It is, in retrospect, preposterous that I waited so long to read this. I had my reasons — no book could possibly need to be this long, there’s no ebook version and no one can carry this monstrosity around, it’s about New York and I don’t care about New York — but they ultimately pale next to the obvious attractions. I love bureaucrats, I love technocrats, I love detailed descriptions of legislative drafting and legal battles, and I love any story where the main character is constantly butting heads with the likes of John Purroy Mitchel and FDR and Nelson Rockefeller.

Does it need to be this long? Probably not, and honestly Caro did a disservice to every other journalist who wants to write a researched biography or nonfiction narrative by setting the bar for completeness and research this ludicrously high. At the same time, there aren’t many obvious sections to cut. I think the descriptions of his neglect of transit and obsessions with highways (roughly chapters 36 and 39-41) drag a bit, but they obviously can’t go entirely. He had to cut an entire chapter on Jane Jacobs as it is, an absence that feels conspicuous and awkward.

My main substantive critique is that the treatment of white flight and “urban decay” is quite bad. The celebrated “One Mile” chapter is excellent, but Caro concludes the story of East Tremont’s destruction by Robert Moses by detailing that “The people moving into the vacated apartments were mostly Negroes—not the middle-class or lower-middle-class Negroes with whom East Tremont's middle-class and lower-middle-class Jews had found it easy to be compatible, but impoverished Negroes—many on welfare, many newly fled to New York from the rural slums of the Deep South—to whom the Jews found it impossible to relate, even had they wanted to.”

These Negroes, Caro says, felt “like the advance guard of the ravaging army that had previously been kept at bay.” He immediately transitions to talking about all the vandalism and break-ins that began in the neighborhood after this new population arrived.

To be charitable, Caro is trying to explain how the period felt to the Jews of East Tremont, and I’m sure they felt that their new black neighbors were a “ravaging army” that was ruining their lives. The old-timers had plenty of good reason to be angry at their treatment, and I’m sure they experienced their replacement by a poor black population as a final humiliation. But Caro is remarkably uncritical of this interpretation, and incurious about the degree to which the residents’ experience was colored by prejudice.

It’s also a case, one of several, where Caro’s New York fixation serves him ill. The emptying out of urban neighborhoods by white communities was a nationwide process driven by factors broader than the whims of Robert Moses. I’m sure Moses accelerated and worsened the process in New York, but it was bigger than him, and Caro, with so much other detail to work through, does not provide this context.

But man, when it’s good, it’s perfect. The introduction alone is the finest of its genre I've ever read, immediately establishing the stakes and the themes. Some assorted things that will stick with me:

* The scene of Moses laying out his beautiful and politically toxic civil service reform proposal to a hall of enraged government employees in 1916. This is policy influence, attempt one: just come up with a good plan and try to impose it. You will be shocked to learn it doesn’t work!

* Drafting the “appropriation” law enabling the Long Island Parks Commission to simply seize land they want. The conventional wisdom I’ve always heard in DC is that trying to pull a fast one by writing an innocuous-seeming provision and then using it for grand schemes will backfire: you will get a reputation for doing that, you will not get to do it again, and your initial efforts will probably be reversed in the backlash too. But for Moses it worked, in part because people really wanted parks and that proved the ultimate trump card, and in part because Al Smith was remarkably personally loyal to this snotty little rich kid.

* The disastrous 1934 gubernatorial campaign where Bob just insults everybody, to a degree that makes me think he was trying to throw the election, followed immediately by him defeating FDR through press jujitsu. “Isn’t the President of the United States entitled to one personal grudge?”

* Bill Exton and Bob Weinberg’s ridiculous fights against the Henry Hudson Parkway. Moses’ car-centric development schemes were dumb but Exton’s objections in particular were beyond silly. He wanted there to be unimproved wilderness? In Manhattan? It’s Manhattan!

