Part Two: The Man Who Ruined New York

Robert is joined again by Bridget Todd to continue to discuss Robert Moses.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Oh, Holy leading Jesus on a cross, his legs broken.
That's the podcast. Stabbed in the side by a spear.
That's a different that's a different show. Holy that Jesus.
I'm Robert Evans. Are you? I am Robert Evans, the

(00:25):
Jesus of podcasting, crucified, crucified by the need to make content,
which I do for your souls in the same way
that Jesus died. I'm sorry you're fired. I feel like
I feel like this is a good direction to go

(00:47):
is do not. I think it's really going to work
out for so if people love blasphemy, everybody's a big
fan of blasphemy. That's what made the Beatles so huge.
It was blasphemy. They were, in fact, bigger than Jesus speaking,
a bigger than Jesus. Bridget Todd my guest today. I'm
good with that, bro. Yeah, you know what, I'm gonna
take it. I'll take that intro. I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah,

(01:10):
I mean you know the fuck him. Um, Bridget how
are how are you doing? How how are you feeling
as we go into part two? I'm feeling good. I
have to, I was telling Sophie before we hit record
I'm a little bit hungover, but I'm otherwise doing well.
That's great. Um, I am hungover from uh taking a

(01:31):
bunch of pain killers last night after laser eye surgery. Um.
Just like bridget all, it was an open bar. Oh
ship ye man, open bar. Had a minute since I
had me an open bar. I love great Goose Martini's
I can't be trust bar. Um. So let's uh, what

(01:54):
do we what do we? What do we bridget? When
we last left off, we're talking about that Jones State Park,
the overpasses that he built real low. Um, We're and
like kind of the debate to it about it to
this day and kind of the shitty arguments people make
to be like, no, he had to make the bridges
too low for busses. It was prettier that way. Um.

(02:17):
So yeah, and it's it's it's kind of like as
we kind of talk about the degree to which it's
fair to blame Moses for making bridges too low, and
you'll find again, you can find a ton of there's
like this whole wave in the last couple of years
and people being like, actually, Robert Moses did nothing wrong
and like it's unfair to critique him for that, they
all tend to ignore the fact that not only did

(02:37):
he like build his bridges super low, but he drafted
because again he's the legislation guy. Right, He's really good
at writing laws. One of the things he did was
he drafted and passed legislation to forbid the use of
busses on parkways. UM because again he wants to cut
off where poor people can travel to um. And and
this is like, uh, he considered, you know, this was

(03:03):
part of his This was part of his kind of
plan to silo off poor people of color from white
people in the places white people went affluent white people
in particular, because he was not just racist, he was classist. UM.
And laws like that kind of like trying to restrict
busses on parkways where something he would do as like
an emergency stop gap because he couldn't funk around with

(03:24):
like construction everywhere. Um. But he considered those laws a
lot less useful in stopping poor people and particularly poor
people of color um, from living around white people than
he did physical construction. Um. Again, you can change a law.
A law can be changed overnight, as we're all currently
dealing with, right. Um. It takes as a court of
returning something or a legislature voting infrastructure has a long lifespan, right, Um,

(03:50):
This is why you know he constructed something like a
hundred and seventy two hundred and eighty bridges that were
too low for buses. Um, and he saw that kind
of thing is much more important. He was quoted often
is saying, quote, legislation can also be changed. It's very
hard to tear down a bridge once it's up, um,
and Moses found it considerably easier, in fact, to tear
down the homes of poor black people, which he did

(04:10):
regularly as part of his construction schemes. His justification for
this was always the need to create a massive network
of urban highways within New York City. The number one
thing that he did, the thing that people remember him
fondly for, is he made all these bridges and parks.
The thing he spent most of his time doing was
building urban highways, because again, he hates public transportation. He
fucking loves cars. And not only do urban highways lead

(04:34):
to congestion, UM, lead to a city in which a
lot of people have to have cars that would probably
be happier living off a public transportation. What you can
do with a highway is you can use it as
a wall, because the highway is a very effective physical barrier. Right,
you can't like run across the highway, He'll get fucking killed. Um.
And so he was. He not only built these highways
and kind of tried to wrench away progress in New

(04:57):
York from towards public transportation, but and and in favor
of like everyone having their own fucking car. But he
used the highway to wall off poor, majority black parts
of the city from affluent white ones. And he also
made sure that whenever he was constructing a highway, because
again you're adding a highway to a city that's already
quite dense, you have to destroy a lot of houses,
you have to bulldoze neighborhoods. And it just so happened

(05:19):
that all of the neighborhoods he destroyed, uh in order
to make his urban highways were majority black. Um. Now,
Robert Carro argues that Moses purposefully placed roots in such
a way as to demand that it would demand the
eviction of large numbers of non white people living in
places he didn't want them to live, particularly neighborhoods that
bordered upper class white neighborhoods um and he would do

(05:40):
this even when the route he picked, even when like
going through these neighborhoods, was hideously inefficient. A great example
of this is the Cross Bronx Expressway, which I'm sure
we're all familiar if you've been to New York, like,
you know of the Cross Bronx Expressway. In order to
build the Cross Bronze Expressway, they had to eliminate the
neighborhood of East tremant Um. This one mile chunk of
highway couldn't be constructed without evicting tens of thousands of people,

