Blair Kamin: Do We Want a Robert Moses Again?
... Should every city have a strongman?
Few would dispute the idealistic notion that all citizens should have their say in how a city grows. But too much debate and too little political muscle can spawn chaos rather than results. Ask anyone who lived through Chicago's "Council Wars" slugfest of the mid-1980s, when white aldermen battled the city's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, for control.
Americans are torn "between the desire to exercise our democratic influence and the desire to have some strong person or government in charge to get things done," said Henry Binford, a Northwestern University urban historian.
These issues are coming into sharp focus as scholars take a fresh look at the figure most closely associated with the strongman phenomenon of city-building - not the two Daleys who ruled Chicago for 39 of the last 52 years, but Robert Moses of New York City, who was and remains America's greatest builder.
From his rise to power in 1934 to his forced exit in 1968, Moses built scores of public works - expressways, parkways, bridges, apartment buildings, public housing projects, pools, parks, playgrounds, beaches, golf courses, garages, a stadium, a cultural center, a convention center, expansions of universities and the list goes on. He did it all without ever being elected to public office.
Moses operated instead in a variety of appointed posts, most notably as New York City's commissioner of parks and as head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, in which he shrewdly - his critics would say ruthlessly - manipulated the levers of power, amassing more of it, in the end, than even the mayors under which he served.
Since 1974, the public's understanding of Moses has been shaped by "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York," Robert A. Caro's brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that casts Moses as a tragic figure right out of Shakespeare - first, in the years before World War II, an idealistic public servant who built parks and parkways that uplifted the lives of the urban masses; then, in the postwar years, the tyrant who lusted after power and kicked hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes in the name of urban renewal.
The iconic counter-figure to Moses became Jane Jacobs, the Greenwich Village activist and author who died last year (Moses died in 1981). She was St. Jane to his Dragon. And she helped slay - or, at least, stop - him in 1958 when he tried unsuccessfully to force an expressway through Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park....
Read entire article at Chicago Tribune
Few would dispute the idealistic notion that all citizens should have their say in how a city grows. But too much debate and too little political muscle can spawn chaos rather than results. Ask anyone who lived through Chicago's "Council Wars" slugfest of the mid-1980s, when white aldermen battled the city's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, for control.
Americans are torn "between the desire to exercise our democratic influence and the desire to have some strong person or government in charge to get things done," said Henry Binford, a Northwestern University urban historian.
These issues are coming into sharp focus as scholars take a fresh look at the figure most closely associated with the strongman phenomenon of city-building - not the two Daleys who ruled Chicago for 39 of the last 52 years, but Robert Moses of New York City, who was and remains America's greatest builder.
From his rise to power in 1934 to his forced exit in 1968, Moses built scores of public works - expressways, parkways, bridges, apartment buildings, public housing projects, pools, parks, playgrounds, beaches, golf courses, garages, a stadium, a cultural center, a convention center, expansions of universities and the list goes on. He did it all without ever being elected to public office.
Moses operated instead in a variety of appointed posts, most notably as New York City's commissioner of parks and as head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, in which he shrewdly - his critics would say ruthlessly - manipulated the levers of power, amassing more of it, in the end, than even the mayors under which he served.
Since 1974, the public's understanding of Moses has been shaped by "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York," Robert A. Caro's brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that casts Moses as a tragic figure right out of Shakespeare - first, in the years before World War II, an idealistic public servant who built parks and parkways that uplifted the lives of the urban masses; then, in the postwar years, the tyrant who lusted after power and kicked hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes in the name of urban renewal.
The iconic counter-figure to Moses became Jane Jacobs, the Greenwich Village activist and author who died last year (Moses died in 1981). She was St. Jane to his Dragon. And she helped slay - or, at least, stop - him in 1958 when he tried unsuccessfully to force an expressway through Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park....