Top: William Friedkin. The Night They Raided Minsky’s, 1968. Frame enlargement. Bottom: William Friedkin. The Night They Raided Minsky’s, 1968. Frame enlargement.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 Imaginary Apparatus: Film Production and Urban Planning in New York City, 1966–1975
McLAIN CLUTTER
“If you want to know why I am so happy doing this picture in New York,” offered Norman Lear, producer of the 1968 film The Night They Raided Minsky’s , “ask the Mayor.” 1 The primary location for Lear’s film was in Manhattan at East Twenty- sixth Street between First and Second Avenues. After beginning production, Lear and his company learned that their film location was slated for demolition while the movie was still being shot, part of a continuing wave of urban renewal that had indelibly altered New York throughout the preceding two decades. 2 The policy’s transformation of the city seemed unstoppable, much to the dismay of the Minsky’s production team. But this particular instance of urban renewal was delayed by an unusual development. With unprecedented political fiat, New York’s mayor, John Lindsay, came to the rescue of The Night They Raided Minsky’s— halting the urban renewal project and allowing Lear’s company to finish shooting their film. Thus, as bulldozers leveled the south side of the street, the north side was turned over to Lear’s art directors to create what one journalist called “Minskyland” —a re-creation of what the neighborhood might have looked like in 1925. 3 Evincing a nostalgic sentiment for a bygone Gotham of tenements and continental immigrants, the block soon became a popular tourist destination. John Lindsay soon earned a rep - utation as a mayor who was not afraid to engage two elements of policy more vigorously than any previous New York mayor: the physical design of the city and the policy governing theatric film productions set in New York. The Lindsay administration governed New York City from 1966 to 1973. During this period, the city created policy intended to alleviate the bureaucracy and cor - ruption that had made movie production financially prohibitive throughout the previous twenty years. Lindsay and his staff made every possible concession to the film industry in providing a comfortable and profitable environment. Also during
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 Lindsay’s tenure, the city drafted a significantly greater amount of innovative plan - ning and urban design policy than the previous several mayoral administrations. The Lindsay administration’s heightened interest in urban design attracted some of the city’s most renowned architects to public service and won the admiration of architecture critics. 4 While the collection of planning documents produced under Lindsay is vast and diverse, one remarkable aspect common to many of them is a tendency to understand the city in ways that are cinematic, or proto-cinematic, in nature. Hence, Lindsay’s planning policy has a synergistic relationship to the con - temporaneous policy regarding film production in New York. Amplifying the significance of this blend of film production and planning policy was a develop - ing financial and interpersonnel symbiosis between the city and the film industry. During the Lindsay administration New York was inviting cinema production to its streets, while conceiving of those streets through various cinematic registers and yoking the financial interests of the city to those of the film industry. The conjuncture of policies and financial alliances under Lindsay provides a lens through which to reexamine the relationship between the filmic and material New York. 5 For at least the past ten years, the confluence of cinema and urbanism has emerged as a popular topic in scholarship. Most commonly, interest in the topic springs from interpretations of two themes found in early-twentieth-century writings about cinema: the syntactic commonality between cinema and urbanism, and the Marxist notion that film may awaken the viewing subject from an ideolog - ical misrecognition of urban reality. 6 This essay insists that Lindsay’s policies created a situation in which the specific relationship between New York and its cinematic representation is most accurately described discursively— as a fluid and iterative exchange between the financial stability of New York and the film indus - try, the methods of conceptualizing urbanism evident in the policies of Lindsay’s New York City Planning Commission, and the subjective affect of the cinema spec - tator and the New Yorker. Through a consideration of the discursive motion of Lindsay’s policies, their effects, and the complex set of institutional interests they involve, a historic relationship between New York, its cinematic representation, and the urban subject can be described.
Lindsay’s Film Production Policy Upon his inauguration, Mayor Lindsay inherited a declining city plagued with cor - ruption, poor race relations, poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and a mounting environmental crisis. 7 Confounding any attempt by the mayor’s administration to deal with the city’s growing list of woes was a mounting budgetary dilemma. More
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 than a decade of middle-class white flight to the suburbs and a dwindling manu - facturing sector had taken its toll on the city’s tax base. 8 At the state level a policy of funds dispersion that favored rural and suburban areas ensured that New York City consistently sent more money to Albany than it received. 9 Nowhere was the bleak outlook more pronounced than in the urban environ - ment. The City Planning Commission’s 1969 Plan for New York City begins It is obvious enough that there is a great deal wrong. The air is polluted. The streets are dirty and choked with traffic. The subways are jammed. The waters of the rivers and bays are fouled. There is a severe shortage of hous - ing. The municipal plant is long past its prime. 10 Although the problems with the built environment were abundantly clear to the commission, less clear was how to acquire the funds needed to rectify those prob - lems. 11 By 1969 the planning commission estimated that in order to meet the cap - ital improvement, housing, and infrastructural needs of New York over the next decade, they would require $52 billion in funding above what could be provided by the city. 12 The commission looked toward the federal urban renewal and Model Cities programs for relief. 13 Meanwhile, the office of the mayor was left to find ways of promoting new industry in the city that could be taxed to fund the city’s struggling offices. In 1966, within this economic climate, Mayor Lindsay signed Executive Order Number 10, which created the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting. Although the American film industry was born in New York in the late-nine - teenth century, by 1932 the rise of the Hollywood studios largely spelled the end of location film production in New York. 14 The reasons were both technical and political: the sound, depth-of-field, and film-speed technologies that were required to make city shooting advantageous had yet to be developed; 15 and New York was a notoriously corrupt location for film production. Throughout the decades after 1932, solutions were developed to alleviate the technical detriments to shooting in the city, and Mayor Lindsay sought to alleviate the political detriments with Executive Order 10. 16 Prior to Lindsay’s executive order, filming in New York required as many as fifty different permits, and productions could face daily fines and police shakedowns of as much as $400 a day. 17 Meanwhile, union corruption made labor in the cin - ema arts in New York cost prohibitive as compared to Los Angeles. 18 The Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting streamlined film-production permitting to one standard document that would apply to all filming locations. 19 While
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 mounting a national letter-writing campaign to attract film productions, the mayor and his staff made every effort to alleviate the obstacles to filming in the city. 20 Lindsay removed film censorship powers from municipal agencies, negotiated with the local industry labor unions to offer competitive rates, and even created a division in the police department composed of officers specially trained in the “cinema arts.” This special task force was trained to “reroute traffic, keep back onlookers, or persuade pedestrians to behave like believable New Yorkers in a street scene.” 21 Executive Order 10 made every possible concession in creating a comfortable and profitable environment for filming in New York. Despite these efforts toward a more streamlined bureaucracy around film pro - duction in New York, the city still lacked postproduction facilities—a problem that Lindsay had promised to rectify when running for office. With private assistance, by 1967 plans were underway to fulfill this promise. An enormous complex called Cinema Center, designed by architect Charles Luckman, was slated for construc - tion on the site of the old Madison Square Garden. The design was to occupy a full west-Midtown block, with two thirty-nine-story office towers bracketing the com - plex on the east and west sides and a seven-story structure that would span the middle of the block and house film studios, two live-action theaters, and four motion picture theaters. 22 Although Cinema Center was never built, its recurrent appearance in the news garnered a substantial amount of public attention, adding visibility to the mayor’s efforts to draw film production to New York. Also enhancing the visibility of Lindsay’s film production policy was the mayor’s charisma and obvious flair for the media. One Newsweek article described Lindsay as “movie-star-handsome.” 23 Another reported that he attended industry events such as the Hollywood Radio and Television Society luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he wooed production company executives. 24 At a 1969 Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of com - mercial films, the mayor was even awarded an achievement medal by MPAA presi - dent Jack Valenti. 25 Lindsay’s movie-star fraternizing aligns with other events, such as his headline-garnering action on the Minsky’s site and reports that he shared his office with director George Seaton as the latter filmed Up the Down Staircase (1967) . Such lust for the limelight contributed to the popular conclusion that this was a mayor more suave than smart—one that, perhaps, just wanted to be in pictures. 26 However, Lindsay’s showmanship should not obscure the tactical wisdom of his policy. The financial results of Lindsay’s efforts were immediately realized. In the final months of 1966,
