Anarchy and Order

The public hearing had already begun when she arrived. After stopping to add her name to the list of people requesting to speak, she headed toward the front of the auditorium, acknowledging the applause that rippled up from the crowd as she passed, a flash of white hair bobbing along the aisle, thick black glasses perched on an aquiline nose. She took a seat at the front of the hall.

The recipient of the applause was Jane Jacobs, a fifty-one-year-old author and activist, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities had made her synonymous with efforts to fight urban renewal projects that destroyed existing neighborhoods. On this pleasant spring evening, about two hundred residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Little Italy, Greenwich Village, and what would later be known as SoHo had gathered in a high-school auditorium for a public discussion of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. They sat scattered in rows of fold-down seats, fanning themselves with pamphlets and craning to see the person who was speaking at a microphone in front of the stage.

The meeting had been called by officials from the New York State Transportation Department who believed the Lower Manhattan Expressway would alleviate street traffic on clogged Manhattan streets and increase efficiency for drivers looking to cross from New Jersey to Long Island. The superhighway was to be elevated, providing ten wide lanes that would soar above the crowded city streets. But its foundation would cut through dense city blocks that had existed almost since the Dutch had settled Manhattan nearly four centuries before. Even the city officials knew that the price of this monument to progress would be steep: the government would have to evict twenty-two hundred families, demolish over four hundred buildings, and relocate more than eight hundred businesses to clear the way.

Though the ostensible purpose of the meeting was to collect opinions about the project, it had been hurriedly scheduled—to make sure testimony was gathered before legislation passed that required an even more extensive public approval process. For years, there had been clear opposition from the neighborhood’s residents, who were now irritated that they had to state their case one more time. The manner in which the meeting was being conducted—the microphone faced toward the audience, not the officials the residents were nominally addressing—suggested that state officials were just going through the motions.

As a stenotypist moved her hands rhythmically over the key tabs of her machine off to the side, the officials frequently interrupted speakers to remind them of a time limit. When a man talking about the dangers of air pollution was told to speed it up, the audience began shouting questions to the officials: What changes had been made to the proposal? Was there anything better about the latest version of the roadway plan? The transportation men shrugged; they were only there to provide basic information and hear testimony, or rather bear witness to the fact that testimony was being given. The crowd began a chant: “We want Jane. We want Jane.”

From the seat she’d taken near the front of the auditorium, Jane Jacobs made her way up the stairs and onto the stage. “It’s interesting, the way the mike is set up,” she observed tartly as she reached the microphone. She was calm, and her expression was matter-of-fact. “At a public hearing, you are supposed to address the officials, not the audience.”

The chairman of the hearing, John Toth of the New York Department of Transportation, bounded down from the stage and turned the microphone around. But Jacobs turned it right back.

“Thank you, sir, but I’d rather speak to my friends,” Jacobs said. “We’ve been talking to ourselves all evening as it is.” The crowd roared with laughter.

After a pause, Jacobs continued. “What kind of administration could even consider destroying the homes of two thousand families at a time like this? With the amount of unemployment in the city who would think of wiping out thousands of minority jobs? They must be insane.” The expressway would destroy families and businesses, factories and historic buildings—in short, entire neighborhoods. Nobody wanted it, she said. But the government wasn’t listening. It was as if the officials backing the project had parted from reality.

“The city is like an insane asylum run by the most far-out inmates. If the expressway is put through,” she warned, “there will be anarchy.” The officials in attendance were mere errand boys, and the residents had to make sure they would take a single message back to their bosses: that the people of lower Manhattan would not stand for this highway. But this message couldn’t be mere words, she said; it had to be a physical demonstration, a defiant march. She called the crowd forward, and about fifty people, some carrying placards, moved up the stairs, with Jane leading the way.

Toth rose from his seat as the first of the protesters stepped onto the stage. “You can’t come up here. Get off the stage!”

“We are going to march right across this stage and down the other side,” Jacobs responded calmly, as if to a petulant child.

“Arrest this woman!” Toth frantically called to the police officers assigned to the hearing.

