The Mark of Robert Moses

Yesterday I went to the first of Robert Caro's three lectures on "The Shapers of New York" at the New-York Historical Society. This one was called "The Mark of Robert Moses." Caro talked generally about the power Moses amassed between 1924 and 1968, how his building projects and highways and bridges altered the physical landscape of New York City, and what affect he had on the lives of New Yorkers then and now. A lot of what Caro talked about, unsurprisingly, came right of his book The Power Broker.

Caro also talked about what made him want to write The Power Broker. He said that when he was a young reporter at Newsday in the 1960s, he would write about how City Parks Commissioner Moses was planning to build the Long Island Expressway. Why would the Parks Commissioner of New York City be building a highway out on Long Island? This was something Caro wanted to investigate at length and what inspired him to write about this man and his awesome power.

About the human impact of Moses on this city, Caro gave several tragic examples, particularly about how the Cross Bronx Expressway basically destroyed the only New York City borough attached to the mainland.

But there was another example Caro gave that was just as sad. When he was Mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia wanted to build street-front clinics for poor pregnant women. Every year he would propose several millions dollars to the city budget for these clinics. Yet as the Board of Estimate was reviewing the budget, about to approve them, a fleet of limousines would roar up to City Hall. Out would pop Moses and his engineers, brandishing their blueprints for some highway or another, and they would head into the Board of Estimate meeting. Moses would tell them that he could get $90 million in Federal money for his project just so long as the city could kick, oh, about $10 million or so. Moses influence was so great at the time that the Board of Estimate would relent ... and slash the money for the clinics. This went on year after year and the clinics never got built. But the highways did.

Moses' power was, as Caro said in the lecture, not only in the things he built in the city but in the priorities he set for it. Cars over people. Highways instead of public transportation. Housing projects instead of communities.

"What is a city?" Caro asked at the end of the lecture. "If Rome is power and Greece is glory, then New York City," Caro said, "is home." And he's right. New York is not only my home and the home to more than eight million people, but it's a place where anyone from anywhere can come and be accepted. New York embraces all, rejects no one, says that no matter where you come from, you can have a life here. This city can be anyone's refuge. Anyone's "home."

By destroying and warping the city's priorities, Robert Moses worked to undermine that sense of "home." He didn't destroy it completely obviously -- NYC will always be resilient and will always be "home" -- but he lessened this city's sense of community, sense of home. And we've been paying the price ever since.

"The Power Broker" @ 40

Several years ago I wrote about Robert Caro's 1974 classic book "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and The Fall of New York."

Clocking in at around 1,200 pages, "The Power Broker" won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and is generally considered the greatest book ever written about NYC. It tells the story of the long, complicated, and fascinating career of Robert Moses, the "master builder" who constructed roads, bridges, highways, parks, beaches, playgrounds, public housing, and huge structures like Lincoln Center and the United Nations. From the mid-1920s until the late 1960s, he was the most powerful man in New York City and New York State, a more consequential figure than any mayor or governor during that time -- or since. Because of Moses, the city's waterfront was cut off from the people, islands were bolted together, neighborhoods were destroyed, public transportation wasn't built, and over half-a-million people were evicted from their homes. The city was, as Caro writes, "flooded with cars" due to Moses' works, and our city's physical landscape changed forever. 

Most shockingly, even though Moses wielded more power and had a greater effect on this city than anyone else in the 20th century, he was never elected to anything.

The story behind "The Power Broker" is equally fascinating: how the young reporter Robert Caro wrote a series of stories about Suffolk County and how it got him a grant to write a book about Moses -- a project that Caro thought would only last a year. How, instead, Caro spent seven years chronicling this incredible story and he and his wife almost went broke, living a total hand-to-mouth existence. How Caro interviewed Moses several times before the great man cut off communication with him. How interest for the book, prior to publication, was generated by serialization in The New Yorker. And how, today, on the 40th anniversary of its publication, "The Power Broker" stands as a classic that has never gone out of print. This article tells the story of how "The Power Broker" came into existence and is a must read like the book itself. 

P.S. This article uses the word "archipelago" i.e. a group of islands, to describe NYC. That is, obviously, an apt description, and I feel deep shame that I have never, in almost a decade of blogging about NYC, never referred to this city as an archipelago. After all, not only is that a neat and proper word to call our fair city, but it's a really cool one. So expect me to throw around the word "archipelago" a lot on this blog going forward. I'll start now: archipelago, archipelago, archipelago, archipelago, archipelago ... archipelago.

Robert Caro on the Shapers of New York

If you love not only New York City but its great history, the New-York Historical Society has something wonderful to offer you next year: three lectures called "The Shapers of New York" about the city by the brilliant historian Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson books. Caro is a native New Yorker who is the preeminent authority on how this city developed in the 20th century. (If you're a dork like me you actually enjoy lectures, obviously depending on the topic; however, I'm not so much of a dork as not to understand that most people don't enjoy lectures on anything.) The lectures are:

The Mark of Robert Moses
Series: Robert A. Caro on the Shapers of New York

Date & Time: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 6:30PM

If you read my Power Broker review, you'll get an idea of what this lecture is probably about.

"What Must the Widow Feel?" -- The Compassion of Al Smith
Series: Robert A. Caro on the Shapers of New York

Date & Time: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 6:30PM

Al Smith was New York State Governor in the 1920s and is generally considered the greatest governor in this state's history. FDR once said that the New Deal was basically a federal imitation of everything Smith did as governor.

The Struggle for Power: La Guardia vs. Moses

Series: Robert A. Caro on the Shapers of New York

Date & Time: Wednesday, January 28, 2009 6:30PM

Fiorello La Guardia was this city's greatest mayor and Moses its greatest builder. They were titanic figures and power-hungry egomaniacs who did more to shape this city's destiny than any two people since. You can get tickets for these lectures now. I'll see you there!

