Anthony Flint is the author of Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City. It chronicles Jane Jacobs’ life, her introduction to the issue of urban planning, and her three great battles with Master Builder Robert Moses that handed him some rare, key losses in his long career of building public works projects good and bad.

Greater Greater Washington Live Chat: Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses(09/10/2009)
12:54 GreaterGreaterWashington: Welcome to our live chat with Anthony Flint, author of Wrestling with Moses. We’ll get started in a few minutes. In the meantime, settle in and submit your questions for Mr. Flint.
1:03
Quick quiz first: Which of the following magazines did Jacobs NOT write for when she came to New York?
  • America Illustrated

  • Architectural Forum

  • Iron Age

  • Reader’s Digest

  • Vogue
1:04 Anthony Flint: Hi, this is Anthony Flint — I’m on.
1:05 David Alpert: Welcome! And thanks for writing on such an interesting subject to Greater Greater Washington readers.
1:06 David Alpert: I wanted to start by asking about the lack of any mention of Jacobs in The Power Broker, which many readers have read.
1:07 David Alpert: I know you said it was cut for length reasons. Do you have any idea why they cut that and not something else? Did Caro not really consider Jacobs that significant to Moses’ career? Was she?
1:14 Anthony Flint: Jane Jacobs was an important source for Robert Caro — she told him quite a few things about the power broker, from her obvious personal experience. As I write in the book, Caro later said he had a whole chapter on Jacobs and how she challenged Moses and Moses’ reaction to that. But Random House felt the manuscript was already too long, so he cut the chapter. I’ve never asked Caro for a look at this chapter, but I have to imagine it provides some detail on the proposal for a roadway through Washington Square Park — one fairly significant battle that is missing from the Caro tome. That of course was Jane’s first involvement in citizen activism.
1:15 David Alpert: I bet a lot of people would love to see that chapter. Of course, now there is a book that fills that in.
1:15 David Alpert: You say in the book Jacobs never cooperated with biographers. Can you explain a bit about why she was so reluctant to be profiled?
1:19 Anthony Flint: She was always very reticent when the spotlight came on her — she always said she wanted people to read her books and listen to what she was saying, but shunned the whole business of being a celebrity. She was very choosy about the journalists she agreed to do interviews with. Mark Feeney at The Boston Globe hit it off with her in the mid-90s. The writer Jim Kunstler had a good relationship. For others, she would always say spending time talking about herself would detract her from her work. Now all that said, she did collect just about every newspaper article written about her — but I suppose that’s quite normal.
1:21 David Alpert: Another thing I found fascinating was that she bought an urban townhouse, renovated it, and even put in an open floor plan on the first floor. These are all things that are really common today (my house is like that) but the Jacobses did this in 1947. Was Jacobs particularly ahead of her time? Were more people doing this back then than we knew, or did she really anticipate popular trends by as much as 40-50 years?
1:22 David Alpert: (BTW, readers, while you’re waiting to see answers, don’t forget to try out the quiz!)
1:23 Anthony Flint: She really did anticipate the trend in popular urban living by a half-century, absolutely. When she and Bob found 555 Hudson Street, the West Village was a bit rough around the edges, very working-class in character, lots of manufacturing and warehousing in transition. So in 1947, buying an old three story building in that context and fixing it up really was quite a pioneering thing to do.
1:24 Anthony Flint: 555 Hudson Street is currently for sale, by the way, and I believe listed for over three million dollars.
1:24 David Alpert: Why were they so advanced? Bob was an architect, but so were many people. Jane liked cities, but she couldn’t have been the only one.
1:28 Anthony Flint: Lots of wealthy people since the 19th century clearly found advantages to living in the city, but she was the first middle-class or upper-middle-class type of person to look at a slightly shabby neighborhood and see the value in it — the bones of a good urban neighborhood, proximity to a great park, to the subway, to a wide variety of shops and businesses … as you correctly point out, this is happening quite regularly now, through the 1990s to today, in places like Brooklyn, but also quite clearly in Washington DC. Living in a city saves money and it’s environmentally friendly.
1:29 David Alpert: Jacobs’ activism got going in the 1960s, which was also a time where society started to turn against authority. Do you think that Jacobs would have been able to stop earlier freeway projects had she been ten years older, or was the situation really only possible with a combination of her ideas and also the particular moment in history?
1:33 Anthony Flint: I think it was a powerful and unique moment, yes. Jane wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, at a time when more Americans were beginning to question authority and the establishment and their government, and Bob Dylan began to play his music down in Greenwich Village. The times were changing. Other books came out at that time that were similarly challenging — Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique,” Ralph Nader, others … but she was the only one to take on the mandarins of the planning establishment and the excesses of Le Corbusier-inspired modernism. By 1968, obviously a year of upheaval for the country, when she stood up at a public hearing on the Lower Manhattan Expressway and ended up getting arrested, her theories on the damage of highways through urban neighborhoods emerged in her actions.
1:33 David Alpert: OK, let’s take some of the reader questions.
1:33 [Comment From Steve in Fairfax, VA]

