When I first read about Robert Moses and all of his accomplishments, it seems like he was a really great man who did a lot for the city. While it is true that he did a lot and the city would be vastly different if it weren’t for him, there is also another view of him and many critics don’t agree with everything that he built and what he did to build them. Moses wasn’t evil by any means, and I believe that all that he accomplished and his lasting legacy on the city of New York is much greater and important what the negatives of what he did.
One of the negatives of what Moses did was the amount of people that we evicted and displaced. There is no accurate number for the number of people displaced, but it is estimated to be close to half a million. Most of the housing he built was for the rich, and the housing he built for the poor was bleak and cheap. It can be argued that what Moses did was for the greater good of the city and society and that it benefited much many more people that it harmed. It’s really difficult to decide when it’s worth it to move so many people out of their homes, if ever, but it not really a rare thing to do, and looking at how New York is now, maybe it was justifiable in those cases.
The most surprising thing I learned about Robert Moses is just how much power he had. It’s quite surprising seeing as how he was never elected to public office and was appointed to the positions he held. He was given the positions he wanted, and like the interaction with Robert F. Wagner showed, he could just threaten to resign and he would get what he wanted. Going along with this, I hadn’t read before about Moses hiring skilled investigators who kept dossiers on city officials. This added to his power since all the city officials knew about the dossiers and knew what he could do to them. This sounds like what power crazy men would do, which I guess Moses might be considered as.
I think that the city could use someone like Moses today. As Kenneth T. Jackson wrote, Moses was unusual in his ability to get the resources needed to see a project from conception to completion. The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge was finished under budget and three months early the Tappan Zee Bridge, not built by Moses, was over budget and opened late. It seems like things take a really long time to get done and be built nowadays, like with the Barclays Center, whether is financial or legal issues, and I think it might be good to have someone really ambitious and a go-getter to build large projects.
At the end of Jackson’s chapter, he writes that Moses made it possible for New York to remain in the front rank of world cities in the 21st century. If it weren’t for Moses, the city might have deteriorated so bad that it couldn’t be brought back to prosperity. I wonder if this is really true, the city couldn’t have bounced back without Moses. This is something the readings make me thing about, along with whether another builder could’ve have emerged. Maybe would there just be less highways, bridge, public parks, and other things he build now, and how much different would the city?
