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May 7, 2007
What the Village Voice was to the Washington Square battle, the blogs are to Atlantic Yards
Atlantic Yards Report surveys Atlantic Yards coverage and concludes that the action is in the blogosphere if you want to know what's really going on.
But there are lessons from “the battle of Washington Square,” notably the availability of sympathetic and analytical media, as argued by architectural historian Robert Fishman, in a presentation 3/10/06 and a chapter in the new book, Robert Moses and the Modern City.
The Village Voice was key to the battle. Today, blogs serve an similar function in the Atlantic Yards debate, which has gotten spotty coverage in the mainstream press . (I contend that Prospect Heights, not Clinton Hill, is the "bloggiest" neighborhood, mostly because of AY.)
The “battle of Washington Square" was not merely a key point of Moses's career, it was a watershed in New York City history and American urbanism. It was then that what now seem to be Jacobsian commonplaces--the primacy of diverse neighborhoods, an orientation to pedestrians, a reliance on mass transit, and the importance of public space--were articulated.
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Without the blogs, the story wouldn't be advanced, the archive wouldn't exist, and reporters and researchers would have trouble exploring the history of Atlantic Yards. We've provided an alternative to reliance on flawed mainstream coverage. (Who covered the epic hearing Thursday in the lawsuit over the Atlantic Yards environmental review? Nobody from a daily.)
Posted by lumi at May 7, 2007 9:56 AM