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Like every affordable housing lottery today, the Harlem River Houses were instantly popular—11,000 applicants vied for 577 units. Some were lured by the amenities, including “playgrounds and wading pools,” along with a “nursery school, health clinic, library, and social rooms.”

However, the main draw was surely the rent. As Bloom points out in Affordable Housing in New York, “generous federal subsidies, which absorbed 45 percent of the construction costs, yielded apartments renting at an average of $7 per room per month ($1,200 in 2013 dollars for a five-room unit).” An extensive screening process and restrictive covenants (no lodgers, for example) meant that those accepted into the Harlem River Houses were economically more stable than many in Harlem. The median annual income for a black family in New York at the time was $837; for residents of the Harlem River Houses, it was $1,312. These were public housing projects, but were they truly serving the public?

Over the next two decades, numerous other projects—sponsored both by NYCHA and private developers—were built in Harlem, including the East River Houses (1939-41), James Weldon Johnson Houses (1942-48), Riverton Houses (1944-48), Jefferson Houses (1950-59), General Grant Houses (1952-57), Morningside Gardens (1952-58), Manhattanville Houses (1954-61), and Franklin Plaza (1954-62). Together, these buildings contained over 11,000 units of housing for Harlem’s low- and middle-income residents. However, restrictions placed on federal housing funds meant that with each successive iteration, public housing was more generic and less well constructed, while at the same time becoming more densely populated.

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For example, the General Grant Houses, completed in 1957, featured 21-story towers, the biggest NYCHA had ever constructed. With the car-loving Robert Moses in charge of a wide swath of city agencies by this point, including the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, it’s not surprising that one of the features was ample off-street parking. Today, about 16 to 25 percent of Harlem households have cars; that number certainly can’t have been larger then. Were the parking spaces supposed to be aspirational—or were Moses and NYCHA that out of touch?

Meanwhile, the housing stock in the rest of Harlem continued to age poorly. As Kenneth B. Clark points out in his controversial 1965 study Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, Harlem housed “232,792 people within its three and one half square miles,” a population density of “100 people per acre.” He goes on to note that:

The condition of all but the newest buildings is poor. Eleven percent are classified as dilapidated by the 1960 census; that is, they do “not provide safe and adequate shelter,” and thirty-three percent are deteriorating (i.e., “need more repair than would be provided in the course of regular maintenance”). There are more people in fewer rooms than elsewhere in the city. Yet the rents and profits from Harlem are often high, as many landlords deliberately crowd more people into buildings in slum areas, knowing that the poor have few alternatives…. Cruel in the extreme is the landlord who, like the store owner who charges Negroes more for shoddy merchandise, exploits the powerlessness of the poor.

When Clark wrote this, nearly three decades had passed since the 1935 riots that sparked the building of the Harlem River Houses. Nearly one-fifth of Harlem’s population had moved into public housing in the intervening years. Yet overall economic and housing conditions had barely changed. Throughout the Depression and World War II, discontent simmered in Harlem, occasionally rising to the surface, as it did in August 1943 in the two days of riots that inspired the culminating scenes in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

While writing that novel, in 1948, Ellison penned an essay, “Harlem Is Nowhere.” It was published by Harper’s in August 1964—immediately following another week-long bloody conflict in Harlem that July. In the essay, Ellison writes that:

Harlem is a ruin—many of its ordinary aspects (its crimes, its casual violence, its crumbling buildings with littered areaways, ill-smelling halls, and vermin-invaded rooms) are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams and, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with hidden and threatening significance.

By 1965, did Harlem need a much more radical solution than what NYCHA could provide?

When the riots broke out in Harlem in 1964—the result of a police officer shooting and killing an unarmed black teenager—Jordan “hurried to the scene and spent the night ‘running on the streets of Harlem,’ administering first aid, and ‘trying to avoid being killed’ in the ‘unbelievable, horrifying siege.’” As Daniel Matlin reports in “‘A New Reality of Harlem’: Imagining the African American Urban Future during the 1960s,” it was the “agony of that moment” that spurred Jordan, as she later recalled, “into a collaborative architectural redesign of Harlem, as my initial, deliberated move away from the hateful, the divisive.” Jordan’s interest in architecture had led her to the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, who was famous for championing not only the geodesic dome but also the even-more-futuristic Dymaxion House. Jordan wrote to propose a collaboration.

