Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects: Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC by Owen Hatherley. Repeater, 218 pp., $17.
Owen Hatherley is not from New York. In fact, as he tells us in his new work of architectural and social criticism Walking the Streets/ Walking the Projects, he has only been here twice. I got the sense at times that he was worried about being called an interloper by us ornery and parochial New Yorkers. His epigraph doesn’t just quote the cutting NYC hip hop group Cannibal Ox and our most left-wing mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, but also Sting’s stupid song “An Englishman in New York.” From the first line, however, Hatherley has us dead to rights.
“New York, like Paris, is paradise for a particular kind of urbanist,” he writes. Yes, it is, and seeing as that particular kind of urbanist is the exact readership of this publication, I highly recommend this insightful and inciteful guide to New York’s planning and architecture and—most critically—to the insipid ideology our city has produced regarding those two subjects.
On its face, Walking the Streets is a Baedeker to the architecture of New York City and, for a chapter, Washington, DC, with an eye toward those cities’ large-scale planned developments. Its pages are peppered with photographs by the author (and a few by the editor of this publication), often coupled with cheeky captions. It is a book you will especially enjoy reading outside, on a park bench with a view to the skyline or while gliding through the city by train, bus, or ferry.
But Hatherley unveils his deeper purpose from the jump. He is not only out to describe his visits to New York and check out the sites that most interest him as a socialist urbanist and cultural critic. He is conducting a very clever experiment that those of us too steeped in New York lore might not even think to attempt.
New York, Hatherley argues, has been in the grips of a hidebound dogma for roughly the past sixty years. “The New York Ideology,” as he dubs it, is a Jacobsian faith in the street, not the plan. It is the belief that what is great about New York came about through the semispontaneous self-activity of both the working class and the bourgeoisie, and that ambitious projects threaten the very alchemy that makes the place work. It looks in awe at the scale of this metropolis and believes that nothing too big should be done to change it, or at least not too quickly. This is a poor understanding of our own hometown, and it is an even worse one when projected outward on other places.
“No better outlet for the pulse of the culture, education, and practice of architecture—in and beyond New York.” — John Hill
Although the New York Ideology has its roots in the debates of the 1960s over so-called urban renewal, with villain Robert Moses and hero Jane Jacobs as its boldface names (if not always its prime movers), Hatherley argues that it still has a hold on our psyches. He sees NIMBYs and YIMBYs—both big camps that accommodate the contending visions of leftists, rightists, and dissenters—fall back on it.
According to the New York Ideology, the city should change and grow not through state intervention but the by slow, steady accretion of popular activity. This ideology encompasses a narrative of our city’s history in which all that is awesome has been unplanned and all that is awful has been planned. It is worth quoting a passage at length to let Hatherley parrot this doctrine with his characteristic sympathy and sarcasm:
The great unplanned, unconscious, untrammeled city made a terrible mistake, it tells you—it tried to plan itself and change itself, in the form of those expensive “projects.” New York was almost brought down by such hubris, and the city was saved from the 1980s onwards by, on street level, the incredible grassroots pop culture that emerged out of the crisis, and from above, by the demented return of delirious New York, in the form of a real estate and finance boom given concrete form by the likes of the developer, oompa-loompa-like Surrealist art object and future far-right President Donald Trump, a man whose mannerisms and accent, not to mention his cruel and bizarre sense of humor, are far more New York than any other American president.
Hatherley’s brilliance is not just in identifying and skewering the ideological waters in which New Yorkers unwittingly swim, but in using its primary methodology against its primary antagonist: That is, he learns the city by walking its streets and making observations—the very means New York Ideologists like Jacobs prescribe—but he walks those streets to see the things they most reject—The Projects, or any big, totalizing development, especially mid-twentieth-century social housing complexes. Hatherley clearly loves a lot about New York, and for all his barbs at our folkways, he does not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Instead, he kindly magpies insights from its greatest proponents (people like Robert Fitch, Marshall Berman, Samuel Delaney, and, yes, Jacobs), even as he casts his own gleanings in a different and sometimes opposing light.
