Original subtitles

in the spring of 1944 as the Second World War dragged into its third long

year a 26-year old photographer and native-born New Yorker named Helen

Levitt carried a 16 millimeter movie camera up to the crowded tenement

district of East Harlem in New York once predominantly attended but now

increasingly filled with black and spanish-speaking newcomers over the next

three years with her friends james agee and janice load she struggled to capture

on film the countless daily dramas and heart-stopping beauty of life in New

York's poorest neighborhoods in a film she called simply in the street

the streets of the poor quarters of great cities are above all a theater and

a battleground they're unaware and unnoticed

every human being is a poet a masker

a lawyer and in his innocent artistry projects

against the turmoil of the street and image of existence

James Agee we say what is the city well the city as many things but one of the things that a

city is is a home to its people if you think of it the great cities of

history Athens is glorious a Rome is grandeur a power let's say Paris is

culture what is New York New York is a

home New York's great gift to the world was that people from all over the world

could come here they could create their own communities their own neighborhoods

so people felt the sense of community a sense of belonging a sense of neighborhood

that's really the basis of human endeavor if people feel they alone they

can go on to other things

now all of a sudden that was going to be harder for New York than ever before

because at this crucial moment in the city's history the city loses its way

whereas before neighborhoods were

creative now neighborhoods are destroyed

the Japanese government at 7:01 p.m. on

the hot sultry evening of August 14 1945 after five tense days of conflicting

rumors and false reports word reached New York that the Japanese High Command

had surrendered at last bringing to an end the bloodiest and most costly war in

human history

as the news reached through the city millions of New Yorkers converged on

Times Square laughing shouting weeping and embracing in a spontaneous

celebration that lasted all through the night and on into the early hours of the morning

on August the 14th when President Truman announces the surrender of Japan I mean

the tumultuous scenes in the city of course we think of celebrations all

around the United States and deed all around the world but no place like Times

Square that's the moment that's the place where the real end of the war is

announced and celebrated

twice a month now in the delirious jubilant days following the close of the

war the two greatest ocean liners in the world the Queen Mary and the Queen

Elizabeth which in four years had ferried more than two million men to war

could be seen steaming into port bringing their fragile human cargo back home

as the great sister ships entered the upper bay their decks crammed with

American soldiers a gigantic cheer went up at the site of the ravishing skyline

of New York which had never seemed more precious or more filled with promise for the future

every inch of land in New Jersey and Staten Island New York was crowded with

people cheering and and the whole thing was such an amazing vision but people

brought together which they usually are not in New York and cheering you know

god bless you boys all that stuff

if I could pick a time to be there I would probably be in spring of 1946 when

they troops were coming home from the war and have seen the great ocean liners

loaded to the brim with returning soldiers from Europe we're at the

pinnacle then New York may have been not just the greatest city in the world but

that may have been the greatest time in New York with the great harbor filled with ships

and tens of thousands of factories churning out goods in record volumes the

halcyon months following the end of the war were in many ways the highest point

of the city's entire history the terrible conflict itself had proved

in many ways to be the city's salvation lifting at last the decade-long

depression and reconfirming New York status as the unofficial capital of what

was now the most powerful nation on earth we know her

as Fiorello LaGuardia finished his third term as mayor and as Robert Moses unable

to build during four long years of war prepared to throw himself into a frenzy

of construction every force that had brought New York to greatness seemed to

be operating at peak capacity it was the apex of the time when it was

like Imperial Rome a standard setter a trend recognizer a place that translated

the world to America when you look at

New York in the late 40s in the early 50s when it mattered it just mattered in

a way that that other places didn't don't if you come from other places

don't be upset them it just did and it was also a place that was producing a

bewildering array of stuff and people were working ladies hats and musical

instruments and table lamps and printers inks and shellac and sugar and beer and

bread and skin creams the thing about New York was that there was no one thing

you know that you said Pittsburgh steel

Detroit cars Akron rubber New York

everything and that's why New York really sort of looked down on the rest

of America from Olympus and the seeds of its downfall might have been in that as

well the core of it was that it was still a manufacturing town which meant that

people like my father with an eighth grade education Irish immigrant could

put first of all form a family and then support it and that sense that you would

get a working men permeated the city I remember one of the things that I missed

the most was what it felt like in the subway around between the hours of 5:00

and 7:00 and being on packed subway cars with working men on those cars

guys stained with sweat the smell of perspiration the raw knuckled hands

toolboxes heading home nobody would mess with guys like that and they were very

proud in the fact that they were working in in the biggest city in the United

States they were functioning people

and yet more than most people realized at the time in the giddy post-war

atmosphere of triumph and success by 1945 much of the fate of the post-war

City had already been written and the stage had been set for one of the most

complex and troubling periods in the city's entire history

the war itself had vastly accelerated a fateful shift in power in America begun

during the Depression and the New Deal but in the years to come were challenged

New York's once unrivaled claim to economic supremacy and alter forever the

relation of the city and the country it is true that there was defense

spending going to New York City but there is far more of it going to the

south and far more of it going to the West huge quantities of money weren't

flowing to shipbuilding operations on the west coast money was going to

develop in the Carolinas new modern garment manufacturing facilities that'll

turn out uniforms noting these crowded little sweatshops you know so well New

York comes out of the war in a sense an unparalleled position of powerful and it

is now in a sense the capital of the world these under toes have been operating and

the city's long term position although it's not apparent yet is in fact going

to be a lot weaker than it had been going into that war certainly no one could have imagined in

the triumphant ears following the war that in little more than three decades

the mighty metropolis on the banks of the Hudson would be shaken to its very

foundations and fighting for its very existence

late one night in the waning days of December 1945 as Fiorello laguardia's

third and final turn wound quietly to a close an aide named Lewis after

returning to City Hall to attend to some last-minute paperwork was surprised to

hear the sound of a lone typewriter clattering down the darkened hallway in

an office at the end of the hall he found LaGuardia himself hunched over

his Secretary's desk hello Lou the mayor said I've got these letters to get out

and there was no one else around can you type but even LaGuardia wore out the

city wore him out you know by the end of his third term he was an exhausted tired man it had

beaten them up the process of it remember this a city almost went

bankrupt under as soon as he showed up when its Depression New York that he was

the mayor of and for all of his amazing gifts that third term was very very hard

for him by the time LaGuardia left

office in January 1946 to be succeeded by a tough but genial ex-policeman named

William O'Dwyer the city he loved her completely rebounded from the

decade-long depression thanks in large part to the New Deal and the war

but LaGuardia himself was already seriously ill with cancer of the

pancreas and less than two years later he died leaving his wife Marie $8,000 in

war bonds and a heavily mortgaged house in the Bronx

he was 64 years old a city of which he

was apart as much as any public building awoke to find the little firebrand dead

it's people had left with him and at him they'd been entertained by his antics

and they had been sobered by his warnings and they found it difficult to believe

that the voice he'd raised on their behalf in the Legislative halls of city

and nation on street corners and on the radio was stilled forever

the New York Times more than most people realized laguardia's death marked the

end of an era facing in doing for 12

long years he had struggled to reconcile two competing visions of the city

the shining vision of the city of tomorrow championed by men like Robert

Moses beholden to the car and the highway and two forces beyond the city's

borders and the old working city of Walt Whitman Al Smith and Emma Lazarus the

city of the block and the neighborhood and the crowded urban street that

however shabby and rundown in appearance he had always known was New York's great

strength heartbeat and true glory

without him in the years to come those two cities would come to seem

increasingly incompatible as the forces of change unleashed by the war pulled

New York into the orbit of an immense new order increasingly indifferent to

the values and beliefs LaGuardia had cared for most deeply hey after

LaGuardia was mayor he was sitting one day in the engineers Club the New York

and a friend of his Walter Binger came over he said may major which is what

everyone called LaGuardia who really knew him major you're really looking down he said

Robert Moses has too much power today and Binger who really disliked Moses

said well who gave it to a major and LaGuardia said but I could control now

no one will be able to control

by 1945 a bold new attitude towards urban life had begun to come to the fore

in New York and in cities across America for more than two decades a growing

number of architects and urban planners disturbed by the increasing congestion

and chaos of the modern city had been arguing that the old urban order of

narrow streets and blocks be left behind and replaced with an entirely new one

consecrated to the car and the highway and the dream of infinite mobility this

vision of a radiant new city of tomorrow and found its purest expression before

the war in the awesome public works of Robert Moses in the ravishing exhibits

of the World's Fair and in the writings of a visionary Swiss architect and urban

theorist named la Corbusier who had been amongst the first to sense that cities

themselves had been rendered completely obsolete by the advent of the automobile

it's a wonderful passage from appreciate he walks out in the streets of Paris

near the University and he feels very

nostalgic and he says in the good old days when I was a student we used to

walk these streets and we would stand in the middle of the street and argue when

we could have races with each other we could play games but now we're swept

away by the cars and he's very bitter about that and he says what can we do

and then there's like a kind of cognitive leap which is we have to

somehow merge with the cars we have to if we can completely identify with them

and forget this paradise lost from our youth when the streets belong to us that

because that's the refrain the streets belong to us then but if you can forget

that and we repress the part of you that love the streets and felt at home in

them and that feels very angry that you can't you know that there's too much

traffic for you now but you don't fit in that like history has surpassed you you

can make a leap and surpass it and the way that he did was through this concept

of the highway system and the flow that would never end and the traffic that

would always be moving and what he wanted to do in Paris in New

York but so basically kill the street tear it all down and put up giant slabs

connected by highways I think she's probably the greatest metaphysician of the highway system

