Books: City Boy

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SKETCHES FROM LIFE: THE EARLY YEARS

by Lewis Mumford

Dial; 500 pages; $19.95

"The Port of New York became my Walden Pond," Lewis Mumford recalls in this luminous autobiography. It still is. With unflagging energy and unfailing memory, Mumford, 86, assumes the tone of an urban Thoreau, ransacking the familiar for overlooked truths. His principal turf is the city; his main object of study, himself. Born in 1895 in Flushing, Queens, raised in the precincts of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, educated at City College and the New York Public Library, Mumford was ideally prepared to become one of the great critics of the modern metropolis. He is also one of the most prolific; this book, begun in 1956, is his 27th since The Story of Utopias in 1922.

Many of Mumford's reasoned humanist views are by now as familiar as his name. He favors planning, gardens, cities and, best of all, the planned garden cities of late 19th century England. (He put his mortgage where his mouth was, living from 1924 to 1935 in the carefully structured community of Sunnyside, just across the East River from Manhattan.) Mumford dislikes automobiles, real estate developers, skyscrapers ("towering urbanoid anthills") and, to the distress of less punctilious planners, the untidy vitality of immigrant neighborhoods. For more than half a century he has railed against the gracelessness and alienating giantism of housing developments. We shape our buildings, Mumford believes, and thereafter they shape us.

What environments shaped Mumford? As he tells it, a procession of boyhood New York apartments so dark and cluttered, in the late Victorian style, that he acquired an early appreciation of the austere forms of 20th century architecture. With affectionate detail he recalls his maverick mother, a shabby-genteel domestic in the house of a New York lawyer, who met the man's nephew and bore young Lewis out of wedlock. The boy's German grandfather, a retired headwaiter at Delmonico's, became the dominant figure of Mumford's early years, taking him on long walks about the city.

As a young man, Mumford dreamed of a career in the theater and wrote a couple of unproduced plays. He became, instead, an editor and contributor for the Dial, an important literary and political journal of the interwar period, and married a fellow staff member, the independent-minded Sophia Wittenberg of Brooklyn. (Sixty years later, he still offers sonnets to her.) Mumford took up the study of cities in earnest after a stint at a municipal job in Pittsburgh. A 1929 book on Herman Melville established him as a literary critic, and his 1938 The Culture of Cities made him a national celebrity.