Environment: Downtown Is Looking Up

In the boom years of the 1960s, every American city resounded to the din of construction. No project seemed too ambitious; builders confidently razed vast downtown areas, and their architects just as confidently designed huge structures to fill the voids. The trouble was that instead of creating new life and vigor downtown, the projects were all too often sterile and uninviting—reason enough, though there were others as well, for businesses and middle-class city dwellers to opt for the suburbs. In 1966 Edward J. Logue, then the highly respected chief of Boston's redevelopment program, succinctly defined the times. "We have raised the right to be ugly to the level of the Bill of Rights," he told a congressional subcommittee. "By the millions, American tourists have gone to Europe to walk the streets of ancient cities, to linger by a glorious fountain, to rest on a piazza bench and watch the world go by."

Somehow, that is one message that got through. As Americans visit their own major cities in this Bicentennial season, they are being surprised, delighted, heartened and even awed by what they see. There is hardly a downtown that is not offering a glittering new face, a startling new profile. In Atlanta, a round 723-ft. tower soars like a silver silo above the Georgia heartland. In Los Angeles, the flat megalopolis that was supposed to spread ever outward, new towers sprout like asparagus. Windswept Oklahoma City, a dramatic vertical statement in the horizontal world of the Western plains, strikes the eye like a mini-Manhattan. Denver's Skyline project, one of the best urban renewal efforts in America, is alive and well named: since 1970, six new towers have poked high against the backdrop of the Rockies, and more are planned. In Kansas City, where once "they went and built a skyscraper seven stories high/ About as high as a building oughta go,"* they've went and built a new one 30 stories high that dominates the whole city.

Other cities—notably Cleveland, St. Louis, Omaha and Louisville—have looked to their rivers for inspiration. Each began as a port town, then grew away from the water, allowing the original settlements to decay. Old wharves and warehouses are making room for bold new projects that mix parks with high-rise buildings. Conclusion: the American city, far from being down and out, is clearly growing up (and up).

Symbolic of the times is the change in the skyscraper itself. During the 1960s, the standard tower looked like a shoebox set on end. Now this sleek but rarely stimulating slab is out of style. Replacing it is a completely new series of high-rise shapes and configurations: ribbed, faceted, angled, notched and cylindrical. Like them or not, they create a skyline full of visual excitement.