I can’t honestly say, particularly after so many years have passed, that it was during my conversations with the farmers and with the people of East Tremont that my concept of the kind of book I wanted to write changed. I don’t really remember exactly when it changed. But these conversations with the Long Island farmers had brought home to me in a new way the fact that a change on a map—Robert Moses’ pencil going one way instead of another, not because of engineering considerations but because of calculations in which the key factor was power—had had profound consequences on the lives of men
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