Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car

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.

Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, and a regular columnist for the New York Post. She is the author of the 2009 book on the global financial crisis, After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street―and Washington. She and her husband live in Hell’s Kitchen.

Movement tells the story of New York through the mastery of its streets. Mayor by mayor, year by year and sometimes street by street, Gelinas assembles the historical facts, the political forces, the powerful personalities and the street fights that have transformed and continue to shape America’s greatest city. —  Janette Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg Associates, former Commissioner, NYC Dept. of Transportation

Simply the best book on explaining the history of our physical city, the protagonists and the obstructionists, viewed through the nuances of the times. It’s been fifty years since The Power Broker was published; this book will undoubtedly serve as the definitive treatise on NYC transportation for the next 50 years. The Power Broker focused on one man, Robert Moses. Gelinas shows that it takes a city and a state and their elected officials to make a regional transportation system. Moses may have been the longest lasting slugger on the team but the drive to adapt the metropolitan region to the car preceded him with Mayor Hylan, the Regional Plan Association, The New York Times and others all calling for the modernization of the city with expressways, parkways and motor vehicle-only bridges. Successive mayors and governors all played a role until Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor John Lindsay reigned in Moses and ended the era of road expansion.

Even though I had a ringside seat for transportation planning over the past half-century I learned so much about what was going on behind the scenes. Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car is a must-read for transportation and city planners as well as anyone who wants to learn how the city got to where it is and where it may be going. — Samuel I. Schwartz, CEO, Sam Schwartz Pedestrian Traffic Management Services, Inc.

An important and timely book. Gelinas has done a superb job of describing and analyzing major conflicts and decisions regarding mass transit, proposed highway projects, and efforts to improve pedestrian and cycling infrastructure in NYC over the past 75 years. — Mitchell Moss, New York University

In this meticulously researched opus, Nicole Gelinas shows us the underbelly of NY politics, the brinksmanship, the civic commitment, the short-sighted self-interest, and the long view. She shows us the heroes and the villains and the people who at different times wore both hats. As a New Yorker I related (and sometimes laughed) to be reminded of the Guardian Angels, the token suckers, the dismal conditions of public transit. . . I learned something in every chapter. Kudos to Nicole, I will refer to this book again and again. — Rachel Weinberger, Regional Plan Association

Why is America’s urban landscape so car-centric? Nicole Gelinas exposes some universal dynamics in Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car. While Robert Moses 'has shouldered the blame,' Gelinas shows that generations of politicians and planners have failed to right the wrongs. Advocating for people over cars is not easy. In one of many fascinating examples, Gelinas reveals that urbanist Jane Jacobs was ready to compromise in the battle to exclude cars from Washington Square Park. Another woman, Shirley Hayes, saved the day. — Richard K. Rein, author of American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Shaped Public Life

You will never look at a city street in the same way again after reading Nicole Gelinas’ magisterial and gripping history of the rise, and maybe decline, of urban car culture. Gelinas persuasively re-interprets "The Power Broker” for the 21st century, showing how a cacophonous crowd of politicians, business elites, labor, newspapers and others pulled New York City into a chokehold of cars. She also offers hope in her nuanced and captivating account of how a new mix of public servants, civic leaders, community groups and determined New Yorkers have started on a path where car-clogged streets may well yield to pedestrians and mass transit, the bedrock of the thriving city. — Elizabeth Glazer, founder Vital City

This is a story that needs to be understood by everyone with who cares about the urban realm. For a century or more, creating space for cars has been associated with improving the prosperity of cities when, as Gelinas shows in her comprehensive and engaging account of New York’s history so cogently, they have done the opposite. Yet, even now as many cities are taking in the lessons, New York remains at a crossroads. Gelinas is in no doubt about which path it should take and this book is a powerful argument not just for Gotham city, but for politicians and planners everywhere. — Christian Wolmar, author of Are Trams Socialist?