Streetsblog New York City

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Tappan Zee Bridge bears all the hallmarks of a Robert Moses project. Cuomo stripped popular transit elements from the original, publicly-conceived plan, leaving only a massive highway. Cuomo has shut down the public outreach process for the bridge entirely. He’s even moving to sign the contracts to build the bridge before answering basic questions about its design and funding. (Cuomo’s less-than-transparent answer about how the state will pay for the bridge today: “We’re working on a number of funding options.”)

Still, while we’d accuse Cuomo of Moses-style transportation planning, we wouldn’t have expected the governor to proudly own the label. But unbelievably, that’s what he did today at a press conference, implicitly comparing his bridge project to those of Moses in response to an on-point question about the New York Works Task Force from Capitol Confidential’s Jimmy Vielkind.

Said Cuomo:

There are ways for government to get things done without using a ramrod, obviously. Your characterization, that Mr. Moses used a ramrod, other people would disagree with that characterization, but it’s yours. My point is that government can function efficiently and effectively, I said with due process, with an open process, with consultation. But the consultation and the process shouldn’t be paralyzing. You know, government needs to work, society needs to be able to replace a bridge.

Talk about it, discuss it, analyze it, argue it. Look at different styles, look at different financing options, but ultimately, you have to decide if you’re going to get anything done.

So if you think the Cross-Bronx, Sheridan, Bruckner and Major Deegan Expressways reinvigorated the South Bronx; if you think the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge is better off without its once-proposed inter-borough transit connection; if you still shake your head at those in Greenwich Village who had the nerve to speak up against a freeway through downtown, then you’ll love Andrew Cuomo’s transit-free Tappan Zee Bridge.

Don’t take our word for it. Andrew Cuomo said so himself.

Rail~volution is underway in Portland, Oregon, bringing together more than 1,000 city planners, engineers, transit advocates, bike policy experts, and elected officials to strategize about making cities and towns better for transit, walking, and biking.

Monday started with 15 different workshops that took place around the city, including one highlighting Portland’s “Lost Freeways” – the roads that were never built, and one that was actually torn out. These battles happened decades ago, but in many cities, highway fights continue to this day, and in some, teardowns are looking more and more possible. (Take note, readers in New Orleans, St. Louis, Seattle, New York, and New Haven.)

Traveling around on bikes and on foot, two groups visited some notable sites in Portland’s battles against freeways. First, we saw some battlegrounds where the anti-freeway movement lost.

South Park Blocks and I-405

In 1943, Portland invited New York’s master freeway planner, Robert Moses, to come to town. After a month of study, he came out with an 86-page document mapping out the “future of Portland”: 14 freeways and a tangle of limited-access parkways to re-make the city. Portland would have become what longtime local transit official Dick Feeney calls “a wonderful place to drive a car through,” where “the neighborhoods would have all vanished.”

Today, one of those highways, I-405, runs right through downtown. Tour guide Sarah Mirk, author of Oregon history comic books (including one about dead highways), took us to a little grassy patchy just across the I-405 overpass from the South Park Blocks, built in the mid-1960s.

This little marooned park over here is an orphan of when they built the I-405 freeway right here. The South Park Blocks are something people love in Portland; it’s a historic part of our city. And when they built I-405 through, they not only tore out two solid blocks of dense housing here in this neighborhood – which was really diverse, low-income housing – they also tore out two blocks of the South Park Blocks. People were really upset about that. And as a concession to people who were really upset about tearing out the park blocks, they said, we’ll do a ‘park-like treatment’ on the overpass coming over here. So you can see the overgrown bramble, and the cement, and the weeds. This is the ‘park-like treatment’ given to the South Park Blocks.

The freeway cut the neighborhood off from their school and library on the other side, becoming a “wall” between the residents and the services they used. Developers put in a bike-ped trail along the freeway as a concession.

