The city bulldozed pre-Civil War blocks despite officially renouncing such plans.

Evidence

Padlocked buildings and empty storefronts give way to wrecked facades and mounds of rubble—a “half-razed ghost town” per the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, a determined foe of heedless urban renewal whom Jacobs encountered on Ferry Street and filmed in the Sky Socialist addendum. Huxtable was exasperated to see the last granite lintels and columns of the pre–Civil War brick buildings “going down like tenpins on Ferry Street.” The so-called Brooklyn Bridge Southwest project was, she wrote, a “total bulldozer plan” perversely realized at a time when the Lindsay administration had officially renounced the approach. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1002

Categorization

• XREF: The bureaucratic contradiction here — official policy renouncing a practice that continues anyway — echoes the reader’s test case for cultural stagnation claims about institutional inertia.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did a ‘total bulldozer plan’ proceed under an administration that had officially renounced the approach? Which agency or funding stream was exempt?