Sifting the Rubble for Facts
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| Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. |
"Guernica is a small town of the Basque province of Vizcaya, lying in a valley ten kilometres from the sea and thirty from Bilbao. With a population of some 7,000, Guernica appears simply one more village in a hilly countryside of friendly villages and isolated farmhouses. It has nevertheless been celebrated since before records began as the home of Basque liberties. For it was before her famous oak that the Spanish Monarchs or their representatives customarily swore to observe Basque local rights.
"On April 26, 1937, a Monday (and, therefore, like all Mondays at Guernica, a market day) the small farmers from nearby were bringing into the main square the fruits of the week's toil. At this time Guernica lay some thirty kilometres from the front.
"At half-past four in the afternoon, a single peal of church bells announced an air raid. There had been some raids in the area before, but Guernica had not been bombed. At twenty minutes to five, Heinkels 111 began to appear, first bombing the town and then machine gunning its streets. The Heinkels were followed by the old spectres of the Spanish War, Junkers 52. People began to run from the town. These also were machine gunned. Incendiary bombs, weighing up to 1,000 lbs, and also high explosives, were dropped by waves of aircraft arriving every twenty minutes until a quarter-to-eight. The centre of the town was then destroyed and burning. 1,654 people were killed and 889 wounded. The Basque parliament house and the famous oak, lying away from the centre, nevertheless remained untouched." (Hugh Thomas,
The Spanish Civil War, 1961, p. 419.)
Guernica was only the beginning, of course. The Battle of Britain, familiarly known as the Blitz, involved a strategic bombing campaign in which the Germans laid waste to large sections of British cities - I've been to Coventry and seen the remains of the cathedral. In due course the Allies responded with strategic bombing campaigns against the Axis, leading to the widespread flattening of cities and culminating with the firebombing, most notably. of
Hamburg,
Dresden (immortalized by Kurt Vonnegut in
Slaughterhouse-Five), and
Tokyo, and also the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Initially there was some effort to focus strategic bombing on military targets, even if they were located in cities with their concomitant civilian populations. Another word for civilian is non-combatant, but civilians quickly became an object of attack, even if they were unable to fight back. Call them victims, as they have been, to a greater or lesser degree, throughout the history of warfare.
This is a story about bricks and mortar, but I hope we can keep in mind the vast suffering caused by the bombing campaigns of World War II.
Gales of Creative Destruction at Home
Guernica and its children came to mind when I was reading Robert Kanigel's recent biography of Jane Jacobs,
Eyes on the Street (2016). On pages 166-167, while discussing the zeitgeist of planning and architecture right after World War II, he says, "Something close to a social consensus emerged, one rejecting the old, ragged past, proposing to scrape it away, often literally, and replace it with a swept-clean, squared-away future: superblocks of Corbusian towers in town and great, green park-like tracts in the new suburbs. In both cases, the street, the heart of the old carcinogenic city and its evils, would be erased. And these sensibilities came on now with such ferocity, as if embracing the urgency, scale, and force of the war itself, that this New Truth could appear self-evident: no need to mend the postwar world's tattered social and physical fabric; best to obliterate it and start over." Or, to put it more succinctly, "the lesson of a postwar world of bombed-out European and Japanese cities: Clear out the rubble. Build anew."
I found that intriguing. I'm thinking I've heard the idea before, in conversation - that the bombed-out cities of Europe and Japan inspired the urban renewal movement in the United States after 1945. But I'd never looked into it. Well, it took a while, but I did follow up.
Not to keep you in suspense, I don't think this is true. My search was hardly exhaustive, and it's quite possible I'm missing something, but I haven't been able to find anybody saying or writing at the time that the flattening of cities in World War II was inspiring or even just encouraging the flattening of neighborhoods in urban renewal.
I should add that Kanigel has a decent critical apparatus in the book, but there are no footnotes for this passage. A zeitgeist without footnotes makes me nervous.
Of course, it's hard to prove a negative. I can't say there's nothing there, only that I haven't found it.
I also have two counterarguments. First, we had been flattening neighborhoods in this country long before World War II - back then it was called slum clearance rather than urban renewal; and, second, at least in Germany, rebuilding was a complicated mix where Corbusier's ville radieuse and the garden city competed with other architectural ideas, limitations imposed by the existing environment, and - who knew? - the wishes of the people who lived there.