* RM’s ridiculous personal schedule. This whole section:

Up in the morning at six or seven, he often made breakfast for his wife and brought it to her in bed. In the evenings, at the far side of twelve or fourteen hours of unbroken toil, he would head not for home but for the swimming pool. One weekend, he invited Ingraham to Babylon and told the reporter to come up to Randall's Island Friday evening and drive out with him. Arriving at five o'clock, Ingraham found Moses in conference, and settled down in the Commissioner's waiting room. An hour later, he was still waiting; the conference was still on. When it broke up around six-thirty, Ingraham was invited in, and Moses told him he still had a few things to attend to. He was still attending to them at seven o'clock and eight o'clock, and nine o'clock and ten. Rising finally, he said, "Let's stop off at Earle Andrews' place on the way out." The "place" turned out to be Andrews' glass-enclosed swimming pool in Huntington. Letting himself in with his own key, Moses changed, plunged into the water and began swimming. Watching the muscular arms windmilling endlessly up and down the pool, the drowsy reporter dozed off. Some time later, he awoke. The windmill was still turning; if anything, Ingraham realized with a start, Moses was swimming faster than before. It was, he says, "late" when the Commissioner clambered out of the water, looking as fresh as a youth, and very late indeed when the two men finally arrived at Thompson Avenue. As Ingraham climbed the stairs to the guest room, he saw the Commissioner's broad back disappearing not into his bedroom but into his study, yellow legal note pad in hand. When Ingraham fell asleep, he knew his host was still working. And what awakened the reporter the next morning—"at some ungodly early hour"— was the smell of bacon and eggs. Hearing him stirring, Mary called up the stairs: "Come on down. Bob's cooking breakfast."

* Rockefeller’s ultimate scheme for bringing Moses down. It’s so beautiful. Moses got so much of his power from the public authority’s legal right to make contracts that neither the New York legislature nor Congress could abrogate. Under the contracts clause of the Constitution, the contractual stipulations of Triborough Authority bonds could not be altered, and so as long as Moses kept selling those bonds and including his dictatorial governance structure within them, he was untouchable. But the way this was enforced, if ever challenged, was by lawsuits from the bondholders, brought by the largest bondholder and trustee for the class of bondholders, Chase Manhattan Bank. And Nelson Rockefeller’s brother David ran Chase Manhattan, and his family as a whole had controlled it for decades. So he just had to ask David not to sue and he could do anything he wanted to Triborough, and to Moses. Robert Moses could not be killed by a man of woman born but Nelson Rockefeller was Macduff.

* Titling the last chapter “Old” is so much funnier when you remember that this book came out when Moses was still alive.

I am neither an urban planner, nor a New Yorker. With that cleared up, I can attempt to review this epic biography by Robert A. Caro, which has garnered a great deal of hype over the past 40 years. Caro takes the entire life of this man and puts it out for review, letting nothing escape his descriptive powers (though the book is a mere 1200 of the original 3000 pages Caro prepared). The book is so thorough and complex that the reader must digest a great deal of information to move through the sections and absorb all that is on offer. Caro depicts the life of Robert Moses as being quite multi-faceted: a staunchly matriarchal home, joyful playground developer, power hungry Parks Commissioner, villain to many. Filled with numerous sources and a plethora of interview comments, Caro describes this vastly powerful man who changed New York City, quite literally, into the urban powerhouse of the United States. Caro’s three themes (discussed below) emanate throughout the text: Moses’ hunger for power, his ability to gain it without election, and the complete about-face done by New Yorkers over the decades because of that power. These themes keep the pace of the book moving and ensure the reader pays attention, to see the apparent changes as the chapters (and events in time) progress.

Moses’ hunger for power could be said to have been planted in a home run by his mother, who accepted no other opinion but her own. Caro lays the groundwork for Moses’ eventual insatiable need for control at her feet, indirectly. A benign search for power by Robert Moses begins upon his returns from Oxford, with the hopes of building new parks for the people of New York, especially children who have no playgrounds on which to spend their time. This morphs into a lust for larger parks and the development of edifices that will leave an indelible mark on the city as a whole. Caro exemplifies this early malignant power intoxication through the creation of the Central Park Zoo, his numerous bridge projects, as well as the construction of the UN buildings. This hunger is not sated there, as Moses continues to forge ahead with expressways to better deal with the increased traffic the 1940s and 50s bring with it, caring little for those in whose way his grand ideas sit. Caro portrays Moses as one who becomes deeply inebriated on power and who eventually loses touch with those he, originally, sought to help. He wants to leave his mark on the city and uses his backhand connections to get the needed ‘in’ to do so. He outwardly circumnavigates those in his way (even elected officials) by writing and forcing legislation to pass the New York Legislature that gives him quasi-deist control of New York (city AND state), to do with what he will. Caro is clear, however, to include those men who stand in his way, including the one man with more power than he and no interest in ceding it, Nelson Rockefeller. It was Rockefeller’s emergence on the political scene and saw the end of Moses’ power. Add to that the horrible 1964 World Fair presidency, as well as Mayor John Lindsay, and you can already hear the nails slamming into the coffin.

