Logue, unafraid to wield power, was something of a dark hero to that new crowd of urbanistas who had sprung up in New York in the midsixties. Improbable as it sounds today, there was an almost rockstar excitement that surrounded city planning and urban improvement in that era. Under Lindsay's mayoralty, there started to be vestpocket parks, traveling theater groups who performed in the barrios, free outdoor movies in summer, and all sorts of smallscale, contextual housing on the boards. Not much actually got built, but a perfume of limitless promise hovered in the air, the mystique of urban solutions drawing idealistic graduates from good universities, the progeny of Jane Jacobs and Paul Goodman. (I was one inch away at the time from becoming a city planner myself.) Nelson Rockefeller, who served as governor of New York from 195 through 1973, pried Ed Logue away from Lindsay (the two men hated each on OR THE BATTLE OF WESTWAY U T В О A R И b th liberal Republicans wanted to be president, with duplicate ' encjes) and made him head of the newly formed Urban l ment Corporation. At its outset, fully funded, the UDC had vast construct housing, dormitories, hospitals, and schools across the t"\Q\vers to other cons Rockefeller had broken Moses' fortyyear hold on the state, by pting the Indispensable One's insincerely tendered resignation. Now L gue was given the authority, and he had more of a commitment to social . an(j consultation with the community than Moses, his predeces sor-which suited his new patron. In spite of being born with the most silvered of silver spoons, Rockefeller, like all successful New York politicians, had the populist touch. "Hiya, fellow!" he would say, and wolf down pastrami at Katz's Delicatessen for the photographers. He wanted to be president, and got as far as vicepresident, but was too liberal a Republican to make it all the way. The left could never say a good word about a Rockefeller, much less Nelson; but in retrospect he had a positive side, a passion for modern art and South America that helped establish the Museum of Modern Art and the United Nations headquarters; and he supported the UDC, which built a fair amount of decent mixedincome housing on Roosevelt Island and elsewhere. True, he made horrendous mistakes-the Albany Mall, the antidrug laws, his handling of the Attica prison riot-and that's what people tend to remember. In any case, he became one of the Westway proposal's earliest and most enthusiastic supporters. THE WESTWAY PLAN was initially hatched around 196970, in the city's Housing and Development Administration (HDA), of all places. Sam Ratensky, a senior city planner at HDA, was, by all accounts, urbane and a mensch; he had apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen in his youth, and wanted to give a chance to young architects and planners bent on improving the city.