Straight Line Crazy

A new play by David Hare revisits debates at the heart of urban design and regeneration.

by Sabina Mohideen

‘Your principal error is this: to imagine that the people’s views are of any importance at all.’

This may appear an outrageous statement, and one that is anathema to professions that aim to respond to what people want in their neighbourhoods, towns and cities. It is, however, how we are introduced to the character of Robert Moses, Chairman of New York State Council of Parks, 1934 to 1963, in the play Straight Line Crazy playing at the Bridge Theatre in London at the time of this review.

This attitude, the play leads us to believe, made possible Jones Beach State Park; Flushing Meadows; 658 playgrounds; and 15 outdoor pools. Under his reign, park acreage doubled to 34,673. It is hard not to be awed by the achievement and feel that it is right that great visionaries are entrusted with great power.

Of course, in 2022 Robert Moses’ achievements for New York’s Road network, and his total dedication to supporting and facilitating car travel allows for straightforward dramatic irony, as the audience is aware of where this obsession with the car will lead. However, it is hard to condemn a man for being excited by the revolution being promised by motorised car travel. Hindsight, after all, gives 20/20 vision and it is still possible to consider his other achievements and think ‘so far, so heroic’. Not least because, in his dedication to democratising access to newly-created public beaches and state parks, Moses is portrayed as battling with the powerful, and powerfully resistant, New York aristocracy, dramatised in the form of a verbal sparring match with Henry Vanderbilt, to defend his vision.

It is not just the mighty families of New York, however, who Moses knew he needed to get on board. Politicians and the press are two equally significant players in the making of a city and he is portrayed as using his friendship with Al Smith, Governor of New York, and his keen understanding of the press, to further his goals. As the character of Al Smith says ‘He’s a new kind of man…who believes that the way you’re written about is as important as what you do.’ We see his manipulations as he skirts regulations to deliver parks, knowing that any attempts to reverse his actions in line with the law will result in a backlash in the press he courts. And he justifies it all in the name of serving the public.

But if the road networks were the means for creating access for all to New York’s new public beaches and state parks – where does that leave those who could not afford such a luxury? And so, in the second half of Straight Line Crazy, we discover the other side of the coin to Moses’ vision and determination. We move from conversations predominantly set within the confines of his office to that of a meeting of grassroots objectors and the narrow lens through which we viewed Moses and his achievements is done away with entirely. These objectors, including a fictionalised Jane Jacobs, represent the wider voices and leads to an expansion of the picture.

Bridges were deliberately constructed to ensure buses could not pass under them; poor and marginalised communities, predominantly Black, were uprooted from their neighbourhoods and transplanted to alien locations; the craze for building roads and accommodating traffic – by just creating the infrastructure to encourage more traffic and pollution – became a driving passion almost at the expense of the very parks and open spaces he claimed to want to create access to previously. Especially horrifying is the revelation that Moses is driven by promises he has made to private developers and the world of commerce.

L-R Ralph Fiennes (Robert Moses), Alisha Bailey (Mariah Heller), Siobhán Cullen (Finnuala Connell).

© Manuel Harlan

Hindsight is now a more immediate experience. We are no longer coming from a place of smugness, as we experienced when assessing his road-building legacy, but are led to reassess our own reaction to the hero of the first hour. That single-minded vision is revealed to be just that – one that excluded a diversity of voices, experiences and viewpoints in favour of his own and those who agree with him. Even the tangles with those first families of New York are now revealed as Moses’ canniness that he must be shown to be consulting with these dynasties, but the marginalised of New York were not even offered the dignity of lip service.

The sight of a number of architectural models demonstrates how much control one man had on New York and, through this, Straight Line Crazy asks us to contemplate much, such as the nature of genius and how it is greeted and indulged, and the magnitude to which cynical politics and an ability to manage the press is embedded into the systems around built environment projects. Most successfully, we wonder whether hindsight can really be called that when, in reality, his tarnished legacy is due to a failure to listen to viewpoints outside of a privileged few.

Where I believe it is flawed, however, is in creating an equivalence between the impacts of Robert Moses’ work and that of Jane Jacobs. The play ends with the character of Jane Jacobs asking whether she was equally responsible for the gentrification that resulted in SoHo and Greenwich Village by preserving it, symbolised by her fight to save Washington Square Park.

What the landscape profession knows, however, is that it is not the provision of well-planned, designed and managed places that creates gentrification. It is that this is not true of all neighbourhoods, and it is this scarcity which creates the enclaves of the haves and have-nots. The choice to dramatise the fight to preserve Washington Square Park demonstrates the importance of access to open space to the wealthy neighbourhoods, so it is particularly worth stressing that a well-designed and managed landscape and public realm is not to blame when specific areas gentrify. Prioritising an unrepresentative vision over that of the resident communities’ who will be most impacted, however, is.

Straight Line Crazy will be available to view at https://www.ntlive.com/

Sabina Mohideen is Programme Manager at Design Council