Bounded by 57th Street to the south and 64th Street to the north and stretching from Amsterdam Avenue to the Hudson River in the heart of the Upper West Side, San Juan Hill was a center of Black cultural life in New York City and later a multi-ethnic working-class community. It was demolished to make way for construction of the “Lincoln Square Renewal Project,” which included construction of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, an expansion of Fordham University, and eight high-rise luxury apartment buildings under the city’s slum clearance/urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s. The project included space for the Philharmonic Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York State Theater, the Vivian Beaumont Theater, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Julliard School. While the Lincoln Center development helped to reaffirm New York’s status as a world-class cultural capital during the mid-twentieth century, it displaced between 13,000 and 15,000 people.
Led by planner Robert Moses, New York carried out the largest urban renewal program in the U.S., accounting for more than a third of all slum clearance and urban renewal construction activity in the country. The Lincoln Square Renewal Project was the city’s biggest at 45 acres (the average size of urban renewal projects in Manhattan during this period was 16 acres), and perhaps the most influential of such projects across the national stage. At Lincoln Square, Moses sought to expand the city’s cultural and educational institutions, as well as its middle class housing, all as a counterweight to mass suburbanization (which, ironically, many of his other infrastructure projects facilitated; see Bridges, Tunnels and Expressways essay).
Moses’ goals required razing communities like San Juan Hill. By 1950, white ethnics (primarily Italian, Irish, German, Russian, and Greek) shared the neighborhood with Puerto Rican and Black residents, who made up about a quarter of the San Juan Hill’s population. Indeed, San Juan Hill was the setting for the 1957 musical West Side Story, whose gang rivalry between the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks depicts the tensions that arose in such a diverse community during this time.
But in general it was a stable neighborhood, home to a diverse economy and a cultural center in its own right. For example, the Lincoln Arcade building on Broadway between 65th and 66th Streets (now home to the Julliard School) held a bowling alley, a theater, various shops, lawyers, dentists, fortune-tellers, detective agencies, dance studios, artists’ studios, and residents. It had also been a home to some of the Ashcan School of realist painters—an art movement that depicted everyday life of New Yorkers, particularly the city’s poor.
Yet the city’s Committee on Slum Clearance declared the area a “slum” by the 1950s, citing rundown housing stock and many apartments without complete bathrooms, central heat, or hot water. Building owners had very little incentive to repair or upgrade the dwellings—the federal government and private banks refused to lend for mortgages or repairs in the entire area given its diverse, polyglot, congested mix of New Yorkers.
The federal urban renewal program, which provided funds for slum clearance and new construction, stemmed from the belief that “slums” were cancers on the city, costing the city excessive tax dollars, fostering deplorable living conditions, and perhaps most importantly, blocking new private development of prime central-city land. Meanwhile, venerable institutions of the arts and high culture, like the Metropolitan Opera and Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, badly needed updated facilities in New York’s competitive real estate market.
Moses partnered with well-connected wealthy elites, including John D. Rockefeller III, to envision the Lincoln Square Renewal Project. Leveraging about $45 million in public funds, Rockefeller, Moses, and their allies raised more than $140 million from private sources for the massive project. The federal slum clearance/urban renewal programs in the postwar era, including the Lincoln Square Project, thus laid the foundation for the first experiments with public-private partnerships—the dominant mode of urban redevelopment today. Under Moses’ leadership, the city selected renewal sites like San Juan Hill, bought or seized the land, relocated any residents, demolished whatever stood on the land, and then sold it to private developers. The land that would eventually hold Lincoln Center was sold by the city to private developers well below market value because the project was believed to serve a public purpose—to drive up neighboring property values and spur nearby economic development.
The Lincoln Square project did not proceed without resistance. Two groups organized collective opposition to the renewal project: the Lincoln Square Residents’ Committee, organized and led by neighborhood women, and the Lincoln Square Businessmen’s Committee. Neither group was opposed to slum clearance in principle, but they did assert that it should be accompanied by sufficient relocation opportunities and compensation. Their efforts were a particularly high profile component of a larger, loosely organized opposition to Moses’ heavy-handed approach to urban renewal across the city, most notably spearheaded by journalist and activist Jane Jacobs.
But there was simply not enough housing in the city to provide for the displaced, and not enough money devoted to relocation services. In 1960 alone, the city was short nearly half a million units for relocation of tenants from renewal sites. Sites were also being cleared for highways and public housing, displacing thousands of other individuals and families. Public housing construction did not meet demand. And while all New Yorkers were affected by the shortage and corresponding prices, Black New Yokers were hurt most, as discrimination in the housing market further limited the supply and drove prices even higher for the city’s Black population. While there is no known reliable record of what happened to the rest of the population displaced by the Lincoln Square project, one survey of the first 500 evicted families showed that 70% moved out of the Upper West Side, their rent increased by an average of 25%, and only 1 in 10 moved into public housing.
Ultimately, Moses oversaw 17 urban renewal projects citywide: 13 in Manhattan, 2 in Brooklyn, and 2 in Queens, including the New York Coliseum, the United Nations headquarters, Shea Stadium, and the Fordham, Pratt, and Long Island University campuses, among others. An unknown number of New Yorkers were displaced for these projects; our best estimates suggest around a half a million in addition to the quarter of a million people displaced for Moses’ highway projects (See Entry # East Tremont and Bridges, Tunnels, and Expressways.)
Further reading:
Ballon, Hilary, and Kenneth T. Jackson. 2008. Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. New York: W. W. Norton.
Zipp, Samuel. 2010. Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. Oxford: Oxford University Press.