1: Introduction
This is my last summer in New York City.
I moved here on July 4, 2001 to start a new job. I left again on July 30, 2007 in order to enter a master’s program upstate. Now that I have my degree, I have a few months to kill before my PhD program in Seattle starts in the fall, and so am staying with my girlfriend in Park Slope. Ideally I would get a job at some point this summer, but in this economy, I’m not holding my breath. Instead, I thought I should come up with a project for myself.
This project is the result of two things I brought with me to New York.
The first is a book. One thing I want to do this summer is to catch up on some of the books I’ve wanted to read that were superceded by reading for my thesis. On the top of that pile was The Power Broker, by Robert A. Caro, a Christmas gift from my parents last year. It is a biography of Robert Moses. Moses is, quite simply, the reason New York City and the surrounding area looks the way it does. A weilder of unrivaled power, he was responsible for the building of almost the entire highway system of New York, many of its bridges and public housing projects, the parkway system of Westchester and Long Island, playgrounds, parks (most prominently, Jones Beach), and landmarks like Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, and the UN Headquarters. Today, this is generally considered to be not a good thing, and he lives on in the public imagination most prominently as the reason that the South Bronx is what it is (due to being cut off from the rest of the borough by expressways). Caro’s book is, in large part, the reason for this. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it came out in 1974 and sealed Moses’ reputation.
The second thing is a car. This is new. During my 6 years as a resident, I mainly took the subway, and so I only saw things that were near the subway lines. At the time, this seemed fine, and I embraced public transportation. Moving back upstate, however, reminded me of how much I liked driving. Last winter, my girlfriend and I drove around the south, eating different kinds of barbeque, and had a hell of a good time. Since she moved back to the city, I’ve driven down to visit her, and when I did, having the car has opened up access to a number of places I’d never seen before, and I like that. As a subway rider, it seemed like that was the only way to get around; the people in cars either seemed to be on commercial business or commuters from outside the city. But staying in Brooklyn now, and driving around, I see that cars are just as much a part of the city as public transportation. Moses can be blamed for that.
And so I thought that I would read the book, think about Moses and power and New York, and drive (as he intended) on and to the things he built.
The most basic goal here would be to see more of New York, a city I love but will shortly be abandoning for the west coast. Though I’ve always been curious about exploring the city, I’ve really only seen a small fraction of it. That seems wrong, given that I am what I am because of the way the city changed. My father was born in Flatbush before moving out to Long Island on Moses’ parkways, watching the island develop from sod farms to a suburban paradise and caddying in the summers at Bethpage, another Moses creation. My great-grandfather, on the other hand, represents the pre-Moses world, getting his job as a fireman in Coney Island and on the Lower East Side as the result of the Tammany system. This project gives me an excuse to ramble far and wide, to check out the dots on the map that have always seemed interesting, and to bring back some tidbits that would be of interest to you readers, who might want to know more about the Marine Parkway Bridge or College Point Park. I’d also like to use the book as an excuse to talk about power, planning, government, politics—all of those good things.
But mainly, I’d like to reexamine Moses and what his work means to the city. Caro’s book came out in the midst of New York’s darkest hour, and it was hard not to see Moses’ work purely in terms of the harm it did. But today, in a New York City that looks surpringly governable, the things Moses built can’t really be seen as conscious choices anymore, as things that might not have been. Instead, they are simply part of the natural landscape, as taken for granted as the ground below our feet. (Some of which, coincidentally, was put there by Moses, too—but that’s for later.) Given that its effects on the city are now, for good or ill, permanent, how has the city adjusted? What does it feel like with Moses as part of it? But at the same time, I want to see those things not as natural, but as the product of a historical process—to look at the physical objects and see the decisions that formed them.
I hope to bring all of this to my writing about Robert Moses and New York. If you’re interested, stick around.
2 years ago | Tags: introduction caro moses