That trail – unsigned, virtually unknown and unused – is known informally as the Ho Chi Minh trail. “Not to honor the Vietnamese leader,” says Mirk, “but because it was so dangerous and there were lots of muggings along here at night. There’s zero lighting, the neighbors have put up barbed wire, and it’s out of sight, out of sound. No one can hear you scream over the sound of the freeway.”

In my next post, I’ll get to the good stuff: the freeway plans that never saw the light of day, and one that came tumbling down.

There is probably no more beloved figure in urbanism than Jane Jacobs, who fought to preserve some of New York City's most treasured neighborhoods and who gave urbanists some of the field's fundamental texts. As Ed Glaeser notes in the New Republic this week, Jacobs died in 2006 "a cherished, almost saintly figure," while her principal antagonist, Robert Moses, remains popularly reviled as a villain.

But as American cities have outgrown their infrastructure in recent decades, and as political institutions have proven unable to muster the energy necessary to construct great projects, Moses' reputation has enjoyed something of a recovery. Increasingly, he is being actively rehabilitated in new histories and essays, of which Glaeser's review is an example.

These efforts are interesting because they manage to earn a degree of sympathy from urbanists themselves, who have grown increasingly tired of the decades required to navigate a transit line from planning stages to operation.

There is something very attractive about an individual who can drive the stakes and get the project built -- damn the politicians, and damn the NIMBYs.

But this is dangerous territory. In rehabilitating Moses and reconsidering Jacobs, it's important to be clear about where each was right, and where each went wrong.

There are many ways to interpret the clash between Moses and Jacobs: development versus preservation, city versus suburb, design for people versus design for automobiles, power versus powerlessness, and so on. To acknowledge that the balance has swung too far in one direction in one of these conflicts does not at all suggest that the balances are similarly out of whack on others.

Read more...

T.A. director Paul White sends along this little nugget he came across in the New York Times archive. Read it for a timely review (penned by a pre-Bilbao Herbert Muschamp) of a Municipal Art Society show staged the last time an economic downturn coincided with a presidential election, in 1992:

"Steel, Stone and Backbone," which runs through Sept. 19, is a protest against recessionary thinking. It's a strike against the idea that in hard economic times people should lower their expectations about what kind of city they want to live in. In fact, the point of the show is to offer historical proof to the contrary. When the going gets tough, the tough get ambitious about architecture. Much of the New York that is most admired -- its water and transportation systems, housing, cultural institutions -- emerged from periods of economic crisis.

The show, put together by Laura Rosen, an archivist with the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, offers a look at six of these periods and the public works they produced. Many viewers will already be familiar with one of them: the Great Depression and its astounding record in projects for housing, recreation and transportation. With segments devoted to such projects as La Guardia Airport, Orchard Beach in the Bronx and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel (with a video presentation on the "sand hogs" who built it), the 1930's takes up most of the exhibition space.

But the real news of the show is that the building boom of the 30's wasn't the exception. It was the rule. Such booms have frequently coincided with financial busts, or as they were termed in the 19th century, "panics." The Panic of 1837 saw the building of the Croton Water System, including the monumental Egyptian Revival reservoir that used to stand on the current site of the New York Public Library. After the Panics of 1873 and 1893, work began on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Zoological Society, later known as the Bronx Zoo. What a panic.

If the 1930s saw the completion of ambitious projects ushering in an age of cheap air travel and mass car commuting, might the near future see a transit renaissance and the mainstream emergence of non-motorized transport?

With municipal budgets reeling, a big question mark is where the money would come from. A national infrastructure bank? Carbon taxes and congestion pricing? Bill Gates and Warren Buffett? "History doesn't hand us a key," says Muschamp in his MAS review. "However, the implicit message of this show is that we will have to invent one for ourselves."

Photo of workers anchoring wire cables on the Triborough Bridge: New Deal Network

Dave Lutz of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition has been digging through the Municipal Archives and look what he found: a 1938 memo from Robert Moses to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia about the need to create a network of dedicated bike paths in city parks. Moses's reasoning looks odd to modern eyes, in part because he argues for bike paths as a purely recreational amenity. His rationale for bike infrastructure fails to see cycling as transportation (sound familiar?), choosing instead to segregate bike facilities from the street network.

