Posts about Robert Moses

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.

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.

Transit

Breakfast links: How we do things in America

by David Alpert   •   March 2, 2009 8:03 am

More bars on the Metro: By 2012, customers of all four existing mobile networks will be able to use their phones in Metro tunnels. The new network will also provide Wi-Fi access. (Post)

Robert Moses what if: Vanshnookenraggen created some Google maps showing what Manhattan would look like if Robert Moses has gotten his Mid-Manhattan and Lower Manhattan expressways built.

What America are you from? An American tourist blocked the exits to a "car park" in Telford, UK. She'd lost her ticket, triggering a mandatory £6 charge, and refused to pay, insisting that nobody pays for parking where she comes from. (Shropshire Star via How We Drive)

LEEDing the way: LEED's 2009 revisions fix two major criticisms of the green building rating system. Retaining an old building gets more points than tearing one down, throwing away all the materials, and building a brand-new energy-efficient building in its place. Also, projects near transit and in dense urban areas will get a lot more points for location than under the old code. (Preservation Nation via Will Stephens)

Free Metro for life? 2,800 former Metro employees and board members have special farecards giving them unlimited rides, for life. Metro wouldn't say how much these cost the system, but the Examiner's Kytja Weir estimates it's at least $377,460 a year. Transit advocate Ben Ross defended the practice as "a legitimate part of compensation and retirement for employees." (Examiner via Unsuck DC Metro)

Honoring Gerry Connolly: The Coalition for Smarter Growth honored Congressman Gerry Connolly of Fairfax last week for his work promoting transit-oriented development, affordable housing, conservation and energy efficiency while Chairman of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors. Will Sharon Bulova continue his legacy? (Article XI)

Development

Breakfast links: Thinking about urbanism edition

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

Conserbanism: A recent panel on transportation and energy featured conservatives and liberals who all agree on transit and compact development. For the conservatives, global warming isn't the reason; while painting urbanism as an environmental issue is a powerful argument, it shouldn't be the only one. Via Ryan Avent.

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.

Parking

Roll Call covers parking reform

by David Alpert   •   July 28, 2008 11:44 am

Roll Call, one of Capitol Hill's newspapers, ventured beyond the federal realm to cover DC's parking reform proposals. The lede:

Walkability, transit-oriented development and smart growth are buzz words of modern urban development. But for more than half a century, D.C. zoning rules have supported automobiles as the main method of transportation in the city.

The rest of the article is only accessible to subscribers and Hill staff. It gives a good overview of the issue and liberally quotes Cheryl Cort of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. I also spoke with the reporter, Melissa Giaimo, at length to provide her with a general understanding of the issue; she also used the statistics on car ownership and non-automobile commuting.

Supporters of the new parking plan believe that rejecting 1950s zoning rules is a return to the thinking of Washington's original city planner, Pierre L'Enfant.

The proposal, Cort said, is "with the great tradition of the L'Enfant plan—revolving around walkability and streetcars."

Opponents of parking reform often claim to be defending L'Enfant's legacy, but (the fact that we didn't really implement L'Enfant's plan aside), defense of high parking minimums is instead promoting the legacy of Robert Moses or his DC counterpart, the author of our 1958 zoning code, New York consultant Harold Lewis.

History

The Master (Re)builder

by David Alpert   •   March 21, 2008 11:43 am

The NYT writes about DC's Capitol Quarter project, which is replacing the failed Capper/Carrollsburg housing projects with new mixed-income townhouses. It includes enough low-income units to accommodate all residents of the old projects, but also has its critics.

The photo of Housing Authority Director Michael Kelly reminds me of another famous photo of an influential figure in housing project construction...

(Left: Photo by Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times, 2008. Right: Photo by Arnold Newman, 1959.)

Transit

Chicken, meet egg on Dulles rail line

by David Alpert   •   January 25, 2008 5:55 pm

Yesterday, many wrote about the FTA and DOT Secretary Mary Peters' decision to deny funding for the Metro extension to Dulles, at least unless the project meets a new set of criteria over and above the many hurdles it's already surmounted. Some are livid. Others doubt the project's wisdom. But Peters and FTA chief James Simpson advance unreasonable chicken-and-egg arguments that could preclude any transit projects anywhere.

