Hudnut v. Moses

New York City's famed and fiery Park Commissioner Robert Moses has blown exceedingly hot recently on the subject of foreign-born city planners with notions about the U.S. (TIME, July 24). His salvos have been charged with such powder as: "[the imported planner] is hurting our architecture by advocating a philosophy which doesn't belong here and fundamentally offers nothing more novel than the lally column and the two-by-four timber."

This week Commissioner Moses drew a learned rebuttal from Harvard University's Professor of Architecture Joseph Hudnut. In the New York Times, with measured sarcasm, 58-year-old, Harvard-trained Professor Hudnut made "A-'Long-Haired' Reply to Moses." Excerpts:

"When . . . Governor Winthrop in 1629 came to Massachusetts to 'find a place for our sitting down,' he wrote to his English sponsor saying, 'Send me, pray, a Frenchman that he may lay out our city for me.' Jefferson, two centuries later, followed his example by inviting Major l'Enfant to design the city of Washington. . . . "These and many other historic instances confirm the European source of our own art of city planning. Our most striking inventions, our most useful techniques, have often had their beginnings across the seas. . . . Those magnificent parkways, for example, which reach out in all directions from our great cities have their prototype and exemplar in the autostrade which star the cities of Hanover and Berlin.

"The cloverleaf intersections which garland Randall's Island and the related flora which cover with concrete the once-lovely slopes of Riverside Park were first propagated in the soil of Prussia. Our housing projects proclaim . . . the precedents of Holland and of Sweden; nor is the tradition of England forgotten in the latest improvements of New York's parks. . . . "All practice originates in theory. Everything that is made must be first imagined. . . . The problems which confront each great city in Europe and in America are not so unique in character as to demand separate philosophies or special techniques of analysis or synthesis. They are like products of the industrial revolutions; all are new and all are without guidance. The chaos of Hamburg and the ravages inflicted on that city by war differ in degree and not in kind from the chaos of ravaged London ; one can die as miserably in the slums of Chicago as in the slums of Istanbul; and the assembly lines which in Detroit made automata of populations are ' yet first cousins to the factories which blacken the sky of Frankfort on the Main. We wandered into this iron theatre together; we confront together its strange confusions; and we shall find our way out together. Together, I think, or not at all."*

*Reprinted by permission of the New York Times and Professor Hudnut.

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