Robert Moses never won an election, yet he rebuilt New York around the car
At one point Robert Moses held as many as 12 official titles at once. He never won a single election, but bridge and tunnel tolls under his control paid for highways, parks and beaches that reshaped New York and set the template for American cities.
Moses was born in New Haven in 1888 to secular German Jewish parents and moved to Manhattan at nine, after his father sold his store and property and retired. He studied at Yale, then Wadham College, Oxford, and earned a Columbia doctorate in 1914 with a thesis on the British civil service. His first job in city government, grading the efficiency of municipal workers, collapsed amid protests that Tammany Hall probably encouraged.
His real ascent came through Governor Al Smith. Moses became known in Albany as a superb drafter of legislation, and in 1924 Smith put him in charge of the new State Council of Parks and the Long Island State Park Commission. From there he built Jones Beach, described as the most visited public beach in the country, and landscaped parkways such as the Northern and Southern State, among the earliest limited-access roads in the United States. When New Deal money arrived in 1933, he was one of the few officials with projects ready to start, and he ran the city parks department from 1934 to 1960. His only run for office, as the Republican candidate for governor in 1934, ended in a landslide defeat.
The Triborough Bridge Authority was his true power base. Toll revenue flowed into it and funded further building: the Cross Bronx, Brooklyn-Queens and Long Island expressways, and crossings such as the Verrazzano-Narrows and Throgs Neck bridges. The Cross Bronx Expressway, finished in 1963, cut through crowded South Bronx neighbourhoods, and many of his schemes cleared large areas of low-income housing.
His standing slipped in the 1960s and 1970s. A proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway would have transformed SoHo and the Lower East Side, and activists led by Jane Jacobs questioned whether his projects helped anyone. Robert Caro's Pulitzer-winning biography The Power Broker, published in 1974, portrayed him as controlling and car-obsessed, with poor and minority communities paying the price. Moses died in 1981.
Source: Robert Moses
