Kenneth T. Jackson - Robert Moses, Hero of New York?

Robert Moses represented a past that's, you know, a time when we wanted to build bridges and superhighways and things that pretty much has gone out. We're not building superhighways now.
We're not building vast bridges like Moses built all the time. Had Robert Moses not lived, not done what he did, New York would have followed the trail of maybe Detroit, essentially all the big roads, all the bridges, all the parks, the United Nations, Lincoln Center, the World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, and hundreds of other things he built.
And I think it was the best book I ever read. In broad strokes, it's correct.
Robert Moses had more power than any urban figure in American history. He built incredible monuments.
He was ruthless and arrogant and honest. Okay, I am really, really excited about this one.
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Professor Kenneth T. Jackson about the life and legacy of Robert Moses.
Professor Jackson is the preeminent historian on New York City. He was the director of the Herbert H.
Lehman Center for American History and the Jacques Barzun Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, where he has also chaired the Department of History. And we will be discussing Robert Moses.

Professor Jackson is the author and editor of Robert Moses and the Modern City,

the Transformation of New York.

Professor Jackson, welcome to the podcast.

Well, thank you for having me.

Okay, so many people will have heard of Robert Moses

and be vaguely aware of him through the popular biography of him by Robert Caro, the power broker. But most people will not be aware of the extent of his influence on New York City.
Can you give a kind of a summary of the things he was able to get built in New York City? One of the best comparisons I can think of is that Archeros himself, when he

compared him to Christopher Wren in London, he said if you would see his monument, look around. It's almost more easier to talk about what Moses didn't do than what he did do.
If you, all the roads, essentially all the big roads, all the bridges, all the parks, the United Nations, Lincoln center, the world's fairs of 1939 and 1964, and hundreds of other things he built. I mean, he didn't actually do it with his own two hands, but he was in charge.
He got it done. And Robert Carroll, who wrote a really great book, I think the book was flawed because I think Carroll only looked at Moses' own documents, and Moses had a very narrow view of himself.
I mean, he thought he was a great man, but I mean, he didn't pay any attention to what was going on in L.A. very much, for example.
But clearly, by any standard, he's the greatest builder in American history. There's nobody really in second place.
And not only did he build and spend this vast amount of money, he was in power for a long time, really a half century more or less. So, and he had a singular focus.
You know, he was married, but his personal life was not important to him. He did it without scandal, really.
Even Carol admits that he really died with less than he started with. So, I mean, he wasn't, he wanted power.
And he had, boy, did he have power. He technically was subservient to governors and mayors, but since he built so much and since he had multiple jobs, that was part of his secret.
He had, you know, as many as six, eight, ten different things at once. If the mayor fired him or got rid of him, he had all these different ways, which he was in charge of, that the mayor couldn't.
So you people were afraid of him, and they also respected him. He was very smart, and he worked for a dollar a year.
So what you going to get him for um as carol says nobody is ready to be compared with robert moses in fact compares him with an act of nature in other words the person you can compare him with is god you know that's the person they he put the rivers in he put the hills in he put the island in compare that to Moses, what Moses did. No other person could compare to that.
You know, that's a little bit of exaggeration. But when you really think about Robert Moses and you read the Power Broker, you are stunned by the scope of his achievement.
Just stunned. And even beyond New York, when we all think of the interstate highway system, which really starts in 1954, 55, 56, and which is, you know, 40-something thousand miles of interstate highways.
Those were built by Moses' men, people who had, in their young life, had worked with the parkways and expressways in and around New York City. So they were ready to go.
And so Moses and Moses also worked outside New York City, mostly inside New York City. But he achieved so much.
So partly you need to understand it's not easy to get things done in New York. It's very, very dense, much twice as dense as any place in the United States and full of neighborhoods that feel like little cities in our little cities and that don't, won't change even today.
A place like Austin, for example, is heavy into development, not New York. You want to build a tall building in New York, you got to fight for it.
And the fact that he did so much in the face of opposition speaks a lot to his methods and the way he, how did Moses do what he did? That is a huge question because it isn't happening anymore. Certainly not in New York.
Yeah. And that's really why I actually wanted to talk to you and talk about this book because, you know, The Power Broker was released in 1974 and at the time New York was not doing well, which is to put it mildly.
But today, the crisis we face is one where we haven't built significant public works in many American cities for decades. And so it's interesting to look back on a time when we could actually get a lot of public works built very quickly and very efficiently and see if like maybe we got our characterization of the people at the time wrong.
And that's where your 2007 book comes in. So I'm curious, how was the book received 50 years after, or I guess 40 years after The Power Broker was released? What was the reception like? How has the intellectual climate around these issues changed in that time? the power broker is a stunning achievement but you're right the power broker colon

robert moses and the fall of new york He's thinking that in the 1970s, which is in New York's 400-year history, we think of the 1970s as being the bottom. The city was bankrupt, crime was going up, corruption was all around, nothing was working very well.
My argument in the subtitle of the 2007 book, or that article is Robert Moses and the Razz of New York, arguing that had Robert Moses not lived, not done what he did, New York would have followed the trail of maybe Detroit and St. Louis and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and most cities in the Northeast and Midwest, which really declined.
New York City really hasn't declined. It's got more people now than it ever did.
It's still the number one city in the world, really, by most of our standards. It's the global leader, maybe along with London.
At one point in the 1980s, we thought it might be Tokyo, which is the largest city in the world, but it's no longer considered competitive with New York and maybe London. I say London too, because New York and London are kind of alone at the top.
But I think Robert Moses' public works, activities, I just don't know that you could have a New York City and not have expressways. I don't like the Cross Bronx Expressway either and don't want to drive on it.
But how can you have a world in which you can't go from Boston to San Francisco? You had to have it. You have to have some highways.
And Carroll had it exactly wrong. He talked about Moses and the decline of public transit in New York.
Actually, what you need to explain in New York is why public transit survived in New York, where in most other American cities, the only people who use public transit are the losers. Old, the disabled, the

poor, and stuff like that. In New York City, rich people ride this over.
It's simply the most efficient way to get around and the quickest. And so that question, some of the things need to be turned on its head.
How did he get it done? How did he do it without scandal? I mean, when you think about how the world is in our time, when everything has either a financial scandal or a sexual scandal attached to it, Moses didn't have scandals. He built the Whitestone Bridge, for example, which is a gigantic bridge connecting the Bronx to Queens.
It's beautiful. It was finished in the late 1930s on time and under budget, actually a little earlier.
There's no such thing as that now. You're going to do a big public works project, and you're going to do it on time.
And also, he did it well. Jones Beach, for example, for generations, has been considered one of the great public facilities on earth i mean it's gigantic and he created it you know i know people say it's just sand and water no no it's a little more complicated than that so everything he did was complicated he i mean i think robert carrow deserves a lot of credit for doing research on Moses, his childhood, his growing up.
His assertion that he's the most important person ever to live in and around New York. And just think of Franklin Roosevelt and all the people who lived in and around New York.
And Moses is in a category by himself, even though most Americans have

never heard of Robert Moses. So his fame is still not, that book made him famous.
And I think his legacy will continue to evolve, and I think slightly improve, as Americans realize that it's hard to build public works, especially in dense urban environments. And he did it.
Yeah. There's so much to talk about there.
But like one of the one of the interesting things from the power broker is Cairo is trying to explain why governors and mayors who were hesitant about the power that Moses was gaining continued to give him more power. And there's a section where he's talking about how FDR would keep giving him more positions and responsibilities, even though FDR and Moses famously had a huge enmity.
And he says no governor could look at the difficulty of getting things built in New York and not admire and respect Moses' ability to do things, as you said, efficiently, on time, under budget, and not need him, essentially, right? But I mean, speaking of scandal, you talked about how he didn't take salary for his 12 concurrent government roles that he was on. But there's a very arresting anecdote in The Power Worker where I think he's 71 and his

daughter gets cancer.

