Displacement and Survival in Puerto Rican New York: Broken Promises in Lincoln Square

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Puerto Rican residents in New York’s poorest census tract – located in the poorest congressional district in the country, in the South Bronx – found themselves in the spotlight. President Jimmy Carter had visited the mostly Puerto Rican Charlotte Street area a few years earlier, intending to offer hope that his administration would help repair some of the devastation the community had experienced over the previous decades, when the city’s fiscal calamity combined with landlord negligence to produce crisis conditions in an already struggling neighborhood.

Three years later, both Senator Edward Kennedy and Ronald Reagan visited the same burned-out blocks of Charlotte Street during their campaigns against Carter. Speaking to a crowd of journalists with microphones and cameras, Reagan made sure to stand in front of a stark mural recently painted at the bottom corners of a bombed-out building, declaring “BROKEN PROMISES” on the right side, “FALSAS PROMESAS” on the left.

A simplistic reading of those campaign-stop images would have conveyed the message that President Carter had failed to make good on his pledge to a community in need – and that his opponents would do better. But for many Puerto Ricans in the South Bronx, the story of falsas promesas was not about presidential politics. And it did not begin with the decaying buildings in their ailing neighborhood. A decisive early chapter in the history of broken promises in Puerto Rican New York unfolded in a section of the city originally known as San Juan Hill¹ and renamed Lincoln Square in the late 1950s, when over a thousand Puerto Rican families were pushed out of their homes to make way for the development of Lincoln Center for the Creative and Performing Arts.

It was conditions like these – and New Dealers’ zeal for improving the standard of living for poor Americans – that had inspired Congress to pass the nation’s first major housing legislation in 1937, which funded new public housing developments and augmented ongoing efforts of local public housing authorities established in the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1949, in the grips of a severe shortage in housing supply after the Second World War, another major housing bill supported “slum clearance” and promised to promote community redevelopment.⁴

New York’s legendary city planning commissioner, Robert Moses, had learned of the pending 1949 legislation well before it was passed and was able to persuade New York’s mayor to establish a Committee on Slum Clearance, which Moses would head for the next decade.⁵ But contrary to the stipulations of the new federal law, Moses’s vision of redevelopment and slum clearance had little to do with building better housing for low-income New Yorkers. He forged ahead with the razing of slums to make way for modern, orderly developments to be enjoyed by the middle class as well as, in his words, to “expand educational, health, civic and cultural institutions in the city.”⁶

The Lincoln Center project represented the pinnacle of these goals, showcasing New York’s dominance in the accumulation of cultural capital. When President Eisenhower lifted the first shovel of dirt during the groundbreaking ceremony in 1959, he declared that Lincoln Center would generate “a mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world.”⁷ In the midst of the Cold War, there was no doubt that Eisenhower’s real point was about global competition rather than cooperation: the building of a colossal arts complex in the nation’s most cosmopolitan city served as a glittering example of American superiority over the Soviet Union.⁸

City officials promised to help relocate low-income residents displaced by development projects, ideally in one of New York’s growing number of public housing projects. But the demolition of low-rent apartment units far outpaced the building of new ones, and the waiting lists for public housing projects were years long. As the nation’s housing shortage persisted into the late 1950s, it was difficult for any of the displaced renters to find a new apartment elsewhere in the city for anything near what they paid for monthly rent in San Juan Hill – a little over $20 per room on average.

The prevalence of “slum” housing reached a crisis point in many cities after the war, and the problem was especially acute for non-white renters in New York. White residents at least had options when they were pushed out of their apartments, even if it meant an inconvenient move to a neighborhood far from work or family. Black residents were more constrained. They faced customary segregation in the housing market that excluded them from many neighborhoods, thereby increasing the scarcity of apartments available to Black renters and inflating rents in the poor Black and mixed-race neighborhoods where they could live.⁹ The city’s new public housing projects amplified these patterns of segregation, largely due to a “neighborhood composition rule” established by federal policymakers, which stipulated that public housing projects had to reflect the “racial composition” of the neighborhoods where they were built.¹⁰

Worst off were Puerto Ricans, the most recent group to settle in San Juan Hill and in the blocks of brownstones south of Columbus Circle that had been turned into tenement apartments long before the 1950s. Some were transplants from the overcrowded East Harlem barrio, pushed out of their old neighborhood by rising rents and deteriorating housing stock and overcrowded schools. But many more were recent migrants to the city, part of a massive postwar labor migration that, at its peak, propelled about 50,000 Puerto Ricans each year to remain in New York City as they sought better wages and better futures for their children. The 1950 census showed that New York’s Puerto Rican population had tripled over the previous decade, and by 1960 it would triple again.¹¹

