Robert Moses

Based on Wikipedia: Robert Moses

Robert Moses never won an election. He never even ran for one. And yet, for nearly half a century, he wielded more power over New York City than any mayor, any governor, perhaps any single individual in the city's history. The bridges you cross, the highways you curse in traffic, the beaches where you escape the summer heat, the housing projects that tower over neighborhoods—Moses built them all. He reshaped not just New York but the very idea of what an American city could be.

This is the story of how one man, armed with law degrees and an encyclopedic understanding of bureaucratic power, transformed the largest city in the Western Hemisphere according to his vision. It's also a cautionary tale about what happens when that much power concentrates in a single pair of hands.

The Reformer's Education

Moses was born on December 18, 1888, in New Haven, Connecticut, just two blocks from Yale University. His parents, Emanuel and Isabella Moses, were of German Jewish descent. Emanuel had made his fortune in department stores and real estate, and when Robert was nine, the family moved to Manhattan—to East 46th Street, just off Fifth Avenue, in the heart of the city's wealthy enclave.

The young Moses collected credentials like some boys collected stamps. Yale for his bachelor's degree. Then Oxford, specifically Wadham College, where he studied jurisprudence. Then Columbia for his doctorate in political science, completed in 1914. This wasn't mere academic tourism. Moses was training himself for something specific: he wanted to reform government.

In 1915, Moses married Mary Louise Sims, a woman from Dodgeville, Wisconsin—about as far from the New York elite as one could imagine. They would have two daughters and remain married until Mary's death in 1966, though she spent her final fourteen years virtually bedridden with arthritis. Within a month of her death, Moses married his secretary, Mary Alicia Grady, a woman who had been accompanying him on vacations for years.

Learning to Pull the Levers

Moses's entry into power came through an unlikely door: civil service reform. In the early twentieth century, New York's government ran on patronage. Jobs went to political allies, competence be damned. Moses developed plans to change this, including a 1919 proposal to reorganize the entire state government. The proposal wasn't adopted, but it caught the attention of someone important.

Belle Moskowitz was a trusted advisor to Governor Al Smith, and she recognized something in Moses: not just intelligence, but a remarkable talent for understanding how government actually worked. Smith was elected governor in 1918 and again in 1922, and with each term, Moses rose alongside him. When the Secretary of State position became an appointed rather than elected office, Smith gave it to Moses. He served from 1927 to 1929.

But titles don't fully capture what Moses was learning. He was becoming what colleagues called "the best bill drafter in Albany." This might sound like bureaucratic tedium, but it was actually the key to everything. Laws create power. Whoever writes the laws—whoever understands their loopholes and provisions, their funding mechanisms and oversight structures—can build empires within them.

Moses headed a "Reconstruction Commission" that produced recommendations adopted almost wholesale: consolidating 187 state agencies into 18 departments, creating a new executive budget system, establishing four-year term limits for governors. This wasn't reform for its own sake. Moses was learning to redesign the machinery of government itself.

The Birth of Public Authorities

In 1924, Governor Smith made two appointments that would define Moses's career: chairman of the State Council of Parks and president of the Long Island State Park Commission. These might sound like honorary positions, the kind given to wealthy donors. They were anything but.

Moses had helped create these commissions, and he had written into their charters something revolutionary: they were "public authorities," semi-autonomous entities that could issue bonds, collect revenue, and operate largely outside normal government oversight. The public authority was Moses's great innovation—or his great end-run around democracy, depending on your perspective.

Consider how normal government works. A mayor or governor wants to build something. They need the legislature to approve funding. Taxpayers vote on bond measures. Every step involves public debate, political compromise, the messiness of democracy. Public authorities bypass all of this. They issue their own bonds, backed by future toll revenue. They answer to no one except, theoretically, the elected officials who appointed their boards. And those officials, perpetually strapped for cash, are rarely willing to challenge an authority that can deliver projects without raiding the public treasury.

Moses would eventually hold as many as twelve titles simultaneously. At the peak of his power, he controlled the Long Island State Park Commission, the New York State Council of Parks, the Bethpage State Park Authority, the Jones Beach Parkway Authority, the New York City Department of Parks, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, the New York City Planning Commission, and the New York State Power Authority. Each position reinforced the others. Each gave him leverage over politicians, contractors, and anyone else who wanted something built in New York.

Jones Beach and the Parks Revolution

But Moses didn't just accumulate bureaucratic power for its own sake. He built things—and what he built first was genuinely popular.

Jones Beach State Park, which opened in 1929, remains the most visited public beach in the United States. Before Moses, Long Island's beaches were largely inaccessible to ordinary New Yorkers. Private estates controlled the waterfront. Roads were inadequate. Moses changed all of this, building not just the beach facilities but an entire parkway system to reach them: the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, the Wantagh State Parkway.