Caro also depicts the Moses power addiction as one run entirely from the backrooms and within arm’s length of the election box. Save for a single run for Governor of New York, Moses never had to face the people to seek their permission for his ideas. He cozied up to mayors and governors into whom he created yes-men or disposed of those who tried to thwart him with his numerous other connections. Legislation penned from his desk came to the floor of the State Legislature and was pushed through with some ease, leaving it only to be signed by a governor here and there. Until FDR came onto the scene (first as Governor of New York and then as President of the United States), Moses had an easy cake walk. Caro denotes how Moses dodges many bullets and used his connections in media and various arms of the political realm to continue forging ahead and getting his ideas approved. A true schemer who saw no issue with sidestepping the democratic process, yet tossed out communist epithets against his opponents, to blackball them during the highly McCarthy-esque era in America.

Caro’s greatest feat has got to be the radical change in public opinion he demonstrated. From chanting school children loving Robert Moses to the hatred by all New Yorkers by the mid-1950s, Moses was left to dodge fists, bottles, and anything else that could be thrown. Caro is sure to include some of the key turnarounds in the book. Schoolchildren, as mentioned above, are but one group who came to vilify him. Mothers with babies, who, in the early chapters, adore him for creating parks and playgrounds (complete with diaper huts) turn on him as he decides to bulldoze those parks down 30 years later to create a parking lot. The poor, who cheered on the creation of open space for them, free of charge, became his greatest obstacle when he needed to destroy their homes to create expressways. Caro is masterful at simply telling the tale and letting the reader make the connections.

Caro’s missive is so detailed that it makes sense why this project was years in the making. It uses the vast amount of information at Caro’s fingertips to lay out the story and lets the reader decide what they wish about the entire story on offer. That said, there is no doubt that any reader who takes the time to read the book will come away with at least some sour taste in their mouth for all Moses did in New York City. Caro throws no punches and does not apologise for what his research discovered. The book added fuel to the already strong fire of dislike surrounding Robert Moses in 1974. It is not hard to understand why this is the case.

The book’s length may be its own downside, although I did not feel things dragged on too unnecessarily. The reader may, stuck in a quagmire of verbose explanation, wonder why we care so much about a certain issue. Having patience to forge ahead and connect the eventual dots leads to that ‘ah ha’ moment where previous glassy-eyed reading is worth the outcome.

Having read all that Caro has penned already in the LBJ saga, I am well-versed in the format and style used in the biographies. I thoroughly enjoy this, even with long and complex missives with hours of detail on many subjects. It is only through this detailed analysis that the reader can truly come to see the duplicitous nature of Moses. The latter part of the book shows just how racist and how completely out of touch Moses became with the people he tried to help in his early years. Caro’s presentation of this about-face is stunning and leaves the interested reader to wonder where things went wrong. Alas, the details are woven through hundreds of pages that it is difficult to pinpoint the precise location of this change.


There is too much for the casual reader to digest in this, and likely any Caro book, biography. I would not recommend its undertaking by anyone who does not have a strong thirst for knowledge or someone looking for a quick read. Then again, the mere size of the book (or length of its audio version) will scare many away. However, those who are intrigued by political and urban histories will surely devour all this book offers. Caro is the master storyteller and can bring many stories to life with his detailed descriptions as well as his highly researched perspectives. A must read for those who marvel at the intricacies of New York City’s traffic edifices and green spaces.

Kudos in high order, Mr. Caro, for this your first work. It shows your attention to detail and interest in a thorough analysis for all to interpret. You have outdone yourself for sure.

Moses was a horrifying example of the idea of "progress" gone stupid and taking advantage of a Manifest Destiny-like philosophy of urbanization. His tactics in NY and so many other cities severed people from each other with scalpel looking to exacerbate class divisions. So despicable that he deliberately build bridges too low to accommodate the city busses so that so the poor and especially the Blacks couldn't go out to the Long Island beaches. He advocated for a "White only" area of Stuyvesant, and tried all kinds of sleazy legal maneuvers in the courts to do what he wanted with New York neighborhoods. The part about Moses and Roosevelt is quite telling.

I read this a long time ago, but reviewed it (and got angry about it again) after I learned that in The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire the corrupt business dealings between Moses and Fred Trump (father of "Don the Con" - President Elect) are detailed. Their shady dealings included claims of quid pro quo over land and development deals with one where Trump took a powerful role on a city council to make decisions to help Moses and Trump helped get Moses appointed as the president of the World's Fair.

