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 “Shouts and Murmurs” piece published in the New Yorker over the summer. By that point, though, the message was clear: If you care about New York, you have to care about this book.

I certainly admire The Power Broker’s longevity and rare achievement of selling more than ten thousand copies a year—forty thousand this year alone. I appreciate Caro’s passion for research and his literary eloquence, his willingness to tackle difficult subjects, and the sheer sitzfleisch it takes for him to weave many disparate, conflicting, and unreliable threads into a compelling historical narrative. As someone who lives in and writes about New York, I am also terrifically interested in all the pernicious details of how Moses, wearer of many bureaucratic hats, hoodwinked and intimidated—or “played,” as Caro’s interview subjects frequently express it—the elected officials of his time and how that time spread through most of the past century, creating significant parts of the topography and reifying much of the social geography of the city that we know today. As a practicing urbanist, I’d be judged professionally incompetent if I didn’t always have a few good Power Broker anecdotes to punch up my critiques. But what drives all the other people who claim to be reading The Power Broker to do so now?

As Caro recently told the Times, the book—spoiler alert—is all about power. Moreover, he specifies, it’s about unchecked power. Never elected to public office, Moses was never accountable to voters. Neither was he censured by a mayor, governor, or city council, and for most of his long career, he enjoyed almost unanimous support in the media, especially the most influential advocate for urban redevelopment, the Times. He vanquished nearly every critic through sheer arrogance, manipulation, and the ability to gain, by one means or another, control of an enormous amount of funds. In the effort to make Moses, who died in 1981, a more relatable villain to younger readers, two Times critics in a preelection episode of the Culture Desk podcast even compare him to Donald Trump—a comparison welcomed by Trump in earlier years, as Caro once told a reporter from Politico.

Yet this is as unfair to Moses as Trump’s repugnant tendency to compare himself favorably to historical figures shortchanges Jesus. Moses was extremely smart and understood how to grab the public’s attention and neutralize the party bosses. He didn’t make empty promises about infrastructure. He really did build a huge number of great public works—highways, parks, public housing—for reasons that did not include fattening his own purse, although his prowess—or skullduggery—at formulating novel rules and burying them in obscurantist legislative jargon did enrich the coffers of his primary power base, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which was enabled by Moses’s sleight of hand to keep the fortune in tolls that it collected. Unlike the former and future president, too, Moses never perfected a carnival barker’s slick pitch to the crowd. His most effective speeches were not delivered at giant rallies but behind closed doors.

Any similarity, as Caro implies, lies in the two men’s abuse of power. Challenged to consider Moses’s reputation today, I’m reminded of the Gilded Age robber baron Andrew Carnegie: Can we forgive the Homestead massacre because he gave us public libraries? As for Moses, can we overlook racial segregation, massive displacement of low- and middle-income residents, and high asthma rates around congested urban highways because he gave the city Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, Brownsville Houses, and the Cross Bronx Expressway?

LET’S THINK ABOUT what “he gave the city” really means. Despite the appeal of Great Man biographies like The Power Broker, Robert Moses did not act alone. His opinions—racist, classist, gender-biased if not explicitly misogynistic—represented dominant elite attitudes of the time. As Joel Schwartz reveals in The New York Approach (1993), Moses engaged liberal community groups and public housing activists in his projects of neighborhood renewal. Most important, he worked within a specific historical context of Progressive Era politics, rapid government expansion, and a crisis mode of management forged by two world wars and unprecedented economic depression. When the public housing authority that he dominated needed to acquire land, locations were determined by a crucial geography that did not originate with him but with the infamous redlining maps drawn by banks and the federal government in the 1930s and that deprived low-income, white ethnic, and nonwhite urban areas of loans to rehabilitate existing housing. The concentration of low-value land in those same pink-hued sectors of the map drew the interest of the real estate industry: Property owners could now sell that land to the government; contractors would get paid to demolish homes and businesses there; and construction companies would build new housing on a much bigger scale.

