I Am Robert Moses
Jane Jacobs died two years ago last week, but if she’d lived, and visited me in my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., I’d like to think she might have written a book about it.
I moved to Columbia Heights, smack dab in the geographic center of the District of Columbia, last fall as I was reading Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For me, these two events are indelibly twinned, impossible to stop from informing each other. As I got further and further into the book, it seemed that the Jacobian dramas spelled out so plainly in Death and Life were being reenacted outside my front stoop just for my benefit.
Around here, rain storms, a slowly gestating wall of humidity, and the odd perfect 70-degree day or two have announced the beginning of lawn mowing season (also known as spring) in Washington. The two-and-a-half-story rowhouse I live in leaves me acquitted of this duty, and for that I’m glad, but I didn’t realize the (non)decision to live in a house without a lawn had a moral and sustainability component until I heard of Fritz Haeg. 
The battle ground of an epic New York City preservation fight is about to be revealed. Soon, Edward Durrell Stone’s Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art at 