When Puerto Ricans in Lincoln Square were told by city officials that their apartments were to be torn down, the burden of relocating might well have seemed insurmountable. In addition to confronting the same degree of racial discrimination in the city’s constricted housing market as their African American neighbors, Puerto Ricans in the 1950s also struggled with an ongoing wave of xenophobia that had gathered force in 1947 as migration from the island swelled. They were the largest population of foreigners to settle in the city since the passage of restrictive immigration legislation in the 1920s and the spike in migration after the war had produced a nasty, racist backlash. (“Foreign” was an incomplete description for Puerto Ricans, since they were migrating from within the U.S. empire; an earlier Supreme Court opinion had described their unusual status as “foreign in a domestic sense.”) Encouraged in their prejudice by newspaper headlines that proclaimed Puerto Ricans were diseased, immoral, and illiterate, and that they were migrating to New York primarily for the welfare benefits, many landlords turned away would-be renters whose accented English or “Latin” names betrayed their origins.¹²

Officials in the liberal Mayor William O’Dwyer’s administration regarded Puerto Ricans’ presence in the city as a problem to be solved. As O’Dwyer was campaigning for reelection in 1949, he convened the Mayor’s Committee on Puerto Rican Affairs as a way to show he would fix what many voters considered to be the city’s most visible social problem. While the large committee included almost two dozen Puerto Rican members, many in the community criticized its failure to take seriously the perspective of earlier migrant leaders who had ample experience in navigating challenges similar to those of their postwar counterparts.

The earliest Puerto Rican colonias (“colonies” or enclaves) had formed by the late 19^th century in Greenwich Village and Midtown, where Puerto Rican expatriates collaborated with likeminded Cubans working to liberate their homelands from Spanish colonialism.¹³ By the 1920s, after the United States had taken possession of Puerto Rico in 1898 following the Spanish-Cuban-American war and then extended U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917, a wave of migrants created a new Spanish-speaking barrio in East Harlem and expanded existing communities in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Most of the early migrants were skilled workers. Although they struggled alongside other working class neighbors to secure decent housing and fair wages, many expressed optimism that their hard work would yield better living conditions over time. During the Depression, Leftist organizers in the barrio collaborated with local political representatives to push for equal access to “relief” funds, with a particular emphasis on affordable housing.

Puerto Ricans’ prospects for a better life in New York looked much worse after World War II. The era of virulent anti-Puerto Rican sentiment that accompanied the wave of postwar migration was painful for earlier migrants who had invested so much in their adopted city, building labor organizations, advocating for better living conditions for Harlem residents, and supporting the war effort. This period of public vilification coincided with the peak years of the Cold War and the suppression of Leftist community organizing in general, with particular suspicion directed at Puerto Ricans on the Left. This meant the dismantling of some of the most effective activism regarding issues like fair housing. It was no small irony that the years of the postwar economic boom in New York turned out to be the most difficult decade yet for Puerto Rican residents.

While the O’Dwyer administration spun its response to the “Puerto Rican problem” into a political opportunity, the Puerto Rican Department of Labor, based in San Juan, pushed to create an agency in New York City that would materially help migrants navigate the challenges of their new surroundings. The first office of the Bureau of Employment and Migration (soon renamed the Migration Division of the Puerto Rican Department of Labor) was established just west of Columbus Circle, at 21 West 60^th Street.¹⁴ The location was, not coincidentally, near the center of the fastest-growing population of Puerto Rican migrants in the city; the proportion of Puerto Rican schoolchildren in the nearby elementary school would increase from eight percent to forty percent over the next few years.¹⁵ The Migration Division office opened its doors to migrants seeking employment assistance in 1948, just a few months before the Committee on Slum Clearance held its first meeting to plan the razing and redevelopment of poor neighborhoods including, it turned out, the very community surrounding the new office.

While the services provided by the Migration Division remained focused on employment, its staff also devoted considerable effort to compiling resources to help migrants navigate life in the city and learn about their rights as U.S. citizens on the mainland.¹⁶ It is somewhat surprising that, despite the urgency of migrants’ struggle to find decent apartments, the Migration Division did not develop a comprehensive housing assistance program in its early years of operation. The Migration Division staff was well aware of migrants’ challenges in securing housing, and eventually the leadership would push the city to inspect residential buildings and to punish landlords who failed to comply with housing code. Throughout the 1950s, though, the Migration Division provided little in the way of advocacy for Puerto Rican tenants.