I hope my point of view is not too theoretical, but basically cities are all about land. A single individual may be able to pull a lot of levers to control how that land is used, but more people and more levers are always involved. As other writers intent on deconstructing the Power Broker mythos have pointed out, Moses would not have been a great builder if the federal government had not been willing to foot the bill. His genius was to figure out how to put together the most compelling package to obtain federal funding and flatter or force mayors and governors to ante up their share and give him carte blanche to build whatever and wherever he chose—in ways that promised to benefit his benefactors. Then the Times would tell its readers that Moses’s plan would benefit everyone, demolishing “blighted” homes and businesses for the city’s greater good. “Gardens to Bloom on ‘Gas House’ Site,” the paper proclaimed on January 4, 1945, when the plan to build the northern expanse of the Stuyvesant Town housing complex, Peter Cooper Village, was announced: “Landscaped ‘Village’ of Homes to Be Built in Once Toughest District in the City; To House 1,500 Families.”

Aside from the federal government, Moses’s principal partners were insurance executives, particularly those who funded and often conceived housing projects like Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. Frederick Ecker, the president and later chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who was largely responsible for Stuy Town’s construction, makes only a minimal appearance in The Power Broker, but he gets the fuller treatment he deserves in Samuel Zipp’s excellent Manhattan Projects (2010), which places four of Moses’s signature achievements—Stuyvesant Town, the United Nations headquarters, Lincoln Center, and public housing projects in East Harlem—in the dual context of Cold War geopolitics and local strategies for urban growth. The Rockefeller family, including John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his sons David, Nelson, and Laurance, was even more important to Moses’s success. Their Manhattan real estate interests spread from Morningside Heights to the East River and throughout Midtown. With Moses’s help, their holdings were buttressed by the building of the middle-income housing project Morningside Gardens, which would buffer the Columbia University campus from dilapidated housing and the neighboring Black population; the United Nations headquarters, which would support New York’s contention of being the “capital of the free world” and Midtown’s central position in that universe; and the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which, though never built, promised to enhance both the value of the old financial district and the global ambitions of its most important property owner, the Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank. Strengthening the synergy between the UN headquarters and Manhattan real estate, apartments in Peter Cooper Village would be reserved for UN employees. In Robert Fitch’s The Assassination of New York (1993)—a highly critical view of the city’s financial elites and their allies in city government—Moses is indelibly portrayed as a handmaiden of Rockefeller capitalism. Although he has been locked in a posthumous hostile coupling with Jane Jacobs in the public imagination, Moses could more accurately be seen as the codependent partner, or servant, of Nelson Rockefeller.

But Moses could just as easily be described as a handmaid of state monopoly capitalism, a term used by European Marxists in the 1960s and 1970s when French government planners developed policies of social housing production and highway construction very similar to those in New York and other American cities and, unlike the US government, directly invested in new industrial plants as well; these policies not only financially supported the country’s biggest corporations (and staved off nationalization), they enhanced the planners’ power. This public-private partnership model, to use today’s terminology, was documented by urban sociologists Manuel Castells and Francis Godard in the aptly titled Monopolville (1974), a study of Dunkirk, a World War II battleground where, in the 1960s, the French government subsidized the construction and operation of a giant steel manufacturing complex. The same model was put in place in Paris, Lyon, and other French cities where urban planning, industrial policy, and corporate power were joined at the hip, underlining a structural symbiosis rather than the individual strengths of a Moses-like public-sector “czar.” This is not to deny that extraordinary leaders may show extraordinary vision and political will but to emphasize that local urban policies were co-constructed in spaces far beyond the offices of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. As Zipp’s Manhattan Projects and my own book Loft Living (1982) suggest, the global dimension is absolutely crucial to understanding the linkages between business elites, governments, and urban redevelopment from the 1950s through the 1970s, yet it is absent from Caro’s account.

