The Battle for Gotham (43 page)

I mentioned that the expressway fight seemed to be the first victory of its kind based on environmental reasoning, using the new federal laws passed in 1968. Jane retorted:

Yes, because before there were environmental impact laws—and in this case air quality—they could justify how this enormous amount of money to be spent had a tremendous cost-benefit ratio, because traffic was going to increase 8 percent a year, etc. They had big figures on the record early, because that’s the only part of the argument that they were concerned with at first. There weren’t any laws about air quality. That’s why on Westway, twelve lanes for a 1 percent increase in traffic, a billion dollars for that! That’s the figure that they used at the hearing, and the hearing officer said, in effect, “I can’t see what you’re basing this on.” So, now comes leaking out in the press, if 3 percent more cars were going to use this, it still would come within the air-quality limits? In short, they have figured they could go up as high as 3 percent and not get into trouble. But that’s all. And it’s not enough to justify all that money. Hence the landfill, et cetera. They hope nobody asks the question: “All right, if this landfill and these parks and all these apartments and everything are so great and the city really will have money to run these parks and fill up this many more apartments and so on, why not do it on its own? Would you do it without the highway? Why is it so great with the highway?”
⁶
Well, it’s so great with the highway because it’s meant to
sell
the highway.

NEW LAND PLUS PLANNED SHRINKAGE

During the Westway debate, observers occasionally questioned whether the land-development portion of the plan made sense. And not just because the city had no money to create or run the parks, but also because the plan only included putting in a lot of dirt and maybe a token park and then zoning it for housing and parks. None of the land development would occur at the same time as the highway was being built. If one liked the idea of all the parks and housing, then the question was: why are we letting the parks, already suffering from great budget cuts, that we have go to hell while talking about new parks, and why are we concerned with new space for housing when Roger Starr is talking about shrinking the city?
⁷

8.4 Many people wore this button.

Roger Starr was head of New York City’s Housing and Development Administration from January 1974 to July 1976 and a
New York Times
editorial writer from 1977 to 1992. Starr’s philosophy of Planned Shrinkage called for the concentration of shrinking urban populations in areas of high density and providing municipal services to those areas, while cutting off services and abandoning or demolishing buildings in the areas with diminishing populations. Create new land and build new housing and office towers while at the same time abandoning areas, where

sewers, streets, parks, schools, electric lines, and more already exist? There is no sense to this, no reality in it at all. This is the reason to change the subject and get behind the pollution issues.

The expressway was a running fight for quite a while. It wasn’t until 1969, after the new pollution regulations had gone in, that the first hearing was held on the plan for all the grand things that were going to be built on either side of this expressway and the marvelous new piece of New York that this money was going to buy. Killing it
did
buy a marvelous new piece of New York. It bought SoHo. SoHo was already reviving, at least starting to. This new exciting neighborhood
was
being created. Chinatown and Little Italy would have been devastated too. But nobody in the media confronted this built-in dilemma. I don’t think this has ever been published, or ever said, and I think this is big news. Don’t you?

MORE DIFFERENCES

Public debate over whether to build Westway was really a mirage. No debate occurred about
whether
to build a highway, just which of five highway plans to adopt: highway alternatives, not transportation alternatives. It was all about cars.

The public has been going through a great learning process in the last couple of decades of how to defeat the highway men. In response the highway people, naturally, have worked up other defenses. The environmental impact and air pollution thing was a new weapon for the public. The changing of the subject was a defense move for proponents.

Now there is a requirement for public participation. The public demanded it and got it. In earlier highway schemes, there was no such requirement. So, the defensive weapon is new ways of manipulating the public and of using public relations to give the impression of public participation. With Westway, they’ve anticipated a lot of the troubles that they had with the Lower Manhattan fight. And this time it’s a harder fight because they know that they can’t give up on Westway and start with another piece of the net.

It was becoming clear that if Westway was lost, the battle
and
the war were lost for more highways like it. “It’s a much harder fight in that they are much more determined to win this battle,” Jacobs said, “so they won’t lose the whole net. But rather than the various differences mentioned,
this
is what makes this a much harder battle. The chips are down on this one. And herein lies the future of New York. The stakes for the people of New York are tremendously higher in this one.”

Westway’s defeat would be an incredible reversal. If it was defeated, then maybe, finally, there might be some notion about getting to the real business at hand, Jacobs said. In the transit field this would mean looking at upgrading and expanding transit. In the housing field it would mean rehabbing what already existed instead of first or only building more new projects. Jacobs’s vision was about strategies for rebuilding the city.