anywhere and motives was certainly his greatest disciple

in the years following the war as urban planners proposed remaking the city on a

breathtaking scale New York would begin to take leave of the past as never

before and rush headlong into the future in little more than half a decade many

of the streets and neighborhoods Helen Levitt had documented so painstakingly

would be razed to the ground to make way for block after block of towering

high-rise housing projects the Courvoisier himself would return to New

York in the boom years following the war to begin work on an austere new complex

of buildings along the East River determined to turn Manhattan itself into

a bold new city of the future

New York is not a capital city it is not

a national capital or a state capital but is by way of becoming the capital of

the world along the East River from the raised slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay men are

coming out the permanent headquarters of the United Nations the greatest housing

project of them all in its tried New York takes on one more

interior city the shelter this time all governments

and a clear the slum World War eebee wife

the real shift to New York becoming the cap of the world comes after world war

two when the United States emerges from the conflict is indisputably the most

powerful militarily an economic force on earth and I think the placement of the

United Nations in New York City kind of symbolizes New York's emergence as the

the capitol of the world let's put it this way if the United Nations hadn't come to New York I think

a lot of people would have killed themselves would just have gone berserk

it just seemed the right place for the United Nations to be it wasn't

inevitable that it would come to New York mccorvey who many ways plays the

evil spirit in this story didn't want it to come to New York and as the leading

architect he had a great say he wanted it to be if it had to be near New York

to be on some estate and Pound Ridge or Westchester they looked at all kinds of

places my god they even thought of Philadelphia little more than a year after the end of

the war thanks in large part to the immense power of the Rockefeller family

and to the administrative genius of Robert Moses a site in New York had been

settled on on the east side of Manhattan along the East River

the startling shapes that soon began to arise on a 17 acre tract of land called

blood alley once filled with stockyards and slaughterhouses were unlike anything

ever built in New York or anywhere else for that matter

the slab of glass a totally new form developed out of a core busiest earlier

work shear slab he'd never gone to extreme glass facing east and west no

windows facing north and south on some kind of idea of solar orientation then

the assembly building with its swoopy roof a new kind of shape has nothing to

do with the city ask to be in a part because of its sculptural force

basically that had never been a building like that seen in New York or virtually

anywhere else all that glass it's what everybody's been dreaming about its what

a little bit of what you could have got a hint of if you'd gone to the fair in

39 and people are thrilled the arrival of the United Nations was

the harbinger of a new kind of globalism in New York by the fall of 1952 as

delegates from around the world arrived for the first general session in the new

headquarters a sleek new international star had begun to transform the look and

feel of central Manhattan not only in architecture and diplomacy but in

corporate culture itself the UN building is decisively in reestablishing New York

and then with the completion of that building New York enters yet another phase of its life

and it becomes more than ever office capital of the world more new office

space was built in New York roughly between 1950 and 1960 than there is in

the entire of the downtown business district of Chicago all of it not just

what was built there but everything that every visibility New York becomes

headquarters city every major corporation even more than in the robber

baron days finds and it has to be in New York feels that it has to be in New York

because American corporations recognize they have to operate on an international

stage and New York is the logical place even as a gleaming new city of glass and

steel thrust skyward in midtown Manhattan another kind of transformation

was under way far from the white collar ramparts of Park and sixth avenues as

hundreds of thousands of african-americans from the rural South poured into the city's poorest

neighborhoods looking for work and a new beginning

so they came from all parts of the south the Georgians came as soon as they were

able to pick train fare off the peach trees they came from South Carolina

where the cotton stalks were bare the North Carolinians came with tobacco

tar beneath their fingernails even while planning the trip they sang spirituals

such as Jesus take my hand and chanted

hallelujah I'm on my way to the promised land

Claude Brown

by 1950 as the great black migration swelled to a flood another immense

influx was underway within a year of the end of the war the first regularly

scheduled flights had begun taking off from San Juan Airport on the island of

Puerto Rico bound for New York City the forerunners of thousands more as

hundreds of thousands of spanish-speaking newcomers streamed

north from the Caribbean many fleeing desperate poverty this emigration is

different the Puerto Ricans come not by ship huddled in the steerage but by

plane paying u.s. citizens they beat at no immigration bars never had their

picture taken in colorful native costume behind the wire enclosures of Ellis

Island they simply seeped in landing by the 20s and 30s from battered planes of

the Guardia Field in Newark suddenly appearing beside their cardboard

suitcases on the city's sidewalks outside a hole in the wall Travel Agency

to them the u.s. means in New York City and 300,000 of them now live in it's five boroughs

Time magazine 1949 yesterday it was the

brutal and uncouth Irish then it was the knife wielding Italians

later it was the clannish truth with their strange ways

yesterday it was the negro today it is to Puerto Ricans and the

Negroes who are relegated to the last step of New York social ladder

exo-skull

like their African American counterparts many of the Puerto Rican newcomers found

it increasingly hard to rise trapped in menial jobs and dilapidated slums by

racism and discrimination and by an ominous new trend stealing over the

city's blue-collar economy within a decade of the end of the Second

World War it was beginning to be clear the New York's great industrial engine

for more than a century the first step on the ladder for newly arrived

immigrants had started to falter and slow far from taking on thousands of new

workers each year as in the past factory owners now often struggled simply to

keep the positions they had in the face of stiff new competition from

manufacturers in the south and west and the city's own suburbs the writer Earl shorris in his book

Latinos says that one of the great tragedies of Puerto Ricans in the 20th

century is that they came to New York of all places had they come to New York

earlier or gone somewhere else when they came to the United States they probably

would have done a lot better but they came to a city that was just about to

begin its transition to a post-industrial economy and they came to

be industrial workers and that was their undoing

in 1945 1950 New York seemed literally to be on top of the world the largest

city in the world our richest city in the world the most powerful city in the

world capital of the world everything seemed to be working in place but we now

see in retrospect that there were ominous signs on the horizon the first

was the loss of industry New York City has more than a million industrial jobs

in 1950 those jobs over the next half century or fall to well below 200,000 so

essentially a whole gigantic sector of New York's economy believes in this New

York again as a leader we have seen this happen first in cities and then it

states and now for the whole entire United States as jobs move out where

they're lower production costs first to the suburbs into the south then offshore

to Asia or wherever the loss of industry was the harbinger

of an even vaster transformation as year after year the center of gravity of the

entire nation continued to shift away from New York and away from older urban

places everywhere as a massive new economic order finished taking hold

linked to the highway and the automobile and incompatible with the structure of

cities as they had existed for hundreds of years well I think the Second World

War changes the ballgame and creates an economy on an enormous scale that really

Dwarfs anything that's existed before and after the war you get a permanent

war economy on one hand it's an industrial bonanza but New York was

almost entirely left out of this because it's really very hard to build aircraft

factories say in or close to New York or any other city the sense of space is

completely different whereas the grid involves bringing people together and creating

concentration vertically going up the war economy and the highway system built

in the Eisenhower period builds a cross and it depends on these enormous

horizontal units and on one hand creates bonanzas in many areas that were pretty

distressed and on the other hand draws talent energy and money enormous amounts

of money away from areas like in New York in the years to come as the entire

nation was integrated into a unified flow whose lifeblood one man later said

was the automobile the dense fabric of older urban places and the very concept

of urban public space itself would begin to come under attack as never before as

cities like New York were increasingly seen as places to escape from or as

problems to be solved or as landscapes to be transformed

to a remarkable degree the man in the middle of the whirlwind of forces

sweeping through New York in the post-war period was the driven

insatiable builder well by 1945 had been transforming the city for almost 20

years Robert Moses

if you saw Moses standing in front of a mat with his pencil going over it in

sweeping gestures you would see the dream or the visionary the artist he's

suing you were and of course by New York I mean New York and its suburbs 2,100

square miles and an area in which when he was building 12 million people he saw

this all as a canvas he was going to build his roads across that he was going

to build his roads around it there were gonna be parks here in Park them you see

them we're gonna have public housing here so we'll do this he saw the whole

thing as one great mural you know one huge wonderful mural it will had the

Union in the unity of a vision and that is the vision to which New York and its

suburbs were shape I am privileged to present the winner of the Grand National

Ward Robert Moses of New York

no one embodied the power and promise of post-war New York more than Robert Moses

the visionary administrator who had rebuilt the city in the depths of the

depression intent on uniting the immense metropolis into a single coherent whole

and linking it to the rest of the nation by highways he had accomplished more in

20 years than most men dreamed of in a lifetime and now with the vastly

increased resources of the federal government behind him looked forward to

realizing his vision on an even vaster scale the tragedy in the end would be

that such a man and such an era should have held out such great promise and

that so much of it should have gone so

terribly astray

immediately after the Second World War Robert Moses is power increased

exponentially to something far greater than before its base was still these

revenues the toll revenues from war his bridges and all his tunnels which of

course were increasing as he was building more but he now gets control of

the city Housing Authority huge monies are now being spent by the federal

government on public housing low-income housing in New York those monies were

spent at the command of Robert Moses up

to that point Robert Moses had been building mostly parks and bridges and

park lands he was building these in a tabula rasa on the open spaces of Long

Island on Jones Beach where there was nothing there now he's going to be

building in the city not on an empty canvas but on the most crowded canvas in

the world that was going to make all the difference it was going to make the

story of Robert Moses become very dark because whether he was building in an

area with no people or an area filled with people Robert Moses was going to

build if you want to create Public Works in a crowded metropolis he said you have