Review: "Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb" (2022)

For the first time in way too long, I was able to do something I had done many times before kids and COVID took over my life -- go to a movie at Film Forum. And nothing could have been a more quintessential NYC experience that seeing a documentary there about two titanic New Yorkers, Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, called Turn Every Page. 

For those who don't already know, Robert Caro is the author of the 1974 classic book The Power Broker about the NYC "master builder" Robert Moses who shaped this city in ways beyond comprehension. I've blogged a lot about Moses and this book over the years to the point of absurdity. 

I haven't done so about Gottlieb but he is no less a legend -- he is not only a book editor but is probably the most successful book editor of the late 20th, early 21st centuries. Since the 1950s, he's edited books by the likes of Michael Crichton and John la Carre, he edited all of Toni Morrison's novels, he not only edited but also came up with the title for Catch-22 (which has become a cultural catchphrase), he edited President Bill Clinton's autobiography in 2004 -- the legacy of the authors he's worked with and the books he's worked on is immense. And he's edited each of Robert Caro's books, starting with The Power Broker and then, for the last 40+ years, his multi-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson, the last book of which they're still working on together.

Turn Every Page is about the working relationship of these two men over the decades, and how it's evolved but also stayed largely the same. They love each other dearly but aren't afraid to fight or disagree about their work, their passion for it being so great. Directed by Gottlieb's daughter Lizzie, it's a very affectionate portrait of these two men but also a very detailed, sober look at the extremely hard work of writing and editing -- they even spend time talking about semi-colons and stuff like that.

And that's what I loved about this documentary -- it's about the work just as much as it is about the personalities. It's about how these men actually get these books written, about how hard it is, about how exacting and time-consuming it is to create great, memorable books. It's also wonderful to see the story of two NYC boys who dreamed big and achieved greatness. But most of all, it focuses on the work, the toughness and demands of the work, and how there are no shortcuts. 

The documentary's title, Turn Every Page, is based on something that Robert Caro's boss told him when he was a young reporter at Newsday and was starting out doing investigating work: "Turn every page, turn every goddamn page!" 

Go see it!

Review: “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York”

In 1974, the historian Robert Caro published The Power Broker, his masterful biography of Robert Moses. It won the Pulitzer Prize and, in 1999, was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest works of nonfiction written in the 20th century (it ranked at #92).

So who was Robert Moses? He was, unquestionably, the most important person ever in New York City history. His impact on this town was enormous, immense, reverberating. We are, for all intensive purposes, living in Robert Moses’ NYC. No one has ever held so much power in this town for so long – more than 44 years – and he was never elected to anything.

So what did he do? He was New York’s master builder. He developed the city we live in today. “Robert Moses shaped New York … He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.” He also built the Triborough and Verrazano Bridges as well Jones Beach, Orchard Beach, Jacob Riis Park and other public parks out on Long Island and upstate. He constructed hundreds of playgrounds, tennis courts, boathouses and baseball diamonds. He also built public pools, including the Astoria Park Pool, one of his better accomplishments.

Oh, he built buildings too: housing developments like Stuyvesant Towns and Peter Cooper Village, as well as Co-Op City. He built some other buildings you might know about: Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Shea Stadium, the New York Coliseum (since demolished, the Time Warner Center sits there now). He also built three of Central Park’s notable structures: Tavern-on-the-Green, Wollman Rink and the Delacorte Theater and the 79th Street Boat Basin in Riverside Park. And he ran (badly) the 1964 World’s Fair.

You get the idea. He built everything. “And what Robert Moses built on was as lie.”

The lie was the image Moses cultivated and propagated for five decades: that he was a self-less servant of the people, above politics, only “doing good” for “the masses.” The reality was that he warped the city to serve the rich few and not the poor and middle class many.

The lie was that he was answerable to the Mayors and Governors who appointed him to head dozens of state and city agencies over the years when, in reality, these elected people deferred to Moses. This includes Franklin Roosevelt when he was Governor and President, as well as Fiorello LaGuardia. Moses was a bully supreme. There’s a great scene in the book where, when FDR was governor, Moses stormed into his office and screamed “You’re a liar Mr. Roosevelt!” Can you imagine anyone doing that? Moses called his supposed elected superiors by their first names: he addressed one letter to Mayor Vincent Impellitteri “Dear Vince.” And he called LaGuardia “that dago son of a bitch.” Nasty, nasty man, this master builder was.

So how did he do it? Moses created and ran a public authority called Triborough that raised money through toll-booths and public bonds and that gave Moses nearly a billion dollars that he could hand out (or not) to the public officials he supposedly served. Needless to say, money talks, or in this case, rules. And the unelected, unanswerable Robert Moses ruled this town for nearly half of the 20th century.

And while Moses certainly did some good for the city, the lie was that New York was better off because of Moses rather than the opposite.

“Robert Moses was America’s greatest builder,” Caro writes. “He was the shaper of the greatest city in the New World. But what did he build?” What did he do to construct the city we live in today? “By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions.”

He “threw out of their homes 250,000 persons … He tore out the hearts of scores of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital parts of the city that made New York a home to its people.” The Cross-Bronx Expressway gutted a pleasant neighborhood called East Tremont, wrecking the Bronx and turning it into a crime-ridden, poverty-stricken borough. The Gowanus Expressway similarly destroyed a lovely middle-class area in Brooklyn, burying it under shadow generating highway. And the public housing Moses built was ugly and depressing. He also built almost no playgrounds and public pools in Harlem or other black neighborhoods. The one public pool he built in Harlem wasn’t even heated – he didn’t think, for some reason, that black people could get cold.

