I’m out of the country for a few days relaxing on the beach at Turks & Caicos celebrating both a friend’s wedding and my passing the New York bar this week. I couldn’t leave you, dear readers, with nothing to discuss. So let’s delve into something I’ve had on tap for a few days: Robert Moses.
As The Hollywood Reporter reported last week, Oliver Stone is set to direct an HBO film based on Robert Caro’s epic tome The Power Broker. To truly capture the depths of the book, the movie would have to last approximately 19 hours, but something tells me they’ll cut it down. The natural question, of course, concerns casting. Who would you tab to play Robert Moses? I’m a Kevin Spacey fan myself. He always brings the right mix of suave likability and cunning evilness to his roles as the villain.
And then of course, there are the other roles: Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Jane Jacobs. It’s a veritable who’s who in New York urban policy and planning. It will be the downfall of Robert Moses as told by Oliver Stone. I can’t wait.
73 comments
Paul Giamatti as LaGuardia.
Everyone keeps saying Jane Jacobs must be cast for this film. I love her and all, but she’s not mentioned in The Power Broker; she’s not a character in that plot. I don’t know if she ever had a conversation with Robert Moses; he wouldn’t have respected her enough to say more than two words to her. . . plus, he wouldn’t have had any time to speak to her. Unless she’s a side story, I don’t think we’ll see much of her in this movie.
I don’t see how anyone can chronicling the failure to build transit improvements for huge money could call Robert Moses a “villain.” It is more complicated than that.
He was a man concerned with building great public works for posterity, and for the region as a whole. He dismissed the short run needs of individuals, and the effects on local neighborhoods. He, one might say, lacked balance.
And the whole country had been like that up until the time The Power Broker was written. And it has been completely unbalanced in the other direction ever since. I’d like to see Robert Caro answer to what hasn’t been done in the past 40 years. Does he still have the same perspective, with bike lanes and transit improvements held up for years by red tape?
It’s been a few years since I read TPB, and even though I think Caro has a penchant for oversimplifying the motivations of all parties, my impression was Caro was critical of Moses’s projects and his conduct, not happy with the idea of red tape. If anything, Caro was a little ahead of his time in one regard in that he saw the opportunity Moses threw away for a more balanced transport network.
Moses, of course, threw up red tape where he could to keep others from touching him.
Caro also had some statement in there along the lines of ‘if Moses had his way there’d be as many bridges spanning the Long Lisland Sound as there are bridges in Rome spanning the Tiber’ Again, what exactly is the problem here? Caro is complaining about an L.I. to Rye crossing that was not built! Does anyone seriously think L.I. is better off for having it’s only agress points through Queens? Does even Caro believe this? L.I. has more people than many major cities in the U.S. and yet you can’t move a quart of milk from Suffolk County to Westchester without going through teh Queens and the Bronx. Congrats.
There is another statement at the end of the book where some local party hack states something like ‘we’ll still build, but not in that Moses way’. 40 years later that is the biggest unintentional joke in that entire tome.
Every other American city in Moses’ era managed to build roads and bridges without having Moses. Clearly there was nothing unique about Moses that was needed for infrastructure to be built.
But I really doubt it if much of those highways would have been built in NY. Many such as the LIE probably would have been surface boulevards instead with traffic lights. He also widened streets like Woodhaven Boulevard. In the 1920s, that required foresight. Thing of the traffic congestion today if it would be two or four lanes today. It provides a realistic alternative to the nearly always jammed Van Wyck.
He also built 300 parks in one year. He was definitely different and something special.
Think of the traffic congestion there wouldn’t be. Throughput would probably be better.
Are you kidding? How would traffic congestion be less on the LIE if it were a boulevard instead of an expressway? How would Woodhaven Blvd move faster as a two lane road instead of four?
Long Island would have developed very differently without the Moses highways.
