ABOUT THIS BOOK

Model City Blues tells the story of how regular people, facing a changing city landscape, fought for their own model of the “ideal city” by creating grassroots plans for urban renewal. Filled with vivid descriptions of significant moments in a protracted struggle, it offers a street-level account of organized resistance to institutional plans to transform New Haven, Connecticut in the 1960s. Anchored in the physical spaces and political struggles of the city, it brings back to center stage the individuals and groups who demanded that their voices be heard.

By reexamining the converging class- and race-based movements of 1960s New Haven, Mandi Jackson helps to explain the city's present-day economic and political struggles. More broadly, by closely analyzing particular sites of resistance in New Haven, Model City Blues employs multiple academic disciplines to redefine and reimagine the roles of everyday city spaces in building social movements and creating urban landscapes.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mandi Isaacs Jackson is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African-American Studies at Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in urban studies.

REVIEWS

"Model City Blues breaks new ground reassessing New Haven politically through the lens of ethnographic and historic research. Through an urban context, Jackson synthesizes the cultural and economic foundations of past and future social movements. This book is the most impressive culmination of the most significant social and political research on New Haven in at least a generation."
—Immanuel Ness, Brooklyn College, City University of New York

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
The Interstate and the Demonstration City: Master Planning and Maximum Feasible Participation
Contested Spaces in a Model City
Neighborhoods and Movement Spaces on the Ring Road Map
        Oak Street
        Dixwell
        The Hill
            State Street
            Downtown

Chapter 1--'The Ghosts of Oak Street's Paved Ravines:' The Oak Street Project, the Construction of Consensus, and the Birth of the Slumless City
    The Planning Tableau and the Experts' Dilemma
    Creating Consensus and Illustrating Progress
    The Progress Pavilion: "Watch the Picture Change!"
    "Very Minimum" Dissent

Chapter 2-On Dixwell Avenue: Civil Rights and the Street
    The Mayor's Proposal
    Two Dixwells, One Corner
    A New Kind of Project
    Taking the Street
    Understanding the Avenue
    Remaking "New Haven's Harlem"

Chapter 3: The Hill Neighborhood Union and Freedom Summer North: Citizen Participation and Movement Spaces in a 'Project Area'
    The Hill
    The Hill Neighborhood Union
    The Hill Rent Strikes
    The Freedom School
    The Children's Park
    Hill Cooperative Housing
The National Commission on Urban Problems: "Too Many People Are a Blighting Influence"

Chapter 4-- Maximum Feasible Urban Management: The "Automatic" City, and the Hill Parents Association
    Hill Reconnaissance
    A Particular Kind of "Model"
    The Hill Parents Association
    Bracing for Summer

Chapter 5-Renewal, Riot, and Resistance: Reclaiming 'Model Cities'
    The Riot
    A "War Zone" on Congress Avenue
    The Aftermath
    Whose "Model Cities"?

Chapter 6-The City and the Six-Lane Highway: Bread & Roses and Parking Garages
    Bread & Roses
    Unmasking the Ring Road
    Route 34: "Like Blowing Into a Hurricane"
    The Language of Agitation
    Public Re-Hearings
    People Against the Garage
    "You Can't Argue With Concrete"

Chapter 7-Downtown Lives and Palaces: From a 'Space of Freedom to a 'Space of Exclusion'
    The Strand Hotel
    The Park Plaza
    Defining Home
    "Clear a Space:" Fighting for a Different Downtown
    "Pulling Power, Buying Power, Growing Power"
    Between the Strand and the Plaza

Conclusion: "The After"

Works Cited

    Index

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