Eminent Dominion (2024)

For a generation, the standard view of Robert Moses has been that he transformed New York but didn’t really make it better. This view was shaped by Robert Caro’s epic biography “The Power Broker”—published in 1974 and in print ever since. (Parts of it initially ran in this magazine.) Caro portrays Moses as a brilliant political operative who perpetuated his power by means of grand public works, filling the landscape with bridges and tunnels and parkways, heedless of people or neighborhoods that might get in the way of them. The notion of Moses as the evil genius of mid-twentieth-century urban design got a boost last spring in obituaries of and tributes to Jane Jacobs, a longtime antagonist, who was instrumental in defeating one of his most outrageously wrongheaded schemes, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have destroyed much of SoHo. Almost every article about Jacobs included a swipe at Moses, whose arrogance and lack of interest in the texture of the city seemed a harsh contrast to Jacobs’s love of neighborhoods, streets, and, by implication, people.

Jacobs’s book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” published in 1961, all but put an end to the idea that the way to improve old urban neighborhoods was to tear them down and replace them with towers and expressways. By the time Moses died, in 1981, his tendency to see public works as a form of machismo had fallen almost entirely out of fashion. Whereas he celebrated big things and his ability to build them, Jacobs changed the way people thought about cities by teaching them to focus on little things.

Moses—who began his marathon career under Governor Al Smith, in the nineteen-twenties, and was forced from power by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, in 1968—has been gone for more than a quarter of a century, and New York, which was decrepit and nearly bankrupt when Caro’s book appeared, is a different place. Moses is clearly due for a reëvaluation, and this week sees the opening of “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” a huge exhibition that surveys his impact on New York. Organized by Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian at Columbia, the exhibition extends over three institutions. The broadest installation, at the Museum of the City of New York, is called “Remaking the Metropolis,” and presents Moses’s highway system and the big institutions, like Lincoln Center and the United Nations, that he helped build. “The Road to Recreation,” at the Queens Museum of Art, documents Moses’s new parks, playgrounds, and swimming pools; and “Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution,” at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery, shows his inventive mastery of the federal government’s Title I slum-clearance programs, and the results, both good and bad. Ballon and Kenneth Jackson, a prominent historian of New York based at Columbia, have put most of the visual material from the three exhibitions, along with several strong essays, into a forthcoming book, “Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York” (Norton; $50). The title is an obvious retort to Caro’s subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” and the book presents itself as a cautious corrective to Caro’s view.

Caro called Moses “America’s greatest builder,” and perhaps the most distinctive service of the exhibition is to bring home the sheer scale of his achievement to a new audience. There are models of many Moses projects and exceptionally elegant color photographs, by Andrew Moore, showing the current state of those projects. The photographs are so beautiful that they make you yearn for a time when enhancing the public realm was a serious calling. Moses built the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Southern and Northern State Parkways, the Grand Central Parkway, the Cross Island Parkway, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the Long Island Expressway, the Meadowbrook Parkway, and the Saw Mill River Parkway. He built Jones Beach State Park (an early masterwork), Orchard Beach, the Niagara and St. Lawrence power projects, the New York Coliseum, and the 1964 World’s Fair. By his own count, Moses added six hundred and fifty-eight playgrounds and seventeen public swimming pools to the New York City park system. In Central Park, he added the Conservatory Garden, the Great Lawn, and the Zoo. He played a major role in the creation of Shea Stadium, Stuyvesant Town, Lenox Terrace, Park West Village, Lincoln Towers, Kips Bay Plaza, Washington Square Village, and Co-op City. At one point, Moses held twelve New York City and New York State positions simultaneously. He served under seven governors and five mayors, and a popular joke had it that Moses wasn’t working for them so much as they were serving under Moses.

