Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power. – Robert Caro, The Power Broker
Fifty years after its publication, I finally read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Vintage Books 1974), the Robert Caro masterpiece widely considered among the best nonfiction books ever written. A large and dense 1,162 pages excluding notes, when I suggested to Andrea that I should bring The Power Broker with us on our two-week trip to France in October, she responded with a hint of sarcasm, “Why don’t you just pack a bowling ball?” When I finished the book in December, I felt a distinct sense of accomplishment, the bookworm’s equivalent to hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Having grown up in central New Jersey, the dominant presence of New York City was always in the background. My dad grew up in Jersey City and frequently crossed the Hudson River into the city as a young man to work summer jobs and to attend baseball games at the Polo Grounds. Even when he grew older and we lived in central Jersey, he remained fascinated with New York’s public infrastructure, its magnificent skyline and its many bridges, tunnels, and expressways. On the few occasions my dad and I drove across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge from the Staten Island Expressway and then onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he would express a sense of awe for what it must have taken to build and connect all of the major thoroughfares of New York and surrounding areas.
Verrazano Narrows Bridge
I had no idea then the role Robert Moses had played in the design, building, and oversight of almost all the public infrastructure of New York. Although he never held elected office, Moses did more to shape and mold modern day New York than anyone who ever lived. In The Power Broker, Caro provides a definitive and engaging account of the life and times of Robert Moses. But his book is primarily a dissertation on power—how Moses obtained it, kept it, and used it as a weapon for over four decades.
Moses wielded unchecked power for decades while holding a series of unassuming positions in New York state and local government—New York City Parks Commissioner, New York State Council of Parks, Chair of the Long Island State Park Commission, New York City Planning Commission—at one point holding twelve titles at once. Caro said that, when he started the book, he did not really know anything about how power worked in New York. And when he talked with the politicians, they did not know how Moses acquired his power. They knew only that he had it.
It was not always so. As a young man, Moses dreamed of a city with parks and scenic drives and great beaches accessible to the people who lived there. He also was a public minded idealist determined to use his Yale and Oxford education to reform New York City’s civil service system. Although Moses failed to make a mark in those early years, early failures taught him important lessons, just as later successes confirmed what he eventually took to heart. Without power, you accomplish nothing.
As Caro explains, it was through the creation of independent public authorities (historically, entities that sell bonds to finance public projects), and Moses’ role in heading them, that gave Moses the means to obtain and hold onto power through countless Governors and Mayors. As Chair of what became the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, from 1934 to 1968, Moses controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The Authority’s quasi-governmental and independent nature enabled Moses to fund dozens of new infrastructure projects with almost no outside input or oversight. As head of Triborough, Moses had absolute control over the revenues collected from the bridges and tunnels in New York City, and these revenues dwarfed any money the city could raise on its own. With that money came the power to control how to spend it and what public projects to fund.
Once Moses obtained power, he commanded any room he entered with a combination of charisma and intimidation, and he used power to design and build important things—parks, highways, bridges, playgrounds, housing, tunnels, beaches, zoos, civic centers, and exhibition halls. During the Depression, his projects employed 84,000 laborers who added skating rinks, boathouses and tennis courts, baseball diamonds and golf courses to every park in the city. Over time, he built 658 playgrounds in New York City when most cities had almost no parks and playgrounds. He built thirteen impressive bridges that distinctively mark the New York landscape. He oversaw the construction of two tunnels (Queens-Midtown and Brooklyn Battery). He built 627 miles of roadways and thoroughfares that allowed millions of people to drive into and through the city every day. And he oversaw massive urban renewal projects that replaced poor neighborhoods with huge public housing structures. In so doing, Moses radically transformed the physical fabric of New York and inspired cities throughout America to implement similar development projects.
Moses’s achievements in building housing projects and highways were comparable, in the words of Caro, not to the achievements of an individual person, but to an era, equivalent to the Age of Skyscrapers and the Age of Railroads.
But Robert Moses did not build only housing projects and highways. Robert Moses built parks and playgrounds and beaches and parking lots and cultural centers and civic centers and a United Nations Building and Shea Stadium and a Coliseum and swept away neighborhoods to clear the way for a Lincoln Center and the mid-city campuses of four separate universities. He was a shaper not of sections of a city but of a city. He was, for the greatest city in the Western world, the city shaper, the only city shaper. In sheer physical impact on New York and the entire New York metropolitan region, he is comparable not to the works of any man or group of men or even generations of men. In the shaping of New York, Robert Moses was comparable only to some elemental force of nature.