And for the first time, I think he had to accept, maybe I'm getting the details wrong,

but he had to accept salary for working on the World's Fair because he was the most powerful person in New York and he didn't have enough money to like pay for his daughter's cancer. And even even Caro himself says that a lot of the scandals that came later in his life, they were just like kind of trivial stuff, right? Like an acre of Central Park or the, you know, Shakespeare in the park.
It just yeah, it like it wasn't the things that actually took him down were just trivial scandals.

Well, in fact, when he finally was taken down,

it took the efforts of a person who was almost considered

the second most powerful person in the United States,

David Rockefeller, and the governor of New York,

both of whom were brothers, and they still had to lie to Moses

to make him kind of get out of power in 1968. But it was time, and he exercised power into his 70s and 80s, and most of it was good.
I mean, the bridges are remarkable. The bridges are gorgeous, mostly.
They're incredible. the Throgsneck Bridge, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Travera Bridge, they're really works of art.
And he liked to bridge, build things you could see. And I think the fact that he didn't take money was important to it.
He, you know, he was not poor. I wouldn't say he was not wealthy in New York terms, but he was not a poor person.
He went to Yale as a Jewish person, and let's say in the early 20th century. That's fairly unusual, and he lived well.
So we can't say he's poor, but I think that Carol was right in saying that what Moses was after, in the end, was not sex and not power, not sex and not money. Power.
He wanted power. And where did he get it? Well, there's a good review of the book from, I'm not sure if I remember the last name, but it was Philip Lopgate or something? Lopate, I.
And they, you know, they had a, he made a good point, which was that the connotation of the word power is very negative, but it's kind of a modern thing really to have this sort of attitude towards power that like somebody who's just seeking it must necessarily has like, must necessarily have suspicious motivations. if Moses believed, and in fact, he was probably right in believing that he was just seeking it must necessarily have suspicious motivations.

If Moses believed, and in fact, he was probably right in believing,

that he was just much more effective at building public works for the people who live in New York,

was it irrational of him or was it selfish of him to just desire to work 14-hour days for 40 years on end and accumulate the power by which he could build more public works? So there's a way of looking at it where this pursuit of power is not itself troubling. Well, first of all, I just need to make a point that it was not just New York City.
I mean, Jones Beach is on Long Island. A lot of those highways, the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, were built outside the city.
And also big projects, the power authority in upstate New York. He also was consultant around the world in cities and transportation.
So his influence was really felt far beyond New York City. And, of course, New York City is so big and so important.
I think also that we might want to think about, at least I think so, what do you want to say, the counterfactual argument. Can you imagine, I can remember when I was in the Air Force, we lived next door to a couple from New York City.
We didn't know New York City at the time. And I can't remember whether she or he was from the Bronx or Brooklyn.
But they made us understand how incredibly much he must have loved her to go to Brooklyn or the Bronx to see her and pick her up for dates and stuff like this. You couldn't get there.
I mean, it would take you three hours to go from the Rockaways in Brooklyn to somewhere in the Northern Bronx. But the roads that Moses built, you know, I know at rush hour they're jammed, but you know, right this minute on a Sunday, you can whiz around New York City on these expressways that Moses built.
It's hard to imagine New York without. The only thing Moses didn't do was the subway.
And many people have criticized him because the subways were deteriorated between the time they were built in the early part of the 20th century in 1974 when Carroll wrote the power broker. But so had public transit systems all over the United States.
And the public transit system in New York is now better than it was 50 years ago. So that trajectory has changed.
And all these other cities, you know, Pittsburgh used to have 600,000 people. Now it has 300,000.
Cleveland used to have 900,000 and something. Now it's below five.
Detroit used to have 2 million. Now it's 600 and something thousand.
St. Louis used to have 850,000.
Now it's 300. I mean, the steep drop in all these other cities in the Midwest and Northeast, even Washington and even Boston and Philadelphia, they all declined, except New York City, which even though it was way bigger than any of them in 1950, is bigger now than it was then.
More people crammed into this small space. And Moses had something to do with that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You write in the book, and I apologize for quoting you back to yourself, but you write, had the city not undertaken a massive program of public works between 1924 and 1970, had it not built the arterial highway system, and had it not relocated 200,000 people from old law tenements to new public housing projects, New York would not have been able to claim in the 1990s that it was the capital of the 20th century.

I would like to make this connection more explicit.

So what is the reason for thinking that if New York hadn't done urban renewal

and hadn't built the more than 600 miles of highways that Moses built there,

that New York would have declined like these other cities in the Northeast and the Midwest?

Well, I mean, you could argue, first of all, and friends of mine have argued this, that New York is not like other cities. It's a world city and has been.
And what happens to the rest of the United States is, I accept a little bit of that, but not all of it. You say, well, New York is just New York.
And so whatever happens here is not necessarily because of Moses or different from Detroit. But I think it's important to realize its history has been different from other American cities.
Most American cities, especially the older cities, have been in relative decline for 75 years. And in some ways, New York has too.
In other words, its relative dominance of the United States is less now because there's been a shift south and west in the United States. But the prosperity of New York, the desire of people to live in it, after all, one of its problems is it's so expensive.
Well, one reason it's expensive is people want to live there. If they didn't want to live there, it would be like Detroit.
It would be perfectly free. You know what I mean? So there are answers to these issues.
But Moses' ways, I think, were interesting. First of all, he didn't worry about legalities.
He would start an expressway through somebody's property and dare a judge to tell him to stop after the construction had already started. And most of the time, Moses, he was kind of like Hitler.
I don't mean to say Hitler, but what I mean is you have such confidence. You just do things and dare other people to change it.
You know what I mean? I'm going to do it. And most people don't have that.
I think there's a little bit of that in Trump, but not as much. I mean, I don't think he has nearly the genius or brains of Moses.
But there's something to self-confidence. There's something to having a broad vision.
Moses liked cities, but he didn't like neighborhoods or people. In other words, I don't think he loved New York City.
Here he is the person who's more involved. He really thought everybody should live in suburbs and drive cars.
And that was the world of the future, and he was going to make that possible. And he thought all those old law tenements in New York, which is really anything built before 1901, were slums.
And they didn't have hot and didn't have often didn't have bathrooms he thought they should be destroyed he didn't and his vision was public housing high-rise public housing was an improvement now i think around the united states we don't think these high-rise public housing projects are wonderful. But he thought he was doing the right thing.
And he was so arrogant. He didn't listen to people like Jane Jacobs who fought him and said, you're saying Greenwich Village is a slum? Are you kidding me? I mean, he thought it was a slum.
Go to Greenwich Village today. Try to buy anything for under a million dollars.
I mean, it doesn't exist. You know what I mean? I mean, Greenwich Village, and he saw old things, old neighborhoods, walking, is hopelessly out of date.
And he was wrong. He was wrong about a lot of his vision.
And now we understand that. And all around the country, we're trying to revitalize downtowns and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and gasoline and cars.
But Moses didn't see the world that way. It's interesting.
He never himself drove a car. Can you believe that the man who had more influence on the American car culture, probably even than Henry Ford, himself was always driven.
He was chauffeur. In fact, he was so busy that Carol talks about him as having two limousines behind each other, and he would have a secretary in one, and he would be dealing with business and writing letters and things like this.
And then she would have all she could do. They would pull off to the side of the road.
She would get out of his car. The car that was following would discharge the secretary in that car.
They would switch places and the fresh secretary would get in the backseat, Moses, and they would continue to work. And the first secretary would go to type up whatever she had to do.
He worked all the time. He really didn't have much of a private life.
There are not many people like Robert Moses. There are people like Robert Moses, but not so many, and he achieved his ideal.
I think that there are so many ironies there. Not only did he not drive himself, he didn't appreciate so much the density of New York, which many people now love, and it's getting more dense.
They're building tall buildings everywhere. And he didn't really appreciate the diversity, the toleration.
He himself was, he didn't care about that, but it worked. And I just think we have to appreciate the fact that he did what was impossible, really impossible, and nobody else could have done what he did.
And if we hadn't done it then, he sure as heck wouldn't be able to do it in the 21st century. When people are even more litigious, you know, you try to, you try to change the color of a door in New York city and there'll be, you try to do something positive, like build a free swimming pool, uh, fix up an old armory and turn it into a public.
There'll be people who'll fight you. I'm not kidding this.
And Moses didn't care. He says, I'm going to do this.
When he built the Cross Bronx Expressway, which in some ways is, it was horrible what he did to these people. But again, Carroll mischaracterizes what happened, but it's a dense working class, let's call it Jewish neighborhood in the early 1950s.
And Moses decides we need an interstate highway or a big highway going right through it. Well, he sent masses of people letters that said, get out in 90 days.
He didn't mean 91 days. He didn't mean let's argue about it for four years.
Let's go to Legit.

