i have never been afraid of hyperbole so here goes: i bow down before the greatness of this book. i can separate my 10 years living in new york as pre-caro and post-caro. every aspect of my life in new york, the subway, the roads, parks, politics (current and historical), every detail of mishka brown's highly anticipated treatise 'what i would do if i was in charge - the new york city edition' (yes, i talk about myself in the third person) is influenced by this book...this book is so vast, so far-reaching that one is tempted to compare caro to herzog: the daring and intensity of the (anti)heros of herzog's films are easily matched by his own in creating them. caro must have had a healthy dose of moses' stamina and ambition (in the good sense) to have written this masterpiece.

Lament, for the sacking of New York is a boulder in a sea with eternal ripples. It is both his way and the highway; his subjects are geese to swallow concrete for his foie gras to be set on the bread of Self.

This is the distinguished exemplar of prose binding so neatly around a tangled story. The Power Broker is Ariadne's thread to unlock the maze of Honest Graft and politics off-paper. This story is nonfiction with the topic of politics and urban planning, yet it is a drama by its own merits, with turns so exciting and dreadful. Amplifying this and refining it is the diligence of Caro to devote such beautiful craft of research and empathy to the story. The result is the reader discovering themself in the dimensional setting of the writing, nodding to the Author as some of the most complex (non)political power enigma is made plain.

It is a book which will rinse away prejudices of thought. Nuance is reality; this is a gray world.

6-11-24: I have read about 1/3 of the book.

How? I made a _joke_ on my college friend group Slack about how our next book club book should this because it's so large that we wouldn't have to pick another book for quite a while. Many of them read it, but I lost interest/lost time about ~250 pages in. (I think I'm one of two people in that Slack who has a kid, so that figures into it.)

Now the podcast 99 Percent Invisible is doing a read along, so I listened to the first few episodes to remind me of what I read and have continued to read a bit more. Eventually, I got the audiobook for the first third of this book, and finished the last few chapters that way. Since they break the audiobook up into segments, I'm breaking this review into segments.

What? This is the Pulitzer Prize winning story of how Robert Moses came to dominate NY politics in a certain way. We start with an anecdote about how, in college, he threatened to resign from the swim team (where he was a star swimmer) when his captain told him he couldn't lie to a donor when asking for money -- the team captain accepted his resignation; and then, for the rest of his life, Moses would pull out that move in a dozen other situations and everyone else caved. What are we to learn from this other than Moses's not learning new tricks? We're to learn that power often works because people are willing to give into it. (We also learn that Moses, Jewish and so not allowed into the ordinary pillars of college society at Yale, would often build a power base elsewhere: swim was a minor sport, and so would take him.)

The rest of the 1/3 of this book is a variation on that theme and a lot of context. We learn not only about Moses's parents, but we learn about how NYC was starved by Tammany Hall shenanigans; we learn about FDR's unspectacular rise to power; we learn some of the history of Long Island, where Moses wanted to build parks and roads. We learn -- oh boy, do we learn -- about Al Smith, the politician who seems so different from Moses, but who formed a lifelong friendship with him.

Yeah, so? My friend Jun-dai noted that the prose was sometimes florid and I agree, and will also add: there's something I think self-consciously Homeric, if not Biblical in how Caro deploys lists: lists of roads, lists of parks, lists of officials, lists of titles, lists of scandals. This is not a criticism, but as someone who -- well, not bounced, but _slid_ off this book after a few hundred pages, well, I can't help but point to this as another area in which we could economize today.

Then again, I also live in a post-this book world, where I already know that Moses is a problem; for many people reading this book, much of this was probably revelation and probably needed to be buttressed by such deep archival research and interviewing, as well as the stentorian tone of the prose.

Style aside -- though again, I think the style here is part of the argument, this is classic rhetoric -- what I've gotten from this first third (and especially the last few chapters that are most present in my memory) is a really powerful and mixed portrait of Moses and his effect -- powerful because mixed. He is, we are continually reminded, a visionary who rambled through NY and planned out a system and then -- miracle of miracles -- made that system happen.

Now, it is tempting to say something anodyne like "he made it happen through sheer force of will" but that's not exactly the case: he made it happen through ignoring people without power, by cutting deals with people with power (like building a parkway so that it wouldn't go through rich men's land on LI), and by driving his army of workers -- people scrounging through the archives to find odd precedents or caveats in legal documents, laborers moved from job to job without official sanction, etc. Certainly people who worked for him were often willing participants because they wanted the same thing he did or were swept up in his vision, but there were certainly others (especially in the Depression) who worked long hours because they didn't want to lose this job.

