The Joys of City Life

Architects have their competing theories of architecture, and they have poured out rivers of ink trying to justify this or that as the purpose of their endeavors. But the ordinary citizen, without thinking about it, knows what the purpose of architecture is, and probably knows it better than an architect who has spent his life filling his head with arcane theories.

The purpose of architecture is to create useful spaces that people want to be in.

It’s not enough to make the space useful if people hate being in it. And it’s not enough to make people want to be in it if they can’t use it for its intended purpose.

But being attractive without being useful is probably better than being useful without being attractive. If people like a space, they’ll find a way to make it work. If people don’t like a space, they’ll stay away, even if it  seems to meet all their practical needs.

Architecture creates more than one kind of space. Interior spaces are the ones we usually think about. But architecture creates exterior spaces as well. A new building on a street makes it a different kind of street. Is it a street where people want to be, or is it a street they hurry through? The architect is as much responsible for the street his building sits on as he is for the space inside the building. If a new construction creates a long, blank wall that people instinctively avoid, the architect has effectively destroyed the street. Businesses on the other side of it will wither, and the street will exist only as a passage from one more desirable place to another.

Style is less important than scale in creating spaces people like. Architecture on a human scale is inherently more friendly than architecture on a titanic scale. Monumental architecture needs smaller subdivisions to make itself relatable: the arches in a Roman basilica, or the stilts in a Mies van der Rohe office building. Great slabs of concrete or stone put us off instead of welcoming us; remembering the human scale is the thing that makes architecture work.

These are all obvious ideas, but the enthusiasm of an all-encompassing theory of architecture can make an architect forget them. An architect needs to look at his plans and ask, “Will people want to be here?” Perhaps he should point to different spots on the blueprint at random: Will people want to be here, or here, or here? If he can always answer yes to that question, he’s done his job well.

A quick and heavy snowfall has a strangely magical effect on the city. Our little blizzard in Pittsburgh the other day brought everything to a halt. The streetcars kept rolling, but most of the buses gave up, and there were abandoned cars here and there on major highways. And when everything stopped—when people gave up trying to be anywhere but where they were—then came the silence.

It’s very hard to describe in words, this surreal acoustical change that comes over the city when the snow is thick on the ground and still falling. But everyone who has heard it remembers it. The absence of the usual urban background noise is what you notice first. But there’s more than silence: the sounds you do hear seem to come from another world, or from inside your own mind. The usual reverberation from paved streets and brick walls is gone; the snow absorbs every sound, so every sound you hear comes directly from its source. Conversations from far away are impossibly distinct; no echoes muddy them up, and no constant hum of traffic obscures them. They’re as frighteningly clear as voices in your head.

The morning after a heavy snow is a sneak preview of that new heaven and new earth we’ve been promised. Every ugliness and imperfection is covered in flawless beauty, freed from every stain and blot. But the greatest miracle happens as the human population of the city wakes up and starts to dig out. Now you see neighbors being neighbors—the strong pitching in to help the weak. This is the life of the New Jerusalem. The old heaven and earth have passed away.

Of course, in a few days it all melts, and then we’re back where we started.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

The suburbs have a strange hold over us. Many of the people who live there insist that they hate Suburbia and all things suburban. But—they live there. Apparently it isn’t that they want to live a suburban life; it’s just that they can’t think of any other life to live.

More than two millennia ago, Aristotle made his famous pronouncement: “Man is a political animal.” He didn’t mean that man was an animal that indulged in politics; he meant that man was an animal that lived in a polis—a city. For Aristotle, the thing that made us human was that we lived in cities.

That’s always been true. Until this century, there has never been a time when it was thought natural for humans to live in isolated groups of two or three. Even in the most primitive cultures, humans are town-dwellers. Our suburban age is the first age where the small family—parents and children, no aunts or grandparents or cousins—is expected to be sufficient unto itself.

You see reproduced on this page an advertisement for a suburban community of the turn of the past century. Do you notice the important differences between Brookline and the suburban developments of today? The main differences are in those three prominent statements right in the middle of the ad:

CHURCHES
are there now
SCHOOLS
are there now
STORES
are there now

In the modern suburban community, all those things are banished—even the churches. Instead, the churches, schools, and stores all line up along dreadful strip-center highways, where they’re accessible only by car. The very institutions that ought to be the centers of community life are ejected from the community. The result, of course, is that there is no community life. (Brookline, incidentally, still has its churches, schools, and stores, and it’s still a very pleasant place to live.)

The suburbs are our ideal, but they make healthy community life impossible. Living in the city (or at least in a small town or village) is the only way of life that’s natural for human beings. But we’ve rejected the city; in fact, we actively seek to destroy it with our zoning laws.

