UPDATE: This program was initially announced for 10/3; it will now take place on 10/10.In the 1960s, the neighborhood we live in was known as the "cast iron district," for the facades you can still see on many of the old warehouses that are now luxury lofts. For much of the decade, controversy swirled around this area because a powerful city planner named Robert Moses wanted to rip out a good number of these buildings and run an expressway directly across lower Manhattan the way he had in the Bronx.
One of his chief opponents was a writer and downtown activist named Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities had been published in 1961. Jacobs believed that New York needed to retain low-rise neighborhoods with dense populations and teeming street life and worried that a cross-town expressway would destroy rather than facilitate the possibility for downtown renewal. In the end, the cast iron district remained intact and the Lower Manhattan Expressway plan was scrapped for good.
The Municipal Art Society of New York just opened an exhibit that revisits Jacobs's legacy and asks what her vision of urban community may still mean for New York's future.
Join FFiR Bryan Waterman on Wednesday, OCT. 10, for a trip uptown to the exhibit. We'll leave from the lobby promptly at 6pm, so please be on time. The exhibit is open until 8pm that evening. For more info on the exhibit, with links to a calendar of related events (including panel discussions and walking tours all over town), click here.
BONUS: here's a link to a 16-minute film from the period, courtesy of archive.org, to give you some sense of the issues involved and how they were presented to the public during these debates. It's a little corny, but worth it, especially if you plan on attending the event. You can also view it directly here:
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