Robert Moses

By almost any measure, Jerry and Rob Speyer’s planned development of the West Side rail yards is on a grand scale.

Its space (26 acres), price tag (perhaps $12 billion to $13 billion, based on the cost for two similar proposals at the site), and size (13 million square feet) all outstrip major development projects such as Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, the World Trade Center, and Sheldon Solow’s seven-tower complex planned for the area just south of the United Nations.

But as the largest development project to grace New York City’s presence in generations, it carries with it great risk—risk that if it were to fail, it could bring down the emerging far West Side with it; risk that if the urban design is poorly planned, the area could be scarred with a large, barren public space for decades. Once eyed to hold an Olympic stadium, the rail yards are intended to be the anchor for the new Midtown West business district—the catalyst that would give the emerging area its critical mass and invite a set of apartment and commercial towers.  read more »

Another excerpt from The Observer's interview last winter with Daniel Doctoroff.

Here's how he feels about all those comparisons of him to the late Robert Moses, the original New Yorker who Got Things Done:  read more »

A notably unhappy Michael Bloomberg just announced that Dan Doctoroff is leaving City Hall, saying, "Dan brought muscle to economic development.

Bloomberg also said that "unlike Robert Moses, Dan did it by working with the communities, not bulldozing them."

UPDATE: He's going to become president of Bloomberg L.P., the mayor said.

After The Death and Life of Great American Cities came out in 1961, Robert Moses returned the copy he had received to its publisher, with instructions to sell the "libelous" monograph to somebody else. (The letter, mentioned in a recent New York Times review of the Jane Jacobs exhibit up now at the Municipal Art Society, is on display there.) The publisher did, to quite a few people. According to Vintage Books, the book's paperback publisher, Jacobs' work has sold more than 500,000 copies.

That number outpaces not just Mr. Moses’ own books (none of which appear to remain in print), but also Robert Caro’s ample biography of the man, The Power Broker, which has sold about 319,000 copies, its publisher told The Observer for an article earlier this year.

A move is underway to put Robert Moses back up on the pedestal where he stood in the 1930’s. If the people backing the rehabilitation of New York’s quondam transportation, housing and recreation czar succeed, they might consider Joseph Stalin for their next revisionist project.  read more »

Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff has been shopping a 35-story tower on Robert Moses Playground just south of the Secretariat "that would consolidate United Nations offices now housed in widely scattered city-owned buildings," The Times reported. The neighborhood "would be compensated for the park's loss by a planned esplanade and bike path along the East River," a city spokeswoman said.

- Matthew Schuerman (via Curbed)

The Real Estate is going for a Robert Moses trifecta this morning. This item's about one of his newer critics, Bronx community organizer Majora Carter, who dared criticize Mayor Bloomberg's development policies and who received a warm response from the media at the Feb. 1 opening of the Moses exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.

The notice above, received via e-mail from Ms. Carter herself, says it all--including the fact that the museum is showing itself pretty receptive to airing all sides of the story.

- Matthew Schuerman

The Wall Street Journal's architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable tackles the three shows now running under the title "Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York." She's old enough to remember battling Moses' plans, and, therefore, finds the show's "comprehensive objectivity" jarring:

"The carefully inclusive narrative tells it all in safely worded labels that neutralize outrage.... [I]ts very evenhandedness is disturbing. It is almost too cool; there was nothing evenhanded about Moses."

- Tom Acitelli

Metropolis contributing editor Karrie Jacobs describes the "Spielgbergian meolodrama" of walking through the three exhibits that make up "Robert Moses and the Modern City": the "inspiring" photos of public swimming pools made her knees weak; the shots of expressways, not so much. - Matthew Schuerman

In the midst of all the hype about, reconsideration of and admiration for Robert Moses comes news from the other side: The Municipal Art Society will hold an exhibit this September about his polar opposite, ur-urbanist Jane Jacobs, in conjunction with a new $200,000 prize that the Rockefeller Foundation will fund. The annual prize has been dubbed the Jane Jacobs Medal.

MAS President Kent Barwick couldn't say whether it would be as large as the Moses ones now under way in three separate venues (Jacobs would be the first to say that size doesn't matter), but he will certainly feel the pressure to make it as good.

"It was a complete coincidence that we are doing this at the time that the Moses shows are going on, but a great coincidence," Mr. Barwick told The Real Estate. "We are really enjoying the opportunity to work with scholars and revisit Jane Jacobs and to look at her with fresh eyes. This is not so much to weigh in against Bob Moses."