Luckily, we’re beginning to wake up from our suburban stupor. But the strange idea of the suburbs still weighs heavily on the American conscience. When we hear politicians rant about family values, we need to remember that “family values,” meaning the isolated “nuclear” family, are an artificial creation of the suburban mind. The values of community—the only values that can ensure the survival of a free state—need the city to grow and flourish.

Have you noticed how sparse the selection seems to be in the giant suburban bookstore chains lately? How the office-supply superstores seem to carry ever-larger quantities of the same three kinds of legal pad? Do you remember a time when those enormous stores seemed to carry everything, no matter how obscure? What happened?

You’re seeing the effects of Superstore Syndrome, the inevitable course of a suburban superstore’s existence, and one of the characteristic diseases of consumerism.

The cycle begins when the superstore first moves into an area. Let’s say you’re opening a giant book chain. There are already bookstores in the area with loyal customers. How are you going to lure away that loyal customer base? Price is one thing you can try, but your best bet is probably selection. People will come to your gigantic store because you have all the books in the world. They may still buy mostly bestsellers, but they’ll love just knowing that they can come here for Frontinus in the original Latin the next time they happen to need him.

And it works. One by one, the little neighborhood bookstores close as their customers desert them for your enticingly comprehensive selection. You dominate the book market. You’re making money hand over fist as the bestsellers fly out the door, with an occasional obscurity joining them to break up the monotony.

Onward! Ten years have passed. The chain of book superstores has flourished and been bought up by a giant international conglomerate. But a brief economic downturn eats into profits. One quarter even shows a loss. In a panic, the parent company begins to look at the numbers very closely. Why, one uncommonly bright young executive demands, are we stocking these Loeb Classics when each store sells only about a dozen each year? Every square foot of shelf space must be accounted for, and these things are wasting valuable space that could be given over to something really profitable, like self-help books. Evreybody buys self-help books.

So the superstore begins to cut back on selection. And at first all goes well. Now the superstore doesn’t really have any more of a selection than the neighborhood bookstores used to have, but since there are no more neighborhood bookstores that’s not so much of a problem. But gradually shoppers begin to realize that the superstore just isn’t fun anymore. There are still acres of books, but it seems as though the’re all the same books. And if bestsellers are the only books you stock—well, we can get those at Kmart. Why should we bother coming to your bookstore?

Where does that leave the book-shopper who’s looking for Frontinus? It sends him back to the city, the natural home of everything unusual, nonstandard, interesting. In the city he can find stores that thrive on the customers left behind and rejected by the superstores, because in the city there are enough of those people to support a store with unusual stock. The superstore begins to struggle, and blames changing economic conditions. The neighborhood specialty shop begins to thrive, and can thank the management of the superstore.

There must be a thousand shades of brown in these November trees. October is the month of spectacular colors in the parks and hillsides of Pittsburgh, but November is more subtle. There’s a kind of pleasant melancholy hanging in the air, especially on one of those long rainy days when the wet leaves spiral downward one by one as if they had all the time in the world–and I watch them as if I had all the time in the world, which in fact I do. On a wet November day, you have all the time in the world. There are no grand excitements, no hurries. Everything is calm. Nothing interesting is happening.

On a rainy November day, the possibilities are endless. You can’t plant bulbs; you can’t rake leaves; the dog would rather not take a walk if it’s all the same with you. So there’s time for all the things you’ve always wanted to do, but never had the time for. You can read a book. You can write a book. You can teach yourself Russian. Or you can just sit, with a cup of good Darjeeling tea in one hand and absolutely nothing in the other. Just sitting is a sadly neglected art in the modern world, one we should all cultivate. Most of the evils of the world would disappear if people could teach themselves to enjoy just sitting.

But perhaps the best thing to do on a rainy November day is to grab a big black umbrella and go out into the world. It would be a glorious day to take the streetcar downtown and do some window-shopping. The rain comes straight down on these rainy November days; it keeps the crowds off the streets, but the umbrella is as good as a roof over your head.

Or what a perfect day to spend in the back stacks of the Carnegie Library, back in those endless rows of books that even the librarians seem to have forgotten about. Or the conservatory–it’s a perfect day for the conservatory. Phipps Conservatory is between shows right now; there won’t be many people there, and we could lose ourselves in the palm house for hours.

Even just a walk through the back streets of one of the city neighborhoods–that would be a perfect way to spend an afternoon under the umbrella. There’s plenty of time to stroll down the sidewalk, pausing to admire a well-restored Victorian house or a patch of stubbornly blooming snapdragons, watching the leaves spiral down one by one as if they had all the time in the world. Tomorrow the rain will stop, and we can get back to work. But today is our own.