If Moses's vision had been something private, like building a company or even a college, we probably wouldn't be talking about him, but because his interest was in the nominal public interest -- who doesn't love a park? -- his actions are a lot more interesting because of that complexity. Like his mother, Moses seems to have wanted things his way and have a low tolerance for frustration from his subordinates; and then there was the racism that made him plan low bridges to keep buses from NY out of his LI parks; the backroom-dealing; and the personal vendettas; and probably a lot of other things -- but against all that, we have these roads and parks. In a way, this book does a fantastic job of pointing out the human cost of all this progress. (In a podcast interview, Caro says that he talked to a bunch of people displaced by Moses, and they all commented how lonely they were after being moved out of their community, and for Caro, "lonely" is not a word that people often use to describe themselves willingly.) But the book also never loses sight of that progress too: how Jones Beach was described as the most amazing public beach, how Moses fought the corruption that kept some public places private, how he jumpstarted the stalled Triborough Bridge.

Here's my worry: there's a pervasive myth that the only way to get things done is to be antidemocratic, and I call it a "myth" but it's something else, and this book seems to be an argument for that in its subtext.

---

9-16-24
How? I have finished reading part 2 of the 3 part book, split between reading and listening, and read in big chunks and then left alone for a long time. (Again, the 99 Percent Invisible podcast is helpful as a reminder during this read-along.)

What? Honestly, I don't recall where part 2 started in the book -- maybe around the time of Moses's disastrous run for mayor. But the theme of part 2 is basically, well, in 2008, the Daily Show did a segment on the presidential candidates, and their history of John McCain said something like, "The only way he would get the nomination now is if he gave up on everything he once stood for" -- and the next section of his history was titled "Giving up on everything he once stood for."

There's some thing about Robert Moses that remain the same throughout his life, those things mostly being his love of swimming and his hatred of the poor. Well, not hatred, so much as he doesn't believe they should be given anything and in fact would rather squeeze them to help out the rich. Or put another way: he'll move a road to save a rich man's mansion when he starts out because that's the only way to get the road built, but he'll go through a farmer's fields fine. Oh, and also: he likes getting to tell people what to do rather than listen to them.

What develops in this middle section is his real willingness, and even zeal, in throwing in with the graft brigade to get things done: the man who once excoriated Tammany Hall now supports the Tammany mayor. The man who didn't want to give out patronage is now throwing around jobs, loading banks with free money, and making sure that contractors give back to the elected officials.

He's also the guy who makes sure that his intelligent and capable brother doesn't get his fair share of the inheritance and then blackballs him from city jobs, and absolutely refuses to admit that his brother exists. He's the guy who continually lies to people to get his way, and his way includes taking over all of the tunnels and bridges into NYC. (As Elliott Kalan says, this is Lex Luthor-like supervillain behavior.)

Yeah, so? I was able to finish this part last night/this morning because I had some bad sleep, and when asked why, I had to admit that partly I was excited to finish a section and partly there's so much about this book that's a bummer. I mean, boiled down, the story of Robert Moses is the story of capital vs. human life (as Moses harnesses the power and promise of money to get people to do things); the story of people who want to do good (so many mayors here are painted as in love with NYC and wanting it to be great and good) but who keep agreeing to do evil to get there ("evil" here means they keep hiring Moses and letting him destroy some people's lives); and the story of short-term thinking having long-term consequences (as we still live in the car-choked future that Moses paved our way to).

All that is to say: I am looking forward to part 3 where he finally gets fired.

---

My day-by-day reading (1-1-22):
Day 2: I have finished the introduction (p 21)

Day 4: I have finished chapter 1 (p 37)

Day 5: chapter 2 down (p 47), his time at Yale (as a Jew)

Day 6, chapter 3 (p55), his time at Oxford, that solidified his upper class chauvinism and some racism to boot

Day 7, chap 4, p70, the progressive movement and Moses in NY

Day 10, chap 5, p88, a real slowdown here when Moses’s plans to reform NYC civil service are shattered

Day 11, chap 6, p111: Belle Moskowitz gets Moses close to Tammany gov Al Smith and teaches him tact.
(This reading brought to you by a sleepless night after my booster.)

