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

WINNER, 2025 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE
FINALIST, 2026 PATTIS FAMILY FOUNDATION GLOBAL CITIES BOOK AWARD

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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 contributing opinion writer to The New York Times. 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.