_Wrestling with Moses_, Anthony Flint (kindle)

Subtitled: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City

I did a pre-review a couple days ago in which I said you (yes, you! I don't care who you are, if you're reading this, you should be reading _Wrestling with Moses_ instead) should run right out and lay hold of a copy and read it. I have not changed my opinion.

Flint tells the story of Jane Jacobs (writer, editor and Extremely Smart Person) v. Robert Moses (planner, Darth Vader-like bureaucrat and, also, Extremely Smart Person). He starts with how Jane got to the city, worked a series of jobs, got married, bought a house in Greenwich Village and had kids. He also describes Moses family and educational background and early political battles and big successes with things like the Triborough bridge. The first battle between Jacobs and Moses was when Moses wanted to wipe out Washington Square Park. The second battle was when he wanted to wipe out the Village. The third and Final Battle was the Lower Manhattan Expressway. While Flint doesn't tell the story in quite that way, it is clear that battle one was an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, battle two was the irresistible force feeling pissy and looking to totally destroy the immovable object, and battle three was someone unrelated recruiting immovable object to place in the path of the irresistible force.

Narrative non-fiction, Flint's tale moves along at a fantastic pace. He has a nice line in descriptive details that contribute to rather than detracting from the main storyline. Even if you do not care at all about history, NYC, transportation, urban planning, etc., the book is worth reading to understand how activism works -- and what can derail it (note to self: never, ever, ever put an important piece of activism in the hands of a Catholic priest. All the other team has to do to knock you back is to go up the chain of command and have him pulled aside and ordered to desist.).

The sum-up is surprisingly excellent. Of course Flint tells us a bit about Jacobs' life in Canada, and what happened to the kids (wow, they clearly respected their mum and wanted to go forth and do likewise), and about Moses' retirement and death, and what people have done to remember Jacobs in subsequent years. But he also touches on some efforts to rehabilitate Moses (which is completely unconvincing; a Moses doing for public transit what Moses did to freeways would never get away with it. Just look at Sound Transit.). Best of all, Flint briefly tells the story of what happened to property values on Broome Street, as well as mentioning efforts to rehabilitate Lincoln Center.

I'll be blogging more about this book in subsequent posts, because it has raised a whole series of fascinating lines of thought in my mind. I'll be thinking about this for a while, with almost as much pleasure as I had reading it.

Great, good stuff.

heroes out of line

US political discourse evokes a linear continuum from left to right (or right to left, as the case may be). We all know it doesn't work that way, and probably a lot of us have had inflicted on us a two-dimensional grid that is used to recruit people to libertarianism, and some of us have been shown a circle version of the left/right line that shows that extremists of both kinds behave the same: resorting to tyranny and coercion and blah, blah, bleeping blah.

A lot of extremely influential, even heroic people don't fit on this left/right continuum. Jane Jacobs is a nice example. The "right" likes her for fighting eminent domain, for example. Ina May Gaskin presents similar problems, as does Ruth Handler. On the one hand, a huge chunk of youthful progressives cannot imagine anything but good in stopping: the destruction of a city by freeway, a criminally high c-section rate, and coercing little girls to immediately adopt a caretaker/mothering role rather than contemplating other productive adults roles for herself. On the other hand, those youthful progressives may be highly disturbed by: gentrification, an out-of-hospital birth (much less on The Farm) with no access to pain relief, and would be quite shocked to discover that Barbie might have some redeeming characteristics (mind you, less in today's context than when she was first imported from Germany).

Jacobs, Gaskin and Handler have shaped our world profoundly, but it's actually kind of hard for a lot of people to really grasp what they did and why they did it, because what they did and why they did it is so far out of sync with the way the rest of us are prepared to contemplate our political landscape. If you go back further -- to the Temperance movement, to the ideology of separate spheres, to the details of the rhetoric associated with abolitionism -- it gets even worse.

It seems that while heroes have feet of clay, heroines are something far more difficult to come to grips with: they reshape reality, and we seem doomed to find either the motivation admirable and the results repulsive -- or the motivation incomprehensible and the results such a part of us we cannot imagine our modern world another way. And whatever else may be the case, they can't readily be pegged as either "left" or "right".

You might be a wonk if...

I realized, after reading the last few delicious pages of _Wrestling with Moses_, well, the Acknowledgments, that I had signed up to get newsletters from the Lincoln Institute (in the wake of that section 8 weird coincidence I blogged about) and paid money for an e-book from the Urban Land Institute. Lincoln is a Land Policy grouop. ULI is a Developers (and I do not mean of the programmer type) organization.

I'm currently reading Stilgoe's _Train Time_. People who tell you that Stilgoe's writing style takes a little getting used to? Soooooo understating things. I _think_ it is worthwhile. I should know for sure by the end of it. ;-)