(06:04):
most of whom were black. Under Moses's reign, these people
were forced out of their homes five years before construction
was completed, and the eviction was brutal. People did not
want to give up their neighborhood for this road, as
pa Rights quote now, and this is after people were
forced out, sometimes by police with weapons. Now, East Trement
looked as London might have looked after the if after

(06:25):
the bombs troops had fought their way through it from
house to house. It had the look of a jungle. Now.
Later in The Power Broker, Carol alleges that quote during
the seven years since the end of World War Two,
there had been evicted from their homes in New York
for public works, mainly Robert moseses public works some hundred
and seventy thousand persons. He suspects this number is actually
quite low. A report published more recently by the New

(06:46):
York City Planning Commission describes this process overseen by Moses,
as an enforced population displacement, unlike any previous population movement
in the city's history. Um, you could see this as
an act of ethnic cleansing, and it is in a
lot of way, and it's but it's done under the
auspices of what we're improving the city. This is going
to make it better for everybody. We have to add
in these roads. We're paying people for their houses even

(07:07):
if they don't want to sell them, and we have
to like force them out using police. I'm going to
quote now from a write up by Poverty Justice Solutions
that makes it clear just how fucked up the demographics
on this were. The evicted population was forty black or
Hispanic at a time when those demographics made up only
a little over ten percent of the city's overall population,

(07:27):
meaning that a large proportion of the evicted tenants faced
extreme discrimination and finding new housing, and little arrangement was
made by the city to help evicted tenants find new housing.
Carol tells us for seven years, Moses had been giving
the impression that the bulk of the low income families
displaced by his public works had been accommodated in public
housing projects. In reality, it was found that the percentage
of displaced families placed in public housing was pathetically small.

(07:51):
Many tenants were forced to crammond already crowded tenement buildings nearby,
exacerbating conditions caused by poverty and allowing exploitative landlords to
reap huge profits. In the worst cases, tenants were forced
to shelter in their old neighborhoods as they were being
torn down, surrounded by the deafening noise of demolitions, and
often without basic utilities. A member of the Women's City
Club investigating the Manhattan Town development on the Upper West

(08:13):
Side described people living in a scene that looked like
a cross section of bombed out Berlin. Right after World
War Two. Some of the tenements were still standing, broken
windows gaped cyclessly at the sky basement doors, yawning and
covered on the sidewalks, and surrounding them were acres strewn
with brick and mortar and rubble where wreckers and bulldozers
had been at work. So that's heart I mean, like

(08:34):
that's heartbreaking. And also even if those people have gone
into like public housing and like housing projects, that's not ideal.
And the fact that they that that wasn't even really
what was happening. They were being crowded into tenements and
things like that, Like I can only imagine the lasting
legacy that that is that had on those families for generations.

(08:55):
I mean, that's that's so heartbreaking. They're being made refugees
in the city they were born in um and it's
you can find pictures of this period of time and
they're they're pretty harrowing. They look like war zone photos.
It will be like, you know, you'll see pictures of
like three or four little black kids sitting on like
a pile of like rocks next to like a burnt
out shell of a building, and it's usually framed. Especially

(09:17):
when like it's brought up, it's like this is how
bad New York was before, like the city got poverty
under and got crime under control, and like all this stuff.
It's like no, no no, no, this is how ugly the
city was after they went to war with like several
neighborhoods in order to build a highway so that people
didn't have to get on a train because Bob Moses
didn't like trains. And then that's why this happens. Yeah, yes,

(09:38):
And then that sentiment that like false sentiment of like oh,
this is how the city was before they got it
under control, that's used to like usher in all manner
of really fucked up policies, Like it's such a fucked
up cycle of that really has criminalizing and targeting poor
people and black people and people of color at the

(09:58):
heart of it. And it's yeah, it really breaks my heart. Yeah,
it's really fucked up. Um. And when Bob Moses wasn't
busy displacing Black New Yorkers, he was deliberately routing roads
in such a way as to clog their neighborhoods, like
heavily black neighborhoods, with pollution and traffic. He specifically built
the road in a highway system of New York as
to offload the majority of the traffic and thus the

(10:20):
pollution on black neighborhoods. The Yale Law Journal notes that
he placed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridges exit ramp and
Harlem when a better location would have been the Upper
east Side. The only reason to locate it in Harlem
was to stop traffic from exiting and wealthy neighborhoods and
instead crowd Harlem with traffic headed for the bridge, right.
And I'm sure that when asked he was like, Oh,

(10:41):
the aesthetics are just better this way. It just looks
better this way. It looks better this way. This is
going to be like you know, he would They always
have some wonky reason why it's not racism, right, m hmm,
but it just keeps happening this way. Um, when he
constructed the Long Island Expressway, it would have cost Moses
four more to add mass transit in the middle of
the highway, right, to like add a mass transit line

(11:03):
in the middle of the highway. Four percent increase. And
we already know Bob Moses is great at getting his
budgets increased, right, right, So when he builds the Long
Island Expressway for four percent more, they could add mass
transit to the highway. This would have doubled the carrying
capacity of the Long Island Railroad, massive improvement and the
ability of New York's public transportation. Moses is presented with
this option um and says no. When he was designing

(11:26):
the Van Wick Expressway to the JFK Airport, he was
asked to reserve space for future mass transit. Basically like,
for an extra two million dollars, we can add space
into this development so that in the future we can
add mass transit and it will be cheap, right, um,
And the two million bucks would have cost is again
a peddling some given the budgets involved in the potential benefit. Uh,
he says no, And again he could have done it

