Robert Moses and the Shaping of New York, Part 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this is part two
of our discussion of Robert Moses, who is unarguably responsible

(00:26):
for a lot of the public works projects that form
the infrastructure of New York. It's also unarguable that he's
easy to argue over, because a lot of people still
do it. We'll get to some more of that. Today, though,
we are going to talk about the second half of
his career, when he was more powerful than ever, but
also he found himself in sort of a constant state

(00:48):
of controversy and a lot of push and pull with
various politicians, as well as the public. If you haven't
listened to part one... You should go back and do
that because otherwise you'll be a little bit lost and
it really won't make sense where we're picking up. Where
we left off from the last episode, we talked at
length about an article that Robert Moses wrote that was

(01:09):
published in The Atlantic in 1945. It's kind of at
the midpoint of his career as a city planner. And
that article is often pointed to as important in that
it shows a real shift in the way Moses thought
about city planning. He had started his career as a
much more idealistic person, and it appears at this writing

(01:31):
to be in a more conservative headspace in regards to
his work. Sometimes this is talked about as though he
had an almost sudden change after the war, but really,
when you read the whole thing... It conveys the mindset
of a person who has spent decades having to negotiate
and maneuver and deal with difficult obstacles. And it's also

(01:54):
a bit funny that he speaks negatively about perfectionists, because
in his years working with Bel Moskowitz, who we talked
about last time, he was described as having been too theoretical,
obsessed with perfectionism, and unwilling to compromise. It's almost as
though he's criticizing his own past self and some of

(02:17):
his rhetoric. Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor that he had worked
with for a chunk of his career, retired from politics
the year after that Atlantic article came out. That article
came out in 1945. LaGuardia retired in 1946. And he
was replaced by William O'Dwyer, who made Moses the New
York construction coordinator. That was a job that came with

(02:40):
a great deal of power and a direct line to Washington, D.C.
So in addition to all of the lobbying he had
been doing earlier, he just had the ear of a
lot more politicians. And perhaps more importantly, it gave him
authority over every single public construction project in the city.
Here's the thing. Moses talked a really good game in

(03:02):
the 1940s about the way other people had created rundown
neighborhoods in New York, but he also did plenty of
his own damage. Three years after his Atlantic article ran
in 1948, he started work on the Cross Bronx Expressway.
This project is one of many in which Moses prioritized
the need for roadways and car traffic over pedestrians and

(03:26):
neighborhoods and public transit. So the Cross Bronx Expressway is
a seven-mile stretch of road that, as the name implies,
crosses right through the Bronx, which was already a heavily
developed area. And to make that project happen, a lot
of people lost their homes. Dozens of apartment buildings were
torn down to make way for the expressway, displacing hundreds

(03:49):
of families. Streets were also cut short in a lot
of situations, creating numerous new dead ends. And this fragmentation
of those neighborhoods has been cited as a reason that
crime rates in those areas increased in the years that followed.
That was also a pattern in a lot of road projects,

(04:10):
that the neighborhoods that were affected in this way were
often the neighborhoods with the least resources to try to
fight it and advocate for themselves. So neighborhoods that were
already struggling, neighborhoods with a more predominantly non-white population, all
of that. But Moses really seemed to believe that more
roads were generally better for everyone. In his Atlantic article,

(04:34):
he had said that it had taken almost two decades
to convince opponents of his plans, quote, that an arterial improvement,
whether it be a parkway for restricted travel or an
express route open to mixed traffic, is not simply a
strip of pavement in a gasoline gully. but a genuine
shoestring or ribbon improvement of the entire area through which

(04:57):
it passes. It brings with it benefits not only to
those who travel in cars, but to the thousands who
live along it or do business or seek recreation there.
So it comes across in his writing, at least, that
he genuinely thought he was making the best choices for
New Yorkers and the future of the city. But that
does stand in contrast to the often really callous ways

(05:19):
that he carried that vision out. We're going to come
back to his slum clearance initiatives in a moment. So
in the 1950s, there was another conflict that had a
major impact on Major League Baseball. So at the time,
Walter O'Malley owned the Brooklyn Dodgers, and O'Malley thought that
Ebbets Field no longer met the needs of the team

