Robert Moses (December 18 1888–July 29 1981) was the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, and other suburbs. As the shaper of a modern city, he is sometimes compared to Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of urban planning in the United States. Although he never held elected office, Moses was arguably the most powerful person in New York City government from the 1930s to the 1950s. He literally changed shorelines, built roadways in the sky, and transformed vibrant neighborhoods forever. His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.

Moses and his works remain strongly criticized in certain circles, to the point of tainting his legacy as a public figure. The most common criticisms include the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in New York City, contributing to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the decline of public transport through disinvestment and willful neglect, and the enormous opportunity cost to the city of building highway after highway project while many other aspects of the city such as schools and hospitals went begging. On the other hand, Moses's projects were also considered by many to be central to the region's development. Moses participated in the construction of two huge World's Fairs: one in 1939 and the other in 1964. Moses was also in large part responsible for the United Nations' decision to headquarter in Manhattan as opposed to San Francisco.

Three major exhibits in 2007 promted a reconsideration of his image among experts, as they acknowledge the magnitude of his achievements. According to the historians such as Columbia University architectural historian Hilary Ballon the Moses legacy is more relevant than ever. All around New York State, Ballon says, people take for granted the parks, playgrounds and housing Moses built, now generally binding forces in those areas, even if the old-style New York neighborhood was of no interest to Moses himself. And were it not for Moses’ public infrastructure and his resolve to carve out more space, she argues, New York might not have been able to recover from the blight and flight of the 1970s and ’80s and become the economic magnet it is today, she suggests.^[1] “Every generation writes its own history,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian of New York City. "It could be that The Power Broker was a reflection of its time: New York was in trouble and had been in decline for 15 years. Now, for a whole host of reasons, New York is entering a new time, a time of optimism, growth and revival that hasn’t been seen in half a century. And that causes us to look at our infrastructure," said Jackson. “A lot of big projects are on the table again, and it kind of suggests a Moses era without Moses,” he added. ^[2]

Early life and rise to power

Robert Moses was born on December 18, 1888, to assimilated German–Jewish parents in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew up in the Dwight Street area of New Haven. Moses's father was a successful department store owner and real estate speculator; his mother was a forceful and brilliant woman, active in the settlement movement, with her own love of building.

After graduating from Yale and Wadham College, Oxford and earning a Ph.D. at Columbia, Moses became attracted to New York City reform politics. At this time a committed idealist, he developed several plans to rid New York of patronage hiring practices. None went very far, but Moses, due to his intelligence, caught the notice of Belle Moskowitz, a friend and trusted advisor of Al Smith.

Moses rose to power with Smith and set in motion a sweeping consolidation of the New York State government. This centralization allowed Smith to run a government later used as a model for Roosevelt's New Deal federal government. Appointed at his own request to the head of the Long Island State Park Commission, Moses soon established a favorable public image for himself by devising and executing a number of projects with great expediency and to wide public acclaim, most notably the development of Jones Beach park and a number of parkways allowing access to it.

Moses knew the law better than most lawyers and engineering better than most engineers, and quickly became known as "the best bill drafter in Albany". He was expert at burying new powers for himself or allied politicians in obscure language deep within proposed legislation, with law makers often approving statutes that had ramifications they did not anticipate. At a time when the public was used to Tammany Hall corruption and incompetence, his ability to get results quickly led the public and the press to regard him as a savior of government. Able to deliver tangible results before their terms expired, Moses became a key ally for politicians as well.

Shortly after President Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration, the federal government found itself with millions of New Deal tax dollars to spend, yet states and cities had few projects ready. Moses was one of the few local officials who had ready projects planned and prepared. For that reason, New York City could count on Moses to deliver to it the lion's share of Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and other depression-era funding.