As Jacobs led the crowd onto the stage, the stenotypist gathered up her machine and clutched it to her chest, proclaiming that she was not an employee of the state, had nothing to do with the expressway, and had just purchased the brand-new equipment herself. With her free hand, she lunged out at the marchers to keep them away, and struck Jacobs. It was more jostle than shove, but a patrolman intervened.

“Why don’t you just sit down here, Mrs. Jacobs,” he said, gesturing to a folding chair at the rear of the stage. She went to the chair and stood behind it, resting her hands on its back.

As more and more marchers made their way to the stage and the stenotypist tried in vain to gather her handiwork, rolls of tape tumbled onto the floor. The defiant New Yorkers, seeing an opportunity, tramped on the unraveling streams and picked up clumps and tossed them in the air. Without the stenographic notes, the officials couldn’t prove they had satisfied the requirement to gather public input. Jacobs had, in fact, discussed this with a few selected residents prior to the meeting: if the record was destroyed, it would be as though the hearing had never happened, delaying the project and buying more time. As Toth and the transportation men scurried to retrieve what they could, Jacobs climbed down from the stage and took to the microphone once again.

“Listen to this! There is no record! There is no hearing! We’re through with this phony, fink hearing!”

As she led the crowd to the exit, a man in plainclothes who identified himself as the precinct captain took her arm and informed Jacobs she was under arrest.

“What are the charges?” Jacobs asked.

The captain said that Toth, the top official from the government, had directed him to arrest her for disrupting the hearing.

“I don’t think that’s very bright of him,” Jacobs said.

“I don’t think so either, but we have no choice,” the captain said.

As the crowd huddled outside the auditorium in disbelief, Patrolman Joseph McGovern guided Jacobs into the backseat of an idling squad car. A lawyer who happened to be among the protesters called out an offer to represent Jacobs, and said he would follow her. The squad car eased away from the curb, heading south to turn around back toward the Seventh Precinct police station on Clinton Street, three blocks away. The demonstrators followed on foot.

At the station, a policeman led Jacobs to a holding room. From where she sat, she could hear another officer talking on the telephone, checking with the city’s legal department to determine the offense with which she should be charged. The officer hung up and walked over to her. Jacobs had been even-keeled, even bemused, during the ride to the station, but she frowned as he told her she had probably committed a felony and would get at least six months in jail.

In the end, Jacobs was not accused that night of a felony. After about two hours in a holding room, she was charged with disorderly conduct, a crime unlikely to result in jail time, and released. At midnight, when Jacobs finally walked out of the precinct station, tired and disheveled, about twenty people were still waiting outside, grouped together in the cooler air and chanting, “We want Jane!”

The cops pleaded with Jacobs to calm them down, and, not wanting to continue the ruckus into the night, she asked them to be quiet. She made her way down the front steps of the station and out onto the empty street near the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, the very spot where the Lower Manhattan Expressway would connect—if the government could ever get it through, that is.

A New York Post reporter stepped forward and asked her what had happened. Composing herself, she said she had done nothing wrong.

“I couldn’t be arrested in a better cause,” she said.

The morning after Jane Jacobs’s arrest, Robert Moses rose before 7:00 a.m. and dressed, as he did each day, in an oxford dress shirt with cuff links, a well-tailored suit, and a dark tie. Though his black hair had thinned and turned to white and his dark eyes had grown slightly hooded, Moses was as dashing as he had been as a young man at Yale—six feet tall and olive skinned, his body toned by a lifetime of swimming. His driver arrived at precisely 7:30 a.m. to take him to his office on Randall’s Island, a spit of land under the Triborough Bridge, a span that Moses had built thirty years before. He read the morning newspapers, which ran accounts of the raucous events at Seward Park High School.

Jane Jacobs, who had led the neighborhood opposition to the Lower Manhattan Expressway for so many years, had finally gotten what was coming to her, Moses thought. Maybe now this project—the final piece of his vision for a complete highway network throughout New York—could proceed without further interference.