(05:41):
and its fans. According to Moses, he offered to build
O'Malley a new stadium at Flushing Meadows in Queens, but
O'Malley was insistent that he wanted a new stadium in Brooklyn,
and he specifically wanted it at the intersection of Atlantic
Avenue and Flatbush Avenue. And at the end of the
1957 season, O'Malley announced that the team was moving to

(06:03):
Los Angeles. When Robert Moses told this story to a reporter,
he claimed that the whole time O'Malley had actually already
been talking to Los Angeles about moving there, and that
the disagreement over stadium placement was just a pretext to go.
But a lot of people blamed Moses for the loss
of their baseball team, and he found himself on the

(06:25):
outs with a lot of New Yorkers after the Dodgers
announced that relocation. Additionally, his ongoing slum projects had become
more and more unpopular, and conflict over them reached a
fever pitch in 1959. Ten years before, Congress had passed
the U.S. Housing Act, which included a section called Title I,

(06:46):
Slum Clearance and Community Development and Redevelopment, This act provided
a billion dollars for loans to cities so the municipality
could purchase slums and land that was deemed blighted for
public or private redevelopment. It allotted an additional $ 100 million
a year for five years to be issued as grants.

(07:09):
Disbursement of those funds was the work of the Housing
and Home Finance Agency. That agency was rolled up under
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1960s.
So the intention of Title I was to get private
capital involved in the costly process of redevelopment. It enabled
municipalities to make deals on sales that would get investors

(07:31):
and developers interested and willing to spend their own money
on rehabbing depressed areas with the long-term goal that those
areas would then become generators of revenue for those private investors.
Robert Moses recognized that New York could potentially get a
hold of a lot of that federal funding. During the 1950s,

(07:53):
he and his team produced 26 brochures about slum clearance,
and each of them was about a specific neighborhood that
he believed needed redevelopment. The brochures outlined the issues in
the neighborhood, and they included spreads of photographs showing the
problem areas, and they backed up everything with statistical information.

(08:14):
And then these pamphlets were sent to the Board of
Estimate of the City of New York, the City Planning Commission,
the Federal Administrator of Title I, and the Federal Housing
and Home Finance Agency, all in an effort to make
the case to get some of that funding. We'll talk
more about the contents of these pamphlets after we pause
for a sponsor break. Music In a 2014 paper published

(08:44):
by the Journal of Planning History, researcher Temis Kronopoulos analyzed
the contents of those brochures that Robert Moses and his
team produced, paying close attention to the photographs that were included.
Kronopoulos notes that in using an aerial view to show
plans for these neighborhoods, Moses was able to present what

(09:05):
appeared to anybody that looked at it a tidy, modern,
and stylistically unified neighborhood. which offered a visual counter to
the way that the neighborhoods had grown in stages without
such plans. So when you looked at that very beautifully
drawn out concept design next to some of these photographs,
it was obvious which one looked better. Chronopolis writes, quote,

(09:27):
empty lots appeared 22 times in the brochures and represented
the most popular depiction of urban blight. They always implied
that a building was missing, that space was underutilized, and
that garbage ended up there. The paper notes 20 images
that show back alleys that often had trash on the
ground and clotheslines filled with clothes stretched between buildings. And

(09:50):
he actually notes that though the laundry in those images
shows that the residents cleaned their things, like that this was,
you know, an act of like maintaining hygiene, the composition
of the photos with the dark and dirty ground below
them overshadowed that. Then Chronopolis makes a really interesting point.
There are rarely any people in the brochure photographs. He notes, quote,

(10:14):
in this case, slum clearance was also an instrument of
social engineering. though the brochures emphasize the physical problem. On
June 29, 1959, the first in a series of four
articles written by journalist Wayne Phillips ran in the New
York Times. That article opened with, quote, New York City
will take title to six blocks of real estate south