Slum Clearance in New York
The fabric of cities has never been static, and the disasters of war and fire have frequently required the rebuilding of large areas. The British really did
burn a good part of Washington, D.C., during the war of 1812, and during the Revolution there was a
devastating fire on the west side of Manhattan. I could multiply examples - the San Francisco
earthquake in 1906, the
great fire in Chicago in 1871 - but you get the idea.
Instead, I'm going to concentrate on slum clearance in New York City, where clearcutting and redevelopment of substantial areas got an early start and was pursued with considerable enthusiasm, to the extent that it has been called the New York Approach. This switch from reactive to proactive redevelopment may have taken inspiration, at least in the later nineteenth century, from Baron Haussmann's
reconstruction of Paris between 1853 and 1870, but I don't have any proof, and that would be another story. (The first Roman emperor, Augustus, also carried out
extensive public works in Rome, which I suppose is a precedent, but I sincerely doubt was an inspiration.)
Let us turn our attention to a bucolic pond that lay out in the country north of the New Amsterdam settlement at the lower tip of Manhattan. People loved to go to the Collect Pond for picnics in the warm weather and ice skating in the cold. However, as the city grew, things changed, and various industries moved in to take advantage of the water.
New York City's Parks Department puts it pretty succinctly: "By the early nineteenth century, however, New York City had transformed the sparkling waters into a communal open sewer. Disgusted, local authorities initiated a project to fill the sewer with earth from an adjacent hill. In 1805, in order to drain the garbage-infested waters, designers opened a forty-foot wide canal that today is known as Canal Street."
We'll stick with the Parks Department story here: "By 1811, the City had completed the filling of Collect Pond. A neighborhood known as Paradise Square soon arose over the pond’s previous site. Unfortunately, due to the area’s extremely high water table, Paradise Square began to sink in the 1820’s. The neighborhood also began to emit a foul odor, prompting the most affluent residents to leave the community. By the 1830s, Paradise Square had become the notorious 'Five Points,' an extremely poor and dangerous neighborhood renowned for its crime and filth." (For the full Parks Department story, click
here. See also Tyler Anbinder,
City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York, 2016, p. 120.)
So a bucolic pond became a noisome industrial zone, which in turn was replaced by a squalid slum. And later this space would become part of New York City's Civic Center, with a small park called Collect Pond Park nestled among the courthouses and other government buildings.
But before all the courthouses could show up, Five Points needed to be cleared. Enter Jacob Riis, a pioneering photojournalist and author of the book
How the Other Half Lives (1890). A lot of people read this book, including a young Theodore Roosevelt, and Riis soon found himself with allies in the slum clearance business.
As Tyler Andbinder puts it in
City of Dreams, on page 416, "The changes Riis and his allies sought came exceedingly slowly - tenement owners had enormous political clout and used every bit of it to resist renovating their lucrative properties - but change eventually did come. Thanks to Riis's efforts, the block of decrepit tenements known as Mulberry Bend was condemned by the city, torn down in 1895, and replaced by Mulberry Bend Park, which opened in 1897." (Mulberry Bend Park is now called
Columbus Park.)
The demolition of Mulberry Bend was a turning point, and not just for Five Points. As Anbinder notes on page 434 of his 2001 book,
Five Points, "the clearing of Mulberry Bend began a whirlwind of tenement destruction that, by World War II, had leveled huge swaths of the Lower East Side and many of the city's other notorious tenement complexes, and replaced them with huge public housing projects that in some cases became almost as frightful as the rookeries." (Rookery was a term that was often used for really bad slum buildings.)
New York City clearly did not wait until World War II for inspiration on slum clearance, and indeed the map below gives an indication of the city's future plans on the eve of the war. In 1940, the New York City Planning Commission mapped 9,000 acres as "Sections Containing Areas for Clearance, Replanning, and Low-Rent Housing." You'll note that Manhattan and the older parts of Brooklyn look like they have measles. The South Bronx and the East River frontage of Queens are also major targets. (The map is from Joel Schwartz,
The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City, 1993, pp. 76-77.)
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| Planned Clearance, 1940. |
And the city did not wait for the end of the war to put these redevelopment projects in gear. The City Planning Commission approved the plans for
Stuyvesant Town in 1943, a few weeks before the fire-bombing of Hamburg.
Reconstruction in West Germany
Now let's have a look at Germany. I confess I knew virtually nothing about the German reconstruction until I started working on this story - the better part of a year ago now. Fortunately there was a book to cure my ignorance: Jeffry M. Diefendorf,
In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (1993).
