Robert Moses
Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was an American urban planner and public official who worked in the New York metropolitan area during the early to mid-20th century. Moses is regarded as one of the most powerful and influential people in the history of New York City and the state of New York. Moses' construction projects transformed the New York area and revolutionized the way urban areas across the United States were designed and built. His philosophy of urban development influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners across the United States.[2]^
Never elected to any office, Moses held myriad positions throughout his more-than-40-year career including New York City Parks Commissioner and chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission. At various points, Moses held as many as 12 titles simultaneously.[3]^ Working closely with New York governor Al Smith early in his career, Moses became an expert in writing laws and influencing the operations of state government.
As head of the Triborough Bridge Authority, Moses was instrumental in the construction of major transportation arteries including the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and the Long Island Expressway, as well as major crossings and transportation infrastructure projects such as the Triborough Bridge, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. These highways, roadways, and bridges, alongside other urban renewal efforts, often sacrificed large swaths of low-income housing and replaced them with public housing projects.
As President of the Long Island State Park Commission, Moses oversaw the construction of Jones Beach State Park, the most visited public beach in the United States,[4]^ and was the primary architect of the New York State Parkway System.
Moses wielded enormous power as he had near-complete control of tolls collected on the various bridge, tunnel, and roadway projects, which he then used to fund additional projects.
Moses' reputation declined throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in part because of his plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have significantly changed the shape and character of SoHo and the Lower East Side. Community activists, notably Jane Jacobs, and elected officials began to cast doubt over the purported benefits of many of Moses' projects. Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Power Broker (1974) further characterized Moses' practices as controlling, overly focused on car dependency, and having a disproportionately negative effect on poor and minority communities. In large part because of The Power Broker,[5]^ Moses has come to be regarded as a controversial figure in the history of New York City, New York State, and the urban planning field.
Early life
Moses was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 18, 1888, to Isabella "Bella" (née Cohen) and Emanuel Moses.[6][7]^ His parents, of German Jewish descent, were adherents of the Ethical Culture Movement who raised Moses in a secular environment; he was uncircumcised and did not have a bar mitzvah. He became an Episcopalian after college, and did not identify as Jewish.[8][9]^ Moses spent the first nine years of his life living at 83 Dwight Street in New Haven, two blocks from Yale University. In 1897, the Moses family moved to New York City,[10]^ where they lived on East 46th Street off Fifth Avenue.[11]^ Moses's father was a successful department store owner and real estate speculator in New Haven. To make this move, Moses' father sold his real estate assets and store, and then retired.[10]^ Moses' mother was active in the settlement movement, with her own love of buildings. Robert Moses and his brother Paul attended several schools for their elementary and secondary education, including the Dwight School, the Mohegan Lake School, and a military academy near Peekskill.[12]^
After graduating from Yale College (B.A., 1909) and Wadham College, Oxford (B.A., Jurisprudence, 1911; M.A., 1913), Moses earned a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1914 with a dissertation titled "The Civil Service of Great Britain"[13]. He subsequently became attracted to New York City reform politics.[14]^
In 1914, John Purroy Mitchel announced his intentions to clean up the civil service in New York City. He selected Henry Moskowitz and Darwin R. James for the three-member Municipal Civil Service Commission, who then chose Moses, at the time working for the Bureau of Municipal Research, as the third member due to his understanding of civil service, assigning him ten assistants. Moses suggested a reform of the city's efficiency-rating system as the first step
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Appraisal
Criticism and The Power Broker
Moses's life was most famously characterized in Robert Caro's 1974 award-winning biography The Power Broker.
The book highlighted his practice of starting projects certain to cost more than the initial funding approved by the New York State Legislature, knowing the legislature would eventually have to fund the full project to avoid appearing to have provided ineffective oversight (fait accompli). He was also characterized as using his political power to benefit cronies, including a case in which he secretly shifted the planned route of the Northern State Parkway large distances to avoid impinging on the estates of the rich, but told owners of the family farms who lost land that it was an unbiased decision based on "engineering considerations."[23]^ The book also charged that Moses libeled officials who opposed him, attempting to have them removed from office by calling them communists during the Red Scare. The biography further notes that Moses fought against schools and other public needs in favor of his preference for parks.[23]^
Moses' critics charge that he preferred automobiles over people. They point out that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City and destroyed traditional neighborhoods by building multiple expressways through them. The projects contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League Baseball teams to relocate to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively, and precipitated the decline of public transport from disinvestment and neglect.[23]^
His construction of expressways also hindered the proposed expansion of the New York City Subway from the 1930s to well into the 1960s because the parkways and expressways that were built replaced, at least to some extent, the planned subway lines. The 1968 Program for Action (which was never completed) was hoped to counter that.[23]^ Other critics charge that he precluded the use of public transit, which would have allowed non-car-owners to enjoy the elaborate recreation facilities he built.
