2010.050

Carlson, Caroline

Gift

Gift of Caroline Carlson.

2010 - 2010

Date(s) Created: 2010 Date(s): 2010-2010

Notes: Archives 2010.050.0001 Ralph Seligman Oral History Interview. Note: page numbers refer to the pagination in original transcript copy. FRIENDS OF THE HOBOKEN PUBLIC LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT INTERVIEWEE: RALPH SELIGMAN INTERVIEWERS: GRACE LYNCH & CAROLINE CARLSON LOCATION: HOME OF RALPH & PEARL SELIGMAN, ROOSEVELT, NEW JERSEY DATE: 6 MARCH 2 010 CC: It's Saturday, March 6, 2010. This is an interview with Ralph Seligman, conducted by Grace Lynch and Caroline Carlson, in Ralph's home in Roosevelt, New Jersey. Ralph, let's start with your life before you came to Hoboken. Tell us where and when you were born, and a little bit about your early years. RS: Okay. I've known Hoboken all my life. It's kind of interesting. I'm really a New Yorker. Both my parents were New Yorkers. They met again when they were working in New Orleans and Macon, Georgia respectively, and they married there. So I have confounded immigration Seligman - 2 officials all my life when they look at where I was born -- Macon, Georgia -- but I'm really a New Yorker. But about Hoboken -- my mother had a Model A car, a great car. Hoboken had a ferry that you could put a car on, to go to New York. So to get to my upper class German-Jewish relatives (that means something to Jews), we would drive from Irvington, where we lived for quite a while, take the ferry -- take the Hoboken ferry, which in those days served coffee and cakes on the trip. It was very luxurious -- and then we would drive up to the Upper East Side, where my German great-grandmother lived. My cousins and I would play in Central Park, while my family visited my great grandma, who was a tyrant. Anyway, my father loved ships -- I think maybe they gave him an escape from my mother -- but he really loved ships, and Hoboken, in those days, had impounded a lot of German ships during World War I. Some of them, like the Leviathan, were still there. So Hoboken, and ships, and going to see Great-Grandma, were all very early experiences in my life. GL: Now were you born in Irvington? Or were you born down in Macon, Georgia? Seligman - 3 RS: I was born in Macon. CC: What year? RS: Nineteen-twenty-two. I'll be eighty- seven -- eighty-eight this week. GL: Eighty-eight this week. Yep. Big birthday. Ralph, when you were young you lived in Irvington? RS: Yes. There were still farms when we moved to Irvington. Just down the street from us there were farms. Union County had a lot of farms, and we were right on the borderline with Union County. The street I lived on happened to be the approach street to a park called Olympic Park, an amusement park -- a mini-Steeplechase Park. GL: Ralph, what did your dad do? What did your parents do? Seligman - 4 RS: My father was in the insurance business. There was always this uncertainty about my father. Was he born in the United States or not? His father lived in Brighton Beach, so we had my father's side living in Brighton Beach, and my mother's side living on the Upper West Side of New York. It was not what you would call a marriage of equals. CC: Where did you study, Ralph, and how did you get interested in -- ? RS: Chancellor Avenue Public School, Irvington High School. We're talking Depression time now. I went to a junior college in Newark, Essex Junior College, which was remarkably good. It had some really terrific, lovely people in it. It was also next to what used to be called Newark State, which has become Kean College now, so we would mix with the Kean College kids. They were a big influence. The ones in the Art Department were a big influence in my life. They knew who Ben Shahn was long before I did, and they were going down to Roosevelt to visit him, and I didn't even know who they were talking about. Seligman - 5 GL: And where did you go to college -before you studied "art." RS: Essex Junior College. In the war, I went to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, which is in Great Neck, on the former Walter P. Chrysler estate. It's so interesting how earlier lives impinge on later lives. My cousins and my playwright uncle -- their playwright father -- lived in Great Neck, and we used to go swimming at the public beach, which was right next to the Walter Chrysler estate. One of the big items of the day was when Chrysler would go to Wall Street in his own yacht. GL: So that piece of college you did while you were in the Merchant Marine? RS: That same estate, that I watched from the public section -- that public section got incorporated into the military academy. GL: And where did you go to planning school? Or where did you study planning? Seligman - 6 RS: Oh, that was a long time later. CC: Let's ask him how he got interested in planning. RS: Okay. I got an undergraduate degree in economics from Berkeley, so I have a B.A. from Berkeley. GL: So you finished your education in Berkeley. RS: Part of it. The military academy was so generous that they took my graduate work, later -- I got a master's in planning -- but the Merchant Marine Academy took those credits, plus my sea time and experience at the Merchant Marine Academy -- so I have two undergraduate degrees, one from Berkeley, and one from the Merchant Marine Academy, on the two coasts, and I have a master's from Hunter. CC: And what's your master's in? Seligman - 7 RS: What's the title they use for it? Planning and Urban Development, I guess is what they called it at Hunter. CC: So what got you interested in going to graduate school in Planning and Urban Development? RS: This town. CC: What's this town? GL: Roosevelt. RS: Roosevelt. We moved here. I felt grateful to the New Deal all my life. At a time when, for me, it wasn't the Great Depression, it was the Great Dysfunction, it was the Great Bad Time, and the only thing that gave hope was the New Deal. And to come to a New Deal town was to be reinvigorated. These are the people -- and it goes with an economics background. But the whole field of planning, believe it or not, was new to me, even though Berkeley had one of the best planning schools in the country. I didn't know about it. But when I came here, I Seligman - 8 said, "Gee, this works," and people participated. People were very proprietary. As soon as I studied planning -just to show you how much people -- a significant portion of the people who were here. Jack Grossman, who was a cutter for Ceil Chapman, or some fashion designer, said, "You're studying planning? You should be on our planning board. Go out and sign up for our planning board." GL: So were you on the planning board here in Roosevelt, before you studied? RS: Yes. Then I said, "Boy, I have to learn more about this. This is great. I like it. But, you know, community organization, also, has a relationship to going to sea. Because the smallest community I can think of is the ship's crew. They have to interact. They come with skills, and you use these skills. You begin with a bunch of strangers who don't even know anything, and you find yourself, as I did, on an eight-month voyage, where you're locked up with the same thirty-three other guys that you began the voyage with. I mentioned Newark State College because Newark State College kids were really avant-garde. The head Seligman - 9 of the Art Department lived in the Village. She had the kids over there, so I was going to Cafe Society Downtown before I was going to other places. So it was this mixture, and they interested me in this whole idea of ships, really. You have to have a successful community if you're going to last the voyage. GL: We're building on the resources of everything that somebody has to do. RS: During wartime, half of these guys were new. There was a tremendous enrollment in the Merchant Marine Academy, but it was a very good school. One of the main problems, which nobody seemed to take as a problem was how do you get along? How do you last for a long voyage? I was on a tanker. I was on this tanker because I wanted to sail on the latest fashion in ships. It was turbo-electric. It was a long, long voyage, a lot of city guys, and no diversion. None of the usual city diversions. Nothing. You're there, and you're doing the same watch, the same work pattern every day -- the same job, the same time. If you're on the 12:00 to 4:00 or the midnight to 4:00, noon to 4:00, and you're there for like ten months. Now if Seligman - 10 you're doing this, and you're also on the equator, you're getting the same time of day and the same temperature every day. The monotony -- the casualties -- a lot of the casualties in the Merchant Marine came from guys just flipping out, because they just were not used to living without being diverted. You couldn't have radio, you couldn't have any of that. It was wartime. In this case, the Japanese could tap into whatever you did. If you're in the Atlantic -- my first trips were in the Atlantic -they'll tap into that. So you're really on your own. So you're working with the idea of a community. How do you make it work? I had had a major disappointment when I was going to Junior College. I wanted very much to go to Black Mountain College. It was adventurous, it was smart, and I had no money. I applied for a scholarship. I was one-down, never made it, so what I tried to do was turn my Junior College into a model, modeling it on Black Mountain. My idea of modeling is -- it really goes back to this old folk tale about the "stone soup," which I think is the most important part of my planning education -- when the beggar comes up to the door, the farmer's door, and says to the lady, "Do you have any food?" and she says, "I don't have any food." Seligman - 11 And he says, "Well, I have something that makes food. I have this beautiful limestone, which I keep very clean. If you can give me a pot of boiling water, I can get you the best soup you ever had." Then he says, "Do you have