The Power Broker #6: Mike Schur
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Today, we're covering the beginning section of part five, The Love of Power, chapters 25 and 26. That's pages 499 to 606 in my book. And later in this episode, our special book club guest is Mike Schur. He is the creator behind beloved sitcoms like Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He was a producer and writer on The Office. And he's also written a book on moral philosophy called How to Be Perfect.

Mike is a huge fan of the Power Broker, maybe the biggest fan of the Power Broker I've ever met. And he has cited this book as inspiration behind Parks and Rec.

So on this episode, we're covering pages 499 to 606 in my book. That's the beginning of part five, The Love of Power, chapters 25 and 26. When we last left the power broker, Robert Moses had run for governor. He had been such an unlikable, unpleasant candidate that he lost more than any major party candidate had ever lost before. And his reputation is tarnished. He's

completely on his ass. But President Roosevelt, a unlikely savior, in an attempt to remove him for good, has an order issued stating that New York City will get no more WPA money until it fires anyone holding both a city and a state office. This was an order written just to expel Moses. Moses leaks this to the press. He's able to frame this as the federal government trying to push around the people of New York City. And it is just ridiculous.

what Moses needed to get his halo affixed back over his head. And under Mayor LaGuardia, Moses perfects the system of providing physical achievements for politicians to run on while threatening to resign if he doesn't get his way. Although LaGuardia finds a way to take the piss out of him in this regard a little bit. Over the course of the last section, Moses is even more flagrant about ignoring orders and laws that get in his way. And he's even more ruthless about just destroying people who are trying to stop him from achieving his ends.

But at the same time, he's beginning to get stretched pretty thin. He's doing all these jobs around the city. Most of them are not as accomplished or as thoughtful as like Jones Beach. And it is very clear that he's underserving New York City's poor and non-white population. And we'll see more of that ruthlessness and neglect in this episode. Because what's clear that Caro is getting to at the end of the last section was that this is not a man in love with his mission, a man in love with parks.

he's become a man who's just in love with power. The love of power. The love of power. That starts chapter 25 called Changing. I think it's like the longest chapter in the book. Is it right? I believe so. This is a 75, 76 page chapter. It's kind of an omnibus chapter that encompasses a bunch of different things all under that heading of changing. And this is one of those times where I'm like,

Mr. Carroll, maybe you could just split this chapter into some smaller pieces. It's a big chapter. That and maybe this one isn't served by being called changing or driving and changing. Like there's some specificity in these stories that I think might have been broken out a little bit better. But regardless, I actually really dig all this stuff like it does. Like it's accumulating to show what type of person Robert Moses has become kind of at the height of his power.

Yes, and in a way, Chapter 5 is – there's some great stuff in it, but in some ways it almost feels like Robert Caro is like, yeah, yeah, let's get through this. I want to get to Chapter 26. Let's get to Chapter 26. And so he's like, I don't want a whole bunch of chapters. We'll just have one big chapter, and then we'll get to the family stuff. So let's jump into it. There's a lot of numbers in this chapter. I apologize, listeners. We're going to be doing a lot of numbers. It's a long chapter. But then Chapter 26 is such a – it's such a dramatic kind of personal –

at the end of this large-scale metropolitan municipal story. So you'll see. This episode, I think you'll feel, is going to be really well-balanced, even though it's going to seem like we spent a lot of time talking about how much things cost and how many thousand feet of riprap are being used in projects.

So we start this chapter. It's ironic that it's called changing because Robert Caro starts by saying that arrogance is just a basic part of Moses' nature. He's positing that just as it was for his mother, for his grandmother, arrogance comes naturally to him. There's something that is not changing in him and that once he had a taste of power, he came to need power and dominance for its own sake. And this is why he thinks Moses seems to start going out of his way to antagonize people just with impunity. Before he would do it

to get his way or because sometimes he's just kind of a jerk but now he seems to be getting pleasure just out of stepping on people and he goes through a couple examples there's a reproduction of Mount Vernon in Prospect Park my own home park when I lived in Brooklyn and he wants to tear it down and the community councils of the city of New York they don't want it to happen and

The council is powerless. Robert Moses could just ignore them. He has total power over parks. But instead he publicizes their opposition so that he can then plant quotes in the papers that are kind of like witty ripostes to them. He's like, I haven't heard anything from any reasonable people about this. And the reporter is like, what about the community council of the city of New York? And he goes, exactly. And it's like, so you're going out of your way just to get that bon mot in the papers.

And he goes all the way to the Rockaways to give a speech to a local association just so he could tell them that their airport, Floyd Bennett Field, stinks, that it's not very good. Like he didn't have to go out there. The Rockaways is not an easy jaunt from where he lives. There's a local newspaper that criticizes him, so he essentially runs it out of business. These are powerless people. They can't really stop him. But –

He just goes out of his way to step on them. Yeah. And one of the ones I found most poignant is this young woman who works for Mayor LaGuardia, Pearl Bernstein. She's a secretary at the Board of Estimate. And all she's doing is doing what LaGuardia tells her to, like puts off Moses a little bit, does this, does that, whatever. And he just makes it a mission to destroy this woman's life. He makes life so difficult.

And he knows she's just a proxy for LaGuardia, that she has no control over what she's doing. But he can't fight LaGuardia quite the same way. He can't belittle LaGuardia the same way. So he goes after her. And there's a story Caro tells of one of Moses' aides making a suggestion at a lunch meeting. And Moses going, now you're just a swabby on this ship. Do you understand? And then going, do you understand? Do you understand? Until the guy finally says, yes, sir. And he's like, no, I don't.

things about that. One, it's so unnecessary. And two, Robert Moses, he cannot avoid maritime water stuff. That's the analogy he goes to immediately. You're a swabby on this ship. He just loves the water. Even when he was attacking people. And he starts to...

He's a big guy. He's got powerful arms from all that swimming, and he's physically threatening to people. And Kara tells the story of Manhattan Borough President Stanley M. Isaacs, who will come up a few times in this book as a opponent of Moses. They're at a board of estimate meeting, and Isaac says, these are misleading cost figures. And Moses takes a swing in his direction and says, I'd like to punch you in the nose. And it's like that's not – there's no – it's not acceptable. It's not acceptable for an adult human to say that to another adult. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think this is the one part where it is Robert Moses changing. Like he's a very pugnacious individual, but usually his opponents are people who have, you know, similar power to him. You know, they're a governor, they're a president who should be doing better things with his time, you know. But now these are really lowly people that he's just bullying, you know. And this is kind of a different story.

like just more extreme Moses. Yes, as opposed to exactly before he was a fighter who wouldn't let people get in his way. Now he's a bully. He's bullying people. And there's always been a little bit of that in him. But now he has the power to really

run rampant with it because knowing he can't in his way and there's a story that uh carol goes into detail on uh we'll see how much detail we go into it i think there's a lot of good details but you may get bored of it i don't know about the columbia yacht club which on the face of it doesn't seem like the most sympathetic group of people just from the name columbia yacht club uh they've been on 86th street since 1888 so that's almost 50 years by the point the story is happening this is 1934 they paid a low rent to the city for the land because they had

Right.

huge West Side plan that we're going to talk about a lot in this chapter. This has been his dream for years. And he says, we're going to have to tear this yacht club down. And the members of the club are like, well, can we stay through September? Because we promised to help host during Fleet Week. And if anyone, I don't know if other cities have Fleet Week the same way, but in New York, Fleet Week is, it's a big thing. Like there's sailors all over the place. People love it.

And Moses says, that's fine because the West Side Improvement is such a big project. It's going to take me so long to get to the part where we need to tear you down. And then he's like, actually, I kind of want to change that building into a restaurant, and I want to start working on that now. So you can stay through September if you donate the building to the Parks Department. And the club, Commodore –

And it's unclear how this happens. In a call with Moses, agrees to this plan. We'll stay through September and we'll give you the building. But agrees in such a way that it irritates Moses in a way that the Commodore can never really figure out. And the next day they get an angry letter from Moses saying they have to vacate in 12 days and anything they leave behind will be considered abandoned property.

property and moses goes to the press and he runs his strategy this is the private interests versus the public good this these wealthy yacht owners they're standing in the way of this big public improvement and the press just runs these statements without question no criticism they don't investigate it why would you investigate it the champion of the parks is up against the columbia yacht club it's a yacht club like they haven't seen 1980s movies yet in the 1930s but they don't

But they know. They can guess. Yacht club owners are kind of – for the average New Yorker, they can't have a yacht in the club. They apply to the state Supreme Court for an injunction, and the court hearing shows that a lot of Moses' attacks are based on just outright lies. And the court issues an injunction, but Robert Moses –

Does he? He doesn't do injunctions. He's like Andrew Jackson. Tell the court you enforce your own injunction, you know, and he has already sent two steam shovels and they literally cut off the dirt roads leading to the clubhouse. So it's very hard to get to this clubhouse. Now, the next day, the power gets shut off and the people from the clubhouse, they get in touch with Con Ed and Con Ed goes, oh, yeah, someone from the yacht club called and told us to shut the power off. And it's clearly someone from the park department has called pretending they're from the club while that's being sorted out. A group of park

employees combined they're like oh yeah we heard there was a problem with the water main so we're just going to dig it up and remove it and they're just like this is it is one thing after another way of forcing them out and the board of aldermen of the city demands Moses rescinds the eviction order and he just ignores them he doesn't have to and in the end the club members have to leave months early Moses tears the building down and later on Caro reports that when someone else asked Moses why did you do this to them he said because they were rude to me

That's amazing. And we don't even know what the rudeness was. As far as the guy from the club knows, he just said, yes, okay, we'll agree to your proposal. Yeah. I mean, a bully with this type of weaponry at his fingertips, like to bring in steam shovels to cut off the road, to bring in Con Ed, to bring in the people to shut off the water. I mean, all that sort of stuff is just...

That is a stunning amount of power for a person who is not mature enough to wield it. Not mature enough to wield it and also not an elected official. Yeah. You can say, you know, the last president before the current one, he was a bully, but he was, you know, considering our weird election system, he was elected to that office. You know, some people had decided he deserved it. Whereas with Moses, the people who decided he deserved this power are other elected officials. But it's not like the people of New York were like, yeah, yeah, we elected him to do this stuff.

And these goals are not just bullying. They also help Moses achieve his goals by making people less likely to cross him. And Caro quotes Judge Jacob Lutzky talking like a New York judge where he says, if you know that every time you get in a guy's way, he's going to kick you in the balls. You make pretty damn sure you don't get in his way, right? And yeah, that's –

This is a judge talking. That's from the – not from the bench I assume, but that's good advice. If you know a guy is going to kick you in the balls, don't get close enough to his feet. And so the people in the city bureaucracy are now making a habit just to stay away from Moses, not – just to let him have his way because they know he's such a troublemaker. And –

It's almost like Robert Caro needs to remind us just the sheer power that he has at his hands. He's not just being a bully to the Columbia Yacht Club. He spends a page talking about the literal physical changes to the map of New York that Robert Moses is making. He's creating 5,000 acres of new land. He's joining islands together to make larger land masses. He's built hundreds of parks and bridges. The shape of the city, the physical reality of the city is in his hands. And so beyond just

pushing out yacht clubs, you know, and tearing down their houses. He's literally changing the map of the city in a way that

Nobody probably should have the power to do, but certainly not someone who is accountable to nobody. And it's only going to get less accountable as time goes on. I mean, he opens 255 playgrounds in the 1930s. He just makes a big deal out of each one of their openings. And he numbers them in the press so they can keep a count of his sort of tally. They're like, playground 145, it just opened. Playground 146, it opened. But what is clear is if you sort of

pay attention to where these playgrounds are, he's really only putting playgrounds in the wealthier neighborhoods. And he's really ignoring the playgrounds in the neighborhoods that need it the most. Specifically, he is building a lot of playgrounds in the comfortable areas of the city. And the least amount of playgrounds in the area of the city inhabited by the city is 400,000 black residents. 200,000 of them are children. And Moses is not really interested in that.

in providing safe places for them to play. They need safe places to play, and the black community in New York is calling out to him specifically, to the city government and to him, our children need playgrounds, they need safe places to go, but he doesn't want to do it. And the press is not running the story

Moses refuses to build playgrounds in black neighborhoods. They're running the story. Look at all these playgrounds. Look at all these playgrounds. 255 playgrounds. This is amazing. And if anyone asks Moses, what about playgrounds in slum areas? He says, I've done a lot for the children of the slums. And the papers are like, yeah, he said it, folks. He's doing a lot.

And beyond playgrounds, this is where Caro talks about swimming pools. And this is – there's a detail in here that was one of the things that always stuck with me in the 20 years after I first read this book where Caro is talking about how swimming pools were particularly personally important to Robert Moses. He loves swimming.

There were very few pools in the city, public pools. And now Moses in the 1930s, he's building all these public pools and he's putting a lot of his own personal attention because he likes – he's not a kid. He's not going to play on monkey bars or on a slide or something like that. But he is going to go swim, not in those pools, not with the regular people.

But you know what I mean. He likes swimming. No. No. And he's putting all the little touches he's known for. Kara talks about how the problem was always how do you get people to wash their feet before they walk into a public pool? And they invent these foot cleansing troughs that you have to step into. They're too wide for you to jump over or step over that have antibacterial stuff. So you have to get this stuff on your feet. And –

It's just all these kind of ingenious solutions to making public pools possible, and he builds 10 of these huge public pools, and one of them is built in Harlem at 146th Street, and Robert Moses is determined –

This is the pool that New Yorkers of color are going to use. I don't want New Yorkers of color. He wouldn't have said New Yorkers of color, but you know what I mean? And white people, I don't want them mixing at these pools. Some kind of trouble is going to erupt. There's going to be fights or something. It just can't happen. And so I want this pool up there. That's the one that black people are going to use. And there's one pool in particular –

That is seen as the one with the biggest threat of race mixing, and that's in East Harlem, which was at the time a white neighborhood, but it's close enough to the black parts of Harlem and to the Puerto Rican parts of Spanish Harlem to worry Robert Moses. And Paul Windles is like, how are you going to do it, Robert Moses? How are you going to keep –

People of color from using that pool, and he tells them his solution is, well, first, we're only going to hire white lifeguards. That goes without saying. But secondly, the other pools in the city, they have heaters that are going to keep them at 70 degrees. This pool, we're not going to heat it because according to Moses, black people do not like cold water, and Robert Carroll can't say that that's the reason why, but…

They find that New Yorkers of color who live close to that pool instead go to that 146th Street pool, even though it's much farther away. If they live three blocks from this pool, they'd rather travel three miles to that pool. And it always stuck with me, the idea that like, well, you know, of course, black people hate cold water. So we got to keep this pool cold. And it seems both…

A weird stereotype. It's not one that I had encountered before I read it in this book, but also such a petty thing to do and such a gross thing to do to say, like, I got to do anything I can to make this pool unpalatable to the people nearby that I don't want using it. There's such a –

casual kind of unquestioned racism about it that I find really shocking, really astounding. Yeah. It's really awful. Yeah. I just kind of like,

I'm struck by it all the time, how many ways this poison in his mind sort of, you know, comes out and the things he builds. You know, it's just unpleasant. And of course, I'd be remiss if we gave the impression that Robert Moses was the one racist in an otherwise beautifully integrated and colorblind world. Not at all. He was the snake in the garden, you know, in this one. I'm sure he can get away with this stuff partly because...

I mean Robert Carroll doesn't call Paul Windles a racist in the book, but it's not like he then recounts Paul Windles saying, oh, Bob, you can't do that. Oh, that's terrible. It's just kind of either tolerated or accepted or believed in by so many people, which we talked a little bit about in a previous episode. And then Robert Carroll goes out of his way to talk about how –

Robert Moses has built this immense stadium complex on Randall's Island. It has 22,000 seats, and it is usually empty. The first five years, it never sells out. Its attendance is usually in the hundreds. And part of the problem is that you can't get there without a car. There's no public transit at the time going there because Moses does not want public transit. He doesn't want buses going to Randall's Island. And so it's kind of biting him in the end that this stadium he built is under-attended because –

He made it hard for people to get there. Yeah, totally. Totally. And this is when we get to the section that I like to call more bridges, more problems. Where – or more parkways, more problems. Where we start – we get into the section about how –

Little good a lot of these parkways seem to be doing in the massive scale of traffic that the book has been dealing with. So we start – it's the summer of 1936. The Grand Central Interborough and the Laurelton Parkways, famous names in the hallowed halls of parkways. They've opened up. This means Moses has now built 100 miles of new parkways since he revealed his big parkway plan in 1924, and the newspapers are like, the traffic problem has been solved forever.

for generations. And then there's a little bit of blank space on the page. And then the next paragraph starts, the new parkway solved the problem for about three weeks. And this is, I love, it's such a New York-y way to say it. And yet there seem to be problems with the, just like, eh, it's solved it for about three weeks. And we see this, we start this pattern here where, which we can go into more detail or we cannot if we don't have to, where

A bridge or a parkway opens up. The Triborough Bridge opens up. The Wontock Expressway opens up, and people say, well, this is it. This is going to take care of the traffic. And then within a few weeks or a few months, the traffic is worse than it was before. The parkways and bridges are becoming jammed almost immediately, but at the same time, the old roads have just as much traffic.

