The Master Builder

On the rain-soaked morning of December 12, 1936, as Jane Jacobs emerged from the apartment on Morton Street and into the cozy chaos of Greenwich Village, Robert Moses stood two miles uptown, christening a much more orderly kind of city. His driver had picked him up at his home on the Upper East Side and cut across to the northwest tip of Manhattan, to the banks of the Hudson River. There Moses stepped out of the black Packard limousine onto the deck of a bridge he had built.

At eight hundred feet high, the Henry Hudson Bridge was the tallest arched span in the world, vaulting over a shipping canal that separated the island of Manhattan from the rest of New York State, its steel latticework painted forest green to blend in with the wooded hillsides. Through the mist and the pelting rain, Moses could barely see the cliffs of New Jersey across the Hudson River to his left. The weather was not ideal for a grand opening, but nothing could spoil the moment. It was the final ribbon cutting of a furiously busy year—a year of red, white, and blue bunting, the silver blades of ceremonial shovels, bands and banners, and the staccato flash of press cameras.

First there was the progress on the West Side Highway, which had been extended from Seventy-second Street to the new bridge on which he stood. He had charged an army of construction workers with the implementation of his West Side Improvement project, submerging railway tracks in a tunnel so the roadway could run along the shore of Riverside Park, which was itself being refurbished and expanded from a new boat basin at Seventy-ninth Street to Harlem. Moses had also opened ten new swimming pool complexes over the summer, at a pace of one a week. He had created a system of large new state parks in the orbit of the city, beginning with the elegant and wildly popular Jones Beach, and completed extensive renovations at Jacob Riis Park and Rockaway Beach on Long Island’s southern shore. In July, he cut the ribbon at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, a crescent beach he created by dumping barge loads of white sand from Long Island. He had also restored and expanded the city’s existing public spaces, among them Sara Delano Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side, Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and Central Park, where he had built Tavern on the Green and a zoo.

That summer, Moses had opened his greatest achievement yet: the Triborough Bridge, a twenty-two-lane art deco masterpiece of concrete, cables, and steel that linked the previously isolated boroughs of the Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan. Plans had been in place for a bridge over the East River as early as 1916, but the project stalled after the stock market crash of 1929. Moses, who wanted to facilitate travel to the Long Island parks he had opened, was able to revive it, creating the independent Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which had the power to borrow money to construct the bridge and charge a twenty-five-cent toll to pay for it. Moses had hired a new architect who gave the bridge a more modern design while cutting costs. Described in a promotional pamphlet as the “hanging highway in the sky” to link “three mighty boroughs … [saving] time and money for 10 million motorists,” the Triborough Bridge was an instant success, smoothing the delivery of goods, people, and services to New York City, upstate New York, Long Island, and Connecticut. It was a landmark project for Moses, a smash hit with the public and the press.

“The Triborough is not just a bridge nor yet a crossing. It is a great artery, connecting three boroughs of the city, and reaching out at its borders into adjacent counties and states,” Moses had said at the opening ceremony, as President Roosevelt christened the span by riding in a motorcade of dozens of sedans and motorcycles. “It is not merely a road for automobiles and trucks, but a general city improvement, reclaiming dead areas and providing for residence along its borders, esplanades, play facilities, landscaping and access to the great new parks.”

Though he had by no means completed his last project—the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Whitestone, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano-Narrows bridges, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, and the United Nations were still to come—on that day of the grand opening of the Henry Hudson Bridge, Moses was already the nation’s most prolific builder of public works. With his parks, zoos, playgrounds, pools, roadways, bridges, and tunnels, he had changed the way millions of New Yorkers spent their leisure time and got around. As Jane Jacobs was in lower Manhattan writing about the quirky charms of the city, Robert Moses was all over the metropolis, seeking to transform it.

Smartly dressed in a suit, oxford shirt, and necktie, Moses surveyed the watery deck of the Henry Hudson. The celebration would have to move inside to the station house beside the tollbooths. But the symbolism would be fitting nonetheless. The complex at the entrance of the bridge housed the uniformed attendants, who would collect a dime per car, a method perfected by Moses that would pay for the construction costs in short order.

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia arrived at the bridge and greeted Moses warmly. La Guardia, whose nickname was the Little Flower, had been elected as the city’s first Italian-American mayor in 1933 and had tapped Moses to be his city parks commissioner. Moses was grateful for the appointment and knew La Guardia relished a gala opening; he had combined the Henry Hudson event with a celebration of the mayor’s fifty-fourth birthday, the previous day.

A full foot shorter and a good deal less muscular than his appointee, La Guardia looked at Moses with a mix of wariness and admiration. Here was a man who held several appointed jobs at once, but had never been elected to anything. In addition to the parks job, La Guardia had named Moses the city’s representative on the bridge-and road-building authorities established by the state. Moses was chair and sole member of the Henry Hudson Parkway Authority and Marine Parkway Authority, which together were merged into the New York City Parkway Authority, and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, the quasi-public, independent authority for which Moses wrote the enabling legislation. Moses was also chairman of a new state parks agency and commissioner of the Long Island state parks. At one point Moses had held twelve appointed positions at the same time. His knack for getting named to powerful jobs led some colleagues and elected officials to refer to him as “commissioner for life.” When the jobs were at newly created agencies, he managed to write the legislation that spelled out the job descriptions himself, always taking special care to make it difficult to be fired.

As the dignitaries gathered for the start of the ceremony, however, La Guardia could not help but feel grateful for Moses’s guile. The fact that the Henry Hudson had been built at all was testament to his value as a champion of public works. A high-speed thoroughfare at the tip of Manhattan had been planned many years before—as early as 1901—but no politician had been able to muster the financing or navigate neighborhood politics to get construction started. Moses, by then an expert in both arenas, pieced together city, state, and federal funding, and had the bridge abutments in place the morning the money was in the bank.

Previously, cars and trucks had been forced to inch across the ship canal that led from the Hudson to the Harlem River on the clogged Broadway Bridge, well below the new bridge, through a neighborhood known by the Dutch name of Spuyten Duyvil. Residents there had wanted a more modest span, arguing that a towering arched structure would spoil the last great wild area in Manhattan, Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill parks, but Moses had dispatched the neighborhood forces with carefully modulated responses. A lower corridor would require a drawbridge, leading to traffic jams every time a ship passed, he knew. Further, he could receive federal funding from the Civil Works Administration if the route went through In-wood Hill Park, as it could then technically be considered a parks access road. As an inducement to neighborhood residents, he promised playgrounds and parks in the area of the Henry Hudson, though, as it turned out, the playground would be accessible only by a steep set of stairs, particularly unsuited for mothers with strollers.