“The New York Ideology,” as Hatherley dubs it, is a Jacobsian faith in the street, not the plan. It is the belief that what is great about New York came about through the semispontaneous self-activity of both the working class and the bourgeoisie, and that ambitious projects threaten the very alchemy that makes the place work.
The book, published by the London imprint Repeater, appears to be written primarily with British readers in mind. Hatherley frequently compares places I’m deeply familiar with in New York with places I don’t know in the UK. (He also enjoys drawing comparisons with places farther from either of our homes, as when he likens southwestern Washington DC’s foreboding landscape of severe office blocks and large open spaces to the capital districts of Pyongyang and Bucharest). But it is nonetheless an arresting read for New Yorkers. Even those intimately acquainted with all the streets and projects Hatherley sets out to see, from Lincoln Hospital to Waterside Plaza and from Queensbridge Houses to Williamsburg Houses, will find joy in following him as he discovers them, as if in real time. Walking the Streets starts in 2014 and Hatherley writes in the present tense about things now irrevocably past. The Westyard has not yet been transformed into Hudson Yards (oy!) and Trump is only “threatening to stand for President” (oy vey!). After two chapters, the book shoots closer to our present, when Hatherley returns to New York, with a day trip to DC, in 2022—although careful readers will find that even in the intervening three years some things have changed.
Hatherley’s first stroll takes him through the “dementedly heroic scale” of Midtown Manhattan, a place I’m somewhat surprised to call home as a resident of a Hell’s Kitchen limited-equity cooperative since 2020. As such, I can personally relate to Hatherley’s Bermanian observation that “you can tie yourself up in knots trying to explain how this thing which is against everything you believe in is actually a fulfilment of it.” As much as Midtown represents the triumph of capital, it also offers some gleaming icons of modernity from Rockefeller Center (which, he notes, escaped Jacobs’s opprobrium because it was competently integrated into the streetscape) to the many “wedding cake” skyscrapers our 1916 zoning code encouraged. Ultimately Hatherley gives in to Midtown’s charms and finds himself “without thinking literally skipping down Broadway” as he makes his way downtown, admiring edifices like I. M. Pei’s NYU residences while playfully casting aspersions on what is now called the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building (which he derides as “municipalist proto-Stalinism”).
From there, Hatherley’s focus and passion is pulled toward large-scale social housing developments. His quest to experience their many typologies takes Hatherley to the Urban Development Corporation’s Mitchell Lama complexes on Roosevelt Island; to the country’s largest public housing development at Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City; and onward to the union- and party-built cooperatives of the northeast Bronx and the Lower East Side of Manhattan the rent-stabilized city-within-a-city of Stuyvesant Town; to the early and beautifully planned Works Progress Administration–era public housing in Harlem and Williamsburg (where Hatherley says he would choose to live if he could live anywhere in the city); to some new green nonprofit housing complexes in the South Bronx, and elsewhere.
Refreshingly, Hatherley finds much to admire in all these developments, and defends both their ambitions and their outcomes against the New York Ideology, but he is also willing to decry their deficiencies. He is amazed by the sheer scale of social housing in a city that is today more famous worldwide for its luxury gargantuanism (see: Billionaires Row) than its working-class strongholds (see: Queensbridge Houses). His heart is warmed by the architectural touches put into the earliest examples of union-built cooperatives and WPA-era public housing, as well as the best of modernist experimentalism, such as the now-privatized Mitchell Lama complex Waterside Plaza in Kip’s Bay. But he consistently denigrates the paltry provision of windows and repetitive dull brickwork in much of the city’s social architecture, particularly that built as public rentals and union cooperatives later in those programs’ timespans. He will not let the reader forget that it was US federal policy to build public housing poorly and only for the poor in order not to challenge the private real estate industry. Walking the Streets never slips into easy nostalgia for a time when planning was king and modernism was the present and future but instead soberly balances this period’s achievements and failures against the limitations of our neoliberal status quo.