(10:37):
of Pennsylvania Station tomorrow, and within a few hours will
sell them for a cooperative housing development. The sale will
mark the start of the 14th Title I slum clearance
project undertaken here since the program was created 10 years
ago next month. Title I, which derives its name from
a section of the National Housing Act of 1949, has

(11:00):
been in that decade a source of constant civic controversy.
Not a little of the controversy has revolved around the
man who was chosen to direct the program here, Robert Moses.
There were a lot. of accusations leveled over the course
of this series that laid out how there were things
that were really quite shady in terms of how Moses

(11:24):
seemed to operate that he wasn't sharing information with a
lot of people we'll talk about some of the specifics
in just a moment It just kind of pointed to
the idea that he was involved with people he shouldn't
have been involved with, and he was handling money with
no oversight, and that it all just seemed really, really
dicey to people. And in the wake of all of
these accusations, Mayor Wagner, whose father incidentally had been one

(11:47):
of the sponsors of the housing bill that included Title I,
did two things. So first, the mayor started asking questions
about Louis Ipocras, who was involved in the slum clearance
project in Harlem in as a corporate sponsor, like basically
his capital investment program was buying in to do the
redevelopment so that they could then make money and collect rents.

(12:09):
And then on July 8th, it was reported that Delaware's
Republican Senator John J. Williams had asked federal housing officials
to ban Pokras from any such projects due to his
organized crime connections. Mayor Wagner at that point had already
stated publicly that Pokras would never be permitted to sponsor
the redevelopment that he was currently working on or any

(12:33):
New York development going forward. Additionally, the mayor banned the
city from working with an architect that Moses really liked
to work with. That was Melvin E. Kessler. So Kessler
had been part of an earlier redevelopment on the Upper
West Side that had sold land to a private developer
called Manhattan Town Incorporated. That developer took Title I money

(12:57):
but then did not erect a single promised building and
also did not demolish any existing buildings. Instead, Manhattan Town
Incorporated was collecting rent from the tenants and just allowing
the buildings to fall apart around them. Manhattan Town was
eventually forced off of this project, but Kessler, who was

(13:19):
one of their architects, had continued to be part of
projects that Moses initiated until the mayor said, no more. Yeah,
he is usually described as having been blacklisted at that point.
And Moses said that he didn't personally know Kessler, that
he was just part of projects that came along with
other architecture offices. But he also said that he didn't

(13:42):
think the mayor could legally have him banned. It was
really apparent that Moses felt that Mayor Wagner had insulted him.
The way his writing comes off, his statement, it almost
sounds like he thinks the mayor had overstepped his boundaries,
which is funny because that's your boss. He made a
public statement that the recent, quote, ruinous charges and misstatements

(14:04):
and the mayor's willingness to give those claims credence had
scared away all the venture capital that such projects might
have gotten and. venture capital that they needed. He then stated, quote,
from now on, over and above projects in the actual
planning stage and perhaps labor cooperatives, no full taxpaying speculative

(14:24):
sponsors will be found. And to that extent, Title I
is a dead duck. What the mayor faces now is
deciding on a Other officials involved with the slum clearance
committee said, no, no, no, Title I would still be
a part of New York projects. And they all kind
of praised Moses in their statements. But looking back at

(14:48):
the way this all plays out in the press, it
really makes Moses look like he's having a very public tantrum.
Even so, things did blow over and Moses did keep
working on redevelopment projects. Several months later, in December of
that year, the Metropolitan Council on Housing started distributing flyers
in the city that were addressed to Mayor Robert Wagner.

(15:11):
The idea was that people could sign the flyer on
the provided line and then enter their address on the
line below that and then fold it up and stamp
it and mail it to the mayor so that his
office would be flooded with these letters. These letters demanded,
in bold writing at the top, For New York to grow,
Moses must go. So, in part, the letter stated, quote,

(15:34):
The flyer notes that there have been these numerous write-ups
in the press about the scandals that seem to be
part of every single slum clearance committee project. And after
chastising the mayor for making what felt to the rest
of New York useless gestures after these previous complaints, the

