Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City

get out of my door,” Bessie Smith lamented in “Backwater Blues.” In response to the “great flood,” Congress in effect nationalized flood control along the Mississippi and entrusted the work to the Army Corps of Engineers. Joseph Ransdell, Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator at the time, called the Flood Control Act of 1928 the most important piece of w

... See more

Sun is part of a park’s setting for people, shaded, to be sure, in summer. A high building effectively cutting the sun angle across the south side of a park can kill off a lot of it. Rittenhouse Square, for all its virtues, has this misfortune. On a good October afternoon, for example, almost a third of the square lies completely empty; the great b

... See more

Erosion of cities by automobiles entails so familiar a series of events that these hardly need describing. The erosion proceeds as a kind of nibbling, small nibbles at first, but eventually hefty bites. Because of vehicular congestion, a street is widened here, another is straightened there, a wide avenue is converted to one-way flow, staggered-sig

... See more