Wrestling with Moses

Wrestling with Moses

Review by Sanford Levinson

This book ends by quoting an unsigned note that was placed at the doorstep of Jane Jacobs’ former home in Greenwich Village, the day after her death on April 25, 2006: “From this house, in 1961, a housewife changed the world.” Note the word “world.” (She had, after all, moved to Toronto in 1968.) But what happened in New York between 1961 and 1968 made an immense difference both at home and, eventually, everywhere.

Those years involved epic “wrestling” matches with Robert Moses, the “master builder” referred to in the title. He had, in the previous 30 years, transformed New York and its environs through massive building projects; urban planners all over the United States (and the world) viewed him as a model, with his devotion to huge buildings and the roads designed to shape the city to the endless number of cars that were yearly being added to American life.

Beginning in 1961, though, Jane Jacobs, a formally uneducated housewife who, however, wrote about urban architecture, took the lead in organizing her fellow residents of Greenwich Village against Moses’ plan to build a roadway through downtown New York’s famous Washington Square. Somewhat improbably, she and her fellow dissidents won that fight, as they did two more struggles with regard to ambitious demolition-and-building projects that Moses was advocating for Manhattan.

At a time when a former “community organizer” has become president, it is fitting to have a book that is as much about community organizing as about the person Jane Jacobs herself. This is not the full-scale biography that would require far more pages (and that Jacobs apparently did not want). Though Flint provides essential details of her early life, the heart of the book is the tale of the remarkable wrestling matches between a true urban Goliath and the community organizations brought into being and energized by the woman he persistently dismissed as a mere “housewife.”

Jacobs helped to transform the American city—and not only New York—in part by proving that aroused citizens could, on occasion, defeat entrenched interests, including developers who stood to make millions of dollars from the kinds of projects envisioned by Moses. She also wrote one of the most important books in the history of city planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she drew on her lived experience as a decades-long resident of Greenwich Village, with its maze of streets and decidedly non-skyscraper buildings, to present a thoroughgoing critique of the then prevailing view of “city planning.” When she began her work, conventional wisdom, as The New York Times wrote in her obituary, “called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space.” When she died, that had been replaced in favor of her own love of “ever more diversity, density and dynamism,” where disparate people would happily join together “in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.”

As Flint notes, Robert Caro was forced to prune the manuscript of his magnificent book on Moses (The Power Broker, winner of the Parkman Prize) by cutting chapters on Jacobs. Flint has rectified this absence.

Hardcover: 272 pages

Publisher: Random House Inc. ( August 04, 2009 )

Item #: 32-9106

ISBN: 9781400066742

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 0.0 inches

Product Weight: 18.0 ounces