Download or read book Wrestling with Moses written by Anthony Flint and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rivalry of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, a struggle for the soul of a city, is one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern American history. To a young Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Village, with its winding cobblestone streets and diverse makeup, was everything a city neighborhood should be. But consummate power broker Robert Moses, the father of many of New York’s most monumental development projects, thought neighborhoods like Greenwich Village were badly in need of “urban renewal.” Standing up against government plans for the city, Jacobs marshaled popular support and political power against Moses, whether to block traffic through her beloved Washington Square Park or to prevent the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, an elevated superhighway that would have destroyed centuries-old streetscapes and displaced thousands of families. By confronting Moses and his vision, Jacobs forever changed the way Americans understood the city. Her story reminds us of the power we have as individuals to confront and defy reckless authority.
Download or read book Robert Moses and the Modern City written by Hilary Ballon and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh look at the greatest builder in the history of New York City and one of its most controversial figures. “We are rebuilding New York, not dispersing and abandoning it”: Robert Moses saw himself on a rescue mission to save the city from obsolescence, decentralization, and decline. His vast building program aimed to modernize urban infrastructure, expand the public realm with extensive recreational facilities, remove blight, and make the city more livable for the middle class. This book offers a fresh look at the physical transformation of New York during Moses’s nearly forty-year reign over city building from 1934 to 1968.It is hard to imagine that anyone will ever have the same impact on New York as did Robert Moses. In his various roles in city and state government, he reshaped the fabric of the city, and his legacy continues to touch the lives of all New Yorkers. Revered for most of his life, he is now one of the most controversial figures in the city’s history. Robert Moses and the Modern City is the first major publication devoted to him since Robert Caro’s damning 1974 biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.In these pages eight short essays by leading scholars of urban history provide a revised perspective; stunning new photographs offer the first visual record of Moses’s far-reaching building program as it stands today; and a comprehensive catalog of his works is illustrated with a wealth of archival records: photographs of buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes, of parks, pools, and playgrounds, of demolished neighborhoods and replacement housing and urban renewal projects, of bridges and highways; renderings of rejected designs and controversial projects that were defeated; and views of spectacular models that have not been seen since Moses made them for promotional purposes.Robert Moses and the Modern City captures research undertaken in the last three decades and will stimulate a new round of debate.
Download or read book Eyes on the Street written by Robert Kanigel and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major biography of the irrepressible woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, and whose influence is felt to this day. Jane Jacobs was a phenomenal woman who wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged in thousands of impassioned debates—all of which she won. Robert Kanigel's revelatory portrait of Jacobs, based on new sources and interviews, brings to life the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the mother who raised three children; the journalist who honed her skills at Architectural Forum and Fortune before writing her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; and the activist who helped lead a successful protest against Robert Moses’s proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village.
Download or read book City in the Sky written by James Glanz and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-11-12 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like David McCullough's "The Great Bridge, City in the Sky" is a riveting story of New York City itself, of architectural daring, human frailty, and a lost American icon.
Download or read book Never Built New York written by Greg Goldin and published by DAP/Distributed Art Publishers. This book was released on 2016 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following on the success of Never Built Los Angeles (Metropolis Books, 2013), authors Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell now turn their eye to New York City. New York towers among world capitals, but the city we know might have reached even more stellar heights, or burrowed into more destructive depths, had the ideas pictured in the minds of its greatest dreamers progressed beyond the drawing board and taken form in stone, steel, and glass. What is wonderfully elegant and grand might easily have been ingloriously grandiose; what is blandly unremarkable, equally, might have become delightfully provocative or humanely inspiring. The ambitious schemes gathered here tell the story of a different skyline and a different sidewalk alike. Nearly 200 ambitious proposals spanning 200 years encompass bridges, skyscrapers, master plans, parks, transit schemes, amusements, airports, plans to fill in rivers and extend Manhattan, and much, much more. Included are alternate visions for such landmarks as Central Park, Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center, MoMA, the U.N., Grand Central Station and the World Trade Centre site, among many others sites. Fact-filled and entertaining texts, as well as sketches, renderings, prints, and models drawn from archives all across the New York metropolitan region tell stories of a new New York, one that surely would have changed the way we inhabit and move through the city.
