Robert Caro has gone on to greater national fame with his (still in the works) biographies of Lyndon Johnson. But in the New York area, particularly, he is renowned for his work, The Power Broker, about local planning czar Robert Moses.
It is the 50th anniversary of the publication of that Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which searingly has defined Moses in the generations since his 1981 death. Countless journalistic and urbanist iterations–and even songs and shows including a popular play starring Ralph Fiennes–have drawn on Caro’s themes. What’s been lacking in the popular or even academic culture is much revisionism on those story lines. Might this milestone year be time for more?
In the first place, it’s generally forgotten (except where the book is still sold) that the subtitle of the work was, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.” Granted, such wording is often the work of publishers trying to seize on a marketing moment, and 1974 was the onset of Gotham’s great financial siege, so this may not have been Caro’s choice. But the wording obviously proved untrue in any larger sense: Within a decade or so, New York City was on its way to new heights. (This was less true of New York State, where Moses also held sway, but the subtitle reference is clearly to the city. In any case, the state’s issues had little to do with Moses.)
Caro’s primary indictment of Moses is that he arrogantly used his unelected powers to rearrange metro New York’s transportation network to favor the automobile at the expense of non-motorists and the general quality of life. He did so by trying and in most cases succeeding in putting traffic around the city–or sometimes through its neighborhoods. The result was that the car either traduced those areas or sucked the life out of them by drawing the middle class in particular to the surrounding suburbs. In the process, Caro maintains, Moses often created more congestion. Many pages of the Power Broker are spent on the hours that solitary drivers were stuck in highway backups going to and from the core city (usually Manhattan).
All the while, Caro details, Moses dismissed opportunities to add to the metro area’s mass-transit capacity. A particular beef was his alleged contempt for including train lines in the middle of his signature late-stage highway, the Long Island Expressway. It’s true that Moses didn’t see much of a future for transit, although he (a resident of Babylon, on the island) could be excused for interpreting a downward trajectory for such lines, including the aging Long Island Rail Road. (Caro has also dined on the observation that Moses himself never learned to drive, having been chauffeured through his reign.)
Whether increased expenditure on transit early on, using the expansive bonding powers of Moses’ Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, would have staved off the “fall of New York” (in the 1960s and ’70s) is unknown. Of course, everyone would like signals, switches and other equipment not to have deteriorated and diminished commuter service. But as it turned out, the parkways that Moses laid out have proved more availing of the residence and work patterns of the modern economy than the hub-and-spoke configuration of most transit lines. The arterials that Moses created–heading into many parts of New York City–are vital to the big truck deliveries of today’s commerce. And, for better or worse, the Long Island Expressway brought Suffolk County at the island’s eastern end into the city’s ambit. People forget that until the 1970s, much of Suffolk looked to Connecticut for “city” connections, including broadcasts.
Highways also play a part in a second Caro indictment of Moses: that he was a racist. It is easy to believe, on the basis of recorded actions and words, that he was a white elitist of his time and place, tending to regard the plight of poorer blacks and Puerto Ricans as a function of their environments and upbringings. That partly drove his efforts at “slum clearance” in favor of higher-rise housing projects in greener surroundings (or for civic projects like Lincoln Center). His record there was decidedly mixed. It is also said, especially today, that his most controversial road project, the Cross Bronx Expressway, was the gutting of a functional if unfavored neighborhood. That is probably true, and the fumes from its traffic pervade the mostly people of color who live there today. But in the late 1950s when the Cross Bronx was undertaken, the residents were largely Jewish or ethnic Irish and Italian.
What has really limned Moses in this regard, however, is Caro’s narrative about the street overpasses on the Long Island parkways. As he told the story, Moses had them built low enough to prevent buses from using the thoroughfares and thereby reaching the beaches and other island retreats he had built for “the public.” To Caro, and all the histories that have followed his, this was a way to keep poor people (without cars) away. Moses and most lieutenants denied this, offering cost and design explanations, but the charge has stuck, long into an era when few are without the means to motor onto the parkways. Again, the Moses of his time was not especially mindful of everyday aspirations of those from the “slums.” But if his designs were overtly racist, what then–for instance–of the ornate, low-slung overpasses on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, built in the same era and without Moses’ involvement? Were these also venally drawn?
An extended discussion of this bridges matter appeared in one of the “fact check” analyses by Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post in 2021. It was precipitated by remarks of U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that drew on the Caro formulation. Kessler’s verdict was muddled but he surfaced an interesting scholarly debate that rarely makes it into Moses recapitulations.
Recreation is one more dark or at least gray element in Caro’s depiction of Moses. The “good Moses” of the early decades, battling Tammany Hall and fighting for popular access to the grounds of Nassau County land barons, is in the book’s pages, if less remembered now. (In an interview for CBS Reports in 1961, Moses was asked if he approved of socialism. Yes, he said, “but not the Communist kind.”) He was always a proponent of public playgrounds, courts and fields, even on the pastoral grounds of Central Park. Caro faults him for skimping on black and brown areas. But Power Broker doesn’t mention sizable East River Park*, which Moses brought to the teeming Lower East Side in 1939. (The author had to cut about a third from his original manuscript, so perhaps it was there.)
On Long Island today, Moses is demonized as a big road builder whose damage to the natural environment was only limited by his failure to realize some big schemes. The signature memory–again, much thanks to Caro–is of a coastal highway that would have traversed Fire Island. The idea seems hare-brained, but was in keeping with Moses’ goal of enhancing public (via private-vehicle) access to beachfront. On the western end of Fire Island he rehabbed an isolated beach space into what became Moses State Park-Long Island (this rare naming for him lately being contested) with a causeway connection to usher in millions of visitors. An avowed pragmatist, he indeed may have had a developer’s eye for raw nature, but in the process grabbed choice parcels before private interests could seize the day. In the Hamptons, Moses gets scant lingering credit for achieving the area’s first major open-space preservations, at Hither Hills and Montauk Point state parks, by 1924 when he was the parks chief there, his first major post.
Caro told that part of the story, yes, but as a set up for Moses’ tragic culmination as a rapacious bigot. Understandably, as he undertook his opus, Caro was seeking to correct years of deference or even adulation accorded “Master Builder” Moses by most news media until the 1960s. (A 1959 NBC program treated him as an oracle.)** That would have served a valuable purposes had Caro’s 1,166-page take been subject to the kind of reconsiderations normally given historical figures. But for 50 years it has stuck as the last word on a man about whom yet much more could be said. –Aug. 29, 2024
* In a cruel irony, the park was named in 2001 for former Mayor John V. Lindsay, whom Moses detested.
** A notable exception to this chorus was the cultural critic Lewis Mumford. Unusually, Moses would cite him by name in his rejoinders to detractors who “never built anything.”
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Tim W. Ferguson 