Recently, at the recommendation of a friend, I read a book call 'Cities' by Lawrence Halprin.
First published in 1963, the used copy I purchased (a revised edition from 1972) came from a library.
It still had the little pocket inside the back cover with a salmon-colored card that could be extracted and stamped with a due date. When I received the book in the mail, I indulged in a few seconds of nostalgia. I remembered being a kid walking up to the library desk with a stack of books, hypnotized as the librarian briskly scanned each book through a Star-Trek like machine, which made a soft whirring and clunking noise, before opening the back cover, removing the card, and stamping it.
After I finished the book, I saw the city with new eyes. Or maybe not completely new, given that I was still dismayed by the way the street -- a public resource -- has been given over to the storage of increasingly gigantic private vehicles. But I felt less alone, which is often the magic of a book.
The city would be better with many fewer cars, of course, but it would also be better if we promoted incentivized legally mandated the use of smaller cars, like this one, which is being swallowed up by its monstrous neighbors. Fifty years ago, Lawrence Halprin understood the danger of prioritizing cars in the city. In an opening section called 'Urban Spaces,' he writes, 'We need to specialize again and separate the functions which streets and open spaces are called upon to perform. It is too much to ask of a street that it serve, at the same time, for pedestrians and traffic and parking and shopping and children's play, and also provide amenity and quiet to the inhabitants along its way.'
I thought about my block, which has devolved into a drag strip and a parking lot, even on the sidewalks. When I moved here in the late '90s, there were no cars on the sidewalk, and I was charmed to see kids playing stickball. It was like I had been thrown back in time to a version of the city that you see in old movies. But as I think about it now, I can't remember the last time I saw kids playing on the street. And I often get yelled at (or swerved at) by drivers for running down the side of the street, adjacent to the parked cars -- where there's less risk of tripping -- because of the entrenched misperception that every inch of every street is for drivers and their cars. In 2024, we know that cars are not only ruining the city, but they are also playing a big part in ruining the world. What will it take, I wonder, to change.
This is not exactly a new situation. Fifty or sixty years ago, when Halprin was writing, cities were also in a period of stagnation and decline, starved for population and business (and tax revenue). Veterans returning home from World War II had moved to the suburbs, and the country had built a highway system and housing stock to enable this exodus. Cities were associated with poverty and crime.
Having grown up in a suburb of Pittsburgh, I can attest that I rarely went downtown, and when I did, it never occurred to me that anyone would ever want to live there. I just assumed that everyone wanted a house and a yard and access to malls and supermarkets that you had to drive to. While Halprin doesn't get into the history of urban decline, he positions his work as an opportunity to reassess what's good about city life and to lay out how we should think about building cities to make them as enjoyable as possible for those who inhabit or visit them, a lesson that's as valuable now as it was sixty years ago. Halprin writes, 'The ultimate purpose of a city in our times is to provide a creative environment for people to live in. By creative, I mean a city which has great diversity and thus allows for freedom of choice; one which generates the maximum of interaction between people and their surroundings.'
He goes on to write about the need for mass transit and a system of pedestrian paths leading through greenways and allowing people to bike and walk to the city center, i.e, my version of heaven. It's not that New York City (which is somehow often touted as the most bike- and pedestrian-friendly city in the country) lacks paths, but they are random and scattered and often don't connect to anything. And if they do connect, they are often too crowded with other bikers/walkers and 'anti-terrorist' bollards to be ridden in anything but a state of anxiety, or they are (increasingly) overrun with mopeds. In the section 'Streets,' the author writes, 'We need to recapture in our own modern terms the aesthetic qualities of the ancient street -- the quiet, the sense of neighborhood, the fine urban scale.' This is more true than ever.
Halprin makes clear what's necessary to begin this process: 'In order to make possible a gracious, unhysterical kind of life on a city street, it has become clear that the automobile must take second place and be excluded.'
He also writes about the use of the waterfront, and how it can make cities even more enjoyable when lined with parks and paths. In New York City, he writes, the riverfront, which looks very appealing from above -- with graceful curves and islands of trees -- is 'bad. If you look carefully, there are five tiers of transportation facilities, including the original railroad right of way. It is true there are trees but they are only decoration. The whole city has been divorced from the great Hudson River waterway by cars and railroad and freeway, even though the actual design is very pleasant.' While this situation has improved over the last fifty years, particularly along the waterfront in downtown Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, these areas represent the lowest-hanging fruit (and the wealthiest constituencies).
Meanwhile, much of the Bronx waterfront is still lined by a sewer of highway traffic and vacant lots, as is plain enough to see from this view of the Major Deegan Expressway looking north from the High Bridge. Halprin writes, 'The visual impact of the concrete ribbons, often beautiful and well designed in themselves, has been responsible, over and over again, for the destruction of every other urban value except speed.'
And here's the view looking south. Keep in mind that people live on the eastern side of this highway, and that they are starved for access to parks; but instead of giving it to them, the city keeps the highways running for the convenience of suburban commuters, which is why so many, when given the chance, choose to leave. 'When the city loses its inhabitants,' Halprin writes, 'it will die. And it will surely die as long as it does not provide a fine, well-rounded environment in which to live.' And this: 'Most freeways, no matter how beautifully structured, cannot overcome the enormous damage and destruction which these vast and complex arteries cause in the heart of a city by their very presence and, more importantly, by the fact of their dumping cars into the downtown core.'
The solution, he writes, is to 'completely bar the automobile from the city core [and] come to grips with the notion that cars cannot come into the city, or by sheer numbers will destroy the very essence of downtown.' And this: 'The essential point is that amenities in a city must have priority over the automobile at whatever cost to mobility.'
Despite my focus here, I should point out that very little of the book is focused on cars; that they must be limited is for the most part more implied than explicit. Most of the book is devoted to the basic elements of the city, including gardens -- open and enclosed -- parks, street furniture (benches and pots), kiosks, doors, clocks, and sculpture (featuring the work of Carl Milles), and staircases.
There's a section on bicycles: 'More American cities, built on flat ground, could profit from the lesson of the bicycle. In New York City traffic jams, it is by far the easiest way of getting about. And doctors have made clear the value of the bicycle as a healthful method of exercising.' There are a few lines like this that feel a bit dated -- several times Halprin refers to the pleasures of 'girl-watching' as if it's a universal trait :( -- but most of the language holds up.
As much as I enjoyed reading the book, it was depressing to consider how little progress we've made over the past fifty years. Getting older for me has been accompanied by a growing realization that things won't change nearly as quickly as I thought they would when I was in my twenties (and that some things get worse).
I try to acknowledge the pockets of progress, such as this new exercise area that's part of the refurbished Highbridge Park, but -- even with global warming and an epidemic of car crashes and death -- systemic change remains nothing more than a glimmer on a distant horizon.
One of the hard things about living in the city in 2024 is to understand its potential and to see how blithely we continue to squander it.
So what will cities look like in 2062?
Will we finally transform cities into a landscape where cars are limited and where people of all incomes have access to parks and public transportation and the other parts of the city that make it good to live in? Or will we continue to strive for tiny little improvements as the entire ship veers with sickening momentum into that bridge in Baltimore an iceberg.
In a section on trees, Halprin writes: 'There is an old Chinese proverb which says: 'No shade tree? Blame not the sun but yourself!' The same idea, I think, could be applied to the city of 2024. The city remains beautiful, but it is again in decline, a result of the terrible policies we have enacted and the good ones that we have failed to enact.
My fear is that, in 2062, cities will still be waiting for a revolution, and a book like 'Cities' -- 100 years after it was written -- will be as relevant then as it is now.