Posts about Jane Jacobs

Public Spaces

Live chat with Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses

by David Alpert   •   September 10, 2009 12:45 pm

Anthony Flint is the author of Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City. It chronicles Jane Jacobs' life, her introduction to the issue of urban planning, and her three great battles with Master Builder Robert Moses that handed him some rare, key losses in his long career of building public works projects good and bad.

Greater Greater Washington Live Chat: Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses

(09/10/2009)

  

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12:54

GreaterGreaterWashington: Welcome to our live chat with Anthony Flint, author of Wrestling with Moses. We'll get started in a few minutes. In the meantime, settle in and submit your questions for Mr. Flint.

1:03	Quick quiz first: Which of the following magazines did Jacobs NOT write for when she came to New York? America Illustrated Architectural Forum Iron Age Reader's Digest Vogue

1:04	Anthony Flint: Hi, this is Anthony Flint—I'm on.

1:05	David Alpert: Welcome! And thanks for writing on such an interesting subject to Greater Greater Washington readers.

1:06	David Alpert: I wanted to start by asking about the lack of any mention of Jacobs in The Power Broker, which many readers have read.

1:07	David Alpert: I know you said it was cut for length reasons. Do you have any idea why they cut that and not something else? Did Caro not really consider Jacobs that significant to Moses' career? Was she?

1:14

Anthony Flint: Jane Jacobs was an important source for Robert Caro—she told him quite a few things about the power broker, from her obvious personal experience. As I write in the book, Caro later said he had a whole chapter on Jacobs and how she challenged Moses and Moses' reaction to that. But Random House felt the manuscript was already too long, so he cut the chapter. I've never asked Caro for a look at this chapter, but I have to imagine it provides some detail on the proposal for a roadway through Washington Square Park—one fairly significant battle that is missing from the Caro tome. That of course was Jane's first involvement in citizen activism.

1:15	David Alpert: I bet a lot of people would love to see that chapter. Of course, now there is a book that fills that in.

1:15	David Alpert: You say in the book Jacobs never cooperated with biographers. Can you explain a bit about why she was so reluctant to be profiled?

1:19

Anthony Flint: She was always very reticent when the spotlight came on her—she always said she wanted people to read her books and listen to what she was saying, but shunned the whole business of being a celebrity. She was very choosy about the journalists she agreed to do interviews with. Mark Feeney at The Boston Globe hit it off with her in the mid-90s. The writer Jim Kunstler had a good relationship. For others, she would always say spending time talking about herself would detract her from her work. Now all that said, she did collect just about every newspaper article written about her—but I suppose that's quite normal.

1:21

David Alpert: Another thing I found fascinating was that she bought an urban townhouse, renovated it, and even put in an open floor plan on the first floor. These are all things that are really common today (my house is like that) but the Jacobses did this in 1947. Was Jacobs particularly ahead of her time? Were more people doing this back then than we knew, or did she really anticipate popular trends by as much as 40-50 years?

1:22	David Alpert: (BTW, readers, while you're waiting to see answers, don't forget to try out the quiz!)

1:23

Anthony Flint: She really did anticipate the trend in popular urban living by a half-century, absolutely. When she and Bob found 555 Hudson Street, the West Village was a bit rough around the edges, very working-class in character, lots of manufacturing and warehousing in transition. So in 1947, buying an old three story building in that context and fixing it up really was quite a pioneering thing to do.

1:24	Anthony Flint: 555 Hudson Street is currently for sale, by the way, and I believe listed for over three million dollars.

1:24	David Alpert: Why were they so advanced? Bob was an architect, but so were many people. Jane liked cities, but she couldn't have been the only one.

1:28

Anthony Flint: Lots of wealthy people since the 19th century clearly found advantages to living in the city, but she was the first middle-class or upper-middle-class type of person to look at a slightly shabby neighborhood and see the value in it—the bones of a good urban neighborhood, proximity to a great park, to the subway, to a wide variety of shops and businesses ... as you correctly point out, this is happening quite regularly now, through the 1990s to today, in places like Brooklyn, but also quite clearly in Washington DC. Living in a city saves money and it's environmentally friendly.