Day 13, chap 7, p125, Al Smith’s history, their inexplicable closeness, Moses’s abandonment of his ideals, and Smith’s re-election

Day 14, chap8, p142, Al Smith in office, Moses gets a taste for power

Day 19 (slower going due to possible Covid cases at Henry’s school) chap 9, p171 — Long Island, playground of the rich, and Bob Moses’s discovery of the land there that could be used for parks for the urban masses (whom the rich hate)

Day 22, chap 10, p177: Moses writes a bill that secretly give him a lot of power as the Long Island Park czar

Day 28, after a long break, chap 11, p206: Moses, appropriating land, oversteps the law and gets in trouble trying to take a Macy’s land

Day 32, chap 12, p225: Moses wins against Macy, learns all the lessons of power: start the thing, and make people catch up
As a Long Island boy myself, reading the description of Moses planning Jones Beach is dizzying
Two years later: finished chapter 20, ~400 pages

Day 897 (6-16-24): chap 21-22: Moses runs for governor and is universally despised for his arrogance and meanness; until FDR picks a fight with him and Moses is able to once again portray himself as the defender of the common man.

Day 900 (6-19-24): chap 23-24, largely in audiobook:
Chapter 23
- Moses's relationship with LaGuardia -- they yell at each other all the time, LaGuardia gets a pad printed up with "I resign" forms for Moses to use, but otherwise often gives in (Moses wants to condemn a ferry dock immediately and not wait for the 60 day limit that LaGuardia gets; Moses starts work to destroy the dock while the ferry is on the water, has his men refuse to listen to the police that LaGuardia sends until the police pull them off the equipment; LaGuardia rebuilds the dock for a week, then lets Moses destroy it)
- Also, Moses has the papers on his side, partly because one of the big stock owners of the Times is pro parks (Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger) and partly because he wines/dines the editors and plants stories
Chapter 24
- Moses uses many underhanded tricks to get his way: lies to people about how much things will cost, then holds over their head the threat of telling everyone they wasted the initial money if they don't give him more; takes workers from other projects; goes ahead without permission; refuses to talk to people from other departments or plants stories about how they are commies when all they're trying to do is make him obey the laws ("McCarthyism before McCarthy" is how Caro puts it); trades favors and patronage
- Also, Caro is building parks in the city but has no understanding of the poor/city life, and doesn't really like them, so his pocket parks are much drabber than Jones Beach partly because he doesn't put in attention.
(This is part of the even-handedness of Caro: Moses is a bully and doesn't listen to anyone, turning his staff from people with big ideas to people who just say "yes"; but also he's really smart and creative.)

Day 906 (6-25-24): chap 25, entirely in audiobook
So far, Caro averages around ~20ish pages to a chapter, so this 76p behemoth feels insurmountable. Luckily, I have some insomniac tendencies.
This chapter is called "Changing" and it starts off a section called "The Love of Power", and that's basically how it starts and ends: we hear how Moses not only laughed or brushed off criticisms of his plans, but he seemed to take delight in making sure that the other person knew it.
He's also, as we learn, pretty petty about his vindictive uses of power; for instance, when a yacht club wants to stay just a few extra months and points out that he's not ready to work on their section yet, he's happy to let them stay, until one of the members does something to annoy him in a meeting, and then he starts tearing up the roads and cutting their utilities.
This chapter also includes a lengthy description of the machinations that got the western highway and Henry Hudson bridge, which includes: lying about how much things will cost; classifying roads as park access roads to get some federal money; holding over other people the prospect of telling the public that they wasted this money; and ignoring a bunch of civic and nascent environmental groups. Honestly, when Caro starts describing the cutting down of this old forest in Manhattan, I felt a little sick. (Could also be related to the insomnia.)

Day 912 (7-1-24): chap 26:
26. Two brothers: a heartbreaking chapter about how Robert Moses ruined his older brother Paul's life -- along, I guess, with Paul himself who (a) won't knuckle under to his mom (and so misses out on the gifts/loans/opportunities that Robert gets) and (b) is too proud to leave NYC ("what, and let him run me out?"), ask his family what crime Robert has accused him of, ask for money, admit to his troubles, etc.
Like: Caro doesn't let Paul off the hook here, and also notes how hard it is to get Paul to talk or how hard it is to verify some of his claims. And yet, some of the claims stand up, and it's basically: Robert made sure that Paul never got a steady government job, even though he would've been perfect for a government job regulating the utility companies.
So in a sense: Robert needs to be seen as so singular and sui generis that he basically ruins his brother -- and cuts his sister out of his life.
In a way, from a craft angle, the fact that Robert went so far in denying his family lends weight to how Caro introduces all of Paul in this chapter.

