The Battle for Gotham (3 page)

Moses and Jacobs were not really adversaries, as is too often suggested, although she directly and successfully opposed specific projects he promoted.
Adversaries
implies equal status. In fact, Jacobs was not a peer of Moses, and she was often either dismissed or berated as “just a housewife.” Make no mistake: Moses had unlimited power “to get things done”; Jacobs had none.

Moses, as the urban renewal and highway building czar, by way of his vision of how he thought things
should
be, shaped the physical city and in consequence the social and economic life of its inhabitants. Jacobs, however, the activist and urbanist, paid attention to how cities work on the ground, what a city actually
is
and how it functions. In the process of paying attention to how things work, she framed vehement opposition to Moses’s and other big sweeping projects, advocated on behalf of an organic process of how a city truly evolves, and helped give voice to a strong civic sentiment.

Moses came out of the Progressive reform tradition. Antagonistic to politics, he learned to use the embedded patronage tradition of the powerful Democratic Party to advance his agenda and assume more control. Jacobs came out of a community-based radical sensibility, antagonistic to both patronage and centralized control, and directly confronted elected officials supportive of Moses.

Moses’s vision derived from the popular urban design theory of the day promoted by French architect Le Corbusier in his 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris.
²
Le Corbusier’s Plan called for both the demolition of the historic core of Paris and its replacement by high-rise towers-in-the-park. As urban design professor Robert Fishman notes, the Plan “announced modernism’s ruthless attitude toward the past and its demand for a revolutionary redesign of the city.”
³

COMPETING VIEWPOINTS

Jacobs saw value and logic in the sometimes messy traditional neighborhoods where work, play, residence, industry, retail, and education lived cheek by jowl in a variety of building styles, ages, and scale—what she termed “mixed use.” Moses, however, saw sprawling chaos that needed replacement with functions spatially separated from each other.

He was about ideology, she about observation. He posited; she watched. He was power; she was common sense. Moses saw static form; she saw process.

Jacobs celebrated the complexity of the urban fabric, recognizing it as a web of interconnections and interdependencies; Moses called for cleaning it up and imposing efficiency and order.

Jacobs advocated interventions in scale with what exists; Moses planned interventions as replacements for that time-woven fabric.

Jacobs saw wisdom in the observations and proposals for change from the local residents and businesspeople whom Moses disdained.

The pedestrian was central in Jacobs’s view, the car in Moses’s.

Jacobs saw regenerative potential in well-worn, solid neighborhoods; Moses saw blight and prospects for clearance and new projects.

Jacobs viewed social and economic problems as needing social and economic solutions, identifying what positive elements could be added to alter the negative dynamic; Moses promulgated the illusion that spending money on the physical plant solves social and economic problems.

Jacobs defined economic development as new work added to older work; Moses defined it as building new buildings for economic activity not yet identified. “You can’t build the ovens and expect the loaves to jump in,” Jacobs said of Moses’s definition of economic development, a definition that is officially still with us today. Jacobs focused on the yeast and loaves, Moses on the ovens.

Moses advocated an efficiency of scale; Jacobs said small is not necessarily beautiful but economies of scale are a myth.

Moses’s projects depended on big government financing of one sort or another; Jacobs abhorred big government underwriting. “Loans, grants, and subsidies are golden eggs which, being only gold, don’t hatch goslings.”

Such intellectual overlays to public policy and events take a long time to articulate. And although the 1950s and ’60s were when some of the specific project battles took place, the penetration of the broader society and public discussion seemed to come to a head in the late 1960s and 1970s.

CONVENTIONAL THINKING CHALLENGED

The Jacobs ethos emerged, even before her name was attached to it, in reaction to the Moses philosophy and policies. Resistance to massive clearance, appreciation of street-level neighborhood life, suspicion of expertise, advocacy of investment in mass transit equal to highway building, opposition to large-scale displacement, and recognition of the physical and social strengths of existing low-income neighborhoods too easily designated slums were all present before Jacobs’s first book and her emergence as a spokesman for the anti-Moses viewpoint. But her writing and activism validated and expanded that civic energy and provided the vocabulary for coming civic battles. Before I knew of Jacobs or had read her works, I was drawn to the stories in the city reflecting that resistance. They formed the core of my reporting at the
New York Post
.

Moses’s power collapsed in the late 1960s due to his own overreaching and the intensity of the growing opposition to his projects.
⁴
He couldn’t sustain such a monopoly on power. The physical and human cost of the massive dislocation of residents and businesses all over the city became too high. So while he fell due to political overreaching, the Jacobs voice gained strength because it was populist, antipolitical (or at least antiparty politics), citizen based instead of “expert” reliant.

Both shortly before and after the Moses-Jacobs clash in the larger arena of intellectual life, assorted voices challenged prevailing authority. The humane world challenged the machine world, a biological view of the built environment versus a physical one, human ecology versus the machine. The primacy of the physical sciences was giving way to the rise of the social sciences.

Marine biologist Rachel Carson would soon jump-start the environmental conservation movement with
Silent Spring
(1962).
⁵
Carson’s critique was broad in specifics and impact because she brought attention to “the interconnectedness and fragility of the natural world,” whether on land or sea, threats posed by the “quest for profits, government policies and by reckless human intervention.” She saw the threats to urban oases, parks, and nature by six-lane highways, the threat to nature of suburban development, and then the threats to the whole environment posed by pesticides and herbicides. She saw the “destruction of beauty and the suppression of human identity in the hundreds of suburban real estate developments where the first action is to cut down all the trees and next to build infinitude of little houses, each like its neighbor.”
⁶
Carson brought attention to the wholeness of nature the way Jacobs focused on the web of connections that add up to an urban organism. The concept of interdependency contradicted the idea that elements of nature or the world could be studied and understood separately.