Irving Michael Felt (left) and architect Charled Luckman (right) with a presentation drawing of Cinema Center. New York Time s, March 8, 1966.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 after the mayor signed Executive Order 10, film production levels in New York rose to an all-time high, adding $20 million to the city economy. 27 In 1965 only eleven films were shot in New York (with only two of these reaching postproduction in local studios). In 1967, 223 permits were issued for feature films and 633 for tele - vision and commercial productions. 28 Although the long-term economic effects of these policies are difficult to calculate, when one considers that the motion pic - ture and television economy in New York had reached a level of $500 million a year by 1980, the contribution of Lindsay’s policies seems significant. 29 By one account, director Sidney Lumet alone had given back to the city an estimated $200 million in direct tax revenue under Executive Order 10 by 1984. 30 This economic success was not merely serendipitous. Lindsay and his staff were keen observers of larger shifts within the business apparatus of Hollywood. Throughout the 1960s, with the growing ubiquity of television in the American home, the film industry experienced a marked decrease in ticket sales. Hollywood’s financial troubles piqued in 1962, when movie attendance hit a nationwide low. 31 Increasingly, the viewing public met the historical epics that were the hallmark product of the Hollywood studios with less and less enthusiasm. Thus, the film industry sought to explore new genres. The Hollywood studios began acting pri - marily as distribution centers for independent movies that were produced around the nation. By 1967, these independently produced films accounted for 51.1 per - cent of all feature releases by the major studios. 32 This shift by the industry was coupled in 1967 with the MPAA’s repeal of the Production Code (also called the Hays Code)—a set of standards that had been implemented in the 1930s to ensure “decency” in motion pictures. The production code censored violence, drug use, and nudity in films and actively discouraged moral ambiguity in filmic narratives. Mayor Lindsay’s executive order cleverly worked in accord with these larger shifts in the film industry. Studio decentralization encouraged filmmaking in New York, and the films enabled by the mayor’s policies later helped to turn the for - tunes of the struggling film industry. At a time when spectators were becoming less receptive to the standard Hollywood production, Mayor Lindsay’s policies enabled filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen to produce tremendously successful location-shot films in New York City. Largely associated with the New Hollywood movement in cinema, these directors created New York movies that earned the studios millions and aided in Hollywood’s eco - nomic recovery. 33 Meanwhile, the end of the Production Code made the content of many films shot in the city after Executive Order 10 possible. Dystopian urban films such as
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) were soon prevalent at the movie theater. These films portrayed issues contextual to New York at the time—such as crime, prostitution, and urban decadence—that simply could not have been treated under the Hays Code. Revealing the contextual blight of New York on the silver screen proved profitable for the film industry, which encouraged studios to continue funding productions shot in New York, thus fueling the city’s economy. The city in effect turned its dystopian conditions, which largely arose from a lack of finances, into a revenue-generating opportunity. More profound than the financial implications of these New York City films was their contribution to revolutionizing the type of production that audiences became accustomed to viewing. Gritty and “realistic” location-shot New York City pro - ductions such as Midnight Cowboy stood in stark contrast to the historically based epics that were the fading staple of the Hollywood production system as late as 1963 .34 Equally, these New York City films contrasted previous types of produc - tions that were either actually or fictionally set in the city. The contextual grit and vice of films such as Taxi Driver significantly revise the portrait of an enchanted city found in the back-lot –shot New York City musicals of the previous few decades or in the shadowy New York of the film-noir cycle. While quantifying this effect is difficult, the new image of New York in film eventually modified the sort of urban narrative that cinema spectators associated with the city, and hence their future expectations of the material New York. Such a modification of New York’s image may have been one of Mayor Lindsay’s motivations behind Executive Order 10. In his 1969 book about his mayoral expe - rience, The City, Lindsay wrote that the root problem with American cities is the lack of positive narratives about urbanism circulating within American culture. Lindsay cites novels such as Moll Flanders as indicative of the prevailing pejora - tive attitude with which Anglo-American narratives have treated the city. 35 The mayor specifically indicts the American psyche as the hidden cause of the decline of the country’s urban areas, claiming that narratives about the city were plagued with a stigma of moral decadence, while small towns and suburbia bene - fited from dreams of benign pastoral settings that circulated through American culture. 36 Lindsay claimed that such derogatory attitudes toward cities were reflected in the lack of funding from the federal government and in the lack of con - cern among the American electorate. Hence, for Lindsay, these financial matters were intricately intertwined with the psychic resonance of cities among Americans. The mayor was therefore unlikely to have been negligent of the psychic associa -
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 tions attached to his own city that would be affected by the filmic narratives enabled by Executive Order 10. Moreover, the mayor’s statements reveal that he viewed the manipulation of such narratives as a vehicle for change in the material New York. Lindsay’s motives behind Executive Order 10 were discursive: complex, multi - faceted, and interrelated. The order intertwined the financial interests of New York with those of the Hollywood studios and affected the way New York was portrayed in cultural narratives, thus inflecting the city’s psychic resonance among Americans. The latter outcome also benefited from the alliance with another, rather unlikely, division of the city’s government: the City Planning Commission. The planning commission was among the most financially needy of the govern - ment agencies under Lindsay that stood to benefit from film-related revenues, and the ideology behind their use of the funds they were granted is significant. By con - ceiving of New York through various cinematic registers in their planning policy, the commission played upon the expectations of those exposed to the city through film and implanted cinematic understandings of the city within the actual New York to be experienced by its inhabitants.
Lindsay’s Urban Planning Policy When Mayor Lindsay entered office in 1966, he did so within a political climate that was increasingly characterized by citizen activism around civil rights and the war in Vietnam. 37 This culture of protest, combined with the legacy of Jane Jacobs’s famed confrontation with the Robert Moses–era urban renewal policies, 38 soon created a context in which the opinion of the typical New Yorker had to be con - sidered in matters of city planning. One architecture critic noted, “No more could the man on a specific street in a real neighborhood be easily ignored, as the power of the picket sign often captured as much airtime in the media as a Presidential news conference. It was where the action was.” 39 Hence, the individual was assum - ing heightened influence in issues of the urban environment, and through media the actions of the individual could be made visible and affect popular opinion. The planning policies of the Lindsay administration reflect a keen understand - ing of the elevated role media, particularly film, were assuming. In 1969, Lindsay’s planning commission, under chairman Donald H. Elliott, released The Plan for New York City, the city’s first master plan in the commission’s thirty-one-year his - tory. 40 On August 22, 1967, more than a year before the new master plan was to be released, Lindsay penned letters to several prominent New York executives and philanthropists in solicitation of funding to make a documentary film based on the
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 unfinished Plan. In one letter, the mayor explained, “Mr. Elliott and I firmly believe in the importance of gaining the greatest possible public understanding of the Plan. We have been persuaded that a documentary film will be the best possi - ble method to educate the people of New York.” 41 The implications of the mayor’s solicitation are manifold. First, that Lindsay solicited funding for his film before the master plan on which it was to be based was finished is revealing. Hence, the policies within the plan, and the city that these policies projected, were presup - posed to be inherently cinematic. Second, the mayor made clear that the intention of the film is to educate New Yorkers. Hence, media was overtly used as a method of inflecting the behavior of the city dweller. The filmic medium and its relation to its audience were used as a conceptual paradigm to abstract the rela - tionship between the city and the urban subject. That relationship was now assumed to be cinematic, the individual on the street being the urban analog of the cinema spectator. Such an awareness of the value of media as a model for conceptualizing the public’s engagement with urbanism within Lindsay’s administration helps to explain the involvement of individuals from media companies in city planning. This inclusion of media personnel is apparent in the list of possible benefactors to whom the mayor sent his letters soliciting funding for his film. The list included— in addition to philanthropists and socialites, such as Joan Davidson of the Kaplan Fund—the presidents of Polaroid (Dr. E. Land), Eastman Kodak (Louis Eilers) and the CEO of CBS Network, William S. Paley. 42 While the involvement of these individuals may have been desirable because of their media expertise, financial motivations likely also motivated their solicitation. Within the welcoming envi - ronment for the filmic arts that Lindsay had recently created, these executives from the film and entertainment industry had every reason to believe that New York was a ripening business environment and that Lindsay and his administration could be valuable allies. This was particularly the case for CBS. As early as 1967, the New York Times was reporting that Paley’s company had plans to begin shooting major motion pic - tures in New York—a new venture for CBS that was undoubtedly influenced by Executive Order 10. 43 Paley’s film company, which began production in 1968, was named Cinema Center Films— apparently borrowing the name of the proposed film facility in which CBS assumed its New York–centered production would be based. While no specific evidence links the mayor’s funding solicitation to specific CBS business plans, one is tempted to recognize “back-room politics.” By funding the mayor’s documentary, Paley may have shown his gratitude to an administration
