New and Old #155
Friday roundup and commentary
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Urban Renewal in Norfolk, Alex Marshall, September 24, 2007
The 1950s was about new stuff, not old stuff. The United States had spent two decades postponing consumption as it fought the Great Depression and then World War II. It was ready for new cars, houses, roads and ways of doing things. With a vengeance.
I often wonder whether urban renewal was really psychologically tied to World War II—whether the notion that we “rewarded” ourselves with suburbia is really true, such that had the war not happened, we would not have broken with our urban past so sharply.
Marshall also illustrates what I often argue, that pre-war/pre-car American cities were in important respects indistinguishable from “European urbanism.” Up until we rewrote urban development in the midcentury, a city was a city pretty much anywhere in the world.
It was in this spirit that from 1949 into the early 1960s, Norfolk proceeded to tear down most of the buildings and streets built over the previous 275 years. A city founded in 1680 was left with little built before 1900. Cities around the country followed its example.
When the dust had ettled in the early 1960s, old East Main Street, lined with burlesque houses and bars, was gone. Gone was the original Commercial Place, where stevedores and merchants traded drinks in ancient taverns while they waited for ships to unload. Gone were the central city markets, where dozens of produce, dairy, meat and fish merchants sold their wares at small stands under mammoth roofs. Gone was the city’s old Union Station near the Elizabeth River, where travelers stepped off trains into the heart of the city. Gone was the entire neighborhood of Atlantic City. Gone was the city’s oldest core, a tight web of streets dating back to the city’s founding.
Norfolk, a small city in Virginia’s tidewater region, isn’t particularly famous, at least not for anything to do with cities per se—it’s probably best known for its shipbuilding facility—but it has this distinction: “Norfolk was first to take advantage of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, which paid 80 percent of urban renewal and gave cities new legal powers to take private property….After the war, Norfolk was the first city in the country to have an urban renewal plan approved under the new Federal Housing Act.”
Read the whole thing. And here is a shocking thread on Twitter with a bunch of before-and-after photos of “urban renewal in Norfolk.” Here’s the thing about all of this: you might think, “Well, that’s sad, but Norfolk was no Old Town Alexandria, after all.” But Old Town Alexandria was no Old Town Alexandria at the nadir of American cities; in fact, Old Town was viewed as slummy and deteriorated and was very nearly bulldozed in the same era.
We can only speculate how many more lovely historic cities America would have if we had simply let them alone until the tide of investment and curiosity turned back in their favor.
Even while recognizing the need for comprehensive solutions, too many urbanists have ignored the importance of finance in charting a different course for the future. Without credit markets that can actually finance the creation of new housing, very little can get built. Without flexible credit markets, very little good can get built. This particularly impacts small developers, and by extension the quality of our communities overall. Small builders imbue identity, intrigue, and charm into the places they work, and confer significant quantitative benefits like providing housing typologies that larger firms might not be willing or able to build, and offering it at attainable pricing.
It’s true that there’s a missing bridge to some extent between real estate professionals and builders on the one hand, and urbanists on the other. Of course there’s a fair bit of overlap, but it’s absolutely right that financing is a huge and separate element from zoning, parking, etc. It’s also true that this acts as a barrier to entry for small developers, which is part of why so much new development is big, bland, and boring. Which is part of why people don’t like new development. Which is part of why…
This is a long and fairly technical piece, so read that or skip that if you like. Here I’m going to pull a bit from towards the end, on why this actually matters:
There are few feelings better than your community accepting or admiring something you created. This confers an intangible reward that can’t be calculated in any excel model. Based on the pride imperative, small builders create places they can be proud of, often imbued with the idiosyncrasies of local character. Moreover, they create places their communities need, as they have an intimate understanding of the area that cannot be divined by demographic analyses in some far off cubicle (or living room couch).
Institutional developers rarely build in their backyards. They're based in a select few city centers (New York, Dallas, Chicago, DC, Miami, San Francisco), and are thus infrequently connected to the places they build in. This leads to a product with little personality—getting creative with design is a risk that might not pay off, after all. If you never pass the places you build, or aren't held accountable for what you create, there's little reason to care about the quality of a building beyond the bare minimum required to hit a certain return threshold unless you’re inordinately driven to create something fantastic.
This idea that developers being locally based is important is something I’ve heard before, especially in small towns where people have a strong sense of place and local pride, and view big developers as “outsiders.” I agree we need to make more room in the marketplace for the small and local, and this piece explains the how and why very well.
Vulgarity as Virtue: On the decline of Edinburgh, City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple, Winter 2024
I used to read Theodore Dalrymple (the pen name of prison doctor and British conservative writer Anthony Daniels) in college. I always liked his upmarket cultural conservatism: there was always a sense of humor and a hint of self-deprecation, always an element of intellectual humility, that perhaps all of this is just an aging man’s frustration with the modern world and not a rigid set of doctrines or prescriptions (so to speak). I don’t agree with all of his opinions, but I find his opinions to be the most articulate and sophisticated of the (still alive) right-wingers I’ve read.
