In the last two years we’ve heard unceasingly about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, figures who, as the Bloomberg administration has rezoned and promoted redevelopment of vast swaths of the city, seem as relevant today as they did when they butted heads over the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s.

Moses and Jacobs had clearly differing visions of how urban development should occur. So, too, did Moses and the architecture critic, cultural commentator, and social critic Lewis Mumford have profoundly differing visions, and in the 1950s, when Jacobs first became a public figure, Mumford heralded her insights. That all changed when Jacobs’s book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” came out in 1961. In her critique of urban planning theories, she took as direct aim at the “Garden City” movement with which Mumford was closely identified as she did at the Corbusian “Radiant City” — superblocks, expressways, etc. — that informed the planning vision of Robert Moses.

Mumford, deeply discomfited by being raked over the coals by Jacobs, retaliated with a would-be scathing but hopelessly confused critique of her book in the New Yorker magazine, for which he served as architecture critic.

The best things he wrote, in my opinion, were his architecture criticism and his memoirs. Since Mumford seems not to be on many New Yorkers’ minds these days, I thought I’d devote the occasional Abroad in New York column to some ambles around town with Mumford’s commentary as a guide. After all, Mumford was a writer self-consciously in the line of John Ruskin, and what visitor to Venice navigates its campi and sottoportegi without Ruskin in mind, if not in hand?

We’ll begin in downtown Brooklyn, at the corner of Jay and Willoughby streets. There stands a Modernist building from 1950, the Board of Transportation Building designed by William Haugaard and Andrew Thomas. Mumford wrote of it in the New Yorker that it has “set the right precedent for a modern office building, and I am hopeful that its sobriety and efficiency will leave a mark on the whole neighborhood.”

The 13-story building stretches north 356 feet along Jay Street, and 82 feet on Willoughby — “ideal dimensions for a building that is intended to rely upon natural lighting and natural ventilation.” The slab is densely fenestrated, with 420 equal-size, openable windows set flush with the limestone wall, with “a neat Monel-metal cornice to punctuate the top.” This is the building where, once upon a time, all the city’s subway tokens made their way via the night trains that collected the tokens from turnstiles. The building stands atop the Jay Street-Borough Hall subway station, and is raised up on one-story piers (Le Corbusier called such piers “pilotis,” and they became a stylistic tic of a certain kind of Modernism) to create an extremely handsome set of subway entrances with illuminated signage and beautiful stylized lettering. There is also, as Mumford pointed out, an excellent, deeply moving World War II memorial.

Mumford wrote that the building “might easily become a model for a whole district of such structures planned for efficient work, for easy access to public transportation, and for convenient pedestrian circulation.” Because of Mumford, whose taste I often don’t share, I’ve grown to love this building.

Next, walk west two blocks along Willoughby to Adams Street. Cross to Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. The front of it, with the broad flight of steps, looks out on a long, narrow, open space called Cadman Plaza.

Once this was, in Mumford’s words, “a vast area largely occupied by dingy buildings that had long begged for demolition.” It also had the clangorous elevated railway. After the El came down, Robert Moses in the 1950s undertook the largest civic-center urban renewal project in America. Hundreds of buildings were razed, and Fulton Street from Borough Hall to the East River was renamed Cadman Plaza West. Moses promised the new civic center would “be as much the pride of Brooklyn as the Piazza San Marco is the pride of Venice.”

But Mumford was right in his critique: Too little thought was given to the relationships of buildings and open spaces, to the right variety of spaces, and to a processional way suitable for civic celebrations. Worst of all, the widening of Adams Street to expressway scale “will,” he wrote, “nullify by this massive disruption most of the aesthetic and social qualities this center might have possessed.”

Walk a few blocks west along Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights, then take a right on Hicks Street. Continue to mid-block, where on the right stands a marvelous pair of 1840s row houses in the Gothic Revival style — which was unusual for row houses — at 131 and 135 Hicks St. The latter is where Mumford and his wife, Sophia Wittenberg, lived in 1925 when his famous book on American architecture, “Sticks and Stones,” was published. They occupied the basement apartment, with access to a rear garden walled by the back of the Gothic Revival First Presbyterian Church.

For the young couple, it could not have been a dreamier place to live. “Hicks Street,” Mumford wrote, “then so humane and serene with its nearby assortment of restaurants, markets, and shops, at hand but not under one’s nose, met our need for esthetic comeliness and social variety.”

Yes, Mumford and Jacobs had fundamental disagreements. But neither was more nor less urban or urbane than the other.

fmorrone@nysun.com