Housing and civil rights advocate Charles Abrams emphasized the calamitous housing situation in New York’s largest Puerto Rican community, in East Harlem, in a 1955 journal article. “In the last twelve months, Abrams wrote, “I have traveled some 75,000 miles on housing missions for the United Nations. With some embarrassment, I have had to conclude that the slums in Harlem where most Puerto Ricans have found shelter are among the worst in the world.” He went on to indict the city for its approach to “slum clearance”: “instead of building on vacant land, [the city] is dislodging almost a quarter of a million slum-dwellers from their homes. Instead of relieving overcrowding, it is intensifying it; instead of diminishing slums, it is spreading them elsewhere; instead of easing the housing shortage, it is worsening it; instead of aiding Puerto Rican adjustment, it is frustrating it.”¹⁷

The announcement in spring 1955 that the city planned to demolish about fifteen blocks in San Juan Hill certainly worsened Puerto Rican residents’ precarious position in the city. As the demolition date approached, Migration Division director Jose Monserrat wrote to Robert Moses inquiring about provisions to be made for the thousands of low-income Puerto Ricans who would be displaced by the Lincoln Square project. Moses offered only a cagey reply, citing legal considerations that limited what he could say in response to Monserrat’s questions. “This is at best a complex thorny problem with all sorts of possibilities of misrepresentation,” Moses concluded, implying that any critique of his handling of the relocation of tenants in the development area would be based on a misreading of the facts.¹⁸

Puerto Ricans and other tenants who were to be displaced from the Lincoln Square development area found their most important ally in Harris Present, a lawyer who began advising residents and small business owners soon after the development project was announced.¹⁹ Present had served throughout his career as counsel for a variety of civic groups in New York and was a committed civil rights and fair housing advocate. Present also had developed a particular interest in the plight of Puerto Ricans in New York and served as counsel for the Spanish-American Youth Bureau, a social service and advocacy organization founded by Puerto Rican business and civic leader Ruperto Ruiz in the early 1940s.

Throughout the 1950s, Present frequently wrote letters to the editor of the New York Times concerning the acute housing struggles of Puerto Ricans in New York. When Mayor Wagner established a Committee for Better Housing in late 1954 (about a year before the Lincoln Square project was announced), Present decried the fact that the committee of ninety-six members did not include a single Puerto Rican representative. “They have a stake as great as, if not greater than, any other segment of our population in achieving better housing,” wrote Present, noting that the city’s population of half a million Puerto Ricans included a number of leaders “who are well versed in housing problems concerning their people.”

The absence of Puerto Rican voices was amplified by the condescending conclusion to the committee’s 1955 report on the prospects for better housing in the city. “As long as Puerto Ricans are content to live under conditions that to our modern civic conscience, educated to higher housing standards, appear to be intolerable,” the committee chided, “there will be such demand for cheap housing that the old law tenements will remain as a very undesirable part of our city housing supply.”²⁰ It was as if the committee’s vision for “better housing” could be achieved only if these marginalized city residents found their own solution to the constrained choices and discrimination they confronted.

The contemptuousness of the Committee for Better Housing was precisely the kind of treatment by city officials that led Jesús Colón, one of the Puerto Rican colonia’s most energetic and thoughtful leaders, to observe the same year that “[t]he community is struggling…to gain recognition and the rights it is entitled to, in the city at large.”²¹ But Colón, a socialist and a champion of the working class, was not the kind of critic the city’s elite would listen to. Harris Present, on the other hand, had status and credentials that made him harder for city leaders to ignore. Present’s ongoing objections to the exclusion of Puerto Rican voices from the city’s policymaking circles was almost certainly a factor in Mayor Wagner’s decision to make the first appointment of a Puerto Rican official to city government. Manuel Gómez was sworn in as magistrate court judge in 1957 and soon developed a reputation for doggedly enforcing the city’s housing laws on behalf of its poor and working class tenants.²²

