Streetsblog New York City

These burned-out cars on Washington Square Park were the result of:
a) A rowdy Halloween Critical Mass ride on Friday.
b) An alternate side of street parking mishap.
c) The filming of the next Will Smith movie

Camera phone photos by Nicholas Whitaker.

Jane Jacobs: A Public Celebration
Wednesday, June 28 at 5:00 pm, rain or shine.
Washington Square Park
Meet in front of the Arch, site of Jacobs' first victory over Robert Moses.

Speakers will represent different aspects of her life and work, journalism, environmentalism, economics, publishing, civic activism, the arts, and local business on Jane Jacobs' impact and legacy.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Living City, the Greenwich Village Historical Society and hosted by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

For further information, call (212) 475-9585 or email.

There will be a public celebration for Jane Jacobs this evening, 5:00 pm, under the arch in Washington Square Park.

Lisa Chamerblain will be there and has a nice write-up on her blog, Polis:

It has become the contrarian fashion to say that Jane Jacobs' contribution to urban planning didn't address many of the problems we grapple with today, and that Robert Moses wasn't entirely destructive and wrong. I find this to be an intellectually lazy argument. No single person could simultaneously explode an entire profession AND anticipate every possible consequence of that (such as gentrification, which did not exist at the time that she wrote her seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961).