Moses’ power stemmed in part from his reputation as the man who could Get Things Done. He knew every provision in every law because he had drafted the very laws that created his positions and gave him unbridled authority with no public accountability. In his early years, while working for Governor Al Smith in the 1920s, Moses developed a reputation as the best drafter of legislation in the State. Later, when he became the head of the Triborough Authority, he could spend public money with little transparency and no accountability because that is how Moses designed it.
During the New Deal, the federal government was looking to spend substantial amounts of money on public works projects, but they needed shovel ready projects that would put people to work immediately. Before other cities and states had developed such plans, Moses masterfully created them, complete with engineering blueprints and all the required documentation, which made it easy for the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal agencies to approve and fund his projects. He was so good, in fact, that New York received a disproportionately large share of the public works money appropriated during the New Deal.
By securing the funding, Moses then hired people to perform the projects, which put him in great stead with the unions. He awarded lucrative contracts to the construction companies and the concrete, pavement, and steel suppliers needed to build playgrounds, parks, roads, and bridges. He hired the best and brightest engineers, architects, and designers, and he pressured everyone to meet inhuman deadlines. He spread around the massive revenue he controlled and gained the loyalty of the most powerful institutions in the city and the country – the banks, the unions, the construction companies, the major law firms, the insurance companies – everyone with the power and influence to pressure any politician who might wish to change how Moses did things. One call from Moses to the key influencers would flood a council member’s or mayor’s office with calls and demands to retreat. And they always did.
Caro brilliantly describes Moses's evolution from a public-spirited man of ideals to a man singularly consumed by power for power's sake. The book captures the many dimensions of Moses's personality, from the charming host of extravagant parties—which helped him curry favor with the politicians, the press, the moneyed interests, anyone who could help him obtain and hold onto power—to the mean-spirited and vindictive person he would become to anyone who questioned or opposed his projects and designs. He employed McCarthyite tactics before McCarthyism was a thing, employing gossip, false rumors of scandals, and spies to destroy the reputations of anyone who dared challenge him.
Moses’s arrogant refusal to consider alternative proposals, even if they could more efficiently achieve a project’s aims without destroying an entire neighborhood or enable the city to economically expand or improve the regional rails and subways, were legendary. As Caro writes, Moses was “blind and deaf to reason, to argument, to new ideas, to any ideas except his own.” Under Moses’s reign, New York became a city of traffic jams and congested roads and expressways while ignoring desperately needed improvements to the city’s subways, commuter rails, and buses.
Moses did not foresee America’s growing reliance on the automobile, which in the most populated metropolitan area in the country became exponentially worse each year. Each new expressway was supposed to solve New York’s growing traffic problems. But with every new road and highway, the traffic only became worse. No matter how many smart people recommended that the millions of people who needed to commute in and out of the city every day could do so more easily and in less time with more and better rail systems, subways, and buses, Moses would not listen.
To Caro, the reason for Moses’s intransigence was simple. The roads and bridges Moses built as head of the Triborough Authority meant more revenue and thus more power for him to wield. Mass transit, which he did not control, would diminish his power. And so, for decades New York severely neglected its subways and railroads, which inconvenienced millions of people and made the traffic, pollution, congestion, and noise all the worse. Moses thereby condemned generations of people to sit for hours in traffic rather than commute by rail.
The mayors, the governors, the council members, the people who in theory had the legal authority to override Moses’s totalitarian application of power, were scared to challenge him. As he continued to hold a monopoly on power in New York, Moses’s disregard for poor and nonwhite residents, and his refusal to understand or listen to their needs and concerns, permanently contributed to the inequality and systemic racism that continues to infect the city’s landscape to this day.
Yet Moses effectively cultivated a mythological reputation as an incorruptible public servant that the press was only too happy to promote. Because he had a reputation as the one person who got things done, who cut through red tape and any rules or laws that stood in the way, the politicians allowed him to take control of the city’s urban renewal efforts and oversee public housing, an area with which he had no expertise. Moses lacked empathy, especially for the poor and working class. He grew up in an affluent, privileged environment, attended private schools, graduated from Yale and Oxford, and drove around the city in a chauffeured limousine. He had no experience with, understanding of, or consideration for the people in need of public housing, the poor, people of color, and those with no political power.
