How does a person become a symbol for something?
When they are useful even after they are gone? When stories about them can be mined for answers or inspiration? The longer this sort of thing goes on, the further you get from the real person, until there are only layers of myth. It happened to Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs in different ways. Moses’s reputation never recovered from the 1974 biography by Robert Caro that revealed the cruelty and corruption behind his 40 year-long reshaping of New York City. He became a bogeyman. Jacobs was more useful. Her 1961 book, Death and Life of American Cities, cemented her reputation as an advocate for the little people, and stories about her ‘saving’ this neighbourhood or that one from the hands of Robert Moses persist, despite not all really being true. Nobody wants to hear any different because she symbolizes decent qualities like standing up to power and fighting for your neighbourhood.
There is a new opera in the works about them. Librettist Tracy K Smith, composer Judd wants to be about something greater than a triangle between a journalist, an urban planner, and the city of New York: it’s about different ways of expressing a love for a place.