Day 936 (7-25), chaps 27-29:
-LaGuardia thwarts Moses, particularly in Moses’s attempt to get public money for public housing
-Moses realizes that he could change the law on his bridge agency so that rather than pay off the bonds (and make the bridge toll free), he could keep the money and use it to raise more money from bankers
-Moses plans a belt highway, wants to change the Battery tunnel plan into a bridge plan, despite a lot of opposition from the reformers and good government types who used to support him, who now see some of his dirty tricks themselves. No one can stop Moses, Caro argues, except the president who gets the Army to not certify the bridge and then gets the feds to give the city money for the tunnel. (Caro’s argument that no one can stop Moses seems to be the big moment he’s building to, but not entirely evident to me — LaGuardia doesn’t like the bridge plan but wants something built, so he supports Moses. So Moses could be stopped if only someone said, “no thanks, Robert.” That’s a recurring theme in the book.)

Day 937 / 7-26-24: chap 30-32
Only like 25 pages all told: Moses uses lies and the cover of WWII to take over the tunnel authority, so now he controls all the ways cars/trucks can go into or out of the city.
He then throws in with Tammany Hall, since the new mayor O’Dwyer promises to give him more power.
I could use a drink.

Day 989 / 9-16-24: chapters 33-34 (104pp):
Though sometimes facing pushback, Moses consolidates more power (this chunk features him described as a “power broker”) by—essentially—mortgaging NY and the lower classes to banks. Part of this section kept me up late with heartburn.
And yet, when it comes to something like the wheeling-dealing to get the UN into NY, I’m left with the other tensions of this book: Moses is a classist, racist monster, but he knows a lot of stuff (dictating procedure based on obscure laws that turn out to be completely accurate) and that he’s always enabled by people who want things for NY (as O’Dwyer wanted the UN to make his beloved NYC a world capital).

Oh, one more note about Chapter 34: it covers 3 mayors pretty quickly:
O'Dwyer, who almost broke with Moses and backed Jerry Finkelstein making a master plan for the city against Moses's wish, but then O'Dwyer was chased out of NYC because of an investigation of his organized crime ties -- which is one of those stories where you can almost see the possibility of getting rid of Moses early;
Impellitteri, who fell into the mayoralty and who everyone regarded as a nice pushover -- so basically Moses was in charge;
Robert F. Wagner, Jr., who we just hear a little of (and finally get the anecdote that started the book, where Moses threatens to resign if he doesn't get all the titles he wanted)

Day 1088, 12-24-2024; chapters 35-38, pp 807-894
“No strictly rational explanation could account for the voraciousness of that appetite [for power and achievement].” (P 807)
These chapters cover RM’s deafness to other people, his use of the power he accumulates by giving away public works: his office rents out restaurant space for low rents, and then the owners lavishly cater RM’s events, thrown to celebrate his achievements or impress other people he needs for their votes — one theme here is that RM had no other hobbies besides power.
Chapter 36-38 cover the ruinous effect of that power on other people, like the one mile of the Cross Bronx that destroyed East Tremont.
The people fought but couldn’t do anything: RM isn’t elected and everyone elected bows to him, and the newspapers are largely supportive of the Moses myth; and when people protest RM and compare him to Hitler, he just laughs at what the little people think of him.

(cont. in comments)

This is a book about power...And parks.

For forty-four years Robert Moses through the control of different institutions, often whose formal authorities he had designed and drafted into legislation, created a power base that enabled him to escape the constraints laid upon bureaucrats and elected officials and to stamp his vision upon the developing city of New York.

If the Bonfire of the Vanities is the shock book of 1980s New York then The Power Broker Robert Moses and the Fall of New York tells the story of some of the factors that made the city that way.

Robert Moses was energetic, ambitious, hugely gifted but deeply arrogant, a bully, and prejudiced. Initially enthusiastic for public service reform to break the power of Tammany Hall over New York politics and government and from a prosperous German-Jewish background involved in charitable works, he became  or perhaps always was, in waiting a master of manipulation, building support through public relations, disbursing jobs and patronage, keeping files on public figures and carrying out revenge with a thoroughness that makes burying a rival in the foundations of a building seem amateur and unimaginative.

Mayors and governors were successively seduced by his ability to complete massive public works before the following election but also successively learnt that his power base made him virtually invulnerable.

Moses' vision was of sweeping roads, bridges and parks. His work reshaped the city. Unfortunately his vision was of a New York designed to be middle class and white. Roads and bridges in some cases were designed to be suitable for cars only and were deliberately set to low to allow buses to pass under them. Attempts to provide mass transit links either to the parks or the World's Fair or even to allow for the possibility of others providing such links in the future were explicitly blocked or prevented through design. His ideal for Long Island in particular was striking - to be a suburban area of low density housing with no industry.

