Eminence Domain: Reassessing the Life and Public Works of Robert Moses

Robert Moses is the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning. Robert Caro's 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York cemented in place a reputation for abuse of power that remained largely intact for decades. Largely, but not entirely. Now a trio of exhibits in New York City, mounted this past spring in coordination with a symposium at Columbia University and the publication of an extensive catalog of Moses's public works projects, has summed up the extent to which historians' perspectives on this brilliant and arrogant man have evolved.

Born into affluence, Moses received degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Columbia but then languished for a decade as a mid-level bureaucrat until he was taken under the wing of New York governor Al Smith, who appointed him head of the Long Island State Parks Authority in 1924. In 1929 he built Jones Beach on Long Island and two parkways to connect it to the light- and air-starved masses of Gotham. He soon perfected the art of using the autonomous, quasi-public agency to centralize control and limit public and legislative scrutiny. In 1934 he added the New York City Parks Commission and the Triborough Bridge Authority to his portfolio, and continued on that aggrandizing path until at one point he simultaneously held twelve separate state, city, and regional offices. As Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson observe in the introduction to Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, the catalog mentioned earlier, "Moses's public works . . . are so indispensable it is impossible to imagine New York without them."¹ He was directly responsible for the construction of the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, the Marine Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, the Long Island Expressway, the Cross-Island Parkway, Orchard Beach, Jacob Riis Beach, New Rockaway Beach, Bethpage State Park, Sunken Meadows State Park, Marine Park, Pelham Bay Park, five hundred playgrounds, seventeen swimming pools, and the 1964 World's Fair. He played a major role in the development of Lincoln Center, the United Nations complex, Shea Stadium, and a dozen major housing projects. He assembled and cleared land for the Manhattan campuses of Fordham University, New York University, and the Juilliard School, and in Brooklyn for the Pratt Institute and Long Island University.

Figure 1.

McCarren Pool, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (Photo © Andrew Moore, reproduced with permission.)

In a paper read on the first day of the symposium, the urban historian Robert Fishman argued that the beginning of the end for Moses came in 1952, with his plan to extend Fifth Avenue south under the Washington Square arch, across the park, and on downtown as a broad new urban arterial.² Residents objected, only to be denounced as malcontents, radicals, and subversives. The "Battle of Washington Square" lasted until 1958, when the city killed the project and closed the park to traffic. The conflict galvanized one of the locals, a minor figure identified in news accounts as Mrs. James Jacobs; three years later her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities would set the consensus view of cities and planning, embodied by Moses and his great public works, on its head. Moses did successfully build his most notorious project, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, in the 1950s and early 1960s, but two even more ambitious schemes, the Mid-Manhattan and Lower Manhattan Expressways, were never started. In 1968 Governor Nelson Rockefeller removed Moses from his last remaining post, as director of the Triborough Bridge Authority, and he withdrew into a resentful retirement made even more bitter by Caro's Pulitzer Prize–winning book. He made an effort to counter his declining fortunes in a 1970 anthology titled Public Works: A Dangerous Trade, but the book was as dry and detached as the man himself and sold poorly. He died in 1981, leaving an estate worth less than fifty thousand...