The Power Broker had for so long been a white whale, a book I wanted to read, had to read, but was afraid to start. A reader my entire life, I don’t think I had ever read a book longer than 1,000 pages. I know you are supposed to drop books that you don’t enjoy reading, but that has never been advice I follow: you just never know where that one little nugget will be that will make the book worth it. In other words, committing to the book was really committing, and I had visions of my entire reading career stopping because I could not get through the book.

How wrong I was. Instead, it is one of the fasted reads I have had in years. It has taken me as long to write this review as read the book, no exaggeration, though the delay is due to a newborn second child than the magnificence of this review.

This review will read less focused than I’d wish. Between the hours of 6:00 a.m. – 8:30 p.m., it is hard to find extended times to focus that are not for work. Between 8:30 p.m. – 6:00 a.m., it is hard to find the energy to focus. In other words, though this review started from bullet points of ideas, there will be ideas I missed and others that don’t flow well. Apologies.

Now, to the content.

What lessons does the book teach about power, its gathering and keeping? Know the most, work the most, be the best prepared, and have public opinion and the media on your side.

Before Moses became a builder of edifices, he was a builder of states, New York to be specific. He was Governor Al Smith’s principal legal and governance expert. A driving architect behind changes to the state constitution that significantly improved governance capability, he also helped pass legislation introducing major social reforms that were the envy of the nation. This slow boring made Moses an expert law writer, and he eventually gained a reputation as the best law writer in Albany.

As a reward for his service, Governor Smith asked Homses what he would like. The states parks was his answer, more specifically the ability to craft a state parks system. With the 19th century urbanization of America, there was a growing realization that nature needed protection and urban dwellers needed nature. Conserving land and opening them to the public was therefore a policy idea that had been around for decades by the middle of the 1920s and, most importantly, had overwhelming support. Moses used his law writing expertise to give himself immense power over the state parks, essentially making himself a dictator. His powers were in the bill drafts for anyone to see, but no one read them in enough detail – some things never change – and Moses quickly had the foundation of all subsequent power. He would later use this same mastery of arcana — and understanding that others would not read bills closely — to give his public works authorities renewable funding authority, turning what were designed to be self-terminating governing bodies into personal fiefdoms that combined the resources of the public sector with the pay and speed of the private.

Knowledge is one thing, activity another. Throughout Moses’ life, even in college, he was a hard worker. By the time he become the state park commissioner, he was the hardest worker. His productivity was legendary and unmatched. He always had a chauffeur, a perquisite, so he could work instead of sitting in traffic. He had three secretaries so he could dictate memos and letters at any time. He would take sheafs of paper home at night and return them to his morning secretary, who would come to his house, first thing in the morning. This energy was necessary because Mose lived in a democracy. Though he carved his autocratic fiefdoms, he still always had to work through committees, courts, negotiations, community meetings, backroom deals, and so on to seize land, get routes approved, hire contractors, and do the million things necessary to build big. If he went slower, his projects would take longer to get built. Though he was absolutely brusque when people got in the way and would often ignore court rulings or legislative requests, the point is that he could not decree projects the way I thought before reading the book. A person with his vision but half the work ethic would have accomplished much less. In addition, this energy lasted his whole life, into his 70s. The man just did not stop.

The third leg of power is to always be prepared for opportunities, which in Moses’ realm meant having shovel ready engineering plans. Moses’ biggest works could not have happened without federal funds. The federal government had no reason to fund Moses’ projects in the city specifically, as there were always other bureaus and needs, but Moses was always the one who could get started immediately. When the government decides it wants to spend money, it has to be spent immediately lest Congress changes its mind, so it could not wait years for engineering studies. Moses was the only who had already made plans for projects and could marshal the laborers necessary, so it was easy to choose his projects.

An infuriating dynamic revealed in The Power Broker is how powerful the press was. Newspaper publishers and editors published no negative articles or even letters to the editors until the 1950s because they did not believe the complaints. They never committed their own investigative reporting, instead trusting Moses’ assurances that complaints were were not credulous. Publishers often had little incentive to anyway, as Moses was a major purchaser of advertisement, gave them early “scoops” on major projects, wined and dined them at Jones Beach, Randall Island, and Central Park, and, in the case of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, did something beneficial to his estate that I now forget but was clearly part of a quid pro quo. Moses’ ability to keep the press on his good side meant that complaints about his program were not heard for decades.

