By Anne Levin

After graduating from Princeton University in 1969 and working for Time magazine, Richard K. Rein took a job with a landscape architecture firm in Pittsburgh, Pa. It wasn’t a good fit — he was fired after 9 months.

But while he was there, Rein happened upon The Last Landscape, a book by American urbanist, journalist, author, and 1939 Princeton University graduate William Hollingsworth “Holly” Whyte. He never forgot it.

Rein is familiar to local readers as the founder and longtime editor of the weekly newspaper U.S.1, from which he retired two years ago. A Princeton resident, he currently edits the community news site TAPinto Princeton, and serves on the council of the nonprofit Princeton Future.

Rein’s interest in Whyte has recently come full-circle. Early this year, his book American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life was published by Island Press.

It was a few years before leaving U.S.1 that Rein started to consider writing a book about Whyte. “He just fascinated me,” Rein said. “He was this early icon of planning, preservation, and environmentalism. He said that in order to save the countryside, you’ve got to do better in the cities. So much of what he wrote about is still so relevant today.”

After graduating from Princeton, Whyte served as a U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer in World War II, and later wrote the bestselling book The Organization Man, which warned about the dangers of what he called “groupthink.” He was a key influence in the revitalization of New York City’s Bryant Park, among other projects, and he helped shape the rising environmental movement. He died in 1999 at the age of 82.

Rein began investigating Whyte with the usual Google search. He found Fred Kent, who had been one of Whyte’s research assistants. and reached him by phone. “Kent was Whyte’s disciple. He was incredibly enthusiastic,” Rein said. “I started thinking I should really do this. In 2018 I went to the Rockefeller archives in Tarrytown, N.Y., where Whyte’s papers are stored. I took photos of documents, walked out the door, and said, ‘Wow, I’ll be coming back here.’ Which I did, on several occasions.”

After his idea was rejected by a few publishers including Princeton University Press, Rein considered publishing the book himself. But he ended up landing a contract with Island Press. “It was a home run. From that point on, I spent over a year working on this pretty much full time,” Rein said. “It was a lot of research, but it could have been more.”

Rein didn’t immediately see the book as a pure biography of Whyte, but ultimately changed his mind after realizing that none existed. “It finally dawned on me, after almost two years of just digging around and getting in the batter’s box and all that. That’s when I came up with the first sentence: ‘This book is about William H. Whyte.’ ”

The book shares how Whyte’s work evolved over five decades of research, writing, and advocacy. Rein was particularly struck by Whyte’s experiences during World War II.

“It was the thing I found most compelling about him,” he said. “I discovered all this writing he had done after he fought at Guadalcanal — some very perceptive, long-form journalism pieces about military intelligence. I realized there was a whole side of the Marine Corps I didn’t appreciate. And as I looked at the rest of Whyte’s life, I saw that the Marine experience really meant a lot to him. It was his equivalent of a Ph.D. He really applied it a lot when he got into analyzing public spaces in New York in the seventies and eighties.”

Editing the book during the end of the Trump administration, Rein was reminded by Whyte’s work of how civil people used to be.

“He was incredibly civil and never confrontational, but always ready to take the enemy’s purported strength and use it against him in a nice way,” he said. “Over and over again, he would take the strongest point of someone’s argument and say, ‘This is an excellent point and here is the way I want you to think about it.’ He was non-partisan.”

Applying Whyte’s writings to current issues facing Princeton, Rein said, “In 1958, he feared exactly what has happened in Princeton today. He wrote in The Exploding Metropolis, ‘More and more, it would seem, the city is becoming a place of extremes – a place for the very poor, or the very rich, or the slightly odd.’ “

If faced with the loss of Princeton’s loss of middle, lower, and working-class residents, Whyte would likely urge stakeholders and decision-makers to get their facts in order. “He’d say, gather empirical evidence,” Rein said. “Stop and think before making emotionally charged conclusions. He would stress the objective gathering of facts, and work from that rather than coming to the conclusion first. He was a real empiricist and would stress empirical data whenever possible.”

Rein had to cut 10,000 words out of his first draft of the book. “Most of it was fat,” he said. “As my editor said, ‘You might have to cut a few of your little darlings.’”

The book has earned positive reviews, most prominently from The New York Times, which called it “a well-timed biography of a man who reshaped city life.” Publishers Weekly said “Journalist Rein debuts with an intriguing intellectual biography,” while Booklist called the book “an accessible and worthy source of inspiration for contemporary and future land-use challenges.”

Rein, who will speak about the book at New York’s Skyscraper Museum on May 4, the birthday of late journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, has been pleasantly surprised by the attention.

“I have to say that once I got the idea, I just said I’m going to write this thing for myself and put together something that I find enjoyable to read at the end of the day,” he said. “If it attracts the attention of 100 people and a few of them read it, that would be a victory; that’s wonderful. So the New York Times was icing on the cake. There have been some other nice discussions with people. And more is going on.”