If there are things about New York that drive you crazy today, you can thank Robert Moses for them.

Why aren’t there subway lines that go directly to La Guardia or JFK? Why aren’t there subway lines serving huge parts of Queens? Why can’t you take a subway to Red Hook? Why is there still no 2nd Avenue Subway? Because Moses didn’t believe in public transportation and had contempt for people who needed it and couldn't’t afford cars. From 1933 until 1968, Moses years in power, not one new subway line was built and New Yorkers had to, and still have to, pack themselves like sardines into the subway cars on the old, old tracks. It’s not exactly a secret that our city’s public transportation is inadequate and overcrowded. Moses was so convinced that cars were the future of New York, he even proposed a Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have run through and destroyed Soho and Greenwich Village! (Mercifully, that was stopped.) And the irony was that Robert Moses never drove a car a day in his 92 years of life.

In short, Caro writes, Moses “systematically defeated every attempt to create the master plan that might have enabled the city to develop on a rational, logical, unified pattern.” By destroying so many neighborhoods and making so many others inaccessible with little or no public transportation, Moses reduced the number of pleasant areas where New Yorkers can or want to live. That’s why it costs so much to live here today and why New Yorkers are paying so much for so little space.

Needless to say Moses’ legacy is what contributed to the subtitle “The Fall of New York” and, for the last few decades, Mayors and Governors have been trying to undo a lot of the problems he created. Bloomberg’s PlaNYC is basically an attempt to overturn and minimize the Moses mess.

So what about the book itself? The Power Broker is a long, exhausting, infuriating, and brilliant book. Caro is an absolutely masterful writer and the jaw drops when you read about all of the interviews he conducted and all of the documents he browsed through. Caro’s gift is explaining the details and decisions of public policy making and how they affect people’s lives. Ultimately, this book is really not a biography of Moses or a history of New York City or a sociological study of urban planning, but an examination of power (hence the book’s title): Caro brilliantly explains how Moses got power, used it, kept it, and eventually lost it.

Because of its length, The Power Broker is a door stopper and it takes a commitment to read it. It took me over a month! But I highly recommend it if you have any desire to understand how New York City changed and grew in the 20th century.

Moses & Caro Speak!

This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker, Robert Caro's brilliant book about the career of NYC master builder Robert Moses. 

I've blogged A LOT about Robert Moses over the years and you can find it all, including my own review of The Power Broker, right here (there's also a big exhibition about it at the New-York Historical Society). 

When Caro wrote in the book in the last 1960s and early 1970s, he was a young man looking to reveal the story behind how Moses built NYC. By this time, Moses himself was an old man, looking back at his controversial legacy. 

Now, fifty years later, Moses is long dead and Caro himself is an old man, looking back on the legacy of his book about the man and what he did to NYC.

Below you can see a 1977 interview that Moses gave to publica television about his career and the book that made him infamous. And then you can watch a very recent 2024 interview with Care reflecting how his great book came to be. 

Caro Papers at NYPL

The great historian and biographer Robert Caro -- he of the legendary Robert Moses and LBJ tomes -- has just donated his vast collection of papers and reporting for his books to the New York Public Library.

Some people, if they ever hit the Lottery and never had to work again, would probably spend it on a beach somewhere. I'd spend it in the NYPL reading Robert Caro's papers, devouring the back story to his great books about political power and how it changes American life.

Talking about archives, if you want to read the extensive Robert Caro/Robert Moses posts on Mr NYC, go here.

And, hey, NYPL, maybe, just maybe, one day in the far, far, future, maybe you'll want to put blogs into your archives?

I can think of a couple!

LaGuardia vs. Moses

This past week I went to Robert Caro's last lecture on "The Shapers of New York" at the New-York Historical Society. This final lecture was about the battle between New York's greatest Mayor and its greatest builder as they wrestled for control of the city's destiny during the Great Depression and World War II. While history has sainted Fiorello LaGuardia's Mayoralty as the one that successfully implemented the New Deal into our city, in the end Robert Moses won the battle as to who would set the city's priorities for literally decades to come.

LaGuardia and Moses were two titanic egomaniacs who literally could not stand the sight of each other. When the Mayor and his Parks Commissioner would be in the same room together, they would pace around each other like two boxers in a ring waiting to the punch the other guy out. They would yell and scream and call the other loathsome names. Moses would call LaGuardia a "dago" and "wop" or, even worse, an "organ grinder." And LaGuardia, the lesser educated and refined but more gentlemanly of the two, would call Moses "your grace."

As I mentioned in my first post about this series, each year LaGuardia would present a city budget that would take care of the needy and poor in NYC and Moses would then swoop in and re-jigger it so that he could get money for his building projects. But their disputes weren't only centered around money. Theirs was a brutal battle of wits and raw power.

This conflict is probably best exemplified in the Astoria Ferry incident of 1936. Shortly before Triborough Bridge was to open, Robert Moses wanted to get rid of the ferry service that took people from Astoria across the East River to Manhattan. These were working people who couldn't afford cars to go over Moses's new bridge and this service was vital to them. LaGuardia ordered that the ferry service continue. So one night, literally minutes after the last ferry had pulled away from the dock on the Manhattan side, a couple of barges pulled up in front of the dock. Bulldozers and pile drivers were unloaded and they began ripping and shredding it to pieces. A furious LaGuardia ordered the police to head down and stop this. Armed cops told the workers to cease and desist immediately. Their reply? "We don't work for you. We work for Mr. Moses." And their work continued without incident.

Robert Moses was so popular, so powerful, his power so unquestioned that not even the Mayor and police department of the greatest city in the world could stop him.

