Wrestling with Moses by Anthony Flint

Author:Anthony Flint [Flint, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-862-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

The Greenwich Village residents—the “Villagers,” as the newspapers called them—had seen what happened at Lincoln Center, and wondered how they could argue against what Moses had convincingly characterized as progress for New York as a whole without being cast as villains themselves and, ultimately, defeated. Yet Jacobs rallied them like a football coach before a big game. Washington Square Park had been closed to traffic, she reminded them. The widening of Hudson Street had been stopped. They could fight, and had fought, City Hall.

Though she was tirelessly positive and supportive while around her fellow volunteers, Jacobs knew that gumption wouldn’t be enough. Stopping urban renewal in its tracks would require a shrewd effort with multiple fronts—just like the fight over Washington Square Park, but with more additions to the strategic playbook, which she was making up as she went along.

Once again she turned to political leaders like Ed Koch, prominent in the increasingly active Village Independent Democrats; John Lindsay, then a congressman; and Assemblyman Louis DeSalvio, who were all looking to endear themselves to new constituencies. Once again she harnessed the power of the media, making sure reporters turned up to see the strength in numbers at the series of city meetings that would be held on the blight study plan; if the public wasn’t allowed to speak, she knew that the residents would likely get quoted if they spoke out of turn and made a scene.

As the battle got under way, Jacobs also settled on a new strategy: to zero in on process and legal technicalities in order to discredit Felt and Davies. The new team, after all, had talked about citizen involvement, but they hadn’t brought the West Village study proposal before the residents of the neighborhood, as Wagner’s new procedures required. “The bulldozer approach is out,” Wagner stated in the summer of 1961. “Any contemplated new improvements shall be in keeping physically and aesthetically with Village traditions.”

Jacobs dismissed such promises as “pious platitudes” and pointed out that the Wagner team was, in reality, still operating under Moses’s rules. The city had “gotten all their ducks in a row,” wooing a carefully selected group—someone from the Greenwich Village Association, someone from a neighborhood political organization, and the monsignor of one church, St. Veronica’s, who had been handpicked by a cardinal who was friendly with Moses. Jacobs pounced on this issue and filed a lawsuit charging that there was insufficient neighborhood-wide public notice of the renewal plans. For the first time, she turned to the courts to chasten the officials who had not followed the process that Wagner had instituted. Previously safe in the impenetrable labyrinth of government bureaucracy, Felt and Davies now cut corners at their peril.

Tipped off by friends in city government, Jacobs and the Villagers gathered intelligence about the officials’ next steps and took every opportunity to confront them, hoping to catch them in a contradiction or expose intentions. Bob Jacobs weighed in with an important strategic insight: always ask the officials to be clear about

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