Tuesday, February 22, 2005

On the Soho Expressway to Boozy

Boozy is an off-off Broadway play about a public official who pulled the strings of power in New York. For decades he rebuilt New York according to his own design. With an insatiable hunger for large public projects he had the prowess to be all but unstoppable.

Robert Moses held contempt for notions of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In the end, he toppled from power when a group of community activists challenged his plan to build an expressway in their beloved Soho. He met his match in Jane Jacobs, emeritus community planner of Greenwhich Village. Jacobs stood by the group and lent her insights in meeting rooms and courtrooms.

Boozy is a production of an Obie award-winning theater company, Les Freres Corbusier. The full title of the play is Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses.

The title has the ironic attitude found throughout the play, which uses all manner of schtick and parody. The top irony was that the play opened at the Ohio Theater, one of the buildings that was to be cleared away by the Soho Expressway.

Today the neighborhood Moses threatened is protected as the Soho Cast Iron Historic District. It contains the best collection of buildings from the brief golden age of a transformative era in American architecture. It preceded the muscular era of reinforced concrete and steel that followed when builders would become capable of piercing the sky, spanning a river, or crisscrossing a city with an expressway.

For much of the 20th century, urban planning was practiced in New York on wholly undemocratic principles. One unelected public official could flex his politically juiced muscles and whole communities of people would be dispersed to allow his rivers of concrete to pour.

The neighborhood with the quaint façades was not turned into an expressway after all. Seeing Boozy reminds me that it took tough community action to save the legacies we enjoy today.

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