William Whyte : Ensuring That Cities Give People a ‘Place for Dreams’

William H. Whyte enjoys stories in which the accidents of fortune win out over the deliberation of planning. He recalls the time when the buildings of an industrial office park were finished and inhabited before connecting sidewalks could be laid. “Wait,” he recollects the architect saying. “Hold back a few months and see where people walk. That’s where you put the sidewalks.”

At the age of 76, Whyte is an elder statesman of urban design who still cultivates the outlook of a rebel. “Street Corner Society,” first published in 1943, is still widely read in college sociology courses. Whyte was one of the first American thinkers to suggest that the modern American city was not some monument to be plotted, paved and puffed up to expectations, but was something that had already taken shape--out of a gorgeous conglomeration of different peoples, passions and dreams. “What the city has to do--still more important than ever, I think--is to give people a place for dreams.”

He was born in Springfield, Mass., and educated at Swarthmore, Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he became a professor of sociology. Some of his more than 14 books appear to be technical tomes--”Human Relations in the Restaurant Industry” (1948), or “Higher Yielding Human Systems for Agriculture” (1984)--that attracted a reputation outside their industries and disciplines because of Whyte’s wit and insights. The largest part of his academic career was spent at Cornell, where he taught industrial relations, applied anthropology and social science.

“City: Rediscovering the Center” (1989), out in paperback, represents the conclusions he and 10 years of students developed by observing the way people conduct themselves on the streets of Manhattan. The sociology is footnoted; but Whyte’s enthusiasm and affection for urban peoples is what stands out.

Today, Whyte commutes daily to his mid-town Manhattan office, overlooking Central Park. It is not the post-card view; water-towers, scarred gravel roofs, alleys and fire-escapes fill most of his window, but you sense these features captivate Whyte more than the rolling green plain of the park that lends a sense of peace to the city. “I like to see the guts of a city working,” says Whyte with a gesture to the view. He offers visitors a cup of coffee, then sets out on a 15-minute voyage that involves rinsing, heating, brewing, pouring and maneuvering through hallways and storerooms in his office building, to return with a single, graciously presented cup. “Dr. Whyte,” says a secretary in an office across the hall, “loves going off on one of his adventures.”

Question: You say that there seems to be a holy war going on against the streets in our major cities, and the miscreants are not necessarily muggers and scoundrels, but often urban planners.

Answer: Exactly, exactly. They are doing all sorts of things for the streets--except strengthening them. They are putting the streets up in sky-bridges. They are putting streets in underground concourses. What they are not doing is strengthening the good, old streets as we know them. The street, I figure, is the river of life of the city. You stick it underground, you put it up in the air, and you have diluted your constituency. It deadens the city.

Q: Doesn’t that come in response to the fact that urban planners and architects and retailers and hotel owners concluded that people were frightened by a lot of what was going on in the streets?

A: Yes. A man put it very well to me. I had been jumping on him, saying, “Why are you pushing these off-street streets, and also the megastructures,” and he said, “OK, they are somewhat anti-urban. But we will never lure people, middle class, back to the city unless we offer them security from the city.” That’s the reason for these huge megastructures that look like fortresses . . . .

Like in Detroit, the Renaissance Center . . . for example, they have that great big berm--sort of a long hill--which actually contains their air conditioning. It is part of what is meant to be an invitation to come in and be safe from Detroit. I think that some of us have thought, “That’s a hell of a way to sell the center of the city.” It’s defensive, it’s apologetic. Heavens, the way you get people back into the town is to say, “Hey! We have something here that you will like.”

Q: Why does it seem that so much of what has been designed to revitalize the city has not worked, and rather more of what just naturally fell into place seems to survive?

A: I think that some of the things were sort of doomed.

For instance, planners go on these pilgrimages. They say, “Let’s look at some of the other cities which have done well, we can get some ideas.” So, they go to Minneapolis, and they see it’s a successful downtown and they see these skybreakers. And they go to Montreal, and there are these wonderful subways and underground concourses, in both Toronto and Montreal. So they go back home with visions and plans for underground concourses and overhead walkways.

