Robert Moses

Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was the master builder of 20th century New York City and its suburbs. As the shaper of a modern city, one of his few peers is Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and he was easily the most polarizing figure in the history of urban planning. Although he never held elective office, Moses was arguably the most powerful person in New York City government from the 1930s to the 1950s. Moses literally changed shorelines, built roadways in the sky, and transformed vibrant neighborhoods forever. His decisions favoring highways over public transport formed the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation. Moses was not without his critics, however. These critics have pointed to many things that they say taint Moses' legacy. The most common criticisms of Moses include the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in New York City, contributing to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the decline of public transport. On the other hand, Moses' projects were also considered by many to be necessary for the region's development, and Moses participated in the construction of two huge World's Fairs, one in 1939 and the other in 1964. To Moses' critics, however, he will always be remembered for believing that "cities are for traffic," and "if the ends don't justify the means, what does?"

Caro

Moses' image suffered a further blow in 1974 with the publication of The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Caro's 1,200-page opus (edited from over 3,000 pages long) largely destroyed the remainder of Moses's reputation. Caro was deliberately intensely critical of Moses because, in 1974, there were many people who only knew the good Moses had done. Many people had come to see Moses as a bully who disregarded public input, but they hadn't known that he had stolen his brother's inheritance (in the 1930s, before Moses's rise to prominence), nor how cruel he was in the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, nor how he willfully neglected public transit. Moses' reputation today is in many ways how Caro left it.

Related Topics:
1974 - The Power Broker - Robert Caro - Cross-Bronx Expressway

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Caro paints Moses as uniquely destructive to the urban fabric, but also was fair in leaving the defining question of the entire book as: the city would have been a very different place, maybe good, maybe bad, if Moses hadn't been around. Other US cities were doing the same thing as New York in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Boston and Seattle, for instance, both built highways straight through their downtown areas. The New York City intelligentsia of the '40s and '50s largely believed in such prophets of the automobile as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe and supported Moses. Many other cities, like Newark, Chicago and St. Louis, also built massive, unattractive public housing projects.

Related Topics:
Boston - Seattle - Intelligentsia - Le Corbusier - Mies van der Rohe - Newark - Chicago - St. Louis

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