As we have already discussed several times in class and in a paraphrase the words of the experts on the topic we watched in that stimulating video, Robert Moses cared less about people than he did cars. Again, as we have discussed, his projects, such as the Cross Bronx Expressway, was built with little care for the people living in the neighborhoods they affected. Using the example of the Cross Bronx Expressway that I am now familiar with from our class discussion, the construction of that particular highway, though beneficial, perhaps, to those using it, particularly those travelling to Moses’s somewhat beloved Long Island via his Whitestone or Throgs Neck bridges, remains to this day detrimental to the socio-economic situation of the South Bronx—a neighborhood, it might be added, delineated by the very existence of the Cross Bronx—and its residents.

Addressing and contradicting Moses’s attitude is the purpose of Jane Jacobs’s famed book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as she herself says in the Introduction to that selfsame opus. Her opening words, wasting no time, are “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding…on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding” (3). Having just completed a discussion concerning Robert Moses’s disregard for people, it is obvious that he and those like him are the object of her opposition. The fact of the matter is that the two were operating in entirely different worlds, and their respective methodologies reflect that distinction.

Moses lived in a world that went, over the course of his career, through two Red Scares. Although aspects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that allowed Moses to complete several of his projects resonates, to some extent, with socialist principles of government assistance to those who require it, much of that was undone or reduced by the middle of the fifties. Moses was of a class and generation that was not about helping one’s fellow man economically or on a grand scale. Jacobs, however, was younger, and, moreover, a woman (as is, not a rich white man). She was not about building a city for the rich, nor even the middle class. Jacobs advocated the building of cities that would stimulate diversity and “argue[d] for high population densities in cities” (Halle 238). In contrast to Moses’s love of winding highways that were parks in and of themselves, Jacobs wanted places for people to live.

In today’s climate, the argument of whose perspectives are better aside, Jacobs ideas are probably more popularly acceptable. After all, consider how many times in class we gave scathing reviews of Moses’s work. In an increasingly globalized world, Jacobs’s views of a diversified city are much easier to accept—and, possibly, better than Moses’s, although that’s a different essay.