Moses Supposes
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the renewed interest in Robert Moses, the legendary planner and builder, and connected this resurgence to what seemed to me to be a rash of massive transportation projects on drawing boards throughout the U.S. I’m revisiting the subject of Moses because I now have, courtesy of The New Yorker and Metropolis Magazine, some links to articles about the recent Moses revival. Three New York City museums have teamed up to offer a retrospective on the career of Robert Moses. A common observation about this exhibit is how it stays away from the “Moses as devil” mentality that hangs over any discussion of him and provides an opportunity to examine his work anew. If I had any reason to visit New York, I would certainly make time to check out this exhibit. I find Moses to be a fascinating character in large part because he was able to accumulate so much power and consequently accomplish so much. I believe that much of what he did caused irreparable harm to large swaths of the city, but I also can’t help but have romantic notions about possibilities of his position. Those of us who believe we have all the answers would kill for one day, let alone 30 years, with that kind of power. Plus, Moses unwittingly helped define our current thinking about the essential messiness of cities by accelerating urban renewal policy through to its horrific conclusion. Without Moses, there is no Jane Jacobs and the rekindled love for cities that has fueled inner city development for the past 20 years.
The coverage by Metropolis includes a reprinted 2002 article by Phillip Lopate, who makes a solid case for revisiting the notion of Moses as monster:
But let me try to make the case for Moses. My first line of defense is that he accomplished much more good than bad. “Oh, did Moses do good things as well?” I am sometimes asked incredulously. Well, yes: he built Riverside Park and Jones Beach and dozens of neighborhood playgrounds and swimming pools, added 20,000 acres to the city’s parkland and 40,000 acres to Long Island’s, built seven major bridges (Triborough, Throgs Neck, Bronx-Whitestone, Henry Hudson, Verrazano, Cross-Bay, Marine Parkway) and almost all the highways and parkways in Greater New York—627 miles total—without which the city would have become completely immobilized and stagnant…
My second argument is that Moses is unfairly held accountable for many questionable urban policies that were national, even global, at the time…What Moses did was to follow the ineluctable flow of dollars, wherever it happened to be at the moment, and siphon off a sizable chunk for what he deemed the betterment of New York...
My third argument is that too much of the anti-Moses sentiment derives from his character…and that we are far too petty and limited by political correctness in assessing it…what is wrong with an able person seeking to accomplish things as an appointed official if he cannot get elected to public office? Must we act naively shocked that, in a capitalist democracy, considerable clout may rest in the hands of nonelected individuals? Perhaps the time has also come to forgive Moses for roughly taking people by the arm when he wished to make a point...
I agree with Lapote that Moses was a product of the era. With the possible exception of Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, no public official, elected or appointed, would be able to accumulate so much power with the media scrutiny and ethical accountability of today. So a study of Moses is really a history lesson about an extinct species of master builders.
The challenge in reviewing the Moses era and its impact is to imagine the world as it might have been. Moses and other planners during the urban renewal era didn’t just destroy unique neighborhoods; they foreclosed competing visions of the future. Even among Moses’s detractors, his bridges are viewed as triumphs. Why? Most of the bridges serve only cars and are too long, even today, for most pedestrians and cyclists. I don’t wish that New York was free of bridges, but they might have a different look and feel if they were designed to appease the carless as well as car owners. Instead, the bridges became just another exit from the city. The bridges, like Moses’s much maligned highways, only reinforce the vision of the car as the conqueror of the city, and the city is only now beginning to reconnect its chopped up waterfront for those on foot or bike. As Vancouver, Amsterdam, Zurich and other world class cities demonstrate, New York did not need an answer to the rising dominance of the car. The age-old draw of a great city would suffice. New York City is as close to car independence as we get in the U.S.; who knows how much more livable the city would be without the accommodations made to the car by Moses. The legacy of Robert Moses is that we’ll never know.