The Woman Who Saved Manhattan From a Freeway Running Through It

dryriver quotes a report from BBC: A massive freeway project dreamed up by city planner Robert Moses would have destroyed Greenwich Village and altered much of Lower Manhattan if not for one woman's efforts -- those of Jane Jacobs. As vast tracts of this U.S. journalist's adopted New York were razed to make way for theoretically fast-flowing urban freeways potted about with soulless high-rise housing projects for the urban poor, Jane Jacobs, skeptical of grand plans and nobody's victim, took on the City of New York through her urgent writing and by galvanizing protest groups who took to the streets of Manhattan to save the city from being dismembered, disinfected and depopulated. Robert Moses wanted to clean up New York while investing heavily in its infrastructure: its public parks, swimming pools, bridges, playgrounds, parkways, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center and the United Nations headquarters. For many years, New York's intellectual elite supported such developments, including the destruction of working-class neighborhoods Moses saw as "cancerous growths" in need of surgical removal. He accrued ever more power and pushed through and proposed ever more radical schemes -- notably expressways that sliced through quarters of the city like blunt knives. This powerful and disdainful planner made enemies, and none more so than Jane Jacobs.