Moses had first proposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway back in 1940, along with miles of roadways and bridges crisscrossing the metropolis. The other projects were up and running, but thus far Moses had been unable to push “Lomex,” as it became known, through to completion. In the past, he had built bridges, highways, parks, and housing towers with astonishing speed, and his works had transformed New York. He was responsible for thirteen bridges, two tunnels, 637 miles of highways, 658 playgrounds, ten giant public swimming pools, seventeen state parks, and dozens of new or renovated city parks. He cleared three hundred acres of city land and constructed towers that contained 28,400 new apartments. He built Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Shea Stadium, Jones Beach, and the Central Park Zoo. He built the Triborough and Verrazano-Narrows bridges, the Long Island and Cross Bronx expressways, parkways down the side of Manhattan and north and east of the city avenues, overpasses, causeways, and viaducts. Any New Yorker or visitor to the city has at one time or another driven down, walked through, sat in, or sailed into something that Moses created.

Like the pharaohs of Egypt building the pyramids, Moses reshaped New York through the exercise of shrewd and unfettered power. He was an independent actor, beholden to no one, and largely insulated from opposition, dissent, and outside influence—including the meddlesome wishes of voters. Working at the side of New York’s governor Alfred Smith in the 1920s and serving briefly as New York secretary of state, Moses ran for governor of New York in 1934, losing badly. But he soon discovered that he could wield power much more effectively if he let others run for elective office, and instead angle to run the agencies that carried out the work of government. Over the course of his career he served as head of numerous agencies, including the Long Island parks agency, the New York City Parks Department, transportation and public works, the city agency in charge of housing and of urban renewal and reconstruction, chairman of the World’s Fair, and chief of a special commission overseeing all the highways called arteries through and around New York. And there was the biggest power base of all: the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, sustained by federal funding and tolls, with its own budget. As chairman of the authority, in whose Randall’s Island headquarters he sat that morning, Moses ran his own government, with its own seal, its own police, a fleet of cars, and even a yacht. Moses had written the legislation creating the authority, including his own job description, terms and bylaws, and the power to issue bonds and collect revenue from tolls. He was the most public figure in New York who had never been elected to anything, at one time holding twelve different city and state positions simultaneously—all of them appointments. He talked his way into these positions of power, rewrote rules and bylaws to strengthen and expand his responsibilities, earned the loyalty of workers and contractors who depended on him for their livelihoods, and made himself so indispensable that the chief executives with the power to fire him always declined to do so. He practiced bureaucratic politics with cunning and expertise, serving through the administrations of five New York City mayors and six governors.

By 1968, Moses was being feted at black-tie dinners, profiled in national newsmagazines, and awarded citations, medals, and honorary degrees. He had mingled with Queen Elizabeth and the pope, world leaders, presidents, governors, and mayors. It had been a great run, and Moses longed to finish it off with the Lower Manhattan Expressway. This last project would make all the other roads and bridges fit together in perfect harmony—the “loom across the weave,” as he called it. Cars and trucks would be able to travel at high speeds not just around but through New York City, allowing it to maintain its dominance as a great economic power.

Only Jane Jacobs and her band of quirky crusaders stood in the way. Moses had waited out neighborhood opposition before—ignoring it, bargaining with activists or staring them down, or making sure the fine print of legislation rendered any opposition helpless. But somehow a woman from Pennsylvania coal country, with no college degree, had managed to stall this project for seven long years.

Settled at his cluttered desk on Randall’s Island, Moses gazed out across the East River and New York’s majestic skyline, and glanced over at the nearby model room, where cardboard creations of all his projects were collected under glass. The model of Lomex was outfitted with a Lucite handle, allowing him to lift the blocks of buildings in the highway’s path and replace them with the smooth gray expanse of the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

In the lair of an empire he had so determinedly built over decades of public service for New York City, Robert Moses snapped up one of the black rotary telephones on his desk to find out more about what had happened that night. It was preposterous, he thought. Some busy housewife thought she was better equipped to plan a roadway network for New York that he knew would last for a century.