The manner of demolition, not just the demolition, destroyed a community’s will to resist
Evidence
What happened at the end of the year, basically, was that the community gave up the fight. “You know, there wasn’t one hell of a lot of fight left in it any more,” Ed Korn says. “They had taken our best housing. Our best people were gone.” And Moses “had taken the heart out of” those who were left. “The manner, the style, in which he operated affected them. The way he changed Bronx Park South. It was the same way he had operated with the expressway. Waking up Monday morning and finding out that he had announced something, and there was nothing you could do about it. It wasn’t just that this [the 159 structures torn down for the Cross-Bronx Expressway] was very good housing stock. And that it was just torn down. It was the manner in which this was done. The manner had a major impact on how the community reacted to change thereafter. He left them with feelings of being isolated, left alone—that no one cared, no one listened to them. When they tried to protest, they were powerless. No one seemed to be interested in their problem. This does generate a feeling of helplessness, of resentment. We’re abandoned! The manner, the implementation, of the highway affected the area as much as the highway. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3728
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A rare articulation that procedural experience — the powerlessness of waking to announcements, of being told ‘impossible’ by bureaucratic buck-passing — does as much damage as the physical act. Caro lets the community’s own words carry a subtle thesis about how governance style itself dissolves civic capacity.
- XREF: Connects to later work on bureaucratic violence and procedural humiliation (e.g., Ta-Nehisi Coates and the ‘hush harbors’ of white supremacy; also to the concept of ‘quiet encroachment’ versus spectacular demolition). — connects to: People displaced from homes, not physical obstacles, made urban expressways hardest to build. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3549; Even a community’s own rebuilding plan was hijacked to destroy its best housing — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3725; Contemptuous mockery masked Moses’ demolition plans as popular sentiment — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2886 (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Incremental demolition can destroy landmarks before the public notices
#expands(0.85) — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 1238 - OAS violence deliberately destroyed the communities it claimed to defend
#expands(0.82) - Colonial order was achieved by destroying villages and rebuilding them to match plans
#expands(0.80) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 163 - Organization can destroy substance but underestimates stable communities
#complicates(0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 892