NYC, Jane Jacobs, and the Fight to Save SOHO
The urban fabric always could have been drastically different
The year is 1968. 51-year-old author and activist Jane Jacobs takes the stage at a local hearing about the new highway proposed to go through the southern part of Manhattan. The project is called Lomex, or Lower Manhattan Expressway, and has stirred controversy ever since it was suggested by the famed public works director Robert Moses.
The event was a formality scheduled by the New York State Department of Transportation so that they could say they collected public opinions. They expected it to be a by-the-book meeting, but it turned out to be nothing of the sort.
Soon the crowd was chanting “We want Jane!” over and over, summoning the famous urbanist to the mic. She denounced the project, encouraging those in protest to join her on stage, where the stenographer’s notes were soon strewn about as the State DOT tried in vain to control the situation. Jacobs would soon be arrested and taken to the police station, even as protestors continued to shout “We want Jane!” outside the jail.
This meeting, and Jane’s subsequent arrest, would turn the tide of opinion surrounding Lomex, a superhighway project that would have cut across Manhattan and destroyed a large chunk of what is now known as SOHO (which was then a poor and struggling commercial area).
The area was ultimately saved because of the efforts of many dedicated New Yorkers, including the well-known author Jane Jacobs.
In the book Wrestling with Moses, the author Anthony Flint recounts the clash between Jane Jacobs and her nemesis, Robert Moses. This story brings us front and center into the struggles for urban space and neighborhoods that would define a generation of New Yorkers, and change Urban Planning for years to come.
The battle over the interstate project wasn’t the first time Moses and Jacobs found themselves on the opposite sides of a fight. There were several battles between the two in Mid-20th-Century New York, all of which Flint describes in gritty detail. Jacobs had won an early victory in the battle to save Washington Square Park in the late 50s, and then a few years later rescued her own neighborhood — Greenwich Village — from an Urban Renewal project.
The fight over the Lower Manhattan Expressway is the third battle detailed in Wrestling with Moses. Lomex was, in many ways, the pet project of the famed public works director Robert Moses, who was arguably the most powerful man during that era of planning and construction in New York City.
Moses’ influence in the city can hardly be overstated. Any projects he backed became inevitabilities, so skilled he was in brokering deals and gaining influence in the city’s political climate.
With money promised by the Federal government (thanks to the 1956 Federal Highway Act), Moses thought that it was now or never to build a high-speed expressway that connected New Jersey and Brooklyn across Manhattan Island.
On the other side ideologically was the historic preservation movement, which sought to preserve notable buildings and build neighborhood pride in New York City. With the destruction of beautiful buildings like Penn Station still controversial with locals, it was becoming increasingly easy to garner support in favor of a saving, rather than destroying, older structures with architectural value.
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