At the time The Power Broker came out in the 1970s, everyone agreed with Caro’s impression that Moses was “a mean son of a bitch” and responsible for the Fall of New York.

He was overtly classist and racist, building bridges unnecessarily low over his parkways to prevent buses, and the less wealthy people who rode them, from using his parkways.

At some points, Moses comes across as an alpha gorilla, taunting his superiority in another gorillas face, just to show he can.

He is responsible for the abysmal state of public transportation in New York. For forty years he blocked every public transportation project, preferring instead the grand parkways and bridges that would serve as monuments to his legacy.

He got away with it because he never took a meaningful salary and never skimmed off of public funds. This made him untouchable legally, and politically helped him maintain the image of a selfless public servant. His currency of choice was power, not money.

Recently, there has been a re-interpretation of Moses.

Moses built many of the parks and green spaces which make the city that is often referred to as “a concrete jungle” livable. The Hamilton Fish Pool and The Lincoln Center, of the Lower East Side and the Upper West Side respectively, both became anchors that helped rejuvenate decaying neighborhoods.

Anytime you are doing major construction in an already densely populated area, there is going to be someone who is unhappy with it, even if it’s a net benefit to the city and the people who live there.

How do we decide when it’s appropriate and when it’s not?

Can we construct a way to get things done that doesn’t require actors like Moses?

Read the full review here: https://taylorpearson.me/power/

Brilliant! I really don't know what to say about this book. It's monumental, brilliantly written and strangely enthralling. I would never have believed that a book about parks, highways, and bridges, many, many, of each, would be so interesting. Of course they all revolve around Robert Moses, who is fascinating and also despicable. He is however, an example of how to amass power, and how to use it, for better and for worse.

Caro is a brilliant writer. This is the 4th of his 5 published works that I have read and he is still my favorite non-fiction writer. The book is very long and quite an undertaking, so is probably not for everyone. But if you are a history lover I highly recommend it. If you are interested specifically in the history of NYC, then this is a necessity for understanding the growth and decay of the city in the 20th century.

when i got in a (minor) car accident while listening to this book, i spent the rest of the drive- yes, crying, but mostly cursing robert moses and how i fully blame him for cities being so car centric.

i think this is the longest book i’ve ever read fully and it was shockingly incredibly engaging. some parts were kinda repetitive and themes definitely were, but each little story was so drama filled that it was entertaining. there need to be way more hater biographies out there, or i need to find and read them.

learned less about traffic and city planning and driving than i wanted to, and more about how fucked public service sector is to allow one person so much power. and also about how one idealist could turn into such a monster. but here are a couple interesting things i did learn about traffic:
- building a second bridge/road next to a busy one will NOT reduce traffic, in a matter of months it will always get to the original traffic level
- if you in fact must build a highway in a city, one of the best ways to incorporate or at least pre plan for more public transit is for a metro (or busway) in the middle of the two sides

overall wouldn’t recommend reading it, but i guess (??) i’m glad i did.

There's a reason this is considered a classic in the world of biography. It's hard to imagine a more sweeping portrait of a man in all his contradictions, especially a figure like Robert Moses who spent his life building power by reading the fine print, working back offices, relying on obscure precedent, greasing the right elbows, and doing, when necessary, some good old fashioned bullying. I was enraptured with every move, over 1200 pages there wasn't a boring moment. You see his rise, and you see his fall. And you're left with one nagging question for Robert Moses, which is the same question you'd want to ask, say, any of the characters on Succession – “why?”

This is one of the best books I've ever read.

It excited me, angered me, disturbed me, and moved me in a way no other book has. The writing was so simple, so engaging, and so effective, that I never wanted it to end. I won't say I understood every single detail of this book - every back door dealing with every committee or organization, but Robert Caro has such an incredible gift for assessing and summarizing everything in clear and interesting prose that it was never an issue.

This book is thematically similar to one of the best movies I've ever seen -- Citizen Kane. Both works depict men who were extreme idealists in their youth -- who believed in helping people, doing good, and working hard -- and through the application and acquisition of power, eventually turned into the opposite.

This book exemplifies the best qualities of a good biography. It pinpoints both significant, character changing moments, and the smaller minutae in it's subjects life that amounts to a well-rounded portrait.

The well-rounded part is especially important.

