The Power Broker

The story in brief

Robert Caro was a reporter at Newsday when he began to wonder how Robert Moses had managed to build so much. Moses, who was never elected to any office, had over forty years built most of New York’s parkways, expressways and bridges, dozens of parks and beaches, the Lincoln Center site, the United Nations site, the 1964 World’s Fair and much of its public housing. Caro spent seven years on the book, often in financial difficulty, and The Power Broker was published in 1974. It runs to over twelve hundred pages, and much more was cut. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1975.

The book follows Moses from his privileged youth and his studies at Yale and Oxford, where he absorbed the ideals of the reformers who wanted government run by experts rather than political machines, through his early career as an idealist frustrated by Tammany Hall, to his discovery of how to get things built, and then to decades of almost unchecked power.

The decisions that made it

In the 1920s Moses learned to draft legislation. As an adviser to Governor Al Smith, he wrote the bills that created the state’s park system, and he wrote into them clauses whose significance only he understood, giving the officials who administered them, himself included, wide powers that legislators did not notice they were approving. Caro shows this as Moses’s first great discovery: that power could be built into the details of law.

His second discovery was the public authority. In the 1930s Moses became head of the Triborough Bridge Authority, a body created to build and run a bridge, financed by bonds repaid from tolls. Moses saw that if tolls kept coming in, the authority could keep issuing bonds and building, and that the bond contracts, which could not be changed without the bondholders’ consent, made the authority almost impossible for any mayor or governor to control. He used the authority’s revenues to fund new projects and to reward the politicians, banks, unions and newspapers whose support he needed.

In 1934 Moses ran for governor and lost badly. Caro treats it as a turning point. Moses never again sought elected office, and turned instead to accumulating appointed positions, at one point holding a dozen at once.

From the 1930s onwards, Moses built highways rather than public transit. He opposed building rail lines in the medians of his parkways, which would have allowed later transit, and designed the overpasses on some of his Long Island parkways too low for buses. Caro argues that this choice shaped the region for generations, encouraging car dependence and suburban growth while the subway decayed.

In the 1950s Moses drove the Cross-Bronx Expressway through the neighbourhood of East Tremont, displacing thousands of people, when an alternative route a short distance away would have spared most of them. Caro’s chapter on East Tremont, based on interviews with residents, is one of the best-known passages in the book.

What the book sees in them

Caro’s subject is power. He shows how it was acquired, through knowledge of law, finance and the weaknesses of other people; how it was used, both to build and to punish; and how it changed the man who held it. In Caro’s account, Moses began as a reformer who believed in public service and ended by treating opposition as an obstacle to be crushed, and by making decisions whose costs fell most heavily on poor New Yorkers, and especially on Black and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods. Caro builds that case from Moses’s own words and records.

Caro also shows the costs of building without accountability. Moses’s achievements were real, and many New Yorkers still use them daily. But because he answered to no one, nobody could weigh those achievements against the lives his projects destroyed, or ask whether there were better alternatives. The site’s idea page Legibility and Mētis describes the planner’s habit of seeing a city from above and missing the life on the ground.

The book’s subtitle, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, makes the judgement plain. Caro argued that the city’s decline in the 1960s and early 1970s was partly the consequence of Moses’s choices, especially the neglect of mass transit.

Since it was published

Historians have debated Caro’s judgement. Some, notably in a 2007 set of exhibitions and essays edited by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, argued that Moses’s public works deserve more credit and that the city’s decline had many causes. Others have reaffirmed Caro’s account of Moses’s methods and their costs. A few specific stories, such as the claim that parkway overpasses were deliberately built too low for buses, have been questioned by later writers, who note that commercial vehicles were barred from the parkways in any case. The book is still regarded as a classic of political biography and of urban history, and it was a major influence on later movements against urban highways and for community participation in planning. Its fiftieth anniversary in 2024 brought renewed attention, including in debates about why it has become so hard to build in American cities, which some writers trace partly to reforms made in reaction to Moses.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks who can say no to you, and what happens if no one can. Moses was effective precisely because he escaped accountability, and that same freedom allowed him to make choices whose costs fell on people with no voice. Every powerful organisation should know who checks its decisions.

It asks what the details of your rules allow. Moses built power into clauses no one read. Governance documents, contracts and terms of service often contain the real distribution of power, and those who draft them shape what follows.

And it asks who bears the costs of what you build. The people of East Tremont were not in the room. Any large decision should ask who is affected but absent, and what an alternative that spared them would cost.