To a young Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Village, with its winding cobblestone streets and diverse makeup, was everything a city neighborhood should be. The activist, writer, and mother of three grew so fond of her bustling community that it became a touchstone for her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But consummate power broker Robert Moses, the father of many of New York's most monumental development projects, saw things differently: neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village were badly in need of "urban renewal." Notorious for exacting enormous human costs, Moses's plans had never before been halted--not by governors, mayors, or FDR himself, and certainly not by a housewife from Scranton.

The epic rivalry of Jacobs and Moses, played out amid the struggle for the soul of a city, is one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern American history. In Wrestling with Moses, acclaimed reporter and urban planning policy expert Anthony Flint recounts this thrilling David-and-Goliath story, the legacy of which echoes through our society today.

The first ordinary citizens to stand up to government plans for their city, Jacobs and her colleagues began a nationwide movement to reclaim cities for the benefit of their residents. Time and again, Jacobs marshaled popular support and political power against Moses, whether to block traffic through her beloved Washington Square Park or to prevent the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a ten-lane elevated superhighway that would have destroyed centuries-old streetscapes and displaced thousands of families and businesses.

Like A Civil Action before it, Wrestling with Moses is the tale of a local battle with far-ranging significance. By confronting Moses and his vision, Jacobs forever changed the way Americans understood the city, and inspired citizens across the country to protest destructive projects in their own communities. Her story reminds us of the power we have as individuals to confront and defy reckless authority.

From the Hardcover edition.

The Girl from Scranton

As the rattling subway train slowed to a stop, Jane Butzner looked up to see the name of the station, its colorful lettering standing out against the white-tile station walls as it flashed by again and again, finally readable: Christopher Street/Sheridan Square. As the doors opened, she watched as a crowd poured out, moving past pretty mosaics to the exit.

She had moved to New York from her hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and had joined her sister, Betty, in a small apartment in Brooklyn a few months before. She was hunting for a job, but the morning's interview had concluded swiftly, so she'd decided to explore her new city. She darted out before the doors slid shut and made her way through the turnstile and up a set of stairs to the street. Without knowing it, Jane had alighted in the heart of Greenwich Village, the place she would call home for decades to come.

As she emerged, she immediately noticed that the streets ran off at odd angles in all directions. She saw storefronts with awnings shading cluttered sidewalks, kids chasing one another in front of a grocery, delivery trucks stopping and starting their way up the street. Walking north on Seventh Avenue, she saw the skyscrapers of midtown in the distance and, when she turned around, the cluster of tall buildings in the financial district to the south. But in this spot most buildings were two or three stories, and few were higher than five or six. They were simple: no grand entrances, no soaring edifices. She gazed at shopwindows full of leather handbags and watches and jewelry, strolled past barbershops and cafés, and ran her fingers over the daily newspapers stacked high in front of shelves inside filled with candy and cigars. Everywhere she looked she saw people-people talking to one another, it seemed, every few feet, among them longshoremen headed to taverns at the end of their shifts, casually dressed women window-shopping, old men with hands clasped on canes sitting on the benches in a triangular park. Mothers sat on stoops watching over it all. Everyone looked, she thought, the way she felt: unpretentious, genuine, living their lives. This was home.

Arriving at her Brooklyn apartment that evening, Jane described the wonders of the neighborhood she had seen, concluding simply, "Betty, I found out where we have to live."

"Where is it?" Betty asked.

"I don't know, but you get in the subway and you get out at a place called Christopher Street."

Jane had moved to New York City in 1934. Armed with a high-school diploma, a recently acquired knowledge of shorthand, and the wisdom of a few months working in the newsroom of a Scranton newspaper, she hoped to break into journalism. She knew it wasn't going to be easy to succeed in a business dominated by men; her assignments in Scranton had been limited to covering weddings, social events, and the meetings of women's civic organizations with names like the Women of the Moose and the Ladies' Nest of Owls No. 3. It was the thick of the Great Depression, and any job was difficult to come by.

Her older sister, Betty, twenty-four, had warned her. Betty had come to New York a few years before with hopes of finding work as an interior designer, but was now grateful to have a job as a salesgirl in the home furnishings section of the Abraham & Straus department store. The headstrong Jane came to the big city anyway, joining her sister in the top floor of a six-floor walk-up in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood of Greek and Gothic Revival mansions and Italianate brownstones at the edge of the East River, overlooking Manhattan.

Within weeks of arriving, Jane realized that breaking into...

 

 

"In this gripping and inspiring story of one woman who galvanized her community against powerful, destructive forces, Anthony Flint gets to the heart of what makes neighborhoods--and cities--thrive."

 

"Jane Jacobs, the crownless queen of cities, defended New York against the assault that would have destroyed its pattern of the daily life. Wrestling with Moses is a masterly tale of how her mandate endures."

 

"Anthony Flint has written a riveting account of a struggle between opposites that forever redefined the American city. With no formal training in urban planning, Jane Jacobs had the audacity to take on Robert Moses and the passion to save old New York from the wrecking ball."

 

"Beautifully written, Wrestling with Moses is a step back in time to the bohemia of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, when Bob Dylan's music filled the streets and revolution was in the air. As a woman standing up to power, Jane Jacobs blazed a trail. This is a remarkable book."

 

"Anthony Flint has not only captured the life and times of the remarkable Jane Jacobs but, more important, he has delineated the amazing cast of characters--politicians, design professionals, neighbors, and citizens--that populated her life and her city. Wrestling with Moses will soon become classic, essential reading for anyone concerned with cities, past, present, and future."

 

Anthony Flint is the director of public affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think-tank on land and development issues located in Cambridge, MA, and was a reporter at The Boston Globe for sixteen years. He is the author of This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America. He lives in Boston.

From the Hardcover...