I'm a little less than halfway through The Power Broker. It's a riveting read, especially as a New Yorker (quite possibly living in housing built by him!). I suppose I haven't quite gotten to the part where Moses goes full corrupt. From what I've read so far, he seemed utterly vicious, sneaky and deceptive, but also ridiculously competent. Anybody who's had to sit in committees and meetings spinning their wheels, hearing excuses on why stuff can't be done, will likely find something appealing about Moses' sheer ability to get shit done. It'll be interesting to see how that opinion gets revised as the book goes on.
I found it particularly amusing how Moses—"the best bill drafter in Albany" as Caro dubs him—was able to write bills that gave him far more power than the politicians who passed them expected. Indeed one part where he referenced a niche definition of appropriation in an old 19th century bill felt almost akin to return oriented programming!
The triumph of Jones Beach is probably still fresh in your mind. But don't worry, you'll find plenty to dislike about him by the end. This a reason we try not to give people that much power.
I'm curious: how annoyed are you friends at you for not being able to shut up about Robert Moses? I imagine covid is saving them from the brunt of that. For me, it lasted at least a couple of months after finishing the book.
I just finished The World That Moses Built documentary on Vimeo. It's low quality but the only place I could find it. It's my second time watching. Moses was a fascinating man in a fascinating city. https://vimeo.com/340060890
The article you quote mostly concludes that it was probably a correct assertion. While the Moses parkways were certainly based on older ones they were found to also have substantially lower bridge clearances than the ones they imitated.
To be honest, what I find more confusing is that nearly a century later we still cling to the parkways being for no commercial traffic. It wouldn’t be all that radical to, whenever a bridge is up for replacement, replace it with a bridge that does meet Interstate clearance standards, and it would provide a less chokepointy system for trucks and take them off local roads, where they have a worse impact. The days of the bucolic parkway have long passed and they are all heavy commuter routes now.
Oh. No. The bridge clearance on the LI parkways was _very definitely_ intentional, but really aimed at preventing them from being used by commercial truck traffic rather than busses. Local sources for it are legion and predate Caro's book by at least a decade. That's also the reason for the tight turns at exits. A car or minibus can usually negotiate those without difficulty (assuming the driver is paying attention), but they're impossible for tractor-trailers.
I recently finished the audiobooks for The Years of Lyndon Johnson. It was 14 months of on-and-off routine listening.
The thing about these books is not only that they're about a famous person, but that they also are about a person that left a huge paper trail, was extremely social, and died young, leaving lots of people who remembered Johnson and were eventually willing to tell the unflattering stories of his youth. In this way it would stand alone as an incredible literary or investigative portrait of a person. The fact that it covers the central political developments of the United States in the 20th Century is just icing on the cake.
It was very important to him that they be accessible for further research:
Louise Mirrer, the president of the historical society, made a generous offer and said a few magical words that clinched the deal. At a dinner with the Caros a few nights later, she elaborated: The papers would be processed quickly, made part of a permanent, rotating Caro exhibit and be easily available to future scholars in a dedicated study area — a stipulation dear to a man who had been told too often in his research that so-and-so’s papers were unavailable.
I can't begin to imagine how much treasure there is to be found in there. Each of his mini-biographies (readers will know what I'm talking about)* probably have a book each worth of interviews and research behind them. I read once that he lamented the lack of any good books on Robert Moses's mentor, Belle Moskowitz; he might posthumously bring such a work to light. He had to cut his chapter on Jane Jacobs from the Power Broker. If that didn't make it, I can only imagine what else didn't. He's conducted thousands of interviews in his lifetime. There are large swaths of the history of government in 20th-Century America that will be preserved thanks to him.
* For the record, my personal favorite is Al Smith.
I love seeing the Caro fans all gathered together, however few the numbers are. I read power broker about 8 years ago and have since read all his other books and it's wild the degree to which they influence my view of the world.
Today is Sunday, and I am casually browsing through Hackernews and I find this article that seems to be talking about one of my favourite authors, Kurt.
