“The menace of the slums” was   “a matter of far-reaching public concern.” This civil court case in 1936 allowed for the WPA and NYCHA to use eminent domain to forever change the urban landscape of the city.

I was surprised to read in the Radford article about the history of Harlem. The article stated that Harlem was originally conceived as an area for the rich. Far enough away from City Hall (8 miles) yet close enough to be located on Manhattan Island. Wealthy investors who saw the opportunity invested in building the area up. Parks, an opera house, and luxury buildings were created to attract the rich. However, the rich were not willing to go that far. They were not willing to drive in horse and carriage eight miles to the north of the city. However, African Americans with the assistance of the new IRT train line could get to Harlem relatively easily, and that is exactly where they went. They moved in great numbers to Harlem, because white landlords had to rent their apartments to someone. So they rented them to African Americans.

What occurred with the population of Harlem is very different then what occurred with the population of other minority groups in the city. Unlike the Chinese, the Jews, and the Italians, African Americans were given some say to which neighborhood they wanted to live in. Before Harlem was opened to them, they predominately lived in Midtown. However, once Harlem became available, they moved there in great numbers. It could have been a result of African Americans looking to establish their own area like the other groups have done, or maybe they saw that these Harlem apartments were better constructed areas in the city then were the slums of the Lower East Side.

Harlem was not a slum, so the question to be asked is why the Harlem River Project was ever constructed. It was a combination of a few factors. First jobs needed to be created by the WPA. Countless schools, government offices, and building projects were built during this time in America. The WPA channeled money to the city, but the money was hard to get. Langdon Post had a difficult time channeling money into these projects, until one of them succeeded, and the First Houses was a great success. The second reason why Harlem got these projects was because of the Harlem Riots discussed in the previous week, by both Greenberg and Locke. The riots did not occur because African Americans necessarily wanted better housing. But housing was seen as a great solution to calm down the activists in Harlem, and to show African Americans that whites carried about their wellbeing. The Third reason why the projects were constructed was because as stated in the Marcuse article Whites wanted to keep Blacks from applying to projects in Williamsburg.

However, the interesting thing about these projects, and most of the projects that I gathered from the readings was that the projects were not constructed for the poorest of the poor, like today’s section 8 housing program still run by the NYCHA. However, these apartments, especially the ones in Williamsburg were constructed for middle-income households. So in fact the city was not helping the poor, but trying to gentrify the area. They were trying to gentrify the areas by taking slums over through eminent domain, and creating these large complexes. They hoped that agreeable citizens would move in, and that these citizens would provide a white balance to the environment. That is what happened, middle class families moved into these buildings, yet the poor, still lived in the slums, and city still remained segregated. The Harlem houses were a great idea, and so were the houses of the Williamsburg. But the combined 2,000 units they provided was nothing close to the amount of housing the areas really needed. Today, the city provides 187,000 apartments to New York City residents. Still only a quarter of a percent, but much more then in the 1930’s.

What was being done in Harlem and in Williamsburg was nothing short of a distraction. The only real benefit of these housing projects was that they created jobs. They created good publicity for people like Rockefeller and Astor, and made the city seem like they cared as well.

 

 

http://www.gsapp.org/Archive/HP/2005-2006/history/img/history09.jpg

 

The video is explicit but it shows today's projects.