Obviously, carrying today’s traffic volumes on four-lane boulevards would be disastrous. But if there were no expressways, traffic volumes would also be much lower.
I’ll be interested to see if there’s any nuance in the portrayal of Moses, something Stone never has been all that good at doing. Moses’ work at least up through his run for governor in 1934 was definitely a positive for the city and the Metro NYC area in general, especially if you go back and look at the Seabury Report on the mess Tammany under Walker left going into the Depression.
It’s the Moses starting in the late 30s, and especially after the war, that was the man who pretty much rode roughshod over others in making sure his planning vision for New York was the one that became reality. My guess is that’s the period we’re going to see the most of if this move does get made, since it’s a lot easier to come up with a simple good-versus-evil narrative when you have a Robert Moses wanting to destroy Castle Clinton or plow highways through the Bronx than the Moses who salvaged the Central Park Zoo or put community swimming pools in neighborhoods across the city.
I agree. They will leave out the “good” Robert Moses. The Robert Moses who didn’t like the way politicians would appoint their unqualified friends to high paying patronage positions and believed the best qualified should be awarded the jobs. I believe he was the one who designed the first civil service tests to ensure that would happen. Today civil service has become a joke with high level positions once again going to political appointees holding provisional positions.
That’s a pretty rosy view. I think the guy certainly had a liberal reformer idealism that was lost to Machiavellian power brokerage as his career progressed, but it’s really out there to say Moses wasn’t a product of patronage himself, early in his career when he still was the “good guy,” and used patronage in his various capacities throughout his career.
I’d say he went from idealist to ideologue. He was still trying to impose the 1920s vision of urban development in the 1960s, when it had clearly already failed.
I think the key to his life was when he realized early on that it didn’t matter how many god ideas you had if you didn’t have the power to do anything about them. That’s the moment he embarked on his quest for power and as they say the rest is history. Your last sentence was the reason for his downfall. He still thought that the primary need for more roads was for recreational purposes.
Eddie Murphy will play everyone.
“Villian”? Seriously? OMG, Jones Beach! The UN Building, Lincoln Center! The Brooklyn Heights Promenade! The Horror!
The Caro book is unhinged in many places. The idea that everything was just fine in the Bronx until a 70 foot highway was built though part of it is silly. On the idiotic premise of this claim, Staten Island should be a slum due to the S.I. Expressway,. Bay Ridge should look like Beirut due to the Gowanus and Little Neck should resemble Camden due to the L.I.E. Don’t get me started on how the Erie Canal devaststed bucolic rural upstate NY with it’s arrow straight watery ditch of doom. Perhaps he’ll be doing a movie on DeWitt Clinton next. He better play Moses as a really over the top bad guy because many people will be at a loss as to why they are supposed to hate this guy. Maybe they can use of those mean looking prominently Nordic guys from Die Hard and show them torturing kittens in between planning meetings or something.
There was a lot of press on Moses in the past couple of years. I think history is starting to soften on their view of him, which had been largely shaped by Caro.
Certainly Caro captures the unbending will of the man, but his conclusion of his legacy is dated. Caro proposed building a rail system all down the length of the LIE, asserting that would have produced less of a free-form, car-dependent Long Island. Having grown up there, I doubt that would have had an impact on Long Island’s car culture.
That “car culture” might have been less prominent if it HAD been built.
I doubt it. The LIRR is always existed, and didn’t exactly stem car culture.
Fair enough, what I’m getting at though is that car culture doesn’t just appear of its own accord, it’s a result of public transit being allowed to decay while the government kept making it easier to drive by building new highways. After all, despite LIRR being expensive and not very useful, and despite LI’s “car culture”, LIRR still gets plenty of riders.
Yeah, but LIRR isn’t exactly a good transit system. It’s okay at ferrying riders between intermediate commuter nodes (stations they drive to) and the central city. Once you’re out there, you drive for everything but your commuter or odd trip to the city.