Hatherley learns the city by walking its streets and making observations—the very means New York Ideologists like Jacobs prescribe— but he walks those streets to see the things they most reject—The Projects, or any big, totalizing development, especially mid-twentieth-century social housing complexes.
After walks through Manhattan and Roosevelt Island, Queens, and The Bronx, Hatherley makes a detour to America’s capital city via a maddeningly delayed Amtrak daytrip. His primary object of interest is DC’s cavernous modern Metro transit system. Readers can sense Hatherley’s excitement upon seeing it: He captions one photo simply “YES.” He lovingly describes the system’s “deep escalators” and “vast concrete halls,” its “chunky Brutalist walkways,” “retro-futuristic Seventies remnants,” and “instantly understandable abstract map” all combining to form “an astounding achievement, made at a time when it was regularly alleged that the state—the federal government in particular—was incapable of executing projects well, especially projects of this scale.”
It is there in DC, over 200 miles south of our fair city, that Hatherley makes his most profound insights into the New York Ideology. First, he mocks those who, in the 1960s and ’70s, doubted the wisdom of building such a grand underground transit system as the DC Metro, or who doubted planning could work in a city that was entirely and quite abstractly planned over 200 years ago. Some criticisms were explicitly right-wing, decrying mass transit as collectivist and socialistic. Others were explicitly left-wing, arguing that such a huge investment in an underground train served the city’s train-curious White residents more than its bus-dependent Black majority. Then there was criticism from the more politically enigmatic Jane Jacobs, who, though she lived her entire adult life by the train, distrusted the magnitude of newly built subway systems and preferred an obscure mini-tram model called “the StarrCar.”
To some extent, history has settled these scores. The Metro exists, and it is gorgeous and effective in equal measures. Widely hailed as a success, it is evidence that modernist state planning could produce some of the best and boldest pieces of infrastructure imaginable, and not just dead-end in blandness and bloat. It is a resounding rejoinder to the Thatcherian mantra that “There Is No Alternative” to the way things are or have been before.
But then Hatherley walks upstairs. What he finds upon hitting the streets is both beautiful Brutalism and literal brutality. He looks in awe at the federal district’s large-scale planning and modernist architecture, particularly Pei’s L’Enfant Plaza and Town Center projects. But he knows that this was not terra nullius. Projects like these—and many of those he profiles in New York City—involved evicting unfathomable numbers of people from their homes and often offered them nothing much in exchange. This is Washington, DC, the country’s premier Black city for much of the twentieth century, and Hatherley takes seriously the racist legacy of project planning. Quite often, “urban renewal” specifically targeted Black and immigrant neighborhoods for demolition and replacement.
Walking the Streets never slips into easy nostalgia for a time when planning was king and modernism was the present and future but instead soberly balances this period’s achievements and failures against the limitations of our neoliberal status quo.
The development of the New York Ideology, then, responded to a real problem. Over 1.3 million people were displaced by American urban renewal, and a majority of them were tenants and people of color. This was especially the case in an already densely populated place like New York—hence Robert Moses’s infamous line about having to “hack your way with a meat axe” in order to carve out space here. In my own research into one designated urban renewal site in Chelsea (which resulted in Penn South, one of the most beloved union-built and state-backed social housing projects in the city, but pushed out 7,000 poorer people to create it), I encountered people who were dislocated by an earlier urban renewal project on the Lower East Side and resettled to Chelsea, only to be uprooted again by the very same union- and state-sponsored bulldozers.
The New York Ideology blamed these outcomes on architecture and planning, but this was always misplaced. With better and more sensitive planning, we could have had modernism without the meat axe. As Hatherley notes, significant parts of the New York left strongly supported the concept of “slum clearance” and project planning. Harlem’s Communist City Councilman Ben Davis, for example, made ridding his district of poor-quality private tenement buildings a priority, and supported public housing as its replacement. But Hatherley also points out that Davis battled the actually existing capitalist outcomes of slum clearance, such as the similar but segregated Met Life–funded projects of Stuyvesant Town (White) and Riverton Houses (Black).