1:29

David Alpert: Jacobs' activism got going in the 1960s, which was also a time where society started to turn against authority. Do you think that Jacobs would have been able to stop earlier freeway projects had she been ten years older, or was the situation really only possible with a combination of her ideas and also the particular moment in history?

1:33

Anthony Flint: I think it was a powerful and unique moment, yes. Jane wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, at a time when more Americans were beginning to question authority and the establishment and their government, and Bob Dylan began to play his music down in Greenwich Village. The times were changing. Other books came out at that time that were similarly challenging—Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique," Ralph Nader, others ... but she was the only one to take on the mandarins of the planning establishment and the excesses of Le Corbusier-inspired modernism. By 1968, obviously a year of upheaval for the country, when she stood up at a public hearing on the Lower Manhattan Expressway and ended up getting arrested, her theories on the damage of highways through urban neighborhoods emerged in her actions.

1:33	David Alpert: OK, let's take some of the reader questions.

1:33

[Comment From Steve in Fairfax, VA] Mr. Flint - I really enjoyed the book. Obviously Jane Jacobs came out against eminent domain as it applied to freeways (Bronx Freeway, LOMEX), but one thing that seems a little absent from Death and Life was the issue of mass transit right of way construction, which is pretty essential to a large city. In NYC, it was already there, so it was as if it was a part of nature, but of course the city went through tremendous upheaval when it was originally put in. We've experienced the trials of this around metro Washington quite a bit with the decades long wrangling over construction of the Silver and Purple Metro lines, which are finally under and near construction. In your research did you come across her opinions on mass transit ROWs?

1:37

Anthony Flint: Steve that is an excellent question. In objecting to the forced relocation from urban renewal or highway construction, she does not address the similar upheaval that comes with transit project construction. She may have made comments later in life on this topic; I think generally, it comes down to tradeoffs and balance and what's good for the city as a whole—that relocating people for bad urban design or a 10-lane elevated highway is clearly a bad idea, but necessary relocation for a subway line that has such clear economic, environmental, energy and climate-change benefits, is something to be considered differently.

1:37	[Comment From Matt Malinowski] As harmful as some of Robert Moses's projects were, they were breathtaking in their size and scope. Do you think the pendulum has swung too far the other way now, in the direction of incrementalism and gridlock? Where would Jacobs place the proper balance?

1:39

Anthony Flint: Matt I think there is a good deal of paralysis these days, as some who assume Jacobs' legacy are in fact merely NIMBYs—not in my backyard. Today they are saying no to anything, any amount of density, and so forth. The difference is, back in the 50s and 60s, Jane was saying no really for the first time—no to a flawed policy (urban renewal) and flawed urban design, no to the established approach to planning and the lack of true citizen participation, and of course no to highway-building. She understood though that cities need to change and evolve and be dynamic, and that it makes no sense to try to preserve all neighborhoods as if they were under glass in a museum. Cities are hubs of innovation in today's new green economy, and they need to be economically competitive and move forward. That means infrastructure, vision, and sometimes big infill redevelopment projects.

1:40

David Alpert: How do people trying to follow in Jacobs' shoes differentiate the two? If we're arguing that 14th and U in DC could use a 9-story building and others are saying that's going to destroy the neighborhood, is there any way to figure out what would be true to Jacobs' legacy and what wouldn't?

1:46

Anthony Flint: In terms of urban design, the ground floor is key—the place where new buildings greet the street. It should be porous and welcoming. The Jacobs principles of course included shorter blocks, a mix of uses, walkability, access to transit—all of which you are very fortunate to have in DC. Sometimes when neighbors say a new building will 'destroy' a neighborhood they are objecting to density—more people, more people to use up parking spaces, and so forth. But the city is the place for density, you don't need a lot of parking if the Metro is close by, and density that is well designed is a beautiful thing. At the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, we have a whole website devoted to the topic, called "Visualizing Density" -- http://www.lincolninst.edu/subcenters/visualizing-density/

1:46

[Comment From Douglas Stewart] In terms of both local and regional planning, how can we get the best of both Moses and Jacobs? Do we need an agency—or an individual—with close to the breadth of regional vision, and power, that Moses had, to build the kind of better places that Jacobs wanted—not just in "Great American Cities" but better American suburbs?

