Jane Jacobs hated it. Lewis Mumford hated it. Fashionable opinion scorned it. Yet the waiting list to get in stretched to Kalamazoo.

Stuyvesant Town has been in the news lately, perhaps more so than at any time since it opened, 50 years ago. It and its slightly more upscale sibling, Peter Cooper Village, replaced the old neighborhood; they are now themselves the old neighborhood. People who grew up there love to swap stories about the buildings — and often do so with misty-eyed nostalgia.

In 2006, Tishman Speyer paid $5.4 billion for the 80 acres, 110 buildings, and 11,232 apartments that make up Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. No bigger real estate transaction had ever taken place in New York. (Tishman Speyer already held the record: $1.85 billion for Rockefeller Center in 2000.)

The sale neatly dovetailed with “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” the three-museum exhibition that served to revive the reputation of a man many New Yorkers regarded as a city destroyer — not a master builder. Moses masterminded the wholesale redevelopment of the Lower East Side riverfront, creating the mile after mile of brick cubes that stultify the viewer from the Brooklyn shore, a boat on the East River, or the F.D.R. Drive. Yet the northernmost and biggest of these brick-cube complexes fetched $5.4 billion. Could Robert Moses have known?

Moses contracted with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to build Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, and MetLife reaped the $5.4 billion reward. Many people railed against the process. After all, MetLife built the project with public subsidies to serve a middle-class of returning veterans, civil servants and clerks, and families whose children frolicked on the green oases of the project’s well-kept lawns. We rightly decry Moses’s wanton dislocation of the poor whenever they stood in his way. But we should also acknowledge that Moses believed strongly in retaining a vibrant middle class in the heart of the city. The notion that Stuyvesant Town would ever house anything other than the middle class, I suspect, would have troubled Moses — as much as the hyper-gentrification of the Hudson Street area in the West Village would have troubled Jane Jacobs. It appears the conflicting 1950s-era urban visions of Jacobs and Moses both appreciated in value beyond their founders’ most outlandish dreams, and fears.

Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village stretch from 14th to 23rd streets, east of First Avenue. When the great Brooklyn reformer Alfred Tredway White built his model tenements, the Tower and Home Buildings, in the 1870s in Cobble Hill, he proclaimed his motto as “philanthropy plus five percent.” He intended to show other, less charitable, builders that they could build decent housing for the poor, and still make a modest profit. Alas, most builders cared little for modest profits.

When MetLife built Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village — and other New York projects totaling 24,000 apartments — the company worked out partnerships with the city. The city would do the condemnation and bulldozing, and MetLife would do the building, agreeing to limit its profit to 6% for 25 years. Controversy over public-private partnerships and the government’s use of eminent domain to aid private builders very much marks the era of the Moses-MetLife collaborations.

For all the staggering numbers related to its size, Stuyvesant Town, as Jane Jacobs pointed out, has a lower density than many mostly low-rise, inner-city neighborhoods. That’s because buildings stand on only about a quarter of Stuyvesant Town’s land. The project belongs to the era of the low-ground-coverage ideology. While Robert Moses didn’t invent this ideology — few of the ideas and assumptions that informed his work originated with him — he embraced it wholly. It seemed to planners and reformers of all stripes to be self-evident that the greater the open space, the healthier and happier the people. Jane Jacobs’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, to this day the term “open space” enchants planning boards all across America.

When Jacobs published “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” in 1961, she took aim at the open-space ideologues, beginning with the turn-of-the-century English promoter of “garden cities,” Ebenezer Howard. She moved on to Le Corbusier, whose 1920s ville radieuse plan envisioned replacing large tracts of cities with highrise apartment complexes, spaced well apart among lawns and trees — that is, the “towers in a park” that characterize postwar urban rebuilding across America, and that Stuyvesant Town perfectly exemplifies.

The more you learn about cities, the less you know about how and why they work. Many of us learned to loathe towers in a park. But Stuyvesant Town earned its misty-eyed nostalgia. What the next half-century holds for the neighborhood, we must wait and see.