Caro understood that any study of power must examine not only how power is exercised and the good it accomplishes, but also who is hurt by it. Caro performed meticulous research and interviewed hundreds of people, including people negatively impacted by Moses’s decisions in the least powerful neighborhoods of New York. Moses designed the roads to transport large numbers of people in and out of Manhattan, but his focus was on benefiting certain types of people. Every road and expressway he built resulted in mass evictions and displacement of the city’s mostly poor and working-class residents. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes at a time when New York was in desperate need of affordable housing, all to make room for one of Moses’ thoroughfares.
Cross-Bronx Expressway
In one particularly compelling chapter of the book, entitled “One Mile,” Caro describes how Moses ignored the concerns of the people living in the East Tremont section of the Bronx as he planned the layout of the seven-mile Cross-Bronx Expressway. After World War II, East Tremont was a working-class Jewish neighborhood consisting mostly of refugees from the ghettos of Eastern Europe. These were not wealthy or powerful people, nothing like the successful, far more affluent Jews who lived by then in Central Park West. But they were industrious, law-abiding people who had built a stable and friendly neighborhood that was conveniently located to everything they needed. The nearby subway lines made it easy to get to the Lower East Side and the garment district, where a sizable number of them worked. The neighborhood had plentiful shops and businesses and jobs, good schools and nearby parks for the children, movie houses, and the Bronx Zoo, all within walking distance. To the people of East Tremont, the neighborhood was like a family.
But Moses wanted to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway straight through the heart of the neighborhood. He sent eviction notices to over 1,500 families (affecting over 5,000 residents) with immediate instructions to vacate their homes and find new, mostly unaffordable housing in other less convenient, crime-ridden neighborhoods, where they knew no one and were not always welcome. Neighborhood activists raised objections with local leaders and city council members, all of whom agreed that Moses’ plans were crazy and said they would help. But nobody could help. Robert Moses had no tolerance for opposition and no interest in changing his plans, even though there were better alternatives. When others pointed out that all Moses had to do was move the proposed expressway two blocks south, where almost no one lived, and thus save the neighborhood and avoid evictions, Moses dismissed outright such “nonsense.” Even when it was shown that re-routing the expressway would save money and keep the expressway straighter than Moses’s proposed route, he still refused to listen. As Caro explained:
Neighborhood feelings, urban planning considerations, cost, aesthetics, common humanity, common sense—none of these mattered in laying out the routes of New York’s great roads. The only consideration that mattered was Robert Moses’ will. He had the power to impose it on New York.
In the end, Moses was not interested in preserving things. He only wanted to build things. Grandiose things. He simply did not care how his projects affected individuals, how many people they displaced, or how his plans negatively impacted neighborhoods. What type of park a particular neighborhood needed or wanted was uninteresting to Moses. He dismissed the opinions of others outright. Caro details countless occasions when one of Moses’ bright engineers and designers proposed easy fixes to neighborhood concerns, only to be at the receiving end of an angry, mean-spirited rant by Moses. Indeed, over the years, loyal staff members lost their jobs simply because they suggested minor improvements to a shovel ready project that Moses wanted to push through.
By the end of The Power Broker, it was difficult to find much to like about Moses the man. When in 1968 Moses finally met his match in Governor Rockefeller and was forced to resign, I felt a sense of relief, even satisfaction. “The age of Moses was over,” writes Caro. “After forty-four years of power, the power was gone.”
And yet, Caro’s writing is so good that, by the final pages, one almost feels sorry for Moses when no one takes his phone calls, and he perceives nothing but ingratitude for all the "great" things he has accomplished. The book sadly ends with the words, “Why weren’t they grateful?”
There is a reason The Power Broker won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and is, as described by "The Power Broker Breakdown" podcast on 99% Invisible, “perhaps the most important and complete explanation of how cities are formed, how neighborhoods are destroyed, bridges are erected, roads are laid down, parks are designed, fortunes are made, lives are ruined, and power is amassed.” Even after fifty years, Caro deserves all the accolades he has received for writing The Power Broker. Despite its length and crushing density, it remains a compelling and masterful history of Moses, the workings of power, and the shaping of modern New York.
Robert Moses Statue - Babylon, New York
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