1:47	David Alpert: (And don't forget to try your hand at making a guess in the quiz! I'll give you a hint - as of right now, nobody has picked the correct answer.)

1:48	Anthony Flint: On the quiz, bear in mind Jacobs came to New York in 1934 hoping to be a journalist. She started out as a secretary and then freelanced and then ended up working full-time as a writer and editor for some of the publications listed.

1:52

Anthony Flint: Responding to Douglas: you raise an interesting point about regional planning. When Jacobs and Moses were battling, it was the bad old days of cities vs. the emerging suburbs. Moses was trying to save New York from being an economic backwater; he thought the secret formula was to raze the old cluttered neighborhoods, build projects like Lincoln Center, and make sure everyone could get around easily and swiftly by car. But he viewed the suburbs—he considered them lifeless 'dormitories' - as competition. Today, we know that it's metropolitan regions that have a common destiny, and indeed collections of metropolitan regions known as 'megaregions.' The Boston-Washington DC corridor is an example of this—it's similar to how cities work together in Europe, on transportation infrastructure and environmental initiatives and of course economic development. Check out www.america2050.org on this notion. Finally, I do think we have a president who understands cities and metropolitan regions, and there's a lot of good thinking going on at places like HUD.

1:53

David Alpert: On the issue of suburbs, did Jacobs fight or write about suburban freeways? Those are just as environmentally damanging, but it seems to be harder to get people to oppose those, since suburbs are already more car-oriented, though perhaps we just don't realize how hard Jacobs worked. Often crusaders against urban freeways like Barbara Mikulski turn into the biggest enablers of sprawl. Are there things from Jacobs' battles that those of us who fight suburban sprawl-creating freeways can learn from?

1:56

Anthony Flint: Jane Jacobs was pretty focused on cities, and stopping the Moses-era highway-building through the heart of cities first and foremost. In the book, I argue that she really inspired the freeway revolts that followed in places like San Francisco, after her high-profile arrest in 1968. She was also one of the first urbanists to criticize suburban sprawl as environmentally damaging. The highway through the cornfield with the big interchange, as we now know, enables very unsustainable land use patterns. She thought this was a very bad idea. But she stayed focused on getting the city right.

1:57	David Alpert: OK, do we have time for one more?

1:57	[Comment From shy] How did she handle gentrification?

1:58	David Alpert: I'd add to that that Jacobs pushed for some affordable housing, but of course Greenwich Village is extremely expensive now for all but the richest New Yorkers. Would Jacobs have been pleased or displeased with the way Greenwich Village is today? What would she recommend today?

2:00

Anthony Flint: Don't be shy! This is a question I get all the time—and rightly so. Gentrification is clearly the single biggest challenge for revitalizing cities like Washington or Boston or New York or Seattle. Jane understood the process very well—indeed, as she described the benefits of living in great urban neighborhoods, it makes sense that more people would flock to them. She viewed it as a supply and demand problem: create more great urban neighborhoods, increase the supply, and prices would come down as the desirable becomes less scarce. This does sort of engineer more gentrification, though—in places like Newark. So she knew that there had to be "windbreaks" or places set aside for low- and moderate-income families. The West Village Houses, which I write about in the book, is the prime example of creating this kind of housing. Today there is also inclusionary zoning and community land trusts as policy interventions for affordable housing. But it's hard.

2:01

David Alpert: Thanks so much for joining us. I encourage everyone to go buy Anthony Flint's book. There are a lot of fascinating tidbits about the history of these fights that I never knew, including the tactics she employed and the many different ways Moses and the city planners tried to push through their ideas.

