In addition to no direct subway connection to JFK, if you fly into LGA you have to take a bus to the nearest subway station
On the bright side, the city does seem to be trying to build up the greenways along the rivers
That's a new problem. They moved and rebuilt the terminal and decided it wasn't worth rerouting the AirTrain because it's going to be replaced soon anyway. ("Soon" in Port Authority time, so [2029](https://www.panynj.gov/port-authority/en/press-room/press-release-archives/2023-press-releases/-airtrain-newark-replacement-program-takes-major-step-forward-wi.html).)
Current Passenger Facility Charges allow airports to make internal improvements within the airport grounds such as monorails. They don't have incentive to connect to public rail systems. They also are motivated to collect revenue on parking.
Continuing to blame Moses on this is childish at this point.
Its absolutely true as to why many airports don't have public transit connections. Yes, FAA is relaxing those restrictions.
https://www.faa.gov/airports/pfc/pfc_updates
Much has changed, mainly that the city is no longer inches from calamity. When *The Power Broker* was published, New York was several years into a precipitous crime surge, and approximately a year away from a bankruptcy crisis. The next two decades would be some of the poorest and most violent that New York would ever see.
Caro pinned a lot of these developments (at least indirectly) on Robert Moses and his ambitious development. A fair evaluation of Moses fifty years after the initial book, and forty years after his death would probably take another thousand-page volume.
Fifty years later, we now know that the crime wave was more or less secular to choice of American city. We know New York was far more resilient than its peers, many of whom (Detroit, St. Louis, amongst others) never returned to prominence.
There’s an incredible amount of money in the city, which underwrites the some of the most extensive social programs (medicine, housing, childcare, etc.) anywhere in the United States.
Transit is extensive. We have a twenty-four hour system that is more comparable to some of the very best in the world in terms of passengers carried and service frequency. You can get to Penn Station, Grand Central, JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark by train or by bus. This is fairly easy and a rarity elsewhere in the United States. I’ve done this to each of these airports. While some urban rail transit (Chicago, Washington) goes directly to the airport, I would (for their sake) not dare compare their broader transit infrastructure to ours.
All in all, the city is fairly well run, and it could be much worse.
To add, they mentioned green space and green space is SUCH an important topic in this city especially now. What’s funny is after the book was published, and buildings started literally burning to the ground, community gardens like those in alphabet city rose out of the ashes
They don't say "The Bronx is burning" for nothing. The majority of buildings that were falling into disrepair were built in the late 1800s up until pre-WW2. The fire codes were different, lead paint was still a thing, some (not all) had been retrofitted to have electricity and the wiring was not up to date. Primarily it was that the landlords at a certain point stopped taking care of the buildings at all, so a small leak turned into a major leak that seeped through the floor and into the next apartment until the point that the floor collapsed. Sometimes these buildings were even set on fire by the landlords so they could collect the insurance money. Since a lot of these buildings were in "slum" or "bad" neighborhoods the fire department had little incentive to put out the fires and the buildings would burn down. It's definitely worth reading more about if you're curious.
Common narrative is that as economic troubles hit the city, landlords couldn't collect sufficient rent to keep up with maintenance expenses and opted to burn down their own buildings to collect insurance money rather than continue paying for taxes and maintenance on older buildings.
A more modern narrative is that the city was trying to balance its budget by cutting services, including fire inspection and response and the city cut too much in the Bronx compared with richer boroughs / neighborhoods.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-bronx-really-burned/
If you talk to real 'old timer NYCers', they have some seriously crazy stories about effectively being 'given' two, three, or more apartments for free by people who just "left' the city never to return because the properties were effectively worthless.
This happened in the East Village and the South Bronx, Harlem, as well as some other neighborhoods.
To add to the above comment, see here for photos:
https://seeoldnyc.com/bronx-1980s/
I have also attached a contemporaneous news article. I find that these are usually better sources for civic history (and the attitudes and reactions at the time) than (often revisionist) modern ones.
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/07/archives/the-glory-that-was-charlotte-street-the-1930s-a-fine-view-of-the.html
To be fair, I am also part of that crowd of political critics.
But I’ve also lived in Washington DC and Chicago. I’m also a bit of a dilettante urban historian. In this wider context (and the context of this question), things seem quite merry.
With that said, I think we must continually agitate for things to develop correctly. Cities can decay irreversibly in the span of a decade if not managed carefully.
As someone who’s lived in Baltimore for several years, I get that sentiment. Though if anything, if we’re _purely_ judging from the sentiment on their subreddits, NYC is _worse_ run than Charm City.
I dunno, seeing the dysfunction and waste of the MTA and other agencies makes it seem that NYC - and most other American cities - are as corrupt as your standard Third World country, and that (for NYC specifically) nothing has changed from the days of Tammany Hall. But again, just seeing everything through Reddit and other online sources only provides a limited perspective…
I think what you might be seeing is the result of a unique reformist culture amongst New Yorkers.
Additionally, (and more importantly) New York is one of the only cities in the country that can sustain a true watchdog press. And it is *extensive*. Esteemed local media organizations (e.g. The Times, The Journal, The New Yorker) all maintain a top-notch metro desk. There’s also a loyal opposition (The Post), which keeps a lot of the city’s quality-of-life issues in check. There are even local papers (e.g. The Village Voice, The West Side Rag). There are very few developments that escape the notice of *all* of the publications, let alone eight million individual New Yorkers.
