The Power Author: Robert Caro, Robert Moses, and the “Fall” of New York

Jason M. Barr          August 5, 2024

A few weeks ago, I was walking in Central Park on the Upper West Side. As I strolled past some benches near the Diana Ross Playground, I saw a young man, likely in his late twenties, with his face buried in a huge, white-covered book. When I got closer, I noticed he was reading a brand-new copy of Robert Caro’s 1974, 1,300-page biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

It struck me that I was witnessing a quintessentially New York act—to buy the Power Broker and read it in the park. In such an act, we glory in our ability to enjoy ourselves in the vast urban wonderland that is Central Park while reading a book about a man who built more parks in New York than anyone and yet who today is vilified as a power-hungry titan who initiated the fall of Gotham.

The Caro Narrative

It also occurred to me that Robert Caro’s legacy is not just that he provided a chronicle of 20^th-century New York’s most important public figure but has also affected the course of public policy.

Caro’s story is about the abuse of power—how Moses transmogrified into a Kurtz-like figure in The Heart of Darkness. Moses began his career as an ambitious idealist Progressive. His genius and endless drive to create parks and parkways pushed him forward and showed New Yorkers how government can improve people’s lives. Yet, with each success, he became increasingly power-hungry and gamed the system to feed his bottomless appetite.

As Caro writes,

Because of the arrogance that was so basic to his nature…Moses’ susceptibility to the addiction of power was unusually strong….Once Robert Moses had sought power only for the sake of his dreams, only as a means to an end; even then, however, there were signs that he was beginning to seek it for its own sake, as an end in itself. And the avidity with which he sought power—and the lengths to which he went to get it—revealed the depth of his need for it.

After World War II, as Caro’s portrait goes, Moses became deeply entrenched in his “Fortress of Solitude” on Randall’s Island as head of the Triborough Bridge Authority. With a wave of his hand, he clear-cut the “slums” that resulted in massive residential displacements; he ramrodded expressways through vibrant working-class neighborhoods; and his highway construction program drove New Yorkers to become automobile junkies while generating rampant white flight and the collapse of the subways.

Caro provides a gripping tale. We all love a Greek tragedy—the king who becomes so blinded by his power and is convinced of his own perfection that he is unable to see the damage he causes.

The Caro Effect

Yet, whereas Moses, the man, was in power until the early 1960s, Caro’s portrait of Moses has been “in power” since 1974. He hovers as a living ghost that haunts New York and holds vast influence, perhaps more so than the flesh-and-blood version ever did.

This is not to say that Moses’s career was not problematic. His policies were not race- or class-neutral and often harmed people of color and the poor to benefit the white middle class.  As a master bill writer, he crafted legislation that left him untouched by the democratic process to implement his programs as he saw fit. He swatted away community pushback with the epithet, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”

Bogeyman Moses

However, the overly simplistic residual of Caro’s book—the belief that people cling to—is that because Moses was a power-hungry bully after World War II and presumably harmed New York, we shouldn’t build important megaprojects that the city needs today (megaprojects that other cities worldwide are building easily).

Because Moses brooked no community input, the logic seemingly follows, we must allow full-on community input, and, by extension, local veto power that stops the city from addressing its problems head-on. The defining legacy of Caro’s book is that we have become paralyzed by the fear of Moses’s ghost which Caro conjured to life.

The Harm

New York faces 21^st-century crises that need to be addressed directly and strongly. Most notably, the city must become resilient against climate change, dramatically expand its housing stock, and upgrade and produce other services, including mass transit, to improve quality of life and prevent the high cost of living from pushing people out.

Today, Gotham is tiptoeing its way to climate change resilience. It builds out the shoreline here, adds some bluebelts there, and buys out some households over there. But the truth is that a patchwork of programs only offers partial protection against increasingly damaging storms, flooding, and sea level rise.

New York is on the path toward building $52 billion worth of seawalls that will be used sporadically to stop storm surges. Politically, erecting seawalls away from any residential neighborhood is the easy path, but practically, its cost-benefit ratio is questionable. Billions more will be spent against sea level rise and coastal disappearance.

The Housing Affordability Crisis

Just as important is housing affordability. Over half the city’s renters are rent-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income for housing, and one in three low-income households is severely rent-burdened, paying more than 50% of their income for an apartment. There is hardly any rental housing to be found with the current vacancy rate at a mere 1.4%, the lowest in half a century.

To his credit, Mayor Adams’s City of Yes Housing Opportunity will attempt to add more housing in each neighborhood, but it’s unlikely to have a meaningful impact on affordability. He has to tread gingerly to avoid total rejection of his plan.