Rashida Jones directed the documentary "Quincy" - about her father, Quincy Jones, which turned out to be more of a million-dollar love letter than a documentary exploring his nuanced character and personality. This happens a lot -- both in film and literature and why Biographers like Robert Caro - who have an incredible ability to take a more objective view of their subjects - are so important.

This book also made me curiously introspective. I started to think about a lot of the pettiness with which I've treated a lot of people over the years. Most of it, like Robert Moses, was related to power. I'm not proud of some of those things, but I have a greater understanding of why I did it, and how I need to curb it.

The power of money, specifically, is one that is emphasized in this book. Money means power, and Robert Moses had a lot of it through committees, organizations, grants, funds. Eventually he amassed what turned out to be a significant portion of New York City's budget, and built many bridges and beaches and parks with it. Moses became accustomed to this authority and power, and did some truly disturbing things - notably evicting poor families, and making his parks geographically innacessible to those families, among other things.

Moses was able to do this for so long because Highways and parks are tangible city structures that are easy to support. I remember Paul Thomas Anderson recounting a story about how the early test screenings for the 1994 remake of "Miracle on 34th Street" were overwhelmingly positive, even though the movie ended up bombing hard at the box office. The answer is that nobody is going to say "No" to Santa Clause. It's Santa Clause, for gods sake.

It's the same with parks. No one is going to oppose a park. It's a...park. It's where kids play, and mothers go for walks. Sadly, what appears to be good for one aspect of the public, sometimes isn't good for others, as the city of New York eventually realized.

He was also enormously valuable to the politicians that he served. Moses built things. Building things meant progress. Progress is good for a politician.

The other thing this book made me reflect on, was how confused we all are about what progress really means. I think many people would agree that a highway that disrupts a peaceful neighborhood isn't progress. But Robert Moses didn't need to consider these things, and the public wasn't really made aware of them.

Extraordinary. Having read this will make me a better planner and a better bureaucrat. It’s rough the amount of times I’ve already brought this book up in casual conversation. And now The Power Broker gets to go in a prime position in my Zoom background, just like every other person interviewed on CNN over Zoom this past year.

4.47 stars

Is Caro’s writing manipulative? Yes. But it’s also pretttty impressive considering the immensity of the project he was undertaking. And, okay, I like to be manipulated sometimes.

It’s hard to sum up this 1200+ page book (the longest I’ve ever read). Often Moses is made out to be a monster, while other times he is deeply pitiable. At just 24 hours out now from having finished this, I don’t know how to feel about him. Am I annoyed more money wasn’t earmarked for public transportation in the decades he was in power? Absolutely. Was he a self-righteous bigot? You betcha. Did he have the best interests of the people at heart when he was creating hundreds of green spaces, beaches, and parks? Only when it suited him and advanced his plan. Did he have a greater impact on this city than any other person to date? Well, Caro would certainly have you think so. The number of things Moses touched in this city (and Long Island) is astounding.

Caro’s bio of Moses is a strange mix of Shakespearean tragedy, city history, and nitty-gritty political details that is, like the man profiled, in a league of its own.

WHEW!!!! This is the longest book I’ve ever listened to, and it marks the growth of my attention span as an audiobook “reader.” 2019 Gab could not have retained most of this information, so I’m pleased that 2025 me could. I think Jessica’s review sums up the experience perfectly: The Power Broker is a clear marker of one’s maturity as a reader. This is a grown-up book, one that schooled me on the making of the world we’ve inherited.

Let’s return, once more, to 2019. Around then, a former boss was gushing about a biography of Lincoln he really enjoyed, explaining how the author detoured for two chapters with a mini-biography of a background character to adequately contextualize a certain part of Lincoln’s life. At the time, I remember thinking this sounded like the biggest waste of time ever. Little did I know that a half-decade later, I’d be thankful for Caro’s extensive portrayals of people like Al Smith and Fiorello La Guardia, if only so I could better understand the monster they unleashed on New York.

Over 60-plus hours, Robert Moses’ life unfolds as a cautionary tale: the rules don’t apply to those with the greed, vision, and clout to break them. Cersei Lannister demonstrated this in the episode “Hear Me Roar”, and Future talked about it on What a Time to Be Alive. 50 years ago, Robert A. Caro showed us the very same thing—and we are all the wiser for it.

Volume 1: an addiction to power
Caro begins his story at the apex of Robert Moses’ reign over the City and State of New York. Despite never being elected to office, Moses held supreme authority over nearly all public works in the City for a period stretching from the 1920s to the 1960s. His influence derived from a plethora of conflicts of interest, with Moses simultaneously holding appointed roles including the NYC Parks Commissioner, Long Island State Park Commission President, NYC Construction Coordinator, NYS Council of Parks Chairman, NYC Planning Commissioner, and the head of the Triborough Bridge Authority.

