#suburbanization

Conoco Philips Headquarters, Houston, Texas. Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates, 1986. 

From the Civil War through World War II, cities generated the vast majority of the Garden State’s wealth, thus attracting the lion’s share of investment and skilled workers, as well as its factories, commercial establishments, and entertainment venues.

In 1909, the City of Newark alone employed over 20 percent of the entire state’s population and was the source of one-fourth of all wages earned in New Jersey.

After World War II, new home construction gravitated towards cheaper and more abundant suburban land. While most heavy industry remained anchored in large cities, by the 1960s companies began opening satellite offices, or moved their headquarters to suburban office parks.

This migration away from urban cores resulted from numerous factors, including changing manufacturing trends, lower property tax rates, and rising inequality and social unrest.

Passage of the National Highway Act of 1956 further encouraged residential and business development away from cities and into previously agricultural land.

As suburban counties attracted new businesses and workers, the construction of Interstates 80 and 287 helped create a suburban “wealth belt” from northeastern to central New Jersey, which benefited from all aspects of America’s post-industrial economy.

From the 1960s through the 1970s, Morris County’s corporate parks manufactured electronics, petrochemicals, aviation instruments, and pharmaceuticals. During this period, the “wealth belt” grew to employ 50 percent of all workers in the state. Overall, 2.1 million individuals now worked in Bergen, Passaic, Morris, Somerset, Union, Middlesex, and Monmouth counties.

Warner-Lambert was the first corporate enterprise to move its headquarters to Morris County, relocating from Brooklyn to Morris Plains in 1947. Here, the company developed and manufactured medical devices and consumer products such as Listerine, cough syrups, antacids, chewing gum, mints, and other products, generating sales of $1.25 billion in 1970. By 1983, its staff of 3,000 made it one of the county’s largest employers.

The Mennen Company found its start as a Newark drugstore, opening in 1878 on the corner of Broad Street and Central Avenue. The small business made a name for itself marketing high-quality talcum powder, sold in a convenient metal container with a shaker built into the lid.

As the company grew, Mennen moved its headquarters in 1953 to a modern Morris Township facility that manufactured deodorant, shampoo, aftershave, fragrances, and baby powder. Mennen remained a family company through the early 1980s, and prided itself on valuing its 2,000 employees as much as the quality of its products.

The Thomas Leeming Company began as a small manufacturer of antiseptic and analgesic ointments originally developed by Parisian Doctor Bengue. Leeming purchased the rights to market it in the United States as Ben-Gay Ointment.

After moving to Parsippany from Union City in 1958, the Leeming Company merged with Pfizer in 1961. By 1982, Pfizer sales surpassed $100 million, with products ranging from medical products to Barbasol shaving cream to Visine eye drops.

A series of mergers and acquisitions in following decades made Pfizer one of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, with 2018 revenue of more than $53 billion.

By 1980, the list of companies migrating westward from New York City to establish headquarters or satellite offices in Morris County included: AT&T, Exxon, Nabisco, Silver Burdett Co., Weichert Realtors, Artisan Electronics, Allied Chemical and Dye Corp., and 40 other Fortune 500 companies.

Through this decade these companies created more than 173 million square feet of office space in suburban north and central New Jersey.

Corporate parks and light manufacturing defined Morris County’s industrial base for decades, even as individual companies merged with larger corporations, or continued to pursue new manufacturing technologies and alternate labor forces elsewhere.

Some businesses, such as Weichert Realtors, Novartis, and GAF Materials Corporation, continue to operate in the area. The site of other longtime companies, like Morris Township’s Mennen facility and Honeywell campus, have found a new life as mixed residential- and retail developments.

