Robert Moses demonized at length

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	• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Robert A. Caro Vintage, 1975 - 1344 pages average customer review:based on 106 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Humane Story of New York

The length of this book is not an issue. It's unapologetic approach to a complex man (Moses) and a complex city are both incredibly enlightening and heart-wrenchingly real. A beautiful book.

Comprehensive To Say the Least

Robert Caro does an excellent job detailing the life and work of Robert Moses. He gives the reader such a detailed account of the impact Robert Moses had on the New York metropolitan area that one actually is introduced to dozens of worthwhile "mini-biographies" within this book of 1162 pages. He gives an excellent description of a multitude of mayors, governors and other politicians, statesmen, and businessmen that Caro's description of these individuals are sometimes more comprehensive than their own biographies.

Caro is comprehensive without resorting to gossip, inuendo and unsubstantiated claims. The Power Broker chronicles Moses'early life as an idealistic but abrasive reformer who is brought under the wing of Governor Al Smith and staff. A significant part of his rise to power should be credited to Governor Smith who has complete trust in Moses and other aides regardless of public criticisms affecting his administration. Smith was absolutely loyal to Moses and supported his endeavors as it related to the fruition of his dreams involving building parks and highways.

Moses gained a great deal of power as the years progressed and became less of an idealist and more of a pragmatic politician who as the steward millions of dollars in city, state, and federal funds for housing, parks, highways, and bridges created a system by which many sectors of society depended on him for jobs, contracts, and political patronage. Unions, politicians, contractors, developers all benefited from Robert Moses.

When picking up this book, I asked myself why the " Fall of NY" portion of the title. If you read the book you will understand that contrary to modern day urban planning, many of Moses' projects were more about his accomplishments than the people adversely affected by the projects. Whether it is the construction of Lincoln Center, the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the reader will see that no mechanism existed to balance the needs of building with the long term social ills that massive construction projects can create.

For anyone who has spent any amount of time in New York City or its surrounding suburbs, many questions are answered by reading this book. Many of these questions have to do with transportation and urban/suburban planning. Caro is highly critical of Moses as were many people during the end of his reign in the late 1960's, but he manages to be objective enough to give credit where credit is due. A book of this magnitude can only reach 1162 pages by being objective .

I higly recommend this book, it is by far the best biography I have read thus far and is told in its proper historical context. Rober Caro did an admirable job in telling the story of a giant of a man who was vehemently loved and vehemently hated by many.

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Robert Moses demonized at length

Driving through New York City, I've always been astonished by the immense scale and innovative engineering behind the bridges, tunnels and highways connecting the city's boroughs. Caro does a tremendous job of discussing how Robert Moses managed to build many of these structures by using a variety of devious means, ranging from political tactics short of blackmail to manipulation of the public through the media.

Caro's Robert Moses is an evil man who did everything within his power to achieve his means no matter the cost. Moses is depicted as an overbearing man who is not only arrogant and greedy, but unsympathetic to the poor and his own family. In the final chapters as Mose's began to lose his power and, to a certain degree, get a taste of his own medicine, I could not help feel a certain sense of satisfaction.

I had to constantly remind myself of Caro's bias. Despite Caro explicitly saying otherwise, this book has the clear implication that Robert Moses destroyed New York--its neighborhoods and people. Moses is demonized at length to an extreme and perhaps somewhat unjustifiably. If you read other material about Moses written before Caro released his book, you find all but praise for Moses, a venerable man in most respects. What Caro should have emphasized more in his book is what happened to New York was not only because of Moses, but due to a variety of social, cultural and political factors reaching far beyond Moses. Similar chaos and destruction took place in other cities where Moses never showed his face.

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Superlatives Fall Short

Surely Robert Moses' greatest achievement is to have formed the subject of this marvelous book. When I first picked it up in 1982 I flew through it in a few days. Recently I obtained the audio edition and began listening to the 43 tapes. It has lost exactly none of its engrossing qualities. Whatever one may think about his megalomania, it's impossible not to get caught up in the sweep of time and change that his life embodied. Born in 1888 when horse and buggy ruled the road, he was responsible more than anyone else in the world for the car-and-truck dominated society we now inhabit. Starting out as a naïve idealist, he evolved into the diametrical opposite of that: a callous, all-powerful autocrat growing like a malignant tumor in the heart of a free society. In the twenties he struggles against the owners of vast estates to open up the beaches and open space of Long Island to the urban poor. By the fifties he is ramming eight lane highways down the middle of the neighborhoods of the urban poor, condemning scores of buildings at a stroke and displacing hundreds of families, and destroying the day-to-day lives of those who remain next to the likes of the Cross Bronx Expressway and the BQE.

One can speculate that the problem was that he was unelected and therefore immune to checks and balances, much like J. Edgar Hoover. But then, Robert Caro's other subject, Lyndon Johnson, did perhaps ten times the damage that Moses did, and he was elected repeatedly. It all makes for great reading-or listening if you happen to be caught in traffic.

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