Next time you take a walk down Broome Street, from Little Italy into SoHo, treasure the little historic churches, the classic Italian restaurants and cafes, the cast-iron buildings, cobblestone streets, galleries and boutiques. Fifty years ago, they were almost swallowed up by an eight-lane highway called the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX) that was scheduled to cross Broome and tear northward through the West Village to connect the East River bridges to the Holland Tunnel.
One fearless New Yorker stopped it. Her name was Jane Jacobs, a sharp-featured woman with black-framed eyeglasses and an unvarying bob haircut. She was an author and neighborhood activist who challenged development czar Robert Moses, the power broker who carved up the Bronx to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway and Brooklyn for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, among other roadways. In doing so, two thousand homes and 10,000 jobs were saved. She was David to Moses’ Goliath.
Born in Scranton, Pa., Jacobs moved to the city in 1934 and became a journalist, working for Architecture Forum magazine. By Kanigel’s account, she considered herself a writer foremost and had to be “pulled kicking and screaming” into activism. But in the 1950s and 1960s, there were enough changes afoot in her beloved neighborhood of Greenwich Village, where she moved in 1947 with her husband, to merit her attention.
She first did battle with Moses in the early 1950s, joining forces with concerned West Village mothers to stop a plan to put a 120-feet-wide road through the middle of Washington Square Park. Goodbye, arch; farewell, fountain. Moses, Kanigel writes, had wanted to “move traffic through the Village” since the 1930s. Jacobs wrote a letter to New York City officials protesting the project in 1955, but she also implored New York City assemblyman and Village resident Carmine DeSapio to support the ban — or lose the support of her mom squad in his re-election bid.
“She was arrested and put in jail,” says Tyrnauer. She was charged with three felonies: rioting, criminal mischief and obstructing public administration. And she had to pay for a new stenotype machine.
The Jacobs arrest made the papers, and cast a spotlight on the LOMEX controversy. According to curbed.com, Moses was beginning to lose influence at City Hall and, in 1969, Mayor John Lindsay formally withdrew his support for the venture and the Board of Estimate formally abandoned plans for the highway.
Moses remained unbowed. In his 1970 book, “Public Works: A Dangerous Trade,” he wrote, “Apparently the expressway has been shelved for the present. On the other hand, most of the parties concerned, including the Downtown Manhattan Association, the Regional Plan Association and others, agree that there must eventually be a Lower Manhattan Expressway.” His fantasy was never to be realized.
With the Moses affair behind her, Jacobs turned her attention to family matters, in particular Ned’s 18th birthday. Kanigel says, she “didn’t want to take any chances” that he might be sent to fight in Vietnam. Jacobs, who was still “under indictment” from the Seward Park hearing (the charges were later reduced to disorderly conduct), and her family closed up the house on Hudson Street, collected their necessary papers, packed up the car and moved. To Toronto.
In her lifetime, Jacobs published seven books. She died at age 89 in 2006. Her antagonism with Moses, who passed on to eternity’s expressway in 1981, inspired several books and one opera, “A Marvelous Order,” with music by Judd Greenstein and a libretto by Pulitzer prize winning poet Tracy K. Smith. “She was really a whistleblower on a grand scale,” says Tyrnauer.