Tracing the Path of Jane Jacobs’ Greenwich Village Battles

We will follow the route of Jane’s involvement in 3 battles against Robert Moses: The road through Washington Square Park, SoHo which the Lower Manhattan Expressway would have wiped out with Little Italy and Chinatown, and then West Village Houses where Moses wanted to demolish 14 square blocks for an Urban Renewal Plan.

Time: 2:00pm-4:30pm

Date: Sunday May 20, 2012

Event Start: Meet under the Washington Square Arch.

Host: Roberta Brandes Gratz, Author of Battle For Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, and Center for the Living City Board Member

Registration: No need to sign up, just show up at the posted meeting location.

Accessibility: This event is welcoming and accessible to wheelchairs, bicycles, seniors, children, and pets.

Sense the energy and ambition that has spurred an incredibly dynamic and fascinating area, tucked away between Tramway Plaza and Sutton Square and dominated by the iconic Queensboro Bridge. The zone grew as a rough and ragged district of power plants, breweries and tenements, until a bevy of society ladies transformed a tenement block into an exclusive enclave that set off a local apartment house boom. Near and distant views reveal the places where Robert Moses bullied locals into accepting the East River Drive, where zoning encouraged residential towers, where Philip Johnson designed a futurist New Town, where citizens locked horns with city planners, and where Louis Kahn’s Memorial to FDR finally nears completion.

Time: 1:00pm-2:30pm

Date: Sunday May 6, 2012

Event Start: Tramway Plaza, 59th St. and 2nd Ave, Manhattan

Event End: Sutton Place Park, 57th St. and Sutton Place, Manahttan

Host: Carole Rifkind, author, filmmaker and MAS Board Member

Registration: No need to sign up, just show up at the posted meeting location.

Accessibility: Fully Accessible

Flushing, Queens: The Rocket Thrower – Robert Moses, the 1964/65 World’s Fair, and Art in the Space Age

The Space Age was a time of bewildering change, yet also of great optimism about the future. Conceived at a time of general consensus in 1958 and designed to celebrate and promote the U.S. entry into the Space Age, the 1964/65 Fair opened instead amidst the turbulent conflicts of the Mid-Sixties. Robert Moses’s presidency of the World’s Fair Corporation became another flash-point for the conflicts emerging in the spheres of civil rights, planning, architecture, and art in New York. Donald De Lue’s sculpture The Rocket Thrower illustrates the conflicts between Moses’s conservative aesthetic, the press, and the changing culture of the 1960’s. Explore the “space age” art and architecture that survives in Flushing Meadows today which recalls those times and their contradictory currents.

This tour is part of a weeklong festival celebrating the Rocket Thrower. The statue is included in the MAS’s Adopt-A-Monument program which through private funding conserves and maintains works of public art. The Rocket Thrower is the last of 36 outdoor monuments in this program waiting to be restored.

Date: Sunday May 6, 2012

Time: 12:00pm-2:00pm

Event Start/End: The East side of the Unisphere, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, opposite the Queens Museum of Art

Hosts: John Kriskiewicz, with John Krawchuk

Registration: No need to sign up, just show up at the posted meeting location.

Accessibility: Fully Accessible

In 1934, 18 year old Jane Jacobs arrived in NYC from Scranton to pursue a writing career. While exploring her new environs, she found herself at Christopher Street Station, and immediately began her love affair with Greenwich Village. Our tour will include the history of the area, woven with stories and relevant sights of Jane’s epic battles with city bureaucracy and the powerful Robert Moses to preserve her beloved Village. Walkers will visit Hudson Street, where she lived for 20 years, observing its daily ‘intricate sidewalk ballet’ that was the inspiration for her acclaimed first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as well as see several other historic sites that would not exist today if it were not for her successful grassroots activism.

Time: 11:00am-1:00pm

Date: Saturday May 5, 2012

Event Start/End: 7th Ave. South & Christopher St., in front of Village Cigars

Host: Joan Schecter

Registration: No need to sign up, just show up at the posted meeting location.

Accessibility: Partially Accessible – curbs, uneven terrain, busy sidewalks