Not long before Jacobs’s rise to prominence, in the late 1950s humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow focused on real people and real lives over statistical analyses and scientific tests. Psychologist Rollo May also emphasized the humanist reality over conventional techniques, a view resonating in the 1960s when people tired of the mechanistic measurements and methods of the behaviorists. Margaret Mead, of course, had brought a whole new human dimension to the study of culture through her pathbreaking observations of primitive peoples, challenging accepted thought about gender, race, and habitat. Canadian educator and communications theorist Marshall McLuhan had already been stirring the media field with his prediction of the emerging “global village,” the term he coined for the coming electronic age.
⁷
And Betty Friedan’s
Feminine Mystique
, published in 1963, launched the women’s movement.

Sociologists, journalists, and other nonacademics in the 1950s and ’60s were challenging the conventional wisdom dominated by academics in different fields, questioning prevailing theories and societal behavior, exposing wrongdoings and injustice. They challenged the status quo and wrote books that were accessible, not abstract or scholarly. Those books set the terms of national public discussion, shaped movements, and gave birth to policy modifications.

David Riesman opened the 1950s with an examination of the American character with
The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
(with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney). William H. Whyte’s
Organization Man
(1956) defined corporate conformity in white-collar suburbs and observed the loss of individualism. Vance Packard’s
Hidden Persuaders
(1957) critically dissected the advertising profession and its manipulation of consumers. John Kenneth Galbraith’s
Affluent Society
(1958) challenged conventional thought, addressing economic inequality and coining the terms
affluent society
and
conventional wisdom
. Galbraith demystified economics by treating it as an aspect of society and culture rather than an arcane discipline and forced the country to reexamine its values, labeling America a “democracy of the fortunate.” Ralph Nader took aim at the automobile industry, the backbone of the country’s postwar back-to-work economy, first in a 1959 article in the
Nation
, “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy,” and then in 1965 in his book
Unsafe at Any Speed
. Michael Harrington exposed the country’s deep poverty in
The Other America: Poverty in the U.S.
(1962). These were transformative books of immense power and resonance that defined a moment. Perhaps most or all of these books gave the public license to reject the prevailing dogmas in any field, and to think for itself, surely a basic Jacobs theme.

Another dimension must be studied as well. What is considered the conventional thinking of the postwar era evolved logically. World War II proved the effectiveness of large-scale planning and the role of expertise. The war built the prestige of a certain kind of mindset of thinking big and the effective role of government in a top-down command economy. During the war, neighborhoods and downtowns deteriorated with no new investment. After the war, the industrial model was applied to domestic and environmental challenges. The cost of dislocation was not of great concern. After all, that industrial model gave rise to the agribusiness food industry we wrestle with today. The quantity of people that could now be fed amazed everyone. This is what Carson was reacting to.

Moses had the prestige to apply this model to the problems of cities. Liberal support was strong for big government programs to address various problems. The prestige of government was strong. The authorities who had done miracles in many areas earned the public’s respect. Opposition was minimal.

NEW WAYS OF SEEING

An echo of all this was found in the design and planning fields, where new voices were being heard.
The Exploding Metropolis
(1958), written mostly by editors of
Fortune
and edited by William H. Whyte Jr., directly challenged the idea of the Le Corbusier “skyscraper city” and the growing dominance of the car. Jacobs contributed a chapter, “Downtown Is for People,” while Whyte, in his introduction to the book, extolled the virtues of the vitality of “messy,” complex urban districts versus the sterility of efficiently planned ones.

Housing advocate Charles Abrams published
Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing
(1956), calling attention to discrimination in public housing and the social upheaval of slum clearance. Herb Gans would publish
The Urban Villagers
(1962) a year after Jacobs’s
Death and Life
, rebutting prevailing notions of what was a slum by focusing on the destruction of an Italian community in the West End of Boston. Gans’s book resonates as much today as it did then in its depiction of community ties and networks that provide social and economic strength.

Architectural critic Lewis Mumford had already published in 1953
The Highway and the City
, lambasting the impact that new highways were having on still-viable cities. Mumford was also a sharp critic of the public housing towers, although his solution—in contrast to Jacobs—was a low-density, quasi-suburban form of Garden City, bringing more country into the city. And while Mumford encouraged Jacobs to write
Death and Life
(they had met in 1958 at a Harvard symposium), he was horrified at its final publication with its contrast to his own views of urban life and wrote a scathing review of her book for the
New Yorker
. “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies” was the headline, reflecting the condescending tone of his review.
⁸

Paul Davidoff’s 1965 article “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning,” following shortly after Jacobs’s book, accelerated the emergence of the advocacy planning movement. Advocacy planning takes a totally different approach to planning than most of the profession. Advocacy planners listen and hear what people on the ground have to say, recognizing that people in the neighborhoods and in area businesses are better able to understand conditions and contribute solutions. Advocacy planners learn what the real problems are, take seriously locally promulgated solutions, and provide technical expertise to the implementation of locally developed plans. Advocacy planning grew out of both civil rights and urban renewal struggles. Davidoff, considered the father of the advocacy planning movement, was greatly influenced by Jacobs.

This was an intellectually rich era “when book publishers sought books that could change thinking and the political agenda,” observes University of Massachusetts history professor Daniel Horowitz.
⁹
This broad group of authors gave the public license to come to their own conclusions and to be skeptical about institutions.