As they did before. Somehow these bridges and these roads are bringing more cars in, which is – they're creating even more of a need, which is then being filled, and Moses' only solution to any of this stuff is…

It's just build more bridges and roads. And Roman, you understand urban infrastructure more than I do. What's going on here? What's going on in this situation? Because this assumption they seem to be working from is there's a limited number of cars provide bridges and those cars will disperse out. Instead, it's almost as if the cars are spontaneously generating to fill this space. Yeah, it's true that you basically induce demand by providing more like you add more lanes. It just fills up. It's always been this way.

And what I wonder is, is this the first time we really learned that? Like that is a truism of urban design. And I wonder if Robert Moses' efforts is when we learned that empirically as such a default pattern that we consider it like a law in urban planning. That you just, if you add a lane, if you add a bridge, it does not alleviate traffic. It just induces traffic.

a new type of demand and it just fills up exactly the same way. And that's taken as a given now. It completely is a given. It's about as true as anything gets in urban planning as far as I can say. Because all I know is what I read in books and by books I mean The Power Broker, just this one book. Over and over again. Multiple times. This is my third time through. And the...

The people in the book, they're like baffled by it. It's like a mystery. It's an enigma they cannot solve. Where are these cars coming from? As if a portal has opened up and cars from another dimension are just pouring in. But you're saying at this point it's – now almost 100 years later, it's pretty well understood that if you create a need, people will fill that need. Completely, and that's why most of the sort of –

urban planning thinking is about restricting cars um and and there is no notion that's going to make things worse that actually will make things better um you know uh in in these ways and so but this could be the moment that people really got this stuck in their heads because every city fell for this in this period of time but i think this is the the clearest and most acute example because

Because of the density of the city and the sort of the scope of the problem and the fact that it fills up so quickly. So incredibly quickly. And it's that it's happening in the most important city in the world, greatest city in the world, New York City, best ever. What other city has a giant gorilla climbing up buildings? We talked about it. It's just this one. Well, and some others, according to other movies. But the I mean, King Kong goes to Tokyo at one point. He's in he's in Rio, I think, in the new movie. But anyway, mostly New York.

But that it's happening there on such a scale. And Carol says – he says tens of millions of dollars have been spent, and the net result is that there used to be four bridges with traffic jams on them. Now there are six bridges with traffic jams on them. And –

People say, what if we add mass transit links to some of these bridges? And Moses refuses. He doesn't want trains on these bridges at all. And it seems like that his big parkway system is now just making it easier to dump cars from one place to another in big numbers. And I wonder if it's like he's really coming from this world where cars were a thing that you had to have money to own. We've talked about before how like

Driving used to be about pleasure and now it's about commuting. But he's also living in a world where like more and more people can afford cars and the car companies are making more cars. So it seems foolish for them to be like, this will take care of the traffic problem as if there never will be more cars. Like they're making cars all the time. There's always new cars and some of them are going to end up in New York City. So it's, I don't know, what do you think is the, what do you think is the reason that they never factored in the fact that more cars can be made and purchased? I don't know. I think that there's,

You know, Robert Moses has a number of blind spots and he really just...

I mean, what Caro tells you of his upbringing, it really set in motion like everything he thinks about the world. And this one, he just cannot wrap his head around. Like he has been driven in a car mostly for pleasure, but also for work because he gets... He's got that sweet car office. Yeah. It's ferried around, you know, to take care of and tromp through wetlands and stuff. But he has a very...

You know, for all of his genius as presented, he has a really hard time updating his firmware to the modern world as he goes along. He just cannot adjust to the world as it is. He's really like building a city for the world. Like you could say that building for cars is a little bit of, I don't know, phony.

or forward thinking because the subway system was built out very, very quickly in the early 20th century. And he's reversing all that momentum. But it's just so surprising how much he cannot imagine

During this part of the book, he was really reminding me a lot of Elon Musk, where it was like Elon Musk had kind of one good idea, which was we should have an electric car company that operates like a large car company. And then assumed that meant he had lots of good ideas, but really he didn't after that. Whereas Moses has this one good idea, which is...

We need to have a way for people to get from one place to another, but then he doesn't have the best solution for it, and he keeps applying that solution. Or maybe a better way to compare it to is Walt Disney, where Walt Disney is like, I want a theme park full of robots so that I can recreate Main Street 1900 like it was when I was a kid. Yeah.

We're like Jurassic Park. We've got all this amazing genetic technology. Let's use it to recreate the oldest things we can think of. Dinosaurs. Maybe that's a human drive is to be trying to figure out new ways to do old things until someone else comes along and is like, well, you can use this new thing for a new way. Or you can use this old thing in a new way. Anyway, so the point is –

Robert Caro is going to dig in deep on another kind of Moses special, which is the destruction of a neighborhood. And this is a kind of a micro version of something we're going to see in much greater detail later in the book in a different neighborhood. But it's November 1941. World War II is about to start. That doesn't really turn into what we're talking about. And –

That's when Moses opens up this thing called the Gowanus Parkway in Brooklyn, and it's an elevated road that he's been able to sell partly because it's on pillars that used to hold the elevated subway line through that area. It runs through Sunset Park. It's a neighborhood very close to where I used to live in Brooklyn, Park Slope. And in fact, real estate brokers in Brooklyn have been expanding the boundaries of Park Slope into Sunset Park for years now as a way of raising the rents in Sunset Park.

Uh, our producer, Isabel is reminding us she's to live in Park Slope too. Park Slope is where people who work in, in, in podcasting. Public radio podcasting. Yeah. Yeah. Writers. Yeah. Yeah. Writers. It's a great neighborhood for, it's a great neighborhood for people in the arts, uh, who want to live in the city, but they want to live like where it's really smelly in the city. Uh,

So there was this elevated train line that ran down 3rd Avenue. It just became a regular part of the neighborhood. Elevated trains are not great. They darken things. The residents of this neighborhood, they've kind of gotten used to the elevated train line, but they know that an expressway is going to be – it's going to block out much more light because instead of the slats of a train track –

It's going to be just a cement block. It's going to be bigger. And they say – Much wider too. And much wider, yeah. And so they say instead of running this expressway over the heart of our neighborhood, can you move it one block over to where it's just industrial waterfront? And even the comptroller of the city who lives in Sunset Park is like, yeah, the expressway would be way worse for the neighborhood than the L tracks were today.

And the parkway route, it's going to have to swing back towards 2nd Avenue after a mile anyway. So it won't really be saving that much money to reuse these pillars, but it will blight this neighborhood. And Moses is like, eh, it's a slum. It's not worth preserving. Why would we bother? And so Caro investigates that, and he goes into detail, and he interviews people from the area. He's going to do this again later in even much more detail with the Tremont neighborhood in the Bronx. But he's interviewing people there, and the portrait he builds is that –

It's a poor neighborhood, but it is not a slum. It is a neighborhood of nice houses where people take care of their blocks. It's quiet. There's this kind of strong community of mostly Norwegians, but they're very active with each other. It's poor, but it's not dangerous. It's not unpleasant. It's a solidly working-class neighborhood of the kinds that I feel like used to be symbolic to me of the outer boroughs when I was growing up, but now feels old-fashioned. And

Robert Carroll, he takes us down a little walk down Third Avenue. If you can indulge me in quoting, he says, the heart of the neighborhood, the focal point that gave it unity and a sense of community was Third Avenue, lining it along with newsstands off which 9000 Nordisk Tidendes were sold every day. That's the like Norwegian newspaper.

We're seven movie theaters, dozens of tiny restaurants run by couples and featuring recipes from the old countries. Little restaurants, but good, and so many you wouldn't know where to go for lunch, recalls Harold Benson, whose hardware store was on 3rd Avenue and 54th Street, and scores of small, friendly mama and papa stores. The Northland Gift Shop, the Finnish Bookstore, a hardware store that looked like a general store out of the Old West, a butcher shop that raffled off 25 big turkeys every Christmas.

That occupied the ground floor of three and four story brick fronts in which mama and papa lived upstairs with the children. The avenue was always busy. People shopping or window shopping or just walking. Benson recalls, this is like old school Brooklyn. Like what I think of as like old school Brooklyn. What makes it nice? The image you get is that the neighborhood residents there are very proud of this neighborhood. And-

They don't want this – understandably don't want an expressway right over their heads. And the Board of Estimate, one of the reasons they approved Moses reusing those pillars is because they assumed, oh, the pillars are already there. Moses isn't going to have to get any new right-of-way land for this expressway. It'll save us time. We won't have to relocate anybody. This will be great. And Moses is like, uh.

Like, uh, funny story. I need to relocate 100 stores and 1,300 families because the board of estimate didn't realize you need on and off ramps for an expressway, like for a parkway. A train doesn't need on and off ramps, just the stations. And Moses also, this is where he kind of, his twisting the rules comes in even more because he's like, if I build this road,

And it's not a parkway. The law says I don't have control over it. So even though it is an elevated treeless stretch of highway that goes through a city, I'm calling it a parkway. And you know what? I have another rule. I don't allow trucks on my parkway. So trucks are instead going to go on Third Avenue underneath. That's a four lane street. I'm going to have to expand that into a highway, into a 10 lane highway so that it's more truck accessible. And so.

Now you've got so much more noise, so much more darkness after he builds this road and businesses start to close down. And Carol makes the point that the elevated train brought people to Sunset Park and the parkway just brings people through it. And this is the big crux of so much of what Moses is doing is he's not interested in bringing people to parts of the city. He just wants to get them through it as quickly as possible. Yeah, this is really key because if you ever lived in a neighborhood with an elevated train, there are –

stops not too far apart that you just take the stairs down and you go buy your Nordic paper, you know, and then you go back up or you get a snack or whatever and it is

Even though this is a, you know, a major artery that, you know, brings people, you know, to and through, it just much more brings people to a place. Yes. When I lived in Astoria, Queens, I was very close to the elevated train there. And like, yeah, you take the elevated train home, you get off your stop. And exactly like on the way home, I could stop at the hardware store, the grocery store, the Chinese takeout place. I did everything I needed in my errands to and from the train. And it felt like,

Right, right.

Um, it's just a different idea of what, uh, this sort of type of conveyance is for. And he's really, he's just trying to get you through a place because he doesn't find that place desirable and thinks that if everyone else inside of it is going to just

Yeah.

And and therefore it becomes a thing that fills it up and therefore makes it bumper to bumper and useless at a certain point. And it just it just creates a worse and worse world when you design it this way.

To quote the actor John Glover playing the role of Daniel Clamp in the classic film Gremlins 2, The New Batch, if you build a place for things, things come. And that's kind of what happens. Yeah. He builds a place that is for cars and not people, and the people leave. It makes it harder for the neighborhood to actually go about their business because –

This road is here. It makes it less pleasant. People are less likely to go patronize the business there, so businesses start to close, which means even less people stop by, so more businesses close. People who own those businesses move away. Families are leaving. Now the side streets are also full of trucks, so people don't want to live there. And Third Avenue, this place that was a kind of poor but bustling kind of friendly street, becomes exactly the kind of place that people are afraid to go to. That's where you go to find drunks, to find –

to find drug addicts. It's more and more people move away and it becomes the slum that Moses said it was. If you call it a slum and you give it the opportunity to become a slum, a neighborhood will become a slum.

Just as happens in Gremlins 2, the new batch, when that shining skyscraper just turns into a hive of gremlins. And to add the most bitter of irony to the whole thing, the Gowanus Parkway is almost instantly backed up with traffic, just like all the other parkways. And Moses' solution to this is we got to widen the road. So he does to the point that if your apartment is on either side of the road, then on wet days, the cars are splattering your windows. Their wheels are just throwing water at your windows. And Moses has essentially said,

wrecked this neighborhood. But as Caro says, quote, no newspaper mentioned that fact. The newspaper is only there to talk about what's going to happen beforehand and how great it is that this guy's getting things done. Look at this amazing road. They're not interested in what happens after the fact. Yeah. And speaking of getting big things done, this brings us to the West Side Improvement Project, which is a great section of the book that I actually really love. But we'll talk about that after the break.

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We have to divide up chapter 25 into several sections because it's a more digestible chunks. Yeah, it is very, very long, as we've said before. But this is the West Side Improvement Project, which is this massive thing that I I love how Carol does this, like demonstrates this.

the problem solving and the process that Moses goes through. So could you describe what is this project? Yes. And I agree with you. This section, it's amazing to be reminded in this section also just how brilliant Moses is. You know, he's not just, if you call him an evil genius, you got to emphasize the genius part because he's just, he's so, he's amazing at this. But the West Side Improvement Project, this is the dream that Robert Moses had since the 1920s. If you hearken back to the first or second chapter, he and

Future Labor Secretary Francis Perkins were walking around the west side of the Manhattan Islands at night as young people, and he's just talking about couldn't you see a park here? Couldn't you see a road here? The west side of Manhattan for years has been…

Train tracks, often ground-level train tracks, so people get killed there frequently by trains. It is garbage dumps. It's municipal waste. Manhattan Island is such a different island than it was in the 1920s and 30s because it used to be an island full of manufacturing, full of industry, and now it's –

been taken over by other businesses. If you walk along the west side of Manhattan now, you're going to see very fancy buildings. You're going to see financial structures and things like that. But there was a time when it smelled bad. It was full of animals. It was full of trash and things like that. And so the idea is you're going to

have an extended elevated parkway all along Manhattan's West side, the West side highway. I think if I'm getting it right, uh, you'll have a six mile long park. You're going to build the Henry Hudson bridge. Finally across the Harlem river, this bridge that up till now in, in the books terms is represented just by a pillar with no statue of Henry Hudson at the top of it because they could not afford to finish it. Uh,

That's going to connect Manhattan and the Bronx. You're going to have a connection from the Bronx that leads you out of the city to the Sawmill River Parkway. This is his dream to connect Manhattan.

to the parkways outside that he's building, but also to make the West Side something that Manhattan can be proud of. He really, he does want to make beautiful things. He wants to make things that are, that at the very least, he can hold pride in having created. And he's been talking about it for years now, but it is going to cost an incredible amount of money. Moses estimates it's going to cost $109 million. And this is during the Depression. The city does not have $109 million. And Moses,

What makes it slightly harder is that there's this 1927 agreement that he knows about between the city and the New York Central Railroad, and it's their tracks that are going up and down the west side. And New York Central Railroad said in exchange for some other land in a different part of the city, we'll cover those tracks. We'll pay for covering them up. Oops, we didn't finish it. Sorry. It just didn't get done. So Moses is like –

I'm going to have to cover up those tracks, and if the city pays for it, that's going to be seen as the city giving away money to the railroad company, which no politician is going to go for. And the railroad is never going to have that kind of money. So what am I going to do? And beyond that, even if I do that, there's still tens of millions of dollars that I'm going to have to figure out to fund this thing. And I feel like even to get an estimate of how much money it's going to cost – and I'm sure he has his staff working with him on it – even that takes a certain amount of genius to be able to put a dollar figure on a project this enormous with so many different pieces to it. Totally.

And as Carol said, to see all these parts working together, that this is not just a park. This is a park and a bridge and a highway, and he's looking at them all as pieces of the same thing. And the only thing I can relate it to in my mind is that like –

I can look at – as a writer, I can look at a story, and I can see how different scenes interact with each other to build a plot while also building character, while also building theme. But that feels like such a small thing compared to like, well, we're going to reconfigure the west side of this island that's the most densely populated island in the country. It's astonishing. Anyway, so the amount of money that he needs, it seems insurmountable.

And this is when Caro, he takes you very methodically, step by step, through the ways that Moses surmounts it. It is no longer insurmountable. It becomes surmountable, which sounds like a pun name that a knight would have. Monty Python. Monty Python, yeah, exactly. Like an old puck cartoon, you know. And then surmountable comes in. Yeah.

He sees that in this 1927 agreement, the railroad owes the city $8.2 million for work on the west side. The railroad doesn't have that kind of money. It has no line of credit. It is in debt. It's paying back its loans at very higher interest rates. So Moses, first he's going to have to get money for the railroad and then convince the railroad to spend that money on the park rather than say pay its workers or get out of debt. And Moses does a lot of work on legal pads. He only works on yellow legal pads, which –

Let me be honest. That's how I work too. I like to work on yellow legal pads. So I really get Robert Moses' love of just scribbling on yellow legal pads. It is the single best way to work out ideas is on a yellow legal pad. I'm sorry. There's no other better way to do it. I agree. Sorry, tech industry. You're never going to improve on this. You're never going to improve on a legal pad. It's the perfect size of paper. It's the perfect color of paper, like just for that kind of work. I wouldn't want to read a book that's all on yellow paper. Your eyes are hurt eventually, but –

After doing a lot of math on those legal pads, he realizes he can arrange for New York State to give the railroad a loan, not a payout, but a loan from this grade-crossing elimination fund that is somehow incredibly well-funded. It has so much money in it. The city can give them a loan for $13.5 million that has such a low interest rate on it that the railroad can pay back its old loans while saving money on its future interest payments.

And he writes up a law. It's this complicated agreement with tax liens and escrow stuff, and that makes the loan appealing I guess. And he pushes it through the legislature just at the end of the session, and he manages to convince Lehman to sign it on the last day. The bill is vile but before it expires, and he says you can take credit for it if you sign it. And now Moses only has $95.5 million left to find. There's still a lot of money left to go. So what's he going to do? Well, hey.