In this section, where Moses makes a public health argument against having bikes on the street, you can see the streets-are-exclusively-for-cars mindset that famously led him to construct rights-of-way that excluded rail and even buses:

The need for taking children off of public streets where they are constantly threatened with serious injury, and are themselves a hazard to motorists is imperative, and is evidenced by the increasingly numerous letters received from parents and others interested in the welfare of the youth of the city. Every motorist is aware of the hazard created by children of the adolescent age exploring the whole width of the roadway...

Recognizing that bicycles have no place on public highways, and fully aware of the marked rise in enthusiasm and growing interest in bicycling on the part of the general public within the city limits, park executives have for some time been studying the entire park system to ascertain local unsatisfied cycling needs, and where proper facilities can be located advantageously to furnish the opportunity for bicycle riding without too long a delay and without involving large expenditures for construction.

Lutz's sleuthing inspired another tipster, Daniel Bowman Simon, to cull together a collection of press reports from the time, including this coverage of the bike path plan in the New York Times. To Moses's credit, when discussing the impact of the Central Park bike path on cars driving through the park, he offers a surprisingly prescient argument for a road diet:

"All of these pavements," Mr. Moses said, "are now unnecessarily wide, and reducing their width by one lane will have no material effect on the movement of traffic though the park."

Okay, so the question comprising the title of this post sounds naive enough to border on rhetorical. But in light of the city's current development climate, it takes a stronger resolve than mine to read "Power Broken," by NYU's Thomas Bender, without wondering which side of the fence to come down on.

Published in the latest edition of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (free registration required), Bender's provocative essay reacts to what he sees as a revisionist Robert Moses movement, typified by the recent book "Robert Moses and the Modern City," by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, and the accompanying museum displays earlier this year. Moses revisionists, Bender writes, believe the thriving New York of today would not exist were it not for the hard-nosed autocrat's bulldozing brand of tough love. Bender says those calling for "neo-Mosesism" are willing to forget -- or, worse, forgive -- the human cost Moses inflicted upon the city, rationalizing it as inevitable, or even necessary, much like Moses himself.

Bender disputes the neo-Mosesist claim that dependence on public process has lead to "urban paralysis," bogging down public works and stifling growth. Instead of Moses clones, Bender argues that cities need better ways to accept and utilize public input.

While it's hard to disagree with that, Bender missteps by citing the progression of Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards as rebuttals to the Mosesist ethic. Of the former, Bender writes:

Today, the recently approved Atlantic Yards project, a huge mixed-use development in central Brooklyn including an arena for professional basketball, proceeds, after a great deal of public discussion and review (albeit a controversial one) by government bureaucracies. 

It would be difficult to find many people, if any at all, from the public advocacy arena who would say Atlantic Yards has been anything other than a developer-driven monster from day one, with enough backroom machinations and public bullying to rank among Moses's most notorious projects. And though the reviled plan for a far West Side Jets football stadium was defeated, as Bender points out, neighborhood residents are suing the Bloomberg administration over its Moses-like quest to include over 20,000 parking spaces as part of new Hudson Yards development.

In fact, with unpopular projects like Atlantic Yards, Willets Point and the new Yankee Stadium surging forward, one could make the case that a new Moses era has long been underway.

To further cloud the picture, consider the positive works that have recently moved forward under edict -- be they relatively smaller ones, like pedestrian improvements to Jewel Avenue in Queens, or an enormous undertaking like congestion pricing. As Transport for London spokesman Alun Shermer said, "If congestion pricing had to go through a legislative process it probably wouldn't have happened." And in New York, it may well be that "populists" for hire end up killing it off.

So what's the solution?  More efficient, effective public involvement? Enlightened, benign dictatorship?  Or should we -- must we -- straddle that fence with some combination of the two?

