https://www.theguardian.

com/cities/2016/apr/28/story-cities-32-
new-york-jane-jacobs-robert-moses

When city planning supremo Robert Moses proposed a road through Greenwich
Village in 1955, he met opposition from one particularly feisty local resident:

In 1961, Bennett Cerf, one of the founders of the publishing firm Random
House, sent a copy of a new book by Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of
American Cities, to the legendary city planner Robert Moses. Moses’s reply was
curt:

Dear Bennett,

I am returning the book you sent me. Aside from the fact that it is intemperate
and inaccurate, it is also libelous. I call your attention, for example, to page
131. Sell this junk to someone else.

Cordially, Robert Moses

This was no ordinary demurral over a book’s merits. It was a salvo in a struggle
between a man who had amassed vast bureaucratic powers and remade New
York with expressways, parks and housing towers, and the woman who
assembled neighbours and public opinion to stop him when he set his sights on
the evisceration of a swath of lower Manhattan.

Moses was an avatar of the early 20th-century vision that the only salvation
of cities was the large-scale destruction of their existing features, and
Jacobs an exemplar of another, which maintained that the future of cities rested
on preserving exactly those qualities. Jacobs’ book was the most powerful retort
to Moses’s mode of thinking, and her actions a resounding retort to his mode of
operating.

The struggles between Jacobs and Moses loom large in the popular
consciousness. The subject of books by Roberta Brandes-Gratz and Anthony
Flint, they now feature in what is surely the world’s first opera about an urban
planning dispute, A Marvelous Order, which premiered last month.

The only hazard to this libretto is that their conflict, which has become an iconic
representation of the tension between top-down and organic notions of
urbanism, was one in which most contact was indirect. In fact they encountered
each other in person only once. Moses’s sneering dismissal of Jacobs’s book was
one of very few direct acknowledgements of her existence.

This is fitting since both worked through realms of indirect influence and
power: Moses within the byzantine and barely accountable tangle of New York’s
public authority powers; Jacobs in the inherently decentralised world of
community organising and writings about urbanism. But however indirect the
sparring, there’s no doubt who prevailed in the end.
‘Immense behind-the-scenes influence’
Despite never winning a single election, Robert Moses reigned over a set of
principalities that would rival a Habsburg monarch. At his peak he held 12
offices, the most prominent being the New York city parks commissioner, state
parks council head, and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel
Authority. The latter, created in 1933 to oversee construction of the set of
bridges connecting Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens, was pivotal, providing
Moses with a steady stream of revenue that he leveraged into countless other
construction projects.

The world’s first opera about an urban planning dispute.

As Robert Caro wrote in his epochal tome The Power Broker, “Moses …
displayed a genius for using the wealth of his public authorities to unite behind
his aims banks, labor unions, contractors, bond underwriters, insurance firms,
the great retail stores, real estate manipulators – all the forces which enjoy
immense behind-the-scenes political influence in New York.”

Moses’s early construction was largely confined to Long Island: he steadily knit
his spider’s web of roads nearer the heart of the city, bulldozing increasingly
dense urban fabric and eventually setting his sights on Washington Square
Park, the historic centre of Greenwich Village.

Washington Square Park anchored the Village, offering 10 acres of green space
to a steadily changing set of neighbours, from Edith Wharton to Bob Dylan. In
1880, Henry James wrote in Washington Square of its “rural and accessible
appearance” – a quality that had not entirely dimmed by the 1950s. Moses,
however, upon looking at the park, was convinced that the amenity it most
sorely lacked was a four-lane road through its centre.

One neighbourhood resident, Jane Jacobs, received a flyer from the Committee
to Save Washington Square Park in 1955, providing notice of the proposal to
extend Manhattan’s 5th Avenue through the park. Jacobs, born in the small city
of Scranton, Pennsylvania, had arrived in the neighbourhood in the 1930s,
holding a variety of writing jobs culminating in work for the prominent
publication Architectural Forum.

