The sort of packed towers, low income housing, are largely being knocked down in a lot of cities or replaced with a different style. A lot of the Mitchell Lama, or sort of subsidized limited equity coops are being privatized. There’s a kind of a shift away from that.

I think it’s important to remember that the places, as flawed as they were, aren’t necessarily places, are placeless. There actually was a history to those places that’s interesting to remember, not so much to replicate but perhaps for future developments to remember that development can incorporate a reformist spirit, not just a destructive spirit. It’s a difficult marriage but there is that sort of possibility, and to sort of rethink if those places as interesting historic places, perhaps as to the mission that could be preserved or remembered.

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