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FINALIST, 2025 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE
InsideHook: The 10 Books You Should Be Reading This November
A gripping account of how the automobile has failed NYC and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to its post-pandemic recovery
In 1969, as all students of New York City history think they have learned, master builder Robert Moses lost his long battle to urbanist Jane Jacobs over his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway. The ten-lane elevated expressway would have sliced across SoHo and Little Italy, demolishing historic buildings, and displacing thousands of families and businesses. Jacobs and her neighbors defeated Moses, and as a result, New York became the only major American city with no interstate highway running through its core. Like many global cities, though, New York had spent fifty years during the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to tame its heavily populated landscape to fit the private automobile. New York has now spent more than fifty years trying to undo those mistakes, wresting back city space for people, not cars.
Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car chronicles the earlier, less-known battles that preceded the cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway: Jacobs became an example for generations of urban planners, but whose example did Jacobs emulate in an earlier victory that saved Washington Square Park? Moses may serve handily as New York's uber-villain now, but who, before him, was responsible for destroying a critical part of New York's transit system?
A well respected urban writer who has focused on New York's transportation system for more than a decade, author Nicole Gelinas resumes the story where Robert Caro's landmark The Power Broker ended. Movement explores how, in the half-century leading up to the COVID- 19 pandemic, New York's re-embracement of its mass-transit system and a livable streetscape helped save the city. Gelinas tackles the 1970s environmental movement, the 1980s rebuilding of the subways, and more contemporary battles, from Mayor Bloomberg's push for more pedestrian plazas and bike lanes in the early 2000s, to transportation advocates' protests to prevent traffic deaths in the Mayor de Blasio era of the 2010s, to how New York's stewardship of its streets and subways have played a critical role during the 2020 pandemic and subsequent recovery.
Introducing a cast of transportation heroes to rival Jane Jacobs (Shirley Hayes, Hazel Henderson, Richard Ravitch, Nilka Martell) and puncturing the myth of Moses as New York's anti-hero, Movement explores how New York City has helped redefine what it means to be a global city: not a place that is easy to drive through, but a place where people can take transit, walk, and bike to work, to school, or just for fun.
Contents
Introduction | 1
Part 1: Driving to the Brink | 5
1. New York's Original Sin: Scrapping Street Transit | 7
2. The 1929 Regional Plan: Paving New York's Car Future | 23
3. Kids versus Cars: A Housewife's Fight to Save Washington Square Park | 43
4. Changing Times (and Minds): Defeating the Lower Manhattan Expressway | 65
5. No Way on Westway: A Watery Grave for Manhattan's Last Highway | 79
Part 2: Getting Back on Track | 103
6. Struck City: The Shutdown That Stressed the Value of Transit | 105
7. Skull Practice at Triborough: Confronting Decades of Mass- Transit Deficits | 118
8. Nixon's Nudge: The Federal Laws That Forced a New Direction | 143
9. The Lion of the MTA: The Push to Rebuild New York's Transit | 159
10. From Fear Train to Packed Train: Securing New York's Subways | 180
Part 3: Beyond Transit: Wrestling with New York's Asphalt Legacy | 201
11. Splitting Lanes: From Bike Nuts to Bike Share | 203
12. Freedom to Walk: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Play Streets | 242
13. Killed in the Crosswalk: Turning Tragedies into Progress | 271
14. Yellow, Green, Black: The Struggle to Limit Ride Services | 297
15. Thou Shalt Not Park Here: The Politics of Public Parking | 327
16. Our Right to Park: The High Cost of Residential Parking | 348
Part 4: Unfinished Business | 361
17. Fast Forward: Plans to Fix New York's Bus System | 363
18. Ban, Charge, or Suffer: The Forever Politics of Congestion Pricing | 378
19. Two Miles: Bronx Mothers versus the Ghost of Moses | 404
20. Deliveristas and Dining Sheds: Locked- Down New York Unlocks Its Streets | 420
21. Sick Transit: Whither the Subways—and New York? | 440
Acknowledgments | 457
Notes | 461
Bibliography | 553
Index | 557
Insert follows page 286
