The Power of Ideas: Five People Who Changed the Urban Landscape

By Terry J. Lassar and Douglas R. Porter

Urban Land Institute, 2004, 150 pp., paperback $34.95.

If you’re ever in Charleston, South Carolina, notice the reddish-brown gravel path in the city’s Waterfront Park. Mayor Joseph Riley, who is famous for his devotion to the city’s physical character, had a lot to do both with the park being built and with its design and furnishings. He micromanaged the search for gravel possessing just the right color and crunch, a hunt that consumed two years. “One woman on my parks staff finally quit out of frustration, said I’d gone wacko,” Riley recalled. “But we eventually came up with the perfect gravel mix that crunches just right” — one that’s dense enough to accommodate wheelchairs and whose color makes a pleasing transition from the park to the water. The thoughts and experiences of Riley form one of the profiles in this vivid, insightful book about the first five winners of the Urban Land Institute’s J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. In addition to Riley, who was elected mayor in 1975 and has been continually reelected ever since, this remarkable group consists of architectural historian Vincent Scully, developers Richard D. Baron and Gerald D. Hines, and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Scully, a longtime Yale professor, grew up in one of New Haven’s many two-family houses, in a family that had few visitors, on a street containing no other children his age. The experience, he says, “made me melancholy but liberated. I had to figure it all out for myself” — which he did brilliantly, eventually educating a number of the students who would usher New Urbanism into existence. Baron, as an undergraduate in the 1960s at Oberlin College in Ohio, worked as a volunteer teacher in a “freedom school” in the Hough district of Cleveland. The exposure to an impoverished, mostly African-American neighborhood helped motivate him to form McCormack Baron Salazar, a St. Louis firm that has developed 3,300 housing units in once-forlorn St. Louis neighborhoods and thousands more in other cities, Cleveland included. Hines started out as an engineering consultant and, from his base in Houston, evolved into one of the nation’s most successful developers, convinced that good design need not add substantial costs, and that good design attracts market interest. Hines believes the US “will develop denser [urban] cores because people will demand them. They’ll pay a higher price per square foot to increase their discretionary time.” Moynihan, the intellectual who was New York’s gift to the US Senate, is remembered for his love of architecture and urban design, which first found expression in his work on reviving Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. Political lore has it that President John F. Kennedy was shocked by the condition of the avenue during his inaugural parade, and ordered that it be improved. In The Power of Ideas, Terry J. Lassar and Douglas R. Porter report that some think the Kennedy legend “was a Moynihan invention.” Moynihan, who worked for JFK, surely was savvy enough to know that by associating JFK with plans for enhancing Pennsylvania Avenue, he would help that long and complicated project command the bureaucracy’s support. All five figures in this book have made an uncommon impact on urban development. Lassar, a writer and consultant on real estate and land use, and Porter, an authority on growth management, tell their stories with great intelligence. u