The Henry Hudson Bridge had followed what was emerging as Moses’s formula for steamrolling projects through: secure the funding, personally work the legislators, court the press to publicize benefits, and build quickly before the opposition can mobilize.

Moses had identified very real benefits of the bridge, which in any fair estimation far outweighed the concerns of a few residents. Now it would be possible to drive easily to Bronxville, Westchester County, and points north in New York State. What’s more, the bridge was part of a system that eased the flow of traffic all across the metropolitan area, connecting Manhattan to the rest of the world across the vast waterways that surrounded it. About a mile down the road, the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey had opened in 1931. The West Side Highway took traffic down to midtown and all the way to the lower end of Manhattan, Wall Street, and a new tunnel to Brooklyn. The Triborough opened up destinations to the east—Queens and Long Island—and Westchester County and Connecticut. Motorists hungrily took to these new routes; in its second year of operation, six million cars traveled on the Henry Hudson Bridge. For La Guardia, the modern infrastructure was critical for revitalizing the city’s economy, and Moses was the man making it happen.

On that day in 1936, Robert Moses controlled virtually every batch of concrete poured, every shovel in the ground, and every land transaction linked to the development of roads and parks in and around New York City. He employed thousands of workers and doled out millions in construction, engineering, and consulting contracts. He devoted every possible moment to executing his plans for New York, at breakfast, in his limousine, or at intermission at the theater in the evening; only Sundays were reserved for time with his wife, Mary, and two young daughters. “He was always burning up with ideas, just burning up with them,” said a friend. “Everything he saw walking around the city made him think of some way that it could be done better.” Behind the scenes, Moses worked with legislators and councilmen, negotiated contracts, sketched out architectural details, and carved out special time to work with the press—limousine tours of projects for reporters, lavish dinners with editors, and leaks and scoops to favored writers, timed to get out in front of controversies. The Henry Hudson bridge and parkway system was no exception; Moses had arranged guided tours for the press to follow the grand opening.

After the ceremony, Moses and a chief engineer bundled into his car and drove up and down the new parkway and across the bridge. Moses was already calculating the torrent of dimes that would be collected. But in the coming days, he would be praised in the press not for his fiscal prudence but for the grandeur of what he had accomplished: “the most beautiful drive in the world,” a “masterpiece,” and a “motorist’s dream” that allowed drivers to go from lower Manhattan to Poughkeepsie without stopping for a traffic light. One scribe said the span was worthy of the praise that the poet William Wordsworth bestowed on Westminster Bridge crossing the Thames:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Another ribbon cutting, another triumph.

From an early age, Robert Moses possessed a singular drive, ambition, and confidence befitting a privileged upbringing. Born December 18, 1888, in New Haven, Connecticut, Moses was the second son of Emanuel Moses, a German-Jewish immigrant who fled the anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century Bavaria and founded an extremely successful department store. His mother, Isabella Silverman Cohen, was an energetic and strong-willed society woman in the well-to-do circles of the German-Jewish diaspora known as “our crowd.” The Moses family lived on Dwight Street in New Haven, but at the urging of Bella, as she was known, they moved to New York in 1897, into a five-story brownstone on East Forty-sixth Street left to her by her father. From the age of nine, Moses slept in a custom-made bed and ate dinner expertly prepared by a cook and placed in front of him by servants in a dining room of chandeliers and fine china. The family took summer trips to Europe or retreated to an estate in the Adirondacks. Robert was driven at all times by a chauffeur, a practice he would continue for the rest of his life, never learning to drive a car.

While other young men in such surroundings might become listless and pampered, Moses quickly developed a hard-charging style that would stand him in good stead in his intellectual and professional life. In this he took after the women of the Moses family, in particular his grandmother and mother. While Emanuel Moses was reserved and passive, Bella was stubborn and arrogant. His grandmother Cohen was known to cut to the front of ticket lines, elbowing people out of her way.

Handsome and charming, Moses excelled in his years at prep school. He quickly joined the ranks of the popular boys while developing a reputation among teachers as nothing less than brilliant. A good athlete, he chose sports—swimming and track—that emphasized individual achievement over teamwork.

In 1905, at the age of sixteen—he had completed preparatory school a year before most of his peers—Moses entered Yale University. He would quickly learn that his religion—the freshman directory identified him as “Hebrew”—would prevent him from breaking into Yale’s major social clubs and student associations. Instead, he aimed for a lower tier of organizations, like the Yale Courant, an alternative to the more prestigious Yale Literary Magazine. As a sophomore, he joined the swimming team, where he proved himself a strong competitor.

His intellectual interests ranged widely in his Yale years, and he impressed his fellow students with his voracious appetite for knowledge, as he often stayed up most of the night reading. One Yale friend recalled seeing a stack of books on his desk, none of which had anything to do with the courses he was taking. He became president of the Kit Kat Club, made up of literary scholars and admirers of Samuel Johnson, and with a classmate published an anthology of student poetry.

Like Jacobs, Moses tried his hand at poetry, mimicking a grandiose, Victorian style:

To-morrow!
But the morrow sure
To-morrow!
The lashes slumber lure;
Ah! Shall we greet the dawning day,
Perchance in vain we longing say,
To-morrow!

Headstrong and confident, if something of a loner, Moses made his presence felt on campus, writing strongly worded editorials for the Yale Daily News urging a diversion of funding from football to so-called minor sports, including swimming. But it wasn’t long before he overstepped. He came up with an idea for raising funds for the swimming team that the captain disagreed with, and retorted that if the captain didn’t go along with his scheme, he’d quit. Much to his surprise, his resignation was accepted on the spot. The confrontation would leave a lasting impression on Moses; he did not like feeling powerless. He would not rejoin the swimming team, despite intense lobbying efforts enlisting everyone from teammates to the pool custodian.

In the end, he received recognition at Yale in other ways. By his senior year he had become a well-known figure in literary and arts circles, conversant in Latin, and able to quote long stretches of verse. He left behind the single rooms he used for the first two years and started bunking with roommates, whom he invited home for weekends in New York. He made new friends and was elected to Senior Council, a student government body controlled by fraternity men. In 1909, Moses graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and took his place in the yearbook photograph in dignified necktie and three-piece suit.

Though he told friends he wanted to go into public service, he sought to remain in academia for a little while longer. He wanted to be a Rhodes scholar, but at the time the program was available only every other year, and not in the year he graduated from Yale, so the family paid for him to attend Wadham College at Oxford University.

