Writing in 1962, Lewis Mumford noted that “The forces that have formed our cities in the past are now almost automatically, by their insensate dynamism, wrecking them.… The prevailing economic and technological forces in the big city have broken away from the ecological pattern, as well as from the moral inhibitions and the social codes and the religious ideals that once, however imperfectly, kept them under some sort of control, and reduced their destructive potentialities.”

The cities, according to this theory, have been killing themselves with growth. They are overwhelmed by monoliths of glass and concrete, riven by freeways; the middle classes flee to the suburbs, and the cities’ inner cores are left to the dependent and the desperate; neighborhoods disintegrate and with them the venerable buildings whose charm engaged the imagination and whose scale satisfied human dimensions. The cities become not places in which to live, but inhuman complexes where merchandise comes and goes and paper gets shuffled about behind the faceless glass of office towers.

The solution to this grim slide into blight and anonymity, says Mumford, lies at the very heart of the urban system: “One cannot control destructive automatisms at the top unless one begins with the smallest units and restores life and initiative to them—to the person as a responsible human being, to the neighborhood as the primary organ not merely of social life but of moral behavior, and finally to the city, as an organic embodiment of the common life.…”

Enter Carl B. Westmoreland, of Cincinnati, Ohio. He is a black man who lives in the Mt. Auburn district of his city; he also is president of the Mt. Auburn Good Housing Foundation, and there are those who maintain that he is moving in his own way to satisfy Mumford’s dictum, for he is living and working in what was once known as one of the most thoroughly depressed urban areas in the country.

Mt. Auburn was not always that way. It was born as the child of Cincinnati’s nineteenth-century prosperity. Founded in 1788 and situated on the banks of a curving bend of the Ohio River, the city blossomed in the years before the Civil War as the commercial heart of the Old Northwest, shipping corn, wheat, hogs, produce, and whisky to the cotton states of the South and the metropolitan centers of the East. After the interruption of war, the town’s booming river trade was augmented by railroads lacing their way throughout the country’s midsection; and in the 1920’s, the channelization of the Ohio River gave a further boost to the economy.

As Cincinnati prospered, so did Mt. Auburn. Located on one of the city’s several hills, with a view of the river and the bustling heart of downtown, Mt. Auburn swiftly became one of the most fashionable areas of the city, a place of stately homes and preserved gentility—the birthplace of William Howard Taft. Yet, in a parallel with most such urban districts after