Exactly my point… hard to say LIers drive because of culture when we have no idea what it would be like with a good mass transit system.
I don’t know about The Bronx as a whole,* but East Tremont was pretty well ruined by Moses’ highway. There is certainly a rather vast difference between building a highway and getting development and building a highway to replace development. The Bronx, of all places, was not really the beneficiary of the former. Staten Island probably was.
* I would date the decline of The Bronx working and middle classes later, from what I know. Probably the 1970s. Moses may deserve some of the blame here for housing projects that contributed.
How about Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn? The Prospect Expessway is a benefit for those living south of the neighorhood, who have direct access via Ocean Parkway, but ripped the neighborhood in half. It survived.
And other neighborhoods without expressways went downhill. Caro took one example, and had it stand in for every neighborhood in the city.
What is its fair to say is that highway development allowed the middle class to flee the city. The Flushing extension to NJ would have the same effect.
I didn’t get the impression he used it as a synecdoche for the whole city, and he cited other examples (Fifth Ave. El?).
Anyway, for those looking for an easy explanation to 20th century urban problems, I think there’s only so much there. I do buy there is a correlation between the type of development Moses pushed and urban social disintegration. I don’t buy that there is a 1.0 correlation though, and why would anyone expect such an effect? I would guess there is something like a 0.1, 0.2, maybe 0.3 correlation. It’s clearly very hard to test that guess without repeating what Moses did, something that is neither desirable nor feasible.
That said, if a new 7 extension gets built, there is nowhere in the region for the middle class to flee to. If anything, provided the jobs were available for them (they’re not), the middle class would be better off fleeing increasingly demesne-like suburbs for cheaper transportation and housing* in the boroughs. Maybe they will, if the upper middle class doesn’t take it all first.
* albeit, smaller housing
Caro also complained in the book that the Gowanus caused industrial development to occur in Sunset Park, thus making it less desirable to live there. Caro basically assumes that any consequence of a road is a bad consequence. If a freight rail tunnel across the harbor terminated in Sunset Park causing the same development in the 1950s I find it highly unlikely that Caro would have had a problem with it.
I have no idea. I got the impression he simply cited a lot of bad consequences of roads, since at least largely the book was about the negative consequences of the Moses machine; it stands to reason he would not dwell on the positives. Since I’m not sure if Caro is right or wrong about the cause-effect relationship you’re talking about, I really don’t know if his complaint stands up. If I ever did know, I have forgotten.
Caro’s problem with Sunset Park is that Moses destroyed a perfectly viable commercial and neighborhood on 3rd Avenue which could have been avoided simply by building the Gowanus on 2nd Avenue instead and widening that road. Second Avenue was already industrial. It was suggested to him, but like the XBronx, Moses refused to alter his plans.
“Staten Island should be a slum due to the S.I. Expressway,”
False comparison. The S.I. Expressway encouraged development in Staten Island. There’s a huge difference between building a highway in an undeveloped area (as the S.I.E. corridor was at the time), and bulldozing development to make way for an urban highway (Cross Bronx, BQE) that will encourage people to move away.
David Straithairn (The Bourne Ultimatum, Dolores Claiborne) would be PERFECT as Robert Moses – he looks exactly like him and he’s a great underrated actor!
Thinking about the performance Straithairn gave playing Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night and Good Luck” is a good indication of the job he would do playing Moses. He really buried himself in the role and was brilliant in the part. He’s a terrific actor.
i’m not sure, but whoever plays robert moses has to be a ruthless mofo. i’m actually scared about this casting, considering the power broker is my favorite book. not too sure why…considering i hate cars and love public transit.
Yes, I really have agree with others that Moses was not entirely a villain. I loved The Power Broker, and despite the fact that all I know about Moses has come from that book, I have had a fairly positive view of him.
It is true that he shifted resources away from walkability and transit and toward unwalkability and roads, but I don’t believe he was really outside the consensus views of most New Yorkers, either then or now. This city is very antitransit, and if the subway system didn’t already exist by the 1930s, it never would have been built.
