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.

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.

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.

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.

Did Robert Moses Destroy the Amazon (Campus)?

The real culprit, according to those in the know, for the failure of Amazon to build a new campus in NYC, is someone who has been dead for almost 40 years -- that's right, our friend, our buddy, our pal, Robert Moses.

Why?

Well, from the 1920s until the 1960s, the "master builder" rammed highways around the city and state, and built other projects in a totally irresponsible manner, wrecking neighborhoods and disposessing their residents. In the name of "progress", he warped this city to his car-centric, anti-poor priorities, underfunding public transit in the process, and basically ignoring the concerns of the communities he affected. Remember, this is the guy who wanted to destroy Soho and Greenwich Village by putting a highway through it -- that was stopped by Jane Jacobs, and NYC vowed never to let something so awful ever possibly happen again. 

By the time he left power in 1968, NYC was suffering a Robert Moses PTSD and new laws were enacted, including the little-known but extremely powerful public utilities committee, to prevent another Moses from building things in this city it didn't want, didn't need, and that would change it forever -- for the worse.

The result, today, is that it's practically impossible to build anything big in NYC as mayors and governors have learned to rue. It took 45 years to build three subway stops on the East Side, after all! You might call this an "overcorrection". 

So whether you were for or against the Amazon deal, this situation proves that NYC today is living in Robert Moses legacy -- in the city he shaped and in the reaction to that -- and his form of progress from yesterday makes progress today all the harder.

Robert Moses Redux?

Besides warping this city's infrastructure and destroying neighborhoods with his ill-conceived highways, parks, and other structures, the "master builder" Robert Moses also did this city another great disservice: he made the idea of huge public works scary.

Over the last forty years since Moses fell from power, New Yorkers have looked askance at attempts to build huge, city-altering projects.

Ten years after 9/11, Ground Zero is still a work in progress after years of financial and regulatory problems and squabbles. Recently the Arc Tunnel project connecting NY and NJ was killed and people both in New York and New Jersey don't seem to care. Moynahan Station and the Second Avenue Subway still remain frustrating out of reach. And now there is great debate over the Tappen Zee bridge which Governor Cuomo wants to repair but wants to do on the cheap -- which would mean not including any kind of public transportation improvements like a rail connector or pedestrian walkways. 

Building big or re-imagining our city and our area's physical plant almost seems impossible these days.

Obviously it comes to down to money (i.e. taxes) and public will (i.e. political power). If New Yorkers aren't willing to pay the taxes or tolls for more public works, then our infrastructure won't improve. If we are going to punish politicians who want to raise the taxes and build these public works with electoral defeat, then our infrastructure won't only not improve -- it will degrade. Sadly, not only in New York but around the country, politicians have been getting elected by promising to kill things like high-speed rail and other public works. Clearly, not only in NY but elsewhere too, we're not going in the right direction in terms of our city and nation's physical plant.

This article makes this point and more. And it makes you wonder: do we need another Robert Moses? The man who got things done despite the politicians?

I don't think so but our city does need to get over its fear of building big. We need to clearly and soberly look at what our city's infrastructure problems are, come to a political and financial consensus about the work required and the costs it will entail, and then move forward boldly. We just don't need to do it the way Robert Moses did.

And this is what we need: we don't need more highways or bike paths -- we need more subways lines and light rail links. We don't need more public housing projects and luxury skyscrapers -- we need more affordable housing constructed in a way that compliments and doesn't destroy neighborhoods. We need to re-build our sewers and other hidden but vital infrastructure. None of this stuff is "sexy" but vital.

We need to build in a way that will make it easier for New Yorkers to live, work and get around this city -- and that will ensure our future. 

"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.

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. 

Robert Moses Revisionism

Recently I was sent an article about Robert Moses that attempted, awkwardly I must say, to revise and re-assess the master builder's legacy. You can read it here. 

Basically the argument is this: Moses did more good stuff than bad and, hey, he was a product of his times. It takes issue with The Power Broker and says that not everything in it is true.  

Well, I think this revisionism is nonsense. You should read my original review of The Power Broker here for the classic argument against the Moses legacy.

See, I grew up in the city that Moses built and I can say that the book is spot-on regarding his diminished legacy. This article lauds Moses for building bridges and, yes, he built lots of them -- with no accommodations for subway lines. Yes, he built lots of parks -- that are depressing and ugly. Yes, he built lots of public housing -- that was even more ugly and depressing. And he rammed so many highways through this town that it destroyed neighborhoods and flooded NYC with cars -- and for this, there is no counter argument.

And the "product of his times" argument holds no water with me. There were lots and lots of people at the time who told him he was wrong and who advocated for increased public transportation, for building fewer highways and building ones in ways that didn't destroy neighborhoods, for not cutting off access to the city's waterfront, and for building better public housing. Moses was not a victim of any kind of group-think: he was an arrogant, abusive man who misshaped NYC and there were lots of people telling him at the time that this was disastrous -- and he didn't listen. 

