The Battle for Gotham
Page 30
On this occasion, our mutual friend Mary Nichols was also visiting. Nichols, a resident of Greenwich Village and former columnist for the Village Voice and then an assistant to Mayor Kevin White in Boston, had kept the expressway in the news through her Village Voice coverage when the mainstream press was less interested and editorially supportive.
Both Jacobs and Nichols were intensely concerned about the Westway progress. They both saw a direct link to the Moses Lower Manhattan Expressway. Jacobs and her family had moved to Toronto in 1968 during the Vietnam War when her two sons were draft age. The final defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway occurred after her 1968 departure. Nichols was working and living in Boston and would return to New York soon to work for her old friend and mayor-elect Ed Koch. Yet both urban activists still cared deeply about New York.
On this particular visit, Jacobs and Nichols both grilled me about the Westway fight and persuaded me to write about Westway—the twelve-lane highway proposed to be built on landfill along the West Side of Manhattan—when criticism of it in the press was rare.2 Did I know how critical it was to the future of New York? Did I realize how important to a city its public transit is? Did I realize that so many American cities were dysfunctional because they had spent decades investing in automobile access while destroying the neighborhoods, downtowns, and transit systems they all once had? Did I realize that New York could go in the same direction? No. I had not realized any of these things to the extent they were presenting them. My focus was on neighborhood and downtown regeneration around the country: the South Bronx, Savannah, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere. I had just started research for my first book, The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way (1989).
I had been coming to Toronto to explore causes of recent urban decay with Jane, as well as to share with her the signs of rebirth that I was observing in my research but that conventional observers and professionals were dismissing as ad hoc and too inconsequential. She was so enthusiastic about what I was describing as the early rebirth of the South Bronx generated by community-based improvisations that she insisted I take her there when she was next in New York. We subsequently visited the People’s Development Corporation and Banana Kelly in the South Bronx in 1978, led by Ron Shiffman, then head of the Pratt Center for Community and Economic Development, who first took me there in 1977.
She was, however, relentless in pushing me to stop and write about Westway. In many ways, the most important aspect of our expanding relationship was her willingness to be critical of what I was saying or thinking. My slowness to recognize the significance of Westway was one of those occasions. Sure, transit was an important issue in the urban regeneration story, but I did not yet view it as an overarching one. Jane and Mary turned my head on this topic. Transportation, they convinced me, was central to the economic, physical, and social life of all of urban America.
Persuaded, I decided to switch gears. Michael Kramer, then an editor at New York Magazine, liked the subject, if I could get Jane to consent to an interview on it. A few months later, she agreed. These kinds of interruptions were intolerable when she was writing. Consenting to this interview, however, was not just rare but sudden, and I asked why. “Westway is different,” she said. “I just think it’s the single most important decision that New York is facing about its future and whether it can possibly reverse itself, or whether it’s hopeless,” she explained. “This is in part because of the practical damage that Westway will do to the city. And it’s also very important as a symptom of whether New York can profit by the clear mistakes and misplaced priorities that it’s had in the past or whether it just has to keep repeating them.”
Her son Jimmy, who lives down the block, told her she was crazy to agree to this interview. “But I told him, ‘Jimmy, this is important for the fight, and what if that Westway is built and I think, ‘Maybe I could have made some difference; I can’t live with that.’ And he said, ‘Ah yeah, sure,’” she laughed.
We spent many hours over several visits discussing this subject, all of which was taped (the tapes were transcribed).3 The substance went way beyond Westway. She talked a lot about recent New York development history, providing tales and tidbits she had never written or spoken about.
Jacobs’s art is to accessibly outline a specific issue while making clear the broader implications of the substance. So much of what she covered when referring to either the Lower Manhattan Expressway or Westway—like every other issue she wrote or talked about—can be applied to highway and urban renewal fights anywhere.
At its simplest, Westway was just another piece of the Interstate Highway System, stretching from Forty-second Street down to the island’s tip. The complexities are not visible at first. No neighborhoods would have been bisected or erased, although plenty would suffer through the increased traffic of the expanded highway. No land would have been taken away. In fact, land would be added with landfill under which the highway would partially go through a tunnel. Together with the six-lane inland service road, Westway would equal twelve lanes. On top of the landfill, two hundred acres of new city would be created for housing, parks, and commercial development. New highway proposals across the country often looked that simple. Sometimes they still do. Deceptively, the Westway route was drawn as a straight line on all maps. The highly land-consumptive on-and off-ramps were rarely shown. Only two ramps were apparently planned, but it wasn’t clear if more would have been added.
8.2 Jane took special pleasure in the view from her porch down through the whole row of porches. Herschel Stroyman.
As she proceeded through this conversation, Jacobs primarily explained the damage Westway would inflict on New York City and how it would transform the city. But she went way beyond this as well. Most significantly, Jacobs illustrated the importance of any highway debate to the future shape of all cities of any size. This was long before this fundamental debate went mainstream. Essentially, how one views a highway proposal directly relates to one’s fundamental understanding of how a city functions best.
