Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We have a massive
stack of research on the table today. And honestly,
looking through it all, I feel like we're about
to talk about a mythological figure rather than
a bureaucrat. That's such a good way to put it.
You know, usually when we talk about history,
we're talking about presidents, generals, maybe
a revolutionary or two, people whose faces are
on the currency. Right. The elected officials.
The ones who lead armies. Exactly. But today
we are talking about a guy who never held an
elected office. He never got a single vote from
the public for anything. And yet, if you are
anywhere near New York, New Jersey or Connecticut,
you are essentially living inside a machine that
he built. It's not just living inside a machine
he built. It's living in a physical reality he
sculpted. We are talking about Robert Moses.
And you're right. Bureaucrat is the technical
term, but it feels woefully inadequate. It really
does. If you look at a satellite map of the New
York metropolitan area, just pull up Google Maps
and zoom out, you see the arteries of the highways,
the placement of the bridges, the vast green
swaths of parks on Long Island. The clusters
of high -rise housing projects in the Bronx and
Manhattan. All of it. That isn't a natural formation.
That is the fingerprint of one man. It's actually
kind of terrifying when you put it that way.
I was looking at the numbers in the prep material,
and they don't even seem real. 658 playgrounds.
Staggering. 416 miles of parkways. 13 bridges.
2 .6 million acres of parkland. I mean, most
mayors are lucky if they get a couple of bike
lanes and a library renovation done in two terms.
How does one human being do all of this? That
is the paradox we have to unravel today. Robert
Moses is this massive contradiction. On one hand,
he's probably the greatest builder in American
history. He physically created the modern suburb.
The whole concept of commuting by car from Long
Island into the city. That was him. He created
the concept of the parkway. He built Jones Beach,
which is still considered a masterpiece of public
space. But on the other hand, the cost of that
construction, human, social, political, was just,
it was staggering. Right. He displaced hundreds
of thousands of people. He destroyed entire neighborhoods.
He entrenched segregation through concrete. And
he did it all while sitting in an office appointed,
not elected, for 44 years. 44 years. That's the
hook for me. The 44 years part? Yeah. Presidents
get four years, maybe eight if they're lucky.
Mayors come and go. But Moses stayed. He was
there for Al Smith. He was there for FDR. He
was there for LaGuardia. He was there for Rockefeller.
He outlasted every single one of them. He saw
them as temporary employees. So the mission for
this deep dive isn't just to list what he built.
I mean, anyone can read a Wikipedia list. We
need to figure out how he did it. What was the
mechanism? How does a guy with a PhD in political
science hack the democratic system so effectively
that he becomes more powerful than the people
who are technically in charge of him? And to
understand the how. We have to go way, way back.
And I think we have to strip away the image of
the old man Moses, you know, the heavy scowling
guy in all the photos, and look at where he started.
Okay. Because he didn't start as a power broker.
He started as an idealist. Yeah, this really
surprised me in the research. He wasn't some,
you know, mob boss type. He was a rich kid from
New Haven, Connecticut, born in 1888. Right.
His parents were wealthy German Jews. His father
was a successful department store owner who retired
early and they moved to a townhouse on East 46th
Street in Manhattan. He had every advantage.
And the education to match. Yale, then Oxford,
then the Ph .D. in political science from Columbia.
He was swimming in academia. He was brilliant.
I mean, a legitimate genius. At Oxford, he fell
in love with the British civil service system.
He got obsessed with the idea of a government
run by the best and brightest, a meritocracy.
Uncorrupted by messy politics and backroom deals.
So he comes back to New York. It's the progressive
era. And he has this burning desire to fix things.
He's on fire with it. He looks at New York City
in the 1910s and all he sees is Tammany Hall.
Right. And for listeners who aren't history buffs,
Tammany Hall was basically the political machine
that ran New York for decades. It was corruption
central. absolute patronage, bribes, jobs for
the boys. You got a city job because you knew
somebody who knew somebody, not because you were
qualified. It was everything he hated. Exactly.
It was inefficient and it was dirty. Moses looked
at that and thought, this is irrational. Government
should be scientific. It should be based on merit
and efficiency. So he starts working for these
reform bureaus. And what was he doing there?
He's writing these incredibly detailed, almost
obsessive plans on how to, like, rate the efficiency
of garbage collectors based on the tonnage they
picked up per hour. Wow. He's designing civil
service exams. He's trying to bring his Oxford
ideal to the grimy streets of New York. And failing
miserably, right? The notes say he got completely
stonewalled. Oh, completely. The politicians
laugh at him. You have this arrogant intellectual
academic coming in with his charts and his graphs
telling these seasoned street politicians how
to run their city. They must have loved that.
