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As he rose in politics, an idealistic urban planner discovered that decisions about the city’s future would not be based on democracy. They would be based on power.
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The power of most public officials is measured in years. The power of Robert Moses was measured in decades. It was formally handed to him on April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government. He held it for more than four decades thereafter—until the day in 1968 when he realized that he had either misunderstood Nelson Rockefeller or been cheated by him and, in either case, had lost the last of it—and it was a power so substantial that in the fields in which he chose to exercise it no mayor of New York City or governor of New York State seriously challenged it. He held this power during the administrations of six governors—Alfred E. Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman, Thomas E. Dewey, and W. Averell Harriman as well as Rockefeller. He held it during the administrations of five mayors—Fiorello LaGuardia, William O’Dwyer, Vincent R. Impellitteri, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., and John V. Lindsay.
And with this power Robert Moses shaped New York.
Any map of New York proves it. The very shoreline of the city was different before he came to power. He hammered bulkheads of steel deep into the muck beneath rivers and harbors and crammed into the space between bulkheads and shore masses of earth and stone, shale and cement that hardened into fifteen thousand acres of new land.
Standing out from the map’s delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines that denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move—roads whose location does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city’s people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway, and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway, and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway, and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.
Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and the four island boroughs are linked to it and to each other by bridges. Since 1931, seven major bridges have been built in the city—immense structures, anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to circle the earth. Those bridges are the Triborough, the Verrazano, the Throgs Neck, the Marine Parkway, the Henry Hudson, the Cross-Bay, and the Bronx-Whitestone. Robert Moses built every one of those bridges.
Scattered throughout New York stand groves of tall luxury apartment houses built under urban-renewal programs. Alongside some of these groves stand college lecture halls and dormitories. Alongside one stands Lincoln Center, the world’s costliest and most imposing cultural center, and alongside another stands the New York Coliseum. Once, other buildings stood on the sites of the groves: stores, factories, tenements that had been there for a century, large apartment houses that were still serviceable and sturdy. Robert Moses decided that these buildings would be torn down, and it was Robert Moses who decided that the dormitories, the cultural center, the Coliseum, and the new apartment houses would be erected in their place.
The eastern edge of Manhattan was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. Northward from the bulge of Corlears Hook loom two miles of drab, hulking apartment houses. Almost all of them are public housing. Together with similar structures huddled alongside the expressways or set in rows beside the Rockaway surf, they contain a hundred and seventy-six thousand apartments and six hundred thousand tenants—a population bigger than that of Minneapolis. These buildings were constructed by the New York City Housing Authority, almost half of them between 1945 and 1958. Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority, and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public-housing project laid without his approval.
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Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935) is an American journalist and author known for his celebrated biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.
After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a biography of the former president.
For his biographies, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, the National Book Award, the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that “best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist”), two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the H.L. Mencken Award, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, the D.B. Hardeman Prize, and a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
(Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)