Cracks in Moses’ armor did not appear until other people about whom the newspapers cared were affected. The New York press did not take a side against Moses until 1956, when he attempted to replace a glade in Central Park with a parking lot for the Tavern on the Green. This glade was beloved by young families on Central Park West, and Moses went about his work without public notice and expecting no opposition, as always. Then as now, residents of Central Park West had social and economic capital: seeing bulldozers, they were able to immediately draw the press’ attention. After a series of escalations, Moses eventually backed down, though by installing playground equipment instead of returning the area to its natural state.

This dent reinforced another theme of the book: Moses’ career is inseparable from elitism. It is likely he would have had a much smaller career if he were not independently wealthy. His father’s wealth, earned in Connecticut merchanting, meant he could choose low paying but influential jobs or forego a salary altogether. His ability to claim, accurately, that he did not receive a salary and was therefore a selfless public servant burnished his reputation for most of his career, until he accepted a large salary for running, quite poorly, the 1964-5 World’s Fair. Even more importantly, he could not find the funding to complete a portion of a parkway connecting New York City to Jones Beach, and without it the first major success of his career may have become a white elephant. Fortunately, his mom loaned him the crucial amount, approximately $25,000, to complete the road, allowing tens of thousands of New Yorkers access to Jones Beach and imprinting Moses’ name in the popular psyche.

An elite, Moses was only invincible to non-elites. The Northern State Parkway on Long Island, one of his first major roads, was designed to connect car owning New Yorkers with Jones Beach, his first major state park. Moses had written the state laws such that he could seize land, which he commonly did, building the road where he wanted as often as possible. If you look at a map of the Northern, however, you will see that it turns sharply south. The reason is not topographic but social: a few major landowners made it clear they would fight him in court. Instead of fighting, Moses changed his route, something he would not do for small farmers in the way or, later, tenants in the way of the Cross Bronx Expressway. The same dynamic played out with his proposed Brooklyn-Manhattan bridge. Obviously inferior to a tunnel, Moses pushed his plans for the bridge for his ego. Seeing how the Manhattan portion would demolish their real estate or block their views, the influential victims pulled every lever they could to stop it. Ultimately, they only succeeded by getting the ear of the Roosevelts. Eleanor wrote against it, and her husband, the president, leaned on an admiral to declare it a threat to the Brooklyn shipyard – it was not – and therefore would not receive approval from the Navy. Robert Moses was vincible, if you knew the levers to pull.

The clearest areas where Moses negatively affected New York City were in his neglect of mass transit and slum clearance program using federal Title 1 money. Moses had an aristocrat’s disdain for the masses as people, only appreciating them as statistics to be improved, which meant he designed his parkways’ bridges to be too low to allow buses, refused to design the Van Wyck expressway to allow mass transit to Idlewild (now JFK) airport, did not build new highways with rights of way for future rail, and neglected the subway as well as Long Island Railroad, turning them from reliable, affordable conveyances into decrepit, expensive embarrassments. Moses, attracted to power like a dog to food, insisted on taking charge of the city’s Title I slum clearance program despite never having an interest in housing. Decades later, it would become clear that his interest was patronage. Reversing course from his earlier self, he used the program to become the key center of power in the Tammany Hall machine after World War II. Publicly promising to expeditiously relocate dispossessed residents into high quality housing and move them back once new housing was constructed, he instead created sham corporations staffed by politically influential figureheads. These corporations would destroy buildings at much slower rates than promised so that the displaced tenants would crowd into the slum’s remaining units, which a Moses lackey now owned, driving up rents. Many of the displaced would spill into neighboring neighborhoods, lowering the quality of life of residents of neighborhoods not directly targeted for slum clearance. The entire slum clearance process was a machine to extract rents from the federal government, unbeknownst to them, and the poor, beknownst to them, to reward financial, labor, and political backers of Moses.

In fact, ED1 would eventually erupt in scandal, Moses’ third major one in the 1950s and the one that would weaken him the most since it belied his reputation of being above politics. What is shocking in learning about the role of ED1 in his career is how little of a role he played in it. At that point, Moses had 12 official positions, most of them with the state, and the day to day operation of the slum clearing was left to trusted lieutenants. In response to a May 1959 inquiry from the New York Citizens Union, Moses said he would make the slum Clearance Committee’s files open to interested parties. That allowance attracted journalists, they found instances where Moses’ staff had not redacted communication enough, and the entire slum clearance scam slowly unraveled. The resulting scandal was so large it eventually cost Moses his city appointments, though he was not relieved of them until given the chairmanship of the World’s Fair.

A modern reader is left with two burning questions after completing the book. First, could a Robert Moses happen again? Second, could there exist a Robert Moses for a modern conception of the public good, one focused on mass transit and increased housing construction.