Moses relished the time in England. “The Oxford education … confers on the average undergraduate independence of mind,” he wrote in an article for the Yale Alumni Weekly. The ambitious American became captain of the swimming and water polo teams, as well as of the Oxford Union debating club. He received a master’s degree from Oxford in jurisprudence and political science and wrote a thesis on the ideal system for structuring government jobs, a topic that became a focus of his postgraduate education. He envisioned a civil service system where people were hired and promoted based on merit and performance, rather than on political ties and patronage—though he insisted that the most important jobs in government should go to the most educated.

After some time in Lucerne and Berlin, in 1912 he returned to the United States, where he was often mistaken for British as a result of the accent he now affected—and two years later earned his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, at the age of twenty-five. He clearly valued the authority and prestige conferred by the degree, never objecting when he was introduced as “Dr. Moses.” His blue-chip credentials were complete—Yale, Oxford, and Columbia.

Eager to plunge into the inner workings of government, Moses attended a training school at the Municipal Research Bureau in New York. The bureau was the research and advisory arm for the nationwide progressive movement, which sought to rid local governments of patronage, corruption, and waste. Moses, impatient to make an impact on the organization, soon volunteered to work for the bureau for no salary, which his family wealth allowed him to do in a number of jobs throughout his career. From these early days, he was more interested in accruing power than in making money. Perhaps because of his second-class status at Yale, he was determined, once he entered the arena of politics and government, to get to a position of influence quickly. His impatience led him to be critical of the Municipal Research Bureau’s style, and its preference for careful study over bold action.

Moses would also find love at the lower Manhattan offices of the bureau. In the winter of 1914, he befriended a secretary from Wisconsin, Mary Louise Sims, granddaughter of a Methodist minister, and asked her out for a date. In Sims, Moses saw a smart and hardworking woman who, with fair skin and blond hair, seemed to exude wholesomeness. By the summer of 1914, when Moses, then twenty-five, went to the family compound at Lake Placid in upstate New York, he was talking of Mary and little else. The next year he brought her to meet the family, and they married later that year. Like Robert and Jane Jacobs, Robert and Mary Moses would remain married for a half century.

Working at the Municipal Research Bureau, Moses found that his expertise in government organization and civil service was much in demand. John Purroy Mitchel, a young prosecutor whose gambling and conspiracy investigations had produced a series of resignations in government, had been elected mayor in 1914. At thirty-four, the “boy mayor,” the youngest chief executive New York had ever seen, set out to reform city government, which at the time was controlled by the infamous Tammany Hall machine—the system of sweetheart deals, kickbacks for government contracts, and buying votes with patronage that epitomized turn-of-the-century municipal corruption.

When Mitchel looked to the bureau for help in restructuring the city’s system of hiring and promotion, Moses was ready with his dissertation. He proposed a merit-based system with an elaborate flowchart of evaluations and quantitative measures of performance, revolutionary ideas for the time. Predictably those who had cushy sinecures through Tammany Hall connections reacted fiercely booing and hissing in the back of the room at hearings where Moses presented the new system. Moses, lugging a bulging leather briefcase and wearing the same white Brooks Brothers suit day after day, calmly talked through the heckling. It was a fleeting moment in the spotlight, however. In 1917, Mitchel was defeated by a candidate from the Tammany Hall machine, and the new administration was not interested in Moses’s ideas. His first major initiative in government came to an ignominious end.

By that time, the United States had plunged into World War I, and Moses managed to find work at the Emergency Fleet Corporation, a government organization set up to speed construction of shipyards. But he was fired after less than a year for writing a sharply worded report on inefficiencies in the procurement process. Moses, who had moved to an apartment on the Upper West Side, found himself jobless. His mother continued to send him money, but he wanted to be more self-sufficient to raise his two young daughters, Barbara and Jane, in the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. He had visions of a bigger family—he wanted a son—though those plans ended when doctors informed Mary she could not have any more children.

In the fall of 1918, Moses received a telephone call that would set him on his path. Belle Moskowitz, a fiery, forty-year-old reformer close to New York’s incoming governor, Alfred E. Smith, offered Moses a job running a new commission charged with reorganizing the state’s government from top to bottom. Moses eagerly accepted and went to work, drawing on his blueprint for reorganizing New York City’s civil service. Over the course of several months, he demanded extensive revisions from his staff, and the initial document was aggressive and ambitious. At Moskowitz’s suggestion, Moses softened the blueprint’s language so that it would have a better chance of approval by the government establishment.

The final 419-page report, which called for consolidating 175 state agencies, bureaus, and commissions into 16 departments, extending the governor’s term from two to four years, and giving the chief executive more power to appoint and remove officials, reflected Moses’s belief in consolidating power so that government could act more quickly and decisively. Like his proposal to restructure civil service in municipal government, the state government reorganization was beaten back. Smith was voted out in 1920, and again Moses was out of a job. But Moses and Smith remained friends, often taking long walks together in lower Manhattan, discussing politics and government. The two men—remarkable colleagues given the difference of their backgrounds, Moses the Oxford scholar, Smith the cigar-chomping Irishman—plotted a comeback. When Smith was reelected in 1922, Moses returned to Albany, the state capital, as part of the governor’s inner circle. Though he had no official title, Moses quickly established himself as the governor’s most trusted aide. He helped write legislation, and lawmakers knew he was speaking for the governor when he stopped them for chats in the halls of the statehouse.

“Bob Moses is the most efficient administrator I have ever met in public life,” Smith observed of his apprentice. “He was the best bill drafter in Albany … I know he went to Yale and Oxford, but he didn’t get that keen mind of his from any college. He was a hard worker. He worked on trains, anywhere and any time. When everyone else was ready for bed he would go back to work.”

After being elected to his second term as governor, Smith put Moses in charge of several important projects, including a reorganization of the state’s prison system and the institution of railroad grade crossings, and was so impressed with the work that he offered Moses virtually any state job he wanted. There was one thing he would like to be in charge of, Moses told Smith. He would like to run all of New York’s parks.

The idea had come to him on a hike around Long Island. In his spare time, Moses often ventured out from a bungalow he and Mary rented in Babylon to the beaches and estuaries east of New York City, where he discovered vast acres of state-and city-owned land and beachfront in the region. There was no easy way for the public to gain access to these largely wild areas, he realized, and no formal system for the state to maintain, develop, or acquire new land. The disarray was particularly acute on Long Island, but Moses learned that the problem was statewide and proposed a new agency to Smith that would turn the large tracts of unused land into a huge, integrated park system, accessible by the public, by car, on a network of new parkways.

