Make No Little Plans
Robert Moses gets all the hate, but Ian Frazier argues in Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough, that leaders of the 1929 Regional Plan of New York deserve some blame for the highways that cut the borough apart.
This group first imagined major projects like the George Washington Bridge and the Cross Bronx Expressway. Frazier writes that its chairman was fond of this quote from another urban planner:
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high and hope and work.”
Frazier argues that this group, which looked at “the bigger picture,” shaped the modern Bronx as a place people drove through, as a place of pollution and neglect.
Last week, I kneeled like a baseball catcher, yanking a few small grasses that poked up in our bed of New York asters, on the plot of public land my neighbors and I are turning into a garden.
I noticed that the asters have shot out additional leaves and thin shoots in their attempts to spread.
In the wake of a rainy day, I noticed that the fungi in the soil shot up their fruiting bodies, or mushrooms.
The presence of these mushrooms is a sign that underground, it’s no longer the mostly lifeless dirt that it was when I found it.
Underground, fungi run threads and provide water and minerals to the plants in exchange for photosynthesized sugar.
It’s the network that knits all the species underground together.
As I kneeled, I thought about the “big plans” of the regional highway network.
The goal of that original plan was to create a network of highways that would knit the great region and its parks together, to paraphrase Moses.
I stared at the mushroom. Knitting. Networks. Threads. Yet, the metaphor feels wrong.
To care for the young native plants takes little plans.
~David
