On April 20 1958, a crowd of invited city officials and downtown business leaders attended the release of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association’s first report, presided over by Chase Manhattan bank vice president for development David Rockefeller. Rockefeller had orchestrated the report to smooth the pathway for the bank’s new headquarters he was charged with planning. He said the report could be a “framework around which a healthy community may be built through the combined efforts of the city government, private capital, and the individual and business enterprises that have a stake to protect lower Manhattan.” Led by Skidmore Owings & Merrill partner Edward J. Mathews, the report reimagined the entire 564-acre area from Canal Street to the tip of Manhattan. It proposed removing the rotting old piers and bulkheads of the harbor and replacing them with parks, a heliport, and a recreational boat basin. It recommended street widenings and closures to ease congestion and create superblock towers. It planned improvements of highways along both rivers. The Second Avenue subway should be extended down Water Street, and the Washington Square produce market relocated to the Bronx. Old warehouses and slums on the East Side should be cleared for office towers and middle-income housing created between Coenties Slip and the Brooklyn Bridge. It was unanimously approved by the New York City Board of Estimate on June 22, 1959. There had been no public meetings. The DLMA report became the plan for Lower Manhattan.
The heirs of John D. Rockefeller were ascendant. That November 1958, David Rockefeller’s brother Nelson would win his election to be governor of New York state. By then, Robert Moses was nearly 70 years old. In a few years, together the Rockefeller brothers would ease Moses, the preeminent power broker of the New Deal era, into retirement. If state planning had ruled the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Fiorella LaGuardia, that was in the city’s socialist past. Public agencies remained crucial for organizing and assembling capital, but bankers would become the new power brokers in the coming age of real-estate development. The Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association would rewrite the rules that enabled those with access to capital to generate revenue in the form of new development, establishing a powerful association that could work the levers of government to assure themselves of infrastructure funding. In the future, public policy would be at the service of private capital—public-private development—which it would attempt to steer toward areas of public interest, allowing the government to vastly increase the amount of investment in strategic areas to support capital improvements and generate tax revenues.
Yet despite the overwhelming influence of bankers and neoconservative economists, other forces mediated their power during the post-war era. By the mid-1970s, as the federal government shifted resources outside of cities and New York’s finances collapsed, the accumulation of real-estate value around cultural communities was a rare bright spot. At the Back to the City conference held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in September 1974, urban revivalists struggling with the lack of funding for the restoration of brownstones and other historic homes came together to share information. The New York Times registered for the first time a new word emerging in London, but without the negative connotation it would later acquire: “This summer a link with the revival committee was established in London, where the movement is known as ‘gentrification.’”
The old-school activists had always preferred the term “speculation.” By the early eighties, even as the city’s reputation for failure persisted and the AIDS crisis overwhelmed cultural districts, inflation of property values reached a boiling point. In March 1983 Valerio Orselli, director of Cooper Square Community Development Committee, told the New York Times, “Apartments in old-law tenements are going for $450 to $600. Five years ago, they went for $100. People come in with a project, do some cosmetics, quadruple the rent and soon you have a new SoHo, with the sterility of the suburbs. Our area suffered too much from that in the 70’s. We want the neighborhood to grow from within. We don’t want people from the outside coming in to make a quick buck and leave.” Urban renewal, zoning, and community planning had had zero-to-limited success, but the artists had seemingly transformed the area within eighteen months. The administration of Mayor Ed Koch too had played its part in rising prices: in order to cover costs for in-rem properties it now managed—about one-third of the city—in 1983 it sought to quadruple rents in publicly owned buildings. “GENTRIFICATION OF THE EAST VILLAGE,” blared the Times real-estate headline a year later.
Artists participated in development activities of all kinds, but they were also beginning to see development around them as to their detriment. It was better if things remained cheap. Every new high-rise became a visible manifestation of the ten-fold increase in property values that the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association’s 1958 report had forecasted. The community’s easygoing way of life diminished, year by year. The second generation of “pioneers” already realized there was limited space for them, and they had to fight for every square foot. “I remember coming to SoHo and it seemed like everyone was starry-eyed and idealistic, and me and my peers were like about wanting to get over,” the artist and editor Walter Robinson said. “That seemed to be a secret that we discovered. ‘That’s very nice, but we want to get over. I want to be a successful artist.”
Ruin is a lively story spanning decades of pivotal moments in the transformation of mid-to-late twentieth-century urban culture seen through the eyes of its New York protagonists. Among its fundamental revelations, it draws extensively from documents and materials in the Rockefeller family archives to show how David and Nelson Rockefeller fired Robert Moses after their rise to power in the late fifties. Why is it not common knowledge who became the real “power brokers” of the post-New Deal era? For all of the well-deserved fame of Robert Caro’s depiction of Moses in The Power Broker, Moses was not the defining figure of twentieth-century urbanism. The new power brokers of the epoch were the bankers and neoconservative ideologues who wrote the tax laws and planning guidelines for their own benefit after the New Deal ended. They replaced the social welfare state with a new theology of capitalism—market fundamentalism—which decreed that short-term profit-making and public-private development would be the way of the future—and the only way.
Delving deeply into the stories of artists and activists who reshaped downtown New York and invented new ways of living and working in the city, Ruin weaves together its framing narrative of David Rockefeller’s role in the planning of Lower Manhattan and the rise of modern banking with uncanny actions of avant-garde figures who forecasted a new way of living in industrial ruins. Their adventurous and illegal activities led to new forms of public art enlivening the streets, DIY urbanism, and the formation of essential institutions that are now taken for granted, among them P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Dia Art Foundation.
Ruin also challenges the consensus view that has emerged in evaluating the role of culture in the history of the contemporary city. Pigeonholed and reductively associated with a process of so-called “gentrification,” careful observation of changing cultural practices in mid-to-late twentieth-century New York reveals how the actions of visual artists, filmmakers, performance artists, theaters, designers, and architects functioned as a counter-power to banking and market-fundamentalist policy, transforming the culture of urbanism in the US in substantial and meaningful ways. Ultimately, the downtown avant-garde represented one of the last anti-commercial challenges to the emerging consumer society during an epoch in which neoconservative economic theory would reshape the very idea of personhood in the contemporary world. But the artists also, almost inevitably, became a part of the professional class for whom the new city was being designed, planned, and banked.
Through nearly 100 interviews with pivotal figures, newspaper sources, scholarly work, and archival materials, the history of the mid-to-late twentieth-century city comes alive in short, entertaining narratives illustrated by provocative, colorful images created by some of the greatest artists and photographers of the era.