“You want to give the people a fur coat when what they need is red flannel underwear,” Smith told Moses. The governor was dubious at the sheer breadth and cost of the plan—a $15 million bond issue to acquire hundreds of acres and build extensive amenities. But Moses took Smith on a tour of Long Island, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks, convincing him of the potential to create a world-class parks system. Moving earth, building grand public works, and laying down roads were thrilling for Moses, but he knew what Smith would find valuable about the idea: parks were good politics. Voters loved them. Millions of ordinary New Yorkers sought places to escape to on the weekends, but they had no dazzling destinations and no way of getting anywhere.

Moses won Smith over, and the governor pushed the state legislature to pass the plan in 1924. Smith named Moses president of the newly created New York State Council of Parks and chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission.

Thus empowered and funded, Moses leased an office in Manhattan and furnished it lavishly. He hired secretaries and staff, including a driver, and acquired the finest black Packard limousine available. Meanwhile, he was building an additional parks headquarters on the estate grounds of the financier and diplomat August Belmont in the town of North Babylon, Long Island. He worked from early in the morning until midnight, often including Saturdays, and his team was expected to do the same. Soon the black sedans of the parks commission began appearing at the edge of farmers’ fields at all hours, as surveyors mapped out the ambitious new parks system and the network of roadways that would provide access to it.

In Moses’s vision, these were not just any roadways but landscaped parkways or “ribbon parks”—two lanes in each direction, sweeping and carving through the wooded countryside—with no traffic lights, no left-turn lanes, and no commercial development except for service areas with a strictly uniform appearance. Cars—and only cars, as Moses made sure that all bridges over the parkways were too low for buses—could zip along the motorways at forty miles per hour, their progress uninterrupted.

To Moses’s chagrin, the people of Long Island did not greet his plans warmly. Farmers shooed away members of Moses’s team with shotguns, and town managers rose up in rebellion against this unprecedented incursion by the state. Above all, the plans stirred the ire of the wealthy landowners who had settled in the pastoral countryside east of Brooklyn and Queens, including some of the wealthiest families in America, Morgans and Vanderbilts and Winthrops and Carnegies. Several of Moses’s parkland expansion schemes and two major east-west routes, the Southern State Parkway and the Northern State Parkway, would nip off corners of estates and run through country-club grounds.

Moses plowed ahead. “If we want your land, we can take it,” he told one farming family. Instead of negotiating with the wealthier residents, Moses simply cited the enabling legislation for the parks agency, which he himself had written. The estate owners dispatched their lawyers, but Moses prevailed in the lawsuits; he had the law of New York State behind him, and it allowed him to “appropriate” needed land. By 1927, any meaningful resistance had been toppled, and earthmovers, graders, and pavers began their work, bringing the first segments of the network of parks and roadways that Moses had envisioned to life.

Moses was satisfied with the victory, but he knew his power could come to an end if Smith was defeated again. When John Mitchel failed to win reelection in 1917, Moses had seen how his proposals to reform government disappeared. The key, he decided, was to raise the public’s expectations and get projects rolling, so that elected officials would not dare to try to stop them. Involving ordinary citizens in the process was the first thing to go; public participation, he had already learned, only slowed things down. Great public works could not be achieved by committee. “There will be squawking no matter what we do,” he said. “We must face at once the demands of those impatient for new facilities and the anguished cries and curses of those who want to be left alone.”

From the 1920s on, Moses sought to rope himself off from dissenting views, and even mere questions, about his projects. The Long Island experience had taught him how to dispatch with sophisticated and organized opposition—and he discovered that opposition from the powerful and the wealthy could actually be useful. When one member of a country club testified at a hearing that he feared Long Island would be “overrun with rabble from the city,” Smith responded: “Rabble? That’s me you’re talking about.” Moses wasted no time portraying the estate owners and country clubbers as selfish elitists, standing in the way of access to recreation for the people. “A Few Rich Golfers Accused of Blocking Plan for State Park,” read the front-page headline in the New York Times on January 8, 1925. “We were bested by every sort of social or political influence,” Moses said, but when one opponent said “undesirable people” would come to the parks, “there was no further need for us to make any argument. That [man] won our case.” Moses began to view controversy as an essential part of getting things done.

In those early years, Moses strove to model himself after Baron Haussmann, who created the grand boulevards and civic monuments of nineteenth-century Paris under Napoleon III. The man who transformed Paris “has been described as a talker, an ogre for work, despotic, insolvent, full of initiative and daring, and caring not a straw for legality. Everything about him was on a grand scale,” Moses later wrote admiringly. His “dictatorial talents enabled him to accomplish a vast amount in a very short time, but they also made him many enemies, for he was in the habit of riding roughshod over all opposition.”

In the democratic twentieth-century United States, Moses did not have a dictator to back him, and thus developed strategies designed to make his projects inevitable, protecting them from democratic resistance. Along with writing his own legislation and running aggressive public-relations campaigns, one of his principal tactics in defeating opposition was simple: act fast. Plowing ahead with land acquisition and laying asphalt, he learned that once projects were started, they gained a momentum all their own. The opposition had a tough time arguing against something that was already half-done or built, and courts would never make him tear something down that public funds had already paid to build. A fellow state commissioner once filed suit after Moses failed to use union labor in constructing bathhouses. The court rebuked Moses for violating state law, but the structures, already completed, were left standing. “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up,” he told a friend.

Moses’s success building parks and parkways was accompanied by other achievements; his perseverance was paying off. The state legislature, under pressure from Smith, had finally passed the Moses-authored plan to reorganize state government in 1926, six years after its debut. A year later, Smith rewarded his most trusted aide by nominating Moses to be secretary of state. In what was his first salaried position in the state government hierarchy, Moses threw himself into the job, using the perch to push a wide range of initiatives. He built hospitals, prisons, and parkways, projects about which Smith would boast during his campaign for president in 1928.

Moses’s tenure as secretary of state was short-lived. In 1928, Smith lost in the presidential campaign to Herbert Hoover, and a rising star named Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected governor of New York. FDR and Moses detested each other. A few years before, when Roosevelt was in private legal practice, stricken by polio, and readying for his run for governor, he had asked Moses to hire his loyal adviser, Louis Howe, at the new state parks agency. The suggestion was that Moses should provide Howe with a position in which he would do little actual work. Moses refused. After Roosevelt was elected governor—despite a plea from Smith to keep Moses as secretary of state—the future president readied his own choice for the position. Moses learned that he would be the only member of the state cabinet not to be reappointed, and resigned before Roosevelt could make the announcement.

