- Email: [email protected]
Working with Charles Abrams
Charles Abrams-Biographical
Notes
35
on Seventh Street to buy some honey; south from Astor Place, past a nondescript building that Abrams identified, with a wave of his hand, as the largest birdseed factory in the United States; to Waverly Place, with elegant, ornamented lofts that have so far escaped the wrecking ball; across Washington Square; and, at last, after a brief pause to savour Washington Mews, on to Abrams’ residence, a spacious house on Tenth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, where they lunched on the whitefish, pastrami, lox, pumpernickel, pickles, bagels, honey, and candies they had garnered along the route, feeling as pleased about this as do fishermen when they make a meal from their catch.
AnotherclosefriendenjoyedAbrams’conbination
of ‘man in thestreet’and intellectual:
Working with Charles Abrams JACQUELINE
TYRWHITT
I first met Charlie Abrams in London just after the war and he remained almost my closest friend in the USA until his death. I had met Catherine Bauer in 1945 and she asked Charlie to look me up when he came to Europe the next year. I was then deeply involved in an intensive training programme for men returning from the forces. It was a crash course to get them through the Town Planning Institute final examinations in three months flat-and we did get 177 through in seven consecutive three-month periods. Charlie was impressed and asked me to give a course of lectures at the New School of Social Research in New York. In 1947, the crash programme was completed, E.A.A. Rowse (former head of the School for Planning and Regional Reconstruction) was demobilized, and I went off to New York. Most of the time, I stayed with Charlie and Ruth at 18 West 10th Street, and we had a marvellous time. Charlie revelled in introducing a British WASP to New York. We walked everywhere: to the Bowery, in and out of the doss houses there, talking to the people and finding out where they came from - many of them relics of the railroad. One day he said: “Do you think rats have sex appeal? Let’s go and have a look at Harlem”. We went up and down tenements there asking about rat infestation. Charlie decided that “rat-bites-baby” had enough sex appeal for an article, and I was staggered to see elevator shafts choked with rubbish, on which the rats were feeding. We went to the wharfs, we went to Coney Island, we went slowly up 6th Avenue, watching how the different sections of the garment trade clustered together; here several blocks all with wedding dress shops, there only braids and buttons or underwear and shirts. We watched the workers, the buyers and the sellers sewing and hustling and pushing their wares on handcarts from shop to shop along the street. All the time Charlie kept up a running commentary on the work, the wages, and the buildings. I think he knew the date of almost every building in lower Manhattan and its history of use, from bank or church, to meeting hall or offices, to workshops or warehouses. We would notice the new uses of shops and buildings in an area that had changed from
36
Charles Ahrams-Biographical
Notes
being Jewish to Irish or black (not so many Puerto Ricans then). I remember one religious building that had started as a Lutheran church and then became a Synagogue. After that it became Orthodox Catholic and finally Roman Catholic. We speculated on the changes that would come to Third Avenue after the Elevated Railway was removed. Everything was serious, but everything was fun. Charlie could quip and joke about the grimmest things, but this did not prevent him from taking action to get things bettered, and he would interlard our casual conversations with people with useful advice and information, all the time making mental notes for Daily Post articles. The lectures at the New School of Social Research were also quite something. They were always held in the evening and the regular front bench of my audience included Lewis Mumford, Charlie, Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey. Charles Ascher and Clarence Stein were also frequent visitors. Most of the rest of the class were young students. Once the class was over Charlie would invite the group to 18 West 10th Street (the New School was on West 12th Street) and we would have drinks and nuts and talk away in his enormous drawing room until pretty late. Other evenings young law students from City College would come in. Charlie had studied and taught there. Among these were Charles Haar and Lloyd Rodwin. One evening I remember Zekendorff bringing in a young man with an architectural project to show Charlie. It was I.M. Pei with his first scheme for a cylindrical building with pieshaped apartments. He spread his plans out on the piano and Zekendorff became enthusiastic about a possible site. I thought how he and Charlie exemplified two contrasting Jewish ideals: Zekendorff like an expansive Solomon-in-all-his-glory and Charlie the articulate reformer-prophet. Charlie’s second book The Future of Housing had just come out to great acclaim, although-in his view -it was less important than his first book Revolution in Land, which had received very little attention. Both stood together at the end of an empty shelf: “One day I shall fill that shelf” said Charlie, and he did.
Bernard Taper concludes this account with aspects of Abrams’more in ternational concerns: THE WORLD
EXPERT
In 1953, just before Abrams began going on UN missions, he prepared, at the UN’s behest, a volume called Urban Land Problems and Policies, which was the first analysis of this complex subject on a worldwide scale. Although, in the numerous advisory missions he has undertaken to such countries as Kenya, Bolivia, the Philippines, Jamaica, and Nigeria, among others, he has been called on to deal with a wide variety of problems, he has discovered that there are some fundamental factors common to all. One such is the squatter problem, which he first gave advice on when he went to a mission to Pakistan in 1957. Squatters, he has found, are a vexatious and politically touchy matter in nearly all the cities of the developing world. Everywhere, armies of the homeless are invading vacant land, throwing up shacktowns overnight, and defying efforts to remove them. Theirs is, in Abrams’ phrase, “the trespass of desperation.” Squatters pose an especially serious problem for a developing country because their actions appear to threaten the duly constituted authority on which the state rests. Throughout the under-developed world, their numbers are staggering. In Karachi, at the time of Abrams’ visit, squatters made up about 30% of the city’s population, most of them being
Notes
35
on Seventh Street to buy some honey; south from Astor Place, past a nondescript building that Abrams identified, with a wave of his hand, as the largest birdseed factory in the United States; to Waverly Place, with elegant, ornamented lofts that have so far escaped the wrecking ball; across Washington Square; and, at last, after a brief pause to savour Washington Mews, on to Abrams’ residence, a spacious house on Tenth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, where they lunched on the whitefish, pastrami, lox, pumpernickel, pickles, bagels, honey, and candies they had garnered along the route, feeling as pleased about this as do fishermen when they make a meal from their catch.
