Robert Moses reshaped New York City more than any other individual in American history, building nearly all of its major highways, bridges, parks, public housing projects, Lincoln Center, the United Nations, and the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs over a half-century of public service. He held up to ten government positions simultaneously, worked for a dollar a year, and died with less money than he started with — his singular obsession was power and building.
Kenneth T. Jackson, the preeminent historian of New York City and editor of Robert Moses and the Modern City, argues that Moses deserves credit for saving New York from the decline that devastated Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and other Northeastern and Midwestern cities. Without Moses’s massive public works program (1924–1970), New York would likely have followed the same trajectory.
Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974) made Moses famous and is widely considered one of the greatest biographies ever written. Jackson calls it the best book he’s ever read and wishes he had written it. But he argues it contains a thousand small errors and a fundamentally misleading thesis — that Moses caused New York’s decline — when in fact New York is the only major old American city that has grown rather than shrunk.
How Moses Got Things Done
He accumulated power by holding multiple overlapping positions — as many as ten at once — so that no single mayor or governor could fire him without losing control of major infrastructure projects. He created the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, whose bond contracts legally protected the chairman from removal, giving him a self-perpetuating funding stream that he used to build project after project.
He was ruthless and arrogant but effective. He would start construction through someone’s property and dare a judge to stop him after the bulldozers were already moving. He gave residents 90-day eviction notices with no negotiation. He paid union wages, finished projects on time and under budget, and delivered results that elected officials needed for re-election.
He never took a salary for most of his career and had no financial scandals. When his daughter got cancer at age 71, he had to accept a paid position for the first time because he didn’t have enough money to cover her treatment — despite being the most powerful person in New York.
He worked with inhuman intensity, using two limousines so that while one secretary typed up notes from the morning’s work, a fresh secretary rode in the second car and Moses continued working without interruption. He had almost no personal life.
The Case For and Against the Highways
The highways were economically transformative. Seven of the ten most valuable highway segments in America (by economic return) are in the New York City area. The Long Island Expressway expansion alone had an estimated economic value of $719 million per year. Without the expressways, moving between boroughs could take hours; today, even congested, they make the city navigable.
But Moses refused to include mass transit in his highway projects, and his prolific road-building contributed to urban sprawl, congestion, and the destruction of neighborhoods. The Cross Bronx Expressway tore through a dense working-class Jewish neighborhood, displacing thousands of families with 90-day notices and no adequate relocation plan.
Jackson argues Caro exaggerated the damage to neighborhoods like East Tremont. Census data shows those neighborhoods were already emptying out due to white flight and demographic shifts unrelated to the highway. The Bronx as a whole declined in the same pattern as Detroit and Baltimore — the neighborhoods not Cross Bronx Expressway emptied out too.
Jackson also argues Moses was “swimming with the tide of history” — every American city was building highways through minority neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s. Los Angeles, Memphis, Kansas City, and New Orleans did the same or worse. The difference is that New York built relatively fewer of them.
Moses fundamentally misunderstood the city he was reshaping. He saw old neighborhoods as slums, didn’t appreciate density or diversity, and believed everyone should live in suburbs and drive cars. He never drove himself. He wanted to run an expressway through Greenwich Village — now one of the most expensive neighborhoods in America.
Moses vs. Jane Jacobs: Two Visions of the City
Jane Jacobs saw the city as a human-scale ecosystem — the block, the corner store, the shoe repairman, eyes on the street, the intricate web of daily life. Moses saw the city as a traffic problem — something to be torn down and rebuilt at monumental scale.
Jackson sides with Jacobs on values but credits Moses with achievements that were functionally necessary. “Had he seen people more, maybe he would never have built what he did — and we wouldn’t have the bridges. But we do.”
Moses was the greatest builder in American history; no one else is in second place. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (at the time the longest suspension bridge in the world, accounting for the curvature of the earth), the Triborough Bridge, Jones Beach, and hundreds of playgrounds are works of lasting beauty and utility. “Can you imagine New York without the Triborough Bridge? It’s not imaginable.”
Why We Can’t Build Like Moses Anym York
Historic preservation, NIMBYism, and litigation have made large-scale public works nearly impossible. In the 1950s, the cultural assumption was that buildings, roads, and progress were inherently good. Today, the default is to oppose change. Jackson cites a recent case where a 27-story Manhattan building was blocked because the parking lot it would replace was in a historic district.
Moses could not do today what he did in the 1950s and 1960s. The regulatory environment, the power of neighborhood opposition, and the lack of political will make it impossible. Even Jackson, who admires Moses’s achievements, acknowledges that his bullying methods would face far more resistance now.
Jackson believes New York needs another Moses-like figure — not to repeat his mistakes, but to overcome the sclerosis. Potential mega-projects include climate infrastructure to protect against rising sea levels and new Hudson River tunnels (though the car-parking problem in Manhattan makes more road capacity a double-edged sword).
The Power Broker’s Legacy and Its Flaws
Jackson was friends with Caro and drove him home after The Power Broker won the Francis Parkman Prize. He told Caro at a 1989 conference that it was the best book he’d ever read — then said it had a thousand errors.
The errors are mostly small but systematic: Caro relied heavily on Moses’s own records and didn’t compare New York to other cities. He mischaracterized neighborhoods he didn’t know personally, exaggerated the decline of public transit (which is now better than it was in 1974), and falsely claimed Moses built bridges too low to allow buses to reach beaches.
Jackson’s students have repeatedly verified this: in decades of teaching, not a single student who went back to Caro’s original sources found that Caro got it right.
Moses’s own response to The Power Broker (a long New Yorker piece) was rambling, ad hominem, and failed to document specific errors — which Jackson sees as vindicating Caro’s portrait of Moses’s personality.
The book achieved cultural prominence because it has a clear, understandable argument running through 1,200 pages, Caro is a masterful writer who builds suspense, and Moses represents a past era of building that modern readers find both admirable and horrifying. “New Yorkers love to hate Robert Moses.”
Is New York’s Future Secure?
Jackson is optimistic.The Economist recently predicted that London and New York will be the world’s leading cities in 2100, as they are today. What they offer that Shanghai or Hong Kong cannot is the rule of law, personal safety, and freedom of expression — combined with unmatched diversity and openness to newcomers.
The pandemic will not permanently reverse urbanization. Humans are social animals; the appeal of cities — density, diversity, the “pure joy of being with others” — will endure. About 25% of people will always want to be in the “tumble and tide” of a place like New York.
Moses didn’t save New York by design — he didn’t even like the city, its neighborhoods, or its people. But by building the infrastructure that allowed tens of millions to move around a dense, water-bound city, he made New York’s survival as a world capital possible. “He didn’t destroy public transit. He didn’t help it — and that’s an important distinction.”
