Urban Renewal Reexamined Through Architectural/Preservationist Lens

A manor — and a huge swath of neighborhood — erased to make room for a highway.

A housing project gone awry, now demolished as well, while its former occupants win a class-action settlement over the poor living conditions they endured

Architectural historian and preservationist Marisa Angell Brown kept stories like these alive as she explored the architectural history of post-World War II New Haven in a lecture at the Yale Center for British Art, recalling some of New Haven’s most contested issues of the mid-20th century that continue to reverberate today.

The lecture, moderated this past Wednesday by University of Hartford architecture professor Michael Crosbie, was part of YCBA’s ongoing lecture series during the pandemic.

Angell Brown currently serves as the assistant director for programs at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University. Angell Brown’s interest in ​“spatial justice,” demolished sites, and the politics of preservation led her to study the Elm City’s built environment as an art history Ph.D. student at Yale about a decade ago.

“There’s a lot that’s happening in … New Haven,” Angell Brown said, ​“which is what makes it such an interesting case study.”

Angell Brown began by summarizing the city’s long, fraught history of urban renewal, as in the mid-20th century, urban planning became the central arena for policy discussions about capitalism, race, and poverty. As White families moved to the suburbs — aided by cheap federal loans and mortgage guarantees — Black families were largely relegated to urban areas due to redlining. The ubiquity of White flight meant that the number of city dwellers steadily dwindled around this time. Between 1930 and 1980, New Haven’s population dropped from 163,000 to 126,000. In a grand way, the future of the city was suddenly in jeopardy.

In the 1960s, the young Mayor Richard C. Lee, who served in that position from 1954 until 1970, seized upon architecture as a vehicle for change in New Haven. It was so central to his campaign that one of his political posters is entirely focused on his redevelopment plans. Lee promised that redevelopment would offer city dwellers new amenities — playgrounds, elderly homes, public housing — while boosting the local economy. 

According to Angell Brown, redevelopment efforts made for good visuals and, crucially, could ​“be executed in a single election cycle.” But the politics of redevelopment was and is much more complicated than a campaign tactic. In New Haven as elsewhere, the allure of redevelopment projects in the mid-20th century lay in the promise of replacing old, below-market structures with new, higher-value ones. Those projects too often obfuscated the displacement of residents, the destruction of historic buildings and the dismantling of whole communities. 

Angell Brown highlighted two redevelopment projects that caused serious harm to New Haven neighborhoods: the Oak Street Connector and Crawford Manor.

These projects caused the city to demolish entire neighborhoods. These lost communities — products of ​“the worst excesses of urban renewal,” as Angell Brown put it — led to a serious housing crisis in New Haven. During the 1950s and 1960s, New Haven’s redevelopment projects displaced approximately 7,000 households and relocated roughly 40 percent of the city’s Black residents.

The city decided to combat that crisis — induced by the influx of modern architecture, planning, and design projects — by creating yet another modernist development: the over 700 units of low-to-moderate-income housing at Church Street South. 

For Mayor Lee and residents alike, the result was lackluster from the start. ​“It is probably the worst venture with one of the best and finest and most decent architects I have known,” Lee wrote to Church Street South’s architect Charles Moore in 1969.

Surprisingly, Moore concurred, writing, ​“I see there now the same bleak concrete walls as you see.” He went on to say that ​“architecturally silent dwellings” would be improved once residents moved in and occupied the site’s public spaces. Residents’ decades of experience living there, as the buildings eroded around them, proved him wrong.

Part of Church Street South’s uninspiring reception may have been because Moore knew little about the people who would move in. ​“I don’t know who the people living there will be,” he wrote. Angell Brown added that Church Street South was ​“engaged in a labor of love for an unspecified client.” Moore may have wanted to reduce the encroaching feeling of ​“placelessness” he found in capitalist America, but he could hardly do that without historical references to the residents who would occupy Church Street South.

Where could Moore have looked to learn more about the residents’ former homes? Where could he have found their old neighborhoods with grassy lawns and clapboard roofs? By the time he designed Church Street South, much of those neighborhoods had been buried under layers of concrete and asphalt.

The history of New Haven’s encounter with modern architecture and redevelopment may be a lesson for architects, preservationists — and developers — today who are determining the urban streets of tomorrow. 

“We are all starting to think a little bit more about demolished neighborhoods,” Angell Brown said. ​“Are there ways to create public art or public history projects,” Angell Brown continued, ​“that bring them back into the story of local cities and sort of the larger story of America?” (Read about Artspace exhibits that focus on this here, here, and here, among others.)

The question is part of Angell Brown’s larger quest for spatial justice.

“I think we are in a place with preservation — and with architecture and architectural history — where we recognize the deep kind of structural racism of these fields,” she said. ​“The buildings and spaces that we … have worked hardest to preserve tend to preserve a very small slice of who makes up this country.” Perhaps the best remedy to New Haven’s brutal history of redevelopment is an intentional consideration of which urban spaces get preserved and who leads the city’s preservation and development efforts. 

For information about upcoming Yale Center for British Art lectures, check its website.