"Not Only Had Architects Stopped Making Them, but the Public Had Stopped Demanding Them"

"Once clean and attractive public spaces were no longer seen as essential, they soon became less clean and attractive. After 1961, San Francisco no longer enforced vagrancy laws, and with predictable results; in 1972, in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned vagrancy laws at the national level. At the same time, the process of deinstitutionalization—the discharge of unwell patients from mental asylums—had begun in earnest. In 1955, some 559,000 people were institutionalized; by 1994 it was 72,000. Meanwhile, in 1975, the Supreme Court declared in O'Connor v. Donaldson that a person could be confined against his will only if it could be proven that he was a danger to himself or others. In practice, as the law was interpreted, that danger had to be immediate; even a schizophrenic who was unable to feed or shelter himself was not regarded as a danger to himself. These two Supreme Court decisions, working in tandem, had a dire effect on the uses of our town squares and civic plazas. It is unimaginable that we would have so casually permitted them to become inhospitable had we still felt them to be essential."

Michael J. Lewis at National Review discusses "The Death of Public Beauty."