to swing the meat ax and he liked swinging the meat ax

I enjoy getting things done that means exactly there are obstacles that are in

the way by whatever means and that means being lonely along the way that you put

up with that temporarily right yes that make us few compromises as possible fun

gives me Rommel had a very funny phrase a little bit on the cynical side and the

grain of truth in it he said if the end

doesn't justify the means what does no one could have predicted the

magnitude of the explosion that would overtake New York in the decades

following World War two greatest was the federal involvement in Public Works

before the war it was nothing compared to the massive new initiatives signed

into law as soon as it was ended not only for highways but for Housing

and Urban Development propelling changes on a scale city planners had scarcely

dreamed of only a few years earlier eager to extend his dominion over every

public construction project in the city Robert Moses quickly moved to wrest

control of the new federal funds before the ink was even dry on the new legislation

he says I'd like to be Construction Co ordinate by the way I have a bill here

that the Legislature will pass creating the office of construction coordinator

nobody realizes that there is a sentence in there that says that the construction

coordinator shall no choice shall represent the city in all its dealings

with the federal government that means that any city request for federal money

is going to go through the office of construction coordinator

and he therefore has control over public housing he has control over the federal

highway money and something much huge is about to happen one day in nineteen the

end of nineteen forty eight an old classmate of Moses is from Yale Robert

if Senator Robert it comes down to talk to Robert Moses about a new proposal

that's going through the Senate of the United States we are gonna coil a title

one it's the slum clearance program the urban renewal program Moses had this

mind that leaped the power like a terrier as soon as Taft leaves his

office he is drafting the necessary documents so that the mayor will have a

slum clearance committee Robert Moses

Jim there had been housing programs before and attempts to clear the slums

but never on this scale intended in part to relieve the severe

post-war housing crisis and to provide affordable housing for the poor the

bills first section known forever after as title one would go on to become one

of the most controversial and in many ways catastrophic federal programs ever

visited upon city dwellers anywhere the bottom line for the urban renewal

program is is that the federal government is going to pay for the city

to use its power of eminent domain to confiscate land and to assemble large

parcels of land from lots of little sort of slum owners and so the blighted

rundown areas then they're going to tear down that land and they're gonna give it

to private developers to build housing on theoretically for poor people in the

real world that's not the way it works out in the real world you get a

constellation of different kinds of players who have got an interest in

becoming the developers who acquire title one land there's a huge range of

possibilities but all of these people share one thing in common they're not

interested in building housing for poor people they're interested in building

housing at the least for middle-class people and in fact they're also

particularly not interested in housing for blacks and Hispanics who are

increasingly in the post-war period growing percentage of the population

most in need of housing

haled is a victory for the working poor title one quickly proved to be an

enormous bonanza not for those most in need but for landowners and real estate

developers who under provisions of the Act were not required to build housing

slum dwellers could afford or even to build new housing at all

despite solemn assurances to the contrary few of those evicted under title one found housing in the

neighborhoods they had once called home many were not rehoused at all and many

of those that were found themselves relocated to massive new low-income

housing projects thrown up in district segregated as never before by race and class

the reality of it was that it was a massive program of removal of usually

the people who had the least political clout and those tended to be blacks and

Hispanics and working-class years and working-class Italians now the man at

the center of this operation is Robert Moses Moses is the coordinator of all

these title 1 programs and Moses is cutting deals left and right by 1959

there are 16 huge title 1 projects that have been completed they have moved out

roughly a hundred thousand for people Robert Moses personified in age where

the interests of working class and poor people were very easily dismissed as

secondary to the interests of middle class upper middle class and wealthy

people so if it meant tearing down hundreds of old brownstone tenements to

build a new Performing Arts Center that was gonna happen if it meant clearing

land in the hope that commercial developers would want to come in and

build skyscrapers instead then that's what you did and often when really poor

communities were fragmented in this way where did they go they went to the next

neighborhood over they went to the next neighborhood that might be showing some

signs of weakness and in the rental market might be showing some signs of

weakness in the housing market and the problems of one neighborhood became the

problems of another far away the other things that Moses does to his shame is

he fills the slum clearance committee with a bunch of his banker and insurance

and developer friends and they begin to use this one for clearance committees

power public power to remove non-white people from areas where the developers

want to create white neighborhoods the result is that they uproot hundreds

and thousands of black New Yorkers and forced them into these expanding ghettos

in bedford-stuyvesant Harlem as striking

is the racial politics of the slum clearance program was it staggering

scale convinced that partial reconstruction of targeted neighborhoods was doomed from the start

title one made slum clearance funds available on one condition the nearly

every structure in a designated area be

destroyed over the next 15 years the maelstrom of destruction that would go

forward in New York in the name of urban renewal would dwarf anything that had

come before in the city's history as thousands of acres of teeming city

blocks were reduced to giant swaths of rubble in New York who needs an atomic bomb

the novelist Bernard Malamud wrote if you walked away from a place they tore it down

well sometimes I think the United States embarked on urban renewal out of some

kind of elaborate guilt trip over bombing so many places in the course of

the Second World War in Europe because we saw that by clearing these sites

suddenly the bombs made it possible for new kinds of developments and a way to

modernize cities how to tackle the problem here we really use the same

techniques we declare whole areas after some kind of study of the declining

demographics susceptible to demolition it just simply moved people out it

became incredibly disruptive to people's lives you scattered neighborhoods which

might have been very very poor but still had a very dense network of associations

and you began through urban renewal in a city like Europe but it's true in

Chicago and elsewhere that process which we are still reeling under of wrenching

communities apart and then families collapsing the whole support system of

the less well advantage in our society collapses and we wonder why they then

become increasingly unable to function in the society as a whole

and there were other problems as well with what was being created as well as

what was being destroyed though for many New Yorkers the new public housing

projects rising from the rubble represented the first decent housing

they had known the structures themselves shaped almost without exception to the

anti virus of men like la Corbusier had little in common with the communities

they had known gong towers isolated from the street on enormous tracts of land

called super blocks planners wanted to reform the city by sweeping it clean

they hated the grid and all the way that the grid led to development of the city

and they wanted to turn the city into a Green Park federal funds would come in

to buy these buildings and you would write the land down virtually to nothing

so you returned the city 2 degrees 0 under Moses you could get rid of the

gridiron because you'd make super blocks Moses had no interest in commercial life

on his projects he wanted them strictly pure of commercial life so he eliminated

streets so makes a bigger gulf between the new development and the existing

city that's a whole betrayal in my view a betrayal not only of New York's

traditions and history and natural structure but also a betrayal of what

makes a community the Uptown slums are

being demolished but the rectangular

tenements that replaced them have not a

trace of invention their bleakness is

absolute

no man has ever dreamed of a city of such monotonous severity

and there must be some bond between our houses

and our dreams John Cheever

everybody it would seem is for the rebuilding of our cities with a unity of

approach that is remarkable but that is not the same thing as liking

cities most of the rebuilding underway is being

designed by people who don't like cities they do not merely dislike the noise and

the dead and the congestion they dislike

the city's variety and concentration

it's tension its hustle and bustle

the results are not cities within cities but auntie cities

William hy

title one was only part of the story title two was the other part of it the

federal government is not only intervening in this program that is

demolishing vast areas of the inner city it is also in fact underwriting the

development of the suburbs by saying to banks that we are going to institute a

program of mortgage guarantees people who might look like they're dangerous

credit risks and you might not want to give them a mortgage because they're not

making enough money we the federal government say to you that if you give

these people mortgages we will guarantee you that in fact if they default we'll

pay you and because of that money was available to flow into the private

housing market and unfortunately it was not allowed to flow into multifamily

housing in the city what are you talking about you're talking about in fact the

development of the suburbs so between this mix of programs the federal

government has opted for a policy which is profound the auntie city and to that

being interstate highways which were ready to Swiss people out of the city

and take them to those new homes that were rising in the cornfields and the

potato fields in response to all this hot loan money being around New York was

suddenly surrounded by the changes in American life but also got it right in

the neck from various federal programs that were supposed to help the city that

said that they were about to help the American people and boy the destruction

that came from these this concentration of effects coincidental it all started

to happen in the late 40s but and probably anyone of them New York could

have fought off or somehow accommodated or made its peace with but all of those

things happening at once just was disastrous in the end nothing would transform the

landscape of American cities more dramatically than the billions of

dollars in federal aid streaming out of Washington to build new arterial

highways culminating in the interstate Highway Act of 1956 the most important

public works project in America since the Erie Canal the 41,000 miles system

would reverse the impact of DeWitt Clinton's great achievement drawing

resources out of cities and diffusing them out across the American landscape

while committing the economy of the entire nation to a self-perpetuating

culture of the automobile but the car has a life of its own and you've got a

more highways so you can sell more cars and if you make more cars you've got to

have more highways and once you're on that treadmill then anything that stands

in the way including that vision of the city is a civilized but dense arena goes

by the wayside and so we've got this period when on the one hand we're

projecting roads out into the suburbs and people are in fact motoring off on

them on the other hand were ramming roads through working class and poor quarters

one way or another Robert Moses had a hand in it all overseeing the

construction of nearly a billion and a half dollars in federally funded

highways in little more than 15 years we wouldn't have any American economy

without the automobile business that's literally true and believe that that

this is a great industry that has to go on and has to keep on turning out cause

and trucks and buses and they have to be places for them to run they have to be

modern Road modern office somebody's got to fill them and that in order to get

those things done and done properly people must be inconvenience to her in the way

after the war everyone was beginning to realize that you had to build great

arterial routes through the cities every city had plans for expressman but nobody

was able to build the expressway there were two reasons one the

staggering costs of his Express was compared to everything that had gone

before in Public Works to build it through a crowded urban setting the

second thing is this is a democracy you had to evict from their homes tens of

thousands of people's for for an ordinary expressway they were voters and

politicians are shied away from the very thought of evictions on a scale like

that Moses shied away from nothing and in the fur as soon as the war and he

began to ram six great expressways right across the heart of New York

of all the federal projects under Robert Moses control none would have more

devastating consequences for the city and its people or in still more rage

against its executor than the Cross Bronx Expressway a two hundred and

twenty five foot wide concrete trench seven miles long that would carve a path of destruction

