[ambience]
[indistinct chatter]
[typewriter clacking]
[instrumental music]
Cities are, in many ways, the greatest invention
that human beings have brought to the world.
Cities have been expanding
and urbanization has been expanding on the globe
in an exponential fashion.
Most extraordinarily, we are urbanizing people
on the planet, at maybe
one and a half million people every week
In less than 2 months
there'll be the equivalent to another Los Angeles
metropolitan area on this planet.
This scale and speed of urbanization
has never, ever happened in human history.
This is the first time.
When you look at what is being built in cities
you have endless, endless
row after row of homogenizing towers.
And you see more and more highways.
At this moment, you're going to shape the cities
for generations to come.
People need to realize this is an opportunity
which will never come again.
There are a couple of ways of approaching
the design of cities.
The question is always who decides..
...what the physical form will be..
...how the city is going to function
and who is going to live in the city.
In order to understand what's happening today..
...we need to think about 2 great figures
in the middle of the 20th century
who embodied the struggle for the city.
The legendary power broker Robert Moses
represented the authority of the great man
who was gonna come into the city with his carving knife
and clear away the cancerous tissue..
[crash]
...and replace it with the shiny implements
of modernist planning.
Uh, you have to move a lot of people out of the way
of a big housing, uh, project
or, uh, slum clearance project.
A lot of 'em are not going to like it.
Many of them are misinformed.
In opposition to the homogenizing clarity
of Moses was Jane Jacobs.
I have very little faith, uh
i -- in, in even the kind of person
who, uh, prefers to take a large overall
uh, view of things.
Jacobs was an outsider.
She believed the city is not about buildings.
The city is about people.
It is about public spaces and the street
and she stood up for that.
She evolved both a theory
of what made a good and just city
and a theory of opposition
to the kind of planning practice that Moses represented.
There's a prudishness, a fear of life
a wish to direct things from some uncontaminated refuge
that is part and parcel of their bad plan.
They were famously at odds with each other.
It really did become a war between opposing forces.
Today we're still fighting these battles
across the world.
When we look across the spectrum of all the problems
generated by urbanization
there is the extraordinary realization that, my gosh
you know, these have been problems that have been around
for the last 100 years in cities.
New York, of course
is the greatest example of that.
In the 1930s
New York was the world's greatest city, you know?
A very special place.
Just the exuberance of metropolitan life
in the early 20th century.
That's, you know, the -- the great age
of the first real great skyscrapers.
You know, the Empire State Building
is the very climax of that.
But then, it all kind of crashes with The Depression.
Through the entire decade of the '30s
it's just one problem after another.
Down at street level
was this degraded environment.
Slums and dirt and, and pollution
that did not fit with the glorious spires
of the new skyscraper city.
The city was overcrowded
harsh, dirty, dangerous
and infested with disease.
Jacob Riis' famous book
"How The Other Half Live"
brought a lot of attention to this.
The idea was, we will solve the city's problem
by cleaning it up.
Now this is a unfortunate period for the city.
We've done an immense amount to cure these diseases
and we have much more to do.
Robert Moses started to work in an era
where we had a great many people
living in truly horrible conditions.
He began his professional life
in opposition to those conditions.
Moses emerged out of the Progressive Movement
early in the 20th century in New York.
The progressives were eager to improve the city.
His early work in developing public parks
and public beaches was about making life better
for people who were not rich.
Now if we don't clean out these slums
the central areas are going to rot.
And it's all nonsense to say that the problem can be solved
by rehabilitating and fixing up Old Law Tenements.
It can't be done.
That problem we've got to face.
Just about every progressive believed
that the way to solve the city's problems
was to wipe the slate clean, start all over again.
We didn't understand how high the price was
how we were giving up so many things
that were so very important until Jane Jacobs came along.
Jane always would see
in a city opportunities
that existed there.
She observed hints of regeneration
hints of creativity
hints of resourcefulness.
It was this life spring
of people coming to make their way.
I think that must have shaped her approach to the city.
I just loved coming to New York.
It was inexhaustible.
Just to walk around its streets and wonder at it.
So many streets different.
So many neighborhoods different.
Uh, so much going on.
She lived in Greenwich Village
and just viscerally felt
the pulse of the city
and was extraordinarily intuitive.
Was extremely observant.
New York was a place where you don't have to be
big and important and rich
or have a great plot of land
or a great development scheme
or something like that to do something.
And maybe even do something new
and do something interesting.
A place that has scope for all kinds of people.
What she saw was the soul of New York
and what it meant to be a city
and a city meaning a community of people.
After the war, the most sensational thing
that came was the full flowering of this vision
of the expressway tower city.
This generation of idealistic city planners comes along
and they're infected with the modernist purity idea.
And they certainly have the tools at their disposal
to sweep away large tracts of land.
We recognize the problems that your community faces
and we know that you share them
with hundreds of cities everywhere.
Now what's involved in making your city a better place?
Well, things like housing
industrial development
better streets and highways.
Improving all these things adds up to a better city.
I'm sure that you will see the exciting opportunity
that exists for your city to become better.
There was this emerging idea that crowded urban areas
where people were kind of hanging out on the street
on their stoops, uh, where there was a lot of poverty
that the way to deal with that problem
was to effectively get rid of the streets.
Was effectively to eliminate that sidewalk culture.
And build projects that would make it impossible really
for people to kind of cluster in public in that way.
The idea of urban renewal was that
places that were blighted
were a cancer on the city
and therefore, we're gonna cut out the cancer.
The planners conceiving these urban renewal projects
are doing this from that
God-like vantage point in the sky.
To be able to look down
and you're able to imagine massive transformations.
They thought that applying the logic
of The Machine Age was gonna do that.
The problem had to be solved by some supervisor
noticing where the slums were, noticing where the traffic was
and going in and bulldozing..
...and building grand projects.
Well, we got out a brochure just now
telling when everybody has to move.
Robert Moses was the great embodiment of this.
