Kenneth Jackson: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. Professor Jackson, now I want to discuss how the process of city planning and building projects has changed since Moses' time. We spent some good amount of time actually discussing what Moses actually did in his time. Last year you wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal talking about how the 27-story building in Manhattan was put in limbo because the parking lot which it would replace was part of a historic district. What is it like to actually build a skyscraper or a highway or a bridge or anything of that sort in today's New York City? In the larger context, it's probably fair to say it's tougher to build in New York City than any other city. You may not deploy a skyscraper in a precious suburb but as far as the city is concerned, there'll be more opposition in New York than anywhere else. It's more dense. So just to unload and load stuff to build a building, how do you do that? Trucks have to park on the street. Everything is more complicated and thus more expensive. I think a major difference between Robert Moses' time and our own was that historic preservation was as yet little known and little understood and little supported. The view generally was — buildings are good, roads are good, houses are good, and they're all on the way to a more modern and better world. We don't have the same kind of faith in the future that they did. We kind of like it like it is. Let's just sit on it. So I think we should say that Moses had an easier time of it than he would have had he lived today. It still wasn't an easy time, but easier than today. Can you talk more about what that change in philosophy has been since then? I feel like that's been one of the themes of this podcast, to see how our cultural attitude towards progress and technology have changed.…

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