(15:58):
flyer states, quote, the mess still continues. One, the tenants
are still sold along with the land. Two, indecent and
inhuman relocation practices still continue. Three, luxury housing is still
being built at the people's expense while those in greater
need are driven from slum to slum. Four, as Charles Abrams,

(16:23):
former rent administrator, has pointed out, slum clearance has become
Negro and Puerto Rican clearance. And this still continues. We need, one,
more low-rent housing. Two, no more subsidized luxury housing. Three,
new housing built before housing is torn down. The flyer

(16:45):
then describes this situation by likening it to a cancer
and then once again reiterates the phrase it opens with,
Moses must go. As all of this had been heating
up and the investigation into the slum clearance projects had
been playing out, there was one very vocal supporter of
Moses who seemed to be absolutely everywhere. That was columnist

(17:07):
and radio broadcaster George Sikulski. Sokolski had columns with multiple
New York papers, but those columns were also syndicated. So
if you do a search for Moses on newspaper archives
from 1959, one after another of the results is a
glowing endorsement of Moses and what a good man he
was from papers all over the country. And they were

(17:31):
all versions of Sokolski's write-ups for New York papers that
were then part of King Features Syndicate. He was really
a piece of work. Yet another person from this two-parter
who could be their own episode one day. Yeah. Also,
King Feature Syndicate is something that Hearst started. So just FYI.
These articles that all appeared that were essentially the same

(17:54):
article had titles like Robert Moses is a selfless man
and similarly a bullion things article. And they included pronouncements like, quote,
this is a constructive, creative personality who is constantly building
and beautifying and whose work, no matter how large and widespread,
is never touched by graft or corruption or waste so

(18:16):
usual in public work. There's so much of this very, like...
It's very puffy love for Robert Moses. And then each
of them ends... with an explainer for why this material
was being published. Quote, the point of writing about Robert

(18:36):
Moses and what he does is to show that despite
the materialism of current American life, there are still selfless
men who serve the people, achieving great improvements in various
fields without concern for private advance. So what makes these
George Sokolski write-ups extra interesting is that they started appearing

(18:57):
in mid-June. I think I saw the first one, like,
June 14th. That was two weeks ahead of that New
York Times four-parter that avidly criticized Moses. So looking back
at it now, it sure starts to seem like Sokolsky
was asked to get out ahead of the scandal that
Moses must have surely known was coming. At the end

(19:17):
of 1959, journalist Bob Baum wrote that he could tell
that the years and constant controversy were starting to affect Moses, noting, quote,
He has maintained his reputation for unrelenting battle, for being
a doer but not necessarily a pleaser. Only a few
weeks ago, he dropped a strong hint that some of

(19:38):
the criticism accompanying his activity has been wearing hard. Baum
discussed how the main argument of his critics was that
Moses had amassed so much power through holding multiple government
jobs at once that he was no longer subject to
checks and balances. The consultants that were paid fees with

(19:59):
no disclosure as to the size of those payouts, the
same non-disclosure of his employees' salaries, closed trustee meetings, the
ability to seize land other than the land seizures. These
are the kinds of things, Baum points out, that private
industry might do, but that the public has a right

(20:20):
to know this kind of information when it is part
of a government entity. Yeah, he was often called like
the construction czar or the city planning czar of New York.
And that is why he was not sharing a lot
of how it all worked behind the scenes, but he
was able to do kind of whatever he wanted. Coming up,

(20:40):
we're going to talk about the last decade of Moses's
career and ongoing debate about his work. But first, we
will hear from the sponsors that make this show possible.
Following that rough end of the 1950s and all of

(21:02):
the criticism lobbed at him, Moses then made several almost
uncharacteristic missteps that got more and more New Yorkers angry.
By the end of 1960, he had resigned from his
positions on the New York City Park Commission, Slum Clearance Committee,
and the City Planning Commission to focus instead on spearheading
the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1962, Robert Moses

(21:27):
locked horns with then-Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. Their
rivalry manifested through a disagreement over plans for Fire Island,
a Long Island barrier reef. Moses wanted to run a
highway the length of the island going back to the 1930s,
and then after a storm in 1962 destroyed most of

(21:48):
the homes there, he saw a chance to finally get
his highway project approved. This was yet another controversial plan.
While Moses had a lot of documentation to back up
his claims that a roadway would actually prevent more erosion,
that documentation was called into question. Additionally, environmental groups had

(22:09):
their own concerns about what the highway would do to
the island. Moses ignored everyone who tried to offer a
differing opinion, but Fire Island residents put together an alternate
proposal to establish protected status for the island as the
Fire Island National Seashore, and they got support from federal offices.