I don't honestly believe that
considering the large numbers of people we've had to move out
of the way of public housing and other public improvements
I don't believe that we've done
any very substantial amount of harm.
There must be people who are discommoded
inconvenienced or call it what you will
on the old theory, that you can't make an omelet
without breaking some eggs.
After the Second World War
Robert Moses began to amass power.
He was the august parks commissioner
in the city of New York.
And he got power to build parkways.
He was appointed the city's construction coordinator.
He built thousands of apartments.
He became urban renewal czar
the head of the mayor's committee on slum clearance.
By the time that Moses was running
the Urban Renewal Program
we had torn down
literally thousands of tenement buildings
in cities like New York and Chicago.
You know, there's the, the pre-war Moses
and the post-war Moses.
The pre-war Moses was mostly an angel.
Post-war Moses was increasingly problematic.
For nearly half a century
this man has pushed people around New York.
Almost anybody who is anybody has cursed him
fought him, knuckled under to him and admired him.
The list of his adversaries include Franklin Roosevelt
Fanny Hurst, Elmer Davis who once compared him
to Hitler, Walter O'Malley
and hundreds of thousands of landowners
who thought their property was sacred.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
and Robert Moses was absolutely powerful.
So he had amassed, um, not simply
an incredible amount of power
but had insulated himself
from oversight by political authorities
and by the broader public.
Don't forget that it's one thing to buy a park
or a great big chunk of land from one owner.
It's quite another thing to get a right-of-way
where hundreds and even thousands of people own it.
You theoretically and, according to some of the, uh
goo-goos and uplift organizations
we ought to negotiate with every individual until he's happy.
Can you imagine when you'd build anything
under those conditions?
Moses along with all of the people
that were involved in the Urban Renewal Program
had an agreed-upon agenda.
People needed adequate housing
adequate recreation facilities
and the motorcar was coming to America
and it needed to be accommodated on a large scale.
That was the agenda.
Moses became one polar view of what you could do.
Until, all of a sudden, there was an alternative.
Jane Jacobs has in
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities"
written a book that advances with the controlled
and implacable power of a bulldozer
against modern orthodox city planning and rebuilding.
I first began to look into city planning
and, and housing
and it was unbelievably awful.
Uh, insane.
When "Death And Life" comes out in the '60s
it's a clarion call.
It's Martin Luther nailing those 95 theses
to the, to the cathedral door.
The book is really the first cogent
accessible articulation of a whole set of ideas
that questions the mainstream thinking about our cities.
She is constantly probing.
By that example, she's saying
"You, reader, you have the ability to question."
"Look what we have built.
"Low-income projects that become
"worse centers of delinquency
"vandalism and general social hopelessness
"than the slums they were supposed to replace.
"Middle-income housing projects
"which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation..
"...sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life.
"Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity
"or try to with a vapid vulgarity.
"Cultural centers that are unable to support
"a good bookstore.
"Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums
"who have fewer choices of loitering place than others.
"Expressways that eviscerate great cities.
"This is not the rebuilding of cities.
This is the sacking of cities."
She was questioning orthodoxy
and in essence saying the emperor has no clothes..
...at a time when women were not welcomed
in those kinds of environments.
If you wanna see what kind of a city can flourish
you need to look at the cities where it's happening.
There must be a lot of diversity
continually building up, diversity of kinds of work..
...diversity of kinds of people.
She revealed the way to create better cities
is by working with the people who live there
and the fabric that existed.
The traditional fabric that people inhabited.
There have to be areas of the city
which people use a lot, walking on the streets
and use at all times of day.
Jane understood neighborhoods need lots of connections.
Short blocks, lots of turns
allowing different kinds of interaction.
Neighborhoods need a mix of buildings, old and new.
They need diverse uses, 24/7, so that they're safer.
Constant connection with, uh, neighborhoods around
so that you're not isolated.
You need public spaces that are accessible to people.
It's all a great network in the city.
It's all related.
She observed these early, early qualities at a time
when housing was being built
in completely opposite direction.
They were isolating communities.
They were creating dead-end streets.
They were separating work uses
and recreation and residential uses.
She was explaining how life worked.
Before "Death And Life," she was a journalist.
She was a very savvy observer of human behavior
of places, of cities.
Jacobs started writing about the city
when she was 18 years old.
She was a secretary for a candy company.
She was determined to write on the side.
She did what any good enterprising writer would do.
She got freelance jobs.
Her curiosity was so remarkable.
She writes about specific
economic districts in the city.
She does the Jewelry District
she does the Fur District, she does the Flower District
and she develops a voice.
And where does she sell them to?
"Vogue" magazine.
She was writing pieces
about what she was observing and seeing in the city.
"The best way to plan for Downtown
"is to see how people use it today.
"To look for its strengths
"and to exploit and reinforce them.
"There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city.
"People make it.
"And it is to them, not buildings
that we must fit our plans."
"Q Magazine" accepted one of her stories
about manhole covers.
She discovered that they had all kinds of interesting
uh, patterns on them, interesting lettering.
How many female journalists
were writing about manhole covers?
Nobody. But she was.
She wanted to figure out how the sewer system was working.
She's curious. She's got a really good craft.
She knows how to write.
And she finds herself in a staff job
with "Architectural Forum."
Mrs. Jacobs, an associate editor
of the magazine "Architectural Forum"
has been a New Yorker for 27 years
and loves it, Mrs. Jane Jacobs.
[applause]
Thank you very much, Mr. Dolbier.
One fine day, "Architectural Forum" put me on an assignment
about some urban renewal projects that were being done.
In Philadelphia, as a matter of fact.
We have found, in our work in rebuilding Philadelphia
that a central design idea, well-developed
and clearly-expressed, can of itself
become a major creative force
and can make more meaningful
the work of individual architects
in various parts of an area.
I found out what they had in mind
and what they were planning to do
and how it was going to look
according to the drawings
and what great things it was going to accomplish.
I came back and wrote
enthusiastic articles about this.
All was well, I was in very cozy
with the planners and the project builders.