That said, Fiorello LaGuardia's impact on NYC was enormous. He reformed the corrupt Tammany Hall-controlled government and steered the city successfully through the Depression. He was also an out-sized, only-in-New York personality who liked to read comics to children over WNYC radio. But in his last years as Mayor, he was literally dying. After he left office in 1945, he would eat lunch at his favorite downtown club and grumble that Robert Moses had too much power -- and that while he, LaGuardia, could control him (which wasn't true) now no one could (which was true). He died in 1947. Today's he's remembered as NYC's greatest mayor and has an airport, a street, a high school and a college named after him. (This is especially ironic since LaGuardia never graduated from either). If you ever walk down LaGuardia Place, between Houston Street and Washington Square, you can see a life-sized statue of the Little Flower that captures his personality perfectly.

These final lectures were a lot of fun and very informative. It was great to hear Robert Caro bring old New York back to life and I was especially grateful that he autographed my copy of The Power Broker. He also told a funny story about how, when he was writing the book, he couldn't get a hold of Moses's Triborough Authority records which were legally sealed. However, he was told that carbon copies of all these records were stored by the Parks Department under the 79th Street Boat Basin. So Caro and his wife Ina would go there to browse through these carbons. The Parks Department made it clear they didn't like having them there and, whenever the guard went to lunch or stepped out, he would remove the light bulbs so that Caro and Ina would literally be in the dark. So after that they would bring their own light bulbs and screw them in whenever the guards went away.

Carbons and light bulbs -- just one of the ways that great history is unearthed so that the rest of us can better understand the great city that we live in.

Memo from NYC

"Why weren't they grateful?"

That's the last sentence of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, the book I've been obsessing about all year. Late in his life, a retired and angry Robert Moses would give speeches and carp to friends about how New Yorkers were ungrateful to him for working so unselfishly on their behalf. Moses was baffled. He couldn't understand why the people had rejected him. Caro ironically writes, just before that last sentence, “Couldn't people see what he had done?”

They did -- and that's why they turned on Moses. His ill-conceived highways caused traffic jams to choke the city, he starved public transportation of funds and prevented it from serving all parts of the city, he built ugly and depressing public housing, he botched the city's waterfront, and he destroyed neighborhoods that led to huge increases in crime. People were supposed to be grateful for this?

America's own power broker is leaving the Presidency soon and, to be cliche, it's deja vu all over again. Bush and his fellow Republicans are screaming about people's ingratitude to him. Americans are ungrateful to him for "keeping us safe." Iraqis are ungrateful to him for "liberating" their country." This whining has been going on for some time now. A few examples:

• On 60 Minutes last year, Bush said, "I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude." The American people, "wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq."
  
  
• Andrew McCarthy from National Review wrote "Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely ... Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates."
  
  
• After Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana State Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere, Jr. called Louisiana Democrats "ungrateful" for everything Bush had done for their state (!)

This blather goes on and on. The case -- or narrative, or spin, or whatever you want to call it -- that Bush and his few remaining acolytes are fashioning goes like this:

"George W Bush is a courageous, deeply moral and principled man, a natural leader, the right man at the right time, who did everything he could to protect and strengthen America and didn't care what popular or elite opinion thought about it. He didn't care what anyone thought about it! And in being so bold and so brave, he made unpopular decisions that history will ultimately deem were the right decisions. You see, George W is like Harry Truman, another president who left office unpopular but has since been reevaluated by history as a great one. We're so lucky to have had Bush for these last eight years. We're just too stupid to realize it right now."

This "Bush-will-be-redeemed-by-history-and-he's-like-Harry Truman" stuff has become accepted dogma in the right-wing intelligentsia. Even a former Mayor of NYC not named Rudy buys this crap. In an article called "History Will Redeem Bush", Ed Koch wrote:

His position can be compared with that of Harry Truman who left Washington unpopular and alone in 1953 … Like Truman, George W. Bush, in my view, will be seen as one of the few world leaders who recognized the danger of Islamic terrorism ... We will recognize his worth long after he is gone."

Truman recognized the danger of Islamic terrorism? Silly me, me thoughts it was Communism. Oy vey. Hiding behind the skirt of history is the ultimate sign of failure. As for this Bush-as-Truman myth, the late great David Halberstam debunked it beautifully with words and wisdom I’ll certainly never be able to muster as well.

In The Power Broker, pondering the Moses legacy, Caro quotes Sophocles who said, "One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”

In the evening of the Bush presidency, how splendid has “the day” been?

He turned the largest budget surplus in US history into the largest deficit, he trashed environmental rules and regulations and did nothing to address global warming or our nation's addiction to foreign oil, he let an already broken health care system worsen and placed impediments on scientific research, he appointed hacks and incompetents all over the government and tried to put one of them on the Supreme Court, he politicized and undermined the credibility of the US Justice Department, he botched the government's response to one of the worst natural disasters in US history, he totally ignored warnings of the terrorist threat prior to 9/11, he invaded and screwed up the occupation of a country that never attacked us and posed no threat to us, and he spent almost four years telling us that this invasion was going just dandy when reality showed it to be a disaster. Oh, and he spied on Americans without warrants, tortured people, and increased government secrecy to a level not seen since Nixon. His government failed to properly regulate the financial industry that led to one of the worst economic calamities since the Great Depression.

And where the hell is Osama Bin Laden?

This is his record. This is the reality of his presidency.

History is going to redeem that? For this we should be … grateful?

"But don't you see," most Bush supporters say, especially when it comes to the economic crises, "most of this wasn’t his fault. A lot of it was out of his control."

So even though Bush has been a great president, he never really was in charge …

Ma'done.

Caro wrote in The Power Broker that Moses “believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born.”

Well, history hasn't redeemed Robert Moses. Today, generations later, New Yorkers are still living in, and trying to grapple with, the mess that he made of our city. The best Bush can hope for is that Barack Obama fixes the disaster he's leaving behind so that Americans years from now aren't still living in it and blame him. Maybe history will be kinder to Bush then. Who knows? That's a big, unknowable maybe ...

