Unsung Urbanist: Robert C. Weinberg, New Yorker Behind the Scenes
In tonight’s program, I would like to discuss the work of a man behind the scenes, Robert C. Weinberg, an architect, city planner and preservationist. Following my brief presentation outlining Robert Weinberg’s work in preservation, speakers Barry Benepe, William Nye, and anyone else so inclined, will do us the honor of recounting some of their memories of Weinberg and their thoughts about how his influence is felt today. Because my work thus far follows the paper trail, itself incomplete, it is limited. And because we don’t want to keep you here all night, my topic is limited to some preservation highlights of Weinberg’s life. I believe that the participation of our speakers in tonight’s program will give you a broader picture of Weinberg, his many interests and projects, and his impact.
Of the 28 organizations in which he participated and was a member, perhaps five or six really received forty years of his focused attention. Weinberg was a fellow of the AIA, a long-term member of the AIP, the Regional Planning Association, the Citizens Union, and the Washington Square Association. He was extremely active not only in general, but in dozens of specific committees and sub-committees, and as an advisor to same. He taught at various Universities and was even won a Fulbright. Weinberg worked with the most powerful shapers of 20th century New York, such as Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. He collaborated with photographer, Bernice Abbott several times, including a WPA Project in 1936, and was closely involved in the contentious building of the Soviet Consulate in the early 1970s. Weinberg was in the fray from the moment he finished at Harvard in 1931 until his death in 1974. But because of his role behind the scenes, his name is not the one associated with the glory or agony of preservation in the last century.
Robert Charles Weinberg was born December 18, 1902 in New York City to Charles and Lily Hayman Weinberg. His life spanned the first three quarters of the twentieth century, almost always in New York City. When Weinberg lived in other cities the experience served primarily to inform his ideas about improving New York. He was at Cambridge, Massachusetts for Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1923, and again when he was at the Graduate School of Design, Department of City Planning, graduating in 1931. He worked in Cleveland in the 1940s, and Chicago in ‘34 and ‘43.
The Weinbergs were a successful German Jewish family who lived in the famous Apthorpe building on the Upper West Side. Charles was a manufacturer, but his wealth came from the real estate investments that would so color and inform young Robert’s perspective and life choices. Robert Weinberg created the very Vinmont Foundation we have to thank for sponsoring this research project, out of these real estate investments. The name ‘Vinmont’ is a clever take on a French translation of Weinberg’s German name, or, in English, “wine mountain” or “vineyard”. Weinberg’s motivation to translate his good fortune into the betterment of society may be the result of his religious inclinations.
Though Jewish, all the Weinbergs were involved in the Ethical Culture movement. Robert and his sister, Ruth, both attended Ethical Culture School. One of the tenets of the movement is a general notion to improve things and that is what Robert Weinberg sought to do throughout his life in New York City. Where ever he could or saw or felt that something could be better, he wrote a letter or an editorial, made a broadcast or telephone call. Weinberg’s influence is a tangible presence in our city today. As Albert Fein, archivist and author of the thoughtful biographical essay on Weinberg prefacing the Finding Aid to Weinberg’s papers at Long Island University, points out, Ethical Culture also influenced Weinberg’s appreciation of and desire to preserve nature. We see that in Weinberg’s campaign to save Riverdale, a very lush area at that time, from the Henry Hudson Bridge. In 1964, Weinberg proposed that the AIA boycott the California Redwood Association. The AIA opted not to, but a dialogue began and awareness was raised as a result of Weinberg’s doggedness. As former employee Bob Esnard said about him, Weinberg was at the beginning of everything!
Robert Weinberg married Marion R. King in 1951, when he was 49 years old and she was 46. They had no children and there is little evidence in his papers at LIU of personal relationships outside of work. Throughout his adult life, Weinberg maintained residences at 21 Washington Square North and in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Certainly he was extremely active in planning in Greenwich Village, serving on Local Planning Board 2 for 25 years, but his files also contain innumerous papers dealing with preservation and planning issues in Connecticut and in Westchester. Weinberg had a great love of place as evidenced by the fury and thoroughness with which he defended the places that were dear to him.
Weinberg will probably be most familiar to preservation history enthusiasts for his appearance in Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. Caro recounts the tale of Weinberg - in the mid-1930s still a young planner - clashing with Robert Moses over the Henry Hudson
Bridge. Weinberg sought to protect Riverdale from being divided by Moses’ highway. That the Weinbergs owned property in Riverdale was Moses’ best tool for discrediting Weinberg’s criticism of the plan. Those two had already crossed swords in 1934, when a friend recommended that Moses hire Weinberg to design parks. Soon after, Weinberg was fired for not keeping his designs uniform and within Moses’ guidelines, but today, the website of the Parks Department has this to say on Weinberg:
“Robert Weinberg, an architect and city planner, was an employee of New York City’s Department of Parks during the 1930s. Responsible for locating and selecting sites for playgrounds, Weinberg redesigned playgrounds according to local needs rather than following formula-like guidelines—an unconventional practice for the time.”