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 that had enabled a new business venture for CBS, and ensured that Lindsay would remain an ally in the future. But Paley’s involvement in urban planning in New York was more complex than a simple financial alliance, and did not begin with the mayor’s funding solicita - tion. In 1966, the year Executive Order 10 was signed, Lindsay established the Mayor’s Task Force on Urban Design. The task force was commissioned to produce a report on New York urban aesthetics that would be more far-reaching and proac - tive in its design considerations than could be the planning commission, whose primary purpose was zoning and urban development policy. The task force— which included architects and philanthropists such as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Robert A.M. Stern, Jaquelin Robertson, and Architectur al Forum editor Walter McQuade—was chaired by William S. Paley. 44 Paley’s curious appointment to head the task force articulates a critical con - juncture between the Lindsay administration’s film production policy and urban design policy. 45 The success of Paley’s newly formed film company was in the best financial interest of both CBS and the city, and the media expertise that Paley brought to the Task Force on Urban Design complimented the prevailing ideology with which the planning commission was conceptualizing the public’s engage - ment with the city. In fact, the mayor’s conviction about the power of media in influencing the public’s impression of the city likely was at least partially inspired by programming broadcast on Paley’s network in the previous ten years. In the early 1960s, WCBS in New York, under Paley’s leadership, aired a series of documentaries about New York City urban planning. The films were titled Our Vanishing Legacy (1961), Reflections on the Fair (1964), A Question of Values (1964), A Fantasy of Forgotten Corners (1966), and Cities of the Future (1966) . The movies, which were written and produced by documentarist Gordon Hyatt, projected visions of the New York of the future and treated contemporary issues such as urban and environmental blight. 46 Our Vanishing Legacy was perhaps the most effective film of the group, and may have been instrumental in persuading the public to take notice of the city’s urban renewal policies and the wave of unmitigated real-estate development that had robbed Manhattan of several historically significant buildings in the early 1960s. 47 The film first aired on CBS on September 21, 1961, and was praised by the press for its attempts to win public support for landmarks preser - vation—years before the New York City Landmarks Law that was passed in 1965. 48 These documentaries were aired by William Paley’s network, and may well have been on Mayor Lindsay’s mind when he decided to make a film version of the city’s new master-plan, as well as when appointing Paley the head of the new urban
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 design task force. 49 Through the CBS films, the mayor may have become convinced not only that the city could be effectively represented cinematically but also that these cinematic representations and their effects on spectators were an appropriate paradigm for the relationship between urban planning and the public. This latter point is consistent with the treatment of the city within the publica - tion produced by the Paley-led Task Force on Urban Design, The Threatened City: A Report on the Design of the City of New York. 50 The editor of Architectur al Forum, Walter McQuade, chiefly transcribed the report. But a television man’s sensitivity is evident from the outset. In the introduction to the report, the task force conveys the now familiar portrayal of New York as the culture setter for the country: Nowhere else are shaped so many of the things which Americans buy, iden - tify with, come to characterize themselves by, ranging from the shape of one’s hat to the songs teenagers wail. New York emits; the nation receives. A large example is the fact that a dozen American cities are even today planning or building groups of offices which they identify as “Rockefeller Centers,” thirty years later. 51 The description privileges the role of New York as an urban impression that is broadcast, as if through film or television, to the rest of the country—shaping con - sumerism and the way in which Americans understand themselves. Significant among the New York City exports highlighted in the report is Rockefeller Center— suggesting that Americans may be trained to understand themselves in urban envi - ronments through the mediated export of New York’s urban image. Such an understanding of the city is pervasive throughout the report in the form of a recurrent interest in grooming an image of the city that could be captured by filmic media. Near the beginning of the report, its authors plainly state, “The com - mittee’s study . . . was directed towards offenses to the eye,” before continuing to describe various methods of approach to Manhattan (by airplane, train, car, and ocean liner) in proto-cinematic terms of urban promenade. 52 The authors applaud the scenographic experience of the skyline view when circling the city by these various methods and indicate that the visual clarity of the skyline—its cohesive - ness as a single iconic image that is immediately apprehended—allows one to understand him- or herself in relation to the city through a dialogue of urban image and urban viewer. The problem with the interior city, according to the report, is that it fails to maintain this scenographic clarity, thus unsettling the urban subject who finds him- or herself upon its streets. 53 To resolve this lack of visual clarity, the task force suggests greater legibility in urban iconography through standard -
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 ization of signage and streetscape and calls for the development of scenic vistas at the corners of Central Park. The Threatened City is replete with further scopophilic examples: scenic vistas at Lincoln Center; controlled views of the city from the arterial highways; and the uniform painting of all city vehicles, kiosks, and telephone booths. 54 Throughout the report, the task force assumed a moralizing tone in its insistence on the visual, at one point urging that the work of the task force “not be shrugged off as cosmetic” but understood as “a meaningful way to make a proclamation, a show of determination that the city is taking its visual destiny in hand.” 55 One might ask: a proclamation to whom? Read against the task force’s introductory statement—“New York emits, the nation receives” 56 —the insistence on the cos - metic can be understood as a moral mandate for the grooming of an urban imagi - nary to be disseminated to New Yorkers and the rest of the country through visual and filmic media. Such a moralizing tone when discussing urban aesthetics—at a time when the city was rife with so many social, economic, and ecological issues—reveals the uncited influence of Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book The Image of the City. In Lynch’s book, visual recognition of the urban environment is codified to give “its possessor an important sense of emotional security.” 57 Lynch notes that a clear environmen - tal image can give the urban subject “an harmonious relationship between himself and the outside world.” 58 In The Threatened City, Lynch’s moralizing urban aes - thetic met Paley’s network-executive sensitivity to the popular image. 59 The moral privilege that Lynch grants the directly experienced urban image in negotiating between subject and city was implicitly extended to encompass the mediated image as well—Paley’s area of expertise. This media model helps explain the appointment of Paley as chairman of the task force. Who better to gauge the possi - bility for positive spectatorial reactions to the mediated city than a network tele - vision executive with one eye on the city and one eye on his Nielson ratings? Further, Paley’s financial interest in grooming the image of the city cannot be ignored. In a sense, the executive was suggesting manipulations of the set that his own network planned to use for major motion pictures in the near future. Indeed, in the years following Paley’s appointment to the task force, two of CBS’s first three feature-length films were shot in Manhattan: Me, Natalie (1969) and April Fools (1969). 60 Especially in the latter, the way Manhattan is presented to the cinema spectator bears striking similarities to some of the visual experiences of New York suggested within The Threatened City. In April Fools the skyline view of the city that the task force lauded for its ability
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 to establish a relationship between the individual and the city is used as a filmic technique to establish and reestablish the protagonist’s presence in New York. The film begins with the camera panning along the reflective façade of a glass office tower before settling on an establishing shot of a broad Manhattan street that dead- ends into an expansive skyline view beyond. In the middle distance, a man in a grey suit paces in front of a building before being met by the protagonist and pass - ing inside. The scene establishes the narrative within New York and provides a recurrent street and skyline image that indicates the protagonist’s spatial locale within the city. Another notable scene occurs as the protagonist is returning to the city from a trip to the suburbs. On a bridge entering Manhattan, the camera affords the film viewer a shot of the protagonist in a car, followed by a long take of the city skyline beyond. Because the previous scenes were set outside of the city, the film - makers used the skyline scenographically to resituate the narrative, protagonist, and spectator within New York. In still another scene, the protagonist is reestablished within the city against the reflection of the skyline in a Central Park pond. Certainly, the use of the skyline establishing shot described here is not unique— it is a common filmic technique that might be found in several films contemporary or prior to April Fools . However, the appearance of the urban vistas suggested in The Threatened City as narrative devices in April Fools (and other films) confirms the cinematic nature of the task force’s urban design suggestions. Hence, these design suggestions would be beneficial to film production set within New York and to urban subjects whose visual navigation within the city was understood to be analogous to the cinema spectator’s visual comprehension of the filmic narrative. Such an ideological privilege granted to the audience/media rela - tionship in abstracting the relationship between the city and the urban subject explains, in part, Paley’s role in New York City urban planning. Paley’s involvement in planning also had financial implications for the city, which stood to benefit from CBS taking advantage of Executive Order 10. Positive audience reactions to films CBS made in New York would net revenues for CBS that could be used
Top and bottom: Stuart Rosenberg. April Fools, 1969. Frame enlargements.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 to make more films in the city. These future productions would net tax revenues for New York, and these funds, in turn, could be reinserted into planning poli - cies that figured the city cinematically. Meanwhile, the circulation of location- shot New York City films, in which the techniques of representing the city were now coincidental with urban design policy, would work to affect the associations and expectations that spectators (in New York and elsewhere) granted New York City.