Mr. Flint - I really enjoyed the book. Obviously Jane Jacobs came out against eminent domain as it applied to freeways (Bronx Freeway, LOMEX), but one thing that seems a little absent from Death and Life was the issue of mass transit right of way construction, which is pretty essential to a large city. In NYC, it was already there, so it was as if it was a part of nature, but of course the city went through tremendous upheaval when it was originally put in. We’ve experienced the trials of this around metro Washington quite a bit with the decades long wrangling over construction of the Silver and Purple Metro lines, which are finally under and near construction. In your research did you come across her opinions on mass transit ROWs?

1:37 Anthony Flint: Steve that is an excellent question. In objecting to the forced relocation from urban renewal or highway construction, she does not address the similar upheaval that comes with transit project construction. She may have made comments later in life on this topic; I think generally, it comes down to tradeoffs and balance and what’s good for the city as a whole — that relocating people for bad urban design or a 10-lane elevated highway is clearly a bad idea, but necessary relocation for a subway line that has such clear economic, environmental, energy and climate-change benefits, is something to be considered differently.

1:37 [Comment From Matt Malinowski]

As harmful as some of Robert Moses’s projects were, they were breathtaking in their size and scope. Do you think the pendulum has swung too far the other way now, in the direction of incrementalism and gridlock? Where would Jacobs place the proper balance?

1:39 Anthony Flint: Matt I think there is a good deal of paralysis these days, as some who assume Jacobs’ legacy are in fact merely NIMBYs — not in my backyard. Today they are saying no to anything, any amount of density, and so forth. The difference is, back in the 50s and 60s, Jane was saying no really for the first time — no to a flawed policy (urban renewal) and flawed urban design, no to the established approach to planning and the lack of true citizen participation, and of course no to highway-building. She understood though that cities need to change and evolve and be dynamic, and that it makes no sense to try to preserve all neighborhoods as if they were under glass in a museum. Cities are hubs of innovation in today’s new green economy, and they need to be economically competitive and move forward. That means infrastructure, vision, and sometimes big infill redevelopment projects.
1:40 David Alpert: How do people trying to follow in Jacobs’ shoes differentiate the two? If we’re arguing that 14th and U in DC could use a 9-story building and others are saying that’s going to destroy the neighborhood, is there any way to figure out what would be true to Jacobs’ legacy and what wouldn’t?
1:46 Anthony Flint: In terms of urban design, the ground floor is key — the place where new buildings greet the street. It should be porous and welcoming. The Jacobs principles of course included shorter blocks, a mix of uses, walkability, access to transit — all of which you are very fortunate to have in DC. Sometimes when neighbors say a new building will ‘destroy’ a neighborhood they are objecting to density — more people, more people to use up parking spaces, and so forth. But the city is the place for density, you don’t need a lot of parking if the Metro is close by, and density that is well designed is a beautiful thing. At the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, we have a whole website devoted to the topic, called “Visualizing Density”—http://www.lincolninst.edu/subcenters/visualizing-density/
1:46 [Comment From Douglas Stewart]

In terms of both local and regional planning, how can we get the best of both Moses and Jacobs? Do we need an agency — or an individual — with close to the breadth of regional vision, and power, that Moses had, to build the kind of better places that Jacobs wanted — not just in “Great American Cities” but better American suburbs?