... but then again, Bush and his supporters already know what history is going to say. You see, we're not as smart as they are, we’re just too stupid to understand his greatness …

Can't people see what he's done?

Why aren't we grateful?

"What Must the Widow Feel?" The Compassion of Al Smith

This past Wednesday we went to the second of Robert Caro's lectures at the New-York Historical Society on "The Shapers of New York." This time the subject was Al Smith, the great New York Governor who served on and off from 1919 to 1928. (I had blogged about Al Smith in October when both McCain and Obama, at the height of the presidential race, appeared at the Al Smith Dinner which is held every year in the old Governor's memory to raise money for Catholic charities). Caro indicated that this was his favorite lecture to give because of his great admiration for Al Smith (1873-1944) .He also sad that, sadly, there are no great books about Smith so learning about him and how important he was is difficult.

In this lecture, Caro talked about Al Smith's incredible rise from being a street kid in the Bowery to New York's first Catholic Governor. Smith worked as a laborer and ran errands for the corrupt Tammany Hall machine. Eventually he worked his way into a seat in the State Legislature where he became one of the hardest working and most capable legislators Albany had ever seen (amongst other things, he actually read the legislation he voted on, something a lot of his colleagues didn't do). During his time in the legislature (he rose to Speaker before becoming Governor), Smith came up with ideas that were revolutionary in early 20th century America but are commonplace today: state farm insurance, worker's compensation and safety laws (following the terrible Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire of 1911), health insurance for the poor, and higher teacher salaries. His compassion for the working poor and working women in particular was extraordinary. In fact, his ideas were so revolutionary that when FDR implemented the New Deal in the 1930s, he told people that "What we're doing is basically what Al Smith in New York." If FDR was the Father of the New Deal, Al Smith was its Godfather.

Smith's life and career had great highs and crushing lows. Although a very successful governor, he never realized his dream of the Presidency. He was the Democratic nominee in 1928 but was crushed by Herbert Hoover. The reason? He was Catholic, and people outside of New York and the Northeast didn't like Catholics very much back then. (It's amazing to think that 80 years ago a Catholic couldn't elected president but now a black man can.) And when FDR became President, he ignored Smith completely and he was never able to bring his talents to the Federal level. However, in the early thirties, the retired Al Smith helped to build the Empire State Building. But his anger at Roosevelt made him abandon his Democratic party affiliation and become something of an angry reactionary late in life.

One other interesting thing about Smith. He had a young assistant whose career he nurtured named Robert Moses. When Smith was retired and Moses was at the height of his power, Moses re-built the Central Park Zoo just for him. Smith loved animals and Moses made him an Honorary Zookeeper. He also gave Smith a key to the zoo so that the old governor could leave his apartment across the street on Fifth Avenue any time day or night to go into the zoo and visit with the animals. Moses, who was a legendary egomaniac, loved to demonstrate his power by calling everyone, including the Mayors and Governors he supposedly worked for, by their first names (including even Nelson Rockefeller). But Moses always called Smith "Governor" and his respect for him never waned. And neither should ours.

The MTA: Decline and Fail

In the first chapter of his legendary biography of NYC master builder Robert Moses, Robert Caro quotes Sophocles: "One must wait until evening/To see how splendid the day has been."

Specifically, Caro wrote about how, in the evening of Moses's life and career, the  disastrous legacy of his transportation projects, housing initiatives, and various public works became clearer and clearer for all to see. It's a reminder that systemic failures take years, even decades, to become apparent and, once they do, they're almost impossible to correct.

This is especially true of the MTA.

This past summer in NYC was one of public transportation meltdown: stalled trains, signal malfunctions, derailments, and on and on. Governor Cuomo declared it an emergency ("the summer of hell!") and ordered massive improvements to the subways and trains. However, this is a Band Aid to a much larger wound. Well, not exactly a wound -- more like a starvation.

For the last twenty-five years, governors and mayors of both political parties have starved the MTA of billions of dollars in funds and much needed structural improvements. The result is the outdated, rickety system that's supposed to serve millions and millions of people every day. 

Why this starvation? Politics, naturally. These governors and mayors favored tax cuts or spending on other projects, including on opulent station makeovers that had nothing to do with improving service. It's a story of misplaced priorities, wasteful spending, and raw, short-term self-interest. 

The MTA is not of the cause of NYC's transportation woes -- it's the victim, as are all the rest of us.

You should read and listen to the authors of this exhaustive report on how the sorry state of the MTA came to be -- only twenty-five years in the making! 

Oh, and the MTA is bringing back "vintage" cars for the holidays -- 'cause, you know, that's worth spending money on! 

Who shapes the city?

Robert Caro's 1974 masterpiece The Power Broker offered a cautionary tale about the power of unelected urban planners shaping cities. Caro's story of Robert Moses, the master builder who for forty-plus years misshaped NYC (destroying neighborhoods with highways and ill-conceived urban renewal housing projects, not building badly needed public transportation, cutting the city off from its waterfront) is searing since, in many ways, our city is still grappling with Moses' legacy today.

For many years after the Moses-era, urban planners went into retreat. NYC and other American cities were grappling with high crime, fiscal crises, and white flight. No one had grand ambitions to build in, and redesign, cities that were struggling for mere survival. But in the last two decades, NYC and other American cities have undergone a renaissance as crime has fallen, finances have been gotten under control, and people have been flooding in. So now urban planners are back, big time, with grand visions of new buildings, parks, and other public works.

But these are not your grandparents' urban planners.

