A girl can dream can't she?

What higher compliment can be given a thinker than for her most significant intellectual enemy to take the time and energy to say all her writing is nonsense?

This weekend I visited the Municipal Arts Society’s Jane Jacobs exhibit. As exhibits go, it was pretty much a long essay printed on some large pieces of paper, but there were some real gems. I encourage you to click the image above and see the larger view. I should have shot it at higher resolution.

Let me give you the executive summary: it’s a letter from Robert Moses, the man who ruled New York City Planning for 40 years. He’s the subject of my all time favorite non-fiction book, The Power Broker.

To massively oversimplify it, Moses believed you could make cities and communities work by parcelling out space to express purposes and dividing them off from each other. Work here. Sleep here. Shop here.

Jacobs believed that urban planners should stir up the chaos and watch the flowers of prosperity bloom.

Roughly.

[The book she wrote, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that this letter presumably responds to, criticized everything Moses, et. al., had been doing to New York City. The Moses letter, above, calls the book “intemperate and innacurate,” among other things.

Jacobs is one of the last century’s most influential thinkers. I’m reading another of her books right now and it rocks my socks. It was a kick to see this insult from her arch-enemy on letterhead.