They chewed him up and spit him out. He was humiliated.
He quit in frustration. And that failure, I think,
is the single most important moment of his entire
life because he realized that being right wasn't
enough. Having the best plan wasn't enough. You
needed power. You needed power. That's the classic
villain origin story moment. You know, the idealist
gets crushed by the system and decides that next
time he's going to bring a tank. And his tank
was Governor Al Smith. This is where the story
really, really starts. Al Smith was a rough -edged,
cigar -chomping politician from the Lower East
Side, the total opposite of the refined academic
Moses. But Smith saw something in him. Smith
was smart. He saw that Moses had ideas, incredible
ideas, and more importantly, Moses had an unbelievable
inexhaustible energy. Moses could work 18 hours
a day, seven days a week. He just never stopped.
So Smith brings him into his inner circle in
Albany. And this is where Moses discovers his
superpower. It wasn't public speaking. He was
actually terrible at that. It wasn't shaking
hands and kissing babies. It was drafting bills.
I want to dig into this because bill drafting
sounds like the most boring superpower imaginable.
It sounds like being really good at filing your
taxes or something. But in the notes, it describes
this as a weapon. How does writing a bill give
you power? This is the absolute genius of Robert
Moses. Most people write laws to be understood.
Moses wrote laws to be misunderstood or rather
to be ignored by the people voting on them until
it was way too late. What does that mean? He
realized that legislators in Albany were busy.
They were often, frankly. Lazy. And they didn't
read the fine print. So when he drafted legislation
to, say, create a new parks commission or a planning
board, he would bury the real power in the definitions
section. In the definitions. Or in cross -references
to other obscure laws that nobody remembered.
He would write a beautiful, high -minded preamble
about the public good and green space for the
children and then slip in a sentence on page
47 that gave him dictatorial authority. Could
you give us an example of what that looks like
in practice? Because it sounds so abstract. Sure.
Let's look at the phrase appropriation of land.
A normal bill might say the state can buy land
for a park if the owner agrees to sell it at
a fair price. Very straightforward. Okay. Moses
would draft a clause that allowed for entry and
appropriation by the filing of a map. It sounds
like boring, technical, procedural language.
Right, it just sounds like paperwork. But what
it meant, in practice, was that Moses' commission
could walk onto your private property, drive
a stake into the ground, go back to the county
clerk's office and file a map of the land they'd
just staked out, and boom, the land belongs to
the state. Immediately. Wait, immediately. Without
a court order. Immediately. You can sue for the
price later, but you cannot stop him from taking
the land. The bulldozers could be there the next
day. He hid the raw power of eminent domain inside
boring procedural language that no one bothered
to question. That is devious. So the legislators
vote on it thinking, oh, this is a nice wholesome
park spill. And the next thing you know, Moses
is bulldozing private estates on Long Island.
That is exactly what happened. And the owners
are calling the police, and Moses just waves
a piece of paper and says, actually, this is
my land now. Read the law you passed. That's
precisely what he did on Long Island. He wanted
to build the northern and southern state parkways
and Jones Beach. But to do that, he had to go
through the playground of the robber barons,
the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the financier.
They did not want that. They hated him. They
didn't want the rabble from the city driving
their noisy cars out to their quiet, exclusive
countryside. They had armies of high priced lawyers
ready to fade him. But he beat them. He outmaneuvered
them legally before they even knew it was happening.
He used those boring bills to seize their land
before they could even get an injunction. He
played a different game, and he wrote the rules
himself. This all leads to his first real consolidation
of power. In the 1920s, under Governor Smith,
he oversees this massive reorganization of the
New York state government. Right. He takes something
like 187 different overlapping inefficient state
agencies and shrinks them down to just 18 streamlined
departments, which on the surface sounds like
great efficient government. I'm a good government.
What he always wanted. It was great efficiency.
But it was also a massive centralization of power.
And in the process, he creates brand new entities
like the State Council of Parks and the Long
Island State Park Commission. And let me guess,
he gets himself appointed to lead them. Naturally.
But here's the trick. He wrote the law so that
the term of the parks commissioner was six years
long. Okay. The governor's term at the time was
only two years. Oh, I see where this is going.
So even if a new governor gets elected and hates
his guts. Moses can just wait him out. He's got
four more years on his term. He created a fiefdom
for himself that existed outside the normal electoral
cycle. It was insulated from politics. And this
became the model for everything he did after.
He wasn't just building parks. He was building
a state within a state. Perfectly put. He was
building a fortress of power, brick by legal
brick. And he didn't stop with one job. The list
of titles he held is just comical. At one point,
he had 12 different positions simultaneously.
