Manhattan: Reimagined

About This Project

“Manhattan: Reimagined” is a digital art project which follows the path of two of Robert Moses’ unrealized projects: The Midtown Expressway and the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX).

I researched the route of both proposed expressways, which would have connected the Williamsburg & Manhattan Bridges to the Holland Tunnel (LOMEX) and the Midtown Tunnel to the Lincoln Tunnel (Midtown Expressway).

I then photographed along the proposed route, but I also photographed the expressways which were built - The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), The Cross-Bronx Expressway, and the Gowanus Expressway.

I then superimposed the existing expressways onto the proposed locations in Manhattan, creating a visual imaginary of what Lower Manhattan might have looked, felt, and even sounded like if the projects had gone through.

The Power Broker…

Manhattan has been the focus of power in New York City since its earliest days. The Financial District, City Hall, Midtown, Central Park…all of them famous in their own right. But taken together, crammed into a dense, heaving gridwork of buildings and roads, they represent more than the sum of their parts - They are the embodiment of the mythology of New York City.

But part of the problem, from a city planner’s perspective, is that Manhattan has always served as an impediment to the swift movement of goods and people from the mainland (mainly New Jersey) to Long Island, and vice versa.

New York City went through a building spree in the early 20th century, adding bridges and tunnels to connect Manhattan to the outer boroughs. Robert Moses, the great NYC planner, had a vision of connecting the city and the adjoining states into a grand, “modern” metropolis. The idea of modernism, ascendant at the time, was that cities needed to be transformed - from the chaotic, slum-filled, narrow streets of the 19th century, into a city form that more closely aligned with modernism’s key tenets of efficiency, order, and mathematical precision.

Moses, as he saw it, was conforming the city to his image of a car-centered, efficient modern model (for a full list of Moses’ many projects, click here). It’s worthwhile to note that Moses was heralded by many as a key ally, a shrewd power broker, and a formidable personality. His plans for a car-powered metropolis fit perfectly with Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency and the creation of the Interstate Highway System, affording him agency not only a builder, but as an unelected, yet tremendously powerful political figure. And by the mid-1950s, Moses’ power was at its zenith. It was at this time that he set his sights on the projects that would vex him and eventually stymie his ambitions of creating New York as the ultimate modern city: The cross-Manhattan highways called the "Midtown Expressway” and the “Lower Manhattan Expressway”.

The Midtown and Lower Manhattan Expressways…

Nothing bothered Moses so much as the presence of unrealized potential, and New York had it in spades. Not only was there an entire metropolitan region to connect (with automobiles, of course, not low-class mass transit) but blocks and blocks of blight and slum dwellings across Manhattan just waiting to be redeveloped. Lower Manhattan in particular was packed with immigrants living in tightly packed tenement houses, Italian and Irish and Chinese and Puerto Ricans, many of whom, it is true (and still to this day) suffering from an onslaught of traffic, fumes and noise. All trucks, cars, and buses that cross Manhattan from Long Island need to exit the bridges onto surface streets, and inch along until the Holland and Lincoln tunnels whisk them under the Hudson River and onto the interstate highways on the other side. The same is true in the reverse direction: all the materials, food, people and cars that service rapidly growing Long Island from the mainland needed to cross through the middle of one of America’s densest residential neighborhoods, belching smoke and threatening pedestrians.

Of course, this was also a heady time for a city planner. The President, governor, and public sentiment was in favor of Moses’ projects, and similar ones across the nation. There was unbounded post-war optimism and prosperity, and an appetite for grand public projects funded on the taxpayer dime that seems almost dreamlike in 2021 (infrastructure spending bill notwithstanding). Casual and overt racism meant that “slum clearance” was a popular phenomenon, and a quest for the modernist ideals of order, shape and efficiency relied upon urban planners and architects to be implemented. For Moses, these two Expressways were a slam dunk.

Opposition…

Moses didn’t count on the staunch opposition to his plans to build massive, elevated (and later, buried) expressways through the center of Manhattan, because he was used to winning. He managed to build other major projects like the Brooklyn-Queens and Cross-Bronx Expressways, and dozens of bridges, parkways, and public pools with a sweep of his outstretched arm. He consolidated political power (unelected) in the NYC Parks Department, which had the authority to operate tolling on the NYC bridges, spend its own budget, and enforce laws with its own police force. This alarmed preservationists and angry citizens alike, who saw Moses as something like a oligarchical bully.

The first chink in Moses’ armor happened in the late 1950s, when his plans for bifurcating Washington Square Park ended in a resounding and noisy failure. This showed Moses was vulnerable to popular mobilization, and in particular, vulnerable to the organizing power of a charismatic woman who lived in Greenwich Village named Jane Jacobs.

Jane Jacobs, a resident of Lower Manhattan and a natural organizer, built a coalition of residents to mobilize against Moses’ plans. She was considered an expert on what we would call today “human-scale” interactions with the city, and wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, considered to be one of the great works in American urbanism.

Her thesis was simple: That what Moses (and other modernists) called disorder, she called dynamism. She argued that dense neighborhoods like SoHo and Little Italy were safer, more interesting, and more liveable than the antiseptic, wide-boulevard communities in Long Island. She argued that the presence of people on the street, walking and interacting, shopping and talking, led to a cohesive society. She believed that the modernist ideals of the Le Corbusier apartment blocks, surrounded by highways and prescribed amounts of green space, were the antithesis of this cohesive society, and moreover just a facade of philosophy overlaid on top of rent-seeking interests anyway.

Of course, she noted that pollution, traffic, and living conditions were not ideal. But she was fervently opposed to both Moses’ vision for how to solve those problems, and his high-handed manner of pushing through them through without any public participation. (Her struggle against Moses, and the eventual success of her fight, was made into a documentary which I highly recommend.)

The Contemporary City…

The Midtown and Lower Manhattan Expressways were never built (aside from two hidden-in-plain-sight improvements on Canal St and Chrystie St). Moses’ star faded in the 1960s, as public sentiment shifted and the zeal for massive, disruptive roads projects waned. The damage, however, had been done. Not only in New York, but across the country, as thousands of miles of interstate highways had been built, displacing tens of thousands of lower-income residents, many of whom were people of color and living in vibrant, successful and cohesive communities.

There’s perhaps no way to calculate if the prosperity and growth that America has enjoyed after WWII could have happened without the disruptive vision of men like Moses, but in a way that is not really the point. The point of this project, and of my work more broadly, is to reflect upon the cost. When we sacrifice neighborhoods that are widely recognized as the most iconic in New York City today - SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, Greenwich Village - we do so in the name of progress, order, and safety. Surely this is at least in part code for profit, as the benefits of rising home prices, clean streets, large chain stores and private automobiles accrue at the top first. But even for the rich - and Lower Manhattan is decidedly much richer than it was in the 1960s - what would have been lost? The corner delis, the cobblestone streets, the bustle and neighborly qualities that people associate - positively - with the spirit of the place. A spirit that once existed in places like Black Bottom, Black Wall Street, West Oakland, West Baltimore. Jane Jacobs and so many nameless others recognized that that indefinable urban spirit, the feeling of community, is at least as important, if not more so, than order, prosperity, or efficiency. As a new generation of urban planners covers highways, “re-wilds” urban spaces, builds walkable cities and “revitalizes” urban cores, we would do well to realize that what we are doing is correcting the mistakes of the past, and not creating something new.