Architecture Here and There

Illustrations: Above, Jane Jacobs at White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village; below, cover of "Wrestling With Moses"; bottom, Robert Moses

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Most people in the planning and architectural communities know that Jane Jacobs beat Robert Moses in the Battle of Washington Square Park, in New York. Moses, who for decades held dictatorial power as the master planner of public projects from bridges to highways to public housing projects, was the nation's leading practitioner of urban renewal, and tried to ram a highway through the center of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. When that failed, he tried to foist "urban removal" on the West Village neighborhood. When that failed, he tried to ram yet another highway through the Soho district. When that failed, he pretty much bowed out of the planning biz in New York City, retiring with his tail between his legs.

His failures were all caused, to a large extent, by Jane Jacobs, most famous for her The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which described what she learned of why cities work (or don't work), culminating in the fight with Moses over Greenwich Village. She led that fight, and wrote the book afterward. By the time Moses came back for revenge, she was a well-known theoretician of urbanism whose celebrity helped buck Moses - whose brutal development style was minutely examined in Robert Caro's pathbreaking The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1975).

Anthony Flint, who is director of public affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in Cambridge, and was a reporter at the Boston Globe for 16 years, at last gives the world a blow-by-blow account of the running battles between Jacobs and Moses. Its full title is Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City. Although the book strives to be evenhanded in its treatment of both protagonists, the book might as easily have been called Wrestling with Jacobs. She turns out to have been the master thinker, besting Moses in her understanding of cities and of how politics in cities works.

However evenhanded Flint may be, readers will not find it difficult to side with Jane Jacobs. She was a housewife without a college degree when she took on Moses. She was still without a degree at her death in 2006 - even honorary degrees, which she spurned as they were offered, so eager was she to avoid the taint of expertise.

I empathize mightily with her on that score. Early in her career, even before she became a writer for Architectural Forum, she met Moses's Philadelphia counterpart, Edmund Bacon, when he showed her one of his urban renewal projects. She immediately picked up on the absence of activity on the streets, and immediately detected that modern architecture and modern planning could only hurt neighborhoods.

Here's an extended excerpt from Wrestling that gives a taste of the flavor of the book:

Going to meet the great Ed Bacon, Jacobs confessed she was "not what you would call a city-planning expert." but she knew Philadelphia was a grand experiment at the time, and Ed Bacon was very fashionalbe. She took the train from New York and met Bacon, who escorted her to a section of the downtown area the city was working on. "First he took me to a street where loads of people were hanging around on the street, on the stoops, having a good time of it, and he said, well, this is the next street we're going to get rid of. That was the 'before' street," she said. "Then he showed me the 'after' street, all fixed up, and there was just one person on it, a bored little boy kicking a tire in the gutter. It was so grim that I would have been kicking a tire, too. But Mr. Bacon thought it had a beautiful vista."

She turned to him and asked, "Where are the people?"

Bacon sidestepped the question. He emphasized the need for order in cluttered and messy downtown neighborhoods, and the importance of having a 'view corridor," a clear sight line revealing the order of the new metropolis. The walked to the next block, where peole were sitting on stoops, talking, running errands, and darting in and out of their homes. She stepped back and looked at him in astonishment. Apparently, Bacon didn't see the neighorhood vibrating with life that she did.

Back in the offices of Architectural Forum, Jacobs shared her growing misgivings about urban renewal with her co-workers. It was just the sort of edgy analysis [journal editor Douglas] Haskell had asked for, but others in the office were reluctant to question the prevailing wisdom of planners like Bacon. He was trying to save Philadelphia, then said. Planners across the country, including the biggest of them all, Robert Moses in New York, were dedicated to the economic salvation of American cities; challenging them was misguided, even unpatriotic.

Substitute modern architecture for modern planning and it's pretty much the same gig. Modern planning has met its Jane Jacobs, but the same cannot be said of modern architecture, which continues to ravage American cities. Another quote from Wrestling suggests the evolution of Jacobs's thinking about modern architecure:

Jacobs was not entirely opposed to modernism as an architectural movement, and admired both the Seagram Building and the work of the Philadelphia-based architect Louis Kahn, who created a series of heavy buildings that visually told the story of the materials used in construction. [Gee! That's important!] She even described his Trenton Bath House as a "marvelous creation." But she was not caught up in the promise and inevitability of the movement, as many of her colleagues were. For her, examples of good modernism were rare; new theories and sketches and renderings werre one thing, but what happened in real life was another. Too much was getting lost in translation as modernism became official policy in cities across the country. By the 1950s, what had begun as an intellectually rigorous and aesthetically elegant movement guided by master architects had resulted in the ubiquitous strip malls, low-slung school buildings [remember Tom Wolfe's "duplicating-machine spare-parts wholesale distribution warehouse"?], and glass office boxes that populate the suburbs to this day. Cities mimicked suburban modernism in turn [Oh?], bulldozing cluttered blocks to make way for wide-open plazas and drab housing towers. As urban renewal cleared out the clutter and brought in light and air, Jacobs began to see that the fine-grained street life of the city was being lost.

Still prior to her first battle with Moses, Jacobs had an essay published in Fortune magazine in which she knocked the modernist bugaboo out of the ballpark:

In "Downtown Is for People," published in Fortune in 1958, Jacobs laid out her critique: downtown redevelopment efforts across the United States were completely misguided, and showed no understanding of how people actually behaved in cities. "These projects will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it," she wrote. "They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery."

If Flint's work has any weaknesses, it is that, in his evenhandedness, he does not give the reader much help in making the connections between the oligarchic planning community of Moses's day and the oligarchic architectural establishment of today. Furthermore, he seems almost to buy into the recent effort to de-tarnish the legacy of Robert Moses, which to me seems like an effort to undo the role Jacobs played in reforming the planning community. The architectural establishment will stop at nothing to make sure that nobody does to modern architecture what Jacobs did to modern planning. As an advocate of wise land use, Flint has a duty to defend Jacobs's legacy against modernist predators hoping to lure planners back into the modernist chamber of horrors.

Among the strongest of many strengths in Wrestling, however, is Flint's detailed descriptions of Moses's efforts to use bureaucracy to stop Jacobs's opposition, including stepping aside himself in favor of other bureaucrats who turned out to be as ineffective. And of Jacobs's tactics in defeating Moses's efforts. For example, in the battle to save the West Village from urban removal, Jacobs saw that compromise with the planners would be inadvisable:

[Federal housing official Lester] Eisner told Jacobs that if [opponents] engaged with the city at all, or made any specific requests for amenities and improvements, they would then be considered complicit in the plans; the city could then claim that there was community support for the urban renewal plan.

"We understood we should be extremely careful not to say, 'Wouldn't it be nice if the area had such-and-such,' " Jacobs recalled. Eisner confirmed Jacobs's conviction that their only chance of success was to kill the plans outright.

As Flint's study again and again suggests, an aroused public has the power to stop a tyrannical bureaucracy once effective publicity clarifies issues long befogged by "expertise." This should be a valuable lesson for those who want to stop modern architecture from ruining the planet.

Flint's excellent book was published earlier this year by Random House. It is 231 pages long and costs $27 at retail.

 Tags  Anthony Flint Jane Jacobs modern architecture New York planning Robert Moses Wrestling with Moses

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