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The Woman Who Saved Manhattan From a Freeway Running Through It (bbc.com)
dryriver quotes a report from BBC: A massive freeway project dreamed up by city planner Robert Moses would have destroyed Greenwich Village and altered much of Lower Manhattan if not for one woman's efforts -- those of Jane Jacobs. As vast tracts of this U.S. journalist's adopted New York were razed to make way for theoretically fast-flowing urban freeways potted about with soulless high-rise housing projects for the urban poor, Jane Jacobs, skeptical of grand plans and nobody's victim, took on the City of New York through her urgent writing and by galvanizing protest groups who took to the streets of Manhattan to save the city from being dismembered, disinfected and depopulated. Robert Moses wanted to clean up New York while investing heavily in its infrastructure: its public parks, swimming pools, bridges, playgrounds, parkways, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center and the United Nations headquarters. For many years, New York's intellectual elite supported such developments, including the destruction of working-class neighborhoods Moses saw as "cancerous growths" in need of surgical removal. He accrued ever more power and pushed through and proposed ever more radical schemes -- notably expressways that sliced through quarters of the city like blunt knives. This powerful and disdainful planner made enemies, and none more so than Jane Jacobs.
Well that's a horribly biased piece and whoever wrote that should be shunned. The article is not so much trying to inform you but much rather convince you which is never what journalism should be. I'm not saying I'm on one side or the other of the argument.
In Capitalist US, the commerce controls the Government.
As vast tracts of this U.S. journalist's adopted New York were razed to make way for theoretically fast-flowing urban freeways potted about with soulless high-rise housing projects for the urban poor,
So.......she's the reason there are so many homeless people in New York?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How can you complain about a freeway? It's free! As in beer? What other as in is there? Which is to ask, where is Trump Park? Is there one is Russia?
It would increase efficiency of the highway system in NY.
The Fifties gave us the interstate highway system, but they were a Dark Age for urban architecture and planning. The cookie-cutter office buildings that survive from that period are now tributes to the "Organization Man" who commuted from the suburbs. "Urban renewal" was the all the rage, which basically meant to raze city ghettos and replace them with highways and complexes of drab apartment towers.
You are totally right. So by your logic, we should raize all the houses in NYC and replace them with roads.
Jacobs didn't get rid of all roads. Moses however singlehandly destroyed Manhattan's Middle Class. He is why we have slums in Manhattan. He kicked out all the working class, and when the wealthy could not afford to buy up all of Manhattan, the slums took over.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I call bullshit on this.
How is this either?
Actually try reading The Power Broker. As Mose's estranged brother knew before everybody else more highways don't reduce congestion. Slightly counter intuitive until you look at the history and the math. In Mose's defense everyone thought the all-car city was the future for decades. We now know that it wasn't a good idea. Manhattan is cursed by Moses, ringed in generally slow moving highways removing access to the rivers. That has been an incredible loss of real estate value over the decades. Regardless of current global elite real estate markets, the degriding of the FDR drive alone would create a far more habitable island == even more tax dollars. Which isn't going to happen and that's a shame.
Quote from the article:
"Jacobs spent the last decades of her life in Toronto, and fought against ambitious urban planning initiatives there"
So she left New York? Why? Was it so bad to live there any longer, after she sabotaged the plans to make it better?
There is nothing worth saving in Manhattan.
I live in Detroit, which is a city where highway development was used to destroy 'undesirable' neighborhoods. as a result, much of the city is horribly unfriendly to all forms of traffic - the neighborhoods that remain are stitched together with a web of deteriorating overpasses and people that used to be neighbors are now strangers.
If this had been done to New York, we'd be contemplating pulling it all down at this point, but the historic structures and neighborhoods could never be recovered.
In the post truth era you can write crap like this and pass it off as a story
Manhattan is cursed by Moses, ringed in generally slow moving highways removing access to the rivers. That has been an incredible loss of real estate value over the decades. Regardless of current global elite real estate markets, the degriding of the FDR drive alone would create a far more habitable island == even more tax dollars.
