Dropping In, Speeding Up

The row on row of depressing brick tenements that make up the big city's slums are a familiar symbol of metropolitan blight. But when they were new in the Nineties, they were hailed as modern. They were well built, incorporated such advancements as light wells, and boasted at least one lavatory on every floor. Faced today with the staggering price of replacing them, many city planners have taken a second look, realized that renovation would be millions of dollars cheaper than tearing them down and starting afresh.

The main problem to date has been that rehabilitation is costly, time-consuming and inconvenient. It requires a major investment in property that has, at best, a low-profit potential. Beyond that, eviction of the present paying tenants means that the building remains fallow during the months of renovation work. Last week New York City and federal housing authorities teamed up with the civic-minded Carolyndale Foundation to stage an impressive demonstration of what can be done to rehabilitate a slum structure in just 48 hours.

Beating the Deadline. The test was made on a dilapidated five-story tenement on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It was largely occupied by relief families and brought rents of only $42 to $72. Early one morning, the families were moved into an inexpensive nearby hotel. At 10 a.m., the whistle blew and 60 wreckers rushed into the building, began the job of stripping down the interior. Painters raced about slapping on fresh coats of color over the scratched, graffiti-scarred hallways. Laborers hurried to load heaps of rubble into waiting dump trucks. Their progress was relayed by three closed-circuit TVs to neighbors, reporters and eagle-eyed straw bosses watching street-level monitors.

The renovators' secret weapon was the "drop-in," a stack of boxlike prefabricated units containing kitchen and bathroom. One by one, the units were lowered by a 250-ft. crane through holes cut in the roof and upper floors, and placed inside. Thus, each apartment got a brand-new, modern service core, including a 20-in. gas range, 10-cu.-ft. refrigerator, stainless-steel sink and complete bathroom with tub, shower, porcelain-finished bowl and toilet.

As fast as the new core units were rested in place, plumbers and electricians began connecting them up to the existing water mains and electrical inlets. Meanwhile, carpenters installed new living-room and bedroom wall panels and ceilings, adjustable aluminum window frames and plastic-coated flooring. As a final touch, pest-control men went through the building to exterminate any left-over rodents and roaches, while roofers closed up the hole through which the core units had been lowered. Seven minutes before the 48-hour target deadline was reached, the whistle blew and the job was done.

Saving the Neighborhood. On hand to greet the returning tenants was HUD Secretary Robert Weaver. "This may be the first hole-in-the-roof ceremony in the entire history of thousands of years of construction--but it will not be the last," he said. "Beautiful," gasped Gregory Perez, 11, as he returned with his goldfish. Reporters, who have lived through their own months-long kitchen renovations, were openly envious of the swift transformation. Mayor Lindsay, also on hand to hail the success of the drop-in, ordered ten more buildings to be renovated by the same process, urged his officials "to put this system on an operational basis for wide application in New York City."

The experiment had paid off in costs; drop-in renovation averaged only $11,000 per apartment, v. $13,000 for conventional rehabilitation and up to $23,000 for new public housing construction. Because of the improvements, rents will rise as high as $120 a month, but so staggering were the results that almost everyone agreed it was worth it. And while instant rehabilitation is not the whole answer to the problem of the slums. Weaver pointed out: "It is one answer--and one we have been looking for as a way to get moving toward saving buildings, and therefore saving neighborhoods for the people who live in them."

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