The Plan for New York City The privilege granted the filmic aspects of New York in The Threatened City is shared by several policies produced by Lindsay’s planning commission. The most obvious example is the 1969 Pl an for New York City. The document was drafted as a collaboration between a team from the planning commission and noted urbanist William H. Whyte. 61 The Pl an is a six-volume tome, with one book for each bor - ough and an introductory volume titled Critical Issues. Despite its impressive girth, the Pl an was widely criticized upon its release for its lack of substance, earn - ing the document the dissenting opinion of planning commissioner Beverly Moss Spatt. Calling the Pl an a “letter to Santa Claus,” Spatt’s criticisms revolve around the lack of functional specificity in the Pl an’ s contents and implementation. 62 The commissioner wrote that the Pl an “derides any professional attempt to establish long range goals and programs based on critical analysis, demographic projections, economic data and technical studies.” 63 Spatt’s criticisms are sound, but the Pl an did grant urban aesthetics a level of consideration uncharacteristic of city-administered planning practices at the time. As in The Threatened City, the concentration on urban image within the Pl an assumes a moralizing tone—as if the manipulation of the image of the city was believed to be a critical bridge in situating the urban subject within actual urbanism. 64 The more singularly remarkable aspect of the Pl an, however, is its attempt to be accessible to the average New Yorker through the use of imagery. Each volume is divided into several sections by city neighborhood, and each section contains a dense collection of images, with anecdotal text woven between. 65 By making a master plan that was almost entirely a picture book, the commission hoped that the 1969 Pl an would be understood by a much broader audience than a document filled with statistics and analysis. New Yorkers could easily identify themselves through the images of their neighborhoods and the narratives about these neigh - borhoods that the images assembled. 66 Through their arrangement on the page and through their content, the Pl an’ s
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 images invite a proto-cinematic reading. Measuring seventeen inches square, each open book creates a panorama with proportions that are almost identical to those of the widescreen. As in cinema, this format envelops the viewer within an immer - sive state of spectatorship. The panoramic arrays of imagery often include a com - bination of nineteenth-century woodcuts and lithographs, as well as more recent photographs of each neighborhood provided by the prestigious photojournalism agency Magnum. The combination of archival illustrations and more contempo - rary photographs invites the viewer to draw historical connections between images and over time, as in cinema. The few planning proposals included in each section read as inevitable extensions of this narrative-through-imagery. The section of the Pl an covering the Midtown region of Manhattan provides a concise example of this use of imagery. The Midtown section begins with words that echo those of the authors of The Threatened City in their treatment of New York as a mediated urbanism to be exported to the outside world: “This dynamic district, more than any other in the City, represents New York to visitors from every state in the Nation, every country in the world.” 67 The text continues, offering the reader a brief and conversational assessment of Midtown—pointing out, for exam - ple, that architect Stanford White was murdered at the site where the New York Life building now stands and that small film companies occupy much of the area east of Madison Square. Above the text, a dramatic series of black-and-white photographs dominates the
Left and opposite: New York City Planning Commission. Plan for New York City, vol. 1, Critical Issues .
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 entire top half of each page. The photographs capture fleeting impressions of city life. One image portrays a couple appearing startled on a city street—framed at the lower-left corner of the shot, and staring off at an undepicted event. The viewer wonders what caused the couple’s alarm in the moment before the photograph was taken (what is the couple staring at?) and wonders what happened in the moment after the photograph was shot. Another photograph depicts the neon glare of a Forty-sixth Street bar, with a car captured partially in the frame while driving by. Groups of people seated at tables inside the bar are barely visible through the store - front windows. The viewer is invited to wonder what kinds of stories might be tak - ing place within the bar between the vaguely visible New Yorkers. What brought these individuals to this point in the city, and what will happen next? The passing car, captured in the frame, indexes a temporality that makes the shot, paradoxi - cally, more cinematic than photographic—we know that in the instance before the shot was taken, the car was outside of the frame to the left and that in the instance after, the car will be off the frame to the right. Hence, each photograph is infused with a narrative and temporality that begs a cinematic reading. Still more interesting is the way in which the assemblage of photographs in this section of the Pl an works to structure a cinematic impression between images. Each image is cropped to include a minimum of decipherable urban fabric. No single photograph offers a comprehensive view of the city. Rather the images depict local details and fragments—operating on the level of the synecdoche or as a montage
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 New York City Planning Commission. Plan for New York City, vol. 4, Manhattan .
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 of details to be consumed over time and in sequence. The series of photographs continues for three-and-a-half pages before terminating with an aerial photograph of Midtown that fills a full half of one page. The effect of the aerial, read in sequence after the series of urban detail photographs, is to provide an abstraction in which to spatialize the events depicted in the detail photography. In exercising these conventions of urban representation—the synecdoche, the montage, the spa - tializing aerial—the Pl an implements techniques discussed by film theorists like Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer, and others. 68 The use of these conventions could be dismissed as coincidental had the mayor not already expressed his desire to make a film of the Pl an for New York City. In 1969, the mayor was granted his wish, and the film, titled What Is the City but the People? was indeed made. 69 An investigation of the movie makes clear the filmic paradigm on which the Pl an was modeled.
What Is the City but the People? What Is the City but the People is narrated by cocreator William H. Whyte and stars then-chairman of the planning commission Donald Elliott as a peripatetic steward of New York. 70 The director of the film was Gordon Hyatt, who produced the early 1960s CBS documentaries about New York. The cinematographer was Arthur Ornitz—a well-known Hollywood tradesman who also worked on New York City films such as Midnight Cowboy , Next Stop Greenwich Village (Mark Marzursky, 1973), and Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1976). While this list of players once again rein - forces notions of an interpersonnel and financial symbiosis between the film industry and city planning in New York, the structure and content of the film is what makes a unique contribution to this story. Confirming the cinematic nature of the Plan for New York City, What Is the City but the People? begins with a montage sequence that is a precise filmic realization of the method of image organization in the Plan. The film begins with a panning aerial shot of Manhattan that can be understood as the typical planner’s concep - tion of the city. 71 The aerial is the type of totalizing view—held far above the level of urban interaction—that allows a planner to conceive of the city as an abstrac - tion to be formally ordered. From above, we can read the rigid metering of the city blocks and the uniform shapes of the buildings within. The aerial shot changes several times, showing different parts of the city and different versions of formal order: densely gridded city blocks, a uniform cluster of pre-1962 zoning towers, and the sort of modernist towers within a field that are characteristic of urban renewal. Montaged between these different visions of formal organization are
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 depictions of disruptive, and often violent, details of events within the city. We are shown a woman assaulting a man, a few seconds of a protest scene, a broken win - dow, a spinning police siren, and even an image of one derelict homeless man breaking a bottle over the head of another. The montaged shots starkly contrast the seemingly formally ordered New York with the disjunctive problems within the city that occur on the level of human interaction. This scene’s rhetoric problematizes the typical planner’s vision of the city and critiques his or her impulse to understand the city as an abstraction. The film implies that the various formal organizations that have been imposed on the city (which are most visible from the abstracting aerial view) are speciously simple and do little to resolve the actual planning problems of New York. The use of montage reveals the limitations of con - ceiving of the city as an abstraction by foiling the aerial view against the violent details of events, which the film’s rhetoric implies depict the real planning prob - lems in the city. These problems occur on the level of the urban subject, to whom the city appears disjunctive, syncopated, and montaged. 72 On the level of human interaction, the city is ordered through common cine - matic conventions. 73 Elsewhere in What Is the City but the People? cinema is celebrated for its analytic and evidentiary possibili - ties. One such scene begins with the planning commis - sion assembled around a conference table discussing policy. One commissioner is heard advocating new zon - ing for a certain Brooklyn neighborhood. The commis - sioner holds up a photograph of the streetscape of the neighborhood in question—a street of almost suburban tranquillity . The camera zooms in on the photograph in the commissioner’s hand and then cuts to a scene with Donald Elliott and the commissioner walking the street depicted. As the two walk, the commissioner continues to advocate a set of policies for the neighbor hood. Elliott is her pensive audience. The camera slowly pans along the houses that compose the streetscape, registering their positive attributes on film and to the soundtrack of
Left and opposite: Gordon Hyatt. What Is the City but the People? 1969. Frame enlargements.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 the commissioner’s voice-over descriptions. In this scene, the commissioner’s photograph of the picturesque streetscape is held up as irrefutable evidence of the neighborhood’s positive qualities. When the camera zooms in on the photograph and then cuts to a scene within the depicted street, now occupied by the commissioner and Donald Elliott, the film rhetorically posits the streetscape as an occupiable image. The panning camera, assessing the charms of the houses in the neighborhood, duplicates and elaborates the evidence offered by the commissioner’s snapshot. The analytic vision of Chairman Elliott is associated with the pan of the camera across the streetscape—substituting the cinematic image for the vision of the individual walking the city street. The spectator’s reception of cinema is used as a conceptual paradigm to explain the relationship between the city and the urban subject.
