Greater New York
New York City
The Robert Moses era and its afterlives in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, plus the Cooper Square victory and the Centro-led recovery of the San Juan Hill record.
Robert Moses directed the cuts. The Cross Bronx Expressway displaced sixty thousand people between 1948 and 1973. San Juan Hill, the Black, Puerto Rican, and Afro-Caribbean neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan, fell to Lincoln Center between 1955 and 1966, at the cost of seven thousand families and eight hundred businesses. East Harlem lost tenements to FDR Drive and the postwar public-housing towers. The Lower East Side’s Cooper Square Committee defeated the Moses plan in 1970 and has kept defeating successor plans ever since. The essays carry each case; the map overlays the redline grid, the takings, and the surviving blocks.
Places
African-American
Brownsville
The city moved displaced families from Manhattan and the Bronx to Brownsville through the postwar decades, built eighteen NYCHA complexes in one square mile, and later displaced Brownsville residents in turn at Prospect Plaza.
1945–2009
Multi-ethnic
Cooper Square
Cooper Square residents defeated Robert Moses's 1959 urban-renewal plan, wrote their own plan in 1961, won city adoption in 1970, and converted the victory into a community land trust that still holds the land under twenty-one buildings.
1959–1970
Multi-ethnic
Cross Bronx Expressway
Robert Moses cut a seven-mile expressway through East Tremont, Morrisania, Crotona Park East, and Highbridge between 1948 and 1972. Approximately 60,000 residents lost their homes. The East Tremont fight shaped a generation of urban-renewal resistance.
1948–1973
Puerto Rican
East Harlem
NYCHA towers and FDR Drive replaced the tenement grid that Puerto Rican and African-American families had built through the 1940s. Centro's archives and the Young Lords record what the clearance tried to erase.
1947–1970
Multi-ethnic
Manhattanville
West Harlem blocks lost two rounds of clearance. The Grant Houses and Morningside Gardens cleared the tenement grid in the 1950s. Columbia University's Manhattanville expansion cleared the surviving blocks after 2003.
1947–2024
Multi-ethnic
San Juan Hill
About seven thousand families, most of them Black, Puerto Rican, or Afro-Caribbean, lost their homes when the Lincoln Square renewal project razed eighteen blocks for Lincoln Center and Fordham University between 1955 and 1966.
1955–1966