Yesterday’s Future
An RPA-themed exhibition performed the usual lip service to social equity without addressing the inequality baked into prevailing models of development.
In 1969, the Regional Planning Association released its second regional plan, which included this cross section of Manhattan (the cut runs along 34th Street). Courtesy the Regional Planning Association
The Constant Future: A Century of the Regional Plan was on view in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall from October 7 to October 25, 2022.
New York has been unlivable since forever. One hundred years ago, a group of visionary citizens—well, a Prohibition-era cocktail party’s worth of politicos, social reformers, planners, and businesspeople—decided to do something about it. They gathered loads of data and made a series of studies and plans. Not just for the city, but for the whole metropolitan region, cutting across jurisdictional lines, looking at flows of water, people, goods, and capital. Seven years and $1.3 million (about $22 million in today’s dollars) later, the newly incorporated Regional Plan Association (RPA), an independent nonprofit, published the first “Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs,” running over one thousand pages across two volumes. To their surprise, over the next decade, many of the bridges, parkways, and parks proposed in the plan were built by Robert Moses, who earned RPA’s “enthusiastic support—until th…
Login or create an account to read three free articles and receive our newsletter.