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When Robert Moses began building state parks and parkways during the 1920’s, twenty-nine states didn’t have a single state park; six had only one each.
In every city, that is, except one. In New York, immediately after World War II, Robert Moses began ramming six great expressways simultaneously through the city’s massed apartment houses.
For highways, Moses dispossessed 250,000 persons.
“Budget,” for example, was only a dictionary word; in turn-of-the-century America, not a single city possessed one.
The peculiarities of man seemed sometimes to join with those of nature to thwart Moses. But he would not be thwarted.
This was one reason why there was a law against the simultaneous holding of state and city jobs.
The lion’s share of the billion-plus dollars poured into New York City by the New Deal was spent on Moses’ projects. To a considerable extent, in the planning of large-scale public works in New York City during the 1930’s, Robert Moses operated independently of the elected official who had appointed him—and therefore independently of the people’s will.
If Robert Moses was a pioneer in the fields of parks and highways, he was also a pioneer in McCarthyism, twenty years before McCarthy.
You were building parks and parkways for people, of course, and therefore you had to take people’s needs into consideration in planning them, but only in a broad, impersonal sense, for you were planning for people in the tens of thousands, humanity in the mass, and the needs of humanity in the mass could be deduced as well from a general knowledge of people as from a specific knowledge of the human beings who made up the mass.
People on the site would have to be removed—evicted, dispossessed, thrown out, relocated—and removal would rend the fabric of their lives.
Power is being able to laugh at people who oppose you and to laugh at them with impunity, to antagonize them without fear of reprisal.
Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930’s. He built one playground in Harlem.
By the end of that week, the bankers had agreed to purchase $3,100,000 of Henry Hudson Parkway Authority bonds, the money to be used to construct a one-deck, four-lane bridge.
The scale of the new federal involvement in urban America was unprecedentedly massive. Before the war—during the entire Depression—the federal government had financed a total of 200,000 low-income apartments. Within the first four years after the war, the federal government authorized the financing of 810,000 low-income apartments.
Banks control the dispensing of huge amounts of insurance and they can dispense it to politicians. Their activities generate immense amounts of legal work and they can dispense the least onerous and most lucrative aspects of that work—local real estate closings, for example—to politicians.
Revenue bonds—the key to his authorities’ existence and power—were the key to the alliance.
Purchasers of the Verrazano bonds could be all but certain that they could collect their interest every year even if the bridge never collected a single toll.
Moses’ generosity to banks had to be paid for out of the pockets of motorists, of course. If bondholders received tens of millions of dollars extra in interest, drivers would have to pay tens of millions of dollars extra in tolls.
During most of his reign—the post-La Guardia portion of it—the city’s people had no real voice at all in determining the city’s future.
But if in the shaping of New York Robert Moses was an elemental force, he was also a blind force: blind and deaf, blind and deaf to reason, to argument, to new ideas, to any ideas except his own.
When Robert Moses came to power in New York in 1934, the city’s mass transportation system was probably the best in the world. When he left power in 1968, it was quite possibly the worst.
Robert Moses had, in just slightly more than seven years, moved from their homes more people than lived in Albany, Phoenix, Little Rock, Sacramento, Tallahassee, Topeka, Baton Rouge, Trenton, Santa Fe, etc.
Moses would still be holding many powerful city posts, that “you’d have to fight him on so many different fronts.” Moses had been able to prop up each post with others, to use each as leverage to make the others more powerful
