When I was 22 and working at a local newspaper in Queens, I opened up “The Power Broker” for the first time. I sat in a park in the borough’s leafy eastern reaches, within a short drive of a Robert Moses-constructed bridge (the Bronx-Whitestone) and a Robert Moses-constructed expressway (the Clearview). I commuted to work from my apartment in the southwest corner of Brooklyn, enduring the Moses parkways and expressways, driving myself to madness in one rush-hour traffic scrum after another. I came to believe this long-dead urban planner had locked me in an asphalt prison that I could never escape.
Like generations of New Yorkers, journalists and historians across America, I came to understand my city through Robert Caro’s magisterial biography of the master builder who dominated the machinery of city and state government from the Jazz Age through Beatlemania. Now a half-century old, “The Power Broker” is every bit the New York institution Mr. Moses ever was — as is Mr. Caro himself.
I was awed by Mr. Caro’s dogged reportage and novelistic sweep. I grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a neighborhood ribboned by two Moses highways and cleaved by what was in the 1960s the largest suspension bridge in the world.
But I have come to believe, with a half-century of hindsight, that Mr. Caro did not get the story of Robert Moses completely right. Today, in the popular imagination, Mr. Moses is understood as an imperious, even racist villain who despised the poor, immolated outer borough neighborhoods and singularly worshiped the automobile. He is a perpetual warning against the consolidation of power, bureaucratic overreach and heedless development; he was, in the aftermath of “The Power Broker,” understood as a catalyst of New York’s deterioration in the 1970s.
Some readers have misunderstood Mr. Caro’s journalism. Others have overlearned the lessons of the “The Power Broker” and absorbed to too great a degree Mr. Caro’s framing of a deeply complex, unsettling and extraordinarily accomplished historical figure. By overlearning, they have lost faith in government and failed to comprehend that some of the Moses spirit must be recaptured today if the United States is going to be a great builder again.
Mr. Moses did have tremendous faults — his dedication to highways at the expense of mass transit and his ultimate unwillingness to take opposition to his megaprojects seriously. His elitism bled into his distaste for trains, buses and any initiatives intended to accommodate them. But he left behind within the five boroughs an egalitarian legacy that has not been matched since. Much of the public housing built under his watch exists to this day and shelters residents who otherwise could never afford to live in a rapidly gentrifying city. In cities like Chicago and St. Louis, similar developments would more likely have already been demolished. Today some of the stock has fallen into disrepair, but this is the fault of limited national investment — the federal government still provides funding for the city housing authority and technically oversees it — and local mismanagement; Mr. Moses himself stood these developments up in a startlingly brief amount of time.
Mr. Caro, to his credit, methodically accounts for the housing boom under Mr. Moses. Between 1945 and 1958, more than 1,000 public housing buildings were constructed, containing 148,000 apartments and housing as many 550,000 tenants. As documented in a study of Mr. Moses’s legacy edited by the historians Kenneth T. Jackson and Hilary Ballon, Mr. Moses so expertly wielded federal funding that New York City received 114 percent more Title I funding than Chicago, the second-highest-spending city.
Mr. Moses was simultaneously the city parks commissioner and the head of the State Parks Council, and he radically reimagined public parkland across New York. While he is often remembered for dreaming up Jones Beach out of a deserted sandbar and keeping his suburban creation out of the reach of public buses and railways, his achievements within the five boroughs — where the working classes jammed together — were far more democratic. In 1934, the city parks system contained 14,000 acres. By 1960, when Mr. Moses left the city Parks Department, the acreage had swelled to more than 34,000. Once again, “The Power Broker” is a worthwhile resource, cataloging how, in that time, the number of playgrounds exploded to 771 from 119, which today make up a vast bulk of the playgrounds in the five boroughs.
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the crown jewel of Queens to this day, was a dumping ground for ashes until Mr. Moses conceived of it as something more.
In the first half of the century, many residents of the city were white ethnic — of Italian, Irish, German and Eastern European descent — and it is here where common misreadings of Mr. Caro’s reportage, and misfires by the author himself, contribute to a warped perception of Mr. Moses’s approach to race relations.
There’s little evidence in Mr. Moses’ urban planning practices that he singled out the city’s relatively small Black and Puerto Rican populations for particular punishment. He did raze Manhattan’s San Juan Hill neighborhood, home to many such residents, to make space for Lincoln Center, but he rarely spared the city’s white working class for his other projects.
In 2021, Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat, declared that one of Mr. Moses’s most notorious projects, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, is “literally and metaphorically a structure of racism” for leaving in its wake “decades of greenhouse gas emission and environmental degradation.”
But “The Power Broker” makes clear that the reality of the expressway’s construction was quite different. The residents of the East Tremont neighborhood who lost their homes to the expressway were, like Mr. Moses, white. So were the residents displaced by almost all the titanic highway and bridge projects of the Moses era. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which ripped apart my native Bay Ridge, demolished the houses of working-class Irish, Italian and Norwegian Americans. When the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, as Mr. Caro wrote, ran roughshod through the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park, it was not yet a Latino and Chinese enclave, as it is today.
All of this might seem like ancient history. But it does matter in the sense that a hardened argument with scant direct evidence to back it up came to define how all hierarchical urban planning was viewed after the 1970s. When “The Power Broker” appeared, deindustrialization and white flight were bleeding the local tax base, and the city itself was on the brink of fiscal insolvency. Mr. Moses’s policies contributed to the middle class drift out of the five boroughs, but suburbanization and car culture would have taken root even if he had never been born. The federal government erected the Interstate System of highways and ignored mass transit. As the writer Nicole Gelinas points out in an upcoming exploration of the history of New York’s streetscape, Mr. Moses’s highways followed earlier proposals sketched out by the Regional Plan Association.
“The Power Broker” rarely meditates on the myriad freeway and slum clearance projects undertaken in other American cities, and since Mr. Caro’s reportage appeared in 1974, it cannot account for New York’s more recent renaissance — and how it is the rare American metropolis to boast more residents now than it did at midcentury.
Many of Mr. Moses’s projects were unnecessarily disruptive, and he was far too callous about those living in the way of his bulldozer. It is also true that Mr. Moses should have included rail links on major bridge and expressway projects, and certain ego-driven ventures, such as the aforementioned Verrazzano, would have been better off as tunnels. Still, as megalomaniacal as Mr. Moses could be, he proved the public sector could be a tangible force for civic improvement in America, delivering monumental public works that could stand for the rest of the century and beyond.
Politicians today need that sort of ambition. Centralization is not inherently grotesque, and community control is sometimes an excuse to reject anything that qualifies as change. The post-Moses era in New York and beyond has been one of frustration and stagnation — public infrastructure deteriorates as the local governments overseeing it dither. Sclerotic bureaucracies like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, created in part to thwart Mr. Moses, make power diffuse, shield politicians from accountability and bloat budgets.
At the minimum, the Faircloth Amendment should be repealed so the federal government, in partnership with the states, can start building public housing again to help solve the affordability crisis. Moses-style efforts should be applied, too, to the construction of high-speed rail, wind farms, new transmission lines and the infrastructure needed to prepare the nation for climate change.
Too much has been foisted upon private entities who must seek profit as they provide for the public. The United States of the 21st century is in desperate need of new power brokers.
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