William Whyte’s Contribution The contributions of William Whyte, ghostwriter of the 1969 Pl an and narrator of What Is the City but the People? are critical to understanding the planning poli - cies produced under the Lindsay administration. 74 One need look no further than Whyte’s subsequent work, which retroactively confirms the conceptual privilege granted the cinema/spectator relationship in Lindsay-era planning policy. After the release of the 1969 Pl an, Whyte was struck by the inability of the planning commission to evaluate their proposals as they were actualized in urban space. Hence, Whyte solicited and received a series of grants to set up an evaluative unit, which he called the Street Life Project. Whyte recorded much of the work of the project in his 1988 book City. 75 Unsurprisingly, the primary tech - nique for observation in the Street Life Project was to distribute cameras throughout New York’s urban spaces—collecting on film the activity within the city for later evaluation. In City, Whyte writes about his methodology:
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 We used photography a lot: 35 mm for stills, Super 8 for time-lapse, and 16 mm for documentary work. With the use of a telephoto lens, one can eas - ily remain unnoticed, but we found that the perspective was unsatisfactory for most street interchanges. We moved in progressively closer until we were five to eight feet from our subjects. With a spirit level atop the camera and a wide-angled lens, we could film away with our backs half turned and thus remain unnoticed—most of the time. 76 Whyte’s insistence on observing the city only after it was filmed is revealing. Preferring to hold his camera with his “back half turned,” Whyte forfeited direct observation of the city for its cinematic registration. Apparently, the sociologist felt he could learn more about one’s experience of New York from filmic footage than from direct observation. Such an assumption is consistent throughout Whyte’s analysis. For Whyte, the New Yorker’s experience of the city is cinematically organized, and this experience could be made visible for analysis only by first filming urban life. Hence, the film camera became a clinical tool for extracting embedded, cine - matic, urban organizations. Whyte recorded the crossing patterns and syncopa - tions of pedestrian traffic, the distribution of urban dwellers on streets over time, the patterning of conversations around storefronts, and a collection of other orga - nizations that occur in motion and over time. These observations are recorded in several passages in City in which Whyte describes the patterns of urban dynamics that emerge as New Yorkers interact. In one section of the book, Whyte explains the benefits of adequate seating in urban plaza spaces. For Whyte, seating was the necessary complement to dense urban dynamics, because the flow of New Yorkers through urban plazas was only visible when adequate spaces of repose are supplied from which to view the unfolding urban spectacle. 77 Such spaces offer a point of removal from the surrounding dynamics from which to figure the urban context as a dynamic urban imaginary. While Whyte never offers precisely this analysis, it is consistent with his descrip - tion of the experience of viewing the dynamics of the functional urban plaza— a description that is thoroughly cinematic: Down at eye level the scene comes alive with movement and color—people walking quickly, walking slowly, skipping up steps, weaving in and out on crossing patterns, accelerating and retarding to match the moves of others. Even if the paving and walls are gray, there will be vivid splashes of color—in winter especially, thanks to women’s fondness for red coats and colored umbrellas. 78
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 This experience is the vision of a stationary urban subject anonymously viewing the surrounding urban scene while excised from its dynamic flow. No doubt assembled from impressions of urban plazas that he gathered from his own film footage, Whyte’s description imbues the plaza occupant with the characteristics of the camera. The occupant is a stationary vision machine, set apart and unnoticed by the surrounding urbanites. The description similarly imparts upon the plaza occupant the characteristics of the spectator in the cinema—anonymous, sub - sumed in space, and intensely engaged in the visual experience of his or her sur - roundings. 79
Conclusion No single piece of conceptual or material evidence links Mayor Lindsay’s effort to draw film productions to New York with the policies of his planning commission that simultaneously conceived of the city’s streets cinematically. Rather, the con - nections between these sets of policies are complex, fragmentary, and discursive. Economic opportunities afforded to the film industry by the mayor’s policies stocked New York with entertainment industry personnel. The expertise of these individuals was synergistic with the ideology of a planning commission that was quickly coming to terms with the value of media in inflecting the behaviors of the citizens of a city that seemingly defied conventional planning. Tax revenues from film productions in New York added gravely needed income to the city’s tax base. This income allowed the city to fund the budget of, among other offices, the City Planning Commission. Continued film production in New York, aided by a shift toward decentralization in Hollywood and the end of the film production code, popularized the cinematic image of New York’s urban blight. And by conceiving of New York cinematically, the planning commission played upon the expecta - tions of those exposed to the city through its renewed presence on film and implanted cinematic understandings of the city within the material New York to be experienced by the urban subject. The implications of such a discursive model might be stirred by a review of a method of film theory that was being developed while the mayor’s polices were being drafted. Just as Lindsay’s policies were manipulating the financial interests of the film industry, film theorists were becoming concerned with the role of insti - tutional interests, economics, and the related psychic resonance of film among spectators in determining Hollywood production. The most influential group of theorists with these interests was formed around the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema, and their ideas came to be known as apparatus theory. 80 Central to the
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 apparatus theory of film is the concept of the cinematic institution. Through repeated cinema attendance, the cinematic institution imposes upon spectators an orientation of consciousness toward the consumption of the products of the film industry. 81 Those who watch cinema are conditioned to negotiate their subjectivities in rela - tion to the images on the movie screen. Hence, theories of the cinematic institution often term cinema an imaginary medium (in the psychoanalytic sense of the term) entailing the formation of desire for the ego-ideal in relation to an understanding of one’s own image. 82 While the cinematic institution orients audience conscious - ness, the audience, as part of the institution, orients the character of the standard Hollywood film as a function of spectatorial desire. 83 Hence, the cinematic insti - tution is meant to describe the iterative exchange between money and subjective affect through which averages are established and filmic aesthetics are naturalized. This exchange brackets spectatorial experience as a function of images beholden to audience desire and the financial well-being of the film industry. Although the apparatus theory of cinema has largely fallen out of favor in aca - demic studies of cinema, the mechanisms described in the theory tell us much about the effects of Mayor Lindsay’s policies. 84 By any reading of apparatus theory, when providing economic incentives to the film industry to shoot in New York, Lindsay’s policies made the city complicit in the financial aspects of the cinematic institution. More profound is the way in which the planning policies crafted dur - ing Lindsay’s tenure that conceived of the city cinematically may have accidentally exploited systems of desire for the image of New York that were forged within spectators by the cinematic institution. By using the relationship between the spectator and media as a conceptual abstraction for the relationship between the urban subject and the city, the planning policies drafted during the Lindsay administration would have figured a city uniquely designed to provoke desirable ego identifications among urban subjects first introduced to New York through its filmic presence. Such an assertion must remain a provocation in this essay. However, New York’s renaissance in the decades following the film industry’s dra - matic return to the city—a renaissance fueled largely by an influx of young pro - fessionals with renewed desire for urban lifestyles—might provide evidence to precisely such a provocation.
