’Cause I’m Mr. Whyteside

Can the people rule? This is the thought that drives Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s late tragedy about the mythical Roman general whose inability to manage the city’s class conflicts dooms him to exile and eventual death. Shakespeare, as usual, does not pick a side but concentrates on dramatizing the tangles of power and politics. What motivates elites—service to an abstract ideal, a desire for renown, the pleasures of domination, luxury itself? How, from the antagonisms of minority rule, are they able to sustain the fantasy of a unified polity, be it “Rome” or “New York”? What could democracy look like in practice? Is it desirable that every cook should govern, as a phrase of the Marxist writer C. L. R. James has it, or is majority rule merely an exercise in the extortion of the greater by the lesser, who in their disorganization are incapable of articulating, let alone securing, a common interest?

At the play’s climax, when a senator cries that popular rule will sink the city, a plebeian tribune shoots back: “What is the city but the people?” It is unclear who chose this phrase for the title of a 1969 documentary produced by the Department of City Planning under then-Mayor John Lindsay. It is an apt one, however, given the way that the film, despite its establishment credentials and endorsement of Lindsay’s defanged New Left politics, depicts class and racial cleavages in a surprisingly frank manner. The film opens with a jarring montage in which the bird’s-eye view of the planner is juxtaposed with the apparent chaos of the street. Broken glass, burned-out storefronts, and street melees flash in alarming quick cuts as helicopter blades chop the soundtrack, evoking the demented carnage of the war in Southeast Asia. After a billboard warns “You Can’t Hide from Venereal Disease,” a man holding a protest sign approaches the camera, shakes his fist, and yells, “The city stinks!”

Midway through What Is the City but the People, a Black construction contractor in Bedford-Stuyvesant, whose work consists of demolishing portions of the neighborhood under the auspices of the federal Model Cities program, explains his social views. Whites fear Blacks becoming self-reliant, preferring them to remain mired in menial agricultural and service work, he says. And yet Black people are expected to sacrifice themselves for an alleged common good, paying taxes and fighting wars of obscure purpose. The only language elites understand is force, since the riots in Watts, Harlem, and elsewhere “did more to bring about some response from the government than hundreds of years of our pleading.” Leaving aside the curious optics of a government-sponsored documentary dignifying the prospect of violent uprising, this man, in his succinct and penetrating analysis, could easily pass for the tribune from Coriolanus.

The counterweight to all this is a voice-over provided by William H. Whyte, whose genial narration referees what otherwise appears to be intractable strife. Whyte cut a distinctive figure across the stage of twentieth-century US intellectual life. His mellifluous name, instinct for showmanship, and distinctive drawl, which somehow conveyed both innocence and archness, answer a question no one had perhaps thought to ask: What if Jimmy Stewart had become a pop sociologist? Educated at Princeton, Whyte had been an editor at Fortune magazine, where he helped jump-start the career of Jane Jacobs before relaunching himself as an urban reformer under the patronage of Laurance S. Rockefeller, the third son of a family whose progeny included the governor of New York and the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank. From his perch at Rockefeller Center, Whyte developed the Street Life Project, which sought to lay bare the mysterious relationship between people’s behavior and the urban environment. This research culminated in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, a 1980 documentary that was restored and re-released to sold-out crowds late last year.

A lot had happened between 1969 and 1980. The faintly democratic promise of the Lindsay years had faded in the face of an economic crisis that sent municipal government, once an active if not entirely effective caretaker of the urban environment, into disorganized retreat. Into the breach stepped capital’s representatives, keen on remaking a public sphere that had slipped their grasp during the radical upsurge of the 1960s. The stamp of their effort is evident everywhere in present-day New York, whether in the omnipresence of “privately owned public spaces” (threadbare provisions exchanged for profitable zoning variances) or the common-sense hegemony of park conservancies (which marshal private resources to refurbish, and govern, nominally public parks). Whyte’s later documentary registers these shifts without explicitly noting them. Where What Is the City but the People evoked the messy problems of republican rule and posed them in the form of a question (sans punctuation), The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces reconceives political life, with its unavoidable suggestion of conflict, as a hazier “social” life emerging from the microdynamics of interactions between individuals.