(22:31):
The pressure from the public gave the governor an opportunity
to tell Moses that they needed to hold off on
the highway project and also suggested that maybe Moses might
want to pare down his many governmental roles in the
interest of focusing more of his energies on the World's Fair.
This was on top of other problems these two men

(22:51):
had been bickering over, and it was the last straw.
Moses submitted his resignation to Nelson Rockefeller, He had threatened
resignation with previous governors, but they always refused to accept
that resignation and recognized that Moses was not only really powerful,
but also that a lot of public projects would just
fall apart if he suddenly left. Rockefeller accepted the resignation,

(23:15):
and that set off a storm of press coverage. Yeah,
he kind of called his bluff. There was so much
back and forth in the papers today. But then the
New York Times, bless them, ran a full aggregation of
all the back and forth statements from Moses and Rockefeller.
So you could kind of see the flow of how
it all played out. Initially, Moses had released a statement
that read in part, quote, Last Tuesday morning, that is

(23:37):
November 27th, Governor Rockefeller at his office in New York
asked me flatly and with no preliminaries to resign immediately
as chairman of the State Council of Parks, so that
he could put his brother Lawrence, now head of the
Palisades Interstate Commission and vice chairman of the council, in
my place. The chairman of the council is elected annually

(23:58):
by 10 members. Rockefeller's response read, quote, I have been
discussing with Mr. Moses for some time, a year or more,
the questions of orderly transition from his long and brilliant
career and leadership in the field of state parks. There
is no one who has done more to develop parks,
not only in this state, but anywhere in the nation,

(24:20):
than has Commissioner Moses, and the people of this state
will forever be indebted to him. We had a meeting
earlier this week to discuss various matters which had been
pending related to the World's Fair, the New York City
Federal State Highway Program, the Power Authority, and the state
parks system, all of which were under his direction. At

(24:42):
this meeting, I suggested that the end of this year
would be a good time to make the transition in
connection with the chairmanship of the State Council of Parks
because of the growing load on him in connection with
the completion of the World's Fair for 1964, in addition
to his responsibilities as chairman of the Triborough Bridge and

(25:05):
Tunnel Authority, which is constructing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the power
authority of the state, the Long Island State Park Commission,
and the presidency of the Bethpage Park Authority, and the
Jones Beach State Parkway Authority. So this whole situation is

(25:25):
often described as Rockefeller just outmaneuvering Moses politically. Yeah, it
was kind of like he wanted him to get mad
and have a tantrum, so he... took advantage of how
people were not happy about this parkway plan on Fire
Island and was like, oh, I don't think that's going
to be popular. We should not do it. And just

(25:46):
let him kind of have his tantrum resign, which he
had threatened to do with many other people and went, okay. Okay, cool.
Thanks for the paper. Moses did then focus on the
World's Fair, but that came with its own set of problems.
He had built a massive fairgrounds at Flushing Meadows Corona

(26:09):
Park for the 1939 World's Fair. And then for the
1960s event, he added a whole bunch of facilities to it. Incidentally.
This is a World's Fair that is near and dear
to my heart. It's the one where Walt Disney tested
out a number of attractions that would make their way
into Disneyland. So the Carousel of Progress, It's a Small World,
Ford's Magic Skyway, and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. It

(26:32):
was also where Rolly Crump's Tower of the Four Winds
sculpture was exhibited as part of the Disney offerings. Just
a beautiful piece of art. And then that is also
where the Belgian waffle made its U.S. debut. Thanks, 1964
World's Fair! Roughly 50 million people attended the fair, and
that sounds like a huge success, but Moses had estimated