2:01	Anthony Flint: Thanks very much for having me on! This was really enjoyable and a great discussion.

2:02

David Alpert: Feel free to continue the discussion of Jane Jacobs in the comments, and stay tuned for our next live chat. By the way, the answer to the quiz is Reader's Digest. Jacobs worked for Iron Age, America Illustrated (a magazine sold in Russia aimed at teaching Russians about America during the cold war) and Architectural Forum; she also had articles published in Vogue during her early journalistic years.

2:02

Public Spaces

Live chat: Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses, tomorrow at 1

by David Alpert   •   September 9, 2009 12:16 pm

Robert Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York cast New York's "master builder" Robert Moses as the villain in the greatest urban planning drama of American history. But where's the hero? Jane Jacobs fought Moses three times, and won three times. Her most well-known book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transformed the planning profession and shattered its orthodoxy for destructive "urban renewal" housing projects and freeways slashing through cities.

Yet there's no mention of Jacobs in The Power Broker. Caro wrote a chapter on Jacobs, but it had to be cut to keep the already-enormous tome to a manageable length. Anthony Flint has essentially written that missing piece. His book, Wrestling with Moses, documents how Jacobs came to live in Greenwich Village, came to understand so much about urban planning when few in the profession did, and came to be the great activist who stopped Moses' seemingly unstoppable power in lower Manhattan.

Tomorrow at 1 pm, join us for a chat with Anthony Flint about Jacobs, Moses, their great battles, and many things you probably never knew about Jane Jacobs. Post your questions in the comments here and we'll queue them up for Mr. Flint, and order the book, or even get the Kindle edition for only $10 and read it tonight.

Public Spaces

A new Third Place enhances a walkable space

by Cavan Wilk   •   December 1, 2008 11:55 am

Life has come to a new, small commercial building on University Avenue in Wheaton after months of construction. First, local favorite poultry eatery El Pollo Rico has finally re-opened at its new location after a fire destroyed its old place of business. Second, there is now a brand new coffee shop, Dejabel Cafe. I could not resist trying a mocha latte. It was tasty. I made sure to return to get an Americano in preparation for a two hour drive to my parents' house on Friday night.

Photo by Ian Britton on FreeFoto.com.

While this is all well and good for my local coffee drinking needs, it is also an important (though small) step in the social and economic fabric of downtown Wheaton. This is walkable downtown Wheaton's first (at least in this decade) non-mall based third place. A few small restaurants and the 24-hour Dunkin' Donuts had partly filled the role of third places. However, no one would choose to go study, read a book, or sit for some relaxing conversation in a take-out or a chain doughnut stand.

Although there are two Starbucks locations in Wheaton, both are in Westfield Wheaton, one in the mall proper and the other in the parking lot adjacent to the Giant supermarket. Neither is as convenient for pedestrians as it is for motorists. The Westfield is also on the wrong side of the pedestrian-unfriendly intersection of University Boulevard and Veirs Mill Road. That intersection is a suburban-style, six-lane monster that a pedestrian never has enough time to cross before another queue of cars comes from another direction. Consequently, that Starbucks functions less like a third place and more like a drive-through window.

Dejabel Cafe has free Wi-Fi, and an ambiance that immediately reminded me of other nice third places, like those in vibrant Adams Morgan. Though not on the same scale, it is a good addition to Wheaton nonetheless. I also like that it is an independent startup with its own unique details. Most importantly, it will be performing a function that is currently underrepresented in downtown Wheaton. It adds diversity of uses to its environment, making the area more attractive to a wider range of people, creating demand for an even greater diversity of uses and businesses. It's a beautiful cycle that any walkable urban place strives for. In her monumental classic book, Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described how a successful walkable place needs such a diversity of uses. We have seen this cycle play out in other parts of our region, such as Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, U Street, and Clarendon.