New Yorkers would never forget this used to be a neighborhood the

neighborhood was called East Tremont than the Bronx in New York I the heart

of it was where this road runs behind made the Cross Bronx Expressway it was

predominantly Jewish there was also Irish and Germans in it

and some blacks it was a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else it

was a community it was a place with a heart Robert Moses tore this heart out

the Chrisman's expressway goes through about 12 or 15 different neighborhoods

and it just like went through the center of the great many and I mean the idea

was that it was built on a straight line and there was no account of you know who

that people are and what they're doing there was no question of can we work

this highway into existing life this question never came up in the 1940s or

50s they had the power to build in straight lines and they just did these

were still intact communities people worked people kept up their properties

people did business where they lived this was a place where you did your

marketing locally you did your business locally you got your First Holy

Communion read your haftorah for your bar mitzvah it all happened right there

it was a culturally and materially self-sufficient world in a lot of ways

on December 4th 1952 this community was

told that Robert Moses was going to take their homes what they wore got the same

letter it was a very typical Robert Moses letter your homes are in the path

of you already approved course price expressway and you have 90 days to get

out now this was 1952 it was not the

year of protests and what this community tried to do was then very new and they

thought for a while that they were gonna win their Assemblyman said they would

never approve it this state senator said it would never be approved and Robert F

Wagner jr. who was running for mayor then solemnly promised in his election

campaign that he would never approve this route for the Cross Bronx Expressway

but of course by this era it wasn't the mayor's word that mattered or borough

presidents word that mattered or an assemblyman zora senators the only word

that mattered as to where highway was going to go in New York with Robert

Moses they seem to think that they have a choice that they'd rather stay in the

houses that they've lived in August on the whole federal arterial aid program

running at the 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 have been all no housing that there'd be no public

improvements the individual has to yield it matters of this kind of the entire

country for the advantages needs of the majority of people

and there's just no other way out no there's no other way out in the end the

opposition never had a chance on April 23rd 1953 at a hearing of the board of

estimate at City Hall the Bronx borough president underwent a mysterious change

of heart after a few whispered words with Robert Moses not long after the new

mayor Robert F Wagner jr. abruptly switched his position to and in the

summer of 1955 the stunned residents of East Tremont looked on work began on one

of the most awesome public works projects in the city's entire history

this is what it's like to build the Great Highway through the greatest city in the world

when the guy who built the Burma Road general Thomas F hour came here with his

chief aide Chapin they looked at this and they said we thought the Burma Road

was tough it was nothing compared to this when they came here this valley

that you see here was of course filled with apartment houses so they had to

demolish scores of six and seven storey apartment houses but that was really

nothing compared to the problem they were going to have to blast through

the ridge there they knew that building this road was going to take ten or

twelve years in fact it took 12 year they knew they couldn't interrupt the subway service

we're gonna have to keep that subway line running while they blasted through

that Ridge also inside that Ridge is one of the world's largest storm sewer mains

gas mains electric lines Telegraph cables sewers of all types a whole mass

of utility lesson moses was going to have to ram this road through there

while keeping all those things in operation i remember standing on the

ground parts of the concrete and watching the engineering job which was

quite magnificent than Sablan because you could see the destruction in one

direction everything was being smashed to the east and to the west nothing had

been done yet so it looked like a completely intact city and yet you knew

it was like the artillery shells were gonna come down on it you know in a year

in two years in a month they didn't tell us and all I could think of was that this

didn't have to be now that very afternoon as it happened I had an

interview with Robert Moses and I was asking him about this expressway and I

was trying to find a polite way to address the subject and I said was it

perhaps more difficult to build an expressway through a crowded City than

to build a Parkway in empty Long Island he said no no not at all not really I

said well what about the chorus proxy business I said no there was no real

trouble up there I said what was their hardship for the people said no no he

said they just stirred up the animals there so I just held fast and that was

all we had to do and of course it was all he had to do because that was the

reality of political power in New York at that time

year after year the rampage of destruction went on as Robert Moses

rammed one expressway after another across communities in Brooklyn Queens

Staten Island and the Bronx thirteen massive roads in all and more than a

hundred and thirty miles of concrete shattering no fewer than twenty one

separate neighborhoods end up ending the lives of more than a quarter of a

million people the impact of that onslaught on the fragile ecology of New

York's working-class neighborhoods would continue to reverberate for generations

the car is not a neutral actor on the

urban landscape the car brings mobility and it brings problems

Moses only saw the mobility he never saw the problems if you owned a store in the

area of the Cross Bronx Expressway suddenly a third of your customers were

gone and half of those that remained were now on the other side of the

highway it knocked down all kinds of places that were the glue of

neighborhood life leaving a world in tatters leaving pieces of neighborhoods that were known

viable that could no longer attract the new residents that help keep rents up

that helped keep property values up that made the whole proposition of living in

a place or owning property in a place a long-term proposition that you could

sustain so the Grand Concourse you know just hits rock bottom in these

decades places like Mott Haven hit rock bottom to become part of the poorest

congressional district in the entire country because of the many many sorrows

that the Bronx has been inflicted with I was stood on the ramparts of the

concourse and said someday I'll get that basket and there were a lot of other

people too who was standing there with me and watching the job and said we hate

that creep someday we'll get him I mean he'd made a lot of enemies over the

years you know people who are willing to do anything to get him we don't pay too

much attention to the crews has too many

critics we ought to get rid of someone

and so the frenzy of building went on as the expressways drove through and the

tall towers rose and whole districts were demolished to make room for

high-rise housing projects and building after building of glass and steel by the

60s we knew that urban renewal was a failure we knew that it had taken the

heart and the gut out of cities but New York's urban renewal had started in the

50s and was moving along like an unstoppable juggernaut and there were of

course deals made between the government and between the real-estate people and

developers it was nothing that those of us who cared about could stop there was

a done deal

in 1956 a 30 year old poet named Allen Ginsberg living on East 7th Street in

the village sought to capture the increasingly impersonal and alien

landscape of the city which he depicted as the insatiable Old Testament God

Moloch to whom children were ritually sacrificed

what's fakes of cement and aluminum packed open their skulls and ate up

their brains and imagination

Maalik the incomprehensible prisons

Moloch the crossbones soulless jailhouse and Congress of Sorrows

mark whose buildings are judgment

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows

Molly who skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovah's

Maalik Maalik robot apartments

invisible suburbs skeleton Treasuries

demonic industries spectral Nations

invincible madhouses

they broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven pavements trees

radios tons

wake up in Moloch like streaming out of the sky

Allen Ginsberg 1956

as the buildings rise as the skyscrapers get bigger as the mechanism of the city

becomes more and more dehumanized as the human being a dwarf as finally gigantic

thousand windows Moloch's are created that look down on the individual and

dwarf the individual and intimidate the individual and then you find the

individual at the mercy of the people up in the big towers that the person has no

control over the guy living on these twelve Street has no idea what's going on

and still the building went on at the southern tip of the island

hundreds of historic buildings would soon be razed to the ground to make room

for two immense rectangular towers that would eventually soar higher than the

Empire State Building itself far out across the harbour meanwhile

Robert Moses had commenced work on yet another epic project a mighty bridge the

longest in the world that would eventually span the great narrows

through which Verrazano and Henry Hudson himself had first sailed so many centuries before

by then most of the more than 600 miles of highway Robert Moses would construct

in and around New York were either complete or well underway and Moses

himself was reaching the very epigenome

well he held 12 public jobs at once which meant he had the overseeing power

for every piece of public construction in New York not just the highways the public housing

projects in the parks he built but everything sewers catch basins no one

could move without Robert Moses approval Robert Moses who built 627 miles of

highway never drove a car in his life except for a couple of driving lessons

unsuccessful ones that he took in 1922 his car but he had this huge limousine

of course his license plate and his car when you were in it with him you

felt like you were insulated from the world the seats were far back you couldn't see