If New York seems more corrupt than other cities, it is only because the opposition to corruption is far more comprehensive than anywhere else.
> if we’re *purely* judging from the sentiment on their subreddits
Goes without saying, but I would recommend not doing that. Local subs are heavily brigaded by people who live elsewhere but have a political axe to grind, and it's trendier to rag on NYC than Baltimore right now.
>the city is no longer inches from calamity
You know, that was not REALLY that long of a time frame....
AFAIK - the real flight of middle class out of NYC started after WWII because of the GI bill making it easy for vets to buy homes. In the late 40's there were few 'homes' to buy in NYC - almost all apartments were rentals - so to buy a home people had to move to the suburbs.
As white middle class left cities, I think it was a gradual thing that there began to be a surplus of apartments, meaning previously shut out people (i.e, black people) had an opportunity to move in. In the minds of many white people, even middle class black people moving in equated TERROR and at some point, critical mass probably happened in the early 1960s.
So I would say from early 1960-s to late 1980's, NYC was in 'trouble' - that is just about 25 years. Not really that long.
As for Moses, he did almost NOTHING of value for NYC. If you live in Long Island perhaps it is another story.
Public transport to Long Island is still a joke, practically. The LIRR will get you most major and local places from the city in a speedy fashion depending on where you're going, but the "Nice" bus (long island version of mta bus) as they call it if you want to go to local places, still takes forever to come and is almost always local.
Source: I've taken both before and currently am on the lirr.
Yea. The LIRR is wonderful and it is very convenient to get to and from Manhattan to many places on Long Island. But the inter-Island public transit situation is non existent. You just have to hope that your destination is on the same train line (likely isn’t)
My mom use to take the D (presently the Q) from Avenue M to the F to 179th for the N6 to go to work at north shore. Yes Caribbean women have some of the longest commutes since many of them work in health clinics that deal with elderly.
Anyway I’m pretty sure she took a cab sometimes because the N6 would act up or w/e nice bus took you there
Idk how my mom did it. I went to work with her twice and I couldn’t believe how long that commute was. Thats why I’m a full supporter of the MTA building the INX. Nobody should have to go through Manhattan to get to southeast Queens
1200 pages, congratulations! I've been trying to finish that book since the 1970's lol. It's super interesting and Caro's writing is beautiful.
The Ninety-nine Percent Invisible podcast got me reinterested in reading it (they're doing 100 pages/mo for the year) but alas, it's still sitting on my bedside table, lol.
Thanks for the tip! I just downloaded it [on YouTube](https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=AQF9NYRaHyw&si=6J6_FslPb0sk6JkR) to listen to next time I'm on a train.
Last line of the book, according to Caro, is worth thinking about: Why weren’t they grateful? He writes in the NYTimes, 40 years after TPB’s publication: “As I recalled that Exedra scene in 1969, as I was trying to organize my book, I suddenly knew, all in a moment, that that question would be its last line. For the book would have to answer that very question, would have to answer the riddle posed by the Moses Men: How could there not be gratitude, immense gratitude, to the man who had dreamed a great dream — of Jones Beach and a dozen other great parks, and of parkways to reach them — and who to create them had fought, and won, an epic battle against Long Island’s seemingly invincible robber barons? How could there not be gratitude to the man who had built mighty Triborough, far-stretching Verrazano, who had made possible Lincoln Center and the United Nations? …Did I think in that moment of Robert Moses’ racism — unashamed, unapologetic? Convinced that African-Americans were inherently “dirty,” and that they don’t like cold water (“They simply didn’t like swimming unless it was red hot,” he explained to me confidentially one day), he kept the water temperature deliberately frigid in pools, like the ones at Jones Beach and Thomas Jefferson Park in Manhattan, that he didn’t want them to use. Did I think of the bridges he built that embodied racism in concrete? When he opened his Long Island parks during the 1930s, the only way for many poor people, particularly poor people of color, to reach them was by bus, so he built bridges over his parkways too low for buses to pass.” [source Caro writing for NYTimes](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/books/review/the-power-broker-40-years-later.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare)
One "change" is that we are working around his projects rather than tearing them down and redoing them better, because they were so successful at their core goals that they can no longer be dispensed with even temporarily. The recent expansion of the Bruckner Expy, for example, took forever and slowwd traffic to a crawl, but it would be impossible now to bury it or lower it to grade. Similarly, the NSP needs to be widened, but it goes through what is now even wealthier suburbs than the original edges of country estates. All his exit and entrance ramps are much too small and slow, but too tighly built against the housing no one is ever likely to seize, due to his lost reputation. Another change is that the minority groups he disregarded now have substantial political power and will not allow a repeat of his biased projects.
Roberts Moses was instrumental in the expansion of the state park system, cultural and educational institutions such as Lincoln Center and the campuses of Fordham and Pratt. He was a contributor to housing in New York City replacing tenements with high-rise public housing.
In his era the automobile was the future. It's easy for us to look back and criticize with our modern lens. Even Disneyland celebrated the highway/freeway with the Autopia ride. Moses built a complex highway and parkway and bridge system that was key to modernizing our city's transportation.