By 1939, Weinberg was urging the editor of the Villager newspaper to publicly acknowledge Moses as an enemy of Washington Square Park who had the means but not the inclination to fix the Park. Weinberg felt that this was due to Moses being insulted at the rejection of his initial plan for the Park.
Weinberg came toe to toe with another well-known public figure twenty years later in the form of Jane Jacobs, now considered the patron saint of cities. Not many people would look at the slum clearing projects of Weinberg’s mid-century colleagues and say the planners of the 1940s and 50s were interested in preserving architectural history. In fact, Jane Jacobs felt that city planners were antithetical to preservation, demonizing the profession in her canonical 1961 Death and Life of Great American Cities. Weinberg disagreed and said as much in his review of Death and Life, published in the AIA Journal in March 1962. Here again, Weinberg’s main complaint was Jacobs’ strategy. He conceded her a few points, but felt that she was dividing the very groups that needed to work together, the community groups and city planners. Like Jacobs, Weinberg rejects both the extreme Modernist attitude that the cities must be swept clean and Jacobs’ polarized reaction to it. Though thoroughly trained as a Modernist, Weinberg makes the argument for moderation - some good planning that would include those urban elements so important to Jacobs but would be orderly and allow the good parts to thrive. Clearly Weinberg respected Jacobs, calling her “a distinguished public servant” at the end of the review. They had been on the same team for many Greenwich Village battles before the publication of the book.
By placing himself in opposition to Jane Jacobs, though, Weinberg did not win the love of the preservationists. For someone so capable of great strategy when it came to professional issues, there is less evidence of strategic maneuvering in his personal dealings. An obvious example of this was his antagonistic relationship with the enormously powerful Robert Moses, to whom Weinberg had been given a personal introduction when a young man. So, while we see that Weinberg maintained certain relationships, he was also unable or unwilling to cultivate friendships that, with the proper handling, could have served his causes as well, if not better.
One of the key ways in which Robert Weinberg was able to affect the face of the city, was by weighing in on almost every aspect and change that went on during his life. Weinberg served on many committees and boards, and then maintained a constant and lifelong dialogue with some of the most influential figures in the history of preservation in New York. These relationships, and the respect with which these men treated the opinions of Weinberg, particularly his extensive knowledge of zoning, directly impacted Weinberg’s influence on decision making in the city. That despite his sometimes caustic manner, Weinberg maintained an influential position is a testament to his ability and knowledge.
Weinberg had a unique view of preservation that was more of a triage approach born out of hard won experience. In a memo from 1967, he says “My new interest, as a chapter rep. to the AIP committee on preservation, is to make the point that what we most need to do is investigate just what preservation should take place & how to form value judgments with regard to specific buildings or areas…We first must decide what to preserve & why. The how can come later.” Perhaps because he was willing to make sacrifices, contemporary preservationists did not claim him as one of their own.
In 1965, Weinberg maligned Henry Hope Reed, the prominent preservationist, for defending the 1909 Old Police Building. Weinberg felt that while all four sides of Washington Square should be included in the proposal for a new Greenwich Village Historic District, they could stand to lose both the Puck and the old Police Building as, “They have little aesthetic merit and appeal to only such exceptional addicts of their era as Henry Hope Reed. So what?”
In reading the history of the selection of a repository for his papers, it seems Weinberg simply could not be pigeonholed well enough to fit in anywhere. For instance, the Avery Architecture Library rejected the papers because he was not well enough known as an architect – after all, what exactly did he build? It was not until Barry Benepe, one of tonight’s speakers suggested it, that the papers found a home at LIU.
While Weinberg was perhaps most fervent about saving the area around Washington Square Park, his home since 1932, this passion evolved into an interest in protecting all of Greenwich Village. Judging by his papers, Weinberg was arguably the zoning genius behind the survival of the Village as we know it.
In 1939, Weinberg petitioned the Municipal Art Society to take a stand against the proposed reconstruction of Sailors Snug Harbor Estate, the houses along the north side of Washington Square Park, east of Fifth Avenue. Weinberg even presented an alternative plan for the site that would use the existing cornice line and save the facades of the buildings. At their meeting of March 15, 1939, the MAS board voted to try to protect those buildings and to propose options such as the one presented by Weinberg.
In 1950, when developers again threatened the site, Weinberg sought to defend it with the bowl principle of graduated zoning, which would not save the building, but the scale of buildings fronting the Park. Perhaps this was seeing the forest for the trees, but many Villagers were unhappy with this compromise.