Moses meant the bulldozers will be bulldozing.

And that kind of attitude we just don't have anymore.

And it's kind of funny now to think back on it,

but it wasn't funny to the people who got evicted.

But again, as I say, it's hard to imagine a New York City

without the Cross Bronx Expressway. Even they tore down five blocks of dense buildings, tore them down, and built this road right through it.
You live, and they didn't worry about where they were going to rehouse them. I mean, they did, but it didn't work.
And now it's so busy, it's crowded all the time. So what does this prove? That we need more roads, but you can't have more roads in New York because if you build more roads, what are you going to do with the cars? Right now the problem is there's so many cars in the city, there's nothing to do.
It's easy to get around in New York, but what are you going to do with the car? You know, the car culture has the seeds of its own destruction. You know, cars just parking them or putting them in a garage is a problem.
And Moses didn't foresee those. He foresees you're all going to live in the Long Island suburbs or Westchester suburbs or New Jersey suburbs.
Park your car in your house and come in the city to work. Now the city is becoming a place to live more than a place to work.
So what they're doing in New York as fast as they can is converting office buildings into residential units. He would never have seen that, that people would want to live in the city who had options, that they would reject a single family house and choose high rise and choose the convenience of going outside and walking to a delicatessen over the rover driving to a grocery store.
It's a world he never saw. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Like the thing you pointed out earlier about him having the two limousines and then the enormous work ethic. And then you have the 90 day eviction.
I mean, I'm a programmer and I can recognize this trope immediately, right?

Robert Moses was the startup founder, but in government, you know, that attitude is like, yeah, it's like Silicon Valley. That's like, we all recognize that.
And I think we should go back to what you said earlier about why was it that governors or mayors couldn't tell him what to do? because there are many scenes in The Power Broker

where he will go to the mayor who wants to do something else and Moses would, damn it, he'd say, damn it, throw his pages on the desk and say, sign this, this is my resignation. You know, okay, and I'm out of here.
Because the mayors and governors love to open bridges and highways and do it efficiently and beautifully, and Moses could do that. Moses could deliver.
And the workers loved him because he paid union wages, good wages to his workers, and he got things things done and things like more than 700 playgrounds, you know, it wasn't just grand things and even though people criticize the 1964 World's Fair as a failure and financially it was a failure but still tens of millions of people went there and had a good time. You know, I mean, even some of the things were supposedly were failures.
Failures according to whom? According to the investment banker, maybe, but not to the people who went there. Right, yeah.
And I mean, the point about the governors and mayors needing him, it was especially important to have somebody who could like work that fast. If you're going to get reelected in four years or two years, you need somebody who can get public works done faster than they're done today.
Right. If you want to be in there for the opening.
Yeah, exactly. And it's important to realize to say that Moses did try public office once.
Yeah. And I think it's true that he lost by more than anybody in the history of New York.
He was not an effective public speaker. He was not soft and friendly and warm and cuddly.
That's not Robert Moses. The voters rejected him.
But the people who had power and also Wall Street, because you had to issue bonds. And one of the ways that Moses had power was he created this thing called the Trabera Bridge and Tunnel Authority to build the Trabera Bridge.
Well, now, if in Portland, Oregon, you want to build a bridge or a road, you issue a couple hundred million dollars worth of bonds to the public and assign a value to it, interest rate that's paid off by the revenue that comes in from the bridge or the road or whatever it is. Normally, you would build a public works and pay for it itself on user fees.
And when the user fees paid it off, it ended.

But what Moses, who was called the best bill drafter in Albany,

which was a Moses term,

he said he was somewhere down in paragraph 13, section G,

say, and the chairman can only be removed for cause.

What that meant was when you buy a bond for the tribe or a bridge or something else, you're in a contract that's supported by the Supreme Court. This is a financial deal you're making with somebody.
And part of the contract was the chairman gets to stay unless he does something wrong. Well, Moses was careful not to do anything wrong.
And it also would continue. You would get the bond for the Trabera Bridge, but rather than pay off the Trabera Bridge, he would build another project.
It would give him the right to continually build this chain of events. And so he had this massive pot of money from all these initially nickels and dimes,

Brazil made up a lot of money, the 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s, to spend more money and build more bridges and build more roads. And that's where he had his power.
And the Wall Street, the big business loved him because they're issuing the bonds. The unions loved him because they're paying the investors.
Now, what Carroll says is that Moses allowed the investors an extra quarter percent, I think a quarter percent or half percent on the bonds. But they all sold out, you know, so everybody was happy.
And, you know, was that crooked? It wasn't really illegal. But it's the way people do that today.
If you're issuing a bond, you've got to figure out what interest am I going to pay on this that will attract investors now. And the crucial thing about these tales of graft is that it never was about Moses trying to get rich, right? It was always him trying to push through a project.
And you can – I mean obviously that can be disturbing, but it is a completely different category of thing, especially when you remember that this was like a corrupt time in New York history, right? This is like after Tammany Hall and so on. So it's like completely different from somebody using their projects to get themselves rich.
But I do want to, you know, actually talk in more detail about the impact of these roads. So, you know, like obviously obviously, we can't...
The current system we have today, where we just kind of treat cities as living museums with nimbyism and historical preservation, that's not optimal. But there are examples, at least if Kara was right, about Moses just throwing out thousands of people carelessly, you know, famously in that chapter on the one mile,

how Moses could have diverted the cross-bronchia expressway one mile and prevented thousands of people from getting needlessly evicted. But I'm just going to like list off a few criticisms of his highway building, and then you can respond to them in any order you want.
So one of the main criticisms that carol is that Moses refused to add mass transit to his highways, which would have helped deal with the traffic problem and the car problem and all these other problems at a time when getting the right of way and doing the construction would have been much cheaper. And because of his dislike for mass transit, he just refused to do that.
And also, the prolific building of highways contributed to urban sprawl. It contributed to congestion.
It contributed to neighborhoods getting torn apart if a highway would cross them. So a whole list of criticisms of these highways.
I'll let you take it in any order you want. Well, first of all, Moses' response was, I wasn't in charge of subways.
So if you think the subways deteriorated or didn't build enough, find out who was in charge of them and blame that person. I was in charge of highways and I built those.
So that's the first thing. Before you answer that, can I just ask, so on that particular point, it is true that he wasn't in charge of mass transit, but also he wasn't in charge of roads until he made himself responsible for roads, right? So if he chose to, he could have made himself responsible for mass transit and taking care of it.
Maybe, although I think the other thing about it is putting Moses in a broader historical concept. He was swimming with the tide of history.
In other words, history, when he was building, was building Ford Motor Company and General Motors and Chrysler Corporation and building cars by the millions. I mean, the automobile industry in the United States was huge.
People thought any kind of rail transit was obsolete and on the way out anyway. So let's just build roads.
I mean, that's what the public wanted. He built what the public wanted.
It's not what I was looking historically. I don't think we did the right thing.
But we needed to join the 20th century. New York could have stayed as a quaint, I don't know, quaint is not the right word, but it's a distinctly different kind of place where everybody walks.
I just don't think it would have been the same kind of city because there are people who are attached to their cars in New York. And so the sprawl in New York, which is enormous, nobody's saying it wasn't, spreads over 31 counties, an area about as large as the state of Connecticut, about as large as the Netherlands, is metropolitan New York.
But it's still relatively, I don't want to say compact, but everybody knows where the center is. It's not that anybody grows up in New York at 16

and thinks that the world is in some mall, you know, three miles away.