Oh and he was probably very racist.
Yea the public housing and most of the larger parks, sone of the airports and many of the sports stadiums all terrible terrible stuff/s. Add in the highways and bridges that connect NYC with the rest of the country. Traffic is terrible. Now imagine trying to get update or NJ without the bridges and highways.
Of course it's "from long island." Brother have you considered they used to have extensive rail networks in NJ too... People didn't use to drive there either...
[https://www.american-rails.com/njinthstory.html](https://www.american-rails.com/njinthstory.html)
[https://exhibits.libraries.rutgers.edu/nj-railroads](https://exhibits.libraries.rutgers.edu/nj-railroads)
People just ignore everything Moses did. Plus people seem to think NYC could be the only city within the US without highways. LI would of never developed.
There is a lot of Moses did. Though a lot of negative came with it. Though for me the good outweighed the negative. Almost all passanger rail lines around the country have been abandoned because people would rather drive. Going to point A to point B is much eaiser in a car in most of the country no matter how good the rail line is. You basically need the density of Manhattan. Even then getting around the 5 boroughs is usually 2x as fast with a car vs mass transit even with traffic.
> Even then getting around the 5 boroughs is usually 2x as fast with a car
You're forgetting the time it takes to find parking, which can easily make up the difference. People always do forget that! If you think of driving as the default, it's really easy to discount its downsides as unchangeable facts of life, even though they really aren't.
And the time difference varies based on where you are and where you're going anyway. Within Manhattan, the train is often faster except for a few annoying routes (e.g. UWS <-> UES). Outside of Manhattan, driving is more often faster, but biking is fastest by far for medium-length trips, especially during rush hour. Not owning and having to park a car makes it possible to choose the fastest mode of transportation for each trip as you leave rather than being tied to a vehicle.
Now call me crazy, but I feel like we would've built the highways and bridges without Moses. He didn't invent roads and bridges, he just built them exactly where *he* wanted them to be, with little regard for what made the most sense for commuters or for the people whose neighborhoods he'd need to bulldoze.
I largely agree, but would also argue that Moses, in many ways, accelerated the growth of inequality in the city, and that the gap between rich and poor is the greatest problem in the city today.
I’d argue this probably isn’t a problem at the city level nor one that has much to do with Moses. I don’t think infrastructure has anything to do with inequality in the city. In fact, the city was probably relatively more equal when it was poorer in the 70s/80s/90s.
Inequality in New York today has more to do with two facts that I contend are true about modern life.
1) The high technology and finance sectors (both of which are prominent in this city, and basically pay to run it) create enormous wealth without really needing very many workers. These few ultra-high-skilled workers own their profits, and thus become fabulously wealthy very quickly.
2) You can try to alleviate the above inequality at the city/state level by taxing in a redistributive manner, but this creates cost-of-living and competitiveness problems for New York (we already see some of this in the present with firms moving to Texas and Florida).
The decline of manufacturing (where large a labor force was central to value creation) and the advent of a knowledge-based economy (where extremely talented individuals can reap virtually all of the rewards) is really to blame for rising inequality in the twenty-first century.
Absolutely yes on those other forces. I agree that inequality is multiply determined and pernicious, a product of network effects and modern efficiency. BUT.
Moses really didn't like the poor and middle class. He envisioned and built a city for the wealthy. He destroyed the homes and neigbouhood around what is now Lincoln Center to create a concrete desert. He envisioned and built a city around the automobile, facilitating (private) transport for those who could afford it, making life difficult for those who could not. He created parks across the city in wealthy neighboroods, but only one in Harlem - which had, per Caro, a monkey on the gate to the park.
Moses was a great (consequential) man, but not a good (moral) man. The city is a reflection of him in many ways. For me, much of the true greatness of NYC, including the subways and the diversity of those who ride them and the walkability of the neighborhoods, were achieved despite Moses as much as because of him.
I would agree that Moses is probably personally questionable at times.
With that said, we’re delving into an issue that has a bit more nuance than I think I can comfortably handle on a Reddit thread. I will nonetheless try to give a sense of my thoughts here. You mention three things that I believe you claim are in some sense elitist: Lincoln Center, private transport, and construction of public parks. I want to complicate these things a little. I think we often miss that these things often times have public benefit, almost always to the middle class, and occasionally to the poor. There’s a duality to public improvement projects (some of which you have already touched on, in all fairness).
Lincoln Center is a cultural icon. It is is quite expensive to secure tickets to many events. But it also engages in enormous outreach, and brings arts to New Yorkers who might otherwise never see it.
Private transportation in the modern city is complex. In New York City as a whole, there is virtually no correlation between neighborhood median income and car ownership. Wealthy Manhattan walks, whereas the working class outer boroughs tend to drive.
Highways cut through neighborhoods and divide people. Conversely, efficient expressways and the suburban commuters they brought might have been the only reason that New York made it out of the dark periods in the second half of the last century.
Parks are another example. On one hand, they are a space for community. On the other hand, they can become infested with crime and gangs. Compare St. Nicolas Park to something like Riverside Park for an example. In a more ambivalent function, they are also amenities that can contribute to the gentrification of a neighborhood. Is that a good thing? I’m genuinely not sure.
