The Power Broker, all done

Elaine and I finished reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York last night. We started reading on October 27 and read every day, save for four or five days devoted to family hijinks. I count The Power Broker as one of the great reading experiences of my life. It’s an extraordinary narrative of a young idealist’s acquisition of power and his use of that power to reshape and deform the life of a city.

I don’t think I’ve ever been angrier while reading than I was while reading “One Mile,” the chapter of the book that documents what the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway did to the East Tremont section of the Bronx. (And I’m still angry.) There, as elsewhere, Moses asserts himself as a figure of blind will. Modify the path of an expressway — resulting in enormous savings and the preservation of a neighborhood? Can’t be done. There, as elsewhere, Moses ignored realities and constructed his own. The East Tremont apartment buildings he was to destroy he called “slums.” (They weren’t: I’ll be posting a WPA tax photograph of one soon.) The residents who protested he called “animals.” “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” he was fond of saying: his contempt for “the people” was profound. And yet he was celebrated as the city’s master builder, by The New York Times and, for a long time, every New York newspaper but the Post — until he wasn’t.

It’s a measure of Caro’s humanity that he’s able to depict Moses in his own humanity: arrogant, underhanded, and vain, but a gifted visionary, a tireless worker, and a figure who inspires pity in his downfall. Allowed to keep his chauffeurs and limousine, Moses in decline reminds me of Lear with his retinue of knights: the trappings of power, without the power.

I have many passages from the book still to post. I’ll stop here by noting that congestion pricing in Manhattan begins in two days. Like the effort to cap the Cross Bronx Expressway, it’s an attempt to undo damage done by Robert Moses.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io) : Elaine’s post after finishing the book

“A terrible finesco!”

Michael J. Madigan was a Moses engineer. From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

The son of an impoverished bartender, Jack Madigan had come out of the Pennsylvania hard-coal country in 1907 at the age of thirteen to enter the construction industry as a waterboy lugging buckets for thirsty work gangs, and by the time, in 1928, he was promoted to supervisor for one of the Jones Beach contractors, he had spent his whole life with the gangs. With his ruddy, square face and grizzled hair he looked like one of them, and he was as boisterous as they as he crowded with them into South Shore taverns after work to wash the sand of the barrier beach out of his throat. His “dese, dose and dem” speech revealed his lack of formal education; he was addicted to awesome malapropisms: “From the standing point of finances,” he would say of Tammany’s handling of the Triborough Bridge project, “what a terrible finesco!”

Related reading
All OCA posts (Raindrop.io)

Deco hospital

[From Internes Can’t Take Money (dir. Alfred Santell, 1937). Click either image for a larger view.]

As I wrote in this post, the Art Deco hospital is a star in this movie. The movie also stars Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea, who’s at the center of the group standing in front of the desk.

Sardines at YouTube

Sardine Exposition is a YouTube channel devoted to taste-testing sardines and other tinned fish.

Thanks, Kevin.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Raindrop.io)

Handwriting in the news

In an attempted bank robbery in Colorado:

Loveland police say a man walked in to the First National Bank, located at 750 North Lincoln Avenue, and handed the teller a note. His handwriting was allegedly almost completely illegible and the teller had a hard time reading it.

While the teller was struggling to read the note, the man reportedly got frustrated and quickly left the bank.

See also these 2020 and 2021 attempted bank roberries. And see, of course, Take the Money and Run.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Raindrop.io)

Resolutions

At Dreamers Rise, resolutions for the new year. Click through — you won’t regret it.

Public Domain Day

Today is Public Domain Day (Duke University School of Law). I repeat: it’s Public Domain Day (Public Domain Review). Featuring William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Wanda Gág, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Cole Porter, Ma Rainey, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Virginia Woolf, and many more.