Investor's Business Daily, June 18th, 2007
Standing in line outside City Hall, with no job and no experience, 30-year-old Robert Moses began a series of events that would change the face of New York City forever.
An idealistic recent graduate of Columbia University's Ph.D. program for political science, Moses did what his career would be defined by: He scrapped together every thing he could to grow more powerful.
By the end of Moses' 44 years serving the public as a master builder, he left a big thumbprint: namely two dams, 12 bridges, 416 miles of parkways, 568 playgrounds and 2.5 million acres of state parks. He also helped make sure Manhattan landed the United Nations, and Queens built Shea Stadium.
"He transformed New York," said Robert Caro, author of "The Power Broker," a Moses biography. "When you talk about New York, you're talking about a city created by the vision of this one single man."
The New York Times commented that his accomplishments "seem little short of miraculous."
Moses' nearly untamed, unmatched power came about in a slow, calculated way. He started modestly, working for free to get his foot in the door in city politics. His responsibilities quickly grew as he never let an opportunity slip by.
And with each opportunity he condensed power until he was on top.
"Today it would take 500 people (to do what he did)," said William Helmreich, a professor of sociology and urban life at City College of New York. "But have you ever had 500 people agree on anything? You couldn't get anything done."
The vast amount of work Moses oversaw nearly all by himself took hard work and ingenuity. He worked 15 hours a day and even had an office in his limousine. He needed the time; at one point he held 12 public offices simultaneously.
"There are people who just take charge," Helmreich said. "He took charge. He was a visionary."
Moses' ascent into becoming arguably the most powerful man in New York's history came with determination at many stages of his life.
Moses was born in 1888 in New Haven, Conn., to parents who owned a retail store. At 17, he decided to attend nearby Yale University. Moses broadened his education and dabbled in many fields, but never studied city planning, on which he built his legacy.
Moses climbed the ranks of state jobs and became known as the best bill drafter in Albany, New York's capital.
Moses never stopped working and striving for more. His failures spurred harder work and craftier solutions. In 1934, he ran for governor and lost. But Moses didn't let that -- or the fact that the margin of defeat was so large it wouldn't be exceeded until 2006 -- hold him back.
Rather than holding the highest state office, he found ways to make his seemingly insignificant titles more powerful.
Moses progressed from speech writer and lobbyist to parks commissioner, secretary of state and chairman of the New York Power Commission. As he added titles, his influence grew.
His successes became apparent by a number of barometers. At one time he had 80,000 people working under him. And at the height of his power, he persuaded Washington to spend one-quarter of federal construction dollars on New York City.
In addition to the massive influx of federal aid, Moses found new ways to make money to build public works. One strategy involved tolls that drivers paid when crossing his numerous bridges and highways.
With this flow of cash, Moses didn't need to woo those in other state offices for money to get jobs done. They needed to court him.
Moses stood atop the country's biggest city while more and more citizens got in gear with cars. The way he saw the landscape, those people needed new roads. "He understood the city as an organism," said Lance Jay Brown, a professor of architecture at City College.
He especially foresaw people's desire to smoothly reach all five boroughs of New York City. That understanding drove Moses to what some call his obsession with highways.
Only six years after Moses' last loss of significant power, "The Power Broker" hit shelves in 1974. Caro's Pulitzer Prize winner stretched 1,300 pages and cast a dark cloud over Moses' life, impact and legacy.
It became gospel that Moses' highways cut through densely populated areas, uprooting thousands. He even proposed sending a throughway down Central Park. "There are long parts of the book showing his genius, but you can't look at Robert Moses just in terms of that," Caro told IBD. "You have to look at his long-term effects on the city. The highways, bridges and tunnels are awesome, but none are as awesome as the congestion in NYC."
That constant traffic jam wasn't inevitable, says Caro; the problem originated with Moses, who over the course of his four-decade career systematically starved mass transit.
Moses disagreed with such criticism until his death in 1981. He said he knew about the harsh impacts of his moves -- but also of the long-term positive effects. "There are those who can build and those who can criticize," he said.
When "The Power Broker" came out, Moses said, "I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs."
Lewis Mumford, a renowned urban planner, once said a Moses project "does not meet even the most meager requirements of good planning." Before Mumford died in 1990, he acknowledged that "in the 20th century the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than any other person."
A quarter-century after his death, Moses' building achievements are still the bar that some politicians dream their cities could achieve.
In 2006, Elliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general before he became governor, said that if a biography of Moses were written now, it might be called "At Least He Got It Built."
"That's what we need today -- a real commitment to get things done," he said in a speech on transportation issues.
Helmreich contends Moses was the ultimate power player in terms of getting things done, and that the closest anyone came was Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor.
Whatever today's perspective of Moses' legacy, Brown said, "As long as there's a (New York) City, there will be an impact of Robert Moses."