Influence

At one point, one quarter of federal construction dollars were being spent in New York, and Moses had 80,000 people working under him. Unfortunately, many of Moses's projects were marked by what is now perceived as racism, and he largely ignored the concerns of the poorer citizens of New York City and New York State. Although he built playgrounds in vast numbers, he managed to locate practically none in Harlem. In the 1930s he built nearly 300 playgrounds in New York City, in Harlem exactly one. .^[3] When complaints were raised about this pattern, Moses responded with claims that Harlem actually had disproportionately too many playgrounds and parks, a barely veiled threat that other areas should be recipients of new parks instead. It wasn't until an independant city review in the 1940s revealed the truth about the neglect of the black neighborhoods that additional parks were built were finally built there. Similarly, the main aesthetic achievements of Riverside Drive and its associated amenities were located south of 125th street, and a pattern of barriers to access for non-white citizens, whether steep stairs or busy highways, appears repeatedly in his public projects. He claimed that he could keep African Americans from using pools in white neighborhoods by making the water too cold.^[4] In an era when two-thirds of the residents of the city did not have a car in their household, Moses actively thwarted public transportation that would have allowed the non-car-owning classes to enjoy the elaborate recreation facilities he built, and on the rare occasion when buses did arrive at Jones Beach, having taken local roads and not his low clearance parkways to get there, his park commission troopers intercepted them and turned them away. ^[5] After much litigation by private landowners, his highway projects on Long Island followed a circuitous path so as not to cross the properties of wealthy landowners such as J. P. Morgan, while those same highways ran freely through local family farms and demolished numerous working class neighborhoods throughout New York City.

During the Depression, however, Moses, along with Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, was responsible for the construction of ten gigantic pools under the WPA Program. Combined, they could accommodate 66,000 swimmers. This extensive social works program is sometimes attributed to the fact that Moses was an avid swimmer himself. One such a pool is McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, now dry and used only for special cultural events.

Moses persuaded Governor Smith and the government of New York City to allow him to hold state and the city governments jobs simultaneously, having carefully crafted exceptions into the statutes to make this normally prohibited practice legal in his case; at one point, he had twelve separate titles, maintaining four palatial offices across the city and Long Island, and actually holding control of all federal appropriations to New York City. For the city itself, he was parks commissioner, and for the state, he was President of the Long Island State Park Commission and Secretary of State of New York (1927–1928), as well as chairman of the New York State Power Commission, responsible for building hydro-electric dams in the Niagara/St. Lawrence region.

During the 1920s, Moses sparred with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then head of the Taconic State Park Commission, who favored the prompt construction of a parkway through the Hudson Valley, Moses succeeded in diverting funds to his Long Island parkway projects (the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway and the Wantagh State Parkway), although the Taconic State Parkway was later completed as well. ^[6] Moses is frequently given credit as the father of the New York State Parkway System from these projects.

As the head of many public authorities, Moses's title as chair gave his entities the flexibility associated with private enterprise, along with the tax-exempt, default-free debt capacity associated with government agencies. The inner workings of the authorities were free from public scrutiny, allowing money to be freely allocated to expenses a public government could not sustain. Contrary to his public image, Moses horse-traded and dealt out patronage extensively, along with extravagant consulting fees, which built political support from construction firms, investment banks, insurance companies, labor unions (and management), engineering and architectural firms, real-estate developers, and politicians. Calling on this broad power base, all with a vested interest in being a part of his continuing regime, Moses quickly developed a reputation for "getting things done" and used his influence to fast-track projects in legislators' home districts, a tactic for which these same lawmakers repaid him by not challenging his demands. He dealt out enough spoils to both political parties to ensure he avoided unwanted attention to his patronage politics.

And on the rare occasion he was challenged, even in the slightest, those raising questions found themselves the target of accusations ranging from corruption to the wrong politics or worse. His close relations with the press ensured that embarassing or compromising facts about his targets appeared like clockwork, and Moses maintained a vast file of research on politicians and public figures ready to use should the need arise. His tactics were so notorious, and so effective, that he won many skirmishes by simply threatening to use the information in his files, whether the file existed or not. The target could never be sure.