Sources:

Joseph A. Grabas, Owning New Jersey: Historic Tales of War, Property Disputes, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014

Maxine Lurie and Richard Viet, eds. New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 2012

Dorrianne R. Perrucci, Morris County: the Progress of Its Legend, Woodland Hills, CA; Windsor Publications, 1983

The collections of the North Jersey History & Genealogy Center, Morristown & Morris Township Library

HOUSTON AFTER HURRICANE HARVEY:  How urban planning (or lack thereof), contributed to the “natural” disaster

Since Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and other parts of the Gulf Coast in August 2017, a debate has arisen in the press and urban planning sites about the role of local policy in the flooding. While there was going to be massive flooding with a weather event of this magnitude, there is broad agreement among that enlightenedNew York Times, 11 NOV. 2017 urban planning and public policy could have lessened the severity of the environmental devastation to some degree.

Despite the appeal of unregulated growth in what has been called “free-enterprise city,” it is time for Houston and other large metropolises to reflect on their growth patterns and see how to conserve environments that contribute to resilience, while protecting residents’ lives, health, homes and real-estate investments. Ed Glaeser, the Harvard economist and author of “Triumph of the City” says that Houston could restrict housing in its flood plains and preserve more open space from development without substantially raising housing costs. 

An excellent review of the lessons from Hurricane Harvey in Houston by Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times (11 NOV. 2017), from which the map above is drawn, also includes the following commentary:

The story of Harvey, Houston and the city’s difficult path forward is a quintessentially American tale. Time and again, America has bent the land to its will, imposing the doctrine of Manifest Destiny on nature’s most daunting obstacles. We have bridged the continent with railways and roads, erected cities in the desert, and changed the course of rivers.

Built on a mosquito-infested Texas swamp, Houston similarly willed itself into a great city. It is the country’s energy capital, home to oil and carbon-producing giants, to the space industry, medical research and engineers of every stripe. Its sprawl of highways and single-family homes is a postwar version of the American dream.

Unfortunately, nature always gets the last word. Houston’s growth contributed to the misery Harvey unleashed. The very forces that pushed the city forward are threatening its way of life.

Sprawl is only part of the story. Houston is also built on an upbeat, pro-business strategy of low taxes and little government. Many Texans regard this as the key to prosperity, an antidote to Washington. It encapsulates a potent vision of an unfettered America.

Harvey called that concept into question. It may have been an unusually bad hurricane, dumping trillions of gallons of water in a few days, even more to the east of the city than to the west, in the prairie, and setting all kinds of records. But it was also the third big storm to slam Houston in three years, dispelling any notion that Houston shouldn’t expect more of the same.

Conoco Philips Headquarters, Houston, Texas. Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates, 1986.

The Los Angeles School discussed in class compelled me to recall my recent experience travelling to Los Angeles with my best friends. With a focus on postmodernism, the Los Angeles School suggested a new urban model defined by fragmented and split urban growth and the decline of metropolitan centers. This hypothesis offers a different way of viewing city growth compared to Burgess’s Concentric-Zone Hypothesis (a product of the Chicago School), which suggested that industrial cities grew radially through a series of concentric zones.

One thing that struck me while planning my trip to Los Angeles is how Los Angeles has multiple core areas in the periphery and not strictly in Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA). It seems like a city composed of a sum of disconnected cores, each with its unique character, and devoid of traditional city centers. I could see how automobiles must have been an essential factor in the development of Los Angeles, given that I find it particularly difficult to commute from one core area or suburb to another with public transport. I also recall how amazed I was to see how incredibly diverse and multicultural Los Angeles is. This is consistent with what Charles Jencks said about Los Angeles, whereby “No single ethnic group, nor way of life, nor industrial sector, dominates the scene.” (Palen’s book, p. 76)

As I walked on the streets of DTLA during my trip, I noticed that office buildings, banks, and hotels dominate most spaces. While there are still a few departmental stores left like Macy’s, in my eyes, the retail scene is not as vibrant as I would have imagined in a big city. This observation aligns with our discussion in class about the out-movement of offices, manufacturing, retail trade, and people from the center city to the periphery areas (i.e., suburbs). The opening of large shopping centers like Valley Plaza and Lakewood Center was widespread in the county as massive suburbanization took off after World War II. By the 1960s, Los Angeles residents didn’t find the need to go to DTLA anymore to shop.  

