What Was Lost: A lot.
What Was Gained: Not Much.
BY ALEX MARSHALL
Tuesday, August 10, 1999
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.
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.
But the city didn’t just tear stuff down. In the place of the old, the city built: wide new roads, like St. Pauls Boulevard, Tidewater Drive, Virginia Beach Boulevard extension, Brambleton Avenue and the interstates; housing projects, including Roberts Park, Diggs Park, Young Park, Grandy Village, Bowling Park and others, which now ring downtown; new civic buildings, including a new City Hall, jail and courts complex, which would sit on a plaza nestled by freeway on-ramps; and vast windswept parking lots, where city officials would wait — and wait — for promised new investment to materialize.
How did the city afford all this? With lots and lots of nearly free federal money. 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. The country had just finished winning a world war, and was ready to attempt and pay for drastic changes, even if a few eggs were broken to make this particular omelet.
Norfolk’s fervor in urban renewal traces back to its concept of “slums” and the city’s passion to get rid of them.
Even before World War II, city leaders looked out from the old City Hall and saw crumbling buildings with poor residents with few options. Many structures were wooden, and lacked indoor plumbing. A 1936 survey by the WPA showed that of 954 dwellings in on area between Monticello and Church Street (now St. Pauls Boulevard), 900 of them lacked flush toilets. About a third of the homes were in need of “major repair.”
Other buildings were more solid, made of brick and stone. But these were used for things city fathers weren’t proud of, like bar and burlesque shows. Of course, there were also family restaurants, hotels, tailors and offices, but these old-style establishments were not seen as anything special worth saving when a brand new city, one of highways, shopping malls and civic buildings, could be created.
Discussion of creating a housing authority was active in the 1930s. Finally in 1940, the City Council overcame its longtime resistance and created the Norfolk Housing Authority, after the Navy swung behind the effort. Lawrence M. Cox, who would lead the authority for almost three decades, would become its first executive director. This organization, later renamed the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, would lead the way, and still does, in the city’s effort to reinvent itself.
But before the city could do much, World War II intervened. Downtown would deteriorate even further as thousands of sailors and civilian workers flooded its streets and swamped its housing. City leaders greatly disliked the reputation the city earned as one giant honky-tonk.
After the war, Norfolk was the first city in the country to have an urban renewal plan approved under the new Federal Housing Act. The city received $25 million in 1949 to build 3000 units of public housing. In 1951, the city proceeded to clear 127 acres of land between Monticello and Church Street, now St. Paul’s Boulevard. In 1953, another major slum clearance project was announced.
As the decade proceeded, city leaders fell in love with the bulldozer. In projects beginning in 1949, 1951,1953, 1957, 1958, 1961 the City Council, through its creation the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, ripped out dozens of streets, knocked down hundreds of buildings and evicted thousands of families from their homes. At the same time, it built new highways, new civic buildings, and new public housing.
Under then Mayor Duckworth, the city would announce a clearance project or an expansion of a current one almost every year. In 1957, the City Council approved the destruction of Atlantic City, a relatively stable neighborhood, that used to exist around the midtown tunnel entrance and underneath the medical complex. In the same year, the city would commence clearance of the central core of the city, which would lead to the construction of a new City Hall, courts complex and jail. These renewal efforts would also create the famous blank “17 acres,” which would stay empty for 35 years before the MacArthur Center was built.
By the mid 1960s, most of downtown, with the exception of Freemason, Granby Street and part of Main Street, had been cleared.
With almost a half century’s perspective, what can be said about the city’s vast urban renewal effort?
Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear the city went too far, too fast. City leaders had envisioned a new city of freeways and plenty of parking that would compete with the suburbs. Instead, the destruction of the older networks of streets and buildings would accelerate the migration of retail activity to the suburbs. The passion to build big highways and freeways made mass transit less workable and made downtown, in comparison to the easy-parking suburbs, less viable.
While initial projects in the early 1950s had focused on crumbling wooden shacks beyond repair, later efforts of that decade would tear down scores of pre Civil War buildings of brick and stone, many dating back to the 1800s. These could have formed a base for tourism and downtown residential living.
Frederick Herman, an architect who served on the city’s design review board during this period, said the city tore down numerous treasures. In retrospect, Herman said, it’s clear the city’s wholesale clearance was the wrong approach.
“Norfolk probably had as many 18th century and early 19th century buildings as Georgetown,” Herman said in an interview in 1996. “And they were basically intact until the early 50s. Some were rundown, but a lot of them could have been rehabilitated.”
True, the city would gain a rebuilt Main Street lined with tax-paying office skyscrapers. But under a different plan, these might have emerged elsewhere while keeping the waterfront intact.
The city also lost less tangible things, like its historical memory. Norfolk not only tore down buildings, but erased ancient streets, dating back to the city’s founding. No longer could someone walk downtown, and remember at a glance where they or their forefathers came from.
But the 1950s were a different time. Norfolk’s old downtown homes, like those that still exist in Freemason, had been abandoned by the upper classes for two generations. The prosperous set had long moved out to fashionable Ghent, Park Place, Colonial Place and other new streetcar suburbs. Historical preservation was a tiny idea. Few people imagined a time when a young lawyer or business person would pay dearly for the privilege of living in a crumbling 18th century house with bad plumbing.
And Norfolk was certainly not alone in its love of destruction. Almost every city in the country pursued urban renewal. Like Norfolk, these cities often erased buildings and streets of great historical and economic value. It’s was a sign of the times that New York, New Orleans and Alexandria considered Greenwich Village, the French Quarter and Alexandria’s Old Town as candidates for urban renewal.
Savannah, whose historic district now attracts six million visitors a year, began tearing it down under urban renewal in the 1950s. This city of Spanish moss hanging over graceful squares has since been made famous in movies like Forrest Gump and books like Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil. But in the 1950s, like in Norfolk, its leaders envisioned a new city of skyscrapers and freeways. Only a backlash by prominent citizens saved most of the city’s unique structure of homes around squares, although some were lost.
It’s tempting to think what Norfolk and other cities would look like if the federal government had given money to renovate old buildings and improve mass transit, as well as for tearing buildings down and building new highways. What if Norfolk had improved its trolley system, and given grants for landlords to repair and renovate their properties?
But that was not to be.
Only after downtown urban renewal was over, would the city began trying to recreate new things in the style of what it had torn down. The new townhouses on Boush Street being built now, for example, mimic the urban homes that once lined Freemason and other streets downtown.
Historically, urban renewal remains a brief, although consequential, period in the history of American cities. By the mid 1960s, urban planners would start to turn against it. Jane Jacobs would startle planners by praising the traditional city street. Scholars would label urban renewal “Negro removal,” because of the thousands of poor, usually black families removed from their homes. In Norfolk in the 1960s, attorney and later judge Joe Jordan denounced urban renewal as racist. In the 1990s, Milwaukee is following the lead of some other cities in trying to tear down some of the highways built during the urban renewal era and rebuild a city of streets, mass transit and walking.
Norfolk was and is unusual in that it started urban renewal early, and has continued it long after it has lost fashion nationally. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city tore down and rebuilt virtually all of Ghent east of Colonial Avenue, moving thousands of black families from their homes. In the present day, the city is clearing a section of East Ocean View, and in the process evicting roughly a thousand families, in an attempt to build a new, more prosperous neighborhood.
For better and for worse, Norfolk continues to believe in the power of the bulldozer.