Henry Watson’s Reviews > The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York > Status Update

Reached the dramatic scene of a young planner discovering that all of Moses’ bridges were built too low for buses to use the parkways. But there’s no reason (aside from drama) that the reader should wait 951 pages to see this; Moses’ highways were always indefensible, but aren’t critiqued until late in the book. In a book this long, structural choices like that matter!

As a note on Caro’s over-mythologizing of Robert Moses, on page 829, he semi-seriously predicts that Moses’ Shea Stadium would stand for 2,000 years, as long as the roads of Rome. Shea Stadium opened in 1964, “The Power Broker” was published in 1974. By 2006, construction was underway on a replacement stadium, and Shea was demolished in 2009 to make room for more parking. Hardly a legacy comparable to Rome.

Caro finally (belatedly) starts to turn on his subject in Part VI: The Lust for Power. In a way, Caro’s portrayal of Moses follows that of the reformers, chronologically, who only realized how evil Moses was during the epic Battery Bridge fight. But it wasn’t that Moses fell from grace in any real way. Power didn’t corrupt him; anyone could see he was always this way from his youth.

There was an interesting, frustrating, passage I just read where Caro attempts to ascribe the low quality of many of Moses’ inner-city projects to a “lack of time.” This is frustrating because it glosses over what, in hindsight, is the much more obvious explanation: Moses was a racist, classist, bigot who didn’t care about the poor, and only cared about NYC as a set of LEGOs for him to rearrange.

A major flaw of this book, so far, is that Caro seems to have at least partially bought into the myth of Robert Moses, and fully bought into Moses’ “dream”. By almost exclusively interviewing people in Moses’ orbit, Caro undersells how tremendously misguided and harmful Moses’ singleminded focus on highways and motorists really was.