The Battle for Gotham (42 page)

“The story is told,” Jacobs recalled, that “an actor and an actress wanted to get married at, I think, Marble Collegiate, and they got short-changed there, and somebody said, ‘Go to the little church around the corner.’ It had a different name [Church of the Transfiguration]. They were treated there with dignity. It became the church of theater people and became known as ‘The Little Church Around the Corner.’ This was either before the war in the ’30s, or right after, not long after the Regional Plan was proposed. That would have been the first lacing across Manhattan, but because of the church, they hit resistance. So that piece was dropped. Then there was the hiatus on construction during the war.”

Early tunnels, bridges, and ramps, Jacobs pointed out, were on the periphery of Manhattan. Few viewed them as affecting the city center. “There’s a certain logic, you see, to drawing this through traffic over to the edges,” she said. “But the plan always presupposed these lacings, this whole net, to get cars into the city expeditiously and across town. A Los Angelizing of the whole city.” The “Los Angelizing,” Jacobs said, is what traffic engineers want to do to all cities, a one-size-fits-all approach to any city.

This is probably what they all are taught, that no place within a city should be more than a quarter of a mile from a ramp onto an expressway. Los Angeles comes closest to that. Everywhere in Los Angeles is fed by expressways. This is the basic idea.

And this was always the plan for New York. But you see, it wasn’t evident when it was just on the outside. The 1929 plan did not show entrance ramps, nor do Westway maps. Ramps require enormous demolition to create. The minute the real plan for Los Angelizing Manhattan ever goes into operation, it alarms the hell out of people because the destructive implications become very vivid. The Thirtieth Street crossing got that kind of opposition. The Cross Bronx Expressway did too, but that opposition didn’t succeed.

The road through Washington Square would have been one of those ramps. Yet it wasn’t clear to people for a long time, she said, that it would connect to the expressway.

FIGHTING CITY HALL

“Some people,” she said, “would like New York to turn into a Los Angeles, or don’t have any sense of the highway’s impact on the fabric of the city, or are like Robert Moses, and there are plenty of people like this. There is no use—we found out in these fights—trying to convince these people. You fight them. If you spend all your time trying to persuade the people who really want this, instead of fighting them, you lose. This is the way to get defeated.” This is a key Jacobs principle: cultivate your constituency rather than trying to persuade your opponents. “You could spend all that energy on trying to bring reason to Robert Moses, or people like him, showing him how he was harming the city, and you would waste it all because his idea of improving the city is really to wipe it out and start over with big projects.”

8.3 This cover story of my interview with Jane about Westway gained a lot of attention in 1978. Jane’s voice had not been heard in New York for a number of years.
New York Magazine
.

People meet with officials at City Hall, hear expressions of empathy, even maybe agreement, think they have made their case, she said. When it doesn’t go their way, they get discouraged. “That’s where the expression ‘You can’t fight City Hall’ comes from. But you can fight City Hall if you understand that trying to fight it is different from trying to persuade. You can’t persuade them, but you can fight them.”

The viability or regenerative potential of some areas is often not easily evident to the casual observer. Thus, officials declare blighted a neighborhood that is anything but. Deterioration along the Westway route was obvious. Buildings had been neglected for a long time in anticipation of the highway. Few people recognized it as a classic condition, like SoHo had been, where the plan for the highway decades earlier made possible the assumption that nothing else could occur there, an illustration of “planners’ blight,” as described in the SoHo chapter.

The question arose about what would happen to traffic without Westway. It would either continue south around the tip of the island or find its way across the streets, Jacobs predicted. But “the faster you make it for the traffic, the more of it will use these facilities, and also, the less money you have for other kinds of transportation. It’s no accident that transit has gone down, while enormous amounts of money have been spent on highways in New York.”

HIGHWAY AS CURE FOR DECAY

Driving down the West Side revealed the many things that were happening to make the area look bad. Aside from derelict and neglected buildings, landlords had readily rented to raunchy nightclubs, like the Anvil. Nevertheless, Jacobs insisted, “no defense is needed of how good the area is, or why it seems so bad. This highway can’t be justified on the grounds that it’s so bad there that things need to be taken out. What a ridiculous idea that you put in a billion-dollar highway to manicure a place!”

I raised a larger issue, arguing that the pattern of designating one area after another for renewal or a highway, as Moses did, caused the constant uprooting of people. Jacobs grew a little impatient:

I know, but that’s still a very peripheral argument against the expressway, because plenty of expressways have been put into areas—or proposed for areas—chosen precisely so that that will not happen. They’ve been put through parkland, through ravines, along old railroad tracks. They’ve been put through all kinds of places where they will not uproot people, or where displacement is minimal. And it still does enormous damage to a city. And it’s still the wrong priority for the money.

This is a wrong way to treat transportation in the city. And it’s an uneconomic way and it’s a polluting way, and it’s got internal contradictions that cannot be justified. And it is a national problem. It doesn’t mean that, aha, if you can, in another city, find an expressway that actually doesn’t uproot anybody and doesn’t cut off the waterfront, and doesn’t do one of these specific things, yet cuts through the city, that it’s okay. It’s not.

For Jacobs, it all boiled down to certain irrevocable givens. One of those givens is that if the plan brings more cars into the city, it is wrong. And, she added, it was “cutting down the amount of money, inevitably, to deal with city transportation in other ways.”