(Professor Diefendorf's book covers West Germany only. East Germany was at this point under Soviet control and had a separate history. East and West Germany reunified in 1990.)
For our purposes, perhaps the first point is the reaction of Americans when they arrived on the ground in Germany and saw the devastation up close. Diefendorf tells this story about what things were like in early 1945: "A group of senior American military officers toured several of the bombed cities by jeep between 17 and 22 April, just before the war ended. Of Nuremberg they reported: 'This is the worst of all, hardly anything but dust. The medieval city center [is] obliterated, including parts of the old city walls. The Cathedral is shattered. A razed city, Biblical annihilation. No such destruction of a large city ever known.'" (P. xv.)
So, perhaps less of an inspiration and more of a cautionary tale.
There was a tremendous amount of rubble. Berlin alone had 55 million cubic meters of rubble. Some of this material - particularly bricks and stone - could be salvaged, but much of it became landfill. "Hamburg was fortunate to have at hand unused canals that could be filled in," and it "also used rubble to raise the level of one whole bombed-out area, Hammerbrook, which had been built originally on marshland and had perpetually suffered from bad drainage and defective sanitation." (Pp. 15, 26-30.)
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| Hamburg, 1943. |
As the work of rubble clearance progressed, a piece of good news gradually became clear - the damage to underground systems was substantially less than the devastation above ground. In Munich, for instance, the damage level for the electrical system was 6.58 percent, the gas system 15.71 percent, the water system 4.21 percent, the sewer system 4 percent, and the telephone lines 40-50 percent (p. 19).
These cities, despite their appearance, were not blank slates. The survival of the underground bones of the city gave the old city layout a significant advantage over new plans that would require new utility grids.
Another hindrance to radical replanning was the pesky issue of private property. As in the United States, expropriation of property was not easy in Germany. The same was true for moving lot lines, perhaps to widen a street, or combining lots to allow for construction of a larger building. (See pp. 230-231, and really all of chapter 8, "Reconstruction and Building Law.")
Various laws were passed to aid the reconstruction process, but, perhaps more importantly, the planners were not the only ones who wanted to rebuild. The people wanted to do it too. Here's how Diefendorf puts in on p. 283:
"Finally, a spirit of cooperation generally prevailed in the bombed cities. Postwar Germany witnessed an efflorescence of citizens' groups dedicated to helping rebuild individual monuments or whole streets or quarters, such as associations that facilitated the redrawing of property lines. Although reconstruction laws enabled authorities to mandate such property adjustments, that involved the time and expense of pursuing complicated administrative and legal procedures. In many places, voluntary associations of property owners, acting upon the advice of local planners, went ahead and made the adjustments on their own, trading lots or buying out individuals who were unwilling or unable to rebuild. As long as they seemed reasonable, property owners usually accepted the proposals of planning authorities, even when those proposals entailed some personal sacrifice."
Overall, the reconstruction of Germany's cities was a great success. Certainly there were shortcomings, and there have been many vocal critics with valid points. However, as Diefendorf puts it on page 276, "Those who condemn reconstruction as a failure and sharply criticize architects and planners may have forgotten that in 1945 Germans faced the enormous challenge of housing millions of people, rebuilding businesses, schools, hospitals, and government buildings, repairing streets and utilities, and restoring or reconstructing the major monuments that characterized each city. Not only was all this work accomplished, but it was completed much faster than anyone at the time thought possible. Within a decade or so after the war, cities that had been reduced to rubble and ashes were again livable and lived in. At least in a quantitative sense, and in terms of speed, reconstruction was a great success."
Just to reinforce this point, "By 1954, the population of most West German cities exceeded that of 1939." (P. 281.) Remember that, in 1945, seasoned military observers were talking about "Biblical annihilation."
The rebuilders faced two main issues: housing and highways. Neither of these was new, and the reconstruction efforts after World War II could draw from a body of ideas and experience dating back over decades.
Germany's population expanded very rapidly during the nineteenth century, and there was a large shift of the population from rural to urban areas. The housing stock in the cities grew, but failed to keep pace with the growing population. Slums became increasingly crowded as the number of people (related or not) in an apartment escalated (p. 108). Think of a dystopian "Friends."
City governments recognized a limited number of options: Renovate or rebuild existing slums, or build affordable housing in new areas outside the city (p. 109). They did all three before the war, and they did all three after the war, although it seems fair to say that the pace picked up a bit. In new construction, for instance, "Between 1949 and 1955, an average of about 450,000 dwelling units were completed yearly in the Federal Republic, compared to about 300,000 units yearly between 1927 and 1930, the prosperous years of Weimar." (P. 131. See also all of chapter 5, "The Housing Problem.")