We make it terribly hard for bars and restaurants to offer live music, but anyone can blare a radio station over a loudspeaker. This is exactly backwards. There ought to be steep licensing fees for recorded music, and none at all for live music. If we made it a financial advantage to have live musicians, there would be live musicians. Young people—and their parents—would see that music was a viable career instead of a waste of time.

It’s no good arguing that licensing fees for live music are justified by the large crowds that live music draws, which require more law enforcement and other city services. Live music draws crowds precisely because it’s unusual. Let every bar on the South Side employ a live band, and the crowds will be dispersed and manageable.

The wonderful thing about music in the city is that you can’t really stamp it out, in spite of punitive laws against musicians who practice their art. But take away those laws, and what a flowering of musical culture there might be! Let the same discouraging regulations be applied to recorded music, and nothing could prevent a musical renaissance in the city.

Still, it might be argued by nervous neighbors that unrestricted live music will produce too much noise. So we might propose a compromise plan. Let there be an amplification fee that applies equally to live and recorded music. You can have a band, or a string quartet, or a symphony orchestra, with no amplification, and you pay no fee. You can play records on a mechanical Victrola without paying the fee. But turn on an amplifier, and you pay the fee. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

A news story making the rounds suggests that people whose ancestors have lived in cities for many generations may have superior immunity to leprosy and tuberculosis. The study in question concludes that frequent exposure to those diseases in crowded urban areas tended to select those individuals who had better immunity by killing off the rest.

This conclusion has little bearing on whether you or I should be living in the city: everything depends on where your ancestors lived, and the diseases studied are not the scourges they once were. But it suggests a closely parallel phenomenon in the intellectual world. The development of physical immunity is much like the development of intellectual tolerance.

Tolerance itself is often portrayed as the disease, an abandonment of the absolute moral standards that made our civilization civilized. But we confuse tolerance with indifference. The two are not at all alike. Indifference is not caring about right and wrong. Tolerance is that grand old Christian (and Buddhist, and Muslim, and Jewish, and Hindu) principle of holding ourselves to a higher standard than the one we demand of other people. It is granting others the right to be wrong, to have bad ideas that we could never allow ourselves to hold. The very word “tolerance” indicates, not approval of what we know is wrong, but acceptance of what we cannot change.

The city exposes us to wrong ideas as soon as we walk out into the street. A Puritan village in colonial New England would find a single Baptist impossible to live with, and would either toss him out or kill him—whichever seemed likely to be most effective in preventing the infection from spreading. The city of today exposes us to a hundred different Christian sects, Orthodox and Liberal Jews and every shade in between, atheists, Hindus, Jains, countless varieties of Muslims, neopagans, Scientologists, and people who just made up their own religion last week. They can’t all be right; most of them must be wrong. Yet we all sit together on the same streetcar and don’t think much about it.

The people who can’t tolerate all this tolerance flee to a colorless suburb where they never have to meet anyone challengingly different. So the city tends to become more tolerant as the suburbs become less tolerant. The tolerance of the city becomes another grievance the suburbs have against it: the city, where evil people peddle their wrong ideas and get away with it. The boundary between city and suburbs hardens into the boundary between tolerance and intolerance.

Once again, it’s important to remember that this urbane tolerance is different from indifference. It can lapse into indifference, but it actually takes quite a shove to push it in that direction. The city is full of churches and temples and mosques, not because its  people believe that one religion is as good as another, but because each citizen knows for a fact that his religion is the only true one. But the urban Puritan knows that you can’t just get rid of the Baptist down the street. He’ll always be there, and he makes a pretty good neighbor if you don’t get him started talking about baptism. Gradually, surrounded by the hordes of Baptists, our Puritan builds up an immunity to them. The Baptists can build huge, ostentatious churches, and it won’t make the Puritan any less of a Puritan. This is tolerance: knowing that your neighbors are wrong, but living with them as neighbors anyway.

The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty.

What Mary Roberts Rinehart captured here is something very hard to put into words: that the beauty and the ugliness of a city are often, and perhaps usually, the same thing. This is a point that escapes urban planners, and many hideous atrocities have been committed by planners who thought they could have beauty alone, perfected and purified, and expunge ugliness from the city.

A concatenation of little uglinesses makes beauty. Everyone loved to look at Lillian Russell, but no one wanted to examine her pores under a glass.

The most beautiful and fascinating city scene is like a fugue, with contrasting melodies moving in different directions to make a harmonious but complex whole. It cannot be all harmony as those parts move against one another: there must be dissonance as well, disharmony, even ugliness, so that there can be real depth of beauty. Yet we often leave our city planning in the hands of people who can barely carry a tune.