Image: W.W. Norton

An op-ed piece by Eleanor Randolph in today's New York Times finds yet another lesson in the current re-examination of Robert Moses's legacy. Randolph looks at the enormously powerful entities, usually known as authorities, that Moses left behind: "public-private hybrid[s] that can collect fees, take on debt and build things with little government interference."

Randolph points out that despite reforms over the past few years, the most influential authority, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, still operates outside many of the laws that cover government agencies, including public-meeting and freedom of information laws. And, given the enormous importance of Port Authority holdings, she rightly calls for more accountability:

[I]f Lower Manhattan is now being rebuilt under the same system that Moses used to both advantage and disadvantage New Yorkers, today's authorities must use their power more responsibly. Governor Spitzer should push for more rules imposing transparency and accountability, like requiring authority directors to sign an oath that they will carry out their fiduciary duties responsibly.

For the Port Authority, the New York and New Jersey Legislatures need to finally pass identical laws requiring public access to its enormous public works operations, which are, after all, the public's business. Mr. Coscia, like many authority directors, now promises "transparency" at some level. But it is worth worrying that future builders might decide, as Robert Moses did regularly, that the best way to respond to public concerns is to send out the bulldozers at midnight.

In the latest issue of the Regional Plan Association's Spotlight on the Region newsletter, editor Alex Marshall has an outstanding essay responding to the recent burst of Robert Moses revisionism. An excerpt:  

It all comes down to capacity. Like many people of his generation, I'm convinced, Moses essentially didn't understand the different capabilities of different modes of transportation, despite his learning and education. A freeway at top capacity can move only a few thousand vehicles per hour, and all those vehicles have to be put somewhere once they arrive where they're going. That means many lanes of freeways and many parking lots and garages chewing up prime real estate.

By comparison, a subway or commuter train can move tens of thousands of people per hour, and they all arrive without the need to store a vehicle. This essential fact is why Manhattan can have dozens of skyscrapers, which not incidentally produce millions in salaries, profits and taxes, crammed right next to each other without any parking lots.

Moses' vision of New York, if he had completed it, would have essentially downsized large parts of the city. At the MCNY exhibit, there's one artist's conception of what Soho would look like after the highway was cut through it. It essentially looked like Dallas or Houston - a broad boulevard lined with Edge City style office buildings. And whether you love or hate Dallas, it's a far less productive city than New York, when calculated on a per square foot basis.

This is what happened to much of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which are still recovering from the damage Moses did. The boroughs are not only less hospitable because of the worst of Moses' freeways; they are also less productive.

The BQE, as seen from Lorimer Street.

All this talk about Robert Moses lately leads one to think about the Freeway Revolt.

The Defeat of the Mt. Hood Freeway
A Clarence Eckerson Streetfilm
Running time: 11:42, 28.21 MB, QuickTime

In the midst of his reign has New York City's master-builder, Robert Moses proposed building a network of massive expressways through the middle of Portland, Oregon's inner-city core. One part of Moses' plan was to replace a stretch of vibrant, healthy neighborhoods with a 40-foot-deep trench that would have been called the Mount Hood Freeway.

Almost identical in design to the entrenched section of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway running through filmmaker Eckerson's Brooklyn neighborhood, construction of the Mount Hood Freeway would have eliminated one percent of all of the housing units in the entire city of Portland.

The plan had the blessings of everyone who was important in Portland politics and was considered a "done deal" until Portland's neighborhoods organized to stop it. The defeat of the Mount Hood Freeway, "radically altered the city of Portland forever," Eckerson says and set Portland on an entirely different trajectory. The story gives us a hint of how New York City could have been and could still be if we begin to prioritize neighborhood life ahead of the goal of moving motor vehicle traffic.

Today, many of the Mt. Hood Freeway's "ghost ramps" lead to bike paths and parks.

Portland's transit systems go out of their way to help commuters leave their cars at home.

Portland's growing lightrail system was built with money that would have been poured into freeways.