Now, I don’t blame people in Minneapolis and Montreal for wanting to be a little warm in terribly cold weather. But then you get to a place like Dallas, with all that warm weather--they’ve built the most complete network of underground walkways and sky-bridges. They boast you can go from one building in Dallas to any other building without ever having to go up on the street. And the question I would throw out is: Why? Why do they go to all this trouble to take people off the streets?

Q: Reading between the lines of much of what you have written in recent years suggests to me that two of the principal motivations in urban planning over the past generation have been fear and greed.

A: Yes, that is true. And of the two, I don’t mind greed so much, because that can impel a lot of merchants to do a better job of merchandising, but I think that the fear is itself an aggrandizing factor. For instance, it is a very unhappy sight when you go in and see spikes in public places, like in the Peachtree Plaza, Atlanta--spikes. And you ask them, “Why this?” And they say, “Oh, so bums won’t spend the night.” Well, suppose a bum did spend the night. So what?

So I think one of the big negative factors in downtowns today is the fear, the almost obsessive fear, that if you fix up a place to attract people, you will attract undesirables, ergo , don’t fix it up.

Q: You have set up cameras on the streets of New York to observe how people behave. Let me ask you about a few of your discoveries. For example, people don’t walk where there is space to walk; they walk where people are already walking.

A: The 100% conversation, I call it. If what we found out is true, then an awful lot of the principles of city planning as now practiced are wrong. When I started this, in 1970, the big cry then was: Let’s reduce this terrible congestion that is throttling the city. And you had a lot of documentaries then, which, again, were almost neurotic on the subject. Their favorite scene was shot from the telephoto lens, and so you see this tremendous compression, all these poor people jammed together--

Q: -- cattle being herded is the impression .

A: Exactly. You know it’s just all wrong. I’m not saying that everybody’s deliriously happy on the streets of New York, but I took sensational, authentic, undoctored film of people on the streets of New York smiling . . . .

We were testing hypotheses on-camera, most of which blew up in my face. One of my hypotheses was when people meet on the street and say, “Hi, how are you doing?” “Long time no see,” and that sort of thing, they would move into that foot of space along a building front. Quite the opposite. With very good exceptions they move into the center of traffic, what I call the 100% location--which is what real-estate people call the busiest street corner. It’s crowded, but it’s also the place of maximum choice. They don’t get off in a corner somewhere; they don’t let themselves get trapped.

That was a most valuable finding, because of the tendency, the thrust, of so much pedestrian planning, downtown planning, is let’s be more spacious, let’s give more room, don’t cram them in.

Q: What about some other findings your film seemed to reveal, that people are not the slobs they have been blamed for being.

A: No, they are not. Our film showed people carrying trash around with no place to put it. They couldn’t see anywhere to throw it away. The minute a trash container gets filled, that’s when you get the slob. What is he to do? He puts the trash in on the top of the thing and it blows away.

Let me tell you about a pet peeve I have: Stairs are unnecessarily steep. Of course, they have to be steep enough so that the flight can be contained in the lateral space. But, for example, take the 27 steps from the Lexington Avenue subway stop to Grand Central--27 uninterrupted steps. It is really a job getting up these things. And unnecessarily steep, because at the top you have got all the room in the world. They could have used that space to make fewer steps. You see this kind of thing all over. They don’t use the space for where people actually walk.

Q: There seem to be a lot of blank walls in cities.

A: You know, I used to take a lot of pictures of blank walls because they are very photogenic.

Q: What’s that on your office wall?

A: That is my favorite. AT&T;’s Longline Division headquarters in Manhattan. It is about 50 stories high.

Q: And the small sign at the bottom saying--

A: “No ball or frisbie playing.” I love it. But the walls, they really shut people out.

Q: No signs of life visible?

A: No. And once you put up a blank wall, it is self-proving. Building owners and/or developers can think of all sorts of excuses, for the heating, for the air conditioning, but it is justification for a blank wall, to dullify downtown.

