A Tale of Three Cities, or, Walt was Wrong

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In the last few weeks I have worked my way through the cutting edge of urban critique. Las Vegas, Santa Fe and Milwaukee; from these three cities you can learn just about everything there is to know about the unreality of everyday existence and the death and life of great American cities, without having to read Jane Jacobs or Jean Baudrillard. It's amazing how our lives are sometimes much more interesting than they appear on the surface. Somewhat along the lines of my favorite quip—if you were smarter I'd be funnier—there's the idea that if you just pay attention a little bit, and think a little bit, you'll find a lot more than you were expecting.

At some point in the mid-twentieth century, urban planning was the replacement of rickety depressed areas with new subsidized housing. You can get a great sense of this when you're on the train passing through Harlem going into Grand Central. You can see some decrepit, crumbling streets, and you can see some big, ugly, anonymous apartment buildings. The theory was that replacing the crumbling streets with these apartment buildings would somehow alleviate the problems that had led to the crumbling streets. At the same time, at least in New York, there was enormous destruction of neighborhoods in general in aid of the building of roads and bridges under the vision of master builder Robert Moses. Moses, in his lifetime, was responsible for practically every major artery in New York, including the city, Long Island, and all the way up to Niagara Falls. He built the Triborough, the Whitestone, the Throg's Neck, the Verrazano. He build every major highway on Long Island. He built Jones Beach. He built much of the Taconic. You name it, he built it. The problem was, or at least one problem was, that Moses had little or no regard for the harm that his constructions did to the areas in which they were built. Quite famously, the stretch of highway through the Bronx from Van Cortlandt Park to those small bridges like the Alexander Hamilton was once a tight, low-income neighborhood that was ripped apart in a blood battle that may not even have had to happen if Moses had simply routed his Cross-Bronx Expressway a few blocks away. But Moses, who was a compromiser like George W. Bush is a francophile, wouldn't even listen to the idea of an alternative.

In the early 60s, Moses was planning the Lower Manhattan Expressway, an elevated eight-lane highway through Greenwich Village connecting the East River to the Hudson River. The damage to lower Manhattan's neighborhoods as neighborhoods is probably incalculable. Jane Jacobs was among those who stood up to, and eventually defeated, the most powerful man in NY. Jacobs' urban theory is a simple one, that the life of a city is in its diversity on the streets, the interplay of people in neighborhoods, the humanization of what is otherwise the enormous scale of place. There are 8 million people in New York City, but to individuals there are only familiar families and familiar shops on your street, where children grow up playing in the parks and the old folks sit in the sun playing chess—you get the picture. Jacobs was right, and she wrote about it, and she is a key figure in understanding modern urban thought. Which is why Walt was wrong. His view of EPCOT, the city of big buildings of commerce separated from residence, is an extremely clear portrait of the modernist (and now discredited) view of urban planning. That city is, ultimately, devoid of life. A living, breathing city is a hodgepodge of residence and commerce and young and old, and that diversity is not only the sign of urban health, it is the cause of urban health. Walt, by building a city that would prophylactically solve for the urban problems that do exist (slums and everything that goes along with poverty), would create a lifeless shell of a city that would never survive. Urban problems must be addressed, but with an eye on the people, not the architecture or the roads. (Malls, of course, are another jejune answer to the problems of the city.)

The other thing Walt did, and this is why we enjoy reading Baudrillard, is create Disneyland, where reality is refined into themes of unreality (e.g., compare a real main street with Disney's Main Street). Disneyfication begins to pervade modern thinking, and over time, back in the real world, designers start emulating unreal themes into so-called actual existence. That is, architecture becomes consciously disneyfied to the extent that we are living in a total world of unreality, or at least a world where the real and unreal are indistinguishable.

So, a tale of three cities. Start with Milwaukee. What marks downtown Milwaukee and connects it to the themes of modern urbanization, is its skyway (or whatever they call it). This is a series of passageways about one flight up above ground level connecting apparently all the main downtown buildings. I took a long walk through it Sunday, and it was deserted. At one point I entered the federal building and went through metal detectors and saw the only other human beings (uniformed guards) in the system. This kind of skyway or something like it has been built in a number of cities, ostensibly to connect hubs and to protect people from the weather. But what they do is remove people from the commons of the ground level. You don't need permission, you don't need to look employed, you can be any kind of bum or race or religion on the streets, but indoors, in the seemingly private sphere of the skyways (even if the skyways claim to be public) you have what is essentially the mall mentality vis-a-vis security. No hare krishnas. No homeless. No teenagers hanging out. No one of dubious ethnicity being dubiously ethnic. The end result of this elevation of traffic from the streets is, literally, the death of the streets. After walking the skyway I did the same trip on ground level. Mostly there's empty storefronts. Whether or not the skyway has killed downtown Milwaukee, it has certainly killed downtown Milwaukee's streets. They are dead. I would guess that they are also rather frightening at certain times, since all the "safe" working people are up above, these dead streets are inhabited by the hare krishnas, the homeless, the teenagers and the dubious ethnics. (There's an essay in Variations on the Theme Park about all of this.)

Las Vegas, of course, is the theme capital of the universe. Arabian souks, Parisian streets, St. Mark's square, ancient Luxor, Manhattan... You've seen the commercials for Steve Wynn's new hotel, the hook of which is, it has no theme; this being Vegas, you would have to say that its theme is themelessness. You can write your own analysis here of the city as a whole, or reality versus unreality, whatever. One analysis is as good as the next. Either you find the place fun or you think it's hell only hotter; it's almost the same thing with WDW: either you find the place fun or you think it's hell only hotter and more humid.

The more interesting place, caveman-wise, is my third city, Santa Fe. This is one of the oldest cities in the western hemisphere. It's got an "old town" that is, allegedly, the old part. But is it? All buildings, young and old, are built to look as if they're old adobe. The new buildings look just like the old buildings which means, in fact, that the new buildings are themed to resemble the originals. Are those real Indians selling real artifacts or real Indians selling what tourists like, and has what tourists like replaced what Indians make? Maybe they're just not real Indians. The whole shebang represents to some extent all those horrible things you hate about commercialism, but then again, some of the stuff is nice. I bought some. And as for all that adobe, why is the rest of the city also adobe? Or more to the point, built to look like adobe? Has the alleged unreality of the old city spread into the new city? What is the bright dividing line?

Fun stuff to think about. These three cities, one after the other, had Menickean juices flowing, anyhow. Which means I'll probably finish Part 5 of Caveman in the year 2008.