Wrestling with Moses

Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint is a short, readable book about the collision of two philosophies of urban development and two people who embodied those philosophies.

In a career of more than thirty years as the “master builder” of New York City (and many parts of New York State), Robert Moses exemplified top-down big-picture planning. By the time he opened the Henry Hudson Bridge in 1936, notes Flint, “Moses was already the nation’s most prolific builder of public works.” Meanwhile, “the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Whitestone, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano-Narrows bridges, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, and the United Nations were still to come.”

Jane Jacobs, on the other hand, was a journalist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who had settled in the West Village and come to appreciate the vitality of dense, organic urban neighborhoods with short blocks and a mix of old and new buildings and residential and commercial space.

Jacobs was not the first person to win a victory against Robert Moses—Flint mentions the battle over a grove of trees in Central Park that Robert Caro considers the turning point in Moses’ fortunes (the trees were cut down, but Moses’ reputation was seriously damaged)—but she was a key figure in the successful fight to stop Greenwich Village from being bulldozed as a slum, and to prevent the Lower Manhattan Expressway from driving across the island by way of Broome Street, displacing thousands of people and businesses, and demolishing many of the historic cast-iron buildings that are a distinctive feature of what is now SoHo.

Robert Moses was such an outsized character that even a 1200-page biography was not enough to cover all the important events of his life. Amazingly, as Flint notes in his epilogue, Jane Jacobs is not even mentioned in The Power Broker.

Though there was an entire chapter on Jacobs in the original manuscript, it had to be cut, along with others on the New York Port Authority and the City Planning Commission and detail on the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers, because the doorstop-size book had grown too large by hundreds of pages.

Having recently read The Power Broker, I appreciated the additional light that Wrestling with Moses sheds on the story. For those who have not yet read Caro’s biography, or Jane Jacobs’ influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Wrestling with Moses is a good place to start.