out the windows and they were covered in leather so fine that you really felt

that you're in library or find men's club when you were in his car so he had

no idea in many ways of what he had ruined

but all the new building so much of it authorized controlled or overseen by

Moses himself could not disguise the fact that by 1960 New York was a city

that seemed to be spiraling into ever deeper trouble you're beginning to get

people noticing that these highways and the new Civic Center's and projects are

in fact destroying vast amounts of space that had been devoted to manufacturing

all those huge projects along the East River are replacing in fact acres and

acres of small workshops and manufacturers the big civic center that

goes up in downtown Brooklyn you know wipes out vast amounts of thriving

business we're not talking about eradicating slums anymore I mean they're

using the word they're saying oops you're blighted you go you know up

you're a slum you go but in fact these are real working-class neighborhoods and

they're organized around real manufacturing centers across the five boroughs even

neighborhoods not ravaged by highways and urban renewal had begun to stagnate

and decline by 1960 not a single mile of new subway track had been laid in more

than 20 years banks and commercial lenders had all but written off the

city's aging housing stock and the census that year revealed an ominous new

trend as the flight to the suburbs begun ten years before now began to accelerate

dramatically the first challenge for New York is going to be the decline of the

tax base in the 1950s and 1960s as white middle-class New Yorkers flee the city

you know after World War two five hundred thousand white Brooklyn Heights

move out of that borough in 20 years now the population of the borough remains

the same because more than five hundred thousand black people move in but

ultimately the effect of it is actually extraordinary the we've replaced

middle-class communities with poor communities and we've isolated poor

people inside inner cities with very few economic opportunities very little

chance of mobility

and there was more trouble to come a suburbanization and white flight

continued and the flight of industry begun 10 years before accelerated

dramatically another exodus was underway on the waterfront where a revolution in

shipping methods was causing the great port itself the city's lifeblood and

mainstay for more than three and a half centuries to spiral into decline

where there were a hundred thousand and more or longshoremen in New York in 1950

as you begin to shift a containerization you just need one guy in a cab and

somebody else to hook the thing on to the Container maybe one guy just to kind

of ease it into place and they lift these whole containers they need lots of

space for that well New York City doesn't have lots of space you need

hundreds of acres to stack up the containers to move 18-wheel tractor

trailers trucks to turn around well they found that from the New Jersey side so

in these two huge areas just these two industrial jobs Harbor jobs New York

City hemorrhages in those let's say 15 or 20 years really after the end of

World War two and I think it's one of the ways of noticing how to make the

city work if the port doesn't work the city's not going to work

and that sense of the thriving noisy

dirty exuberant waterfront it's gone now

take a ride down the west side drive now what's left of it you see some of the

piers just riding into the river like bad teeth there's no people working on

them you have the one luxury liner pier but that's not what it was up until 1962

will you see liner at the liner if a liar

maybe the great symbol of what happened to that waterfront is one of its

greatest attractions right now which is the intrepid which is a ship that

doesn't sail it's got a flight deck covered with ferocious looking jet

warplanes whose noses appointed straight at H&H bagels it's crowded every weekend

but it doesn't go anywhere so it employs people really as a function of memory

rather than of anything that's active

with new thriving the museum by 1962 New

York seemed too many people to have lost its way only 30 years before f scott Fitzgerald

had stood atop the Empire State Building and gazed out into the endless expanse

of blue and green that stretched beyond the city's borders filled with despair

to see that the city had limits now a new kind of despair could be discerned

from the city's tallest towers the blue and green that had once marked New

York's limits had turned to gray and brown and signified something more

ominous still the limitless suburban sprawl that was now superseding the city

an endless agglomeration of highways parking lots and tract housing developments punctuated by the

deteriorating cores of older urban areas that now stretched almost continuously

from Boston to Washington New York itself stood at the very center of what

the French demographer Jean Gutman called megalopolis an immense area that

by 1960 was home to more than 40 million inhabitants nearly one in four Americans

but by now many wondered if the very notion of a center still had any real

meaning or whether cities themselves had

any reason for continuing at all

out for a walk after all week in bed

I find them tearing a part of my block

as usual everything in New York is torn down before you have had time to care

for it you would think the simple fact

of having lasted threatened our cities

like mysterious fires James Merrill

until the first blows fell no one was really convinced that Penn Station would

really be demolished or that New York would permit this monumental act of

vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age

any city gets what it admires and will pay for and ultimately deserves

and we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but the monuments we destroy

ADA Louise Huxtable

one of the worst things that's happened in New York's history is the loss of

Penn Station Penn was so traumatic because this was something that belonged

to everybody and that people felt was so beautiful and that they were so proud of

it I think I stood for granted I felt that it you know it couldn't

possibly be torn down could you tear down the Grand Canyon and then in wars

and they put this really disgusting rabbit warren in its place

how tragic coughs and so many Americans will never know what it was like to

arrive in New York have the first time in your life at Penn Station

it was spectacular if you had never been to New York before you came into the

city for the first time you came out and there you were in this breathtaking

man-made wondrous architectural place

finsih Scully says that we used to come in to New York like gods when we came

into Penn Station now we come in to the present Penn Station like rats it was one of the

worst things to happen to an American treasure not just in New York in the

whole country Pennsylvania Station the greatest

architectural monument of the Imperial Age of rail had stood for more than half

a century at the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street in New York when in the

spring of 1961 the financially troubled Pennsylvania Railroad announced plans to

tear the Magnificent structure down and replace it with a high-rise glass and

steel office tower and sports facility hoping it would bring in more money

though some voices were raised in protest the coalition of architects

writers and historians who tried to stop the demolition could do nothing to save

Penn Station from the Wreckers ball and two years later on the morning of

October 28 1963 the demolition began

it would take more than three years in all to pull the great stone structure down

one by one the enormous Doric columns winged eagles and granite angels that

had ornamented its facade were cut down carted away and dumped in a

foul-smelling swamp in the New Jersey Meadowlands

it is inconceivable that Penn Station was destroyed demolished for one of the

sorest replacements that one could ever imagine

everything about the ambition of Penn Station and of the great railroad

stations expresses the kind of power that had been concentrated in New York

the loss of it was a sad commentary on the ideology of modernism the belief

that new is better the belief that modern efficiency or that the profiting

from new construction is an adequate replacement for the traditions the

heritage and the real meaning of places in people's lives

the loss of Penn Station seemed to many an irrefutable confirmation that the age

of rail had come to an end and at the age of the automobile had triumphed and

in many ways it had but more than most people understood at the time the

destruction of Penn Station had marked a crucial turning point in the life of New York City

it's when that comes down that a sense

of sacrilege really activates people it's destroying the past it is symbolic

of the triumph of the auto era over the old interconnected mass transit

operations it generated for many people a different attitude about the new you

know maybe the tradition of the new you know wasn't something that we should

celebrate someone critically I think what was game was even more important

than what was lost and what was lost was of course one of the last really

magnificent boza constructions in terms of design and space and material and

architectural quality that was lost what

was gained was an enormous groundswell popular groundswell for preservation

that not everything was expendable and that some things were worth a struggle

that you had to find uses you had to find ways to keep the character and the

quality and the continuity of a city it went far beyond actually losing a

station it really was a sense of what is the city and how do you have that

resonance really that you get from the past that makes the city rich and real

and a rewarding place to be that it isn't sterile it isn't the product of

building by the bottom line which of course so much construction is

nobody seems to care about New York except for those of us who live and work here

and we who do care believe the time has come to put a stop to the wanton

destruction of our greatest buildings to

put a stop to wholesale vandalism it may

be too late to save Penn Station but it is not too late to save New York Jane

Jacobs and the action group for better architecture in New York

power is a very unusual weapon but it's a sword whose health as well as it blade

as sharp as a razor so that it cuts into not only the people on whom it is used

but it cuts into the man who is using it changing and we see in the career of

Robert Moses a change a personal change as he gets more and more power and wants

more power in his early days he wanted power for the sake of the things he wanted

built more and more you can chart a decade by decade he chooses the things

to build because of the power that they

will give

by the early 1960s the master plan Robert Moses had laid out for the

remaking of New York more than three decades before was all but complete

hundreds of miles of parkways and expressways and dozens of bridges and

tunnels now connected the city to the suburban reaches of Long Island and

beyond hundreds more had been driven through the outer boroughs themselves

weaving together as Moses himself declared the loose strands and frayed

edges of the Metropolitan arterial tapestry but in all the frenzy of

construction the master builder had never been able to penetrate the heart

of Manhattan itself with a superhighway and in 1961 he resolved to do something about it

fixing in his sights a low-lying area of lower Manhattan stretching from

Chinatown in the south up through the wayward lanes and ancient side streets

of Greenwich Village we simply repeat that cities are created

by and for traffic a city without

traffic is a ghost town the area between Canal Street and 3rd Street a strip

three-quarters of a mile wide is the most depressed area in lower Manhattan

and one of the worst if not the worst

slums in the entire city Robert Moses

condemning the West Village as a slum and the old cast-iron district to the

south as an obstacle to the free flow of traffic by 1961 he had set in motion to

immense federal initiatives a vast urban renewal project that would level

fourteen entire blocks along Hudson Street in the village an 1/8 lane

elevated highway one of his most cherished dreams that would drive

straight across the heart of lower Manhattan from the East River to the

Hudson destroying thousands of historic structures and displacing nearly 10,000

residents and workers it's difficult to even make anyone understand what would

have happened he would have bulldoze a

swath about 225 feet why right across lower Manhattan today that's the cast-on

district to Soho what was the vision what was the aims of a man who would decide for the sake of

