If our so-called national conversation had any health in it, liberals and conservatives would be fighting to claim Jane Jacobs. Here's what she offers conservatives: She takes down the Utopians, those would-be directors of others' lives who, handing down their great plans from above, manage to be aloof and superior, yet meddling and bureaucratic. But she doesn't go after their philosophies; she simply assesses their works, the swaths of cities rendered dangerous and barely inhabited by slum clearance and urban renewal.
The modern movement for "improving" cities by tearing down old buildings took off in 1854, when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's minister Georges-Eugène Haussmann began to tear down much of old Paris in order to lay out boulevards and parks and erect new uniform buildings.
Large-scale slum clearance projects began in the United States after 1932, when the federal government created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in response to the Depression. In fact, the RFC board member who first proposed federally funded slum clearance was Arkansas' own Harvey Couch.
The real devastation of American cities by slum clearance began with the Housing Act of 1949, which made available $1 billion in loans to allow cities to acquire and raze "blighted" areas with the aim of developing public housing or amenities such as parks; the program came to be called urban renewal.
The second great blow to American cities came with the creation of the interstate highway system in 1956. I would love to know the ratio of inner-city acreage lost to eminent domain for interstate highways against acreage lost to urban renewal. The lost areas are often adjacent, so that the harm of one great federal planning project is intensified by that of another.
In 1961, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came out against federal funding for urban renewal. According to a story in the Arkansas Gazette (April 28, 1961), the Little Rock Housing Authority "went calling" on the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce and persuaded it to take a stand in favor of continued federal funding.
By that time, Little Rock was, according to the Gazette, "a national leader in the urban renewal field, with eight projects totaling $47 million and covering 4.5 square miles and two more pending final approval."
Faced with the U.S. Chamber's objection (rather conservative) against federal intervention in city matters via urban renewal, Dowell Naylor Jr. of the Little Rock Housing Authority replied that federal intervention was "nonexistent," claiming that "by all definitions, urban renewal is a local program, administered by local agencies, and subject to local control." In other words, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
During the same year, someone photographed West Ninth Street from Broadway to Cross Street. West Ninth Street was the heart of Little Rock's Black business district. It was completely taken out from Chester to Cross Street to make way for Interstate 630, and almost everything in the West Ninth Street corridor shriveled and died. The Butler Center presents the photographs in a digital tour called Lost West Ninth Street. https://robertslibrary.org/lost-west-ninth-street/
The series of photographs presents a proper city neighborhood, the real thing. The houses appear to have been built between 1880 and 1920. I'd call most of them simple Victorian vernacular. Most are wood, a little run down, narrow and long, one-story, with front-facing gables and a porch close to the street. They are similar enough for visual coherence but there is organic variety.
They are close enough together that you could easily call out to your neighbor on either side. They don't offer the privacy modern suburbanites claim to crave, but wouldn't you rather have your neighbor keeping an eye on you than, say, someone in the welfare bureaucracy? (Or, more likely these days, an algorithm?)
There are people on the porches and businesses scattered about. To get a sense of the place in its heyday, I took a walk down West Ninth with the 1920 City Directory, which notes the names of some householders and proprietors with a (c) for "colored." On the first block west of Main, there are three white physicians, a white barber, three Black households, and two white households. On the third block west of Main, S.J. Spitzberg appears, the last white grocer for a while.
The fourth block is entirely Black households and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. West of Broadway for seven blocks to Cross Street, almost every residence or establishment is marked with a (c).
The directory lists at least five physicians, two drug stores, two undertakers, two dentists, a plumber, a lawyer, a jeweler, a tailor, a taxi, a shining parlor, a beauty parlor, clothes cleaners, a hospital, and several insurance entities and fraternal halls (the Mosaic Templars fraternal organization and insurance concern was national in scope). Jas Kindle and Coleman Lavender were shoemakers. Frank Dinwiddie was a photographer. At the southeast corner of State Street stood the First Congregational Church. Rare survivor Taborian Hall still stands today.
Louis More, J.I. Blakely, and E.L. Edwards sold groceries. N.G. Slagle was the lone white grocer from the 300 block to the 900 block. Louis More (again) had a restaurant, as did E.J. Lucas. Another was called Jones & Mitchell.
In the 900 block of West Ninth Street, white residents and businesses appear again (such as Flora Akins restaurant and Leon Spitzberg, grocer) and at Cross Street, West Ninth becomes mostly white again.
In 1920 on West Ninth Street, there was life. And in the photos from 1961, it's still there, the kind of neighborhood Jane Jacobs lived in, studied, and approved of.
And then came the federally funded wrecking ball. I'm not afraid to walk down West Ninth Street today; it's just that, with no houses and few shops, and with a view of the interstate, there's just not much reason to.