Here's something you can do. I feel like this is Depression-era thinking. He's like, oh, when the railroad covers up all that land and expands the park space, it's going to create a lot of waste rocks. And I need landfill. I need $4 million worth of landfill. Why should I let these rocks go to waste? I'll just use that as the landfill. That's $4 million. He's saved right there. Now he only needs $91.5 million more. This next one, it's not a lot of money, but it's my favorite. Yeah, it's so great. He goes –

He goes, if we build a boat basin and we put gargoyles on the boat basin, there's this fund for artwork on public works that we can tap into that no one remembers. And you know what? This philanthropist years ago set up a fund to put freezes on public buildings. So if we put a freeze on it, we'll do that. And it says in the book that the engineers are like, well, we've never seen gargoyles on a boat basin, but okay. And it gets them $100,000 more. So that's $91.4 million to go.

And the next one, this is another one. It's also boat basin related. So it's this boat basin. It's going to have a marina. It's going to have a restaurant. It's going to have a promenade. Remember, Robert Moses, he loves the idea of recreational facilities. He likes multi-use recreational facilities, these grand buildings that a lot of people can use all at once. And coincidentally, Harold Ickes over at the WPA or the PWA, I get my letters mixed up. Harold Ickes, he wants to employ more people. This is Moses' enemy from last episode. But yeah.

Harold Dickey is like, I'm going to give quick approval to any plan ready project for things like railroad grade eliminations that can employ a bunch of people. And one week later, Moses has the plans drawn up for the 79th Street grade elimination structure, which is just the boat basin building with the marina and the restaurant and the bureaucrats at the in the federal government. They're like,

It doesn't really look like a grade elimination structure, but okay. But maybe these brass turtle ornaments are a little much for a structure for eliminating railroad grades, and they slash $154,000 from the budget. Now, this is where I would have said, I guess we don't need those brass turtle ornaments. But no, instead, Moses goes to LaGuardia and says, hey –

If the city chips in $154,000 for brass turtles, then we can get another $1.7 million from the federal government for this beautiful boat basin. And the CWA is going to contribute another $3 million for the labor. Look.

Now we've got $5 million for this boat basin. All the city has to do is spend $154,000 on brass turtles. And so he gets it. And that leaves only $86,400,000 to go for the project. There's still a lot of money, but you see the way he's like chopping it down. And-

He's able to find all these ways for it to qualify for state and federal funds for housing, for interstate highways, for river and harbor funds, for railroads, and gets another $12 million out of that. He's so good at finding these programs. He's like Matthew Lesko, you know, the guy who had the book about all these government programs that are giving out free money. And all these different ways of like tax strategies and like getting to this government fund and making it work for this and your brass turd.

and kind of whipsawing LaGuardia into thinking that he has to do this $150,000 to get the rest of the money versus just eliminating the brass turtles is his particular brand of genius. But what gets him the most amount of money off of this $109 million bill is he begins to see that he has a certain amount of plundering

plans for this park cost about $8 million per mile. And he realizes that this actually goes up into Harlem and he does not care that the people of Harlem have a nicer park as the people in below 125th street. And so, you know, by building the park to different standards, he saves $29 million. This isn't like a hundred thousand dollars here and a hundred thousand dollars there. Like he's,

This is where he really eliminates it by just providing worse services for people who need it more. Yes, by short shrifting the people in the neighborhoods that he considers not really worth spending the money on. And so he's got this park that below 110th Street is going to be beautiful. Between 110th and 125th, it's going to be

Okay, it's not going to be so bad. And then from 125th up, it's going to be done as cheaply as he can do it. And that's over three miles of the park. And so he's saving a lot of money. There's only $45 million to go. He's more than halfway there. And at this point –

He goes, okay, this section is going to cost $30 million, what I don't have paid for, this section of the park. I'll tell the city I can get $20 million in funding from the CWA for labor if the city pays $10 million for materials. And he does the same song and dance. Are you going to let $20 million in pay for this city going to be lost because you won't spend $10 million? And then when they agree, he goes to CWA and goes, hey, I can get $10 million from the city. Give me $20 million in labor funding. And –

They agree. He's whipsawing back and forth, and he manages to make it fit the legal bounds of what they can contribute to by calling the Henry Hudson Parkway a park access road. It has to have access to a park. It's this huge highway. And now he has all the money he needs to build this dream project up to 192nd Street. And this is when it always reminds me how much bigger New York is than any New Yorker spends time in because this is a huge city. And how many people spend time here?

below 14th Street and above 192nd Street in the same lifetime? Very few. But he only needs $15 million to pay for those last three miles. And this is when we get into the part where he starts to do some things that are

irreversible changes to the city in order to find and save this money. There were previous plans for Northern Highway that took a different route that kind of avoided cutting through any of the parks up in the north end of the city, the north end of Manhattan, and building this lower bridge, this lower Henry Hudson Bridge that would go through an industrial area called Marble Hill. And the idea behind this was let's avoid

taking up land that people might want to use for other things with this road and this bridge. But Moses has to run the road through the parks, at least in some way, because the funds are from a park access road. And if he doesn't at least get into the parks, then he can't use these funds because it's illegal to charge tolls on roads that have certain types of federal funding, and he needs to charge tolls to pay off the bonds for funding the building of the Henry Hudson Parkway. It's all complicated. And anyway, the end result is he's like,

I guess what I have to do is run this road right through these two parks, Fort Tryon Park and Inwood Park, and it's parkland. I have control over it. I can do whatever I want. And who's to say a park access road can't run all the way through a park? There's no greater access to a park than if you go all the way through it. That's right.

And this is going to save him $5 million of the $15 million he still needs. So he only needs $10 million, and this is the exact amount of money that the Henry Hudson Authority is allowed to raise. Unfortunately, this is the Depression, and New York City has almost defaulted on its loans. Bankers are really wary of investing in public bonds. And this is when Robert Carroll brings in a new character who's going to show up every now and then, Michael Jack Madigan. His name is Michael, but his nickname is Jack, and he grew up.

He's a contractor originally from the Pennsylvania coal country, and he ends up as Moses' shrewd kind of financial retailer who sells bonds for Moses' projects to Wall Street bankers. And here there's a lot of talk about interest rates and amortization coverage rates. I do not fully understand it. I'm no Jack Madigan. The point is he's having trouble convincing lenders that enough drivers will pay $0.10 for the convenience of this Henry Hudson bridge. And so there's a lot of hard selling, and the bankers say, we'll buy $3.1 million in authority bonds and no more than that.

So if Moses is going to build this bridge, it cannot cost more than $3.1 million. And the only way to do that is to run as much of the parkway as possible through the only city-owned land on the Riverdale side of the bridge, Van Cortlandt Park. And he does his usual whipsawing magic, but he can't get the authorities' share of the bridge cost lower than $5 million. He can't cut it anymore. He gets depressed. Technically $5,090,000. And he doesn't know what to do. Madigan has an idea. What if they don't?

totally finish the bridge. It's supposed to be a six-lane bridge. What if they build a four-lane bridge, but they make the arches supporting it strong enough that they could put an upper deck on there when they have the money for two more lanes? And the bankers say, okay. And they sign an agreement that says if traffic reaches a certain level on the bridge, they'll buy another $2 million worth of bonds to complete the bridge. And with that, the financing of the Westside Improvement Project is finally complete. He did it. He and his staff have succeeded in doing something the city has been trying to do for 50 years.

Fund an improvement that will make the west side of the city livable and make it easier for people to drive north and south on the west side. And Robert Carroll says it's perhaps the supreme example of the practical side, the getting things done side of Moses thinking. He has got this thing done only, Roman. When you are going to build this huge thing through parks –

That's totally fine, right? Like that doesn't affect anything. You know, that's that's you're not sacrificing anything that you can never get back again. Right. Probably. Yeah. I mean, this is something that's really key to understanding New York at this time. I mean, up here in this park, it's kind of the last natural area of the island of Manhattan. I mean, it is it is not developed much at all. And it's.

And these are the types of parks that Robert Moses doesn't really care for. He's a recreation park kind of guy. Like Woodlands doesn't really excite him because he didn't build it. Yes. And so some people, you know, when this plan goes into effect, you know, they're they love this park, including a couple of reformers, Bill Exton and Bob Weinberg. And, you know, they love.

Say, you know, like there's ways to build around this and what they probably don't know the amount of work he has done to get to this point. He doesn't want to undo like a single thing.

legal pad worth of math about it. He has woven such a tightly constructed, like an intricate house of financial cards that can't tumble. And these two guys, Exton and Weinberg, and Exton is particularly focused on Inwood Hill Park, which is that kind of untouched wilderness. It's on the northwest tip of Manhattan Island. This is, like you're saying, this is a New York City that still has untouched parkland. It still has marshland that hasn't been touched. And

All of that is going to be wrecked. A huge six-lane highway is going to go through that woodland. The plan involves them taking this last natural marshland, which Caro paints as this kind of biological refuge that biology classes go to to see life that they can't see anywhere else in the city. That's going to get turned into an enormous cloverleaf with landscaped shrubbery because –

Moses doesn't like that stuff. And Weinberg is protective of this neighborhood called Sputn Doival that is – it's almost rural at this point in the Bronx, this small thing. And right now it has a two-lane road, and that would be turned again into a six-lane highway, which would kind of split this community in half. And –

They find this original alternate route that avoids cutting through these places, and they find, oh, this route would be cheaper. It would be a little longer. It would be cheaper. And also – and they don't have the terms to describe this at the time in the 30s, but it would be better environmentally and ecologically. They do start to worry about things like what's going to happen to drainage in this area if we remove all these trees. They don't have the words for that because at the time –

Who was thinking about the environment in the 1930s? Very few people. I mean John Muir was until he died. I don't know when he died, but I assumed he was dead by then. But there was no environmental movement like that. There was only a little bit of a preservation movement. And they're worried that – not just environmentally, but if you run this road through Sputnik, then like –

That area is going to be overrun with people. And I should have asked my mom. My mom lived in Riverdale until she was 13. I should have asked her if it felt overrun with people. But she certainly – she lived in an apartment building then, and that was an area that had houses. It didn't have apartments at the time in the 30s when this was happening. My mom didn't live there in the 30s. Don't worry about it. Don't have to worry about my mom's timeline. And –

And the thing is, as Carol makes the point of saying, this kind of thing cannot be undone. If you destroy that marshland, if you run a road through that forest, you cannot ever get that back. That's impossible to return. And not only that, if you have this – he's been talking about this park that runs along the river. But really it's the highway that runs along the river for most of that length right along the water, and that cuts off the waterfront from New Yorkers forever. You won't be able to walk along the river. You can't fish from it. You can't picnic by it. And I grew up.

going to New York and then living in New York where this is already the case. The waterfront is maybe a little parts of it that you can fish off of a highway overpass or something like that, or, you know, off the, over a railing. But there were, for most of New York's history before this time, there

You could go down to the water and just kind of be there at the water. It's why New York was one of the great oyster fishing centers of the world. The big oyster. You could just go down to the water and get stuff. And of course, that also meant people would just like throw trash into the water for centuries. But still, Moses will be creating a wall of Russian cars that will separate New Yorkers from their waterfront. And we'll talk about this more later probably, but…

I lived in New York for years and I would forget I lived in a maritime city because you, you are cut off from the water and you just don't think about it. You don't involve yourself with it very much. It's a, it's a pretty big deal. And it, I'm going to invoke another city of the United States, Chicago as, um, a counter example. I think one of the most important reasons why Chicago is as good as it is, is that there was an ordinance that you could not build, um,

large commercial buildings on the east side of Lakeshore Drive, which is the drive that goes along Lake Michigan. And it allows just everyone to both, you know, to see, to go down, experience the lake and

and make it a part of their lives and doesn't cut it off the way a bunch of high-rises would. And it really is like one of the most important architectural features of Chicago, making it as great as it is. That preservation, as opposed to, you know, building great things, you know, sometimes, you know, in order to make the great things great, you have to, like, have some restraint, you know, like, and think about the system as a whole. And it really does...

It's so important to Chicago. I think it's one of the most important things about Chicago that makes it great. It feels so central to that city that it's right there as opposed to if you want to see the water in New York, you have to go out. You got to go out to the if you want to go to the beach, you got to go to the far reaches, you know, where Coney Island or, you know, Rockaway is. It's such a weird thing. It's a place surrounded by water. Yeah. And and you don't get to experience it. And it's it's a real choice and a real bad choice that people made when they designed these cities and they did these things.

Yeah, although I will ask this question just to play devil's advocate. How many King Kongs does Chicago have? I rest my case. Your Honor, I rest my case. I think we can end this trial here. And so Robert Caro, going back to the book, he presents this as a – no, but I agree with you. He presents this as a conflict of values like we talked about. Moses' generation, parks are for upper class people. You take leisurely drives in them.

And as he was coming of age, the question was we've got all this land. How are we going to develop it so people can use it? Now the land has been developed, and the new question is how do we preserve what's left that's undeveloped for the people who need an escape from that development? And how do you balance the needs of people traveling through the city with the needs of people in the city? And Kara talks about weighing the need for this bridge against the risk of not having the money for it in the future against the destruction of the things the city can never bring back. It's a very complicated –

Yeah.

There are some civic groups that start listening to the reformers who are against it, but the group with the most clout is the Park Association. The Park Association is led by Iffigen Salzberger, and she just loves Moses. She's in the tank for him. She has the Park Association approve these plans. And

Once again, as we will see time and again, the reformers are shocked to realize that this law they lobbied for that gives Moses ultimate power over parks was not a great idea that he's not, he's not the benevolent king of parks that they were hoping for a bunch of like the king of cartoons on PB's playhouse is a benevolent king. You know, he doesn't tell you what, what should be in a cartoon or not. He just shows you a little bit of a public domain cartoon and then, and then leaves. But Moses is much more destructive than that guy. Uh,

he and he does it all his favorite stuff he said he goes oh i'll hold public hearings and he starts cutting down hundreds of trees weeks before the hearings and he drives stakes he whipsaws he misinforms um and his opponents don't really have technical experts who can examine moses plans fully and without the support of the press without support of the mayor because the mayor wants this west side improvement to run on for re-election there's little that anyone can do to obstruct him and

Moses begins work cartoonishly fast. So the board of estimate needs to vote on the route through Sputnik. By the time they meet to vote, the bridge heads have already been installed. So there's nowhere else for it to go. It has to go there. And the legislation authorizing the building of the Henry Hudson Bridge, it's signed at 1 p.m. on May 1st, 1935. At 5 p.m., Moses has already signed the contracts with the contractors. And by 7 a.m. the next day, the workers are working on it. And a few weeks later at midnight, they're putting the steel spans in place.

And they're installed by 5.55 a.m. that day. And Caro says, when Riverdalians went to work in the morning, there before them was a bridge where none had existed the night before. Like, he's building bridges overnight. It's bonkers. And...

Moses has to work fast because he can't allow people to discuss things. He cannot have it get out that he is referring to a highway as a park access road or that all these decisions about location and how the bridge is designed are not based on what's best for the bridge or what's best for the city but based on what are bankers going to invest in? What are they going to buy bonds in? Discussion might create controversy. Controversy scares investors. He is only interested in what's going to keep the investment coming in, and discussion also means delay. And –

Who knows? New York City may never have access to this kind of money again for this project. And Jack Madigan tells Caro there was no alternative. And Caro is like, in the book, I don't know if he said this to Madigan, but in the book he's like, uh...

There is an alternative. You can just wait and not build a bridge right now. Wait till later. Why is that to be right now? It'd be great to have this bridge, but the rest of the project is almost finished. You don't really need this bridge for the whole west side improvement. LaGuardia's fixing the city budget. He's getting a little better. If you need a bridge, do this. Can't you balance that against the fact that the economy may or may not get better or worse and the fact that there are things that we're going to lose forever by building it in this place and

to Moses and his men, those things don't matter at all. So why would they bother out? They don't have to care if those things matter to someone else. They don't matter to them. They have the power to ignore them. It's the cutting down the trees that just gets me so mad and sad at the same time. Oh, for me, it's the marsh, but the trees too, the trees too, all that stuff. I mean, just like, you know, while people are discussing things, you know, he just does what he always does. And just like of the places he controls, he just destroys them so that...

There's nothing to save at a certain point. And that just is like heartbreaking. I find that extremely upsetting. It really it reminds me of it's a more effective version of something that was said in when George W. Bush was president, where someone I forget who it was, if it was.

Rumsfeld or Rove or somebody was like, well, the press can talk about this stuff. But while the press is talking about reality, we're going to be out there creating new realities. And then the press can talk about that. And it's Moses is like, yeah, we can discuss whether we should cut those trees down, but they're down. So you can talk about it, but I'm going to do it. And once I've done it, you're not gonna be able to stop me. And it's, it's so interesting.

It's horrifying. Yeah. And that fact that I remember reading this book for the first time when I was a young man and being like so mad about him destroying that forest, destroying that marshland and having to remind myself like getting physically angry while I was reading it and having to remind myself this happened before your parents were born. Like this is – it's no use getting mad about it now. And Moses would I'm sure say the day after the trees are cut down. Why get mad about it? It's done. You can't – what's done is done. Yeah.