National government funding, an obsession with modernity and national prestige, entanglement with a burgeoning auto industry, and, as always, the banks: These were the common elements of all public policies uniting economic “recovery” and urban “renewal” across North America, Europe, and Japan in the early years of the Cold War, which coincided with the final phase of Moses’s rule. In New York and other major cities throughout the world, an ambitious building program to create jobs and eliminate slums would show capitalism’s ability to launch a new era of prosperity. Such “traveling policies” circumnavigated a global urban network of planners, business leaders, and politicians in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, installing large-scale social housing projects on the edges of New York, Lisbon, and Stockholm; upgrading historic centers with new government and office complexes; and building the Cross Bronx and Brooklyn Queens Expressways, London’s M25, and the Boulevard Périphérique around Paris.

Lincoln Center, for instance, finds its counterpart in the Pompidou Center on the Right Bank in Paris, strategically situated between two “blighted” areas: the former wholesale food markets of Les Halles (its historic pavilions designed by Victor Baltard and razed during the 1970s in a Moses-like blitzkrieg), replaced by an underground shopping mall, and the Jewish immigrant quarter of the Marais, a working-class neighborhood whose small workshops and dilapidated, subdivided mansions became a hotbed of gentrification. Like Lincoln Center, the Pompidou represented an effort to both assert the prestige of Paris as an important global center of culture and modernize a particularly degraded neighborhood on the Plateau Beaubourg, a hodgepodge of “ilôts insalubres” filled with the Parisian equivalent of New York’s old-law tenements: housing without bathrooms or hot water. The French government had eyed this area for redevelopment since the 1930s, but planning was delayed by the Great Depression, World War II, and German occupation. Finally, during the 1960s, economic growth delivered both the funds and the incentive for redevelopment; in 1969, the government decided that a spectacularly modern art museum with a youth-oriented program would be just the centerpiece this project needed, and it would also subvert the insurrectionary aims of the militant student movement of May 1968 that had helped to discredit the government of President Charles de Gaulle. Like its programming, the museum’s strikingly innovative architectural design offered a major contrast to the modernist classicism of Lincoln Center, but both projects joined national ambitions and real estate development. Both also displaced lower- and middle-income renters and erased all traces of their homes, communities, and culture, which were deemed unsuitable in the corporate core of a modern metropolis.

MOSES’S GREAT SELLING POINT, like that of government planners elsewhere, was that he got results. When that basic premise was questioned, however, and grassroots opponents were able to take advantage of dissension within the political class, his grand schemes fell apart. That is what happened to the elevated expressways across upper Manhattan, lower Manhattan, and Midtown that Moses planned from the 1940s through the 1960s. The Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), which would have linked Long Island to New Jersey by cutting across Manhattan around Canal Street, was the only one to gain traction, but achieving a critical mass of political support to build it continually eluded Moses’s grasp. Initially proposed in 1929 by the Regional Plan Association, the expressway was shelved for a decade because of the Depression. It was resurrected by the city planning commission in 1941 as a six-lane, double-decker highway but was delayed again because of the war. Three years later, the New York state legislature approved its funding and, in 1946, engineering studies began to be produced. These culminated in 1955 in a regional Joint Study of Arterial Facilities by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and the Port of New York Authority (now the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey), whose executive director, Austin Tobin, had a checkered history with Moses; Moses himself wrote the introduction. Yet the plan still stalled. Engineers believed the expressway was needed to accommodate already heavy traffic flows that they expected to keep growing, and Tammany Hall–connected politicians and construction trade unions knew it would provide lucrative contracts and jobs. But opponents didn’t like the expressway’s complicated over-and-under design, combining elevated and below-grade roadways and interchanges. These would not only be expensive to build but would require the demolition of impressive nineteenth-century structures like the E. V. Haughwout Building on Broadway at Broome Street and the police headquarters on Centre Street, as well as houses of worship, community centers, and local stores. LOMEX would surely destroy neighborhood life, as Moses’s Gowanus Expressway had done in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and the Cross Bronx Expressway did in Tremont.