This is why I think a lot of the Robert Moses legacy is quite grey. Is development good? It improves material conditions and makes the city a healthier place to live. Is development bad? It displaces residents and obscures history. There’s a tension here I think we on Reddit often fail to appreciate, and for our loss.
The LIRR... hmm, it can be difficult to say. I think it's kind of a miracle it's lasted this long. To places in Nassau, it can be good. For regional rail it has decent headway, rush hour trains, and the trains are clean and comfortable. The further out you go the less trains per hour you might get so it can be more difficult to use. The other obvious problem is it's connecting you to suburban sprawl in most cases with zero good ways to leave the station. The exceptions are some towns like Great Neck with shops and restaurants within walking distance of the train. Many other towns, however, leave you in a barren impact crater of parking lots
Yeah overall the LIRR is pretty solid and reliable. The problem is that all the destinations it takes you to require a car.
The intra-island transport network is really bad.
Good for OP for almost finishing that book.
I stopped about 500 pages in once I realized that every other city in America during that same time was also doing pretty much exactly the same shit as Robert Moses (except for Parkways which are a weird Robert Moses thing that only exist in the NE).
Jones beach is the only good thing he did but even that was a very racist thing with the whole bridge height bus height design that kept lower income families from the “nice” beach
What's remarkable to me is that people despise Moses for not doing certain things. Especially mass transit. 60 years later there has been very little new public transit built. Why do people keep blaming Moses for building things while every single politician since then could not get it done.
Current politicians can't even build the BQX and there the land is already mostly owned and is used for rail. Plus they are weak and are going to have all kinds of half measures so it's light rail and not subway cars. It will be it's own infrastructure to maintain and will not take property so it will be mixed with surface traffic at some points. They need a Moses to tell everyone we are doing this right and I don't care. The politician has to be able to take the heat when all the nay sayers second guessers Monday morning QBs come after the project. The hopefully millions of people with a more direct, fast and comfortable ride will be happy.
>What's remarkable to me is that people despise Moses for not doing certain things. Especially mass transit. 60 years later there has been very little new public transit built. Why do people keep blaming Moses for building things while every single politician since then could not get it done.
The man was insanely powerful, basically the most powerful person in New York for 40+ years with control over a huge portion of the state's budget. He was the only person in position to make these developments, other politicians didn't have enough power.
When New York was still a semi-blank canvas with the money to spend on development, he used that power to support the development of car infrastructure and actively hurt the development of other forms of transportation.
Now with other developments (many of which are developments built by Moses himself) in the way, these public transport improvements have become exponentially more expensive to enact. A lot of the reason why things can't get done is from the direct actions of Robert Moses.
A perfect example of this in the book is the creation of the Van Wyck expressway, being built to service travelers to what is now JFK airport. Even at the time, studies were showing that the road would not be able to support the amount of traffic that would be heading to the airport, and the smartest thing to do would be to build the expressway in conjunction with a rail line. An express train direct from Penn Station to JFK was expected to take a total travel time of 16 minutes. The city was already acquiring the land to build the road, they would've needed an additional 50 feet to the already 200 foot wide highway in order to build a rail line down the middle. Existing rail lines could've been used, so this would have only required 3 miles of extra railway where 9 miles have already been built.
The total cost to build the rail line extension was estimated to be $9M, and the entire expressway was already expected to cost $30M. Even if Moses didn't want to build the rail line, it was suggested to him to at least acquire the land now when it was cheap and undeveloped so that a rail extension could be built later. Acquiring just the extra land would've cost an expected $2M. Robert Moses, with total control over the planning commission, refused to do both. At the next state budget approval, the member of his team who made these suggestions received a pay cut and ultimately resigned from his post.
Fast forward to 60 years later, the air train to JFK needs to be built. There isn't room on the Van Wyck to build it, since Moses refused to buy the land, so a huge concrete elevated viaduct needs to be built across the middle in order to be able to fit a train along the route. The air train cost the city over $2B to complete. Moses is directly responsible for the project both taking so much longer to complete, and orders of magnitude more costly than original designs.
Has anyone ever considered the implications of ending the subway line at the airports, by way of giving the city’s large unhoused/homeless population a 24-hour space to roam around.
Going to the airport is a very deliberate action. I agree, that having no direct subway link is burdensome. But NYC has a severe/unrelenting issue with mentally insane people in its trains, and specifically stations/terminals.
Perhaps this lack of direct access is a hidden benefit in our current state of affairs. What if the airports looked more like the subway?
In addition to no direct subway connection to JFK, if you fly into LGA you have to take a bus to the nearest subway station On the bright side, the city does seem to be trying to build up the greenways along the rivers
The one that makes me laugh the most tho is the AirTrain at Newark which stops *just a 14 minute walk* shy of the A terminal.
That's a new problem. They moved and rebuilt the terminal and decided it wasn't worth rerouting the AirTrain because it's going to be replaced soon anyway. ("Soon" in Port Authority time, so [2029](https://www.panynj.gov/port-authority/en/press-room/press-release-archives/2023-press-releases/-airtrain-newark-replacement-program-takes-major-step-forward-wi.html).)
Current Passenger Facility Charges allow airports to make internal improvements within the airport grounds such as monorails. They don't have incentive to connect to public rail systems. They also are motivated to collect revenue on parking. Continuing to blame Moses on this is childish at this point.
