Speaking of painting, the genesis of the American movement to reconfigure big city housing—and soon enough small town and rural housing too, and heck, the entire enchilada of urban design—came in 1934 at, of all places, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which in the Depression’s depths hosted a “Modern Housing Exhibition.”
The Picassos and Cubism and Dadas were on another floor. This unusual museum exhibition, writes Husock, had little to do with art, but a lot to do with “modern.” It “was the spearhead of a crusade; it made the economic, political, and even visual case that the federal government should finance the construction of housing for working families of modest means—not as an emergency measure but as part of the ongoing responsibilities of government.”
Why? A book accompanying the exhibition proved an exemplar of an empowered and eager progressivism, describing itself as:
a statement of the far reaching and varied social, financial, technological, administrative, legislative and political factors which have led to the present situation. It discusses the radical changes which must be made in our social philosophy and public policy in order to improve the housing condition of the masses of the American people.
But was it housing—or was it something else—that tempted the progressive social engineer? Something else gets the nod: The mission, writes Husock, was not truly “the mere provision of utilitarian housing.” Instead, the aspiration was “about building a new type of urban landscape, a city of tomorrow . . . organized by government and designed by architects.”
Actually, a motivating spirit for the exhibition and the forces it would unleash was a 1927 book, The City of Tomorrow, by Charles- Édouard Jeanneret, a Swiss-French architect known as “Le Corbusier,” whose vision—which detested streets—was the creation of “superblocks,” long now a reality for many American cities. Superblocks
were set projects with no cross streets for stores, cars, or small homes. Le Corbusier had already designed such a city in his 1922 plan for the Ville Contemporaine, which was to comprise sixty-story apartment buildings, all identical, surrounded by a zigzag of smaller buildings and a park. Le Corbusier asserted that whole urban scene “is one of wasted opportunities and inefficiency.” He proposes an alternative course, “which is a bold and drastic reconstruction of the entire machine.” Central to his vision was that of “skyscrapers set at immense distances from one another and surrounded by large open spaces or parks.”
Where to build this new city? The canvases for Le Corbusier and his acolytes were to be empty sites—or, sites that were to be emptied because they were decreed slums. Harvard professor James Ford was one of the moment’s leading, persuasive apostles of slum eradication, and Husock quotes him amply: “Wrote Ford, ‘The slum is a menace which cannot be overcome by piece meal modernization loans or random demolitions with the owner’s consent. . . . No solution will be found short of a comprehensive and intelligent policy actuated by one or more units of government, apply financed, which makes the neighborhood rather than the buildings the basis of operations.’”
What was to be the collateral damage of implementing utopia? “As for the shops,” writes Husock, “the churches and synagogues, the small businesses, street life, and so much more which slums were replete, Ford was silent.”
Within three years of the Depression-era exhibition, its patrons and the forces of “slum elimination” it effectively unleashed had successfully lobbied Congress to pass the National Housing Act and create the United States Housing Authority, tools embraced by big city mayors and in particular First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a major champion of slum clearance.