The Carol does such a good job of just making you so sad that it happened even when you're reading it decades later when it's not just a fait accompli. It's history. It happened. There's no changing it. He talks about December 12, 1936. The Henry Hudson Bridge opens. The ceremony doesn't go great. It's raining, and this detail that I love that –

LaGuardia forces them to stop the ceremony so he can go to the radio and listen to King Edward VIII abdicate from his throne. And I love the idea of that, that like just that moment to remind the reader and to remind maybe Moses too that like there's other stuff going on in the world besides the Henry Hudson Bridge opening. Like this is not the most important thing going on in the world right now. Not that the King of England abdicating is the most important thing in the world either, but there's other stuff going on. But Moses is so preoccupied.

proud of this. And the whole thing is finished by October of 1937. And it's just six miles of parks and roads replacing six miles of garbage dumps and industrial waste and shantytowns. And this is the dream he has had since he was a young man. And he's made it happen. And

Robert Caro goes on to this long, very beautiful section describing the experience of driving through the woods right outside the city in the woods that are alongside the Sawmill River Parkway and then going on to the Henry Hudson and finally emerging into New York. And he –

He makes you imagine you're one of the reporters on opening day and the kind of magical effect of descending from the forest to the city and how beautifully this has all been put together. There's really no way for me – I'd love to read some selections from it, but there's no way to abridge it and keep the power in it. So you're going to have to just read the book. I'm sorry. Just read the section of the book about it, and it's –

For a moment – I don't know if you had this impression, but for the moment, it's almost like Robert Caro makes me agree that, yeah, maybe this was worthwhile because it's such a – the way he describes it is so beautiful and so powerful. And I've driven into New York before. It's not – I've never had that experience of –

Yeah. Yeah.

I do find a lot of the parkways in the sort of East Coast nice to be on. And a lot of these bridges are nice to be on. I love going over the Golden Gate Bridge, for example. You didn't have to destroy a forest to create it. But, I mean, probably part of the procedure. Who knows? Anyway. But the...

I also just like this, this part of this doesn't work on me. I mean, I own a couple of cars, you know, like a big family, but I do not enjoy driving. It is just a functional thing for me. I, when everyone says to me like, oh, it's just such a nice drive. It's a beautiful drive. I'm just like that for some reason just doesn't work on me. Um, even though I'm a car dependent person, uh, where I live. And so I just, uh, I, I get it. But I also like, this is for me.

You know, he's designing a world for himself to be sitting in the back of a chauffeured car. And I mean, that makes a drive way more beautiful. Now imagine you were sitting in the back of that chauffeured car. Oh boy, how great it would be. It would be amazing. I think it's funny reading that. I read this the first time I read this, I was 20 years old and.

At that point, I hated driving. I didn't like it as a teenager. I was living in New York. I would live in New York for years without owning a car or touching the wheel of a car and both the inside wheel and the outside – the steering wheel and any of the outside wheels that touched the ground. I don't know why I would touch those, but I didn't touch those either. And maybe – I'm trying to remember. I think it still affected me somewhat, but now as a Los Angeles resident –

And someone who drives most days and has really come to enjoy driving. Maybe that's it. I'm like imagining myself. I'm like, yeah, that would be a really nice drive. But I'm imagining that drive on opening the preview the reporters get before opening day when there are no other cars. And so a daily news reporter, he calls it the most beautiful drive in the world. The press loves it. Moses is like, this is going to eliminate West Side traffic jams. It's going to take 26 minutes to get from Canal Street to the edge of the city, which is incredible.

Which is amazing. That's amazing. And I've made a note here. I've gone on trips where I have to drive down Canal Street, and it takes more than 26 minutes because it's so incredibly traffic jammed there. And there's all these statistics on how much hydraulic fill they use and how much feet of steel and cubic yards of granite. And Moses says – and the whole thing only cost $24 million, which is, of course, a huge lie. And Caro says, ultimately –

There's no way of knowing exactly how much it costs because there's so many different sources that are tied up in these things. Caro estimates that the entire project all put together with all the money from everywhere and the tax assessments and things cost at least $180 million, maybe as high as $218 million.

That's in 1930s dollars. This is what a hamburger costs like a nickel. And he says the Boulder Dam, which at the time was the monument to how expensive you could build something, cost $76 million. And this West Side Improvement potentially cost $10.

Two or maybe even three possibly times more. But it's at the same time, everyone's talking about how great it is, you know, and it's so beautiful. And finally, the West Side railroad tracks are covered up. The press is excited about that. And Carlos Carro goes, not exactly. The railroad tracks were covered until they reached 125th Street. And then...

Once you're in Harlem, the tracks are uncovered, and there's from 125th up to 155th Street. And so you get stench and soot and grime and noise. And Carroll says the white people who lived along Riverside Drive were freed from those annoyances, but the black people were not. He talks about how Moses added 132 acres of land to the parts of the park below 125th Street with all the fill and stuff like that. He added no new land to the park areas above 125th Street that are likely to be used by black New Yorkers.

And Caro essentially describes two different parks. One of them is very lush, it's very ornamented, it's beautiful, and is free of commercial buildings. And the other one, above 125th, has had as little work put into it as possible. There's a minimum of any sort of facilities, and they're not

easily accessible. And this is where Caro talks about how in the Harlem section of Riverside Park, there are decorations of wrought iron monkeys that appear to have shackles on their arms. This has become a very controversial claim. We don't need to get into it right now. We'll probably get into it in the future. But this is something that I feel like there are two aspects of this book that get

picked at. And one of them is this claim, and the other is the height of the bridges. And we'll return to them again and again. But we're talking about this other thing right now, so we'll get back to that another time. The press, they're talking about how Moses has reclaimed the waterfront for the people. But Carol makes the point that for much of the improvement, the parks are not on the waterfront. The parkway is. You can't even really see the water past the road. So a driver gets a few moments of a beautiful view, but the person on foot

Can't with the time to absorb that view, they can see almost none of it. And he says, with a chance, a wonderful chance to give the city's people a way of escaping the city, he had instead sealed them within it, which is such an ominous way to talk about it. It's so scary. And I have to admit, when you're in New York City, you don't feel sealed in necessarily. But I do wish that you could get to the water more easily. It would be nice.

The driver totals are enormous. The bankers had promised they would only buy more bonds when traffic reaches 6,000 cars per day. On the first day of toll collection, over 9,000 cars use it. They're like, okay, it's a new bridge. People are excited about driving over it. It's not going to always be that way, but –

The drive totals continue to go up and up, and they have a chart in the shape of a thermometer in the office measuring the daily traffic totals, and it's pretty soon the numbers are rising above the top of the thermometer chart. They've broken the thermometer, and bankers are rushing to buy bonds. The second deck gets added to the bridge. Moses finally puts up that statue of Henry Hudson that's been meant to go on that pillar since 1909. He builds a park there for small children. Of course, he puts steps in the park so he can't bring baby carriages in. It takes 20 years of lobbying to get the steps removed.

And this is the point where if you're reading the physical copy of the book, there's this section here of black and white photos of Moses Bridges that interrupts this chapter. And the one – I feel like one of the weaknesses of the book, one of the few weaknesses is the photo sections, which are kind of disorganized, and the photos are not amazing. But there's this one picture on here that I –

maybe we'll come back to in the future about the proposed Midtown expressway, which is an expressway that's going through the buildings in Midtown Manhattan. Yeah. It looks so futuristic. It's one of those things where you look at it and you're like, that looks cool. And then you think about it for two minutes and you're like, that would be terrible. But, uh, by 1938, Moses has hooked up all his parkways. The second deck is on that bridge. We heard about how beautiful that parkway drive is when you're driving in. It's just you speeding along, just getting, getting right into the city from the forest. Uh,

Traffic is a thing of the past. Right, Roman? Is traffic a thing of the past? No, sir. Because the central axiom to urban planning is however many lanes you build, how many bridges you build, cars will fill it.

I don't know. Let's find out. Let's just take a look at the book and see what happened. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, it's all backed up. And the old bridges and roads, they're also backed up. And it talks about a reporter decides he's like, I'm going to drive that that trip from the city line to Canal Street back and see if it takes 26 minutes. This is a nine mile trip. Um.

One way it took him 58 minutes. Another way, 73 minutes. And it's bumper-to-bumper traffic along the water. So you're not looking at the water. You're looking at the bumper of the car in front of you because you've got to keep moving. And it seems, Carol says, Moses had two objectives, reclaim the waterfront for New Yorkers and ease traffic. One of those things did poorly, and the other thing it just did not do. On opening day for the West Side Improvement, Bill Exton, he goes to Inwood Hill, the park that now has a road running through it, and he finds –

The peacefulness is all gone, and Weinberg's predictions about Sputnik and Riverdale, they came true. They're becoming haphazardly developed suburbs. The city didn't really plan for them to absorb all this traffic coming through it. That last freshwater marsh in New York, it's gone, and Carroll says these things are also part of the cost of the West Side improvement. Beyond that, maybe $200 million that were spent on it, this was the cost, and it was barely considered.

before it was built. But no one's thinking about that at the time. Moses, he's still being celebrated for his work. People love him. Look, children get new playgrounds. Of course, they're going to love him. The old guard of the good government goo-goo groups, they still love him. Mrs. Sulzberger is like, the Park Association wants to give you our award for the year. And he's like, uh, I'm really busy, so you can come to my office and give it to me. And

All these big business groups want to celebrate him. There's a movement named the West Side Highway, the Robert Moses Highway, but it fails because New York politicians are worried that people are going to call it the Moses Highway, which would sound too Jewish, which if you can't even have a Jewish highway in New York, it's not going to happen anywhere. I'm sorry.

And so many groups want to honor him that at one point there's a black tie dinner in his honor that's sponsored by 16 different groups. And the media is doing the thing of taking his faults and spinning them as strengths. And Carol says his vituperation and personal attacks on anyone who dared to oppose him were outspokenness. His refusal to obey the rules and regulations of the WPA or laws he had sworn to uphold was independence.

and refusal to let the public interest be hampered by red tape and bureaucrats. And the columnist Westbrook Pegler, he makes a joke that Moses, when he starts projects, it's the oops, sorry technique, that he just starts a project without authorization and goes, oops, sorry, and everyone's kind of like,

laughing it off. That's Moses. That's what he does. And national magazines have started picking up the story of this amazing guy in New York who's getting things done. And Harper's does this story talking about how great it is that Moses doesn't let the law or personal property rights get in the way of building his stuff. And Fortune magazine – this is my favorite of the quotes that Cara has. Fortune magazine says –

Thus, not only like a Boy Scout is Bob Moses always prepared, like Galahad, his strength is as the strength of 10 because his heart is pure, which even if Robert Moses was like a truly noble parks builder, that's a bonkers way to describe him.

And his national reputation sort of grows and grows and more and more people go to New York to study with Moses to try to figure out how to build things, how to, you know, like ignore people. You know, it's really something. And if you're a dissenting voice, then you are.

ignored, or in one case, literally drowned out by singing at a Moses event. Someone is like, hey, maybe you shouldn't have done this thing. And people just sing really loudly to drown him out. And this is when he starts being called the master builder or the master planner. You know, he is no longer just the man with the parks. You know, he's no longer just the guy who, man who can get things done. He is the master of it all. The master, the someone who is unquestioned, like the authority. And Robert Moses, he still visits Al Smith.

This is where Caro takes us a moment to look in at Al Smith, who is now 56 years old, not yet an old man, but he has been sidelined from politics. He blames Roosevelt. He's become bitter. He's become obsessed with his hatred of Roosevelt. He's starting to fall in with right-wingers because they also hate the New Deal and hate Roosevelt. Mrs. Moskowitz, who might have been a tempering influence on him, has died.

His other cronies, they don't see him much anymore because he's not powerful. He's still beloved and popular. And Robert Caro talks about him getting on the bus and people on the bus will applaud him as soon as he walks on. I'm sure people are still singing East Side, West Side to him.

I'm sorry. People are still singing the sidewalks of New York to him. It's not called East Side, West Side. And people are still singing a song to him all the time. But he's not a political force. He is not even an elder statesman. He is just kind of like a relic. And he tells Bob Moses, public support is a slender reed to lean on.

But Moses seems sure that he's never going to lose it. He's always going to have that public support. Yeah. Roman, you made that sound as if at some point the public may turn on Robert Moses. But I don't think so. I mean, this is the end of the book, right? What I am struck by in this section is what a good heart Al Smith has through most of his life. I'm sure he had a

um horrible blind spots and did bad things but mostly is a champion of uh you know the people he cares about the champion of the city and this obsession you know this bitterness and this pettiness towards roosevelt uh being ignored by roosevelt really just undoes him and in this way that is just you know it's kind of heartbreaking it's just so but it's also just sort of like

You know, he has complete control over this. Like, he could just...

you know, let that go and move on and do different things. Um, but he cannot, and it really, it just diminishes them. It's, it's just like a poison that he, he just drinks on his own accord. He like mixes it up and drinks it just this hatred. Um, and it just makes him less and less of a person. Um, and, and less and less of a person worth, um,

You know, being revered. But Bob Moses still, you know, likes the, you know, the old, sees the old Al Smith. But there's just something about him that's broken here that I find just truly heartbreaking and mostly heartbreaking because it's a completely self-inflicted wound. It feels very sad. And there are two thoughts that I have about it. And one is...

That this is a premonition, and I think Carol is setting it up this way, of Bob Moses in the future. Robert Moses also will someday be a bitter old man who is not lauded the way that he thinks, is not listened to the way that he thinks. And maybe that's just –

Right.

And Moses saw Al Smith at his height, and Al Smith has fallen from that height. And Moses is like, yeah, but that's not going to happen to me. Like I'm going to – it's fame. I'm going to live forever. I'm going to learn how to fly. I don't have to worry about this ever happening to me. But it happens, and it's as inevitable a part of life as dying. And it feels to me like Al Smith very much there is like –

this is an early death for me and it's an admission that my life will end and my other thought is so why doesn't he like run for office like I don't know what it's a it's a weirdest thing and I wonder if it's the machine politics of the day maybe or he feels like he can't get the support but like I feel like if

If Al Smith ran for – I mean he's not going to run for governor again. That would be a slap in the face. For mayor, which is something LaGuardia is deeply afraid of in the beginning. He's always worried about it. Yeah. Or he could run for Congress. Like I think about John Quincy Adams who was president, lost re-election, and then went into Congress for years and years. Was a congressman for a long time after that. There's this idea that –

Maybe that also that once you've had kind of ultimate executive power, that's the only thing that will satisfy you too. That we don't know – and I have a biography of Al Smith that's been sitting on my to-be-read shelf for a long time, and I should have read it before we did this podcast, but I didn't get around to it. This is when you would have used it for sure. Yeah. But I wonder if there was this feeling in him of like, well, I had it. Why would I settle for anything less? I want it all. Because this is a man who –

thought he would be president, ran for president and probably should have won if not for anti-Catholic bigotry. But it's a good question. It feels like he has, more than anyone else, he has closed the door, but he's blamed that on Roosevelt. And maybe it's like he knows he doesn't have it in him anymore, but it's easier to blame Roosevelt than to blame himself. But it is very sad. It's a sad way for Al Smith to go. He suffers from the same thing that a lot of people who accomplish things suffer from, which is

Yeah.

kind of victim of the, of the same political machine that, that brought him to that prominence and power. Um, and, and,

he just he just becomes diminished in that and and i you know anyway i just i i would be curious to know if you ever do read that book elliot um i'll get to it maybe i'll try to do it before the end of the actually maybe i'll read it next when i when i finish this book of short science fiction short stories that's unrelated to what we're working on right now but i would love to know from another perspective what um his biographers say about the end of his life in that in that

in that regard. Stay tuned, listeners. Will I get to reading that biography before we finish the podcast? We'll find out. So that's how that chapter ends. And it's a pretty sad, bitter end to the chapter. Luckily, the next chapter is

It's pretty happy, right? The next chapters are pretty happy, joyful, sunshiny chapters. It's an amazing chapter of great gaiety and frivolity. Oh, thank goodness. Thank goodness. It's called Two Brothers. It's almost the exact opposite of the chapter that we're talking about now. It's super fascinating. We'll talk about Two Brothers after this.

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Just something else. And this chapter is one of the things I most want to talk to Robert Caro about because it's inclusion of the way, you know, kind of the different way Robert Moses uses power and to kind of hurt the people closest to him is such an authorial choice to include as opposed to all this other like.

You know, like fighting with the Board of Estimates and, you know, grounding down, you know, different newspaper people and reformers that he doesn't like is one thing. But the dastardly relationship with his brother is really something else. And I'm so intrigued by it. And so, I don't know. Let's start talking about this chapter. How does this open? So this chapter opens thusly. It begins like this.

Often at the rear of a cheering audience, there would be standing one figure who wasn't cheering, who amid a room full of men and women gathered to honor Robert Moses, stood watching Robert Moses with a face twisted with bitterness and hatred and contempt. He was Robert Moses' brother. And this is a – actually, I'd like to continue to read more of that passage because the way this chapter opens –

Paul Moses had a strange story to tell about this hero who appeared particularly heroic because, so the legend went, he had absolutely no interest in money. Robert Moses, Paul Moses said, had cut him out of part of his inheritance. And, Paul said, his brother had done more. To minimize the possibility of mutual acquaintances finding out what he had done, he had used his influence to keep Paul away from those acquaintances as much as possible by keeping him out of city posts for which he was eminently well qualified and to which he would have otherwise been appointed.

And so this is a – like you said, this kind of book, this is a biography. It's not like a Kitty Kelly tell-all biography where it's like, here, let's get into the closets and look at the skeletons and all the dirty laundry. This is a book that is working on these huge scale themes of how a city works, how democracy works, how power works. And it's almost like –

Robert Caro has taken you through this long chapter about how you fund a public work and the costs that are embedded in that, both social and technological. And he's like, we've done a lot of that. It's time to get small and let's look at Robert Moses, the person in his family. I think that hasn't really been touched on too much previously in the book. But I think that he would tell you, is my guess, and I'd love to ask him about this too, is he is looking at Robert Moses' life.