The fact that this is not even an *exhaustive* list of his posts reveals Caro’s central criticism: Robert Moses was a bonafide power addict, a man who became obsessed with nothing but how he could wrest more and more control out of any situation. Despite this chilling introduction, Caro is actually quite admiring of Moses in the initial chapters of Volume 1. He wistfully describes Moses’ embrace of the municipal reform movement, thinking about what could have been if the young man retained these noble values about public service. Unfortunately, nothing gold can stay.

Around the middle of Volume 1, Moses enters the downward spiral of government corruption. Thanks to the patronage of his lifelong friend, Al Smith, Moses was brought into the inner circle of the New York Governor’s administration, and didn't leave power for the next forty years. Many times, Caro notes that the Robert Moses of 1919, a man with less political strength and greater moral conviction, would not have made a certain action. As time goes on, Caro surmises that even the Robert Moses of 1924, newly risen up by Al Smith, would’ve thought twice about an action he was making by 1928. As the years went on, Moses' actions became more and more nefarious. Eventually, the man who had once railed against government corruption was willfully exchanging parkway route details with legislators in exchange for their approval of the park’s budget. When these legislators scooped up the land around the parkway before any other speculators had the information, the new Robert Moses could find little of his previous disdain for these acts. Whether it was ballot referendum rigging or the intimidation of septuagenarian rivals on the New York Council of Parks, the corrosive nature of power had drained any morality out of the man.

The people and media who helped him get this way
Of course, such a monster couldn’t have made himself. New York Governors like Al Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Herbert Lehman often bent the rules for Moses in ways they shouldn’t have, and allowed his authority over state parks to grow unchecked. When Moses set his sights more firmly on New York City, mayors like Fiorello La Guardia and William O’Dwyer proved equally pliant. On his death bed, La Guardia was literally crying about how no one could keep Moses in check!!! While the Little Flower was certainly right, I wanted to smack him from the grave for not coming to this realization sooner. To quote my favorite Lannister, “it’s hard to put a leash on a dog once you've put a crown on its head”—and that is exactly what the politicians of New York did.

While the politicians were often outmaneuvered by Robert Moses, the public was simply duped by him. Thanks to the media’s decades-long acclaim of the man who gave New York its parks, Robert Moses had the unchallenged ability to control the narrative on any political issue he wanted to. Many newspapers published pages-long letters from him whenever he asked, not even bothering to fact check the many false claims he made in these press releases. As Caro notes in Chapter 11, “a man who had once been the master of scrupulous, reliable research but who had become a master propagandist, one who did not let facts stand in the way of his aim.” The very professionals who were supposed to catch these lies didn’t until it was years too late, and by then the damage was done.

Maybe we *shouldn’t* have nice things
I want to make a detour about the human impacts not just of Moses’ destruction, but also of his construction. In my education as a planner, I have primarily learned about people who were harmed by Robert Moses’ destruction—their homes were razed, their communities were dismantled, and their connection to the rest of New York was intentionally blocked. Caro’s in-depth coverage of the arduous work ethic Moses demanded revealed something else to me—there was also an incredibly dire strain put on the humans responsible for his *construction* of public works.

Even amongst those who despise Robert Moses, many will often hold a sense of awe for the sheer scale of work he was able to complete. Caro even falls into this at times—at the start of Volume 3, he compares Moses’ roads to those of the Roman and French Empires. However, when Caro describes the worker abuses that needed to occur for these roads, bridges, and parks to take form, I immediately began to think that maybe we DO need to take a long time to construct public works!!! If the only way to build things at such a quick speed is to employ “drivers” to abuse the parks workers, as Moses did, to threaten your employees with physical violence, as Moses did, and to expect round-the-clock access to his aides and architects, as Moses did?!?!? Then I’d say we need to move a lot more slowly.

While Caro holds a semblance of nostalgia for the “Moses Men”, the public servants trained under Moses’ administrations, I just felt incredibly sorry for them. They suffered under a federally-funded dictatorship where staff had no ability to reject their dictator’s unreasonable demands. They couldn't even share a conflicting opinion about the color of the sky!!! All this just really made me think differently about the human costs of the actual builders of public works. Despite our commonly-used language as planners and general white-collar workers, Robert Moses didn't physically build a single one of the parks, roads, or bridges he’s credited with. Unfortunately, the thousands of unnamed people who actually built these structures suffered grave injustices while doing so.