To the first question, no. The media are so fragmented that it is hard to imagine any one official having so much influence on their own coverage. Negative facts about a planner would almost certainly come to light in a way they did not for most of his career. Having learned the lessons of unchecked authority power, I suspect it is also harder now to create an authority with so much power, though I don’t actually know what current statutes say. The cost of labor is also so much higher, in real terms, that large-scale public construction projects could not be completed as quickly. (Environmental reviews would also interfere.) Indeed, the failure of American to produce any construction more inspiring than a football stadium speaks to the difficulty of large-scale public works, a difficulty largely a result of the backlash against Robert Moses.

The first question answers the second, though it is inspiring to imagine what that would look like. One reform would be greater control over land use policies for transit agencies. Mass transit is better funded in much of the world because transit agencies own the land around their stations, which gives them an incentive to develop housing. The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority has started to build housing around its stations, though not on a scale to meaningfully affect ridership. Environmental review processes have also become a magnet of abuse and would need to be weakened for urban development. Protecting undeveloped land is wonderful, protecting abandoned lots is woeful.

It is also important not to overly judge Caro with modern glasses. One thing you never hear about Moses but that The Power Broker made clear was that he started as a good governance reformer. He essentially wrote the New York constitution that is still in effect, and the goal was to make government more responsive to the people, not to machine politics. He was one of Governor Al Smith’s inner circle. Smith was a Tammany Hall chief who used his power to introduce modern welfare and relief policies that were inspirations for the country, so inspirational that he ran for President in 1928.

Another dimension of good governance reform was the provision of parks, the protection of undeveloped land for mass enjoyment. There was always some supply of parkland from benign benefactors, but they were in the conservation camp and were not keen on seeing land accessed. Moses was in the consumption camp, and you cannot appreciate nature if you cannot access, and frolick, in it. Frolicking in turn required cars, which were modern tools of urban emancipation in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, the rise and enfirmament of Moses. In other words, the abundant provision of roads was for decades seen not as anti-poor imperium but as quality of life enhancing for the broad middle class. Parkways and then, after World World II, highways and interstates were not abominations but manifestations of good government.

Contextualization leads to my final revelation: I had always understood Moses as a destroyer of New York City, a villain not stopped until Jane Jacobs bravely protected the already gentrifying West Village from yet another highway. But in fact, no matter what you thought of New York City in 1960 or 1970, it was unmistakably worse when he took over, and much of the improvement is due to them. The Tammany Machine meant government was designed to extract resources, not provide services. There were few parks, and Central Park was decrepit. High quality roads were non-existent. There was no centralized budget or standardized method of personnel evaluation. Moses was an elitist and destroyed a lot of neighborhoods, but he also was genuinely popular for providing playgrounds, small parks, regional parks, and opening up the city and surrounding region to cars. As a suburbanite from Connecticut, I certainly benefited from his bridges and roads into the city and its airports as well.

Jacobs, the hero for Baby Boomers, is credited with stopping all that, thought that reputation is because of her book. Is New York City better off because the West Village exists? Absolutely. Is New York City better off that the West Village has become one of or the most expensive part of the entire city as opposed to affordable to working class immigrants during Jacobs’ era? No. Is New York City better off with his highways no longer encircling imperturbably? Absolutely. Is New York City better off because of encircled with red tape and weighed down with unaffordable rent and ownership costs? Of course not.

One criticism of the book is that its subtitle does not match its content, though that is a criticism I have of most books. The subtitle is “The Downfall of New York”, but that argument is never made in the book. If Caro means the encircling of the city with concrete without an increase in quality of life, then sure. On the other hand, the first 100 pages make it clear that New York was not great before Moses rose to power. There were no playgrounds, the few parks that existed were poorly maintained, even Central Park, and Tammany Hall ensured that public monies were wasted. By the 1950s and 1960s the cost of Moses’ power was clear, but the first twenty years of his reign were accorded high praise for obvious reason. Perhaps instead the downfall refers to the repeated cost overruns and subsequent debt Moses’ projects gave to the city, and perhaps those debts contributed to the malaise that would overtake it in the 1970s. Caro mentions the constant indebtedness of the city, but from his own account it was always broke. Moses may have broken it more, but statistics are never provided to show how much of the city’s fiscal problems were due to Moses.

It is hard to imagine a book better than this one. I would read a companion though, one that shows how Moses’ stature affected urban planning around the country. Moses loved playing hosting delegations from around the country and world to show how to build roads, set up authorities, and generally do everything he was doing. The spread of highways across and through cities across America is due in no small part to his influence. The Power Broker, it turns out, is not a story about New York City. It is a story about 20th century America’s relationship with the city. That relationship had its positives and negatives, but it is no longer one that fits for the 21st.