So much for Jane Jacobs.
Legend holds that in 1958 she and a ragtag band of Greenwich Village community activists took their city back from the clutches of the bullying, power-mad master builder Robert Moses, who had run ruin over New York since 1924, by noisily forcing the city to block an extension of Fifth Avenue he championed that would have cut through Washington Square Park. The activist spark lit, other tight-knit communities went on to defeat his plans for a Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have devastated SoHo, Chinatown, and Tribeca. Moses held onto power until 1968, but history would damn him for ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers by gutting their neighbourhoods to throw up beastly highways and other community-killers.
Or so we thought.
Over the next few months, though Jacobs has not yet been dead a year, the reputation of her arch-nemesis is getting a hearty spit polish. Three simultaneous museum exhibitions now under way, gathered under the title Robert Moses and the Modern City and curated by the Columbia University architectural historian Hillary Ballon, seek to re-evaluate and rehabilitate Moses, praising him for his unparalleled achievements.
Most of what we know about Moses comes from Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Power Broker. Published in 1974, when the city was afflicted with flight and blight and flirting with bankruptcy, the 1,336-page doorstop was subtitled Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
Needless to say, the city is in a very different place now than it was 33 years ago. Ballon's shows argue that, far from causing the city's downfall, by taking the long view Moses positioned it for a continuing influx of people that has proved to be the key to its vitality.
Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution at Columbia's Wallach Gallery features photographs of many Moses projects.
Over the course of 44 years in a series of unelected offices (initially as city parks commissioner, he added the title of chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority, then chairman of the Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance, and many other roles: he collected titles and power like a gambler on a hot streak), Moses built more than 600 playgrounds, 670 kilometres of parkways, bridges and tunnels, a pair of world's fairs, tens of thousands of housing units, more than a dozen pools and bathhouses, beaches, parks, and other recreational facilities including Central Park's Wollman Rink, as well as Lincoln Center. He was instrumental in bringing the United Nations to New York.
The Road to Recreation at the Queens Museum of Art, which opened yesterday, focuses on the roads and playgrounds he built. (The Queens Museum has a special connection to Moses: Its most popular exhibit, an architectural panorama of 867 square metres that now includes a model of every city building constructed before 1992, was originally built by him for the 1964 World's Fair.) And at the Museum of the City of New York, Robert Moses and the Modern City: Remaking the Metropolis takes a sweeping look at the way he moved the city into the future. (In the mid-1950s, the license plate of his black chauffeured limousine read: NY 2000.) To their credit, the shows don't seek to whitewash his racism (believing integration was a risky social proposition, he supported MetLife to exclude blacks from its landmark middle-class housing development Stuyvesant Town); his arrogance (he refused a slight alteration to the route for his Cross-Bronx Expressway that would have displaced fewer people simply because he didn't want the roadway to curve); his inability to grasp that cities were intended for people to use (the only reason he built a string of 15 playgrounds on the margins of Central Park was, "to intercept the little potential destroyers on the perimeter of the park"); and the manner in which he was a product of his era (he had an evangelical belief in the car -- though he never did learn to drive -- which drove him to favour expressways over street life). They note that he loved pointing out the impossibility of making an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
Last Thursday night, the Museum of the City of New York held a symposium titled The Lessons of Robert Moses. Most of the panelists, including Dan Doctoroff, the city's deputy mayor of economic development and rebuilding, seem to be taking the wrong lesson from the current re-evaluation of Moses. They have learned that arrogance was Moses's real sin. So their modus operandi is to appear to care about communities and then go ahead with big development plans anyway.
Doctoroff, who failed in his bid to build a stadium on the west side of Manhattan and also failed to secure the 2012 Olympics for the city, is overseeing the largest building boom in the city since Moses's era. "We definitely do not believe you need to break eggs," he said.
That would be news to the hundreds of families and businesses in Brooklyn who will be evicted under the government's powers of land expropriation to make way for the gargantuan Frank Gehry-designed Atlantic Yards project, which will attempt to deposit a massive high-density downtown-style development (including a basketball arena and a 50-storey apartment tower) in a low-rise area of Brooklyn.
No one is suggesting racism is playing the same role in Brooklyn today that it did in the Bronx, where Moses pushed more than 200,000 people from their homes to make way for his developments and freeways. But there are fears Atlantic Yards will change the face of the neighbourhood.
And it was striking to see how few blacks were in the symposium audience, or on the panel. In fact the one black panelist, Majora Carter of the community group Sustainable South Bronx, seemed to be the only one who had a personal stake in the Robert Moses legacy.
Carter spoke of how she'd watched the working class neighbourhood of her youth, Hunts Point in the Bronx, collapse when Moses's plans for the Cross-Bronx Expressway took hold. As local businesses closed and families moved to get out of the way of the bulldozers, her own family's property was declared worthless. And Carter doesn't want anyone to forget.
"On this, the first day of Black History Month, I'm struck by the irony of the efforts to rehabilitate a man whose contempt for black people is well documented and still felt today," she began. "In order to build monuments that people point to in his name, he took from somewhere else. He took from someone else. I'm one of those someones."
Halfway through her 10 minute speech, some in the sold-out audience of 700 broke into spontaneous applause, and Carter was almost moved to tears. "It's taken decades for American cities, including New York, to climb out of a hole made by a handful of individuals who looked at communities and the people in them as obstacles," she declared. "The lesson to be learned from Moses is that these communities are smarter, kinder, more rational, and their interests are truly sustainable ones with an intuitive sense for the long-term health of the city."
I could have sworn that Jane Jacobs was there in the room, and she was beaming.
Simon Houpt