The result was decades of an environment where Moses could do largely as he pleased, with no meaningful review of his plans or their impacts, let alone the conduct of his agencies, and even the most powerful politiicans, from governors, mayors, and borough presidents on down had virtually no practical ability to even modify his plans, let alone approve or disapprove of the projects.

Triborough Bridge

Robert Moses had power over the construction of all public housing projects, but the one position above all others giving him political power was his chairmanship of the Triborough Bridge Authority.

The Triborough Bridge, a cluster of three separate spans, connects the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. The legal structure of this particular public authority made it impervious to influence from mayors and governors, due to the language in the bond contracts and multi-year appointments of the Commissioners. While New York City and New York State were perpetually strapped for money, the bridge's toll revenues amounted to tens of millions of dollars a year, capable of financing the borrowing of hundreds of millions of dollars, making Moses the only person in New York capable of funding large public construction projects. As toll revenues rose, which they did quickly as traffic on the bridges exceeded all projections, rather than pay off the bonds Moses sought other toll projects to build, a cycle that fed on itself.

Battle of Brooklyn Battery Bridge

In the late 1930s a municipal controversy raged over whether an additional vehicular link between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan would be a bridge or a tunnel. Bridges can be wider and cheaper but tall ones use more ramp space at landfall than tunnels. A "Brooklyn Battery Bridge" would have destroyed Battery Park and physically encroached on the financial district. The bridge was opposed by historical preservationists, Wall Street financial interests and property owners, various high society people and civic leaders, construction unions (since a tunnel would give them more work), the Manhattan borough president, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and governor Herbert H. Lehman.

However, Moses favored a bridge. He claimed it could carry more automobile traffic than a tunnel and would also serve as a visible monument. More traffic meant more tolls, and more tolls meant more money and therefore more power for public improvements. LaGuardia and Lehman had some money to spend, though not enough to complete the project, and the federal government could not or would not make up the difference. Moses, because of his control of Triborough, had money, and he decided his money could only be spent on a bridge. In public Moses exaggerated the cost of the tunnel option while claiming a vastly reduced sum for the proposed bridge. In reality, aside from greatly underestimating the construction costs, he was also letting funding for the approach roads fall to the city's responsibility and factoring that out of his plans, too.

Only a lack of a key Federal approval thwarted the bridge scheme. President Roosevelt ordered the War Department to assert that a bridge in that location, if bombed, would block the East River access to the Brooklyn Naval Yard upstream. A dubious claim for a river already crossed by bridges, it nevertheless stopped Moses. In retaliation for being prevented from building his bridge, Moses dismantled the New York Aquarium that had been in Castle Clinton and moved it to Coney Island in Brooklyn where it eventually grew, prospered and added to the attractiveness of this amusement area. Despite widespread opposition, in retaliation he also attempted to demolish Castle Clinton itself on a variety of pretenses, and the historic fort's survival was assured only after ownership was transferred to the federal government. Ultimately, the federal government found enough money to build the tunnel (at substantially less than Moses had been claiming it would cost) and Moses was forced to settle for a tunnel connecting Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan, now called the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority claims that the government had forced them to build a tunnel at "twice the cost, twice the operating fees, twice the difficulty to engineer, and half the traffic" were contradicted by the findings of the tunnel's chief engineer, but lodged in the public mind nevertheless.

Post-war city planning

Moses's power increased after World War II, when, after the retirement of LaGuardia, a series of politically weak mayors consented to almost all of Moses's proposals. Named city "construction coordinator", in 1946, by Mayor William O'Dwyer, Moses also became the official representative of New York City in Washington, D.C. Moses was also now given powers over public housing that had eluded him under LaGuardia. Moses's power grew even more when O'Dwyer was forced to resign in disgrace and was succeeded by Vincent R. Impellitteri, who was more than content to allow Moses to exercise his control over infrastructure projects from behind the scenes. One of his first steps after Impellitteri became mayor was killing a city-wide comprehensive zoning plan, underway since 1938, that would have restrained some of Moses's nearly uninhibited power to build within the city, and removing the existing Zoning Commissioner from office. Impellitteri enabled Moses in other ways, too. Moses was now the sole person authorized to negotiate in Washington for New York City projects. He could now remake New York for the automobile on an even larger scale. Before Moses, most housing projects in New York were small scale (like the Queensbridge projects on the Queens side of the Queensboro Bridge). With Moses, projects grew to be the spartan, featureless skyscrapers now widely associated with public housing. By 1959, Moses had built 28,000 apartment units on hundreds of acres. Ironically, in clearing the land for high-rises, he often destroyed almost as many housing units as he built.^{[citation needed]}

