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Wrestling With Moses

30 July 2009 - 2:42pm
Photo: Anthony Flint

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. Buy Now

Book cover

Praise for Wrestling with Moses:
"In this gripping and inspiring story of one woman who galvanized her community against powerful, destructive forces, Anthony Flint gets to the heart of what makes neighborhoods -- and cities -- thrive."
—Richard Florida, author of Who's Your City

“Beautifully written, Wrestling with Moses is a step back in time to the bohemia of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, when Bob Dylan’s music filled the streets and revolution was in the air. As a woman standing up to power, Jane Jacobs blazed a trail. This is a remarkable book.”
—Brad Matsen, author of Titanic’s Last Secrets

“Jane Jacobs, the crownless queen of cities, defended New York aginst the assault that would have destroyed the pattern of its daily life. Wrestling With Moses is a masterly tale of how her mandate endures.”
—Jane Holtz Kay, architecture critic for The Nation


Anthony Flint, a 20-year journalist and author at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think-tank based in Cambridge, Mass., writes about cities and the built environment. A former reporter for The Boston Globe, Loeb Fellow, visiting scholar at Harvard Design School, and policy adviser in Massachusetts state government, his previous book, This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America, is a cultural and political analysis of the smart growth movement. He lectures nationwide on urbanism and trends in land and living, in the coming post-cheap oil, post-carbon future.

Price: $26.95
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In short, we’ve seen the last of the cheap oil on which we’ve built our economy, our communities, and our daily lives.
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