The Battle for Gotham (2 page)

When I walked to school each day, played in Washington Square Park in the afternoon, visited my father in his dry-cleaning store, bought candy at a nearby newsstand, ran an errand for my mom, and came in from Washington Square Park for dinner when she called me from the sixth-floor window of our apartment house, my life was a page out of urbanist, author, and advocate Jane Jacobs’s
Death and Life of Great American Cities.

When my father’s main store on West Third Street, where all garments were cleaned and pressed, was condemned to make way for an urban renewal housing project, when our apartment house on the south side of Washington Square also was condemned for another urban renewal project, this one for a New York University library, when my father was pushed to relocate his business and the family moved to a Connecticut suburb, my life was a page from the book of master planner and builder Robert Moses, who transformed New York City and State through the twelve appointed positions he held over forty years, from the 1930s to 1970s.

Mine was a classic city childhood of the 1940s and 1950s. New York street life was robust and vibrant, offering a feeling of total safety. I rode the double-decker bus up and down Fifth Avenue to dance class, shopping, and an occasional outing to Central Park. I took the subway to visit friends and, somewhat foolishly, went all the way to Coney Island with two friends and no adult at the age of eight. Washington Square Park was the primary arena for play, hanging out, or roller skating, with a daily stop to say hi to my grandfather on his favorite bench.

Our move to the suburbs was a distressing one. I had trouble fitting in. The difference between city and country was dramatic back then, and it was reflected in my classmates. I stood out like a sore thumb until I caught on to fitting in. The upstate girls’ college I started at was much the same, and I eagerly returned to New York midstream to complete my undergraduate studies at New York University. Even then, New York still offered a rich experience with endless choices, including city and national politics during John Kennedy’s election campaign,
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until I embarked on a newspaper career at the
New York Post.

I reveled in covering city life and couldn’t believe I was getting paid to learn something new every day. Marriage, children, and brownstone living on the Upper West Side came later, and that too revealed aspects of city life that informed my reporting. This was the 1960s and 1970s: New York was changing, incrementally, I thought, but in retrospect quite dramatically. I was part of and witness to a sea change in city life. On one level, I was oblivious to the major forces driving it. With the hindsight and experience of forty years, I understand those forces now and share that understanding in the pages that follow.

I grew up in the shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. Their clashing urban visions shaped postwar New York both directly and indirectly. In turn, that clash of visions helped shape the nation.

But I knew of neither of these overarching New York figures until adulthood and then only vaguely until well into my career as a newspaper reporter. Most New Yorkers were and still are similarly oblivious to either Moses or Jacobs. Yet these two giants of urban philosophy had enormous influence on the shape of American cities in general and New York City in particular.

THE MOSES-JACOBS LENS

To look at recent New York City history through the lens of the conflicting urban views of Moses and Jacobs is to gain a new understanding of the city today. This lens provides a small measure by which to evaluate the kind of big and modest projects outlined in this book. I did not have that lens either growing up or as a reporter for the
New York Post
from the mid-1960s until late in the 1970s covering city development issues. Eventually, I understood that in my writing I was immersing myself in the web of challenges personified in the conflict between the urban perspectives of Moses and Jacobs.

Two things helped develop that lens for me: reading Robert Caro’s book
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
when it was published in 1974 and reading, meeting, and developing a lasting friendship with Jane Jacobs in 1978. My own urban vision had been shaped earlier during my fifteen years as a reporter, meeting and learning from people all over the city and watching positive and negative city policies unfold. But that urban vision was deepened and added to by that Moses-Jacobs lens and was expressed in my first book,
The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way
, first published by Simon and Schuster in 1989.
Urban Husbandry
was the term I coined in that book to describe a regeneration approach that reinvigorates and builds on assets already in place, adding to instead of replacing long-evolving strengths.

From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, I reported for the
New York Post
on the impact of the great social and economic dislocations in the city. There were the urban renewal projects in Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side and, most dramatically, the opening of Co-op City that vacuumed out so many residents from the Grand Concourse and accelerated the decay of the South Bronx. I covered school decentralization battles in Ocean Hill and Brownsville and urban renewal on the Lower East Side, and I learned the fascinating evolution of Washington Heights while working on an in-depth series about newly appointed secretary of state Henry Kissinger, whose family settled there after fleeing Germany in 1938. There were public housing conflicts, landlord scandals in Times Square and on the Upper West Side, and middle-income apartment shortages. New urban renewal projects and battles to save landmarks all got my attention. But I had no knowledge of the role of Robert Moses in shaping urban renewal policies, locally and nationally, until Caro’s extraordinarily well-researched and thorough opus.
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I had heard a little about Jane Jacobs’s activism in Greenwich Village, particularly fighting the West Village Urban Renewal and the Lower Manhattan Expressway projects, but I had not read
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
. When I finally did read it, just before I was heading to Toronto to meet her, I discovered a way of understanding the city that I could relate to, a way that I had instinctively come to believe during years of reporting on community-based stories, an understanding that Jane believed all keen observers are capable of developing on their own. Over the years she challenged me, broadened my thinking, and encouraged me to look, observe, and understand beyond what I had already learned.