As a person as a whole, and this is another way that his use of power reveals something about him because this isn't just Robert Moses getting at his brother and we're going to revel in the dirty laundry like I said. This is Robert Moses using power not just against the faceless thousands or millions that he doesn't know personally. This is him using power against someone who in theory is closer to him than anyone else, to his brother who he's known as obviously his whole life. It's his slightly older brother.

Yeah. And this is an amazing magic trick to me how that last chapter was so huge and now it's like we're going to zoom way in and we're going to look at his personal history, something that we haven't done before. We're going to talk about a new character, someone we have never – have not mentioned in the book up to this point, his brother Paul Moses. So there's something –

Like if a TV show did this, it would be startling to suddenly have this new character and be like, oh, yeah, I'm his brother. You'd be like, I didn't know he had a brother. What's what's his story? What's going on? Like he's just masterful at this kind of storytelling. And there's a little bit at the end we'll get to about Moses wife, too. And I feel like like character.

Caro touches on that briefly, and that feels kind of like old world gentility to me, that that is not what the chapter is about. But it's also who he had access to, because as we'll see, Rabbi Caro had access to a little bit at least to Paul Moses, to Moses' brother, and he really makes use of it. Yeah, and that's a point I want to get to of this chapter that I found really intriguing. So these two chapters, these two chapters side by side that we've grouped together sort of artificially and are sort of

episode making planning and stuff like this but I like to juxtapose them because I'm really fascinated by them is that

You know, there's this whole section that that one hundred nine million dollar section that I love in the previous chapter that represents so much work. I mean, just understanding that weird tax strategy loan thing to get the money to the railroad legally and then pull that money back out to fund his project. That is.

must have represented so much work of just spade work of just just documents and talking to people and just understanding it and carol gives no mention of how much work that really was even though i know that represents a ton of work but he spends a lot of time in the beginning and

Of this chapter talking about how hard it was to get Paul Moses to talk to him. Yes. And I was trying to think about why. And I think it's because he's not trying to show off how hard it was and how he got him eventually. He's trying to show, you know, in support of this story that Paul Moses just did not want to talk to him. Paul Moses was not someone who.

who wanted to speak ill of Robert Moses, like to anyone who would listen. Um, and especially Robert Caro, like, so he's sitting the struggle up to talk to Paul Moses, not as like this, look at this amazing thing I finally got to do as a reporter. He's setting up is like,

You should maybe trust what Paul Moses is saying here because he's just not out there like on every street corner talking about how bad Robert Moses is. I think it's a little bit of that. And it's also I think the other things that Carol's been talking about that last chapter, there's that if he says it, it means there's documentation that backs it up. There's you can look at the paperwork and here it's like he I think he wants to make it clear that.

I got this from Paul Moses. Here's how I tracked him down. And here's how I got to him. So if anything in this isn't true, it's because Paul Moses is confused. And so there's a little bit of him, I think, trying to both back it up and also distance himself from the claims. Or just explain it that the provenance of the material is not the same as his normal level of rigor. Right.

It really is single sourced in a lot of ways. Well, and he says in it, he says the truth of Paul Moses charge about the inheritance will never be determined. And I remember I've heard Carol talk about how when he was writing about Lyndon Johnson, they would say no one will ever know whether Lyndon Johnson stole this election. And he was like, I'm never going to write.

No one will ever know. I'm going to find out the answer to that. But here he has to write. I'll never know the truth of this because by the time he's writing this, Paul Moses is dead. Robert Moses refuses to talk about it. Everyone else who was involved in it is also dead. And so I think he's – this is the first chapter and maybe the only chapter where I can remember where Caro is entering kind of like –

Yeah.

And it's like, oh, like, also the pain of that for Caro, too, of like, oh, I have to do this.

I had it. Like, I almost had it. Because as we'll see with Paul's story, there are parts of Paul's life that are a mystery. No one knows what was going on with him during that time. And we'll never know now. And that Caro was so close to having it. But there's also something of a like –

There's something kind of Victorian novel about it, too, where it's that what you want to learn more now that you know that we'll never know the truth of it. You know, now it's a mystery. So I want to hear about it. And you really couldn't create a fictional rivalry as rich as this one. I mean, these two men, Paul and Robert, are kind of.

Yeah, he's only a year older and...

they have so much of the same personality about them. Like you said, they're both really smart. They're both really charming. They both feel their superiority to other people. They feel that not necessarily the need, both felt the need to show it, but they both feel the assumption that they are superior to other people. And Caro, he points out that they had two differences, one small and one big. The small difference is Robert Moses did not care about lower class people or people of color, whereas Paul Moses seemed to be genuinely sympathetic towards them. And

even seemed to express warmth towards poor people that he would not show towards more affluent people. But the biggest difference, and Robert Caro was like, this is the turning point for them, is that Robert Moses, the guy who stands up to power and everything, if his mother said something, he'd be like, uh, yes, mom. Whereas Paul Moses would not. So if they're disagreeing with Bella Moses, eventually Bob would be like, yeah, okay, I guess you're right, mom. And just pretend. And Paul Moses would be like, no, you're wrong, mom. Which means that

The person who is the real secret weapon for Robert Moses in that she is bankrolling him for much of his adult life before he can amass that power…

He's on his side because he will follow her lead, whereas Paul Moses, the slightly older brother, he will not follow her lead. And we talk about Paul Moses' youth here, and there's these kind of blank spots. He seems to have had some kind of falling out with her mom. It was either over politics – he was a Democrat and she was a Republican – or it was over a girl that he was in love with. But either way, the upshot is that he drops out of Princeton, and for four years –

He's just gone, and nobody knows where he is. Nobody knows what he's doing. And then he returns to college, and instead of majoring in classics, now he's majoring in electrical engineering. And this is one of those dark spots in his life that Carol wanted to know about and is never going to know about. In 1913, both Bob and Paul want to go into public service. Bella, we know, arranges for Bob to go to the Bureau of Municipal Research. This is the first big step in his eventually becoming the power broker.

Paul is told, we've arranged a job for you at an investment bank. And Paul is like, I don't want to do that. And he leaves. Nobody knows where he goes. Some other family members, they tell Carol, yeah, I think he might have been in South America for a little bit. Nobody knows what he does. And the trail doesn't pick up again until Paul is serving in the Navy during World War I. And Carol mentions during World War I, Robert Moses is staying out of

He doesn't want to do it. Whereas Paul enlists and serves. And while Bob is kind of starting to compromise his anti-machine politics so he can learn from Bill Moskowitz at this point, if you remember back that far in the series, while he's doing that, Paul Moses is working at Con Ed and is wrecking a very promising career by arguing politics with his bosses. Like he will not compromise. He is – in some ways, Paul Moses is the Bob Moses that Bob Moses is promised to be. Like he cares about people who –

below him on the social scale. He is uncompromising and it just keeps causing him trouble. And finally, he gets the chance to enter public service. He's offered a job at the Department of Public Works. At the last minute, Al Smith, who was governor at the time, vetoes the appointment. And Paul Mose, I guess, tells Robert Caro that he didn't suspect at the time that his brother might have been behind that because at the time, it wouldn't have occurred to him that his brother would be getting in the way of him ascending into that world. This is so sinister. Yeah.

Yeah. I really this is also really upsetting. And then one of the other things that they have in common, curiously, is this love of swimming, like this obsession with swimming. And so while, you know, Bob Moses is building Jones Beach, Paul is building this enormous swimming club in Pennsylvania, which is, again, what an obsession. I don't understand it.

I could understand it if this was like the Louganus family. They had a history of family swimming or diving. But yeah, they just love swimming. I don't know. And the difference here – Paul Moses, he's like an alternate reality version of Robert Moses in so many different ways where –

Robert Moses can build Jones Beach, and he can go way over cost because he has the power of the governor behind him. He can spend an entire bathhouse's budget on the foundation for the bathhouse and then say to the legislature, give me more money. I got to finish this bathhouse. But Paul, when he overspends on this swimming club…

He has nowhere to turn. He won't ask his mother for financial help. Robert Moses, remember he asked his mom to float him like $22,000 to finish a project once, and she did. And Paul Moses, he won't do it. So he's sinking further and further into debt. And by 1929, things are looking up. It's a great year for everybody, 1929. And Paul and his mom are starting to reconcile. He gets a consulting job with Common Edison. The pool is starting to bring in money.

And he has an argument with his brother, and Paul Moses tells Robert Caro that he didn't see it as any other different argument than before Robert Moses was a government guy. But suddenly in 1930, the next year, Paul and his mom, they have another falling out, and when he tries to make up with her, she refuses to see him. And suddenly other relatives are cutting him out. They won't talk to him. And –

This is the big mystery that I'm always drawn to in this chapter is they all seem to think he has done something horrible. He's committed some kind of crime, and he is too proud to ask what they think he did, and he will never know. And later in the chapter, Robert Caro talks to relatives, and they're like, yeah, I don't really remember. He did something bad. I don't remember what it was. Maybe Bob said he did something bad, but nobody can seem to remember what the sin is that Paul committed that basically got him excommunicated from the family. No one knows.

And when Bella Moses dies, she divides her estate up between Robert Moses and their sister Edna, who we've barely heard anything about. And she leaves a trust for Paul. It's $100,000. He's only allowed to receive the interest, which is not very much money, never the principal.

It says in the will that if he contests the will, it all goes to his siblings and he loses it automatically, which is a very Bob Moses move I feel like. And worst of all, Robert Moses is named the trustee of the fund or one of the trustees. And so now that his mother is gone, Paul Moses has lost any financial security. He –

ever felt like he had before. And even into his old age, he's wondering, why did my mom cut me out of a full share of her will? Like he'll never know. And much like Al Smith curdling with resentment towards Roosevelt in some ways, Paul Moses comes to believe Robert Moses, he didn't say Robert Moses, he said Bob, that Paul Moses comes, in my notes I say Bob all throughout and I'm like, I'm not used to calling him Bob. This is very disorienting. Paul Moses comes to believe that his brother Bob

lied about him to the rest of the family to poison his relationship

And Paul Moses tells Robert Caro, there was an earlier will that divided the estate into three equal parts. And then when my mom was in the hospital, Bob came and got her to sign a new will because he wanted my share of the money. And he alleges that then his brother made it harder for him to find work. And Caro, he investigates Paul's charges as best as he could. He finds Paul has some details wrong about when the new will was signed. There was an old will and a new one, but it was before she was in the hospital. It was re-signed. Paul's relatives, they don't remember what the deal was. They're sure he did something bad. And

Paul Moses says to Robert Carroll, look at this in light of Robert's 1930 financial situation. He's not secretary of state anymore. He doesn't have a job. He's 41 years old. He has no income except what he's getting from his mom. He had two girls to send to private school. He's got two homes to keep up.

And for the first time, you can see he needs money because he submits a bill to the government for some work he's done for them. And the bill is denied payment. But he made such a big deal about I don't get paid for my work that just to send a bill means he needs money. And he refuses to leave public service for a private industry job. His whole deal is that he's the guy who doesn't care about money. He spends lavishly. All the Moses do. But he doesn't care about money. And meanwhile, Bella Moses is spending her money faster than it can be replenished in her old age. And Bob Moses is like, if I'm going to get a fair share of this inheritance –

I'm not going to be able to support my family. And Caro says, this, of course, is Paul's analysis. Robert will not discuss it, and there is living no one else who is able to. And he says a little later, but it is possible to ascertain the truth of Paul Moses' other charge. It is possible to determine whether or not it is true that Robert Moses secretly employed his behind-the-scenes influence in city government to keep his brother from getting jobs he deserved. Paragraph indent, it is true. And it's like, what? And it

And if Robert Caro is saying it, it's because people told him. And he says, I know this is true because people I talk to told me it was true. And I can't find anyone to tell me that it's not true. And this is what – it's like you're reading it and you're like, yeah, okay. I certainly have family members who argue with each other and blame each other for things that happened a long time ago. And they don't talk to each other now because of wills and things like that. It's always like, all right, all right. So this story with Paul Moses, I'm like –

All right. Maybe. I don't know. And then as soon as it gets to, oh, yeah, he totally stopped his brother from getting work. You're like, oh, well, maybe the will stuff was true. I don't know. It's it's it's. And this is when it gets it gets kind of strange. You know, the lengths that Robert Moses going to to keep his brother from supporting himself from working in the same field that he's in. Yeah. And this is just hard to figure out. Like the the it's it's funny that the the.

cutting him out of the will is the motivations or what Robert Moses' role in that is harder to determine. But the motivation for such an action is very clear. Here, the, you know, the trail of evidence is very clear, but the motivation sort of eludes me, you

you know, why you would make it so that he could not find consulting jobs in the city. I mean, it's, it's very, there's two, only two thoughts I have about that one. Roman, do you have any brothers? I do not. Okay. So I have a brother and sometimes I get kind of annoyed with him and then, so, you know, this, he rubs me the wrong way, but, uh, that's a, that's a minor point, but I, it's,

There's something about Bob Moses. He needs to be the superior one. He needs to be the authority. He needs to be the bully. And I wonder if just having someone there who not only doesn't see him as an authority, sees him as an equal or maybe even as slightly lesser because he's his younger brother, like to have someone who is like.

Oh, yeah. Well, I'm not as afraid of you because like I literally remember when you were pooping in your pants as you were a little kid. Like that's something I imagine Bob Moses cannot have around even beyond the will stuff. So he goes about making sure that his brother cannot be hired in the city and then both for the government and then later in private industry. And there's a point where LaGuardia.

He needs someone like Paul Moses. He needs someone who understands electrical engineering and is liberal so that he can give him the information he needs to regulate and investigate the utility companies for ripping off New Yorkers and –

He also needs someone who has that knowledge and expertise, believes in the cause, and does not care if he pisses off utility companies that might hire him later on. And there's basically one guy who fits that bill, and it's Paul Moses. And multiple people recommend Paul to LaGuardia, and LaGuardia says to them, I can't have him around as long as Bob is here. Yeah.

And people in the city government, they can sometimes hire him for temporary consulting jobs. They're impressed by him. He cannot seem to get hired on a permanent job. And what's interesting is Paul Windles seems to be trying to hire him all the time. But then when Caro talks to Paul Moses, Paul Moses is like, yeah, Paul Windles didn't want me around. Like even he doesn't fully understand who was really stopping him from getting hired. And once Paul Windles leaves the government, Paul can't get temporary jobs. Suddenly even private companies won't hire him even though they used to offer him work.

And the hand behind this is Robert Moses, who, again, controls all this stuff. He can he's the one person who both has the influence to stop his brother from getting work and also would care at all. Who else would give a shit? Pardon my language. Who else would care if if Paul Moses gets a job in the amount that this sabotages his life is not just he's throwing up roadblocks to make things difficult, that he doesn't gain a certain level of success and therefore is somehow

more formidable rival to Robert Moses. He brings him to poverty through these actions. He ruins him completely. Yeah, it's not like... And so Paul Moses didn't work in government and he ended up becoming a lawyer or he ran a shoe store or something. No, it's like he's wrecked as a person. Partly it's his own fault because the Moseses spend money lavishly. Paul Moses also a spendthrift. And by the end of 1938, when we...

Yeah.

And he also he also like lobbies to as the trust as the executor of the trust. He demands Bob Moses demands a salary for this money. Like it's just like insult to injury. It's so terrible. Robert Rose, he says, I want to be paid for this work. Also, this investment, we actually overpaid into it. So you need to return some money to us to return a few thousand dollars you don't have. And Paul Moses is like, my brother's going to get paid more money from the trust I inherited than I'm ever going to get.

Like this is – and he sues the trustees, and the case is moved from an impartial judge to a judge who's friends with Al Smith, who not only rules for the trustees and rules for Robert Moses, but then lectures Paul about being greedy. And like at this point, it's like the Book of Job. It's just one thing after another happening to Paul Moses, and he becomes this guy who is fixated on his brother, and it makes it easier for other people around him to believe, oh, he's unstable. He did something bad in the past. He must have – he can't trust him.

And he just can't get work in New York City. And Robert Caro says to him, why don't you go to another city? And Paul says to him, what? Let him drive me away? And it's like, oh, that's not a healthy outcome. And it does remind you. It's like, oh, well, he probably could have gone to Chicago, Los Angeles, some other city, Cincinnati, somewhere, and gotten a job doing this kind of work. But now there's a personal rivalry to it. And also, New York is the place that he knows. By now, he's becoming an older man. And-

People in the New York area, they're like, oh, it's pretty weird that this brilliant electrical engineer whose brother controls the hiring of engineers for public projects, that he can't get a job. Very strange. It's like...

Robert, you're having trouble finding engineers for this dam you're building on the St. Lawrence River. Didn't your brother already make up plans for a dam on the St. Lawrence River? But you won't hire him. I don't know what's going on. And it gets to the point that you're saying he ends up in poverty. He's an old man. He lives in a one-room walk-up apartment at the very southern tip of Manhattan. He lives with a woman named Millie who Carol says nobody seems to know what her last name is. She's just this older woman who seems devoted to him.

And Caro hints that this may be the woman Paul loved at Princeton when he was young. There's something about that that feels a little too romantic to me, a little too like, so I don't know. And I wonder. I like it. I always remember that detail because it's so poignant, you know, even if it's, you know, just doesn't, you know, I don't know, doesn't quite hold water. To sound like a newspaper, say beautiful if true, you know, but. And.