Download or read book The Lofts of SoHo written by Aaron Shkuda and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-06-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking look at the transformation of SoHo. American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighborhood into an artist district, creating the conditions under which it evolved into an upper-income, gentrified area. Introducing the idea—still potent in city planning today—that art could be harnessed to drive municipal prosperity, SoHo was the forerunner of gentrified districts in cities nationwide, spawning the notion of the creative class. In The Lofts of SoHo, Aaron Shkuda studies the transition of the district from industrial space to artists’ enclave to affluent residential area, focusing on the legacy of urban renewal in and around SoHo and the growth of artist-led redevelopment. Shkuda explores conflicts between residents and property owners and analyzes the city’s embrace of the once-illegal loft conversion as an urban development strategy. As Shkuda explains, artists eventually lost control of SoHo’s development, but over several decades they nonetheless forced scholars, policymakers, and the general public to take them seriously as critical actors in the twentieth-century American city.
Download or read book Becoming Jane Jacobs written by Peter L. Laurence and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the key figures in American urbanism. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she uncovered the complex and intertwined physical and social fabric of the city and excoriated the urban renewal policies of the 1950s. As the legend goes, Jacobs, a housewife, single-handedly stood up to Robert Moses, New York City's powerful master builder, and other city planners who sought first to level her Greenwich Village neighborhood and then to drive a highway through it. Jacobs's most effective weapons in these David-versus-Goliath battles, and in writing her book, were her powers of observation and common sense. What is missing from such discussions and other myths about Jacobs, according to Peter L. Laurence, is a critical examination of how she arrived at her ideas about city life. Laurence shows that although Jacobs had only a high school diploma, she was nevertheless immersed in an elite intellectual community of architects and urbanists. Becoming Jane Jacobs is an intellectual biography that chronicles Jacobs's development, influences, and writing career, and provides a new foundation for understanding Death and Life and her subsequent books. Laurence explains how Jacobs's ideas developed over many decades and how she was influenced by members of the traditions she was critiquing, including Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell, shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, housing advocate Catherine Bauer, architect Louis Kahn, Philadelphia city planner Edmund Bacon, urban historian Lewis Mumford, and the British writers at The Architectural Review. Rather than discount the power of Jacobs's critique or contributions, Laurence asserts that Death and Life was not the spontaneous epiphany of an amateur activist but the product of a professional writer and experienced architectural critic with deep knowledge about the renewal and dynamics of American cities.
Download or read book Route log and finder list written by United States. Federal Highway Administration and published by . This book was released on 1977* with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Robert Moses written by Pierre Christin and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The achievements of one man changed the face of an entire city. Robert Moses: the mastermind of New York. From the subway to the skyscraper, from Manhattan's Financial District to the Long Island suburbs, every inch of New York tells the story of this controversial urban planner's mind. In paperback for the first time, Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez's comic book takes on the infamous "Power Broker" and unlocks the historical battles that created the modern metropolis.
Download or read book Times Square Roulette written by Lynne B. Sagalyn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The compelling story of the politics, policies, and personalities that made Times Square's revitalization possible. The spectacularly successful transformation of Times Square has become a model for other cities. From its beginning as Longacre Square, Times Square's commercialism, signage, cultural diversity, and social tolerance have been deeply embedded in New York City's psyche. Its symbolic role guaranteed that any plan for its renewal would push the hot buttons of public controversy: free speech, property-taking through eminent domain, development density, tax subsidy, and historic preservation. In Times Square Roulette, Lynne Sagalyn debunks the myth of an overnight urban miracle performed by Disney and Mayor Giuliani, to tell the far more complex and commanding tale of a twenty-year process of public controversy, nonstop litigation, and interminable delay. She tells how the troubled execution of the original redevelopment plan provided a rare opportunity to rescript it. And timing was all: the mid-1990s saw rising international corporate interest in the city was a mecca for mass-market entertainment and synergistic merchandising. Sagalyn details the complex relationship between planning and politics and the role of market forces in shaping Times Square's redevelopment opportunities. She shows how policy was wedded to deal making and how persistent individuals and groups forged both.