The outcome of all this was a city congested with car traffic (which in turn necessitated the early adoption of multi-storey car parks). Neighbourhoods with all their existing networks of employment and local commerce were broken up and either degenerated into slums or were replaced with higher cost housing. The massive building projects swallowed up city, state and federal funds to the extent that there was not even the money available for the maintenance of the new parks let alone for non-Moses approved transport development. However since a key source of Moses' power was the money raised from toll bridges it was a situation that at least worked to the advantage of one man.

The giant swimming pools that Moses had built in New York show the workings of his mind to both good and ill. On the one hand he and his team developed new systems of underwater lighting and the system of disinfecting foot baths that are ubiquitous in public swimming pools today. At the same time because he believed that black people prefer to swim in warm water he had the temperatures of certain pools kept low and to further discourage non-whites from swimming would only employ white staff (the same policies were also used at his beach developments and parks) to signal the type of users who would be welcomed, and it is striking to observe the application of careful intelligence to the business of purely being nasty to groups of people he would never come into contact with. At the same time the financial drain on the city from paying for these public amenities which through management and placement were targeted at white middle class users meant that spending on schools and hospitals was inadequate.

As befitted a man educated at Yale and Oxford he didn't offer patronage in the obvious Tammany Hall method of jobs with inflated salaries with the city but in a subtle way. This included cut price concessions, advance information about road building plans, consultancy jobs, lavish entertainments, long-term relationships with banks and even effectively creating a bank run by a leading member of the New York Democratic party Thomas Shanahan by depositing large sums of money with him at zero percent interest and obliging contractors he worked with to bank with Shanahan. Cronies had businesses created for them to manage the relocation of people dispossessed by building works, in turn sub-businesses were created to drain out money, for example by buying the fixed appliances in apartments for a nominal sum and leasing them back to the main company for sums which were not nominal. The main company itself would be funded by the city to manage the relocation process, while dispossessed residents were largely left to fend for themselves.

Essentially Robert Moses became an Augustus and created step by step an Empire for himself. The legislation that he had drafted protected him, almost totally, from political interference. Toll incomes and increasing car traffic allowed him to raise enormous sums on the money markets. Massive building works provided masses of patronage to disburse. Association with public parks  although not all the parks were fit for purpose, Caro describes one as a mass of concrete set in a traffic island, accessible only by car  won him widespread support and the mistaken impression that he had the public's interests at heart and was opposed to the vested interests, whose interest was entirely vested in Moses until he was finally deposed. (An arrogant man, the one time he stood for election he managed to lose the support of the press by insulting them at his first press conference and managed to speak against the particular local concerns of voters where ever he was on the campaign trail).

This is a book about the realities of power. It is full of politicking, intrigues, machinations, deals, law making, the importance of effective law drafting, the exploitation of the naive, dealings with politicians and interest groups alike. Also power over the environment, marshes drained, rivers bridged, moved and channelled, beaches created, land created. It is virtually a history of New York in the middle of the 20th century as seen through the work of one man. The paperback edition is 1.7 kilos of fascinating, audacious and breath-taking undertakings few of which were ever tainted with legality as Moses himself liked to say.

I was drawn to reading this after reading a review of a volume of Caro's Johnson biography, a massive multi-volume biography of President Johnson was a commitment I was prepared to make but this seemed an approachable alternative that wouldn't require reinforcing the bookshelves.

An epic story of Robert Moses's career spent transforming the New York area, especially in parks, bridges, roads and housing. Moses built on an incredible scale. Certainly he made terrible, irremediable mistakes, but he did get things done, beyond what anyone else has done before or since.

The blow-by-blow details of how Moses got things done, accumulating and maintaining power, ensconcing himself as the unaccountable head of the Triborough Bridge Authority as well as around a dozen other city and state positions, are fascinating. Although initially an idealist reformer, even working without taking a salary, Moses is soon corrupted---not so much by money for himself, although he enjoyed perks and luxury, as by whatever it took, including money, to control others. He battles with mayors, governors, even President FDR, and is only taken down by Governor Nelson Rockefeller (whose unique advantages included being of the family controlling Chase Manhattan Bank, which was the trustee for the Triborough bonds, and who manages to trick Moses into allowing his authority to be merged into a larger transit authority with no role for Moses). He takes what levers he has, and uses them (for example, knowing future road routes is quite useful for a local politician, to profit from development instead of fighting it). Moses defends his own position (e.g., keeping files on everyone). Moses is arrogant and does not like the public, and his reputation is eventually destroyed as he futilely battles the press---while still maintaining his power.

