A Fight to Forget: Urban Renewal,Robert Moses,Jane Jacobs,and the Stories of Our Cities

A devastating and gripping account of the persistence of discredited public-housing models is in D. Bradford Hunt , Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York ( New York, NY: Knopf, 1974). One such early critic was Edward N. Saveth , "The Moses Model," Reviews in American History 4, no. 3 (1976): 451-57. A more recent overview of scholarly reactions to Caro’s work is Jon C. Teaford , "Caro versus Moses, Round Two," Technology and Culture 49, no. 2 (2008): 442-48.

Marshall Berman , "Buildings Are Judgment . . . or ‘What Man Can Build,’" Ramparts 13 (March 1975): 33-39, 50-58, at 56. Caro’s provincialism was also noted in Jane Holtz Kay , "The Master Builder and His Works," The Nation, September 28, 1974, 277.

In a recent feature on the New York Times website, questions from readers repeatedly referenced some of Caro’s more outlandish assertions. "Ask about the Legacy of Robert Moses," May 10, 2010, http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/ask-about-the-legacy-of-robert-moses .

In the historiography of Robert Moses, a good story has rarely been constrained by facts. The early biographical pieces on him (e.g., Cleveland Rodgers, Robert Moses: Builder for Democracy [New York, NY: Holt, 1952]) were essentially public relations fictions. On Moses’s battles over narrative control with other potential biographers, including Rexford G. Tugwell, see Appendix 1 of my "Everything Must Go: A Novel of Robert Moses’s New York" (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2007).

Joel Schwartz , The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993).

Joann P. Krieg, ed., Robert Moses: Single-Minded Genius (Interlaken, NY: Heart of the Lakes, 1989), includes Kenneth T. Jackson, "Robert Moses and the Planned Environment," 21-30; Jameson W. Doig, "Some Reflections on Moses and His Biographer," 31-33; George Stevens, "Robert Caro’s Moses: A Historian’s Critique," 35-45; Karen E. Markoe, "Robert Caro and His Critics," 47-54; Jameson W. Doig, "How to Rein in and Reshape Robert Moses: The Port Authority’s Varied Strategies," 57-67; David C. Perry, "The Moses Model of Governance," 69-78; Helen A. Harrison, "From Dump to Glory: Robert Moses and the Flushing Meadow Improvement," 91-100; and J. Lance Mallamo, "Building the Roads to Greatness: Robert Moses and Long Island’s State Parkways," 159-67, among others.

Robert Moses to Louis F. V. Mercler (picture editor of Holiday), October 16, 1959, and Robert Moses to C. C. Jones, December 5, 1959, both in folder 8H, Box 46, Robert Moses Papers (RMP), Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Bromley is also the author of a comprehensive dismantling of Caro’s famous chapter on the Cross-Bronx Expressway: "Not So Simple! Caro, Moses, and the Impact of the Cross-Bronx Expressway," Bronx County Historical Society Journal 35, no. 1 (spring 1998): 4-29.

Recent work includes Nicolai Ouroussoff, "Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York," The New York Times, April 30, 2006; Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009); Roberta Brandes Gratz, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2010); and Stephen A. Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth, eds., What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs (Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2010). The biographies Jacobs has received so far are thin stuff-Alice Sparberg Alexiou’s Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006) is practically a mash note.

I was employed by this imprint from 1999 to 2002.

Norman Oder , "The Missing Jane Jacobs Chapter in The Power Broker," October 9, 2007, http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/2007/10/missing-jane-jacobs-chapter-in-power.html .

On the lack of an actual dynamic between Jacobs and Moses, see Christopher Klemek, "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," pp. 7-11 in Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York, ed. Timothy Mennel, Jo Steffens, and Christopher Klemek (New York, NY: Municipal Art Society of New York and Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).

Robert Moses to Sidney W. Davidson, September 19, 1962, in folder "September, 1962-Library Copies," Box 48, RMP.

Peter Laurence , "The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955-1965," Journal of Urban Design 11, no. 2 (June 2006): 145-72.

Schwartz, New York Approach; and Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, NY: Knopf, 2003). Other recent works in similar veins as Zipp’s are Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster; and Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

Robert A. Beauregard , When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Zipp is clear about his debts to other works for the facts if not the framing; conspicuous among them is Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York, NY: Monacelli, 1995).