AnotherclosefriendenjoyedAbrams’conbination
of ‘man in thestreet’and intellectual:
Working with Charles Abrams JACQUELINE
TYRWHITT
I first met Charlie Abrams in London just after the war and he remained almost my closest friend in the USA until his death. I had met Catherine Bauer in 1945 and she asked Charlie to look me up when he came to Europe the next year. I was then deeply involved in an intensive training programme for men returning from the forces. It was a crash course to get them through the Town Planning Institute final examinations in three months flat-and we did get 177 through in seven consecutive three-month periods. Charlie was impressed and asked me to give a course of lectures at the New School of Social Research in New York. In 1947, the crash programme was completed, E.A.A. Rowse (former head of the School for Planning and Regional Reconstruction) was demobilized, and I went off to New York. Most of the time, I stayed with Charlie and Ruth at 18 West 10th Street, and we had a marvellous time. Charlie revelled in introducing a British WASP to New York. We walked everywhere: to the Bowery, in and out of the doss houses there, talking to the people and finding out where they came from - many of them relics of the railroad. One day he said: “Do you think rats have sex appeal? Let’s go and have a look at Harlem”. We went up and down tenements there asking about rat infestation. Charlie decided that “rat-bites-baby” had enough sex appeal for an article, and I was staggered to see elevator shafts choked with rubbish, on which the rats were feeding. We went to the wharfs, we went to Coney Island, we went slowly up 6th Avenue, watching how the different sections of the garment trade clustered together; here several blocks all with wedding dress shops, there only braids and buttons or underwear and shirts. We watched the workers, the buyers and the sellers sewing and hustling and pushing their wares on handcarts from shop to shop along the street. All the time Charlie kept up a running commentary on the work, the wages, and the buildings. I think he knew the date of almost every building in lower Manhattan and its history of use, from bank or church, to meeting hall or offices, to workshops or warehouses. We would notice the new uses of shops and buildings in an area that had changed from
36
Charles Ahrams-Biographical
Notes
being Jewish to Irish or black (not so many Puerto Ricans then). I remember one religious building that had started as a Lutheran church and then became a Synagogue. After that it became Orthodox Catholic and finally Roman Catholic. We speculated on the changes that would come to Third Avenue after the Elevated Railway was removed. Everything was serious, but everything was fun. Charlie could quip and joke about the grimmest things, but this did not prevent him from taking action to get things bettered, and he would interlard our casual conversations with people with useful advice and information, all the time making mental notes for Daily Post articles. The lectures at the New School of Social Research were also quite something. They were always held in the evening and the regular front bench of my audience included Lewis Mumford, Charlie, Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey. Charles Ascher and Clarence Stein were also frequent visitors. Most of the rest of the class were young students. Once the class was over Charlie would invite the group to 18 West 10th Street (the New School was on West 12th Street) and we would have drinks and nuts and talk away in his enormous drawing room until pretty late. Other evenings young law students from City College would come in. Charlie had studied and taught there. Among these were Charles Haar and Lloyd Rodwin. One evening I remember Zekendorff bringing in a young man with an architectural project to show Charlie. It was I.M. Pei with his first scheme for a cylindrical building with pieshaped apartments. He spread his plans out on the piano and Zekendorff became enthusiastic about a possible site. I thought how he and Charlie exemplified two contrasting Jewish ideals: Zekendorff like an expansive Solomon-in-all-his-glory and Charlie the articulate reformer-prophet. Charlie’s second book The Future of Housing had just come out to great acclaim, although-in his view -it was less important than his first book Revolution in Land, which had received very little attention. Both stood together at the end of an empty shelf: “One day I shall fill that shelf” said Charlie, and he did.
Bernard Taper concludes this account with aspects of Abrams’more in ternational concerns: THE WORLD
EXPERT
In 1953, just before Abrams began going on UN missions, he prepared, at the UN’s behest, a volume called Urban Land Problems and Policies, which was the first analysis of this complex subject on a worldwide scale. Although, in the numerous advisory missions he has undertaken to such countries as Kenya, Bolivia, the Philippines, Jamaica, and Nigeria, among others, he has been called on to deal with a wide variety of problems, he has discovered that there are some fundamental factors common to all. One such is the squatter problem, which he first gave advice on when he went to a mission to Pakistan in 1957. Squatters, he has found, are a vexatious and politically touchy matter in nearly all the cities of the developing world. Everywhere, armies of the homeless are invading vacant land, throwing up shacktowns overnight, and defying efforts to remove them. Theirs is, in Abrams’ phrase, “the trespass of desperation.” Squatters pose an especially serious problem for a developing country because their actions appear to threaten the duly constituted authority on which the state rests. Throughout the under-developed world, their numbers are staggering. In Karachi, at the time of Abrams’ visit, squatters made up about 30% of the city’s population, most of them being