Asked for his own opinion of Moses, Mr. Barwick said, "That's like saying, 'How do you like the Himalayan Mountains?' It is a very big subject."

- Matthew Schuerman

Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx, tells New York magazine that she doesn't much care for the man some call New York's modern-day Robert Moses, Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff:

It's interesting that you group Doctoroff and Moses together. Do you think the deputy mayor sees himself as the new Moses?
Oh, God, yeah. Completely. He thinks he's the man ... The problem with the big projects of Moses and now Doctoroff is that they don't think about what the long-term impacts are of exercising that much power on people who have none. It's the idea that people are in the way.

- Tom Acitelli

Location: The downside of a strong real-estate market is that people have been priced out of neighbo  read more »

New York Utopia: Less Traffic,  a Park on Every Corner    read more »

Ina Caro, the wife, research assistant, typist and confidant of Moses biographer Robert Caro writes in an e-mail:

Dear Friends, I have been scolded for not letting some of you know that Bob was speaking at the Museum of the City of New York last Sunday, so..... the speech "Reflections on Robert Moses" is being televised next Sunday, February 18, on C-Span 2, at 7 and at 10. Ina

A must for all Moses geeks.

- Matthew Schuerman

Robert Caro, he of The Power Broker fame, started off his lecture on Sunday praising the exhibition which challenges his pre-eminence in Moses scholarship if it doesn't also challenge his interpretation of the city's master builder. "I think it's a fair and even-handed job."

But throughout the next hour, Mr. Caro kept making subtle suggestions about how that exhibit, "Robert Moses and the Making of the Modern City," came up short.

While the exhibit emphasizes the impact Moses had on "the built environment" without regard for his methods, Mr. Caro argued, "The way that Robert Moses left his mark on New York has to do with the way he treated the people of the city"--in particular how he diverted money from health clinics to his construction projects.

And to those who had found Mr. Caro's subtitle (Robert Moses and the Fall of New York) to be incongruous with the city's renaissance, he replied, "I meant that the city had fallen, not that it was fallen forever."

And for those who feel the ends justify Moses' means, Mr. Caro said:

For several years now I am constantly being approached at parties by large gentlemen, usually of the real estate persuasion, but sometimes from government--they come up to me and say to me, 'Don't you think it's time for a new Robert Moses?' And because I don't want to argue with people at cocktail parties, I say to these people, 'No!' Which happily cuts the conversation short.

The overflow crowd jumped to its feet to give the guy a standing ovation.

- Matthew Schuerman

Donald Trump Responds   To the Editor:    read more »

To the Editor:    read more »

Donald Trump Responds   To the Editor:    read more »

Sometime last fall, the biographer Robert Caro got a phone call from Roger Hertog, then vice chairma  read more »

For those who cannot wait until the Robert Moses retrospective opens next week, The Bridge and Tunnel Club has reproduced the 23-page rebuttal that The Power Broker himself wrote in 1974, when The Power Broker and excerpts from it in The New Yorker first came out:

Here and there in the Profiles there are broad hints that my associates and I were not always ultra refined in our actions. They say on occasion we quietly after hours smoothed the paths for our parkways. They insinuate that old trees were whisked away by ingenious stump pullers to allay the apprehensions of nervous environmentalists. [...]

As the city folk ride into the open country, we shall, I trust, be forgiven. The original railroad builders too were in a sense fuel merchants and chopped down some spindly woods to stoke their engines.

For more, including Moses' prediction that he doubted "many well-heeled readers will fork out $17.95, plus sachet, to read the unexpurgated Caro" (Robert Caro's tome has sold 315,000 copies so far), go to the cyber version on The Bridge and Tunnel Club's site.

For The Observer's piece this week on the exhibit, go here.

Timber!

- Matthew Schuerman

Jason Horowitz reports on the unparalleled Hillary Clinton fund-raising network as it roars to life and leaves her competitors with the scraps.

Matt Schuerman chronicles a difference of opinion between historians Robert Caro and Kenneth Jackson over the legacy of Robert Moses.

Steve Kornacki writes about the way that John Edwards is using his status as a former elected official to make life difficult for his fellow presidential candidates in the senate.

And Joe Conason thinks that the president's State of the Union address was shop-worn and unrealistic.