Even more significant, perhaps, than Moses’s productivity is the fact that he was one of the first people to look at New York City not as an isolated urban zone but as the central element in a sprawling region. In the early nineteen-thirties, he would charter small planes and fly back and forth across the metropolitan area to get a better sense of regional patterns. His vision of New York was of an integrated system with an urban center, a suburban ring, and a series of huge public recreational areas, all connected by parkways. Although the Regional Plan Association had proposed looking at the metropolitan area that way in 1929, Moses was the only public official who both grasped regionalism as a concept and had the ability to do something about it—which meant not only transcending local politics but also figuring out ways to pay for huge projects. He did this by establishing a series of public authorities, which allowed him to issue public bonds at favorable rates while leaving him with nearly as much autonomy as he would have had if he were running a private corporation. He moved among his various offices via a fleet of limousines—the highway-builder never learned to drive. His home base was in the headquarters of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, a small building on Randall’s Island, nestled under the Triborough Bridge, where he held court in lavish offices that were hidden from public view.

It is this image of Moses—unseen, omnipotent—that dominates Caro’s biography. Thirty years after its publication, the book remains remarkable both for its exhaustive research and for its almost Shakespearean scale and complexity. At the same time, it can be melodramatic (“He had learned the lesson of power. And now he grabbed for power with both hands”), and it sometimes underemphasizes the extent to which, extraordinary as he was, Moses was still a product of his time. Caro points out, for example, how many subway improvements could have been bought with the money Moses spent on highways, but in Moses’s day cities all over the country were building highways at the expense of mass transit, and New York was far from the worst. Some critics, like Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, were complaining that highways damaged urban neighborhoods, but most people didn’t see this until long after the damage had been done. Moses’s view of “urban renewal” was no different from that of officials elsewhere, and in some ways it was far more imaginative. Moses didn’t bring down New York, and he didn’t single-handedly sell its soul to the automobile. Indeed, New York probably comes closer to having a workable balance between cars and mass transit than any other city in the country.

One of Caro’s most damaging accusations is that Moses was motivated by racism both in his designs for certain projects and in his decisions about what neighborhoods would be given priority for new parks and pools. In an interview with Paul Windels, a colleague of Moses, Caro turns up the bizarre detail that Moses believed that black people preferred warm water and decided to use this supposed fact to deter them from using a particular pool in East Harlem: “While heating plants at the other swimming pools kept the water at a comfortable seventy degrees, at the Thomas Jefferson Pool, the water was left unheated.” The essays in the exhibition catalogue go into the issue of racism in some detail but do little to rebut Caro’s claims. They show a willingness to give Moses the benefit of the doubt, where doubt exists. The architectural historian Marta Gutman points out that the placement of swimming pools was in almost all cases determined by the location of existing city parks. She also confirms that the pool in East Harlem contained the same heating equipment as the others (although, of course, there is no proof that it was turned on). Kenneth Jackson makes a more general point: “The important questions, however, are not whether Moses was prejudiced—no doubt he was—but whether that prejudice was something upon which he acted frequently.” Jackson argues that Moses’s strong commitment to the creation of expansive public works more than compensated for his tendency to skimp on facilities for black neighborhoods. It’s also worth pointing out that, no matter what planners think or do, architecture is ultimately defined by patterns of use that emerge over generations; today, Moses’s pools, situated in multiethnic neighborhoods, serve entirely different communities from the ones he envisaged.

Whatever Moses’s racial views, the swimming pools he built were monuments that conferred grandeur, even nobility, on their neighborhoods, and they suggest that Moses believed that the public realm deserved only the best design. In the summer of 1936, he opened one swimming pool per week. Each was architecturally notable; each was different; and the biggest ones could hold thousands of people at a time. A few, like the Crotona Pool, in East Tremont, and the McCarren Pool, in Greenpoint, were masterworks of modernist public architecture. Gutman writes that Moses managed “to integrate monumental modern buildings into the fabric of everyday urban life,” and she persuasively asserts that the buildings were “unique in the United States during the New Deal.”