In the essay “Place, Emotion, and Environmental Justice in Harlem: June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s 1965 ‘Architextual’ Collaboration,” Cheryl Fish points out that when Jordan corresponded with Fuller, she made certain to emphasize that their plan must embrace “radical reconstruction rather than mere improvement into the middle-class physical chaos prized by the rest of the city.”

That plan, as detailed in Esquire, was certainly radical. As Jordan herself writes:

Harlem is life dying inside a closet, an excrescence beginning where a green park ends, a self-perpetuating disintegration of walls, ceilings, doorways, lives…. Redevelopment generally means the removal of slum residents while land is cleared for new buildings and new purposes. In fact, “redevelopment” is frequently a pretext for the permanent expulsion of Negro populations. Fuller’s design permits all residents to remain on site while new and vastly improved dwelling facilities rise directly over the old. No one will move anywhere but up.

The idea was that Fuller’s fireproof, cylindrical towers would be flown in via helicopter and assembled over the top of the preexisting landscape. Once these 15 “abstract, stylized Christmas trees” were completed—with room for 500,000 people—the older Harlem below them would be razed to be replaced by green space.

The towers themselves—“great wheels of life”—would be encircled by a “parking system of ramps that never cross.” Each apartment would be 1,200 square feet (not including the balcony or the private parking space outside each unit’s door), but the towers would also include “shops, supermarkets, game rooms and workshops on every deck….”

Courtesy Columbia University GSAPP

In place of sidewalks, the towers would be connected by “wide walkways entirely separate from the cloverleaf ribbonry that will divide the high-speed through traffic from local traffic.” Meanwhile, that high-speed vehicular traffic would be “separately routed over an arterial system similar to that of the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey…. Now it becomes possible to travel from the Triborough nonstop over Manhattan Island and onto a newly created Riverspan Bridge at 125th Street into New Jersey.”

Robert Moses had nothing to do with “Skyrise for Harlem,” but those familiar with his work—in particular, the ill-fated LOMEX expressway downtown, which was still on the drawing board in 1965—will see the influence of his type of urban thinking. Jordan and Fuller’s plans claim to save Harlem, but it is hard not to see their “radical reconstruction” as anything other than annihilation. Although Jordan was wary of the “expulsion” of people, she had no qualms about destroying the architectural remnants of the old neighborhood. As Fuller would later comment, the project would both accommodate those who already lived in Harlem and “an equal number who would ‘come from the rest of the world’ because ‘it would be such a wonderful place.’ Harlem would be ‘inviting to all races and all colors, so that there would be spontaneous integration occurring.’”

Take, for example, the ARCH proposal for the East Harlem Triangle redevelopment. As Matlin notes, “In 1961, the City’s Planning Commission had declared this mixed-use area blighted and unsuitable for housing, and specified that it should be rebuilt exclusively for industrial and commercial uses. Mid-decade estimates put the area’s population at 4,500 residents, 70 percent of them African American, 20 percent Puerto Rican, and 10 percent white.” The city’s plan was to turn the area—the triangle bounded by Madison Avenue, 125th Street, and the Harlem River—into an industrial zone. Pushback from the newly formed Community Association of the East Harlem Triangle (CAEHT) convinced the city to consider alternate proposals. Working with CAEHT, the planners at ARCH, led by its director, African-American architect J. Max Bond Jr., produced a plan that would not only radically transform the East Harlem Triangle, but would create a “distinctively black and democratic urban space.”

As opposed to “Skyrise for Harlem,” the East Harlem Triangle plan advocated the preservation of newer townhouses and tenements, while new construction would preserve “positive features of the present living patterns.” Like Jacobs, Bond and his ARCH team saw the street as the central commons of the community, and the plan’s drawings reflected that. On a reconfigured 125th Street, most of the traffic is eliminated in favor of wide sidewalks and tree-lined medians with bench seating. Typical examples from the urban planning wishlist are present, like a dedicated lane for bus traffic, while very specific symbols of Harlem abound: the bus boasts an ad for Muhammad Speaks, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam. A man in a dashiki stands in the median, while a woman on the sidewalk raises a black power salute.