Download or read book The Lower Manhattan expressway project report to Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority written by and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Folklore of the Freeway written by Eric Avila and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The works of Chicanas and other women of color--from the commemorative poetry of Patricia Preciado Martin and Lorna Dee Cervantes to the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes to the underpass murals of Judy Baca--expose highway construction as not only a racist but also a sexist enterprise. In colorful paintings, East Los Angeles artists such as David Botello, Carlos Almaraz, and Frank Romero satirize, criticize, and aestheticize the structure of the freeway. Local artists paint murals on the concrete piers of a highway interchange in San Diego's Chicano Park. The Rondo Days Festival in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Black Archives, History, and Research Foundation in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami preserve and celebrate the memories of historic African American communities lost to the freeway.Bringing such efforts to the fore in the story of the freeway revolt, The Folklore of the Freeway moves beyond a simplistic narrative of victimization.
Download or read book Paul Rudolph written by Eugenia Bell and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Rudolph (1918–1997) authored some of Modernism's most powerful designs and served as an influential educator while chair of Yale's School of Architecture. His early residential work in Sarasota, Florida, garnered international attention, and his later exploration of Brutalist materials nd forms, most famously embodied in his Yale Art & Architecture Building (1963), earned Rudolph both notoriety and acclaim. Many of the dynamic drawings included in this collection — selected from the architect's archive housed in the Library of Congress — illustrate his highly emotive hand and deft drafting skill. They include his designs for Tuskegee University Chapel, Interama, Lower Manhattan Expressway, his analysis of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion, and his own inventive penthouse on Beekman Place in New York City. A lively Rudolph interview, conducted in 1986, and a newly commissioned introductory essay provide context for the drawings.
Download or read book Downtown Inc written by Bernard J. Frieden and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1991-07-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneering observers of the urban landscape Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn delve into the inner workings of the exciting new public entrepreneurship and public-private partnerships that have revitalized the downtowns of such cities as Boston, San Diego, Seattle, St. Paul, and Pasadena.
Download or read book Jane Jacobs written by Alice Sparberg Alexiou and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this analysis of Jane Jacobs's ideas and work, Alice Sparberg Alexiou tells the story of a woman who without any formal training in planning became a prominent spokesperson for sensible urban change. Besides writing the seminal book about contemporary cities, Jacobs organized successful community battles in New York against powerful interests. Based on an array of interviews and primary source material, this book brings long-overdue attention to Jacobs's far-reaching influence as an original thinker and effective activist."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Big Roads written by Earl Swift and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-06-09 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the twists and turns of one of America’s great infrastructure projects with this “engrossing history of the creation of the U.S. interstate system” (Los Angeles Times). It’s become a part of the landscape that we take for granted, the site of rumbling eighteen-wheelers and roadside rest stops, a familiar route for commuters and vacationing families. But during the twentieth century, the interstate highway system dramatically changed the face of our nation. These interconnected roads—over 47,000 miles of them—are man-made wonders, economic pipelines, agents of sprawl, uniquely American symbols of escape and freedom, and an unrivaled public works accomplishment. Though officially named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, this network of roadways has origins that reach all the way back to the World War I era, and The Big Roads—“the first thorough history of the expressway system” (The Washington Post)—tells the full story of how they came to be. From the speed demon who inspired a primitive web of dirt auto trails to the largely forgotten technocrats who planned the system years before Ike reached the White House to the city dwellers who resisted the concrete juggernaut when it bore down on their neighborhoods, this book reveals both the massive scale of this government engineering project, and the individual lives that have been transformed by it. A fast-paced history filled with fascinating detours, “the book is a road geek’s treasure—and everyone who travels the highways ought to know these stories” (Kirkus Reviews).
Download or read book Dark Age Ahead written by Jane Jacobs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we’re at risk of cultural collapse. Jacobs—renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities—pinpoints five pillars of our culture that are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation, and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions. The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Drawing on a vast frame of reference—from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to Ireland’s cultural rebirth—Jacobs suggests how the cycles of decay can be arrested and our way of life renewed. Invigorating and accessible, Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs’ career, but one of the most important works of our time.
