Famed urban critic Jane Jacobs often took issue with misguided design proposals. In 1968, she resolved to stop a particularly controversial project -- by destroying the records of a public hearing about an expressway which Robert Moses wanted to build across Lower Manhattan.

["The most perfectly designed place can't compete," Jacobs once remarked of New York. "Everything is provided, which is the worst thing we can provide. There's a joke that the father of an old friend used to tell, about a preacher who warns children, 'In Hell there will be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.' 'What if you don't have teeth?' one of the children asks. 'Then teeth will be provided,' he says sternly. That's it -- the spirit of the designed city: Teeth Will Be Provided for You."]