Moses Parts Urban Waters
By Jerry Tallmer
The Parkchester stop of the No. 6 IRT subway is actually an elevated platform high up over the Bronx. As you wait to change trains, the view looking down from this platform at 9:30 or 10 in the morning – any weekday morning – is a slow-crawling three-lane parking lot of huge Manhattan-bound or Jersey-bound trucks cemented bumper to-bumper in a squeeze of unwise smaller vehicles as far as the eye can see.
This parking lot is called the Cross-Bronx Expressway. It is an object lesson in something you will not learn from the walls of the broad-scope, sobersided “Robert Moses and the Modern City” exhibit at the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University; something that Robert Moses himself, high priest of the superhighway, either never learned or, in his imperiousness, chose to ignore. If you build them, they will come — the road creates the traffic, and the traffic jam. In the case of the BCE, build it by bulldozing a stable working-class community of some 5,000 human beings out of existence and into a wasteland.
All the more ironic, then, that the first three wall panels as you enter the gallery on the 8th floor of Schermerhorn Hall proclaim, in big bold capital letters: SLUM … BLIGHT … CANCER. Three words for urban enclaves inhabited by Poor People Who Are Not Us. Three words that (a) set the scene for this scrupulously objective exhibit curated by Hilary Ballon, (b) are there to provide a rationale for the entire life and works of the Commissioner of Everything who bestrode New York State and City like a colossus from the 1920s to 1968.
Yes, he did some good things – many good things – in terms of beaches and playgrounds and swimming pools and bridges and even some of those roadways; but for the rest of the story, the human story, the other side of the coin, you would have to look not on these walls but in the plainspoken truth-telling essays by Martha Bioni (on his racism), Robert Fishman (on his opposition), and a number of others in the indispensable 336-page catalogue (Norton, $35) co-edited by Ms. Ballon and Kenneth L. Jackson. It is there that you will read of the pesky unknown “ordinary people” who stopped the colossus in its – in his – tracks; in Greenwich Village, in Midtown and Lower Manhattan, in Central Park. Who brought it toppling like sculptured Stalin, you might say.
There are of course no ordinary people in this universe. These particular heroes, for they were that, notably included a writer and Villager named Jane Jacobs, a housewife, mother, and Village activist named Shirley Hayes (who never let me sleep when she was on the case), a Village Voice editor named Daniel Wolf, a minister named Howard Moody whom, I regret to say. you will not find in this catalogue, and a theatrical dynamo named Joseph Papp who made a laughing stock of the Big Bad Moses who said Shakespeare was ruining the grass in Central Park. (It was Papp’s politics that Coriolanus Moses, Commissioner of Parks, actually didn’t like. Grass be damned.)
For the rest of the story – well, most of the rest of the story – there’s the exhibit at Columbia through April 14 and two correlative shows, “Remaking the Metropolis” at the Museum of the City of New York (through May 28) and “The Road to Recreation” at the Queens Museum of Art (through May 27) – a structural relic, by the way, of the Dada Robert Moses World Fair of 1964.
