In 1961,
Bennett Cerf, one of the founders of the publishing firm Random House, sent a copy of a new book by Jane Jacobs,
The Death and Life of American Cities, to the legendary city planner Robert Moses. Moses’s reply was curt:
Dear Bennett,
I am returning the book you sent me. Aside from the fact that it is intemperate and inaccurate, it is also libelous. I call your attention, for example, to page 131. Sell this junk to someone else.
Cordially, Robert Moses
This was no ordinary demurral over a book’s merits. It was a salvo in a struggle between a man who had amassed vast bureaucratic powers and remade
New York with expressways, parks and housing towers, and the woman who assembled neighbours and public opinion to stop him when he set his sights on the evisceration of a swath of lower Manhattan.
Moses was an avatar of the early 20th-century vision that the only salvation of cities was the large-scale destruction of their existing features, and Jacobs an exemplar of another, which maintained that the future of cities rested on preserving exactly those qualities. Jacobs’ book was the most powerful retort to Moses’s mode of thinking, and her actions a resounding retort to his mode of operating.
[...]
Jacobs eventually determined to leave New York. Her architect husband had obtained a commission in Toronto, and she was eager to take her sons beyond the risk of the draft for Vietnam. She left in 1968 – not in defeat, however, but in victory. The expressway project had lost all steam, and Mayor Lindsay declared it scrapped the following summer.
Moses received his final comeuppance in the same year, undone by the internal manoeuvrings in government that had so elevated him, as Governor Nelson Rockefeller engineered the dissolution of his most lasting fiefdom, the Triborough Bridge Authority. While Jacobs went on to enjoy a distinguished career as author and urbanist, Moses descended into increasing obloquy. He died in 1981, Jacobs in 2006 – one largely reviled, the other venerated.
“And sure enough,”
wrote Tom Wolfe in 2007, “over the past 40 years, the rebirth of Lower Manhattan from Chelsea to Tribeca, of northern Brooklyn, of Astoria and Long Island City in Queens, has taken place without razing a single building in the name of ‘urban renewal’, or shooing away a single citizen through ‘eminent domain’.”
Jacobs – one of those common citizens, denigrated at the time as merely a “housewife” – has, perhaps more than any other, offered inspiration to those informed that plans drawn up in the corridors of power will require them to move elsewhere. Simply say “no”.
