The Woman Who Saved New York City from Superhighway Hell. Plan a night at the movies to see Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, a rousing documentary about journalist- activist Jane Jacobs and her fight in the 1. Robert Moses, New York’s tsar of urban development, which opens April 2. Selected for both the Toronto and New York film festivals last year, it was directed by V. F. The film was backed by the Rockefeller Foundation as well as the Ford Foundation. Prior to taking on Moses, Jacobs wrote articles about city life for Vogue, Architectural Forum, and Fortune, and these led her in 1.

Get the latest news on celebrity scandals, engagements, and divorces! Check out our breaking stories on Hollywood?s hottest stars!

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, now considered a classic. Moses was the all- powerful planner and developer of a host of New York’s biggest civic undertakings, including Shea Stadium, Jones Beach, the Bronx River Parkway, the Verrazano- Narrows Bridge, Lincoln Center, and two world’s fairs.

He saw himself as the builder of a brave new world, where the poor would be housed in tall, clean, uniform superblocks on the outskirts of cities. The filthy slums they vacated—“cancerous growths,” in his words—would be torn down to make room for parks, arts centers, and expressways. If the uprooted tenants didn’t want to move, or didn’t like the airy towers they were moved into, too bad. As the ice- cold dealmaker calmly states in the film, “Our greatest single problem is tenant removal.”Jacobs, who lived in cozy, scrambled Greenwich Village, took exception to virtually every aspect of Moses’s vision, declaring, “There is no logic that can be superimposed on a city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” She saw city life as the genial co- existence of many different neighborhoods, where the residents supported and looked out for one another while enjoying access to all the cultural advantages of the greater metropolis. She saw Moses’s housing projects as sterile fortresses of concentrated poverty, which sucked the soul out of people, robbed them of normal communication on normal streets, and fostered stigmatization and crime. It would also necessitate bulldozing much of Greenwich Village and the area now known as So. Ho. All three hit Jacobs right where she lived, so she dug in.

Offers news, comment and features about the British arts scene with sections on books, films, music, theatre, art and architecture. Requires free registration.

When Game of Thrones returns this Sunday, Cersei Lannister will be ruling Westeros from her ill-gotten place on the Iron Throne. But with well-armed enemies closing.

She wrote letters, galvanized neighbors, called meetings, organized protests of women with baby carriages, and attracted such powerful allies as Margaret Mead and Eleanor Roosevelt. She announced (in the voice of Marisa Tomei in the film), “It’s wicked, in a way, to be a victim.” Eventually she even wound up being arrested and charged with disrupting a public hearing on the expressway scheme. Sci Fi Thriller Movies Le Trou (2017) here. But in the end she prevailed.

In 1. 96. 9, Mayor John Lindsay withdrew his support for the project, which signaled the end of Moses’s stranglehold. In 1. 96. 8, Jacobs and her husband moved to Toronto to keep their sons out of the Vietnam War. She was soon a celebrated resident there for helping to stop a giant project known as the Spadina Expressway, and she went on to write eight more books on urban politics and economics. By the time she died, in 2. She would certainly have thrilled to watch one remarkable section of Citizen Jane, which shows block after block of Moses- style projects being dynamited to smithereens in cities all across America—a bare 4.

During the Q& A session following the showing of the film at the Toronto International Film Festival, a man in the audience asked Tyrnauer why he had not included, among the numerous talking heads in the movie, Robert Caro, the Moses biographer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1. The Power Broker. The director stunned everyone in the theater when he replied it was because there is not a single mention of Jacobs in the 1,3.

Her story resonates today, as we are faced with a president—an international developer, no less, of luxury towers—who throws around the terms . Certainly in this country, but also in the developing world, entrepreneurs and governments collude routinely to uproot low- income sections of cities in favor of towers for the rich. That is in large part what Jacobs was writing about, and it’s happening all over again, on a much bigger scale. As the economist Saskia Sassen says in the film, China and India today are . History has outdone him.’ This is why we need to know about Jane Jacobs.”Full Screen. Photos: 1/1. 01. 0 New York City Landmarks That Almost Weren’t.

RADIO CITY MUSIC HALLDeclared a financial failure in the 1. Radio City was slated for demolition in 1. Preservationists rallied, and the Art Deco marvel was declared an interior landmark in 1. The largest indoor theater in the world, Radio City has attracted more than 3. Photo: By Frederic Lewis/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

New Amsterdam Theater. As New York’s oldest surviving Broadway theater and the only one designed in the Art Nouveau style, New Amsterdam was flooded in the 1. It sat unused until the commission designated its interior a landmark in 1. Soon after, it attracted the attention of the Walt Disney Co., which paid for a full restoration. Photo: By Geo. Hall & Son/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images.

Sailors’ Snug Harbor. This 1. 9th- century complex on Staten Island, one of the “most notable” groups of Greek Revival buildings in the United States, was founded as a place of respite for “aged, decrepit, and worn- out sailors.” After several buildings in the complex were torn down in the 1.

L. P. C. In 1. 96. New York State court upheld the L. P. C.’s designation. Photo: Courtesy of The Library of Congress.(Loew’s) Paradise Theater. Built in 1. 92. 9 along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, the Paradise was designed to evoke exotic, foreign lands. With “3. 60- degree trompe l’oeil visions of Old World courtyards,” a blue ceiling and light- bulb stars, the nearly 4,0. The theater lay in ruin, switched handsand saw its interior restored in 2.

The L. P. C., which had designated the Paradise’s exterior a landmark in 1. New York City, and in 2. Photo: By R. Gates/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. The Four Seasons Restaurant. Deemed “spacious, understated and elegant” by the commission, the Four Seasons Restaurant gained interior landmark status in 1. A lawsuit by the building’s owners challenging the landmark designation followed one year later, but was unsuccessful.

Today, the restaurant’s rooms are as much a tourist attraction as they are the site for a perfect power lunch, and they remain outfitted with the original bronze, travertine marble, rawhide panels, and French oak. Photo: From Patrick. Mc. Mullan. com. TWA Flight Center, J. F. K. Airport. A retro- futuristic voyage back to the 1. Trans World Airlines’ terminal gained landmark status in 1.

Jet. Blue now operates in a new space surrounding the original structure, and tentative plans for the former terminal have included a restaurant, lounge or ticketing gates, any of which would be connected to the new terminal by passenger tubes. And yes, this is where Leonardo Di. Caprio filmed that scene from Catch Me If You Can. Photo: From Lehnartz/Ullstein bild via Getty Images. Bryant Park. Once derelict, Bryant Park was almost a lost cause in the early 1. Nevertheless, the L.

P. C. By the 1. 99. New York Fashion Week’s home for several years. It now holds an ice skating rink in the winter and shows outdoor movies in the summer. Photo: By Frederic Lewis/Getty Images.