THE HEART OF THE ARGUMENT
Two fundamental points formed the heart of her argument against Westway. The first is that Westway was part of the same original overall highway network plan of 1929, as was the Lower Manhattan Expressway, thus their intrinsic connection. That plan for all of Manhattan, she argued, improperly favored development geared toward the car, not mass transit or the pedestrian. The second point was the internal contradiction between economics and the environment evident in the argument for both highways. “These are really very obvious things, but I don’t think they’re obvious to most of the public,” she said. “The first point is that Westway is only part of the 1929 plan. Just think of that. It’s almost fifty years old, almost half a century old. New York prides itself on being up to date, but it’s being run by a half-century-old plan. Only pieces of it keep surfacing. Nobody would ever consent to the insanity of doing the entire thing. And yet, if, piece by piece, it gets done, the whole thing is inevitable, because each part depends on another.”
In this case, if Westway were built, the same expanded highway would inevitably be necessary from Forty-second Street north and from the Battery south around and up the East Side. Robert Caro, she pointed out, illustrates well in The Power Broker the Moses technique of building a bridge without saying there’s got to be a new or wider highway on either side. “And the bridge gets built,” she said, “and aha, now the wider highway becomes necessary. Or he builds a road and says nothing about a great big bridge that’s going to have to come, and aha, all of a sudden, the bridge is necessary. It’s piecemeal. People would have a fit if they saw the whole thing.” But, she said, that’s the way these highways have been pushed and not just in New York but everywhere. “In essence, the plan is a ring, an oval really, all around the outside of the island, and then it has lacings across the middle. It’s a net, catching Manhattan. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was one of these crosstown lacings for the whole system.”
“The story is told,” Jacobs recalled, that “an actor and an actress wanted to get married at, I think, Marble Collegiate, and they got short-changed there, and somebody said, ‘Go to the little church around the corner.’ It had a different name [Church of the Transfiguration]. They were treated there with dignity. It became the church of theater people and became known as ‘The Little Church Around the Corner.’ This was either before the war in the ’30s, or right after, not long after the Regional Plan was proposed. That would have been the first lacing across Manhattan, but because of the church, they hit resistance. So that piece was dropped. Then there was the hiatus on construction during the war.”
Early tunnels, bridges, and ramps, Jacobs pointed out, were on the periphery of Manhattan. Few viewed them as affecting the city center. “There’s a certain logic, you see, to drawing this through traffic over to the edges,” she said. “But the plan always presupposed these lacings, this whole net, to get cars into the city expeditiously and across town. A Los Angelizing of the whole city.” The “Los Angelizing,” Jacobs said, is what traffic engineers want to do to all cities, a one-size-fits-all approach to any city.
This is probably what they all are taught, that no place within a city should be more than a quarter of a mile from a ramp onto an expressway. Los Angeles comes closest to that. Everywhere in Los Angeles is fed by expressways. This is the basic idea.
And this was always the plan for New York. But you see, it wasn’t evident when it was just on the outside. The 1929 plan did not show entrance ramps, nor do Westway maps. Ramps require enormous demolition to create. The minute the real plan for Los Angelizing Manhattan ever goes into operation, it alarms the hell out of people because the destructive implications become very vivid. The Thirtieth Street crossing got that kind of opposition. The Cross Bronx Expressway did too, but that opposition didn’t succeed.
The road through Washington Square would have been one of those ramps. Yet it wasn’t clear to people for a long time, she said, that it would connect to the expressway.
FIGHTING CITY HALL
“Some people,” she said, “would like New York to turn into a Los Angeles, or don’t have any sense of the highway’s impact on the fabric of the city, or are like Robert Moses, and there are plenty of people like this. There is no use—we found out in these fights—trying to convince these people. You fight them. If you spend all your time trying to persuade the people who really want this, instead of fighting them, you lose. This is the way to get defeated.” This is a key Jacobs principle: cultivate your constituency rather than trying to persuade your opponents. “You could spend all that energy on trying to bring reason to Robert Moses, or people like him, showing him how he was harming the city, and you would waste it all because his idea of improving the city is really to wipe it out and start over with big projects.”
8.3 This cover story of my interview with Jane about Westway gained a lot of attention in 1978. Jane’s voice had not been heard in New York for a number of years. New York Magazine.
People meet with officials at City Hall, hear expressions of empathy, even maybe agreement, think they have made their case, she said. When it doesn’t go their way, they get discouraged. “That’s where the expression ‘You can’t fight City Hall’ comes from. But you can fight City Hall if you understand that trying to fight it is different from trying to persuade. You can’t persuade them, but you can fight them.”