The Meadowbrook State Parkway, completed under Moses's direction, was the first fully divided limited-access highway in the world. We take divided highways for granted now—the notion that opposing traffic should be physically separated seems obvious. But someone had to build the first one, and that someone was Moses.

During the Depression, Moses's ability to deliver became even more valuable. When Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal created programs like the Works Progress Administration (known as the WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (called the CCC), there was suddenly federal money available for public works. The problem was that most cities and states had no projects ready. Moses did. New York received an outsized share of Depression-era funding because Moses had plans sitting on his desk, waiting for money to arrive.

The Pools of 1936

One of Moses's most remarkable achievements from this era was building eleven massive public swimming pools across New York City, all opening in 1936. Working with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and funded by the WPA, Moses devised an ambitious plan: each pool would be at least fifty-five yards long, with underwater lighting, heating, and filtration. There would be separate pools for diving, swimming, and wading, plus bathhouses, bleachers, and gymnasiums.

To keep costs down, Moses worked with architects Aymar Embury II and Gilmore David Clarke to create a common design in the Streamline Moderne and Classical styles—the sleek, optimistic architecture of the era. Construction began in October 1934. By mid-1936, ten of the eleven pools were complete, opening at a rate of one per week. Combined, they could accommodate forty-nine thousand swimmers. Ten of these pools were eventually designated New York City landmarks.

But even this triumph had a shadow. According to subordinates who worked with Moses, he allegedly tried to keep African American swimmers out of his pools. One remembered Moses saying the water should be kept a few degrees colder, supposedly because he believed Black people didn't like cold water. Whether or not this particular story is true, the accusation that Moses's projects systematically disadvantaged Black neighborhoods would follow him throughout his career and eventually help destroy his reputation.

The Triborough and the Money Machine

Moses became Parks Commissioner of New York City in January 1934, a position he would hold for over a quarter century. But the title that gave him the most power was one that seemed almost technical: chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority.

The Triborough Bridge—later renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge—opened in 1936, connecting the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens via three separate spans. The bridge itself was an engineering marvel, but the real genius was in the fine print of the Authority's bond contracts and commissioner appointments. Moses had written language that made the Authority almost completely independent of mayors and governors. Bond covenants required that toll revenue be used to service the bonds before anything else. Multi-year appointments meant that even a hostile mayor couldn't easily remove Moses or his allies from the board.

And the tolls came in. Traffic exceeded all projections. Tens of millions of dollars flowed through the Authority every year. Moses didn't use this money to pay off the bonds and dissolve the Authority. Instead, he borrowed against future toll revenue to fund new projects, which would generate their own tolls, which would allow him to borrow even more. It was a self-perpetuating machine of construction and power.

While New York City and New York State were perpetually short of money, Moses was awash in it. Politicians who wanted projects built in their districts had to come to him. And Moses had a very clear vision of what he wanted to build.

The Battle of the Battery

In the late 1930s, a fight erupted over how to connect Brooklyn to lower Manhattan. The existing options were inadequate; a new vehicular link was clearly needed. But should it be a bridge or a tunnel?

This might seem like a technical question. It wasn't. It was a fundamental dispute about what kind of city New York would become.

Bridges are generally cheaper and can carry more traffic. But a bridge to lower Manhattan would have required massive ramps landing right at Battery Park, at the southern tip of the island. It would have decimated the park and physically encroached on the financial district. The Regional Plan Association opposed it. Historical preservationists opposed it. Wall Street opposed it. The construction unions opposed it. The Manhattan borough president opposed it. Mayor La Guardia opposed it. Governor Herbert Lehman opposed it.

Moses wanted the bridge.

Why? Partly because a bridge could carry more cars—Moses believed deeply in automobile transportation. But also because a bridge is visible. A bridge is a monument. A tunnel disappears underground, useful but unglorious. Moses wanted to build things people could see.

La Guardia and Lehman, as usual, had little money. The federal government had just spent a hundred and five million dollars (about 1.8 billion in today's money) on the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and refused to fund any more New York projects. But Moses, with his Triborough toll money, announced that his funds could only be spent on a bridge. The chief engineer of the project, Ole Singstad, disagreed; Singstad was a tunnel specialist who had designed the Holland Tunnel. Moses clashed with him repeatedly.

In the end, only federal intervention stopped the bridge. President Roosevelt—who had feuded with Moses for years—ordered the War Department to claim that a bridge at that location could be bombed and block East River access to the Brooklyn Navy Yard upstream. It was a creative use of military authority to thwart a civilian project.

Moses lost, but he made sure everyone knew he was angry. He dismantled the New York Aquarium from its home at Castle Clinton—a historic fort at the Battery—and moved it to Coney Island, claiming that construction of the tunnel would undermine the fort's foundation. This was almost certainly false; it was punishment. He even tried to demolish Castle Clinton itself, and the historic structure survived only because it was transferred to the federal government.

