 Interesting!
This short book details the protests inspired and led by Jane Jacobs against various projects spearheaded by Robert Moses in New York's Greenwich Village in the 1950's and 60's.
It is extremely well researched and much more substantial than the biography of Jane Jacobs by Alice Alexiou. Actually, it deals not only with Jane Jacobs' life but also with Robert Moses'. Anecdotally, it even includes poems written by Jacobs and Moses in their student days! The photographs add significantly to the contents and are very revealing of the times.
The essence of the book is narrative but the analytical epilogue is of the greatest interest with respect to the true impact of both protagonists on our cities and our ways of thinking. It could actually be read quite separately from the rest of the work.
Sadly, the layout in the hardcover version is blandly traditional with the strictly black and white photographs grouped together in unnumbered pages towards the middle of the book.
Worse, the writing style is hampered by an organization that is thematic and not strictly chronological. This leads of course to some repetition from one chapter to another. The lack of chronology sometimes also confusingly occurs within a single paragraph. The High Line Park of 2009 is for instance introduced in the discussion of freight transportation in the 60's.
Overall, however, this book is warmly recommended to those curious and concerned with the development of cities and its history.
 Wrestling with Moses
This book provides an excellent overview of the evolution of community activism in New York City during the first half of the 20th century. The city experienced massive change triggered by dependence on the automobile and the flight to the suburbs. Robert Moses was the proverbial 800-pound gorilla who thought he knew what was best for New York and set out to create a model for the rest of the nation's cities. You've heard the expression--never underestimate the power of a woman--well, this is especially true regarding one named Jane Jacobs. The principles of community that Ms. Jacobs so fervently advocated are contained in her most well-known book, //The Death and Life of Great American Cities//.
Jane Jacobs took on that 800-pound gorilla. Among his projects, Robert Moses had a grand scheme for creating new traffic patterns in New York. Ms. Jacobs and her family were impacted when West Greenwich Village and the Washington Square Park were facing relocation and the destruction of their charming, though somewhat shabby, neighborhood. With the help of friends, neighbors, and her children, she thwarted Moses on more than one occasion. She had the guts to publicly state, "The city is like an insane asylum run by the most far-out inmates. If the expressway is put through, there will be anarchy."
This is a fascinating and well-written account of the movement behind the rebirth of many of the successful cities in this country.
Reviewed by Joseph Arellano
A good counterpoint to the Moses stories
Robert Moses has been the 500 pound gorilla in NY history for so long that it is good to see that he was not invincible. The book is written with great admiration for Jacobs, but doesn't descend into vitriol when discussing Moses.
Lessons for today from yesterday
"Wrestling With Moses" is the true story of how a small group of neighbors challenged, and stopped, rampaging development in New York City, led by Robert Moses. Jane Jacobs formed her ideas for her brilliant "Death and Life of Great American Cities" in the struggles to save Washington Square Park, and many neighborhoods, countering Moses's approach of total demoition and replacement by roads and instant slum housing projects. It is hard today to comprehend how Moses held so much power, staying in charge through five mayors, but Jane Jacobs and her neighbors offer lessons for taking on today's stone-wall bureaucracies. Anthony Flint clearly likes the late Jane Jacobs, but gives Moses his full due. A good read for anyone interested in politics, urban studies, or involved in fighting wrong-headed development (like the proposed I-10 Bypass in my rural Arizona neighborhood).
 Too Elaborate a Plan, Too Lame an Execution
According to the urbanist and civic activist Jane Jacobs, author of the modern classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," a city is made great by the diversity of its neighborhoods, which are in themselves the organic growth and interactions of buildings, streets, and people: cities are not planned, but grown and nurtured by the people who live in them. That's the completely opposite approach of the master builder Robert Moses, who saw New York City as wild, sprawling, and restless, and which needed to be tamed, structured, and controlled by the sheer power of his will and imagination. It is the epic struggle between these unlikely enemies -- one a fiercely ambitious Yale graduate who controlled most of the city's construction and a soft-spoken self-educated mother of three -- that the former Boston Globe architecture correspondent Anthony Flint chronicles in "Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City."
In the epilogue Mr. Flint writes that Jane Jacobs offered help and information to a young Newsday reporter by the name of Robert Caro while he was researching his epic "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York." The book was much too long, and Robert Caro had to cut out the chapter on Jane Jacobs. Mr. Caro was writing a book about Robert Moses, and there is little reason to suspect that, so busy with his epic battles with American President Franklin Roosevelt and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as well as overseeing his vast empire that could at any time be responsible for over two thousand construction projects, Mr. Moses paid any attention to a committed but ultimately powerless urban activist by the name of Jane Jacobs. By the time of Jane Jacobs' ascent, culminating with the 1961 publication of her classic tome on what makes a city great the seeds of Robert Moses' decline had already been planted: his arrogance, his pride, his absolutely loyalty to his corrupt functionaries, his disregard for and contempt of his fellow beings, and his relentless power-mongering all caused his spectacular descent from power after spending a lifetime methodically and meticulously rising to the top. To suggest that Jane Jacobs or one book or one movement could take down this titan as Anthony Flint and many thinkers suggest is slightly ridiculous. Robert Moses made too many enemies, and his ideas didn't work: his highways and transportation grids caused more problems -- mainly traffic -- than they solved, and his urban renewal plans destroyed neighborhoods, livelihoods, and lives. Living in and witnessing the Age of Moses, an intelligent observer such as Jane Jacobs could see exactly what was wrong.
Mr. Flint's book draws on shamelessly from other works, and there is very little original research that the author himself conducted. On his section on Robert Moses Mr. Flint breathlessly summarizes "The Power Broker." Yet, ironically, even though Mr. Flint's book is ostensibly about Jane Jacobs, and Mr. Caro's book is about Robert Moses, it's Mr. Flint's book that best captures the spirit of Robert Moses and Mr. Caro's book that captures best the spirit of Jane Jacobs.
Robert Moses liked to plan big projects and construct them as quickly as he could, and "Wrestling with Moses" certainly feels that way: it sounds like an excellent story, but the story of the struggle reads too artificial and mechanical. Like most of Robert Moses' structures there's no life and soul in "Wrestling with Moses": it's just there.
And if it were a city "The Power Broker" would be Jane Jacob's ideal: each chapter is sprawling, diverse, and overflowing. Each chapter feels like its own neighborhood, with its own collection of diverse people, structures, philosophy, and language. You can roam each chapter of "The Power Broker" at your own pace, feel alive in it, and know that if you come back you'll always find new things to interest you. Like all great pieces of literature and great neighborhoods "The Power Broker" will continue to interact with people in different ways at different times.
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