Moses himself is less interesting a character than Caro's other biography subject, LBJ. Moses ages poorly, becoming a deaf old codger. Having surrounded himself with yes-men, he is unable to recognize that New York's problems have changed. Traffic won't be solved by another bridge or a cross-town expressway. Mass transit is needed, but Moses is fixedly opposed to mass transit (not only refusing to build it, or to reserve some space along his parkways for future transit---but deliberately trying to frustrate transit by, for example, making the overpasses too low for buses). Moses is narrow-minded. He never learns to drive and for his whole life he thinks of driving as a recreational activity for the wealthy. He is severely racist, and would like to keep the poor away from his parks. He is in my opinion much less perspicacious than Caro tries to argue. He is not a sympathetic figure. The tragedy is not Moses, but the victims of his housing condemnations (often made for corrupt reasons) and, especially, the major development mistakes he made in laying out Long Island parkways to encourage sprawl.

The book is occasionally repetitive and drawn-out. It could probably be edited to half the length. But why would you want it to be? The story, and the writing, are fantastic.

What is America’s fascination with cars? With the exception of New Zealand, no country with a population of more than 50,000 people has more cars per capita than America. We have fifty percent more cars per person than France, Germany, Russia, or the United Kingdom.

So, what does this have to do with Robert Moses and New York City?

Surprisingly a lot!

Robert Moses was a failed politician who through legislative genius became one of the most powerful men in New York City during the 20th century. Moses was never elected to public office, but crafted numerous laws and bills that made himself immune to the vagrancies of politics. Mayor, governors, and even the President of the United States were unable to uproot him from his throne.

Moses built his empire through his unassuming role as Parks Commissioner.

Park Commissioner? Moses essentially bypassed existing laws. Streets, roads, highways, and freeways required a myriad of approvals and funding. But nowhere in the laws were “Parkways” discussed. Of course, before Moses the word didn’t exist, but Moses wrote benign legislation that granted him exclusive authority over Parkways. Politicians knew that they had to go through an annual appropriations process to get funding, but Moses knew that to appropriate also meant to acquire. So he wrote laws that allowed him to “appropriate” property from others without having to go through the normal process. Those are just two of the many creative ways that Moses acquired power---but the full story is so much more complex and devious.

So what does Moses have to do with car ownership in America?

After World War II, industrial nations followed one of two paths when it came to transportation. Most countries opted to develop various forms of mass or rapid transit. They invested in subways, rail lines, busses, etc. Robert Moses saw these as threats to his power, so he ensured that NYC could not rely upon public transportation (for example, he built overpasses too short to allow busses to pass through.)

NYC was designed based upon Moses vision that relied upon private vehicles. A city that could depend upon public transportation in the 1930s, could not trust that same system in the 1950s and 1960s---especially as the 1930s technology had not been updated or properly maintained. Moses ensured that public transportation was not a financially viable option in NYC (with no connecting passes, a commute that involved 3 busses required 3 separate fares.)

As Moses’ vision became the template for other American, personal car ownership became a virtual requirement nationwide.

This is my last Caro biography. I've given all of his other biographies 5 stars, but there are places where this one (his first) is a little repetitive. Thus I have to dock it one star. Still, today is a sad day as I have no more Caro books to read until he publishes his next one.

I've already read the first 4 volumes of Caro's Lyndon Johnson biography--and loved them. I knew, from my sister's recommendation, that The Power Broker was Caro's first formulation of his fascination with power. In retirement I had time to read it, though, I confess, I listened to the audio book. But that was 80 hours long. I'm been listening part of the time on my daily walks of an hour or so, but also when I'm knitting, cooking, doing household chores. It's addictive, as indeed a book with 1300 some pages has to be addictive. Caro is addictive, largely because of the extensive research he does which results in so much detail. In the Lyndon Johnson biography, when LBJ first went to Congress and decided his project would be to bring electricity to the Texas Hill Country, Caro devoted a whole long chapter to what it was like (for women particularly) to live without electricity, especially with rural America mostly had electricity already.

I loved this one too. Having just finished it, I was surprised how much I felt for Robert Moses in the end and how much I appreciated the intellect and the energy of a man who, a few days ago, I'd been reviling. He was really a towering intellect. As a young man he conquered challenges easily, first Yale and then Oxford. He finally did a PhD at Columbia. He was a reformer and an idealist and his focus was on parks. Early on he imagined having changing stations in the parks so mothers could change their babies.