I told the proprietor of Dejabel Cafe how I'd been hoping for such a place to open up, because so many other potential third places in Wheaton did not directly appeal to me. He said that he'd heard the same thing from other customers. He's betting that there are many people with my consumer tastes and preferences within walking distance. Wheaton's earlier walkable place was abandoned in the 1980s for the then-new subdivisions farther up Georgia Avenue. It's a slow process, but very enjoyable to watch a new vibrant, walkable place unfold right at my feet.

Development

Breakfast links: Thinking about urbanism edition

by David Alpert   •   September 10, 2008 9:15 am

A Metro train at the potential River Terrace station. Photo by David Alpert.

Imagining River Terrace: Imagine, DC imagines the new mixed-use community that could exist on the PEPCO site north of River Terrance on the banks of the Anacostia. It's a great spot for a new station to serve a new neighborhood, especially if we ever build the separate Blue Line.

A meeting of giants: Robert Caro, author of the definitive biography of Robert Moses, spoke recently about his one meeting with Jane Jacobs. "It turns out we each had a question that we wanted to ask the other," said Caro. "Jane wanted to ask me what it was like to meet him. I wanted to ask her what it was like to beat him." Via Richard Layman.

Is walk-"ability" enough? Ryan Avent summarizes an interesting blog debate over neighborhood design between Atrios and Kevin Drum. If you segregate residential uses from commercial uses and provide ample parking, but locate them in close enough proximity that people can walk and include nice sidewalks, will people walk? Drum does but none of his neighbors do. (Columbia, MD is similar.) Once we've put huge sunk costs into devoting most of the land to cars and foregoing all alternatives, the marginal cost of one more car trip to the store is small, and therefore people drive.

Architecture

Jacobs & Locke smack down Pascal & Corbu

by David Alpert   •   March 5, 2008 3:02 pm

Today, the community and creativity of cities—a consequence of many people interacting in all aspects of life—is widely recognized as one of cities' greatest strengths. Naturally, then, Jane Jacobs' celebration of the vibrant city seems obvious and Le Corbusier's vision of the isolating city of huge towers and empty spaces seems ridiculous, the product of his ideas like L'Enfant Plaza widely reviled.

Les Freres Corbusier's brilliant drawing
of Le Plan Voisin realized in New York

But according to a thought-provoking article, The Antisocial Urbanism of Le Corbusier, the concept of human interaction as necessarily desirable was not always the consensus belief. From Rene Descartes to Blaise Pascal to Albert Camus, solitude fought with community for dominance as the ideal human condition.

Jacobs' and Florida's celebration of community, on the other hand, draws on the intellectual tradition of John Locke, also the predominant influence on the Declaration of Independence. Those ideas ultimately won out, though not until relatively recent times; as Simon Richards says in the paper, "For the greater part of the last twenty-five hundred years, the question 'what are cities good for?' would have garnered the answer: 'good for nothing.' Today, they are highly desired and architects who plan "the Death of the Street," as Le Corbusier did, find themselves roundly mocked in popular off-Broadway performances.

Parking

Parking reformers have some educatin' to do

by David Alpert   •   February 26, 2008 2:46 pm

Image by emily geoff on Flickr

The Jane Jacobs of parking policy, Donald Shoup, published his groundbreaking book in 2005, giving us 44 fewer years to educate people about the fallacy of free parking.

Development

Maybe they can build 'em like they used to

by David Alpert   •   December 9, 2007 11:40 pm

During the dark ages of urban planning (the 1960s and 70s), many old residential buildings were replaced with discredited the idea. Block after block of attractive row houses are gone forever, even though brownstones in places like Brooklyn, Boston, San Francisco, and DC sell for a million dollars or two, or more.

Can we ever go back? Most of today's urban developments are glassy high-rises, the better to capture the maximum possible revenue for the developer. They're better than 1970s concrete boxes, but is anyone building brightly colored townhouses with bay windows in front?

They are building them in one place, DC's "Capitol Quarter" development in Southeast DC near the new baseball stadium.

