Robert Moses, The Man Who Built New York City -

Robert Moses, The Man Who Built New York City

Robert Moses

Born in 1888 New Haven Connecticut, Robert Moses earned his Bachelor’s degree from Yale, a Masters in jurisprudence from Oxford and a PhD in political science from Columbia University, rising to unelected power in 1924 under the tutelage of his friend and trusted advisor, Governor Al Smith.

Quiet Power

Now regarded as one of the most powerful men in the history of New York State, Moses transformed New York City from the early to mid-20th century, in a series of bold infrastructure projects and urban development philosophies which influenced a generation of engineers, architects and urban planners in cities across North America. In his more than forty-year career, Moses held as many as 12 simultaneous titles, including New York City Parks Commissioner and Chairman of the Long Island State Parks Commission, becoming an expert at writing laws and manipulating the inner workings of New York state government, including the issuance of bonds to fund his many projects, with little outside input or oversight.

Long List of Achievements

Among his many achievements is the construction of Jones Beach State Park, the most visited public beach in America, the New York State Parkway System, the Triborough Bridge, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the Throgs Neck Bridge and several major highways. On the downside, many of Moses’ projects witnessed the destruction of large swaths of tenement housing neighborhoods, displacing many impoverished minority residents to large public housing projects, which in turn inspired other U.S. cities to duplicate New York’s high rise tenements for the poor.

Late Criticism

Although highly regarded throughout most of his career, his reputation came under increased scrutiny after the 1974 publication of Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Power Broker, which painted Moses as a power-grabbing and quite vindictive man of questionable ethics and treatment regarding many of the city’s poor minorities, which he repeatedly displaced with an almost vindictive, racist zeal, making Robert Moses, a one-man army who forever changed the face of New York City.