This stark risk energized community organizers in the expressway’s path, which was now projected to cut across Manhattan above a widened Broome Street. In 1962, Jane Jacobs marched with anxious residents and determined activists from the West Village to the Lower East Side to protest the plan, and opponents continued to agitate at required public hearings. But Moses kept the plan alive, and by this time, he had a compelling argument: Because of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the US government would pay for 90 percent of the construction costs. Yet competing demands from Tammany bosses, on one side, and a newly insurgent wing of reform Democrats, on the other, held elected officials’ support in check. City council members and state legislators who represented districts in Greenwich Village, where a reform club was strong, feared for their reelection. All this opposition to Moses—and Jacobs’s role in it—was edited out of Caro’s text, a critical absence picked up by Marshall Berman in his eloquent postscript to All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982), where he praises Jacobs’s grand refusal of the “expressway world,” her preference for the playground over the roadway, and her rejection of cataclysmic redevelopment in favor of organic growth, all of which challenged Moses’s way of thinking and offered an alternative vision of urban modernity.

In 1967, the Ford Foundation asked Paul Rudolph to imagine how an elevated highway might look, and his dark renderings of multilevel megastructures, reminiscent of both Hugh Ferriss’s shadowed metropolis and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s dystopian prisons, may have caused even a growth-oriented elite to pause. Although Rudolph’s vision never attracted much attention, least of all from Moses, the ongoing dissension created so much uncertainty that building owners allowed their properties, deprived of improvements since the Depression, to continue to decline. Many small factories, wholesalers, and warehouses went out of business or moved to modern facilities out of state, raising questions about the need for any new roadway at all. Under these conditions, the loft buildings along Broome Street between Broadway and West Broadway in the area we now call SoHo emptied.

I recently returned to this convoluted history while conducting interviews for a documentary film about SoHo that I’m making with Alice Arnold. Although many artists whom I interviewed for Loft Living have since died or moved away, those who remain still tell war stories about renovating lofts for live-work studios, evading the buildings department’s inspectors because they were living illegally in a manufacturing zone, and battling Moses over the proposed expressway. Artists who lived in lower Manhattan in the early 1960s, and participated in protests then, thought the plan had died when the Board of Estimate voted, in 1962, to reject it. Yet a dancer who moved to Spring Street, one block north of the expressway’s projected path, with her young family in 1969 recalls the horror she felt reading an article in the Village Voice and realizing that LOMEX was still in play. She helped to organize new opposition, which, by now, included a significant number of articulate, politically aware, college-educated artists who were connected to major museums, cultural institutions like the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and art collectors. They wrote letters to the mayor and demonstrated at city hall; the dancer was enlisted to walk around SoHo with her baby in tow to count the number of artists living there whose community would be jeopardized if Moses got his way. The artists also called a public protest meeting at the Museum of Modern Art, until the museum backed out because supporting opposition to LOMEX would irritate David Rockefeller, then a member of the board. The meeting was moved to the Whitney and 250 people came; it was covered, unlike any of the artists’ earlier protests, by the Times; and opposition to LOMEX soared.

By that time, though, the political context had changed. In 1968, a year of widespread social protest and cultural contestation, Jacobs spoke against the expressway at a public meeting called by the city planning department, where she was arrested for disorderly conduct after she ripped the transcript from the stenotype machine and tore it up. Environmental scientists predicted a rise in carbon monoxide levels around the expressway’s potential path, a point that strengthened the opposition. Museum directors from around the world wrote to the mayor saying that the expressway would destroy the city’s valuable art community, while historic preservationists argued against destroying SoHo’s irreplaceable industrial architecture. Most important, the new mayor, John Lindsay, having won the support of opponents to LOMEX by promising to kill the expressway, waffled for a time but ultimately carried through on his promise. “We discovered that we had influence,” the dancer still marvels. Indeed, they had more influence than Robert Moses.

Moses, by then, was no longer invincible. His management of a dozen public agencies was tarnished by scandal: There were rumors about his lavish business expenditures, and his promises that more highways would prevent traffic congestion were demonstrably false. Caro does not write about this, but in the late 1950s, at the very start of the national highway-building program championed by the Eisenhower administration, a few skeptics like John T. Howard, a pioneering city planning professor at MIT, began to question the social benefits of highway construction. Evidently, these doubts did not penetrate the ranks of decision-makers at city hall. A decade later, however, Moses faced a seemingly more progressive city administration, a growing number of reform Democrats (many of whom, based in Greenwich Village and brownstone Brooklyn, formed a strong advocacy group for historic preservation), and a new governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who wanted to direct his own “edifice complex.” Rockefeller killed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and his old ally Moses was on his way out.