But Roosevelt recognized that Moses had momentum developing the parks system, a popular project with the public and especially the press. Though he would have liked to rid New York state government of Moses entirely, Roosevelt allowed him to continue the parks work. The strategy Moses had crafted on Long Island had worked perfectly. If the public supported his projects, he could stay on no matter who the chief executive was.

The vision for the parks system on Long Island had been audacious from the beginning. By the end of the 1920s, Moses was thinking even bigger. While exploring the southern coast of Long Island, he discovered miles of new land that had been created by shifting currents, waves, and sand deposits. The barrier beach known as Fire Island was accessible only by boat. Sketching plans on the back of an envelope, Moses set out to transform a nearby sandbar into a signature public recreation area with bathhouses, restaurants, and a water tank hidden inside a soaring Venetian bell tower—all just a short trip from downtown Manhattan. He pushed his team of engineers and architects to make every detail and finish the finest possible, insisting on sandstone and brick for the bathhouses, huge parking lots, a theater, and “wholesome” games like shuffleboard. The two Jones Beach bathhouses, faced with an especially expensive brick that Moses had admired on an East Side hotel, cost a million dollars each to build. The design was a mix of Moorish, Gothic, and modern styles, complete with mosaics, elegant signs, fountains, railings, and trash cans that all evoked a maritime theme. Moses was involved in the smallest details, including a suggestion for shelves at just the right waist-high level for diaper-changing mothers.

Moses was able to secure the necessary state funding for Jones Beach by articulating his early philosophy—that the public, albeit primarily white and middle-class, deserved the best and would treat public facilities with respect. When Jones Beach was “made as attractive as if it were a private club of rich men, but sufficiently large to prevent overcrowding, something happens. The crowds are well-dispersed, quiet, respectable and leisurely. The atmosphere is that of a great public club and the patrons behave like club members,” he wrote. Jones Beach opened in 1930 and was wildly popular, with millions flocking there every summer. The project’s success helped keep Moses afloat during another period of political tumult.

When Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, his ally and lieutenant governor, Herbert H. Lehman, became governor of New York. Lehman viewed Moses with more tolerance than affection, but recognized his talents for securing funding and building public works—hugely important at a time when the federal government was ramping up spending to counter the Depression. Lehman appointed Moses chairman of the Emergency Public Works Commission and let him put men to work on big projects throughout the state. It was during this time that Moses would realize the importance of having projects planned and ready to go, in order to be first in line when the federal government announced new funding programs. He had such financing in mind as he rushed to secure the corridor for the Henry Hudson Bridge, and was eager to show Washington another project worthy of federal largesse: the Triborough Bridge.

New York City engineers drafted plans for a span connecting Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens—hopscotching over Ward’s and Randall’s islands at the tip of the East River—beginning in 1916, originally calling for the bridge to be clad in ornate granite and pairs of Gothic arches between steel suspension towers. The project was shelved after the stock market crash of 1929, however, and Moses stepped in by enlisting a new engineer, Othmar Ammann, to streamline the design and give it a more modern appearance. Federal funding was the key for getting it built, but Moses knew that Washington would be more likely to support the project if there was a long-term entity to bolster the financing and maintenance of the bridge. He proposed the independent Triborough Bridge Authority, signed into law by Governor Lehman on April 7, 1933, to handle the finances of construction and operation. The authority was given the power to issue bonds, for additional funding that was needed to complement the federal aid, and could expect a steady stream of independent revenue from tolls it would collect on the bridge.

The result was a self-contained entity that operated outside the checks-and-balances system of city and state government. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority would become the base of the Moses empire; he wrote the legislation creating it and served first as a member of the board and then as chairman. The authority had its own seal, as elaborate as the city’s or the state’s, and it adorned the sleeves of a fifty-plus-man police force, as well as official correspondence, license plates, and places of prominence on the structures themselves—as if to announce there was a new form of government in town, rebuilding and reshaping Gotham.

From the moment he took charge of the state parks agency, Moses recognized the importance of hiring teams of men who were bright and hardworking—but at the same time never so independent that they questioned his authority. The Triborough Bridge Authority allowed him to cultivate loyalty by doling out perks such as houses and consulting contracts for associates, even going so far as to put the spouses of key staff members on the payroll. He brought in the best and the brightest in architecture and engineering, such as Ammann, the brilliant Swiss-born engineer and designer of the George Washington Bridge, which opened in 1931, and Aymar Embury, designer of the Central Park Zoo and the McCarren Pool in Brooklyn, who favored the sleek and modern style known as art deco. When Moses called for a new administration building to serve as Triborough headquarters on Randall’s Island—supplanting institutions for the sick and the poor, which he hastily relocated—he turned to Embury for a beefy limestone-facade structure befitting his new base of power.

With money continuing to flow in from Washington, the authority soon ran at a surplus, allowing Moses to hire armies of union workers and consultants, real estate developers, insurance companies, and investment bankers who essentially owed him their livelihoods. He was steadily building a moat around himself that he hoped would allow him to operate with complete independence from city and state government.

When La Guardia was elected mayor of New York in 1933, Moses seized on a new opportunity to expand his influence. The new mayor wanted physical development to be the hallmark of his administration and tapped Moses as a top lieutenant to carry out that goal. La Guardia helped Moses gain complete control over the Triborough authority making him chief executive officer and chairman, and also named him city parks commissioner. Just as he had consolidated disparate bureaus for the new state parks agency during Alfred Smith’s tenure as mayor, Moses wrote legislation unifying the parks departments of the city’s five boroughs into a single organization. Then he launched an ambitious construction and restoration campaign for New York City’s public spaces. The line of architects applying for jobs in the new city program of public works was two blocks long in front of Parks Department headquarters on Fifth Avenue.

With the same zeal he had demonstrated at the state level, Moses revamped the city parks network by taking control of unused city and state land throughout the city and turning it into parks and playgrounds, sprucing up dilapidated facilities to the delight of local neighborhoods. In those early years of the La Guardia administration, Moses had close to two thousand projects going at once, ranging from park bench repairs to new golf courses to the new Central Park Zoo—the opening of which he had to miss because he caught the flu, nearly collapsed, and was ordered to stay in bed. His staff worried he was working so hard he sometimes never seemed to eat or sleep. He wore his suits until they were threadbare and his shoes until they went to tatters, counting on Mary to notice and replace them.

