Posted on 05/04/2016 5:01:32 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Wednesday is the 100th birthday of Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist whose 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, changed the trajectory of New York and cities everywhere. In the book, Jacobs argued that the preceding century of urban planning had essentially “arisen on a foundation of nonsense”—that the old, white men who advocated for highways and high-rises, wide streets and buildings set back from sidewalks by acres of grass, were not only clueless but were actively destroying American cities. Instead, Jacobs wrote, cities should be built with communities and street-level interaction in mind. […]
Jacobs used Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where she lived (and where I grew up), as a prime example of how neighborhoods should look, and she fought her entire life to ensure it would keep looking that way, battling mega-planner Robert Moses, who wanted to build a highway right through SoHo and the West Village. […]
But as often happens when we remember the dead, nearly all of these celebrations and tributes fail to recognize Jacobs as a real person with deeply flawed ideas. […] Looking at the Village today is a great place to start. The same neighborhood Jacobs lauded for its diversity in the 1960s and ’70s is today a nearly all-white, aesthetically suburban playground for the rich. The average price for a two-bedroom apartment is about $5,000 a month. …
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
And Robert Moses did not have any plans for a highway through Greenwich Village. The Lower Manhattan Expressway would have been built generally over Canal Street; the southern boundary of the West Village is at Houston Street.
I’ve read some of Jacobs, but have studied more deeply what happened to Chicago’s neighborhoods (and other cities) following WW2. The theory-driven, macro-level-only thinking of the early urban planners like Moses and Le Corbusier did untold damage to the urban fabric of established cities.
Then, as now, it’s perfectly acceptable to find fault with ‘old white men’.
All problems stem from old, white men. Of the European variety I presume.
People hate global wealth until they have something they wish to sell to the world!
Go figure.
Can you imagine what traffic would be like in America today if there were no expressways. If every commute was at 10-20 mph peak speed with stop lights at every corner.
Expressways are a good thing.
I’d tell those folks, the inside of your house is what you primarily ought to be decorating. The outside, secondarily, but otherwise cities aren’t museums. There’s plenty of countryside for that kind of vision, and more power to its Carhenges and the like.
Expressways that detour the ghetto are a great thing. Less opportunity for the bad people to prey upon the innocent.
The revolution is eating its own.
She isn’t of the rave du jour.
Funny fickle lefties. They have their heyday then they grow old.
I thought Jane Jacobs opposed:
Big government projects
Spending taxpayer money on social engineering
Disrupting the lives of normal people because some bureaucrat “knew better”
I thought she was sensible.
Jacobs herself did not use that meme.
She was. This article is digging deep to find fault in a perfect is the enemy of the good sort of way?
Would the author have preferred the area turn into slums ... as is the fate of most “tower in the park” schemes have done?
Exactly.
And the reason why wealthy people want to be in those areas is because they find them desirable places to be.
It’s not all one thing or nothing.
Moses wanted to protect Long Island from the urban garbage of the city. He do so until it was imported. Now,we have pockets of urban decay and getting worse. The blame is the people themselves!
I agree. Another thing Jane Jacobs railed against was all the government buildings that were going up in downtown cities. She opposed eminent domain takings to put up social welfare buildings essentially making downtown an urban wasteland.
Wow.
I have lived my entire adult life to this point without ever hearing of Jane Jacobs.
That makes two of us.
I’ve heard of the anti-Robert Moses activism in the Village in NYC, but none of the names until now.
I admit to not liking what I read of her, she sounds like someone I would have detested in so many ways, particularly with the company she kept.
That said, her battle to fight expressways has merit to it.
I saw the effects an expressway can have, and the arm twisting that took place to build them is unseemly and un-American. It the Boston area (and many other cities) people were forced against their will to relocate, and these expressways put up. The one in Boston cut right through the center of the city, a big, ugly, rotting, rusting thing that turned out to be filled with cars day and night.
It was only after it was taken down during “The Big Dig” that you could easily see just exactly what that expressway had done to the city, how it changed its character.
(Note: I like what the Big Dig has done for Boston, but I would never, ever support it because of the way it was funded, and the wasteful way money was spent...my comment on this thread is about the effect of an expressway through the heart of a city and its subsequent removal, which I have seen with my own eyes. I DON’T WANT OLAG-HAI’S THREAD HIJACKED TO DISCUSS THE BIG DIG PLEASE)
That said, I understand the NEED for expressways. But the way it was done in Boston back in the 1950’s actually laid much of the groundwork for the additional EXORBITANT expense when the Big Dig was built. That expressway should have been done differently back in the Fifties.
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