Anyhow, time passed
and some of these things were actually built.
Society Hill is residential.
The oldest part of the city, it is the site
of an intensive restoration project.
Houses, many pre-dating the American Revolution
slowly had grown dilapidated
and had been converted to other uses.
In addition, there was room for new
dramatically contemporary apartment towers.
Society Hill emerges
as a combination of ancient and modern.
But they didn't work at all the way they should've worked.
The city around them didn't react the way
uh, theoretically the city around them
should have reacted.
She is the hyper-sensitive antennae
you know, that's picking up something here
that no one else is seeing.
Why did stores that looked very cheerful and posed
to, uh, be doing a great booming business in the plans
actually go empty or languish?
Well, I would bring these questions up
with the people who had been responsible
for the, uh, planning of these places.
And I got quite a lot of alibis
boiling down to, uh, "People are stupid.
They don't do what they're supposed to do."
And this was a great shock to me.
Never mind highfalutin theories and so forth.
What are we looking at? What are we seeing?
Do you wanna trust some theory
that somebody figured out sitting in an office somewhere?
Or do you wanna trust what you actually see
out there with your own eyes?
Maybe the experts didn't really know
as much as they pretended to know.
About this time, a gentleman came into the office
of the "Architectural Forum."
He was very much worried about East Harlem.
About 300 million dollars
uh, worth of city rebuilding money
had been put to work.
He could see that their problems
were growing greater than they had ever been in the past.
She goes up to Harlem and she was taken around
by William Kirk of the Union Settlement House.
And he's showing her all the things
that are being lost in this community
when it's being demolished.
He would walk me around East Harlem.
We would stop in at stores
stop in at housing projects.
I began to see the..
Just out of the accumulation of all of this
I was beginning to understand how things worked.
Many little details of cause and effect.
She describes it as the very beginning.
The sort of moment when the light bulb
kind of went off in her head.
What I was seeing, in fact, was, uh
what makes the very intricate order of the city.
This has to do with a quality
that's called rather vaguely urbanism.
Cities are extremely physical places.
It's not an inert mass.
It's enterprises and people
reacting in certain ways to each other
and mutually supporting each other.
And wherever it worked properly
there seemed to be an awful lot of diversity.
Many different kinds of enterprises
many different kinds of people
mutually supporting and supplementing each other.
Jane Jacobs is thinking about how does a neighborhood work?
How does a street work?
What function does a sidewalk play?
But what she's really after is a new theory
of how cities function.
"In Death And Life Of Great American Cities"
she's asking what is the problem of a city?
She argues, "A city is a problem
of organized complexity."
Looks on the surface
like it's complex and disorderly..
...but in fact, there's an underlying structure.
Looks like chaos, but in fact, there's a balance.
There's a productive mix
of different functions and organisms.
She draws on ecological metaphors
biological metaphors
to suggest how it's really an ecosystem.
She wrote..
"To see complex systems of functional order
"as order and not as chaos
takes understanding.
"The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn
"the interior of an airplane engine..
"...the entrails of a dissected rabbit..
"...the city desk of a newspaper..
"all appear to be chaos
"if they are seen without comprehension.
"Once they are seen as systems of order
they actually look different."
Jacobs understood when cities really work
they're phenomena that come from the bottom up.
So a great neighborhood is what happens
when thousands of different actors..
...and that's the shopkeepers, the bar owners
the people walking the streets
they spontaneously come together
in, in an uncoordinated but meaningful way
to create the kind of flavor and personality
of a distinct neighborhood.
That's not planned.
That's much more a question of organized complexity.
Jane Jacobs understood that living cities are not pretty.
They're messy, uh, chaotic
dense with people interacting together.
Dead cities are beautiful in a certain sense
because they tend to look predictable.
There aren't very many people.
If you can understand a city, then that city is dead.
Living cities are congested.
They're frustrating.
And at the same time, that's where your dreams come true.
Planners, they don't see any of the wondrous human qualities
that Jacobs is seeing.
The very forms of urbanism that she wrote about
the urban renewalists sought to destroy.
What would you do for Harlem?
- The slum corner of Harlem. - Yes.
I'd take that and all the other similar slums.
I'd tear 'em all out, every bit of 'em.
It's a cancerous thing
and you've just got to wipe them out.
I say that you have a cancerous growth there
that has to be carved out.
Alright, you've carved it out
and now you've replaced it with something new.
Yes, that's right.
With something that's decent
something that involves light and air
and, uh, new schools and playgrounds and parks.
And I'd say that's a hell of a big contribution
and certainly all the contribution
that I would be able to make
with all the people I can persuade to make it.
Instead of following the natural way
that people use space
city planning in this post-war era
and modern architecture created
this abstract vision of what it should be.
Concentrated on the utopian and the ideal.
In the 1920s, you get the rise
of this curious, mystical figure
um, out of Switzerland
uh, who calls himself Le Corbusier.
He's done some architecture and he's bethinking himself
not only an architect, but a great urban visionary.
The real gestation of his ideas
about modernist urbanism
that came as a result of riding in an airplane over Paris.
Seeing the city from up in the air
looking down God-like on this diorama
versus considering and knowing the city from the streets.
Corb was enraptured by the airplane.
He writes that the airplane indicts the mess
we've made of our cities.
Before the wheels hit the tarmac
he's concluded that we need to sweep all this away
and rebuild our cities.
Le Corbusier envisioned tearing down
huge sections of Paris..
...and replacing it with slabs
modern slabs, cruciform buildings.
He proposed superhighways
that went through green open space.
And they were going to terminate in superblocks.
And the superblocks had high-rise buildings
and the high-rise buildings
were so that people could have light and air
and they could get out of the slums.
He was thoroughly of the opinion
that if you had, uh, good architecture
the lives of people would be improved
and that architecture would improve people
and people would improve architecture
until perfectibility would descend on us
like The Holy Ghost and we'd be happy forever after.
Corb did this plan and made his models
and, uh, it excited a lot of people.
But in France, they weren't so excited.
