2005-05-25 - 6:40 p.m.
Saturday night (I got out of the hospital that morning) I went to a play with my friends Aileen and Lauren. It was �Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses�, also featuring Jane Jacobs, Fiorello LaGuardia, FDR, Nelson Rockefeller, and with a cameo by Daniel Liebskind. As Lauren noted, �I didn�t know if it was a real play or just some weird dream you had.�
I thought it was a good effort to explain (if not necessarily redeem) Moses� motivation as someone who eventually went power-mad, but did start with good intentions to house the poor and make the city a better place, influenced by the (now-seen-as-horrific) Modernist ideals of Le Corbusier (Corbu = Boozy). But it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, better in conception than in execution. I mean, a musical about iron-fisted New York planner Robert Moses? A song about the somewhat obscure topic of single-use zoning? That�s just an inherently funny idea. The actual implementation was a bit spotty.
First of all, it occurred to me that if a patron didn�t have a pretty good understanding of urban planning history and New York politics, they might be kind of lost by the performance. There were a lot of inside jokes about architects and planners, some of which I didn�t even catch at first. Like one ensemble player complained that she had been knocked up and left by Louis Kahn, which I didn�t get until it was later explained to me that architect Louis Kahn did indeed treat women abysmally and fathered kids by three different partners.
The plot also conflated time a lot, which was kind of funny if you understood it was being done, but just confusing if you didn�t. The play seemed to be set in the postwar late-40s. But FDR was walking around (and really walking - there was an oblique, humorous reference to this when the character observed �that formerly crippled boy seems to be cured now; how very confusing�), Jane Jacobs (who wasn�t really active until the 50s) was Moses� main opposition, LaGuardia was mayor (he served mostly in the 1930s), and Nelson Rockefeller was governor (mostly the 1960s).
There were also odd underlying themes that didn�t always seem to contribute to the overall idea. World War II is presented as the result of a cabalistic plot between FDR, Goebbels (Hitler never appears for some reason), and Mussolini to privately profit from the rebuilding efforts in Europe. Although the current Iraq war does raise fears about behind-the-scenes machinations by W and others to profit from rebuilding (if not the collaboration between sides), ascribing this to World War II is pretty dubious.
There�s also the idea that Jane Jacobs is actually a reinvention of Le Corbusier�s girlfriend. She leaves him in a huff after he scorns her croissants or something (actually, his lines were mostly in French and a pillar blocked my view of the monitor with the translation, so I didn�t quite follow this). She swears revenge and decides she must oppose Robert Moses, since he�s so influenced by Corbu and actually builds stuff (relatively few of Le Corbusier�s works got off the drawing board). So she re-creates herself as organic-neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs. Indeed.
In regular New York mythology, Robert Moses has become almost a cartoonish figure of evil. A megalomaniacal, racist, anti-Semitic, neighborhood-bulldozing, car-centric caricature of a planner - what not to do. I had always just accepted this and never really thought about how he got so damn ugly. This play somewhat humanized him and made him almost understandable.
Moses was indeed from a bratty rich background and the play only lightly touched on his rather intense racism and anti-Semitism (he used to design playgrounds in minority neighborhoods with sculptures of frolicking monkeys on the fences, black children being little monkeys of course, and hold public hearings on Yom Kippur so Jews couldn�t go). But the play did portray him as actually concerned with people�s lives. He wanted to make housing for the homeless and park space for children to play and generally make New York a nicer place.
The true intent of Modernism in planning and architecture was indeed to humanize space and provide for people. With hindsight today, this looks like an utterly ridiculous way of realizing these goals. Huge, ugly, cold apartment towers set in windswept plazas? Highways driven through walkable neighborhoods? But when Le Corbusier and others pioneered these ideas, they really did think this would be best. So Robert Moses may have set out totally misguided, but with good intentions.
His top-down attitude towards public works did indeed give the entire concept of urban planning a bad name for a long time. The dominant idea was often that civic projects were some sort of imposed bequest from the authorities, conceived by some would-be-beneficent planner who might be totally out of touch with the actual community. Jane Jacobs and others championed a bottom-up approach to planning, with decisions about what to create actually coming from community voices.
The problem with this was lampooned well in the play. In one scene a community board drones on with endless input into a project to be built in their neighborhood. They decide that there should be a bus depot which should be placed on the 70th floor to preserve an open building footprint and a radio tower which should be submerged in a front plaza fountain. And I did find in development work that a plethora of voices in the design process means you could be there all fucking day.
Moses meanwhile had a sort of leitmotif cheer: �Get things done!� He did have pretty dictatorial powers to effect city building. He created the Triborough Authority, with himself as head, funded by bridge tolls and able to issue its own bonds. In the play he�s caricatured as Jesus, with Governor Rockefeller as the betraying Judas. Moses was indeed eventually taken down, but after like 30 years.
The finale considers his legacy. Things did indeed get done. Maybe not what we wanted or how we wanted it, but there it is. Of course it�s a good thing that there can never again be another municipal dictator who was never even elected. But I�m glad �Boozy� did make me think about what drove the actual person behind the mustache-twirling villain we all love to hate.
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
Sign My Guestbook!
powered by SignMyGuestbook.com
�
