Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs: Path Clearing and Strips of Chaos

This week: the final segment in our August series on American architects and urban planners.   Careful readers will have noticed we’ve gone chronologically – Thomas Jefferson, Louis Sullivan, Julia Morgan – and regionally - from South to Midwest to West Coast. 

Today - New York City.   I thought that the story of American public architecture should include more than just some interesting individual buildings, so here’s a look at one example of changing ideas about urban planning. New York’s imperial urban developer Robert Moses built unopposed for decades, until 1960 when he met his first real challenge in the person of neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs.

Robert MosesRobert Moses saved New York City and almost destroyed it. 

An extremely shrewd and powerful man, Moses (1888-1981) wielded complete control over the city’s public works from the 1920’s to the 60’s.  Not only did he convince mayors and governors to give his agencies unlimited power to build bridges and highways, but he retained all the toll income from this massive system – 13 major bridges and hundreds of miles of freeways, that funneled commuters from Long Island and the outer boroughs into Manhattan.  He also oversaw the building of hundreds of parks and pools and playgrounds and was in charge of two NY World’s Fairs, in 1939 and 1964.  He was a master at getting federal dollars for the city and he oversaw the drastic Slum Clearance Committee, which began with Depression-era New Deal money and continued into the 50’s. He oversaw the construction of tens of thousands of new housing units, both middle class high rises and low income housing projects.

Destruction of San Juan NeighborhoodHe helped New York grow and grow up as the century advanced, especially post Depression and World War II, bringing to the city a great deal of people, money, power, jobs and a place on the national and world stage. But there was also a human cost to his power.  Through force of will and control of purse strings, Moses intimidated politicians and ignored the protests of residents whose neighborhoods he tore down for freeways, bridge on-ramps, stadiums, and redevelopment.  When Moses used eminent domain to flatten hundreds of buildings in the San Juan Hill neighborhood on the West Side, residents sued all the way to the Supreme Court but lost, Moses arguing successfully that federal housing redevelopment laws gave him to power to tear down neighborhoods.

The Lincoln Center That West Side neighborhood had been the ethnically diverse home to many artists, such as Thelonius Monk, and it’s where Leonard Bernstein set West Side Story.  Moses and John D. Rockefeller rebuilt the area, turning it into the remarkable multi-acre complex of theaters and concert halls and arts schools now known as Lincoln Center.  In a similar tale of displacement and redevelopment over on the East Side, Moses used his political clout to bring the United Nations complex to New York, when it was all must assured of settling in Philadelphia.

Moses finally met his match in the person of Jane Jacobs, a citizen activist who argued that neighborhoods and people were more valuable than big urban projects and the almighty automobile. Just as iconic a New Yorker as Moses, Jacobs wrote the very influential book, The Death and Life of American Cities in the early 60’s, introducing such now-accepted phrases and concepts as “social capital,” “mixed primary use,” and “eyes on the street.”  She argued that quirky neighborhoods are essential in a city, using the great phrase in my title, “strips of chaos.”  She said we should “respect – in the deepest sense – strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order.”

Washington Square ParkJacobs was a long time resident of one of New York’s more iconic strips of chaos, with weird wisdom of its own, Greenwich Village.  When Moses proposed, his last hurrah, a multilane freeway that would run right through historic Washington Square Park, Jacobs led an “eyes on the street” people’s campaign against New York’s most powerful builder.

Enlisting such allies as Margaret Mead, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lewis Mumford, Jacobs got the support of the new leftist newspaper, The Village Voice, while the New York Times supported Moses and his plan. The tide of public opinion was turning against these monumental freeways through towns, and after a massive grassroots effort, the city rejected the project.  Jacobs and her supporters held a ribbon tying ceremony (as opposed to cutting) in Washington Square Park.  Moses tried three more time in the 60’s to revive the project, but Jacobs continued her successful opposition.

Moses’ legacy was further tarnished by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which revealed how Moses’ considerable success became megalomania in his later years.  Caro also alleged that it was racism that fueled Moses’ destruction of “slums” and led him to prefer freeways from the suburbs rather than public transportation.  Only in 1968 had a NY mayor, John Lindsey, stood up to Moses and stripped him of his control of all the toll income from his bridges and freeways, taking that money to expand the subway system. 

Jane JacobsCriticism of Moses has tempered a bit in recent years.  Frustrated by how hard it has been to get the World Trade Center rebuilt (now 13 years post destruction,) former governor Eliot Spitzer said of Moses in 2009 that if Caro’s book had been written today it might have been called, At Least He Got It Built.  

Great cities don’t just happen.  Hard decisions must be made and new paths cleared sometimes through old complex neighborhoods.  But thank God for folks like Jane Jacobs who promote the weird and chaotic.  Of such is true urban flavor and force.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter