Robert Moses and the Shaping of New York, Part 2

Stuff You Missed in History Class

This episode examines the latter half of Robert Moses's career, focusing on the period when his immense power over New York's infrastructure led

Key takeaways

The Cross Bronx Expressway prioritized vehicle traffic over pedestrians, contributing to neighborhood fragmentation and increased crime rates.
The relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles was heavily blamed on Moses's refusal to support a stadium in Brooklyn.
Title I slum clearance projects were criticized as tools for social engineering that used biased photography to depict urban blight.
Governor Nelson Rockefeller effectively ended Moses's political dominance by accepting his resignation following the Fire Island highway dispute.
Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 'The Power Broker,' fundamentally reshaped the public perception of Moses as a ruthless figure.

Main topics

Robert Moses's political power
Cross Bronx Expressway impact
Brooklyn Dodgers relocation

Notable quotes

For New York to grow, Moses must go.

Conclusion

The episode provides a nuanced look at how one man's drive for moderni

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Iwano. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (0:35) I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcast. The true crime comedy podcast all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest. Speaker 2 (0:47) Ooh, I scammed him. What? I could talk to you for an hour. Speaker 7 (0:50) You're a generational yapper, like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. Start listening to Scam Goddess on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (1:05) Hi, this is Kylie Brakeman, Angela Speaker 7 (1:07) Geratana, Speaker 3 (1:08) Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonald, and Speaker 5 (1:10) we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists podcast, the Speaker 3 (1:14) improvised character comedy podcast, where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Speaker 5 (1:19) Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. You've never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (1:46) Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I talk to actor Stephen Root. Speaker 6 (1:52) I'm a people watcher. You see that guy going down the screen, go, yeah, I can use that. Speaker 4 (1:56) And Open Igloo co-founder Alia Mohamed. Speaker 1 (1:59) I love staying on top of what is going on in our city, what is on renters' minds, and taking all of that knowledge to build a platform that hopefully is going to make New York City better in the long run. Speaker 4 (2:11) Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (2:18) Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poynter, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Adria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Poynter on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (2:48) You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (3:18) Is there an epidemic against literature? More specifically, Black literature. I'm Jacquees Peace Thomas, and on this season of the Black Lit Podcast, we're outside asking why. They don't want a whole bunch of little Ella Bakers, Malcolm Xs, and Martin Luther Kings running around. And when you look at a lot of different cultures, they're like, we need to know where you came from. And considering this is Black Reading Month, the only real question is, what are you reading next? Listen to Black Lit from the Black Effect Podcast Network on our iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (3:51) Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 3 (4:02) Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this is part two of our discussion of Robert Moses, who is unarguably responsible for a lot of the public works projects that form the infrastructure of New York. It's also unarguable that he's easy to argue over because a lot of people still do it. We'll get to some more of that. Today, though, we are going to talk about the second half of his career when he was more powerful than ever, but also he found himself in sort of a constant state of controversy and a lot of push and pull with various politicians, as well as the public. If you haven't listened to part one. You should go back and do that because otherwise you'll be a little bit lost and it really won't make sense where we're picking up. Speaker 2 (4:52) Where we left off from the last episode, we talked at length about an article that Robert Moses wrote that was published in The Atlantic in 1945. It's kind of at the midpoint of his career as a city planner. And that article is often pointed to as important in that it shows a real shift in the way Moses thought about city planning. He had started his career as a much more idealistic person, and it appears at this writing to be in a more conservative headspace in regards to his work. Sometimes this is talked about as though he had an almost sudden change after the war, but really, when you read the whole thing... It conveys the mindset of a person who has spent decades having to negotiate and maneuver and deal with difficult obstacles. And it's also a bit funny that he speaks negatively about perfectionists, because in his years working with Bel Moskowitz, who we talked about last time, he was described as having been too theoretical, obsessed with perfectionism, and unwilling to compromise. It's almost as though he's criticizing his own past self and some of his rhetoric. Speaker 3 (6:08) Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor that he had worked with for a chunk of his career, retired from politics the year after that Atlantic article came out. That article came out in 1945. LaGuardia retired in 1946. And he was replaced by William O'Dwyer, who made Moses the New York construction coordinator. That was a job that came with a great deal of power and a direct line to Washington, D.C. So in addition to all of the lobbying he had been doing earlier, he just had the ear of a lot more politicians. And perhaps more importantly, it gave him authority over every single public construction project in the city. Speaker 2 (6:48) Now, here's the thing. Moses talked a really good game in the 1940s about the way other people... had created rundown neighborhoods in New York, but he also did plenty of his own damage. Three years after his Atlantic article ran in 1948, he started work on the Cross Bronx Expressway. This project is one of many in which Moses prioritized the need for roadways and car traffic over pedestrians and neighborhoods and public transit. Speaker 3 (7:19) So the Cross Bronx Expressway is a seven-mile stretch of road that, as the name implies, crosses right through the Bronx, which was already a heavily developed area. And to make that project happen, a lot of people lost their homes. Dozens of apartment buildings were torn down to make way for the expressway, displacing hundreds of families. Streets were also cut short in a lot of situations, creating... numerous new dead ends. And this fragmentation of those neighborhoods has been cited as a