Originally published in American Habits.

Maybe it’s too painful to consider what we’ve lost. Maybe the political obstacles to rebirth appear too great. Whatever the case, many Americans seem to have written off our old-line core cities. When families increasingly see cities as no-go zones for raising children, something is clearly wrong.

For much of our nation’s history, city leaders from coast to coast assembled public and private resources to create grand parks and parkways, pedestrian-friendly boulevards, iconic city halls, noble monuments, museums and libraries with architecture worthy of ancient Greece or Rome, and landmark bridges. They even managed to imbue massive infrastructure projects with beauty: Picture the Brooklyn Bridge with its cathedral-like double archways opening onto a vista of old Manhattan. The city leaders of yore laid down the foundations of modern civilization – water, sewer and drainage systems, and humane street grids with sidewalks and trees. They established and built esteem in local police and fire departments. Somehow, they did it all with minimal interference in private land use decisions and at reasonable rates of property taxation – and before the advent of sales taxes (or income taxes, for that matter).

Writings of the 19th and early 20th centuries show civic leaders burning with ambition to make their hometowns safe, prosperous, high-functioning, humane and beautiful. This mentality (combined with periods of prosperity) gave us the historic parts of Boston, Charleston, and New Orleans – cultural capitals that sought to compete with the charm and urban fabric of grand European cities. Later – among visionaries like Frederick Law Olmstead in New York (and elsewhere) and Daniel Burnham in Chicago – order, beauty, cleanliness and quality of life were core concerns.

Those who came afterward embraced International Style conformity, glass and steel, and low-slung banalities set behind parking lots. Mid-20th century planner Robert Moses and his acolytes sliced through neighborhoods with grim expressways. Core cities became increasingly interchangeable political subdivisions, rather than unique expressions of civilization. They also became more stratified. As the middle class retreated to the suburbs for the safety and education of their children, core cities became ethnically divided hives for the affluent and the economically dependent, for the highest and the least educated. To symbolize these changes, core cities installed blobs of grim modernity in place of ornate fountains, monuments and equestrian statues of war heroes.

Resources that might have gone toward infrastructure, public safety, and public spaces went instead into spiraling pension obligations, expanding social services and bureaucratic expansion that far outpaced population growth. Along with all of this came major declines in quality of life, family stability, neighborhood cohesion, cleanliness and, particularly from the 1970s to the 1990s, public safety.

The near-universality of this trend across the U.S. suggests it was inevitable – that nothing could have been done to stop it.