Curdled Vision

What it looks like when one man decides what is best for a city

I finally got my Libby copy of The Power Broker by Robert Caro after a several-month wait. When a 1284-page book drops in your lap and you have 21 days to read it, it’s daunting. Yes, I could buy a copy. I could borrow a friend’s copy. But the truth is, given all the time in the world to read it, it would take all the time in the world to read it. Instead, this, a submersion into New York City history.

Why read it? I’m not tremendously interested in political histories, and I’ve never lived in New York City, but the book isn’t really about politics or history. Caro, most famous for his series of books on Lyndon B. Johnson, likes to write about power and the behind-the-scenes machinations between people that ultimately change lives for millions.

The Power Broker is about Robert Moses, the parks commissioner and city planner who is responsible for remaking New York City and the New York state parks system. He is a person who destroyed neighborhoods, wrecked individual lives, was a Machiavellian schemer of the highest order, and generally an arrogant know-it-all. But he also revitalized parts of New York City, created thousands of acres of parks, and employed thousands of people during the Great Depression.

Moses emerges during the height of the Tammany Hall era. Votes were bought, loyalty was everything, and money determined who got into power and who stayed there. Moses didn’t actually earn a living wage for his family until he was 38 and had two kids, his mother’s wealth had bankrolled him through Yale and Oxford. If he starts off as an idealist, it is as one cushioned by wealth. And it is also one for whom the poor are abstract. The white middle class, he sees as the horde that must be protected if not understood. Anyone else is best disregarded under his gimlet eye.

Looking back through the lens of history, it’s easy to see how much he damage he caused, how he poured concrete over everything, how he prioritized cars and pushed poor people to the edges. If he Fiorello LaGuardia saw himself as the indulgent father of New York City, Moses was its disciplinarian, the one who knew what was best. The people loved him for it, fully fell for the ceremony of each new playground opening. They believed that everything he was doing was out of this selfless love for New York, not out of his own ego and arrogant desire to cast the city in the image that he thought was most advisable.

There’s a moment when power shifts into voraciousness. For Moses it is after LaGuardia’s reign. Most tyrants don’t start out that way; they apprentice, they study, and at some point, arrogance tilts into authoritarianism. Once Moses figures out he can do a lot of things, he believes he can do everything. Sure, he gets thwarted in some ways such as when he wants to build a bridge and gets a tunnel instead, but that only makes him more vengeful. He tears down the old New York aquarium as a power flex and an act of spite (not his first or his last).

The book is about the intersection of money and power the whole way through but I find one aspect particularly interesting and that is his secret weapon: banks. Once Moses has his bridges, he has in place a mechanism for making money and for using that money to make money. Revenue bonds became the key to his power. This was a win for banks which need safe places to invest in. Good news for them, and for wealthy investors, but as usual, this was built on the backs of those who could ill afford it. As Caro writes: “If bondholders received tens of millions of dollars extra in interest, drivers would have to pay tens of millions of dollars extra in tolls.”

The money also meant that if he wanted to raze a neighborhood to give a university more land in the city, he could. The right of eminent domain, something I studied in my real estate classes, seems like an abstract until it is being used in front of you. I saw it in Los Angeles when the government decided neighborhoods were in the way of a freeway expansion, which never ended up being built. Eminent domain is often fought when it is large in scope but it is a governmental power I’m worried about a lot more lately. How it was used in New York is worth paying attention to, especially the way that Moses used government contracts to fuel a system in which politicians friendly to his cause got into power and stayed there because they never dared to cross him.

Why read a book this detailed about something that happened decades ago? Caro’s meticulous research gives us the blueprint of how one man turned the biggest city in the United States into his private empire, not just for an election cycle, but for decades. Our culture often misses the power that doesn’t get elected, the bankers, and businessmen, the appointees, and administrators. We are under the misapprehension that power cycles out every four years. It doesn’t. Moses ran for governor once, he lost mostly because he couldn’t manipulate the masses the way he could people he deemed to be more or less on his level. People loved him for his works, the man himself was far less palatable.

It’s tempting to think about what a non-Moses New York City would have looked like. According to Caro, the city’s transportation system was probably the best in the world in the 1930s. Had money gone into subways and public transit instead of expressways and bridges, would the city be fundamentally different? Would New York City be the same size it is now?

What lessons are there in the rise and fall of Robert Moses? When someone grabs power, it can seem like all doors are closed, especially when different levels of government and authority are in collusion. What brought Moses down was no one thing but there is a thread to follow: women. His battles with Jane Jacobs were legendary but there were other women, often housewives and mothers, who saw what was happening and spoke out. Eventually, the worshipful press of the 1930s and 1940s turned to the questioning press of the 1950s. It wasn’t the estimated 170,000 people displaced by his bridges and highways that made the news. It was moves like putting a parking lot near Tavern On The Green and canceling Shakespeare in the Park that got attention.

Moses was an edifice; it took many stories, many studies, many protests, to finally chip away at the fortress of his power. But in the end, it took an unbeatable foe, a man with more power and money whom he could not outflank: Nelson Rockefeller, whose family just happened to have control over Chase Manhattan. Yes, age played a role here, too, but a lion in winter still roars. In the end, he lived long enough to seem himself nearly forgotten, a painful end for a man whose power was unassailable for so long.

What would it take to write a book like this today? It took seven years, 522 interviews, countless books read, sources examined, the help of many assistants, and the research efforts of Caro’s wife, Ina. In the future, will scholarship in part be left to artificial intelligence? Who will write a book like this? And who will read over a thousand pages without relying on an AI summary? In this time when we are losing so many things, it seems a small thing to worry about the decline of reading too, but this is how we understand the world. I think of a young Barry Obama reading The Power Broker at 22 and learning something profound about how politics really work. To read, to sit in contemplation of a man and a time period, to connect the lessons to today’s world seems self-indulgent but it is vital. For me, understanding history and humanity in its fullness is the real work of this life.