Manhattantown, now known as Park West Village or West Park Apartments, was a massive

urban renewal Urban renewal (also called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address urban decay in cities. Urban renewal involves the clearing out of blighte ...

project in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

Manhattan Valley Manhattan Valley (also known as Bloomingdale ) is a neighborhood in the northern part of Upper West Side in Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded by West 110th Street to the north, Central Park West to the east, West 96th Street to the south, ...

neighborhood (formerly known as the Bloomingdale District). The project, which stretched between West 96th and West 100th streets, bordering

Central Park West Eighth Avenue is a major north–south avenue on the west side of Manhattan in New York City, carrying northbound traffic below 59th Street. It is one of the original avenues of the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 to run the length of Manhattan, ...

, was funded by Title I of the

Housing Act of 1949 The American Housing Act of 1949 () was a landmark, sweeping expansion of the federal role in mortgage insurance and issuance and the construction of public housing. It was part of President Harry Truman's program of domestic legislation, the Fai ...

, which financed

slum clearance Slum clearance, slum eviction or slum removal is an urban renewal strategy used to transform low income settlements with poor reputation into another type of development or housing. This has long been a strategy for redeveloping urban communities; ...

under urban redevelopment initiatives. Allegations of corruption were leveled soon after the project's inception in the spring of 1949, culminating in hearings in the Senate's Banking and Currency Committee in 1954. But the Senate hearings garnered little publicity. It was not until 1956 that a series of investigative articles in the ''World Sun-Telegram'' by Gene Gleason and Fred Cook revealed the extent of the mismanagement. It was the first instance in which Robert Moses' practice of "honest graft"—the method by which Slum Clearance chairman Moses distributed premiums, contracts and retainers to favored and incompetent friends—was revealed in the press. Under Title I, the plot of tenements worth $15 million (equivalent to $ million in ) had been sold, for $1 million (equivalent to $ million in ), to developer Samuel Caspert, charged with building public housing. Instead of relocating occupants, bulldozing the slum, and constructing public housing, Caspert and Co. merely sat on the newly acquired property collecting millions in rents. In the end, the city was forced to facilitate the transfer of Manhattantown to another developer,

William Zeckendorf William Zeckendorf Sr. (June 30, 1905 – September 30, 1976) was a prominent American real estate developer. Through his development company Webb and Knapp — for which he began working in 1938 and which he purchased in 1949 — he developed ...

. Caro, Robert. ''

The Power Broker ''The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York'' is a 1974 biography of Robert Moses by Robert Caro. The book focuses on the creation and use of power in New York local and state politics, as witnessed through Moses' use of unelected ...

''. Vintage Books: 1974.

References

External links

"The Tragedy of Urban Renewal,"
Reason.tv, 2011. Geography of Manhattan Urban renewal Slum clearance {{Manhattan-geo-stub