Here’s an example of his rather understated humor. Commenting on what he sees as the downward-filtering trashiness of modern British culture, he writes:
This vulgarity is not a mere absence of refinement, such as has always existed among a section of any public, nor is it a satirical commentary on the overrefinement of a self-appointed cultural elite. On the contrary, it is a conscious, positive ideology: vulgarity as political virtue. It partakes of a false syllogism:
The common people are vulgar.
I am vulgar.
Therefore, I have empathy with, and sympathy for, the common people—the highest form of political virtue.
Only the second of these three statements is unequivocally true.
And this bit also made me nod my head. He was commenting on an establishment called “Kick Ass Cafe,” which, he notes, is not only vulgar but—perhaps worse?—an American rather than a British phrase:
“So,” I can hear a good social liberal object, “you would prohibit a café from availing itself of that name?” Social liberalism has become so debased that it thinks that anything not prohibited by the law is permissible in all other senses. Therefore, if I object to the name, I must be calling for its prohibition.
No. What I am commenting upon is a culture in which such a name is not only considered unobjectionable but, on the contrary, is taken as an expression of democratic sentiment and liberation from oppression, and objection to which constitutes reprehensible political reaction.
I’ve noticed this too—all of these crude, mostly sexual, plays on words in business names. I don’t care for it. I can think of a few I’ve seen over the years myself: a UPS Store clone called Ship Happens; a pet grooming shop called Doggie Style; a flower stall at a festival called Peony’s Envy; and my favorite (which is to say my least favorite): a mercifully short-lived pizzeria with the both undignified and unfunny name Cheesus Crust.
I don’t go as far as Dalrymple; heck, he’s suggested in one column or another that he even thinks rock music is unrefined. But I kind of admire the square old fogey attitude, and I see a little bit of it in myself. I wouldn’t adopt this whole politics myself, but I think it’s an essential worldview to exist in the public square.
An Icelandic shark dish, called hákarl, was the first assault on his stomach. “Eating it was like gnawing on three-week-old cheese from the garbage that had also been pissed on by every dog in the neighborhood,” he said. Next up was durian, a spiky, custard-like fruit from Southeast Asia that “smelled like socks at the bottom of a gym locker, drizzled with paint thinner.” But worst of all was surströmming, a fermented herring that is beloved in northern Sweden. De Meyer said that eating it was like taking a bite out of a corpse.
He vomited ten times, topping the museum’s previous record of six. Mercifully, admission tickets are printed on airplane-style barf bags.
Well, that’s disgusting, and you hardly have to be “woke” or particularly culturally sensitive to conclude that. I actually don’t know what Fan’s ultimate argument is, because I couldn’t get through the article. You’re allowed to like what you like and be comfortable with what you’re comfortable with, which is not the same thing as being judgmental.
One of the psychological things about diversity and pluralism in general is that it require you to grasp that what feels like an absolute truth to you most likely is just a preference. I think for some people, simply knowing that different people with different beliefs and preferences exist can weaken your sense of yourself—your confidence in what you know or think you know.
This is one reason some people don’t like cities, or immigration, or what have you. There can be a comfort in uniformity, or conformity. My mother, who grew up in diverse, bustling New York City, likes to say “To each their own.” Seconded.
Related Reading:
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I wonder about the psychology of Urban Renewal too. More than just a dam-bursting of pent-up demand for construction and consumption, I have to think that there was a priming effect of seeing many of the Western world’s cities flattened by war that lent more credence to the proposition of flattening swaths of America’s cities.
Hi Addison, this is Alex Marshall, who is also a long time subscriber. I like that you quoted this long piece of mine. Here is the link again. https://substack.com/redirect/c25d8091-8cc3-48a8-a71c-f2ab5d178034?j=eyJ1IjoiYmZ3MSJ9.25ocTtX8LFgzE-cajLr2mefiA6BloTpR0oc5QYEov00
I wrote this for the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk when I was a staff writer there. It probably appeared in 1996. It was on the front of the Commentary section I believe, with a lot of pictures. The Virginian-Pilot was a family newspaper then. A big company bought it a few years ago, whose name is not coming to mind, and it’s archives are a mess. Virtually all of the hundreds of stories I wrote for it are no longer discoverable on the Internet, including the one you cite. This is a real problem. There is this idea that the Internet is permanent. But things are in someways less permanent than in the old days, and libraries kept physical copies of newspapers and newspapers kept physical archives. There has been an urban renewal of our archives!
But I digress. I’m glad you quoted my piece as I said. I was born in Norfolk as was my father, and it really pained me to see what the city did to itself. I am the author of several books on cities, which I will not plug here.
One idea I had about Urban renewal, which was too far fetched to mention in the story, is that the United States pursued it with such a vengeance after World War II because during the war, it did so many gigantic things with such a huge cost in lives and materials. So after the war, they were ready to break a lot of eggs to make new omelettes. The country had grown accustomed to it, or at least its leaders had.