Any large public work permanently alters its host neighborhood’s social fabric

Evidence

Things were different in the city. The crucial factor in the building of public works on Long Island was space, vast, endless tracts of uncluttered openness; in the city the crucial factor was lack of space and the fact that space was not merely filled but filled with people, people with their endlessly intertwined, hopelessly snarled tangles of aspirations and antagonisms, hopes and fears, dreams and dreads. People on the site would have to be removed—evicted, dispossessed, thrown out, relocated—and removal would rend the fabric of their lives. The lives of those near the site might not be rent but they would certainly be altered, for the physical environment which did so much to shape their daily existence would be altered, not only in dramatic ways such as the razing of a block of tenements for a bridge anchorage, but in ways subtle and endlessly various: the construction of almost any public work inevitably added to or subtracted from that delicate balance of humanity that was a city neighborhood ingredients that would change that balance forever, change the neighborhood’s economic or ethnic composition, make it quieter or noisier, cleaner or dirtier, cut one part of it off from the rest, fill it with new life or drain it of its vitality, turn it into something different—possibly better but also possibly worse—than it was before. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2059

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme from the earlier chapter claim that Moses’ car-first roads permanently made commuting a life-consuming burden — here generalized to all urban public works.