The idea of the Ville Radieuse and the tower in a park
ended up, uh, moving to America
just like the rest of modernism did.
To help us get a glimpse into the future
of this unfinished world of ours
there has been created for the New York World's Fair
a thought-provoking exhibit
of the developments ahead of us.
In 1939, General Motors had an exhibition.
The Futurama.
It showed superhighways.
And everybody in America wanted this.
Here is an American city replanned
around a highly-developed modern traffic system.
Rebuilt and replanned.
Residential, commercial and industrial areas
all have been separated
for greater efficiency and greater convenience.
The '39 World's Fair in New York
was a Corbusier event.
It celebrated that style.
And so we see some suggestion
of the things to come.
A world with a future
in which all of us are tremendously interested
because that is where we are going to spend
the rest of our lives.
In a future which can be whatever
we propose to make it.
Modernism moved into the mainstream
of both American commercial architecture
and urban renewal.
The public housing model that we picked in the United States
was a misinterpretation of Le Corbusier.
The towers in his 1923 plan
were for offices, and then around the towers
were low 7 story buildings with generous balconies.
He never called for people
living in high-rise towers.
It was one of those odd moments
where a set of intellectual ideas
could be corrupted very quickly and easily
into something cheap and commercial.
The simplest formula to make quick money is modernism.
And it was very cheap, very quick to produce
and could suddenly enable
huge amounts of building to happen very quickly.
And Robert Moses totally understood that.
The one thing missing completely
from that vision is streets.
And the idea that a street is something you actually walk on
and a street is a place where things happen.
Jane Jacobs saw that at a time
when everybody else was thinking the sidewalk
was a kind of foolish leftover of another age.
"This is something everyone already knows.
"A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street.
"A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.
"But how does this work really?
"There must be eyes upon the street.
"Eyes belonging to those we may call
"the natural proprietors of the street.
"The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers
"and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers
"must be oriented to the street.
"They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it
and leave it blind."
Philosophically, what she recognized was
safety doesn't come from armed security guards
or blocking the entrances.
What makes a neighborhood great is precisely the fact
that there are people on the street.
"The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously
"both to add to the numbers of effective eyes on the street
"and to induce the people in the buildings along the street
"to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers.
"Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop
"or looking out a window at an empty street.
"Almost nobody does such a thing.
"Large numbers of people entertain themselves off and on
by watching street activity."
She went out and looked at things.
When she said that the doormen were paid eyes on the street
and that the same thing could happen
from bars on the street in West Village
I understood what she was talking about.
Nobody has to worry about things
where there are a lot of people on the street.
Jane Jacobs reverses the vantage point.
What is it like actually to live in these places
from street level?
And it's that simple change of perspective
that lead her away from the orthodoxy of the time.
Robert Moses had no interest really in paying attention
to what was there in neighborhoods.
What was there, he viewed as simply an obstacle
to what he wanted to make happen.
People oppose Moses all the time.
Whether he wanted Lincoln Center for the performing arts
a bridge across the entrance to New York Harbor
a parking lot where mothers air their babies in Central Park
a highway down the spine of Fire Island
or one through the middle of Washington Square
vehement opposition was what he expected
and what he got.
Oh, there's opposition to everything
that's, uh, progressive, everything that's new.
The opinion of people who were activists
as we were in the village
were Robert Moses was terrible
and Robert Moses was destroying the city
and Robert Moses had to be stopped.
Jane had got involved in several efforts
to stop Robert Moses from ripping the city to pieces.
Starting with the, uh, his attempt
to run Fifth Avenue down through Washington Square.
The first time I became aware
of the threat of what the highways
were doing and could do to New York
was when along came the plan
to push Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park
and down below it as a continuous street.
They, uh, wanted to have the Fifth Avenue buses
go through the park
down into West Broadway
and change the name of that
to Fifth Avenue South
so as to make it more valuable for rents.
And that was a Robert Moses project.
This wasn't in the abstract for Jane Jacobs.
This was happening close to home.
Right in her backyard.
This was where she brought her kids
in strollers to play in that park.
It was the campus for a university.
It was the front yard
for neighborhood kids growing up.
It was a true reflection of a diverse neighborhood.
This is The Circle.
On weekdays, it's a wading pool for village kids.
But on Sundays, the water is turned off
and the circle becomes a meeting place
for guitarists, bongo and banjo players
villagers on a stroll, folk singers and tourists.
To me and to many others, we were outraged
about a road going through Washington Square
and we were going to save Washington Square Park.
Washington Square was really Jane Jacobs'
beginning as a civic activist.
All of the activists, myself included
were involved in trying to stop that.
The leaders there
included, uh, Jane Jacobs
and Shirley Hayes.
Shirley Hayes and Edith Lyons
uh, were the 2 women
who started the, the fight against the roadway
in Washington Square Park.
Jane was not deferential to power.
So she ups the ante on that Washington Square fight
and says, "I'm gonna write the mayor."
"I have heard with alarm and almost with disbelief
"the plans to run a sunken highway through the center
"of Washington Square.
"My husband and I are amongst the citizens
"who truly believe in New York
"to the extent that we have bought a home
"in the heart of the city and remodeled it
"with a lot of hard work.
"It is very discouraging to do our best
"to make the city more habitable
"and then to learn that the city itself
is thinking up schemes to make it uninhabitable."
Jane's example that she set for herself
is an example for other people to follow.
If a highway is coming through
that's going to be very destructive
and you know it's an idiotic thing
you fight that highway.
Protest against stultification and the status quo
and things that touch you and your neighborhood directly.
I think she was effective
because of the force of her personality
and the fact that she was able to mobilize
a lot of people.
And Margaret Meade and Susan Sontag
and all the various folks that Jane was involved with
were drawn to the tangibility of this particular fight.
They get too many critics.
They get too many mud-throwers
too many people who foul their nest and there we are.
That's our trouble.
Too many people sitting around
calling names like Mumford.
People that, what do they contribute?
You have any problem to solve, any difficulty
you'd never call upon them.