Every time I think about the film, my mind semiconsciously renames it, interpolating the word public. Yet few if any of the spaces celebrated by Whyte are in fact public, at least in the generally accepted sense of that word as referring to a realm of universal access and political contestation. Seagram Plaza, financed in part with profits from the Bronfman family’s bootlegging business (the Seagram company was also a sponsor of Whyte’s documentary), admits pedestrians but proscribes their assembly. So too with Paley Park, built on the site of the demolished Stork Club (bootlegging emerges as a curious subtext in Social Life). The pocket park bears the name of the millionaire cigar manufacturer Samuel Paley, father of CBS executive William S. Paley, who chaired Lindsay’s Task Force on Urban Design in 1966. Greenacre Park, with its twenty-five-foot waterfall, was built by the Rockefellers themselves, one of many forays in a multidecade effort to burnish the potential of their vast Midtown real-estate holdings. However appealing, these spaces mark a political shift where the principle of collective decision-making was replaced with that of philanthropy.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is a potent cocktail. Like What Is the City but the People, it opens with the view from above, where sun, stone, and bodies compose themselves into abstract moving images. But unlike its predecessor, whose overture suggests a hopeless breach between the view from on high and the scrum of the street, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces promises that you can in fact reconcile the two. The method? Science. By combining “simple, direct observation” with a set of mostly unacknowledged priors, you can create vibrant, dynamic urban spaces that somehow, without overt management, organically even, respond to universally shared human needs. This premise, articulated repeatedly throughout Social Life, is garnished by the personal charisma of  Whyte, the happy warrior whose comic stutter, penchant for folksy maxims (“People tend to sit where there are places to sit”), and mild permissiveness make him something like the good dad, the one who’s tickled when you put your feet in the fountain.

Whyte proposes that we all share certain basic desires and offers a sort of decoder ring for their satisfaction. What do people want? Food, shelter, excitation, rest, some combination of privacy and social intercourse. Mostly, they want sex, if Whyte’s appraisal of the most commonly observed activity (“People looking at people looking at other people”) and his bemused endorsement of the alleged “swinger’s plaza” at 77 Water Street (“the most prolifically sittable place in New York,” he jokes) are understood in sufficient breadth. For Whyte, such places are above all social theaters in which a recursive, multidirectional looking helps us triangulate our respective positions in the world. He is duly critical of design interventions—awkward or no seating, spikes meant to dissuade idling—that compromise this essential intercourse. Given the correct dispensation of ledges, steps, plazas, nooks, channels, light, plant life, running water, sculpture, etc., something like natural equilibriums will emerge. “There is an instinctive feel that people have for the number that’s right for a place,” Whyte tells the viewer. That such instincts are universal is suggested by a segment in which the residents of 101st Street in benighted East Harlem are said to have implemented a bottom-up Whytean paradise hewed from the rough materials of the ghetto streetscape.

This is a theory of human nature that excises social antagonism thoroughly enough that the interests of the Seagram Company and the dispossessed Puerto Ricans of East Harlem can be assumed to be roughly the same. Nowhere is this rhetorical gambit clearer than in Whyte’s treatment of that “key person—the undesirable.” After forty years of broken-windows policing, it can be startling to hear how blithely Whyte, at the moment of its birth, dismisses the question of deviation from the silent compacts that govern the acceptable use of public space. “In actual fact,” he chirps, “these people are harmless and sometimes very well behaved.” After all, “in well-used public places, people are tolerant of the odd ones and life goes on with little fuss or trouble.” He mocks the fortress urbanism then emerging in Houston, Los Angeles, and Detroit, where leisure space was explicitly privatized and aloof architecture spurned the spontaneity, and vulnerability, of the street.