The viability or regenerative potential of some areas is often not easily evident to the casual observer. Thus, officials declare blighted a neighborhood that is anything but. Deterioration along the Westway route was obvious. Buildings had been neglected for a long time in anticipation of the highway. Few people recognized it as a classic condition, like SoHo had been, where the plan for the highway decades earlier made possible the assumption that nothing else could occur there, an illustration of “planners’ blight,” as described in the SoHo chapter.
The question arose about what would happen to traffic without Westway. It would either continue south around the tip of the island or find its way across the streets, Jacobs predicted. But “the faster you make it for the traffic, the more of it will use these facilities, and also, the less money you have for other kinds of transportation. It’s no accident that transit has gone down, while enormous amounts of money have been spent on highways in New York.”
HIGHWAY AS CURE FOR DECAY
Driving down the West Side revealed the many things that were happening to make the area look bad. Aside from derelict and neglected buildings, landlords had readily rented to raunchy nightclubs, like the Anvil. Nevertheless, Jacobs insisted, “no defense is needed of how good the area is, or why it seems so bad. This highway can’t be justified on the grounds that it’s so bad there that things need to be taken out. What a ridiculous idea that you put in a billion-dollar highway to manicure a place!”
I raised a larger issue, arguing that the pattern of designating one area after another for renewal or a highway, as Moses did, caused the constant uprooting of people. Jacobs grew a little impatient:
I know, but that’s still a very peripheral argument against the expressway, because plenty of expressways have been put into areas—or proposed for areas—chosen precisely so that that will not happen. They’ve been put through parkland, through ravines, along old railroad tracks. They’ve been put through all kinds of places where they will not uproot people, or where displacement is minimal. And it still does enormous damage to a city. And it’s still the wrong priority for the money.
This is a wrong way to treat transportation in the city. And it’s an uneconomic way and it’s a polluting way, and it’s got internal contradictions that cannot be justified. And it is a national problem. It doesn’t mean that, aha, if you can, in another city, find an expressway that actually doesn’t uproot anybody and doesn’t cut off the waterfront, and doesn’t do one of these specific things, yet cuts through the city, that it’s okay. It’s not.
For Jacobs, it all boiled down to certain irrevocable givens. One of those givens is that if the plan brings more cars into the city, it is wrong. And, she added, it was “cutting down the amount of money, inevitably, to deal with city transportation in other ways.”
TIDE TURNING AGAINST CARS?
Neighborhood traffic has long been a sore point in many places, but most people assume that providing more parking opportunities takes moving cars off the streets. Yet, just as critics argued and showed in the Washington Square Park fight, the more you provide for cars, the more cars will come. The easier to park, the more people will drive. But how traffic cripples, if not kills, a neighborhood is not always understood.
In Death and Life, Jacobs summed up the problem as she had done in our interview—the erosion of the city in favor of the automobile. Roads become wider. Sidewalks are narrowed. Noise, pollution, danger increase. It’s a process of erosion of everything else. When too many automobiles start coming into a neighborhood, deterioration inevitably occurs. When every other amenity of the neighborhood, or of the city, is sacrificed, and inordinate proportions of transportation money are devoted to cars, then you’re eroding the city.
Jacobs was not anticar, just against transforming the city primarily for cars. “There are people who must have this metal cocoon,” Jacobs added.4 “If they will accept some of the disadvantages of it—that it�
��s a very slow way to get about, very aggravating to be caught in traffic, and so on—okay, they make their choice. But when they want the whole city remodeled to accommodate their phobia, that’s the problem. And furthermore it’s an impossible thing. You cannot do it. You just can’t, especially in dense and large cities, accommodate all the potential cars. Inevitably, you’re eroding things.”
And, of course, it came back again to priorities. “Westway is a prime example of not only, my God, the cost,” Jacobs said, “but also the vision of what the waterfront will be, and what it will do to the rest of New York streets.”
This becomes the first step in a new erosion process. “And a very big one,” she added. “A very big step. The amount of money involved is sort of a measure of that.”
THE INTERNAL CONTRADICTION
This was where her second fundamental point came in. The first was that Westway was part of the same network as the Lower Manhattan Expressway, all first provided for in the 1929 Regional Plan. The second point, similar in both fights, was the internal contradiction of the proponents’ argument.
Here it is, their big vulnerable point: two contradictory things. One is, if they say that what this expressway is going to accomplish is to accommodate a whole lot of additional traffic, then they run into the problem about air pollution. Even if they say the traffic is going to move faster. If it’s going to accommodate over the next twenty years 2 or 3 percent more traffic a year, or whatever, and you begin to convert that into air pollution, it’s horrifying, and it will never meet the air pollution standards. So they have to minimize the increase in traffic and downplay that it is encouraging more and more automobile traffic at the expense of transit.