Call upon them for four-letter words.
They don't even have very good vocabulary in my book.
Robert Moses wasn't used to anybody saying no to him.
He'd fire off these letters
to people of, uh, Greenwich Village.
"I realized that in the process of rebuilding
"south of Washington Square
"there would be cries of anguish
"from those who are honestly convinced
"the Sistine Madonna was painted in the basement
"of one of the old buildings there
"not presently occupied by a cabaret or speakeasy.
"That Michelangelo's David was fashioned
"in a garret in the same neighborhood.
"And that anyone who lays hands
"on these sacred landmarks will be executed
"if he has not already been struck down
by a bolt from heaven."
They managed to show Moses as this bully
and they, they got a lot of important people
on their side, including Eleanor Roosevelt.
I would feel very strongly
that destroying the Square
by putting a large artery
for traffic through the Square
would harm not only the Square itself
but the whole neighborhood
and really the city.
I'm not opposed to change.
In fact, I believe in change.
But I think that good tradition
has to be preserved.
Jacobs was a brilliant strategist
when it came to civil action.
She had a real sense for the photo op.
In Washington Square Park
she arranged for her daughter and another girl
to conduct a ribbon-tying ceremony.
This, of course, was the opposite of
the ribbon cutting ceremony
the politicians loved to, uh, celebrate
with public works.
It was at one of the hearings
where Moses was foolish enough to say that
nobody's against us except a bunch of mothers.
How could he be so tactless?
Only if you think that people don't matter at all
could you make a statement like that.
She was a housewife. That's how they treated her.
I mean, of course, she was a professional journalist.
That was not somehow..
When you want to dismiss her, you just say
there was this housewife from Hudson Street.
Try to mess with a bunch of mothers.
Uh, I think that
he underestimated what the, uh
effectiveness of these mothers might in fact be.
Literally thousands of people turned to
and it took quite a few years, but did save it.
It ended up being an extraordinarily
potent opposition, which he'd never met before.
Moses had never met this before.
He had his, he had it coming.
Washington Square Park was certainly
the first, uh, public defeat for Robert Moses
and it was a, uh, uh, a major chink in his armor.
The battle over Washington Square
is, is Jane's first taste of victory.
Not long after the Washington Square victory
"Death And Life" is published.
And Bennett Cerf, head of Random House
sends a copy to Robert Moses.
And Moses sends it back.
"I am returning the book you sent me.
"Aside from the fact that it is intemperate
"and inaccurate..
"...it is also libelous.
I call your attention, for example, to page 131."
"Robert Moses has made an art of using control
"of public money to get his way
"with those whom the voters elect and depend on
"to represent their frequently opposing interests.
"This is, of course, in other guises
an old, sad story of democratic government."
He didn't even wanna recognize
the existence of the book or of Jane.
Others, uh, were also, uh, not charitable
including Lewis Mumford.
Lewis Mumford, the great architectural critic
for "The New Yorker," his famous review of her book
had the title Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies.
He's immediately telling you
Jane Jacobs was just this sweet, old lady
trying to get some homeopathic medicine into the city
instead of doing the serious surgery
that a real doctor would do.
Right around the time
of "Death and Life of Great American Cities"
ironically, her own neighborhood
of the West Village, the very neighborhood
that she had, had proclaimed as a model
for what neighborhoods could be
was earmarked for urban renewal.
Moses was commissioner of, uh, housing
in the urban renewal effort to build more public housing
in New York City.
He actually stepped down from that position
but before he did
he designated the West Village
as eligible for slum designation.
I got the book finished finally
and thought, ah, now I can think about something else.
And for 3 weeks
I did think about other things.
Then I opened the "New York Times" one morning
and found that our own area of the West Village
was going to have an urban renewal project in it.
She really didn't think of herself as a community organizer
as a, a street fighter or that sort.
She was a writer.
She did not appreciate the distraction.
She really didn't, but she knew she had to do it.
She was sad. I mean, she would shrug her shoulders.
What can I, what can I do?
You know that thing about an inert object?
Well, there is nothing more inert
than a government bureau.
There's nothing more inert than a planning office.
It gets going in one direction
and it is never going to change of its own accord.
So I suddenly had to put into practice my own premises
that if anything was going to happen to reverse
the way things were being done
then the citizens had to take some initiative
and the citizens had to frustrate the planners.
I thereupon began to devote myself
to frustrating planners.
And so did the whole neighborhood.
Jane calls a meeting of local residents
at The Lion's Head
a favorite neighborhood hangout.
Organizes people to speak at public meetings
and gets everybody to wear sunglasses
with an X painted on them.
They were fairly sophisticated
I think, in the tactics that they would employ
and they're tackling somebody who's been writing
for a living for a couple of decades
and knows how to make an argument.
We all knew one another and were constantly planning
on how to, uh, get the mayor on our side
and how to threaten him. And we did.
We got him on our side.
She filed a lawsuit against the city of New York
to try to block the urban renewal plan.
"I think that the time has come
"to put the West Village
"urban renewal proposal to rest.
"Promptly remove the West Village designation.
Cordially, Robert F. Wagner."
They prevailed and, uh, at the end of the day
the slum designation never happened in the West Village.
She effectively showed the people of Greenwich Village
that they could fight city hall
that they did not have to accept
the plans of the planners at their drafting tables
and that they could reject those lines
being drawn around their homes.
We need to understand Greenwich Village
is a proxy here for a wave
that was starting to take hold in the United States
where there was increasing resistance
to centralized authority.
Her strategy was certainly informed
by other struggles that were going on at the time.
Within 3 years of each other
Jacobs published her book.
Uh, Betty Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique."
Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring."
The Environmental Movement.
Civil Rights.
The movement for decent cities
feminism, you know
all were being born at once
and all were sharing tools
of propaganda, of local organizing
of civil disobedience.
Jane Jacobs was perhaps the most articulate voice
of a movement that now seems
merely common sense.
