The state stacked public hearings to push Lower Manhattan Expressway

Evidence

Jane Jacobs successfully deranged a hastily called hearing on LOMEX convened at Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side by the newly created New York State Department of Transportation. Ostensibly held to solicit community feedback, the meeting featured the state agency’s chief engineer, John Toth, who was basically there to sell the project, which was elaborated by a glossy prospectus available at an information table. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1144

Categorization

• SEED: An essay on how infrastructure agencies stage fake-public-participation hearings — state selling vs. community feedback — and how one citizen (Jacobs) can derail the machinery; maps directly onto contemporary Highway Removal debates and community-review performativity.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the gentrification-origin thesis of the chapter: Jacobs’s anti-highway activism is the proximate political fight that shaped how SoHo and the Lower East Side were later developed — the infrastructure politics that precede artistic displacement.