Unlike the “spontaneous integration” Fuller envisioned for Harlem, this was architecture and urban planning as a specific embodiment of black pride. Jane Jacobs always saw the “slum” as a place where “advancement and self-diversification in a population” would ultimately lead to “unslumming.” Certainly, the ARCH plans were dedicated to the advancement of a black middle class in Harlem; however, as Goldstein points out, Jacobs’s nebulous idea of “self-diversification” can be interpreted as requiring “desegregation as a prerequisite for ‘unslumming.’” The ARCH plan envisioned no such desegregation, but instead “proposed the radical idea that Harlem did not need class transformation, whether from within or without, to succeed as a community but could flourish by housing and serving its existing residents.”

What began as a trickle of black families soon became a larger number of whites. In theNew York Times in 2016, Michael Henry Adams wrote of the “End of Black Harlem,” noting that while wealth and not race may be a primary factor in gentrification, that’s a “distinction without a difference.”

Unfortunately, this is often the price of attempting to maintain the sort of streetscape favored by Jane Jacobs. Where she was trying to “unslum” neighborhoods to create cohesive, working-class communities with the schools, churches, corner stores, and stoop-sitting she saw as crucial to an area’s lifeblood, the gentrifiers turn old schools into housing, replace corner stores with Whole Foods, and do their people-watching at Starbucks. A bodega is not ethically superior to a Whole Foods, but as Adams points out, for “so many privileged New Yorkers… Whole Foods is just the corner store. But among the black and working-class residents of Harlem, who have withstood red-lining and neglect, it might as well be Fortnum and Mason. To us, our Harlem is being remade, upgraded and transformed, just for them, for wealthier white people.”

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Would things be better if Jordan and Fuller had been given the opportunity to fly in 15 gargantuan towers and drop them down on Harlem? Common sense says no, but looking at the success of large-scale planned urban communities, like Battery Park City, should at least make one pause to consider the possibility.

Residents of Battery Park City liken their neighborhood—large residential towers knitted together by a ribbon of parkland with a self-contained ecosystem of shops and entertainment—to living in a kind of urban village. Could “Skyrise for Harlem” have ever achieved the same success?

In Affordable Housing in New York, one resident of Rockefeller’s Dunbar Apartments told an interviewer: “The design of the building is phenomenal. We live in a two bedroom that has light, exposure on all sides.” Another concurs: “this building has far more of a hold on people than your average apartment building… The greatest thing is that you do know your neighbors and you do stop to chat in the courtyard.”

With the designs in “Skyrise for Harlem” emphasizing light-filled apartments, communal spaces within the towers, and green grass in place of Ralph Ellison’s “crumbling buildings with littered areaways,” could Jordan and Fuller’s mega-project truly have created a New Harlem that held onto the area’s unique sense of place?

On November 30, 2017, the City Council approved a new East Harlem Rezoning. The plan covers everything from affordable housing (including 3,500 units of new housing, “a substantial proportion of which” are supposed to be affordable), 122,000 square feet of retail and restaurants, and 275,000 square feet of office and industrial space. Using such preferred zoning techniques as Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, the proposal shifts much of the burden of development onto the private sector, while controlling for open space, building heights, and providing “incentives for the creation of visual and performing arts space and enhance the area’s role as a major arts, entertainment and cultural destination.”

The Harlem that emerges from this zoning resolution over the next two decades is anyone’s guess. Will this blueprint serve to help preserve Harlem’s vital ethnic and cultural mix? Or will it become just another enclave filled with faceless housing and retail corridors of CVS, Target, and Home Depot? And, from an architectural point of view, will there be any unifying program or just a hodgepodge of unregulated and incoherent styles?

At the conclusion of “Instant Slum Clearance,” Jordan writes that there is “no evading architecture, no meaningful denial of our position.” Architecture has the power to “protect” and “illuminate” the human condition, but only if we refuse to build “merely in spasmodic response to past and present crises, for then crisis, like the poor, will be with us always. If man is to have not only a future but a destiny, it must consciously and deliberately be designed.”

Editor: Sara Polsky