Makers and Breakers

Confidential property of University of California Press Uncorrected proofs Not for reproduction or distribution Van 12 Cortlandt Park 10 MAKERS AND BREAKERS Van Co-op Cortlandt City OLMSTED, MOSES, JACOBS SHAPE THE CITY Pelham Bay Village Park Long Island Sound frederick law olmsted (1822–1903) 14 1963–65: Presides over transformation of Flushing Meadows for BRONX o Cr ss Br onx 1 August 1840: Arrives in New its second world’s fair, which flounders in finances and attendance 11 Ex py York at 18, from Connecticut, to 15 1968: Still swims in Atlantic at age 79 near longtime Babylon, clerk for a silk importer; lodges in Long Island, home Brooklyn Heights 2 1848–55: On 125 acres jane jacobs (born Jane Butzner, 1916–2006) purchased for him by his father, 1 1934: Arrives from Scranton, builds Tosomock Farm into a PA, at age 18, intent on breaking successful nursery between stints into journalism, and with her traveling sister soon moves to the West 3 February 16, 1853: Publishes Village, their “ideal neighbor- first dispatch from the South in hood” Hudson River nascent New York Times, starting 6 5 2 7 1943: Having dropped out a series that transforms him into a staunch abolitionist, respected of Columbia’s University Exten- Riverside 4 journalist, and influential public voice Triborough Park sion, rejecting formal education, Bridge 4 Fall 1857–April 1858: Spending nights at architect Calvert Vaux’s, takes job as writer at the US collaborates on Greensward Plan for entry into the Central Park State Department’s Office of 9 design competition War Information; covers urban redevelopment and later faces 12 6 2 Central Park 5 June 1859: Marries his brother’s widow, Mary Olmsted, by Central questions on alleged communist sympathies 2 5 Park’s Great Hill and then moves into Central Park administration 3 1944: Meets architect Robert Hyde Jacobs during a party at her 8 5 offices with her children apartment and marries him a month later 1 6 1861: Drills park employees at outbreak of Civil War before 4 1947: Purchases a former candy store with her husband and begins Flushing 9 8 leaving to head the US Sanitary Commission, precursor to the renovating it into their longtime home Meadows— Red Cross Corona 5 1958: While working as an editor at Architectural Forum, publishes Park 7 14 1865: Returns from stormy tenure at a California gold mine “Downtown Is for People” in establishing herself as a Fortune, MANHATTAN y Exp and launches Olmsted, Vaux & Company, Landscape Architects; Jane Jacobs Way 4 4 UEENS major critic of urban renewal 7 Stuyvesant 3 s 1 n begins planning Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Town 6 6 e 1958: Turns two sons and daughter loose with petitions in e u 8 1866: Helps found magazine as part-owner -Q The Nation campaign to defeat Moses’s plan for avenue bisecting Washington n LOMEX ly k and associate editor Square Park (Jacobs’s daughter, Mary, appears at center in front o ro 11 B of the park’s arch on the opposite page) 9 Mid-1870s: Calls view of Lullwater through the Cleft Ridge Span River 3 in completed Prospect Park “one of the most superb and refined 7 8 1961: Frequents Lion’s Head pub, hub for West Villagers’ 3 7 park scenes I ever saw” successful fight against urban renewal plan for neighborhood East 10 10 1881: Leaves New York for Brookline, Massachusetts, to live out 8 1961: Working with editor Jason Epstein of Random House, 10 his days publishes The Death and Life of Great American Cities 1 9 1962: Pickets in protest of planned demolition of Pennsylvania Fort Greene robert moses (1888–1981) Station and then joins Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Park Manhattan Expressway (lomex) as its co-chair 1 1897: Moves to the city from 10 December 6, 1967: Arrested for blocking entrance to a military New Haven at 8; grows up in five- Park induction center in protest of Vietnam War story brownstone surrounded by Eastern Pkwy Rembrandts and maids 11 April 10, 1968: Arrested for disrupting public meeting on lomex 2 1901–3: Attends elite Ethical and charged with inciting a riot; lomex, by 1971, is officially killed Upper Prospect 9 12 Culture School before transfer- Summer 1968: Moves to Toronto to keep sons out of the draft 15 ring to even more elite Dwight Bay School and Mohegan Lake Academy 3 1914: Begins work to reform Ocean Pkwy city’s corrupt civil service system BROOKLYN at the Bureau of Municipal Research, epicenter of Progressivism, where he meets his wife, Mary Louise Sims 4 1918: Living in small apartment with no job, supported by his mother after being drummed out of city government, takes a position run- py ning commission to reorganize New York state government S d Ex 13 taten Islan 5 1934: Takes helm as the first city parks commissioner, overseeing all boroughs; fires all employees of borough parks departments Verrazano- Narrows 6 July 21, 1936: Defying Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, demolishes