Moses Operandi

I CONFESS THAT I MANAGED to live through the first half of 2024 before learning that it was, according to the New York Times, “the year of  The Power Broker.” Although I had read Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Robert Moses, the public sector baumeister of pre- and postwar New York City, shortly after it appeared—indeed, the pages that have shaken loose from the binding of my paperback edition testify to my leafing through it too many times—I had no idea that the fiftieth anniversary of its initial publication was near. I didn’t know about the virtual reading group with celebrity guests mobilized by the podcast 99% Invisible to plow through the tome’s 1,200-plus pages. I was unaware that New York Historical would mount an exhibition featuring the author’s notes and one of the typewriters on which he wrote the book or that the Municipal Art Society of New York would charter an “elegant 1920s-style yacht” to ferry visitors to some of the Moses-related sites that Caro exhaustively describes. I only began to notice all the hoopla when I read an ironic “…