The main source of Moses’s power, the public authorities that he had manipulated so adroitly for years, thrived without him. Their regional or even statewide reach, ability to issue bonds without legislative oversight or public accountability, and right to carry out big infrastructure projects without holding public hearings—a bane of democracy, in Moses’s view—remained intact. Indeed, they continued to offer mayors and governors a useful tool for building bridges like the Tappan Zee (now Governor Mario M. Cuomo) Bridge in the early 1950s and real estate complexes like the World Trade Center in the 1960s without raising taxes; they also brought huge profits to the financial institutions that sold their bonds and the investors who bought them. “The fall of New York,” a subtitle attached to The Power Broker by its publisher, more aptly fits the public authorities’ role in increasing the debt burden on both the city and the state during these years, as we learned when the city could no longer service its debts and was pushed into a fiscal crisis by banks and bondholders in 1975.

As LOMEX was on its last legs, Governor Rockefeller created a new form of public authority, the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), which built mixed-income, racially integrated housing on Roosevelt Island and in Coney Island and the Bronx, as well as in upstate cities, and developed low-rise, high-density housing in Brooklyn’s Brownsville, before being overcome by suburban resistance to racial integration and cascading debt. But the public authority didn’t die: UDC pivoted from housing to economic development and, in the 1990s, joined other authorities to form what is now referred to as Empire State Development (ESD). Very much Moses’s heir, ESD retained the power to override local zoning laws and planning processes, enabling it to control projects like Amazon’s thwarted HQ2 in the 2010s and the redevelopment of Penn Station today.

The city created its own public authority for economic development, the Public Development Corporation, which by 1991 grew into the New York Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), the most powerful and financially self-sufficient of all the city’s agencies. Like UDC, NYCEDC can act without oversight by the public or its elected representatives; it doesn’t need a Robert Moses at its head to foil the popular will. As the first Governor Cuomo, Mario, said in 1996, a few years after he left office, a public authority is “something above democracy, absolutely, that’s why it was invented by politicians, to keep the people away from the operation, and to insulate the politicians.” This can have devastating effects: During Rockefeller’s time in Albany, Eric Darton notes in Divided We Stand, his 1999 history of the original World Trade Center, the state’s public authorities racked up debts totaling more than $12 billion, with a large chunk of it invested in lower Manhattan near the Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank. Yet it’s as difficult to hold public authorities accountable as it was to challenge Moses.

IN RECENT YEARS, urban pundits from Michael Kimmelman to Ross Barkan have called for big projects to rekindle New York City’s languishing mojo and another Moses-like figure to carry them out. But this would open the door to redevelopment without careful public scrutiny, elevate the speed of planners’ fiats over time-consuming environmental and social reviews, and support the alliances between big government and big capital that doom the city to dependence. Does this sound like the reasoning behind the zoning proposals in the Adams administration’s “City of Yes” package, which has recently been passed, with modifications, by the city council? Substitute gambling casinos for expressways, remove community boards from even an advisory role in development decisions, overlook the overreliance on private-sector developers, and that’s where New York is heading now.

Housing, of course, remains a major problem. Long-term strictures on federal funding for public housing bear significant responsibility for the shortage of affordable rentals. But so, too, does developers’ preference for building luxury housing, their refusal to carry out projects without the assurance of public subsidies, and their illicit conversion of rent-stabilized apartments into high-rent units and owner-occupied condos—a strategy that aligns with the misguided initiatives of housing reformers and middle-class renters to convert their rental buildings to co-ops. The state legislature’s enthusiasm for eliminating rent regulation also aligns with the interests of the city’s landlords. As for Jacobsian “community control,” a radical slogan in the 1960s, it was perverted by Bloomberg’s city planning department into a way of deferring to the interests of brownstone denizens by downzoning their streets and is now interpreted by homeowners in low-density neighborhoods as a method for resisting building anything nearby. Yet building truly affordable housing on the scale at which it’s needed would require a new public housing system and a regional land-use plan. Ironically, this recalls the vision if not the ferocious egoism of Robert Moses.