ferry Bridge docks to make way for approaches to the Triborough Bridge; later builds his permanent office under its toll plaza Pkwy Jamaica Bay B Fresh Kills elt 7 1936: Reportedly orders that Thomas Jefferson Pool, one of 11 Landfill massive pools funded by the New Deal, go unheated to discourage use by “coloreds” 8 December 11, 1946: Pulls together last-minute deal with money from the Rockefellers to build permanent UN headquarters STATEN 9 1950–53: From his apartment down the street from Gracie Mansion, exercises virtual control over city government, through ISLAND Lower Bay daily consultations with “accidental” mayor Vincent Impellitteri FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED 10 Early 1950s: Rents penthouse of Marguerite Hotel to watch Realized plans (designed, excavation for Brooklyn-Queens Expressway redesigned, or proposed in part by 11 Olmsted, alone or in partnership) 1952: Refuses alternate Cross-Bronx Expressway route through East 2 Tremont; 1,530 apartments, home to over 5,000, are demolished Unrealized plans 12 April 24, 1956: Orders park employees to destroy glen beloved to mothers and children of Upper West Side under cover of night ROBERT MOSES 13 November 21, 1964: Leads 52-limousine motorcade on first Realized plans (proposed by crossing of Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; does not invite Moses or implemented by a bridge workers to celebration Moses-directed agency) Unrealized plans Confidential property of University of California Press Uncorrected proofs Not for reproduction or distribution necessary to gain the new boulevard and pleasure ground lined with homes that Olmsted MAKERS AND BREAKERS pitched for prosperous “city-bred country boys.” Today, Carrville is remembered only for 16 no longer existing, not for what it once was. Cities are accretions—of lives, structures, landscapes, histories, and plans. While This kind of destruction is rarely associated with “the father of landscape architecture,” marks of the millions who’ve touched New York over time can be identified who also midwifed modern regional planning and suburban design. Olmsted’s name calls to mind the urbane wilderness of his best-known masterpiece. He’s the genius who forged within its layers, those wrought by three central figures in the making of the Central Park—its Ramble of wooded paths encased in the city’s grandeur—from a part of modern metropolis are nearly impossible to avoid. Frederick Law Olmsted was Manhattan that engineer Egbert Viele described as “a pestilential spot, where rank vegeta- the “father of landscape architecture”: he designed the city’s greatest parks and tion and miasmatic odors taint every breath of air.” Which is why, perhaps, the site was the world’s first parkways, pleasure grounds celebrated by the masses today. Rob- also home to Seneca Village, another refuge for free black New Yorkers. As with Eastern Parkway, Olmsted and Vaux’s first slum clearance project wasn’t admired exclusively for ert Moses was the “master builder” of New York in the twentieth century: he the park it brought to life; its removal of the black community provided another cause for drew a new city by sprinkling even more parks across the boroughs but also by celebration among city elites. erasing neighborhoods to make way for monumental highways, bridges, cultural The name most New Yorkers would associate with such demolition of low-income, centers, and housing projects. Jane Jacobs was Moses’s nemesis: the celebrated minority neighborhoods in the name of a greater good is Robert Moses: the planner-cum- power broker and so-called master builder of the city who, for a key stretch of decades in writer and activist rallied fellow citizens to reject his wholesale and undemo- the mid-twentieth century, simultaneously held twelve appointed positions in city and cratic reworking of their communities, helping to birth the preservation move- state government, among them parks commissioner, chairman of the Triborough Bridge ment. This is a map of three lives and their remnants—the plans each giant made and Tunnel Authority, and, perhaps most fittingly, a sui generis omnibus designation as and thwarted; the places they birthed, destroyed, and saved; the New Yorks they “construction coordinator of the City of New York.” For over forty years, he wielded a not-so-invisible power over New York’s ruling establishment, bending mayors, the press, dreamed of and brought into being. As Jonathan Tarleton’s essay here reminds us, and Wall Street to his vision. Thirteen bridges, 416 miles of parkways, 658 playgrounds, the line between a maker and breaker of the city can be a fine one. But whether and 150,000 housing units are attributed to Moses’s monomaniacal, arrogant leader- through enduring ideas or those embedded in the city’s very structure, the lega- ship—and that’s a partial accounting.

Load more