Civil rights protestors weaponized Moses’s own road network against his Fair

Evidence

April 4, CORE’s Brooklyn and Bronx chapters announced plans to protest the Fair’s indifference to existing rules regarding the desegregation of the construction trades and draw attention to New York City police brutality, slum housing, and poor schools. Demonstrators would disrupt the Opening Day with a stall-in on the Long Island Expressway. CORE further intended to block Grand Central Parkway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Belt Parkway, the Interboro Parkway, and the Van Wyck Expressway—all roads that Moses had constructed or overhauled. The Master Builder would thus be hoisted on his own petard. In response, the mayor announced that a thousand police officers in hundreds of vehicles would patrol every road leading into or out of Queens, while police helicopters—including one capable of lifting an automobile—would hover overhead. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 517

Categorization

• XREF: The stall-in plan is a precise materialist inversion — infrastructure built by Moses becomes the instrument to humiliate the event he built it for. Echoes the artist-as-advance-guard-of-its-own-displacement logic: the same tool serves both construction and demolition of power.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ insofar as that piece treats infrastructure as reversible/weaponizable — here a highway system becomes the site of protest, not just the route to it.