this? Do you have this? Do you have this?" And it's a matter of "expiration." What do you have that you really aren't aware that you have? GL: And each party adds to that process. RS: Each party "adds to the life." GL: A new ingredient. RS: A new personality, and another set of interests. So we got a letter of commendation from the Health Department, because we were one of the very few tankers that were stuck as sort of floating reservoirs in the Pacific Ocean, that didn't have self-inflicted casualties, so people -- so the guys could get home, get "away," who can do this. Seligman - 12 I had had this experience -- this disappointment -- not getting into Black Mountain, trying to make my Junior College more like Black Mountain, and discovering, say, that the registrar, a very sweet lady, was also great with music. So we started a course in music, and started doing that. Well, I just carried that idea over to the ship. Two guys on the ship knew how to box, and had brought boxing gloves. We had a boxing tournament within a month. A couple knew how to play chess; we had a chess tournament within a short amount of time. There were these two marvelous old-timers. The newly-arrived merchant seamen -- you could tell them. They were fidgety. These old guys sat like stones. One was Hawaiian, one was -- I forget what he was. German -- and they knew more about seamanship, and had come down in the tradition of how do you come? You serve an apprenticeship. They gave a course in knot-tying. Where was this knot used? Why was it used? How do you do it right? And they had all these ways. They could do that scrimshaw that sailors do -- all those things that sailors -- so they never had time on their hands. They never got fidgety. They blended in with the ocean. GL: And they had a skill to share. Seligman - 13 RS: They had a skill to share. They were wonderful teachers. GL: Ralph, other than the time on the ships, what other kinds of -- ? RS: That was my first community. That was the first community ever. GL: Kind of a formative need to continue -- RS: Kind of a continuum, yes. GL: What other kinds of jobs did you work on, that also kind of propelled you along your way? RS: I did jobs that did a lot of selling to people. I told you there was an amusement park at the head of our street in Irvington. We'd get a summer job, at terrible wages -- like ten cents an hour -- at the amusement park. "Step right up, have a photograph made, four for a dime." That's what it was. That kind of stuff. Seligman - 14 Or knock down the milk bottles, or Poker Fascination. I Guessed Weights. Whatever it was, I worked -- and you're then exposed to all these people every day, just rivers of people. By the end of the summer I could tell you what high school a kid went to by the way the kid dressed, the accent, and all that stuff. We began to look for these sort of community personalities that were there. CC: After that -- was that before or after you went to Berkeley? RS: That was before Berkeley. Berkeley was post-war. CC: And then after Berkeley was planning school. Did you have any other early work experiences, before you came to Hoboken -- RS: Sure. CC: -- after college? Seligman - 15 RS: My work experiences were working -probably the most important one -- Newark had this wonderful fierce old librarian, Beatrice Winser, who ran this program where only if you were going to college could you be a "stack person." We put the books back where they belonged, etc. It was great. I met a bunch of guys like I'd never met before. They were smart, they were funny, and there was a lot of camaraderie there. It was another kind of community. So you were exposed to the community at large. People came to use the library, just as I was exposed to a huge community in the amusement park, people of all kinds -- usually the middle class and lower middle class, and what kinds of sales techniques they responded to, etc. But, again, this was people, and how do they -- so there was a theme that I wasn't really aware of, that was following me through the various jobs that I had. It all had to do with the idea of community. Then I came to Roosevelt, and it was a community. And wow, it was a planned community. Now was that Communism? But it worked. People felt responsible for it. Like Jack Grossman. GL: Participants in the process. Seligman - 16 RS: I was very impressed by that, and by the New Deal. Yes. GL: So Ralph, how long did you live in Hoboken before you actually started to study planning? RS: I was commuting from Roosevelt in the early days. CC: Were you living in Hoboken? RS: No. I never lived in Hoboken until I got so busy, at a later point. CC: So when did you first come to Hoboken, and why? RS: Well, I came to Hoboken to take the ferry to New York, to see my great-grandmother. CC: I mean, when did you come -- Seligman - 17 GL: -- as a profession; to do professional work. RS: Oh, as a profession. When I met your father -- Grace's father. He was one of the -"intelligence" doesn't begin to tell the story. It was applied intelligence, one of the smartest people about the way communities really worked; about the politics of working-class, Hudson County communities, incredibly insightful. He was the one who talked me into coming to work for Mayo Lynch. GL: Where did you meet him, Ralph? Were you taking classes together? RS: Oh. Okay. Remember, 1950 I'm in Hoboken. In 1950 -- yes. In 1951 I get a call one day that said, "Sterling told me I should call you. We're coming to live in New York." It turns out that this is the English wife of an Englishman who's on a scholarship -- fellowship, really, graduate fellowship -- he's at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he had met my former roommate at Berkeley, and he was now in Princeton. Seligman - 18 One of the things that kept me from going buggy on long trips was on our first trip -- the first trip I had made -- was to Sicily. One of the guys came back from his first day ashore, and he had this little banjo mandolin, a tiny little thing, beautiful. He said, "Do you want to buy it?" I said, "How much?" and he said, "Five bucks. I'm not gonna use it." That mandolin kept me company all the time I went to sea. I really had a very privileged war. As a cadet, I shared a cabin with another cadet. After that, I had my own cabin; my bed was made by somebody; somebody else cooked my food; washed my sheets and did all that. All I had to worry about was maybe we'd get torpedoed one day. Those are pretty good odds. GL: So what year did you come to Hoboken to start working? RS: Well, in continuation of the story of the call from England -- I met this Englishman, and he was blind. He was blinded the last week of World War II. A sniper's bullet hit the bridge of his nose and destroyed the optic nerve, and it was gone. He was a marvelous, marvelous guy. Seligman - 19 GL: That's Alan Milne. RS: Alan Milne. His field was philosophy. His work opportunities in the United States, in New Jersey, were at the Institute for Advanced Study. So I met some pretty interesting people there. GL: Is that about the time -- RS: That was 1950. GL: Is that about the time you met Dad? Or was that earlier? RS: No. I met your father because -- oh, I know. Yes. Because Alan lived in England, we had somebody to -- and I went to England already being aware that planning was a major activity in England. I started reading this and visiting, so Pearl and I spent a year in Europe. We did it on $3,000 we'd saved, and managed to buy a little mini-car; we both got jobs and the rest of it. It's been a long time. But when I came back, I said, "I'm going to work Seligman - 20 for a planner." So it was after my year in England that I pretty much -- I talked to a lot of people. I met the head of the planning school at the University of Liverpool, who invited me to tea, and we talked about cricket (which my friend Alan had explained to me, so I at least knew the terms of that game). GL: And I'm guessing a few planning conversations, too, to boot. RS: What transpired -- when I went to the University of Liverpool, Sir Miles Wright was the man I met, the one who was so kind and had me for tea. He said, "Look, if you're interested in planning, if I were you I'd study in the country where I'm going to practice." So as soon as we got back from England, which was September of about 1957, I guess, I looked for a job, and I got hired immediately. CC: Where were you working then, immediately? Seligman - 21 RS: In Newark. One of the major planning firms in the state was called Candeub & Fleissig, and I just asked -- I said, "Look, I'll work for cheap." They said, "No, you won't. From your experience, you ought to do very well in this kind of work." They hired me, and I was the planner for East St. Louis, which was probably the most poverty-stricken municipality in the whole United States. Candeub sent me out there to get my feet wet. He was if not the biggest consulting-planning firm, he was close to it. GL: And how did you get to Hoboken? RS: Car. GL: No, no. I meant your first -- how did you make the connection to start working in Hoboken? Through Candeub? RS: Hoboken was always my favorite city. When I worked in the library, Hoboken was a very inexpensive but a very pleasant night out. Seligman - 22 GL: But when you left Candeub & Fleissig, was there a reason? RS: I left because there was a cut in federal funding, and that dropped off. Oh. My skill had been in construction as -- what the British call a "quantities surveyor," cost surveyor for materials that go into construction. So I earned a living after I parted from the library as a cost estimator. CC: I want to ask you how you started working with Joe Lynch. GL: How did you find him, or how did he find you? CC: And the name of the company would be good to hear. RS: Candeub & Fleissig. GL: Yes. But when you came to work with Dad. Seligman - 23 RS: That was later. My first planning company was Candeub & Fleissig. GL: Right. And that's when you worked in St. Louis. RS: Federal funding dropped off, so I went back to construction. But I continued going to graduate school. Once I started -- GL: Okay, Ralph. So the job with Candeub & Fleissig -- when the funding fell out, you had continued to work in construction. Then you went back to graduate school? RS: I continued with graduate school. Once I started, I had made my commitment, and the more I worked in it, the more at-home I felt. GL: And was that all at Hunter? Seligman - 24 RS: No, the first program I was in was one that was run jointly by NYU, which did the social studies part. And what's in Brooklyn? GL: Pratt. RS: Pratt -- the Pratt Institute, which did the planning part. GL: Is that where you met Joe Lynch? Because he was at Pratt. RS: That's where I met Joe. GL: He was at Pratt. He was studying planning at Pratt. Okay. RS: We're talking now 1958. Nineteen-fifty- eight. CC: Then how did you actually come to work in Hoboken? Seligman - 25 RS: Because Joe Lynch said to me, "At some point you've got to stop screwing around. You're either going to go into planning, or you're not. So I'm going to start a planning section of my engineering company, and the job is yours if you want to take it. But make up your mind." That was how I started. [Laughs] Does that sound like your father? GL: Unfortunately, it does sound like my father. But also, in the sense of -- so the two of you started on that endeavor together, in the late '50s. RS: I told you just recently about Hoboken, how we went through Hoboken on the way to my great- grandmother's. I went to Hoboken when I was doing other work, and when I was working in Hudson County. One of the construction companies I worked for was s. They painted the George Washington Bridge, and stuff like that. So here I am, back in Hoboken a lot, and I always liked it. I liked the feel, I liked the feel of the city. There was a camaraderie that was best expressed at the Clam Broth House. Now I know they didn't let women in there -- Seligman - 26 GL: Not then. RS: Not then -- but there were guys on the way home, on the Erie-Lackawanna, and they would stop in the Clam Broth Bar, and it didn't make any difference how expensive their attache cases were, they talked. Everybody talked. They said -- that was a community place. GL: So when you were taking classes at Pratt, Dad had started his company, in 1951. I think, he incorporated in '53, so it was about '59-'58 when you started to work in Hoboken with him -- RS: Yes. GL: -- and you started that planning department. CC: What kinds of projects did you work on in Hoboken? Seligman - 27 GL: When you came to Hoboken, and you were starting up that planning department with Mayo Lynch, how did you start? RS: Okay. We started partly at Joe Lynch's suggestion. He was always looking for a more practical way to do things, and there was this program that, after my experience at Candeub & Fleissig, I thought this program was more productive of good results. It was called a Community Renewal Program. GL: That's the name I couldn't think of, Caroline. RS: It had to do with assessing a community's needs, but then spelling out the projects that were available through the government, and how to put them together in order to -- because you not only specified a project, as you did with a master plan -- if you even got that far with the master plan -- and they just said, "Well, you ought to have this -- " The Community Renewal Program was much better than that. It was this program, this federal program, has these kinds of objectives, so you were Seligman - 28 starting with something that, for me, was better than the master plan, which is sort of airy, fairy, and theoretical. This was what do you do, how do you do it, and what results do you expect from it, and what does it cost, and how do you afford it? GL: Now the needs-assessment that would have gone into it -- was that a federally funded program? Did you apply for federal grants? RS: Housing and Home Finance Agency. GL: So you were aware that that was available, and then you started to do the needs-assessment. RS: I had worked for Candeub & Fleissig. I was in touch with people who were doing actual planning, etc. People I met in my very brief time with Candeub & Fleissig have remained my friends forever. I can't tell you -- I won't bother going into the names of them -- there were conversations with them: "What are you doing? How are you doing?" It was also a time when Jonny Shahn, who lives in town, was living in Boston, and Jane Jacobs was really Seligman - 29 stirring things up with her books, and pointing out the difference (which I just thought was marvelous) of saving all the buildings, of using them, of converting them. GL: It was '61, right, when she published The Death and Life of American Cities. RS: The Death and Life of American Cities, and it was a very appealing thing. And since Jon Shahn, who lives in Roosevelt, was up there -- we've been