-- Josh Benson

Hudson Square Grabs Viacom Lease "Media behemoth Viacom has a lease out for as much as 250,000 square feet at 345 Hudson Street in the long-struggling commercial area of Soho's Hudson Square." New York Sports Club Parent Leases in Penn Plaza "Take that, Equinox! Town Sports, which controls omnipresent gym New York Sports Club, has found its new headquarters. Town Sports will move into a 28,000-square-foot home at 5 Penn Plaza." Go to Commercial Breaks by John Koblin. Bank Branches Disappearing? What Corner You Live On? "Not long ago, some retail brokers were predicting a sort of cataclysmic bubble-bursting for the city's seemingly never-ending bank-branch boom. At least at street level, these forecasts of a recession in the recent retail-leasing dominance of banks appear quite premature." Go to Counter Espionage by Chris Shott. Moses Envy: Caro, Columbia Battle Over The Ghost of Moses "Sometime last fall, the biographer Robert Caro got a phone call from Roger Hertog, vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management and a rich and powerful New York City history buff. Columbia was planning a big exhibit on Robert Moses, New York's master builder from the mid-20th century, and he wanted to know if Mr. Caro would give a lecture as part of it. It was the first time, Mr. Caro said, that he had heard from anyone connected to the massive three-part exhibit opening next week, 'Robert Moses and the Modern City,' which includes among its backers noted historian Kenneth T. Jackson." Go to story by Matthew Schuerman. Johnson & Johnson Heiress Libet Sells Last Trump Condo for $18.5M "After a five-year wait, heiress Libet Johnson has finally sold off the brassiest penthouse in the brassiest tower in town. According to city records, she parted with Penthouse 51-B at Trump International on Central Park West for $18.5 million." Andre to Wally: Comfort Can Be Dangerous! "Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg, the exceedingly literary local power couple, have bought the duplex penthouse in a West 23rd Street brownstone near 10th Avenue. According to city records, they paid $2,158,530." Go to Manhattan Transfers by Max Abelson. Sky-High Property Taxes Give Renters the Shaft "Renters, beware! You are about to get shafted--thanks to property taxes. For many years now, rental landlords (and commercial-building owners) have been paying disproportionately more in property taxes; and they often pass these higher taxes on to tenants through higher rents." Go to The Lab by Tom Acitelli.

Michael Sorkin's event poster [click]

The panelists at last night's fully booked Jane Jacobs-vs.-Robert Moses panel at the Gotham Center had had enough about the fawning adulation and fierce demonization, respectively, of the two icons, and came up with some fresh revisionist views. Hilary Ballon, a Columbia University professor who is curating a three-part exhibition on the master builder next year, called Moses a "symptomatic builder" who built whatever the federal government happened to be funding that day, no better, no worse.

Then, Richard Kahan, a former president of the Urban Development Corporation (now the Empire State Development Corporation), pooh-poohed the nostalgia for big plans. "I agree that we are no longer destroying neighborhoods and that we are trying to have a diversity of uses where Moses was encouraging monolithic superblocks," he said. "But I still think we are talking about megaprojects, not bad, not good necessarily. They are certainly not destroying neighborhoods, but they are hardly in my mind on a neighborhood scale or paying much attention to neighborhood scale."

Later, Brad Lander, the executive director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, saw the bogeyman of the Moses era being replaced by a far more intractable force. "Today I think it is hard to argue that the state, in the form of overreaching planning, is what's responsible for driving the strains of growth and the loss of livability of the city, the displacement of people as a result of ever-rising real estate values, the displacement of middle-income people from Stuyvesant Town, the ongoing racial segregation of the city," he said. "It's the market that is doing those things."  read more »

Soon enough, like most groups of people who get together these days, they all started bickering about Atlantic Yards. -Matthew Schuerman

Silda Wall Spitzer, Michelle Paige Paterson and Women for Spitzer host a luncheon with the gubenatorial candidate.

A public celebration for Jane Jacobs will be held at 5pm in front of the Washington Square Arch, site of her first victory over Robert Moses.

The Laughing Liberally National Tour Returns to New York City's The Tank.

Steven Van Zandt will host a fundraiser with special guest Bonnie Raitt in support of John Hall, at a private home following Bonnie Raitt's Summerstage Concert in Central Park.

—Nicole Brydson

The Post's story on the Mayor reviving plans to build an office tower on Robert Moses Playground has United Nations officials denying any knowledge of it.