Forced to build a tunnel, Moses commissioned what is now called the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel (originally the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel). The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority published a petulant 1941 report claiming the government had forced them to build a crossing at "twice the cost, twice the operating fees, twice the difficulty to engineer, and half the traffic." Engineering studies did not support these conclusions.

The Zenith of Power

After World War Two, Moses's power reached its peak. Mayor La Guardia, the one politician who had consistently challenged him, retired. A series of successors proved far more pliable.

In 1946, Mayor William O'Dwyer named Moses the city's "construction coordinator," making him New York's de facto representative in Washington. He also gained powers over public housing that La Guardia had denied him. When O'Dwyer resigned in disgrace and was replaced by Vincent Impellitteri, Moses assumed even greater behind-the-scenes control.

One of his first acts under the new mayor was to halt a comprehensive zoning plan that had been underway since 1938. Such a plan would have created citywide rules that even Moses would have to follow. He couldn't allow that.

By this point, Moses was responsible for an astonishing array of projects. The Throgs Neck Bridge. Highways that cut through neighborhoods across the city. Urban renewal projects that demolished vast areas of tenement housing and replaced them with towering public housing complexes. The physical fabric of New York was being rewoven according to one man's vision.

That vision was clear: New York was a city for automobiles. Highways would carry commuters from suburbs into the city center. Parking would accommodate their cars. Public transportation was, at best, secondary—and at worst, an obstacle to be demolished to make room for more lanes.

What Moses Built

The full inventory of Moses's projects is staggering. He built or controlled:

• The Triborough Bridge, connecting three boroughs
• The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, linking Brooklyn to lower Manhattan
• The Throgs Neck Bridge, spanning the East River
• The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened
• Jones Beach State Park and the Long Island parkway system
• Hundreds of playgrounds and smaller parks across New York City
• The United Nations headquarters (he helped secure the land)
• Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
• Shea Stadium
• The 1964 World's Fair
• Vast public housing projects
• Miles upon miles of urban highways

No single individual had ever built so much in an American city. Moses transformed not just New York but the template for postwar urban development nationwide. Cities across America looked at his highways and housing projects and tried to replicate them.

The Power Broker

Moses's reputation began to crumble in 1974 with the publication of a book that would define his legacy: Robert Caro's "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York."

Caro spent seven years researching the book. It runs to over twelve hundred pages. And it systematically demolished the idea that Moses was a public servant building for the common good.

Caro documented how Moses's highways had deliberately been routed through poor and minority neighborhoods, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. He showed how the bridges and parkways to Long Island had been designed with overpasses too low for buses—ensuring that poor New Yorkers without cars couldn't easily reach the beaches Moses had built. He traced how Moses had used his power to enrich allies and punish enemies, how he had manipulated bond covenants to make himself nearly impossible to remove, how he had systematically underestimated costs and overestimated benefits to get projects approved.

Most damningly, Caro showed that Moses's vision of an automobile-centered city was destroying the urban fabric it claimed to serve. Neighborhoods severed by highways declined and died. Public transportation withered as resources flowed to roads. The very act of building more highways generated more traffic, in an endless cycle that could never actually solve congestion.

"The Power Broker" won the Pulitzer Prize. It transformed Moses from a master builder into a cautionary tale. The highways he championed came to be seen not as progress but as scars across the urban landscape. The housing projects he built became symbols of failed urban renewal, towers of poverty and crime that isolated their residents from the city around them.

The Lessons of Moses

Robert Moses died on July 29, 1981, at the age of ninety-two. By then, his reputation had been largely dismantled. The very phrase "master builder" had become ironic, almost accusatory.

What are we to make of him?

Moses understood something that idealists often miss: power matters. He studied the law, mastered the bureaucracy, built financial independence through toll revenue, and created institutional structures that outlasted any individual politician's term. He got things built when others could only talk.

But Moses also demonstrated the dangers of concentrated power, especially power that evades democratic accountability. His public authorities answered to no voters. His bond covenants made him nearly impossible to remove. His vision of the city became policy regardless of what residents wanted.

And his vision was limited. Moses believed in highways and housing projects, in grand monuments and automobile access. He didn't believe in the messy vitality of urban neighborhoods, in the value of walkable streets and mixed-use development, in the importance of public transportation for a functioning city. His certainty was his greatest asset and his greatest flaw.

Today, cities are dismantling Moses's highways. Elevated expressways that once seemed essential are being torn down to restore urban neighborhoods. The pendulum has swung against everything Moses represented.

But the questions he grappled with remain. How do we build things in a democracy? How do we balance the need for decisive action against the value of public participation? How do we create urban infrastructure that serves everyone, not just those with cars and political connections?

Robert Moses's answer was to accumulate power and use it according to his own vision. We're still living with the results—and still searching for better answers.