From the 1930s to the 1960s, Robert Moses was responsible for the construction of the Throgs Neck, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Henry Hudson, and the Verrazano Narrows bridges. His other projects included the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Belt Parkway, the Laurelton Parkway, and many more. Federal interest had shifted from parkway to freeway systems, and the new roads mostly conformed to the new vision, lacking the landscaping or the commercial traffic restrictions of the pre-war ones. He was the mover behind Shea Stadium and Lincoln Center, and by brokering the timely acquisition of land he made itpossible for the United Nations headquarters to locate in New York instead of San Francisco or Boston.

Moses had direct influence outside the New York area as well. City planners in many smaller American cities hired Moses to design freeway networks for them in the 1940s and early 1950s. Few of these were built; initially postponed for lack of funding, projects still unbuilt by the 1960s were often defeated by the awakening citizen-led opposition movement. The first successful example of these freeway revolts was the blocking of New Orleans' Vieux Carre Expressway, an elevated highway which would have sliced through the French Quarter. Later, successful freeway revolts that saw highway projects either scaled back or cancelled outright also occurred in Boston, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Toronto^[7][8] and eventually even Los Angeles.^[9]

Car culture

Moses himself never learned to drive, and his view of the automobile was shaped by the 1920s, when the car was thought of as entertainment and not a utilitarian lifestyle. Moses's highways were curving, landscaped "ribbon parks," intended to be pleasures to drive in. While appearing utopian on its face, some critics contend Moses's vision of towers, cities and parks linked by cars and highways in practice led to the expansion of wholesale ghettos, decay, middle-class urban flight, and blight. Beginning in the 1960s and reaching a crescendo in the 1990s, public opinion and the ideals of many in the city planning profession shifted away from this strand of car-oriented thought, instead focusing on the more intimate Jane Jacobs-style approach to urban renewal.

End of the Moses era

Moses's reputation began to wane in the 1960s, as the public debate on city-planning policy began once again to appreciate the virtues of intimate neighborhoods and smallness of scale. Moses, around this time, also started picking political battles he could not win. His campaign against the free Shakespeare in the Park received much negative publicity; his effort to destroy a shaded playground in Central Park to make way for a parking lot for the expensive Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant made him many enemies among the middle-class voters of the Upper West Side. Worse, his hardball tactics against mothers, children, and the arts in these skirmishes damaged his reputation.

The opposition reached a crescendo over the demolition of Penn Station, which many attributed to the "development scheme" mentality cultivated by Moses (although a poverty-stricken Pennsylvania Railroad was actually responsible for the demolition). This caused many city residents to turn against Moses's plans to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have cut through what is now Greenwich Village and SoHo. One of his most vocal critics during this time was the urban activist Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was instrumental in turning opinion against Moses's plans; the city government rejected it in 1964.

Moses's power was further sapped by his association with the 1964 New York World's Fair. His assumption of aggregate attendance for this event of 70 million people proved wildly optimistic, and generous contracts for fair executives and contactors did not help the situation. His repeated and forceful public denials of the fair's considerable financial difficulties, in the face of all visible evidence, provoked press and governmental investigations of the situation. Moses's reputation over the organization of the fair was tarnished by his disdain for the opinions of others, his high-handed attempts to get his way in moments of conflict by turning to the press (or increasingly his just blaming the press itself), and the fact that the fair was not sanctioned by the Bureau of International Expositions, the worldwide body supervising such events. Moses refused to accept BIE requirements, including a restriction against charging ground rents to exhibitors, and they in turn instructed member nations not to participate. (The United States had already staged the sanctioned Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962. According to the rules of the organization, no one nation could host more than one fair in a decade.) The major European democracies, Canada, Australia and the Soviet Union were all BIE members and thus declined to participate, instead reserving their efforts for the Seattle fair to be used at Expo 1967 in Montreal.

