New Nightmares for Old?

New York City's Robert Moses is a practical man, who believes that one park under construction is worth a quart of green ink on a city map. As Park Commissioner and the city's construction coordinator, he has done more to reshape New York's aging face than any other man in the last 14 years. The New Yorker's Lewis Mumford is what Moses scornfully calls "an Ivory Tower" planner, a devoted disciple of Scotland's famed planner, Sir Patrick Geddes, and a learned critic who for years has been examining Manhattan's skyline with a dour eye. A fortnight ago, the two were hooting at each other in the columns of the New Yorker like motorists in a traffic jam.

"A Nightmare." Mumford had dared to criticize Moses' pride & joy, the enormous Stuyvesant Town development of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., whose 24,000 tenants will form a community larger than all but 400 other U.S. cities. Mumford pronounced Stuyvesant Town "a caricature of urban rebuilding . . . considering all the benefits it might have derived from beginning at scratch, on a site as large as this." Snorted he: "As things go nowadays one has only a choice of nightmares. Shall it be the old, careless urban nightmare of post-Civil War New York ... or shall it be the new nightmare, a great superblock, quiet, orderly, self-contained, but designed as if the fabulous innkeeper Procrustes had turned architect--a nightmare not of caprice and self-centered individualism but of impersonal regimentation, apparently for people who have no identity but the serial numbers of their Social Security cards?"

The buildings, said Mumford, were too high. Children could not use the elevators alone; mothers could not keep an eye on them from their kitchen windows. The foyers were dark, windowless and waste space. Though subsidized by tax exemption, the apartments were not reserved for low-income families. The "completely asphalted" playgrounds were inadequate.

'There should be hedges and windscreens for mothers and infants, digging pits and water pools for the toddlers, and trees and bushes for hide-and-seek . . ." The overall density of population to open space, Mumford declared, "does not meet even the most meager requirements of good planning."

Plain Tripe. Roaring like a subway express, Commissioner Moses retorted: "This is just plain tripe . . ." He pointed out that the buildings will house more tenants than the "rookeries" they replaced and use but 23% of the land compared to the rookeries' 60-70%. As for their height, "neither the Metropolitan nor public-housing officials can build two-story cottages or garden apartments housing a hundred people an acre on $8 to $10 a foot slum land. Mr. Mumford's funny arithmetic is based on the assumption that some private Santa Claus was . . . aching to buy this enormously expensive property, tear down and throw away all the old tenements, rebuild the slums, and pay the city full taxes."

And Mumbo-Jumbo. Moses professed confusion at Mumford's talk of "hide-and-seek" bushes. Said he: "Having built and run more city and suburban playgrounds than almost anyone else around, and never having seen any designed or operated by Mr. Mumford, I don't know what all this mumbo-jumbo is about."

Beleagured Mr. Mumford was ducking other brickbats. Stuyvesant tenants wrote indignantly that their quarters were equal to anything in town at two or three times the rental and "they feel that they are in heaven." Said Mumford grumpily: "Like almost all New Yorkers, who have spent most of their lives in cramped, sunless, dusty and even garbagy blighted areas, they have no proper basis for judging Stuyvesant Town ... If one judges housing not in terms of rents and profits and prestige but in terms of human decency, the greater part of New York consists, in Patrick Geddes' words, of slums, semi-slums, and super-slums . . . They praise Stuyvesant Town only because they do not know how much is missing from its design."

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