(26:52):
that it would draw 70 million. Even though it's considered
an important historical event for the many visions of the
future it exhibited, it was actually the first World's Fair
to have that futurism focus, it also had a lot
of problems. The New York Times reported that when the
fair opened, only 85% of it was actually ready. reporting

(27:14):
that 15 of the 139 pavilions were not finished and
that many of the finished pavilions did not have all
of their exhibit materials. Some exhibitors were there and ready
but had nowhere to put their exhibits. Fair spokespeople told
the press that because it would take more than a
week to see everything, the unfinished pavilions would be completed

(27:36):
before attendees exhausted all their other options. Some of the
attractions were also unfinished. While a lot of these unready
elements were completed in the first few weeks of the fair,
some were abandoned entirely. After the fair closed, Moses was
no longer the city construction coordinator. Yeah, it seems like

(27:59):
there was just so much frustration with him by the
end of that whole thing. In September of 1966, Robert's wife, Mary,
died after a long illness that had made her bedridden
for years. But less than a month later, he got remarried.
His second wife was Mary Grady, who was his secretary
at the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. Their presumption here

(28:21):
is that they might have had something romantic going on
before the first Mary passed, but we don't know. I
don't know. He was removed from the Triborough Bridge and
Tunnel Authority by Rockefeller when it merged into another transit
authority in 1968. That again seems like maybe some Rockefeller maneuvering,
but that had been the last job that Moses had

(28:42):
with the New York government. In his retirement, he immediately
got busy writing a book, and that came out in 1970.
The book is titled Public Works, A Dangerous Trade, and
it walks through the entirety of his career and the
various challenges he faced, how he overcame them. He notes
that often people who argue against new construction of public

(29:04):
works end up liking them in the long run, noting, quote,
history repeats itself. Before long, as has happened over and
over again, the opponents will calm down and claim they
were always in favor of the improvement. In 1974, journalist
Robert Caro wrote a book about Moses titled The Power Broker,

(29:24):
which detailed the way that Moses had amassed his power.
This is an incredibly influential book in regards to how
Robert Moses has been perceived ever since its publication. It
paints a negative picture of the city planner overall, and
it was huge. successful. Moses issued a response to the
book in August of that year, basically like he put

(29:47):
out a statement through his PR team denouncing it as, quote,
full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty, baseless personalities, and random
haymakers thrown at just about everybody in public life. He
also wrote in his statement, quote, the biography tries to
prove that I was a good boy who fell from grace,
became a politician, and mistreated the poor. He also states

(30:10):
that Caro has fabricated the idea that, quote, helpless, displaced
persons met ruthless public works dictators who sadistically scattered them
to the worst rookeries, noting that Caro did not provide
any evidence for these statements. Moses refutes this by saying
that 98% of the people moved from condemned neighborhoods were

(30:31):
given better places to live. Incidentally, I also did not
see any evidence from him. Caro's book won the Pulitzer Prize,
so whether it was accurate or not, its characterization of
Moses really stuck. Robert Moses died of heart disease on
July 29, 1981, in West Islip, New York. Today, almost

(30:54):
every movement or group or person that takes an interest
in Moses's legacy is divided on it. I, as a
single person, am divided on it. While pro-housing groups admire
his bias for action and his ability to push projects
past red tape to get things done, there is really
no way to ignore the fact that he often destroyed

(31:15):
historic neighborhoods to do so, and his pro-vehicle, new-road-centric approach
created a lot of places, that are not as walkable
or safe as they could be. It can also just
be really hard to wrap your head around the complex
nature of a decades-long career that included things like massive
parks initiatives and the creation of public leisure spaces alongside

(31:38):
an undeniable accumulation of power that was often used to
strong-arm governmental officials to bend to his will. And even
in the immediate wake of his death, New Yorkers seemed
to be trying to figure out whether he was a
figure to admire or demonize. On August 5th, 1981, a
write-up about him by Red Smith appeared in the New

(31:59):
York Times and detailed several of his controversial projects and
how he managed them. That article concluded with the story
of the Cross Queens Expressway, and the takeaway is that
Moses was right about the need for a larger road,
but also seems smug in having been right without really
considering the human cost of destroying housing. Even in the

(32:24):
last 20 years or so, and prior to that, but
it's really heated up, I think, there has been a
lot of discussion of the Robert Caro biography and whether
it really accurately represents Moses or if there is more
nuance to his career to be considered. So Caro did
describe Moses starting out as an idealist who became power-hungry,

(32:46):
writing that his, quote, susceptibility to the addiction of power
was unusually strong. It is, though, also easy to see
when you look at his career and many of the
things he wrote that Moses was often accumulating power so
that he could cut through the slog of bureaucracy that
prevented progress and municipal improvement. The desire to do so

(33:08):
is evident in that 1945 article in The Atlantic. He was, though,
without a doubt, influenced by racist bias in neglecting or
even destroying areas that were typically occupied by Black and
other minority residents of the city in an effort to
build a very idealized New York that clearly catered to
the city's white population and its white growing middle class.

(33:32):
One way that people really characterize Moses pretty frequently is
that he ruined New York by adding so many roadways
and catering to the growing number of cars in the city.
Caro's book led a lot of people to attribute the
decline of New York in the 70s and 80s to
his projects. And he did, for sure, head up a

(33:54):
lot of roadway projects, although some of the ones he
wanted to build were not approved. But more modern takes
on the way Moses shaped New York through expressways note
that this is not a problem that's exclusive to New
York at all, and that most large cities in the U.S.
went through a similar rapid growth of their highway systems. Yeah,

(34:16):
the takeaway with a lot of those is that New
York is the most populous, and so everything is sort
of that much more of a big problem. There are
so many more people to account for. So many more
people on the roads, so many more roads that need
to be built, etc. Yeah, shifting, planning to really accommodate
cars and drivers more than other transit, like that is

(34:40):
not a uniquely New York problem in any way. At all. Listen,
I live in Atlanta. I know what's up. Moses was
obviously not at all unaware of the many criticisms of
his work and the way he ran government offices. He
wrote in that 1970 book a defense of his mode
of operation after citing Parkinson's Law. That was a book

(35:03):
of satire that was written by C. Northcote Parkinson in
1957 that stated, work expands so as to fill the
time available for its completion. And Moses goes on in
his own words to say, quote, avoiding Dr. Parkinson's logic
is not easy when there is actually inescapable expansion of government.

(35:23):
Theorists inveigh against spreading, but if one man holds several
related jobs and uses employees interchangeably, or if departments are
telescoped and consolidated to ensure economy and coordination, there is
always a cry of czarism. If, however, there is a
real crisis or an unavoidable confrontation, as distinguished from a

(35:44):
tempest in a teapot, the same critics yell for quick action.
During his 50-year career, Moses led projects that totaled a
whopping $ 30 billion worth of urban planning and construction. Examining
the many books, articles, scholarly papers, and opinions about the
impact of that work, it's easy to start thinking that

(36:06):
his greatest legacy might be the debate about his legacy.
His name is invoked almost any time there's a new
project that gets introduced in the city as part of
the discussion weighing its merits and its impact just like
the social media posts that inspired this two-parter. That Bob
Balm article from 1959 that we quoted earlier also included

(36:26):
this sort of prescient passage. which really sums it all up. Quote,
whether Robert Moses is right or wrong in what and
the way he does things, whether he deserves an accolade
of greatness or is just a puffed-up egoist, or whether,
as some of his opponents contend, others could have done
as well, are things that historians and students of tomorrow

(36:50):
may examine in hard perspective. Well, it is tomorrow and
we are still turning this one over with no real
obvious summation. So, Robert Moses. And we left so many
things out. A lot, yeah. Because there's just so much
to talk about. I hope somebody does a whole Robert

(37:10):
Moses podcast one day. Well, so the podcast 99% Invisible
did kind of a deep dive into the power broker
and I have not listened to those episodes because I
kind of pick and choose the 99 PI episodes that
sound interesting to me. And I was like, this sounds
like a lot. But like they took an in-depth look