So beware the revisionists! Beware those who wish "to set the record straight." It's like people today who talk about Nixon and say, "Oh, besides that whole Watergate thing, he was a great president."  Or LBJ: "Besides that whole Vietnam thing, he was a great president."

Same thing with Moses: "Oh yeah, he destroyed neighborhoods, flooded the city with cars, built ugly and depressing public parks and housing, and starved badly needed public transportation of money, all of which still plagues us to this day but really, the good outweighs the bad." 

Ha! Please. Revisionism is a feeble attempt to make bad people and bad decisions look less bad. To somehow portray a negative legacy as a good one. It's an Orwellian exercise, like trying to make two plus two equal five. And it reminds me of that old joke: "Besides that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

The Robert Moses Debate

A couple of years ago I reviewed Robert Caro's 1974 book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. This Pulitzer Prize winning biography about NYC's "master builder" has been generating controversy for close to forty years. On The New York Times online, there has recently been an ongoing debate about the Moses' legacy that is captured in a new book called The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. The debate is monitored by the book's author Roberta Brandes Gratz and she provides some very smart answers to all sorts of reader questions about this man who continues to haunt NYC almost 30 years after his death.

Interview: Greg Young of The Bowery Boys Podcast

Easily the best podcast about New York City history is The Bowery Boys, created and still hosted today by Greg Young and Tom Meyers. On each episode, these two uber-NYC enthusiasts deep-dive into so many aspects of this city's history: the people, neighborhoods, events, and eccentricities that have formed this most amazing of places. They go way back in history and make it relevant to life in the city today. The enthusiasm and joy that Greg and Tom bring to each episode is infectious, and the show has gone beyond the podcast into books and tours. 

It's brilliant and extremely fun, and I get excited every time I see a new episode pop up in my IPhone. 

The Bowery Boys, still going strong after more than a decade, is extremely popular with listeners from all over the world. Greg Young was kind enough to answer some questions for Mr NYC about the podcast, the city, its history, and his favorite NYC-related things.  

Tell us what inspired you and your co-host Tom Meyers to create The Bowery Boys podcast. What makes you keep doing it after 11 years? And why call is the "Bowery" boys? 

We started the podcast in 2007 as a way to keep us inspired about the city and to learn more about our neighborhood at the time (which was the Lower East Side). We have not been exhausted by the information we continue to find about the city, so we keep doing the show! The Bowery Boys were a 19th century gang that roamed the streets of Five Points, the notorious slum that once sat near Chinatown today. Although we like to also consider ourselves in the tradition of the ‘Bowery b’hoys’ and ‘Bowery g’hals’ of the 1830s and 40s, Irish-phrased slang for the new young Irish immigrant populations that were moving into lower Manhattan at the time.

While the podcast is about the history of NYC, it seems focused on how the history of the physical city intersects with its cultural and social history -- as well as its "mystique." Is this is a good way to describe the podcast or am I missing something? What else would you say the podcast is about? 

All of that – and more! I’d say the meaning of our show has evolved as well, especially now that we’ve done it for 11 years. Things we talked about at the beginning have changed or are now entirely gone. It’s interesting listening to our early shows just to compare how the city has developed – in some ways good, others bad. For instance, it’s almost amusing to hear our early shows on the High Line and the Meat-Packing District, recorded years before Hudson Yards project was dreamt up. 

How do you guys go about finding subjects to discuss and what is your research process like? How do you avoid being repetitive? 

Topics develop out of research or are inspired by current events or pop culture moments. For instance, our next show is on the history of the New York comedy scene, inspired by our affection for the The Marvelous Mrs Maisel on Amazon. And it’s okay to be a little repetitive, we have discovered. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to approach subjects again from a different point of view. We just recently did a show on Emma Lazarus, incorporating the history of the Statue of Liberty into that, but from the angle of immigration (a hot button issue these days). 

The podcast goes pretty far back into the history of NYC. Are you guys most interested in NYC before the 1950s and '60s or do you ever like to get into recent history? 

We do whatever interests us. When we do recent history, we like to interview people who remembered the history. Sometimes, due to time constraints, its just easier for us to talk about older topics but technically no decade is off limits. Our comedy show in two weeks will have a whole section about the 1990s. 

Do you have to fight the urge to make the podcast Manhattan-centric and is it harder to do episodes about the outer boroughs? 

It drives me crazy because I’d love to do more about the outer boroughs. But we have such a diverse audience at this point – with as many listeners outside New York City as in – and Manhattan tales are still the most popular. PLUS you can’t overlook how important New York (which was just Manhattan until 1898) is in American history. That said, there will be a LOT more Brooklyn and Queens in the coming year. 