Twelve, yes. New York City Parks Commissioner,
Chairman of the State Council of Parks, City
Planning Commissioner, Chairman of the Triborough
Bridge Authority, Chairman of the State Power
Authority. The list just goes on and on. Why?
I mean, was it just pure ego? Or was there a
strategic reason to have that many business cards?
Oh, it was pure strategy. It was a web. It made
him irremovable. Oh, so. Okay, so let's say you're
the mayor of New York. And let's pick a strong
one, like Fiorello LaGuardia, the little flower.
He was a very powerful, very strong -willed mayor.
Right. You get mad at Moses because he's doing
something you don't like with the city parks.
He's tearing something down or refusing to build
something. You, as mayor, want to fire him. So
I call him into my office and say, you're fired.
And Moses looks at you and says, OK, fire me
as city parks commissioner. That's your right.
But I'm still the head of the state parks council,
which, by the way, controls all the state parks
that happen to be inside your city limits. And
he would continue. I'm also the head of the Triborough
Bridge Authority, which has the money and the
engineering talent you desperately need for your
other public works projects. So if you fire me
from job A, I will use my power from job B and
job C to strangle your administration. I'll rock
your permits. I'll withhold my funds. I'll make
your life a living hell. He weaponized the bureaucracy
against his own bosses. He was woven so tightly
into the fabric of the government that you couldn't
cut him out without unraveling the whole sweater.
Precisely. It was a system of mutually assured
destruction, but only he had his finger on the
button. And he used these positions to leverage
each other constantly. He would use state money
to force the city to do something or city land
to leverage federal money. He was the only person
who knew where all the levers were. Because he
was the one pulling all of them. Exactly. But
levers and titles are one thing. You still need
cash. I mean, concrete costs money. Steel costs
money. And usually in a democracy, if you want
money, you have to go to the city council or
the state legislature, hat in hand, and ask for
it. And they can say no. And Robert Moses hated
asking. He despised it. He hated being dependent
on politicians who could cut his budget or question
his vision. So he found a way to never have to
ask again. He perfected the public authority.
This is the money machine we have in our outline.
Yeah. I think this is the part that most people
don't understand about how New York or really
any major infrastructure works. We hear port
authority or tribal bridge authority and we just
think. government departments but it's not is
it it's a fundamental misunderstanding so what
is it a public authority is a corporation it's
a quasi -governmental entity created by the state
to do a specific job usually building and running
something that generates revenue like a bridge
or a port it operates like a business it operates
exactly like a business it issues bonds which
are basically loans from private investors on
wall street to get the cash to build the bridge
Then it charges tolls to the cars crossing the
bridge. That toll money is then used to pay back
the investors with interest. Okay, that sounds
pretty standard. You borrow money to buy a house,
you pay the mortgage, and eventually you own
the house free and clear. So when the bridge
is paid for, the tolls should stop or the money
should go back to the city, right? Yeah, that
was the original intent of the law. And that's
the democratic check on the authority's power.
Once the debt is gone, the authority is supposed
to dissolve. But that's not what happened with
Moses. Not at all. Let's look at the Triborough
Bridge, the massive complex connecting Manhattan,
Queens, and the Bronx. It opened in 1936, and
it was a cash cow from day one. The tolls were
just pouring in, millions and millions of dollars
a year. So the bonds were going to be paid off
pretty quickly. Way ahead of schedule. But Moses
saw this looming deadline. If the bonds were
paid off, the tribe or bridge authority would
go out of existence and he would lose his independent
power base. He'd lose his money. He'd have to
go back to begging the legislature. So what did
the best bill drafter do? He found a loophole
in corporate finance. He rewrote the bond contracts.
He essentially went to the investors and said,
hey, instead of me paying you back now, how about
we refinance? I'll keep the debt going and I'll
use all this extra toll money as collateral to
issue new bonds to build another bridge. The
Bronx Whitestone Bridge. Exactly. And then a
tunnel. And then another highway. He created
a cycle where the debt was never fully retired.
The Triborough Bridge Authority became a perpetual
motion machine of money and construction. It's
like having a credit card with an infinite limit
where the minimum payment is always covered by
the tolls and you can just keep spending the
principal and whatever you want. And here is
the absolute kicker. Because the authority was
a separate corporation with its own independent
revenue source, Moses didn't need tax money.
He didn't need the mayor or the governor or the
city council to approve his budget. He had his
own bank account. He had his own bank account.
In the 1940s and 50s, the Triborough Authority
had more disposable income, more cash on hand
than the city of New York itself. That is just
mind blowing. Right. He essentially privatized
a core function of public infrastructure for
his own use. And he locked it down legally. This
is the final turn of the screw. In the bond contracts,
the agreements with the Wall Street investors,
he included covenants. These are legally binding
promises to the bondholders. What did they say?
