Whew. I’ve been meaning to read this for years ever since we read an excerpt in one of my urban planning classes. I finally decided to do it, and it is indeed as great as everyone says.
The subject matter is amazing and the writing is excellent. It took me a couple of chapters to get into the book, but once I did, I did not get bored for the entire remainder of the 1100 pages. Several passages were so powerful that I felt compelled to read them aloud to my partner while we were reading on the couch—some for their content, be it the incredible engineering feats that Moses accomplished and the urgency with which he did so:
The very day after approval was given, huge pile drivers were hammering bulkheads into the Hudson River off the shore of Riverside Park. Within a week, convoys of dump trucks—five hundred a day—were rumbling over the dirt roads leading into the park. Six thousand WPA-paid laborers were shoveling into place the rock and earth the trucks were delivering, and pouring over them cement that would harden into a new shoreline for Manhattan Island.
or the genius (if appalling) methods he used to accomplish those feats and to cement his power:
During those forty months of Impy, he drove a lot of stakes. He selected the routes for a dozen expressways, had thousands of families evicted from them and demolished their residences. What public official—even if he did not like the route of one of the expressways, even if he did not want any expressway built in the area at all—could thereafter say it would not be constructed, that the evictions made and money spent had been made and spent for no purpose?
but some simply for the way Caro writes:
…the big powerful face would turn pale, almost white, and a wave of purple, rising up the thick neck, would sweep across it. More and more frequently, the palm of the big right hand would begin to smack down on the table as he talked…
And through it all, I learned a ton about New York—I spent quite a bit of time on Google Maps in awe of the scale of the projects being described, even nearly a century later. The book describes the shaping of New York’s transportation in such an engaging and insightful way that I think anyone from New York would enjoy it, even if they are not a transportation and urban history nerd like I am. I learned a ton about politics—Moses’s methods, from his stake-driving and effortless use of the press to his creative reinterpretation of the role of public authority that allowed him to create an sprawling unelected empire in New York City, are genius and were clearly extremely effective.
We should take many lessons, and heed as many warnings, from Robert Moses’s astonishing career as we move (hopefully) move into a new era of building more sustainable transportation infrastructure within and between our cities. The Power Broker relates these lessons and warnings in an incredibly compelling and engaging way.
It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived.
It is possible to say only that it would have been a different city.