They all know there is a center, and that's where it is.

It's called Manhattan, and that's New York,

and Moses didn't change that for all of his roads.

There's still in New York a definite center, the skyscrapers and everything in the middle. And it's true.
Public transit did decline. But, you know, those, and I like Chicago, by the way, and they have a rail transit from O'Hare down to Dan Ryan, not to Dan Ryan, but the JFK expressway, I think.
And it works sort of, but you got to walk a ways to get on. You got to walk blocks to get in the middle of the expressway and catch the train there.
It's not like in New York where you just go down some steps. I mean, New York subway is much bigger than Chicago and more widely used.
And the key thing about New York, and so I think what Carol was trying to explain, and your question suggests this, is was Moses responsible for the decline of public transit? Well, he was building cars and roads and bridges. So in that sense, a little bit, yes.

But if you look at New York compared to the rest of the United States,

it used to be that maybe 20% of all the transit riders in the United States were in the New York

area. Now it's 40%.
So if you're looking at the United States, what you have to explain is why

is New York different from the rest of the United States? Why is it that when I was chairman

Thank you. So if you're looking at the United States, what you have to explain is why is New York different from the rest of the United States? Why is it that when I was chairman or president of the New York Historical Society, we had rich trustees, and I would tell them, well, I got here on a subway or something.
They would say, how do you think I got here? Do you know what I mean? I mean, these are people who are close to billionaires, and they're saying they used the subway. If you're in lower Manhattan and you're trying to get to Midtown and it's raining, it's 5 o'clock, you've got to be a fool to try to get in your own limousine.
It isn't going to get you there very quickly. A subway will.
So there are reasons for it, and I think Moses didn't destroy public transit. He didn't help it, but his argument was he did.
And that's an important distinction, I think. But he was swimming with history.
He built what the public wanted. I think if he had built public transit, he would have found it tougher to build.
Just for example, Cincinnati built a subway system, a tunnel all through the city. It never has opened.
They built it. You can still see the holes in the ground where it's supposed to come out.
By the time they built it, people weren't riding trains anymore. And so it's there now and they don't know what to do with it.
And that's 80 years ago. So it's a very complicated, I don't mean to make these issues, they're much more complex than I'm speaking of.
And I just think it's unfair to blame Moses for the problems of the city. I think he did as much as anybody to try to bring the city into the 21st century, which he didn't live to.
But you've got to adopt. You've got to have a hybrid model in the world now.
And I think the model that America needs to follow is a model where we reduce our dependence on the cars and somehow ride buses more or use the internet more or whatever it is, but stop using so much fossil fuels so that we destroy our environment. And New York, by far, is the most energy efficient place in the United States, mainly because you live in tall buildings, you have hot floors, it doesn't really cost much to heat places because you're heating the floor below you and above you, and you don't have outside walls.
And you walk. New Yorkers are thinner.
Many more people take buses and subways in New York than anywhere else in New York. Not just in absolute terms, in relative terms.
So they're helping. It's probably a healthier lifestyle to walk around.
And I think we're rediscovering it. For example, if you come to New York between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there's so many tourists in the city, I'm not making this up, that there is gridlock on the sidewalks.
The police have to direct the traffic. And in part, it's because a Detroit grandmother wants to bring her granddaughter to New York to see what Hudson's, which is a great department store in Detroit, or in any city.
It could be Rich's in Atlanta, Fox, G Fox in Hartford. Every city had these giant departments.
And windows where there's Santa Claus is and stuff like this. You can still go to New York and see that.
You can say, Jane, this is the way it used to be in Detroit. People are ringing the bells and looking at the store windows and things like that.
A mall can't recapture that. It just can't.
You try, but it's not the same thing. And so I think that in a way, Moses didn't not, not only did he not destroy New York, I think he gets a little bit of credit for saving it because it might've been on the way to Detroit.
Again, I'm not saying that it would have been Detroit because Detroit's almost empty, but Baltimore wasn't just Baltimore, it's Cleveland, it's every place. There's nobody there anymore.
And even in New York, the department stores have mostly closed, not all of them. And so it's not the same as it was 80 years ago, but it's closer to it than anywhere else.
Okay. So, yeah.
So I'm actually very curious to get your opinion on the following question, given the fact that you are an expert on New York history and, you know, you've written the encyclopedia, literally written the encyclopedia on New York City. 800 people wrote the encyclopedia.
I just took all the credit for it. I was the editor-in-chief, so.
So I'm actually curious, is Caro actually right that, I mean, you talked about the importance just earlier about counterfactual history.

So I'm curious if Caro is actually right about the claim that the neighborhoods through which Moses built his highways were destroyed in a way that neighborhoods which weren't touched

by the highways weren't.

Sorry for the confusing phrasing there.

But basically, was there like a looking back on all these neighborhoods?

Is there a clear

counterfactual negative impact on the neighborhoods in which Moses built his highways and bridges and

so on? Well, Moses, I mean, Carol makes that argument mostly about East Tremont and places

like that in the Bronx where the Cross Bronx Expressway passed through. And he says this

perfectly wonderful Jewish neighborhood that was not racially prejudiced and everybody was happy

and not leaving was destroyed by Moses. Well, first of all, as a historian of New York City, or for that matter, any city, if a student comes to you and says, that's what I found out, you said, well, you know, that runs counter to the experience of every city.
So let's do a little more work on that. Well, first of all, if you look at the census tracts or the residential security maps of FHA, you know it's not true.
First of all, the Jews were leaving and had nothing to do with the thing. They didn't love blacks.
And also, if you look at other Jewish, and the Bronx was called the Jewish borough at the time, those neighborhoods that weren't on the cross-Bronx all emptied out mostly. So the Bronx itself was a part of New York City that followed the pattern of Detroit and Baltimore and Cleveland.
Bronx is now coming back, but it's a different place. But so I think it's, well, I've said this in public and I'm playing it trick.
Carol wouldn't know those neighborhoods if he landed there by parachute. You know, they're much better than he ever said they were.
You know, he acted like if you went outside near the Bronx County Courthouse, you needed a wagon train to go. I mean, I've taken my students there dozens of times and showed them to people, the old lady's eating on the benches and stuff like this.

Nobody's mugging them.

You know, he just has an outsider's view.

He didn't know the places he was writing about.

But I think Harold was right about some things.

Moses was personally a jerk.

You can make it stronger than that.

But, I mean, he was not your friendly grandfather. He was arrogant.
He was self-centered. He thought he knew the truth and you don't.
He was vindictive, ruthless. But some of those were good.
You know, now he would, his strategies, his strategies in some were good. He made people building a beach or a building feel like you're building a cathedral.
You're building something great and I'm going to pay you for it and let's make it good. Let's make it as best as we can.
That itself is a real trick. How do you get people to think of their jobs as more than a job, as something else? And even a beach or a wall or something like that to say it's good.
And he also paid them. So that's important that he does that.
And he's making improvements. He said he was improving things for the people.
And, you know, it's not everybody.

I don't know if you want to talk about Jane Jacobs.

Yes.

