Los Angeles in 1957 finally bowed to the skyscraper.
) And without high density in the core, rapid-transit systems cannot be maintained economically, let alone built from scratch at today's prices.

However, the building of freeways and garages cannot continue forever.
The new interchange among the four Los Angeles freeways, including the grade-constructed accesses, occupies by itself no less than eighty acres of downtown land, one-eighth of a square mile, an area about the size of Rockefeller Center in New York.
It is hard to believe that this mass of intertwined concrete constitutes what the law calls "the highest and best use" of centrally located urban land.
As it affects the city's fiscal situation, such an interchange is ruinous;
it removes forever from the tax rolls property which should be taxed to pay for the city services.
Subways improved land values without taking away land;
freeways boost valuation less (because the garages they require are not prime buildings by a long shot), and reduce the acreage that can be taxed.
Downtown Los Angeles is already two-thirds freeway, interchange, street, parking lot and garage -- one of those preposterous "if" statistics has already come to pass.

The freeway with narrowly spaced interchanges concentrates and mitigates the access problem, but it also acts inevitably as an artificial, isolating boundary.
City planners do not always use this boundary as effectively as they might.
Less ambitious freeway plans may be more successful -- especially when the roadways and interchanges are raised, allowing for cross access at many points and providing parking areas below the ramp.

Meanwhile, the automobile and its friend the truck have cost the central city some of its industrial dominance.
In ever greater numbers, factories are locating in the suburbs or in "industrial parks" removed from the city's political jurisdiction.
The appeal of the suburb is particularly strong for heavy industry, which must move bulky objects along a lengthy assembly line and wants enough land area to do the entire job on one floor.
To light industry, the economies of being on one floor are much slighter, but efficiency engineers usually believe in them, and manufacturers looking for ways to cut costs cannot be prevented from turning to efficiency engineers.

This movement of industry away from the central cities is not so catastrophically new as some prophets seem to believe.
It is merely the latest example of the leapfrog growth which formed the pattern of virtually all American cities.
The big factories which are relatively near the centers of our cities -- the rubber factories in Akron, Chrysler's Detroit plants, U.S. Steel's Pittsburgh works -- often began on these sites at a time when that was the edge of the city, yet close to transport (river), storage (piers) and power (river).
The "leapfrog" was a phenomenon of the railroad and the steam turbine, and the time when the belts of residence surrounding the old factory area were not yet blighted.

The truck and the car gave the manufacturer a new degree of freedom in selecting his plant site.
Until internal combustion became cheap, he had to be near a railroad siding and a trolley line or an existing large community of lower-class homes.
The railroad siding is still important -- it is usually, though not always, true that long-haul shipment by rail is cheaper than trucking.
But anybody who promises a substantial volume of business can get a railroad to run a short spur to his plant these days, and many businesses can live without the railroad.
And there are now many millions of workers for whom the factory with the big parking lot, which can be reached by driving across or against the usual pattern of rush hour traffic and grille-route bus lines, is actually more convenient than the walk-to factory.

Willow Run, General Electric's enormous installations at Louisville and Syracuse, the Pentagon, Boeing in Seattle, Douglas and Lockheed in Los Angeles, the new automobile assembly plants everywhere -- none of these is substantially served by any sort of conventional mass rapid transit.
They are all suburban plants, relying on the roads to keep them supplied with workers.
And wherever the new thruways go up their banks are lined by neat glass and metal and colored brick light industry.
The drive along Massachusetts' Route 128, the by-pass which makes an arc about twenty miles from downtown Boston, may be a vision of the future.

The future could be worse.
The plants along Route 128 are mostly well designed and nicely set against the New England rocks and trees.
They can even be rather grand, like Edward Land's monument to the astonishing success of Polaroid.
But they deny the values of the city -- the crowded, competitive, tolerant city, the "melting pot" which gave off so many of the most admirable American qualities.
They are segregated businesses, combining again on one site the factory and the office, drawing their work force from segregated communities.
It is interesting to note how many of the plants on Massachusetts' Route 128 draw most of their income either from the government in non-competitive cost-plus arrangements, or from the exploitation of patents which grant at least a partial monopoly.

While the factories were always the center of the labor market, they were often on the city's periphery.
In spreading the factories even farther, the automobile may not have changed to any great extent the growth pattern of the cities.
Even the loss of hotel business to the outskirt's motel has been relatively painless;
the hotel-motel demarcation is becoming harder to find every year.
What hurts most is the damage the automobile has done to central-city retailing, especially in those cities where public transit is feeble.

