Summary Comments: Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9: INVENTING DICK LEE

I love that story about "snow tickets" (end of Chapter 8), which introduces the subject of Chapter 9, Dick Lee. It harkens back to a more "urbanist" time in New Haven. We'll see later (Chap. 10) how Dick Lee's tenure as mayor will in many ways belie that urbanist experience.

Opens by underscoring the importance of Dick Lee's (partial) Irish heritage and Irish patronage. "Dick Lee was deeply grounded in ward politics and chose, for obvious reasons, to stress his Irish blood at the expense of the Scottish and English plasmas with which he was in fact diluted. He never for an instant imagined himself giving up his lace-curtain Irish identity or his place in the city's street corner urbanism."

1. He was also nutured by the DTC (Democratic Town Committee).

Then there was the rivalry between Italian politicians recruited by the Republican party and the Democratic Irish.

Italian-American mayor, Celentano (1945-53), was very much in the mold of Frank Rice -- focusing on providing government services well. Nicely state, see middle p. 295. Because he was so focused on the small scale, he did not see that so much was changing around the city.

One of those changes being traffic congestion on New Haven streets, with average speeds around 5mph. Parking was also strangling the downtown area. Trolleys were losing out to the automobile (but there were other factors at play in the demise of the trolleys nationwide -- a conspiracy to dismantle them led by GM). (see p. 296)

Suburban development picking up. School populations declining.

Add insult to injury, HOLC had declared most New Haven residential areas a bad mortgage risk; favored the suburbs.

Above changes announce the "end of urbanism." (see middle, p. 298)
Ethnic mayors, like Celentano, continued to be "detail men" - attending to city services even as the city as a whole was undergoing significant change.

Rae then notes Lee's strong reaction to visiting a slum when he was campaigning. This is the beginning of what will become his consuming interest in URBAN RENEWAL. "Slum clearance and redevelopment quickly became Lee's passion,..." (p. 304) A problem was the "top-down" approach of the Federal government: do something TO or FOR city neighborhoods, but not WITH them. Also believed in "environmental determinism," that "good buildings make good neighborhoods," when in reality it is more "good neighborhoods make good buildings." (p. 305) And Rae goes on to give a glimpse of the heavy hand of urban renewal which clearly undermined urbanism.

Lee believed current city government was incapable of making the needed changes.
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That's all for now. I'll post summary comments on Chapter 10 early next week.