Who was his nemesis. Yeah.
And I tend to vote with Jane Jacobs. Jane Jacobs and I agree on a lot of things, or did, before she died a few years ago.
But they didn't, Jane Jacobs saw the city as intricate stores and people living and walking and knowing each other and eyes on the street and all these kinds of things. Moses didn't see that at all.
He saw the city as a traffic problem. How do we tear this down and build something big and get people the hell out of here? And that was a mistake.
Moses made mistakes. But what Moses was doing was what everybody in the United States was doing, just not as big and not as ruthless and not as quick.
It was not like Moses built a different kind of world that exists in Kansas City. That's exactly what they did in Kansas City or every other city.
Blow the damn roads through the black neighborhoods, build the expressway interchanges. My hometown of Memphis, crisscrossed with big streets.
Those neighborhoods gone. They're even more extensive in places like Memphis and Kansas City and New Orleans than they are in New York.
Because New York builds relatively fewer of them. It's still huge what he built.
But you would not know from the power broker that Los Angeles exists. Actually, Los Angeles was building freeways too.
Or he says that New York will have federal money. Then he said, well, not true.
I've had students work on Chicago and Chicago is getting more money per person than New York for some of these projects. So some of the claims, no doubt he got those from Moses' own records.
But you know, if you're going to write a like this, you've got to know what's going on other places. Anyway, let's go back to your questions.
No, no. I actually was – that was one of the things I was actually going to ask you about.
So I was glad to get your opinion on that. You know, actually in preparing for this interview and trying to like learn more about the impact of these different projects, I was like trying to find the economic literature on the value of these highways.
And so there was a National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Morgan Foy, or at least a digest by Morgan Foy, where he says that... He's talking about the gains, economic gains from highways.
And he says the gains tend to be largest in areas where roads connect large economic hubs where few alternative routes exist. And he goes on to say two segments near New York City have welfare benefits exceeding five hundred million dollars a year.
Expanding the Long Island Expressway between had an estimated economic value of seven hundred19 million, which I think was, um, I think was Moses. Um, and he says of the top 10 segments with the highest rate of return, seven are in New York city area.
So it turns out that seven of the top 10 most valuable highway segments in America are in New York. And reading that it makes me, um, suspect must have...
I mean, the way Cairo paints Moses' planning process, it's just kind of very impulsive and feelings-based and almost, in some cases, out of malice towards poor people. But given that a century later, it seems that many of the most valuable tracks of highways were planned and built exactly how Moses envisioned.
It makes you think that there was some sort of like actual intelligent deliberation and thought that was put into where they were placed. I think that's true.
And I'm not saying that they don't have – the automobile didn't have an economic impact. That's what Moses was building for.
He would probably endorse that idea yeah and I think that what what we're looking at now in the 21st century is the high value put on places that Moses literally thought were something he was going to run an expressway from Brooklyn through lower Manhattan to New Jersey and knock down all these buildings in Greenwich Village that people love now, love. I mean, you couldn't, movie stars, people crowd into those neighborhoods to live, and he saw it as a slum.
Well, Moses was simply wrong, and Carroll puts him to task for that i think that's true okay uh professor jackson now i want to discuss how the process of city planning and building projects has changed since moses time we spent some good amount of time actually discussing what it was like what moses actually did in his time but um I mean, last year, I believe you wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal talking about how the 27 story building in Manhattan was still was put in limbo because the parking lot, which we would replace was part of a historic district. So yeah.
Well, what is it like to actually build a skyscraper or highway or a bridge or anything of that sort in today's New York City? Well, I do think in the larger context, it's probably fair to say it's tougher to build in New York City than any other city. I mean, yeah, you know, a little precious suburb, you may not have to build a skyscraper, but I mean, as far as the city is concerned, there'll be more opposition in New York than anywhere else.
And they're just more, it's more dense. So just to unload and load stuff to build a building, how do you do that? You know, you got trucks have to park on the street and Everything is more complicated and thus more expensive.

I think a major difference between Robert Moses' time and our own, in Robert Moses' time, historic preservation was as yet little known and little understood and little supported. it and the view generally was, um, building is good.
Roads are good. Houses are good.
Uh, and they're all on the way to a modern, more modern and better world. We don't have the same kind of faith, faith in the future that they did.
We kind of say, you know,, we kind of like it like it is. Let's just sit on it.
So I think we should say that Moses had an easier time of it than he would have had he lived today. It still wasn't an easy time, but easier than today.
Yeah. Well, actually, can you talk more about what that change in, I i guess philosophy has been since then that i feel like that's been one of the themes of this podcast to like i see how our cultural attitude towards progress and technology have changed well i think one reason why the power broker robert carroll's famous book received such popular acclaim is it fits in with book readers' opinions today, which is old is better.
I mean, also, you've got to think about New York City. If you say it's a pre-war apartment, you mean it's a better apartment.
You know, the walls are solid plaster, not fiberboard and stuff like that. So old has a reverence in New York that it doesn't have in Japan.
In Japan, they tear down houses every 15 years. So it's a whole different thing.
We tend to, in this new country, new culture, we tend to value oldness in some places, and especially in a place that's old like New York City. I mean, most Americans don't realize that New York is not only the most dense American city and the largest, but also really the oldest.
I mean, I know there's St. Augustine, but that's taking the concept of what's a city to pretty extreme things.
And then there's Jamestown in Virginia, but there's nobody, literally there's nobody there and then where the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts Plymouth Plantation that's totally rebuilt as kind of a theme park so for a place that's a city, in Santa Fe a little bit in New Mexico but it was a wide place on the road until after World War II so the the places that would be also, if you think cities, New York is really old. And it's never valued history, but the historic preservation movement here is very strong.
What is the reason for its resurgence? Is it just that? Because, I mean, it's had a big impact on many cities, right? Like, I'm in san francisco right now and obviously like you can't tear down one of these victorian houses to build the build the housing that like the city massively needs why have we like gained a reverence for anything that was both before like 80 years because just think of the two most expensive places in the united states it could change a little from year to year, but usually San Francisco and New York. Right.
And really, if you want to make it more affordable, if you want to drop the price of popsicles on your block, sell more popsicles. Have more people selling popsicles and the price will fall.
But somehow they say they're going to build luxury housing. When actually, if you build any housing,

it'll put downward pressure on prices, even if it's super luxury.

But anyway, most Americans don't understand that. So they oppose change, and especially so in New York and San Francisco,

on the basis that change means gentrification.

And, of course, there has been a lot of gentrification.

In World War II, San Francisco was a working class city. It really was.
And huge numbers of short and longshoremen live there. Now San Francisco has become the headquarters really in Silicon Valley, but a headquarter city of the tech revolution and it's become very expensive and very homeless.

It's very complex, not easy to understand, even if you're in the middle of it. Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so if we could get a Robert Moses back again today, what major mega project do you think New York needs today that a Moses-like figure could build? Well, if you think really broadly and you take climate change seriously, as I think most people do, probably to build some sort of infrastructure to prevent rising water from sinking the city, it's doable. You'd have to, like New Orleans, in order to save New Orleans, you had to flood Mississippi and some other places.
So usually there is a downside somewhere. But you could, that would be a huge project to maybe build a bridge, not a bridge, a land bridge from Brooklyn to New York to Manhattan to prevent water coming in from the ocean because New York is on the ocean.
And to think of something like that, that's really big. You know, some of the other big infrastructure projects, like they're talking about another tunnel under the river, Hudson River, from New Jersey to New York, the problem with that is there are already too many cars in Manhattan.
anything that makes it easier to bring cars into Manhattan

because in New York. The problem with that is there are already too many cars in Manhattan.

Anything that makes it easier to bring cars

into Manhattan. Because

you know, if you've not

been to New York, you don't really understand this,

but there's no place for anything.

And if you bring more cars

in, what are you going to do with them?

