A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1940-1980 / Edition 1

by David Schuyler

Overview

As was true of many American cities, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, adopted urban renewal programs in the postwar years to revitalize a downtown that was experiencing economic decline. As the commercial and residential infrastructure of the city decayed, people and jobs migrated to the suburbs. Urban renewal was supposed to make the downtown viable again as a site for both businesses and residences. But as David Schuyler shows in A City Transformed, redevelopment in Lancaster resulted in more failures than successes.

Beginning in the 1950s, the Lancaster Redevelopment Authority implemented a comprehensive revitalization program that changed the physical shape of the city. In attempting to solidify the retail functions of the traditional central business district, redevelopment dramatically altered key blocks of the downtown, replacing handsome turn-of-the-century Beaux Arts structures with modernist concrete boxes and a sterile public square. The strategy for eliminating density and blighted buildings resulted in the demolition of whole blocks of dwellings and, perhaps more importantly, destabilized Lancaster's African American community.

A City Transformed is a compelling examination of a northern city struggling with its history and the legacy of segregation. But the redevelopment projects undertaken by the city, however ambitious, could not overcome the suburban growth that continues to sprawl over the countryside or the patterns of residential segregation that define city and suburb. When the Redevelopment Authority ceased operating in 1980, its legacy was a city with a declining economy, high levels of poverty and joblessness, and an increasing concentration of racial and ethnic minorities—a city very much at risk. In important ways what happened in Lancaster was the product of federal policies and national trends. As Schuyler observes, Lancaster's experience is the nation's drama played on a local stage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271022086
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

David Schuyler is Professor of American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He is the author of Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852 (1996) and The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (1986). He serves on the editorial board of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers project and is chair of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Board.

Read an Excerpt

A CITY TRANSFORMED
Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania 1940-1980

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By David Schuyler

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2002 The Pennsylvania State University.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0271022086

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Chapter One

The photograph is haunting: fifteen houses in a row, six with contiguous walls, then a narrow space, two more houses adjoining, another void, the pattern repeating itself as roof lines, windows, and doors cascade down a hillside (Fig. 1). Two young African American children stare at the lens, perhaps a suggestion that the camera or the skin color of the photographer was an unusual sight. An old man in a rocking chair and another standing nearby exhibit less interest. For them, the presence of the photographer and the reporter was hardly noteworthy; over the years city officials had come to inspect and condemn the houses, then departed. Life continued. Friends had moved away, newcomers had arrived; children had been born, old folks died. This was the 700 block of Southeast Avenue, perhaps the most notorious neighborhood in the city, a place that was known locally as Barney Google Row. City directories indicate a high rate of residential transition in the neighborhood. Of the fifteen structures on the block listed in the 1944 directory, the occupants of six had changed from two years earlier. Only four households remained from as recently as 1939, and one of those had moved from one house to another in the row. Despite the demographic change, the buildings, the squalid conditions, the human misery, remained.

    The companion photograph documents another dilapidated frame house, surrounded by discarded furniture and other objects, which was part of a sprawling subcommunity of approximately forty-eight dwellings located on a tract of land owned by the county that formerly had been the city's ash dump. This dwelling, like the vast majority in Shantytown, was constructed by occupants using what one newspaper described as "materials salvaged from the nearby dump, such as old tin, sheet metal, boxes and miscellaneous lumber." Stands of trees cast the buildings in deep shadow, and no humans appear (Fig. 2). This was a wasteland—a forlorn site rendered unsuitable for more traditional urban development by topography and prior use, its buildings little more than shacks rudely fashioned from scraps of discarded material—a desolate landscape, a place devoid of hope.

    These photographs, taken in 1944, could have depicted any of hundreds, perhaps thousands of clusters of substandard housing across the United States. But while the poverty they illustrated was widespread, the locale was specific: the photographs accompanied a newspaper article on housing conditions in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. According to the newspaper account, as part of its effort to anticipate community needs in the aftermath of World War II, the Housing Committee of the Post-War Planning Council reported that fully 85 percent of the housing stock occupied by the city's African American population was "unfit to live in." Sixty percent of the houses were without toilets, 40 percent were without electricity, and 30 percent had no running water. Seventy percent of the Lancaster's minority population were renters, another 20 percent were squatters.

