Write Your Own Caption

But first check out the caption written by the author of a new book about New Haven’s grassroots struggles against urban renewal.

The book is called Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven. Written by Mandi Isaacs Jackson, it covers protests against the bulldozers and bureaucracies that defined Mayor Dick Lee’s New Haven in the 1950s and ​’60s — the urban renewal programs that leveled and remade downtown and entire neighborhoods, and the ​“human renewal” programs that tested social service programs that became the foundation of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The photo here comes from page 62 of Isaacs’s book. It’s from a period in which City Hall sought to tear down entire blocks of the Dixwell neighborhood in the interests of building a car-oriented, wider main avenue and racially mixed and mixed-income housing.

Here’s her caption:

“Meeting of the Dixwell Neighborhood Renewal Committee at the Winchester School, August 1960, as published in the first issue of the RA [Redevelopment Agency]‘s Dixwell Renewal News. Although the RA reported that the meeting was a success, and the plans for Dixwell were well received, the woman gesturing in the lower right-hand corner — looking directly at the camera as she speaks could be read as a suggestion of dissent.”

Yes, it could be.

Then again, that gesture could be ​“read” a lot of ways. Maybe someone lost his coat and asked the woman if she knew where it was. Maybe someone asked where the nearest gas station was. Maybe she was pointing out the guy who had the funniest haircut.

The meaning of that gesture would be clearer if, say, we could hear the woman say what she meant by it. Alas, Model City Blues offers no clues. The reader doesn’t get to hear her voice.

That’s understandable. It’s hard, sometimes impossible, to track down people in old photos. The problem is, the reader hears remarkably few voices of the people to whom this book supposedly gives voice — the people who actually lived in Dixwell, in the Hill, on State Street, in residential hotels, when their lives were uprooted and their city snatched from them as part of a social science experiment.

(If you have any knowledge about the people in the picture, or memories about that meeting, feel free to post your own caption in the comments section below!)

We do get edited snippets quoted from news articles and reports. We have to trust that the author has selected quotations honestly, with an open mind. We have to trust that the author tried to talk to some real people involved in the events in question. Rather than use them as props, the way city government too often did.

The author lists seven names of people she personally interviewed for the book. All seven are white activists affiliated with Yale and/or a lefty political group called the American Independent Movement (AIM). All good people, to be sure. Their critiques of New Haven as the ​“Model City” have survived the cruel light of time far better than the promises of the government officials who spent the most money per capita of any city in the nation to try to wipe out poverty and rebuild a city.

But this book is the activists’ story, not the story promised by the packaging, not the story of the people whose lives and neighborhoods were being toyed with. And not the story that begs to be told.

If you comb the footnotes closely enough, you find that Jackson has done a handful of live interviews with some of the grassroots people to whose voices the book is devoted. A handful.

As a result, a chance is lost to advance the continuing argument of the legacy of mid-20th century New Haven — an important argument, because of the intensity of the experiment, and because of the need to learn from the past. New Haven, dubbed America’s ​“Model City,” undertook the country’s most concentrated experiment in trying to create the ​“slumless city.” The experiment left the city poorer than when it began.

And, given the assumptions made not just in comments but throughout the text about how people thought, we are left to doubt, rather than trust, the spin Jackson puts on the anecdotes she retrieves from live humans in the historical record.

Jackson should have been able to hit this one out of the park. She starts out with assumptions that, at this point, few fair-minded people could disagree with. Liberal elite Democrats planned for people, not with them, when they leveled sections of the Hill and Dixwell, when they uprooted more than 1,000 families and 20 business in Dixwell alone. They destroyed community; the city has never recovered. They pursued the folly (and danger) of planning a new city around cars, not people. They wasted money meant to help poor people. White people made assumptions about black people, middle-class planners made assumptions about working-class people, that were insulting, off-base, and sometimes downright racist.

Combing through old newspapers and Dick Lee’s archives, Jackson preserves tantalizing and inspiring stories about how the planned-upon fought back. They, or the activists often speaking on their behalf, exposed and stopped a plan for a monstrous ​“ring road” highway sealing off Yale from the rest of the city. They prevented a monster parking garage from devouring State Street (though not in time to save small businesses). They offered alternative models for cooperative housing and a ​“movement” coffee shop.

The preservation of their stories alone makes this book worth reading.

But the people themselves become cartoons, or speculative captions.

This in a book by an academic (Yale PhD. in American studies) published by an academic press (Temple).

Not only are we asked to accept that people Jackson never meets were part of a mass opposition to Dick Lee’s plans. We are also supposed to believe that their fates were argued over by equally one-dimensional elites: stumbling, blind, greedy Boris Badenov City Hall planners and their neighborhood stooges; versus noble, visionary, brilliant, white organizers and performance artists who were never themselves misguided or condescending.

