Go Down, Moses

Rethinking Robert Moses on the 50th Anniversary of "The Power Broker"

Washington Square Park teemed with life as I sauntered through its marble arch two weeks ago. People dangled legs in the fountain, they read books on its benches, they lounged on the grass. A vendor was selling “Cat Ladies for Harris” pins while a busker strummed a guitar, honeyed notes thrumming through tree-dappled light. Even with neighboring NYU not yet in session, the crowd reflected the neighborhood’s cosmopolitan flair. Ever the flâneur, I left the photo-taking to the tourists, but I paused to watch a plein-air painter capture the scene in watercolor.

The park is a beloved respite from the hustle and hubbub of the city. If Robert Moses had had his way, it would today have a highway running through it.

This month, Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Since its publication, Moses has loomed over urban discourse in New York and beyond. The biography is as much a history of New York’s emergence into the Twentieth Century as it is a chronicle of Moses’s unparalleled accomplishments and eventual downfall. 

The scale of his accomplishments, some of the most important infrastructure in New York—hundreds of parks, beaches, parkways, swimming pools, bridges, tunnels, and highways—is awesome to behold. Disgusted by the endemic corruption and incompetence of Tammany Hall-style governance, Moses learned to harness the levers of power to ingeniously find ways to work around the system, or to make the system work for him, and in so doing delivered incredible results that enjoyed near-universal public support for decades. These projects did not come without costs: the seizure of private property, the leveling of whole neighborhoods, the displacement of thousands—but the public would ultimately find these costs and his power too great to bear. Caro expresses the awesomeness of Moses’s legacy with the full sense of its meaning, capturing both admiration and fear: Caro’s words tremble on the page as he traces Moses’s long career arc from wide-eyed reformer to pragmatic political operative to despotic, omnipotent power broker.

And so the book mythologized its protagonist-cum-antihero. 

Arriving in 1974, when New York City was on the brink and the shine had come off urban renewal and highway building, The Power Broker was published in a culture that had already soured on world-historical figures like Moses and the midcentury mindset he embodied. The myth of the world-building, world-destroying Master Builder has steeped in the public imagination for fifty years, with the book itself—all 1,250 pages—serving as a cautionary tome about the abuses of power and the hubris of great men: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Today, we despair that we have lost the ability to build anything. 

The depiction of Moses as a man of unchecked power nourished a deepening public distrust of building big, whether by state or private actors, that has prevented New York and other cities from embarking on the wide-scale modernization they require to address 21st-Century challenges like housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, and climate vulnerability. This skepticism has manifested in what Daniel Golliher calls the “Moses Meme,” which he describes as: 

the attitude that building is bad, the power to build is inherently suspect, a pro-building default will destroy everything good, and allowing large projects will have unacceptable consequences.  

The effect of the Moses Meme is to “ensure nothing much (and certainly nothing much of large scope) will be built in New York City again,” because people “conflate ‘building, and building big’ with ‘building badly and deleteriously.’” Golliher argues that the ultimate legacy of The Power Broker is the “Master Veto,” the ability of anyone to stop anything from getting built anywhere.

As economics professor Jason Barr writes:

Because Moses brooked no community input, the logic seemingly follows, we must allow full-on community input, and, by extension, local veto power that stops the city from addressing its problems head-on. The defining legacy of Caro’s book is that we have become paralyzed by the fear of Moses’s ghost which Caro conjured to life.

That ghost must be interpreted in the context of the dead past of American, not merely New York, history.

As Barr explains, Moses didn’t invent auto-centric planning, or slum clearance, or urban renewal—the federal government poured billions of taxpayer dollars into highway construction and Title I slum clearance programs nationally. Moses was not the first, nor the only, nor the worst offender to bulldoze his city in the name of saving it—and New York escaped less scathed than other American cities. Rather, as Owen D. Gutfreund describes him, Moses “was in the right place at the right time, with the right skills, and he took every opportunity to make the most of the situation, expanding his power, his tools, and his mandate.” 

Nevertheless, he did not, contrary to the subtitle of Caro’s book, single-handedly usher in New York’s 1970s fall into near-bankruptcy—decades of corruption and fiscal mismanagement contributed more than their fair share to that. But neither did the city drop dead. What did eventually die, as Golliher explains, was the historical context that made Moses possible: “the government and legal system that enabled him is gone.” He argues that Moses is, quite literally, history:

Robert Moses is not actively relevant to New York City anymore. He is only historically relevant. Invoking the Moses Meme is a lazy excuse to avoid engaging with the real contemporary personalities and facts of New York City and State.

