The Battle for Gotham by Roberta Brandes Gratz Read Free Book Online Page B

was one of those idyllic communities where comfortable homes were surrounded by woods, streams, and lawns. A Long Island Sound beach was a short drive. Historic white clapboard farmhouses and similarly redolent colonials dominated the landscape until suburban development overran so much open space in the 1950s and ’60s. Year-round country living appealed to my father. For a boy who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, learned to dive off piers in New York Harbor, and played stickball in the street, the lure of the lawn, the rose garden, and the swimming pond was irresistible. He planted an apple tree from seed, and every few years I drive by to assure myself it is still there. Taxes were cheap. The public schools were nationally acclaimed. In those days, New York City was only one hour away by train, an hour and a half by car. Both modes of travel to New York City take longer today due to excruciating vehicular traffic and diminished train service.

    SUBURBIA IN FORMATION
    Model homes were going up around Westport, a great attraction for city residents. Low-interest, federally guaranteed mortgages, new federally funded modern school construction, low taxes, and the allure of home ownership added appeal. I was oblivious to the suburbanization of America then in full swing. But I do remember when the woods and fields where we went horseback riding were lost to a development of split-level homes.
    My mother, by then a well-practiced interior decorator, worked for local new home builders, making the insides of the model homes as appealing as the larger idea of moving to suburbia was. The trick of the trade, she told me, was to furnish the model home with diminutive furniture to make the rooms look bigger—such as cot-size beds instead of twins, a love seat instead of a full-size sofa, small paintings on the walls. Most of what was going up in and around Westport, as with the rest of suburban America in the 1950s, were split-level homes with the single (only sometimes double) garage and unfinished basement. That unfinished basement was the middle-class sweat-equity opportunity to finish yourself. When we in fact built our own new home to replace the summer cottage, it was a “customized” and enlarged version of that split-level model.
    In a nutshell, there it was: many of the urban-suburban issues that would dominate development news for the second half of the last century. They shaped my early life and my journalistic interests later.
    We were living the “push-pull” effect. People weren’t simply fleeing cities for the suburbs. They were being pulled by the opportunities to buy a home, pay low taxes, open a business, or send kids to brand-new schools. The amenities of the suburbs—the roads to get there, the low-interest loans to finance homes, the modern schools, the shopping centers to lure city businesses—were subsidized by the federal and state governments.
    No comparable programs were investing in cities. In fact, the reverse was true. Redlining by banks and insurers and blockbusting by realtors precluded the home-ownership dream in most New York neighborhoods and in cities across America. “When I lived in New York,” Jane Jacobs told me years later, “we had savings and could borrow from family members to buy a small house in Greenwich Village. We couldn’t get any bank loans. Banks had blacklisted or redlined this area. In America, all sorts of cities that were very viable were redlined. People couldn’t get a loan. We could have gotten a loan very easily to move to the suburbs. There was a lot of social engineering manifested through where money would be lent and wouldn’t be lent, what would be built and wouldn’t be built. People weren’t told they were being socially engineered like this, but they were.” 3

    DEFINING PROGRESS
    The push to leave for us and many others was not due to the so-called deteriorating urban conditions popularly blamed for the population shift to the suburbs. We didn’t