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.
The revolution is eating its own.
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.
Wow.
I have lived my entire adult life to this point without ever hearing of Jane Jacobs.
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.
“Instead, Jacobs wrote, cities should be built with communities and street-level interaction in mind. […]”
__________
Well, we have plenty of “street level interactions” now, don’t we.