It looks too long, the first question that comes to my mind on this sleepy day is whether this is worth it. A lot of these tend to be self wound articles, but I start reading and interest develops slowly but surely. Before you know it I am through reading and starting to wonder, how did I read this as a whole and how great this was. May be this was even small and some more of it wouldn't have hurt.
Thank you for posting this. This article gives great insight into the thought and the narrative behind these great authors. I would be looking forward to reading The Power Broker and the LBJ series. As always, reading about Kurt or his work is always fascinating.
Yes, he tells the story about the time and context so well that you don't need any background knowledge. All his books are about people and power, which I think anyone can learn from.
I would recommend starting with Master of the Senate, since I think it's his best work. But I started with the first in the LBJ series and it's incredibly gripping as well.
The Power Broker is also excellent and absolutely worth reading, but in my view not quite as good as the LBJ series.
For those who have read The Power Broker... how do you stand to hold it?
I bought the paper book after reading another one of these threads on HN, but it's so large that it makes my hands sore to hold it (or my neck if I lay it on my lap to read). Since there's no ebook version, I wonder how you all manage to get through a tome like this.
Caro's anecdote about how he persuaded Lyndon's brother to open up, in the re-creation of their childhood home, has stuck with me for years and almost feels like a parable.
Definitely recommend the audiobook if you haven’t heard it already. Caro’s got a thick Brooklyn accent and a manner of speaking that’s really compelling.
I wonder if Caro, were he starting today, would write about someone like Zuckerberg: an individual who has accumulated and exercises immense power but who, like Moses, has little accountability.
The difference is Moses has a compelling story with an interesting clash between his public persona and private demeanor. Zuckerberg, while certainly a good biography subject, doesn't have the same idealist turned corrupt by power story.
I suspect that the bigger difference is that the truth about Moses was probably little known at the time - I think most people know the Zuckerberg story by now.
Perhaps, although Zuckerberg never built Facebook in an attempt to help the public. Even the most hagiographic recounting still acknowledges that Facebook is a profit seeking endeavor. What's so interesting about Moses is the paradox of how someone so arrogant, so elitist indeed, can have done so much for the public.
For some of the public. But, for example, he deliberately made the overpasses on one of his expressways too low for buses to use, so that only people with cars could get to the beaches. This excluded the poor, and the black were mostly poor.
So "done so much for the public" is... complicated. His elitism and exclusionism was literally cast in concrete.
I haven't heard of him before but his wiki has this line in it which was extremely similar to comments I've heard about another recent person in the news. Complicated for sure.
"While bragging that he served in his many public jobs without compensation, he lived like a king and similarly enriched those individuals in public and private life who aided him."
Agreed. I'm not claiming Moses was necessarily altruistic. But he did something for the public, while I'm not sure Zuckerberg, besides the odd charity work, has anything close to that
I just posted about The Power Broker and Silicon Valley to my blog: Elon Musk and the Environmenthttps://joshuaspodek.com/elon-musk-and-the-environment. I'll repost it here in case people find it meaningful or relevant.
Many New Yorkers know Robert Moses from Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which won every award it could. At over 1,000 oversized pages, I thought I’d browse it at first, but couldn’t put it down.
Robert Moses may have shaped New York City more than any other person, holding multiple offices from the 1920s to the 80s. Residents loved him early in his career when most knew him for creating public parks and reforming crony, corrupt government. Not many drove then and traffic congestion barely existed so people appreciated that he built new roads.
It made sense as highways grew to think a road becoming congested meant that demand exceeded and conclude that adding another lane or road would meet that demand. Today we know that adding roads leads people to adjust and take advantage of uncongested roads. We move, buy more cars, take more trips, and so on until we reattain a level of congestion worth complaining about. In other words, traffic congestion is often an arch problem, where building new roads is like supporting the arch from below. Eventually you reach the road version of “the bureaucracy expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy”—no longer serving people. Increasing roads also brought pollution, split communities, and distanced people.
