MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Decades before highways and urban renewal leveled swathes of New York, and nearly a century before gentrification became a topic of everyday conversation among New Yorkers, a generation of civic leaders mounted a major attack on city landmarks and neighborhoods in the name of business, progress, and efficiency. While building subways beneath the surface to “decongest” tenement districts and relocate their populations to the outer boroughs, New York’s reformers also wanted to streamline the city at street level in order to create a network of wide streets that would move traffic and befit New York’s position as a modern commercial and cultural capital. The redesigned and extended streets would displace unsavory street vendors and tenements and deface many of the city’s well-known buildings.

In this paper I outline the major components of this remarkably destructive project, which transformed the island’s lively and varied avenues into uniform speedways for auto traffic, badly scarred Greenwich Village, and nearly wiped Chinatown off the map. The overall project was left unfinished as World War I loomed, but it had appreciably and permanently changed the character of Manhattan within a short span of time. I aim to demonstrate that this instance of City Beautiful “creative destruction”, which coincided with the birth of the American city planning movement, had a significant, lasting influence, helping identify planning with large-scale demolition and rebuilding.