If you build parking garages for all the cars

that could come in the city,

then you'd be building over the whole city. There'd be no reason to come here because it would all be parking garages or parking places.
So New York City simply won't work if you reduce the density or you get rid of underground transportation because it's all about people moving around underneath the streets and not taking up space as they do it. So it won't work.
It won't work. And, of course, it's not the only city.
Tokyo wouldn't work either, or lots of cities in the world won't work, increasingly without not just public transportation, but underground public transportation, where you can get it out of the way of traffic and stuff like that. Moses probably could have done that.
He probably, he wouldn't have loved it as much as he loved bridges because he wanted you to see what he built. And there was an argument in the power broker, but he didn't really want the Brooklyn battery tunnel built because he wanted to build a bridge that everybody could see.
So he may not have done it with such enthusiasm.

I actually believe that Moses was first and foremost a builder.

He really wanted to build things, change things.

If you said, we'll pay you to build tunnels,

I think he would have built tunnels.

Who knows?

He never was offered that.

That wasn't the time in which he lived.

Yeah, okay.

and then I'm curious if you think that

Thank you. Who knows? He never was offered that.
That wasn't the time in which he lived. Yeah, okay.
And then I'm curious if you think that today, to get rid of, I guess, the red tape and the nimbyism, would it just be enough for one man to accumulate as much influence as Moses had and then to push through some things? Or does there need to be some sort of systemic reform? Because when Moses took power, of course, there was also that Tammany Hall machine that he had to run through, right? Is that just what's needed today to get through the bureaucracy or is something more needed? Well, I don't think Robert Moses with all of his talents and personality, I don't think he could do in the 21st century what he did in the middle of the 20th century. I think he would have done a lot, maybe more than anybody else.
But also I think his methods, his really bullying messages really, really, he bullied people, including powerful people. I don't think that would work quite as easily today.
But I do think we need it today. And I think even today, you know, we find even now we have in New York, just the beginnings of leftists.
I'm thinking of AOC, the woman who led the campaign against Amazon in New York, saying, well, we need some development. If we want to make housing more affordable, somebody's got to build something.
It's not going to become more affordable because you say you want affordable housing. You've got to build affordable housing, and especially you've got to build more of it.
So we have to allow people, we have to overturn the nimbyism to say, well, even today for all of our concern about environmental change, we have to work together. I mean, in some ways we have to believe that we're in some ways in the same boat.
And it won't work if we put more people in the boat but don't make the boat any bigger. Yeah.
But when people discuss Moses and the power accumulated, they often talk about the fact that he took so much power away from democratically elected officials and he has centralized so much power in himself. Um, and, uh, you know, obviously the power broker talks a great deal about the harms of that kind of centralization, but I'm curious, having studied the history of New York, what are the benefits if there can be one coordinated, cohesive plan for the entire city?

So if there's one person who's designing all the bridges, all the highways, all the parks, is something more made possible that can be possible if like multiple different branches and people have their own unique visions? I don't know if that question makes sense, but. That's a big question.

And you've got to put a lot of trust into the Grand Planner,

especially of a massive area of 20, 25 million people bigger than the city, I'm sure what you're really talking about. Now, I think that in some ways we've gone too far in the ability to obstruct change, to stop it.
And we need change. I mean, houses deteriorate and roads deteriorate and sewers deteriorate.
We have to build into our system the ability to improve them. And we have little.
Now in New York, we respond to emergencies all of a sudden a water main breaks the street collapses and then they stop everything stop the water main break and repair the street and whatever it is and duty meanwhile in a hundred other places it's leaking it's just not leaking enough to make the road collapse but the problem is there every day every minute right yeah yeah i'm curious like as a professor i mean you you've like studied american history do you just see this as a cyclical thing where you have periods where maybe one person has too much power to periods where there's like dispersed vitocracy and sclerosis and then you're just going to go through these cycles or Or how do you see that in the grand context of things? How do you see where we are, where we were during Moses, and where we might be in the future? Well, you're right to say that much of life is cyclical. And there is a swing back and forth.
But having said that, I think a person like Robert Moses is unusual, partly because, you know, he might have gone on to become a hedge fund person or they didn't have hedge funds. He was around, but, you know, new competitor to Goldman Sachs.
I mean, he could have done a lot of things, maybe been a general. He wanted to have power and control.
And I think that's harder to accumulate now. We have too much power in demonstrating.
You can stop anything. We love demonstrations in the United States.
We respect them. We see it as a visible expression of our democracy, is your ability to get on the streets and block the streets.
But, you know, still, you have to get to work. I mean, at some point in the day, you've got to do something.
And, yeah, Hitler could have done a lot of things if he wanted to. You know, he could have made Berlin into it.
But, you know, if you have all the power, Hitler had a lot of it. If he turned into Berlin into a colossal city, he was going to make it like Washington, but times five.
Washington has already got its own issues. You know, the buildings are too big.
Government buildings don't have eyes, don't have life on the street and stuff like this. Somebody like Hitler would destroy it forever, you know,

because you build a monumental city that's not for people.

And I think that was probably one of Moses' weak points,

is unlike a Jane Jacobs who saw people, Moses didn't see people.

He saw bridges.

He saw highways. He saw tunnels.
He saw rivers. He saw the city as a giant traffic problem.
Jane Jacobs, who was a person without portfolio most of her life, except of her own powers of judgment and persuasion. She thought, well, what does the shoe repair man got to do with the grocery store, got to do with the school, got to do with something else? She saw what Moses didn't see.
She saw the intricacies of the city. He saw a giant landscape.
She saw the block, just the the block yeah there's a there's like a common trope about socialist and communist which is that they that they love humanity and the abstract but they hate people as individuals um and it's like i guess one way to like describe robert moses uh it actually kind of reminds me of a of my relatives that's a doctor.

And he's not exactly a people person. And he says, like, you know, I hate, like, actually having to talk to the patients about, like, you know, like, ask them questions.
I just like the actual detective work of, like, what is going on, looking at the charts and figuring out, doing the diagnosis. Are you optimistic about New York? Do you think that continuing towards the end of the 21st century and the 22nd century, it will still be the capital of the world? Or

what do you think is the future of the city? Well, The Economist, which is a

major publication that comes out of England, recently predicted that London and New York

would be in 2100 what they are today, which is the capitals of the world. And London is not

