He wasn't God; he was just Moses with a meat ax

Update Feb. 21, 2007: a new exibition on Robert Moses and the Modern City: Remaking the Metropolis at the Museum of the City of New York, February 1 through May 28, 2007.

One of the seminal figures in New York's modern history was Robert Moses. Though the posts he held may sound relatively lowly, he used them to literally reshape New York, in particular to reshape it for benefit of automobiles. Through his forty-plus year career, Moses held many positions at once: city parks commissioner, planning commissioner, construction coordinator, chairman of the Slum Clearance Committee, and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnels Authority, as well as sitting on half a dozen boards and commissions of New York State, including the State Power Authority. That his tentacles wrapped around so much explains the power which for so long went unchecked — even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to dislodge Moses from power, and failed. Moses began his career in civil service in the late 1920s, and by 1929 had created Jones Beach on Long Island. This, and the more than 600 other parks that he was to build, cemented his adoration by the public he at once loved and despised.

Moses seized the public money available beginning in the 1930s to fashion a New York for the modern era, built around the automobile. He constructed the parkways that opened up Long Island to car-owning vacationers (deliberately making overpasses too low for buses, and thus inaccessible to the poorer classes), and the plethora of bridges and tunnels which cross the waterways around New York. For a man who never learned how to drive, Moses was obsessed with the automobile, building 627 miles of major roadway, including, in the late 1950s, the Cross Bronx Expressway. Likened to Baron von Haussman's Parisian boulevards, Moses's expressways often devastated the communities they went through. The Cross Bronx Expressway initiated the decline that led to the horrific conditions in the Bronx in the decades since.

Moses may loved the idea of “the people” (the parks and recreation facilities he built endeared him to the working public for years), but ultimately Moses's philosophy was tyrannical and destructive: “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax,” he wrote in his 1970 memoir. It was his disdain for the lives of the thousands he ruined with expressway building which eventually brought him down, finally knocked from power by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and fervent public opposition to additional expressways which would carve up Manhattan.

» More about Robert Moses and the disruption of American cities in the mid-20th Century

Technorati Tags: NewYorkCity, RobertMoses, ThePowerBroker

New York City's Central Park: modern life, cubicles, and why we want to take a walk

The reason why New York's Central Park is such a fantastic park is because it lets you engage in that activity which humans have been predisposed by evolution to do: wander. The park's meandering paths flow intricately through a “naturalistic” landscape; in their walking, we are returned to that place in our ancient history where we ambulated across the savannahs, through the forests, over the hill country and onto the plains; where we crossed watercourses and settled upon pond-side. The instinct to roam is deeply embedded in our human type; Central Park fulfills that place where we instinctively, irrepressibly, and desperately need to go to.

It's no surprise that a walk through a sylvan landscape refreshes our soul so thoroughly, since  we spent much of our pre-agricultural history doing something of the sort.  We were that “special” primate which  evolved from a four-on-the-floor knuckle-dragger to walking tall on our two back limbs. As chimpanzees (or something like that), we used our arms a lot — climbing trees, picking coconuts, or  scurrying across the dirt. But at some point we became homo erectus, and all of a sudden we're walking upright (freeing our arms for other tasks — and no sooner had we idle hands than we did devil's work!).

What do humans do when they can walk upright and look comfortably across the horizon instead of being hunched over an ant hill? They wander. And so we wander out of Africa, across central Asia, into Europe; we paddle onto islands and continents in the Pacific; we gorge ourselves on Woolly Mammoths and seals while we  cross a strip of land in a desolate near-Arctic environment; we nibble on acorns as we trickle down through California (!), and we scatter into Meso and South America where soon we'll grow to love corn. All this, before the S.U.V., before jet travel, before the Internet and the Queen Mary — we humans were just walking around the entire earth!

And then, in  a flash, in the last moments of our history, in the era in which we now live, we learn something that will change everything: agriculture. We plant, and we harvest, and we stay in one place;  we build irrigation systems, and apartment homes, and palaces. We enslave, we sacrifice, we honor, we love. We hire soldiers, and cobblers, and men to read the stars. We become believers, we become followers, we learn to get along in bigger and bigger families, our families become our villages, become our valleys, become our nation states.

