To me, reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro always seemed like an intellectual bullying move. There are some of us that can’t get through a 1344-page book, no matter how hard we try. It’s just not going to happen. Even the audiobook clocks in at 66 hours long.
On the other hand, it sounds like an awesome book. Barack Obama and Conan O’Brien call it their favorite book. One of my favorite podcasts, 99% Invisible, even ran a book club on The Power Broker, using it to unpack how power quietly shapes cities. Guests included The Good Place creator Michael Schur, former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and even Caro himself. The New Yorker even published a satire piece on this phenomenon.
I’d resigned myself that I was never going to get to it. But then I discovered that the book was serialized into a series of articles in The New Yorker. These articles appeared in the issues in the summer of 1974. True to form, this was one of the longest serializations, broken up into 4 pieces for a total of 79,000 words—the length of a substantial book:1
- “The Best Bill‑Drafter in Albany”, July 14, 1974
- “If the End Doesn’t Justify the Means, What Does?”, July 21, 1974
- III: “How Robert Moses Got Things Done”, August 4, 1974
- IV: “Point of No Return”, August 11, 1974
Reading these articles, I realized that Robert Moses didn’t just shape New York—he built it. Every time I drive around the city, I find myself asking: How did all these roads get here? I understand the Manhattan grid of the early 1800s, but what about the highways, bridges, and parkways? None of them have changed in my lifetime, yet most were built only after the automobile arrived around 1900. The answer, it turns out, is Robert Moses. As Caro says in the introduction:
Standing out from the map’s delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city’s people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway, and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.
Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. Those bridges are the Triborough,[*] the Verrazano, the Throgs Neck, the Marine, the Henry Hudson, the Cross Bay and the Bronx-Whitestone. Robert Moses built every one of those bridges.
Scattered throughout New York stand clusters of tall apartment houses built under urban renewal programs and bearing color, splashed on terraces and finials, that in the twentieth-century American cityscape marks them as luxury dwellings. Alongside some of these clusters stand college lecture halls and dormitories. Alongside one stand five immense dingy white expanses of travertine that are Lincoln Center, the world’s most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex.
Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
This doesn’t even mention the 148,000 apartments and 600+ playgrounds. That’s why this cartoon, from this summer, is still so relevant:
Caro spent seven years researching The Power Broker. Remember, this is a man who has only written two major works in his life—the other being his still-unfinished, multi-volume authoritative biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro was such a relentless researcher that Robert Moses stopped speaking to him after Caro began asking pointed questions that challenged Moses’s official narrative.
Caro carefully unfolds the history of these projects. One of my favorites is how suburban Long Island exists largely because Robert Moses wanted to get New Yorkers to the beach. In the 1920s, when he was Parks Commissioner, Moses envisioned a vast network of beaches and parks—Jones Beach, Sunken Meadow, Hither Hills—that would offer working-class city residents a democratic escape from the sweltering, crowded tenements of New York. But the problem wasn’t just building the beaches—it was getting people to them. So Moses didn’t just build parks; he built the parkways to reach them. With meticulous strategy, he secured funding, dodged political opposition, and used obscure legal provisions to seize and rezone land for long, scenic highways like the Southern State, Northern State, and Wantagh Parkway. These roads weren’t just infrastructure—they were invitations.
Once the highways were built, people flooded out of the city in their cars, and where they stopped for recreation, they eventually stayed to live. The desire to reach the beaches started a new pattern of suburban growth. Moses didn’t just give New Yorkers access to sand and surf; he redrew the map of where people could imagine their lives unfolding. What began as a public amenity strategy became the foundation for postwar suburban expansion—sprawling communities along the corridors that led to the coast.
It’s written with the pace and drama of a novel, but at heart it’s a tragedy. Caro structures The Power Broker like the story of a fallen hero—someone who begins as an idealist and ends as a cautionary tale. In the early chapters, Moses is a sympathetic character: a brilliant reformer who wants to clean up the graft and inefficiency of Tammany Hall, a man who genuinely believes parks and public works can ennoble a city. But as his power grows, so does his arrogance. The same moral certainty that fueled his reforms hardens into something darker.
Caro captures this transformation as a novelist would. The idealist who once built Jones Beach so ordinary New Yorkers could see the ocean becomes the autocrat who lowers the parkway bridges so buses—and thus poor and Black families—can’t reach it. The planner who once dreamed of playgrounds for children ends up bulldozing their neighborhoods to make way for expressways. By the time he’s slicing the Cross Bronx through the heart of working-class communities, he’s stopped seeing citizens at all—only obstacles.
The only problem with the book is that it’s too powerful—and for decades, it’s been almost the only story we have about Moses. Written in the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s Jane Jacobs movement, it reflects a moment when the tide had turned against Moses’s brand of top-down modernism. By then, expressways had become symbols of destruction, not progress, and the neighborhood voices Moses once ignored were finally being heard. Caro channels that spirit, using Moses as both subject and warning: the man who thought he was saving New York by remaking it in concrete and steel was, in Jacobs’s eyes, dismantling the very fabric of the living city.
The book uses Moses as the embodiment of an entire era—making moses into a villain. Caro channels all the arrogance, blindness, and hubris of mid-century modernism into a single man, as if Moses alone poured the concrete and cleared the neighborhoods. But Moses wasn’t acting in a vacuum—he was the product of a culture that worshiped progress, trusted technocrats, and believed problems could be solved by building something big. By personalizing that system, Caro gives us a gripping story, but also a convenient scapegoat. The real story isn’t just about Robert Moses; it’s about everything going on at that time.
And there’s a larger problem: there’s really only one major book about him—and it’s a 1,344-page tome. While the book offers different sides of Moses, there’s only one theory of the case, and it’s from Caro. His Moses—the brilliant tyrant who built New York and broke it in the same breath—became the definitive version. Over time, that version hardened into truth.
When The Power Broker came out in 1974, New York was falling apart—graffiti on the subways, crime in the headlines, garbage piling up on the sidewalks. The city that had once believed it could build its way into the future was now on the verge of bankruptcy. Caro’s book didn’t just tell the story of Robert Moses; it told the story of a whole generation. It gave shape to what people were already feeling—that the modern world, with all its glass towers and expressways, had failed them. The Power Broker offered them an explanation.
So even reading the entire book doesn’t give you the whole story. Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for the New Yorker, adds some crucial context. Goldberger reminds us that Moses wasn’t some rogue genius operating outside his era—he was his era. Every major American city in the mid-century was tearing itself apart in the name of progress, trading subways for expressways and neighborhoods for parking lots. Moses just did it bigger, faster, and more visibly than anyone else. To say he single-handedly ruined New York is to miss the deeper truth: that he was the clearest expression of what America believed at the time—that the future could be engineered. Goldberger writes that “Moses didn’t bring down New York, and he didn’t single-handedly sell its soul to the automobile. Indeed, New York probably comes closer to having a workable balance between cars and mass transit than any other city in the country.”2
I’m so glad that I finally got to read The Power Broker, in its abridged form. It is a phenomenal book, full of history, drama and intrigue. But the book needs to be read in context. The book’s subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” doesn’t really ring true 50 years later. We wouldn’t have the Triborough Bridge or the Long Island Expressway. We wouldn’t have Long Island as we know it today.
For me it’s personal. Moses bulldozed working-class neighborhoods to build Lincoln Center, which jumpstarted the redevelopment of the Upper West Side—the theaters, restaurants, and brownstones that define it today. As part of that transformation, he built our apartment building in Lincoln Towers. I owe my home, my kids’ elementary school down the block, and the neighborhood I love to Robert Moses.
Footnotes
You must be logged in to post a comment.