Review: Roberta Brandes Gratz's It’s a Helluva Town: Joan K. Davidson, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, and the Fight for a Better New York

Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Have you recently trekked to a farmers’ market for fresh produce? In this lockdown year, do you miss attending concerts at Carnegie Hall? A Broadway show? Have you enjoyed roaming through the romantic landscape of Central Park, or wandered the streets of the city’s historic districts? Do you go out of your way to experience the inspiring urban spaces of Grand Central Terminal? Are you invigorated when you head west to the Hudson River Park and marvel at the river’s recovery?

For these and other New York delights you must thank the J.M. Kaplan Fund and its longtime leader, Joan K. Davidson.

Who?

Historians have wrestled mightily with the question of New York City’s decline in the latter 20th century, and identified any number of explanations — federal disinvestment in mass transit and the funding of superhighways; urban renewal; deindustrialization; flight to suburbia; racial succession; add your own. Ditto, explanations for the city’s recovery — renewed immigration; gentrification; historic preservation and adaptive reuse; enhanced public safety; the rise of FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate).  Each of these explanations essentially leans upon great impersonal forces.

It’s a Helluva Town: Joan K. Davidson, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, and the Fight for a Better New York
By Roberta Brandes Gratz
Boldtype Books, 2020
250 pages

This volume by Roberta Brandes Gratz reveals how actual people generated the ideas that returned the city to prominence, and those who funded the often small-scale and fine-grained efforts. No one was more involved in such activities than Davidson, who epitomizes what the author calls “activist philanthropy.”

Born to Jewish immigrants in 1891, Jacob Merrill Kaplan was largely self-educated, and he was certainly a self-made man. “I’ve been a scrapper all my days,” he once recalled. “I had to fight my way out of a hard and joyless childhood. I had to fight my way through the competitive world of business. I had to fight against my own inadequacies – my lack of formal education, my tendency to feel bitter about the things I missed as a child, my desire to build success upon success.” As a young man he shipped molasses from Cuba to the United States and built a fortune. In 1945 he purchased the Welch’s grape juice company, turned it around, and later sold it to a grape-growers cooperative (he would be an early funder of the conservation of farmland). That same year he founded the J.M. Kaplan Fund; according to his daughter, Joan, it was “mainly to be used for what he wanted it to be used for. He responded to people he liked and admired, period.” What he funded, in sum, was the livable and beautiful city, and opposition to the forces intent on destroying livability and beauty.

Roberta Brandes Gratz is the author of several books about urbanism and preservation, including The Living City (1989), Cities Back From the Edge (1998), The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (2010), and We’re Still Here Ya Bastards: How the People of New Orleans Rebuilt Their City (2015). She began her career as a reporter for the New York Post (the liberal Post of Dorothy Schiff, Gratz explains, not the very un-liberal Post of Rupert Murdoch, who acquired the paper in 1976), and covered many of the architectural and planning controversies of the sixties and seventies, including the demolition of Penn Station and the early years of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. She became a friend of Jane Jacobs, and her writing certainly expresses a Jacobs-inflected perspective.

The story Gratz tells of the city’s decline will not be unfamiliar to Jacobs fans. Robert Moses emerges on these pages as the archvillain from time to time, and she blames him for everything. She identifies several of the great, impersonal forces intent upon destroying the historic city, particularly the federal government’s investment in the suburbs and the destructive tendencies of the ever-hissable Moses. She goes overboard, however, when she states that “The 1950s and ‘60s had seen a loss of about five hundred thousand white residents per year as part of an overall diminishment of population.” During the 1970s, the city’s population fell by 800,000, and Brooklyn lost half a million white residents, but that was over a decade, not every year, a demographic collapse that is scarcely imaginable.  

However powerful the impersonal forces of history destroying New York may have been, they had a formidable opponent in the Kaplan Foundation. The moment was right, for any number of bad ideas were threatening to erase the very attributes that gave New York its character. Undeniably, New York was in decline in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Gratz argues, the forces of darkness could have triumphed in the absence of the contrasting vision championed by the good citizens of the city. But it takes more than a good idea to trounce a bad idea, especially a bad idea backed by powerful corporate interests and their willing accomplices in government. It takes money, and to an extent that will surely surprise most readers, J. M. Kaplan funded those visions. While her father set the tone in the urban battles he chose to support, the Fund flourished under the leadership of Davidson, who joined the board in 1967 and took the helm in 1978.

Perhaps a better way to understand the impact of the Kaplan Fund is to imagine what New York would be like today had the citizens and activists supported by it not succeeded:

o   A bright red, forty-story skyscraper would be standing in place of Carnegie Hall.
o   Sailor’s Snug Harbor would have been erased for apartment buildings.
o   The South Street Seaport would have been leveled.
o   The Lower Manhattan Expressway would have cut through the island from the Williamsburg Bridge to the Holland Tunnel.
o   The Bell Telephone Laboratory complex at West and Bethune Streets would never have become the subsidized artists’ housing called Westbeth (and the concept of adaptive reuse would have remained an untried concept).
o   Many, many Broadway theaters would have been demolished.
o   Westway, a twelve-lane highway, would have blocked New Yorkers from the Hudson River.
o   A tower would have risen above Grand Central Terminal, and the Landmarks Law itself gutted.
o   The 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue would have been abandoned and continue to decay (Gratz was personally involved in its twenty-year, $20 million restoration).
o   Central Park would be still an underfunded, maintenance-starved eyesore, and the Central Park Conservancy would have never been created (and yes, there is room for argument over whether reliance on private funding and private management is what is best for the city, but there is no denying that the park desperately needed investment in the 1970s).

 And beyond the five boroughs:

o   Con Edison would have built a massive pump storage facility at Storm King, forever scarring the Hudson Highlands.
o   The Natural Resources Defense Council would not exist.
o   The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in the Berkshires, would have been sold and probably demolished, or remodeled beyond all recognition.
o   Thousands of acres in the Catskills watershed would have remained open to development.

This is a partial list. Now, it is indeed possible that these battles would have been won without the financial support and behind the scenes influence of the Kaplan Fund, but counter-factual history is tricky. All we can say is that the Kaplan Fund was a key player in each controversy, and from my perspective, was on the right side of every issue.

Joan Davidson also provided grants for preservation advocacy, often to fund little books about a historic part of the city at risk. (Full disclosure: the Kaplan Fund awarded me a grant to produce Historic Preservation in Queens in 1990; the cover is reproduced in Gratz’s book.) Other such preservation-minded works include End of the Road for Ladies Mile?; A Dream Fulfilled: City and Suburban’s York Avenue Estate; and The Texture of Tribeca. Kaplan also funded the exhibition at the Bronx Museum of Art and subsequent book, Devastation/Resurrection: The South Bronx.

Beyond bricks and mortar issues, the Fund supported legal aid to address the AIDS crisis; campaigns by the ACLU and the formation of Human Rights Watch; the Coalition for the Homeless started by Bob Hayes; and the effort to provide public toilets on the streets of the city. Joan’s sister, Mary Kaplan, was a founder and funder of Poets House.

Roberta Brandes Gratz has done a splendid job in celebrating the many ways that the J.M. Kaplan Fund contributed to the rejuvenation and livability of New York. This is not to say her very readable book is flawless; there are several factual errors (the Grand Concourse was in fact designated a historic district), but these are minor quibbles. Unquestionably, to understand the trajectory of New York City in the late 20th century we have to appreciate the contributions of Jacob Merrill Kaplan, his daughter Joan K. Davidson, and the J.M. Kaplan Fund.

Jeffrey A. Kroessler is the Interim Chief Librarian of the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY.