What's the Urban Underground?

I went to work for the New York City Department of City Planning in 1968.   It was my first job out of graduate school   I made $8500 per year and that seemed like a princely sum.

I found at City Planning other radicals/lefties, etc.   They had formed a radical planners' group called Urban Underground.   Some of the planners worked for the City, others worked for various planning consultants.   We became part of a larger organization of post Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) called Movement for a Democratic Society.   This was a great political place for people to go after they graduated college.   There were welfare workers' groups, teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc. 

Our planning group was lead by some pretty sharp folks including Jacqueline Leavitt, who still teaches planning at UCLA.  We had a pretty sophisticated critique of urban planning and the politics of the planning process in NYC.   We favored banning cars from Manhattan.  We understood liberals were not always the peoples' friends.   We understood both the economic impact of planning on poor people, and the broader social implications of architecture and various kinds of plans.   While I was active we were involved in a very successful whistle blowing episode which may have been the most significant victory I've been part of in a lifetime on the left.   More for that later.

MDS got trashed and eaten up by the feeding frenzy that became the New York sectarian left.   The Urban Underground may have outlasted some of its fellow units, but eventually faded away.   We put out a newsprint newspaper on NYC issues.   Of course it was called the Urban Underground.   I remember a fantastic front page (staged) photo which showed a man dressed in a business suit, carrying an attache case, descending into a subway entrance wearing a gas mask.