Jane Jacobs’s Epic Battle With Robert Moses Takes To Times Square Billboards

Image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

By Talya Zax May 4, 2017

In the 20th century, New York City was shaped by city planner Robert Moses, activist Jane Jacobs, and their notorious battles. Now the city’s most famous district, Times Square, will pay homage to the impact of their clashes.

As DNA Info reports, a background animation to the opera “A Marvelous Order,” which chronicles the conflict, will take over Times Square for a few minutes each night in May.

The animation is the work of Joshua Frankel, also the opera’s director; he created the opera with composer Judd Greenstein, librettist Tracy K. Smith, and choreographer Will Rawls. An excerpt of “A Marvelous Order” will be performed at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s River to River Festival in mid-June.

The animation, titled “I LIVE HERE,” will screen on Times Square’s famed billboards between 11:57 and midnight every night this month, as the May installation of Times Square Arts’s and Times Square Advertising Coalition’s “Midnight Moment” series. The series is, according to its website, “the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition.”

For an introduction to the opera, see the video below.

Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO