The Scope of Robert Moses' Power
While reading Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker today (I'm on page 829 now...just a few hundred more to go!), I came across this awesome summation of Moses' influence on New York:
"Robert Moses held shaping power over the New York metropolitan region for forty-four years. Was the tirelessness of his work and its duration comparable to a natural force? So was the result of that work - the sum total of the accomplishments, the Things he Got Done. As natural forces shaped the city and its suburbs east of the Hudson, the 2,100 square-mile region on which by 1974 dwelt more than 12,000,000 human beings, so did he.
He changed the course of rivers, filling in the beds of the Harlem and the Bronx and cutting new channels for them, shoving to one side the mighty St. Lawrence, making new curves in the swift Niagara. He filled in the city's frayed edges, transforming into solid earth Great Kills on Staten Island, the Flushing Meadows in Queens, a dozen other vast marshes. Nature gave the region one shoreline; he gave it another, closing inlets in the barrier beaches, cutting new inlets, reshaping miles of beach dunes. For mile after mile, the earth and rock that constitute the shoreline of Brooklyn and Queens, and of Manhattan's Hudson shore, are his, the cement and steel that hold them in place are his, the grass and shrubs and tress that adorn them are his - as are the concrete and steel of the marinas, the shoreline overlooks, the parking fields, the bicycle paths, the runways and airport terminals, and, of course, the shoreline parkways. Not nature but he put them there. His bridges bound together Long Island and the mainland of the continent, torn apart by glaciers eons before. His causeways reunited the Island with its barrier beach. He hacked out lagoons, filled lakes, made beaches, welded islands together, cut, at Inwood Hill, through a primeval forest substantially unaltered by the hand of man since the dawn of time. He altered the region's skyline, leveling great areas of the low, regular tenement foothills and replacing them with slim, tall spires two hundred, three hundred feet high - civic and cultural edifices, great groves of apartment houses. By the close of the Age of Moses, for example, the skyline along much of the eastern shore of Manhattan Island that was the heart of the metropolis - a skyline that was, to a great extent, Governor Smith Houses, La Guardia Houses, Corlears Hook Houses, Baruch Houses, Lillian Wald Houses, Jacob Riis Houses, Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, Bellevue Hospital, NYU-Bellevue Medical Center, the United Nations, Rockefeller Institute, New York Hospital, East River Houses, Woodrow Wilson Houses, Senator Robert F. Wagner, Sr. Houses, Abraham Lincoln Houses, Riverton Houses, North Harlem Houses, Harlem River Houses, Colonial Park Houses - was, for miles at a time, a Robert Moses creation. [...] "What will people see in the year 1999?" he predicted. "The long arteries of travel will stand out [and the parks]." Fly over New York in 1974, and the prediction seems likely ot be true, not only for the year 1999 but, if New York endures in anything like its present shape, far, far beyond." (p. 828-829).
The more I read in this book, the more I realize that Robert Moses used his incredible intelligence, power and authority to make the city I call home. Without him there would have been no Riverside Park, no Lincoln Center, no Triborough Bridge. There would also have been no Battery Park, no Castle Clinton, and neighborhood-killing mid-Manhattan expressways if he had had his way all of the time. He was a force both good and evil. I hope there is never again another public official with as much power as he had.
posted by Kari @ 4:03 PM
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