I have to say that in particular, the conclusion that Robert Caro came to about the decline of the Bronx – that the Cross Bronx Expressway was the biggest part of the problem – didn’t make sense to me even as I read it. Maybe because when I was reading the book, I lived literally across the street from I5 in Downtown Seattle, and it was impossible for me to think that I5 had destroyed the neighborhood I lived in. I think Seattle (and the neighborhood I lived in especially, which has way too many surface parking lots) would have been better off without it, but the depths that the Bronx had fallen to in the 70s and 80s have no parallel anywhere else. I think rent control is a much better explanation for what happened in the Bronx, and this obviously had nothing to do with Robert Moses. But like a lot of the problems that Moses did have a hand in, it has everything to do with the New York political class’s poor understanding of microeconomics. Which is a little ironic considering what the biggest industry is in this town.
That said, the movie has to cut out a lot of his life, and if they only covered the dispute over the Mid-Manhattan Expressway it could be pretty entertaining. I’m thinking something like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but without the cartoons…
I loved that book also.
I remember when they built the Cross Bronx. I had three aunts who lived nearby so I was always up there to visit. I can’t say how much of an impact it had to destroying the neighborhoods there, but its downfall occurred shortly thereafter, and it certainly didn’t help the neighborhoods. I think, however, it was necessary to build it and it was an engineering marvel as Caro describes it. The problem was that with a simple rerouting, 3,000 fewer families would have had to be relocated, but Moses wouldn’t listen to logic or to anyone.
My aunt lived in a 6 story apartment building in the middle of the block lined with similar buildings. One day we came to visit and her building was now the last one on the block. I asked her where all the other building went and she told me they were building a highway where they used to be.
After it was completed, her whole apartment was no longer level but on a slope. Until I read the Caro book, I didn’t realize it was due to the damage caused by the blasting. I remember placing a glass of soda on the table and watching it slide down to the other end. None of the owners were even compensated for all that damage done to their buildings.
What? I-5 in Seattle is an abomination…
I don’t think even Caro tries to make him out to be a villain, his main point was that Moses was a corrupted idealist- which itself is probably an oversimplification.
For me though the main point is that Moses trampled thousands of people for the supposed “greater good”, without the least bit mercy, and took part in the same corruption he claimed to oppose. Yes it was less odious than Walker-style corruption, but it was still a kind of corruption, and cost the city millions of dollars. He also epitomized the decide-announce-defend attitude that still plagues New York’s bureaucracy.
As for consensus on building more highways, it probably wouldn’t have been as strong if not for Moses’ influence with New York’s newspapers, and the influence of the city’s anti-urban elite.
If you look at what people do and not what they say, you’ll see that the consensus for personal automobile transport is at Albanian election results levels. The NPR-listening woman with the $2 Greenpeace bumper sticker on her $75,000 Range Rover does and says two opposite things.
In what way do elections reflect consensus in a city dominated by machine politics? What next – are you going to say there’s a consensus in Russia for Putin and a consensus in Venezuela for Chavez?
What choice does she have? If you’re going to cite people’s behavior as evidence of their preferences, you need to first make sure they have a choice to begin with. Policy, decided largely non-democratically, is what makes it so we have to pay tribute to Big Oil and the Big
ThreeTwo(?) every time we drive to the grocery store.She could get a Corolla.
Well, presumably, she could live in a transit-oriented development. In practice, there aren’t many. Whether it’s a Land Rover or a Corolla seems to miss the point. The type of development encouraged by auto-centric planning is much more detrimental than incidental car ownership and use.
SUVs are attractive to assholes, but they don’t make assholes.
I think Caro’s point is even more subtle then that. The argument Caro ultimately made was that it was impossible to say that New York was a worse or better place because of Moses, but it was undoubtedly a different place.