And by the 1960s, when Robert Moses is still a powerful person, Paul Moses is an elderly man. He can't get up the stairs of his building. His brother is building thousands of apartments in elevator buildings for people at Paul Moses' income level. And Robert Moses is giving out those apartments to people as favors.

And it never occurs to him, or if it does, he rejects the idea to give his brother one of those buildings, which, as Carol points out, would have improved his brother's life immeasurably to live in a building with an elevator. This is how far their lives have gone. These two guys started in the same place. They're very similar men.

Robert Moses is the shaper of worlds who is almost by hand remolding New York and Manhattan Island and things like that and putting up more bricks than anyone ever has, more cement. And his brother, meanwhile, is struggling to get up the stairs to this tiny apartment he lives in. And he haunts kind of City Hall. He's always hanging around there to the point that people he used to know –

And now Paul Moses becomes just kind of like in the eyes of the people who work there, like a nut who just goes into offices and bothers people. And finally, in 1962, Paul collapses and his brother finally goes to visit him at the hospital. And he brings him like a brochure about the Triborough Authority or something like that. Like he brings him like souvenirs that are about how great Bob Moses work is. And.

Paul Moses at this point, he's so nervous that Millie is going to be left with nothing when he dies, with no money, that he swallows his pride after decades and he writes Robert Moses and he asks him for a job and –

Moses arranges for him to become what Caro describes essentially an errand boy at an engineering firm for $96.16 a week. Like the least he can do is what he does, which is like, oh, my elderly brother, yeah, I'll get you this kind of low man on the pole job where you should be probably running this firm at this point. It's such a – there's other members of the family that we'll get into in just a moment. But the story of Paul Moses, it really feels like you're seeing –

In some ways, the same person, it's a real sliding doors thing, the same person on alternate tracks. And I wonder if part of it is like Bob Moses seeing competition from his brother and wanting to cut that off or Robert Moses being like, I could have turned out like my brother. I don't want to be reminded of that. Like, I just don't want anything to do with him. You know, that's the more sympathetic way to look at it in a way, you know. Or doesn't want anybody to see someone so similar to him.

So down on his luck. So, so low. And so therefore you can imagine Robert Moses as this man, you know, as this man knocking around city hall talking about engineering, you know, you could totally, I think this idea of Robert Moses self-mythologizing is,

He has to come from somewhere. So obviously, Bella Moses is part of his story. But there's this way, he doesn't talk about having a brother in any public forum. His biography, when stuff like that is mentioned, part of his personal life is mentioned, he stops cooperating with his biographer. He never talks about a sister either. And I think that there's a bit of him that just like,

He doesn't want any personal history that allows for some kind of weakness, like some kind of like different part of the story instead of what he makes of himself. Like he is the city builder and he was just like born, you know, you know, fully armored out of Zeus's head as, as the city builder and him, you know, like having a period of time where this like weak man, this failure of a man, uh,

probably dominated him, was maybe smarter than him. He can't have a period of his life, have any type of narrative in which he is below or less than or, you know, whatever it is. I mean, it's just, it's really, I mean, this chapter is really heartbreaking. And it's also, you know, like of all the different things and interpretations of whether or not Robert Moses is doing

you know, the right thing for the most amount of people, the person who can get things done when most people can't. And you can argue these little bits and points about like, you know, him being just part of the entire culture of cars that's happening in cities around the nation. Um, and, and his poor decisions were really the fashion of the time and,

This type of thing where this is a man who could literally give him an apartment and gives apartments to people all the time could just alleviate the suffering of his brother and doesn't do it is just...

It's like so cold. It's so painful. There's no national ideological trend of ruining your brother in America at the time. Like there's a car culture, but there's not a torturing your siblings culture, you know, into adulthood. Kids torture their siblings all the time. And he could do, it's so little, it's so nothing for him to make Paul's life better. And it just blows my mind. Yeah. It's astounding. And it's almost like the, you know, he's the master builder. He's going to reshape the world.

the world the way he wants it no matter who has to leave has to get relocated or hurt in the process and he's going to reshape his history the way he wants it no matter who he has to relocate or get rid of in the process um and i mean the story only gets a little sadder from here so buckle up folks i mean first carol briefly talks about uh their sister edna who really gets short shrift in the book maybe because she didn't talk to robert i don't know but uh or maybe because her life is not particularly eventful which is fine but uh

She kind of does whatever Robert Moses tells her to do in terms of family stuff until she and her husband move to Florida, and then she finds that her brother effectively forgets she exists and just ignores her, doesn't take her calls. There's one point where he's coming to Florida, and she's like, oh, can I see you? And he's like, yeah, well, if you come to the airport, you can see me for a couple minutes before I leave for this other place. And she goes, okay, I get the idea. I'm just not going. I don't need to do that. And it fits into that rubric for him of like if I can use this person –

They're a part of my life. If I can't use this person, I don't need them to be a part of my life. But then Caro ends the chapter talking about the relationship between Robert Moses and his wife, Mary Moses. And we remember Mary was the secretary at the bureau that he fell in love with. He would talk his ideas out with her, and she was the woman who, when he was working two long hours on the Long Island Park Commission, she'd come to the office and pull him by the ear. Yeah.

And get him home. And she is the person who is effectively making his career possible by running their home while he is away. And that split is pretty classic for the time that the man works outside the home, the woman is inside the home. But even further than normal, she's buying all his clothes. She's paying the bills. She's arranging for his haircuts. She makes sure in the morning that he has car fare in his pockets in case he has to take a car or train somewhere. And –

If he's schmoozing with city politicians, she helps him remember who people are. She helps him to get them on his side. She helps take care of the staff. If he's in a bad mood when he leaves to work, she'll call ahead and say he's in a bad mood today. Like, just be careful. If someone on staff loses a family member, she's the one who remembers to reach out to them and give their condolences. Like, she is very much a partner in a lot of what he's doing.

and is also constantly defending him to other people, constantly advising him. And Moses quoted in the chapter that when he makes a mistake and something doesn't work out, he goes, oh, that's one of the times I didn't listen to Mary. I didn't talk to Mary about that one. Yeah, anytime he makes a boner, it's because he didn't listen to Mary. Yeah. Old-fashioned way of saying it. Yeah, yeah. But over the years, Caro depicts this process, and it's not as detailed as the Paul stuff. I think because he wasn't talking directly to Mary

Mary Moses. And also I think there's a, I get the feeling here that he's kind of covering his sources a little bit more than he does in other sections. I have to look in the notes in the back to see every now and then in the notes, you'll find a part where it's like this person only spoke if I kept them anonymous or there's the mention in one part early in the book of, of one of Moses staff members who commits suicide because he's being driven so hard. And he says in the notes, I am not mentioning this man's name out of respect for his mother who's still alive. And like, so there's a little bit of that. I wonder going on here, but,

He talks about how as the years go on and Robert Moses gets more powerful and louder, Mary Moses is getting kind of weaker and quieter. And by 1930, she's seen by people no longer as like the vivacious equal partner of Bob Moses, but as this kind of shy, withdrawn woman. She still clearly idolizes her husband, and she boosts him a lot while minimizing herself. When he's running for governor, she's interviewed, and she's like, well, I don't know why you talked to me. You should talk to the candidate. He's a more interesting person than me. I don't know what I've done. And she seems to –

be aging dramatically, perhaps from the strain of running their household and Bob's life and her own life, or perhaps just from being...

so much. Who knows? You know, so much of Robert Moses' life is spent with the things he's doing. And as Carol has made it clear earlier, there's almost no time in the day for any of this stuff. It's funny because Carol will be like, Robert Moses was always there for clam bakes with the kids, but it seems like that, I don't know how often that must have happened. It seems impossible. Yeah, exactly. It's not a weekly clam bake. And Robert Moses is, you know, at any time of day or night, he may suddenly leave and go swimming to stay kind of physically vigorous. And

Carol starts jumping ahead and saying by the 1950s, Robert Moses is catching the eyes of younger women who see Mary as not being much to speak of. And as early as the 1930s, there are rumors that Moses was a womanizer.

Moses having affairs with kind of more glamorous women, richer women. And under the strain of all this, Mary begins to drink. People began to assume that she is an alcoholic. And there are times when she embarrasses herself in public because she's had too much drink. And she's eventually hospitalized several times. It seems unclear whether that's because of alcohol abuse or because of other kinds of breakdowns. But.

we're left with this portrait of this marriage that was between these two vigorous people, one of whom was clearly subordinating herself for the ambitions of the other

And now he's stayed powerful. He's gotten only more powerful and she has withdrawn more and more. And I, I think it's too far to say that Caro is saying this, but the impression I get is almost of Moses, like a vampire kind of like draining the vitality from his wife in order to stay on top of his own life. And then when she is no longer able to keep up in the same way, because she's gotten older, kind of like tucking her away, you know, and not,

necessarily openly mistreating her but sidelining her from his life and there's it's such a it's just sad way for this chapter to end you know the last chapter ended with the sadness of al smith is this bitter old man and this chapter has taken us through the ruin of paul moses and then the just diminishment of mary moses and

There's something I'm of two thoughts about this chapter. And one of them is that this is much more gossipy than other chapters in a way that Carol mostly stays away from. But also that

To avoid showing this, to say only, oh, we're only going to talk about his public life. We're only talking about the public things he did is to not look at the person in full, all the ways that he used power because there's another sort of power. That's the power between two people. That's the power dynamic that's in a family. And these are other aspects of power that are not democratic power. They're not urban infrastructure power or electric power, which comes up so much in the book.

The power of motors and things like that. But every human interaction involves some sort of power dynamic. And I feel like the last, I don't know what, 10, 15 years of American society has been about people having their eyes opened to kinds of power dynamics they maybe didn't recognize before or were refused to recognize before, were oblivious to. And these are other aspects of power and they show us

Yeah.

And Caro's not going to give us that answer. That's not his job to give us that answer. His job is only to lay it all out there and then allow us to make the choice, I think, of how we feel about it. And it's a hard – it's a thing that – I don't know. I like it when my books tell me what to think. I don't like it when my books just ask questions. It's pretty interesting to me how –

you know, segregated this portion is. It both like extends and collapses time in an interesting way. It works on a different time scale than other parts that we're talking about. I mean, we sort of reach the end of Mary Moses' life here somewhat and definitely the end of Paul Moses' life. But it's very sequestered to do this thing, which is to give a well-rounded view of Robert Moses as a man

as opposed to his sort of just activities as the master builder. It strikes me that like, you know, the Lyndon Johnson books that Carol wrote, the personal and political are more integrated into the story of LBJ and they're more documented too. So it seems like

He's figuring out how to place this. He sort of has a way of just integrating it better when he's talking about Lyndon Johnson in the later volumes of the work that he did. This just stands out. This is one strange chapter that tells a totally different story that gives you a different view of this man that you've at this point grown to somewhat loathe.

And now you really do. Because these are like, it's not that his actions are relatable at all. They're just more normal. Like more people have experienced like rifts within families that cause this type of strife and can place themselves more in these situations. And you can totally see how...

you know, a person could read this and see themselves in Paul Moses or Mary Moses in a way that they maybe can't, you know, like,

you know, a person who's just has their favorite park bulldozed or, you know, or something like that. There's a, Caro is so good. I feel like, I think you're right that in the Lyndon Johnson books, they're more integrated. I wonder if part of that is because, yeah, Lyndon Johnson was already a famous personality, but also he had three, he knew he would have at least three books to work on that with. So he kind of get into it more. But I also, I wonder if like Caro is still kind of working in some ways in a reporter mode and the reporter mode is like,

You're telling a big story. You've got to find the human element of it. Like we talked with Brandy last episode about like people are interested in people. Every story that's interesting has people in it. And so he's very good I think at picking out –

Who is the individual that he's going to boil a story down to a lot of the time when it's when, you know, when he gives a couple examples earlier on in the first chapter, but like when it's time for him to talk about Moses as a bully, he focuses for a few moments on Pearl Bernstein and the way that Moses treated Pearl Bernstein. And it's so much more powerful than if he said, you know, 400 people quit for Moses's staff or something like that. And here it's like.

It's like the reporter part of him that's like, you got to find the human angle. We'll do it here. This is the – and we'll do it about Paul Moses. And yeah, it is a strange chapter. It's strange the way it's balanced. It's called Two Brothers, but it ends talking about – About his wife, yeah. About Mary Moses. And I'm not quite sure how I feel about how little space Mary Moses gets, whether I think more space would be allowing to tell her story more fully and –

Because right now she's almost treated like a side person in this whole story. Or if more space would feel like it was –

Holding her up to an indignity, whether it's protecting her or not, what the gentility of it and the old-fashionedness of protecting someone or revealing the truth. And there's a lot going on under the surface in this chapter, and I wonder if that's also why – or if it's aided by the fact that Kara was so open at the beginning of like, this is when I talked to Paul Moses. This is what it looked like where I saw Paul Moses. He's much more in this chapter than he is in other chapters. Yeah.

Yeah, it's just so different and fascinating. And I think it's like, you know, when people look back and have read this with us over the year, I think it's super likely that this will be the chapter they remember the most, the most.

The most detailed love and and and has the most visceral impact on them. It's it's just it's really something else. It's sort of like it just stands out in this interesting way that that I like. But I'm I'm just like I'm just kind of fascinated by it. I think about it all the time.

Yeah.

That visual and that moment stuck with me so long, and it's so cinematic. And this feels to me like when a TV show does their one episode that's kind of like the weird episode, you know, where it's like a musical or it's like all set in one room or it's told backwards. And it's so unlike what the rest of the series is, but that's the episode people remember, partly for that reason, you know, that it sticks out in their mind. Yeah.

So I guess this is Robert Caro's bottle episode where he didn't have the budget. So he had to have everything take place in one car or something. Walk-up apartment. Well, anyway, so it's just a fascinating chapter, a fascinating discussion. And we move on from here. Next month we'll be covering pages –

607 to 702. That's chapters 27 through 32, which will finish out the part five, The Love of Power, and continues on to part six, The Lust for Power. It just gets worse and worse. Oh, you thought The Love of Power was bad. Lusting for power is even worse. At least loving. There's an emotional aspect to it. Lusting, it's just animal passion for power. Yeah. That's next month. But after this break, we're going to talk to Mike Schurr.

who created Parks and Rec and The Good Place. And we're going to talk to him a little bit about what this book means to him and how he, you know, after Robert Caro presented the Parks Department as this secret source of power, Mike Schur came along decades later to remind us that Parks and Rec is actually a little tiny department that does nothing. That's after the break.

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Now for our interview with television writer and creator Mike Schur, the man behind Parks and Rec and The Good Place and a bunch of other amazing television. We learned that not only is Mike a power broker super fan, but he also used the book as inspiration in developing Parks and Rec. We just had to have him on. The idea for having Mike on the show actually came from our Discord server. So thank you to user Ben for the suggestion.

First of all, let's talk about your experience with Power Broker. How did you come to it and what happened to you once you read it? Well, I don't want to kick this off with a brag, but I've read it three times.

We call that the minimum around here. We call that the beginning step. But yeah, okay. Yeah, that's right. I have achieved amateur status by reading it three times. So I moved to New York after college in 1997, and I love New York. I grew up in Connecticut, and New York was always big and scary and exciting. And then I moved there and just completely fell in love with the city. And I was at a party once.

maybe a year after I moved. And I was ranting about New York because I was saying, this is the best city in the world.

And it is so beautiful and so – it makes so much sense. You know, the layout of the streets and the neighborhoods and Central Park right in the middle taking up 1,000 acres of the greatest, most valuable real estate in the – certainly in North America. And it's just – everything about it is great except for one thing, which is why is it so messed up in terms of its transportation?

And, you know, coming from Connecticut, which is just north and a little east of the city, every time I drove home, I would have the same feeling, which is like, what is this insane tangle of road that you encounter? Why is it so crazy? The Van Wick Expressway and the Major Deegan and then the Sawmill and the BQE and the Cross Bronx, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you can't

You can barely take the subway to the airport. It takes four hours. And it's just, I don't get it. And someone, I don't know who, lost to history, basically said like, read this book and you'll understand. And it was, and I've heard you two talk about this on this very podcast. It was like,

I was being inducted into the Masons or something. It was like a secret society where it was like, just here, like, like they opened a trench coat and there were some knockoff watches and a copy of the power broker. And they gave me the copy of the power broker. And I, and I started reading it and I just tore through it. I, I read it in, in a, in a, like two weeks. And I thought when I was done, uh,

I thought that's the greatest novel I've ever read is how I thought about it. It's certainly the greatest book I've ever read, but I thought of it as a novel. It's like you couldn't have, no imagination could have come up with a better story than this story. And I started talking about it so much that my then girlfriend and now wife said,

actually banned me from talking about it at cocktail parties or other gatherings. It's one of three times in her life she's been like, you got to stop talking about this. Not for her sake, for my sake. She was like, you're going to drive all of your friends away if you keep talking about this book. And she was, by the way, totally right. So instead of talking about it, I just thought about it. I thought about it endlessly for years. And

I moved to LA in 2004 and a couple years after that, I started working on the TV show Parks and Recreation, which was about a woman who worked in local government. And the idea for Leslie Knope, Amy Poehler's character, was she was going to be a person who was a pure idealist but had no kind of understanding of the structures, the power structures and the calcified system of government and how to actually get things done.

