While Mayor Bill de Blasio recently went on the late night television show “Real Time with Bill Maher” to proclaim himself an indisputable progressive, some in his city have found themselves disagreeing. Recently, a small Brooklyn-based newspaper called The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote an article about a protest that occurred as a result of de Blasio’s new plans for the BQE. They spoke with community organizers, and discovered a very interesting link between the current mayor and a city planner who was the primary antagonist of every community organizer in the 1950s.
As the City plans to build a six-lane highway that would cut through the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, citizens have begun calling out for de Blasio to prevent such regressive measures that echo back to the anti-community building policies of the Robert Moses era of New York City.
It is not difficult to understand how such a comparison could be made. Moses, in his time, built much of the City that we know today. Without consulting fully with the community, beyond a few meagre gestures like pamphlets and puppet council meetings, Moses demolished many people’s homes and neighborhoods. One of Moses’ last great efforts was to build a highway through Washington Square Park, but was forced to abandon his efforts as a result of community intervention. Shirley Hayes, a community activist at the time, organized the Washington Square community against Moses. She, and several other prominent figures in Greenwich Village and Washington Square, stood stalwartly in defense of their neighborhood, just as some activists are being forced to today.
Hilary Jager, who cofounded the organization “Better Way NYC” – a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the highway – declared that “While Governor Cuomo is taking an innovative approach to avoid the devastating consequences of closing L train service, Mayor de Blasio is taking a page out of the Robert Moses playbook: proposing to spend nearly $4 billion to bulldoze local neighborhoods, expand highways and further New York’s dependence on pollution-spewing cars.” It is not difficult to understand why she thinks this way. Just as Moses believed that “Cities are created by and for traffic”, de Blasio seems more than willing to hinder communities in pursuit of solutions to traffic issues. His plan for fixing the BQE would cause environmental disturbance, would destroy landmarks, and would cause increased air pollution to community residents.
However, while Jager’s concerns are understandable, de Blasio is nowhere near as careless for the community as Moses was. Where Moses was quite happy to tear down slums without providing other means of housing for the vast majority of people, de Blasio’s plan will not reroute anyone from their homes. The similarities remain in the act of putting traffic over community needs, but de Blasio shows nowhere near the same reckless disregard for neighborhood beliefs and opinions that Moses did.
I chose to cover this issue, because it is an important topic that harkens very closely to the readings from this week. In fact, it is an issue that harkens directly back to Moses’ quote about traffic being what cities are made for. The moment I read that quote, it became obvious that these two issues could easily be associated with each other. Once again, the City has been left to debate if traffic is more important than community. Once again, community organizations are left rebelling against those who believe it is. The issues seem near-identical, and it was interesting to see that things have certainly changed since the 1950s, but maybe not as much as we thought they had.
Related Questions:
- Is a city created by and for traffic, or is community more important?
- How do we balance the needs of the city against the needs of specific communities?
- Should the community have a say in public projects, or is that the government’s responsibility?
Source Article:
Tate, Francesca Norsen. “Brooklyn Heights Promenade Rally Draws Hundreds to Protest BQE Rehab Plan.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 14 Jan. 2019, brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/01/13/brooklyn-heights-promenade-rally-draws-hundreds-to-protest-bqe-rehab-plan/.