Thank you. I recently predicted that London and New York would be in 2100 what they are today, which is the capitals of the world.
And London is not really a major city in terms of population, probably under 10 million, much smaller than New York and way smaller than Tokyo. But London has a cosmopolitan, heterogeneous atmosphere within the rule of law.
What London and New York both offer, which Shanghai doesn't, or Hong Kong doesn't at the moment, is a system so if you disagree, you're not going to disappear. You know what I mean? It's like there's some level of guarantee that personal safety is sacred and you can say what you want.
I think that's valuable. It's very valuable.
And I think the fact that it's open to newcomers, you can't find a minority so minority that they don't have a presence in New York and a physical presence. I mean, if you're from Estonia, which has got fewer people than New York suburbs, I mean, individual New York suburbs, but there's an Estonian house, there's Estonian restaurants, there's, you know, India, Pakistan, every place has got an ethnic presence.
And if you want it, you can have it. You want to merge with the larger community, merge with it.
That's fine. But if you want to celebrate your special circumstances, it's been said that New York is everybody's second home.
Because you know if you come to New York, you can find people just like yourself and speaking your language and eating your food and going to your religious institution. I think that's going to continue.
And I think not only what makes the United States unusual, there are a few other places like it. Switzerland is like it.
But the thing about Switzerland that's different from the United States is there are parts of Switzerland that most of it's Swiss-German and parts of it are French. But they stay in there one places, you know what I mean? So they speak French here and they speak German there.
You know, Arizona and Maine are not that different demographically in the United States. Everybody has shuffled the deck several times.
And so I think that's what makes New York unique. And London too.
Paris a little bit. You can go to the Paris underground.
You don't even know what language you're listening to. I think to be a great city in the 21st century.
And by the way, often the Texas cities are very diverse. San Francisco, LA, very diverse.
It's not just New York. New York kind of stands out because it's bigger and because the neighborhoods are more distinct.
Anybody can see them. I think that's, and that's what Robert Moses didn't spend any time thinking about.
He wasn't concerned with who was eating at that restaurant. Wasn't important, or even if there was a restaurant, you know, whereas now the move, the slow drift back towards cities, and I'm predicting that the pandemic will not have a permanent influence.
I mean, the pandemic is huge, and it's affected the way people work and live and shop and have recreation. So I'm not trying to blow it off like something else.
But I think in the long run, we are social animals. We want to be with each other.
We need each other, especially if you're young and you want to be with potential romantic partners. But even other people are drawn.
Like just a few days ago, there was a horrible tragedy in Seoul, Korea. That's because 100,000 young people are drawn to each other.
They could have had more room to swing their arms, but they wanted to crowd into this one alley because that's where other people were. They wanted to go where other people were.
And that's a lot about the appeal of cities today. We've been in cars and we've been on interstate highways.
And at the end of the day, we're almost like cats. We want to get together at night and sleep on each other or with each other.
And I think that's the ultimate, it's not for everybody. Most people that maybe rather live in a small town or on the top of a mountain, but there's a percentage of people, let's call it 25%, who really want to be part of the tumble in the tide and want to be things mixed up.
And they will always want to be in a place like New York. There are other places, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia a little bit.
They're not many in the United States, but in Europe, Copenhagen, you know, they're not, Copenhagen is not a big city, neither is Prague, but they have urbanity. New York has urbanity.
And I think we don't celebrate urbanity as much as we might. The pure joy of being with others.
Yep. Yep.
But I'm curious if you ever got a chance to talk to Robert Caro himself about Moses at some point. Robert Caro and I were friends.
In fact, when the power broker received an award, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, it turned out we lived near each other in the Bronx. and I drove him home, and we became friends and social friends.
And I happened to be with him on the day that Robert Moses died. We were with our wives eating out in a neighborhood called Arthur Avenue, the real little, little Eve, New York.
It's in the Bronx. It's also called Belmont.
But then on the 100th anniversary of Moses' birth, I think in 1989, I was asked to give the keynote speech at a conference at Hofstra University on Moses. And Carol was also invited to be a speaker, maybe another keynote speaker.
And there I said, and I still stand by this, that the power broker, I learned more from it than any book I ever read because it's such an enormous topic. I learned more from it, and I wish I had written it myself so that my name was on it rather than his.
And I think it was the best book I ever read. That may be a slight exaggeration, but just slight.
It's an incredible achievement. But having said that, I said it's got a thousand errors, you know, just small errors.
I mean, in broad strokes, it's correct. Robert Moses had more power than any urban figure in American history.
He built incredible monuments that the city needs. He was ruthless and arrogant and honest.
That's a big story right there. That's probably true.
But in all the little stories about the temperature in the swimming pools, about the destruction of public transit, about the destruction of the Bronx with the cross Bronx Expressway, about the building the bridges too low so that buses couldn't get to the beaches. He's just wrong.
I mean, it's just in that way. Wasn't that way.
Isn't that way. And all he had to do was look at some different sources.
You know that they were doing some of the same same things in la or chicago they just weren't as famous as new york i mean that's more or less what it was um but i think um i still feel that way i still wish i had written the book um wish my name was on even with all those mistakes i've had taught for a half half a century or more New York City history at Columbia University. I've had dozens of students write term papers on one or another aspect of Carol's book.
I can never remember a single one coming back and saying, oh, Carol got it right. You know, they would go back to the same source and stuff like this and say, you know, this is not what, this is not the way he said it was.

Now, they may be smaller, but it was generally that way.

They didn't celebrate it.

I think he'd made up his mind what he was going to argue before he started it. And Moses was a jerk.
For example, think of the issues now with President Biden and his son Hunter, you know, and all the grief he's catching about his son or people with, you know, having a hiring. My wife is telling me not to go down this road.
But Moses is attacked in the book because he's not good enough to his brother. You know, he should have done more for his brother than he did.
Well, you know, so he didn't give his brother a job. And so I'm just saying that all these little things that you can come to about different neighborhoods and things like that.
But I think Carol was right. Moses, the biggest builder of cities in the 20th century, the builder of the greatest city in the world, didn't like it.
That's incredible. He didn't actually like the place he was designing.
He wanted everybody to get out. It's better.

It's better in the suburbs.

Better if you have a house.

Better if you have a garage.

Better if you have a car at the front.

That's better than the Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens.

You know what I mean?

Whereas, again, his opponent, Jane Jacobs, are people now.

And one of the greatest changes now than when Carol was writing Moses is people wanted to all have a car in New York. Everybody have a car.
Teeters, when they were 16 years old, they wanted to have a driver's license more than they wanted to have sex. Get me the car.
Now, a big percentage of young Americans are skipping the driver's license. They don't care as much.
We're moving into a different time. And where that's going to lead us, I'm not sure.
But I think we're ready to

walk more for health reasons, all sorts of reasons. But Moses did not see it.
Moses never

drove, but he created the world for drivers. Yeah.
So some people might object to this

defense of Moses by saying, like, listen, whenever he does something well, we give him credit here.

But then whenever he does something badly, we just say, oh, well, he was just swimming with the tide of history.

There were other cities that were doing it worse.

So we're doing, you know, we're like doing whataboutism on the negative side of Moses' legacy.

But then we're like happy to let him take credit for the good things. It's kind of a double standard.
How would you respond to that? Well, I understand what you're saying, and I could sympathize with it. But I think most of the things, let's take the Cross Bronx Expressway as an egregious example of something that Robert Carroll or Moses' critics would say, God, all these people, tens of thousands of people paid a price.
Their lives were uprooted. But I just can't imagine you would say we can't have a cross Bronx.
I mean, you know, it could have been two blocks this way or two blocks that way. That's a different question.
And we could talk about that too. But I think we have to have it.
And I think the parks, I think the bridges, the Verrazano Neros Bridge transformed Staten Island.

The history of Staten Island is before and after 1964.

They had to take into account the curvature of the earth.

That bridge was so long.

At the time, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It's been surpassed in Europe since then, but a big bridge.
That would be a lifetime's achievement. If you built the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, this gigantic, gorgeous entrance to New York Harbor, that's a lifetime achievement.
For Moses, it's one of a list of about 50 things. You don't even think about the Verrazano and Arrows Bridge and Robert Moses.
Yeah, he did it. So what? He did lots of other big things, too.
I think it's the scale. And the scale was not human.
It was totally on a different scale.

And with that comes a lot of criticism.

Because as he would say himself,

in order to make an omelet,

you have to break eggs.

No other way to do it.

And he would say,

I had to make,

I had to do it.

This is his answer.

In order to build a great public event or thing, I have to hurt some people. That's just the way it is.
And I think, and we don't want to, the way we live now, we don't want to hurt anybody. You can't run a city or a country that way.
You can't. Nothing will change.
yeah i I've had recently a lot of guests who have been advocating for this philosophical view that's called long-termism, which is basically the idea that we should take the interest of future generations and consider them equally with the interest of people alive today as a way to emphasize, for example, you know people who live like thousands of years from now we should take their interest seriously and one of the um i guess if we take this kind of view that basically we just care about uh progeny more you know it's interesting there's a part in the power broker where they're talking about the you know the cross bronx expressway through east tremont, and Moses is getting opposition from some elected official. And Moses responds by saying, you know, you make a habit out of pointing out that I'm not democratically elected while you are.
But the advantage of me not being democratically elected is that I can build projects that might not be the favorite thing for the people alive now, but will benefit the city for generations and centuries to come. There's obviously a lot of arrogance there.
And it's like, well, if that's true, right? But to the extent that that is true, and it is in many cases, right? All these bridges you're talking about and all these highways, they're still standing today and in wide use. It kind of changes how you think about him.
like given all given all the omelet breaking that or the egg breaking that had to happen at the time it's still the fact that like we can uh we can for hundreds of years we'll get to use the things he built right so uh yeah um i'm curious how did how did caro so you mentioned you were you were with with him when you found out that Moses had died.