(11:47):
back in like the fifties for two million dollars. Instead,
years later, when the city priced adding a rail link,
they were quoted three million. This is one of the concept.
This is part of what because of the way he
builds the highways and build the roads and builds the
parks in the city, one of the things that it
does because he hates public transit. It's part of why
it's so fucking expensive today to make any change to

(12:08):
New York City. And there's other reasons, right, there's permitting
and why. There's a bunch of reasons why. One of
them is that Moses specifically puts a bunch of ship
in the city that he builds without even though he
has the option without any like without space for a
public transit, because he hates it, right, And that's part
of why it's so expensive to expand anything in the city. Again,
not trying to say that's the whole thing. This is

(12:29):
a complicated story, but he's this is a significant factor
in it, and it's it's still very hard today. Like
it's like a lasting legacy, and it is really wild
to me. I know that you've said this a few times,
but like hating public transit while being in charge of
public transit and like never taking public he's in charge
of the parks. Well yes, but that that also means

(12:51):
that he gets to be in charge as they're building
these roads and these things that like connect you know,
all of this stuff. Like as he's doing these developments,
he gets to make decisions about public transit. Again, he's
not in charge of technically anything but the parks. This
is all the way he's like wielding power because of
he's he's he's not None of this is formal right.
None of this is like him issuing executive orders. This

(13:13):
is all him sitting down and talking to people are
like using the flex at the park depart Parks Department
has pushing his budgets like threatening people who are elected
with like well, if this doesn't get done, it's gonna
look bad. Like that's how he does all of this.
Um So, the New York City bridges that are built
under Robert Moses, which are the Tribe Borough, the Verrizono,
the Henry Hudson, throgs Neck, and Bronx white Stone, all

(13:35):
became iconic symbols of the city, and all of them
are built without a mass transit component. Moses repeatedly shut
down proposals to add this capacity whenever it came up,
and he also acted to hamper the subway system whenever possible.
On two occasions, the city attempted to build a second
Avenue subway line. Both times Moses stopped them from using
funds which he controlled, to pay for the project. He

(13:58):
instead diverted the money to bridges and high ways. In
nineteen fifty five, the transportation budget Moses Shepherd it was
large enough to modernize the Long Island Railroad and build
two new tunnels under the Hudson, and I'm gonna quote
again from the power broker here, it would have been
more than enough to build a long, proposed and desperately
needed Second Avenue subway, and to build a tunnel along
across the East River through which a branch of the

(14:18):
Second Avenue line would extend out to Queens to provide
adequate subway service there, and to build extensions of the
existing subway lines to Queens to provide service for the
hundreds of thousands of residents of Eastern Queens who were
miles away from the nearest subway, And to extend the
Nostrand Avenue subway in Brooklyn three miles along Flatbush Avenue
to a new modern terminal that would serve the growing
Mill basin area that possessed no rapid transit at all.

(14:41):
And to construct a new plaza and great elimination project
at the Calb Avenue that would eliminate switching delays which
caused the most severe bottleneck and train service between Brooklyn
and Manhattan. So he he has the budget, he has
can do all this right. This could have all been
in place decades ago in New York City, but instea
of using it for that, Moses ensures the money is

(15:02):
diverted to build more highways. He takes the money that
could have gone and he builds more fucking roads for
people's personal cars. Um. And again his justification for this
is always this is going to solve traffic. This is
going to help people's commute time, right right, like that, Yeah,
what a joke. It never does, right, raise your hand

(15:23):
listening at home, if you've been in a city that
expanded a highway and if it actually helped with your commute,
it never does, like if they always say that, it
never does. And the traffic in New York, as you
said Earl as you opened the show with it, is
a nightmare to this day. Yeah, it never quite seems
to work. Um the because again, cars are actually a
hideously inefficient way of getting large numbers of people around

(15:46):
a dense urban area. Um so yeah, And this becomes
clear eventually city officials are like, wait a minute, none
of these roads are helping with the traffic problem. The
in fact, the more roads that he builds, the worst
traffic gets because and also the more cars are just
in the city that need parking, that are like and
so parking is now more expensive and the streets are
even more crowded, and yeah, um people do start as

(16:08):
like this becomes clear and the fifties and stuff pushing
for him to add more public transit, but Moses, for
forty years, fights it every chance he gets. Right, He
doesn't always get his way, but he always fights whenever
he whenever it like crosses his purview. He fights to
limit the expansion of public transit because like, fuck people,
you know, I have a driver, right, I don't want

(16:29):
to get all I'm not gonna get on a subway. No,
I mean, the whole justification really is fun. People. He
probably has no sense of what like the ways that
expanding public transit would actually improve cities and improve livability.
He can't because again, he doesn't drive. So that's the
other part of this. He takes a car everywhere, but

(16:50):
a dude is driving him when he needs to get somewhere.
He has a fucking driver because he never learns how
to drive, So that also means he never has to park.
Like's not he is. He is. He is because of
his wealth and privilege, completely immune to the consequences of
all the decisions he's making. So he just gets to like, well,
when I'm on the highway, I just get to like

(17:11):
read my book or you know, work on paperwork or something,
and then off I go. And this seems like a
good development. No more nasty subways. You know, he sucks
pretty bad. He sucks pretty bad, Bridget. But you know
who doesn't suck pretty bad? You know who sucks good?
They suck incredibly these they could they could take the