If the dedication to work nearly exhausted him, the payoff was clearly evident. Even the most cynical New Yorker was grateful for the citywide spruce-up that included thirty-eight thousand gallons of fresh paint, seventy miles of new fencing, walkways, and bridle paths, hundreds of drinking fountains, comfort stations, tennis courts, golf courses, and thirty-four new playgrounds. The trees were pruned, weeds removed, statues burnished. The achievements “seem little short of miraculous,” a 1934 New York Times editorial gushed. “It is almost as if Mr. Moses rubbed a lamp, or murmured some incantation over an old jar, and made the jinn leap out and do his bidding.”

The success was intoxicating, and in 1934 Moses decided to run for governor. As it turned out, he was a better political insider than candidate. On the stump, he berated the press, refused to pose for traditional campaign photographs, had little patience for courting campaign contributors, and delivered speeches that came off as lectures. Running as a Republican, Moses conducted an intensely negative campaign against the incumbent governor, Lehman, a popular and mild-mannered New Deal Democrat backed by Roosevelt. Though their families had grown up close to each other, and Lehman had kept Moses on running public works projects, Moses called Lehman weak, stupid, corrupt, and a liar. The attacks backfired among voters, and Moses lost by a record margin. He telephoned Lehman early on election night with congratulations, took his campaign workers out for a big dinner at Sardi’s, and tried to put the whole experience behind him by the morning.

Having offended Lehman and his staff during the campaign, Moses was again in danger of losing his appointed positions. Advisers to both Lehman and La Guardia urged their bosses to fire Moses. Through a top aide, President Roosevelt pressured La Guardia to get rid of Moses once and for all, and drafted a White House directive cutting off federal funds for the city if Moses remained in place. La Guardia hesitated, siding with the man who was delivering the parks renovations so popular with the public. Now a deft manipulator of the press, Moses leaked the plot to the press, and Roosevelt was portrayed as engaging in petty politics. Remarkably, Lehman, too, opted to keep Moses on, putting aside the attacks of the campaign; with so many public works projects under way, Moses was too important to lose. The master builder remained in power.

Outmaneuvering the president of the United States only made Moses more cocksure. His thirst for power kept growing, and his exercise of it grew less and less judicious. If a member of a commission or council was recalcitrant with a vote, he would have his team investigate for blackmail fodder—a drinking problem or an affair—though he himself was dogged by rumors of infidelities. Throughout the 1930s, Moses developed a well-earned reputation for vindictiveness. He razed the Casino, an elaborate banquet facility in Central Park, because Mayor Jimmy Walker, who had used it for lavish private parties, had crossed his beloved friend Alfred Smith. He demolished the Columbia Yacht Club at the foot of West Eighty-sixth Street after he felt the commodore running the club had been rude to him. When Roosevelt killed his plans for a new, six-lane bridge from Battery Park to Brooklyn, Moses reluctantly agreed to build the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel instead—but insisted that the portal had to be right at the spot of the historic Castle Clinton and the aquarium it housed, requiring its destruction. In every case, Moses operated outside the jurisdiction of city government; on more than one occasion, La Guardia resorted to dispatching police to make sure Moses didn’t tear things down.

Though fiery rhetoric had not served him well in his bid for governor, as city commissioner and head of an independent authority Moses felt free to lob bombs at will. He reserved special vituperation for architecture and planning professionals, even as he embraced many aspects of contemporary design. He had a lively private correspondence with Frank Lloyd Wright, and supported the construction of the Guggenheim Museum, though in public he castigated the star architect as someone who “was regarded in Russia as our greatest builder.” Lewis Mumford, the urban theorist and architectural critic for the New Yorker, was, according to Moses, “an outspoken revolutionary” who only wrote articles and never built anything, part of a crowd of leftist urban theorists. Moses’s references to communism were intentional. Before Jane Jacobs was defending herself in the State Department interrogatory, and as Joseph McCarthy prepared to bring red-baiting to an art form, Moses had an intuitive sense of how to undermine others while promoting his own agenda: he questioned their patriotism.

Moses was nothing if not mercurial, punishing those he perceived as enemies and rewarding loyal friends and those he took under his wing. When security guards caught a fourteen-year-old boy named David Oats who had sneaked onto the grounds of the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, they brought him before Moses himself for a lecture. But instead, Moses was charmed by the trespasser, caked in mud as he was, and asked him if he would like to pursue his interest in the fair. Moses brought him into the planning process; Oats went on to lead the World’s Fair Association and became a fervent defender of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Moses left him priceless World’s Fair memorabilia in his will. Other friends received good treatment for life. He gave Alfred Smith his own key to the Central Park Zoo so the retired governor, a lover of animals, could enter at any time to walk through the menagerie. Moses always remembered a favor, just as he never forgot a slight. His staff lived in fear of angry outbursts, he swore and used ethnic slurs, and on one occasion he physically assaulted a political rival. The dials of his personality—charm, anger, gratitude, vindictiveness—were turned all the way up.

A lover of theater, the opera, and big bands like those led by Guy Lombardo, a close friend, Moses also possessed a flair for entertainment. He relished the opportunity to flaunt his showmanship at New York’s World’s Fair in 1939. La Guardia put him in charge of the project, and Moses quickly identified a site—an ash heap in the northern section of Queens, which he transformed into Flushing Meadows Corona Park, later home to Shea Stadium and the World’s Fair of 1964. The World’s Fair had become an important event for cities, producing the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Crystal Palace in London, and the Beaux Arts exhibition known as the White City in Chicago. The fair had become an opportunity to show off a vision of the future, and Moses settled on a theme: “the world of tomorrow.” He brought in General Motors to put on Futurama, a model of the twentieth-century city knit together by highways. Some forty-five million visitors were dazzled by the promise of such a modern metropolis.

That the centerpiece of the World’s Fair was an exhibit on cars and highways was no accident. Moses was convinced that middle-class families would remain in New York if they could get around by car, and pushed ahead with plans for a comprehensive roadway network for the metropolitan area. He viewed mass transit—crowded streetcars, buses, and subways—as a hallmark of the past. Cities built the first subway systems around the turn of the century, and for nearly four decades moving people en masse was an efficient way to provide transportation in places of great density. But for Moses, the automobile provided mobility and convenience that transit could never match. He was strictly a planner for cars and trucks and never incorporated transit in his plans—even when it would have been simple to put a rail line down the median of his highways, as other cities, including Chicago, were planning to do. “Cities are created by and for traffic,” he declared.