    As if statistics were not disheartening enough, the Housing Committee's report then described some of the worst dwellings. The fifteen dwellings on the 700 block of Southeast Avenue—Barney Google Row—were simple one-story buildings with flat roofs, approximately sixteen feet square. All the houses were of frame construction, though six had been covered with stucco. Some of the structures were divided into two rooms, others three. A tap of cold running water worked in a few of the houses, but there were "no other conveniences of any kind." Privies, located about ten feet from the back doors, stood in dusty yards devoid of grass and other ornamental plantings that were no larger than the houses. Shantytown's makeshift dwellings similarly relied on outdoor toilets, and its 144 residents drew water from a single hydrant. Neither the newspaper account nor the photographs depict interiors of the structures, and the report concluded with the telling observation that "vital facts could not be learned because Negroes who have a roof over their heads are afraid to talk."

    In 1944 Barney Google Row was an unpaved extension of Southeast Avenue that ran diagonally from Juniata Street to Susquehanna Street in the southeast quadrant of the city. A Sanborn insurance map from the same decade reveals that much of the surrounding area, especially to the south and west, was largely undeveloped. A row of modest brick houses fronted on South Duke Street facing an automobile junkyard. Other nearby structures included gasoline stations, an aluminum and brass foundry, and several concrete block buildings. Several hundred yards to the east was Shantytown, located behind two schools that had been erected in the 1920s: Edward Hand Junior High and Washington Elementary. This was a neighborhood in transition, with a concentration of frame dwellings that was rare if not unique in a city dominated by red brick. The process of change would continue, indeed accelerate, in the decades following World War II. Shortly after the demolition of Barney Google Row in 1957, the city began proceedings to extend Southeast Avenue across the site, but the street was not built. Barney Google Row has disappeared, seemingly without a trace, as have the houses that once stood along South Duke Street. All that remains is a grass athletic field with several rows of wooden bleachers, surrounded by a locked chain-link fence. Shantytown too has disappeared, the last of its dwellings also razed in 1957, and there is no record of what happened to its inhabitants. Barney Google Row and Shantytown are telling examples of the kinds of neighborhoods and residents that were excluded from the government-sponsored prosperity of the postwar years. Moreover, although they were by no means the only blighted neighborhoods or even necessarily the worst housing in Lancaster, Barney Google Row and Shantytown epitomized the problem of slum housing—dwellings that were a threat to the health and welfare of residents, the inability of the private sector to address a severe housing shortage, especially for lower-income families, and, because of discrimination, the absence of alternative residential locations for minorities. The demolition of Barney Google Row and Shantytown represented the first step in Lancaster's experiment with urban redevelopment. What happened to residents revealed the larger community's attitude toward race and poverty that would shape the housing options made available to the minority population during the process of renewal.

The origins of Barney Google Row and Shantytown are shrouded in uncertainty. The future site of the 700 block of Southeast Avenue was a farm until the early twentieth century, when it was purchased by Anna and Barney Cohn. Fourteen of the structures along Barney Google Row were probably built in the early 1920s as income-producing properties. Manuscript schedules for the 1920 federal census contain no record of the 700 block of Southeast Avenue, and the earliest real estate transaction mentioning the existence of the buildings was recorded in 1934. However, one newspaper account reported that the houses were built in 1922, and a city directory of 1929 lists the occupants of houses along the block. While the precise date of construction has proven elusive, this much is certain: Barney Google Row was substandard housing constructed in response to the acute shortage of dwelling units that existed during and after World War I and to the tremendous demographic increase taking place in the southeast quadrant of the city. This area's population, 9,541 in 1920, had swelled to 11,042 ten years later, a 16 percent increase. According to the city's 1945 comprehensive plan, prepared by Michael Baker and associates of Rochester, Pennsylvania, most of the population growth in the Seventh Ward was the result of new construction on largely undeveloped land south of the older city. Shantytown probably began as a squatter community during World War II, when large numbers of new residents moved to Lancaster seeking industrial work at a time when the housing market was already strained. The findings of an investigation of Shantytown, undertaken as part of the Baker plan, are surely applicable to Barney Google Row as well: "Inquiry reveals that the occupants were forced into these conditions because of the lack of adequate housing accommodations in the city."

