Sublime

Lately a few planners, notably Reginald Isaacs of Harvard, have daringly begun to question whether the conception of neighborhood in big cities has any meaning at all. Isaacs points out that city people are mobile. They can and do pick and choose from the entire city (and beyond) for everything from a job, a dentist, recreation, or friends, to

“With its migratory population, its diversity of cultures and institutions, and its vast resources of infrastructure, capital, and intellect, New York has been the quintessential modern city for more than a century, constantly reinventing itself,” Michael Stone concluded in his New York magazine

You can’t make people use streets they have no reason to use. You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch. Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or

New York was a city in which public office was, increasingly, a means to private profit.

some hypothetical headlines for what the news coverage might be, they included these gems:

When Red Mike Hylan swept into City Hall—Mitchel, who had been elected in 1913 by the largest plurality in New York’s history, was turned out in 1917 by an even larger plurality—Progressivism in the city was dead.

Not all planners fully understood yet that if Moses’ proposals were carried out, New York would become a place not for people but for cars, spread out by the hundreds of acres on monstrous parking fields, cars piled up seven stories high or more—to “whatever height they have to be”—cars that would bring their roar and the fumes of their “foul