Caro puts it well when he claims that “it is only possible to say that [New York without Moses] would have been different.” After all he did to leave his mark on the very structures which make up and supply the city, we can’t know what the city would have looked like without Moses. Ultimately, he remade NYC in his image, changing it into the type of city he wished it to be. Though all his many actions affected everything around them, I will work from a single example, his reshaping of the way New Yorkers get around. Through extensive roadbuilding and seizure of funds which could have gone to the transit system, Moses set the city on the path to dependance on cars, rather then mass transit. Whether this is a good or bad decision is somewhat subjective, but the character of the city was undeniably altered by it. Admittedly, NYC was growing fast at the time, and it is possible that many of these changes would have been made eventually, and probably less effectively without Moses, but this assumption may be a product of the idea that these structures are necessary, simply because citizens are now used to them. This is even more true because of Moses’ national power, and his influence over all later urban development plans. Perhaps the idea of an affective train system allowing travel to long island and new jersey is hard to picture because New York and all subsequent US cities relied on the car.
