Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City [Hardcover]

Over the last couple of years, it has been nearly impossible for any Torontonian to avoid the presence of Richard Florida, the author, “lecturer in creativity,” and well-compensated University of Toronto professor. Specifically, one regular Globe and Mail feature recorded Florida’s musings on different Toronto neighbourhoods. As tedious and self-indulgent as those Globe stories and accompanying videos were, they loosely replicated the methodology of Jane Jacobs, another transplanted American. In 1968, decades before Florida came north to accept his sinecure, Jacobs moved from New York to Toronto with her family (she had a draft-age son). Before leaving the Big Apple, she published her seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and famously did battle with legendary New York city planner Robert Moses. In Wrestling with Moses, former Boston Globe reporter Anthony Flint focuses on Jacobs’ improbable journey from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to New York’s Greenwich Village – a neighbourhood she would fight to save from Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. Jacobs (née Butzner) moved to New York in 1934 intending to become a journalist. While working as a secretary and living with her sister, she began writing stories on spec, the first of which were published in Vogue. As Flint notes, Jacobs’ early pieces, like a 1937 article about Lower Manhattan’s flower market, seem to presage her mature style, which was observational verging on ethnographic. For his part, Flint’s own style is highly readable, a function of his many years as a newspaper reporter. He adheres to the basic credo “show, don’t tell,” which, in the case of a story more than four decades old and with both of the main characters dead, is no easy task. For the most part, Flint avoids sentimentalizing the key figures in his story. As a result, when he puts Jacobs’ work during this period in context, his arguments are worthy of attention. For example, he writes that The Death and Life of Great American Cities, first published in 1961, was the first of a series of book-length journalistic investigations – which also included Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed – that successfully managed to “identify flaws in American politics, policy, and culture in the postwar period.” And more importantly, those works inspired people to act. It is not clear who will be inspired by Jeb Brugmann’s Welcome to the Urban Revolution. Brugmann, a Toronto resident and a faculty member of Cambridge University’s Programme for Industry, is now the founding partner of The Next Practice, which, despite sounding like a shadowy organization in a J.J. Abrams production, helps corporations such as Barclays, Nestlé, and Visa better serve low-income markets. His argument, supported by copious examples from all corners of the globe, is that the whole world is being organized into one big City. (Brugmann capitalizes “City” when he refers to it in this sense.) The available data are certainly on Brugmann’s side. Statistics show that a rapidly growing proportion of the world’s population lives in urban centres. This will create unavoidable logistical and political concerns in the developed and developing worlds. The more curious part of Welcome to the Urban Revolution is Brugmann’s notion that the people who emigrate to the world’s cities (or, I suppose, the City) are society’s most entrepreneurial individuals. Brugmann claims these people come to the city seeking the economic and social advantages of modern urban life: density, scale, association, and extension. In some ways, this idea is an extrapolation of the work of German scholar Max Weber, who argued over a century ago that the moral underpinnings of Calvinism were a significant factor in the economic development of the West. Except Brugmann can’t even point to something as intangible as faith to bolster his argument. His emigrants are a self-selecting group of high-achievers lured to the city by dreams of streets paved with gold – or, at least, paved streets. While Welcome to the Urban Revolution employs examples from cities around the world, Brugmann spends a lot of time writing about Dharavi, a slum on the edges of Mumbai. He notes that entrepreneurs in Dharavi took advantage of cheap labour, the slum’s proximity to slaughterhouses, and the growing demand for leather goods to build a flourishing industry. Brugmann believes that government planners need to avoid interfering in such areas except to provide infrastructure, health care, and security.  Brugmann’s belief in the enterprising nature of slum-dwellers is a narrow-minded and overly optimistic leap of faith that has similarities to Florida’s insistence that the size of a city’s “creative class” correlates positively with its economic development. While the slums of Mumbai, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and the housing projects of Toronto may be home to thousands of entrepreneurs, they also teem with poverty and desperation. In the absence of easy solutions, the public will increasingly turn to urban gurus like Brugmann in the hopes of finding the next Jacobs. But her replacement is not here yet.

“Wrestling with Moses is an epic tale filled with nuanced lessons. Flint is passionate in supporting Jacobs’s once radical but now commonly shared views, yet he deftly leaves room for Moses. This is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the shaping of cities.”—Alex Krieger, professor of urban design, Harvard University

“In this gripping and inspiring story of one woman who galvanized her community against powerful, destructive forces, Anthony Flint gets to the heart of what makes neighborhoods–and cities–thrive.”—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and Who’s Your City?