Weinberg’s involvement particularly stands out in the role he played in protecting the Village during a grace period before the new zoning went into effect in 1961. Community Board 2 put together a committee to respond to this citywide rezoning. Among the committee members were Weinberg, Stanley Tankel, and Jane Jacobs husband, Robert. The committee offered to prepare a thoughtful, Village-specific zoning resolution to the City Planning Commission. The over-burdened Planning Commission accepted their plan gratefully. But Weinberg discovered that there was a window into which developers could squeeze their plans. He determined that an immediate stopgap zoning resolution to amend the 1916 zoning could be done successfully and would protect the Village. Flying below the radar, they did just that. The developers never knew what hit them. Of the approximately 100 plans filed for the Village by developers, six were built.
Robert Weinberg fought to protect both of New York City’s major train stations. In August of 1960, the Herald Tribune began running articles with titles such as, “Grand Central to Install 44-Lane Bowling Alley.” Weinberg was quick to respond with a letter to the editor condemning this “proposal to stuff a three-level bowling alley into the high, roomy airspace over the always crowded waiting room…” Later that year, Weinberg published an editorial in Architectural Forum entitled “Visionless Enterprise” recounting the lack of perspective of the railroad companies and calling them “pygmies.” In a four page, single-spaced letter dated Dec. 8, 1960, to John Crosby, a columnist at the New York Herald Tribune, Weinberg, points out that though he himself is a Times reader, he does want to make mention of a variety of vocabulary problems and some incorrect historical information. About Grand Central, he says this:
“I am tickled to death that you have jumped on to the happy bandwagon that a few of us started rolling some months ago, but, please, try and be accurate in [your] reporting.”
The letter serves to illustrate the very aspect of Weinberg’s personality that may have inhibited the range of his influence. Like many men in his position, Weinberg had the time and inclination to be highly critical, detail oriented, to abhor inaccuracies, and to be very vocal about it. It seems that this was not always well received. In the biographical essay preceding the guide to Weinberg’s papers, Albert Fein writes, “At times Weinberg seemed unnecessarily abrasive.” Phone conversations with those who knew and worked with him confirm this, but many say he was also good company, witty, and “a wonderful man”.
Perhaps it was success at Grand Central that allowed Weinberg to sit back a bit in the Penn Station battle. That said, his files are filled with notes that he scrawled during the City Planning Commission hearing. In an April 1962 letter to the editor of the New York Times, Weinberg proposed preserving the façade. Using both the history and the common sense angles, he wrote,
“…why must it be destroyed?… Would it not be possible to consider retaining intact the granite façade? There is a well-known precedent for such an action in the Bank of England, whose original façade by Sir John Soane was retained when the entire interior was gutted. Demolition costs for removing the granite colonnade, entablature and other portions of the Seventh Avenue façade would, at today’s wrecking prices, probably cost as much if not more than leaving it in place.”
In the days following his letter, Weinberg’s proposal found some public support and some dissention in the pages of the New York Times. Norval White of AGBANY, the Action Group for Better Architecture in NY, one of the leading groups involved in trying to save the Station, wrote; “[Weinberg’s] statements concerning Pennsylvania Station however, totally miss the main point…Pennsylvania Station is total architecture.”
Whether the public was for or against Weinberg’s ideas, he was unable to get any of his savvy planning proposals carried out, and nothing was enough to save even part of Penn Station.
In a 1964 letter to the editor of Oculus magazine, Weinberg wrote with disgust about the destruction of Penn Station, “except for the memorable picketing event some of us participated in in August of 1962, there was not a scream of protest, nor any real struggle.”
Realizing that sometimes no amount of passion will save a building, Weinberg tried another angle when Grand Central was again threatened in 1968 with the same fate as Penn. Weinberg wrote to the City Planning Commission offering them a clever alternative solution. Weinberg suggested that they “condemn” the air rights above Grand Central. He pragmatically pointed out that, “if the city wanted to really stop this building on account of the inevitable disadvantages of increased traffic and confusion and the calculable public cost of relieving this (quite aside from the aesthetic considerations), I see no reason why the City could not condemn the air rights…”
A former employee related the tale of Weinberg’s chagrin that Marcel Breuer had accepted the commission to construct a new building over Grand Central Station. Weinberg refused to attend the reception in Breuer's honor at the Whitney Museum. Instead he sent the employee with the single request that he ask Breuer “Why?" Breuer responded: "Because someone will do it, and I will do it better than others." This response so infuriated Weinberg that he went on a campaign - through his connections with so many advocacy planning groups - to deride the proposed project. Many people saved Grand Central, but Weinberg certainly had his say.