Take this article from the The New Republic. It's about a man named Edmund Bacon who was, in his day and in many ways, the Robert Moses of Philadelphia. There is a new book about Bacon that seeks to re-introduce him to another generation as a great urban visionary who built Philadelphia into the great American city it is today. This is going hand-in-hand with some people who are trying to restore Moses' reputation and reconsider his legacy that The Power Broker so powerfully damned. (FYI Ed Bacon was the father of actor Kevin Bacon. Cut loose!)

But the new urban planners aren't people trying to be another Robert Moses or Ed Bacon. Instead, they are largely private organizations and companies trying to put a unique stamp on cities. Here in NYC, the most popular recent example is the Highline -- the old abandoned railway tracked turned into a park in the sky. It was mostly private funds that went into this project raised by Friends of the Highline.

Now comes Citi -- Citi Bank, that is -- with its new bike share program. If you've been walking around NYC in the last few weeks, you've probably seen these clunky blue bikes stuffed in docking stations at various points around the city. They have the words "citiBike" pasted on them, and you pay an annual fee to use these bikes -- but not to the City but to Citi.

These are the new urban planners -- companies like Citi Bank, organizations like Friends of the Highline -- literally changing the face of NYC. They are making their own imprint on our town. This isn't the government providing services, it's private enterprise making a mark, and sometimes we have to pay an additional fee (some might call it tax) for the privilege. For example, the 9/11 memorial museum is not public institution like you might think -- it's private, and you have to pay an entrance fee.

So, instead of a grand visionary like Robert Moses using government funds or bonds for big public works, it's companies and various private organizations finding incremental ways to shape the city.

In some ways, this has been going on for a long time. The big New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square was originally created by The New York Times about 100 years ago ... to promote The New York Times (before it was used by Dick Clark to promote Ryan Seacrest). The July 4th fireworks and the Thanksgiving Day Parade were (and are) sponsored by Macy's to promote ... Macy's. This was then known as good corporate citizenship -- and also good corporate PR.

Of course, private developers have been building residential and commercial real estate for centuries -- but they weren't shaping the life and identityy of the city in quite the same way.

Personally, I think the new urban planners are a mixed bag. Things like the Highline and New Year's Eve and the parade and fireworks are great; things like the bike share program are good if you really want to bike in NYC and have the money; things like paying money to go to the 9/11 museum ... eh, not so much.

Yet one thing is clear: no longer is the government of NYC truly shaping the city. Big money is shaping the city -- shaping its identity, its soul, and its future.

Let's hope they do a better job than the urban planners of yore.

NYC Turns, Turns, Turns ...

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and Pete Seegar taught us well: "To everything there is a season ... a time to live, and a time to die ... a time to break down, and a time to build up ... a time to mourn, and a time to dance ... a time to keep, and a time to cast away ... and a time to every purpose ... turn, turn, turn ..."

The yin and yang, the ups and downs, the hopes and dreams realized and dashed, the constant churn -- or turn -- of existence is something that you only begin to fully appreciate as you age. Life is never a permanent up or down escalator. In fact, as we get older, accepting this constant "to everything there is a season" fact of life -- and not just accepting but cherishing it -- is what makes the craziness and vicissitudes of aging bearable. It's a basic tenet of survival -- things happen, things change, sometimes for better, often for worst, but they are inevitable. Accepting them with grace is a greater part of wisdom.

Of course, in this day and age, there are lots of people who either can't or won't accept what the Bible and our greatest folk singer taught us. They go in the opposite direction -- trying hopelessly, miserably, quixotically to reclaim their youths, reclaim their pasts, reclaim times gone by. They express this in both harmless and harmful ways, like reveling in cultural nostalgia (harmless) or voting for Trump (harmful). F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this yearn for regression in his last, brilliant line of The Great Gatsby: "So beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

In NYC, we see this "turn" all the time, in ways both big and small. Concurrently, we also see the desire, in varying ways, to recapture the city's past.

For example, the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn: this area has a rather bi-polar identity, as both the ultimate liberal hipster mecca and the home to the very conservative Orthodox Jewish community. But did you know there is highly Italian part of it? It's fading away, and the people there seem to accept that their neighborhood and the times have changed, as this article and its amazing photographs demonstrate.

Two recent deaths also show how people in our past made the city's present and future turn for the better. I love reading about New Yorkers like this because, without them, our city and its culture would be poorer. Genevieve Oswald created and curated the dance archive at the public library for more than 40 years. And Henry Stern was the Parks Commissions off and on for almost 20 years (from 1983-2001), the longest serving and probably most imaginative commissioner since Robert Moses. 

*Side note: I tried interviewing Henry Stern for this blog several years ago. I emailed him at an organization he ran, and got a rather weird message in reply that I didn't understand -- it wasn't an outright rejection but it certainly didn't read like an acceptance. It was more like, "If you call this number, something might happen but don't expect it." I never did call. His was one of a few interviews that just never quite happened.

Anyway, they were both great New Yorkers, they made it "turn" for the better. May they RIP.

Moving on ... I was a teenager in NYC in the 1990s. As much as I'd like to say it was a special time and place to be young, it sure didn't feel that way at the time. Honestly, I was a complete loser (unlike now, where I'm only a partial loser), and back then I had no money, no girlfriends, few real friends, and lots of school work. Le ugh. However, as the 21st century so far has given us 9/11, two endless wars, more and more mass shootings, more and more man-made natural disasters, the financial crises, and Trump, it's easy to look at the last decade of the 20th century as some of kind of "end of innocence" even though it really wasn't. In recent years, there have been movies about being a teenager in the 1990s, both in NYC and elsewhere, including The Wackness from 2008 and more recently one called Landline (I actually went to high school with the person who made it but didn't know her). This article is about these movies and their 1990s nostalgia is both misplaced and yet totally understandable (also, this year is the 30th anniversary of the classic NYC romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally which, in many ways, was a '90s movie even though it came out in the last year of the 1980s).

