nothin On Broadway | New Haven Independent

On Broadway

There’s a picture of Robert Moses tucked behind Book Trader Café on Chapel Street. His arms are crossed and he’s smiling, though there’s something a little uneasy about his pose: his tie is slightly off-center, his face half-hidden in shadow. He looks eager to get back to work.

For the observant pedestrian, here hangs a picture of a man who was never elected to public office, but who nonetheless exerted so much power, built and destroyed and reshaped so much of New York City over the course of the 20th century, that cities throughout the country are still wrestling with the influence of his vision: one of swift, merciless, inescapable modernity.

On its surface, Elihu Rubin and Elena Oxman’s 1999 documentary On Broadway: A New Haven Streetscape has nothing to do with Robert Moses. The short film documents a transitional moment at the eve of the new millennium for a one-block commercial district in downtown New Haven. But the spirit of Robert Moses pervades On Broadway, which transcends its narrow focus to ask bigger questions about the fate of modern cities. Who gets to define the physical landscape of a city? How do its streets and buildings and businesses shape a city’s character, let alone its economy? In an environment swept up in the rush of change, progress, modernization, who are the people left behind or pushed out of the way? And when they go, what do we have left in their stead?

Thomas Breen

Hank Hoffman introduces movie at Best Video.

On Broadway, which co-director and Yale Associate Professor of Urbanism Elihu Rubin presented and discussed at Best Video’s performance space Monday night, finds its story in the conflict between the small, family-owned businesses that had defined the block for generations, and their relatively new landlord, Yale University. Throughout the film, Rubin and Oxman interview many of the street’s shop-owners and customers, who prove to be ambivalent about the university’s engagement in the commercial district. Some appreciate the university’s investment in new buildings and clean streets; some resent its demands for high rent and long hours.

But the movie, which is the first in Rubin and Oxman’s New Haven Trilogy,” is most affecting in describing a conflict of visions, if not necessarily of peoples. As a landlord intent on reshaping its environment according to globalization and unfettered free-market capitalism, the university has little concern for the particularity of Cutler’s Record Shop, the Yankee Doodle, Quality Wines, or Whitlock’s Typewriter Shop. To the university, these stores are not necessarily good or bad, but rather in the way, potential liabilities.

Thomas Breen

Elihu Rubin

Institutions and corporations do not deal with uncertainty very well,” Rubin acknowledged during a post-screening conversation with the audience at Best Video. And places that really foster creativity also foster uncertainty. Who’s going to show? What going to happen? You don’t know. That’s what makes places creative. And institutions are institutionally driven against that.”

Instead, the landlord encouraged the development of nationally and internationally recognizable chains. Some, like Au Bon Pain, have not survived the block. While others, like Urban Outfitters, continue to define Broadway’s business culture and street life as cosmopolitan, generic, and resolutely upper-middle class.

The trend in urban planning that On Broadway outlines is both intensely specific to New Haven and dispiritingly familiar to city-dwellers around the world: global capital leans toward homogeneity and predictability. But what is safe and predictable often comes at a steep price, particularly for those companies, and people, who don’t fit the vision.

Of course, some of the family-owned stores featured in the documentary seem doomed to technological obsolescence, no matter their owner’s charm, skill, or character. The movie opens and closes in the typewriter repair shop of Mason Whitlock, who laments that his sons are more interested in fixing automobiles than typewriters, and, come to think of it, so is he.

But On Broadway is just as interested in examining certain attitudes towards urban development as it is in any particular big landlord or small business. Must a local economy inevitably follow the path of global capital? Is the trend towards familiar chains and uniform products an inevitability of the abstract forces of the market? Or is it the result of a series of conscious decisions, made by people and corporations with a specific vision for how a city should look and who it should attract?

The architectural feats and societal conflicts achieved by Robert Moses exist at a much larger scale than any activity on one block in downtown New Haven. But On Broadway nevertheless captures the challenges of the legacy of the New Haven-born master builder.” The movie calls out for audiences to pay attention to the changes in a city block, to think critically about which businesses are moving in and why. Globalization and homogenization are not unequivocally good or bad developments. But they are developments that result from specific decisions made by conscious actors, and a citizenry’s awareness of that fact takes it one step closer to being able to influence the development of its own city streets.

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