Free Republic

n 1948, a scar running west to east began to appear across the center of The Bronx. It was the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, one of the many ill-conceived works of Robert Moses, and it would leave an indelible mark on our borough. The highway, which would eventually become one of America’s most congested, tore communities in half. White neighborhoods and communities of color were affected, but the Black and Latino community bears the brunt of its legacy years later — with devastating health consequences. It’s past time to rectify the mistake of Moses’s monstrosity. Ed García Conde...

… For 44 years, Robert Moses ruled over New York. Unelected, his power drawn from up to 12 concurrent city, state and federal appointments, he used his unparalleled control of public authorities with impunity. Deftly utilizing loopholes and creating new law, Moses had his own shadow government, with his own police force, flag, and an island under the Triborough (now Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge. There is no debate over the sheer magnitude of what he built. His accomplishments bestride New York: 416 miles of highways, 13 bridges, 658 playgrounds and housing for 150,000 people. He constructed parkways, tunnels, beaches, zoos,...

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. […]...

If you live in New York you may have heard of him, but outside the area his name may be a mystery. Robert Caro, famed author of four books on Lyndon Johnson, wrote his first book about him for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. The book was later named one of the one hundred greatest non-fiction books of the 20th century. The man is Robert Moses and the book is The Power Broker. The book was written in 1974 (celebrating its 40th anniversary.) I have owned it for about ten years and finally tackled it on my recent vacation....

On November 4, 2008, America changed. On that day, the Chicago Machine went national with the election of Barak Obama to the Presidency of the United States. While the media largely failed to examine the implications of this, the Chicago Way style corruption of our core institutions once almost ripped the very fabric of our society apart. This is a multipart series devoted to examining the adoption of Chicago style power practices nationally. While the Chicago Way is most closely associated with politics, it actually involves the corruption of multiple institutions. The Al Capone story focuses on the corruption of...

NEW YORK -- Jane Jacobs, an author and community activist of singular influence whose classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" transformed ideas about urban planning died Tuesday, her publisher said. Jacobs, a longtime resident of Toronto, was 89. Jacobs died in her sleep Tuesday morning at a Toronto hospital, which she entered a few days ago, according to Random House publicist Sally Marvin. Jacob's son, James, was with her at the time. The author, who would have turned 90 on May 4, had been in poor health. A native of Scranton, Pa., Jacobs lived for many years...

AT least 20 Egyptian policemen were injured today when 1000 Christians staging a sit-in at the main Coptic cathedral in Cairo threw rocks at them. Roads leading to the cathedral, the seat of Pope Shenuda III, head of the Coptic Church, were sealed off, as the police tried to restore calm and restrain a protest over the disappearance of a priest's wife. The protesters claimed the woman was abducted by her Muslim boss and forced to convert to Islam.