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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.
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
How is this either?
Learn about induced traffic.
Traffic is not like sewage that needs to be piped from one place to another. Sure, road improvements can lead to increased traffic, but traffic is PEOPLE and better roads give more of them the ability to live as they choose. Government should serve the people, and should not view citizens as an annoyance to be managed away.
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?
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.
Government should serve the people, and should not view citizens as an annoyance to be managed away.
So you're under the impression that razing entire residential sections of a city to make room for freeways isn't "managing away" people?
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!”
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."
Attention people bitching about New York: Detroit has superhighways going into its core and all it did was let people move out of the city to the suburbs.
Poor if you do, poor if you don't.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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
"Freeway" doesn't mean it's non-toll, it means that it's a limited-access highway with grade separation. Term of art.
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.
Except that they don't. Studies say that more roads leads to more traffic, which leads to more congestion.
http://theconversation.com/do-...
The article reflects current thinking that building highways through cities were a bad idea. Take Atlanta, for example. Three interstates go though the city, and congestion is horrible, not to mention that it is an eyesore.
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
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.
I lived in NYC for years and it was super easy to forget it was on the ocean. Especially in Manhattan where you are really never by the water (without having a freeway 16 feet from you). Yes the middle of the city is a bad spot to put a highway. But so is the waterfront.
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
That whole discipline of 'studies' is permeated with anti-car intellectuals. People who consider suburban development 'urban sprawl.'
Said intellectuals want the population concentrated in high-density housing along rapid transit corridors. They're at work in cities like Minneapolis/St.Paul, destroying traditional urban corridors.
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.
Congestion is horrible in part because people in the 1960s and 1970s decided that development and highways were bad and stopped projects to make new ones to handle the increasing population. So we end up with 1950s designed highway networks with 10x the traffic. Adding 6 lanes to an originally 2 lane highway is a band-aid, not a solution.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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.