For the last six months or so, I have been plodding through one 1200 page book.
The book:
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro.
The quick review:
This book is hands down, the best book I have read in my life!
The long review:
To come. I will be posting ideas and points that I enjoyed over the next week or so.
Basically, it's the story of government and politics in the State and City of New York between 1920 and 1970. This story cannot be told without the man who helped make this country the traffic-jam-ridden, mass transit deprived place it is today and is almost solely responsible for the ghetto neighborhoods in New York City. That is: Robert Moses. He also built almost every bridge and tunnel in NYC and New York State along with the vast majority of parks, especially throughout Long Island.
Two cool facts found in this book:
1) Robert Moses, creator of the parkway - never drove a car in his life.
2) Central Park used to have a casino.
To wrap it up for now, I will leave you with one of the reviews on the back cover of the book. It is in my mind, the most complimentary review humanly possible.
"The feverish hype that dominates the merchandising of arts and letters in America has so debased the language that, when a truly exceptional achievement comes along, there are no words left to praise it. Important, awesome, compelling -- These no longer summon the full flourish of trumpets this book deserves. It is extraordinary on many levels and certain to endure."
-- William Greider, The Washington Post Book World
Someday, I want it said that something I have done is so great that words themselves lack the capability of properly praising it. Now, that is a review.
One of the repeating themes in my life is that I have all these goals and ideas of things I want to do or achieve. However, they often occur to me while I am busy, so I write them down so that I will get to them when I have the time.
Only one problem... even when I have the time, I find myself putting off these things that I later wish I had spent time on.
For instance... this site. Every night when I go to sleep, I think of a million things I want to write. Then, I wake up... and put it off for awhile. Then I plan to write something, but can't come up with any great ideas, so I put it off. Next, of course, it starts to become too late, so I postpone it until tomorrow, when I can dedicate the proper amount of time.
I find myself doing this with phone calls to family and friends as well. I want to call people and talk, but I don't have the time that they deserve, so I push it off until later, when I can set aside the proper amount of time to do the job right. That perfect period never comes, which only makes the call that much more important, which requires even more time, which never comes. Rinse. Repeat.
Well, at least I've got this server stuff underway, so I can end the paralysis of analysis that has been swamping me the past few days. Now that I've just gone ahead and done it, I can no longer waste hours thinking about whether or not I should pick up more bandwidth. Next, I am going to prove to myself that I can both design a good website and invest wisely in the stock/options market. Good luck to me.
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.
1964 - Moses was finished with highwaybuilding, NYC area had 899 miles of roads. LA the highway city had 459.
Everywhere you went required a car, greatly increasing traffic
Lane of expressway 1,500 cars per hour, in 1955 requiring 60 new lanes by 1985 just to handle cars in Queens.
By allowing for rail tracks in the center of a highway median - trains could carry 40,000 passengars per hour a 13X increase in the same space. Could have been done for negligible increase in price.
A big bus-only lane - wider, divided with bigger turning radii, could handle 20,000 people/hour. - one lane in each direction is equal to building an extra 8 lane highway. It must be exclusive though.
For instance, adding a seven mile train line to middle of Marathon Parkway, would have cost 20 mil. 25 mins to Queens and 40 mins to Nassau would have been saved.
in comparison, Moses proposed spending 500 mil to increase LIE's capacity by one lane - 1500 cars/hour., less than the 6500 people a day the marathon extension would have saved.
Building a train line along the LIE would have cost 100 mil or 1/5th the road expansion. Doing both would cost an additional 20 mil on top of the 500, money the Triborough had in cash reserves.
Mid town elevated expressway.
made sure all 204 bridges and were too low and every exit ramp radius was too small for buses
To have sufficient mass transit, you need density, or people had to get in their cars anyway. Moses's highways made sure that density would never happen.
