To Read: The Battle For Gotham

April 2nd, 2010

I haven’t read this book yet, but it’s near the top of my ‘to read’ list.

Excerpt from The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs by urban critic and journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz.

To look at recent New York City history through the lens of the conflicting urban views of Moses and Jacobs is to gain a new understanding of the city today. This lens provides a small measure by which to evaluate the kind of big and modest projects outlined in this book. I did not have that lens either growing up or as a reporter for The New York Post from the mid-1960s until late in the 1970s covering city development issues. Eventually, I understood that in my writing I was immersing myself in the web of challenges personified in the conflict between the urban perspectives of Moses and Jacobs.

Two things helped develop that lens for me: Reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York when it was published in 1974 and reading, meeting and developing a lasting friendship with Jane Jacobs in 1978. My own urban vision had been shaped earlier during my 15 years as a reporter, meeting and learning from people all over the city and watching positive and negative city policies unfold. But that urban vision was deepened and added to by that Moses/Jacobs lens and was expressed in my first book, The Living City : How America’s Cities Are Being Revitalized by Thinking Small in a Big Way, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1989. “Urban Husbandry” was the term I coined in that book t odescribe a regeneration approach that reinvigorates and builds ona ssets already in place, adding to instead of replacing long-evolving strengths.

From the mid 1960s to the late 1970s, I reported for The New York Post on the impact of the great social and economic dislocations in the city. There were the urban renewal projects in Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side and most dramatically, the opening of Co-Op City which vacuumed out so many residents from the Grand Concourse and accelerated the decay of the South Bronx. I covered school decentralization battles in Ocean Hill/Brownsville, urban renewal on the Lower East Side and learned the fascinating evolution of Washington Heights while working on an in depth series about Henry Kissinger , whose family settled there after fleeing Germany in 1938, after he was appointed Secretary of State. There were public housing conflicts, landlord scandals in Times Square and on the Upper West Side, and middle-income apartment shortages. New urban renewal projects and battles to save landmarks all got my attention. But I had no knowledge of the role of Robert Moses in shaping urban renewal policies,locally and nationally, until Caro’s extraordinarily well-researched and thorough opus.

I had heard a little about Jane Jacobs’ activism in Greenwich Village, particularly fighting the West Village Urban Renewal and the Lower Manhattan Expressway, but I had not read The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When I finally did read it, just before I was heading to Toronto to meet her, I discovered a way of understanding the city that I could relate to, a way that I had instinctively come to believe during years of reporting on community-based stories, an understanding that Jane believed all keen observers are capable of developingon their own. Over the years, she challenged me, broadened my thinking and encouraged me to look, observe and understand way beyond what I had already learned.

This book now looks back on the city as I first experienced it growing up and then wrote about it as a New York Post reporter. By using the Moses-Jacobs lens to examine some of the issues I wrote about in the late 1960s and l970s, I come to a different conclusion than many experts on how the city reached the ultra-successful and constantly adapting condition of today – even if suddenly tempered by a colossal national economic meltdown.

The perspective of time is very useful.

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