I suspect that even he would not be able to overcome suburban hostility toward dense construction and lower-cost housing, not to mention the specter of ethnic, class, and racial diversity. Can we even imagine a Robert Moses of today, when city planning is constrained by the cost of land and labor, interest rates, and the real estate industry’s arsenal of threats of litigation, campaign contributions, and—their ultimate weapon when legislators take away subsidies—a strategic refusal to build anything at all? Neither Caro nor Jacobs took these factors into account when they blamed Moses individually or planners in general for ruining New York.

A shortage of developable land in the city would hamstring any wannabe Robert Moses. Acquisition costs are much higher than in his time; ownership is often fragmented or contested; and the use of eminent domain arouses much stronger protest, up to and including litigation. The ongoing debate about renovating, rebuilding, or replacing Penn Station and redeveloping the area around it is a case in point, involving quarrelsome private property owners and influential developers; the federal, state, and city governments; two government-owned railroad companies (Amtrak and NJ Transit); and public authorities like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which controls another interested party, the Long Island Railroad. The governor, regardless of party or personality, also asserts an independent stake in the city’s big development projects. The previous Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, not only promoted a Penn Station redevelopment plan that would affect a large swath of west Midtown, but also got personally involved in the expansion of the Q subway line along Second Avenue and the repair of the tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan used by the L train. Twenty years ago, after 9/11, Republican governor George Pataki wrested control of redevelopment of the World Trade Center site from Mayor Michael Bloomberg—and control of that site, like Penn Station, was divided between two private real estate development companies, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and numerous building owners. Decisions about the adjacent highway site were also influenced by businesses such as Goldman Sachs, whose global headquarters is on West Street.

Even when the city owns developable land, determining which agency controls it and evicting a private party that may be using it poses problems. The Elizabeth Street Garden, a small but symbolically significant plot of land in Nolita, is a good example. In the 1990s, the city leased the plot to the owner of an antiques store next door, who cleaned it, planted grass, fenced it in, and used it to display statues. In 2013, after obtaining control over the parcel from the Department of Education, which didn’t even know it held the deed, Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) decided to lease it to a private developer and a nonprofit organization so they could build housing. But HPD would first have to strike a deal with the local city council member, who, it turned out, was willing to package the land with the much larger, long-suffering Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), a half-mile away on the Lower East Side, near the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. (SPURA, one of the largest city-owned redevelopment sites, first acquired by Moses with Title I funds, was delayed for fifty years because the ethnic communities living and owning businesses there, and their elected representatives, could not agree on how to share the facilities that would be built, and nearby renters and co-op owners did not see eye to eye on building market-rate or low-income housing.) When the antiques store owner and his neighbors heard that the Bloomberg administration wanted to terminate the Elizabeth Street lease, they fought back by converting the informal sculpture park into a community garden, where volunteers planted flowers, organized public programs, and created a beloved local resource. In 2014, the gardeners formed a not-for-profit corporation to create an official identity, raise funds, and give themselves staying power. But by then they faced an incoming de Blasio administration that wanted the land to build subsidized housing for low-income LGBTQ seniors, especially those already living in the area. Because of the shortage of developable land in lower Manhattan, this noble aim required the destruction of the garden, a decision that engaged the garden’s members and their many supporters for several years in protest, lobbying, and litigation, recalling the battles against former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the late 1990s, when he decided to destroy several hundred community gardens in low-income areas of the city so private developers could erect housing. The New York Supreme Court has stayed what was supposed to be the final order of eviction until February 2025, when the garden members’ appeal will be argued, signaling the end (perhaps) of a long battle over one acre of land, a battle that would have been inconceivable in Moses’s time.