And we forget, eventually, where we came from, because in a flash of deep time, we have gone from a direct experience of life on earth to a disconnected experience of life on earth, a life where the human-made, the human-transformed, the human-imprinted dominates. Strangely captivating, this life of cubes, of the unnaturally square: of cubicles in the office, cubicles on four wheels, cubicles of food, cubicles of sleep, cubicles of pixels of curlicues of pubic views.

Our lives, our home, our world — cubed. Unitized. Assayed. Sold and sold again. And when the modern human plan is taken to its last great place — North America — never mind the nature, never mind the savages who already live there. The lines are drawn by engineers in the employ of the powerful, and the form of human civilization is platted with greatest efficiency (or so it is believed) — see New York, see San Francisco. The nature part of the city is all but ignored, as economic expediency dictates the new form of the land.

And now this is my world. In my efficient cube of a home, I look out onto hundreds of other cubes, across a city of cubes (interrupted, blessedly, by an expanse of salt water bay).

My arms, once so powerful I could hoist myself through trees all day — to escape a hyena, to capture a squirrel — now serve more abstract purposes. At this moment, they rest lamely in front of me, my precisely dextrous fingertips tap-tapping on little white plastic cubes coded with 26 keys to a language in whose unlocking we can speak to others of our species. Later, I might use my left-hand fingertips to press six taut wires onto a flat wooden beam, while I  pluck those wires  with my right-hand fingertips — music, another language we learn.

Ah, this modern world! What a life!

Technorati Tags: centralpark, newyorkcity, parks, sanfrancisco, suburb, urbangrid, urbanplanning, walking, wanderlust

Jane Jacobs, famed New York urbanist, dies

Jane Jacobs, who gained fame for her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, died today in Toronto, where she had lived since the late 1960s.

On the NPR story which I just heard, they interviewed Robert Caro, who wrote The Power Broker,  a biography of Robert Moses — all of which reminded me of what I wrote about Robert Moses when I was a writer working in New York City for The Berkeley Guides.

Here's the book I worked on, titled Berkeley Guides: New York City '97 : On the Loose, On the Cheap, Off the Beaten Path.  You can buy it on Amazon for less than 50¢.

Technorati Tags: janejacobs, newyorkcity, robertmoses, sanmateocoast, thepowerbroker, urbanplanning

The Empire State Building: A WWII Casualty

In the waning days of World War II, Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith, an Army Air Force pilot, was flying his B-25 bomber from Bedford, Massachusets to Newark, New Jersey. Smith had just visited his wife in Bedford when he was returning to Newark in the unarmed bomber. Visibility in Manhattan was poor that morning of July 28, 1945, with the fog level around the 80th floor. Flying over Manhattan that morning, Smith found himself dodging the tops of syscrapers when he came up to the Empire State Building at 200 miles an hour---and slammed into it. Tearing an 18x20 foot hole in the 79th floor, the airplane’s gas tanks exploded in flames that scorched those inside the building. Besides the instant deaths of the pilot and his 2-man crew, 11 people at work in their offices were killed and 5 injured. Windows shattered all the way to the ground level, sending a rain of glass and debris to the street. One of the airplane’s prop engines cut an elevator cable and sent the elevator plunging 1000 feet (the operator survived), while the other engine ripped through the building to come out the other side and fall through the roof of an artist’s studio. All in all, a hell of a bout for the Empire State Building, which took the crash in stride.

Big white sound spaces in Manhattan

When New York was going through its 1980s building boom, deals between developers and city zoning regulators resulted in a proliferation of interior atriums and exterior plazas. The trade-off for these corporate-maintained semi-public spaces was height: in exchange for “giving” the public some open space at ground level, complete with art and a white-sound generating fountain or waterfall, the developer got to build an even taller skyscraper from which more rent could be garnered. Here are some of the better atriums and plazas to be found in Manhattan; keep them in mind when you’re looking for a place to kick back. Waterfalls, foliage, plenty of seating, and a small cafe often complement the scene, and the indoor atriums are invariably air-conditioned. Most are open 6 or 7 days a week; hours are typically 8AM – 6PM, though some are open later.

