And text of Int 0386-2003 here:
http://webdocs.nyccouncil.info/textfiles/Int%200386-2003.htm

The advantages of our proposal are very great. Important and immediate are the relief of tension, noise, and anxiety; purifying the air of fumes and smog; alleviating the crowding of pedestrians; providing safety for children. Subsequently, and not less importantly, we gain the opportunity of diversifying the gridiron, beautifying the city, and designing a more integrated community life.

and this one:

There is space for recreation and play. E.g. the length of a tennis court fits across Ninth Avenue; an occasional corner is big enough for a softball field. Given the large fund of newly available land, now wasted on largely unnecessary and always inconvenient traffic and parking, it is possible to develop new neighborhoods in a leisurely fashion…

Take that, Atlantic Yards!!
And don’t miss the link to Guy Debord’s Situationist Theses on Traffic, with this gem:

We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.

How better to explain why I like to bike to the job site?

And I was intrigued by his campaign plank of banning private cars from Manhattan — an idea Paul Goodman had floated in a NYT Mag article in 1962.

Wow, thanks for that, Charles! Here it is:

http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/goodman-cars.htm

In May 1969, teaching high school in New Rochelle but living on West 16th Street, I went to what was billed as a Mailer-Breslin campaign evening at PS 41 on West 11th Street. I was a serious Mailer fan (he and I had both marched at the Pentagon in October 1967, though only one of us had written a Pulitzer-Prize-winning account). And I was intrigued by his campaign plank of banning private cars from Manhattan — an idea Paul Goodman had floated in a NYT Mag article in 1962.

Unfortunately, an evening of political speech-making was not to be. Mailer was seriously late, and during the long wait the stage was commandeered by “The Crazies,” a bunch of East Village street punks. Mailer finally showed up, three sheets to the wind, of course, and neither he nor us in the audience had the cojones to storm the stage and eject the Crazies. As I recall, they heckled and baited him, and after not very long he gave up and retreated into the wings. Evening over.

Tom Robbins has a vivid account of the same evening in last week’s voice, here:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0747,robbins,78425,2.html
(on page 2 of 3)

I never forgot the evening — my frustration at not hearing Mailer, my shame at not leading a charge to get those a**holes off the stage. But who knows, perhaps those feelings were part of why, in 1986, I left a comfortable life and grabbed the horns of leadership at T.A. Those bad feelings are long gone now, replaced by satisfaction at being part of a vibrant and increasingly successful Livable Streets Movement.

U.S. out of Hudsonia!

Couldn’t it be both?

Still a pretty good idea.

I’m also anti-stabbing, so he would have lost my vote on that issue.