And I thought, I got to read The Power Broker again. Like that's the book that helps you understand these things. So I read it for the second time sort of in preparation to run that show. And it was very sort of meaningful in this new context, which was not about living in New York, but about what happens when you are an idealist in

But you also need to get things done because obviously that book is the greatest story ever of a person who starts off with the best of intentions and is slowly corrupted by power and sort of like the understanding of how levers are pulled.

And the goal, I remember saying early on to Amy, the goal of this is to have Leslie be Robert Moses but remain true to herself. Like, yeah, but Robert Moses but good. It's a pretty good... It's a good explanation of the character. And then...

So that was a sort of guiding principle. We actually worked it into an episode. She mentioned it in one episode and I think gave it to a friend of hers as a present or something. And then the third time I read it was over COVID. When we were all locked in our houses, I sort of had this thought of like,

well, I can't leave my house and what should I do to spend my time? And I was like, I haven't read that book in a decade. I'll read it again. So I read it for the third time. And the wonderful and funny thing was that when I read it over COVID, it was the same copy. It was the same paperback copy I'd read the first two times. And it completely disintegrated in my hands. Like it just, the binding broke and like huge chunks of the book had fallen out. And I was like, by the time I was done reading it, it was...

the cover of the 1100 page book, but with only like 300 pages still actually adhering to the spine. So that's my history with it. It started with how do I understand New York City? It changed to how can I understand this character who is obviously not anything close to Robert Moses, but has the same set of goals as he did when he started out as a sort of wide eyed reformer.

And then the third time was just because I love it and I wanted to read it again. I love that. Your story with it is kind of like the story of a prophet who has received the word from on high, tries to share it with everybody. It falls on deaf ears. They're not listening. They tell you, stop. Don't tell us this anymore. Then you find the person or the form that you can actually communicate it in, and you reach –

I guess, Amy Poehler, you reach the one person who is open to that message. And then when you try to return to the original source, the original word, it's like God has shut off that valve and is like, you don't need this anymore. My time with you is done. You're no longer a tool I need in the universe. And the book disintegrates like something in a fantasy novel. Exactly. Yeah. It's like the words floated off the pages and disappeared into the ether. The lost golden discs of Moroni. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Am I saying I'm a prophet of some kind? I don't know. That's not for me to decide. That's up to your listeners. That's right. That's outstanding. I mean, one of the reasons why I was so intrigued to talk to you is this Parks and Rec, you know, connection of like Robert Caro, you know, creating this

masterpiece to talk to us about how the Parks Department is this strange source of hidden undemocratic power. And then you, you know, like whatever, 40 years later, you

talk about being like as sort of silly as you might expect, you know, Parks and Rec department to be, but also having all these sort of, you know, intricacies of bureaucracy and, and, and good people doing, you know, bad things, bad things, you know, mostly it's good people doing good things on Parks and Rec. Yeah. So, but it's, it's so funny to me that there's this connection there when you are already connected to this material in some way.

Yeah, I mean, the research that Greg Daniels and I did early on in order to write this show was very eye-opening and also very, at a small scale level, obviously, very reminiscent of the early chunk of The Power Broker because what we learned was like, you start off when you're trying to do public works projects, you start off with an idea and the idea can be very pure.

And then because this is America, the public gets to weigh in. And the public has a lot of opinions, and some of them are good and some of them are bad, but they all have to be heard. And we talked to this one guy who he was trying to redesign a small park.

And he had this in New York City, and he had this idea to sort of restore the park to the way that it had looked in the 1890s. And that involved light stanchions that had a certain kind of, at the time, I think it was like a Doric column kind of feel because it was the Gilded Age. Yeah.

And so he was gonna do these like old timey 19th century sconces and all this sort of stuff. And it was a very beautiful idea. And then meeting after meeting, after meeting, after meeting, people say, those lights are too tall. They're gonna shine in my apartment and I'm not gonna be able to sleep. And so he makes alterations. And then someone else says, this is where we walk our dogs. And if the paths aren't, if there isn't enough green space, then the dogs won't have places to walk or whatever.

And they just kind of like chip away and chip away and chip away. And by the time the design was actually approved by the public commission, it was like he had one, like the columns were just now like steel poles and everything was like flattened. And there was this one little tiny...

like, little flourish. Like, at the top of the light stanchions, there was, like, a tiny bit of, like, you know, intricate stone relief that he had managed to, like, keep and salvage from his original design. And we said, like, that must have been so devastating. And he kind of shrugged, and he was like, look, I got this, like, small win. Like, I had this idea that

to do this big elaborate thing. And like, at the end of the day, yeah, it's not what I wanted, but like, that's not the job of the, that's not my job. My job is to serve the public. And so if I can manage to salvage like one little tiny thing that I'm proud of, then great. And then the public, to the extent that the public can ever be truly satisfied with something, the public will be satisfied with the project.

And it was both sort of heartbreaking and also kind of lovely because his attitude was like, I managed to do something that I'm proud of. And also the public was served in the way that they asked to be served. And we sort of had that. It's not like a, I don't know what you would call it. It's not quite a North Star for the show, but it had this vibe of like,

This is what Robert Moses lacked, especially as he gained power, was he forgot about the second part, right? He forgot about the part where his job was to serve the public, and all he wanted was for it to be the way that he wanted it to be. And I thought, well, there's the difference, right? If you're trying to create a character who is the good version of Robert Moses, then the part of Robert Moses, the idealist and the reformer,

should be 99% of the character. And the part of Robert Moses that just wanted to run roughshod over everybody and do things only the way that he saw fit should be 1% or less than the way that this person goes about their business. And there were a lot of moments like that where we would hear a story or a sort of tale of woe from a public servant

And the first thing I would think of is Robert Moses. I would think about the book and like the, and the difference, the fundamental difference between the way that folks who are responsible public servants behave versus how Moses ended up behaving for the great majority of his life. Yeah. And like in your research, I bet you found as I think I have found sort of like in my life is the public servants that are, they're more like Leslie Knope than they are like Robert Moses out there in the world.

Yeah, I think that's probably true. I mean, really, many of them are not like either. They're neither angels nor demons. I don't know. Yeah. But there's a sense of serving the public in a way. I mean, they know what's right and wrong. And sometimes you put yourself in a position of leadership because you feel you know what is right, you know, and therefore you reluctantly take the advice of other people. But I found that

you know, most people are trying to do good in this world. Mostly. I think that's true. Yes. I think that, that there's, let's put it this way. There were very few people who are trying to be Robert Moses in part because it'll never happen again. That part, part of what makes the book so compelling is it's the exact person and personality type and sort of like, and family type.

uh, lineage and city at a time of possibility, you know, everything in most things in American cities are pretty well formed at this point. You know, there, we're not making a lot of new big cities that even have the opportunity for someone to do what Moses did in New York. And then also the kind of weird, uh,

of events of Moses coming of age in a time when like Tammany Hall was running New York and him getting that firsthand look at how the

you know, idealism is fine, but power is what gets things done. And him learning that lesson, getting crushed by that power, and then shifting gears from idealist to power gatherer. And at a time when

the entire west side of Manhattan was, you know, garbage and landfill. And there were no highways. And cars were just kind of coming into vogue as individual modes of transportation. And,

there were beaches all around and no one could get to them. And so he was able by building those roads to get people to beaches, which then gave him the power in the public sphere to that he could wield as, as the great, you know, man of the people, like all of those things had to swirl around and join forces at exactly the right moment. So if you're a public servant now, you,

you don't even have the opportunity to become Robert Moses because it's too late. So I think most people go into public service, especially in urban design or in working for a parks and rec department or something,

with the goal of doing something good for the public. They don't go in... No one in their right mind would say, I want to be the most powerful man in the world. I'm going to join the Parks and Rec Department of this city. It's hard to imagine what kind of psychopath would think that was even possible. So I think you're right. I think that if there's a...

if there's a default setting for the folks who have these jobs now, it is on the side of good. It is like, I want to, I just want to like make the soccer field look nicer for the girls, you know, youth league to play on and not, I'm going to, I'm going to dominate the urban landscape for 50 years. You make, you make a good point that the, the time when that's possible is, is,

I'm fairly over – I feel like within my lifetime, the only person I can think of in New York at least that wanted to do that same sort of thing was maybe Michael Bloomberg when he was mayor. Where he was like, I'm a billionaire. I can do whatever I want. I'm going to make it so I can run for a third term. And everyone's going to let me do what I want. And he had these big visions, but he's still coloring in the lines that Robert Moses –

There just isn't the blank canvas. I mean, Robert Rose's canvas was not that blank since – as happens throughout the book, he displaces thousands of people. But this sense of like, oh, this city is clay that I can mold. With Bloomberg, even with his – his vision was still limited by the fact that the city was now – instead of clay, it was like plastic. So it was like, well, I can break this piece off, but I can't mold it. I can melt this piece.

this kind of plastic structure, but I can't totally... When I was leaving New York, so I left New York in 2004, and just as I was leaving, and I might have the timeline wrong, it's been 20 years, obviously, Bloomberg unveiled a giant plan for West Side redevelopment, and it involved millions

massive new stadia for, I think, the Yankees and maybe the Mets and maybe the New York Giants and Jets and like... As many teams as he could push to the west side of Manhattan. And he wanted the Olympics to be in New York so badly. So it's like, we have to build all these facilities to make New York a world-class city for the Olympics. And I remember that...

I felt as a New Yorker at the time, I was like, uh, we're already the greatest city in the world. Like I don't, the Olympics would be lucky to have us, but you'd be right. He had this huge plan for all these, this stadium development. Yeah. And it, and it was not just a stadium. It was, it was like the whole West side was in, in this plan that he laid out the whole West side. It was exactly the kind of project that Moses would have not only proposed, but actually just ramrodded through. Right. And, uh,

I remember thinking like, well, this is insane. This guy's lost his mind. You can't, there's no, this is $100 trillion worth of development. But I remember reading a quote from him and the quote was fascinating and I think both scary and also true. And what he said was, New York is a city that builds things. And if New York ever stops building things, New York will die. Right.

And that's a paraphrase, but that's what he said. And I remember thinking, of course, immediately of the power broker, but also that he's right.

that one of the things about New York that has defined the city is that even though you can walk down blocks on the Upper West Side or the Upper East Side and you can see these brownstones that have been there for 150 years and there are enormous cathedrals and there are structures that date back 200 years, which for American cities is pretty old,

The defining characteristic of the city is that every time you go back, it's different. There are stores and restaurants have disappeared and new ones are there and buildings have been torn down and new skyscrapers have been built. And for better or worse, the city just moves forward and it moves forward through construction.

And Bloomberg was the last mayor, I think, who was trying to sort of not only acknowledge that fact, but also get downwind of it and sail on that aspect of the city and say the stuff that Moses did, yes, it might have been racist and awful and displaced thousands of people and destroyed neighborhoods,

But that's just what this city does. It's what the city has always done. And we can't stop doing that. We maybe can do it more responsibly and less racistly, but we can't stop building. And I do think that part of...

again, part of what made Moses a singular person was he was doing it in that city. If Robert Moses does what he did in Cleveland, Ohio, or even Chicago, or Dallas, or Phoenix, or even Los Angeles, I don't think it's the same thing because New York is so concentrated. It's so packed in. And in order for it to have this kind of like

this, you know, the ages of, of emperors were traditionally very long and the ages of emperors in New York are very short. You know, these, these time periods that we think about in the city, they're measured in years or maybe decades, but not centuries, not millennia. They're everything is knocked down and built back up very quickly and,

And so he was just, Moses was the guy who did it the most. But other folks who have come after him have recognized that and have tried in some cases like Bloomberg to actually replicate it by saying like, hey, if we stop moving, this doesn't, this isn't New York anymore. And it's, it's one of the things that is so wonderful and also kind of heartbreaking about loving that city is just how often it is erased like an Etch-a-Sketch and then rebuilt. Mm-hmm.

And I don't know what that means about the future, whether that will continue, whether the time of New York has come and gone. But it's part of the reason the book is so fascinating is because that true fact about New York met the greatest builder who's ever lived. And they, in the course of whatever it was, call it 30 years, basically built a new city within the city that already existed. Yeah.

Wow. It's true that you're – I mean, that's very well said. I think it's well said. Yeah. But it's funny because you kind of get the idea that –

It comes after the book is written because it's interesting to me to read the book now also 50 years after it was written. And there are certain things in it where Moses is saying the things I'm building are going to last for centuries. This is not going to be for centuries. For centuries, people will be going to the New York Coliseum. That's going to last as long as the Roman Coliseum, and it's gone. For centuries, people are going to go to Shea Stadium. That's not there anymore. That even Moses – he's building the biggest sandcastles. Maybe that's the –

nature of New York is that it's a wave that eventually wears down anything. So maybe there's hope to get that waterfront back. I don't know. Well, that's part, again, another fascinating aspect of this, right, is that he was right in some cases and very wrong in other cases, especially toward the end when he kind of lost his fastball, is like he didn't understand. He built Shea Stadium. Shea Stadium was always a piece of crap. Always. It was never a good stadium. Ever. Right.

And he had right next to it, he had Yankee Stadium that was also now gone, but was like a testament to history and to something that had longevity compared to other similar stadiums across the country. Yeah.

But he was so short-sighted to think that Shea Stadium, this kind of like random collection of slabs of concrete and a terrible blue and orange color scheme and all of the other stuff that made Shea Stadium terrible, that like this is his Roman Coliseum? Like this is what's going to stand the test of time? Like that thing was doomed from the beginning. I went to Shea Stadium for the first time in 1987. Yeah.

And I remember thinking, like, what a piece of crap. Like, I mean, just awful. And it's very funny to have the attitude that he had, which was, I am the one guy who will build things in this city that will never be torn down, and then to build Shea Stadium. It's a very funny PS. But his, like...

His slow growth and you might say delusion of, I've won this race. I have conquered this city. I will be the person who's never forgotten anything.

The irony is that if it weren't for Robert Caro, he would absolutely have been forgotten by now. Because it's not that people wouldn't know who he was. He still has his name on a thousand state parks all over the state. And people would go like, oh, who is that guy? Yeah, he built the Van Wick or whatever. But all truly...

kind of narcissistic delusional lunatics by the time he was done he felt like he was going to be you know Caesar or Nero or whoever he was going to be a he was a piece of history that would never be displaced which is why the last line of the book spoiler alert is so beautiful

Pause this interview right now, listeners. Then listen to the rest of the series. Then come back and finish this interview. Something I want to ask you about. So in this episode we talked about – one of the chapters we talked about is Two Brothers, the story of Paul Moses and Robert Moses. And you are a very versatile writer, but you are – majority of your writing on television is sitcoms.

I'm curious, how would you develop a sitcom about the rivalry between the two Moses brothers? Is that basically just Frasier or is there a way to do that? Well, you know what it really is at some level is the succession kind of already did it. Like when I was watching Succession,

the James Cromwell character is... It's got a similar vibe, I think, to the James Cromwell-Brian Cox relationship. It's slightly different because James Cromwell is also like a billionaire, you know? But he broke a different way and he has this... And in that version, Cromwell was...

His character was 100% convinced that his brother was just a terrible, evil demon, right? Like it was, it's not, the relationship of the book is very different. The relationship of the book is more heartbreaking because Moses just essentially like writes, like ignores his brother. His brother's living in poverty, right?

And Moses could, Carol makes it clear, at any moment, give him any number of hundreds of thousands of different jobs that he controlled to lift him out of poverty and just didn't because of his vindictiveness and his acid and everything else. So it's not, you know, Cromwell in succession was also because he was a part of the family. This Titanic family was like a billionaire. But the...

the way in which those two brothers just a rift formed that was unhealable and the differences in the way that they approached the world

had a like, it reminded me of the book a lot, like at different times. And they didn't pull their punches, you know, in Succession. Again, spoiler alert if you haven't watched Succession. But when it gets all the way to Brian Cox's character's funeral and Cromwell just is like, I'm going to speak at this funeral. And what you expect, because we're so trained for this, is that there would be like a little bit of a like,

There are moments where I, you know, regret the way that we grew up or we treated each other. And you get like one tiny fleck of that in the eulogy that I remember. But mostly it's Cromwell going like, my brother was an asshole. He was a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible person. And it's so shocking. But it's like, yeah, that's the truth of these relationships sometimes. It's like, just because you're brothers, it doesn't mean that...

when one of you dies, it's all, everything, wounds are healed. Like Moses was so awful to his brother in so many ways that I can't imagine if Paul spoke at his funeral that he would have been like, you know, he was, he wasn't a bad guy. He was all right. We had our differences, but look at those bridges, you know? I've thought of, of course, as I work in TV, um,

I've thought so many times about like, can you ever film this? Right? Like it's the greatest story ever told about America. Could you ever film it?

