Drawing a Blank Downtown

Buildings that wall themselves in are deadening the life of cities

Blank Wall is on its way to becoming the dominant feature of many United States downtowns," complains William H. Whyte, one of America's most astute observers of the urban scene. Without windows or adornment to relieve their monotony, the walls are built of concrete, brick, granite, metal veneer, opaque glass and mirrors. They cover up department stores and shopping malls, offices and civic buildings, convention centers and hotels. Designed out of fear—fear of the untidy hustle and bustle of city streets and "undesirables"—the walls spread fear. By eliminating the hospitable jumble of shop fronts, restaurant entrances and newsstands, the walls deaden the very city life their builders claim to "revitalize."

Whyte, 65, has long been concerned with the real life of cities as opposed to the conventional urban wisdom of planners and architects. A former Fortune editor, he belongs to a small band of journalists who have alerted laymen to the folly of the two extreme approaches to the hearts of our cities: neglect and cataclysmic "renewal." Among Whyte's allies are Grady Clay, formerly of the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, now editor of Landscape Architecture magazine, and Jane Jacobs, who is teaching at Toronto. In the 1958 anthology The Exploding Metropolis, Jacobs wrote, "The point. . . is to work with the city. Bedraggled and abused as they are, our downtowns do work. They need help, not wholesale razing . . . the remarkable intricacy and liveliness of downtown can never be created by the abstract logic of a few men. Downtown has had the capability of providing something for everybody only because it has been created by every body."

Although the tide has turned and bankers and developers are again investing in downtown, the shiny new megastructures of the '70s and '80s are often still as destructive of its "remarkable intricacy and liveliness" as the bulldozers of the '50s and '60s. Whyte first noticed the proliferation of blank walls when, some years ago, he studied how people use city streets, plazas and other open spaces. With the help of movie cameras, he demonstrated that people move, window-shop, meet, chat, rest on benches, stairs and planter boxes and watch other people in ways that are often entirely different from what planners and architects intended. Whyte's book and film, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, have become indispensable tools of sensible city planning.

Now Whyte has assembled his own photographs of blank walls into a small but impressive exhibition at New York City's Urban Center. New York, appropriately, is one of two major cities (San Francisco is the other) to ban blank walls, in effect, through zoning that requires retailing at street level in commercial buildings. As Whyte's photos make clear, the worst offenders are convention centers, like the one in the Seattle Sheraton Hotel, and the new megastructure office, hotel and shopping centers, such as the Bonaventure Hotel and Atlantic Richfield Plaza in Los Angeles, the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco and Omni International in Atlanta. Architecturally, these structures often have an awesome and arrogant beauty. Socially, they set themselves deliberately and offensively apart from the city around them.