Opera: Robert Moses Vs. Jane Jacobs
City Lab says: ‘It was a true clash of titans, a battle of enormous intellects and wills on a world-class stage, a title fight for the ages. On one side: Robert Moses, builder of highways and bridges, destroyer of slums, visionary creator of parks. The Power Broker. On the other: Jane Jacobs, observer of the “ballet of the good city sidewalk,†champion of the human scale, preserver of neighborhoods. The Eyes on the Street. When the two grappled over the future of New York’s Washington Square in the 1950s, the resulting conflict was epic in scale, with a city’s future hanging in the balance. Maybe only an opera could do justice to the scope of the forces at work, and pretty soon we’ll have one. It’s called “Marvelous Order” — the phrase is drawn from Jacobs’s masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities—and its creators are presenting scenes from the work-in-progress at a gala fundraising performance on November 2. The event will be staged at National Sawdust, a just-minted music venue in a former sawdust factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A “pre-premiere†is slated for next spring at Williams College.’