the automobile to cut a swath across a city of course a beautiful vibrant

bustling part of the city and you know Robert Moses wanted to build three

expressways across New York City not just the lower Manhattan he will had a

mid Manhattan expressway which would have run across 30th Street in the air

and he wanted to build one again at ground level at a hundred and

twenty-fifth Street and Upper Manhattan Express

for decades nothing had stopped the juggernaut of road building or slowed

the rampage of urban renewal which in the name of rebuilding the city had torn

the heart out of one community after another but this time things would turn out different

determined to save Manhattan from the devastation that had blighted the Bronx

residents of the village banded together and resolved to fight selecting as their

leader a 45 year old journalist and working mother from Hudson Street who

had that very year published a groundbreaking book about the mistakes

of urban planning her name was Jane Jacobs the book was called the death and

life of great American cities and New York would never be the same again and

it started out by saying something like this is an attack on city planning and

then she went through the litany of what the Corbusier and other ideologues had

imagined what a city should be as opposed to what a city who really was

Jane Jacobs was taking on the orthodoxies of planning that had

prevailed in the post-world War two period the ideas of Luca Busey and the

Bauhaus and and other planners and who thought that the city needed to be

renewed there were areas that that that needed help but the kind of help that

she saw that they needed was the assistance to allow people to continue

living in their brand stones in the neighborhoods where they had a harmony

with their neighbors and the destruction of those neighborhoods is one of the

great tragedies of a post-world War two New York

she understood that urban economies are different she understood the sort of

beehive thousand different interdependent functions nature of urban

economies and that's what we lose when we surrender the street to the

automobile when people don't want to be on the street anymore when they reshape

their lives in a way that they're always in privatized space rather than sharing

public space Jane Jacobs knew thirty-five years ago that that was a

recipe for the destruction of what makes cities wonderful

look what they have built low-income projects that become worse centers of

delinquency and vandalism than the slums that were supposed to replace

promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenade or

express ways that eviscerate great cities

this is not the rebuilding of cities this is the sacking of cities Jane

Jacobs she hit the nerve at the right moment with that book it was the right book at

exactly the right moment because she made people see particulars she made

them see the street this had been a period of urban renewal when everything

was on a model on a big plan or a drawing with overlays and she made

people look at the street and what was there she spoke about the eyes on the

street the smaller buildings where people looked out and watched their

neighbors she spoke about the small stores the mom-and-pop stores all of the

things that urban renewal not only was destroying but didn't acknowledge

insisted she basically said that from her house at 5:55 Hudson Street in the

West Village from the sidewalk of her block you could observe what a whole

city was like but it returned the discussion of what urbanism should be

about what New York should be about from big land plan games to individuals shops

streets cars crosswalks networks of people people rich and poor living more

closely together less concerned with the elevator to the 35th floor and more

concerned with the life of the five-story walk-up

under the seeming disorder of the old city wherever the old city is working

successfully as a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets

and the freedom of the city

it is a complex order its essence is the

intricacy of sidewalk use bringing with it a constant succession of eyes

this order is composed of movement and change and we may liken it to the dance

not to a simple-minded precision dance 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 Jane Jacobs

her writing enabled people to imagine her block but also enable people to see to see other blocks

she created maybe without intending to do it a kind of empathy and opened up

possibilities for empathy as a political force in the 60s so that once people

could imagine how other people lived even if they didn't concretely know they

could help them they could work for them they could work together

when she comes out with her book in 1961 it's it's not just that it's brilliantly

written it's pithy its punchy its down-to-earth you know it's enjoyable

it's entertaining its mind capturing it's not just that it's that what she is

doing is providing a counter narrative a counter argument a counter vision about

the cities but it's a vision that says you don't want to break out

manufacturing and send it off somewhere else you don't want to in fact send the

citizens off to the suburbs you what you want to have is an integrated community

a way it through used to be in essence but you want to have people in a

position to walk to work you want small-scale buildings you want people to

be able to watch the streets I'm in crime to some extent it's beginning to

explode in the city in the 50s and a lot of it is you know there's certainly the

pathology of drugs and such but it is also from shattered communities that

have been renewed and removed and the highway doubt--and are in turmoil and

are about you know in the 60s to really explode and not just here again but all

across the country armed with a philosophy capable of countering those

in power Jacobs and her colleagues threw themselves into the fight holding

rallies staging demonstrations and attacking in public hearings and in

print the underlying assumptions behind the culture of the automobile and of urban renewal

and also you know Jacobs is an activist she doesn't just simply write about this

stuff but then she's out in the streets she's demonstrating they are trying to

block the lower Manhattan Expressway they're trying to stop the plan to run

roadways through Washington Square their counter planning they're planning a West

Village building project which is based on rehabilitation as he had in the Bronx

Robert Moses fought them every step of the way marshaling every weapon at his command

to blunt the opposition that was personally affected adversely or he

thinks he is he's gonna be opposed to you don't want it they don't want it

done at all or he wants it done somewhere else what moved away now he

may be wrong in more than a half the case of three-quarters of the case he's

wrong from his own point of view what do you mean by that I mean by that

he doesn't know what's in his own interest he's an smart enough to

visualize what you're going to do once you've built the thing he comes around

and he tells you he was always for it has that happened to you

for decades Robert Moses had simply written roughshod over all those who

disagreed with him brutally negating the power of votes Jane Jacobs charged with

the power of money but this time he had completely misjudged the strength of the

opposition rising up from the streets of Greenwich Village which had been the

center of political dissent in the city since the days of the Triangle

Shirtwaist Factory fire and before I think it maybe couldn't have happened

anywhere else the Lower East Side is different the village is different it

has a history there were very experienced organizers we were not

johnny-come-lately 's we not only knew how to organize we not only knew how to

get publicity we not only knew how to mobilize the troops but we knew how to

form coalition's mafiosi radical Jews

factory owners Chinese merchants people who ordinarily never had anything to say

to each other people who ordinarily hated each other came together to stop

this they discovered that different kinds of people could work together and

really make a difference and generate a kind of power that neither of them by

themselves could ever have imagined they would call a meeting and there

would be three times as many people as anybody expected they'd have to find a

new hall and there was a particular thrill in this at the end of the 50s in

the start of the sixties that we might be able to really make a difference and

that there was a power that was even greater than the power of cars power of people

at the head of the unlikely coalition was Jane Jacobs herself frustrated at

one public hearing she and her colleagues tore up the stenographers

report then declared that since there was no official record of the hearing

there had been no hearing she was arrested and charged with riot

inciting to riot criminal mischief and obstructing public administration but

public support for her actions only grew mr. Moses says that the expressway must

go through regardless of who stands in the way do you agree with that

absolutely not if this expressway goes through it will absolutely be catastrophic

this will set a pattern no doubt there that will be followed there in other

parts of the city and if he has his way he'll criss cross the city north south

east and west bisected tri-sector every which way with expressways

expressways - mr. Moses are ever not any more important than people seeing

evidence of the need of that thing is overwhelming from the point of view of

engineering and traffic and that's all that matters well in the end yes

congestion gets bad enough have to have

it the meantime what happens the Salvio

doesn't want it's a lot

the battle over the lower Manhattan Expressway came to a crucial climax on

the night of December 11 1962 at a tense crowded meeting of the board of estimate

on the second floor of City Hall except for one old man Assemblyman Luis

de Salvio declared I've been unable to find anyone of technical competence who

was for this so-called Expressway and this old man is a cantankerous

stubborn old man who has done many things which may have in their time been

good for New York City but I think that the time has come for the stubborn old

man to realize the to many of his dreams turn out to be nightmares for the city

and this board must realize that if it does not kill this stupid example of bad

city planning but the stench of it will haunt them and this great city for many years to come

Jane Jacobs led the fight against that

expressway that was Moses's last he had many lies to Roz but that really did it

every major politician a Lindsay Koch than a congressman I was in it with the

debates were all over the press nationally and internationally and

somehow the fate of what an inner city is stark but still very modern city

would be was being decided on whether these super projects whether clearance

for housing or foreign expressway could go forward in an existing city or

whether the people who live there had rights to their own environment

in the end jacobs and her allies prevailed what of estimate in an executive session

today voted unanimously to turn down

proposal for a lower Manhattan expressly

I wonder how David felt when he bested Goliath that's the way we felt we felt

we beat Robert Moses you know sir you look belly relieved to you lived right

in the path of the proposed Iran's brewing streak so this is a reprieve

from a long time sentences and yes yes it was the greatest thing the mayor ever

did for the people in that neighborhood because everybody was worried that that

and everybody was getting sick over it so when they hear this news this will be

the best news that they ever hide for Christmas they selected the Christmas

present for the people on Broome Street would you say that the result was in

this case a triumph of public opinion against Moses no there hasn't been

any triumph for anybody yet

Robert Moses always felt that he was a tremendous failure in Manhattan and he

couldn't communicate his vision to people he built highways around the edges but

he could never get through the center people just wouldn't bar it

they stayed attached to their streets to their Kearny houses to their crummy

neighborhoods and kept him from doing this they abstained from the flow they

didn't want to be part of the flow what a result of this is that Manhattan is

one of the very few parts of America where you can live a whole life without

a car okay and where your daily life can depend on the street and on interacting

with other people and on seeing what's gonna happen in ways that you don't plan

and in that way New York is different from I think probably every other

American city it may be the only American city without an expressway

going through the center of town and Moses felt extremely frustrated and

mortified by this but he just couldn't do it the community protests were too great