He never really went looking for a job though. His mother financed him well into his adulthood, when he married and had children. It was only much later when he had "official positions" with the city that he had a salary of his own. Money didn't motivate him, at least not having it himself. Whatever he did, it was power he wanted, not personal wealth. And he ended up having to buy his own stamps!

As a very young man he came up with plans to reorganize the Parks Department, based on current efficiency theories but was laughed at. Finally it became clear to him that he couldn't demote people in droves, not in the Depression in a city where jobs came as patronage and where salaries reflected loyalty to bosses. Moses initially had little use for Mayor Al Smith, until he began to notice how effectively Smith ran the city and how much power he had. (The book even has chapters on how Smith learned about political power from Belle Moskovitiz, a reformer, settlement worker, and labor mediator who became a force in Democratic politics and who taught him how to use power. He offered her jobs but she preferred to be his unofficial advisor.) At first Moses tended to look down on the uneducated Al Smith, but eventually he realized the mayor knew something he didn't about getting things done. When he asked Smith's advice, he was referred to Belle and he listened and learned. Al Smith became not only a colleague but a friend and he never addressed another mayor as Mayor. That title was reserved for Smith, even long after his death.

Moses had always known what to do. He just didn't know how to do it until he listened to Al Smith. One piece of advice he was given had to the with the power of whoever wrote the bills the legislature in Albany voted on (a lesson Al Smith had had to learn). And Moses became that person. It allowed him to draft legislation that would not only pass but which would benefit the Parks Department and himself. Moses acquired loyal followers himself, including those who could help him finance his projects as well as build them.

His first big success was Jones Beach which he not only turned into an attractive park but realized that it needed roads so that people in the city could get there. He built roads, many of which he designated as "parkways" which allowed him to include them in his many parks for funding purposes.

When Moses started he was an idealist and a reformer. He became a skilled politician (this was the age of Tammany after all) and slowly as his power grew, power was more important to him than the purpose of the projects. He'd always dealt with people who owned the land he wanted for parks, or access roads. At first he wasn't very successful with the owners of the estates on the north side of Long Island. In one project where he hadn't the power to put a road through the land of rich people, he condemned part of the land of a small farmer, in fact, the middle of the land so that the farm wouldn't be profitable any more. He seemed to give no thought to the farmer and his family.

In spite of the fact that he saw as his mission building parks for everyone, powerful citizens typically got better deals from him . When one of his roads had to go on private property, he typically chose neighborhoods where the homeowners were powerless. He wasn't derelicts he was forcing out but owners of small homes. He also quite obviously discriminated against Jews and blacks. He never worried that blacks in the slums had no way to get to his parks.

In the 50ies, at the height of his powers, he moved into Title 1 slum clearance projects and paid absolutely no attention to the low income tenants he removed. On one project he promised help relocating people (which never got done) and forced many of the tenants he displaced into slums. Caro tells these stories in detail. He tracked down people who'd been moved out of condemned properties years before and listened to their stories and then told them in this book. On one project there was an alternative route for the highway going in which was absolutely viable, yet Moses refused to change it even though it would save the homes of more than half of the people he was evicting.

In the 60ies there were lawsuits trying to stop his projects, but by then he'd accumulated so much power that even the lawyers didn't realize how impossible it was to change his mind. Finally he was publicly embarrassed at protests by mothers because the part of Central Park where their children played was being paved for a parking lot. No one could believe that the idealistic Park Commissioner could be so unfeeling. It was a small loss for Moses, but his image had been tarnished because of the publicity.

By then it was clear that Moses and his huge network of highways and parkways and bridges was not really going to be the answer to NY's traffic problems, particularly Long Island's traffic problems. Every time a new road was added, traffic got worse not better. Moses had always refused to make accommodations for mass transit in his schemes, leave room for extra lanes in the middle of a highway that might eventually become a train, include train stations in his future plans. It was even discovered when the idea of putting bus lanes in the center of the Long Island parkways came up, that Moses had not left enough clearance for a bus to negotiate an exit or entrance. And that he'd done it purposely. (Moses never drove a car, had always used a chauffeur-driven limousine. His roads had been built to make access to parks easy. One of his main early goals was to get rid of railroad crossings. He no longer really knew the people who used his roads and bridges.)

Moses was forced out when he was 78 years old. And only then because the governor was Nelson Rockefeller whose brother headed up the last huge bank in the US that was still family controlled. Chase Manhattan.

