Robert Moses: The Power Broker
Near Jones Beach, New York
Robert Moses never won an election in his life, yet for more than four decades he was the most powerful figure shaping the physical landscape of New York. He held as many as twelve simultaneous government positions at a time, all appointed rather than elected, and he accumulated and retained them across multiple gubernatorial and mayoral administrations by making himself effectively indispensable. He built parks, parkways, bridges, tunnels, housing projects, and dams.
He shaped the form of New York City and Long Island more decisively than any elected official of the twentieth century. Moses was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in eighteen eighty eight, educated at Yale, then Oxford, then Columbia, and came to public life with a genuine passion for parks and open space. His position as Long Island State Park Commission president in the nineteen twenties gave him the power and the platform to build Jones Beach.
Robert Caro's biography of Moses, published in nineteen seventy four under the title The Power Broker, won the Pulitzer Prize and gave Moses the complicated legacy by which most people know him today: a man of extraordinary achievement who displaced hundreds of thousands of people through urban renewal, whose design choices fell hardest on poor and non-white New Yorkers, and whose work remade the landscape of the city in ways that outlasted his power and his lifetime. Moses died in nineteen eighty one.
