I am Robert Caro, a journalist and the author of “Power Broker,” a biography detailing the life and impact of Robert Moses, the defendant in this trial. Robert Moses was undoubtedly a visionary, who was the shaper of modern day New York City. But through my extensive study, I found that for all his vision, how he went about realizing this plan is worthy of condemnation. Over his decades long career, time and time again, Robert Moses used unscrupulous methods to get what he wanted, in many instances by intimidating public officials, and allowed personal convictions influence where improvements were made, letting slums languish in desperate need without public works while wealthier neighborhoods received numerous parks and playgrounds.
Many people in New York could see the benefits of Moses’s public works right before their eyes, in all the new pools, parks and playgrounds that he built. But this wasn’t the case for blacks living in poorer neighborhoods, neighborhoods that desperately needed those new facilities. During the 1930s, Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City – and he made a point of advertising this accomplishment. But there was only one playground in Harlem, only one in Stuyvesant Heights, and none in South Jamaica – all three major black neighborhoods. Through interviews with community leaders in those neighborhoods, I learned that children in these neighborhoods had to play in the streets, in dilapidated tenements or vacant lots covered in metal and rotting meals. Robert Moses ignored the plight of these people, despite their pleas.
In order to make his vision for the Cross-Bronx Expressway a reality, Robert Moses had to cut through the poor, but safe and clean neighborhood of East Tremont. He served the people of East Tremont a 90-day eviction notice, without the proper authority and without regard to their livelihood. He destroyed these families’ lives on nothing more than a whim – and if not a whim, for his position stood against all common sense, then political backdealings.
One can make the argument that the Cross-Bronx Expressway was still a necessity, and that the route Robert Moses chose was, if not perfect, one that worked. But still, even so, Robert Moses then went above and beyond to make the lives of those displaced people in East Tremont hard and squalid. He promised the people of East Tremont an easy relocation, but the company which he gave the relocation contracts to was notorious for its redirection and inability to actually perform its duty. In the end, East Tremont was reduced to a horrific slum, with gaping pits in abandoned lots, bonfires of heaped up lumber blazing, and rats running throughout the streets. Elderly neighbors, who had no one else left but each other, were flung to parts of the city that meant isolation from their only contacts, when they had specifically asked to be located in buildings close to each other. Day by day, as construction went on, the families left or remained in buildings that often had no heat or water, buildings that were often vandalized and looted.
Furthermore, his method of pushing his plan for the Cross-Bronx Expressway through was obvious interference in what should have been an impartial process. When the citizens of East Tremont organized in order to protect their neighborhood, Robert Moses used his extensive network of political connections to thwart them at every turn, even when their request was as simple as having a stenographer to record a meeting between the community group and members of the city government, when the city government had their own stenographer to tell their own side of the story. Respect for the redress of grievances meant nothing to Robert Moses, and this is clear from his relentless manueverings against the citizens of East Tremont, who ended up, as a community, completely shattered. This is all par for the course for Robert Moses. He was able to get the people of New York, and even the entirety of the city government, to do whatever he pleased – and through whatever means necessary; Joseph McGoldrick, New York City Comptroller from 1938-1945, admitted that officials in the city government were intimidated by Robert Moses, and often felt attacked.
The price that came with Robert Moses’s vision was high; neighborhoods were shattered, slums were left to languish – and these effects can all still be felt today. Robert Moses, once the young idealist, in the end became that which he had initially fought so hard against: another corrupt politician who would crush others out of the slightest offense, and who used whatever means necessary – intimidation, extralegal action – to get what he wanted. Nothing could stand in the path of Robert Moses, not even the public good, when it stood against his particular vision of a project or his overarching plan for New York.
