Jane Jacobs organized the fight that killed the Lower Manhattan Expressway

Evidence

The Master Builder had been stymied in his attempt to “renew” Greenwich Village. Community groups prevented the extension of Fifth Avenue across Washington Square and, in 1961, blocked a Moses plan to level twenty blocks on the Village’s western edge, from Hudson Street to the river. Perhaps not coincidentally that area was home to anti-redevelopment activist Jane Jacobs, who criticized Moses in her 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Recruited by the newly formed Joint Committee Against the Lower Manhattan Expressway in the summer of 1962, Jacobs took up the struggle against LOMEX—a cause célèbre with its own protest song, “Listen, Robert Moses,” written by Jacobs with an assist from Bob Dylan at the height of his Broadside phase. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1009

Categorization

• CANDY: The detail that Jane Jacobs co-wrote an anti-Moses protest song with Bob Dylan is a fun, shareable tidbit.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s larger gentrification-origin thesis: Jacobs’s victory preserved the very loft stock that became SoHo.