Unfortunately, this is still an issue incredibly relevant to our modern times. In my field, I often hear affordable housing developers complaining about the prevailing wage requirements for projects they’re hoping to build with federal subsidies. However, these requirements are designed to ensure that people can actually live on the pay they receive—something that affordable housing advocates should ostensibly support. The way affordable housing and living wages are pitted against each other is really sinister, and it calls to mind several questions. Should we build *anything*, even good things, if we can’t do right by the actual builders? Should we really have sports arenas being built in Qatar if even a single person might die building them? Should we even admire ancient works like the Egyptian pyramids, when in a just and slavery-free world, they never would have existed? This book makes it impossible to ignore the human suffering we condone for things we call the "public good."

Volume 2: out of the Depression and into the postwar era
I enjoyed reading Caro’s work at the same time as Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley. Both histories explore different reasons why many people hated the New Deal in real time. Moses’ manipulation of the New Deal previewed a tool he used often—strike first, before anyone else can even know what you’re doing. Moses’ early adoption of the WPA in particular allowed him to completely control where New York’s allocations of New Deal funding went to: his parks and roads, at the expense of other public needs. There were decades-long delayed maintenance and construction backlogs for schools and hospitals. But, that would have to wait, because all the money was going to another bridge!!!

Another interesting connection to Hammer and Hoe was the way that redbaiting could help consolidate one's power. In Volume 2, Moses willfully rode the coattails of McCarthyism to remove his rivals from public office, and replace them with men more easily bent to his will. Showing once more his skill as a master propagandist, Moses was able to spin middle-aged men’s teenage participation in a Communist organization into a national security threat. Just devious stuff!!!

An enemy of black people, working-class neighborhoods, and long-range planners everywhere
Volume 2 also helps cohere some of Moses’ greatest victims: random people just trying to live their lives in the City. Throughout his career, the man presided over an unimaginable amount of anti-Blackness, even for his times. I wasn’t surprised that Harlem got scraps of parks during the 1940s, or that Moses’ Long Island beaches and parks used access tricks and transportation schemes to keep Black people away. However, Caro really shows how Robert Moses was racist even when it was EASIER to just do unbiased things. He literally chose more expensive routes for certain parkways simply so he wouldn’t have to listen to defer to the opinions of people he considered below him, when they shared that his planned routes would demolish their neighborhoods. This man, who any other time detested labor rights, actually bonded with the building unions over a shared desire to keep Black and Puerto Rican workers out of their ranks.

If that wasn’t enough, Robert Moses also ruined mass transit in New York during a critical period that could’ve set the course for a much less auto-dependent region. Caro wryly notes that part of Moses’ insistence on building roads and roads alone was his own aversion to anyone else's opinion, part of it was his outdated notion of vehicular travel as leisurely transport, and part of it was because THE MAN NEVER DROVE A CARRRRRRR. He had a paid driver his entire life, and so even when he was sitting in one of the many traffic jams on his parkways, he could just lean back and close his eyes. This irony just sent me into a blind rage—the man who siphoned all the money away for potential subways that would’ve actually reduced the congestion the highways were exacerbating—that man?!?!?! He never suffered through a bit of that congestion. You know who is suffering from that congestion, nearly a century later?!?!

MEEEEEEEEEE. I have made the tedious journey to LaGuardia Airport from Tribeca, taking the subway to Queens then taking to a bus to another part of Queens and then transferring to a SHUTTLE BUS that would finally take me to the airport. When I learned that all this could have been resolved by Moses not even building rail lines on some of his expressways, but simply leaving the space open for the MTA to build those lines in the future?!?!?! I nearly burst a blood vessel. This man presided over the deeply unenjoyable, wholly unnecessary shift from rail to road commutes in the mid-twentieth century. He achieved this by decimating the funding streams that could support improved train service and quality, and by hoarding all transportation funds for future rail expansion.