(17:32):
lug nuts off of an eighteen wheelers tires, Bridget. Who's
that the products and services that support this podcast? Wow?
So if you just let me get away with that one,
she didn't stop it at all. Didn't stop it at all.
Suck him right off, pop him out. Have the energy
for this today? Well, our sponsors have the energy to

(17:54):
do that, Sophie. Here they are. Oh, we're back, and
we're talking about the mouth game of our sponsors, which
is solid um anyway. So if he's still fine with us, Wow,

(18:17):
she just muted herself. Incredible, just great, everybody's wow, what
a professional podcast. Unbelievable. I can't believe you're allowing us.
She gave me the thumbs up that means we're good
to go. Okay, So obviously Bridget Moses is new Defenders
cannot deny his staggering racism or the degree to which
his policies contributed to a small, choked city based around

(18:39):
the least efficient form of transit conceivable. But they will argue,
while he was not perfect, he did a lot of
good things to and people don't note all of the
good things he did for black people, right, he did
a lot of nice stuff for black people. So really, like,
how could he be that racist if he did nice
things for black people helping us out? What do you do?
Here's Bloomberg to tell you what he did? Okay, but

(19:02):
Moses was complex. He gave Harlem a glorious pool and
play center. Now Jackie Robinson Park one of the best
public works of the New Deal era anywhere in the
United States. A crowd of twenty five thousand attended the
opening ceremony in August nineteen thirty six, sixty nine, regiment
playing when the music goes Round and Round before park's commissioner,
Moses was introduced to great applause by Bill bow Jangles Robinson.

(19:24):
So this is undeniable, right, have you been to that park?
Jackie Robinson's Yeah, it's a lovely Park. It's undeniable that,
like he's the mastermind of making that happen. Um. But
even while he's building things that carried real benefits to
New York black citizens, he couldn't avoid the urge to
be racist as all hell. And this quote from the

(19:45):
Power Broker, you may need to brace yourself for here,
all right, I'm strapped in Robert Moses had always displayed
a genius for adorning his creations with little details that
made them fit in with their setting, that made the
people who use them feel at home in them. There
was a little detail in the Playhouse comfort station of
the Harlem section of Riverside Park that has found nowhere
else in the park. The wrought iron trellises of the

(20:08):
park's other playhouse and comfort stations are decorated with designs
like curling waves. The wrought iron trellises of the Harlem
Playhouse comfort station are decorated with monkeys. Oh my fucking god,
not monkeys. I mean it's I mean, it's it's really
saying the quiet part a loud, if you know what

(20:29):
I mean. Yeah, it's it's not even yeah, it's not
the quiet park for Bob Moses, Like well, It says
a lot about New York City government culture too that
like they're having they have there has to have been
like a meeting where they're like, how should we uh
and what what do you what do you want on
these on these playground Treillis is in the Harlem side
of the park, should we just add like the more
of those wave designs? And He's like, no, no, no,

(20:50):
let's put some monkeys in there. And everyone was just like,
oh yeah, okay, go right along with it. They definitely
had to have a meeting where this was decided and
everybody agree it was a good idea that he must
have signed off on it. All of that. Yeah, Now
that Bloomberg quote, because again it's very funny to me
as opposed to just saying that, like look his his

(21:11):
Like anytime you talk about like a powerful white dude
who's like Legacy was for a long time beloved but
also was super fucked up, you have to call it
complex um, which is I guess true because he was.
He had a lot of power that he exercised in
a variety of ways, and that is complicated. His racism
isn't complicated the fact that he also made some playgrounds

(21:34):
for black people is not does not make it complicated
that he did all of this, other that he bulldozed
neighborhoods and made people refugees. Right, it doesn't make it's
like saying, hey, there was a complicated figure, right, he
had he made some mistakes in Eastern Europe, But the
Volkswagen is a pretty good car. Right. That's a complex legacy,
you know, Like you wouldn't say that. Um, some people

(21:56):
would say that, And Bloomberg fails to note in their
talking about his complicated legacy that while Moses made two
and fifty five playgrounds in New York City during the
nineteen thirties, do you want to guess how many we're
putting Harlem? Oh? How many? One? Uh, that's one more
than I thought you were a park? What more do
you want? Well, it really reminds me of how we

(22:20):
started the previous episode about talking about sort of like
how people can be like patronized in this way where
it's like we'll give you a little something, but like
you know, it's just crumbs, and we know it's just crumbs,
and like you should still enjoy the park, and like
you shouldn't turn up your nose at this park. But
like you know, if you live in Harlem, you don't have,
Like you live in Harlem, what more do you want?

(22:41):
Do you want more than one park? Because like if
you haven't noticed your poor so like yeah, and we
need that space to to shotgun traffic into your neighborhood
so the rich people don't have to see it and
small and like keep you out. And this this was
this by the way, Like obviously there's other black wound
at neighborhoods in New York such as Stuyvesant Heights and

(23:02):
South Jamaica in this period, and in both of those
neighborhoods together he built a combined one park in the
nineteen thirties. UH nineteen forty three grand jury investigation into
the high crime rates in Stuyvesant in the neighborhood found
one of the major causes was a complete lack of
recreational facilities there, which again for nineteen forty three a
pretty reasonable finding that like, well, yeah, one of the

