Moses, Robert

Moses, Robert 1888-1981

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robert Moses is known as the “master builder” of New York. After receiving his BA from Yale, MA from Oxford, and PhD from Columbia, Moses officially began an extraordinary career in public service in 1924. His career ended in 1968 after he had served under seven governors and five mayors. He held several city and state offices, often simultaneously, including commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and coordinator of construction, as well as chairman of the New York State Power Authority and chairman of the State Council of Parks. His close friend and mentor was the legendary Al Smith, Democrat and four-term governor of New York. Moses never held elected office, although in 1934 he ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for governor.

Moses’s public projects in New York City include seven major bridges, 658 playgrounds, seventeen public swimming pools, 416 miles of highway, and over two million acres of parkland and other works throughout the state. He was also an important force in the construction of 1,082 public-housing buildings. The cost of only those projects for which he was directly responsible, from conception to completion, was roughly equivalent to what NASA spent in the 1960s to land a man on the moon. Moses mastered the art of using federal funds and was a pioneer in the development of the “public authority,” in particular the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, the financial base of his planning empire.

Author of 102 articles in national and regional publications, Moses published little of a theoretical nature. Yet there are parallels between his planning philosophy and that of Le Corbusier, the hypermodernist urban designer (although there is no entry for Le Corbusier in either Robert Caro’s 1974 The Power Broker or Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson’s 2007 Robert Moses and the Modern City ). Both viewed averages and aggregates as starting points for understanding cities. Both discounted the role of face-to-face, street-level interactions and the complex social orders that spontaneously emerge from them that for urbanist Jane Jacobs, Moses’s great nemesis, are the life of a city. And both promoted “efficient” cities and massive urban reconstruction, especially for the automobile, at the expense of traditional neighborhoods. Unlike Le Corbusier, however, Moses acquired the political clout to “get things done.”

Both supporters and detractors describe him as visionary, brilliant, tireless, driven, and ruthless. Thanks largely to Caro’s 1974 book, the latter have tended to outnumber the former, although over time the pendulum will swing surely in both directions.

Many believe that Jacobs is chiefly responsible for Moses’s decline from power, but other factors are also important. First, Moses was approaching his eighties when his defeats began to accumulate in the 1960s. Second, this was also when New York City began facing chronic economic and financial problems that for long afterward soured public opinion against expensive large-scale public projects. Third, the status of Le Corbusier–style modernism was waning among influential intellectuals. His decline coincided with, and probably helped hasten, the rise of so-called “participatory planning,” in which formal public hearings are an essential part of the planning process.

Thus, not only at his height but also in the wake of his fall, Moses exerted a deep and lasting influence on urban planning.

SEE ALSO Architecture; Cities; Jacobs, Jane; Metropolis; Modernism; Planning; Public Goods; Regions, Metropolitan

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ballon, Hilary, and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds. 2007. Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. New York: Norton.

Caro, Robert. 1974. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Knopf.

Sanford Ikeda