The feeling I felt more then anything after reading the book was that Moses was a monumental force for change, but there was such a magnitude of missed opportunities for even more socially progressive change that Moses came across as a villain for crushing or overlooking these potential outlets. Time and time again Caro points out that marginal changes to Moses’ plans would have vastly improved the lives of thousands and potentially millions in the case of improved mass transit.
CONGRATULATIONS, Benjamin Kabak, Esq.
Seconded.
Third. Woo Hoo! If I may speak for all readersBen, congrads to you.
Now if we made a movie about you, we could call it My Cousin Benny! Starring Joe Pecci & Marissa Tomei. “Yeah, you blend.”
Fourth!
Fifth’d. And may I take the opportunity to say I appreciate your writing this blog!
SIXTHED? CONGRATS!! Love the website.
Jane Jacobs probably won’t be in this movie, right? “The Power Broker” doesn’t even mention her name. Has anyone read anything about a Jane Jacobs element to the movie?
A “Wrestling With Moses” movie could be interesting…
Congrats.
Joe Pesci as Fiorello LaGuardia? Bearing in mind that LaGuardia stood 5’2″ or so, you’d need a short guy to play him. I’m sure Pesci is taller than that, but he’s got the right build to play him.
Right personality too.
danny devito
I nominate James Cromwell. That’s how I always pictured Robert Moses.
As to The Power Broker, I think Caro starts off showing Moses in a fairly favorable light, building roads to help get people from the city to the beauty of Long Island more easily. It’s not until later, when he highlights how city parks were built under Moses’ tenure in disproportionately large numbers in white neighborhoods that we begin to see the bias and untoward side of Moses.
Clearly, from where we stand, many of the projects Moses pushed had a harmful long-term effect on NYC, but at the time it was a car culture. It’s too bad the vision he an so many urban planners had at the time wasn’t a little more far-sighted.
Still I would hate to think where we would be today without Moses’ highways. I can get from Sheepshead Bay to Nassau County in 35 minutes, to Westchester in 45 minutes, to New Jersey in 30 minutes, but it takes me 45 minutes to get to Borough Park or Park Slope in my own borough including a quarter mile walk to my destination because we have no highways through Brooklyn, only on the circumference.
Or you can do all those things in two hours. Moses highways aren’t all that great when they’re clogged.
Agree if the time you are using them is in the rush hours. But most of the time they are not.
But to show you how out of touch today’s planners are with reality, the Belt Parkway has about ten times the usage since it was expanded to 3 lanes in 1950. But when they are rebuilding 7 bridges, they wouldn’t even add a lane to enable future widening of the highway on the portion where there are no service roads since today it is sometimes crowded even during midday especially during the summer on beach days.
I guess your solution would be not to have built them at all so it would always take two hours for me to get to the places I mentioned rather than it only take two hours for about six hours a day.
Or to build a rail system that can move as many people with just two tracks instead 6 lanes.
But what you forget is in many places where highways generally work a rapid transit line won’t because the densities aren’t there. Now if there were an easy way to get a car when you needed it and a place for you to leave it at a station and you could easily pick up another one when you got off the train if you needed to, all at a reasonable cost, it would be a different story and you would have a point.
That’s why we have to place more emphasis on improving our local bus system and using existing right of ways for mass transit that are going to waste. A handful of SBS lines won’t be enough to get people out of their cars. It’s not a question of highways or mass transit.
I’m talking about the ’30’s, not today. If the rail network was expanded as well as the highway network you probably would have both higher densities and less suburban development, and less need for highway widening. But, according to Caro, Moses channeled all the money he could into his highways and other projects, starving mass transit of funds for expansion. That’s my big problem with Moses (other than trampling on those directly harmed by his policies): he favored a form of transportation and development that weren’t suited for New York, while denying the city money for the form of transportation best suited for it.
