Home

As I wrote before I recently finished The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro. Originally published in 1974, The Power Broker is the impeccably researched true story of Robert Moses, the most powerful man in the history of New York. It starts in 1909, recounting Moses's college years, where he was the not-so-rich Jew amongst the many very rich Protestants at Yale. While there, he beame entralled with the idea of "good government", the early 20th century Progressive movement to remove the corruption and inefficiency from both public office and all non-elective government jobs as well (i.e. inspectors, road construction, etc.). He wrote an exhaustive paper on how to change government for the better - and no one cared. Brimming with great ideas and having no one to listen to them, he used to walk along the Hudson River on the Manhattan side and stare at the empty train tracks. It was here that he came up with his plan to create the West Side Highway and the park surrounding it. All these ideas were revolutionary in a time when government never did anything big - it couldn't because well over half of the annual budget was spent on graft and political payoffs. Well, that's not exactly true, because there was no budget. New York City had no idea how much it spent or how much it brought in through taxes. Then, Al Smith stepped in. A moderate reformer that came to power under Tammany Hall (the root of all corruption and control over the Democratic Party), Smith wanted some reform and since Moses had written such a good paper on it, hired him. Determined to never see his ideas go to waste again, Moses became great friends with Smith to the point of becoming and indispensible asset. As Smith went on to be Governor, Moses rose to control the Long Island Park System. Through it, he built every highway in Long Island (previously empty farmland and the playground for the rich - see "The Great Gatsby") to make his public parks accessible by car. That way, his great parks would not be limited to the rich, but instead to any family that could own a car. Notice that you had to own a car to get to them. This was a recurring theme. Moses hated the idea of the unwashed masses being able to board mass transit and visit his parks. So he built his highway overpasses too low for buses and made no provisions for trains, using all available transportation funds for his parkways (note: not highways, but parkways). Moses kept acquiring power through his ability to intimidate (he was a very large and strong man), his relationship with the press and the public (which loved his parks and parkways, even if their construction was laying the groundwork for the eventual implosion of the city), and for his shrewd ability to manipulate people as an intermediary. Eventually he was in charge of all public works in the state and city of New York and most importantly, the head of the Triborough Authority. The Triborough Authority was a quasi-public institution that was subject to no oversight and used the money from the tolls it generated (set way too high by the way). There is no way on earth that the maintenance of a bridge would cause them to even spend a fraction of what they were generating in tools. So, faced with the prospect of paying off the bonds on the bridge early and taking down the tolls (Moses's worst nightmare - it removed his power), Moses spent that money as fast as he could get it in to support building more bridges. From the Triborough Bridge came the 59th St, which begot the Battery Tunnel, which begot the Bronx-Whitestone, the Throgs Neck, and even the Verrazano. Every bridge and highway (excepting the FDR Drive - pushed through by FDR-who hated Moses with an unending passion) in New York is a result of that man. So every time you are sitting in traffic in New York because a highway was built with tight turns to limit speed (and make it more park like), or because for 70 years the metro area spent no money on mass transit, or because his highways are linked up to bridges that generated money for him, completely disregarding any form of urban planning - you can thank Robert Moses. Instead of helping traffic, every highway he built actually made it WORSE. Within a month of every highway built, it took longer to drive the same distance than it did over local roads before. How do you fix that problem? Build more parkways of course! That's enough for now, but there's more where that came from.