Robert Moses

Origins and early life

Robert Moses was born in New Haven on 18 December 1888 to Emanuel and Bella Moses, assimilated German Jewish parents who belonged to the Ethical Culture movement; he was not circumcised, had no bar mitzvah, and as an adult denied being Jewish, which this fiche states plainly rather than glossing over. He studied at Yale, Oxford and Columbia, entered New York government as a reformer, and from 1924 to 1968 accumulated a dozen unelected offices, chief among them the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, whose toll revenues made him independent of mayors and governors.

Work and career

He built Jones Beach, the Long Island parkways, the Verrazzano-Narrows, Throgs Neck and Triborough bridges, 658 playgrounds, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium and the United Nations site, and ran the 1964 World's Fair. Robert Caro's Pulitzer-winning biography The Power Broker, published in 1974, documents the other side of that record: expressways driven through working-class neighbourhoods, above all the Cross Bronx Expressway, which displaced thousands of families in a heavily Jewish and immigrant Bronx, and Caro calls him the most racist person he ever encountered.

Jane Jacobs and the residents of Greenwich Village defeated his plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s, a defeat now taught as the turning point of American urban planning. His powers were finally stripped by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1968.

Later years

He died at West Islip on 29 July 1981, leaving a legacy that is genuinely double: an unmatched body of public works, and a school of planning the city has spent fifty years undoing.