Another way of looking at it is that now anyone can enjoy the river view by driving by, instead of only a few select rich people who buy it up and keep everyone else out.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From what I can tell you're just flat out wrong about NYC.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
You say that like it's a Bad Thing...
Manhattan has I-95 crossing E-W in the north part of the city. NYC has several interstates.
The summary calls the proposed road a freeway, which is wrong. There would have been a toll to cross the river(s), so the road would have been called a turnpike or a (hah) parkway.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
NYC's population is about 8.5 million, the highest it's ever been. It's not in decline. That in itself is something of a minor miracle only because the city ran out of room to build new housing decades ago, and going up is the only way to increase housing now, unlike Atlanta, which continues to sprawl.
Whether or not Atlanta is "prospering" compared to NYC (Atlanta's GDP is about 1/5 of NYC's) you can debate, but you clearly know very little about NYC, its population, and its roads.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Another way of looking at it is that now anyone can enjoy the river view by driving by...
I would prefer they keep their eyes on the road...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Right, because to build roads and highways in a city it means you have to raze every single house in that city. [x] logic checks out.
Why? The entire reason to have a chauffeur is so you don't have to.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Anything but that
The core of Jacob's ideas is that cities should be designed for the people living there: Walkable areas where people know their neighbors and will watch out for each other.
Robert Moses built for the sake of building and to accrue himself power and influence- and displaced/impoverished many working class people to do it. He ignored the research that shows that building more freeways actually creates MORE traffic jams because it encourages more driving-only development and thus more automobile commuters. NYC's other transit options have never caught up from the lack of investment in them during the mid-20th century.
And if you think NYC is still something from The Warriors/1980s, try visiting the Village some time- it's one of the nicest neighborhoods of any city in North America. /urban planner steps off that soapbox.
Incidentally, you should read "Roadwork" by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman), which is a story about this exact scenario.
Decades later, thanks to the heroic efforts, the entire Manhattan remains rodent-infested and overcrowded .
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
But the original Penn Station was a marvelous piece of Beaux Arts design. Its story is also one of the most tragic tales in architecture---54 years ago . . . it was torn down to make way for Madison Square Garden.
The original Pennsylvania station---named for the Pennsylvania Railroad---opened its doors in 1910. Designed by McKim, Mead, and White, it a monument of pink granite, marked by an army of 84 Greek Doric columns and 150-foot vaulted ceilings. Inside, glass and steel soared to make one of the most breathtaking train sheds ever built. Inspired by the Roman baths of Caracalla, its massive waiting area was one of the largest public spaces in the world.
from The Original Penn Station
That was Mose's idea as well. Except the combination of exhaust and traffic stretch "enjoy" past the breaking point on the East River. The faceless block housing that abuts the FDR drive with no street presence is a blight commercially and aesthetically. Battery Park City is a mostly successful attempt to work around Mose's mistake but the political will isn't there to (do anything) fix with large projects the blights of the Harlem River Drive and FDR Drive. Seemed like a good idea to everyone at the time. Luckily Jane Jacobs stopped Moses when she did.
Old 1960's and 1970's maps of NYC showed other "proposed" roads, mostly pushed by Moses. I lived on Staten Island, and my father was a NYC fireman. The "official" maps used by the city had proposed highways along the south shore beach, with a big cloverleaf in what is now Gateway National Recreation Center (Great Kills Park). There was another one in what eventually became the Greenbelt in the middle of the island. Some of the highways were actually built, the Richmond Parkway runs from the Outerbridge Crossing bridge to the middle of the island, and then just... stopped. They built an overpass that ended at the edge of a swamp that was supposed to connect to one of the highways that was never built, so for something like 30 years it just sat there vacant. I think they've since connected it to the local roads, but they spent millions of dollars on it and knocked down a popular local restaurant for it, all for nothing.
Of course it's biased. Show me one person writing an article like this about an individual fighting the overreach of government isn't biased. You're just being silly NIMBY is fine, that's why we have courts to way the advantage of individuals vs overreaching governments who are usually in the pocket of one or two big corporations or unions.