And so Moses charged on, determined to make it easier for traffic to flow in and around New York City. The Marine Parkway Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge, at the time the world’s longest span for vehicles, opened in 1937, providing access to Rockaway and Jacob Riis on the southern shore of Long Island. The Henry Hudson got a second deck in 1938. The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge connecting Queens and the Bronx opened in 1939. The new roadway network in Brooklyn, Queens, and out onto Long Island was taking shape, as the Grand Central, Interborough, Belt, Laurelton, Cross Island, and Whitestone parkways were all in final stages of construction. When traffic jams clogged the system, Moses simply proposed widening and extending the highways even more.

The elevated Gowanus Parkway, his last parkway project before a renewed campaign of expressways following World War II, gave a taste of what was in store for the urban neighborhoods in the path of progress. Moses had insisted on putting the four-lane parkway along Third Avenue in Brooklyn, where an elevated subway line already ran. Knowing that a dark, damp overpass would be far worse than the El, residents pleaded for the roadway to instead cut through an industrial area one block over. But Moses would not agree to move the corridor he had planned. He had made the calculations and knew best where the roadway should be, just as he had in the case of the Henry Hudson Bridge at Spuyten Duyvil. Fiddling around with the right-of-way would only lead to costly delays. Thus, the Gowanus soared through, rattling windows on either side, and left the avenue in darkness. The neighborhood would, as a result, succumb to blight, closed storefronts, and crime.

Moses believed that some pain was necessary in modernizing an old, cluttered city like New York. Yes, some people had to be moved, and yes, the process could be viewed as ruthless, but he considered his methods more disciplined than inflexible. “You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia,” he said, “but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”

Beginning in the 1940s, Moses turned to a new project: housing. In 1942, the New York state legislature passed the Redevelopment Companies Law, which allowed the city to clear land using eminent domain, the constitutionally enshrined power of government to seize private property for public use. Under the new law, once land was taken, it was to be turned over to private developers to invest in large-scale housing projects. The idea was to enlist the private sector to build affordable housing that would help the city retain its middle-class population, who were increasingly departing for the suburbs. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was the first to take the plunge, building Stuyvesant Town, a complex of thirty-five new buildings on more than sixty acres on the Lower East Side, housing twenty-four thousand people.

Stuyvesant Town was for Moses the first big opportunity to design large-scale housing in New York City, and Moses convinced La Guardia to let him manage the project. Though continually riddled with controversy because of its whites-only covenant, a clause demanded by Metropolitan Life, and the outright eviction of most of the low-income residents who lived at the site prior to rebuilding, Stuyvesant Town nevertheless achieved the stated goal of the city—more affordable places for the middle class to live—and Moses had his entrée into the area of housing.

New York’s Redevelopment Companies Law was only the first step. Moses and many others in government believed that a more systematic effort was necessary, to fund an even more massive redevelopment of the city encompassing several blocks at a time. The vision was to clear away slums and build not only housing but new commercial, civic, and cultural projects as well. A friend and fellow Yale man, Senator Robert Taft, gave Moses advance notice that Congress, worried about the decline of the nation’s cities, was about to pass the Housing Act of 1949, which included a program known as Title I, in which cities could take property by eminent domain and turn it over to private developers for redevelopment. Moses had seen how New Deal money for parks and projects like the Triborough Bridge was a godsend, and was similarly ready with several proposed projects so New York City could be first in line for the new millions for public housing under Title I. The policy that would come to be known as urban renewal allowed Moses to work at a much grander scale.

The motivation behind urban renewal was the prevailing view, after World War II, that major cities were in decline, marked by unhealthy, crowded conditions, traffic congestion, and an eroding manufacturing base. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities found themselves losing population to the suburbs and became increasingly fearful of turning into economic backwaters. Moses and other planners of the time proposed the solution: new infrastructure, including highways and parking garages, to provide better access to downtowns; cultural and civic attractions; and the massive construction of affordable housing to retain working-and middle-class families.

The problem, of course, was that cities had already been developed over the previous hundred years. There was no blank canvas for Moses and other urban planners to create this new vision of the modern city. They needed to tear down existing neighborhoods and start over and, to do so, set out to designate those neighborhoods as blighted slums. The modernist movement in urban planning and architecture provided the rationale—that close-knit, dense urban street grids must be replaced with fewer and taller buildings surrounded by open space to let in light and air. The cluttered, medieval-style cities of Europe had outlived their usefulness; modern times and new economic realities demanded a new approach to human settlement. Moses and the modernists believed that cities weren’t static places and that centuries-old block and building layouts needed to be revisited and revised.

Moses was in a strong position to lead urban renewal in New York City. He convinced William O’Dwyer, who succeeded La Guardia as mayor in 1946, to name him to the new post of “construction coordinator,” giving him free-ranging power over redevelopment efforts. Moses was also named chairman of the Emergency Committee on Housing, which had urgency in its title that Moses would eagerly exploit to push projects and secure funding. In 1946, he became chairman of the Committee on Slum Clearance, which ultimately allowed him to channel federal funds to New York for urban renewal—easily outrunning other planning czars in Boston and Philadelphia. New York over the next twelve years would receive close to $70 million in Title I funds, far outperforming Chicago, which received the second-largest amount of funding at about $30 million. In his industry, Moses was the pacesetter, and no one came close to keeping up.

In the same way that Moses wanted to break the logjam of traffic congestion with smooth, wide-open highways and bridges and tunnels, he viewed the problem of housing as a kind of engineering challenge. While he claimed he was not a big fan of modern architecture—he preferred a more traditional style to appeal to broad public tastes, such as the neoclassical style he employed at Jones Beach—the emerging modernist formula for urban design provided a handy vehicle for maximizing the number of housing units. The model had been established by Le Corbusier—towering slabs with open space at their bases, which would serve as a kind of communal front yard for the low-income families who would inhabit the developments. For the housing campaign using Title I funding, Moses relied on private developers to undertake design and construction, some of whom produced fine examples of modernist architecture, the dominant style of the time. But in other cases, particularly for low-income housing, the architects hired by the private-sector developers, who were seeking to cut costs, produced complexes that were monotonous and plain. Urban renewal and housing in New York City soon took the form of big rectangular structures and cruciform, X-shaped towers on what became known as superblocks—the cold and uninviting environments that Jane Jacobs observed in East Harlem and that stymied the basic functions of city life. Increasingly, Moses abandoned the attention to fine details that characterized Jones Beach and the swimming pools and bathhouses, instead focusing on the number of new apartments—just as his later expressways, built with the single goal of the swift flow of traffic, possessed none of the charm of his wooden-guard railed parkways. Swept up in the power he had amassed, he pursued the singular goal of building more housing, with less attention to how the projects actually functioned.

