The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City by Neil Smith

Author:Neil Smith [Smith, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: USA, Geografia
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2005-10-25T22:00:00+00:00

Plate 6.3 Ground clearance for Society Hill Towers, 1961 (courtesy of Urban Archives, Temple University)

In May 1961, Webb and Knapp purchased the land designated for Society Hill Towers from the Redevelopment Authority. The company paid $1.3 million and to finance construction it proceeded to secure a 3 percent FHA-insured mortgage for $14.5 million under section 220 of the 1954 Housing Act. Alcoa, already a junior partner in the enterprise, bought out Webb and Knapp’s interest in November 1962 when the developer suffered a periodic but severe short-term cash flow crisis. Through numerous incorporated subsidiaries inherited from Zeckendorf, Alcoa now held 90 percent of the contract for the Towers. The other 10 percent was owned by a British property development concern—Covent America Corporation—which was also a Zeckendorf partner. Such international partnerships in urban development were only beginning to come into existence as European capital, strengthened by postwar reconstruction, began to seek American investment opportunities in earnest. In any case, Society Hill Towers was completed and received its first tenants in 1964. Alcoa did not retain the building, however; it was resold in 1969 when the seven-year “double balance depreciation” period had expired and it no longer functioned as a tax write-off for the aluminum company. The new buyer was General Properties, a property company again associated with Zeckendorf. When, in the mid-1970s, General Properties’ seven years of accelerated depreciation had in turn passed, they were confronted by a depressed property market with few prospective buyers. The owners attempted, instead of selling the Towers to a single buyer, to offload them onto the tenants as a tenant-owned cooperative. Too few tenants were willing to buy, however, and in 1976 General Properties finally managed to find a buyer in US Life, a Texas-based insurance company. And so the story continued. Through all of these tax-induced changes in ownership, the buildings were managed by Albert M.Greenfield and Co.

As the evolution of the Society Hill Towers illustrates, the gentrification of Society Hill was intimately tied into the rhythms and contours of wider national and international circuits of capital. Ownership and development interests were variously located from New York to Texas, Pittsburgh to London; the prime activities of the owners ranged from aluminum manufacturing to property development to life insurance; and the rationale for ownership had more to do with below-the-line profits and tax-reduction strategies than with a remake of the “most historic square mile” in the country.

And yet the gentrification of Society Hill was widely sold as a project of local “revitalization.” If the Towers symbolize new construction by multinational capital, and the involvement of professional and landlord developers, the popular ideology of Society Hill emphasized the “occupier developers”—individual gentrifiers. The case of C.Jared Ingersoll and his wife Agnes was given early and prominent attention in the media as a means of boosting the area and igniting gentrification. Boasting an ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence, Ingersoll was the scion of one of the city’s “top families.” As E.Digby Baltzell (1958:311) put it in

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