it was a crucial turning point in the life of New York and in the culture of

cities everywhere with their stunning victory Jacobs and her allies had

reasserted the value of the city block and by extension that of urban public

space itself challenging the most basic assumptions upon which New York had

proceeded since the dawn of the modern age that the new was always better than the old

and there's a sensitivity to history which is also a new dimension to this I

mean you gotta understand that since the 20s it's been modern modern modern and

modern means dump the past break with the past think new think Art Deco think

streamline I think projectile think you know tear down the old stuff not just

because although it may be you know constraint on our ability to make

profits but because it's old because the new is intrinsically superior to the old

but Jacob says wait a minute part of the texture of life in a city is

that people are not just connected to each other on the street by virtue of

being neighbors but they're connected in time there's some sense in the buildings

around you that you know remain that gives you a sense of being part of a

continuum you know the history isn't dead it's not something which has been

transcended today is not the first day of the rest of your life people are

beings in time and they need to be surrounded not entirely but you know to

some extent by the legacy the built environment of the past

three years later Jacobs triumph would be codified in an extraordinary new law

when on April 19 1965 Mayor Robert Wagner signed legislation establishing

the Landmarks Preservation Commission the agency came two years too late to

save Penn Station but in the years to come it would save hundreds of

individual buildings in New York from the records ball along with entire

districts including Brooklyn Heights Greenwich Village and Soho itself

vibrant places Robert Moses had yearned so passionately to transform

well the darkside of Moses character was probably every bit as prominent as the

bright side especially in the context of New York City on the one hand we can

admit the city needed a rubber Moses to adapt and become a modern city on the

other hand Robert Moses saw the city in some sense as a transportation problem

but New York is more than a transportation problem and having created let's say the kind of minimal

number of new roads and new bridges that the city needed to sort of function in

the second half of the 20th century then he began to maybe continue that beyond

what was absolutely essential persons like Jane Jacobs and others began to say

no wait a minute why do we need this road that the whole purpose of things is

not to see how fast you can move traffic that there's a city there that there

people who live in neighborhoods there are people who like it the way it is and

I think that Moses never really understood that the man who never drove

but who created an automobile kind of circumstance a man who was responsible

for planning and building this enormous metropolis and I think you can't escape

the feeling that he really wasn't comfortable in the very city that he was responsible for building

by 1965 the worst rampages of urban renewal were over and the long fateful

career of Robert Moses was drawing to a close but nothing could stop the

onslaught of forces that in the decade to come would break over New York City

and over older urban places everywhere as the bill for nearly half a century of

massive social change physical upheaval and economic transformation finished

coming do I think that when we finished the city form the urban formed when

traffic lands and freeways and tall buildings and business districts become

our priority and we forget about people in neighborhoods we actually forget

about what is the lifeblood of the city one of the things that we ended up doing

by focusing on the urban form by building taller bigger faster better is

that we actually achieved physically what we wanted to by the 1960's New York

City has actually gone through probably one of the greatest urban building booms

in the history of mankind the problem is antonie financial crisis it's in

financial crisis because we neglected neighborhoods for 40 years

to a startling degree the vast river of federal funds that had poured into the

city for nearly 20 years and only served to accelerate anti urban trends begun

long before hastening the flight of industry in the middle class to the

suburbs and beyond while traffic New York's most vulnerable citizens in

rapidly expanding ghettos at the heart of an inner city increasingly plagued by

deteriorating finances rising crime falling city services and worsening race

relations

with resources dwindle and the needs of New York's poorest citizens on the runs

years of simmering racial and social tension began to erupt into open

conflict on the city streets in the summer of 1964 riots once again ripped

through Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant when an off-duty policeman shot and

killed a 15 year old boy the violence that ensued echoing even greater

violence in cities across America would continue for five full days and cast a

shadow over the last of Robert Wagner's three terms as mayor his successor a

liberal ex congressman from the Upper East Side named John Lindsay promised

New Yorkers a fresh start but from the day he took office on January 1st 1966

the city would be battered by one crisis after another as the first in a series

of crippling citywide strikes by municipal employees among the lowest

paid workers in the city brought New York's Transit System to a complete

standstill

and the working people the Catalan people in many ways I think New York in

the 60s and 70s embodied the 60s and 70s in all the ambiguities and all the

tensions in American society you have a civil rights movement that is raising

all sorts of problematic questions for people about the nature of power in the

nature of access to power at the same time you have an economic shift you have

money draining off to support the Vietnam War we can't acknowledge that we're really

fighting the war and so we do deficit spending it's a terrible blow ultimately

economically and all those things are happening not only in the country but

right in the city and so you have a very quick shift in the vision of New York

from a city with promise to a city of devastation of poor people of complaining people of crumbling

buildings of inadequate services meanwhile the suburbs are booing people

are moving elsewhere where labor costs might be less expensive where

opportunities are different and what you're left with in is a city that

nobody wants to support the 1960s and 1970s were not good for American cities

this was a time when everybody thought the suburbs were the wave of the future

just a matter of time until really all cities and all older neighborhoods were

abandoned in favor of the car in favor of the corporate office park in favor of

the suburban residential subdivision it was a time of fiscal crisis as the

country essentially spent its money on defense or Vietnam and is in such money out of cities so that

the early 1970s mad city was had an amazing financial crisis brought on by

borrowing too much money and perhaps living beyond its means but also it no

longer had the schools were beginning to decline the crime rate was beginning an

explosive increase in New York City as in other places the Bronx was burning

every night there were fires that you could see and so there was an orange

glow we heard about Fort Apache who's

dangerous police percent by 1970 the

city that had emerged from the second world war as the most powerful

metropolis on earth and begun to spiral down into an abyss of urban chaos and

despair almost without precedent in American urban history well the worst

feature of New York and the period for me of the neighborhood that were falling

apart a lot of the South Bronx in the course of the 70s was burnt down the

biggest industry in the Bronx became Horace the 1976 World Series whether it

was a night game in Yankee Stadium the Goodyear blimp showed by the model away

a building was burning down and Howard Cosell said what's wrong with these

people that they burned down their houses some people began to suggest that it had

to do with the character of the landlords in the fact that you could

collect more money on insurance than you could collect in grant on buildings that

were old and needed constant refinancing and ironically that were redlined

because the whole Bronx was redlined in this Bureau so you couldn't you couldn't

fix up the building but you could fix it down

by 1973 more than 2000 City blogs had been burned to the ground more than

43,000 departments had been destroyed and the South Bronx had become a symbol

around the world of urban decline there was this brief period in the 1970s

especially where it seemed like New York was really gonna be further and further

off the chart that really did feel like neighborhoods were being sequentially

abandoned by their owners you could see in a lower Eastside landlord arson was

rampant because that was the only way they'd ever be able to make money they

couldn't get people to move into these places that they might as well burn them

down and it really seemed like this was just going to happen all throughout the island

for the city itself there was one final chapter to come in the long downward

spiral begun three decades before all through John Lindsay second term as tax

revenues faltered and expenses soared the beleaguered mayor had refused to cut

the crucial public programs that had been New York's hallmark since the days

of the depression using hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for

long-term capital projects to cover the mounting shortfall borrowing hundreds of millions more to

make up for that and rolling over the ever mounting debt from one year to

another very bad accounting practices the city was in effect borrowing to buy

groceries people and political institutions should borrow money for

capital reasons we were the city was borrowing money in order to meet its

current bills and you can't do that forever I think that's culminated in the fiscal

crisis in the early 1970s because it kind of brought it all together sure was

partly because the city was living beyond its means and trying to maintain

this kind of old New Deal attitude of building a public hospitals and public

colleges and generous public welfare benefits even when the other estimation

wasn't following behind

by 1975 more than two billion dollars a year were going simply to service New

York's enormous 11 billion dollar debt which was increasing now at an alarming

rate with each passing month and threatening to capsize is the new

administration of John Lindsay's successor mayor it'd be a I don't want

to know if New York City is going down the drain now is it safe to say not

going down the drain that October the apocalyptic reckoning city leaders had

been attempting to stave off for nearly ten years finally came due when the

consortium of banks that had freely lent the city billions of dollars over the

previous decade abruptly suspended New York's borrowing privileges until the

city had put its financial house in order within days the city was facing a fiscal

crisis unlike any since the darkest hours of the depression the bank said

looking at how much money in New York City owed we're not gonna lend you any

more money and nobody believed they would ever do that and they just shut

the window the bank's essentially sits in New York give us six billion dollars

back now please and New York City couldn't do that so in a sense New York

City was bankrupt or virtually Bangor then the fiscal crisis is the process of

getting six billion dollars to pay back the banks of the money that they once

loaned to the city with the prospect of bankruptcy staring them in the face

city leaders turned in desperation to the one source that could possibly save

the federal government submitting a request for more than two billion

dollars in emergency loan guarantees the city's last hope of avoiding complete

financial ruin President Gerald Ford stunning response came in to speech on

October 29th at the National Press Club in Washington responsibility for New York City's