There were other problems. The private developers that Moses used were interested in building profitable luxury housing, along with the more modest apartments, to be occupied by teachers and nurses and municipal employees working in the city. But invariably, even the ostensible affordable housing in many projects was still out of reach for the people living in the “blighted” neighborhoods that had been cleared away. Under the guidelines of Title I, evicted residents were supposed to be guaranteed relocation, but thousands of low-income and minority families fell through the cracks and could not navigate the bureaucratic procedures to move into new homes. Critics began to refer to urban renewal as “Negro removal.” And many of those lucky enough to move into the new apartments soon found that living conditions were not up to the standards that had been promised. The downside of handing over operations to private developers became apparent, as tenant complaints about basic functions were ignored.

To head off what he perceived to be a growing unease about urban renewal and the new housing construction, Moses cranked up the public-relations machine that had proved so useful in getting his parkways built on Long Island. He instructed a staffer to create pamphlets with plans and renderings that make “the statement that we mean business, that the procedure will be entirely fair and orderly, and that hardships will be, so far as humanly possible, avoided.”

In 1951, he produced a glossy brochure with Mondrian-like graphics on the cover, detailing seven major clearance projects in the works and plans for many more. From Harlem to Greenwich Village, and Morningside Heights to Brooklyn Heights, the promise was for modern city living to replace old and tattered neighborhoods.

“Five minutes from Wall Street and Times Square, in the heart of Manhattan, is rising a dream of the future that genius, skill and inspiration have made today’s reality,” read a brochure for the Washington Square Southeast urban renewal project. “It is Washington Square Village—destined to be a spacious new concept of city living to New York and the world.”

The vision extended well beyond housing. Moses set out to reinvent all the major features of the city—with new cultural and civic institutions, universities, and commercial development. Throughout the mid-1940s and early 1950s, he used urban renewal to create some of his best-known redevelopment projects. He laid plans for Lincoln Center, the performing arts complex on the Upper West Side, to be built in alliance with powerful nonprofit institutions such as the Juilliard School, the Metropolitan Opera, and Fordham University. The design competition for the complex attracted some of the biggest names in modernist architecture. A few blocks south, Moses transformed Columbus Circle, creating the New York Coliseum, a bulky civic center at the Paris-like monument and traffic circle at the southwest corner of Central Park. At the same time, Moses used his various positions heading city agencies to lead the effort to locate the new United Nations headquarters in New York, initially favoring a site at Flushing Meadows in Queens, but ultimately bringing about the modernist tower and plaza complex over the FDR Drive at Forty-second Street. Inspired by Le Corbusier, the big vertical rectangle was dark green glass on its east and west faces and white marble on its north and south ends, and featured a sweeping General Assembly building and park at its base. Almost immediately, it would become one of the city’s iconic structures.

As this massive redevelopment of New York City plowed ahead, Moses was lauded by the business community, academia, and the press as a visionary master builder; the future of New York as an economic power was at stake, and Moses, more than anyone, was dedicated to the city’s salvation. While mayors came and went, his prominence was a constant. Vincent Richard Impellitteri, who came into power when O’Dwyer was forced to resign due to allegations of corruption, deferred to Moses more than any of his predecessors had.

With so many major projects built or under construction, Moses was feted almost weekly at black-tie dinners, where he accepted awards and gave rousing speeches on the future of New York—speeches that, of course, highlighted his many accomplishments. He attended elaborate parties at the Jones Beach pavilion with his friend the bandleader Guy Lombardo, held court over lunches catered in his multiple offices by on-call chefs, and was a favored guest at major civic events. In his free time he went swimming in the ocean and angled for bluefish in Great South Bay on his broad-bottomed small motorboat, which Mary had named the Bob. Life was good.

By the mid-1950s—twenty years after his triumphant year opening the pools and playgrounds, the Triborough and the Henry Hudson bridges—Moses was on a winning streak with no end in sight. Federal funding for urban renewal continued to pour in, allowing him to transform whole sections of New York City. Elected officials and businessmen alike understood that any major initiative in New York City required the approval of Robert Moses.

Even the most shrewd and powerful men of the city could not prevail over Moses. Walter O’Malley owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had for several years pressured Moses to help him condemn land at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues, near the entrance to a Long Island Rail Road station, for a new home for the Dodgers. Thanks to suburbanization and the roads that Moses had built, Dodgers fans were fleeing the city for burgeoning Long Island developments such as Levittown and weren’t coming back to the Dodgers’ home stadium, Ebbets Field, which had no access to the LIRR and only seven hundred parking spaces. Attendance had dropped precipitously, and the stadium was deteriorating. O’Malley proposed a new, privately financed domed facility, but he needed the city to help him clear the proposed site, then occupied by a meat market and some industrial and storage buildings. Moses refused at every turn, saying he could not “dress up” the stadium site as a Title I project—although he had massaged the standards of the program in many other instances. Moses wanted to build a new baseball stadium, but not in Brooklyn—rather, in Queens, in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the World’s Fair grounds, the site of what would ultimately become Shea Stadium. O’Malley’s idea wasn’t his idea, and Moses wasn’t about to budge.

Robert Wagner, the newly elected mayor, worried that the Dodgers would leave New York, called a meeting with O’Malley and Moses, which took place on the porch at Gracie Mansion in 1955. In the meeting, recorded by a crew from CBS News, Moses accused O’Malley of being a fat-cat sports team owner who was blackmailing the city. O’Malley, Moses said, was essentially saying he would pick up his marbles and go home. Though Moses was as responsible for the impasse as O’Malley, he knew the characterization would strike a chord with the public. During the World Series against the Yankees that year, O’Malley announced he would take the team to Los Angeles, and O’Malley is reviled to this day for moving the Dodgers out of Brooklyn.

Moses was at the height of his power. Virtually untouchable in his government post, and highly skilled at outmaneuvering and crushing his opponents, he seemed invincible. O’Malley, a well-connected Irish businessman and strategic thinker, couldn’t find a way around him. Mayors, from La Guardia to O’Dwyer to Impellitteri and ultimately Wagner, bent to his wishes. Governors tiptoed around him, and even presidents couldn’t outfox him. The president of the United States couldn’t get him fired. By 1956, nobody—certainly not mere citizens—tangled with Robert Moses and won.

Certainly not a bunch of mothers.