Ghosts of Urban Architecture

Ghosts of Modernity: The Voice of the Polyrhetor

From the very beginning, the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair was haunted. Along with the national pavilions featuring cultural displays from their respective countries, the great technology corporations of the time—AT&T, Westinghouse, GM, and Ford—were developing their own version of a technological future, in which machines extended or even replaced embodied human activities: AT&T’s Voder, Westinghouse’s Elektro the Moto-Man, the farming pavilion’s Rotolactor, GM/Chevrolet’s Roll-Oh, and, in the Futurama, General Motors’ Polyrhetor.

The Polyrhetor was the answer to a technical problem: how to deliver specific sections of a short voice-over narrative to multiple moving chairs in such a way that the narrative synchronized with each individual visitor as he or she moved through the diorama. The solution: a twenty-ton sound machine would pipe individual clips of audio commentary, which was stored on celluloid film, to the appropriate chair as the wheels passed over tracks and triggered playback. But the Polyrhetor also marked the way the Futurama exhibit viewed transportation infrastructure as an integrated phenomenon: nature and culture, working and living, sight and sound. Riding in the plush armchairs of the carry-go-round, visitors could both look at a vision of the future and hear a voice from the future. The voice, like a personalized spirit communicating to each visitor, told the promising tale of a future world in which nature and culture would be reconciled through the grand visual space of a perfectly designed, perfectly controlled highway system.

The Polyrhetor’s story was one that visitors to the fair were eager to hear. Urban renewal seemed to the people of the post-depression a welcomed relief. David Gelertner reports that “the depression made the utopian future an urgent and compelling belief” (51), and the onus was on planners and engineers to find ways to create more pleasant urban environments.

Unfortunately, urban planners and political officials often solved social problems with a bulldozer, and they saw urban renewal as a scheme that addressed two problems at once: they could finance highway construction with tax dollars while at the same time removing “outmoded” areas in the central business districts (Rose 107). In other words, they ran new highways through whole neighborhoods designated as “slums,” often with the approbation of the white middle-class public. In the Futurama, the voice of the Polyrhetor tells a tale of urban renewal that would require wiping out existing living and working spaces; in fact, one of the more chilling scenes of the accompanying documentary film, To New Horizons, proclaims this social Darwinist vision:

On all express city thoroughfares, the rights of way have been so routed as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible. Man continually strives to replace the old with the new.

The power of the highway to enact social renewal was symbolic of a more insidious possibility: the total re-engineering of the world of tomorrow by today’s urban planners. Geddes’ dream of the perfectly designed future is haunted by this dark ghost of an “improved” future, speaking through the voice-boxes of the Futurama exhibit.

Ghosts on the Walls

The site of the World’s Fair itself was part of an ambitious personal vision of the world of tomorrow. It was planned and executed in New York’s Flushing Meadows, a grimy, polluted ash dump in the borough of Queens that was rejuvenated under the direction of New York City Parks Commissioner and urban planner Robert Moses. Moses, who arranged for the financing of the fair, saw the event as a means to appropriate Flushing Meadows, a “blank slate” of land that he could later develop into part of the New York City parks and parkway system. While he was not directly involved in the actual running of the World’s Fair, it was in some ways the epitome of his vision. The fair was a shining example of what was possible in city and transportation planning, but it also revealed the dark underbelly of urban development: “when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis,” Moses famously remarked in 1964, “you have to hack your way with a meat ax” (qtd. Caro 849).

While it may not have been solely responsible for the will to modernization so dominant in the latter half of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, the highway as it was imagined by designers such as Norman Bel Geddes and Le Corbusier and implemented under the iron hand of Robert Moses, had a profound impact on the shape of modern life. Geddes’ plan for the Futurama, featuring designs reminiscent of both Le Corbusier’s Radiant City (a rationalized city based on grids and skyscrapers) and the Garden City movement (which emphasized the movement from inner city slums to a less dense, decentralized suburban landscape), certainly presented a compelling technological vision, but it also hid from view the costs of designing America around the automobile.

In the early twenty-first century, having endured fifty years of the gutting of the inner city to make way for arterial bypasses as well as the noise and air pollution that came with them, we can now look back with a deep sense of irony at the triumphant presentation of “an American city replanned around the highly developed modern traffic system” (To New Horizons). What was at stake, then and today, as critics of Robert Moses such as Jane Jacobs, Helen Leavitt, Marshall Berman, and Robert Caro so clearly articulated as early as the 1960s, is the recognition that highways are at their most destructive when they are built for the sake of “progress” and at the expense of the communities they supposedly serve.

