What baseball fan doesn’t know who Babe
Ruth was? Or “Shoeless Joe Jackson”? Every part of American history has its heroes
and villains.
Yet, it’s frightening how much we forget
about the past mistakes we have made in planning for transportation… lessons we
should have learned from. This became
clear recently when I was asked to be a guest lecturer to a group of urban
planning graduate students at UCONN.
I made reference in the class to Robert
Moses and these planners of our future just gave me a blank stare. “You do
know who Robert Moses was, don’t you?” I asked.
They did not. I was shocked.
No single individual was more powerful
or made more decisions affecting the New York City area’s transportation
network than the “master builder” Moses. His grip on power came from holding 12
different job titles though he was never elected to public office.
From the 1930’s to the 1960’s he
directed the building of 416 miles of parkways (Long Island’s Northern &
Southern State and Westchester’s Taconic, to name a few), many bridges (the
Tri-Borough, Throgs Neck, Henry Hudson, Verrazano-Narrows as well as the
Brooklyn Battery Tunnel) and designed Jones Beach and the NY State Parks system. He presided over two Worlds Fairs (1939 and
1964) and helped bring the UN’s headquarters to NYC.
But he did nothing for mass
transit. He loved cars and didn’t really
care for people who did not own them.
Where others had envisioned expanding
the city’s subway lines, he built roads, displacing thousands of
residents. Robert Caro, author of the
Pulitzer prize winning biography of Moses, “The Power Broker” even called Moses a racist, because he built
motorways for the middle class while discouraging the car-less (blacks) from
visiting Jones Beach.
He opposed blacks moving into Stuyvesant Town, a Manhattan
development on the lower east side for veterans. City swimming pools in black neighborhoods
were kept cold to discourage blacks from using them.
Moses’ dénouement came when he tried to
build the elevated, ten-lane Lower Manhattan
Expressway which would have connected the Holland Tunnel to the
Manhattan Bridge straight through Greenwich Village and Little Italy, evicting
2000 families and 800+ businesses. “The
Master Builder” called it “slum clearance”, but residents like Jane Jacobs (author of the “Death and Life of
Great American Cities”) fought back and the city’s artistic heart was saved.
Robert Moses was not an evil man. Today, many hail his accomplishments and
think we need a benevolent despot to get things done in transportation and
urban planning, even if a few people get hurt along the way. It’s all for the greater good, Moses once
said:
"I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving
people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs."
History will judge Moses… those he helped and
those he hurt. But I think of him, more
than the people he displaced, when I drive on the Cross Bronx or any of the
city’s bridges. Love the omelet, forget
about the eggs.
But for graduate students at UCONN to be
unaware of this man, what he built and how, worries me greatly. To paraphrase George Santayana: those who cannot learn from history are
doomed to repeat it.
Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media
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