Robert Moses certainly did a lot for New York City; nearly every expressway I hear about on the 1010 WINS morning traffic reports was built because of him. It is crazy to imagine how swiftly he got things done, and even crazier to try to imagine New York City had he never existed— I think even in 2013, we wouldn’t be close to having the number of parks, highways, and bridges that Robert Moses erected in one seven year period.
The word “ruthless” definitely comes to mind when reading about all of the physical change he brought to New York. Of course, I think that those rapid changes were for the better, though seeing it that way only works when you are looking back on the changes; not necessarily experiencing them. Being born in 1993, those hundreds of parks and roads had already long existed. Society, by then, had recuperated from the massive shift that Robert Moses made. Living in those changes, however, especially if you were the one getting evicted as part of urban reconstruction, must have been horrible. It reminds me of colonial settlers uprooting the lives of thousands of Native Americans, though all too often we optimistically glaze over the fact that such a great loss happened to create our home today.
People were evicted, and even driven out of New York through Moses’ McCarthyism, in a similar way to those settlers. Robert Moses’ actions raise the important questions of “how much is change worth?” “At what point does causing negative irreversible change for thousands of people become acceptable, and for what cause?”
I hate to say it myself at the risk of sounding like a dictator, but I think that in the end, all that Robert Moses did was worth it. If he hadn’t had as strong an influence on New York, I would have said that we could have gone without displacing so many New Yorkers. But he has changed and done so much to the physical landscape of New York that to undo it, if we could, would be even more disastrous than evicting all those people. From a financial perspective, all of those roads and parks helped stimulate New Yorkers and tourists worldwide to experience the city and pay for more items and services. I find it similar to Mayor Bloomberg’s current capitalist approach to making money for the city; he is all about creating stimuli for tourists to generate more revenue.
He was a great man— so ruthless that one cannot help but respect him.
