November 2024
by

Myron Magnet
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Robert Moses biography.

Robert Moses was a titan—the Napoleon of city building—and Robert A. Caro’s classic biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year and still sells forty thousand copies annually, is almost as titanic.1 In the three-quarter-million words that crowd the book’s 1,200 pages, Caro depicts in encyclopedic detail what Moses achieved in shaping Gotham and its environs in his forty-four years in office, and he brilliantly illuminates the political legerdemain needed to accomplish that. But with half a century’s perspective, Caro’s judgments look less sure-footed. Notwithstanding the book’s subtitle, New York did not fall, however badly it stumbled in the 1970s, when The Power Broker appeared, and later developments have advanced our understanding of what makes cities thrive. As for Moses himself, while time hasn’t shrunk his giant imprint on Gotham, it has made his faults, which Caro excoriates with the zeal of an inquisitor, seem merely human. Continue reading →