Review: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

Abstract

Matt Tyrnauer, director Citizen Jane: Battle for the Cityf Altimeter Films, Los Angeles, 2017, 92 min., http://www.altimeterfilms.com/citizen-jane-battle-for-the-city The current political climate in the United States, wherein government officials with an authoritarian bent attempt to implement “reforms” in the face of popular resistance and disapproval, bears a strong resemblance to the story of Robert Moses's efforts to reconfigure housing and transit systems in New York City in the 1950s–60s and the grassroots opposition to them led by Jane Jacobs. The saltiness of the language with which some might denigrate Donald Trump's presidential administration echoes, no doubt, the same sort of diction one could use to describe Moses, the de facto director of all municipal construction and associated programs of urban renewal in New York City for much of the two decades after World War II. Meanwhile, the now-familiar mantra “Nevertheless, she persisted” could be applied retroactively to Jacobs, whose unflagging determination united her neighbors in Greenwich Village. In the end, Jacobs and her cohort scuttled Moses's plans for an elevated Lower Manhattan Expressway—projected to destroy much of the vibrant district and its trademark collection of historic cast-iron buildings—along with his political career. Indeed, while these comparisons are warranted, Matt Tyrnauer's documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for the City spares us any discussion of the political events of the recent past in favor of a focus on those of nearly sixty years ago. For seasoned students of the history of urban planning in postwar America, Citizen Jane offers few new insights. It is, for all intents and purposes, a recounting of Jacobs's well-known struggle against Moses's destruction of the “slums” he identified as “cancerous areas” to be excised from the urban fabric of New York City. Documentary, in this case, is not scholarship, nor is it necessarily meant to be. But in its exceptionally rich visual presentation, which includes resurrected film footage of once-bustling Manhattan neighborhoods juxtaposed with shocking stills …