(23:24):
reasons crime is so high is there's fucking nothing to do,
Like are our neighborhood is a parking lot, there's no parks,
there's nowhere for people to like go be um so
like kids get up to fucking ship. Um. Now, A
stark example of how differently Moses valued projects meant for
white and black people can be seen in the fact
that he spent eight million dollars per mile on parks

(23:47):
in the Western Manhattan Waterfront. These parks butted up against
an almost all white neighborhood. Uh. Meanwhile, the four point
seven mile stretch of the park that butted up against
Harlem cost one point seven million per mile. So you've
got this big long park, the Western Manhattan Waterfront Park,
which is a huge park, eight million dollars per mile
in the parts of the park that are next doors

(24:08):
in white neighborhoods one point seven million per mile, and
the parts that touch Harlem. Right, it's just very blatant
when you actually look at the numbers. Um. Not a subtleman. Yeah,
these these disparities are very stark. And again the fact
that there are still people today who would look at
his legacy and be like, oh, well, it's unfair to

(24:29):
judge him by the standard, or it's very complex. It's like, no,
it's not, it's not very complex. Well, and they make
it part of like it is within their interest to
make it seem complex. And part of how they do that,
and this isn't just with Bob Moses, this is this
is like what that kind of person does with everything
is they'll zero in on some incredibly specific niche detail
and so let's start arguing, like, well, what about this

(24:49):
specific bridge, because this bridge, if you actually look at it,
they say it's this height, but really it would have
been this height at this point, and like if this
bridge is that size, and like number one, they're ignoring
a lot of other bridges. But also by zeroing in
on this one thing that they can claim was was
not wholly accurate about his legacy, they focus the discussion
about this single rather than like the broad picture of
how fucking racist the development that he engaged in was.

(25:13):
And it's broad ranging consequences and they're always going to
have with anything like this, one or two things they
can redirect around, Like so the heart that they who
built the best park in the city and it's in
a black neighborhood and it's like, yeah, well, how many
other parks city build in black neighborhoods, right, Like how
much did you spend on I'm compared to the white
neighborhoods right, but they don't. They don't want to have
like again, this is just this is how you kind

(25:34):
of redirect the topic of discussion and anger away from
things people should be angry about and things that like
have negatively impacted their lives, um and just try to
be like, well, he was complicated, and we're not denying
that there were problems with the man. But boy, look
at look at the how nice this one park was,
and look at how pretty these bridges are. And it's like, well,

(25:55):
why don't those bridges have transit access or why did
it cost an extra two million to put it in?
And any way, Robert Moses operated with almost unchecked power
until the late nineteen fifties, when resistance to his policies
finally started to build. Uh and I'm gonna quote now
from the Culture Trip. Often intransigent and prone to belligerence,
Moses grew complacent. A series of flubs, such as a

(26:16):
public tussle with the Shakespeare in the Park initiative, exposed
him to criticism. More broadly, his rip it Up and
Started Again approach to urbanism had begun to come under attack.
His plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would see
neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and Soho leveled became a
crisis point. Activists, including the journalist Jane Jacobs, who Moses
never met but has come to be seen as his
most eloquent nemesis, argued for a mixed use, street scaled,

(26:39):
community conscious city rather than one driven from above by
the all powerful planners. He was finally stripped of most
of his offices in nineteen sixty two, when state Governor
Nelson Rockefeller accepted a resignation that Moses had intended as
a feint. By this time, he had become so despised
that the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, which he had no
hand in, were penned on his ideology. So he does

(27:02):
like the tight of public opinion turns against him, But
it's because he like Fox with Shakespeare in the Park
and tries to build an expressway that would have destroyed
Soho at Greenwich Village. Like it's because he got he
like goes kind of mad with power, and people are like, well,
number one, the folks that you're attempting to funk over
with your policies has changed your exerting power against the folks.

(27:25):
You're exerting power against are like wealthier than they used
to be and wider than they used to be. So
that's going to be a problem for you. Um, but yeah,
it's it takes forty years of of of basically having
total power over like construction in the city of New
York for any of that to happen. Yeah, it's so

(27:45):
funny to me that you say that he was even
though he wasn't involved in Penn Station. It's like his
his ideology is sort of what shaped it. I don't
know if you have been to Penn Station lately, but
there is not a fucking single place to just sit
the funk down for one second. It's like, it's like
I have never seen anything like it. And it's like
even though he wasn't involved in that, in that redesign,

(28:06):
but there's no place to sit. So he shaped And
we're about to talk about this nationally, the attitudes towards
how you use architecture and how you use the layout
of a city to stop things like people sitting where
you don't want them, right, like the wrong people sitting
where you don't want them to sit, you know, exactly.
And it's so fund up because like even if you're

(28:28):
saying like, oh, we don't want on house people to
be sitting here, blah blah blah. That's sucked up. But
even if that's what you're going for, it makes the
experience worse for everyone, right, Like everyone loses, well everyone
but Bob Moses. I mean he eventually lost, but you know,
and he does. One of the things that's nice is yeah,
he gets he kind of ends his career in disgrace,

(28:50):
like he he does a power play with Nelson Rockefeller
and it's like, well, I'm going to resign if you
don't do this, and Rockefeller is like okay. Um, So
he doesn't get to destroy Soho or Gringach Village, which,
depending on your opinions of those neighborhoods, could either be
seen as a good or a bad thing. Um. He
does live to see the publication in nineteen seventy four
of The Power Broker by Robert Carrow, which effectively Sabbage,