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1. “The Advantages of Making Films in New York,” New York Magazine, December 1967, 35–36. 2. Urban renewal began as a federal policy enacted by Congress in 1949 in order to channel capi - tal development funds to the nation’s struggling cities during their postwar decline. In New York, urban renewal was managed through the City Planning Commission, an agency under the direct oversight of the office of the mayor. Urban renewal projects typically entailed the wholesale leveling of decrepit neighborhoods, replacing them with subsidized housing or late-modernist development. Between 1949 and 1959 alone, the city spent more than $141 million in federal dollars on urban renewal projects and more than $1 billion in private investor dollars. See Bill Rose, “The Fifties,” in Planning the Future of New York City: A Conference Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the New York City Planning Commission (New York, 1979), 24–28. 3. “The Advantages of Making Films in New York,” 35–36. 4. See Ada Louise Huxtable, “Adding Up the Score,” New York Times, 20 January 1974. 5. Since the development of the movie camera, theorists have suggested connections between the city and cinema. Many have posited a syntactic commonality between the two—noting that the pace and amount of stimuli offered by the city finds its media analog in the movie reel. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 217 –251; and Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel , adapt. D. Weinstein, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409 – 424. Likewise, theorists have granted the filmic medium a privileged position in representing urban life—claiming movies can reintroduce to consciousness elements of material reality either invisible to the naked eye or clouded by the subterfuge of ideology. Walter Benjamin, for example, believed in the revolutionary capacity of the medium “in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation” to “reactivate the object reproduced”–hence awakening the viewing subject from distraction and ideology. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 221. Later, Siegfried Kracauer offered a slightly decanted version of these revolutionary goals. In his 1960 book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), Kracauer sit - uates society in a state of abstraction—bereft of the bygone unifying belief structures. Echoing Benjamin, Kracauer grants cinema an intrinsic ability to awaken audience consciousness of reality— hence countering societal abstraction with the reintroduced material. For Kracauer, this was not really an awakening from ideology. He claimed that societal abstraction had made the conditions of the time postideological. Rather, cinema could reintroduce to consciousness the material realities that were, then, newly available in the wake of ideology’s disintegration (287–296). More recently, many of the realist theories of cinema on which these connections between movies and the city have been based have come under increasing scrutiny. Among the common criticism of these theories are claims that they generalize urbanism, a concept as varied as are individual cities, into a homogenous entity. Another criticism is that the once avant-garde filmic techniques that these theories entail have
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 been appropriated by popular media. 6. See Benjamin, “Work of Art.” 7. John V. Lindsay, Speech at the Urban American Conference in Washington, DC, 12 September 1966, in Folder 153, Box 63, John V. Lindsay Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. 8. Donald H. Elliott, Critical Issues, vol. 1 of The Plan for the City of New York (New York: New York City Planning Commission, 1971), 4. 9. Lindsay, Speech, 12 September 1966. 10. Elliott, Critical Issues, 4. 11. A 1 November 1968 memo from John Lindsay to the commission explained that a record allowance of $400 million for capital improvements was being provided to the commission in 1969. Nevertheless, this record budget amounted to only one quarter of the $1.6 billion the commission required. Memorandum, by John Lindsay to the City Planning Commission, 1 November 1968, in Roll A-6, John Lindsay Microfilm, New York City Municipal Archive. 12. Elliott, Critical Issues, 23. 13. Carter Horsley, “The Sixties,” in Planning the Future of New York City, 29–36. The Model Cities program was created in 1966 as part of President Johnson’s war on poverty. The program was administered by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and was meant to improve and fund the coordination of existing federally funded urban programs, such as Urban Renewal, with locally produced planning. The program advocated the participation of local citizens in the planning process and extended beyond the physical aspects of the city to fund the delivery of social services. 14. James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 343. Exceptions did occur, most notably Jules Dassin’s 1948 film noir The Naked City. With much fanfare, and nearly twenty years after the studios relocated to Hollywood, the film brought mass location shooting to Manhattan. At the time, the film was widely understood to be remarkable in its insistence on location shooting. After the film studios moved to Hollywood, productions that were fictionally set in New York were usually shot on back-lot re-creations of the city that had been built at great expense and detail by major studios such as Paramount and 20th Century Fox. Films from this period include classics such as RKO’s Swing Time (1936, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949). Narratives set within New York remained com - mon and quite popular. The popularity of these films made the possibility of returning to location shooting in New York all the more attractive when the opportunity arose. See Sanders, 44–84, for a description of the major studio’s efforts in re-creating New York in the art departments and back-lots of Hollywood. 15. From the advent of the sound film in the 1920s until the development of the directional micro - phone, noise pollution was the most immediate detriment to shooting in the city. In California, where construction space was abundant, sealed soundstages became a more appropriate shooting location. See Sanders, 44–45. 16. Sanders, 341. 17. “New York—The Big Set,” Newsweek, 29 May 1967, 86–87. 18. “Movie Men Like Our Town: ‘It’s Alive,’” World Journal Tribune, 23 April 1967.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 19. Remarks by Mayor John V. Lindsay at the opening luncheon for the 1966 convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, 28 September 1966, Folder 167, Box 63, John V. Lindsay Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. The initial officers in the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting included three unpaid “consultants”: Russell Downing, manager of Radio City Music Hall; David Garth, an actor; and Franklin Weissberg, an entertainment lawyer and U.S. district court judge. The office also had one paid adviser to the mayor, Barry Gottehrer. 20. Remarks by Mayor John V. Lindsay at the opening luncheon for the 1966 convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, 28 September 1966. 21. “Movie Men Like Our Town.” 22. “Cinema City Planned for Old Garden Site,” New York Times, 8 March 1966. Cinema Center was funded by Irving Michael Felt, president of the Madison Square Garden Corporation and brother of former City Planning Commission chairman James Felt. 23. “New York—The Big Set,” 86–87. 24. “Mayor Lindsay Charms H’wood, But Did He Sell ’Em N.Y. as Location?” Variety Magazine, 22 November 1967. 25. Briefing to Mayor Lindsay on the proceedings of the MPAA’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of the motion picture, 10 April 1969, Folder 854, Box 83, John V. Lindsay Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. 26. Lindsay, in fact, went on to play the role of Senator Donnovan in Otto Preminger’s 1975 film Rosebud. Preminger’s previous film, Such Good Friends (1971), was filmed in New York under the stewardship of Executive Order 10. 27. “For the Movie-Makers,” World Journal Tribune, 23 April 1967. 28. “Watch Out—,” American Way 1, no. 3, 7 –9. 29. “Koch Predicts Astoria Studio Rebirth,” New York Times, 6 September 1980, 12. The economic boon for New York from Lindsay’s policies was not limited to direct tax revenues on film productions. A 1968 article on the mayor’s work to bring film to the city appeared in American Way, the American Airlines Magazine, directly indicating the cross-pollination of Lindsay’s policy and tourism within the city. The article points to the recent shooting of Up the Down Staircase as an enticement for trav - elers to spend their next vacation, and their money, in New York: “It was a ball for the fortunate tourists and natives who happened in on the beautiful Miss Dennis while she was at work. And there will be many more such happenings in and around the landmarks of New York.” “Watch Out—,” 8. 30. “Sidney Lumet: Prince of the City,” New York Times, 7 June 1984, 17. 31. David Parkinson, History of Film (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 221. Industry ticket sales were $900 million in 1962. 32. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 26. 33. James, 26–27. 34. This was the year that Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra debuted. The film was a major financial disappointment for 20th Century Fox. 35. John V. Lindsay, The City (New York: Norton, 1970), 50–60. This was not an isolated argument for Lindsay. He repeated it on several occasions, including at a 1966 speech at the Urban American