Another event of significance to Puerto Rican New Yorkers in 1957 was the opening on Broadway of West Side Story. The story of an ill-fated romance between a young Puerto Rican woman and a young white man (of unspecified ethnic origins) charmed New York theatergoers with its sympathetic portrayal of immigrant grit and the dangers of forbidden love.²³ Observers at the time, including Puerto Ricans, seemed not to object to the portrayal of young Puerto Rican men as dangerous gang members—although that has been one of several major criticisms of the play in recent decades. The play’s original setting on the “West Side” was indeterminate, and perhaps residents of various West Side neighborhoods imagined their own. But when the film version of West Side Story debuted in 1961, the setting was unmistakable to New Yorkers familiar with San Juan Hill and Lincoln Square. One scene early in the film showed a vacant lot in a state of rubbled decay, filmed on location near the northern end of the Lincoln Center development site during the demolition stage.²⁴

Also in late 1957, after nearly two years of picketing and petitioning against the project had failed to force any real changes to the development plan, Harris Present filed a lawsuit on behalf of tenants and business owners in Lincoln Square. Present argued that the inclusion of Fordham University, a Catholic institution, in the plans for Lincoln Square violated the constitutional principle of church-state separation. (Fordham, based in the Bronx, planned to purchase land from the city to build a new Manhattan campus.) Although a succession of judges rejected that claim, Present continued to advocate aggressively on behalf of the people displaced by the Lincoln Square project.²⁵

Present also persisted in calling attention to ways federal and local housing policies had intensified – not ameliorated – the housing problems of Black and Puerto Rican Americans over the previous decade. When the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights conducted hearings on housing issues in 1959, Present urged the commission to address the ongoing problem of segregation in Title I housing projects. “When you build… luxury housing with a general provision that there is to be no discrimination[,] but the overwhelming majority of Negroes and Puerto Ricans cannot afford that housing, you get the segregated housing in the economically favored racial group without having to resort officially to discrimination,” he explained.²⁶

Puerto Rican community activists in neighborhoods beyond the West Side were beginning to make the same point as the struggle over affordable rents and landlord accountability was turning housing into a political issue for Puerto Ricans throughout the city. Through the following decades – as the decline of New York’s manufacturing economy and the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s hit the city’s Black and Puerto Rican communities earliest and hardest — Puerto Rican leaders, including a small but increasing number of elected officials, would argue over and over that access to decent, affordable housing was fundamental to staving off impending disaster in the city’s working class neighborhoods.

Within a few years of the destruction of San Juan Hill, some of the most visible young leaders in the Puerto Rican community were devoting their careers to housing advocacy. Ted Vélez, a social worker, founded the East Harlem Tenants’ Council in 1962 at the age of twenty-four. A few years later East Harlem, which was still the center of New York’s Puerto Rican population, exploded in several days of riots and in the aftermath Vélez interpreted the events for a New York Times reporter. A combination of Puerto Ricans’ “bad housing” and the related lack of “recognition, respect, [and] dignity” they continually confronted were the real cause of the discontent that had boiled over, said Vélez.²⁷ “[W]e have talked, demonstrated, argued, picketed, boycotted,” Vélez told the reporter, yet still city officials ignored their needs.

By 1970, young Puerto Rican housing activists no longer asked for recognition. Housing was a matter of survival, they said, and the city’s inaction forced them to take matters into their own hands. Puerto Rican community activists became major strategists of a growing fair housing movement across the city, organizing rent strikes and squatter actions to disrupt the “slum economics” that had plagued low-income people for decades.

Their work intersected with that of other activists participating in what was soon called the despertar boricua (the “Puerto Rican awakening”), including the legendary South Bronx organizer Evelina López Antonetty who founded a group called United Bronx Parents in the mid-1960s. López Antonetty’s original focus was training parents to advocate for their children in city schools, but the scope of her organization soon expanded to include public health and housing justice – issues that fundamentally shaped a child’s educational opportunity, as López Antonetty and two dozen other Puerto Rican leaders explained to a U.S. Senate panel over several days of hearings in 1970.²⁸

By the time images of the “BROKEN PROMISES/FALSAS PROMESAS” mural in the South Bronx appeared on the front page of newspapers during the 1980 presidential campaign, Puerto Ricans in New York had been struggling for decades to secure stable, decent housing.²⁹ Imagery of decay and evidence of broken promises were only the most visible aspects of this struggle; behind the rubble, dozens of organizations and thousands of people in New York’s many Puerto Rican neighborhoods were working to help their neighbors to live with dignity and to demand fair treatment in the city’s housing market. Over the decades since, the impact of this housing justice work has contributed to the resiliency and vibrancy of the city as a whole.