The stakes for everybody in the country are high. If Westway were built, it would be a very clear signal that there was no hope for the future of New York, that it could do nothing but repeat expensive, disastrous mistakes, and that it can’t turn itself around, and that it was okay to keep building new or expanding existing highways. Other cities will follow.

New York used to be its people, its citizens and the brilliance of many of its citizens. This was what put it ahead of other places. What’s happened to a city that can have handed to it such a brilliant analysis of what its highway programs did to it, as Bob Caro did in
The Power Broker
, and it just rolls off? And they just keep obsessively repeating the same mistakes. This is what’s absolutely frightening about Westway, that there’s no way New York can turn itself around. That’s what it would mean to me.

I asked, was this is a classic turning point, then, a crossroads? Jane stated, “Yes, it is. I do think it is that important.”

9

BIG THINGS GET DONE

The decline of New York’s essentially efficient, energy-saving, decrepit transport system has reflected the decline of the city. But the massive rehabilitation of this arterial lifeline through a trade-in of Westway funds would be the most significant present step this city would take to assert its inner vitality and to underpin its future growth and development for the benefit of the masses of people who live and work here.

JOHN OAKES,
New York Times (op-ed, 1978)

A
nd that is what happened with the defeat of Westway.

No mayor could have as much of an impact on the city as did the official defeat of Westway in 1985. In fact, Westway would have cost endless billions of dollars and stunted the rebirth of the city that is so universally admired today.
¹

Citywide, the benefits are many but not easy to recognize and hard to measure. Transportation investments were fundamentally altered. Transit, on which 85 percent of New Yorkers depend, became a priority for the first time since the 1930s. Car-oriented policies were significantly challenged and seriously rethought. The years of debate resulted in a sea of change in urban development thinking. As a result, many destructive urban policies that evolved after World War II were reversed or, at least, moderated; transportation, after all, shapes development anywhere.

9.1 The Westway landfill would surely have seen towers rise on it at least as tall as ones like this rising on the Williamsburg waterfront.
Ron Shiffman
.

The defeat of that massive highway project changed the transportation debate in New York City. It also helped change the debate nationwide. And it helped change the debate about how we understand and view cities. As Jacobs noted in conversation, one’s view of the city shapes the feeling about this highway. Above all, the defeat helped renew New York City in many unrecognized ways.

If it had been built, the disruption and construction in Manhattan would rival the Big Dig in Boston. Expected federal funding would have been exhausted long before completion. Where the money would have come from to rebuild the subway and regional transit system is anybody’s guess. The state legislature is unlikely to have filled the gap. The distinctively revived neighborhoods along the far West Side—Tribeca, the West Village, Gansvoort Market, Chelsea, and the West Thirties and Forties—would instead be coping with the impact of that disruption. The full range of consequence is hard to imagine.

Westway was more than a debate about a highway or even the larger transportation issues. It focused attention and drew out differences over how cities function and how they are reinvigorated. In the broadest sense, the battle over Westway should have been the final chapter—a postscript—in the long-standing clash of urban strategies defined by the battles in the 1950s and 1960s between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.

Neither Moses nor Jacobs played a direct role in the Westway saga. Moses was long out of power; Jacobs lived in Toronto by then. But their urban philosophies were central to the argument over Westway.

The idea of massive highways through cities, as we’ve seen, was heavily promoted by Robert Moses. And while Westway was not Moses’s project, it was clearly in keeping with his legacy.
²
In fact, Moses had his own plan to rebuild the West Side Highway, about which he said: “There isn’t a project I’ve been connected with in forty years that would have been built if I had consulted [the public] prior to announcing it.”

By the time the Westway fight was engaged, the highway resistance, inspired by Jacobs’s victory with the Lower Manhattan Expressway, had strength. Proponents like to attribute the Westway opposition to the total dedication of one woman, Marcy Benstock, an environmental activist most identified as the opposition leader. They like to blame her for Westway’s demise. Her vigorous opposition was, in fact, dedicated, formidable, and effective. Clearly, she was the leading public voice. But that opposition was broader and more widespread than recognized or acknowledged. A CBS poll in 1976, for example, found 67 percent of New Yorkers asked wanted the money spent on transit, not a highway.
³
The opposition was, in fact, a diverse but loose alliance: environmentalists, local legislators, transit advocates, community boards, preservationists, fiscal conservatives, and liberals aided by some transportation and environmental officials inside government agencies.