The conflict between Moses and Jacobs certainly makes for high drama. At one point, Jacobs literally defended her home from Moses, the country’s most prolific builder of public works at the time. He wanted to pave a highway through Washington Square Park and Greenwich Village, which would have displaced Jacobs and thousands of families. The plan was typical of Moses and other so-called master builders of the era who sought to reorganize urban neighborhoods around the automobile.

The story is helped by larger fault lines between Moses and Jacobs. It wasn’t just about one roadway. On a personal level, Moses and Jacobs were a study in contrasts. He held degrees from Yale and Oxford and enjoyed being addressed as “Dr. Moses.” She took courses at Columbia, but considered it a badge of honor that she never finished college. He was a government insider, at one point holding 12 appointed positions on city and state commissions. She applied pressure from the outside, both as a journalist and neighborhood activist.

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The as-yet-untitled opera is scheduled to debut in Williamstown, Mass., next year, with a New York premiere in 2017. To drum up public interest and financial support, Frankel and Greenstein held short scene presentations in May and are documenting their progress through Twitter and Tumblr. The story is set in 1960s New York, when Jacobs organized several successful grassroots campaigns against projects Moses had planned. ... Frankel and Greenstein say they’ll present their opera as a love triangle between the city and two visionary urban theorists vying for its affections. Nowadays, it seems that Jacobs won that courtship. Her seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is required reading for city planners. The American Planning Association, at first critical of the bottom-up approach to community planning advocated by Jacobs, has since adopted many of her principles in its charter. “Death and Life changed how the world viewed cities,” says Gratz. Traces of Jacobs’ ideas are alive today in highway teardowns, the proliferation of bike lanes and the walkability scores by which many neighborhoods are rated. “We are undoing Robert Moses,” Gratz says, “and bringing in more of Jane Jacobs than ever before.”