They said that the state of New York and the
city of New York could not interfere with the
authorities operations, reduce its powers. or
limit its ability to collect tolls, as long as
a single bond was still outstanding. And since
he was always issuing new bonds? The bonds were
never paid off, and here's why that matters.
The U .S. Constitution has a clause that forbids
states from impairing the obligation of contracts.
So if a governor tried to fire Moses or take
his toll money, Moses' lawyers would sue, and
the Supreme Court would step in and say, you
can't do that, you're breaking a contract with
Wall Street. He engineered a situation where
democracy literally could not touch him. That
is, honestly, it's brilliant in a terrifying,
Machiavellian way. It was a masterpiece of legal
and financial engineering. And that financial
independence is what allowed him to shape the
city for the next 30 years without anyone being
able to stop him. So let's talk about what he
actually did with all that power and all that
money. Because we can't deny the sheer volume
of stuff he built. And a lot of it happened during
the absolute worst time, the Great Depression.
Right. The 1930s, the country is on its knees.
Unemployment is at 25 percent. Franklin D. Roosevelt
starts the New Deal. The federal government is
basically printing money through agencies like
the WPA, the Public Works Administration, to
try to get people back to work. And they're desperate
for projects. They're desperate. But here's the
catch. You can't just throw money at a vague
idea. You need blueprints. You need engineering
surveys. You need cost estimates. You need to
be in lingo, shovel ready. And most cities weren't
ready. They were broke. Their planning departments
were shells. Exactly. Most cities had vague concepts.
We'd like a park over here someday. But Robert
Moses. Moses had been working for years. He had
a massive salaried staff of the best engineers
and architects paid for by his early state commissions.
And he had them designing projects that he didn't
even have the money for yet. He was planning
for a future he couldn't afford. He had drawers,
literal file cabinets full of blueprints, the
Triborough Bridge, the West Side Highway, dozens
of parks and pools. So when the federal spigot
opened, Moses showed up in Washington and said,
I can put 50 ,000 men to work tomorrow. Here
are the plans. And Washington must have just
seen him as a savior. He was their dream come
true. So New York City got a massive, completely
disproportionate share of New Deal funding simply
because Robert Moses was the only guy in the
country who was ready to spend it and spend it
fast. And one of the most famous results of that
spending spree was the swimming pools. the summer
of 1936. It was a legendary summer. It's the
middle of a brutal heat wave in the dead center
of the Depression. People are suffering. And
in one summer, Moses opens 11 massive outdoor
swimming pools. McCarran in Brooklyn. Astoria
in Queens. Highbridge in Manhattan Sunset Park.
All over the city. And these weren't little wading
pools. These were aquatic cathedrals. Some of
them could hold 10 ,000 people at a time. I was
looking at photos of the Astoria pool from opening
day. It looks like a Roman spectacle. The scale,
the architecture, the lighting, it's unbelievable.
He used a grand architectural style, a mix of
streamlined, modern, and classical. It was meant
to be imposing, monumental. He used underwater
lighting, which was cutting -edge, expensive
technology at the time. Why go to all that expense
during the Depression? He included heating systems
in the filtration plants so they could extend
the swimming season into the spring and fall.
He wanted the poor children of New York, kids
who lived in sweltering tenements to feel like
they were entering a palace. He had this philosophy
that public didn't have to mean cheap or ugly.
He wanted to give them the best. That sounds
incredibly noble. The best for the most. But
this is where we have to pivot to the darker
side of the ledger, because you can't talk about
Moses and his cools or his parkways without talking
about who he thought the public was and who was
allowed to enjoy these creations. This is the
shadow that defines the second half of Robert
Caro's book, The Power Broker, and it's the part
of his legacy that is the most debated and the
most toxic. The accusation is that Moses was
deeply racist and classist and that he designed
the physical city to enforce those prejudices.
Let's address the specific allegations because
they're explosive. The cold water story is the
one that always comes up in relation to the pools.
The idea that he deliberately kept the pool water
cold to keep black people out. Is that true?
Well, let's look at the source for that claim.
Robert Caro, in his book, interviewed one of
Moses' longtime high -level aides. And this aide
claimed, on the record, that Moses held a racist
stereotype that African Americans didn't like
cold water. And that, based on this belief, He
instructed the pool engineers to lower the temperature
in pools located in or near black neighborhoods
to deter them from coming. That sounds like a
cartoon villain. Turn down the thermostat. It's
so petty and overtly racist. But is there any
hard proof? And that's the problem for historians.
There are no memos found to date that say official
order make the water colder in Harlem. There
are no engineering logs showing temperature manipulation.
So strictly speaking, we can't verify the physical
act. The heaters were installed in all the pools.
So it might just be an anecdote. It might be,
but the fact that his close associates believed
he was capable of it and told Caro about it speaks
volumes about the culture in his organization
and his own reputation among his staff. But there
is another much more famous allegation that has
much more physical, concrete evidence. The low
bridges on the parkways to Long Island. The low
bridges. This is the one that really gets me.
If you drive on the Southern State Parkway on
Long Island today. the overpasses the beautiful
arched stone -faced bridges that go over the
road are incredibly low dangerously low sometimes
trucks are always hitting them They are. And
the allegation, again, laid out in meticulous
detail by Caro, is that Moses designed them that
way on purpose to prevent buses from using the
parkway. Because in the 1930s and 40s, poor people
and people of color overwhelmingly did not own
cars. They relied on public transportation, on
buses. So buses can't fit under the bridges.
Then the rabble can't get to Jones Beach. Jones
Beach was Moses's pride and joy, his masterpiece.
He wanted it to be a pristine, orderly, middle
class escape. want the chaotic, diverse, working
class crowds that you found at Coney Island.
So by keeping the bridges low, he effectively
filtered the population by class and by extension,
race. Now, I have read some pushback on this.
Some historians and engineers have called this
an urban legend. They say, well, parkways were
designed for cars, not commercial traffic. Trucks
were banned anyway, so the low bridges were just
an aesthetic choice. That is the main counter
argument, and it's important to address it. Parkways,
by definition, were meant to be linear parks.
They were for pleasure driving. So commercial
vehicles, including buses, were banned by regulations.
So you could argue the bridges were just designed
to be quaint and low profile to fit that park
like aesthetic. But there's more to it. There
is. Sidney Shapiro, who is one of Moses's top
engineers and a very close aide, admitted to
Caro that while the law banned buses, Moses knew
that laws. could be changed. A future mayor,
a future governor could come along and say, let
the buses go to Jones Beach. But you can't change
concrete. But you can't change concrete. Concrete
is permanent. If you build the bridge too low,
you physically prevent that political change
from ever happening. It was social engineering
hardened into stone. That is a profound concept.
The idea that infrastructure is politics frozen
in time. A bridge isn't just a bridge. It's a
gatekeeper. Exactly. And it wasn't just bridges.
It was housing. It was his entire approach to
slum clearance. Moses was a huge proponent of
the idea that you had to destroy the cancer of
old, dense neighborhoods to save the city. But
the slums were people's homes. They were communities.
He didn't see that. He saw blight. He saw inefficiency.
He saw congestion. The Cross Bronx Expressway
is the ultimate example of this. It just sliced
through the heart of the Bronx like a knife.
Not around neighborhoods. Through them. Straight
through them. Yeah. He displaced roughly 60 ,000
people for just one seven -mile stretch of that
highway. Vibrant, tight -knit neighborhoods,
mostly working class, Jewish, Irish, Italian,
and later his demographic shifted, African -American
and Puerto Rican. He didn't see the value of
the street life, the shops, the social fabric.
He just saw a line on a map. He just saw a line
on a map that needed to be cleared. And this
is where we get that famous quote of his. When
challenged on the human cost of his projects,
he said, I raise my stein to the builder who
can remove ghettos without moving people as I
hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking
eggs. That quote just chills me. Make omelets
without breaking eggs. He is explicitly saying
that people, entire communities, are just raw
material to be broken for the greater good. And
he was the only one with the power and the appetite
to break them. This is where the bully really
comes out. If you opposed him, he didn't just
defeat you in a debate. He tried to destroy you
personally and professionally. The aquarium story.
This is one of the craziest, most vindictive
anecdotes in his whole career. We have to tell
this properly. This is the Battle of the Brooklyn
Battery Crossing. We're in the late 1930s. Moses
wants to build a bridge from the tip of Manhattan
at the battery to Brooklyn. A massive suspension
bridge. A huge one. which would have completely,
utterly ruined the iconic view of the harbor
and the Statue of Liberty. It would have put
a giant concrete anchorage right in the middle
of Battery Park. So, understandably, people were
opposed. Everyone hated the idea. Civic groups,
preservationists, the business community, even
the War Department. And Eleanor Roosevelt, the
first lady, was leading the charge against it.
They all said, build a tunnel. A tunnel is invisible.
