Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York´s Master B

To a young Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Village, with its winding cobblestone streets and diverse makeup, was everything a city neighborhood should be. The activist, writer, and mother of three grew so fond of her bustling community that it became a touchstone for her landmark book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." But consummate power broker Robert Moses, the father of many of New York´s most monumental development projects, saw things differently: neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village were badly in need of "urban renewal." Notorious for exacting enormous human costs, Moses´s plans had never before been halted-not by governors, mayors, or FDR himself, and certainly not by a housewife from Scranton. The epic rivalry of Jacobs and Moses, played out amid the struggle for the soul of a city, is one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern American history. In Wrestling with Moses, acclaimed reporter and urban planning policy expert Anthony Flint recounts this thrilling David-and-Goliath story, the legacy of which echoes through our society today.