As Barr says, “it’s time to move on” from the ghosts of the past while holding on to the “true lessons of Moses.” We need to recognize that building isn’t bad—in fact, that it’s necessary—and find ways to minimize any negative externalities that building creates, without yielding to total local veto power. This will require that governments reclaim a loss of public trust, undoing entrenched NIMBYism that reflects “a failure of confidence that the government will do what’s good for individual residents and that large-scale building projects will do more harm than good.” Further, Barr says we must rebrand Moses for the 21st Century, “incorporating the lessons from the best version of Moses while leaving behind those from his worst side.” 

However, to fully move on from Moses, to rebuild the public trust and rediscover our capacity to build at the scale that our problems demand—that requires fully reckoning with the “worst side” of his legacy. The reason people lost trust in Moses and his methods, why the Master Veto of NIMBYism emerged as a many-headed hydra in municipalities across the nation, is because of profound flaws in both the means employed and the ends pursued by Moses and other builders of his era.

Consider the Washington Square Park I visited recently, which doesn’t have a highway running through it today. Moses thought cities were created “by and for traffic,” and so he did not particularly care that his highway plan would destroy a beloved community asset. A group of neighborhood mothers—urbanist writer Jane Jacobs among them—fought for six years to rescue the park, eventually defeating the Master Builder’s master plan in 1958. Moses remained in power, though this battle presaged the beginning of the end, his Götterdämmerung. Jane Jacobs would go on to publish The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, describing a different vision of cities created “by and for neighborhoods.” Moses and Jacobs fundamentally disagreed about who and what the city was for.

Moses embraced but did not originate the idea of a spacious, car-centric city; this idea was commonplace and synonymous with progress by the 1920s. If the city existed for car traffic, then realizing that end required building highways and clearing slums, which necessitated his means—the bulldozer—even if it meant sacrificing beloved parks. As Moses was fond of saying, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. 

Hilary Ballon, coeditor of Robert Moses and the Modern City, summarizes the inherent tension within this worldview:

Indeed, the arc of [Moses’s] career and his evolving approach to public works take on a greater meaning when seen in the light of this historical American dilemma: how to balance private property rights and the public good.

For Moses, the “public good” was largely what he thought was good for the public. His one-time friend and a former Labor Secretary, Francis Perkins, allegedly said of him:

He loves the public, but not as people. The public is…a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons just to make it a better public.

Whereas Jane Jacobs saw the city person by person, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, Moses had a “God view” of the city and embodied the power of the Creator in his person. The problem with Moses was not his vision per se, but what—and who—he did not see. He moved the earth, but he did so without regard for what was there, who was there, or who owned it. He did it with impunity and legal immunity: because he had the power to do it. Among the powers he accrued for himself and the agencies he controlled was that of eminent domain, the power to condemn private property for public use, in the name of the public good.

His inability to see the public as individual people meant he did not see nor care that people had individual dignity and rights. 

Moses used the power of eminent domain to condemn, seize, and bulldoze neighborhoods where poor people lived—derisively labeled “slums”—and to replace them with modern, monotonous “towers in the park,” ubiquitous but soulless buildings that provided affordable middle-class housing. He did so by dispossessing property owners and displacing tens of thousands of poorer people. He likewise used his power of eminent domain to ram highways through established neighborhoods across the great swathe of the city, not only destroying the homes and livelihoods of the thousands who lived in his way, but also blighting the areas around his new creations.

The state should, legitimately, have the power to seize property in limited situations, such as if a building is at risk of a catastrophic failure that would harm the lives and property of inhabitants and neighbors. There may be other limited, legitimate uses, as well. But the fundamental inequity inherent in eminent domain—the absolute power to seize—has meant it has a long history of abuse. The state is supposed to provide those whose property is taken with “just compensation,” but with a sole buyer, this has been a recipe for undervaluing seized property. More fundamentally, when homes and businesses are seized and people are displaced against their will, it is hard to see what’s just in the cause. 

An egg-breaker like Moses could seize property “just ‘cause.” Unbound by any objective standard for what defined “public use,” unconcerned by rights or reparations, he used his power at his pleasure. With many of Moses’s slum clearance programs, the problem was simply that too many of the poor unwashed masses lived there for his taste. Elsewhere, he cleared slums to make way not for housing but expansions of NYU’s private campus in Greenwich Village and Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side. For his parkways and highways, often the only rationale he needed for condemning property was that he wanted his roads to go through there—even if there were alternatives that would have been less damaging. 

