Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

by Samuel Zipp

Overview

Moving beyond the usual good-versus-evil story that pits master-planner Robert Moses against the plucky neighborhood advocate Jane Jacobs, Samuel Zipp sheds new light on the rise and fall of New York's urban renewal in the decades after World War II. Focusing on four iconic "Manhattan projects"—the United Nations building, Stuyvesant Town, Lincoln Center, and the great swaths of public housing in East Harlem—Zipp unearths a host of forgotten stories and characters that flesh out the conventional history of urban renewal. He shows how boosters hoped to make Manhattan the capital of modernity and a symbol of American power, but even as the builders executed their plans, a chorus of critics revealed the dark side of those Cold War visions, attacking urban renewal for perpetuating deindustrialization, racial segregation, and class division; for uprooting thousands, and for implanting a new, alienating cityscape. Cold War-era urban renewal was not merely a failed planning ideal, Zipp concludes, but also a crucial phase in the transformation of New York into both a world city and one mired in urban crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199874057
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/29/2012
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Samuel Zipp is Assistant Professor of American Civilization and Urban Studies at Brown University.

Table of Contents

Introdution

Part I: United Nations
1. Clearing the Slum Called War

Part II: Stuyvesant Town
2. Remaking the Ethic of City Rebuilding
3. The Mass Home in the Middle-Class Cityscape

Part III: Lincoln Square
4. Culture and Cold War in the Making of Lincoln Center
5. The Battle of Lincoln Square

Part IV: East Harlmen
6. Cold War Public Housing in the Age of Urgan Renewal
7. Confronting the "Mass Way of Life"

Conclusion: Under the Sign of the White Cross
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Zipp highlights four post-war construction projects in New York City that significantly altered the landscape, delivering a measured critique of urban renewal at a time when “city blocks were literally uprooted, broken down, and reconstructed in geometric arrangements that produced a new, unfamiliar sense of order.” The author looks at efforts that helped to create and maintain Manhattan’s global influence on politics and the arts: The United Nations headquarters, for instance, designed by a diverse group of 11 architects, became “a kind of international territory, considered inviolable under U.S. law, and figuratively, politically, and aesthetically to no one nation.” And Lincoln Center traded “blocks of tenements, warehouses, factories, and storefronts for a world-class, modern performing arts complex that capped New York’s campaign to become the cultural capital of the world.” But the plans that perhaps most directly affected Manhattan residents include the construction of Stuyvesant Town in the 1940s and “vast belts of public housing... erected in East Harlem” in the 1950s and ’60s. Though at times overly academic, Zipp’s deeply-researched and comprehensive volume manages to give readers a strong sense of history and a relevant social context in which to view it. Photos. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Samuel Zipp's Manhattan Projects is a significant and welcome contribution to this scholarship...[A] rich, detailed, and well-documented historical analysis."—Journal of American History

"Samuel Zipp's gracefully-written Manhattan Projects offers detailed, well-illustrated case studies of famous urban renewal schemes to make a larger point about urban planning in modern America."—Contemporary Sociology

"Zipp's rigorous, thoughtful, and careful argument is a guide out of the intellectual dead end represented by the conventional narrative of urban renewal. He both reframes much of our existing knowledge of the subject and then adds to it with details that directly and indirectly cast the planning history of twentieth-century New York in a fresh and convincing light. This is a masterpiece of research, synthesis, and persuasion."—Timothy Mennel, Journal of Urban History

"Zipp offers a fresh perspective on this dispiriting tale. Unlike many of his scholarly predecessors, who regarded the anti-urban agenda of policy makers as a given (why else would they have so destroyed our cities?), Mr. Zipp tells his story from the point of view of policy makers who loved cities and who thought they were making a 'benevolent intervention'...compelling...[An] absorbing account."—Wall Street Journal

"Giving projects built by Robert Moses and the New York City Housing Authority their due, Professor Zipp argues that urban renewal cannot be measured merely by the number of structures that were bulldozed or built. Rather, he makes a convincing case that the policy also transformed 'the terms by which cities were understood' and recast debates over 'the impacts of modernism, progress, public and private power, and cold war ideology on culture, politics and social life.'"—New York Times

"In prose that balances academic rigor and storytelling Mr. Zipp makes his case with a compelling re-creation of the postwar historical moment Manhattan Projects takes long strides toward rescuing urban renewal from today's regnant discourse, which brushstrokes the monolithic towers that are now our visual touchstones for poverty are understood as the work of hubris at best and, at worst, anti-poor and anti-urban."—New York Observer

"Compelling...challenge[s] readers to rethink what are fast becoming standard misconceptions of New York City's history."—Next American City

"Intense and meticulously detailed."—New York Journal of Books

"Lucidly written and intricately argued."—The Berkshire Eagle

"Beyond his capacity for detailed research, Zipp's greatest talent as an historian may be his ability to pursue the various threads of his arguments to their conclusions, leaving the door open to the many ironies that have typified New York's conflicted history."—New York History

"Richly detailed and thoughtfully written."—Times Literary Supplement

"Thoroughly researched and enlivened by an array of source materials. Highly recommended."—CHOICE

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