Robert Caro addresses the Congress of New Urbanism

 
Last week, with activities starting on Wednesday and running through Sunday, the Congress for the New Urbanism assembled in Austin for its sixteenth annual conference. The CNU website says, "The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is the leading organization promoting walkable, neighborhood-based development as an alternative to sprawl." Founded by architects, the organization now embraces engineers, planners, developers, government officials, and many others.
 
Being so close this year, I felt fortunate to be able to attend and to see so many people that I've met over the years, many from North Texas. I attended a large number of seminars on a variety of subjects and I hope to cover several over the next several posts. If my posting was less than normal, being out of town and spending about twelve hours each day at the conference took a toll. Also, I've not had so much crammed into my brain in such a short period for a very long time.
 
Among the many fine speakers, Robert A Caro, pictured above, spoke on Robert Moses, a name I've heard many times and still did not know all that much about. Most of Mr Caro's comments came from his book: The Power Broker; Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; ©1974. Moses' name is well known among city planners. I could never tell if references were with affection or distaste. Maybe it was a lot of both.
 
According to Caro, Moses was "unquestionably America's most prolific creator. He was America's greatest builder." He started building in New York in the 1920's and continued for over 40 years. He built highways, expressways, parkways, parks with zoos and skating rinks and golf courses and baseball diamonds, stadiums, power dams, bridges, tunnels, public housing, and more, on a scale unlike the world had seen before. He remained in power through numerous mayors and governors, aloof and out of reach of all.
 
To build most of it meant moving people out of the way. His expressways crisscrossed the city, dicing neighborhoods and opening the suburbs to massive flows of traffic. Many of the people were relocated to miles and miles of high-rise, barren apartment blocks. The tolls from the highways funded immense projects and gave Moses access to enormous amounts of federal funding. For the highways, he removed 250,000 persons. For the apartments, he removed more. To build all his public works, Moses must have moved almost a half million people.
 
His works were great and his sins greater. Those removed were usually the poorest. The grand parks were usually for the richest. He institutionalized ghettos, divided by "color and income." Always for highways and tolls, he starved mass transit, the subways, the trains.
 
And they came from far and wide to learn his secrets, how he financed and constructed these great projects. When the engineers and planners and financiers left they carried his methods to cities across the nation, like a disease. Just as the core of New York City started to rot, so did many other cities. As the New York public housing fell to ruin and disrepair, so did Chicago and Los Angeles. As neighborhoods in New York felt the iron curtain of the expressway superstructure stretched through their middles, so did countless other American cities. As cars and businesses and homes traveled the lanes from New York to the suburbs, so did they in Dallas and Houston and Minneapolis and Cleveland.
 
I don't know enough yet to say what measuring device and scale could best be used to measure the life and career of the man. As Caro says, "Moses himself, who feels his works will make him immortal, believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born. Perhaps he is right. It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived.
 
"It is possible to say only that it would have been a different city."
 
Over thirty years after Robert Caro wrote those words, he sees history starting to decide. The expressways that robbed the riverfront from the city have been torn down and replaced by accessible boulevards. The public housing that had become new slums has been razed.
 
Many of Moses' choices may have arisen and been propelled by the new ideas of the day, such as future cities where cars dominated. So was the thinking by the time of the 1964 New York World's Fair.
 
The New Urbanists have certainly taken their historical measure of Moses and it's not pretty. The New Urbanist harken to an earlier day, reflected in the working cities of the Old World, and in American until the time of Moses. About this same time, zoning was being adapted in most cities to segregate uses for health, safety, and the public welfare. Blighting industries could not brazenly be built in residential neighborhoods. Separation became the rule of the day. In the interim, uses have become less obnoxious and less invasive. Technology has rendered many mute and moot. Uses that were once oil and water are now a blended dressing. Enter the New Urbanist with a belief that towns and cities that once functioned well should be revered and copied. Uses no longer require such drastic separation. Suburban sprawl is wasting land and infrastructure. The cost to maintain the status quo is becoming unsustainable. Only continual new construction on greenfield sites can pay to maintain the older developments. The constraining effects of build-out and ever-more-expensive gas are starving that continued growth. It cannot be sustained.
 
The numbers of New Urbanists were still small in 1993. Their projects had not yet caught the eye of the Disney corporation. But their ideas of community-focused design and activities had caught the eye of the new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros, the former Mayor of San Antonio. The bombed-out and defecated shells of public housing projects across the country were leveled and a new type of public housing was used to replace it. Houses were built with porches and trees were planted to line the streets and cool the yards. Maybe history is slow to render judgment here too, but all indications are favorable for the solutions instituted by Cisneros using the ideas of the New Urbanists.
 
History surely has it right: observe long and decide slowly. It takes time to split the streams of the many variables that affect our cities and suburbs. Two or three or more may combine for a result that we cannot easily grasp. Hasty, invalid deductions only slow the process of understanding.
 
I don't know the answers to who is right, Moses or Cisneros. I do know that I'm inclined to follow the New Urbanists. In many ways, life was better and more interesting in many of the older settlements. It's not so interesting sitting hours and hours each year in slow-moving traffic or paying for the gas to do so.