If you are a narcissistic megalomaniac, I know of just the right career for you: highway builder. That’s one of the lessons I learned from The Power Broker.
Building highways may not sound like a glamorous task, but there is hardly a legacy that is more lasting. In New York, Broadway (”Breedaway,” as it was called back then) follows the same Indian path that the Dutch widened when they settled Manhattan. In Atlanta, Peachtree Street follows the Peachtree Trail, first established by the Creek nation. In Europe, many modern highways follow routes first established by ancient Roman highways.
The warning brought about by “The Power Broker” has to do with a man whose power went unchecked for half a century, and whose vision was blindly stubborn. That he was a highway builder (among other things) meant that his vision would affect many future generations. The warning should give pause to anyone who seeks to use Band-Aid solutions to mitigate congestion.
Robert Moses — RM — gathered power for himself in a way that trapped him into his own vision. Author Robert Caro pointed out that when RM began his career, he would seek power for the sake of building things; and as he aged, RM built things in order to accumulate more power for himself. But from the very beginning, Moses was guided by his own vision, which he began to formulate at the beginning of his career. “The Power Broker” documented the path Moses took to, for example, build the West Side Improvement in the 1930s, a vision he first formulated in 1914. As much as circumstances may have changed in fifteen years, Robert Moses would not change his vision except to accommodate ways he could obtain the money necessary to pay for that vision.
The power Moses accumulated over the years served as part of the warning Caro offers. The power Moses held was not simply administrative — that he held 16 city- and state-wide posts at once was not enough. Moses wrote the laws that established many of the positions he held — laws that gave him an extraordinary amount of power, and made it very difficult to take that power away from him.
Through toll bridges, Moses had access to vast sums of money that could be used to justify an even greater wealth of bonding capacity, which would then be used to finance more roads and highways that served the toll bridges. All that money supplied thousands of jobs, which could be doled out to anyone who would subscribe to the Moses vision. And it was that vision that supplied seemingly endless profits to engineering firms, road-building contractors, insurance companies, banks, unions, political campaigns, and others. This road-building coalition served as a model for departments of transportation to copy throughout the country. (Here in Georgia the profits come, in part, from a dedicated tax on fuel.) In this sense, one difference between Moses graft and Tammany Hall graft was that Moses was able to dress his graft up to look honest.
Beyond tolls, the additional money supplied to him from the City and State came even as schools, police, fire, and other essential services were getting starved.
There is also another warning supplied by this book. While highways can be so strong as to leave a lasting legacy, Moses exposed the delicacy of the urban fabric by ripping it apart. Once-stable neighborhoods were transformed into exactly the sorts of traffic-filled, poverty-stricken, crime-ridden places that so-called American Dreamers paint cities to be. Crime and poverty immediately struck the places where the highways were laid down. Once-thriving neighborhoods were torn apart as residents were displaced by the tens-of-thousands. Businesses on either side of the highways lost half (or more) of their customer base — some to displacement, some to the inconvenience of a new highway dividing the neighborhood.
It is an odd sort of thing about cities. Part of what makes a great city is really in the details that “masterbuilders” like Robert Moses never thought of or cared about — and these are the details that make the city a delicate place. A strong city is a place full of delicate pieces that no highway-building bureaucrat could possibly appreciate.
Part of New York’s fall came after Robert Moses lost his power. The City descended into a staggering load of debt, and eventually had to be bailed out. Much of the South Bronx area, torn apart by multiple Moses highways, burned down as apartment buildings became worth more for insurance collections than they were worth in rent (or rehabilitation, or redevelopment). The highways — built in such a way to retain more permanence than Broadway or Peachtree — contributed to the weakness of the city. New York became, for a few decades, a weak city, full of strong highways.
Some have learned the lesson that the rise of an American dictator such as Robert Moses should never happen again. Cities are for people, not for cars. But many great American cities, torn apart by highways, remain torn apart to this day, choked in traffic, crime and poverty — problems that seem intractable to this day.
Robert Moses is dead. Long live Robert Moses.