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 Conference in Washington, DC. See Lindsay, Speech, 12 September 1966. 36. Lindsay, The City, 50. 37. Horsley, 31. 38. See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1992). 39. Horsley, 32; emphasis added. 40. The document was required of the commission in order to be eligible for federally funded programs. 41. John V. Lindsay to Dr. E. Land, President of the Polaroid Company, 22 August 1967, in Roll A-7, John Lindsay Microfilm, New York City Municipal Archive. 42. Letters from John V. Lindsay to Joan Davidson (22 August 1967), Dr. E. Land (29 August 1967), Louis Eilers (29 August 1967) and William S. Paley (22 August 1967), Roll A-7, John Lindsay Microfilm, New York City Municipal Archive. 43. “Now Is Our Great Opportunity!” New York Times , n.d. Newspaper clipping in Roll A-7, John Lindsay Microfilm, New York City Municipal Archive. 44. Other members of the task force were James M. Clark, a noted New York businessman; Joan K. Davidson, trustee and president of the Kaplan Fund; Eli Jacobs, a lawyer and bureaucrat; George Lindsay, a lawyer and the mayor’s brother; and Mrs. Albert A. List, wife of the founder of the Albert A. List foundation. 45. Some have suggested that Paley’s selection was related to his funding of Paley Park, a “vest- pocket park” designed by Robert Zion, that the network executive built in dedication to his late father, Samuel Paley. The public park was built on privately owned land on Fifty-third Street at Madison Avenue and was praised by architecture critics who marveled at its successful opening. See, for example, Maurice Carroll, “Paley Park: A Corner of Quiet Delights amid City’s Bustle,” New York Times, 20 September 1967. The park’s successful opening, however, was over a year away when the mayor assembled the Task Force on Urban Design in 1966. Thus, if Paley Park was influential in the executive’s appointment to lead the task force, that influence must have had more to do with the perceived merits of the private sector taking ownership of the public realm than with specific design credentials. The motives CBS might have entertained for intervening in the public realm must be care - fully considered. Paley’s gift to the city could be read both as a method of ingratiating himself with a cash-starved administration whose policies could effect the success of his film production ventures and as a method of grooming the stage on which his network soon planned to make movies. The latter possibility is consistent with the ideology manifested in many of the design suggestions made by the task force. 46. The CBS documentaries were most recently viewed at a series of screenings hosted by the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America in early 2006. The films are the property of CBS and have not been released for general sale or rental. I have not been able to procure copies of the films from CBS. My analysis is based on information from attendees of the 2006 screenings. 47. The planning commission was partially responsible for this wave of development. In 1960, after years of negotiation with real-estate interests, the commission passed a new zoning resolution to reflect decreased assessments of future population. The revision stipulated far lower maximum square footage figures for midtown lots and was poised to infuriate influential members of the New
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 York real-estate industry. To assuage these interests, the new zoning revision allowed a one-year grace period for compliance with the new resolution. As a result, 1961 witnessed an unprecedented onslaught of submitted plans from developers intent on securing permits under the old zoning reg - ulations. The building boom that followed dramatically changed Midtown Manhattan throughout the 1960s—robbing the city of what many later valued as a prized architectural heritage. 48. See “TV: Focus on New York,” New York Times, 22 September 1961. 49. In a sense, Paley was being asked to do for New York what he had done for CBS since pur - chasing it in September 1928. Scholars of design have noted that Paley was an innovator in his use of branding and imagery in building CBS from a minor radio station into a national television giant. The careful branding of CBS and its corporate environments under Paley’s supervision was instru - mental in popularizing the network with the viewing audience through its designed image. The CBS “eye” logo and its iconic Eero Saarinen –designed headquarters in New York are examples of this careful aesthetic curation. See Dennis P. Doordon, “Design at CBS,” Design Issues 6, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 4–17. Our Vanishing Legacy proved that a similar strategy of influencing popular opinion through imagery could be applied to the urban environment. 50. The Thre atened City is structured in four parts. The first section, “The Troubles,” diagnoses the problems with the urban environment; the second section, “Opportunities,” attempts to highlight areas rife for change; the third section, “Towards a Method,” begins to explicate a new juridical struc - ture for city planning; and the final section, “Proposals,” suggests policy changes. William S. Paley et al., The Threatened City: A Report on the Design of the City of New York (New York: 1967). 51. Paley et al., 4. 52. Paley et al., 9. 53. Paley et al., 10. 54. Paley et al., 27. In order to ensure that the content of its report was implemented as policy, the task force made two major suggestions for changes to the juridical structure of planning in New York City. First, the task force suggested the creation of the Urban Design Council, a group of aesthetic- minded citizens who could advise the mayor on issues of urban design. This council was established with William S. Paley as its first chairman and with I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson as members. The second major suggestion was for the establishment of the Urban Design Group, a cadre of elite pro - fessionals whose purpose was to take a proactive stance toward urban design in the city. While the planning commission typically limited its intervention with the built environment to abstract zon - ing, the Urban Design Group could more adeptly ensure that the visual issues privileged in The Threatened City were codified into policy by proposing substantive revisions or countersuggestions to privately planned development in the city. Again, the mayor accepted this juridical suggestion, and the Urban Design Group was created with Jaquelin Robertson as its first head. Throughout the 1970s the Urban Design Group was instrumental in drafting a series of planning policies in which the emphasis on urban aesthetics, views, and visual order originating in the task force were codified as policy. 55. Paley et al., 38. 56. Paley et al., 4. 57. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 4.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 58. Lynch, 4. 59. The introduction to The Threatened City, in which the proto-cinematic experience of the sky - line from the peripheral routes of transportation is lauded, also smacks of Lynch’s influence. Lynch’s 1964 addendum to The Image of the City , The View from the Road (with Donald Appleyard and John R. Myer), provides storyboards of precisely this type of proto-cinematic experience of the urban imaginary from the periphery. See Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 3–63. 60. CBS films were produced under the pseudonym Cinema Center Films. 61. William H. Whyte was the author of the 1956 indictment of American corporate culture, The Organizational Man, and was an active employee within Lindsay’s planning commission from 1966–1969. Whyte, or “Holly” to his associates, was an uncredited ghostwriter of the 1969 Pl an and was involved in developing its content throughout its creation. Donald Elliott, interview by author, 9 February 2007. 62. Beverly Moss Spatt, “Dissenting Report of Commissioner Spatt,” in Elliott, Critical Issues, 174. See Beverly Moss Spatt, A Proposal to Change the Structure of City Planning; Case Study of New York City (New York: Praeger, 1971), 39–48, for a more complete summary of the commissioner’s dis - sentions from the 1969 Pl an for New York City. See the Journal of the American Institute of Planners 36, no. 6 (November 1970): 436–449, for a series of reviews of the 1969 Plan. In that issue, critics including Ada Louise Huxtable, Beverly Moss Spatt, Sigurd Grava, Paul Niebanck, and Marcia Marker Feld contribute to the nearly unanimous opinion that the 1969 Pl an, while sometimes ambi - tious in its suggestions, was lacking in substantive analysis and detailed plans for execution. The most thorough sections of the Pl an actually only re-present preexisting policy and proposals. For example, the design completed in 1966 for Lower Manhattan was reprinted within the 1969 Pl an. The 1966 Lower Manhattan Plan was contracted to the firm of Wallace, McHarg, Todd, and Roberts while William Ballard was chair of the planning commission and included substantial analysis and design work. Likewise, design work for Midtown by the Office of Midtown Planning and Development was reprinted in the 1969 Pl an. Beyond these and a handful of other examples, detailed projective analysis is conspicuously missing from the Manhattan volume of the 1969 Pl an. 63. Spatt, “Dissenting Report,” in Elliott, Critical Issues , 174. 64. The Pl an’ s authors note, “New York City must be made more legible. The signs and the munic - ipal furniture on its streets—lamp posts, utility poles, trashbaskets—come in every conceivable size, material, typography, and color.” Elliott, Critical Issues, 150. Later, the plan derides city engineers for their lack of visual sensitivity on bridge design, noting, “They [the bridges] are great structures, but for some reason the engineers managed to contrive the railings and abutments at just the angle to blot out for people some of the most spectacular vistas in the whole world” (151). Even the 1965 passage of the Landmarks Law, which the Pl an highlights, is symptomatic of the commission’s ten - dency to operate on the image of the city: the law preserved only the paper-thin appearance of build - ings as they might register on celluloid, while expressing no concern for the interior of structures, much less the programmatic and functional aspects of planning expected by Spatt. As is the case for the content of The Thre atened City, the importance granted the imagable—and fundamentally filmable—aspects of the city in the Pl an assume heightened significance in light of the city’s con -