Fritz Reuter, the U.N. Assistant Secretary General for the capital plan, told us that he had no knowledge of any such idea. "Someone just e-mailed this to me. I have no idea where it came from," he said of the story.

The playground proposal has been around for a while: build a new 35-story on 1st Avenue between 41st and 42nd streets as swing space while the Secretariat building is renovated. But Reuter said it was never the U.N.'s idea, and once the state Senate blocked funding for it in 2004, the international agency settled on a plan that would put a new structure on the lawn to the north of the Secretariat. In February we uncovered Sheldon Solow's interest in dooming the playground tower, and Bloomberg's renewed push cannot be good news for the developer's plans for the old Con Ed site to the south, because yet another tower would make the neighborhood awfully congested.

"The U.N. has been for about a year on renovating the Secretariat under its capital plan," Reuter said.

The Mayor's siter, Marjorie Tiven, is the head of the city's Commission for United Nations, Consular Corps & Protocol, so his interest in the matter is not insubstantial. And the Post's Kenneth Lovett suggests there is something in it for the city:

The Bloomberg administration plans to argue that the project will not only create construction jobs, but will ultimately free up two city-owned buildings at 1 and 2 U.N. Plaza that eventually can be sold for big bucks.

-Matthew Schuerman

F.D.R. Drive built from the rubble caused by the London Blitz? Apparantly so, according to Jeff Byles' Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition, from The New York Times. From Witoldriedel.com:

So here is a quote from the Encyclopedia of New York (a great book available in a store near you.): "FDR Drive. A controlled-access highway running along the east side of Manhattan Island from the financial district to Harlem. Built under the direction of Robert Moses during the administration of H. La Guardia... Much of the landfill on which it is constructed consists of the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Second World War by the Luftwaffe's Blitz on London and Bristol. Convoys of ships returning from Great Britain carried the broken masonry in their holds as ballast..." (Kenneth T. Jackson)

-Matthew Grace

It's sometimes not until new development starts threatening a blighted area, and lots of eyeballs are focused on it from the outside, that neighborhoods develop their own organizations to improve conditions. Meet the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance:

Our neighborhoods are saturated with junkyards, waste transfer stations, brownfields, and truck-dependent, polluting industries that pollute our air, water, and soil. A highway-dominated planning mentality dating back to the 1950s left the South Bronx fragmented and isolated by a network of highways designed to serve regional and national needs, regardless of the costs they imposed on the low-income communities they passed through. Today, those communities are confronting the legacy of Robert Moses, and struggling to forge a new vision, grounded in values of environmental justice and sustainable development.

The group, a consortium of several community and city-wide organizations and the Pratt Institute, seems mostly concenred for now with getting rid of the stub of Robert Moses' largely unsuccessful Sheridan Expressway to clear land for park and help clean up the Bronx River.

You'll be hearing more from these people as government and real-estate interests converge on the South Bronx in coming years.  read more »

- Tom McGeveran

Sheldon Solow's development near Robert Moses Park, the privatization of a public park planned for the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, the mounting constructions in downtown Manhattan, and the fight for public parks over market space in the South Bronx: The overtaking of public spaces by private investors and developers has become a regular routine in the city's real estate sections.

Astor Place, modestly reimagined.

The new constructions often promise to maintain a section of park or plaza space, but they are typically out of reach to the public at large. Or large segments of them are parceled off for development in return for private maintenance of the public part of the space. And, of course, there is a difference between wasteful and useful public space—open, sans gate, with seats and maybe food.

The New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign is now focusing on another public space that routinely requires private maintenance—the city's streets. Taken together they are by far the city's largest public space. Tuesday night was the opening gala for Livable Streets: A New Vision for New York , an multimedia exhibit on display at The Urban Center until March 29th that explores how traffic and poor planning affects the quality of urban life.  read more »

When the smoke cleared from the rubble of the World Trade Center, the image that emerged was of a br  read more »

In the moments before Donald Trump barreled through a packed house at Michael Kors' runway show last  read more »

BOSTON-It takes no small amount of fortitude to get to this city's Museum of Science from downtown.  read more »

Lost in the self-congratulatory media frenzy focusing on the "calmness" of New Yorkers during the bl  read more »

Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York–The Last Two Hundred Years , by Benjamin Miller.  read more »

After he got himself sworn in again early this month for a second term, Rudolph W.  read more »