North America was stitched together by meeting places. Think: forks in rivers, coastal estuaries, forest clearings, high ground.

What became one of the continent’s most-hallowed rendezvous spots was a mushy peat bog when the Europeans arrived. The area was drained for farmland by Dutch fur traders, reclaimed by Lenape First Nations, recouped by freed African slaves, usurped by English soldiers and looted by rich Americans after the revolution.

Becoming Washington Square Park

In the early 1800s, what is now Manhattan’s Washington Square Park was aptly used as a duelling ground, a public gallows and a graveyard. War of 1812 hero Philip Hone recast it, aping the public squares of London’s West End and eventually making the same four hectares that exist today an aristocrat’s promenade. By the mid 19th century, the park had become a melting pot for everyone from tramps to tycoons, and a focal point for civic demonstration.

Ever since, Washington Square Park has remained a social conduit, a meeting place for both feral and refined ideas. While America’s free-market prosperity filled in the surrounding skyline, iconoclasm gathered around the likes of Whitman, Pollock, Kerouac and Dylan, who made Greenwich Village their soul-feeding stomping grounds.

The fusion that drew them still thrives. Any blue sky over Washington Square brings together sandals, sneakers, stilettos, loafers, boots and bare feet. On any random afternoon in late summer, the grass and benches are packed with sunbathers, buskers, hustlers, gawkers, lovers, readers, thinkers, curious scribblers, aimless wanderers, wailing kids, frisky teenagers, serious shoppers and plenty of photo-poseurs. 

More than 60 years ago, the man who poured a considerable portion of modern NYC’s concrete wanted to split this human-traffic magnet with four car lanes, extending Fifth Avenue’s prestigious addresses (and wealthy developers’ interests) farther south towards Wall Street. Mercifully, urban planner Robert Moses’ reign of reconstruction was halted at Washington Square, his power trumped by the newborn activism of perhaps the most-influential urban planning theorist of the 20th century.

Jane Jacobs Pioneers Progressive Urban Development

By the time Moses’ proposal was officially scrapped (a ribbon tying ceremony took place in November 1958), writer Jane Jacobs had given New Yorkers a profound new sense of their stake in public space.

Soon afterwards, Jacobs got a $1,500 advance from Random House to pen The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her pioneering 1961 book about the ingenuity of organic urban development, the then-unsung value of mixed-use neighbourhoods and the remarkable boon of humble cultural density.

Here’s a taste of her vitriol: “The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design, have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world.”

Robert Moses Left His Mark on NYC

Still, Moses left his mark all over NYC. He helped create 13 bridges around the city (including the Triborough and record-breaking Verrazano-Narrows), two tunnels, more than 1,000 kilometres of highway, Lincoln Centre, the United Nations building and two World’s Fairs.

And lest you think concrete was his only medium of choice, his lengthy tenure, which spanned more than four decades, also saw the city’s park space double to 35,000 acres, and he added 658 playgrounds, 10 huge public swimming pools, 27 kilometres of beach and the Central Park Zoo.

But Moses remains a contentious figure because his projects razed 300 acres of city land, unceremoniously uprooting hundreds of thousands and totally destroying many neighbourhoods.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway: Moses Versus Jacobs

The battle over Washington Square Park was only round one of the Moses-Jacobs conflict. Since 1940, Moses had been trying to build his legacy project, the Lower Manhattan Expressway—a 10-lane, 107-metre-wide corridor across Manhattan that would connect the Holland Tunnel to both the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges. By 1962, the “Lomex” was essentially green-lit, with the feds picking up most of the cheque.

But Jacobs clearly saw the cultural value the Lomex would bury, and the social havoc it would wreak. The demolition would have consumed 416 buildings (including most of Broome Street’s north side) and displaced 2,200 families, 365 retailers and 480 other commercial operations, permanently scarring the vibrancy of SoHo, Little Italy and the Lower East Side.

The Lomex path was, and thankfully still is, steeped in local mystique. Absorbed on foot, the modern-day exoticism can be intoxicating: seeing knock-off peddlers mixed with filthy-rich indulgences; smelling the mingling aromas of amazing coffee, exorbitant perfume and unidentifiable Chinese herbs; paying a visit to the pizza slice’s birthplace; or gawking outside the site of Heath Ledger’s deathbed.

There are also the tenement ghettos east of Bowery, where countless immigrant families found freedom in cramped quarters. There is also the 1857 E.V. Haughwout building at Broadway and Broome, one of the first iconic New York department stores and the most architecturally advanced structure of its day, featuring the country’s first steam-driven commercial passenger elevator.

Saving the Palaces of Trade

In fact, the steel-and-glass skyscraper evolved from the cast-iron building bonanza that surrounds Haughwout. Starting in the 1840s, hundreds of facades inspired by the Italian and French Renaissance went up (and many burned down) in SoHo with cast iron and masonry, often using prefabricated chunks manufactured in the midwestern U.S.

The resulting “palaces of trade” had declined after the Second World War, but had come to sustain the feisty diversity Jacobs prized: textile and fashion warehouses, mom-and-pop shops, markets and butchers, cheap eateries, converted lofts and small apartments.

Jacobs lent her piercing voice and organizational zeal to would-be Lomex evictees. She helped assemble local merchants, artists, families and figureheads into a Joint Commission to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and again became the iron lung in a plight that was being suffocated by political pressure. It took years of concentrated resistance and well-coordinated theatrics, and in July 1969, the Lomex was finally yanked from the city’s build-out blueprints.

A SoHo Explosion

Moses abruptly fell from grace, demoted during a reorganization. SoHo’s heyday as a modern-art hotbed exploded. Little Italy swelled and then was partially devoured by Chinatown. The high-end retailers and property developers flocked, restoring the cast-iron grandiosity and igniting the concepts of adaptive reuse and luxurious loft-living. What happened after that could be dubbed the SoHo-fication of America—and beyond.

Fifty years on, strolling the Lomex corridor is to explore what makes a city enticing, peppered as it is with well-worn cobblestone and mind-boggling street art, beacons of couture and weird watering holes, breathtaking architecture and wonderfully strange personalities. 

A local since 1977, SoHo Alliance director Sean Sweeney says the “scrappy” community spirit that emerged during the fight over Lomex lives on due to landlord-tenant struggles. He attributes part of that dynamic to an active landmarks preservation effort, as well as some peculiar zoning.

But Sweeney also points out a subtle physical detail in this part of Manhattan, one that helps keep the social bricolage intact: “The sidewalks are the same size as they were in the 19th century.”

Just as they were back then, those 3.3-metre-wide stretches of concrete are great meeting places today.

To learn more about the historic buildings and spaces in this month's feature article, head to this photo story.

Photos by Ken Kaminesky