Having just returned from a week in San Francisco, I will chime in: Kill the viaduct and save our city!

I loved Jane Jacobs. She was one of my heroes. Her ideas about neighborhoods are the very source of EVERYONE'S thinking about how cities should be. Short blocks -- medium heights -- mix of old and new buildings -- plenty of street furniture -- no one-way streets -- etc.; these ideas would be later expanded on by people like Wiliam Whyte, but Jacobs is the one who first and best addressed the subject.

She also played a major role in creating the urban preservation movement, starting with the fight against The Tavern On the Green development in Central Park. Her work was extremely influential in Seattle, leading to the preservation of both Pioneer Square and the Market. Everyone who has any interest in neighborhoods and city life MUST, MUST, MUST read The Death and Life of American Cities.

But I think it's very questionable to say that she would have reflexively opposed a replacement viaduct. The kind of "urban planning" that is being perpetrated against that area by the PWC is exactly the kind of soulless, all-at-once instant development and mass replacement she fought against. Seattle likes to pretend we're beyond Modernism, but we are magnetically attracted to the same old mistakes every time.

Jane did love New York once upon a time, but it's good to remember that she moved away in 1969, and spent the last 36 years in another large city to the north, Toronto.

Fnarf, go back and read the books again. The choice not to build a highway is only absolute in that it will allow removal of an absolute that helps spawn dead-area sprawl. What goes in its place must be programmed, if at all, to have no program, and create the kind of variety, freedom and surprise Jacobs knew was the lifeblood of cities. Unfortunately as urbanites in this late hour we are developing battered-wife syndrome: we are so used to our shitty environments we have come to nostalgize them.