(37:32):
at it, at least that part of it. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't think there's ever been like a biopic about him.
I imagine his family might stand in the way of that.
I think his daughters are long past, but I think
his grandchildren are still alive. You know. There's a lot
of conflict. Okay. But I have very fun, joyous, and

(37:53):
adorable listener mail. I'm excited. This is from our listener, Aubrey,
who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I recently listened to
your episode on Beulah Henry. I'm sure plenty of listeners
will write in with their own mental images of her inventions,
but something else about the episode prompted me to write in.
I am currently in the midst of a sewing frenzy,
trying to draft my own patterns for a specific type

(38:15):
of clothing item. As some may know, this process involves
a lot of trial and error and going through a
lot of thread and scrap fabric while testing whether a
technique will get the result I want. So when home
sewing machines came up, I perked up and I related
strongly to Holly's comment about bobbins notoriously running out mid stitch.
This happened to me more times than I can count.

(38:36):
I just had to write in about the most amazing
thing that's happened to me during this project. While sewing
one of the finished pieces, I pulled the fabric away
to cut the thread and noticed only one string trailing
from the fabric. My first thought was, oh no, the
bobbin ran out mid-stitch. I trimmed the thread and went
to see where it had run out, expecting to need
to pull out the thread and start all over again.

(38:59):
And to my delight, it had stopped right at the
very end of the stitch after backstitching. That had never
happened to me before. And if you can believe it,
it happened again. This time I didn't notice until I'd
finished the piece and was prepping to start a brand
new stitch on a new pattern and saw only the
top thread was visible. I couldn't believe my luck. Two
bobbins in a row that lasted exactly through a full stitch.

(39:21):
I feel like I should play the lottery. I felt
I just had to share this with people who could
understand and appreciate just how exciting it is for that
to happen. As for Pet Tax, I have attached photos
of my sweet dachshund named Obi-Wan. He is 14 now
and sometimes referred to as Old Ben, among other various
other nicknames bestowed upon him. His tongue now permanently hangs

(39:43):
out of his mouth since he had his remaining teeth
removed last summer. So most of our recent photos feature
his long red tongue hanging out the side of his muzzle.
Thank you both for all the work and research that
goes into each episode and for making me feel like
I'm just listening in on two friends talking about interesting
history topics. Listen, I've had that bobbin moment and it
does really feel like you've been blessed in some way

(40:05):
by the sewing gods. But we got to talk about Obi-Wan.
This dog is so cute. One of these pictures, Obi-Wan,
who does look like a distinguished and mature gentleman... is
dressed in a hot dog costume. And he's just lying
on the carpet and he looks almost borderly forlorn. Like, mother,

(40:26):
why have you demeaned me thus? But he's very cute
and he has gray in his muzzle and I love it.
I love an old pup. I love him so much.
There's one where he's looking out a window and he
looks so cute. And another where he's just sitting looking precious.
And I love it. So thank you so much for
sharing Obi-Wan with us because he is a really precious baby.

(40:48):
I also see those Princess Leia pillows on what I
think is your couch. Fabulous. And I'm so glad that
the sewing gods blessed you. And I hope that that
project was everything you had hoped, especially if you are
working out your own pattern. That is so much work.
And also thank you for working out your own pattern
in a world where people are throwing AI patterns everywhere.
everywhere on the internet. It does not make me happy

(41:11):
in any way, shape, form, or fashion. Keep making original
patterns like humans by humans. Makes me happy. But also,
keep sending us pictures of your adorable dogs. They don't
have to be Star Wars themed. I like all the dogs.
You can do that at historypodcast at iheartradio.com. You can
also find the show notes for this week's two-parter or

(41:33):
any show that we've done on Those are at MissedInHistory.com.
And if you just click into the show, you'll see
all of the resources that we use to put it together.
And I hope you enjoy reading those. You can also
subscribe to the podcast. It is easy peasy, rice and cheesy.
You can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff You Missed in

(41:59):
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Robert Moses and the Shaping of New York, Part 2