friends since he was ten -- and I would go up there, and we'd go around the city and talk to people and meet his friends. CC: Ralph, how did the Community Renewal Program transition into your work at the beginning of the Hoboken Model Cities program? RS: The Model Cities Program was grounded in the Community Renewal Program. When I became the planner for Hoboken, I imagined -- let me just say, if I'm not flattering myself -- I realized what a complex city Hoboken is, and, always, how unappreciated it was as a special place. Seligman - 30 RS: So at this time there were these fights going on in Boston between a city's character -- the way a city would develop; what about its character? How much do you respect it? How valuable is it? I had a friend from Roosevelt I used to visit in Boston, so I got even closer up on this. GL: So this was in the early '60s. RS: This was in the early '60s, yes. I didn't want to sell people an empty bag of goods. I had read about this planner, Walter Thabit, who was a friend of Jane Jacobs, who herself was doing work in Boston. GL: Was he planning in Boston? RS: Oh, yes. What impressed me was that he had stopped Robert Moses from changing the character of where you went to school -- Cooper Union -- Seligman - 31 GL: Downtown in the Village, right. That was a fight that Jane Jacobs and all those urban activists were fighting. RS: Right. I always seem to know somebody who knows somebody, so I knew somebody who knew Walter Thabit, who had successfully defeated (the toughest guy in the world to defeat) Robert Moses. We talked. He had his own firm, and while I started off by thinking, you know, he's the precious little hero of the Village Voice, I changed immediately and saw him as one of the neatest thinkers, cleanest thinkers, thorough thinkers I've ever met. He was a marvelous guy to work with. That's Walter Thabit. He was just marvelous. And he was interested in Hoboken. He had come here. Walter's not alive now. I think he came here once, and wanted to get an abortion for his wife -- but never mind. So he had a whole planning staff at the time, and somehow everything seemed to fall in together. GL: So he came in as a consultant to you, with - Seligman - 32 RS: Yes, as a consultant to me. But Walter certainly should have taken credit for that community. That was Walter's work, it was his staff's work, and it was a great staff. Walter's an extremely modest guy, and all that stuff with the Voice -- that was somebody else's doing. That wasn't Walter pushing himself. GL: Now Ralph - RS: Go ahead. We're talking 1962. GL: Right. I just have a quick question, before we go into the Model Cities Program, and some of these things which were worked on with the Hoboken Planning Board, in the sense that you were representing them. But was the planning board in Hoboken well established when you got there? RS: Oh, they already had a master plan. Fleissig had done the master plan for Hoboken. Seligman - 33 GL: Candeub & Fleissig. Okay. That was the question I had. And did they have an ordinance at that time? RS: They had ordinances, as they say, up the kazoo. Yes, they had lots of ordinances. What they didn't have -- and what I once remembered in a conversation with a state official -- I was talking about a state program that had to do with transportation, and I said, "You know, this place is really a goldmine. It has all these different possibilities." And this state official said, "Yes, but to get any benefit from a goldmine, you've got to go work in the mine, and nobody in Hoboken wants to do the work." GL: So by consolidating all that effort into the community program, that was the seed -- RS: What the Community Renewal Program gave -- an initial program that paid my salary, that paid Walter Thabit's salary. It had enough flexibility, and was more daring than the master plan. It wasn't a conventional program. Come up with a result. Show where you're going to get the money for these projects. Don't spin out a project Seligman - 34 that just looks marvelous, show how you're going to do it. Then you'll see how you build from this, and get to where you want to go. CC: What was the project or projects that you worked on that got funding, and became reality. RS: That's the program that I began my connection with Hoboken on. GL: The Model Cities. RS: It wasn't Model Cities, it was Community Renewal. GL: Community Renewal. But now you're working within the -- RS: The master plan was specific tasks, not specific philosophies -- which is the real difference. It was really hard-nosed stuff. What are you going to do, where are you going to get the money? Seligman - 35 GL: And I think the question is, some of the projects that were implemented, based on the work that you did putting together the over-view in the community renewal plan -- what were some of those early projects that were implemented? RS: Well, you know, we're back to stone soup again. I guess I got connected wit... [truncated due to length]