Architecture

Three visions of the city

by David Alpert   •   May 17, 2006 9:31 pm

As Boozy so entertainingly informed us, Le Corbusier's vision for a city was the Radiant City, of rows of identical buildings and skyscrapers separated by parkland. Robert Moses' vision for the city included wide expressways (which eventually became choked with traffic) cutting across boulevards of urban renewal style projects. And Jane Jacobs famously extolled the chaotic streets where children played, adults walked and shopped, and residential and commercial activities blended together.

Entering Manhattan across the Manhattan Bridge we pass examples of each of these visions. Approaching the island we see the East River waterfront, where the FDR Drive, begun under Moses, separates the river from the projects of Corlears Hook, built by Moses. Passing the projects, bland and identical, with empty greenery between, we see an image of Corbusier's vision come to life. And finally, once we reach far enough into the interior of Chinatown where Moses' bulldozers never reached, the streets are pulsing with chaotic energy, full of people and life and activity, in the way that Jacobs recognized as the greatest height of city life.

Below are pictures of each of the three.

Roads

Freeways that never were

by David Alpert   •   May 13, 2006 2:46 pm

In the 1950s and 60s, urban planners were busy constructing freeways across America, through plains and mountains where they were needed, and into the centers of cities where they bulldozed vibrant communities and hastened sprawl and urban decay.

In most cities, local activists fought these highways and, with varying degrees of success, eventually halted new construction. In many areas the local Departments of Transportation never entirely gave up on these plans. Here is a quick roundup of what freeways would look like in some of our most walkable, neighborhood cities had planners had their way:

First, the poster child for freeway opposition, San Francisco, which cancelled its freeway construction as early as 1959 in the famous Freeway Revolt. SF Cityscape has a great annotated map of freeways that were and were not built.

1948 plan from California Department of Highways, via BikeSummer.

In Boston, the Inner Ring would have demolished much of Central Square in Cambridge, Cambridgeport, the neighborhoods around BU, and much more; activists killed it and other expressways in 1972. Some of the funding was rerouted to transit; Northwest and Southwest Expressways (to Burlington and Canton) were replaced by the Red and Orange Lines respectively.

1948 Master Highway Plan sketch by Mass. Department of Public Works. From BostonRoads.com.

Should BU have looked like this? Courtesy Scott Moore.

Washington DC built most of its planned freeways on its southern side and in Virginia, but not downtown and in suburban Maryland.

1955 proposal for Washington DC. Photo by Richard Layman.

As Zachary Schrag points out in this op-ed, the money that was to be used for the DC freeways in the 1960s was directly put into the Metro instead, to DC's great benefit.

I'd always thought that the black communities, such as in Southeast DC, had failed to stop the freeways because they were poor or minority, while the white areas of Northwest had successfully fought them off (as in New York, where the Cross-Bronx bulldozed black neighborhoods while Jane Jacobs and the white people of Greenwich Village were able to kill the Lower Manhattan Expressway), but that's apparently not the case, or at least not entirely:

Photo by Richard Layman.

And speaking of Jane Jacobs, the most celebrated urban activist and the one who personally sparked public awareness of the fallacy of then-conventional wisdom in urban planning, she and others succeeded in killing the terrible Lower Manhattan Expressway and other roads. But the sadder part is that by 1961, when she published Death and Life, Robert Moses had already built most of the roads that he'd wanted to build. In the below map, all of the solid lines were actually built.

Regional Plan Association expressway plan, 1964. From NYCRoads.com.

New York has the most extensive subway system in the U.S., sure, but who knows how many of these subway lines would have been built had transportation funding been reallocated to transit as Washington did? How different might Queens be today?

Unlike San Francisco, where opposition stopped 80-90% of the planned freeways, New Yorkers only stopped the last few. Unlike San Francisco, which killed the freeway that was to run through Golden Gate Park (except the very short transverse segment of CA-1), Moses successfully ran parkways through Inwood Hill Park, Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx River Park, and what is now Riverside Park and Flushing Meadows Parks. And unlike San Francisco, with a "Transit First" policy that favors public transportation over private cars in planning decisions, New York's DOT still moves cars first and foremost.