There is nobody against this plan – nobody but a bunch of

MOTHERS!
Robert Moses

News of the proposed roadway provoked alarm. In a letter to the city’s mayor,
Jacobs wrote: “It is very discouraging to do our best to make the city more
habitable and then to learn that the city is thinking up schemes to make it
uninhabitable.” Moses’s previous road plans had an unerring tendency to
become reality. Jacobs set about ensuring that this one didn’t.
She rapidly took on the roles of both strategist and media and community
liaison with the park’s committee, displaying a great skill for community
organising – enlisting supporters both small and large, from local children to
prominent neighbourhood residents such as Eleanor Roosevelt.

Jacobs cultivated the media in all its forms, garnering the support of
independent press such as the nascent Village Voice. Nor were traditional levers
of power neglected: the support of Carmine DeSapio, New York secretary of
state, Democratic machine politician and Village resident, proved very helpful.
The Board of Estimate (a city body controlling land use decisions) was prevailed
upon to drop the plan.

It was amid this process that Jacobs saw Moses for the only time, as she
reported to James Howard Kunstler in a Metropolis Magazine interview:

I saw him only once, at a hearing about the road through Washington Square,
which was to be an entrance ramp to the Lower Manhattan Expressway. He
was there briefly to speak his piece. But nobody was told that at the time.

None of us had spoken yet because they always had the officials speak first and
then they would go away and they wouldn’t listen to the people. Anyway, he
stood up there gripping the railing, and he was furious at the effrontery of this,
and I guess he could already see that his plan was in danger. Because he was
saying: ‘There is nobody against this – NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY but a
bunch of … a bunch of MOTHERS!’ And then he stomped out.”

Jacobs continued her struggle against urban renewal by articulating a positive

vision of the “teeming city” in a 1958 article for Fortune magazine – which led to
the commission of her masterwork, The Death and Life of American Cities.

The city is like an insane asylum run by the most far-out inmates
Jane Jacobs

This broadside against the prevailing scientific rationalism of urban planning

extolled diversities of usage, old buildings and the organic
structures of cities: “Why have cities not, long since, been identified,
understood and treated as problems of organised complexity?” It was a powerful
call in an era in which any such complexity was the very thing that planners
were looking to organise out of existence.

Another such effort arose about a month after Jacobs had finished her
manuscript. The city’s Housing and Redevelopment Board was pursuing a study
intended to classify a large area of Greenwich Village south of Washington
Square Park as “blighted”, in order to enable large-scale redevelopment. Moses
was not personally responsible but his associates headed the effort. Jacobs soon
became co-chair of a Committee to Save the West Village, devising a new set of
efforts to derail the flattening of her neighbourhood.
Moses’s efforts had frequently glided forward thanks to assertions of expert
knowledge unavailable to the general public and the skilful manipulation of
civic processes. Jacobs fought back on both fronts. The committee conducted
their own survey of neighbourhood conditions to rebut the “blighted”
designation, collecting ample documentation that the neighbourhood was not,
in fact, a slum.

Public hearings on the proposal had not been held, as mandated by law; Jacobs
obtained an order from a state judge that they must take place. It soon emerged
that the City Planning Commission had already, surreptitiously, designated the
area as blighted.

A frequent Moses tactic, aped by the city in these proceedings, was to schedule
public hearings at short-notice, to avoid mobilised resistance. But Jacobs had a
source at City Hall providing regular tips, and worked to deluge these meetings
with opposed citizens.

Additional skulduggery was unearthed. She noticed the same irregular “r”
appearing both on press releases from the real estate company charged with
redeveloping the area, and on statements from an ostensible community group
in support of the redevelopment. The latter was revealed as a front that had
vastly misrepresented the scale of the project proposed to neighbourhood
residents.

Rising public distaste with the secrecy and collusion at work in the process led
to the city’s abandonment of the “blighted” designation, and its plans for
redevelopment. By then, however, another, potentially more destructive, threat
awaited.