Oddly, for all that Caro tried to destroy the myths about Moses, he never challenged the biggest one of all—that of his omnipotence. Moses is portrayed as rarely losing a political battle, but in fact he lost quite a few. One of the most important was the struggle, in the early nineteen-fifties, to extend Fifth Avenue south through Washington Square, splitting the park in two. It was as indefensible as the Lower Manhattan Expressway plan, a few years later, and Moses’s inept handling of opposition to the Fifth Avenue plan from residents of Greenwich Village contributed directly to Jane Jacobs’s radicalization and, ultimately, to the growing interest in preserving urban neighborhoods. In 1958, in a speech titled “Washington Square and the Revolt of the Urbs,” the urban planner Charles Abrams said, “It is no surprise that, at long last, rebellion is brewing in America, that the American city is the battleground for the preservation of diversity, and that Greenwich Village should be its Bunker Hill. . . . In the battle of Washington Square, even Moses is yielding.” Lewis Mumford, writing in this magazine in 1959, described the fight to ban traffic from Washington Square as “a heartening sign of the way in which a stir of intelligence and feeling not only can rally far more support than one would expect . . . but can bring to a halt the seemingly irresistible force of a group of experts and ‘authorities.’ ” Caro barely mentions the battle over Washington Square. By contrast, he devotes three chapters to the saga of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, in which Moses trampled over the neighborhood opposition.

Caro enhances the sense of Moses’s power by minimizing the influence of less flamboyant players, such as Austin Tobin, the head of the Port Authority from 1942 to 1972. Tobin managed to wrestle control of the city airports from Moses, construct a container port, expand the Lincoln Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge, and to build the World Trade Center.

When Caro’s book was published, Jane Jacobs’s views were on the ascendant, and it seemed reasonable to connect the city’s troubles to Moses’s imperious way of doing things. But Moses’s surgery, while radical, may just possibly have saved New York. For every Moses project that ruined a neighborhood, as the Cross-Bronx Expressway did East Tremont, there are others, like the vast pool and play center in Astoria Park, Queens, or the Hamilton Fish Pool, on the Lower East Side, that became anchors of their neighborhoods and now are designated landmarks. Lincoln Center, whatever you may think of it, jump-started the revival of the Upper West Side; if Moses hadn’t pushed it through, there is little chance that the high-rise condominiums, multiplex theatres, restaurants, and stores that now fill the neighborhood could have sprung up when they did. We are lucky, of course, that Moses’s last big project, a bridge across the Long Island Sound connecting Rye and Oyster Bay, was defeated on environmental grounds, but it is difficult to imagine the New York region functioning without the Triborough Bridge or the Grand Central Parkway.

And Robert Moses got things done. In the age of citizen participation, this has become harder and harder. For more than five years, we have been fighting over what to do at Ground Zero, and the future of much of the sixteen-acre site is still unresolved. The idea of Moynihan Station—a conversion of the classical Farley Post Office, on Eighth Avenue, into an improved Penn Station—was first proposed a decade ago, and it still hasn’t happened. By contrast, Moses’s plan to cover miles of train tracks on the Upper West Side with an extension of Riverside Park took under three years from design to completion. In an era when almost any project can be held up for years by public hearings and reviews by community boards, community groups, civic groups, and planning commissions, not to mention the courts, it is hard not to feel a certain nostalgic tug for Moses’s method of building by decree. It may not have been democratic, or even right. Still, somebody has to look at the big picture and make decisions for the greater good. Moses’s problem was that he couldn’t take his eye off the big picture. He was so in tune with New York’s vastness that he had no patience for anything small within it. Caro brilliantly immortalized Moses’s indifference to neighborhoods and people at a time when the city was weak, when the wounds from his high-handed approach were raw, and when Jane Jacobs’s focus on the fine grain of neighborhoods held fresh promise. But there is a price to pay for thinking small, just as there is for thinking big. Thirty years later, we are still trying to find the balance. ♦