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.

Comments

Biased

[Avarist]

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.

Re:Biased

[ShanghaiBill]

Well that's a horribly biased piece and whoever wrote that should be shunned.

Indeed. TFA is portraying NIMBYism as heroic. The freeway may have been a bad idea, but the other projects would have been nice to have. Cities should be dynamic, with growth, change, and progress. Stagnation is bad for our economy and is a major source of inequality, as rents are driven up, and poorer people are driven out of the most prosperous areas, while the rich cash in on the rising property values driven by artificial scarcity.

Re:Biased

[kenj123]

Please post an article with a counter view that defends the plan. I think the plan was ridiculous. NYC is a city for people, not for cars. Moses's previous project, the cross Bronx expressway is just as ridiculous. Why divert one of the most important national highways, route 80 and 95 through the heart of densely urban area like the Bronx? the problem is the alternate route would have gone through the Hudson valley and there are too many wealthy connected people who live there that would have shutdown the project. So it ends up in a lower middleclass immigrant area like the Bronx. The problem is its ridiculous for both the people who are just trying to pass through and get caught in local traffic and it destroyed many establish local neighborhoods. The disaster that cross Bronx represents was a big reason Jacobs could mobilize sentiment against Moses lower manhattan plan which would have done the same thing.

Re:Biased

[JWW]

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...

Re:Biased

[ArmoredDragon]

I'm still trying to figure out how this is an appropriate slashdot topic. This sounds more like a topic for People's World.

Re: Biased

[dunkelfalke]

Cities also should be built for people, not for cars.

Re:Biased

[MangoCats]

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.

Re:Biased

[kenj123]

We're talking NYC area in the 1970s through 90s. then it cost like $200 dollars to get rid of a car for salvage. You could pay a tow truck or possibly drive your self out side of area but it will cost you about that much in tolls, gas, hassle. thus cars were regularly abandoned and reported as stolen. Its really interesting that you feel so strongly that everyone in the world has to conform to your logical model.

Re:Biased

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re: Biased

[pdclarry]

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".

News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this either?

Cities should be about people, not infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

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.