Although it controls a much smaller domain than Moses did, the New York City Economic Development Corporation arguably plays a similar role. This public-sector institution collectively enabled the city’s tech industry to gain new life in the 2010s, turning it into a pillar of the regional economy and helping New York emerge as a strong second to the San Francisco Bay Area in the sweepstakes of startup cities. NYCEDC did this by controlling developable city-owned land, primarily on Roosevelt Island, along the Brooklyn waterfront in Sunset Park, and on Fourteenth Street near Union Square, spending funds it earned from its rent rolls, as the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority does with its tolls, and, like Moses’s public authorities, dispensing it on projects of its choosing. NYCEDC also developed a new capacity for strategic planning; this was a kind of crisis management, to deal with the disastrous effects of the 2008 financial crash, that recalls—in substance though not in scope or scale—the Depression and post-Depression eras in which Moses worked. But NYCEDC did not do this alone. It began by consulting with business leaders in the city’s legacy industries and nonprofit organizations and asking what they thought was necessary. Out of the consensus that emerged, NYCEDC formed a plan to sponsor the creation of a new postgraduate engineering school, which became Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. From 2010 to 2017, when the first of its buildings opened, this campus was the tentpole, though hardly the only important element, of the city’s innovation complex.

Yet no one would claim that Seth Pinsky, NYCEDC’s president at the time, was a Robert Moses for the digital age. To guide the city into startup mode, the corporation hired Steven Strauss, a consultant who had worked for the World Economic Forum, and it was Strauss who managed consensus-building among the various interests that would have to buy into an innovation economy. The federal government contributed research grants—New York competes with Boston for winning the most federal grants for biomedical research—and pushed digitization of medical records onto the city’s many hospitals. Management of individual development projects, beginning with Cornell Tech, was distributed to nonprofit organizations, mainly universities that were prodded by both government policies and their own financial interests to become more “entrepreneurial” about tech research. And the growing number of venture capitalists in New York raised capital for startups to hire and pay rent.

In contrast to this successful ad hoc strategy that relied on talent from outside the public sector, the city and state’s failure to launch Amazon’s purported HQ2 in the late 2010s shows that public authorities do, in fact, have limited power. Even though the Amazon plan was managed by Empire State Development, the public authority that grew out of Nelson Rockefeller’s Urban Development Corporation, which enabled planners to avoid going through the Uniform Land Use Review Process, I doubt that a reincarnated Robert Moses could have overcome the fierce opposition the scheme provoked. Neither Governor Andrew Cuomo nor Mayor Bill de Blasio, both initially great supporters of HQ2, could beat down labor, community, and immigrant groups that were equally concerned with federal immigration policies, the potential gentrification of areas bounded by public housing and middle-income homes, lack of substantial job training for public housing residents, and the spatial imposition of Amazon itself—not to mention their outrage over the $3.5 billion in subsidies that the city and state offered to one of the biggest corporations in the world, run by the then-world’s richest person. City council hearings that were scheduled by popular demand offered a focused arena for various constituencies to air their grievances and solicit wider support, and closer scrutiny of the jobs the company said it would create aroused serious mistrust. Lack of confidence in Amazon, and the severe, chronic suspicion of government that has pervaded the country since the Vietnam War in the 1970s and has only deepened with Covid, Trump, and conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” would doom any would-be power brokers today.

According to New York Magazine’s 2023 “Power Issue,” a ranking of local officials, businesspeople, and celebrities that the editors have periodically compiled since the late 1960s, there are no more outsize actors like Robert Moses. “New York’s major power brokers,” the editors complain in an introductory note, “the moguls and the billionaires, the sort of people who bend the city to their will—are, as a group, remarkably staid and listless.” Is this a result of modesty or overspecialization? Have the structural barriers erected in the municipal reforms that Jane Jacobs’s generation fought for prevented a new Robert Moses from emerging? Or is everyone too busy pursuing kudos and money in a narrower sphere? The magazine’s editors settle for presenting a power list of “people fearsomely regarded in their industry and virtually unknown to anyone else.” But maybe that would describe Robert Moses before Robert Caro wrote The Power Broker.