If his use and abuse of eminent domain was “progress,” Moses’s vision of the future did not include the poor, the powerless, or anyone whose private property stood in his way. When people finally said, “No,” this was what they revolted against—literally the seizure of their backyards, or the blighting of their property from the neighborhood-killing projects he created. When they said “not my backyard,” they had legitimate grievances, but they were late to discover the principle in their revolt. In Moses’s early years, when he was building popular beaches and parkways to reach them, the people cheered when he seized land from the baronial estates and yacht clubs of wealthy West Egg types. When Moses turned the bulldozers on land inhabited by the poorer eggs, they had no political or moral authority to stop him. They had already acceded to the premise behind the omelet.

But this was not NIMBYism. Conversely, modern NIMBYism has flipped the Moses omelet, so to speak.

Today’s NIMBYism, though it gathers under the rallying cry “Not in my backyard,” is not actually concerned with individual people and their property, either. It’s not “my backyard” but rather somebody else’s backyard they’re talking about—and seeking to control. We have enshrined both the community veto and oppressive land use policy into law, allowing neighbors to inappropriately and perversely invoke “property rights” when seeking to preserve neighborhood or citywide stasis at the expense of others’ actual property rights, including those of individuals, businesses, and other organizations. NIMBYism has taken power from the Master Planner and the property owner alike.

What today’s NIMBYs seek is not relief from eminent domain abuse but “dominant preemption,” the power to prevent from being built what they don’t like—even when it is clear that no individuals’ rights or livelihoods would be harmed, including their own. Like the master builders, NIMBYism seeks the power to condemn; unlike the master builders, it is to prevent building.

If we want to build big again, we’ll need to dispense with the Moses Meme, as well as eminent domain abuse and its NIMBY twin, dominant preemption. We need to find a new synthesis that embraces the prodigious productive capacity of Moses and his God-eye view of the city at large with the nuanced, human-scale, “eyes on the street” vision of Jane Jacobs. We can protect the property of those who do not wish their property to be built upon while liberating, through extensive land use and veto reform, those who would like to build more. At the same time, our cities can better utilize existing rights of way and underdeveloped public land to accomplish their goals and protect cherished public assets like parks, while even possibly creating new rights of way and new land. New York, especially, is abundant in both available property and possibilities—it’s the opportunity that must be seized.

There are some who will argue that our ability to do big things requires us to occasionally marshal the eminent domain power of the state for the public good—whoever gets to define what that is. They will argue that the real problem is that the government uses this power for the wrong ends, like highway expansions, instead of nobler goals like high speed rail. But that reasoning accepts the same perverse logic that allowed Moses to steamroll his vision into reality and empowers present-day NIMBYism: that the designs of the planner or the neighbor are somehow morally superior to those of the owner. 

The only way to have it all—to put the Moses Meme and NIMBY moralism to bed—is to (re)discover a property rights framework that enables building and disables such moral relativism.

That would be progress.

We can imagine a world in which Robert Moses had loved the public as people, and loved people more than cars. He might have built the world’s most comprehensive subway system and redesigned New York’s streets for pedestrians and transit. Neighborhoods that were cleared for slums would have evolved naturally over time, thousands would not have been displaced, and the vibrant street grid would still exist. If his vanity hadn’t demanded that people be able to see his great works above ground, he might have tunneled throughways under Manhattan and the other boroughs, still allowing for an accommodation with automobiles that preserved the essential urbanism of the city. The Power Broker might then be called The Master Builder, an ode to a great humanist, who built cities by and for people.

As an economist friend likes to say that the past is a sunk cost. We can’t undo what was destroyed through things like slum clearance or highway construction, we can’t make whole the individuals who suffered in the long-dead past; we can only move forward, live differently, build a different future. 

Robert Moses was a man of his time—but he doesn’t have to be the man for ours.

In its portrayal of the genius of Moses, The Power Broker convinced me that political power was something that could be understood and harnessed to make political change. As Moses learned, power is a tool; it can be used for good or for evil, but political change cannot happen without it. This is perhaps the most important lesson of Caro’s great book, the legacy we should carry with us, especially those of us who wish to see our cities change for the better: unlike Moses, who abandoned his early idealism, we can be guided by political ideals, but we must learn the art of practical politics to make real change happen. 

All the rest is history.

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