If THAT wasn’t enough, he also just ruined New York City itself. Moses directed the City’s massive expansion of slum clearance work through the Title 1 program, resulting in the demolition of many thriving communities. Caro paints a particularly compassionate picture of East Tremont, a Jewish neighborhood that Moses destroyed when he didn’t even have to for the Cross Bronx Expressway. Chapters like this cement Moses not just as an enemy of the people, but as an enemy of urban planners. In many ways, Robert Moses exists as the anti-planner: someone who insisted on forcing individual projects through without delay, so there was never any time to consider the long-range picture or competing public needs. By Volume 2 of The Power Broker, you get the sense of Moses himself as an overworked, headless chicken—someone who couldn’t slow down his own work to evaluate its impact. Still, I hold little sympathy for the man, as we are all worse off because of his breakneck speed.

Volume 3: everything the light touches has been ruined by Robert Moses
At last: the dark, dark end of an unfathomably narcissistic person. Volume 3 of The Power Broker reminded me of Scar’s decimated Pride Lands domain, or of Stannis Baratheon’s camp before his "attack" of Winterfell. One can only further evil for so long before it starts to eat away at even the things you hold dear. Caro has these beautiful, haunting descriptions of how Robert Moses’ deafness mirrored his long-held unwillingness to hear others, and how his retinue of “yes men” made lavish dinners feel like hostage situations.

By the time we finally see the demise of his empire, Moses didn’t even realize what to hide, because he was so insulated from the consequences of his actions. Just like Joffrey Baratheon, Robert Moses was just petty and unreasonable and disagreeable until the very end, making it very hard to feel pity for him. When the Triborough Bridge Authority’s 1966 merger with the MTA finally stripped him of his power, I couldn’t help but laugh!!!

Robert Caro and anti-hagiographic biographers, I was not familiar with y’alls game
I briefly discussed this in my Empire of Pain review, but I am coming to love these sorts of take-down biographies. I like to consider myself a pretty passionate hater, but I may have to reconsider that title now. When I say that Robert Caro HATEDDDDD this man, I am really understating the situation. He is fair, he is thorough, but he is also incredibly incisive—I know Robert Moses must’ve had acid reflux the minute he got a copy of this book!!!

While I love being a hater just for the fun of it, the critical biographies that Robert A. Caro accomplished with The Power Broker and Patrick Radden Keefe accomplished with Empire of Pain serve a higher purpose. Robert Moses is still lauded in certain circles, despite it all. Just a few weeks ago, a few coworkers close in age to me were shocked to hear a higher-up at our company list Robert Moses as his greatest role model. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. My own planning department had the literal authors of Durham’s urban renewal plans on faculty until the late twentieth century. It makes sense that people who started their careers just a few decades after the end of Moses’ empire might still have a bit of awe over all he did. I am thankful that this sort of masterpiece exists to make sure we never forget the cost of all his works.

Final Thoughts
If you’ve made it this far, ESPECIALLY after reading the book itself, you deserve a prize!!! I’d recommend this to all interested readers. I can’t wait to read more biographies with this sort of perspective, and I’m also hoping to go see the 50th anniversary exhibit for The Power Broker, which will be at the New York Historical until August 2025.

Before Trump There Was Moses

Want to understand the politics and the reasons why NYC is the way it is? Read it and weep.

Robert Moses was never elected to public office. Yet his power over public finance and social decision-making was greater than that of any elected official, including at times the President of the United States (His nemesis, however, was the president's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was also unelected to anything but just as crafty).

Moses created his power by creating the laws which New York State politicians passed without reading or understanding the fine print. He effectively institutionalised himself as, among other posts, the Chairman of the Long Island State Parks Commission, and the head of the Triborough Bridge Authority. These positions, thanks to his foresightful design, were immune to political review.

At the LISPC, he single-handedly designed the expansion of the New York City suburbs from the 1930's onward as totally dependent on the automobile and in such a way that would limit racial integration. At the Triborough Bridge Authority, he created a spectacularly successful cash cow whose funds could not be touched without his approval. And even the 1970's financial collapse of the City was not enough to attract this approval.

Yet other administrative positions, often held simultaneously in the City and the State, gave Moses blanket-control of every significant planning and planning-variance decision within the City. His tentacles of power extended even to the Northern reaches of the State through his control of electricity generation along the St. Lawrence River.

There is no evidence that Moses ever took a bribe or benefitted financially from his immense power. He started his career and pursued it as an idealist. He was nonetheless a dictator who routinely destroyed neighbourhoods, regularly flouted the law, coerced politicians of both major parties, and ultimately left a legacy of social devastation which will last for decades if not centuries.

Caro's documentation of Moses's strategy and activities is unparalleled. His attention to detail and nuance is acute. His judgments and conclusions are never precipitous and always subtle. This book should be on the required reading list of every course in democratic government in every country on the planet.