City Beautiful, City Ugly

Chicago — which as I write is formalizing a beautiful new political movement — over a century ago gave form to the City Beautiful Movement, a Beaux Arts philosophy of architecture and urbanism that drove the design of cities nationwide, especially the urban manufacturing juggernauts of the Great Lakes. A balm to the malign impacts of the Industrial Revolution, the City Beautiful Movement was seen as far more than an aesthetic project; its proponents believed that the beautification of the city would instill civic virtue among its residents, a kind of converse of today’s theory of broken windows, in which a glorious cityscape would instill beatific urban behavior. Among its chief advocates was famed Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, known among other feats for his legendary plea in the aftermath of the Windy City’s great fire:

The work of this brilliant gilded-age straight white man, with his focus on European design determinism and Christian civic virtue, culminated in the cancellation of the City Beautiful Movement in the 1920s, well before cancel culture even existed. A then emergent modernism relegated City Beautiful to a historical dustbin that would later brim full with the oft-malicious urban renewal of Robert Moses, the tower-in-the-park public housing of Catherine Bauer Wurster, Ed Logue and J. Max Bond, along with virtually all other organized urban design intention since that has tried to guide the plight of our shared built environment and its residents. As scholar Thomas Campanella once wrote about Jane Jacobs, she presided not only over the demise of Moses, but over the “Death and Life of American Planning.”

So now, in a time of climate change, social division and urban uncertainty, we are drifting without rudder, imagining somehow that it is our very lack of collective imagination that is our great achievement, our lack of strong vision an act of pluralism instead of what it actually is — an arc of chaos.

As I look at Gotham today, I can’t help but think there is, in fact, a movement taking hold as powerful as the City Beautiful movement once was, but manifest as its exact polar opposite. It is a City Ugly movement, a tacit yet strongly-held belief that only when we reject all expressions of dignity that could be embodied in the beauty and self-regard of our public works and spaces — and make sure that we build the utterly banal — can we fully achieve the holy grail of today’s local politics and the squeaky wheels that propel it: the lowest common denominator.

What else could explain our collective shrug at the disgusting state of Eighth Avenue, the indefinite delay of congestion pricing, the demise of the governor’s laudable housing compact, the histrionic opposition to the mayor’s motherhood-and-apple-pie City of Yes plan, or the pejorative dismissal of years of work by many, myself included, to fix the tracks, platforms, concourses and wheelchair elevators at New York’s decrepit Pennsylvania Station as “pretty.”

Progressive readers might decry that I am bolstering Trump’s wild narratives of carnage in blue cities, but it is not carnage I see, it is complacency. James Baldwin rightfully insisted that it is patriotic to criticize our country, which means we must similarly be able to criticize our own progressive cities on both coasts when they fail. With familiar impunity, Trump falsely claims violent crime is up nationally. In New York City violent crime is actually down, and we are safer than we were decades ago, but other significant forms of crime remain pernicious. As Ezra Klein recently noted, Kamala Harris wrote years ago that it is a public right, not a privilege, to feel a sense of safety about one’s body, loved ones and possessions. Yet New Yorkers continue to suffer daily indignities like purse-snatching and potholes, small dangers that erode these rights, corrode the urban soul and make us worry that the city has once again become ungovernable.

To me the worst part about it is the collective shrug I sense in response to these communal failures. It is the resignation that this is the best we can muster for the greatest city on Earth — that our failure isn’t the problem, it is seeking better that is.

Over my career, I have been deeply involved in projects like the High Line and Domino Park, and with each I’ve heard specious claims that such projects serve only the rich, when they are deeply public by design. One notes that these places don’t exhibit much of the urban dysfunctions we experience citywide today, perhaps because the City Beautiful proponents were right: Places built with love for the public elicit civic pride and self-respect. The critique I hear constantly, however, is that these places “look too good,” and as such can’t possibly serve all New Yorkers equitably. To do that they must wallow in mediocrity, like the plutocrat-built widgets that pass for affordable housing, or they must lack public dignity and safety, like Penn Station and its environs. After all, what could be more equitable than shared ugliness and the collective malaise it inspires?

As a former Bloomberg administration official who heard the left laugh loudly when Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff advocated for hosting the Olympics in New York City, I look in awe at what Paris just pulled off in a city that simultaneously is advancing social housing, new live/work neighborhoods and safe biking, all while maintaining its renowned culture, commerce and tourism. In our society, so lacking in nuance, it would seem that our truly Olympian feat is to continuously hurl babies out alongside their bathwater.

Perhaps, even as a brown guy, I like Daniel Burnham am being too European — or at least too foreign — in my desires and values for this immigrant city still run by natives. Yet at the risk of being canceled, I share Burnham’s insistence that as we rebuild New York post-pandemic, we “aim high in hope and work,” that we not settle for our moribund status quo, and that we together create a city of jobs, justice and joy — a city of shared and meaningful beauty.