The Morgan Library & Museum was the grand setting Monday night for an event that celebrated the variety, colors, characters, and leaders of New York City’s communities. The Rockefeller Foundation presented its Jane Jacobs Medal to the executive director and co-founder of the West Harlem Environmental Action organization, Peggy Shepard, and the executive director and founder of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, Alexie Torres-Fleming. First announced in the spring, the winners were selected by a jury led by Cooper Union’s president, George Campbell, and a cultural leader, Agnes Gund.

“The event is a celebration of New York,” the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin, said as guests gathered at the Morgan.

Ms. Torres-Fleming, who as a teenager in the South Bronx saw her neighborhood burn, spoke of “the beauty of community and the power of staying and not running away.” She urged the civic leaders in the room to figure out how to “bridge the gap between the planners and the people who live in the communities of this city,” those like her father, Oscar Fleming, who was a caretaker who collected the garbage in the housing project where she grew up.

Ms. Shepard gave an example of a city project that she believes effectively incorporated the ideas of the community: a waterfront park scheduled to open this fall in Harlem.

Author Robert Caro, who spoke during the awards ceremony about “The Power Broker,” his book about the city’s most powerful parks commissioner, Robert Moses, said, “Community and neighborhood is what New York is all about. New York is the in-gatherer, the city everyone comes to, the city that becomes home.”

Mr. Caro met Jane Jacobs only once, he said. A friend brought them together for a buffet dinner in the Village. Jacobs, the only person to successfully fight a Moses project (the Lower Manhattan Expressway), had moved to Toronto and was visiting.

It turned out they each had come with one question they wanted to ask the other — about Moses. “Jane wanted to ask me what it was like to meet him, and I wanted to ask Jane what it was like to beat him,” he said.

Attendees included a medal winner from last year, Omar Freilla, who used his cash award to open a business in the South Bronx that sells salvaged kitchen materials, such as sinks, tiles, and cabinets, and the director of Creative Time, Anne Pasternak, who noted her organization’s next project: “Democracy in America,” an exhibit at the Armory opening September 21.

agordon@nysun.com