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1. Jacobs versus Moses: A Fight for the City’s Soul
- Temple University Press
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1 Jacobs versus Moses A Fight for the City’s Soul I n October 2006 the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York hosted a public forum. Engaged in a spirited conversation was a select group of historians, architects, planners, community activists, developers, and political appointees. The group debated which of two urban visions dominates New York City’s approach to city building today—that of Jane Jacobs, the legendary urbanist and writer who penned the now-classic attack on planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,1 or her frequent antagonist, Robert Moses, the master builder of the mid-twentieth century.2 Pointing to promotional posters that showed the pair posed as if ready for a modern-day gunfight at O.K. Corral, event moderator and Gotham Center director Mike Wallace suggested that the imagery was symbolic, indicative of “the ur status” Moses and Jacobs had achieved: They seem to have become almost iconic figures, touchstones with whom participants in contemporary debates on city building often seek to align themselves. In part, perhaps, this is because their clashes back in the ’60s were so intensely dramatic. Yes, they each channeled and shaped forces far vaster than themselves, but their combat was also between two unique and powerful personalities. They really did detest each other, as far as I know, and what they believed the other stood for. (Wallace 2006) Yet while Wallace and many of the gathered experts spoke as if Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses were truly physical combatants, metaphorical 2 Chapter 1 gun-slingers and ideological opposites, situated at the far ends of the urban planning spectrum, one of the evenings’ featured speakers offered a starkly different view. Serving as New York City’s representative on the panel, Amanda Burden, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s director of city planning and chair of the City Planning Commission, argued that the time had come to stop focusing on the ways in which Jacobs and Moses were at odds and to consider instead the ways in which their ideas could work together. Clearly, Burden acknowledged, the debate over the different ideologies of “these two icons” would continue, even as Jacobs had won greater influence among planners, urbanists, and elected officials. But, she added, the need to build additional housing, create jobs, and lay the foundation for New York City’s future growth demanded the kind of leadership, ingenuity, and drive that Moses embodied (Burden 2006a). At the time the administration was in the middle of a protracted battle to push through its own ambitious redevelopment agenda. Moses-like in scope and scale, it called for a massive city makeover, with plans that ranged from an effort to win the 2012 Summer Olympic Games and a proposed $4.4 billion conversion of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards from an open-air rail yard into a mixed-use community of luxury condominiums, affordable housing, office towers, and a $1 billion basketball arena designed by noted architect Frank Gehry to an aggressive agenda for rezoning neighborhoods across all five boroughs and an ever-expanding and evolving proposal to transform midtown Manhattan’s Far West Side into the city’s “newest central business district” (Pinsky 2008). By the summer of 2009, more than ninety-four rezonings covering eight thousand city blocks had cleared the City Council, with fifteen more on the docket. Among the more prominent projects remaining on the administration’s agenda were the development of an East River Science Park as “the flagship ” of the city’s effort to become a biotech hub (Pinsky 2008); the redevelopment of the industrial neighborhood of Willets Point in Queens from a “toxic wasteland to a green and renewable neighborhood”; the rezoning of seventy-five-acre Coney Island in Brooklyn; and the rezoning and redevelopment of Hunts Point along the East River in the Bronx (Pinsky 2008). Central to a number of the projects—including Atlantic Yards, Willets Point, and a proposed expansion of Columbia University in West Harlem—was the specter of the powers of eminent domain being invoked to clear the way for redevelopment. “Big cities need big projects,” Burden maintained, going on to say: Big projects are a necessary part of the diversity, competition, and growth that both Jacobs and Moses fought for. It is to the great credit of the mayor that we are building and rezoning today, once again, like Moses on an unprecedented scale but with Jane [52.91.54.203] Project MUSE...