Racism
Criticisms of Moses and his work, particularly The Power Broker, characterize Moses and his planning decisions as racist. Generally, these criticisms rest on the perceived disproportionate racial impact of Moses's decisions and instances where Moses is said to have explicitly made decisions to the disadvantage of black and brown residents.
Critics charge that Moses used various methods to keep black and brown New Yorkers away from the parks and beaches he built. Caro writes that Moses attempted to discourage black people from visiting Jones Beach, the centerpiece of the Long Island state park system, by such measures as making it difficult for black groups to get permits to park buses, and assigning black lifeguards to "distant, less developed beaches".[59]^
While the exclusion of commercial vehicles and the use of low bridges where appropriate were standard on earlier parkways, where they had been instituted for aesthetic reasons, Moses appears to have made greater use of low bridges, which his aide Sidney Shapiro said was done to make it more difficult for future legislatures to allow access for commercial vehicles.[90][91]^ Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper refer to the claim about bridges as an "urban legend", and Kenneth T. Jackson similarly refutes that there was nefarious intent.[92][58]^
Regarding Stuyvesant Town, a Manhattan residential development complex created to house World War II veterans, Moses and the LaGuardia administration defended the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's decision to exclude black residents from the development, regarding it as a private project despite its public subsidization. Moses believed that public supervision of MetLife's tenant selection would make it "impossible to get insurance companies and banks to help us clear sub-standard, run-down, and cancerous areas in the heart of the city.”[23][81]^
Additionally, there were allegations that Moses selectively chose locations for recreational facilities based on the racial compositions of a neighborhood, such as when he selected sites for eleven pools that opened in 1936. According to one author, Moses purposely placed some pools in neighborhoods with mainly white populations to deter African Americans from using them, and other pools intended for African Americans, such as the one in Colonial Park (now Jackie Robinson Park), were placed in inconvenient locations.[93]^
Another author wrote that of 255 playgrounds built in the 1930s under Moses's tenure, only two were in largely black neighborhoods.[94]^ Caro wrote that close associates of Moses had claimed they could keep African Americans from using the Thomas Jefferson Pool, in then-predominantly-white East Harlem, by making the water too cold.[95][82]^ Nonetheless, no other source has corroborated the claim that heaters in any particular pool were deactivated or not included in the pool's design; Kenneth T. Jackson asserted these claims were "just wrong."[58][96]^
On March 26, 1952, Moses gave a speech at an event in New York City which commemorated Lady Randolph Churchill, the mother of Sir Winston Churchill. In the speech, Moses claimed that Rudyard Kipling foresaw "the rise of lesser breeds without the law", a comment described as "excruciatingly racist" by the journalist Glen Jeffries.[97][98][99]^
In response to the biography, Moses defended his forced displacement of poor and minority communities as an inevitable part of urban revitalization: "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."[78]^ Defenders of Moses and critics of The Power Broker say that that there is "little evidence in Mr. Moses’ urban planning practices that he singled out the city’s relatively small Black and Puerto Rican populations for particular punishment".[83]^ Some of the racist incidents documented in The Power Broker, including the overpass-lowering and pool-cooling episodes, have been called fabrications by critics.[58]^
Reappraisal
Some scholars have attempted to rehabilitate Moses' reputation by contrasting the scale of works with the high cost and the slow speed of public works in the decades following his era. The peak of Moses's construction occurred during the economic duress of the Great Depression, and despite the era's woes, Moses' projects were completed in a timely fashion and have been reliable public works since then, which compares favorably to the delays that New York City officials have had in redeveloping the Ground Zero site of the former World Trade Center or to the delays and technical problems surrounding the Second Avenue Subway and Boston's Big Dig project.[100]^
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