Necropolis Revisited

THE CITY IN HISTORY (657 pp.)--Lewis Mumford--Harcourf, Brace & World ($ 11.50).

Lewis Mumford has probably staked out as good a claim as any to being the U.S.'s leading critic of its cities, towns and cultural highways and byways. In the 1920s, when Van Wyck Brooks was discovering the unrecognized richness of the U.S. literary past and Poet Hart Crane was apotheosizing the Brooklyn Bridge, Mumford's Sticks and Stones, A Study of American Architecture and Civilization was the first, brash exploration of American town planning and building, ranging from the New England Common to the glories of Bridge Builder John A. Roebling. Mumford's fresh eye saw in the heavy, Romanesque masonry works of 19th century Architect Henry Hobson Richardson (Boston's Trinity Church), the work of "our first truly indigenous master-builder." With The Brown Decades (1865-1895), Mumford mined another overlooked lode, set in perspective Chicago Skyscraper Poet Louis Sullivan and his great pupil, Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the tradition of homespun philosophers (Mumford proudly possesses no university degrees), his esthetic judgments are liberally laced with moralizing. Though Manhattan-raised, Mumford has a gardener's love of greenery, likes to weed in the vegetable patch between paragraphs. And the less a city becomes like a village, the more it rouses Mumford's wrath. In a prescient 1922 essay, The City, he warned: "The movies, the White Ways and the Coney Islands, which almost every American city boasts in some form or other, are means of giving jaded and throttled people the sensations of living without the direct experience of life--a sort of spiritual masturbation. In short, we have had the alternative of humanizing the industrial city or dehumanizing the population. So far we have dehumanized the population."

The Constant Vision. Almost 40 years and 20 books later, Mumford's perspective has broadened, but the vision has scarcely changed: it is still Cassandra's, ominous and unheeded. Writes Mumford in The City in History: "Another century of such 'progress' may work irreparable damage upon the human race. Instead of deliberately creating an environment more effective than the ancient city, . . . our present methods would smooth out differences and reduce potentialities, to create a state of mindless unconsciousness . The polite name for this creature is 'man-in-space,' but the correct phrase is 'man out of his mind.' "

Mumford's theme is thus the ceaseless struggle between modern civilization and modern man, massively and often turgidly argued in the pioneering tetralogy-on which he labored, heedless of the paradox that as his reputation has grown, his influence has diminished. Now, in an intricate synthesis of his past output, Sociologist-Art Critic-Litterateur-Town Planner Mumford has written a densely composed history of that struggle on its most bloody battlefield--the city. The interpretation may not be fresh, but simply as a Portable Mumford (if 576 pages of narrative, 56 pages of annotated bibliography, and 114 pages of photographs and extended captions can be called portable) The City in History is a remarkable achievement: a scholarly chronicle on a noble theme--man's fate in the city of man.

Muses & Monuments. The city which for Mumford best maintained the precarious balance between creativity and destruction was 5th century Athens in which the gods were reduced to man size. Although the streets were narrow, the lanes dung-heaped, the houses cramped, and public gardens nonexistent, "in Athens, at least, the muses had a home." By contrast, ancient Rome was a swarming ant heap, where monumental arches glorified the conquests of a rapacious army, gigantic hippodromes housed unspeakable spectacles of torture, and vast public baths cleansed the body, if not the mind, of the previous day's gluttony. At no other time in history, claims Moralist Mumford, did architectural splendor conceal such urban depravity.

The current state of the city is fast approaching Rome's spectacular decline and fall, if it has not already surpassed it. Long gone is the dream that idyllic greenbelt towns such as Radburn, N.J., would dot the tranquil, ordered landscape. Frank Lloyd Wright's proposal for Broadacre City (one acre for every family) now seems a "clear anticipation (romantically rationalized) of the contemporary exurban sprawl." The most influential treatise of his generation, Mumford reluctantly concedes, was Le Corbusier's The City of the Future, with its proposal for widely spaced skyscrapers set in parklands through which thread elevated, multideck highways. Cities, like Holland's rebuilt Rotterdam or present-day Philadelphia, may rebuild their centers with intelligence and sensitivity. Mumford believes they have: "As a leader in urban planning, Philadelphia now occupies the place that Boston did in the 1890s." But, warns Mumford, "such cores can be kept alive only by dealing with all the factors that affect the city's life" and threaten to destroy it: greed, avarice and pride.

The Angry Prophet. Preacher Mumford has long pinned his hopes on spiritual and physical remedies, but after 40 years of sermonizing his patience is growing thin. The gentle Job has become the raging Jeremiah as he casts his eyes upon signs of Rome reborn: rising rents, spreading slums, suffocating crowds, proliferating bathrooms, expensive roads, "and above all, the massive collective concentration on glib ephemeralities of all kinds, performed with supreme technical audacity. These are the symptoms of the end: magnifications of demoralized power, minifications of life. When these signs multiply, Necropolis is near, though not a stone has yet crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from within. Come, hangman! Come, vulture!"

*Technics and Civilization (1934), The Culture of Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944), The Conduct of Life (1951).

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