But, aside from the greater initial costs entailed by covering perimeter highways, it was never a priority for Moses to make the waterside accessible to pedestrians, perhaps because he regarded himself as serving another constituency. Moses shared with Olmsted a preference for personal transportation over mass transit. Though he has been portrayed since as Enemy of the People, it was probably more that he saw the middle class as Everyman (a common bourgeois misperception), and, since car ownership was the linchpin of American peacetime industry and the hallmark of citizenship and upward mobility, he regarded perimeter highways as a means of giving middleclass drivers and passengers alike something inspiring to look at as they tooled along. In any event, the West Side Highway became a workhorse, the second mostutilized road in the Greater New York area, next to the Long Island Expressway, and by the mid1950s, a mere twentyfive years after construction, it was already dilapidated. Some traced the highway's crumbling condition to corrosive rock salt used during the big snow of 1947; others, to pigeon excrement. "Nothing is to be gained," wrote Moses, taking the ofty perspective, "by carping criticism and second guessing as to why the g ways were allowed to deteriorate to their present state." Suffice it to 'My fijst emory is of that 1947 snow, at four years old, when my mother tied my brother, sister, and a sled and pulled us down Havemeyer Street to do her marketing. What fun! say there has always been more money in the city budget to build than t maintain infrastructure. From 1956 on, plans were put forward to replace the West SitJ, Highway, the most drastic being Moses' own egregious Lower Manhattar Expressway proposal, which would have barreled through parts 0 Greenwich Village and S0H0 and shattered both communities. Jane Jacobs, whose paradigmshifting 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, awakened my generation to the value of multiuse neighborhoods and street life, and to the mistakes of urban planners seeking to impose excessive order, led the successful fight against this scheme. The Lower Manhattan Expressway proposal seemed the apotheosis of everything seignorial and urbicidal in Moses' method of planning; and the relative ease with which it was defeated signaled that a new day of community activism had arrived. John F. Kennedy was in the White House, and on the local level, the same freshstart, glamorous spirit was exemplified by John V. Lindsay, the tall, handsome Lochinvar of a congressman from the Silk Stocking district. In 1965 Lindsay got himself elected mayor of New York on the Republican ticket (a rare event in a thenDemocratic town), on a platform of giving neighborhoods more control over their destinies, through local city halls and community boards. Lindsay brought in Edward Logue from Boston, where he had done great things as planning head.