Tell us about some of your favorite episodes and what made them so special? 

So many ways to answer this! We love our ghost story shows of course – we get to be melodramatic and over-produced – and we love our big infrastructure shows the most (like the subway, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, the grid plan). Personally speaking, I love the music shows. I come from a career in the music industry and was so thrilled to do shows on Billie Holiday and The Cotton Club that were brimming with music. 

What are some of your favorite pieces of NYC historical trivia -- and what things about the city's history do you think are important for anyone who lives here to know? 

I’m currently obsessed with the origins of place names. Find an interestingly names street and go down a rabbit hole of how it got its name. For instance, there are a row of streets in Greenpoint that are alphabetical north to south (Ash Street, Box Street, Clay Street etc.) and its all to do with the 19th century industry that once lined the waterfront there. 

Have you ever read The Power Broker and what are your thoughts on the legacy of Robert Moses? 

One of my favorite books of course! I’ll say this – our city could probably use a 1930s Robert Moses right about now, to erase and reverse some of the damage that 1950s and 60s Robert Moses did to this city. 

What are favorite NYC neighborhoods and why?

I have about a million, but I always suggest people visit Roosevelt Island. You’d be surprised how many native New Yorkers have never been. It’s got a ton of history and some excellent views. Plus – SMALLPOX HOSPITAL RUINS. 

What are some of your favorite NYC movies, TV shows, and novels? Which movies, in your opinion, show off the city the best or makes people really understand why life is (or was) like here? 

The aforementioned Mrs Maisel, Mad Men, The Knick – are all excellent portrayals of New York. The Alienist was often good, even though it was filmed in Europe. In terms of recent movies – believe it or not, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them actually does an amazing job at re-imagining 1920s New York. Loved the Saiorse Ronan movie Brooklyn, the Oscar Isaac movies A Most Violent Year and Inside Llewyn Davis. I just recently re-watched Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and thought it really held up. 

As the city becomes more and more gentrified, do you think NYC is in danger of losing parts of its history or has historical preservation done enough to, well, preserve it? Tell us your thoughts about how you think NYC should keep its history while also moving into the future? 

New York City always needs to keep changing; it can’t afford to be a museum artifact like Paris or Rome. We’ve got excellent preservation laws in place and well-regarded community groups fighting to save those artifacts that are most endangered. But I do worry about classic mom-and-pop places disappearing with skyrocketing rents. There are some excellent ideas in play to help save them, but the best way to save those types of businesses is to actually frequent them, spend money at them. We can’t lament the loss of a classic diner or a deli if we’ve never bothered to step foot in it. 

What are your hopes for The Bowery Boys podcast moving forward? What does the future hold? 

More live shows, a new spin-off show for 2019, and another book! 

Finally, what do you love most about NYC? 

My answer changes every week. Last week’s answer – the beauty of snow falling in a brownstone neighborhood with a canopy of trees. The week before – my local bakery’s bagels. Next week’s answer – visiting the American Museum of Natural History on Wednesday to watch workers inflate the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats. 

Thanks Greg!

You can find podcast episodes and more info about where to download them here. 

We Built This City on Rock and Roll? Alert Robert Moses!!!

I'm currently reading "The Power Broker", Robert Caro's massive biography of Robert Moses. This book is literally 1300+ pages long and I'm determined to read the whole thing. I'm currently on page 578 and will post a review when I'm done. "The Power Broker" is, both in length and reputation, the "War and Peace" of biographies.

In case you don't know who Robert Moses was, he was New York City's "master builder" of the 20th century. He built Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Triborough Bride, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the West Side Highway, the Long Island Expressway and a whole lot more ("If you seek his monument, look around you" and so forth). He was also a complete bastard but I'll tell you more about that when I write my review.

Anyway, being a child of the 1980s and having the associative mind that I do, the idea of "building cities" led to me to think of this now-classic song from my youth, "We Built this City (on Rock and Roll)" by Starship (nee Jefferson Airplane). In 2004, VH1 declared this the most "Awesomely Bad" song of all-time. The video, as you can see, is one of the most bizarre, surreal, Felliniesque things ever made. It's pure 1980s schlock. I remember as a kid watching it on MTV -- back in the days when they still showed videos and before they realized they could get higher ratings with hot chicks on reality shows.

This song isn't really about New York or any city in particular. Although the traffic report you hear in the middle of the song here is for San Francisco, various versions of this song has reports for different cities. There was one for NYC but I can't find it. Sorry.

Now admit it: you love this song. As dumb as it is, it's catchy and fun. Grace Slick never sounded better, and it brings our minds and emotions back to that wonderful time of Ronald Reagan and "Family Ties." Besides, how can you not love a song whose catchphrase is "Marconi played the Mamba?" Enjoy!

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?

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!

"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.

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!

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.