It's true that $5 billion is a lot of money, and San Francisco's BART extension to SFO airport—often compared to this project—hasn't been the success planners hoped. It's unclear how to fit three lines' worth of trains all on the Orange/Blue tracks through DC; this expansion should really be coupled with don't need to prove their cost-effectiveness while transit projects not only do, but is critical to the region.

Peters and Simpson say they are concerned that Metro can't operate the line because it has trouble getting enough money to run its current lines. But by this logic no transit would ever be built. As Zachary Schrag explains in The Great Society Subway, the governments funding the DC Metro expected operating costs to cover capital expenses. Only once much of the system was already built did officials realize this wouldn't happen, but the system was too popular with the public and had too much momentum to stop. It's just like the way Robert Moses built highways in New York by starting them with limited funds, then relying on governments' unwillingness to kill the project once there were holes in the ground.

Do we wish Metro had never been built, now that we know the costs? Like all transit systems, it operates at a deficit, but its externalities are positive and significant, as opposed to highways' negative externalities. Schrag quotes transportation officials and real estate developers alike who argue that "Downtown would not have come back [after the riots of 1968] if it wasn't for the subway". I'm glad officials in the 1960s underestimated Metro's long-term costs, because the city's long-term benefits far outweigh them.

And the public won't allow Metro to run out of money or cut service. Maybe voters will only support funding for transit when it's truly threatened, but they will. Maybe we have to build it and then figure out how to pay for it long-term. Under Peters' logic, that would never happen.

We built the Interstate Highways without knowing for sure where the money would come from to maintain them (and still often do). Likewise, we built the highways before anyone had expertise building them. WMATA, led by a former Army Corps of Engineers general, built Metro without really having any expertise building a subway. But Peters believes that because the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority is better at running airports than building trains, we shouldn't build the trains at all. Maybe someone better can build them. Or maybe we just have to develop the expertise. Otherwise, we'll only build roads for the simple reason that we already have state highway departments who know how to build roads.

By that logic, our transportation choices can never change from where they have been for the last 50 years. Maybe that's exactly what Mary Peters wants.

Development

Save Our Superblock

by David Alpert   •   June 1, 2006 11:49 am

One of the travesties of 1950s-era urban planning was the "superblock", where cities disrupted the regular street grid to build large towers surrounded by windswept plazas. Most of these superblocks are now recognized as mistakes, such as Boston's City Hall Plaza, a huge barren space nearly empty all year round, and the World Trade Center superblock, where part of the old grid has already been restored including a little park.

But up at Park West Village, a residential superblock originally built by Robert Moses as an "urban renewal" project (replacing 4,212 apartments in lower height buildings with 2,662 apartments in large, impersonal towers), residents opposed to new development actually cite the superblock as an argument against change. The owner of the property wants to redevelop some retail space, and recently kicked out a C-Town, a low-cost supermarket, to build nicer, shinier retail spaces and a tall residential tower.

I certainly think this community group has many valid points. The zoning ought to require a significant amount of low- and middle-income housing on the site, and discourage replacing affordable supermarkets with smaller, upscale ones. I don't know enough about the plan to be able to judge the issue of cutting off access to Columbus, but a superblock is not something to be preserved, and the drawing here looks nice, from an architectural standpoint - it creates a continuous street wall with retail exposure, encouraging street activity.

Much of this construction will replace a parking lot, and parking lots neither build a sense of community, nor provide trees, nor generate more affordable housing. A tall tower could provide affordable housing, though the city needs to make sure it does. The residents surely have many valid concerns, and should be listened to in the planning process. I just wish that just because they live in an example of urban planning's least glorious ideas, that they wouldn't argue that everything that makes urban renewal projects awful is actually a great, important asset to the community that must be preserved.

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.