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 at least fifteen pages a 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