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“I teach with games,” says Study of the City Professor Alexander Garvin, who looks like someone out of a Russian spy novel. But his rakishly sinister eyebrows are offset by a garish floral bowtie, twinkling eyes, and the huge grin on his face as he speaks to his class.

This week, the game takes the form of a public hearing, in which three students of the more than 100 in his class play the parts of Harlem developers and present a plea for federal funds to the New York City Council. The members of the class represent architects, presidents of banks, and storeowners. Garvin, playing the City Council President, moderates the discussion. He is tough, impatient, and quick to point out the flaws in the proposal; he takes no nonsense from insipid storeowners.

Garvin knows a lot about city planning and how to handle its personalities: he served as New York’s Deputy Commissioner of Housing from 1974 to 1978 and as Director of Comprehensive Planning for the City of New York from 1978 to 1980. he has taught at Yale since 1967, commuting once a week from Manhattan.

Garvin’s course, the last remnant of an entire urban studies department, is not required for any major. It meets at night, and it requires an extensive research paper on the student’s own neighborhood. Yet the course has remained popular since Garvin changed it from seminar to lecture format in 1973, and more than 100 students are currently enrolled. Garvin eats dinner in Trumbull college on Tuesday nights before class begins, to be “more accessible to students.” In line, he speaks about his days as an undergraduate, “when the food was worse,” and he carefully puts his silverware and napkin in his breast pocket rather than on his tray, “so that the soup won’t get on them.” Once seated, he speaks seriously about the Study of the City.

The goal of his class, Garvin explains, “is to give students an introduction to American cities and city planning, how the private sector works, and how the government intervenes.”

“It is not a course in administration, but a course in planning,” Garvin emphasizes. He explains that this covers a lot of ground: “politics, aesthetics, urban architecture, real estate finance, and public administration” all go into “dealing with the problems of how the city will be in twenty or thirty years.”

To introduce students to the problems of city planning, Garvin has designed a course “full of variety.” Half the classes are lectures; half are games in which members of the class play various parts. Sometimes he invites public officials, such as Deputy Mayor of New York Wagner, “to play themselves.”

“I like to change the games and the guests around,” Garvin adds. His lectures are updated each year to reflect the changes in student interests and pertinent issues, he says.

The character of the course reflects changes in students’ perceptions of urban planning. “Students used to believe that if a community wanted a project, it would work. Now they think everything is determined by money,” Garvin said.

Garvin’s eagerness to update his course regularly reflects a disdain for routine which is also apparent in conversation—his thoughts move quickly, and he touches on many subjects.

As he eats, he is approached by a steady stream of students. Two students dressed in three-piece suits and carrying briefcases—they are the ‘Harlem Developers’—ask him an obscure question about a tax recovery law’s effect on building depreciation. Another student wants to see him in New York on Thursday. A third sits at the table and argues about the governability of City of New York.

Though Garvin has claimed earlier to “terrible” at remembering student names, he gets them all right. He adds that living in New York makes it difficult to see students often, but admits that his inaccessibility is really a “delusion.” “Students can reach me on the telephone when they need to.”

This holds true despite what sounds like a very busy life. Since leaving the municipal government three years ago, Garvin, who is unmarried, has worked as a real estate developer and a city planning consultant.

Garvin regards his ten years in New York City government—he worked under the Lindsay, Beame, and Koch administrations—as a “success.” Among his accomplishments were leadership in a Washington Heights neighborhood preservation program. Although he says his work was hampered by “inadequate personnel and working conditions, and an inability to get everyday equipment,” Garvin misses “the sense of participation, the ability to change things and have an impact on the city.”

On the other hand, he says, he enjoys “the freedom of being in business for myself, of doing my own thing. I can conceivably go back to government later on.”

Garvin has been connected with Yale since 1958, when he entered as an undergraduate. After graduating in 1962, he enrolled in the School of Architecture, took a year off to study and work in Paris, and returned to receive double degrees in Architecture and City Planning.

Garvin first taught Study of the City as a Trumball College Seminar, and it remained in that form for six years. It then took on its present lecture format. Garvin says he had to change his style of teaching “from a social situation with intense human interaction to a public event with an entirely different set of approaches.” He enjoys the communication possible in small classes and continues to teach occasional seminars. The most recent one was held in Davenport this fall.

Interest in his course was greatest in the late ‘60’s, Garvin says, and, though enrollment dropped in the ‘70’s, “it has never reached below 50. The current enrollment is substantially higher than it was two years ago.”

Garvin, who has also taught at the School of Organization and Management and the School of Architecture, says that “as long as Yale College offers a course in city planning, I’m delighted to teach it. I think Yale should expand its program, and there is annual correspondence between me and the University on the subject: there is adequate demand, and the topic warrants it. The problem is one of resources.”

Garvin has no interest in becoming a full-time academic, however. When asked about the merits of tenure, he said he didn’t know how to get it and didn’t care.

Garvin’s thoughts stray quickly from himself to his favorite topic, city planning. He remember where the students sitting at the table lives and launches into a discussion on the renewal of the neighborhood.

The student mentions a particular mall in Brooklyn; Garvin recognizes it and praises it as being “not beautiful, but profitable. It’s marvelous what has been done there,” he says. He rolls his eyes, “There’s a much worse one in Far Rockaway.” Garvin says that he can just look at such a project and tell that “it’s a waste of time and a waste of money. A lot of people had that ability.”

But bad projects go through because “some people just don’t know, and for political reasons. For example, New York City has many more libraries than it needs. This is because the cheapest capital budget gain is a library, and all through the ‘50’s and ‘60’s councilman put libraries in their district budgets,” so they could show they had gotten things done.

Although he has never lived outside of Manhattan, Garvin knows about the whole city, laving learned about it “by riding the subway. You have to know how to walk around,” he advises, and especially, “how to take the right train—the system is as badly marked as any subway system in the world.” This leads him into a discussion of the demise of the subway in New York.

When asked if the problem is a lack of funds, he snaps impatiently that “there are always limited amounts of money, and the problem is how to designate them.”

“Governing New York City is not a losing battle,” Garvin says. He acknowledges that in such a city, “much time is spent not in planning but running what’s there. Cities are constantly changing; that’s the only permanent thing about them.”

His sixteen years of teaching have been very satisfying, he says, and graduates of his course are starting to show up on the urban planning boards across the country. The Chairman of the Planning Commission in Omaha, Nebraska, was a student of his, for example.

“Yale students were terrific, and are terrific. They’ve never been difficult to teach,” Garvin says.

He raises his menacing eyebrows and grins disarmingly, “I suppose I’m just an Old Blue, or a character out of a Chekkov play—the perennial student. Except that I graduated.”