The conclusion I've come to is no, you could not. Because you would need 50 hours. You would need 50 hours of drama. And you would need an actor who could play both an 18-year-old and a 79-year-old somehow. Or you'd have to do that thing where you cast different actors who kind of look like each other to play these different eras or whatever. I mean, look, The Crown did it. Maybe it's possible. But it's one of those... If you could snap your fingers...

and have the version of like a crown-like show about Robert Moses, it would be the greatest filmed story ever told. Like it just, there's no more compelling story

of an American than that book, you know? I mean, we've been talking about the book as this, you know, great novel, as this Dickensian, Shakespearean, all that sort of stuff. But it's also just like this great ethical case study. And, you know, you wrote a book on moral philosophy. And I, you know, I wonder, you know, about that. So what Kara was setting up is, you

Robert Moses' values that inform his sort of utilitarian calculation of a greater good are being questioned by Caro because he has extremely different values about what the greater good is. And, you know, what's

How do you look at the book as someone who's thought about, wrote about, did a show about moral philosophy? It's an incredible case study for a number of different issues, I would say, that pop up in moral philosophy. The first and most obvious to me is what I would describe

sort of broadly call the danger of the shifting Overton window, right? Like what you find, I wrote about this in the book I wrote, there's a danger in...

violating any moral principle that you hold in even the slightest way. And the danger to me is that once you do that, your Overton window for what you personally find permissible, ethically speaking, shifts a tiny bit, right? So you normally don't park in a handicapped parking spot, but today you do because you're in a rush to

And nothing bad happens. And so the next time that you're driving around, you see like there's a fire lane that you could park in. And you're again in a rush. And so you're like, well, the last time I parked in the handicapped spot and nothing bad happened. So this is fine. I'll just do this. And then nothing bad happens. Then you're like, you ding someone's mirror when you're pulling into your next parking space. And it's like a tiny little chip of paint that

And you're like, well, this isn't that much worse than parking in a handicapped spot or a fire lane. And so I'm just going to drive away. It's whatever. Cars get banged up. It's fine. And like, you know, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. The Overton window just shifts a little bit more and a little bit more. And soon...

You know, you're a serial killer. That's the end of the story. We've seen it so many times. Yeah, we have, right? But no, you're not a serial killer, but you're a person who has now deemed it permissible for you to do certain things and then certain things that crop up that are only slightly worse than the thing that you are okay with and it just snowballs, right? And the problem, obviously, with thinking this way is that

No one likes a rules nerd. And I know that because I'm a rules nerd and no one likes me. And so you don't want to be the kind of person who never does anything even, never jaywalks or never, you know, it's like, that's not a way to live either. So the trick, and this is what I wrote about, the trick is in those moments where we have to do things, small things that aren't quite, you know, aren't quite right, or, you know, are bending the rules a little bit, which we all do,

The trick isn't never do them. The trick is when you do them, just note it in your brain. Just be like, you know, I should make a habit of this, right? Like, this is not quite 100% in line with my personal ethical code, and I'm not going to make a habit of this, and I'm not going to justify more severe transgressions by saying, well, I did that other thing, and that was okay, so I'll do this now.

And Moses's trajectory was so granular, you know? It was so... And that's, again, why the book is 1,100 pages long. It's like...

The piece by piece, bit by bit, he goes from a guy who is a pure idealist reformer into the most corrupt person who's ever been a part of any government, which is saying a lot in this country. And you can read the whole book as just a continual slide of his personal Overton window.

From idealist reformer to completely corrupt lunatic. And those moments where he does something, he pulls a lever of power, it works out for him, he gets what he wants, and then the next time he pulls two levers of power and gets what he wants even more, they're laid out so perfectly and so completely that you can just watch in real time. It's a slow motion train wreck.

of a guy moving from one kind of person to another kind of person. So that, to me, that's the biggest sort of philosophical or ethical story of the book. The other one is, is that

Again, no one likes Kant because Kant is too rigid to actually be helpful in the world. You know, like you can't lie ever. You can't ever. You can't. He would say you can't ever jaywalk because jaywalking, you know, jaywalking isn't allowable. And if everybody jaywalked, then the world would be chaos. So he'll never let you jaywalk. And if it's like 120 degrees and you need to go to CVS and the light is taking a long time and there's no cars coming, you can jaywalk. It's fine. Just jaywalk. It's okay. You know?

But what Kant would say is that he was following essentially a pretty strict moral code in terms of how he was trying to go about his business. And then he gets to a point where, you know, he's crushed by the levers of power and the gears grind him up and spit him out. And he basically in that moment just flips.

He flips from a pure Kantian to a pure utilitarian and says, if I can justify what I'm doing for the greater good, if what I'm doing, even though it seems like it's a little iffy, if it gets people to Jones Beach and they can swim, then it's worth it. And it doesn't matter what I did. That's irrelevant. What matters is the result. And when you combine...

That shifting personal Overton window with a flip from Kantian ethics to utilitarian ethics. And utilitarian ethics are the most easily justified ethics in the world because it doesn't matter. You can murder a busload of nuns, but if it helps, you know, if it helps like 50 more people than there were nuns have a certain amount of happiness that, you know, that overtakes the amount of sadness you cause to the nuns and their families, right?

then you're fine. And so he just found a haven in this really corrupted view of utilitarian ends justify the means power.

And it's the greatest cautionary tale maybe ever of why a corrupt version of utilitarianism is a bad idea because he justified everything he did essentially by saying it's good for the people, it's good for the people, it's good for the people long after the things he was doing stopped being good for the people that he was supposed to be helping. Yeah, yeah.

I think it's so amazing that Robert Caro identifies the moment that the Overton window shifts in taking the sort of deal with Otto Kahn. And he knows that's the moment. And he knows that Robert Moses is sensitive to that moment because maybe even Robert Moses knows that that's the moment that he began to shift his Overton window. Well, I heard you talk about this in an earlier podcast, but the...

primary attitude I think that Caro adopts is that power doesn't corrupt, it reveals. And I think that what is so great about that moment

is what he has set up for you is a guy who was waiting, kind of waiting all his life for that moment to be presented to him, right? It's like, he was a guy who was like, he had these goals. He had this idea in his head of how to achieve them. He was wrong. Someone else was like, this is how you achieve them. And he was like, great, then I'll do that. And you're talking about a guy who

You know, lest we think that he was actually a good person who was corrupted by power. You're talking about a guy who didn't only believe that all cities should be

planned and all city planning should be executed by only Ivy League graduates. He thought they should only be planned and executed by people from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Like, screw you, Columbia. You're not good enough to build our cities. Sorry, Brown. Nice try. Good riddance, Cornell grads. He was such an inveterate snob and so elitist that the actual disconnect, when you read the book, to me was

is his combination of extreme elitism and his initial stance on sort of idealistic populism. That's the part of the character that doesn't make sense to me. The part of it that gets corrupted by the deal with Otto Kahn and then executes his miserable plan of running roughshod over rules and regulations and the public for 40 years.

That makes sense. That's the part that seems like, yes, this lines up with the guy that we learned about at Yale and the guy who had this –

absurd view of how it was that cities should be run. And so when that deal happens, what it actually feels like is the gears were not meshing properly until then for him. And then once the deal happens, it's like, yeah, click, click, click. Now everything is working the way it was supposed to for him. Yeah. Well, I think that what I could use to explain Robert Moses's delusion in his younger years is that

He thought that these sort of masters of the universe should be anointed masters of the universe out of merit. And then he ran into reality and he realized that there was no merit. And so he just had to use the old systems to get things done. Totally. 100%. And that's why Al Smith is, again, this confluence of events. Al Smith, essentially an illiterate

who did not, by the way, go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, right? Like, I think Moses met him and was like, wait, this son of a bitch is the guy who has all the power in the city? Like, how is that possible? I'm 6'4 and devilishly handsome and Ivy League educated and I wrote a thesis on civic...

And like, how is Al Smith running rings around me? And so it shattered his worldview that like, because you are born to the right kind of family, look a certain way or educated in a certain place that you shall be granted from on high, the ability to just do whatever you want to do. He learned that lesson from a slovenly, functionally illiterate guy who was just very charming and had figured out how to consolidate power. And,

And that was incredibly revealing for him, obviously. It was like, if this jackass who didn't even go to college can be just knocking me off my game so easily, then I haven't actually learned how to achieve what I need to achieve. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's totally right. And he also learns that this idea of the tools to use that is...

is how to learn laws and how to write laws. And he learns the skill through Al Smith. And I find that to be stunning. I just love that. Oh, the details of him burying in footnotes, all of those little like, you know, we're going to use the definition of this thing as laid out in the 1812 law that says this thing, which allows this commission to be set up. Like, I mean, it is very, it's very damning because it's,

I don't think... This is one way in which the world, I think, is very similar, right? You learn all the time about these omnibus spending bills that are passed in Congress, and they're given to people to read with like 48 hours before the vote. And there's...

handwritten notes just thrown into the margins and things crossed out or whatever. And you see the politicians in the minority party say like, we're having a vote on this tomorrow and it's 6,000 pages long and no one's read it. And then it just passes. And you're like, all right, whatever's in that bill is now the law of the land. And money is being thrown around and wasted and given out to people left and right that we have no, there's no accountability for.

And when you read how Albany functioned back in that time, and you realize that all of the people in the Tammany Hall world are just, they're just out getting drunk. They don't read the bills. And him realizing they don't read the bills. And if I learn how to do this, I can do anything I want because it becomes the law. It's just such an amazing thing.

Like it's such an amazing lesson to learn and be right about. And it's probably still right today. Yeah. It's such, it's such classic. I keep bringing it back to stories. I apologize. It's such classic kind of like fantasy or martial arts storytelling where it's like,

oh, okay, I want to learn how to be the greatest fighter in the world. Well, you're going to have to carry this bucket to that well and back again a hundred times a day, every day. I can't believe I'm doing it. Wait a minute. These are the motions I need. So it's almost like he walks in and he's like, of course I'm going to run the world. But it turns out he's going to have

to read every bill so we can learn this arcane, you know, magic language of the law. And then suddenly he's, yeah, suddenly he's Neo in the Matrix and he can see the code and no one else can see it and he's dodging our bullets. I was about to say, it's the really slow and boring version of

Getting that – Neo getting that thing plugged into the back of his head and then saying, I know Kung Fu. It's that, but it takes like four years and it involves reading a billion really boring bills from legislators. It's the real-life version of – the way that like – if you want to be a holy man, you have to go sit on a mountain and just think for nonstop for years. And it's like that's a lot of work. I guess –

Maybe I don't want to be holy that badly, but Moses wants to be in control that badly. He's like, I'll do it. And Al Smith too. I'll do it. I'm going to put the work in. And it's such a – if this was a different kind of book, if Kara was more on Moses' side, this could be a book about how –

Kids, if you put the work in, if you strive and you work harder than everybody else, you get to the top of the heap. And that's kind of buried in there. But unfortunately, usually in those stories, the person does the work and then they're a good person. And that's not exactly the case in real life or in the book. I want to read that version of the book now where it's like, hey, kids, you want to become powerful and do good things? That's Robert Moses' self-appointed version.

Like that's his spin on it is like it's the story, a noble man who did the work and reap the rewards. Like that's an amazing version of the power broker. I'd love to read that. I mean, the funny thing is, is that story was written, you know, for decades in the newspaper. Right. Yes, that's true. And and, you know, and he began to believe that in his own way. And when somebody interrogates it even slightly and they go, what about that brother? Paul is like, I never had a brother. Paul.

There has to be – in that Overton window moral choice mindset, there has to be a moment where you say if I'm –

telling the world my brother doesn't exist. Maybe I'm doing the wrong thing here. Maybe if I'm denying the existence of my closest sibling, maybe I'm not the good guy at the moment. Or maybe I am. I don't know. Well, the unknowable thing, right, that is never to be known is to what degree, if any, those thoughts pass through Moses' brain, right? Did he ever, did he ever, did he have a single pang of regret or regret

sadness or did he feel like maybe this isn't so great like all of the times that he wanted to build something and a group of people came to him and said if you just do this three blocks to the south that you will destroy a bunch of abandoned buildings and you won't destroy this neighborhood and you won't displace these people and

And he ignored them. And then all the people were displaced. And he said, and he would say to the press, they're all being given housing. And none of them were being given housing. And they were driven from their house, like home, families ruined, neighborhoods ruined. In all of those moments, was there ever a moment where he thought to himself like, oh, this isn't great. And it sure doesn't seem like it was. It doesn't seem like it at all. No, it doesn't.

And I just can't imagine what you're thinking about when you're swimming all those laps, except for that. Like that's what's always on my mind at all times. And it's just building bridges. And to me is, did I accidentally upset that person in junior high? You know?

I imagine when Moses is in the shower, he's not thinking about what are all the mistakes that I made when I was young. And instead it's, how do I get this thing done? How do I get that? And I wonder if there's an aspect of it, of his psychology that is like

Mayor Bloomberg's vision of New York that I have to keep moving. I have to keep building or I stop. And if I stop, I think and I can't think I've got to keep thinking about the next project because I can't think about my life or what I've done. And I doubt he was conscious enough of those things were cared enough. But it does feel like when he's swimming.

I certainly – I don't like swimming partly for the reason that my mind wanders to embarrassments in the past or things like that. But I'm sure he's just thinking about, okay, if I can put this bond across at that percentage rate, then I can get the money from the federal government to get the labor, and then I can build this bridge across. It seems like his mind is just always going at these problems. Yeah, like I – I don't know.

In 1993, I was getting on a plane and the woman at the counter helped me change my seat and she gave me my ticket and she said, have a nice flight. And I said, you too.

And then I walked on the plane and I was like, she's not flying anywhere. Why did I say you too? And that was 32 years ago and I haven't stopped thinking about it. I think about it once a month. You know, like, just like, that was so weird. Why did I do that? Why did I say you too to a woman who wasn't flying anywhere? And that, it's like, there's something essentially human about reflecting on your own foibles and like mistakes and small goofs and gaffes and, and,

Certainly more serious things, times that you offended someone, hurt someone, broke up with someone in a crappy way and made their lives miserable or anything like that stuff haunts us and it should haunt us. It's probably evolutionarily wrong.

beneficial that it haunts us because it helps us correct our behavior or maybe do better the next time we're in a similar situation. And he, Moses, had apparently such a hardened kind of lizard brain just to like a fight or flight approach

guided brain that you get the sense that none of that, not only did it not haunt him, I don't think he ever would have seen any of those things as mistakes or foibles or failures of character or anything. I think he just...

somehow had a constitution that allowed him to focus only on the future and like you're saying and what else he could accomplish in his limited time on earth and had a true belief that everything he did was right and good and proper yeah and that's just not a mindset that i think most of us can access thank god i don't think we'd want to i don't would not want to access that kind of mindset

What kind of person do you become if there's no self-reflection? I think we know the answer is Robert Moses or a couple other people we could probably name in national politics, right? It's like that's the kind of person who...

And never apologize, never admit you were wrong, never admit defeat, never focus on anything except the next thing you're going to do and be 100% sure that that thing is right and good and proper. It's a very...

brutal way to go through life. And it seems like, and the, the alongside that, if he does think about the past, he does seem very conscious of how other people have wronged him or things that he's mad about. And it's, it's like Richard Nixon where he seems powered by just wanting to be like, I'll show them, I'll show them all. Like there's this, there's this spite that is just fueling him. That is very in the right person is real powerful. You can accomplish a lot if you, if you can harness that spite, you know?

Yeah, no, look, dictators can accomplish more than democratically elected officials. Like that's always been true. Like the pyramids were not voted on by the Egyptian public, you know? It's like that's why certain folks who have this mindset have dictator fantasies. That's why Trump...

is constantly praising world leaders who have dictatorial powers. It's because to him and to folks with this mindset, that is the ideal kind of methodology for a world leader. It's like you have all of the power. No one can challenge you. You do whatever you want and you're convinced that what you do is the right thing to do.

It's just completely antithetical to the American system of government. And it's why Moses worming his way up to that amount of power through non-elected positions is such a cautionary tale and such a...

fascinating portrait of a person not who ran for president or who ran for governor and didn't really care he had already figured out the way to do what it was that he wanted to do and it was through legislation and commissions and you know by the time he hit the peak of his power he had a

Yeah.

Well, it's been so much fun talking to you about Power Broker. I love the fact that it's infused all these parts of your work and that you read it three times. It's just been a real pleasure for us to have you here. So thank you so much for joining us on the book club. Thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. It's the greatest book ever written. I'm so glad you're doing this podcast. I will be listening to every episode and it's been a real pleasure to be here. So thank you for having me on.

That's all for this month, power brokers. Next month, we're going to cover chapters 27 through 32. We're really burning through the chapters there. Only two this episode? So many next episode. We'll be finishing part five and starting part six, The Lust for Power. It's pages 607 through 702 in my copy of the book. If you just need to hear my mellifluous voice sometime between now and next month, then...

please listen to The Flophouse Podcast. It is my bad movie podcast. I co-host with Dan McCoy and Stuart Wellington. It is as foolish and devoid of information as this podcast is serious, literary, and educational. If you have a guest idea or just want to keep talking with fellow Power Broker fans, head to our Discord. To join in, the link is on our website, or you can go to discord.gg slash 99pi. Thanks again to Ben for suggesting Mike Schur as a guest.

And you might have noticed that Mike didn't finish his thought about what makes the last line of the book so beautiful. Well, in case you haven't read it before, we just we don't want to spoil it for you. We're only halfway through. We don't want to give away the last line right now. But we love what Mike said so much. He had so many great ideas about it and thoughts that we are saving that for the end of the series. So stay tuned. You will hear it in the appropriate time. The 99% of visible breakdown of the power broker is produced by Isabel Angel, edited by committee music by Swan Real, mixed by Dara Hirsch.

99.pi's executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriela Gladney, Martine Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashima Dawn, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Nina Potok, and me, Roman Mars.

The 99% of visible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California.

You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server where we have fun discussions about the Power Broker, about architecture, about movies, music, all kinds of good stuff. It's where I'm hanging out most of the time these days. You can find a link to the Discord server as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

If you have five more hours, I can keep talking. You know what? I just gave us a wrap-up point because we gave us an hour. But, like, I have tons more questions. I actually probably need to go do my actual job.

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