Some retailing, of course, always spreads with the population -- grocery stores, drugstores, local haberdasheries and dress shops, candy stores and the like.
But whenever a major purchase was contemplated forty years ago -- a new bedroom set or a winter coat, an Easter bonnet, a bicycle for Junior -- the family set off for the downtown department store, where the selection would be greatest.
Department stores congregated in the "one hundred per cent location", where all the transit lines converged.
These stores are still there, but the volume of the "downtown store" has been on a relative decline, while in many cities the suburban "branch" sells more and more dry goods.
If the retailer and hotelman's downtown unit sales have been decreasing, however, his dollar volume continues to rise, and it is dollars which you put in the bank.

In most discussions of this phenomenon, the figures are substantially inflated.
No suburban shopping-center branch -- not even Hudson's vast Northland outside Detroit -- does anything like the unit volume of business or carries anything like the variety of merchandise to be found in the home store.
Telephone orders distort the picture: the suburbanite naturally calls a local rather than a central-city number if both are listed in an advertisement, especially if the local call eliminates city sales tax.
The suburban branch is thereby credited with a sale which would have been made even if its glass doors had never opened.
Accounting procedures which continue to charge a disproportionate overhead and warehouse expense to the main store make the branches seem more profitable than they are.
In many cases that statement -- "We break even on our downtown operation and make money on our branches" -- would be turned around if the cost analysis were recalculated on terms less prejudicial to the old store.
Fear of the competition -- always a great motivating force in the American economy -- makes retailers who do not have suburban operations exaggerate both the volume and the profitability of their rival's shiny new branches.
The fact seems to be that very many large branch stores are uneconomical, that the choice of location in the suburbs is as important as it was downtown, and that even highly suburbanized cities will support only so many big branches.
Moreover, the cost of operations is always high in any new store, as the conservative bankers who act as controllers for retail giants are beginning to discover.

When all has been said, however, the big branch store remains a major break with history in the development of American retailing.
Just as the suburban factory may be more convenient than the downtown plant to the worker with a car, the trip to the shopping center may seem far easier than to the downtown department store, though both are the same distance from home.
Indeed, there are some cities where the suburban shopping pulls customers who are geographically much nearer to downtown.
Raymond Vernon reports that residents of East St. Louis have been driving across the Mississippi, through the heart of downtown St. Louis and out to the western suburbs for major shopping, simply because parking is easier at the big branches than it is in the heart of town.
To the extent that the problem is merely parking, an aggressive downtown management, like that of Lazarus Brothers in Columbus, Ohio, can fight back successfully by building a garage on the lot next door.
If the distant patron of the suburban branch has been frightened away from downtown by traffic problems, however, the city store can only pressure the politicians to do something about the highways or await the completion of the federal highway program.
And if the affection for the suburban branch reflects a desire to shop with "nice people", rather than with the indiscriminate urban mass which supports the downtown department store, the central location may be in serious trouble.
Today, according to land economist Homer Hoyt, shopping centers and their associated parking lots cover some 46,000 acres of land, which is almost exactly the total land area in all the nation's Central Business Districts put together.

The downtown store continues to offer the great inducement of variety, both within its gates and across the street, where other department stores are immediately convenient for the shopper who wants to see what is available before making up her mind.
If anything may be predicted in the quicksilver world of retailing, it seems likely that the suburban branch will come to dominate children's clothing (taking the kid downtown is too much of a production), household gadgetry and the discount business in big-ticket items.
Department stores were built on dry goods, especially ladies' fashions, and in this area, in the long run, the suburban branches will be hard put to compete against downtown.
If this analysis is correct, the suburban branches will turn out to be what management's cost accountants refuse to acknowledge, marginal operations rather than major factors.

Historically in America the appeal of cities has been their color and life, the variety of experience they offered.
"How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm"?
Was a question that had to be asked long before they saw Paree.
Though Americans usually lived in groups segregated by national origin or religious belief, they liked to work and shop in the noise and vitality of downtown.
Only a radical change in the nature of the population in the central city would be likely to destroy this preference -- and we must now turn our attention to the question of whether such a change, gloomily foreseen by so many urban diagnosticians, is actually upon us.

4.

Suburbs and Negroes

In their book, American Skyline, Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed argue that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was what made the modern suburb a possibility -- a fine ironical argument, when you consider how suburbanites tend to vote.
The first superhighways -- New York's Henry Hudson and Chicago's Lake Shore, San Francisco's Bay Bridge and its approaches, a good slice of the Pennsylvania Turnpike -- were built as part of the federal works program which was going to cure the depression.
At the same time, Roosevelt's Federal Housing Administration, coupled with Henry Morgenthau's cheap-money policy, permitted ordinary lower-middle-class families to build their own homes.
Bankers who had been reluctant to lend without better security than the house itself got that security from the U. S. government;
householders who had been unable to pick up the burden of short-term high-interest mortgages found they could borrow for twenty-five years at 4 per cent, under government aegis.