Jane Jacobs was one of several people who opposed that expressway, which would have improved traffic problems that still persist to this day. It would not have been great for all the rich people that live in Greenwich Village today, but would be amazing for everyone who lives or has to commute between anywhere Southeast of Manhattan, and Brooklyn, Queens, or Long Island. Jane Jacobs became famous because she was the one among the protesters to write a book about it afterward. She did not start the movement, nor was she alone.
Why is this on Slashdot? It is a bit of history yes, but it doesn't seem relevant, and there is the accuracy thing. It may be part of a campaign to create a new / old female folk hero out of Jacobs, who is well known in urban planning, but not to the masses. Nothing wrong with that, but not keen on attempted manipulation either.
For 24 bux in beads, it was a Trumpian deal.
Yours,
Trump University, degree holder
Yeah, because real estate value in Manhattan is just way too low, and absolutely needs more price uplift.
"Freeway" doesn't mean it's non-toll, it means that it's a limited-access highway with grade separation. Term of art.
It's been tough on me. The Waffle House job was one of the best gigs I ever had. Losing my job because I jacked myself just isn't fair! If anyone knows of any available jobs in the area, please post them here. I'm a hard worker.
Let me guess, the new "set" of problems includes really hot, well-ventilated fires in skyrise towers everywhere.
Then there will be an immediate mass return to brutalist architecture, only all that concrete and brick will function as really tall security bollards, and we'll all stop talking about gated neighbourhoods, and start talking about domed neighbourhoods.
"Shuttered", prepare thyself for gentrification.
I think you mean I-85.
Atlanta has a highway cutting right through the middle of the city and that city is prospering.
Atlanta's prosperity is at the price of escalating water demands, increased pollution, and fractious politics. Yay?
NYC is experiencing population decline.
Many New Yorkers are glad to see the Donald leave, and wish he'd take the rest of his family with him.
Some thin moron urbanists never like to talk about.
But what about the corpulent ones?
Creimer is that you?
Her theory was that cities could exist without growth, but the reality was that growth was provided by immigration, and the cities would collapse without growth. Capitalism is a law of nature, like evolution. Communism is a religion, like creationism.
Was he the guy drinking the waffle syrup directly from the tub?
As with many documentaries and books, there is a need to amplify drama to attract viewers. But none of this is as simple as it seems. New York, a 19th century city, needed roads, bridges and parks. Many of the projects listed above - Lincoln Center, for example - are public goods that helped preserve New York as a viable city. It is a good thing that the village was preserved, but that does not mean the other examples are ignoble and wicked.
Additionally, New York is not cut off from the waterfront. The greenway and riverside park run the length of manahattan, as originally intended. What was there when the first sections were built were largely polluted industrial sites like meatpacking plants.
This.
Yeah, actually it was another woman named Shirley Hayes who started organizing against the Moses expressway project. Jacobs joined in later, and wrote a book on urban planning, defending organic growth of neighborhoods. If any one woman deserved credit for stopping the expressway, it would be Hayes.
Just to add to this, Jacobs was a journalist, so she was in a unique position to glom onto what Hayes and others did, and get credit for it. Hayes was a house wife, who didn't want to see her neighborhood bulldozed. Once they won, Hayes went back to her life. Jacobs saw an opportunity, and wrote a book of her ideas on urban planning, and became a figure in that world, but she did not stop the expressway.
A better idea would have been having an overpass going right over or around the city, w/ appropriate exits. It would have left Greenwich village as well as the ground in Manhattan untouched. Or even an overpass w/o exits, so that people wanting to drive directly from Queens to NJ could do so w/o having to go through or around Manhattan.
Biggest issue, though, would remain the bi-directional tolls, which is what causes much of the congestion
I'm still trying to figure out how this is an appropriate slashdot topic.
RTFA. Ultimately Jane Jacobs stopped Robert Moses by planting crypto-ransomware on the sole computer where he kept the plans - Moses was notoriously bad about backing things up. The ransom she demanded was high enough to bankrupt the project and stop it cold.
So you're saying she was a criminal?
Ransomware == Criminal. There is no moral high ground.
Oh, the irony of those espousing the virtues of spending obscene amounts of money on infrastructure projects and now The Village has become so gentrified that mere mortals can't afford to live there.