reason that crime rates in those areas increased in the years that followed. That was also Speaker 2 (7:57) a pattern in a lot of road projects, that the neighborhoods that were affected in this way were often the neighborhoods with the least resources to try to fight it and advocate for themselves. So neighborhoods that were already struggling, neighborhoods with the... more predominantly non-white population, all of that. But Moses really seemed to believe that more roads were generally better for everyone. In his Atlantic article, he had said that it had taken almost two decades to convince opponents of his plans, quote, that an arterial improvement, whether it be a parkway for restricted travel or an express route open to mixed traffic, It's not simply a strip of pavement in a gasoline gully, but a genuine shoestring or ribbon improvement of the entire area through which it passes. It brings with it benefits not only to those who travel in cars, but to the thousands who live along it or do business or seek recreation there. So it comes across in his writing, at least, that he genuinely thought he was making the best choices for New Yorkers and the future of the city. But that does stand in contrast to the often really callous ways that he carried that vision out. So we're Speaker 3 (9:12) going Speaker 2 (9:12) to come back to his slum clearance initiatives in a moment. So in Speaker 3 (9:17) the 1950s, there was another conflict that had a major impact on Major League Baseball. So at the time, Walter O'Malley owned the Brooklyn Dodgers, and O'Malley thought that Ebbets Field no longer met the needs of the team and its fans. According to Moses, he offered to build O'Malley a new stadium at Flushing Meadows in Queens, but O'Malley was insistent that he wanted a new stadium in Brooklyn, and he specifically wanted it at the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue. And at the end of the 1957 season, O'Malley announced that the team was moving to Los Angeles. When Robert Moses told this story to a reporter, he claimed that the whole time O'Malley had actually already been talking to Los Angeles about moving there and that the disagreement over stadium placement was just a pretext to go. But a lot of people blamed Moses for the loss of their baseball team, and he found himself on the outs with a lot of New Yorkers after the Dodgers announced that relocation. Speaker 2 (10:20) Additionally, his ongoing slum projects had become more and more unpopular, and conflict over them reached a fever pitch in 1959. Ten years before, Congress had passed the U.S. Housing Act, which included a section called Title I, Slum Clearance and Community Development and Redevelopment. This act provided a billion dollars for loans to cities so the municipality could purchase slums and land that was deemed blighted for public or private redevelopment. It allotted an additional $100 million a year for five years to be issued as grants. Disbursement of those funds was the work of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. That agency was rolled up under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1960s. So the intention of Title I was to get Speaker 3 (11:12) private capital involved in the costly process of redevelopment. It enabled municipalities to make deals on sales that would get investors and developers interested and willing to spend their own money on rehabbing depressed areas with the long-term goal that those areas would then become generators of revenue for those private investors. Robert Moses recognized that New York could potentially get a hold of a lot of that federal funding. During the 1950s, he and his team produced 26 brochures about slum clearance, and each of them was about a specific neighborhood that he believed needed redevelopment. The brochures outlined the issues in the neighborhood, and they included spreads of photographs showing the problem areas, and they backed up everything with statistical information. And then these pamphlets were sent to the Board of Estimate of the City of New York, the City Planning Commission, the Federal Administrator of Title I, and the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, all in an effort to make the case to get some of that funding. Speaker 2 (12:19) We'll talk more about the contents of these pamphlets after we pause for a sponsor break. Speaker 5 (12:27) Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh my God, Lexi, we have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Iwanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisi DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anywhere fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Liar. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (13:34) I don't really care. What would change if you stopped letting money stress run your life, sis? I'm Mandy Money, host of Brown Ambition, the podcast. And right now I'm taking you through my six part money reboot series. This is your chance to hit reset, break the debt cycle, get honest about where your money's going, build a savings plan that actually sticks and start making financial choices that support the life you want, not just the bills you have. Because wealth building is not about being perfect. It's about having a plan, knowing your numbers, and making your next move with confidence with a community that cares like we do on Brown Ambition. Each episode gives you practical steps, real talk, and the motivation to stop putting your financial goals on hold. So if you've been saying, I'll get serious about money next month, this is your sign. Start now. Listen to Brown Ambition. That's Brown Ambition. and begin your money reboot today. Listen to Brown Ambition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (14:38) Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poynter, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Adria Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. A Speaker 5 (14:57) hundred percent of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our quality of life. But even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? The types of symptoms that people talk about is forgetting everything. I never used to forget things. They're concerned that, one, they have dementia, and the other one is, do I have ADHD? Speaker 3 (15:17) There is unprecedented promise with regard to cannabis and cannabinoids to sleep better, to have less pain, to have better mood, and also to have better day-to-day life. Speaker 6 (15:28) Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Poynter on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening now. You're not incurable. Speaker 5 (15:40) You're not broken. You're having a normal human experience, and we have a solution for that. And that solution is our show, Free Therapy. I'm Ben. And I'm Kevin. And we think everyone could use a little bit of therapy, including us. Absolutely. That's why each week we sit down with a different therapist to talk about the things we're all dealing with. If you're trying to get rid of anxiety, you're actually fueling more anxiety. We talked to some of the leading therapists in the country