It works better for traffic. But Moses hated
tunnels. You can't see a tunnel. There's no monument
to put your name on. Exactly. He wanted the glory
of the bridge. But the old New York Aquarium
was in his way. It was located inside Castle
Clinton, a historic fort from the War of 1812,
right in Battery Park. It was beloved. Millions
of visitors a year. So he uses that as leverage.
He claims that building the tunnel would undermine
the fort's foundations, so the aquarium had to
be torn down anyway. This was a complete lie.
His own engineers told him the fort was perfectly
stable. So what did he do when he met this opposition?
He decided to punish the public for disagreeing
with him. In the middle of the dispute, he sent
his parks department crews into Battery Park.
They put up fences. They shut out the public.
And essentially, he held the fish hostage. You're
kidding. He stripped the interior of the aquarium.
He moved the animals, the beluga whales, the
seals, to the Bronx Zoo and to a temporary facility
in Coney Island. He tore the roof off the historic
fort. He deliberately tried to make it a ruin
so that there was nothing left to save. He destroyed
a beloved city institution just out of spite.
Pure spite and leverage. He figured if the aquarium
was gone, there was no reason not to build his
bridge anchorage there. It was unbelievably vindictive.
In the end, President Roosevelt and the War Department
stepped in and blocked the bridge on national
defense rounds. They argued a bridge could be
bombed in wartime and block the Navy yard. So
Moses lost. He lost the battle. We got the Brooklyn
Battery Tunnel. But he won the war on the aquarium.
It was gone from Manhattan forever. He left a
permanent scar just to prove a point. That same
scubbornness, that refusal to compromise, it
happened again with the Brooklyn Dodge. I feel
like every Brooklynite over a certain age knows
this story, but maybe they don't know it was
Moses' fault. It was almost entirely Robert Moses'
fault. The team's owner, Walter O'Malley, saw
the writing on the wall in the 1950s. Ebbets
Field was old, it was tiny, and it had basically
no parking. And the age of the automobile was
here. Right. O'Malley wanted to build a new,
modern -domed stadium. And he had the perfect
spot, the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush
Avenues. Which is where the Berkeley Center is
now. It's a huge transit hub. It's the perfect
location. It was the logical place. All the subway
lines meet there. The Long Island Railroad is
right there. It was accessible to everyone. O'Malley
had financing. He just needed the city to use
its power of eminent domain to help him assemble
the last few parcels of land. So he went to the
most powerful man in the city, Robert Moses.
And Moses said no. Flat out no. Why? Why would
he say no to keeping the Dodgers in Brooklyn?
Because Moses didn't care about subways or trains.
He cared about cars. And he had his own vision.
He wanted the new stadium to be built in Flushing
Meadows, Queens, next to one of his highways.
He had this obsession with turning the old world's
fairgrounds in Flushing Meadows into a great
park with sports facilities. So he was trying
to force his vision on the team. He told O'Malley,
you go to Queens or you get nothing. He refused
to use eminent domain for what he called a private
enterprise in Brooklyn, even though he'd used
it for countless other projects. I'm not going
to Queens. We're the Brooklyn Dodgers. And he
also said, if I can't build in Brooklyn, I'm
going to Los Angeles. And Robert Moses, in his
supreme arrogance, called his bluff. He refused
to budge an inch. He thought O'Malley would come
crawling back. But he didn't. Instead, O'Malley
packed up the team and left for the West Coast.
The hearts of an entire borough were broken because
Robert Moses refused to compromise on a stadium
location. He eventually got his way, building
Shea Stadium in Queens, but he lost the Dodgers
forever. irony of all of this. The low bridges,
the parkways, the obsession with parking lots,
driving the Dodgers out because of a car -centric
vision is the car thing. The ultimate staggering
irony, Robert Moses, the man who built the city
for the car, did not drive. He never had a license,
ever. Never. The story goes he tried to take
a driving lesson once in the 1920s, almost crashed
and killed the instructor and gave up on the
spot. He was chauffeured everywhere for the rest
of his life in a custom limousine with a desk
in the back. So he experienced the city from
the backseat of a luxury car. Always. And I think
this is profound. To him, a highway wasn't a
place of stress and traffic jams and angry drivers.
It was a smooth, flowing ribbon of concrete through
the countryside. It was a cinematic experience.
He saw the flow of traffic on a map, not the
lived reality of the commute. He was completely
detached from the user experience of his own
product. And that detachment, I think, eventually
had to catch up with him. You can only push people
around for so long before they push back. But
it took decades. Why did the tide finally turn
against him in the 1960s? What changed? It was
a perfect storm, really. The culture was changing.
You had the rise of the civil rights movement,
the anti -war movement, and a new era of community
activism. People were no longer willing to just
accept that father knows best from a government
official. And Moses himself was getting older.
