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| Re: Housing Projects Re: Jane Jacobs Re: Cross Manhattan expressway (465754) | |||
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Re: Housing Projects Re: Jane Jacobs Re: Cross Manhattan expressway |
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Posted by BrooklynBus on Tue Jul 24 20:51:35 2007, in response to Housing Projects Re: Jane Jacobs Re: Cross Manhattan expressway, posted by GP38/R42 Chris on Tue Jul 24 20:22:09 2007. I agree with you as to the difference in thinking then and now.I've also been to the tenement museum on the Lower East Side. No pictures can do justice to the horrors of living as well as working in one of these buildings, therefore spending 16 hours or more a day in them. After you realize this, you get even more respect for the vast number of inner city parks that Moses built that allowed these people to escape from their prisons. That said, I wonder in fact how many of the buildings Moses took down for the CBEx was in fact old-law tenements, and how much of it was fully functional housing. My aunt lived in the Tremont section of the Bronx and we would visit her every six months. One day she was living on the sixth floor in the middle of the block line with 6 story apartment houses on both sides of the street. All the buildings were built in the 1920s and were only 40 years old at the time. One day she is living at the end of the block and there was something funny about her living room like it had been hit by an earthquake. Whenever I put my drink down on the table, it slid to the other end. My father asked her if the building was safe. I asked her what happened to all the other buildings. She said they were torn down to make way for a highway. It wasn't until I read the Power Broker that I realized that her building like many others still standing, were severely damaged by the blasting of the CBEx. While considered safe to live in, hoe would you like to be walking up a hill to go from the living room to the kitchen all day long? I also doubt that any of these landlords were compensated for the damage lowering their property values. So while the tenement argument sounds good, it falls apart unless you can prove that most of the housing taken down was indeed obsolete. I doubt this to be the case. |
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