‘A monstrous and useless folly’

The Lower Manhattan Expressway was an effort to tie up the loose ends of local
roadways by extending Interstate 78 – all 10 lanes of it – from the Holland
Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. The obstacle was the
streetscape of SoHo and Little Italy, and the great variety of uses within that the
city found dispensable.

“The grand total for proposed demolition was 416 buildings that housed 2,200
families, 365 retail stores, and 480 other commercial establishments,” wrote
Anthony Flint in Wrestling with Moses.

Greenwich Village residents protest against Robert Moses’s plans to build the
Lower Manhattan Expressway in 1960. Photograph: Alamy

The area was both densely settled and architecturally significant, containing one
of the greatest collections of cast-iron architecture in the world. Yet neither
factor registered as even slightly consequential initial objections to a fresh new
expressway – and one eligible for 90% federal funding as part of the Interstate
Highway system.
The expressway had the support of the city, the Regional Plan Association, the
American Institute of Architects, the Municipal Art Society, business groups and
construction workers’ associations.

Once again, Jacobs set about forging a diverse local coalition to stop it.

An organic network of support was developed, drawing on a diverse set of local

residents, Puerto Ricans, Italians, intellectuals, labourers and, rumour has it,
even the mafia – united by a common opposition to their homes and businesses
becoming a merge lane.

Jacobs’s coalition pursued both short- and long-term tactics, obtaining delays
for resident relocation studies while holding frequent rallies – one featuring
residents in gas masks, to dramatise the likely increase in pollution – and
blanketing any public hearings with opposition. She herself offered frequent
quotable barbs, once describing the expressway at a Board of Estimate meeting
as a “monstrous and useless folly”.

The city’s mayor, Robert F Wagner, halted the condemnation proceedings in

1962. But the expressway was a beast that refused to be slain, thanks to
continued support from powerful backers – none more powerful than Moses. By
1965, the mayor announced his renewed support, offering a slightly altered plan
that submerged parts of the expressway complex, as well as a proposal for some
new housing as a sop to relocated residents.

Mayoral challenger John Linsday took up the baton of expressway opposition –

yet once elected, he too went about tweaking the proposal in the hopes of
making it more palatable. New versions included an 80-foot elevation and an
ultra-modern Paul Rudolph proposal for a wrapping of new housing. Multi-lane
highways are, however, a difficult dish to make appetising.

The city’s steamroller processes continued. At one public meeting concerning

the project, writes Flint, “the microphone faced toward the audience, not the
officials the residents were nominally addressing ... suggest[ing] that state
officials were just going through the motions.”

“The city is like an insane asylum run by the most far-out inmates,” Jacobs
pronounced. She led protesters on to the stage, and the stenographer’s record of
the meeting was destroyed. She was arrested and jailed for a night on charges
including inciting a riot and criminal mischief, and could have faced years in
prison if convicted.

Jacobs eventually determined to leave New York. Her architect husband had
obtained a commission in Toronto, and she was eager to take her sons beyond
the risk of the draft for Vietnam. She left in 1968 – not in defeat, however, but in
victory. The expressway project had lost all steam, and Mayor Lindsay declared

it scrapped the following summer.

Moses received his final comeuppance in the same year, undone by the internal
manoeuvrings in government that had so elevated him, as Governor Nelson
Rockefeller engineered the dissolution of his most lasting fiefdom, the
Triborough Bridge Authority. While Jacobs went on to enjoy a distinguished
career as author and urbanist, Moses descended into increasing obloquy. He
died in 1981, Jacobs in 2006 – one largely reviled, the other venerated.

“And sure enough,” wrote Tom Wolfe in 2007, “over the past 40 years, the
rebirth of Lower Manhattan from Chelsea to Tribeca, of northern Brooklyn, of
Astoria and Long Island City in Queens, has taken place without razing a single
building in the name of ‘urban renewal’, or shooing away a single citizen
through ‘eminent domain’.”

Jacobs – one of those common citizens, denigrated at the time as merely a

“housewife” – has, perhaps more than any other, offered inspiration to those
informed that plans drawn up in the corridors of power will require them to
move elsewhere. Simply say “no”.

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