Kenneth Jackson: recommendation

Transcript context

…Maybe, maybe. Although I think the other thing about it is putting Moses in a broader historical concept. He was swimming with the tide of history. In other words, history when he was building, was building Ford Motor Company and General Motors and Chrysler Corporation and building cars by the millions. The automobile industry in the United States was huge. People thought any kind of rail transit was obsolete and on the way out anyway so let's just build roads. That's what the public wanted. He built what the public wanted. Looking historically, I don't think he did the right thing, but we needed to join the 20th century. New York could have stayed as a distinctly different kind of place where everybody walks. I just don't think it would have been the same kind of city because there are people who are attached to their cars in New York. The sprawl in New York, which is enormous, nobody's saying it wasn't, spreads over 31 counties, an area about as large as the state of Connecticut. Metropolitan New York is about as large as the Netherlands. But it's still relatively, I don't want to say compact, but everybody knows where the center is. It's not that anybody grows up in New York at 16 and thinks that the world is in some mall three miles away. They all know there is a center and that's where it is. It's called Manhattan. And that's New York and Moses didn't change that, for all of his roads. There is still a definite center in New York. Skyscrapers and everything in the middle. It's true that public transit did decline. I like Chicago and they have a rail transit from O'Hare down to JFK Expressway and it works sort of, but you have to walk a ways to get on. You have to walk blocks to get in the middle of the expressway and catch the train there. It's not like in New York where you just go down some steps. New York subway is much bigger than Chicago and more widely used. I think what Caro was trying to explain and your question suggests is, was Moses responsible for the decline of public transit? Well, he was building cars and roads and bridges. So in that sense, a little bit, yes. But if you look at New York compared to the rest of the United States, it used to be that maybe 20 percent of all the transit riders in the United States were in the New York area. Now it's 40 percent. So if you're looking at the United States, what you have to explain is why is New York different from the rest of the United States? Why is it that when I was chairman or president of the New York Historical Society, we had rich trustees, and I would tell them, “Well, I got here on a subway.” They would say, “How do you think I got here?” These are people who are close to billionaires and they're saying they used the subway. If you're in lower Manhattan and you're trying to get to Midtown and it's raining and it's five o'clock, you've got to be a fool to try to get in your own limousine. It isn't going to get you there very quickly. A subway will. an and you're trying to get to Midtown and it's raining and it's five o'clock, you've got to be a fool to try to get in your own limousine. It isn't going to get you there very quickly. A subway will. So there are reasons for it. And I think Moses didn't destroy public transit. He didn't help it and that's an important distinction. But he was swimming with history. He built what the public wanted. I think if he had built public transit, he would have found it tougher to build. Just for example, Cincinnati built a subway system, a tunnel all through the city. It never has opened. They built it. You can still see the holes in the ground where it's supposed to come out. By the time they built it, people weren't riding trains anymore. So it's there now and they don't know what to do with it. And that's 80 years ago. These issues are much more complex than I'm speaking of. I just think it's unfair to blame Moses for the problems of the city. I think he did as much as anybody to try to bring the city into the 21st century, which he didn't live to. You've got to adapt and you've got to have a hybrid model in the world now. And I think the model that America needs to follow is a model where we reduce our dependence on the cars and somehow ride buses more or use the internet more or whatever it is, but stop using so much fossil fuels so that we destroy our environment. And New York, by far, is the most energy efficient place in the United States. Mainly because you live in tall buildings, you have hot floors. It doesn't really cost much to heat places because you're heating the floor below you and above you. And you don't have outside walls and you walk. New Yorkers are thinner. Many more people take buses and subways in New York than anywhere else in the United States, not just in absolute terms, in relative terms. So they're helping. It's probably a healthier lifestyle to walk around. And I think we're rediscovering it. For example, if you come to New York between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there's so many tourists in the city that there is gridlock on the sidewalks around. The police have to direct the traffic and in part, it's because a Detroit grandmother wants to bring her granddaughter to New York. to see Hudson's, which is a great department store in Detroit or in any city or GFox in Hartford. Every city had these giant department and windows where Santa Claus is and stuff like this. You can still go to New York and see that. You can say, “Jane, this is the way it used to be in Detroit.” People ringing the bells and looking at the store windows and things like that. A mall can't recapture that. It just can't. You can try, but it's not the same thing. So I think that in a way, not only did Moses not destroy New York he gets a little bit of credit for saving it because it might have been on the way to Detroit. Again, I'm not saying that it would have been Detroit because Detroit's almost empty. It’s Baltimore, it's Cleveland, it's every place. There's nobody there anymore. And even in New York, the department stores have mostly closed, not all of them. And so it's not the same as it was 80 years ago, but it's closer to it than anywhere else. OK, I'm actually very curious to get your opinion on the following question given the fact that you are an expert on New York history and have literally written the encyclopedia on New York City.…

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