Streetcar- A Film by Jasper Wood, pt 1
Jasper Wood's short film "Streetcar" is a poetic documentary of life in a big American city centered on the experience of riding its ...
Interview with Anthony Flint, Author of “Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on America’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City”
In your new book, â Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New Yorkâs Master Builder and Transformed the American City ,â you write about Jane Jacobâs efforts to stop Robert Mosesâs major highway plans, which would have decimated Greenwich Villageâs Washington Square Park, major parts of the West Village and SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. Please describe the contrasting visions of New York City offered by Moses and Jacobs, and how they came into conflict.
They certainly are a stark contrast and both remarkable people in their own ways, and thatâs why it was so much fun to write this book and why I think itâs a marvelous and theatrical story.
She was the housewife from Scranton, who never got a college degree and who shunned credentials, moved to New York and fell in love with its old neighborhoods, and was entirely self-taught as she wrote â The Death and Life of Great American Cities ,â which revolutionized planning and permanently changed the way we think about cities. She identified the elements of the well-functioning urban neighborhood, its scale and mix of uses, and the successful public space â and saw that the excesses of modernism and the policy of urban renewal were hurting more than helping our cities. So she rose up to take on the establishment, in classic David vs. Goliath fashion.
He was the power broker, dapper and swaggering, on the swim team at Yale and with a PhD from Oxford, who lorded over his own private government and single-handedly built the New York we know today â its bridges, tunnels, and parkways, parks and swimming pools, Jones Beach, the U.N. building, Shea Stadium, and a long list of public works and urban infrastructure that also endure to this day. He wanted to save New York from economic decline, make it easy to get around, and to provide ample housing. Some of his accomplishments were laudable, but as he consolidated power he got a bit carried away and wouldnât accept criticism â setting up the clash with Jacobs over roadways and the cross-town expressways and the urban-renewal bulldozers and bleak towers in the park.
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