Additionally, climate change resilience and housing affordability are not independent. Housing will become scarcer and more expensive as more land is removed from use because of rising sea levels or to mitigate flooding.

Moses: A 20^th-Century Centurion

In the decades following the Power Broker’s publication, there have been more nuanced reevaluations of Moses’s career and impacts. The most forceful and comprehensive is the 2007 book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, edited by Hillary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson (which contains a comprehensive list of Moses’s New York City projects). But the revisionists have been drowned out by the howling of the Caro’s spirit.

Lost in the collective memory is that Moses was a product of his time. He rose out of the Progressive Movement, frustrated with machine politics’ failure to eradicate urban ills like overcrowding and lack of fresh air and sunlight. His genius was in figuring out (for good and for bad) how to overcome nimbyism and status quo politics. He had the support of leaders and the people because he delivered the results that they wanted.

Moses existed within the political spectrum of reformers. On the far left were the socialists who sought to abolish private property. Just to their right were those who wanted to master plan the metropolis, deconcentrate it, and create a network of garden cities.  Moses pushed back against those that he saw as being too extreme. He decided that a project-by-project strategy was to be preferred to grand schemes. The populace agreed with him, being suspicious of grand plans that would disrupt the culture of laissez-faire New York.^[1]

Slum Clearance

Moses did not invent slum clearance.^[2] It had been the dream of reformers since after the Civil War with the rise of hyperdense slums in Five Points. In the 1890s, Jacob Riis’s expose, How the Other Half Lives, provided more fuel to the slum clearance movement.

One of the earliest examples of slum clearance was that of Mulberry Bend, a dense cluster of tenements in the Lower East Side that was notorious for its poverty, crime, and vice. It was cleared in 1904 and the land was converted into a park (today Columbus Park).

When Moses was in his heyday, slum clearance advocates were in positions of power through the New Deal programs. After World War II, Title I and public housing funds were made available on a level never seen before in human history.^[3]  Moses was able to grab the lion’s share for New York. He was largely supported in his endeavor because he was carrying out the work that previous reformers had been unable to accomplish. Moses was their Trojan Horse.

The Automobile

Moses did not invent America’s love of the automobile, and we can’t blame New Yorker’s car addiction on him (and which is certainly no worse as compared to the rest of the country). It’s good that he didn’t get his way in various projects, such as building elevated highways across Greenwich Village and SoHo, and it’s bad that he did not consider neighborhood impacts when helping to build America’s highway system within Gotham’s borders.

But America’s automobile dependence is based on a much larger institutional and cultural framework—subsidies for cheap oil, various Federal Highway Acts (the National Highway Act of 1956 had the Federal Government covering 90% of localities’ highway construction expenses), and the fact that people highly value the personal freedom that comes with cars.

Moses’s radial highway system for New York City was not his invention. As historian Leonard Wallock states:

Far from being novel, [Moses’s] ideas for a circumferential system of roadways were nearly identical to the ones proposed by the Regional Plan Association in 1929, which in turn were based on Edward H. Bennett’s Brooklyn City Plan (1914) and Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909).

Moses and “The Fall”

The most influential element of Caro’s book has been its subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” as if Moses destroyed New York. Yes, Moses did some bad things, and blaming him for Gotham’s post-industrial woes makes for good copy, but it’s just plain wrong.

In fact, after the massive wave of deindustrialization that hit manufacturing cities in the 1960s, New York fared better than most. It lost population from 1970 to 1980 but rebounded after that, and today, the city holds its highest population ever. Detroit and St. Louis, on the other hand, are still losing people. Chicago, Boston, and Newark, for example, have rebounded, but their populations remain far lower than their peak in the 1950s.^[4]

More broadly, while Moses is seen as godlike in his impact on New York, the truth is that there was nothing wholly unique about his building spree. As Wallock writes:

In The Power Broker…Moses is not merely the lawgiver but the creator, for he transcends the role of his Biblical progenitor and usurps the place of God. By making Moses the prime mover responsible for the city’s genesis, [Caro’s] interpretations disregard a crucial fact: from the 1920s through the 1960s, New York’s physical and spatial development was markedly similar to that of other large American cities….The Power Broker fail[s] to explain why other cities, not blessed with a Moses figure, assumed the same physical and spatial configuration as New York.

But Caro was writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s when New York was seemingly coming apart at the seams. To many, including Caro, the “fall” was brought about by Moses’s opening the barn doors. In hindsight, this seems to be a confusion of correlation with causation.

Ironically, in his Introduction, Caro hedges on Moses’s net impact, which is quite rich, given how powerful his book has become. He concludes:

Would New York have been a better place to live if Robert Moses had never built anything? Would it have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? ….