• Chemcourt. 277 Park Ave., at 47th St., Midtown East
• Citicorp Center. 53rd St., btw Third and Lexington Aves., Midtown East
• Crystal Pavilion. 50th St. at Third Ave., Midtown East
• Ford Foundation. 42nd St., btw First and Second Aves., Midtown East
• Grand Hyatt. 42nd St., at Park Ave., Midtown East
• Harkness Atrium. Broadway, btw 62nd and 63rd Sts., Upper West Side
• IBM Garden Plaza. 56th St., at Madison Ave., Midtown East
• Marriot Marquis Hotel. Broadway, btw 45th to 46th Sts., Midtown West
• New York Palace Hotel. Madison Ave., at 50th St., Midtown East
• Olympic Tower. 51st St., at Fifth Ave., Midtown West
• Omni Berkshire Place. 52nd St., at Madison Ave., Midtown East
• Paine Webber. Sixth Ave., btw 51st and 52nd Sts., Midtown West
• Park Avenue Atrium. 45th to 46th Sts., btw Park and Lexington Aves., Midtown East
• Park Avenue Plaza. Off Park Avenue btw 52nd and 53rd Sts., Midtown East
• Parker Meridien. 57th St., btw Sixth and Seventh Aves., Midtown West
• Place des Antiquaires. 57th St., btw Lexington and Park Aves
• Trump Tower. Fifth Ave., at 56th St., Midtown East
• Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris. 42nd St., at Park Ave., Midtown East
• World Financial Center. Hudson River (directly across from World Trade Center) btw Vesey and Liberty Sts., downtown

…And some vestpocket parks: 46th St., btw Sixth and Seventh Aves., Midtown West; 53rd St., btw Fifth and Madison, Midtown East; 51st St., btw Second and Third Aves., Midtown East.

A long ride to an empty beach

New York’s subway system is an awesome work of engineering, speeding millions of people across a huge area. The longest line in the system is the A Train, whose tracks stretch 32.29 miles from 207th Street at the northern tip of Manhattan to Far Rockaway in Queens. For the mere price of a subway token, you get a ride that lasts well over an hour and ends up overlooking a wind-swept beach at the Atlantic Ocean. Board the A Train anywhere along its line (remember that the A only makes express stops in Manhattan). Make sure you get on the train bound for Far Rockaway, rather than Lefferts Boulevard. The views far out in Queens are beautiful, especially as the train goes through the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, where you’ll swear you’re passing through a rural fishing village. At the Broad Channel station, you have the option of switching to the S Train bound for Rockaway Park, or staying on the A Train to Far Rockaway. Either one will put you within easy walking distance of the beach. For the truly adventurous, get off at Broad Channel and walk over to the boat rental place, where you can rent an aluminum skiff and motor around Jamaica Bay.

Mole people: living in New York's subway tunnels

As you speed through the dark subway tunnels, try to look beyond the reflections and into the caverns which sometimes stretch out from the tunnel. See anything? We’re not talking about alligators flushed down the toilet, but real people who live underground in the nooks and crannies of the subway system. These are the Mole People, made famous by journalist Jennifer Toth, who in 1993 wrote a book describing their plight. The mole people, who by some estimates number 5,000, are considered by New York’s homeless population the most dangerous and unstable of its numbers. They have chosen to live in the countless uncharted crannies of the city’s underground tunnel networks, especially those labyrinths which emanate from Riverside Park, Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, and Port Authority. Hooking up to wires for electricity has been easy, and the city’s discards provide all the material comforts they need: beds, rugs, lamps, paintings, even pets. Only running water is lacking, and so the mole people are encrusted in dirt and grime, blackened and blending in with the darkness. Sometimes, a mole person is killed by a train, or touches the electric third rail---that’s when their head, feet, and hands explode. Police sweeps through the small encampments try to force the subway dwellers into accepting social services, but many resist: At least in their tunnel spaces, they can set up a relatively permanent home, and even avoid much of the crime that homeless people on the outside suffer. To the mole people, the tunnels underneath New York aren’t much, but they are home.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates in Central Park, New York City: after the snow

Also see my photos of  Christo's Umbrellas in  Southern California (1991)

More photos of Christo's Gates in New York City, 2005:

• Gates in Central Park, New York City: before the snow
• Gates in Central Park, New York City: night time

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates in Central Park, New York City: before the snow

Also see my photos of  Christo's Umbrellas in  Southern California (1991)

More photos of Christo's Gates in New York City, 2005:

• Gates in Central Park, New York City:  after the snow 
• Gates in Central Park, New York City: night time

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates in Central Park, New York City: night time

Also see my photos of  Christo's Umbrellas in  Southern California (1991)

See my photos of Christo's Gates in New York City, 2005:

• Gates in Central Park, New York City: before the snow 
• Gates in Central Park, New York City:  after the snow