Robert Caro. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Books. 1975. 1246 pages.
Robert Caro was a reporter for the New York Times who “wanted to get the goods on Robert Moses. But Moses wouldn’t talk.” Caro “could never get the big story.” Mary Perot Nichols was a writer and editor for the Village Voice. She was also Robert Moses’ nemesis. “Mary had the kind of anger that made abolitionists….”
In a brief stint as assistant director of the NYC Parks Department, “one of her jobs was to look around and get a feel for the whole place. The Arsenal up on Fifth Avenue in Central park — she got into a storage area under Central Park itself. There was an iron door built into a stone wall, and she said, ‘what’s behind there?’ And they said, ‘oh, it’s just a bunch of old records and things.’ She said ‘I want to see it.’… So they opened the iron door, and there is a cave-like, gigantic room, full of file cabinets with papers. She started opening the filing cabinets, and lo and behold, they’re the files of Robert Moses — all the goods on Moses, all his correspondence… She dials the phone and said, ‘Bob Caro, have I got a surprise for you. Meet me in Central Park.’” *
Mary Perot Nichols is a bit player in Caro’s book, but her discovery, recounted in this history of The Village Voice, added heft to the various other collections, private and public, that Caro was eventually to access in his biography of a man who for very good reasons resisted being known — Robert Moses.
Caro’s 1,200 pages describe how New York City got from A — a 19th century beacon to a world in pain — to B — mid-20th century spaghetti bowl of highways and bridges that produced gridlock more than any other single thing.
Caro began his story with the brilliance of this visionary man who wanted to reform the boss system of New York politics. His memory was astonishing; his ability to imagine was incomparable. What he imagined was a network of parks and parkways unlike anything in the world and suited to the needs of the world’s fastest growing city. The end of the story is that whatever public work, park or amenity you can name in New York City, chances are high that Bob Moses built it. The list is very very long — and would have been longer had Moses not ‘aged out.’ It would have been much shorter had the people of New York been able to stop him.
Moses was a master of amassing power; city and state authorities for decades were easily duped. So for 40 years, he held multiple state and city positions of authority — as many as 12 at one point — entitling him to control of almost every penny of public works money that New York could access (billions of dollars), with sole authority for use of those monies and little regard for the desires or ideas of anyone else.
He built highways, parks and parkways, bridges, tunnels, housing, beaches (hauling in fill that would actually reshape New York’s coastline), the Lincoln Center, the UN plaza, more highways, more parks, theaters, pools, parking garages, more highways.
It is tempting to appreciate his ability to Get Things Done, for which he was known.
But the ugly emerged fairly quickly in the development: highways that destroyed irreplaceable woodlands while preserving the lands of his wealthy or politically connected friends, housing projects that upended lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people (mostly people of little or no means, including one neighborhood that was razed by an expressway that took an inexplicable southern dip; the neighborhood was gone, but the dip saved a small parcel of land owned by a friend of a friend), parks that were designed to discourage use by Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers, public lands condemned for private use (Fordham University, for example), and perhaps most maddeningly, highways where there should have been subways.
Moses was a visionary man, but his vision was stuck in the pre-WWII era of Sunday drives on a nice day, not massive commutes on a daily basis. As the highway traffic on New York roads increased exponentially, Moses kept building highway, ignoring the voices of experts who said they would only make things worse.
Further, his long tenure was marked by what Caro calls “honest graft,” with Moses ensuring that anyone with any power to trade was on his payroll in some way — bankers, lawyers, politicians, construction contractors, union leaders and more. And he kept detailed dossiers of the graft, to ensure none of his legatees would turn on him. Any uprising among the people would be met with public sympathy by the mayor, borough president or local official, but undone behind closed doors, as Moses pulled strings. I’m not sure how Caro calls this “honest” anything. The people’s money made Moses’ beneficiaries very very rich.
Graft was only one source of his power, however. He also crafted legislation — approved by folks who thought he was trustworthy and didn’t examine the fine print — giving him the power he craved, including directorship of public authorities, authorities like the Triborough Bridge Authority, which issued bonds intended to build things and which were then to pay off the works and turn them over to the city. Under Moses, the law was tweaked so that nothing ever had to be paid off, and his public authorities got to keep all the money — tens of millions of dollars every year from tolls on everything that moved, completely under Moses’ control — hence the ability to pay all the people to fall in line.
When the city needed money, it had to turn to Moses, the only person in town with money to spare.
His other source of insularity and power was the relationship he built with the press for decades — especially the New York Times, which would bury criticism of him and publish his every announcement. He lied, he exaggerated, he created stories and facts out of whole cloth; and when that didn’t work, he smeared the reputations of those who challenged him, ruining the careers of brilliant and capable people along the way, including his brother who died in poverty, cheated out of even their mother’s bequest.
Robert Moses was visionary, yes, brilliant, but also contemptible. And there are state parks named after him today. In very many ways, he reminds me of Trump, driven by ego, vindictive, with a disdain for people, given to superlatives, and not a fan of democracy because it involves people who aren’t worthy of attention and slows things down. His power gave him, said Caro, “what was his greatest pleasure: the imposition of his will on others.”
The battles that unfold in the telling are big — with the press that eventually saw through him, with neighborhoods that he beat or couldn’t beat, with citizen groups trying to save landmarks or historical remnants or views of the ocean or the Statue of Liberty, with other countries who couldn’t fathom his management of the 1964-65 World’s Fair, with a small-time theatre producer who wanted to create Shakespeare in Central Park. Battles with mayors, governors, presidents — from the governor who built him up to the governor who finally took him down.
Written while Moses and many of his associates were still alive, Caro’s book is comprehensive in scope and detail. And not everyone agrees with his assessment. In a 2014 essay called “The bible of the modern American city: Why ‘The Power Broker’ is still one of our most important books” Henry Grabar contends Caro’s failure is that the work keeps “its eye on Moses’s victims rather than his achievements,” and he cited several academic and journalistic sources who believe Caro was off the mark. ** I found Moses contemptible in his disdain for the people harmed by his ego.
There were moments I chafed at all the detail that seemed irrelevant (like the many pages describing the Long Island coastline), but realized as I read how very foundational it was to Caro’s storytelling and Moses’ visioning. Shortly, I learned to relax and enjoy the telling. Caro’s authorial tic is in his use of dashes to set apart text in the middle of sentences. Much as I’ve done above. Inserts were often long and unwieldy, and caused me to read some sentences multiple times. I also had challenges from time to time following the story; he writes generally chronologically, but then diverts to separate chapters on the relationships with each governor and mayor, which mixes up the timeline.
But the story is fascinating, hard to put down after the first couple of chapters. There were moments in 1,200 pages when I wondered if I would ever get to the end, but when it came, I was sad to let it go.
This book is 50 years old, controversial and regularly reopened for discussion. The balance for me is that Moses was a man ultimately unworthy of praise. For very many reasons, the perspective and lessons of the time are as valuable as ever.
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* Romano, The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture. Public Affairs, Hachette Book Group, 2024.
**https://www.salon.com/2014/09/21/the_bible_of_the_modern_american_city_why_the_power_broker_is_still_one_of_our_most_important_books/