Magazine
Reports from the Edge: Riding the Tide of History? Not Quite.
Everybody, it would seem, is for the rebuilding of our cities… But this is not the same as liking cities… most of the rebuilding under way and in prospect is being designed by people who don’t like cities. They do not merely dislike the noise and the dirt and the congestion. They dislike the city’s ariety and concentration, its tension, its hustle and bustle.
This could be said about many of the big, formulaic urban developments being built today. But these thoughts were written half a century ago by William H. Whyte, Jr. At the time, in the mid-1950s, “towers in the park” (based on the design of French architect Le Corbusier) were beginning to proliferate in New York under urban renewal and slum clearance czar Robert Moses. Moses was the most aggressive and successful of the urban renewal directors. He created the paradigm. The country followed. Many of those “towers in the park” public housing projects are the same ones cities have been blowing up in recent years as disastrous failures. Others have remained middle-income housing complexes, but they are now too expensive for many of the middle-income families they were meant to serve.
Part of Whyte’s quote—the bit about “not liking cities”—was, in fact, included in the exhibit “Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution” at Columbia University, part of three recent reconsiderations of Robert Moses at museums in New York City. This museum marathon offered a revisionist view of Moses, who once headed twelve separate New York City and state agencies at the same time, during his almost 50 years of shaping the city and state. The exhibition presented Moses as more constructive than destructive, more builder than demolisher, and the man most responsible for the city’s greatest large-scale achievements.
Most people know little more than hearsay about Moses, unless they have read Robert Caro’s definitive 1974 biography, The Power Broker. It delves into the complexities of this Yale-educated New Yorker who outpowered every governor and mayor “under which” he served. Indeed, Moses’s physical achievements, good or bad, are undeniably mighty in breadth and scale.
The three recent exhibits focused on Moses’s New York City projects— primarily, highways, parks and housing projects. But Moses also had an enormous impact all around the country. He helped steer the country to the car-based culture we struggle to tame today. “Cities are created by and for traffic,” he declared. Aides to President Eisenhower consulted with Moses as they crafted the 1956 Highway Act. Bertram Tallamy, the de facto head of the Interstate Highway System, told Caro that the $50 billion, 41,000-mile system “was built by principles he had learned from” lectures given by Moses years earlier. University of Michigan professor Robert Fishman notes, “Moses became the principal spokesman of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in urging that interstates ‘must go right through cities and not around them.”
Similarly, Moses helped shape national slum clearance programs. Caro notes that Moses’s Yale classmate, Senator Robert A. Taft, tapped Moses to discuss “details of a new type of federal slum clearance program— ‘urban renewal’—that he was considering sponsoring.” Moses persuaded New York City’s William O’Dwyer to appoint a Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee (Moses was chair.) Pittsburgh, Portland, and New Orleans hired him to help design their urban renewal or highway projects.
By 1950, according to the recent exhibitions, cities were in “crisis.” The automobile was everyone’s answer to future transportation needs, and the accepted way to eradicate slums was through massive clearance. But the solution to these various city problems shouldn’t have been to demolish whole swaths of urban fabric, hoping the remaining threads wouldn’t weaken and fall apart. Repairing and replacing city neighborhoods could have included many new projects, but none on the ripping scale that Moses proposed. It wasn’t as if parks, roads, and housing didn’t get built before Moses, or wouldn’t have without him, especially with the faucet of federal money fully open.
Much of what has evolved since the 1970s is exactly what was advocated by Moses’s critics, first led by housing activist Charles Abrams, and later by Jane Jacobs, Whyte, and others: demolish judiciously. Replace the unrepairable strategically. Leave standing the viable buildings, from modest apartment houses to structurally sound tenements to run-down brownstones. The real causes of slums—disinvestment, redlining, rent gouging, racism, and gradual departure of the middle-class—were either unaffected by Moses, or, often, made worse. The three recent exhibits worked hard to put a new and positive spin on the Moses legacy, but history and today’s reality make that difficult. The critical question about Moses now is whether the damage he wrought outweighs the good.
This article appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!
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