We never come to understand what truly motivated the Lee crowd who made these crucial decisions — because Jackson doesn’t speak to them, either. Nor does she present what they wrote or said except in snippets meant, like the caption to the above photo, to bolster her thesis, no questions asked.

Instead, we’re asked to believe that, had only a small group of artists and university-affiliated New Left organizers run New Haven instead of Dick Lee’s gang, the popular will would have blossomed into an enlightened governing force that succeeded in building that urban paradise after all.

I’ll admit some biases here. I happen to agree with Jackson’s and AIM​’s take on urban and human renewal. John Wilhelm and Rick Wolff, two of Jackson’s seven main interviewees, have influenced my thinking deeply over the years. (Contrary to Jackson’s idyllic vision of the activists’ realistic alternative models for New Haven, Wilhelm told me last year that he believes AIM failed in not coming up with enough serious, comprehensive, viable positive alternatives to the plans it was fighting).

I also have known and spent long hours discussing the period with some of the Boris Badenovs in her book’s bestiary, the government planners and allied neighborhood workers. Believe it or not, they weren’t stupid. Nor were they less committed to the public good than her heroes. They believed they were fighting the bad guys — racist suburbs, decision-makers from fleeing corporations, a changing economic and political reality in the United States that hurt cities.

They made fatal mistakes, for sure, and were wrong about how to renew cities and work alongside people at the grassroots.

But, contrary to Jackson’s view, they weren’t wrong about everything. Legal aid and Head Start, for instance, were products of New Haven’s experiments.

Even a project like Florence Virtue Homes, the Dixwell cooeprative housing complex Jackson vilifies as a tool for middle-class white people to drive out poor black families, was more complex than presented in this book.

Many people, including people of both races who moved in, saw Florence Virtue as an idealistic venture. They believed that neighborhoods benefit from mixes of residents, of people from different economic backgrounds and races living alongside each other. There are two sides to that story; as Jackson points out (without acknowledging the mix of intentions), building new mixed-income, mixed-race housing can have the practical effect of destroying existing housing for working families of color who already live there. But she presents just that side.

Jackson also conveniently leaves out the fact that Florence Virtue was part of a federal program in which not-for-profit community institutions supported stable cooperative housing. That wouldn’t have fit into the narrative of evil Dick Lee emissaries grabbing ​“physical spaces” as part of a ​“political struggle.” However, elsewhere in the book, she hails as a positive model another housing development in town (Trade Union Plaza) that was built the exact same way, under the exact same program. There she mentions, and praises, the program.

Similarly, you’d think that every black person in Dixwell who planned or marched in the Freddie Fixer Parade was participating in plantation politics, in setting up a City Hall-concocted event to distract the natives from challenging the system. What an insult to people like, say, Ed Grant, who spent decades organizing their neighbors to clean up their neighborhood, pioneer recycling programs, and generally make Dixwell a nicer place to live.

Yes, people like Grant believed they’d accomplish more by working with the Lee administration. Sometimes they were right, sometimes wrong. Sometimes they ended up acting as pawns, other times as honest brokers. That’s an ongoing argument — working with established power or outside it. Most activists, including labor organizers, find themselves sometimes on one side of that fence, sometimes on the other. Simply dismissing everyone who weighs those calculations ignores the difficulty of making those choices. It ignores what people have genuinely accomplished. For instance, Ed Grant accomplished a lot in Dixwell, just as, today, Yale’s labor organizers have sometimes found success working with the DeStefano administration (on a hospital community-benefits agreement, for instance), sometimes by working against it.

(Click here for a story with links to several audio interviews in which you can hear Ed Grant tell his own story.)

Reading this book, I couldn’t help thinking again and again of another academic book about New Haven, called City. Its author, Doug Rae, shared some (not all) of Jackson’s views about urban renewal. (Note: I co-authored a different book about New Haven with Rae.) He allowed the reader to view, in exquisite detail, the thinking of the planners who went so wrong. He presented them as people with mixtures of motivations. Rae trusted his readers, and let people of all backgrounds (including the planned-upon) speak and emerge as human beings. In the end, whatever his intentions, Rae advanced the argument about the dangers of top-down, undemocratic, car-oriented, and large-scale city planning and zoning in a way that Jackson’s purported everyday heroes could have, too. If they’d had the chance to write their own captions.

Author Mandi Issacs Jackson will discuss Model City Blues at Labyrinth Books New Haven, 290 York St., on Thursday, May 22, beginning at 5.30 p.m.