He was getting older, more rigid, and even more
arrogant, if that's possible. He started picking
battles that just made him look like a bully.
battles he couldn't win. Like the fight over
the tavern on the green parking lot. That was
a public relations disaster for him. He wanted
to expand a parking lot for an expensive restaurant
in Central Park. To do it, he had to bulldoze
a shaded playground that was beloved by local
mothers and their children. And the mothers fought
back. They linked arms in front of the bulldozers.
It became a huge media story. And Moses handled
it terribly. He sent in work crews at dawn to
try and cut down the trees before the press and
the protesters could get there. That is just
awful. It backfired spectacularly. The newspapers
painted him as a monster destroying a children's
playground for a parking lot. rich it completely
shattered that old image of the benevolent public
servant and around the same time an ideological
challenger emerges jane jacobs We have to spend
some time on Jane Jacobs because she wasn't just
another protester. She was the intellectual counterweight
to everything Robert Moses stood for. He was
the top -down planner. He was the top -down planner.
He believed in the towers in the park model of
urban renewal. You separate the cars from the
people. You clear the messy, crowded streets.
You build tall, orderly, identical towers surrounded
by grass, clean, efficient, and ultimately sterile.
And Jacobs had the opposite view. Jane Jacobs
looked at that and said, This is the death of
the city. She wasn't a planner. She was a journalist,
an observer. She wrote The Death and Life of
Great American Cities. And she argued that the
mess of the city, the crowded sidewalks, the
shopkeepers keeping an eye on the street, the
mixture of old and new buildings, that was what
made a city safe and vibrant. She called it the
intricate ballet of the sidewalk. So you have
Moses the planner versus Jacobs the observer.
Exactly. And they collided head on over the proposal
for the lower Manhattan Expressway. Lomax. Lomax.
Moses wanted to run a massive 10 -lane elevated
highway right through the heart of what we now
call Soho, Little Italy, and Greenwich Village.
It would have leveled hundreds of buildings and
displaced thousands of people. It's hard to even
imagine Soho today, the beautiful cast iron buildings
and the art galleries being just a highway overpass.
It would have been gone, wiped off the map. And
for years, people assumed it was inevitable because
Moses always won. But Jane Jacobs organized the
community. She didn't just protest. She outsmarted
him. She understood the bureaucracy, too. She
attacked his traffic studies, proving they were
flawed. She mobilized voters. She turned public
hearings into circuses. Damn, it worked. For
the first time, the politicians, Mayor Wagner
and others, realized that siding with Robert
Moses was now political suicide. The community
was too organized, too loud. They voted the project
down. The dragon had finally - But he still had
his jobs. Right. He still had the triber authority.
How did he actually lose the power? Because he
never resigned. No, he was forced out. He was
outmaneuvered. And it took a Rockefeller to do
it, Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Another giant
ego on the New York stage. An ego as big as Moses's,
but with an even bigger bank account. By the
late 1960s, the New York City subway system was
collapsing. It was dirty, dangerous, and bleeding
money. The fare was being kept artificially low
for political reasons, and the whole system was
nearing bankruptcy. So Rockefeller needed cash.
Rockefeller looked at the Triborough Bridge Authority.
It was sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars
of surplus toll revenue. It was a mountain of
cash. And Rockefeller said, we need that money
for the subways. And Moses must have said, over
my dead body, that's my money for my bridges
and highways. Exactly. Moses cited the bond contracts.
He said, you can't touch it. The law protects
me. But Nelson Rockefeller had a team of lawyers,
too. And his brother, David Rockefeller, was
the head of Chase Manhattan Bank. They came up
with a plan to merge the Triborough Authority
into a new super agency, the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority, the MTA. The MTA that we know today.
So by merging it, he could legally access the
funds. Yes. The new MTA charter would specifically
allow the bridge tolls to subsidize the subway.
But to do that. He needed Moses to agree to the
merger. And to get him to agree, Rockefeller
played on his ego. He flattered him. He stroked
his ego. He told Moses, Bob, you're a legend.
We need your expertise. You'll be a consultant
to the new MTA. You'll have a seat at the table.
Your legacy will be preserved. And Moses, who
was nearly 80 by this point, fell for it. He
fell for it. He agreed to the merger. He thought
he could still control things from the inside.
And once the ink was dry on the legislation?
The trap sprung. The consultant role turned out
to be nothing. It was an empty title. He had
no power, no staff, no car. The new board members
appointed by Rockefeller politely ignored him.
Rockefeller and his brother essentially froze
him out completely. In 1968, Robert Moses found
himself sitting in an office where the phone
didn't ring. The money machine now belonged to
the MTA. That is a truly Shakespearean ending.