By the time the early 1960s were rolling in, Weinberg was considered enough of an authority to be asked in January 1962 by Whitney North Seymour, acting as president of the Fine Arts Federation, to serve on the nominating committee for the fledging Landmarks Preservation Commission. Weinberg listed no fewer than nine people of various professions whom he felt were “men of considerable professional stature, know for their concern with public affairs…” Weinberg also added this:
“While your invitation to participate in the Nominating Committee for the proposed Commission does not call for my making comments on other aspects of the matter, I do want to repeat that I am much disturbed by the use of the word “preservation” in the title of the official set-up. This smacks too much of archeological, looking-backward, rear-guard actions and romantic sentimentality…[the commission should be] positive, forward-looking, planning and not be limited in its charter to nothing more than the prohibition of destruction of monuments of days gone by.”
The tone of this letter alludes to that tension in Weinberg’s life about where he stood on the preservation line. In the titles to articles that he wrote, such as “Pitfalls and Plausibilities of Landmarks Preservation” for the AIA Journal, and “60 Years…And the Problems are Still With Us,” for the AIP Journal, we can see that he was a harsh critic and analyst of the things about which he cared most deeply. So, for Weinberg, always a strategist, the ends often justified the means.
Weinberg traveled constantly abroad and throughout the United States, studying other cities, attending conferences and giving talks and papers. He used all of his travel experience and analysis of other cities for his seminal work Community Planning and Appearance, published in 1958. According to a press release for Community Planning and Appearance, Weinberg and Henry Fagin, co-editors, pose and answer the questions: “Why are American cities and town ugly? How can their growth be made to reflect harmony and beauty rather than discord and ugliness?” Contemporary preservationists may wince at the language, but to their mid-century counterparts working toward a landmarks law in New York, Weinberg’s publication was an introduction to the means to enact public control over community appearance and save specific buildings, the character, and indeed, the beauty, of the neighborhoods. For Otis Pratt Pearsall, the well-known advocate for the designation of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, Weinberg’s book provided a crucial and empowering introduction to the Bard Act.
The idea for the book came from a need identified in 1953 by the AIA-AIP New York Area Joint Committee on Design Control. As the forward to the book states, “This report tells what a group of architects and planners found when they joined to study governmental influences on community appearance.” Weinberg and Henry Fagin co-chaired, and committee members included Arthur Holden, Albert Bard, and Geoffrey Platt, who later served as the first Landmarks Chair.
The committee’s goal was to create a program for improving community appearance. As a July 1958 piece in the Times put it, “They felt the time had come to go a step farther and stress “inspiration rather than prohibition, creation rather than prevention.” The committee worked with six guiding principles for improving urban appearance. This is Arthur Holden’s more concise version:
Planning and Community Appearance was a successful, easy to read and understand, how-to book for imposing some design control on a community. Weinberg’s files hold reams of letters complimenting him on the book, citing its value and requesting copies. There was enough buzz around the book that Weinberg was receiving requests for it as early as August 1955. Carl Feiss began his AIA Journal review of Planning and Community Appearance in this way:
“This is an excellent book providing much food for thought and should be read by every planner before being placed in the active file in his office.”
One of the most frustrating episodes of Weinberg’s life involved his attempt to publish a second, updated edition of Planning and Community Appearance. Thorough as always, Weinberg attempted to find funding, new contributors, and volleyed ideas back and forth with former committee members. In 1967, nine years after the publication, Weinberg received a letter saying, “This did not seem to me so much of a book as a collection of only tenuously related materials. There was no real attempt made to update your original report.” Weinberg spent the next six months responding to that charge. But the second edition was never published.
Ultimately, in Weinberg’s Archive, there were notes on every major preservation and planning event of the 20th century in New York City. Many of these files contain information pertaining to preservation and planning battles that are being waged today or even recently. These include arguments over the World Trade Center site, the far west side of Manhattan, Lincoln Center, the rehabilitation of Chelsea, the redevelopment of the Harlem economic base, the United Nations, Columbus Circle, the airports, and the list goes on and spans out beyond Manhattan into the other boroughs, Westchester and Connecticut. Robert Weinberg’s story is that of the preservation issues of his time. But where we see the Weinberg piece, the part of the city that we can look at and say Robert C. Weinberg is the reason we enjoy this today, is probably Greenwich Village. He certainly did not act alone, but as part of this group of activists. We also must look at New York City as a whole to see Weinberg’s stamp. Because he loved the Village, but he was OF the whole city, the upper west side, Riverdale, he received “reports” from Bill Nye about the situation in Brooklyn – Weinberg looked after New York.
There is much, much more that can be said about Weinberg, many more topics that could be addressed, such as the 464 weekly broadcasts that he made for WNYC as the station’s Architecture Critic-at-Large. Weinberg was a firm believer in bringing the information to the people and I am pleased tonight to be carrying on in that tradition. I’d like to thank the Vinmont Foundation for giving me the opportunity to do so and Long Island University for providing access to the Weinberg Papers.
Presented January 20, 2005 at the Neighborhood Preservation Center, 232 East 11th Street, New York City, by Rudie Hurwitz. No information contained herein may be used without the permission of the author.