The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Robert Caro's The Power Broker follows Robert Moses from a comfortable Connecticut childhood and an education at Yale and at Oxford into New York's civil service, where he arrived as a genuine reformer determined to professionalize a system built on patronage. Caro follows Moses's early success building New York's state park system and the Triborough Bridge, projects that established both his competence and his growing appetite for the kind of unelected authority that let him outlast mayors and governors alike, since the public authorities Moses built and controlled answered to no electorate and could issue their own bonds free of ordinary budget oversight. Over more than a thousand pages the book follows Moses through four decades of bridges, highways, parks, and housing projects that physically remade New York City and State, and it argues throughout that the power Moses accumulated, though he never won or even sought elected office, came to exceed that of the governors and mayors who nominally outranked him.

The book's most sustained and most devastating episode is the chapter titled One Mile, which The New Yorker ran as an excerpt ahead of publication, an account of how Moses's Cross Bronx Expressway tore through the East Tremont neighborhood, displacing thousands of residents and businesses along a route Caro argues Moses chose for his own convenience rather than for any engineering necessity, over an alternative that would have spared the neighborhood at comparable cost. Caro follows Moses to the end of his long public career, an old man still controlling agencies and commissions into his late seventies, having built more public works than any other single figure in American history while never once facing the voters whose city he had reshaped, and the book closes without offering Moses redemption, insisting the same drive that built Jones Beach also emptied whole neighborhoods with a bureaucrat's indifference to the people living in them.

Caro spent seven years reporting the book, drawing on hundreds of interviews and an enormous body of archival material, after Moses, who granted him seven interviews before cutting them off once Caro's questions grew too pointed, refused to cooperate further.