Complex Complex
By AARON RETICA
Published: May 15, 2005
My grandfather served on a hospital boat in the Pacific during World War II, and so he was a preferred applicant for one of the 8,756 new rent-regulated apartments in Stuyvesant Town when it opened in 1947. The massive redbrick complex, which lies just north of the East Village in New York, was built by Metropolitan Life with the political help of Robert Moses and Fiorello La Guardia, who were anxious about where to put returning veterans and eager to clear away the vicious Gashouse district. It was modeled on the European concept, then modish, of towers in a park. In Stuyvesant Town and its slightly more upscale counterpart, Peter Cooper Village, there are 110 apartment buildings, from 13 to 15 stories each, housing more than 25,000 people on the equivalent of 27 Manhattan blocks.
My grandfather would have laughed at the phrase ''East Village.'' It was all the Lower East Side when he grew up there. Among the mythic-seeming friends of his youth was Abie Hecht, with whom my grandfather was in a gang called the Third Street Boys. Hecht supposedly became a real gangster later, and whenever someone angered my grandfather profoundly, he would shake his whole arm and say, his voice rising: ''Just one phone call. One phone call to Abie Hecht!'' A special kind of annihilation beckoned.
My grandfather had nothing in common with the urbanists of the postwar era, one of whom, Lewis Mumford, writing in The New Yorker in 1948, said that Stuyvesant Town featured ''the architecture of the police state,'' a phrase that still meant something then. But he would have been just as surprised to find out that the local tenants' association (of which I am a member) now wants to landmark the complex. After all, on its exterior, it has long been renowned for its ugliness.
Yet my grandfather lived in Stuyvesant Town until he died; so did my grandmother. My mother grew up there and, for the most part, so did I. Even my great-grandparents, who came to America from the Carpathian Mountains, lived there when I was a boy. After school, I'd watch my great-grandfather return home from his job -- at a tie factory on Allen Street -- to schnapps, a cigar and a Yiddish newspaper; it felt more like 1924 than 1974. Now my wife and I are raising our daughters in Peter Cooper, which means that my kids are fifth-generation residents.
When Stuyvesant Town went up, Irish and Italian Catholics and Eastern European Jews were the first to move in. It was all white, at the behest of Metropolitan Life's chairman, Frederick H. Ecker, who, alongside his praiseworthy commitment to affordable housing, said: ''Negroes and whites don't mix. Perhaps they will in a hundred years, but they don't now.'' The first black families didn't move in until he retired in 1950. In a strange twist, one rationale that has been suggested for landmarking Stuyvesant Town is that its whites-only policy later prompted the country's first anti-discrimination housing legislation.
There are very few stores on the outside flanks of the complex, so there isn't much street life, something that attracted negative attention from Jane Jacobs, who had Stuyvesant Town in mind when, in ''The Death and Life of Great American Cities,'' she mocked ''middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against the buoyancy of city life.'' But inside there are 15 playgrounds and a central grass oval open to residents. Against city-planning doctrine, the complex faces inward, like a Spanish hacienda, but to my mind it is much more like the ideal of a city neighborhood than either Mumford or Jacobs would concede. The oval serves as a kind of town square, where, for good or ill, everyone must interact with everyone else -- whether the conversation is about the lamb tacos at the Mexican grocery store on Avenue A, the right response to Sept. 11 or local PTA nominations. When I am out there playing baseball with my kids, I see it: a giant mishmash of activity around us, with every type of child represented, 50 years earlier than Ecker imagined.
So the people who brought their manners and mores with them from the Lower East Side -- and so from Hungary, Ireland, Italy and Poland -- and who were lectured by urban theorists that they would not be living a real city life, ended up making this place named after a distant Dutchman into an actual neighborhood. Gradually (if sometimes grudgingly) they let other people -- black Americans, Puerto Ricans, South and East Asians -- feel at home there too.
The towers-in-a-park model has failed in most of the places it has been tried. And it remains to be seen whether it can continue to work in Stuyvesant Town, now that Met Life has taken every newly vacated apartment out of the rent-regulation system. But five generations on, it seems to me that this particular experiment, conducted day to day for almost 60 years, proves that the richest kind of civic life can be found in unlikely places.
nytimes.com
Aaron Retica is chief of research for the magazine. |