(29:12):
savages his reputation and paints him as an outrageous bigot.
He spends his last years in a state of modest disgrace,
rich white person disgrace until he dies in nineteen eighty one.
By the time he passed, the New York City subway
system was in a disastrous state of repair. The financial
crisis of the nineteen seventies contributed to this, of course,
but the fact that Moses has been decades worth of

(29:34):
boom time money on choking highways played a larger role.
One year after his death, the m t A announced
a massive plan to revitalize the transit system. It has
remained in a state of deferred maintenance ever since, right,
Like this is I mean, you know, right, have you been? Right? Yeah?
I love the New York City subway system, but it
is not in It is in a state of disrepair,

(29:56):
and it has been for a really long time. And
it's it's a I guess we're talking about infrastructure from
so long ago that it has never really been updated
or modernized. No, and it part of why is because
Bob Moses made it a lot harder to do it.
And I'm gonna quote from a write up by Curb
to kind of make that point. As Raskin says, we're
still playing catch up from the mt A program initiated

(30:18):
in the nineteen eighties, and the current stakes are much higher,
as wridership levels recently hit the highest numbers since ninety eight.
Just this week, the MTA began the slow process of
addressing those issues. Chairman Joe Lhota revealed an eight hundred
and thirty six million dollar, thirty point action plan to
address the key drivers that account for subway delays and
system failures. As he said in a press conference announcing
the plan, we're here because the city New York City

(30:39):
subway system is in distress. But some see it as
too little, too late. Despite Moses's focus on highway development,
modern day New York emerged as a city whose inhabitants
depend not just on automobiles, but trains, buses, ferries, and bicycles.
And the period of development under Moses stands as one
of New York's great lost opportunities to invest in and
expand public transit. Because when it comes to Moses, as

(31:00):
Draper puts it, if he wanted to get it done,
it absolutely would have been done. And that's what an
indictment he had. This was again, there was more money
back then, there was more money to put into and
it was cheaper to do these developments. And when that
we had this kind of precious period that would not
wind up coming again. He poured all the money into
highways that he made deliberately like difficult to add transit to.

(31:23):
And that's like if you actually think this is not
a man who like murdered people, right, But if you
think about the lost human hours and like traffic and
transit in New York City, I don't know if that
seems like a body count, right, especially comedy people died
by getting hit by cars or whatever, run over across
walks and ship who might not have been if the
city had been built by a guy who was not

(31:45):
basing his attitudes on traffic on how nice it is
to be driven around in a limousine. Absolutely, and just
like asked someone who lived in New York not that
long ago, just the quality that the quality of life like,
I don't know. I I firmly believe that poor people
people around people, we doesn't we still do we deserve
like a nice quality of life. We didn't don't deserve
to be sitting in traffic and being claws like like

(32:10):
having all the respiratory and health impacts of things like
you know, environmental factors, like I think that it's easy
to not see these as deliberate choices and deliberate like
strategies to make our lives more difficult. And I think
the last he may not have murdered people, but the
lasting legacy of that, I think is really really something
to contend with. Yeah, it is something to contend with.

(32:33):
And you know what else is something to contend with,
bridget what's that the sponsors of this show. Uh, we're
back um talking about the legacy of Robert Moses and
probably you know, we've just talked about his influence on
the subway, which is extremely negative, and a number of

(32:56):
things he did in New York, Um and how people
are still grappling with the consequences of that to this day.
Perhaps the greater long term consequence of Robert Moses, though,
is the concept of exclusionary architecture. Well, again, he didn't.
He's not the first guy to do this. He was
its most successful, influential, long standing practitioner, and his work
provided models for cities around the United States. In Detroit

(33:17):
in nineteen forty, a private developer constructed an eight mile long,
six foot high wall to separate an existing black neighborhood
from a new white one in development. You may recognize
this from the eminem documentary Eight Mile Now This was
not done just because the constructing company was racist. This
was done because the Federal Housing Administration at the time
refused to finance new developments and less neighborhoods were segregated.

(33:41):
The wall still exists today, and Detroit is still the
most segregated metropolitan area in the country. Another divider is
a tin foot high, fifteen hundred foot long fence that
separated the mostly white development of Hamden, Connecticut, from the
majority black housing projects of New Haven. The fence, erected
in the nineteen fifties, was eventually torn down in two
thousand fourteen, but in the decades prior, it meant that

(34:01):
residents of New Haven had to travel seven point seven
miles just to buy groceries at a store three miles away. Right, Like,
that's again, and we talked about food deserts. This is
come down just in like what happened in Buffalo, right
the mass shooting at the at that supermarket, which like
people had to fight for for years to get because
of ship like this um due to inadequate public transportation

(34:23):
in New Haven. It took two hours to complete this journey.
And again, Bob Moses is a New York guy. He
barely leaves that fucking state. His work is in New York,
and you're not going to find people saying Bob Moses
told us to do this in Detroit, Bob Moses told
us to do this in New Haven. But as New
York goes, so goes an awful lot of As we
talked about f DR patterns, the way his government is

(34:43):
kind of set his administration is set up during the
New Deal on New York. It is a model in
a lot of ways for the rest of the country.
So people are following Bob's example, right, Not that they
not that they would not have tried to segregate neighborhoods
if he hadn't been around, But he provides a very
effective bluep it for how to do it. He's good
at it, and people pay attention. You know. Um. And

