Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City

by Anthony Flint

Hardcover, 2009

Status

Available

Call number

711.4092

Publication

Random House (2009), Edition: First Edition, 256 pages

Description

Documents the 1968 clash between activist writer Jane Jacobs and urban-planning giant Robert Moses over a planned expressway in New York City, exploring how Jacobs' eventual victory reshaped the ways in which people respond to urban renewal projects.

Media reviews

Mr. Flint neatly summarizes all three battles between Jacobs and her forces and Moses and his. He captures Mr. Moses’s pique at being stymied. “There is nobody against this,” he sputtered about the Washington Square Park plan. “Nobody, nobody, nobody but a bunch of, a bunch of mothers.”

User reviews

LibraryThing member bruchu
Great Backgrounder

This is a decently written non-fictional work about the well publicized battles between the quintessential modernist Robert Moses and his arch-nemesis and modernism's grandest critic in Jane Jacobs. Although Anthony Flint offers no new analytical insight into modernism, Flint does
Show More
a good job in weaving in between stories to deliver a well-written biography.

Written to the level of the average reader, I am sure this book will be of interest to anyone studying postwar urban development.
Show Less
LibraryThing member breic
I think this is of somewhat limited interest. It would have been much better as a magazine article (or as a chapter in "The Power Broker"!). Jane Jacobs had good ideas, countering modernism in urban redevelopment. She also perhaps started modern NIMBYism, and it is disappointing that Flint doesn't
Show More
wrestle with this aspect of her legacy. Instead, Flint largely sees unattainable housing prices as a good thing, evidence that Jacobs's vision was highly desirable. Repeatedly, Flint cites the fact that the Greenwich Village neighborhood is now priced for celebrities and designer boutiques as a *good thing*. "The Power Broker" gives a better portrait of Moses.
Show Less

Language

Original language

English

Physical description

256 p.; 9.55 inches

ISBN

9781400066742
Page: 0.3001 seconds