Things in NYC and the world have "turned" since the 1990s -- in some ways for better (the smartphone, the smoking ban, lower crime, Barack Obama) and, obviously, for worse. I know for me things have actually "turned" for the better, but even I sometimes looked back misty-eyed at the Clinton era.

And in understanding how the times "turn", no New Yorker explains not only history but power -- and how people in power made history -- than Robert Caro. Author of the Robert Moses tome The Power Broker and the Lyndon Johnson series, Caro has just published a book about his working life (literally titled Working). His advice to aspiring historians? "Turn every page." Turn over the pages, the materials, the people, the metaphorical rocks of the past to understand how our present was formed and how we are forming our future. 

NYC, like the world it exists in, turns forever -- and it is we who do the turning.

Brian Lehrer 20th Anniversary

Easily the best local talk show in town is WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, broadcast each morning from 10 AM to noon. This call-in/interview show is not typical shock-talk, rile'em'up, partisan shout-fest -- it's a thoughtful, intelligent show that explores issues concerning the world, the nation, and, of course, New York. All the while it manages to be vastly entertaining.

The show covers a whole variety of topics, moving seamlessly from one to the next. In one segment Brian and his guests might be talking about reform in the public schools, the next about how to denuclearize Iran, the next he'll be talking calls from people who've been laid off in the Great Recession.

And besides being a great interviewer and congenial host, Brian gets the bests guests. From
Newt Gingrich to Ralph Nader, he interviews everyone. You know you've made it in this town if you're invited to appear on his show.

Yesterday Brian celebrated the 20th anniversary of his show with special guest Micheal Moore. It's a great segment. To get an idea of how good the show is, in 2007 Brian interviewed Robert Caro and other guests on the legacy of Robert Moses. It's a fascinating program and you can listen to it here.

So happy anniversary Brian -- you have the best news show in NYC. (And I know I'll made it if I'm ever invited to appear on his show which should happen oh ... you know ... probably never. But a boy can dream).

The Ghosts of NYC

Did you know we live in a ghost town?

Yes, NYC is a place where ghosts live. Not literally of course -- ghosts don't exist -- but the lives of past New Yorkers have shaped our city, literally and figuratively, and the spirit of New Yorkers past still haunt our collective memories.

And, to find them, all you have to do is a take a walk.

First, go to West 44th Street. This one block of Manhattan is one of the most fascinating in this or any part of any city in this country. This is where the Algonquin Hotel once existed, and in its restaurant, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley and Edna Ferber and George Kaufman and all sorts of literary legends formed the Round Table -- perhaps the most famous American salon in history. West 44th Street is also where the Harvard Club is located, a place where New Yorkers at the pinnacle of wealth and power came and still do come to congregate. It's where The New Yorker used to have its offices. Under the decades long leadership of William Shawn, this magazine launched the careers of countless legendary writers, including JD Salinger and John Updike. And, much more recently, West 44th Street is the location of the Sofitel Hotel, where a certain former IMF chief got nasty with a maid and thus upended French politics. 

This long, fascinating article from Vanity Fair gives a general and personal history of West 44th Street and how the people who worked, drank, and screwed there formed our city's cultural and political history forever.

Second, walk up to Fifth Avenue and 72nd street and pop into Central Park. And stare at Rumsey Playground and then close your eyes. Then open your mind and imagine a gorgeous Beaux Arts building standing right there. And imagine it's nighttime, and men and women in beautiful suits and dresses are getting out of limos and going inside into what used to be casino. Yes, such a place used to exist right there. It was a building designed by Calvert Vaux in 1859, one of the original architects of Central Park, that was originally called the Ladies Refreshment Salon. By the turn of the century it became a music hall and then, in 1929, under the infamous Mayor Jimmy Walker, it was turned into a Casino -- a sign of the wretched excess of Roaring Twenties New York. Walker's corruption, and the casino he helped build, became hated symbols after the Great Depression began. Walker was forced to resign in 1932 and Robert Moses, in a rash act of thoughtless anti-Walkerism, tore this beautiful historic building down. The ghosts of Walker and Mosesstill  exist in this empty space -- a symbol of the price of corruption and zealous self-righteousness. (If you ever read The Power Broker, Robert Caro writes a lot about this.)

So today, people who visit Central Park, never know that such a building used to exist there. But the ghosts still do.

"The Power Broker" on TV!

Believe it or not, I haven't been watching much TV during this pandemic -- I spend so much time working at my job, taking care of my kids, keeping my house in order, cooking, and occasionally blogging, that my TV time is severely limited. When I do watch something, it's usually for only an hour or so before bed, usually some show that I've recorded or get off a streaming service.

But on the rare occasion when I do catch the news, I've noticed a trend: people who are broadcasting or being interviewed from home, a bookcase behind them, with a copy of Robert Caro's The Power Broker prominently displayed on a top shelf. Just last night I caught two minutes of Erroll Louis on NY1, and there was the mighty tome looming over his shoulder. 

I'm not the only one who's noticed this -- today there's a big article about how numerous politicians, journalists, and other assorted NYC bigwigs who appear on TV regularly are making sure that The Power Broker can be seen by the audience. Some politicians, like Congressman Max Rose of Staten Island, downright admit that they put it there just be seen. Displaying this book so clearly to the public is an perfect example of what we might call "intelligence signaling" -- it says, "look how smart, informed, sophisticated, and New York I am. Oh, and I really, really like to read." 

Unlike many of these people who've probably never actually read The Power Broker, yours truly has -- I even blogged about it twelve yearss ago. So there!