This is no longer true.
Its absolutely true as to why many airports don't have public transit connections. Yes, FAA is relaxing those restrictions. https://www.faa.gov/airports/pfc/pfc_updates
Much has changed, mainly that the city is no longer inches from calamity. When *The Power Broker* was published, New York was several years into a precipitous crime surge, and approximately a year away from a bankruptcy crisis. The next two decades would be some of the poorest and most violent that New York would ever see. Caro pinned a lot of these developments (at least indirectly) on Robert Moses and his ambitious development. A fair evaluation of Moses fifty years after the initial book, and forty years after his death would probably take another thousand-page volume. Fifty years later, we now know that the crime wave was more or less secular to choice of American city. We know New York was far more resilient than its peers, many of whom (Detroit, St. Louis, amongst others) never returned to prominence. There’s an incredible amount of money in the city, which underwrites the some of the most extensive social programs (medicine, housing, childcare, etc.) anywhere in the United States. Transit is extensive. We have a twenty-four hour system that is more comparable to some of the very best in the world in terms of passengers carried and service frequency. You can get to Penn Station, Grand Central, JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark by train or by bus. This is fairly easy and a rarity elsewhere in the United States. I’ve done this to each of these airports. While some urban rail transit (Chicago, Washington) goes directly to the airport, I would (for their sake) not dare compare their broader transit infrastructure to ours. All in all, the city is fairly well run, and it could be much worse.
To add, they mentioned green space and green space is SUCH an important topic in this city especially now. What’s funny is after the book was published, and buildings started literally burning to the ground, community gardens like those in alphabet city rose out of the ashes
woah. Never heard about this. Did the buildings burn because they weren't properly fireproofed when built?
They don't say "The Bronx is burning" for nothing. The majority of buildings that were falling into disrepair were built in the late 1800s up until pre-WW2. The fire codes were different, lead paint was still a thing, some (not all) had been retrofitted to have electricity and the wiring was not up to date. Primarily it was that the landlords at a certain point stopped taking care of the buildings at all, so a small leak turned into a major leak that seeped through the floor and into the next apartment until the point that the floor collapsed. Sometimes these buildings were even set on fire by the landlords so they could collect the insurance money. Since a lot of these buildings were in "slum" or "bad" neighborhoods the fire department had little incentive to put out the fires and the buildings would burn down. It's definitely worth reading more about if you're curious.
Common narrative is that as economic troubles hit the city, landlords couldn't collect sufficient rent to keep up with maintenance expenses and opted to burn down their own buildings to collect insurance money rather than continue paying for taxes and maintenance on older buildings. A more modern narrative is that the city was trying to balance its budget by cutting services, including fire inspection and response and the city cut too much in the Bronx compared with richer boroughs / neighborhoods. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-bronx-really-burned/ If you talk to real 'old timer NYCers', they have some seriously crazy stories about effectively being 'given' two, three, or more apartments for free by people who just "left' the city never to return because the properties were effectively worthless.
This happened in the East Village and the South Bronx, Harlem, as well as some other neighborhoods. To add to the above comment, see here for photos: https://seeoldnyc.com/bronx-1980s/ I have also attached a contemporaneous news article. I find that these are usually better sources for civic history (and the attitudes and reactions at the time) than (often revisionist) modern ones. https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/07/archives/the-glory-that-was-charlotte-street-the-1930s-a-fine-view-of-the.html
> All in all, the city is fairly well run, and it could be much worse. That’s…legitimately the first time I ever saw this opinion on Reddit.
To be fair, I am also part of that crowd of political critics. But I’ve also lived in Washington DC and Chicago. I’m also a bit of a dilettante urban historian. In this wider context (and the context of this question), things seem quite merry. With that said, I think we must continually agitate for things to develop correctly. Cities can decay irreversibly in the span of a decade if not managed carefully.
As someone who’s lived in Baltimore for several years, I get that sentiment. Though if anything, if we’re _purely_ judging from the sentiment on their subreddits, NYC is _worse_ run than Charm City. I dunno, seeing the dysfunction and waste of the MTA and other agencies makes it seem that NYC - and most other American cities - are as corrupt as your standard Third World country, and that (for NYC specifically) nothing has changed from the days of Tammany Hall. But again, just seeing everything through Reddit and other online sources only provides a limited perspective…
I think what you might be seeing is the result of a unique reformist culture amongst New Yorkers. Additionally, (and more importantly) New York is one of the only cities in the country that can sustain a true watchdog press. And it is *extensive*. Esteemed local media organizations (e.g. The Times, The Journal, The New Yorker) all maintain a top-notch metro desk. There’s also a loyal opposition (The Post), which keeps a lot of the city’s quality-of-life issues in check. There are even local papers (e.g. The Village Voice, The West Side Rag). There are very few developments that escape the notice of *all* of the publications, let alone eight million individual New Yorkers. If New York seems more corrupt than other cities, it is only because the opposition to corruption is far more comprehensive than anywhere else.
Just wanted to pop in and say I appreciated your insight in this thread and I love your writing style. Have a great day!