This was supposed to happen in DC too. Here's a basic overview of the original plan.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
only for them to be destroyed by gentrification.
I was watching the first season of Daredevil, and I was struck by the anachronism of a Manhattan depicted as being full of working class immigrants who needed protection from greedy, ruthless developers. That battle was lost decades ago.
The average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in Hell's Kitchen is $3400/month. Using the 30% of income rent rule, such an apartment would be affordable to someone who makes $136,000/year.
It's not just NYC. I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in Boston; the current price of a 1 bedroom apartment on my street is now $2100. The three bedroom apartments that families with 5 or 6 kids squeezed into back in the day runs about $3000, affordable for a family making 120,000/year in a state where the median income is 68,000. I don't know where the janitors, garbage men, and laborers who used to populate have gone, but looking at a heat map of rent prices the likely places seem to be urbanized suburban pockets which, ironically, have poor transportation connections.
So instead of rich people driving through poor people's vivisected neighborhoods we have them settling in them and walking or taking public transit to work, while the people they displace have to spend hours taking a series of buses or else pay for a car while still paying half-again as much for an apartment as they can afford.
Now I've traveled around the country and having grown up in an urban neighborhood I always take an interest in them wherever I go. I've seen countless instances of the inane, destructive power of the 1950s and 1960s planners' mania for wiping the slate clean to clear the way for cars. It's not that cars shouldn't have a place in the landscape, but you can't organize a society solely around the needs of the car.
Fortunately we came to our senses and started to look at these things from more perspectives than just just automobiles... but it didn't really help the people who used to live in the places slated to be flattened, because it doesn't address the underlying problem: people in power don't care about them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
New York City's prosperity is at the price of escalating water demands, increased pollution, and fractious politics.
The sooner that infested cesspool is nuked out of existence, the better.
Robert Moses built for the sake of building and to accrue himself power and influence- and displaced/impoverished many working class people to do it. He ignored the research that shows that building more freeways actually creates MORE traffic jams because it encourages more driving-only development and thus more automobile commuters. NYC's other transit options have never caught up from the lack of investment in them during the mid-20th century.
And if you think NYC is still something from The Warriors/1980s, try visiting the Village some time- it's one of the nicest neighborhoods of any city in North America. /urban planner steps off that soapbox.
sadly the myth that freeways themselves cause traffic is untrue, clearly the root cause is not integrating work and living spaces together effectively
commuting is mostly bad decisions and bad design
If it was, he'd have told you already.
This is why we have huge bridges ending at stoplights, emptying into neighborhoods with no street capacity, and having sharp, hairpin turn approaches.
The Holland tunnel ends at a traffic circle. A traffic circle. And an intensely dense neighborhood.
The Triborough Bridge Manhattan approach abrubtly stops at an abrubt 90-degree angle to the northwest and a 45-degree angle to the northeast.
At least we have I-95, after leaving the George Washington Bridge, lets us reach the Bronx, practically the only Interstate in Manhattan (they call part of this route "under the apartments").
And it's a funny amusement park where the Long Island Expressway just kind of oozes out of the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
And those are less than half of the results of the anti-Moses movement.
Yeah, none of it makes sense. But back to the topic. Nobody seems to remember how bad and seedy lower Manhattan used to be before gentrification transformed it into a museum piece today.
One fun thing to know and tell about about Mario Cuomo, though, is that he did make an off-handed comment about the impossibly ridiculous traffic problems in the City. He suggested banning personal automobiles as a solution. Really.
Kriston
"I lived on Staten Island, and my father was a NYC fireman."
Another Staten Island Lad here; Dad was in Shipping. We lived next to Walker Park, in a house that the Shaw Family once owned. (Davis Avenue is also known for a stretch as "Colonel Robert Gould Shaw's Glory Way".)
That was a long time ago, but I do want to steer this into a Slashdot theme of sorts.
For a couple of Generations, kids could take the Ferry over to Radio Row and root through the piles of gear stashed in boxes out front. I once paid a dime for some 2000 Ohm WWII era headphones... Which I still have. Then came "Redevelopment".
