Jane Jacobs, The Super Villain?

Jane Jacobs stars as an evil, time-travelling super villain in an off-Broadway play called 'Boozy', which offers a warped look at the life of Robert Moses.

1 minute read

May 31, 2005, 7:00 AM PDT

By Chris Steins @planetizen


"Written and directed by Alex Timbers, Boozy takes a warped look at the life of Robert Moses, the master builder who shaped New York City unchallenged from the 1930s until opinion turned against him after the demolition of Penn Station and his attempt to build an expressway through SoHo and Greenwich Village in the '60s. As chairman of the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the American-born Jacobs was one of Moses' most vocal critics and was instrumental in bringing him down.

...But, in Boozy -- which purports to be a play created by the descendants of Swiss architect Le Corbusier -- Moses gets a tongue-in-cheek rehabilitation. "We re-envisioned him as a Messianic action hero who can create public housing at the flick of a wrist," explains Timbers, a Yale graduate... 'And then we took Jane Jacobs, who is really this beneficent, wonderful community activist ... whose ideas about planning are really what are today the ideal of conscientious planning, and we turned her into a time-travelling, globe-trotting super villain.' "

Thanks to Chris Steins

Monday, May 30, 2005 in The National Post

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