Working

by Robert A. Caro

But when I began researching Robert Moses’ expressway-building, and kept reading, in textbook after textbook, some version of the phrase “the human cost of highways” with never a detailed examination of what the “human cost” truly consisted of or of how it stacked up against the benefits of highways, I found myself simply unable to go forward to the next chapter. I felt I just had to try to show—to make readers not only see but understand and feel—what “human cost” meant. And I felt I had figured out a way to do that: to take one mile of the 627 miles of highway that Robert Moses built and show what the building of that mile meant for the thousands of human beings who had lived in the highway’s path or adjacent to it. I had selected a mile that I thought would be good for demonstrating this: a mile of the Cross-Bronx Expressway that ran through a neighborhood called “East Tremont.” I even knew what I was going to call that chapter: “One Mile.” But I wasn’t fooling myself: I also knew it was going to take months, perhaps six months, to research that neighborhood—to learn what it had been like before the expressway came, to find (because they were scattered now) and interview people Moses had evicted because they had been in the expressway’s path. And also, in order to show what the neighborhood had now become, to interview the people—overwhelmingly black and poor—who had moved into vacated apartments in buildings adjacent to the expressway.