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 current efforts to attract film productions. With the onslaught of film activity, the privilege granted the directly experienced image of the city in situating the urban subject within New York might be extended to encompass the mediated image of the city that was captured by the films attracted by the mayor’s executive order. 65. The text falls under the recurrent headings of population, neighborhood character, institu - tions, industry, shopping, and recreations. The text is more conversational than analytic and rarely asserts firm planning trajectories. 66. Among the few concrete suggestions within the Pl an was to divide the once monolithically planned city into sixty-two discrete community-planning districts. Copies of the massive picture books were distributed to each of the planning districts, where citizens were invited to review the volumes and engage with its content through imagery. Horsley, 33. Based on these reviews, New Yorkers formed opinions of the merits of the Pl an. On the whole, these opinions were quite negative, as local neighborhood representatives were wary of top-down governmental models of which they assumed the massive Pl an was demonstrative. Thus, by the mid-1970s much of the Pl an had been superceded by a series of smaller, decentralized neighborhood initiatives that were formed around feedback from community groups. Ironically, such decentralization and community involvement was the intent of the 1969 Pl an. This interest in decentralization in the planning process in New York arrived with ideas about urban and cultural ecology. See Lawrence Halprin, New York, New York (San Francisco: Chapman Press, 1968), a report commissioned by the city with federal grant money. Halprin never worked directly with the planning commission, and while some of the ideas within New York, New York reappear in the 1969 Pl an, he is not credited. 67. Donald H. Elliott, Manhattan, vol. 2 of The Pl an for the City of New York (New York: New York City Planning Commission, 1971), 75. 68. For a theoretical discussion of synecdoche, see Kracauer, 45–52; and Sergei Eisenstein, “Methods of Montage,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory , ed. and tr. Jay Leyda (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1977), 72 –83. For a discussion of the aerial as a spatializing agent, see Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 36–47. 69. The title is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The line, from act III, scene 1, is spoken by Sicinius in reference to Rome. 70. I received a copy of What Is the City but the People? on 16 mm from Donald Elliott. To my knowledge, the film was never widely released and was screened only once—in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. 71. See John R. Gold and Stephen Ward, “Of Plans and Planners: Documentary Film and the Challenge of the Urban Future, 1935–1952,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke, 59–82 (London: Routledge, 1997). 72. The structure of this introductory scene, with details of events in the city montaged against the aerial view, bears striking resemblance to the introductory scene to Jules Dassin’s 1948 film noir, The Naked City. Dassin’s introductory scene even features the sound of the helicopter propeller in the soundtrack (as does the planning commission’s film). In 1948, Dassin’s film was quite remarkable for its insistence on location shooting; it was the first film to do so in such volume in twenty-two
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 years. As in What Is the City but the People? the insistence on location shooting in the Naked City reflected the filmmaker’s intent to reveal to the film viewer the realities of New York street life. 73. Another aspect of this montage sequence resonates from the unsettling images of urban vio - lence and destruction depicted. The treatment of such abject conditions of city life is prevalent throughout What Is The City but the People? and, as in the highly aestheticized opening montage sequence, these depictions are often presented through sophisticated cinematic rhetoric. As a result, despite the opening sequence’s sober condemnation of the urban conditions depicted, the images evince an unmistakable allure—presenting the disarray of the city more in the manner of a Hollywood production, or even an avant-garde film, than in the deadpan didactic style of the evening news. The effects of the dystopian urban imagery used by the planning commission are a topic of concurrent scholarship by this author and are analyzed in the context of contemporaneous dystopian depictions of New York in Hollywood releases, gentrification patterns, and what Slavoj Zizek has called the “passion for the real.” See Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (New York: Verso, 2002), 5–33, for a discussion of the desire for the real, its semblance, and the “effect” of the real. 74. In a 9 February 2007 interview with Donald Elliott, the former planning commission chair - man recounted William Whyte’s contribution to the 1969 Pl an. Elliott indicated that while Whyte originally was hired primarily for his literary abilities, he was a man with strong opinions that were regularly voiced. Elliott stated that Whyte was not the primary ideologue behind the 1969 Pl an but admitted that after years of collaboration Whyte had a profound ideological effect on the work of the commission. 75. William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 3. 76. Whyte, 4. 77. Whyte, 116. 78. Whyte, 108. 79. See Kracauer, 159–160, for one such description of the cinema spectator. Philosopher Stanley Cavell has offered another. See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 75. 80. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 456–491, for a concise history of the emergence of apparatus theory in Cahiers du Cinema, as well as the influence of Althusserian Marxism and psychoanalysis therein. 81. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1977), 7. According to Metz, the goal of the film industry is to create “good object relations” within its audi - ence—to create image-objects that prompt positive cathexes from the viewing public. This fact becomes a point of elision, a shared ambition, between the psychic composition of the audience and the financial composition of the film industry. This elided entity is what Metz terms the “cinematic institution.” Metz writes, “Let me insist once again, the cinema institution is not just the cinema industry (which works to fill cinemas, not to empty them), it is also the mental machinery—another industry—which spectators ‘accustomed to the cinema’ have internalized historically and which has adapted them to the consumption of films.” Metz, 7. 82. “A technique of the imaginary, but in two senses. In the ordinary sense of the word, as a whole
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 critical tendency culminating in the work of Edgar Morin has demonstrated, because most films consist of fictional narratives and because all films depend even for their signifier on the primary imaginary of photography and phonography. In the Lacanian sense, too, in which the imaginary, opposed to the symbolic but constantly imbricated with it, designates the basic lure of the ego, the definitive imprint of a stage before the Oedipus complex (which also continues after it), the durable mark of the mirror which alienates man in his own reflection and makes him the double of his dou - ble, the subterranean persistence of the exclusive relation to the mother, desire as a pure effect of lack and endless pursuit, the initial core of the conscious (primal repression).” Metz, 3–4. Metz’s work concentrates on the latter, the Lacanian, sense of the imaginary, springing from Metz’s earlier interpretation of Lacan’s mirror-stage analysis. Elaborating on Lacan, Metz notes the point in an infant’s development when the mother stands next to the child in front of the mirror and the infant is forced to identify with both the ego-ideal and, secondarily, the reflected image of the other (44). This secondary identification is critical for understanding cinema, which acts as a “kind of mirror” wherein the ego-ideal is not present (45). Cinema builds on Metz’s corollary to the mirror-stage in which the infant and mother both appear reflected by creating a situation that is analogous to a mir - ror-stage in which one’s reflection is no longer present—leaving the secondary identification of other- as- image to be negotiated by the cinema spectator. Metz concludes that this situation is dealt with by the spectator through a primary identification of self-as-vision—through an understanding of self as a seeing mechanism that allows one to individuate in relation to the images on screen. Hence, the Metzian imaginary is fundamentally an extension of Lacanian concepts of subjective individuation through images as exemplified in the infant’s relation to reflected images in the mirror-stage. Metz’s corollary to the mirror-stage training is the beginning of a malleable internalization that allows one to have object relations with the imaginary objects of cinema, thus enabling subjective identification in relation to the conventions of the imaginary on the movie screen. 83. “It [cinema] also exists as our product, the product of the society which consumes it, as an orientation of consciousness, whose roots are unconscious, and without which we would be unable to understand the overall trajectory which founds the institution and accounts for its continuing exis - tence.” Metz, 93. 84. That Mayor Lindsay or anyone on his staff was familiar with theories of the cinematic insti - tution is unlikely. However, the mayor’s economic manipulation of Hollywood production is illus - trative of precisely the type of institutional determinism that was at issue in this type of film theory. That the administration’s policies were being drafted at precisely the moment that apparatus theory was beginning to take hold within the academic film community is not a coincidence. Further, through this line of thought one can understand how the mayor’s quest to modify popular opinion of New York through urban narratives—and subsequently the material city—might be achieved by Executive Order 10.
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