A biography, a history of mid 20th Century New York City politics and a study of the corruptive qualities of power. This is not my favorite biography I have ever read, but it might be the most impressive. For over 1,100 pages (with another 200 pages for notes and a bibliography), Caro is able to keep the narrative thread together despite a plethora of information and influential figures. “The Power Broker” requires a big commitment, but it was easily worth the two months of my reading time.

Dear God, are you there? It’s me, Katherine.

Please let HBO make a series on the life of Robert Moses. (It has to be HBO, I don’t trust anybody else to pull it off.)

I finally finished the book after three months. It’s a bit of a behemoth. The parts of excruciating detail about Long Island land deals? Probably could have been edited down. But that’s really my only complaint. That, and you let Robert Moses have more power than the Holy Trinity. What’s up with that??

Anyway at this point all that’s left is the cinematic adaptation. It’ll have everything: grand parties, political drama, mantrums, illicit affairs, beaches, explosions. It’s only missing a shooting but surely that pops up somewhere and we can add it in.

This is more than the story of one man, it is about more than one man. It’s a story of political corruption in the changing world of the 20th century. It’s got parks and highways but it also has scandals, family drama, political drama, Shakespeare, and several household names like Rockefeller, LaGuardia, Roosevelt. It seems there is no aspect of New York history from 1930-1970 that Robert Moses didn’t intersect with and lay his hands on.

i did it

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And before there was Donald Trump there was Robert Moses.

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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York was an epic story and an exceptional achievement by Robert Caro and well-deserving of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1975. Throughout his time in power Robert Moses worked with many governors, including Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, Thomas Dewey, Averell Harriman, and Nelson Rockefeller. The mayors of New York City who Robert Moses worked with included Walker, LaGuardia, O’Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner, and Mayor John Lindsay. His power ranged over the presidencies of Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. This riveting book is a study in the power of corruption and is told unflinchingly by Robert Caro.

This exciting biography of Robert Moses focused on the creation and use of power in local and state politics of New York. It described Moses’ strong-willed grandmother and mother in his childhood in Connecticut, and his studies at Yale and Oxford University. It is said that Moses’ experience initially in the administrations of Governor Al Smith and Mayor Jimmy Walker, he learned how to acquire and wield power. By the 1930s, Moses was admired as a champion of parks in the city and state of New York. Robert Moses then led many projects such as the Triborough Bridge. It is in these pages that we begin to see Moses as a bureaucrat who gradually shifted his focus from the development of improvements to ways to exert control. There is no denying that the landscape of New York City from Central Park to regional parks to the massive and sweeping bridges has changed largely due to the dreams of Robert Moses. But there is the downside of the countless people who were needlessly dislocated with the ruination of neighborhoods. It also should be said that in writing this book, Robert Caro interviewed Robert Moses extensively and many of those interviews are referred to though out the narrative.

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“Few men had ever viewed Long Island entire. One who had was Walt Whitman, who saw it as a ‘Sea-Beauty! stretch’d and basking! Isle of sweet brooks of drinking water—healthy air and soil! Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine!’ Now Moses saw it entire, and if he had written poetry once, he wrote park reports now, and brooks, healthy air, salty shore and breeze and brine mean parks. Standing on Montauk Point, where Long Island’s southern fluke ends in the steep bluffs plunging abruptly into the Atlantic, Whitman had said, ‘I stand as on some might eagle’s beak.’ Now Moses went to see Montauk, not with the eyes of the poet but with those of the park planner.”

“And the dream was the important thing; the dream was what mattered.”

“This lesson Robert Moses translated into phrases that began to appear in his letters and according to associates, his conversation after the Taylor Estate fight: ‘The important thing is to get things done.’ ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.’ ‘If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?’”

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This is the story of a man who held unelected power in New York from April 23, 1924 - March 1, 1968. A man who held more power than the governors and mayors he "served" under. How did he obtain, retain, and finally lose that power? The man is Robert Moses and I had never heard of him before reading this book. The author, Robert Caro, spends 1,162 pages describing the intricacies of power. The perpetual pursuit of power. How deep and widespread this power reached. And how Moses used this power to build as no man had built before, certainly not within a democracy. It's an astonishing story with results you know well - The Lincoln Center, the UN complex, and Jones Beach. But along with the accomplishments was a dark side. 600 miles of roads with no improvement in mass transit, resulting in more and more traffic. The displacement of thousands of families to make way for his projects. The utter ruining of people who got in his way.

I have now read all books that Robert Caro has written. I enjoyed the LBJ series a little more than this book, but this also was a masterpiece. I was sad arriving at the final chapters, knowing I'll need to wait a few more years until the 5th Caro book about LBJ comes out.