{"content":[{"text":"The Oregonian \n How Robert Moses' car-centric vision shaped modern \n Portland, and then reshaped it in reverse \n By Douglas Perry \n May 3, 2017 \n His fee was $100,000, and this was in 1943, but Multnomah County leaders thought they had \n scored a great deal. \n They described Robert Moses, New York City's parks commissioner, as \"one of the nation's \n outstanding city development experts\" and the ideal man \"to blueprint the Portland area's future.\" \n In the Big Apple, The Oregonian reported, Moses was known as \"The Man Who Gets Things \n Done.\" New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called him, supposedly in all seriousness, \"His \n Grace.\" \n Portlanders expected Moses to live up to those honorifics with his plan for the Rose City. They \n believed he would put 20,000 returning-from-war Oregonians to work and turn Portland into \"a \n permanent industrial empire.\" The politicians who hired him hailed the 54-year-old planner as a \n man who wasn't afraid to tell politicians \"to go to hell.\" \n Today, Moses, who died in 1981, is best known for the opposition he engendered in New York. \n Neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs became an urban-planning heroine in the 1960s for \n successfully resisting Moses' efforts to build a massive highway through the center of \n Manhattan. A new documentary about her fight with the powerful planner, \"Citizen Jane: The \n Battle for the City,\" has received raves. Britain's The Guardian, reviewing the film, sneeringly \n dismissed Moses as \"Bulldozer Bob.\" \n Moses' vision for Portland was more or less the same one he had for New York: an industrial \n metropolis developed around massive highways, with residents thrown into shadow underneath \n the throughways or, better yet, pushed out to the city's periphery. \n His 1943 proposal for Oregon's biggest burgh -- commissioned by the Portland city council, the \n port authority and the Multnomah County commissioners -- included widening the Ross Island \n Bridge and the construction of a Skidmore Street bridge, an interstate bridge, a \"foothill \n throughway\" linking the Ross Island and Skidmore bridges, another highway connecting \n McLoughlin Boulevard with the Skidmore bridge, seven new schools and an 11-block Union \n Station/bus-depot plaza. The estimated cost started at $75,000,000. \n He also proposed a \"24-block civic center between S.W. Salmon and Columbia streets, \n extending from Front [Naito] avenue to 6th avenue, with a connection to the south Park blocks,\" \n The Oregonian reported. To top off his proposal, Moses recommended construction of a $10 \n million, state-of-the-art sewage system. \n Collier's magazine called the Portland plan \"a masterpiece,\" insisting it was \"one of the wisest, \n most foresighted pieces of postwar planning we've yet heard of. It insures Portland, if the plan is \n adopted, against a lot of haphazard, wasteful leaf-raking projects dreamed up in a hurry as the \n boys come piling home. It means local control and financing of the assorted projects, with a \n horde of carpetbagger bureaucrats from Washington ruled off the scene.\" \n That local financing, however, ended up being the problem. Portland leaders expressed as much \n enthusiasm for the plan as Collier's, but, unlike the national magazine, they had to find a way to \n pay for it. \n Commissioner William Bowes, who had led the effort to hire the New York planner, declared \n there was \"the utmost desire among the [region's leaders] to put in the Moses program.\" (The","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.037182,"width":0.76251,"height":0.904196}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}