After the World's Fair debacle, New York City mayor John Lindsay, along with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, sought to use toll revenues from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority's bridges and tunnels to cover deficits in the city's then financially ailing subway system. Moses, however, opposed this idea and fought to prevent it.

Lindsay removed Moses from his post as the city's chief advocate for federal highway money in Washington afterwards, a small victory in what was largely seen as a political misstep.

But Moses could not so easily fend off Rockefeller, the only politician in the state who had a power base independent of him. The legislature's vote to fold the TBTA into the newly-created Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) could technically have led to a lawsuit by the TBTA bondholders, since the bond contracts were written into state law and under Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution states may not impair existing contractual obligations.

However, the largest holder of TBTA bonds, and thus agent for all the others, was the Chase Manhattan Bank, headed then by none other than David Rockefeller, the governor's brother. No suit was filed, or even discussed. Moses could have directed TBTA to go to court against the action, but having been promised certain roles in the merged authority he in turn declined to challenge the merger.

So, on March 1, 1968, the TBTA was folded into the MTA and Moses was gave up his post as chairman of the TBTA. He eventually became a consultant to the MTA, but its new chairman and the governor froze him out, the promised roles did not materialize, and for all practical purposes he was now out of power.

Moses had thought he had convinced Nelson Rockefeller of the need for one last great bridge project, a span crossing Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay. Rockefeller did not press for the project in the late 1960s through 1970, fearing public backlash among suburban Republicans would hinder his re-election prospects. While a 1972 study found the bridge fiscally prudent and environmentally manageable, the anti-development sentiment was now insurmountable and in 1973 Rockefeller cancelled all plans for the bridge. In retrospect, NYCroads.com author Steve Anderson writes that leaving densely populated Long Island completely dependent on access through New York City may not have been an optimal policy decision. ^{[10] [neutrality is disputed]}

During the last years of his life, Moses concentrated on his lifelong love of swimming and was an active member of the Colony Hill Country Club.

Caro

Moses's image suffered a further blow in 1974 with the publication of The Power Broker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Robert A. Caro. Caro's 1,200-page opus (edited from over 3,000 pages long) largely destroyed the remainder of Moses's reputation. ^{[citation needed]} Many people had come to see Moses as a bully who disregarded public input, but they had not known how he had stolen his brother's inheritance in the 1930s before his own rise to prominence, or how cruelly insensitive he was in the relocating resdients as demonstrated by the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, or how he willfully neglected public transit. Moses's reputation today is in many ways attributable to Caro whose book not only won a Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1975, a Francis Parkman Prize awarded by the Society of American Historians, but was also selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books of the Twentieth Century.

Caro's depiction of Moses' life gives him full credit for his early achievements, showing for example how he conceived and created Jones Beach and the New York State Park system, but he also shows how, as Moses' desire for power came to be more important to him than his earlier dreams, he destroyed scores of neighborhoods ramming thirteen huge expressways across the heart of New York City and by building huge urban renewal projects with little regard for the urban fabric or for human scale. Yet the author is more neutral in his central premise: the city would have been a very different place -- maybe better, maybe worse -- if Moses had never existed. Other U.S. cities were doing some of the same things as New York in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Boston and Seattle, for instance, both built highways straight through their downtown areas. The New York City architectural intelligentsia of the 1940s and 1950s largely believed in such prophets of the automobile as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe and supported Moses. Many other cities, like Newark, Chicago and St. Louis, also built massive, unattractive public housing projects.