financial problems is being left on the front doorstep of the federal government

unwanted and abandoned by its real

parents and when New York City now asked the rest of the country to guarantee its

bills it can be no surprise that many

other Americans ask why

municipal default ford concluded would be a good thing for new york forcing the

city to curtail its traditionally spendthrift ways no federal loan

guarantees would be forthcoming the next

day a towering black headline loomed ominously from the front page of The

Daily News Ford to City drop dead

what's astonishing is that the crest of the United States could essentially tell

the greatest city in the Western world to drop that because he didn't say it

exactly but remember those daily news headlines drop dead New York City tells

you just how far in a sense the city and something a city that had sent so many successful

people out into the world should have had more friends by the mid 70s it was

surrounded by people who did not wish the place well and interestingly people

whose own life stories passed through the five boroughs are decamped in Jersey

and Westchester and out on the island and when that Daily News headline comes

out for two city dropped dead instead of recoiling in horror this Aang yeah

drop dead we think you should drop dead too it was a terrible terrible time it really was

instead of looking at this as a treasure of the American scene New York was seen

as representing almost everything that was worst about post-war America

in its blunt and homely way the headline in the Daily News captured is nothing

else and the basic assumption behind President Ford's remarks an assumption

that had been growing more and more commonplace among Americans for years as

the city's social and economic problems multiplied New York like many of the

nation's older cities was plummeting into the abyss New York America's

extraordinary unwieldy experiment in capitalism and democracy hope and greed

had failed New York City of cities

capital of capitalism gateway to America

was going to die and good riddance

grace Paley at one of the great New York writers has a story written early

seventies South Bronx and one of the characters who's like a community

organizer there says the buildings are burning down on one side of the street

and the kids are trying to put something together on the other and this could be

a parable of one of the great achievements of that period from a lot

of the neighborhoods that were most devastated in New York the earliest form

in which most people who weren't part of that neighborhood saw it with the

graffiti that appeared on the subways in the 70s and this was on a very rickety

decayed generation of great trains they painted enormous ly exuberant colored

names and reliefs and mottos

and you can see many films now a great day a great neighborhood and l-train and

certainly the l-train is like a rainbow

and it's thrilling the next incarnation

was wrapping the earliest form that people saw would be there would be one

kid wrapping with small speakers in a drum track in the subway you know with a

hat open for money and you know these are parables of a

city that's being ruined that's being destroyed and that's saying we can rise

again we come from ruins but we're not ruined and I mean in 15 years it's

become the basic form of world music so it's a field but it's important to

understand that it came from totally burnt-out ruined districts and that's

where it was born and it was born out of this suffering and misery and that a lot

of the creativity that New York is always had has come from the cellars

from the rooms from how the other half lives so an important part of sharing

space and living city life is being able to live through the ways in which the

city itself is torn down and is consumed that is destroyed but also consumes

itself you know if you can do that you can become human in more alive than

you've been before

in the end of course the city didn't die despite all the destruction and

heartbreak of the post-war years despite the demise of neighborhoods and the loss

of industry and the bitter clash of races and classes despite everything as

it had so many times in the past the city - almost everyone's surprise got

back up off the floor and began to revive less than a month after refusing

to come to the city's aid President Ford reversed himself and grudgingly agreed

to approve the city's request for loan guarantees warned by advisers that New

York's demise might trigger a catastrophic domino effect of fiscal

default that would bring down one city after another across the country with

time to put its finances in order city officials moved with startling

dispatch cutting services repaying the city's outstanding loans and balancing

the city budget by 1981 a full year ahead of schedule

in the end the US Treasury made millions of dollars out of its arrangement with

New York I think New York became the

experiment ground for a new national program of austerity to check the power

of labor and to reverse some of the trends of New Deal liberalism it was put

on display and it was created as a kind of negative object example this is

liberalism gone amok this is a kind of degeneration high

moral degeneracy that can only be solved by the old fashioned medicine of fiscal

austerity and it's a program that in the sense was then successful New York and

followed in the 1980s in the country at large the summer of my election I went

for a walk on the Brighton Beach

boardwalk zorka's suddenly I heard a

woman calling mayor mayor and I looked down the boardwalk and there was this

elderly lady she must have been in her late 70s and she came towards me she

took my hand and she looked at me and

she said mayor make it like it was I haven't Stella I still have moose

pimples and I thought to myself as she said it Madame

it never was the way you think it was but I'll try

in the years to come despite the terrible hardships that continued to be

suffered by many of New York's most vulnerable citizens the city would not

only survive but begin to thrive and flourish again in large measure because

the urban qualities that had defined the city since the time of the Dutch began

to reassert themselves not as problems to be solved but as crucial urban values

to be celebrated nurtured and sustained what I think accounts for New York's

success and reinventing itself and at the end of the 20th century for the very

strengths that the Dutch are the first little settlement in the 17th century

made visible the heterogeneity of the city so that everyone was welcome maybe

everyone did not be loved we're not gonna be pleasant we're not gonna hug

you and I can't even say good morning every time we've seen but in the end

opportunity is here people knew it so we have this incredible immigration flows

which accelerate after the mid-1960s with the new immigration laws secondly

we have the same kind of entrepreneurial spirit that the Dutch West India Company

had established in 1624 it has kind of run through New York all the time third

I think it's the density and concentration of deal there's something about the mood of the

place that's directed toward achievement and getting something done fourthly I

think it's always been a kind of an openness to change New York City was

always willing to go with what worked to find the balance to reach a new

understanding by the 1980s as the city's role within

the widening gyre of an increasingly global economy continued to shift and

change the relentless commercial energy that had characterized New York for

nearly four hundred years began to return with a frantic intensity not seen

on Wall Street since the days of the Roaring Twenties by the 1990s though the

days of New York's blue-collar glory were over most of the hundreds of

thousands of jobs that had been lost had been replaced as thousands of new

companies and small businesses streamed back into New York eager to draw on the unique

concentration of talent resources gathered there and attracted

by the very density that had once driven businesses away cities bring a lot of

people together some people feel too many people too big crowds but there's a

Great Commandment of urban life that can be a tremendous source of happiness thou

shalt share space I mean cities in many ways are expensive and inconvenient and noisy and dirty but

the wonderful thing about them is the way they bring people together you

design cities that don't let people get together you're losing what may be most

special and beautiful about them and then of course make people think why

bother to live in a city at all if you don't even have what's most special about the city

by the turn of the century the greatest and most moving sign of the city's

miraculous revival could be seen on the city streets themselves which within ten

years of the end of the fiscal crisis were filled with hundreds of thousands

of newcomers from around the world who had been pouring into New York since the

mid 1960s when the federal government finally reopened the great human gateway

Emma Lazarus had called the Golden Door I mean New York became the kind of port

that it had been at the beginning of the 20th century again and people began

coming in enormous numbers from East Asia from Latin America from Eastern

Europe colonizing neighborhoods that really people considered abandoned the

census Department says that now something like 43% of New Yorkers you

know have been born outside the USA and they said that they haven't been

comparable figure since 1910

by the end of the 20th century the fiscal crisis had dwindled to a memory

and New York seemed to have reinvented itself once again the epic

transformations of the previous half-century had left the city with a

host of intractable problems including failing schools a crumbling

infrastructure and immense disparities of income race and opportunity but the

city had come back and Americans everywhere had begun to recognize the

crucial role bourbon places had played in the tapestry of American history

carrying on the experiment New York had begun on the banks of the Hudson four

hundred years before

the experiment is how close can rich and

poor live before the fabric completely falls apart how close can you put ethnic

groups that don't like one another much how much can you promise people about a

rich and privileged future and then not really be able to deliver before they

rise up and say enough and the answer here over and over and over again has

been that the fabric becomes tattered that sometimes the fabric even becomes

torn but the fabric survives

you

you

some unfamiliar with history because complaints about New York and

predictions of its demise have been so common for so long and certainly go back

at least a hundred years and more I think we're living in one of the glory

times I think near the saga of New York City is nowhere near to being over the

city has had good times and bad times and it will continue to is Vanitas

George M Cohen or refer to Broadway as a fabulous invalid well I think New York

City is also in many ways a fabulous envelope New York City has become so hot

that it's unbelievable in the early 90s it was just the opposite it was the

closest that it's ever been to 1929 Depression today New York City is hotter

than it ever was in the roaring 20s in the roaring 80s right now New York City

is the hottest it's ever been by far you feel in New York City the energy coming

up out of the sidewalk she said you know that you were in the midst of something

tremendous something and if something tremendous hasn't yet happened it's just

about to happen yeah it's it's always a lot

I can hear now it's it's a maintenance

the sound of maintenance that's it

because it's the ultimate battle with entropy there's no other more entropic I

mean it's all of the lights the World Trade Center that are out at night on

allow our sucking Indian point a nuclear power station it's one big live wire

eight million people jammed together on

a very small amount of space people talk about how dirty our city is it's

amazingly clean for the huge numbers of people coming from so many different

experiences Olivia I think that the story ought to be told and it's amazing

a New York exists and it does and it

goes on from day today today when you

fly into the city at night and you see the lights in this city and the way this

city lights up like this Crystal Palace it is an unbelievable sight to see

Manhattan lit up at night from the sky

and so not only are you in awe of the lights and the beauty of it

but being from New York being in New York when you come back into that it's a

mo