Whyte’s argument buttresses a familiar New York triumphalism that casts the city as a place where the lessons of Jacobs—that density, diversity, and a dash of chaos equal safety and not its opposite—were properly heeded. But it’s wishful thinking to imagine that the forces of order in New York did not, in their own way, intervene decisively during these years to shape the social life of small urban spaces. The Fund for the City of New York, an arm of the Ford Foundation that helped pay for Whyte’s film, was at the same moment underwriting Operation Crossroads, an early experiment in “quality-of-life” policing in which the NYPD deployed special units in Times Square to mount spectacular shows of force and conduct what officials described to The New York Times as “harassment” of panhandlers and suspected sex workers. The units were also activated in nearby Bryant Park, as a brief scene in Social Life approvingly depicts. Whyte was working at a moment when law enforcement pivoted from responding to crime as defined by statute toward the proactive regulation of social behavior itself. This marked a return to an earlier, broader conception of policing, reactivating its etymological connections to “policy” and “politics,” and thus to sovereignty; power would be wielded negatively but also positively, with the object of forging a more malleable polity. Where fortress urbanism proper represented a kind of mechanized approach to engineering urban spaces where property and propriety would be respected, in an older, denser metropolis like New York, whose transit system fosters a richer set of interconnections between its parts, this segregating instinct necessarily took a more labor-intensive form, one supported by New York’s finance-driven recovery and the correspondingly large police budgets it enabled. In the years following Whyte’s documentary, the number of cops in New York exploded, and the rank and file were inculcated with a confrontational bias against anyone perceived as a threat to commerce, especially young working-class people of color, whose services were no longer required in the new postindustrial economy. In other words, fortress urbanism did take root in New York, albeit in a different form. In select locations, though, where a sedimented culture of opposition met the specter of great real-estate profits, the fortresses became literal. In the years following the bloody 1988 police victory over “social parasites, druggies, skinheads, and communists” (as the head of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association put it at the time), Tompkins Square Park was sealed off with eight-foot-high chain-link fencing. Two groups were permitted entry: families with children and patrons of the privately financed dog run, the first in the city. The website of this amenity credits its founders with having combated “the perils of the day.” A lot of people paid for that dog run, not all of them with money.

How is it that where others saw something approaching civil war, Whyte alighted on a market utopia, where innumerable small preferences were negotiated peacefully among sufficiently like-minded individuals? It might be because in the spaces Whyte extolled, the intractable conflicts that it took a literal pitched battle to settle in Tompkins Square Park had already been overcome by elites winding their way back to private control of urban space aided by the nightstick. His methods are analogous to those of the neoclassical economists, who based their revolution on microfoundational claims that elided the raw domination that made markets possible in the first place: Whyte marvels at people’s powers of self-management without acknowledging that this smoothness is only feasible once the basic political questions around domination, property, distribution, and representation have been solved. The message of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, even if it is not stated outright, is that once the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the NYPD are securely in charge, things will go mostly fine.

Late in the film, Whyte takes viewers to Chase Manhattan Plaza to see Jean Dubuffet’s Four Trees sculpture (1972), commissioned by David Rockefeller as a “gift to the bank and the downtown community.” Such artworks serve as visual magnets and conversation pieces, says Whyte, who recommends their widespread installation. In February, on my way from the gym to therapy, I cut through the plaza, now renamed for the Chinese holding company that purchased it in 2013. A sign advised visitors that this was a privately owned space that “Owner” had made available to the public “at its discretion.” Following this strange, contract-like capitalization was a roster of thirteen prohibited activities—no lying down, no demonstrating, etc. The list concluded with a catchall provision that made the previous twelve redundant: Visitors shall not create “any conditions that unreasonably pose a health or safety risk, or disturb others.” The power to define of each of these terms—“unreasonably,” “disturb,” “others”—belongs to Fosun International, which also reserves the right to conduct “random searches of personal property.” The following week, when I attempted to traverse the plaza once again, I found it “closed until further notice,” barred off with the metal protest barricades used by the police to suppress unwanted movements. As I rerouted myself down Nassau Street, I glanced behind the bars, where a giant screen set up in the lobby window of the former headquarters of the Chase Manhattan Bank played the Winter Olympics to no one. It’s the wet dream of capital—the city without the people.