Moses and Dressler

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Now Robert Moses’ eyes were turning again to the city around which, as a youth, he had wandered “burning up” with ideas for its improvement.

I never thought to think about it before, but I would wager that Steven Millhauser read The Power Broker in doing the research that went into his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996). Martin Dressler walking around the city and imagining its possibilities is a nineteenth-century version of Robert Moses walking around his New York. The difference is that Dressler imagines the vertical possibilities; Moses, the horizontal ones.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts : Steven Millhauser posts (Raindrop.io)