Before Moses and Jacobs: The Battle for New York That Never Happened

Earlier this week I examined the epic battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs over the Lower Manhattan Expressway.  This episode had consequences: the highway was never built, and the debate undermined Moses' vision of a city reshaped for cars.  Lucky for New York: as my photos showed, the city would have lost chunks of several neighborhoods and some remarkable buildings.

That highway was intensely controversial.  It's easy to assume, as many do, that the battle became so intense because the highway was an unprecedented assault on an intact neighborhood.

But it wasn't.

In fact, this neighborhood had already experienced some of the same impacts that the highway would have imposed.

Houston Street -- blank walls, empty spaces

To see what I mean, let's go just three blocks north of the proposed highway, to Houston Street (the north boundary of Soho).  This is a wide-open space: eight lanes with a median of trees and flowers.  Walk up and down a few times, and other aspects become apparent.  Blank walls, and small, odd-shaped, orphaned spaces give this big street a raw, unfinished character.  Billboards cover some of the blank walls (the street has been called the poor man's Times Square); one left-over space is now a parking lot for city trucks, another is a gas station.

What happened here?  A search in the online municipal archives and elsewhere provides the answer.  Houston Street, like most streets nearby, was once only two lanes wide.  But then everything changed: scores of buildings were demolished, and six more lanes were carved out of the city.  To see the change, compare this photo, taken at Bowery and Houston on June 23, 1929, with this photo taken yesterday at the same spot (the same buildings are evident on the left side of each photo):

This transformation happened in two stages.  In the 1930s a connecting link for the IND subway was built under Houston.  That job required a great deal of road-widening.  Then, between 1957 and 1963 Houston was widened again, into its current eight lane configuration, all the way from the East River to Sixth Avenue.  A 1957 photo gives a sense of the demolition required:

November 12, 1957 (New York Times)

 The interesting feature in both episodes was the absence of controversy.  Subway construction in the 1930s was hugely disruptive: 5,000 workers were displaced and 1,795 apartments demolished (almost as many as would have been taken out for the Lower Manhattan Expressway).  But The New York Times reported at the time:

"Some workers have been living in the flats for a score or more of years and bow to the inevitable march of progress now without a tinge of regret at leaving the neighborhood which has been a part and parcel of their lives for so long. They think of the days which are no more."

There seems to have been much the same response in the late 1950s.  This stage of widening and demolition was announced afterthe construction contract had been awarded.  Press coverage presented the project as simply a necessary initiative to ensure the smooth flow of traffic, particularly given the soon-to-be-built expressway just to the south:

New York Times, April 4, 1957

Houston Street has taken several decades to recover from these bouts of demolition and widening.  While some left-over spaces remain, others have been redeveloped only recently.  This unusual two-story building was added in 1984:

 And this condo building appeared only in 2004:

The gas station (often the first scar tissue to appear after a city is wounded) is said to be a place-holder until its owner can arrange a more lucrative development.

But two questions come to mind.  First, given the disruption involved, why wasn't this transformation more controversial?  And why hasn't this episode become part of our historical understanding (and mythologizing) about cities and highways?

Part of the answer must be that although by the 1950s Moses had become a lightening rod for criticism, he seemed not to have played the key role in these projects.  (The 1957 road-widening was announced by Manhattan Borough President Hulan E. Jack.)  These projects were also portrayed simply as administrative matters � not something that required public discussion.

But ironies abound.  In the 1960s Jane Jacobs and others went to battle over the Lower Manhattan Expressway � and won.  In the 1950s they campaigned to preserve Greenwich Village � and won a partial victory.  But even as they were doing so, just down the street another neighborhood was being reduced to rubble, and people displaced, all to ensure the smooth flow of traffic.