The Battle for Gotham (23 page)

But the public testimony changed the mind of the Board of Estimate. The opposition had been conducting a long, hard fight with every kind of pressure, and more and more people were involved and were showing up in busloads. That seemed to persuade the officials. “It may have been what it seemed like,” Jacobs said. “But how does one know behind the scenes what were the operative levers and deciding factors? There was really nobody there who argued for it, except a man from David Rockefeller’s downtown association. I think it’s important that there weren’t many highway people and not much preparation on their side. I think they thought they had a sure thing. And we had so many people, so much preparation, and facts and figures and arguments. I really think that it swayed them; they already knew they had a big and growing fight on their hands.”

Opponents testified about jobs that would be destroyed and businesses that would be lost, contrasting lost jobs with the temporary nature and number of jobs that would be achieved. “What we talked about most was how New York would be ruined,” she continued, “if you kept trying to supply, first and foremost, roads for automobiles, and letting everything else disintegrate and just fit in the margins. Then the Board of Estimate went into a session, and we waited. It was an hour or two, quite a while. They came out, sat down, and voted against the expressway. Incredible! We’d won. Fantastic!”

The fight died down for a while, but it wasn’t the end. It came up again the next year in some form for reconsideration. “Now the fight was not only taken up by the Planning Commission,” she said, “but also very vigorously by the State Highway Department, which meant it was taken up very vigorously by Governor Nelson Rockefeller [1959-1973]. The state became our chief opponent.”

Gee, this is one reason I hate Nelson Rockefeller. I only saw him face-to-face once and talked to him once in my life, and he told me a lie [laughter]. The only firsthand experience I had with him is one great big lie.

He came down to the San Gennaro Festival when he was running for governor. It was in the area that would be destroyed. We had a bullhorn and kept following him. We kept telling people that this man had a plan that was going to destroy the neighborhood, that this man was supporting the expressway, that this man was going to take their homes away from them. The expressway would’ve taken the guts right out of Little Italy. We took turns saying, “Governor Rockefeller, why do you want to destroy this neighborhood?” We stuck close to him.

Finally it got on his nerves, evidently. He tried to ignore it for a long time; we just kept at it. So he turned around, and I happened to have the horn in my hand. We were all taking turns. He said that this was a city, not a state, matter. I disputed him on that. I said it was on the state highway map, and we wanted it taken off. He said that he believed in local government, and the state would do whatever the mayor and the Board of Estimate wanted. So I pinned him down. I said, “If the Board of Estimate turns down this plan, will you have the state take it off the highway map?” And he said yes, he would.

I really pinned him down: “You promise that if the Board of Estimate turns this down, that you will take it off the state map?” “I promise I will,” he said. “It’s your own government that wants this; don’t come after me about it. We will do whatever the city wants.” Okay, that was the great big lie, because then we got the Board of Estimate to turn it down. We promptly began trips to Albany to get it off the state map. Governor Rockefeller promised this. Thousands of people heard him. He promised it to me!

[But in Albany] we got a great runaround from everybody. Everyone was sympathetic. God, we saw a lot of people. They all would say you have to have the city liaison people . . . and the city liaison people would say that it was up to the people in Albany. What it came down to was that the governor wouldn’t allow it to be taken off in spite of this grand public promise before thousands of people. So, that’s the only person-to-person communication I ever had with Rockefeller, and all it amounted to was a huge lie. If the only thing somebody ever told you was a lie, would you like him?

After that, in 1964 she thought, it was rescheduled, and this time the opposition lost. Dozens of construction workers showed up, as they often did for big projects (and still do). One can always tell if they’re paid; they leave right at five o’clock. The new hearings were on technical aspects of land acquisition, not whether it should or shouldn’t happen at all. Many postponements followed for one reason or another. “All kinds of shenanigans were occurring. We kept finding out new things, such as that they were promising a housing project and that it would transgress the new pollution laws soon to be passed.” Much was “going on at top speed,” she said. “Eventually came the time when they had to change their tune because of those pollution laws.”

NEW AMENITIES PROMISED

The pollution laws had a significant impact on the course of this fight, since increased traffic would logically increase pollution. The idea that the speed of the cars diminished the pollution did not prevail. Thus, the proponents changed the argument for the expressway to what was to be built with it. “All of a sudden they were going to have this great, glorious swatch of land right across Manhattan that was going to be full of fountains, gardens, and new buildings of all sorts,” Jacobs explained. “That’s what they now tried to say the expressway was all about. It wasn’t about how many cars it would carry anymore, for heaven’s sake.”

The new school and park proposal apparently stiffened the resolve of people in Chinatown. They would get enough carbon monoxide at their children’s school to do them harm. About this time, Jacobs recalled, it became known that in the apartment houses built over the newly constructed approach to the George Washington Bridge, people couldn’t open their windows.
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“The whole idea of combining housing or schools with expressways, for the first time, was frightening people,” Jacobs observed. “People there were complaining they had headaches all the time. The Department of Health, I think it was, warned people not to open their windows. The song and dance about, ‘Oh, there’s less pollution, because the cars are going fast,’ just didn’t hold up in real life. There was concentrated pollution there.”

So the pollution issue, because of the new laws, was becoming a real problem. The proponents had already given figures about how many cars this expressway would carry.

I think they were inflated for cost-benefit purposes. Using those figures creates the pollution problem. Now all of a sudden they have to argue that they won’t have many cars. They never would discuss these two things—cost benefits and pollution—at the same meeting.

