Moses encouraged the same rapacious romp through Baltimore.Īt about the same time Moses cast his asphalt spell over Baltimore, the city - like all deprived metropolitan centers - was emerging from World War II with pent-up consumer demands. Nelson Rockefeller, encouraged by social critics and authors Jane Jacobs and Louis Mumford, put an end to Moses’ supremacy as New York’s “master builder” when he went one project too far - the proposed demolition of Greenwich Village’s landmark Washington Square. He created “authorities” to oversee each of his projects and collected a handsome salary as executive director of each of the oversight organizations he created.įinally, Gov. He leveled huge swaths of New York, tore up communities, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, shut down businesses, reduced neighborhoods and buildings to rubble. They include Jones Beach, accessible to the masses by highway and automobile, and the greenswards of Central Park, designed to be an oasis plop in the center of Manhattan, among the world’s foremost concentrations of skyscrapers. Some city officials and mass transit proponents hope to revive the Red Line project, though the set-aside funding has been applied elsewhere, mainly to roads in the outlying counties, while the deadline for federal funds expired.Īnyone who’s read Robert Caro’s masterwork, The Power Broker - among the best books on politics ever written - grasps Moses’ affection for highways, throughways, expressways, bypasses, freeways, and all the other asphalt sluiceways that dissect New York. Moses scoffed to officials that the city’s configuration was misaligned: There should be an expressway extending from East to West, using his forefinger to draw an imaginary line horizontally across the center of the map, connecting Baltimore’s two outer margins.Īnd as witnesses to history repeating itself, the now defunct Red Line followed nearly the same East-West fingernail pathway across town through an unacceptable tunnel scooped though the city’s underbelly to Fells Point and Canton. Moses, never hesitant to apply bulldozers and asphalt where grass and houses bloom, hunched over a map of Baltimore and pondered the 92 square miles of urban lifescape. Today it ranks 30th, its population diminished to 593,000. Back then, Baltimore was the nation’s 6th largest city with a population of nearly a million. They invited New York’s master planner, Robert Moses, to Baltimore to ascertain the city’s best means of getting its bulging post-World War II population from here to there in the most efficient manner. In that fateful year, the ministers of influence at City Hall succumbed to the notion - and the influence of Detroit - that the future lay with the automobile and not public transportation. The western end of the freeway stub in Baltimore City intended for use by the canceled I-170, now dubbed the “highway to nowhere.” Photo by Adam Moss, Wikimedia Commons.Īfter more than 70 years of planning and dead-ending in the middle of the city, federal and local officials want to undo what their predecessors did in 1949.
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