Radio Row, with its little shops and little Manufacturers with apartments above or behind them, was razed to make way for the World Trade Center. It was Eminent Domained out of existence, to be replaced with Towers that thousands of people commuted to every day, and of course Transit Projects were needed to accommodate them. Moses' Transit Projects.
I read an article a long time ago that described how Manhattan could have been Silicon Valley. AT&T, CBS and RCA were there, as well as CUNY. All the ingredients were there; US TV was basically invented in New York City. But that faded with the push to make New York _the_ Financial Powerhouse, to the exclusion of any more light industry or R&D. AT&T moved Bell Labs to New Jersey; RCA and CBS became "Media" companies, those interested in "East Coast" Tech moved to Massachusetts
And there were a lot of cheap Orange Groves out West in Santa Clara just waiting to be picked. (In my Salad Years I worked for CBS as a Engineering tech; if you have some old SAE Audio Gear, some of that circuitry is probably mine. CBS folded their R&D Labs just after I made enough money to go back to University. Berkeley, not CUNY.)
Other Cities had Radio Rows, but it was nothing like what could be found in Manhattan. Two or Three Generations of NYC Kids learned Electronics by tinkering with cardboard boxes full of Gear, bought at times by the pound. Those Kids, if they stuck with it, probably ended up sooner or later on the West Coast, like I did.
This concept of Suburbanization, of turning Cities into Commuter hubs, can not only be stopped, but reversed. When the Embarcadero Freeway in SF was heavily damaged by one of our local Earthquakes, the decision was made, with a lot of Community support, to just tear that damn eyesore down. Some people, mostly Commuters, grumbled. Many switched to BART. If you want to see how horrible SF Bay could have turned out, "Planners" even thought of Damming the Golden Gate, and filling the entire North Bay in for housing, except for a Shipping Channel to Sacramento. Then a bunch of Little Old Ladies formed "Save The Bay" to do just that, and they were remarkably successful.
The SF Bay Area got Silicon Valley _and_ they got to save their Bay, well, much of it; Manhattan got Bankers, Bridges, and Trump.
You don't need complicated technology like Nukes to wipe NYC out of existence.
Simply cut off the power in mid August, and the whole place will melt.
And if you think NYC is still something from The Warriors/1980s, try visiting the Village some time- it's one of the nicest neighborhoods of any city in North America. /urban planner steps off that soapbox.
Visit. That's right. Because the average ordinary American will never have the opportunity to live there.
You might as well be suggesting we visit one of the historical reconstructions at a Disney Theme park.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this describing what actually happened in Detroit?
Areas torn down for freeways that never recovered, despite a gimmick railway, a gimmick "building of the future" and the desperate attempt to get enough cash to save things via a casino.
Umm yeah that *is* the solution. The city's got millions of people in it; there's no space for cars. We need more, and better, mass transit.
In New York it would not have been freeway. No such thing here, tolls everywhere.
Science! Oh wait this is just the sort of regular news stuff I guess.
Nothing to see here
Jane Jacobs was an amazing economist, her book 'The Economy of Cities' explains how cities grow and prosper. And points out with nuance how city planners, ignorant of the growth networks of cities and how they function, can actually hurt the city from an economic prospect with their grand plans. While the city planners and top-down organizational thinkers believe they are 'modernizing' a part of a city, or engaging in a new construction project to boost the local economy, they often do the exact opposite. This was Jacob's great contribution to understanding the growth and development of cities, and this article doesn't do her justice.
My favorite part of the book is how she explains (and backs up with crime statistics) that a street with a strip club, residential apartments, restaurant, and convenience store all next to each other (something a city planner would HATE and try to prevent with strict zoning laws) is actually SAFER for all the citizens in the area then a street with only residential apartments, or apartments and shopping malls that close at 7pm. An area composed entirely of government buildings (you've seen em before, city hall right next to a court, right next to a public library) were statistically the most dangerous places at night. It was city planners attempts to 'lump like businesses together' and their history of favoring big established chain businesses over smaller local businesses that she mostly opposed. She was not opposed to city growth or progress.