What A City Needs

Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City

By Anthony Flint

(Random House, 256 pp., $27)

For urbanists and others, the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs was the great titanic struggle of the twentieth century. Like the bout between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, their conflict has magnified significance, as the two figures have become symbols. Jacobs is the secular saint of street life, representing a humane approach to urban planning grounded in the messy interactions of the neighborhood. Moses is the icon of infrastructure established by power, the physical reconstruction of cities with great bridges and wide expressways and tall apartment buildings. The actual projects that fueled their acrimony may now be curiosities of urban history, but the ideological conflict embodied by Jacobs and Moses continues to rage in every growing city in the world. The growth of Shanghai may be described as Moses on steroids, whereas the land-use restrictions in Mumbai honor a central element of Jacobs’s legacy.

Anthony Flint’s book is a timely retelling of their battles. The federal government, under pressure of an economic crisis but also for reasons of principle, has now renewed its commitment to infrastructure, but it has done so in a way that preserves existing biases. The transportation spending in the Obama administration’s recovery program targets highway-heavy areas, and promises twice as much aid, per capita, to the ten least-dense states as to the ten most-dense states. And beyond our borders, nothing less than the economic and environmental future of the world is tied to urban planning decisions now being made in China and India. So it is a good time to re-acquaint ourselves with Jacobs and Moses.

While Moses dominated New York’s urban growth for the forty years that ended in 1968, Jacobs has owned the last four decades. She had a certain advantage—it is ironic to say so, in the light of her adversary’s immense political power—in establishing her place in history: she was a great writer, and we can hear her still through her own words. Another great writer, Robert Caro, produced the definitive biography of Robert Moses; and unfortunately for the master builder, The Power Broker was so skillfully done, so painstakingly researched, that history has generally accepted its depiction of Moses as an unfeeling, power-mad figure who did much to harm New York. Two years ago, Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson presented an alternative to Caro, a more sympathetic depiction of Moses, in an exhibition partly at the Museum of the City of New York and in an accompanying catalogue. Flint is not a revisionist of any sort, but his book does provide a somewhat balanced picture of New York’s answer to Baron Haussmann.

Robert Moses was born to prosperous parents in 1888 and grew up in New Haven and New York. After graduating from Yale, he received a doctorate in political science from Columbia. Moses’s charging intelligence and idealism gained him the patronage of Belle Moskowitz, a progressive reformer and ally of Al Smith, the Good Government governor from Tammany Hall and the Fulton Fish Market. In the 1920s, parks were part of the Good Government agenda, and Moses became Al Smith’s parks guy. After all, Moses lived on Long Island, which made him more sylvan than most of Smith’s friends.

Parks gave Moses a path to power. By building parkways and popular beaches, Moses demonstrated his skills as a project manager, a bill drafter, and a public persuader. In those early days, he displayed an extraordinary ability to divide and defeat the local opposition to his projects. Moses’s reputation for probity and competence enabled him to thrive even during the Roosevelt years, despite the mutual antipathy between the two men. (Their feud began in the 1920s, when Roosevelt chaired the Taconic State Park Commission and Moses refused funding for Hudson Valley Parkway.) Moses managed to get control over much of the federal spending that was slated for New York, and he used the tolls from his bridges as a sort of venture-capital fund for public infrastructure. While we so often wonder what happened to our tax dollars, the products of Moses’s spending are perfectly plain: they surround New York. If you travel to midtown Manhattan from LaGuardia Airport, you will drive on a Moses bridge to a Moses highway and look from your window at Moses buildings and Moses parks.

By the 1950s, Moses’s achievements had made him a public hero. I may have been one of Manhattan’s most athletically inept children, but even I have fond memories of swimming in pools and beaches that Moses created, and of playing blissfully in his parks. If Moses had retired at the age of sixty-five, he would have left in a blaze of glory, beloved by his city and his state. But the unextinguishable and obsessed man kept on building for another fifteen years. He built much during those later years, including Lincoln Center and the 1964 World’s Fair—but history’s tides were turning against him. More specifically, Jane Jacobs was turning against him, as was the new urban sensibility that she represented.

While many of Flint’s readers will have read Caro’s vast masterwork on Moses, few will have perused Alice Alexiou’s valuable biography of Jacobs, which appeared in 2006. Flint’s background material on Jacobs will therefore come as news to many people, and Flint understandably leads with her story, despite the fact that she was born almost thirty years after Moses. At the time of the first fight between Jacobs and Moses in the early 1950s, Jacobs had moved from Scranton to Greenwich Village, worked as a stenographer, a writer, and an editor, married an architect and had three children. In 1952, she began writing for Architectural Forum and managed, despite the lack of any formal training, to become a powerful public voice excoriating what she called the “anti-city ideals of conventional planning.”

In her battle with Moses, Jacobs was a foot soldier, one of many neighborhood mothers who fought to save Washington Square Park from Moses’s four-lane extension of Fifth Avenue that was intended to snake through the greenery. The mastermind behind the community opposition to the road was Shirley Hayes, a Broadway performer turned Greenwich Village mother. Hayes seems to have taught Jacobs something about organizing opposition to big government projects, which only confirmed Jacobs’s views about the ability of urban density to spread knowledge from person to person. Eleanor Roosevelt was the star member of Hayes’s team. The fight lasted from 1952 to 1958, and Hayes, Roosevelt, and Jacobs beat Robert Moses.

The master builder's defeat wasan early warning about the sea change in public attitudes towards big government projects. As Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff have ably chronicled in their book Mega-Projects, there were three epochs in postwar public building. In the 1950s, during Moses’s heyday, governments happily developed roads, bridges, and stadiums, and ignored the ill-organized local opposition. In the 1960s and 1970s, activists such as Jacobs learned how to use the media and political pressures to stop the bulldozers. In the most recent era, a few mega-projects, such as the Big Dig in Boston, were resumed, but these had to move mountains and spend billions to avoid angering anyone.

Jacobs’s second fight with Moses concerned her own home. Just as she was writing her great denunciation of urban renewal, she learned that her block had been declared “blight” and therefore slated for demolition. Moses had grown up in the Progressive movement, for which slum clearance was a significant objective. In 1937 and in 1949, encouraged by real estate developers, the federal government widened the war against slums to also include “blight,” an ill-defined term which could mean any place where properties were less than pristine.

Moses had relinquished his position as Sultan of Slum Clearance in 1960, but Flint writes that “it was entirely plausible—and, to Jacobs, seemed likely—that on the way out Moses suggested where the bulldozers should go next and steered his successors right to Hudson Street.” Moses’s influence was enormous, so I suspect that Flint is right on this point, but I am less sure about his allegation that urban renewal in “the West Village had the whiff of revenge,” a payback for Moses’s “first major defeat.” Everything we know about Moses’s tastes in urban planning suggests that he would have liked to rebuild the West Village, whether or not it happened to house Jane Jacobs.

Jacobs now took on Shirley Hayes’s leadership role and served as co-chair of the Committee to Save the West Village. She mobilized hundreds of voters to confront and to harass the urban renewal project at every turn. As Jacobs told The New York Times, “We had been ladies and gentlemen and only got pushed around. So yesterday we protested loudly.” Smart politicians latched onto Jacobs’s coattails and became advocates for her community. One assemblyman angrily told the city planners that “you have sent the urban renewal program of this city, state and federal government back to the dark ages of Robert Moses, and his arbitrary and inhuman procedures.” Moses was no longer a champion of good government, but a symbol of dictatorial power.