The Emperor of New York

Robert Moses: 1888-1981

“By courage and sheer logic and the ultimate ring of truth, men and women without conspicuously agreeable personalities have often won a place in history as great figures of their time.”

Robert Moses, the author of that sentiment, was conspicuously disagreeable, and he never doubted he was one of the great figures of his time. He once likened himself to the Roman Emperor Titus (40-81 A.D.), who, like Moses, was an impresario of bricks and marble. The Moses empire embraced yachts, chefs, chauffeurs and 86,000 other minions. His power nominally depended on the chairmanships of obscure parks commissions and revenues from a toll bridge. In fact, he relied on a public as steadfastly admiring of him as he was contemptuous of them. He defied Governors and mayors for nearly half a century, outmaneuvered even Franklin D. Roosevelt, imposed his vision on millions of acres of New York City and State, and inspired the reshaping of the rest of urban America.

Neither planner nor architect nor lawyer nor legislator, just a self-described “senior ditchdigger,” he was at once utterly pragmatic and utterly visionary. His skill, he said, was “getting things done.” His genius was in seeing and serving the needs of future generations without flinching at the uprooting or expense he inflicted on the present one. When he died last week of congestive heart failure at 92, still in office as a $35,000-a-year consultant to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, his legacy included: a metropolitan highway system in New York City bigger than the one in Los Angeles; the Lincoln Center cultural complex; the United Nations headquarters; and his last project, the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. Moses left behind twelve bridges, 35 highways, 658 playgrounds and more than 2 million acres of parks. He also built two Robert Moses state parks, a Robert Moses Causeway, a Robert Moses Parkway, a Robert Moses Dam at Niagara and another at Massena, which bears his name in stainless steel letters 3 ft. high. When he was forced out of power by Nelson Rockefeller in 1968, it was estimated he had spent the equivalent of $27 billion.

Robert Caro, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for a critical investigative biography of Moses, The Power Broker, calls him quite simply the greatest builder in American history. Says Urban Scholar Lewis Mumford, perhaps the most persistent critic of the immensity and impersonality of typical Moses projects: “In the 20th century, the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person.” Like Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th century landscape architect who built Manhattan’s Central Park, Moses believed in the democratizing effect of recreation. His goal was not simply to preserve beauty or connect neighborhoods, but to change the way the common man lived. His vision, alas, was sometimes misguided. A champion of the automobile (though he always had a chauffeur and never learned to drive), Moses hated mass transit. He designed parkways on Long Island with overpasses too low to allow buses. He also favored big, sterile public housing towers of a kind now associated with alienation and crime.

His idea of urban renewal was to level a neighborhood and start afresh. He unhesitatingly displaced 250,000 New York City residents and razed their homes to build highways serving the suburbs. Moses answered critics with contempt. He liked to demand: “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?” Architects reviewing the plans for a building would sometimes discover it had already been erected. Legislators who in 1926 had refused to fund Moses’ Moorish-fantasy bathhouses for Jones Beach State Park found he had spent the entire appropriation on the foundations. Moses was fond of saying “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.”

The son of a New Haven department store owner, Moses moved to Manhattan with his family as a child. He was educated at Yale, Oxford and Columbia, and entered New York City government in 1914 to test his theories about civil service reform. Hired by Governor Al Smith in 1918 to reorganize state government, he began as a builder in 1924, when Smith asked him to head two state park commissions. He parlayed those jobs into a dozen quasi-public posts, held simultaneously. The only time Moses ran for office, as Republican nominee for Governor in 1934, he lost by a record 800,000 votes. But within a few months he was back in public favor, and his impact steadily grew on the use of space throughout America.

When he started building parks in the 1920s, 29 of the 48 states had no parks at all. When he left the state park system in the early 1960s, not only did New York have 2,567,256 acres, but the other states, inspired by his example, had 3,232,701. Viewers of Britain’s royal wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral last week were reminded that the church’s architect, Sir Christoper Wren, is buried there beneath a marker that reads, “If you seek his monument, look about you.” Robert Moses could be buried anywhere in New York State, perhaps anywhere in America, beneath a tombstone that says just that. —By William A. Henry III. Reported by Petor Stoler/New York