The powerful king, stripped of his crown, left
to wander the heath. It really was. He lived
for another 13 years, mostly in bitterness and
anger, writing long, furious letters to newspapers
that no one read. But the final blow to his public
image wasn't the firing. It was the book. The
Power Broker. The Power Broker by Robert Caro.
He was a young, incredibly dogged investigative
reporter from Newsday who decided to take a look
at the career of Robert Moses. At first, Moses
thought he could charm Caro or bully him. He
granted him a few interviews. Big mistake. Huge
mistake. Caro spent seven years digging. He conducted
over 500 interviews. He went through mountains
of documents. He found the evidence of the racism.
He found the financial trickery. He found the
ruined lives of the people who were displaced.
And the book came out in 1974. It came out. It
was over 1 ,200 pages long. And it was a devastating
indictment. It won the Pulitzer Prize. And it
completely destroyed Moses's public reputation
forever. He went from being widely known as the
master builder. To the master villain. Overnight.
The book was that powerful. Moses himself wrote
a 23 -page rebuttal, but it was useless. The
damage was done. It's amazing how a single book
can so completely rewrite the public understanding
of history. Before that, people grumbled, but
Caro gave them the receipts. He showed the mechanism.
He showed how power really worked, not how we
pretend it works in civics class. But now, here
we are, decades later. The power broker is almost
50 years old. And I feel like the conversation
is shifting again. I hear people whispering almost
secretly, man, I wish we had a Robert Moses today.
That's the at least he got things done argument.
And you hear it a lot. We live in an era of analysis,
paralysis and gridlock. Right. The Second Avenue
subway took basically 90 years to build three
stops. Congestion pricing in Manhattan has been
debated for decades. Environmental reviews for
a new bridge can take years, even before a shovel
hits the ground. People look at something like
the Whitestone Bridge, which Moses built in just
two years, ahead of schedule and under budget,
and they think. Maybe we need a dictator. It's
the temptation of efficiency over democracy.
It is. And there's a serious argument to be made
that New York City might not have survived the
economic collapse of the 1970s and 80s without
the vast infrastructure that Mo just built. The
highways kept the city connected to the regional
economy when the port and manufacturing died.
The housing projects, as grim as they often were,
provided homes when the private sector wasn't
building anything. So we're still living off
the capital he vanked, in a way. In many ways,
yes. So it's a tradeoff. It's the fundamental
question. Do we want the messy, slow, frustrating,
but inclusive process of democracy where everyone
gets a say? Or do we want the brutal efficiency
of a guy who points at a map and says, I don't
care about your house or your neighborhood. I'm
building a bridge there. That is the central
question of modern governance, isn't it? Moses
proved that you can achieve monumental things
if you remove the friction of democracy. but
he also proved that the friction of democracy
is there for a reason it's there to protect the
vulnerable it's there to stop the eggs from being
broken without a second thought So as we wrap
up, I want to ask you about the physical legacy.
We talked about the satellite map at the beginning.
If I want to go see Robert Moses today, where
do I go? You go everywhere. You're already there.
You drive over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge,
the longest suspension bridge in the Americas
when it was built. You go to a concert at Lincoln
Center. He assembled the land for that. You visit
the UN headquarters. He cleared the land for
that, too. So his work is unavoidable. But what
about him? Where is he memorialized? That's the
fascinating part. His name is on a state park,
a causeway, a power dam. But if you want to see
a statue of Robert Moses, you have to go to his
hometown of Babylon on Long Island. There's a
statue of him there. Not in Central Park. Not
in Times Square. Not in front of the UN. No.
New York City has a deeply complicated, almost
schizophrenic relationship with him. We use his
creations... every single day, but we don't celebrate
the creator. We can't. It's like we're living
in a beautiful, functional house that was built
by a brilliant architect who also happened to
be a tyrant. We love the roof over our heads,
but we hate remembering how it got there. That
is a perfect way to put it. We live in Moses'
house. So, to our listener, the next time you
are stuck in traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway,
or you're lying on the sand at Jones Beach, or
you're swimming in the Astoria Pool, just take
a second. Look at the concrete. Look at the steel.
And ask yourself, who decided this should be
here? And what used to be here before? Because
the city isn't an accident. It's a series of
decisions. And for 44 years, the decider -in
-chief was Robert Moses. And understanding that,
I think, changes how you see the entire built
world around you. It really does. Thank you for
walking us through all of this. This was a heavy
one. but absolutely necessary. My pleasure. It's
an incredible story. And thank you for listening
to this deep dive. And seriously, go read The
Power Broker if you have a spare month in your
life. It's worth every single page. We'll see
you next time.