Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York?s Master Builder

[Justin7]

Book review.

What A City Needs

Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York?s Master Builder and Transformed the American City

By Anthony Flint

For urbanists and others, the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs was the great titanic struggle of the twentieth century. Like the bout between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, their conflict has magnified significance, as the two figures have become symbols. Jacobs is the secular saint of street life, representing a humane approach to urban planning grounded in the messy interactions of the neighborhood. Moses is the icon of infrastructure established by power, the physical reconstruction of cities with great bridges and wide expressways and tall apartment buildings. The actual projects that fueled their acrimony may now be curiosities of urban history, but the ideological conflict embodied by Jacobs and Moses continues to rage in every growing city in the world. The growth of Shanghai may be described as Moses on steroids, whereas the land-use restrictions in Mumbai honor a central element of Jacobs?s legacy.

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/what-city-needs

 

[JohnAKeith]

We have two Jane Jacobs / Robert Moses threads; I'm putting this here because the lady who wrote this NY Times column has also written a book.

One of my favorite lines from this, about moving into a run-down neighborhood:

"people came because of the lack of planning; the absence of order signified opportunity ..."

O Urban Pioneers!
By ROBERTA BRANDES GRATZ
NEW YORK TIMES

In 1967, my husband and I bought and fully renovated a four-story brownstone on Manhattan?s Upper West Side, creating a duplex for ourselves and two floors of rental apartments. Despite its Manhattan address, our friends envied neither our money nor our luck; at the time, it didn?t take much of either to buy in the neighborhood.

If anything, they thought we were a little nuts ? in the late 1960?s the Upper West Side was one of New York?s fastest-declining neighborhoods, rife with drugs, crime and decay. Yet where others saw risk, we saw opportunity: affordable housing, racial and economic diversity and a vision of a sustainable, vibrant community not yet on the urban demographer?s radar.

Historians and observers of the 1970?s love to discuss the ?return to nature? movement, in which hordes of hippies, political radicals and people simply tired of urban life moved to the country to set up shop in communes, on farms and in small towns. Less well-observed was the ?return to the city? movement, in which urban pioneers like my husband and me went the opposite direction, putting down roots in places like the Upper West Side. We were statistically insignificant, but no less historically significant ? because it was here, not in the Wall Street boom of the 1980?s or the get-tough mayoral policies of the 1990?s, that New York and other American cities began to turn around.

Today?s Upper West Side is so gentrified and expensive that it is difficult to imagine just how dangerous and rundown it was in the late 1960?s. It was hit hard and early by postwar middle-class flight to the suburbs, as well as Robert Moses? slum clearance of the 1950?s and 1960?s. The superblock created by Lincoln Center destroyed the entire neighborhood of San Juan Hill. Then came city-service cuts, which meant fewer cops, more trash on the streets and less maintenance of basic amenities like playgrounds and park grass. The Upper West Side quickly became the territory of drug dealers, pimps and absentee landlords. In 1970, Saul Bellow?s ?Mr. Sammler?s Planet? depicted the neighborhood as a place fast becoming a hell on earth.

But property was cheap, and like so many of today?s frontier urban neighborhoods, it appealed to risk takers like my husband and me. We were willing to enter a problem-filled neighborhood for the value and quality of the available homes and the chance for a backyard in the city. We soon met other middle-class families, black and white, who had taken the plunge ahead of us. Most Upper West Side brownstones had been built in the late 1890?s for middle-class families but had been broken up into tiny apartments in the 1950?s and neglected since by absentee landlords. They were easily, if expensively, converted back to single-family or duplex dwellings. And it wasn?t just individual actors: a few houses were taken over and restored for low-income families by the New York City Housing Authority and nonprofit organizations.

True, most people were skeptical. My in-laws and most of our friends said we were crazy. Bankers laughed at mortgage seekers. They refused loans to all but the richest urban neighborhoods, paralleling the experience today of surviving but deteriorated neighborhoods across the country. City policies, also like today, wrote off areas of old neglected housing, preferring demolition to renovation. Both then and now, public- and private-sector leaders didn?t believe that real urban renewal could take place without government intervention.

For example, there?s the tenacious myth that Lincoln Center was the catalyst for the Upper West Side?s rebirth.

But if anything, Lincoln Center, with its forbidding plinth and bulky structures that turn their back on the city, was a symbol and cause of the decline of urban life. It was something people arrived at from afar, but not an amenity that locals wanted to use; anyway, many couldn?t afford it anyway. I never met a new Upper West Side homeowner who put the center among even the top 10 reasons to move there. If anything, people came because of the lack of planning; the absence of order signified opportunity. We looked foolhardy at the time; today, those who stuck around look like geniuses of foresight.

These Upper West Side pioneers weren?t alone. Similar ?back to the city? movements were happening from Boston to San Francisco.

Anywhere that postwar slum clearance hadn?t totally erased the high-quality 19th-century housing ? brick or limestone row houses, clapboard or brick triple-deckers, freestanding Victorians ? was ripe. Too many cities demolished these neighborhoods; today, developers try in vain to replicate them.

Indeed, despite the natural regrowth of the Upper West Side in the 1970?s and 1980?s, and of vast sections of Brooklyn today, city officials still look askance at the idea of letting neighborhood ecology take its own course. Politically, it is easier to give out demolition contracts and turn land over to developers. Which is a shame: new projects, no matter how architecturally attractive, can?t replicate the diversity of people, styles and economics of an organically regenerated neighborhood.

Roberta Brandes Gratz is an urban critic and author of ?The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.?

 

[Patrick]

How similar is that book to Wrestling with Moses? It seems like it came out just after WWM was seen as a success. Is it a copy?