(35:04):
I'm going to close out this episode, probably by quoting
from the Yale Law Review quote. Often cities use barriers
and blockades to mold traffic patterns. For example, the concrete
barriers and ballards that exist throughout the streets of Berkeley, California,
were installed to calm traffic. However, the barriers do this
by preventing people from driving down the streets on which
they are placed. In Shaker Heights, Ohio, the city installed

(35:26):
a traffic diverter, which was called the Berlin Wall, for
black people by nearby neighbors in Cleveland. Yeah, I mean again,
people always like, know, how fucked up this is? Right? Oh?
People know? And again, like, I think that you've done
a great job of showing how like not only was
it effective, but it gave that like plausible deniability of

(35:49):
like it's you. You can't say he specifically is the
reason he didn't tell them to do this, But people know,
people feel it in their communities, like you you know
when you're being boxed out. Yeah, you know when you're
being boxed out. And it's like, again, this is a
broader problem than Bob Moses. He's just one of the
most successful problems solvers in the community of people trying
to solve the problem of folks who aren't rich and

(36:09):
white hanging out near folks who are rich and white, right, Like,
that's that's that's what's happening here. I'm going to continue
that quote. In some communities, the purpose of rerouting traffic
is to inhibit harmful behaviors tied to drugs and crime.
Concrete barriers were put in place near the highways of Bridgeport, Connecticut,
to block quick access into the city by those who
wanted to buy drugs. The strategy, according to police, was

(36:31):
that buyers would fear driving all over looped streets, stopping
and turning around trying to find drugs with the possibility
of having their nice cars though jewelry their money ripped
off as they look. A similar technique was implemented in
Los Angeles, which put traffic barriers in place on certain
streets that allegedly provided quick escape routes for gang members
who had committed crimes. Sometimes transit will allow a person
to get close to a given area, but not all

(36:53):
the way. They're leaving the writer in a dangerous situation.
This was the scenario faced by Cynthia Wiggins, a seventeen
year old woman who was hit and killed by a
dump truck while she was attempting to cross a seven
lane highway to get to the mall where she worked.
Wiggins took the bus from the inner city where she lived,
to her job at the suburban mall. However, the mall's
owners had actively resisted requests to allow the bus to

(37:14):
stop on its property. Rather, the bus stopped outside the
mall on the other side of a large highway. Documents
produced during the trial revealed that this transit sitting decision
was motivated at least in part by race or class bias.
A local transport official wrote in an internal document that
quote mall decision makers feel it will not bring the
type of people they want to come to the mall.

(37:35):
One mall retail store owner recalled a conversation with a
mall official who said something like the people who rode
the Walden Avenue bus were not the kind of people
they were trying to attract to the Walden Galleria. The
mall did, however, allow some charter buses to stop on
its property. Members of Buffalo's black community asserted that the
mall was trying to use the highway as a moat
to exclude some city residents, a classic example of architecture exclusion.

(37:57):
The case settled, but it presents a stark exam ample
of the dangers inherent in exclusionary transit design. And so again,
like there's a there's body counts to this ship, right,
like when the walls are made up of moats of
fast moving cars. People are going to die trying to
get from A to B. People who can't afford public trains.
People are gonna get arrested hopping onto public transit because
they can't afford it, because it's expensive because funds have

(38:20):
been drained away, Like people are going to the consequences
of all this are so titanic and echo out so
widely in our society, and they all come down to like, well,
we don't think it's good for the mall if certain
people come here, right, it's not good for this neighborhood
and Manhattan if certain if the traffic comes out here,
so we'll rout it the Harlem and will put more
lead into like the air in Harlem and will put

(38:42):
more traffic onto the streets and where kids will get hit, right, Like,
it's not. The plan is not I want more black
kids to have bad lungs and to get hit by cars.
The plan is I want to protect this nice neighborhood
from the consequences of the traffic that I have needlessly
increased in the city. But that's what happens, you know,
and who cares if there's a human cost, If that

(39:02):
cost is poor or black or brown, well, and it's
you know, the argument is always the argument always comes
down to when you're looking at the people who are
like defending this ship, Well, I just want my neighborhood
to be nice. I just want my housing price to
go up, right, I just I I uh, you know,
I don't I, as the person spending all this money
on this mall and this business, have a right to

(39:23):
try to ensure that like the right kind of people
come here that like, you know, isn't that isn't that
important too. I'm trying to keep I'm trying to improve
the neighborhood right and and and the justifications change through time.
Now you would have a lot of trouble being like
we're going to build a nightmare highway interchange system with
a bunch of like loops in order to stop people
from buying drugs in this neighborhood. Um. But instead it's like, well,

(39:47):
we need to, um, we need to carry out this
project to like make it more difficult for homeless people
to like sleep under this overpass, or we need to
carry out this project, like we want to put a
park here. We want to keep this space green and open,
so we can't allow um new construction it would ruin
the look of the neighborhood if we allowed higher density
housing developments to live here, right, don't people deserve to

(40:09):
have like their property values stay high and whatnot? Like
it's it's these are the kind of things we're talking
a lot these days about, like the literal Nazis and
the literal fascists always trying to take power. But it's
worth noting that, like for decades a lot of the
worst problems in our country that have like contributed massively
to everything that's wrong with it. Today, we're like not

(40:30):
people being like I seek a white ethno state, but
we're people being like, well, I have a right to
and I have a right to look out at a
nice hill, don't I? Yeah? And I think like what
you describe that as sort of soft power. I think
that it's almost kind of more dangerous that we associated
with like well, like like it's on its face, that's

(40:51):
so that's so relatable. It's like, of course you want
green spaces and pretty places and blah blah blah. Like
that really allows for people to do a lot a
lot of like pretty terrible stuff that has a human
cost um without really having to take take ownership of
how bad some of that stuff is. Yeah, we don't.
We're not talking about this today. Perhaps we should. We'll

(41:11):
get to it at some point, but like, there's a
lot to be said about And I love the National parks.
Who doesn't like a nice park, But there's a tremendous
amount of racism in the National park system and how
it's constructed and why it's constructed, in the idea that
like white people need a place to go be in nature. Um,
and that doesn't include indigenous people, right, because then we
can't claim that this is untamed wilderness because actually it

(41:33):
was all like tamed and heavily like regulated by different
societies for thousands and thousands of years. Um. But we're
going to kick them off and we're going to like
try to manage it ourselves. And oh god, now there's
forest fires everywhere because it turns out we actually suck
at forestry. Um, let's sell access to our forests to
people who want to make paper and do that under
the ages of we're protecting the forest from forest fires.
Oh no, everything keeps getting worse. Um. Anyway, it's all

(41:57):
like it's all the same story one way or the other.
It's it's this like, I want things to be nice
in a specific way where I live, so I'm going
to push these laws to protect the area around me
or to make this thing that I want to have happen.
But there's all these knock on effects, and you ignore
or shut down anyone who complains about the knockdown effects,
knock on effects by saying like, well, I have a

(42:18):
right to this, you know, I have a right to
keep my neighborhood this way. I have a right to
to drive a car. You know, I have a right
to one another high way, to one less traffic. Um.
And I don't want to spend money on the public
transit system. UM. I don't like public right like I
have a right to want my city to be this way. Um.
But of course, the reality is always that even though
they justify it as saying they're doing it for the people,

(42:39):
they're doing it for this community, they're doing it for
the city. UM, it's always done for a tiny chunk
of the people who live in that city. And it's
it's again often administrated by people like Robert Moses, who
are all either completely unelected or who, because of the
nature of local politics, are elected by like five dudes right, like, yeah,
it's cool. It also manifests in like a lot of

(43:01):
different ways where people like prioritize like a building over people,
and like like like a pile of bricks matters more
than than than a person. We saw that a lot
in people are like, well, but there's property damage, don't
I don't care, Like I don't care about your building.
I'm sorry it doesn't have It's not a person. It's

(43:24):
very insane, Like I've gotten caught up in a degree
of this myself where it's like I don't like I
don't like living in in like I don't like condos, um,
I don't like the way they look. And it was
had to be pointed out to me by like a friend,
and again I had like an argument over this and
they pointed out, like no, they actually like they do.
Like while there are stupid luxury developments that are dumb,

(43:44):
the higher density housing lowers housing prices, lowers rent prices,
like it makes areas more affordable, and people who cannot
afford a house are not going to afford a house
under the current system. But if you allow this thing
to be subdivided in such a way, they can't afford
to actually own and thus not be like fucking renting
a place and subject to all of the fun UPHI
about the rental market, or we get moved to have

(44:05):
to like live on a trailer park, which are really
problematic in a lot of exploitative ways. And like, as
a general rule, I believe in keeping as much of
the world as possible free of development, but we're going
to have cities, and cities should be high density and
geared towards being livable as high density things because that's
what makes sense environmentally and it's what makes them more humane.

(44:26):
Right yeah, yeah, anyway, Robert moses, just people need to
care more about people and less about piles of bricks,
less about piles of bricks and uh yeah, I don't know, um,

(44:46):
build more public transit burned down the carry out a
series of terrorist attacks on the on the are we
not should we not urge a series of terrorist attacks?
That is that a federal crime Sophie problem? Okay, well,
let's bleep all of that out and adding me doing
a plug for um because loves our nation's highway system

(45:11):
and interstate system because it's the most efficient way to
kidnap children. Right when they try to head into the
bathroom at a race track or something bam, and then
they're off to the island and Indonesia where we hunt
them for sport. That's the promise, Sophie. No children are safe, Bridget,
do you have any plugables for us? I sure do.
Thank you so much for having me. You can hear

(45:32):
me on my podcast there are no girls on the internet.
You can follow me on Twitter at Bridget Marie or
on Instagram at Bridget Marie in d C. Well lovely,
Thank you, Bridget. Thanks for talking fucking parks policy and ship. No,
this was this was this fun than like people being

(45:53):
you know, yeah, taken out back and shot. You know,
it's not not cheery, but it wasn't you know, it
wasn't as dark as I thought it was to be. Yeah,
you've gotta understand guys like this because they they exercise
just as much an influence on like why things are bad. Um,
But they're just like guys in suits who who are
building stuff in ways that's like secretly really shitty and

(46:16):
it's it's just much. It's it's a kind of evil.
I guess we don't get into enough, like it's it's
it's that kind of UM. It's it's more subtle than
like Mitch McConnell evil, which I think is the kind
of political evil we're used to. UM, but it has
just as much of an impact. And so yeah, uh,
if you want to read pages about Robert Moses, check

(46:36):
out The Power Broker. UM. Otherwise, just like, drive around
in New York City and you'll be you'll be the
proper amount of angry. I'm walking here, yeah. Exactly Behind
the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone

(46:58):
media dot com, or check us out on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.