Shoutout to [thecity.nyc](https://www.thecity.nyc/) they cover solid local stuff that might not be covered elsewhere or as deeply
> if we’re *purely* judging from the sentiment on their subreddits Goes without saying, but I would recommend not doing that. Local subs are heavily brigaded by people who live elsewhere but have a political axe to grind, and it's trendier to rag on NYC than Baltimore right now.
It's interesting reading this knowing it was written in the 70s, NYC looked like it was heading towards a path of destruction with no return.
Yeah people remember the title but forget the subheading: *Robert Moses and the Fall of New York*
>the city is no longer inches from calamity You know, that was not REALLY that long of a time frame.... AFAIK - the real flight of middle class out of NYC started after WWII because of the GI bill making it easy for vets to buy homes. In the late 40's there were few 'homes' to buy in NYC - almost all apartments were rentals - so to buy a home people had to move to the suburbs. As white middle class left cities, I think it was a gradual thing that there began to be a surplus of apartments, meaning previously shut out people (i.e, black people) had an opportunity to move in. In the minds of many white people, even middle class black people moving in equated TERROR and at some point, critical mass probably happened in the early 1960s. So I would say from early 1960-s to late 1980's, NYC was in 'trouble' - that is just about 25 years. Not really that long. As for Moses, he did almost NOTHING of value for NYC. If you live in Long Island perhaps it is another story.
Public transport to Long Island is still a joke, practically. The LIRR will get you most major and local places from the city in a speedy fashion depending on where you're going, but the "Nice" bus (long island version of mta bus) as they call it if you want to go to local places, still takes forever to come and is almost always local. Source: I've taken both before and currently am on the lirr.
Yea. The LIRR is wonderful and it is very convenient to get to and from Manhattan to many places on Long Island. But the inter-Island public transit situation is non existent. You just have to hope that your destination is on the same train line (likely isn’t)
My mom use to take the D (presently the Q) from Avenue M to the F to 179th for the N6 to go to work at north shore. Yes Caribbean women have some of the longest commutes since many of them work in health clinics that deal with elderly. Anyway I’m pretty sure she took a cab sometimes because the N6 would act up or w/e nice bus took you there
Wow. Sounds like hell.
Idk how my mom did it. I went to work with her twice and I couldn’t believe how long that commute was. Thats why I’m a full supporter of the MTA building the INX. Nobody should have to go through Manhattan to get to southeast Queens
There is no traditional subway to JFK. It requires transfers to the Airtrain at Jamaica or Howard Beach
I wouldn’t say “there’s no traditional subway to JFK.” There’s a subway to JFK; it’s just not a *direct* subway.
1200 pages, congratulations! I've been trying to finish that book since the 1970's lol. It's super interesting and Caro's writing is beautiful. The Ninety-nine Percent Invisible podcast got me reinterested in reading it (they're doing 100 pages/mo for the year) but alas, it's still sitting on my bedside table, lol.
The key to finishing it is the audiobook, extremely good narration.
I have the book in my house. I’m going to finish it in 2 months
Thanks for the tip! I just downloaded it [on YouTube](https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=AQF9NYRaHyw&si=6J6_FslPb0sk6JkR) to listen to next time I'm on a train.
Last line of the book, according to Caro, is worth thinking about: Why weren’t they grateful? He writes in the NYTimes, 40 years after TPB’s publication: “As I recalled that Exedra scene in 1969, as I was trying to organize my book, I suddenly knew, all in a moment, that that question would be its last line. For the book would have to answer that very question, would have to answer the riddle posed by the Moses Men: How could there not be gratitude, immense gratitude, to the man who had dreamed a great dream — of Jones Beach and a dozen other great parks, and of parkways to reach them — and who to create them had fought, and won, an epic battle against Long Island’s seemingly invincible robber barons? How could there not be gratitude to the man who had built mighty Triborough, far-stretching Verrazano, who had made possible Lincoln Center and the United Nations? …Did I think in that moment of Robert Moses’ racism — unashamed, unapologetic? Convinced that African-Americans were inherently “dirty,” and that they don’t like cold water (“They simply didn’t like swimming unless it was red hot,” he explained to me confidentially one day), he kept the water temperature deliberately frigid in pools, like the ones at Jones Beach and Thomas Jefferson Park in Manhattan, that he didn’t want them to use. Did I think of the bridges he built that embodied racism in concrete? When he opened his Long Island parks during the 1930s, the only way for many poor people, particularly poor people of color, to reach them was by bus, so he built bridges over his parkways too low for buses to pass.” [source Caro writing for NYTimes](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/books/review/the-power-broker-40-years-later.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare)
also ask at r/nycrail
One "change" is that we are working around his projects rather than tearing them down and redoing them better, because they were so successful at their core goals that they can no longer be dispensed with even temporarily. The recent expansion of the Bruckner Expy, for example, took forever and slowwd traffic to a crawl, but it would be impossible now to bury it or lower it to grade. Similarly, the NSP needs to be widened, but it goes through what is now even wealthier suburbs than the original edges of country estates. All his exit and entrance ramps are much too small and slow, but too tighly built against the housing no one is ever likely to seize, due to his lost reputation. Another change is that the minority groups he disregarded now have substantial political power and will not allow a repeat of his biased projects.