Caro argues that Moses also demonstrated racist tendencies.[^[11]]^{[citation needed]} He, along with other members of the New York city planning commission, were vocal opponents against black war veterans moving into Stuyvesant Town, a Manhattan residential development complex created to house World War II veterans.

Death

Moses died of heart disease on July 29, 1981, at the age of 92 in West Islip, New York. The title of his New York Times obituary package is both a found poem and a thumbnail sketch of his life and influence: "Robert Moses, Master Builder, Is Dead at 92; Robert Moses, Builder of Road, Beach, Bridge and Housing Projects, Is Dead; Associate of High Officials; The Grand-Scale Approach; Not a Professional Planner; Part of 'Our Crowd'; Into the Orbit of Power; Fur Coat or Underwear?; An Overwhelming Success; Long Court Fights; Drafted Park Legislation; Moses' Tactics Were Both Extolled and Criticized; Badly Beaten in Election; Built to His Own Tastes; A Sampler of Quotations by Moses; The Face of a Region; and How One Man Changed It." Moses, born Jewish but an adult convert to Christianity^{[citation needed]}, was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx following services at Saint Peter's Episcopal Church in Bay Shore, New York.

Legacy and lasting impact

The bridges of Robert Moses are an exemplary and disputed topic in the sociology of technology. The main question is, how much ideology and politics can be built into technology and infrastructure such as bridges? (Cf. Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" in Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Winter 1980, and reactions on that article, e.g., by Bernward Joerges).

Robert A. Caro was fortunate enough to be able to interview Moses on May 26, June 11,16 February 4,5,9,10 11, and March 16, 29, 30, 1968. He was also able to conduct 19 interviews with Sidney M. Shapiro, Moses's General Manager,and chief engineer of the Long Island State Park Commission, who worked for Moses for forty years, and was the man who carried out Moses's instructions (The Power Broker p. 318,fn p.1196) to build the bridges on his parkways too low for buses. In his notes on sources Mr. Caro writes: "It is thanks to Shapiro, more than any other source that I came to understand Moses' attitude towards Negroes...." (The Power Broker, pp 1167-8)

For example, the construction of low overpasses on parkways were made purposely too low for buses to clear, and the veto of extension of the Long Island Rail Road to Jones Beach, were to prevent the poor and racial minorities (largely dependent on public transit) from accessing the beach while providing easy car access for wealthier, white groups. In furtherance of this point of view, Caro also notes the provision of numerous park amenities on the West Side highway below 125th Street (the southern boundary of Harlem) versus the provision of few (if any) amenities north of 125th Street. Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, both of which sit in the northern part of Manhattan Island, are in the white neighborhood of Inwood, not Harlem.

Aside from the sociological view of Moses's accomplishments, there lies the question of urban destruction and suburban mobilization. Did Moses's work degrade the quality of life in the inner city? Does increased accessibility from the suburbs improve the quality of life in the city by enabling automobile commuting? Was the general direction of Moses's work a damaging trend which is now being corrected, or a natural part of urban evolution? Did he solve a difficult urban housing problem by tearing down slums, or did he simply paper over it most of the time by building high rises for people with more money? While Caro and others attributed the urban decay of New York neighborhoods to Moses's aggressive road building, it may be noted cities with far less aggressive postwar highway construction such as Philadelphia and Baltimore suffered similarly negative--or even worse--social trends.

And fiscally, Moses's spending dwarfed most other construction projects in the New York area during his reign. He made sure that money was not diverted from his projects to public transportation. Moses built not a mile of subway, denied right-of-way to railroads along his highways. Other spending needs of schools, hospitals, the social infrastructure, and portions of the physical infrastructure which he did not control were left wanting for decades. Meanwhile, in demolishing blocks and blocks of dense urban landscapes, he removed tens of millions of dollars of revenue producing land from the tax rolls forever. Costs of simply providing city services crippled New York for a long time. What could have been done instead with the huge sums of money that went to build roads? Did Moses create, accelerate, and deepen New York's fall? Or did he provide the city a route back to prosperity?

