national register nomination for boulevard park historic

new construction. By declaring a neighborhood “blighted,” a broad definition that did not
require conditions of dilapidation or extreme poverty, property could be taken for
redevelopment. Often, “blight” became a way to target neighborhoods that were not
actually slums. Nonwhite and ethnic neighborhoods were identified as the potential sites
of future slums, primarily because of the difference between their current tax valuation
and what the city felt the land should be worth if it was part of the business district.
Because the redevelopment laws did not require that replacement low-cost housing be
provided on redevelopment sites, the sites could be used for “high-priced apartment
houses, office buildings, convention centers, and even parking lots.” 26
Fogelson
concludes that these efforts failed to return downtowns to their previous role as the sole
center of commerce in cities, despite the social cost to urban neighborhoods and the
displacement of communities who lived there.
In Living Downtown, Paul Groth examines the residents of downtowns from a
different perspective than Fogelson.
27
Instead of examining the actions of civic and
business leaders, Groth details the lives of people who lived downtown in a broad
category of housing called residential hotels. He shows how and why people lived
downtown, and how the efforts of social reformers to better the lives of working people
indirectly caused the destruction of their homes and the depopulation of American cities.
Groth opens the book with a quote from Goethe: “There is nothing more frightening than
active ignorance.” Central to his approach is the idea that the reality of residential hotels
26
Fogelson, Downtown, p. 378
27
Groth, Paul, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994.
20