TIDE TURNING AGAINST CARS?

Neighborhood traffic has long been a sore point in many places, but most people assume that providing more parking opportunities takes moving cars off the streets. Yet, just as critics argued and showed in the Washington Square Park fight, the more you provide for cars, the more cars will come. The easier to park, the more people will drive. But how traffic cripples, if not kills, a neighborhood is not always understood.

In
Death and Life,
Jacobs summed up the problem as she had done in our interview—the erosion of the city in favor of the automobile. Roads become wider. Sidewalks are narrowed. Noise, pollution, danger increase. It’s a process of erosion of everything else. When too many automobiles start coming into a neighborhood, deterioration inevitably occurs. When every other amenity of the neighborhood, or of the city, is sacrificed, and inordinate proportions of transportation money are devoted to cars, then you’re eroding the city.

Jacobs was not anticar, just against transforming the city primarily for cars. “There are people who must have this metal cocoon,” Jacobs added.
⁴
“If they will accept some of the disadvantages of it—that it’s a very slow way to get about, very aggravating to be caught in traffic, and so on—okay, they make their choice. But when they want the whole city remodeled to accommodate their phobia, that’s the problem. And furthermore it’s an impossible thing. You cannot do it. You just can’t, especially in dense and large cities, accommodate all the potential cars. Inevitably, you’re eroding things.”

And, of course, it came back again to priorities. “Westway is a prime example of not only, my God, the cost,” Jacobs said, “but also the vision of what the waterfront will be, and what it will do to the rest of New York streets.”

This becomes the first step in a new erosion process. “And a very big one,” she added. “A very big step. The amount of money involved is sort of a measure of that.”

THE INTERNAL CONTRADICTION

This was where her second fundamental point came in. The first was that Westway was part of the same network as the Lower Manhattan Expressway, all first provided for in the 1929 Regional Plan. The second point, similar in both fights, was the internal contradiction of the proponents’ argument.

Here it is, their big vulnerable point: two contradictory things. One is, if they say that what this expressway is going to accomplish is to accommodate a whole lot of additional traffic, then they run into the problem about air pollution. Even if they say the traffic is going to move faster. If it’s going to accommodate over the next twenty years 2 or 3 percent more traffic a year, or whatever, and you begin to convert that into air pollution, it’s horrifying, and it will never meet the air pollution standards. So they have to minimize the increase in traffic and downplay that it is encouraging more and more automobile traffic at the expense of transit.

But these things cost so damn much, how are you going to justify spending billions of dollars on this highway if it’s not going to handle any more traffic than is being handled now? The enormous costs require arguing that there is some commensurate enormous service it will do. And yet that service, carrying and generating increased traffic, implies horrendous damage to the environment. So, in one case they argue the one thing. Then they have to be inconsistent and argue the other one.

Thus, if it’s going to do what it’s supposed to do and justify its cost, more traffic will be created, and pollution will be generated. If you minimize the traffic projection, you’re minimizing the job the project will do, and therefore you forfeit its justification. The cost can’t be justified. “We may think we have problems,” she laughed, “but we don’t have any built-in inherent intellectual inconsistency, terrible inconsistency, ruinous inconsistency, which they do.”

Now, this is the chief thing that I think is alike on both these fights. As far as I know, the Lower Manhattan Expressway fight was the first one, at least in New York, where the citizens fighting it began to focus on this inconsistency. That’s partly because of the much greater awareness of what was happening to air quality than in the past.
⁵
And when you took the figures that were promoted for the expressway and turned them into what it would mean to the air, in Chinatown, for example, it was outrageous.

PROPONENTS CHANGE THE ARGUMENT

That’s when suddenly expressway proponents switched the whole argument to the marvelous new housing and parks and all that was going to be put in on either side of the expressway; it was going to be a whole new piece of city.

And the hearing that was held, the one where I got arrested, that’s what that was all about in ’68? [That hearing] was put together very hastily to change the subject. They
had
to change the subject because they were hung up on this dilemma.

Now, with Westway, here’s how it’s similar: it
started
with a change of subject. So much about Westway has been about the landfill and what will be built on it, and the proponents of Westway keep trying to talk about that instead of about the highway. And the more they can talk about that, the less they have to face this absolutely impossible thing of trying to justify it. That’s the function of the landfill.

They learned a lesson. They can’t argue Westway on the grounds of how much traffic it will service because the argument then becomes the pollution. They can’t argue how little pollution it will provide because the argument becomes why spend all this money if it’s going to do that little for traffic. But the opponents of Westway won’t let them change the subject entirely.

Now they’re saying, look, even if it was 3 percent—that’s nothing. But you see
these are different hearings
. They never have a hearing at which the economic justification and the pollution both have to be argued. They argue one thing at one kind of hearing, and then years later when the pollution one comes up they’ll argue something else. And there’s no honesty to any of these figures. And here is the basic inconsistency, the basic impossibility. Actually, it
is
impossible to deal with the traffic needs of New York in highways instead of transit; it’s an utter impossibility. It’s a contradiction in terms. And it’s not a verbal contradiction; it’s a real one. You can’t do it and keep New York, keep it as a viable city.