For decades after people recognized this pattern, Robert Moses held enough political power to keep building roads. His public image suffered. Eventually the public stopped him from building a parking lot in Central Park and highways that would gut Little Italy, Soho, and Greenwich Village. If his original intent had been to serve the public, he had crossed a line to mindless growth and dated ideas whose counterproductive unintended side-effects dwarfed the intended effects.
Elon Musk is today’s Robert Moses. Reversing our environmental course means fewer cars, electric when not reducible. Musk is promoting more cars. He is pursuing growth primarily. The purported solution increases the problem, creating more perception of ruinous demand, though not among those who see the systemic problem he’s exacerbating.
Likewise, most Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and corporate initiatives promote growth first, often including self-aggrandizement for founders and ignoring unintended side-effects, that amount to stepping on the gas, thinking it’s the brake, and wanting congratulations.
A Greenwich Village resident, Jane Jacobs, came to personify the movement who saw that Moses was serving himself, ignoring his work’s actual effects, not his intent. Her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, focused on people, what made communities livable and desirable, and how highways in cities did the opposite. Maybe you or I will become her equivalent.
Meanwhile, The Power Broker recounted Moses’s life and career, revealing his drive for growth, power, self-aggrandizement, and contempt for the people he pretended to serve, belying his claims of modesty and service. An enduring legacy results from personal integrity. Moses saw his crumble, as DiCaprio and Gore are seeing theirs, as will Musk if he continues in Moses’s erroneous path to grandeur.
However, any path towards a cleaner, more environmentally sound future requires the mass adoption of electric. Fossil Fuels are named as such for a reason. Getting caught up on growth is an inappropriate lens in this context.
I've never found the narrative that more roads were supposed to cause more congestion particularly convincing. If you fulfill demand, and then more demand springs up, then you fulfill that demand too. It's like with housing: the solution is to build more, not less.
Only in infrastructure construction do you see complaints that people take advantage of the provided service. In any other business where creating more product prompted superlinear demand, this would be seen as a marvelous opportunity.
There can exist a situation where the parameters limit possibilities.
For example, you can’t fit the world’s population in California and still have the same quality of life, even if you build 3 billion houses.
Same thing with roads, especially with regards to pedestrians and bicyclists. You simply can’t have big roads and big vehicles traveling at high speed in the same space as walking and bicycling people. Not to mention the exponential effects of spreading things out makes everything too far away, compounding the number of vehicles and need for lanes and so on and so forth.
Any elderly (or small child) person can’t cross a typical suburban 6 to 8 lane intersection. It takes a healthy adult 20+ seconds to cross some of these intersections.
The real solution is to create more desirable cities, walkable cities, and more economically productive cities so that all the demand isn’t in a few select locations. However, modern zoning and regulations don’t allow for the type of tight construction that allowed dense urban areas to come into existence in the first place.
Not to mention the politics of dealing with people who simultaneously want a single family house with a detached garage and front and back yard, but also want a walkable neighborhood where the kids can roam around outside with little risk of being hit by a pickup truck. These are conflicting demands and will never be satisfied.
The fewer people that drive, the less you have to expend on massive road projects and the better the experience for anyone who actually needs to drive. The whole bicycle infrastructure of a city like Amsterdam probably costs less than any single major highway, and the number of cars it eliminates from the road is massive. In my experience though, once a place has become car dependent, the attitude changes into one where alternative city design is almost impossible to contemplate. The assumption just becomes that adding a lane to a highway is the best course of action even though it doesn't really increase the flow that much at all.
One area that appears to have come under attack is Caro's accusation that Moses deliberately lowered the bridge heights: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...
I found it particularly amusing how Moses—"the best bill drafter in Albany" as Caro dubs him—was able to write bills that gave him far more power than the politicians who passed them expected. Indeed one part where he referenced a niche definition of appropriation in an old 19th century bill felt almost akin to return oriented programming!