Other suggested big NYC books to have on your bookshelf to show what a super-sophisticated New Yorker you are: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, Underworld by Don DeLillo (might want to throw in White Noise or Mao ii for good measure), maybe some older books like The Great Gatsby, Sister Carrie, and The Age of Innocence, and anything by Vonnegut. 

And here's 1977 interview with the "power broker" himself, Robert Moses!

Take Me Back to Funky Town

Mr NYC is nothing if not nostalgic. If you read this blog regularly then you know that plumbing the depths of New York's collective memory is one of my favorite things to do.

I'm not alone. For some reason, in the last few years, there's been a little boomlette of movies, TV shows, and other stuff that seeks to remember NYC back in what Tom Wolfe called the Me Decade -- the 1970s. Movies like 54, American Gangster, Summer of Sam, and the coming remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3; TV shows like Life on Mars and The Bronx is Burning (based on the book "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning"); and a new exhibit about John Lennon in NYC, all bring back memories of the city in that most of tumultuous of decades.

Call this anti-, or ironic, nostalgia.

NYC in the 1970s was supposedly not a pretty place. Literally and figuratively. According to history, the city was a horror show back then. You couldn't go outside without getting raped, mugged, molested, beaten up, or kept out of Studio 54. Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker that the city was in "chaos and despair." Annie Hall in Annie Hall said it was "a dying city." That's when the city almost went bankrupt and President Ford told it to "drop dead" (he never actually said it but it made for one of the greatest headlines ever).

Apparently, NYC in the seventies just sucked.

Or maybe not. Maybe it wasn't so bad. Maybe it was actually kinda great. Some people are looking back at this low, dishonest decade and thinking that for all the misery, there was something special about it. They want to go back to funky town.

One of these people is James Walcott of Vanity Fair. He has a great article and a slide show in this month's issue about NYC in the 1970s that remembers the city as a strange, exciting place. It hadn't totally and completely sold out to money like it would in the 80s, 90s, and the oughts. NYC back then was still a place that embraced funky people more so than now. This includes the band The New York Dolls and Walcott has another great short article about this band and the late, great CBGBs.

Reading this, I couldn't help but sigh a little. I don't remember NYC in the 1970s at all -- I spent the three years I was alive in it crawling and running around my parents apartment. All of the exciting stuff was happening downtown, far away. And while the city has in no doubt improved since then, for everything we've gained, no doubt, as Walcott says, we've lost something to.

So all we have now is nostalgia.

P.S. I managed to write two blog posts in a row with "funky" in the title. Good for me. Mr NYC vows to keep it (whatever "it" is, presumably this blog) quite funky indeed.

Glenda Jackson & Robert Gottlieb RIP

This week two titans of their respective crafts -- the legendary book editor Robert Gottlieb and the famous actress/British politician Glenda Jackson -- passed away at the ages of 92 and 87, respectively. 

Just a few months ago I blogged about the wonderful documentary Turn Every Page about the career of Robert Gottlieb -- and the countless great authors he worked with and their books that he published, especially his special working relationship with Robert Caro. A New Yorker to the core, Gottlieb not only edited books but also fundraised and helped run the New York City Ballet and was a huge part of the cultural life of this city. RIP

Glenda Jackson was not a New Yorker -- she was English and acted in movies, theater, and TV for decades except for when she took a 23-year break from acting to serve in the British House of Commons as a Labour MP (she even served as a minister in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government). She won two Oscars and many other awards and, if you've ever seen it, the 1971 mini-series where she plays Queen Elizabeth I is one of the best things I've ever seen. Fortunately I got to see her on Broadway -- twice -- in Three Tall Women in 2018 and King Lear in 2019. You can read my reviews of them here. She was a giant of acting and politics. RIP.

Da' Bronx

Interesting article from NY Mag online about the only NYC borough grafted to the American mainland: the Bronx. Titled "What is the Bronx Anyway?", it's a meditation about the borough, by a native, about what makes the Bronx both fascinating and yet, at the same time, so elusive to New Yorkers who live outside it.

The author raises some interesting points, and the article is worth a read, but I think there's more to what makes the Bronx such a difficult place to describe and understandd. Three main points I'd include:

1. Other than Staten Island, the Bronx is very isolated from the rest of NYC. In fact, it's even more isolated: you can ferry it from Staten Island to lower Manhattan very easily or drive across the Verrazano bridge into Brooklyn. The Bronx, on the other hand, is only attached to the city by a few bridges and subway lines to upper Manhattan. So, for the rest of the city, the Bronx might as well be Westchester. Out of easy reach, out of mind.

2. The Bronx is not, shockingly enough, geographically homogeneous. Yes, the South Bronx is popularly thought of as a Bonfire of the Vanities-like urban hell hole, and other parts of it are very citified too. But remember, the Bronx is also home to the super-suburban area of Riverdale. Also, huge swaths of it are covered by park land: Van Cortland Park, Pelham Bay Park, Ferry Point Park, not to mention all of the space that the Bronx Zoo takes up (it's huge!). So the Bronx is hard to define since it's a patchwork of urban landscapes, suburbs, parks, and islands (like City Island).

3. The Bronx has a very sad history. In the 1950s, wonderful middle class, largely Jewish, neighborhoods like Tremont were destroyed and blighted by the Cross Bronx Expressway. When Robert Moses rammed this enormous highway straight across the borough, the wonderful Marty-like ccommunities housed in the Bronx were wrecked and scattered. No one wanted to live next to a big noisy highway and neighborhoods were literallyy gashed apart. Abandoned buildings turned into drug dens. Filth and grime took root. People who could afford to live elsewhere did. Read the chapter "One Mile" from Robert Caro's The Power Broker to learn about how an entire borough of this great town was basically ruined by this evil highway. The Bronx has never fully recovered.