“Jane Jacobs, the crownless queen of cities, defended New York against the assault that would have destroyed its pattern of the daily life. Wrestling with Moses is a masterly tale of how her mandate endures.”—Jane Holtz Kay, architecture critic for The Nation and author of Asphalt Nation

“Anthony Flint has written a riveting account of a struggle between opposites that forever redefined the American city. With no formal training in urban planning, Jane Jacobs had the audacity to take on Robert Moses and the passion to save old New York from the wrecking ball.”—James L. Swanson, Edgar Award—winning author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer

“Beautifully written, Wrestling with Moses is a step back in time to the bohemia of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, when Bob Dylan’s music filled the streets and revolution was in the air. As a woman standing up to power, Jane Jacobs blazed a trail. This is a remarkable book.”—Brad Matsen, author of Titanic’s Last Secrets

“Anthony Flint has not only captured the life and times of the remarkable Jane Jacobs but, more important, he has delineated the amazing cast of characters–politicians, design professionals, neighbors, and citizens–that populated her life and her city. Wrestling with Moses will soon become classic, essential reading for anyone concerned with cities, past, present, and future.”—Eugenie L. Birch, Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research and Education, University of Pennsylvania

“Reporter Flint offers a fascinating history of the two combatants as well as an architectural history of New York City.”—Booklist

To a young Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Village, with its winding cobblestone streets and diverse makeup, was everything a city neighborhood should be. The activist, writer, and mother of three grew so fond of her bustling community that it became a touchstone for her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But consummate power broker Robert Moses, the father of many of New York’s most monumental development projects, saw things differently: neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village were badly in need of “urban renewal.” Notorious for exacting enormous human costs, Moses’s plans had never before been halted–not by governors, mayors, or FDR himself, and certainly not by a housewife from Scranton.

The epic rivalry of Jacobs and Moses, played out amid the struggle for the soul of a city, is one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern American history. In Wrestling with Moses, acclaimed reporter and urban planning policy expert Anthony Flint recounts this thrilling David-and-Goliath story, the legacy of which echoes through our society today.

The first ordinary citizens to stand up to government plans for their city, Jacobs and her colleagues began a nationwide movement to reclaim cities for the benefit of their residents. Time and again, Jacobs marshaled popular support and political power against Moses, whether to block traffic through her beloved Washington Square Park or to prevent the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a ten-lane elevated superhighway that would have destroyed centuries-old streetscapes and displaced thousands of families and businesses.

Like A Civil Action before it, Wrestling with Moses is the tale of a local battle with far-ranging significance. By confronting Moses and his vision, Jacobs forever changed the way Americans understood the city, and inspired citizens across the country to protest destructive projects in their own communities. Her story reminds us of the power we have as individuals to confront and defy reckless authority.

Anthony Flint is the director of public affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think-tank on land and development issues located in Cambridge, MA, and was a reporter at The Boston Globe for sixteen years. He is the author of This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America. He lives in Boston.

Chapter One


The Girl from Scranton

As the rattling subway train slowed to a stop, Jane Butzner looked up to see the name of the station, its colorful lettering standing out against the white-tile station walls as it flashed by again and again, finally readable: Christopher Street/Sheridan Square. As the doors opened, she watched as a crowd poured out, moving past pretty mosaics to the exit.

She had moved to New York from her hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and had joined her sister, Betty, in a small apartment in Brooklyn a few months before. She was hunting for a job, but the morning's interview had concluded swiftly, so she'd decided to explore her new city. She darted out before the doors slid shut and made her way through the turnstile and up a set of stairs to the street. Without knowing it, Jane had alighted in the heart of Greenwich Village, the place she would call home for decades to come.

As she emerged, she immediately noticed that the streets ran off at odd angles in all directions. She saw storefronts with awnings shading cluttered sidewalks, kids chasing one another in front of a grocery, delivery trucks stopping and starting their way up the street. Walking north on Seventh Avenue, she saw the skyscrapers of midtown in the distance and, when she turned around, the cluster of tall buildings in the financial district to the south. But in this spot most buildings were two or three stories, and few were higher than five or six. They were simple: no grand entrances, no soaring edifices. She gazed at shopwindows full of leather handbags and watches and jewelry, strolled past barbershops and cafés, and ran her fingers over the daily newspapers stacked high in front of shelves inside filled with candy and cigars. Everywhere she looked she saw people-people talking to one another, it seemed, every few feet, among them longshoremen headed to taverns at the end of their shifts, casually dressed women window-shopping, old men with hands clasped on canes sitting on the benches in a triangular park. Mothers sat on stoops watching over it all. Everyone looked, she thought, the way she felt: unpretentious, genuine, living their lives. This was home.

Arriving at her Brooklyn apartment that evening, Jane described the wonders of the neighborhood she had seen, concluding simply, "Betty, I found out where we have to live."

"Where is it?" Betty asked.

"I don't know, but you get in the subway and you get out at a place called Christopher Street."

Jane had moved to New York City in 1934. Armed with a high-school diploma, a recently acquired knowledge of shorthand, and the wisdom of a few months working in the newsroom of a Scranton newspaper, she hoped to break into journalism. She knew it wasn't going to be easy to succeed in a business dominated by men; her assignments in Scranton had been limited to covering weddings, social events, and the meetings of women's civic organizations with names like the Women of the Moose and the Ladies' Nest of Owls No. 3. It was the thick of the Great Depression, and any job was difficult to come by.

Her older sister, Betty, twenty-four, had warned her. Betty had come to New York a few years before with hopes of finding work as an interior designer, but was now grateful to have a job as a salesgirl in the home furnishings section of the Abraham & Straus department store. The headstrong Jane came to the big city anyway, joining her sister in the top floor of a six-floor walk-up in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood of Greek and Gothic Revival mansions and Italianate brownstones at the edge of the East River, overlooking Manhattan.