So, they tried very hard to change the subject. This is the first time the subject had to be changed, because it was the first time that these things came into conflict—the amount of pollution as against the cost? That was in ’67 when they began changing the subject, without much success, because this had gone on for so many years, people understood what an expressway would do. It was something very real to them.

ARREST

One of the great eccentric stories about Jane Jacobs is her arrest during the expressway fight. Many versions are told. Some who say they were with her during the incident even tell a different version from her own. She recounted in detail how it really happened in our conversation of March 1978, some of which is included here.

The state held a hearing to focus on a new big promotion for all this great land development that was going to occur, all of a sudden softpedaling, or ignoring, the number of cars, because now they worried about the pollution factor. The plan for the school had been found out. A committee was researching the pollution impact, and they were very frightened. So now comes a hearing on the grand physical environment that was going to be built around the expressway, downplaying the number of cars. They kept talking about fountains, fountains everywhere, so many beautiful fountains. And gardens and things to appeal to the environmentalists.

People tried asking: if it wasn’t going to increase the pollution because there would not be so many cars, then how could the cost be justified? They would say that’s not what this hearing is about. It was a great charade.

Then a hearing was scheduled that she knew was meant to pacify the community. According to Frances Goldin of the Cooper Square Committee, Jacobs arranged with a few of them to stage some kind of protest action. When they got to the meeting, something new was happening. Instead of the lectern for speakers from the public facing the stage where officials were supposed to be listening, it was instead facing the audience, as if citizens only needed to address each other. This was like adding salt to a wound. The public already felt the elected leaders were not interested in what they had to say. This was proof.

Jacobs wanted to “send a message” to officialdom. No one of official consequence was on the stage to listen anyway. Her strategy of “sending a message” was to just quietly walk across the stage from one side to the other in protest. She invited anyone who was similarly inclined to follow. As they walked across the stage, an apparently frightened stenotypist grabbed her steno machine, clutched it to her chest, and, in the process, dropped the tape, which began unraveling all over the stage. Protesters apparently helped send it in the air, grabbing it and tossing it around like confetti. At this point, Jacobs declared that the hearing didn’t happen because there was no record.
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What ensued was quite serious in Jacobs’s mind. She didn’t like being arrested and charged with inciting to riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing public administration. The community had to hold fund-raisers to pay for her defense. Of course, charges were eventually dropped but not before she was actually booked, charged, and eventually ordered by a judge to pay for damages. She didn’t believe for one minute that any damage occurred, but she and her lawyer kept asking the city for receipts of costs of damage in order to fulfill her responsibility. They never received any. The matter simply ended.

In various conversations, Jacobs repeated the point that lawsuits are most useful in these fights just for the benefits of delay, delay, delay. “Some issues you fight with lawsuits and buy time that way,” she explained. “With others, you buy time by throwing other kinds of monkey wrenches in. You have to buy time in all these fights. The lawsuit way is the most expensive.”

THE IMPACT OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS

“We accomplished something with all this mess,” she pointed out. “The feds held a hearing, declaring the expressway environmentally unacceptable. Well, well, that verdict
really
changed the subject, you see what I mean? [laughter] So my arrest bought some time, and it was well worth it. That’s why I plea-bargained, to buy more time. I would have gone to jail if necessary. But the only point of it was to buy time to continue working in Washington on the environment and get a judgment against the expressway based on figures about that school, for instance, and about the general pollution that it would cause based on their own figures on new traffic to be generated.”

By the time the decision was made in D.C. on the environmental questions, the Jacobs family had moved to Toronto in 1968. “It was a little like the West Village fight,” she said. “After a while, Washington wanted the West Village thing to end. It was giving the urban renewal program a bad name all over the country. There were editorials in the
Saturday Evening Post
about the West Village. [laughter] There were pictures all over the U.S. of people protesting it with adhesive tape and
x
’s on their glasses. It was a bad image for them, a bad press that they were getting. I think highway people in Washington began to feel the same thing was happening with the expressway, too.”

The pollution laws were still new. “It was one of the earliest cases to go this way. And it was an unequivocal thing. You could see how much pollution would occur. The state had used these increased car figures very early to justify spending this much money and doing this amount of destruction because of how much traffic it would accommodate. But now it was over and, eventually, demapped.”

EXPRESSWAY KILLED; SOHO EMERGED

After years of protracted battles, the expressway was killed by the Lindsay administration.
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By then, the district was an empty shadow of its former self.

With the expressway out of the way in 1969, the Landmarks Commission held a hearing on the district’s designation proposal in 1970, the first historic district in a primarily commercial area. There were then eighteen districts. Also that year, the city legalized the residential use by artists of lofts in commercial buildings. Buildings with artists illegally occupying them had small signs put on the front door, AIR for “artist in residence,” to alert the fire department in case of a fire. Occupied buildings were given this designation also to protect people who had fixed up derelict spaces. Art galleries, boutiques, restaurants, and a few artist-entrepreneurs were already sprouting around the area, coexisting comfortably with the more than twenty thousand people who still worked in a variety of light manufacturing industries. No one doubted that industry would probably continue to leave the area.

The significance of SoHo and the critical importance of its preservation for the course of urban development and downtown regeneration nationwide was unclear to most people at the time citizens were vigorously seeking its designation as a historic district. Certainly, it was not yet clear to me. I wrote several stories about the civic campaign, but my focus was on SoHo as an internationally significant architectural district and the fight to gain historic district status for it. My recognition of the multidimensional significance emerged slowly. Eventually, SoHo’s profound impact on the course of American urban history became apparent.
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