The twentieth century brought another population explosion - this one in motor vehicles. Postwar planners clearly saw a need to make cities work for cars - the phrase was "die autogerechte Stadt," or the automobile-ready city. The planners wanted it, and so did the people. Streets were widened "even though such work frequently entailed removing historic facades, demolishing potentially restorable damaged buildings, undercutting facades to create arcades for pedestrians, and appropriating former sidewalk space for roads or parking." In addition, new streets were cut through built-up areas. The word for this was Durchbruch, or breakthrough (p. 206).
Opposition to this work started early. As one planner put it in 1947, widening old streets or cutting through new ones could only make traffic flow "at best no better than
approximately good,
approximately fluid." (P. 210.)
And another planner mentioned - also in 1947 - the quality-of-life issues involved in creating arterial highways to run through densely populated areas. "We also do not want people to have to live on these traffic arteries as we are planning them. It is systematic murder for the individual resident every day to have to experience and put up with the smell, noise, and dirt of a major artery." (P. 208.)
As for historic preservation, the focus was primarily on churches and government buildings, where it knew considerable success. Private buildings, however, were generally left to their owners, where restoration naturally competed with issues such as the pressing need for shelter (pp. 69-70, 74).
It's worth taking a moment to think about all the nice, old buildings in Germany that were lost to the war. In Hannover, before World War II there were approximately 1,600
half-timbered buildings in the older parts of the city. At the end of the war there were 32 (p. 78).
As for the architectural quality of all the new construction, "No one would claim that the postwar period marked a golden age of German architecture." (P. 278.) Yet, again, arguments for or against a particular style, or whether the architect's design maximizes the building's potential for utility and beauty, seem a bit beside the point when we look at the actual situation in Germany in the late 1940s. As Diefendorf puts it, "During the process of urban reconstruction, it proved much more important that architects design and build whatever was needed than that they build in one particular style." (P. 66.)
The actual outcomes of the reconstruction varied considerably from city to city, because each individual city essentially directed its own rebuilding. We can place these cities on a spectrum, with Frankfurt at one end as the most "American" city and Muenster at the other end as the most "traditional" city.
Frankfurt had started building modern suburban housing projects in the 1920s. The devastation of the war meant that modern thinking could be applied to the rubble of the inner city as well as the suburbs. Because Berlin was isolated in the Russian sector, Frankfurt became the financial capital of West Germany, and soon banks and major corporations were sprouting major skyscrapers, "and Frankfurt went on to become perhaps the most modern - its critics might say the most Americanized - of West Germany's cities, replete with traffic-clogged thoroughfares and smog-obscured views of the commercial downtown." (Pp. 77-78.)
In contrast, Muenster "succeeded in creating the air of a historic city in its center. It did so by reconstructing key monuments, retaining much of the old street and property layout, and requiring that new buildings in proximity to historic buildings utilize traditional proportions, colors, and materials." (Pp. 87-88.)
In sum, Muenster "impresses observers as a historic city with a clear identity." (P. 89.)
Germany vs. the Big Apple
When we set the German and American experiences side by side, what strikes me the most is their commonalities. The two basic issues are housing and highways. In both countries the origins of urban crowding lie well back in the nineteenth century; the problems with cars are newer, but certainly predate World War II.
I think the biggest difference between Germany and the United States is the Altstadt, or old city. In Europe there are three phases in the history of cities - the early city, the industrial city (in the nineteenth century), and, with apologies to Detroit, the motor city of the twentieth century.
American cities often lack the Altstadt. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, "There is no there there."
In Germany, it turned out that many people actually liked their old town centers, with relatively small buildings, narrow streets, quirky street patterns, and lots of pedestrians.
In a number of American cities, particularly those with downtowns that date from before 1800, I believe we are now seeing a similar attraction to the old city.
Much as I love the old buildings, I think the German experience teaches us that the key issue is the survival of the old street network. The quirky little old streets set the human scale, and even prepare the occasional surprise. Think of it: Intimacy outdoors.
Special thanks to the staff of the Free Library's City Institute branch and to the Interlibrary Loan Department. This story would not have happened without them.
See also Permeable Blocks,
A Larger Story Coming On,
Small Streets Are Like Diamonds,
Transportation Should Not Trump Destination,
Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?
