Moses's greatest failures were his housing projects. More than 40 years
ago, Jacobs attacked Moses for replacing well-functioning neighborhoods
with Le Corbusier-inspired towers. She was prescient. Moses spent
millions and evicted tens of thousands to create buildings that became
centers of crime, poverty, and despair.
The exhibition plays out like a drama. A reformer emerges, gains power,
refashions the city, then falls from grace as a new kind of reformer
emerges. There is a nostalgia, lurking behind this exhibition, for the
grandeur that was Moses. He was a breathtakingly arrogant man. After
Caro's book was published, Moses wrote a high-handed and spirited
riposte, quoting from Shakespeare, the Old Testament and obscure English
poets. And he defended the importance of men who break eggs: "The
current fiction is that any overnight ersatz bagel and lox boardwalk
merchant, any down to earth commentator or barfly, any busy housewife
who gets her expertise from newspapers, television, radio and telephone,
is ipso facto endowed to plan in detail a huge metropolitan arterial
complex good for a century." Thus, he brushed aside the very notion that
citizens might reasonably direct the planning of their cities.
But the pendulum swings and swings. For now, and for a little while
longer, cities will debate the right balance between Moses' car-culture
city, and Jacobs's walkable urban paradises. But the terms of the
argument will change, as the environmental devastation of the internal
combustion engine and other unsustainable technologies becomes
impossible to brush aside.
And then cities will need massive new kinds of infrastructure, built
quickly, to move people and things, to provide power, and to do it all
without ruining the atmosphere. And very likely, cities like New York
will need a new Robert Moses, wielding blueprints not of highways or
bridges, but new kinds of mass transit. A lot of eggs will have to be
broken, but one hopes the cost will be borne more equitably than in
Moses's day.
cont'd....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030900449.html
================
Robert Moses and the Modern City, a three-part exhibition, can be seen
at the Museum of the City of New York until May 6, the Queens Museum of
Art until May 13 and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at
Columbia University until April 14. More information is available at
http://www.mcny.org/.