Busy Streets

By Sam Allis

Urban thinker William H. Whyte has read endless obituaries of the American city. He has heard it called everything from "an ecological smear" to a "behavioral sink." The future, he has been told, is elsewhere: in the suburbs, the country, anywhere but the city. Nonsense, says Whyte. "The core of the city has held. It has not gone to hell." What is more, he argues, "the city remains a magnificent place to do business, and that is part of the rediscovery of the center. While we are losing a lot of functions that we used to enjoy, we are intensifying the most important function of all -- a place for coming together."

"Holly" Whyte, an irrepressible 71, has been lobbing potshots at purveyors of conventional wisdom about cities for more than 20 years. He started making waves in 1956 with his bestseller The Organization Man, one of the first exposes of the emptiness of corporate life. In 1974 the National Geographic Society awarded him its first domestic expedition grant to pursue his urban sleuthing.

In his latest book, City, Whyte continues to challenge orthodox urban planning. For one thing, he likes free-floating city congestion. He maintains that gentrification gets a bum rap and that the corporate exodus to the suburbs is stupid. He advocates narrower streets for cars and wider sidewalks for people. Forget exits, he says, it's time to make better doors. The revolving ones at the bottom of most office towers may save energy, but they are hopelessly inefficient at moving people. Cram as many stores as possible along the streets to bring them alive. Do away with skywalks, abolish sunken plazas and tear down walls in front of parks and playgrounds, because they all increase isolation from the city experience.

Whyte puts his faith in something he calls "the impulse of the center," which animates his vision of the teeming urban core. "You see it at cocktail parties," he says, "the phenomenon where people move toward the center. It is an instinct to be in a position of maximum choice."

On the other hand, Whyte contends, the heralded corporate exodus to the suburbs has produced minimal choice. "The new suburban headquarters," he declares, "say, 'By God, if those bastards from New York come and try to storm our ramparts, we'll pour boiling water on them.' " He claims these suburban offices are such lonely places that consultants have to be imported as visitors. "One guy said, 'You've missed an important point. It is true no one comes out to see us. But when we go into town, we're much more careful, and we schedule ourselves much more efficiently than otherwise would be the case.' He proceeded to sketch out a formula for cutting yourself off from any unplanned encounter." And the unplanned encounter, Whyte concludes, is one of the joys of urban life: "You hear the point you didn't expect to hear."

Whyte has detected what may be a selfish motive behind the suburban corporate shift. He tracked 38 companies that left New York City over a ten- year period and discovered that 31 of them had relocated to within eight miles of the home of their chief executive officer. "I take that at face value," he says deadpan.

To Whyte, volume is life. That is why he is convinced that the street corner remains the best meeting place in the world: "A downtown, if it is any damned good, ought to be able to put out on the street more than 1,000 people an hour. What you want to do is maximize street activity," he continues. "Your life is on the street. A lively street has many entrances and exits. It's like a stage set. This is one of the reasons why there shouldn't be blank walls. Stores need all the competition they can get. I don't know if that sounds funny, but one of the problems with some pedestrian malls is that they don't have enough people to really make the thing work."

He is stunned by the attitudes of officials in cities like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where a skywalk system saps the foot traffic from the streets below, which are already threatened by nearby malls. "When they tell me that they are really going to curb their pedestrian congestion, I can hardly believe my ears," Whyte says. "The thing to worry about is not enough people."

Not all congestion is good, he cautions. Choice is paramount. "On a bus or a subway, you are trapped," Whyte says about the bad kind. "But in a free- choice situation, carrying capacity is the key. People have a visceral sense of what is right for a place. They can feel it. Also, in a healthy downtown, you'll see that most successful places have a very high proportion of people in pairs and threesomes and foursomes. Maybe 40% are females. They don't want to go to a place if something is wrong with it."

Many foreign cities retain their street life. Whyte says that Venice has some of the world's best urban spaces. "Venice deserves all of the kudos it * gets," he contends. "In addition to the spectacular space of Piazza San Marco, Venice has a host of smaller campi -- squares -- where so much intimate, friendly interchange occurs. It's absolutely superb." Whyte also likes Milan, particularly for its cavernous, glass-covered Galleria shopping area. While he loves the street life of Tokyo, he bemoans its near total lack of open spaces.

Whyte scorns many smaller Midwestern and Southwestern cities in America. "They don't have the urban tradition of the Northeast," he explains. "I know that sounds snotty, but it's not just the Northeast. Seattle and Portland are tremendous cities, partly because they both have urban traditions." Smaller cities in general, he argues, are more vulnerable than larger ones to competition from nearby shopping malls. "I heard James Rouse, the urban developer, lecture in Dallas on this. He said, 'You are copying the physical form of my malls. You shouldn't be doing that because the malls are not for downtown. What you should be copying is my centralized management, my tenant selection, my outreach.' "

Whyte also claims that gentrification, one of the symbols of renewed urban vitality, is not the social evil for displaced people it has been made out to be. The real culprit, he contends, is the government decision not to build more housing. "People think you have a nice Italian family, and then you have these peace-eating liberals who push them out. Well, that's not the way it works," Whyte argues. "By and large, many steps have been taking place before the so-called gentrifiers move in. They do not buy from the nice ethnic family and kick them out. So much housing has been destroyed. Look at the Bronx. There has been more housing destroyed there than has been built in all of New York. There is the root of the problem -- lack of housing."

Whyte is noticeably quiet about the crime, dirt, awful schools and general corrosiveness that drive people out of cities in the first place. One urban expert says Whyte romanticizes a city that no longer exists -- "the city E.B. White wrote about in 1946, where you could leave the Stork Club at 2 a.m. and take the subway home." Whyte concedes that he has no plan to solve the litany of urban problems, but he denies he is a dreamer. "I am an anti-Utopian," he says. "We've got a lot of problems in New York that are not going to be solved by having nicer parks. I speak with no sentiment at all. I am very scared of the city. I've been mugged twice."

Why, then, go on living in Manhattan, as he has done for decades? "You've got to be crazy to live in Manhattan," Whyte concludes. Crazy about cities.