Robert Moses

• Born: December 18, 1888
• Birthplace: New Haven, Connecticut
• Died: July 29, 1981
• Place of death: West Islip, Long Island, New York

Urban planner

For nearly a half century, Moses was the major designer of New York City’s expressways, bridges, parks, and many other structures.

Areas of achievement: Architecture and design; government and politics

Early Life

Robert Moses (MOH-zehs) was the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany. His mother, Bella, possessed a willful, idealistic, and opportunistic nature that observers later saw reflected in Moses. His father, Emanuel, was the owner of a department store in New Haven, Connecticut, who retired when Bella expressed a desire to live in New York City. Unlike many other New York Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Moses family did not move to the lower East Side but further uptown, to a prosperous German Jewish neighborhood. Bella spent much of her life working in a settlement house for Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who, she believed, needed to be “Americanized.”

The Moses family provided private schools for Moses and his brother Paul Emanuel. Bella was strict with her children but tended to spoil them. Both boys were considered brilliant, their sister less so. Moses grew tall, wiry, and handsome. His education continued at Yale; Wadham College, Oxford; and Columbia University, where he earned a Ph.D. His dissertation, The Civil Service of Great Britain, revealed his admiration for the British system, which he saw as attracting men of intelligence and high ability to influential posts in the civil service, while a much larger group performed at a lower level. He defended what seemed to be an undemocratic vision of society by insisting that merit must be the qualification for success. The meritorious were likely to be intelligent students with Ivy League educations.

Completing his degree in 1913, Moses gained a position with the Training School for Public Service in New York, the first American educational institution established to train young men for government service. Bella had connections with the trustees of this organization. At this school, Moses met Mary Sims, whom he married in 1915. Work at the school bored him, however, and he was offered a chance to reorganize New York City government under its young mayor, John Purroy Mitchel. Then Belle Moskowitz, the wife of one of his colleagues at the training school, introduced Moses to an even more important man, Alfred E. Smith, her employer, who had been elected governor of New York.

Life’s Work

Moses’s initial job in Smith’s administration was a supervisory position with the State Reconstruction Commission. He prepared a report on the reorganization of state government that was much applauded by reformers, and Moses became essentially an adviser to Smith. A check to his growing influence came in 1920 when Smith lost the governorship to a Republican opponent. However, in 1922, Smith regained the seat. Offered various positions over the next few years, Moses perceived that the one opening the most opportunities for him was the presidency of the Long Island State Park Commission, which he assumed in 1924 and held for forty-four years. At a time when people were gaining more leisure time and the means to own an automobile, the need for more recreational space was obvious. Parks previously had been conceived as wilderness places, but Moses believed that parks should also provide various recreational and sporting opportunities. Within four years, the number of state parks on Long Island grew from one to fourteen. When Moses established a park, he built roads to link them with highways. Despite the fact that his position pertained to Long Island, Moses was responsible for generating park additions and improvements throughout the state.

Moses’s notable accomplishments are associated closely with New York City. Jones Beach, fashioned on a sandbar off the Long Island coast, became a favorite destination for New Yorkers. A position Moses gained under Mayor Fiorello Henry La Guardia on January 19, 1934, heading the New York City Park Commission, gave Moses much more latitude. By May 1 of the same year park visitors found every tennis court resurfaced, every lawn reseeded, eleven miles of bridle paths rebuilt, eight golf courses refashioned, and many other obvious improvements made. All structures were freshly painted, and hundreds of comfort stations, drinking fountains, and benches had been repaired. That was just the beginning. In the 1930’s, Moses built 235 playgrounds, although at that time few people noticed that only one of them was built in Harlem.

Moses did not just build and improve parks. He built seven bridges, one of which, the aptly named Triborough Bridge, connects three boroughs with three bridges and a causeway. He built fourteen expressways, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the New York Coliseum, Shea Stadium, and more. The power Moses accumulated to accomplish this building boom flowed from political leaders eager to demonstrate tangible benefits that they could present to the public.

Construction also involves destruction, especially in an established metropolitan complex such as New York City, and Moses received much criticism for projects that destroyed homes and ravaged neighborhoods. One example is the seven-mile Cross-Bronx Expressway. In just one mile of this project, which links northern and southern sections of Routes 1 and I-95, fifty-four apartment houses, each holding from thirty to fifty families, were destroyed as well as many small homes. Adjoining streets of the Bronx became dead ends, and criminal activity in the neighborhood mushroomed. Critics claimed that a slightly different route would have preserved most of these structures. Here and elsewhere, neighborhoods and pedestrians were forced to give way to Moses’s dedication to automobiles and thoroughfares for them. Moses died of heart disease in 1981 at the age of ninety-two.

Significance

Both supporters and opponents of Moses’s achievements agree that the changes he made in New York City and his influence in the field of urban design are of immense importance. Had he never lived, New York would be a different city. Whether it would be a better or a worse city is a question that will continue to be argued. After a period of several decades, in which people familiar with his work regarded it as astonishing and admirable, negative criticism arose sharply in the 1970’s, when people saw that neighborhoods from downtown Manhattan to the South Bronx had lapsed into serious decline, and they began to identify Moses’s alterations as leading to that degeneration. Subsequent reinvigoration of the city suggests that the criticism was too harsh and that the work of this remarkable man should be reassessed.

Bibliography

Ballon, Hilary, and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds. Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.The editors present eight essays by urban experts who have investigated Moses’s achievement and influence in the exercise of public authority to design and reshape the modern city.

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. This immense study is both a biography of Moses and a history of his recasting of the New York metropolitan era in more than four decades in the twentieth century. Caro calls Moses “America’s greatest builder” but sees him also as a man obsessed with the attainment and exercise of power, which brought about what Caro terms the city’s “fall.”

Gratz, Roberta Brandes. The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. New York: Nation Books, 2010. The author writes as an advocate of Jane Jacobs, an activist and writer on urban problems, who, beginning late in Moses’s career, became his most bitterly negative critic. This book, more one-sided than Caro’s, presents some of the most trenchant criticisms of Moses’s philosophy of urban improvement.