1:47 David Alpert: (And don’t forget to try your hand at making a guess in the quiz! I’ll give you a hint - as of right now, nobody has picked the correct answer.)
1:48 Anthony Flint: On the quiz, bear in mind Jacobs came to New York in 1934 hoping to be a journalist. She started out as a secretary and then freelanced and then ended up working full-time as a writer and editor for some of the publications listed.
1:52 Anthony Flint: Responding to Douglas: you raise an interesting point about regional planning. When Jacobs and Moses were battling, it was the bad old days of cities vs. the emerging suburbs. Moses was trying to save New York from being an economic backwater; he thought the secret formula was to raze the old cluttered neighborhoods, build projects like Lincoln Center, and make sure everyone could get around easily and swiftly by car. But he viewed the suburbs — he considered them lifeless ‘dormitories’ - as competition. Today, we know that it’s metropolitan regions that have a common destiny, and indeed collections of metropolitan regions known as ‘megaregions.’ The Boston-Washington DC corridor is an example of this — it’s similar to how cities work together in Europe, on transportation infrastructure and environmental initiatives and of course economic development. Check out www.america2050.org on this notion. Finally, I do think we have a president who understands cities and metropolitan regions, and there’s a lot of good thinking going on at places like HUD.
1:53 David Alpert: On the issue of suburbs, did Jacobs fight or write about suburban freeways? Those are just as environmentally damanging, but it seems to be harder to get people to oppose those, since suburbs are already more car-oriented, though perhaps we just don’t realize how hard Jacobs worked. Often crusaders against urban freeways like Barbara Mikulski turn into the biggest enablers of sprawl. Are there things from Jacobs’ battles that those of us who fight suburban sprawl-creating freeways can learn from?
1:56 Anthony Flint: Jane Jacobs was pretty focused on cities, and stopping the Moses-era highway-building through the heart of cities first and foremost. In the book, I argue that she really inspired the freeway revolts that followed in places like San Francisco, after her high-profile arrest in 1968. She was also one of the first urbanists to criticize suburban sprawl as environmentally damaging. The highway through the cornfield with the big interchange, as we now know, enables very unsustainable land use patterns. She thought this was a very bad idea. But she stayed focused on getting the city right.
1:57 David Alpert: OK, do we have time for one more?
1:57 [Comment From shy]

How did she handle gentrification?

1:58 David Alpert: I’d add to that that Jacobs pushed for some affordable housing, but of course Greenwich Village is extremely expensive now for all but the richest New Yorkers. Would Jacobs have been pleased or displeased with the way Greenwich Village is today? What would she recommend today?
2:00 Anthony Flint: Don’t be shy! This is a question I get all the time — and rightly so. Gentrification is clearly the single biggest challenge for revitalizing cities like Washington or Boston or New York or Seattle. Jane understood the process very well — indeed, as she described the benefits of living in great urban neighborhoods, it makes sense that more people would flock to them. She viewed it as a supply and demand problem: create more great urban neighborhoods, increase the supply, and prices would come down as the desirable becomes less scarce. This does sort of engineer more gentrification, though — in places like Newark. So she knew that there had to be “windbreaks” or places set aside for low- and moderate-income families. The West Village Houses, which I write about in the book, is the prime example of creating this kind of housing. Today there is also inclusionary zoning and community land trusts as policy interventions for affordable housing. But it’s hard.
2:01 David Alpert: Thanks so much for joining us. I encourage everyone to go buy Anthony Flint’s book. There are a lot of fascinating tidbits about the history of these fights that I never knew, including the tactics she employed and the many different ways Moses and the city planners tried to push through their ideas.
2:01 Anthony Flint: Thanks very much for having me on! This was really enjoyable and a great discussion.
2:02 David Alpert: Feel free to continue the discussion of Jane Jacobs in the comments, and stay tuned for our next live chat. By the way, the answer to the quiz is Reader’s Digest. Jacobs worked for Iron Age, America Illustrated (a magazine sold in Russia aimed at teaching Russians about America during the cold war) and Architectural Forum; she also had articles published in Vogue during her early journalistic years.
2:02

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Tagged: jane jacobs, live chat, public spaces, robert moses

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.