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REVIEWS | Issue: "Cities of God and Man" March 27, 2010

Books

Cities up close

Jane Jacobs fought to save cities from the destruction of 'urban renewal' | Marvin Olasky

Bob Gomel/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

From a distance we all have enough, and no one is in need. And there are no guns, no bombs, and no disease, no hungry mouths to feed. . . . God is watching us. God is watching us, from a distance."

Those are key words from a song Julie Gold penned 25 years ago: "From a Distance." Nanci Griffith sang it first in 1987, but Bette Midler made it a No. 1 hit 20 years ago. Gold has said she believes in an immanent and benevolent God, but many others have taken her lyrics as an indictment of a far-off god who doesn't grasp street-level devastation.

Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City (Random House, 2009) shows how Jacobs, an intellectual housewife, led the fight in the 1950s and 1960s to stop Robert Moses, then the powerful czar of New York City's urban renewal. The back cover has a photo of Moses looking over a model of a city featuring skyscrapers, a bridge, a park, big residential blocks, all in their places with bright shining faces. He watched from a distance.

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March 27, 2010, Vol. 25, No. 6

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