Any city that's tearing down its buildings
just to make money for a development
or, uh, just to have novelty
is doing something criminal.
A fella who gets up in the upper stories
of a, of a public housing project
where he has a view, what's the matter with him?
He's got a nice place to live, hasn't he?
I think that the objection that some might have
was that the view is just of another housing development
and another highway.
No, I don't concede that.
It wasn't just that they wanted
new housing in place of the old.
They wanted an entirely different-looking city.
Robert Moses and his constituency
wanted it all to be very simplified
very sterilized.
It was the hubris of Moses and his ilk.
The idea that we're gonna rearrange the spaces
and therefore, we're gonna rearrange the social relations.
It had to do with this towers-in-the-park mentality.
It had to do with the creation
of a new form of ghetto.
Whole downtowns were being bulldozed
in the name of people, but not for the people.
They were destroying lives
and replacing them with these housing projects.
And why?
Because it was making a lot of people
a lot of money.
It was making developers a lot of money
politicians a lot of money
and it was fast money.
So they kept doing it over and over and over again
in cities all over the country.
It was several years
after Robert Moses had begun building these projects
that the other cities caught up.
What they were building was the Corbusier model.
You saw the kind of building of these
uh, these housing projects across the United States.
You know, 25 story block apartment buildings
with playgrounds and gardens around them
that looked great in all the drawings.
Here in bright, new buildings
with spacious grounds, they can live.
Live with indoor plumbing, electric lights
fresh plastered walls and the rest of the conveniences
that are expected in the 20th century.
In these projects, children can play in safety
on the wide lawns
not in the littered alleys and vacant lots.
We must make sure that every family in America
lives in a home of dignity
in a neighborhood of pride
and a community of opportunity
and a city of promise and hope.
But what ended up happening is nobody ever hung out
on, uh, in the kind of public space around these
uh, projects and so they became
these under-populated places.
And they actually very quickly became
some of the most dangerous places in the world.
Concentrated poverty.
This was a, you know, the really
the worst thing about, uh, the projects
and therefore, amplified all of the pathological
and antisocial elements of poverty.
These institutions became fortressed.
You become cornered. You feel cornered.
You feel trapped.
They left people more vulnerable.
Public housing became places of fear.
High-rise fortresses like these
were built this way to save money.
In the long run, they didn't even do that.
The problem was that they were all wrong
for the people who wound up living in them.
Rural blacks, broken families
allowed in and to stay in
only if their incomes were low enough.
Most cities now are engaged
in something called urban renewal
which means moving the Negroes out.
It means Negro removal. That is what it means.
And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact.
Now this, we are talking about human beings.
There's not such a thing as a monolithic wall
or, you know, some abstraction called Negro problem.
These Negro boys and girls
who at 16 and 17 don't believe
the country means anything that it says
and don't feel that they have any place here.
The phrase, Urban renewal is Negro removal
was an acknowledgement by African-Americans
that, that this was an assault.
Removal is in the sense of
out, over there, away, far away.
Some place inhospitable where you can just die.
And a huge part of what happened to people was
that they were put in inhospitable places.
And African-Americans were put in at the margins of the city
in places that were, could barely support
the vital kind of life that people need to prosper.
It's as though the builders have not realized
that children would be living there
nor did they foresee the crime
the vandalism, which is really the acting out of rage
and self-loathing that can make people want
to destroy their own property.
People had lived in communities
that were messy, but they worked.
People had social capitals, people watched
each other's child when somebody was not there.
All this was actually taken away.
People had no investment emotionally.
People resented these projects that had been built for them
because they were poor.
So you see a lot of windows broken out.
They all were broken out by children throwing rocks.
And, uh, what's more natural than children throwing rocks?
They don't have nothing else to do.
There's absolutely no recreation facilities here.
And, uh, the playground like this
is a mockery for thousands of children.
Tenants had no input as to what they wanted.
Uh, it was built because somebody said
this would be good for children to play on.
There were graffiti everywhere
and there were drug problems and all the problems
that you can imagine come from
when you uproot people without their will.
And what do you expect, that they will love these projects?
No, that wasn't gonna happen.
Pruitt-Igoe, if you really see
an, uh, an aerial view of it
those buildings were spaced quite a distance apart.
If you took them and threw them on their faces
which is where they should've fallen
you will get lovely housing 20 feet high.
You can take a look at a little exercise here
that if these towers, these slabs
are removed from the towers
you begin to see a different attitude
of what is visible.
You begin to see through the site
as opposed to looking at a slab of buildings running.
One thing, the tenants are really stressing
is for a low-rise building
closer to a home.
Something that they can relate to.
What we are trying to do here
is to take a given situation
and try to bring it back
to a community where people would want to live.
After thinking about the problem
of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project
the city planners blew it up.
[explosion]
Just dynamited it away.
The projects end up being tremendous failures.
You know, we know all about that failure now.
And everywhere they existed
30, 40 years later
they're all being torn down.
You can't put streets back where you took them out.
You can't put stores back.
You can't put the daily life and all the institutions.
It takes generations to build up those institutions.
That's what was eliminated by these projects.
[explosion]
The superblock urbanism of the modernist ilk
that Jane Jacobs, uh, writes about
is, is destroying cities.
You also have, at the very same time
the automobile being rammed through.
This causes as many problems
as the urban renewal projects.
The most profound influence
on the city in the last hundred years
has been the automobile.
The decision made almost inevitable
was to drive the freeways, the interstates in some
right through the cities and through neighborhoods
whose value city elites and developers
wanted to ultimately reclaim.
We wouldn't have any American economy
without the automobile business.
That's literally true.
I believe that that this is a great industry
that has to go on and has to keep on turning out
cars and trucks and buses
and there have to be places for them to run.
There have to be modern roads.
The first of Moses' commandments for progress
is thou shalt drive.
Jane Jacobs was one of the very first people
to say the car is not supreme.
The people who walk on the sidewalk
are what makes the city.
It isn't hard to understand
that producing and consuming automobiles
might seem all-important to the management of Ford
and Chrysler and General Motors.
