The Power Broker

After more than a thousand pages, I am nearing the end of The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, a book I have been meaning to read for more than 30 years.

I had thought that I would learn a lot about Robert Moses and the modern history of New York State and New York City, and I have. I also expected that the book would be a bit of a slog—and in that I was wrong. It is a mark of the energy of this book that I will be a little sorry to come to the end. In its clarity, its erudition, its character drawing, and its flashes of emotion, it reminds me of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

The Power Broker would have been a great reading experience years ago, but now that I have spent more than a decade in New York City, it becomes much richer. I have been to Inwood Hill Park, and was startled to see that a highway built by Robert Moses cuts through what is still billed as the only unspoiled indigenous forest in Manhattan. I’ve spent time looking out from Battery Park, and shudder to think that Robert Moses nearly succeeded in demolishing historic Castle Clinton and covering the park with a highway overpass. I’ve been to the site of the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, one of Moses’ last great projects, and seen the Unisphere standing in the rather bleak surroundings of what was meant to be one of his greatest parks.

I knew that Robert Moses had reshaped Long Island and much of New York City for the benefit of drivers, so when I decided one day that I would like to walk across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, I was not too surprised to find that the bridge had been built by Moses without pedestrian access. But I didn’t know until reading this book that Moses himself never learned to drive.

Though Moses was unquestionably a ruthless, arrogant bastard, he Got Things Done, as Caro puts it. The Power Broker dramatically conveys the almost impossible technical challenges of, for instance, threading the Cross-Bronx Expressway through a densely populated borough and across or under existing highways, water mains, and railroad lines.

But, especially in the chapter “One Mile,” Caro underlines the human cost of his subject’s success. Time and again—as when he sacrificed the neighborhood of East Tremont rather than reroute the expressway by two blocks—Moses added to that cost through stubbornness and vindictiveness.

Asked why he demolished the valuable clubhouse of the Columbia yacht club after taking it over for the city, he replied, “Because they were rude to me.”