Moses himself, who feels his works will make him immortal, believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born. Perhaps he is right. It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived.

Time to Move On

It’s time to move on. Let’s put Moses in the past where he belongs. We need to learn the true lessons of Moses and use them as a guide to improve New York’s future, rather than clinging to outdated myths that keep the city nearly paralyzed. The true lessons of Moses are that big projects that will benefit New York can and should be built, but they also need to minimize the negative spillovers and unintended consequences and be done in a way that engenders trust and confidence in the government. Getting community input is vital, but community input should not mean complete veto power.

How to Vanquish Moses’s Ghost

However, once lodged in the public consciousness, myths are hard to kill.^[5] We long for simple explanations for complex phenomena, and when the “truthiness” of the simple explanations is strong, we cling to them. Blaming Moses for the planning mistakes of the 20^th century is easy because he stood in the center of these changes and was seemingly waving his magic wand like Lord Voldemort.

So, how do we remove the Moses Myth from blocking policies needed to keep New York safe, affordable, and viable in the 21^st century?  I believe the answer is twofold. One approach must come from the top down and the other from the bottom up.

Trust Building

First is that our leaders need to engender trust. Nimbyism is, in large part, motivated by a failure of confidence that the government will do what’s good for individual residents and that large-scale building projects will do more harm than good. The legacy of Moses and Caro was to remove this trust.

Enabling communities to have strong veto power over large projects forces policymakers to employ half-hearted measures instead. When these measures fail to achieve their purpose, residents blame the government for its inability to solve problems, thereby reinforcing their mistrust.

Leaders need to say, “Yes, people like Moses were heavy-handed and their decisions led to projects that today we feel were poorly implemented, but we must move forward. Some large problems require big solutions, and we can’t tiptoe our way to the future. The cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action and we have learned from the mistakes of the past and will not repeat them. Here are the ways that we have your back….”

Just as importantly, leaders need to create the institutional mechanisms that will bring residents and communities on board. Community input is vital and should be part of the bargaining process. However, all large-scale policies need to lay out the costs, benefits, and the likely negative spillovers, and directly address how these spillovers will be mitigated to reduce the fear of change. (I have spelled out examples here). One mechanism is that a large project also comes with a compensation fund to which people can apply if directly harmed and which is objectively administered by an impartial board.

Rebranding Moses

While leaders work on the issue of trust and compensation, we, the people, need to rebrand Moses and reframe how he is seen in the public eye.^[6] Yes, Moses did many things that, in hindsight, were regretful. But he also did many wonderful things. What’s wrong with a story about a complicated man who was a product of his time?

We need to change the narrative. We need to get the word out that Old Man Moses died in the 20^th century and we refuse to be afraid of the Spooky Ghost Moses. Let’s put him in the history books along with other 20^th-century figures like Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, and Fiorello La Guardia. It’s time to create a future with new leaders who help build New York by incorporating the lessons from the best version of Moses while leaving behind those from his worst side.

 

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Notes

[1] When Jane Jacobs emerged on the scene in the early 1960s, her antidote to planning was to eliminate it altogether. Death and Life directly response to the wide-eyed planners who wanted to remake the city from scratch or to build towers in the park. Her “cure” for neighborhoods was to leave them alone (or allow residents to veto any new construction) and permit mixed uses. In terms of city planning, her recipe for utopia was to build more playgrounds and cut long blocks in half to create more sidewalks and street frontages.

[2] Moses did not invent the tower-in-park style of housing either. It was an invention of reformers and visionaries, such as Le Corbusier, starting in the 1920s. The planning consensus during the Great Depression and beyond was that building towers surrounded by green space would cure urban ills.

[3] Arguably federal mortgage programs that created redlining and with which Moses was not involved had a greater effect on cities like New York than Moses’s housing and slum clearance projects.

[4] Ironically, public housing—something in which Moses had a more behind-scenes role in developing—today is a success story in New York. Given the massive affordability problem, NYCHA housing provides a huge benefit for those with low incomes. See Nicholas Dagen Bloom’s book, Public Housing that Worked: New York in the 20^th Century. More broadly, given recent economics research on the impacts of highways (such a Brinkman and Lin, 2024) and slum clearance on cities (such as Collins and Shester, 2013), measuring the net impact of Robert Moses on New York relative to what happened in other cities, would not be too difficult. To my knowledge, no one has specifically measured whether Moses’s projects were a net plus or negative for the city’s economic growth.

[5] Old myths die hard, including the first skyscraper myth, the Manhattan bedrock myth, and the myth of the Skyscraper Curse.

[6] Thanks to Daniel Golliher for his suggestion that it’s time to rebrand Moses.