The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro is a massive book - my copy was 1162 pages NOT including the lengthy notes and bibliography. It is a book that I've heard rave reviews about for years and resisted purchasing only because of that size ... not because the length is daunting, but because it's not available in electronic format.

At all.

That's a deal breaker for me ... or at least, it was, until I no longer could resist the siren songs of the book - it won the Pulitzer Prize and people whose opinions I really respect kept talking it up. So I took the plunge and bought it, and read it over the last month or so.

Totally worth it.

Robert Moses is someone whose name I never knew - but he's largely responsible for SO much of what everybody considers modern New York -- here's just a sample of what almost certainly wouldn't exist in its current form without Robert Moses:

The Triborough Bridge, Jones Beach State Park, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, West Side Highway, the Long Island parkway system, and the Niagara and St. Lawrence power projects, to name a few. He preserved and created 2,567,256 acres of parks. He built 658 playgrounds in New York City, 416 miles of parkways and 13 bridges.

And yet ... it is impossible to simply call Moses a hero.

Robert Moses was a hero. Robert Moses was a villain.

Robert Moses was a visionary. Robert Moses was incredibly close-minded.

It is easy to be in awe of what Robert Moses did, and just as easy to be disgusted with what Robert Moses did. It is easy to feel envy for Robert Moses, and easy to feel pity for him.

I could go on, but importantly, this is the EPIC story of Robert Moses, who not only created all these parks, bridges and other public entities, but did so over almost 40 years, through seven governors - and in most of that time, in many ways had more power and control than those very governors. The tale of how Moses became the man he was is fascinating and heartbreaking - because its complicated, like life.

Moses rose to power by turning on his values and doing everything he could to gather power for himself - all while he presumably was doing things for the people. He spent the equivalent of $150 billion in state and federal funds - and did so only according to his plans. Anyone else who wanted to suggest changes - changes that would, as an example, not destroy entire neighborhoods for a parkway, but instead gently route the parkway around the town - were threats to that power. And so he crushed those attempts.

Moses was not a fan of the very people he seemed to be building for - he refused to address mass transportation, building more bridges instead (which mathematically cannot help in the volume that subways and buses can). Moses found ways to cement his own power, in political, practical and financial terms that are absolutely fascinating. He got away with this because of the genius of his financial funding of the Triborough Authority - he got banks to sell bonds worth millions, and instead of ever paying off the debt service, he used the funds made from tolls, etc., to develop new projects. Had he paid off those bonds, his power would have gone away with that debt.

His negative impact -- destroying lower-class towns and buildings, while routing around the estates of the wealthy, failing to use those vast funds to truly address the traffic and congestion (and the misery that comes with commuting in it), are brutal. One quote from the book emphasizes this:

“To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons — more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods.”

Moses didn't want low-class things like buses on his parkways so he built the overpasses to be too low for buses to clear - hence, folks who take buses got no benefit. He refused to put even the room for a train to ride in the center of new auto parkways, meaning they'd be costly and prohibitive forever after.

Did he do all this because he was racist and class-ist? Not all - but that's certainly a factor. But the real reason he wouldn't allow ANY changes to HIS plans were that if someone could allow a single change, then his power was eroded. The string would start to unravel.

But similarly ... without that same arrogance, power and drive, those bridges, parks and beaches never get built. Did the end justify the means? As one example, many people were pressing him to use funds to build the "Second Avenue Subway" for what would have likely been $25-30 million, a very large sum. I thought about this and realized there still was no Second Avenue Subway - this eventually (in 2006) did start development, at an almost certain UNDER estimate of $17 billion.

It would take way too long to detail all the remarkable points of The Power Broker - which details in perfect measures the man and what he did - and the book picks up speed and momentum as it develops - so I won't. But it's brilliant. Truly a genius book and one I can't help but "see" in daily life. As I write this, the Bay Bridge is closed for the final transition to the new extension - and people are complaining about its budget, etc., and I think of how Moses got so many projects done. He lied about how much they'd cost, and then shrugged later - are you going to leave a bridge half-built? You can't. I wondered how he could get away with that ... and then I thought about if a half-built Bay Bridge sat empty and incomplete next to Treasure Island, and that any Governor would lose his job over that. I hear about a road being paved in the Amazon to help Ecuador dig for oil, and I think of Robert Moses paving roads where none were in remote Long Island.

The book will change how you look at power, at how public entities are run (for this progressive voter, it was eye opening to say the least) and at the individual of Robert Moses. It is recommended for basically everybody. It's a challenge, but read it.

I will add this - while reading it, I discovered the following blog of someone who kept a running diary of the book as he read it. It's very helpful and I'd recommend it to anyone as a nice supplement to use while reading it yourself.

Rating: 9.5/10.0