But it's harder to understand why the production
and consumption of automobiles should be the purpose of life
for all the rest of us.
Moses was about realizing
a very particular vision of the American dream.
That was, you know, what's good for General Motors
is good for the United States of America.
I'm privileged to present
the winner of the Grand National Award.
Robert Moses of New York.
Robert Moses, New York City Construction Coordinator
is a world-famous highway planner.
A man who knows his business.
What he was really doing was tearing up vital neighborhoods.
For example, in the South Bronx
where he built the Cross Bronx Expressway.
This was the single most destructive decision
ever made about US cities.
The Cross Bronx Expressway
an artery whose history was marked by
such gigantic problems of construction, financing
relocation and organized obstruction
that it took 17 years to complete.
The Cross Bronx Expressway ripped through the heart
and the middle of the Bronx
creating what was a wall between
what eventually was known as
the northern and the southern part of the Bronx.
Robert Moses thought he'd get away with anything.
Who's gonna stop him?
He's got all the city politicians on his side
because he's bringing a lot of federal money
from the federal highway program.
And that gets passed around.
Today our greatest
single problem is tenant removal.
The, uh, tendency on the part
of people in politics
as well as those who are living on these
rights-of-way who are immediately affected
is to assume that the people who are doing this job
are unsympathetic.
They're even sadistic.
Well, of course, that isn't the truth at all.
When Moses would ram the Cross Bronx Expressway through
it was not just breaking down the physical structure
of that borough literally
so south and north become different
but the community.
When you remove the daily life
when you remove the stores, you remove the places
that constitute where they spend time
what we would call the public realm
the sidewalks, the bars, the grocery stores
you remove the city.
And that's what Jane Jacobs says.
You draw away the people with a prescription
that is guaranteed to hurt cities.
Well, you have to bull it through. You've gotta do it.
It's like all these, these things that have opposition.
The fact that 2000 people come and agitate
against the extension of an expressway
doesn't prove that you're not gonna build the expressway.
So many of the problems of the South Bronx grew directly
out of the devastation caused by building that expressway.
Which, of course, became totally gridlocked
15 minutes after it was open.
I mean, Moses thought he was improving the city
by bringing it up-to-date
by making it work for the automobile.
And as it became clear
that urban highways were, in fact
uh, profoundly destructive
it really became a battle between opposing forces.
Of course, in Lower Manhattan
uh, Moses, uh, wanted to build a road
right across, um, uh, the city there.
The Whole Cast Iron District
would've been basically obliterated.
The Lower Manhattan Expressway
was to have connected the Holland Tunnel
with the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges.
It would've destroyed most of SoHo.
We would've lost one of the greatest inventories
of 19th century buildings, not just in New York
but in the world.
The highways, of course
destroyed the neighborhoods
that they went through.
Where was this going to end?
The whole place was going to be laced with highways.
What would we have left of Manhattan?
On any day of the week, if you walk along Canal Street
and it's often faster than riding
this is what you'll see.
The crush of endless waiting traffic.
Now look at the solution.
A Lower Manhattan Expressway
only practical highway crossing
serving the Lower Manhattan
commercial and business districts.
Can we afford to let one section of our city
slowly strangle in hopeless traffic congestion?
There was an awful campaign against that neighborhood.
It was called Hell's Hundred Acres.
A bottled-up, stagnating section of the city.
No new private buildings erected in 30 years.
A valley of economic depression.
The need is urgent.
We must have a Lower Manhattan Expressway now.
The local priest in a church on Broom Street
had heard about Jane's
successful defenses fighting Moses
and asked if she could help.
Father, what effect do you feel
that the expressway will have on the neighborhood?
Well, the expressway will, will destroy the neighborhood.
This is the worst thing about these monumental plans.
There is no way there
that old buildings can easily be torn down
and new ones put up.
Old things adapted to different use.
It's settled.
Well, that's not planning for the future.
Reminded of some of the opposition
to his longtime dream for an expressway
across Lower Manhattan
Moses was specific about what it takes
to override the inevitable roadblocks.
You gotta move people.
And that, the political leaders
naturally, if they have people ticketed
and they know where they are and they vote right
they don't wanna move 'em and have 'em go somewhere else.
What I try to do, uh, in New York
what we've done successfully in other places
which is to pay more money to people in cash.
Come take the money and go away.
You got people who rent. They don't own anything.
So what different does it make
when you're talking about a, uh, an expressway
that costs 84 million dollars?
Stop being victims.
I think it's wicked
in a way, to be a victim.
It's even wickeder to be a predator
but it's wicked to be a victim and allow it.
You can't, as an individual, you can't do anything
but you can organize.
If you're being victimized by an expressway
that a bureaucracy is putting through
for the benefit of the automobile people
then you fight that you refuse to be a victim of that.
What effect do you think this will have
on the neighborhood itself?
It will destroy the neighborhood.
It's one of the few neighborhoods that you can..
A woman can go down the streets at night and be safe.
And the women know it and I know it.
2 or 3 o'clock in the morning
the men are sitting in the cafes
and they're watching you, taking care of you.
You wanna build up neighborhoods like this.
They say let's get back to the old, safe neighborhoods.
This is it!
Memorandum to Arthur Hodgkiss from Robert Moses.
"The Lower Manhattan will move very soon.
Please keep an eye on it."
Mr. Simon, are you saying that
they're trying to sneak it through?
I would say it's a sleeper.
If this thing is passed, uh
these are how these things happen.
If they're not watched, uh, it's a sleeper.
Who do you think is pushing this?
Well, uh, there's only one man
that I can think of that can be pushing.
They seem to think that they have a choice.
That they'd rather stay in the houses
that they've lived in all this time.
The whole federal arterial aid program
running into billions of dollars
depend upon the votes of a few
a very few people in one section.
We wouldn't build anything. Nothing would be built.
There'd be no highways, there'd be no -- no housing.
There, there'd be no public improvements.
Please do not build this express highway.
