Jane Jacobs
saw that end of the new york documentary yesterday. she saved us (according to burns) from moses and his sky gods and their parting of hudson and canal streets. quite interesting stuff about how ghettoes were formed and neighborhoods ruined as a result of the tyrrany of the automobile.
yes, thats where I picked up on her.G village/Soho/Little Italy/Bwry/Lowasada would have looked like the cross Bronx Xpressway. Then after saving "The Village" she took her two Vietnam era, draft age sons to Canada and never came back.
Somewhere I read that she was the only living person who declined to be interviewed for the documentary. I guess she's moved on, but the highway fight left a lasting impression in the city. When I was in school here in the second half of the 70s, there was a lot of controversy over "Westway", a proposal for a new West Side highway. I can now see that the issues and strategies were largely a rehearsal of the earlier confrontation. It took twenty years to come to some sort of compromise, even though there is a pretty clear need for highways along the edge (if not through the middle) of Manhattan. We used to ride bikes on the old elevated highway, which stood for some years along the lower West Side, before it was finally demolished. It was a strange view, contrasting the new Trade Center with the derelict remnant of the old industrial city. Sometimes we rode at night. With streetlights at eye level, you were semi-blinded, and lost connection to the pavement, so that you felt you were flying through a nowhere zone between past and future. It was the Punk era of post-sixties disillusionment, and we made a fetish out of the city's decrepitude, because it didn't seem like we could hope for anything better. A few years earlier, Robert Smithson had written The Monuments of Passaic, a tour of the industrial ruins of New Jersey, written in the style of a 19th century Baedecker of classical ruins. This was the period when Modernism, with its expansive vision of the future, gave way to the ironic confusions of Post-Modernism. Money finally started flowing in the Reagan era, but only after a bitter recession which the supply-siders clamed we were going to avoid. We called the "improvements" gentrification, and resented it. If the city did eventually become more livable, no little credit should be reserved for Jacobs, Huxtable (structural preservation can't be separated from human preservation), and others who saw that progress is not a one way street, and that the future is never separable from the past.
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- bill 11-25-2001 5:13 pm
saw that end of the new york documentary yesterday. she saved us (according to burns) from moses and his sky gods and their parting of hudson and canal streets. quite interesting stuff about how ghettoes were formed and neighborhoods ruined as a result of the tyrrany of the automobile.
- dave 11-26-2001 3:11 am [add a comment]
yes, thats where I picked up on her.G village/Soho/Little Italy/Bwry/Lowasada would have looked like the cross Bronx Xpressway. Then after saving "The Village" she took her two Vietnam era, draft age sons to Canada and never came back.
- bill 11-26-2001 4:09 pm [add a comment]
Somewhere I read that she was the only living person who declined to be interviewed for the documentary. I guess she's moved on, but the highway fight left a lasting impression in the city. When I was in school here in the second half of the 70s, there was a lot of controversy over "Westway", a proposal for a new West Side highway. I can now see that the issues and strategies were largely a rehearsal of the earlier confrontation. It took twenty years to come to some sort of compromise, even though there is a pretty clear need for highways along the edge (if not through the middle) of Manhattan. We used to ride bikes on the old elevated highway, which stood for some years along the lower West Side, before it was finally demolished. It was a strange view, contrasting the new Trade Center with the derelict remnant of the old industrial city. Sometimes we rode at night. With streetlights at eye level, you were semi-blinded, and lost connection to the pavement, so that you felt you were flying through a nowhere zone between past and future. It was the Punk era of post-sixties disillusionment, and we made a fetish out of the city's decrepitude, because it didn't seem like we could hope for anything better. A few years earlier, Robert Smithson had written The Monuments of Passaic, a tour of the industrial ruins of New Jersey, written in the style of a 19th century Baedecker of classical ruins. This was the period when Modernism, with its expansive vision of the future, gave way to the ironic confusions of Post-Modernism. Money finally started flowing in the Reagan era, but only after a bitter recession which the supply-siders clamed we were going to avoid. We called the "improvements" gentrification, and resented it. If the city did eventually become more livable, no little credit should be reserved for Jacobs, Huxtable (structural preservation can't be separated from human preservation), and others who saw that progress is not a one way street, and that the future is never separable from the past.
- alex 11-26-2001 9:56 pm [add a comment]
that penn station thing still irks me...1 2 3
- dave 11-27-2001 6:33 am [add a comment]