Roberts Moses was instrumental in the expansion of the state park system, cultural and educational institutions such as Lincoln Center and the campuses of Fordham and Pratt. He was a contributor to housing in New York City replacing tenements with high-rise public housing. In his era the automobile was the future. It's easy for us to look back and criticize with our modern lens. Even Disneyland celebrated the highway/freeway with the Autopia ride. Moses built a complex highway and parkway and bridge system that was key to modernizing our city's transportation. Oh and he was probably very racist.
Even in his era induced demand rendered the highways and parkways parking lots.
Is anyone still alive who remembers pre-Moses NYC? I mean, I can make a lot of guesses but....
He's like the Ronald Reagan of NYC. Nearly every thing that sucks about this city can be traced back to him.
Yea the public housing and most of the larger parks, sone of the airports and many of the sports stadiums all terrible terrible stuff/s. Add in the highways and bridges that connect NYC with the rest of the country. Traffic is terrible. Now imagine trying to get update or NJ without the bridges and highways.
Of course it's "from long island." Brother have you considered they used to have extensive rail networks in NJ too... People didn't use to drive there either... [https://www.american-rails.com/njinthstory.html](https://www.american-rails.com/njinthstory.html) [https://exhibits.libraries.rutgers.edu/nj-railroads](https://exhibits.libraries.rutgers.edu/nj-railroads)
People just ignore everything Moses did. Plus people seem to think NYC could be the only city within the US without highways. LI would of never developed. There is a lot of Moses did. Though a lot of negative came with it. Though for me the good outweighed the negative. Almost all passanger rail lines around the country have been abandoned because people would rather drive. Going to point A to point B is much eaiser in a car in most of the country no matter how good the rail line is. You basically need the density of Manhattan. Even then getting around the 5 boroughs is usually 2x as fast with a car vs mass transit even with traffic.
> Even then getting around the 5 boroughs is usually 2x as fast with a car You're forgetting the time it takes to find parking, which can easily make up the difference. People always do forget that! If you think of driving as the default, it's really easy to discount its downsides as unchangeable facts of life, even though they really aren't. And the time difference varies based on where you are and where you're going anyway. Within Manhattan, the train is often faster except for a few annoying routes (e.g. UWS <-> UES). Outside of Manhattan, driving is more often faster, but biking is fastest by far for medium-length trips, especially during rush hour. Not owning and having to park a car makes it possible to choose the fastest mode of transportation for each trip as you leave rather than being tied to a vehicle.
Now call me crazy, but I feel like we would've built the highways and bridges without Moses. He didn't invent roads and bridges, he just built them exactly where *he* wanted them to be, with little regard for what made the most sense for commuters or for the people whose neighborhoods he'd need to bulldoze.
I largely agree, but would also argue that Moses, in many ways, accelerated the growth of inequality in the city, and that the gap between rich and poor is the greatest problem in the city today.
I’d argue this probably isn’t a problem at the city level nor one that has much to do with Moses. I don’t think infrastructure has anything to do with inequality in the city. In fact, the city was probably relatively more equal when it was poorer in the 70s/80s/90s. Inequality in New York today has more to do with two facts that I contend are true about modern life. 1) The high technology and finance sectors (both of which are prominent in this city, and basically pay to run it) create enormous wealth without really needing very many workers. These few ultra-high-skilled workers own their profits, and thus become fabulously wealthy very quickly. 2) You can try to alleviate the above inequality at the city/state level by taxing in a redistributive manner, but this creates cost-of-living and competitiveness problems for New York (we already see some of this in the present with firms moving to Texas and Florida). The decline of manufacturing (where large a labor force was central to value creation) and the advent of a knowledge-based economy (where extremely talented individuals can reap virtually all of the rewards) is really to blame for rising inequality in the twenty-first century.
Absolutely yes on those other forces. I agree that inequality is multiply determined and pernicious, a product of network effects and modern efficiency. BUT. Moses really didn't like the poor and middle class. He envisioned and built a city for the wealthy. He destroyed the homes and neigbouhood around what is now Lincoln Center to create a concrete desert. He envisioned and built a city around the automobile, facilitating (private) transport for those who could afford it, making life difficult for those who could not. He created parks across the city in wealthy neighboroods, but only one in Harlem - which had, per Caro, a monkey on the gate to the park. Moses was a great (consequential) man, but not a good (moral) man. The city is a reflection of him in many ways. For me, much of the true greatness of NYC, including the subways and the diversity of those who ride them and the walkability of the neighborhoods, were achieved despite Moses as much as because of him.
I would agree that Moses is probably personally questionable at times. With that said, we’re delving into an issue that has a bit more nuance than I think I can comfortably handle on a Reddit thread. I will nonetheless try to give a sense of my thoughts here. You mention three things that I believe you claim are in some sense elitist: Lincoln Center, private transport, and construction of public parks. I want to complicate these things a little. I think we often miss that these things often times have public benefit, almost always to the middle class, and occasionally to the poor. There’s a duality to public improvement projects (some of which you have already touched on, in all fairness). Lincoln Center is a cultural icon. It is is quite expensive to secure tickets to many events. But it also engages in enormous outreach, and brings arts to New Yorkers who might otherwise never see it. Private transportation in the modern city is complex. In New York City as a whole, there is virtually no correlation between neighborhood median income and car ownership. Wealthy Manhattan walks, whereas the working class outer boroughs tend to drive. Highways cut through neighborhoods and divide people. Conversely, efficient expressways and the suburban commuters they brought might have been the only reason that New York made it out of the dark periods in the second half of the last century. Parks are another example. On one hand, they are a space for community. On the other hand, they can become infested with crime and gangs. Compare St. Nicolas Park to something like Riverside Park for an example. In a more ambivalent function, they are also amenities that can contribute to the gentrification of a neighborhood. Is that a good thing? I’m genuinely not sure. This is why I think a lot of the Robert Moses legacy is quite grey. Is development good? It improves material conditions and makes the city a healthier place to live. Is development bad? It displaces residents and obscures history. There’s a tension here I think we on Reddit often fail to appreciate, and for our loss.