How did he react?

Was he sad about it or – Well, he was being interviewed.

I just remember being stunned at the restaurant.

We were in a restaurant in the Bronx and they brought a telephone to him.

I've never seen anybody have a telephone brought to them.

That was way before cell phones and everything else.

It was 1989 or something like that. I don't remember the exact year but it was somewhere like that um but we were we were we were we were friends when that when he died maybe it was 1981 anyway whatever year it was um it was after he i criticized him in public and the new york times quoted me but they didn't quote that i thought it was the best book I'd ever read.
I wish I'd written it. They did quote that I said it was full of mistakes.
That's what the New York Times, that's what he read. He didn't hear my speech.
And so, but I'm sorry. I've done that.
I don't want to have enemies with anyone, but I have regard for the book and have regard for his ability to do research. That's what's amazing about the power broker is his ability and interest in going back and interviewing his third grade teacher, you know, and stuff like that and finding that out.
That's way more than most of us are willing to do. But what was his reaction when he found out that Moses died? You know, that was not unexpected.
He was 90 years old at the time. And remember, this is 30 years ago, more than that.
Not many people lived to be 90. And he was a, well, he swam.
He was an athlete. He was a swimmer, swam in the ocean in his eighties.
He was quite a person. Yeah.
Yeah. There's a part in Caro's memoir where he talks about learning from Moses' former aides who are now friends with Caro, how they would tell him that now that he had lost his power, he was just in his house all day just looking at all his plans and writing down more ideas for there should be another highway here and so on and you know just kind of like um impotently making new you know new ideas and so on and caro says that uh just like that hearing about that scene um this master builder just kind of just having nothing to do really.

It made him want to cry.

And despite the fact that he was,

he had documented all the harm that Moses had done.

So it was like a really interesting,

really interesting.

Well,

Moses had a phenomenal amount of power and he loses it all in the short

order.

And that's got to be tough,

really tough.

Now Moses did write a response to the power broker, which was published in The New Yorker about 1975, which is a long response, saying, of course, that Carroll had it all wrong and didn't know that your listeners might want to go to. It's available, I'm sure, in the new yorker yeah uh yeah actually i i thought um i don't know what your reaction to the response was i read it and i thought that moses um at least i thought that moses kind of vindicated caro's description of his personality because it was very ad hominem it wasn't specific um i'm sure there were were a lot of errors, as you say, but then Moses just says, I mean, he wrote 8,000 words, but he actually documents very few of the supposed errors that he claims Kara is making.
And the ones he does document are like minor ones, not the major ones that were about his major public work. So it's just like small little details.
But yeah, I don't know what your reaction was to that response. Well, I think you're very perceptive.
I think his response was rambling, wordy, not particular. I think he probably could have taken Carol apart, but he didn't.
He didn't say this, Paige so-and-so, you said this. You know, this is wrong.
He didn't. And he also, Moses didn't have people around him, like maybe Hitler didn't or Trump or somebody else, to say, boss, you're wrong here.
You've got to reword this. You don't mean it the way you said it.
Yeah, exactly. And also the quality of his response was poor enough that he needed assistance.
He needed a smart or three or four smart people to say, put it this way. You got to – or give this example or do something else.
But still, it tells you something about Moses, the response. And also the way Moses kind of held grudges.
And so he blames the New Yorker and he blames Knopf, Alfred Knopf publishers, because you're in cahoots with Kero. So you're all damned and going to hell.
You're rather than just talking about Kero. So maybe that's just the way he looked at the world at his time.
You know, you got to find out who's got the levers of power and then go after them.

The rest of the people don't matter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

OK, so I want to respect for your time.

You've given me so much already.

But before we close out the interview, if you have any other things you want to say about the power broker or about Moses or about his legacy or about, I don't know, NIMBYism today or the state of construction and public works today?

Well, I think of Moses as the polar opposite of Jane Jacobs. Jane Jacobs was a woman, but think about what Jane Jacobs saw as important.
She saw the block, the store, the people, the mixture of genders and races and everything else as being significant. Robert Moses really didn't see, as you said earlier, people.
He saw massive things, you know, things you put on an architectural board, you know, and he didn't see other things. So that's both his strength and his weakness.
Had he seen people more, maybe he would never have built what he did and we wouldn't have had the bridges. But we do.
And can you imagine New York without the Trialboro Bridge? I mean, it's not imaginable. You've got to have it.
Because what, again, readers who have not been to New York may not understand, this is a city that has water all through it. You know, it's about water.
It's not like Dallas, where there's essentially no water. You know what I mean? New York water is everywhere.
You've got to cross these bridges. You've got to get over that.
So it creates a problem of circulation that's vast, especially when you have tens of millions of people trying to move around. So that's something that Moses figured a way around.
Yep. Yep.
Actually, one more question that just occurs to me is just that I'm curious why you think that this biography of Moses by Carol achieved the cultural prominence. It did, of course it's like an incredible book.
And I like, I incredibly, I enjoyed it a lot as well, but like there's countless biographies written every year. Right.
And many of them are also good. What, what was it about this book that catapulted it? I mean, there a review of the new play about robert moses and the title of that review was just that new yorkers love to hate robert moses why does he have this sort of uh cultural prominence uh in new york and actually like just across the world well because i think robert moses represented a past that's you know a time when we wanted to build bridges and superhighways and things that pretty much has gone out.
We're not building superhighways now. We're not building vast bridges like Moses built all the time.
So he's not swimming with the tide of history anymore. And so I think that's part of it.
Plus the fact that it's a, it's a biography that has a,

has an argument and the argument's understandable and it runs through the whole book. And he's in a, he's a terrific writer and builds suspense and he can write a paragraph in two words and he repeats himself a little too much.
And anyway, when I get negative, my wife is nearby. getting on there.

But anyway, I think it's a terrific book.

Look, Moses... And anyway, when I get negative, my wife is nearby, getting on me.

But anyway, I think it's a terrific book.

Look, Moses was a great man.

Carol is a great writer and in many ways a great historian.

And I think the other thing is Carol's book is so important.

You know, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, I have lots of books written about him. Carol, not so much.
I mean, Moses, not so much. He's not that famous.
So it's such a big and intimidating book. Everybody else is afraid to go there.
There will be other books about Robert Moses. There may be underway as we speak, and they will revise our reinterpretation.
I think that's true. He will be reinterpreted in ways in which we talked about today, though I don't know that.
But, you know, the basic thing that Moses did was there. You can look at it.
And the things that Carol said about him are mostly true. I mean, where he lived, you know, he gives a little tiny bit about an affair

that he once explained to me that sex was not important to Moses.

You know, that you want to understand him, it wasn't about females.

And I think that he cared about what Moses was committed, married to his job and to his vision of a city. And that's both his greatness and the fact that he didn't have friends or many friends.
And he didn't live the world the way most people live, you know, with people. I think that's probably all I know.
well, this is a true pleasure. I highly recommend that people check out your book, Robert Moses and the Modern City, the Transformation of New York.
And there they can find your essay on, you know, Robert Moses and the Rise of New York City, which I highly recommend. Professor Jackson, where else can people find you? My email address is still at Columbia University.
KTJ, just my initials, one, number one, at Columbia.edu. I'm there.
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