Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses in David Hare's play Straight Line Crazy.
Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses in David Hare's play Straight Line Crazy.
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
No urban planner has been more famous, more influential or more widely despised than Robert Moses. From the 1920s until the 1960s, Moses rebuilt the roads and parks and housing of New York.
He started well - or seemed to. He cleared slums and replaced them with “parkways”: highways throughparklands, to make the experience of driving glorious. He said it was for “the masses” but in the 1920s and in the decades that followed, most ordinary New Yorkers didn’t own a car.
He cleared more slums and replaced them with tenement blocks, also surrounded by parks. That became the notorious Projects. He put expressways everywhere he could. He bullied his way through all and every opposition.
In the 1950s Moses even tried to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway through the middle of Washington Square and Greenwich Village. At that point he met his match: the journalist-turned-urban-advocate Jane Jacobs led a popular opposition movement that brought an end to the vandalism.
Washington Square Park, through which Robert Moses wanted to put an expressway. Photo / Getty Images
Jacobs knew Moses and his big new roads and isolated tower blocks weren’t connecting people, they were destroying the busy, mid-rise street life that made them already connected. And she knew the value of a park in the middle of a city.
New Yorkers currently have the chance to relive the Moses years: the play Straight Line Crazy by British playwright David Hare has transferred from London for an off-Broadway season, with Ralph Fiennes in the lead.
Hare has focused on two episodes in Moses’ career: his successful introduction of parkways on Long Island and his downfall in Washington Square.
Moses loved the Manhattan grid – hence the play’s name – but he hated that the island did not have major crosstown routes. That, he says in the play, was “an offence against logic and against reason”.
The problem with Moses wasn’t only that he glorified the motorcar, or that he wouldn’t listen to anyone else. He was also terribly racist.
When he built the Jones Beach State Park, which contained the largest public beach in America, he made sure the overbridges on the parkway leading to it were too low to allow buses to pass beneath. It kept the “scum” from Puerto Rico and the black people of Harlem away.
You don’t need official segregation when infrastructure achieves the same purpose.
Straight Line Crazy contains lessons for cities everywhere. As Jane Jacobs discovered, people power works. And as everyone around Moses discovered, even good intentions are corruptible and it never helps when the boss is afflicted with a hero complex.
Planners and politicians always bring their own values into play, often without being aware of it. Progress is hard, especially when previously excluded voices want to be heard.
Another theme: three cheers for messy cities! We need efficiency but we also need randomness and unplanned organic growth, because that’s what sustains the life of a place.
Plus: driving everywhere isn’t natural. It only seems that way when cities are built to offer citizens no other choice. Robert Moses, and planners all over the world who followed him, did it deliberately.
How good, though, to be able to see all this brought to life and debated on stage.
