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Robert Moses
1888–1981 · 93 years Tier II
He never drove a car and laid 416 miles of parkway
His father sold a New Haven department store along with his real estate and retired to East 46th Street in Manhattan in 1897, when Robert was eight. His mother worked in the settlement movement and had her own love of buildings. Both parents were German Jews, and Moses insisted for the rest of his life that he was not Jewish. He collected credentials the way other men collect property: Yale in 1909, a jurisprudence degree from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1911, a Columbia doctorate in political science in 1914. Then he drifted into New York reform politics, where in 1918 Belle Moskowitz noticed him through his mother's settlement house and delivered him to the incoming governor, Al Smith.
Smith made him president of the Long Island State Park Commission in 1924, and he did not let go for 39 years. Jones Beach opened in 1929 and remains the most visited public beach in the country. He held as many as 12 titles at once, and from 1934 he ran the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, where the tolls from one crossing financed the next. The inventory: the Triborough in 1936, the Bronx-Whitestone in 1939, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in 1940, the Brooklyn-Battery in 1950, the Throgs Neck in 1961, and in 1964 the Verrazzano-Narrows, the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened. Eleven WPA pools in 1936 with room for 49,000 swimmers. Some 658 playgrounds. And 416 miles of parkway, including the Cross Bronx Expressway, finished in 1963.
In the seven years after the war roughly 170,000 New Yorkers were evicted for public projects, most of them his. Moses decided alone which blocks counted as blighted under Title I, and nobody could review the decision. The communities he cleared were disproportionately poor, Black and Hispanic, and the Cross Bronx cut a swath a mile wide through the South Bronx. He spoke against letting Black war veterans into Stuyvesant Town. In a 1952 speech he reached for Kipling on the rise of lesser breeds without the law. Caro charged that he built parkway overpasses too low for buses in order to keep families without cars out of the state parks. That charge stays contested: his aide Sidney Shapiro said the low bridges were meant to lock out commercial traffic, and later scholars have called the story an urban legend.
He faced voters once, in 1934, lost the governorship to Herbert Lehman and never tried again. What ended him was smaller than a statewide race: a plan to replace a shaded Central Park playground with a parking lot for Tavern-on-the-Green, the accounting scandal of his own 1964 World's Fair, and Jane Jacobs killing the Lower Manhattan Expressway. On March 1, 1968 the legislature folded his authority into the new MTA and the role he had been promised never materialized. Caro's The Power Broker took the Pulitzer in 1975 and fixed his public reputation for decades. He died of heart disease on July 29, 1981 and was interred at Woodlawn. Niagara took his name off its parkway in 2016.
Lifespan
Robert Moses's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
Jones Beach State Park
building
His own favorite, and the most visited public beach in the United States 1929 -
Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority
company
The toll revenue that financed everything else and made him unremovable 1934 -
Triborough Bridge
building
Now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, joining the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens 1936 -
Cross Bronx Expressway
building
A mile-wide cut through the densely settled South Bronx 1963 -
Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge
building
The longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened 1964 -
1964 New York World's Fair
other
He presided over it, missed his attendance forecast badly, and drew investigators 1964
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1914 aged ~26 Takes a Columbia doctorate in political science and turns to reform politics
- 1918 aged ~30 Belle Moskowitz brings him to the attention of Governor-elect Al Smith The connection came through his mother's settlement house work.
- 1924 aged ~36 Appointed president of the Long Island State Park Commission He held the post until 1963.
- 1929 aged ~41 Jones Beach opens
- January 19, 1934 aged 45 Becomes New York City Parks Commissioner The same year he lost the governor's race to Herbert Lehman and gave up on elections.
- 1936 aged ~48 Opens the Triborough Bridge and 11 WPA swimming pools The pools together held 49,000 swimmers.
- 1963 aged ~75 The Cross Bronx Expressway is completed
- March 1, 1968 aged 79 The legislature folds his Triborough Authority into the new MTA He was promised a role in the merged agency and then frozen out of it.
- 1974 aged ~86 Robert Caro publishes The Power Broker Moses answered with a 23-page statement. The book won the Pulitzer the following year.
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