Person

Robert Moses

Related Excerpts

Cartoon of a person squished upside-down in a city high-rise.

The Death and Life of Progressive Urbanism

Blue America lacks a Gov. Ron DeSantis: someone remaking a state or major city in the image of a well-articulated ideology.

Read Another Book

The Power Broker leaves us ill-equipped to understand or confront the struggles that face the city today.
Photograph of Robert Moses on a background collage of a blueprint and a photo of passengers waiting in Penn Station.

Robert Moses Helped Ruin Penn Station. He'd Have Made it Easier to Fix, Too.

Preservationists like Jane Jacobs are urbanist heroes. But their rules can stifle.
Architectural rendering of a bridge.

The True Measure of Robert Moses (and His Racist Bridges)

Did Robert Moses ordered engineers to build the Southern State Parkway’s bridges extra-low, to prevent poor people in buses from them? The truth is complex.

Emperor of Concrete

A 1974 review of Robert Caro's "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York."
Robert Moses sitting in front of a catelog of blueprints.

The Inadequacy of the Abundance Agenda

Three new books propose market solutions to problems that require government intervention. We’ve been here before. It didn’t end well.
The famous photo of the eyes from The Great Gatsby.

How “The Great Gatsby” Changed the Landscape of New York City

On Robert Moses, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the culture of environmental waste.
Lincoln Center on the opening night of the Met Opera, 1966.

Curtains for Lincoln Center

On the falsification of Lincoln Center’s history.
The Cross-Bronx Expressway, April 1971. Photo by Dan McCoy/Environmental Protection Agency/National Archives

How the New York of Robert Moses Shaped my Father’s Health

My dad grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City. His story is a testament to how urban planning shapes countless lives.
The image of the forlorn girl on the outskirts of the Highway to Nowhere was shot by John Van Horn in the fall of 1968

Road to Ruin

In the late 1960s, Baltimore began demolishing Black neighborhoods to make room for an ill-fated expressway. Will the harm from the Highway to Nowhere ever be repaired?
A pile of trash at a landfill behind a member of the Army Corps of Engineers.

The History of New York, Told Through Its Trash

In 1948, the landfill at Fresh Kills was marketed to Staten Island as a stopgap measure. No one guessed that it would remain open for more than half a century.

When Robert Moses Wiped Out New York’s ‘Little Syria’

What happened to the former Main Street of Syrian America.

Jane Jacobs vs. The Power Brokers

How the patron saint of progressive urban planning’s ideas and ideals were implemented – and corrupted.

Against the Great Man Theory of Historians

Without accounting for the often-invisible work of others in his research, Robert Caro's new memoir is not so much inspiration as an exercise in self-celebration.

Rexford Guy Tugwell and the Case for Big Urbanism

New York City’s first planning commissioner lost a bigger battle against Robert Moses than the fight Jane Jacobs won.

Present Tense, Future Perfect: Protest and Progress at the 1964 World's Fair

The stall-in threatened to interrupt a certain imaginary of progress, democracy, and freedom with the reality of racial injustice.
Fiorello La Guardia.

How Mayor Fiorello La Guardia Transformed New York City

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is questioning what a socialist might accomplish as mayor of NYC. To answer it, it’s worth looking back on Fiorello La Guardia.
A bulldozer juxtapositioned with destroyed buildings and barren land.

The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer

From India to the Amazon to Israel, bulldozers have left a path of destruction that offers a cautionary tale for how technology can be misused.
People protesting the demolition of homes to make way for the performing arts saying "shelter before culture."

Lincoln Center Destroyed Lives for the Sake of the Arts

The terrific new doc “San Juan Hill” chronicles the 1960s land grab that gave the Metropolitan Opera a home, while scattering longtime residents.
Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates speak during the 'Gates Foundation' press conference at the Annual Meeting 2009 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 30, 2009" by Remy Steinegger.

Philanthropy’s Power Brokers

An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor is long overdue.