Most of these people consider automobiles
more than the human being.
It is not right!
I think it's awful.
I don't think it's fair.
I don't think it's very good
'cause I live there, I look out my window.
The truck, the car and everything.
They don't need expressway.
What they gonna do, throw me in the street?
After 51 years, I'm citizen and everything?
There's something awful to think every day
they gonna throw you out.
I think it's awful thing. They make me sick.
I hope God they have to be damn sick.
That's what I hope. Goodbye.
Thank you.
It was gonna be a defining hearing
in which they would approve the expressway.
And Jane said, when they discuss this issue
I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna speak against it.
I went up, uh, to the microphone.
I was very angry. They weren't listening to us.
They had made their decision. That was clear.
They were really only errand boys
who had no power to make decisions.
So we had better let them take back a message.
We would never stand for this expressway.
I intended just to climb up to their level
and walk across the stage.
There was a stenotypist
who had a new machine.
She was frightened
and she picked up her stenotype machine
and clasped it to her bosom.
The tapes fell out of the machine
and ran across the floor like confetti.
People began tossing it in the air.
I knew it had to be brought to an end
so an inspiration struck me.
I said, "There is no hearing
"because the record is gone.
And without a record, there can't be a hearing."
The chief state person was saying
"Arrest that woman. Arrest that woman."
As I went out, police captain told me that
uh, I was arrested.
The police were very apologetic.
They knew who she was and what was going on.
She was charged with 3 felonies
which is pretty rotten for what she did.
What did she do? She didn't hurt anybody.
She became the hero.
And the politics did shift at that point.
The Board of Estimate in an executive session today
voted unanimously to turn down the proposal
for a Lower Manhattan Expressway.
The board -- Please.
[applause]
That was the decisive moment.
And Moses couldn't do anything.
He was just a pure villain.
The politicians were villains.
At that point, it was clear that no politicians
were gonna get away with this.
The Lower Manhattan Expressway
was really the beginning of the end for Robert Moses.
Robert Moses was finally squeezed out
by Nelson Rockefeller, who as Governor of New York
might have been the first public official
powerful enough to call his bluff.
Moses was famous for threatening to resign
when he was unhappy with something.
Rockefeller said at one point okay
and Moses had no choice.
He couldn't back down and he was gone.
After the Moses' expressway situation was finally settled
Jane felt she could go to Canada with her typewriter
and become a writer again.
Her husband, who was an architect
was building hospitals up there.
And their sons were there be, to keep out of the
that awful Vietnam War.
Of course, as soon as she got to Toronto
she, she saw there was another expressway
heading right for her house
the Spadina Expressway.
She stopped that too.
And then got to work.
The Lower Manhattan Expressway
was officially dead in the year 1970.
Meanwhile, across the country
these kinds of freeway revolts were taking place
and similar roadways were being defeated.
But the Lower Manhattan Expressway
was really the leading example.
If that had happened, there would be no SoHo.
The entire history of development
and redevelopment and adaptive reuse in the city
would've played out in a different way.
It would've been the single most
damaging intervention in the urban fabric
in Manhattan in the 20th century, period.
A city is not just a physical object.
The city is a living thing.
It will always morph and change.
Our goal has to be to manage change well
not to freeze it in time.
As cities around the world are obliged to house
this dramatically increasing population
we still have the conversation in terms of
top down versus bottom up
formality versus informality.
These are the eternal polarities
of thinking about the city.
If you go to China, you see huge swathes
of farmland that are now being urbanized
in exactly the model that America used in 1950s
and we know that it failed.
China today is Moses on steroids, you know.
And the notion that Moses could not have conceived
of this extraordinary scaling up
of what it means to build.
In that sense, history has outdone him.
These isolated developments
with hundreds of similar-looking blocks
with no urbanism, no street
who can live in them and how would you live in them?
What they are building today, I think..
...is the slums of the future.
And they're made in concrete.
They're gonna last at least 60 years.
We are condemning future generations
to an absolute world without hope.
Given the scale of the problem we have
that makes a completely different context..
...in which Jane Jacobs' ideas again now
have a new incarnation.
"It is so easy to blame the decay of cities
"on traffic or immigrants..
"...or the whimsies of the middle class.
"The decay of cities goes deeper and is more complicated.
"It goes right down to what we think we want
and to our ignorance about how cities work."
With the amount of people who now need to live in cities
you have to accept that you're going to need more density.
But a lot of densely built up terrain..
...is not a city.
If, when we're to build a city
no matter how fast it is
without building a great public realm
you don't have a city.
That's what Jane Jacobs talks about.
Historically, solutions to city problems
have very seldom come from the top.
They come from people
who understand the problems firsthand
'cause they're living with them
and who have new and ingenious
and often very offbeat ideas of how to solve them.
The creativity and the concern
and the ideas down there in city neighborhoods
and city communities has to be given a chance
has to be released.
People have to insist on government
trying things their way.
If you gave people an environment
that they could shape themselves
they would not only be happier..
...but you would have a completely
different kind of city.
The problem for people who are planning
and designing and thinking about all this new urban tissue
that's being created is how to take some of these
incredibly valuable lessons that Jane Jacobs teaches
um, and apply them to the project of creating
the places where, uh, all of these
billions of people are going to live.
The key thing about Jane Jacobs
much more important than loving stoops and streets and stuff
was a willingness to be skeptical
a willingness to doubt the received wisdom..
...and to trust our eyes instead.
"Under the seeming disorder of the old city
"wherever the old city is working successfully..
"...is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety
"of the street
"and the freedom of the city.
"It is a complex order.
"This order is all composed of movement and change.
"And although it is life, not art..
"...we may fancifully call it the art form of the city..
"...and liken it to the dance.
"Not to a simpleminded precision dance
"with everyone kicking up at the same time
"twirling in unison and bowing off en masse..
"...but to an intricate ballet
"in which the individual dancers and ensembles
"all have distinctive parts..
"...which miraculously reinforce each other..
...and compose an orderly whole."
[instrumental music]