New-York Historical Society Celebrates The Power Broker at 50

By Daniel Katzive

I was once told that Robert Caro’s great opus The Power Broker was the book most likely to be found on a shelf in a New York City home. I don’t know the provenance of this assertion or whether anyone ever tried to prove it empirically. The theory did seem to get some currency during the COVID-19 era of Zoom interviews, when, as the New York Times observed, the 1974 critical biography of master builder Robert Moses so often appeared conspicuously on bookshelves in the background behind various academics and officials.

I can remember my parents’ somber hardcover edition, the iconic dust jacket long disappeared, looming above me on a high shelf, with its intriguing title, in our den. I purchased and consumed my own first copy of the book not long after I moved to the Upper West Side in the early 1990s. That copy was borrowed by a friend and never returned (you know who you are!). I replaced it perhaps five years ago and read it again as I geared up for a second career as an urban journalist, this time with a deeper appreciation for the regional geography and infrastructure it so vividly describes. For me, the book was a Rosetta Stone, and I could never see the city the same way again after having read it.

If it feels like you have been hearing a lot about The Power Broker this year, it’s because the book is celebrating its 50th birthday. The New-York Historical Society on Central Park West at West 77th Street, which hosts an extensive archive of Caro’s papers, has opened a show this week to commemorate the anniversary featuring never-before displayed documents.

For a reader familiar with the highways and neighborhoods of greater New York City and Long Island, digesting The Power Broker for the first time can feel like a revelation. “Ah, so that’s why that is like that!” one might exclaim, while thinking about the Henry Hudson Parkway bombing right through the middle of Riverdale, the Northern State Parkway swinging wildly to the south, or the Cross-Bronx Expressway diving deep under the Grand Concourse.

Though never elected to public office, Moses served in multiple city and state roles, including parks and city planning commissioner, state parks commissioner, and head of the once-powerful Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. His career spanned four decades of explosive growth in the region. There are few pieces of New York City’s highway and park infrastructure that he did not have a hand in crafting, for better and for worse. He left behind a complicated legacy of magnificent works tainted by the brush of environmental racism and neglect of public transit.

At age 50, the book feels as relevant as ever. This is partly because Caro’s observations on how political power is built and maintained are probably somewhat timeless. But it also reflects the reality that, when it comes to highways and bridges in New York City, not much has changed since Robert Moses left the scene in the late 1960s. A motorist could switch off their GPS today, flip open a 1974 edition of the Hagstrom Road Atlas, and navigate the five boroughs just fine. Certainly, they would not find any bridges or tunnels that didn’t appear on their old paper map.

In contrast, go back 50 years further, to 1924 when Robert Moses was just getting started as a protege of Governor Alfred E. Smith, and you would find only the four East River bridges and the short Harlem River crossings tethering Manhattan to the rest of the city, and none of the interconnecting highway network that binds the region together today. In sad contrast, a rail commuter of 1924 would probably find today’s Long Island Railroad and Metro North lines, as well as much of the subway system, disappointingly familiar. The Power Broker is the story of how this all came to be.

The New-York Historical Society exhibit sits in space in the museum’s ground floor lobby until recently occupied by a commemoration of another major milestone observed this year: the 400th anniversary of the Dutch New Amsterdam colony. Visitors can view Caro’s first letter to Moses requesting an interview in 1966, as well as Moses’s firm rejection of the request. “I am not at all in favor of such a biography and have no time to spend on it,” he wrote.

Handwritten notes taken by the author, after he finally was able to interview Moses years later, are also on display, and one can trace quotations from steno pad to typewritten transcripts and ultimately to the book itself. Notes from Caro’s interview with Moses associate Sidney Shapiro document with shocking clarity Moses’s efforts to discourage inner city visitors without cars from being able to easily access his seaside masterpiece, Jones Beach. That was accomplished by building parkway bridges too low for buses to pass under and steering Poverty Program youth trips to beaches on the North Shore.”We don’t offer [Jones Beach],” Shapiro told Caro.

While the Power Broker is a story about New York City and the region writ large, the Upper West Side features prominently, and there is plenty of local history in the one-time Central Park West resident’s life story. The upper level of Riverside Park was initially created in the late 19th Century, but the waterfront park as it exists today was largely crafted by Moses in the 1930s. He conceived and pushed through a plan to build a broad park promenade over the railroad tracks that cut off the West Side from the water. At the time, the tracks were used by a New York Central freight line; today they serve Amtrak’s Empire Service to access Penn Station. Moses wove his new Henry Hudson Parkway seamlessly through the greenery, increasing pedestrian waterfront access through numerous tunnels along the way. Of course, as Caro points out in his book, the railroad and highway were left unexposed in the less affluent (and less white) neighborhoods north of 125th Street.

Though not really detailed in the NYHS exhibit, Moses also was behind the urban renewal projects which brought us Lincoln Center, the Lincoln Towers housing development in the West 60s, and Park West Village in the West 90s. The book helps us remember that these much loved Upper West Side assets also came with a cost: thriving minority communities in San Juan Hill and Manhattan Valley bulldozed in the name of “slum clearance.”

Upper West Siders may also appreciate Caro’s description of one of the few times that community activists were able to stop the master builder in his tracks. A plan to build a second parking lot for Tavern on the Green, roughly where the Tarr-Coyne Tots Playground is today, was blocked by a group of neighborhood mothers who literally stood in front of bulldozers sent to remove trees.

Lastly, the Upper West Side played a key part in Caro’s research process: it was in a garage space deep below the 79th Street Boat Basin Rotunda that Caro discovered forgotten carbon copies of archived Moses memos going back decades. These allowed him to trace and document how the man built his power base and leveraged influence to accomplish his goals, even as the original copies of the documents were sealed and unavailable.

The compact exhibit opened on Friday September 6 and will run through February 2. The NYHS’s larger ongoing exhibit on the Caro archives can also be visited on the museum’s second floor, which includes more material from the Power Broker, as well as from Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. The book itself, of course, remains in print—you can pick up a copy of your own in the museum store.

Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here.