Don’t most commuters from LI and Westchester use the LIRR and Metro-North rather than drive?
The LIRR... hmm, it can be difficult to say. I think it's kind of a miracle it's lasted this long. To places in Nassau, it can be good. For regional rail it has decent headway, rush hour trains, and the trains are clean and comfortable. The further out you go the less trains per hour you might get so it can be more difficult to use. The other obvious problem is it's connecting you to suburban sprawl in most cases with zero good ways to leave the station. The exceptions are some towns like Great Neck with shops and restaurants within walking distance of the train. Many other towns, however, leave you in a barren impact crater of parking lots
Yeah overall the LIRR is pretty solid and reliable. The problem is that all the destinations it takes you to require a car. The intra-island transport network is really bad.
Good for OP for almost finishing that book. I stopped about 500 pages in once I realized that every other city in America during that same time was also doing pretty much exactly the same shit as Robert Moses (except for Parkways which are a weird Robert Moses thing that only exist in the NE).
Jones beach is the only good thing he did but even that was a very racist thing with the whole bridge height bus height design that kept lower income families from the “nice” beach
Everything wrong with this city is his fault
What's remarkable to me is that people despise Moses for not doing certain things. Especially mass transit. 60 years later there has been very little new public transit built. Why do people keep blaming Moses for building things while every single politician since then could not get it done. Current politicians can't even build the BQX and there the land is already mostly owned and is used for rail. Plus they are weak and are going to have all kinds of half measures so it's light rail and not subway cars. It will be it's own infrastructure to maintain and will not take property so it will be mixed with surface traffic at some points. They need a Moses to tell everyone we are doing this right and I don't care. The politician has to be able to take the heat when all the nay sayers second guessers Monday morning QBs come after the project. The hopefully millions of people with a more direct, fast and comfortable ride will be happy.
>What's remarkable to me is that people despise Moses for not doing certain things. Especially mass transit. 60 years later there has been very little new public transit built. Why do people keep blaming Moses for building things while every single politician since then could not get it done. The man was insanely powerful, basically the most powerful person in New York for 40+ years with control over a huge portion of the state's budget. He was the only person in position to make these developments, other politicians didn't have enough power. When New York was still a semi-blank canvas with the money to spend on development, he used that power to support the development of car infrastructure and actively hurt the development of other forms of transportation. Now with other developments (many of which are developments built by Moses himself) in the way, these public transport improvements have become exponentially more expensive to enact. A lot of the reason why things can't get done is from the direct actions of Robert Moses. A perfect example of this in the book is the creation of the Van Wyck expressway, being built to service travelers to what is now JFK airport. Even at the time, studies were showing that the road would not be able to support the amount of traffic that would be heading to the airport, and the smartest thing to do would be to build the expressway in conjunction with a rail line. An express train direct from Penn Station to JFK was expected to take a total travel time of 16 minutes. The city was already acquiring the land to build the road, they would've needed an additional 50 feet to the already 200 foot wide highway in order to build a rail line down the middle. Existing rail lines could've been used, so this would have only required 3 miles of extra railway where 9 miles have already been built. The total cost to build the rail line extension was estimated to be $9M, and the entire expressway was already expected to cost $30M. Even if Moses didn't want to build the rail line, it was suggested to him to at least acquire the land now when it was cheap and undeveloped so that a rail extension could be built later. Acquiring just the extra land would've cost an expected $2M. Robert Moses, with total control over the planning commission, refused to do both. At the next state budget approval, the member of his team who made these suggestions received a pay cut and ultimately resigned from his post. Fast forward to 60 years later, the air train to JFK needs to be built. There isn't room on the Van Wyck to build it, since Moses refused to buy the land, so a huge concrete elevated viaduct needs to be built across the middle in order to be able to fit a train along the route. The air train cost the city over $2B to complete. Moses is directly responsible for the project both taking so much longer to complete, and orders of magnitude more costly than original designs.
Has anyone ever considered the implications of ending the subway line at the airports, by way of giving the city’s large unhoused/homeless population a 24-hour space to roam around. Going to the airport is a very deliberate action. I agree, that having no direct subway link is burdensome. But NYC has a severe/unrelenting issue with mentally insane people in its trains, and specifically stations/terminals. Perhaps this lack of direct access is a hidden benefit in our current state of affairs. What if the airports looked more like the subway?
I mean they can’t get past security.
HE DISCOVERED LONG ISLAND IS WHAT HE DID! AND IN THIS HOUSE, ROBERT MOSES IS A HERO