Q: They did put a window in John Portman’s Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel.

A: They were finally driven to it because of tremendous criticism from types like myself. You bring up the subject of Bonaventure, any of his (Portman’s) stuff, and everybody says, “I was just in a conference there, I couldn’t find my way.” All these horror tales. You go inside this thing, and they have got the Cocktail Plaza, they have got water walls, and you don’t know where is north, where is south, and it is all sort of circular. Very confusing. And I think it is ironic that only about 30 miles away, down in Anaheim, people pay good money to walk along a replica of an old-fashioned street in Disneyland. See, the market is saying something.

Q: Let me see if I can get you to be a bit indiscreet. What North American cities do you most enjoy walking around?

A: The pedestrian cities, which, generally speaking, are pedestrian for a number of reasons, but one is the ancient street pattern. Boston is a delightful place really to walk around. And yet you could argue that the really old parts look very perverse, very twisty and so forth, but it is a wonderful example of pedestrian scale. OK, what other ones? Well, I am hopelessly provincial--I like New York. It is a great pedestrian town. Philadelphia, also. They tend to be 18th Century cities.

Then, there’s Seattle. And Portland--a city that is really coming around. I think that the thing that runs though, and you can see my bias, is that they look like cities. They don’t look like the suburban thing. San Francisco, of course--everybody’s favorite city. And Chicago, Toronto, Montreal. These are ones--they tend to be a little on the big side, except for Portland, so they have a strong identity. Everybody jumps on Chicago and says it is gritty. Well, that is one of the reasons it is great.

Q: What are some of those North American cities you least enjoy walking around?

A: I hate to name any particular. Most middle-western smaller cities, I think, have thrown away some of their great attributes. They seem unusually vulnerable to the siren song of a suburbanized downtown. With a lot of them, it is too late, although I’ve been to Dayton (Ohio) and they are doing wonderful things.

Q: Where does the 20th-Century city, Los Angeles, fit?

A: Well, Los Angeles is very difficult to place. It is a very urban place, make no mistake. I mean, everybody says so many suburbs in search of a city, but it is an urban place. They have a downtown that is beginning to take shape again. I think Los Angeles is a very dynamic city, very exciting, fascinating.

They are trying to work their way to a strong center. There is a downtown, but it doesn’t fit any category of the others. For instance, Broadway--it is mostly Mexican, a damn lively place, it really is. I mean, you want to see street life, boy oh boy, Broadway on Saturday morning.

Q: You have been writing about and walking about the streets of the city for 50 years now. How are North American cities different today from what you might have imagined 50 years ago?

A: I think they are better. They really are. It is interesting that the most interesting part of the city is downtown. It is not the mall, because as people say, one mall looks just like another. They are really amazingly identical--1,000 feet from anchor to anchor.

Q: Would you have guessed, 50 years ago, that there would be so much concern about our cities becoming vacant rather than congested?

A: That was a big change, a big change. But you know, these things people say stem from a philosophic base that cities are basically bad places and we have got to protect ourselves from the city. That battle is now over, and I think sort of ideologically won.

Q: That lesson notwithstanding, how much progress can be made until Americans feel that they are not only safe in the middle of the city, but that they can send their youngsters to school there, or hold a job in that area?

A: Well, this is the big problem. We certainly don’t see any solution how.

You know, it is interesting about crime. As far as downtowns go, downtown is about the safest place there is in America. Really. I went to a conference of police chiefs, and got the computer printout of all the reported crimes in Dallas. And, hell’s bells, I mean, it is in the suburbs, the suburban mall.

Now, I don’t want to say too much bad about the suburban malls, because they obviously fulfill a purpose. But the parking lot of a suburban shopping mall is a very dangerous place. Something in the layout--they are scary places. If you park way out there, and then if, by the time you take your car most of the intervening cars have since left, it is spooky.

So what you are talking about--crime and homelessness--is part of a huge social problem. And that is just as much a problem, it seems to me, for the suburban shopping malls as anywhere else.