William H. Whyte; Urban Sociologist Wrote About Cities, ‘Organization Man’

William H. Whyte, the self-taught urban sociologist who dissected corporate life in the 1950s in the classic “The Organization Man” and later turned his keen eye to the patterns of life on the streets of America’s cities, died Tuesday in New York. He was 81.

Whyte had been in declining health for five years, suffering from heart problems and Parkinson’s disease, longtime colleague Fred Kent said Wednesday.

Because of a blood clot, Whyte’s legs had been amputated below the knees, a loss that was particularly devastating for a man whose great love in the second stage of his life was ambling along city streets--the more crowded with pedestrians, the better--and observing how people interacted with each other and the built environment.

He influenced a generation of architects and urban designers, reminding them that they are not just creating buildings and streets but spaces for people.

“The street, I figure, is the river of life of the city,” he told The Times in 1990. “You stick it underground, you put it up in the air, and you have diluted your constituency. It deadens the city.”

Known as Holly (for Hollingsworth, his middle name) to friends, Whyte was born a block from the cornfields in the small Pennsylvania town of West Chester on Oct. 1, 1917. He majored in English at Princeton, graduating in 1939, then worked for two years as a salesman peddling Vicks VapoRub on the road.

He joined the Marines (“a breeze compared to Vicks,” he once joked), saw action at Guadalcanal during World War II, then became a writer for Fortune magazine in New York.

It was there in the late 1940s that he became interested in the flight of middle-class families from the cities to new suburbs. He wrote a series about the sociology of the emerging corporate managerial class and its postwar embrace of suburbia that resulted in his 1956 “The Organization Man.”

The book was a surprise bestseller, tapping into a tension in postwar America between individuals and the bureaucracies that were seeping into nearly every aspect of life.

His analysis addressed not only the plight of the corporation man but “the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics PhD in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project . . . the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory. They are all, as they so often put it, in the same boat,” he wrote.

Whyte believed that individualism within organizational life was possible and that big organizations generally worked well and were necessary. But he lamented that the organizations also caused a narrowing of ambitions as workers downscaled their dreams “to achieve a good job with adequate pay and proper pension and a nice house in a pleasant community populated with people as nearly like themselves as possible.”

The danger, he wrote, was that people could be lulled by security, good pay and prestige into thinking that life was better than it really was.

“It is not so much that the organization is going to push the individual around more than it used to. It is that it is becoming increasingly hard for the individual to figure out when he is being pushed around.”

Three decades after its publication, Newsweek essayist Robert J. Samuelson wrote that “The Organization Man” remained a classic because it captured “a permanent part of the social condition,” the enduring dilemmas of modern work.

By 1959, when Whyte was in his 40s, he began focusing on the problem of urban sprawl. He left his job at Fortune and became active in urban affairs as a consultant, proposing zoning legislation and fighting ill-conceived projects.

As a hobby, he began to study New York’s bustling Lexington Avenue, observing the behavior of people on its sidewalks and plazas. He spent the next two decades writing about what he saw on the streets of American cities.

In the course of helping the New York City Planning Commission draft a master plan for the city, he began to examine the impact of “incentive zoning,” new laws designed to provide parks and plazas within the city’s core. Did the laws work? No one seemed to know.

He recruited a band of Hunter College students as researchers and applied for grants, one of which was an “expedition grant” from the National Geographic Society, the first such given for a domestic project. He and his young assistants took to the streets, believing that direct observation would provide the best information.

The urban snoops were equipped with note pads, time-lapse cameras and tape measures, and watched how people acted in the streets and how the city made them act. Whyte, always dressed in a neat tweed suit, relished those excursions, often tucking a camera under his arm so that he could document unobtrusively how people reacted to street entertainers or chose where to settle with a sack lunch.

Whyte loved the messiness and vitality of big-city life, and his studies produced many observations that were profound in their utter simplicity. People gather and sit in a city center, for instance, when there are places to sit. People don’t litter when there are places to throw trash.

Kent, who knew Whyte for 28 years and founded the Project for Public Spaces, a New York-based nonprofit consulting firm that was inspired by Whyte’s ideas, said Whyte once made him spend an entire day watching a trash can and how litter got on the ground.

“It was the most revealing thing,” Kent said. “You began to look at the design of the wastebasket. It had a top with a hole in it. Most of the litter got blown out by accident. So you learned things about where to place a wastebasket. Holly set you up to see that.”

Those observations provided Whyte with the grist for an array of books and essays about urban life that are required reading in architecture and urban design classes. They include “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” (1980) and “City: Rediscovering the Center” (1988).

Los Angeles architect William Fain, whose projects include the Fox Plaza in Century City, called Whyte “a guru on bringing humanity back to very dense urban spaces. We often look at buildings as objects. He was a constant reminder we are creating spaces for people.”