Jacobs warned of the danger that Moses’ ideas, formed in the 1920s when designers were “captivated by the vision of the freeway Radiant City” (371), would continue to inform a new generation of urban planners:

It is disturbing to think that men who are young today, men who are being trained for their careers, should accept on the grounds that they must be “modern” in their thinking, conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkable, but also to which nothing new of any significance has been added since their fathers were children. (371, author’s emphasis)

For Jacobs, Moses was not only a representative of the destructive force of urban renewal, but also a figure who could reach into the future and forestall the conception of alternative models for city dwelling.

Jacobs’ concern over the dangerous influence of Moses-era “modern” design was well-founded. Looking back from the vantage point of the 1980s, Marshall Berman argued that the remaking of the city around the highway had been a function of coupling “modernization” with the abstract ideals of modernity. Moses, responsible for most of New York City’s parkways and freeways, as well as the clearing of Flushing Meadows, epitomized for Berman the extreme will to modernization that had been embraced by an entire generation of urban planners:

For forty years, [Robert Moses] was able to pre-empt the vision of the modern. To oppose his bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centers, was—or so it seemed—to oppose history, progress, modernity itself. (Berman 294)

In Moses’ destruction of the Bronx to make way for a network of freeways into the inner city, Berman saw the end of any possible synthesis between modernization and modernity. The highway, no longer a road to a brighter future but rather the technological instigator of a hellish inner-city environment, emerged as a massive force of destruction in twentieth-century urban planning. Berman was left to suggest, rather poignantly, that pictures of neighborhoods be painted on the high walls of the highways to serve as ghostly reminders of the displaced urban communities that no longer existed:

The mural might depict cross-sections of streets, of houses, even of rooms full of people just as they were before the Expressway cut through them all. (342)

Fighting the Future

By the 1960s, cultural responses to the Interstate had changed dramatically. Robert Moses’ “meat-ax” approach to progress was countered by Jane Jacobs’ opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a profoundly influential critique of the gutting of the inner city. Her work marked an increasing awareness of the impacts of unfettered technological development that failed to consider the citizens it claimed to help.

Jacobs’ seminal work on the consequences of highway development for urban neighborhoods presents the highway as one element in a larger equation, stating that

[i]t is questionable how much of the destruction wrought by automobiles on cities is really a response to transportation and traffic needs, and how much of it is owing to sheer disrespect for other city needs, uses and functions. (339)

In other words, poor planning of the overall city as a place for individual human habitation is more to blame than the mere existence of the automobile or the highway. In fact, Jacobs predicted that a failure to plan for the diversity and vitality of everyday street life would lead to increased highway traffic and insecure neighborhoods, and would require citizens to retreat to the safety of their automobiles: “In the absence of city diversity, people in large settlements are probably better off in cars than on foot” (349).

In the matter of public perceptions of urban planning, Jacobs’ successful 1962-1968 campaign against Moses’ proposed destruction of West Greenwich Village to make way for the Lower Manhattan Expressway dealt a serious blow to the utopian dream of urban planners and marked a dramatic shift in public opinion.

This shifting public response to highway development continued to gather momentum. One indication of this shift is the eventual defeat of New Orleans’ proposed Vieux Carré Riverfront Expressway, a battle that took place between 1965 and 1969, but began in 1946 and would have effects until 1985 when the ill-conceived highway was finally removed from city plans.

When Moses was first approached in 1946 to help the Louisiana Highway Department plan a new downtown express route to ease city congestion, city highways were widely regarded as the solution to overcrowded streets where unpredictable pedestrian traffic clashed with a burgeoning car population. At that time the modern highway, and by extension Moses, was regarded as the hero for a new age of urban planning. Tom Lewis notes that “[N]ewspaper editors across the country praised him for his ability to turn plans into elegant strands of concrete and asphalt that threaded their way into and above crowded cities” (183).

By 1965, however, the general populace was beginning to interrogate the need, not just for superhighways, but for many of the massive projects proposed by planners like Moses:

The technocrats who had spoken with such authority in the twenties, who had flooded into Washington beginning with Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and who had become a standard part of the federal government, suddenly found ordinary citizens asking questions and holding firm convictions about matters that formerly they would have left to “experts.” (Lewis 199-200)

In the first few years following the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, the combined influences of urban racism and eager highway officials aiming to forge ahead with construction plans before public dissent would result in organized revolt meant that a number of bypasses and arterial highways were constructed in and through minority neighborhoods. Raymond Mohl offers as an example the case of I-95 in Miami, which ran straight through Overtown, a large African American district in the city’s center. Disregarding an earlier highway plan that would have bypassed Overtown completely, state highway officials opted, instead, to use the highway as a means to both reclaim valuable city space for commercial development and to relocate blacks outside of the city limits (683-85). Because the plan was implemented in a southern state prior to the Civil Rights movement, Mohl notes, few citizens were able to organize to oppose the plan:

