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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.
Nothing Robert Moses thought of was a good idea.
I understand the people screaming about BIAS for this article.
Its a concrete description of how bad an idea these socialist building projects and housing concepts were... and still are.
Hindsight is 20/20 and hindsight says Robert Moses di an insane amount of damage to cities he had influence over...
>>Nothing Robert Moses thought of was a good idea.
That's not true. His early work on NYC parks was fantastic. Jones Beach is an iconic beach and recreational area.
Crossed it too many times to count, I live in the area. I even regularly ride my bike in the area, across the GWB and up to Van Cortlandt park. Those cars weren't breakdowns. They were purposely abandoned there because the owners wanted to claim the car was stolen to collect the insurance money and because it cost a couple hundred dollars to get rid of a car at a salvage yard.
This isn't NIMBY, this is "traditional neighborhood preservation" - which can be as rabid and overblown as NIMBY, but it's a different thing, really. NIMBY sends the problem off to somebody else. Neighborhood preservation embraces the problems of the past rather than rushing into the problems of the present or near future.
Freeways are truly evil and destructive to urban development, they need to be underground, or outside the urban area. The summary delves into social justice themes with the planner wanting to use the freeway as an excuse to raze the housing for the undesirables, but, really, the freeway itself breaks up a community when it's built in a traditional above ground (affordable) manner, regardless of who lives there.
If you want to talk about NIMBY - the "heroine" of the piece was actually the opposite, striving to keep the "problem people" where they are, rather than displacing them off to somebody else's neighborhood.
It makes no sense for ANY interstate highway to run through a city.
That's actually one of the major flaws of the interstate highway system,. They should have been run entirely through rural areas, with spurs giving cities access to them. I-95 should have been built at least a hundred miles away from a giant city like NYC. It should service NYC with a I-195 spur that goes to but not through the city.
Running interstate highways through cities was one of the worst mistakes of the planning of the whole system. They should have been free flowing highways for interstate (or at least long distance) travel. As built, local traffic mixes in with the interstate traffic, creating massive bottlenecks in every city.
Spoken as someone who has no idea how city planning works.
Robert Moses's projects are a textbook case of how NOT to design a city. Billions of dollars of waterfront property in Lower Manhattan is literally covered by a highway designed and created by... Robert Moses.
On top of that billions of dollars worth of almost-next-to-waterfront New York City property were converted into low income housing projects designed and created by... Robert Moses.
To top it all off, the people living in the projects KNOW how valuable the property is so they absolutely refuse to move (even temporarily) so the government can renovate the building, because they're terrified its just a government scheme to kick them out... again... which is why most of them are living there to this very day. All thanks to Robert Moses.
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.
Yes, he is responsible for Jones Beach. But he also designed the highways to get to it for cars only, with underpasses too low for buses. Intentionally, to keep anyone who couldn't afford a car out. He intended it for middle class only, not "poor people".