    The earliest residents of Barney Google Row were probably poor whites. Barney Google was the subject of a Billy DeBeck-King Features comic strip, begun in 1919, and the title of a popular song written by Billy Rose and Con Conrad in 1923. To a later generation of readers he appeared less regularly as the citified cousin of Snuffy Smith, the archetypal hillbilly and engaging ne'er-do-well. The designation "Barney Google Row" may have functioned as a humorous, denigrating, or dismissive characterization of the residents in terms of a comic strip character who came from a poor rural area, spoke a catchy vernacular slang, and was unprepared for the new circumstances of life in a city. Whatever the intent, the association of residents of the row with Barney Google had an important consequence: it enabled public officials, the press, and citizens to depersonalize the issue of substandard housing, to think in terms of stereotypes rather than of human beings.

    If the association with Barney Google suggests that early residents were poor whites, by the late 1920s the racial composition of the row had begun to change. In 1929 several African Americans were listed as residents in the city directory, and by the early 1930s, when Leroy Hopkins Sr. lived briefly in a house on Barney Google Row, the transition from poor white to poor black was almost complete: only two or three white families remained. The African American residents of Barney Google Row fit the comic stereotype in one sense. Many, like Hopkins, had migrated to Lancaster city from rural areas of the county. Hopkins had been born in Fulton Township but grew up in Quarryville. At the age of twenty, in 1928 or 1929, he moved to the city of Lancaster. Other early residents of the row migrated there from Conestoga Center, about eight miles south of the city, which had been home to a small African American community at least since the 1880s. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in rural parts of Lancaster County during the 1920s undoubtedly influenced the decision to migrate. The social "push" impelling black migrants was greater than the economic "pull" of jobs, because most of Lancaster's major industries remained segregated until after World War II. For newcomers, the principal available jobs were as domestics and menial laborers. Shantytown's initial residents may also have been predominantly white; the Baker plan reported that recent migrants to the city were largely whites drawn from rural areas. If that were the case, by mid-century the racial composition of the neighborhood had shifted. Health officer Benjamin F. Charles reported in February 1950 that of the adult residents of Shantytown, twenty-nine were white and forty-four were African American, while there were twenty-two white and twenty-seven African American children.

    Throughout much of their history, Barney Google Row and Shantytown were tolerated because of the intense demand for housing. By the mid-1930s federal officials had established minimum standards for housing; in 1936 the Works Progress Administration analysis of real property in Lancaster defined an adequate dwelling as one that provided "at least one bathing unit; an inside flush toilet; a central steam, hot water or warm air heating system; electric lighting; and electricity or gas for cooking purposes." Although both Barney Google Row and Shantytown obviously failed to meet these criteria, the dwellings were a haven for the poor, whites and minorities alike, who had few alternatives in a very constricted housing market.

    As federal and local leaders began planning the transition from war to peace in the early 1940s, housing finally became an important component of national policy. Earlier involvement in housing by the federal government had been limited to the emergency housing undertaken as part of the war effort in 1917-18, which was quickly privatized in peacetime, and to the New Deal Greenbelt communities, which were undertaken on such a small scale that the results were negligible. The Housing Division of the Public Works Administration (PWA) built several experimental apartment projects in the 1930s, including the Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia, designed by Oskar Stonorov and Alfred Kastner, and the Harlem River Houses, which were erected by the PWA following plans prepared by a team of architects headed by A. M. Brown. But the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), established in 1934 under the first National Housing Act, largely limited its efforts to the restructuring of the mortgage industry, while the Wagner Housing Act of 1937, which authorized a public housing program, was deeply flawed in its imposition of cost limitations per unit on new construction, its linking of slum clearance with public housing, and the income limits it established for tenants. An increasingly powerful conservative opposition in Congress severely limited the number of dwelling units the U.S. Housing Authority could build and effectively ended the public housing program in 1942.

    By 1944, however, after fifteen years of depression and war, the shortage of decent housing clearly demonstrated the need for national planning and action. The 1944 Housing Committee study in Lancaster, which highlighted the inadequacies of Barney Google Row and Shantytown, was the product of this postwar planning effort. The following year Michael Baker, who prepared the city's new comprehensive plan, also lamented the persistence of blight in residential areas of Lancaster, particularly in the southeast quadrant, and pointed to federal and state legislation then being considered that would enable the city's leaders to undertake an aggressive program to eliminate blight. Indeed, the Baker plan warned, a continuation of "laissez-faire policy will assure that the new homes will be built in the urban fringe and will leave the over-age, congested, unhealthy, hazardous residential sections of Lancaster for further decay." Urban redevelopment became possible with federal financing upon enactment of the U.S. Housing Act of 1949, which incorporated many of the provisions of the Wagner Act and established the goal of "a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family." Title I of the act established federal urban redevelopment policies and committed funding to enable municipal authorities to acquire and clear blighted or slum areas as a first step in the revitalization of the nation's cities.