Related, though not discussed in this book, is the case of the Cooper Square district on the Lower East Side. Today the Cooper Square Community Land Trust is a model of social housing conversion and community control, with landlords supplanted by governing boards of residents and advocates. But the tenants’ original plan called on the city to build modernist public housing on a vacant lot, move tenants from nearby substandard housing into that new building, then demolish their former homes and repeat the process until all the neighborhood’s “slum housing” had been replaced. That, of course, is not what happened, because the government simply stopped producing public housing. The Cooper Square leaseholders pivoted to a renovation and tenant control model, which has worked out phenomenally well, but it is important to remember that this was always plan B. In this sense, New York’s socialist housing movement didn’t turn away from modernism so much as modernism turned away from it.
Hatherley is still blown away by the scale of DC’s project architecture, some of it quite effective and some of it quite deadening. He compares the sheer impact of all this concrete to the sound of one of New York’s 1980s No Wave records. “I could not defend it on moral grounds,” Hatherley writes of the Federal Center, “but on aesthetic ones, it is an Antonioni set waiting for Monica Vitti to pace around in, an Alan J. Pakula place to be assassinated in.” Elsewhere, he bemoans much of New York City’s social housing projects for their repetitiveness and banality, saying they recall Poland’s dreary mass housing more than Sweden’s livelier model.
Walking the Streets is far from an unconditional endorsement from the American project style, some of which simply sucks. It is instead something more specific and more interesting: In the guise of a guidebook, it is an attack on New York’s current city planning and rebuilding orthodoxy, which rejects planning, projects, and public ventures. It is also a resuscitation of the optimism that once accompanied the best of these projects, as when the original residents of Williamsburg Houses chose to name their newspaper The Projector. No shame in project-hood there!
With better and more sensitive planning, we could have had modernism without the meat axe.
Part of what Hatherley does in combating the New York Ideology is to normalize New York’s modernist project architecture as equally essential to the city’s identity as its typical tenements, brownstones, and office towers. This means seeing the styles side by side rather than in opposition to one another. This, in fact, is part of Hatherley’s argument about why the best projects work: because they are not fully isolated but sit beside the city grid.
While nearly 4,000 acres of New York City land were cleared and rebuilt under urban renewal, no single neighborhood was taken out entirely, meaning the resulting projects are facets of dynamic neighborhoods, surrounded by buildings both older and newer. Wandering out of the Lower East Side’s tower-in-the-park zone of union-built cooperatives and public housing complexes and into its tenement-lined traffic grid, Hatherley notes that the relative repetitiveness of their design is mitigated by the diversity and liveliness of the streets that the New York Ideology celebrates. Later, however, when he leaves the Harlem River Houses, Hatherley wishes their humanistic design (“a sense of enclosure with a Modernist green openness”) would have continued further.
It bears repeating that his argument is not absolutist. He is not calling for the projectification of everything but rather celebrating what works about them and decrying the stultifying faith in incrementalism and individualism, smallness and spontaneity, that is intrinsic to the New York Ideology, even in its lefty manifestations.
At 218 pages, Walking the Streets is a breeze to read, and when it ended I wanted more. What would Hatherley have to say about Coney Island, with its mix of just about every mode of housing-project planning alongside its beaches and parks? What would he think of Electchester, the electricians’ union’s cooperative village built on a former golf course in eastern Queens? What about NYCHA’s Mariner’s Harbor Houses in Staten Island? Manhattan Plaza in Hell’s Kitchen? East New York’s Starrett City? Brownsville’s Marcus Garvey Village? The remains of Twin Parks in the central Bronx? NYRA will have to invite him back for another round of walks.