Decentralization of economic activities and housing to locations outside of DTLA have certainly taken place in the City of Angels. Take Anaheim on the outskirts of Los Angeles, for example. While it is still part of Los Angeles County, it is a core area of its own and is popularly known for its theme parks. Another example that is integral to the Los Angeles School Hypothesis is Santa Monica which boasts itself of being the home to the headquarters of many businesses, tourist attractions, shopping districts, and real estates, despite being quite a distance from DTLA. Century City is also an example of an edge city that is a thriving business and commerce city outside of DTLA. It is anchored by a 1.3 million-square-feet outdoor shopping mall called Westfield Century City and is very much automobile-dependent.

While the Los Angeles School of Thoughts might be a better representation of the urban sprawl in Los Angeles today, this video showing the growth of Los Angeles from 1877 to 2000 made me think about how Burgess’s Concentric-Zone Hypothesis might have come into play in the city, especially in the early 20th century. Some articles I read also confirmed that the small towns that emerged in the early 1900s centered around the economically booming DTLA. Eventually, a 1,100-mile streetcar system came into the area, establishing an urban footprint there. I remember walking from our hotel in DTLA to Little Tokyo and observing how the buildings were gradually shorter as we walked further away from the financial district of DTLA. The financial district of DTLA can be best described as Zone I—the Central Business District. On the other hand, neighborhoods like Chinatown, Koreatown, and Little Tokyo are reflective of Zone 2—the zone in transition—since they were “immigrant settlements”. I believe that, in the early 1900s, there might be the influence of an urban growth pattern similar to the one described by Burgess when Los Angeles was a relatively small area. However, it was fascinating to see how, in the video, there seems to be concentric growth from different cores in Los Angeles (not necessarily the center city), especially after the 1940s, affirming the Los Angeles School of Thoughts Hypothesis.

Suburbanization

the advent of automobiles

Federal policy 

During this time period suburbanization was taking place and a few things were at work that kept blacks and other minorities from accessing wealth. From which owning a home in this time period whites were able to hoard generational wealth and were incentivized to own a home because of the tax write offs. Many of the federal aid provided went to constructing newer homes in the suburbs because of migration of blacks and immigrants to urban areas. Even if migration was only assumed and not realized, whites moved to the suburbs. Urban Renewal or as Timuel Black would say “Negro Removal” cities had given Eminent Domain to Landlords to remove their residents as long as the Landlord was properly compensated. Urban areas were largely black, as America had a declining immigrant population because this era immigrants were restricted to their county because of geopolitical conditions and coming out of the depression, immigrant policy was halted https://www.uscis.gov/about-us/our-history/overview-of-agency-history/post-war-years#:~:text=Reforming%20Immigration%20Policy&text=The%201952%20law%20removed%20all,retained%20the%20national%20origins%20quotas.

Also with the advent of automobiles whites were able to move to the suburbs were the newer homes were being built, and access to those suburbs was via highways and expressways placed right over impoverished areas with a high population of blacks and/or migrants.  During this time period around 1945 people had been rationing their consumption and saving their monies at around 21%, and buy the wars end they were able to buy homes and appliances, cars and the such. Again, blacks were not able to enjoy these lavish luxuries, because of racist policy and redlining happening in this era. https://www.history.com/news/post-world-war-ii-boom-economy 

Redlining was purely racist and was adopted by the FHA from HOLC, who had constructed the Residential Survey map which served as a guideline of places to avoid for realtors and potential home owners, but also a tool of where to invest federal money. It was an assault on black wealth from many different industries, construction, realty, government aid, small business ownership, housing market. It also served as a social identifier as to whom was not worthy of respect, and dignity.