    Lancaster launched its war on slums at the beginning of 1950. At the request of City Council, the Board of Health undertook a survey of substandard housing that identified 178 buildings in need of significant repairs. Dr. Horace K. Hogg, executive secretary of the Board of Health, announced that the city was beginning to compile minimum standards of living as the basis for a housing code, and he pointed to Baltimore's widely regarded Waverly project, a code enforcement program, as a model of what Lancaster could accomplish in improving the condition of its housing. In April 1951 health officer B. F. Charles presented a set of criteria to be used as a "yardstick" in the slum eradication program—basic standards such as roof, spouting, exterior walls, porches, and sidewalks in good repair; well-fitted doors and windows; and serviceable sink and toilet. Despite the efforts of health officials, the city did not formally adopt a comprehensive housing code until February 16, 1960, as part of its federally mandated Workable Program for urban renewal. The absence of a housing code during the 1950s was a telling indicator of the lack of a modern administrative structure in the city: Lancaster's leaders had not yet adopted national standards for housing, and the city's planning commission did not have the professional expertise to prepare such a code. In subsequent years critics of renewal would place blame on "experts" from other places who did not understand how Lancaster worked, but in the 1950s it was clear that the lack of professional expertise affected the city's ability to eliminate substandard dwellings.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A CITY TRANSFORMED by David Schuyler. Copyright © 2002 by The Pennsylvania State University. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: The Discovery of Urban Blight

1. The Postwar Housing Crisis

2. The Problem with Downtown

Part II: Planning a New Downtown

3. Best-Laid Plans

4. A New Heart for Lancaster

Part III: Race, Housing, and Renewal

5. Race and Residential Renewal: The Adams-Musser Towns Projects

6. Church-Musser: Race and the Limits of Housing Renewal

Part IV: Consequences

7. Sunnyside: The Persisting Failure of Planning and Renewal

8. Legacy: A Historic City in the Suburban Age

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

In A City Transformed David Schuyler offers a body of new information on the effects of urban redevelopment on a small city. The Lancaster story is important in that it mirrors the frustrated efforts of so many other cities faced with the debilitating effects of economic decline. In the end we see how such cities fumbled the ball, sacrificing so much and getting so little in return.”

—Christopher Silver, University of Illinois


“Schuyler is intimately acquainted with the community, and the quality of his narrative rests upon his unrelenting scrutiny as to how Lancastrians wrangled over renewal and race. He is an omniscient observer, acutely aware of the nuances of local political culture and fluent in the argot of design, redevelopment, and the whims of architectural clients. . . . Amidst a raft of books on urban redevelopment, few are as shrewd and impassioned as this sad, familiar tale of a townscape lost.”

—Joel Schwartz, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography


“This well-focused case study surveys how the political leadership of one city went about using, and fighting, various federal programs for replacing substandard housing, from the Depression to the suburban age.”

—I. Cohen, CHOICE


“A City Transformed provides a valuable complement to recent studies of comparable struggles over urban renewal in larger cities such as Minneapolis-St.Paul and Detroit.”

—W. Edward Orser, History: Reviews of New Books


“Schuyler details the travails of trying to revive a downtown in the age of the shopping mall, clearly describing the process and basic features. This case study will be more useful to more advanced students and professionals interested in comparative studies.”

—I. Cohen, CHOICE


“A City Transformed would make an excellent reading in a course on planning history or urban studies. Policy makers would also benefit from reading the book.”

—Tom Daniels, Professor, Journal of Planning Education and Research


“But these comments should not gainsay respect for an admirable account about a city that struggled against colossal metropolitan trends. Amidst a raft of books on urban redevelopment, few are as shrewd and impassioned as this sad, familiar tale of a townscape lost.”

—Joel Schwartz, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography


“David Schulyler’s history of urban renewal in the age of suburbia is a well-researched and well-told story of how American city governments often applied misguided strategies with disastrous results. Anyone who wishes to study the mutually reinforcing dynamics of suburbanization and urban decline should read this excellent study of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

—David R. Contosta, Journal of American History


“A City Transformed is an important, if depressing book. This study, carefully argued and closely researched through newspapers, planning reports, and government documents, tells a convincing story of the results of urban redevelopment in a small Mid-Atlantic city.”

—Gabrielle M. Lanier, Winterthur Portfolio

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