Robert Moses - Creating a Modern NYC

The modern city / urban center is definitely one of the most visible and obvious developments of modern life.  In the United States, one immediately thinks of the development of the "Big Three" cities, two of which lie on opposite coasts and the other in the center of the country. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.  This entry will take a critical look at New York City and one of its most famous developers, Robert Moses.

As the title of the book is All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Bermann keeps coming back to this quote to define one of the most important aspects of modernism. The idea is that nothing is permanent - institutions, ideas, buildings, cultures, and beliefs - none of these have intrinsic staying power in the wake of advancement.  Mankind builds. Mankind enjoys the fruits of his labor.  Mankind finds that what he built is obsolete or tired.  Mankind destroys.  Mankind builds again.

New York City in the 1930s was already a modern city.  Unlike Chicago, which had the benefit of growing during the 1800s so it could have some sort of plan (Burnham's Boulevards, Lakefront development, not to mention the rebuilding opportunity The Great Fire presented), New York tore down itself and rebuilt many times over since its founding in the 1600s.  As New York emerges as The Great American City (sorry Chicago!) over the years, it found itself also reinventing itself for the modern age.  Take the rapid transit system - New York City has 245 miles of subway line.  Not a close second is Washington D.C. with 117 miles of subway line. Since the subway line was largely built below ground (NYC does have its share of elevated track also), its impact on specific neighborhoods and communities was marginal.  This is not true with one of Robert Moses's earlier projects, the Cross-Bronx Expressway.

I've established that one of the tenets of modernism is to destroy old forms and build some newer, better form in its place.  The destruction should make sense, as long as something better takes its place. However, what if that destruction has "collateral damage" such as a neighborhood or a community? Such was the case with the ill-fated Cross-Bronx Expressway.  The author remembers the Art Deco buildings on beautiful boulevards being destroyed to make way for the project:

As I saw one of the loveliest of these buildings being wrecked for the road, I felt a grief that, I can see now, is endemic to modern life. So often the price of ongoing and expanding modernity is the destruction not merely of "traditional" and "pre-modern" institutions and environments but - and here is the real tragedy - of everything most vital and beautiful in the modern world itself. Here in the Bronx, thanks to Robert Moses, the modernity of the urban boulevard was being condemned as obsolete, and blown to pieces, by the modernity of the interstate highway. (295)

 It wasn't just buildings that were destroyed.  The Cross-Bronx Expressway split the borough into two separate halves.  The South Bronx was created, along with all the problems of blight and economic ruin as the project separated businesses from their customers, churches from their parishoners, neighbors from their neighbors. While eminent domain now connected New Jersey to Queens, the project forced many established families in the Bronx to move and businesses in the Bronx to relocate or shut down. The Bronx hasn't been the same since.

Robert Moses, troublingly, had the public good in mind as he strong-armed projects through (some very much to the benefit of NYC - Flushing Park, for instance). What he didn't consider was the human factor of his projects - what they would do long-term to the communities they effected, in the name of modernism.

Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1988.

This is the Modern World

When I think of the word "modern," my mind immediately gravitates to two deeply-rooted personal cultural touchstones.  One of these touchstones is a pop song: "Modern World" by The Jam. Basically this song is running on a loop in my mind as I write this . . . "What kind of a fool do you think I am? / You think I know nothing of the modern world? / All my life has been the same / I've learned to live by hate and pain / It's my inspiration drive" - then to cool guitar riff.  In its time (1977), the music of The Jam and other power pop or punk bands coming out of England was indeed an expression of modernism - the idea that "they had the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own" (Berman 16). The theme carries through in reaction to the commercialization of the music industry and subsequent watering down and homogenization of originality and artistry.

The other "modern" touchstone I envision in my mind's eye is the Godfrey Reggio film Powaqquatsi. I remember seeing this with a group of high school friends at the Dundee Theater in Omaha - not really a great date film, but one that left a definite impression on me.  The film focuses on the how the elements of modernism - industry, technology, communications, world economy, etc. - impose themselves on the people and cultures in developing nations.  The film is JUST images and music (superb Philip Glass soundtrack by the way). The image that sticks with me is also the movie poster: a boy walking toward the camera on a dirt road with a huge truck bearing down on him from behind.  The boy pays no attention to the truck, keeping an even steady pace toward the camera, even as the behemoth passes, obliterating the boy in a cloud of dust.  It's a spot-on visual metaphor for how modernism's more destructive side - devouring cultures that may be innocently oblivious to the changes around them.

Now to the book, Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. I am drawn to this text by an idea that modern life acts much like a parasite - sucking the lifeblood out of unsuspecting hosts while gaining in strength and size.  We get caught up in its many manifestations: "the industrialization of production...immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from their ancestral habits...rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth" (16) just to name a few. This development, gone unchecked, has its cost. Berman's chapter on "The Tragedy of Development" delves into the phenomenon:

...the process of development has spread, often at a frantic pace, into the most remote, isolated, and backward sectors of advanced societies. It has transformed innumerable pastures and cornfields into chemical plants, corporate headquarters, suburban shopping centers-- How many orange groves are left in California's Orange County?  It has transformed thousands of urban neighborhoods into freeways and parking lots, or into World Trade Centers and Peachtree Plazas, or into abandoned, burnt-out wilderness... (78)

Tragedy indeed!  These more concrete (pun intended) expressions of modernity hold my attention more than the philosophical and political.  Berman begins his discussion by tracing the roots of modernism mainly to Rousseau and Marx - so will be getting a heavy dose of why/how the rise of the bourgeoisie correlates with the rise of modernist ideals.  The title of the book actually comes from Marx: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men" (Berman 89). It seems that with modernism comes an awareness that may not always be pleasant - the reality of "the real conditions of our lives" may reveal servitude, shallowness, vapid frivolity, and futility in the presence of corporate power structures and addictive media.  That's really why I'm reading the book, to get a better sense of what is the driving force behind all that is modern, and why we both embrace it and shrink from it.

Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1988.