I don’t remember reading that he channeled highway money into mass transit. What I remember is Caro stating that he blocked mass transit projects at every opportunity he could like preventing medians on his highways being used for mass transit or allowing mass transit on his bridges.
Caro made a point of stating how he was steering money for hospitals and schools to highways and parks when there was a shortage of both hospitals and parks. Can you give me one example where he took money from transit and used it to build a highway because I don’t remember reading that he did that?
In the chapter “And When the Last Law Was Down…”, on pg. 642 (of my paperback edition), Caro describes how LaGuardia’s comptroller found that Moses’ park and highway projects were sucking up money from other city needs, including hospitals and schools, as you note, and subways. It’s not that Moses took funds already intended for building subways, it’s that by monopolizing funds for his projects Moses ensured there was no money available for more subways. On pg. 760, in “Moses and the Mayors”, Caro describes how Moses pressed O’Dwyer to raise the subway fare to release money from the city’s debt limit, so that money could be used to build more of Moses’ projects. Basically subway riders funded highway expansion instead of subway expansion. In “The Highwayman”, on pg. 900, Caro describes how “[Moses’] monopolization of funds made subway construction impossible” and that because the poorer 2/3s of the city’s households did not own cars, “the portion of the city’s population helped… would not be the portion that needed it most.”
Thanks.
Opportunity cost. When resources are finite, using them for one thing means they can’t be used for another.
You aren’t going to get the density necessary to make rapid transit system work if you don’t build the services and create the land use framework that lets it be a convenient means of transportation – which probably means at least perceived inconvenience for some drivers.
And LRVs serve the intermediate market quite well, and they scale well beyond the capacity of buses when the time comes.
To me part of the point of public transit is that a city as dense as New York is never going to be conducive to driving- you’re gonna have to pave over a lot of buildings to build highways, and then assuming everyone drives to downtown Brooklyn there’s the problem of parking. Cars just take up too much space in a city that lacks space. Point of public transit is that even though it’s slower, it takes up less space, and since the city is dense you can reach much more despite lower speeds. You don’t need to be able to get to Nassau in 35 minutes as much as would need to be to go a similar distance in a similar amount of time in, say, Kansas.
Have the critics of Robert Caro actually read The Power Broker? I doubt it.
Caro doesn’t argue that Moses was just a villain. And Caro never argues that New York didn’t need modern highways, bridges, and other public works. He also makes clear that no one but Moses had figured out how to get much-needed projects built in New York. The book describes a genius who accomplished great things but often abused his power and ran roughshod over others in order to do so. Caro’s basic argument is what PSwift said above: We can’t know whether New York would have been better or worse without Moses, but it certainly would have been very different.
This is from the introduction to The Power Broker: “Would [New York] have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? Any critic who says so ignores the fact that both before and after Robert Moses–both under ‘reform’ mayors such as John Purroy Mitchel and John V. Lindsay and under Tammany mayors such as Red Mike Hylan and Jimmy Walker–the city was utterly unable to meet the needs of its people in areas requiring physical construction. Robert Moses may have bent the democratic processes of the city to his own ends to build public works; left to themselves, these processes proved unequal to the building required.”
It’s fine to criticize the popular shorthand The Power Broker has come to represent, which is closer to the simple good v. evil story that Caro’s critics hate. But that is *not* the book that Caro actually wrote.
You are 100% correct. Let’s hope the movie stays tru to the book.
“Have the critics of Robert Caro actually read The Power Broker?”
Yes. Despite what you say, in the end the book was inbalanced. The damage Robert Moses did is real, but exaggerated. Just look at the subtitle — Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
I quoted from the book itself to support my point. Do you have some evidence from the book to show these supposed exaggerations?
Danny Devito as LaGuardia.
[…] post on the upcoming plans to turn Robert Caro’s The Power Broker into a movie. Who, I asked, should play Robert Moses, and in doing so, I offhandedly called him the villain of the story. The reaction was regular […]