And his emphasis on ends justifying any and all means left a long shadow on the planning process. His unilateral behavior on virtually all matters, unwilling to tolerate public input or even honest discussion, so upset residents and politicians that it set in motion such a change in the planning approval process that today destruction and construction on a Moses scale is nearly unthinkable.

While the overall impact of many of Moses's projects continues to be debated, their sheer scale across the urban landscape is indisputable. The peak of Moses's construction occurred during the economic duress of the Great Depression and despite that era's woes Moses's projects were completed in a timely fashion and have been reliable public works since, which compares favorably to the contemporary delays New York City officials have had redeveloping the Ground Zero site of the former World Trade Center or the technical snafus surrounding Boston's Big Dig project. ^[12]

Three major exhibits in 2007 are prompting a reconsideration of his image among intellectuals, as they acknowledge the magnitude of his achievements. According to Columbia University architectural historian Hilary Ballon and assorted colleagues, Moses deserves better. They argue that his legacy is more relevant than ever. All around New York State, she says, people take for granted the parks, playgrounds and housing Moses built, now generally binding forces in those areas, even if the old-style New York neighborhood was of no interest to Moses himself. And were it not for Moses’ public infrastructure and his resolve to carve out more space, she argues, New York might not have been able to recover from the blight and flight of the 1970s and ’80s and become the economic magnet it is today, she suggests.^[13]

"Every generation writes its own history," said Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian of New York City. "It could be that The Power Broker was a reflection of its time: New York was in trouble and had been in decline for 15 years. Now, for a whole host of reasons, New York is entering a new time, a time of optimism, growth and revival that hasn't been seen in half a century. And that causes us to look at our infrastructure", said Jackson. "A lot of big projects are on the table again, and it kind of suggests a Moses era without Moses", he added.^{[This quote needs a citation]}

Politicians, too, are reconsidering the Moses legacy. In a 2006 speech to the Regional Plan Association on downstate transportation needs, Elliot Spitzer, who would be overwhelmingly elected governor later that year, said a biography of Moses written today might be called At Least He Got It Built. "That's what we need today. A real commitment to get things done".^[14]

A testament to the enduring nature of his impact can be found in the various locations and roadways in New York State that bear Moses's name. These include two state parks (one in Massena, New York, the other on Long Island), the Robert Moses Causeway on Long Island, the Robert Moses State Parkway in Niagara Falls, New York, and the Robert Moses Hydro-Electric Dam (source of much of New York City's electricity) also in Niagara Falls. Moses also has a school named after him in North Babylon, New York on Long Island. There are other signs of the surviving appreciation held for him by some circles of the public. A statue of Moses was erected next to the Village Hall in his long-time hometown, Babylon Village, New York, in 2003, as well as a bust on the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University.

Some Facts

• Robert Moses held power through five mayors of New York City: Fiorello H. La Guardia, William O'Dwyer, Vincent Impellitteri, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., and John V. Lindsay

• Moses held power through six Governors of New York: Alfred E. Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman, Thomas E. Dewey, W. Averell Harriman and Nelson A. Rockefeller

• Moses put his name on numerous public works. On Long Island: the Robert Moses Causeway, and Robert Moses State Park - Long Island. Also, at Niagara Falls: the Robert Moses Power Dam, and Robert Moses State Parkway follows the Niagara Gorge to Lewiston, New York and beyond.

• In 1945, Moses received a LL.D. from Bates College, one of dozens of honorary degrees he was granted.

• In 1934, Moses ran unsuccessfully for the office of Governor of New York, against incumbent Herbert H. Lehman, losing by a record margin.

• Also in 1934, Moses received The Hundred Year Association of New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York."

• The impact of Robert Moses on the Rockaway Peninsula was almost universally considered positive with his development of Jacob Riis Park and the Marine Parkway Bridge in the 1930s. However, Moses's construction of the Shore Front Parkway and his large-scale introduction of public housing and large-scale demolition of the bungalow area along Rockaway's beachfront provoked a large amount of public criticism.