In the 1920s and 30s it cost something to maintain one’s posture as a believer in civil rights. Radicals were personally involved in and were dunned incessantly in campaigns for strikes in the South, sharecroppers’ relief, and the defense of …
Are workers becoming “middle class”? Is Fortune correct in describing workers as a “salariat” rather than a “proletariat”? A belief is spreading among social scientists and unionists that in their middle age unions are becoming middle class. But an evaluation …
THE FUTILITARIAN SOCIETY, by Wiliam J. Newman. George Braziller. 1961. William J. Newman’s theme can be expressed in a loose syllogism: America’s problems call for change and innovation. But conservatives are “stasis seekers.” Therefore conservative ideas are a “menace” to …
The absence of esthetic gratification—an outstanding characteristic of the architecture of our cities—has definite effects on the community as well as on individuals. The main effects become apparent through a multitude of symptoms, ambiguous enough to be seldom traced and …
I had no desire to get to Jerusalem, no expectation of living in Athens, little interest in Rome. I was eighteen. What did I know then about Paris? My whole aim was to live in New York—where I have lived …
The most striking fact about New York in the last decade is the realty boom. Wherever one goes—in the heart of old Manhattan or the farther outskirts of the Bronx and Staten Island—construction is seen. Craters yawn in what were …
By June 30, 1960, the New York City Housing Authority had become the country’s largest landlord, housing some 567,000 lower-class tenants in 109 projects. Anyone who has visited some of these projects, however, knows that the problem of slums in …
On the tombstone of our race, a famous writer has told us, there will some day be carved the single chilling remembrance: They copulated and read the newspapers. He didn’t go far enough, that writer. Our epitaph is actually going …
The Housing and Redevelopment Board has replaced Robert Moses’s Slum Clearance Committee, and a new order has been proclaimed for the on-going work of tucking in New York’s residential shirt tails. Robert Moses, who now deals only with sovereign nations, …
In Edward Albee’s two-character play, The Zoo Story, the publisher asks the young man who accosts him in Central Park if he lives in the Village. The boy, who eventually forces the publisher to kill him in a desperate attempt …
The giant city of today lives by a miracle: it survives contradictions of policy and endless administrative improvisations. But if its life is miraculous, then its decline, even its terminal illness, is not at all impossible. And in the pathology …
I first went down to Brooklyn to see the gang on a bone cold February afternoon this year. They were waiting for Bruce Davidson and me in a candy store about a half mile from their turf, a parlor they …
In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer argues that the distinguishing characteristic of man is his symbolizing activity. While the animal responds to signs and finds satisfaction in the manipulation and incorporation of physical objects, man also needs, and …
In New York City Robert Moses is the most prominent exponent of the credo that the end justifies the means; that he, “the great doer” always knows best; that the public should shut up, or in any event not be …
“Me kill Daddy-Wong-Wegs!” An idle conversation had lapsed comfortably into silence. Jessica was sitting in a state of summer-afternoon vacancy when the child’s voice and the mother’s quick reply aroused her. “Oh, no, darling, I wouldn’t do that.” The expressive …