Within weeks of arriving, Jane realized that breaking into journalism was going to take time and that, in the meantime, she'd need to support herself. She began poring over employment agency listings looking for any clerical position she could find, and soon settled into a routine. Each morning she would walk from her apartment building, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and into lower Manhattan, where most of her interviews took place. The rest of her day would be spent exploring the city; she would invest a nickel for a subway ride and get out at random stops. She had been to New York only once before, as a girl of twelve, and now, at eighteen, she was drinking in the sights and sounds of a metropolis that could not be more different from Scranton.

Greenwich Village seemed to capture all the promise of moving to New York City for the young bespectacled girl from eastern Pennsylvania. As soon as she could, Jane brought her sister to Greenwich Village. Betty shared her enthusiasm for the neighborhood, and they quickly found an apartment on Morton Street, just south of the Christopher Street subway station. Morton Street was a classic Greenwich Village lane, running four blocks from east to west from the Hudson River, bending at a forty-five-degree angle in glorious violation of the orderly street grid of the rest of Manhattan. It was lined with petite trees, front-yard gardens, iron fences, and stately rows of four- and five-story brownstones and town houses.

Their neighbors there ranged from truckers and railway workers to artists, painters, and poets, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and e. e. cummings. The White Horse Tavern, which for decades had been a gathering place for the bohemians of Greenwich Village, stood just around the corner on Hudson Street.

As excited as they were to be there, money was tight. After paying the rent, Jane and Betty had so little to spare that they resorted to mixing Pablum, a nutritious but notably bland cereal for infants, with milk for sustenance.

Their father's advice proved to be wise counsel in this time: that while the girls should pursue the careers of their dreams, they should also learn a practical skill to fall back on. The degree from the Powell secretarial and stenography school in Scranton gave Jane enough of an edge in the barren job market that after months of searching, she finally landed a job as a secretary for a candy manufacturing company. She would serve in similar clerical positions at a clock maker and a drapery hardware business in the years that followed. In her off time, she worked toward her dream career, honing her journalistic skills.

On those afternoons exploring the city after job interviews, and in her off-hours once she started working, she had begun writing down her observations of the city. In time she began to work them into articles. Early on she noticed that every few blocks of the city seemed to have a specialty trade-a little economy all their own. She sought to learn everything she could about these trades, striking up conversations with the shopkeepers and workers pushing racks of furs down the streets, and the leather makers in the deep back rooms into which she peered. Buckets of flowers on the sidewalk would prompt her to probe into the cut-flower trade; wandering through the diamond district on the Bowery on Manhattan's scrappy Lower East Side, she familiarized herself with the intricate system of jewelry auctions.

Immediately upon arriving home from work, she would toss her handbag on the sofa and settle in front of her manual typewriter in her room and write. After a while, she began to submit her pieces to popular magazines of the day. Much to her surprise, she arrived home one evening to find an envelope from an editor at Vogue who wanted to publish a story she had written on the fur district. The editors liked her plainspoken style and keen observations and wished to retain her as a freelance contributor. They proposed that she write four essays over the next two years, for which they would pay her $40 per article, a slightly better rate than the $12 per week she was making as a secretary. Her career as a writer in New York City had officially begun.

Her early journalism reflected an eye for the detail and the drama beneath the quotidian. A 1937 piece on the flower market in lower Manhattan, titled "Flowers Come to Town," began with a typical flourish:

All the ingredients of a lavender-and-old-lace love story, with a rip- roaring, contrasting background, are in New York's wholesale flower district, centered around Twenty-Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Under the melodramatic roar of the "El," encircled by hash-houses and Turkish baths, are the shops of hard-boiled, stalwart men, who shyly admit that they are dottles for love, sentiment, and romance.

She went on to describe in detail the 5:00 a.m. arrival of orchids, gardenias, peonies, and lilacs from Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey that were then meted out into buckets for sale by retailers. She considered the city's voracious demand for cut flowers and foliage-200 million ferns, 150,000 roses a day from just one grower in a season. It made sense when she thought about it: office reception areas, wedding receptions, society functions, and funerals all needed flowers. It was a big market, but the competition was fierce; she noted how the merchants adopted a set of rules to maintain a level playing field, such as agreeing not to open hampers in the flower market until 6:00 a.m., at the sound of a gong. She was fascinated not only with the mores of the city but with the way systems seemed to self-organize to prosper.

In another article, Jane wrote about the diamond district, which in the 1930s was centered on the Bowery across from the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She described how the dealers in their beards and hats jotted down notes on the cut stones, rings, necklaces, and lockets that pawnbrokers had sent for display at auction, then made their bids with silent gestures or by squeezing the auctioneer's arm. "Upstairs, in the small light rooms over the stores, diamonds are cut and polished and set or re-set, and silver is buffed. The doors and vestibules to the rooms are barred and there is no superfluous furniture, just the tools and tables where the skillful workmen sit with leather ham...