What is the secret to successful urban planning? It lies somewhere in a successful distinction between uglinesses. A composer writes dissonance into his fugue because he knows where a chunk of ugliness will be a building-block rather than a stumbling-block for beauty. In a city, quite plainly there are ugly things that spoil a whole view; but there are ugly things that enhance it, and we need to have the taste to distinguish the two. In an established city, we need the wisdom to distinguish between the ugliness that must go and the ugliness that must stay. That, in a few words, is the mission of modern urban planning.

Mary Roberts Rinehart in 1914.

No one ever captured the poetry and mystery of the city of Pittsburgh better than Mary Roberts Rinehart, one of the bestselling American authors of all time, who lived here when she wrote her famous mysteries. Here is the opening of her novel A Poor Wise Man, first published in 1920.

The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty. Sometimes the softened towers of the great steel bridges rose above the river mist like fairy towers suspended between Heaven and earth. And again the sun tipped the surrounding hills with gold, while the city lay buried in its smoke shroud, and white ghosts of river boats moved spectrally along.

Sometimes it was ugly, sometimes beautiful, but always the city was powerful, significant, important. It was a vast melting pot. Through its gates came alike the hopeful and the hopeless, the dreamers and those who would destroy those dreams. From all over the world there came men who sought a chance to labor. They came in groups, anxious and dumb, carrying with them their pathetic bundles, and shepherded by men with cunning eyes.

Raw material, for the crucible of the city, as potentially powerful as the iron ore which entered the city by the same gate.

The city took them in, gave them sanctuary, and forgot them. But the shepherds with the cunning eyes remembered.

We make a distinction, convenient but false, between the works of human art and the works of nature. But suppose for a moment that we were extraterrestrial visitors touring Earth for the first time: what would we see? We’d see strange and beautiful landscapes—some of them stark and angular, others green and gentle. Some features in them would be the products of erosion. Others would have been put there by tool-using mammalian creatures. Still others, and among them surely some of the most magnificent, would have been grown by innumerable tiny sea animals. Perhaps as extraterrestrial visitors we would find in coral reefs our best evidence that life on Earth had really accomplished something.

Earth’s great cities might look something like coral reefs to extraterrestrials who didn’t know any better. After a while, we might learn from observation that the coral reefs were homes built by stationary creatures, whereas the builders of the cities are mobile and in fact spend a good part of their lives migrating across miles of urban landscape. But to us extraterrestrials that’s a small distinction. The main thing is that both humans and corals have evolved the capacity to build their own permanent residences, and in so doing to change the nature of the land or sea around them.

The humans, who are an argumentative lot (one of the many ways they might appear to be inferior to the corals), might point out that corals build by blind instinct, whereas humans have an innate sense of beauty and order. Yet the corals consistently produce works that are breathtakingly beautiful to humans, whereas humans—by our own admission—more often produce breathtakingly ugly architectural excrescences that you’d never catch a self-respecting coral living in.

One of the ironies of human nature is that we tend to turn out ugly cities when we put the most thought into them. Left to grow by itself, a city may have ugly sections, but the city as a whole is almost invariably beautiful. Subjected to the whims of urban planners, the city suddenly finds itself shot full of holes, empty spots where the urban planner has decreed a pedestrian mall or ample free parking.

Zoning laws are among the most pernicious enemies of the city. The laws were conceived with the very best intentions. Their laudable purpose was to keep warehouses and factories from encroaching too much on residential neighborhoods. But instead of preserving the character of a neighborhood, zoning laws more often outlaw the very things that make up that character.

In a city neighborhood in Pittsburgh, if your house is destroyed, it is—or at least was until recently—probably illegal to replace it with an exact duplicate. Even though your house may be nearly identical to every other house on your street, the zoning laws demand something entirely different. You need to be set back farther from the street; you need more space between your house and your neighbors’. In fact, the creators of the zoning laws would dearly love it if you constructed a suburban ranch house on a street of Second Empire rowhouses. The ideal of the suburb has been forced onto the city, with catastrophic results for many formerly beautiful urban neighborhoods.

Fortunately, there’s a long-overdue reaction afoot. Zoning laws are slowly being rationalized–sometimes over the vociferous objections of misguided neighborhood activists. In some cities, the tide has turned so far the other way that new developments in certain areas must conform to the ideals of the “new urbanism.”

What will the city of the future look like? In the 1950s and 1960s, we imagined the city of the future as looking a lot like the suburbs—open green spaces with a few buildings here and there and no obvious shopping area. (In these cities of the long-past future, the government apparently supplied everyone’s wants.) But now we know better. The city of the future will look more like the city of the past—at least the city of the past in its best aspects. If we plan wisely now, we might be able to avoid the worst aspects of the city of the past. If we can manage that, we might come close to finding our paradise on Earth. At least we’ll impress the extraterrestrials.