Imagine the cobblestone streets of New York City’s SoHo neighborhood uprooted and replaced by a six-lane elevated highway; not a pretty sight. But if Robert Moses had gotten his way in 1962, most of SoHo—and large swaths of Greenwich Village—would have been razed. It’s not the only iconic neighborhood that narrowly escaped a plan that would have drastically changed it. Future and present urban planners, please, take note.
Robert Moses’s and the Butchery of Lower Manhattan
The incredibly powerful New York City planner Robert Moses (pictured at left), who was quoted as saying that when developing a city “you have to hack your way with a meat ax,” once hoped to cleave his way through Manhattan with construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (or LOMEX), connecting the Holland Tunnel with the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. Had Moses gotten his way, the Big Apple would have bid a fond farewell to SoHo and Greenwich Village, along with nearly 2,000 families’ homes and 800 businesses. After budget concerns and public opposition led by the author and urbanist Jane Jacobs, the plans eventually disappeared, and New York has since kept meat-ax-wielding developers at bay.
Map illustration by Philippe Nicolas.
This article first appeared in GOOD Issue 19: The Neighborhoods Issue. You can read more from the issue here, or find out what it’s all about by reading the introduction.
