"The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs"
by Roberta Brandes Gratz
Nation Books
400 pages
$27.95

What is at first jarring about Roberta Brandes Gratz's latest book is how much of it is about Roberta Brandes Gratz. Her childhood in the city and the 'burbs. Her life as a young reporter. Her husband's metal fabrication business. Her reporting on Westway. Her chats with an old friend. She is as big a character in this story as either of the icons that her subtitle salutes. There is not the slightest effort made at objectivity.

City Limits Magazine


January 2011:
The UnPlanned City

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Jarrett Murphy
Jarrett Murphy
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Thank goodness for that. A book that adopted the pretense of detachment, and treated New York as an entity to be observed from a distance rather than lived up close, would not only have been boring, it would have undermined the central idea—and the essential truth—of Gratz's work: that New York cannot be studied from 15,000 feet because no one lives it from up there, that it can only be understood at the human level.

Thus, this story of Robert Moses' heyday and fall, Jane Jacobs' rise and departure and the subsequent decades of contest between their two antithetical notions of the city is told as Gratz saw and lived it. And lives it still. For the contest between those two visions is far from over.
        

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Moses passed away in 1981, more than a decade after Nelson Rockefeller finally drove him from power. Jacobs, who had long ago left the city for Toronto to protect her sons from the Vietnam draft, died in 2006.

The following year three museums in the city undertook a re-examination of Moses—the master builder of roads, clearer of “slums” and maker of parks who had been an urban pariah since Robert Caro's 1974 biography “The Power Broker.” Caro's book is enormous and dense with detail about Moses' 50 years of public life. By comparison, the image that many of Moses' detractors held of him (your author included) was simplistic, cartoonish. So the exhibits delivered some important nuance.

But the problem with the Moses project of 2007, as Gratz observes, was that it stretched reexamination into rehabilitation. Suddenly Robert Moses was the reason New York had become a modern city, as if there had been no plausible way for the New York of 2010 to be created without, say, the Cross-Bronx Expressway cutting through the heart of the Bronx or Lincoln Center obliterating a West Side neighborhood. “The physical achievements, whether judged good or bad, are undeniably mighty in breadth, scale and obstacles overcome,” Gratz writes of Moses. “But the danger in a revisionist view of history is that it takes on a life of its own.”

Worse still was the timing of this Moses revival, coming at the end of a development boom that was Moses-esque in its scale and deafness to public outcry, from Atlantic Yards to Yankee Stadium to Willets Point. Community plans were pushed aside to meet developers' demands. Huge public subsidies were proffered and the threat of eminent domain brandished repeatedly. The defense of Moses was easily repurposed as a defense of the city's new power brokers, whose excesses Gratz details.
        

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The book is hard to categorize. Part biography, part urban history, sometimes manifesto, sometimes love letter to New York. Gratz, a former New York Post reporter who has penned several books on urbanism and has contributed to City Limits in the past, is probably one of the most authoritative interpreters of Jacobs' legacy.