This book now looks back on the city as I first experienced it growing up and then wrote about it as a reporter. By using the Moses-Jacobs lens to examine some of the issues I wrote about in the late 1960s and 1970s, I come to a different conclusion from many experts on how the city reached the ultrasuccessful and constantly adapting condition of today—even if suddenly tempered by a colossal national economic meltdown.

The perspective of time is very useful. My time as a reporter was a trying period for the city. Bankruptcy loomed. Crime hit its peak. The infrastructure was crumbling. Vast swaths of neighborhoods lay abandoned. People were leaving. Fear was pervasive.

PAST IS PROLOGUE

For many, the memory of the depth of the city’s troubles back then has dimmed over time. Through the lens of a newspaper reporter I observed this period firsthand. Many of the stories I wrote reflected both the trends of the day and hints of the future. Some directly mirrored my personal experience.

As a native New Yorker, my life and the life of the city are one. I have watched the changes in the Greenwich Village of my birth, lived the ascent of the Upper West Side with my husband and children, felt the impact of dubious city economic policies through the ups and downs of my husband’s family-owned manufacturing business. All these experiences informed my observations and reporting and add focus to today’s debates. Many of the issues I covered were of the moment—historic preservation, planning, community rebirth, the Westway fight. Most people have forgotten our recent history; some have never learned it. Looking back offers an interesting picture of the period and helps recapture that lost memory. I draw from those stories herein, in part, to look at where we were and how we evolved from that negative era, how New York City “repaired” itself, to borrow Jane Jacobs’s word.

We know the past informs and shapes the present. But the past is not often defined as the recent past. The city’s recent past, as revealed in this book, will surprise many. It is my contention that the Moses policies were largely responsible for the torn-apart, fallen city that brought the city to its worst condition in the 1970s;
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Moses’s fall from power and the end of his policies—both because of his excesses and because of the drying up of federal funding—brought the city back from the depths of urban despair. It is also my contention that the modern city of today, which some would give Moses credit for, evolved despite the damage he wrought.

It is ridiculous to think that we could not have built roads, constructed public housing, or created parks without Moses. Europe rebuilt whole cities after World War II without destroying the urbanism that had been bombed away. Alternatives to Moses’s plans were always available that did not erase neighborhoods, undermine social capital, and wipe out longstanding economic investment. Once he was gone, alternative options had a chance. For good reasons, the rebound of the city as a magnet for talent and improved neighborhoods all occurred after Moses’s departure.

Observation tells us that the most successful areas of the city today are those Moses didn’t eviscerate; the most troublesome are the ones he did. I am not ready to let the rehabilitation of Robert Moses go unchallenged. The worst of his legacy lives on.

The fall of Moses allowed the city to meaningfully regenerate. And while I don’t think the urban philosophy of Jane Jacobs has prevailed to the degree many observers contend, I do recognize it as the driving force—the foundation, if you will—of the opposition to favored, repetitive Moses-style development policies. It is also the defining force—articulated as such or not—of some of the most innovative current citizen-based initiatives. Fortunately for the city, for all cities in fact, the Jacobs legacy lives on.

This book tells the tale of two cities reflected in two very different and competing urban views, as represented by Moses and Jacobs. Moses’s view was antiurban; the city needed to be reshaped, thinned out, controlled. Jacobs’s view was the opposite; she found in the city a dynamic energy, a vitality from the absence of control, the ability of so many positive things made possible exactly because of people’s ability to self-organize for civic, economic, or social purposes.

I lived, observed, and wrote about things shaped by both of those city views. No single vision can guide a city; by its very nature, a city embodies multiple visions. This book explores their world and mine and, in the process, offers another particular view of what can be seen.

INTRODUCTION

A Clash of Visions—Then and Now

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody only because and only when they are created by everybody.

JANE JACOBS

R
obert Moses started in the 1920s, Jane Jacobs in the late 1950s and early ’60s. While they were of different periods, they overlapped in the 1960s, and their clashing visions have had unending impacts from then to now.

Moses’s influence came through the nearly unlimited power he exercised in the administrations of six governors and five mayors; Jacobs’s came through the insightful and popular observations of urban life that she penned in seven books, starting with
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
in 1961 and her leadership in New York battles against Moses projects during the 1960s.
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Moses also directly helped shape projects in other cities; Jacobs inspired resistance to them. The impact of both personalities stretched across the country and beyond.

Moses started in state government in the 1920s as a reformer, but by the end of World War II, he held several positions in New York City that put him in charge of almost all public housing, public works projects, and highway construction. He learned to use the system he helped to reform in order to amass power on a scale never seen before or since. Eventually, his autocratic approach to massive highway building, park creation, and large-scale public housing construction led to urban policies that were elitist, top down, efficiency based, expert dependent, technocratic, and anti-democratic. The policies Moses initiated were totally dependent on large government subsidies under national and local programs he helped create.