Miami had few community organizations, most of them property owners’ associations primarily interested in keeping blacks out of their neighborhoods. Although the city was undergoing demographic change with Jewish migration from the north and Cuban migration from the south, Miami was still very southern in orientation in the 1950s and early 1960s, making interracial cooperation problematic. (687)

Such tensions manifested themselves similarly in Louisiana. The fight against the Vieux Carré expressway was eventually won by New Orleans citizens, but communities fractured into splinter groups as they realized that centralized planning had enabled the systematic advancement of corporate and white interests against those of less politically connected black communities. In the case of the Vieux Carré, the predominantly black community across the river was reluctant to join the fight because they had already had a section of Interstate plowed through their own neighborhood—an action which had provoked no protest at all from the white residents of Vieux Carré (Lewis 189).

The road’s pathway, cutting straight through the middle of Claiborne Avenue in the neighborhood of Treme, impeded local foot traffic while car exhaust, noise, and the blockage of light left the neighborhood, once home to elegant, well-kept art deco-era houses, polluted, dirty, and run down.

Claiborne Avenue was a victim of highway planners’ determination to create clean, smooth-flowing traffic at the expense of livability. “Slum clearance,” an implicit agenda of large-scale urban highway projects aimed at wiping away the more incipient specters of racism and classism that haunted American cities, failed to recognize that these so-called “slums” were often well-established, thriving neighborhoods.

Race finally took center stage in Washington, D.C. where, in the mid-1960s, engineers aiming to plow an Interstate through an African American neighborhood ran up against organized black activists from Tacoma Park who formed the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis to resist “white man’s road thru black man’s home” (Schrag 119).

Mike Davis, commenting on the way urban planners used redevelopment of central city districts to break up Black and Latino communities in Los Angeles, calls the resulting areas not the Radiant City or the Garden City, but the “Forbidden City” (228), arguing that corporate interests have used highways and skyscrapers to create a “spatial apartheid” (230), dividing up neighborhoods and denying passage from one space to another (231). The spirit of the genius loci, so compellingly posited by John Brinckerhoff Jackson in Sense of Place, Sense of Time as the benevolent “guardian divinity” of a place (157), had been replaced by a malevolent specter that continues to haunt the concrete overpasses.

The Highway That Never Was

Like the social costs of the superhighway, material considerations could no longer be ignored when it came to the actual construction of the highway system. Aesthetically, the grand, curving sweep of the highways and overpasses, the perfect symmetry of cloverleaf interchanges, and the deco-inspired architecture of arterial city highways still bear the stamp of Walter Teague and Geddes, fellow designers for Ford and General Motors. But despite the system’s centralized planning, each section of the Interstate was developed through a complex series of negotiations and compromises between corporations, communities, and state governments. Geddes’ vision of a postwar superhighway did not retain its integrated perfection, even on a material level: different colored stone used in local construction, orange cones, and inconsistent numbering schemes for highway exits all mediate our experience on the road.

Megan Shaw and Rick Prelinger, in discussing the narratives of manifest destiny that were so freely used in the imagination of future highways, note that these narratives fail in the face of everyday use:

[B]orrowing from a pre-twentieth-century paradigm for an understanding of the uniquely twentieth-century road-building technology that freeways represent has left us open to the dissonances that arise from the conflict between the lived experience of freeways in the late twentieth century and the remembered experience of free horizons that we were drawing on when we built them. (“Manifest Congestion”)

The predictions of the Futurama, so dependent on the superhighways running through an imagined landscape that combined Garden City and Radiant City, would not survive the reality of urban and highway development in the 1950s and 1960s, nor did Futurama predict the social and material problems that the increased traffic, further enabled by highways, would create.

Similarly, traffic engineering estimates that the Interstate Highway System would be completed by 1970 were, at their best, optimistic. Our highways must undergo constant repair to address damage caused by weather, natural disasters, and the passage of time. Blown-out tires litter the shoulder of main-line trucking routes; the decomposing remains of deer and other victims of “roadkill” draw our eye like forlorn ghosts of nature cut down by an insidious technology. Sections of the Interstate decay; the bumps, bangs, and rumbles of the degraded roadway rolling under wheel—a different kind of Polyrhetor—remind us of the costly cycles of construction and repair required to keep the Interstate in working order.

The Interstate, then, turns out not be a perfect network of freedom and motion overlaid on the American landscape. Instead, it exists as a constantly renegotiated stratum of dynamic variables, both social and physical: urban politics of race and class, traffic patterns, financial distortions, construction, weather, decay. The magical moment at which “the future” would finally be realized never actually arrived.